What you do before you friend someone

I opened the bathroom door and a squeal erupted from inside.

"I'm deodoring!" my son said.

Oops.

*

Recently, I challenged myself to record each day with a photo and an observation, much like what happens at habit: a collection of days. Some of the pictures and writing I've used here, others I only posted on my Flickr account, Dance in the Kitchen. You can find them here, if you're curious.

You get what you get

It was an extravagance, turning a whole chicken into stock, but I wanted a rich, fragrant, meaty broth with shimmering droplets of fat, a soup that cured. It bubbled on the stove all day long.

I don't like caring for sick kids. I resent their neediness, the tether they become, the disruption they cause, but I am their mother and this is what mothers do: They measure cough syrup, brew cups of herbal tea, take temperatures, rub backs, then wake in the middle of the night to do it all again. Yesterday, I did this but not well, for in between the good-mother stuff, I lost my temper, cursed my children, rudely hung up on my husband and ate handfuls of chocolate chips straight out of the bag. I feel guilty that I'm at my worst when my kids need me most, but there it is.

I needed this chicken broth to work magic and restore not only health but also good will, which was asking a lot from a bowl of soup, but I can wish, can't I?
  
"It's not simply its warmth, aroma or digestibility that makes you feel better. Chicken soup really is good for you, but only if it has those pools of golden fat floating on its top," Jennifer McLagan writes in the cookbook "Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient." "All poultry fats contain the monosaturated fatty acid palmitoleic acid, which is believed to boost our immune systems. Chicken fat has more palmitoleic acid than other types of poultry fat."

I seasoned the broth, added thin coins of carrots, dill and plump matzo balls. But some days can't be saved. Some days are bitter, a struggle to live through, a slog. My daughter continued to whimper that her chest hurt when she coughed and my sons didn't return my smile when they returned from school. Although beautiful flecks of fat glittered on its surface, this soup didn't cure what ailed the day, although it made it taste a little better.

Chicken stock

One whole chicken
Enough water to just cover it
A couple bay leaves
A handful of whole peppercorns
One onion, quartered
Salt and pepper, to taste

Bring to a boil, reduce heat to a simmer and skim the foam off the surface. A whole chicken simmered a long time will yield the richest and most flavorful stock, but you also can use the bones from a couple roasted chickens. About one hour into the process, I pull the chicken out and cut off the breasts, saving them for another meal. Typically, I simmer the chicken until it falls to pieces or about four hours, then strain through a colander.

French kissing a mermaid

Courtesy of Steve Snodgrass.

I've eaten an oyster.

To be completely accurate, I've eaten six.

Each one was like a wave exploding in my mouth, soft, salty, sharp. I swallowed and felt this rush, this high, this incredible feeling of aliveness like I get when I bodysurf, but this time the ocean was tumbling and crashing inside of me instead of me inside the ocean.

Man began eating oysters some 140,000 years ago, and I like to imagine that we've been uttering the same sound for oyster since prehistory. After all, the word hasn't changed much: Oyster is a derivative of the Middle English oistre, which comes from Old French uistsre, which itself comes from Latin's ostreum, which comes from the Greek word ostrakon.

My first oyster shimmered in its shell. I wasn't sure what to do with it, so I watched others sitting at the Walrus and the Carpenter oyster bar then squirted lemon, added a generous pinch of fresh grated horseradish, drizzled vinegar, and slurped. I closed my eyes and managed one bite before it slid down my throat. A slow, silly smile spread across my face, the very same grin I get when I've been tossed head-over-heels by a wave and am yanking up my swimsuit so I can head back out and ride another. More. More. More.

Courtesy of Swamibu.

I worked my way from small to large and somewhere in the mix I ate a kumamoto (sweet, buttery and a bit briny) and a baron point (soft textured, with a slightly mineral taste and a musky finish). Apparently, oysters are like wine and cheese, with much of their flavor credited to terroir or the environment in which they're grown, but my virgin tongue couldn't taste the difference; all it wanted was more of the full-contact experience, another soft, salty, citrus-y wave crashing inside my mouth.

"I feel like I'm drunk and I haven't even finished my glass of wine," I told my waitress. "What's going on?"

She rattled off various possibilities: The oyster's considered an aphrodisiac, it's raw food, the whole act of eating one is somewhat ceremonial. Then she pointed to the oyster shucker behind the bar, he'll know more, she said.

