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The Boys of Ukraine

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I was traveling with my friend and colleague, Kveta, heading to an orphanage for boys somewhere in western Ukraine.  We traveled over pock-marked roads, sometimes driving on the right side, sometimes the left, dodging the largest potholes with varying success. 

This part of Ukraine is beautiful but remote, everything in sight churned up and lumpen from the thawing winter:  the fields, the forest floor, and especially the roads. 

Kveta and her school, Caritas College of Social Work, have deep roots in Ukraine, sending students to complete internships, students like Marketa, who travels with us.  We arrive in mid-afternoon, with Roystia, our driver and guide.  He is a priest and a great friend to the orphanage and the boys. 

We round a corner carrying our bags and a dozen or more boys hang out the upstairs windows, shouting down to Roystia. 

“Where will the girls stay?”

“Will they stay in our rooms with us?”

We are the girls, of course, old enough to be their mothers, grandmothers, maybe, and Marketa the beautiful and mysterious older cousin.

Roystia laughs and translates for us. 

“No, they have their own room, and you must leave them alone,” he shouts back, but already they boys are clattering down the wide stone steps and they clang out the door to get a better look. 

It is a place bereft of women, of motherly tenderness and care.  There is a cranky cook and a kind housekeeper, but she is busy and overworked, and the boys rarely see her as she swirls between her tasks. The headmaster, too, is kind, and the teachers.  They admit it is a problem for the boys, but can only shrug and look off in the middle distance.  There is no solution to this delimma.

The boys kick soccer balls and grab whatever is at hand to hold above their heads and wave at us, vying for attention and appreciation. One boy brings me an American football, surprised I know how to throw it, but good-natured and laughing when he throws it much farther.  

One boy, maybe twelve,  runs into a small out building and stands just outside the doorway with a chainsaw as big as he is.  It is running and he revs it, or I think he does, until he is satified we have all seen him.

Alexei, the youngest child here, is only five, too young to be here, but his older brother is here and looks out for him. Alexei is everywhere, follows us like our shadow, weaseling his way between us and the the railings of the winding staircase, managing to sneak into our room unseen as soon as we unlook the door.  He rummages then, looking in drawers, bouncing on each of our beds, saying something in Ukrainian I don’t understand. 

The older boys know his tricks, and come to remove him, embarrassed and apologizing in English.  Alexei will knock on our door at 5:00 a.m.each morning. Any time we head to the large room we share, there he is, tiny and fast, grinning and bouncing and repeating the same phrase, again and again.

On our last day I learn what he has said all week.  

“You will take me with you.  You will take me with you.”

Demetri wants us to stay.  He has made a space for our shoes in the hall closet where thirty sets of shoes sit, waiting for their owners to go outside.  He comes to get us, points to the place for our shoes, holds out the soft slippers for us, the ones the Ukrainians wear indoors.  You see? He seems to say.  We will make room for all of you.  Stay.

The little boys pose with their buddies for photos, seem to have endless energy for it. The older boys, the adolescents, watch in an amused way, always on the edges, not as frisky as the smaller boys, but not far away from us, either.  

They agree to a photo finally, when no one is looking. They go shy and awkward, these handsome boys, perhaps a little embarrassed that they want their picture taken as much as the younger ones do. 

I think of these sweet boys, the ones who spoke English like little scholars.  The one who had a way with the chainsaw, and the graceful athlete in the broken-down shoes, his arm instinctively finding the arc of a thrown football.

Demetri holding out slippers.

Alexei, and how he broke my heart, in the same moment we broke his.

How even he is fighting age now.

Where are they, the boys, as bombs fall on Ukraine?  And the boys who came after them, and how many more boys made orphans, this very night, by sheer evil.  And what are we to do?

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WHAT DO I WANT NOW?

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The question put to Marty Byrde by the drug lord was simple and direct.  

What do you want?  

Marty, under some duress, being held in a stone cell with blaring music and bright lights, was hard put to come up with something.  So back he goes to his dungeon accommodations to ponder on it some more. 

Halfway through the third season of “Ozark” the kidnapped Marty is given an opportunity for clarity and focus, although we can all agree the wages of his particular sins will be death if he doesn’t come up with a satisfactory answer.

