One Art

I am sitting in a motel room in WI, Cora asleep in the bed, Chris at a concert, the room filling up with darkness as the world beyond the open window fills with evening birdsong and highway thrum, and I am thinking about that Elizabeth Bishop poem "One Art" and in particular, these lines:

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I think I am thinking about these lines because earlier this evening we were all down
in the motel pool and at the end I was sitting and waiting for Chris to coax Cora out of the
water and my mind wandered to memories of our backyard pool when I was in high school,
 and I was thinking that having that pool was one of the very best things about high school,
as I see it now. I loved being in that pool, lying on hot cement next to it after being in the
water for a long time, the feeling of the heat soaking into a wet suit. I would read stretched
out on the diving board. My brothers and I played games there - made up games of baseball
while sitting perched on boogie boards.

And I was thinking about places, bodies of water, I've left behind - that pool, the ocean,
a beloved lake, and soon a river, and those lines popped into my head. I am finding there is
something about a motel room, a cool evening, birdsong, a highway, and a sleeping child that
all conspire to make it very easy to think about loss. That is the art in Bishop's poem, after all,
the art of losing.

Holy Moley It's a New Post!

Or that is what I imagine my mother saying. (And my other six readers, bless your hearts.)

I'm not going to to fill in from my missing time incident, but jump right to the important stuff, which is what I made for dinner tonight. The mixed greens stir fry from p264 of Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, with Napa cabbage, spinach, and hon tsai tai, the latter two coming from our beloved CSA (yes, we signed up again!). With brown basmati rice and a few variations (more garlic, more ginger, a little teriyaki sauce, and so on). Yum! Cora tried a bite of the greens, and while she didn't want more, she didn't spit it out. Round these parts, we call that a success. She did eat her bowl of rice, plus some cheese, ham, and crackers.

Today I collected the final papers from my students, and graded them. I was really pleased with the papers this time around, though frankly I had designed the assignment so that it would take a real act of homework disregard to screw it up. And then I was really happy to be COOKING and enjoying it again. I even have plans to make a cake tonight, still. I think it is partly that Chris is home again, that the semester is over, and also that we have made our decisions.

I can't say that our decision completely fulfills all my hopes for the next few years, but this year apart has also helped to clear up my priorities to the point where I am mostly content with the fact that we are moving to Grand Forks.

There. I said it.

Turn here for Memory Lane

Today I watched Natalie Merchant's Feb 2010 performance on TED; she sang songs from her new album, settings of old poems. It was terrific, especially her setting of Hopkins' "Spring and Fall", a poem I love dearly. Then at the end, for an encore, an old 10,000 Maniacs song.

And then I spent some time in the storage closet looking for my old tapes, remembering how many times I listened to those songs in Santa Barbara, in my old apartment, humming them on the walk to the beach, singing along with a friend at her place in Ojai. You know, throwing myself a big nostalgia party.

These are some of the songs I listened to while I packed up my apartment, getting ready to move to the Twin Cities.

These songs cover a lot of emotional territory for me. I found the tapes. I'm not sure I'm really ready to play them again.

A good morning

Despite the fact that Cora woke up at 6am, this morning is nice. She laid in bed pretty quietly for another half hour (a bad dream last night sent to my bed at about 10pm, and she seems to finally be grasping the concept of "don't push Mommy off the bed"). Then she played in her room for another half hour. Given that I finally weaned myself off the baby monitor, this was actually restful for me.

Once I got up, we had a tea party. Then she wanted to get dressed. She colored while I made French Toast. She ate four pieces of French toast, a banana, a cheese stick, and drank a cup of juice. Right now she's watching Dinosaur Train ("Our favorite show, Mom!!!") and wearing her Palm Sunday outfit: pink polka dot dress, pink striped pants, rainbow shoes. I'll try to get a photo.

