Imagination to Real Object

I find that when I have frustration and turmoil in one part of my life, I most often compensate for that by making things: cooking, baking, sewing, knitting, etc. It is a good time for Cora to decide her dollies need a throne, because I will find a way to make one. It is a good time for Bon Appetit to declare they have the best-ever brownie recipe, because I will try it out. It is a good time for mutter paneer cravings!

Red onion and friends - ready for curry!

I tend not to examine this too closely. I know it has something to do with control and satisfaction and compartmentalization. It works for me. So, I have been in a frenzy of making for about a month now, you may have noticed.

Another dog.

Last weekend, I made progress on a couple sewing projects, and some knitting ones, and even some writing ones. But one in particular was special. I have a little muslin, drawstring project bag for knitting that I really like. But I tend to work on more than one project at a time, and I kept thinking maybe I should buy another one. Then I decided that was ridiculous, because I have muslin. Surely I could make something myself?

Hat from Noro Silk Garden yarn - love it!

And then I started thinking about how plain muslin is, and what could I do to enliven it? I remembered this beautiful poppy ribbon I bought, oh, maybe eight years ago, and never could bear to use. So I went upstairs and found the ribbon and the muslin and sketched out a pattern. Then I thought it could use a lining. I looked over at the bins of fabric, and there was a fabric, pressed up against the side of the bin, just the perfect fabric!

Once again neglected to take process photos -
having too much fun to go downstairs for the camera.

So, then I thought about how it would look if the lining were rolled down over the outside muslin, for extra color and to set off the ribbon. And what if the bottom of the bag was the lining fabric?

The colors are not a perfect match, but I like that.

And then I made the bag. The process wasn't perfect and one corner is a little goofy, but I love my project bag. I love that I figured out how to make it. I love the way it came together, from thinking about buying something, to making my own, better version. I love that I had the time available and that most of the materials were ones I've had for years, just waiting for the right project. Very satisfying!

Noro sock yarn in the bag - but I've ended up using size 0 dpns
instead of the single circular. Socks take me a long time.
More on that later.

Times when a map would come in handy

When you live with a highly verbal preschooler, you soon realize that every conversation is actually a thin path bordered on each side by miles and miles of quicksand. And you, the parent, do not know the path at all. And your preschooler just happens to regard quicksand as her natural habitat.

I am thinking of the conversation Cora and I had in the car about a year ago, when I was explaining Memorial Day and why it was a holiday, and soon found myself facing the laser-beam gaze of a four-year-old asking, "Would you die for your country, Mommy?" 

Which brings me to the most recent episode. The one that got me thinking that Cora actually does know the path, but the path she wants me to follow her down is indeed overlaid with quicksand, and so long as I don't panic, we will be just fine. The thing about these conversations is that they always seem to come out of nowhere. Sunday evening, we were watching Nickolodeon after dinner - I am not sure why, but iCarly has caught Cora's attention in a big way - and Cora was also coloring on the floor while I caught up with some editing work. Then she asked me if the world started when Baby Jesus was born.

This was actually still sure-footing territory, because if there is one thing I am clear on, it is that the world existed for a very long time before that point in history. And I thought it would be cool to talk about evolution and dinosaurs and so on. But, she cut off the science talk to ask why the people "crossed him." We are nowhere near Easter! Where is this coming from?!

Cora might be much smarter than me, because I'm pretty sure that it took me another six years to realize that being nailed by your hands and feet does not kill you. And that was her next question: If they didn't put a nail through his head, why did he die? And this is where I thanked Mary Roach and her book Stiff for providing me the answer, which I delivered in short, relatively non-graphic language. (But, face it, once you are talking about crucifixion, you are in the graphic language whether you want to be or not.) And then we were back to why, and a discussion of Biblical-times politics.

How much of this has to do with amorphous knowledge of the Arizona shootings? Did she hear Chris and I talk about it? Something in the air? We don't watch news shows with her, and I don't think they do "breaking news" on Nick or PBS. Is it just synergy? Even though I often fumble my way through the theological discussions, trying to tread that thin line between cultural and personal assumptions and beliefs, I find the discussions of real-world violence harder. I would rather explain the mechanics of childbirth than try to explain war.

