A Sunfish on Lake Riley

Published on Monday, August 2, 2010 in Briar Haven and Conversing With the Rain. 11 Comments

The Briar Haven series begins here: Briar Haven, Part I– The Demon Lives at Seven

 When a boat capsizes, the first step in the procedure is for the captain to call the names of each crew and passenger and say:

“Are you okay?”

Once all are accounted for, the captain has some choices to make – namely, whether to attempt to right the boat and head back to port, or whether to focus on getting help.

On Lake Riley, help is never far away.  In fact, the Briar Haven launch keeps the campers in view at all times, so that part is more of an exercise than a life-or-death decision.

If the boat is only half over – lying with the mast on the surface of the water – you can right it.  This is hard work.  One person – the heaviest, which can be a mortifying assessment – stands on the daggerboard – the long piece that sticks from the bottom of the boat into the water.  Everyone else gets on the other side – under the gunwales, the mast – and puts their hands up. 

The one on the daggerboard gives the count – she bears down with all her weight and rocks – One, two, three …. PUSH!

And everyone on the other side treads hard, breathes deep and shoves.

The boat is a little sunfish.  Most often it goes right over.  Sometimes, you do it so well, it actually swings past the midpoint, keeps going, and the mast splashes back down again on the other side.  When that happens, everyone has to switch places and start again.  That can go on all day.  Frustrating, sure, but you keep working the procedure until eventually it is righted.  You get in, you bail, and head for home.

At Briar Haven, there is a procedure for everything – from how to set the table to how to board a canoe.  No matter what happens you know what you’re supposed to do, because there is a plan.

A really good plan, I learned there, will survive a catastrophe. 

It will think for you when panic locks your brain.

  Briar Haven Part III — If We Were All The Same, There Would Be No Olympics

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Briar Haven, Part II — In Which I Make Soup

Published on Sunday, August 1, 2010 in Briar Haven and Conversing With the Rain. 29 Comments

Briar Haven, Part I — The Demon Lives at Seven 

“What’s your favorite thing about Briar Haven?”  Mare asks me.  She is fresh from the shower, wrapped in a towel and burrowed into the kitchen couch, watching me fold laundry.

“The way the mist rises on the lake in the morning while you’re having breakfast,” I answer.  “And how every day you think it’s going to be cold, but by 10 a.m. the mist is gone and it’s hot out.”

“Do you think anyone there remembers you?”  Mare asks.

Ahahaha – yeah, about that.

It is entirely possible that someone there remembers me – Briar Haven tends to keep staff for decades.  So maybe I will encounter someone who knew me as that girl I was, and maybe it will hurt.

Or maybe they will just be shocked that I managed to produce the bright-eyed, well-adjusted, perfectly un-spooky girl standing beside me in her Briar Haven fleece.  God knows I am.

 “Not many people there will know me, Mare, it was many years ago.  And that’s good.  It’s your place now.  You’ll always be my kid, no matter where you go.  This is a chance to figure out who else you are.”

At the very beginning of the summer, Mare pulled my old trunk out of the basement, scrubbed it herself, laid it out in the sun on Clover Hill to remove the dingy smell.  She brought it into the kitchen and insisted that we start packing it, three weeks before she was to go.

The sight of it – my name still visible in faded stenciling on the front – is incongruous in the warm kitchen of the Tilty-Floored Farmhouse.   It occupies the periphery of my vision when I am cooking, or feeding Eden, or getting the girls loaded for a trip to the market.  

I have been slowly filling it with things off the equipment list – shorts and t-shirts and good walking shoes.  Camping blankets and a basket of toiletries to take to the wash house.  I have remembered things that aren’t on the list – a good mattress pad, itch cream, a tarp for her bed in case it rains.  We treated her to a great headlamp and I showed her how to read under the covers.

