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 I am decaffeinated. Have you ever been decaffeinated? Maybe you've never caffeinated yourself in the first place. Neither of my brothers drink coffee, and I find that strange. How did they get through their college exams?

I started drinking coffee my freshman year and have been a devoted imbiber ever sense. I don't drink a lot--two mugs a day, plenty of half and half--and can't have any after 5 p.m. or else I'm up all night. I drank coffee through both of my pregnancies, even though it didn't taste quite right. But nothing tasted quite right when I was pregnant.

Last week, when I went to see my doctor about my cranky gut, he said I had to give up coffee for the time being. My stomach is inflamed (we don't know why) and coffee is just turning the heat up higher.

I assumed I'd go through a day or two of feeling sort of sleepy, and then I'd feel fine. Instead, it's like I've been sleepwalking for a week. Today is the first day I've felt myself again, and I'm pretty sure it's because I had a cup of black tea with my toast this morning.

The question is, when my stomach calms down again, will I go back to coffee? I had assumed I would. But now that I've gotten over the worst of it, I wonder. I'm going to monitor myself for the next week and see how I feel. Do I sleep better? Does my morning anxiety drop off? Am I calmer? Smarter? Prettier?

I'll keep you posted.

***

After much consideration, I'm fairly sure I'm going to get braces this fall. My dentist feels like it will improve my overall dental health and help me keep my own teeth for years to come. I think it's a good idea, though I'm not looking forward to everyone calling me "brace face" and "metal mouth" for the next 18+ months.

The funny thing is, I think I'll miss my old mouth. I have an overbite, a crooked tooth, and a big gap in between two bottom teeth. Nobody notices the gap until I point it out, but it bugs me. Still, it's mine, and it's a part of my smile, just like the overbite and the crooked tooth. I've had this mouth forever. Will I still be me when my overbite is gone and my teeth are straight and gap-free?

Or will I be Julia Roberts? I might be Julia Roberts. And I really don't want to deal with the paparazzi. Would you?

***

I'm still waiting for the summer to fall into a routine. So far it hasn't. Maybe it won't. Maybe the lack of routine will be the summer routine. I always imagine my summers will be one way, and they're almost always another. You'd think I'd learn.

And Now Summer *Really* Begins

We're back from our lovely vacation, and I have spent most of the morning and the early part of the afternoon getting the house put back together. I scrubbed and scrubbed before we left, knowing from experience how nice it is to return to a clean house and how depressing to return to a dirty one.

For all my scrubbing, as soon as we brought in the luggage and towels and boxes of books, the house lost its clean and tidy vibe. It will probably take days, even years, to return it to its former glory. And given the heat and the humidity around here, well, girls, I don't know if I'm up for the full job. I may watch "From Larkrise to Candleford" DVDs and knit instead.

***

One job I'll need to be up for soon: processing tomatoes. The vines are loaded down with them, and I predict we'll start seeing ripe, red globes by the end of the week. I plan on canning gallons of spaghetti sauce until I can't stand it anymore and just start freezing tomatoes whole. I made a lot of very fine sauce from frozen tomatoes this winter. All you do is thaw them in bowl, then throw them in a pan with some sauteed onions and garlic, break the tomatoes up with the edge of your spatula, and then let the sauce cook down until it's thick enough to do something with. Easy as pie.

I need to take some pictures of the garden to show you. It's gone wild, as it does every year we get enough rain. Lots of green beans and lima beans and little melons and HUGE zucchini (you really have to stay on top of the zucchini or else they turn into cavemen clubs overnight) and yellow squash and crowder peas. It's a bit much, really, but fun.

***

Have you read any books by the English writer Miss Read? She wrote tons of them, mostly about two villages, Fairacre and Thrush Green. Her first book was published in 1955, and she continued to publish until the 1990s. She died earlier this year at the age of 98.

I have just begun my odyssey with Miss Read (real name: Dora Jessie Saint). I checked out Emily Davis from the library, and am enjoying it very much. It's a fairly straightforward, unadorned sort of book, but it satisfies my anglophile soul. So far there have been several mentions of knitting. Need I say more?

