Summer Report

Summer's bounty: A basketful of Romas on their
 way to becoming paste. Photo: The Man.

It occurred to me the other day that summer is the only season I actively review. Has it been a good summer? Did I get done this summer all I had planned (ha!)? I never ask myself if I had a good fall, if I enjoyed the winter, if I accomplished all my springtime goals.

So has it been a good summer? Well, it's a been a good summer for tomatoes. Our freezer is loaded with tomato sauce, tomato soup, and tomato paste. With my stomach ailments, I haven't been able to eat tomatoes this summer, so I have been an admirer of tomatoes. They are such beautiful creatures.

(By the way, I just ate a sliver of cheddar cheese to see if it would give me a stomachache. I should know in the next ten minutes or so. I'm very tired of chicken, brown rice and steamed zucchini, as you might imagine. So I've become a risk-taker. Cheddar cheese! Tortellini! A grape! It's all an adventure.)

All this to say, culinarily-speaking, it hasn't been such a great summer. Writing-wise, not so hot either. Who knew that I needed to be caffeinated in order to create? I've started drinking Lady Gray tea, which has just a smidgen of caffeine, and I seem to be able to tolerate it, so maybe in a couple of weeks I'll move up to the hard stuff. That's right, Earl Gray. Just try to stop me.

Quilt-wise? It's all good. Right now I'm quilting a quilt for a friend. Here's how it looks:

I'm free-motion quilting, which is about as much fun as I can legally have.

I have not done a good job this summer of handing over all the household chores to the boys, as was my plan. I lacked resolve. My tummy hurt. I was too busy worrying about the terminal illness my bad gut surely portended. It's impossible to work up the enthusiasm for showing a boy how to scrub out a toilet when you're convinced you only have a month or two to live.

Many good walks this summer, a bit of weight loss, some nice get-togethers with friends. Too much time in the dentist's chair. The very sad loss of a neighbor who wasn't yet fifty and left behind a wife and two teenaged children.

I don't think I can sum this summer up. Well, there's two weeks left before school starts (and two months more, at least, of warm weather). Maybe I'll see the big picture as I wave goodbye to the boys on the first day. I suspect when I think back to this summer, what I'll remember most of all is sitting in the family room with the Man, knitting and watching the Olympics and "Foyle's War," very cozy indeed. Not so bad at all.

The Latest News

Here are some things to tell you: I finished another quilt (see above). It was a year in the making, because I had every intention of hand-quilting it, and I did hand-quilt a little over half. But one day earlier this month I realized I wasn't enjoying the hand-quilting and it was taking forever. So I whipped the quilt over to my sewing machine and finished quilting it in a couple of hours. The pattern is called "Hidden Stars."

Other news: My stomach is finally on the mend. It's still sensitive and my diet is still limited. It seems strange to me that I can't eat string cheese without my stomach hurting, but there you have it. I've lost six pounds, which puts me close to my New Year's Resolution of losing ten pounds. So there are silver linings here.

I'm in a finishing mood. I'm finishing up the Gryffindor sweater I started for Will last summer, and a brown cardigan for myself. Why a brown cardigan, you ask? Well, knitting is all about imagination, I think, and a year or so ago, I imagined myself in a brown cardigan and gardening clogs in the late fall out in the beds picking kale, and so a sweater was born. I'm on the second sleeve, and it's just a tee tiny bit boring, all this brown. But it will be worth it this autumn, when I'm living out my sweater dreams.

Will went to the pool with Gavin today, and Jack went to drama camp, and I had several blissful hours in the house all alone. I don't think that's happened once this summer. I worked on a quilt and watched the last of "The Forsyte Saga" on Netflix. Have you watched it? Loved it. Now I'm going to read the book.

Lots of tomato action. One of the nice things about feeling better is that I have lots more energy and a lot less aversion to kitchen tasks. Last week I processed loads of tomatoes and made lots and lots of tomato sauce. The week before that, the Man processed tomatoes and made tomato-basil sauce, which is delicious. The freezer is started to fill up.  A good feeling.

Speaking of the Man ... he wanted to do something nice for me since I haven't been feeling so hot, so he painted our bedroom this weekend. I'll share a before picture now, and when we get the room put back together I'll show you the after picture.

Here's before:

The Man had just started working when I took this picture. Can you see how the room was industrial park beige? It was that way when we moved in--how did it take us so long to paint it? I guess we were putting all our decorating energy into the downstairs ...

It's nice to have someone willing to paint a room for you when your stomach hurts, don't you think? And today is our anniversary--eighteen years. Hurray!

Latest quilt top--July has been good for my quilty life!

A couple of weeks ago we had a string of very hot days--100+ degrees, a few days where the thermometer hit 105 and 106. Not pleasant, to say the least, but there has been a payoff. Now that we're back in the mid-90s, normal for these parts this time of year, well, it feels downright cool. What a difference ten degrees makes!

Yesterday Will and I spent three hours working on a paint-by-numbers painting, and we are both quite proud of the results. We also began our Harry Potter marathon, watching movies no. 1 and 2. Later, Will got stung by a yellow jacket when he was outside playing basketball. Having been stung a couple of times myself, I felt terrible for him, but I have to say it's nice to have a child who's still young enough to comfort with hugs and kisses.

Yesterday Jack, to nobody's surprise, slept until 2. Given that he appears to be growing an inch a week, I assume that all this sleep is necessary. Sometimes I try to get him to get up earlier, but really I don't have the heart for it. He's so cheerful after thirteen hours of sleep! As pleasant as can be. Does his chores without complaint, socializes with the family, spends long stretches of time reading real books and petting the dog. Do I really want to mess with that?

No. No I don't. School will mess with it soon enough.

Class rosters came out yesterday. Will is back with his best buddies, Gavin and Win. Much rejoicing was heard, the phone rang off the hook, and Will kept fist pumping the air every time he thought of it. Victory! Whether or not any learning will take place with this triumvirate in the same classroom remains to be seen.

Poor Jack. After an amazing 7th grade advisory, his eighth grade group looks a bit rag tag. The girls are wonderful, but the boys? Meh. One of them's a nice kid we've known for ages, though I don't think he and Jack are great friends. The other three boys? Bottom of the barrel. But I told Jack that you never know. Middle school is a time where great changes occur over the course of the summer. He may be surprised that some of the bozos have grown into good guys. It could happen.

My gut is still cranky, and I'm still waiting to hear back about the lab results, which I hope will come in today or tomorrow. It's not so bad, existing on chicken noodle soup, toast and yogurt pretzels. It certainly simplifies things. And it's fun to think about the food I'll eat when I get better again. Tomatoes! Pizza! More pizza! Salad! Fruit! Oh, my goodness. Did I mention pizza?

Okay, well, my lack of coffee is kicking in, and suddenly I feel like a nap. Given that it's only 10:30 in the morning, maybe I'll do the dishes instead. Hope all is well with you!

from the Use Half Campaign on Facebook

 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.