The Refracted Shell Jar

Shadows in early morning

sun shining through leafed out trees

and those jostling branches painting

their moving self-portrait

on an interior wall

through a light shadow lens.

 Delightful whimsy. That moment where nature and science unexpectedly charm.

***

We’ve sunken into the deep freeze. I woke up this morning to cool air in the bedroom, despite the fact that I had closed all the windows before I went to bed last night.  This morning the temperature outside is 9 degrees F.  The wind chill is minus 9 degrees F.  Upstairs, the water pipes running through the baseboard radiators have frozen, so our bathrooms and bedrooms have no heat.  The residual heat is at 66 degrees.  We’ll put electric heaters in each room so we can sleep up there until the ice in the pipes melts, probably in four to seven days—after the temperature hovers above freezing for a few days.

Somewhere in the remodel construction of 2012, a pipe in a wall was left ass bare of insulation, so if we have enough below freezing days in a row, we lose all heat upstairs.  We have had contractors and plumbers come out and scratch their heads at this situation.  Our normal plumber said that he thinks the problem is in the addition as newer pops are resilient to bursting.  I hope that is still the case this winter. 

Last week, I bumped up the heating to 72 when the outdoor temperature dipped to the 20s.  I was hoping if the water moved around faster the pipes wouldn’t freeze.  With the hot water racing, the rooms were scorching hot.  Except Liam’s.  In the same remodel his radiators seem to have been left out of the loop.  His main heat source is an electric radiator.  Will slept with his window cracked open as did Bill and me.

That same morning, I lifted the shade in the upstairs hallway and opened that window as well.  I never let light in this window as people coming down the hill in front of our house can see right inside to the painting on the wall twenty feet from the window.  But this piece is about whimsy…

All day, the blinds on the narrow window in that upstairs hallway were up as high as they could go.  Around 4:30 I walked out of my bedroom and was stunned by the sight of my giant sea glass jar sitting on the hall table—and the light shadows cast onto the wall behind it.  I snapped pictures with my phone even though I know it’s hard to capture whimsy in a frozen moment. 

Maybe this is why I prefer early and late sun.  It shies horizontally, peeking through windows and creating art via objects through which it travels.  This whimsy makes my eyes and heart fill up to giddiness.  A rush perhaps akin to… honestly, I don’t know who gets this feeling from what moments in their lives.

I called Liam up to see it and to take pictures.  For ten minutes we watched the sun dip through the window’s horizon, changing the light art second by second. 

At minute 9 of the show, Will came out of the bathroom off the hallway where he had been taking a shower.  Will joined us in the light gawking, and seconds after he opened the door the scene changed.  The square of solid light framed by the window began to move.  The edges bounced and the boxed light shimmered with movement.  Heat.  Wet heat from the bathroom poured invisibly into the scene and was lit and recognized by the stream of light. 

Not all shadows are dark; some are filled with glorious, refracted, motion-filled light.

(Take a look at The Refracted Shell Jar over ten minutes in my Whimsy Photo Gallery.)

Emulsification

A few days ago, I reserved the kitchen for cooking, singing, and dancing.  And, to be honest, for talking to myself.  We have been cooking a lot over the last year—mostly cooking to eat.  Thinking about routines and rituals last week pushed me to the kitchen where I could go on autopilot and make my old standby, chicken and rice soup, and also test out a new lasagna recipe.  With the counter completely cleared and not another human in sight, I put dance music on and pulled out the biggest knife and the biggest cutting board.

I can make chicken and rice soup from memory.  When I included this recipe in my book, I used a roasted chicken from the store to make the broth, but since then I bumped into a recipe where a fresh, whole chicken is simmered in a stockpot for an hour-and-a-half.  The chicken cooks and makes its own broth for the following soup all at once.  That’s where I started the morning. 

The lasagna took more discipline as I followed a recipe with a list of twenty ingredients and layered preparation.  Although I sang and danced while putting the soup together, I turned the music down and struck up a conversation with myself over making that lasagna sauce. “OK, the meat is browned… now I add sugar through parsley.  Sugar through parsley.  Sugar through… parsley.” Maybe if I make the lasagna often enough, it too will become rote like the soup—or risotto or chili.

Once the soup and sauce were set to simmer, I glanced at the narrow shelves next to the fridge and saw the vinaigrette jar was empty.  It was time for an episode of emulsification—a wholly satisfying endeavor of beating ingredients to the point where there is unequivocal bonding of molecules that are polar opposites. 

At my emulsification station in the far corner of the kitchen, I can reach all ingredients and tools with only slight turns and small steps.  From the upper corner cupboard, I pull my old plastic two quart bowl with a handle and pour spout, as well as my Pyrex 1-cup measuring cup with a pour spout.  The vinaigrette whisk jumps from the utensil jar, much like a dog that heads to the door upon hearing the word “walk.”  I open the skinny vinegar cupboard door to see the sly, potent white balsamic vinegar waiting for its name to be called. 

To the left of that cupboard lays in wait the bulb of garlic; I break off a clove and watch garlic papers waft to the floor.  They join the other cooking evidence of the day: bits of carrots, celery, and onion already scattered in my cooking galley.  Near the beginning of a cooking session, when the first ingredient falls to the floor, I mutter knowingly, “Now we’re cooking!”  If it weren’t for the floor, I wouldn’t be able to cook.

I open the hinged door to the lower corner Lazy Susan and find the half-gallon sentry of extra-virgin olive oil on the bottom shelf in the shadows, right next to my shin.  With a step out of my spin-radius, I open the fridge door and retrieve the Grey Poupon Dijon mustard that’s hiding in the door behind the ketchup.  From my corner, I step in the opposite direction to the drawer where the garlic press resides. Then finally, back squarely at the vinaigrette station, I open the cupboard door and pull out the salt cellar and the pepper mill.  All ingredients and tools are at the ready for the convening of emulsification.

We know the scientific fact-come-cliché: Oil and water don’t mix.  If shaken together in a jar, the oil breaks into tiny formations that may give the impression of combining with the water, but in fact, the oil particles stand strong via no effort, but simply because of their molecular structure.  Oil molecules are hydrophobic; they repel water.  That is where the magic of mustard enters.  The hulls of mustard seeds contain mucilage, which is a combination of proteins and polysaccharides, or a kind of gum.  The molecules of mustard mucilage have two ends: one is hydrophilic (loves water/vinegar) and the other is hydrophobic (hates water/vinegar).  Hence, mustard is a great glue—or in scientific cooking terms, an emulsifier. Its molecular structure enables it to pull oil and vinegar together.

As with the layered preparation of lasagna sauce, making this vinaigrette is not a throw-it-in-the-pot recipe.  To remain a vinaigrette—for it not to quietly separate back into oil and vinegar—key steps must be adhered to in the creation process.

These ingredients go into the bowl: ¼ cup white balsamic vinegar, 1 pressed garlic clove, 1 teaspoon Grey Poupon Dijon mustard, a pinch of salt, and 20 twists of milled black pepper.  Then these ingredients are whisked together and dissolved to form a cloudy, watery solution. Next, a large ¾ cup pour of extra-virgin olive oil goes into the same 1-cup Pyrex measuring cup used to measure the vinegar.  At this point, the call to duty comes: lean the body against the counter, place the whisk in the dominate hand, lift the cup of oil in the other hand.  Pause to say a little emulsification prayer, “Please stay together…” And then, begin.

With intensity, start whisking the vinegar concoction while ever so slowly drizzling the oil into the mix.  Just a thin thread of gold should flow into the bowl.  As the pouring continues the oil should disappear into the new liquid state.  If oil hovers near the top edges, stop the pour and continue to whisk until oil blends in, then recommence the slow drizzle.  Let the bowl bounce off the torso as necessary; the bowl is like a floating stadium where a Greek battle is ensuing.  It will move with each flick of the whisk.  Garlic skins on the floor are easier to clean up than a mustard mucilage emulsification spill.

When the last drip of oil has dropped into the plastic bowl, put the measuring cup down and with that hand grab the bowl handle to stabilize it while giving the emulsification a final molecular beating. 

This is undoubtedly one of the loudest recipes ever prepared in my kitchen.  The battle in the bowl pulls Liam from yonder corners of the house, “Oohh… Did I hear you making dressing, Mom?”  And we both admire the smooth silky thickened liquid pouring from the bowl into a jar, full well knowing the kick it will put in salad that evening. 

To serve this vinaigrette, we toss a big bowlful of lettuce with three tablespoons of dressing.  This isn’t a pooling potion like ranch or blue cheese.  With its potency via white balsamic vinegar and Dijon dressing, it is truly meant to lightly dress salad leaves.  In the days when we used to have guests for dinner, I hesitated to serve this dressing because of the high risk of an acid-up-the nose coughing fit at the table.  However, the salad eaters in our house are accustomed to the strength of this dressing.  Our bodies have adapted, and those connections between mouth and nose that elicit choking over acidic evaporation close when we eat salad.  How that works is research for another day.

Habits, Routines, and Rituals

The words routines, rituals, and habits intertwine like a thick braid.  Are they interchangeable?  Have I been taking liberties with their usage? 