It's the kind of weekend morning that was so rare to have this past fall, and is becoming something more dependable. It's nice. After a couple months of feeling like I am struggling uphill with this girl, now it feels more like we can meet each other on more even ground. Yesterday we were at a birthday party...at a toy store (I know). We had talked in the car about how we weren't going to buy anything, but that fell apart when Cora spotted a ballet bunny play set. And, frankly, if it had been a $5 thing I might have just bought it. But this was $20.95. After about 30 minutes of off and on tears and negotiations, she made the choice to put it back and wait for another time. It was a relief and a surprise. This girl, she is growing up.

I am liking the way age 4 looks from this vantage point: five weeks to go!

Four new reasons why spring has to be on the way

This morning was a good morning. I dropped Cora off at school and we went through our new ritual where she walks me to the lunchroom door, gives me something out of her "pocket", holds the door for me, gets one more kiss, and then runs back to her cereal. Then I went to my favorite neighborhood cafe for a coffee and a muffin (plus a bag of coffee beans and a baguette) and waited for the Co-op to open. There is something about going to the co-op that makes me happy about cooking. I've struggled with that this year, with finding the happy in the cooking, as exhaustion and cooking for a preschooler has taken a toll. But I've got it today, and I am happy about that.

(I have to point out: preschooler. Not toddler. I'm trying to break the habit of calling her a toddler, because she is so not a toddler. A mother of one of the 2nd graders who is at Cora's daycare for before and after schoolcare stopped me in the hall the other day to say she had had quite a conversation with my daughter, and can't believe how many words she knows. I know! It's crazy! I love it! She also winks!)



Today at the co-op they had something guarenteed to stop me in my tracks. Seeds. A big display of seeds.



It is only March. Early March. I exercised restraint and only bought four packets. Brought them home. Took their picture. Decided I wanted to be able to see them all the time until I get their little seed-butts in the ground. (The best joke in our house right now? "Guess what!" "What?" "Chicken butt!" Oh yeah. Incredibly funny EVERY TIME.) SO, of course, I taped them up on the cupboards in the kitchen.



Where I tape all the things I want to see everyday. Don't you?

(One day, probably in an alternate universe,
I will have two English bulldogs
and their names will be Muscles and Roosevelt. )

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)

That's right, I MADE a dog!

A lot of the dissatisfaction I have been feeling in recent months has had to do with how nearly impossible it has become to find time to *make* something. I made some fingerless gloves for myself around New Year's, with some yarn I had ordered online and then ordered Chris to give me for Christmas. Then I made a pair for Cora, who implied she might die a horribly whiny death if I didn't know her something immediately. Gratifyingly, she wears them almost every day. Then I made a pair for my grandma (which resulted in my mom buying me yarn so I could make her a pair, and my grandma commissioning a pair for an aunt).

When I was visiting my mom recently, I saw an ad in one of her quilting magazines for a book called "Sew Me, Love Me" - the cover appealed to me and I thought it would be good browsing, and my local library had the book, so I picked it up when we got back home. This past Saturday, Cora and I snuggled up on the couch to look through the book. She spotted a dog she especially liked and asked if we could make it.

I was pretty sure I had everything I needed already in-house, including socks I no longer was wearing (heel holes) that could serve as a body. So we headed upstairs and chose our materials. At this point Cora lost interest in the process and while I cut out the pieces, she completely unpacked her dresser and spread her clothes in piles all over her room. This had something to do with a dance performance she was planning, but we never got that far.

In short, I made a stuffed doggy this weekend, and while I can see the ways I would do it differently next time, and have some other ideas, I like this little dog. I think she's pretty cute. And, considering I have not attempted a stuffed creature in quite a few years (I think jr. high was the last time), I'm also pretty proud.

I read a number of blogs by creative, crafty people, and often I have envied their "I wanted to make this so I looked around and found the stuff and did it!" capabilities. Making this little pup brought me some delight of a kind I've been missing. It felt good to realize I had everything I needed. It felt good to realize I certainly had the sewing skills to do this quickly. It felt good to watch the dog take shape. It even felt good to do it all by hand!

And, does she like her new doggy? After about 36 hours of deliberation, she named her Alyssa.