Light and Momentary

The One True Food Magazine (only not really)

I picked up a special issue of Cook's Illustrated at the grocery store last week, and when I read it I remembered why I never buy Cook's Illustrated. Laura Vanderkam linked to an interview with Christopher Kimball in her post today (oh, look, it's actually a post from tomorrow -- now that's time management expertise), and it reminded me of the magazine sitting forlornly on my end table.

I always think I ought to like Cook's Illustrated. A person who blogs about The One True Cornbread should be a natural fit for a magazine that's forever writing about the one best way to do anything in the kitchen. But OH MY GOODNESS I have no patience with Cook's Illustrated. Does anybody remember their crazy pumpkin pie recipe? Let me see if I can find a link... here you go. Dude, if I wanted a sweet potato pie I would make a sweet potato pie. And may I never lead a life in which I have nothing better to do than to boil down canned pumpkin. (Boil! down! canned! pumpkin! I ask you!)

Here are the keys to pumpkin pie that makes everyone happy: first, bite the bullet and learn to make pastry. You do not need any vodka for your pastry (yet another crazy CI idea to complicate your life and jack up your grocery bill); you just need practice. Give it time and your hands will learn just how much moisture is the right amount of moisture and when you need another sprinkle of flour. Use plenty of butter and give it time to rest both before and after you roll it out. Second, never buy tins of ginger in the spice aisle. Get it from a bulk aisle in a store with rapid turnover, and use it frequently. If it's more than six months old it will taste like book lice frass. See? If your pumpkin pie is nestled in a flaky buttery crust and is 100% free of book lice frass, people will clamor for more and you will have one less pot to wash in the run-up to Thanksgiving. (Also, 60% more sanity. Because really? boiling? down? canned? pumpkin?)

(I have not actually been eating the leavings of the book lice. In case you wondered.)

I agree with a lot of what Christopher Kimball says about developing skill in the kitchen, about how learning to cook is something that requires time and patience. I used to like to read his little essays about life in rural Vermont. But the recipes leave me cold. You?

The horror! The horror!

Tonight I hauled up the Advent box from the basement. I put fresh candles in the wreath. I set up the fragile Nativity set on the server (not a computer server -- maybe you call it a sideboard or a buffet instead of a server?) and the Little People Nativity set in the floor. I pulled down the breviaries and asked Joe to help me move the markers.

"What's that?" he asked, gesturing to the fat spider hauling its oversized belly along the table away from us. 

"It's a spider," I told him calmly. "Grab a tissue and dispatch him." 

I wondered for a moment what that spider had been living on, but I was focused on getting ribbons in the right places.

I was surprised to see a tiny bug crawl away from the breviary in my hands, but I didn't worry until Elwood squashed another. When a third and then a fourth appeared in short order I said, "This is not good."

You guys, I think we have book lice. I also think I might prefer head lice, because I know what to do about those. (Attention, Gladlyville head lice, or at least the Gladlyville head lice who read this blog: that is not an invitation.) (This paragraph is making my head itch.) (Maybe I wouldn't actually prefer head lice.)

But! Book lice! You guys, do you know how large a book louse population we could sustain in this house? Here, I will give you a glimpse from where I'm sitting.

This is one wall of our dining room. There are many, many more books in this house.

We said Evening Prayer together, and it was very nice and no book lice nibbled on my fingers while we were praying (which is good, because the peace that passeth understanding might or might not be the peace that withstandeth creepy-crawlies on my actual body), and then Elwood said, "Let's put the books in the oven."

I was not sure this was a good idea, because the last time I thought about using the oven for pest control I was dissuaded. But! Book lice! So into the oven they went, where they exuded a faint smell of melting plastic but no actual smoke or flames. (Is it bad that I have taught my children that the beeping of the smoke alarm is their cue to chant "It's not a party 'til the smoke alarm goes off!" in unison? I suspect the fire marshal would disapprove.)

Now I don't know where to put them, though, because I am still suspicious. I don't want to put them back in their original spot in case any escapees are still lurking there. I don't want to put them in with the other books, because failure to quarantine is exactly how bubonic plague devastated Europe and do I look like a person who wants bubonic plague? (or book lice?)

Perhaps I will put them in the toaster oven overnight and wait for you all to suggest a better plan. Surely there aren't any book lice in the toaster oven. I'm counting on you, internet pals. This could be ugly.

