The New Digs

My search for a house felt more like an episode of Sex and the City than it did Househunters.  Weeks of seeking the elusive ‘one’ filled with disappointment and dealbreakers.  For one house, it was the multitude of healthy gum trees (read: gumballs); for another, the disconcerting and pervasive scent of body odor that permeated the structure.  I began to lose hope (and patience) with each passing day.

And then I found it.  The One.  I knew it was the ‘one’ the second I saw the arched entranceway into the dining alcove…an alcove that had my dining table written all over it.

It had everything I wanted.  Hardwood floors, space for my table, modern bath, charm, etc.

The house was built in 1940, a time when full-size beds were the norm (read: small bedrooms).  What it lacks in size, it makes up for in character pieces such as crystal doorknobs and a built-in telephone stand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve unpacked all most of the boxes, begun planning my first project (painting the hallway), located the oven, and placed pictures on display.  It feels like home now.

23 days

I can go without a lot of things for 23 days.  Cable TV…my DVD collection of SATC episodes can handle my entertainment needs well past 23 days.  Clothing purchases…made easier by the plethora of poofy shirts in style this summer.  Chocolate…this one is hypothetical, but I’m assuming I could do it.  Internet, on the other hand, is a completely different ball of wax.  I just went 23 days without it.  I whined about its absence.  My hands twitched when I looked at my useless keyboard.   I had a ‘Girl Interrupted’ moment (or two) on the phone with an AT&T representative.  And now it’s back.  I’m reading FB status updates out the wazoo; emailing pictures of my kid to anybody crazy enough to have provided me with an accurate email address; and re-acquainting myself with avatars.  Welcome back, internet.

Strawberry Pretzel Squares

These were the perfect combination of salty and sweet.   Yum.

Have some.

Ingredients:

• 2 c. finely crushed pretzels
• ½ c. sugar, divided
• 2/3 c. butter or margarine, melted
• 1 ½ pkg. (8 oz. each) cream cheese, softened
• 2 Tbsp. milk
• 1 c. thawed whipped topping
• 2 c. boiling water
• 1 pkg. (6 oz.) strawberry gelatin
• 1 ½ c. cold water
• 1 qt. fresh strawberries, sliced

Instructions:

Heat oven to 350°F.  Mix pretzel crumbs, ¼ c. sugar and butter; press onto bottom of 13×9-inch pan.  Bake 10 min.  Cool. 

Beat cream cheese, remaining sugar and milk until blended.  Stir in whipped topping; spread over crust.  Refrigerate.

Add boiling water to gelatin mix in large bowl; stir 2 min. until completely dissolved.  Stir in cold water.  Refrigerate 1 ½ hours or until thickened.  Stir in strawberries; spoon over cream cheese layer.  Refrigerate 3 hours or until firm.

How I Spent My Lunch Break

Reading this post.  This one really struck a chord with me.  If you’ve ever lived somewhere you didn’t want to live, missed someone you loved deeply, been completely overwhelmed by a beloved baby, or stressed about money…maybe it will strike a chord with you too.

A Midspring Morning’s Ramble

I am a creature of habit with a multitude of routines and quirks.  My alarm was set for 4:35 this morning…its usual weekday setting.  I uncharacteristically awoke before the buzzer sounded.  I lay there in silence enjoying the cool breeze through the slightly opened window for several minutes…not nearly long enough.  I love sleeping with the window open…even if it’s a little too warm and humid to do so…which it wasn’t last night.  It had been perfect window-open weather.  I turned the alarm off at the first hint of a bzzzzzz.  I need an annoying bzzzzz…the radio does not alarm me at all.  I applied eye drops so that everything would appear clear and I wouldn’t frighten people with my eyes.  Even if I get a full 8 hours, they never look rested.  I don’t understand that.  I dressed for the gym.  Mondays are my favorite days to dress for the gym.  I wash all of my gym clothes on Sunday and therefore have the complete assortment from which to pick on Monday.  Today’s selection was a pink Nike shirt with dragonflies and pink shorts.  It sounds worse than it looks…I hope.  My whites weren’t dry when I went to bed last night so I grabbed my socks with purple trim…not so good with the pink, but who looks at 5 in the morning?  I grabbed a blueberry breakfast bar and headed toward the office.  On my way to the office, I looked through the windows surrounding the front door and observed the crescent moon and a brilliant star.  I am not exaggerating about the star.  It was so brilliant that I wondered if it was really a planet.  I couldn’t see any other stars in the sky.  I lingered for a moment before moving on to the computer.  I like to do a quick email check before I leave in the morning because I’m compulsive like that.  The potential for communication lures me.  I left the house at 4:50 knowing that I would arrive “late” after the opening, but at least I wouldn’t have to stand in line to enter the building with Grumpy Wally.  Plus, there hasn’t been much competition for the Stepmill lately so I wasn’t worried about that.  The drive was extraordinarily pleasant.  I normally just go through the motions with my non-imp morning commutes.  Sometimes I make it to the gym and don’t recall how I got there…hoping that I didn’t miss any red lights.  Surely somebody or something would have notified me if I had.  This morning was different.  The air was cool, but not cold so I had my window cracked.  In addition to enjoying sleeping with windows open, I have an affinity for driving with the windows down.  The sky was gorgeous.  There was just the hint of sunlight starting to appear on the horizon.  So amazing.  Then one of my favorite songs by Keane, Love is the End, started playing.  It’s a calming song for me.  I had no promises for what the rest of the day would bring, but I reveled in its beginning.

