Category Archives: Family

Motherly Love

Posted on by
4

It’s no secret that I love my mothers. I post about both the wonderful woman who carried me into this world and raised me and the marvelous woman who joined in mothering me when her son and I became partners for life. No amount of Mother’s Day posts, no matter how heartfelt, can tell anyone who doesn’t already know it how important these two superb people have been, and will always be, in my heart and in my daily existence.

Even telling you that I had to compose this post entirely from scratch twice, thanks to the joys of hiccuping technology, and was still willing to do it, can’t convey the height and depth of my affection and respect, of my love for them both. Though, if you know how technologically inept I can be, the latter might come close.

I’m here, though, to say thanks not only to Mom W and Mom S, with sincere gratitude and delight, but also to the innumerable stars in the sheltering sky of motherhood. Those who conceived (with a bit of help) and carried (with, or without) children and raised them from infancy. Those who have raised, or helped to raise, others’ children. People of all ages and socioeconomic levels; the educated and the self-taught; the mild-mannered and the most colorful characters on earth. Nature doesn’t guarantee aptitude or attitude, nor does nurture: like many people raised by outstanding, wise, and loving mothers, I did not feel the call to motherhood as a biological imperative myself, and of course many who do are not granted the opportunity.

I think men can mother. Youth can mother age. Persons with no genetic or legal relationship can mother. Anyone with the commitment to bettering the lives of those around them who may have a moment—or a lifetime—of need may be motherly material. I think that the truism “it takes a village to raise a child” isn’t far off the mark, but might be interpreted more broadly than some would do. History has handed us so many examples of familial bonds and gifts that extend far beyond an individual marriage or household or lineage that it surprises me we don’t celebrate the motherly instinct in any and everyone who is willing and able to exercise it for the good of others in their life’s path.

So I say Thank You with my whole heart to my beloved mothers. And I must add my deep appreciation, too, to every next-door mom, teacher mom, sports team coach mom, lady at the local convenience store mom, psychiatrist mom, librarian mom, delivery truck driver mom, classmate mom, and dive bar mom who ever counseled, taught, comforted, held, humored, read to, chastised, fed, and showed patient kindness to the rest of us when the time arose. My “village” has been a grand one, and good mothering is one of the best reasons it is so.Photo: To Mothers of All Kinds

Foodie Tuesday: The Gingerbread Woman

Posted on by
11

The scent of cinnamon drifting out as I open the door invites me to plunge inside, but I can’t help taking my time. A deep, slow breath: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice. Ginger. A smack of icy air throws my collar up around my ears and gives me the final push to dash inside, the storm door slamming behind me.

Gingerbread.Photo: Gingerbread 1

Mama loves us. The school board thinks it better we all traipse home, damp and frost-speckled, through the sidewalk maze of shoveled snow than that we stay snugly tucked into the school with a sack lunch, and we kids complain at the bitter wind and the icy ground. Slipping sidelong into the snowdrifts isn’t as fun when we still have the slog back to afternoon class ahead, wet and miserable, blue around the nose and chin or not.

But some lucky few of us have the respite of bath-towel-wielding mothers, a pair of dry socks hanging over the back of the chair, and on top of it all, a homemade lunch waiting for us at home. Lunch with gingerbread. Sweet, so hot from the oven that clouds of spice envelop us at the threshold. So hot that even after we’ve gobbled our sandwiches and soup to get to it, the layer of homemade applesauce on top can’t keep the uppermost layer of whipped cream from melting faster than those last snowflakes in our hair.

Gingerbread. Mother’s love and blessed relief from the cold winter’s day all wrapped up in a helping of almost unbearably delicious goodness. Sigh. Back to school. Repeat. Maybe there will be enough gingerbread left over for after supper, if we hurry home fast enough.Photo: The Gingerbread WomanMy Own Gingerbread with Rum Caramel

