Author: Picking My Battles

Spoiled

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Because I'd been so good on my diet for the last three days, when 13yo Thing1 suggested getting dessert for tonight's dinner while we were at the grocery store, I reluctantly went along with it. And by reluctantly, I mean it took me 20 seconds to decide we should head to the frozen dessert section rather than the bakery.

We both decided we should have Sweet Cream ice cream from a local Vermont dairy, but then the perennial problem of what to have with it kept us staring at the freezer case for a good ten minutes. Frozen blueberry pie was out – only summer blueberries could make a decent pie. Then we spied an apple crumb pie and went, “Yummm” in unison.

I was thinking about that pie all through making and eating our semi-healthy dinner, so when the first bite of crust and overly-sugared apples failed to help me achieve nirvana, I was sorely disappointed. The boys were heartily making apple pie soup with their ice cream, and the Big Guy was savoring his first few bites.

“The crust is no good,” I said, thinking of the dozen different recipes I had experimented with during apple harvest season (we have apple pie or apple crisp almost every night when our trees are producing). I got a few grunts in agreement, but no one was willing to surrender his pie. I took a few more bites and decided apple pie soup was the only way to really enjoy this tart whose defining characteristic was an overabundance of sugar and caramel 'seasoning'.

I used to think that, as a person who lived to travel and try new things, I had a reasonably adventurous appetite. Now, as a recovering nomad steeped in local color, I know I have completely spoiled it for anything but fresh picked and home grown. It's somehow turned something as humble as apple pie into something sacred.

 

Leave the Cape, Pack the Pretzels

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I saw the homework folder neatly tucked in the backpack and decided it was safe to zip the big pocket. The sound of merging metal teeth brought seven-year-old Thing2 flying out of his room and into the living room.

“Wait!” he shrieked. “I left something in there!”

“What is it?” I ducked, trying to avoid his flapping arms.

“It’s going to snow today!” Thing2 unzipped the big pocket an pulled out his red satin cape.

“You’re not taking that?” I scratched my head, not even remembering seeing it a few minutes earlier.

“No.” Thing2 now unfurled the cape on the couch and then extracted his army green third-hand snow pants from the same pocket.

“Of course I don’t need it now.” Realizing I still have a lot to learn about the fashion rituals of the average rainbow-wigged superhero in the country, I popped the lunchbox into the front pocket and zipped entire the pack closed again.

“Well then,” I said, “leave the cape, but pack the cannoli.”

“Huh?”

“The pretzels,” I said, “pack the pretzels.”

“Obviously I was taking the pretzels,” he said trotting out his favorite new adult buzzword and demonstrating once again that I have am achieving true wisdom because when it come to the inner working of my youngest child’s mind, I know nothing.

 

I Know Thee

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It was just beginning to snow by the time I browbeat thirteen-year-old Thing1 into a clean T-shirt and into the car last Thursday. We were headed to Hubbard Hall for a pay-what-you-will dress rehearsal of 'King Lear', and, for the first time all year, Thing1 had decided he really wanted to do homework.

“Who are you and what have you done with my son?” I asked as we got into the car. He rolled his eyes at me. Any other night, such devotion to homework would have prompted me to call a mental health professional, but we had to get to dinner before the show, and I decided not to spike the ball.

Thirteen has made Thing1 unrecognizable somedays. A winter ago on the same road, anticipating another winter Shakespeare tragedy, this same young man regaled me with the intricacies of modifying his favorite computer game. Thursday night, he kept his own council.

I asked about his day at school and got mostly monosyllabic answers to my questions. Finally, I asked the right question.

“How are you liking The Crucible?” The two of us had seen that play a year earlier at another local theatre, and I hoped the experience was enhancing his classwork.

“I'm just bored with it,” he finally answered.

“With the play?” I asked. “Or the class in general?” I thought I knew his answer. Thing1 loves math and science and considers English classes state-sanctioned torture. But I didnt know him as well as I thought.

“I'm bored with school,” he said, and my head nearly exploded with the questions that were forming. For the next fifteen minutes and then the next hour at dinner and in the theatre as we waited for King Lear to disown a loving daughter and a loyal servant only to realize he didn't understand their motives all that well, I uncovered a wealth of curiosity and dreams that my son had been quietly nurturing these last few months.

Instead of a knave bent on defying his parents' entreaties to take homework seriously, I was seeing a boy hungry for inspiration at school but determined to find it on his own if necessary. I was seeing a spark and, with it, the boy I thought I knew.

 

Old Habits

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Back on The Wagon horizontal Web

I’m enough of a yo-yo artiste that I know bad habits don’t die, they just wait for winter to regroup.  Case in point, the last few weeks I’ve been treating my body like a bit of an amusement park, and I can’t be too shocked when I feel like I’m looking into a funhouse mirror.  

