Sunday
the boy
Last Practice of the Season
Volleyball and Soccer
Game Night
We only have so much time together as a family of four. L will graduate in a few short months, and then her time in our house will be limited to summers. I expect that soon enough, she won’t be staying with us the entire summer. She’ll be twenty, twenty-one years old. She’ll have her own life. She’ll have her own priorities. She’ll have a job that she’ll want to continue working over the summer. Or she’ll have some internship or other. So these evenings are rare.
Some things have, of course, changed, but for poor K, nothing has changed. She always has the absolute worst luck in board games. When we play Monopoly, we call her (and she calls herself) the Slum Lord because she can never manage to get anything other than the very cheapest of properties, and the three of us end up bankrupting her in fairly short order. Tonight’s game of Sorry was no exception. But one other thing stayed the same: we all laughed heartily about it.
Laughing as a family — few things are more precious.
Halloween Concert
I forgot to post this…
And given how I feel tonight, I just thought posting something positive was the way to go.
Working Around the House
Black Balsam Knob
Autumn Saturday
Night Hike
Looking Glass Sunset
Conestee Re-Visit
Fall Soccer
Evening Walkathon
Saturday
Helene-Free Friday
We are fortunate indeed that I could even think of titling today’s update “Helene-Free Friday.” I guess it’s not entirely accurate: the Boy and I did go out and get an enormous bit of wood that we’ll use as our chopping block in the future, but other than that, Helene didn’t impact our day that much.
Other than the fact that we still have friends family staying with us.
Of course, we’re more than glad to help those we love, but it does come with certain advantages to us: three Polish women can make a batch of pierogi (we had leftover mashed potatoes from last night — what else would we do with them?) in almost no time at all.
Most of the evening, though, we spent getting ready for our Chicago trip. We fly out at 6:30 tomorrow morning and arrive back here at 9:30 Sunday. We’ve got our walking tour planned for tomorrow,
and Cocia M is ready to take E for his early game tomorrow morning.
Tuesday After the Storm
Our street has been blocked since Friday morning when Helene took down the tree I’d expected to fall for at least five years.
“When are they going to take care of that?” L asked. “When are they going to get rid of that tree,” E asked. The answer was simple, like so many things in Helene’s wake: “I don’t know.”
We kept reminding them about fortunate we are: we had power back the same day we lost it. We never lost water. We have a home that “flooded” with about two inches of water at most, and in the basement, where we’d already prepared for just that much flooding.
Today, though, the linesmen began working in our neighborhood. They took care of the broken power pole behind our house and cleared the tree blocking our road (though that was the city’s work, I guess).
And we decided it was time to do some exploring. We headed back along the creek that we’ve always called our adventuring area. There was a waterfall there that spilled over some rocks and enormous roots of two trees that towered over everything.
Those two trees, however, were casualties of Helene. Minor casualties, to be sure: they were tall enough to take out a bit of fencing in a backyard on our street, but that’s nothing compared to the death toll that’s in the Carolinas.
Heading back home, we noticed another change: without the enormous tree that was hanging over our street (and the blocking our street), our street looks a lot different.
It’s not the only thing in the south that looks different thanks to Helene.
Reminders
The dump truck was a highlight of a birthday some years ago — his fifth? sixth? seventh? It was all he was dreaming of, and he loved it so.
Then he outgrew it, and K thought of using it for a planter. She had a potted plant in it, replaced every now and then, for a couple of years.
Now it sits by the side gate of our fence, neglected and forgotten until I walk into the yard, happen to glance back down.
Game Day
Hike
We headed to Paris Mountain State Park today for a warm-up hike for the coming fall hiking season. E and I, we prefer mountain biking. K enjoys it as well, but she prefers hiking, and she’s got a goal for this season: the Dismal Loop. Today’s hike was much less daunting:
We tried to talk the Girl into going with us, but she was intent on studying at the library. Of all of us, she definitely has the most negative opinion of hiking.
We’ve been to this lake several times, and we’ve even got pictures of L tottering about the place as a toddler.
The Boy managed fine, but he’s insisting that he’s outgrown these hiking boots — which he wore daily just this summer at Scout Camp. Is it possibe? And they’re the Girl’s boots, not his own boots.
Two signs of how our kids are changing: our daughter elects to go study at the library (I’m sure there was a fair amount of socializing as well — that’s how I studied at the library in high school), and our son is approaching full size with alarming rapidity, with a full-size appetite developing and a full-size teenage attitude emerging.
We decided to come head back next Sunday, and the Boy and I will ride while K takes the dog for a walk. The Boy, by the way, now rides K’s mountain bike whenever he gets the chance.
So that means we’re also looking for yet another bike for him. He’s not quite outgrown his bike physically, but he’s already putting demands on it that the poor bike can’t handle. He’s broken a chain once and gotten more pinch-punctures than I care to recall.
Once we got back and had some dinner, K did what she always does: she found some chore or other she felt she should have accomplished ealier and gets to work.
I graded articles of the week for my honors kids and snapped a picture of K, noticing once I’d converted it to black and white how awful our front yard looks.
Soup
Polish cuisine, in my experience, is centered around soups. I’m not a culinary expert or anything of the kind, so this is undoubtedly my personal preference coming to the fore: what has always caught my eye (and my tastebuds) in Polish cooking has been the soups.
Barszcz z uszkami is a treat beyond treats: we only have it once a year because the uszki are so time-consuming. It’s one of E’s favorites.
Żurek is such an odd-ball dish for Americans: soup made from a base of fermented rye flour? How weird. And how utterly delicious. It’s one of L’s favorites.
Ogorkowa? Pickle soup? “Get out!” was my first reaction. Who the hell makes soup out of pickles?! It’s absolutely perfect.
K likes most Polish soups, but she probably agrees with L and E that a simple rosół is the best. Babcia always makes it for us as our first dish in Poland, and a gentle, easy broth like that is the perfect thing after traveling.
And then there are the other: koperkowa, chłodnik, kapuśniak — the classics. But there are a couple of soups that stand above them all for me: flaczki (not because I love it so much — I do, but it’s not a favorite — but because I only get it in Poland: K absolutely is not a fan) and my hands-down favorite, kwaśnica. Not so much a Polish soup as a regional highlander soup.
We usually stick to soups in the winter and give them a break in the summer: having the stove on that long really warms up the house, and we want lighter meals in the summer. Except for rosół and koperkowa (none of us is really a chłodnik fan), the soups disappear.
Until the Girl asks K to fix that one soup — you know, with the potatoes and bacon bits.
And so we had for dinner a soup I have always thought of as a winter soup.
“We should do kwaśnica,” I will say some time in October or November.
“No, it’s not cold enough yet,” comes the reply.
But all our Girl has to do is ask for kwaśnica, and it can be 90 degrees outside, and K will not hesitate.