Category Archives: parenting / family

Season and ancestors

SEASON: Two weeks from midsummer and already we see signs of fall. This, at least, is nothing new. But the ordinary rain falling on an otherwise ordinary Sunday tamps down extraordinary Canadian smoke. It still plagues the Northeast.

ANCESTORS: It’s always befuddled me, this notion of wanting contact with dead relatives. Kind of spoiled the idea of Heaven too. You don’t need to ask why. But here’s what I’m trying. It’s so simple.

When I make dough now — always a tricky proposition for me — I channel an unnamed ancestor from the west coast of Ireland — County Cork, let’s say, where my MGM Alice Healey’s family resided. I feel the dough though her hands. Sometimes I close my eyes. She knows what to do even if I don’t. How to fold the dough. How much flour to shake on the counter. When to stop.

I don’t know who she is but I can imagine her — wry-humored, stout, with grey eyes. She grieves the loss of her sons and daughters before they even set sail for America. She can milk a cow and jerry-rig a fan. Her name could be Bridget or Mary.

This morning, the result? One of the best batches of buttermilk biscuits I’ve ever made!

Notes:

I used Elizabeth Germain’s recipe from one in a series of small books published by Cook’s Illustrated.

Somewhere I recently learned NOT TO TWIST your cutter. It wrecks the air flow or something.

A Worry Jar Unearthed

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Ever go looking for something and find something else of interest? I’ve written about losing things and finding things before because it is such a part of my daily life.

Yesterday I came upon an old Worry Jar in a drawer full of photos — a Mason jar with a metal hasp, missing its glass lid.

You probably know the drill: you put notes or symbols about the things that worry you into the jar. The simple ritual is not meant to be a fix so much as temporarily freeing.

Here Jar, you take these thoughts for a while!

There were coins, a rock, a smooth bit of glass, a roll of cloth, and many notes. Almost all of the notes were about my sister, so let’s just admit that the jar was also a repository of despair.

There was a teeny pouch with a five dollar bill in it. I don’t remember making it or filling it, but I do remember being worried about money.

There was a pencil, likely representing writing, a miniature plastic scuba diver, probably referring to my husband who is a master diver, and a beautiful miniature clay mother and child, there no doubt to stand for a whole world of Mother Worries. I’m surprised the clay didn’t melt or shatter.

I rather unceremoniously threw all the paper out. Another letting go? I’ll pocket the coins, although I don’t know why since they’re not even needed for parking meters anymore (do NOT ask me how I feel about the Passport Parking app). Mother and Child went on my bookcase-altar. They look content — perhaps singing praise songs? — sitting there near the pretty spring gentians and the glass owl.

The owl was a gift to my sister and makes for a happier sibling reference. She was obsessed with them after a recurring dream about “Owl Mountain” during her nearly two-month medically-induced coma in 2009. In case you’re wondering, I like elephants.

The jar is empty now. I am not free of worry, of course, but that particular chapter is quite over. After reading the Brene Brown quotes I had collected in August 2021 and posted here yesterday, I wonder: can I apply curiosity to the things that eat at me?

Hello there! Who are you and what do you want with me?

A walk in Webster Woods

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All the recent rain changed the landscape. Rogue rivulets. Impromptu puddles hoping to become ponds. Glistening leaves. It was slippery enough for me to wish I’d brought poles.

It’s hard to get lost in this patch of woods, but we don’t always know precisely where we are. All the fallen leaves obscuring the paths today didn’t help.

It’s hard to believe this small wooded escarpment lies within a mile and a half of the house. Almost every time we traipse through here, I think about how if our boys were raised in the 60’s, they would have known every inch of this area. It makes me a little sad.

This week we are 33 years together. There are certain patterns of communication. I say Which way and when K doesn’t answer I say Let’s go right and when it turns out we kind of went the wrong way and we got to where perhaps we meant to go K says This is where we would’ve come if I’d said what I wanted to which was to go left.

One of the consequences of making a choice is you might be wrong. But if you don’t assert a choice, do you get to be right?

I can think of worse thing to stumble over.

Since a brilliant variety of mushrooms made our last walk festive, I kept an eye out but there were hardly any. What few I saw were like the Puritan versions of Mardi Gras celebrants. Don’t get me wrong, they were still spectacular, which is not an adjective I’d apply to a Puritan.