Preheat oven to 350°F/177°C.  Blend dry ingredients gently with a whisk: 2 cups [gluten-free, in my case] flour, 1 cup packed brown sugar, 1 cup granulated sugar, a scant 1 1/5 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp baking soda, spice mix [2 T ginger, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp each cloves, nutmeg, and white pepper, + 1 hefty pinch each cardamom and salt]. In a saucepan, melt 3/4 cup coconut oil and add to it 1 cup molasses, 1/2 cup whole milk yogurt, and 1/2 cup dark rum (cane sugar cola, root beer, or ginger ale is a great non-alcoholic alternative), warming just until thoroughly blended. Add 3 large eggs and beat them in well, tempering the wet ingredients if the warmed ones are still at all hot so the eggs won’t curdle. Combine the wet and dry ingredients and pour into a heavily greased and floured (I used cocoa powder mixed with cinnamon, to keep from building up any unseemly white dust blooming on the finished goods) cake or loaf pan, cupcake tins, or a combination of these, allowing plenty of space for a bit of rising as the batter bakes.

For small portions like the cupcakes, start with no more than 18-20 minutes’ baking; larger batches like a Bundt pan can be checked later, allowing up to nearly an hour for full baking. Check occasionally, removing them from the oven when they seem nearly done; a very little under-baking keeps them nicely sticky and gooey, good cousins to the Britons’ glorious Sticky Toffee Pudding.

While I’m on the subject of toffee, there’s nothing at all wrong with the idea of a caramel kind of topping to accompany a nice, intensely spicy gingerbread like this. So I made some Rum Caramel Sauce: in a nonstick saucepan, I cooked together, until melted, 1 cup brown sugar (again!), 1/2 cup browned butter (I’d just made up a nice big batch of my beloved beurre noisette), 1/4 cup dark rum (see above note for non-alcoholic versions), plus a touch or two of cream to thin it as desired at the last. Terrible stuff; you wouldn’t like it at all. May I have your serving of it?

Lastly, of course, if one is feeling particularly indulgent-and-when-am-I-not, it’s good to top all of this with a heaping spoonful of cream whipped up with lots of vanilla and dark maple syrup. The resulting calorie-free, eternal-life-conferring dessert met with approval at snack time, after dinner, in the late evening, and for breakfast. So you can expect that my friends and I will be outliving all of you. Or at least, dying contented. I didn’t get any no-thank-yous when I offered thirds, anyway. As I’m sure my mama never did, back in the old days of snowy trudges and school lunches.

Dear Ones All

Posted on by
10

Photo: Bouquet of the Day 1I have my own Theory of Relativity, and I hope you’ll find it useful, too, as you grow from the tiniest curl of humanity to a venerable old woman. No claim of scientific knowledge here, only an observation on what I think really matters in my small corner of the universe: relationships between people.

Relationships, regardless of economic or social, religious or political status, can be begged, borrowed, and bought; they can be stolen, stumbled upon, forced or freely given; there are also, of course, the clearly genetic sort or the biologically driven. All are valid, and many of them necessary, but none of those fully encompasses the best of what I think defines Family.

For starters, none of those aspects can guarantee a relationship’s ultimate failure or success. Human connexions, like living creatures, can suffer from Failure to Thrive, whether through damaging acts or events or mere neglect. Estrangement is, I think, the perfect name for a lost relationship: what was familiar has somehow changed, become alien. Whether birth, common interests or goals, affinity, or contract is its basis, a relationship can still fail. Or it can flourish.

Family is, for me, the height of relationship, the pinnacle of human interaction. Bloodlines, religion, and legal bonds don’t own it. My view of the ideal, when it comes to family, is that it should spring from an ongoing will to maintain and foster the connection; just keeping it plugged in is useless unless all involved see that it’s well-oiled, reboot it when in need, and occasionally, polish it to a high gleam and rediscover its original beauty.

In my heart and mind, family as that highest form of relationship is an earned status, a privilege. If it doesn’t work in mutuality, with both parties contributing, it’s a different sort of transaction. I don’t see it as a constantly equal balance; in fact, the level of need versus the level of resource and capability in any individual varies greatly over time and situational changes, and the more people in the equation, the more the possible iterations. Sometimes the crisis is virtually universal, everyone called to extraordinary service for each other’s good. The established bond helps bridge those gaps between need and sparse resource in the moment. Happier times and better circumstances, when life is more gracious again, will replenish the void for more balanced give-and-take in days to come. Ebb. Flow.

