pull up a chair

blueberries go on sale today for $1.88 a pint at my grocery store. cantaloupes will be flying off the crates at a mere 99 cents each.
so, like i always do in the juicy months, the summer months, i’ll probably grab a few of each, dump ’em in a bowl, put ’em out for breakfast. think little of it, ’cept how juicy it all looks. you might do the same at your house.
but what if we couldn’t? what if the stores near where we lived didn’t sell fruit? didn’t put it on sale in the juicy months because there was no fruit. they never sold it. on sale, or otherwise.
what if you’re a kid named jerry and you’re 11 and you used to live in a place called cabrini-green, a famous place around chicago, a sad place, because it was full of poor black folks and kids who grew up knowing to dive for cover when the gunshots broke the thick night air, or, worse, you once saw someone stagger in your apartment door, shot in the gut, and you watched him writhe, then die, right there on your front-room floor?
and what if someone decided to do away with cabrini-green, filled the air with promise but then let you–and thousands of others–down, down as a flat old bicycle tire, the kind you’ve never ridden anyway, and instead of letting you stay in the place you knew, the place where you and your mama and your mama’s mama grew up, they dumped you miles away in a place called englewood, a place that ends up being even worse, way worse?
and what if, down in englewood, there are no stores where, even if you wanted, even if you had a taste for blueberries in summer–or even a plain old dumpy apple–you couldn’t get any, not even one?
because the only store you could get to you call “the chip store,” because it sells, well, like 20 kinds of chips. and pop. but no blueberries. and no apples. and not a single banana even. no fruit. none.
but luckily–blessedly–jerry is a friend of my friend mary beth. so is a kid named william, who is 7.
my friend mary beth, who for years and years has been friends with jerry’s aunt and william’s cousin, who actually was a true big sister in ways that would leave you jaw-dropped at her humongous heart and her facile mind, is now pretty much the fruit lady of englewood.
oh, that’s not official. it just is. it’s what she does.
every weekend, my friend mary beth, who lives way north, along the lake, but in uptown, and who works all week in philadelphia, because she’s a nurse and she’s running the cardiology department at children’s hospital of philadelphia, and she’s been flying back and forth between philly and chicago every week for a couple years now, well, she spends half her weekend getting fruit for jerry and william and whoever else is there, is hungry, when she makes her fruit drop.
she gets up on saturday morning, heads out to costco, buys huge cartons of strawberries–you can really get a lot for 5 bucks, she tells me–and as much as she can carry of whatever else looks good. and juicy.
then she drives down to englewood, drives down to where, just a year or so ago, jerry was out running down the sidewalk with a friend, a little friend, a friend who i think was maybe 9, and jerry heard a pop, and then his friend was down. his friend died. right there on the sidewalk. right next to jerry. it was the sixth violent death that jerry had witnessed in one long year of his short sad life.
that’s where mary beth brings the crates of strawberries. and maybe blueberries too, this weekend. maybe she too can get a super deal at costco, when she shows up this saturday, fixing for her fruit run.
my friend mary beth is the sort of soul who has taken my breath away as long as i have known her. and i’ve known her a long, long time now. nearly 30 years. she was the one who hired me, fresh out of nursing school, to work at children’s memorial right here in chicago.
she was the one, back then, who cared about what kind of food inner-city kids were eating. she cared, too, about how families worked, or didn’t work, especially when a kid was really sick. and she cared about a health care system that she saw, way before plenty of others, might not keep working, not much longer anyway, if someone didn’t get in there and start to fix the breaking parts before they flat-out broke.
but mary beth doesn’t just care about what goes on in hospitals. she cares, maybe more deeply than anyone i know, about what goes on in cities, especially parts of the city that already are flat-out broken.
and mary beth, who is the godmother to my firstborn, and here’s a big reason why, doesn’t just sit and talk about how to fix the broken city.
she gets up on saturday morning, week after week, and picks out blueberries and strawberries and peaches and melons, and maybe even a mango–more likely, a whole crate of mangoes–and drives them miles and miles to where the stores don’t sell them.
then she walks in a banged-up apartment, where jerry and william and a whole handful of other folk live, and she lays the boxes packed with fruit on the kitchen table.
because kids, all kids, especially kids who sit and fill their cheeks and their tummies with chips for breakfast and chips all day long, kids not allowed to play outside for fear, for God’s sake, that they too could fall dead to the sidewalk so instead they sit inside with those damn chips and they get what the doctors call obese, all those kids deserve a little taste of summer when it’s summertime.
and i don’t mean a sticky popsicle, though, heck, i hope they get that too.
so i had this kooky idea. not so kooky, really. what if, somehow, we all pitch in?
what if we all, all of us who pull up a chair maybe, what if we build a fund so we can send a message, to mary beth at least, but maybe even to jerry and william?
what if we can say that, damn it, no kid should be robbed of the taste of blueberries and strawberries and melon? not when they’re going on sale today at grocery stores that will never be without mounds and mounds of fruit for kids who might turn up their noses sometimes, say they’re full from too many strawberries.
what if, in some teeny tiny way, we say it’s not right that there’s a jerry, thousands and thousands of jerrys probably, who would not sink their teeth into the sweet, red, seeded flesh of a strawberry, who would not know what it is to have that blood red juice run down and off their chin, were it not for the great good soul of a mary beth who takes the time–and has the heart–to spend her saturdays plucking fruit?

sign up here, people. add your own big ideas. click over to the chair lady page, and you’ll find my email. send an email, and i’ll send details, and we will see if we can build a fresh fruit fund so there won’t be so many jerrys, or so many williams, who go without a single berry the whole year long. especially, the whole summer.

funny, how bright lights in the sky make us look up, make us crane our necks and wonder. funny how, once a year, we flock, whole heaping crowds of us, to the edge of where the lights are coming. we haul wagons and blankets and lots of little children. we come in wheelchairs, with walkers, on crutches. we cannot stand to miss the show.

we set up shop, as if we own a piece of the planet there. the real estate is ours, until the show sizzles to its final smoky end.

and while we’re waiting, everyone is antsy. checking watches, scanning sky. looking for a far-off pop, the first explosion in the sky.

