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January 23, 2007

from tasha’s bees to me

a box arrived over the weekend from vermont. anything from vermont makes me happy. but this particular box said it was from tasha tudor, who is pretty much my hero. she might be the loveliest illustrator of children’s books that ever there was. think “secret garden.” she’s the one who painted the garden that pulled you in, and all these years later has never let you go.

tasha is my hero as much for how she lives as for how she puts color to paper. she lives at the end of a perilously-steep, much-potholed road, in a timeworn cedar-planked farmhouse–just like one built in 1740 in concord, new hampshire, one that caught her considerable fancy.

but her house, on the crest of a hill, the inside a labyrinth of rooms with low-slung doorways and uneven floorboards, is one that her son seth built for her, using only hand tools.

seth and his mama are both, they like to say, “a bit reluctant to live in the twentieth century.”

tasha, who is 91, lives purely. you might say she lives simply, but that would be to discount the bone-thinning work it takes to live the way she lives. she is old yankee through and through.

she cooks on an old black cookstove, roasts a turkey in a “tin kitchen,” a contraption she describes as a reflector oven, set in front of the fire. (“barricade the bird from corgies and cats with a firescreen,” she warns, right in the midst of her roasted turkey recipe, a recipe for which she insists a fireplace is required, not optional.)

she eats what she grows in her tumbly riotous garden. raises goats for milk and butter and cheese. wraps herself in shawls to keep away the cold.

when dusk rolls in through the windows, she lights her rooms with beeswax candles, candles she has dipped in autumn, after she cleans the hives so the bees can begin again.

which brings us back to the box that came from vermont over the weekend. it was sent by my sister who is married to my brother in maine (don’t be frightened by that construction; i just constructed it, but it seems right, more right than saying, sister-in-law, a term too clinical for me). it was sent by becca. but it came from tasha.

yes, tasha dipped the candles that now are at my house, now lying on my window seat. maybe it was her children who did the dipping, or maybe one of her grandchildren, some of whom live in cottages nearby. whoever dipped, it’s close enough for me.

and so, as i opened the box, unrolled the sturdy brown paper, i watched six nubby, knobby hand-dipped sticks of beeswax roll toward me. they are in pairs, their wicks still joined, their wicks all tumbled together.

i was dumbstruck by the candlesticks. by the bees’ hard work. by their purity. by the fact that they were dipped and came from tasha’s bees, bees that sucked the nectar from tasha’s enviable and magnificent garden, the garden that has long been the muse for all her painting. the garden that is a muse for me.

the candles got me to thinking about bees. i happen to love bees. i did some reading. soaked up all kinds of wonderful things about bees, about beeswax. i will tell you all about it tomorrow, because this seems to have turned into a tale about tasha. which is a good thing.

which is a pure thing.

please come back tomorrow for another pure thing, a bit about bees, a bit about beeswax, the less considered thing about bees and their labors. honey, of course, being the bee thing that tends to get more of our time and attention. because it’s a sweet thing. of course.

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January 22, 2007

monday morning slam

it hits sometimes, with all the force of a dumptruck backing into your front hood (a force i recently felt firsthand).

one minute you are tossing off your hazy dreams, the next your heart is pounding, your boy is running late, oatmeal is looking impossible, and the week is barreling at you.

this was one of those mornings. oatmeal got into the boy, but only thanks to a styrofoam, toss-away bowl thrust into his clutches as he dashed past, stumbling into untied shoes, en route to carpool at the curb.

the throbbing thing in my mouth kept up its 2:4 time. i realized, head spinning, we were out of the weekend zone of leftovers and chili made by someone else in the middle of the afternoon.

it’s my turn again. to feed the boys. to wash their clothes. to get them where they need to be. to get me where i need to be. imagine that.

and so, lumbering down the stairs, to unearth the frozen chicken breasts from their frosty slumber, i take in a deep, deep breath. i consider all the things that soothe me. i take account of what surrounds me for moments such as this.

i consider soup, a tall slow pot of it simmering through the day. i consider the loaf of bread a wonder woman dropped by yesterday afternoon, hot still from the oven. i shoot a glance at my amaryllis, the one now neverminding a measly three blooms, going instead for homeplate, with four trumpets about to blare in all directions, north, south, east and west.

i press my nose to the window. see the birds flapping and the squirrels chasing each other for the cookie i tossed out last night.

i listen to the heartbeat of the clock, slow mine to sync with its.

i pour a big tall mug of coffee, spiked with cinnamon, as always.

i invoke the patron saints of everyday grace. i realize it’s my job to soothe these jagged nerves, the ones that are mine, and blessedly the ones of those who dwell here with me.

it is a job i love, a job that i’ll get done with snippets of herbs on bowls of soup, with toasty bread, with more seed for more birds, with breathing deep and slowed.

may every one of us this day find ways of stitching grace into the madness that is the monday morning slam. how do you soothe the dwelling place that you call home? do tell….

