fun in threes, sometimes fours
Our lone rose is blooming.
And with our holly cut back, it's easy to see why the sweet gum that continually plagued me was so difficult impossible to kill, other than it being a sweet gum tree.
It wraps itself around all that's good and perverts it to its own nefarious ends. Sounds familiar...
"Hey L, come help me take out the trash and recycling," I call as we finish up playing tag in the front yard, our new daily tradition. I pull into the laundry room the wicker basket we put our paper recycling in during the week and have her help me transfer the paper from it to the tub we'll take out to the street. And then she sees it: one of her drawings. There. In the recycling.
She gasps.
"What's this doing here?!" she asks, confused. "Are you throwing this away?"
I think fast and answer truthfully: "Well, we went through everything, and we're saving the best."
She looks at one of her crayon drawings and asks incredulously: "And this?!?"
Truthfully, it is quite good.
"Well, we can take that," I admit. "It's a good drawing."
"And this?!" she exclaims, pulling out another. "And my subtraction work?!"
Soon she's pulled out every single item of hers, each time accompanying the delicate removal with a gasp of shock and horror.
I explain to her that we can't keep everything, making a mental note to check with K before having the Girl help sort recycling again. Still, it's not a lesson she'll learn quickly: most of us tend to hold onto things more than we should.
One class began working on Flowers for Algernon.
Another class continued with Great Expectations.
Still another class began looking at the notion of voice in writing.
Busy day back.
The day before school starts again, I always get a bit nervous. What's the return going to be like? Is it going to be like pulling teeth to get them to work? What will their attitudes be like? What will my attitude be like?
Blessings are everywhere if we just look for them. I suppose that's called an optimistic outlook in secular terms. Perhaps hope? (The odd thing about hope: you have to have hope in something. There has to be a basis for that hope. Either you have hope in a deity or hope in the goodness of humanity, or hope something else.)
Today is a day of blessings, from a kind mother who does something as simple as trying new, time-consuming ways of putting patterns in colored eggs to bring a little different shade of joy to the Easter table.
Or a priest sprinkling holy water over baskets of food to be consumed as part of the Easter celebration.
Or people who embrace the traditions of the Old World and pass them on to their children.
Or family and friends who are with you at all the major markers of one's life.
Or children laughing and screaming in delight.
Or the pride of accomplishment. Or electricity.
Or new-found courage and independence.
Or a friend to hold you when you're hurt.
With guests arriving for the whole Easter weekend, there's only one thing to do: get a blood sugar baseline for the weekend.
In a sense, like most Polish religious celebrations, food plays an important part, but like most Polish religious celebrations, it begins with a fast.
So my experiment -- stuffing tenderloin with pepper-encrusted bacon, prunes, and green onions before smoking -- will remain untasted until later in the weekend.
Such a temptation.
But there are other temptations.
More appropriate temptations.
I spent the morning with six lovely ladies and a camper with a Jacuzzi, flat screen television, double hammock, and loads of other extras.
It was a morning of pretend: “Tata, pretend she…” “Tata, let’s pretend they…” “Oh, Tata, you need to pretend the dog…”
The days of pretend, when the simple imperative “Pretend” was enough to make it reality.
When we still had complete control over something.
And we could easily get a closet full of whatever it is that thrills us.
"I promised her!" K mouths to me as L thumps up the stairs to brush her teeth, disheartened by my casual dismissal of her idea to go down to the blooming azalea and pick some flowers to take to school. "You can just get some from our neighbors' azalea in their front yard," I said just moments earlier. They're out of town, but I knew they wouldn't mind: they're like long-lost family to the Girl.
"I'm not tromping down through the cold, wet leaves and grass to pick blooms for her when she can walk fifty feet..."
A few minutes later, I'm pulling small clumps of blooms from the bush, excited about the foggy early morning that promises a sunny mid-morning.
An hour later, the prophecy is fulfilled.
Our two hostas (Fortunei Albopicta) winter under decaying leaves and an ever-dwindling smattering of decorative rocks. After the new leaves of most all trees have fully unfurled and the crape myrtles have begun budding, the hostas finally begin to emerge from winter dormancy.
It’s almost magical to watch such perennials resurrect themselves every spring. Little buds emerge from even the dampest, thickest blanket of last autumn’s leaves — the strength to push stones and leaves away is a testament to life’s tendency to conquer death.
Then again, maybe it just likes to hide.
After all, who doesn’t like hiding?
The first day of spring break 2012 proper, and it starts like any spring day should: sun, warmth, clear light. Freshly emerged leaves offset the patch of Azalea blue (or is that purple? I've never checked, i.e., asked K) in the back corner. It would be great to be out in the warmth, to do some work on our small raised-bed garden, to work up the first sweat of the year. The grass needs mowing; autumn's leaves need raking; the raspberries need netting shortly -- yet none of these are options.
With a major paper due in a week, I'm sequestered, reading through articles, planning an attack, drowning in coffee and tea.
I spend the day filling a folder with articles from JSTOR, Gale, and seemingly countless other online resources that make it possible to research most anything from home. Then I write, write, write.
"In calling these stories 'parabolic,' we encounter an critical etymological parallel with geometry."
Did I really just write that?
Still, I take my own advice, the mantra to my students that I seem to chant daily: "It's a first draft. Don't worry about making everything perfect -- or even close to it -- in a first draft."
Evening approaches and with it, new tasks. I help the Girl get ready for bed; I trim tenderloin and prepare the brine for smoking later this week. K reads the Girl stories and prepares a salad for tomorrow's lunch. Having to go to work tomorrow, she trundles off to bed; I sit down once more at the computer.
Others I'm sure are enjoying a first evening at the beach or the sounds of crickets at a mountain retreat. Me, I'm just ready to turn out the lights and head to bed.
Buds out of the focal plane will soon become the center of all attention — especially birds.
At times I want to strangle them. Sometimes, five minute later, I want to hug them.
It’s a bold idea that only a winter-hardened Polish woman could come up with. It’s more Eastern Europe that a consonant cluster. We need only imagine the ground, frozen solid for months, is covered with snow as a scarfed babcia digs about in the cellar for something to use in soup. She happens upon a store of cucumbers preserved in brine — pickles to us, but since everything in the East is pickled, it makes little sense to single one veggie out for distinction like that.
Whatever the series of fortunate events, Polish pickle soup is a reality, and now that we know the Girl likes pickles — “I eat them at school with my lunch!” she smiles — we have a new soup in our regular line-up.
A recipe for those interested is here, though I don’t vouch for it. It’s not what K uses — she freestyles!