And all I have to say when it is all over: thank God for Solumel.

Postscript: My kind husband has pointed out that the above writing could be misconstrued as anger. No. Exasperation mixed with humor is more like it.

Postscript2: Get this: the girls wake up from their forced naps. Audrey tells me she is thirsty while I am cleaning the upstairs sitting room. I tell her to go downstairs and find her water cup. I come down a bit later after not seeing her for sometime, and lo and behold, there she is in the kitchen nook eating the very food we fought to the point of vomit over earlier. You have got to be freakin’ kidding me?!? Get this2: This evening, instead of eating LoAnn’s amazing homemade macaroni and cheese, the kid wants a repeat performance of what we had for lunch. She is currently in the kitchen eating another helping of it (tuna fish salad).

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (like four year old’s who refuse to eat their lunches and puke all over my stairs) and courage to change the things I can (like my visceral reactions to not liking being a mom some days).

It was dusk and big flakes were still falling, coating everything in the woods. Right when you enter the woods you encounter a very old pine grove that is stunning. Stunning in the sense that it centers you, stilling the resonating places within that need quieting. These old evergreens have a way of putting me at rest the moment I enter, particularly with the hush of snow that comes over one, that really deep quiet of snow.

I start walking and within a few paces I hear the hoot of an owl not far off. Amazed, I stop in my snowy tracks. I walk a bit farther and I hear it calling to me again. I stop. What a magical sound that was: the deep quiet of the snow and the hooting owl. Stunning in the sense that I felt so special to be able to catch the brilliance of the woods in that very moment. No one else was there in that moment but me.

I keep walking, hearing the owl calling now and then. From the distant trail, I can see someone coming with a dog that is running. They approach quickly and before I know it there is the most extraordinary thing before me: a man “cross country skiing” with 2 large ropes attached to his dog like reigns pulling him along. What a smart dog owner! They both looked like they were having fun. They went a bit past me and turned around and as the man “cross country skied” past me a second time, he says in a Santa Claus sort of voice, “Beautiful isn’t it…that owl in the woods.” And off he went. I felt stuck in my tracks and mesmerized by the entire experience.

I fear the owl was not so keen on the dog/skiing man contraption and did not call to me from that point on. I only walked for a bit longer and turned around for my little toesy-woesy’s were getting cold. I came home straight away and told Audrey about the owl and she was dazzled.

We have checked out from the library a book many times because I, in particular, really enjoy it. It is called Owl Moon. I believe it is an older book. The story goes something like this: a father takes his small daughter out owling in the woods as if it is a family rite of passage. To go owling involves bravery, patience, and utmost quiet and, I guess, the ability to keep up with your long-legged dad. The woods are captivating, the moon is powerful and bright and in the end they hear an owl and even spot it in the tree. Audrey and I were inspired to do this ourselves. There is another children’s book we adore called “Miss Spider” and there is one short story where she takes one of her little adopted children on a “listening walk”. Owling and listening walks have a pull on little Audrey Anne’s curious and adventurous heart.

So off we went tonight, owling in Lions Woods. It was dark, there was not much moon, a sliver in fact. The woods were thick with darkness, the snow was packed down under our feet. We had flashlights in our hands but I found that the beam of the light made it more eerie. Quiet and some more quiet. We started in and I bent down to look under the many layers of hoods and hats into my daughter’s eyes to make sure she didn’t have on her wide eyed owl panic look. Nope. She was game for adventure. We walked on and ever so often we would let out a hoot of our own, first me and then Audrey echoing, calling to the owl. Stop, listen, listen more deeply. Nothing. Keep walking. We repeated this for some time until we were deep in the grove of pines and still no owl calling to us. I was the one to turn us ’round and head back. I think Audrey could have kept walking in those woods, searching, waiting, listening. What a remarkable little owl watcher she is.

As we came out of the woods into the parking lot, she says to me, “That was fun!” I smiled.
“Were you scared at all?”, I asked her.
“Nope.”
“I was.”

