A Howl in the Darkness: Sinéad O'Connor

© Bryan Ledgard by Creative Commons license

Sinéad O'Connor understood the concept of tone policing long before we had a recognized term for what was happening to women in that era (and this one, too). She had the audacity not to care what people thought about her honesty, and she gave zero fucks about the discomfort people (mostly white, male) had with her rage. She raged against the patriarchy and the Catholic Church (which are pretty much one and the same) and it turns out she was right about them all along. For women my age (Gen X) she was such a scorching figure—one of righteous indignation and incandescent passion—that she burned our eyes. She validated us at a time when people were still raising their daughters to be silent. We weren't ready for her, and in many ways we still are not. I know she was traumatized, an abuse survivor, struggling with mental health issues throughout her life, and that her voice was a howl in the darkness. I'm so glad we were given the gift of hearing it.

Making a Deck More Porch-Like

Many people use the terms deck, porch, and patio interchangeably, though if you have talked to me for more than fifteen minutes, you'll know that I have a tendency to hairsplit definitions. To me, a deck is an uncovered, more casual, recreational space for family use at the back of the house. A porch is a covered space that is on the front entrance of the house. There are of course, variations on this. You can have a porch on the side or back of a house, and Victorian era homes are a like a love letter to porches--stick 'em wherever you like-- have a front porch, a side porch, a kitchen porch, even a sleeping porch. A porch is a more traditional feature of an older home, while decks seem to look more fitting on a house with modern lines. 

Which is why, for more than a decade, I have loathed (I checked, and that is not too strong of a word), the deck on the front of my 1930s-era colonial. Not only do decks not belong on the fronts of houses, any houses (in my admittedly strong opinion), they also don't belong on this age of home. 

I disliked it from the moment I moved in, but the image above is a "before" photo from a few summers ago. What can't be seen from this image is the rickety railing, the warped wood, and the gaps and warps between deck boards that were beginning trip people up. This awful looking thing replaced a proper brick stoop, as you can see in this historical photo from 1942, below, and an even larger version with wrought iron railing that was added later, but not photographed.  

Below is a more recent photo, when we took a stop-gap approach to a stair issue that had become a hazard for our elderly parents. Now we were at the point where the deck was not only ass ugly, it was a potential danger to family members. It was the final motivation to get going on the renovation project, which we began last spring. 

While we did not have the budget or the skills to put up a true covered porch (we likely would have hired an architect and a building contractor for a project of that scale), our goal was to porchify our deck. That's a new word in the DIY lexicon: porchify. You heard it here first. We submitted our plans to our local municipal authority for a building permit. The design itself was pretty simple, traditional, but with certain elements beefed up to give that porch-like feel, and of course chosen to meet the safety requirements of local building codes. We married the elements of several designs we found online into something we felt matched the personality and era of the house. 

In the spring of 2022, Tom started demolition. And as the kids like to say, I was there for it. Nothing better than to see a particularly hated part of your house getting replaced for something better. 

Despite the sad state of the decking and railing, we found that the footings, posts, and joists were in great shape, and well constructed (almost to the point I wondered if they were done at separate times by different people? Hard to say.) Given the price of lumber during the pandemic, we decided to keep these in order to shave a little off the total expense.

Because we aren't home improvement television personalities or social media influencers, I'm not going to pretend this project took a weekend, or two, or even three. Tom was the driving force and mastermind behind this project, but he was not about to give up his summer kayaking or bicycling trips. And then we also had elder parent care, and visits from grandchildren, and yard work and jobs. When he was able to carve out time to work on the project, our front yard looked like this: 

He worked hard to get the stairs and decking in place, so that people could use our front door safely. Then the posts and railing went in as time allowed. 

One thing we did a little differently is that we kept the footprint of the existing deck, but routed the railing around the front window, so that it didn't obstruct it. That created a little ledge off the deck railing that is under the window, which you can sort of see in the photo on the right. Right now our potted trees are there. We might build some sort of planter box or feature in the future, but for now it's just a quirk of building around existing features. The photo is from this summer. 

Construction continued into the fall months because, well, life. It felt a little strange. In our Midwestern "work hard and get it done" culture, spreading projects out incrementally over months seems almost wrong. And while we did want to get it done, our priorities were all over the place last summer, so our efforts were too. It was not a straight line. We had to be okay with that. I think for the most part we were. 

One of the other accomplishments of this project was redesigning the stairs so that there were more of them, with shallower rises, so that our elderly parents could more easily navigate them. Stairs are particularly difficult to get right, and when you don't get it right, even by a hair's breadth, people stumble on them. It's really a credit to his patience and determination that these are well constructed, solid, and easier on old knees. Below is a picture from last September, when we were beginning to get close to the railing finish line. 

By October, Tom had finished the railing, the trim, filling and paint touch-ups that seem never-ending on projects like these. It has been downright glorious to pull up the curb of our home and see the big difference it has made in how our house presents itself to the neighborhood. (Ignoring the fact that we need to mow, and finish painting scraped window trim on the upper story window. Chores are never done!)

Even now, in the summer of 2023, we have one last task to do to finish our porchified front entrance, and that is staining the decking. Pressure treated wood needs to cure a good long time before staining, and we're hoping to get that job done this fall, so we can finally call the project complete. We also have a few other small projects that "accessorize" this one, like the replacement of a shabby and leaning old lamp post. But this was a big, big item to get checked off our list, and we feel really good about it. 

The next steps in the front of the house exterior mostlly have to do with updating parts of the front perennial and landscaping beds, which after a few years need a little tweaking and reviving. That's more in my wheelhouse, and I've already gotten a bit of a start with weeding and moving some plants around. More to come on that, soon. 

Origin Stories

When my son Joe went off to college, I shut the door on his bedroom. Not just for a few days or weeks, but months. As teen boy bedrooms do, it needed some cleaning in there. Some decluttering. Maybe a bit of paint.

But I didn’t touch it. It would be easiest to say that work got busy, that I don’t like housework all that much, that I was respecting his space. Which are all true, but in ways that obscure another, more difficult truth– that really, I was hurt.

Joe was so eager to go to college and begin his adult independence that he spent the majority of his senior year and the summer after graduation firmly brushing off parental assistance and guidance. Not even brushing– at times he positively bristled with ferocity– that he alone would make the decisions, figure things out, do it his way. It was a long year of trying to stay out of his way when I could, and negotiating compromises when I could not.

By the time we pulled up to the curb in front of the dormitory in August, two hours from home, we were thoroughly irritated with each other. I managed a thin version of the cheerful enthusiasm expected of new college parents. It was mainly for show, for those volunteer students in school colors helping all the wandering freshmen move their stuff up flights of stairs. I trailed behind with an armload of blankets and frustration.

I explained to him, standing with the boxes stacked around us, that I wanted to help him NOT because I wanted to baby him, not because I thought he was incapable, but because this milestone was different for me than it was for him. It would be the only time that I brought him to college for the first time. When he next came home, he would be a different person. I wanted this last time to take care of my son. I wanted this time to say goodbye. Not just to the Joe he was right now, but to the mother I had been to him all this time.