Which means I have my work cut out for me, because I have read, written, and thought a lot about certain world events, and one day Cora is going to be able to read. She's going to look at those collections of books and have some big questions about words like Holocaust, genocide, Rwanda, and others that she can find in our volumes of history, politics, literature, poetry, and graphic novels.

Really, it has already started, because she's seen The Sound of Music, and while you don't have to go into the whole WWII history, you do have to talk a little about Nazis. And, thinking she would love the dancing, I did show her some clips on YouTube of West Side Story, which turned out to require a primer on gangs and the politics of the "other". 

There are so few sure pathways!

Well-stocked, and proud of it

About two months ago a friend paid me a compliment that I keep returning to and treasuring. She was helping me pack up and rearrange things in the pantry, in anticipation of the house going on the market. At one point she told me that she really admired and envied my well-stocked pantry.

I know that many, many cookbooks are happy to tell you what you should have in your pantry, what a "well-stocked pantry" will have. But what I find is that it is more important to know what my family likes, eats, and tends to think would be tasty. Lots of tomato products. Various kinds of beans and rices and pastas. Certain produce should always be on hand, certain condiments. Certain categories of food can be completely dispensed with (any kind of fish, any canned soup product).

My friend's comment was especially nice to hear because I do take a certain secret (up until now) pride in my pantry - in the readiness of it. I like it that I can do a decent amount of baking and cook on the fly, if need be. I like being able to pull a nice lunch together on the spur of the moment, especially in the summer when Chris and I are both pretty much home for lunch together most days. It's nice to grab up a bunch of good-looking peaches at the store and come home and waffle between pie and cobbler for a while, and know that either one could be made from what is on hand. Or bringing home an awful lot of zucchini in a CSA box and knowing I have everything I need for zucchini bread.

Getting those CSA boxes has really given me some great opportunities to exercise my pantry - both the physical pantry and also what I think of as my mental pantry, which is not so much stocked with food as with ideas about food. I have loved our CSA this summer - I learned a lot last summer about how to manage the box, what to expect, and how to work in new veggies for my family. There have been many fewer incidents of throwing things away completely unused. There have been times we haven't used something up entirely, and there have been times we just couldn't bring ourselves to eat more of something (I'm looking at you, kohlrobi), but on the whole, way fewer than last year.

The other night I made a fresh corn polenta recipe from the recent Bon Appetit - the only thing I needed from the store was the mascarpone. We had it with grilled chicken with some leftover jerk marinade that Chris has made a few days before, and with green beans - all the veggies involved were from the CSA. There was leftover polenta, of course, and once refrigerated it firmed up nicely. Earlier in the week I'd made tomatillo salsa from CSA tomatillos, onions, and jalapenos, and we had that with stacked cheese enchiladas, but there was extra salsa, of course.

So, the other day, faced with lunchtime and not wanting a sandwich, I started poking around the mental pantry. Here's what we ended up with: leftover chicken (retail chicken, nothing too virtuous there), and then a pan-fried polenta slice topped with a salad of chopped tomatoes (two kinds from the farmer's market) and black-eyed peas that just happened to be in the pantry and the leftover tomatillo salsa. It was the kind of plate that I find myself looking at with great satisfaction.

It was a combination of the "luck of the box" from the CSA and a prepared pantry. And it fit in with what we are striving towards: only buying what we might call ingredients, basic building blocks, and trying to buy locally and/or responsibly. (In this last respect, that leftover chicken totally didn't fit in.) But if we can keep to these rough guidelines, we can have meals like that: Totally unplanned, totally made up, totally delicious.

Long Live the Kitchen Table

There have been a couple times in the last few weeks when I have been in the kitchen and felt entirely at peace - which is a funny thing to say, because it is usually the times when I have two things going on the stove and something in progress on the counter, and a growing sink of dishes. It's like that old saying about the duck - serenely floating above the water, paddling like mad beneath - except that for once I actually feel like the top part of the duck!

(And here is how life with Cora is currently affecting me: I have an irresistible need to say Guess what? Duck butt!)

I am having a good and successful time using up nearly everything from our Harmony Valley CSA box. (I cannot say enough good things about Harmony Valley.) I found a new cobbler recipe that is quick and easy and comes out the way I want it to. I made a cherry pie with cherries from a friend's trees that I loved, which is amazing, because I have not, historically, had much interest in cherry pies.