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January 12, 2007

national oatmeal season

the fine folks who tell us these things, tell us that this is national oatmeal month. they are wrong.

at our house, the oatmeal barrel gets hauled out once the leaves start crisping and swirling to the ground. doesn’t get put away ’til the easter grass is pushing through the softening earth. oatmeal is a way of life. it is, by all accounts over here, a good life.

we are fully aware that in some corners of the planet, perhaps just down the block, the word oatmeal is met with hands crossed over mouth, and heads ducking for cover. apparently, it is an old porridge. an ancient porridge. goes all the way back to the ancient chinese in 7000 b.c.e. not too long after, relatively speaking, the greeks were gobbling it for gruel. they were the first, the history books tell us, to do so.

oats came to america, the story goes, when a sea captain planted a crop on one of the islands off massachusetts, somewhere around 1602.

then, along about 1877, true modernity practically, the man we know and love, the quaker oat man, showed his shining face. that man, a pottery rendition thereof, now sits on the shelf, looking down on my stove. he is pretty much my kitchen buddha. i don’t leave him offerings, but i do bow down before him. and i always say, if we had a fire, my oat man i’d grab. see, my papa, once an ad man, gave me the oat man. and every time i’ve moved, the oat man gets layers and layers of tissue and newsprint, lest he lose a nose or a tip of his tri-cornered cap in the transfer.

but back to the bowl that will soon be set before those who i love.

if this is national oatmeal month, there is a reason beyond the pure promotionality. oatmeal in your belly fuels you right through ’til pb&j-time.

but for me, it’s all in the making. i stand there at my cookstove, pouring my oats and my milk. then i start doctoring. i would no sooner spoon up plain oats and milk than i would pour orange juice on cheerios.

no, i add things. as if i am tossing in jewels. i have a whole row of dried fruits in glass jars, fruits the color of amethyst, ruby, garnet and onyx. every day it’s a new rendition: chunks of dried apricot, a sprinkle of cranberry. if it’s not for the boy who hates nuts, almonds land in the mix. i’m not afraid of wheat germ, consider its power, so that too gets stirred in the brew.

it is as if i am arming my boys for the dragons they’ll slay. the more i toss in the mix, the more certain they’ll conquer the day.

it is a mother’s amulet, almost. oatmeal as shield for the dangers that lurk.

that is rather a lot, the power i put in the oats, steamed, rolled and cut. but as i stand there concocting i’m some sort of sorceress. me and my oats and my shriveled-up fruits.

brown sugar on top, a small moat of milk. they sink spoon into mound. once the bowl reappears, specks of oatmeal no more, they are set, they can soar.

as they bound out the door, i toss a glance to my ol’ quaker friend. he is winking, i swear. we’ve done it again.

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January 10, 2007

chop, saute, edit…

it is delicious, the way the day unfolds when i weave back and forth from cutting board to keyboard, in my slow dance toward dinner.

2 c. onion, chopped.

one story cobbled, edited.

1 sweet red pepper, seeded, chopped.

one phone call, dialed.

i am a writer who works from home. i am a mother who needs to feed children. i am also a woman who savors the adagio toward dinner.

as the january chill slipped in through the cracks and the crevices of this old house some time yesterday morn, and as i realized dinner would eventually be upon us, i walked into the pantry and starting eyeing the shelves.

black beans, i saw. grabbed for the bag. ticked through the means toward the simmering end, a bold steaming soup; beans the color of midnight, hot-sausage-studded.

and so the rhythm began: onions and garlic, chopped and sauteed. beans set to simmering. two phone calls made. story re-read, cut by 200 words.

there is something that soothes me, inhaling the onions, the garlic, the simmering beans. all the while tending to stories and editors and sources not yet discovered. knowing that dinner is coming the slow way. not something rushed in the 15 minutes before everyone crawls to the table, famished and grumpy and harried.

