Monthly Archives: June 2012

Enjoying the quiet while it lasts

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The grandchildren will be here any time, and I am taking the opportunity to sit and relax for a bit before they arrive. It won’t be this quiet for a while.It has been a busy day for all of us. My son arrived last night from Georgia just before dark and then got up at daybreak to drive halfway across Kansas to pick up his kids, who have also been riding in the car all day, having left Colorado Springs early this morning with their mother. My husband left about 3:00 to go call a dance in Rolla, Missouri tonight (he claims he will be back eventually).

I have been trying to remember how to cook for children and have been to the farmers market and the grocery store to stock up on cereal and goldfish crackers and bananas. It’s been a long time since I had to cook for picky eaters, and the list of foods that the youngest grandchild will eat, according to his mother, seems rather limited. Fortunately, I found a website by a mom who has four children and who kindly publishes her kid-tested weekly menus and grocery lists. So I picked a set of menus for the next two weeks, and we’re just going to go with those. I don’t want to argue about food or spend all my time filling special orders, as though this were some sort of restaurant. I’d rather spend our time having fun together. I don’t mind changing my cooking habits while they are here (I’m not going to make them eat navy beans with chard, for example, or anything with tofu), but I can’t guarantee that what I cook will taste exactly like what they’re used to. When my children were young, my main rule at dinner time was, “If you don’t want to eat what’s on your plate, fine. Don’t talk about it. Don’t say Ew Yuck. Just ignore it. But this is what’s for dinner tonight.”

I have also been making a list of things we could do while the children are here, but the heatwave this past week (up to 107 on Thursday) has kind of thrown me for a loop. Of course, the heat makes water activities a lot more appealing, but it might dampen the enthusiasm for walking around the zoo or farm. We are fortunate to live in a college town, where there is a lot to do. Some of the activities going on in and around  town the next two weeks include:

  • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a brief adaptation by two professional actors from Hamstead Stage Company, put on at the public library.
  • Fun-Tastic Classics with the Missouri Symphony, also at the public library.
  • “This Land is Your Land” Family Concert at the Missouri Symphony
  • Kids Series, “World of Art: Found Objects” at the Museum of Art and Archeology
  • Fourth of July “Fire in the Sky” and Children’s Activities
  • Family Summer Camp at Bass Pro
  • Outdoor movies and concerts
  • Numerous parks, including a couple with splash parks

Only a short drive away, there are many farms we could visit, including Warm Springs Ranch, where 16 baby Clydesdale horses were born this year.

In Hannibal, Missouri, they will be celebrating the 57th Annual Tom Sawyer Days, complete with fence-painting contests, frog-jumping contests, a “Mighty Miss” raft face, concerts, and more.

And there is always bowling, fishing, swimming, picnicking, going to movies, going to the river, camping out, biking, hiking, caving, and so on, depending on how adventurous we feel.

On days when we want to stay home, my grandaughter has asked if I would teach her to sew, and we can come up with lots of other games and crafts and stories to fill the time.

We are also only two hours from either St. Louis or Kansas City, so we could take any number of day trips while the children are here to visit the zoo, Lego Land, the Steamboat Arabia Museum, Six Flags, the Botanical Garden, the Science Center, Grant’s Farm, or take a ride on the light rail train.

With all these things to do, I bet the grandchildren will hardly notice we don’t have a television or video games. What do you think? (I’ll let you know how that theory works out. Did I mention the children are 14, 12, and 8 years old?)

Summer Reading

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Note: Apparently I wrote this post last year but never published it. So here you go! It’s still mostly true.

I have very fond memories of the Busy Bee Summer Reading Program at the local public library when I was growing up. I especially enjoyed the requirement to read books in various categories that I might not read, left to my own devices—fantasy, science fiction, adventure, biography, travel, history—and I had no trouble reading enough books over a summer to fill out my card and then some. I would have been reading anyway, out on a blanket in the yard or up in the crotch of a tree or on the front-porch swing or in the musty reading room in the public library.

