he just sat there watching us watch him. no fear or aggression, he was peaceful and calm, even appearing gentle. we’ve seen him a time or two before – or perhaps a possum that looks like him – since they are individually hard to discern between. we’ve seen him waddle down our driveway and cross the street. we’ve seen him down by the corner, where the neighbor puts out seed and corn.
but the allure in our yard was the golden-corral-like smorgasbord we were providing in the small compost pile we have out back. i sent a picture of peter and a description of what he was likely eating to a friend who wrote back that it wasn’t golden corral. “that’s the four seasons back there!” a little research showed that opossums love fruit and vegetables, among other things, so we were right on target with our spread. it’s sweet to know that the compost is aiding this beautiful creature in its survival during this cold winter.
we try to keep our birdfeeder full and we generally set out the crusty ends of bread or the last bits of tortillas on the potting bench. the squirrels have discovered it and leave menus with items checked off they’d like to see more often. we haven’t seen our chipmunks, so they must be hibernating under the deck or living in the volkswagen in the garage – who knows – waiting for spring. they won’t be fooled by false starts; i’m certain they’ve enough birdseed from our feeder to last until the temperatures don’t hover near freezing anymore. i know that fox and raccoons, rabbits and skunks are out there, foraging and waiting.
it’s darn cold. and as february drones on and on we seek comfort from warm soups and stews and nourishing foods. i’m grateful that the wild critters in our neighborhood have a fighting chance.
and i swear that peter, gazing at us from the fencepost, seemingly waiting for buffet hours to open below him, telepathically said thank you.
outside the window – just this very second – we can hear the sound of a sweet bird singing its little heart out. mostly quiet out there all winter, except for the sound of the crows chasing the neighborhood hawk, the chirping gives me hope. sans-chirping seemed like a long time, extended – stretch—-ed out like 1960s turkish taffy or 1970s laffy taffy – by this never-ending pandemic and its concerns and restrictions. but today chirped and my heart lifts.
when we first moved to wisconsin we rented a little house. the kitchen was yellow-yellow, which was probably a good thing, as we moved from florida to wisconsin in the dead of winter and i struggled with some giant homesickness (and probably not-just-a-little seasonal affective disorder, unnamed at the time). the bathroom had no shower, just a tub, so we installed a rubber hose on the tub spout and rigged up a shower with zipties. the living room was tiny, especially with a big black lab ranging over the hundred pound mark. the basement was suuuch a basement. and, though it was in a sweet neighborhood, i felt lost.
but each morning, as that first wisconsin spring approached – in its crawling-not-even-baby-steps-kind-of-way – i could hear the birds in the bushes just out the bedroom window, in the very corner of the yard, right by the chain link fence. and those birds brought me back to the birdsounds of my growing-up. and that all reassured me. because sometimes change is hard.
we only spent one winter, one spring and a bit of summer in that house before we moved here – to this house – and i learned the birds of this lakefront neighborhood.
and then today.
this bird, singing outside on a grey morning, may be singing itself to clarity. the lake is changing. the skies at dawn and at dusk are changing, stripes of color. the moon sweeps across the sky. there is a little more sun a little earlier in the day and a little later in the evening. a day here or there that is a tiny bit warmer.
maybe this bird is feeling a little less lost and a little more promise.
i was about ten. and i was helping my dad clean out the gutters. we were up on the roof of our house on long island. and i was feeling on top of the world. that is, until, i wasn’t.
this could easily become a commercial for leaf-filter-gutter-guards, but that wasn’t a thing back then. instead, we were up there using little trowels and our hands to scoop and toss, scoop and toss. until i wasn’t.
i wanted to stop…but my body kept going. i hit the ground hard and broke my cheekbone. my sweet momma was not-so-pleased with my dad’s allowing-me-to-fall-off-the-roof, but it wasn’t his fault. if you lean forward over a gutter too far, gravity takes over. and that’s the story.
last night, i was awake most of the night. around 2:30 or so, david got us bananas to munch on and we started chatting. valentine’s day was his birthday and he turned 61, which he said feels very different than 60. “i don’t have a problem with the tens,” he said. “it’s the ones. it’s once you are solidly in the decade that it’s different.”
we talked about the differences between 51 and 61, of which, i must say, there are many. you want your body to stop changing (read: aging), but it keeps going and going and going. after much laughter and poking fun, we decided we were fortunate and shouldn’t complain.
