Jesus on line one.

Today I took Jack to the barbershop at Meijer’s (yes. I DO know that it’s Meijer. But I’m from Michigan. So we call it Meijer’s. Technically we are correct… because it used to be Meijer’s Thrifty Acres… but I digress.) where the hair cuts are relatively cheap ($12).

It was Jack’s first trip to a barber chair. The first five years of hair cuts came courtesy of my Momma or myself. We did a pretty decent job for the most part. Lately his hair has gotten all thatchy and crazy, not to mention long, and so it was time to seek out the professionals.

He did pretty well. He was squirmy and wiggly and a little apprehensive about the squirt bottle but the end result was good. I tipped the nice lady $3 for “combat pay.”

On the way home we stopped at the donut store for a “First Trip to the Barbershop” treat. Jack munched his little chocolate and glazed donut holes in the backseat and somehow we started talking about my Dad. Jack wanted to know if Bompa got his hair cut at a barbershop, too. I said that yes but that sometimes my mother cut his hair, too.

“Did Bompa have donuts when he got his hair cut?”
“You know, Jack– I think he probably did sometimes. It’s a very Bompa-thing-to-do to have donuts when you get your hair cut.”

Jack muleed this over and chewed thoughtfully on his donuts.
“Mommy? Did he die?”
“Yes, Jack.”
“Today??!”
“No Jacky. It was a long time ago. Before you were born.”
“So he’s not here any more?”
“Right. But remember– Bompa lives in heaven with Jesus and the angels now.”
“I don’t want him to be gone. I want him to be here!”
“I know sweet pea. I do, too.”

We drove a few blocks.
“Mommy? Why does Bompa live in heaven?”
“Well… Because when you believe in Jesus and you die; you get to live in heaven with him and all the angels. And Bompa loved Jesus very much and believed in Jesus. He asked Jesus to live in his heart so when Bompa died he got to go to heaven to live.”
“Mommy! I want to have Jesus live in my heart, too!”
“Well, Jack– all you have to do is say a little prayer to ask Jesus. Do you want to do that?”
“Yes Mommy! Can I call him?”
“Call who?”
“Can I call Jesus?”
“No sweetie. Not on the phone. But you can say a prayer and I promise that Jesus will hear you.”

We discussed it a little more and, a block later, my little son said something to the effect of “Dear Jesus. Please come live in my heart. Thank you! Amen”

We’ll see where this all goes. It’s nice when some things are relatively simple.

It’s all gravy

This morning my nieces and my sister came over for breakfast. Our school system had a “late start day” so we all were able to sleep in and still get in a bigger breakfast than we normally would do in the middle of the week.

I made sausage gravy and biscuits. I’ve made it a couple of times in the past few months… I made it for Robby’s 40th birthday-surprise-brunch (or “The Meat Feast” as my sister refers to it) and I made a batch for us to reheat on a cold morning at family camp. My nieces don’t remember me making it before those times. Which surprised me at first– I don’t make it every weekend but it shows up on our breakfast repertoire here and there.

But there was a big gap in its appearance on our menu. When Robby and I were first married I made it more often. I learned to make it when I worked at Greenfield Village. One Christmas season I worked in one of the historic house kitchens most often with a girl named Lola. She and I both loved sausage and made everything associated with it we could. Hash. Gravy. Soup. Stuffed things. Our house was off the beaten path and on really snowy days we had a big window of time before the first visitor would show up giving us a lot of time to experiment. Neither of us were great cooks– but we improved quite a bit that winter. We figured out sausage gravy one morning and enjoyed it with batches of beaten biscuits. I still think of Lola whenever I make it.

Meanwhile, my Dad was going through chemotherapy and didn’t have much of an appetite. Or rather he didn’t have much of a tolerance to food– certain things still sounded appealing but the normal odors and aromas could turn him off before he was able to enjoy a bite. Eating breakfast at a restaurant was nearly impossible– by the time Dad would sit and order he was too nauseated by all the food around him to stand the wait until his own food came to the table. When he found out that I could make sausage gravy and biscuits we had several Saturdays where Robby and I would wake up at an ungodly hour to Dad calling us on the phone to tell us he and Momma were on their way. It was 77 minutes between their house and ours. Robby and I would jump up and start the sausage cooking and whip together a batch of biscuit dough. We got pretty good at it. It would be finished when Dad arrived– he and Momma would eat with us then escape the smells and drive back home. Robby and I would go back to bed.