I can easily parse habits from the three-some.  Those are the small things I do on autopilot which are guided by circumstances like time of day or environment. Floss and brush before bed.  Squirt hand sanitizer out of the pump when I get into the van.  Pilates on Mondays and Wednesdays.  Habits are those cheeky things that push the world just a tad off kilter if you skip one. Like seeing an unmade bed late in the day. Bill normally makes the bed, and if he doesn’t, I usually make it by the end of the day.  That moment of walking into the room and seeing the visual peace in a made bed is definitely worth the two minutes it takes to make it. Even the physicality of making it has become rewarding to me.

Routines and rituals are a bit more complex.  I’ve been muttering to myself over the last several months that I need more rituals.  Or do I need more routines? Patterns of activity over time become routines.  I could say that when the library was open, my routine on Tuesdays and Thursdays was to drop the boys off at school by 7:45 a.m., go to the coffeeshop and review the day and organize the calendar until 9:00 when the library doors opened.  Then I would drive to the library, park on the side street and carry in my weighty backpack and my water bottle.  I would stop in the bathroom then soar up the stairs to the quiet room.  I would claim my space at the end of a long table and put my backpack in the chair to my right.  After a swift unzipping of pockets, I arranged the computer, water, notebook, and pen on the table.  I left the phone in my backpack.  I popped open the lid and chose “New document.”  The next two to three hours unfolded easily under the umbrella term “writing.” 

The knowing swirl of those mornings was comforting and energizing.  And while the patter of those mornings was routine, the ruffled feathers over their disappearance have convinced me that this was my writing ritual, not merely a routine. 

Cream of Tartar

The three wise men followed the beckoning star to find the Christ child in the manger where there was no room for a bed.  They brought with them gifts of gold, frankincense, and cream of tartar, for the world was raucous with uncertainty and in limited supply of valuable goods. 

Alas, one wise man was in fact a wise woman well aware of the traditional homemade sugar cookies baked in celebration of birth in Bethlehem.  Cream of tartar, a mysterious but necessary sugar cookie ingredient, was in short supply as the 500-year locusts had devoured the tartar crops in the fall, so the cream that had been salvaged from the small harvest of tartar had been dried to extend its shelf life.  

Mary nodded and gave the wise woman a Mona Lisa smile as the wise men, shepherds, and Joseph scoffed at the 1.5 ounces of white dust.  Mary’s outstretched hand easily accepted the weight of the dried cream; she watched the men struggle through the weighty transfer of heavy gold nuggets and thick sappy frankincense freshly collected from the Boswellia tree.  

The wise men made their exit in three different directions.  Behind the stable, the wise woman slung off her wise man regalia, then went and discreetly slid in between the donkey and the ox.  Her quiet grace felt only by Mary. 

***

Writing fiction is painful.  I much prefer transcribing thoughts in a rather direct line from brain to fingertips.  With fiction, the options are too great and the parameters unknown.  And I think maybe writer’s block can occur more frequently: I wanted the wise woman and Mary to bake cookies together, but I couldn’t figure out how to get them out of the stable and into a kitchen, so I left the scene unfinished and moved back into a sturdier reality.

I had two bottles of cream of tartar mid-October when I found an online class on how to decorate sugar cookies with royal icing.  I sat for over two hours watching a professional decorate five Halloween cookies.  Two hours, five cookies. I found a less complicated design and thrived in the mind-numbing repetition of creating puffy pumpkins.

For the first half of my life, I thickly spread some version of buttercream frosting over Christmas sugar cookies and then loaded sprinkles over the top.  This method left the base shapes barely recognizable, aside from perhaps a red hot where Rudolph’s nose should be or gold, tooth-splitting balls outlining a snowman’s eyes and mouth. While the cookies and the decorating were basic and beautiful, the brain-freezing hit of dopamine from the sweet buttercream was divine.  The sugar cookie was a mere conveyance of the frosting. 

I grew up baking Mary’s Sugar Cookies from Betty Crocker’s Cookbook.  Twenty-some years later, that was followed by the best sugar cookie I’ve ever had—a recipe shared on a plate then on paper by my sister-in-law.  It’s the sugar cookie recipe that landed in my book. (I also plopped it onto my website with the “Menagerie of Recipes.”)

Since October I’ve made three or four batches of these cookies and practiced my royal icing technique.  Over the last two weeks, I’ve taken two more classes live where I pre-baked the cookies, pre-mixed three consistencies of icing in a half dozen colors, then commandeered the whole kitchen to spread out and decorate them as directed by the professional on the iPad screen.

When sub-cultures call, I take interest.  I want to learn; I turn to research; however, I rarely experience through absolute submersion.  I won’t buy a Harley.  I might join a ukulele meet-up some day.  But I can bake a mean sugar cookie, and now—with a bit of technology, a whole lot of powdered sugar, and some meringue powder—I can slip into artistry for a few hours. 

I keep the home renovation show “Love It or List It” recording on my DVR for an occasional pop of that dopamine that comes from seeing before, during, and after home renovations.  One night while watching it with Bill, a scene with a man spraying purple insulating foam filled our wide screen TV.  I confessed that I want to do that. I want to spray just the right amount of foam and watch it billow and grow to perfectly fill the hollows between the studs.  I will never do that; however, successfully flooding a sugar cookie comes pretty darn close.

Perfection of the flood is a challenge; sometimes I’m left with a product reminding me of the painting of melting clocks.  In my case the indication of strange malleability and movement in a normally solid object is not intentional as it was in Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory.  My melting bells are a result of too much liquid in my flood icing—and/or not enough strength in my detail border icing which should act like a dam in holding the flood.  Once the flood breaks that border, there is no return.

(Photo from https://eatdelights.com/cream-of-tartar-expire/)

Back to cream of tartar, that standard mysterious ingredient in sugar cookies.  I want to know what it is and why it is.  According to allrecipes.com, cream of tartar is “a dry, powdery, acidic byproduct of fermenting grapes into wine.”  From a bit of reading, I understand it to be an ingredient that gives meringue, angel food cake, and cookies a bit of lift.  I think of it as an injection of a fluffy, white cumulus cloud that has some structure to it.

I’m running low on cream of tartar.  With a case of asymptomatic COVID in our house and no cream of tartar on the shelves of my grocery delivery service, I responded rather selfishly to a friend’s offer to pick anything up we might need from the store.  Cream of tartar, please. 

This wise woman filled a small container from her own supply and left it on my snowy front step.  It was at the bottom of a brown bag that was tucked into a plastic grocery bag and only visible after unpacking a puzzle, two cans of beer, and a bottle of wine. 

The wings of grace tapped my shoulder.

Blueberry Syrup

While Bill and I flip through lists of tv shows, Will and Liam turn to YouTube videos for entertainment.  With the prediction of six to eight inches of snow for us on Saturday, Liam woke up and bounded into the kitchen.  “I’m going to make blueberry syrup for snow cones!”  An idea from a YouTube video.

As it poured with rain outside, only the promise of a change-over to snow hung in the air.  A pan and a pint of blueberries went on the stove along with enough water for the berries to float a bit off the bottom of the pan.  “I’m going by memory; I don’t think I need to follow a recipe.”  His unrestricted confidence in the kitchen mimics Bill’s more so than mine.  For most dishes, I’d like a recipe to be my guiding light.  A tablespoon of butter went into the warming blueberries and water. 

Since Liam first saw the snow at a year old, his gut response has been the same year after year: to eat it. Off the ground or out of the air, his excitement for falling frozen water is like a puppy’s in freshly fallen snow.  Upon Liam’s direction, I searched for the strainer, found a bowl it could sit on, and put both into the sink.  We watched the blueberries shed their color in the water as the boiling bubbles grew more intense.  I think they should be called purple berries, given the color of the water.

We wondered together how long it should boil; Liam decided when to pull it off of the stove and moved the pan to a trivet next to the sink where he ladled the blueberries and liquid into the strainer.  When the ladle couldn’t pick up the last bits of blueberries, Liam lifted the pan, lightened by the ladling, and dumped the rest through the sieve.  With the back of the ladle, he pushed the blueberries in the bowl-shaped sieve to get all of the juice out.

Gently and with a little trepidation, Liam poured the mixture back into the pan and returned it to the stove.  Liam added sugar.  One and a half cups of sugar.  I bit my tongue knowing that was a bit too much, but this was his experiment, not mine.

Liam wants an ice scraper for Christmas.  Not for the car but rather for freezing sheets of ice and scraping it as it freezes so he can have snow whenever he wants.  We smelled the simmering concoction; it made me think that vanilla might be a good addition.  Liam agreed, and a teaspoon of strong Mexican vanilla joined the dance.  Liam’s nose suggested freshly squeezed lemon.  In it went.  After a few minutes, the combination thickened ever so slightly, and Liam took it off of the stove to cool.  We took turns dipping spoons in for taste testing.  It tasted more of sweetness than of blueberry.

Once we had discussed the rationale for letting the syrup cool before putting it into a glass jar, Liam disappeared for a half hour.  Then we found a bulbous squatty jar that the whole batch fit into perfectly.  Then—we waited.  Hours later, around three, the snow cloud finally arrived over our house.  The air was thick with heavy, clunky, wet snow.  It was a good start to the winter storm.  Three days before, the forecast for us was only one to three inches.  Now, the forecast had increased to a real snow of six to eight inches.  It was the weekend, and no one had to go anywhere: We were ready for that dump of snow to cover the dark, dreary, leaf-free ground.