Every summer it seems like there are a few dishes that become the Dish of the Summer and that get made about every other week, or more frequently. And I'm not just talking about things like quesadillas or ham and pea pasta! Last summer it was a black-eyed pea-feta-and tomato salad. This summer it has been my version of a Rick Bayless Beans-Greens-and-Chorizo taco filling and a wilted spinach and bacon and egg salad. What I find astonishing here is the presence of greens and spinach - not previously staples of our table - but this summer we are all about the greens. Even Cora, though she is a dedicated raw food purist when it comes to her vegetables. And her fruits - she is not a fan of pie. Or cobbler. Or tarts. Or even blueberry pancakes (!!) - she wants her blueberries on the side, please.

The kitchen often feels like the one area of the house, and my life, that I am in control of, or where I feel fully prepared and competent. Even though our kitchen is off in a corner of the house, it feels like the center. And if I can keep centered there, then I can carry that into the other areas.

I admit it: lately I envision myself as an octopus. Only psychically, of course. Or does that sound worse? But, I do try to pull myself, my tendrils or tentacles, from that center, that calm and knowing center, rather than from the places where it all feels like chaos and limbo and anger and sadness. Those are the places I am not enjoying finding myself lately. Not much gets created in those places that is going to nourish anyone.

Today I ran into the poem "Perhaps the World Ends Here" by Joy Harjo. Her first line is "The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live." And later she writes "It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human."

Oh yes. And this summer, I would say that the instructions served up by our kitchen table are: Be creative. Learn to love what you thought you would not. Make something your own. Know where you are safe, and how to carry that safety with you.

What groundhog? or, thinking of spring and fresh food

I was surprised what an impression Groundhog Day made on Cora. She came home knowing all about Punxatawny Phil, though she insists he lives in Milwaukee and is named PunxaTONY Phil. She was disappointed about the six more weeks of winter. She was a real snow bunny last year, but this year she is not into it at all. This year it is all about spring, and when is spring coming, and how in the spring it will be warm and Daddy will be home!

We have a book, When Will It Be Spring?, that we have been reading often this month. It's about little Alfie bear and his first hibernation and he keeps waking up his mama to see if it is spring - he mistakes frozen leaves for birds in the trees, a hunter's campfire for the sun, and snowflakes for butterflies. Cora and I take turns being Alfie or Mama and playing the game of the story.

We talk about how in spring we can plant her garden again with radishes and carrots and pink flowers. In spring we will start getting vegetables from the farmers again - we reupped for the CSA, hooray! - and we will get out her tricycle and be able to walk to the park again. We'll plant my flowers again. We'll attack the weedy bits of the garden again. We'll have patio parties again and grill again.

I am particularly excited about the CSA and having more fresh and local produce. I was thinking the other day about the places I go to buy our food, and how somethings can only be had from certain stores and that is what keeps me from cutting out one of them. There's Whole Foods (the cats' crunchies come from here - lowest protein content without filler and without prescription food prices), the conventional grocery story (my usual brands of certain canned and packaged foods come from here, plus it is the most convenient to our usual driving routes), the co-op (local produce, local cheeses, locally roasted coffee, one cat's canned food), the CSA, the grocery delivery service (though I am using them less as I recommit to eating more produce and I like to pick that out myself, and see it before I buy it), and during the warmer months the farmers market (especially for the local organic meat). Now, even I can look at this paragraph and see one good reason why I have no spare time! The easiest to cut out, and the ones I have the most reason to cut out, are also the most convenient: the conventional store and the delivery service.

I'm also thinking about this because I just watched Jaime Oliver's TED prize talk over at TED.com, and it was inspiring and reminded me of all the ideas and plans I had when I read Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and whenever I pick up one of my favorite cookbooks. I really do want to be making more of our food. I really do want that food to have more grains and produce in it. I really do want to pass on to Cora a passion for cooking and for, as my favorite cafe puts it, good real food.

And I want to do it without waiting six more weeks for spring. (Ha! We live in the upper midwest; we probably have eight to ten more weeks until spring!) Which is why I'm off to the co-op today to buy poblanos, white onions, potatoes, chard, leeks, a rutabaga, a scarlet turnip, and some other ingredients for soups, tacos, and risottos.