Guest post by my favorite and most abominable brother

Dear ladies of Most Gladly,

I am here tonight to talk to you about waxing your moustaches. Are you into moustaches? Does moustache actually have an "o" in it, or is that a Canadianism? If you are working on a fabulous handlebar moustache you will find that once you have achieved a certain length you will need a little touch of wax to keep it out of your mouth. Most of the commercial products actually have a hint of rosewater, a wonderful surprise known only to people who kiss you.

I have also been tasked with discussing flannel shirts. I am in fact currently wearing a flannel shirt, which is at least third hand and terribly comfotable. The exceptionally nice thing about flannel shirts is that they are very warm, which is useful if you have come to visit your sister in the frozen wastelands of the American Prairie. (My editor wanted me to write "the frozen north" but that would offend our Canadian friends, who are wearing at least two flannel shirts each.) Are you cold? Burn your moustache and wear a flannel shirt.

Do I need another paragraph or am I done? This type of meta discussion would normally be conducted outside of the typist's box, but that would be dreary, like the plains of the frozen American prairie. Which are actually wonderful and beautiful and full of delicious food just growing right out of the ground. Also flannel. And wax. My sister said that she could grow anything in her garden but I did not believe her at first.

My nephew thinks that you might also like to know about the quantum Hall effect. I remember during Jamie's PhD days how the readers of Most Gladly eagerly awaited her discussions of R and statistical miscegenation so that they would finally have the time to read another blog instead. [Brief interlude in which the control-freak sister wrests back the laptop to type "HEY DON'T MAKE FUN OF MY BLOG I'M STILL OLDER THAN YOU and then hands back the keyboard to perpetuate the illusion of maturity].,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, There are a large number of commas in this paragraph about the quantum Hall effect because the comma key is damaged and I was afraid it was food and tried to scrape it off without anyone noticing. We'll just keep it to ourselves, shall we? Anyway, the quantum Hall effect is exactly like the classical Hall effect, where there is a force on a current whose direction depends on the sign of the charge carriers inside the material, except that like everything else in quantum mechanics the quantum Hall effect comes in lumps.  It's named for Mr. Hall. There's even a fractional quantum Hall effect which comes in smaller lumps; that was the subject of an excellent book by Nobelist Robert Laughlin whose title I cannot remember at the moment.

Moustaches. Jamie's is not coming along very quickly. Oldest boy has one on his chin which will look quite fine in a few more years.

Thanksgiving haiku from a tired cook

House full of people
Food and fun >> small oven fire
All out of words now

PS I need a new pecan pie recipe that is less likely to set my oven on fire. Favorites?

Furnace of Affliction

I almost missed the furnace guy this morning. We had the routine maintenance visit scheduled for this morning, but I wound up taking Elwood to work and forgetting about the appointment, and if we hadn't been delayed by a couple of minutes I would have been on the road instead of backing out of the driveway when the van pulled up. These guys have been servicing our furnace ever since we moved here, so I didn't think twice about letting the tech in and running Elwood to work. 

It was just a cleaning, after all.

When I came home I stopped in the basement. "How's it going?" I asked nonchalantly. "...Not so well," said the guy. "You've got a cracked heat exchanger." It turns out that a replacement heat exchanger for our 25-year-old furnace costs $2200 and is not especially easy to track down. It also turns out that if your heat exchanger is cracked, they shut down your furnace with stern warnings. Like, if you choose to turn this furnace back on, you can only do so after you sign a waiver and they leave the premises. Like, you're not going to want to run it at night, at all, because carbon monoxide is too sneaky for you to take any chances.

I said, "I am hosting Thanksgiving dinner for FIFTEEN PEOPLE tomorrow. Also my brother is bringing his children here tonight and I do not want to send them home either charred or poisoned." 

He said, "I'm afraid you're going to need a new furnace."

So you guys, here is a weird little tidbit about me: for as long as we have owned a house I have been a little stressed out about the furnace. Is its exhaust working right? Is it going to catch on fire? Is it going to fail in this particular cold snap? When it needs to be replaced, will we have to refinance the house to afford it? Would it be more environmentally responsible to look into geothermal? It's not a high-level anxiety that keeps me up at night, but it has been niggling at me steadily for a long time.