I devoured books, the way my mom had when she was young and would climb up on the garage roof to read, within easy reach of the ripe peaches. In fact, many of the books I enjoyed as a child were ones she had passed down to me—The Middle Moffat; Betsy and Tacy; Five Little Peppers and How They Grew; Little Women; Mary Poppins; The Little Colonel; The Boxcar Children—all with peach stains on the brittle and yellowing war-issue paper.

There is nothing like the feeling of escaping into a book on a lazy summer day, with all the time in the world and no real responsibilities. I still enjoy books, but it’s not the same as before. I generally don’t get “lost” in books the way I once did—with the possible exception of the Harry Potter books and a book called The Thirteenth Tale that my mother gave me, or the series about the girl with the dragon tattoo—and I seldom have the luxury of reading all day long like I did when I was young. Mostly those feelings are connected with a different time and place—before central air conditioning, before Internet, before life got complicated.

But I am a voracious and democratic reader, who always has way too many books going at once. I tend to read more nonfiction than fiction, but I still enjoy a good story about interesting characters. Here are the books I am currently reading:

  • Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D Seeley–This fascinating book is about how honeybee swarms choose a new home
  • Get Up Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite by Bruce E. Levine–I am hoping this book will at some point provide some inspiration and practical actions I can take, but so far it is just reminding me of all the problems that this country faces and how powerless I feel to solve them.
  • At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson–This book reminds me of Bryson’s earlier book, A Short History of Almost Everything
  • Everyday Cooking with Organic Produce by Cathy Thomas
  • Pain Free: A Revolutionary Method for Stopping Chronic Pain by Pete Egoscue with Roger Gittiner

Here are ones I completed most recently:

  • Hour Game by David Baldacci
  • How Did the Government Get in Your Backyard by Jeff Gillman and Eric Hererlig
  • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

I don’t know why I can’t just read one book at a time until I’m finished and then start the next, except that I see interesting books on the new-book shelf at the library and know they won’t stay on that shelf forever, or friends recommend something, or I forgot to take the book I’m currently reading to work and then at lunch pick up whatever is lying around on the table in the break room. (Maybe the same reason I also have three knitting projects going at the moment: a baby hat for a friend at work, an afghan for a very belated wedding present for my younger son and his wife, and a shawl for myself from beautiful yarn that my son picked up for me in New Zealand.)

Reinventing our living space

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When we first moved into our house many years ago, my sons were 9 and 2 years old, and the downstairs made a perfect den for two growing boys–finished enough to look civilized but not so fussy that I worried about damage. We put down a heavy-duty industrial carpet that refused to show dirt. The holes in the wall behind the dart board could be patched easily enough. The furniture could be reupholstered. The downstairs was the kids’ zone. Over the years the den has been transformed many times to suit their changing needs. At one time the room featured a pingpong table and mini trampoline. There was plenty of room to set up race tracks or electric trains or make tents with sheets and light-weight blankets over the furniture. Later, the entertainment center took over, as the kids gathered their friends around to watch movies or play video games.

Likewise, the bedrooms in the house changed over the years to meet the changing needs of the family. At first my older son liked the room tucked away in the back downstairs, away from meddling little brother and parents. But before too long, he felt lonely and wanted to move upstairs with the rest of the family. We gave the boys the 11 x 22 foot master bedroom, with their bunk bed set down the middle to delineate Matt’s side from Isaac’s side of the room, and we parents took the smaller room next door, which at least had the advantage of windows facing the woods, so we woke to morning sun and birdsong.

Eventually, though, little brother was 7 years old and big brother was 13 and very much needing his privacy, so we decided to put up walls in the den and build him a room of his own.  However, before we could finish building his room,  his 13-year-old cousin Melissa came to live with us. The boys still shared the big room upstairs, and technically, we had a spare bedroom downstairs that we could have put Melissa in, but we wanted her to feel welcome, so the adults moved bedrooms again–this time downstairs to the room in the basement that Matt had started out in. (We doubted very seriously that we would feel “lonely” down there but were certainly willing to take our chances.)