He still said no to much help. I made his bed, popping new pillows out of plastic bagging. He sulked. I was angry and tried not to be. We walked across campus to get his student ID. Being out of the dorms helped, like it was part of our problem, or maybe just the stage for it. But lunch was over, his college program was beginning an afternoon of welcome to campus activities, and I needed to get back on the road.

“It’s time for you to go now Mom. Don’t call me.” I had to ask for a hug. He gave me one, but it was grudging.

This last week, finally, I opened the door to his room and began putting things in order. I opened the window and let in fresh air. I washed the bed-sheets, blankets, mattress pad, pillows. I sorted his clothes, finding plenty of outgrown jeans and shirts. Soon there were bags for donating lined up in the hallway. I discovered the curtains that had hung in his window since he was a grade-school boy were so sun-damaged, they were barely holding together. I carried them downstairs and stuffed them in the garbage can. For some reason, trashing them felt good.

I hesitated at his desk, not wanting to intrude on his privacy, but eventually deciding to at least dust and organize the jumble of electronics and gaming paraphernalia on the desktop, the stacks of books and other papers.

It was there that I found them. Yellowing and fragile comic books from my own childhood, mixed in with his own collection. I’d been a fan of the Fantastic Four, and there they were–Mr. Fantastic, The Invisible Woman, The Human Torch, and Thing. I showed my old comics to him once when he was in his tweens, hoping to make some kind of connection with him. At the time he seemed disinterested. I had understood– at twelve, it is hardly comprehensible that your mom could have ever been twelve once too. But, it seems, he kept them. It was good to see my old friends there, in among his own.

If you were an English literature college student in the 1980s, as I was, you didn’t get a diploma without a solid bit of Joseph Campbell and comparative mythology. For years, his book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” held sway in collegiate lectures about fiction, folklore, and myth. Dr. Campbell told us that we humans, across time and cultures and distances, tell each other lots of stories. But in many ways, these stories are all the same. They’re all the same because we are all the same– we all want to be the hero of our own story.

Joe wants to be the hero of his own story. I’ve known this for a long time about him, when his autism made every day at school a struggle, not just with academics. He struggled to contain himself in a world completely engineered for the success of normies, and not at all for a little boy whose intelligence was like light shining through heavy branches–sparkling blindly at times, and then wind blowing, shifting in direction, shape, and intensity, sometimes shrouded completely. Or for a little boy whose expressions of frustration with a world who couldn’t understand him were often monstrous, heartbreaking, frightening to us and to him. Every day was like being presented with the same child, but under a new secret identity– new to us, and sometimes even to him.

As his mom, I saw him as his own superhero, Joe the Brave, who endured long years of struggling to succeed– and then succeeding– in an educational system that wasn’t designed for his brain or his behavior or his way of interacting with the world. Who never once said he hated school, or didn’t want to go. He was often far tougher as an autistic kid than I was as an autistic kid’s mom. And while that often meant that I felt like he was dragging me down the road as I struggled to keep my supposedly adult feet under me, it also meant knowing that if he could show up for himself, the least I could do was show up for him too, even if I wasn’t sure at times how best to help him.

In early grade school, Joe’s first favorite superhero was Batman, a superhero with no actual superpowers, a man with a tragic past who has to exist in the DC Universe as a flat-footed mortal, and make up for that lack using only his intelligence, his gadgetry, and his fighting skills. Later on, Joe’s favorite was Spiderman, who was an awkward, bullied, and outcast teenage Peter Parker before receiving the radioactive spider bite that superhumanized him. These days, he’s a fan of Venom, the symbiote anti-hero who may (eventually) use his alien superpowers for good, but only on his own terms. As Joe’s mom, I recognize pieces of his boyhood in his personal pantheon– feeling powerless, but making yourself strong anyway; being ridiculed without anyone knowing who you really are; having rebellious parts of you that you are not sure you actually want to control.

In the world of superheroes, everyone has an origin story. That fits with Campbell’s arc of the hero’s journey– they have to come from somewhere, before they go…out there. They have an ordinary, known world they have to shed and leave behind before they can become the kind of hero they need to be.

That is right where Joe is right now in his story. He’s crossing the threshold between his ordinary, known world, and answering the call to adventure. Heroes-to-be eventually realize that their origin story is not a complete one and that is why they go– they need to discover more about themselves and their real power.

What origin stories don’t always say, though, is how the people who live in the hero’s ordinary world feel about that call to adventure, that momentous departure. I thought about that a lot as I smoothed clean sheets and vacuumed floors in his empty room. This is the part of the story I can’t write; it belongs to him now. He will want, and need, other mentors that are not me. He will have trials and quests and triumphs that I can’t help him with, because he needs to know that he can do it on his own.

I’m proud of my part in this hero’s origin. I am in the process of learning to trust that he has the powers necessary to write the rest of his own legend. And I will patiently await the hero’s triumphant return. I know it’s gonna be a great story.

Waiting Out Empty

September is a soft and warm word for a soft warm month, and it was a good season to be empty. 

Just...empty. Not running on empty, or as in drained dry, or as in devoid of emotion. None of those things. 

More like empty as in absence of fullness. Absence of people that I love. Absence of happenings. Absence of thinking that I know things. 

Because I knew a lot of things about myself before I sent my two youngest sons off to college. 

I knew I spent years sharing custody with my children's father, giving me over a decade of intermittent training in having them out of my house, out of my view, out of my attention. 

I knew I never wanted to be that dreaded of all creatures, the "helicopter parent," who helps with freshman homework, emails college professors, and desperately clings to tasks that rightfully belong to their now nearly adult children. 

I knew I wanted a next chapter, one that perhaps belonged a little bit more to me than to my children. But it always seemed to me, year after year, that there were thousands of leaves to turn before we reached that particular page, that new direction in the storyline-- so I kept reading. Until now. I'm finding that I can't read any further. The aptness of my metaphor and my knowledge about myself have faded, running out like too little ink on dry paper.  

All of that knowing wasn't enough to prepare me for the large quiet space that opened up in my life when they began college, one at the "other" public university on the other side of the state, and another at a community college 45 minutes away. At first, that quiet space loomed like an entire undiscovered universe, especially in stark contrast to the short, noisy, and tightly wound days of packing and unpacking, driving loaded trucks, navigating two crowded campuses just days apart, and the rapid fire artillery of problem solving. Where do you get a bus pass? How do we get your window blinds fixed? How in the world did we forget toilet paper? 

The next chapter is here, now. There are no words on the page for me to read. At least, none that I can see clearly. Yet. It's an unsettling feeling. I have ideas, but they're struggling to form themselves into something coherent. That too, seems like part of the blankness I'm confronting. 

I spent the month of September letting myself be empty-- allowing it, and even sometimes insisting to myself that I sit with that nothingness for a period of time. Sometimes I failed, and attempted to fill it (poorly) with anxiety, insomnia, NYT crossword puzzles, crap food, and too much social media. Many other times, though, I found myself fully absorbed in the details of a simple action, pruning a houseplant, brushing my hair, scrubbing a saucepan, without my mind racing on some other unrelated concern. I realized how novel and uncluttered and undiluted those actions felt, compared to other times when my life was anything but empty. 

