Dreamfarm Girl

Transition

2011-05-26T09:16:00.000-05:00

Transitions are rough business.

The transition from winter to spring this year has been particularly harsh. As the South and Midwest live through the horror of devastating tornadoes and floods, which passed within a few miles of my daughter's home and razed Tuscaloosa where she and my son went to school, and my home state of Texas suffers extreme drought and wildfires, my heart goes out to those who are reeling from the dangers of simply living on this planet. And my heart is equally gladdened by the incredible power of community to pick up the pieces and give thanks.

I'm sure my own transition, the letting go of my Austin home and setting myself right again in New York, is somehow woven into this poem...

Transition

Jilted Winter
releases her bitter
clutch in rages,
wreaking litter of lives,
pelting possessions:
Scraps of photos.
Teacup shards.
A muddied shoe.
Hurled beyond miles
to strangers’ lawns,
disbelieving eyes.
Scorned, she
twists, flattens
scorches
drowns.
She casts us away.

We reel toward
the open arms
of Spring.
Mornings beckoned
by soothing breezes,
a lavish sun and
gleeful dogs.
Kind eyes of
nodding strangers.
Bask in drifting
petal confetti,
laden trees
in showy promise.
We drink her in,
forgiveness sweetly
on our lips.

At Last!

2011-02-20T20:36:00.002-06:00

Coming back to blogging is akin, I am feeling right this minute, to returning to Earth on the space shuttle. Though isn't that a strange analogy, since it is into cyberspace that I am returning, having spent lo these many weeks living fully in the real world. And yet, going through such a revolution as I am, moving from the A-town to the Apple, from the five-acre farm to the uber-urban, I have been living in my head sped up in double-time, triple-time. It's the chipmunks in here! No, even that is not enough; I have a head full of bees is what. Getting some of it down, finally, in words does feel like coming home. I bet I sleep a little better tonight.

How to pick up where I left off? In this winter of extremes, I have shivered in snow storms on two coasts, the First and the Working. I even visited the Calm Coast and drank up the zen of Sausalito for a few days, basking in the rare winter sunshine there (though I was working, so it wasn't too relaxing). My temperament has zigzagged like the nation's thermometer, buoyant at my new adventure; dipping dangerously low at times with uncertainty. Elation to severe crankiness, like the flash freeze that hit Austin a couple of weeks ago, the mercury dropping a degree a minute for half an hour. And now? I believe I am hovering in the mid-ranges at the letting go of a former life, ready to swing in either direction with the faintest breeze. It is exciting. And it is saddening.

But fear not! (I say this to myself quite a bit lately.) I am taking the old me with me. To prove it, I give you a couple snapshots of my unfurnished apartment (where I am sort of camping) in the Upper West Side, a block from Central Park, where the light is good and the lilting snippets of kids' voices wander up through my windows as they make their way to school. (I have landed in the neighborhood of schools, it appears, and kids are kids are kids everywhere, it also appears.) I have lit into a world where kind doormen have helped me with boxes and not only is the familiar Whole Foods up the street, a very quaint locally owned natural foods store is even closer. Most importantly, my husband's daily phone calls assure me his physical self will soon appear. And with him will come real furniture!

I brought a ball jar and cuttings of lavender and rosemary from Dreamfarm--sweet smells of home. And I have a New Yorker on the counter. Old meets new. But, which is which?

My little pitchers and jars against a twinkling New York nighsky.

So thank you, dear friends, for inquiring about the move, for perhaps checking in from time to time, dismayed at the interminably static page, wondering where the heck has Dreamfarm Girl gone?

I have gone to the city. But I have returned. And now I look forward to seeing what each of you has been up to!

Always~
Dreamfarm Girl

Please Pardon My Rust

2010-12-31T21:56:00.003-06:00

Usually when I write a post, it starts in my head like a little sprout that peeks out a bit timid but full of promise. Then somehow it becomes...like the tender thistles jutting their brave chins against the gathering stormclouds --?

Nope, that's not it at all.

It morphs, dreamlike, into a brewing cauldron of soup into which I drop potatoes, sausage, mushrooms, herbs -- mmmm, maybe oregano and thyme? And just a pinch of Mexican marigold, but be careful, that's a bossy one who likes to take things her own way. And then a swig of cooking wine, shredded sharp cheese and some milk. Cream you think? Even better. And voila! Soup's on.

Yet what has happened in this word-starved, thought-hungry month? My brain froze in a brainfreeze, is what. And now that our President has acknowledged the Slurpee's deliciousness, we can all admit our intimate knowledge with the Slurpee brainfreeze. You know what I mean. It's as if time stops, and all one can do is vacantly announce, "I've got brainfreeze!" and everyone nods, slightly sympathetically, but not too much, because really what is there is to say? It's just brainfreeze.

Oh, I've got some good excuses all right. Haven't we all? But what have I interesting to say now? Let's just skip to that.

So!

Um.

Truly, may I ask, what is blogworthy? Once you get away from the habit, nothing it seems is worth writing into the ether.

Don't worry, it's not depression. This little light of mine is shining! I've been happy. (I also apparently still have vestiges of vacation Bible school lingering in my brain.)

It's not boredom. I have cooked up storms in the past weeks. I have sewed till my thumbs turned into red tomato pincushions. I have Christmassed. (What? Are you really going to tell me that's not a verb in my precarious state?)

To heck with not giving excuses. Did I mention I'm basically doing two jobs right now? And getting ready for the move to NY? Preparing my house to rent out? Finding out just which teensy closet on the Upper West Side is just the right place for me to cram my whole house into? Unloading my valuable treasures I once thought I couldn't part with? Getting sick and slowly getting well?

Ah! Maybe there's the little nugget I am looking for. When I took to bed for a full 24 hours to simmer my fevered self down (and wishing I twittered so I could claim to the world I had the vapors -- admit it, aren't you just dying to say that, just once?), I read a fabulous book, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. It's a memoir of her crazy upbringing by genius and devoted, yet 99% unfit-to-be-parents. I saw a little of myself in her cuckoo mother who is Artistically Inspired But Lacking in all Practicality and Common Sense Despite Sounding Deceptively Pragmatic; however I am more her mirrored twin, Practically Inspired But Lacking in all Artistic Sense Despite Sounding Uncommonly Artsy. I suspect we have a similar trajectory for success.

Regardless, it's a fine book and I heartily recommend it. And it can be read in one bed-ridden day, with naps! The truth is, I could not put it down.

There. Meaning has been found in today's blog. And it goes with the picture, too.
Struggle little tender shoot. You can kick some ass if you just keep at it.
A-men.

Happy New Year, y'all.

Pineapple Cheesecake, We Love You

2010-11-30T22:04:00.001-06:00

In our family, Thanksgiving = pineapple cheesecake. Most people have never heard of pineapple cheesecake, and more's the pity. This humble little dessert is nothing short of heaven and home and holidays, all rolled into one 9" pie pan of graham cracker encrusted, creamy sweet vanilla pineappley goodness.

**Mmmmmmmmm...kiss**
(That is me, the cook, smooching my fingers into the air at the dreamy thought of it. Dang, it's good!)

Every year for Thanksgiving I make Grandma Punkin's pineapple cheesecake legacy. The recipe is simple, but it commands absolute reverence. All familial mouths water in anticipation of it. Giddiness breaks out when it is born from the oven. A hush descends across the table when it is served. Treaties are signed over who gets how much and when.

Most people wish relatives and friends a Happy Turkey Day; my son's texted holiday greeting this year? Enjoy the pineapple cheesecake. Notice the lack of an exclamation mark, indicating not so much happiness for us, but a lament for his own pineapple cheesecakeless meal.

Once when my daughter was in college, she decided not to come home for Thanksgiving. The Wednesday before, she called begging for a ticket. She needed that pineapple cheesecake. Another time her brother came when she could not; we boxed up a hefty slice and Southwest Airlines carried Thanksgiving to her.

And this year, a new era has begun. My daughter Caitlin -- for the first time -- made Grandma Punkin's pineapple cheesecake for her own Thanksgiving celebration. She texted me to let me know her plans.

Did she have the recipe? I texted back. Yes, she says. I had given it to her a few years ago. Ah, I remembered. She didn't have a food processor then and the graham cracker crust is impossible without one. And don't even think about buying a pre-made one -- horrors! (Once I dared not to buy a prefab, but pre-crushed crumbs to use in the recipe. You'd have thought me an unwashed heretic. Mutiny was considered. I pleaded for my life, and fully believe I was spared because I was the only one in the house who knew the recipe and had the potential to make another one the right way.)

Remember to use only real vanilla, I texted. Yep, she replied, those three letters assuring me the family recipe was in capable hands.

But was it?? After the crust was made (Honeymaids, crushed to a whisper and added to a lake of melted butter, then pressed lovingly into a pan), she texted me again. Made it myself! the text proclaimed. (Look ma! No hands!)

As the minutes ticked by, as I knew that beautiful crust had been filled and committed to a 350 degree oven, I admit to being nervous. Could she do it? Would she capture that thick creaminess topped with a whipped burst of fresh juicy tangy sweetness? Would she ever so gently lay the topping on the baked custard bottom so that it didn't break through? Would she watch the custard like a hawk so that it firmed up but didn't dry out? Would she leave it in precisely 22 minutes? Drain the crushed pineapple so that it wasn't too soupy? Use good pineapple, not a generic brand that is never sweet enough? Well, would she??

She sent me picture mail when it was done. It was perfect. It was a fine, fine moment.

It was, in fact, a moment I realize I've been waiting for. Not for 22 minutes, but for, oh, almost 27 years, when I first became the mother of a daughter. That day when my daughter begins to pick up the the threads of tradition I've laid out for her, and make them her own. When she has taken all the years of watching, and produced it in her own way, for her own self. And she did put her own twist on it. Her pie is not round. But as you can see, it's perfection!

From Grandma Punkin, to whom we owe a big Thanksgiving thanks for all her great Texas cooking and recipe-sharing (next Thanksgiving I shall do an ode to cornbread dressing), and before her Grandma Bowen, from whence pineapple cheesecake came, to me -- a lucky and grateful daughter-in-law, and now to my daughter, and soon to my stepdaughter Carmen who also wants to learn to how to make it, and I would bet even to my son who will want to give it a go (or find a pretty girl who will) -- the family traditions carry on. And don't we all need them? When life flies by faster than car window scenery, and when what shows up in your life one day that is not at all what you expected to come to call, biting into that comforting delicious pineapple cheesecake year to year is a constant that reminds us, love and family are always here. Some things are right and always will be.

Some people may have ties that bind, but for us Dreamfarmers, it's the pies that bind!

(The next generation pineapple cheesecake lover: my great-niece Eva Grace.)

The Dog that Caught the Car

2010-11-22T17:03:00.000-06:00

Moving, and not moving, is deep in my psyche. I have been moving or not moving all my life. Which is to say, my family moved a lot when I was a kid, and when we weren't moving, that was almost as much a presence as moving, since it was only a matter of time. Oh, once I got to be a tween I got pretty good at fooling myself that I'd never have to move again, till Dad came home with new orders and the cycle started all over again. I cried and hated it. Till we got somewhere new and I never wanted to leave. (Again.)

My adult life is the plant born of these constantly shifting roots. I have become attached to places where I swore I would not leave. And then, I left. I have taken on identities later abandoned. But those identities never really escaped me; they just became a layer I built upon. This last layer's been building for quite some time. If my life were a layer cake, I'd be toppling over in a massive confectionary disaster.

And now. And now! After year upon year upon year of Dreamfarm life here in sunny South Austin, Texas, I have been offered a new path. A very different path. And I am going to take it!

Your very own Dreamfarm Girl will be relocating to the very antithesis of Dreamfarm. Like the North Pole to the South, like the day to the night, like the meadow to the metal.

Which is to say New York City.

(Noo York City? Get a rope!) (Tell me you're not too young to remember that commercial.)

Yup. I am the dog that caught the car. I have been offered a job that I cannot turn down, and holy cow what happens now. But truth be told, I have been ready for the next exciting thing in my life-work (which I prefer to worklife, which is so much less than thinking of it in terms of the work I want to accomplish in my life). For some time I contemplated that the next exciting thing would be quitting my job, being a creative and selling my wares at the farmer's market, on Etsy, and artsy-craftsy fairs. Maybe do some freelance writing. Write short stories and poetry. Monetize my blog. Alas, this plan did not promise to pay my bills or land me gently into that goodly rest of retirement. A promotion at my nonprofit organization did.

But it's so much more than that! I am energized to be thinking about making a contribution in a new way, to stretching my brain and testing the waters I have surrounded myself with. Once again, after quite some time, I find myself whispering, I can do this!

And so we're off to the Big Apple. And don't you think that big bad apple could use a little DFG energy? (Okay, it doesn't care. I know it. But who cares?)

There are a few odds and ends, like dealing with our 5-acre house, barn, shed and gardens (anyone want to rent it? buy it? come to a massive garage sale?), and till then I'll be zipping back and forth. But I'm hoping in a few months we'll be nestled in a sunny apartment with my herbs growing in the window and my paintbrushes and the DFG blog given new inspiration.

Of course, it's not without some sadness. I've been surrounded by family and friends here and that is not an easy thing to let go. But when I think of how letting go used to be the harsh closing of an airtight door, with only memories to connect me to the past, this is nothing like that. We will be back to visit often.

Here's to new challenges, new muses, and new scenery! Because even though Dreamfarm is about a very wonderful place, it's also about keeping your eyes open and letting the world come in.

Sunday come to call

2010-11-07T23:27:00.000-06:00

I have read in books that Sunday once was a day for calling...on your neighbors, family, friends. And doesn't that sound lovely, a world where Sunday means socializing? I do love my Sundays, but mostly they are spent becoming one with my house through the generosity of Mrs. Meyer's cleaning products.

Today was not so different, except I did have a few visitors come to call. Foremost, my sissy and I sat at the kitchen table for a good hour over Italian sodas. That just did my heart good.

But she is not the only one who came to call. A dapper fellow in a black and white suit and a dashing red cap fluttered into my world and banged quite noisily -- not on the door, but on the tree. (I know, he is hard to see, but you must admit that red cap is quite the eye-catcher.) When I tried to get a little bit closer, he took a fright and headed for another oak. But as he did, who should I spy?

This slinky neighborhood lady, who belongs to no one but herself, and stealthily wanders the neighborhood acreage. I call her Inky. (There have been perhaps dozens of Inkys in the years I've lived here, or there could be just one. With at least nine lives. She is quite resourceful, that Inky. And leery of all things human. So I was quite honored she stopped by and stared. And stared some more.)

But that is not all, folks, that is not all at all! Just as the afternoon sun was high in the sky, I heard my new neighbor making quite a ruckus. You might even say he was braying.

Meet Bandit. My new neighbor donkey. Isn't he just the sweetest???

And the best news is I get to visit with him any day of the week, not just Sunday. I think we will become great friends.

Possibilities

2010-11-03T22:28:00.001-05:00

I was wandering around Dreamfarm with my camera the other day--the kind of day that feels like a bite out of a crisp, tart, juicy apple--on the lookout for anything fancy or shadowed or angled just so. And Dreamfarm obliged, as it so often does on such a day.

Which got me thinking about possibilities.

The possibilities at Dreamfarm for something to discover seem both limitless and comfortably contained.

I stumbled onto something that has been at Dreamfarm long before my own arrival, plain as the nose on a face, and yet I have never noticed it.

The sticker on the gate at the entrance. It's unassuming and the gate is permanently open -- I'm not sure it would shut if I gave it my best, what with the flora growing all up and through it. But somehow it gave me a little thrill: I live on a farm, says my gate (with the authority of coming from Nebraska), and it has said so for quite some time. And it's because I want to think of my Dreamfarm as a farm that this thrills me so. And also, because I actually don't live on a farm.

But the possibility is there, is it not?

And what a perfect time to think such thoughts, just as Halloween invites us to be something other than ourselves. Or, more truthfully, something within ourselves brought into being under the magical light of the moon.

Last year I was a milk maid, German girl style. There is a part of me that very, very much feels like she was meant to be hauling milk pails on her hips in the old country, on her way to churn butter. Bitte!

A couple weeks ago I spied a flowing, layered skirt at a garage sale and immediately knew what I would be this year: a garden fairy. Don't I feel like that each morning as I tend my garden whispering, grow little radishes, grow! (My shiny wings were perkier at the beginning of the night, I promise.)

And when I think of possibilities for my life, somehow the endless unknowable sea that once was my future now feels more like the me-that-is-already stepping into her destiny. It could veer one way or it could lean another, but like the Farmaster sticker that's been there all along, whatever I become is in my bones already. I just have to discover it. I have to grow, little radish, grow!

(And strangely, as I get older, it seems it is the past that becomes the endless sea to discover. Where was it spent, and what did it mean?)

My head gets a hall pass

2010-10-24T23:25:00.001-05:00

The work week left me a wee bit rattled, so I gave my brain the weekend off. I gave myself permission to wander about the place aimlessly looking at pretty things.

These wildflowers blanket the Dreamfarm fields in an autumnal yellow wonderland and make me feel, well, dreamy. Somehow, cleansed and blameless and optimistic. (But fatally so? taunts the wind...)

I weeded in the garden and cooked some of my bounty. This handsome bell went into stir-fry greens (Dreamfarm chards and mustards) along with garlic and onion (alas, store-bought), which was stuffed into masa crepes with jack cheese that melted all gooey. Served with black beans and rice mixed with banana and sage. A glass of pinot grigio. Oh, yes -- you're right -- it was divine.

I watered the garden and stared at the water droplets dazzle in the sun, showing off what a magic elixir it is. My cabbage look pregnant, with their babes tucked secretly into the folds of their innermost leaves.

I stared at the grass waving gently against a blue blue sky.

I contemplated how the shiny bronze blades of grass did not have to do so much to dazzle against the blue blue sky. They just were. They just woke up each morning and said, Here we are you blue blue sky. Don't we look so very fine with you at our back? and perhaps they also say, Yes, blue sky, we know you bring out our shine, but perhaps we bring out your blueness as well?

And I am pretty sure shiny bronze blades of grass are not required, as part of their job, to say when the dreary sky comes and makes them drab and slack, that it's dreary sky's fault because he just isn't able to get his act together. And yet, and yet....sometimes when my head has not been given a hall pass, sometimes when instead it must be engaged and worthy of a paycheck, it must mention such things. It really hates to do that. Even when it does so in the fairest of ways possible.

For when I was a child, there was a lot of emphasis on where my nose was supposed to be. To the grindstone. In front of my face. Not in the air. And certainly not in someone else's business. If someone else was not doing his job, what interest was it of mine, I was asked, rather pointedly. None of course.

Until, many years later, darn the luck, it is part of my job. And still, it feels like tattling. I must then somehow undo the upset. I slipped the skin off boiled chickpeas for an entire hour, while singing as many songs as I could think of. Most in a minor key.

There is no picture of this, nor would you want there to be.

(Tomorrow's another Monday; let's hope it's a blue-sky and grass-waving week.)

The Fine Line

2010-10-17T21:49:00.001-05:00

I have developed the habit of late of getting up on Sunday morning, and, while slowly waking -- brought closer to the day with each sip-o-joe -- making granola. Granola, as it turns out, is both very easy to make and very complicated. Such is life.

The basic recipe is two cups raw oats, 1/3 cup oil, 1/2 cup sweetener such as honey, maple syrup, or agave nectar. I prefer the latter, with just a hint of maple, please. I also add 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg. You combine all this in a bowl, mix well, and lay out out oh so thinly on a baking sheet and cook at 300 degrees for 30 minutes, turning once at the halfway. Pretty simple.

And cheap! Even buying organic oats, it's at least half the cost of boxed granola, plus no additives or box to get rid of, and I am using the healthy oil, canola. (Thank you, kitchen gods, for giving us guilt-free oil (in small doses). And avocados. But I digress.)

Baking granola is wonderful. Who, I ask you, doesn't love the smell of cinnamon baking in the kitchen?

The first time I made granola, this summer -- remember I was going on a simplicity kick? -- I was smitten. Here was something I had been paying a ridiculous amount of money for (and have you noticed how many niche granola makers there are these days charging kingdom prices for their fancy wares?). Yet it was easy to make, and mine was even better than store-bought.

Oh, simple, silly me. Because like all things, once you become familiar with them, you are treated to the nuances, the finely etched lines of them, the cracks. What at first seemed like perfection I soon realized was not. I wanted crispier, lighter, less sticky. Every batch I strive for granola nirvana. Alas, I cannot find it.

The batches keep coming out ever so slightly gunky. It tends to clump together. (Cinnamon oatmeal chewing gum, is how the better half described it.) I think it's because I've been doubling the recipe, which throws off the cooking time. If I leave the trays in for a bit longer, it gets a teensy bit too toasty. Today, after taking it out once -- cooling, cooling -- still too sticky... I put it back on the trays and back in the oven's maw. Five minutes later, repeat. I got mad and yelled at the oven, squatting there so boxy, looking all what-did-I-do stupid.

Let's just see how much time you need, sister! Slam went the oven door and off I stomped to my room, far far away from the reach of the timer, leaving the baking sheets in just a teensy bit more than a teensy bit longer.

So. This week's granola flavor is called Campfire. I spent 20 minutes culling out the dark brown to black oats while estimating how many pretty pennies this was not saving me. As we say around this house: It's a fine line between clever and stupid.

But I am not giving up. Not because of the expense factor. I am at a point in my life, thank goodness, when an extra five bucks a week isn't going to break me. And not because of the health factor, though I do rather like knowing the ingredients are all actually words commonly used outside a laboratory.

No, I will keep making granola on Sunday mornings because I love the ritual of it. I love the smell of it (unless charred). Most of all, I love the feel of it -- of the wooden-handled spatula in my hands, the curved rubber head mixing the oats. I love pulling down my trusty indigo blue bowl that has been the vessel for years upon years of cookies, pies and breads and my very favorite lemon squares, that I have fed to my family and friends.

(I just might believe it has a secret life of its own, Blue Bowl does, in which it loves being my favorite bowl and deep in the night whispers to her next door neighbor bowl upon the shelf, in an overly sweet voice, that it is the best-loved bowl of all. To which the vintage frosted-glass, hand-painted Leaf Bowl haughtily replies: Yes, but it is I she takes to parties. Blue Bowl feels the pang of plain-janiness for a fleeting moment; however, she quickly recovers with a short sniff retort, secure in her heart that I love her best of all, my workhorse bowl, oh how I do.)

Where was I? Oh, yes. I love crumbling the warm, toasted oats in my hands, transfering them from wax paper to the non-BPA bin from which I will scoop out a half-cup every day to top my yogurt and berries. And I love that I have a grateful eater, my sweetie, who adores that I make granola.

Oh, granola. You crazy edible art project you. You know what I love the most? You make me feel like I am participating. Not just consuming. That it doesn't matter if I'm clever or stupid or -- more likely -- walking the very fine line in between, because you and me and Blue Bowl are in this thing together, and we are creating something. Someday we will get it right. We will! Or we will come to love clumps.

P.S. Husband just snacked on the latest batch, salvaged from the taint of ashen bits, and declared it my best yet. Hmmmmm.

Revived!

2010-10-11T11:47:00.001-05:00

Fall in Central Texas: When all living beings give a great sigh of relief. Another sweltering summer has been sternly put to bed and the grownups can finally have that long-awaited pinot grigio in peace.

The birds chirp more cheerfully, all atwitter after a long drink from birdbath (which, miracle of miracles, has water!).

Grass stalks grow tall and handsome, their golden seeds catching the angled sun. Flowers erupt from dormant bulbs deep in the earth where they ever so smartly rode out the long weeks of hundred degree days.

Color springs from bushes that hung on so faithfully, desperately, during drought. The sky lifts and clears, dispelling the humid, suffocating haze to reveal the high blue sky that was there all along.

My roses and marigolds are, it seems, actually roses and marigolds. I was beginning to wonder.

Ah, fall -- when a young girl's fancy turns to...the best yard sales of the year!

Because fall also ushers in the biological need to nest. Winter is coming and we simply can't make it through the long cold months with the same drab accoutrements. The richest among us go to the richest of stores, but the rest of us -- well, we are the lucky ones. We can pick up their gently used dregs for mere pennies on the dollar. (DFG tip: It's best to target your Saturday morning garage sale route to the neighborhoods you wished you lived in.)

A new creamer, fifty cents, to add to my small collection. I have become deeply attached to pouring into my morning coffee sweetly warmed half-milk/half half-n-half from an honest pitcher. It just tastes better.

Vintage lime and cream rooster bowls. For a buck. I mean, come on!

A brand new (used) desk ($5) and painted lamp ($10 -- they drove a hard bargain) from whence I sit and compose my missives to you. Ah, so civilized!

Sweaters! (Is it not a miracle in itself that one can even imagine wearing sweaters when not 6 weeks ago I clawed at even the thinnest film of cotton touching my clammy skin.)

With all these new treasures, I had to give into the foyer's incessant begging for sunflowers and mini-pumpkins to accompany the newly returned jackets on the coat rack.