and then, at last, when night has fully fallen, when sky is draped in black, the curtain rises.

announced in pop-pop-pop. and then the colors, poured across the sky. the exploding has begun.

it was at about that moment, after aw-ing one or two last night, that my little one climbed in my lap, said in my ear, “don’t you wish you could be a fireworks?”

without waiting for an answer, his little shoulders lifted, felt as if they might take off. “i do,” he sighed.

and then, just minutes later, after a chemical chrysanthemum had blossomed in the sky, had showered petals made of light over all the crowd–the endless squares of blanket, upturned faces, open ooh-ing mouths and chrysanthemum-painted eyes–he added this: “i’d be a purple one.”

not long after, the pit-a-pat of rain came. and so the show was hurried. it ended, as it always, always does, with a bang, a bang that makes you plug your ears. only, by then, everyone was up and scrambling, dashing, before the final flicker fell, softly, from the sky.

walking home, the big boy who i love, the one who never wished to be a fireworks, far as i know, though, in his own way, wouldn’t mind lighting up the sky, offered the thinking that is his own pyrotechnic explosion, as he sparks his fuse and practices watching big ideas, in many colors, stretch across the whole horizon.

he told me he was thinking of writing an essay called “empty sky.” said he found it odd that we, as a nation, say we’re celebrating freedom, then proceed to all dress up, in lockstep, in the same three colors, eat “pseudo-patriotic foods,” and then, “rather than exercising our freedom, we go to watch destruction.”

what’s left, when all is ended, he mused, when all our policies have set us off in wrong directions, is empty sky.

as the rain kept up its rat-a-tat on our heads, our shoulders, our legs, our shoes, we kept walking, my boy and i.

he unspooled, in pure eloquence, his thoughts that already i have mucked up, just above. by the time we got home he promised me he would write it down. told me he’d take a picture of the pitch black sky to illustrate his essay.

i marveled, as i hung up the soggy blanket, at the blessing that is mine on the day america takes a seat to watch the sky show.

it leaves me nearly gasping, the fact that, at once, i could have one who climbs on laps and wishes he too could dazzle in exploding colors, free-fall from the heavens, take a ride on sky crescendo, while my other is taking in the fireworks and stitching deep political threads into what’s stretched across the dark black canvas.

then i heard the crash, boom, bang. i looked up to where the lights had been. i saw more lights. these from God. or Mother Nature. or whoever is the one who takes cold wind and hot, and bangs them both together like a cymbal in the sky, complete with jagged bolts of light.

i stared, i gasped again. took in the second act of sky show for the night. it gave me goosebumps, the good kind. i watched awhile, all alone. no blankets, ohhs or ahhs.

just a silent kind of awe that this night of sky lights, acts one and two, had sparked so much wonder in so very many colors.

what do you think when you watch the sky ignite? would you like to be a fireworks? or do you see explosions and think deep and stirring thought about how you’d like the world to be? happy fourth.

having explained my way through airport security not long ago, whispering in the armed guard’s ear, gesturing oddly toward the long blue stick the 5-year-old was boldly flailing, trying to persuade the nice man that the light saber would really not cause a problem, not unless it was absconded there at the so-called security checkpoint, i was not at all surprised when my virgin camper informed me he was taking the saber to the woods.
of course he was, i thought to self. he’d heard word of bears and wolves, and would not be left unarmed.
what i did not know was that the jedi camper had tucked his make-believe jedi robe into the backpack. and within minutes of pulling into slot 12, at the wooded loop of camping plots, off went the shorts, the shirt; out came the robe.
while i was busy muttering about the tent poles, and which was which, and, oh, look out for ticks there in the underbrush that seems to be poking through the northwest corner of our tent, the little jedi tapped me on the shoulder to ask me this important question: “when you wear a robe, do you take off your boxers?”
egad. he was going to get us chased from these here woods. just two plots over there was a chap, a bearded chap, who looked like he might wrestle bears for entertainment. i was not so sure he’d take a liking to a stick-legged little boy prancing in his ruby-colored chinese robe, with golden-threaded dragon on the back. even if it was a big bad bear he, too, was aiming to take on.
i swallowed hard, i did, i did.
but i said calmly, “why no, you keep your boxers on, my fierce defender.”
presto change-o, i am happy to report, he pranced in robe with red boxers.
and, then, before i could even whisper, “force be with you,” or whatever it is a jedi mama would be inclined to say, he had grabbed the sabers from the wagon.
off he went, so thoroughly equipped to slice and dice the fears that come with all that’s unexplored. how very wise, the instincts of a little boy not to leave himself unarmed when it comes to fending off his worries, even if it’s a glowing plastic stick that carries all the super-powers.
indeed, without so much as a flinch, he and his accomplice, a jedi partner sans the robe, stalked the perimeter of the slice of woods that was ours for the night.
“no bears,” he came back to report, while i kept muttering to the tent.
he stayed in jedi garb right through the chopping of the logs and the igniting of the flames.
then, when just enough mosquitoes had nipped his naked little legs, he turned in his robe, at last, for shorts less likely to get us tossed from those there parts.
and so it went, the early chapters of my little camper’s first dark night in the big, big woods.
the sabers and the robe, as long as they were on the scene, did seem to work. we never heard so much as a single growl.
but then, after s’mores and sitting on a dock, after taking in the bullfrogs’ foghorns and slapping at the swarms of ‘squitoes, when we slithered in our not-so-wobbly tent, and the flashlights did at last go off, there spouted from the jedi camper the deepest, tenderest tears i believe i’ve heard in years and years.
“i’m homesick for my room,” he blurted out, there in the blackest blackness of a woodsy night without a single beam of moon, thanks to fat ol’ clouds that blocked out all of heaven’s light.
this time the saber, lying still, lying darkly, just beside his sleeping bag, could not fend off the scary things that seem to loom when you are planted there at the edge of the woods for the very first time.
all around, there were night sounds. and, truth be told, the ground beneath our backs was rather hard and oh-so-lumpy. the little warrior’s papa, his nearly every night’s bedtime cuddler, was miles and miles away. from a 5-year-old’s perspective, there was every reason to be sick for home.
so we did the best we could, the little one’s big strong brother and i. we started telling stories all about the room he missed. we sketched it out in vivid detail, from the night light to the window prism to the books that line the shelves.
we tried, in every way we could, to make his room come back to life, there in the creepy-crawly darkness of the hardly-sleeping woods.
big brother on one side, mama on the other, we lulled him, finally, into sleep. he slept at last like a little log. while i kept watch the whole night long. i would not let my jedi camper fret the night away.
and besides, the tree root beneath my back made for nasty sleeping anyway.
not long after walking in the door, now back at home sweet home, i bent and kissed that little camper. asked him if after all maybe it was a little bit of fun, fending bears away from s’mores.
“well,” he said, sounding very brave, “i really wanted to shoot more bows and arrows.”
so fierce, the little camper, as long as the lights are on. and the room he calls his own is just a quick dash up the stairs.