Now it's October, and I'm waiting out the empty. I know it won't be like this forever. I imagine there will be a time in the not too distant future where I'm able to put some words to the empty-- words like grief, change, transition, aging, self-realization, reflection, and respite. I realize I'm not ready to do that just yet, and that's okay. 

In the meantime, we've begun my favorite month of the year. We've danced our way through a family wedding, and are about to embark on a new adventure-- joy is a welcome vantage point to come to terms with, and begin to fill, emptiness. Eventually the words of the next chapter will become clearer. When that happens, I will write them down. Just like I have all the times before. 

The Work of Love Bends Little by Little

When I was the mom of four young boys, I would not have believed that a more stressful stage of my life was possible. Then, my first husband and I had knee-jerk moved into a suburban tract house, one that needed cleaning and paint and repairs, just in time to have the extra room for twins. We were living in Michigan, far away from the support of family in Iowa and Minnesota. We scrambled like mad until I ended up on bed rest to prevent pre-term labor. I languished on a sofa in the middle of a living room stacked with unpacked boxes, reading picture books to my four-year-old, who felt as un-moored as I did. The sofa was our little boat in uncertain seas--me, unborn babies, and preschooler, paddling along as well as we could with I Spy, Dr. Suess, and fitful naps.

I was a stay-at-home mother. "Tired" as a word, as an adjective, as a feeling, did not even begin to touch the reality of what I experienced after the twins were born. True, there was a profound lack of sleep as I navigated the world with two babies, then two toddlers, and somehow also got the older boys fed, hugged, and sent to school. I remember lying on my back every morning, looking at the ceiling and hearing the babies stir in their cribs. Knowing that in a few minutes I would clutch tiny toes still warm from their footed sleepers, a thing that gave me much joy every morning. Yet I was also taking deep breaths, wondering if there was enough. Enough energy. Enough patience. Enough time. Enough me. It was a time when the work of love seemed too big to even contemplate, let alone show up for every day. 

I have always remembered those deep breaths, those ceiling stares, those feelings of love and inadequacy, joy and worry, dedication and weariness, as a state of mind distinct to that period of my life. So it caught me by surprise to find myself as a woman of 54, contemplating another, different ceiling in a very familiar way. Taking those same deep breaths. 

I did not recognize the similarity until I took a week off work, and really a week off pretty much everything. The first few days of my vacation I woke up early, checked chores off my list in the garden, and went hard into my wealth of free time, sunshine, and dirt under my fingernails. While I enjoyed those days, they also weren't quite right. I'd just transferred my workplace tension to the garden, that feeling of being utterly behind and trying to "catch up." That feeling of having let things fall out of order because I am only one person. By day four I was back aboard my sofa-ship, this time minus the picture books, but still with the naps. It took that many days for my mind to surrender to some much needed nothingness, and to connect that time of my life with this. 

Eighteen years ago my babies were literally lifted from my womb. Now, we're doing it again, just metaphorically this time, though the labor pains seem about the same. Ben has acquired a dented old Subaru and my heart is somewhere up around my tonsils every time he pulls away from the curb in front of our house. Joe has chosen a college on the other side of the state and he was ready to go yesterday, while I make a pile of his future life in the corner of the guest bedroom-- bedsheets, shampoo, microwave popcorn. There's another pile for Ben, who'll be just half an hour away, and a third pile for older brother Noah, who's moving into his own apartment without roommates for the first time. And while we work to amass the goods needed for all these big life changes, the questions in my heart are also stacking up-- are they ready? What did I forget to tell them, teach them, show them? How much help is too much? How much is too little? Do they know how much I love them? How did 18 years disappear in an instant?

At the same time, I've been caring for an aging parent. You think your parent is aging gracefully (enough, anyway) until suddenly they are not. My relationship with my mother has always been fraught, a sum of her upbringing and mine, a sum that added up to disappointment on her part, and resignation on mine. But now the Irresponsible Daughter, the Rebellious Daughter, the Scatterbrained Daughter, is needed. Can she phone this doctor? Can she drive her mother to this appointment? Explain this lab result? Take out the trash? It turns out that I can, that I am capable in ways my Mother never saw in me. My sister comes all the way from Georgia to visit, to pitch some much needed relief. We exhange looks over our mother's head as she talks. Were those the words of someone just not feeling well today, or of someone on the threshhold of dementia? Is her refusal to do things the doctors ask of her going to be the hill she dies on, possibly in the realest of senses? We both know our mother is more vulnerable than she herself realizes. She still believes that she is our mother. My sister and I both know she is taking her first steps toward being our child, our dependent. None of us, I suspect, know what we're truly in for-- only that we are in for it, because it happens to us all. 

It's not just the morning ceiling meditation, the deep breaths that draw my current life into parallel with young motherhood. I too often leap from one mundane decision to another, from office email to pharmacy errands to dormitory registration forms to what to cook for dinner, every five minutes all day long until I simply don't care. one. damn. bit. About anything. I too often have short patience for small mishaps, firing off more curses than necessary for a dropped book, a lost set of keys, a slow traffic light. And oh-my-God, I miss my husband. He's right here, as always, helping with my Mom's yard work and teaching Ben how to change a car battery and remodeling our decrepit front porch. But we've had lots of missed opportunities to go on regular dates, to talk in the evening without the kids around, to even just go to the hardware store together. Right now we feel a million miles apart-- nobody's fault, only circumstances.

When I was younger I didn't, or at least couldn't, foresee an end to circumstances. Lost in my anxieties, a part of my brain tricked me into thinking I'd always be washing tiny t-shirts at midnight, taking wadded papers out of little backpacks, shrugging wearily as I vacuumed up Lego pieces. I didn't realize that the work of love bends, sometimes little by little, so that we barely notice it happening. Other times it bends sharply, and we are swung out of orbit, struggling to form ourselves to new ways of showing up for the people we love. Babies become college students. Tiny t-shirts become rugby jerseys. Stay-at-home mom becomes career mom. The daughter that disappoints decides to show up anyway. 

It's in the bendy places that we stress, we hurt, we grieve, we struggle, we fear the lurking unknown. I am sitting right there now, in the bendiest of curves in that work of love. I still don't know if I have enough energy, patience, or time. I still don't know if there's enough of me. I'll still continue to take deep breaths. But this time I'll consider that there's new ways of loving beyond this bend and the next one and the next. I hope I learn that new work well. 

(Dis)lodging in Arizona

Sometimes, the only thing left is strong, sharp yank in another direction. Upend the norm, find the opposite, find thoughts so different from your own that it glues your feet to the ground while your brain tries to grow those first, shaky, tendrils of neurons around something....else. Not you, but you in a different place. 

That was Arizona in March. 

