This year is flying, just like last year did. Seedlings are starting to come up, we’ve begun to tackle yard cleanup, a multi-week endeavor, my 10-mile spring road race is just one short week away, oldest child won an art award that is a pretty big deal, and our lives are totally different than they were just a week ago. We’re in the process of making our final decision on whether to adopt a very cute brother/sister pair, and we’ve been moving forward as if it will be a yes. It’s both exciting and overwhelming, and with not a small touch of worry about the impact on our biological kids tossed in.
We have a lot to do this spring – the big, split-trunk pines are finally coming down, as are a couple smaller dead pines and a giant pine that split and fell behind the garage but didn’t hurt anything, thankfully. There’s a lot of old, very tall pines here, and taking them down is a very expensive endeavor. But it’s critical to do, and worth the it so that we don’t worry every time we have a windstorm. The split-trunk pines are house and human killers, and we’ve been putting it off, but we just can’t now. These are not a-guy-with-a-chainsaw trees, these are where-do-we-put-the-crane trees.
And our walkway, which is filled with pea gravel is getting a redo. I truly loathe pea gravel – it gets in everything and everywhere, when we shovel snow we inadvertently throw it onto the grass, and the guy who plows sometimes gets too close in and tosses it everywhere. So we’re done, and budgeting for a brick walkway, which is really a weekend’s worth of effort, plus the cost of bricks, edging and sand. We also need to replace the two cracked storm windows on the porch, and the pull-down attic staircase, which broke right around Christmas because why not. I’d really love to replace the light on the stairway landing, but we’ll see. I hate it, it collects bugs (who in their right minds puts a light up that high – really too high to clean very often – that doesn’t have an open base?) but it’s not super critical.
Last year we got hit very hard in the financials – we had a thing, and it took out just about all of our hard-won savings, accrued some debt, and left me feeling pretty deflated, after the intense ups and downs of the last 7 years. We had finally been in a place where savings was up, expenses were down and the future felt bright. Enter a heart-stopping, mind-rending tax bill from closing down my consulting company, and literally the day after we paid it, our furnace guy telling us ‘your old oil tank is leaking, I have to pull it out and replace it, that will be $5500.00, no it can’t waitalso here’s a $1700 bill for your heating oil‘.
There’s not a lot of things that put me in a mood to lie down in a fetal position, but those couple days did. So we did what we had to do, and have been working through bringing ourselves back to level ground since, somewhat more challenging with inflation being what it is. We still have to do much-needed repair work – and the bottom of the driveway will have to be repaved soon, but we can leave it for a while.
The good news is that we had some additional income that came in shortly thereafter, the bad news is that we also have some fairly major and expensive dental work for Eli this year, and renovation probably can’t wait much longer. So we’re in this interesting place where we’re fine, really, but not at all where we want to be, and it’s been a little exhausting. The upside is that I have hotel and airline points for travel, so we’re able to do some things this year despite the unexpected convergence of us needing to pay for everything, everywhere, all at once.
So we did what anyone would to plan for it. We broke our multi-month stretch of only buying what we needed for the week, went to Costco and stocked up on literally everything, then bought all the Easter candy and basket stuffs, and now our grocery shops are small and focused again. We have plenty of food, we have warmth and safety and a roof over our heads, we have friends and family who we love and are loved by us, and we’ll rebuild to where we were, it’s just going to take a while. It’s hard to have to do that yet again, and I won’t lie and say it isn’t demoralizing at times.
But my gratitude for our life is immense. What hit us in the last year could have been a tidal wave that took us out. Instead, because we’re generally good savers it was a hole in the boat, granted a huge one, but our ship was far from sinking, and we chugged in to shore for repairs under our own sail, a bit battered and tired, but still upright.
We’ve not eliminated all the luxuries of our life – the kids activities, occasional fun outings or short trips, but we’ve pared back significantly, eliminating lots of recurring charges, finding frugal or free ways to solve problems, and still tried to be there for family and friends. We budget for the stuff we really enjoy and have jettisoned a lot of extraneous spending.
For a long time, I was mad and upset – we had worked so hard to be where we were, and it was so not fair to have instability tear through our lives again. But after a while I realized that it was my mindset that had to change, not so much our circumstances.
Shit happens, and that’s why you structure your life so you can handle it when it does. We have a home full of love, our kids are safe and well, and money is – well, it’s just money. It’s great and all, but it’s a vehicle, not the end game. It took a while for me to remember that. And so this afternoon as Eli and I started on the monthlong venture that is spring yard cleanup, I turned my thoughts to where we have both been. It is a thousand miles from where we are now and while there has been grief and challenges, our joy is only limited by our perception of how things are.
