For my mother: things I grew up with

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Today my mother turned 65. She and I share an easy and generous sense of humor that is somehow sister to our earnest literal-mindedness and unflappable trust in things working out – a quality that either endears us to you or drives you mad or both. I also owe her big time for my impressive mental catalog of early and mid 80s easy listening and country, my enthusiasm for game nights and meandering drives, and my love of cocktails, cake, baseball, books, stacks of books, ice cream, ephemera, British miniseries, and sitting in my chair at the movies until the very very last credits have rolled. Watching her taught me that kindness matters more than almost everything else, that it’s never too late for another cup of coffee, and that reading on the beach is better when you drag your chair into the surf. She has an astounding mind for minutiae, is fiercely loyal, and remembers my own stories better than I do. She is a marvel. She is my closest friend.

A few weeks ago she came across this post of Andrea’s from 2013 and asked if I might consider making a similar list for her, as a birthday gift. Indulge in some sweet nostalgia and make my mom happy? This I can do.

“A happy childhood can’t be cured. Mine’ll hang around my neck like a rainbow,
that’s all, instead of a noose.” – Hortense Calisher, Queenie (1971)

Here you go, Mom. A long and happy list of things I grew up with:

that Strawberry Shortcake album, which I’d listen to with my ear pressed flush against one of the giant wood-paneled speakers (later it was Bookends and Sgt. Pepper)
Steak San Marco
Le Sueur peas in the silver can
Laurie’s chicken
baked potatoes with their steady plumes of steam
Life cereal
languorous Saturdays stretched out on the blue love seat with Johnny Tremain or The Egypt Game or The Baby-Sitters Club
clarinet reeds
road trips to the Smokies, to St. Louis, to Providence/Boston
the smell of church: that heady alchemical fusion of wooden pews and old hymnals and pink soap and sheet music and coffee and perfume and choir robes and wine that to this day, despite considerable wandering, comforts me immediately like little else
doodling with you on the back of a Sunday bulletin insert
lazy summers
Randy Travis
pets, always
KinderCare
Sniglets
Certs (and in fact the composite smell of your purse: Certs, leather, cash, Poison perfume, and CoverGirl Hint of Bronze Lipslick)
Born in the U.S.A.
Fisher Price Little People
blocks
afghans
Pert Plus in our bathroom, the brown Vidal Sassoon bottles in yours
Bisquick
Madonna
watching you pull on your knee highs
sticker books
Sticker Page
dinner rolls
oldies radio
cul-de-sac living
Bain de Soleil
MoonPies at PoFolks, the peg game at Cracker Barrel, popcorn shrimp at Red Lobster
Parker pens
piano music at dinnertime
red tip photinias
Putt-Putt
rock candy
the mall
TGIF
Georgia pines, sweetgums, Russian poplars
the smell of our street after a summer rain
whole wheat + Provolone grilled cheese
my eraser collection
friends’ birthday parties at roller rinks, McDonalds, ShowBiz
the staccato of orange roller skate wheels on the tile floors of the bathrooms at the rink
“Oh My Darling, Clementine” and “Marianne” and “Stewball”
Weekly Reader, Children’s Choice, and Parents’ Magazine book clubs
riding bikes
fireworks at Fort Gordon
swimming at Clarks Hill Lake
the Hawaiian nativity
the hum of Grandma’s sewing machine
a flamingo sticker on the sugar bin
red dirt
dappled light
seeing you and Dad kiss good-bye and hello every day

(Anyone else want to play? I’d love to read your lists.)

Three things

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Gosh, it’s been almost four months since I did one of these posts, and that one was the only time I did it in 2014. Hogwash! I do like some links.

1) PROJECT | Bored and Brilliant: The Lost Art of Spacing Out Join WNYC’s New Tech City managing editor Manoush Zomorodi for an experiment in spending less time on your phone and more time spacing out and doing creative work that doesn’t happen if we never allow our minds to be idle. There will be a week of challenges starting February 2, and in the meantime, download the Moment app to learn more about how you’re really using your phone, and follow the podcast and blog for more.