It wasn’t just the food on those Saturdays– it was the chance for a homesick new bride/worried daughter to see her parents and a chance for Robby and I to, in the most miniscule way, repay some of the enormous kindness that my parents showed us. And Dad got to eat and run without anyone at the table thinking it odd.

I couldn’t help think of my Dad this morning when my kitchen table was crowded with Trish and the girls. It always makes me sad to think of my lovely nieces growing up without the Bompa that they both adored when little.

I also thought of Lola and wished she were here with some of her better-than-mine beaten biscuits. I didn’t want the pressure of making biscuits this morning so I used the refrigerator-tube kind.

 

17 Days of Being Grateful

Some of my facebook pals have been using November to post Things I Am Grateful For in their status. It’s a good idea. So I’ll try to think of 17 for the first 17 days of this month:

I Am Grateful For:

1. my husband. I’m glad I am not alone in life. I am glad that there are warm legs to warm my cold toes against in our bed. I’m glad that there is someone to raise Jack with.

2. my son. I am so glad that I get to be a mother. Apparently I’m not so good at the gestating a baby so I’m glad that Jack’s time in my belly was relatively normal.

3. Our furry little children Philbin (aka The Little Black Dog) and Hildy Guard Dog. As infuriating as the two of them can be when they do not want to play nicely together… or when Hildy decides that pooing inside the house is preferable to going outside… and as expensive as Hildy’s first shots have been… well. I’m glad that they are part of our lives.

4. our parents– my father, my mother, Rob’s parents, and Eric. They’re all good people who love us and take good care of us.

5.my sister and her girls. Jack loves few people like he loves his cousins.

6. Robby’s job. It leaves him sapped out on some days and some of his coworkers drive him batty… but we’re very grateful that he is gainfully employed.

7. our home. It’s an old house so there is a lot of things about it that frustrate us on a daily basis. But then, to compensate, there are the arched doorways and lovely, lovely dark wood throughout, and the windows that make me happy.

8. books and the ablility to read them. Watching Jack learn to read has made me so grateful that I can read and that I enjoy it so. I can’t imagine life without a book within reach. I like my tall bookshelves full of a mishmash of book genres. I love the glass window doors that protect the two “good shelf” books.

9. our health. We’re so lucky to be in working order.

10. our friends. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I take a cue from Bing and Rosemary and count my blessings. Usually that comes in the form of our friends. Oldest friends and newest friends and far-flung friends and old-school friends and church-family friends and our parents’ friends and work friends and and and and and. We’re lucky. I wish that our best friends lived closer and that we saw the far-flung friends more often… but at least we get to know them and love them.

11. orange juice and chocolate. My favorite comfort foods are fresh-squeezed orange juice and really, really good chocolate. Lumpy mashed potatoes and gravy. Glass-bottled Coke. Good cheese. Cold Calder’s milk. Scones with clotted cream and jam. Jam tarts. My mother’s Texas Sheet Cake. My sister’s Scripture Cookies. My pot roast. Mrs. Nordmeyer’s soup. Horseshoes with Cheese Whiz. Biscuits and gravy and grits. Eggs in the Snow. Brussel Sprouts. Bacon. A proper sponge cake. Mallomars. Mommy’s Smokey Corn Chowder or Bean soup.

12. Tea. Properly made and perfectly hot tea. Or perfectly iced. A day without tea is a sad, sad day.

13. sewing and knitting. I like to make things. I like the quietness that comes about me when I can sew a long seam by hand and the soothing rhythm of knitting.

14. Lush. There are few things more decadent in my life than soaking in a Lush-y tub full of some yummy thing. Add in a Hello magazine, glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and a box of Mallomars and you’ve made for a darn fine evening.

15. our church. I’m really grateful for our church. We have great pastors and a wonderful music program. The church family is a good mix of old and new members, new people, old and young, and it’s getting more racially diverse with each generation. I like it there. We feel well-fed when we leave.

16. Jack’s school. After all the agony of the past year trying to choose just the right place for Jack to learn– we lucked into a great school. We’re so happy with his teacher. We couldn’t have imagined what a good fit that she would be for Jack. We should have– we’ve prayed and prayed about it– but it was beyond our hoping.

17. that it’s almost Christmas. I love Christmas. I love the trees and lights and cookies and music. I like the goodwill among men. And I love wrapping presents. So it’s all good.

The Annual Reading of The Long Winter

I just finished my annual reading of The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I think it’s probably my favorite book. Not just in the Little House series– but of all the books I’ve ever read. It’s the one I’ve re-read the most often.