The shucker pried open the shell, used his knife to flip the oyster onto its belly -- they look prettier and plumper, he said -- and nestled it in ice. He picked up his next shell, explaining that my "oyster rush" was a physiological reaction to the burst of protein and minerals, that this slippery, squishy shellfish is loaded with zinc, packed with protein and rich in amino acids that trigger sex hormones.

Hmmm. So that's why author Tom Robbins once wrote that "eating a raw oyster is like French kissing a mermaid," but since my plate was empty and there were no more mermaids to be found, I took the next best thing -- my man -- and went to Sunset Hill.

I am 40, now

I can't weave straw into gold, but I can make threads of silver. It surprises me, each strand sparkling brilliantly against the duller browns. I hadn't expected to enjoy turning gray.

***

I'm reading "Crime and Punishment." For some reason I'd never read it before, but then there are so many classic novels I've never read, and when I finally begin my reaction is always the same. My gosh, this is good. It's so good, so much better than this book or that book that I just wasted my time on. Why have I waited so long to read this? Then I go around telling everyone how great this novel is, as if I'm the first to discover it, when really, I shouldn't be surprised. It's why they're classics, after all.

Anyway, I had picked up "Crime and Punishment" again, the night of my birthday (long after song and candles and brownies had been sung, extinguished, devoured), when these sentences made me pause. I re-read them.

For although Mrs. Raskolnikov was forty-three, her face still preserved traces of its former beauty. Besides, she looked much younger than her years, which is almost always the case with women who keep their serenity of mind, the freshness of their impressions, and a pure and sincere warmth of heart to their old age. We may add in parenthesis that to possess all this is the only way a woman can preserve her beauty even in old age. Her hair was already beginning to grow thin and grey, crows'-foot wrinkles had long ago appeared round her eyes, her cheeks were hollow and shrunken from anxiety and grief, but her face still remained beautiful.

It's an odd feeling, learning that Dostoyevsky would've considered me old.

Cancer cracked me open and I weep

Courtesy of Kent Landerholm.

I drive through the intersection of an emergency.

I hear sirens. I see the red flash of a fire truck, a policeman directing traffic, people looking up. So I slow down and I look up, too. From the roof of a tall building is a woman balanced on her belly, legs dangle, waiting.

I drive past a man praying next to man taking a picture on his smart phone. I drive through two lights then join a crowd of cars on a freeway where no one knows that blocks away a woman is deciding whether to live or die.

***

I cry as as I wash dishes, as I run, as I write. Two months ago, my father was healthy; now he fights for his life. Life is painful, resentful, but also, strangely enough, beautiful. The discovery of cancer reminds me how fragile and gorgeous and fleeting is my life, my dad's life, my children's. 

Cancer cracked me open and I weep.

Until I laugh.

At the absurdity of life because it wraps a suicide in a good sky day. Because on the way home, my 2-year-old pukes all over himself and his car seat. Because I go to the grocery store and buy things I don't need and forget things I do. Because two months ago, my father was healthy and now he fights for his life.

At home, I pull the soiled clothes off my son and he walks, naked, into the house. We rock in the sun until my eyes close and my head drops, jerks. I wake. Then nod off again.

Courtesy of Deja Photo.

I don't know what to  make for dinner. I never know what to make for dinner anymore. Yesterday I came home with leeks and a pound of dried currants. I forgot bread. Four days ago, I bought five pounds of spinach. I forgot milk. Now I stand before the refrigerator and am uninspired. I pour cans of chicken broth into a pot. I saute spinach with garlic. I boil water and begin poaching eggs. In bowls I ladle broth over spinach and egg and hand it to my children. 

I've never had this before.

Not eggs. Please, Mom, not eggs.

I sing.

I do not like the way they slide. 
I do not like their soft insides. 
I do not like them many way,
and I could do for many days 
without eggs.

It's a song they know from the many hours spent listening to the story of a young badger named Frances who refuses to eat anything but bread and jam. They take their bowls. Ten minutes later, one son is halfway through his bowl and looks up stunned. 

What's wrong?

Nothing. I just realized this was dinner.

I smile ruefully and finish my own bowl of soup, salty, garlicky, thickened with the sweet yolk. I get up from the table, walk into the bedroom. It's 7:30 p.m. and I'm so tired. I pull off my clothes, crawl into bed and sleep.

A conversation with a young superhero

Ivan, in training.

"How can I fly, Mom?"