This is lesson #6447813 in the  Dread Is Dumb files: God is good. Good in nudging me to schedule the maintenance when I did, good in keeping us safe with a potentially dangerous defect lurking there. Good in helping us to find non-scammy furnace guys whom I trust, who sold us a 96% efficiency furnace at a far lower price than I was expecting. Good as in this morning's kerfuffle was resolved before 3:00 this afternoon-- old furnace out, new furnace in, bill paid. No angst, no decision fatigue, and weirdly, unexpectedly, no stress. It wasn't even all that loud. (Do you hate it when people are banging on your house? It stresses me right out.)

And I am feeling grateful. We had just replenished our house fund (and I mean just, as in last week) after last year's home maintenance adventures, but hey-- we have a house fund. I had been feeling a little uneasy about the mix of people we're expecting tomorrow, but we will welcome them to a warm house.

This morning I woke up at 5 and I couldn't get back to sleep. I was worried about one of my teenagers, and worried that our second car would need new tires, and I finally decided to get up and pray the Office and make pastry instead of lying in bed catastrophizing. The car tires are fine, it turns out. The teenager is much better. None of the things I was fretting about have materialized. When the situation I had been worried about for years suddenly plopped in my lap, God's grace was ample.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow. One of these years I'll get that figured out.

Where did I put my time compressor?

Hmm, internet, I am not sure how it came to be 9:43 here. Things on my list to do tonight:

1. Blog.
2. Finish I-cord bind-off on yummy cowl I have been using to coax myself through the grading. (And yes, if you infer from the state of the cowl that the Thanksgiving break grading is DONE, you infer correctly. Wheeee!)
3. Track down a couple of online purchases.
4. Make pastry.
5. Make sweet potatoes.
6. Finish rosary.
7. Go to bed early.

Warping the space-time continuum in 3-2-1...

Musings on gratitude

My house smells like cornbread. We are expecting 14 people at Thanksgiving dinner (must buy forks) (also, internet, what can I put under the card tables in the living room that will shield the carpet from spills and be a little less unattractive than a shower curtain?) and I am trying to plan ahead. Ergo, a double batch of The One True Cornbread for stuffing. 

The smell is more attractive than the appearance. It will be fine in stuffing, moistened with butter and stock, but I didn't measure the yogurt and so it's not what you'd call beautiful. It's a metaphor, I think.

One of my children, when he was small, used to love to unpack the groceries. "Oh, Daddy!" he would exclaim. "Light bulbs! Thank you! Toilet paper! Thank you so much, Daddy!" He wasn't digging through the bags in search of Captain Crunch (I'm not sure he would have known what Captain Crunch was); he was just happy with whatever treasures he unearthed.

Another of my boys tells me all the time how glad he is that I'm his mom. And I am grateful, of course, but I am also humbled. I am keenly aware of my shortcomings. (Chief among my guilt-inducers right now: this boy wants to cook his way through Honest Pretzels. Why, Mollie Katzen, why must each recipe use twenty-eleven bowls? Why did you think it was a good idea for small children to make tortillas by hand when their mothers know nothing about tortilla-making? I get a little irritated about messy unfamiliar kitchen tasks. Irritation is not the right response.)

I also have a child who is quick to point out my shortcomings, and you might imagine that this does not spark the happiest of responses in me. I get defensive. I get accusatory. I get...more aware of my shortcomings.

To a certain extent, I think, gratitude is a personality characteristic. But it's also something we can cultivate -- should cultivate. I can say, "Oh, the cornbread smells terrific and the stuffing will be great and I can't wait to see everyone." I can say, "It looks terrible and I feel grumpy about it. And I bet people will grind stuffing into the living room carpet where it does not belong."

One of those is clearly a better option.

Christmas Letters

Yesterday I thought I'd work on the Christmas letter, but I quickly got tired of it. It's hard to get a Christmas letter right, isn't it? I'm sure you've gotten your share of braggy letters and letters that needed an editor. I don't want to write either of those. I said to my oldest, "What should I say about Joe?" He answered immediately: "That he turned into a duck this year." 

