Petit jardin des gilles

lustre and sledding

Yesterday I went sledding with the girls...it was a blast! With the baby sleeping inside, we went out around 4:45, just as night was falling. The nearly full moon made our snow-covered prairie hill glow, it was magical to be out and playing in the glowing dark. Trudging up the hill, sliding down with the little one, while Ines went on her own - it was great. We came up with a new sport, too - snow ballet. While sliding down the hill, you put your foot down on one side to make the sled twirl around in a circle - that's snow ballet. And it's great. My sister-in-law and her little girl of nearly two also joined us, a real nighttime sledding party.

After an hour we came in a to a hungry baby. The girls' bright red cheeks made me happy. And I couldn't stop thinking about the light, and that part of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas' about the moon creating the 'lustre of midday on objects below'. Lustre is lovely! 

the first visit

Around a week ago we brought my mother out for her first visit to the house. It was a big occasion for us, and for her. Charles and the girls went into town to get her, while I frantically cooked and set the table and tried to make all the unpacked boxes and undone projects miraculously shrink. That didn't work.

I picked a few recipes from my favorite cookbook, Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells. I love this cookbook. I chose the chicken bouillabaisse with fennel, a nice yummy stew that would be easy for my mother to eat. The only problem was that when I was looking for the last few ingredients the day before, I found out that the grocery store in our town does not carry fennel, nor does the liquor store stock Ricard, and anise-flavored liquor that was key to marinating the chicken overnight. Oh well. Let's just change the recipe! Do it exactly the same but change a few things - no fennel, no Ricard, how about carrots and Belgian beer instead? No problem. I also made tarte tatin aux poires, a family favorite dessert that involves nearly two sticks of butter, pears caramelized in sugar, and a homemade crust.

The first thing my mother said, when they pulled into the driveway a little before noon, was "I wasn't expecting this. You have a lot of work, a lot of work." She had that mother-disapproval expression winding up her face. "Hi, Mom!" was all I said. The first 45 minutes were rough, as they always are when my mother arrives in a place she's never been to (except a doctor's office). When she is out of her comfort zone, which is nearly everywhere except her apartment, she retreats into herself, gets very grouchy and negative, and is no fun to be around. And this was way out of her comfort zone. And I can understand some of her difficulty: She is in a wheelchair, and she had to use her cane to get up a few steps to the path to the veranda door. We managed that, which was a little difficult because of the overgrown grass. Once on the path the girls were shouting 'Grandma! Grandma! Look at us!" They were on their rope swing, happy as clams....and Grandma couldn't even look their way, she was so consumed with herself, and needing to get inside and go to the bathroom. As we were getting inside, she said, "I'll never do this again." She always says that, it's very hard to hear, but I know it will pass. It was too bad she couldn't enjoy the girls swinging for a little while.

My sister Kathy and her husband also came for lunch, which turned out to be delish. We ate out on the back patio. That was also quite a change for my mother. She is never outside! She doesn't go out on the patios where she lives. She won't let you just take her for a stroll outside in the wheelchair. Anyway, we had a nice lunch, but my mom was pretty quiet and negative the whole time. She didn't seem to like the chicken but loved the tarte tatin. But of course there was no enthusiasm. Then she wanted to escape, back to the inside of the house, where we sat in the living room and I mended the little pillow she likes to rest her right arm on. A little while later she told me she wanted to go back, she was very tired, and she looked it. So we had a nice talk as I drove her back to her assisted living, about 30 minutes away door to door. She was very enthusiastic about us stopping at Walgreen's on the way back for a few supplies she needed, more animated than she had been the whole time at our house.

Even after five and a half years, I still find it such a challenge and extremely exhausting interacting with someone who has brain damage. Later that night, in the middle of the night, I woke up with a horrible rash on my face, and a swollen face, and very high blood pressure...now that I look back, I think it was due to the stress. The stress of preparing for a visit, which everyone feels from time to time, but also the stress of trying to please and do something nice for someone - someone who is not the person you expect them to be, each and every time.

viable transport

Two days after our move, on an early morning run to empty the last items from our rental house before the deadline to move out, Charles had a car accident. The main thing is he was fine. The second main thing is that our car was totaled. We had just been talking about how, now that we were in the countryside, we were more dependent on the car, and how we hoped, given the expense of moving and the initial repairs that had to be done on the house (well water, anyone?), we were hoping that this car, a 2000 Toyota, would last us another good long time because it's miles were low and it was in good condition. Ahem. It's funny because we were also talking about how our fortune was so good in finding this house, and we were all healthy, etc., etc. that something bad was bound to happen. Well, in the grand scheme of something bad, a wrecked car with nobody injured isn't too bad.

That is, until you try and find another one. Used car shopping is not fun. I knew that from watching lots of movies. Dealerships, classifieds, word-of-mouth, craigslist - how to do it? Faced with the exhaustion of the move (and a seven-year-old's birthday party one week later) and years of built-up stereotypes of used car dealers, we did what any responsible adult would do - we put it off. We enjoyed the view from our porch.

But sooner or later, we could not put it off any longer. Now we, not the insurance company, were paying for our rental car. We were a little less tired. So what did we need? Something reliable, I said. Something large enough to haul stuff, Charles said. Big car! said my daughter. Good gas mileage. Affordable. Easy for grandma to get in and out of. Good in bad weather. A blue car! said another daughter. Finally, after some looking and much back-and-forthing, we decided we needed a six-seater, all-wheel-drive vehicle, that, nonetheless, was not too big - and at the same time not too small. Good luck. Dealers here, dealers there, big ones, small ones, in-town operations, country outposts - we tried them all. Some that called back, some that didn't. Some that were 'slicked-back salesman-y' and most that weren't. People trying to make a living while catching their breath from the cash-for-clunkers phenomenon that was taking some dealerships by storm. Every car we looked at the girls would say "Let's get this one!" We knew we had to make a decision when our nearly-three-year-old started identifying cars from the back seat as we drove on the highway to yet another dealership, "Look, mommy, a Subaru!".   

