a walk in the woods

When you can’t plan and you can’t make lists and the future is too hazy for comfort, go for a walk in the woods. When all the stuff of life is too much, do something that requires only presence. Go for a walk in the woods with the ones you love most. If you don’t like the woods, do the thing you like. (Even if you think you should stay home and worry some more.) Go for a walk in the woods. You will never be sorry you did.

thursday stew—a random collection of unrelated miscellany

I think some of my cleaning habits are pretty brilliant. Or maybe totally compulsive. But mostly brilliant. Such as separating the dirty cutlery in the dishwasher basket as you fill it. Do you know how much less time it takes to put it all away when you’ve already separated it?! At least 2 minutes less than when it hasn’t been. Imagine what you will be able to get accomplished now that I have shared this trick.

I happened to be at my sister’s when I was writing this so I snapped a photo of her basket of MIXED cutlery. That is one disgraceful mess. And she will be separating all that for at least 2 extra minutes once it’s washed. This kind of wasted time is why world peace gets back-burnered, people.

Here’s a laundry trick you’ll love. I used to just do the kids laundry together in one big load. But now they are getting bigger and so are their clothes (that will always happen) so I usually just combine mine in with theirs and make it a 2 load job. (Steve does his own laundry. I know, ladies... don’t even look at him—he’s MINE.) Now the problem, I soon learned, was that the first load was full of halves of sock and jammies sets, some of this and some of that and zero organization. I am nothing without my obsessive methodologies, people! You really want to know how I do it, don’t you? First load consists of pants and anything that goes on a hanger; second load is for undies, socks, shirts and jammies sets. Here’s the why part. Pants fold up quickly and I don’t even have to fold the hanger stuff. I carry it all up, hang up the dresses and shirts, stash the pants (super quick) and wait for load number 2 wherein all socks and jammies sets are conveniently together! Then I fold them and put them in neat little piles according to the individual to whom it belongs. Then I bring the basket upstairs and usually empty it out around 5 days later.

(Did you want to know this much about my laundry system?)

(Also, sorry if I just bored you to near-death.)

I’m scared to tweet. I’m supposed to start using Twitter to build my author platform. I don’t know what to tweet and I don’t really understand Twitter in the first place and hash-tags and re-tweeting and I don’t like learning new things. I am the type who keeps the same cell phone until it literally falls apart or is no longer compatible with contemporary technology simply because I don’t want to have to figure out a new phone. That’s where I’m at on tweeting. But FINE I will do it. (And then wonder where it has been my whole life. Like Facebook and Spotify. And wine.)

“Are you supposed to have that chicken?” This falls in the category of things you sometimes have to yell from the kitchen door out at kids in the yard. I would explain this one but would rather hear what you might be imagining. (Kindly leave your musings in the comments section below.)

Trader Joe’s is awesome and I already knew this but I forgot for a while and now just remembered again. I have been thinking about how my grocery shopping methodologies (yes, of course I have a methodology for that, too—did you really fathom that I didn’t?) will need to change when we move. I do not like the primary grocery store in the area to which we are moving, but there is a Trader Joe’s about 45 minutes away. I figure I can go there every 2 weeks and do some bulk shopping and fill in on alternating weeks at the stores closer to home. I was always concerned that buying my full shopping list at Trader Joe’s would blow the budget. But it really didn’t! And organic apples for .79 cents a pound! .79 cents! I am a total convert.

(I just read that back to myself and almost died of boredom. Do you still have a pulse? If not, get someone to hit you in the chest with those electrified paddles they use on Grey’s Anatomy until you hear a beep beep beep. That’ll be your heart coming back. And sorry about that.)

We received an ungodly amount of candy for Easter (which is kind of ironic). We ate some and saved some and some I had to put in the trash in order to stop eating it. This unfortunately did not entirely stop me from eating it until I threw something gross on top. Even then I considered just rinsing some peanut M&Ms off under the faucet. I am proud to say I didn’t. But mostly because Steve came home and I didn’t want to explain why I was rinsing peanut M&Ms off under the faucet.  (I should have waited until he was busy and then I might have gotten away with it. That’s what I’ll do next year.)

I wish you the happiest of Thursdays!

a stranger said my house stinks

Does one really need to empty out the bottom of the toaster oven? In theory, won’t it all eventually simply burn away? I would bet that lots of crumbs have already burned away without my explicit knowledge. It’s sort of a perfect system. I never clean it. This is not an act of will—more like unintentional neglect. Now and again, when I am toasting something (usually toast) Steve will holler from somewhere in the house, “Is something burning?”

“Just the 2 year old bread crumbs, honey!”

I think it smells pretty.

(Although apparently not everyone does...)

We had an open house the other day and one of the parties that came through said my house is smelly. (It is NOT.) This was the quote from their agent: The buyer really liked the area, the house showed pretty well, but it had a very strong odor, and that was a real turn off.

Seriously?

Was the odor akin to Fritos or raw sewage? Paint or athlete’s foot? A little specificity would be most appreciated. And I made mini muffins for these freakin’ people. With tiny and adorable mini chocolate chips.

Additionally, random people coming through my house is totally freaking me out. They are touching everything with their germiness and who all knows what. It has prompted us to wipe down the whole place with disinfectant wipes after every showing. Luckily Steve is crazy in many of the same ways I am which normalizes us. (I think.) We hide this activity from the kids just in case it’s actually crazy.

And I have to put away my dish rack every time we have a showing to make the counters appear more spacious and it’s a pain. I like my dish rack because it makes my life easier and all these shenanigans are not making my life easier.

(I’m a little fussy right now.)

Also, all this uncertainty is giving me a stomachache.

That, I suspect, is the root of the problem. I am no good with not knowing.

Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. Chuang Tzu

I bumped into that quote in Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything by Laura Grace Weldon. I love this book—its perspective is so refreshing and right-on. It’s helping me solidify my own homeschooling philosophy, which has evolved into more of a life-learning philosophy. Meaning we don’t think of learning or “education” as separate from life itself. We (meaning all people, not just my brood) are always learning—you just try to stop us! Case in point, this Chuang Tzu quote. Just when I was feeling as though the unknown were about to engulf me, this quote stops me in my tracks with its freakin’ logic and wisdom. How dare you, Chuang Tzu. Of course I don’t know what’s going to happen! No one ever knows what’s going to happen and any sense of that idea is an illusion. But I embrace that illusion! That is my happy illusion!

I think it’s funny how often little gems such as this fall into your path just when you need them. Or maybe we notice them more when they pertain to what’s happening in our lives. Who knows. Either way, it made me smile. And breathe.

Apparently this was my lesson for the day. Thank you, Chuang Tzu. I will try to stay centered and I will work on acceptance.

I will not accept, however, that my house is smelly. And if it is, it’s my stench and that of my most beloved. But I will consider cleaning out the bottom of the toaster oven—just in case.

clutter is not the worst thing that can happen

Not cleaning made my life better. That makes me sound gross which is not entirely accurate. Clean bathrooms, clean kitchen—totally. I HATE crumbs and sticky food messes—they seriously gross me out. And nasty stuff in the kitchen sink drain totally freaks me out. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is your average, day-to-day crap pile. Mostly, this will be from the kids. If you don’t have kids, it will be from your husband. If you don’t have a husband, it will be from you. I haven’t really covered all the possible living-arrangement scenarios, and I strongly believe in being all-inclusive, so please simply insert your own configuration here, confident in the the knowledge that I embrace all of you.

That average, day-to-day crap pile used to make me raving nuts. Mean Mommy. Grouchy Wife. Seriously grumpy. I would reach the end of every single day and grudgingly, angrily, hostilely clean up that crap pile. Put everything back in its stinkin’ place, resenting every moment it took.

Then I chose not to do that anymore.

(You can do that, too, you know.)

Nothing bad will happen if you only clean that crap pile every 3 days or so. I swear—I totally ignore it most of the time. Trying to get the kids to help was more work than cleaning it myself. While I believe it’s important for kids to understand their responsibility to the home, I also believe that will naturally ripen as they develop. You live the behavior you want to nurture and you encourage them and you keep your expectations low when they are little, lest you find yourself wanting to toss them and their crap piles out the window.

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is only so much you can achieve each day. And peace of mind and body should be one of those things. To give the best of ourselves to our kids we have to recharge. Better to ignore the crap pile and take some time to rejuvenate to ensure you have the best to give.

I did help myself out by cutting back on the clutter that I could—the knick-knacks, the amount of stuff out on the kitchen counter—and I seriously purged in general. I went rather cuckoo—stuff I didn’t really need or care about, duplicate items (do you really need 4,200 towels and 5,300 kitchen gadgets? No, you don’t), all that stuff you keep “just in case” (of what?)—GONE. And it worked—we have space and no more crammed closets and cabinets. That kind of simplifying makes day-to-day tidiness easier to maintain.

And the crap pile? You clean that every few days. You let it go. Someday the kids won’t drop everything on the floor and throw their stuff around as a matter of course. They will outgrow this behavior. You can let this one go. I swear, you really can.