He offered to write the Christmas letter while we were at Adoration. It contained plenty of tidbits like the following:

☭. The child we had previously called Pete has now changed his name to ☭ (UTF-8
e298ad) in keeping with his new, radically communist political philosophy.  He
has also annexed several local farms to create a workers' paradise, and, apart
from a few minor gulag issues, seems to be doing quite well for himself. 

So...yeah. Maybe I'll just print up a card with names and ages.

For Whose Sake?

"The true burden of environmentally induced cancers has been grossly underestimated," according to a report from the NIH National Cancer Institute.

You might recall that I spent half of my childhood in Raleigh County, West Virginia, home of the mine in which 29 men died in 2010. (My high school pal Chris took this picture for the NYT.) The explosion was caused by blatant safety violations; an independent investigation laid the blame at the feet of the owner, Massey Energy.

Don Blankenship, Massey's CEO, was in the New Yorker earlier this week. He set up a nonprofit, see, and with staggering irony called it And For The Sake Of The Kids. He used this organization to buy himself a state supreme court justice, contributing $3 million dollars to the campaign of one Brent Benjamin. 

Benjamin did not recuse himself from hearing Blankenship's case when it came before the court. Can you guess who won?

Hint: not the kids.

I have posted before about the impact of toxin exposure on West Virginia kids. This time I have been thinking more about my friends from high school. The newspaper kids and the yearbook kids used to hang out together. One of those boys died recently after a long battle with cancer. The yearbook editor has been Facebooking her breast cancer treatment. Another Facebook friend is relieved that her breast cancer is in remission, but she has such extensive nerve damage from chemo that she can't walk. Trying to be upbeat, she shared a story about trying to drive her wheeled cart through Walmart and crashing into a display.

I'm not laughing.

Exposure to mining waste is associated with a significant increase in cancer risk. Don Blankenship's corner-cutting has real costs and he is not being held accountable for them. West Virginia wants to call itself "open for business." That shouldn't have to mean "closed to the sufferings of its citizens."

Seven Quick Takes: Things My Daughter Says Edition

1. Instead of "when I go to sleep" she says "when my eyes turn black."

2. One day I said to her brother, "I think Stella just has music inside her." She said, "Yes, I do. When I sing, I let it out. But then it comes right back."

3. This morning she said, "I don't want Joe to scold me [about feeding the guinea pigs]." I said, "Where'd you learn that word?" (It's not one that comes up often at our house.) She said, "When I was a little girl and you read me that book about the elephant who was a king." Remember when Arthur and Celeste get in trouble for running away?

4. She thinks that cracking a joke requires the speaker to sprinkle the word "underwear" liberally across her attempt.

5. She still produces fractured versions of words she uses a lot. "Stop derrupting me!" she tells her brothers regularly. "That's usgusting," she says about food that is green. She's also a fan of Carcass Stone, a game that is not nearly as grisly in reality as it sounds in her rendition.

6. Long ago I blogged about the way she said "meed" and "mee" for "need" and "knee." She can get it right if she thinks about it, but mostly she still meeds things.

7. She is a little bit interested in Return of the King, but she wanders in and out. Tonight after the boys and I finished our chapter she brought me our graphic novel version of The Hobbit and we read for a while. She thought it was hilarious that one troll called another a booby, and skipped around saying "You're a booby" until bedtime. I'm hoping that fades away by Monday, because I'm not sure the kindergarten teacher will be consoled by my explanation that she's talking about the blue-footed bird.

Fall Soup

Today's post was going to be about Don Blankenship, but I was reading the siege of Gondor chapter to the 9yo and the 12yo and when they asked me to keep reading I couldn't say no. How could I pass up a chance to intone "Grond crawled on" to a captive audience? 

So I am giving you a recipe instead. Crescent Dragonwagon's Passionate Vegetarian has a delicious fall lasagna recipe: pumpkin, garlic, kidney beans, cabbage, ricotta. Sounds a little weird, maybe, but it's so tasty. It's also kind of a pain. I had a pumpkin that was getting a little soft in the pantry and half a head of Chinese cabbage, so I re-imagined her lasagna as soup. 

Coarsely chop a bunch of garlic (6-8 cloves) and seed/peel/cube a small pumpkin. Brown them lightly in oil or butter or a combination. Stir in finely ribboned cabbage, a can of petite diced tomatoes, a can of rinsed/drained kidney beans. and a pint of stock. I would have tossed in a glass of white wine if I'd thought about it, but I didn't. Simmer until the squash is tender. While the squash is cooking, fry sage leaves in butter until crisp. Serve soup with sage leaves and Parmesan.