it is the blessing of working from home, stirring with one hand, typing with the other. it is rare, and i know it, to be home alone with the smells and the sizzles and the sentences growing.

i have given up much, not being in the newsroom. but i cannot imagine not being here where most everything matters. it’s my own cockamamie invention, the place where domesticity meets deadline. and i love every drop. (except for when i’m pulling my hair out.)

perhaps it’s the post-winterbreak quiet that, this week, is so particularly sweet, now that the big yellow bus rumbles down the lane and swallows up my littlest boy.

but what it really seems is that the broth of my life is richer, is deeper, when i’m here on the homefront doing two things at once. and doing one of them slowly.

as the sweet scent of the beans and the cumin rise from the pot and curl under my nose, i feel less like a mad scrambled mama, more like a soul who is blessedly tending my flock.

be it a soup or a stew or a fat roasting hen, there is a certain elixir in the kitchen perfume as it comes ’round the corner to me and my keyboard.

maybe it’s nothing so much as the sweet simple knowing that, while tracking down editors, i am aiming toward dinner, that most sacred time when we all come together.

more than deadlines and drafts one, two and three, it’s that time towards the end of the day that most deepens my soul. and when it unspools not in a rush, not in staccato, i am soothed, i am stoked by the slow dance to dinner.

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January 8, 2007

sunday night calm, monday morning alarm

sometimes i almost hear a voice in my head, nudging me, reminding me, i am the mother, it’s my job to interlace calm into our midst.

sometimes you have to turn out the lights to do that.

last night i turned out the lights.

i hollered up the stairs. said it was mandatory. be in front of the fire. in pajamas. 9 o’clock on the dot.

then i got to work, simply. lit the fire. put out the crumbles of christmas cookies on a fine plate. piled clementines into what has become the clementine basket. grabbed a marvelous book, a book on the birth, life and death of words, “the life of language,” it’s called. and then headed up to slip on my own red-and-white stripes.

this is not, not until now, our usual sunday night rhythm. hmm, i can think of science projects rushing toward deadline. and whole volumes of books being downed at indigestible speeds. i can think sunday night and think jitters and fuming and pulling out hairs.

so i turned out the lights.

there is something powerful about coming together in a darkened room, with only the glow from the crackling logs. the same effect could be gained from coming together ’round a circle of candles.

it’s the flame, i tell you, that holds the power. the flame at the center and the dark all around. it’s beyond ancient. it’s primal.
but injected into the everyday, injected into a 100-watt world, it is wholly absorbing.

and this particular sunday, the sunday that holds back the floodtide that comes rushing in once the backpacks are out and the school days return, well, we needed flames leaping from logs. we needed to gather. one more time in a circle. to push back the oncoming crunch.

we talked about words. we broke open orange peels. we drank in the dark and the light and the quiet.

someone decided this should be every sunday. so, for now, it’s a plan. we’ll see if it sticks. like so many great good ideas, sometimes the world gets in the way.

the world, yes, the world…

so this morning, at 6, the alarm it did ring. back to the world, the real world, it shouted. i was up, i was ready. i was splashing my face. but i noticed no sounds from the room where the brand-new replacement alarm, the one set to rouse the slumbering teen, was supposed to be ringing. uh oh. strike one.

rousing him from his blankets, i leapt down the stairs. even snipped dill for the top of his lox. called up the stairs every few minutes. the carpool was coming; he needed to eat. the orange juice was waiting. the vitamins, too.

but before i saw the tops of his shoes, the headlights beamed to the curb. the carpool was here. the boy, he was not. strike two.

i dashed out to do some curb-dancing. begged for a minute. noted that they were, um, 10 minutes early.

tossed lox and black bread at boy on the run.

then, as i gently closed the front door behind him, my sweet loving husband shared one little secret: the bus pass, the one that i’d bought and tucked on his desktop, it was lost, it was missing. that’s why the boy was so slow coming down. he had left, it now seems, without a way to get home.

strike three. i am out.

so much for the calm of the logs in the fire.

would someone please turn out the lights?

