The Bird Tree

This time of year

always has me

thinking a lot

about

grandparents.

My husband and I both were blessed with eight of the most amazing grandparents a person could wish for. Some of them I knew very very well, and some passed at an age when I was too young to understand the value of a long life. My Papa passed when I was only a year old, but the feeling of him was easy to come by as my Nana never remarried and spoke of him to me often. I was lucky to have Nana until I was seventeen. My Grandma passed when I was only nine years old, but I knew her well and valued her immensely even at that age. It troubled me for years as an adult because I could not recollect the exact tone of her voice, which I had dearly loved as a child. Then, when I was about twenty-six, I had a dream that she called me on the telephone- and there it was, that voice. I haven't forgotten it since. My Grandfather was an incredible man and father. He passed in 2002 and it was heart wrenching for me. I was living in Florida and had just been able to come North and visit him a few months prior. I will forever be thankful for that visit. But the last time I was able to speak with him as he was dying was and will most likely forever be my most difficult conversation I have ever had. I knew without a doubt that this was the last time I would be able to hear his voice in real time, and the last time I would say "I love you" and he would hear it in real time. Nothing can prepare you for the finality of a conversation like that. These four people left an incredible mark on my life. Papa taught about a life of hard work and being a calm and gentle person, Nana taught me about how the world had changed over the course of her life. My sick days off from school always meant that stories about living in the early part of the 1900's without automobiles or television would be the activity we would share. Grandma was an incredible cook, and her thriftiness is something we all still have a good yarn about- but all deeply respect. My Grandfather taught me about the lessons to be learned from travel and the importance of places in nature being preserved for all the world to see. And then there are my husband's grandparents, the privilege of which I have had to know three. Grandpa Ray passed before I met my husband, but he has what can only be described as a saintly quality. A man of nature himself, he left his mark on the landscape in these parts by creating numerous lakes and ponds. We have those bodies of water to be thankful for as they allow of multitude of nature to exist here at Hawk's Run. He loved birds as did my Grandfather, and both were well studied on ornithology. Jason's Grandma was perhaps the sweetest person I have ever met. She and Grandpa Ray had a marriage that I think might just be unattainable for us common folk. They had a true partnership, no ego involved whatsoever. It has been said that no one ever heard Grandma utter a bad word, and I believe it. Grandpa and Granny on my husband's mother's side are still with us and are two of the most interesting and welcoming people I have ever met. Both grew up in the wilds of West Virginia and they have made an incredible impression on my views of "home" and what it should look and feel like for my family. Grandpa plays a mean guitar and his favorite music is bluegrass. Granny is a southern goddess in the kitchen and I will forever fall short in my husband's eyes, but it's more than OK. Trying to live up to the women cooks in his family is a little like trying to out cook Julia Child. It just probably will not happen. The holidays make me think on the lives of all these people and how much we have been enriched by just knowing them. A tree is decorated every Christmas with birds to honor my husband's Grandpa and my Grandfather and I think they both would have enjoyed it. A lot of the recipes made by Nana, both Grandma's, and Granny get practiced in my kitchen. And Papa's zeal with finances and hard work make me strive to try and do better every day in a world that is all too much set up for financial and career disappointment. This world of today is not theirs, it is ours to deal with, but the lessons we have learned from them I hope will help us to survive the world today.

Someone... Please Send Four More Hours!

These days,

no matter

who you are

or where

you live,

I can bet

you could

use an extra

four hours

in your day.