Years later, the kids have moved on and built lives for themselves. Matthew is 32 and a captain in the Army, with one son and two stepchildren. Isaac is 26, married, and finishing up his PhD in molecular biology. Melissa is 32, a registered nurse, with a 3-year-old and a new baby on the way. I have remarried, and it’s time to transform the house again to fit our new lives. Although it feels like moving backwards in some ways (and I feel somewhat bad about losing a space that was so important at the time), we have taken the walls back out to open up the space again. We took up the carpet and painted the floor, boxed in the duct work and the support poles, replaced the ceiling tiles, put in additional lights, and added a 3-way switch at the bottom of the stairs (and by “we,” I mean the contractors who actually know how to do these things, as opposed to the earlier remodeling project that we did ourselves and which took months, if not years, to finish).

We have in mind a place we can have people over to play music and dance, but we still have extra bedrooms for family to spend the night.

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Getting ready for Grandma camp!

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The grandkids are coming! The grandkids are coming! I have three grandchildren, but unfortunately they live two states over (and one of those states is Kansas, so you know that’s a long ways away), so I don’t get to see them often enough. The oldest is 14, the middle one is almost 12, and the youngest is 8. Last summer we took the two oldest ones to Cumberland Dance Week, which was a whole lot of fun, but their mom didn’t think the youngest one would want to be so far away from her for that long. Personally, I think he would have had a great time, but we didn’t try to fight it. It was just too complicated trying to figure out how to get them from Colorado to Missouri and then on to Kentucky for the camp and back. The younger one has never flown before, so that wasn’t a good option, and it didn’t seem right to have them ride in a car all those miles on their vacation. So this year we settled on “Grandma Camp” at my house.

Now I just need to come up with a list of fun things to do. The good thing about dance camp was that someone else planned all the activities and prepared all the meals. And even then, after extremely full days of activities that went from 6:00 a.m. when we got up for breakfast to 11:00 p.m. when we returned to our room after the last dance, it took until Wednesday before the middle one admitted that he might be a little tired and didn’t fight going to bed. I don’t know that I can do as well keeping them entertained, but I’m going to give it a good try. The only requests they have made so far are bowling and movies, and the 14-year-old wants me to teach her to sew.

Fortunately, I’ll have help, because my son will also be here during these two weeks. He is driving up from Fort Benning, where he is now stationed, and will meet the kids’ mother in Kansas to bring them to my house. But I’m accepting suggestions of things to do with 8, 12, and 14-year-olds!

Stephan, Jearid, and Bethany at the zoo

I’m pretty excited about my grapes.

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This is the first year I have gotten any grapes on my vines, and although I don’t expect to actually get to eat any of them, between the Japanese beetles and the birds, not to mention the various diseases that grapes are prone to, I am still excited to see actual fruit forming on the vines that are growing over the arbor across my front walk.

My friend Frank Miranti, who was a gifted gardener and a generous person, gave me the cuttings early one spring after he had pruned his own well-established vines, and he wrote me a detailed email explaining how to care for them. He told me I should start by planting the whole bundle of cuttings together and let them send down their roots. He likely gave me a complicated formula of minerals and fertilizers to give them a good start. The next year I was to choose the 3-4 strongest and transplant them to where I wanted them to grow. That year he said  I should just let the vines grow straight up, tying them to a string or some sort of support as they grew higher. The third year I was to determine what training system I wanted to follow and begin pruning the grapes, but his email said at that point he would just come over to my house and show me what to do. Unfortunately, by the time the vines were ready to be trained to a trellis or a fence, my dear friend Frank had died unexpectedly in his sleep.

Since Frank was no longer here to give advice, last year I went to a workshop and tour at Les Bourgeois Winery and learned just enough about viticulture to be even more impressed with Frank’s ability to grow grapes without resorting to a bunch of chemical sprays and fertilizers. I still haven’t actually pruned my vines (maybe next year), and I am this week fighting off an infestation of Japanese beetles and fretting over what appears to be some kind of fungus, but I consider the small green fruits a form of success. I hope Frank would have agreed.