The crucial elements in all of this have, for me, much more to do with respect, mutual values, friendship, and delight in one another’s company than with lineage, contracts, or societal expectations. I’m a rarity in having both born relatives and married ones that do meet and surpass my standards for true family. Further, I’ve a remarkably expansive extended family, acquired over the years through shared ideas and experiences and the love and respect that grow out of them. I know that with all of these joys, I’m beyond blessed. I have a world-sized circle of good people, both related by DNA and not, surrounding me and, through that, one of the largest and most wonderful of familial relationships possible. I’ve spent years discovering just how wide caring arms reach to embrace me, and how deep open hearts’, minds’, and hands’ resources go, regardless of physical proximity, when anyone anywhere treats me like family.

It is a wonderful world, my beloved, and there is always room in it for more like us, if you are willing to take on the role and cultivate the larger Family too.Photo: Bouquet of the Day 2

No Greater Gift

Posted on by
9

Digital illo: The Greatest GiftLove is the answer. Not romance, not lust, not preferential treatment; love. Real, tangible, spoken and expressed with clockwork regularity and with kindness and clarity. The sort of love that fills your car’s gas tank before you leave for work and gives you snow tires for an anniversary gift, that calls Tech Support and sits around on hold for forty minutes before the ninety-minute-long session of troubleshooting to fix your confounded computer’s latest case of the hiccups. The sort of love that silently reaches over and holds your hand when there are no possible words for the occasion, good or bad.

Love is forgetful and fretful, persistent to the point of irritating, deaf in one ear and hard of hearing in the other, and demands, without realizing it, a high percentage of return—and all of this is absolutely nothing in exchange for the comfort, companionship, reverence, and acceptance received before any of these minor shortcomings are called into account. This kind of love transcends human norms so far that I can only assume it derives from some larger, more stable and powerful force than our own desires and whims. Love is what makes me sorrowful for the sorrows of a kindred soul, joyful in her joys, and comforted by a deep sense of her presence when she’s absent.

Love is, too, the act of sending a hand-written note, in this age of technology, that says “I’m thinking of you” and carries with it great personal weight in and between the lines. My second mother, the one I acquired so fortuitously and blessedly through marrying her son, sent just such a note recently. It wasn’t long. It didn’t cover a lot of ground. It said little that she doesn’t say to us in our regular phone conversations. But it was so sweet, so heartfelt and unexpected, that it brought happy tears to my eyes and I was flooded with a renewed sense of how deeply glad I am to be immersed in such love. And it reminded me that I will be all the more deeply blessed if I can find ways to pass along such love, no matter how small or simple those ways might seem at the time, to all of the other people I possibly can, for as long as I possibly can. Amazing how these things can multiply. That, of course, is one of the reasons that love, in all its forms, is such a powerful gift.Digital illo: The Amazing Multiplier

Sometimes It’s Better to Part Ways with One’s Parts

Posted on by
12

When something goes wrong inside, for most of us it’s no big deal; just an off day in the old innards, whether physically or emotionally, and it’ll pass. But when something goes wrong in a more complicated way, I tend to think it’s pretty good luck if “all” one has to do to get well is remove a malfunctioning part and either replace it or live without. Modern life makes that possible: a swift appendectomy with a tiny scar to show for it, a manufactured hip here, a transplanted kidney there. Lots of things that, if not chronic, are reparable and survivable when they used to lead to long, slow, miserable declines or instant death.

There’s still plenty of the latter kind of illness and injury to keep doctors busy and patients unhappy and money funneling from the latter to the former in ever-widening streams, and that’s no joke. But I think it remarkably good that I live in an era when far less stuff is fatal by default. I was especially glad that when my poor brother-in-law was violently attacked by his own gallbladder recently and it tried to stone him to death, there was adequate artillery to fight back and win. What did he ever do to it, to deserve such lousy treatment! I can tell you from (supposed) experience that gallbladder pain is horrendous. I can’t tell you what it’s like to have the offending organ removed, or even have the stones destroyed and extracted, because either I don’t have a gallbladder at all or it is an expat living in a foreign part of my body from where they are normally located: the doctor and ultrasound technician spent a lot of time hunting and could never find the little hunk of meanness before the pain, thankfully, dissipated on its own.