Scents That Make Me Smile

My sense of smell has been in overdrive this week.  It started with a drive home following a short-lived rain shower; continued yesterday morning with a hike past a patch of fragrant honeysuckle yesterday morning; and culminated when I encountered a homemade soap booth at an arts & crafts festival.  I took my sweet time smelling bar after bar of unwrapped soaps…Lavendar Oatmal, Orange Blossom, Sandalwood, Mint Julep.  Mmmmmmm.  I started thinking about my favorite scents…some a link to the past (like crayons) and others a delight in the present (like libraries).

• Play-doh
• Irish Spring bar soap
• Potting soil
• Line-dried linens
• Vintage Strawberry Shortcake dolls
• Freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies
• Honeysuckle
• Rain on warm pavement
• Baby lotion
• Baby skin
• Bleached whites (clothing, not teeth)
• Lingering chlorine
• Noxema
• Paper fresh from the ditto machine
• Briar & Bean stores
• Leaf piles
• Crayons
• Oil of Olay lotion
• Campfires
• Italian restaurants
• Lumber yards
• Pine trees
• Libraries
• Ocean air
• Yellow birthday cake
• Any birthday cake
• Mr. Bubble bubble bath

Any others?

Tantrums and Tiaras

Whoever said the Peace Corps was the toughest job you’ll ever love didn’t have a 3-year old.  Whoever christened the twos ‘terrible’ had that wrong too.  The imp experienced a major transformation on her third birthday.  She became full of opinions, and wasn’t afraid to express them even if they ran contrary to my own…which happened regularly. 

For the first six months of her third year she threw at least one tantrum daily.  The most frequently occuring tantrum took place at daycare pick-ups.  She was never ready to leave the playground.  She always ran to the little playhouse in the corner to evade detection and removal.  Try chasing a kid around a puncturable rubber-surfaced playground wearing heels.  The most public tantrum occurred in my beloved Target.  Following an unfortunate shopping cart incident, I had no choice but to escort my screaming child out of the building.  She still throws fits, but not nearly as many as she did when she first turned three.

I struggle with my reaction to her fits.  I struggle the most with this when I’m hurrying to get ready in the mornings and when I’m tired and trying to get her in bed at night.  I verbally snap at her more than I would like during those times…always followed by guilt.   In the most meaningful of circumstances, a friend returned a picture of my daughter to me a few weeks ago.  The picture had been taken when she was 2 ½.  Her cheeks were still very round in that picture.  They’re quite a bit slimmer now.  Her hair was in short, wispy pigtails.  Her hair is quite a bit longer and thicker now.  Her eyes twinkled and her smile melted my heart.  That hasn’t changed.  I remember the day it was taken quite well.  She cried almost the whole time.  She did not want to sit by herself on the table to have her pictures taken.  The photographer gave her a Sesame Street background and surrounded her with Sesame Street character dolls.  She threw every doll on the floor.  I laugh when I see that picture because she looks like a homeless child with a NYC street scene behind her and no Big Bird.  She smiled for 10 seconds that morning.  In that 10 seconds, the photographer caught the best eye twinkle and the most heart warming smile I had ever seen. 

I stared at that picture for a long time. It was like looking in a mirror.  There are the obvious physical similarities…eyes, mouth, etc.  I saw more than that though.  The phrase ‘tempestuous spirit’ kept running through my mind.  At that moment I prayed that I would do a better job of respecting her (inherited) tempestuous spirit, even if I didn’t always understand her.

We had an exceptionally bad morning a couple of days after I received that photograph.  She rebelled against every article of clothing and foot apparel.  She made her body stiff so that I couldn’t get her to go to the bathroom, and made her legs limp when it was time to brush her teeth.  I basically carried her screaming to my car.  I didn’t say much to her, but I was not being particularly gentle with her either.  Once I got her in the car, I stepped inside the house for a minute to calm down.  She wasn’t screaming when I returned, but I could tell by her eyes that she was still upset.  I opened the back door and knelt down.  I quietly asked her what was wrong.  Her lower lip started quivering and she said that she didn’t want to go to school.  When I saw her tantrum as an expression of sadness, I was able to let go of my irritation and anger and just hug her.  The rest of the morning went much better.  I am not saying that all of her tantrums end that well now, but I am so glad that particular tantrum did.