When the table on the deck had collected about an inch of snow, Liam took a glass out with a spoon and scraped the cold, wet sheet.  Back in the house, he spooned syrup over the white mound, but it didn’t have the desired effect of thoroughly dripping and drizzling through the snow.  The heavy snow didn’t have enough air between the flakes to allow for snow cone absorption.  Once again, the taste testing proved that the syrup was more sweet than blueberry.  As the snow melted a bit, the purple syrup eventually colored the whole glob of slush. 

As Liam looked at the remaining two cups of syrup, he was decidedly disappointed.  Was it worth keeping?  Could we just pour it away down the drain?  All that effort and he was left with a subpar concoction.  We tucked it into the fridge, behind the milk. Perhaps it will resurface for a retest with the next snowfall, for there wasn’t a second chance with this snow event: It only snowed about two inches. 

All around, the anticipation and preparation gloriously outshone the main events.

Clocks

At 6:19 a.m., I have been looking at a blank page for fifteen minutes.  My mind is wandering to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family.  In particular, to their clock on the mantel.  I fact check my memory and can find no Google reference to a clock that needed daily winding in Laura’s growing up years.  However, there is a Pinterest mention of a clock that Almanzo gave to his family in 1886, and it’s now on display at their historic home, Rock Ridge Farm House, in Mansfield, Missouri.  Facts around this clock are elusive. Yet my mind clings to a clock in Little House in the Big Woods. 

When I get ready in the morning, I get caught up in all the ticking between the closet and the bathroom.  There are three clocks with faces and second hands: one by the tub, one on the wall with an outdoor temperature reading, and one on a closet shelf that’s visible from the bathroom.  Time moves in this area with three asynchronous ticks marking out each second.  According to those clocks, it may be 9:03, 9:07, or 9:09.  They keep time at their own pace—even the one that is supposed to be tuned in to gather time information off of the radio waves is in a time warp.  If the minutia of minutes is important on a given day, I take my phone into the bathroom. 

The clocks fell back the last weekend in October.  The last clock in our house to fall back was the cow cuckoo clock in the office-come-Liam’s-computer room.  It’s not often seen, only heard when the little cow pops out of the doors and moos on the hour.  That clock is mounted on the wall in a space tucked between book and LEGO shelves.  A couple of weeks ago, I recruited Bill to reach up and change it, so I didn’t need to haul out my leg extension.  Great Grandma Whittier kept a step stool in plain sight in her kitchen.  I keep my two-step step ladder in a crevice next to the dryer that can only be reached by moving the trash can which is currently locked in its spot by the tub for fall decorations.  Grandma was practical in keeping her step stool at hand; I want my kitchen void of leg extensions; however, on the days I have that thing at the ready, I’m much more productive when it comes to elevated tasks. Back to clocks, via puzzles…

In the living room, Bill has a jigsaw puzzle going on the coffee table.  He loves to watch TV and work on a puzzle.  I can’t comprehend that much division in brain power.  A few weeks ago, the table sat empty for a couple of days.  Bill was debating on a switch to the 4,000+ piece unfinished Death Star LEGO set in the basement.  The LEGO craze had fizzled in our house by the time we were old enough to feel we could make this investment.  Only about a quarter of the 58 bags of LEGOS had been opened, and only the first level had been built.  The project has sat undone on a shelf in the dining room for a couple of years.  This past summer, I rooted out space in the top shelf of a cupboard in the basement and mothballed the spacecraft.  In November, Bill brought the started structure up, together with the box of pieces.  The Death Star sprung up from the puzzle table in a few days.  The finished 20” x 20”-ish Death Star needed a galaxy in which to comfortably float.  The perfect one was atop the computer hutch in the living room.  That flat surface has always been a decorating challenge.  Our living room clock sat on top of it, and every season I changed the décor around it.  I rarely hit the mark on having a lovely, seasonally staged computer hutch.  We hung the clock on the wall next to the hutch, and now the Death Star floats majestically on that surface.  I’ll never need to decorate that space again. 

With the change out of clock for Death Star, I’ve become acutely aware of how often I looked at that clock.  Now it’s an exciting new little routine for me to glance in that direction, smile and murmur “Death Star o’clock,” then adjust my sight mere inches to the clock on the wall to find the true time.  It’s a straight shot from that clock through the living room, kitchen, and mudroom to where another analog clock is in sight on the far wall of the mudroom.  So from the main kitchen thoroughfare, I have a clock at exactly 180 from my left to my right.  I just discovered that this morning.  I try to keep those two clocks closely anchored to the time on my phone, for they are ground control to Major Malcolm.

In reality, most clocks in our house are decorative, giving only a close estimate of true time.  My phone has become the current day version of what my watch was twenty years ago: accurate, dependable, and always at hand. By far my favorite clock is the one that runs truest: the tidal clock with just one hand that marks incoming and outgoing tides.  In the summer months, I hang it in the kitchen as a ready reference.  Now, it’s by the bathtub and serves as a visual cue for reliving years of summer days at the beach. 

At high tide, the hand points straight up to where a “12” would be on a time-keeping clock.  I see a narrow Wingaersheek Beach in Gloucester, most of it reclaimed by water, with footsteps sinking into soft, hot, dry sand.  The boulders that we climb lay to the right as we face the ocean; their bases are submerged in the surf.  Waves move inland intensely and with purpose: to cover land, wash out sandcastles, and flood sand that has had six hours of sun. 

At low tide, when the arm swings to where the “6” would be on a standard clock, the land widens as the water retreats, yards and yards away from dunes.  The boulders are accessible for climbing and only shallow tidal pools of warm water are left at their base.  With nets and shovels and buckets in hand, kids and adults look for clams and crabs and surprise finds, like starfish or baby sand dollars.  The wet sand packs and hardens making it easier to walk along the beach.  The waves mellow and lap at the land they are moving away from. Ripples form in the hard pack sand as little streams of water work their way back to the ocean.  A meandering line of seaweed and driftwood mark the high water mark, and they work as a kind of cage to hold small treasures—shells, mermaid purses, rocks, and other surprises—in place for beachcombers to ruffle through. 

Meanwhile large empty quahog clam shells, up to six inches wide, are heavy enough to hold tight in the surf while the sand piles around them hiding their true size.  The white humps pop like polka-dots scattered on the beach, and digging them up becomes a game with a bit of suspense in how big each of them might be.  With the unearthing of each quahog shell comes a quick pop of endorphins. 

I never know where a loose thought will take me when I start putting it down on paper.  The idea for this essay came from the comedic annoyance of three timepieces in my bathroom ticking away at different times.  I’m happy that it ended at the beach. At low tide.

The Glow

The glow of my fall tree is quietest at 5 a.m.  Before anyone else is up and before the sun rises.  Normally around this time of year, we go out and find a live dead tree to anchor up in the living room.  We water it regularly like we’re taking care of a delicate rose.  I found a two-foot long funnel that we can sink into the tree at waist height with the end dipping into the water bowl, so rather than bending over and crawling under the tree with a watering can, we can just dump the water in from a standing position.  Despite all the watering, the tree often starts slouching its arms to the ground well before Christmas arrives. 

Looking through Christmas tree photos, I found one from a few years ago that was strange: two skinny fake trees were standing side by side exactly where the live dead one should have been.  That was the year the real tree started shedding its ornaments several days before Christmas day.  Its branches and needles reached to the floor with such gusto that the ornaments simply slid off the ends or hung precariously on the tips as if on the edge of a cliff.  I removed all the baubles, tipped the tree over, and hauled it to the curb. 

While I said I always wanted a real tree, this year I made the move to an artificial one.  The adventure of choosing one on the tree lot in the cold, the setting up—and some years, the falling over—plucking my favorite big tree from the group only for Bill to remind me that we don’t have twelve-foot ceilings, the stuffing of hundreds of lights into the pokey boughs before the ornaments go on… that adventure will not be this year.  Instead, I had a tree of light and hope at the beginning of November; now I have a fall tree, and next week I’ll have a Christmas tree.  Who knows what will become of it after the twelve days of Christmas.  It may very well revert to an undecorated tree of light and hope.

Two weeks ago, I stood at the edge of the Christmas tree display in Home Depot trying to pick the right tree.  I knew the height I needed: less than eight feet.  I knew the width: round enough to fill the window spot and narrow enough so that we could walk between the tree and couch into the living room.  I knew it needed to look real: no poles or wires waving at me from the inside.  The choice came down between two trees: one with 1,400 lights and another with 4,000.  I had never had more than 1,000 lights on the trees of my past, so I was pretty sure that 1,400 would be plenty, but that 4,000-light tree was spectacularly twinkly and mesmerizing.

Standing there too long in a mask and with my glasses fogging up, I contemplated the kind of light I wanted to make with this investment.  The gambit of cataloged light adjectives squarely fell into two camps: that which I detested and that which sparked warmth.  In any kind of meditative or mindfulness practice referencing light, I translate whatever the instructor suggests envisioning into a tempered light.  Bright, radiating, white, exploding, and beaming light do not energize me.  All of those point to burning hot summer days where the only good place to be outdoors is near a body of water.  A pool or the beach.  Beyond that summer association, the reference of those powerful rays of light remind me of radiation treatment.  I’m thankful I had that in my wheelhouse a decade ago, but those descriptors of light fall too close and joggle the memory box.  Imagining a beam of white light shining up and down my chakras takes me out of the moment quicker than would a bucket of ice water thrown over my head.