And when I really take stock, they are pretty damn good. That’s not a Pollyanna-ish happy ending, there’s still stress, too much laundry, and we’re often so busy and tired we can’t see straight.
But it is important perspective – joy is not a thing that is bought.
It’s all over. Christmas, and the big turkey feast. Trips to the grandparents for the kids to ice skate. A big evening out for Eli and I. A New Year’s Eve feast with the grandmas. In one short week, we filled our lives with wonderful meals, company, and so much of everything – fun, work, joy, celebration. So much time with family. Our hearts are filled with love from it all.
But we’re also weary.
But from here, it’s mellow. It’s January, and oddly warm as it is here, it’s the quiet part of winter. We have another couple days of vacation before life comes back to greet us, and I intend to use that time well for both rest and restoration, as well as to get a few things done.
We still need to dismantle the Christmas decorations, but from now until late February when I start my garden seeds, it will be the small things that really matter. Meals, routines, small cleaning or home improvement projects, time to do a puzzle. Later this month or in early February I’ll order more seeds, but not yet.
Because today and tomorrow the plan is to rest, to cook, to organize, and just be. It’s time to get my training going for the 10-mile race I am planning for April. This year is home-centered. We’ll spend some time away in the mountains and in Maine this summer, and depending on the adoption situation we’ll maybe get away for a few days over April vacation, but most of our time this year will be spent at home, and that contents me. Last year was a big one for trips, but being away from home so much meant that some things, like being an attentive gardener, or keeping track of what was in the freezer went by the wayside.
This year the focus will be much more on making sure we have time to breathe and spend in the yard.
Garden. Kids. Home. And in May, baby chicks. Most of our flock is almost 4 years old now, so it’s time. While we are still getting eggs after a prolonged pause, we are sporadically losing chickens and it’s time to replenish our flock.
But first, we are in day 1 of our pantry eat down and frugal month challenge, which means overall we’re just not spending money on anything other than bills. The biggest part of this is the pantry challenge. The rules are this – for the full month of January we can buy vegetables for planned meals, milk for drinking, coffee augmentation & cereal, as it’s an essential in this house, and fruit. Alternatives must be found (for example, toasted tortillas if we’re out of tortilla chips, etc) for anything we don’t have. Other than our monthly meat delivery, which I forgot, in the holiday madness, to put on hold for January our total budget for the month for food is $198, which is about 1/4 of the usual expenditure in this area, and we may be able to do it for less.
And a perk of the big cleanout is…cleaning out. As things empty – and our time is put into cleaning out closets and drawers, we clean as we go along. To say the house needs it is an understatement as clutter is creeping in everywhere.
Since we had our big Chinese feast last night, most of the meals so far today have been leftover oriented, but tonight we’ll need something healthy to offset all the heavy meals of the last week or two. I have some fresh broccoli and cauliflower, so I’ll pan roast them with a little garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil and serve them up with a simple chicken dish, maybe Butternut Squash Butter Chicken, or a simple stir fry. This week is the race to use up all the veggies in the vegetable drawers that I bought around the holidays. My budget starting next Friday is $72 including all groceries, and milk. If I want delivery, in order to stay out of the store, that has to include delivery and tip, so I’ll be very careful about our meal plan, but this week we have to be a bit more flexible to use up what we have.
Tomorrow I’ll make Chicken Parmesan that will cover lunches for my son as well, and prepare some sort of turkey soup with the broth I made for Tuesday, when everyone is back to work and school, and likely to be tired at the end. I’m thinking something along a Mexican theme, with salsa verde and tortillas toasted into chips.
Wednesday is just Eli and I, and I have the ingredients, minus the ground chicken (I’ll sub in ground beef) for a re-creation of Buffalo Chicken Enchilada Bake.
Thursday Eli is planning to make us Broccoli Cheddar Soup, and then this weekend, while the kids are at their Dad’s and we’re cleaning out closets and doing projects, I’ll stuff spaghetti squash, roast sweet potatoes, and maybe make some homemade Indian food dishes for us as well as preparing something delicious for Sunday night when the kids come home. Probably Shepherd’s Pie, which we haven’t had in ages, and will help use up the last of the red potatoes we bought for Christmas dinner.
