Fall

That's her pirate sweater. In case you couldn't tell.

Yom Kippur 5769

Hi, all--I wrote this yesterday and then thought better of putting it up, because it seemed like I could just WRITE already. But Susan put up a similar post, so I changed my mind.

About this time last year I checked out from this blog, and I've been coming back to it very fitfully. Yom Kippur to Yom Kippur, it was an intensely hard year on several fronts, one I know I'll still be trying to make sense of for years to come. Very little of it was bloggable, some because it was intensely private, and not only for me, and some of it because blogging it could realistically have put me and mine at risk of physical harm. That didn't leave me feeling very free to use this space, but I miss taking the scraps out of my head and spinning them into something to put up in front of the little bitty world. I'm not sure exactly where it's going to take me, but I'm starting November early this year. I may finish early, too--retail season and all that--but I'm hoping it'll be more like I get into a groove I can stick with.

And I hope everyone who fasted had an easy one.

Susan's question

Susan from Crunchy Granola asked me about why I felt a need to intervene in Z.'s pronunciation of "a" (as it's pronounced in "pants" and "hand" and "lap"). I've been thinking it over and I thought instead of burying my response in the comments I'd use it to round out my November posts.*

My first level of answer is that the sound of that particular vowel sound grates on me when I hear it from my own daughter. I haven't intervened in any of the rest of her pronunciation, so I'm not sure why that one is worse than anything else, but somehow, it is.

The first time I noticed her doing it, I thought it must be something that I do, but it's not--I have been paying attention to it now, for months, while she's been in two different daycare classes, and it's just not something that she's picking up at home and presumably it's also not from one particular teacher, though she may have picked it up from one teacher last year and it stuck--though of the two most likely teachers, one has standard American English pronunciation and the other has the remnants of a Trindadian accent, so neither seems to be a real likely source (you can see this has been bothering me a long time.). But whatever--in some way, I'm reacting to that diphthong as both a reflection on my own pronunciation and also as evidence of some kind of linguistic invasion from outside my home.

That vowel sounds foreign to my culture. Immigrant parents must have this with every word that comes out of their children's mouths (Nu, Julia?), so the fact that I am homing in on one sound is pretty nitpicky of me, I admit.

I think the dimension on which it sounds foreign is class. I'll own up to it: to my upper-middle class, mid-Atlantic ear, it sounds uncultured and uneducated. Of course I know that she's 2, but it is my vanity to hope that she comes across as a well-educated, highly literate 2, and that impression falls apart, for me anyway, when she asks to sit in my liap to read a book.

My father, a midwesterner, both schooled himself out of saying "ya" when he moved East and later schooled us, his children, in the correct pronunciation of his hometown (it is Omahaw, not Omahah). He was mildly appalled when I temporarily picked up "ya" during a two-year sojourn in Wisconsin. I think that there is something about hearing both the sounds of your home and the sounds of your aspirations in your children's accents, and I am acting it out for at least the second generation of my family when I cringe as she puts on her piants.

*I didn't manage every day, but I did average one post per day. For an unofficial go, I think that's a success.

Future acquisitions

S.: Hey, Z., guess what I got you, it's coming in the mail? A purple shirt with a ladybug on it.

Z.: No, a peuhpeul hat!

S.: No, but I'll make you a purple hat.

Z.: No, don't make it, knit it!

S.: Sure, I'll knit it!

Z.: Wif my peuhpeul yawrn?

S.: No, yours is a little too tangled. I have some purple yarn downstairs, I'll use that.

Z.: And den you'll put all yeuwr peuhpeul yawrn, you'll take it and you'll shove it into dat hat, and den it will be all gone, and I'll have it! It won't be yeuwrs anymore! You'll shove it into dat hat, and it will be in dat peuhpeul hat, and it will be mine!

Just call me Henry Higgins

The linguistic map still says differently, but in our house there's evidence that The Northern Cities Shift has arrived in Philadelphia.

Actually, I don't know whether the entire shift has arrived, since I'm not listening to all of Z.'s vowels that closely but the final feature of the shift is that a word like "pants" is pronounced "pee-ants," because all the other vowels have shifted over and therefore to stay differentiated from whatever vowel sound has bumped it out of its old place in the world of differentiated vowel sounds, that "a" in pants gets diphthongized. And that is just how Z. is saying "piants."

In the past week or so, I've started actively combating it, and it's starting to take. Today I heard her say, spontaneously and uncorrected, "hahnds."

I don't care. I'd rather wash her "hahnds" than her "hiands."

Blue, Green, Red, Yellow

Caring Honesty Respect Responsibility--quick, which one goes with which color?