Don't you love how their stems come with their own curly ribbon. So clever.
Good heavens, winter had better get here soon. This blathering perkiness is frightening me!

Wheeeeeee! Thud.

2010-09-26T23:14:00.001-05:00

The road trip home is like a slow sigh, knowing the best is over and something is looming hard and heavy in the near future....er, what's it called? Oh, yes, reality. No matter how you look at it, the vacation funslide ends in that hard, hard ground that goes by the name of The Job, Etc. at the bottom. You know the thud is coming.

Such was my thinking as we left Ohio, winding along the river into West Virginia (briefly) and west through Kentucky. How much fun was this going to be, I pouted. Might as well just high-tail it quickly back to Texas and get it over with.

As it turns out, My Old Kentucky Home state park in Bardstown, Kentucky, was a pretty fun stop. The park was right in the middle of the historic little town, founded by French in 1779 and containing the old jail, graveyard, schoolhouse, and tavern. The names of the dead on the headstones made the town come alive for me, thinking of the souls that bore those monikers once walking these very same streets, taking a drink at the bar, scorning the scallywags on display in front of the jail. Probably wishing they didn't have to work so hard either.

That night a great storm blew through and our mighty underdog tent withstood the test like a champ. We lay inside listening to thunder roll across the skies in a powerful timpani orchestral performance. Mr. Dieter Dog, now only smelling very faintly of skunk, was very happy to be allowed back in the tent; he pretends to be fearless but he is quite a-skeered of bellowing skies.

The next day took us into Memphis where we were able to camp near the Mississippi River, just a few miles from Graceland. It was near the anniversary of The King's death, so we drove by just to witness the spectacle, and I have to say, it did him proud -- the street show was every bit as gaudy as one of his stone-studded jumpsuits. Elvis impersonators were jail-house rockin' a throng of fans under a big tent across from the mansion, and the Lisa Marie, Elvis' airplane, looked like it had made an eye-popping landing in the parking lot.

After all that excitement (and we didn't even get in to Graceland itself, with the pooch and all), we worked up a powerful appetite and headed on down to Beale Street as the sun went down. With the delta blues blaring out of joints for several blocks long, and a team of acrobats back-flipping down the pedestrian street to tourist amazement and applause, we sat outside the fine establishment simply named Pig on Beale and happily ate a huge mess of the best pork ribs I've ever had the pleasure of downing. Bone sucking good.

We drove to East Texas the next night and camped beside a lake, which was, as all but one lake in Texas is, a river-dammed reservoir. We went in for a dip to counter the suffocating heat, but we only succeeded in getting slimy. The bathrooms were swarming with mosquitoes and gnats. We had a fire despite the relentless heat to keep the bugs at bay, and then spent a clammy night praying for a breeze. I can see how one could hate camping, and the next day drove home in eager anticipation of air conditioning. How happily I entered the house, exhausted, and turned on the air conditioner. How very, very frustratingly sad did I fall into bed when the damn thing would not come on.

Thud.

(Ah, but it was a fun ride. How many more days till I get another turn on the slide?)

The Road of Our Own

2010-09-16T20:36:00.000-05:00

As we headed north to Lake Erie, the charming towns and farmhouses became further and further apart, like how the stars in the universe slowly expand away from each other, the interim filled with what you might think is nothingness but is in fact filled with incredible weight. Whether dark matter or sea of corn fields, it is a force to be reckoned with; I can feel it. One might imagine never escaping this place, hampered down by the endless chores, backbreaking labor and months entrenched in deep snow. And I might now understand why my parents, barely in their 20's, jumped at the chance to join the Air Force and fly away to see the world.

I felt Lake Erie in the air before we arrived at its shores. Thick with moisture, even the atmosphere seemed to want to inhale the vast waters after so many miles hovering over flat farmland. As we arrived at East Harbor State Park on a peninsula that juts out into the Great Lake at the northwest corner of the state, we discovered we had just missed a rainstorm, and all the mosquitoes had come out to celebrate. The sky was dimming prematurely thanks to lingering clouds, so we hurried to pitch our tent along the short wooded road that was reserved for tent-campers. Across the way there was an entire small city of RVs who must've been there to enjoy the boating and fishing, since there wasn't much nature going on in that parking lot. Over on our side, we each had our own lawn and woods. We were like the mellow kids smoking out back of the high school gym while the dance party raged on under bright lights inside.

The sky cleared up a bit and in the gloaming we ventured out to the lake, where along the way we encountered an inlet filled with geese and water lilies. This area is a remnant of the Great Black Swamp...seems some of those fields we passed on our way here were meant to be marshes teeming with life. Settlers drained them and began planting crops, as settlers are wont to do, and now only ten percent of Ohio's original wetlands remain. We walked along the lake, steel gray and not at all what I had imagined. A couple years ago, I visited my aunt's house on Lake Michigan near Traverse City; recalling the water's emerald-jewel shine, I expected this to be the same. After a long dreary day of driving, I was ready for the sun and a strip of sand along sparkling water, as promised on the Ohio State Parks website. It was not to be, and I pouted, dear reader, yes I did.

But we got some great photos of the water lilies at sunset, and Keaton showed off his dog-manliness at all those geese-bogeys, who squawked in annoyance. I was by then pretty tuckered out and ready for my picnic meal, bare bones as it was (we were down to peanut butter and jam on Ritz crackers and fruit), and the next chapter of The Road.

Back in Hocking Hills, we began reading aloud Cormac McCarthy's novel about a father and son on an apocolyptic journey to safety. We were captivated by the torturous trek of parent and child -- gruesome and harrowing in the circumstances, yet not unlike the journey every parent and child make together -- and maybe every longterm relationship: navigating fear and danger, losing and finding trust and faith, the constant knitting and binding, the painful letting go. It seemed a fitting book, being on our own version of The Road.

The sky finally dark and cooling off, and wood still too wet for a fire, we were getting close to turning in. My husband picked a gentle tune on the guitar. Keaton and I at the picnic table were lulled to near hypnosis, when suddenly Keater leapt up and, at a full dash, ran about 10 yards toward the woods. Dieter! I sharply yelled (for that is his other name, from Keater-Dieter). And to my amazement, he turned right back around and....dove into barrel roll after frantic barrel roll, as the wall of skunk slammed into my face. Skunk! I yelled, paying no mind that it was after 10pm quiet time.

Skunk, if you have not had the pleasure, smells like burnt rubber doused perhaps with old urine. Plus maybe some day-old burnt coffee (like when someone forgets to turn off the burner at work?). Times 10. No, times 100.

It was late at night. We were in a park, miles from a town. Skunk does not come off with soap and water. It is oil. (Nature is very clever.) What were we to do? We tied him to the picnic bench, got into our tent, and prayed it didn't rain.

At first light, my husband dashed to town for two cans of tomato juice, the standard home remedy and only option. We doused him, whereupon he promptly rolled in the dirt, which only made it gunk up more. He looked like Dirty Halloween Dog. And he still stunk.

So we took him over to the water hose area for RVs and scrubbed him with soap and water. He still stunk.

We set him on a picnic table, got out the scissors, and chopped away as much fur as we possibly could without skinning him. We did nick him a few times (poor baby) and he didn't even wince. He knew we were in hunker-down Code Red (orange?) mode. When it was over, he still stunk a little, but not too bad. But he looked like hell, and was still faintly orange.

Our whole campsite had smelled him. All morning, one by one, the neighbors stopped by, friendly and curious, while looking sympathetically at the dog as if they were visiting a child stricken with measles, poor puppy. A heavily tattooed, washed out looking girl offered her car's scented cone, but it had a reek all of its own, so we politely declined. All the rangers came by, zipping up in the golf carts, each one jovial and quick to relay previous campers' skunk misfortunes. We were grateful for everyone's kindness.

Minus a leash, collar and blanket, all beyond salvage (but we had spares), we packed up the car and took off to catch the ferry for Kelley's Island perched in the middle of Lake Erie. Though rain had been predicted, the sky cleared up magnificently, and with all the windows down airing out the smell, we had a beautiful trip out to the small, quaint island of Victorian homes and narrow streets, where ice cream shops and putt-putt golf are the main attraction, and most people--having crossed over as pedestrians--rented golf carts to get around. The water had turned a lovely turquoise under a gleaming sun. We got a great little campsite and headed off to the beach where the shallow water was the perfect temperature for a dip. Keaton soaked for a good long while as we let our eyes gaze far out into the distance -- north toward Canada, and east as far as the eye could see was this magnificent glacier pond. We treated ourselves to an ice cream that night in town, and read a few more chapters of The Road by flashlight.

Hidden all snug in our tent, Keaton now allowed back in, I wondered how well, like the boy and his father in the story, we carried the light inside us. That light of humanity. I fall short at times I know, but it felt like it was glowing a little warmer and brighter in me on this shared journey that had become as much about examining the internal landscape as taking in the world. Even with the scent of skunk still lingering in the air. Maybe even made better because of it.

Hello, Ohio! Is that me I see?

2010-09-13T19:44:00.001-05:00

Though I didn't grow up in Ohio, both my parents did, and as they hauled their four children from one Air Force base to the next, we somehow learned from them, or from the occasional visits to the rooted homestead, that Ohio was a place where good, honest people lived. Farmers and astronauts and Miss Americas were from Ohio. As a kid (when Miss America seemed like a pretty cool thing), I loved going back for visits, though by the time I was a teenager and for the decade following, romanced by Southern charms, I couldn't imagine a place more boring. Yet, the circle, like faithful Ohio seasons, comes around.

When we crossed the Ohio River on an old metal bridge from Ravenswood, West Virginia, my heart leapt with excitement. It did indeed feel like I was returning to a place where my DNA knew it belonged. My cells, each nucleus, were being pulled like a magnet to a land that was part of who I was, even if I knew I wasn't all that much a part of it. A place that for me would forever hold a grandma who gave squishy hugs and a grandpa who had his own private stash of ginger ale, which he'd share with us kids while ignoring my mother's half-hearted protests. Where cousins whom I barely knew but with whom I instantly felt a kinship had the same grandma as me and, with an odd familiarity, called my mom Aunt Judy. Where life carried on in an orderly way because grown up people seemed to know what they were doing and so kids could just be kids and bang on the Hammond organ trying out all the cool sound effects, or lay on the hammock reading comic books, or create plays or dress up in grandma's clothes, and never ever get in trouble. A grandfather clock chimed softly each hour to let you know time was passing exactly as it should.

And finally, we were there! But the Ohio I was used to seeing was the west, flat side. We always came in at Cincinnati, where north of town the hills of Kentucky smoothed out like a fitted sheet for miles. This time, my husband, Keaton the dog and I came in from the foothills of the Appalachians, which continued rolling merrily along, woodsy and hilly, all the way to Athens, our destination about an hour away.

It was a beautiful college campus -- in fact, the first university in the Northwest Territory, founded in 1803 -- with green lawns, majestic trees, and old stone and brick buildings. As we drove into town, we headed straight for a college bar -- not because we were in desperate need of a drink, though I did promptly order a beer -- but because my husband's friend of 30 years whom we were coming to see was playing a gig. The joint wasn't hard to find, since the strip of restaurants and bars across from the university was only a few blocks long. Yet, it had a friendly character of mostly locally owned shops, and I had the feeling it hadn't changed too much in appearance despite a cultural revolution in the world and students that now filled its streets. As it turns out, two of my aunts and one of my uncles went to school here.

The band played R&B to a rowdy crowd of alumni in town for some event. On the break, I met John, my husband's guitarist friend, who had that Midwestern straight-up niceness. He gave us the keys to his house and told us to stay as long as we'd like. I am not one to enjoy staying at a stranger's home, and my husband and I had a pre-arranged agreement that we'd stay one night and then shove off. But once we got to their house, I immediately felt at home. Though John's wife was out of town till the next afternoon, photos of her smiling warming surrounded by family drew me to her, and her quilts on our bed and about the house, and her inviting art room in the room next to ours, made me sure we'd hit it off. And we did, so we stayed a second night.

The town was well-kept with quaint older homes on hilly streets. John and Suzanne lived not 5 minutes from campus, in the hills to the east of town where they had five acres, a large garden guarded by towering sunflowers, an empty historic log cabin idly passing the time, and an energetic German shepherd puppy named Pinky. They both had public service jobs, he at the university involved with health care for kids and she at the public television station doing education outreach for kids. (See? Good people. My parents seemed to be right.)

As we drove around town and ate at an incredible restaurant that served locally grown, organic foods, and visited the farmer's market where we stocked up on organic grapes and berries, banana bread and homemade jellies, and as we visited a coffee shop that supported a local sustainable farming initiative, and passed by the quilt barn where art shows are held, I imagined myself slipping into this life as easily as climbing into a familiar bed. John and Suzanne knew people every place we went; we constantly ran into other musicians and quilters and a friend who made maple syrup or was a beekeeper or artist. It was a hip town with agrarian roots. Yes, I think I could live here. (If they didn't have winter.)

After a couple of days, we headed west about 40 miles, taking meandering back roads lined with white clapboard houses behind sprawling mowed lawns, to a park called Hocking Hills where eons ago glaciers cut out caves in the limestone. We camped two nights there, spending a full day hiking the caves and resting in the pools and waterfalls where butterflies darted about so colorfully, I thought I might have time-traveled right into a Disney animated meadow. (Was Walt also from Ohio?)

From Hocking Hills, we decided to go up to Lake Erie, driving north along narrow, hilly roads, through a summer storm that helped break the humidity. I wanted to go through Newark, the town in Licking County east of Columbus where my grandfather had grown up on a farm. That farm, though I've never seen it, seems to call to me. No one else in my family is interested in the farm girl life, even my citified, backyard garden version. I have my Great-grandma Ada's quilts that she made while on that Newark farm where she raised five kids, and often as I snuggle under its cottony sheen, I imagine her fingers pulling the needle through the patchwork again and again, and I wonder if she ever imagined it would be treasured by a great-grandchild she barely knew who one day would grow up to be nearing fifty and longing to know her.

I didn't know where the farm actually was, but we passed farm after farm all similarly possessed with sturdiness, upkeep, and German practicality and orderliness, and the beauty that emanates from those virtues. As we passed through Newark itself, I saw a business sign that carried my very unusual maiden name. I whooped upon spying it. All my life no one had ever heard of my last name or could figure out how to pronounce it. I had never lived around extended family, never felt that I belonged, despite a sincere effort at fitting in, including a propensity for adopting a new accent within about five minutes of landing in a new home. And here, plain as day, proclaimed for all passers-by to see, was evidence that I had relatives, distant cousins, going on about their lives. People who if I lived here, I might run into at the grocery store or the hardware store, and they would say, Oh! aren't you Dick's girl, Ralph's granddaughter?

And I would nod, yes ma'am, that's who I am.

As it turns out, my Dad later told me, it was just about then, just as I was thinking those thoughts as we sped away from Newark, that we passed right by what once had been the family farm. Where no matter what it had become and no matter where I go, I will in some way always belong.

T for Tennessee

2010-09-06T21:28:00.000-05:00

Our summer trip continues in the great state of Tennessee, as a country song replays endlessly in my head: T for Texas, T for Tennessee....T for Thelma, she made a wreck out of me...

After Chattanooga shooed us out from under her skirts with a thundersome voice, we headed for them thar hills. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, that is. We soon arrived, the late afternoon welcoming us onto a winding park road along the banks of the sparkling Little River.

With the stormy weather far behind, we rolled down the windows to take in the cooler breezes shushing through the mountain trees towering high above us. The Little River tripped its way over rocks and curves, babbling in song surely as it’s done for nearly ever, appealing to the Indians, early Mountain folks, Revolutionaries and Johnny Rebs. I imagine them all, arriving from just beyond this bend or that tree, kneeling down and scooping out a tin ladle filled to the brim.

We pull into the campgrounds. Finally! Three days into the trip and we are actually camping. I'm a bit giddy as we haul out the tent and blow-up mattress, the routine familiar, yet shiny new, since it has been a full year since last put into practice -- quite like the annual unleashing of Christmas from its storage box. In no time at all, we have a cozy little home in the woods, though in truth we are in a pretty tightly packed area and our neighbors behind us are within easy view (though we all follow campground etiquette and ignore each other politely).

Building a fire

As dusk falls, my husband gathers firewood while I fix dinner. Our new homestead (like all our campsites) has three main attractions: the kitchen, a picnic table covered in a cheery red checkered cloth, with one end reserved for wash-ups (a plastic tub, dish soap, hand soap, towels); the living room, a fire ring around which our two folding chairs are posed, and the bedroom, our lightweight but proven tent in which our air mattress is covered by comfy sheets and pillows from home. I'm as happy as one of the Boxcar Children (if you don't know this reference, get thee to a library and read just the best orphaned children's adventure story ever! (that is, if I even remember it anywhere close to correctly, which is actually highly improbable)).

not my finest photographic moment, but here's home, for a night

As we make our preparations for a peaceful night in the woods, a train-sized rumbling comes to a heartsinking halt right next to us, and a huge RV backs into the space next door. Out comes a burly man with an unsanitarily long, red-gray beard. He is clad in wellworn overalls, his belly taking full advantage of the roominess. My husband immediately dubbed him Boss Hogg, though this is really not fair. Dukes of Hazzard's Boss Hogg wore a fine white suit. Nonetheless, our stout, pink Boss Hogg better fits the name. I imagined his family's roots coming from the English and Irish who settled this land; he looked as if he'd be right at home in a pub swilling down a pint or four, then tossing the shotput around for fun, while bellowing fee fie foe fum!

Behind him, nearly a dozen others tumble out of the old RV and another truck that has pulled up alongside it -- men and women and little children, certainly the progeny of this man, as many resemble him in color and heft, and all follow his orders as he lumbered about. (Did I say I politely ignored the other sites? Oops.) The men were put onto tasks getting the rig set up. The women ( a couple of them just girls, really) hollered at the little ones to git away from ever'thang. Two young teenage boys started wrasslin' when they couldn't get their tent to do right.

Soon, Boss and his men-minions tried to start up what must've been a homemade generator that caused the campgrounds to shake. To my everlasting relief, after about 15 minutes of earnest effort, they couldn't get it to stay on and had to do without. By then, dark was falling and their complex of several tents, trucks and that 747 of an RV had quieted down to a decibel shared by the rest of us, and we all slept the serene sleep that only the great outdoors and no access to email can bring.

The next morning, I had to feel a little sorry for them. After a long walk around the extensive campgrounds -- which included offshoots that provided lots of sites in the woods with privacy and Little River access, a bonus to early arrivers -- we passed by the Hoggs, and I could see that by backing into their drive, their awning-covered "front porch" was practically inches away from the bathrooms, making it impossible to avoid the wafting from the composting toilets. A few of the womenfolk gave me shy, kindly smiles, which I of course returned, and immediately I felt the wrath of shame from labelling them, presupposing their lives and, let’s face it, their merit. People watching may be fun, but it is a dangerous sport if you've been blessed with a generous Lutheran guilt. (I know, I know: I am a poor, sinful being.)

On our way out, we drove through Gatlinburg, a sort of Six Flags meets the mall while faking historic celebration. But we get a miraculously good cup of coffee at Peaches, and, on our way out of the region, at last I see what I have engineered our way this far east to see. The gently layers upon layers of rolling purple mountains, laid out like soft blankets across the foggy skies. I have seen the Great Smoky Mountains.

Now, I am heading home. Not to Texas. Home to Ohio, where I have only lived as a very small child, but where I know my people are from, where I have been returning all my life. Where, despite my nomadic existence and my current claim staked in Texas, I am solidly sure -- as my mother says -- the ground is just a little bit firmer. Ohio. On this day, I will cross a great river and I will be there to feel it for myself.

Alabama into the Appalachians

2010-08-29T18:33:00.003-05:00

The Summer 2010 Journey Continues...

We left New Orleans, allowing it to simmer in its heated mugginess all unto itself, like a big ol' pot of gumbo that never quite empties and is never quite done. As we skimmed over Lake Pontchartrain to the North Shore, sea breezes proffered relief, and then suddenly we were upon the tall, cool piney woods that welcome wanderers into the deep soul of Mississippi. Mississippi to me is a Faulkner novel through and through; there is no separating the two (nor would I want to). The present is steeped in the past, full of complications and simplicities.

We chanced finding a picnic table in Picayune to eat our lunch. Graced with southernly manners, Picayune obliged with a narrow strip of green along the railroad tracks near the center of town, where an historic train engine was on display next to a lovely gazebo, all surrounded by a newly landscaped walkway embedded with the good townspeople's names who must have reached into their pockets to bestow the town this honor. Our picnic lunch was quite delicious, thank you very much, the potato and squash salads not yet swimming in the ice chest's mucky melted ice-water and we ourselves not yet sick to death of it. The highlight of the meal was the blaring of an actual working train whistle and very loud and long roar past us, not more than about 35 yards away, where presumably the on-display train once carried goods from the Port of New Orleans northward. Keaton stayed tucked under our legs till the terrible danger passed.

Long leaf pine (photo borrowed from NRCS)

The next several hours were spent in a peaceful green panorama. I must hand it to Mississippi and its sister Alabama: they are lovely ladies and do not try to improve upon their natural beauty with the wanton charms of billboards, as Texas and Louisiana have done. At least not on the stretch of hilly highway we traversed, anyway. Our only trouble was not allowing enough time to make it to the campsite before dinner and dark, a problem my capable daughter immediately solved by finding us a nice motel that welcomes doggies. (If you have read previous posts, you may recall that my daughter has doubted my capacities since I first fed her green beans at six months; this last blunder did not help my reputation.)

As dusk descended, we drove into the southeast side of Birmingham, through the winding roads of the quaint suburban towns of Meadowbrook, Vestavia and Homewood, all snugly nestled into rolling hills. Warm light filled many a picture window in houses reigning over expansive green lawns and sheltered under tall pines, and I imagine southern moms calling their families to supper in languid drawls. I'm hungry myself and, why yes please, I could eat a plate of pork chops, turnip greens and cornbread, with sweet tea, thank you, ma'am.

Caitlin at work

We find Caitlin's house, which she has just moved into a few weeks before, and as I am opening the back door to let Keaton out, I see she has emerged into the yard and is walking toward me with a warm smile that melts me completely, as it always has and always will.

(What is the matter with me? Tears have sprung into my eyes as I write this and I am a mess even thinking about it. The depth of love I have for that child is beyond my own comprehension, and even my own awareness, it seems. And as further evidence of my own foolishness, I have neglected to take any pictures whatsoever of this leg of the journey.)

She takes us to a cute litte restaurant where we sit outside and chat, as she dotes on Keaty. I do not get the southern meal I imagined, but instead a healthy, hip little salad and quiche. I suppose the South had to grow up, too. Caitlin is happy. Her eyes shine. Even as she tells about an aggravating day, it's clear she is happy happy, down in her bones. She says she's in love, she thinks. She is full of surprises. She is joining a flag football team with her female colleagues, not letting her pint-sized stature daunt her in the least. She has tales of her job and her boyfriend and life, all relayed with a dash of dark humor and charm. Just laying my eyes on her for two hours' time is worth every nanosecond of the 13 hours' drive it took to get there.

We get up the next day and head toward Tennessee, my heart still singing, though beginning to ache just a tad. I shove that aside and let myself fall into a trance of rolling green scenery. At Chattanooga we again go for the downtown park picnic lunch, and Chattanooga is up for the challenge, making the most of its natural attractions by devoting greenspace along the riverfront, just a block from cute shops that I'm sure could sell me some lovely goods if only I had the car space. We haul out the ice chest and picnic baskets, our mouths watering for hardboiled eggs with mustard and cheese and chips and fruit and nuts. Just as all these items are spread out across my red checkered table cloth, a storm arrives out of absolutely no where. (When I see this happen in movies, I am exceedingly dubious that it ever happens in real life. Well, folks, it does!)

Thunder roars and the rain begins pelting, the weather dispensing entirely with its manners. We dash under the old bridge that is now for pedestrians only, since it is made of wood. Here is a little tip for you: wood bridges leak. We sat with our wet goods under that wooden bridge getting mighty moist, but not as drenched as we figured we'd get in the open race to the car. After about 15 minutes, we realized the storm was not bluffing, we were already drenched, and so we made a mad dash to the car anyway.

With the delightful smell of wet dog emanating from the rear of the car, we sat in our steamy mobile sauna and headed for the hills...the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Another "borrowed" photo from the web. The road part of the bridge on the left is wooden.
Isn't Chattanooga lovely in the sunshine? Not so much in a downpour.

Join me next time, when we meet Tennessee Boss Hogg and his Red-headed Minions.

Hail and Farewell

2010-08-21T00:32:00.002-05:00

When I lived in Turkey on a U.S. military base in third and fourth grade, my parents often went to Hail and Farewell parties. My mother -- chic and mysterious as Audrey Hepburn -- would dress up in fruit-colored concoctions she sewed for herself, complete with tight princess waists, flaring hips narrowed to a pencil skirts, and pointy breasts like bomb warheads jutting below scandalously bared shoulders. Hail and Farewells seemed like fabulous events where grownups engaged in nefarious activities, and the bits of gossip that floated down to the progeny like drifting confetti left us thinking the world of adults was both a good bit titillating and scary. Shifting terrain, and no place you'd want to get lost.

