la femme follette

je demeure

This day has been long, full of waiting for the refrigerator repairman, mostly, but also feeling as if the sound of my voice makes people deaf.  Or that maybe I am going crazy or something, that when I say to a child, "Can you go to the kitchen and get the orange bag on the counter?"  for that child to ask "What bag?  Does it say Whole Foods Market on it?  Is there anything in it?  What?"  etc, it makes me just out of my mind, immediately, because it seems to me that if the child could just move one goddamn muscle to the kitchen that when they got there they would see that there is only one orange bag on the counter.  Just one.  The one I mean.  Go!  Look!  Stop talking to me about it!  What is no country I ever heard of!

Then, the refrigerator repairman came.  He asked for me to tell him the problem.  I told him that the thing (that I waved at him, the part) broke off of the icemaker and it is broken, not just dismantled, so it seems like we need the entire assembly replaced.

He nodded, wrote something down in his book, then looked into my freezer and said, "Oh, that whole thing came off. I am going to need to give you a new one."  It was so strange, as if I had not just said the exact thing right before.  I do not know.  It is so bizarre, this invisibility from which I seem to be suffering.  He seemed to be listening.  Maybe he was just staring at my tits.

Anyhow, the point is that it was a long day with the children, with the world, and after a mostly-successful mealtime endeavor presented jointly by my son and me, I wanted to decompress a little with the internet and a stupid cup of tea.  Stupid, because I really would rather have a glass of bourbon.  Alex-- who is always just right, even when he and I are just texting the shit back and forth -- set me on the right path with a Beatles kick in the pants. 

I wanted to write about Hot Playground Dad, who is just that, the seditiously attractive dad I met on the playground 3 years ago -- great kids, lovely wife, nice guy -- who makes me lose my internal cool such that I a. fall down or b. drop everything in a spectacular shit everywhere fashion every single time I encounter him.  It is not for any reason anyone can figure out, including Mari, who has seen it with his own eyes and just laughs at me later. 

But, listening to the Beatles, I got a little distracted, and I wanted to read more first, before I embarked upon this journey, and clicking through my bloglines folder was not hitting the spot.  Everything was so tidy, or business-oriented, or smiley or whatever.  Or, at the other end of the spectrum, a shameless wreck, not anyone I would ever want to know, and steeped in defiance for no reason, like a child (hallo, Ayelet Waldman).  I really wanted to read about the gal who lost her temper and was unable to resist the impulse to destroy the children's toys to make a point about property rights, or who was selfish because she knows that if she gives her children everything, they will never repay her and then she will have nothing, or the frankly unhinged ramblings of a lunatic who could no longer bear the reverberations of her naughty girlhood, plus loves everyone, and plus plus needs a. a nap and b. a yoga class, just as soon as she finishes a mighty domestic task , oh, plus, look at how this shit got effed up due to faulty instructions or lack of attention, seventeen photos of time, gloriously wasted.

I was sulking and clicking and hating my cup of tea and wanting everyone's everything to be different, more variant, more messy and lifelike, not so matchy-matchy or sloven's-slutty, not without major flaws, but also not without a little ambition to be better, and then I realized, Oh, I write that weblog.  That's mine, it's me.  And it just ... it made me feel so alone, like am I weak and selfish and -- as the Israeli will tease me -- just made of pure id, so there is no one else who identifies with Jules Winnfield in their parenting frustrations or who uses the f-word or wants her children to grow up and yes, yes, yes, leave her alone, or cries for an entire week because her friends won't live forever, which is of course obvious, but it is the process of the weakening of life's bond which is painful, very much more than the outcome.  Or is it that I am the only one willing to write about it and set it down for the whole world to see in black & white, that maybe I just do not give a fuck? Maybe. Despair, with gardening, some desultory baking, and an uncertain optimism. What the world needs now.

Any old way.  We got an excellent box from Blick today.

I get my school supplies in July, for it is when I begin thinking about curriculum, and I am unable to discern one thing in the world without a Rhodia pad on which to write a list using a staedtler triplus fineliner.  10 black, five red.  I am keeping the packing slip so that when Mari tries to tell me he bought his own staedtler triplus fineliners at the Staples, I can tell him where to go. 

The rest of the box is all supplies for Alicia Paulson's papier maché birds, freezer-paper stenciling, Artistick hijinks, and watercoloring our faces off.  Also, I bought Garçon a three-dollar pencil for drawing.  THREE DOLLARS.  I know! 

do it for Johnny

Oh, my baby's shoulders used to be so beautiful.

They are resting today in our makeshift sunburn ward.  Chagrined by the pain & consequences of their carelessness, they rather glumly offered that they would like to stay home from the pool today to recover their skin.  I tend to overtreat everything anyhow (when Fille got her ears pierced, I banned all sugars and made her take a nap every day for 6 weeks, "so she could heal"), so am glad they want to lie around & listen to audio books (Mrs Piggle Wiggle's Farm) & put icy compresses on each other just so. 

