Upper Ranchitos Road in October

On a bright October Sunday afternoon, my friend Liana and I left our children at her house with their dads, who were perhaps a little too happily ensconced in the family room, eating barbecued chicken wings, drinking bloody Mary’s and watching football. We set out in Liana’s car, with a map and a list of addresses in hand, to go canvassing near my neighborhood on behalf of the Obama campaign in Taos. Our noble goal was to spread the word about early voting and answer questions on a range of related topics including poll locations and vote-by-mail ballots. Oban’s parting words of encouragement to us had been, “If a dog comes at you, just pick up a rock.”

Walking up to our first house together, I felt like a Jehova’s Witness. The last time I had gone door-to-door I was either selling girl scout cookies or trick-or-treating. We stopped first at this particular house, a sand colored trailer with pumpkins on the porch, because Liana wanted to follow up with a woman she had met last week while canvassing, and make sure she had finally received her vote-by-mail ballot which was late in arriving. The woman came out of her trailer waving and smiling, assured Liana that she had received her ballot, and thanked Liana warmly for coming back.

“Well, that wasn’t so bad,” I said to Liana.

At our second house, a tiny brown adobe, the door was answered by a man. I can’t remember exactly what he looked like because I was so distracted by the hairy stomach that was hanging over his pants, protruding from beneath his purple t-shirt. We introduced ourselves, and asked if he had decided which candidate he would support in the upcoming election. Scratching his wiry, grey hair (on his head, thankfully) he told us, scowling, that he had a real problem with Joe Biden. When Liana noted that this was a fairly unusual comment, he explained that he didn’t like Joe Biden because of “all his Botox and plastic surgery.”

“So, you prefer Palin, then?” I ventured.

“She doesn’t have enough experience.”

“OK, so do you need any information on early voting?” asked Liana.

“No.”

“Alright, thanks,” we said, smiling, and made a break for the car.

We drove a little further down the road, until we found the next house on our list in a dusty barrio, no small feat in a town largely without road signs or marked house numbers. We recognized the sweet faced woman who answered the door. She works at the natural grocery store in town and invited us into our house. She shared a slew of good ideas, which included advertising free rides to the polls on the local Spanish speaking radio station. She bemoaned the fact that although she had never had the opportunity to go to school beyond tenth grade, she had managed to send her daughter to college to become a teacher and her daughter now earned less than she did. We could have stayed in her low ceilinged kitchen all day, chatting with her, her son – who hadn’t registered to vote, and her grandchild who was was playing in the living room while watching Pinky Dinky Doo. When we finally left, we asked her if she might know the location of our next listed address and she pointed around the bend.

We crossed a small bridge and ventured down an unmarked driveway that we thought might be the right one. Someone was sunbathing in the grassy yard. When we got out of the car, an older, wiry man, whose body language reminded me of the half-man, half goat satyr character from Narnia in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, pranced out to greet us and ushered us into the studio where he had been working. He was missing quite a few teeth. Lovely pieces of blown glass lined the shelves.

“They’re beautiful!” I commented.

Liana had realized long before I did that the delicate pieces of blown glass I so admired were either crystal meth or crack pipes. A smiling, scantily clad teenage girl scampered out a back door. It turned out we were not at the right address but the man certainly didn’t seem to mind at all.

“Sure I’m voting for Obama,” he said, high as a kite. “Pipe blowers for Obama!”

We thanked the satyr for his time and moved determinedly along. Our next stop was an old, two-story farmstead adobe that resembled a Tuscan villa melting into several lush acres, rimmed by orange cottonwood trees. The friendly man who lived there happened to be the president of the local ditch association (a distinction that is related to that of mayordomo, or ditch manager, of the local acequias, the community operated waterways in New Mexico used for irrigating fields.) He let us choose plump spaghetti squashes from a pile he had harvested in his field and helped Liana with her questions regarding the water rights on her recently purchased plot of land. He told us he planned on voting early.

We continued to zig zag our way around the neighborhood, talking with one woman who had already voted and who had a “God is coming and she’s pissed!” bumper sticker on the back of her pick up truck and with an elderly woman who finished dressing herself as she slowly made her way to the door with her walker. We felt sorry to have bothered her but she seemed to enjoy the company if only for a minute. She told us she was looking forward to voting on Election Day.

After trying a few more houses with no one at home, and intentionally avoiding a trailer occupied by two middle aged men who we happened to know sit on the stoop every day drinking beer out of tall boy cans in paper bags, our final stop was at windowless hovel seemingly attached to an RV from the 1960′s that sat only a couple of feet from the road. The tall, weathered, white haired man who lived there mysteriously emerged before we knocked, wearing a plaid flannel shirt, green down vest, Levi jeans and work boots. He looked suspiciously down at us. When we explained what the hell we were doing there, the man paused and twisted his mouth into a Clint Eastwood kind of smirk. There was a long silence and then he dove headfirst into a monologue about his long political involvement via the Internet on a wide range of social justice issues (in a conspiracy theorist kind of way) and concluded by saying he supposed he would vote for Obama as the lesser of two evils.

“We don’t really think he’s evil,” Liana pointed out. His face softened. By the time we left, we were all friends, and he helped guide us as we backed out onto road.

Our mission accomplished, we drove back to the Obama campaign office in town to drop off our map and paperwork. I felt like Lucy stepping back out of the wardrobe, relieved and bewildered and wondering if anyone would ever believe us.