Writing prompt

Today A. used this as a journal topic for her 7th graders. (It's getting late in November, isn't it?)

What's the most dramatic way you've altered your appearance?

Me, I'm tempted to answer it three different ways.

The single thing I did that people noticed most was to cut my hair off, from the middle of my back to above my ears. Close friends didn't recognize me, from even a foot or two away. But hair grows, and in time mine grew back, so that as dramatic as that change was, it's gone now. As far as my hair goes, I look about the same way I did in high school and college.

The thing I did that felt the most dramatic at the time was getting my first tattoo. It's pretty discreet, a vine around my ankle, hidden easily under a sock, but it took hours and it hurt with a welcome kind of pain, and it is never going to not be there. Doing it felt like it radically changed my body, from pristine to deliberately marked. My second tattoo, a snake, is almost hidden under my hairline (catch the Helene Cixous reference, anyone? Yes, I am a theoryhead, thankyouverymuch) so it's even less dramatic. But both of those body alterations felt very intense in the way they insribed and acted out my own ownership of my body, at an age and a stage in my life when claiming my body as my own was central.

But, well. In the end I have to say that the most dramatic thing I've done to change my appearance--and it was both temporary and radical--was to go get pregnant.

And you, my commentariat? How about you?

One will spread our ashes round the yard

Home again, finally.

After too much time spent on living room couches or in the car over the last five days, and after far too little time spent paying attention to my own thoughts, I finally squeezed in a late-afternoon walk over in my little patch of woods.

Since the last time I walked there, before we went up to A.'s parents' house, the trees have gone from mostly covered to mostly bare, and the leaves that were up on the branches have settled down on the ground in an inches-thick carpet of gold, red, orange, green. The little shallow creek at the bottom of the woods is covered over with leaves, too; in places it looks like little more than a wet ribbon in the russet groundcover.

I came to the spot where I usually perch on the creek's bank to let my thoughts wander along while the water flows over its shallow bed. The place where I leave the path for my spot lies between the footbridge and the fencing that keeps the erosion-control project safe from wandering feet and paws. It's a favorite place for dogs to get wet, and suddenly I realized what it was that my eyes had just barely been registering without taking in, as I'd made my way down along the path.

Fine, grey dust lying on top of the leaves. Fine and grey, but not uniform in grade or regular in shape. Fine and grey, across the leaves on the side of the creek. On top of the leaves that carpeted the creek itself. Settled on the bottom of the creekbed. As yet completely undisturbed.

I walked along from rock to rock for a few yards, respectfully, carefully. I found more fine, grey dust on the opposite bank of the creek, another place where pawprints are common.

I stood there on the rocks in the creek for a few long minutes and thought of Smartest Dog, whose ashes I spread in the St. Mary's River years before I moved to my house near the woods. I thought of Diva Dog, whose ashes are buried near the gate to our garden, who loved this spot in the creek. I thought of the Iron and Wine song, "Naked As We Came," that made me cry this morning while we were on our way to a shiva visit.

I thought of how much longer it is, forever, with people than with dogs. Decades and decades longer, god willing.

I thought of how little I know of how you get there. To forever.

Good question.

Z., surrounded by a toppled tower of blocks: How do I cope wif dis? How do I cope wif it?

Buy Nothing Day

Way-ell, I didn't buy nothing. I bought lunch for me and Z., and I bought McVitie's chocolate biscuits, sold at the corner store in my in-laws largely Irish immigrant neighborhood. (Alas, they only had milk chocolate, not plain. But I'll manage.)

However, the store was closed today. The Co-op on the Corner is closed the Friday after Thanksgiving, and so is everything else on the corner, so after two years of dismal sales we put up an Adbusters flyer in the window and decided to call it a celebration.

Thanksgiving at the in-laws--well, I had some kind of stomach upset that kept me from enjoying the morning, but A. valiantly braved the local supermarket chain just before it closed and got me ginger tea, which made a big difference. I did manage to eat some small portions of the meal. I'm much improved but not all the way better today--could be stress. I do okay with A.'s immediate family but I kind of shut down when her extended family is involved. I realized that I often need to just retreat from the scene--sometimes my body comes up with some physical thing, sometimes something else overwhelms me. Anyhow, worth keeping track of, I guess.


Here is what we veggie folks ate last night--this is my recipe, and I've made it in four states, the District of Columbia, and Mexico City.