I am grievously annoyed by this. How am I supposed to run an infirmary on two sticks and one foot?  Anyhow, this is like being in some kind of MASH unit, the way everything is kind of balanced in the room & all the ice for the compresses has been brought up in a cooler.  By one of the patients!  This is no way to get well!  For any of us!  What kind of infirmary makes you fix yr own lunch?  I feel like we have to draw lots to see who can rest next!

gratia plena

Our children are on a long leash.  I do not know if I would describe them using the au courant term free-range kids, but they are definitely less hamstrung than their peers.  I think a lot of this is because we have more time, because of our domestic dynamic -- more agrarian in style than post-industrial -- where we have the luxury of time with them for homekeeping and the other tasks of salary-earning support.  They are right within 10 yards of me nearly all the time, which gives me clarity in assessing their strengths and readinesses for independence.  Also, the things they are allowed to do independently mirror things they have been doing all along.  It is like independence training.  Small steps.

This summer has been a huge change, maybe not as baby-steppy-intro as I would have liked, because of my brokenness.  This will be the summer they remember, whether as good or bad, time will only tell.  For example:  today they both got a bad sunburn while at the pool.  Bad.  I mean, in my opinion, it is not the world's worst sunburn, but I am not the one lying wanly on the fold-out sofa with icy compresses on my back. 

How did they get this very first sunburn?  Well!  I told them this morning to get themselves ready for the pool & also do not forget sunscreen.  They did not, but they each failed to ask the other to do their back and so their shoulders are not well.  Burned.  They will definitely remember it and are unlikely to ever make this error again.  Is time to live & learn, babies.

Garçon is cooking!  He has long been aching to cook, and I just could not.  While I am happy to engage the Socratic method homeschool all the livelong day, cooking is too, uh, at once technical and also boring to me.  Or something.  Trying to oversee the child cooking, just, ugh.  Some of the conflict comes from him not wanting to be corrected and me not wanting him to get hurt.  Then, reasonably, comes the point in the face-off where he postures that if I know so much, I should just do it myself, and I of course say FINE, because who has been doing it all this time anyhow?  I am never happy with the way these afternoons end, and knew something would have to happen to bust up the dynamic.  Or, just bust up my ankle, har har. 

So, today, it was his job to remove a baking sheet from the oven, turn the vegetable patties, then return it to the 400-degree oven.  He somehow found himself (I was not in the kitchen) juggling a half sheet pan in one hand and a spatula in the other, in front of the hot, open oven, and burned his thumb.  Oh, well.  He assures me he will elect more carefully next time.  The funny thing is that had I been in the kitchen, I would have said, "First things first!" and he would have grumbled and I would have complained, and status quo and anyhow, the burn on his little thumb has been majorly upstaged by the sunburn.

I can not detail on the interwebs for just anyone to see without a trace the things the children have been doing out-of-doors, the privileges and accountability they have been granted -- exciting things!  Important things!  Things none of their friends get to do!  Things about which Mari & I have said, "Will you two be comfortable doing [this] alone?"  Every time it is something they have been doing all along right alongside of us, so they know how it goes, but now they will have the challenge of doing it while managing being by themselves in the world.  And their faces go quiet & nervous before they agree, hesitantly, and then they leave together, cautiously confident (and always hand-in-hand, like Hansel & Gretel) before returning all LOOK AT WE DID IT!  OH WOW!

Mari and I would be more excited if we were not in the back of our minds afraid that some meddlesome know-it-all would call the authorities because in America, children must be endlessly supervised by a parent or nanny or school administrator within arms' reach at all times until one day they are given a drivers' license.  It seems so silly. 

The point is this:  no one in the family wanted to see the third stupid Ice Age movie, except my sweet boy.  We were sad to tell him that really, we just ... ugh.  No.  He came back a little while later, "Mom, do you think that I could go see it by myself?"  Oh, um, och.  Uh ... no?  I don't know.  Um.  Ask me later.  Again, ok?

Today, I was lying around at the pool after my attempt at a suitable working out (AquaJogging round the diving well for one hour is not any kind of replacement for my usual grueling sorties, broken foot or not) and thinking about the burn from cooking & all their little errands and how much my little boy very much wants to see that blasted 3-D movie, and in a theatre we know quite well and in our neighborhood, in fact, and I want him to be able to see it, if only his sister wanted to see it, also, they could go together and stay together...

What came to me of course (of course!) was Frank O'Hara's delightfully nervy and daring and sharp, "Ave Maria," which of course starts plaintively, Mothers of America/let your kids go to the movies! and ends with don’t blame me if you won’t take this advice/ and the family breaks up/ and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set/ seeing/ movies you wouldn’t let them see when they were young.

I have long  wanted to love the poem for its shocking verve, but was at the same time never really sure of what to think of it!  Now that I am here where it is relevant, it makes me laugh and also surprises me that it makes me say, "Yes!"  Mari scoffed, because of all the poem says in the middle, and pointed out, "You don't let Garçon use the men's room by himself." But the poem does not say I should let him go to the men's room! It says "go to the movies" and that is what he wants to do! Convenient, that, and I say yes! Now is the time! Always with parenting him, not Fille, but always him, where to go next always feels sudden to me, but also always certain & sure.  Like falling from a bike.

cinema. cereal.