And for brownie sundaes. It is Valentine's weekend, after all.

(the double rainbow photo is from spring 2009)

How not to expect

On the fridge we have a little poem by Galway Kinnell (ok, we have lots of stuff up on our fridge aside from this one little scrap of paper). Here it is:

Prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

I can no longer remember where it came from - it looks like I cut it out of something like a newsletter or other piece of mail. Something that was folded, and there's a crease running across the paper just below Kinnell's name. But, I thought of this poem this morning as I tried to derail my brain's worrying at the usual topics (are we moving? when will we know? when will they call? what if they don't? what will we do? are we moving? when will we know?...).

I like the idea of this poem, I like it for many things. I like the idea of just wanting what happens next, whatever "what happens next" turns out to be. I often strive for that kind of expectant nonexpectancy. It is a harder struggle - of course it is - when I actually do have something specific that I want that whatever happens to be. And when I want it to be something good; when I expect something good. Or at least something more good than not.

I'm looking for a more nonexpectant attitude, even if just for today. I can be good at standing against the flow and I can be good at going with the flow, but I am not so good at hanging out in the eddies and waiting for the stream to start moving again. Is this about some kind of psychological inertia? Maybe.

One good side effect is that, in my desire to feel like something is moving forward, that there is movement for my psyche, I am reading a lot more. I hadn't been doing much since October - the busybusy fall, the illnesses, the stress and sadnesses of the holidays and January, all those things made it hard for me to focus on the page. But now...a different story. That part feels good. That part of right now I am enjoying, and I'm trying to keep that in mind.

The waiting.

We are waiting. Waiting to hear whether we will be moving or not, what our summer and fall will look like, where we are going with our lives. We are in that strange and uncomfortable limbo of "everything went really well...I think everything went really well...did everything go really well?" that is so familiar, I think, to anyone who has been on a job interview.

We were pretty sure it would be at least a week before we heard anything. That week is over and we are trying to stave off the second-guessing mode that has been inching closer and closer. Waiting, I may have said here before, is not a strength I possess. I can do it, but not easily. Not without some major distractions on hand.

I thought maybe I would distract myself with potty training! Yes! Fun! Pull-ups! M&Ms! Constant entreaties to please sit on the potty, please, please. Reminders of how if one finds diaper changes offensive to one's existence, one could always choose...THE POTTY!!

Yeah. That worked for about as long as (and about as well as) you might think. We'll continue buying diapers for a while longer yet. We'll continue waiting.

Forgot to mention...

That I'm also weirdly excited about the upcoming changes in our lives. I mean, there's the heartbreak and sadness of leaving people and places we have come to think of as home, but at the same time there is excitement and pride in Chris's accomplishments and the thrill of learning a new place.

Do you know the tarot card the two of pentacles? The image on the card has been popping into my head a lot in the past couple weeks - the holding of two things and finding the balancing point between them has been my task, not just careening from one emotion to another. I'm striving for flexibility and fluidity, rather than the squelching of either emotion.

But, perhaps the sadness end has been given freer rein in my speech and writing, because when I drove Chris to the airport for his interview on Wednesday and said something about being excited, he was surprised. It is hard to keep both in my mind, let alone my mouth, but they are both there. He came home late last night, full of positive feelings about the class he taught as a demonstration of his professorial style, his meetings with various important people, and his interactions with students and faculty.

So now, we wait with fingers crossed for a phone call, for an official offer. It seems likely to be coming, but of course nothing is certain, and we are a little afraid to put too much conviction into it quite yet.

All Cheese New Year

For New Year's Day dinner, after Cora went to bed, totally exhausted after being awake all day after staying up all night, Chris and I enjoyed a fondue dinner. The closest I may ever get to an actual all cheese dinner.

I have mixed feelings about both 2008 and 2009. 2008 had a lot of good moments, but in many ways it kind of feels like the year that never quite got off the ground for me - so much that didn't get done, so much that didn't go right. I feel like the last three months especially were just sort of this grimy gray wash of time, interspersed with some great meals, fun outings, and lovely moments of friendship, beauty, and love. But I'd like the ratio to be reversed, for the grime to be less.