The Hail and Farewells were about acknowledging journeys -- welcoming newcomers to the base and saying goodbye to those who were finishing their two year stint. It was a life we knew well: We come and we go; we make friends, share ourselves for a time and move on. The key was traveling with your family intact; this kept you grounded, held you firm.

Even though my recent journey was a short one, just a couple of weeks, it reminds me of what the military life was all about. We -- my husband and I and our dog Keaton -- were going to hit the road, hail family and friends, see new sights, explore the world. Exciting, and with an element of the unknown. I was eager to begin our travels, but knew there would be at least a tinge of heartache in the wake.

We loaded up the car with duffle bags, camping gear, an ice chest (with containers of too much potato salad and squash salad, fruit, cheese, milk and juice) and a bag of dry goods (chips, cookies, nuts, cereal, coffee), and a picnic basket with plates and utensils. My big improvement over last year was the addition of an electric tea kettle with which to make our own coffee through a Melitta cone, and in case our campsite didn't have electricity, packets of cold-brew Starbucks.

We set off on a Wednesday morning, with plans to meet my son in New Orleans for dinner by 7 pm. Our first night was to be spent in a B&B I reserved, since there is no place to camp in New Orleans. I found a great place--The Chimes--which I highly recommend if you want to visit New Orleans and not stay in the fracas that is the French Quarter. It's uptown, and just a couple of blocks from the first place I lived when moving to New Orleans at 19 where I had 600 square feet of an old house with gracefully tall windows and hardwood floors, which I shared with a boyfriend who became my first husband and a black lab named Redneck.

The drive is one I've made many times, mostly with small kids in tow. But it's been a few years, and the last time I drove it was before Louisiana welcomed gambling (legally) into the family. Soon as we crossed the TX-LA state line, we saw huge billboards with hard-looking women luring travelers to stop by the local casino. Casinos seemed to be everywhere: gas station and casino; truck stop and casino; restaurant and casino. When we pulled into Lafayette to find a place to picnic (since all those casinos don't seem to have provided Louisiana enough money to invest in rest stops), upon seeing business sign for a dentist's office, my husband quipped, "Dentures... and casino." I wouldn't be surprised.

(P.S. Do not stop for a picnic lunch in Lafayette. The only park we could find was right next to an industrial enterprise on one side and, I'm pretty sure, a drug-dealing establishment posing as a neighborhood on the other. I was sort of wishing we were packing more than sandwiches. Upon visiting the park restroom, my husband turned promptly around and warned, You do not want to go in there.)

As we crossed the Atchafalaya Basin, I felt a new thrill rise from the swampy, mysterious forest of cypress trees and marshland. It always felt other-wordly, traversing the wetlands over a bridge where there is too little land to sustain a terrestrial road. But now I see this landscape with a new understanding of the ecological system and how it functions. I work for a group that is helping to secure the policy support and infrastructure to rebuild the disappearing wetlands that are so critical for fisheries and wildlife and provide an invaluable service as storm protection to the Cajun communities that have lived there for so long. My teeny-tiny part in raising the funds for a project that is leading to major restoration initiatives is inordinately satisifying, and I am honored to be a guest upon the land, able to pay it a tiny bit of the dues it so justly deserves.

Upon arriving in New Orleans, we check into The Chimes, then head over to my son's house, which he shares with a couple of roommates. I have to catch my breath, which sticks in my throat, when I see him. As happens everytime I see him now, it is hard to believe this man is my son. And yet, in him I still see the little boy who told corny jokes and loved The Simpsons and Batman and baseball (for months, when he was five, he changed his name to Batman, though he would also generously answer to just "Bat"). He has a man's strong jaw, but his eyes and nose are still soft and gentle and carry his youth.

We have a fun dinner as he tells us about his new job and life since returning to his hometown, as we sit outside a cafe on Magazine Street, which I traveled most days I lived uptown more than two decades before. It looks much the same.

So does the Bourbon Street, which we stroll after dinner with our dog Keaton, who is a big hit among tourists and locals alike. They all smile and give him a pet. A P. Diddy-looking fellow nodded at him (mistaking Keaton for a female, as many seem to do), saying "Fine looking lady you got there." He did not mean me. There is heat lightning in the sky, and a cacophony of music flowing from every bar into the streets, mixing with the flashing neon, hanging in the humid air. Overwhelming the senses, begging you to forget your sensibilities.

However, the Ninth Ward, which we toured the next morning, is vastly different from pre-Katrina days. While neighborhoods are being rebuilt, there are many many empty lots where houses once stood. A few homes still bear the post-Katrina inspection tattoo: the cross in the circle with cryptic numbers denoting the number of dead found within. Now the region is facing a fresh devastation with the BP oil spill. It will rebound, just as it always does, with a sense that life is hard along this stretch of God's earth. However, there are plenty wrongs that ought to be righted, and I know good people are working to make that happen.

As I learned early on, with each hail comes a farewell. No sooner had we arrived at this place I once called home, that will forever be home to my children, then it was time to shove off. We left New Orleans at noon, crossing over Lake Pontchartrain and heading to Birmingham where my daughter is claiming her future. I am giddy to see her, to reclaim her just a teensy bit for myself -- our mother-daughter bond, in which my past, present and future is so heavily steeped.

~~Stay tuned for Alabama into the Appalachians~~

Car Rides

2010-08-01T22:56:00.002-05:00

My husband and dog and I are soon to be off on another of our summer journeys. We love to get in the car and travel for miles, living out of our car, our tent, our ice chest, and not needing too much else. Except stopping for a real meal at a restaurant every once in a while. OK, often.

Last year's trip from to Wyoming is what got me started blogging. I kept a journal the old fashioned way, and when we got back, I typed it up, added pictures and planned to keep it as a remembrance for us. But then I decided to share it with family, and the easiest way to do that was to put it in a blog. I had no intention of starting a never-ending preoccupation. But by the time I actually posted it, I was hooked, and here I am, a whole year later, addicted to writing and reading in Blogland. Such a lovely country!

If you'd like to read it, here you go (I must warn you, it is long. But worth it! (Possibly.)): Summer Road

I'm not sure if I will blog along the way this time, or just give myself material for the next month of Sundays. We'll see. But in the meantime, I leave you with a memory from my childhood car rides, which quite possibly should have cured me from ever getting in the car again.

Car Rides

Our family of six gathered in summer
only for long distance car rides,
Held hostage like flies, languid and purposeless
in an air-tight jar as we skimmed the earth:

I see my mother's tight face as it skews to the right
The endless scenery beyond her reach.
The baby is wedged under her arm,
Plugged into a silent, pacified stupor.

The back of my father's almost-bald head
nearly reaches the roof like an aging mountain,
Resolutely rising through a cigarette fog, his fringe
Of black hair combed to narrow, straight roads

Till a roll of neck fat sends the end hairs flying
Like reckless cars leaping a sudden train track.
He is the same, linear as headlights
Until a rattling unnerves him and his voice explodes.

My brother stares ceaselessly from his corner at nothing.
My sister's asleep, slouching dreamless between us.
Her hot, sweaty legs stick idly to mine,
So I pull myself closer to the window, the edge.

My eyes drift to the clouds floating like angels.
I try very, very hard to not make a sound.

Saturday morning

2010-07-28T23:25:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been longing for that feeling you used to get when you woke up and realized it was Saturday morning cartoons. Remember that?

This was before cartoons ran 24-7. Before there were more than a few stations. Saturday morning cartoons were the rare moment when something was only for us kids and the world was all right. (Oh sure, there was Popeye after school, but you had to wait through that stupid part where the Captain asked all the kids their names on the benches...lame! Who cared? And half an hour of cartoons was nothing compared to an entire cartoonerama-jamfest that lasted all morning long!)

Staying home from school sick was only kind of a treat, because after the very early morning kid shows (and let's face it, Mr. Rogers was boring) and a few Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best reruns, it was stupid game shows. My first inkling that adults could be morons. And then, the soaps. I had no desire to watch them when I was little, though I did get hooked on All My Children the summer after 5th grade, when being manipulative and cunning seemed interesting. Until suddenly, it just seemed stupid.

But Saturday morning cartoons, now there was a winner. My brother and I would get up, make our own bowl of cereal (Cheerios. My mom would not abide anything that sounded like a dessert) and we would settle in. Cartoons on all 3 channels! No parents to bug us from 6 or 7 am till the dumb shows started around 11 when my mother would shake us out of our trance, yelling, Turn that thing off and go outside! And don't come back in till I call you for lunch!

After lunch she would shoo us back outside again, where we had to make up games our very own selves, with no packaged help or instructions. Games like Wedding in the Alley (long walk down the aisle) and Talent Show (songs on the fly), Office (lots of fake typing and Hello?) and Church (collecting "offerings" aka rocks). Sometimes we would reenact our favorite movies like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and most of the game would be discussing the set-up of who was who and what they would do. (Okay, you be her and then you say...and then I'll say...and then you'll cry and I'll....) Once you had got through that, the thrill was pretty much over. Then there was freeze tag when you could get a quorum of all the other exiled children. Sometimes you even had to let the weird kids with runny noses play just so you could have enough for a decent round.

Once in a while we'd have enough money to go the Little Store on our bikes, which was dangerously far away, about 10 blocks. Yes, we were allowed to go without parental supervision and no one kidnapped us, not even once. All you needed was about 4 pennies to make it worthwhile, but you had to have a posse to travel with.You needed someone to smoke those candy cigarettes on the curb with.

Still, none of those fun times held a candle to Saturday morning. My favorite cartoons had lovable characters forever challenged by disaster, like Tweetie Bird who was so sweet and innocent and always outwitted that puddytat. And Bugs, with his smart-alecky sense of humor, always got the best of Elmer Fudd. Now those were some role models! Life was going to be hard, but you oughta keep your wits, your humor and sweetness, and you'd beat those bad boys every time.

And maybe that is why, this summer when there's been depressing news (it's been awful hard to watch the oil disaster and now once again we're doing nothing on climate) and work has been one long slog with many extra long hours -- and did I mention my good work friend quit? -- I have been craving the simplicity of kid cartoons. Just me and my brother in our warm jammies and a bowl of soggy cereal and real heroes, funny and endearing, always beating the odds and coming up grinning.

Simple Syrup

2010-07-20T23:02:00.000-05:00

I may be in danger of becoming the crazy herb lady. Not, perhaps, a very good one, such as with remedies to cure what all ails you. But I think I might have that bubbling herbal brew down straight. Because dear friends, I have learned the beauty of the Simple Syrup. Yes, it deserves those capital letters.

My sweet mother-in-law sent me an herb-lovers cookbook. Really thoughtful. It is compiled by the good ladies of Waco, Texas. (And you thought only David Koresh lived in Waco. Not true. The town just attracts David Koreshes.) In addition to recipes, my herb-lovers cookbook provides tips on how to store your summer herbs long after the sun and heat are gone, and all the happy little herbs have gone to meet their maker.

First up, the good book says, put 'em in vodka. All right! Can do. Got myself a nice .750 liter of Tito's Handmade (from right here in Austin, Texas -- and feeling quite virtuous for buying local, thank you very much), made myself a highball, and sat right down to work. A slightly woozy hour later, Bingo! A quart of schnockered basil, ready to go into any Italian meal this winter. (Too bad those Branch Davidians didn't get ahold of this cookbook; they mighta eased up a bit on the weapon-hoarding.) I also put up a couple of jars in olive oil.

Next up, Simple Syrup. Easy as pie to make (easier, actually), it's equal parts sugar and water, brought to a boil, and then a cup or so of fresh herbs dropped in to soak overnight. The first batch I made was mint, grated lemon peel and ginger. We sweetened our iced tea with it -- excellent. Then, after all the tea was gone, we mixed a little of the Simple Syrup with sparkling mineral soda.

Oh my!

Do you remember the first time you had chocolate? Neither do I. But I've always suspected there was that first moment when I thought (more or less), WTF? I didn't know this existed in the world! And foreverafter, the world was a world that had chocolate in it. Such a gift. Really, it changed everything.

On the other hand, I do remember the first time I gave my baby girl mushed green beans. She had been living blissfully on breastmilk, then rice cereal, then rice cereal and strained peaches, then rice cereal and strained peaches and sometimes mashed bananas, pears and cherries. One new sweet fruit a week for my Sweetie.

Then it was time to explore the vegetables. Have you ever tried baby food vegetables? Maybe they've changed, but back in the Gerber days, it was pretty bitter tasting stuff. Still, like a good mom, I faked it.

I dipped the little spoon into the gently warmed green goo, turned into the universal jet propelled plane weighted down with a tiny biteful of goodness and sing-songily cooed, Here come the greenbeans for Mommy's little Sweetums!

And like the sweet-fed trusting baby she was, she opened her two-tooth mouth wide as an open hangar and in went the plane for a landing.

You have never seen such disgust in your life. The hangar went into a total rejection sputter, spraying green bean goo as far as her little spit could carry. She has never trusted me since.

So there you have it. A new food can change your life. Such is our Simple Syrup story today. Luckily it is of the favorable change variety. Since you make it with equal parts sugar and water, and all. (Though I admit, it could become a very bad habit.)

Moreover, the Simple Syrup has brought another revelation. Suddenly I understand sodas. You know, like how the forefathers and mothers made ginger ale and root beer. (For some reason, I thought you had to have a cellar and a wooden barrel.) Obviously, I've never given it much thought, but it seemed soda today was only achievable in a big factory like the Coca-cola plant my mistrustful daughter and I visited in Atlanta. (And she thought I had us lost the entire time. See what I mean?)

Just think of how the world has changed in a hundred years. I am nearly a half-century old, and I am finally understanding that the mysteries of life, like soda can be made at home. Simply. Now isn't it perplexing, why the world should work like this: fooling us into thinking it's so complex and everything's out of reach except through the purchase of what other people make in complicated practices hidden away in factories, packaged up and sold to us out of convenience, which we need because we're too busy earning money to have time to make it the Simple way. Plus we don't know how, so we have to earn money to be able to buy it.

It was a riddle I was determined to solve. So I tried to make lavender soap. Let's just say there are a few items I may still need to purchase.

(At least the clean-up was easy. It's soap! Sorta.)

Mute

2010-07-14T21:54:00.000-05:00

Technology has a sinister way of making you think it is your friend. The time it will save, it whispers in your ear. Look how cool!, it cajoles. The convenience!

I've been bamboozled like everyone else. I was so flattered when my work place generously bestowed the Treo in my palm, courtesy of the IT department. It was going to make my life so much easier, not to have to miss all those emails while I wasn't in the office. And just how long did it take till I was unable to go more than 20 minutes without checking it, including all evening and weekend long when I used to be able to take a real break? I'd say they are getting their $245 retail price out of this little deal.

Last week, my technology hell was with the videoconference. I have a standing biweekly meeting with my team, which is spread across the country. A small group, most of us have been on this team for years and we all know and like each other well. But sometimes there are tensions from within and handed down from above, and that day was such a day.

And the vcon was acting up. One office couldn't see the other offices. One person had called in rather than vcon because another meeting was going on in their vcon room. There was a sound problem, possibly from an errant mute button, causing feedback that threw a simple sentence into a neverending echo like shouting down a well. And with vcon, it's hard anyway to contribute to the conversation, to be able to jump in with ease. You always feel like you're interrupting. Plenty of opportunity for agitation. It was a full hour long -- an agonizing, jaw clenching, toe curling hour long.

As soon as it was over and my assistant had shut off the screen in our office, I commented on our little group just a teensy bit indiscreetly. By name.

And what message was waiting for me back at my desk phone?

You might want to check and make sure the mute button is on before you start dishing it out.

It seems that even though we turned off our video, the headquarters' video was still on, meaning they could see me and hear me. Every word.

Damn the technology!

I had to make a few pretty embarrassing apology calls.

Technology is not your friend, people. Nor is cattiness. Ever.

(Luckily, I have been forgiven. I think.)

Sheepishly yours,
Dreamfarm Girl

Summer Joys

2010-07-05T23:33:00.001-05:00

Watermelon.

Cherries,
I stemmed and pitted.
They stained my hands dark
The purple of secrets,
And gave themselves willingly

For a cherry lemon pie
An oatmeal cookie crust
The kind every cherry
Aspires
To be part of.

Clothes on the line.

Dried by the wind,
Baked by the sun.

Purple coneflower,

Yellow rose and

Esperanza.

Hope is undaunted.

Luscious colors everywhere.

