Your Correspondent Returns

I am back from the grazing-, oil- and cotton-leases of Corn Hole, KS, and am home in the grazing-, oil- and cotton-leases of Hill Country, TX.

Yes, we visited The Sod. We stayed at the Pee and Em’s, and my daddy even allowed Monsieur and me to sleep in the same room. Not like there was any chance that Monsieur’d give me any loving, what with my penchant for Rather Loud Noises during the physical act of love.

Monsieur survived Midwestern hospitality with great aplomb. He successfully won the approbation of My Seven Aunts by remembering all of their children’s names flawlessly, and also won the approval of My Five Uncles because he is able to talk about Big 12 Football despite the handicap of being born a foreigner – and a French one, at that.

“He’s all right,” said The Uncles, each in his own way, which is as close as this taciturn bunch gets to hoisting Monsieur up on their collective shoulders and giving him a victory parade.

“Let me know when you’re tired of him,” whispered my very-married Aunt Louise, with a wink.

The boys were spoiled with breakfast cereals and presents, cable TV and all of my old Disney videos. They didn’t let it spoil them much; in fact, Bigglest Boy was heard to tell Littlest Boy, “I think we’ve watched enough TV today, don’t you?”

At some point when Monsieur and the boys got corralled into going to fetch groceries with Daddy, Mom sat me down and, while we snapped some green beans, she asked me if I will always be “doing your teaching and whatever else it is you’re doing with the kids.”

I just said that I didn’t have any immediate plans to change.

“I’m just checking to make sure you are happy,” she said, “and you don’t miss being just a student without the responsibilities of a classroom or houseful of kids.”

I don’t remember what I said to that, but it was something along the lines of, “I’m fine, very satisfied with what I’m doing, and I find it very rewarding,” – which I do, actually.

She talked about her teaching years for a bit, and how she stopped when she got pregnant, and then she said, “Are you still using birth control? You can tell me it’s none of my business if you want.”

I blushed beet-red, and bit my lip to avoid sneezing. “No, I went off that a couple years ago,” I said. “But he um, he uses birth control.”

“Well, that’s good.” She looked around and then whispered to me, “I never could get your daddy to use those things.”

“No, Mom, I mean, he’s had a vasectomy.”

“Oh!” my mom said, startled. “Is it … is it permanent?”

“Pretty permanent, as far as those things go,” I said, trying to reassure her.

“So … so if you wanted to have kids, he’d need to have surgery?”

“Probably. But I don’t want to have kids,” I reminded her.

“Right,” she said. She poked through the beans, making sure she hadn’t missed any.

“We’re not even married…” I continued.

She looked up at me from over her bifocals. “Not yet, anyway.”

On the street where I live

Meta: here are all the posts I’ve begun and have had to end abruptly. Sorry for the incoherent format. Wait, no I’m not; it’s a blog.

I think this time of year is why people live in Texas, because it’s chilly at night and nice and warm in the afternoon, sort of like a mild spring day in the Midwest. There’s been rain so the creek’s been running. Even though the road up Blue Hill is twisty-turny and has had huge ruts in it – not anymore, the grader has come and smoothed it out, here’s a picture of last year’s flood crossing.

Here’s a picture of the view above Monsieur’s car.

It’s really beautiful here; here are some flowers which bloom in November.

Ranching, a bit of oil, and cotton are where the money is here, because it’s so dry but when those rains come this winter we should be ready. Skip the Gay Rancher says it’s likely to be a wet winter.

Wet winters can be good, if the rain and other wet come all spread out, instead of all at once. Any rancher will tell you that he’s really just a grass farmer, and the ones up here are wary of feedlot ranching. They like to feed them on grass and some clover and hard feed. Their poop goes right back into the food chain, and they, in a sense, eat it the next spring.

Monsieur, like most land owners out here, leases a bit of his small acreage out to cattle and other stock grazing. It’s very good for the land, especially if the stock is rotated out with alfalfa.

Those trees you see in this picture are called cedar trees. They’re not like the cedars you see up in the American Northwest; they’re not much good for anything except fence posts, mulch and firewood. Thousands of years ago most of them would have been trampled or eaten by herds of bison before they had ever gotten much higher than your knees. Cattle don’t eat cedar saplings though. They do fertilize them, and the rest of our back yard.

The main reason I haven’t posted in so long is that I didn’t want to turn this into a mommy (or stepmommy) blog.

I've been getting immersed in teaching and childcare over the last month. Middlest Boy at 5½ is turning into this whiny, negative little poop. It’s hard for him, because his older brother tends to get all the attention (mostly negative, for things like throwing tantrums – and rocking chairs).

I’m trying like crazy also to get a couple more kids to get their multiplication tables memorized. I think it’s just one of those things that they’re going to have trouble with.

But this isn’t a teacher blog either.

So, I’ll go on about my love life, which is really extraordinary. OK, to me, anyway.

Extraordinary is such a Monsieur sort of word; it’s something he would say.