Thanksgiving casserole:

Layer one:
1 1/2 c. lentils
1/2 tsp. ground sage, bay leaf
salt and pepper

Layer two:
olive oil
1 tsp ground sage
2 clove(s) garlic
1 red onion, finely chopped
2 apples (Fuji, Gala, etc.), diced
1/2 c. walnuts, chopped
1/2-1 c. dried cranberry
1/2 small jicama, diced (optional)

Layer three:
2 cups grated sharp cheddar

Preheat oven to 350.

Cook lentils w/ bay leaf until just tender.

While lentils are cooking, saute all ingredients for layer two, beginning with garlic and onion. Apple should go last.

Remove bay leaf from lentils, drain well, add sage and salt and pepper to taste.

Spread layers in a large, lidded casserole, in order indicated. End with cheese. Bake at 350 for 35 minutes, then remove lid and cook for 5-10 minutes, just so cheese looks more finished.

You can make this vegan by leaving out the cheese, but it's better with cheese. Though in my opinion, everything is better with cheese.

The deal with the phone line

Writing from work to fill y'all in on the bloggy silence. We've had no voice line for a couple of days, except A. did manage to call me, very staticky, from work this morning. But when you pick up the phone, there's no dial tone, just a little lonely crackling.

Oddly, we do have some DSL service, but it's extremely patchy and liable to vanish and leave you stranded on the side of the information highway.

We checked the box with an old-fashioned plug-in phone, and the trouble is outside the house and therefore the phone company's problem. Hooray! They're supposed to fix it Friday while we're still at my in-laws. Anyone want to make a bet on it? The day after Thanksgiving?

Meanwhile, for Mom and anyone else who might be calling, our phone is being forwarded to my cell, which spends 95% of its life both misplaced somewhere or other and turned off so you can't call it to figure out where it is. But I dug it out when we figured out the landline was down and I've had it with me since. Yeah, ambivalent about the cellphone revolution, that's me: if cellphones didn't so obviously solve the problem of staying in contact while in transit, I might be perfectly happy for it to pass me by.

It's kind of funny, having it with me. It's like there's a phone in my pocket, or something. I feel a little bit "on" all the time. There's also a phone at my elbow, the store's phone, and objectively speaking it rings much more often. Why having a phone in my pocket should make me feel more keyed up for it to ring, I don't know.

Any thoughts on cellphones, or am I just a decade too late on this one?

Bad news

DSL on the fritz. Details to follow.

My gaping wounds

Z.: (pointing to Mama's chin) Do you have a ouchie?

S.: (fingers the spot) Yes, I guess I do have an ouchie.

Z.: Can we put a band-aid on it?

S.: No, that ouchie is called a zit, and we don't put band-aids on zits.

(Z. pauses to consider this for awhile, then shares her conclusions.)

Z.: Maybe dey can sew you up again.

Binky crisis

Earlier this week, a binky wound up under the car, and that was the end of it. And another one showed enough signs of wear and tear that we pitched it. And we just hadn't been paying attention to numbers of binkies because usually one can be turned up when you need one.

But after the losses of this week, one could not be turned up today. I think we were actually down to one, single solitary binky, and it could not be located for several critical hours.

She's doing better on the whole binky thing, Z. is. She's capable of forgetting to ask for one for an entire run of errands. But we still weren't about to go to synagogue without one. So for lack of a binky, a morning was lost, and for lack of a morning, well.

We've had better days around here.

Life and Art

This installation went up in the woods last weekend.



These are papier mache tree trunks, and they have been wilting all week.

I generally like the little bits of human-made beauty I find in the woods, but they usually run to sculptures of twigs and branches or rocks, or arrangements of seeds and leaves.



These trees, though. I appreciate the work that went into them. I just think I would have liked them more if I weren't comparing them so starkly to real trees that withstand the weather. I think if I encountered them indoors they would have been more imposing.

Maybe that's the point, though.

Thursdays

On Thursdays after school, I take Z. to the cafe in the next block. It's a ritual that developed last Spring, though I'm a little hazy on exactly when. School gets out at four, so we're seldom there much before four-thirty, and the cafe closes at five, in a flexible kind of way. If you're already in, they don't kick you out, but they do start cleaning around you.

Z. gets warm milky tea and a lemon brioche. I get a hot jasmine green tea and either nothing or whatever looks good. She picks out two dog biscuits from the complimentary jar near the register, for taking home to our dogs later. I cut down her straw so it's easier for her to drink. She asks for a napkin and I tuck one into her collar. Puppy Pie gets a seat of honor on the table. Z. picks the lemon part out of the brioche (think cinnamon roll with lemon curd filling) and scatters the crumbs around her plate. I drink my jasmine green. When Z. loses interest in the crumbs, I get a little bag for her to take them home and we bus our table with enthusiasm. Occasionally we score some leftover baked goods for free when they clean out the case. We then have the bag, the milky tea, and Puppy Pie to juggle on the way home, and sometimes the stroller, which Z. no longer wants to occupy.