  I am re-watching the series in preparation for the fourth and final season, and because of the language and violence and unsavory characters—most all of them—I can’t recommend it.  It is a “buyer beware” kind of situation, not unlike “Breaking Bad,” another train wreck of a story line that was just like a train wreck to watch.  Upsetting, loud with lots of screeching, explosions and double-crosses,  and yet, we can’t look away. 

The line was delivered as I sat high over the Gulf of Mexico, the door to the balcony slightly cracked against a bright day with cool winds.  Not quite south enough to offer a feel of the tropics in February, but still, the sun was warm and palm trees swayed, and it is enough to give a hint of spring, and that was just fine for now.  And yet, beautiful though it was out the sliding glass doors, it wasn’t enough.  Not exactly. 

It is very nice.  I am surrounded by friends. A change of scene is always good, especially in winter.  There is lots of love here, and laughter. 

But it isn’t all I want. 

And I feel full of hubris and a bit embarrassed to even be having this conversation. Do we, any of us, get what we want?  Can we engineer it, craft it from pieces of pine and wood  glue, set it in a corner or on display, this thing that is our heart’s desire? Is it even a worthy use of our time, such contemplation? 

Well, yes and no. 

We can plan and wish and worry and wool our lives away.  I do this with notebooks, calendars, planners, notes on scraps of paper, written in the dark of a movie theatre, in bed, as ideas come to me.  That I never return to them later in the cold light of day doesn’t seem to faze me. Somehow, writing it down makes it so, a hold over from childhood when my dreams were bigger than the fat pencil I used to record them. Grand, but really, beside the point.

Beside the point because a child has so little agency, has so little means to make dreams come true.  Maybe that is why they are so big, those dreams.  The elephant rides across the Alps, the Olympic gold medals for ski jump, traveling to Mars, saving the world with a towel pinned to a pajama top, tight fists jutting out, fighting for truth, justice and the American way. 

I rode a slew of horses when I was a child, saved many, many lives. That’s me, right there, riding along side Penny and her uncle, Sky King.  Dale Evans and Roy Rogers relied on me, too.  And Cheyenne, although ours was a complicated relationship.  I had a crush on him, you see, or what passed as a crush for an eight year old. 

Perhaps I was so busy doing heroic things because so much of the time I was just plain scared.  There is much to spook a child, and I had my share. The dark.  Creaky old floorboards in creaky old houses, the bully who chased and sometimes caught me coming home from school. Losing sight of my mother in a crowded store, the mysterious things children see but don’t understand. 

By now, I have a handle on most things, can outrun a bully because I drive a car, am comforted by the sounds of an old house settling, as I sit and settle, too. I have agency in spades.  But time?  It no longer creeps up on me, it races by as swift and violent as a purse snatcher.  

The beach is nice, but, for me, it is a kind of staging area, not a final destination. It is so much nicer than Marty Byrde’s dungeon cell.  But deciding what I want seems as critical and time-sensitive as Marty figuring out what he wants. But we will both feel better, I think,  once we strike on the true, and have heart enough to utter it aloud.

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The Way of Wintering

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It will be some weeks until my birthday, my dead of winter birthday, but I think about it differently than I used to. I never liked my February birthday, but something a friend said this time last year intrigued me and I have been mulling it over since.  

She, too, has a winter birthday, and she also hated it as a kid.  I thought my February celebration in Kentucky was drab and cold and overcast.  She grew up in a northern clime so she has me beat, with snow and ice and slush, and bare branches against the sky.   No cookouts for her, either, or swim parties or park picnics.  

Perhaps my siblings didn’t have swim parties, either, what with their summer birthdays, but there were cookouts, there were picnics. I know because I ate the hotdogs.  I licked the salt from my fingers before and after scrounging around in a big bag of Lay’s.  And I never forgot, and nursed the resentment, that in seven months we will gather inside and after dark on a cold day for my birthday and presents, but it will be over in a twinkling because tomorrow is  a school day. 

My friend likes her winter birthday now, likes the dormant world, the cold, the early nightfall that wraps around her, creating the space for contemplation, quiet, and simple pleasures:  warmth on a frigid night, good bread, a book, rest.

