Jesus in a tortilla*

Yesterday, my three older kids and I attended a retreat for children preparing to make their First Reconciliation. By volunteering to shepherd five second-graders through the sessions, I enjoyed an hour of knitting and eavesdropping.

Below is a snippet of a conversation between a boy and his teacher, who was explaining the story of the Lost Sheep. She asked if any of the kids had ever been lost, and the boy piped up that he once had been lost in a grocery store.

"How did you feel when you were lost?" she asked.

"Scared."

"Who found you?"

"Nobody. I found my mom."

The teacher went on to explain how the story is a parable: We are the lost sheep and the Good Shepherd is Jesus. We become lost from Jesus when we sin, she said.

"How do we find our way back to Jesus?" she asked.

The same small boy raised his hand.

"I would run up and down the aisles looking for him."

* Based on the alleged siting of Jesus Christ's face in a tortilla in 1977. For more information about the Shrine of the Miracle Tortilla, click here.

"Winter" by Sam

Today I'm featuring a poem written by my 7-year-old son Sam. It was found in the bottom of his backpack among the wad of crumpled school work.

"Fiore D'inverno" by Shock2006

Winter looks like hot cookies.
Winter tastes like hot chocolate.
Winter smells like cookies.
Winter feels like a rainy day.
Winter sounds like soft pillows.

Elusive heat

"Simplicity" by suvodeb.

Once upon a time there was woman who woke one morning and couldn't get warm.

She drank two cups of coffee. But she was still cold. She drank a cup of black tea. But she was still cold. Outside snow fell. Inside, her cold fingers tapped on the keyboard, and she shivered thinking of the laps she'd committed to swim at noon.

"How shall I convince myself to stick a toe in the water?" she asked.

Then she remembered a small cafe called the Aroma Club that served hot chocolate spiked with chili. The drink was sinfully thick and surprisingly spicy, with each sip making love to her mouth and leaving a slow burn in her throat. For weeks afterward, she tried to recreate the experience.

She melted an entire Lindt chili chocolate bar in milk. But it was much too bland.

She bought a box of Ibarra's "genuine Mexican chocolate" from the Latino market down the street. But it was much too sweet.

She became a cooking chemist, combining cinnamon and chili and coriander with cocoa. But it was much too spicy.

However, the woman wouldn't despair. Instead, she packed her swimsuit, goggles and a promise. And when she finished her laps, she cranked up the heat in her car and drove across town to the cafe where, she knew, they got it just right.

Unraveled

I hauled myself out of bed, pulled on my purple bathrobe and walked right into one of my sons.

"Mom, what's for brefkist?" he asked.

"God, I don't know. Give me a few minutes to wake up."

In the bathroom, I pried the retainer from my teeth, brushed them and popped a thyroid pill. My kids' belly thoughts dominate their mornings -- and their evenings, for that matter. It's the first question asked as they shuffle into the kitchen, rubbing eyes and squinting in the light. It's the last question posed as I tuck them in at night.

"What's for brefkist?"

"God, I don't know. We just ate dinner."

Then from each bed come three different belly prayers:

"Can we have Dutch baby? We haven't had that in a loooong time."

"Please, don't make oatmeal again."

I toss kisses on their foreheads and head for the door, eager to close it, to put to sleep the mama part of me, even for just a few hours.

"Can we have pancakes with chocolate chips?"

"We'll see."

But this morning's request that I serve as short-order cook was unraveling the young day. My mutterings turned to lecturing as I made my coffee. The lectures rose in pitch as I banged a pot onto the stove and measured out the oatmeal. And before I could catch myself, I was yelling at everyone and threatening to go on strike over packing lunches.

In desperation, I grabbed my knitting bag and headed for the couch with a warning that people needed to leave me alone. After five minutes of purling and knitting my husband ventured into the room.

"I'm trying to find my good mood," I said.

And after five rows, I did.

Inspirations

Photo courtesy of i:tzharr.

Dragon puffs of warm air rose from our mouths this morning as I walked my children to school. The cold, gray days of January have returned after a false spring, and I kicked mulch over the moss phlox that had been tricked into opening a few pink blooms.

"Go back to sleep," I tell it.

I'm mentally hibernating this winter -- stoking ideas, dreaming up possibilities, weighing changes. Some of my mood is triggered by the recession as I watch the corner gas station shutter its windows, and the food line lengthen outside the neighborhood church. My husband tinkers with our budget in order to squirrel away a few more dollars against a pay-cut. I buy more beans, and imagine squeezing freelance writing into my child-dominated days.

But my hibernating also comes from discovering silver threads of age in my hair, of the strand of fear that twisted itself around my excitement while sledding, of the stiffness I feel when I climb out of bed in the morning. Given family genetics and age, my life may well be half-lived, and this realization has me seeking inspiration from late bloomers like Cezanne, whose greatest work came late, and Mark Twain, who published "Huckleberry Finn" at forty-nine.

But it's not just the dead and famous who inspire me. During my holiday hiatus from this blog, I found things online that warmed my imagination -- whether with beauty, irreverence or plain yumminess -- some of them created, not for money or fame, but for the sheer joy of creating.

