Unlimited Horizon

Dietrich finished eating early and went into the other room to make a rocket contraption and sit by the fire. He listened to Elliott and me talking about the atmosphere and going through it to get to space, offering up corrections when needed. Then Elliott came up with this:

"Here's how I go to space. I just go to the end of the lake where the sky goes zup zup (cutting with his hand a right angle) and I put my head like this (tucking his chin as if to crawl in a tunnel) and reach out this high (stretching his arm up) and there! I'm in space."

How many times have I watched the horizon on Lake Michigan -- on a bike, running, driving (carefully), sitting on the beach -- and watched the end of the Earth as Elliott described? As I stared out at its beauty, its seeming infinity, all I could do was allow myself to awe at it. The horizon never looked the same from day to day, even during the steamy summer when a haze loomed over it or when the foggy late winter drizzle denied it was even there. It spoke silently of possibility, but did I really believe it? Elliott noticed it, too, bouncing along in the Burley, playing on the beach, climbing on the rocks at the Point. For me it was a matter of beauty and perspective; for Elliott the horizon as he described tonight was just out of reach but it holds the possibility of another world.

Now that I think of it, the world Elliott imagined may have also been inspired by a clever book called Katie Meets the Impressionists (James Mayhew) where a girl visiting an art museum climbs into the paintings and becomes part of the scene (sometimes finding herself in more than one painter's world). Whatever his muse, the image he gave is powerful. Why not just go to the end of the lake, reach into the horizon, and get where you want to be?

Getting Dressed

This is my daily challenge -- not finding something for me to wear, that is an entirely different story, one that usually comes up on Sunday mornings when my jeans with the hole in the seam and the Eddie Bauer fleece won't quite do. My daily challenge is not losing it with Elliott when it's time to get dressed. Or not helping with the items he can easily do on his own. Or not raising my voice when we are about to miss the bus. Or not holding a grudge about the getting-dressed episode for the rest of the day. Why is it so hard? When he was first learning where to put his body parts into the various holes in the clothing I had a lot more patience. But I've witnessed it! He knows where everything goes and can get all the parts in the right places (give or take a few tags in the front). But there are so many more interesting things to do: cuddling in his comforter and sheets sans ropa; oh, there's a book on the floor, does it have a table of contents? Yes!; And this book over here, where is the date due paper for it?; Oh, there is my brother getting dressed, would he like to wrestle? The distractions go on and on until I either cave in and decided getting to the bus and getting on with our day is worth enabling his behavior or until I hover over him and step by step ask him what is next. And then, being winter, we do it all over again once we're downstairs. Boots, snow pants, but no, honey, it doesn't work in that order, now jacket, where are your mittens and hat? Okay, let's go. We'll zip outside. At least it is warm enough for that. The competition factor works great for Dietrich -- all I have to do is suggest a contest or race and he is off! But Elliott would rather be in the sheets or a book than win anything.

Clothes for Sunday are sitting out tonight. Maybe he will show up for breakfast all dressed! Then again, maybe his lack of focus on getting dressed isn't so different from my own blank stares into the closet. Though no one is watching me, there are plenty of days that it takes me far longer to find something to wear than necessary. Almost everyday I forget socks or decide on different ones and have to dash back up two flights before leaving the house. It is the transition between the comforts of home and facing the world. Maybe that requires a little more snuggling for Elliott, or another look at a book, or one last run around the basement before he can put it all together and see the world today.

Emerging

It is one of those words that is hugely popular, kind of like hugely. There is the emerging church, a Christian movement to rethink common Christian practices, and light lots of candles. The emerging job market, though it is debated if it will ever emerge or if we'll be stuck in an emerging state for a while. There are emerging therapeutics, or at least there should be with all the pharmaceuticals being peddled on TV, in print, on the side of my gmail account.

