Shaking my fist at the summer

In April, I invested lots of time and a non-zero amount of money in researching our garden, picking fruit and vegetable seedlings, and lovingly tucking the plants into the soil of our new raised-bed planter.

This afternoon, I pulled about almost everything – or whatever remained of it following the awful, hot, dry summer that we had this year. It makes me incredibly depressed to see everything that ended up blooming and getting no further. Beautiful, green, healthy leaves… but no fruit.

Better luck next year, right?

#tenyearsagotoday

It’s a fun little hashtag that comes up on Twitter every once in a while., like on New Year’s Eve last year. Everyone reminisces a bit, gets a bit wistful, laughs, and goes on.

Tomorrow, I have a feeling that it’ll be different. I don’t know anyone who laughs when recalling September 11, 2001.

I was a junior in college, living in the Mark Twain residence hall. It was the only res hall at the time that had a swimming pool and a shared bathroom every two rooms. I lucked out and was working there as a peer advisor with Mizzou’s Freshman Interest Groups, so I had a room to myself. And my alarm went off one, two, three times that Tuesday morning. I had gone to bed early with the intention of rolling out of bed and hitting the gym before lunch and my one class for the day at 12:30 that afternoon.

I was bone-tired, though. Very few other people on my side of the hall had morning classes on Tuesday, so they tended to stay up late and be rowdier than normal on Monday evenings. After the third time smacking the snooze button on my alarm clock at around 7:45, I slid out of the top bunk and opened the blinds. It was a stunning, crisp, absolutely clear morning. I groaned, knowing that the gym would be packed already with the nice weather and people being more willing to get out and make the walk over to the Student Rec Center.

I flipped on KBIA, the campus NPR affiliate, as I went into the bathroom. I left my door to the bathroom open (living alone, who cared?), and thought I heard something about a plane hitting something in New York. Huh, I thought. That’s awful – I wonder what happened? Must be foggy, little Cessna single-engine job… how terrible. I finished up and went back out into my room, closed the door, and turned up the radio as I washed my hands, grabbed a granola bar, found my gym clothes, and started washing my face.

I had already been an avid NPR listener for five years at that point. Morning Edition was in the middle of a pre-recorded story when one of the hosts broke in. I had never heard that happen. It’s my recollection that a woman broke into the story, and she said that it was a jet – a passenger jet – that had hit the World Trade Center. (World Trade Center? I thought. Is that the Twin Towers? Holy…) I grabbed my washcloth off the lip of the sink, rinsed my face, and grabbed the TV remote. Flipping through the channels, I looked for anything that was not local news.

I don’t remember which network it was, but I think it was one of The Big Three. It was live coverage from a helicopter, and a woman in the helicopter was from one of the New York channels [Channel 4, as Google and YouTube show me]. I tried to get to the CNN.com site and several other national news sites, but the campus network had crashed and wasn’t loading any websites at all. A few minutes later, a huge orange fireball appeared on the television screen. It was the second plane.

I was still in my pajamas. From the timestamp on an e-mail, I know I e-mailed my best friend around 8:10 AM. Her brothers lived in NYC at the time.

“G,

Are your brothers okay?

–L”

Her response, a few minutes later:

“I think so. Why?”

She had an 8 AM class across campus on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I e-mailed her, assuming that she’d get it after coming home from class and hearing what had happened. She slept in that day and skipped class, waking up to my e-mail.

Her second response, a few minutes after that:

“HOLY SHIT!”

(Her brothers were okay. One still lives in NYC; the other returned to their hometown.)

The networks started reporting that there was smoke coming from a crash at the Pentagon. I know I went to my dorm room door and just opened it wide. I didn’t care. No one was up yet, and I kept getting up to go look in the hallway, to see if anyone else was awake and out of their rooms. I didn’t know where to go – not the gym, that was for sure. I logged on to AIM and waited for someone, anyone to sign on. I clearly recall thinking, I need for someone else to wake up and turn on their television. I need to know this isn’t a dream. Another peer advisor up on the seventh floor, Becky, signed on. I told her to turn on her TV. No pleasantries, just “Becky, turn your tv on.” I asked if she had morning class, and she said, “No.” I told her I was coming upstairs, and we turned on the giant projection TV in the seventh floor lounge.