The half-block home is sometimes a little tricky, honestly, especially if she drops something while we're crossing the street. But it's been a good way to organize the end of the week for us. On Fridays, we have a similar routine at the bakery where I pick up the pastries for the weekend's events at the store, only with milk instead of milky tea, and a cookie or a cupcake instead of a brioche. (Fridays are are a cheaper date than Thursdays, it will not surprise you to know.) So if there are baked goods and go-cups involved in our afternoon, we know the weekend can't be far away.

When we first fell into this pattern, Z. sat at her chair at the cafe and her chin just naturally rested on the table. Now her shoulders are well above it, the table comes about to her armpits. Today, there were no lemon brioches left, but there was fruit tart, and we each had a slice. I gave her my strawberry slices and she gave me her kiwi ones, and she used a fork to eat most of her custard. (And her finger for the rest, of course.) It occurred to me that we have a long, long time ahead of us, mother and daughter, sharing pastries over tea. I'm looking forward to it.

To everything, there is a season

This November thing selects for quantity over quality, doesn't it? Though it's also pushing me to put up more photographs out of deadline desperation, and maybe that's all to the good. It certainly livens up the place. In real life, I crave sunlight and brightness and I'm not sure why I continue to inflict this dark, melodramatic template on everyone, except that I'm still kind of delighted by the way my late-night fiddling with color turned out. Also, I'm lazy.

I chose it because I was mired in grief and depression when I started blogging, and this is the template you wind up with if you're mired in grief and depression, I think. Well, no one who's been reading for long will deny that those have both had their place here.

I'm heading into the toughest part of my year, Thanksgiving through my birthday (early April). Well, I'm usually doing better a few weeks before my birthday, but I've learned not to count on it, or I wind up depressed about still being depressed, and that's just depressing, if you know what I mean.

This morning was hard. I had a hard night last night, and woke up to grey half-light, feeling bleak and pointless. Like being me was pointless.

Tuesday is the day I'm most committed to swimming, so I swam, but I managed it only through the inertia of driving a route I've memorized. You know the way you drive yourself to work, say, or the supermarket, mostly by telling yourself that's where you want to wind up? After you've set the destination, some not-quite-conscious part of your brain takes care of the navigation for you.

Well, first I drove home from dropping Z. off, even though the only reason I drove those four blocks was to continue on to the pool. But I drove home because I was trying to stay depressed. Luckily, parking is tight on our block, and there wasn't a spot near our house. Instead of circling, I let that not-quite-conscious navigator take me to the Y like it was originally planning to, anyway, but all the while I was lining up excuses to turn back: I just washed my hair yesterday anyway; I didn't want to be wet on such a grey day; it was already nearly 9:00 and I had a meeting at 11:00; I hate the smell of chlorine; etc.

My autopilot is sturdy, though. I tuned back in to my surroundings and found I'd made it to the locker room. There was another moment where I told myself how comfortable my clothes were and how cold my feet would be if I took them out of my shoes and socks, but really, the locker room is plenty warm. I took my time stowing things in the locker. I took my time with the lock. I got in the water because wouldn't I feel ridiculous changing into my bathing suit and not getting wet? I swam the first lap because I might as well, now I was wet.

In the end, I managed my half-mile. It didn't pull me out of the depression of the morning, but maybe it gave me enough of a boost that chatting with a friend at lunch and playing with Z. in the afternoon and a gift of flowers from my sweetie in the evening let me climb out the rest of the way.

Running, Leaves

Z. visiting the park near her aunties Lo and Co, somewhere nebulously-identified in the New York metropolitan area. Edited: there are still more pix up at the Family O, including an adorable one of Z. with Teh Maggie!

Photos courtesy of A.

(Mama stayed home and played with iTunes.)

From Friday

If it happened Friday but I blog it today, that's not cheating, right?

S.: Who was at school today?

Z.: No Enthusiastic Blond Boy!

S.: Was Enthusiastic Blond Boy on a trip?

Z.: No, he was at his house. He was at home wif his Daddy.

A.: How do you know?

(Z. makes dismissive hand gesture identical to one her Mama makes)

Z.: I just made it up.


A. took Z. to see Lo and Co today--bloggable pictures resulted, so watch this space!

Time to put the garden to bed

November tomatoes



The child's gloves in question, rescued from the digging box.



Virginia creeper on the sidewall of the store.