And 2009, well, what I can say about the prospects for this year? It is likely we will be moving away from the city and (more importantly) the friends we love. It's the official Year of Potty-Training. Ugh. That's about as much as I care to talk about the 2009 horizon right now, because I pretty quickly get a sinking feeling when I look at the horizon.

Thank goodness, then, that I have a nearly-three year old in the house, for whom that horizon simply does not exist. For whom the new year is simply an excuse to dance.

So, come on in, 2009. Who knows what really lurks within your days?

Diamonds in the rough

Saturday night Cora fell asleep before 7pm, which enabled me to get the last 20 papers graded (whew, and ack). She woke around 11pm, and again around midnight when I came up to bed, but all in all a really good night.

Then came Sunday night and the two-hour bedtime battle. Now, I know that there are many mamas out there who would love a bedtime battle that was only two hours, and many who would love even more the way things usually go in our house, but last night really almost broke my patience.

Okay, it did break my patience, and eventually even the duct tape was starting to look a little fragile. We had stories, we had songs, we had wailing, we had weeping, we had more songs, we had flailing about, we had clinging. It was a miserable affair that ended with us just sitting in the chair under a blanket, in the dark, quietly, waiting to see who would fall asleep first. Thank goodness the papers were already done, because I had zero energy afterwards for anything more than boiling water for a hot buttered rum.

But in the midst of all the angst, there were two especially memorable moments for me. At one point Cora insisted that before she could go to sleep she had to fix my hair - or, as she would say, "I have to make you a haircut!" This basically consists of her telling me which way to look while she lifts up my hair and lets it fall in my face. This went on for about three weeks. Then she looked at me, holding my face in her little hands, and said, "Now you look so beautiful!"

Earlier in the day we had watched most of The Nutcracker Ballet - did I mention she is also now a ballerina? - and so, once we had moved on to the sitting quietly in the dark phase, she kept putting the blanket over her head. Finally, I had to ask her what she was doing. "I putting on my mousie mask, but you no worry Mommy, I not real mouse, I just pretending for my ballet dancing."

With each of these moments I felt a pang of regret that the rest of bedtime had been so miserable, for both of us, and a foolish wish to encourage the sweet moments to last longer, and a little chagrin about that last one. But most of all I felt grateful to be reminded that underneath the wailing, whining, crying, flailing, and screaming that surfaces once a week or so, there is still my sweeter-tempered, imaginative baby.

No no NaNoWriMo, not this year

Well, yeah, I thought about it. I got a little fired up. And then I looked around at reality. I just don't see how the household could function with me spending all my spare time trying to pound out 50,000 words worth of novel. I wish it could, but I don't see it happening.

Alternatives: January could be my own personal NaNoWriMo, as I wasn't given a J-term assignment this year (don't even get me started.).
November could be the month I get my new poetry manuscript in working order (see above.)

But, jeez louise people, I probably won't even get all my pumpkins carved in time for Halloween, let alone a major creative project.

Thoughts on work and attendance

I just finished reading a book called Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It; I heard the authors interviewed on the radio a couple weeks ago. The interview was exciting to me to hear, because the type of work environment they describe - one where results matter more than putting in your obligatory 8 hours at a desk - rang so true, and is so close to what I tried to manufacture within my own department. My own experiment failed, of course, because the larger corporate structure had little faith in my ideas or department and was not ready for massive culture change.

Now, as a professor, I can indeed work in a way that is closer to the ideas in this book. I have a lot of autonomy. Not so much money. A lot of people are talking these days about "the three currencies" - money, time, autonomy; or some similar variation. I have a lot of the last two.

One thing that struck me in reading the book was, in the list of Guidelines the authors give, guidelines that are the backbone of this culture change, one is "all meetings are optional." And they see this as a totally non-negotiable point. If the meeting feels superfluous to you, you don't have to go. If your input is needed only for the first five minutes, go for those minutes, or call it in, or whatever. It's beautiful!

My husband is also a professor, and one thing he struggles with is the question of an attendance policy. He feels strongly that college students should be treated as adults, that attendance should be up to them, that if they choose not to attend class, they should be prepared for the consequences.