Three Acts

Act I, Fall 2011. I assign a semester-long project to my grad students. I offer them feedback on topic selection in advance, but that's it. I am crushed under the weight of the grading, staggered by the magnitude of the task and the direness of the papers. I cannot even see the goodness of the good papers clearly because the bad ones are so blindingly awful. I stumble into mid-December certain I will never assign a project like that again.

Interlude, Fall 2012. NO SEMESTER-LONG PROJECTS, NO SIRREE. DO I LOOK STUPID?

Act II, Scene i. August 2013. I do a summer workshop on designing my fall course. I think, "This course needs a semester-long project." But! this time! I will offer them Formative Feedback along the way! I will show them their errors and they will fix them! Fairies will caper along the unicorn-trodden paths of Learning Together and we will frolic there!

Act II, Scene ii. September 2013. I grade until I am an old woman.

Act II, Scene iii. October 2013. I grade until I am an older woman, stooped and shriveled but still clutching her red pen.

Act II, Scene iv. November 2013. I post about my gray hair, failing to connect it to the ETERNITY of grading this fall has brought me.

Act II, Scene v. December 2013. I think I might die of grading. If I don't die of grading, I might die of futility-- I showed them their errors and a substantial fraction of the class said, "Yeah, whatever." I am late submitting grades to the registrar because SO MUCH grading. And also despair. SO MUCH DESPAIR.

Act III, Scene i. August 2014. At a workshop on student writing I say, "I almost died of grading last year. Penna-rubra-tosis, they call it, when you stab yourself through the heart with your red pen because you can't face one more comma splice." The workshop leader raises an eyebrow. She says, "Let's talk about your formative feedback."

Act III, Scene ii. November 2014. I have told the students I will give them advance feedback on selected parts of their semester-long project. Two parts are required submissions; two more parts are optional. All parts get a preliminary grade, which will be incorporated into the final grade. "Making good use of feedback" is built into the rubric as well, with a hefty penalty for people who disregard the comments I have labored over. I require them to get structured feedback from a classmate and from an outside party, and to tell me in detail how they're making use of that feedback.

I'm trying to make it a project they can really learn from that also leaves my will to live intact.

It's still a lot of grading.

P.S. I love 90% of my job and my students are awesome. 

Dear Amy

In the fall of 1968, when you were approximately the size of a grape, a knitter named Elizabeth Zimmerman published a pattern called the Surprise Jacket. When I heard that Brice had come to live with you, I knew right away that he needed his Aunt Jamie to make him a Surprise Jacket. (That's what he was saying that one time he wouldn't settle down: "Where is my jacket? How long does a guy have to wait around here?")

The thing about a Baby Surprise Jacket is that it looks more like an Amoeba or perhaps a Series of Drunken Errors than a jacket. The pattern warns the knitter: it will look "v. odd, indeed, but trust me, and press on." I have wondered if this might explain part of the BSJ's popularity. On the website where I keep my online knitting notebook, there are currently 22,499 BSJ's logged. That's a lot of amoebas, is it not? I think it's one of those knitting-is-like-life things: sometimes the idea that an intractable baby or toddler will actually grow into a person who is capable of shaving and voting and operating a motor vehicle seems at least as implausible as the idea that an amoeba could become a cute little retro garment. But both those things are true. If ever you are having a bleak day, I suggest that you trust and press on.

When we lived on Simpson Street, on any given day you'd be wearing black and I'd be wearing green. I striped this jacket in black and green on purpose, thinking the black would make it easier for you to dress in clothes that matched the baby (come on, you know you want to!). But there's a bit of metaphor there too: it's mostly black, because the work of raising this baby will fall mostly on your shoulders. But the smaller stripes of green are there because I hope also that you feel enfolded in love and support from people all around you, some of them nearby and hands-on helpful, others sending love and good wishes from far away.