Tuesday and Wednesday of next week I have to travel, getting home Thursday morning, so Eli will be on his own for food prep, but I’ll pick back up for Friday night dinner with the kids on the 13th, and cook straight through the weekend.
It might sound funny to take so much pleasure in using up what we have, but there’s something about January that makes me want to use things up and tidy, maybe making space for all the new that’s on the way in.
Happy New Year to you and yours. May today be restful for you, body and spirit.
This time of year I feel like we’re never still for more than a moment. Their are presents to buy and make, gifts to wrap, cookies to bake, food to deliver, packages to mail, and all of that on top of just our general busyness – work, school and life.
We finally start to still on Christmas in the late afternoon – all the work is done, gifts are gifted, Christmas dinner is eaten, and there’s nothing left but to sit back and breathe. It’s that moment around 5 pm Christmas day when there’s nothing left to be done that I finally sit and relax. And for us, the day after Christmas is a continuation of the nothing – leftovers, a fire in the wood stove, everyone gets to enjoy their presents and relax.
But as I sit and write, we’re still a couple of days from that. The Christmas turkey is thawing, I’ve got batches of cookies to bake tonight, and gifts to wrap, and the refrigerator is filled with delicious things, so full it’s hard to squeak it all in.
Still, for all the craziness, it’s been joyful as well. I managed to sneak away for a weekend in Montreal with the oldest, just the two of us, and it was a delight. Cold, but marvelous 1-1 time visiting the Christmas Markets, Biodome, A Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibit, and a dress-up dinner, plus exploration of bakeries, the underground city, and Chinatown. 13 is honestly a delight – interested in food and experiences, willing to try new things, funny and opinionated. While we did that Eli took my son into Boston for a night for pool time and holiday shopping.
January is our pantry challenge month, and so far I have meals planned to the end of the first week. We have a lot of things to use up right now, so our meals are being built around what we have in most cases. But first we had to have all the things for our Christmas meal, so our final grocery delivery came today. We also have a few things we don’t usually cook from our last winter CSA, like celeriac and rutabaga, so I need to get creative to use those up.
I have some days off after the holiday, and some of that time will be spent prepping freezer items, such as homemade pizza dough, so we can just grab it and thaw it. 2022 was full of travel and adventure. The coming year will be much more centered around home, and that’s just fine. Adoption, the garden, and some home maintenance in advance of full renovation – taking trees down, the end of the driveway needs repaving, and just generally getting ready. In order to be fully ready, and because interest rates and construction costs are so high, we postponed a year, but we’re reaching the point where we can’t wait.
So it’s time. But first, it’s time to gather and celebrate, and be profoundly grateful for our life, just as it is.
Meal plan for Christmastime: Friday December 23rd: Taco Pizza, guacamole, salsa and chips Saturday December 24th: Dinner with Family – their house Sunday December 25th: Cheese board, turkey, stuffing with sausage, sage and onion, 4 cheese mashed potatoes, roasted Brussels sprouts and onions, and cranberry-raspberry sauce. Eli will make pizzelles, and our guests will bring green bean casserole and pie. Monday December 26: Leftovers. Mom definitely doesn’t cook Tuesday December 27th: Turkey pot pie, broccoli cheese soup Wednesday December 28th: Play-it-by-ear day, maybe leftovers, maybe something else, definitely the day to turn the turkey into soup stock. I do have to cook for some friends who have a child fighting cancer, so we may end up having the same thing they are Thursday December 29th: Time to detox from Christmas food so Salmon with horseradish and mustard crust and a squash salad Friday December 30th: Date night – some nice person at an Italian restaurant is cooking Saturday December 31st: Homemade and ordered Chinese food Sunday January 1st: Montreal Steaks with Green Goddess salad Monday January 2nd: Chicken Parmesan, popovers, pasta and broccoli
From my home to yours, Happy Holidays. May they be filled with warmth, light and food.
I am not a big YouTube watcher – after talking on Zoom all day 8-10 hours a day, the last thing I want is to watch videos. Also, I just generally prefer the printed word, but a recent profile of June Xie on The Guardian got me watching.
This woman is a badass cook, and is much more along the lines of mostly how I grew up, with a bunch of things throw in a pot or pan, and very few measurements. It was creative, and cheap, and while there were definitely a few recipes that were followed to the letter, most of the time it was simple.