I have a attendance policy that is an echo of my institution's: if you miss more than a week of class, you may not pass the class. I tend to think of my students as still being in training for adulthood (I mostly teach first-year students). Many of them believe that old story about how in college no one cares whether you go to class or not. Maybe not at a big university. But, we are a small liberal arts college with small classes and we notice if students are missing. We are asked to notice.

Still, every semester some students do make the decision, at some level, to see class as optional.

Something else the book mentions is that under the kind of culture they advocate for work, it immediately becomes apparent who the slackers are, because they can't produce results. And, they end up fired. The authors say that in the beginning stages, involuntary turnover (firings) go up, but voluntary turnover (people choosing to go to other companies) goes way down.

This is true on the academic level as well, except that instead of being fired, they don't pass, or they barely pass. College students occupy an unusual position, I think. They are being encouraged to think for themselves and to take responsibility, often in ways they never have before. In a way, I think of my attendance policy as a kind of safety net. I can't really enforce it except by pointing out the consequences - I can't go down to the dorms and pull them out of bed; I won't spend my time reminding them of everything via email.

My hope, though, is that they don't see my class as a meeting that has no purpose or relation for them. My hope is that my meetings are ones they don't want to miss - that there is something about the hour and a half we spend together talking about literature that compells them to come. Something other than an administrative policy. It's a shared responsibility, but it's a responsibility that I must model first.

If she ever becomes an author...

This would make a great book jacket photo. Ignore the obviously incorrect date my camera insisted on attaching to the photo; this is from January '08, possibly February.

Today I give the first of a series of presentations to groups of incoming first-year students. My topic? Academic Expectations, and more specifically how college is different from high school. We are encouraged to be realistic yet encouraging. What my talk boils down to:

You will have to work harder and be more responsible than ever before.

And you will survive it.

Is that encouraging enough?

As a rule, I don't like to get all Chicken Little about the state of the world...

...okay, that is a complete lie. Consider that most of my favorite books involve some sort of post-apocalyptic landscape that even while I am reading I know will give me day-horrors for weeks (or months, or years), but I still can't keep from reading. Few people know this, because I like to mostly keep it to myself, but I can get very Chicken Little indeed...

but the other day I did an online poll at a parenting web site. The poll was this: What is the most important value for kids to learn? And the possible answers were:
Empathy
Respect
Generosity
Responsibility
Honesty

In a bit, I'll reveal what the voting was when I was last there, but first I'll tell you which one I picked and why. Ready? Got your guess?

Empathy, of course. I think it really contains all the other choices, for one thing - it is hard, perhaps impossible to empathize without having respect for the person, situation, etc. you feel empathy for or with. Feeling empathy would seem to lead directly to being generous and honest, and also to responsibility. In fact, I would say that empathy is the only choice that can possibly encompass all the others, so it is my favorite kind of answer: the carpetbag answer.

Now, I know not everyone might think this way, trying to get the most out of his or her vote, but I still expected results to be pretty evenly distributed among the possible responses. Here are the results up to the point I cast my vote:

Empathy: 17%
Respect: 41%
Generosity: 2%
Responsibility: 19%
Honesty: 21%

While these are all fine values, I'm a little taken aback by the low score of generosity, and that honesty scores second-highest. Do people think it is a quality too often taken advantage of? Why the low interest in generosity as something to teach kids? Does respect or honesty also contain the promise of generosity? I suppose respect might, but I don't think there is anything in honesty that also promises generosity. I think there are a good many people who are very honest, but hardly generous - who, if they were being honest, might actually see generosity as a weakness.

In fact, honesty seems to me to be the quality on this list that is the most discrete, the one with the least overlap with the others. I confess I think that scrupulous honesty is overrated, is, in fact, on some level dishonest, disrespectful, and definitely lacking in empathy. Of all the qualities on this list it is the one I feel most ambivalent about. Honesty is good and to be encouraged, but not at the cost of everything else. If you want my honest, respectful opinion.

If you don't, well, I will try to understand how you feel.

The conventional phase

Here is a picture of the three bears Cora currently likes to sleep with. (Don't worry - no one has been kicked out of the crib! Cora is clearly more of an additive personality.) She decided early on that the pink bear is the mommy bear, the little cream-colored bear is the baby, and she was a little at a loss until she spotted the sweater-wearing bear in the music room and decided he would make a fine daddy to go with the other two.