my goodness, sorry we’re so late in checking in here. had to check for ticks, shake out the tent, and on the way home we stopped for peaches and farm-ripe tomatoes. just thought you might like a simple little tale of how a boy takes on the woods. do you get scared when you go out sleeping beneath the trees? what soothes you when you feel sick for home?

p.s. next time you take to the woods, be sure to bring along your very own woodsman. that’s big david up there, once upon a boy scout. he had us fully stocked for every campfire a jedi and his mama could ever ever want. why, there were flames for melting marshmallows and flames for heating up old coffee in the morn. twas heavenly, his lovely wife’s bright bold idea, to take a jedi camping. next year, two nights. and of course, twice as many sabers.

perhaps it was a fevered dream. certainly, some screw was loose. had to be. i signed up, yes i did, to go into the woods tonight. alone. with my boys.
praise the heavens and hallelujah, the one, the man-child, is taller, by a yard, i think, than his ever-shrinking mama. it will be his job to scare the bears.
oh, i forgot. there are no bears in northern illinois. at least not outside of zoos. and we will not be camping in a zoo. so i should strike bear fears from my list.
my list is long enough.
let’s see. there would be the rocks i am worrying about. the rocks i’m sure we will pitch the tent right over, and i will discover said rocks, wedged beneath my shoulder blades, the very instant i lie down. when all is dark except the stars and there won’t be a chance of re-pitching the tent without rustling like a blessed fool and waking half the campground.
oh, yes, i should mention, this is camping lite.
this is camping in a spot that’s basically been cleared for moi and whatever amenities i lug along. this is camping with a little map and reservation ticket that tells you just where to pull in your car, and all those city-slicker essential camping extras. (did someone mention a blow-up tub for taking woodsy baths?)
oh, no, this is not the way my mountain-lion little brother camps, where he hikes a few days into some primal forest and gently, without disturbing so much as a blade of grass (oh, wait, there is no grass in forest deep; see how deep my woodsy know-how isn’t), he settles in for days of living off the land.
nope, i would be the wimpy camper sister.
while i’ve never forgotten the thicket of shining stars, stars planted like wild daisies in a meadow, that you can only see from there along the banks of a rushing river where a nighttime campfire is burning down to its final red-glow embers. and while i’ve never forgotten pulling back the dewy tent flap in the dawn, breathing in that softest morning air. or tasting an egg cooked atop an upturned coffee can that you and your 9-year-old friends are pretending is a campstove there in the wilds of your backyard, i cannot say i’ve gone rushing to the woods so very much these last few quarter-centuries.
in fact, i have been racking my ever-shrinking brain and the last campfire i recall just might have been way, way back with a euell-gibbons-wanna-be college friend who had me plucking berries off of bushes and making foil wraps of roots that had been growing deep beneath the forest.
so just what was the cockamamie notion that had me nodding when, mere weeks ago, my friend with 6- and 3-year-old called to see if i would join her in the woods tonight?
egad. she’d said something about sitting ’round the campfire, how delightful it would be, and that i do believe was where i caved. i pictured stars above. golden marshmallows on long sticks.
i blocked out, apparently, the sounds of children crying because their gooey, charred-black puff had just fallen in the flames. i blocked out the fact that somewhere between pulling in the car slot and slipping sleepy self and children in that fully erected tent, there was the little matter of getting the tent and all its poles to go along with the program. (which is why you see above the practice session we had just yesterday, shortly after unearthing that bulbous tent from the cobwebs of our blessed neighbors’ uninhabitable garage.)
silly me, i inked it in. “camp w/ boys.” tonight’s the night. the man i live with is not coming. he has scrounged up some fine excuse. says the world of newspapers cannot live without him in the morning. funny, i’ll make it back in time to get to work tomorrow. but, for his busy schedule, there is no time–nor inclination–for a night in the woods with children 3 and 5 and 6 and 14.
i cannot imagine.
ah, well. his loss.
he’ll miss the marshmallows–and all the crying. he’ll be home alone, in a real bed, with real pillows. did i mention the bed, the pillow, both, would be soft?
i, though, will march my boys into those would-be woods. i will teach the little one, at least (the big one’s done more camping in last few years than i would do if i had ten lifetimes), i will teach him the pure joy of fetching proper long-necked sticks for s’mores.
i will teach him to feel the night wrapping in around him, as the stars come on, as the nightsounds from the woods grow rather loud and easy to imagine a whole menagerie of furry things with long sharp claws.
i will teach him the fine art of finally being so tired that you drift off to sleep–despite the bumpy things lodged beneath your back, and the one darn mosquito that wriggled its way into your no-bugs-allowed tent confines.
i will teach him the taste of triumph in the morning, when you’ve made it, without the walls, the roof, the comforts that you count on, all the other nights.
i will, i hope, even teach him the satisfaction of taking down that trusty tent, packing it away for next time.
unless of course it comes crashing down in the night. unless of course it’s some woodland critter who knocks it in, trying to make a midnight snack of leftover s’mores–or us.
then i will teach him to run like a wild hen for the back seat of the car, lock the doors, and drive like a fiend home to where there might not be stars in thickets but at least there is a mattress and you can call it yours.

