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'Surreal days, all of them anymore, but a new year begins and I face it determined to focus on kindness and goodness and gratitude and beauty as always. My seemingly-adult-life-long fight against depression rages on daily (hourly!) these days, of course, but I can lose a few of those battles and still win the war. I have little concentration for writing or reading the past couple months, but I journal a bit, at least, and I can get through about a chapter of a book before finding myself reading more news stories again instead. I usually write a dozen pages a week and am such a fast reader, but not lately. (What's turning into this spring's--and at this rate, maybe this summer's--books, then: Unbroken: A WWII Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand and The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson.) The lost time between loved ones is what makes me saddest. I know you know. I have been writing and rewriting this paragraph off and on for three hours. Ay yi yi. 'Alternate blog post title tonight: The Pandemic: I Know You Know.
As in my last post, almost every picture I take anymore is taken on my walk to work or my walk home from work--Essential Workers, unite!--as the only other place I've been since March is the grocery store weekly and the post office once. From what little I see of it on my walks to/from, though, this has been a beautiful spring. I've missed seeing and smelling Lilacs this year, since there are none along my to/from work-route and I've been skipping longer walks until it feels safer to be outside, but all the other spring blooms have been lovely, and I've appreciated spring--both the fact of it and the specifics of it--more this year than any other. Birdsong, for example, is especially lovely and welcome in the wee hours when I'm either still struggling to fall asleep at all or awake too early after another night of nightmares. I have somehow always loved birdsong but never truly appreciated it until this spring--so now, I suppose, I can say I'm truly loving it for the first time. It is one of the good things I will likely most vividly remember about this anxiety-filled time, the tender sounds of the birds breaking into the darkness. There have been more than a few days this year I've gone to work on no sleep or two-or-three hours of sleep. On my days off lately, I sometimes relax enough to fall sleep only after the sun's come up for the day. Maybe I'd never truly loved mornings until now either. Maybe even I, then, ever-determined to live looking for the pretty in the rough patches, will now learn right-down-to-the-bones-and-beyond levels of gratitude.
Take care of yourselves and of each other, Friends. If we can't be kind to ourselves and to each other during a PANDEMIC, though, really. . . Heaven help us. And I do think most people are rising to meet the moment. ♥ I leave you now with not only a flower petal heart,
but also--and this year would be the year I find one--a heart in a roll of toilet paper. :)
I felt like starting the day with something creative so made my cake a day early. My fortieth year begins with a few carrot cake cupcakes topped with cream cheese-lemon frosting--and with Forget-Me-Nots, too, to remind me to take as good of care of myself as I do of everyone and everything else in my life. Forty! ♥ How sweet is that!
This is how the candle-taped-to-the-treat-idea began, Jenny. :) I couldn't get home for my 2009 birthday, so in the package Mom mailed that year, she included a pink candle taped to a store-bought cupcake. :) (The little one-story pink house beside it was a flea market find from just the day before, she had explained on the card. [I am always looking for cute one-story houses.]) The candle really is a charming idea, and one I need to remember more often. I clipped from a magazine years ago the idea to mail someone a box of already-blown-up gifts along with his/her birthday gift, and I love that but have yet to try it. (I always imagine the balloons bursting during shipping. [I should mail blown-up balloons to myself first as a trial.] Anyway, here's to sweet moms and sweet ideas. ♥
The new year is beginning with a flurry of book-buying for my former elementary school. I will have donated about six hundred books by the end of this month so am very much on-track with my goal of donating a thousand by my fortieth birthday in May. "Did you know that all media's now half-off on Sundays?" the thrift shop cashier asked me last week as she rang up my stack of books. I did not, and the new prices will make my goal even easier to reach this spring. 'Fifteen like-new hardcover books last week for practically nothing--like a wink from the universe. ♥ I also did not know that Mary Poppins dolls existed--!--and lo and behold, this one, complete with carpetbag and umbrella, will soon be flying off to the school with the related books.
Mom's January 4th birthday proved tricky to get a package out in time for since there was no mail here January 2nd for the New Year's postal holiday and I didn't want to mail it the Saturday before and have it--with cookies inside--sit in a post office or postal truck over the three-day weekend. With a few little wrapped gifts nestling them inside the box, gluten-free nut roll cookies ended up being Mom's birthday treat this year. I used a bag of Bob's Red Mill-brand gluten-free pie crust mix and was completely charmed by the packaging. This would make a darling print. And it's pink! ♥
My original plan had been to make rugelach, but the dough was too sticky to roll properly and I hadn't remembered to leave myself enough of the flour for that purpose, so after a messy attempt at the rugelach, I ended up making a dozen nut roll cookies for Mom instead. Had I put a bit more thought into my Plan B, I'd have made a tidier thumbprint cookie with the nut filling so they would have looked prettier. Next time. These turned out, though, with the nut-mixture mixed right into and around the dough, and they tasted good.