I am drenching
Layer after layer
Water+color
Seeping in and
Flowing back
The best summerworld
I could aspire
To be part of.

~~~Hope your 4th of July was filled with sun and color and happiness~~~

Doers and Delegators Pie

2010-06-17T22:13:00.000-05:00

Oh, the pie chart. Its ubiquity in the work world has wormed its way into my thought process. Today I have been thinking all the world is a pie and it is sliced into Doers and Delegators. Over here in one big fat slice of the world pie you've got your Doers. They know things must get done and they do them. They aren't waiting around for someone else to pick up the slack or the midnight fairies to come clean up the mess. No matter what that mess is, and there are messes in every single situation out there, they are on the J-O-B.

And then we have the other slice. These people are living high on the hog over in the other helping of pie, quite sure that they can get someone to do the job for them. They, in fact, are so good at this that on occasion they rise to the top of the heap of the work pile and indeed win the authority to assign others to do the job. Officially.

Now I know a good manager delegates. That is not what I'm talking about. Most managers do a lot of work and it's not easy. If done well, it requires thinking, leading, guiding, mentoring, taking the work of the group and rolling it up into something bigger and more meaningful. What I'm talking about is shirking. The one who takes a heaping spoonful of the credit but has done none of the work or even provided a scant amount of guidance or coordination.

Think teenagers, but more sophisticated. Teenagers are natural shirkers, for they have come from the Faraway World of Childhood in the Land of No Responsibility. They might have accepted the reality of a chore here or there, but let's face it, they are desperately trying to hold onto the pleasant glow of the slacker sunset, even while booting out the king and queen of the kingdom. But, here's the deal; you can't kick out the monarchy without taking the sceptor yourself. That sceptor is shiny. They want it bad. But it can be heavy.

I remember being an insolent teenager, standing at the front door after school, my arms piled high with books, my purse, probably my gym bag and lunch leftovers, doing a ridiculous balancing act to get my hands on the front door handle so I could push my way in and dump all that crap on the floor. It was locked. My key was buried in the nether reaches of my stuffed bag, if it was even in there. I knew my mom was inside. I hollered. No answer. Hollered louder. Nope. The music was on. Good God she was probably singing in there. And she was not coming to my rescue. I was incensed. Was I really asking so much? Why, she should be welcoming me into the house!

And a strange thought came over me that I can still recall today: Well (said this oddly calm voice), what would you do if she weren't even home? Oh! (I considered, surprised). And I set all my things down, got out my key and entered the house. Done.

And that is when I transitioned to being a Doer. A good thing. Except...(there's always an except). Doers can be martyrs.

When my kids were little, I felt exceedingly attached to them as most new moms do. But I wasn't much into sharing that yummy love-reward. And my husband worked long hours and wasn't all that experienced with babies. It became a self-reinforcing situation; the more he was away, the closer I became to the children and convinced I was the parent that knew what to do best, because, gee, I did everything. Not surprisingly, resentment built a great big wall around my kingdom where I had to do everything myself. It took me years to figure out that, oh, I kinda arranged it that way. It wasn't entirely my fault, but I definitely contributed my share.

And yet, this Doer-attitude persists. I still take on too much and resent it. I resent the Delegators I see who are getting by doing very little and getting rewarded for this. I do think the Delegator is building a house of cards that eventually falls down, but why must it take so long? And why must I be scrambling like mad the whole time to finish each and every little item I have agreed to be plopped onto my plate.

And where is that calm voice of reason when I need her, anyway? When I could use a reminder that I am only cheating myself. That I could indeed cut the pie differently, into a third slice where I could happily live doing a reasonable amount of work but not afraid to say, sorry I just can't take that on.

Does this happen to you? How do you find balance?

From the Bed to the Table: Cucumberama!

2010-06-13T16:37:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the Cucumber Nation. This ever-sprawling garden metropolis boasts an expansive chlorophylled canopy that provides ample shade to the delicate and damp citizenry below, which consists of pert yellow flowers gracing long hairy, sticky vines, and -- prize of all prizes -- teensy weensy cucumber babies, all bumpy and tender and cute as can be.

These cukies have burst miraculously onto the scene, delivered by the hardworking bees that dart to and fro, all to the gentle waving of approval, almost lullaby-like, of the hardworking leaves that keep watch overhead. For their only hope and purpose is to ensure the unadulterated upbringing of their juicy little creatures. Make no mistake: they guard them with their lives, and are not the least bit shy of employing their wily weapons, which would be their intense scratchiness, warning away would-be marauders. Such as myself.

For as soon as this nursery of cucumberkins gets to adolescence size, there I am, on the scene, ready to pilfer and pillage, and I don't care how ravaged my forearms and fingers get. Nothing can stop me. Nothing!

I have Cucumber Mint Salad to make! Cucumber Mint Salad is something I can practically live on daily all summer long (it only needs to be supplemented with something small such as, oh, a grilled piece of fish, buttered red potatoes, a glass of pinot grigio and let's say Starbucks coffee ice cream to wash it all down). But don't bother with the rest of that stuff, the Cucumber Mint Salad is the star, the crowning jewel, the breath mint and veggie in one! It's the skip in your step, the zest in your day, the palate refresher to beat all palate refreshers. And just the right remedy to make you forget that you worked till 7 pm every single day this week,several of them with a headache, and still had a boatload of housework to do this weekend in between checking your persistently annoying work email. Yeah, that sucked.

I know this is really too much to take in all at once. So take a deep breath. Sit down. I am going to share this recipe with you, my fine Cucumber Mint Salad-starved friends.

(Okay, I confess. I did not make this up. I think it came from a magazine that would sue me if 1. this blog had any impact more than 49 people, and that is being generous and 2. I had any money and 3. they hadn't lifted it off of someone else, which I consider to be highly likely since there are only as many ingredients as most of us have fingers on one hand. Which makes me think it's really just a traditional recipe that's been around ever since cucumbers, vinegar, sugar, salt, onions and mint. Oops. Make that one hand plus a pinky.)

So, clearly, today's cooking lesson would be an incredibly easy ~A+~ should the Daughterness to my Motherness decide to give it a try. (Caitin, are you one of the 49 this week? Well are you?) It's not even cooking for goodness sakes; it's salad!

Dreamfarm Girl's stolen Cucumber Mint Salad

Mix 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar with 3 TBSP sugar till sugar is dissolved.
Add a pinch of salt. About 1/8 tsp, I guess.
Pour into a container (something you can put a top on and put in the fridge, like tupperware).
Add about a cup of water, and mix. You can add more water if you are using more cucumbers. You need enough to cover most of cucumbers.
Add 1-2 sliced cucumbers.
Add about half a red onion, chopped. Yellow onion will work, too, if you can handle its spiciness (which is what we have in the picture above since in my zeal to make this I could not take the time to go to the store). I will note, though, red onion is prettier. And that's important.
Add fresh mint, chopped. As much as you like. You know, a handful, a sprinkling. Enough to make it pretty and minty.

Let's hear it for the mint!

Put in the fridge and soak for a while. If you are desperate, ten minutes will do, but really, you will like it better if it soaks for at least an hour. And the good news is, you can keep this in the fridge for days, and just keep adding cucumbers, mint and onions...the vinegar does not go bad! How convenient is that?

Perhaps Caitlin, in our little mother-daughter cooking lesson adventure, will try this recipe and give us her experience. I haven't cleared it with her. Which means it very likely will end up being tomatoes, basil and ranch dressing.

But if you try this yourself, I promise you, you will never want to eat a cucumber another way.

Except maybe cucumber soup. Which is what I'm going to try next. Since I have about 73 cukie-babies nursing in the Cucumber Nation right this very minute just waiting to be cukenapped. (Why can I not remember to plant less??)

Pitchforks, Ants, Tomatoes & Squash: A summer garden tale

2010-06-02T22:21:00.001-05:00

Saturday I uttered a sentence that never in all my life had passed my lips: I need a pitchfork.

I was piling cedar mulch from a very imposing heap (taller than I on tiptoes) into my battered blue wheelbarrow to bestow a cooling grass skirt around my drooping vegetables. This task is not easily done with a shovel, as I soon learned, as it has too blunt an end to get its way into the pile. Even worse by hand, especially when a brigade of fire ants has taken up residence in the mulch and is apparently pretty ticked off that 1) I've disturbed their fine country castle and 2) they've ended up in a dark, strange, confined place known as my work gloves. OUCH! Luckily, we had pitchfork in the shed and now I painfully know why.

Summer is here folks, and there's no going back to temperatures below 90 degrees during daytime hours unless a hurricane comes blowing through, so the mulching was mandatory. But the reward is, all things are growing so well! Also, all that pitching mulch into the wheelbarrow, pushing a very laden wheelbarrow over to the garden, unloading mulch, and heading back to the pile, repeat, repeat, repeat, helped me break through that last little plateau on the scales that has been irritating the heck out of me. You know, you've got just 5 pounds more to go yet nothing, NOTHING, will bust that barrier. Okay, maybe I haven't exhausted all possibilities down to nothing, but...Ladies and gents, mulching the garden in 95 degree heat will do it. You're welcome.

The garden has blessed us with three beets and a few tomatoes, which upon the first bite you are compelled to bellow Yes! This is what a tomato is supposed to taste like! It's a ritual. And completely true, because there is nothing that can beat pulling a juicy tomato off the vine and eating it within minutes, all its true and ripe tomato soul bursting into your mouth. There is just no way a store-bought tomato can do that.

For one, it was probably picked green and then spent a day or more on a truck, then a day getting sorted and packaged in warehouse, another day on another truck, five days in your grocery store getting picked up, manhandled and rejected, put back into the pile, when you, unsuspecting gullible shopper, mosey your way down the aisle and choose the now reddish tomato, gleaming in the fluorescence. It looks round and high-colored, if a bit orangy. It whispers sweetly, pick me, pick me, I'm juicy. I will taste great in your salad. Stop, drop and roll. It is an imposter! Trust me on this. If you never grow a single other vegetable in your life, you really must grow your own tomatoes. (Have you seen those cool upside-downsy tomato plant kits -- for you urban gardeners, it looks pretty cool for a porch tomato garden!)

But what we really are in just now is squash. Yellow crookneck and zucchini. Plus one volunteer pumpkin. All growing gangbusters. In fact, squash season at Dreamfarm is also known as Eat Squash Every Day season, or there is no way you are gonna keep up with those prolific mamas. It also becomes a very long season after about a month. Which is why I only ever eat squash out of my garden. I eat so much over June and July, I just can't stand to have another roasted, grilled, sauted, or broiled squash till the following spring, when just like pregnancy I've forgotten all about the last season's pain and I'm an eager beaver for more. Which explains why once again I've planted too many.

Also, I should add here that it is possibly proof of a Creator that squash season coincides with basil season. These guys were simply made for each other, especially when they are bound together by melted cheese. A perfect union. Let no man put that asunder. (Unless asunder means swallowing. I'm not really sure.)

When I am working in the garden I often think of the lessons it teaches me. So, what life lessons are we to learn from the garden this week? For one, I think it is that last year's garden was a lot easier on me because we hired some help to weed and mulch, and while it was really nice to have it all done for me, I appreciate my own labor so much more (especially when I actually used the right tool, lesson 1 subsection a.). I am downright proud of my pitchforking abilities and my sweat equity in that garden. The vegetables taste all that much better. (Did I mention I also had to weed a considerable amount before the mulching even began? Just in case you weren't as impressed as I'd hoped with the mulching business.)

Also, the point of mulching is to conserve water, and it's already paying off. They can withstand at least two full days of hot Texas sun when their feet are cooled off with mulch. Moreover, the plants are even happier than if I did water every day. My plan is to cut back on our watering bill a lot this year. So, second lesson is that the upfront work saves in the long run and is better in more ways than one. This is often the case -- a stitch in time saves nine, right? -- but it's a lot harder to put out that effort up front than have it spread out over time. It's easy to make excuses. But once you've done the hard work (and this seems to be true of just about anything), and you step back and enjoy the labor, and think: Ain't it grand?
Yep.

Mr. Owl oversees the garden

(If you look closely you will see where my son shot him with a BB gun. Boys!)

3 things to say today

2010-05-30T16:42:00.001-05:00

Three things are burning in my mind and on my tongue and fingertips, so here's a quick post on this fine Memorial Day weekend.

1. That oil gusher! Oh. My. Gosh!! It's so hideously, roaringly, unstoppably bad. Thirty years after the last major Gulf oil well blowout, the advancements we've made are....mud and golf balls?? It makes one very angry. GRRRRRRR. There! I just had to say that.

AP photo

2. I didn't mean to imply... In a recent post, I talked about the sadness I felt after my kids went to live with their dad. This could sound like I put the blame on them for this. I do not! They had really good reasons to go, and it was only fair. I supported them fully in this decision. While part of my pain had to do with simply missing them, it also had to do with coming to grips with the fact that I was going through no more pain than I had asked them and their father to go through over the years by leaving New Orleans and hauling them with me to Texas. That was a tough pill to swallow. Also, every parent has to go through the empty nest syndrome. Anyway, I just felt that I needed to acknowledge that. Thanks.

3. Introducing: the sweetest little baby (of those who currently are babies, so as not to insult any of the other cute babies now grown up; you know who you are). She was clever enough to make me love her long before she was born, so much so that I made her a quilt (as you dear readers may remember in all those laborous quilt-analogy posts).... Here she is, Miss Eva Grace. Whom I met for the first time yesterday. She adored me right away, as you can see by the way she slept so irresistably cutely in my arms. (Before she cried.) Can you tell, she's a redhead. Isn't that smart!

O Happy Day

2010-05-26T22:15:00.001-05:00

As I said to Sara in Le Petit Village when she asked for 10 things that make me happy (upon sending me The Happiness Meme, and after I said Thanks!): Being asked what makes me happy is what makes me happy! Okay, it might be cheating to count that as one, so we'll call that 0.5a.

Then 0.5b on the happylist has to be that with The Happiness Meme one doesn’t actually have to do all that awarding and posting to other people's blogs because as anyone who has been lovely and kind enough to give me an award knows, I really suck at doing all those steps. It's not that I don't appreciate the awards, I do! I love a pat on the back just as much as everyone else. I just can't seem to find 10 things to tell you about me, list style. I’m better at finding out things about me when I blog about nothing. (Have you noticed how that happens?)

And anyway, I really pretty much read a small, select group of blogs regularly, because I love you guys! And I just don’t need to go finding more blogs to read and recommend. Therefore, I would just be giving you the same award right back. (This is called rationalization. I know, I took PSY 101.)

0.5c of happiness is that you guys let me get away with this and haven’t seemed to hold it against me. Because what I really mean by being derelict in not passing along awards is that I think all of you deserve all of them. That is definitely true.

But I am going to go along with the rules of The Happiness Meme, because, well, they are easier is the word I think I’m striving for. I've been just a tad bit maudlin lately, and a little happiness is just exactly what I need to think about. Here, then, are

~~a few of my favorite happiness things~~

(I am cheating here by posting this picture of the ocean because obviously it is something that makes me happy, but I'm not counting it. Because doesn't the ocean make everybody happy?)

Pulling weeds. There's really nothing quite so satisfying as getting the whole root out of the ground with a firm tug, hearing that ripping sound, knowing that weed is really truly done for. That is the sadist in me, I suppose. Luckily it doesn't get any worse. Much.

The first 30 minutes of the morning AFTER the first five. (The first five are the worst.) The next 30 are really so pleasant. I make coffee. Pet my dog. Don’t speak. I also put away the dishes from the dishwasher and the kindergartner in me loves to nest the spoons.

Coming up with just the right turn of phrase, which is akin to finding a new pair of shoes that the minute you sink your feet into, your dogs know they are home; that this shoe will never ever cause you a blister or ache. So satisfying!

Eating anything from my garden makes me extraordinarily happy. Eating it while still in the garden = perfection. (I ate a raspberry today right off the vine. I KNOW!)

The kind of book that makes you sigh wistfully at the end because you have come to truly love the character, which means you have learned something about yourself, I think.

Hmmm, what else? Ten suddenly seems like a pretty big number.

Getting a funny Someecard from my daughter. They crack me up. She and the card. Love that. And a text from my son because it’s usually random and not worth a whole conversation but it means something made him think of me.

The smell of fresh herbs. My husband just brought in a sprig of mint for me to sniff. It cleans your head out. Seriously! Oh, I guess this is a twofer, because you gotta count the husband in there, too.

The way my doggie crinkles his nose when I come home from work. It’s sort of a shy smile, with his head lowered, aw shucks style. It’s completely adorable. And it’s especially for me.

Creating something, and having hours and hours to do so. Creativity cannot be rushed.

What else? Oh--Of course! Sisterdays. Sisterdays are really the best. They require all three sisters in attendance (I am Big Sister Me; we have Middle Sister Me and Little Sister Me, which for short is BSM, MSM and LSM). It requires food of some sort, almost always wine or mimosas (but not strictly required), and some sort of spa service. Endless chatter. No odd pauses. No second guessing yourself. Because: No one loves you like your sisters. When we are all widowed someday we will live together and tell each other we really were good mothers, wives and daughters and make ourselves believe it. And we have promised to tweezer each others’ stray facial hairs. That is sister love.

And now, I have made myself happy and maybe you are thinking for just a moment of what makes you happy. But the trick of The Happiness Meme, just like in Red Rover Red Rover, is you have to name somebody to go next. Panic moment!

JennAventures pray tell, what makes you happy?

Beyond Belief

2010-05-24T22:26:00.000-05:00

Today was a day when I woke up wanting to be all things, all the things that I want to be, and can't. Not all at once. So today was a day that turned to tears, the kind that just spill out inappropriately when you're not even expecting them -- so rude! -- and I had to jump up and shut my office door so no one would see. Which wasn't the person I wanted to be at all. Then I had to buckle down and set all those stewing emotions aside and work. (Sometimes it's actually a good thing to smash those feelings down down down and make them behave for a while till you can talk to them with some sense.) I worked a full day and then got in a run, and now -- after a movie and dinner and some kind words -- I'm ready to talk to those feelings and see what they were screaming about.

Which is: I want to have more than I can have right now. No, not things. More like all the pieces of me, the pieces I like. Time to be them all.

I actually do believe you can have it all. Just not all at the same time. This is why life has stages. Why you can't imagine yourself doing what you did ten years ago now. Why there's no way you can imagine where you'll be in ten years. (Even if it's doing the exact same thing. I mean, really, can you imagine that? )

I didn't nearly get to do all the creative things I thought of doing this weekend. I barely got started. I even liked doing the things I did do -- it wasn't that I didn't want to do the chores, the gardening, the family time, the going to my husband's gig and dancing, the sleeping in the next day. All that was all great. There just wasn't enough time to do the other things I wanted to do, too, which annoyed me and then made me really sad. Because there is never enough time and the weekend is over and it's back to work, which also fulfills a certain part of me, but is a constant slavedriving treadmill. Up hill.

Tonight we watched LA Story. I've seen this movie at least 4 times and love it. It lived with me through a rough period in my life, actually. Remember how the meteorologist (Steve Martin), dismally bereft of all life's pleasure, writes on his window, Bored Beyond Belief? When my kids decided to live with their dad, just before my daughter turned 15 and my son 12, I went into a kind of shock and then the deepest sadness I have ever known. I would look at myself in the mirror and think Sad Beyond Belief. I said this to myself many times during those first couple of years after they left. It defined me. I think it helped to have Steve Martin with me on this. Even though his sign said bored, I knew he was the same as me. Fallen, without hope. Lost.

But in LA Story, Steve Martin is given an incredible gift -- the voice of something bigger than he is -- the hint of hope. He can't believe it, that his life will change; he can't see his way out of where he is for the life of him. Yet, this voice on the LA freeway keeps coming to him and does see him through to a different life where he can be happy.

I didn't get a big flashing freeway sign. And my transformation took just a tad bit longer than 98 movie minutes. By about, oh, a few years. But I did get a million other little gifts that eventually led me to acceptance and a way to live the new life that was now mine. And it became okay -- and eventually I could see all the good that came out of it. And the loss I felt, well it's true -- I, and my children, lost the exact relationship we had, but we got a different one that is also full of love. We are okay.

Now I am feeling a change of a different kind coming. I don't know what it will be, how it will happen. But it is coming with some kind of a storm that I hope will leave that sweet fresh clean air in its wake, and in ten years I will say Yes! look at what had to happen to become the me I am today. I don't know exactly what that me will be, but I think I will like her.

Chaos and Order

2010-05-15T15:35:00.005-05:00

To ancient Greeks, chaos meant the abyss, the original state of the universe -- and when I stare into that great beyond, I can see how the word came to mean (according to my trusty Merriam Webster) a state of things in which chance is supreme. The multitudes of scattered stars, galaxies whirling in time, the black murkiness of the unknown punctuated by dazzling explosions of a dynamic, expanding universe -- to the untrained eye (mine), it does look random and unpredictable.

Chaos is also defined as "the inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a natural system (as the atmosphere, boiling water or the beating heart)." Yet, chaos theory, despite its name, recognizes a stunning underlying order even in the most chaotic looking events. The article I read on an introduction to chaos theory discussed the repeating patterns of things like fern leaves, tree branches, arteries and veins, weather, even the price of cotton -- all of which look random but follow fractals, or repeating patterns. DNA does not need to know where to place each and every cell, it just needs to have the pattern of how structures are to be built and voila! capillaries branch off in the same kind of pattern as tree branches, as heart rhythms, as ocean waves. (As for commodities markets, I need some more book-learnin' to understand that one. Also, I am wondering if the dog hair on my floor is following some undetected pattern.)

Chaos keeps coming to mind as I try to get my head around the oil gusher that is despoiling my beloved Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes affectionately called "the Dirty Coast" or the "Third Coast" -- residents of the Gulf from Texas to Florida know it is a working coast. Oil and gas has been here a long time, and from Galveston to Boca Chica beaches in Texas, you are likely to see an oil rig in the distance. The fishing industry is a multi-million dollar business, supplying much of the nation's seafood and recreational fishing opportunities.

But the Gulf is also home to national wildlife refuges that provide habitat for millions of birds. Dolphins swim in its waters and we even have the northernmost coral reef off the Louisiana-Texas shores. As the globs of oil begin to wash ashore, I fear for the delicate marshlands that have for 60 years been slowly drowning, thanks to saltwater intrusion caused by oil companies criss-crossing channels in them, and the disciplining of the Mississippi River to a single channel, which has tamed its natural function of rebuilding the wetlands through silt and sand deposits in flooding events. Moreover, the oil we don't see, lurking below the surface, may cause as much damage to ocean life as the oil that comes ashore.

If you go to nola.com, you can view a daily map of the oil slick. It's fascinating to see how it moves in shape and geography, depending on weather and currents and probably many more factors I know nothing about. Chaotic, it seems, but we know better. The spill itself -- unavoidable? random? unpredictable? It seemed so at first, but the more we learn -- including a faulty blowout preventer (shouldn't that have been discovered on, say, any number of inspections?) -- display an underlying order, an inevitability caused by a series of circumstances. Negligence (as it now seems) + highly pressurized oil wells = (doh!) disaster. I'm sure there's a mathematic equation with all kinds of Greek letters and functions long forgotten to this writer's brain, but I'm betting my pretty simple equation gets to the gist.

So, indeed, there does seem to be more order in this world than meets the eye. Not just in disasters, but everywhere we look. I leave you with a reverence for the astonishing beauty in the repetition of patterns, the complexity of the world and all its creation. (Yes, these snapshots are the California coast, unmarred by oil, and I don't blame them for insisting it stay that way.)

And I encourage you to visit the websites of groups helping clean up the disaster and providing relief to communities affected. This chaotic oil mess is going to be with us for awhile.

The Journey Continues

2010-05-09T23:32:00.001-05:00

As we made our way north to Oregon, I was lulled into a peaceful rhythm of time off the clock -- long silences in the car in which my husband and I, well suited traveling companions, give each other the expansive space to let our minds wander and wonder. My thoughts rolled like the hills and mountains before me, spread out wide and flat and high like the clear blue sky, shimmered like the clear lakes in the valleys. I can breathe, and I do not panic, not once.

In Oregon, we stopped in Ashland where we have lunch at an adorable little shop that serves organic everything under the sun. We mosied over to a little park at the end of the quaint row of shops, where a kind man offered to take our picture and tells us the park -- which is sculptured with blooming rhododendrons and flaming flowering trees -- was designed by the same landscape artist who designed the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. We greeted each new section of the park, which seems to go on forever, with awe and delight.

After spending the night overlooking the Rogue River in Grants Pass, we headed back south, through mountain passes and a stand of redwoods to California's coastal highway 101, which took us to Eureka. There, we explored the old town with its ornate Victorian architecture, taking a room in the old waterside Eagle House, built in 1880 and still carrying its charm and grace like royalty.

The next day we continued our journey south, going off-the-beaten-path along the Lost Coast. The narrow road wound up forested mountains and pastured hillsides with contented cows grazing in the sunny, salt-tinged air. I had noticed on the previous night's menu that the restaurant proudly served Humbolt County grassfed beef, and from the looks of these cows, the steaks would be quite tasty. These were the happiest cows I've ever seen. (As would I be if I were a cow.)

Finally, we caught a glimpse of the Pacific through a break in the peaks, and soon enough, we rounded a mountain to see the gorgeous aquamarine coastal waters breaking onto pristine sandy beaches. It was stunning.

A few miles later we arrived at the King Range Conservation Area, where we explored a small portion of the 35-mile stretch of natural coastline. Such raw beauty! To be in its presence was humbling; I was reminded of that poignant and moving carol, "Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices" -- reverent and awestruck in the sheer power and beauty of creation. As we walked along the white sand upon which water-polished bits of wood and sun-bleached logs rested, we saw a plump looking piece of driftwood that turned out to be, upon closer inspection, a sunning sea lion.

Perhaps my favorite spot was the headlands in the tiny town of Mendocino. The dark rocks jutted into the bay majestically, beaten by waves whipped into a shocking white froth, then calmed into the quiet pools of aqua swirling round the shore. Where the two worlds of land and sea joined, astonishing colors and shapes were born in the lichens and seaweeds, in the flowers and grasses, and the rocks and water themselves. Each angle, every turn was a new piece of artwork on a transitioning canvas.

This crazy gorgeous landscape only got more staggering as we traveled further south along the coast. When we could barely stand more, it was time to head back east on a small road that would lead us into wine country of Sonoma and then Napa. I was almost relieved to be able to rest my eyes. And yet, no sooner had we turned off the highway, we encountered another "Scenic Byway" sign. We groaned, Stop it! We can't take it anymore! This is when I decided the Golden State deserved a new motto.

California: Ridiculously Beautiful.

Have I even mentioned the adorable towns, all of them clean and quaint and filled with cute shops and good food? Did I tell you about the crisp air, a tad bit cool but accompanied -- like a fine wine and sharp cheese -- with bonewarming sun? Did I say that every single person we encountered, without fail, was kind and pleasant and helpful?