At first she was excited and fearless and every day demanded to know HOW MUCH LONGER UNTIL BRIAR HAVEN?  I was the best mother in the whole darn world.  My seven-year-old – SEVEN! the people marveled – wanted to go to overnight camp.

But then she started cramming the tray with little things she suddenly couldn’t stand to leave behind – the flowered diary with the tiny lock, her quill pen, Ren’s music box.   Every time she looks at the trunk now, she blanches.   She is starting to ask more questions,  and as she watches me do laundry, I know what’s coming.

 “I’m scared.  I think I don’t want to go.”

The hairs along my arms stand up.  I can’t settle my hands.  Can’t sit, can’t stand, can’t contain myself in my own skin.  I put down the little pink shorts I was folding and go to the fridge where I dig, find some onions, put them on the counter, and proceed to chop.   

“Baby, if you weren’t nervous, I’d be worried that you just didn’t get it,” I say, leveling those onions with vicious focus.  Chopitty-chop.

“Oh,” she nods.

Back to the fridge for a bottle of fizzy water.   I take a swig, swallow bile and carbon, pick up my knife again.  The trunk is there, small and dark in the corner.  I want to throw it out the window, watch it shatter glass, splinter on my lawn. 

This is too hard.

I have had too many children.  I was crazy even to have the one, I know it, but they were so cute I kept having them without thinking about the consequences – about the fact that one day they would be seven and it wouldn’t be enough just to be there.

“Let’s play ‘what if,’” I manage.  A big stupid tear falls on the cutting board, I sniffle hard and clear my throat.     “What if … your bunk mate has a GIGANTIC UGLY WART ON HER NOSE … and you even think it moves when you talk to her?”

Mare laughs.                                        

Oh-my-god-the-onion-is-done-now-what.

“Okay, first step – DON’T LOOK AT IT!”  I say, moving to the fridge and peering in.  “Whatever you do!

“Second step:” she chimes in with a giggle, “Say nothing.  Don’t laugh.  And later, in bed, laugh to myself all I want.”

“Exactly,” I say. “Okay.  Another one.  What if … you decide you hate it and you want to go home?” 

Ah, celery!   I take it to the cutting board.  Chopped celery in little tiny cubes.  In piles of cubes.  Next to the onion.

“Do you think that will happen?”

“Oh, yes!  Absolutely.  It’s part of the whole experience.  Everybody feels that way.  The key is to have a plan.  So what if?  What will you do?”

“I’ll call you.”

“You know, they don’t let campers call home.  It’s part of it.”  (Unless you are wailing hysterically that your mother promised you could go home – that works, I hear.)

“I’ll write you a letter,” Mare said.

“Right.  And if you send me a letter that says, ‘Momma, come get me,’ what do you think I’m going to do?”

“Get in the car.”

I will get in the car and I will pound the shit out of anyone who gets between me and you.

“Exactly.  So if you write that letter, I think you better not send it right away.   I think you better put it under your pillow.  Leave it there for a day.  Because, you know, wanting to go home is perfectly normal.  Everyone feels that way.  But it passes.  So put the letter under your pillow, and remind yourself that it passes.”

 On my countertop, a pile of chopped-up things.  A pan.  Soup.  I’m making soup.  It’s a hundred degrees out, let’s simmer.  Why-the-fuck-not.

I find the plastic container filled with thick strips of white-fleshed sea bass brought home from a colleague after a spectacular weekend catch.  I slice fish into chunks, feel for bones, slip stray scales away with my thumbs.

“Come outside with me,” I say, carrying the tray out to the grill.  I cook out there in the summer, because to cook in the kitchen would be unbearably hot.

Mare follows me, her long lean body wrapped in the towel, the edge of which she is chewing.  I sauté the chopped-up things and then add the lobster stock from last weekend’s shells.

“I’m half excited, half terrified,” she says. 

“Best things in life are like that,” I answer.  “Do you have any idea how utterly undone I was the night before I had you?”

She laughs, my daughter in the smoke and the summer woods and the coming twilight.