for those scant few of you who are not off vacationing, or procuring fireworks, welcome to july. if all goes swimmingly, we’ll be back tomorrow to let you know all about our adventures in the woods. if not, you’ll see a big black blank. and you’ll know to send out the search dogs. tell them to look for the mama with the tent draped over her head and teardrops streaming out the flap. stay tuned for more camping in the woods…

it must be the sunlight. or something in the air. or somewhere deep inside of me where there is the trigger. the little cord that yanks when i walk into the grocery store these days and see a peach.
not just any peach. a peach nearly garnet red, and just soft enough so when i pick it up to give a gentle squeeze, the evidence is left behind. little indents that match precisely the tips of my fat fingers. little indents that would mark me guilty, should the produce man ever haul me in a line-up to determine who’s been doing all the groping of the soft-fleshed summer fruit.
or better yet, weeks ago, when i sauntered by the stand at the farmer’s market, and eyed the little balsa-wood baskets of field-picked ruby berries. strawberries. lined up all in a row, offering their very seeds and souls to the cause.
the cause, of course, is shortcake. ‘tis the season for the shortest cakes i know.
those bumpy golden squats of cloud-like dough. cumulus, a whole sky full, lined up on baking sheet, if i’ve been lazy and not used a biscuit cutter. or scalloped round, and uniform, the effervescence coming in the puffy tops, if i’ve not been lazy, if i followed shortcake etiquette and unearthed the cutter from the bottom of the baking drawer.
i learned these things, the easy way, the proper way, to form a shortcake, at the sturdy elbow of lucille.
lucille we call her now, now that she is gone, and her name alone captures just a glint of who she was, her not-lucy, no-nickname, just-lucille-thank-you solid german spirit.
but, then, when she was here and would have boxed us in the ears for such informality, she was grandma, or oma, my mother’s mother and the only one i ever got to cook beside in the steamy cincinnati kitchen where she was undisputed queen, down there in what the locals call the queen city.
i was merely sous, pure underling. i was, probably, just in the way. but she never really said so, so i learned a thing or two.
cutout “basic cookies” would be one (she called them basic; we call them classic, what with their stick of butter and inter-racial sugars, dark brown and white). pineapple upside down cake, in cast-iron skillet, again with stick (or two) of butter, would be two. and, doing the arithmetic, i suppose the shortcake that my papa loved (and, thus, she loved him back) would be no. 3 in the baking department. cooking, well that’s a whole ‘nother thing, for a whole ‘nother day.
and so it was, when just the other afternoon that peach called out to me, so perfect with the little leaf still attached to the quarter-inch of stem, i beckoned lucille.
i marched straight to where i hold what might as well be her ashes, it is so much the essence of her being, only instead it is the banged-up, slightly rusty tin marked, simply, straight-forwardly, “recipes.”
as i cracked the lid and tiptoed my finger tops through the alphabet of “what’s cookin’?” index cards, one after another a whole parade of the best of lucille–baked alaska pie, bourbon balls, gooey bars (not to be confused with gooey butter cake), right on to yumyum cookies–i heard her whispering over my shoulder. at the start, that is. but then i swear she might as well have pulled up a stool and perched beside me, she was so clearly there.
it was as if the search for shortcake was some sort of seance that brought her to me, and suddenly i was muttering, “darn it, lucille, where are those shortcakes? they must be in here. you made them every blessed steamy cincinnati night. which, by the way, would be the entire summer.”
hmm. no shortcakes. not scribbled in her proud secretarial shorthand, the one that forever marked her as a woman with a career under her belt, a schoolgirl smart enough to have moved on to learn to type and take dictation in what now might be dismissed as vocational school, but then, when few were chosen, set her apart, made her a girl with smarts to match her aspirations.
on my second futile spin through my grandma’s alphabet, where i noticed a marked expansion at the Ds–dessert, her downfall, her pride and joy, her way of heaping love onto a plate–it dawned on me that there was no shortcake scribble because this one she could do in her sleep.
i can see her now, sifting flour, cutting butter, making pea-sized grains of flour-butter doughbits. but, darn it, i cannot see closely enough to know if it’s one stick or two of butter, and a cup or a cup and a half of sifted flour. i have no clue what else might be in her mix, her magic potion.
so there i was, fully hearing the call of the shortcake, but having no clear route to get there.
i thought about winging it, but, nah, that might just lead to leaden clouds. a cirrus when what i want, surely, is cumulus.
so i did the next best thing. i left lucille and her tin of well-worn, butter-smeared, “what’s cookin’?” cards, and i wandered over to where the silver palate girls were waiting, twiddling their buttered thumbs, wondering why i’d not come calling sooner.
heck, they’ve been on my shelf for 25 years, a whole quarter century i spell out for elongated emphasis. heck, they’re the ones who taught me much, much, much about how to cook and how to, simply, abundantly, take it up a notch.
sure enough, they do not leave me without a path to puffy clouds. right there, spilling across pages 276 and 277, complete with signature black-on-white line drawing, they told me just what i needed to do to catch me a shortcake cloud, on short notice.
lest i leave you high and dry, i’ll be sure to leave instructions just down below. in case, you too, are looking skyward, and you need some clouds to go with all your celestial summer fruit.
fear not, lucille, i’ll be back for something soon. perhaps my boys would love a little morsel from your gooey-gooey repertoire. why don’t you give some thought to what might set them to drooling, just the way i used to do?

strawberry shortcake, ala silver palate cookbook
makes 6 shortcakes

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
4 tablespoons sweet butter, chilled
1/2 cup light cream
6 cups strawberries, sliced and sugared to taste (here, lucille would slice her peaches and bathe them in a brown sugar bath. just so you know; it’s what i did)
1 1/2 cups heavy cream, chilled
12 perfect (their descriptive, not mine) strawberries (the garnish, thank you)