Photo: Plumbing

Don’t you just hate it when something goes wrong with your plumbing?

My BIL was not such a fortunate escapee, and the pain persisted and worsened until he ended up with several exceedingly un-fun procedures to zap the stones and remove the offending organ, which if you ask me did have a heck of a lot of gall to treat him like that. I am ever so glad he has already begun a full recovery! I wrote him a silly poem, ’cause I love him.

Parting with Parts

is Such Sweet Sorrow

Can anything be worse, or sadder,

Than to give up one’s gallbladder?

Well, perhaps one worser quirk:

Still having one that doesn’t work…

And one worse yet: the wails and groans

Induced by one that’s filled with stones.

So I’ll amend Assertion One:

Having a gallbladder’s no fun.

But then again, I must concede

That surgery is bad indeed.

It all comes down, if I should guess

To what will save my happiness

More fruitfully: intact gallbladder?

None? Can’t say: it doesn’t matter,

Since the choice will not be mine—

‘Til then, I s’pose I’ll be just fine—

I hope. Of course, I still don’t know

Whether I even have one, though.

Foodie Tuesday: Tikka Masala Madness

Posted on by
11

We were both hungry for something Indian-food-ish. Really hungry. It was time to figure out a new recipe for a nice Tikka Masala-like sauce, for a change of pace. So I went hunting. I looked through my Indian cookbooks and went wandering online for a while, and found that the core ingredients for a creamy tomato curry seemed fairly stable from one recipe to another, but as with any sort of classic food, not only did the proportions vary widely but the peripheral or add-on ingredients did, too.

Jamie Oliver’s recipe seemed to me to sit somewhere right in the middle of the typical combinations, so I chose to use that as a jumping-off point for today’s home-brew. And what do you know, it came out pretty nicely. And relatively simply. I made a big enough batch that I could freeze a couple of meals’ worth, too. I opted to cook up the other parts of the meal (a batch of vegetables, roughly chopped prawns, and coconut rice) separately, then just took some of the finished sauce after it’d simmered for a while and spooned up customized individual combinations in bowls for our dinner.

This is a recipe where it’s particularly helpful to have your mise en place waiting next to the cooktop so it goes together very easily.Photo: Tickled Tikka Masala

Tickled Tikka Masala

Finely mince or crush 2-3 cloves garlic, 2 Tablespoons fresh ginger, 1-2 teaspoons freshly chopped jalapeño, and 1 T grated citrus zest (I used lemon and lime together). Mix with 2-3 T lemon juice, 1.5 T chicken bouillon (I like Better Than Bouillon brand). Set aside.

Blend together dry ingredients: 2 Tablespoons garam masala, 1 T ground coriander, 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves, 1 T cumin, and 1 T smoked paprika, and 2 T freeze-dried diced shallots. Toast gently in 3-4 T ghee in a large pan over medium-low heat.

Add the citrus-bouillon blend and stir it all together to warm through. To this, add a whole can of rich coconut milk (13.5 oz Chaokoh, my fave) and stir it in. Add 24.5 oz canned tomato puree or sauce (tomatoes and salt only; Mutti Passata is my favorite) and about 2 T tomato paste. Let this whole thing simmer gently for an hour or two, covered, stirring occasionally.

Add whole milk yogurt or labneh to taste, serving by serving and garnish with chopped fresh cilantro. Or, if you don’t have a yogurt-and-green-thingies-averse partner like mine, finish the whole dish with them. Or you can top it with toasted coconut, with cashews, pistachios, bacon pieces, chopped dried apricots, or whatever suits your fancy. However you choose to do it, as you can see by the long list of ingredients and the longer list of recipes I surfed before landing on one of my own, the dish is endlessly customizable. And yes, it turns out, every bit as tasty as I remembered.

Photo: Tikka with Toppings

Foodie Tuesday: Birthday Cake for a Peach of a Guy!