But nothing says emerging to me more than stepping outside and seeing our neighbors. Even if we've seen them out there from time to time this winter, it was either too dark to play safely or too cold to do anything but dart to the car. But today there were adults, kids, dogs, bikers out on both sides of the street. One girl climbed the heap of snow by her driveway and slid down, no gloves, no snow pants. Another girl along with her brother shoveled crystallized snow back onto the sidewalk while their dad talked with a neighbor whose dog waited patiently for a walk. I talked with the dog's other owner in between her dashes toward the front stoop to pull her one year old away from the screen door.

The boys tolerated our stop but would have rather kept moving toward the bike path for round two of "dog catcher", a chase-and-catch game inspired by The Stray Dog, a book where the dog catcher plays a minor roll, but for better or worse has become the most fun to imitate. They run and catch each other or I catch both of them (but I refuse to be a dog catcher, just a people catcher, is that any better?). Soon we were off, Dietrich with his ice scrapper and Elliott finishing off a box of raisins. But those few minutes of sidewalk exchanges and seeing the faces of our neighbors in late afternoon sunshine assured me that even in these last weeks of winter, we are emerging.

Making Bread

Four loaves of white bread sat on the cutting board in my grandma's kitchen at some point during every one of our summer visits and most of the time during the Christmas visits, too, though sometimes sticky cinnamon buns might replace them. The warm heels were my favorite where the crust curled around the soft white bread inside. I remember a story of my mom and her sisters cutting off both heels -- probably not the best for storage, but how could anyone resist?

After I graduated from college I met another bread-making family in Thailand. They were from the U.S. and lived not far from the house I was watching. Every morning -- every morning -- she had dough rising, and by noon there was fresh bread. She had two sons who devoured most of it before dinner. The bread baking reminded me of my grandma's house half way around the world. Maybe someday I would bake bread.

And we have been baking bread, but not often enough to get it right. Pizza dough I have down, I don't even need to consult the More With Less Cookbook, my favorite kitchen literature. But bread I still struggle with. Yesterday the big meal was going to be vegetable soup and bread (and cheese, we live in Wisconsin). But we were out of yeast and Trader Joe's counts it as one of their "seasonal items". After negotiating another walk to the smaller grocery store that carries yeast year-round, we found our neighbor friend playing sidewalk chalk. The grocery store could wait, chalk after a 4 month hiatus could not. We did pick up the yeast later, but I didn't bother to check the flour supply. Not surprising, we were low. The recipe called for 7-8 cups. Whole wheat we had, but I've worked with it enough times to know that it won't take the place of white -- or it might, but it will be a lot of work.

Dietrich helped work the course flour into the wet ingredients (at least the yeast claimed to work well with whole grains) but eventually returned to his lego moon lander. I moved the big blue ceramic bowl to the table for better leverage. The dough worked me as much as I worked it. At first I was bemoaning to myself how I can forget to get flour when making bread? Why not just have extra around, and yeast, too, for that matter? Why do I seem to have just barely enough of everything? Maybe we should become members of Costco! Thankfully the dough started working better and I could stop questioning my worth and just kneed. I could feel it in my gut, and shoulders, and the heals of my hands. I pushed the coarse dough in on itself, again, again, until it was at least bouncing back slightly. Two hours later, it had nearly doubled. That didn't make rolling it out any easier (it was a recipe for french bread) but it was edible and obviously high fiber. Flour is on the list. Two bags, at least. And yeast. And next time, I'm trying Grandma's recipe.

Sticky

North Carolina in August (and sometimes in June or May, or even April, but just for a day); chubby fingers eating noodles with cheese sprinkled on top; raisins; the flat fruit snacks and even worse, their plastic packaging; the underside of the fork that slipped too far onto a plate of buttermilk pancakes; toothpaste from a brush that was dropped on the floor; balsam needles that keep showing up in the corners, even in March; bagels and cream cheese and honey, but so good it is worth all the stick; juice, any kind, any amount, any time of the day -- no spill is ever unstuck until the hands and knees scrubbing is done; the upper edge of the glue stick that leaps onto hands no matter how far away from it they hold it; feet that have just come out of the pool, even if showered, those little feet stick to their socks; the laundry detergent cup; Trader Joe's stickers which adorn our doorknobs in the basement, and the walls next to the doors (filling in for automatic door-buttons), the bottoms of our slippers, and countless random pieces of paper;

Time's up! Feel free to add some more...