This past summer I took the boys to a swimming pool several times a week.  That was a great reprieve to be in the sun with a cooling pool to jump into when the heat got too intense.  We never went mid-day when the crowds were big, rather we went late in the afternoon and normally left the pool around 8 p.m. as the lifeguards played “Closing Time” over the speakers.  We trudged out in wet swim gear, towels wrapped around us, and bags in hand.  It was a fifteen minute drive home where we could shower and dry off. 

As the season waned, we watched summer slide away by the sunlight shortening on the drive home.  I came to a red light one evening and my eye was drawn to the white, slatted United Methodist Church steeple to my left just across the intersection.  The west side was draped in a lovely hue of golden pink.  The glow of color was divine.  I imagined the setting sun’s rays hitting the top of the steeple then being diffused into a flood of ambient light washing down a white canvas.  Cascading light.  With no overbearing intensity.  Firm enough to light the sky and the land.  Indirect but present.  Quiet and peaceful. 

I stood solid in indecision until I paired that steeple light with each of the Christmas trees.  Both were sparkly, but the intensity of the lights soon settled into those two camps of light adjectives.  That comparison finally made the decision an easy one. The glow of the 1,400-light tree will take us through the holiday season and the dark winter, and perhaps it will pull us right into spring.

May you find just the right light as we head into this holiday season.

Too Much

(Written mid-October through mid-November)

Before Halloween, I cleared the shelves on either side of the fireplace.  They were laden with unread, unused, and unwanted books.  Twenty books on New England travels: from best restaurants in Boston and coastal walks in Maine to hiking the Green Mountains in Vermont and directions to waterfalls in the Northeast.  Stacks of games that no one played.  Old photos that no one looked at.  The stuff on the shelves didn’t elicit calm and welcoming, but rather it all looked like too much.  Too much left undone.

A healthy clearing between seasons feels good.  Not just an in-depth dusting.  An absolute removal of everything.  The shelves sat empty for two weeks.  A little sad looking but also comforting.  Tabula rasa: a blank slate.  Like clearing the cobwebs before the headlong plunge into the holidays and winter. 

Now the shelves are thickly settled with Halloween decorations.  Thickly settled, that quirky New England road sign posted in rural areas where buildings are less than two hundred feet apart for at least a quarter mile.  Often times it doesn’t look thickly settled as the homes sit far off the road and are hidden by trees.  The coy thing about these signs is in their legal assertation: the yellow “thickly settled” sign is code for “30 mph speed limit.”  No where is that visually stated on the road.  Quaint wording reminiscent of pilgrim days? Or tricky speed trap?

In the coming week, I’ll dismantle and re-tub the Halloween decorations.  Eight tubs of black, orange, and purple; cats, pumpkins, skeletons, and scarecrows.  And the shelves will stay sparse until the ten tubs of Christmas enter from stage right. Another intermission in the middle of too much.

Sometime in the last year, my husband Bill and I discovered Jamie Oliver’s Show on PBS, “Quick & Easy Food.” I remember when Jamie, a young English chef, first came on the food scene back in the late nineties.  His spunky young energy flew in the face of stodgy chefs. 

Bill and I have gone through many iterations of cooking, and our spice cupboard reflects it.  It takes up one cupboard in our kitchen and the spices are alphabetized.  We don’t follow the recommended shelf life on spices because we know that they can be resuscitated with a twist of thyme between the palms or a dry roast of cardamom in our small skillet dedicated to dry roasting.  That spice cupboard is like a desert full of wildflower seeds burrowed into the sand and lying in wait for the every-20-year rain.  Yet to cook an intricate dish means to go on an archaeological dig through the bottles, and undoubtedly, among the 75 bottles, there will be one spice missing.  Thus, it was only a momentary surprise that when we looked for Italian seasoning yesterday so my husband Bill could make his legendary Bolognese sauce that the cupboard was bare of that ingredient.  Here’s where the beauty of Jamie’s quick food lies: he uses just five ingredients, plus a handful of pantry staples: salt, pepper, extra virgin olive oil, and red wine vinegar.

Our 14-year-old son Liam saunters through the kitchen on occasion with a request for ingredients to try a new recipe.  Most recently he wanted to make muffins—make that one muffin, in a mug, in the microwave.  “I just need some self-rising flour and vanilla ice cream.”  And indeed, with those simple ingredients, he replicated a food hack he had seen online.  The result was a bit rubbery but edible to him.  Jamie Oliver’s five ingredient recipes are like food hacks for grown-ups.

As some people are drawn to cozy British mysteries for the cinematography of the land or the Marvelous Mrs. Mazel for the stunning period dress, I gape bright-eyed at the tight shots of a thick steak being rolled in pepper on all sides and at the sight of garlic and sage hitting hot olive oil. It’s like a balm for the senses.  When my son Liam was little and his eczema raised its ugly head, I would cover him in thick skin cream, Vaseline, or a few dabs of Cortizone.  If he had a sore spot, I would tell him that we just needed to put on a little “shield,” and he would feel better.  I would look at the spot and decide which version of ointment would work best.  As he grew older, he didn’t complain about the hurt, he only asked for the fix.  “I need some shield.”  Jamie in the kitchen reminds me of the “shield”—that which protects.

A few weeks ago, up in the middle of the night unable to sleep, I was watching one of Jamie’s episodes.  I smiled seeing a close-up on a beautifully clean counter of cilantro, butternut squash cubes, a whole chicken, a bottle of red curry paste, and a can of coconut milk. The few ingredients for “Thai Red Chicken Soup.” When the stores opened later that morning, I nipped out for the five ingredients. 

The beauty of this was the ease of preparation.  A little chop of the cilantro stems, a big chop of the squash, a rinse of the chicken, a pop of the lid on the curry paste, and a twist of the can opener to free the coconut milk was all the prep required.  I dropped that whole chicken into a stock pot and dumped everything else in on top of it.  Then I simmered it for 1 ½ hours.  That was it – done. 

Twenty years ago, Bill and I would have made an afternoon out of making red curry paste.  With a little rummage around online, I just found one recipe for this paste that included fifteen ingredients ranging from fresh lemongrass and fresh turmeric to avocado oil and coconut sugar.  I read that prep as four grocery stores and at least one ingredient substitution.  Too much. 

While chopped cilantro stems flavored the soup as it cooked, the leaves were reserved for serving. I took a handful of freshly chopped cilantro leaves and liberally sprinkled them over my bowl of soup.  I have a special connection to cilantro that’s hard to put into words—if you grew up with cattle, you have a better chance of understanding.  When cows graze, they lower their majestic heads to the ground where their big teeth rip off a hunk of grass, and then they slowly lift their heads and chew and chew and chew.  Standing still, looking around unhurriedly, they chew and chew and chew.  Cattle don’t have huge food choices, but what they have, they chew.  I’ll stop short of explaining that chewing as it relates to their digestion, for the important point here is their calm and quiet happiness in eating grass. Cilantro is to me what grass is to cows. Cilantro, balm, and shield are one when there is too much.

 ***

Click here for Jamie Oliver’s “Thai Red Chicken Soup” recipe—and a picture of the final product. Jamie Oliver’s show airs on PBS; however, I couldn’t find a link to this particular episode. 

Looking for an Essay

At 5 a.m., there are no leaf blowers revved up in the neighborhood or motorcycles storming up the hill outside our house.  Even the leaves are still without the squirrels shuffling through them emulating the sounds of big game creeping up behind me.  It’s dark and foggy with streetlights showing clouds of moisture at ground level.  Before sunrise may be the place where I can best focus on writing. 

This is my son Will’s senior year in high school, so we are marching through the corridor where so many others have forged through before us: college application season.  For two months, the word “essay” has loomed dark and large.  Following the school’s college counselor’s advice, last week Will applied “early action” to the colleges that have that optional deadline.  The counselor’s strategy is for students to apply early and find out in December if they’re accepted anywhere.  If they are, that gives them a bit of confidence to forge on with the other schools that have January 1st regular decision deadlines—unless students decide that one of the school’s that accepts them early is where they want to go.  Now, come December, with the Common App and the essay completed, applying will be easier.  Except for those occasional schools that require a supplemental essay or two.  Or six.  It’s draining to think about someone else’s essay deadline, so much so that the keenness for my own faltered.  And the word “essay” itself lost its artful meaning when it time-traveled back to high school, away from the confines of writing as a passion. 

So at 5 a.m., I’m looking for the place to write and for the passion to reignite.  And while the fingers didn’t meet the keyboard over the last several weeks, ideas sputtered about at various intersections throughout the days and weeks. I’m going back over a list that I muddled together.  It’s not complete as I do not always have a pen and paper to my right at these intersections where inspiration hits. And, given my undeniable ability to stay in the present, the glowing ember may burn out before I can record it.  A few months ago, I was having lunch with a friend who had been on her fair share of meds that affected her memory.  I related to how she was feeling as chemo cobwebs still cloud my mind.  We were talking about mindfulness.  I said that I should feel at ease with mindfulness because I can’t remember things that have already happened nor things that I need to do in the future, so I’m left squarely in the present.

