The Sledding Hill

So many of my childhood memories blur together in my head. Summer is one long camping trip where we fished in a river in Montana in the morning and got chased by water moccasins in a Texas lake after lunch and visited the Trail of Tears museum before dinner. I have a hard time separating out what happened when or even where. I see it in my children too. It's the reason that Briton will occasionally start a sentence with, "When we lived in Paris...." We didn't live in Paris, we visited Paris when we lived in Dublin. But to Briton, at 3, a week in a tiny apartment in Paris with his beloved Thomas trains covering the carpet was not very different from every day life in a tiny apartment in Ireland where, again, his trains took up all the available floor surface. Paris, Rome, Missouri, Dublin, Portland... it all kind of blurs together for him, the wheres and the whens.

Like summer, my childhood winters blurs together into one, long, Beverly Cleary-eque day. I don't remember feeling cold or wet from the northern Idaho snow. I don't remember my mittens growing soggy with caked ice or the exhahusting task of keeping the sidewalk of our corner lot shoveled, although now that I've lived in snow country as an adult, I can imagine it. I don't even remember feeling stir crazy with too many days indoors, waiting for spring. No. Winter was all about sledding, and did I ever sled.

My friend Molly lived at the top of the best sledding hill in town and since I spent my afternoons at her house until my parents were done with work, I had the advantage over almost every other kid at school. Apart from Molly and her many brothers and sisters and Hannah, who lived across the street and therefore also had a full time sledding wonderland just out her front door, I got the most sledding hours per day of any kid I knew. We would rush home from school, toss our homework onto the table, gulp down a bowl of ramen noodles from the steaming pot that seemed ever present on the stove at Molly's house and be back out the door before the prime spots were taken by the other kids.

We became experts in reading the iciness of the street, too fresh of snow and the runner sleds, though faster and more controllable, were abandoned for the thin plastic sheet sleds or if we could find one, a smooth bottomed toboggan. Both were alright, but the runner sleds were best. With two or three kids packed on, the pilot holding firmly to the rope with her feet wedged onto the steering bar, the rear position rider would give a good push and then jump on, arms wrapped tightly around the waist in front of them if they were lucky, or sprawled out on the snow as the sled careened downhill away from them if they were not. The road dropped sharply downhill for a block, evened out as it crossed another street and then dipped again until it leveled out finally another block down. More often than not, a run would go awry and dump you into the snowbacks somewhere along the first block. A good run would carry you across the first cross street and you'd crash somewhere in the second block. A great run, only achieved if you started dead center in the road, if your runners were sharp, your passengers well balanced and your aim true, ended in an Olympic ski run finish, slowing to a perfect stop in the flat of the second cross street, arms in the air in triumph. Those were rare and wonderful moments, but they could be achieved. And then, no matter where you ended, the long slog up the hill to start again. A lesser run made acceptable by the fact that you only had a short distance to go to be back at the top, a great run made easy by the lingering triumph of making it to the bottom without a crash. Up to the top, and down again, over and over until the afternoon light faded into darkness and the street emptied until the next day. An eternal winter's afternoon.

                                                       - Gillian

Sticks in the window

I never really thought I would see beauty in a winter-bared tree trunk. But I suppose it is really a matter of how you frame it.

I learned about forests in the Northwest, where the definition of “tree” is something very tall, very green and very determined to stay that way in the coldest of winters.

When I first saw Missouri in the spring, I was amazed by the lush green canopy that stretched over me like an organic tent. You don’t really walk through the forest in the Northwest – you thrash through the low fir and spruce limbs hoping you won’t get a handful of needles down your shirt. But Missouri is on the edge of the Great American Hardwood Forest – that leafy cathedral through which movie Indians crept silently and under which the village smithy stood.

Of course, the movies seldom have winter editions. Hardwoods are lush in the spring and then spectacular in the fall when they burst out into color – just before losing everything. By November, that great leafy cathedral has become a bunch of naked sticks.

But I have come to love those sticks. This time of the year, I frequently find myself staring out my window in Zen-like silence, just watching the sticks.

We have five huge windows that look out on the forest. Between me and the trees is a deck, a heated birdbath and a couple of feeders. And umpteen-dozen squirrels, as many woodpeckers, and troops of nuthatches, wrens, jays and finches who enjoy my largess. Plus the odd raccoon or woodchuck come just to torment my dog.

My wintry oaks and maples are not just figures in a still life. The are the cast of a full-fledged matinee feature.

The view of those “dead” sticks through my windows is an ever-changing passion play. I’m constantly amazed at how tree trunks so bare can shelter an ark-ful. In the Northwest, I could hear that birds were up there, but seldom saw more than a flash of feathers.

Here the lack of cover means neighbors of any species have little choice but to politely nod to each other. So I stand at my window and raise my coffee cup to the creature of the moment.

It’s a Midwest kind of thing. Not a bad one, at that.

Clyde    

A Farm Girl at Heart

The other morning I went out to dump the watery coffee grounds from my french press into my planters when I discovered that my broccoli plant had sprouted a tiny little florette and the potatoes I planted a month ago were leafing up out of the black dirt. Just the site of my plants spring to life was enough to make my finger tips tingle in excitement.

I love to garden. Well, I love to garden vegetables. I will be the first to tell you that I know almost nothing about flowers. I love them, I long for a beautiful, blousy cottage garden with roses and lilacs and phlox and pinks and every other kind of flower that I love to look at around the neighborhood but don't know the name of. But vegetables, well, I'm pretty good at vegetables.