  The first time I stepped out on to this deck, adjoining the old screened porch with its view of the forest, I thought, “Wow.  This feels just like being at Briar Haven.”

My love of land and trees and earth was born in those long terrible weeks, in finding the goodness of what was around me, even as the darkness inside me deepened.

 “I would not send you to Briar Haven if I did not absolutely believe you will love it there,” I tell her. “I think it will be a very special, very beautiful week for you.  You’ll miss us, but it will be all right.”

***

Two nights later. A shrill electrical wail breaks through the silent bedroom, the thickness of sleep, the clatter of the window air conditioner.

Mare, I think, with a starburst of panic from my core out to my fingers and toes.  A squint at blue digital clock numbers: 4:02 a.m.

“Hello, is she okay?” I say into the cordless receiver.  She is not at camp yet, I struggle to remind myself.  She is at a sleepover at Ryan’s.

“She’s fine,” Ryan says.  “She’s having a hard night.”

“Okay, I’m on my way.”

Mary has been going on sleepovers for several years now and has never once called home.

I fumble for pants, keys, shoes.

A terrible hour.  Is it yesterday or tomorrow? 

Driving in the darkness, the familiar forms fade into each other and even the gentlest of roads feels menacing.

In later years my mother said she had not brought me home because a child psychologist told her it would be devastating to my self-esteem to be allowed to quit.  I don’t believe that story, but here in the twilight where I want to tell Mare it is all too much, camp is a huge mistake, she shouldn’t go — I wonder what it would do to her; to quit, to have me quit on her behalf, before she even starts.

What would it do to her to get there and discover she has made a terrible mistake and the world is just not as beautiful  and she is not as strong as she thought?

How did I ever allow this to get so far?

There is no repression in the pre-dawn, particularly when you are alone.  Each sleeping house seems safer and cozier than any I could ever make for my children.  Those people are asleep because they have not done this to their daughters – because they are not destined to be destructive parents.

And then my headlights are lighting the long driveway to Ryan’s house,  where two figures are sitting on the porch.  I park and cross the lawn toward them, gathering an inventory of the socially-appropriate vocabulary I will need to collect my daughter without revealing that what I really want to do is scale the pretty blue siding, scamper to the roof, and howl at the moon.

A blast of cold water flings into my face.

Automatic sprinklers.  Of course.

So I arrive at Ryan’s doorstep in my pj’s in that horrible predawn, water dripping from my chin and eyebrows. 

Mary is quiet and dry-eyed, her sleeping bag and pillow in her lap.  I am surprised there are no tears.

“You’re totally going to want to duck on the way out,” I say.

“She’s been talking a lot about camp,” Ryan says to me. 

“Thanks.”

Mary stands to go, and her calm intrigues me. 

 I tell her to get under the sleeping bag with me.  She does and we run through the sprinklers together and when we get to the car we are laughing. 

She piles in, I shut her door and then lean my back against it.  I look at the moon and make a checklist.

Really, sometimes, it’s just that simple. 

Sprinklers and checklists.

1)  Don’t tell her she doesn’t have to go.  Let her introduce that idea if she wants to, but don’t you do it.

2)  She doesn’t have to go.  You’re in charge, here, not some bullshit made-up psychiatrist from the 1980’s.  If it’s not right for Mare, you pull her, no regrets, no apologies.

3)  Remember that she is not you – you don’t know what she is actually feeling.  Let her talk first.

4)  Remember that she might be saying she feels a certain way to see what your reaction is.  Don’t give validity to irrationality – respect all of her reactions but set the example and don’t fuel  mindless panic.

“I was trying to sleep,” she says, as I back the car down the driveway.  “And then my foot itched.  And I think my nervousness about camp is what itched it, you know?”

“What a great way to describe it,” I smile.  “I’m sure that’s exactly what happened.”

“I’m nervous about camp,” she repeats.

