What the fox says



Our new friend Addison is a fireball of energy. The only time I saw her still when she visited Fern Forest Treehouse was when she was watching videos of mischievous cats on H’s iPad. Her jumpiness is fine with us. Addie is an eight-year-old athletic marvel. The only girl on her Little League team, she made the All-Star list this past season. Next year she wants to be the pitcher. She also plays basketball, soccer, does gymnastics, and swims.
            Boy, does she swim! Her grandparents Gail and Craig took her to a local swimming hole on the New Haven River on Saturday. From the overhead bridge, an old rope hangs that swimmers used to jump from, but someone attached a new rope that’s longer and sturdier, and that’s what folks use now to swing and drop into the deep pool under the bridge. Addie did that a few times before she got bored. Then she grabbed the rope, swung out, and leaped from the new rope to the old one, swung again and finally let go for a plunge into the pool.
            Remember, she’s eight years old and weighs probably all of sixty pounds.
            Below the pool is a cluster of boulders smoothed by cascading water. Some of the boulders form a chute where the water runs through furiously. I’ve never dared the chute, but H has shot it a few times, always feet first.
            Not Addie. Splayed out like Superman, she rode the rushing water through the chute headfirst and laughed as she was dumped into the lower swimming hole. The water slows down there, and she could leisurely swim to the side where she got a foothold and scrabbled up over the boulders to have another go at the ropes.
            Gail had a tough time keeping up with Addie, but don’t count this grandma out. She took a turn on the rope, too, and bravely let go over the deep water. Craig took several turns, but Addie was audacious. Needless to say, she was fairly worn out that evening and at dinner slipped into slumber in a booth at the Bobcat Café.
            One day she was wearing a tee shirt with “What does the fox say” on the front.
            “I like your tee shirt,” I said. “What does it mean?”
            “It’s a song.” She tried to describe the song to me, but I was having trouble grasping it. So H looked it up on his iPad.
            “Here’s the video,” he said and handed me the tablet. The song is by a group called “Ylvis,” and “The Fox” is a sort of upbeat, modern version of Old MacDonald: “Dog goes woof
/ Cat goes meow 
 /Bird goes tweet 
and mouse goes squeek. / Cow goes moo 
 /Frog goes croak 
and the elephant goes toot. / Ducks say quack
 and fish go blub 
and the seal goes ow ow ow ow ow.”
            The tune is seductively catchy (500 million video hits will attest to that). If you watch the video, you’ll see that the members of the band are handsome and quite young—maybe too young to have kids of their own. I remember reading to my own young son a book called Fox Eyes by Margaret Wise Brown. In the book, the fox only said “Whiskerchoo.” Bry loved it whenever I sneezed the word, which was on nearly every page.
            But Ylvis has pounded author Brown into the ground with their lyrics. Here’s a little bit of what the fox says, according to their song: "Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow!
 Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow!
 Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow!”
And the fox says: “Hatee-hatee-hatee-ho!
 Hatee-hatee-hatee-ho!
 Hatee-hatee-hatee-ho!
”
            And the fox says: “Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff!
 Tchoff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff!
 Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff!”
           The fox says a lot of other things in the song, too. A very vocal fox it is. And since Addie’s visit, I’m a fan of the fox, and I’m a fan of Ylvis. But I’m especially a fan of Addie and her grandparents. They promised to make their visit an annual tradition. I hope they do. I want to hear more about this fox and the feats of courage of our new friend Addison.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sex and the Treehouse

Image
When Hana asked to book Fern Forest Treehouse for herself and three friends, H said there wasn’t room, the treehouse is only ninety square feet, he didn’t know how they’d sleep. “Oh, we’ll bring sleeping bags,” she wrote. “Don’t worry—we’ll fit in.” H is a pushover, especially for such youthful enthusiasm. And he thought it sounded like a good time. When the four gals pulled in from Boston around eleven Friday night, H was waiting up for them, the path to the treehouse lit by solar lamps, the treehouse itself all aglitter with colored lights. From upstairs, I heard excited giggles as he showed them around, more giggles as they climbed into the spa under a sky studded with a million stars. As happens in water at 102 degrees, the giggles calmed to whispers, and eventually all was quiet. The sun rose clear Saturday morning, warming the treehouse so that the girls were up a little after 7:00 a.m. We were still in bed when I heard water running in the downstairs bathroom, and H and ...
Read more

Octopus Fishing in Portugal

Image
Ann was studying in Spain for a semester, living with a Spanish family. When the university had a break, Portugal called. It’s an old country, remains of the first settlements dating back to the Neolithic period, five thousand years before Christ. The Visigoths invaded in the sixth century. In 1986, the hills were covered in wildflowers, and horses grazed in fields crimsoned with red geraniums. On the southern coast of Portugal, the area of Algarve is dotted with small fishing villages. Santa Luzia, Tavira, Lisboa, Faro, Cape Sagres, Salema. From the gold dust beaches, one can look across the sea to the shores of Morocco. Bathers swim topless—young women, old women, bathing tops cast aside, breasts bared to the sun. Ann felt strange covering herself. She was just nineteen and modest, but she wanted to fit in, to be accepted, even among these strangers on the beach. She’d worn a one-piece tank suit but slipped the straps off her shoulders, rolled down the suit’s upper half, lay...
Read more

A Treehouse guest discovers his roots in an old millstone

Image
In spring 1794, a group of men set their shoulders to clearing land in what is now Lincoln, Vermont. The footpath they blazed into the forest eventually became a road named for the Quakers who came to settle with ox carts holding all their belongings. They were young, strong, and healthy. Once they pried rocks from the fields, they found the soil rich enough to support their crops. A year later, nearly one hundred residents, mostly from New York and Connecticut, scattered over 24,000 acres of wilderness, most living in tiny one-room cabins made from logs they hewed by hand from trees they had cut on their property. They cooked meals in stick-and-mud fireplaces, spun wool from their sheep, wove fabrics to make their own clothing, and cobbled shoes for their families. They hunted game in the forests and guarded their livestock from wolves that prowled the land. When the crops failed and game was sparse, they went hungry. Quaker services were held in homes until they built a m...
Read more