I was complaining the other day that Easy Rider made no sense to me.  Surely it is because I am too young.  I know that recently I was mapping out for my husband ("mapping out" is an overstatement, he is not stupid, but I cannot think of a lesser term) why Kids Today do not grok, and moreover are horrified by, Heathers.  ("Columbine," I said to him.  "Sea change.") 

Anyhow, the point is that my Pilates trainer has a son who is just 18, who I see frequently because the studio is in their home.  He always seems nice and deferential, but something was always not-quite-aligned, and then the very last time he and I encountered each other, I realized Omigod, he hears the bamp-chicka music when he sees me!  Ahahahaha.  I'm old enough to be his mother!  Ahahahahahaha!

Then I was thinking about how funny & ridiculous that was, but then also not, because he does not see me as old enough to be his mother, even though I am twice his age, because his mother is 20 years older than I am.  All his friends' mothers, too, surely.  Then, then, I was thinking of how in a few years, The Graduate will be somewhat puzzling -- at least in the Mid-Atlantic states, since it seems the kids today have parents who are about 60 already when they graduate from high school.  So, yeah.  Wild! 

Also, so many from the 20th-century of entertainment are just falling down dead!  Karl Malden!  Michael Jackson!  Farrah Fawcett!  Fred Talaveras!  Ed McMahon! I wonder who will be next, for time marches on.  (If you were ever on The Love Boat, watch out!)

My own son is catching on and growing up and maybe someday soon will be very politely ogling acquaintances of mine many years his senior.  Right now, I would just appreciate him marching on, which is a skill we are marshalling, this ability to follow instructions without a lot of cheeky backtalk and hairsplitting. 

His disobedience reminds me of the scene from The Incredibles, when Elastigirl is all "DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW," and Violet is all, "But you said that I would know better than you what we should do in an emergency, so I am going to TALK AND TALK AND DEFY YOU AND KNOW BETTER THAN YOU UNTIL THE HELICOPTER GETS HIT." It is not that we are being attacked by missles, mais non, but of course I am also not reneging on house rules. I am nothing if not a model of consistency in parenting. Hence, the shouting and maternal resentment. Honestly.

Oh, children are exhausting.  Good god.

But, now Garçon can make granola, and that is why we have decided to let him live here a little bit longer.

For a long time I searched for an acceptable granola recipe.  Oh, plenty of them were acceptable for homemade granola, but none of them were good.  I wanted to make granola at home like the stuff I bought in the store, but not like the stuff I bought in the store, because it was not homemade.  (I am aware of the fact that the sentence prior makes me seem like a goddamn lunatic.)

I wanted a granola that was sweet and toasty, a little clumpy, and also fatty, without being greasy.  Kind of like Cracker Jack, but wholesome, like hippie chicks might feed their kids for breakfast.  I used everyone's recipe, from all of my books -- Mark Bittman, Nigella Lawson, Mollie Katzen, Joy of Cooking -- I tried recipes from the internet pointed out by girlfriends, and while every batch of every product was surely edible, it was never what I wanted.

The last thing I did before I rode my bicycle to my destruction was make a batch of granola from Alton Brown's recipe, more or less, which I had long known about, but had not used, for how many disappointments must I bear?  I noticed, though, sifting through stuff on my desk last month (before my crash, I was very summertime-busy for a major reörg/redesign of our home), that there was not any toasting of the grains and nuts prior to the mixing & the baking.

I think I might have come to this, eventually -- the not-toasting -- on my own, if I had any tolerance for playing mad scientist in the kitchen, which I do not.  Or, I might have come to it in a fit of refusing-makework pique (because there is enough to do!).  Not toasting makes perfect sense for turning out the product I sought, though not for one reason I can articulate.

After one hour, it turned out very close to what I had always wanted, and I left it out to cool and rode off to crash my bicycle.

If the recipe were accurate in its estimation of time, my ankle & foot would be whole today.  (I would just fuck it up some other, less-convenient time, surely.) Within 5 minutes after I left, it was pouring down rain, and surely would have taken the car to the farmers' market. If the recipe were accurate in its estimation of time, my son would not have had the challenge of granola put to him.

It is a perfect recipe for a baby-learner in the kitchen, for it is just opening the right bags of ingredients and measuring them out.  The baking part is perfect-novice stuff, too.  Opening and closing the oven to take out the sheets and stir the cereal gives good practice in standing clear and making a habit of arming oneself with oven mitts.  A 250-degree oven is hot enough to burn, but not the worst burn ever, and also is not so furnace-of-hell punishing to stand over and reach into.  If the worst should happen -- he should burn himself, or have carelessness sliding the sheets in and out -- the upset of a tray full of cereal is not the worst cleanup this house has seen. 

Granola, for teaching a 10-year-old to cook.
(adapted ever-so-slightly from the recipe of  Alton Brown)

Preheat oven to 250 degrees.

Combine 3 cups rolled oats, 1 cup slivered almonds, 1 cup cashews, and 3/4 cup shredded, unsweetened coconut with 6 tablespoons evaporated cane juice.

Whisk together 6 tablespoons maple syrup and 1/4 cup coconut oil.

Add oats & nuts to syrup & oil.  Mix and mix.

Pour onto a half sheet pan lined with parchment.  Stir every 20 minutes or so for about an hour, or, as Mari hates to see any recipe read, cook till done. 