I ponder this need often, because try as I might, it's hard to imagine that society has always lived within in a twenty four hour day. Because I live in the country, my life is more than likely much slower than the lives of most people. Within the last few years I have even given up having a vehicle at my disposal during the day to concentrate on being a mom to my two kids. The vehicle always meant running to the store and trying to get in errands that ate away at most of our day. And most of our day was already taken up with the business of living. My children are 3 1/2 and 11 months. I think age is relevant, because as a friend and I were recently discussing, it is difficult to compare life schedules when you have children who are of different ages. Different ages bring different tasks, and different levels of day to day involvement. I am at the stage now where my eldest is sleeping through the night, but my youngest is still getting up for at least one feeding between 1 am and 6 am. Couple that with the almost certainty that he will stir and wake up somewhere in those hours too, and you have a night of sleep that is far from satisfactory. Therefore, what should be my most productive time of day, nap time, sometimes finds me passed out right along with the children. But this doesn't happen enough times in a week to make up for lost sleep. In trying to be more productive I made a mental list of the goings on that happen in our household on a daily basis, only to be a bit discouraged when I found that I wasn't going to make up time by cutting in that arena. By the time breakfast is served, kitchen and play areas are cleaned from yesterday's doings, baths are given, lunch is served, naps are accomplished, and plans for dinner are made, evening is rolling around before I even knew the day had gone. If you work out of the home, your day is much the same only you are juggling work tasks plus taking the children to and from wherever they go during the day. Add to this list a mom's array of household chores such as laundry, cleaning bathrooms, floors, dusting, and the million other tasks that must be done, it's no wonder we feel a bit overwhelmed. If you are in charge of getting bills paid, the stress alone of that task probably makes it last on your list. In today's world of financial crisis, bill paying probably ought to be first on all of our lists. It is no surprise that tasks like yard work, washing cars and pets, and the necessary odd job like weatherproofing only happen when said task is about to create a huge problem if it doesn't get done that day. Somewhere in there, though, there has to be a few moments to do those things that keep us from losing our grip. Things like reading and writing, which I often do in the middle of the night during one of those wake-ups with my infant. Or cooking something special, which may happen during nap time. I hope gardening and yard work will come back into my life as the children get older. Right now I have to be content with stealing five minutes here and there for that sort of pleasure. If you are a man and work outside the home, your schedule problems are probably very similar only with very different components. I find humor in the fact that sometimes my husband will walk through the door with the look of "You have no idea what I have been through today" only to see the same look on my face. I can relate to his day because I worked outside the home for years and dealt with those stresses, but I am not entirely sure he can relate to mine. The single dad most certainly can. I think those men are extremely under-rated and even less appreciated. We all need more time to get just the necessary things accomplished in our lives. If we could figure out how to get more time, then we might just be able to get down to the real business of life which is spending quality time with our families. I don't know about you, but I spend an awful lot of time disciplining my toddler, especially since the birth of our second child. This experience has given me a glimpse into how difficult it must be for today's teachers to just teach. I keep coming back to this thought and it's taking on new importance. Could it be that in prior generations, children were expected to do more alongside their parents, even from an early age? This could be why so many people in prior generations remember having so much more family time than we do today. And were prior generations less concerned with teaching their infants everything possible prior to school? I am not sure that my three year old's ability to decipher colors, letters, and count will really give her a head start in class. What if she shows up at the first day of Kindergarten and feels no challenge whatsoever? Have we mixed up our roles as parents in some ways? Time is the ultimate deceiver and I realize that parents of yesteryear probably felt like they needed a 28 hour day too. I just can't help but think that through progress we have tripped ourselves up a bit.

On Vegetables in the Bathtub and Eavesdropping

I am now pretty confident that the best insight as to how you are doing as a parent is paying attention to how your children play.