Monsieur is a really extraordinary daddy. He’s also an extraordinary musician, well a performer anyway. I’ve known better guitar players but he tends to look at songs like I look at scenes and you don’t go for technical perfection in diction or virtuosity, you go for the feeling – which is why he complimented Maggie so well on stage.

I didn’t do very well while Monsieur was gone. I don’t mean with the kids; I expected one of them to act out in some way because Daddy was out. I didn’t expect a rocking chair to come sailing at me, though.

This tree is a reminder that it is just turning fall here in Texas, where we are still here and doing very well. I will try to post a bit more soon.

Daddy's home, I'm still here

Yes, I’m still here.

Monsieur came back on schedule, after being away on business. I missed him, awfully. I was glad to see him and I told him so. I even let him relax and catch up on his sleep, as he was pretty badly jet-lagged. I waited a whole day before I pounced on him, like a cat in heat.

I also surprised him, I think. I had, at some point, resolved to be able to give him a decent BJ, instead of the licking/stroking I’d been managing. While he was gone, I got out my biggest toy and practiced sucking it.

Anyone spying on me with a hidden camera late at night that week would have been rewarded with the sight of a redhead, lying on her back or her side, trying to get her mouth around a huge black dildo.

It helped, a bit. When I got the chance, while Monsieur was going down on me, I turned around under him and sucked his cock right into my mouth. Somehow I managed to relax and let it happen. I dropped my tongue into the floor of my mouth and just let him work it in. I didn’t ever get it into my throat, but I bobbed my head and sucked it without chewing it up too badly. He was surprised.

“That was impressive,” he allowed, when he turned me around to take me.

“I’ve been practicing,” I said, and he bit the back of my neck very wonderfully before plunging into me.

I’ve been pretty well buried by my school teaching, and also with handling and wrangling the boys. I’ve got a two-year-old who climbs everything: bookcases, curtains, bare walls. I heard a noise the other morning and got out of bed to check on it; Monsieur was outside but this noise came from the living room area. I went in there to find Littlest Boy hanging from a chandelier. He had piled up boxes on top of chairs and climbed them, then reached up and grabbed hold. The sound I had heard was cause by his swinging feet kicking the boxes out from under him. He was hanging there, giggling like it was the greatest fun and as if he wasn’t suspended eight feet over a tile floor, about to plummet to a certain head injury.

“Littlest Boy,” I said, holding onto his feet, “you don’t hang from the ceiling fixtures. That’s dangerous.”

“But I wanna go upsy-down!” he protested.

I did not argue with him, as he is only two, but I could not actually pry his fingers loose until I got up on a chair and worked each finger away from its vise grip on the chandelier.

“You’re not to climb in the house,” I reinforced. “When we go to the creek or to the park, I will help you climb trees, the playscapes, the rock quarry, the thirty-three floors of the Frost Bank Tower…”

“I wanna go outside,” he said.

Monsieur came in to see the piled-up furniture and boxes, and figured out the whole scheme immediately. He apologized, and took Littlest Boy outside with him to help in the garden.

Middlest Boy had a wonderful Halloween. He dressed up as the Green Arrow and Littlest Boy dressed as a little leopard. I was Bo Peep, and took them to the circle of neighbors who gather in the fork in the road and we had Trick or Treat, then we set up our own little stand and gave away the candy that we didn’t want.

Bigglest Boy was not especially happy when his daddy was away for that week. One night he threw a tantrum, a fit, and finally a rocking chair. I had been trying to confine him to his room, just so he could cool down, but he wasn’t accepting my authority and he picked up a glider rocker, lifted it over his head, and threw it across the living room, where it broke. It had missed me by about a foot.

I managed to confine him to his room after that.

I think he was more surprised that he could actually pick up and throw a glider rocker than anything.

Still, I was furious.

“That was your mama’s chair!” I cried. “Your mama’s rocker! Your grandfather bought that for you, when you were a baby!”

I cried for a while, with the other two boys gathering around me and trying to calm me down. I felt as though I wasn’t doing a good job, and that he would eventually end up more and more distant from me, no matter what I did.

Bigglest Boy calmed down immediately, and quietly went up to his room when he was sent there.

I didn’t tell his father, until he had come back home. When I did, I was rather frightened on Bigglest Boy’s behalf.

“Don’t be angry,” I begged him. “I’ve already yelled at him enough.”

“Thank you,” he said, “but this is quite inexcusable. I need to punish him in a way that is fitting for what he has done. Don’t forget,” he added as he went upstairs, “that he threw a chair, and that he threw it at you, and his younger brothers could also have been hurt. We do not harm women, and we do not harm children.”

Bigglest Boy has been restricted from all television since then, for a month, and must perform community service, gathering trash with his father on the roadside every weekend and every night for 50 hours.

Thanks to all who have written me, wondering if I'm OK and we're OK and if I've fallen off the planet or something. I'm fine, I promise. We're fine. Everything is very, very good.