Remove from oven; layer in one cup of dried fruit/fruit pieces.  (We like cherries.) 

If you are a grownup person, you can throw in a handful of chocolate chips before pouring on the milk.  Explain nothing.

hamburgers

Man, having a broken whatever is hard!  It takes me hours just to get up and get showered & get my contacts in and everything.  Not least of all because I have to rest between every step.  Then I have to make certain I have everything before I head downstairs to make tea.  Because I do not want to go back upstairs once I have gone downstairs.  There is an accounting of every step that has to happen and oh.

It is not the going up and down the stairs per se, it is that I do not use the crutches but instead crabwalk up and swing myself down, so have to drag the crutches along, or have a child ferry them to me and, ok enough, this is tiresome to recount & (I would imagine) to read.

I was lying on the second-floor landing, just on the floor, a few days ago, waiting for Fifille to bring my crutches.  She leaned them on the bookshelf next to me & went into their playroom.  I kept lying there, and she came out after a while to ask if I was all right.  I told her I was just feeling sad, not sad that I had to crawl up the steps or whatever, but just sad that I was broken, that I felt interrupted & frustrated. 

She knelt by my shoulder and told me she knew exactly how I felt, that she felt the same when she broke her arm.  I told her that I remembered her feeling that way, but having never broken myself, I had no idea how she was feeling, and now I do.  It was sweet, and it would not have happened with my whole unbroken foot. 

I try to not be too sad or cranky, and mostly it works out.  Unless I get hungry.  If I get hungry, it is all over and much screaming can happen.  Mari observes that it is much like when I was pregnant, where by the time I notice I am hungry, it is too late to escape the raving & shrieking.  I guess it is the rebuilding happening?  Ravenous, is all I know. 

I do have to schedule a little time in every day to cry, like Holly Hunter in Broadcast News.  There is just too much happening and so much of it is slow and the torture of the innocents and I have to be kind & painstakingly informative to children who say "What?" in reply to every instruction which makes me so angry, it just shorts out my goddamn brain just exactly so very much like Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction & I have to just maintain self-control & not make everyone miserable, so I just keep quiet (except about being hungry). 

But I am getting better, faster on the crutches, and by the end, perhaps I will be sliding down the banister!  (Say what again!  I dare you!  I double dare you!) 

wendy witch world

These dahlias are free, at this point.  Dahlias are not supposed to overwinter here, the conventional wisdom is that you are supposed to dig them up and ... fuck if I know how that instruction ends, because that is when I cast aside the instructions.  I cannot be bothered with a plant that needs special treatment, and obviously, these do not, since they have come back every single year.  I do not like Garden-y or Kitchen-y Makework, who the fuck needs to make work in the kitchen or the garden?  There is not enough to do already? I would rather save all that fussy, frilly, artisan's can-do, perfectionist's slavering for the fucking bedroom. Ok, I am just saying.

What the hell were you doing in the garden with your decimated ankle joint and your overused shoulders? is what a reasonable person would ask.  Digging up comfrey root, I would answer.  I wanted to make a comfrey root poultice and since I have the plant & a sassy cred in gonzo herbalism, I went out there and hacked away in the dirt looking for it. 

Why the fuck did you not ask yr able-bodied husband to do that?  ARP would ask.  Mind your own goddamn business, I would respond. 

Sometimes, it is more work to talk about something than it is to just crawl around on the ground and do it.  After I dug it up and threw the root chunks behind me, over & over, Mari picked it all up & took it in the house & washed it for me & cleaned the food processor (rr-rrr-rrrr-rr) when I was finished.  I put the poultice all over my foot & ankle, wrapped it back up in its fracture strap-on guy, hobbled around for a little bit, took my crutches out for a spin to go talk to a neighbor.  When I came home & washed if all off before bed, it was like someone had erased the bruising.  All that was left was a just a very faint rose-colored outline of a stain. Obviously, I was taking photos of the wrong thing on Sunday.

I had the camera with me in the yard because we had just come home from a Fathers' Day outing to a minor-league baseball game & I did not waste any steps going to the house from the car first.  Navigating a sporting stadium was pretty much the definition of Doing Too Much.  I fell to the ground and trying to make my way back to the comfrey -- which is one plant in from the margin of the garden -- I was literally swatting dahlias out of the way crossly -- God, if these weedy, what are these, red, oh, so thickety, hey! -- before I realized it was my bonus bloom.  Awesome.

I ventured out to the backyard to check on the vegetables today; nothing back there -- beans, a couple of squashes, cucumbers, 2 tomatoes, kale, nasturtiums -- is really growing very seriously.  Also, the god damned squirrels keep eating the sunflower seedlings. But I cannot be worried about it anyhow this summer.  Bloom, don't bloom; fruit, don't fruit.  It is as much trouble for me to get around the backyard as send my family to the farmers' market, so whatever.

Good things are happening, as I predicted.  Well, maybe. I tell the children to do things. I do not actually know if they ever do the things I ask because I mostly take naps and have dreams about eating candy bars.  Never since I was pregnant have I been so ravenous as since this accident!  (God, syntax, why do you never help me!!)

les bleus

Last year, when the baby broke her arm, it came out that I had never broken a bone.  Know why?  As I told the fashionable Ms Minty the other day, it is because I do nothing which might injure me. 