the snowboard expert who was sharing the commentator role with the nbc peacock host was telling a story during the olympics. i don’t remember the story because i was too busy writing down his comment, which felt like it could generalize to so.much.in.life. “i wanted to stop but my body kept going.” we watch amazing athletes who have taken their whole lives mastering their sport to prepare for moments-in-time-competing, on top of their game, winning, and, in other moments-in-time having to deal with the stumbling of a body that didn’t quite cooperate on that particular day at that particular time.
i had two normal wrists before. and then, that one particular time. i wanted to stop – on my snowboard on the side of the skihill so as not to plow into the little girl crossing my path on skis – but my body kept going. simple as that. tried to stop. couldn’t stop. got closer and closer to her as she traversed on her tiny skis. and fell. two broken wrists. it’s been two years now. another one of those things david and i talked about in the wee hours. time. how it flies. it just keeps going, no matter what we want.
we went to the grocery store. we both wore masks. there is a global pandemic. still. as we walked toward the paper towels along the aisle that’s perpendicular to theirs, an unmasked naked-faced man came the other way. he started staring from a distance away. and frowning. at my mask. and then, direct eye contact. staring. i stared back. it was awkward. two people out-and-out staring as they approached in the grocery store sale aisle. normally, i would drop my gaze and look elsewhere, but this time i just held it. he passed by within inches of me, still staring. the aggression in the grocery store is titanic. such a waste of energy. such a waste of staring. i wonder if he wanted to stop. it was creepy.
we got home from the store and brought in the first of the bags. dogga bounced up and down at the door, greeting us. “on the rug,” we pointed. he tried – very, very hard – to sit down on the rug and wait to be invited to go outside. but he just couldn’t. we knew he wanted to. he wants to please us. but he just couldn’t. his little body – running at 78rpm-as-opposed-to-33 and downshifting to a lower gear to amp it up – just couldn’t stop. his delight was obvious. we were home. he was happy. he wanted to go out. jump. bounce. jump. bounce.
he skidded across the deck, long paw prints in the snow. luckily, when he came to the end, it was merely a foot or so off the ground. ka-thump.
he stood up and off he ran. he is clearly closer to 51 than 61.
every weekday for four years is kind of a long time. we kicked off our mélange on february 12, 2018 with the intention to blog each day using a mutual image. we’d see where those images would take us: down backroads of memory, forays into wondering, dropping into the tiniest cracks of things that happen in our days. they would generate stories and pondering and poetry and a dedication to a practice we both love: writing.
1106 blogs later – in the context of the mélange – and we are just as committed now as we were then. in these tens of hundreds of posts, we have been both succinct and verbose, grateful and snarky, questioning and certain. mostly, we have sat next to each other – every single post – typed on laptops and read aloud to the other what the chosen image evoked. it has been an absolute gift.
from an analytical standpoint, we can see that people all over the world are reading. we marvel at the number of countries where someone has opened up what we have blathered. it is not without wonder that we -every so often- hear from someone from afar. and then, there are those days that the analytics suggest perhaps no one is interested and our writing is for naught. yet, we write anyway. because, we have discovered, this is for us – a gift we have given ourselves.
in the beginning our monday-friday topics included two cartoon days: chicken marsala monday and flawed cartoon wednesday. those days have since morphed and changed into merely-a-thought monday and not-so-flawed (and sometimes flawed) wednesday. in the beginning, too, every day had products i designed for that day. we had (actually, still have) five stores on society6 where people could purchase prints and canvases and tote bags, mugs and phone cases, throw pillows and leggings and shirts with our original work. hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of products. and so much fun to design. we have featured morsels of david’s paintings and youtubes or mp3s of my music, tiny snippets of color and texture and devoted artistry. we dove into the telling-the-tale of these pieces and we have shared the soul of our work.
soon it will be a year since we first added saturday morning smack-dab, our smack-dab-in-the-middle-of-middle-age cartoon. we’ll be setting up an additional separate page for smack-dab, the cartoon. some people want less words and that will be the place to go for the less-is-more approach. this cartoon is one of the delights of my week and the scripting, layout, colorizing, design work give me a distinct honor of co-cartoonist.
we have learned – in this practice – to photograph, to look, to listen – even more carefully and intently than before. so much to notice, to pay attention to. life is about how you take it in and respond to it all.
