Saturday, December 29, 2012

New Kind of Christmas

They are wearing matching Christmas suits! Silvio, eleven, is so loving with his twin brother and sister.

It was a different kind of Christmas for us, not being at home.

We flew a thousand miles to be with our son's family. We had six of our eight grand kids there. The twins had a wonderful time eating the wrapping paper and tumbling around from arms to arms, crawling like mad from room to room and cruising along on the furniture. They are that delicious age of nine months, plump and cute, just starting to speak, so curious and accepting of everything.

The twins' three brothers were there, amazing young adults and Silvio the eleven year old. Their cousin Quincy, eight, rounded out the grandchild contingent.

What really delighted me was observing how my son and his wife took so naturally to the noisy hubub of managing this family of five kids ranging in age from nine months to nineteen years old, and a huge number of family and friends who came on Christmas.

Our son has the wonderful capacity of being able to work full bore in a very responsible position in state government, and then, when he is off, he's Dad. He makes his life for his family fun and warm. He cooked a huge Christmas dinner for thirty and seemed to love every minute of it. When the babies needed anything, he was there for changing or feeding or reading them a story.

I loved how he and his wife have such a natural rhythm for getting stuff done, paying attention to each other and to the kids. My daughter-in-law is just the best! I love how she is easy and accepting. And I love her style of making sure those twins eat only organic and home made food, no fake stuff in their environment. But she's not shrill about this. She just does it. She clearly loves this part of life when she's majorly on duty as the Mom. And anyone can clearly see that these twins, who were quite premature, are thriving like crazy.

Someday, probably soon, this woman will go back to working full time at an outside job, and I know she'll have a huge array of help to do it.

It was a wonderful Christmas, very interesting. And I am still enjoying the chocolates!


Thursday, December 27, 2012

The House on the Side of the Road

Many years ago when we first lived here so far out in the boondocks we found a cross stitched sampler in an antique store that said " Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man." We bought it and installed it in front of the toilet in the powder room, where it has been ever since throughout many new themes and coats of paint. I thought about this old beloved piece today. Out of the corner of my eye I saw from my studio window an unusual sight. Here came a young man on a loaded bicycle, pedaling like mad from the farm track to the north. He stopped at the cattle gap and went across it. I went out to greet him as he threw the bike down near our front door. Clearly, he was in trouble. Reminded me of the many lost hunting dogs that find their way here, knowing we will return them to where they are supposed to be. It turned out that this young man had been lost in the woods for four days, and somehow found his way to our doorstep. We stuck out our hands (Tracy and Molly). "Come in for breakfast" was the first thing I said. It never occurred to me then to be suspicious. Obviously, he was not packing an assault rifle. O.K. The bathroom is that way, and then come and sit down and I will feed you. I stirred up four eggs, ten sausages, four English muffins, strong hot coffee, orange juice, no questions asked. (Are you vegan,vegetarian, gluten free?) This guy would have eaten the wallpaper, and a traditional huge breakfast was just right. I asked him if he had celebrated Christmas and he was somewhat noncommittal. His mother had dropped him off with his canoe and bike at the state park up the road. As he ate everything on the plate he politely told us of his adventure on the river. There was some weird stuff, such as was why did he not have a better grip on the geography of where he was, how could he have gone out on a four day trip without any food? Or a compass? How could he have portaged his canoe and the bike? (This would have killed me!) But, still, here was this friend to man, needing sustenance, and here we were by the side of the road, extending friendship. We learned little about him as he ate steadily. I could see that his arms were very strong and he told us that he took no food on his trip because he expected to forage for food. He was not a hunter, but he wanted to fish for food. He did eat some fungus from trees but was sickened by it because he had not boiled it. The recent frost killed so many green plants he was unable to find much to eat. I wanted to ask him botany questions about food foraging, but he was clearly focusing on the breakfast. We did find out that he was unemployed, laid off as a tech trouble shooter, went to college, lives with his mom, has a girl friend,not a hunter, loves nature. He was very polite and I could see that he was exhausted from the four days he spent lost in the Green Swamp.I wondered what his back story is.. He only told us about adopting a baby fox and how great it was. I guess I should have been more cautious, more suspicious. I should have examined his voluminous bike packs for assault weapons or hand guns. But, trusting person as I am, I did not. I invited him in. (And I do this with the lost dogs, too!) After breakfast and many thanks, we hoisted his bike into the truck and dropped him off in town. We exchanged phone numbers and expect he'll be back to collect his canoe on the bank of the river. When he said, "How can I repay you?", we only told him to pay it forward to the next time. He got it. These funny and strange encounters with our fellow man give me hope to think that we all Americans, weird as we all are, can welcome each other and still trust. Tears still spring from my eyes when I think about the carnage in Newtown. Those survivor kids will have a long way to go before they trust again. But it can happen. We must make it happen. Wishing you all a New Year of peace and love.

Friday, December 21, 2012

Families Happen

 Like everyone else, mostly, I have this vast family connected to me by DNA. Of course, I love and treasure them, and connect with them over thousands of miles whenever we can. We visit back and forth and it is so important to me to be in contact with all my eight grandchildren.

Because we live so far from most of our family we have our "family" here as well. Here is Maria, the sister I adopted many years ago in Italy. She is wearing the robe I gave her for her trip up north where it will be cold.