That is not exactly true, strictly speaking.  But it is true that I eschew the terribly risky sportmaking of the world, of which I knew bicycling in this town at my age was.  Is.  Whatever.

So, anyhow, this is kind of endlessly gruesome and fascinating for me, to be so broken & damaged & dinged.  Banged-up.  Aside from an accident during sex c. 1994, nothing has ever happened to me, really.  Except that this ankle has been sprained over & over again.  It is quite a bother and somewhat of a major betrayer.  This is the limit, however. 

The new orthopaedist, the foot & ankle specialist, came into the exam room while I was photographing the ugly bruise that evidenced itself beneath the road rash.  I sheepishly tucked the camera away, but not before she said, "Oh, that's a good idea!  You can have them to show the children later." 

I did like her quite a bit.

Instead of a waterproof cast, she demurred casting altogether & gave me a Cam Walker with a compression stocking.  It is heavy and hot & kind of a drag to wear.  After I was all outfitted & knew what the next 6 weeks would entail, medical-accessory-wise, we stopped at Dick's and I got a new pull buoy to keep my legs still & these cute-as-heck swim gloves.  I have swim paddles, but I want nothing more hard nor plastic touching me. 

Today, Mari dropped us off at the pool in the afternoon.  The children played in the play pool ("Marco ... Polo ... Marco ... Polo") with a gaggle of their friends. I carefully removed all my stabilizers then paddled along in the lap pool for 1200 yards, taking a break halfway through to read my Kennedy biography.  I am totally high on endorphins since and have not been crabby for not one second this evening and have screamed at no one in this family. 

People have been counseling me to lie down for a week now & it was making me want to burn them in their faces.  Being incapable is not the least bit relaxing to me and I am actually a little bit ashamed to be on the bench.   I have things to do. Many accommodations have been made, and I do not fatigue myself with bullshit I can hand off to the children, or just skip altogether, but they are still children & I am still the adult. Mari is here, but is on a deadline, and the least I am able to do is sit on a stool and make a couple of meals a day, calling out to the children to bring me ingredients and tools I have forgotten to load up on the rolling bar cart we set up in the kitchen.

(Rolling bar cart to shuttle ingredients over to the prep area from the fridge is v clever & I wonder why I have not always lived like this. It just never occurred to me, is all. Plus, my kitchen is not so large that I can't waste the steps, ordinarily.)

At the pool I was chatting with a neighbor in between my first & second go, and explained that I needed her to excuse me so I could get back to the business of working it off, the irritability & rage & irrational screaming, also hurling things.  She asked me if the physicians had given me any meds.  Yes, of course, I have 100 tablets of Percocet (98, actually), but my foot only hurts at 800mg-of-ibuprofen levels. 

She told me that maybe if I took the meds, I would be less filled with tension.  I mean ... I guess that might be true, but it seems like a good way to be addicted to a Schedule II narcotic in pretty short order.  I would rather just swim really hard in the pool.  It seems safer. I have risked enough already.

snapped

Photography is not super-possible since I am just propped up on two sticks & one leg, but I shoot a lot of photos.  This is from some festival we were at, when summer was new & full of promise.

Now, basically, it is about one day then the next.  One foot in front of the other, propped up on crutches.  I found out last night that I do not just have a broken foot, but also have completely blown out the ligaments on the outside of the ankle.  Ok.  Sure.

The good news is that is has been double-plus splinted since Monday and does not hurt.  Oh, except for when I was in the MRI machine Tuesday and it was being incidentally vibrated.  The bad news is that I had to already fire the first doctor, who was going to put a cast on it tomorrow, for he would not accommodate my very reasonable request that I have a waterproof cast.  It is reasonable for a very many number of reasons, some of them actually medical.   

He seemed like the kind of guy who just did not want to do what I wanted him to do because it was not what he wanted to do.  What really made me angry was that Tuesday night, when he called with the results of the radiologist's report, he said a waterproof cast was fine. Then when I sought to double-check today, he turned wobbly & reversey. Not that he had actual medical rebuttals for me.  So, onto the next doctor.

I will fire a physician in a fucking heartbeat.  This time I was coy about the reasons, because really, it does not matter.  He had already made it very clear he could not hear my whispery, girlish, feminine, housewife's voice when I talked.  So whatever.  Good riddance.

Oh, whispery-girlish reminds me that I am reading yet another Kennedy biography.  It is my guilty pleasure.  My children could have drowned off the coast of South Carolina a couple of years ago while I was riveted to Don Spoto's bio of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.  I am pretty sure I got a sunburn.  That guy is an excellent writer. 

Anyhow, first a cast, from someone, then we will see what is next.

splash crash

I crashed my bike yesterday.  It was, like, the third time I have ridden it. 

 

I am so grateful to have only sustained a broken foot, a badly-sprained ankle, and two patches of road rash.  ("O, my knee!  It used to be so beautiful!" I said to the woman holding her umbrella over me while I gathered my limbs up from the asphalt.)  I did not break my bicycle, nor did I tear any of my clothes. My grocery cargo did not spill from the bike and so our food was fine. I am also grateful that we live in a very bikey part of America and four very kind total strangers were involved in my rescue -- which amounted to me getting out of the damn street and hobbling over to the curb.  The post carrier was the first on the scene.   