“It’s just a feeling,” I say.  We ride in silence.  I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t.

The Tilty-Floored Farmhouse is deliciously still when I open the front door.  Mare dumps her stuff next to the trunk and goes up to the tiny bedroom she shares with her sisters.  I see her peer into Eden’s crib, pat her back, then fall into her bed, asleep instantly.

I find my way to my own bed, pull up the afghan, and cry, drifting off just as sunlight is filling the corners of the room.

Briar Haven — A Sunfish on Lake Riley

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Briar Haven, Part I — The Demon Lives at Seven

Published on Saturday, July 31, 2010 in Briar Haven and Conversing With the Rain. 46 Comments

This is part I of a four-part series.

I’m not much for anniversaries, so it surprised Cute Husband how excited I was for our sixth.

“Six, really?” he asked.  “Not five or ten … six?”

My parents divorced after their fifth, I reminded him.  Ah, he said.

You don’t want to live your life this way, looking over your shoulder to see if the bad thing is gaining on you.   Still, we are all a product of something,  and for me the marriage demon lived at six, and every subsequent anniversary has been something of a six-plus-howevermany celebration for me.   

In my motherhood, the demon lived at seven.

***

From the beginning it has startled me that my children like me, that they seek me out for affection, that I am the thing that makes them feel safest in the world.  When they are babies, I feel pretty good about my ability to fulfill that.  I breastfeed.  I coo, I rub and pat and I come every god-damned-time they call.  It’s a simple formula and it has brought me success.

But I’m always waiting for them to hate me.  Worse, I am waiting to find out they’re not okay, and it’s my fault.

Because I find it implausible that I am capable of raising healthy daughters.

Bad stuff happened before I was seven, and bad stuff happened after, but along the living breathing line of my life there is a dark scar in the summer of that year.  The course of my character was diverted and whoever I might have been without it, gone forever. 

And it happened because of camp.

She told me I would love it.  She told me I would have the time of my life.  But it was for two months, and I had never been away from home before.

She told me to think about it for a week and tell her next Tuesday what I had decided.  Tuesday came and went and she didn’t ask me and I was thrilled.  I was off the hook.

 Sometime in May she told me it was time to start packing my trunk for Briar Haven.  

I sobbed. 

“When you didn’t answer me, I assumed it was a yes,” she said.  “I’ve already paid the money, you have to go.”  Besides, she added, normally they didn’t take children as young as me, but they had made an exception when she told them how grown-up I was.

Thirty days past my seventh birthday, she dropped me off.  The only way she got me out of the car was by swearing that if I didn’t like it after one week she’d take me back.

Exactly one week later, in the room with oak walls covered with black and white pictures of girls in bloomers rowing canoes, I called my mother and invoked her promise to come get me.

I had entered the office believing I would be in my own bed the next night.  I left the office knowing my mother didn’t want me.

That night I vomited in my sleep for the first time.  My twenty year-old counselor struggled to clean me up in the darkness.  The other girls woke and made fun of me.  

Over the next two months, I became the sad girl, the odd one.  I was nauseated all the time, afraid of the dark, and sometimes I puked in my sleep.  People said I smelled funny.

That was the girl who returned to Boston at the end of the summer, who tried to rejoin her second-grade classmates and remember what she had been like before.   What the camp and my mother had called “homesickness” followed me as a dull roar of anxiety I started to feel all the time – and would struggle with the rest of my life.

I was sent to Briar Haven for two more summers, and then to other camps every summer after that until I was fourteen.  It never mattered that I didn’t want to go.

I became that unique beast of the dysfunctional WASPY American family – institutionalized.  I grew adept at eating in cafeterias and showering with strangers and navigating the social dramas of untended girls.  I devoured books and I scrawled diaries and I acquired whatever basic athletic, art, outdoors skills I needed to get by.

Although I have learned to manage it, I still dread socializing in groups.

And on some key matters, I struggle to know what normal is. 