We watched the rest of that morning’s events unfold on the big screen. I remember wanting to throw up when the towers collapsed. I went back down to my room after the second tower collapsed and just sat in front of the TV for a while before getting ready, going to lunch, and walking to class. I debated about whether or not to go, but classes hadn’t been cancelled, and I didn’t want to see any more repeats of any of the video footage from that morning. I took my Walkman with me on the fifteen-minute walk to my psychology lecture. It was a surreal walk. Beautiful day, sun warming my shoulders and back, but I was listening to the NPR hosts recap a terrorist attack that I had watched live on TV.

In the lecture hall, about a third of the class was out. No one was talking. The professor came in, sighed, and said, “Well, I, uh – I don’t know what to say about today. I went by Walgreens this morning to pick up pictures from New York City that I got developed. My boys and I went there last weekend for Labor Day. I was looking at them in my office just as I heard the news, and there was a picture of my boys on the World Trade Center observation deck. And now… well, I can’t stop thinking about it. And that’s why I decided to come to class today. I’m glad to see you all here. Normal routines will help us start to get through this in some ways.” And we learned about chemical uptake and receptors on neurons. And it felt good to be in that classroom, sketching crappy diagrams of the nervous system and brain cells.

I don’t remember what I did on the afternoon or evening of September 11. I think I went to work at my tutoring job, though I’m not sure. I know I stayed up late, listening to the NPR hosts, and that I didn’t sleep well when I did finally pass out on the bottom bunk. I woke up every hour or two, hoping there wasn’t going to be news of more. I haven’t really watched TV news since 2001. The images and videos from that morning stick in my head to this day, and even seeing them on YouTube or seeing photos in the retrospectives that so many news sites are running this week is making me jittery and a little sick to my stomach.

There are some amazing articles and photos out there, and I may link to them tomorrow. But not tonight. Tonight I’m just going to meditate on life for a while, hug my family close, and enjoy the evening.

Gotta knitta hippo

In the uproar of the early summer that involved clearing out and painting the two extra bedrooms upstairs right before The Heat Wave that Felted My Brain*, I managed to put together 3 bags and one box full of stuff to donate to Goodwill. I also had a giant stuffed gargoyle that I had bought several years ago for my classroom; it served its purpose, but now that I’m not teaching, it was just taking up a tremendous amount of space in one of the rooms.

Kidlette had never paid much attention to it, but as the woman at Goodwill wheeled away the bin containing all of our donations, Kidlette suddenly decided she was very attached to the “hippopotamus.” She wailed and insisted that we take it back, but I assured her that she didn’t need that big of a hippo, and besides, it had scared her a few times.

I thought she’d forget.

But this kid has a mind like a steel trap. (She’s also grieving the temporary loss of a jackalope that a friend knitted for me – being entered in the state fair this fall – and her blue convertible toddler rocker chair – gone to the same friend for use with her new baby, due early next year.)

So, next on my knitting list (after the Knee Socks in a Month and my daughter’s sweater and my friend’s Estonian colorwork socks) will be a tiny sock yarn hippopotamus. I don’t particularly like knitting toys, but for her? Yes. I will knit just about anything.

*”My brain is felted” is this summer’s in-joke at the LYS. It’s the state of mind after your brain is subjected to extreme heat and agitation.

Summer blahs

If I hadn’t mentioned it before, I hate summer. I especially hate summer in the Great Plains. This summer? If I weren’t already a hater, it would have transformed me. I was worried that it was going to be too cool when I bought plants for the garden this year; 3 months later, all we have to show for our efforts are one (1) tomato; one (1) sweet-gum-ball-sized red pepper; and three (3) gross yellow cucumbers. Only the tomato got eaten (but, oh… it was so sweet and juicy and delicious!). It has been a withering summer with something like forty-two days above one hundred degrees. My French friends and family don’t even know how to process that information. They think I’m lying. Meanwhile, they’ve been enjoying temperatures that have barely risen above seventy degrees this year.