The nut-mixture was about 7 oz. of walnut-meal, maybe 3/4 cup whole milk, a cup or so of sugar, an egg, and most of a stick of butter--cooked until boiling, then just kind of rolled into the pie crust-cookie dough. Next time I make these, I'll add some of the walnut-meal to the flour so there will be more nut-flavor throughout.
I baked them early in the morning on January 3rd--the day before Mom's birthday, so. . .cutting it close--practically ran to the post office with the package as soon as I'd finished wrapping it all, and was told that it likely wouldn't reach her until the day after her birthday. Bah! to postal holidays! And no, it did not arrive in my parents' morning mail delivery on Mom's birthday, which made me sad. (She did not care--"Getting mail tomorrow will just extend my birthday, Vally!"--but I very much did.) We talked just a few minutes that afternoon since she and Dad were on their way out dinner and a movie. She called me before I left for work the next night to let me know that just as they'd been leaving for dinner, a postal van had pulled up to drop off her package--an unprecedented second mail delivery in a single day for them--so she had received it on her birthday, after all. ♥ And yes, she loved the cookies. :)
As the temperature outside has bounced from a painful 8° one day to now-raining-and-near-40° a few days later, I have mostly been a homebody, contentedly sorting books and puttering around the apartment, save for walks to and from work, the thrift shop, and the post office. 'A peaceful and most satisfying first ten days of the year.
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'Still settling back into life here after a few days with family. Dad's birthday and the annual family reunion fell on the same day this year, and his two sisters also spent the night at the house Sunday and were able to stay through lunch Monday, making this visit home especially memorable. Dad cooked their grandmother's risotto--his best batch of it yet, we all agreed--and his just-picked tomatoes and cucumbers made a perfect side-salad. 'A special meal and sweet way for the siblings' visit to end. Mom, Dad, and I opted for the Olympics over seemingly-ceaseless election-related-news-coverage in the evenings, I finished reading Judy Blume's latest book Monday night and began Bill Bryson's take on Australia in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, and too soon--
--I was back at the bus station, greeting its resident cat and waiting to board to come back here.
Assuming Aunt Laurie's health remains good, I will be looking out the bus windows at Pennsylvania countryside again next week already for a visit with her and the rest of my family.
This summer has been miserably hot and humid, but it's one that has found me both getting somewhere with my running finally and reuniting with family, so those are two Summer 2016 things that I will remember fondly.
My birthday fell the day before Mother's Day this year, making my weekend home even sweeter for both me and Mom. Some years, we mail each other our cards and goodies, and other years, we just wait until we see each other to exchange gifts. This time around, Mom made me my usual cheesecake--and the only cheesecake I've ever liked (with a chilled-not-baked filling of lemon gelatin, cream cheese, sugar, evaporated milk, and vanilla)--for Saturday night, and we all had leftovers of that and Mom's berries-and-flowers Mother's Day cake on Sunday, so by yesterday, a single cupcake back here at the apartment seemed like more than enough. I froze a few Lilac petals I'd pulled from one of Mom and Dad's shrubs before leaving yesterday morning and they were still a pretty shade of lilac when thawed and sprinkled over the cupcake last night, but the camera refused to capture the color. In any case, this was my tiny 39th birthday cake, a simple end to a sweet weekend and a pretty start to the last year of my thirties.
A woman I spent some time talking with in my hometown bus station yesterday morning asked me if I was a student, and I was momentarily flustered by the question, answering clumsily, "Oh no, I'm out of school--Done with school. I'm older. I'll be 40 next year"--because I'm smooth like this in conversation, clearly (see: Goals, cross-referenced with Val, Self-Improvement Needs of) :)--and she exclaimed, "Forty!? I was thinking maybe 24 if you were out of school! Well! Good for you!" Noooo, thank youuuuuuuuu! We talked some more, and it was part of an otherwise already-lovely kick-off to the year ahead. Lisa and Cheryl, if I looked 39 or 40 or 45 to you in-person last month, let me have a week before you burst my bubble. ;)
Last year's birthday wishes and goals included finishing a first draft of the 80s memoir I've been working on, and while I've written a lot, I learned early-on this past year that producing a rough draft by this May wasn't a realistic goal, so the work on that continues. I continue to write, though, and I'm still walking my way back into running shape, dreaming of spending the morning of my 40th birthday finishing my first full marathon. I have a lot of (gained, lost, and re-gained) weight to (re-)lose before then, and many miles to walk and then run before that day, but it remains the goal. Here's to the year ahead.