***

“I want to go to CAMP!!” Mare said to me with a gigantic grin.

She was six. 

She read books about camp, asked older kids all about it, played “camp” with her sister.   Her Daring Book for Girls was dog-eared and beloved with little pieces of tissue marking the pages on how to use a jackknife, cook over an open fire, make a macramé bracelet.

“Why couldn’t it be horses or Disney-freaking-world?” I said.

But it couldn’t be because she was Mary, my fierce adventure-girl, my chatter-bug who wants to join the ecology club and unite kids to fight the oil spill.  Mare, who doesn’t just swing on the monkey bars, but climbs over the top of them as high as she can go, who builds a sister-swing to hang from a large oak tree — and it actually works.   Mare who could spend all afternoon trying to save a wounded earth worm, or constructing a wild-animal shelter in our back yard.

On a whim, I Googled Briar Haven.  They had introduced a special 10-day program for seven year-old girls.   I filled out the online form before I could come to my senses.  They sent a little introductory video on DVD and a map of the grounds.  Within days the map was tattered and I had to e-mail again for a new one she could hang on the wall.

She memorized the video.

“It’s perfect for her,” Cute Husband said.  “It’s exactly right.  And I think,” he added carefully, “that it would do you a lot of good, too.”

When we told her, she squealed and screeched and rolled around and said it was even better than Christmas.

Briar Haven, Part II:  In Which I Make Soup

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Vegetable Curry — A Recipe In Captions

Published on Thursday, July 29, 2010 in Recipes. 5 Comments

We are coming into my favorite time of year -- late summer/early fall. The ground is exploding and everywhere we go are little roadside stands selling earthy-smelling warm vegetables full of streaks and mottles and vibrant color.

I must have curry. Because it is delicious, because it is absurdly healthy, because it is cool enough to cook inside and I want the smell of it wafting through the house. Curry starts with ginger (NOT local. To me, anyway). I cut all the nubs off, peel, make a cube. I cut the cube into sheets, then strips, then tiny cubes. The onions are cooking up while I do this. I toss the ginger in, and then the garlic.

It doesn't even matter what vegetables you use. What's good? What's colorful? I must have eggplant, and little potatoes, and cauliflower. I had a bunch of kinds of squash, and of course peppers. I cooked it until it was getting brown, and then I added a little water. Chicken broth works, too, but I am proud that I have one vegan dish.

Here's where I tell you -- I have no idea what I'm doing. I am sure I am breaking a million Sacred Curry Rules, but I don't know them so I don't mind. Write to tell me, it won't bother me. Some day I will have a mortar and pestle and a recipe and I'll make my own curry. Until then, I've tried every powder and paste available locally and this is the stuff I like: A really cheap brand called "Taste of India." I add a lot. Then I add tomato sauce. Is that wrong? I'm sure it's wrong. I better not tell you about the squeeze of lemon, I'll really be getting e-mails then.

Add cilantro, chopped. Snow peas or sugar snaps or green beans. Add a protein like chickpeas or kidney beans. (I sometimes add cut up hard boiled egg at the end.) Let it thicken, season, smell, contemplate. This is what curry is about -- you have to keep with it, tasting and testing until it's right for you. At the very end, I pile local baby spinach on top, turn the heat off, drop the lid down. Then I set the table.

This is the stuff. After you have your curry the way you want it, you put it over rice, and then spoon some chutneys over. Geeta's onion is my favorite, but also the tamarind and papaya. But dig around, try all the funky fun flavors there are, and mix them up, too. This curry is even better second day. You can put it in an omlete, too.

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Shopping — A Day in Pictures

Published on Tuesday, July 27, 2010 in Dancing and crying and doing our hair. 35 Comments

We went to the shoe store because a newly-walking girl must have properly-fitted toddler shoes.

Instantly, we spied the pink Primigi Mary Janes.  I said,

“If I had millions, I would buy these, just for fun.”