Here's a description of Miss Read's oeuvre from Wikipedia, in case you think you might be interested:

From 1955 to 1996 Saint wrote a series of novels centred on two fictional villages, Fairacre and Thrush Green. The first Fairacre novel appeared in 1955, the last in 1996. The first Thrush Green novel appeared in 1959. The principal character in the Fairacre books, Miss Read, is an unmarried schoolteacher in a small village school, an acerbic and yet compassionate observer of village life. Saint's novels are wry regional social comedies, laced with gentle humour and subtle social commentary. Saint was also a keen observer of nature and the changing seasons.

***

No matter how much I enjoy our time at the beach, by the end of the week I'm ready to come back to my little world and my little dog and my messy kitchen with its tiny oven and the window over the sink where I can watch my garden grow a little wilder every day.

It's nice to be home.

Vacation News

Bottle Tree, Ocracoke Island, NC

We're on vacation and doing our best to ignore the children. Jack is happily ignored, loaded down as he is with books, a bike and his computer. Will needs to be ignored in order to straighten him out. He's a moody cuss, our Will. Every year I think, 'This will be the year when Will finally chills on vacation,' and every year I'm wrong. Transitions of any kind discombobulate him a bit, and his moods fly up and down, up and down.

For years the Man and I have catered to Will, trying to make him happy, but this year we've given up. Our best attempts never work anyway, so why try? Will will cheer up when he's ready, and if you ignore him, he tends to cheer up more quickly. It's only taken us nine and a half years to figure this out.

***

We've been spending this week on Ocracoke Island, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It's a beautiful, strange place, a fishing village that playacts as a tourist town during the summer months. It takes seven hours to get here from our house, two and a half of those hours on a ferry to the island. The beach is a National Seashore and is considered one of the most beautiful beaches in the country. Fortunately, since it's such a haul to get here, the beach is never all that crowded. North Carolina is littered with beaches you can get to in a couple of hours from the center of the state. Why travel so far for a little surf and sand?

I like it here because it's a real place. People live and work here. This morning I visited a graveyard beside somebody's house. This place is full of 'em. Some of the graves date back to the mid-1800s; some are from this century.

We're staying in a house built in 1925. It has virtually no closets, but it has a huge front porch with rocking chairs and a front yard with cedar trees and butterfly bushes. It's my favorite beach house ever. Will thinks next year we should get a house on stilts because he prefers his beach houses on stilts. I didn't bother telling him that this is the house we'll be renting until the end of time. I just ignored him.

***

Bikes rule the road here. I went bike-riding this morning, but I have to confess: I'm a bike-riding weenie. I'm the only bike rider on the road who wears a helmet (other than my children) and the sound of a car behind me makes me tense up, even though there's an unwritten law that bikes have the right-away in all cases. Cars will patiently cruise behind you until they can safely pass. It's a biker's paradise, but mostly I'd rather walk. You can think better walking, in my opinion. Though this morning I took a long ride and thought of my friend Danielle, who didn't have many toys growing up, but she had a bike, and that bike was it for her. Her best thing. And when I'm riding down a street without any traffic, the wind blowing over my helmet, I do feel sort of free and easy. But nervous, always nervous.

Think of Danielle and be brave, I tell myself. And I try, I really do.

***

Okay, then--back to the books and the pimento cheese crackers and Coke. See you next week!

Summer Post No. 2

Pickled Pigs' Feet, Y'all. Photo by Me, taken outside Gaffney, SC, 6-17-12.

Family is hard. That was my big take-away from this past weekend. We went down to Atlanta to visit my brother and his family and had a lovely time. They are lovely people. And still it was hard. It's hard to fit one family into another family's life. Assumptions are made in error. Expectations are misbegotten. Children who are trying to behave themselves get tired and act out because that's the only way they know how to say, Enough!

What saves us? Moments of generosity. The sudden understanding that what someone needs is a few minutes alone or a cold Coke or forgiveness. Humility. Baseball.

We left on Sunday feeling connected to my brother's family, feeling happy for our time together. And it occurred to me that being with family, like everything else worth doing, takes practice. We haven't been to Atlanta in a long time--usually we see the Atlanta folks at my parents' house in Kentucky--and as a result we made mistakes. Rookie errors.

We failed to take into account, for instance, the fact that no one in my brother's house really cooks. So a lot of time and energy went into planning on where to eat and what time we were going to eat and how we were going to get there (one car? two cars?). This doesn't sound like a big deal, but when you have kids, it is a big deal. You can't just whip up a quick meal to fill the stomach of a cranky child. The child gets crankier, tensions increase, the hosts bicker about the best place to go and how long it takes to get served ...

You get the idea.

