Memento Week

Scene 1: Green tomato chutney making on Saturday with the fabulous Harriet Fasenfest and my reliable life domestic pals Kristen and Mel (of What Not fame). In this photo, Kristen and Harriet stir up two large vats of what will ultimately be very yummy chutney--some 40 or so jars of the stuff. It's true: the labors of chopping onions, apples, prunes, and tomatoes are so much more pleasurable with good (albeit at times heated and politcal) conversation. But notice that this picture is taken from behind our range, where once a wall had been. . . .

Scene 2: Look at this spacious combined dining room and kitchen space. Though some would call it a travesty to open up a kitchen in a traditional house to the adjoining dining room, thinking it too modern and disrespectful. But you know what I find more disrespectful? Leaving someone stranded in the kitchen slaving over a meal while family members and guests laugh and drink wine in another room. Plus, the opened space makes it easier for kids to run circles through the house in that crazy way that I mostly don't mind, as long as no one is carrying a stick or pair of scissors (Parenting 101). And though it's not clear yet, the beam will be enclosed and sheetrocked and fitted with molding that matches that of the rest of the house. So there: history respected and modern family life accommodated.

Scene 3: Beam-raising day! After a fair bit of persuasion on my part, Alex made an eleventh-hour call to good buddy (and hubby of What Knot) Brian to ask for help with installing that aforementioned humungous beam where a wall once was. After some let's call it "discussion" between two accomplished and know-it-all handy men, the beam was up and set to do its job of keeping the second floor above the first floor. Not magic or aliens after all: just strong, smart men and math!

A quick pitch for a site that doesn't need my help

I hope you're all reading Tina Brown's latest baby The Daily Beast, because even though I'm supposed to be prepping my manuscript to give to my committee on Thursday, I am! Here's a quick list of why:

1. A picture of Laura from Project Runway breastfeeding one of her thirty kids and offering advice to Sarah Palin. (I repeat: A picture of Laura from Project Runway breastfeeding one of her thirty kids and offering advice to Sarah Palin, ISYN.)

2. A list of how to avoid giving your kid a hipster name, like Mathilda or Daisy (both that, ahem, have been on the short list for my imaginary future second child, who, I guess, better be a girl).

3. On October 10, Christopher Buckley says on DB that he's going to vote for Obama, then today, he quits The National Review because so many conservatives are pissed at him? Maybe The Nation needs a columnist?

While you're digesting this info, please do yourselves a favor and read Christopher Hitchens's not-quite-endorsement-of-Obama-but-definitely-bitch-slapping-of-McPalin in Slate. Scathing. My friend Sarah wonders if this is the last stand of centrist conservatives, the thought of which, in all seriousness, bums me out. At least, I can sometimes understand where Buckley and Hitchens are coming from, unlike the crazies that have been showing up at McCain rallies. Yikes. As Alex says, the bigger problem with homogeneity, which I snarked about in a recent post, is that at extremes, it encourages intractability and fanaticism. We need those centrists and moderates for ballast.

But back to The Daily Beast: it's like Fred Meyer--slightly gaudy and tacky, but you can buy groceries, underwear, and a hammer at one checkstand. Check it out and thank me later.

The unexplainable in home improvement (as explained by the clueless)

Sometimes, I hate living in the city. For example, I came home the other day and found out that someone dropped this 300-pound beam in the middle of our kitchen:

Alex claims he was napping when it happened, but that must have been some REM sleep he was in. Near as I can tell, some high school kids must have hijacked some sort of heavy equipment machinery to get the thing in here and when they backed up to leave, that beep-beep-beeping sound would have normally woken Alex. But he's been going to lots of concerts lately, and using nail guns, so maybe his hearing is going a bit.

This is the kind of thing that can really only happen in the city. Kids in the country do harmless things like tip cows and play mailbox baseball.

On the bright side, this beam will apparently come in handy for our ongoing home remodeling project. At some point, in fact, it will soon hold up the second floor of our house, either through some feat of engineering or magic or both. I wonder if space aliens will use their advanced powers to levitate the thing and hold it place while Alex pounds/glues/staples it into place?

How to make your four-year-old daughter cry

Wake up on a stay-home day and rush your daughter through a breakfast of apples and peanut butter because there are things to do. You've been on an anti-grocery store kick since spring, so, instead of spending time wandering aisles, you spend perhaps more time gathering food from farmers markets, a CSA, and food buying group. This morning, you're supposed to meet the Azure Standard truck at Rebecca's, to pick up, among other things, a gallon of olive oil, gluten-free flours, and assorted frozen goods. Hardly a good time for a kid, but she hangs out on the porch while you and the other moms schlep boxes of food from Jeff's enormous delivery truck through the first serious rain of fall.