Ridiculous!

The last week of work before vacation was a maelstrom -- more than usual. The stress level was cranked to eleven. Amid preparation for a pivotal meeting, some major leadership changes were made that affect a lot of staff. One colleague quipped: they give you the red ball, you play with the red ball; they give you the blue ball, you play with the blue ball.

There is some wisdom in this. You have to keep doing what you do, especially when you believe what you are doing has meaning. Still, sometimes you have to wonder when is it time to count yourself out. As I sailed through what felt like a dreamworld, from the Sierra Nevadas to the Coastal Range, from mountain to shore, from redwood forest to bucolic pastures to valley vineyards, I thought about all that carries on, day in and day out -- the crashing of waves, the fall and melt of snow, the varied lives of people everywhere living their lives a million different ways. And I wondered about the possibilities for me to trade in the blue ball, the red ball, for a different game altogether.

And I began to write a novel.

Greetings from Sunny California

2010-05-03T22:34:00.000-05:00

I read my book (Olive Kitteridge -- great read!) till we began our approach and I looked out the window and saw Lake Tahoe, sparkling below me like a jewel, a perfect welcome to California. This was gonna be fun.

We landed shortly thereafter in Sacramento and drove northeast to Grass Valley where our friends, native San Franciscans who staked their claim in Austin for 15 years and, after their daughter left home, made their way back to their beloved California. They just packed up and drove out, choosing a place to live after looking around Northern California a bit. Grass Valley was a lovely choice. Halfway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, its mining history has led to a charming tourist present, with almost entirely locally owned businesses, historic buildings, fabulous restaurants, all garnished with blooming trees and flowers canopied by pines. Seeing our friends was great, and they may have convinced us to move. Tomorrow.

Well, we resisted that immediate urge, and on Sunday afternoon we made our way throught the Sierra Nevadas, winding our way up and down mountain roads lined with snow. We were enthralled with the Yuba River, its turquoise green water bubbling over rocks, on which sun worshippers bathed. We stopped at Oregon Creek to stick our toes in...it was chilly but not too cold. At least a couple of kids didn't seem to mind, with the warm sun blazing through the dry air.

We stopped for the night in Quincy, California, at the Ranchito Motel: quaint yellow cabins on beautifully treed grounds. Its motto was "Sleep by the Babbling Brook," and that is what sold us, instead of sleeping at the local bed and breakfast. After the transaction and we found our cabin, we discovered the babbling brooks was 1) a ditch about 3 feet wide and 2) dry. Hmmm. The bed was equally oversold -- well worn and bouncy. The night got pretty darn chilly and my husband dreamed we were at a football game besieged by snowfall. A mad dash of fans to the local Walmart was mayhem, and kept us from reaching the clothing aisle. That may have been when I stole his covers.

Breakfast at Mi Casita welomed a brand new day with a hearty American breakfast from our Spanish-speaking owner. He was curious about our inquiry for breakfast tacos; he hadn't heard of this Austin staple. He did serve breakfast burritos, which is similar, but tacos offer a lot of delicious variety. I think we talked him into a road trip to Texas to learn about our version of Mexican breakfast. We lamented that our doggie Keaton wasn't with us to be the benefactor of our leftover sausauge, flapjacks and potates (we ate all our eggs). But since he wasn't, we overate.

Then we drove today to Lassen Volcano National Park, which at 10,000 feet had deep snow, and though the road was plowed the five miles to the park entrance, beyond that, it was closed.

Passing truck after truck hauling lumber, we caught I-5 and headed north. Lake Shasta Recreational Area made me want to stop and buy a boat and never leave -- its aquamarine waters against red rocks and dark green pines cajoling me like a siren. Still, we pressed on through the mountain. I was immersed in the calming silence, the surroundings providing a fertile valley for my thoughts, when in the distance, we saw the majestic 14,000 foot Mount Shasta, snowcapped and gleaming up to the heavens, its peak concealed by a swirl of snowy clouds. Drawn to it like mortals to the Great Spirit, we were led off the exit to Mt. Shasta City where the mountain top revealed itself, favoring us, I am convinced, for our appropriate reverence.

Mt. Shasta City is a quaint tourist ski town. We got a room at the chipper Strawberry Valley Inn. We walked the town streets where charming shops sold everything from essential oils for animals to earth art to a plainly named Music Shop (my musician husband's favorite). We wandered into the Berryville Natural Foods store where we purchased a yummy broccoli salad, an organic avacado, and an organic dark chocolate bar to add to our goody basket. I refrained from buying every other item they sold, though I was sorely tempted. Including, I might add, fabulous cotton clothes and hand made pottery dishware. Oh, thank goodness for the two-bag carryon rule.

And that leads us till now, where I sit in the dwindling sunlight with a glass of white wine and my dark chocolate and California grown roasted and salted almonds. Oh, and I've already tested out the bed. Heav-En-Ly!

One last treat:: As you may know. my home is TV-free, but vacation means unabashed TV viewing. And one of my old faves, Reno 911 just came on. C'mon, you know you love that crazy show!
Night! Tomorrow, we are off to Ashland, Oregon. More mountains and real babbling brooks, waterfalls, and quaint towns. How does the West Coast sustain all this charm? I ask you!

Me + Next Week = Vacation!

2010-04-30T19:04:00.000-05:00

Now there's some math I can understand!

I may or may not (depending on how the internet tubes work and the level of activity and/or boredom I encounter) post for 10 days, as I am on VACA! (gotta love the short form of that word: it's too much energy to write out the whole thing when you're on it, or about to be....so what am I waiting for? I'm outta here!!

Best to you all for a lovely May Day.

Dreamfarm Girl

Caitlin Cooks!

2010-04-23T16:59:00.001-05:00

Today we have a guest post from my daughter Caitlin, who is holding up her half of the mother-daughter project to cook together long distance, with a little help from this newfangled thingy of tubes called the Internets. I (in Texas) post a recipe using my fresh garden ingredients; she (in Alabama) cooks it. This is her version of swiss chard & crumbled tofu on a bed of rice (warning: she takes a few "liberties.") Take it away, Cait!

Thursday afternoon I made the decision. “Tonight is the night,” I thought to myself, “I am going to cook.” I’m pretty sure I made a fist at my computer, you know, “I’ll show you,” as if my poor little (huge and awesomely bad ass) Mac cared as to whether I attempted anything new or not.

I had to work late so no time for the store. I figured this would make it even more of an adventure! Exciting! I got home and took a peek in the fridge.

Okaaaaaay. Luckily I keep the fridge drawers and freezer stocked with veggies, frozen and fresh. Who would have thought that, at 26, I would not have a stockpile of Lean Cuisine meals, but vegetables! Well I do people. And thank God, because they all came in handy. I must note that I ordered chicken and beef teriyaki on Sunday night, a hangover cure if I’ve ever known one, (thank you Chen Express), and had frozen leftovers to feed me all week. I pulled out my ingredients.

As my mom knows, I loathe chard. I think it is one of those things that I have always hated and always will. So I decided to go with spinach. I cut up the meat and added a few frozen shrimp, because, well, they are so delish. Mushrooms were necessary, as well as some snap peas, water chestnuts (Always so crunchy! And from a can! HOW?), onion, a single broccoli floret, and the yummy garlic. Not fresh. Still good.

Got out a few more items, oil, soy, salt, and pepper, and then put a skillet (or what sort of looked like a skillet) on the stove.

“Do I reeeeeally feel like dealing with the fire alarm tonight,” I posed to myself. Nah.

I don’t know how people live without a microwave. Let me repeat: I. Do. Not. Know. How. People. Can. Live. I meeeean, it’s a miracle gadget. A dream. I digress.

Look at that plate! Although one may argue that anything looks good with a Kit Kat next to it, I do have to say that my meal was superb and I will definitely toot my own horn here. Toot toot, I can cook (kind of) and it tastes GOOD!

Let's review. Caitlin's swiss chard & crumbled tofu on a bed of rice has 1) no swiss chard; 2) no crumbled tofu and 3) no rice. But, she did cook with mushrooms, garlic and soy sauce. And greens! Let's give her an A+! (Yeah, I was the pushover parent.) But it does look delish!

Sprout and Grow

2010-04-21T21:52:00.000-05:00

Now that I have put my summer garden in the ground, I have returned to the daily rhythm of waking just after dawn and, after wordlessly making my coffee, packing my lunch for later, and putting away the previous night's dishes, my dog and I head out the back door and into the morning wonderland. I am off to the garden, and he -- well, he is off to chase away the remains of last night's bogeys. Or at least make his mark where they left theirs.

In the buttery glow of the morning, the world seems incredibly light. Playful. I can breathe. I hum. I like this me.

My vegetable garden is the centerpiece of the meadow behind the house, smack dab in the middle, demarcated by deer fencing which the weeds gleefully ignore. As I enter through the gate, I feel I've entered a sacred space. It is my zen spot, my church. When I am in there, watering and weeding and even when I'm doing the hard labor of digging, I feel that all the secrets of life are there for me to learn.

May hay while the sun shines. Don't count your eggs before they're hatched. These simple guides and many more come from our heritage of an agrarian society, and personnally, I think I want to go back to it. At least part time. Oh, I know it's very hard work. I'd be up the proverbial creek without a paddle if I had to rely solely on my garden food. I would have to be a vegetarian I suppose, as I could perfectly well raise chickens and lambs, but don't ask me to slit their throats and serve them up for supper. And even when my garden is at its best harvest, there's still lots that I need to buy at the grocery store.

Lately I've been hearing a lot about the slow food movement to grow your own food, for numerous reasons regarding health and our environment and connectedness to the most basic of human activities. I'm delighted to see more people tending gardens and raising chickens for eggs. (There's even a big controversy in many cities over having roosters. I say there's a lot noisier things in my city than roosters -- leaf blowers and car alarms are far more irritating!) And now there's a slow money movement, too, which is for people to invest in their local farmers and coops to buy fresh, local fruits and vegetables.

It's not practical, obviously, for everyone to be a sideline farmer or buy all their food directly from one, but I do like the attention food is getting these days. I myself am not ready to put all my eggs in the farming basket either, and am indeed quite happy after working in the garden to have a nice desk by a sunny window where I can sit down and write. But I do respect and admire the local farmers here who are growing food organically and selling to my neighbors and community.

The important thing is that we actually think about our food. Its nutritious value, its tastiness, and where it come from. When we connect ourselves to the earth, to our food, we connect ourselves to the gifts of this world. Giving thanks for a meal seems to me the one of the most loveliest, meaningful ways to give thanks for life itself. I find when I am eating something I've grown myself, I always am incredibly thankful for such a gift because I know how long it took -- how much rain and watering and sunshine and weeding was required to allow this meal to arrive on my table.

And when I eat my own vegetables, I feel that my little Dreamfarm is giving of its very self to keep me nourished. I like to think that maybe that is the way the land is thanking me and my husband for all the tending we give it. What I do know is that spending a little time each morning in the garden watching the mystery of life unfold, as seeds sprout and spread and flower and fruit.... well, that is just close to heaven.

From the Bed to the Table

2010-04-17T22:03:00.002-05:00

~~A sometimes series of home-grown food, home-cooked and home-eaten~~

My daughter Caitlin suggested that in addition to posting the occasional update of my garden, I blog about cooking the bounty. Then, she'll give the recipe a whirl and it will be our little mother-daughter cooking lesson we'll share with you all, in hopes that you might find it interesting (I've noticed a few requests for the occasional recipe). And maybe you will share your cooking experience with us? That is, if any of the recipes strike your fancy. Warning: these are going to star our very good and helpful friends, The Vegetables. They will never let you down.

(But first, I must say, my heart leapt with delight when Cait suggested this, as I always dreamed of teaching my daughter to cook. There's some strong tug lurking in my genes to hand down the female lessons. Which must be the same gene that causes me to look to back to my mom, grandmas and great-grandmas and aunts, remembering tidbits of their lives and trying to understand the rest. But I know these are not just female lessons...so you guys out there, give it a try! Are you listening, son? No? I thought not.)

So today, just back from yet another out of town trip, this time New York (because you asked: I work for a non profit national environmental group, as a fundraiser of foundation grants, which requires me to interpret and write lengthy proposals on environmental policy solutions) I was feeling very mopey and discombobulated. There was a huge distance between me and all things home, even though I was smack dab in the middle of it and in fact went no where else today. Still, I could not connect. Until I started cooking. As I cleaned up my kitchen and prepared the meal using many ingredients from my garden, soon I was back on course, my house felt mine, and all was right with the world.

That is what cooking can do for you. Now, here is your challenge, should you choose to accept it:

Swiss chard

dancing among a chorus of crumbled tofu

on a stage of brown & wild rice

(Okay, yes, I saw a musical while I was in New York. The Gondoliers, and my very own friends and colleagues were in the chorus. It was grand! And why shouldn't our recipes be just as showbizzy, I ask you? They star in the meals on our plates every day! Applause.)

First, photos from The Bed, from whence we held auditions: Handsome looking fellas who are eagerly boasting, pick me!

(As you may have guessed, the tattered reprobate in the foreground did not win a role.)

Step 1. Begin by cooking the rice. Use the recipe given, the standard 2 parts water to 1 part rice. I like to use short-grain brown rice with the addition of about a quarter cup of some wild rice and quinoa, to add a little nutty zip (use the same proportions as if it were rice). (Hint: If you buy one container of each, they will last a long time if you add just a tich to your regular rice each time. Not sure if "tich" is a word, but it is in our house.)

Step 2. Prep the main attraction. Take a bunch of red swiss chard leaves (if you are purchasing at the store, one bunch will do) and after thoroughly washing, cut the main stem from the leaf. Just cut out the part that is firm like celery; once it gets about halfway up the leaf, it's tender enough just to be part of the leaf. Cut the stems like you would celery, slicing thick stems lengthwise and then chopping them.

Then slice and chop the leaves into pieces (about 1" x 2-3") so that once cooked they will be bite sized. Set aside.

Chop garlic and onion to taste. I used garden onions (photo op! the onions are ready to be picked when they flower; my don't they clean up nice?). If I were using store-bought I'd use one yellow onion. Also I love garlic so I used about 7 toes, but 3 might do if you are garlic-challenged (condolences).

I also chopped up some fresh sage. Here it is so sweet and flowery in the garden. You don't have to use sage, but you might want to use some rich zesty herb to enhance the greens -- basil or thyme or oregano are options.

Chop the tofu into small cubes (you can make this recipe sans tofu, or with something else, like chicken, tampeh, or bacon...because really the chards are the darling star). I also added some chopped mushrooms. Here's most of it ready to go into the pot.

Step 3. Time to cook! Drizzle vegetable oil into a large pan or pot. Don't go overboard; we aren't deep frying, but you will need at least a couple of tablespoons so the tofu won't stick. Use less if you are only cooking veggies. I use my Dutch oven because it has some depth, and with a lot of ingredients, you need the space. A note on oils: be sure to use one that works well at high heat -- I prefer canola or grapeseed oil. (Remember, olive oil is best room temp or at low heat. Unfair, I know, but true.) This is especially important if you are cooking tofu -- it will crisp up much more nicely if you use the right oil.

So, heat your oil to high and add in the tofu, onions, garlic and chard stems. Sprinkle with your favorite must-haves (for me that is cayenne pepper, sea salt, garlic powder and currently, Paul Prudhomme's Magic Seasoning). This has to cook at high heat, with occasional stirring for a while to brown up and dry out the ingredients. I like my tofu to break down into crumbles with stirring.

Once it starts to brown and dry out, I add in something like red cooking wine or Bragg's (like soy sauce only not fermented) or soy sauce. Today I did both. These serve to help brown the ingredients as well as add flavor.

Once you've got a good scald on it, as my husband likes to say, meaning it's browned up all golden and yummy, add the chopped greens on top and cover, allowing the moisture within to steam them. This takes about 5 minutes or so....once the greens are wilted enough to be edible, blend into ingredients below it, lifting and separating (just like Jane Mansfield's full-figured-gal bra).

Step 4. Top n' serve! For toppers, I like pepitas (roasted and salted pumpkin seeds) sprinkled lightly, and crisp red bell peppers, chopped. Plus a sprinkling of fresh mint. Yum!

It was delicious and easy! And incredibly healthful and low in calories. Take a bow, Miss Swiss Chard. Encore!

Danger in A Strange Bed

2010-04-09T22:28:00.000-05:00

I had to travel for work this week, up to our DC office for a day, and then a group of us headed off for a two-day retreat in Maryland at a lovely little conference center amidst the gentle woods and farmland lying along a tributary of the Chesapeake. Spring has come suddenly to that neck of the woods, and dainty wisps of pollen fell lightly in the breeze, dusting every square inch with a light film, like powdered sugar on lemon squares.

While we call these work events "retreats," there's an awful lot of work going on and no free time. So it was pretty early to bed after a long day of thinking and no time alone. I was conked out by about 10:30 in my little cabin room.

My little cabin room, I should say, was like a hotel room, except it was in cabin style quarters of six rooms per cabin. There were probably eight or ten of them along a shady lane of budding trees, the understory lined with daffodils, violets and May apples. Our rooms had doors both facing outside to a porch with the requisite wood railings and inside, to a decidedly hotel looking hallway.

So, I've got a mild headache, as usual when I travel; I've had a Cape Cod prior to dinner and a white wine with dinner, which was a heavier meal than I usually eat including a thick slice of cheesecake drizzled with chocolate caramel; I've slugged back a couple of Tylenol allergy pills to ward off the effects of pollen. I made it through a paragraph of my book before falling into a deep coma. Soooo nice...

RING-RING! My husband called at about midnight. Hullo? He can tell immediately I'm drooling and my eyes are still shut tight. Brief conversation of love you's and I'm back, face shoved into the pillow, snoring away.

ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER!!!!

Holy shit! I bolt upright. What the F??

ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER!!!!! Red lights flashing. Blaring horrible horrible mean alarm screaming.

I jump out of bed. I am confused. I open my door to the porch. No one else is outside. I come back in. That horrible noise will not stop. I look at my pajamas and while I actually have on a matching cotton top and shorts, the top is pretty loose with spaghetti straps and deep V neck, and though if I stand still everything's covered, it's pretty iffy the second I move. Why didn't I bring the robe? Damn it, I had laid it out on the bed when I packed and I decided the suitcase was too crowded. I run to my suitcase and fling clothes out to find my jacket, which I put on and go back outside. Still no one is around. ER-ER-ER-ER-ER! Where is everyone? Am I in the twilight zone?

Miraculously, it stops. Okayyyyy then, I guess it's back to bed I go. I skeptically lay my head back down, turn out the light, and lay there.

I am edgy. I can't fall back asleep. My headache, just slight when I went to bed, is roaring. I get up and take a couple of Advil. I know I am pushing it, you are not supposed to take this much especially after having a couple of drinks. My liver is pissed off. Shhh, shhh, I tell it, go to sleep. It's okay. It's over now. Sweet dreams. Slowly, me and my liver and my headache let go and drift off....to.....sleep.

ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER!!!!!!

F*CK! Seriously? Again?!

I turn on the light and grab my jacket. It's almost 2:00. ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER!!!

I get the message. I grab my jacket. I am getting the. hell. out. of. here. This time I go to the hallway door. Two doors down one of my colleagues, Tom, is stepping out the door in his pj's too, shorts and white t-shirt. Suddenly I'm aware that I have on my thick glasses (instead of my contacts) and I most certainly have very bad bedhead. Good evening, he yells over the ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER!!!

The door between us opens and Amanda looks at us in the only appropriate expression, WTF?? Tom yells, you can disengage the alarm! Twist it off the ceiling! Others are coming out of their rooms and we all go back inside our rooms to take the alarms off our ceilings, even though it is painful to be anywhere near the alarms. I think of whales who beach themselves, ready to die, after suffering from sonar blasts.

I can't get mine off and go back to the hall, helpless. Tom is going around helping everyone. He comes in my room without looking at me (thank god! I guess I'm not the only one embarrassed to be wearing pajamas in front of my colleagues), and stands on my bed, yanks out the alarm, sets it on the table and walks out. Thanks! I call in the now blissful silence, incredibly grateful.

I shut my door and take a deep breath. Once again, I shed my jacket and crawl in bed. I tell myself, it's over. The Thing is dead. I can go back to sleep and still get almost five more hours of sleep...And this time, I really do fall back asleep.

You guessed it.

ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER!

This can't be! ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER!!

I look up and sure enough, the damn thing is going off on the table.

EFFing amazing! It's alive! It's not even connected and it's gone off again! ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER! I jump up and as I get right over it, the sound is incredibly painful, like a knife stabbing my brain right through my ears. I remember I saw this once in an old Vincent Price black and white horror movie. ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER! I grab a pillow off the bed and cover the offensive thing up. I open up the closet and find the spare wool blanket, and I transfer it into the blanket, wrap it up tight and place more pillows on top and sit on it. I realize I do not want to just sit there with an alarm going off on my butt, and so I get up and shut the door and get in bed.

I am sure that my neighbors' alarms did not go off this time, because now they are not all connected and I can't hear anyone else rattling about the halls, nor can I hear any other alarms. I really do not want to wake them. Let's just say I'm not at the top of the totem pole in the hierarchy of people at this retreat. But I'm thinking, it's not too loud buried in the closet, and it stopped all by itself once before, right? So I will just wait it out a few minutes and then try to figure out how to disengage the battery so it can't possibly do this again. I wait in bed five minutes, listening to the er-er-er-er-er-er-er pulsing from the closet. If I plug my ears with my fingers I can't even hear it, but of course, I can't go to sleep that way. Relentlessly it beats er-er-er-er-er-er-er-er-er-er-er with no sign of stopping. I go back to the closet. I try to dislodge the battery without actually taking the alarm out of the blanket. I am desperate.

It is as secure as Fort Knox. The damn thing is impossible to break open, and moreover, it's impossible to do anything with it still in the blanket. I am pushing and pulling on it, and it is sliding in and out of the blanket, its evil evil alarm blaring hideously at me each time it is unveiled from the blanket. I slam it back into the closet with pillows and search the room for something to pry it apart. I find a pen. A measly pen.

I am brave. I go back into the closet and cradle the screaming blanket and slide my hand in with the pen and try to pry it open without actually having it unmuffled. All the while it is shamelessly, endlessly blaring ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER!!!! I can't get it open. I start stabbing it with the pen because it is just a hateful, hateful thing. I claw at it, my fingers smashed into the slots that circle the contraption, in which I can see a 9-volt battery, the satanic soul of this beast. I pull and scratch at it; I yank and yank at the wires. I am in tears, nearly blind with my nearsightedness and ill-fitting thick glasses that keep sliding off my face, my head pounding, my entire being sweaty from exhaustion and frustration. And that damn ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER like the tell-tale heart to the 100th power never giving up. I am on the event horizon, about to fall deep into the black hole of no escape. I pull and yank and hit and claw and yank some more. ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER-ER!

And then, silence. Overwhelmingly, powerfully deafening silence. I look down amid the blanket and pillows and there in my scratched hands lies the dead alien being, a deceptively innocent white disk, with a long, slender, two inch black wire dangling oh so carelessly from the 9-volt battery. I was the Hurt Locker bomb defuser, and I won, you little f*cker.

I threw it on the desk. I whispered viciously, You are an Evil, Hateful, Hateful Thing. I. Hate.You.

I go back to bed. My head is pounding worse than ever. I do some deep breathing. It is 3:30 and I have to get up at 7:00. I drink a bunch of water and deep breathe some more. I finally drift off to sleep, my ears damaged and now doing a soft little er-er-er-er-er-er-er-er all on their own.

And I dream. I dream I am being stalked by a persistent evil grad student who wants to stab me over and over and over and over and over. I am running in a panic and my heart is pounding er-er-er-er-er-er-er-er-er-er-er!

This is why I hate to travel. These things never happen when I'm sleeping in my own bed.

A New Dress and a Fresh Start

2010-04-04T23:31:00.000-05:00

Saturday, my mom, who is more commonly called Grandma these days, had an Easter egg hunt at her house. Most of the grandkids were there, though really there's only one egg-hunt-aged kid left, a five-year-old. But even the older kids and aunts and uncles had a grand time just being part of it, giving hints and sneaking candy. Grandma made a coconut bunny cake that was delicious!

Easter is more a religious holiday than secular, as it probably ought to be (though the Easter basket claims a firmly treasured place). Still, even though I am not a religious person (strictly speaking), I too find a lot of meaning in the whole concept of rebirth. The possibility of forgiveness and renewal, of mercy and grace. Isn't this the miracle we are given each year with the re-emergence of spring? We, like most creatures on this Earth, come alive again after the long winter, embracing spring, happy to be part of the reawakening.

Still, when I think back to Easters past, what I remember most is the fabulous Easter dresses my mom always made me and my sisters. Usually they were matching or complementary, and I think some years her dress was, too. Here we are, me and my siblings, the Easter I was turning 11. My dad was in Vietnam, it was 1972, and the world was a mess, but we were a happy little troupe in our new Easter digs with the coolest appliques my mom let me and my sister pick out to sew on the front. I remember I loved that purple flower!

I know, I look kind of satanic with those candles behind my head like horns, right? Also, please notice my watch, which was a Timex, but the band--thick leather--was one I had picked out myself and it was on my arm for an entire year at least. It was decent, as we said back then (that meant the coolest ever!).

On my other wrist was a POW-MIA bracelet for a pilot whom I actually saw on television almost a year later when the war was finally over and streams of men were released, and America watched them clean shaven and uniformed, in their own new dresses of sorts, step off military planes and back into another world, called American Life in the 70s. I remember wishing he would wave at me as he crossed the tarmac, even though I knew he had no idea who I was, or that I had held his name for nearly a year on my body and close to my heart, fervently wishing for that very moment of his homecoming to come true.

Another year when we lived in Turkey, my mom sent away for fabric, which as I remember was a delicate cantaloupe color, striped with creamy bands of white and maybe a thin line of green running through it. She probably also had to send away for the patterns and lace, possibly as soon as Christmas was over, to get them done in time. I never questioned or considered how many hours it must have taken her to sew for my sister and me, but I always loved putting on that new Easter dress. That year, I remember it had a fitted waist and puffy skirt, and the sleeves also puffed out in the most exotic way (so I thought). Now, I want to say, thanks Mom, for all those hours of sewing you did for me. Now I know what it means.

Even then, though, I knew that having a wonderful new dress did indeed make me feel like a fresh start was possible, like I was remade into something cleaner and shinier, with a promising new future.

And isn't that what spring is all about?

Missing in Action

2010-03-31T23:45:00.001-05:00

Maybe you haven't noticed, but it's been crickets over here for a whole week. I've been missing in action. That is because I've been in actual action. As in doing things not contained only in my head and in words strung together, which much of the time feels as much like the real world as the real world. Well, duh, right?

March 30 was marked on my calendar a month ago as Book Group at My House. Like a bull's eye in the future, my arrow sailed closer and closer, honing in on its target, quivering over what must be done before I was ready. To entertain. (Such a scary word!)

Now, Book Group is supposed to be a casual affair. A group of women that has 8 people on the email list but no more than 6 at any one gathering, and always, I mean always, including a core 4 (of which I am one and have been for more than 10 years). We meet at each others' houses and sometimes at restaurants. Most of us Book Groupers can pull off casual without a hitch. We like it this way. We like visiting homes where kidstuff is everywhere and kitchens are messy.

I live further away than most, so we only come to my house about once a year. Whenever Book Group is at my house, I vow not to get neurotic and uptight. I promise myself I will just fix something easy and be confident in my housekeeping and house status, remembering that my friends are not here on an Inspection. I will have a few friends over and not think twice about it.