Lucia is my goddaughter and is like a cousin to Jack and Liam. She is nearly eight years old and has the throaty voice and the husky laugh of a forty year old smoker. She is insightful, precocious, sensitive, opinionated, and occasionally, she busts out singing loud show tunes from The Sound of Music, Oliver, or Annie. And with thick brown ringlets bouncing near her round face, fair skin, and dark liquid eyes, she looks like she may as well have been plucked from a Broadway stage. As a very little girl, Lucia possessed a plate shattering scream. Her tantrums were legendary. Lately, she has acquired a stillness and a contemplative sense of humor that seem almost womanly to me, since I of course spend most of my time in the male dominated lunatic asylum that is our home.

Lucia goes to the same school as our boys. On the occasional days when I pick her up from school and bring her back to our house to play, Jack and Liam spend the time jumping and flipping on our couch incessantly like maniacs. Being two years younger, and boys, and twins who do not necessarily have their own language but certainly share their own dialect, they can barely speak English compared to Lucia. While they squeal, snort and giggle in a blur of constant motion, Lucia pulls a chair up to the kitchen table and settles in for a bowl of rice pudding, a glass of juice, and some meaningful conversation. She smiles, amused, watching the boys. Last week she surprised me when she asked, “So when can I have another sleepover, Jen?”

I pointed at the two whirling dervishes flying across the ottoman, and asked with amazement, “With them?”

I used to think the only reason Lucia liked coming to our house was because it was the closest thing she could get to a trip to Vegas. With ice-cream always waiting in the freezer, waffles and sausages for breakfast, cheetos before noon, dancing on furniture, a couple of little dudes to boss around, lots of plastic toys, videos galore, and plenty of chaos, our house seemed in her estimation to be its own little garden of Eden. Now I’m beginning to think she really might like us.

Lucia arrived for her sleepover on Saturday evening, responsibly clutching in one hand a tote bag containing her American Girl doll and an overnight bag in the other. She brought a homemade birthday card for Oban, a pretty drawing for our refrigerator and a glass jar filled with blue water and gemstones for the boys. Jack and Liam tried to impress her, Liam by donning a vampire costume complete with bloody rubber vampire teeth and Jack by strapping his Ninja swords to his back and performing a series of invented “karate” moves. I cooked Lucia’s favorite meal, spaghetti, while they played.

After a remarkably civilized dinner, the boys still trying to show off, they all watched a movie with Oban. I had struggled for almost forty minutes earlier that day in the video store trying to choose something that wouldn’t scare the B’Jesus out of Jack, who hasn’t slept for the last week. Liam, apparently in the spirit of the Halloween season, has become fascinated by the dark side as is evidenced by the tower of Dracula, myths, and monster library books piled next to his bed. I made the mistake last week of letting them both watch a short Hobbit cartoon video that Liam had also talked me into at the library, the freakiness of which managed to send Jack into one of his terror ridden bedtime spirals and kept him awake all night long. The fact that Liam is all too willing to point out goblins to Jack in their room as they lay in their beds at night has certainly not helped in resolving matters. So today I selected a DVD I suspected would be boringly benign, a Jim Hensen version of The Tortoise and the Hare.

They watched the movie without incident, ate caramel ice cream for dessert, and then Jack and Liam pulled out their sleepover pieces de resistance; transparent plastic balls in which we put their new hamsters, Tiny and Kookookutie, for their requisite hamster enrichment/torture time spent rolling themselves around on the floor. When Lucia and the boys got too hyped up and Lucia began bowling the hamster balls, with Liam wide-eyed and giggling over thrilling flashes of her underwear, we decided it was bed time. This provoked the usual displays of utter disbelief and outrage by Jack and Liam but Lucia quietly disappeared into the bathroom and emerged minutes later with pajamas on, teeth brushed and face washed. While I grew increasingly impatient and shrill with Jack and Liam’s stall tactics, from belabored book choosing to last minute toy repairs and arguing over whose turn it was for me to kiss good-night first, Lucia, of all people, remained the voice of calm and compassion.

“Can I help you guys?” she asked, sweetly.

And when, after Jack had kept me up half that night, ravaged by Tortoise and Hare phobias and a slightly sniffly nose, I emerged from my room in a dark and stormy mood, Lucia was there to comfort him.

“I used to be afraid of things like that too when I was your age, Jack,” she said.

“Really?” Jack asked hopefully, his very manliness at stake.

Yes, it was true. Lucia had been afraid of things like that. In fact, she had not so long ago been fearful of everything from the Count on Sesame Street to virtually all animated Disney movies. And it was hard to believe that this was the same Lucia who just this past summer, while at her grandmother’s house on Shelter Island, had sent Liam crying and running out of the clear water where they were happily swimming after convincing him she had seen a swarm of red jellyfish, in a way that reminded me of Liam identifying all the goblins in the room.

“ Yep. And after a week or two, I’d forget about it and I wouldn’t be scared anymore,”she added gently and knowingly. “Can I take a bath, Jen?”

Jack’s mood brightened, as did mine somehow. He took a morning bath after Lucia. The water turned the color of a swamp, since Jack is not typically a big fan of baths. Liam bathed next. I thought back to when they all could fit in a tub together. Lucia brushed her long, wet hair out, slowly and methodically, like – well, like a girl. I tucked a package of hair bands I had bought that were too small for my own ponytails but would be perfect for Lucia’s pigtails into her bag.

When her dad and baby sister arrived to pick her up, Lucia delayed her departure by playing a few rounds of Uno with Oban and the boys. When she left, I gave Lucia a big hug. With her head at my chest, all I could think of was how quickly she is growing up.

Jack and Liam had a pirates and princesses themed birthday party a couple of weeks ago at a a very magical play space in Taos called Twirl. Maybe its the novelty of it all after growing up in a household full of girls, but something about watching a bunch of boys ranging in age from three to eight, decked out in pirate regalia, commanding each other to “Man the ship!” and “Hoist the sails!” while dashing across a little wooden bridge fills me with a specific kind of joy.