Speaking of cleaning up, please tell me what the hell I am going to do with this enormous bowl of sugar? Seriously. This is the Easter haul. That is a large-ass bowl pictured right there. There is no way my kids are going to consume all that. Any takers? I will mail it to you. I could stretch this pile out all the way through June—I am notoriously chintzy on doling out the sugar to my little ones. Their idea of a “treat” might shock some in its skimpiness. (But—ssshhhh—they have no idea I’m a cheapie.)

Keep the bar low—it’s how I roll.

"A Cool Dry Place"—part 6

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“Hi,” Mandy says softly. The tight smile she forces to her face gets stuck there. Her muscles work on their own, she needs to retain no consciousness of them.

“Hi, Nicole,” Mandy’s Mom says. “How are you?”

“Good, Mrs. Logan. Out for dinner with the family?” She is very sweet.

The food in Mandy’s mouth grinds to paste. She sips her orange soda, but everything inside her is thick and gluey.

“Yes. Every Friday unless there’s a game Mandy wants to go to.” Mom smiles. The things that are harmless for adults to say always astound Mandy. Something curls up inside her. The last thing she needs is for Nicole to know more than she already does.

“That’s nice.” She turns on Mandy. “Mandy, me and the other girls are over in the corner. You should come over to our table and say hi.”

“Go ahead, honey,” Mom says. “Not too long, though—your food will get cold.”

From the corner of her eye, Mandy sees Nicole smirk. Her mother would dismiss it as a simple smile if Mandy were to mention it later (not that she will). Mandy knows Nicole better. She slides out of the booth and follows Nicole. She is amazed she is able. Her body is so heavy.

She would rather stay with her family. She looks back; just a small glance. Lara looks into her eyes, watches as she walks away with Nicole. Lara knows. And that does not require words.

“Hey, guys! Look—Mandy’s here. With her family!”

Giggles. “Cool,” says Tara. Mandy knows it is not cool. But it’s not the validity of her family on the line here. It is uncool that she would rather be with them than with the girls. Not that she was invited. And she doesn’t want to be with them, so it’s a relief she wasn’t invited. But it’s not okay not to be chosen. There is a longing, mournful feeling that she is missing something. At the same time she knows she is missing nothing of which she wants to be a part. She has been included enough times to know.

But still.

“So, what’re your plans after this?” one of them asks Mandy.

“Um. Nothing really,” she shrugs. She’s going home and Dad will start a fire in the wood stove and she and Lara will have bowls of ice cream and Mom will make herself a cup of hot tea and they will watch Friday night TV. This is the kind of thing she likes. She knows it’s not the right thing. Liking your sister best of anyone, wanting to be with your Mom and Dad at Friendly’s and in front of the TV on a Friday night. None of this is right and she knows it. She also has a vague and undefined idea that she should not, at her age, be expected to have “plans.” It is an unnamed feeling I am too young, I am not ready for plans.

“Oh. We’re going to the Mall.” The Mall is adjacent to the restaurant. She says Mall with a weightiness she attempts to temper with nonchalance.

This is all new as far as Mandy knows. She knows they would have talked about it at school if they had done this before. She knows it will be the Big Topic on Monday.

“Cool,” Mandy says. All she can think of is getting away, back to her table. “Well, I should finish my food before it gets cold. And I’m really hungry. See you guys.” She turns back and adds, “Have fun at the Mall!” She hopes this comes off as breezy and I don’t care what you guys are doing! I’m really busy myself! But she hears a pinched tone in her voice and knows they, too, with their preternatural ability to hear things like that, to know what others are thinking, hear it. She knows they will talk about it later, as they paw through racks of clothes, through top-ten audio cassettes, through the latest teen magazine photos of heartthrobs over whom they will loudly exclaim. Ever eager to call attention to themselves, ever hungry for eyes to be upon them, ever needing to soak in all the available energy around them.

She won’t look back at them, even though her skin burns for a quick look. As she rounds the corner she risks a glimpse. Their heads are close together, they laugh loudly. Mandy walks faster to her table. She sees her family talking and smiling and Lara sips her root beer.

And she feels better.

She slides in next to Lara. The girls start to disappear a little, they start to fade around the edges. And they float on the air. Float off on the french fry and chocolate ice cream smelling air of Friendly’s. She watches as the faded color pieces of the girls float away. She looks out the smooth cool glass into the night. Watches the air clear of it until all that is in front of her is the black black sky with its sliver moon and pinpoint stars. The blackness stretches out and out.

She wonders where it all settles.

holy crap i almost bought a $50 trash bin

Holy crap I almost bought a $50 trash bin.

It never made it out of the van.

I woke one day and decided our white plastic Rubbermaid flip-open trash bin was too ugly to reside in my kitchen any longer. (That’s how it happens—I wake one day and certain things are no longer tolerable. Could happen to almost anything around here. I do suggest Steve watch himself. I mean, I can’t ditch the kids—you can’t just run around being a bad mother. No, I have to keep them. But bad wife really doesn’t carry the same stigma.)

(Steve knows I’m totally kidding. Or am I?)

I considered decoupaging the trash bin—even found instructions on Pinterest and bought a jar of Modge Podge. But then I thought that project might be too crazy even for me. At any rate, that ugly trash bin had to be relegated to some other, less visually obvious duty—such as laundry lint collection—and a new bin would have to be procured. But those stinkin’ fancy stainless trash bins are expensive. And their purpose is to collect trash—I am not immune to that irony, people.

Typically, I try to find fun, frugal ways to solve dilemmas such as suddenly hating a trash bin I’ve lived amongst for several years in perfect but suddenly defunct harmony. I am hesitant to declare that I’m cheap, but I’m kinda cheap. I like bargains, I like consignment shops, I like finding discarded items on the neighbors’ lawns. But that ugly white trash bin had to go and I happened to possess an expired Bed Bath and Beyond coupon! Pretty frugal right there! I called them up and Chantal, who answered the phone, promised to honor the expired coupon and I set off to peruse their glorious inventory of beautiful—not ugly—trash bins. Shiny and sleek, they seduced me, they beckoned with their come-hither loveliness and I chose a stainless beauty with rails to be secured inside the cabinet. That glorious trash bin would swoosh in and out and I could almost pretend there was no trash bin! (Except when I had trash to dump in it.) The measurements were perfect. Clearly, this was fate. I carried it to the counter, lovingly held it close, presented my expired coupon (which the good people at Bed Bath and Beyond did indeed honor) and $54.99 plus tax later, I placed my pretty trash bin in the back of my van and as I pulled away from the store, I suddenly thought Holy crap I just spent $54.99 plus tax on a freakin’ trash bin. Luckily, Target is in the same shopping plaza and I went right in there and bought a white plastic trash bin whose dimensions could be accommodated under the sink (that part of the idea was still good) for $4.97 plus tax (a lot less tax) and returned the shiny one the next day lest I seem nuts having just bought it. I prefer to exhibit my brand of crazy in more subtle, less conscious ways.

Look how gross the floor of my van is. Popcorn, anyone? It's covered in dirt and filth and dead bugs. Yum! Kids just have a knack of knowing how to enhance everything.

This trash bin triumph leads me to relay a less victorious moment. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had entered my novel, The Mosquito Hours, into a writing contest—big prize, publication with Amazon, waves of accolades. The book made it through the first round, 2000 entrants down to 400—not too shabby.

But that was as far as I got.

I spent about a half hour telling myself it was all over, maybe I was simply no good, I should give up all aspirations and hopes. It was a pitiful 30 minutes.

Then I readjusted.

And that’s what I want to tell you, good people. There is no failure—there is only readjustment. I don’t intend to get all sickly sweet here on you, but one of the things I keep reading and thinking about in all my homeschooling learning and experiences is that there is no failure in homeschool. In homeschool, when you don’t yet know how to read at the age of 7 like you’re “supposed to,” there is not failure in it. There is no comparison. There is only tomorrow and tomorrow to keep on doing. Doing the things that will lead to the reading. There is doing, observing the outcome, doing more.

Do or do not. There is no try.

Where there are no expected outcomes, there can be no failure.

Failure is merely another word for fear. Master Yoda also said, Named must your fear be before banish it you can.

This writing life of mine—this life—is an adventure of doing. I cannot fail. I can make plans, execute them and observe the outcome. I can make adjustments. There is not one singular, right, exact way to do this. There is no try. There is do. I am doing! Look for The Mosquito Hours for your summer beach reading pleasure! It’s happening, people! Fear of failure, hereby banish you do I!

I don’t need the shiny bin, the flashy prize. All I need is to do, readjust, observe and do some more. Place trust in the power of doing.

And never, ever spend $50 on a trash bin.

Seriously.

"A Cool Dry Place"—part 5

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Mandy goes to the back door to shake out the dust mop.

It is winter.

The sky is already mostly dark although it is not quite four-thirty yet. It is Friday night.

Tonight they will go to Friendly’s for supper, once the house is clean, once Dad comes home.