On Tuesdays when the weather is fine…

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On most Tuesday evenings, Spring through Fall, you will find me on the patio at Ragtag CinemaCafé playing old-time music with several of my friends, just for the fun of it. We usually arrive about 7:30 and play until about 9:30. Usually the group includes Pippa on fiddle, Cliff on guitar, Molly on mandolin, Jim on banjo, Rhett on banjo, and me on keyboard. Sometimes others will also join in. Every now and then spontaneous dancing will break out on the patio.

Although we occasionally play together as the Two Cent String Band for dances or other events, where we might actually earn a few dollars (we’ll travel hundreds of miles for tens of dollars), on Tuesdays we just enjoy getting together and playing tunes. It reminds me of when we were kids and you would go around the neighborhood with your ball or your bike or your skates and try to find someone else who wanted to play with you. Now it’s like, “Hey, I have a banjo. Want to come out and play?”

I took piano lessons for years and years, starting when I was 5 years old, and I always enjoyed learning to play and performing at piano play parties for Christmas and at the spring recitals (well, except for that time I forgot the entire Moonlight Sonata, but we won’t talk about that). I even considered majoring in music in college, but I thought that would be too impractical. But it’s only been in the last 15 years that I have met people who decided to pick up difficult instruments like the fiddle and learn to play–just because. Not because they wanted to be professional musicians. Not because someone told them it was good for them. They just wanted to play.

It turns out there are people all over town who get together regular as clockwork to do just that. In addition to our little group that plays on Tuesdays, there is an Irish session that meets at someone’s house on Wednesdays and a bluegrass/old-time jam that meets on the same night at a different house. There is an old-time jam at the Historical Society. A few miles north of town, in Hallsville, master fiddler John White hosts an old-time jam the second Saturday of every month, followed by a pot luck and square dance.  I’ve heard tell of a blues jam and song circles around the area. Who knew?

WTF–The Year is Half Over

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We’re not even going to talk about the last blog post, where I went on and on about my New Year’s Resolutions and how I was going to get organized and accomplish amazing things. But the good thing about resolutions is that you can make them any time. You can always start over. The first of every year, every season, every month, every week, every day, even every hour you can decide once again to pay attention and do those things you meant to do. Today is as good as any day.

For the longest time I couldn’t understand why my dad, after being away at sea for 18 months at a time, would never ask upon his return what my brother and I had been doing while he was gone and never told us what he had seen and done. Instead he would act as though he had just stepped out of the room for a minute and would talk about Right Now, and How About Them Tigers, and Did You Get a Look at That Car and Looks Like It’s Going to Be Another Scorcher. Eventually I figured out that if you spend all your time trying to recover a past you never shared, you miss out on what’s happening now.

I don’t know what it’s been like where you live, but here in the Midwest, every growing thing has been about a month early this year, which only adds to the sense that time is slipping by in a frightening way. The daffodils were fading by mid-March. The strawberries had a brief moment of glory not too long after. The corn is by now way past knee high and we still have another two weeks before the Fourth of July. Peaches are already ripe. We picked blueberries two weeks ago and put them in bags in the freezer. And all this with no rain to speak of. We did have a good rain the last weekend of April and then nothing for six weeks, until last week when it rained almost an inch, and all the gardeners were ecstatic.

With everything coming on so early, by the time we were able to pick up new queen bees in late April, the main honey flow was already over, and we’re beginning to wonder if we will be able to harvest any honey this year. But we’re taking one day at a time, and we have established a most satisfactory routine.

On Sunday afternoons about 4:00 or 5:00, we head out of town to the apiaries to check on our bees.  This year we have five hives in two different locations: two hives that wintered over and three brand new hives that we made from splits from the established hives. Both bee yards are on land belonging to friends. The established hives near the well-manicured University farms are having some trouble finding enough nectar this year, but the new hives, which are down by the river, where things are a bit wilder, are next to a large field of clover and are drawing out beautiful white comb and filling the cells with light honey.

After checking each hive and marveling at the amazing bees, we head down to Coopers Landing, where we listen to live music, eat Thai food, visit with friends, and watch the sun set over the river.

Pippa and friends playing some old-time music at Coopers Landing.