The Hen House
I am happy to announce that my first monthly column is up at Literary Mama. I’ll be writing stories about my so-called rural life for the next year or so. Thank you in advance, dear readers, for following me there.
From the Archives: Thanksgiving 2007
Here is a post I wrote on this day two years ago. Today I am thankful for so many things, chief among them all of you who return to this humble little site again and again to read what I have written. Thank you.
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While I have had to buy nine tubes of chapstick in the last nine days because I can never remember where mine is, the one thing that never seems to leave my mind is lines from books or poems I haven’t read in years. Lately, it’s this haiku: While in Kyoto listening to the cuckoo birds/I am longing for Kyoto. I even remember the day that I heard Robert Haas recite it, how he explained that the poem is about how as humans, we are more comfortable in a state of wanting than we are in a state of being. “We are constantly,” he explained to the perennially dense Teri Gross, “trying to rehabilitate our longing.”
This would be my version of the haiku: I am 27 weeks pregnant, longing to be 27 weeks pregnant. While this might seem like an odd sentiment for someone who has done a fair bit of complaining about her physical state, I seem to have reached that elusive moment of gestational equilibrium when the baby needs just as much from my body as my body can (fairly) happily offer. I’m not terribly uncomfortable or tired or Tums-dependent. And because this is most likely the last time I will be 27 weeks pregnant, I feel myself wishing that this time was still be on the horizon, waiting for me.
When I was pregnant with Grace, I loved feeling her move. Loved her kicks and squirms. I loved how eventually I could tell the different between her feet and her butt and her head as they pushed against my skin as though it were a tent whose door she couldn’t find in the darkness. Every kick was an occasion for “feel, feel! It’s moving!” and with every kick the reminder: you’re having a baby. You are going to be someone’s mother.
But this time I don’t need to wrap my head around the idea that I am indeed having a baby (that is going to come out of my vagina) and I am already someone’s mother. And this time, the kicks don’t surprise me and they don’t get much of a mention. What they do is remove me–for an instant–from whatever I am thinking or saying or doing and bring me to that planet where only the baby and I live, that closed system of heating blood and evaporating hormones, of the baby’s elongating limbs and sprouting eyelashes, my shiny hair and darkening nipples. The planet where each of our psyches occupies an opposite pole: the baby’s, which knows me but does not yet love me; and mine, which loves the baby and does not yet know it. The kick holds me there for just an instant, and then sends me back to unloading the dishwasher or folding laundry or unwrapping fruit leather with my teeth while I drive. But it sends me back altered, ever so slightly altered. And it is the alteration I will miss. It is the alteration I would rather look forward to than look back on, would rather anticipate than experience.
It is the alteration that I am trying, really trying, to just be grateful for today, this cold and snowy day before Thanksgiving when I am nearly 27 weeks pregnant with my second child.
Nine Days Down, Twelve to Go
Twelve days from now will mark the three-week anniversary of the night we discovered that Grace had pinworms. Pinworms. Pinworms! Pin. Worms. How did we know, you ask? Oh, you really don’t want to know how we knew.
I am so tired. I wash so many things these days. I wash hands and I wash sheets and I wash car seat covers and legos and pacifiers and plastic animals and slings and dish towels and wool hats and anything I can’t wash I put in garbage bags in the attic. I use diluted Clorox and full-strength Lysol and I don’t use any Seventh Generation. I don’t even use Method. Method is for sissies.
Did I mention how tired I am? People whose children are grown tell me that their kids had pinworms and they didn’t clean as much as I am cleaning. I am comforted by this, but I have not stopped cleaning. And I don’t entirely believe them. I don’t know if it would be possible to see what I saw coming out of my precious child’s tush and not want to spray the entire house with a fine mist of full-strength bleach.
If I didn’t know it before, I know it now: I hate cleaning. It is exhausting, demoralizing, boring, and endless. Didn’t someone once say that cleaning when you have young children is like shoveling in a snowstorm? I think it is more like blow drying your hair in the shower.
Nearly all the girls’ toys are in the attic because they are too soft to be washed. I’ve left them with wooden blocks, a wooden doll house, a wooden play kitchen, and a few puzzles. It is very Waldorf around here. Which means that the girls are spending most of their time looking at the most recent American Girl catalog and playing with loose change. June calls her stash “my moneys”, and she screams when you try to take it away from her. She likes to count it: “Two, two, two, mine!”
On Monday we will all take our second dose of pinworm medicine and the next Monday all the pinworms and their spawn will be dead. We can stop cleaning, the dolls can come down from the attic, and I can go back to changing June’s crib sheet every other never. That Monday cannot come soon enough.
Rolling Over the Blogroll
My dusty little blogroll has gone more than two years without an update. I’m going to try something new– a new listing of blogs I’ve been enjoying that changes every few weeks (or months). Suggestions? Leave a comment or send an email.
Also, those of you who have kindly inquired about why it is that you can’t list my blog as one you follow on your Blogger profile, well, now you can! That little snafu has been fixed. Thanks for your patience.
