Electric Blankets, Furnaces and Other Warm Thoughts

Our furnace has made me so glad that we live in California. The wires got chewed by rodents and suddenly everything flickered and then cooled down to a rather brisk temperature. At first we thought maybe the kids were messing with the thermostat but we quickly realized that it was something bigger than that and our heat was caput. Its usually pretty warm here and the cool temp in the winter is usually kind of 60ish but its been in the 30's at night and the 50's during the day this week. This morning when I got up to make breakfast I could see my breath in the kitchen. I was laughing over the fact that I live in California and I was turning on the oven and standing there rubbing my hands over the opened door before I started breakfast. It feels so cold when your body has become used to 60-70 degrees all of the time.

 It does feel rather seasonal though! I have to say that I grew up pretty prepared for this. It makes me think of wood fires and power outages, stacking logs by the cookstove and getting into bed with our coats on when we came home from a trip away during the winter. There's something good about learning to be a little bit tough. Coffee and tea are amazing when its a frosty 40 something in your kitchen. Also, snuggling with your man never felt more alluring.

 A bought me a heating pad for Christmas, though I am embarrassed to admit that this California girl wanted one in the very worst way. It has been the most delicious treat to slip it into my spot under the quilt and turn it on as I do that last pick-ups around the house and brush my teeth. By the time I get into bed, its made my side of the bed into a glowing little oasis. I am now contemplating an electric blanket.

 My grandma had electric blankets, I think she really was the only person I knew who had them. I sometimes could use one when I slept overnight at her house. She would let me have one but I couldn't sleep with it on all night. We would go to sleep in side by side twin beds, the wind off of Lake Michigan making the gentle whoosing sound that it always does. I would lie under that electric blanket and we would make gentle conversation together before sleep: "What do you think we should do tomorrow?" or "What shall we have for breakfast?" It was always a little bit of a guessing game with Grandma, trying to think of something that would be special and make her feel inspired but nothing too demanding or rich feeling which she would never have been okay with. My grandma was a slightly imposing woman who wanted to be seen and elegant and illustrious but practical and frugal at the same time. I would float my ideas her way in the quiet room, both of us tucked in up to our chins, while the waves outside shushed rhythmically. She would mostly listen to me and then say. "Aha!" in response like she often did when I told her my plans or my thoughts. And then pretty soon she'd tell me that it was time to turn out the light and she'd remind me to turn off my electric blanket with a click, we'd goodnight each other and then I was lying there in the dark, wiggling my toes under the fading warmth and listening to the waves rock me to sleep.

The Bethlehem Fair, birthplace of holy memories

We just did our annual trip to the county fair, one of my very favorite, ever end-of-summer rituals. Little things can make wonderful traditions.

 We live in a size-able city that is a bedroom community of The Big Apple...that means that living around these parts is quite urban and rather devoid of fairs. In urban New England, people in our neck of the woods have mostly grown up attending carnivals which are like fairs, minus the agricultural bits. I love agricultural bits.

 I love the part about how you park in a tromped down hay field and walk forever to get to the gate. I love the quilts and the baking contests and the view from the top of the ferris wheel that is all trees and rolling hills and the occasional church steeple.

I love that you have to wear your old boots because the midway is just a dirt path that gets messy from so many feet tromping through it all week. I love that nobody thinks twice when our four year old has grass stains on both knees and our toddler is hanging off the fences by the livestock pens.

The fair was one of my childhood rituals. I grew up entering things I made, dreaming of owning a horse of my own after visiting velvet noses in the horse barn and spending my savings on the Tilt-a-Whirl and The Scrambler. I feel so right at the fair, lots of great memories there. Wonderful, precious to me, part-of-who-I-am, things-that-make-the-world-feel-right-memories. Its simple stuff and silly stuff, (the ridiculous carny patter on the midway still makes me laugh out loud and The Scrambler makes me giddy) but its so happy and so gritty and inspiring to me.