So I’ve been quite a prolific knitter this summer – at least I will be well-stocked on winter items is my philosophy. I have knit: two (2) sweaters, one (1) giant scarf/shawl hybrid, one (1) pair of mittens, three socks (none of which match). I have swatched like mad for several upcoming projects. I designed three sock patterns (all of which have yet to be tested/published, but hey, it’s a start). And I organized my stash and figured out that perhaps I have a slight problem when it comes to sock yarn. (The Yarn Harlot is right about sock yarn not counting when it only takes one tote to hold it. I have three of varying shapes/sizes.)

And now I’m getting ready to hit the road for Ohio. I haven’t been out that way for three years, and I’m looking forward to seeing friends and family for the first time in ages. Sadly, it’ll probably be the last time that I see many of these family members together with the oldest generation of the family, but I’m so thankful to have the opportunity to go out there to experience this and to have Kidlette in pictures with some of them. She’ll get to meet a few of her cousins for the first time ever; I’m just hoping that she doesn’t say much about one of her cousins having the same name as one of our cats.

 

My daughter is a freak. In a good way.

Music has been a big part of Kidlette’s life. She was subjected to DIAM’S and Michel Sardou and Le Vent du Nord before she was even born, and she’s put up with French songs and nursery rhymes, Queen, They Might Be Giants, Dixie Chicks, and so much other musical randomness over the past two and a half years.

Lately, she’s been letting the freak flag fly. I’m totally okay with it, but it’s kind of scaring me. She started singing along to songs in March. She started requesting songs in April. And this month, she’s started recognizing instrumental pieces. Up to this point, it’s been pieces from the movie Cars. She knows the movie frontwards and backwards, has memorized song lyrics, and apparently made all of the connections between the score and important parts of the film. It started when she recognized one piece as “Lightning and Sally’s song.” And earlier this week, it went a step further. During that part of the film, Lightning and Sally drive up a mountain road, and Lightning is amazed to see a giant waterfall. The score broadens and takes on a very Aaron-Copeland-essence-of-The-Great-American-West feeling. Kidlette walked in the room as that part played, stopped, and declared, “Oh! It’s the river!”

Today, as I was getting cleaned up from breakfast, I had let iTunes wander, and Billy Joel’s “Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)” came on. Until about December or January, singing that was a mandatory part of bedtime – then she declared she liked a couple of the French lullabyes better, and we let it drop off our “playlist.” She hasn’t heard this song for the better part of seven months, yet she took her head out of her plate of nectarines, looked at me, and declared, “This is baby sleep song. When baby goes to sleep. I’m not a baby. I’m a rather small girl.”

And did I mention that she doesn’t let me hum songs anymore? I try, just so she doesn’t fixate on the lyrics (which keeps her awake much longer at bedtime), but she has started telling me, “No humming, Mama. I want the song.”

So it looks like we might be in piano lessons before we accomplish potty training. Sheesh.

“Hot town, summer in the city”

IT IS SO FRAKKING HOT. We hit 111 degrees yesterday. That’s more than halfway to standard boiling temperature for water. But hey! At least it wasn’t humid! *sigh* Unfortunately, our garden – which for once, had so much promise this year! – is pretty much done. Everything looked like wilted spinach after yesterday’s high temperatures and nothing’s ripened beyond where it was about 2 weeks ago. I’m trying not to absolutely lose my cool at how hard it is to grow anything in this place. Also frustrating is that apparently wasps like water. I’ve tried to take Kidlette out on the porch early in the morning – before it gets suffocatingly hot – so that she can play on her water table and with her sand wheels. Unfortunately, we usually only make it through 30 minutes of playtime before her water table apparently sends out its Batsignal to the neighborhood wasps, who descend upon us and start swarming the table. Grrrrr.