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'Not the most appetizing picture, I'm thinking, but since I didn't think to take one after the nut roll was baked, this is the only shot I have of it. Mom loves nut rolls but hadn't had one in a few years since going gluten-free in 2011 for various health issues, so I decided I'd bake her a gluten-free one and "Priority Mail" it to her for her birthday this week. It reached her about twenty-two hours after I'd taken it out of the oven, which was the best I could have hoped for, and she loved it, but may I just say what a messy process this was! I used this recipe but with a different gluten-free flour mixture, and while it did taste quite good, it seemed like surely, this was twice the amount of filling needed?! I was smart enough, at least, to have decided from the start the other day to divide the dough and filling into three nut rolls, considering the first my trial one and whichever was the best of the other two the one I'd send Mom. 'So glad I did it that way--three cheers for thinking ahead, yes--because the filling I added to the first roll seeped through the dough and stuck to the baking pan I used. The nut roll I ended up mailing with Mom's other birthday gifts was not messy-looking, but even though I'd spread a little less filling into that one and tried to wrap it more tightly than the first, and even though I'd rolled the dough between sheets of parchment paper too, the dough remained so sticky (as gluten-free dough always seems to be), it just didn't roll up into the beautiful log I'd envisioned. (And by the time I baked the third roll, I hardly cared, since Mike doesn't eat many sweets and still had Christmas morning cinnamon rolls here anyway and I'm not a fanatic about these the way Mom is.) Mom loved it, regardless, and was tickled with the tea pot address labels and stickers I'd included with it, as well, so all's well that ends well, and happy birthday, Mom. :) Of course, a few days after I'd made and mailed it, I found a magazine article that suggested using ready-made gluten-free pie crust and the same walnut filling to make gluten-free rugelach, which tastes--to me, at least--just like this nut roll did anyway, and yesssss, that will likely be the way I do this next time. Given the large amount of dough that this recipe makes and the cost of the gluten-free flour mixture, and since it's a just-at-Christmas treat for (really) just one person anyway, going the easier route may be the way to do it next time.
Mike and I took a bus to Yankee Stadium this weekend, Mike's first time in New York and my first visit to the Bronx. The Yankees are Mike's and his dad's team, and since my mom is from New York, more than a few people in my family are Yankees fans, so it was especially sweet to see the stadium finally. I thought the six-hour bus trip would find me and Mike featured in a "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" magazine column, but we experienced both the travel and the heat-index-of-103°-temperature and lived to tell the tale.
Mom made up a gift basket and this cute Snoopy card for us and arranged to have it waiting in our hotel room. The card was one of the first things Mike unpacked when we got home this afternoon. :)
We got to visit with both my parents this weekend, as well, so it was a sweet weekend all-around, with Dad loading up our rental car with vegetables from his garden before we got back on the road.
Mike got to see Alex Rodriguez warming up for the game. This was the only player we saw signing autographs for the kids before the game too.
In my favorite photo from the game, Yankee Stadium's rooftop lights and flags are reflected in Mike's sunglasses. A happy accident. This trip was both our vacation-ish thing this summer and my birthday present for him, so to look at our pictures later and see Yankee Stadium in his eyes was great fun.
And as a final sweet post-game surprise, we discovered while looking up video online of one of the game's home runs that we can be seen in one of the crowd shots that aired on TV after the game, since a guy sitting in front of us caught the ball. 'Not bad for our first visit to the stadium. :)
And another two days off before I have to go back to work. 'A most refreshing and much-needed break. Next on this summer's to-do list is painting the bathroom and bedroom. Yes, the building manager gave me permission to paint! Onward and upward. :)
My younger brother's wife had just finished her nursing school exams and I was home for the wedding on a weekend-break from packing up our old apartment to move here, so I'm surprised we look as carefree as we do in this 2011 picture. It is one of my favorites. Happy birthday to my sister-in-law, and a happy anniversary to her and my younger brother. ♥
The computer went kaput before I could share my birthday cake here a couple weeks ago. I seem to be regressing regarding birthday cakes, getting more of a kick out of them--my own and others'--the older I get: Deciding on flavors, decorations, candles, and tablecloths for my birthday is a small thing I look forward to every spring now, although I didn't seem to pay much attention even in my early thirties. The past few years, it's become a fun and reflective time for me, just as setting the table for Christmas breakfast before I go to bed on Christmas Eve has. ♥
The high temperature on my birthday this year was a humid 84°, so I decided just to mix up some pink buttercream and frost a ready-made ice cream cake. And after a few minutes of wandering the store with my why-did-I-take-it-out-of-the-freezer-case-before-I-finished-the-rest-of-my-shopping cake, I finally hit upon what I wanted to use as this year's cake topper: A truffle decorated like a nesting doll. Her dreamy expression and heart-shaped lips charmed me and seemed appropriate for this birthday.