Well, put like that, I began to see the merits.  It changed my whole attitude. I use the weeks after the holidays to do things there is never time for in the weeks leading up to Christmas.  I go to bed early, not to sleep, necessarily, but to read and dream, and check my phone for pictures of the new babies in the family. 

At first I thought I would celebrate Old Christmas, Epiphany, as a way to keep the Christmas spirit going, but let’s face it.  Except for a few pockets of people holding on to the old ways, and except for the Anglicans among us, there isn’t much to recommend it.  Now, the Tudors knew how to throw a twelve-day party, but even they were exhausted at the end of it and their neighbors didn’t see them again until the streams ran high.

I think my friend was talking about the idea of wintering. It should occur after the New Year and last until just before the birds begin to wake us up.  Here in the Ohio River Valley, that should be sometime in mid-March.  Wintering should include sleep, quality sleep with a favorite blankie, something I have only just discovered.  It may take some doing to find your perfect wrap, but it is important, and I don’t recommend you rush it.  Wintering requires soups, and something in the oven, and coffee brewed in fancy ways.  A French press, perhaps, or a Chemex, an item so beautiful it is displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.  

The Chemex coffee pot—can we call it a pot?—was designed in 1941 by chemist and inventor, Peter Schlumbohm, and it is part Bauhaus chic, part chemistry lab gear, and the coffee it renders is as clean and glorious as its design. 

Like the French press, it takes some time to get your brew, and on a gray winter morning it is reassuring, the tiny tinkerings that engage us, the waiting.  It cracks the world, just a little bit, takes us to that soft place in the middle distance where we float for a while as we wait, never reeling too far out, but far enough to slow our breathing.  Such resting and waking, the symmetry of that. 

My time is my own now, and I have the luxury of letting a day take me where it will. This isn’t the way for everyone.  Or myself, for a long long time.  Then I was always thinking months ahead, begrudging the boredom of the cold, the damp, the snow that came or didn’t come, messing with every plan I had made.  I spent chunks of my year in suspended animation, waiting for the clearing of the weather, the clearing of my calendar, for the arrival of spring and birds, the pale greening that signaled the true new year. 

Now I think of late winter, of January, February, as the quiet quickening of all newness. The gray a blanket to crawl under and keep warm until I can warm myself. The snow, the rain and a roof, an invitation to sit still and wonder. And to rest.

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The Word

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Writers love words.  Of course we do.  Love to think about them, look them up, say them over and over until they begin to sound like nonsense syllables.  We delight in stringing them together, moving them around, sometimes for hours at a time.  We have been known to weep over our words when we manage to sort them into a sequence so beautiful it is as if all the sun in all the world has broken through to shine only on that paragraph, that sentence. 

We weep again, when we realize, some time later, the beautiful words no longer work.  Then we gently lay them to rest, heartsick they won’t see the light of day.   We might keep them in a special notebook, handwritten and tucked up with tissue, as we bend over them promising to return, to use them again, in some other, finer piece. We whisper to them, telling of the day they might soar with their brothers into the world to inspire and move all those readers as they have moved us. 

We almost never keep this promise, of course, but it eases our hearts, somehow, this ritual of saving something we have created, something beautiful, but in the end, useless. 

When a new year blossoms we are tempted, sometimes shamed, into making resolutions, those great resolves for improvement, discipline, life-altering changes that often run counter to the true essence of our natures.  A nine-year old child who doesn’t like to run is unlikely to grow into a fifty-year old who decides to take up jogging.  It happens, of course, but I’ve seen them out there pounding the asphalt, their faces in grimaces worthy of Goya.
A friend is shifting around for her word, just one, to serve as her touchstone for the year.  She writes with a group which does this, find the one word to guide and inspire them, something pithy and meaningful.  A word easily transferred to a post-it note for the bathroom mirror, a word folded away with the ones and fives in a wallet, something to scribble in the margins when meetings run long. 

A different friend gave me my word for this year.  We were chatting and she said she experienced me in a certain way.  She meant it as a compliment, and I took it that way, but I also thought, it isn’t very accurate.  I might aspire to the word, might walk around in it on those days when I’m feeling imaginative and hopeful, but there is much in my life that runs counter to it.  

Things that get in my way, keep me from my better self, things I do, out out habit or inattention, that hinder me in a thousand little ways.  Like the principle of compound interest, little things add up, slowly at first, and then at a rapid rate.  I find myself overwhelmed and set adrift, with no paddle or wind. Nothing changes.  The shore always too far to reach.  