Here's what's got me happily hibernating:

You Won't Remember This Either.
My toddler's fascination with dogs.
Indecent Haiku.
Pumpkin pancakes recipe.
This Joy Ride: poetry+photos+inspiration.
These wine glasses featured in a video of the Wall Street Journal's wine columnists.
Late Bloomers.
The Indian Magic crabapples we planted this winter.
The hat worn by Aretha Franklin during the Inauguration. Oh yeah!

Poetry and pineapples

As Barack Obama sat down to the traditional Inaugural Luncheon, I arranged rings of pineapple in caramelized brown sugar and wrote a limerick to our new leader. I hope you do something to make this day special.

On this wintr'y day I bake
a sweet inaugural cake,
to celebrate a new prez,
a black man, no lez!
Of hist'ry, I happ'ly partake.

Here is the recipe from "Chez Panisse Fruit," with my modifications: Melt 4 tablespoons butter with 3/4 cup brown sugar in a cast-iron skillet. When the mixture starts to caramelize, turning a darker shade of brown, remove from heat and let cool. Arrange slices of pineapple rings evenly in the bottom of the pan and place a maraschino cherry in the center of each ring. Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 350-degrees.

To make the cake batter, sift 1 1/2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/4 teaspoon salt in a bowl. In a large mixing bowl, cream 1/4 pound (1 stick) butter and 1 cup white sugar until pale and fluffy. Mix in 1 teaspoon vanilla. Add 2 egg yolks, one at a time. Gradually add the dry ingredients and 1/2 cup whole milk in stages.

In another large bowl, whisk together the egg whites and 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar. Beat until the whites form firm peaks. Fold the whites into the batter in two batches. Pour the batter over the topping in the skillet and bake until the top is slightly brown and the cake pulls away, about 50 to 60 minutes. Let the cake cool for 15 minutes. Run a knife around the edge of the pan and invert the cake onto a serving plate. Serve with lightly sweetened whipped cream.

Ouch!

Vintage postcard of "winter sports near Reno, Nevada."

We took our family sledding at the foot of Mount Rose this past weekend. Again and again, we hiked up the hill, and screamed and whooped our way down it. Our sleds careened into willows, bounced over berms and sent us flying. Some quick thinking kept one son from hitting a tree, and some quick steering kept another from crashing into a giant snowball, but our list of injuries is evidence of how hard we played:

One bruised elbow.
One fat lip.
Two welts on two cheeks.
Some bruised ribs.
One sore neck.
Two bonked heads.

If you dare to challenge the mountains on your own sleds, I suggest you bring a can of Sterno and the ingredients for s'mores. They're delicious in the snow.

Smoking

"Ignition 2" courtesy of Tambako the Jaguar.

The flue was open, the newspaper crumpled, the firewood angled just so, but there was no match. Not one. I rummaged through the junk drawer, rifled through the jar of coins and rubber bands, peered into the bottom of the bag of charcoal. No match.

"What the hell," I mumbled under my breath.

I twisted a piece of newspaper into a small stick, laid it on the electric stove and waited as it smoldered, filled the room with smoke, then finally burst into flame. Carrying the burning paper, I quickly walked from the kitchen to the fireplace and lit the kindling. The kids ran around opening windows to let the smoke escape into the cold winter night, giggling with shock and delight.

"Don't ever, ever, under any circumstances, do what I just did," I told them as we snuggled around the crackling fire and toasted marshmallows.

All that's left of that night is the lingering smell of a campfire in our living room and some ashes, but my mind has stayed clouded and smokey. How, I asked my husband, do I air out my brain after a month crammed with parties and packages and (at the tail-end) puking? How do I spark smoldering ideas? As usual, his response came as an emailed link to a great little video on ideas and a warning that it was "nothing the kids should watch."

So I watched it one night and it worked. Thinking about smoking ideas like brain crack reminded me of my long winter in Moscow, Idaho in 1993. I was working for the Daily News, living in a converted chicken coop and playing with fire. On most Friday nights you'd find me sitting on a bar stool in John's Alley, flirting with the Nez Perce bartender and tucking away Heinekens in honor of my long-distance and half-Dutch boyfriend (who may as well have been half a world instead of half a state away).

I closed the bar with the bartender one night and brought him home to my coop. He leaned against the wall and I sat on top of my furnace and we talked until he leaned down and kissed me. As our mouths touched and my fingers reached up into his hair I wondered and weighed the moment: Was this worth losing what I loved? His mouth opened and he tasted of ashes and smoke, of passions burning and dying. I pulled away and sent him home.

Then I brushed my teeth.

Which got me thinking about another fire, older and fainter, that burned in our trailer's potbelly stove when I was a girl. My dad made the hottest, most raging fires in that stove hoping, perhaps, that waves of heat would lap the edges of the room I shared with my two sisters. But our bedroom never thawed though the stove's metal glowed red as an ember.

So there I was at the frozen end of the trailer, shivering as I slipped into my flannel nightgown, teeth chattering as I brushed them. Then I'd sprint down the hall to the potbelly stove. I'd scooch as close to that glowing wall as I could and let the heat burn into my skin. Still cold, I'd sandwich myself in heat by inching my body between burning stove and radiating wall until my mom would tell me to step back because my nightgown was smoking.

"Don't do that," she told me.

But later I noticed that her own nightgown was toasted brown.