I’ve scanned through these jotted, fragmented ideas and future essay titles.  Few make sense.  It’s as if I wrote them in code so no one could steal the ideas.  I thought there would be more inspiration there; rather, I pick up on two themes of bright light and unending noise.  I read through the notes as a whole and think perhaps they are pointing to a larger overarching theme—of seeking peace and calm.  I’ll keep poking through this double-sided page of thoughts and maybe next time around, there will be clarification.  For now, I have the somewhat nauseating feeling I get when I’m looking for that incredibly special gift I purchased two months early but now cannot find, for it’s hidden in a safe spot.

Fall in Small Vistas

This week, I’m struggling to get words on paper. On Tuesday, I had a short note written but then with a brush across the mousepad on my new computer, I deleted it. I’m making the real switch from my old computer with Windows 7 to the new one with Windows 10. To make this happen, I’ve turned to the wizardry of YouTube, where so many questions can be answered. There's something comforting about typing in “how do I disable the mousepad” and finding the immediate answer via a video. That means I’m not the first to experience this.

In between these online tutorials—and with a hit of early fall humidity, I’ve been taking photos looking out the windows of my house. I don’t have endless sky horizons of Iowa here in Massachusetts; instead I’ve created distractions at many of the windows. With the help of nature—and an occasional chainsaw—the vistas change every season.

Check out these new photos in my New England Gallery… Fall: Inside Looking Out.

Human Propulsion

Objects propel creativity.  A whale tooth found on the beach.  Newly picked sweetcorn piled high in coolers at Mom and Dad’s.  My grandma’s tablecloth.  Roasted potatoes.  Hydrangeas.  Yesterday, shimmers of rainbow light dancing on the dining room walls—set off by a crystal rotating in the window, powered by a little solar panel gathering high afternoon rays from a southern fall sun.

I collect objects with muse power.  Sometimes just etching the sight in my mind and more often taking a photo, not trusting the etching to hold tight.  Sometimes I pick up the “thing” and keep it.  Having it nearby keeps the simmer going for what I might one day want to say about it.  Trusting that a small glance or a touch will stir the muse energy.  As much as I love simple, sparse, streamlined décor, my propensity to collect defies this genre of home decorating.  The mind etchings and photos are not as powerful reminders as are things.  While someone might see an embroidered garden hanging on the office wall or a quilted typewriter on a little pillow that’s perched on a chair, I see the faces of my friends Deb and Marie—the artists who created these gems—and stories about quilting and mouse capers. I hear women’s laughter around a dinner table, and perhaps even louder, I hear the natural early morning quiet sitting amongst three friends, nestled on a cabin porch by a lake.

Dried hydrangeas flock the mantel and fill vases around the house.  I’m fascinated by the science behind drying these multi-petaled flowers, and my mind goes back to a small house in the town where I went to school.  Two elderly men lived there; it was on the main drag and next door to the bank where I worked as a teller during high school.  Their house smelled of cigars or pipes. And became what I thought of as a smell synonymous with old men.  Didn’t they have cigar smoking stands next to their chairs?  Were they 50 years old?  Or 90?  Brothers? I don’t remember who these men were; that will be the topic of conversation when I talk to Mom and Dad later.  Few people can follow my threads of childhood inquiry like my mom and dad, with just a few words: “Who were those two old men that lived on 6th Street next to the bank?”  I’m guessing they’ll know who I’m talking about, and they’ll have the details to fill in my blanks.  On the north side of the men’s house, these enigmatic bushes grew with balls of creamy flowers, touched with a breath of light green.  Hydrangeas are prolific in Massachusetts. I don’t remember them growing as abundantly in Iowa.  The dichotomy of these hydrangea bushes-–abundant here and not so much there—remind me of the vast differences between Iowa and Massachusetts—the climate, the culture, the people. 

So you see, the hydrangea on a shelf to my right, sent me down that little hydrangea packed walk.  Those thought journeys are exhilarating to a writer.  And the art of writing lies in waiting for the moment when the story is ready to be told.  It might take a while to fully develop, like a bubbling sourdough starter sitting on the counter.  Or it might take many experiences of the same ilk to finally see clarification of what words need to land on paper.  I’m reminded of these as I sit in the cool basement drinking coffee from a cup with a chip in the rim.  It was with this cup that the essay from summer to fall with a pocketful of prayer, fell to fruition—a reflection on that annual transition.  I remember well where I was and how I felt when I wrote this, so as I searched for it this morning, I was shocked to discover that I wrote it on September 4, 2014.  Six years later, I still connect with the sentiment of that refreshing seasonal change. 

When an essay stays intact and relevant over time, it’s “evergreen”—a literary term I learned a few years.  It’s good to be evergreen in the business of writing non-fiction.  I liken it to dressing not in the newest trendy clothes but rather having a solid stash of black tops and comfortable khaki or denim bottoms—and a set of go-to earrings.  Consistent.  Stable. Unmoving.

For Pete’s sake.  I’m miles away from what thought I was writing about today. This.  This is the thing that set me on the current path:

I have held onto this little piece of plastic for eight years.  In 2012, my son Will was in elementary school and entranced by space exploration.  He built rockets out of toilet tube rolls and launched them with black powder that Bill helped him buy at the hobby store.  He drew Saturn V’s and taped them to the walls.  We couldn’t feed Will enough space knowledge.  In the middle of this era, I found the item above in the playroom.  I assumed Will had found it on a playground and brought it home.  I have kept this little bit of plastic, wondering what “human propulsion” test some scientist named Nathan had been conducting.  And thinking how fitting it was that Will had brought something home with those words on it.  I envisioned rockets propelling humans into space.  I kept this piece of plastic thinking I would some day write the story that goes with it.

In a recent stirring of things in boxes and on shelves, I came across this tag again.  I put it on a shelf in plain sight so as to jostle words.  This morning, I sat at my table with little thought about what I would write.  I glanced at the shelves with the vase of hydrangeas and found this piece of hard plastic.  Perhaps today? 

Being a non-fiction writer, I started by researching exactly what the company makes.  And now, I feel like my high-flying hot air balloon has a gigantic hole in the beautiful nylon.  I akin this feeling to going to the Harry Potter studio in England where the magic of flying dissolved at the illumination of how the “magic” of a green screen works. 

Will did not prophetically collect this piece of plastic.  In 2012, I walked 26 miles in Boston’s Avon Walk.  In preparation for the walk, I purchased a “waist pak”—formerly known as a bum bag—with a water bottle on either side of the zippered pouch.  And the tag sewn into the seam of the pak has the orange rectangle with three arrows stamped onto it: the logo of Nathan Human Propulsion Laboratories.  For eight years, I’ve held onto a plastic hanger that attached my bum bag to a hook on a water bottle display in a store.

Shall I keep this hanger?  Tack it to the wall to remind me… of what? That things aren’t always what they seem?  That my 8-year-old was an aspiring rocket scientist?  That my imagination is healthy?

Now that the essay has been written, the value of this piece of plastic is diminishing, melting away like the wicked witch of the West.  It will most likely end up in the recycle bin.

But I’m still drinking from that chipped coffee cup.

Constant Companions: Potatoes

Oh, potatoes, how I love thee!  From ping-pong-ball-sized purple, yellow, and white to giant baked potatoes that serve two to shredded hash in the freezer and mashed spuds on the stove top.  Potatoes have been our constant companion over the last several months because everyone who lives in this house likes them! 

Serving them in their simplest forms of boiled, mashed, and baked does not appeal to Liam, but put a bit of crackle on the edges and everyone is scooping from the pan.  As Grand Marshal of Nourishment, I feel my heart sing when we have a dinner in which the main and side appeals to each person—enter grilled steaks (without a grill fire finishing them at 800 degrees) and roasted potatoes (perfectly cut into a 3/4-inch dice).

My first forage into hash browns on the stove left Liam asking, “Whoa, it’s so good!  What is it?”  And that initial shred intro left Liam working like a scientist in a potato lab to perfect homemade hash.  We researched the McDonald’s hash brown and found a recipe that called for a parboil of peeled potatoes, a shred in the food processor, an egg, and a browning in a skillet with salt and pepper.  Liam wondered what parboil meant, and I guessed, rather than looking up the recipe for parboil.  The result was the shredding of overcooked potatoes that surpassed the definition of parboil.  We hashed out shredded mashed potatoes in the skillet.  “Not quite there yet, is it, Mom?” “No,” I confirmed.

For roast potatoes, we have moved away from parboiling then roasting large pieces, finding it quicker to cut medium-sized potatoes into small pieces that will roast at 425 in about 25 minutes—with perhaps a last minute broil to brown the tops just a smidge more. Wedges of fries work, but they need to be flipped midway through.  After multiple roasted potato tastings, Liam decided his favorite roasted potato is the ¾-inch cube as it has the most surface area for a good crunch to form; plus those small pieces have the least amount of mushy potato inside. This size is my go-to as well because they don’t need to be flipped mid-roast, and that maneuver is too futzy for me.  The key to making this roast appeal to everyone is having just the right amount of olive oil: enough to provide a glistening layer that crisps up but not so much that they are swimming.  The combo of potatoes, olive oil, and salt have household-wide palette appeal.