Posted on by
16

Photo: Birthday Cake for a Peach of a GuyDad, who celebrated his eightieth birthday last week, is a peach of a guy. His uncle was fond of using that phrase to extol the sweetness and excellence of anybody he liked and admired greatly, including his own nephew David, and Uncle Lloyd himself was special, as the only person in the known universe (other than us kids, who imitated him with a certain amount of childish glee when we heard it) who ever called my dad Davy. But he was fond and proud, too, of his nephew—enough to include him in the Peachy category. So to my father David, and to my late great-uncle Lloyd, and to all of the other ‘guys’ (male, female, or other) worthy of the title, I dedicate this birthday treat that I made in honor of their being truly swell human beings.

It’s a gluten-free pound cake recipe, essentially (as long as you check that the individual ingredients meet that requirement in their production, should you be truly gluten sensitive); I only went GF because I happened to find several GF pound cake recipes that piqued my interest and I also happened to have the necessary ingredients for this variant of them on hand. I made it with cardamom both because I think that a grand companion flavor for peaches and because, being of Norwegian descent, I believe there may be at least a hint of cardamom in my bloodstream. In any case, I love the stuff. Almond flavors, too, and what better flour to use in the cake than almond flour, then?

The topping, which of course one can eliminate if it’s too much for the occasion—not that I know any people who absolutely adore sliced, toasted day-old pound cake for breakfast, preferably with yet more butter melted on top—is less Norwegian in its overall flavor profile, perhaps. It is somewhat like a peach sangria, I suppose. But maybe I can pass it off as “Scan-gria,” if pressed for a commitment. No matter; it’s a bit peachy, zippy, happy, has a lot of color and flavor, and is pretty sweet. All kind of like Dad and Uncle Lloyd, come to think of it. PS—no law against using the icing for the breakfast version of this, either.

Cardamom-Almond Cake

Preheat the oven to 350°F/ca. 177°C. In a mixing bowl, whisk together 2-1/4 cups almond flour/meal, 1/4 cup coconut flour (I ground some from toasted coconut flakes), 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp ground cardamom, and 1 tsp baking soda. In another container (I like to use a spouted measuring pitcher for prepping liquids so I can easily pour them up when ready), blend 2/3 cup melted butter or oil (I used clarified browned butter), 2/3 cup raw honey, 1/2 cup + 3 Tablespoons full-fat coconut milk, 2 tsp vanilla and 1/2 tsp almond extract, and beat in 4 large eggs until all is blended thoroughly. Pour the mix into the dry ingredients and gently blend everything together. The batter fits into a standard 9×9″ baking pan or, as I used, a round casserole of about the same capacity, and goes into the oven for about 25-35 minutes.

My famously unreliable oven temperatures make me distrust giving anything other than approximate times and temps, and I just watch every individual dish, as I did this time. It’s a gooey cake, not light and fluffy, but I’d rather err on the moist side than otherwise. Just my thing. Meanwhile, I had prepared and refrigerated the icing earlier.

Tipsy Peaches & Cream Icing

Simmer together 2 ounces sliced freeze-dried peaches, 1/2 tsp rosewater, 1/2 tsp almond extract, 2 tsp vanilla, a pinch of salt, 1/2 tsp cardamom, 3/4 cup red wine, and 1 cup brown sugar until the sugar melts and the peaches are well rehydrated. [I warmed this mix in the evening until it was close to ready and then just left the pot sitting, covered, until the morning, so there was no question everything was well soaked and softened, but that was just because I was too tired after a long day of work to do it all that night.] Then, using a stick blender, puree the mix fully, adding 3/4 cup coconut oil (melted or room temp), 1 cup marshmallow fluff, and 1 cup cream cheese (or labneh). I threw in about 1/4 tsp silver edible glitter, just for fun. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Photomontage: Cake-WreckingI will confess to going a little further over the top this time, since I was in the mood to play with my food and it was for a good person’s cause. So I sliced a “lid” from the cake, carved out its middle, crumbled the interior hunk, blended it with a bunch of the icing stuff (reserving enough icing to drizzle over the exterior), packed the icing/cake crumb mix into the crater of the cake, closed the lid and covered up my tracks with a slathering of the remaining icing before putting peach (canned—it’s winter, y’all) and toasted almond slices on top of it all. I pinned the toppings together before sticking it in the refrigerator to chill out and set without sliding into oblivion. But it’s messy enough that it just might end up being a trifle or a bombe (possibly even a bomb) instead of a cake this way. And that’s okay. If I learned nothing else from my father, I did see in him a fine example of both how to make any situation work as well as possible—and how to play with my food.Photo: Squishy Cake