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January 4, 2007

cleaning, housekeeping, the recipe

sometimes i feel i need to apologize for being such a cleaner. not now, not at the new year. which for me begins today. this is my jan. 2, by the way. i’m on a two-day delay thanks to the accident of my birth.

but here we are. all of us on the relative same page here. all leaping in anew. perhaps you too are cleaning. it seems to be a widespread affliction. right up there with new date books, new diet plans. i, believe it or not, forgo both of those. get my date book in july, just to be a trend-bucker, i suppose. don’t diet; hard to do when popcorn and broccoli are your main food groups.

ahem, back to the subject at hand here, back to the cleaning. the older i get the more i give in to my quirks and my personal square pegs. and the quirk of the day is i love to clean. down on my hands and knees in the corner. vacuuming can send me to the moon. (which by the way, that wolf moon has me howling.)

there is something about wiping away dirt, sweeping off crumbs, returning to order that simply sings to my heart. i cannot go to bed with dishes in the sink. oh, okay, maybe the single occasional popcorn bowl waits ’til the morn. but i am a girl who likes to pretend my life is in order by banning the crumbs to the dustbin.

i am not naturally neat. naturally, i am a piler. piles are not mess, i tell myself. piles are order, vertically. but i married a guy who likes neat. and i am a once-nurse who likes clean. so, once children were born, and my life turned upside down, inside out, suddenly found myself cleaning for joy.

and, oh the joy. i breathe easier when i walk out of or into a room that is sparkling, especially when the sparkle comes from my own sweat and muscle. there must be little tiny specks of my germanic genes washing around in the great irish stew, for the hard work of cleaning is balm to my soul.

the tree is not yet down. i should say trees, for we indulged little T and planted a sweet baby balsam up in the hall on the landing, so he could fall asleep to the lights, wake up to the rumble of the train tumbling off the tracks down below.

so the big cleaning, the clearing of trees, still lies ahead. but for days now, i have been clearing my desk, sifting through files, wiping the slate for the start of a new year of piles.

and speaking of cleaning, how ’bout time for some…

housekeeping: with the holidays tucked behind us, it seems there’s a new percolation of chairs being pulled to the table. i couldn’t be more delighted. it is a gift in ways you will never know. my heart only keeps whispering, carry on, carry on. a most important critical point is that at a table we all take turns talking. please please add your thoughts. and if you’re new here, or took some time off, feel free to meander around. there are some magnificent thoughts being added to meanderings, some way back in the days.

please see a delightful, wonderful passage, tacked onto “extending the table” (12.27.06), by a marvelous thinker and writer, who tags herself jcv, and who trembled at her first-ever blog moment. she is a treasure i know you too will come to treasure.

delight yourself further, and not so far back, by reading along with jan and her moon story, on “bring on the birds” (01.02.07).

marvel, as i do, at anything posted by the mysterious, marvelous wm ulysses, who goes back nearly to the beginning and makes my jaw drop every time.

and finally, drum roll……

the recipe, the one we’ve been waiting for….here’s where i will get teary. if you haven’t, please please read, “eggs, cheese, an ungodly hour” (12.22.06). it was a magical, heart-filling tale of a miracle of a woman named nina who for years made a christmas gift for a soup kitchen. she made a strata, which is an egg-cheese-and-bread layered-y thing. (forgive me, i love making up the occasional word.) well, sweet blessed nina died nearly two years ago but her strata lives on. in a pure christmas twist, her beautiful husband, her father, and her sweet little girls carry on. they make strata by the carload, and we (the ones who get up at an ungodly hour) dish it up in the dark of christmas eve morn. i had thought that we could truly lift nina up if we all got the recipe, and beginning now, made nina’s strata into a most blessed christmas tradition. what if, i wrote, we all made nina’s strata, and, in true nina spirit, we gave it away, gave it away to someone whose eyes needed glistening.

well, michael, god bless him, came through with a marvelous rendition of the recipe. and it seems those who loved nina most have added their heart to the mix. please please, i beg you, go take a look. it’s right there in the archives. and i will re-post the recipe on the lazy susan page, for easy plucking. fear not, next christmastime i will haul it out of the recipe box, remind everyone. and we shall all of us, perhaps, take to our kitchens, tearing up bread by the bits, to lift nina to heights she only could have imagined, as we all brighten the world nina-style, through our great oozy pans of eggs and cheese served at an ungodly hour.

bless you each and everyone. ’til tomorrow…

nina’s strata, coming out of the oven christmas eve morn….