Not to spoil it if you haven’t read it– it’s not a very cheerful story. Laura and her Ma and Pa and sisters (blind, good Mary; thin, fragile Carrie; and small Grace) endure a long, hard winter of seven months of blizzards. Their little town of DeSmet in the Dakota territory is only a year old and the townspeople run out of supplies when the trains stop running due to the weather. Laura’s family goes from eating simple but hearty meals of beans and salt pork and bread to eating just potatoes and bread to eating a coarse bread made from Almanzo Wilder’s seed wheat ground in the coffee mill. They run out of things to burn and end up making sticks out of twisted hunks of hay to keep from freezing. It gets bad. They are starving and cold. They’re cut off from the rest of the town– each family unable to make much contact with the others so that they might as well not be in town at all– the blizzards are that bad.

It’s the darkest of the books (until Laura gets married and they have a series of misfortunes). Laura describes the monotony of surviving the winter as an unending cycle of grinding wheat, twisting hay, eating the coarse bread (without butter or preserves or gravy– just coarse, brown bread), sleeping– all in a semi-darkness brought on by the blizzards and lack of kerosene.

At the lowest point Pa can’t play the fiddle– his hands are too chapped from the cold. They exhaust the only other entertainment– reciting from memory the things they can remember like poems from their schoolbooks or verses from Sunday School. Laura feels “dull” and “tired.”

And then– in the last few chapters it all comes out well. Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland make a desperate run for some rumored wheat, find it, bring it back, and save the town from starving. The Christmas barrel that was sent out from the Minnesota church on the last train arrives with the turkey still frozen and they Ingalls have a Christmas feast in May to celebrate the return of Spring and their survival.

Mixed in are a few observations about human nature. The storekeeper that tries to make an unfair profit from the wheat brought in to save the town. The inexperienced Easterner that ruins a (literal) shot at some meat when the men see a rare herd of antelope. The patient Ma who snaps.

I’m not sure why I love it so. But I do. And I’ve reread it every year since I first read it when I was about 9. I usually read it in the summer. Her descriptions of the howling winds and thick snows of the blizzards chase off the humid Michigan summer heat. This year I read it late. I had it with me at church this week. We had a conference after church and I used the half-hour between to read a bit. I was interrupted by several people asking what I was reading. Our pastor’s eyes lit up when I showed him the cover. He knows it well, too.

Several years ago I was doing a research project for work. I spent a day at the Detroit Public Library’s special collections pulling images for an exhibit. The staff there was pretty patient– they filled my many requests with trips to the archives. I finished earlier than I’d expected to and I sought out the librarian that had been the nicest and asked politely if it was true that the original manuscript for The Long Winter was in their collection. She sighed and laid aside her work and led me to a locked case where she handed me a pair of white cotton gloves. We sat together at a long table where she carefully pulled a Red Chief notebook from an archival box and opened it to reveal Laura’s long-hand writing. Page after page in long hand was the story I’ve loved complete with corrections and crossed out phrases. I soaked it in. Took in the way she shaped her letters and the height of her letters. And then I thanked the librarian for letting me see it. She was startled. Didn’t I want to see the rest? She was willing to sit and turn it page by page while I read it. The entire thing. I was just as startled. “Oh no. I’ve read it before. I just wanted to see it in her handwriting.” I don’t remember a single image we pulled that day for the project at work– and I was there pulling images for at least 6 hours. But I remember the way my throat filled up with my 9 year old heart when I saw that first page of Laura’s familiar words.

If you haven’t read the Little House books you shouldn’t necessarily start with The Long Winter but keep reading till you get to it. Little House in the Big Woods will seem simple and childlike. Little House on the Prairie might be too earnest. Farmer Boy (my second favorite) will make you obsess over donuts and ham and baked beans. By the Banks of Plum Creek is where the payoff starts in your investment with the Ingalls Family. By the Shores of Silver Lake is the hardest one for me to slog through. Partially because in the first 50 pages or so Jack the dog will die and Mary will be blind. And then there are all the passages about building the railroad (Robby loved this book because of that). My beloved The Long Winter makes its appearance here. And then it’s a happy coasting through Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years before Laura’s writing tone changes with her memories of The First Four Years of her marriage to Almanzo Wilder.

Let me know what you think.

And they have all that flat pizza, too– it’s not fair!

Question of the day:

Do East Coasters appreciate their Mallomar availablity? Do they express genuine gratitude for the months that they can stroll into a market and pick up a box as easily as a carton of eggs??

Grrr.