There is no CYO basketball game tonight and Mandy is glad. She would not admit it, but it’s better to go to Friendly’s. She wouldn’t say that aloud, especially to the girls. Never never to the girls. Oh my God, never. But it’s so much better not to have to go to a basketball game. No one says she has to go to the basketball games. But she does have to go. The girls would notice. Mandy doesn’t suspect they’d miss her. Doesn’t think their fun would be in any way diminished by her absence. No. She goes to the games for the same reason she goes to the parties and sleepovers. She goes in order to keep up. Stay a part of things. This compulsion of hers, when she examines it closely and honestly, makes her angry with herself. That she needs—with such desperation—their approval, their attention, their inclusion. It leaves her feeling naked and breathless. But she can never say no. She begs for them while at the same time she is terrified of what they will give her. While she almost hates them, every now and then one of them tosses her something she can hold onto. Some kindness, a shared giggle, a party invitation, an afternoon together after school and she forgets the hard parts or it softens them enough so that the sharp edges don’t penetrate quite so deeply. She dismisses the worry, the fear, the humiliation. The unnameable longing.

But tonight there is no game. Only Friendly’s.

She shakes the dust from the dust mop. Her room is clean.

“Lara!” she calls down the hall.

“What?”

“You done yet?” She wants to start the bathroom, but wants to make sure Lara will join her soon from cleaning her own room. Otherwise Mandy will end up doing most of it herself.

“Nope!”

Mandy walks down the hall to Lara’s room, plunks down the dust mop.

“Come on. You’re going slow on purpose.”

“No I’m not!”

“Yeah, right. Just hurry.” She pauses in Lara’s doorway, watches her dust. She could not be moving more slowly. “How much more?”

“Just this,” she waves the dust rag around, “and dust mop.”

“Ok, I’ll go start the bathroom. But hurry.”

Mandy sprinkles powder cleanser in the tub, the toilet, the sink. She starts scrubbing. Soon, Lara joins her and they get the room done quickly. They move into the kitchen. Lara plugs the sink, runs water, squirts soap. Mandy turns the chairs upside-down on the table, gets the broom from the pantry. They move efficiently, old pros. They must be quick—Mom is running errands so they need to clean the living room, too.

Even though Mandy complains, there is something comforting about the Friday cleaning ritual. Partly because it starts with disorder and dirt and ends with an organized and perfected thing. But mostly it is comforting because they do it every week. One of those things on which she can depend.

When the work is all done, they bundle up and step outside. It is very dark. Black dark, milky stars sprinkled. A thin crescent of a moon.

Mandy and Lara run to the car. Laughing, they dive into the backseat. They huddle near each other, wait for the heater to kick in.

“How was your day, girls?” their Dad asks.

“Fine,” Mandy says right away.

“Mine was terrible!” Lara says, drawing out the word. “First of all, Mrs. Brown gave us a pop quiz in spelling. We didn’t even know she was going to give a quiz!”

“Well, duh. That’s why they call it ‘pop,’” says Mandy.

“Still. It was totally unfair. And then she gave us a ton of homework and it’s the weekend! Totally unfair. Plus I found out that Jenny Price is having a birthday party and she’s inviting boys. I am totally not going. They will ruin everything.”

Mandy feels envious of Lara’s problems. Her own life seems so much harder. So much more troubling and worrisome.

“What’s wrong with boys? I’m a boy,” Dad says.

“You’re a grown-up, Dad. Real boys are loud, they throw things, they tease all the girls. Forget it.”

“Fifth grade is a little young for a boy-girl party. What is Margie Price thinking?” Mom says.

“Oh, what’s the harm?” Dad says. “I’ll be more worried for eighth grade and ninth and tenth and until they’re thirty-five.”

“Thirty-five!” Lara says. “I’ll be old and married with kids by then, Dad!”

“Yeah. We’ll totally be married.”

“I’m not even going to let you start dating until you’re at least thirty-two!” he says.

“Dad!” both girls yell. Although neither is interested in dating boys yet, they are intrigued by the dark idea of them. A shadow that hovers in what they think of as their far, far future.

“Can we get sundaes?” Lara asks.

“We’ll see,” Mom says. Which usually means no, but I don’t want to deal with it right now.

It is six-thirty on a Friday and the restaurant is crowded. People in heavy coats cram the foyer. While they wait, shifting from foot to foot, Mandy and Lara debate what they will order, even though in the end they always get the same thing week after week. Mandy is caught up being happy, so giddy and pleased with the food they will eat soon and goofing around with Lara and in the aura of her parents quiet talking and smiling as they do with each other. She is caught up in contentment and a languid softness in her limbs, her easy breath, easy smile. She is so caught up in comfort, and ease in her own being, that when she sees the girls, their presence here—so out of place—confounds her. They sit at one of the big booths in a corner. Five of them. The core group of girls.

She looks away quickly. She hopes they have not seen her. Everything easy and soft has drained from inside her and she is now filled with a fluttering yet heavy feeling. She feels as though she might float away. She feels as though she will never be able to move because of her cinder block feet.

Her family’s table is ready. The hostess grabs four menus and leads them across the restaurant into the back. Far from the girls.

She relaxes. She orders grilled cheese, french fries and orange soda.

“You always get that,” Lara rolls her eyes but then orders the same thing she always orders.

And there in the back room of the restaurant, everything is good again. The drinks arrive and they talk about the day and wait for their supper—patiently, there is no rush—and Lara asks again about sundaes.

The food comes and Mandy is caught up in eating and talking and forgetting. When Nicole stands in front of their table, she wonders if she is a phantom.

“Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Logan. Hi, Mandy.” She says this so evenly and her small white teeth line up perfectly in her mouth.

"A Cool Dry Place"—part 4

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She never has to see any of the girls during summer.

It is only Mandy, Lara and Mom on summer days. Mandy knows the other girls see each other during summer vacation. They have sleepovers and spend days together. Mandy is never upset when they don’t include her during the summer, even though she is during the school year. When it is summer it is as though they do not exist.

Because there is nothing better than summer at the beach as it has always been—Mandy, Lara and Mom. Nothing is missing.

At the beach, they follow the boardwalk over the rise of the dunes and as they descend, the ocean comes into view.

The first moment of a day on the beach is a good, hope-filled one.

She becomes unaware of time and unconscious of herself in a way that frees her.

And this day becomes some variation of all the days they have ever spent at the beach. Hours pass until the best part of the day arrives—the time when the light begins to slant.

The sun on the other side of its arc, angled across the surface of the water. Bright beads of light ride on top of the waves up to the shore. Fingers taste of salt.

Now they will walk down the shore in all that liminal light. This walk is like all the other walks of every summer day. And better, because it is this time.

It is summer, and summer is light.

The summer after seventh grade. In two weeks, Mandy will be back in school. In three, she will be thirteen.

***

It is winter.

During winter, the family goes out for supper every Friday night. Friendly's or pizza at one of the Italian places. Sometimes Chinese—fried butterfly shrimp dipped in sweet sauce.

In winter, Mandy, Lara and Mom clean the house when they get home from school on Friday afternoons. Friday cleaning is one of Mom's things.

"This way we can all just relax for the weekend," Mom says.

This has never made much sense to Mandy. For one thing, she herself would relax just fine if the house were dirty or not. And for the other thing, Mom never really seems to relax all that much ever.

Every Friday, the girls have a snack right after school, then they dawdle as much as possible to avoid cleaning. They poke around the idea of cleaning until Mom begins to lose her patience.

“Let’s get going, girls. The sooner we do it, the sooner it’ll be done. Then when Dad gets home, we can go out to eat.”

First, they each clean their own room. Tidy the clutter, dust the furniture, dust-mop the hardwood floor. Then they’re both supposed to clean either the kitchen or the bathroom, alternating weeks. But instead, they do the rooms together. Mom says it’s okay; she doesn’t care as long as it gets done.

As they clean, the winter sun lowers and the sky darkens. They finish just before Dad’s headlights turn into the driveway. Then they bundle up and go out to eat.

***

In the summer, they clean the house on Friday mornings.

“Before we can go to the beach, we’ve got to get this house cleaned,” Mom pronounces first thing every Friday morning. She folds clothes at the kitchen counter. Her back to the girls.

Lara rolls her eyes at Mandy across their French toast.

“Duh,” Mandy mouths.

They giggle.

“After breakfast, you girls get going on the cleaning. I have to run a couple errands. Then when we’re done, we’ll pack up and head to the beach.”

After Mom is gone, Lara begins to complain about cleaning.

“I am so sick of cleaning cleaning cleaning,” she says and flops onto Mandy’s bed.

“Me, too,” Mandy says as she clears clutter into its right places. She sprays furniture polish on a rag—one of Dad’s old undershirts. It’s the lemony kind of furniture polish, which is what the linen closet where they store it smells like. She runs the cloth over her furniture, moves items, lifts them and replaces them, runs the cloth over the dust. There’s not much dust to wipe up since Mom makes them do this every week. Sometimes Mandy thinks it’s kind of pointless, but suspects Mom would know if they skimped.

“I don’t want to clean!” Lara’s muffled voice comes from under the pillow.

Mandy swipes the pillow off Lara’s head. “Get up. I have to make my bed.”

“Fine.” Lara slaps her feet onto the floor, stands up heavily.

“Lara. Just get your room done so we can do the other rooms and get it over with. You know we have to.”

“I know.” She shuffles to her room. Her head hangs back, her mouth gaping, her shoulders pulled to her ears. Mandy sighs noisily.

Mandy makes her bed. She runs the dust mop over the floor quickly—under the bed, over the open areas around the bureau, nightstand, bookshelf—then goes to the back door to shake it out.