Knitting and parenting are both tasks that call for patience and willingness to take the long view; they also call for determination to keep on learning and to accept one's shortcomings. When I finished the fun part of the jacket, I got stalled on the finishing. While I was finally wrapping it up I figured out a new and better way to tackle a technique I'd been using for years. One last thought on knitting as parenting metaphor: you never know when your task will teach you something unexpected. You never know when something frustrating will turn into something deeply satisfying. I am wishing you a lifetime of deep satisfaction, and fruitful frustration, and learning together. 

Monday Night Bullets

• Tonight I was browsing through Crescent Dragonwagon's cornbread cookbook when I saw that her caldo verde recipe calls for a cup of garlic cloves. HOW did I not notice this before? HOW have I not made this soup already: chorizo, kale, white beans, and -- did I mention? -- a CUP of garlic cloves. I think I was born to eat this soup. I think that once I make this soup, all I will have to do if anyone gives me crap about anything between now and January is breathe on him.
• Crescent Dragonwagon is about the only person on the planet who could sell me on a cornbread cookbook. We have a compact kitchen, and my cookbooks are confined to a little shelf. If something new comes in, something old has to go.
• Here, look, I will post a picture or two, even though nobody is reading this blog for the photography. I realized after I posted last night that my sampling error was pretty conspicuous in hindsight: anyone who loves video posts is probably going to skitter quickly away from this blog with its 1000-word screeds on... who knows what. 
• When we moved into this house, Elwood built shelves all along one kitchen wall, stretching all the way up to the ceiling. Underneath the butcher block table he also jury-rigged a cookbook shelf that keeps the cookbooks handy but relatively free of spills. Isn't that clever? 
• I am also putting in a picture of the cookbook spines, because I love to see what cookbooks other people keep on their shelves.
• Remember when I mentioned that I was making a cookbook for our favorite babysitter? It wound up costing, like, twelve cents more to have a second one printed up. So I did -- it's one of the black comb bindings, unhelpfully. It's been unexpectedly fantastic. If the kids want to know how mom would make pancakes or brownies or palak paneer, boom -- they have an immediate answer.
• Tomorrow: Knitting As Metaphor. You know you can't wait.

Discuss

Today I was going to do a video post. I recorded the video this morning, spliced it together this evening, and then thought, "I can't put this on the internet."

In the process I came across a video I made in May of 2013, also intended for the blog, demonstrating the way to get homemade brownies in the oven in 6 minutes. I wanted to show that it is eminently possible to make delicious lightning-fast brownies, without setting up any sort of elaborate mise en place. The downside of this approach, though, is that segments of the video involve me diving for the refrigerator or smacking aluminum foil into a pan or talking with my back to the camera.

I guess there are two issues here. One is that I usually hate watching videos on the internet. There are occasional exceptions, but before I watch a video I pretty much have to see recommendations from a double-digit number of people whose taste I admire. Why, then, would I think it was a good idea to contribute to the youtubization of the internet?

The other issue is that the bloggity tension between keeping it real and making it polished is heightened with video posts. I could, theoretically, trim down the boring bits of the brownie post. I could, theoretically, get new footage of the applied I-cord I made this morning, in which I could be a bit more careful about camera angles. I could, theoretically, relax about my imperfections. (Hahahahahahahaha, I'm so hilarious.)

Tell me what you think: yea or nay on video posts? What makes a good one?

For Miriel

Go ahead and be sad. Take your time. Don't listen to anybody who tells you that you should just be grateful he's better. Don't listen for a minute.

Sometimes I still cry when I tell the story of my oldest son's birth. He'll be 18 next month. But I'm not ashamed that those memories are still vivid. I am the keeper of those memories. That's part of my job.

Nobody else can love a boy quite like his mother. And when the boy is in danger, and when the remedy is painful and hard and scary-- it's only natural that the memory of those events is a sad one.

It took time for me to stop feeling like the memory of his birth was an open wound. I wish I had been more patient with myself. Take all the time you need. And if you encounter anyone who wants to tell you to get over it faster -- someone who needs a quick smiting with the Figurative Super-Soaker Of Icy Scorn And Hey Get Off Her Case Already -- just send 'em my way.

Dirt Alert

Most of us have less dirt in our lives than our forebears did. And in some ways this is good: I'm not arguing that the world needs more tetanus. I think, though, that we're more squeamish than we used to be -- I think that's how magazines can dedicate space to articles about whether it's better to wipe in between the crevices of the hotel remote or just put the whole thing in a plastic bag.