This past weekend found us very busy on Friday and into Saturday. Friday afternoon my son had a haircut, I had to run to the farm to get the next installment of our winter CSA, and then we had a much-delayed Azure Standard pickup. All 3 of those things meant our plan for homemade MYO pizza was off the table until Sunday, so I started picking through our very full freezer for options. I pulled out some pulled pork from Walden Local to thaw, and noodled around the interwebs for ideas. And found it – a tamale pie recipe. Which called for things we didn’t have.
I had ordered groceries – mostly based around the idea that we need lots and lots and lots of cheese for Thanksgiving appetizers, so it wasn’t hard to add (gasp!) a box of corn muffin mix to the order. Do I normally buy pre-made mixes? No, not really, but with only a few minutes here and there to cook, and hungry cold kids after school, I figured I had better take a couple of shortcuts.
I didn’t have creamed corn, but I did happen to have one random can of corn in the house, nor did I have sour cream, but I did have plain Greek yogurt. So I added a full cup of that, more than the recipe called for to offset the lack of cream in the corn.
I baked that, then I covered the top with some of the homemade refried beans I’d made and frozen a while back. Then I added the pulled pork but I also sauteed half a red pepper in with the onions and garlic for a little color and extra veggies (our current goal is to eat 30 varieties of plant-based foods a week) put the enchilada sauce on top of that, and then topped it with shredded cheese and baked it.
And that was how I loosely baked Delish’s Tamale Pie, but not really. At the end of the day my oldest pronounced it good, but it really could have used more flavor. Still, it was filling and warm on a cold night.
I’m a huge fan of the food renaissance that has occurred over the last 2 decades, and I love that people who make food are just as big as rock stars, because food is literally life. I adore trying new recipes, mostly on weekends when I have extra time. I take delight in feeding my family wonderful, healthy meals. I love learning about different cultures via their food.
But look – we all have to eat, right? And not every meal we eat needs to impress Gordon Ramsey. And I’m a fan of the idea that most of the time you shouldn’t be trying.
I mean that. What you should try for is: healthy, nourishing, tasty, and with variety. Pretty, too, I like a good looking meal. But you know what you shouldn’t worry about? Whether you used Himalayan Sea Salt or plain old table salt. If you didn’t use the Burrata the recipe called for vs. just some mozzarella. The pressure to follow recipes exactly and use ingredients that may or may not be out of your budget should be jettisoned.
Completely.
It was just as busy Saturday, so I got up early and tossed some stringy cuts of beef from our meat share into the crock pot with red wine, crushed tomatoes, and onions and carrots – the recipe called for celery but we didn’t have any and I never use it fast enough to make it worth buying – sauteed and then coated with a combination of cinnamon, allspice, pepper and cloves. 10 hours later the stringy beef was shreddable and it went well on top of pearl couscous and a cabbage slaw I just made up, with a dressing of the juice of 2 limes, a couple teaspoons of sugar, a generous scoop of plain Greek yogurt and a little bit of olive oil. I topped it with toasted pumpkin seeds.
This pot roast is always a hit in our house.
The slaw turned out great, even for my not-really-cabbage-loving husband, a win for the ‘use what’s in the house and use a recipe as a jumping off point’ method of feeding everyone.
Because it’s Thanksgiving week and our autumn bulk food stock up time, even though we don’t host this holiday, the pantry and freezers and fridge are literally bursting with food. We’re on for starters Thursday and a series of sides and a dessert for the other side of the family’s Saturday feast. On top of that, it’s holiday cookie baking season, and we ordered our Christmas turkey – oh how i love turkey – so that’s taking up a bunch of space in the freezer. Because everything is so full it’s easy to lose track of things, so I’m working extra hard to try and stay on top of what we have.
This week’s meal plan is a little wonkier than most because of the holidays.
Sunday: Homemade pizza with various toppings – finally! Pesto, fresh mozzarella, sauteed onions, sun dried tomatoes, sausage, shredded mozzarella and tomato sauce are all good options, but really any veggie or condiment we have in the house is fair game. Everyone chooses their own toppings for MYO night.
Monday: Leftover night – Parmesan-crusted chicken I made a while back and froze for a future meal, leftover Italian pot roast, with noodles or more pearl couscous, whatever the kids want. Sauteed spinach on the side, simple with garlic, oil and salt.
Tuesday: Eli Cooks..maybe homemade Empanadas
Wednesday: Chicken Gyros with Naan and tzatziki, a house favorite with roasted Brussels sprouts and onions on the side. Probably a cucumber salad too.
