uncertainty

We're all juggling a lot of unknowns right now. The month's full of them. This weekend is full of them. Can't predict where this is all heading. Must wait.

You've heard about one uncertainty, of course. My mother's move. That'll likely remain up in the air all month long. Or not. I can't tell. No one can tell.

In the immediate future, we have uncertainty generated by the double winter storm that is to hit Wisconsin pretty darn soon (within hours). It also happens to be the weekend when Snowdrop is to have her kid and extended family birthday party (Saturday) and when Sparrow is to have his Baptism, followed by a rather large friend and family party in his honor (Sunday). People are flying in from the west coast and from the east coast. Others are driving up from Chicago. Will they be lucky and avoid the weather craziness? There is a window of calm today and then on Saturday morning. Will it accommodate all the travelers? Will flights be cancelled? Will the birthday party have to be postponed?

I have no answers. The weather people are telling us that this is more like a March storm than a January event. My head spins with that! The temperatures and wind chills look pretty punchy to me! What's so "March" about this double trouble?

Of course, Ed and I do like winter snow. Nonetheless, the timing of this storm is, for our family, unfortunate. Though I remind myself that this is what family legends are made of! My younger daughter was born on the coldest day of the century, remember?? And Snowdrop  too came in on the coat tails of Arctic madness. January births and celebrations are never boring!

Breakfast, just before I run off to do weekly grocery shopping.






The grocery store is crowded. People must be stocking up. I'm supposed to host an informal supper for family and closest friends this Saturday (as in pizza), but the weather is likely to mess with our plans. I can't have more than a dozen people drive out on country roads in a snowstorm. I put things in the cart with some uncertainty. Perhaps we'll shift venues. We're all tracking the storms carefully.

($5 roses; amazing...)






This afternoon, I'm at the farmhouse with just Snowdrop.


 



It's been a while since she has been here alone and she is full of plans for her time here.





Books come first. It's our routine. Today she has me reading for 90 minutes straight. I stop because my voice is giving out.

She then sets up a game for us -- one we haven't played in ages. But I have to put an end to it very early on. It's getting dark and it's sleeting outside. I want to get her home safely before all hell breaks loose.



Night time. It's quiet outside. There is a full moon behind all those layers of cloud. Wolf Moon. And the menacing winds pick up and as the night progresses, and the ice and sleet turn to snow.

numbers

If you are female and manage to not die by the time you get to be my mom's age (96), you are predicted (by our government) to live another 3.16 years. Me, at 66, I have another 19.69, so though I am thirty years younger than her, I'm likely to die about twenty years from now, while she's likely to totter along to a ripe old 99.16.

Oh, numbers! I tell Ed -- if I want to make pizza for 14 people, I'll need to bake at least six large pizzas. Wrong! -- he proclaims. Just five!
That's chintzy!
No it isn't! There's a website that tells you how many square inches of pizza per person to make. For a 16 inch pizza, you only need five!
My pizzas are more like 15 inches.
Five.
Six! 

It is a day for calculating things.

Bleak, gray, warm, with storms hovering to the north of us and more storms barrelling right through Madison this weekend. It makes for an interesting set of days.

(Breakfast)






I drive to my mom's place... (steely gray day)

 



... and attack her kitchen today. I empty out just one of her kitchen cupboards plus her freezer. No comment on her frozen foods. We have different tastes. Understandable. But the kitchen cupboard is, I think, indicative of her demographic: dozens and dozens of empty plastic containers. The kind in which you would buy humus or prepared foods. All washed and neatly stacked, though most with mismatched lids. Out they go. My favorite words these days: give it away or throw it away!

It's a beginning of a slow process of moving out.

(I have no news on where she goes next. Her current Rehab Facility called today: have you heard anything?- they ask. Um, no. And I don't expect to. Not for several weeks. The facility wants her room. I'm happy to hand it over, just show me where you intend to place her.)
 

(Snack, before heading out to pick up the kids. A question to mull over: if you bake an Italian panettone  bread in November with no added preservatives, seal it up and ship it to Madison Wisconsin, and a delighted person opens it up on Christmas Day, how long will it stay fresh? The answer -- at least until January 9th. Mmm, so good with an afternoon cup of milky coffee!)

 The kids are bouncy, happy, playful. Sparrow is 19 months old today. Snowdrop is five years and four days. These are such sweet ages!











(Snowdrop has a bunch of questions for Ed. He often answers with an experiment. Here, his answer was: because wood is lighter than water. It's all in the numbers. The experiment:  Do you have a book? Let's see if it will float!)






