Monthly Archives: March 2021

About Odd Things

Posted on by

I finished off the Parmesan cheese the other day, the Kraft kind with the red double flip top that lets you choose what kind of adventure in cheesiness you would like. I washed the container out and put it in the recycle bin but when I went to toss in the lid as well, my hand wouldn’t let go. I took a closer look at it, then put it in the place where I keep “The Odd Things I Cannot Throw Away”.

Sometimes, such “found” items are just…un-throw-away-able. The box that my husband’s Maui Jim’s sunglasses came in with the cardboard top that looks like real wicker? A good holder for my Post-it notepads. The miniature bottle of Tabasco that accompanied a room-service meal in New York? Now a tiny memory that sits on my bookshelf. The stopper from my Starbuck’s coffee? Strangely interesting and even more impressive in quantity (not unlike the collection of bread bag clips I alluded to in last week’s post.)

After my Mom passed away and we were going through her house, I found an old cookie tin on a shelf in the basement rumpus room that held a magpie’s assortment of saved objects: old board games pieces, some wooden beads and some tiny plastic gewgaws that she had saved. This last category held things that could have easily been thrown away, or recycled, like (wait for it) bread bag clips or the lid from an interesting perfume bottle. My own magpie instincts were modeled to me a long time ago.

What did she see in these tiny bits of ephemera? For her, saving these things was a bit like an eccentric savings account, not unlike my father-in-law’s shop where, with a little bit of thought, he is able to forage out the exact size bolt or screw for an odd job. Odd jobs, after all, require odds things. But the odd things are also sometimes gateways to the weird and wonderful, art projects that are so utterly unique by virtue of the the odds that spawned them.

When I was still in single digits, my Mom created for me a Barbie doll house. Now, this wasn’t a typical doll house that could be carted around and it didn’t live in my bedroom. Instead my Mom commandeered three shelves of the closet in my oldest brother’s basement bedroom – and created a Barbie condo. The bathtub? Carved from a blue fabric softener bottle. The clock on the wall? An old broken wristwatch divorced of its straps. The bed-side lamps? Two plastic pop-tops from cheap champagne. (Take a look next time. You won’t be able to see anything else.)

That Barbie doll house has inhabited my psyche for forty years now. I have so many questions: Did I ask for a Barbie doll house or did Mom get the idea on her own? Was it due to the critical mass of tchotchkes that she had saved up that needed to go somewhere? (Not unlike the patchwork lap blankets she cobbled together for all of us from old polyester sweaters and Fortrel pants.) How did my brother feel about having a Barbie doll house – and his elementary school sister playing – in his bedroom? Did I even like Barbie dolls?

I don’t really remember playing with dolls that much, but I do remember that house. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t throw away that Parmesan cheese top the other day. It would make the perfect Barbie ottoman, with storage for Barbie knitting needles and Barbie yarn, a hobby she’s probably taken up during Covid. Barbie is getting older, after all, just like me. But her condo – in my mind – is still a classic.

About Spring Cleaning

Posted on by

[Today: another throwback post. I find it interesting when I read back my words some twenty years ago how entrenched I was in the role of mothering and domestic engineering. I loved it then – still love the mothering – but the spring cleaning has turned into year round cleaning. More manageable, less odious – not to mention I don’t have three little ruffians upending my efforts every waking hour anymore. Good times. And the gender roles aren’t nearly as strict now. Also: I don’t have much of a Martha Stewart consciousness anymore except to enjoy her friendship with Snoop Dog.]

Every year about this time I have an irrepressible urge to rid my house of all excess dirt, grime, recyclables and of course, any clothing that has mysteriously shrunk in size. As the old adage goes, in spring a man’s heart turns to baseball and a woman’s towards baseboards. Or more specifically, the chocolate milk that seeped under there when one of your children decided to demonstrate jumping jacks, forgetting he had a full glass in his hand.

I always know that the time has come by the state of affairs in my storage room. One look in there and you might think I had some sort of disease, the kind that the absence of many Styrofoam trays, paper towel tubes, milk carton caps and Pringles cans would preclude my normal functioning in life. A symptom of my ailment is my total inability to throw something away (or recycle it) before it has migrated to said storage room and has become part of a teetering tower that threatens to landslide into the hallway if you don’t open and close the door VERY quickly. Which makes retrieving the vacuum cleaner a problem. Which is why the kids have the vacuum cleaner in their toy room. They think it’s an alligator.

I like to think that it’s a frontier quality that I have honed, saving things beyond all reason. One never knows when Martha Stewart comes up with a way of making a “beautiful” giant topiary from several detergent bottles and hundreds of bread clips, which (of course) I have. But having three little boys in the house has foils all my aesthetic intentions. Whereas I envision a teeny tiny skyscraper from the medicine box I can’t throw away, my boys see a weapon of the grenade variety. Cardboard trays? Shields. Wrapping paper tubes? Swords. Which explains the strange ring-shaped bruises that they all sport on their tummies.