2) WISDOM | The Strange Art of Trying I’ve been meaning to share Deja’s post since last summer, maybe in a post of my own about our family food culture and my kid and all the things we did right and how he’s still so damn picky at five and how if I had to do it all over again I’d still do most of the same stuff. I think that post may linger in Draft Land forever, but I don’t want to wait any longer to share this. In half a sentence about effort and surrender, Deja says everything I felt but couldn’t articulate about kids and food. Hell, about how to live.

3) PHOTO ESSAY | 1989: America’s Malls I was strangely moved by Michael Galinsky’s photos of late 80s mall patrons. I think it’s to do with how I’ve been chewing on the idea of our shifting commons recently. More thoughts on that in another post, perhaps. Anyway, I was 12 in 1989.

A simple pot of lentils

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I found some pretty deep peace in a simple pot of lentils this week. It happened like this:

We’ve been hunkering down and making do/merry pretty well, all things considered – imagined Autobot space voyages to Pluto for magical ice, daytime baths, long read-alouds on the couch, good coffee and mugs of bone broth with ginger and cayenne – but it is also true that we’re still coming down from the joyous mayhem of presents and travel, that the weather outside is very grey and very wet, and that all four of us have massive, dizzying, ugly colds. To say I look forward to the moment when my husband walks in the door at the end of the day is a study in understatement.

Tuesday around 4pm: I get a text that a meeting is running long and he’ll be at least an hour late. I’m not mad, of course, but that doesn’t stop a knee jerk inner growl. I yawn and rub my temples, my daughter whimpers on my hip and wipes her snotty nose against my shoulder, and my son leaps off the table and lands with a ruthless thud. “Mom? What’s for dinner?”

Running on empty and knowing I’ve been by neither farm nor store since our return from the North Carolina mountains, I look in the fridge. Hmm. Lots of cheese. Very old milk. Three kinds of mustard. Pickle relish, yeast, simple syrup, tomato paste, miso, wrinkled grapes. Leftovers of indeterminate origin. It’s not looking good.

Popcorn and smoothies is not a terrible dinn– I begin to tell myself.

But I don’t want popcorn and smoothies I interrupt. I want something substantial and healing. I want protein. I want plants. Yes, you’re really tired. No, smoothies for dinner don’t make you a bad mom. Cook anyway.

I close the fridge. I think suddenly of the More-with-Less Cookbook, written by Doris Janzen Longacre and published by the Mennonite Central Committee in 1976 as an appeal to thrift in the kitchen and a call to arms against the global hunger crisis. I haven’t reached for it in a long time, but it is homely and modest and practical and that’s what I need tonight. I pull it down, find a recipe for Basic Cooked Lentils, and get to work.

Both kids are playing with the dog’s bowls under the kitchen table. I smile, put a couple cups of rice in the rice cooker, and slip out the back door, rummaging through our upright freezer out in the shed for some frozen chicken broth. I wrestle it out of its Ziploc armor, drop it into a big pot on the stove, and set the burner to high. I rinse a cup of lentils and as I agitate them in the sieve under running water I feel my mental fog lifting. The kids laugh and I hear dog food scatter and all I think is it feels good to feed my family. I add the lentils to the broth along with a bay leaf and a pinch of salt and turn everything down to a simmer. I look in the fridge again and surface with three leeks, shriveled and pretty gnarly but not rotten. Perfect. I put our big skillet on another burner and set half a stick of butter to melt in it. I peel away the (many) dried outer layers of the leeks and chop off their roots, slice them, rinse them well, and drop them in the skillet. My daughter clings to my leg with another soft whimper.

“Hello, sweet girl,” I say, hoisting her to my hip and kissing her forehead. “I know you want snuggles now. But I need to get dinner ready.” Like magic her brother appears with a big ball and a grin, and she turns to him with twinkling eyes, already wriggling free.