1. preheat oven to 450 degrees.
2. sift flour, sugar, salt and baking powder together in a mixing bowl.
3. cut in 4 tablespoons butter until mixture resembles oats. pour in cream and mix gently until just blended.
4. roll dough onto floured work surface to a thickness of 5/8
inch. (for heaven’s sake, they expect a ruler, here.) cut into 3-inch circles with cookie cutter (or upside-down juice glass, if you are lucille). gather scraps, roll again and cut more rounds; you should have 6 rounds.
5. bake shortcakes on greased baking sheet for about 10 minutes, or until puffed and lightly browned.
6. cool the biscuits slightly, split them, and spread softened butter lightly over the cut surfaces. set the bottoms on dessert plates; spoon on sliced strawberries, and crown with the tops of the biscuits. whip chilled cream, and spoon a dollop onto each shortcake, then garnish with a single perfect strawberry. serve immediately.

note: to make drop (or lazy) biscuits, use an additional 1/4 cup cream and drop the dough by large spoonfuls onto the baking sheet. bake as directed.

please, step right up, if you can top the shortcakes up above. do tell your secrets. or the story of the summer sweet that brings someone you loved back into the holy communion of the cookstove, where the two of you, joined by numbered steps, once again heat up the kitchen together.

when it comes, comes rushing in on sound of leaves quaking with unbridled twitterpation, shaking with the shimmy that is the north wind dance, it is pure hallelujah.
you go to bed at night, hot, sticky, like one buttery popcorn kernel to another. you go to bed, if you are my boys, half naked, as little cloth against the skin as you can get away with without your mother clucking tongue and rolling eyeballs. you go to sleep upside down, head down where feet most often are, because you have turned your self around, positioning as if on military mission, to get the most possible breeze on a night when the air is not moving, is saturating, is maybe one dew point away from pure precipitation.
you finally fall asleep because the molten air just makes you throw up your hands and surrender. so you surrender to your sweaty dreams.
but then, some unmarked moment in the night, the rushing comes. the hot still soup that is the air is stirred. cool winds blow in. as if a cube of ice was plunked into the bowl of too-hot soup, before you burned your tongue. just before you choked on your own hot breathing.
it is the holy blessed cold front. it is delicious air.
air and delicious have sat side-by-side in my vocabulary since i was just a wee little girl, and my mother would lift her arms, and her blouse would flutter–finally–and she would proclaim the air, “delicious!”
and so i learned. air, like biscuits and fudge and buttercream frosting on your birthday, can be delicious.
it might just be a phenomenon particular to these parts, here along the western shore of lake michigan, that great good lake, down close enough to where it turns and heads back up to the fruit side of the lake, over there in michigan, the place for which it’s named.
it might just be that here, nestled all around chicago, the city that loves its lake, the winds blow long and easy over all those miles of icy water and by the time they come to my house, by the time they swoop in unannounced through the screens, well, heck, it’s as if the winds had taken a cool bath. and, generous after all their travels, they share what they’ve acquired, they share the cold-lake souvenir.
they swirl and twirl and fill our rooms, our every pore, with what can only be winds worthy of rejoicing.
God bless the wind. God bless the puffy cheeks that blow the wind from up where cool is king, that knock the southern winds back from whence they came, where they can spend the summer baking cotton fields and making huckleberries ripen on the vine.
thank God for delectable delicious might-i-have-another-helping air.
growing up–and still–my mother, who studies clouds and reads the signals of the tree leaves, would announce, as if the house were catching fire, “cold front! get the windows.” which was clue to us, us who had been schooled at the foot of a cold-front watcher, to race around to every blessed window on the north side of the house, and usher in the almighty refrigerated winds that would finally break the heat that had us grumpy, maybe, and wishing we could perhaps strip off our skin. if that would cool us even one degree.
now, you might by now be shaking your tousled head. you might be saying, fools, why not crank the air conditioner?
well, for the most part, we were raised to think that all such artificial coolants were for the birds. or the weak. we toughed it out, with fans and windows letting in or keeping out the air that had been handed to us. as if God was up there shuffling the weather deck, and we got the ace of hearts, or a lowly two of clubs. and then we did what needed to be done until the shout went out, “cold front! get the windows.”
i’d have to say, in my blessed mother’s defense, it is not such a bad thing–it might even be a fine thing–to grow up paying attention to the wind. to grow up understanding that the air comes in flavors, and one of them, at least, is called delicious.
it is as if the wind, and the air that fills your lungs, is there quite boldly to remind you that just when you think you are at the end of your hot sweaty slithery rope, something mighty might be stirred, might come rushing in.
and in a flash, a flash that has no blinking lights, no blaring siren, but simply a sound like water over rocks, a quivering of the white underbelly of the leaves, you are delivered. from hot to cool. from barely breathing to sweetly taking in the lung perfume.
once again, the world reminds us, there is hope, and it’s coming in off the lake. crack the windows. crank the fans. it is ours to suck right in, into our rooms, our lungs, our soul.
the air’s delicious, and it always comes.

is there anywhere else out there where, without much notice, the winds can change, the hot-baked air can stir and suddenly you find yourself standing in an air bath? anyone else keep the windows cracked, even on the hottest nights, in hopes that while you sleep the wind gods will blow your way, and you’ll wake up needing to wrap yourself in at least a sheet, if not a blanket, like both my boys seem to have done during the sweetness of last night?

p.s. happy blessed birthday sweet andrea, a soulmate i bumped into on a cold and windy corner, and knew right away, would be a friend for life. how lonely would it be without another old mother down the block? although of course, to me, you are a young’n’. you’ll always be.