I was thinking about dirt earlier this week when we picked up our next-to-last CSA share. After our first year I wasn't sure if we should sign up again, but this year I wrote a check without hesitation. It's been really good for me to see the farmer who grows our vegetables, week after week. It's been good for me to have a visible reminder of how much labor lies behind the food on my table, and how much uncertainty, and how much providence. 

It's been good for me to eat what's growing over these past three CSA seasons. I used to be deeply skeptical of people who said they loved eating greens, because who could really love greens? I thought perhaps they meant "I love the sanctimonious feeling I get when I say 'I love greens' and thus by the transitive property I love eating greens." I didn't waste a lot of our greens, but it was an effort making use of them.

Something weird happened, though. On Tuesday night we got the most gorgeous kale in our share. Wait, gorgeous is too overused to convey the beauty of this kale. I need a better word, like pulchritudinobellissimous. (Be quiet, spellcheck, I have a point to make.) It had these fabulously rumpled leaves and this deep dull sheen that made me want to (a) pat it gently and (b) get it in my mouth.

(OH DEAR now you will all think I'm a weirdo, but it's NaBloPoMo and I don't have time to start over with a nice neutral post on "What are you cooking for Thanksgiving? Turkey? Oh, me too!")

Elwood cooked it up with some chicken thighs in an Indian-ish sauce. The first strange thing was that I recognized it right away despite the fact that it had cooked down. It had to be kale; couldn't be any of the other greens in the fridge. The second, even stranger thing was that I wanted to eat it ALL ALL ALL. Not out of guilt, not so I could write a sanctimonious blog post (this is not sanctimonious; it is weird), but out of sheer delight. It was like edible velvet-- silky with some heft to it. I picked out every bit from the pan and ate it while making happy noises.

(OH DEAR weirder and weirder)

If we were picking our own vegetables every week at the grocery store, it would be mostly broccoli and carrots and green beans, because that's what the kids eat. I do not think this kale enthusiasm would have descended on me under those circumstances.

I'm remembering a world in which people used to wash their own handkerchiefs (and share them with strangers in need as an act of kindness), and eat what was growing in the gardens around them, and have a little more trouble with dirt under their fingernails. And I don't mean to be overly sentimental or to overlook the things we've gained in the past 60 or 75 or however many years, but I am grateful for the farmer in my area code who is willing to keep on wrangling with the dirt.

Germ Alert

I was waiting at the pharmacy this evening, flipping through Real Simple while they counted out my beta blockers. There's an article this month on staying safe in hotel rooms. Did you know that hotel rooms contain [shock, horror] germs?

Am I the only one who thinks the advice to spray down a hotel toilet with Lysol is a little odd? I mean, sure, I'd be worried if room service were going to lay out my meal on the toilet seat. I'm not so worried about using it for its intended purpose. One wonders-- does the author carry his own toilet seat to work every day? Does he spritz restaurant bathrooms with Lysol? What about when he's visiting friends' houses? (And does he hire out?)

Also weird: pre-cleaning the shower before you climb in. Dude, if I have to clean a bathtub it is NOT a vacation. I might prefer to contract foot fungus than to clean a bathtub on vacation.

Even weirder: do NOT sleep under the bedspread. Gather it up in your gloved hands and toss it in a corner. Tell the housekeeping staff NOT to put it on the bed during the stay. While I don't think I'd want to look at a hotel bedspread under a black light, surely it's overkill to treat it like the cloak of Hercules.

I wondered if I had picked up Real Simple For The Immunocompromised And Deeply Paranoid, or perhaps a print version of The Onion, but it seems to be an actual story intended for actual readers. Did they run short of Faux Simple Things You Can Serve For Thanksgiving To Wow Your Guests And Jack Up Your Stress Level? It would seem so.

Bringing Up Bébé

Pamela Druckerman was living in Paris when she had her three children, and she wrote a book about the differences in French and American expectations of children. I read it in early September and I'm still thinking about it.

I've been thinking about the sleep section, and mostly disagreeing with it. Early on French babies sleep through the night, or font les nuits, according to Druckerman, and she credits the willingness of French parents to give their babies some space when they stir in their sleep. They don't, she insists, leave babies to wail -- that idea strikes them as barbaric. 