I was thinking of this graphic while I was lying there in the street. Maybe they could add "Throw yrself down in the road & get injured" to the list. Honestly.

After I got to the curb, while I was standing there, in the rain, in my stoicism, meeting & greeting & exchanging introductions with everyone, trying to decide if I was fine enough to ride the four blocks home or if I should accept a neighbor/stranger's offer to ride my bike to my house while her husband drove me home, in a bona fide miracle, Mari drove up with the children. They were on their way to run an errand and wanted to let me know about it on their way out.

Mari and Garçon dropped me at home with Fifille, who volunteered to be the Helper Nurse.  I felt very sad for her, for she is quite a good girl and she went around the house v helpfully looking for the arnica gel (and not finding it) while I lay face down on the stone floor in our kitchen -- having collapsed after diving into the freezer for the frozen peas, with my leg propped up on her Helper Sous Chef kitchen stool -- weeping and weeping from the pain.  Poor thing, she looked everywhere I gasped out for her to look and it was never there.  Eventually she did turn up an old emptyish tube and we got out enough gel to slather the worst of it, the huge and fleshy, swelling protuberance on the outside of an ankle that has often betrayed me. 

I must say right here that it is a really good thing that years ago when the children got their bicycles that I read that they should have gloves to keep them from scraping their hands in a fall.  They do, and the requirement to wear them is enforced with the same vigilance as helmeting.  Then last month when I brought my bike home, I rather reluctantly parted with the $35 for my own gloves.  Since the crash, I keep looking down at my own palms, tingling as they are, and expecting to see road rash and there is nothing and I am ever so glad to have paid so little money for that most valuable insurance.

Mari came home with our son and managed to restrain himself from asking why in the hell I had decided to take a header smack in the middle of the kitchen floor.  Then he passed out ibuprofen and a rolled-up towel and brought me a utility blanket and made me a little snack. 

A couple of hours later, I felt so good that I decided I had to get off of the floor and get out of my wet & dirty clothes. That was when I realized we should go to the emergency room.  So, that is that.

 

Now I have crutches, can not drive, obviously cannot bicycle, and walking is quite a chore with two sticks and one foot.  So is getting around our 3-story victorian home.  I said to Mari last night, as I tricep-dipped myself up the 16 steps to the second floor, "Well, I have been thinking of changing my exercise program to be more rigorous."  Ahahahaha!  Now every single thing I do is like an exercise devised by a sadist to get a starlet into a rigorous & sinewy form for a very important superhero movie with very important fight scenes and very many stunts.  Right now already, I can not even lift my arms over my head any higher than John McCain can. 

One v shiny-good plus-plus about all this is that the children are about to be home with me all summer long.  That I am unable to do things for them all the time on auto-pilot means that I can stop & force them to do the things they are capable of doing for themselves.  (Or for the house by themselves.)  Which was my plan all along -- to ratchet them up to the next level of taking it on -- but now there is no danger of me just forgetting in the smooth-running of a day and also, no arguing from them about how they should have a live-in chef and maid for all of their days.  So, good.

The very best thing about the accident is that I will not be afraid to ride again.  This town has a physical feature in its landscape, which is notorious for taking down cyclists, and in fact has its own lexicon.  I knew that riding on a street with this feature was at best risky and at worst dangerous.  I could have planned a different route and was quite mindful of my ginger riding in the rain, right up until I hit the pavement.  Everyone who rides a bicycle here has story of the time they had an encounter with this nearly inevitable smackdown.  So, I have just been inducted into the league of cyclists!  I cannot quit now!  Rah!

garden state

First of all, I would be remiss if I did not volunteer that I am feeling better.  Sunshiny, even. 

 

When I was a girl, I was acquainted with an excellent sort of a guy -- the best kind really, and probably, though I have long run with a gang of self-styled intellectuals, he is the only true intellectual I have ever known -- who once remarked that any time one got up before 9am, it was going to be a long day.  It struck me then as particularly sharp, and lo these many years I think of him any time I wake before [whatever time] and am as the day wears on in for the confusion of, for example, trying to feed people lunch at 10:30 already, and put them to bed at 4 in wintertime, but never never, not for a decade, has the hour been 9am.

This morning, I rousted everyone up & out (as a threesome, we are early risers, but not very early movers) to pick cherries at the farm.  Cherries were going to be open today, and the farm expected the crop to be fully-harvested by afternoon.

I do not know why I was so excited about cherries.  They are sturdy & so good enough when you buy them in the store.

The relevance and/or accuracy of cherry picking as a colloquialism was not revealed to me during this horticultural endeavor.

I was really motivated for early-morning farmgoing by the one-two punch of rhubarb and cherries.  Rhubarb costs almost $4 per pound at the farmers' market.  Whatev, dudes.  $1.19 per pound if you snap it up yourself.

When we got there, we found out raspberries have just come into season.  Oh, my.  The picking, just at the beginning here, was so easy and a harbinger of a super season to come.  Exciting!