And so the second clue that it’s spring-cleaning time is when the playroom is littered with squashed boxes and tubes. The reason it has to be spring when you begin the Big Clean is so that you can send your kids outside for an indefinite amount of time. This tradition dates back to the beginning of history when cavewoman, at the sign of the first thaw, told her children to go play outside and not to come back until she called them. Although she didn’t have a Swiffer or a Dirt Devil, her cleanup was relatively easy, consisting merely of removing all the bones and rocks that had made their way into the cave over the winter and then sweeping it out with a stick that had some dried weeds attached to it.

Of course, all you really have to do is tell your family that you’re going to clean today and they will all miraculously disappear, including your husband. This also dates way back to ancient Scotland when Old MacDonald fled the house and his wife’s feather duster. Picking up a stick in a fit of male protest, he got in touch with his primitive side and knocked a stone flying into a gopher hole, thus inventing another timeless spring tradition.

And so spring-cleaning has also become synonymous for Mommy’s Alone Time. Which makes it a perfect time to forget about the impending avalanche in your storage room, kick back and tune your television to see what Martha’s up to. Or to the baseball season opener. Whatever it takes until the feeling passes.

About the Farm (and Some Pigs)

Posted on by
“Pigs by the Radiator” Copyright Sharlie Donily

One thing I have been using a lot more during the pandemic is a nice little library app called Libby. It’s like a one-stop shop for all my digital library needs – especially audiobooks. Sometimes when I just want to listen to something while I walk or cook or exercise, I check out what’s available right now – kind of like Russian library roulette. And so, I found myself listening to Charlotte’s Web. The bonus: it was read by the author E. B. White himself.

I came to this classic book kind of late, not reading it until I was in my thirties. I was enchanted then and was enchanted again as I listened last week to a story about a couple of unlikely best friends: a pig and a spider. The setting however, was not unfamiliar to me: a barn with lots of other residents. In the story there are cows, geese, even a rat who goes through his own story arc. And I reminisced a little about when I had a barn to visit like Fern, the girl who saved Wilbur the pig from an early demise.

One of my favorite memories about living on the farm, however, isn’t about me visiting the animals in the barn but the other way around. In the early spring, when a litter of baby pigs arrived but the temperature dipped too low for their safety, my Dad or my brothers would bring a cardboard box of piggies into the house for the night. The box would be placed next to the wall register in my bedroom off the kitchen and I was lulled to sleep by the gentle squeaks of warm baby piggies. (I would pay cash money for a sleep app that featured a “warm newborn piglets in a cardboard box” soundtrack.)

I’m so thankful for having grown up on the farm. Although it was never my ambition to keep being a farm girl, I am glad that I know where my bread and butter actually do come from. I’m re-reading another favorite right now – Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver – about her family’s year-long chronicle with eating a diet of only locally sourced foods, much of which was grown on their own farm. I decided to read this book slowly, enjoying the corresponding chapters with each ensuing month. It starts in March. Kingsolver, an wonderful writer, but also a botanist and a vigilante gardener outlines in the introduction how very far removed most people are from the source of their food. Even a biologist friend, hearing Kingsolver recap over the phone the goings-on in her garden was surprised to hear that the potatoes were “up”: she thought that potatoes only had bottoms, no tops.

Most of us who grow up on the farm know that you name your pets with caution, understanding the caveat that having a name doesn’t mean they will escape their eventual fate like Wilbur the Pig does. (And zero of us knows a spider who managed it.) But there’s something very gratifying about knowing where your Easter ham comes from or the colored eggs (hint: not a bunny) or the asparagus that Kingsolver rhapsodizes about in her March chapter.

Thank goodness for farmers and writers who remind us of these simple life-giving things.

(Oh, and Instagrammers, too!)

About Spring

Posted on by

It’s happening. Once the calendar flips to March, we can rightfully claim that it’s the beginning of the end of winter. Yes, we still get snow and negative double-digits well into April and sometimes May, but the third month means Spring, like Aslan, is on the move.

And one of the most gratifying things about my long walks outside in spring has to be the puddles, lightly frozen over, that are oh so satisfying to crunch my way through – as long as I am wearing waterproof shoes. What is it about frozen puddles, or melted puddles, that make for such fun for kids? And adults? I think it might be the hidden delight of being about to shatter something with no consequences other than a wet sock if you misjudge the depth of said puddle.

Maybe it’s just all that wonderful water. In the spring, it abounds, causing floods and havoc and deep moisture, a promise for future greenery. When the ice and snow starts to melt, it thaws out our souls as well. Maybe that’s why I get playful in the puddles in the spring.

When I was younger, we had a culvert that crossed under the road near our driveway on the farm. When the spring runoff happened, I would spend hours splashing in the water that came tumbling out one end or throwing sticks in the other, then racing across the road to see if I could beat it. Not unlike the famous game of Poohsticks that Winnie-the-Pooh played with his friend Piglet.

I had such good memories of playing in the water in the spring that when I had my three little boys, I was happy to allow them to wade through the swimming pools that formed in the ditches beside our acreage. They would tread carefully at first, breaking the ice, but then eventually they would start wading through, filling up their boots with water. When they got cold enough, we headed into the house for a hot bath – back when all three of them could still fit in the tub together – and then hot chocolate to warm the outside, then the inside.

It’s here, but it’s a limited time only. Get on your boots. Get out there and have a splash. It might freeze your toes but that’s the price of a little fun sometimes. And it’s worth it for the hot chocolate after.