This year I am making an electric propagating bed. Sounds impressive; it is. A box with a warming coil covered in sand and you put the seedlings on top of that. I spent the afternoon going through all my seeds, categorizing them, herbs, vegetables, full sun flowers, part sun flowers, etc. I then slowly, very slowly perused through the Burpee’s seed catalog making a dream list (that accounted for a couple hundred dollars and that is why it is called a dream list). How many different variety of tomatoes do I “need”? Do I need every color variation of nasturtium? Could I go without the bi-colored beets (probably not)? Dreaming about green things; caught up in a whole other fantasy world that involved rototillers, sand, and vermiculite.

I did all this while it snowed a couple of inches in my backyard and then I proceeded to go outside with the little snow-women (who looked just like Randy from A Christmas Story).

Scarlet did not proceed to move one little size 5 foot in any direction; paralyzed by all the white stuff.

We made snow angels, even Scarlet with such a cute, tiny wingspan. I jumped in more than once and I fear that may be why by lower back is a achin’ me and requiring multiple doses of Ibuprofen. Can you say, “Old Lady!”?

We went for a little sled ride; me pulling them around the back yard until, unbeknownst to me, they fell off face first into the snow. I have a bad Trudi-habit of laughing hysterically in these situations. But I sure did scoop up the littlest of the two who had the most snow-plowed-face damage and provided some comfort and a windshield wiper blade sort of swipe with my glove.

Gotcha! The one and only beauty of a photo amidst all the rest.
I love these two snow-women.

We adore you, King baby Jesus!

So you will understand exactly why the moment we arrived at my parents house we unloaded perishable items and perishable children and left immediately for the local bar, the Hilltop.

And you will understand, based on previous mentioned evidence, that it would be totally appropriate to catch Ivan drinking one of these:

I felt this with this book. Powerful writing and beautiful prose. I found myself marking pages with little green sticky notes to come back to later and reread and eventually write down because they captured something I have held within, without words or illustration, just an ache. My mother will mark pages in books and keep a log at the back in those random blank pages of all the words she finds to be curious and a bit odd; a dictionary of sorts to return to when she wants their meanings. I marked the pages of stunning prose and bring me to tears literature.

Here are some excerpts with a ribbon of theme:
“Whenever you leave cleared land, or a path, or a road, when you step from someplace carved out, plowed, or traced by a human and pass into the woods, you must leave something of yourself behind. It is that sudden loss, I think, even more than the difficulty of walking through the undergrowth that keeps people firmly fixed to paths. In the woods, there is no right way to go, of course, no trail to follow but the law of growth. You must leave behind the notion that things are right. Just look around you. Here is the way things are. Twisted, fallen, split at the root. What grows best does so at the expense of what’s beneath. A white birch feeds on the pulp of an old hemlock and supports the grapevine that will slowly throttle it. In the deadwood of another tree, fungi black as devil’s hooves. Over us the canopy, tall pines that whistle and shudder and choke off light from their own lower branches.”

“When things are very quiet, the old house ticks. Not regularly, like a clock, but softly all through itself as the slats in the walls change temperature or the plaster tightens or the earth shifts underneath the granite slab foundation. From time to time, the little sounds that the house makes reverberate inside the drum. My breath does, too. I hear a rising, then a falling. In and out. A greatness, a lightness. I grow heavier, then so inert my body seems without life. Between breaths, I lose feeling. And then my chest fills, a resurrection.

There is another thing that our old house does in the deep of night. I have heard it before and now I wait for it to happen. The house releases the whole day’s footsteps. All day we press down minutely on the wide old floorboards, moving about on small, regular errands, from room to room. It takes hours for the boards to readjust, to squeak back up the nails, fro the old fibers of the pinewood to recover their give. As they do so, they reproduce to the sounds of footsteps. In the night our maze of pathways is audibly retraced. I am used to it, as is mother, but sometimes a wakeful guest is frightened. I can understand this. For now, as I rise and I stand in half-darkness in the doorway of my bedroom, I hear the distinct creak of footsteps proceeding towards me, then past me, over to my bed. It’s very cold. My skin prickles. I feel the breath of my own passage, as though my dead self and living self briefly met in that doorway to sleep.”