The trip started as something else entirely. It was a Christmas present to my Chicago Cubs fan husband; we planned to fly out for a fast weekend at a spring training game-- eat a few hot dogs, drink a few beers, sunburn our pasty Midwestern flesh, and run back home to routine and some more winter. 

Major League Baseball had other plans. The players strike canceled the game. But instead of scrapping the trip altogether, we ended up stretching it out on either end, packing hiking shoes, renting a car, and heading out in multiple directions from our hotel room in Mesa. 

When you spend much of your childhood and adult life in the Midwest, it's difficult to comprehend land that has value apart from the economy of agriculture. Row upon row upon row of corn and soybeans tends to brainwash your mind into thinking that if land can't grow anything you can sell, it isn't worth much. "You can't eat the view," an old farmer once told me, about wasting land on flowers and trees. 

It's a little breathtaking, then, to have your fields of monoculture, your soil-factory sameness, stripped away just by taking a few hours and a plane ride into the desert, a place so different from the plains that it might as well be another planet-- agave and prickly pear instead of corn and soy, saguaro and cholla instead of trees. 

I had needed that planetary travel sensation, that strong sharp yank away from everything I knew at home, knew with a tiresome and fretful familiarity lately. Too much time handcuffed to a laptop for a job that is taking too much out of me. Too much time in my corner of the sofa. Too much time walking from bedroom to kitchen to mailbox to kitchen again, looking at my own walls and floors. I needed something to interrupt the sameness of the days. 

In Arizona the sky is sharp, and clear, and the sun will have its way with you. The first couple of days Tom and I both drank water to the point it seemed to take up all our time, even though the weather itself was not warm. We acclimated. We had drinks (not just the water kind) on warm patios. We didn't miss the baseball all that much.

I re-learned important stuff. I remembered that talking with my husband is one of my favorite things to do. I remembered that I get carsick and panicky on mountain highways. We discovered the passport stamp book for the U.S. National Park System, and I was in eight-year-old sticker book heaven, filling it up with all our visits to the state's parks and monuments. 

I learned what a fresh flour tortilla tastes like, made by a woman who quietly rolled and cooked them, one at a time, outside the Mission at Tumacácori National Historical Park. I had never had one that had not come out of a plastic bag at a grocery store. 

I learned that history has weight. At Casa Grande National Monument, there are the remains of a house made by Sonoran people in the 1200s, mysteriously constructed with openings to align with the solstice and the equinoxes. These people populated the Gila River Valley for milennia, and then abandoned their villages and farms for reasons archeologists do not know. There was heavy energy there, made up of grief, and a kind of long waiting. A raven circled high up above the whole. I learned later that O'Odham and Hopi tribes consider the builders of Casa Grande ancestors, and the site sacred. I believe them. 

Things I have been doing:

Reconsidering what work setting is meaningful, healthy, and productive while reading this New York Times article. 

Buying gladiolus bulbs, the much maligned "grandma flower" of the past. I love them BECAUSE they are a "grandma flower," and remind me of my own, who grew them in her garden. They're in bins near the front door of every hardware store everywhere right now, and each new variety has me buying just a few more. 

Reading The Victory Garden Cookbook, an out of print collection of recipes based on the PBS television show. It's out of print, and I recently scored a replacement copy of one that got lost. It's a combination how-to-grow, how-to-cook book of vegetables, and it's been a real nostalgia trip for me to read and re-discover. 

Crafting a Craft Room Out of a Basement Corner

 

In the past couple of years I've blogged more about thoughts and issues than home improvement, and part of that was intentional. I decided I was not really a home improvement or decor blogger, for a bunch of reasons. Mostly because I can't tap into fads, nor do I want to (white shiplap? So stupid, and banal. There I said it.) Mostly because as a normal, average person, I can't sustain "doing stuff" to the level that is necessary to have regular and worthwhile content for a strictly home improvement blog. I moved away from home improvement blogging because I had other things to say about my home and my life, things that didn't include paint chips and power tools.

That said, we have actually been "doing stuff" this past year, and I'm back around to the idea that maybe I could post more about that "stuff." Why? If I put out my normal, average person content, it's a voice that is different than those glossy fifty-shades of beige magazines, blogs, and TV shows. It's definitely real life, real budgets. I mean, does that picture up above get any more real life? 

My house was built in 1939 on a cinder block basement foundation. It does not have support posts. Instead it has interior cinder block walls that not only serve that support function, they carve the whole basement into six smaller rooms. We have a laundry room, a shop room, a furnace/utilities room, an area that we use as a second family room, an area we pile up crap in (let's be honest here), and a room

that used to be used as a darkroom by a previous owner. Which we also used to pile up crap in (more painful honesty).

I've blogged about that darkroom space before, here. At that time I schemed to get an additional bathroom in there, but have since realized that plan would involve jackhammering up the basement floor to add adequate sewer, plus other expensive work I am not in the mood to do, especially when our main, everyday-use bathrooms need money invested in them too. 

Instead, we decided that I, as a somewhat crafty person who also sews now and then, needed a craft/sewing room. Now if I get out a sewing project, it ends up being set up in the dining room. Inevitably I get pulled away to other responsibilities, then something comes up where I need the dining room for its intended purpose, or we have company over, and I have to clean up the project. It's a situation that is not great for getting said projects done, or managing clutter, or marital bliss, or for the creative process. 

The darkroom space was not an inspiring one; in fact, it was sort of murder-basementy-- windowless, dark, spidery, damp, dirty, rust stains on the floor, and with a sink that looked like it had been used to clean up after unspeakable crimes. At the basic level, we wanted the room to be clean, well-lit, and functional for crafting and sewing. It would be a bonus if we could rescue the sink, which was super vintage cool under all the grime. Here's another shot of it below in June, after we'd emptied our crap out of it, and before we started stripping out the random things left from the darkroom configuration. 

After emptying, we cleaned. That included a first run on cleaning the sink, to see if it was even salvageable. We were worried that darkroom chemicals had been dumped down this drain so much, that the enamel had been eaten away beyond the point of rescue. But the first attempt was promising, so we decided it was worth refitting. 

We also decided that we wouldn't be finishing this room with drywall and flooring; we didn't want to spend huge amounts of our home improvement dollars here, and we didn't want to make a small room even smaller by studding out the walls and building framed boxes around the exposed utilites. 

Instead, we spent the bulk of our time and money on lots of lighting, and lots of white paint to bounce that light around, to compensate for the lack of a window. That involved installing new lighting where none existed before, lots of wall prep, and gallons of masonry waterproofing (we used Drylok, linked here. This is not a sponsored post or a product endorsement). We used Sherwin Williams Emerald Designer Edition paint (again, not a sponsored post) in a flat warm white that would make wall imperfections (and it being a basement cinder wall, there were a ton of those) recede, and reduce glare from all the lighting. We also painted utility pipes and ducting so that they would disappear visually as much as possible. 

The sink got removed, then repositioned back where it started, but on a new sink base that Tom designed, built, painted, and slightly distressed. I removed another several layers of paint, grime, and staining from the sink enamel, using multiple products and more patience than I thought I had. 