She watches big dust balls fly off the mop first then finer and finer particles float away on the breeze. She watches as they go floating away on the same air in which the sunbeams sit. Watches it all float away. Watches the air clear it until all that is in front of her, all that is left, is the blue blue blueness of the sky. The green lushness of the big old trees that line the back of the yard and stretch into woods up against the highway.

She is still and wonders where all that dust settles.

***

wednesday stew—a random collection of unrelated miscellany

It is not nice to foist an old, out-of-tune, mostly-broken upright piano on anyone. I know because it happened to me and now we have to deconstruct it, which is neither easy nor fun. The last family who owned our house left behind an old, out-of-tune, mostly-broken upright piano which we have sort of just lived around but now must dismantle because no one—I mean, NO ONE—wants it and we can’t just have it here being all ugly, old, out-of-tune and mostly-broken when we want to have a nice open house so we can move. I admit, the deconstruction process has been a little fun and actually pretty interesting. (But I must still urge you not to foist an old, out-of-tune, mostly-broken upright piano on anyone because in spite of the up-sides, it’s still not very nice. Unless you don’t care about being nice in which case carry on with the assurance that it is indeed not a very nice thing to do.) But look how cool its innards are?

This is the built-in cabinet in my dining room. Until a few days ago, it had very ugly glowing gold knobs that I totally despised. Also, right through the glass all the mess I attempt to contain inside the cabinet was visible. (That’s exactly how glass works, in case science eludes you as it does me.) Why didn’t I make it pretty like this 5 years ago when we moved in? I have no idea. The next person will probably think this is ugly and despise it for years until she is ready to move and then changes it to exactly the way she likes.

This is what another 20 inches of snow looks like on top of about 20 other inches of snow that was already there.

Seriously? Enough already.

That’s all.

We went on a getaway this past weekend to a hotel with a (ridiculously over-chlorinated) pool. The kids went to bed too late, got overstimulated in general, slept too little which meant I also slept too little. It was a ton of work planning, packing, unpacking, repacking, unpacking. And I hardly relaxed at all. Now that we’re home, this is what I have to contend with. Yeah—that is all dirty.

(Do I have a bad attitude or what?)

Pocket.com is cool. Most likely someone told you this ages ago, but I am also telling you now! You can save web pages you want to read for when you actually have time to read them. You can organize and archive them, choose your favorites or simply delete the ones that are ehhh. What will probably happen is that you will stockpile a ton of stuff you will never have time to read, but at least you’ll know where it all is. (That’s my plan.)

And, lastly—THIS! Yes it is a laundry basket hung with those removable adhesive strips and hooks. It is where the dirty dish cloths and towels, rags, cloth napkins and burned potholders gather together for washing. I used to have a square container that sat itself on the top stair and often got accidentally kicked down into the basement which always totally pissed me off. Also it was very small and then a giant pile would grow which then got accidentally kicked down into the basement. Which totally pissed me off. This green basket once held all the girls’ stuffed animals until I repurposed a nice old chest which is now a nice toy chest. Anyhow, this is awesome, if I do say so myself. When full, I simply remove it from the wall and carry it down to the washer. Steve doesn’t like it because he says he keeps bumping into it. I told him to stop doing that and then he would be able to appreciate its greatness. I like to solve problems.

Happy Wednesday!

"A Cool Dry Place"—part 3

read part 1read part 2

All week she thinks about the necklace.

When she lies in bed before falling asleep, she imagines wearing it to the game and what the girls would say and how surprised they’d be. And jealous. She crafts spectacular scenarios in which she wears the necklace. In class, at basketball games and the ice cream parlor after, on field trips to places the school would never actually go. Places that have no educational or Catholic value, but lend themselves perfectly to daydreams.

The days pass. She thinks of the necklace day after day. She is afraid to ask her mother if she can wear it. Not because she is afraid of her mother—because she is afraid of the answer, has an idea what it will be, and as long as she doesn’t ask, she can maintain the hope for it. When she finally musters the courage, of course the answer is no.

“But, Mom!”

“To a basketball game? Mandy.” Mom shakes her head. She is ironing her dress for work tomorrow.

“But I need to look extra nice.”

“You always look nice.” Why do parents say things like this? It is not even true. Mandy vows to never say things like this to her own kids someday.

“Mom, please!” There is a frantic quality to her voice.

Her mother places the iron down and looks at Mandy. “Mandy, I don’t know when I’d ever let you, or anyone else for that matter, borrow it. But certainly not for a CYO basketball game.” She returns to her ironing. “It’s special to me. And it was expensive.”

This is Thursday.

Mandy goes to her room, flops down onto her belly on her bed.

After a minute, Lara flops down beside her.

“She said no?” Lara asks.

“Yeah.” Mandy’s hands are under her chin. Lara lies there with her in silence until their Mom calls down the hall, “Girls, supper!”

At the game, neck bare—glaring—feeling as if she sits in a spotlight highlighting her embarrassment and the stupidity for her lie, which she will now have to lie over thickly with more lies, she prays the evening will go by quickly.

All of the girls to whom she does not want to talk are part of the cheering squad. They line up facing the court, white and navy kick-pleat skirts, black and white saddle shoes, snowy white sweaters, large SMS embroidered in navy blue over their budding breasts. They jump around in synch, they bark out matching words goading the boys to victory. Mandy thinks cheering itself is stupid, but still feels she is missing something sitting way up in the chipped bleachers with the other girls who are not on the squad and the boys who are not athletic.

The game is over and they all board the bus to go to Dot's, the ice cream place. There she will eat ice cream from a paper cup which will stick thickly inside her mouth and throat and she will wait endlessly for nine-thirty when her Mom will pick her up.

She needs only to get through his.

The lights in Dot's are bright white. Mandy stands in line and talks with the kids near her. The cheerleaders burst through the door, cheering for the basketball players who follow. They won the game. The girls break into one of their cheers. They laugh uproariously as if no one else in the place matters more than they do. (Which Mandy knows is exactly what they think.) The cheerleaders are loud, they smile largely, they seem to Mandy carefree and they fit in their bodies easily. The basketball players amble in behind them, some sheepish, some with arms upraised. The girls chant each boy's name. It is easy to tell who relishes it and who is embarrassed.

Mandy gets her ice cream and sits with some of the less popular girls. The nice girls. She avoids the popular girls, but they sit at a table close-by. She shrinks and thinks herself very small, but she is still there, still solid. They can see her. Of course. They sit with their big dishes of ice cream or paper cups of frappes. One or two drink diet soda. They don't make a big deal of it—they pretend it's normal, an everyday thing, for them to drink diet soda instead of eat ice cream. "I have to watch my figure. I'll get so fat." As if they're not making a big deal, Mandy thinks. As if no one knows they're making a big deal of something like that. Mandy sees right through it. Everyone plays along and some of the girls really buy it. Mandy plays along, too. What else can she do? But inside she thinks, you don’t fool me. None of them do. Nothing they do. But all she can do is think these things. At least she has that. This private knowledge—this safe space of her own thought.

But then one of them swoops in.

"Mandy." It is Nicole. She is the worst one of all. She eyes the other girls, a brief darting motion. Dart dart one girl two three girls four girls five back to Mandy.

Nicole eyes Mandy's collarbone showily. "Thought you were going to wear your new necklace."

Nicole sits at the corner of the overcrowded table. The table full all around with the right girls. Nicole sits, one leg crossed over the other, and wags her saddle shoe up and down—her folded-down white socks, her kick pleats fanned over her thigh almost touch her knee. She sips her diet soda and watches Mandy's face. The other girls watch, too.

"Um. My mom said it's too nice to wear out to just a basketball game."

"Oh," says Nicole. She turns to the other girls, ghost of a smirk on her mouth. Heads come together. One of them laughs loudly.

"Shhh," Nicole says, glances at Mandy quickly.

Mandy can't finish her ice cream.

Then it's nine-thirty and Mom is waiting outside.

Mandy pulls her coat close around her. It's absolutely freezing out. She gets into the warm car.

Her mother kisses her. "Did you have fun, honey?"

Mandy nods. "Uh-huh," she says.

***

it’s not an 80’s metal video, people—it’s a baptism

My new red sparkly shoes. They glitter like Dorothy's!

When did it happen that women’s dress shoes started being produced only with heels that topple out at 6 inches?

Seriously.

I attended a baptism this weekend, with the honor of being made godmother to my friend’s son. And I needed some freakin’ shoes to go with the pretty dress Steve gave me for Christmas. The dress is navy with white polka dots and totally adorable.

I simply wanted a basic black pump with a normal sized heel. 6” heels are not so much in order when you are in the moment of becoming a godmother. I’m neither a prude nor a particularly good Catholic, but when you’re in church, you gotta at least look like a godmother and not Tawny Kitaen in a Whitesnake video. (Yes, I did just watch every Whitesnake video available on youtube. Once you start, it’s hard to stop.) Also, I seriously doubt I could walk in those things without looking like a badly produced CGI character. Jar Jar Binks comes to mind.

I did find some cute red pumps and they looked even cuter than black would have. But they were the one pair of shoes I found that did not render me the tallest person in the room. Apparently I am grossly out of the loop on current fashion trends. If you could see what I normally wear—plain long-sleeve shirts, yoga pants and cardigan sweaters—you would most likely not be surprised.