Thursday – Thanksgiving: We make some appetizers and plate some cheese and things. Then onto mashed potatoes and stuffing! Oh, and I’m making these (with sprite for the non-alcohol drinkers and littles) and this amazing salad.
Friday: If we get lucky my older sister and her family will be with us at lunch, and that’s likely going to be a pizza order. Eli and I head out to holiday shop and maybe we’ll get some delicious Indian food out as well. Not a frugal day!
Saturday: Thanksgiving #2. We’re on for creamed onions, a dessert, some wine and Cranberry-raspberry sauce.
And then I’ll prep a dish for Monday, just to get us through. Occasionally our meal plan holds us through the week, but often things change and our plans get upended. Still, we mostly eat at home, even if it’s just some Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken, rice and sliced veggies because no one had time to cook. Or some ground beef and veggies in a simple stir fry over rice.
But we’ll be flexible. And if we don’t have an ingredient, we’ll find something we can use in our house or we’ll move on to another more fitting dish.
Yesterday I bought my oldest a pair of shoes. Platform Ugg booties to be exact, for $150, full price, at Nordstrom. They had asked to go get some concealer, and so we went off for a very rare trip to the mall. On our way out we spotted them, tried them on, bought them instantly.
It was neither planned nor budgeted. They were far out of the normal price range of anything I would buy for a 13 year-old. I don’t think they have taken them off since, they may have even slept in them. The delight on their face at their height and comfort could have been measured in kilowatts.
For me, it was a bit of a way to exorcise some anger at learning that last year a former friend had bullied them, hard, in an approach called relational aggression, which is the pointing, whisper campaigns, talking about someone loudly in their hearing at the cafeteria lunch table, etc. Hard to track or prove, it had been an undercurrent in an already hard year. When it popped up again last week at a shared extracurricular activity, I finally got the full story.
Of course the other child’s mom went into deep denial (Not her baby!We must have misunderstood!), and as there went 11.5 years of social niceties and casual friendship, so did all of my give-a-s**t about it.
I did what any Mom would, I documented, I notified the school it had happened and asked for future monitoring, and I informed the parent that we would be watching, closely in the event that her commitments that it would stop proved themselves not worth the air they were promised in.
And then I took my oldest child to Sephora, got what they needed plus a little, and then as we saw those shoes on the way back to the car, I figured my husband would forgive me (sorry honey, I should have called) and I bought them. Not as a te absolvo to myself for not realizing that their reluctance for school and stress was something bigger than the loss of the friendship compounded by a fall consumed with the loss of their uncle, but because as a result of that and other things makes them think they don’t warrant their parents spending money on them. So they don’t like asking for things.
So I damn well did spend money and reminded them they are worthy of attention, money, and to feel good about themselves. If that was received as parent-y gibberish or it landed I don’t know, but there was a day wreathed in smiles (also hugs as they reveled in their ability to be taller than me).
We’ve been being extremely careful for months and months now. We filled the year with trips and that plus some fairly major unexpected expenses and all the deposits and architect fees we put into the renovation have made things tighter than usual. Add to that inflation and we’re just being super thoughtful before we spend any money on nonessentials.
And this was a nonessential, but in the end…also kind of essential.
Money really can’t buy happiness after a point. Given how often Elon Musk whines on Twitter I observe that no matter how wealthy you get, you can’t escape yourself. Often I feel as much or more delight hiking or sitting with a book as I do in the bigger experiences. I love to travel, and I used to like shopping a lot, although I really don’t now. But sometimes money buys not just a pair of shoes, but a demonstration of value, an experience of real joy along with the stuff.
And that is worth a broken budget once in a while.
Summer mornings, even the weekday ones, are my favorite time. The air is cool enough for a light blanket over my legs. Everyone else is asleep, and I can watch the sunrise through the living room windows while I sip coffee.
Taco the rooster starts crowing far too early, but even that is part of the ambiance here, although I do occasionally consider really how badly we need his company in the here and now, and come up fairly empty on what he’s useful for.
This year is flying by. Everyone I talk to agrees, and no one is exactly sure where the time is going. It’s crawling up on July. The garden is planted, the world is green, but won’t be for much longer – we desperately need for it to rain. School is out and there are two full, lovely months before we have to start gearing up for it again.
And we’ve been busy, with every weekend being filled with commitments. After 2 years of quiet weekends, I’m happy to see everyone and feeling quite overwhelmed, and wishing for time in my garden. Unstructured time is good for all of us.
