Of Birdsong and Eggplant

I wake to birdsong: a five note trill that bounces up a fifth before repeating.  Sometimes, the bird drops down the scale and and bounces once or twice on a low note.  I rise, intending to learn the name of this bird who so willingly sings outside my window.

The sun is becoming more generous.  The wind is gentle and warm. 

Our seeds arrive in the mailbox bringing a sudden joy to the day.  Squints tears open the bag, begins separating “his” seeds from mine.  “Mom, they sent us eggplant.”  His face is disgusted.


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Prom Season

Robins wake me in the morning now.  My daffodils are ready to burst into bloom.  I have a feeling the peepers will be starting within the week. 

Spring is here. 

And that, unfortunately, can mean only one thing: It’s time to shop for prom dresses.

V drives us, carefully adjusting the seat for her five-two height before backing out of the drive and heading out to what she calls “new territory”—an area she’s never driven in before. 



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Leak

“It’s a cook’s instinct, Mom,” Squints explained, sprinkling a pinch of sugar over his pizza sauce.  “Kind of like a Jedi fighter going after Darth Vader.”  It was this same cook’s instinct that led him to add vinegar to his homemade ranch dressing last night. 

“That’s going to taste funny,” I told him. “The vinegar is going to separate the fat in the buttermilk.” 

Of course I was wrong.  The dressing was delicious.

But I noticed that Squints’ cook’s instinct failed him on the second night of our pizza bakeoff: His instinct didn’t tell him that that night he would blow up the pizza stone in my oven.



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Fenced In

It’s a beautiful, cloudless day.  The temperature is in the high forties and is expected to be in the fifties all next week.  My husband made his annual trek to the garage attic this morning, handing down posts and fencing and plastic containers.  This afternoon, after the sun begins to warm the back yard, Squints and I decide to put the garden fence up.

In this high-brow neighborhood, it’s a low-brow affair: Ugly metal fence secured with white twine to green posts hammered into the ground every three feet or so.  And I keep telling myself, as I do every year, I want to grow more; I want to do more; I want to have more land. 

I pause in my hammering and watch Squints tying the fence to a post.  Outside Cat pounces at the fence and grabs at the twine.  Squints laughs and cuts a new piece of twine.  “You’re not going to get over this fence, Cat,” he says.  “No more messing in the garden.”  He pauses.  “Hey, Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“Think I have any strawberries yet?”
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Pizza Cookoff

“Listen to this recipe, Squints,” I said.  “No-knead pizza dough that keeps in the fridge for days.  Tastes like sourdough.”  I began reading from the recipe printed in my Mother Earth magazine. 

He wrinkled his nose and grabbed his Bon Appétit.  “My recipe sounds better.”   He listed the various toppings: bacon, some cheese I’d never heard of, arugula, Brussels sprouts…

Squints has gotten to the point in his cooking where he considers himself an expert—certainly he considers himself a better cook than I: He’ll offer to add some spices to a soup I’ve been working on all day or he’ll tell me that I might add a bit of salt to the lentils.  Sometimes I find this endearing.  Often it irritates me. 

“Well, we should just have a pizza cook off,” I said.  “All week.  Then we’ll know who’s got the better recipe.”

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Ordered Lives

Well it’s midterm week in our neck of the woods.  Every day after I pick them up from school, my daughters begin studying for the next day.  One daughter goes to the basement and reads aloud until well after two in the morning.  The other one types frantically on her computer, trying to outline two quarters of work in an effort to remember all she has learned.  They’re stressed and grumpy beyond belief.

Squints decides this is the week he’ll cook: pad tai and Japanese fried chicken and wonton noodles stuffed and deep fried.

My husband’s been in London for a week.  He calls when he can, tries to diffuse the stress long distance; reassures the girls that they’ll do fine; everything will be fine; tells Squints he’s sorry he missed his dinner again.

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Christmas Past

Yesterday, our recently-adopted kitten officially became an outdoor cat.  There were a number of factors leading us to this decision: The stash of pooh I found two nights ago beneath the basement stairs two feet from the litter box; the copious amounts of cat urine on V’s mattress; Squint’s allergy flare up; the stealth attacks on the other unsuspecting cat; the jumping on the counters; the stealing of food from dinner plates.  Sometimes I get the feeling that this cat is Destructo back from the dead. 

Squints took him outside and re-introduced him to the great outdoors: He was a wild cat, born in the wild likely to a feral mother.  He took to being outside immediately.  He ran here then there.  He sniffed. 

He chased. 

He meowed. 

He ran away.

“Mom!”  Squints said.

“He’ll be back.”

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Goodbye, Friend

In the end, Destructo lived up to his name.