While the newly-frosted cake was refreezing, I used pink acrylic paint, a light coat of glue, and a sprinkling of white sanding sugar to doll up a couple grocery store candles. I only keep candles in cakes long enough for the pictures anyway, so why not jazz them up for the few seconds they'll last. I stuck toothpicks into the candles' bases to make it easier to poke them into the frozen buttercream.
A few hours later. . .eating and wish-making with Mr. Mike. Ohhh, I want to have driven a lot more before my next birthday, although without owning a car, the amount of driving practice depends on how often we rent one. And I hope to remain in good health and get back into running shape in the next couple years. My biggest goal and dream for the year ahead, though, is to have finished writing a full first draft of the memoir of my 1980s childhood that I've been working on rather sporadically the past few years. Memories of my family, house, friends, street, neighbors, pets, and teachers from those years make me light up like nothing else. The more I write, the more I remember, and while my family and I have many old photos, I've also kept all the diaries I've written since the fourth or fifth grade, and they are detailed treasure troves of memories: TV show theme songs, conversations with my parents, class projects, Christmas and birthday wishlists, first-day-of-school outfits, board games played with my brothers, paperbacks ordered from the school book order flyers, the athletes that thrilled and inspired during the Olympics, the first cassette tapes I ever owned, even a drawing of the view from my bedroom window circa 1987. It is time to put all my notes and paragraphs together and get a rough draft finished. At least a few of you here are published writers, and I hope my own dream of getting the memoir published as book comes true before too long.
My family moved out of my childhood home in late 1988, when I was eleven-and-a-half, and I feel drawn to it like a magnet lately. I haven't visited it since the day we moved, and I've always dreamed of it almost abnormally often, but even more-so this past year. The night of Mike's dad's funeral in March, while we were staying at his parents' house, I had what began as a beautiful dream that my dad and I had gone together to visit our former street. Oh, how I loved our little street! It was a short no-outlet hill of a street hosting only seven homes. And our former house! I have loved few things in my life the way I loved that house. I was so excited that I was about to see it all again, and Dad was humoring me. As we turned the car up the short little hill, I was horrified to see that the street now looked like London's after the Blitz. There was just enough of each house still standing to make it clear which one was which. "My God," Dad kept saying, and remembering his voice even now hurts my heart. I told him I wanted to walk around what was left of the house, and he said he'd seen enough and would wait for me outside. I made my way into what had been our kitchen, and the dream got worse from there and soon ended, one of the worst nightmares I've ever had. I was shaking when I awoke, and I'd somehow woken Mike with my fitful sleep during the dream. "Tonight of all nights," I asked him, "Why would I have to dream something so horrible?" Because his dad had just died? Because I was thinking of my own? Because with the death of one parent, that 80s childhood seemed especially Long Ago and Far Away and finishing the memoir felt that much more urgent? All of the above, I'm sure, but the timing was cruel. It took a long time that night to shake the feeling that I really had just been on that ravaged, silent street with Dad. Four days after the funeral and nightmare, I dreamed that a woman asked me if she could publish my memoir. "Yes, PLEASE!" I practically shouted in response. Yes, I'm paying attention, Universe, and I'm connecting the dots.
While I was home a couple weeks ago, I told Mom how much I wanted to visit "our" street, but from the glimpse of the house visible in the distance as we passed the hill, we could see the current owner in the driveway, and that wasn't the visit I wanted. I will explore it all on my next visit, home, though, Current Owner in the Driveway or not, because it feels more necessary all the time, like I'm being pushed or pulled there.