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December 27, 2006

extending the table

the leaves of the table, perhaps, are the heart of the table. they’re meant for extending. for adding guests. for making room. this is about extending the table.

if you’ve poked about this place we are building, this place called pull up a chair, you might have wandered over to the corner of it called the bottomless cup. i mention there a book i was dying to dash out and get, a book called “extending the table: a world community cookbook.” well, i dashed all right, and i got it. and it is every bit as delicious, as chewy, as i had hoped it would be. there’s a link on the bottomless cup, right where i mention the book, that will hook you right over to the ten thousand villages website, where you could order up a copy all your own. (or you could look for it elsewhere, it’s compiled by joetta handrich schlabach, it’s $20 and it comes from herald press.)

i am reading the book with yellow highlighter in hand. when’s the last time you read a cookbook with a highlighter?

the reason i am highlighting madly is because the book shares a deep underlying theme with pull up a chair. it is about welcoming. taking time. it is about making room at your table. making room in your day.

as my wise wonderful friend susie, the one who told me about “extending the table” in the first place, was musing, she talked about how when she was growing up, if you came to her mother’s house, you got a cup of coffee set down before you. no one even bothered to ask. you just got a coffee. it was assumed you were staying long enough to get to the bottom of the cup. now, says susie, you’re lucky if someone offers you a glass of water from the front of the fridge; no one really has time. no time to make the coffee, no time really for you to stay. a quick swallow of pre-chilled water, you’re back out the door.

not so around the world. not so in places where cold water does not come spitting out the front of the fridge.

“in turkey,” one passage of “extending the table” begins, “it is a great virtue to be known as someone who loves company and has a lot of it.”

the book goes on to tell that when a guest arrives at the door, shoes are removed, a pair of slippers are offered. the guest is ushered into the great room; the host kisses both cheeks, and sprinkles lemon cologne on their hands. coffee is offered, the host asks if they like it with or without sugar. once coffee is finished, the host prepares tea, which must be simmered 17 minutes, and always is made fresh for a guest (family might drink warmed-up tea). tea comes with sweet and salty pastries; the cup is refilled until the guest insists she or he cannot swallow another drop. when the guest insists she must leave, the host hurries to the kitchen, returning with plates of fresh fruit for everyone. when the fruit is finished, and the guest again insists she must leave, the host brings damp washcloths, and arranges shoes with toes pointed toward the door. they part with kisses, handshakes, and an exchange of invitations for future visits.

oh my. nearly makes you squirm. imagine packing that in your blackberry-buzzed day.

makes you think, though. makes me stop and think.

when was the last time you made coffee for someone who came to your door? when was the last time someone came to your door, dropping in for the sole purpose of pulling up a chair to your table?

maybe, one cup at a time, we can begin to change that…

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December 26, 2006

an ear to your heart

sometimes, great swaths of time can go by and it doesn’t happen. but it happened this year.

happened as i reached for the wadded-up clump that came in a box of other-sized things, all wrapped in the same red-with-white-snowmen.

little hands, you see, unable to wait when the big box arrived, had reached for the same lump and started the ripping, so this particular clump had some of its underthings showing. a brown-paper webbing, in fact, that was meant to keep something safe. but this something had my name on it, penned in silver on a snowflake cut from white paper, so when the ripping began we told it to stop. patiently, temptingly, its underthings showing, the lump it had waited all of these days.

there wasn’t much under the tree with my name on it this year, and for some reason i knew that this something i would want to open off to side, where i alone could drink in whatever it was.

and so, after the rest of the opening hubbub this christmas eve, in between gathering up scraps of paper and ribbons and ladling out bowls of white-hot white chili, i reached under the tree for the lump that was mine. as i unrolled the brown-paper webbing, i uncovered a layer of tissue with the stamp of a store that i love up in maine. stonewall kitchen, i read. and my heart started to skip.

you see, stonewall kitchen, a vast storehouse of jams and jellies and all sorts of dry mixes, also happens to peddle a blue-and-white pottery that makes my heart skip. burleighware, it’s called. comes from england.

the signature pattern is a rich cobalt calico. months and months ago, i splurged on a big fat oversized pitcher, marking the end of the kitchen construction and the start of the second half-century of me, which begins in just over a week.

never in my life have i wanted to collect anything (although there was a spell when the world, it seemed, had decided i was a bovine collector, and thus i seemed to reap cows in every size shape and utility), but once i eyed this burleighware, i thought, uh oh, this could be trouble. it’s blue and white you see, and i am a sucker for that.