The Numbers
During the first trimester of my first pregnancy I braced myself for blood every time I pulled down my pants to pee. Day after day, week after week, I held my breath, told myself I would be fine no matter what, and looked down to see nothing. And then finally one day I was thirteen weeks and suddenly feeling better, feeling well enough to cook a chicken and consider eating it, feeling well enough for a boisterous long-distance phone call that I didn’t want to end even though I had to pee and so I cradled the phone between my shoulder and ear and pulled down my pants and did not, even for an instant, think of blood. And there it was.
For several hours I could only assume that I was miscarrying. But then the ob flipped on the ultrasound machine, swiped the wand across my belly, and found a flipping fetus with a smooth and fast heart, completely oblivious to a blood clot seeping out from the spot where the placenta was trying to knit itself into my body.
Subchoronic hematoma is the clinical name for what was happening then, and its common name is One Fresh Hell. I was so frightened that I couldn’t even bear to look it up on the Internet. I asked a friend to do it for me, and to give me an honest report. “According to the numbers,” she said, “it could go either way.”
The way it went, of course, was the way of Gracie. When she was an infant I used to think of that blot clot and cry loud tears into her curly hair at the thought of what I nearly lost. Now when I think of the blot clot I think: of course. Of course she was not deterred, of course that bleeding did not stop her from getting to where she was going. Who among us was meant for life more than this girl?
Grace and June had the flu last week. They were careful to stagger their infections so as to insure the longest possible window of time we could spend together, as a family, without any contact with the outside world. (If you are looking for a chance to really get to know your loved ones in the confined space of your own home, then I highly recommend contracting H1N1. No one else will want to see any of you, from any distance, for a very very long time.)
I spent several nights sitting up holding the girls while they tried to sleep. When Grace was sick, I propped myself up in bed and she slept with her head on my chest the way she used to when she was an infant. When it was June’s turn, I sat up in the rocking chair. They were both in some kind of terrible and unfamiliar pain with bodies so hot I tried to keep a thin blanket between my skin and theirs because the heat of their skin made it hard for me to believe that they were not destined to become one of those numbers I had been looking up when I shouldn’t have been: the number in hospitals, the number on ventilators, the number dead.
But the heat of their skin was nothing more than their smart and able bodies burning away what would harm them. And they did, they burned for days and then the heat broke and they slept and ate popsicles and watched profound amounts of television. Because they are healthy and lucky children. Because they are not, and never have been, one of the numbers.
Refusing Grace
“Don’t read this week’s Modern Love,” Chris calls from the living room.
“OK,” I call back. I don’t need to ask why. I have already seen the byline and recognized the name and know that I will not be reading it. The essay is by Ann Hood, who is a prolific and talented writer I must avoid. She is a writer I must avoid because several years ago her five-year old daughter, Grace, died suddenly after contracting a virulent form of strep. I know this because I once stumbled upon an essay of hers in an anthology and for days I was haunted by the arrangement of her words. Grace. Death. Grace’s death.
I do not read essays by Ann Hood.
Grace– our living, breathing Grace– has a friend whose mother died last year. The little girl, I’ll call her Sylvie, is four now. Grace didn’t know Sylvie when her mother died. But this year they have taken a dance class together, and spent a few afternoons at the lake and at a weekly nature program called the Flying Turtles. “Sylvie’s mother died,” Gracie told me this Saturday night as we drove to a friend’s birthday party. I had just told her I thought Sylvie would be there.
“She did die,” I say. “I knew that.”
“Now they have a bench for her. With butterflies.”
She is talking about Sylvie’s mother’s gravestone, which is a bench. She is buried in the cemetery just across the road from Sylvie’s preschool. Grace doesn’t seem to understand exactly what the bench is for, and so we begin a familiar yet painful conversation about death, about where Sylvie’s mother is now, and why there is a bench near the spot where her body is buried. I do my whole routine about her body being with the flowers and the water and the air and her voice and her ideas being with God, and Grace listens carefully, as she always does. And then we move on to something else, as we always do. But soon enough we are back again.
“Do we have a bench we can use if you die?”
I tell her that I’m sure we do but I am not going to die for such a very very long time. I tell her that we are not going to need a bench.
Grace does not try to avoid all reminders and portents of my death. She does not refuse Sylvie’s playful beckoning the way I refuse Ann Hood’s beautiful prose. Instead she plays all night with Sylvie, she leaps off the wobbly porch step again and again to take Sylvie’s hand, to run into the darkness while I watch and wait for their bodies to appear in the distance, illuminated by the fire someone has made to keep them warm.
Keepsake
When Gracie was a toddler Chris’s mother gave us a small bag of clothes that had been Chris’s when she was young. The clothes were vintage turn of the 70’s–lots of terry cloth and smocking, short hems and mickey mouse decals. The clothes were delicate and girlish and from what I know of Chris’s childhood, of her preference for jeans and baseball jerseys and spitting through her teeth, and her mother’s disdain for all three, it is no surprise that these are the clothes that became keepsakes. Some dreams die hard.