The Man with the Stained Glass Voice

Posted on by
11

Photo: Stained Glass VoiceWhen my dad was a collegiate radio announcer, he was known to at least one of my mom’s admiring girlfriends as Heavenly Voice, and between his speech-major skills as an orator, his wacky sense of humor, and that mellifluous voice, it’s no wonder he was able to persuade the rest of the student body to elect him president, nor that later he became a successful preacher, board chair, bishop, and community advocate in various capacities over the years.

He did not, however, use his voice as a deliberate affectation like some people we have known do. There was one cleric in particular whom my family and friends knew to have a naturally light baritone voice but, whether he did it consciously or not in the beginning, he habitually intoned everything he said with what sounded to us like a very stagey, unnatural, and ultimately pompous and pontificating basso that we dubbed his Stained Glass Voice. Dad, thankfully, only ever did such a thing as a joke. His voice was, and is, naturally attractive and engaging enough, and I suppose more importantly, he wasn’t insecure enough to need to pretend he was anything other than his own fantastic self, so we found it highly amusing in our friend and a relief that Dad didn’t fall to such silliness himself. Heaven knows he has mastered numerous other forms of more palatable silliness over the years, so why waste the energy on cartoonish vocal contortions!

Dad is celebrating his 80th birthday today, and it’s every bit as good to hear his voice (his real one) now as it ever was. Maybe more so, given that I live farther away from my parents than I did for most of my life, and that we’re all getting older and a little more conscious of the aging process with each successive year. On the other hand, my father still has the same impish and impudent sense of humor that always made him slightly hard to control or predict but easy to love, so passing calendar years neither make him seem much more grownup nor much older, a few minor scuffles with his own Father Time notwithstanding (hello, knee replacement)!Photo: Heavenly Voice

Now, I can’t begin to imitate anything as impressive and imposing as a faux James Earl Jones voice in which to wish my dad a happy birthday, nor can I sing it to him like a choir of angels. But I do send my heartfelt birthday greetings and love to him, and no matter how scratchy or shallow, Spasmodic or silly I may sound, the sentiments are as real and as clear as any stained glass. I love you, Dad! May this birthday and the whole year that follows it be filled with delight and great adventures. And whatever your heart desires. [Within reason. Nothing that the Glen Brothers and I can’t provide between us, anyway.]

Keep the Lines Open

Posted on by
4

In a general sense, I know life is better and easier when the lines of communication remain open and flow freely in both directions. Recent notes from friends and family who have been visited by disasters—natural or otherwise—remind me of how spectacularly crucial the communication becomes in moments of crisis. The mere words “it’s okay” have virtual magic powers in those instances when we know that something big is happening and we can’t be there to offer help or consolation. I have mostly been incredibly fortunate in this regard, rarely hearing of terrible goings-on in progress without being able to get regular reports from my connexions in their midst, but like everyone, I have had enough moments of that intense fear and anxiety arising out of ‘dead air‘ to know what high value is in keeping the flow of information steady.

The latest round of wind- and snowstorms in various parts of my loved ones’ worlds is an instant review of those times when, amid a winter howler or while driving through flooded terrain or hunkered down in a good-sized earthquake, I had no easy access to a telephone or (if they were yet a household item) computer. A perfect example from my own memory is one clear winter Saturday when I was working around the house and the winds began picking up significantly. I hadn’t watched the weather forecast and was unaware that any storm was incoming, only realizing over a matter of a couple of hours that the gusts had grown to a point where I was hearing the towering evergreens and maples close to the house creak and branches snap, and could look out the back windows and see Douglas-firs dancing like hula dancers. But nothing major had broken when I looked outside. I was so preoccupied with the impressive action and the whistling and moaning noises of the trees that it startled me into an electric jump when the phone rang.Photo: Storm Clouds

I trotted into the back bedroom to grab the phone where I could sit at bedside and watch the wind’s power at play through the window while reassuring my sister, who had called from a bit farther north to see if everything down our way was safe since the reports of the storm had in fact preceded it northward. I was cheerily reporting on the show and the snug and intact condition of house and inhabitants when I saw a six-by-four-foot section of the back fence uproot twenty feet behind the house and sail like a kite right through the plate glass window. Thankfully, the shards of flying glass went in the direction of the fence, which in turn was not aimed directly at me, so as soon as the crash and shatter quieted I could speak into the receiver that was still gripped in my hand and assure my sister that I was quite all right, tell her what had happened, and promise to call back after the window was closed off again. Because, of course, with that wind, the rain was close behind.