I step onto the back porch, where we often keep a crate or two of farm vegetables. I’m not hopeful because I know we haven’t filled the crates since our Christmas travels, but lo, there beneath a handful of wilted lettuce leaves sits one plump carrot – it looks a little tired, sure, but not so bad. I bring it inside, give it a quick scrub in the sink, dice it, and add it to the leeks along with another small knob of butter and some curry powder.

Miraculously – or perhaps because I am ignoring them – the kids don’t need anything. All the base components of the meal are cooking now, and I can turn to the tinier tasks of stirring, tasting, adjusting spices. My mind meanders pleasantly. I think of curries, of how little I know about authentic ones, of how much I love them anyway, of the lunchtime curries I ate at any of the half dozen little restaurants along East Sixth Street in the East Village and of the many approximations I’ve cobbled together at home. Almost seventeen years ago I bought two books from a man sitting on a quilt outside a train station in Chennai. One was Gandhi’s autobiography and the other was called Indian Cookery: for use in all countries, by E.P. Veerasawmy. For no good reason I haven’t cooked from it much (despite the back cover’s admonition that it “should be part of any cook-proud housewife’s library”!). But one big lesson from its first chapter has lingered with me for years: you must cook your curry powder or curry spices in the fat with your onions and garlic for several minutes, before adding any coconut milk or other liquids, to cook off their raw flavor. I’d like to learn more someday, I think, about how to really build layers of flavor in a curry. I think of the pact my husband and I make (and break) every year, to each pick a cuisine and cook from it once a week. Maybe this will be the year.

I think of my enormous cookbook collection. I think of what a thrilling time this seems for cookbooks in general: vibrant, clever flavor combinations; deep explorations of single ingredients or techniques; endless options for all kinds of eaters; and of course the beauty of the books themselves. I don’t get to do it much these days, but I love to sit with a stack of cookbooks and a cup of tea.

There’s a clear trend right now toward clean, wholesome cooking, whether you tend toward marrow bones and raw milk and home cured bacon or collard wraps and almond milk and meal-sized salads (or all of it, like me!). But there’s also a clear trend toward luxury in book design: heavy matte paper, breathtaking full bleed photographs, obvious care and cleverness in layout. It’s an interesting juxtaposition.

I think suddenly, absent any guilt or shame: what if I only had three or four cookbooks? I don’t mean what if I had to pick my three or four favorites from this crazy collection. I mean: what if, by choice or circumstance or culture, I just wasn’t into cookbooks? What if I was just a confident and unfussy home cook with a few worn references tucked on the counter between the coffee pot and the fridge? More-with-Less, maybe. The 1979 Fannie Farmer? A cookie book? What would that be like?

Our own little family straddles these questions of abundance and scarcity every day really: work that means access to the highest possible quality of produce and eggs and meat, smashed up against a pretty spartan budget everywhere else. Hmm. It’s a lot to think about, and tonight I am grateful to be muting the chatter and making some simple food with what I could rustle up.

I check the vegetables. The carrots aren’t quite done, and over in the pot, neither are the lentils. I scrape the curry mixture into the lentils and pour in another cup of broth. My phone buzzes again: another hour late. I put a lid on the pot, turn the heat to low, and gather my children into my arms.

Wishing you and yours a joyous new year. May your bellies and hearts be as full as mine.

* * *

A Simple Pot of Lentils
adapted from More-with-Less Cookbook, by Doris Janzen Longacre

I like this over rice or another grain. If you do too, get that started first. Then combine 2 1/2 cups broth or water and 1 cup rinsed lentils in a pot and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and add a bay leaf and a pinch of salt.