There was a dress in the bag, a simple peach-colored shift that Chris’s grandmother made for her. It is a beautiful dress made from a material that must have its own name but I do not know what it is, a material of large-petaled flowers edged and sewn together with white thread. It has a high neck and no sleeves: it is a perfectly made late-sixties shift.
I think that Chris loves to see Grace in the dress. I don’t think that she has many fond memories of wearing it herself (if she remembers wearing it at all), but she does have enormous fondness for her grandmother, whom I am certain she remembers daily.
I didn’t really know Chris’s grandmother. I met her at a few family gatherings, but she thought of me only as a friend, if she thought of me at all. I was a secret then, as all Chris’s girlfriends had been. She died one summer and we were married the next: two summers later Grace was born.
The order of those events is part gift, part heartache. I do not know what might have happened if we had married and had a child while Chris’s grandmother was still alive. I like to think it would have been a profound opportunity for everyone, but I can’t be sure of that. What I can be sure of is that Chris’s grandmother, whoever and wherever she is now, adores this golden-haired child in the peach dress. I know that she is happy to see Grace in the dress; I know that she would agree with me when I say that our Grace is the child she made this dress for, those many many years ago.
The photo above is of Grace, I just played around with it here.
Goodbye, Old Friend
The cover of the August 2004 issue of Gourmet is a photograph of a mason jar filled with jam. The jar’s lid is off and its sides are shellacked with jam and seeds and gooey bits of berry. The handle of a wooden spoon sticks out just above the jar’s lip. I know this because the magazine is on the desk next to me, but I also know this because I read that issue cover to cover and back again while I sat in bed holding a sleeping newborn. I can remember September’s cover too, and also October’s. I read those while Grace slept on me in the rocking chair, long deep sleeps that would only be long and deep if she slept on me and I did not move. I kept the magazine on a table next to the rocker and sometimes I didn’t turn the page for fear of disturbing her so I read the same recipes over and over, the same beautiful articles about shrimp and tiered cakes and Corsica.
When Grace was three and I was pregnant for the second time, I let my subscription lapse. I didn’t have time to read the essays; the photographs that usually fed my soul were making me nauseous; and my characteristic first trimester lack of all perspective and abandonment of all hope led me to believe that I would never have the time and energy to care about food again. A friend suggested I try Cooking Light instead, that the recipes were fresh and healthy and easy. So I tried it, and during my pregnancy and the first few months of June’s life I cooked lots of fresh and healthy and easy recipes. But it didn’t take long before I grew tired of the magazine’s life-coachy tone, and of dinner recipes that called for 1/4 teaspoon of butter and recipes for brownies baked in a 8×8 inch pan with a yield of 24 squares. It wasn’t Cooking Light so much as Cooking Little and it was getting on my nerves.
So I went back to Gourmet. The truth was the even before Grace was born I was never cooking more than a handful of recipes from each issue. I was reading smart and lyrical writing and losing myself in stunning photographs. I was learning about street food and Polynesia and cocktails with names like Jealous Marys and The Waldorf. I was learning how to toast seeds and cook custard in a water bath. I was tearing out recipes for Christmas cookies to make with my yet-to-be-conceived children, and reviews for restaurants three states away. But I didn’t care when I used those recipes and reviews. I just thought it all looked delicious and exciting. I thought they looked like things worth saving.
This summer I cooked an entire menu from the August 2009 issue. It took me three days, but I made every last bit of it, from the red pepper walnut spread with warm pita to the cumin-scented beef kabobs to the lemon ice cream sandwiches with swirled blueberry compote. I made the ice cream sandwiches one night when Chris was in Washington for work. I put June to bed and Grace sat at the counter while I made the two cookie crusts and mixed lemon juice and zest into soft ice cream. Grace licked the beater while I stirred blueberries and lemon juice on the stove, careful not to let the thickening sugar burn. The whole thing was taking longer than I would have hoped, but even as the night grew darker and the dishes piled up around me, I was happy. The windows were open and the air was cool; the radio was on and my oh-so-not-newborn daughter was beside me, her lips stained blue from the berries, and she was chatting and mixing and sneaking spoonfuls of batter when she thought I wasn’t paying attention. The next day Chris came home and our dear friends came over bearing wine and salad and together we ate the food that I had made while our girls slept in their beds down the hall.
Yesterday a friend emailed to tell me that after nearly 70 years in print, Gourmet magazine is folding. I imagine that in the coming days the airways and internet will be filled with people’s stories of their deep love for the publication, stories of how Gourmet taught them to cook and taught them to love food and taught them how to bone a fish. I also imagine that people will be talking about how it was too rich, too glamorous, too much about fancy food and fancy wine and privilege. For me Gourmet will always be about that sleeping baby on my chest and what I wished for then, and what I have now.
The Field at the Top of the Hill
Last Sunday was my 36th birthday. I walked in this field until the flowers and the sky were the only things I could see. This week the flowers are starting to droop; by next week the farmer will have started to harvest them for oil. Then we’ll have nothing left but these photos and our fervent hope that this year’s yield will merit another planting in the spring.