"I don't know. How does a superhero fly?"

"I can fly up and I can fly down."

"It's easier to fly down, I'd think."

"I wanna fly up."

"Okay."

"You get the remote control?"

"To help you fly up?"

"Yeah."

"I think you're going to have to do this on your own."

He ran.

He jumped.

He skidded.

He fell.

Then settled for piloting a paper airplane.

We are stardust, we are golden or Rilke's elegies

"... We are billion year old carbon" by Joni Mitchell. 

Image courtesy of Hubblesite.org

The lab results came back.

My dad's cancer was supposed to have been cut out of his lung and life was supposed to continue as it always had. The tumor was supposed to be no more than a hard, tiny rock that would be tossed into the trash. Instead the cancer is like dark matter, dark energy, drawing life away.

I spiral into a place that neither shines nor reflects.

Once

for each thing, only once. 

Once, and no more. And we too,

once. Never again. But this

once, to have been, though only once,

to have been an earthly thing – seems irrevocable.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Ninth Elegy

Lung cancer can spread into the neck and cause a droopy eyelid and sunken eye. It can grow into the esophagus and cause painful swallowing. It can twist itself around the heart and cause irregular beating. Or it can travel through the blood stream to the brain, the liver, the bones. My dad's cancer was found in his lymph nodes, bean-shaped filters that trap foreign particles and are part of the immune system.

I tell everyone I know. I tell everyone I don't know. I tell because I want the news to spread faster than the rogue cells, because I want to imagine that a thousand individual fleeting thoughts focused on my dad's cancer will slow it, halt it, hell, why not erase it?

Want to know the prognosis for lung cancer?

It sucks.

For we, when we feel, evaporate: oh, we

breathe ourselves out and away: from ember to ember,

yielding us fainter fragrance. Then someone may say to us:

‘Yes, you are in my blood ... 

 -- Rilke, The Second Elegy

Cancer is going to change my family's story and it makes me scared and angry. We -- my family -- die from heart attacks. It is written in our genetic code that more than likely death will come with a slow thickening of pipes until nothing but a trickle of blood remains and the heart gasps, shudders and breaks.

I don't want my dad to die. Okay, I know we're all dying, that each change is a sort of death to prepare us for the act of dying, but I don't want him to die. He's a good, strong man and the world's a better place because he's here, so he can't go.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry

of a darkened sobbing

Rilke, The First Elegy

I cradle the phone against my ear, bite my lip, and rock back and forth as I listen to my dad describe the chemotherapy's toxic concoction of drugs that would burn his veins, so doctors will put a port into his neck. He tells me another biopsy has been scheduled and a brain scan because doctors are still trying to define what and where they're fighting the cancer. Yet even as the ground falls from under him, he is strong. This is his life right now, fighting cancer, and he's ready for it, wants the fight. Had the cancer ended with the single surgery he said he would've felt a little cheated. Bring it on.

 Engraving of Orion from Johann Bayer's Uranometria, 1603 

(US Naval Observatory Library)

I want to live my life like my father, with courage, but I'm stuck in the empty, gravity-sucking space that makes up most of our universe.

When I was a kid and my dad took me camping, he'd hunch over a constellation wheel and then squint at the sky, find some faint cluster of stars and call me over. Then we'd both stare up into the night sky and he'd point out Big Bear and Little Bear, the North Star, Scorpio and the Pleiades, the star-studded belt of Orion, the hunter.

But it's not story, but science that comforts me now. Strength lies in fact, not in prayer, and I think that's okay. Knowing that we are just specks upon specks floating in a lonely corner of an ever-expanding universe doesn't make me feel hopeless because the universe is in us. You, me, my dad, the cancer are composed of the same ingredients -- hydrogen, oxygen and carbon -- in roughly the same proportion as the recipe for the universe.

Does the cosmic space,

we dissolve into, taste of us then? Do the Angels

really only take back what is theirs, what has streamed out of them,

or is there sometimes, as if by an oversight, something

of our being, as well? 

Rilke, The Second Elegy

The other night the rain stopped and the clouds lifted, stars peered down from the heavens, and from my kitchen door I traced the outline of the Big Dipper. I wasn't filled with hope or peace or fear or sadness or anger.

I just was.

Happy man on a happy day

Photo courtesy of Conor Keller.

Today's the last day of my thirties, 
and of the aspects of my life I can control, 
I wouldn't change a thing. 