Every day, he tried to get into the trash to find something to satisfy his insatiable hunger.  He tore up the  basement carpeting.  He chased the cats.  He pulled the blankets from Squints’ bed to cover himself.  He tore holes in clothing.  He destroyed the acorn tree I’d grown from seed.

But we forgave him.  He was just a pup, after all.

And I say lived here, because this morning, Destructo was killed.  Correction: my husband and I had him killed.  Put to sleep.  Put down. 

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The Company of Strangers

Summer is still such a recent memory, I’d forgotten what it feels like to be cold.  But we’ve had no heat for over a week and I suddenly remember.  I wear double pairs of socks and shirts.  I wear a scarf and a hat and gloves in the house.  I’ve become like our fat orange cat who moves from window to window searching for a patch of sunlight slanting in through the window.  The tea grows cold in my mug before I’ve finished it and at night, the dogs pull the blankets from our beds and lie beneath, curled up into tight little balls of fur. 

* * *

Squints was in a cooking contest the other day.  Four groups of people received an identical basket of food and cooked it according to their time period:  The 1940s group used camp stoves.  The Revolutionary group cooked over an open fire. 

Visitors had to pay an entrance fee and, for an additional sum of money, could purchase one of a very limited supply of orange wrist bands that entitled the wearer to taste small samples of the food.  There were tiny Dixie cups, dessert-sized paper plates and a handful of plastic forks and spoons set out for that purpose.

The weather was cold and raw.  Besides my family—we were more or less obliged to be there—only one man showed up.  He wore a green down vest and a checked shirt and baggy blue jeans and boots.  His orange wristband was displayed prominently.  But nobody checked for it anyway.

Our money refused, we were invited to eat.  The small, limited samples of food became enormous.  Instead of a teaspoonful of chicken soup and half of a Brussels sprout, we ate the equivalent of two meals there, moving from century to century with abandon, tasting a bit of chicken cooked in a reflecting oven and moving on to chicken and dumplings.  We tasted squash and scalloped potatoes and Johnny cakes and biscuits.  We ate cabbage with sausage and apples; we ate eggs and sausage; we ate an apple and onion tart.

Besides their obvious love of cooking, historical cooks love to talk: They want to educate the public; they want to talk about the methods historical cooks used.  Food historians like to connect the past to the present.  Most of all they like to connect to people.  Having no one else with whom to talk, they talked to us: Staffers talked to us about the weather and the history of the place; a husband of a staffer, dragged along to help, talked to us about sports; a tag-along husband of a woman from the 1600s plopped down in the folding chair next to my husband and talked about trying to sell his house and moving to Kentucky, absently scratching his knee beneath his woolen pants.

In that room heated only by cooking fires, we ate the food of strangers and listened to the cooks exchanging ideas.  We learned how a turkey feather makes a superior baster; We learned how to make a whisk from twigs; We learned how to tell the temperature of roasted chicken by touch; We learned how to cook rice inside a pumpkin. 

The caretaker came from his apartment with his own plate—a large wooden plate—upon which he heaped chicken and sausage and potatoes.  A cat jumped into my lap and started knitting.  “That there’s Albert,” the caretaker said.  “Just showed up one day.  He’s real friendly.  Not like Yellow Cat.”  He put a piece of chicken in his mouth.  “Yellow Cat’s been here two years and still won’t let me get near him.”

Someone set a plate of chicken on the floor.  Albert jumped from my lap and began eating. 

“We got a cat needs adopted out—a drop off,” the caretaker said.

 “We have a cat,” I said.

“Tried to take him to the shelter, but he’s just a little bit of a thing.  They told me that at his size, they take ‘em in the front door and haul ‘em out the back.”  He shook his head.  “I’d hate to see that happen.  He walked to the door and paused there.  “Wanna’ see him?” 

“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to see him.”

“Cat likes to sleep on yer head,” the caretaker said.  “Keeps me warm all night.”

Perhaps it was the thought of warmth that made us do it: We took him home. 

* * *

We’re having tile installed in the basement this week.  We had to remove everything and bring it upstairs.  It’s disheartening to see how much stuff we’ve accumulated.  It’s embarrassing, seeing it stacked up around the perimeter of each room.  We’ve reacquainted ourselves with things we’d forgotten.  We’ve made plans to get rid of things we don’t need. 

The tile guys showed up and I led them the basement.  I split up the animals: One dog is relegated to the garage; another to a cage.  There’s a cat locked in one bedroom; the second in another.  The hamster, displaced from the basement, is now in the dining room, running a hundred miles to nowhere on his wheel. 

I apologize to the tile guys for the lack of heat.  I show them the bathroom and offer coffee, which they refuse.   