And then I saw the price — $25! Marked down from $60!  — These are good, sound toddler shoes but … pink patent leather?  How impractical.  And then Eden reached out a fat fist and grabbed one and while I was telling Ren to quit taking the Lelli Kellys off the shelf Eden snarked and shoved the shoe at me.

So I put it on her.

And she smiled.

And I said, “NO, SORRY THAT ROLE HAS BEEN CAST HAVE YOU NOT MET YOUR SISTER REN?”

And the shoe-lady pulled out a perfectly respectable pair of purple toddler sneakers — Stride Rites — and tried to ram one on Eden’s foot but she looked up with big chocolatey eyes and said,

“No, no, no, no, no!!”

 and before it got one step further, I said,

“STOP.” And put a hand on the woman’s hand on my daughter’s foot.

Because I am a seasoned mother now.

She stopped, and looked annoyed or whatever, but Eden wasn’t fussing any more.

I took the sneaker off her and she smiled and handed me the pink shoe.  I sighed and put it on her, and found the mate and put that on her, and the shoe lady said, “They’re a perfect fit!” and Eden stomped happily off.

In her first ever pair of real shoes.

They're Italian!

I saw the price of the sneakers — $30!  HA!

And then I found a pair, a $20 pair, hidden away in the back of the shelf and I pulled it out thinking, “What are the chances?” and sure enough, they were in Ren’s size.  She was looking longingly at the Lelli Kellys and said her old nasty flip-flops were hurting her and I said, “Momma does not respond to hints.  Use real words to tell me what you want.”

“I WANT NEW SHOES,” she said, and I pulled the $20 pair out from behind my back and she grinned.    She sat down right away and put them on her feet and smiled.

She was very satisfied with those $20 shoes.

Then we went grocery shopping. This is my view of the cart.

35 Comments

Mussels — A Recipe In Captions

Published on Sunday, July 25, 2010 in Recipes. 20 Comments

Prepped. Guess where I got the mussels? -- That's right! Off the back of a truck! These were $4 bucks a bag. (One bag was not enough, two was too much. Ah, well, too much it is.) Very simple ingredients. Very New England. Actually, no, very Spanish. Whatever, roll with it, people.

Personally, I believe it should be a federal crime to cook mussels over dry heat. However, it's still too hot to turn on the range in the Tilty-Floored kitchen, so I just brought out my trusty All-Clad and put it on the grill. I got it hot, and then I added a splash of oil and the chorizo. This is spicy stuff and it has great color.

It also seems wrong to cook something on the grill without its tasting like it was cooked on the grill, so I got some hickory chips going in there, too.

Chopped local onions, chunked local garlic. (Do I ever cook anything without onions and garlic? -- Of course. Cake.) That rosemary is so local it actually grew about two feet from the grill in a deck canister. I know! She blogs, she cooks, she grows rosemary. The smell of this -- the rosemary and the smoke and the onions and garlic and chorizo -- YOWZA baby, it was awesome. (The chorizo is from Spain. Which is, you know, local to Spanish people, so we're okay.)

Before the garlic burns, spoon those mussels in. They sizzle when they hit the pan. (A note here -- mussels are dangerous eating if you don't handle them right. If you've never worked with them, get some good professional advice about how to handle them. There is nothing about me and food that has even a hint of professionalism, so I'm not your source on shellfish safety.)

Add lemon, and a long cold splash of wine. (Water or vegetable broth works great, too). I don't pick wine, that's Cute Husband's job. Left to my own devices I selected a Chilean something the guy sold me on. I figured -- Chile? Spain? New England? Work with me, people. I lowered the heat to make everything simmer, dropped the grill lid down. The smoke and the steam and the wine and the stuff and the night and the coming rain and the rustly trees ...

Toasty sour dough. It's not cooked properly if there are no char marks. You slurp the mussels, dip the bread, drink wine, talk about the Sox and what makes a life interesting and anything but the thing you've been talking about all week.