cobalt blue sets me to swooning. and this burleighware comes in intricate patterns, each one transferred by hand, over in some charming barn in the countryside of merry ol’ england.

so back to my lump, now revealing its stonewall-kitchen origins. here’s where the magic starts to creep in.

i do not go on and on about “things” that i love. so maybe i might have once mentioned the shop, maybe twice. but someone was listening, someone was looking. paying attention to the thump in my heart that came from the blue calico pitcher, and a small flock of similar ilk that had crept into my kitchen in dribs and in drabs.

that, there, is the magic of christmas, the magic of gifting, the magic of utterly truly giving a gift. for in the end, as my dear becca (blessed art therapist who works wonders with the most troubled of kids) says, all that all of us want is to be heard.

and so, standing there, pulling back the tissue, pulling back the wrap, i found in my hands two tiny pitchers, both in calico blue. how did she know, was the first thing i thought. bless her for listening, bless her for hearing the thumpety-thumpety-thump of my heart.

they sit on my sill now, my white-with-blue sill, in the little thin window that charmed me, that whispered to me, the instant the builders slipped it into its place. there’s a bramble of bushes and a tall cedar fence out that window, but if you look carefully you can imagine a scene from a farm, all rolling and cows. and now, with the english calico pitchers, you might imagine an english farm scene.

but the best part of the window, now that they’re perched, is that someone was listening to the inner tick of my heart.

for a girl who spent years opening things that seemed to belong to someone down the road, around the corner, certainly at some other address, there is nothing so sweet, nothing so humbling, as the great gift of being touched at the tick of your heart.

perhaps it happened to you, perhaps someone heard the tick or the tock of your inner-most heart. if you care to, tell your tale here….

December 15, 2006

every time i turn a knob…

which, as you might imagine, is a hundred times a day in a working kitchen, with two boys, a fat cat, a hungry husband and me. and every single time, since i found out, i think of danny. danny screwed in every one of those ice box catches, as they are called in hardware speak. there are 17 of them in the farmhouse kitchen, and another 23 drawer pulls.

danny, who is no longer, sweated over every last one of all of them.

on a july day so hot he was licking away sweat from his upper lip before the third catch was on, danny and his power driver had at it. during a chapter in the kitchen construction that was nearly a stand-still, they called in danny. to come to our rescue. danny was the kind of guy who comes to your rescue: solid, quiet, get-the-job-done.

danny killed himself exactly three weeks ago today. leaving behind a wife he loved, and three kids, 5, 3, and newborn.
hung himself, danny did.

despondent over lord knows how many things. but one of the things was that he’d been rehabbing his own house, trying to make it stretch for his stretching family. he’d dug a new foundation, right up against the old one. and the rains came one september spell. literally washed his foundation out. the house caved in. danny, 38, wore the weight of it on his taut, slim shoulders.

and every time i turn a knob, i see danny. see a hundred frames of danny getting the job done.

a house, a house lived in by souls who love it, who honor it, who keep an ear open to its many whisperings, is, as any archeologist would tell you, an artifact layered with history and meaning, heartbreak and miracle.

the knobs for me will forever be danny, danny’s heartbreaking story.

besides the fact that we were finally getting knobs on cabinets that had hung naked for weeks, the drama of the week that danny came was that danny had a baby coming any minute. his third baby.

see, danny had grown up on our watch. back at our old house, he was the smart, young kid on the job. the carpenter with the degree in economics from lawrence university, one of those really fine midwest liberal arts schools that pull in really smart kids who might not look toward the coasts. danny could push a pencil, but he thrilled at banging a hammer.

they were a team of four, the builders, our builders, jim&friends. and we loved them. i don’t know how you have a house filled with men hammering and sawing and building your dreams and not love them. each one had a role, a schtick, a something you could count on. characters on the stage of your life for however long the job takes, you await their coming in from the wings each morning, you stand and applaud when they have just sung their hearts out–even when they sing with a hand plane or a power driver.

not long after wrapping up our job in the city, danny decided he needed to hang up his tool belt and become something of which his wife would be proud: an accountant. he took the tests, passed on his first try. danny was always a smart kid. he tried crunching numbers for awhile. but he just didn’t get the buzz that comes from building houses for a living. so he went out on his own, his little family growing right along with his business.

but we needed him this summer. the building had, for a number of reasons, gotten way behind.

the day he showed up, everyone knew we were back on track. he stayed late the night he put the knobs on. we came home to a dark house, but a house with polished-nickel knobs shining.

danny kept coming all week, getting the job done. his wife had the baby the next tuesday. he didn’t come to our house that day. but he came back soon after. he was beaming. he talked about kathy, the kids, he was beaming.

i never talked to him after his house caved in in september. i should have. i was dreaming up some kind of benefit concert, something that would get some cash in his hands. i never got past dreaming.

then jim called one dreary november morn, right before thanksgiving. jim who had worked beside danny since danny was a 15-year-old kid looking to make money during summers in high school. jim who said he cried like a baby when he got the call.