“As I return from my berry picking, carrying the lobster pot with both handles, I brush through the jewelweed. The light seeds bounce off me, ping off the curve of the cheap old pot. Some tear like tiny cannonballs through the webs I’ve tried so hard to avoid. I stop, of course, and watch the spiders. Exiting the field, I leave them to the suave calm of their thoughtful repairs. My scratches tingle and my hair’s a knot of twigs. I’m slick with sweat and gritty with scrapings of bark and wood rot, and I’m peaceful. I have reached an understanding in the woods, as I always do.”

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

Yes, this is how exciting my life is and how low I have slid. Felt super low this morning, glum and teary; recognizing and feeling some more loss, namely friendships.

I took Audrey over to Timmy and Wescott’s, her beloved friends, and Scarlet and I proceeded to finish up the grocery shopping at Lewis Fresh Foods. I am one of those mom’s that shops at 3-4 different stores to get the cheapest, very specific and most fresh foods that I need. Our fridge and pantry were bare, literally, after going away for the holiday so I have been on a stock piling spree.

Scarlet and I arrive and this time I remembered a quarter (just like Aldi’s where you have to “rent” the shopping cart). Last time I forgot. It’s tough gathering groceries with a whining three year old who wants candy around every corner and a 23 pound one year old who isn’t quite ready to be cruising through a store at a fast clip on her own two legs. Needless to say, heavy loads and high stress with an F-word thrown in there.

I had one of those shopping excursions today where you have some leisure time to simply peruse. And, friends, this is the store to do it in. They have the most amazing things in this store. First, you start in produce where you can find every pepper known to the Latino world. You can usually buy 10 limes for a dollar even in the winter. And the mushrooms; have I told you lately how much I love mushrooms?

Every time I come here I am simply amazed. They have an aisle for all Indian foods. The whole bottom two rows along one aisle are almost entirely legumes. Jasmine rice, basmati, wild rice, brown rice, all different kinds and brands. Greek foods abound with the best selection of reasonably priced olive oil. There is an aisle that is all varieties of Asian foods including a whole selection of Filipino foods, which I recognize from my summer in Manila. I walked down the aisle marked “International foods, European favorites, Yugoslavian groceries, Lithuanian and Polish groceries”. Amazing! There are some really interesting jars of something-or-others on the shelves. And since we live in a primarily Latino neighborhood, the store abounds with anything and everything you might need to cook authentic Mexican food. Yumm.

I realized I have been spending way too much on my roasted bell peppers at Walmart. You can get a huge jar of them for 1/2 the price at this place. I found banana leaves; what do you do with those? I found myself wanting someone from each of these cultures to walk around with me and explain what you might use some of these ingredients for in cooking. I had the brilliant thought to start reading up on ethnic cooking and check out some cookbooks at the local library. I have every ingredient at my disposal here. I found myself in sheer delight and celebration of other cultures. How wonderful that we are not all the same.

I was entirely refreshed after my hour long walk through this grocery store.

Highlight of my day #2: doing dishes while listening to music.

The other moment today that lifted by sorrowful heart was when I found myself worshiping with my dish gloved hands high in the air rocking out to Kim Walker. You know you are desperate for some Jesus-connection when you have purple plastic gloves dripping with soapy water high in the air, praising. I can’t remember the last time I really worshiped. I was reminded by a Matt Redman oldie-but-goodie song that I am invited to worship despite my circumstances, to worship because of who I know God to be and his affection for me. I had forgotten this. You give and take away, my heart will choose to say, BLESSED BE YOUR NAME.

And one last highlight of my day #3: hugs from Scarlet.

I remember Ivan would get up early in the morning around 5:45am. When he would leave for work, he would turn on Rita Springer in the office and let it lull me from my slumber into a quiet and wakeful state. I felt the words of these songs washing over me and orienting me to what is true, noble and good.

This morning, I came down the stairs with groggy eyes, stiff joints and two girls in my arms and out of our little orange office came the melodies and powerful voice of Rita. Ahhhhh. I felt loved by Ivan and let the music wash over me again.

What a wonderful memory.