Don’t my sparkly red shoes look pretty with the the socks I happen to have on today? You can’t tell, but I’m wearing a plain long-sleeve shirt, yoga pants and a cardigan sweater. But these shoes do dress things up. Think I’ll go roll around on the hood of the car.

Anyway, my kids had a stomach bug about a 6 weeks ago and then sort of a weird mini-nausea experience the week before last. Didn’t result in barf, just a barfish-feeling. Enough to entirely freak out one of my little girls. It’s been 10 days and she is still carrying around the barf bucket, to which she refers as “the frow-up bucket.” She keeps it close and insists on a towel in her bed at night. She is eating as much as ever—where this little 40 pound kid puts it, I do not know—and is clearly a-okay, yet the bucket persists. She is also suddenly preoccupied with the idea of death. The other night after all the bedtime stories and songs and hijinks and ensuing parental threats of what might befall if they didn’t just GO TO SLEEP, she called me up to inquire, “When am I gonna die?”

Seriously?

The ever-present bucket.

I recently read Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm by Thich Nhat Hanh. I am well-acquainted with fear myself, most often referred to as “worry” by us grown-ups. The book talked a lot about not fighting fear, but rather embracing it tenderly. When you rail against it, it only gains power. Thich Nhat Hanh—a Buddhist monk—also reminds us to be mindful and present. This is hard work—harder than almost anything, really. At least for me.

Right now, there is a black void of time sort of stretching out in front of me. A long stretch of the unknown. I can picture my life in July—by then we most likely will have moved and I can see us at the beach. Often. (We really like the beach.) But it’s only early March and we have this house to sell and my husband’s employment situation is in flux and therefore our income and I’m not exactly sure when we’ll move or even how I will get everything done that needs to get done in order to place the house on the market and so many things—big and little—are just entirely uncertain right now. It’s all very dark and I can’t even wedge a narrow beam of light in there to get a glimpse of what I might expect. Being present is difficult.

I heard about this thing called “Schrödinger's cat.” I am no physicist—but I watch reruns of The Big Bang Theory from time to time and they talked about Schrödinger's cat on an episode I watched the other day. In a nutshell—with my very shaky understanding of physics—Schrödinger's cat refers to a thought experiment in which you imagine a live cat in a closed box. Now, there is a vial of poison (or something like that) in the box with the cat and at some unknown point in time the poison will have been released, or not. So, until you open the box, you can presume that the cat is both alive and dead since you have no knowledge of whether or not the poison vial is intact or broken. (At least this is what I gleaned from Sheldon’s explanation.)

So, here’s what I think. Life is like Schrödinger's cat. Could be one thing, could be another. Sometimes there is darkness and sometimes there is light and you simply put one foot in front of the other, you breathe in the moment (thank you for the wisdom, Thich Nhat Hanh), you dream your dreams and you smile at your fear.

My little girl and I are going to make it—we’ll navigate our own black corridors. I’ll help her out, since that’s what mamas do, and we’ll travel with the bucket for as long as we must. We all need our talismans, our lucky charms, that which brings magic to our lives. Maybe I’ll wear my red sparkly shoes, dare to dream, and hope those dreams really do come true. (Click, click.)

Hey, so if you haven’t yet had a chance to read any of the short story I have been serializing, I would love it if you did and appreciate your opinion. Here’s what has published so far:

“A Cool Dry Place”—part 1 “A Cool Dry Place”—part 2

Many thanks to you for coming here!

"A Cool Dry Place"—part 2

read part 1 It is not winter Mandy dislikes. She doesn’t mind the cold. She actually prefers it to the feverish humidity of July and August. She likes the feel of the cold on her skin, the red nose, icy toes and fingers. Likes the scarves and hats and boots and snow. Likes to warm the backs of her legs at the wood stove her father keeps cranking hot.

It is winter. Mandy is twelve. Seventh grade.

“What’re you gonna ask for for Christmas?” Lara asks her.

The house is decked-out. They have boxes and boxes of Christmas stuff to decorate the tree, the walls, every surface, every room. Mom has the touch to pull it all together and it is so nice and homey.

They listen to Mom’s vinyl LPs—Perry Como and Andy Williams. The Carpenters. Every year, unpacking the decorations, they forget about much of it, so the things in the boxes feel like Christmas presents themselves.

“Oh! The crescent moon Santa!”

“I love that one.”

“Where did we get this one?” Mom says every year about one or another.

Now the lights twinkle on the tree as Mandy and Lara discuss their Christmas wishes. It is dark by four-thirty in the afternoon and they turn on the tree lights as soon as the sun drops below the horizon. Every day one of them says, “Can we turn on the tree, Mom?”

“When it’s dark,” she calls from wherever she is in the house.

“Is it dark now?”

A pause. “I guess it’s close enough.”

The girls have discussed many times what they each want for Christmas, but never tire of the conversation. So when Lara asks Mandy what she wants for Christmas, Mandy doesn’t acknowledge she has told Lara many times already, she simply answers.

“Well,” she says, “the new Barbie is nice, but maybe one of the dolls.” She means Cabbage Patch. They are the craze of this Christmas season.

“Yeah,” Lara breathes. “Me, too.”

Lara is in fifth grade. Most of the girls in her class are asking for the doll. Mandy knows what the girls in her class will be getting. Or at least she has an idea. (And it’s not a doll.) Things like sweaters, curling irons, records, the right jacket. She knows the girls would laugh about the doll. She even knows a doll is babyish. But she still wants to play with Barbies and baby dolls. She and Lara play every day after school, after homework. This is nothing she would ever tell the girls at school. She has learned the hard way to go along with them and keep her own secrets.

But she can’t help but want one of the dolls.

“Renee and Sherry know exactly which ones they want,” Lara says. The thing about the dolls is they are all different with their own unique names.

“They showed their mothers and everything. I bet their parents went back to the store and got them,” Lara says. “I don’t even care which one I get. I’d be happy with any one of them. They’re all so cute.”

“I know,” says Mandy. She wishes she could want this doll with the same abandon Lara does. The want sticks inside her—coats the inside of her chest and throat thickly. She wants to be excited and careless. But the want weighs on her.

Still, she requests the doll when their mother asks them what they want for Christmas.

They are in the car. It hasn’t been running long enough yet and coolish air pours from the vents. Yet it feels warmer than the frigid air outside. Christmas songs play on the radio. They’re on their way to the Mall to do some shopping. Mandy feels happy. She loves Christmastime.

“What do you want for Christmas?” says their mother.

“Cabbage Patch!” Lara says. “Cabbage Patch, Cabbage Patch, Cabbage Patch!” She tosses her head back. Mom watches her in the rearview mirror and laughs.

“Are you sure?” Mom asks.

Lara squeezes her eyes shut and turns her head back up at the ceiling. “Yes, yes, yes!” She smiles broadly. They all laugh.

When Mom turns to Mandy and asks, “What about you, honey?” Mandy hesitates. “Do you like the dolls, too?”

Mandy nods. “Yeah.” Some knotted thing sits in her stomach. “I do like them.” In the end, her desire for the doll eclipses the worry.

Too soon it is the first day back at school after Christmas vacation. The girls in Mandy’s class show off their presents in the schoolyard. The air is raw and stinging. Their breath puffs out in fluffy plumes around them. Nicole got a pink and navy jacket, the most popular kind. The one with the hood. The pink is a deep raspberry. It’s not warm enough to wear it, but she begged her mom. (This is something to which Mandy knows her own mother would never give in.)

“She said I’d have to wait ‘til Spring to wear it again. But isn’t it so cool?” Nicole says. Everyone agrees.

Tara got a real angora sweater, powder blue. “Shows off my you-know-whats. I’m totally wearing it to boys basketball on Friday night. Plus, I got some awesome jeans—designer. I think they were really expensive.” Her eyes widen, her voice drops.

Mandy listens, keeps her eyes slightly averted, her exclamations subdued—enough so they won’t notice, enough so they will. She blends. It is one of her cultivated skills. A necessity in her arsenal. Sometimes it works. Other times she forgets to use it. And sometimes it’s not enough.

Then it is her turn.

“So,” Nicole says, turning on Mandy. “Mandy, what did you get?”

A look passes between some of the girls, their smiles suppress giggles.

She is not prepared. This is shocking because she has been unprepared so many times before she’d think it impossible to find herself in this very position again.

“Um, some good stuff. Some clothes. A new sweater. It’s pretty.” Comes out in a great rush.

The eyes.

“But what was your big gift?” Tara says.

“I don’t know. I got lots of things.” She stops, her minding whirling. Then! “But I guess the necklace.” She feels triumphant. And relieved. And large yet light.

Nicole’s eyes narrow. Through Mandy’s coat, she eyes the top of Mandy's chest where a necklace would be. “What necklace? Show us.”

“Oh,” Mandy touches her collarbone with her mitten-covered hand. She is protected by her coat and scarf now, but knows she’ll have to take her winter stuff off as soon as the bell rings and they all line up, file inside, stand in the coat closet and hang their things on the designated hooks. The coat closet will smell of wet heated wool, hot air from the registers, bananas and lunch boxes from now and all the years past, the gloom and heaviness of a long new day. Mandy can smell it now, here. She can call the scent to mind at any time. Home in her own safe bed. She doesn’t like to recall it. Sometimes it comes on its own.