if only i had a periscope. i would take you right into the nursery, right into the apparently messy little chamber where mama and the babies keep up their ruckus all through the day, and into the night.
oh, dear, it is a sound so sweet, a chorus of baby peeps, lullabies perhaps, ’tis music to my flighted soul.
it is soft, just slightly louder than leaves rustling in the wind, more like mice playing with mice-like chopsticks. just the barest rubbing together of air and vocal cords. bird breath, with a message.
and now that the sci-fi cicada song is no longer, is barely, i am all ears taking in the sounds we hadn’t heard.
funny, i was busy missing the cicada chorus, that otherworldly whirring that spoke to me, it did, when i stepped out the front door and heard the barest brush of peeps.
i looked up. i cocked my ear. sure enough, the baby birds, the ones whose every move–at least all those on this side of the hole–i’ve kept close eye on, from here in the little room where i birth words.
back in february, it seems, i watched mama and papa sparrow darting here and there, trying out the hole and several others, trying to find just the finest place in which to upholster their obstetrical ambitions.
they must have liked the way it nestled in to the corner of the house. a safe cove, indeed. not like other nests i have watched empty one-by-one, because poor mama robin did not have the sense to move her babies out of striking distance of some harsh and hungry critter who did them in, one sadistic heartbreak at a time.
once the hole was theirs, once the “under contract” sign was posted, i watched them flitting in and out, for weeks and weeks, with straw and grass and cellophane strips, for heaven’s sake. and fluff, must be a whole pillow’s stuff of fluff in there. somehow.
you don’t know how much i wish i had a periscope. as is, i look like mrs. cratchett, up there on tippy-toes atop my ladder that isn’t tall enough, trying to get a teeny tiny peek inside what shall be called the peep hole, now that it’s alive and animated and very much a place of non-stop peeping, except of course when it’s naptime, which must come right after story hour, and milk-and-worm time.
yet again, i leap too quickly.
remember how one fertile day in may, right out my window, in the boughs of the serviceberry and the rhododendron (both lovely spots for mating, don’t you think), i watched, could not help but notice, as mama and papa did their baby-making all day long, right before my eyes, so long i wanted to go lift the weary mama, set her up in comfy armchair, give her icepack for her head, or other parts, as well?
it appears, from the peep of things, the deed was duly done, and we’ve a whole brood out there, just above the door, where one wall meets another, where it’s gotten rather messy, but i don’t mind, because i too have been a new mother, have been overwhelmed, have wondered how in the world i would ever get through the summer when i could barely manage to get through a day, stuck in my pajamas.
so i cut her slack. i sweep away the bits she drops flitting in and out with all those big cicadas dangling from her beak. no wonder those baby birds are making such a fuss. they, like all the other baby birds of the summer of ‘007, are spoiled little feathered things. they’ve all been richly fed on whole cicadas. and they are, most likely, expecting a whole life long of such unencumbered feasting.
well, baby birds, that party’s almost over. so, hush your crying, it’s back to worms, and simple spiders.
any day now, i am hoping, flying lessons will begin. then, i think, i will haul out my lawn chair and a lemonade. i will set up shop, and spend the days marveling at the miracles that chose to peep above the very door where i go in and out.
they remind me, with every blessed peep, that sometimes you must turn up your ears, to grasp the trumpet glory of all creation. sometimes the finest trumpet song comes on notes as soft as grass bending in the breeze.
it just might be the sound of God whispering.

is anyone else being serenaded by the baby birds? what other gentle notes lull you into holy contemplation? anyone else already miss the cicada whirring? isn’t it uncanny the way one joy fades away and another comes rushing in?

and by the way, the chair committee on all things technologic is attempting to record the bird peeps so you too can swoon along. only problem is the recorder has yet to be unearthed up there in the room that looks like kansas during twister season. a cyclone seems to have blown in and set all sorts of things aflying. stay tuned for peeps.

the story goes that when i was little i’d stay up all night during a road trip, just to see the cows.
in fact, i remember: nose pressed against the glass, crawling along the back seat of whatever was the family sedan, climbing helter-skelter over one brother or another. excuse me, i need to see the cows. i would moo at the window, hoping the cows might moo me back. my papa, i’m told, mooed right along.
now what in the world i was doing searching for nocturnal cows, i do not know. commonsense is not often a thread in family legend.
as i grew older it was a silo that became the object of my affection. though i don’t recall mooing at the window for a silo.
no, no, for the silo i had other plans. the silo i wanted to climb from the inside, to carry up my typewriter, to make a window, hang a simple curtain, and spend my whole life on a farm, typing and watching the world down below.
farms call me. farms are in my blood. one kentucky farm i never got to see. and a horse farm that wasn’t ours but that my papa knew; my papa grew up there. but, since my papa was not a raconteur, not about his boyhood, anyway, i do not have volumes of horse farm stories. only one or two.
when i plant my foot on farm soil, i feel something. it is rather like a vein is opened up, and something of the earth courses through me. i see the hard, back-breaking work, but i feel the poetry.
a farm is elemental. it is pure. it is loamy soil teeming with lessons worth sinking your hands into, getting muddy. it’s earth and sky, and hard-won curriculum in between.
it’s ancient. it’s eternal.
you cannot speed up the germination of a seedling. you cannot make it rain. but you can sow seed. and you can hope. and you can, God willing, make it on your own. feed yourself, your children, the good folk down the road. at least that’s the way it’s supposed to be. that’s the beauty and the tragedy all at once.
it is you and God, down on the farm.
you have entered, i do believe, into a holy equation that depends on sun and rain and soil. too much, too little, and all is lost. days and weeks and months of labor, of getting up at dawn, of sweat rolling down your nose and muscles aching. of praying. on your knees begging for the rain clouds to come on, to bring the benediction that just might be a quarter inch of rain.
it is, i do believe, a hands-on PhD in all the truths of life. you name it, it’s in the book. birth and death and resurrection, sometimes. anticipation. heartbreak. hallelujahs.
just last week, on a day i was blessed to turn my car down a gravel lane, where the corn gave way to a place called beauregards farm, i was out walking with a woman who is now a farmer and there, right before us where the queen anne’s lace was trampled, lay the head and the feathers of what had been one of her 23 “stepford chickens,” she calls them.
just like that, a weasel, she figured, came and snatched a bronze-feathered hen. she crouched down, the farmer woman did, stroked the feathers, cursed the weasel and then walked on. said she’d be back to bury the dear thing. it was just another moment on a farm.
heartache comes in spoonfuls all day long. you get used to heartache, i suppose, because you know there just might be a hallelujah around the next bend.
i worry that it’s what we’re missing, here in our saran-wrapped urban and suburban worlds. by the time the lessons come to us they’ve been rinsed, flash-frozen and packed in little boxes.
we don’t even know any more what a tomato is supposed to taste like. let alone the goosebumps when a weasel takes your hen.
my farmer friend took me ’round the corn crib, walked me up to ike, introduced me. ike is what you’d call a scarecrow, only she doesn’t, because ike is not there to scare the birds. not so much anyway.
“when i’m not cursin’ them, i’m blessin’ them”, she tells me, of the tug and pull that underscores so much of life, especially on a farm.
ike is there for the chickens. ike is dressed the way my farmer friend usually is. in bib overalls. only ike’s are 10 sizes bigger. and ike is there so the nosey chickens think the farmer’s there, where the broccoli and the pole beans and the eggplant grow.
were it not for ike and his too-big bibs, the chickens would poke around, pull out whatever just got planted, drive the farmer crazy. ike is there, not for scaring purposes, but to make the hens think they’re not alone.
i took a shining to big ol’ ike.
now, when i drift off to farmland in my sleep, i seem to dream of droopy-bottomed ike keeping company with the nosey hens.
i wish my backyard had room for ike. i wish my backyard rolled on and on, in tidy rows of whatever sun and rain and soil had set to reaching for the sky. i wish the world in which i lived was not saran-wrapped, but more earth-stained. i wish i knew the aching arms and legs at the long end of an even longer day. i wish, most of all, i lived the poetry that is the farm.
and i kinda wonder, too, what would happen if you mooed at ike.