Ah, but the word.  If I practiced it, just a little, what difference it could make. 

I am not going to share my word just yet. I know myself well.  To toss it out there now is to all but toss it away.  Sometimes just saying a thing makes it so, or it feels that way, and I am on to the next shiny thing, with nary a look back.  I will share it eventually, but not quite yet.

Perhaps there is a word rolling around for you to embrace, to ponder and apply in your life, for snags big and small.  Looking through a single lens helps us focus.  Helps me focus.  My breathing slows.  Like tumblers in a lock, my next course of action falls into place and opens before me. 

May you find your word. May you let it guide you, challenge you. It is you  and it is yours, this word.  May it delight you with the glow of a thousand suns.

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Perfect and Not Perfect — When Not Perfect’s Better

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The week between Christmas and New Year’s is my favorite of the year.  Before the plague descended, it was the only time I enjoyed the luxury of not knowing the day of the week, the exact time of day, and sometimes, my own name.  

My days are filled binging movies, naps that overtake me, awaking in the dark at 5:00 o’clock, with that panic that starts in the solar plexus, is it morning or night?  The little stashes of Christmas goodies delivered by friends and tucked away from prying eyes, so I might have them all to myself, without sharing, which feels mean and wonderful.  

By mid-week I may stop lighting the tree, more from sloth more than ennui.  I will spend five minutes thinking of warm and sunny shores, palm trees, humidity.  But then, toting my trash to the curb, extra bags with boxes and crumpled wrapping, I will experience humidity, balmy breezes, and curse whatever powers that conspire to rob me of a white Christmas. 

My lovely, lovely notebooks and planners sit stacked and enticing on the edge of my coffee table.  I won’t touch them until my new pens arrive.  I won’t touch them even then, because I want them to stay perfect, pristine, the embodiment of promise — for organization, purpose, discipline.  

One of my writing friends is terrified by the blank page.  He writes whole chapters in his head, outlines plot and scene and fleshes out his characters before ever sitting down to the computer.  I love nothing better than a blank page, a clean slate.  It is a mirror, I think, of perfection.  But of course, once even the shadow of your face come into view, it becomes this other, imperfect thing, all illusion shattered. 

Not that this is a bad thing. In fact, it is a necessary thing, intended to save us from ourselves and the construct that is perfection.   That mirror wants to be our friend, showing us ourselves clearly, practically willing us to accept what we see, all of it, as we do with the lovable imperfections of others.

Like a good antique, our image in the mirror or on the blank page is the evidence of use, and wear, and on occasion trauma—the dark place a candle burned too low, the butterfly block that holds it together, fixed up, still standing.  

My friend, Sally, tells me not to be concerned about imperfections when it comes to antiques.   Sometimes we are willing to pay a lot of money for those cracks. Some say the crack tells the better story.

While it is still early in the week, while I still know the day and time, I think I’ll  take a gander in the mirror that is the blank page of the New Year.  I will try to look past the unreasonable weather, the rain which should be snow, will put away the Christmas tins, brush the crumbs off my front, sit up straight on couch. Open a notebook.

Concentrate not on perfection but  on all the lovely cracks. 

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A Sibling Christmas

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By the week before Christmas, my siblings and I would finally be out of school and sick with anticipation.  This manifested itself in several ways.  Conspiratorial whisperings late at night as to how to catch Santa Claus.  Manic running through the house, so furious the glass ornaments on the tree tinkled and clinked together, the old wooden floors groaning under our pounding feet.  Arguments over nothing ensued, some playful slur or accidental elbow thrown, ending, as all such romps ended, in a fist fight. 

Not a true fist fight, of course.  We were careful not to hit faces or torsos where all the best organs lived, but there was some slugging and rolling around involved. My mother, bent over the jam cake batter, hollered that way she had in the moments just before she snapped, and we retreated to our rooms, relieved to flop on our beds and save ourselves from ourselves.  We tossed insults at each other across the hall but really, our hearts weren’t in it.