When I read that section I thought a lot about the Kippleys' influence on my parenting: as a rule of thumb, if your baby sleeps through the night, fertility returns shortly thereafter. And your baby neeeeeeeds you. Be one with your baby, Sheila Kippley exhorts her readers. I was, frankly, a bit of a nut about being neeeeeeeded by my babies. Some of them genuinely did neeeeeeed me a lot. A couple of those same babies were outrageously bad sleepers. I spent YEARS in a state of low-level (or sometimes high-level) sleep deprivation, most of the time thinking I was doing something noble by responding to my babies' neeeeeeeds. And as you might be able to tell from all of the extra Es in this paragraph, when I read this book part of me wondered if I had actually been doing something self-sabotaging.

It can't be a universal truth that babies ought to sleep through the night by 4 months old, because that would have real repercussions for baby-spacing and child nutrition in areas of the developing world where food insecurity and contamination are continuing problems. It can't be the case that there's One Right Way. We will gloss over my tendency to use any convenient stick to beat myself up, but I'm still wondering: what approach to infant sleep is closest to optimal?

So that was the part that I disagreed with while wondering if my disagreement was delusional. Much of the rest I found thought-provoking in a good way, except for the part about sending 5-year-olds to camp which is très-très cray-cray, to make a little multilingual poem about it. I think one of the major shortcomings of the books currently available on attachment parenting is that they don't provide a lot of guidance about making the transition from saying yes to saying no. French parents tell their children to be sage. They expect their children to be able to wait, without anything blinking entertainingly to assist them. Those are fantastic expectations. (Kid interruptions of adult conversations continue to vex my husband and me. A French visitor would apparently be appalled that we haven't put the kibosh on it yet.)

I once heard an accurate if unkind phrase from a breastfeeding counselor pal that has stuck with me: she described a mother-child pair as illustrating "the worst of La Leche League parenting." You have to make that transition from saying "I am here to help you learn that you are safe and loved..." to saying "...and also that you are not in charge and you need to listen and do what's right." Some parents, and some kids, navigate that change more easily than others. Druckerman points out that it's not about exerting authority for its own sake, to indulge some kind of tyrannical fantasy. One of the authorities she quotes says that "the main point of parental authority is to authorize kids to do things, not to block them." She describes a mother who "managed to be both affectionate and to have authority without raising her voice."

That's the way to be, I think. I'm still mulling over the best way to pull it off. I would love to hear your thoughts on the book too. I have more to say but it's 10:00 (the NaBloPoMo lament this year). See you in the comments!

If Mama ain't happy...

Winter gets me down. It's been true for as long as I can remember. When I was ten my teacher told us to write a poem about winter. All of my classmates wrote about happy snowmen and super-fun ice skating. I wrote about how my soul shriveled up and didn't really come back to life until spring. I had a really hard time with it in college, when I was on my own and feeding myself for the first time, and living in a place with harsher winters and stiffer responsibilities than I was used to.

It was a big drag.

It was even worse when we moved to Scotland. I just republished an old blog post about it, but it was written in 2004 so you'll probably want the TL;DR: SAD + PPD = bad news. The bad-news-ness was an unexpected blessing, though, because it spurred me to rent a light box. And weirdly but unmistakably, I could feel my shriveled soul unfurling when I sat down in front of the light.

This is on my mind tonight because I saw a link to this article earlier this evening. If you are a SAD sufferer, I have some tips to share that have greatly decreased my own suffering:

1. Buy or rent a light box. It's like magic for me.
2. Consider fish oil and vitamin D supplements. Fewer side effects than antidepressants and they do good things for my neurotransmitter levels.
3. Eat clean, even when surrounded by Halloween candy and leftover pumpkin pie. There is a clear association between the state of my diet and the state of my mind.
4. Make time to exercise, even when you think you can't make time to exercise.

That looks kind of stupid now that it's written out. I mean, DUH: eat well and exercise regularly. Even though it's not rocket science, I have to push myself to keep up with it as the days get gloomy. But I don't want my kids to remember the shriveled-soul version of their mom when they think back on childhood. If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. (Though let me lobby again for a change: I remain a fan of "If Mama ain't happy, the rest of the family cuts her some slack and perhaps gives her a footrub.") That's why every winter I am going to work on amping up the happy and damping down the angst.