It’s been a busy month. I’ve been busy with priming/painting the two extra bedrooms upstairs, crafting, cleaning, reorganizing the two extra bedrooms, and crafting. I learned how to do set-in sleeves and good seaming on a sweater, how to sand down putty and drywall repair tape, and how to do twisted-stitch knitting to make cables. Not bad. Kidlette should be ready to move into her room later this week, and I’m very happy getting the Craft Haven set up in the former Ugly Room. It was so nice last night to sit down at a table, lay my chart out, and knit without juggling chart/yarn/yarn bowl/needles/post-its/glass of water at the same time.

After a rare illness-free start to the summer, we’ve all been sick over the past few days. I’m apparently the last one to get things going around now, so while the rest of the household laid low over the weekend, I’m laying low this week. My sinuses feel like they snuck out, bought a couple bags of concrete, and poured it up my nose while I was sleeping. Jerks.

And the most amazing part of the weekend? Okay, so back in December, I recounted – briefly – how I had written an apology to an old friend after twelve years of silence. I heard back on Saturday. And we’re going to give friendship another go. E-mails rarely make me burst into tears (most of them aren’t as overtly personal as letters or phone calls), but this one did. It was such a relief.

So now back to our normal, boring weekday routine. We’re just going to stay in the AC today. I’m not ashamed to be a hermit when it’s this hot.

In which my grandmothers disappear

Growing up, getting to see my grandmothers was an extraordinarily special event. We never lived in the same cities that they did, and I have incredibly vivid memories of times I spent with them over the years. Special time where I got to talk to them and have “coffee” before my sisters were awake. Our favorite restaurants and bakeries to visit. Taping brown paper garbage sacks shut with masking tape because one grandmother abhorred the cost of plastic bags designed only to be thrown away. (That was also the grandmother who declared that no margarine would ever touch her table. She remembered the white, false creaminess of the first margarines of World War II, and the color packets that had to be stirred in so it would at least LOOK like butter.)

The two women could not be more different if they had tried to be. One tried to be Mrs. Cleaver, and the other one simply dressed vaguely like Mrs. Cleaver. The culture of conformity was strong with the former; the latter was causing trouble long a good twenty years before it was fashionable to do so. I had no idea how my parents had ever come from these two families – now that I’m older, I see how my father’s approach to life and parenting was irreparably warped by his mother. And how my mother learned to keep calm and carry on through all crises from her mother.

Now, these two grandmothers – so very different in times past – are spiraling down towards the end of life in slow, steady, similar ways. Just three years ago, I saw both of them in one week. Grandma G. was in assisted living temporarily, recovering from a broken hip. Grandma M. was still living at home, complaining about her cane but conceding that maybe it would be best if she took it with her to the cafeteria where we were going to dinner. That was the week where my husband and I told them that they would be great-grandmothers.

Grandma G. is now in the hospital, after having spent a few days at home. She insisted on being released from the nursing home because she hated it. She cannot see well enough to lead any kind of independent life, and this is actually her second trip to the hospital. (The first one was when she couldn’t see well enough and took too many of her medications at once.) The doctors now say that she is addicted to her pain medications. In my mind, she has turned into Mrs. Dubose from To Kill a Mockingbird. She won’t stand for any of us to try and intervene.

Grandma M. faded slowly at first. She was apologetic about being unable to remember certain events or names, but laughed and reassured us that “it’ll come. It always does.” She bristled at being offered canes or walkers and continued to trudge up and down stairs to do laundry. She came down with pneumonia the week that I had my daughter, and her decline was swift. When I first saw her six months after the pneumonia, she relied on a walker. Her memory was much weaker. Her eyes would occasionally glaze over, and I knew she wasn’t totally “with” us. Sitting in our living room today, she was a ghost of herself. She cannot remember my uncles’ names. She won’t try to call my sister or me by name, since she either cannot remember our names or trips over them. I cry when I realize that she has perhaps never really known my daughter’s name, or that my daughter is partially named after her. The woman who helped me learn how to do crossword puzzles cannot summon simple words and cannot correctly identify colors.

I don’t know when my grandmothers turned into what I think of as “shadow women,” but they have. I know that these changes are somewhat normal with age, especially given their health troubles as they have aged. That doesn’t help me accept that at some point in the past three years, we have lost them both. They are still with us in body, and somewhat with us in mind, but the women whom I so adored as a child are gone. I don’t want their shadows. I want them, walking to the playground with us in the sunshine, keeping us off the freshly tarred driveway, telling us that eating the bread crusts will make our hair curl. I want so badly for a few last moments of clarity in which they are the women who live on in my mind and memory.