Rush her home to unload, and when she kicks off her rainboots, say, "Sorry, we've got to do another errand." She sighs and puts them back on. You drive downtown and circle a block about twenty times before finally parking illegally in a bank lot. Then, drag her up to the graduate studies office on the sixth floor, where a nice woman tells you they have the GO-12 and the GO-16M, but not the GO-19, which makes you laugh but not because it's funny. Your daughter, wearing a green frog raincoat that's one size too big and clutching a Mother Goose book, collapses on the floor and waits.

You try to make up for the morning with a quick lunch at Burgerville, purple balloon and all, but then, it's off to Kuts 4 Kids, where Suzanne cleans up your daughter's curls and ties them up in red and purple ribbons. When asked what she wants to be for Halloween, your daughter glowers. You think about withholding the usual post-haircut lollipop, but instead, smile tightly and lecture her about respecting her elders as you drive home. It's still raining.

After quiet time for her and work time for you, break it to her that, though the day is all but done, you still have to pick up your CSA vegetable share. Her pretty little mouth moves toward a pout, so you desperately offer to let her watch Curious George and eat a popsicle when she gets home, which elicits a cheer from her but makes your stomach twist up in failure because you realize how much you suck--not always, but definitely today.

You keep your end of the bargain when you get home. Your husband is in the kitchen putting soup together and you finish work you didn't finish earlier in the day. When you turn off the TV after her show is over, she gives you a look that reminds you that you suck, so you offer to play hospital with her, using her new birthday ambulance that came complete with a kid, bicycle, and bandages. You remind her to thank her dad for ordering the toy for her, but she blows you off, walks past him, and grabs a handful of trail mix. This enrages you, so you take the raisins away from her, sit her on the "time out" step, and give her another "respecting your elders" lecture. You leave her there but hear her hiccuping and sniffling from the other room.

After she thanks her dad, still hiccuping and sniffling and chewing on the soft fleshy part of her palm (a remnant tic from when she was a baby), you play hospital for a while, but then it's dinnertime. She tries to avoid the meal entirely, knowing it's soup--not her favorite--by asking to watch "the TV show of me"--videos from when she was a baby. You agree, convincing yourself that home movies don't really count as TV.

She chokes down kale and squash, digging around for the bacon and beans, but then you all sit down and watch snippets from 2006. You laugh at her chubby legs and sweet baby voice. You talk about the old house, the trip to Mt. Hood, how young Ella and Zoe and Isaiah look. Then it's bedtime and you turn the TV off and she starts to cry, saying, "Mama, I don't like what I'm doing." When you ask what she means, she says, stammering with the effort of speaking through tears, "I don't like how I haven't had fun this whole day." For a moment, you can't reconcile the images of the toddler on the video and this long-legged girl who speaks in complete sentences. You think of what else you can offer her, but it's almost 8:00, so you promise her a few more minutes of SBTV tomorrow and give her a piggy back ride upstairs.

Later that night, snuggled in bed, you cry while reading the last chapter of Charlotte's Web. Your daughter's head is resting on your chest, so you struggle to control your voice, but the words get gobbed up in your throat, and now, it's you who's hiccuping. She sits up, sees your face, and asks why you're sad. When you say it's because Charlotte died and she was such a good friend to Wilbur, she begins to cry, too.

You wipe your tears on the purple handkerchief that sits on her nightstand, then pass it to her. You pull yourself together and continue reading, but she's listening closely now, not to the words on the page but to the inflections of your voice. You finish the book, tears streaming down your face, but your voice perfectly normal. Your daughter dabs at your cheeks with the handkerchief. Tears stream down her face, too, and when you say, "Why are you sad? Because of the book? Because we had a rough day?" She shakes her head, reaches for you, and says, "No. I'm sad because you're sad."

You turn off the light, settle her in under the covers, and pull her close. Her small body is angular, knobby at the joints, but her face is full and smooth. You kiss her check and forehead over and over again, and sing "Our House" in a hoarse rasp against her sweet-smelling hair.

Swirly, sparkly, addicting things

Is it normal to feel so bereft after being practically done with the project that has consumed every free minute of my life for several months and that has haunted me (the guilt, mostly) for years? I feel out of sorts. I keep thinking of things like public space, private space, house as a symbol of (fill in the blank). That's not just a "green home"--that's a political stand, a sign of the times, a vote with dollars. But maybe it's just a cool house with a living wall and roof, graywater processing system, and solar panels, all backed by someone with more time and money than he/she knows what to do with. Perhaps some things are not more than the sum of their parts.