When I was growing up, my parents divided out yard into three, nearly even parts. One third was for grass and trees and for a time, my rabbit, minx. One third was devoted to the deck and one third was the vegetable garden. i can honestly say that the only flower I remember my house having growing up were some red tulips that I thought smelled of watermelons. I know we had more, I'm sure the front door was surrounded by flowers, I just cant remember them. But I remember almost every inch of the vegetable garden. Against the house was a triangular shaped bed that started out being devoted to potatoes but ended up being overtaken by mint. Along the garage was a narrow bed where the pole beans grew. I used to lie on my back in the grass between the pole beans the the next bed over, usually planted with tomatoes or peas, hidden amongst the green, blowing bubbles up into the air from my dollar store can of bubble mix. I thought that every time a bubble popped, a fairy was born. My own version of the old adage "every time a bell rings..."

Through most of the moves of my childhood I helped my father plant out a garden. In San Antonio we planted a long row of okra which I never learned to like. In Pendleton there were sweet potatoes in big pots on the deck. When I went away to college I craved a garden the way most college students craved jello shots. I cajoled Will into helping me dig up an enormous patch of land in the even more enormous back yard of the first house we rented. I planted the newly tilled soil with winter rye, as recommended by my favorite book and then paid the price when it was almost impossible to till in by hand and ended up borrowing a crappy rototiller from our neighbor and almost vibrating to death trying to make a garden out of it. I discovered that I had a talent for starting tomatoes from seed and could get even the most sorry looking tomato plant from the dying plant table to flourish. The summer that Briton was born my tomatoes were so big that just one could make a huge bowl of salsa.

I continue to plant gardens, both big and small, in homes we've owned and places we've rented. In our flat in Dublin I raised one tiny squash plant from seeds I bought from a street vendor in Rome. In our last house I had four glorious raised beds, two compost bins and a chicken coop in a corner of the yard that was all my own. Here, where our back yard is almost completely shaded, I have a collection of pots on the deck where I hope to get a small but delicious crop of onions, broccoli, tomatoes, and potatoes, not to mention the lettuce we've already been eating for the past two weeks.

I'm not, by any means, the worlds best gardener. I hate being really hot so come July I'll be neglecting to do much beyond watering. I tend to let tomatoes go their own way without much support, which can be messy looking and sometimes hard to harvest. I'm not a big fan of weeding. But I do love the feel of dirt under my fingernails. I never could do the "Scratch a bar of soap" thing, I'm only just getting used to wearing gloves, and only because I'm afraid of spiders and in Virginia, there are lots of spiders. And even though my garden this year is just a clump of pots, I still love it. And someday I'll have my big garden again, where I can use up all the good manure/chicken poop our hens are making right at this moment or the worm castings that the worm bin at Will's office harvests every month and comes home in coffee cans or Tupperware (and as a side note, worm castings do look like leftover brownies when brought home from the office in Tupperware, but sadly, they do not taste like brownies. Lesson learned!)

Until then I'll just keep myself busy with lists of plants I'll have in my dream garden and visions of the chest freezer that I'll get someday and fill with shucked corn and shredded zucchini and tubs of homemade pesto. Bring on the summer, and the harvest, even if it's a tiny one.

A Legacy of Wooden Spools and Cherished Wisdom

My grandmother had a rack of spools over her sewing desk in the spare bedroom of her house when I was growing up. Every summer I would spend a few weeks at her house and every summer she would take me to the fabric store, almost as soon as I arrived, to pick out a pattern and fabric to learn during my visit. I spent hours each summer in the room affectionately known as the waterbed room with it’s green and white butterfly papered walls, it’s wall size shelf of family photos, and my grandmother’s sewing table. When I wasn’t in the kitchen learning how to stew figs for drying or experimenting with pudding and gelatin or out in the back yard trying to work up my courage to attempt my aunts famous “death Drops” off the swing set, I was in the sewing room working on increasingly difficult patterns and never fully understanding the valuable skills I was acquiring.

The sewing room was a haven from the Redding heat. The shade from the house next door, the dark walls, perhaps even the waterbed itself made the room cooler than the rest of the house. In the cool quiet I could pin and cut and stitch, or lie on the undulating mattress of the waterbed, or in my tween years, watch Days of our Lives on the tiny black and white Television that was perched on the bedside dresser.

Sometimes in a fit of teenage self-righteousness I would do nothing but spin the spools of thread on their wooded pins or finger the gold stork handles of the delicate sewing scissors that hung from a ribbon on a hook. The wooden spools were always my favorite. It seemed she had hundred of them, but it was probably no more and a dozen, plastic spools were already taking over by then. When one of the wooden spools ran out of thread we made them into dolls or furniture or animals or spool crochet sets. My grandmother’s imagination was endless and she always had something new to make, to teach, to show.

When she moved out of her house after my grandfather died, a pair of wooden spools was among the treasures I took away with me. I have carried them across states and oceans and they now sit in one of the mason jars of thread on my sewing table, a reminder of the lessons of those long hot summer days of my child hood. Of sewing dozens of tiny buttons down the front of a dress and sneaking dried figs out of the freezer in the family room, of my grandmothers dried apple kitchen witch and the thumping of the dough hook on her beloved mixer beating away at her bread.

My Grandmother, who now lives in a second floor apartment and uses the Internet and has a Judi Dench haircut, continues to amaze me, to inspire me. And every time I sit down to sew or slide dinner in the oven, or set out on a new project, I am reminded of those summers, the rows of wooden spools and the cool of the waterbed room, and of my grandmother.