Still, when, in honor of spring and impending swimsuit season (which, for me, is a misnomer as I rarely wear a swimsuit anywhere), I stepped on the scale this morning, I realized it’s time to get back on the wagon.   

Win a Print in the March Common Threads Give-Away

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March Give Away

It’s the first Monday of March, so it’s time for the Common Thread Give-a-way.  Last month Maria gave away on of her drawings.

This month, in a nod to the winter that won’t quit, I’m giving away a print of a watercolor and mixed media drawing of nearby Ice Pond Barn.  The print is on 8×10 archival paper in a protective matt.

If you’d like to enter the drawing for ‘Ice Pond Barn’, leave a comment on my blog.  When you’ve left a comment, take a trip over to the other blogs in our group.

I’ll be picking the winner (using Random.org) and announcing who it is on Friday morning.

A Simple Life

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Growing up, I loved Little House on the Prairie. I loved it so much, I thought I wanted to switch places with Laura Ingalls Wilder. I loved the idea of making everything you used, and there seemed to be a simplicity to their lives that doesn't exist now. Once I got older and learned to appreciate things like penicillin and voting, that wish vanished (now I'd settle for a Time Machine for the occasional visit),

Searching through town records and shared family trees, it's clear rural life was definitely simpler back then. You were born. You lived. You struggled. If you were lucky, you made it to adulthood and struggled some more.

We struggle with bills and schedules. We struggle with chores and parenting, but when I come across the all too-frequent pairs of dates indicating the existence of a child who died as soon as he or she drew breath, I know I don't really struggle at all.

That struggle is one any parent can imagine. To imagine it happening one or two times in a row – sometime five or six in a lifetime – and still keep fighting just so you could keep parenting the children that managed to draw a next breath, however, is to begin to understand what real strength must have been (and still is where this story continues to plays out around the world).

It is also to begin to appreciate in earnest that a complicated life is actually a fortunate one.

 

Must See His-tor-y

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In a graveyard in a small Vermont town sits a headstone belonging to a woman, Joanna E. Houghton. who is named as the mother of Alice Fox. She was married to Moses Fox, the man who was listed as Alice's father, and, at the age of 37 had a baby – her last child – the year she was married.

It was a second marriage, and only one of her three children from the first marriage survived infancy. It's a sad start to her life, but not an uncommon one. What was uncommon was the absence, in the scanned records of Wiimington, show a long tap root for Moses's family tree. Joanna seems more of a leaf.

There are many Houghton's in the area. There are a few Johnsons (her first husband was named Johnson), but the first record with her name is her marriage to Moses. All of Alice's, from what I can tell from town records, descend from Irish and English immigrants. Her picture tells a different story, however.

The soap fan in me is already speculating. Could Joanna have been adopted? Could Moses or Joanna Fox's roots belong to another tree altogether?

The mystery is just beginning. It's a volume of a story so many people are writing for themselves, and for me, it's already better than any soap or must-see realty-TV scenario.

 

Sentimental Journey

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Blog sappy

We’ve had a few weeks of frigid temperatures and, after a few years of almost no snow – a return to a normal Vermont winter. This morning greeted me with perfect pink skies that can only come from the promise of a perfect sunny day. Even though I should know better, I couldn’t help thinking it’s almost spring, and as I navigated the mud pit that is our road, I starting humming something from ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’. Pretty sappy, right?

It gets sappier. I’d gotten up early, escaping to our favorite diner for uninterrupted writing before the Big Guy and Thing1 and Thing2 woke up. The guys met me for breakfast a few hours later. Thing1 and Thing2 argued over who’s turn it was to sit with Mom, and, still euphoric from hours of typing, I basked in the glow of being with my guys. But it was going to get even sappier.

The Big Guy took the little guys to find a part for vacuum, and I headed back towards our neck of the woods in my car. On my way back, I noticed a few pickup trucks parked up on a hill. There was a group of men – some young, some old – congregated around a blue cistern next to a tree. Still feeling sappy, I thought didn’t notice the blue tube connecting the tank to the tree and thought, instead, how nice it was to see teenagers not too embarrassed to spend time with their fathers.

It wasn’t until I turned onto the last paved road on the way to our house that I had the sappiest moment of the day. Then, there he was. An older man standing in the bed of his pickup sorting a pile of tin buckets with tent shaped lids on them. I drove on and noticed he had already driven in the taps for at least a dozen trees.

I turned onto our road feeling extremely sappy and sentimental (and suddenly craving something maple). Even the mud didn’t bother me on my way back up our hill because even though there’s still a good eight inches of snow in our yard today and single digits forecast for a few nights next week, I know spring is here. I saw it on the way home from the Diner, clear as day.