Evenings and we lay under the tree, fanned out like spokes in a wheel, the room dark but for the tree lights, as we discussed with great solemnity, the existence of you-know-who.  My brother, Billy, and I were old enough to have seen price tags left of toys the year before:  W.T. Grant, Kuester’s, Sears & Roebuck.  This required an elaborate series of events to explain, ones involving managers late on Christmas Eve letting Santa in the backdoor.  We accepted  the logic that he couldn’t carry all the toys for the world at once, while still accepting the fact  that Santa delivered toys by sleigh.

The little kids joined us under the tree, all sweet-smelling in their flannel pajamas, and we were as happy as we ever were, lulled by the dark and colorful lights, all our energy spent for one day, and filled with generosity and goodwill as we anticipated the generosity and goodwill soon to be coming to us. 

That’s the thing, isn’t it, how easy to be generous when we have enough.  How kind we are when we anticipate kindness from others.  How calm our hearts after a good scolding when we know we deserved it and to see, when the dust settles, that whatever it was that got us in trouble isn’t even forgiven, but completely forgotten. 

We have new babies in the family this year.  Four of them.  They are far-flung and we have yet to have them all in the same room together.  Right now they are new and fresh and still a wonderment to their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.  Their job is to be gazed upon and adored, to reach for us so we will pick them up, to squirm and fuss until we find just the spot where they fold into us and find our fit. 

The fit that will be different with each child. 

And we will study them like lab experiments, working like the teacher’s pet to understand every nuance of their movements, their burbles and grunts, until we believe we are the best in the class, unlocking their codes. We will study them for the rest of our lives.  We all want straight A’s in the knowing of these children. 

I find myself looking to my young niece, who is the true expert on her infant son, and take instruction as if I’ve paid her for tutoring.  I all but take notes.  I don’t get much of the new mothering these days: sleep sacks, tummy time, back sleeping.  But I get that, for all the baby’s squishy rolls of fat, there is something delicate about new life, like those old German Christmas ornaments, big and brilliant and shiny, and fragile as egg shells. 

There will soon be siblings for these babies to love and fight with, new babies for us to learn head to toe.

I have my own version of time under the Christmas tree now.  It involves visits with friends, long chats on the phone with pals I might not see for months and months.  Christmas music going, sometimes the old holiday classics, sometimes Trans-Siberian Orchestra, sometimes medieval chants, sometimes sweet nuns singing to me in Latin. 

No longer waiting for Santa Claus and bribing him with cookies and milk, I will toss seeds and nuts out my backdoor on Christmas morning for the birds and squirrels still inhabiting my yard.  I’ll make my mother’s jam cake.  I’ll wear flannel pajamas to bed, although I am warm natured. I won’t miss slugging somebody, but I’ll think on the that particular form of sibling love that says, I may hit you but I won’t hurt you.  You can trust me.  And you do.

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Fires, Family and Furious Shopping

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The Thanksgiving holiday weekend passed just as I had hoped, with food, family, fun, and ferocious on-line shopping.  And fire.  Don’t forget the fire.  

My mother and grandmother passed down the story of the twenty pound turkey that caught the oven on fire.  It was spoken of in reverent tones, tinged a little with fear, the perfect kind of cautionary tale.  The bird was simply too big.  The grease was simply too copious.  The oven too hot.  

Fire. 

The story never progressed beyond this, just somber and knowing looks all around. 

Did you buy a turkey this year?  Couldn’t find a small one, could you?  Me, either. 

So, an hour into roasting, and the house filling with smoke, I decided to have a look, and in so doing, adding the third element of combustion, oxygen. Up came the flames, and after a couple of boxes of baking soda, most of them were out.  But maybe not all.  911 and I discussed this, even as I heard the sirens on their way from the No. 4 fire station.

By the time the two policemen, the ladder truck, the pumper truck, and the ambulance arrived, everything was out.  Fire terrifies me, thank you “Wizard of Oz,” so I always err on the side of caution.  And such a nice bunch of young men.  Reassuring, helpful, opening windows and bringing in that nice powerful fan to remove the smoke. 

It scared my neighbors, but brought offers of another oven, offers of help and plates of food.  My sister always makes a turkey, too, so she saved the day and has called often to remind me of it.