 I always come home and want to go to visit the area farms more and grow bigger carrots and teach the boys to knit and work more carefully on my pie edging. I love that fairs make me think of things that I can do myself and want to do them. I love that they make me proud of capability and relaxed warmth and my own state. I love how much the fair has become a celebration for my sons. Its super fun to share the things you love with the next generation.

And I have to say, my husband, who isn't an agricultural devotee has been very gracious about learning to appreciate this ritual that I love so deeply. Affectionate shout out to him for making me feel understood and helping the kids value things he knows matter so much to me.

Poetry Friday: Re-creating My Grandparents

Happy Poetry Friday, everyone!

Today's poem is all about my maternal grandparents: Grandpa Mac and Grandma Sallie. I am one of those past-pickers who loves to marinate in the stories, details and even dates of my ancestors. I have drawn up family trees and dug around in the great, stale stores of The Internet for immigration records and am always pressing relatives for little stories and anecdotes. I think one of the key reasons why I am so fixated is because I long for a sense of connection of human understanding, of familial community that stretches deeper and farther than my varied cousins and my several aunts. I want to know what "we" as a clan were like in the Great Depression, how we cook, how we were in The Old Country, how we hold our liquor, how we walk, how we all tell jokes and what kinds of things we do in times of stress. I wish I could interview all my ancestors but instead I am writing a poem for them and for myself. 

My grandpa, the year the stock market crashed, 1929.

My grandma as a young woman with her first child, my aunt Nancy.

My Roots Are Showing

Odd how I run my fingers over and over
The many strands of my family roots,
Harping, my husband calls it when I go on.
I especially think about my grandparents:
I know I am lucky to have hugged them,
Had their wrinkled hands stroke mine
And to have felt their hair with sleepy fingers
But I know my versions of them are pale
Flickering, silhouettes sketches of people.
I remember old snatches of my grandpa:
Rag wool sweaters, pipe tobacco and his back
Bent in the sun over the stone garden wall.
Grandma is the scent of geraniums, solitaire
And glasses of water with crossword puzzles, 
A chic tip to her head, her feet curved and shuffling
I have these little torn, scavenged memories
And I have fashioned them into frozen collages
The two of them, stiff and quirky: static human art.
I know they gasped along like I do, their lives
As thumping and real as mine and my husband's
But sometimes I have to write to really feel them,
Cracking open the trunk of words in my mind
To enliven them, breathing in their realities
How it truly felt...in the bones, to have:
A cascade of preemie daughters, a house-fire,
A war hero ghost for a brother, an ex-wife,
An explosive temper, a yen for pink pistachios,
A college crush, a wry joke over gin,  a first art sale,
A master's degree, a quiet breakfast in Paris,
A job in another state, an absent spouse, a broken nose,
An alcoholic father, a museum you helped found,
A fear of gaining weight, A obsession with saving bags,
Or a commitment that sticks there through it all
Stubborn and eternal and lumpy like all real things.

My grandparents are the elegant couple on the left, my aunt and uncle on the right.

 You can go browse the other submissions for Poetry Friday tonight as a celebration of the weekend or tomorrow morning (like I will) with a mug of tea in hand. There is always a huge buffet of delicious offerings to pick through. Trudy is hosting this week over at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

Happy Weekend!
xoxo

Terri Jean in Collage

My Aunt is in a coma.

She is improving and I hear that she is slowly, slowly coming around. Making hopeful little steps towards waking. I am thinking about her, sending her a lot of love and long-distance encouragement and connectivity and feeling nostalgic. I made this collage about her five years ago, during a random online obsession with collaging those who have been influential in my life. She was a wonderful aunt to a little girl with wide eyes. She fed me amazing, exciting things, lived the vibrant expression of an artist in front of me and was the carefree, silly kind of warmth that I still copy in crowded rooms.

Tonight I am thinking of her and rooting for her and telling the world how much she means to me! Come on out, Aunt Terri! We love you so!
xoxo
Your loving niece,
 

2012, Diagnosed

It was a good year.