So, predictably, over the weekend before The Day I went into a panic. The fans were dusty. The blinds a nightmare. The table legs scandalous. My new deck had a glaring, gaping hole where a baker's rack was intended to go. The couches needed to be cleaned. The baseboards. My God! The baseboards. Did I mention I needed a new tablecloth and placemats? And damn it! I still hadn't replaced the awful curtains in the bedroom after we repainted, when was it -- a year ago? What is wrong with me?

I spent an entire two days getting ready. The truth is, I needed a good spring cleaning sprint, and this was the reason to make it happen. I filled buckets of soapy water and spritzed countless squirts of almond scented wood oil. I bought a new mop and used it. I emptied a couple of vacuum containers. That dog hair gets everywhere! I purchased multiple items from Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, Hobby Lobby and Pier One. I returned a large portion of said items.

The night before, I set my table, remembering when I first learned to set a table as a kindergartener, with all the same thrill. Spoon guards the knife, its blade to the inside so as not to hurt his date, Miss Spoon. Fork's friend is the napkin. Demure candles accompanied a shapely small vase in the center with yellow flowers. I called my husband to take a look. Imagine, he wasn't nearly as giddy as I was, though he did say it looked nice.

So I am here to tell you that yes indeed Book Group was a satisfying thing of beauty. A lovely time was had by all. My cilantro pesto and goat cheese: scrumptious. My quiche with grilled halibut and summer squash = yummy. My fresh garden spinach with mushrooms and feta cheese, mouthwatering. Everyone else's dishes, perfect complements. (Yeah, I know that was self-centered.) Lots of wine. Ditto on the laughter.

And all 6 of us spent the entire evening in the kitchen and at the table on the screened porch. No one looked at my baseboards, my ceiling fans, my table legs. But they were clean, goddammit! And the table, well I have to say, it was a dream....until the feast began. In no time at all, it was a total wreck. Which is to say, it was just perfect!

'Night. And I promise to catch up with what you all have been doing tomorrow!

Spilled Milk

2010-03-24T22:30:00.001-05:00

I walk in from work, a long day I might add because it is performance evaluation time and everyone is generally in an uptight, am I worthy?, hell yes I'm worthy, I'm far worthier than that! kind of mood, and I quickly set down my stuff so I can pet the one beaming waggy creature who would leap over furniture to get to me, and has indeed done so, and

~~# $ % C ^ R* A #S @H # $ %~~

I turn in horror.

There staring at me is the remains of my very most favorite coffee mug in the whole wide world. Broken into shards and drowning in the leftovers of this morning's coffee. Completely recalcitrant.

I apparently did not set it down entirely upon the counter top. And gravity being what it will be, played its evil little hand and went and spoiled it for me. My sister gave me that mug. In fact it says,

which makes me think of my baby sister (who is now approaching 40) each morning. Now it looks like this

and I perhaps will have to remember each morning as I use one of our drab mugs how everything eventually breaks down with time. I don't think my sis is gonna like me thinking that thought, since of course I am going to link it to her and me, once young sisters without cares in the world and now...well. never mind.

I know the saying is there's no use crying over spilled milk, but despite my deep fondness for the cup, it is strange. I do not feel like crying a bit. My most immediate feeling is disbelief. I do not want to believe my favorite mug is lying in pieces in a sticky brown mess.

Of course, I get over this and clean it up. And then am sad. But what gets me is the brain's slow motion comprehension of what it doesn't want to see.

Once a man broke into my garage, walked out the side screened porch (the door of which I heard slam from my child's room where I was putting a baby down for a midday nap) and sauntered out the back yard with a television hoisted onto his shoulder. As I peered at him, I thought, Hmmmm, my husband must have asked this strange man to come by and get the TV to fix it (as it was broken, and hence in the garage). My brain could not conceive of any other possibility for what seemed a pretty long interval. I watched him continue walking and walking (our yard was pretty big, but also my brain was moving pretty slowly) till I finally thought, This man is stealing my television. I repeated it a few times like a mantra. And then I called 911.

The man, it turns out, was not too bright. And what little wits he had were seriously tripping on some chemical. So even my dulled wits were a slam dunk against his. He had mosied on over to the nearest bus stop, sat on my TV, and there was easily caught like a drunk butterfly in a net by the local cop who picked up the call. They brought him round to my house where I identified him (um, yes, he is the man I saw walking in my backyard with my TV, since I could still see him from my back yard when you picked him up and--hard to believe--there just is no competition for that starring role today).

Turns out, he had served time in prison for manslaughter. He was wanted on other charges. He went to prison for ten years hard labor. I had to go to court, but luckily did not have to testify. Still, after a few years went by and I became single, living in that house alone, I worried he would be let out early. And remember the nice lady who sent him away.

When faced with something you can't believe you're seeing, your brain is slow to process. But when it gets ahold of a scary prospect like that, it just doesn't let go.

I moved.

Has your brain ever deceived you like this, for a moment, when it wants to hold reality back for just a bit longer? Or gotten hold of a frightening prospect that, however unlikely, it can't forget?

The brain, I tell ya, it's got a mind of its own.

...Til You Give It Away

2010-03-21T13:51:00.000-05:00

You may remember that over the Christmas holidays I began making a quilt for my niece Amanda's baby. She is due in early May, so I figured even I could manage to finish a quilt in five months' time. Then a few weeks ago, an invitation to a baby shower arrived. I hadn't thought of this! Could I, would I finish the quilt in time? It was already well on its way, the quilt top pieced together and the actual quilting maybe a fourth of the way done. Was I going to buckle down and finish?

Curiously, I wavered. Of course I was going to finish, and then obviously I was not. I could just get another present and finish this in my own time. I browsed the sites where she is registered. I longed for, I mean I longed to buy, all the items she had selected, practical items like organic cotton diapers in sweet colors like blossom and grasshopper. I wanted her to have those! I thought about buying an adorable girly dress at a local shop I love. But then again, here was this beautiful gift just waiting to be given.

Why was I hesitating? There were a few weekends and many nights in which to complete it. I didn't. Finally, last Monday, the week of the shower, which was to be on Saturday, I decided to take a day off from work and knock it out. When the day-off arrived, I took my sweet time drinking my coffee, reading the paper, doing this and that. Around noon, I finally settled into my sewing room and began.

As I stitched, quilting a daisy flower pattern in the center of each 4-inch square, and linked hearts, looping one to the next, in the 8-inch blocks, moving from one to the next to the next, it slowly came to me. I loved this quilt. I loved having it as a project. I loved the idea of putting it together for a sweet little baby. I loved the colors and the patterns that smiled at me from my sewing table each day, waiting for me to pick it up. I loved the thoughts that came to me while creating it, which made their way into my heart (and into my blog posts).

I wasn't ready to give it up.

I was being selfish. I had started out wanting to make it for my niece, whom I love, who is as sweet as they come, who is part of me, my family, my life. We have the exact same mitochondrial DNA for goodness sakes! (I love to think about that maternal DNA, my grandmothers' living in me and in every sibling, child and niece and nephew I have. Wow.) And that same mitochondrial DNA was already in each and every cell of little Eva Grace, who is now fully formed and fattening up, tucked warmly inside her mama. I had wanted to do it for her.

And I was, still doing it for Eva and Amanda, that is. But it had also become part of me, too. And as soon as I realized how much I had come to love it, to understand this reluctance, I was able to prepare my heart with each stitch for giving it away. By the time I sewed the binding by hand, I was ready. When I folded it up, still warm from the dryer, and wrapped it in a package, I couldn't wait for her to open it and feel the love it held. As I tied the bow, it was no longer mine, and now, this made me happy.

And when she opened it, it was perfect. She loved it. And in her arms, she brought the quilt to life. I could see it becoming what it was meant to be.

(And I have to say, my gift was not one bit more special than all the other beautiful gifts that all those around her brought; all were equally chosen or made with love. As it should be.)

At the shower all the guests were asked to give parenting advice, written on a card, for Amanda to turn to in the days and months ahead as she embraces motherhood. A bit lost, I settled on something practical: three tips for getting your little one to sleep. Which isn't bad advice, because heaven knows a desperate mom sometimes needs this kind of information.

But later in the evening, as I reflected on the day of gift-giving and baby-welcoming, of supporting a new mom; on this day surrounded by my own mom and sisters and nieces; on this day of loving and giving up and receiving, I am overwhelmed. Overcome with the love that comes with being part of a family and a community. Which happens when you are ready to give up a part of yourself.

I loved making the quilt, but in the end, I loved giving it away even more. Which, it now occurs to me, is a lot like parenting. So if I had that advice card again, maybe this is what I'd write. Love being your child's parent, each and every day. Love parenting for all that it brings you, nurtures you, challenges you, makes you grow. And each and every day, with every new thing your baby learns, also learn that this love, this job of parenting and guiding, is also about letting go. Love letting her grow up and become who she is (with all the necessary guidance and nurturing of course). It is the greatest gift you can give her, and it will bring you endless joy.

My Morning Adventure (A Tiny Spring Break)

2010-03-18T13:00:00.000-05:00

First the bad news, because that is how the story starts. I had to get up early today to take my car in for body work. Because a family member who shall remain nameless backed into my car while it was parked in the driveway. And naturally, I had to be nice about it. Insurance was paying, so it wasn't overly bad. I knew this, deep in my heart. But I still begrudged the hassle. I was, shall we say, a tad bit grumpy at 6:45 am.

And that is when the radio gleefully announced, among other important news, that it was spring break. Except for you, glum girl with a car in need of repair and a job to endure. You have to get up. Now!

I got up. I made coffee. It was dark. I was grumpy. Did I say that already? My husband was going to follow me and then take me on to work. This was not spring break.

But.

As the sun came up and tumbled through my windows, as it dried up all of yesterday's rain and left the world with a brand new sparkly shine, my mood lifted and I could see it was going to be a gorgeous morn. So I hatched a little plan. I would create my own tiny spring break. Since I had to drop the car off an hour earlier than I had to be at my desk, I had plenty of time to walk the four miles to work, which would take me along the hike and bike trail following the river. I tiptoed out of the house, quiet as a mouse so as not to wake my husband, feeling just a teensy bit giddy with My Morning Adventure plans.

And My Morning Adventure did not let me down. After dropping of the car, I walked down a busy boulevard for a few blocks, and soon crossed over to the park in front of the events center just across the river from downtown, where freshly mown grass wafted into my perky nose. This was very spring breaky!

The sun was warm on my skin and the air was perfectly cool. I was Goldilocks and everything around me was just right. The whole day seemed to stretch out before me as calmly as the morning sky.

It was fun to cross in the pedestrian crosswalk instead of being a car that had to stop for me.

And when I got to the other side, the sun was rising over sparkling water.

A doggy stopped and looked up at me curiously. Hello, I said. He wagged.

I took a picture of the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue and became for a second the tourist I usually am scoffing when I run this trail. Being a tourist made me feel strangely light-headed. If I weren't from here, where would I be from? It could be anywhere!

I passed by the soundstage at Auditorium Shore, already set up for free concerts later this week, because it's South By Southwest (SXSW), which has attracted a takeover of too-cool-to-have-a-day-job wunderkinds and ragamuffins loitering our streets looking ubercool, all hoping to glom onto the newest social media winner, groove on the ubiquitous fine tunes and swoon over artsy indie films. I saw several band set-ups -- at 8:30 in the morning! I actually heard a sound check. Craziness is in the crisp spring air!

Unless you're a native; then you're just pissed at all the traffic and street-loungers hanging out while the rest of us work at real jobs. But not me. I was walking and a faux tourist, and I felt like I was part of the energy. Not a SXSWer -- no, that is not me -- but a rider of the wave left in their wake. That I can do.

I passed the fountain spray, dancing in the light...

...and lots of empty benches with placards in memory of someone's dearly departed. I think that's such a lovely memorial. If you are reading, Caitlin, can I have one of those someday, huh? I'm leaving this up to you because I'm pretty sure you are the only one who would make this happen.

I also passed lots of joggers who were reveling in the sweet morning air. One particularly fit young woman passed me and called out enthusiastically, I like your boots! And suddenly my steps were just a bit jauntier. And I didn't mind anymore that tiny blister that was making its debut.

Then along came the rowing crews slicing through the water, with their coach in a motor boat bellowing out commands. I think the coach should have to row, too! Then he might be nicer.

I passed under the Congress Avenue bridge and heard the sweet little squeal of the bats who have returned from their Mexico winter vacation. I gave a sassy little squeal back. In my head, that is. I don't mind being mistaken for a tourist, but beyond that I draw the line.

I made it to my office in just about an hour, grateful for the little gift the Morning Adventure turned out to be. It may have been only a tiny spring break, but it was special, and it was mine.

I hope you, too, are having at least a tiny spring break!

Is It Live or is It Memorex?

2010-03-15T22:43:00.001-05:00

"All the world's a stage," Shakespeare pronounced, and it's easy to believe. He often employed the literary device of telling a story within a story, where the first scene shows the audience about to watch a play. One of my favorites of his plays, The Taming of the Shrew, begins this way, so that the reader or audience is actually watching the audience watch the story and is occasionally reminded of the "real" audience (not you). (Or are you?) And P.S., don't you love that feisty Kate?

When I took a class on Shakespeare in college, we first read The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd, who preceded the Old Bard both in era and in much of Shakespeare's style. He, too, used the story within a story conceit, only his audience was a couple of gods who were a wee bit on the cruel side, getting their jollies making humans act out their jealousies and revenge. Sort of like when little girls play Barbies and oops! Poor Francie's car just threw her over a cliff, right after Ken said how cute she was. (Or was that just me?)

So that story within a story idea is pretty old and apparently pretty basic to human thought -- probably considered as soon as we starting telling stories back when we were hanging out in the trees watching a few hunters and gatherers down below. The French call it mise en abyme, which translates into "putting into infinity" or "putting into the abyss" but is commonly used to describe what it's like to stand in between two mirrors and see yourself over and over and over....and who doesn't love that! I still feel sort of like a kid when I'm in a fancy bathroom that has mirrors placed like that and all those mini-me's reach out into infinity just waiting to do as I say. Like when I consider string theory of all the me's that broke off and made the right choice all those times...

I was thinking of all this when I watched Stranger than Fiction, the other night starring Emma Thompson as a writer and Will Farrell as her main character, come to life. It was this same mise en abyme, but in a refreshing way, in that this time, the god actually meets her creation. On his terms... clever! And without giving away the plot, in case I wasn't the last Netflixer in America to watch it, its message is that we are the creators of our own destiny. So take that, you jaded gods jerking us around with your maddening puppet strings! We are smarter than that. (Or dumber. With free will, it can go either way.)

I was thinking about all this on a run (because I'd forgotten my iPod) and it occurred to me that I must want to be that Emma Thompson writer character, those gods of Thomas Kyd (though hopefully I've outgrown the petty revenge). Because whenever I'm in the middle of something that seems even remotely interesting, I start the narration in my head of how it will sound transformed into a blog post. It's not even about the actual event anymore, it's about how it will play back in black and white punctuated with a half decent picture that I must find. This running dialogue wants to become something of its own!

Most of the time, though, it's really not worth it, and I am left with a sorry little story dwindling down like a fading popsicleman's tune, drifting away in the wind, pitiful and out of tune.

I know. You're thinking, and this is what she decided was one good enough to post? Yes, it's what I got today.

And this: a word from our own creator (however it is defined for you). Even when the play is going lousy, the scenery is award-winning.

Huh?

2010-03-11T22:49:00.003-06:00

Over the weekend as I caught up on my blogging, I checked out a site I rarely go to anymore. It was one of the first blogs I followed, but it didn't take long to discover much of the author's thinking was not so aligned with mine and I just quit going there. Till this one post caught my eye.

And boy was I in for a doozie. CJane says she's just read an article on what it means to be a feminist, and turns out, she's not one. Not because the definition was skewed into some man-hating or must-have-career nonsense. Nope. The definition she reacted to was your basic equality for women. Turns out, she just doesn't want to be equal. Equal means fair (she says), and life isn't fair.

She doesn't want equality for women because (deep breath) she is different from a man and if she has to worry about tit for tat, life won't be so much fun. I don't want to rehash the argument here; if you're up for that, go ahead and join the 616 comments she's gotten so far. I read quite a few, and they seemed to be running 50-50. I will say, those in opposition were largely articulate, rational, and well considered, pointing out that it isn't about differences, it's about opportunities, and registering their sadness and deep disappointment at her lack of recognition of the binding plight of women around the world, of the many barriers for women in the U.S. that were overcome in just the last century, not to mention those that still remain. On the supporting side was mostly, I love being a woman! As if that had even one teensy piece of relevance.

(Updated edit from original post: I want to add that I agree with CJane that tit for tat, I do this so you do that, is no way to run a marriage. It's no way to raise kids. Respect and love is what we want to aim for, as I think she is saying. I totally agree with that; I just don't agree that that is what we are talking about when we talk about equality for women.)

No, I am not bringing this up not to revisit the arguments (because as you may be able to tell, I find the arguments against equality entirely inane), but because it is astonishing to me that equality for women is even an issue! How is this possible? Are women not people? How can an educated, well spoken woman who (according to the website) has a mother who holds elected office (councilwoman) say, straight-faced, that equality has never done her any good? Are we being narcissitic here? Missing the point?

And I say we, because I fear that if young women in this country think this way, it's a problem for all of us. And clearly, too many women in this country (judging by the 300 commenters in favor, anyway) apparently do not understand history, or what goes on outside their own little nests or don't care.
How do we help those who do not want equality see that this is about being supportive, hoping for, valuing, validating, and honoring another human being's struggle to choose a course in life that is right for her? Like -- oh, getting away from a man who beats you, let's say -- or, getting paid the same as the men on your shift so that you can feed your children, too. If it's just ignorance: How do we help them see that equality is about having choices and opportunities? How do we help them understand that this is about their daughters' and sons' futures?

(And yes, I am very supportive of being a stay-at-home mom, if that is what you want to do! Which is exactly the point.)

Coincidentally, I had the pleasure this week of seeing Kathryn Fuller, chair of the Ford Foundation, give a talk on the role of private foundations in spurring social change. To my delight, she gave the example of the Ford Foundation's role in propelling the women's movement. Once the foundation had identified social justice for women as an issue they wanted to tackle, they first invested in research. What were the realities for women on the ground? What were the policy barriers that kept them from attaining equality -- jobs, education, well being?

Next, they funded the dissemination of the research. They convened groups and held discussions and invited the media. They told stories of nonconventional women forging new pathways with their careers, education, talents. They offered possibilities. They built momentum.

Soon, academic institutions were clamoring for grants from the Ford Foundation to do their own research. The body of evidence grew: what women wanted, what women could do, what women ought to be able to do, what could we do to provide women the opportunity to do all the many things they could do! And so they funded efforts for policy reform. They developed award programs. They created programs for women to get the skills they needed to get into new professions, to understand they could get into new professions. They partnered with businesses that were willing to open doors and promote women to corporate boards.

Within a couple of decades, the landscape for women changed dramatically. It didn't happen by chance. It happened because women and men were dedicated to righting a wrong.

These changes had profound effects on women's lives, day in and day out. On how much money they have, on how interesting their jobs are, how fulfilling their lives are. Not stuff to be taken lightly.

I see it in my own life, from the life of my grandmother down the maternal line to the life of my daughter. My grandmother was tickled pink when, on a business trip, I stopped off in Ohio to visit her, renting a car to make the hourlong drive myself from the airport to her small town house. On that same visit, I heard a bitterness in her voice when my grandpa told of his travels as a young man; she whispered sharply under her breath how she had been stuck at home. Maybe she would have felt differently if the choice had been hers to make. Her great-granddaughter (my daughter), though, had a wide range of options available to her, which she seized, including a graduate degree in the field of her choosing and now a job and apartment of her own in a city she has chosen for herself. (Oh, how she makes me proud!)

So when I hear that among us are young women who don't realize that it's because of feminists that we are not still chattel, it is time to speak up and make sure all our daughters are hearing us. Perhaps it is even good news, in a strange and twisted way, that an American woman can say she is not a feminist because of how much we have already leveled the playing field and that she lives in a world full of hard-won rights. But, that's not good enough. Like other groups who fight the long hard slog against discrimination, we must make sure we keep opening doors, not blindly shutting them.

Cool Lips and other springtime musings

2010-03-07T14:39:00.004-06:00

A week ago I eagerly purchased a pot of tulips and placed them in the foyer. They greet me each day, a little taller, a bit fuller, happily harking the spring as I come and go. My five-year-old niece who stayed with me last weekend told her mommy, Aunt Peaches has "cool lips!" Not me, the tulips. But she got it right, they sort of are cool lips. Deeply colored magenta and perfectly curved, much like her own little mouth which I never tire looking at. Children's lips are just scrumptious little works of art, aren't they?

Saturday I dug winter weeds from the vegetable garden, getting ready to plant the early spring vegetables--carrots, beets, onions, and more lettuces. I also bought seeds for the April planting for the summer garden -- tomatoes, yellow squash, zucchini, green beans. Yum!

I picked a lovely salad of spinach, chard, red cabbage and lettuces, all made especially sweet this year from many frosts. I'm sure there is a profound lesson there, life's adversities sweetening our victories. Unfortunately, that is not how it always happens. But it should, right? We should become more savory with time.

Friday night my husband and I watched the movie, Calendar Girls, a real life story about a group of Junior-League-ish (in England, it's called WI) women doing a nude calendar to raise money for a couch in a visitors' lounge at the local hospital, where a couple of the women had sat for many hours as one of their husbands went through treatment for cancer. The calendar was not obscene; just the unexpected dichotomy of upright English women going about their jam-making, piano-playing, flower-gardening lives, but nude. All props carefully placed, of course. It became a smash hit, raising huge sums of money not only for that much needed couch, but for cancer research. And the women became minor celebrities.

See there? Just goes to show you, we women of years are still very much alive and desirable. Savory. And this is a mesage I love. It's a message that goes against the mainstream media, and especially the Internet garbage, but not, I think, everyday real life. I think our men out there want their women real and prefer their own women to poster pin-ups. Being healthy, taking care of oneself, taking pride in who you are, being interesting...this keeps a women desirable. Am I right?

Not all men, of course. There are some who never outgrow the adolescent fantasies, and these men I would bet, do not have healthy relationships. These men are not the men that smart women want anyway. These are the kind of men who drool over silly girl pictures and send them around. Annoying!

So as the Dreamfarm meadow advances jauntily into spring (above is a tiny wildflower now dotted about the acreage) I am renewed as always by the rebirth. But I am not sad not to be a spring chicken anymore. I know what a gift youth is, but spring for me each year brings with it the loveliness and knowledge of all the springs before, and just gets more pleasurable. The bloom is not off this rose. Yet.

The peach tree is full of flowers. They weren't there at all last weekend (or so small I didn't even notice), and now, just look! Lovely, yes? I hope this means we will have a summer tree full of juicy, sweet fruit.

A Dreary Homily

2010-03-01T22:58:00.000-06:00

"One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them. And is not that, she wants to say to somebody, a dreary homily?"

So said Sophia in Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness, as she sat on a hard wooden bench for hours and hours shivering on a cold train making its way across the frozen landscape of Northern Europe. She ached with the beginnings of pneumonia, made worse by several stops where she stood freezing in the snow and waited for a connection, or for workers to shovel snow off the tracks. A brilliant mathematician and writer, one of Europe's first female professors, she died a few days later.

The quote resonates for me, thinking of the despair I've felt when ill, or the extended discomfort I felt when I was pregnant, or nowadays, when I suffer from a migraine. And how grateful I become just to get to a point where I can tolerate the pain. And it does seem mighty dreary to be so grateful for such a meager comfort... When happiness and the lighthearted world slip away, not only out of reach, but out of view, like the moonless night, and we can barely recall that on some nights it shines brightly, casting dancing silver shadows. The depths to which we can fall never ceases to astound me, the levels at which we can make do when required.

I saw my sister last week a few hours after a major surgery, and she looked stricken with the trauma and pain, and woozy ill from the morphine... I had this overwhelming feeling of gratefulness that she was okay tinged with worry and grief that she was going through this at all. My heart ached to see her this way, just holding on to whatever she could to make it through the hour, the minute. I know that pain.

And today, my daughter had a painful procedure done, and emailed me that it caused her to cry. My whole body hurt in a wave of empathy, wanting to take away that discomfort and erase even its memory.

Still, we are able to hold on, to protect ourselves. And I know that even being able to see wryly the dreariness of such situations speaks to how fortunate I am to most often live in lightness and light.

A red bud tree is budding. The first flowering tree of spring.

On a Lighter Note

2010-02-26T21:25:00.000-06:00

Sometimes it's all about light.

The way it calls to you to come out and play. The dancing shadows want you to dive into the scenery, let the dappled sunlight fall on your face. Swing in the hammock and be a part.

The way the light falls on an object gives it its definition, sharpens it, brings it into being.

The way the light falls at an angle certain times of year, as the seasons approach a change. The way it makes your heart soar and seek out the colors of the day. You and the bee love the color and the light.

And even the dog sneaking a drink from the bird bath seems a brilliant, lighthearted event, laughing like spring, so you know spring is indeed on its way.

The bark of an oak tree shouts hello like abstract art.

And I remember how I get really lost in the greyness of winter when the sun is shut out by a heavy draping of clouds, and all seems lost, and I sleepwalk through days, weeks, until the sun returns and I'm lifted again.

But this week I found that sun isn't the only source of light. This southern girl isn't used to snow. But its pure whiteness illuminated an otherwise dreary day.

Briefly.

Flight or Fight. Or maybe just learn to cope.

2010-02-21T00:08:00.001-06:00

I thought today's post would be about all the great food I ate in New Orleans and about seeing my son taking his place in the world. And foremost, about the change in the city since the last time I was there, the April following Katrina, when the wounds were achingly visible. I recall seeing new 30-foot palms propped up along the neutral ground of Canal Street, where the old ones had died in the flood, lining a street where many office buildings were still empty, with windows here and there gutted. It was impossible not to overlay images of desperate survivors wading to safety through waist-deep water right there on that very street months before.