-- Marcel Levy 

Breathless

Photo courtesy of just.jim.

The weekend's whirlwind trip back to Nevada included three trips to the hospital, a sleepover with my girlfriends, a tea party for thirty, a trek out to the homestead and then we were back in the air again. As the ground rushed away from us and we headed into clouds, Ivan clutched the arms of his chair, leaned back and uttered one word:

Whoa.

You said it, cowboy.

Air

Photo courtesy of Patrick Wilkin.  

I am listening to myself breathe, air rushing in and out of my nose, my chest expanding, contracting, until my concentration leaves me light headed, dizzy with emotions. Wonder, dread, fear, hope rise and fall like hot air balloons.

Somewhere, a doctor breaks my father's rib and carves out a piece of lung sick with cancer.

I sip tea that is strong and bitter, fold clothes, wait.

Have I ever told you that I once held a lung? It was a small set of warm, pale pink lungs that minutes earlier were inside the chest of a rabbit but were now cupped in my child hands. My dad was butchering a rabbit and was explaining to me the animal's innards as he pulled them out. I held the wind pipe up to my lips, breathed and I remember how strangely firm the lung felt, not at all like a light and hollow balloon.

For more than a year doctors couldn't figure out why my dad kept coughing; it turned out he was trying to hack out a tumor. Twice, yesterday, my mother texted with updates.

Message number one: No news. Doing well... just w8ing. I'll let u kno.
 
Message number two: Only did lobectomy - removed lower lobe of rt lung + 1/2doz lymph nodes. Lab results on nodes due nxt week. Going 2 ICU 2nite. Doc says he is doing well. I'll keep u posted.

It's easier to imagine the journey of that piece of tissue than to see in my mind's-eye my father sleeping in a hospital bed, missing one-fifth of his lungs. I imagine a brightly lit operating table and a metal bowl nearby, sterile, antiseptic, cool to the touch even through surgical gloves. Someone drops the chunk of lung into it.

Later, when the surgery is finished and the technicians are on break, they toss the lung to a crow hanging out in one of the cottonwood trees behind the hospital. The crow swallows the lung and catches my father's cough.

It makes the world go 'round

 Shel Silverstein's "Hug O' War."

Two-year-old Ivan and I were motoring our way through a morning of errands when we passed two men in their 20s, loping along with rounded shoulder and skinny leg.

"I wuv those guys," Ivan said.

I glanced back at the men who were now glancing back at us.

"You love them?"

"Yeah."

I shrugged.

They laughed.

And everyone had a better day because of it.

 

I've been listening this tribute to Shel Silverstein for two weeks, straight. Here's where you can preview the entire album. And while we're singing on the subject, why not learn about the mathematics of poetry, enjoy Seattle poet John Olson's love of lines, or pick up some tips from budding author Caroline Starr Rose on telling a story in free verse.

Bilocation or returning home

by-lo-kay-shun

noun

Familiar hills surround Silver Springs, Nevada.

1. The supposed phenomenon of being in two places simultaneously.

I'm thinking about home, about going home to the desert where a small trailer sits anchored in the sand and bleached by the sun. The wind has blasted off paint, exposing metal that twinkles dully like a dime on the sidewalk. I pick up the dime, rub away the dust and look for the year. It is 1980.

I place my hand on a splintered railing and climb a set of steps that lead to the trailer's front door. I'm careful to avoid the nails protruding from the old planks held together by hammer and story. This is where my sister tumbled down and deadened her front teeth. And this crack between step and trailer was where the coyote-clawed cat hid, died and wasn't found for a month.

I step inside, onto vinyl flooring whose brick pattern is patchy and in some places worn clean away by years of sand ground into it. Like those trails that cut through grass and ignore sidewalk, a serpentine path is etched into the floor beginning at the front door and winding its way between kitchen table and stove before veering left and disappearing down the hall. Here more stories lurk. Stories held in the books lined up on hall shelves, and stories held in my mind.

But I don't walk down the hall. Instead, I sit at the oval kitchen table that also shows signs of wear. The wood veneer is yellowed and faded where plates are set daily. Within arms reach of the table is the counter and drawers, which open stubbornly and if yanked too hard will tumble out and send forks, spoons and knives clattering to the floor. At this table, I'd meet my mom for late night cups of cocoa and towers of buttered toast. I'd wake and wander into the kitchen, perch on a chair with knees drawn up to my chest and my flannel nightgown tented around me. As I'd dunk toast, we'd talk. Then with a stomach full and warm, I'd wander back to bed. I don't sleep, but lay looking out the window at the stars and the dusty line of the Milky Way. A meteor burns across the darkness.