We had a baby to pass around this year, but mostly I got to rock him to sleep and then hold him for the duration of his nap.  When anyone tried to relieve me of him, I jiggled his leg to make his startle, then told the interloper we best not disturb him.  He and I stayed like that until it was time to go home.  I looked all apologetic at his light sleeping habits, but I wasn’t sorry,, not at all.

My nephews were home with their dogs, who just love me.  I am not much of a pet person, so this guarantees no matter where I go, dogs lick my hands and jump up on me, cats rub around my ankles and silently hop onto the furniture when I’m not looking, the better to peer deep into my eyes. The toddlers I really want to play with?  I am dead to them.

Reading’s dog, Kobe, will stay with his grandparents for the week.  He pulled one of his master’s sweatshirts out of his bag, and flopped down on it.  I am told he will pine for Reading until he returns, moving from the sweatshirt to the front door and back again.  It’s sweet, and pitiful, and I don’t know what all. 

Friday I spent over an hour attempting to buy a 2022 planner on a Taiwanese website.  I am fussy about planners and am convinced the right one will change my life in all the good ways.  I will be taller, thinner, smarter, more accomplished.  This one has Tomoe River paper, of which I am quite fond.  Vertical weeks, month at a glance pages in a handsome grid pattern. 

A pal of mine likes calendars, too, whispering like it might be a great shame she gets new calendars all year long when the old ones get messy.  Oh, I get it. 

Somewhere in this calendar buying, she also posted on Facebook a photo of a new notebook she bought, something to give her that last little push to finish the semester and the year with success.  So, I had to check those out, too.  

They are Decomposition notebooks, made completely with recycled materials, which I often eschew because I don’t like the paper.  But these are great.  The size and shape of traditional composition books, they have wonderful covers and inside illustrations, and I bought several, to end my year right and organize me, too.

When they arrived I felt like John Boy on Christmas Eve with his stack of Big Chief tablets.  This friend of mine is cool, but she is starting to cost me money.  I admit I am “other directed,” a fancy term for being a follower, all shallow and insecure.   But right this minute, I am organized and creative, and too cool to hang around here much longer. And tall, don’t forget tall.

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Thanksgiving Traditions — The Same and Different

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The November sun is not quite up, but I am.  My grandmother would have been, too, sitting in her darkened kitchen, her thin legs wrapped around each other, a treble clef, smoking, thinking about the day ahead.  At her elbow would be a stenographer’s pad with notes and a timeline as she prepared for battle with the Thanksgiving feast. 

I say “battle,” but really it was more like maneuvers, the complicated logistics of who goes first, second, third, carrying what, all manner of equipment and provisions packed into the olive drab jeeps and canvas covered trucks in just the right order. 

Somewhere else in the quiet house, my brother and I would be sleeping.  Granny Opal was known for her quiet ways. Calm, reserved.  Easy, I think, is the word to describe her.  A soothing presence, a baby whisperer.  Reassuring.  She never woke us, even when we begged her to get us up in time to put the bird in the oven.  I don’t remember now why that was such a big deal, but it was. 

We were never too disappointed we missed it, and might have been secretly glad, because we slept under blankets in a pitch black room, and it was fine by us to stay there, in soft beds warmed by our small bodies.  

I have tried to get my nieces and nephews interested in learning the old recipes, some written in Granny Opal’s elaborate hand.  They are spattered, some of them, but they are also dated, with attribution and notes in the margins.  Her recipe books are full of the names I recognize as  her Sunday school group, names from an era when they gathered at someone’s home a couple of times of year.  Gatherings with butter mints and peanuts—cocktail nuts, to be exact, these tee-totaling Baptists.  

It was a time of ladies’ magazines, snack sets and sweater sets. And recipes that made the rounds. Recipes that took all afternoon to make, fancy sandwiches, mile-high cakes with freshly grated coconut. And always something passed along by Gwen Brown, or Mrs. Pruden, the best bakers at Buena Vista Baptist Church. 

The elaborate cranberry salad we slaved over, with all the ingredients ground in a cast iron food mill clipped to the formica table is particularly labor-intensive.  We helped with grinding and chopping, and I would have sworn it was a recipe brought with great-grandmother when she moved to town. 