But the horrific news in my own hometown of Austin pervades my thinking today. How could a man become so disturbed with the IRS that he was compelled to crash his small plane into an office building filled with staff who had nothing to do with making tax policy or the man's personal plight? (Not that that would make it okay.) How could the imperfect, unjust and yes, certainly, cruel world we all deal with so overwhelm him that a fiery, violent end seemed to him the only solution?

I read his manifesto in the paper. Tax laws can be mind boggling and unfair. Check. The world, our government, is not that paragon of virtue you thought it was in first grade. We have a class system, and the name of the game is the upper class wins. Every time, pretty much. Not that it's right, and I have much sympathy for those out of work and struggling in this economy. But, we all have to deal with it, try to make it better, find ways that actually make a positive difference. If that is our starting point, Point A, how the hell did his mind zigzag and twist its way down a vortex of fear and loathing to reach Point X, the moment of impact when many worlds around him were shattered? It's not even that he was disgusted with something truly abhorrent like wars where people are actually dying and suffering, or the pain so many people experience through any number of shortcomings and neglect. He was pissed about being cheated out of money.

The guy, by the way, lived in a nice neighborhood in a nice city. He had a plane.

A few people interviewed in the paper said he had been a quiet, even-keeled man. All this torment roiling inside him with nowhere to go, till quite literally, he blew up.

When I think about the nature of the unjust world that shook Joe Stack to his core, I can't help thinking about what I saw in the Lower 9th Ward this week. Last time I visited, the entire place, street after street, mile after mile, was completely devastated by a powerful storm, the disappearance of protective wetlands, and the shoddy management of a levee system. Houses lifted up off their foundations, cars looking like they had dropped from the sky. The ugly black X's tattooed on the fronts of houses denoting they had been searched and the number of dead found therein. Household goods covered in mud and left on the streets, useless. Not a soul in sight. And this was eight months after Katrina. Now here is a reason for grievances.

Last week, when I entered the Lower 9, I saw houses being rebuilt, shining with bright new coats of paint, looking proud against a crisp blue sky. I saw the Make It Right development Brad Pitt is funding to help homeowners rebuild sustainably -- blocks of California-meets-shotgun-cottage houses, also brightly colored and fitted with energy efficient windows, some with solar panels, most higher off the ground that city codes require to help guard against any future flooding. While many lots were vacant and filled with tall, now wheat-colored grass of winter, there was no trash strewn about, no grafitti. The 3,500 residents that have returned to the Lower 9 of the 17,000 that once lived here clearly aim for a brighter, safer future. They are not going down from this shitstorm, both the one Mother Nature caused and the many all-too-human mistakes that led to their plight. Their hope -- the whole city's hope -- was palpable, especially in the heady days following the Saints win in the Superbowl, a successful Mardi Gras, and the election of a new mayor.

I had these two events playing in my mind today as I thought about Match Point, a Woody Allen flick I watched last night that darkly examines luck. Using the analogy of a tennis ball that strikes the net and hovers over it for a second, Allen makes us think about what haphazard forces direct our lives -- all a matter of chance, which side the ball will land. Certainly, randomness and things beyond our control shape our lives considerably. But as with Allen's fatal character, while the circumstance was, in one way, externally, left to chance, the real fate, the internal consequences, and the source of his trouble lay wholly, undeniably within.

Some of us get dealt much better hands than others. And clearly this guy Stack had gone nuts, his thinking no longer reasonable. But I can't help but think, was there a time before he slipped that far when he could have gotten help? When he could have seen, should have seen himself sliding into depths so cavernous that there was no escape? When he could have chosen not to destroy other lives along with his own?

Or will there always be people who hate themselves and the world so much they are unstoppable?
I'm afraid so.

Love for a city

2010-02-13T23:27:00.004-06:00

When I was 19, I followed my boyfriend from Tampa to New Orleans, his hometown. He had childhood friends and family of the nuclear, step, extended, and multiple-times-removed variety living nearby. He had a city full of charm and grace, peculiarities and picayunes. He had a world steeped in tradition.

photo from New Orleans RTA

I had a family that had been moving all its existence, that was once again moving across the country to California, led by parents who had been separated and were trying married life again (but not enthusiastically). I had friends who had been flung far and wide in the year since high school graduation. I had possessions that could easily fit into a small car, and a head and heart that were completely lost.

I moved to New Orleans. Well, wouldn't you? We set up house in an apartment carved from an 1800s shotgun house in the uptown area, with hardwood floors and 15 foot ceilings and a red brick fireplace. He got his black labrador dog Redneck back from a friend who'd been keeping him. I got a job at a school office and took college classes at nights. We hung out at the local bar on the corner where I watched Mardi Gras parades. I learned to eat crawfish and king cake. And say things like makin' groceries and neutral ground and my-nez for mayonnaise.

But after a while, after we got married and babies came, and we bought a house and life got hard and the marriage fell apart, I had to leave the city. I felt oppressed living in society that was not mine, that would never be mine. It was full of wealth and poverty, and I had been raised middle of America. My husband had been older than me and I was a fish out of water in years, in outlook, in philosophy. The very tradition and history that made me fall in love with New Orleans would never claim me rightfully as its own. I felt smothered in the mildewed air and needed to find my own way.

That was more than 20 years ago. And while I know I made the right decision escaping, there is no doubt that it left its mark on me. Not counting that my children are New Orleanians through and through, born and half raised there, I have a certain enduring love for that city. Even though it wasn't mine, it let me love it for a time.

Last week I cheered the Saints as they won the Superbowl. I sat in Da Dome many a Sunday as they lost, years ago, and I was there when the Who Dat cheer was born. Today I sang along to the Mardi Gras Mambo playing on the radio and remembered the fun of watching the parades roll down St. Charles every evening the entire week before Mardi Gras.

And next week, I am going to New Orleans for my job, to meet with a local organization helping to rebuild sustainably and safely. I'll get to have dinner with my son, who now has an office in the CBD (that's the central business district).

Did you hear that? My son has an office. In New Orleans. Now that's about as strange as it gets. I can so easily conjure him up as a child in his father's house; it was not so long ago.

But now I know that my relationship with that town is far from over, different and distant as it now may be. It is the home of my son and he probably will live there for some time to come. Even though I cast it off so many years ago, New Orleans welcomes me back, not as one of its own but as a friend.

Vision

2010-02-09T17:32:00.001-06:00

That quilt business has got me thinking about the stages in life.

This poem was me just over a decade ago, a mother of growing kids, looking back at a time (recalled in a dream) when she was just a girl, autonomous; her most important relationships were with friends, in whom she once confided her dreams; and her whole life lay wide open like the Texas sky. She blindly took a step forward. And another...

Vision

Susan, I see
Your long hair shining
Unencumbered as the dream

You floated on the wind last night
As if no years had passed between
No husbands, jobs, babies, lives
We each were only one
As if the thread had not yet slipped
From the dwindling spool.

We spun in our lightness
Laughed at our options
We promised our futures
Scoffed at the darkness
Not thinking that one step
Would lead to another
Compromises would have to be made.

Susan, I see
Your long hair dancing
As if it were the wind.

First you make a plan

2010-02-03T21:35:00.000-06:00

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, over the Christmas holidays my sister and I spent a lovely hour at the quilt store selecting the fabric for a quilt for my niece's baby girl, who is expected to arrive into this world in May. She's the first grandchild among my siblings and me, and we are excited to have a baby in the family again.

After the purchase, I immediately handwashed and tumbled dry the fabric -- a must in order to preshrink the fabric. Then the fabric squares -- called fat quarters -- sat in my art room. And sat. And sat. Well, I was finishing up other projects. I had to go out of town. I wasn't ready yet. You know the drill.

Finally I got out the pattern book and read and re-read the directions for this particular quilt. I'm not an old-hand at quiltmaking; I've made a couple of traditional quilts and a couple of freestyle art quilts. I still need directions. Carefully spelled out directions.

But part of the joy of quiltmaking is how deliberate it is. First you make a plan. Then, step by step, inch by inch, stitch by stitch, you bring it into being. There are choices to make along the way, such as which dark fabric to pair with which light fabric. But all contained within a pretty nifty little framework, and ta-da! A quilt is born.

Life does not work like this.

In life -- and actually in the freestyle quilts, which may be why I like them -- I make a hazy, inchoate plan. A general I-want-to-go-in-that-direction plan. And then each step of the way helps to create and shape that plan. The near path is always clearer than farther down the road. Mistakes turn into new plans. This is much of the fun of it.

I remember when I moved to Austin and I would drive past the high school. Finally, I lived in a town where I wanted to stay for a good long stretch. My kids were in elementary school and yet I would think, This is where they will go to high school and have all those lifelong lessons and memories. This will be that iconic place for them. And I would imagine their little bodies bolted into gangly teenagers. It seemed extraordinary to me that I should have such foresight. When I was a kid, we moved every two to three years, sometimes more often, never knowing where on the planet we would next land, stake our belongings and call it home.

Now, 16 years later, I drive by that same high school and think wryly, That is where I was so sure my kids would go to high school. Because they didn't go there. We didn't move; they moved. They decided to live with their father, who lives in another city, in another state. All those memories and lifelong friends and lessons, packed up and shipped off to a different place where I was not a part, except in a peripheral way.

Well who coulda seen that one coming? In hindsight, I did. I saw all the footprints on the path that were invisible to me along the way. It took a lot of looking -- a lot of seeing -- to find them all, especially my own, but they were there, waiting for me to discover them.

But even when you make a plan and stick with it, what you get can be eye-popping. Because you can't see what's coming, either way. What it's going to look like or feel like next to the other things in your life. You can only plan for what you know now, who you are now, not who you'll be and what will be swirling around you.

Like this quilt. (Yes, again with the quilt analogy!) I bought fabrics that I thought played well off each other. Even so, as I started mixing and matching, lining up and cutting up into squares, little surprises jumped out. Like the way the dots are so fun next to the squares, and the way the paper dolls fabric gets crisper next to the white.

I have a couple of my great-grandma's quilts, and I like to think about how she must have planned them out, then saw them through. I wonder if at the end of her life, did it seem like the road she had followed was the one she set out on. And if it wasn't, did she embrace the deviations? Did they come to be okay? Did she find herself returned to a road that felt like her own? I worked hard to make the unscheduled departures from my path my own. And I realize I have caused a few wheels to go off other people's roads, too.

What turns await me still? What roads will a brand new baby see?

First you make a plan.
Then, watch your life unfold
In a mystery.

Two days in La Paz

2010-01-30T23:16:00.001-06:00

Two vans carrying my colleagues and me arrived in La Paz, Baja California Sur on a Wednesday afternoon as the sun was setting behind us. A marine biologist in the group read passages about the city from Steinbeck's Log from the Sea of Cortez as we made our way across town; LaPaz had been a gathering spot for marine biologists in Steinbeck's day, and the tradition continues -- serving as the conservation center of Mexico.

We drove through the newer sections of the city that seemed to be thriving with hip-looking strip malls and traffic snarling the main streets. Many American signs mixed in with Spanish-named establishments. One might be comforted to see Applebee's and Burger King on the corners; I was not.

We were in search of the old town hugging the bay. Our hotel was on the Malecon -- the shoreline levee and name of the boulevard that runs along it -- offering dos shows daily of rising and retiring sunlight on the glassy water. The Crown 7 had a pleasant, modern lobby separated by a glass wall to a travel agency next door. It reminded me of the travel agency in "Destinos," the Mexican soap opera I was required to watch while learning Spanish at the University of Texas. I was sure I would catch a glimpse of Gloria the chipper abrogado (lawyer) making plans to travel to California to investigate some nefarious plan Don Julio was hatching.

My room was sparsely furnished with double beds showing bare legs, florescent lights in the walls (but no lamps), one dresser, beige curtains covering two windows that refused to lock, no artwork, and monotone, ruffled bedspreads from the 1950s (perhaps literally) covering thin sheets (no blankets). The beds were firm as my father's voice. The floors were Mexican tile throughout the entire hotel, from which every voice and rolling suitcase sound in the hallway bounced mercilessly in the middle of the night. My showers were short, since hot water only lasted about 2 minutes.

I insisted that the windows be fixed or that I be moved, since they overlooked a common courtyard for the entire suite of rooms on my side of the floor. The man at the front desk was eager to please and took care of it while I was at dinner. All in all, it was an okay place to stay, and after the first night (which is always rough for me when I'm traveling), I slept soundly.

The first full day in La Paz required our group to walk about 10 blocks to our organization's small office located in a renovated house. The air was fresh with a seabreeze. Bougainvilla lined wrought iron fences here and there among the low rise buildings that looked to have been there for more than 100 years. We passed a church and butcher shop and plumeria (plumbing supplies), one Dobermann pinscher in a jungle garden who was greatly troubled by our presence and (thankfully) had a solid fence to hold him back, a coffee shop (at which we stopped a couple of mornings) -- finally finding our charming destination. We spent the full day meeting in a courtyard, alternately warmed by the sun and cooled by the breeze.

The next day offered a different treat: we traveled about an hour south of the city, down a two-lane road till we came to the entrance of a property that once had been a working ranch and now serves as a gathering spot for groups such as ours. We then traveled another 30 minutes down very rough sand roads, dodging potholes and the occasional critter. I saw a jackrabbit leap across our path. (I can't even say the word jackrabbit without thinking of Jethro on the Beverly Hillbillies...there was one episode where a jackrabbit was causing a problem, to the infinite amusement of Jane and Mr. Drysdale. Oh, what TV hath done to us!)

The ranch had a lovely adobe casita, complete with a wide porch covered by a palm roof; a courtyard with los banos nearby, and outdoor sinks. The sinks were so cleverly installed, I was enthralled as a child wanting to wash my hands over and over again.

After lunch we took a 45-minute walk on the property, taking a sandy road that led to the Gulf, though we hadn't time to go that far. If you've not been to a desert, you might be surprised to see how vibrant and colorful it can be, and abuzz with critters such as bees and butterflies.

The trees and cactus fatten up with rain water, as it often must last them for quite a spell. The region had had a lot of rain recently -- receiving an entire year's worth in December. This fig tree's limbs looked like massive dinosaur bones.

We ate three meals there, all lovingly cooked by two Mexican women who clearly had been preparing these same recipes for some time. As our group brainstormed in the courtyard all morning we could hear chop-chop-chopping of knife on wood. As we problem-solved all afternoon, we saw the woman stirring huge pots over an open fire -- and our mouths watered for the meal that was hours in the making. Among the day's preparations, we ate fried fresh marlin tacos, slow cooked beef and chicken, guacamole, beans and rice, cheese quesadillas, tortillas, always lime and guacamole for everything, salad, sliced, baked potatoes, and to top it off, wonderfully sweet and warm pineapple tamales for dessert. Following the evening meal, we sat under the desert stars, 'round a roaring campfire, chatting up a mix of work and personal conversations.

It has been a week since I got home, and the trip is already disappearing in the distance now that I'm back into the usual frantic pace of the daily office life. Now I -- all of us --are working hard at carrying out the plans we made when we took the time to breathe deep and think. Mexico is especially good for that; after all, La Paz does mean peace.

Up the Baja coastline

2010-01-25T23:11:00.000-06:00

After the whale watching trip and the glorious, but all-too-hasty swim, ten of us crammed into two vans and drove for about two hours up the hilly Baja west coast to La Paz, which is on the Gulf side.

Along the way the scenery was mesmerizing. As soon as we were out of the resort town of Cabo San Lucas, the terrain turned to full desert -- scrubby brush, cardon cactus (which looks like saguaro), agaves, palms, mesquites and paloverde. I've seen deserts before, in West Texas and further west, but not sidled up right next to the great wide ocean. Off to the east were mountains, which separated us from the Gulf shore. (I didn't really get good photos as we were on a speedy and at times terrifying journey. A semi truck passed another on a small two lane highway and was aiming right at us at about 70 mph. Our driver had to slam on the brakes to keep us from meeting our maker right then and there on a desolate Mexican highway.)

About halfway, we stopped in the tiny little town of Todos Santos (All Saints), which was filled with art shops, restaurants, a teatro, and church (of course) with this great red door.

(I don't claim to be a great photographer...those heads are of my colleagues.)

Luckily, we had just enough time for sight-seeing and a little shopping (but only 30 minutes, which is a good thing). I bought a small hand-hammered copper vase from an ex-patriot who said she moved to Todos Santos more than 20 years ago and never looked back.

This shop was full of beautiful jewelry. But not bargains, so I restrained myself. (Isn't it great that the Spanish word for jewelry is joyeria?)

Baja towns from Cabo to La Paz were filled with bougainvilla, and Todos Santos was no exception. Brilliant fuschias and reds lined the walls of this boutique hotel appropriately named Hotel California. You would not ever want to check out. The food smelled great at the hotel's restaurant, and the bar was inviting, but it was not on our agenda. We had to climb back into the stinky vans and head on up to La Paz.

Hola de Mexico!

2010-01-23T12:32:00.002-06:00

I am writing from a sunny perch in the airy airport of Los Cabos, Baja California Sur – with a view of mountains against a blue sky (just beyond the runway) and the sound of Mexican voices in the background. I’m not on vacation. I had a two-day workshop to attend in La Paz on fishery management, and with the two travel days and one extra play day, I’ve been gone all week. I thought I’d have a chance to get online mid-week, but the agenda was packed from sun up to well past sun down, so I am just catching up.

View of the marina from my hotel balcony

Cabo San Lucas is at the tip of the Baja peninsula, and its staggering rocks and clean, clear waters made me hold my breath and fling my hand to my chest in awe – in a gesture that was meant to take it all in and hold it close for as long as I could. My colleagues and I took a morning boat trip out for a couple of hours of whale watching, and were lucky enough to see the unmistakeable black gleaming backs arch majestically in the water, their telltale humps slicing the Pacific, their graceful tales flipping up to show a patch of white before diving back down deep into the ocean. Since there were two whales in close company, our guides told us they were likely both female, one pregnant and one a nanny – an auntie-friend to help with the birth, nosing the young one up for its first breath and responsible for caring for the calf should anything happen to the mother. Calves are a huge investment for whales, one that the community shares.

(Muy malo: no tomo un foto porque me olvide mi camera en el barko. Which in my pitiful Spanish I am trying to say, Very bad: I did not take a photo because I forgot my camera on the boat. Muy triste!! However, many of my colleagues brought their cameras and will share their whale pics...and once I get them I will share with you.)

Just after noon, a group of us took a water taxi from the marina to a small but stunning beach nestled among the towering rocks at the point that divides the Gulf of California from the Pacific. The beach itself crossed from the calm, warm emerald waters of the bay on the Gulf side to the tempestuous waters of the Pacific, which roared to shore and were said to have a treacherous undertow. We planted ourselves at the waters edge of the bay and went for a swim.

This is the stretch of sand and rock that bridges the Gulf to the Pacific.

The windblown rocks were gorgous sculptures. The sand was a rich golden brown and the consistency of sea salt coming out fresh from the grinder – coarser than the powdery white flour of the South Texas beaches or even the fine brown sand of mid-coast Texas. It felt like a spa treatment for gently cleansing the skin of its dead outer layer. Rejuvenating. The water was crisp and chilling at first, but soon was refreshing. I have never seen such clear salt water and could have spent all day in and out of the water, warming myself like a turtle, then slipping into the emerald calm like a snake.

However, that was not to be. Our bus for La Paz was leaving at 2:00 pm, and our little group had just enough time to grab a warm taco with freshly made tortillas and bottle of water, check out of the hotel and climb aboard for a two hour journey north. About that, mas luego.

Por ahora, yo hablo: Living in Texas, bordering Mexico and home to many Hispanics, both Mexican natives and those of Mexican descent, I always have felt the close tie to Mexico – especially evident in many Austin neighborhoods, including to some degree my own, where Spanish is the common language and Mexican customs are strong. However, actually being in Mexico gave me a whole different feeling. Yes, there were many similarities. And Cabo is a resort town, catering to Americans, so that many Mexicans spoke English. Still, I was surprised to have that You’re Not in Kansas Anymore feeling…like the tether to my homeland had been let out wrecklessly long and it was a far sight to get back. Everything was tilted off balance, the colors the smells the angles all different. It just wasn’t home and why it feels so good to be going home. But it was a fun adventure, not to mention a great work experience.

I still catch my breath thinking about how it felt to swim among the rocks at the edge of the New World. I shall remember that the rest of my life.

The rocks and beach where we swam was indeed very close to the tip of the Baja Peninsula.

Fine January Day

2010-01-17T22:35:00.000-06:00

Saturday was a fine January day, and so we spent some time cleaning up the gardens and I took some photos. Today was equally as lovely. January is a fine time to be in Texas.

The nandinas take on a brilliant red after a cold spell.

The Mexican fan palm wasn't happy with the bitter cold, despite being wrapped. But if you look into the center you'll see a little promising green.

The red cabbage didn't mind the cold snap. They were covered and did just fine.

Missy Spinach is also thriving.

We (that would be my husband and son-in-law) are building a fence. It's coming along quite nicely, I think. We bought some berries and grapes to grow along the fence -- dewberries, blackberries and raspberries.

With all the awful news of despair, the harsh world is also a beautiful place. Today I am thankful, and looking forward to the fruits of spring.

People of Haiti, we pray for you tonight

2010-01-13T22:38:00.000-06:00

Heartwrenching. The news of the suffering in Haiti is beyond words, and yet I, we, all of us everywhere crave to hear the words of those who are there, who can report what is going on, who can take the overwhelming magnitude of damage and parse it down to letters and sounds we might get our heads around. A hundred thousand or more dead, possibly. Who knows? More than we can comprehend. I switch over to cnn.com in between my assignments during the day to read more words, see the pictures. I listen to NPR driving home. We share the horror and pain because we are only human and something inside us wants to be part of it, to experience it with them, for them. Our bodies hurt for them, quite literally, our stomachs raw and our bones empty. We know these kinds of natural terrors could happen anywhere, the unstoppable threat part of what it means to be human living in a violent universe. (Though better construction could help.) We are but tiny ants making our homes, our jobs, our lives, our dreams in precarious anthills which the earth in her indifference can shrug off at any moment. We send our meager dollars, whatever we can, to help repair the damage, heal the wounded, bury the dead. We are with them. People of Haiti, we pray for you tonight.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I last wrote about experiencing a tremor in Turkey and had been thinking about how strange it is to live in a land of earthquakes. They happened fairly often, and one got used to them. But one night a major quake hit. I was asleep and recall rolling over and almost falling out of bed. At the same time my father appeared and rushed my sister and me down the stairs, along with my mom and brother. The railing wouldn't stay put, jumping away from me as I tried to steady myself. We ran out the front door where, in the middle of the moonlit night, I could see all the neighbors on their lawns in their pajamas. In the distance the water tower rocked side to side like it was rubber, a child's toy fixed to the surface of a table and batted back and forth. Later we learned that it had been a 7.1, centered about 75 miles away. A thousand people died, many more left homeless, whole villages in rubble.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Precarious, vulnerable world. We are humbled.

We are saddened.

People of Haiti, we are with you tonight.

Living in a strange land

2010-01-10T23:38:00.000-06:00

I am nine or ten years old, curled up on a pillow covering an old wooden toy chest my grandpa made for my brother, which my mother has painted and antiqued an avocado green. My mother loved to antique things. I didn't quite get the appeal; why dirty up the rich, deep green of banana leaves with a filmy brown? I was reading, probably Nancy Drew or the Bobbsey Twins, or in a pinch, a Hardy Boys from my brother's collection. Hardy Boys had just as good mysteries as the others, but they had a lot of stupid boy stuff in them.

I was tucked away in the sunny downstairs bedroom of our four bedroom duplex, which was, over the two years we lived there, a family room and, after my youngest sister was born, my brother's room.  The duplex bore my father's name on the front door with a stately "Capt." preceding; while we were there we got a new sign with the title, "Maj." We were lucky; the house was one of the few four bedrooms on Karamursel Common Defense Installation, a one-square-mile base with various branches of the military, in Turkey, about a four-hour drive from Istanbul. But we were much closer to the ancient city as the crow flies, across the Sea of Marmara. We could see purple jagged mountains on the other side of the water from the base, where we swam in a small roped-off beach area. My brother and I threw dead jellyfish at each other when they floated ashore in droves, and while in the brown, murky water I was always aware that in the little town of Karamursel just a mile away, heavy mothers draped in dark, flowing, smoky scented clothes and gauzy white scarves that looked like diapers wrapped around their heads, let their kids use the sea wall across from the market as a toilet to perch on over the sea. I wondered if those molecules of waste had floated our way, or off to Istanbul, or out to the Mediterranean.

In Turkey, we had no television, as no English language stations existed. This was fine with me since I loved to read, and we also usually had the radio on, dialed into the American station. Sounds of the Beatles and other hits of the 60s filled the air, and my Mom and we kids sang along. We were interrupted several times a day by the haunting Moslem calls from the minaret a mile away, and I would listen for the calls as I lay awake at night, knowing all the Turkish people were on their knees, bending over in a strange prayer.

This afternoon was quiet, though; perhaps my mother was napping as she often did. It was likely summer, and my mother pregnant. When my parents gathered us kids together to tell us we would soon welcome a baby, I had thought they were going to tell us they were getting divorced. My parents argued a lot, and I was becoming aware from popular songs and in the rumors of airmen and their wives on base that couples fell out of love, separated and divorced.  My mother left me and my brother and sister alone to occupy ourselves most of the time, and I made do with a confused and questioning imagination.

I was engrossed in my book. After a time, I looked up, feeling something peculiar.  The playchest, which sat on four small wheels, had rolled entirely across the room. I looked around; I was alone. I remember thinking, Oh, it's a tremor, and I went back to my book. Minutes later, it had rolled back again. And I kept right on reading.

We were living in a land of earthquakes. Life went on.

Let's make a deal, said the mind to the mind

2010-01-06T22:37:00.000-06:00

A couple of days ago I giddily purchased Alice Munro's newest collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness. Often compared to Chekhov, she writes clean, seemingly simple tales about everyday characters navigating the events, sometimes minor and sometimes major, that somehow both crisply and subtly define what it means to be human. She explores the core of what drives us -- love, hate, loss, longing, dissatisfaction, and frustration -- conveyed in the lives of ordinary people who make the deals we all make with ourselves, the ways in which we learn to live within the boundaries of our own lives.