Santa Claus brought a dollhouse to our two year old daughter last Christmas. She was way too young, of course, but I had explained to Mr. Claus that these items seemed to be getting more and more expensive. It kind of seemed like now or never at the time, and Santa presented a pretty great package deal. We recruited her grandparents and aunts to help with the add-ons, which by the way, are never ending. I figured at the very least it would be something she would enjoy because of all the bright colors and movable pieces. The dollhouse stayed in the great room of our house for about a month, and then all those movable pieces started to get under my skin. They were traveling everywhere. The dollhouse then traveled up to the attic playroom and this helped to contain all the little pieces. I am not the parent who can just plop all the pieces into a box and leave it there for next time- I am the kind of parent who puts each little part back in its place. Anyone who has Playmobil sets around the house will know what I speak of. It is maddening. I humbly salute and envy "box parents". Like all children, if you are paying attention, my daughter's play was becoming more and more complex. She was talking to her dolls and making them talk to each other. Grammy and Grandpa in Florida slipped into the roles of the doll grandparents, and she was identifying herself as the little blond haired girl doll. This is when I brought the dollhouse back downstairs and into my bedroom. We co sleep, even though my daughter has her own room, and the baby is in my room too. So we spend a lot of time there in the mornings and before bed, two perfect times for play. A lot of times I am right down on the floor with her, but at others I like to give her some time to develop her own sense of how she would like to play. This is where the shameless eavesdropping began. I have noticed that she assumes the mommy role when I am not in the bubble of play with her. It is interesting and downright funny to hear how she deals with situations that she dreams up with the dolls. She reenacts events from the last few days and seems to especially enjoy being mommy to her baby brother who always is the infant in the doll set. I think at this point she just can't imagine him ever being the big boy in the dolls. The dolls were making dinner the other night and there was a problem. The garden vegetables needed washing and the kitchen sink does not have a basin. So she put them all in the bathtub. Very smart, I thought to myself. Then she did something interesting...she removed the dining table and just placed the tub in the middle of the four chairs so everyone could eat straight from the tub. Dolls lead an interesting life. It makes me realize that children desperately need a place where there are no rules. If you want to eat dinner out of the tub, so be it. It has also made me realize that I do enough cleaning as it is in our real house, so I have vowed to let the dollhouse just be messy. I may even get a box for all the small parts littering my bedroom floor. It's an important start, because Santa is working on a Playmobil farm for next Christmas.

Tasha's Gingerbread

It's a rainy day here in the Ohio River Valley, a perfect day for warm bread fresh from the oven.

Tasha Tudor's "receipt" for gingerbread is a near perfect rendition. One of my favorite cold weather treats, I was eager to try Tasha's version. She is about as famous for her holiday gingerbread as she is for the wonderful character cookies she made from the Tree bread version of her recipe. Without further ado, here is the recipe I made this morning based loosely on her version from The Tasha Tudor Cookbook. How my recipe differs is that I nearly double the spices and leave out the raisins. I also use a darker molasses for a deeper color to the bread. My pan was a deeper version that what Tasha calls for so I added 15 minutes to the bake time and watched it closely the last portion of the baking. Lastly, I used nearly all organic ingredients.

Ingredients

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened (you may microwave for 30 seconds)
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg beaten
1 cup medium molasses (dark amber in color)
2 1/2 cups unbleached flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons ginger
1 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup hot water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Spray a 9x9x2 inch baking pan liberally with non-stick oil, being especially careful to coat the bottom of the pan. You may wish to dust the bottom with a bit of flour as this recipe may stick due to the longer baking time.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon. Add the egg and the molasses. Sift all the dry ingredients together and add them to the batter mixing well by hand. Add the hot water and hand blend until smooth.

Pour into baking pan and bake for 50 minutes paying close attention to the progress the last 15 minutes. The bread should be well done on the rim of the pan pulling away slightly from the edges. The center will appear nearly done and should rise about 1 to 2 inches. Insert a toothpick if uncertain as to center progress. At this stage of a clean toothpick but the center not quite complete, I baked for another 5 minutes to attain crustiness on the outer edges and thorough baking in the center.

Remove from oven and slide a blunt knife around edges to loosen bread. Turn out on to parchment paper and wrap in warm towel to cool a bit. Eat warm with a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar on top if you wish.

I hope you enjoy it!

Knock Knock...

Knock

Knock

Who's

There?