20 Comments

Hiatus

Published on Wednesday, July 21, 2010 in A Little Bit of Business. 24 Comments

Hello, Bloggitty People,

Yes, it has been more than a week since I posted, and yes, I do have a very good reason.  With all love and kisses to you, it’s not one I feel like sharing right now. I promise that all the residents of the Tilty Floored Farmhouse are quite well, and I will return to a regular blogging schedule shortly.

Also, I’m getting ready for a big sixth Bloggiversary Special that will include PRESENTS! 

In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter and Facebook as always, and I’m also sort of still answering e-mail, too.

xoxox

~DaMomma~

24 Comments

In a Minute, I Will Yell. But First, the Camera

Published on Monday, July 12, 2010 in Momma's Smoke'n Crack. 39 Comments

39 Comments

Scallops On the Grill — A Recipe in Captions

Published on Monday, July 12, 2010 in Recipes. 25 Comments

I bought these out of the back of a truck, fresh from Chatham. They smell like seabreeze. I rinsed them, pulled off the veins, salt and peppered them and drizzled them with olive oil

A cheap pizza pan with holes in it. It's ruined now, blackened from the grill. Perfect. I heat it to 500 degrees and then drop the scallops on. The key is high heat and don't move them around too much. Let each side get brown, and then turn it. Squeeze lemon over, let it sizzle. The little ones cook faster. Pull them off at just underdone. They'll finish cooking while they wait.

The woman who grew these is named Clarissa. She let Eden chew a few greenbeans while we talked fava recipes. ("Fffff!!") I chopped the onions rough, they leaked onion water everywhere and spattered when they hit the pan. I added the garlic -- sliced into big chunks -- after the onions were starting to brown. Clarissa's garlic comes in big purple bulbs, four thick cloves each, none of the little skinny slivers.

Crappy pitcture, sorry. This was a gigantic tomato with green stripes. I squeezed out the seeds and the tough core and then tore the rest of it into chunks with my fingers. The onions and garlic were carmelized by then. It sizzled. I had about a cup of balsemic vinegar simmering on the little burner, and the air around us was starting to cool and rustle the leaves and we lit citronella candles and opened the wine.

Fistfulls of Clarissa's baby spinach. Also, some awesome heirloom greens from Riverside Farm -- purple and spindly. And a gigantic handful of fresh basil, whole-leaf. Just a hit of water and I dropped the lid and turned off the heat and when I opened it, the steam smelled like green wildness.

Brown rice on the bottom. Then greens, then scallops, and all the juices from everything. The balsamic had become a nice syrup which I drizzled over the top. We sat on the deck and watched the sun set behind our trees and talked about how when we are retired we will turn this into a real farm because we won't be able to afford groceries anyway and we will be old and chasing the chickens with forks. How many grandchildren could the barn fit, if we rennovated it? And how great would those Christmases be?

25 Comments

Crappy Honda: A Tale in Eight Parts

Published on Sunday, July 4, 2010 in What a wonderful world. 16 Comments

 October, 2003   I decide to take Little Mare on a grocery run.   I drop her into the tiny rear-facing seat, which is determinedly fastened into the back of my zippy convertible.  The convertible, purchased at a second-hand dealer in Washington, in small and fast and so very Me.  I paid cash for it, back when I was a Press Secretary and had disposable income.

Mare looks up at me with big trusting eyes and I suffer a searing moment of adulthood: I can’t drive this kid in this car.  And snow is coming, too.

Across from the market is a dealership.  It is an even trade, and I drive away in the Honda in tears.   At home, another trade.  Cute Husband gets the Crappy Honda, and I bolt Mare’s car seat into the middle back of his old Nissan Pathfinder.

For weeks every time I drive by the dealership I gaze at my zippy convertible and weep, until finally one day it’s not there.  That day, it snows, and the kid is safe and warm in the truck with 4 wheel drive.