So next time we'll know this, and we'll keep in mind that my sister-in-law gets frequent migraines, and my brother's probably going to work Saturday mornings, guests or not, because his job his demanding and that's just how it goes. Next time we'll keep this in mind and make our own plans for the morning. We're okay with that. We just didn't know.

Now we're getting ready for a trip to the beach. Right now I'm focusing on the ways it won't be perfect so that I can be pleasantly surprised, the way I was pleasantly surprised when Jack got stuck in the direct sun at brunch on Sunday and didn't complain or trade seats with the Man, who was sitting in the shade and offered to switch.

***

On our way back from Atlanta we stopped outside of Gaffney, SC, and bought peaches at this spot:

This is my favorite kind of place in the world. We bought a watermelon, too, and it had seeds. Lots of spitting going on around here, folks. Lots of spitting.

Summer Post No. 1

A picture of the compost bowl before it went out to the bin. The Man took the picture, of course.

Well, hey there. So much to tell you, but how to begin? School is out. The 7th grade pool party went off without a hitch. First of all, my fellow room parent, Ellen, made the middle school front the cash for the party, so we didn't have to come up with ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS out of our own pockets.

Second of all, the rain that hung over the party for the first thirty minutes got blown away, the sun came out, and the pizza arrived on time. The parents who volunteered were a great group. Jack appeared to enjoy himself and actually interacted with his peers. A friend left chocolate and wine by my minivan as a "Congratulations on surviving this ordeal" gift, then texted me frantically to tell me what she'd done, afraid I might not see her care package and run it over. Clearly she did not understand that I would never run over chocolate. Never. I have a sixth sense about these sort of things.

Wednesday night, I went over to my neighbor Amy's house. Amy is the vegetarian I wrote about a while back, the one who got served a hamburger instead of the veggie burger she ordered, took a bite, and ended her meatless streak of thirty years. When I told Amy recently that I wish I liked tofu, she invited me and the Man over for a tofu cooking lesson. Anthony, Amy's husband, actually did all the cooking, and he didn't measure anything, not even the rice. I was shocked and amazed. The meal was all delicious, and I am now a tofu convert. We ate spicy, Asian tofu, and simple cornmeal-encrusted tofu, and tofu braised in tahini, and it was all delicious. It turns out if you know what you're doing, tofu doesn't have to taste like pencil erasers. I had no idea.

Other news ... I went to the orthodontist today to get more information about braces. I still can't decide. The Man is concerned that I will be in constant discomfort and take it out on the family. Ah, he knows me too well.  What everyone tells me is that I will be in pain the first week or so, and then things will be fine. I sort of want to get them, but I think anyone who has seen pictures of her mouth, lips pulled back with plastic spatulas, would want every orthodontal and dental procedure available. My teeth are terribly yellow and stained and there's a space and they're kind of crooked ... But unless I'm looking at pictures of my mouth with my lips pulled back with plastic spatulas, I don't care all that much. I really don't know what to do.

Our garden is insane. The tomato plants are eight feet tall. It's a jungle out there!

Tomorrow: root canal. The funny thing is? Root canals aren't really that bad. Dentistry in general these days isn't all that bad. You know what's bad? My teeth. My teeth are awful. The only thing worse would be not having them, which at this point is a distinct possibility.

Blogs to watch out for: I am quite taken with All the Blue Day, and I think you should be, too. Another fabulous blogger from the land down under. Please go say hey!

So Summer Begins ...

 Beans! Maters! Squash! Cukes! Summer Garden!

Two more days of school. Two half-days, to be precise, and then the bell rings, and it's eleven weeks of summer fun.

I am terrified.

Will has already displayed a bit of his patented summer behavior. On Saturday he lolled about the house groaning, "I'm too tired to do anything," and "I'm bored," and "Can I have some extra computer time?" I came up with a list of sparkling ideas for fun and frolic, but no. My ideas were boring. Life is boring. Can I watch TV?

Jack slept until 3. I assumed he was up. The Man assumed he was up. He wasn't up. Of course, he wasn't whining about how bored he was, either, which is the plus side of having a child who would happily sleep eighteen hours a day. Sure, he's a tree sloth, but he's a quiet, uncomplaining sort of tree sloth.

My summer plans? Surviving. That's the number one plan.

Number two? Following my new-found commandments for happiness. I've been reading Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, which I recommend for mental housekeeping. I'm working on my list of personal commandments, and right now they include the following:

1. Eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full.
2. First things first.
3. Accept the reality of the situation.