In a large skillet, melt several tablespoons butter or warm several tablespoons olive oil over medium heat. Add an onion (chopped) or a large leek (sliced and very well rinsed) and anything else that sounds good or is lying around threatening to go to waste (chopped small) – a stalk of celery, a carrot, a red pepper, a few turnips maybe. Sauté until the vegetables begin to soften. Add some chopped garlic and continue to cook for another minute. Now add some spices or herbs. A tablespoon or two of curry powder is nice. Or try some thyme or rosemary and some black pepper. Italian flavors work great. Don’t skimp. Saute for a few minutes more and then scrape the vegetables into the pot of lentils. Add more broth or water if things seem dry. Taste the lentils. If they’re done, simmer everything for a few minutes more. If they’re not, bring everything back to a simmer, put a lid on the pot, and go read with your kids.

Adjust seasonings and serve over grains. Top with a dollop of yogurt or a squeeze of lemon juice and some chopped parsley, if you like.

(seven posts in ~~seven~~ forty-two days)

The rest of it

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Sometimes the sour looks and the careless words and the doubts make such a ferocious racket. Maybe, probably, almost certainly the racket dons a mask and tries to pass as truth when you’re getting very little sleep.

So let me take a sweet moment to remember the rest of it: one mother, one baby, one 5-year old, and the 19 pounds of fleece/wool/Gore-Tex required to go anywhere this time of year. Dashing with my boy through the drizzle into our favorite coffee shop for hot chocolate. A slow drive up the coast, through sleepy shore towns and across silvery sounds. Wreaths on balconies. Windblown shacks teetering on stilts above the water. Empty osprey nests. Filling an empty diner with our laughter and squeals and stories. Bacon. A white paper bag of donuts tucked quietly under my arm by our waitress as we headed back out into the bluster. Dinosaur bones, fast slides, and 28 wild turkeys in the rain at the playground.

And then this morning: a boy making his own scrambled eggs and talking a blue streak while his dad made me coffee. This album. All the cars pulled over at the end of Beach Ave to watch the waves crash, and all the cars parked where the canal empties into the mouth of the bay, watching the ferries. The way such disparate strangers gather in an accidental kinship of awe and delight warms me every time.

(seven posts in seven days)

(Only one more to go! If I post again by Thursday it’ll be seven posts in 21 days,
which doesn’t have quite the same ring, but is still satisfyingly mathematical.)

Thanks

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“Thanks”

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

W.S. Merwin
Rain in the Trees

(seven posts in seven days)

Enormously gratifying (also: eggnog!)

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Regarding my progress in my seven posts in seven days challenge, this is post #4 on day #6. Not perfect, but not bad. Onward and upward!

I’m thinking back on the wintry drinks of my childhood, and I think I can sum up my happy memories in two telling words: Swiss Miss. There was the occasional waxed paper cup of hot cider after a haunted hayride, to be sure, and I only have to close my eyes to see my dad’s green Stanley vacuum thermos of coffee bouncing on the black vinyl passenger seat of our sky blue Volkwagen Beetle on the occasional thrilling dirt road shortcut to KinderCare. But it was really all about the Swiss Miss: Swiss Miss to warm fingers and belly after caroling, Swiss Miss halfway through my frostbitten gig as a shepherd in our church’s live nativity, Swiss Miss from the snack bar during the third quarter of high school football games (when we marching band folks were permitted a short break), Swiss Miss after marching in our town Christmas parade.

What was it exactly? One packet was never really enough to make a satisfyingly creamy drink with 12 ounces of water – and that water was always either lukewarm, requiring Sisyphean effort with a plastic stirrer to dissolve the lumps of powder, or scalding, and you never could make yourself wait, rushed as you were to feel the tiny marshmallows on your tongue before they melted completely, so then you’d burn your tongue and it would hurt for two days. None of this diminished my love for Swiss Miss in the slightest. And I’d wager to guess that in another twenty years, my own son will recall his packets of hot cocoa mix at our favorite deli with at least as much fondness as our nights in front of the stove with real milk and a box of cocoa.