But right now she is still outside with her hand at her throat.

“It’s too nice to wear to school,” she says quickly.

“Can you wear it to the basketball game?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my mom. It’s really nice,” she says. “And really expensive,” she adds.

“I can’t wait to see it on Friday,” says Tara. She sneaks a look at Nicole. Not sneaky enough that Mandy misses it. (Of course not.) They walk away together, arms locked, heads close. They giggle. Mandy thinks it could be anything at which they laugh.

“What kind of necklace is it, Mandy?” Sara asks. She is one of the nice girls. But she’s fringe, like Mandy. Even more so than Mandy.

Mandy thinks. She remembers the one Dad gave Mom for their anniversary. It is a solid gold heart, the size of a quarter. Fat and gleaming.

“It’s a heart,” she says. “Solid gold.”

“It sounds pretty.”

“Thanks.” She feels a little badly lying to Sara who is always nice to her. “What did you get?”

She shrugs. “A few things. Nothing like the other girls got. Or you,” she says.

“Yeah, well, it’s nice and everything, but I’ll bet your stuff is nice, too,” says Mandy.

The bell rings.

It is Monday.

All week she thinks about the necklace.

who needs a proper day planner when there are perfectly good scraps of paper on the living room floor?

If I had a nickel for every organization system and notebook/folder planner I have pulled together in the last couple of years, I would be at least .60 cents richer. And while that is not an impressive amount of cash, and therefore fails to drive my point as effectively as I’d intended, it nevertheless represents quite a few attempts at creating an adequate organization system. Let’s say if I had a hundred thousand dollars for every organization system and notebook/folder planner I have pulled together in the last couple of years, I would be at least twelve hundred thousand dollars richer. (That could be wrong—I don’t do math. But, whatever it is, I think it comes out to a lot.) Now do you see what I mean? That sum makes things a lot more serious, doesn’t it?

But somehow, none of these organization systems ever stuck. I’ve tried day-runners (remember those?), small binders, big binders, We’Moon which is super-cool and divinely crunchy and I got it one year and looked at it twice, TeuxDeux which is a brilliant idea but I simply stopped using it for no decipherable reason, spiral notebooks, notebooks with perforated pages, little purse-sized calendars.

My most recent foray into the organized life was in the form of a pretty binder, some free life-organizing printables I found online and a weekly calendar I designed with the help of a Google docs template. Yeah. Didn’t stick. But it looked impressively nice.

But the thing is, I am not actually disorganized at all, because as it turns out I already have an effective organization system. It’s called mining the living room floor for useable scraps of paper.

Lists! As it turns out, I am all about lists. They work for me. Steve once asked me if my lists freaked me out—that seeing everything to do and think about in writing caused me stress. It does not. I am actually semi-psychotic without them. A legal pad (12 for $5 from Ocean State Job Lot), sticky notes and scraps of paper—detritus from the living room floor—upon which I write the pressing stuff to leave right on top of the pad. So I won’t forget. Backs of rejected kid artwork, torn construction paper—either works beautifully. I have daily lists and house to-do lists and books to read lists. I have lists of lists I need to list.

To complete my system, I printed out a simple 2013 doodle calendar from Creative Mamma (love her stuff) for keeping track of events and birthdays and plans. I stapled half a sheet of cardstock to the back of the legal pad creating a pocket to hold other all the other lists.

I think the trick is not any one thing—any perfect thing. You simply keep trying until you find that thing that works for you. It might be a cheap-o legal pad and some free printables. It might be right under your nose. Or your feet. Look down—you just never know.

Here’s the beautiful thing about a legal pad: rip off the top page and you have a fresh start every time. You gotta love the metaphors.

"A Cool Dry Place"—part 1

It is winter.

She wakes too late to shower. Someone forgot to set the alarm and the entire family oversleeps.

“Please!” she begs.

“We just don’t have time, honey,” Dad says. He holds his hands out to her—a kind of offering. His smooth smooth hands, skin softened by raw fat. The suet that rubs against his hands as he slices through flesh—carves steaks, fillets, grinds the tougher cuts into hamburger.

He tells her that he and Mom must get to work and Mandy and her sister, Lara, must be dropped off at school. Mandy requires neither his explanations—the details of which is she aware—nor his sympathy. She only wants a shower. Her mother doesn’t allow her to wash her hair every day. She insists daily shampoos will damage it. But Mandy’s hair is oily. Sleek and shiny. Almost pretty, on the days she shampoos. Flat from bed and greasy on the days she doesn’t. (The girls have made note of it, obliquely. But it is only a matter of time.)

This day, the day the alarm clock does not go off, is a shampoo day. But there is not enough time. It has been two days now since her hair was washed. She is panicked.

“But my hair is dirty, Mom!”

It is winter.

She is twelve. Seventh grade.

“Mandy, you look fine. It’ll be okay.” Her mother touches her shoulder gently.

She does not look fine, though. Mom is just saying that.

“You can wash it tonight,” her mother adds.

Tonight is another lifetime altogether.

Mandy dresses quickly. She jams a knit hat over her hair and dreads the unavoidable moment when she will have to remove it. She pictures her hair vividly dirty and matted. Some of the boys might laugh and say some stupid things she will almost be able to ignore, or at the least successfully pretend to brush off. But the girls, who might say nothing at all, will look at her sharply and shrewdly and efficiently, with cool nonchalance and cooler blue eyes or brown or some other color. And with no words at all, they will say more.

The entire school day she lightly runs her hand over her hair. She imagines it slippery and wet-looking. Dripping onto the collar of her white oxford shirt. Trips to the girls’ room prove it not quite as bad as her imagination conjures, but her thoughts continually slide back to the greasy image of herself. She thinks it and thinks it until it becomes her. Not the hair, not the oiliness but some bigger, more horrible thing. It overtakes her to the point that she forgets the day is about come to an end. She almost forgets that she is not the unnameable thing, heavy and slow and slunk down in the wooden chair with the desk part attached like a big flat arm. She almost forgets there will be other days, other moments.

Then the bell rings. Relief more like joy floods her.

She gathers her things. Shoves her hat on her head before she puts on her coat.

She moves quietly away out of the classroom, meets up with her sister in the schoolyard.

It is bitterly cold, like ice on teeth.

It is winter and Mandy is in seventh grade.

As she walks away from the school on her way home, she and Lara talk; they giggle; they belly laugh. Distance between her and the school lengthens. The space starts out thick and heavy, wide and dark, growing thin and transparent until enough has uncoiled and the space, now thin as spaghetti and light as organdy ribbon, turns to white smoke and is gone, absorbed into the blue of the sky.

There are times when she is heavy and times when she is light.

The day is cold and brittle. It hurts to smile. Yet they do. Bring forth the hot insides of mouth and tongue and exhale warmth where it needs to be.

***

Summer is light.

She wakes to the sound of the shade snapping against the frame of the window—pulled in and blown out by the cool morning breeze. The shade snaps this way only during summer. Mandy doesn’t open her eyes. The sheets and pillows smell of fresh air. During summer, they dry their clothes outside in the sun. The clothesline pulley is stuck into the house outside Mandy’s bedroom window—the line runs in a white loop to a tall wooden pole where the other pulley is secured. Both pulleys squeak crazily as the line is run towards or away from the window.

“I’ve got to get Daddy to spray those with WD-40,” Mom says. Mandy’s dad always gets those little jobs. Mom has plenty of her own—she teaches all year and is almost never still when she is home.

They drop clothespins to the ground sometimes as they hang clothes on the line. When enough have gathered beneath the window, sunk in the soft moss and the tender green of the grass, Mom calls to Mandy and Lara as they play outside.

From the window she calls out, “Girls! Can you get the clothespins, please?” They run to the window, stoop to pick up the clothespins and stand on tippy-toes to hand them up to her as she reaches down from the window. The girls gather them up in little bunches. The ones that fell first, weeks ago, are damp and weathered. They laugh as some fall again from Mom’s hands.

Summer is light.

Mandy nestles under the sweet grass-smelling sheets and with her eyes closed, listens to the shade snapping. Maybe right now she needs only to slide the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands slowly across the smooth sheets—the green and yellow flowers, sun-faded, washed many times, rubbed to thin softness.

It is summer after seventh grade. She is twelve but not for long. She turns thirteen at the end of the summer. Not that she’s in a hurry to be thirteen as the other girls are, whose favorite topics include: boys, teen magazines, periods, boobs, high school boys. To all of their talk she smiles enough to show interest, not enough to be called out.

But all of that is far away and now she can press her face into the softness and scent of the sheets.

The summer morning is a cool sweet-smelling hushed thing with its own weight pressing into the new day. She opens her eyes. As air pushes the shade away from the window, bright white sunlight erupts into the room, then, as quickly, rushes away like the ocean, as the shade is sucked back into the window frame.

Mandy listens and hears her sister talking with their Mom in the kitchen. She throws off the covers, tosses her thin tan legs over the side of the bed. Her feet touch the wood floor and slap lightly to her bedroom door, are silenced on the pile-carpet of the hallway.