Before I left this last time, the subject of my sixth-grade science fair project came up while I was talking with my dad, and he said again, as he did a couple years ago, "I think now that those were the best years. All you kids were still little, and Mum and Dad were still alive, and we were going to Ocean City every summer. . . ." And this time when he said it, just like the first time he'd said it, I choked up at his words, and I wished more than ever that I could whip a hardcover copy of my memoir out from under the picnic table and say, "I think those were the best years too. Here's a book I wrote about it." The memoir really is, after all, a love letter to my parents. Thirty-eight begins, then, with not only dreaming, but also writing. What else could have topped my cake this year but a dreaming brunette with love on her lips?! Surely, things are unfolding just as they should here, with death, nightmare, dream, conversation, and cake topper each showing up as they did. Surely, my dream too can come true. By the time I share my next birthday cake, I hope to tell you that I have a finished piece I can start submitting--however-many submissions it takes--for publication. And oh! Please, please let me have my handing-Mom-and-Dad-their-copies-of-my-book moment.
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"Did you know," inquires my dad in his last letter, "that ice-chipping is much worse than snow-shoveling? Well, it is. 75 lures later, I still have three weeks to kill before March 1st--my sanity cut-off date. Pitchers and catchers report coming soon. Cardinals are singing. I'll cling to any ray of hope. " Indeed. I wasn't minding winter until this past week but now feel like I've
gotten the gist--If I were in Boston, I'd say I've more than gotten the gist. We got hit by our own three-feet-of-snow blizzard here in February 2010, so I empathize--and am ready to move on to spring. This photo. . .after
a mile-and-a-half walk a few days ago. 'Have been in a rotten mood all week, and it's not like me to be in one for this many days. I blame the wind, the slippery sidewalks, everyday life nonsense in general, phantom wisdom tooth pain--they were removed thirteen years ago, but now and then, the site of one missing tooth starts aching--and lack of enough real walks. Blehhh! I echo Mom's postscript-drawing in Dad's letter below.
My younger brother turns thirty-three today. It is my father-in-law's birthday too. And by Saturday, a small package containing chocolate-marshmallow hearts for my niece and my nephew and a copy of this sweet book will reach my niece Alyssa--of bat-and-cat-drawing fame--who turns eight this weekend. Both my grandmothers, Mike's niece, a great-aunt, and my older brother have all had birthdays this month too, and each circled cake-and-ice-cream date on the calendar is a bright spot in this otherwise dreary month. And thank God for that. ♥
My mom's birthday should fall in May or June, it's always seemed to me. She doesn't seem like a winter birthday person, but instead like one who should get to enjoy a garden party in full sunshine on her day. She has Mother's Day in springtime, at least.
I've introduced Mom to the artwork of Susan Wheeler, creator of the illustrated "Holly Pond Hill" world, in the past few years. I sent her the Wheeler card above a few days ago--she mentioned tonight how she loved the giggling mice on it--and as part of a small package that postal service tracking promises will arrive Monday morning, one of Wheeler's Holly Pond Hill books titled Today Is Your Day. Every one of Wheeler's illustrations in it is "so Mom," I can't imagine a more perfect book for her. If reincarnation exists and Mom has any say in it, she will come back as a tea-drinking rabbit dressed like Tasha Tudor. The rustic cottages depicted in Wheeler's artwork are what do it for me: The arched windows and doors, the scalloped shingles, the colorful furniture. . . .Bliss!
The illustration above reminds me of the treasured photo below of Mom's surprising me--the oddball sixteen-year-old with a lap full of decorating magazines--with my birthday cake in 1993. Birthday laughter, the best of gifts. ♥
When
I talked with her earlier tonight, she said that she'd gotten to
see both my brothers and their families in the past few days, had talked
with her sister Laurie and their friend Vickie, and that she and Dad had enjoyed their weekend together. All good news.
Mom had mentioned while I was home at Christmas that she misses chocolate-covered pretzels now that she's gone gluten-free, and I found her a box of gluten-free ones last week to include in her package. She had surprised me on Christmas Eve: While I was baking, Mike checked the mail and returned with a tiny box from her that contained a felt stocking holding a few of the chocolate marshmallow snowmen I'd discovered last month and raved about while home last month and the smallest gift box with an Old English Sheepdog key-chain inside.
The box was the perfect size for a miniature gift for her--
--so I reused it for her blue floral tea pot and plate of cookies-- ♥
--and then re-wrapped the box itself, so the silly surprise will be more of a surprise. :)
Last spring or summer, I had found a couple sheets of vintage blue wrapping paper with colonial-looking tavern signs like those Mom collects on it, and I saved it for this year's birthday package.
I had enough to wrap the book, pretzels, miniatures, and a couple sets of note cards too, and since there was still some left, I covered the outside of the entire package in it then strengthened it with clear tape before taking it to the post office.
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Happy birthday, Mom. ♥
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