But on a rainy Sunday last weekend, I was able to slow down. While it was, in fact, Father’s Day, my husband was in Los Angeles, my bestie, who had come to stay for a few days left early that morning and the kids were with their Dad. Other than the dog, who decided to nap through the morning, I was alone and not on a schedule for the first time in ages.
The rest of the country was experiencing a heatwave, but it was downright chilly in Massachusetts. I sat in bed under the blankets and contemplated all the things I could be doing, which included nothing. I sipped my tea and pondered more, occasionally getting up to do a small chore, such as laundry or dishes, then returning to my seat.
Even that time though, was productive, as Sundays are the days to make our meal plan. As we go into summer, time becomes more fungible, and meals more flexible, fresher and based on local ingredients. Our CSA is heading into week 4, and while the garden isn’t producing yet, it will be soon enough. This week I brought home the first zucchinis from the CSA, and cheerfully broke out my spiralizer. I don’t eat zucchini noodles because they are just healthy, I eat them because they are completely delicious, absorbing whatever flavors you add to a saucepan.
We have lettuce and bok choy and turnips galore right now, along with farm-fresh scallions, so my daughter made us homemade Ramen. All you need are noodles, broth, soy sauce and some seasonings, eggs and cut up veggies. It’s cheap, delicious and most of all, accessible, i.e. you don’t have to have a pantry full of fancy ingredients to make it. Slicing up scallions, cucumbers and carrots to go in keep it healthy and they are all affordable veggies.
I do have a pretty diverse pantry, but these days, with grocery prices skyrocketing, I’m focused on how to do it better, cheaper, and full-flavor, with a focus on using up what we have. We love Moroccan and Israeli pearl couscous, and I finally bought a 5-lb bag so that we can have it any time (for comparison,Whole Foods sells 12-ounce boxes for $3.19 each) and 0ver the next week we’ll add Moroccan Chicken and Couscous to our repertoire. The cost of it on Amazon has gone up to $23 but I think we paid $17. Bulk food purchases pay off in the short and long haul if you can store them. I regularly make Dal and my own Lentil Sausage Soup and a 5-lb bag of red lentils still lasts me quite a long time. 18-24 months maybe?
This week I bought some beef (ouch! So not cheap) so that I could marinate some Beef Bulgogi, and pop it in the freezer. Two pounds will feed us for dinner and a couple lunches at some point when no one feels like doing food prep. While it was a bit of a splurge it is very handy to have ready to thaw. And tomorrow we’re going to give Pesto Chicken Saltimbocca a try. I have lots of cherry tomatoes on hand from my last trip to BJs, and I bought some chicken cutlets.
But otherwise, we’ll eat the food we have. The raspberry bushes are starting to produce and we have some other fruits. It’s prime grill time and most of our meals will be focused around that. Hamburgers, grilled veggies, and simple sides, lots of no-recipe recipes. And occasionally just cereal for dinner too. Because it’s summer, and we can.
Warning: This isn’t my usual kind of post. There’s no recipes, for one. There’s a pretty picture, but a sad one.
Sometimes bad things happen to perfectly good people and families. The call in the night. The diagnosis. The accident. And a terrible, horrible no good very bad moment turns into a very long and crummy time.
I’ve done it a bit in my my life, and I call it Taking a Trip to the Suck Palace. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it’s like that book We’re Going on A Bear Hunt. You can’t go over it, you can’t go under it, you can’t go around it, you have to go through it. Whatever the it is, there’s no way other than to acknowledge that for a while it might just be kind of, well, shitty.
For us, it’s been 3 extended family deaths in 4 months and a lot of other crises in between, the kind of run of things where you start making dark jokes with others about how you might be able to open your own morgue and call it Dying to See You. But whatever your ‘it‘ is, sometimes life is kind of hard and sad and difficult, and you have to go to the Suck Palace.
Maui it isn’t. I visualize it as a depressing motel room that needed to be renovated about 30 years ago with grimy 70s orange carpet and a window that looks out onto the dumpster.
Your job now is to be in that room.
And you have to visit it while you are also simultaneously doing your regular life. Meals need to be made. Laundry done, work attended to, bills paid.
I woke up this morning in a good mental space despite it all, knowing that this too, shall pass, even as I was choosing what to wear for a drive to yet another memorial service, this time for an Uncle I adored, who lost a 2 year agonizing battle with cancer. It was no life for him at the end, but his going leaves yet another empty seat that can’t be filled. No one again is going to show my children how to find hermit crabs on the beach in Cape Cod, or help my daughter find so many shells I have to take off my shoe to hold them all.