If we go for a mash, which is Will’s favorite preparation, then we put a second pot on to boil noodles for Liam.  Sometimes the main dish recipe results in a beautiful sauce for the potatoes that is decadent for Bill and me, and full disclosure, Bill is the chef supreme when it comes to making those sauces.  Again, that scene gets a bit futzy for me as I hurl food into the dinner feeding trough.  Barring a sauce, my potato heaven is a deep indentation made in a mound of potatoes to make a melting pot for a small dollop of butter, followed by a generous pepper dousing.  That is a plate of comfort food.  On the other hand, Will doesn’t want to see that drippy butter—I’m pretty sure he does not realize that butter is used in the making of mash.  He likes shredded cheddar cheese, chopped bacon, and the salt shaker near the pot of potatoes.  I used to twice bake potatoes with these same ingredients, but after watching Will just eat the insides, the twice-baked effort seemed redundant.

To peel or not to peel?  That is the question.  For the mash purist, peel.  For the woman preparing the mash, do not peel.  The unpeeled is not accepted as whole-heartedly as the pure form.  Most of us aren’t big on leftover mashed potatoes, however, one morning I pulled a small bowl out of skin-filled mash and ate it cold for breakfast.  It was like a potato salad without the calories; I let my imagination run with it, for I do not make potato salad.  There is no serving size control on that particular dish.

Normally, due to lack of planning, I use the microwave to bake potatoes.  For Will who doesn’t eat the skins, this isn’t a big deal, for the soft white of the potato seems about the same whether microwaved or baked—unless we run a little short on time in the microwave.  The resulting slight crunch cut-with-a-knife potato makes for a complete waste of material and time.

I’ve made roasted potatoes a few times on the stove top: with a bag of small potatoes, a couple tablespoons of butter, a swirl of olive oil, and pinch of salt. When I steamed mussels last week, I thought this would be a good tater for everyone.  While Bill and I ate mussels, the boys could have burgers, and we could all have potatoes.  As the potatoes were sizzling away, I gave them a good shake now and then to keep them roasting evenly.  I never take the lid off as that releases the steam which I feel is integral in the cooking process. 

As the burgers came off the grill, the mussels popped open in the pan, and the potatoes smelled done.  Do you know that moment when all prepared food comes together at the same time?  It’s an art form and a rarity when I’m in the kitchen.  “We can have the corn on the cob after the steak and potatoes.”  “Do you want your salad first?  The gas went out on the grill and the steaks are only halfway cooked.”  “Roasted asparagus is just as good at room temperature as it is straight from the oven!” 

My reaction to the potatoes in the pan when I scooped off the lid was a bit more intense—with hardly a salvageable work-around.  I’m unsure what I said, but my granddad’s voice simply observed, “When it’s brown it’s cooking and when it’s black it’s done!”  They were done. I’m guessing I went to the grill for the burgers and forgot to shake the potatoes before and after that deck visit.  The potatoes were blackened half way up from where they had been resting on the bottom of the pan.  I need to consult the actual Ina Garten recipe for cooking time and temperature before trying this recipe again.

Bill’s voice picked up where Granddad’s assertion stopped.  “They’ll be fine!”  Bill and I scooped them onto our plates, cut off the bottom half, and ate the tops of the poor little things.  That evening—as he does most every evening—Bill cleaned up from dinner.  The next morning, I found a clear glass bowl of optimistically-packed leftover burnt potatoes.  I shook my head and said, “Inedible.”

Bless him.

Algebraic Revelations

Last night Liam asked me for some help on one of the problems in his summer algebra assignment.  I stood over his desk and admitted, “You need to get Dad or Will to help you.”

I’m confident I could get to “x” in a simple algebra equation; after all, I spent hours after school with my high school algebra teacher working on that trick.  However, there were more words than numbers in this problem.  It wasn’t a simple solve “x” situation.  And they were complicated words that I knew the definition of in the grammatical English sense of the word, but not in the mathematical sense of the word.  I hovered at Liam’s request as he talked out the problem.  After a couple minutes, I excused myself saying I was not the one he needed at this moment.  “Send Dad up.”

“Bill, Liam needs your help with algebra.  Could you also please show him how to tie a tie while you’re up there?”  Today is school picture day, and the kids need to wear button-up shirts and real ties.  Throughout grade school and middle school, Liam managed with tie hacks: clip-ons and snap-togethers.   However, he’s a freshman this year in a new school.  That real tie is symbolic for so many nouns in his life this week with the adjective of “new.”

Liam has moved to the high school where Will goes.  Will, who is a senior this year.  Another kid with a whole lot of “new” this year.  Although, the adjective “last” is more prevalent in his thoughts.  On Labor Day, we were at the pool for the last day; virtual school started the following day.  “Mom, do you know that this is my last day of summer as a high school student?”

Fifteen minutes after I left Liam’s bedroom math lab, my husband and my two sons were huddled in the dining room speaking in tongue.  Algebraic 2 Honors tongue. 

I noticed this from where I was sitting in the kitchen, minding my own business.  I heard those three minds click together like cogs in a wheel.  Seeing and hearing this reminded me that these “lasts” and these “news” are no longer mine.  Will and Liam are working their way towards becoming independent young men—and their business is theirs to own. 

And mine is mine.

Do you see the goldfinch? While it’s the state bird of Iowa, this one is hanging out and eating my zinnia seeds in Massachusetts.



A Cool Room

I’ve been writing for a decade, and as much as life moves on and changes, the ebb and flow of the seasons bring about repetitive themes, and I think, “I’ve already written about that—how can I tell it any differently?”  Fortunately for me, I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, so on occasion, I give it a go through the lens of today.  Take, for instance, the heat and humidity of summer.  It’s not my cup of tea.  I become lethargic in this season.  I’ve told you that in a myriad of ways over the last decade.  Yet through the close, muggy lens of this summer comes something new to share.

I run ten degrees warmer than my husband Bill and my sons, Will and Liam.  They prefer the indoor main floor temperature to be set at 80 degrees.  On balmy days of relative 100-degree heat, I find the room in the basement to be my retreat.  I close the door then run full throttle the built-in wall air-conditioning unit.  Not only does it cool the room, it also puts a good dose of white noise into the air.  The combination lulls me into a focused state.

One of the first days I discovered this, I wrote for a solid hour, nonstop.  Then a new yet familiar noise started to compete with that of the air-conditioner.  I turned my head to the left and right thinking my eyes or ears might figure it out.  For a moment, I resolved that the sound must be coming from some activity upstairs.  Only when the noise grew a bit more intense did I recognize it: the baseboard heat had kicked on in the room.  Indeed, the thermostat for the heat was set at 62 degrees.  I turned that dial down as low as it would go, to 40 degrees, and let the air-conditioner belt out its song of summer reprieve.

Regaining Routine

Dad’s birthday is this week, and he’ll be 77.  I think of that as I write because some ambitious sort is outside my office door pounding in fence posts at 8:00 a.m.  When we lived in Rockford, Illinois, Mom and Dad would drive out from Iowa for weekend visits.  Their visit meant getting a lot of stuff done. They wake up and go.  On a Saturday morning at 6:00, I would put Dad on a short leash until 8:00.; then I’d let him crank up the lawn mower.  Like an overly excited Labrador Retriever, he’d pace at the door until he could do something loud outside.  Meanwhile, Mom would have my china closet doors open and be moving glasses and plates to the sink for their annual only-when-Mom-visits bath. 

This morning, I resisted the urge to turn on the box.  I wandered around until 7:00, and then I quietly clattered the clean pans and utensils from the counter where they dried overnight to the cupboards and drawers.  I moved to the laundry room, folded all the clothes hanging on my big wooden drying rack, and folded that monster up to rest in the back corner until needed again.  It feels good to accomplish something first thing in the morning before the world comes to life.  I’m my mom and dad’s daughter.

Next, I went to the basement. To the above-mentioned office. The replacement for my quiet room at the library.  It’s Tuesday, and this is who I am on Tuesdays: the writer, Linda Malcolm.  I’m used to writing at a public table, not a private desk.  I gleaned the crop of my random crap from the tabletop and now have only the essentials.  A drink.  The computer.  A notebook in which to jot down interrupting thoughts. A pen.    

Back in early March, I was interviewed by Elizabeth Christopher, a writer who serves on the board of Follow Your Art Community Studios in Melrose, MA.  Elizabeth has written a series of blog posts on “The Many Paths to Publishing.”  We talked in depth about my writing and publishing process.  Today, I find sensible reminders in my voice via Elizabeth’s words. Here’s the link to the interview: “The Many Paths to Publishing, Part 2: A Conversation with Linda Malcolm.” 

I’m entering the reboot phase—for writing new essays and for reaching new readers who are waiting to read Cornfields to Codfish.

Mish Mash August 2020

I’m burrowed away in the basement in one of those funky rooms that’s undefinable. I’m sitting at a 2’ x 4’ portable table against a light yellow wall that’s been scratched by items coming and going.  When we moved into the house, all of our boxes of unnecessary stuff filled this room for nearly a year.  Now half a wall is populated by boxes and drawers of questionable memorabilia: newspaper clippings, papers from conferences, photographs, architectural projects from the kids’ elementary days—in general, riffraff that has not steeped long enough to merit being pitched.  It reminds me of the vegetable drawer.  Things that are aged—but not green, mushy, or growing sprouts—get a fair chance.  Or those funny weeds that pose as flowers throughout the growing season, only to be identified in late August as impostors.  They soar to the sky with confidence mimicking a perennial, only to peter out with no blooms like a dud firecracker.