The instance was fortuitous in many ways, not least of which was that my mother arrived on the scene mere moments later, and that we had pieces of plywood in the garage large enough to cover the whole big window with just two hunks. We dutifully covered the new opening with plastic sheeting, screwed plywood panels over it to close, and put up a bit more sealed plastic to hold off the remaining elements, and managed, if I remember right, to beat all but the first sprinkles of the downpour. A good seal was, we knew, important, since in our region there were not only vast swaths of evergreens to knock over or prune limb by limb onto roofs and through windows but many of them were Douglas-firs, a shallow rooted variety that is not hard to fell full length if the wind catches it just right. And in such windstorms in the area, many do go down. Growing up in a family of carpenters, I knew full well that even if we could reach one of the relatives and set up repairs earlier than other folk, their calendars would be jammed for days or weeks after a storm like this one.Photo: Kicking up a Storm

The first order of business was, of course, to call my sister back and tell her that not only were we all safe but the house was closed up tightly again, the bedroom carpet vacuumed about six times over to get all of the glass out of it, the fence section dismantled and relocated outdoors, a temporary barrier put up where it had been so that the neighbors’ horses couldn’t just walk over for an unsupervised visit, and that the wind was already abating, leaving mostly rain in its wake. She, in turn, called the other sisters to pass along the news. No one else was ‘visited’ by anything untoward in that storm, and we all lived happily ever after. And though it was a challenge to reach my uncle’s construction company and get a repair appointment, we even managed that before the day was done. Of course, having closed up the broken window sufficiently, we did have to get in line behind people without roofs, with trees lying lengthwise through their bedrooms, and the like, as was only fair. For them, I could only hope that they hadn’t also been harmed themselves—and could still call their loved ones to report on their safety.

First Flower of the Season

Posted on by
13

Sister number three in our line is a winter baby, born on this date a few decades or so ago. But like the few blooms that brave the cold grip of the January earth in Washington state’s temperate climate, she is an early sign of the season of warmth and growth yet to come, a reminder that winter is finite and spring is ahead.Photo: First Crocus

Like the ethereally delicate crocus, whose pristine tenderness belies its vigor in breaking through the hard earth of the cold season, my sister brings a shining intensity to life that would be unexpected in someone so kindhearted and sympathetic and sensitive, at least to any who didn’t know better. But like the first flowers of the season, she is tougher than even she gives herself credit for being. She sustains an accomplished life that no shrinking violet could hope to do, raising with her marvelous husband two outstanding, smart, and exceedingly charming sons, and keeping her three sisters in line when our inappropriately youthful enthusiasm for life occasionally threatens to get in the way of getting any grownup sort of business done. She’s practical and clever enough to corral our tangents, but also creative enough to steer us toward worthwhile tangents of her own when it’ll help get our projects in hand. For decades, she’s also successfully applied these cat-wrangling skills to the demanding and volatile world of tech business, being the administrative linchpin of support for an array of engineers and executives and other fellow workers that surely must remind her at times of a class of unruly kindergartners destined to never graduate to the first grade. And yet I marvel that she rarely seems to lose her equilibrium over their, or our, antics for very long.
Photo: Thalia in Bloom

Like the Thalia narcissus, she instead continues to break through the tough old world as a spot of dazzling joy, her bold and decisive will to prevail against life’s trials and vicissitudes carried always in the fragrant flowering of early bloom highlighted by the solemn backdrop of the still-sleeping earth. May the year ahead hold bouquets of such lovely surprise for her, in turn, and her days be a garden of promise and delight. Happy Birthday, my sweet!