So, I have been thinking of my far-flung, very-fondly-remembered acquaintance today, but trying to figure out a corollary something along the lines of Any time you pick 20 pounds of fruit before you would normally be on your second cup of coffee ... But so far I've got nothing.

persistance. vegetative.

I am fully aware that I am spending long days luring innocent people off the intarwebs to look at food.  Sorry.  I am processing inside my mind important things and it is super-mess, and I do not want to say the wrong thing, even if I knew what to say at all.

This is kohlrabi.  That German Girl and I chatted this morning on a ship-to-shore call and she told me how they do it.  The children did not like it, and I do not like white food.  Except hummous, which I guess is actually beige.  It tasted good and all, but mostly I guess I am glad not to live in Germany.

Speaking of hummous, I was driving down the road today, inexplicably suffused with a proustian swooning about good times & the late 20th century with my pal the Israeli.  Hey, I said, snapping out of it about 3 miles from my house, I smell cigar smoke! 

Evidently, our new mechanic smokes in his shop.  Which is fine & all, it is just that smell is a minefield of who left that just lying around over there?  Then I told Mari about it when I got home & since then he has had the I Dream of Jeannie theme song stuck in his head, humming it without realizing.  Make of it what you will.

greenstuff

Our Monday farm share consisted of 2 heads broccoli, 1 head Napa cabbage, 1 bunch kohlrabi, 1 bunch spring onions, 1 bunch mustard greens, 1 bunch red kale, 1 head green leaf lettuce, and 1 half-pound bag young lettuce mix, not photographed due to a lack of space.

Kohlrabi are fun, and Mari & I have been playing a lot with them this afternoon, because they look just like the aliens in the Claw Game at the pizzeria in Toy Story.  I have zero idea about what to do with them, you know, so far as getting them on the table for eating, and I will have to figure that out.

I have a lot of things on my mind so far this month, there is relentless presentation of one thing over and over and over and I have decided to surrender myself to the Universe's lesson on this point, but OK ALREADY ENOUGH GIVE ME A MINUTE (June is making me v cranky!), for there are a lot of feelings I do not feel ready to feel. So, in the meantime, there is the endless asceticism of grueling workouts, Mr Bikram & his yoga, and (times are this desperate) my old standby, the rosary. Also, a nice 10pm bedtime, in the main. Chin up! (Ugh, Up; I may never recover.)

sixth

You know, so far June is making me cranky. 

I did go to the market today on my bicycle and all by myself to pick up our CSA share.  Then, because it was not enough food, I had to shop a little.  My bicycle is awesome and a little souped up with a back rack thingy holding a milk crate on with a bungee cord.  Mari laughed at me when I got home and complained that putting a bunch of cargo on yr bike makes it heavy and also you cannot go downhill both ways!

This is sugar snap peas, romaine, red leaf lettuce, a tasty bag of young leaf lettuces -- lolla rosa & others -- scallions, zucchini, and rhubarb.  There was a quart of strawberries that I forgot to photograph, but that with the rhubarb went here.

Rhubarb crumble adapted from Nigella Lawson's Feast book.  "Adapted" because it is obviously gluten-free (oat flour), and also because I replaced some of the rhubarb with strawberries.  I have done that a few times now, added strawberries to a rhubarb recipe, but have decided I just prefer the plain rhubarb. 

I also bought 2 bunches of lacinato kale and a few pounds of all-winterlong-cured sweet potatoes.  Ordinarily, I would have been suspicious, but the farm is actually run in part by a neighbor of ours and that is the whole point of all this local food hootenanny.  Where does it come from?  Well, do you know?  Well, I do, or certainly I did this time, anyhow, and it felt good.

Which reminds me -- that this whole thing with the lady filing for warantee protection under California law against the cereal people?  Because she thought Crunch Berries were real fruit?  Ok, I hate to be a killjoy + all serious all the time, but I am disappointed with the judge's dismissal, based partially herein:

a reasonable consumer would not be deceived into believing that the Product in the instant case contained a fruit that does not exist. . . . So far as this Court has been made aware, there is no such fruit growing in the wild or occurring naturally in any part of the world.

First of all, a new goddamn fruit comes out of an exotic location or a laboratory every week, it seems -- goji & acai spring immediately to mind, but also grapples and plumcots and all kind of fruit that did not exist in the grocery store when I was a girl. Then there is the matter of the package labeling calling the "crunchberries" berries on the labeling. 

Ok, sure, it seems ridiculous, cold cereal with red, green, and teal berries, but I know of at least one cereal on the shelves with actual berries -- Special K with Strawberries (which I thought, until Mari told me otherwise, were actually high-rent crunchberry sorts of guys), and for all I know (nothing about cereal), there may be more!  Finally, really, hardly anyone knows where their food comes from anymore or what it looks like or anything. 

For my very best personal example of WTF and what do you see when you read labels? I frequently have grownup people say to me, when they find out the baby & I can not eat wheat, they say, "Oh gosh, so you only eat white bread?"  They are quite serious and I find I rarely know what to say.  Because what can I possibly say to that?  (I say, "you know, we just don't find we care for any bread anymore," which is true.)