Evening. After supper, I look over the NY Times' 52 places you should visit in 2020. You could twist my arm to go to nearly any of them with Ed. But right now he's unbudgable.
Okay, this is off the list, but would you go north of the Arctic Circle? In Finland, we could stay in a cabin with three walls made of glass. 
All the way in Finland? 
I go back to reading about travel to places I am not ever likely to visit.

bouncing around

It was utterly freezing this morning. We'd expected an Arctic snap, but I still felt whipped by the cold when I stepped outside to feed the animals. Plenty of sunshine, but bitter cold.






It's odd how inconsistent these January days are. Mild, then biting cold, then mild again, but only for a day. And still no snow.

(breakfast)





My mornings are equally inconsistent. Lots of family, then lots of mom, then today, where I put it all aside and spend the entire morning losing myself in a book. Even as tomorrow I have lots of mom stuff, then the day after -- lots of family, and then back to mom. It's as if I can't really pace myself. I do not control my time. Not on most mornings. Just this morning.



Predictability comes in the afternoon, with me picking up the kids -- first Sparrow, who always rushes over with a grin and with his racoon, shouting out bye to everyone, except that it sounds like "guy," but it's all so cute that we all just smile and smile. Then he and I climb the stairs to get Snowdrop and the little guy is feeling so stable these days that he no longer looks terrified when she runs over to hug him and pull him along to wherever she'd been working or drawing.

At the farmhouse, Sparrow still puts up with endless chapters from her book of the moment. Right now, we're plowing through the Just Grace books, which are lively and fun (though I would edit their punctuation: not enough of it for a smooth read out loud!). What grandmother would not like Grace, whose "small super power" is that she feels empathy?






We interrupt these with occasional Maisy books for the little guy, who appears to seamlessly bounce between listening to elementary school books and ones that are barely toddler material. For that matter, so does Snowdrop, who puts up with these Maisy interruptions without protest.

During these reading sessions, Snowdrop always eats a bowlful of fruit and Sparrow eats none of it. It's Graham Crackers all the way for him. If he's feeling open minded, he'll accept cheddar bunnies. Once, yesterday, he took two slices of mandarin, but I'm sure it was more for show than for any pleasure the fruit may have given him. His resistance to fresh and honest is becoming legendary.






It's an off day where Snowdrop does not tell a story. She is on a "super power pig" wave, ever since she sketched flyers to keep a pig toy I threatened to give to Goodwill because I thought it was useless for us. (She disagreed.)  The other day she asked me to describe a pig tail and when I told her it was curly, she took that to the highest level by drawing the most adorable pigs with tails that curl all the way up to the clouds. The girl always imagines on the large scale.






Play time today is affectionate...

("Sparrow, hugging from the back isn't always the most comfortable...")






("let's try this instead...")






... though ultimately each kid gravitates to her or his own: he navigates a train of his creation, she struggles with a rubiks cube type game with penguins.





The kids leave a little earlier today and you wont be surprised to learn that I merely slide back into my own book reading. It's not the story line that grabs me, it's the author's use of language to shape characters. I can't get enough of it.

Which means our supper is going to be a low effort thing tonight. CSA spinach, Henny eggs (she's the only one laying), a slice of smoked salmon and a half a yam each. And a quilt, on the couch.

Tuesday

 (Breakfast, so so late...)





January is when many gardeners start flipping through seed and plant catalogues (or browsing online sites), looking at what's new, seeking inspiration. I notice that I am growing less ambitious. This fall, I did a wildflower seeding over some of the grassy areas -- that's a big experiment for us right there -- and we dug out a huge bush from the Big Flower Bed. I'll have to fill in that space with... something. I'm not in a hurry to decide. It wont be a true lily because we have an infestation of lily bugs in south central Wisconsin. There is, in fact, a good chance that I will lose many of my true lilies to the little red pests. (They are, thank goodness, not interested in day lilies.) What big bloomers will I put in to anchor that bed? I don't know. In any case, I am looking to maintain and fix, rather than design and expand.

This leaves me with a January that's once again focused on what's inside the farmhouse rather than what's outside. Without snow, the motivation to step out is really on the low side. Warm and cozy is preferable to cold and bleak.

We are moving slowly today. I told Ed I had a list of tasks to work through. We should be outside taking advantage of another reasonably mild day (just above freezing), but I am in a bearish mood. Hibernate! Let the other animals romp and play -- I'm happy working on my computer from the comfort of a couch.

Of course, in the afternoon, the kids are here. Snowdrop often comes home with a kite she'd made at the art table in school. Today, despite the sudden bite in the air, she is determined to try it out.






Verdict? She tells Ed: ahah, we need wind, but also warm weather or hot weather to go fly a kite!

In the meantime, Sparrow has discovered the girl's birthday "tree house."