All years are good years.

I am trying to get less attached to ideas of emotional happiness and instead learn to see the fluid beauty in all things...even the rough things, even the stuff we are tempted to label and discard.

It is so alluring to kick 2012 out with a big heave ho and stamp it on the hiney as it goes with a giant red "FOR DISCARD" like a snubbed library book.

This was the year..... A had an accident with a bike and spent months in ridiculous physical therapy trying to learn to walk again after the official diagnosis of "bruising and small bone chip," it was the year we had such a plague of mosquitoes in our yard that we basically spent the second half of the summer indoors hiding, it was the year our shower started leaking through the dining room ceiling and we shifted to using the kid shower (still are!) while we saving up funds to afford a ceiling demolition, it was the year that I spent a week, heavily pregnant with my fourth baby teetering on the edge of a hospital bed holding my third son while he cried and pinning his arms down while nurses gave him i.v. meds, it was the year my cherished midwife was no longer practicing and I had to walk through this last pregnancy and birth without her care, and it was the year of illness after illness, the boys never all well at the same time.

But you know...there are so many sides to life. So many pieces to stories and so often, its all about your spin.

This was also the year.....I discovered eating grain-free/sugar free and thus shed a shackling depression, the year we met our gentle, fourth son in an amazingly quick and smooth birth, the year we hauled basket after basket in from our garden laden with peas and lettuce and tomatoes and our first ever watermelons, it was the year I finally took an interior design class, the year A picked up Spanish in his spare time, the year we celebrated surviving an entire decade of marriage together, the year we visited Hawaii and swam under a waterfall with our children, the year we picked the first fruit from our mini-orchard, and the year we made it back to Michigan for a family reunion on my great-grandparents farm, the year we brought home two furry little guinea pig sisters to live with us, the year I had a painting up in a real gallery and then sold a piece to a genuine member of the anonymous public, the year a Raleigh  policeman went out of his way to help find my stolen phone and restore my faith in cops, it was the year we were graciously mega-loved by friends in our homeschool group, neighbors and church when hard times did hit, it was the year we had a huge flock of daffodils bloom by our front door.  This and so much more...

I want to always look for the ripe, warm, flavorful bits in my experiences...even the things that feel bitter at first bite. So here I am with the winter light slanting across the floor and a round cheeked baby on my lap, on the brink of a whole new story. This year, whatever it brings I hope for more awareness, more open-eyed seeing, more love, more unity with side portions of vision, and dreams, and spine tingling to boot. Here's to 2013, doubtless, a good year!

Poetry Friday: A Watermelon Poem

 Happy Poetry Friday, everyone!

Today it is cold and rainy, again. We've been having quite a lot of those spells this summer. The handy thing is that I am spending very little time watering the plants and everything is growing like gangbusters. I am looking forward to a few more of those painfully sunny days now that it is officially summer.

It's important to have squint-your-eyes sunshiny days for watermelon eating. A's favorite fruit, and one of his very favorite foods is watermelon, a quintessential summer pleasure. He always asserts that it is "the thinker's fruit" which never fails to make me smile. Who doesn't have rosy memories from their childhood involving watermelon? Today's poem is a little intro to summers past in my brain, in celebration of the solstice this past week. Shout-out to my cousins, scattered all over the world but still as fond as ever!

Ode to Watermelon

I remember standing on my grandma's veranda
The grey wood, slippery with dry beach sand,
Ptoo!-ing black seeds into the curling sawgrass.
All the cousins, reunited for an elastic week,
Here together flicking the stubborn ones from
Crisp, rosy flesh with springy index fingers.
Proper technique also meant leaning far forward
All of us slanted togetherlike books on a shelf,
The whole deck tilting,like a summer canoe as
We dripped rivulets of juice down our arms
And let it plink in pink drops overboard.
I heard the aunt-sisters laugh from the kitchen,
An adult world of loud talk and ice in tinkly glass.
Behind us Grandma opened the grill and squinted
Briskly balancing the deck again by leaning backwards,
Dodging the smoke cloud from the shish-kabobs,
Carefully threaded on their funny blackened sticks.
Bellies full, we heaped up a mound of rinds,
Gnawed to pale crescents with a moat of juice.
And then clenched and unclenched our fists
Giggling at the tacky feeling of all that sugar
Dried to rubber cement between our fingers.