 2003-2005 Law school.  Cute Husband commutes the hell out of the Crappy Honda.  It acquires an interesting smell — rotting apple cores, gym shoes, stale coffee and books.  

July, 2004  Rear-ended on the highway with Ducky in the car.  Bad bumper damage, but all else is fine.  We take the insurance money to pay bills and go ahead and leave the bumper.  It looks bad-ass, anyway.  Crappy Honda has 100,000 miles on it.

January 2006  After hitting an ice slick and catching air, Cute Husband brings the Crappy Honda down on a large granite boulder on the neighbor’s lawn.   Tow-guy Mike brings the Big Truck with the fish turner to lift it off.  Miraculously, the Crappy Honda is perfectly drivable afterward, and Mike is so happy he got to use the Big Truck he charges us almost nothing.

2007  Another rear-ending, and also Cute Husband keeps driving by these vicious trees that reach out and yank off hubs and mirrors and stuff.

Summer 2009  On the way in to work, some adorable young thing in a zippy convertible gives Crappy Honda rear-end number three.  Finds out Cute Husband is a lawyer and cries.  He says, “Look, lady … have you seen the car?”  She laughs, but he still gets her insurance info.  Our claims adjuster tells us it’s totaled and offers us $200 for it.  “NO!!” we say.  “No, don’t total it!”  You can still drive it, Mr. Insurance man says, but we are never giving you any more money on it. Ever. 

Awesome.  We duct-tape the bumper and use the $200 to pay bills.

Fall, 2009 I am driving Crappy Honda to work.  I call El.  “What is that noise?” she asks me. “Are you passing a huge truck or something?”

“No …”  I say.  “I think that’s just the Crappy Honda.”

“Does it always sound like that?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe you should have that checked.”

“Oh.  El.  Really.”

Later,  on that same drive I call Cute Husband.

“What is that noise?” he demands.

“Your car,” I say.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.  This is what I mean when I say I can hear you coming a block away.”

“It really sounds like that?”

“Yep.”

Summer, 2010  At work, the Crappy Honda won’t go into gear.  Cute Husband rocks the shift, speaks lovingly to it, finally, with a clank, it moves.  The clank turns out to be the sound of a piece of brake hitting the pavement.  He chucks the piece on the floor next to the rotting apple cores and heads for home.  It is a dangerous drive, but he sings to Crappy Honda, coos to her, and rolls into the Tilty-Floored Farmhouse driveway in one piece.  Later, I take the car over to Local Mechanic Man Who Understands Me Right in My Heart and say, “Please get her back on the road.”  He nods, because he can add and subtract:  if he can get this car back on the road, there is the promise it will soon be back in his garage.

“Good news, Cute Husband!”  I tell him.  “Local Mechanic Man says you can have Crappy Honda tonight!  And he is impressed that you drove home with absolutely no brake on the left side.”

Cute Husband: “Yeah that was pretty terrifying.  He was impressed?”

Me:  “Said you had balls the size of coconuts.”

Him:  “Really??”

Me: “No.  He just asked for payment.”

Him:  “Why you gotta be like that?”

Me: “You were fine until you questioned it.  If you had just accepted it you would have gotten to keep it.”

As a special present, Mr. Mechanic Man even took the duct tape off the bumper and put a screw in to hold it up, no charge.  Cute Husband looks so much more professional now.

That battered, rattling, rumbling pile of shit car is a metaphor for the best of Cute Husband and me.  For our lack of bullshit, our ability to keep it on the road,  our fierce commitment to getting to work and home again every day.  Mr. Mechanic Man thinks the Crappy Honda can go a few more years, and we’re psyched.  As long as we’re paying him less than we’d be paying a car payment, we’re going to keep going like this. 

Some day I’ll drive a zippy convertible again, and I’ll be happy to.  But I don’t think I’ll ever be as proud of it as I am of that damned Honda.

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