He is so ready to join in with his sister. And he's a good play mate, going forward: he's not one who comes over with the intention of wrecking her set ups. Nonetheless, when Snowdrop's setups are intricate and important to her story line, it's better to find something comparable for the little guy, without having him try to insert his characters into her tight space. This worked well for them today!







("I'll just put the baby on the chair next to the mommy and daddy...")






("In the alternative, I'll sit on Snowdrop and make her laugh.")






Later, much later, we settle into a good hour of "office" play. Snowdrop wants to make a book about super hero pigs and Sparrow wants to be allowed to use all drawing utensils.
















Such happy kids!  And in the middle of January no less!

Monday stuff

We are up before sunrise. So much to do this morning! It's a pretty day. Normally we'd be planning a walk for sure. Sunshine and a predicted high of just above freezing. Lovely!





(Breakfast)




But there is no time for treks and rambles. Ed pulls out his old truck. Flat tire. That's fixable. Subsequent driving reveals more truck issues. Not so fixable. But we don't know that yet.
Good to go! -- he shouts.
I get in the car and we drive toward a storage facility just outside of town.

Back in 2005, when I moved out of a suburban house into an apartment downtown, we (my ex, my daughters and I) divided stuff between various households. But the suburban house had been rather sprawly and it had a large basement and so the collecting had continued, unabated. Over the entire childhood of my daughters, it continued. Old books, papers, art projects. Toys, clothes, who knows what. Into the basement it went. When the house was sold, no one wanted any of it -- at that moment. I wanted none of it ever: I'm not a collector. Still, we all agreed to keep all those boxes and trunks for a while, until households were established and decisions could be made.

That was fifteen years ago.

In the meantime, we've kept a storage locker and each year I threaten to empty it out and close it up, but one person or another has (legitimate) unusual circumstances and begs for a little longer and so the boxes stay there and the dust settles.

Today, Ed and I want to take out stuff that absolutely no one could ever want. Musty dirty old stuff that has no sentimental value. Bedding, old brittle paperbacks, VHS tapes of I Love Lucy. Plastic, probably toxic (standards were different then) toddler toys that have lost their color. And we take out the one thing that is somewhat interesting to me: my old trunk that had sailed with me across the ocean and back again. It has old letters and photos. Not much else. I intend to dump it all out, but I want to go through it first to see if there is anything there that would aid me with my Great Writing Project.





The goal is really to make room in the storage locker for my mom's stuff. Ed glances at the unit and shakes his head.
Enough room here for half a dozen households!

Still, we work through boxes and boxes of stuff, leaving most for my daughters and my ex-husband to sort through, but removing at least one truck-load of junk.

It's all terribly dusty! I've come dressed in old clothes. I can't wait to change out of them. My one good pair of mittens is filthy. I toss them on the floor of the car, feeling grateful that it's warming up outside.

Ed drives away in his now rattling truck to Goodwill with the discards, I drive to my mom's apartment. (You'll recognize the view en route.)

 


And I think about the various things that flashed before me in that storage locker: kid clothes -- the pretty dress I bought for my then three year old when we were in Scotland. Programs -- the Madison Nutcracker, where my younger girl performed as Clara. A picture drawn by my older girl when she was just about Snowdrop's age. How can you ever toss these things away?

On the other hand, if you never look at any of it again, indeed, if you have lived for fifteen years not even remembering that these things are there, doesn't that tell you that it's time to let go of it all? How do you look back on a life well lived? Surely not by rifling through brittle papers? In theory, I have some curiosity about my notebook from my Polish first grade (It's long been tossed away by my parents): we used to draw colorful borders after each writing assignment. I'm trying to remember how my borders looked. But will I be any worse off if I never see them again?

At my mom's place, I survey stuff she has neatly packed into three large closets, two dressers and a desk. Oh, and a trunk. We are a family of many trunks.

The woman is a clothes horse! She relocated here from California a year and a half ago and I thought she had considerably downsized then, but somehow her closets are full nonetheless. Stacks of clothes. Piles of stuff. Of papers, of music tapes that she does not want to listen to anymore. (Will she ever? I don't know.) It's overwhelming.

My mom had made a list of things I can get rid of. Ed and I fill several cardboard boxes and we don't even make a dent.
This wont work -- I tell him. We need to start with a list of things she DOES want. 

Again Ed drives off to Goodwill, as I go on to see my mom at the Rehab Center. We talk about her things. She is slowly getting used to the idea of not returning to her apartment, even as neither of us know where she will be a month or two from now.

As I return to the farmette I think about how wonderful it has been to work through all this with Ed by my side. There's the lifting, the hauling that I truly haven't the muscle strength to do on my own, but more importantly, there's his reassuring presence. He's a guy who never despairs that something can't be done. He just does it. Slowly, methodically, without anxiety, without complaint.  It allows me to believe that we can whittle it down and move it out. That we can stall the apartment people until we hear about the next step. That we can manage this despite the dust, the endless hauls, the moving, the sorting. [What does he get in return? A grateful smile from me and a parking ticket stuck in his truck window from Madison police. The meter had run out.]