Even though at night when I step outside, I look at a certain point in the sky, where we noticed an ultra-cool moon at about 9:20 pm on October 20th, 2021, not then knowing an hour later we would get the call that changed all the things, I still know that even if it will never feel ok to lose my people, I will be ok. We will be ok.
But I also remember what it’s like notto know that.
To not know that grief, which is truly physical as well as emotional – it really hurts – will become less of a pile of bricks, less pain. It doesn’t go away, and if you are in the first of the concentric circles of loved ones around someone, their spouse or their children, it’s different than it is if you are in a different concentric ring, a little further away. It’s still awful, it’s just different.
Visits to the Suck Palace last longer than anyone wants to hear about, and even the most patient friends just wish maybe you could just get over it and move on? Gently and politely they push you to talk about something, anything else, and talk about getting your mind off. You know, like even a liquid lunch isn’t likely to make you forget unless you drink to the point where you probably need to get some help for it. I don’t suggest that, as it creates it’s own crisis, although a few well-placed margaritas here and there can help some, if that’s your jam.
In the end, your visit to the Suck Palace will last as long as it lasts, and the more I talk about our losses the more I hear from others who lost multiple family members in a year or less – it’s more common than you think, as are the secondary challenges as you watch grief in action. I have a new boss, and I wasn’t sure how he would react to yet another impact – but instead of frustration, he told me about his year of it, when there were so many deaths so close together he and his siblings had to juggle who could make it to what funeral.
His kindness was everything, as are the random texts from friends just checking in. It really is the little things.
If you are in an outer ring, you send support inward, and any other feelings outward even when that’s hard to do. Finding a physical way to support, such as meals or notes or texts or visits or flowers is a good place to put that energy, even if you don’t get much back in the beginning, consider it an investment in being kind without expectations in return.
Gratitude helps, sleep helps, connection helps more, and giving yourself all the grace in the world. These days my exercise routines are shot between weather and just nonstop demands on my time, so I’m getting a treadmill to help squeeze in the workouts, but I’m also cutting myself a whole bunch of slack.
Hug your people, tell them you love them, plant some flowers, make donations, go for walks, bake…there’s no one right way to do this. And one day you’ll open the door and step out onto the beach and remember how to find a hermit crab in the sand.
And you will smile because it happened and that person’s gifts are still here. Even if through tears.
Most people I know hate January. Cold, dark, it is the month of giving up alcohol and unhealthy food, with it’s only holiday one that not a lot of people get to take off.
I used to feel the same, but after returning from a 2 1/2 year stint in Florida 5 years ago, I now love the it, dark and cold and all. As a recovering winter-hater, the peace and quiet of the month is a breath in our general busyness. There’s no birthdays, no major holidays, nothing that needs to be bought or wrapped or shopped for. Our weekends, even without Omicron putting things on hold, are calm and unplanned. Seedlings, unless I want winter lettuce or sweet peas aren’t planted. There’s no yardwork to do except the occasional shoveling.
It’s a time to get frugal and eat up what we have in our pantry and freezer. I try to limit what we buy, make meal plans, and find new and interesting healthy recipes to try with what we have. The winter squash start to soften up around now, so we need to consume them before they become compost-worthy. We still have tons of onions, garlic and sweet potatoes. Pesto, Kale, and other preserved foods are waiting to be used in cozy meals.
It’s also time to clean and declutter. On January 1, the lovely holiday decorations somehow magically transform themselves into annoying clutter that needs to be immediately put away. I like to hang on to the outside lights for a week or two, but the inside stuff needs to go. Along with that I spend my time sorting and clearing surfaces and spaces.
It’s time to be cozy. A new coverlet and knit blanket cover our bed in creams and whites with touches of red trim, making for a warm spot to curl up. There’s fires in the woodstove, there”s soup and stews on the regular, and lots of cups of tea after walks in the cold. We have throw blankets everywhere in the house, and we use them.
Hygge is a term that has been widely circulated in the US, the Danish concept of cozy, and we live it here at Sithean. Warm things, soft clothes, cozy homemade food, getting rid of clutter and time with people we love. Come February there are school breaks, my daughter’s birthday, Valentine’s day and the world starts to pick up energy again, but in January, restful and warm is the only way to be..