 

The Way We Are

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This blog was born during a writing workshop which was originally to focus on different aspects of rural life. When I first came to the workshop, I was working on two pieces. One was a story about a potluck dinner (currently in a drawer but still staying out of the circular file), and the other was an idea for a story based on the life and marriage of Alice Little Fox, the girl in the picture above.
 
Alice Little Fox, a Mohawk, was the Big Guy's great-grandmother. She grew up in Wilmington, Vermont and eventually married Charles. He had a business in the town, and eventually they began raising Morgan horses together.

Alice's genealogy has always interested me, but not as much as the story of how she and the Big Guy's grandfather found each other. Interracial marriages did happen in the 1880s, but they were hardly common. The ancestry charts can tell you when and where they married, they leave out the most important story. Town records and headstones never reveal how two people from such different worlds built a bridge to each other and then a life together.
 
I'll admit to loving a good romance. I love the story of how my grandfather, still pulling himself up by his bootstraps, won my grandmother's heart (to the initial chagrin of her patrician parents). I love the story of an uncle who refused to let culture and an ocean prevent a marriage that's lasted over 50 years. But these aren't just romances. To me, every star-crossed union is a story, not only of how we came to be what we are as a family, but as a part of the culture we live in.
 

When in Vermont

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Ski jump

Last Sunday we took a much-needed family stay-cation to Brattleboro for a ski jump competition. We chose the destination because it’s been a stopping point for many Olympians, and, in the forties, for the Big Guy’s dad.

The temperature was brisk, and the sun was out. Food vendors and tailgaiters created delicious grilled odors that bouyed the four of us on our climb up the 150+ snowy steps that lined the jump hill.

Twenty feet of snow-covered hillside and path separated the top of the stairs from the wall that bordered the jump area. We staked out a spot just below the jump-off just as the first round of jumpers whooshed past us.

Seven-year-old Thing2 watched a few jumpers and then, his awe subsiding, focused on the consistency of the snow and it’s suitability for sliding and ammunition.

The first round ended, and he began begging for permission to slide down the massive hill next to the steps. Noting the abundant opportunities the hill afforded for an impromptu ambulance ride, I naturally said, ‘No’. Thing2 pouted, but kept his silence.

The loudspeaker announced a break in the action, and we decided to move to a lower part of the hill for a different view of the action. The Big Guy and I began navigating down the hill towards the stairs. Half-way down, I turned around to offer a hand to Thing2. Still standing at the wall, he grinned at me.

“Mom, I want to slide down here!”

I hesitated for a minute and scanned his intended course for any objet d’injury.  Noting the incline leveled enough near the bottom for him to stop himself, gave my permission. Thing2 sat on his snowpant-covered butt and slid.

“You are a true Vermonter,” I told him as he coasted to a stop at my feet.  He is.

Despite the Big Guy’s deep roots in Vermont (from his father back to a time before “Vermont” existed) and Thing1’s maple syrup-steeped childhood, Thing2 is the only “real” Vermonter among us (I’m a recovering nomad). Local tradition confers the label only on those born in-state. The smile on his face as he sat in the snow, however, proved his status better than any birth certificate.

The path had been packed down, and Thing2 decided it was another slower sliding opportunity. I inched along behind him, keenly aware of the aging tread on my boot.  

Finally, the eternal adventurer in me decided that since we were in Vermont, I should do as my native-Vermonter had just done. The slippery path was much more easily negotiated on my butt. The path from nomad to settled Vermonter is one Thing2 will be showing me how to navigate for some time.

 

Isn’t It Romantic

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We live well away from the madding crowd – such as it exists in rural Vermont (no, it’s not redundant). While we try to be as energy and resource independent as possible, the plot where our slice of life plays out is definitely a homestead – not a farm.
During summer months, we grow a fair amount of food, but my garden is as much about pleasure as it is necessity. We’ve had chickens for eggs, but also for company in the garden. When the fox raided our coop, we were sad but not scared – we knew there were fresh brown eggs for sale in the cooler at the end of our neighor’s driveway. We’ve made our own maple syrup, but most of the time we buy it from friends who are trying to build a working family farm.

Most days we’re so wrapped up in middle-class mundaneity that the solar panels and hot water on the roof and the amish wood cookstove that heat and power our life seem completely mainstream.

And then it snows. And snows. And snows. And we load a few more logs next to the woodstove and think how lovely it all looks. And, as much as I once romanticized the idea of being completely self-sufficient ,I’m glad we’ve picked the battle that lets us wait out the storms we’ve seen this winter without worry.

It is work – I hang every scrap of laundry and we monitor every watt we use – but it’s also a luxury, and we’re grateful for it each time the snow begins to fly.