I have just enough time for a cup of coffee at home and then I head out to pick up the kids at school. Winter break is over -- we are back to our regular weekday schedule.

(Playing with yesterday's two balloons...)






(oops! a tangle!)






(freed again!)





I cook soup for supper. Vegetables, beans, but really the broth is what counts. Chicken broth. Make your own or buy a good variety in the store. Add it to your sauteed veggies, let it all simmer, inhale the aromas, eat. Mmmm! So good.

Sunday and five

The first birthday that I actually remember very well is when I turned seven. Everything about is crystal clear in my mind: we lived in a two room apartment in Warsaw and I had a party. Probably my first ever party. My mom's friend baked a nut cake. We played "American" games like pin the tail on the donkey, because my mother had lived in the U.S. for a long time and she knew kid stuff of this nature. I only remember two friends who were present -- both of them sons of my mom's chums. If I had other friends from school, they were not ones who stayed in my memory. We played "telephone," whispering messages that made their way around the table. I found this hilariously funny! I laughed so hard that I bit my glass with fruit compote in it. My terrified mother rushed me to the kitchen sink, where I spit out shreds of glass.

Snowdrop turns five today. Whether or not she remembers the details of this rather beautiful age is not really important. She will have photos, sure, but even more significantly, all the fuss and delight that her parents and her larger family make on this very special day will have an impact. This child (like her brother and her cousin) is loved and adored and given all smiles on her special day. Like any other child (person?), she looked forward to her birthday all year long. It's here. We celebrate!

The birthday girl spends her morning and afternoon with her parents and brother. She will have a party with more grandparents, her aunt, uncle, cousin, and  her school friends next weekend. Tonight, we'll do a farmhouse birthday dinner. She gets to pick the menu.

After breakfast...






.. I set the pans ready for baking. Snowdrop wants a lemon cake. I'm on it!






Phew! Takes a while. A coffee break (with leftover Christmas Panettone... amazing how long that bread stays fresh!) before I start in on dinner.







The family comes over, she opens just a couple of gifts from us (card first!)...






She plays... (Sparrow needs a dose of Maisey books first...)











("I'm moving the family to the tree house!")






We eat, there is cake, we sing, she is happy.






(Everyone in the family is good at sprinkling on loads of parmesan cheese, including little Sparrow...)






(By the time I reach for the camera, there's only one candle left!)






(Yeah!)


















("You found cherries? Really?? Can I hang one on my ear?")







That's what you wish for your birthday babes: that they are happy on this day and that they stuff some of that happiness in their pocket and keep it with them all year long!

Five beautiful years! Incredible!

Saturday

During the kids' school vacation, I've not had them here, at the farmhouse in the afternoons. Oh, I've seen them often enough -- on or around the important holidays, or when their cousin was visiting, and too, for no reason at all. Just because.

Today was a "just because" day. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that it was a good hair day. Immediately after breakfast (appreciate the colors!!)...





... I set to giving Ed a haircut/beard trim. For once, he asked me for it, possibly because his eyebrows had grown so long and bushy, that they were obstructing his field of vision.

And soon after, I drove over to the young family's home. A visit with the grandkids there is in order. Why today? Well, there is the issue of hair again: Sparrow is scheduled to go with his dad to the barber for his very first haircut. So there is the before photo (what, you cant see that his hair's two inches long in the back??) ...






... and of course an "after" picture: here's the little guy looking mighty grown up with his big boy cut!






As for Snowdrop -- I could say there is a need for a before and after sequence as well, only I wont get to the "after" photo until tomorrow. Today is the last time we see her as a four year old!





Tomorrow, she will turn that wonderful age of five, when you're old enough to understand a few of life's complexities, but young enough to believe that happiness is absolutely within reach, every single minute of your day, so long as you've got your family nearby, a good book on your lap, a favorite toy still there, unbroken, waiting for you, and a mandarin orange, or some other food du jour on your plate. (If you're lucky, you'll carry that belief in happiness for a long long long time! Perhaps into your senior years!)






So, everyone's looking spiffy right now. Time to return to a few of my resolves. Very late in the afternoon, Ed and I head out for a walk. To the usual county park next to us. Just before sunset. Because it's quite beautiful then.
























And as long as we're out, we may as well grab a bite to eat at the Great Dane Pub, just a few miles up the road from us. We do our usual: sit at the bar, read the newspaper (Ed) or a book (me). A perfect date, on a beautiful good hair day.