We still buy a lot of watermelon, we're a melon a week family at our house, but I miss the seeds. A thinks I'm crazy, but there's a little bit of evidence out there that perhaps the modern hybrid breeding programs that have culled the little black teardrops from our fruit have done some taste dulling in the bargain. I hope, eventually to accomplish growing my own old fashioned seeded melons. Next year I will actually be able to get plants in the ground at the right time and maybe that will be the clinching key. In the meantime, thank goodness for the farmer's market!

Check out more Poetry Friday poems at Carol's Corner, the host blog for this week.

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Halloween of Yore...

It was a great Halloween. I called it the best one in our memory as a family although A said that he thought we'd had others just as happy and full of cheer. I may be a child of the moment, only really remembering what I just ate or maybe it really was just that fabulous. Who knows.

I was a gardener (I had leaves and sticks in my hair) and Nib was my yard gnome. The big boys were both firemen of course.

There was a wonderful dinnertime open-house costume party at the next door neighbors. The grown-up wore costumes, even if they didn't have little kids, there were lots of homemade get-ups and everyone was very warm and jolly, grinning at each other and swapping stories over the pizza and caramel apple dip. At exactly the right time the party disbanded in a whirl of glitter and feathers and pretend noses....and we all took to the streets to wish each other a happy autumn, make introductions, hand out candy to each other's children and kick our way through the leaves on all the sidewalks.

Here's a neighbor at the costume party who was also a gnome. So funny to see them together!

Dee collected lollipops on his rounds saying when asked what he'd like from a basket or bowl "I like lollipops." and then carried them in bouquets all over town. They didn't go in the bucket...just in the hand.

A said that it was truly surreal trick-or-treating...crowds of people out halloing across the street and parents back slapping each other over their children's costume choices and neighbors passing out glow-in-the-dark bracelets for all the small ones trooping down the street. Such a fabulous sense of community and togetherness and warmth and trust. I am won over, completely.

A is a careful and studious carver and spends a good bit of time on his creation every year. This year he was carving swiss cheese holes in his pumpkin to make a gleeful Sponge Bob.

And here are all of them on the porch: Mommy, Dee, Daddy and Ru...four in a row.

Our pumpkins we carved were wonderful this year too. No botched slips of the knife, very warm and cheery glows and I'm cooking them down today to make them twice useful. Pumpkin pie, here we come!

This Was The Summer of.....

Just thinking a little tonight about the cool fall weather we've been having and how official the end of summer feels suddenly. It was a good summer and it seems healthy to process it out now that its about to become a file in the memory bank. How would I label the last few months if I had to define what made this summer unique, what would that look like.

How about this:

It was the summer of.......

• our big house purchase
• the epic cousin visit
• nightly ice cream in little ramekins
• much painting
• the family carpool
• the iPhone
• learning to sumersault
• the big hail storm
• Frog and Toad
• Mason Jennings and Michael Franti
• my last year in the twenties
• our third son
• long swims
• the perfect bruschetta
• my favorite flip flops
• truck-stop pancakes
• Daddy's ciabatta
• iced coffee
• long stories
• silly words
• my new bloghost
• the great, hot July
• old suits
• the fair's return
• neighbors
• Grandpa's riding mower

Lots of wonderful memories in all those little labels and a heck of a lot of poetry too, without meaning it at all. They actually would all make great poem titles. I keep meaning to write more and always struggle with titles. Huh. Kind of inspiring. Good old lists.