Let’s not beat around the bush: mainly it was the sugar. Rare is the kid who can resist it. But there was also something enormously gratifying about how fast you could turn something that looked like powdered tempera paint into something that smelled of cake and snowfall and Christmas break. It was like magic.

And so eggnog – the stuff in the carton with its musty nutmeg and slimy mouthfeel – really didn’t stand a chance with me in 1989, but a quarter century later, the real stuff has my heart. We make it a couple times every December. Sometimes it’s on offer at a small solstice gathering with friends, and I like to sip it when we decorate the tree too. It is, of course, lovely with bourbon, or rum, or brandy, but there is little that compares to the gleam in my son’s eyes or his frothy mustache when he drinks it, so I usually hold back the booze and we adults just add it to taste, if at all.

(seven posts in seven days)

Eggnog
adapted from Alton Brown

About the ingredients: lucky as I am to have such easy access to such high quality ingredients, I’m often reluctant to suggest you use “the best you can afford.” Most people can’t afford that stuff, and I feel strongly that a wholesome family life doesn’t depend on pastured eggs. But because eggnog is raw, taste and safety matter enormously here. Make sure you feel good about where your eggs, milk, and cream are coming from.

4 eggs, separated
1 tablespoon plus 1/3 cup sugar
1 pint whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
generous grating fresh nutmeg (about 1 teaspoon, or to taste)
3 ounces bourbon, rum, or brandy (optional)

Using a stand mixer or handheld electric mixer, beat the egg whites to soft peaks. Add 1 tablespoon sugar and beat to stiff peaks. Pour the whites into a small bowl and set them aside. You don’t need to clean your mixing bowl.

In your mixing bowl, beat the egg yolks on medium speed until they begin to lighten. Add the rest of the sugar and beat until dissolved. Add the milk, cream, nutmeg, and optional liquor, and mix on low until just combined. Gently whisk in the whipped egg whites.

This is best served right away, but leftovers can be stored, tightly covered, for about a day in the fridge. You’ll need to shake the jar before drinking leftovers.

Serves 4-8, depending on serving size.

* * *

Mark Twain said, “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” Does that mean I can keep talking about eggnog?

Alton Brown’s recipe really is everything I want in eggnog: it’s rich and festive and worth waiting for, super easy to make, and delicious with or without booze. But Molly’s great-grandfather J. P. Hartt’s boozy eggnog was the first stuff to open my eyes to a world beyond the carton in the supermarket dairy aisle, close to ten years ago now, and if you’re having a party, you should consider it. Also, two years ago I made this vegan eggnog. You won’t confuse it with the traditional stuff, but it’s really very good in its own right. But wait; there’s more! I had written off storebought eggnog completely until my friend Abbie – who farms in Vermont with her family and knows a thing or two about good dairy – encouraged me to check out Organic Valley’s eggnog. Whoa! Game changer! Real food ingredients! Pastured cows! Really worth seeking out in a pinch or if you just don’t fancy making your own. But if, perhaps, you do fancy more kitchen experimenting … has anyone ever made aged eggnog? Three years! Whoa again! I want to do it. And finally, convention be damned, I really want to try this rose and cardamom eggnog (and everything else in that post).

What did you love to drink as a kid when the weather turned or during the holidays? What do you love to drink now?

Only on Sundays

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The day begins a little before 7 in a tangled, laughing pileup of pouncing baby and garrulous older brother and bleary-eyed parents, the late November light creeping through the blinds a merciful pearly grey. After a few minutes I take a deep breath and throw back the quilts, one child on my right hip and the other at my left side, hand in mine. We close the door behind us and slip out into the world of coffee and Legos. (Only on Sundays; the rest of the week my husband is the one wrangling the early birds and scrambling eggs and unloading the dishwasher, and I am the one burrowed deep under the covers stealing a blissful bit of uninterrupted sleep.) I plug in the waffle irons (we have two!) and put on a Christmas record even though it’s not yet Thanksgiving. I am almost 37 and I find myself pleasantly loosening my iron grip on these sorts of things. I sip my coffee through a smile and marvel at these two children playing amicably, needing little more than my nearness.