There was recently a soft news feature that talked about the writer joshing around with some kids at the Union Square Greenmarket about "What kind of fruit is this?"  and brandishing an apple, and the children did not readily have the answer.  I can say right now that many, if not most, of my children's playmates can not answer questions about where or on what kind of plant or in what part of the world or what time of the year different fruits or vegetables grow.  I know when I was their age, goddamned if I knew -- It comes from the store, I would have said.

I bet Mari that I could stand on a street corner with a flat of blackberries and tell people they were crunchberries and ask them to tell me what they thought of them & no one would bat an eye & say, "Duh, lady, those are blackberries."  Maybe they would say, "Crunchberries?  I thought those were made up by the cereal people!"  But likely as not.  

So, I actually do not think it is so far-fetched that someone would think a crunchberry is a real fruit, and while I am not a jurist, I do think it is a shame that the courts (in California, you know, where they have protected meat) did not take a minute to look at the reality of this sea change. 

It is June, and I am cranky.

sit down, Jake

Last week, I was writing a letter while waiting on a cake to bake.  It was a rhubarb cake that did not seem to be meeting my expectations.  "And if it does not, I will have a tantrum about it on my weblog!"  I wrote, referring obviously for my correspondent to my tantrum over last week's failure cookies & the subsequent pillory of Shauna Ahern.

I do not stand down from any of that (cookies?  horrible!  wtf?), but would be remiss if I did not mention that I forgot about a loaf of lovely, lovely banana bread I made last month from a recipe Ms Ahern adapted from that of the Orangette chick.

I baked it the weekend of the birthday party, on Friday, before bed. 

By Saturday afternoon, the four of us had gobbled it to a shadow of its former self.

It was a little wet, but I always find banana bread a little soggier than I would like.  It was helpful that Ms Ahern gave a cup-measure to the banana volume, instead of old Nigella's kind of 3 medium bananas or whatever, wtf is medium? I seem to recall also that it took an awful lot longer to cook than the recipe said.  Hm, ok, so now I am recalling being again with the calumny & Ms Ahern while in the kitchen baking.

I just checked with Mari and he said that I did indeed use the phrase "shame on Oklahoma" that night as I was working from the recipe.  This endeavor was not an unqualified success, but -- important! -- neither was it an unmitigated failure.  It was manageable, certainly within the range of normal for recipe-wtf-tweakiness, though I guess reviewing her oeuvre, not enough to keep South Dakota from being in the doghouse.  So to speak.

voodoo woman

This may be what I was dreaming of when I decided to keep them home for the summer.  It may be, in fact, a dream from when I found out I was pregnant with a second child. 

In Charlotte's Web, there are passages describing sweetnesses between Avery & Fern; not an overt partnership like these two have, but something similarly companionable and team-spirited. As a girl, I read them wistfully, and now at least they have this.

I remembered in the shower that I was the bad-behavior story from ballet's observation this year.  Shocking, I know.  In the locker room, after class, I was keeping Fille on task & chattering with a mother of one of Fille's classmates from a prior year.  I excused myself from her for one second and called out to a classmate from Fille's current class.  "Great leaping, Louise!"  I gave her a thumbs-up.  "Good job!"

Fille said, when I was done, "Was I a great leaper?" 

"Your leaping was good, sure," I said to her, matter-of-factly.  "But Louise!  Did you see her?"

"No, I didn't see her."

"Too bad, honey.  You missed some great leaping!"

Now, the woman with whom I had been talking, a former dancer herself, did not seem to think this was at all strange.  The rest of the moms in the locker room could barely conceal their disbelief.  Whatever.  Were they blind?  Louise was the best leaper in the room!  My kid?  She was kind of a sucky leaper, I would have thought, except that a. what do I know about ballet and b. she was about on par with the other girls in the class.  But Louise was something special, leapwise. 

I have planted every plant and seed and transplanted seedling that needs to be planted and since then it has been raining steadily, for which I am glad.  This year there are zucchini in the front yard again and about 10 borage plants on our teeny lot all around.  Please, bees!

I am really sad about Koko Taylor dying.  80 seems too young, particularly for a super-duper badass like her. There is the loss of her, what she represents of my hometown -- it feels rather like terrorists drove a plane into the Carbide & Carbon building -- and also, there is the sadness for the people who will be deprived of her excellence going forward. People in the world who had yet to see her perform!

I saw her perform over & over, but only in Chicago -- where the chances of her singing attended by Buddy Guy on the guitar and in the pipes were increased mightily -- so I cannot say how she was received in other cities, but we all loved her at home.  Personally, "Nitty Gritty," and "Little Mixed Up," added for me a great & sentimental depth to old Kowalski's excellent & epic day-and-night serenading & blues-harp blowing, and "Wang Dang Doodle" was the first grownup song little three-year-old Garçon knew. 

Well, "knew."  Instead of Razor-Toting Jim, it was raisins, toads & Jim, and Abyssinian Ned, it was rabbits, zinnias & Ed, but we all knew what he meant.  Somehow Butcher-Knife-Toting Annie hit him clear as a bell, and he realized the importance of knocking out the windows & kicking down the doors until daylight, having a heck of a time in a melee, and o, I was so pleased, my little guy.