This is the staging room for tubs of seasonal decorations coming into the house from the barn loft.  During the months of September through January, I call this the “room where all the magic happens.”  Then, it’s a disaster zone with tub lids laying around and wrinkled paper in heaps from unwrapped glass ornaments. However, it’s a snug place and would be a safe refuge in which to avoid tornadoes.  A rarity here in Massachusetts but for the possible spin cranked up by a passing hurricane or tropical storm. 

The hard black shiny ceramic tiled floor is cold to my bare feet.  I have a throw rug laying under the table.  Insulating my feet, the flimsy rug swims on top of the slick tile, and my toes cannot resist the urge to move it around feeling grooves of the joining grout underneath.  I could see an 8’ x 10’ area rug working nicely here.  Big enough to carve out an office footprint, yet small enough so as not to infringe on the storage space and not needing to go under heavy storage shelves a foot away from my table. 

The hydrangeas are hanging on porcelain door knobs from my great aunt’s house. Harikleia Kuliopolos painted the Greek scenes on the shelf; she paints light spectacularly.

Given the close proximity of a predicted, glancing hurricane, I hacked some hydrangeas off the bush and made bouquets that will dry.  I’m trying two methods: One group of stems is in water and will dry when the water evaporates.  The other is a big branch hanging upside down to dry more quickly.  A simple science experiment to see which ones look the best in September.

During this dry, humid summer, I water the flower gardens nearly every morning, but I have not weeded or taken out stray saplings.  I like to say I have a lot of “undergrowth” this season; that sounds better than “weeds.”  In early summer, I downloaded a plant identifying app on my phone.  I can take a shot of any plant, and whether it’s flowering or not, the app identifies the plant in seconds.  Three saplings out front have unique yet familiar leaves and are growing taller than usual since I haven’t ventured out with my pruning shears.  A couple weeks ago, I pulled my phone out of my back pocket, where it was happily broadcasting Christmas music to my neck speaker, and in the app, I snapped photos of these three saplings. 

A black walnut.  A shag bark hickory. An American elm.  All grow in black Iowa dirt.  That’s the closest I’ve been to Iowa trees since November 2019.

Yet, onward.

Playlists vs Albums

Voice commands to Siri do not work well in my van.  Will was in the front seat with me on a trek last week, so I asked him to find and play Jack Johnson’s album Upside Down on my phone.  With quick teen fingers, he tapped out the search, and when the song list popped up, he tapped “Shuffle.”

Shuffle? I’ve never tapped shuffle.  I play albums.  If I want the shuffle genre, I listen to the radio.  However, I rarely do that because of the commercials and the interrupting on-going commentary.  If my goal is to listen to music, I do not want the interjections of someone’s speaking voice.  There was a time in the hour-plus Rockford-to-Chicago commute some twenty years ago that I connected with radio personalities, but my drives are shorter now.  And the in-car music options are supposedly broader—particularly if you have access to a cell tower such that you can grab your music from a cloud.

My husband Bill and I have eclectic music tastes.  In the 1980’s, when it was common to give CDs to people as birthday or Christmas presents, we had a CD tower in the living room that held 100 disks.  They were roughly categorized by genres like blues, classic rock, jazz, new age, musicals, plus a couple country titles and multiple Christmas CDs. 

When we played music in our house back then, it was a sensory experience:  To study and scan that rack of titles with the familiar fonts and designs on the spines of the plastic cases was to invite previews of sound before a selection was made.  Then, with the visual choice confirmed, there was scraping of the selected hard plastic case pulled out of the metal slot, comfort in seeing familiar art on the album cover before hinging open the lid and clicking the disk up and off of the hub.  Then, finally the glide of the CD into the slot.  That whole experience reminds me of going to a video rental store on a Sunday afternoon to look for a movie to watch that night.  Choosing a video in the store and finding a CD from the tower were journeys into entertainment.  Overtures before the main event.

Albums, as they were, put the musicians and their labels in control of how we consumed music.  From the art on the album cover to the order of the songs, we took the product from the creators and popped it into a CD player where their art was delivered to us.  We listened to the albums front to back while we were driving in the car, cooking dinner, sitting around on a lazy Sunday afternoon, or having a party.  And the songs were not independent of one another; they were webbed together as one so that when one ended our mind could find the first note of the next song before it was strummed, plucked, or tapped.  Then we hummed with the first note as it was struck.

Whether Genesis’ Trick of the Tail or Wind and Wuthering blew through the summer air of a top-down convertible, there was a cadence to the progression of the music as it was left untouched for some fifty minutes.  One artist onstage riding the airwaves for that length of time: a musician’s dream.  A musician’s dusty memory?  I recently read a headline saying Sheryl Crow was no longer going to record albums.  But she’s so young – and talented, why would she stop now?  I continued reading to see that she was only going to release singles as the market has changed in how listeners consume.  Thanks to the fingertip convenience of the likes of Apple, Spotify, Pandora, and IHeart, albums are an expiring art form. 

I know changes happen; I’m not naïve.  However, the CD – and LPs, cassettes, and 8-tracks pre-CD – gave musicians a full artistic stage.  This new rhythm of consumption reminds me of a dystopian setting where novelists lose the ability to publish books – where only short stories are allowed to be read. 

For me, Keith Urban’s hook on his newest album Graffiti U was “Coming Home” – and on his previous album, Ripcord, “Wasted Time.”  Both songs worked their magic on me: I bought the albums, albeit via a platform.  And playing the albums straight through, holy cow, I heard that man play outrageous guitar!  So, I know this musician as a vocalist and a guitarist.  Will this experience happen in the future with the consumer’s ability to build an “album” by grabbing their favorite hits from multiple artists as they build their playlists, rather than delving into an album?  The playlist is grandstanding over the album.  I see Sheryl’s point.

I admit that I have the start of a couple potential playlists rattling through my head as though in a rock tumbler. Keith Urban’s “Coming Home” and Philip Phillips “Home.”  Guns’n’Roses “Sweet Child of Mine” and Keith Urban’s “Wasted Time.”  Sometimes I think about creating collections that remind me of where or how I grew up.  However, I haven’t had the best of luck in creating playlists.  Last November, bumbling and stumbling between my library and the cloud, I started a Christmas music playlist, but it disappeared into the abyss. Perhaps it’s floating high on a summery cirrus or catapulting in the thick air between the walls of a stormy cumulonimbus.  

And yet, truly, I have no inclination to attempt a playlist again soon.  The time has come to bring the tower down from the attic, give it a scrub, and load it up.  There’s a CD player in the corner of the kitchen with a dusty slot.  And when a CD goes in, the machine’s default is to start with the first song and proceed chronologically through the artist’s dream.

Squirrels and Gum

Last week, two events sparked in me an urge to write.    

One morning, I came out to the porch in the morning to try to write and found flecks of dirt on my bistro table’s cloth, two poop pellets on my chair cushion, and dirt spread over the cotton runner woven in 1996 by an old woman in Greece, a widow dressed head-to-toe in black.  The pretense of neither a porch nor nostalgic linens is understood by a squirrel—identified as such by a google search for “squirrel poop photo.”

Right in the middle of the big mother-in-law tongue plant, the squirrel had dug a hole in the dirt.  Did the squirrel think he planted a walnut there?  Was he scouting for a place to hide one this fall?  None of the plants have been ripped out, but their roots have been lightly roto-tilled.  Motivated by this event, I set up a table and chair in the basement facing a blank wall in an attempt to replicate the quiet room at the library where I used to write. This is a storage/hobby/multi-purpose room. But all that is at my back. Facing forward is a plain wall, blank with possibilities. And the table is pellet free. And one essay has now been written there.

After this turd discovery, I switched gears and took the July Jalopy out for a little spin to run errands.  Bill has owned a convertible ever since I’ve known him—31 years.  Both cars were introduced to society in James Bond movies.  Neither were monetary investments but rather sunny weather accessories.  Air flows through freely.  Pollen and dust land thickly.  They are meant to be driven in the sun, or in my case yesterday, between the rain drops.  The current little green jalopy is a stick shift.  Each year it physically ages a bit.  Two years ago, I noticed the seat slides a couple inches when braking or accelerating.  Last year, on the first drive of the season, I went to shift gears, and the knob from the gear shift came off in my hand.  This year, the driver’s side arm rest that you would normally grab to close the door has become unattached from the door.  Not a big deal as the top is always down, so we just make a LEGO-shaped hand to clamp over the door and pull it shut.

I turned 54 this month and while driving this low-to-the-ground ride, I wondered how many more years I could rise up from the seat to exit this jalopy.  It’s a lot like getting out of a kayak.  At the drug store, I reached down just above my knees to lock the trunk—the only place to store valuables in a perpetually-top-down convertible.  As I turned away from the car, one foot hesitated on the pivot.  I knew before I looked.  Gum.  I grumbled as I drug my foot like a maimed animal across the parking lot.  A woman passed me and our eyes met as we simultaneously said, “Gum.”  “That’s the worst!” she decreed with compassionate exhaustion in her voice. I nodded.