Before long my husband joins us, taking my spot on the couch when I rise to make the batter and set the table and put on the kettle for another cup of coffee. I pull buttermilk from the fridge. We never used to keep buttermilk around and now we do and I find myself reaching for it all the time. I smile at this too. Some eggs, some butter, some flours. Quiet whisking. I think to slice some apples into a small pot with a knob of butter.

I call everyone into the kitchen. We’re easy and merry. The baby is ravenous recently. I think she’s growing. After nine months of not really napping she’s napping, and maybe it’s just for this week, but I’ll take it, because she is also nursing like a new piglet all night long. At the table she reaches for everything, stewed apples and red pepper hummus and pork roast and buttery carrots and, because I am trying to chill out a little, a couple bites of her brother’s waffle, pre-syrup. She slaps the table and yowls out for more.

Our mornings are not always like this, not by a long shot, but sometimes they are.

(seven posts in seven days)

Whole Grain Waffles
adapted from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

I didn’t post yesterday but I do have waffles to share. I hope that counts for something. We love breakfast around here. Growing up, we all had to be out the door pretty early for school or work most days, and so it was usually, and happily, cereal and milk, maybe a Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tart. These days we mostly do oatmeal or scrambled eggs with toast and fruit. But I do love a Sunday morning, the one day we’re all home. We take it very easy and we usually up our breakfast game, just a little. Scrambled eggs with scones or muffins instead of toast, often. Tara’s berried breakfast cobbler. Dutch babies and bacon. My dad’s French toast (which is really his mom’s French toast). Or waffles! I’ve tried so many recipes over the years and while I can’t say I’ve ever met a waffle I didn’t like (except for the one time I tried using organic vegetable shortening that had been sitting in the cupboard for who knows how long; those tasted exactly like plastic), I keep coming back to two Deborah Madison recipes – these and her yeasted waffles, which I make with a blend of white whole wheat, millet, and buckwheat flours. Really, really good, but you have to remember to start them the night before.

(See note below on substitutions.)

1/4 cup (half a stick) butter
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups buttermilk or 1/2 cup yogurt stirred into 1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup white whole wheat flour, whole wheat pastry flour, or all-purpose flour
1/4 cup each of four additional flours or meals (try cornmeal, millet flour, barley flour, buckwheat flour, oats whirred into coarse flour in the food processor or blender, even a cracked grain hot cereal blend)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat your waffle iron and melt your butter.

Whisk all the wet ingredients except the butter together in a bowl. Whisk the dry ingredients in a separate bowl. Add the wet ingredients and the butter to the dry ingredients and whisk or stir to combine. The batter should be fairly thick but shouldn’t get stuck in the whisk; if it seems too thick (and it might, depending on which combination of flours you choose) add another splash or two of milk. Cook in your waffle iron until nicely browned!

(A note on substitutions: we love these waffles on a Sunday, when I relax a little about starting the day off with whole foods, but I’m happy to make them on other days too, because there’s only white flour in them if you want it; they’re fantastic without it. Feel free to play around with the flour combination. I’ve found the recipe quite flexible, although I find rye flour does make them a bit heavy. I have not worried too much about the percentage of gluten flours. These are easy to make vegan by subbing in flax eggs for the regular eggs, any milk alternative plus a splash of vinegar or lemon juice for the buttermilk, and oil for the butter.)

PS If you’ve made it this far: who wants to weigh in on this?

Tonight

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Not long after breakfast I was tucked quite comfortably into a corner of the couch, nursing the baby (who will be nine months old in a couple days, whaaaaaat?) and surveying the detritus of life with little people and stealing sips of my second cup of coffee, when wham! I knew exactly what I’d write about today. There’s this thing that’s been a real haven for me in these early years of motherhood and I think this might be just the time and just the spot to talk about that.