 We both needed a sister (I already had one, she had none). You can't have too many sisters! In case you're thinking this beautiful woman is some kind of desperate orphan - NOT! She's a famous and published anthropologist, and we happened to do the adoption in Italy because we were both there having an amazing holiday and it seemed the right thing to do.

In this photo she's wearing the new robe I gave her for the family Hannuka celebration last week. In our mutual adoption, I got a new brother-in-law, my grandson got a wonderful uncle, all of us got new family we treasure.

This weekend another part of our "family" is here. This is a family of four- Peter, Anne. Stephan and Phil. This family has been visiting our ranch for years and we have watched their two boys grow up. Together we have explored the woods and swamps and fields. We have shared so many meals, talks and walks and heavy work cutting downed trees and mowing the fields. More than any 'real' relation, this family truly gets it why we love this place.

We are hoping that they will be able to buy some of the acreage next to ours.. So much to think about that.

Their boys do not have any living grandparents, and I think they may regard us as some kind of surrogate. This family is our family forever.

And, so important under my heart as an outlier part of my family is Warren, the cowboy we inherited when we bought this land more than twenty years ago. Warren owns and takes care of the cattle on our place. He is a suspicious guy who takes his time figuring out anyone. But, now, he and I are thick as thieves, we hug a lot, have conversations about cows and vegetables and the weather. He is so different from me politically, but I know he is not ever mean spirited (the deer he kills is butchered and sent to the local food banks) Warren would do anything for me and I would do the same for him. He's family to me.

Last Friday as the massacre was happening in Newtown, I was in a public school first grade making latkes with the kids.

Terrible week, thinking about this. What I do know is that the IRA is totally on the wrong track!

Families happen in the most serendipitous ways. My little family of those first graders grating the potatoes and onions, asking questions, trusting.

Family happens!




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Sunday, December 16, 2012

Festival of Lights

 Here is my grandson Quincy last night lighting the last candle for Hannukah. There is my brother-in-law supervising.

I love this part of our family tradition when we all sit down to the usual knishes and latkes and everything else and we exchange all those wonderful and wacky gifts. My sister Maria listened when many months ago I said I really wanted a statue of St. Francis for my garden. So there it was- tasteful and the perfect size to guard my water garden.

We are certainly diverse; our family includes all colors, ethnicities and religions. And we celebrate like mad! This night we were especially tender as we thought about the tragedy in Connecticut but never spoke about it in front of Quincy. None of us could bear what those parents who lost their children have to do. So we hold him tighter and laugh as he releases the big slinky down the back stairs and we hear the clanks going down. We laugh as he manoeuvers his new robotic spider under the table and over our feet, and we scream.

Next week we'll be going to visit five of our other grandchildren in Connecticut. We'll celebrate Christmas with all the decorations and twin babies crawling around eating the wrapping paper and bigger ones eager to tell us what they have been doing since we last saw them. We won't be eating latkes. We'll be feasting on traditional Puertorican food, and probably a dab of some traditional English fare.

We'll rush in on Christmas Eve morning on a blast of cold air, so eager to see everyone and hugs and kisses and how you've grown and is there any time left to run out to the CVS for more stocking stuffers.

I do love the holidays! I am glad we do not have to have our own Christmas tree here, but I am looking forward to the one I'll see soon. (And I am looking forward to chocolates!)

Happy Holidays, friends. Hold tight to your family, hug your kids. Pray for peace and love.
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Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Food, Glorious Food!

The New York Times says that dinner parties are dead. The Tampa Bay Times says, not really. From my perspective, I'd say that dinner parties are alive and thriving. We have always given dinner parties, but not the Manhattan kind where everything is exquisite. What we do is invite folks, mostly close to the last minute. "Hey, we have some great fish, come on over!" Or, more formally, a week or two in advance. At the ranch where we mostly live, we often invite local people to round out the weekend guests we frequently have. Our local friends usually bring eggs from their own chickens, or whatever interesting produce they have. We send them home with our garden produce, maybe some good books or puzzles. More often than not we have many dogs flopping around in the dining room and kids taking their places at the table. My husband who does all the cooking takes into consideration all the dietary needs (gluten free, vegan, vegetarian etc.) and comes up with wonderful menus everyone likes. The vegetables and salad come from our garden out back. I set the farm style table with colorful and casual stuff (Martha Stewart would be proud), and my eight year old grandson places and lights the candles. I am not concerned with how people dress! Just be clean, no bare torsos, no ball caps inside. The conversation will be great. And the food, the glorious food is stellar! Some of our friends are truly great cooks, and I think that it invigorates my husband to do the little extra when they come. Of course, in these dinner parties, we all eat the same things. Sometimes people who are staying in the guest house contribute dessert or something else. What truly interests me is that we all have to eat and we must eat the stuff we grow and cook from scratch. We must realize that eating is a social thing that is fun to do together. In doing this we'll all be slim and fit (even after scraping the last bits out of the lemon souffle pan!) Dinner parties give me courage to set forth again and again in this community where I labor so hard at growing a garden for all and find it uphill work where I daily encounter people who never cook from scratch, never have the wonderful experience of eating good food together and consume calories mostly from fast food and the Dollar General.