It will be a sunny hot day—they will go to the beach.

And she steeps herself in the comfort of slipping on a day like a best-loved sweater. Soft, cottony, fat loopy weave, loved, unraveling. Some pretty, faded color.

This morning Mom has sliced some strawberries for the corn flakes. Sprinkled with sugar, floating in the creamy white.

***

For the following several Thursdays the story will be continued through the ending. Hope to see you back here for more!

how much is enough?

Steve and I spent the last 3 days stripping and refinishing floors, painting walls, cleaning out the garage, prepping molding for fresh paint. The kids were at my parents’ (thanks, Mom and Dad!) or we would have achieved exactly 2% of that stuff.

As I de-clutter my house in preparation for selling it, this pile of boxed stuff keeps growing higher and spreading wider along one wall of my basement. It is all the stuff that is too “personal” (framed photos and kids’ art) and clutter-some (most decorations) to keep out. And boxes and boxes of books. Oh, and random weirdness like binoculars and tiny camera tripods. It makes me wonder how much we need some of this stuff if we’re living happily without it. I do not mean the books and photos of my kids. I mean the tiny tripod. (Why do we have that?) It leaves me wondering what do we really need? Not want, like or possess “just in case”—need. I am thinking about sufficiency versus excess.

How much is enough?

I am a contributing blogger at Lifeables.com—I write on a variety of parenting topics from reclaiming the Green Hour to battling cabin fever, spending quality time with your kids to creating meaningful Thanksgivings and Christmases to taming the plethora of toys in your house. (I am much better behaved over there than I am here.) I write about all the things you can do with your kids to make their lives richer. However, I do not explicitly claim to accomplish all those things about which I write. I do my best.

Do you ever wonder if you’re really doing your best? I do.

I guess it might be more accurate to say that I wonder if I am doing enough. Because how much is enough?

I jokingly referred to myself as the “boring mom” to a friend today. We are kind of a homebody family—we stick close to the hacienda. We keep our activities simple and our schedule loose. I love the freedom we enjoy and that we sometimes stay in our jammies until bedtime. (Then we change into clean ones.) I love that we sometimes cuddle together on the couch for half the morning reading or creating together. That a big afternoon out is the woods or the playground or our own neighborhood. I believe in simplicity. My kids are happy. They are almost always busy with activities they choose themselves. I rarely hear the word “bored” from their mouths. But here is the plague of this homeschooling mom—while I firmly believe that there is no curriculum or list of activities that can possibly encompass all that there is to know, and there is no set amount of time or specific age by which to learn a particular skill, that allowing my kids the freedom to do the things they want to do each day is the best thing to encourage a love of learning, that play should be the biggest part of what they do right now, that my job is to answer their questions and find new materials to incite their curiosity and interest, I still can’t help but wonder—how much is enough?

And yet maybe simply asking that question is a start—is enough upon which to build. Maybe keeping it simple and authentic is enough. While I want more for my kids than what is merely sufficient, I want to be aware of what feels like excess.

It’s a delicate balancing act and there is no blueprint. You gotta do it from your heart and your gut. And you know what? I can do that. We can do that.

Oh, one last (unrelated to the current topic) thing: I said I was going to post my short story series on Fridays, but I changed my mind and it will be Thursdays. Someone told me that the best days to blog are Tuesdays and Thursdays and who am I to question the collective unconscious whims of the masses? That would be just plain crazy.

(And my unique crazy is far more interesting!)

who has the time to moisturize?

Who has the time to use hand cream? I would like to meet the lucky lady who does and learn her time-management secrets. I keep hand cream close-by, in eye-shot, so that I will remember to apply it to my flaking hands. But then every time I think I’d better moisturize (usually just after accidentally glimpsing my crispy skin) my very next thought is I don’t have time. I am not even making that up. Seriously.

In the interest of best-utilizing my time and providing you, my dearest readers, with fun stuff in which to bathe your mind, I thought I might serialize some of my short fiction. For the next bunch of Fridays I will post some of my long-ish short stories, a little at a time.

The first story I selected is from a story series I’ve been working on here and there for a few years. It’s loosely based on my childhood. But all events and characters are fictitious. I made them up. That’s what writers do. Those of you who know me might recognize some glimmers of other people you may also know, but I swear I made most of it up. You won’t find yourself no matter how hard you look. Except you. Yeah, YOU. You know who you are.

I’m kidding! (Am I, though?)

Once, after reading a novel I had in progress, the reader (a friend) said, “You need more of the Steve character.” Steve is my husband. (Steve is not his real name—I blog-o-gized his actual name for his protection. From what is he being protected? I have no idea.) Steve was not in that book, though. The husband in that book is NOTHING like Steve. The reader automatically assumed the protagonist (a woman) was me and her husband was Steve. Other readers assumed the sister of the protagonist was my actual sister and the mother my actual mother.

Truth is, some of my characters are hybrids of people I’ve met and some are entirely made up and some are blatantly stolen (but in that case only people I don’t know well and I suppose it’s more an imagining of how I think they think and act, their histories and opinions). The danger in knowing a writer is that something of you might just find its way into her work. You should know this: we artists are thieves. But it’s still mostly a lot of imagined stuff.

Come back next Friday for some short story enjoyment! Unless you are moisturizing. Oh, wait—I have a better idea. Read the story while you moisturize. That is called multi-tasking, a required skill of the 21st Century, and probably how the lucky ladies get it done.

(I might even find the time to moisturize, too. I doubt it, though.)

because i just can’t leave well-enough alone

This week I decorated an old storage chest. I totally do not have time for weird projects such as this, but why allow that fact to stop me? Exactly.

I’ve had this chest for a long time. I bought it at Bostonwood (which used to be called Maverick Something Something) in Allston, Massachusetts (woot woot for Allston!) and dragged it many blocks down Commonwealth Avenue to a sweet studio apartment I lived in when I was 23.

Dead cat scratches on each corner. (She wasn't dead yet when she did the scratching.)

The chest has been painted over many times and served many purposes over the years—sweaters, extra blankets, I can’t even remember what-all. Most recently, it held our winter outerwear in the breezeway. One of the things I like to do periodically is start moving furniture around. It begins innocently enough—perhaps I need to rearrange some storage or something. But then you move one thing and you need to move something in its place to store whatever you emptied out and sometimes when you move something, you see that the paint on the wall needs to be touched up and if you’re bothering, you might as well paint the radiators the same color so you have to go down to Rocky’s Ace Hardware and buy the paint. And then you should really put up a shelf right there—it would look awfully nice—but its color is wrong so just paint that, too. The other curtains would look better with this new furniture arrangement and newly painted wall. They’ll have to be ironed, of course. Meanwhile, this all began because there was one too many sweaters to fit in the bureau. Would a better solution perhaps be to give the offending sweater away? Yes. But why would you do that? Exactly.

This chest project began because I am tired of organizing the girls’ toys. The best thing for kids’ toys is to have little bins (label them if you have a laminator—the best mothers laminate) on shelves at their eye-level, thus making available to them all their stimulating and educational play options. (All your kids’ stuff is stimulating and educationally rich, right?) Then they go to Harvard. If you do this exactly right, they will go to Harvard when they’re 12 and turn out like Doogie Howser, MD. DO NOT get a big toy box (like you had when you were a kid) because then all their educationally rich stuff gets all jumbled together and they won’t be properly stimulated and then guess who’s going to Harvard? No one.

But do you know who organizes all those little toys every stinkin’ day? ME. Thus, I wanted a nice big toy box (like I had when I was a kid) to just toss all the toys in and shut the lid and go downstairs again. So I decided they can just go to college at the normal age to a nice regular university, just like I did, and take 6 years to get a BA at 3 different schools after changing majors twice. I turned out FINE. See?

And here I bring us to the purpose of this blog post: potato paint stamps! (Did you see that coming?)

Once I decided regular college was just fine, I went out to the consignment shops and the Salvation Army Thrift store to buy some kind of toy chest for them. Found nothing. I didn’t want to buy something new or something they would outgrow, so I decided simply to re-purpose my good old storage chest. I shifted a bunch of stuff around, painted a few walls and then tackled potato stamping! First, I got me some little paint samples from Rocky’s Ace Hardware and painted the top purple.

Then I carved little shapes from halved potatoes to fashion simple flowers and voilà! Toy chest! (‘Cause I’m a bad mother.)

There are other things around here I also can’t leave alone. The kids’ tables, for example.

These are those really inexpensive ones from IKEA that lots of people have. And even though they were only $19.99 for a table and 2 chairs, they have held up really well.

These chairs I snagged from a neighbor’s lawn (no one was sitting on them and I love to take free stuff off neighbors’ lawns). I am discriminating about the free stuff I remove from lawns. (That’s what I tell everyone.) I painted the tables with some paint I had around and smoothed contact paper over the tops.

But then the table was too low for the new chairs so I had to fashion special bottoms for the table legs. See how things just snowball?