I continued to the curb in front of the entrance.  There I stopped and raked the bottom of my foot across the top of the curb several times. A couple came out of the store and looked at me.  Again, “Gum,” was uttered from all three of us. They shook their heads in disgust as I continued scraping.

Squirrels on the porch and gum on the bottom of a shoe are minor existential problems.  But as for the gum situation? That is one of humanity’s lowest common denominators.

A Midsummer Day

I’ve always said I love the four seasons and would find it hard living somewhere without four distinct seasons.  If I look a bit deeper, what I really like is the change of seasons: the shutting off of one and the opening of another.  At nearly 54 years old, I see that the four seasons are actually splintered into subsets.  About a week ago, we moved from early summer to midsummer.  Despite heat and humidity of this new sub-season, I’m yearning for the outdoors: away from visual reminders of projects and chores.

Today, I’m parked on the porch, perched at the typewriter.  Oh, I see my folly: I’m perched at the computer—and still wishing that I could find perfect alliteration with perched.  Whether typewriter or computer falls through my fingertips, neither begin with a “p” to sit nicely with parked, porch, and perched.

Since the turn to midsummer, each morning I get a jump on the sun and water the flower beds before ten; this guarantees that I’ll be in the shade of the maples surrounding our property – not standing in the sun with water spraying from a hose and sweat dripping down from my knees.  After hauling a 100-foot hose around for a half-hour to water, I return inside to where I’ve adjusted the air conditioner for what was the early morning “working-in-the-house-mode.” That has now changed to meat cooler temperature.

I’m sitting at the two-person bistro table on my porch.  The tablecloths are damp from the humidity.  A small rechargeable-battery operated fan sits on the table directed at my neck, which like my knees has a propensity to shed water in the humidity; I awoke at 5:12 this morning with a neck sweat.  There is a breeze crossing the porch, and the ceiling fan is whirring above me where it’s securely attached to the porch roof.  I rarely use this fan, so when I flipped the switch on a few minutes ago, I stood a safe distance away in the doorway watching it spin and studying how its action created a smaller rotation in the light hanging under the fan.  After a minute or so, the light was still attached to the fan; I have faith that the light was engineered so as to move with the fan.  This phenomenon must be related to the way skyscrapers are built to sway, in particular what used to be the Sears Tower in Chicago.  On average it sways six inches, but it could sway—if need be—up to three feet.  Like heat exchangers, radio waves, and airplanes, I accept these beasts’ ways although I don’t fully understand the physics. 

We have air-conditioning in the house.  When we added onto the house in 2012, the old air vents in the bedrooms were connected to the new vents in the master bathroom and bedroom.  When the air comes on, the sound in all of the rooms in the new addition sounds like we are about to set sail on a continental trade wind—those dry, hot prevailing land winds. On an island, where the necessity for full clothing coverage is diminished, the maritime trade winds are wetter but still warm, strong, and prevailing.  Given the humidity outside, I imagine we are sailing on the latter—while still having to dress as if we are on land.

The thermostat for the second story where the bedrooms are is in the hallway outside our sons’ small 1880-circa bedrooms.  Down the hallway eight feet and around the corner is the sailboat on-high in the master bedroom.  If the thermostat is set at what might seem to be a comfortable 72 degrees, the old ducts halt air flow giving way to the streamlined ducts in the new part.  So while the thermostat dutifully holds the hallway at 72 degrees, the new 2012-circa bathroom, located three corners away, drops to 66, perhaps 64 degrees.  “Houston, we have a problem” says no one, for they fear the wrath of a women whose neck and knees sweat.  (An alliteration by sound if not by letters… so comforting.)

I sat down on the porch thinking I would be writing about green beans.  I thought after twenty years that topic might finally be ready to hit the paper.  This proves yet again that I’m a “pantser” and not a planner; a realization I came to only in my recent writing years.  Yet I will not go there now as there is a future piece reserved just for that topic—when deemed ready.

Today is reserved for one of my evergreen topics: hot, humid, midsummer days.  I will leave you on the edge of your seat for those percolating essays on green beans and being a pantser.  On the edge of the seat, like where I’m sitting—where the water dripping down my back, having previously glued my shirt to a chair cushion, has a chance to dry up with the various winds blowing out and about.

On the other hand, the flowers are looking sublime. I can make them happy in this heat with my personal gardening therapy. They are marching through their summer blooms, ebbing and flowing as they should.

Thoughts from the Porch

Would it be easier to write if I was a novelist?  Would the keyboard be more welcoming if I was stepping into an imagined world of my own making?  One that I’d been building for weeks, months, or years? 

Over the weekend I occupied myself by putting my “porch” together.  It’s one end of the deck that has a roof covering.  Chairs and tables brought down from the barn loft.  Pots of ivy that I successfully wintered over in my dining room now hang in rusty, whimsical metal plant hangers.  Grandma Mills’ and Grandma Murphy’s plants have been pulled from their stands in the living room and from the table in the dining room to summer in the shade of the porch-deck.  The two matriarchal plants loom large; they were the first to claim space in this porch design.  Then all the smaller plants, most broken off from Grandma Mills’ Christmas cactus, fill in around them.

Grandma Mills’ Christmas cactus, approx. 150 years old… stubborn & bloom-less.

Grandma Murphy’s mother-in-law tongue… keeps adding to the family with new spikes.

I couldn’t find the two table coverings for the square metal table-for-two and the square wooden “coffee” table in the middle of the porch.  They weren’t in the special linen pile in the office closet; nor were they in the true “linen closet” upstairs.  They weren’t in the linen chests in the dining room.  That adage “everything has a place and everything in its place” struggles in my Malcolm organization.  Much the way my mind misfiles information.

While digging to the bottom of the chests in the dining room, I fumble past small runners and table clothes that I never use.  As my fingers brush over them, nostalgia seeps through my skin.  They had belonged to my mom’s grandma/my great-grandma, Grandma Whittier, and my dad’s mom/my grandma, Grandma Mills. How would my grandmothers perceive this dystopian landscape?  Living most of their lives on farms, their lives were tightly sewn to tasks at hand on any given day.  Chores guided by the seasons. 

Throughout the year of 1966, my great grandma, who by then had left the farm and, in her 70s, was living in town, baked kolaches, pies, and cakes; tore and sewed carpet rags; mended clothing for her children and grandchildren; and went to church many days a week.  But then in the late spring and summer, her diary entries pointed to the season: washed some windows on the outside; mowed lawn; shelled and froze first peas; looked over a lot of lettuce. 

And in mid-July of 1966, she wrote that she met me for the first time when I was three days old, probably as Mom and Dad were taking me home from the hospital.  I like to imagine that this was the tradition for grand babies born locally: On their way home from the hospital, they were driven two minutes from the hospital and, with one left turn onto 5th Avenue NE, arrived at  a small white house with a screened front porch -- to meet Grandpa and Grandma Whitter. 

Then in the next few days, Grandma got on with making rhubarb juice; cleaning and cooking apples; washing and canning peaches; making apple and plum butter; and shelling a lot of beans.  And interspersed throughout all of her daily entries were visits with family and friends. Tucked into summer days of making salads and glorified rice and winter days of making banana bread and cracking and picking out nuts.

My great grandma documented all of her days in what she did.  No emotions or feelings, which leads me to define this original writing as a five-year diary—not a journal.  As I flip through pages, I see that five months after I was born there are blank days in mid-December.  I turn back page by page to a week before Christmas where I find her consecutive short, tight daily entries: Took Harry hosp. Harry in Hosp. Harry passed away. 1:15 p.m.  Harry was my great-granddad.  Those days around his death look hollow and pain-filled in their blankness.  Out of the ordinary rhythm. Then on Christmas Day, Grandma picked up the pen and continued to mark her life down in cadence with her earlier entries.

I write this on the table-for-two on the porch.  On top of a piece of sunflower yellow fabric is a small white linen table cloth—whose origins I’m unsure of—and one of Grandma Mills’ hand-embroidered table runners.  Baskets of flowers are outlined on either end.  At first glance it looks like a completed pattern, but the basket in the middle of my table is lacking green leaves.  The flowers float.  I look closer and see the remainders of tiny green threads; Grandma had finished it, but the leaves came unraveled and unsewn over the years. 

One of Grandma Whittier’s old tablecloths, full of brightness of blue, yellow, and red flowers, is summerly draped over the coffee table.  It’s square and met for a table-for-two.  I can’t imagine where it would’ve been used in Grandma’s house—but for one of the card tables set up for the kids, perhaps for a Mother’s Day dinner. 

Another cross-stitched cloth covers a small side table.  It’s overall simple, white appearance betrays the painstaking individual stitches quietly dotting the material in yet another basket-of-flowers design.  It sits shyly in contrast with the brightness of cloth on the coffee table.

I’m not in the place I had intended to go while re-reading Grandma Whittier’s diary and writing this piece. And I can’t twist the narrative to get back to my original intent, whatever that was.  What I see as I sit on my porch and relook at those blank entries in my great-grandma’s diary is that picking up a pen simply isn’t doable at times.  No matter the genre. Still, I hear words that surely were thought, if not spoken, by my grandmothers: This too shall pass.

A collection of Linda’s essays about people and places are woven together in her recently published book, Cornfields to Codfish. Signed copies are available when purchased directly from the author.