If you aren't familiar with Munro, maybe you saw Julie Christie in "Away from Her," a movie about a beautiful 60-ish woman who suffers from Alzheimers, which is based on a Munro short story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." The movie was good, but it didn't capture the complex and delicate trade-offs the characters made with themselves and each other, and I'm not sure the movie allowed me to feel for the characters in the heartbreaking way the written story did. Munro can capture so much in her even-handed, almost sparse way. If her words were furniture, her stories would be Amish or Shaker household staples: smooth, solid wood finely crafted into plain, sturdy, yet graceful hutches or sideboards that hold the family tableware, or the dining tables over which the lives of people are shared and their stories spilled.

Taking the title to heart, I'm only allowing myself to read one short story every few days, to let it swirl around me and sink in. Not surprisingly, I can't stop thinking about the first story, "Dimensions."

Without giving anything away, I'll just say the story finds our heroine facing the reminder of a gaping, crevasse-like event in her life and is drawn back to it in strange ways. I kept thinking of her floating into this other place in her mind, a less encumbered way of looking at the world, at the events she cannot bear and yet must. She drifts further away, backwards really, because there is no other place for her to go.

I remember a time when I felt like that, floating in some other, inner realm of calculations, away from the real world of pain. My mind played tricks on me to help me cope. If one focuses on controlling one small, particular square inch of threat, one can ignore that the whole continent has run amok. Later, looking back at it, I came to think of the mind as behaving like a tube of toothpaste. You squish it too hard with the cap on, it sprouts a new opening to let the muck out. But it's coming out, one way or another, because life is going to press on you but hard and physics will tell you that crap's got to go somewhere. The mind at least knows that.

Luckily, life is anything but static and our minds are malleable, resilient, remarkable. We can repair those tiny rips and bruises in the walls of our sanity and find new paths to understanding ourselves. We can be saved in as many ways as we can be drowned. Munro knows this, too, and she offers to the reader the obscure triumphs that set us right, feet again on solid ground.

Southern Like A Drunken Maraschino Cherry

2010-01-03T16:40:00.004-06:00

Southerners welcome the New Year with (what else?) a heapin' mess of food. I am not Southern by birth (having been born in Arizona to a couple of Ohioans of mostly German-Norwegian stock), but much of my life has been spent along the Gulf Coast states of Texas, Louisiana and Florida, plus a three-year stint in Georgia. (Now lest anyone rebel, I know Texas is only part Southern, with equal part Western, and better said as its own country, but that is a whole 'nother topic.) I don't feel Southern in my bones, but I do feel steeped in it -- like a drunken maraschino cherry in a shot of Southern Comfort.

Southern cuisine has always called to me. I remember the first time I ate fried pork chops at my best friend Celeste's house in 8th grade, the meal accompanied by vegetables swimming in butter and tall glass of sweet tea. Her folks had moved to Atlanta from a Georgia red dirt farm, bringing their deep Southern cooking with them. I wanted to suck on that pork chop bone long after I'd gnawed the meat clean off, and you can believe I accepted dinner invitations there as often as they were extended. I learned to cook mostly as a young bride in New Orleans, trying out recipes from the Plantation Cookbook whose names and ingredients I could barely pronounce. Something in the economy of the cooking appeals to my thrifty German soul. No part is to be wasted, and if you simmer it long enough with herbs and spices, it's going to taste damn good.

So, this New Year's Day was no different. I cooked up a pot of black-eyed peas with pork sausage; mixed greens, with every leaf from our very own garden, including turnips, mustard greens, spinach and chard; sour cabbage; and cornbread. Oh man, was it delicious! And pretty, to boot, all brightly colored. I hope it brings the good luck that the hours of aromas wafting from the stove, and the labor before that of chopping garlic, onions and peppers, heartily promised.

Interesting that the belief persists that eating the right food on a single day will bring us the luck we so fervently want for the next 365. Magic is alive and well, and it is good. But while I doubt anyone really believes the tradition literally, it nevertheless anchors us to the day, the year, the past-present-and-future, keeping us somehow aligned with the universe. All the years I lived in New Orleans, we had red beans and rice on Mondays, because it was washday. Not my washday, mind you. Just traditionally washday, calling back to an era when a pot cooking on the fire all day allowed time for all the hours of scrubbing and hanging clothes out to dry.

We've been eating leftovers all weekend. The weather has turned overcast and chilly, with the arctic wind pushing its way like a Southbound train, due to arrive later this week. I'm cherishing the last of my two weeks at home. Putting Christmas back into its box. Washing and putting away the sheets my son slept on for a week, wondering as I fold them when I will see him again. Preparing the material for my great-niece's quilt while I finish a landscape quilt. Rationalizing that landscape quilts are meant to be quirky and it doesn't matter so much if they aren't square (right?).

Steeling myself for an early morning wakeup tomorrow. And promising myself in fervent whispers that I will make time this year for the things I love to do. I will! I ate the meal that will make it so.

Bits and Pieces

2009-12-31T16:53:00.003-06:00

When I was a young girl, I flew overseas to a new world. My father had been reassigned to a strange place called Turkey where we would live for two years with people who did not speak our language or share our customs. It was an adventure.

From the window seat of the roaring plane, I perched, mesmerized, as we slowly descended to the distant land in the bright morning light. To my utter surprise, I saw the world was stitched together in swatches, like a quilt. Squares and rectangles, each with their own row patterns mimmicking the blocks in the quilt made by my great-grandmother, which I had slept under since I was old enough to have a big girl bed. The patches of the farms below me rose up hills and stretched along valleys till we reached the city of Istanbul. The crazy jigsaw patterns made no sense at all, but came together perfectly to form a seamless world.

Today I am buying the pieces of cloth, light and dark, patterned and plain, that will come together in a quilt to lay soft against the skin of my niece's new baby girl. When I first laid eyes on my niece more than two decades ago, it was like spinning back in time and seeing my little sister for the first time all over again. Now, that little girl will be the mother, and her daughter will have a special quilt from her great-aunt. I hope this new daughter in our family spends many childhood hours dreaming up stories while she warms herself with this quilt, tracing the bits and pieces lovingly chosen by her grandmother and me.

It seems to me what we know about the world comes together in bits and pieces, like the quilt, like the bird's-eye view of the earth, like our memories. We stitch them together over time to become ourselves, to connect ourselves with everything around us. It is the contrast, what we take and what we leave behind, that makes it an artful journey.

Embrace. Release.

2009-12-28T21:19:00.001-06:00

Growing up as I did, moving often and always far away from where I'd been, I learned to say goodbye. And to understand the pain it brings. In those days, there was no way to stay connected except the dwindling exchange of letters that soon faded to faint memories of childhood friends, homes, neighborhoods, cultures.

Forty-eight years old and I am still saying goodbye. Today as I hugged my son at the airport, I felt the familiar pang of a multitude of farewells I've given him and his sister. They echo all the partings I've ever endured.

And yet, now they are different. They have a happiness to them as well. They are not final, and they are right. He is on his way, walking through a doorway to his own lovely life. His sister is the same.

One cannot release unless one has embraced. I am so fortunate for the warmth, love and beauty I have been given to embrace, in the forms of my children, and the rest of my family and friends. The holidays make this so poignant.

At Christmas and New Years, I always feel like I've reached the pinnacle of the year, the top of the mountain. From here, it's a slow hike down to the valley of summer. This week, I get to stand at the mountain top, surveying the view, enjoying the accomplishment of the year's hard climb and anticipating the journey on down. Onward, ho -- to 2010!

The future is lovely and it is practically here

2009-12-19T13:22:00.000-06:00

See this place? This is a place I am not going to see again for 16 days! I know, it is a nifty little office, but one can get just a teensy bit sick of the workplace four-walls, even when one of them is a window overlooking graceful oaks. It's like that second piece of fudge. You really really want a piece of fudge when you have had nary a morsel for a while. But soon as you've had a big ol' chunk? Not so enticing anymore. If you know what I mean.

I have been working here so long, these are the pictures of the kids I first displayed. I can't bear to take them down now. Such sweet kids they were! (From L to R, Baldwin, Caitlin and my stepdaughter Carmen. Pay no attention to the dead fly.)

It's definitely time for vacation when, every time I walk up the cold, dank stairwell (since I refuse to take the elevator), I calculate, How many times have I walked these stairs? 15 years x 52 weeks minus how many weeks for vacation? Minus a few sick days....averaging 3 times per day... Why don't I just go ahead and slit my wrists now and save myself the mathmatical gymnastics, since I will be walking this flight many, many, many steps to come.

(But just maybe... Well, who knows what exciting new life 2010 shall bring? The New Year seems so lively with opportunities just dancing slightly beyond reach, waiting for an eager, outstretched arm and wiggling, hungry fingers to seize them. Will I? Will I? Will I?)

And therefore, I am in a glorious mood. The future is lovely and it is practically here! I am off for two weeks! My son is coming in town for a whole week! He is already here in my own very state of Texas, living and breathing a mere 2.5 hours away (visiting his girlfriend). He is usually hundreds and hundreds of miles away, three fat states over. Right now, if I learned an asteroid were going to hit the earth in, say, five hours or less, I would see my son before I die. And that is a nice feeling. See? These are the kinds of thoughts a mother is burdened with.

Sadly, my daughter is not coming to visit (miss you, Caitlin! xoxo), and this will be the first time in forever that I haven't spent Christmas with her. I could, however, possibly see her if the asteroid gives us 10 hours, because she will be at her father's only 1 state over, and that is something to be thankful for. Also, there is some satisfaction in knowing she is an adult; she is employed; she has a life. This is a good thing.

However. Christmas is going to be pretty different this year. Not only no Cait (sniff sniff), Carmen got married this year (though, of course, that is a happy thing). But last year was the last year that just we with our 3 kids gathered 'round in the twinkly living room on Christmas Eve, unwrapping all the silly little stocking stuffers I love to buy each year. The last year just we 5 did our annual holiday family movie night together. That little -- no, that big, happy -- chapter is over. I know, change is good. (I am embracing this, but I am allowed a bit of nostalgia. Right?) This year, it's grown-up presents for all. Like housewares and money. Not so much fun for Santa. But there's always the hope of a grandbaby in Christmas Future, right? (No pressure, guys; no hurry. I'm just saying...)

Anyway and finally, today I am ready to think about Christmas. Getting out the Christmas box, hunting down presents on my list, filling my house with good smells of the many creations I shall pop in the oven, and blanketing the rooms with the tinkling tunes of holiday merriment, sprinkled like fairy dust throughout, magically transforming Dreamfarm into the Yuletide.

Let the holidays begin!

When the chickens reigned

2009-12-16T11:03:00.003-06:00

So one day while I was innocently at work and the kids were off from school, Mr. Husbandman took them to Callenders Feed Store and bought them each a baby chick, plus one for himself. Four fuzzy, adorable, peeping, leaky black and white barred rocks.

It was winter and so the chicks lived in a big cardboard box indoors for a time, while Mr. H-man built a chicken coop off the side of the shed, complete with a play yard surrounding an oak tree. The Coop Deville.

But before it was finished, and after they got old enough, we would let the chicks outside during the day to wander around the Dreamfarm yard and fields, scratching and pecking at bugs to their little chicken hearts' content. At night they would line up on the back step waiting to be put into their cardboard hotel, four dainty, plump gals, polite as you please.

I came to love Lucille, Graciella, Thelma and Agnes. They happily spent their days clucking and waddling and scratching, never complaining, always cheerful. After the Coop Deville was finished, the kids would round them up at night and lock them in. My son's job was to gather their eggs and let them out in the morning.

Despite the fine digs we provided, getting them in the coop at night became a challenge. The song of their chicken souls called to them from the trees, whispering that proper chickens were still birds and slept among the boughs. And so our chickens heeded the ancient call and flew up to nest. If they hadn't been rounded up as dusk set in, forget it. They settled up in the oaks. It didn't matter if it was pouring rain or freezing cold; they loved nesting in the trees.

At some point, Mr. Husbandman, not content to have just four lovely ladies merrily clucking to themselves all day long, brought home a rooster. He was a mean one, ready for a fight at any moment and ready to have himself the pleasures of a gal whenever he got the urge. Which was often. He announced his manliness all day long with his crackled crow. A big show-off, we called him Mr. Stanky, for his sheer orneriness.

Mr. Stanky chased the kids down, his neck cocking back and forth, ready to strike. They took to carrying a broom whenever they were outside to fend him off. Didn't take long, though, for the broom to become a weapon and they would bait him, swiping it at him and then taking off for the chase, laughing their silly heads off.

Some days I came home and found a 32-gallon trash can upside down. I knew Mr. Stanky would be inside. That is how Mr. H-man got him to shut up. Mr. Stanky didn't seem to mind; it was just a pleasant little nap to him, a peculiarity of the world that darkness would suddenly fall upon him. Soon as the can was lifted, he would stretch his legs, look around, and go off after one of his ladies.

Soon enough, there were babies. A clutch of seven chicks were born, but within a few weeks, we were down to four. We have a lot of birds, coyotes, coons and dogs around; no telling what got the others and frankly, it's kind of amazing four of them made it. I thought they were adorable till the day I heard two of them spitting out an adolescent crow. What? More roosters! This was no good.

We named the boys Frank and Ernest. They hung around awhile. I think it was Ernest who flew over to the neighbor's yard where several big white dogs lived. We watched him swoop over the fence and knew he needed to go down for a landing...the ending was inevitable and there was nothing anyone could do. I hid my eyes, and the flurry didn't last long. I can't remember what happened to Frank, but I'm sure it wasn't good.

The girls got picked off here and there, too. I can't remember when this particular scene happened, whether it was with the first round of girls or the second or third, but it happened one night when the girls were corralled into the coop for safety. My son, who was maybe 8 or 9 was sent out to feed them and gather any eggs. He ran into the kitchen breathless as I was fixing my coffee.

Mom! They're dead! The chickens are dead!

Oh, honey. I'm sure they're not dead...

Mom, their heads are gnawed OFF!

He was right. Oh boy were they were dead, and gross. A raccoon had gotten them; we heard coons will kill the chickens for the sport of it, mutilating their heads while leaving their plump meat alone. I felt like a horrible mother, exposing him to such a scene, but I suppose it was a lesson. I don't think he was scarred.

It was a sad day at Dreamfarm. But, there is a certain order in the world -- like rocks, paper, scissors. And coons beat chickens hands down every time. That incident wasn't the end of all the chickens (I think a couple had escaped somehow, maybe they hadn't been in the coop that night), but one by one, they all got picked off, and we gave Stanky away. I fear he became soup. The last of the gals was called Little Red Hen, a neighbor who came over and joined our clan where all the fun was. We found her dead under the house one day, ending the chickens' reign at Dreamfarm.

But someday, I hope to get another brood and keep them safer if I can. I surely loved watching them waddle around all day long, in their ruffled skirts. They kept the bugs down, too. Such sweet girls.

(Disclosure: the photo isn't a Dreamfarm chicken, but is a barred rock that looks just like ours did.)

A Sweetie to Love

2009-12-12T01:33:00.000-06:00

Mama and daughter: Me and my Caitie-pie.

When Caitlin was two, she remarked from her carseat with heartfelt empathy: Look at that car, Mommy. They don't have any Sweeties. It was a couple, no kids. And indeed, how sad my life would be without my Sweetie. Which was, of course, Caitlin. The moment she was born, she was my world.

The bond between us makes me think of mothers and daughters everywhere, throughout time. The birth of a daughter (hopefully) means a well loved girl is welcomed into the female clan, to share in the tasks and, along the way, unravel of the meaning of life. To share all the little things that go into our lives, daily and singularly, trivially and monumentally; to share what it means to be a woman. To have a female confidante for life.

What transpires between mother and daughter is perhaps, ideally, the most complex, interdependent, cherished, volatile, tightly woven and lifelong bind of any relationship. There is none other I have that is all wrapped up in these swirling, tangling, potent ties as the one I have with my daughter. My beautiful daughter.

And today we are celebrating her birthday -- Caitlin is turning 26. Yippee! There's much to toast. She's a woman, coming into her own self, her own distinct voice, her own master. She has, in fact, recently earned a master's degree, surpassing the secret hopes I whispered in sing-song while kissing her chubby toddler cheek and tenderly carved ear, Look what a smart girl you are! You are going to go to college and have a good job and the best life!

She listened well. She's on her way. Oh, thank goodness! I am so proud of her.

I can remember a million moments in our lives together. No person has changed me as much, has taught me and continues to challenge me as much. Her entrance into this world made me, makes me, a better person; she gave me something solid and meaningful to wrap my entire being around. Oh, I have failed her and I'm sure will do so again. But it has never been for lack of love. I have never been short of having an entirely overwhelming love for this little Sweetie.

From the start, she was the beaming, smart, eager daughter I expected, with plump ruby lips and clear soft skin. She was all I had hoped for, always at the top of the charts, achieving all her milestones early. She walked at 8 and a half months! At 18 months, she spoke in full sentences!  Quite obviously (to me) she was brilliant. The only surprise was that I was certain I would have a blue-eyed blond, and she made her grand entrance as a brunette with eyes that quickly turned amber-brown.

This was the first of a long line of statements that she was going to be her own self, despite my ideas. I may have chosen her name, but she was taking it from there, thank you very much.

The Baby Cait was pretty strong willed. The grown up Caitlin, pretty much the same. But she is not without her vulnerabilities, as I suppose we all are, and I hope to be there for her to help see her through. She has a great sense of humor, and we laugh a lot. We don't see or like everything the same, but there's a lot of overlap. We like to believe we are telepathically connected, even if it's silly. (But we are!) (Maybe.)

I sometimes think I would have better liked to live in maybe the 19th century, a simpler time, because I am drawn to the idea of the family as an economic and social unit, living together in multi-generational households or at least nearby. Girls apprenticing with their mothers on all the skills they will need throughout life, and then sharing the tasks throughout the years: cooking and baking; quilting and sewing; spinning and weaving.

Ok, so she hates those things.  She will go on to do many things beyond such household economics, and I couldn't be any prouder...but there is still a part of me that would love to stand side by side with her at the kitchen sink peeling potates and snapping green beans year after year.

But the beauty of our high tech world is that ever since she left my house years ago, we have kept talking by email.  Nothing makes me light up more than seeing an email from her. She was my first blog reader and follower, and the first to encourage me to keep it up.  She is the one who sends me funny e-cards and loves my little hand-made notes. She is the one who shares with me the family news. It is Caitlin whose advice I ask about any number of matters and who I can count on to share in my frustrations, triumphs and snarkiness at the world, and she can count on me.

So even though we aren't shoulder to shoulder with potato peelers in hand, we are, in a 21st century sort of way, carrying on that mother-daughter tradition of sharing our lives. Which makes me feel positively sappy-happy...just like when she made that Sweetie comment so many years ago, when she let me know that she knew just how much I loved her. And oh how very right she was.

Happy Birthday, Caitlin!

You would think

2009-12-09T22:50:00.002-06:00

I drove to Houston and back today for a meeting. A one hour meeting. It was a good one, and a necessary one, but let me tell, I am now bleary and weary. Not only did I drive 7 hours, I also got up and went to work for a couple hours in front of this.

The drive there wasn't so bad. I was by myself. I practiced what I would say at said meeting. I ate a PB&J while avoiding the white lines and neighboring vehicles. I even peeled a clementine. My but those little mandarins are delicious!

The first half of the journey was on State Hwy 71. It's a hilly, windy and generally picturesque two-lane each way, separated by a wide grassy median. Even if, post-hard-freeze it's a bit, well, bare. Dull. Washed out. Still, the piney woods alongside it are tall and green, and the region is mostly rural. So it was all right.

Interstate 10, not so much. Many big trucks. Not much scenery. Still, it's better than I-35, which is the Highway of Death because it is overrun with semitrucks hauling up goods from Mexico, and back down again. I-10 is just normal highway busy. You have to pay attention, but you are not about to be sucked under a semi at any moment.

An hour or more into the drive, transformed to existing in travel-time, I plugged in my iPod and sang rather loudly and daydreamed about my quantum physics other life that split off from me at some critical point years ago, and she went off to become a terribly famous alt country singer. She's still nice, too, not at all affected by the fame and fortune, and boy can she really belt out tunes. I was having fun in this crazy quantum world (that only makes itself known to me on long private car rides and such). Until I hit Katy.

Katy is the sweetest name (my daughter is a Caitlin and she has been called Caitie plenty-a-times). Katy by all rights should be a cute town. Maybe it is, how would I know? I am no where near anything that looks like an actual town. I am only on the Katy Freeway, which is sort of a ruse. It is just I-10, all dolled up with a cutie-pie name for goodness knows why. So you will think you actually are somewhere unique and fun other than on a particularly dismal stretch of a highway that spans from Florida to California and is home to a repeating scenery of McD's, Burger King, Exxon, Shell, Starbucks and TacoBell. Like wallpaper.

The traffic gets heavy in Katy. And this was early afternoon, 2:00-ish. No reason for a rush hour, none at all. I had to stop and pick up a colleague who was attending a meeting at a 40-story high rise complex right near the intersection of Hwy 6 and the Katy Freeway on the west side of town. You would think that you were in Houston already, given the glassy highrise, the construction, the traffic and the general horrible citiness of it. But no, we were miles and miles from Houston proper. Houston stretches out for eons, if you are measuring in light years.

I didn't have my camera, but if I had I would have taken a photo, for your enjoyment, right in front of said glassy-highrise-with-construction-and-traffic, a completely out of place yellow warning sign: Duck Xing. With an adorable graphic of a mama duck and babies waddling across. Turns out, suffering through all the jackhammer racket and diesel and dust are a whole clutch of ducks in a manmade pond out front. Those poor miserable quackers, they've got no idea what a duck's life should be. I wanted to do an intervention for them, but such was not their fate, and carry on they must in the terrifying noise and fake city pond. They didn't seem to mind, though.

We headed into Houston and darn it all, even though there were two of us in the car, I missed getting on the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) Lane, so we got stuck in a dreadful standstill. Luckily, I had planned on needing extra time, and we met up with another coworker and got to that meeting on time.

The meeting itself is nothing to write home about...it was business, it was good, my colleagues and I were pleased. They were both riding back to Austin with me and I was happy to have the company. I had pretty much worn out the daydream anyway.

We drove 70 mph trying to keep up with the setting sun that cast long lavender streaks for our viewing pleasure, but the results of the experiment are in; you can't keep up with a setting sun at 70 mph. Soon we were in pitch dark with falling temps. It was a long way home. We stopped in LaGrange at a semi-famous bakery that has kolaches and other yummy, terribly bad for you baked goods. I was bad. Are you ready? Pig in a blanket with cheese AND a piece of German chocolate cake. There are lots of Germans and Czechs in Central Texas, and when they bake, you just have to honor their traditions and eat. I blame it on my German heritage. And the road, where the speed somehow negates the calories. I can't explain it, it just happens.

I'm afraid this tale has no finely crafted philosophical or metaphorical wrap up. I made it home is just about it. In time to haul in the plants to save them from the oncoming hard freeze, and likewise in the vegetable garden, cover up the impressively handsome cabbages and spinach and mustard greens, and the somewhat puny lettuces (that won't get very big because I keep eating them leaf by leaf) and the seriously measly broccoli and cauliflower, which I actually considered not covering up so they could just go ahead and die and stop disappointing me. But of course I couldn't; I still have hope. You would think hope would be tired, but it's all right.

That is a line from a song I heard today by The Innocence Mission, and that about sums it up, the long tiring day, and the general state of things. So much to be tired about, and yet...it is all right.

Slippers and Football

2009-12-07T00:19:00.003-06:00

Maybe it's the holidays or the dreary weather or both my kids' birthdays this month... but yesterday I was nearly weepy as I purchased slippers for the children's slipper drive our office is participating in. I wanted to buy every pair of kid slippers at Target. Just the thought of boy-smelly feet and chipped-polish girly toes going cold this winter made me lose it. I bought four pairs, imagining the little tootsies that would scamper around the house in them, the girls twirling and prancing and the boys rough-housing. But can't you just see them?

It's all about connecting, isn't it? Four kids I will never know will slip their feet into these little toasters, but I am the one who smiles. I am hoping they will too, big tooth-gapped grins.

Afterwards, I watched the Alabama-Florida game while I made a pepper wreath from the gazillions of peppers that had to get picked before the huge snowstorm of 2009 (in which I saw all of four snowflakes flutter past). I enjoy football once it gets to the finals if my alma mater is in it. Still, I will only watch if I've got a second project going at the same time. And while I enjoyed creating the wreath, I was happy imagining family and friends coming by and feeling all holiday-welcome just seeing my wreath. It's really all about participating in Christmas. Connecting.

Both my kids are Bama alums (well, my son's got exams to take this week before he earns that title...fingers crossed everyone!). I went to Florida for one quarter; it was a traumatic freshman year and I transferred after that. But my brother graduated from Florida. If you are keeping track of football, you will know that the game was for the SEC championship. Later that evening, my alma mater, University of Texas, played for the Big 12 Championship. Texas won (barely, in a nail-biter), and will now play Alabama for the national championship.

I come from a football family. My dad was a high school star and played college ball in Ohio. My brother was the winning QB of my high school in Florida, and since he was just a year older than me, I inherited a lot of coolness by familial association. Which was great, except all my girlfriends sooner or later wanted to date him. That got a little old. Moving on, my son played high school football, too. And, final football family fact, I was on the dance squad in high school where we performed at the half time shows with the band. Both my sisters were, too. And we all live in states where football rules. I mean, people are fanatical. So, it's kind of surprising I am not any more avid than I am.

After high school, I started thinking of it as a total waste of time. I mean, it's on ALL the damn time. My first husband watched Monday night football from my labor room as I prepared to give birth to my daughter. I was like, Wait a minute, this is not a football-compatible activity over here! I've also spent time thinking about the violent nature of the game, and its similarities to rallying groups for war -- the undying alliance to your team, the zealous cheering, the lining up and knocking down, the strategic plays for taking the opponent's territory. Maybe we're just not far enough removed yet from our genetic forebearers for whom community defense and offense meant survival, and this is a pretty innocent and fun way of fulfilling that need without actually killing anyone. At least we've come a ways from the Romans, right? No hungry lions out there! And besides, you can't deny the skill it takes.

Mostly, I can take it or leave it, but once you start watching, it's easy to get hooked. You want to your team to win, goddammit! You feel that spirited connection to the team and all the other fans.

I watched the Alabama-Florida game, knowing my kids were watching (my son was at the game) cheering for the Crimson Tide, and my brother was at my dad's cheering for his Gators. I had to pull for Alabama on account of my kids and how much money I've sent that school. And I felt connected to them the whole game. I even texted my daughter, RTR! (She didn't believe I knew what it meant. Roll Tide Roll! I answered. Pretty sure she was laughing at me with her friends, but that's what I'm there for.I don't mind.)

Now, it's Alabama-Texas in the national championship game in Pasadena. Note to my kids: It is on.

So now that I'm getting in the holiday spirit, here's my Christmas wish: warm slippers for everyone on a cold night, welcoming houses, plentiful tables, laughing families and friends, and Hook 'em Horns!