They prop open the screen door and leave the front door open, which I keep shutting when I know they’re done cutting tile for a while, not to be rude but because there’s a chill in the air and a wild cat with her four kittens roaming the neighborhood.

I do not speak the language of these men.  I wonder, listening to their easy laughter, their chatter, their occasional singing along to the radio they blast in the basement, what they’re talking about.  Yet, I cannot bridge the gap that divides us.

I feel I’m in their way.  I hide off in a corner, try to be unobtrusive.  For the moment, this house is theirs.    I take my lunch in the dining room so they do not see me eat.  They eat their lunch in the van, the ignition turned on for the radio and the heat.

I look forward to having my house quiet and in order again.  But even more so, I look forward to the heat.  Because a little patch of sunlight in the window is only so warm, and eventually, it disappears. 

Besides, the cats have already taken the best spots.

A Lot of Treasure

“It’s too early to pick out pumpkins,” Filibuster groused.  “I’m busy.”

“Yeah,” V added.  “It’s hardly fall, anyway.”

“It’s a nice day,” my husband said.  “Besides, if we go early in the season, we’ll avoid all the crazies.  Let’s go.”

We piled in the car and drove to the patch we went to last year.  I remembered it as a modest patch; hidden away from the crowds with only a few touristy items here and there: a flyer advertising a haunted house somewhere nearby; a goat and a cow you could pet; owners who would talk with you; a field you could actually walk into.

“Form two lines,” I read aloud as my husband pulled into the patch.  “I don’t remember that.”  I continued reading.  “Two dollars to park.” 

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Falling

“Mom?”  Squints shouted down the stairs, even though he knows we have a rule in this house against shouting.

“What?”  I shouted back up the stairs.  I was busy crocheting; crocheting a hat to go with the scarf I made him last week.  After that I’d have to make hats to match the scarves I’d made my daughters two weeks ago.  I took up my crocheting again and began counting stitches to see where I’d left off. 

“You know how my glasses are always slipping off my nose ever since Zoe crashed into me?”

“Yeah?”

“They just slipped off.” 

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The Gathering Time

Tonight

Night falls gently as my husband and I walk the dogs this evening: The last of the lightning bugs flash lazily.  Clouds gather thick and close.  Water rushes along the sides of the street, but for now, the rain has passed.  From the trees, the katydids sing and respond; sing and respond a harsh percussive three note tune while the crickets offer a gentle lullaby from tall grasses.

Autumn is a time of gathering up: a time for the bringing in of the harvest.  It’s a time for shaking the sand from one’s feet and for folding up the beach towels; a time for exchanging flip flops for sturdy shoes and backpacks. 

Autumn is a time to gather in one’s family; to sit extra long at the dinner table, exchanging stories of the day; a time to see the yellow glow of lights in the windows of other houses and know that they, too, have gathered together.

The sun reels in her arms of gold a bit earlier every day; lazily casts them out a bit later; a bit closer every morning.  But it’s too early in the season to tire of the darkness: the change is welcome; comforting; new.

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Twenty Minutes More

“How many more minutes to the bottom?”  A woman gripped her daughter’s hand.  The girl’s knee was mildly bloodied, the result, I was certain of a fall against rock.

I looked at my husband.  “Twenty minutes?”

He nodded.  “Yeah, about that.”

By all rights, we, too, should’ve been heading down the mountain at that hour.  At three o’clock in the afternoon, we were pointed in the wrong direction.

People climb Cadillac Mountain for a variety of reasons: Some attack the mountain, seemingly wanting to prove something to themselves or the other climbers, running up as fast as they can, stabbing feet and cleats and ski poles into the face of the mountain.  Others leisure their way up; stopping here and there to snap pictures of Bar Harbor posing prettily amid colorful boats in Frenchman’s Bay.  Some people, clearly ill, stagger and huff and crawl up the mountain, refusing the hand of a sister or a son waiting patiently a few steps ahead, and it’s these people who I hope make it to the top. 

But this day, we hurried up the mountain.

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Eyes in the Clams

Six years ago, on our first trip to Maine, we went to a restaurant that came recommended by the locals.  We like these sorts of places: You know the food and the service will be good.  Plus, we like to act as if we belong; as if we’re in the know; as if we’re, above all, not tourists. 

This restaurant was really more of a shack than a restaurant and it specialized in fried clams.  It was a dive, but sometimes the worst-looking places turn out to be the best, so we remained stalwartly hopeful. 

We went into the dining room and discovered that all eight of the tables were full of the memories of previous diners: stacked plates, empty corncobs, piles of clamshells, a forlorn-looking exoskeleton of a lobster that an hour before had been swimming in a tank labeled: Caution.  Keep hands out. 

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Fragile

“Do you want some chicken feet for the dog?”  The owner of the farm where we’d rented our cabin nodded at Destructo.  “We’re slaughtering Thursday.” 