The next project in this room rehab was the floor. I cleaned the rust stains up as much as I could, waterproofed, primed, and painted. I used floor paint in a taupe color that I hope will hide dirt, but will also be easily scrubbable. 

All of that work happened more or less during June, July and August. More recently, Tom has been working on the ceiling, so that less light escapes into the dark recesses of the unfinished floor joists. We're using a painted wood tongue-and-groove style product that's easier in some ways to jigsaw puzzle around all the odd surfaces and pipes, but also has to go up a strip at a time. We're not sure if this part has been easier than drywall, but at least it goes up finished; we won't have to tape, plaster, and paint like we would with drywall. We're not done yet with this part, but we're close. 

Remaining on our to-do list is installing a door, and cleaning up our construction debris and tools. 

For a person that dislikes all-white anything in decor, this room sure has a lot of it. But it was necessary to banish the darkness. I'm appreciating the somewhat industrial/utilitarian vibe we've created, but I'll also be bringing in furnishings, a rug, and some art that have lots of color to offset it, and I'm excited to get to that point. I want a warm, bright, interesting place to sew and craft, and I think we've built the perfect backdrop for it. I'm ready to move in! 

Things I have been doing: 

Reading this article from the Atlantic, about work/life balance. 

Making this butterscotch pudding, from Smitten Kitchen. Oh my goodness, perfect comfort food and several steps above the boxed powdered stuff. 

Planning my garden. My two current favorites for ordering plants for spring are Bluestone Perennials and Select Seeds.  

Accidental Pumpkins

Life can be improbable at times. 

Our family has had a lot going this fall, from a couple of medical scares (we are fine, thankfully) to a prolonged bout with COVID, pneumonia, and some other viral crud (also, we are fine, but geez). Piled on top of the last year and a half, after the last five years, where we've collectively seen so many things that we never thought we'd see-- politically, culturally, environmentally-- you name it, October and November have seemed like a lot for me. Unfair, even. Nothing seemed especially easy. 

I'd originally started this post some time ago, when I took these pumpking photos that appear in it, but I had to walk away from it, and I'm in such a completely different place from when I snapped these images, I had to backspace-delete entire paragraphs, until the page was blank again. Except for the pictures. I'm keeping those. I persist in feeling there's a metaphor for the pumpkins (like I found for the zucchini in my previous post) that I'm not quite seeing yet and maybe I'll find it if I keep writing. Then again, maybe not, but it's a damn fine story, so I'm determined to tell it, even if I can't hook it into a broader meaning. Maybe that itself is the point. Maybe it's just the story. 

We have an asparagus patch that I would describe as beginner's grade. Asparagus is one of the rare vegetables that are perennial in our northern midwestern geography, and because it needs a permanent place and lots more sun that our backyard provides, we plunked our first crowns in the dirt in our front yard foundation beds. Then for two years, rabbits sawed what little plant growth we achieved completely down to the ground. It led to a lot of cursing before we finally admitted defeat and threw up a wire fence. This year we got a few handfuls of asparagus. It was divine and worth persevering through the bunnies to have. Then, as asparagus does, they grew out their tall feathery tops, and spring moved on to summer, and we also moved on, to carrots and cauliflower and other veg. 

While I was busy ignoring the asparagus patch, we realized that a long delayed project, replacing the aging main water line from the house to the municipal water supply, was now imperative. While we were at it, a chipped and cracked and uneven front sidewalk might as well be replaced. The first thing necessitated trenching up a big chunk of our front yard, and the second thing required uprooting the hardscaping around our our front perennial border. The new water main was done in May, and we waited until the very last minute before cold weather for the new sidewalk. While I'm glad they're both finally done, my front yard has never been such a mess. It was hard to regain my enthusiasm for imposing order while waiting to finish up the infrastructure projects. I mentally and literally walked away. 

Somewhere during the midsummer months of trying to ignore the unholy mess our front yard had become, I discovered a volunteer vine growing in our asparagus patch. I was able to identify it as a member of the curcubita genus-- the plants that give us summer squash, pumpkins, and gourds-- but since I didn't plant it, it was impossible to know what exactly. Probably spread by birds or animals. I usually weed these things out. This time, I shrugged. I don't even know why. Maybe because I'd already written off the front yard for the year. Maybe because I didn't want to climb into asparagus fence to reach it. Maybe because I wanted to to see what it might be. 

The vine grew, and grew, and grew, and started sprawling out into the yard, weaving itself into the uncut grass we were trying to nurture over the trenching scars in the lawn. While it looked robustly healthy, it didn't seem inclined to bloom, and what few buds I found on it seemed to shrivel before opening. Sometimes the offspring of hybrid vegetables are sterile, I reasoned, and this must be the case here. I still shrugged at pulling it out, though. I wasn't exactly embracing the chaos that was our front yard this summer, but I wasn't fighting back, either. I was exceedingly neutral about that vine. 

Then Tom came in from yard work one day and said "Did you know we have pumpkins?" 

What?

The vine that hadn't managed a single blossom all summer (I thought), now had pumpkins growing. And not just small ones. 

Accidental pumpkins. It's the horticultural equivalent of not knowing you're pregnant. 

Perhaps I'd been in training for this all summer, with the zucchini I kept missing until they were gigantic. It's been that kind of year. The thing I love most, my garden, had to run on a certain amount of benign neglect. 

I'm always surprised when neglect (benign or otherwise) gives you good surprises, like these fat orange (and green)

pumpkins. It always feels like luck. Or perhaps serendipity is the better word. Either way, these were the best accident I've had in a long time. 

I am a person who leans hard into fall festivities, and only reluctantly gives them up for Christmas decorations. Accidental pumpkins are just perfect for this, and here, on Thanksgiving Day, they're still hanginout out on the front porch. They'll probably continue to hang out there until next weekend, because I don't usually start getting my Christmas on until early December, or even later. 

Maybe I'll bring the fully ripe ones in and decide if I can stew them. Maybe I won't and they'll just hit the compost heap. 

Today, we're having Thanksgiving dinner for only the nuclear family, since one family member is just now emerged from COVID isolation and the rest of us are starting to feel better from all our various sneezes, coughs, and ailments. It's a pretty simple meal with just the classic Thanksgiving basics-- turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, dressing, a vegetable, and pie. It seems like a real effort, given that we're still a bit tired from being sick. It's nice, though, to sit down at the sturdy table that serves up our meals every day, and eat something that isn't dry toast and tea. It's nice that we are trending back toward healthy. It's nice we have nowhere to go for a long five-day weekend. It's nice that even in the midst of all our recent chaos, the universe still saw fit to send us pumpkins, when we didn't even ask for them. 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. 

My Life In the Season of Big Zucchini

It's been a big zucchini summer here at this household. Not big as in numerous zucchini, big as in BIG zucchini. The big fat green zeppelins that happen when you don't pick your vegetable patch on the regular, so that all the squash get seedy, tough, and outrageously over-sized. 

I like summer squash. I like the advantage of growing it in your own garden, so you can pick them when they are small, young, and tender. Sauteed in butter and herbs, they are a fast, easy, tasty side dish to all the grilling going on during the season. I like them on the grill too, and as a substitute for noodles in lasagna. 