I asked my daughter to go outside just now and take some pictures of the car we ultimately bought, a 2005 Ford Freestyle (two days ago now, in an exhausted haze of research, blue books, car faxes, far too many phone calls to friends and family and all the rest). I NEVER thought I'd EVER spend this much time thinking about cars. 

It's got tires.

Could this be her favorite feature? After all that?

Oh, those trees!

It's great to have a kid's eye view to put it all in perspective.

tales of water

Well, we're in. The last week has been a little rough. We slept here for the first time last Wednesday night, boxes everywhere, mattresses on the floor, and no drinkable water. We had to drill a new well, which was done the week before our move. But the new well (think: large shiny red drilling rig expertly avoiding the willow in the back - but happily crushing a few thistles! - massive noises from the drill, rivers of clay and water, finally, liquid gold at 320 feet!) needed a pump, and electricity. The plumber did not do this until Thursday and Friday (somebody in the family - ahem - was a little grumpy about this) - finally Friday, a few days after our move, we had water to drink from our very own well. It's a measure of our trepidation that no one in the family wanted to be the first to take a drink. I think it also shows how disconnected we are, in general, from the source of our sustenance. Before, in all the places we lived in, water came from a faucet. Now (now?), for us it's coming from the earth, our earth, and we can see the well from the back kitchen window, and we saw them drill the hole it's coming out of, and put the pump in, and we heard the backhoe that dug the six-foot-deep trench for the pipe to get it into the house. 

So, after all that solid evidence that something was coming out of the earth (not to mention the nitrates test the drillers performed), I decided I would be the first to take a drink. It was good! Really good water. My older daughter eyed me a little suspiciously that night when I told her she could use our water to brush her teeth.

"Go for it," I told her. And she did.

do we really need all that

It's our moving day today. A predominate feeling is sheer fatigue, followed in a close second by the feeling that we have way. too. much. stuff. We were up late last night packing, bleary-eyed, not quite seeing how it would all get done. The girls had a good bath and conked out, which of course was a good thing. I am six months pregnant so by the time midnight rolled around I could barely stand. Yet I managed to pack up the kitchen in record time, driven by sheer terror of not getting it done before the movers arrived in the morning.

We moved to Wisconsin only a year ago, and had done a big purge then, so I was surprised at the overwhelming feeling of waytoomuchstuff I was having in the kitchen last night at midnight. In the interim between last year's and this year's move, stuff seems to have found us, again. Of course, a few months after our move last year we received a big shipment of my mother's things. We had finally managed to clean out HER old apartment in Las Vegas about a year before that, when it was clear that she could no longer live there and had to be brought closer to us. My epiphany when sorting her belongings and giving many of them away was that a) it is easy to accumulate many many objects during the course of a lifetime; b) it is much nicer to go through those objects when their owner is still living, though the whole process was poignant and sad; and c) mental note to myself not to let such an accumulation happen to me, because d) you don't really need it anyway. After all, who really wants to put up the early eighties-era family portrait featuring completely over-the-top feathered hair and soft-focus lighting? Not me. But it's a family portrait, with a nice shot of my beloved father, who has been dead for many years, and a smiling picture of my mother when she was still my mother, and the roles had not yet been reversed. I still don't want to put it up. But who has the courage to throw it away?

Well, here we are, one 24-foot packed-to-the-brim truck and three movers later. Whatever epiphany I had in Las Vegas two years ago must have gone back to where it came from. No matter how many times you read the 'clear the clutter' book it doesn't help unless you actually clear the clutter (or don't let it in in the first place).

Kids know the truth of it. My girls were playing with empty boxes, building forts, cradles or 'stations', as my two-year-old put it. Chasing each other around with little twigs, hiding in corners, under boxes, taking joy in such an empty house today when the movers were gone [nb. the dance moves came out again in the face of the sheer potential of an empty wood floor: jazz turns, tap shuffles, the whole bit]. The lovely, echo-y emptiness of it.

Do we really need so much stuff?

floored

Floors, floors. Refinish the floors - this was the one thing I wanted to do before we moved into our new house, my little indulgence that, after all, had a practical side: it's so much easier to do them before the furniture, the toys, the shoes and the little ones arrive. And MUCH less expensive than drilling the well (!). My lovely husband obliged. Now, I have never owned a house before, but I have lived on a lot of floors - beautiful inlaid parquet in Brooklyn, wide boards (the kind they call 'plancher') in Brussels, regular, not very nicely kept up wooden floors in a host of rentals, carpeting, vinyl, you name it. Floors.  

Which brings us to this weekend. Friday was spent sanding the floors, which seemed to be cherry (the entryway and office) and maple (the kitchen). I received regular phone calls with updates from Charles, who was busy with all the actual work. It was an all-day affair, truly dawn until well after dark. I did do my part: I obsessed over the floor finish for about a week. And of course ultimately chose a finish that was super eco-friendly, extremely complicated to apply (but it only takes one coat!) and needed a bucking bronco of a buffing machine to get it all looking pretty. Oh, and it wasn't available in our town. I was feeling pretty bad by the end of the day (now we are on Saturday), again getting regular updates from my by-now-weary husband. It all seemed too much - too much trouble over something we're only going to walk on. 

Today I went out and saw the floors. Upon reflection, I don't think it was too much trouble. After all, floors are the base, what we see all the time, a metaphor in our finer moments for how we think about how we are living. They hold us up. And no matter what they look like, we can at least try and make them shine. 

The girls preferred chasing butterflies.