“Do you do the butchering yourself?”

He gave a satisfied nod.  “We used to pluck by hand until we were able to make a plucker.” 

Although the farm was hundreds of miles from home, we found we shared a connection: The owner sold wool to a highbrow place near our home; a sterile place whose shoppers, I was sure, wouldn’t give a moment’s thought to the farm and the people and the animals that had produced that wool.  Thus connected, we were invited to gather the eggs from the chickens just outside our cabin; to visit the turkeys and the pigs and the sheep.  We could pet the goats and the horses used to plow the fields.  We were free to milk the cow, provided we got up early enough.  And, of course, the hundred acres were ours to explore.

And we explored with abandon: We passed a hundred-year-old farmhouse and went on to the pigpen where baby durocs no bigger than our—admittedly fat—cat ran round the pen en masse while their mother looked on wearily.  A pasture down, there was another pig, sequestered from a lamb and a couple of horses by a wire fence.  Drying on a wooden fencepost was the horned scalp of a goat.  Here and there, where the rocks would allow, were patches of garden: Scallions and tomatoes and lettuces to the right; Further down the path a bed of peas and green beans, still in season in August.

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With Peaches...

With peaches, it’s easy to get carried away.

Noon and it’s already ninety degrees.  The exhausted air seems unable to support itself.  Here and there, it will appear to wrinkle under the weight of all that heat.  A tree will ripple and I’ll catch myself blinking, staring, testing my vision, or perhaps my sanity.

Across the street, the neighbors' Yorkshire terrier is wearing a tiny red jacket with black straps and silver buckles, languishing beneath the shade of a sweet gum tree. 

And if that dog dreams, surely he is dreaming of growing—growing so big, he bursts out of his little red jacket with black straps and silver buckles—growing so huge, he can exact revenge, rounding up his owners, dressing them in red woolen coats with black and silver buttons and setting them upon the front stoop.

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'Fessing Up

Well, Filibuster and V are at work.  Squints is in the kitchen making chocolate chip cookies, fiddling with the recipe—adding a little of this and a little of that—experimenting to see if he can improve it or, perhaps, make the recipe his own. 

I’m OK with this tinkering. My only requirement is that he run the new ingredients past me first.  Sorry, but I cannot tolerate cilantro in my chocolate chip cookies, even if it is organic. 

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Fifteen Dollar Mistakes

“What do you want me to get, Mom?”  Squints grabbed a cart and wheeled it to the produce section.

“A couple of pounds of cheese for sandwiches.”  My kids live on grilled cheese during the summer.  For each sandwich she makes, V puts on four slices of cheese.  And she’ll eat two sandwiches for lunch.

“Snacks?” He waggled his eyebrows at me and grinned.   

They also live on snacks.  Unhealthy, expensive snacks that disappear minutes after they enter the house.  “A bag or two.  We’re on a budget.”

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Competition Over Blueberries

As soon as we hit the blueberry patch, the kids disperse:  Filibuster stealthily cases the entire patch until she finds the best row from which she picks only the choicest berries.  V disappears, watching people between branches, planning film scenes in her head, disdaining the people around her for their very humanity in the same way she so often distains herself.  And Squints?  When he finds a really good bush, he’ll shout out for the entire world to hear, “Mom! Dad! Come look at these berries! They’re amazing!”  But I won’t respond to his summons, not immediately.  Because I feel it’s my duty to pick a bush clean.  Even if there are other berries down the row that are perhaps a bit plumper, I can’t move on until I’ve gotten  all possible berries from the bush.  My husband stays beside me.  He claims it’s because I’m an expert, that he needs my guidance, but I think that he just wants to protect me from those dangerous blueberry-throwing men sometimes seen at this particular patch.  He picks slowly (he calls it deliberately), enjoying the nature that surrounds him.  We’ll pick in silence, listening to the birds and the conversations that float by as people head out to stake their own claims.

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Hard Labor

So on Tuesday, my husband and I lassoed Squints and V into helping us with our yearly service at our community garden.  For the second year in a row, Filibuster escaped the event, as she had to go to work. 

We pulled in and parked.  In the distance, we heard the tractor in one of the fields.  D, one-half of the farm partnership, met us at the barn, wearing sandals and a floppy hat.  She was deeply tanned and, I could tell, deeply happy with her circumstance, despite the long hours and the backbreaking work her job required.

We heard a car on the gravel drive.  D nodded.  “There’s the rest of the work party.”  A man walked up eagerly, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder.  “They’re coming.”  His wife and daughters approached at a more leisurely pace, as if not so sure about the whole thing.  The daughters had long, thin, tanned legs and were carefully made up for the occasion.

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