In her mother's house.

Seven hundred miles and thirty years away, my own daughter and I are sharing hot chocolate and  nighttime conversation as we drive home from a meeting. It is a moment of bilocation between mother and daughter, everything at once familiar and foreign, like when I return to the desert. The trailer is still cemented in sand, but the insides are gutted, table and floor have been replaced, dark walls are painted light. I am a different mother and she a different daughter than what my own mother and I shared, but still we're here, together, wrapped in the night. She leans her head against the car window. Outside, a star gleams dull as a dime then falls from the sky.

Homage to Sendak and an ushering in of the flu

Illustration from "Alligators All Around" by Maurice Sendak, whose book "Chicken Soup with Rice: A book of months" inspired me despite my sinus headache.

In October,
I've been host
to coughs,
fevers and
a runny nose.
Soup's cured all
but the nasal drip, post.
Sneezing once.
Hacking twice.
Cold season sure ain't nice.

Maunder or writing about writing

mon-duhr
verb

1. To talk incoherently; to speak in a rambling manner.
2. To talk or wander aimlessly.

We all have favorite tools we grab when a job needs finishing. When making soup, I grab one wooden spoon out of a canister full of them because I like the heft of its handle and the shape of its bowl, perfect for slurping from before adjusting the seasoning. I drink my morning coffee from one cup, my afternoon tea from another. Again and again, I reach for the same things because they're useful, predictable, because I'm trying to recapture an experience, like the time I stirred a pot of soup that turned out fabulous, or sipped from a cup and the sun shone all day, or wrote with a certain pen and the sentences sang.

My favorite pen to write with is Paper Mate Flair with a porous point in black ink. The pen is sleek, lightweight, unadorned and unidentifiable but for the company's name stamped into the tiny metal clip on the cap. It's basically a marker, the ink is easy to read, the tip glides effortlessly across the page. The Flair once was a standard in every office supply store, where it came not only in black, but also blue, red and green, and was sold in sets of two or four. But the Flair is harder to find now and my latest box of twelve had to be ordered online for $22.

My favorite notebook is the Moleskin. I carry a pocket one to jot down grocery lists, doctor appointments, the size of my vacuum's replacement bags (RR), instructions on how to knit a sock, bits of eavesdropping, books I want to read and so on. To scribble down longer thoughts, partial stories and poetry, I recently switched from a spiral-bound college notebook to a (5.25 x 8.5 in.) Moleskin Volant and am pleased. The notebook's soft cover folds in two, its pages are large enough so I don't feel cramped while writing, yet the book is small and thin enough to be tucked easily into my backpack or messenger bag. In addition, the sewn binding is far superior to the spiral, which bent, snagged and (most irritating) released its pages.

My habits met with limited success this week: My soup spoon went unused, my morning cup produced only sunny afternoons and my trusty pen maundered across lined paper -- while making fried rice (added soy sauce to my grocery list), while stopped at a red light (wondered about the different qualities of rain), and as my son nursed and napped (began an essay about school). Pages were filled with partial thoughts, bouts of self-pity, bits of truth, maybe a lie or two, but no singing, just my mind humming along, aimlessly, happily, writing about nothing much at all.

I like wind

Tilting Quilting from Andrea Dorfman, interviewed by this joy+ride.

This makes me happy. And nostalgic for my clothesline.

Pears and chocolate

 Mr. Putter and his fine cat, Tabby, 

a series by author Cynthia Rylant and illustrator Arthur Howard.

The pear sings of autumn, with its green speckled skin blushed red, its flesh juicy, sweet and slightly musky. Getting the perfect pear from farm to table is a complicated, risky business, according to chef Alice Waters, and requires knowledge and skill all along the way.

"First the pear must be picked from the tree when it is mature but not fully ripe. It must experience a period of cool storage," Waters writes in "Chez Panisse Fruit." "Then it must be brought out to room temperature to finish ripening. At every step of the way, from tree to market to kitchen, it must be handled gently to avoid bruising. Determining the point of perfect ripeness isn't easy at a glace; most pears do not indicate by their color when they are ready. The signal is a slight yielding to gentle pressure at the neck. And then, what wonderful eating from a carefully tended pear!"