While Cora is clearly most devoted at this stage in her life to the mommy-baby dyad (it is okay to go to bed without the daddy bear, but it is very much NOT OKAY to be without the other two together), she also likes to keep track of the daddies. She wants very much to know where they are, if they are not immediately visible.

And so we found ourselves a few weeks ago at a park with a little pond, complete with a mother duck and seven ducklings. "Baby duckies!" Cora shrieked with delight. We counted them. We talked about the mama duckie leading them around the pond. We talked about dibbling ("Oh! Where duckie go?!"). Then Cora asked the big question, the one I suspected was coming:

"Where daddy duckie?"
"Well, maybe there isn't one."
"Where daddy duckie?" (Sometimes Mama doesn't hear right the first time.)
"Some animals don't have daddies that stay with them."
"Where daddy duckie?" (Mama seems more dense than usual. Maybe more volume will help.)
"I don't know"
Pause.
"Mama, where daddy duckie?" (Let her see you're serious!)
Sigh. "Maybe he's at work."
Knowing smile and nod of approval. "Teacher. Daddy duckie teacher."

She at least has it down pretty good now that Peter Rabbit's mama has gone to the store and his daddy is in a pie (though I doubt she really gets it). She doesn't ask about the cats' parents, because they aren't baby cats. Arvo is a daddy cat and Emily is a mommy cat. Anything male and not clearly a baby is a daddy. Anything female and not clearly a baby is a mommy. She seems to have an intuitive grasp of what puberty does to the reproductive possibilities.

But, I do wish she weren't quite so conventional. Granted, most of the families we see come in the variety she currently finds most predictable, but not all. We know some two-mommy families, we know some no-daddy families, we know some adoptive families, we know some two-person households that we really really hope might one day be allowed to get legally married and maybe even become two-daddy families, too (not even necessarily in that order - we're not picky when it comes to our friends' happiness).

I suppose this part of being two and trying to figure out how the world works. And that there is comfort in finding the configuration you know replicated other places. (I remember the consternation of our friends' oldest girl when she spent the night at our house, at about age six, and realized that in our house the woman does the cooking! In her house, it is almost always the daddy who cooks dinner.)

As Cora becomes more aware of all the families we know, and all the ways families come together, I hope that her question to kids she meets will be something more along the lines of "Who's in your family?"

Spring and all

Is that the name of the poem that WCW begins with talking about how the weeds on the way to the contagious hospital are starting to grow again? Because, I think that's kind of the day I'm having, where really the best thing you can see is that the weeds are coming back! What luck!

A couple weeks ago I picked up a couple seed packets while we were at Target, thinking it was a good start on my big plans for the garden. Well, it looks like that might have been it for the garden budget this year. I'd wanted to try out that newspaper-mulch-compost cover idea on one big weed-infested flowerbed, but I think instead I'd better start hoping for some pretty weeds.

A while ago I managed to clear a part of one of the many weedy, overgrown flowerbeds out back and I put in delphiniums, cosmos, and marigolds. The cosmos are coming up now. The marigold seeds were two years old; they were, I think, the tenth or eleventh generation harvest from seeds originally bought even before we bought this house. They do not seem to be coming up. I am sad about this. Also about the rosebush, a gift at Cora's birth, that seems to be well and truly dead. I planted batchelor button seeds around it, just in case it changes its mind.

Inside this little patch, separated from its weedier neighbors by a little wire fence, I also placed the little bunny statue my grandma gave me. Everytime she goes out back Cora wants to water "the bunny garden" and she was crouch next to the fence and pet and talk to the bunny. She likes to say bye-bye to the bunny when we leave by the back, too.

Today out front I put in the straw flowers, standard zinnias, and some miniature zinnias. I noticed that only one of the two coral bells is coming back, ditto for the Jacob's ladder, all the creeping phlox seem less robust than usual, the lavendar is making a valiant effort, and the stringy whatever-it-is flower is also trying very hard to look lively. There are some long patches of bare ground lining the walkway to the house, and I don't think the other packet of delphinium is going to work there.