The post nearly wrote itself: when I was nursing the baby down for her naps, and when I drove to the library and then again when I drove to pick up pizza, and when I was giving the kids their bath. Do you do some of your best writing like this too?

Hoping hard that post will still be up there in my head waiting for me in a day or two. Tonight I’m going to bed full to bursting with thanks, for hot breakfasts and good coffee and another cup whenever I want it. For the way the back of my baby’s head fits into the crook of my elbow. For my five-year old’s morning hair. For apologies and deep breaths and do-overs. For librarians. For a hungry hungry baby and cooking with my boy and his exploding interest in math. For four phone calls a day with my mom. For clear night skies and Christmas records and hot cocoa. For wind on the bay. For Legos. For bread. For Henry and Mudge. For Cheers on the couch and a splash of bourbon in my cider and my husband at my side.

(seven posts in seven days)

In any case

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Monday started sweetly enough: steel cut oats piled high with yogurt and apples and drizzled with maple syrup, and coffee of course, always coffee, and then the family yoga class we’ve been joyously starting our week with for a couple months now. But Monday also started with some deep yawns. It felt less like the beginning of the week and more like the next in a long string of long work days for my husband. Farming is like this: lots of weekend work and lots of last minute demands. I think I surrendered to it more easily though when it was our farm and when it was happening a field away. Work and family life were all mashed up together. In any case, the day was cold and wet, and we passed lots of it bouncing off the walls inside, and when late afternoon rolled around I was very, very ready for the music class we’ve also been loving this fall. We dashed through the parking lot in the rain to find the walls of the music room torn to pieces, drywall and plaster dust and exposed lumber everywhere, with nary another confused family in sight; I’d clearly missed, or misplaced, the memo. My pocket buzzed: a text from my husband saying there’d been a delay with some equipment and he wouldn’t make it home until two hours after bedtime. I took a deep breath. We dashed back to the car, and I buckled the kids in, and I slid into the driver’s seat. “Well,” I said. “Shall we see if anyone’s Christmas lights are up yet?”

And so we drove around this beach town for an hour, listening to Elmer and the Dragon on Audible and looking for lights. It was perfect. And when the baby wouldn’t sleep and we all had a Prince dance party in the living room instead, waiting for my husband? Perfect too.

(seven posts in seven days)

Write anyway.

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There are so many reasons I don’t write here much. I’m sure the list is familiar to lots of you: I have two young kids and I cannot figure out when to shower, much less write. I still can’t decide how much is okay to write about my family. I expect a lot out of my own writing and have not been very open to sometimes posting tiny plumes of words. And finally, the big one for me maybe: is writing about myself this much too self-indulgent? When all is said and done, will I wish I had directed this energy toward something broader, toward building loving community, here on my block and out there in the world?

But writing here flexes my storytelling muscles and sends up smoke signals – of distress, yes, but also the sort that say, “I’ve found good food and shelter from the storm; come join me!” – and opens up all kinds of doors. Writing here has been my respite during some tough years, and even the sporadic posts have become a record I would otherwise have lost. Also, the satisfaction of seeing a thought through to its natural end – a deep pleasure I took wholly for granted in my 20s – should not be underestimated. All this from crumpling up that list of reasons not to write.

And so I’m issuing myself a small challenge: seven posts in seven days. Public accountability does not generally light much of a fire under my rump (to wit: my Year of Mornings 365 several years ago, which took me a full two years to complete) and sometimes it even makes me downright irritable, but I think I can do this. I was pretty sure I was going to, and then I read Janelle’s awesome post yesterday on Renegade Mama, Twelve Easy Steps to Doing Creative Work While Parenting, where she said, “Write anyway write instead write because of write when you can’t write.” And apparently that did light a fire under my rump, because here I am. My aim is to keep the posts short, and since ’tis the season, I’m going to focus on gratitude.

See you here tomorrow!