A Bartlett.

While the experienced farmer and appreciative chef view the pear as a work of art, in my neighborhood they're a bit of a nuisance. Around the corner from my house are three trees whose pears have been ignored by all but the crows and my youngest son. As we picked our way through smashed fruit and pecked cores, 2-year-old Ivan spotted a whole pear.

He picked it up and turned the hard, green fruit over in his small hands. It probably was a Bartlett, the most widely planted pear in North America and one of the most popular pears in the world. The Bartlett, along with most modern varieties like the D'Anjou and Comice, were developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and are descendants of the European pear, Pyrus communis, cultivated by the Greeks and Romans. The Bartlett is the classic pear, wide in the neck but clearly pear-shaped -- or, botanically speaking, pyriform. And if Ivan's pear was a Bartlett it would need only a few weeks off the tree before its skin turned a golden yellow and its flesh became sweet and buttery.

But I believe that in Ivan's mind this unripe pear already was perfect, fallen straight out of a story he'd become so smitten with that he takes the book with him in the car, in the bathtub, in bed. He reads it sprawled on the floor, curled up in a big chair and with his oatmeal at breakfast. It is "Mr. Putter and Tabby Pick the Pears" and is one in a series by writer Cynthia Rylant and illustrator Arthur Howard about a cantankerous old man and his twitchy cat.

In this story, Mr. Putter has a penchant for pear jelly, but his "cranky legs, cranky knees and cranky feet" prevent him from climbing the ladder and picking his fruit tree. So, he sets to knock the pears out of the tree using a slingshot and apples, but his aim is way off and he spends an afternoon "zinging" all the apples into his neighbor's yard. The next day, the neighbor arrives with pies, jellies and cider. While Mr. Putter feasts, he figures out what he's going to do with his pears: wait for them to fall and then he'll "zing" them into his neighbor's yard and wait for the pear jelly to arrive.

Ivan loves it.

It's hard to explain why one story resonates and another doesn't, why we leave some books half read, yet return to others, again and again. Pages are pawed, spines broken and whole passages become so familiar they can be recited by memory, yet we never grow weary of the tale. I've seen this love affair develop in my three older children, who find a comfy corner, snuggle in and sigh with delight as they open a book. It's an infatuation that spills into real life, so sticks become wizard wands and patterns are purchased for the necessary prairie bonnet. And now it has begun with Ivan, who carried the pear home, found the slingshot and called me to the yard.

We aligned the smooth, heavy pear against the slingshot's rubber band and released it. Thud. The pear landed on his toe. Again we pulled, the slingshot snapped. Thud. Ivan threw himself on the ground and yelled through angry tears.

"It's not working! It's not working!"

We went inside and returned with a second slingshot (a benefit of having older brothers), and tried again.

More tears.

Again.

Another tantrum in the grass.

Again.

Then -- zing! -- the pear sailed two feet and dropped.

"That," Ivan said, "was awesome!"

In the end, the pear was pocked and bruised, best left for the crows to finish off. For this recipe, we picked our pears from the market, where I followed a few general rules from Alice Waters:

First it's best to buy green pears and ripen them at home because it ensures that they weren't picked past their prime and decreases their chances of bruising. At home, the pears can be stored in a loosely closed paper bag and kept at room temperature, where ripening can take as long as a couple weeks or as little as a few days, so check daily for that slight give in the neck when gently pressed.

"You do not want to miss that moment of perfect ripeness," Waters zings, er, sings.

Chocolate Almond Squares
Adapted from Raley's "Something Extra"
Serves 6

Ingredients:
One perfect pear
A sheet of puff pastry
Almond paste
Chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 400-degrees Fahrenheit. Place a sheet of puff pastry on a baking sheet and fold up a small rim on all sides. Sprinkle about one-fourth of a pear, peeled and diced, 2 tablespoon crumbled almond paste and a few handfuls of chocolate chips in center. Bake for about 12 minutes or until lightly golden and puffy.

 

Three cheers for mediocre

Across the street.

Beek or what I did on a good sky day

noun

1. To bask or warm in the sunshine or before a fireplace, stove or bonfire.

*

One son was running a fever and everyone was missing soccer, but my family hasn't come close to filling the summer camping quota, so this was the weekend to go. But then the newspaper promised days of rain and we bailed because if there's one lesson I've learned after four kids it's this: Sick kid + soggy tent = sucky weekend.