the learning curve on anything worthwhile can be steep. toughing out the vulnerability factor, finding your voice, using it to write, putting-it-out-there, brings a mélange of emotion. for us, it has been about 1106x joy.
it was a first. the very first time that david had a dozen roses sent to me.
i heard the knock on the door and went to see what it was. the tall package was sitting there. fromyouflowers.com the label read. i, excitedly, called d down from his office upstairs, saying, “look! i got flowers!!” he ran downstairs, looked at the box with a slight furrow and replied that they were ordered to arrive monday, on valentine’s day. i suppose that might have given us a glimpse into what-would-be.
i brought the box into the kitchen and grabbed the scissors to slice the tape, tears coming to my eyes as i gently pried the flap open and saw the red-red of roses inside. we’ve been daisy-people with a single rose-here-or-there, but never a dozen roses. i extracted the inner cardboard holding everything upright and looked down into the top of the bouquet.
there were loose rose petals everywhere. rose buds floated on top of the bundle and i could see the stems where they belonged. sensing that this was not going to be pretty, with d watching, i unwrapped the paper around the stems.
rose petals and leaves fell around us, on the counter, on the floor, on my clothes. though d had not ordered an invisible flower girl, it appeared that one had magically appeared to shower us with rose-love. clearly when he ordered this gift he hadn’t checked the option where the buds and leaves were attached to the stems.
his face said it all.
the one time he went all-out. the one time he surprised me with delivered-to-the-door-flowers. the one time he sent a whole dozen roses.
i gathered together all the rose petals and rose buds that still-tightly-held-their-shape-but-not-their-stems. i went into the dining room and took out a beautiful crystal bowl that used to be my sweet momma’s and poppo’s. i placed all the petals and buds into the bowl, arranging the buds so their graceful curls faced up.
i looked at david and said, “still beautiful. just different.”
a little later, work-day over, we lit a candle, clinked glasses and sent naked-stem-photographs to our friends and family, sharing the moment and lemonading rose petals.
10.5 x 15. the size of my sweet momma’s crumb cake.
back in the 90s, her crumb cake preceded her. everyone knew about her crumb cake. and everyone loved it. “beaky’s crumb cake,” they’d anticipate it.
based on the beloved new york entenmann’s crumb cake, she took crumb cake to another level. she’d, very specifically, tell you about how to make crumbs, that you MUST mix with your hands. she’d tell you how to sprinkle the confectionary sugar on top. and she’d proudly march it into the school, the hangar, the state attorney’s office, the church, the party. her recipe is dated 10/87; she didn’t start making her own crumbs until almost a decade into living in florida.
the other day – the day i was writing last monday’s blogpost – i was craving her crumb cake. i just wanted to sit down with a huge slab o’ cake and a piping-hot cup of coffee and chat with her. i wanted to hear her voice, her laugh, see her raised eyebrow and piercing blue-hazel eyes. i wanted to tell her stories. i wanted to ask her questions. i wanted to hug her tightly. i wanted her to hug me.
i wanted crumb cake.
we went to woodman’s and looked for the entenmann’s display. sure enough, it was there, this brooklyn-based bakery from way-back-when.
if entenmann’s crumb cake tastes like anything, it tastes like long island and the table in the kitchen by the window overlooking the patio where you could look out and see the dog run and the woods and clay pitts park in the distance and, at different times, different years, the above-ground pool or the vegetable garden and the grove with the big stump where we’d place the metal picnic sticks in the ground to hold brightly colored aluminum tumblers. it tastes like family gathered around a table with placemats labeled in the corner with initials that spell out shabaeawaka. it tastes like after-school and sunday-brunch. it tastes like saturday morning. it tastes like my dad, whistling, and pouring coffee from the percolator. it tastes like early spring and forsythia, salty breezes and bike hikes.
we bought the crumb cake.
and each day, for a few days, i made us a nespresso and placed each tiny mug on a clear glass plate with a piece of crumb cake. i savored each bite, each sip, getting lost in thought as only taste and scent can evoke.
and each day, my sweet momma and my poppo smiled from just-on-the-other-side. i could hear my dad whistling and my mom ask, “another piece?”
i read the reviews. i always read the reviews. before purchasing. before booking. before going. before clicking.