I make it still even though no one eats it.  But tradition is tradition and not subject to practicality. Then my sister informs me that, no.  My mother didn’t grow up eating this.  They served cranberry sauce from a can.  Granny Opal started the tradition, sometime in the sixties.  I didn’t believe it.  But there it is, neatly typed in her recipe book. “Cranberry Salad”  from “Mrs. Sam Talley, 8-13-64.”

What am I to do with this information? 

I have the cranberries, the pecans, the celery, the orange and the grinder. I’ll make it, of course, using the old grinder,  as Mrs. Sam Talley instructs.

The generations are turning, and the nieces who had little interest in recreating my childhood Thanksgiving  Eve rituals now need sweet potato recipes.  They have decided they love the  cranberry salad, request instruction on creating the perfect pie crust. It seems to happen when they leave in that real way, creating families of their own.  The first one to need a recipe was my niece, Alex, a couple of years ago.  The first married, she wanted the Thanksgiving dressing recipe. 

I sent it, of course. But I also made her call me, because there are things Granny Opal and I needed her to know, things about proportions and execution that can not be written on a recipe card.  I wanted her to have the most important part of the tradition.  The showing, the telling, the heads bent over chopped onion and celery. 

My nieces and nephews, that great sleepover and soccer-playing busy generation, are only now catching their breath and casting around for something more sustaining.  We have new little ones among us although the cousins have yet to meet.  They are far-flung and still so new, but soon I hope to see them in a puppy pile, rolling around on some floor, the adults looking on admiringly. 

I hope, too, just once, on Thanksgiving morning, to have little ones asleep upstairs, snug and toasty, while I put the poor bird in the oven. 

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Retreat To The Woods

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I spent the weekend in the woods, or almost in the woods, and perhaps more accurately on the edge of the woods that cover the hill which seemed like a mountain that rose behind the cottage where I stayed at Hindman Settlement School.  

I know of those who spent the weekend lallygagging poolside in Florida,  but I had on my calendar a writing retreat at the settlement school, one I signed up for in the sweltering heat of July. I signed up because I was hot and November seemed refreshing. I signed up because several of my friends had signed up, too.  It was a bit like junior high.  

Our pal, Silas, was facilitating the workshop, and he sent a text telling us the spaces would go quick and we eagerly enrolled, like adolescents going on a field trip.  It was better than any field trip, with all those writers, and with the author, Ashley Blooms there, too, running her own sessions.  I came home with some new people to call friends, and I suspect, so did most of us. 

I liked my new pals immediately.  For one thing, writers, at least my favorite ones,  are just funny,  They tell the best stories.  So, we sat around the first night laughing our heads off, as we rearranged the furniture a piece at a time to accommodate newcomers to the circle. I suspect, we also gathered in a bit because our hearts were slowly warming to each other. 

The thing I like best about a good story told by a writer is the clever turns of phrase they use…so we laugh, but we also repeat the phrase quietly to ourselves, catch the eye of someone doing the same thing, and we laugh all over again.  It’s like chili or soup that is better the next day. 

We had to show vaccination cards upon arrival and we socially distanced during craft workshops, each of us with a big table to ourselves.  But the rest of the weekend was … just normal.  Taking our mugs to Marianne’s room for her good coffee each morning.  Lunch and supper in the great hall, where Vivian fed us well and with the best and kindest of humor, retrieving her polenta recipe so I could take a picture of it.  

Until Hindman, I have been dismissive of polenta, remembering only my grandmother’s cornmeal mush, which she served when she’d get on a kick.  Out came Vivian with an Ina Garden recipe and her own notations written in the margins, and I was the hero of our table, because we had all rhapsodized about that polenta throughout the meal. 

Some in the group stayed mostly in their rooms, writing.  Some of us stayed mostly outside our rooms, making too much noise.  It was a weekend designed for whatever we wanted.  Silas did several craft seminars, and we could attend them or not. If we wanted to work on our writing in solitude, we could do that.  If we wanted to just relax and rejuvenate, show up for meals, we could do that.  If we wanted to do any combination of activities, go right ahead. 

One group, hardy souls that they are, walked the steep hill behind the school.  I am told the view from the ridge is wonderful.  And I am sure it was Saturday afternoon, too.  The late November light was slanting golden and warm, the trees almost bare after laying down a carpet of russet and ruby leaves for the hikers.  The pictures they posted were stunning.  All of them smiling, backlit and shiny, leaning in toward each other like comfortable old lawn chairs. 