But then Saturday arrived with a sky as beautiful as an abalone shell, creamy pinks, iridescent whites and feather blues, and by the time I finished my run and returned to a house, now smelling of coffee cake and bacon, the sun was shining.

There was only one thing to do: take my coffee to the front steps and beek the sun. After swigging the last of my cup, I invited the sun in for a visit and thought you might want to come too.

Sit here.

Or here, the replacement for the couch that refused to fit through the front door (a bench better for practicing perfect posture that curling up with a book).

Look at this delicious light.

Rare shadows in the office lined with bookshelves.

After chores and the smallest son's nap, we headed out for a hike, but in the 20 minutes it took to get there, clouds had rolled in, and by the time we hit the trail home, rain was falling.

That night, while cooking spaghetti and listening to National Public Radio, the local station cut in with the next day's forecast: "And tomorrow's weather is ... wait for it ... rain."

Sigh.

First lesson learned about living in Seattle: Seize the sunshine when it comes.

Tears with my tea

September afternoon, Seattle.

Long ago my father and I drove the old Chevy pick-up into mountains burned by wildfire. For hours he'd cut and I'd haul the logs, my ears ringing from the whine of chainsaw, my arms aching from carrying blackened wood. At the end of the day, I lay down in the scorched field and watched puffy white clouds blow across the sky.

Faraway in a forest sits the wide trunk of an ancient tree, and from inside this trunk grows a smaller, younger tree, pulling its energy and life from the decaying stump.

Once upon a time a cell smaller than a seed burrowed into my father, took root and grew into a miniature version of the corpse flower, which now blooms in his right lung and has been given a name, cancer.

Yesterday it rained inside the trees. I stood under the branches and drops hit my head and I listened to the patter of water on leaves, but when I walked out from under the trees and into the street, it wasn't raining. All around me I heard water falling, but not where I stood in open space, under a heavy sky.

Lacuna or wandering through negative space

luh-kyoo-nuh
noun

September morning, Seattle.

1. A blank space or a missing part.
2. Small cavity, pit or discontinuity in an anatomical structure.

*

There is much to say. And little. Since I put down my pen and stopped recording my thoughts, summer has slipped by, minutes ticked off in traffic, at the beach, under the dull skies and mist of Seattle, a cool summer, short on warmth and sunshine that surrendered early to autumn.

When I moved, I packed all I love and now it surrounds me -- husband and children, books and pictures -- but when I open the door to our house an unfamiliar smell greets me and I've yet to learn to avoid the squeaks while walking across the wood floor.

All images by Molly Bang, author of "The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher," a 1981 Caldecott Honor Book.

A friend sends sagebrush in the mail and I open the bag and inhale the pungent, tangy, dry scent. I pass it to one son and he buries his face in it, breathing, breathing until he blinks back tears and pinches his nose.

Oh, he says, I've missed this.

I say nothing. There is nothing to say.

"A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass."
-- Henry Moore

The place I love is not the place I live, and so there is a cavity, a lacuna, in my life. I mislead you if I sound sad, for I'm not, nor am I suffering from a shortage of sun (which, when it shines on Seattle, turns it into a glorious city). No, I'm just acknowledging that for which I yearn, what couldn't be boxed and loaded into the U-Haul, clear blues and burnished golds, night skies sugared with starlight, and the familiarity between old friends.

The days spent in Seattle have felt like a vacation. I marvel at the mist that soaks me, at the clams that spit and the plankton that sparkle in dark waters. I inhale the forest's smells of rotting leaves, soft moss and lush ferns. I eagerly climb aboard the bus to lose myself in the city. But I cannot return home.

Walls with windows and doors form the house,

but the empty space within it

is the essence of the house.

-- Taoist philosopher Lao Tse

As a stranger, I invite in all that's foreign, opening the windows of my brain to the morning fog, which smudge the names and places that leave me smarting with loss. This move erased me around the edges and I've yet to fill what is empty.

One morning I run through damp streets and discover where the world ends. Road and sidewalk meet grass, then fence, then blackberry bush, then cliff, then tree in the woolly tangle of gray that whispers the secrets of salt and gull and the growl of fishing boats. And for a moment I imagine leaping off, tumbling through negative space, that part of the world that lies around and between things, the pause, the gap, or, in Japanese the ma, falling through the muted world until I'm snared by the brambles' thorns where I'd stay, eating berries and crunching tiny seeds.