this one said, “and the first thing we made was potato chips! because we could!” it made up my mind – that would be the first thing we’d make too. homemade potato chips. goodness! we were jazzed.
the new mandoline was a little bit of an investment for sparing people who already own cutting boards and knives. i kept the tab open on my laptop for about a week, pondering, for we do not buy in haste here. but in the middle of the indecision – and still, the middle of this pandemic – in lieu of restaurants, pubs, bistros – eateries of any kind – we felt we could justify it. plus it was on sale. plus it had a zillion reviews raving about how it changed the lives of the people who purchased it. plus, potato chips!
the slicing was a dream! it took little to no time to have thin slices of three large potatoes. tossed in olive oil (maybe avocado oil would be good too) with a bit of sea salt, we laid them out on the old cookie sheet. (note to self: buy new insulated cookie sheets) the recipe gave a raaaaange of temperatures in the oven so we went with almost the highest. and… bake!
having to turn each individual potato slice over to bake the other side was a tad bit tedious. i cannot imagine the lays people doing that with their baked-chips. we quickly realized that we needed fewer chips-to-be on the sheet in order for them to self-actualize. that would mean three potatoes of potential chips would take a few rounds in the oven. nevertheless, we persevered, knowing that this was an experiment and experiments are supposed to be, er, experimental.
they may not have looked like the homemade chips at red robin, but they did not require driving anywhere or concerning ourselves with a restaurant’s ventilation system. they were browned and crunchy and just sea-salty enough. even the ones that were not-quite-there were devoured. we figure we will try it again. and we can try sweet potato chips too.
cause this new mandoline is pretty cool, just like the reviews said. 2022. who knew?
in my wild-harebrained-dream we own a food truck called “and sauce.” and we drive around the country in big red pulling our food truck and selling sauce on pretty-much-anything.
i blame the whole30. or credit the whole30. i suppose there’s a difference between blaming and crediting.
the whole30 is a diet for 30 days (clever, eh?) during which you only eat whole foods and do not eat any: grains, legumes, dairy, added sugars, alcohol. you pare down your menus to fresh vegetables and meats and seafood and, after 30 days, deliberately add things back in to see how your body and digestive system react to various ingredients. it was back in early 2018 and it truly helped me get a tummy that was having a rebellion under control.
in many ways, it kind of stuck.
one of our staples was my homemade tomato meat sauce. but, at the time, we could not have it over pasta – regular or gluten-free. so we had it over spaghetti squash, which was, surprisingly, amazing. then we had it over oven-roasted chopped sweet potatoes. then we had it over roasted brussels sprouts. and over a hamburger. and over a baked potato. when we could add gluten-free products back in, we had sauce over penne, over rotini, wrapped in corn tortillas. sauce, we had discovered, is good on pretty much anything.
and the ideas were born. “and sauce”, the cafe, the food truck, the home delivery service. with the entrance of the pandemic, the food truck seemed like an apt adventure. i mean, who needs to even think about pianos and stages when you can travel around with stock pots and a food truck?
perhaps i am romanticizing this a tad bit, but, since this is my dream and not my reality, i am giving myself grace to daydream.
in those moments where comfort is sought and food that soothes the soul is paramount, we turn to the stock pot, to sauce or soup. the biggest pot comes out, the apron goes on (i adore over-the-head aprons), the cutting boards sit on the counter and life instantly slows down.
chopping and measuring (sort of) and sauteing and stirring with the giant wooden spoon from finland and sampling…it’s all heaven. there is not much that smells better than onions and garlic being sauted in olive oil. (though i recently read how you could re-create the williams sonoma store scent, which is very popular, by simply simmering vanilla extract, rosemary, lemon and peppercorns.)
just walking into the kitchen and seeing the stock pot on the stove is a reassurance. whether there is sauce in that stock pot or veggie soup or – drumroll – my sweet momma’s chicken soup (with the addition of spinach leaves and shredded parmesan, of course), it brings everything back into focus.
and as we ladle out sauce or soup into bowls or onto baked potatoes or penne, we, in turn, put worries and concerns and out-of-sorts-ness into the big pot. cause that’s actually the job of big stock pots. balancing out life.
we are creatures of repetition. we will eat black-bean-burgers every single day for lunch until – one day – we cannot stand the idea of another black-bean-burger ever-again. and then, after some time – poof! the yen for a b-b-b comes back.