The leaf below looked like a bird in flight.

This boy was happy. Finn’s pack instincts came to the fore whenever K and I momentarily diverged (for me to take the low route, for instance — when did I become so cautious?). At these junctures, The dog becomes visibly anxious. I love how it matters to him that we stick together!

Today I will: ** read ten Joy Harjo poems; ** boil up Friday’s chicken carcass for stock and then make mushroom soup (shrooms from the market — not to worry!), ** scoop up wet leaves and walnuts along the curb using a straight-edged shovel. We will

Sumac stealth

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“Ugh, it’s hot. My app says it’s 97.”

“My app says it’s 94. Rain at 2:00.”

“Mine’s showing it holding off ‘til 4:00”

This conversation, nearly verbatim, happens to an embarrassing degree in our house. I’m not sure whether it speaks more to being married for more than thirty years or to being over-reliant on our devices.

It was really too hot to be poking around scrub land behind retail space in search of sumac, but there we were. Finn’s tags fell off somewhere along the way this week necessitating a trip to Pet Co. We left the dog home and brought along gloves, spade, and two empty containers.

My mother was famous for plant-grabbing. She’d drive up into the woods behind our house in Pittsfield as far as the road would go, and fill the trunk with small trees which eventually, of course, became big trees. My brother claims she got permission from the landowner. I’m not so sure.

I’d seen her pull over on Route 43 or Dalton Road and dig up what to any other eye might appear to be a weed, perhaps with a spoon that she happened to have in the glove box. A little savage. Let’s just say she was a resourceful opportunist with a very good eye. This being her birth week, I figured why not honor her with my own sly acquisitions?

Last weekend, we more legitimately came by a clethra and a yew. These are all for the fence line along the back edge of the property. I also had to buy and plant two flats of pachysandra which the workers stomped to extinction on my neighbor’s property. Part of the price of our new fence.

And speaking of that neighbor. The son has come home with his girlfriend to live and turns out, the girlfriend is interested in learning how to quilt. Would I want a student? I almost said no, but I’m already thinking what I’d bring to a casual show and tell for a first lesson. And if the main reason I don’t want to proceed is because I can’t think what to charge a recent college grad with no job, then is that really a reason?

I sent my neighbor away with a few books and gave her Jude’s blog’s name. Ruth McDowell’s too. The young woman is an engineer so it occurred to me that McDowell’s precise piecing method may appeal to her. That’s a place to start, answering the question: What are you drawn to?

Meanwhile, I finished this with a little help from my friends (speaking of Jude, also Maggie and Jenn) (mostly re: a disappearing head. I think I fixed it!)

Cooked gardened cleaned

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At my brother’s, I cooked, gardened, and cleaned. It was hot and dry and, unlike here, SUNNY. We watched a lot of TV, too. It’s kind of one of my jobs. Was happy to turn my brother onto Shetland and Justified. Last visit it was Vera.

He was feeling so much better than last visit that he was episodically downright chatty. The old Billy. Is it too much to hope that the fevers and abdominal pain are over for now?

The drugstore on Eagle Rock Parkway was closed when I went to pick up some meds. American life at its worst: a young store clerk tried to apprehend a shoplifter and was shot and killed. There were balloons and flowers and Jesus candles lining the sidewalk. People huddled in grief. It was hard to be too upset about the inconvenience of going to the place on York Boulevard, three miles away, with a clerk who could barely ring up items, meaning it took an eternity to get through the five people in front of me. Okay, so I got annoyed in spite of the tragedy.

Zooey, the 15 year old black dog, does not seem to be in pain but is bladder challenged. She has trouble getting up and can barely walk, so there is a constant race to launch her toward the rear door and get the slider open. She needs to go A LOT. Three times during the night, often. A whole other layer of caregiving but also a lesson in survival. She has sooo much personality.

I doubt I’ll see her again.

Delilah is the other dog, mentioned before. A right lioness. Formerly anxious (still anxious with fireworks) and now dignified and mostly calm. I’d take her home if I could!

Because of the Covid-surge, I’m not sure when I’ll be back. There’s much more to say about everything but I have other writing to get back to. I hate it when I lug my laptop on a trip and don’t even open it! This time I edited six chapters during my flight home, so at least there was that.