But these giant squash? Yech. Don't tell me to shred and put them in cake or sweet bread, because zucchini is a savory food only for this girl. Desserts with green vegetables in them? No, thank you. Yes, I have tried them, and I think y'all have gone straight crazy. 

Up until this summer, I've considered it a sign of failure, a sign of even (Lutherans all gasp in judgement) laziness, that I keep missing, and then picking, these big green brutes instead of the tender little lovelies that we prefer to eat. I dutifully go out into the yard with my wire basket, peek under the giant umbrella leaves, and -- "Dang it. Again?!"

At the beginning of the summer I took all of this zucchini-picking failure quite seriously. If I'm going to go to the trouble and expense of gardening, I want to do it well. There is a small window (just shy of three months) where I can supply most of my family's fresh produce needs; I want to optimize that. Coming from a family that has experienced poverty, I hate wasting food. Large zucchini seemed to represent a lot of things to me: poor resource management, inattention, waste, and even ingratitude to the processes of Nature which provide for us. 

But zucchini is a distinct season of the summer. We watch it come along in expectation in early May, when the earth finally warms up enough in Iowa to germinate squash seeds, and in June, while the plants spread out their giant leaves and start to bloom. Come July and August, there are pyramids of squash crowding kitchen counters. The reason for all the jokes about summer squash stuffed in mailboxes, left on neighbors' doorsteps, piled on break-room tables at work is because we know that they are prolific. Sometimes too prolific. We balance our gratitude for all that plenty with the relentlessness of it. So, so much. And while we are grateful, we are also tasked with it. Peeling it, slicing it, sauteeing it, roasting it, pickling it, tossing it into omelettes, soups, quiches, pasta-- even if we love summer squash, we know it takes up space in our lives, requires work, and sometimes, is just too, too much. 

This summer, big zucchini do not represent laziness, or ingratitude, or even inept gardening. They do, however, still represent overabundance-- a distinct season in our lives. In the last several months our household has seen multiple major appliance failures, major house repair, a car vs. deer accident (property damage only, thank God), and storm damage. We've done several home improvement projects, and have several more that are needed or that we are considering. We have a grandchild we are over the moon for, and love to help care for him and nurture him. We have aging parents who sometimes need support. We are gone multiple weekends in a row, honoring milestones like a son's entrance into pharmacy school, or another son's move into his first home. We have welcomed home a son-in-law who was deployed in the National Guard. We have visited a sister in Georgia, paddled the Boundary Waters with a blended family of menfolk, gone fishing. We survived a school year complicated by the pandemic and are about to embark on a senior year of high school that is looking much the same. We are navigating menopause. We lost an extended family member unexpectedly. We're looking ahead at college enrollments, helping autism spectrum children find their way in the adult world, and empty nesting.

All of these things are piled up on our metaphorical kitchen counter, and we need to process all of it. Slice and dice, cut out the bad parts where we can, create our own recipe out of these ingredients we've been handed, simmer, chew, swallow, and digest. All that growing, celebrating, repairing, nurturing, grieving, planning, sharing of time with people we love, closing one chapter, opening others. A great deal of it is joyous work, and for that we are grateful. A great deal of it is work-work. Labor and grief and frustration and exhaustion and loss and expense and time. So, we balance our gratitude for all that plenty with the relentlessness of it. It is also so, so much. 

We are in a season of life where things are coming at us fast and thick, both the gifts and the trials. Big zucchini aren't our ideal, but can be expected when we'd rather take care of a grandbaby, or help an adult kid move boxes. They can be expected while we sort through trenching a new water main to our house. They can be expected when we neglect garden work in favor of ceremonies, milestones, funerals, jobs, and much needed rest. 

For that reason, I will make of big zucchini what I can. Some days, that will mean preparing, seasoning, and cooking those parts we like, and enjoying the results. Some times it will mean sharing our overabundance with others that can make better use of big squash than we can in the moment. Some days, it means I will send that big ol' squash sailing over the compost fence and into the pile, so that it can feed some vegetable garden of the future, in another season, where life will assuredly be different than it is now. 

Things I have been doing: 

Enjoying this, this, and this recipe as a way to use up those big zucchini. When I don't, you know, compost them out of sheer lack of time to do anything with them. 

Not reading. But looking at The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain sitting on my end table, and deciding it's a better book for cooler and cozier fall nights. 

Painting buckets of primer and paint on the walls of a basement craft room that we are working on. I'm looking forward to having a permanent home for my sewing machine. 

This Dip: It's Kind of a Big Dill

 

I've got a lot of dill in the garden this year. Like, a LOT. Mind you, it is totally my fault that we have this predicament. When I first started vegetable and herb gardening many seasons ago, I started some dill from seed inside, and transplanted the little herblets out when the weather got warm. Now, every season, the dill grows tall everywhere, with lots of full feathery fronds and giant seed heads. I let it come and go as it pleases, for the most part. 

This year it's been a little, dare I say, out of control. Even for a person who likes dill. It's shown up in places I don't really care for it to be, like driveway cracks and perennial beds, and I've even had to pull up some of the plants so that they don't shade out other things, like my peppers, which need their fair share of the sun too. 

It's hard to hate the situation, though, because I love the smell so much. Along with cucumbers and greenbeans, it's the smell of high summer in the vegetable patch. I like adding it to flower bouquets, and sometimes I like big bunches of it as a stand alone; it makes the kitchen smell great, even if I'm not making pickles. I'm a refrigerator pickle person. My canned pickles are straight up terrible, and I don't seem to have a knack for heat canning them. 

It's a shame, because if there were a year I could be hitting the dill hard for pickles, it would be this one. I've got plenty of material to work with. And I have stuffed plenty of dill into the few jars of refrigerator pickles I've made so far. But there are only so many refrigerator pickles I can make, and then I'm looking at my dill-weedy garden and wondering why I was so confident, years ago, that setting this plant loose in my garden was such a good idea. 

Another thing I've been trying to do is reduce the number of additives and preservatives in my food. I've discovered that I am sensitive to a few of them, some of them make my eczema worse, and not all of them are great from a healthy diet perspective either. And since one of the worst offenders in this area is salad dressings and dips, I've been experimenting for awhile with homemade ones. I've made a few really tasty and relatively healthy dips (I say relatively, because we're talking mayonnaise here, and there's only so much I can lie to myself), and because of that ongoing kitchen exploration, it seemed like a natural place to use all these bunches of dill. 

And I do mean bunches. I'm not a measurer of things, which gets me into trouble. If I make a terrific and tasty version of something, and didn't measure any of the ingredients while putting it together, I can't replicate it. If someone likes it and asks for a recipe, I have to say I don't have one, which makes me sound like I don't want to share. But I do want to share, and after several rounds in the kitchen with a notepad and paper to jot down what I'm doing, I have a recipe that is worth sharing. 

