pomegranatesandpaper

Out of Chaos Comes....Chocolate

 Morning 

 

 

 

 

 

till night

 

 

 

we live on the porch.

 

So many of you responded so compassionately for the Facebook request for prayers for Mr. Pom that I was misty-eyed. The outpatient spinal surgery went flawlessly and he was able to avoid the more extreme operation  for which he signed a consent should the surgeon determine in medias res that more extreme repair was necessary. He's  moving slowly and gingerly,  but each day has been better than the last, and knowing how many folks were thinking of him raised his spirits  considerably.  

We have spent most of the days since then on the porch, where the temperature has been perfect for porch sitting.  Cool enough not to need the overhead fan and warm enough for a cold glass of wine.   Mornings I am in the yellow cushioned chair impatiently waiting for the seven-minute French press to do its thing.  The sky is pearly white and blazing pink down the hill over my sister's house. To the west gray hazy clouds cling to the daybreak sky like the dog hair clumps that fly across my wood floors on the breeze.

Evenings, especially if Mr. Pom has gone to bed, like last night, I am on the sofa, quilts and shawls at the ready, trying to read under the fairy lights. It is quiet and as long as no one dares walk a dog by our house - or heaven forbid, have a conversation on the sidewalk - the labs will sleep at my feet.  It was a perfectly beautiful last Saturday evening in summer.  I was alone with  my thoughts and the twinkle lights, trying to practice the "mindfulness" that I had just read about in the issue of Flow pictured above.  All that was missing was a firepit, which  for some reason, Mr. Pom thinks is dangerous on a screened porch. My suggestion that I  turn on the overhead fan to blow the smoke away was met with that "you can't be serious" look that only long time partner dares give you after years of hearing your  harebrained schemes.  

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Mindfulness is on my mind again this morning. Since vacation, the weeks have been jam-packed and I am glad to have the last week behind me.  For two weeks, I've been dragging myself around sick f and finally got an antibiotic.  The youngest has been interviewing for a new job and we were on pins and needles waiting for The Phone Call. (She got it!)Both Mr. Pom and I  were scrambling to get ahead at work  before his surgery. And then, of course, was the actual surgery. There was no time for mindfulness. 

 

Watching the child feed himself applesauce and watermelon is a great stress reliever, if you're not the New Mom who   has to carry him upstairs to the only working sink - twice.  

 

No, it was not propitious to begin some kitchen renovations right now. When we lined up the contractors and picked a date two months ago, we did  not foresee  back surgery occurring in  mid-September. When we returned in August from vacation,   the youngest and I leisurely began emptying cabinets and moving furniture and planned to finish c the weekend before the start date. Then the contractors moved up the date and arrived without notice while I was at work. They threw our kitchenware and food into boxes, crates - and even a baby pool they found in the garage! I rushed home from work, , burst into tears at the sight of the dining and living rooms,  grabbed a bunch of giant garbage bags, and sat in my suit sorting bagging up  expired cans and obsolete kitchen tools. Then I boxed "like" things together (my word, how many coffee cups do I have??),  and the New Mom  rushed over to rescue me and organized a mini kitchen in the dining room.  Mr. Pom looked on helplessly, only adding to his stress, of course. 

 

See the blue baby pool - dog pool actually - in the rear?

 

Two weeks later, we are a bit more organized and used to blowing plaster dust off our toothbrushes. Saturday morning, I would not leave the house until  I cleaned the sawdust and sheetrock dust on the first floor and organized our living space.  I lugged stuff outside and hoped for no rain. I dusted, swept and mopped. I moved all the foodstuffs from different areas (no more dog bones on the Victorian side-by-side) and onto the porch hutch. The quilts and blankets on the porch sofa got an airing and last week's Sunday papers were thrown into the recycle bin.  

When everything was clean and bright, I arranged some succulents  in a corner with the bear, the bunny, and the frog, and added my mother's white ceramic Cheshire cat and Christmas cactus. I had to make one space of beauty amidst this chaos.   I breathed a little sigh of relief and put my feet up for a minute, heard a  car door open, and the fellow who is  "the taper" was at the back door to spend a few hours troweling more  mud on the walls and do some sanding. 

Sigh.

It is what it is. 

Unfortunately, this is my favorite season to wander the Farmer Markets and spend Sunday morning cooking. I like to chop all the veggies into a ratatouille with fresh tomatoes sauce and brown up some pork ribs for the base for a long-simmering tomato gravy. It is my Sunday zen. I

You cannot make soup in the microwave nor roast vegetables in a toaster oven. I could be a little creative with the outdoor grills, but the problem  is the clean up - I am resistant to  scrubbing a roasting pan caramelized with chicken fat in the upstairs bathtub. Yuck.  Thank you the gods of paper goods! We apologize for temporarily increasing our carbon footprint but maintaining our sanity for a few weeks!