anyone else out there yearn to sink your toes in farm dirt? anyone else believe in the poetry of the farm? ever notice how the farmers might know a thing or two that we’ve not even bothered to realize is mighty important? anyone else moo at a cow or a silo or a chap named ike, out standing in his field?

some mornings at the farmer’s market i get so hungry sifting through the dew-soaked bins of what’s just been picked, packed, bounced up the highway, i could sit right down and feast.

so far, seeing as i never bring a fork, i haven’t done so.

oh, i might nibble at a tip of asparagus, or pop a blueberry. but mostly i start dreaming. i concoct huge farm menus in my head. come up with ways to use every single green, and every single root, all at one sitting sometimes.

it is all so fresh, so spilling with what the good Lord intended, it feels like there should be some addendum commandment. a little asterisk. a footnote. thou shalt eat what is of the earth, as is.

taste the holy goodness that is the alchemy of soil and rain and sunshine. fill your every corpuscle. do honor to the creation that is you, and the creation that is earth.

silly as it sounds, that’s the way it feels to me. closest thing to communion i’ve ever slipped between my lips not at the altar rail.

it does feel sacred, what my farmer henry coddles from the earth down in congerville, in the mackinaw river valley where the land rolls in hills, and country roads make way for century-old oaks, not the way they do it here in the cities, where trees are felled willy-nilly, in the name of someone’s idea of progress. or just the easy way out.

down where henry grows, i suspect there are no easy ways out. and if there are, henry doesn’t take them. henry seems to me the noblest farmer. henry seems a farmer other farmers might learn from. the way cezanne learned from pissarro. the way those two dabbed paint on canvas and critics called it impressionism, and a whole new art was born.

yep, when i eat what henry grows it all feels holy. and for someone who has known her share of struggles with what i put between my lips, that, people, is nothing short of a praise-the-Lord, first-order miracle. a healing. not quite a dunking in the river, maybe. not a quaking in the aisles.

just a simple saturday supper, made of henry’s offerings, that goes down easy. that goes down with almighty joy.

i could eat henry’s mounds of earth-rich bounty 365 days a year, and snatch a bonus day, too, in leap years. if i had the knack and the time and the extra freezer to do so, i’d figure out a way to make that happen. as is, i make the most of henry’s growing months. and then i’ll pine all winter.

every saturday, when he pulls up his truck to the parking lot behind a chain hotel, wedged in by train tracks to the west and a research park to the north, not a mile-and-a-half from where i sleep, i am not yet rolling out of bed. it is 4 a.m., and he, like all the other farmers, is keeping farmer hours, is laying out his weekly harvest before the rooster crows good morning.

crate upon crate is hoisted, lifted, stacked. a veritable green grocer takes the slot that, come monday morning, will merely hold a chevy or a honda, key turned counter-clockwise, slipped into park.

i won’t be long. even though it’s the one morning i could sleep to, well, nine, i won’t. not even close.

henry’s amazing wall of lettuces, that’s what he calls the stretch that takes up as much room as probably five honda civics, henry’s wall is calling me.

oh, people, i wish and pray you too could taste what henry grows. i hope and pray there is a farmer close to you who grows like henry grows.

i never knew, not until henry, that a mesclun mix could taste just like a symphony sounds: full of varied notes, some spicy, some sweet. all with crunch and texture. some buttery soft. some ruffly, melt-in-your-mouthable. some sturdy little leaves, leaves with a backbone, i tell you. leaves with heft. oh, and charming little flowers too. right in with all the leaves. it is art in a bag, believe me.

i take home my bags of greens i’ve never cooked before. heck, sometimes not seen before. shiso leaves. baby choi. pea sprouts. greens with japanese names i couldn’t spell. not without a dictionary, anyway.

i take home scallions so fat and bulbous and pristine white, once you rinse the mud off, you’d swear they were an onion on a leash. nothing like the anemic skinny scallions in the grocery store, the ones that barely have a bump down where the green fades to white and the bulb is supposed to be.

on a really fine saturday night, like the one i had this weekend, i settle in the kitchen a good hour before i’m hungry. just to get my hands on all the goods that henry grew. just to invent ways to stir-fry this, grill that.

this week, it was the ruby-veined chard that got me going. i sliced a big fat onion, set it sizzling. rinsed, rough-chopped the chard, tossed it on the sizzled onions. poured a stream of fine balsamic vinegar, a syrupy blood-red drizzle from a bottle brought home from italy back before the aftermath of shoe bombs meant you couldn’t carry on a plane a balsamic vinegar that you couldn’t bear to leave behind.

i made such a mess of garden things–grilled asparagus, grilled onions, grilled portabello mushrooms. roasted baby beets, drizzled, again, with balsamic vinegar. sprinkled with thyme from henry’s sister, and sea salt, like my brother david taught me. i made a heaping salad. a heaping skillet of chard, and then, because it was there, chinese cabbage, too.

