It's a small, small world

The floods in the Midwest have prompted many people to think about their own emergency preparedness. What would they grab if they had to evacuate? Where are all their important papers? And in the case of parents, how would they get to their children?

Call me fatalistic, but we haven't thought too much about how we'd get to Edith in case of an emergency. On a given day we're rarely more than three miles from her, an hour's walk at most; the rest of the time, we're several hundred yards away in our apartment, in sight of her daycare.

Without intending to make light of the floods or any other disaster, our day-to-day experience is the more peculiar one of trying to carve out work, home, and school spheres when everything we do and everyone we know are all in one place. Consider the following:

-The computer lab where Tom and I do some of our writing and work is in the same building as Edith's daycare. In fact, it shares a wall with her classroom, and the lab windows look out directly onto the daycare playground, at eye level. I try to take a carrel on the far side of the room and to duck my head when I'm at the printer. Often Edith's teachers are in there, too, checking email on their lunch breaks.

-Our landlord is also the executive director of the daycare. So if you want some wiggle room on the issue of leaving bikes and strollers parked outside the apartment building, think before you ask for a special scheduling arrangement for daycare. And if you want to take a month-long summer vacation from daycare without paying for that time, best not to flout the dogs-on-leash rule in the woods.

-For that matter, it's a little tricky to take Bismarck on a walk on sunny days, because you never know when you'll come around the corner and bump into the Older Toddlers, also out taking advantage of the good weather.

-Edith's daycare class uses both the little playground at school, and on occasion, the big playground behind our building. It's hard for her to understand why I can't take her on the school playground on the weekends, if her teachers can take her on the home playground during the week. It's all communal property, right?

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But most of the time I deeply appreciate the unusually self-contained environment we live in. Even if we're hemmed in by highway on one end of the block and poison-ivy-filled, mosquito-ridden woods at the other, there are great things about life in our little interconnected world.

This morning, for instance. When I dropped Edith off at daycare she was fine, but we encountered her friend Torrey sobbing for his mom. Usually Torrey has no problems with drop-off, but Ms. Bela is taking a vacation day, and I suspect that Torrey was thrown off by the two newish teachers substituting in the Older Toddler class. Neither of them could get him to stop crying. But I know Torrey pretty well, so I asked him if he wanted to read a book with me and Edith. He curled up in my lap, we read a couple of books together, and he calmed down. Then he started examining the ID card I had in my hand. He knew it was Edith's daddy's picture on the card, and he knew that his mommy, who works in the student services office, had made that card for Edith's daddy. When I finally left, giving both Edith and Torrey hugs goodbye, Harrison asked the teachers, "Do you know Miss Gretchen is leaving?" as if I were another class teacher who was stepping out. For these kids, who live together a few yards from daycare and know each other's parents, all of whom work and go to school together, the lines between school and home seem comfortably blurry. It's a small world.

On the way out I chatted with handyman Pete, who was checking the school's emergency lights in case of a power outage, and who is the same handyman who put in our new bathroom cabinet this winter and fixed a leak in our sink last week. All the kids know him, too. He knows my dog. Small world.

I also chatted with Ms. Chrissy, the preschool teacher, about the intramural softball team on which she and Tom play together, he as a (former) student and she as an employee of the seminary. The team plays in a league at the university that they got into just last year through Tom, who was already playing on the history department team as my spouse. So now there are nights when Edith and I sit and watch my classmates and professors play her preschool teacher and our neighbors in softball. Small world.

Edith's school is in the same building as the computer lab but also--mercifully for us this week--in the same building as the seminary's indoor swimming pool. Guess what we've done right after school for the past couple of 100-degree days? Hurray!

There are times when I itch to see some new corner of the world, or even the county, and to travel some route other than the worn path from home/daycare/computer lab to university/library/church and back. In the meantime, we'll take satisfaction in our relatively small carbon footprint and the rare experience of bowling (and eating/studying/playing/swimming/commuting) together with all our neighbors, knowing it won't last forever.