Then I went and looked at the side yard. Wow. Two years of basic neglect and I'm actually kind of surprised to see anything at all growing over there. I can't tell yet if the clematis has survived or been replaced by a look-alike weed. The anemones are halfway through their blooming. The sedum is going bonkers. The striped creeping phlox is doing its best, as is the ground cover carnation-like flower.

Today, I think, is my transition day. Going from the idea that I will have beautiful, or at least totally mulched, gardens this year, to the reality that I will have a few really nice looking spots and a lot of spots I am totally dissatisfied with. And, I think once this transition is complete, I'll be able to come to terms with that dissatisfaction in a way that doesn't make me feel like I might run into a contagious hospital at any moment.

News of the world

Remember that section of William Carlos Williams's long poem "Asphodel, that Greeny Flower"? The one that talks about getting the news of the world from poetry? About how "it is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably everyday/for lack/of what is found there"?

Mary Oliver has a new book of poems out, Red Bird, that I just got from the library. This morning after putting Cora down for her nap I opened the book at random, to see what news there was for me. Here is what I found on page 45:

Watching a Documentary about Polar Bears Trying to Survive on the Melting Ice Floes

That God had a plan, I do not doubt.
But what if His plan was, that we would do better?

The basic difference between an adult and a toddler

I would be very disappointed if I received this in the mail from Payroll.

Cora would be delighted.

Wisdom from the Queen

One of the (library!) books I've been reading this month is Margaret Atwood's Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983-2005. I love Atwood's writing in any genre - novels, stories, poems - and one thing that always impresses me is that she can be so witty and entertaining no matter what she is writing. Her voice is so distinctive, such a pleasure. So often, when I read her nonfiction writing, I find her saying exactly what I needed to hear.

Here is an example, from the essay "Nine Beginnings":

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection. She is the tenth Muse, the one without whom none of the others can function. The gift she offers you is the freedom of the second chance. Or as many chances as you'll take.

It's a beautiful paragraph, but what I really love is this idea of the tenth Muse, Oblivion, who might sound forboding, but is perhaps the most generous of muses. And while I have certainly made many, many sacrifices to her, I would say I have not made enough. I'm not saying that I think I need to cast my work into the wastebasket. I'm saying I don't think I've taken as many chances as I'm offered. I haven't failed as often as I could have....because I haven't tried as often as I could have.

I've written about this before, about how I am trying to change this. I picked a difficult time of year for this, with the sickness cycle and the sudden return to harsh midwestern winters, but I also know that it doesn't matter. There will always be a dozen readymade excuses for not doing something. As the fog of FluFest 2008 lifts, I'm ready to jump back in.

Just above the paragraph I quoted is this: "Girls should be allowed to play in the mud. They should be released from the obligations of perfection. Some of your writing, at least, should be as evanescent as play."

A brief catching up

In the days since the last posting, Chris has gone to Jamaica and returned (singing and playing trombone in 11 concerts in six days, while still managing to get a wicked sunburn), Grandma Jan has been to stay with us, I have been sick with some abbreviated form of flu (I thought it was food poisoning, but now other people are telling me they have had similar cases in the past couple months), and now we are all busy dealing with the fact that Spring Semester starts in one week even though we may not get above freezing until the end of the month. Hee hee!

Spring (the semester, not the season) will be a welcome change from the fall (though less financially rewarding) as I will have just one class, the freshman course in poetry and drama. I am excited about the books I chose, even though as usual I am bothered by having to leave out some very good poems. There are some I've had to admit just don't work well with the average first year student, some that I can't bear to have "dissected" again (oh how they love that word for interpreting poems! really, "vivisected" would be more accurate - you can just hear the poems screaming), some I'm just tired of teaching and need a short break from, and some just don't fit neatly into the thematic groupings I am using this time around.

I am hoping this decrease in coursework will equal an increase in time spent in creating - I would love to see myself devoting more time to my writing and quilting than I did in the last four months of the year (not that hard, as any amount of time would be an increase). Plus, there are a lot of house projects to be tackled. I'm kicking off this anticipated season of creativity with a workshop this coming weekend, which I hope will lead to a kind of "fountain of youth" of either inspiration or motivation (I will take either!). I know that most of the time I am my own worst enemy, distracting myself with false obligations, postponeable chores, and inane diversions. Knowing this has yet to make me immune.