Little Miss Muffet and her cracker spiders

I took treats to Jack’s class today. I missed the sign-up for the Halloween Party treats when we were sick last week so I asked the good Mrs. R if we could bring something today. His class has a snack every afternoon so she’s always grateful when we offer to pitch in.

I made the same spider crackers as last year with a few changes– Ritz cracker bodies sandwiched together with peanut butter (last year I had to use squirty cheese because his preschool had a peanut ban…), 8 matchstick pretzel legs, and raisinet eyes affxed with a little frosting. (The raisinet eyes might be about the most daring thing I’ve done in quite a while. Jack’s school– the whole district actually– has a “healthy foods” initiative that bans any sweets, cookies, cakes, and the like from the school. The good Mrs. R and I agreed that chocolate is a major food group. And, for crying out loud– it was chocolate covering a raisin. Still. I feel rebellious. Like I drove a Harley to school.) I brought apple sauce, too– it was on sale at the market.

The snack was a hit with Jack’s little schoolmates. Except for the kid who told me three times, “I can’t eat applesauce!” (Okay. junior. Got it. Had it the first time.) So Jack was pleased with me for the most part.

My visit coincided with the end of the Math Lesson today. I helped Jack’s table and the table near by with their 5s, 6s, and 7s. Fives are tough when you’re in kindergarten. There’s a lot to remember. Jack’s class has a little mantra of “Down! Big belly! Put a hat on top!” It’s stuck in my head now. And 6s, it turns out, are tricky if you don’t want them to look like a row of small bs. Sevens are a huge relief after all the concentration to get the 5s and 6s to behave– 7s are just “a straight line then s-l-i-d-e.”

It’s funny to see them all so furrowed up over the formation of their numbers. And how most of them were relieved when they got to the coloring part of the paper. I like how encouraging the good Mrs. R and her aide are in getting them to the ends of their papers.

We got to see the little preschool kids in their costumes, too. They don’t have school on Fridays so they had their Halloween party today and then paraded through the rest of the school in and out of the “big kids” classrooms and down the halls where there parents were snapping pictures and oohing/aahing. I felt old to have a Kindergarten kid with that group of parents.

There were some great costumes– a tiny Optimus Prime (he would be, to the real Optimus Prime about the size of a Happy Meal toy), and a fierce and scowling and incredibly politically incorrect Indian Chief (he carried a little tomahawk and grunted at us. I loved him). There were several little witches in multihued witch hats and witch dresses (a pink witch!?) and the cutest little Tinkerbell who dramatically flourished her little sparkly wand at each of us.

I’m looking forward to the party in Jack’s class tomorrow.

Noodle soup

The Husband is sick. Poor thing is miserable. Stuffy and fevery and achey. Nothing sounds good. Yesterday he picked at some Stouffer’s Mac & Cheese and a Jell-O cup.

So today I’ve rolled up my sleeves to get him to eat. A Slurpee. Fresh-squeezed orange juice. And noodle soup. I don’t like seeing him not hungry. And lethargic.

Let’s hope the soup helps.

Progress Report

Jack brought home his first semi-official Kindergarten progress report on Friday. His teacher, the very good Mrs. R is sending home weekly reports.

It’s a simple report– five statements of classroom behavior/expectations with three possible evaluation choices: needs improvement, satisfactory, and fantastic.  Jack brought home two satisfactories and three fantastics! Hooray! We’re very proud.

And grateful. Every day we are reassured that we chose the right school for him. And more and more we are assured that our prayers (that Jack would be matched with the right teacher) were answered.

We celebrated this first week’s report with dinner out at the new Japanese place. Jack even ate cucumber rolls (inserting some of the carrot garnish in his) and tempura shrimp in addition to his usual edaname.

We’d grade the day fantastic.

Blue.

It’s cold and rainy here this morning. It makes me miss Jack. On mornings like this we’d stay in our jammies and do puzzles or look at his “learning books” trying to make sense of the dinosaur names.

It might have to be a good apple crisp night.

At least there is a good lunch to look forward to– I’m meeting a partner-in-crime to go over the lesson for this week’s Sunday School.

Bring me my slippers!

It’s cold and blustery out tonight. We still haven’t turned on the furnace yet– both of us suspect that this cold snap will ease into an Indian Summer and we’re hoping to save a little money. Luckily there is no shortage of blankets and throws and sweaters in reach.

And it’s a good night to polish off the chocolate zucchini bread I made yesterday. Maybe with some hot tea. And to make up the caramel cake for Keegan’s 15th birthday tomorrow night.

Right now, though, I’m enjoying the nice heat from the laptop.

And the little black pup on my feet.