Walk Score

A year ago I was obsessed with a web site called "walk score". We were in the middle of a housing search for a home that above all we wanted to be "walkable". The site allows you to type in any address to rate how easy it is to walk to libraries, grocery stores or convenience stores, restaurants, coffee shops, and parks. I would find a house on a real estate site, type in the address to walk score, and wait while it drew a map surrounding the little red dot, our potential new home. Many times the just-right house was just outside a comfortable walk zone. Car-dependent, it declared. As the ratings went up, the yards shrunk, the garages squeezed onto the lots (or didn't exist at all), and the price shot up, too. But how great would it be to be able to walk to most things?

The walk from our house to New Morning Nursery school is just under a mile with only a mild elevation change (I am still adjusting from Chicago). Today I pushed the empty jogger over to pick the boys up. They bemoaned my new rule that I don't push them uphill. Granted, they were exhausted after swimming this morning and playing this afternoon and the general excitement of the spring-is-coming sun. Once we were on the slow downward slope home, they rode and happily bantered about making hats and reading books about a king in a bathtub who ate his lunch in the tub and a magic hat that made people into animals. I relish this peek into their new world apart from me. When we drive, it is Justin Roberts all three minutes home -- whether the CD is in the player or not. But today, walking, they let me in on the books they read and the hats they made.

When we reached the bike trail, Dietrich hopped out and ran ahead. The runners had shed layers today and smiled at Dietrich clad in the same winter gear he had on in January. He did finally take off his mittens. Bike commuters slowed down to make sure Dietrich stayed on his side of the path as he waved them by. Elliott sleepily wore a cone-shaped magician's hat and rode solo. Just as we crested the exit ramp from the bike path to our block (with heavy whining at the request to walk the hill) we met a neighbor going to join the walkers and bikers and runners and strollers and be-hatted kids on the path.

March

The jar said Smuckers jelly on the lid and it was covered in a frosty haze. Underneath a lively green began to show through as it thawed during the day. March holds the possibility of green, if not the grass at least we have St Patrick's Day when even the beer and the Chicago river turn green. There may be a surprising t-shirt day, but more likely there will be a surprising 8 inches of snow day. But this jar held our first, and maybe only, green of March.

We picked up the batch of basil from a farm in Sun Prairie toward the end of the summer when the ripe tomatoes dripped sweet juice, all over, as I tried to cut them up, cook them, freeze them, somehow save them before they rotted or froze or we tired of their sticky sweet. The tomatoes seemed a nuisance compared to the basil. I froze the tomatoes knowing we would use them often, but I also knew they would lose most of their taste. But the basil was different. It needed just to be chopped and mixed up with other happy ingredients: pine nuts, olive oil, garlic, parmesan cheese, a little salt. A few whirrs of the food processor and wha-la, we have pesto. The harder part was putting it in jars and forgetting about it so that we could surprise us with its warm reminders of summer on some long winter night.

Most of the jars are long gone. I don't think one has never made it this long. Maybe it was our new freezer that is low to the ground so I don't see things in the door (there was also a can of frozen lemonade sitting next to the pesto). Or maybe I had been saving it long enough I actually did forget about it because we bought some from Trader Joe's a few weeks ago. But tonight when Dietrich wanted pesto pizza and Elliott wanted pesto noodles (this is as close to consensus as we ever arrive, save Chipotle), there it was in the door, waiting to be thawed, spread on carbohydrates, and savored.

I've been mourning the end of winter. I know this won't last for long and soon I will be as ready as everyone else to see it go. But the snow has been our playground for the past three months and I'm sorry to see it going. But this taste of summer tonight, on the first day of March, reminded me how sweet the summer is. How good it tastes, how warm the sun feels on my back after a winter of being layered down. How the trees drape over our house, how the lake laps easily on the beach. I am sad to see the winter go, though I doubt it has had its last word. But I'm grateful to be reminded of the life to come by this jar of pesto that has sat quietly in the freezer door these long months.