 

 

Last night, the New Parents brought over turkey burgers and delicious kale and spinach soup and I was able to microwave small red bliss and purple potatoes for a simple warm potato salad dressed with a rosemary and basil vinaigrette.   The baby had a variety of entrees until settling on ricotta with applesauce and a generous smear of ketchup sucked off  the turkey burger (he didn't care for the burger consistency), and mouthfuls of watermelon. Unfortunately, he ate this in stages before and during our dinner, requiring his mother to have to carry him twice upstairs to the only working sink to clean him up

Today  I have a full day of work  reports to do.  Since I could not spend the morning cooking,  I worked in the basement for an hour or two throwing out the junk of 15 years and lugging it to the curb. It was not as tasty as morning cooking, but in a way just as satisfying as moldy stuffed animals were, literally, kicked to the curb. This  lack of a kitchen may actually benefit my waistline.  

(No, that is a lie as there are  are leftover Italian heroes from yesterday for lunch and this morning we drove to Tarry Market for cappuccinos and continued up the road to Citarella's for a few imported cheeses and raisin semolina rolls, which we had for breakfast.)

I am about to set up my work laptop and make another cup of coffee and carry it all to the porch. Wishing you a fair and pleasant last weekend of summer. Make something wonderful in the oven like an apple pie and grill something in the backyard that requires woodsmoke and pork and let the smell drift over here, pretty please? Let me know what you are culinarily creating and be content that I will be sitting on the porch in the sunshine. 

À la recherche du temps perdu

 

This usually doesn't happen to me so soon into the change of seasons. The heat waves across the blacktopped street have barely stopped shimmering  and the apples are still ripening their blush, we are still able to sit on the porch after supper, and nary a leaf has fallen. But here I am, here I found myself , in a swoon of memory and longing for...... for what I do not really know.

Perhaps it was a long and spirited conversation with someone this morning, an unlikely person to have shared such an intimate - and yet totally banal - review of times past. When I got out of bed this morning I could not have foreseen a half hour leaning against the kitchen wall and names tumbling out of our mouths and faces appearing like apparitions against the bare plaster and lath of the walls. 

It set me up for the day, I suppose, triggered a melancholy that hastened the seasonal slide into longing that usually besets me by October's end.  Oh, I soon forgot about in the whirlwind of the day, the usual strings of beads that clack orderly like a rosary in a nun's hand:  dress, drive, depose, drive debrief, dine, undress, decompress. 

But still, I held something else inside all day, not sure what it was, not even aware, really, that it was there or that I was protecting it, probing it, harboring the feeling the way one can slide into a cold, succumbing almost with pleasure into tissues and pillows and books.  Yet, it also was a weight, not a dragging down weight, but more of a ballast, a tugging that straightened my head and aligned my mind and I realized: this is not at all what this is supposed to be.

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I found an old movie on Netflix. George Cukor;  Cary Grant the gorgeous dreamer;  the younger vain, shallow sister love object; the sassy and deep Katherine Hepburn older sister madly crushing;  a nursery at the top of a mansion decorated by Sister Parrish. It skated on thin ice, but Grant and Hepburn do a somersault  onto a ship to France and all ends well. But at the beginning when they are at a Christmas church service and singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing, and the women wear hats and the men   fedoras and bulky overcoats, I fight back a sob. Later,  a glimpse of a huge, bulky double-doored behemoth of a refrigerator in the servant's kitchen causes tears to run down my cheeks.  Perhaps too many late nights at work?

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I locked my laptop in my desk drawer and took nothing home with me today but my purse. My grandson and daughter surprised me in the driveway with a slice of pizza and a salad.  We sat on the landing  to the stairs and played with the vacuum attachments  as we pretended to vacuum.We pulled the retractable cord in and out of the vacuum and pressed the magic button that makes it  retract like a whip about ten times. We fed the dogs bits of graham crackers from our hands and sat (at least he did) in a plastic storage box that became a train chugging across the bare floor of the living room.  We looked at the fairy lights on the porch and were torn between counting them or going back to the stairs and playing with the vacuum hose while making sounds like an elephant. 

But  then we decided to return to the porch and he took my finger and led  me to the corner where a  foot high clay bear has lived all its  life and no one took  notice. We petted the bear on the nose. We repeated "bear". We petted the dark green stone frog that lives next to bear in the corner and said, "frog". We petted the cement baby rabbit that completes the corner trinity and finished with "bunny".

 After a drink of water and a fling onto his mother's lap, he pulled me by finger back to the corner and we repeated the names of the corner trinity.  Then he reached out a tiny finger to pet the bear's nose but was rather too afraid. I  petted each head and repeated their names. He stood and bent from the waist until his face was against the stone floor and he opened his mouth and left a wet imprint in his form of a kiss, a pilgrim in adoration. 

A warmth flooded me.  I had a sensation of simultaneously plunging back in time and seeing the future like a bird on a wing. 

I am a grandmother. I am a a granddaughter.  I remember my grandmothers. I have a grandson. I was the mother.  I am the grandmother. 

I am the grandmother who had a bear, a frog, and a bunny  in the corner of the porch and we used to pet their heads and feed them bits of graham crackers.

I am the grandmother. 

I am the memory.

I am the future. 

I will become the past. 

I am the grandmother who had a bear, a frog, and a bunny in the corner of the porch and we petted their heads and fed them bits of graham crackers. 

I am the memory I seek.