The reality of my situation is that my children are not always splendid. I don't understand this, because the Man and I are splendid 99% of the time. Do the math: doesn't that mean our children should be splendid 198% of the time?

Some good things: Yesterday, I canned eight pints of blueberry jam, using the blueberries picked last summer that were buried at the bottom of my deep freeze. I cleaned out the deep freeze after the Man and I walked through the garden Friday night and realized that in a matter of weeks, we are going to be drowning in a sea of tomatoes. Time to make room in the freezer for this year's crops.

When I cleaned out the deep freeze I found a cup of snow from three winters ago. I didn't know what to do with it, so I put it back in the freezer. Seems a shame to throw it away. I could throw it at the children instead.

Do you have any personal commandments? Other than no throwing snowballs at the children in the house? Share!

P.S. A couple of you who shall not be named (Tracy, Debbie) read my last post and brought up ... my attic. Sigh. Yes. It's still there, it's still a mess, I still haven't hired a bright, energetic organizer to come make it bearable. But look at my hall closet! It's beautiful!

Summer Housekeeping Report #1

It's not actually summer yet, but it's beginning to feel that way. A string of days in the mid-80s, the garden out back actually starting to look like something. Absolute panic on my part when I think about keeping children entertained for the next eleven weeks.

So I have that summer feeling, which is akin to a New Year's feeling, which is to say, that feeling that makes you want to get everything in tip top shape and organized and clean and breezy. You want to shed all heaviness--heavy food, heavy blankets, heavy blanketings of dust on the furniture.

To that end, I've been cleaning out closets. First, I tackled the upstairs linen closet, forcing myself to stuff a huge bag full of sheets and towels we never use (but I've kept on hand "just in case"), the lovely Winnie-the-Pooh pillowcase my mom made for Jack, which he seems to have no use for anymore, go figure, and yes, even quilts. Bad quilts. Quilts that serve no purpose in my life, as they are, well, ugly.

After the linen closet, the downstairs hall closet. Forced myself to chuck shoes that I once loved but will never wear again, even though in their day they were quite fabulous. I love shoes, but there's no point in getting nostalgic over them. Life's too short. Also abandoned Will's tennis shoes from first grade, his cleats from second grade, his basketball shoes from last season that had to be replaced three weeks in due to a sudden growth spurt ...

And yesterday I did something I've been meaning to do for ages and ages. If you're like me, you rip recipes out of magazines even if there's only the remotest chance you might make them some day. Maybe you've been reading a lot about quinoa lately, and Cooking Light has five pages of quinoa recipes. Rip, rip, rip. You've never been able to pass up a recipe for cold sesame noodles, and here's one in Wednesday's cooking section of the paper. Rip. And so on, until you have several cookbook's worth of recipes--that you never, ever make. Never. Why is that?

I don't know. It probably has something to do with the fact that my children protest just about anything that doesn't involve a slab or red meat or macaroni and cheese. So I dream, but my dreams come to nothing.

Yesterday, I sat down with several binders and a pile of page protectors, and I put together three cookbooks. Well, first I got real and threw 85% of my recipe collection into the recycling bin. I have recipes that are eighteen years old that I've never once attempted. Actually, I held onto a few of those, just because they from my early married life, and it's fun to see what kind of cooking I aspired to back then.

The remaining recipes I put in one of the three binders: Summer Cooking, Fall and Winter Cooking, and Everyday Cooking. The everyday recipes are the old standbys--the Cheesy Chicken Chowder, the cold tuna pasta Salad, the spaghetti pie--my greatest hits, so to speak, the recipes I hardly need recipes for anymore, but can never find when I go looking for them.

It was a big job, but I sat out on the screened porch and listened to the Snap Judgement podcast, and I got 'er done.

So all this to say, mostly what I've been doing the last few days is walking around and looking in closets, and in the laundry room (really my laundry closet; it's a miniscule space),  where my out-of-control recipe collection lived. Everything looks spiffy and organized. Next up, the shelves over the washer and dryer, which are filled to the ceiling with things we no longer use. Hello--fingerpaints, anyone?

***

Bread and Roses was one of my favorite housewiferly blogs for a long time running, but it's been on a sabbatical for close to two years. Now Dulce's back and posting on a fairly regularly basis. Go visit her and say hey!