it’s like that with oatmeal too. oatmeal-oatmeal-oatmeal. oatmeal’s biggest fans. with walnuts and dates and raisins and dried cranberries and bananas. yum! oatmeal! until – ugh – we cannot stand to eat another bowl of oatmeal.
and then, in our latest obsession, there’s rye toast. now, keeping in mind that we have been eating gluten-free, rye toast is kinda out of the safety-loop. but….ohmygoodness…it’s rye toast! it makes me think of my sweet momma and her momma and long island and – this is really great – the day my daughter was born. they brought me scrambled eggs and rye toast in the hospital and now, forever, the association is sealed. so…rye toast, rye toast, rye toast!
for a while we would have midnight-pancakes. what is not to love about pancakes and maple syrup late at night when your tummy is kinda pokin’ at you?
we aren’t ihop people. i can’t tell you the last time i went to an ihop. denny’s too. the stand-out time i went to denny’s was the day we moved to wisconsin on thanksgiving day and ended up at denny’s for dinner. it was a pitiful scene, i’m sure. but it wasn’t for pancakes. my mom and dad always went for the grand-slam-breakfast, which, i think, includes pancakes. denny’s has never made it onto our list of places-to-go when we roadtrip.
there was this place – a diner – in hanover, new hampshire just on the other side of the state line from vermont. i was eighteen or maybe nineteen. a group of us had been to a drive-in movie (where the guy driving drove in the exit backwards while i worried about getting in trouble) and were properly starving at the end of the double feature. especially me. anxiety will do that. the diner served up piles of pancakes and lukewarm coffee. it’s hard to remember the details from back in the dark ages, but, somehow, i remember the pancakes.
these days we generally try to find hole-in-the-wall kinds of places. back-roads places. small-town places. and, truth be told, we never ever – and i really mean never ever – go to any thing or any where that is “all-you-can-eat”.
though all-you-can-eat-pancakes does have a certain ring to it.
kodiak cakes had an ever-present home in our cupboard for a long time. because, really, pancakes have a way of satiating all worries and bringing peace.
it pains me to even write this, but there’s actually more than one. fart-noise-apps, that is. “tap and fart” and “fartworld” are two examples. i could be considered mirthless – and i don’t care if i am – for not wanting to jump on these and install them on my iphone. what kind of person wants a fart app, anyway?
“the devaluation of music and what it’s now deemed to be worth is laughable to me. my single costs 99 cents. that’s what a single cost in 1960. on my phone, i can get an app for 99 cents that makes fart noises – the same price as the thing i create and speak to the world with. some would say that the fart app is more important. it’s an awkward time. creative brains are being sorely mistreated.” (vince gill)
i am on the devaluation-pushback-wagon with vince. we’ve never met, and we are in different stratospheres from a making-bank-standpoint, but there are some basic tenets on which we clearly agree.
i have beat this drum again and again. as an independent musician, composer and recording artist, it is likely i will continue to beat it and beat it and beat it, and each thump of the djembe will float into the atmosphere, unresolved. because times have changed. and apple music and spotify and pandora and tidal and amazon music have it down to a science. point-zero-zero-zero-something of a penny for a stream. i wrote about it seven years ago and it hasn’t changed. 99 cents seems like a gold mine!
yet, doesn’t the thought of feeling like it is striking gold – at 99 cents – take your breath away?
and how would YOUR life be without music?
the imperative for an artist to create – a composer to compose, a musician to play, a painter to paint, a writer to write, a dancer to dance, a potter to throw – is undeniable. it is how we speak to the world. it is a creation, an invention of the heart and soul.
vince gill has had multiple number one hits. he is extraordinarily successful. yet, he is apparently just as disgruntled with the industry’s standard of payment to artists as little-ole-me. though i doubt it’s quite the same for him, it raises questions for me of the great whether-or-not.
whether-or-not to ever record new material, an expensive venture always.
whether-or-not i can ever squeeze more royalties out of my fifteen albums in the world streaming freely in rivers of computers and iphones and tablets and androids.
whether-or-not to pursue stage-performing ever again.
whether-or-not to keep writing.
whether-or-not there is relevancy.
or, since the world seems to value other noises above music – and i am incredulous and saddened about this – whether-or-not to point my imperative to creating some obnoxious noise app.
reverse threading 