Sunday morning recipe call

This is random, having nothing to do with “regular” writing nor with fiber arts. It has everything to do with the fact that it is TOO DAMN HOT in the region, and I have no desire to cook, go outside, or move from my desk/the couch. This combination of factors has sent me hunting for tasty, no- (or very little-) cooking, and fresh ingredients.

So I present to you my menu for the week. I’m really excited about it, mainly because these are some of my favorite recipes ever. And only one involves bacon, thank you very much.

• Grilled steak with bell pepper salsa. I like steak. I don’t usually turn it down. But the salsa? The salsa MAKES this dish. I could (and have) eaten only the salsa with some baguette and called it a meal.
• Eggplant salad toasts. France made me fall in love with eggplant and vinaigrette and goat cheese. Check, check, check.
• Summer succotash with bacon and garlic croutons. Fresh summer vegetables and tomatoes. And bacon. And homemade garlic croutons.
• Some sort of variation on pan bagnat. I don’t usually do tuna (helloooo, bad college budget-cooking memories), but toss it in vinaigrette and add some sauteed vegetables and slap it all on bread? Score!
• Blueberry soup. I don’t have a recipe for this, but I’m basing it off the strawberry soup that has fueled my “I need cold food NOW” binge over the past 2 weeks.

 

In which life happens

All of my other knitting projects have taken a back seat to this news: my French Dad is being treated for a type of stomach cancer. He e-mailed me on Wednesday afternoon (early, early in the morning in our time zone) to tell me, and I was already sobbing by the time that I got to the end of the letter: “Thank you again so much for everything that you do for us. We love you.”

My French Dad is not actually my father, though he might as well be. He gives me advice on parenting, he yells at me, he and my French Mom call me for my birthday… you get the picture. They’re the ones who took me in when my living situation in France got bad (offering testimony at the police station in support of kicking people out of their apartment is not anything my French major prepared me for). They’re the ones who basically allowed me to get through the entire assistantship experience in one piece, mentally. And my French Dad and my own father resemble each other so well that when my parents came to visit, French Dad’s friends commented that they “had never been introduced to this brother before.”

My heart hurts. There are five kids, the eldest of whom is just ten months younger than me. My husband and I hosted the two youngest kids at our house for about a month in 2007. And we just saw most of the family back in February – we stayed with my French Parents for just over a week at the end of our trip. I cannot be there for them as they were there for me in so many ways, and I wish with all my heart that I could get repacked and hop on a plane to be there tomorrow. Alas.

So I’ve put all of my other projects on the back burner to get my first chemo cap done. I’m almost halfway done with A Hat Fit for a Boyfriend, using Berocco Vintage in Black Cherry. My hope is to churn out a few more of these over the next few weeks, as well as a bulky-weight wrap or blanket that he can use.

The kicker? 45 minutes after I got that punch-to-the-gut news, my French sister (the one closest in age to me) e-mailed me to tell me that she’s expecting her first child near the end of the year. I’m obviously hugely excited for her, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around the arrival of both pieces of news in under one hour on the same day. Sigh.  I think I have to concur with a Twitter-based acquaintance when she says that “Cancer should get cancer and die.”

DOH

I finished the heel flap and turn of The Super-Secret Sock last Friday. A dear friend and diehard sock knitter helped me figure out how to get the sole to be just the way I wanted, I started knitting, and after I got the gusset to a manageable place, I decided to try it on.

*ahem* Fail. Big fail.

The sock leg won’t even go over the ball of my foot. How did I screw that up, you might ask? The usual for knitters. I didn’t swatch. I was so desperate to work this pattern out and start the pattern writing process that I didn’t swatch. On the bright side, I’m learning quite a bit about catching floats. And still really enjoying the design on this sock that, at this size, will only fit an elementary school student (or maybe a skinny middle-schooler).