WHAT I DID WITH MY SUMMER VACATION

By Mary Elizabeth Podles

Every five years, my alma mater sends a begging letter. Not one asking for money; those come every three weeks. This one asks for news. "What have you been doing since we last heard from you? Fill in this blank page which will be sent around to all your classmates." The prospect is always a little daunting. Some of us opt out altogether; my freshman roommate sent in Roz Chast’s cartoon depicting Bad Housekeeping without comment. I always need a little prodding to make the effort. Will I make a fool of myself? Will my classmates shake their heads over all that wasted potential? Will they eye me askance when they hear I am home-schooling my shockingly large family, and wonder if I am the first graduate of the college to join the Vipers militia? Every time the members of some anti-government survivalist cult are arrested and their poor home-schooled children paraded across our TV screens, a distinct frost arises in my neighborhood, and some of the local residents begin again to gently query my friends, my near-neighbors, my cleaning lady: Are those children really all right? Are they really being properly socialized?

Some, it is true, have stopped asking. They are the parents of the nine extra children presently in my kitchen making peanut butter sandwiches. Perhaps these offspring have been sent over on missionary work, to help with the proper socialization of the Podles children, or perhaps it is something else. When my own boys recently went away to Scout camp, I found I had inadvertently opened a small-scale boarding house, with five more children and a dog from four different families sleeping over, one of them a cousin of the family across the street who moved in with us for three days of her four-day visit. We have been known to answer the phone at dinner time with the greeting, "Hello, Used Children’s Exchange." I have even learned a little Spanish talking on the phone with a frequent visitor’s Peruvian nanny.

Some people cynically suggest I begin charging for day care. But these children have enough of that during the school year, and besides, I would not be so unsubtle. Instead I have simply reinstated the bad old practice of conscripted child labor, and we have excavated quite a respectable pond in the back yard. Everybody helped. What I had envisioned as an all-summer project was mostly dug out in a day, long before I had even phoned away for the Lilypons catalogue. True, without some of my helpers, we probably could have done it in half the time, but it was meant as a cooperative project, and it was. It also inadvertently turned into an impromptu science lesson. Psychologists have determined that children around the age of four ask approximately 600 questions a day. I would add that at least half of them begin with the word Why. "Why do we have to level the pond’s edges?" Because otherwise the water would spill out the low side. "Why would it?" It’s like a cup when one side is up and the other is down—water falls out. "Why does it fall out?" And so on. People ask me when my school lets out for summer. I will let them know when I find out. Right now, though, I am busy researching pond ecology and trying to calculate the proper snails-to-fish-to-plants ratio.

During my researches into the mysteries of water gardening, I discovered a wonderful book written by one of the college classmates I hope not to have let down. She studied landscape architecture in that loveliest of cities, Kyoto, and now designs gardens so elegant and lush that I could scarcely refrain from drooling over her book. I remember her from Mrs. Anderson’s Early Renaissance Art — tall and serene, unruffled by the cruelest exam. When my ship comes in, I will hire Julie to design me a beautiful garden like a harbor, a promontory, an island, a journey of the mind.

I do not know how it will look swarming with all of these children. But in the meantime, I have a backyard with a pond. It does not look like one of Julie’s archetypal landscape spaces, an image of paradise. It looks a little like a Pictish escarpment with a mild case of drunk staggers. Some day it will be full of graceful, slow-moving Japanese carp. Right now it’s full of little boys planning to decorate it with frogs, tadpoles, and Lego men in very small cement overshoes.

Still the alumnae questionnaire is on my mind. "Have my children hindered my career advancement?" it asks. Certainly not. They have scuttled it forever, like the leaf boats proceeding towards the pond-sized Davy Jones’s locker. Do I have any regrets? I will not say I never look back, nor wonder where I might be now if I had chosen otherwise. Most of my neighbors are serious professional women with interesting and fulfilling careers. Might not I fit in better were I still one of them? Maybe, but I would be missing all the fun. And I wouldn’t have a pond.