The only not-a-measurement measurement I will make for this recipe is for the dill itself. You need a big handful of fresh dill, like you see at left. How much is that? No idea. About a 1/3 cup to 1/2 cup chopped, loosely packed? Probably. You can wing this a little. I trust you. 

So, a big handful of mostly dill, but also stuff some chives in there too, also as shown. I'd say this amounts to about 1/4 to 1/3 cup chopped and loosely packed. I know "big handful" is relative: I have rather small hands, and so my big handful will be different than your big handful. But it won't matter, because this is a dip recipe, and it is flexible enough to cope with this inconsistency. 

Strip the feathery leaves off the dill stalks and roughly chop the dill leaves with the chives. Don't go crazy, because the food processor is going to do most of the work. Throw the herbs in the food processor with:

1 cup plain greek yogurt. I am picky about greek yogurt. I use Fage brand 2% fat, and I really recommend it for it's thick texture and mild but tangy taste). For a full fat version, you can use sour cream.

1/2 cup mayonnaise. I'm also picky about mayonnaise and want to eliminate some of the fat calories, so I usually make mine with Hellman's Low Fat Mayo or Hellman's Olive Oil Mayo. You can also use full fat mayo if you like. I will still recommend Hellman's/Best Foods, or Duke's. 

Juice of 1/2 lemon. Or if you don't have a lemon around (it happens), use a tablespoon or two of apple cider vinegar. 

1 T. minced garlic. That seems like a lot. It is. Trust me. 

1 T. dijon mustard. I prefer coarse ground. 

1/2 tsp. kosher salt

1/2 tsp. ground black pepper

a pinch of sugar

You need to pulse this only a few seconds in the food processor until it is thoroughly blended. Seriously, you will spend more time rummaging around in your condiment rack and scooping stuff out of tubs and jars than you will processing this up. Most of the time I make this, it is a thick pour out of the processor, and it sets up a bit once it's had a chance to meld flavors in the fridge for a few hours. Other times it's very thick and a tablespoon of milk will help get it to the right consistency if you'd rather use this as salad dressing, which you can totally do.  It makes just shy of 1 3/4 cups of dip, and you can double the recipe if you've got a crowd coming, or if your people are just total dip hogs (we know who we are). 

This dip is great with raw veggies and crackers or chips as a dip. It is fantastic on the side of fried green tomatoes. Toss a few tablespoons of capers in it and serve it with grilled salmon. Throw in some grated, drained cucumber and a drizzle of olive oil and it becomes tzatziki sauce for Mediterranean food. Put it on a buttered baked potato. It's great on salad greens and tomatoes. I'm also thinking (though I haven't tried it yet) that it would be good as the dressing for pea salad, or maybe egg salad too. As long as my dill patch holds out, we will have plenty of chances to experiment. 

What is my seed starting mix?

 

Living in a small Midwestern city like I do, I'm grateful that our community has a locally owned greenhouse and nursery. I don't just try to support it, I pilgrimage there as soon as they open their doors (usually late January-early February) for the season. I breathe in the smells of dirt and liquid fertilizer, which in late winter in Iowa is basically the smell of Hope with a capital H, for those of us that struggle with dark winter days. 

I am a particular fan of their seed starting mix, a special blend that is light, fluffy, moist, and just right for germinating all the things I like to grow in my garden-- annual flowers like zinnia, marigold, calendula, sunflowers, and amaranth; and vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and cucumbers.

This year I wasn't as successful starting seed as I usually am, though I'm not blaming my local nursery's bags of soil-- they are only one factor in the complex and tiny miracle of unfolding new plant life. So many things I did wrong this year-- I tried to use up older packages of seed that wouldn't germinate; I started some seeds too late, and others too early. I tried to grow some seeds that I have yet to conquer successfully (Bells of Ireland, Nigella) when I was too distracted by work stress; I failed to grow some stupidly easy plants because of the same distractions; I discovered too far into the game that my lighting timer wasn't working properly, denying them the light my veggies and flowers needed to truly thrive. 

It's weird to be writing about seed starting right now, as we are well past the seed starting stage, well past spring and into high summer. But this year has been weird. We've had March days in the 90s (Fahrenheit) and June frosts. The plants and I have had multiple trips out to the patio, back into the screen porch. We've had weeks of nothing but rain, but are now verging on drought in Iowa. Up and down. Back and forth. Forward and backward. Start and stop and give up for this week, try again next week. Even now, that hot weather seems here to stay for awhile, the garden is upside down. The chrysanthemums are too early. The cucumbers, running late. 

It's been that way emerging from the pandemic, as well. Vaccines have been very much progress. My strong reaction to them (hives) was not. I have been eager to get out, see people, do things. I often come home from these first-in-a-long-time activities a sweet and sour pickle of attitude-- delighted to be out of the house, full of vinegar about the how exhausting humans (including myself) can be sometimes. I thought I had missed them. I return from their company not so sure.

So I put the mask back on and flew to Georgia to see my sister. We hiked the Appalachian Trail to Preacher's Rock on Big Cedar Mountain. It was beautiful but I was out of shape and clumsy, skinning my knee falling on the steeper switchbacks. It was embarrassing and yet how could it be any other way, after more than a year of eating and drinking my feelings, and trying to get a grip on a new managerial position from the sofa? 

We ate lunch out and had midday margaritas. We went for walks. We shopped for anything and nothing. We talked. We talked a lot. The topics weren't necessarily important-- we talked about kitchen cupboards and plants and running shoes and dogs. But the talking is the medicine. It is a way to be with our ancestors. It is a way to straighten our girl crowns. It is a part of my seed-starting mix. 

Since coming back from that trip I've been able to distinguish a few maddeningly conflicting truths about seed-starting. I know that the same seeds that failed to grow carefully planted in the shelter of my house in March are springing up in random places in June from seeds that were accidentally strewn last fall while cleaning up the garden. While my carrot seeds were too old this year, I know scientists have resurrected a date palm seed from Biblical times, and I myself have grown hollyhock seeds that were at least a decade old. While March is long gone and it is too late to start peas and spinach, there is still time for planting sunflower seeds and another crop of basil or dill. We are always simultaneously out of time, just in time, too early, too late. We grow amazing things with planning and care and also by marvelous accident and benign neglect. It's how the beautiful weeds wind their way through through our carefully planted rows, both pushing stem and leaf upwards toward the sunlight. 

Things I have been doing: 

Binge-watching Home Town. I fell back in love with the fantasy of reviving an old house in an hour. 

Making whoopie pies. They are good straight from the fridge with a glass of milk. 

Planning to carve out a small craft room in our basement. Lighting and waterproofing come first!

Cleaning the bathroom supply closet. 

Capable of Enchantment

Sunday snow in the backyard

This week I attended a memorial service for Mike, the younger brother of my best friend in high school. He fought a battle with cancer he could not win. 