I fall for it every time. I live in a wood house with no doorbells. Who wouldn't? Knock knock knock knock knock....the impatient rap sends me running to the front door (possibly a delivery?) then the breezeway door (friend or family?) only to realize I've been had again. It's November I remind myself, and it's the woodpeckers. Scads of them, and they are making us crazy. Me, because once I get use to their incessant knocking, I begin to ignore ALL knocks. This leaves me chasing down the delivery trying to be made once I realize that for once it is NOT the woodpeckers. Or it leaves me explaining that, yes I was home when you stopped by, but that I didn't come to the door because I thought that you were, yes, a woodpecker. If you and I are both lucky, I catch you in the drive before you just give up and think we're not home. My three year old daughter announces every woodpecker to land on the house and have a go because she is now in on the joke too. My husband is losing his cool because he is convinced that the woodpeckers are having a plentiful meal of bugs, in the wood house. The bugs are a concern, of course, but so are the wood shingles which may now resemble Swiss cheese. All manner of heckling from husband to woodpecker occur when he happens to be here during the times when they are knocking. He tells me often, you really need to run outside and scare them away. Right, I'll just grab my coat and sit guard in the front yard to save me the hundred times going in and out the front door. Ohio is home to seven different types of woodpecker. They include the red-bellied, red-headed, yellow-bellied sapsucker, downy, hairy, northern flicker, and the pileated. The type that likes our house is the red-bellied. This is misleading, because as you can see in the picture above, his head is red, not his belly as the name implies. I was happy to learn that the red-bellies often knock to attract mates, and that their knocking is a lot more about getting busy than getting bugs. Somehow I don't think this is going to soothe my husband but at least I have stopped having nightmares about crawling bugs all over the ceiling. November is typically the time that the birds would be feeding while pecking, but I think we may have a bit of a competition going on here. There are quite a few of the birds flitting around at any one time, and while they are trying to grab a meal, I believe they are also trying to keep other birds from grabbing their mates. This would explain the variations in knocking patterns that we hear. We have spotted quite a few of the other species of woodpeckers here at Hawk's Run, but it's the red-bellied who prefers the house over the trees. Every now and again I'll wake in the morning to a cute little redhead looking in the bedroom window. I think it's sweet until he starts knocking on the sills. But at least he has the decency to show himself so that I don't get out of bed to go answer the door.

Burn After Reading

Knit One
Purl One
Knit One
Purl One






There's nothing like a simple set of directions to a project to make you just throw in the towel before you even begin. I think I have spent years of my life avoiding certain things that I now find really enjoyable because I let the directions scare me into not trying. Certain activities have directions that may as well be written in Greek to me- like cooking, playing music, gardening, and knitting. I'll just muse on knitting here unless you have the next four years free to hear me out. The things is, I have now respectively tackled basic skills in three of the four but those skills didn't happen until I was willing to be brave and get on my own path. When it came to knitting, everyone told me the same few bits of advice. Do not use beautiful chunky or uneven yarns. Do not do more than one stitch on your first project. Do not use the method of left handed knitters- or the style many Europeans use. First of all, those beautiful and irregular yarns are just begging to be used- it's like choosing the Oreo over the Amish version of homemade chocolate cakes with cream filling. So unfair. Then there's the monotony of one stitch and the fact that I wasn't looking to bore myself to death. Lastly, I am left handed. This knitting thing was going to be difficult enough without my trying to turn ambidextrous. So I threw caution to the wind and just wung it. I recently realized I needed a good thick and long winter scarf because my Florida blood was clearly not up to Ohio's last winter freeze. I dutifully had pulled out my project book and found exactly what I was looking for. Only it wasn't. Again, the project called for that basic boring yarn, one stitch, and smallish needles. I thought clearly I would hang myself with the scarf before I even finished it. I parked the project for a few days. Then I happened to be in a yarn department and saw this beautiful green yarn in the same crazy texture I had done my son's hat in. The price is really inexpensive so I decided at this point there was no harm if the scarf didn't turn out. I then laid eyes on a pair of gigantic size 17 needles. That could help excite up the one stitch problem, I thought to myself, and dropped the needles into my purchases. I conceded on the one type of stitch and changed up the other two pieces of the directions. I read them through once more before beginning and then nicely shelved the book back in its place. I am now about a foot into this really pretty scarf and the big needles are making the stitches show the pattern and irregularity of the yarn really well. I have decided also that I will just knit this piece until the yarn runs out. I feel so much more relaxed in this project because there are no rules. No measuring tapes to keep getting out to agonize over how much more I have to go to completion, no stitches to count and make sure that I still have the same number of casts that I began with. There's something very liberating about getting a feel for a project and then making it your own. Now I wouldn't recommend this with everything- things like changing your brake lines in your car could be disastrous. More like it, would be disastrous. But a little leeway with things like knitting and cooking can have some surprisingly wonderful outcomes. I marvel now how knitting ever came to be in the first place. I'm not sure how long it would have taken me if someone just sat me down with a ball of yarn and a few sticks and said, "Here, make a sweater." Maybe one hundred years later I may have made something recognizable, I don't know. What I clearly do now understand, however, is that tearing out stitches ten or so times in the first hat I ever made has given me the insight on the mechanics behind the movements. I can now fix it if I mess it up and do not have to start over a new like I did with the hat. I also inadvertently learned to rib knit on that first project because even then I had changed something up right from the start. I knew after five or so rows that my project didn't look like it was supposed to, but the pattern was recognizable as other types of hats I had seen. Imagine my surprise when I learned that what I had been doing by accident was actually something I could make useful. I am about to embark on the musical thing once again. This has been a stressful endeavor as I have forgot how to read music as an adult. Then again, maybe I'll just learn to play by ear.