I couldn’t make that hike the first time I tried it, the trail shoots straight up in a lung-busting trajectory. I wasn’t tempted even a little bit to join them Saturday afternoon.  But I waited for them to return, all rosy-cheeked and bringing the crisp fall air in with them, the woods trapped in their jackets and wool caps. We toasted them as they toasted each other, and it was perfect, as perfect as a moment can be.  Simple, warm, loving.

We created a little community as best we could in this time of almost past Covid.  I noticed the way we instinctively spaced ourselves in the dinner line and when chatting around tables after meals were over, or before sessions began.  That three foot spacing for public life. But then we went home to our little cottage in the woods, and friends from other cottages stopped by. And there were hugs, and heads bent together for gossip, and a glimpse of normal, and it felt good.

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Finally, Signs of Fall

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I awoke yesterday morning to a text from a pal in Lexington.  He reported an overnight frost and that he was wearing his cashmere sweater.  Relax those eyebrows, it’s okay. He was in cashmere mid-week because he was going calling.  I had overslept, so a quick scan of the backyard showed no signs of frost here, but I’ll be glad when it does. 

Right now I have a few Gerber daisies still hanging on, colorful little starburst heads bobbing on worn-out stems.  I can’t bring myself to toss them on the compost pile, but neither can I quite stand to look at them.  A killing frost will put things right, and I can move on to collecting moonflower seeds. 

My house wasn’t particularly cold, and I am not cold-natured, but I turned my heat on anyway, just to smell the furnace.  You know, the way it smells after months of idleness, a warm, toasty, “is my house on fire” kind of aroma that scares and soothes us. I didn’t keep it on very long, just long enough to get that autumn longing out of my system.  

Halloween will kick off the holiday season, and it sounds like we might have some challenges this year.  Turn on the news and gaze upon the thousands of metal containers on ships off the coast of California, Georgia.  In those containers are the toys, and games, and very cool electronics that land on Christmas lists.  If you see it in the stores, you better buy it. 

In this way I am lucky.  My Christmas gifts fold neatly into envelopes or lie on a shelf in a closet, gathering dust as I have collected them all year long. 

But the same can’t be said for the Thanksgiving turkey. 

I tell you what I am about to tell you in a spasm of holiday solidarity.  I keep reading that turkeys may be in short supply this year. It isn’t the turkey so much that is elusive, but the personnel to process it.  I have already begun scouting the deep freeze bins in our local food emporiums.  I urge you to do the same, and if you see one, get it.  Just don’t get mine. 

I am so stressed about the turkey shortage that I dreamed just last night I was invited to a Thanksgiving dinner with people I do not know, and when I arrived there was no scent of roast turkey in the air.  I have no idea what they served.  I woke up from this nightmare in a cold sweat and had to get up and walk around a bit to shake it off. 

Before I thought my house was on fire because of my furnace, I thought it was on fire because so many neighbors have fireplaces and fire pits all aglow.  I have a fire pit, too, with tinder, kindling and fuel all laid out in perfect Girl Scout order, but I have yet to put a match to it.  The city has replaced the light in the alley, some LED horror that lights up my backyard like a prison yard.  Sitting just so, around the fire pit, it shines directly in your eyes and you could read the newspaper by it. 

They promise to come out and adjust the light, and I hope that happens soon.  It is one of my best skills, harnessing fire, and I miss getting to use it. 

I have sorted my books, the ones I’ve ordered and left in a pile, awaiting the fall,  and I am reading “Anxious People,” by Fredrik Backman, who gave us the wonderful “A Man Called Ove.”  And the second Thursday Murder Club mystery, “The Man Who Died Twice,” by Richard Osman. Here we have a group of sophisticated retirees, still vital, still irritating in the ways they have always been irritating, still talented in the ways they have always been talented, solving murders, old and new.  And these books are funny.  But not fluffy.  Well, light, maybe, engaging and affirming, because the characters are old, but they are not sweet. 

If I had a cashmere sweater I might put it on.  As it is, I’m digging out a sweatshirt, some socks, a fuzzy blanket for the couch, because the window it rests against faces west, and soon the wind will whistle and barge its way through the cracks. Now if those leaves will just turn.