When I was thirteen, I was friends with his sister, and their life on the other side of town seemed a lot more like a family should be. I lived in a tiny duplex apartment with a divorced, frequently worn-out working mom; all the wounds of our family's detonation were freshly bandaged but still sore. They lived in a house just a short block from the cemetery and easy walking distance to our junior high school. While they were also a family who had divorced and remarried, they seemed to have all the representative parts-- mom, dad, house, yard, dog-- that constituted "normal" in those days, and to me their house seemed like a reprieve from all the not-normal that my own life contained, with its hand-me-down clothing from older cousins and a diet that often relied heavily on 10lb bags of potatoes. 

While my friendship was with his sister, Mike was the tag-along little brother to our new-to-teenhood adventures. He was Norwegian blonde with ruddy cheeks and a bit of the devil in his blues eyes. His sister and I would walk through the cemetery after dusk, to have a private, quiet place to talk about the seriousness of our thoughts about boys, our mothers, our plans for life. Mike would follow, lurking behind headstones, leaping out to to scare the living bejabbers out of us, running away laughing. We would make rice krispie bars in the kitchen after school; Mike would be in and out, snitching marshmallows out of the bag, later making off with large slabs of the finished product. We would go ice skating down at the park, and Mike would be there, making many expert, speeding loops around the ice to my wobbly beginner one, coming to a dramatic hockey stop again and again, spraying ice chips everywhere. 

Now that I'm past middle-age, the friendship with his sister is no longer, over years ago because of hurts we couldn't work through. While I'd been in touch with Mike now and then over the past decade, it was mostly to share that he too, was estranged from her. She did not attend the memorial service for her brother. That "normal" that I had seen and so coveted when I was a kid was just an angle, a trick of light in the form of ice skates and rice krispy bars. They had their struggles too, as all families do. The details aren't my story to tell. But it took the perspective of the fully adult me to realize it, and to deeply feel the gratitude I have for the family that gave me those memories, despite whatever troubles were housed within their walls. 

Today is Sunday, and it is snowing. It is an enchanting snow, but it is February. I am no longer as capable of enchantment as I was in, say, December. But I live in Iowa, and complaining about the weather is futile. This is what February in Iowa looks like. The fifty-three-year-old me is also not capable of enchantment with "normal" as I was at thirteen, and indeed I wonder why I even wanted it, now. But that is the way of growing older. This is what 53 looks like. What remains are the gestures of half-grown children from long ago. Mike still skates smoothly away under a street lamp in the park, snow falling from dark skies on his impossibly beautiful blonde lashes. He smiles, and pants out bursts of frosty breath.  

I am not an empath, and other ways I am (not) coping

Over my lifetime, I've flogged myself and prided myself over my hyper-sensitivity, in equal measure. I hate that it often makes me the odd one out. Hate that it at times has makes me literally physically ill. Hate that it necessitates a list of coping strategies that don't even occur to many. Hate that whatever is neurologically different about me, I can't seem to put it down or choose my way out of it. 

Still, I admit taking a kind of grim satisfaction in being a so-called empath, able to intuit the emotional states and intents of other people, often so correctly it seems like clairvoyance. I may not always like what my emotional antennae are reporting back to my highly anxious cerebral cortex, but it's a kind of darkly beneficial superpower, isn't it? Isn't it?

On Inauguration Day, I was watching the 46th President of the United States take his oath of office. I had live coverage streaming from my personal laptop most of the day, while I sat at my work laptop and attempted to act as though it was a normal day. It wasn't. It already wasn't, like so much of the past year wasn't, like so much of the past four years weren't. I was working from home, on the sofa, with a quilt in my lap, pandemic style. Guarded from harm. 

The Inaugural proceedings were not normal either. The president and vice president took their oaths of office in a capitol on high alert, full of national guards, before a nearly empty venue, with masks and distancing. Guarded from harm. 

On that day, I was a peculiar combination of lighthearted and wildly anxious. I let myself enjoy the assembly of past and present presidents and first ladies. I took in the perfection that was Amanda Gorman's poetry, hair, and vivid gold suit.  I, too, laughed at Bernie's mittens. I noted the symbolism of all that purple (red + blue = purple). I counted how many times Joe said "unity." I considered that this sunny hopeful moment came the day after a memorial service to 400,000+ dead of a pandemic our country has failed to contain. I stood watch for violence that (thankfully) never came. It was a stew of outward hope and relief and inward fear and grief that boiled up into the emotional equivalent of carsickness after a long trip-- I'm glad we're finally here after that long awful ride, but now I need to go throw up. 

I didn't actually "throw up," until the next day. I was again at my work laptop, at the kitchen table, drinking my morning coffee and reading my e-mail, which included some information about the policies and plans of the new Biden-Harris administration. Policies and plans that were common sense. Practical. Inclusive. Humane. Optimistic. Responsible. I don't really remember starting to cry. Just that there were big fat blobby teardrops falling on my forearms, the table, the keyboard. Breath went out of me like stale air exits a house from an opening door. I could feel the muscles that run up my back, neck, and shoulders sag downward, suddenly all out of tension.

Somewhere between the day of fat blobby tears and last weekend, this meme popped up in one of my feeds-- "Babe you're not an empath, you have PTSD from an unstable household, and are sensitive to emotional changes as a defense mechanism." Ouch. 

I grew up where the expectations were that I would be good. Really good and clean and tidy and polite. And quiet. And not cause trouble. Or talk back. Talk, even. In many ways, the relative peace of the household depended on my ability to disappear-- verbally, physically, emotionally. What did that train me for? Withdrawing. I am a special forces-in-camouflage level withdrawer, able to sense impending danger, gather my feelings up tight around me, sink below the radar of community, colleagues, friends, and family, out of their depth and unavailable, sometimes even to myself, for long stretches at a time. Guarded from harm. 

Until I bumped into that meme, I thought I had addressed that part of myself with some reasonable self-awareness, that I'd made a conscious decision to shed that part of my behavior, like it was an ill-fitting jacket instead of a layer of dragon scales that I had grown. I was wrong. How do you flay that off of yourself when it's the only armor you've ever known? Who is brave enough to stand all tender and bare, when the enemy is all around? I wasn't. I can see all the ways, now, that I simply returned to the well-worn grooves of my own history, for the last four years of this authoritarian insanity, the last year of this global pandemic. 

I have no doubt that plenty of others have traveled their well-worn grooves to get them through this time of outrage and untruths and disease. The thing about survival tactics is that they work, at some level, even if they aren't psychologically healthy ones. If survival is the goal, and it was for many, many people during these last four years, then a measure of grace is needed, both for those whose response was fight, and for those whose response was flight. 

While I'm trying to decide what that measure of grace might be, how to bestow it upon myself and others, I am hopeful that the coming days and months will give us the air and light and space we need to figure it all out, and find other ways of living besides just surviving. 

Things I'm doing right now: 

Painting interior house trim, and hating every minute of it. 

Reading a cookbook: Plenty, by Yotam Ottolenghi

Losing sleep over the anxiety-inducing ideas presented in this New York Times article: "How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted."

Adding salted caramel-flavor Bailey's Irish Cream to vanilla buttercream frosting. This isn't sponsored. This isn't a recipe (add a few tablespoons to a batch for part of the liquids). It's just solid advice for cake eaters. Go do it.