A Perfectly Simple Memory

I am one of those persons some would call a contemplator.

Even in moments when I am completely present in what I am doing, or not doing, I am vaguely aware that there is another part of my brain that is mulling something over. Sometimes it has to do with what I am doing, sometimes not. Lately I have been mulling about childhood, and I am coming to the stunning conclusion that nearly every memory I have is a good one- or great one. I had an uncomplicated childhood, and in this, I believe I am very fortunate. There is one memory that keeps coming back to the forefront and I have no explanation as to why. Except that it is, in my mind, perhaps the most content moment of my childhood. It is snowing heavily and it is night time. It is near Christmas as the lights from the Christmas tree are nearly the only light in the room. It is the mid 70's and everything in the living room is aglow in gold tones. The carpet is a gold hue, the satin brocade sofa under the huge picture window is a deeper shade of gold, the walls are even a shade of gold. I am actually so small that I am lying on the sill of the picture window which is about a foot in depth and even with all the decorations in the window I am quite comfortable. A winter scene is set of which I cannot remember the exact details except that frosted bottle brush trees and angels hair are in plenty. There are many cylindrical candles with ornate holiday scenes painted on the inside of the glass and they smell of paraffin wax. Luckily, at this moment none of them are lit. Perry Como is crooning on a 33 in the huge wood encased stereo so typical of that period. Andy Williams was waiting on the little pin that would drop the next record when Perry sang his last song on the album. Frank Sinatra was probably next. I can still picture those album covers in exact detail. Lying in that picture window watching the snow fall down is just like lying outdoors underneath the winter sky, except that I am in flannel pajamas and there is a roaring fire in the living room fireplace. All traces of human existence lie in a deep blanket of snow. The cars in the driveway are already buried nearly up to their windows and I know for certain there will be no school tomorrow. I loved school, but I loved a snow day better. I have no idea where my parents are, but it is likely my dad was in the next room watching something on TV. No doubt my mom had something going on in the kitchen, or a cat fast asleep in her lap. I cannot remember these details because I am completely lost in the moment. There are three massive evergreens in our front yard right next to the street. If the plows make it out, the piled up snow may reach six feet or more at the evergreens. With no class tomorrow, I am already imagining the snow igloo that can be carved out of the drifts and the boughs of the tree. These snow forts we made in those trees were invisible to all who passed by. They were the ultimate hiding out spot, yet they were thirty or so feet away from a nice mug of hot chocolate. As I drifted off to sleep in the picture window, I was already holed up in my snow igloo in my mind, the smell of paraffin replaced by balsam. Tomorrow was going to be the perfect day. And it was.