After the holidays, the kids went to their Dad’s for a couple of days, and Eli and I finally took a breath. There were lots of chores to do, including deep cleans of the various bedrooms, and the start of dismantling the Christmas decor, but there was also quiet mornings sitting with coffee and my thoughts, and time together. I was also inexplicably cranky and mad at the world some of the time, despite getting more sleep than I had in probably years. Still, I managed to put my cranky down long enough to celebrate the 4 years, and immense changes in our life, since Eli and I had our first date on a bitterly cold December 30th night, a quick drink that turned into 6 hours, mostly spent laughing.
And then our New Year’s Eve feast, with our traditional homemade scallion pancakes (there’s non-paleo ones to be made as well of course, but these are so good I don’t know why you would bother), homemade lo mein and this year’s new star was Eli taking on Crab Rangoon that supplemented some take out, and was paired with the 2nd Harry Potter movie, now that the kids are old enough to work our way through the series.
The new year is coming, and I’m not too old or too cynical to set resolutions and plan for things to be different. Our eating always gets healthier in January, using up all the veggies we’ve preserved over the summer and fall, and trying to spend as little as possible on groceries. Tonight we’ll eat homemade Chicken Tortilla Soup, a simple pantry-based recipe
In addition to our New Years Day tradition of setting goals for the year, Melissa, my next-door-neighbor/close friend/life coach guru, handed me a tradition a few years ago of choosing a word or phrase each year that defines what you want of it – a mantra, so to speak, with an expiration date.
Thoughts of what it should be percolated in my head as I went to HMart to stock up last week, and as I went for long walks as many mornings as I could. This year is not one for radical change, that I knew. It’s for tweaks to make our lives more balanced, less cluttered, easier. It’s about acceptance, making peace with our loss and the things that I don’t love about myself. It’s about making things easier for myself and others.
And so this year, for 2022, Go Easy is my mantra. Go easy on the world around me, struggling with all the things. Go easy on my family, who do the best they can. Go easy on myself – I expect too much, and push too hard. I’ll invent recipes, blog and do a great job at work and as a parent and a spouse without having to feel bad when I sometimes miss the mark.
January and February are for decluttering, relaxing, exercising, and making cozy, healthy foods. Work and school of course. But I’m going to try to let up the pressure on myself and others to get it all right and go easy on all of us.
Happy New Year everyone. I hope 2022 is softer and gentler than 2021 for all of us.
Thanksgiving passed with light and food and joy and sadness as well, augmented by another death – this one of my brother-in-law’s mom, who had come to the end of her time with little quality of life, but so soon after her son, and on the Thanksgiving holiday as well is another brutal knife in that family.
This year, we are all winding more tightly together as a result for the holidays. Every candle in the window, light on the porches, and tradition that can be upheld will be. Every hug of our people is another candle lit.
Eli and I were fortunate enough to have a day out to do some small-business holiday shopping and even go out to dinner in an actual restaurant for the first time in ages. Of course, we woke up to headlines about the Omicron variant the next day, so it might be the last time in a while. While I don’t miss all the things of the before-times, before Covid-19, I do miss some. Restaurants are one of them, mostly because it often symbolized a too-rare evening out with my husband.
I miss my brother too, with a grief that is sometimes so deep I need an extension ladder to climb out and back into the world. Saturday morning was particularly tough. I woke up too early again, and prepared to go for a walk with my neighbor and friend, Melissa. I wasn’t feeling it, sad and unmotivated, but I had postponed enough times that I knew I was out of excuses, although she would have understood. There was an ever-so-tiny bit of snow on the ground, and the wind was biting. All too many excuses to stay home were there.
But.
I saw something oddly pink in the stark landscape as I stepped off the porch.
A Rose in Winter
Melissa describes the process of grief as much like the book ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ and I’d add to that the ever-pervasive pandemic as well.
You can’t go over it. You can’t go under it. You can’t go around it. You have to go through it.
By the end of the walk I was warm through from talking and smiling. And I kept returning in my thoughts to that one rose which really shouldn’t be blooming on a day like yesterday. It was too cold, too grey, too out of season, too-all-the-things. But bloom it did, if only for a day. By the time we got home from a lovely dinner at my parents that night, it had started to crumple and die, as all things must, leaving behind a photograph, and my memory.
Even though it only stayed for less than a day, it was enough to remind me that there is always magic here, and that nothing ever truly leaves us, that energy is neither created nor destroyed.
“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they neednot have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen. – Aaron Freeman, via NPR
Little House on the Fairy Hill 