to pull it all together, i opened up a carton of farm-plucked eggs, duck and chicken and bantam, too, the hand-lettered carton label tells me. i scrambled them all up with the scallions.

and then i called the boys. oh, i wish i’d had a clanging dinner bell, the kind you find just outside a farmhouse door. instead, i used my lungs. they got the message. they came loping down for supper.

i cannot tell you they were quite as tickled by my grilled-wilted-scrambled feast. but i didn’t much notice. i was busy reaching for my fork.

as we all bowed heads, joined hands to say our grace, i thanked the Lord almighty for the miracle of henry and his fields, for the old truck that makes the trip, and for my great good fortune being fed, at last, at long last, through and through.

if only i’d known henry long, long ago. i do believe i’ve been hungry for what henry grows for years and years and years. and now, finally, i am sated.

how do you like to eat in summer time? do you find your produce bin spilling with things you can’t help but buy, and can’t eat fast enough? do you have a henry who harvests just for you? who fills your soul as much as your tummy?
by the way, if i had a recipe for my farm-scramble-heap-o-roots-and-greens, i’d share it. but i pretty much cook by heart when it comes to saturday farm suppers….

like that whole parade of the enchanted–santa, the easter bunny, the tooth fairy–she comes when you are sleeping.
she walks on her tippy toes. she tries, hard, not to get tangled in her web, the web of her own making. and the balloons, the blowing of balloons grows more breathless every year–she reports.
i mean i wouldn’t know. i just get these little scribbled notes, progress reports, in the morning, twice a year, june 22 and august 8, the days my boys were born, the days the fairy comes. in the night, of course. always in the night. while they are sleeping, dreaming birthday dreams.
when they awake–kaboom! kapow!–their whole chamber is awash in crepe paper and balloons (some blown fully, some not) and signs. oh, the signs. there are poster boards everywhere they look, in the closet, beside the bed. taped to lamps (beware the fire hazard), on the ceiling.
placards, signs, whole billboards, really. telling who was sleeping how very, very much he is loved.
by the birthday fairy, of course. it is all about the fairy leaving wisps of magic in her trail.
funny thing this year, perplexing thing, is that the birthday boy is often turning out his light well past his mama’s bedtime. not that his mama has anything to do with the birthday fairy or anything,
but, sheesh, one of us was really needing toothpicks to keep the eyelids propped last night, and the nearly 14-year-old just carried on as nearly 14-year-olds are wont to do these days. had some IM’ing to do. and a little browsing on the web.
while one of us was nearly stalking the door. just happened to have the annual load of crepe paper rolls stuffed in pockets, poster boards spilling down the stairs. balloons making that ol’ tattered robe look as if, well, anna nicole smith had moved in for the night. if you catch my drift there. (psst, in case anyone is counting, that there was a.n.s.’ second-ever mention here at the table; not bad considering the avalanche we are up against out there in the world of magazine rack culture.)
at last, when even toothpicks to the lids were failing, one of us had to knock at that teenage door, inquire insistently, “sweetheart, are you tired? do you think perhaps you would like to go to sleep?”
perhaps the dear thing had heard me pawing at the door, like some pathetic mouse. or perhaps my balloons had let out a telltale squeak.
whatever, as they like to say. he caught my drift, no thick-head birthday boy is he. he threw off the t-shirt, dove between the sheets. he feigned sleep quite nicely. accommodating fellow. always has been.
so while the teen pretended to be in dreamland, the one who does the draping and the taping on the eve of all the birthdays found herself oddly thinking how rather sort of sweet it was to finally wink and let him in on all the years of rustling in the dark.
you see, the birthday fairy first tapped on one of our bedroom windows long, long ago. when the big one, the one whose chin is now inches above the tippy-top of my head, was but a baby. a two-year-old, i am fairly certain.
for the life of me, though, i cannot quite recall exactly how it was that he awoke that first second birthday with his room a criss-crossed twisted web of crepe paper in every color, and balloons galore. hmm. perhaps it had something to do with the fact that, for years and years, that little curly-headed boy slept in my grandma’s nearly 100-year-old bed, a four-poster bed, a bed whose posts called out to be a crucial part of the birthday fairy’s twisted plot.
maybe it was the posts that called out for birthday decoration.
or maybe it was something deeper. a sense of blessing that exploded out of me like a birthday popper filled to bursting with confetti.
or maybe it was my from-the-get-go, hard-wired determination and desire to wrap that little boy in a love so thick and undeniable, the crepe paper and balloons and all the silly posters (nearly every one of which, a whole lifetime of mama-made naive art, are saved, tucked up high in the closet and the attic) just couldn’t help but pop from my ever-poppin’ head.
i do know this: the joy of watching little eyes awake, take in the wholeness, the all-enveloping sense that this morn was something special, and thus anointed, a day unlike any other day, well, that sold me on what will probably be a lifelong assignment stringing crinkly paper and increasingly-less-blown-up balloons on the eves of the days my babies were first cradled in my arms.
it is what a mother does. it is what this mother does. as i type, i wipe away the tears, the overwhelming birthday gift that never leaves me, no matter how many times it’s been unwrapped: all my life i prayed to be a mother. it wasn’t easy, not for me at least, getting to that delivery room. the whole time i was there i pinched myself, i checked to see if it was real, or just a taunting dream from which i would awake.
if it’s a dream, i never did wake up. so every year, i celebrate my gift, my extraordinary blessing, by climbing up the stairs, fully armed, equipped with all the makings of the birthday fairy who is more than thrilled to spend her wee wee hours stringing joy and hallelujahs from bedpost to closet door, from doorknob to window sill, and back again.
on and on i will string, no matter how big that log in bed grows to be. no matter how unconvincingly he pretends to be deeply sawing zzzzzs.
i will always be his mother. i will always be, don’t tell, his birthday fairy. on my hands and knees i drop, i say amen, amen, amen. and hallelujah.

funny thing, some times these words take turns i did not expect. that whole last bit came pouring out. i’ll let it be. that is the beauty of a meander. it’s fresh and raw. it is what it is. and i suppose it’s what it needed to be today.
how do you bless the days on which those you love were born? you tell me that, while i go grab a hankie…