Another part of my tempestuous spirit prayer was to savor all that is good about her vivacious 3-year old spirit.  While we were driving to Moe’s for supper last weekend with my dad,  I mentioned to Dad that she had eaten lunch at Penn Station with her aunt and uncle that day.  He asked her if she had enjoyed her lunch.  She said that Penn Station was “yummy” and asked him if he liked it.  He told her that he did not like Penn Station.  She replied, “You can’t say you don’t like something if you haven’t tried it.”  He told her that he had tried it twice and didn’t like it either time.  She thought about that for a few seconds and then said, “Well, that makes sense.”

My imp is socially savvy.  I got to see that when she charmed the receptionist, nurse, and anesthesiologist the other day before receiving (her third set of) ear tubes.  She is also a comedian in the making.  Her biggest joke is to insert the word ‘poop’ into any phrase or sentence.  “You’re welcome” becomes “You’re welc-poop.”  “Amen” becomes “A-poop”.  I’m looking forward to a new recurring joke.  She is also vulnerable.  She gets stuck under her bed in the middle of the night and doesn’t remember how it happened.  She gets scrapes that can only be mended with Diego band-aids.  Most importantly of all, she is loved and she knows it.

B-I-N-G-O

My first trip to a farm was in 1982 as part of a school field trip.  On a warm spring day, my classmates and I crawled through a hay maze, marveled at baby pigs, and exchanged our licked-clean popsicle sticks for 30 seconds upon a horse’s back.

Fifteen years later I took my next trip to a farm…only this time I went with a group of college friends instead of first graders and we exchanged our (licked-clean) popsicles sticks for combine rides.  My friend, Erica, invited a group of college friends including me to spend a weekend on her family farm near the Kentucky-Tennessee border.  We all knew and loved Erica as the girl who had to be taught how to pay for gas (she was accustomed to ‘free’ gas from the farm’s  pump)  and called grocery carts ‘buggies’.  We had to know about the place from which she hailed.

Our 2-car caravan headed south on a crisp autumn morning.  Along the way we observed a fall festival, a memorial to Jefferson Davis, and more red dirt than I had ever seen in my life.  We were welcomed to the family farm by a ferocious beast family dog named Teddy.  “Don’t worry,” Erica assured us, “He wouldn’t hurt a flea.  He just likes to try to bite the bumpers off of cars.”  I opted to keep my distance from ’sweet’ Teddy that weekend.

Our first bona fide farm activity was taking turns riding in the combine with Erica’s younger brother.  He was only 16 at the time, but clearly had been operating heavy equipment for quite some time.  “Gets kind of messy when you get a deer,” he observed stoically.  I quickly suppressed that mental image.

Dinner that evening was more than a meal.  Truly it was a feast.  Erica’s mother prepared enough food for an army, and we showed our appreciation by eating accordingly.  I wouldn’t even care to guess how many sticks of butter (real butter, not margarine) went into that meal.  When you’ve become accustomed to eating ramen noodles at your dorm desk for a meal, the opportunity to eat a home-cooked meal at a real dining room table with a family is golden.

Erica’s brother entertained us with his hidden talen of clucking (yes, like a chicken).  Erica’s little sister couldn’t wait for dinner to be over so that she could return to the basement to her beloved roller skates.  Erica’s mother won our hearts with her sweet southern charm and crystal-blue eyes, and her father won my heart by calling me “the first cotton-pickin’ Hoosier” he ever liked.  A high compliment indeed.  In short, her family was a hit and we quickly surmised where the credit lay for Erica’s warmth and vivacity.

Autumn nights in Kentucky were made for bonfires, and I was made for autumn nights in Kentucky.  On a whim, I looked up that night and was amazed by what I saw– stars.  A lot of stars…tiny stars and constellations previously unknown due to street lights, city lights, air pollution, etc.  I looked upward for a long time knowing it might be the last time I saw some of those stars for quite some time (sadly, I was right about that).

The chance of our group slipping into Erica’s church the next morning unnoticed was virtually zero.  Thankfully, we were just as welcomed there as we were in Erica’s home.  I’m inclined to like any church where the pastor’s wife is named Kitty.  I can’t really explain that inclination. 

Church was followed by (surprise) food, and food was followed by sad farewells.  I had the pleasure of returning to the farm several times throughout my college career and once after.  I look back on those visits fondly…each time remembering clucks at the dinner table and secret stars on a chilly autumn night.