Ben's Pee Hat

Untitled Part 1

 You might reasonably wonder why I just lowered a skein of wet wool – none too pleasant smelling already – into an empty kitty litter bucket full of green liquid that smells like pee. I would wonder if I were you.

It started innocently enough. I was at a farmers market with my family last month, and Mom found a booth that sold undyed wool yarn, and some natural dyes. She decided that learning to knit using yarn we dyed ourselves, with traditional methods, would be a great homeschool project.

At the time I agreed with her. Mom's homeschool projects are exceptionally creative. We once built a sweat lodge in the backyard, partly as a school project and partly as a gift for our housekeeper, Hannah, who is Navajo. She teaches me Navajo.

Another time, we built a scale model of the solar system in our neighborhood. We chalked a 12-foot sun on our driveway and made planets out of polymer clay mounted on wire hangers we straightened out so we could stick them in the ground. The earth was three houses down and the size of an extra-large jawbreaker. Lots of people stopped to read our explanations and tour the solar system. Or some of it. The solar system is so huge, that even with a 12-foot sun, we ran out of neighborhood after Mars, and Mom wasn't going to let us cross the big through street to build the asteroid belt. Which was probably just as well, because I don't know how we would have built that many asteroids out of clay.

Mom's projects are always fun, so we were all excited. Except Jorge, who was too little to understand.

"I want yellow," Jeri, my twin sister, said immediately. The lady at the booth said she needed some coreopsis to make her dye. Beza, our older sister, saw the madder root and wanted that. She knew that madder was used in ancient Egypt to make red dye. Beza knows everything about ancient Egypt, because she wants to be a mortician, and the Egyptians were master mummifiers.

"I don't see any color I like," I said.

"Tell me what color you'd like. You can't always tell by looking what color the dye will be."

"Could I have blue, please?"

"Woad it is."

The lady handed me a lumpy ball that looked kind of greeny-gray, like a round avocado.

"I would like blue," I said, slower and clearer than last time.

She laughed. "This will make blue. Trust me."

So mom bought the yarn, coreopsis, madder, and woad, and the lady gave her three booklets of instructions, one for each dye.

"Fun!" shouted Jorge from his perch in mom's baby backpack. He can't talk very much, because he's having to learn English now that he's in the United States, but he chooses his words well.

Now I have to lift the yarn out and let it drip over the grass, not in the bucket. Our back yard smells worse than the garage. Which is saying something, because that's where Beza does her dissections. If you're going to perform embalming, you have to know a lot about anatomy. The yarn reeks, but it is turning a little bit blue. I would be impressed that the greenish water turns the yarn blue, if it weren't quite so putrid. Now I have to dip the yarn back in the bucket.

When we got home, Mom read the pamphlets while we kids worked on our usual studies. Jeri picked up her dry-erase markers and went to work on whatever she was doing on the living room white boards.

Excuse me, Ben, but that was advanced calculus. I'm working out a way to explain it to one of my clients.

And that is Jeri. We can talk to each other mentally, since before Mom adopted us from the orphanage in South Korea. And Jeri is a math prodigy. She – we, actually – are only twelve, and she makes extra money tutoring college students in calculus.

My interests tend more toward the liberal arts, particularly languages. I speak ten languages.

Eleven. You speak eleven languages.

I'm not counting Latin, because I can only read and write it. No one speaks Latin anymore, because we don't know for sure how it was pronounced.

That's the problem with languages; it's all too inconsistent. We don't have the problem with math. If the Pythagorean Theorem worked for the ancient Greeks, it works for us.

As I was saying, when Mom finished reading the pamphlets, she gathered us in the kitchen. Beza came in from the garage, closing the door on the formaldehyde smell.

"Kids, this is going to be such fun! And at the end, you'll each have a lovely hat to wear!"

She went on to explain how Jeri would soak her coreopsis flowers in water overnight, and then boil them tomorrow. That would make the dye. Jeri is going to make a wonderful chapeau out of her golden colored yarn.

Beza would have to soak the dried madder roots, then puree them in a blender, then boil them and strain out the roots, then soak the yarn in that for a while. Her yarn is a rich red, which looks great with her dark skin and eyes.

I was the only one who had to put my pee in a bucket. For weeks!

It wasn't weeks. You had to fill a five-liter bucket, which holds 169.07 ounches. Given that the average teenager will pee about 20 ounces a day, it only took you nine days, and you could have quit after lunch time on –

Okay, it felt like weeks. Because I had to pee in a cup, and then take the pee to the bucket, which had to sit in the sun to stay warm, and when I opened the lid, the smell was noisome. Like it is now, while I have the lid open, so I can swish the yarn around in the pee dye. I take the yarn out of the dye, very carefully, and let it drip on the grass.

The blue is getting a little darker now, and it's going to be a handsome hue. Almost the same shade of blue as the T-shirt I wear whenever Ariel comes over from across the street to watch wrestling with Jeri. Ariel says she really likes that shade of blue. I wonder what she would think about a matching blue hat?

But no, I don't think I will ever wear it. I might have to knit it, as part of a homeschool project. But I don't think I can bring myself to wear a pee hat.