We have fun family or mama/SB things planned all weekend. I have a stack of magazines, all glossy and undogeared, waiting on the coffee table and nightstand. I even bought two brand-spanking-new books, which I never do, cheapskate that I am (Plenty and House at Sugar Beach). Yet, I'm fighting the urge to sit at my computer or scribble notes on scraps of paper. While eating lunch with SB, I got up and wrote the following on a Working Assets pad of paper I found in the debris of my desk: "Public v. Private lives. Milk on porch. Internet. Green parenting. Risk private for public? Holloran. Losing data and identity theft. Embrace public." Good grief, woman. Let it go for a couple of weeks.

But I'm Type A--can't sit still, have to stay busy. Which is a kind of sickness. Or is it that cliche about scratching at a long-ago amputated limb? One day, if I'm lucky, I'll forget about it. But that day is not today.

When we were out celebrating Alex's birthday the other night, he asked, "So, what are you going to do now that your thesis is mostly done?" I was supposed to say, "I'm going to Disneyland!" but instead my shoulders seized up and I felt a flush of panic flood my body. What am I going to do with all my newfound time?

My acupuncturist says to maybe just let the rest of my life, the stuff that's been crammed into the tight corners of my days, stretch out a bit. Don't fill yourself up again, she gently warned me, as she stuck me with about thirty needles meant to beat back an encroaching cold and get rid of weeks of stress. But she's not like me. She's a mellow, relaxed person. Just being in the same room as her makes me sleepy. I might be lazy, but I'm rarely ever relaxed.

The thing is, I remember a time before full-time work and family and trying to live a greener life and writing in the spare minutes of a day and hanging out with friends. I had less to do, I was more relaxed, but some days, I couldn't even get out of bed. There was nothing to yank me out of own head and into the world. I cried a lot and felt sorry for myself. That was a crappy time of thinking too much and doing too little.

The swirl of sound and color and motion—of SB and her friends running through the house while unwinding a ball of yarn, of jam burning on the stove, of hooting and moaning at the Daily Show, of Twittering about Project Runway, of newspapers and magazines slipping off of every flat surface in the house, of weekends so full that they feel like weekdays—that mess of parts equals the sum total of my life. The energy of this crazy book project can't just disappear, so where will it go? I'm not worried: something else equally sparkly and distracting and addicting will come along. And honestly, I can hardly wait.

Goodbye, goodbye, hello

We're reading Charlotte's Web right now, a chapter or so before bed. Tonight we read the bittersweet chapter about the crickets, how they call "goodbye, summer" and everyone hears it. I hear it, too.

We went to the Eastbank Farmers Market for the last time this season. I'll miss the lovely ritual of stopping there after work to buy fruit for the weekend (peaches are still lovely, and apples are coming in strong) and eat a little dinner (Toddbott Triangles for SB, tamales or lamb sandwiches for Alex and me) and listen to music. We always run into to friends, old and new. Tonight, Todd saw us in line, heard SB asking about the spinach roll with tamari, and had one ready for her when we got to the top of the line. We said goodbye to him until next year.

At the market, we picked up twenty-five pounds of tomatoes to can or freeze. Last week, Alex and SB went to the farm while I worked on my thesis and picked up seventy-plus ears of corn and ten pounds of beans. Later that night, while I continued to work, Alex blanched and prepped the vegetables for the freezer. Though veggies are still rolling into town from the nearby fields, there's a turn in the weather, a chill in the morning air. I think we'll soon be saying goodbye to tomatoes, corn, and beans, too.

But--Hello to football season for Alex. Hello to striped tights, flowered tights, pink tights for SB. Hello to the stack of books and magazines piled on the coffee table that have been waiting for me to finish my thesis. Hello to fall dinners with friends, to stews and soups, to squash of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Hello to reading, guilt-free, on cold, rainy Saturdays.

Goodbye to summer's pleasures and pressures--I'm just about ready for fall.

Whew!

It's done! 113 pages. Finished a draft on Sunday night at 10:30 and turned it in to my advisor on Monday afternoon. Whew.

Next up: a week of revisions in mid-October then I give copies to my committee. A ten-page written exam later (WTF?) and I defend in late October/early November. If all goes well, I'll be a master by December!

On Sunday, the last day of thesis writing, as SB was heading out with Alex to the Children's Museum to meet some friends, I heard her say, "I miss Mama." Almost stopped working to run out and hug her, but realized that I just needed to keep writing so that I could join my family in the real world again.