“you remember danny,” he started, oddly. as if. as if i wouldn’t remember.

“he took his life.”

it’s been three weeks. and every time i reach for the knob….i think of those kids, this christmas. i run my fingers slowly over the polished-nickel knob. bless you, danny. bless you.

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December 14, 2006

honey, what’s that growing in the fridge?

tucked back between the leftover roast-chicken hash, the spaghetti, and the cranberry relish, there squats a hyacinth bulb in a bidet of cold water in my otherwise innocent fridge. what we’re aiming for here is to get the ol’ bulb’s private parts, the basal plate, if you prefer, to delight in sucking up that cold drink, thus sending down roots that will gulp mightily while the green stem starts shooting up toward the cottage-cheese shelf. this is how you grow a garden in winter, how you turn upside down the whole planet and the slant of the sun, really, tricking the poor globes of potential into thinking it’s spring we are entering, not the deep depths of winter.
i am something of a paperwhite nut. like gretel scattering her bread crumbs through the woods, i scatter paperwhites everywhere i go in december. if i’m coming to your house, you can bet i’ll have paperwhites somewhere on my person–stuffed in a pocket, tucked in a big fat cereal bowl, planted in a gravely mound–and i’ll leave them behind for you to take in their december dance. i can do paperwhites with my eyes closed.
apparently, i can’t do hyacinths. not even with eyes wide open.
i am a hyacinth virgin, and i am definitely doing this with training wheels on.
feeling frisky and full of risk a few weeks back, i decided it was high time i moved up the horticultural ladder: a hyacinth would be mine. with all the tremble of a true go-get-’em girl, i reached out my fist at the garden shop that i love, and i grabbed the biggest, fattest purple-skinned bulb from the bin. because they do gardening for dummies there at the nursery, they had a healthy stash of cheat sheets nearby. “forcing hyacinth bulbs,” it read. “hyacinths are one of the easiest bulbs to force,” it promised.
that was two weeks ago. i did everything they told me. i plopped the fat bottom of the bulb in my special hyacinth forcing jar. i studied the cheat-sheet diagram, determined from their careful line drawing that the water was not supposed to touch the frilly underparts of the bulb. i tucked the whole contraption at the back of a storage closet in my shivery basement. (if you want beauty in winter, you must simulate the deep dark frozen underground of your garden.) i checked every morning for days. nothing. nothing. then, as if some subterranean plot to foil my hope, a spot of mold. egad. a green, furry threat to do in my bulb. but nothing, still, from the frilly underparts.
no more waiting around. it was time to put in a call to jennifer brennan, horticultural wizard and bulb lady supreme at the chalet nursery in wilmette, where this recalcitrant bulb had found its way to my basket in the first place.
get that thing in the fridge, and be sure the water is tickling its under-frills, she insisted. the 50-degree basement, while too cold for a little boy and his legos, is not cold enough for a hyacinth bulb itching to burst out of its oniony skin. it needs 38 to 40 degrees. and, while we’re at it, it does not like the gases emitted by ripening fruits or veggies, so the persnickety thing needed a see-through sealable coat, the bulb lady advised. thus, the gallon-sized zip-lock bag in which the whole kitten caboodle now sits, shivering. i need to keep an eye on the water level; make sure it’s touching the basal plate now, and once they start their winter’s descent, the tips of the roots must be dangling in water. then, when the whole forcing-vase bottom is a thicket of roots, i can unearth the whole deal, exhuming my experiment-in-risk from its place at the sorry back of the fridge. today it twiddles its rootlets alongside soggy spaghetti, by the middle of january, god and basal plate willing, it shall be a proud cobalt-blue garden of one, abloom by my sink, knocking me silly with its heavenly scent. stay tuned…

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