Anyone can unnecessarily refinish all kinds of things around the house—even you! I promise that you don’t have time for it but why would you allow that to stop you? Exactly.

friday stew—a random collection of unrelated miscellany

When confronted with a wretched mixed pile of Lego bricks and Lego Hero Factory parts, I will know which is which 95% of the time. This is not a skill I intentionally cultivated nor one upon I wish to improve. (But I bet I will.) Sorting these little pieces of plastic represents one of the reasons why writing blog posts and novels and shaving regularly prove to be a challenge. (Good thing I don’t really care about shaving.) It is too cold and I am tired of being too cold. Usually I do not complain about winter but seriously I am D-O-N-E. It’s only early February which is bad news for me since February only means many more weeks of cold in these parts. A blizzard today and tomorrow is promising to deliver 24” plus to my little part of the Earth. Maybe even 30”. Right on my house. The up-side: snow hides a bleak and messy backyard when you are hopeful of selling aforementioned domicile.

Exciting cup news! Remember when I cracked my beloved Starbucks reusable cold cup? Well, it remains cracked, but useable. However, its integrity is becoming more and more heartachingly compromised. But then I heard about this amazing invention on RadioBoston, one of my favorite NPR shows. It is called CUPPOW and it’s a little insert that turns any mason jar into a travel mug! My awesome mail carrier, Brian, brought mine to me this week. You can insert a straw in it. I am going to sew a little cozy for my Cuppowed jar. It is certain to be adorable. Like one of those little sweatered dogs.

Sugar is really pissing me off lately. I mean its pervasiveness. As a result, I have sworn off packaged cereal. Even the "healthy" ones contain a crapload of sugar. So what to leave handy for the little monsters so I can stay in bed just a few more minutes in the morning? Homemade granola sweetened with only natural maple syrup! Here’s the recipe. Combine 3 cups of rolled oats, 3/4 cup of unsweetened coconut, a tablespoon of cinnamon and/or some raisins and almonds—toss the mixture with 3 ounces of olive oil and 3 ounces of maple syrup and bake at 250 degrees F for an hour. Oh, throw in some flax seeds if you got ‘em. The kids think it’s the greatest thing. And they say I am the best and cutest mother in the world (no lie), so I must be doing something right. Sometimes I am the WORST MOTHER IN THE WORLD as well, which is confusing. Either way, this granola does not have refined sugar in it which was the point of this paragraph.

My son likes to watch this BBC series about Cavemen and the animals that predated the dinosaurs and other prehistoric stuff. The other day he walked into the kitchen where I was preparing supper and said, “Mommy, did you know that Australopithecus was the first primate species to mate face to face?” Then he left with no further commentary to return to his wretched mixed pile of Lego bricks and Lego Hero Factory parts (to which he refers simply as Legos and Heroes).

And here ends the Friday stew of random, unrelated miscellany. I hope you have an opportunity to mate face to face this weekend, especially if you are buried in 30” of snow—I mean, what else will there be to do?

things we contemplate while in a demerol-induced stupor

I found my hoard of Sweet Valley High books in the basement. Good judgement whispers to let them go.

(I doubt I’m gonna listen.)

Generally I’m an enthusiastic disposer—just ask Steve. I have been known to remove things directly from his hands and into the donation box or trash in an effort to de-clutter. (He totally loves it when I do that.) I really despise clutter.

But those glossy-covered lovelies I cannot seem to ditch.

I considered naming my twins Jessica and Elizabeth. I was in a Demerol-induced post C-Section stupor, but it seemed like a decent idea. How fun would it be to introduce your twins as Jessica and Elizabeth? Both my girls and the Wakefield twins are identical. Both sets of twins have a handsome older brother. One is bookish and the other can’t resist a rich boy driving a black Porsche.

Elizabeth and Jessica DeLorenzo! Not really—but how awesome would that be?

Imagine my recent excitement when I discovered Sweet Valley High Confidential: Ten Years Later? It picks up the story of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield 10 years after high school. SPOILER ALERT! (Are you really gonna read this book, though?) Steven Wakefield is gay. Lila Fowler is as insipid and spoiled as ever but it’s no longer charming and deliciously catty. Just kind of pathetic. Bruce Patman is in love with Elizabeth. (I can sort of buy that.) They say naughty words (even the big F), have sex (!), drink wine AND caffeinated beverages. It should have been exciting, but it was all sort of a big let-down. None of the innocence or designer jeans. Cell phones and laptops and stuff that wasn’t even invented in the 80s. And yet I could have lived with all of it, but for the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard in my life: Todd and Jessica are a couple. An ENGAGED couple.

Come. On.

What the frickety-frack. There is no way that would have happened in a million years. Elizabeth and Todd are perfect together and Francine Pascal RUINED EVERYTHING! I feel like Kathy Bates in Misery.

My well-traveled plastic box of pulpy 80s literary treasure surfaced this week because it seems we are contemplating a move (more on this as the situation unfolds) and as a result, I am cleaning up and clearing out and packing things and scrutinizing every corner of my house. All those little projects we have neglected these past years will finally get finished just in time to give the house to someone else. My to-do list just grew a mile and my time is more stretched than usual which really draws out my sunny side. The realtor says we must de-clutter (oooh!) and de-personalize (I took down the kids’ art—the walls look bare and devoid of spirit).

I’m excited for this new phase of our lives, but leaving things behind—a home I love, great neighbors, our sweet backyard and lovely neighborhood, a city I have grown to think of as home—won't be easy. Especially for a chick who kicks and screams as much as she can when confronted with change.

I doubt I will read any more of the new Sweet Valley books—I’d rather sink back into the gentle 80s version of life in the perfect Southern California setting. Life was simpler—for me and the Wakefield twins. Everyone needs an injection of that every once in a while, no matter where real life takes you.

(The books are coming with me.)

sickness, sleep (not much), meal-planning

Don’t even try to deny that is the best, most compelling blog post title ever! Yeah, so you’re only getting one blog post again this week, due to sickness (kids’) and lack of sleep (mine). But I do have a small offering and it just might change your life.

(For the better.)

It is meal-planning.

Recently I heard a stat that is completely wackadoo: according to a recent study, Americans throw away nearly 40% of the food we buy. (Think on that for a moment. Okay, continue.) If you want, go ahead and use the Google to find out what this means for water waste, increased greenhouse gas emissions from rotting food in landfills and the amount of money you might be throwing away annually. Also, only 28% of Americans say they can cook.

What?!

100% wackadoo.

I am not being judgy or bossy. (I’m being slightly bossy.) Let’s think of it not as bossiness but as unsolicited helpfulness.

I am really good at meal-planning. There are many things at which I suck. Gymnastics. Swallowing vitamins. Behaving normally in a great deal of social situations. But this chick can meal-plan.

I created a standard grocery list and print a copy every week then cross off and add to it as needed. This is a blank one. I shop at several places, so they’re all on here as well as a little OTHER column for those one-offs. I know—I’m such a dork.

You can totally do this, too. I swear that you do have the time. I developed this skill when I was in graduate school full-time and working 40 hours a week simultaneously. And even though I didn’t possess actual small humans in those days, believe me when I tell you that schedule is something like having 7 newborns with at least 2 of them screaming at all times.

(I am totally being bossy today. It’s the lack of sleep. Or that I’m bossy.)

I promise you, this is quick and easy. Okay, you don’t need a fancy app, but you do need to start with one of two things (or both): a little stash of recipes you like and/or a little list of things that your family likes to eat. Now jot down the days of the week. Choose 5 meals and, depending on what your schedule looks like for the week—when you’ll be getting home and how long each recipe will take to prepare, etc.—decide what meal you will assign to each day. I say 5 because chances are you’ll have leftovers to eat on the other days. If you want to only cook 4 days of the week, choose recipes that produce a high yield and hence a larger quantity leftovers. I do suggest choosing recipes that are quick and easy for weekdays and save those that are more challenging and time-consuming for weekends. And I promise that if you decide to switch things around during the week no one will stop you.

Next, make your grocery list based off the ingredients that your chosen recipes require, plus your usual staples.

I write in my weekly meals plan here as well. This sheet may seem a little much, but it really makes my life easier. I categorize the items by department and also list stuff in order by aisle. (I’m a freak.)
Grocery stores tend to induce the fight or flight response in me—
it’s best for everyone if I get outta there quickly.

If this all seems like, doy, I know—I get it. But before I devised this system, I was one of those people who threw food away every week. Not only do I never throw out fresh produce or meat anymore, I almost never even throw out leftovers. ‘Cause I plan.

Bonus Tips! Freeze those leftovers! If, after a day or 3, it seems evident that you are not going to consume a container of leftovers, label them (don’t question me on this one) and toss them in the freezer. Some night when you don’t feel like cooking, you will rejoice over that container. And if you make a soup, double the recipe and freeze half. Soup freezes really well and doubling is easy since soup is pretty much just a bunch of stuff you bung in a big pan. Double lasagna filling and freeze half. Double veggie or chicken pot pie filling and freeze half. (Use pre-made pie crust—cheat! Who’s gonna know?) Make a double recipe of meatballs and freeze half. (Are you getting this?)

See? Easier than executing a cartwheel. Or carrying on a normal conversation with the cashier at Hannaford.

I have begun to dabble in make-ahead-and-freeze meals (got this book) and once a month cooking (this is an oldie). I’ll keep you posted.

(Expect more unsolicited helpfulness in your future. You can’t wait.)

Notice how WINE is both capitalized and emphasized? Like I’d forget wine... But better safe than sorry.