V is for Vicarious

I have a confession to make: I kind of like Martha Stewart.

Years ago, when I was working as a cook at a catering company, several of our go to recipes were from Martha's cookbooks, Entertaining and Weddings. The dishes were always foolproof crowd-pleasers, so it was hard to throw any shade on her. And a few years later, when my 4-year-old nephew Riley told everyone he saw a lady on TV who looked like Aunt Tracey, I was a little tickled that it was Martha.

Even when she was sent to that low-security prison in West Virginia for the white collar crime of insider trading, I just couldn't hold it against her. Perhaps it helped that one of her fabulous estates is on Mount Desert Island, home of Acadia National Park, and one of my favorite places in the world. Or maybe it was just plain admiration for a middle class kid from Jersey City who went to Barnard and built a hundred and fifty million dollar business.

Either way, here's where I tell you that I subscribe to her magazine, Living, not for the decorating advice, nor the crafts, nor the recipes (although I do love the photos of all of those), but for Martha's monthly calendar which appears in the first pages of every issue. There we see, in addition to celebrations with friends and family, her exercise schedule (cardio and strength on alternating days), when she will glean her garden and clean her gutters, decorate and send her cards for holidays, groom her dogs, go horseback riding, pick and freeze peas, and swim and have cocktails by the pool. What an enviable life it seems she leads!

But I had to wonder today, when I got my June copy out of the mailbox, how far in advance they plan these issues, and what sort of alacrity could they bring to Living in this situation we all find ourselves. And I must say, that the calendar does reflect the reality of social distancing. Martha is at home, cooking, gardening, exercising, and caring for her pets.

But this month, the difference is, so am I. Okay, minus the horses and pool, but still.

Life Lesson:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
~Mary Oliver
The Summer Day

U is for Up, Up, and Away

Tomorrow is National Paper Airplane Day. I know because in a continuing effort to keep my students connected to school, I have become a poor man's middle school version of the NYTimes At Home section, which offers three diversions a day for those of us who are, well, at home. I think my students appreciate my efforts-- in addition to a fact about the day, I have provided ice cream recipes, water bottle bird feeder directions, virtual tours of glaciers, personality quizzes, and the like all in an effort to keep the kids engaged and writing.

And tomorrow? It's a video about making paper airplanes, and a gentle prompt to consider any experience they might have with a real airplane.

Remember those?

Life Lesson: It's the journey, not the destination.

T is for These Things

1. Treat, my nephew

With the stay-at-home order this spring, Treat has expanded both his interest in gardening, and the vegetable beds he put in last year. His garden is amazing, and at 25, he is tireless and strong, especially when it comes to gardening.

2. Transplanting

So, I leapt at Treat's offer to help me in our garden. We even went ahead and made it official, adding his name to the community as our co-gardener. Treat and I spent over four hours in our garden today. I had some lumber and metal corners and I had hauled in 16 bags of top soil with the plan f constructing a raised bed. First, though, we had to move some flowers that were on the spot. With two of us working, the task went quickly and well, and we created a little cutting garden in the corner and along the fence.

3. Tomatoes

MY main crop has always been that jewel of summer, vine ripe tomatoes, and this year will be no different. After we wrestled the raised bed together and filled it with the soil, we put in 10 tomato plants. Some of them were from my friend and colleague, Enid, who nurtured them from seed for our school garden, which she manages quite impressively. After 11 weeks away from the building, it was nice to see her in person when she dropped the wee tomato plants by.

We still have a bunch more tomatoes to plant, too.

4. Tomorrow

Treat and I parted ways at a little before four, but not before agreeing to meet back there tomorrow morning to build another bed and plant a few more veggies.

5. Three sisters

One of the other projects we'll work on tomorrow will be creating the mounds for our three sister growing. This year we have four varieties of corn, five types of shell beans, and six or seven squashes. Planting those crops together last year was a whim, but this year? It's a mission!

6. Tired

I was pretty spent when I unlaced my boots and stepped out of them on the front porch. I headed right upstairs, shucked my garden duds, left the tie-dye t-shirt and cargo shorts in a heap on the floor and hit the shower. I'm still tired, but it's definitely the good kind.

As worn out as I am, I'm also so grateful for all the help. We made a lot of progress, much more than I ever could have done on my own, and I'm excited to get back in there tomorrow.

Life Lesson: T is also for Thanks!

S is for Strawberries

When I was about 4 years old, and my little brother was two, we moved to our first real house. Before that we had lived in an apartment and then a row house, but now we had a whole big front yard and back yard of our own. On one of our first days there, we were playing on the side of the house when we found a whole garden full of strawberries. We couldn't believe it, and when we tasted them, they were so sweet and juicy that soon we had eaten all of them.

When we told my mom, she was mad, because that garden belonged to our next door neighbor, and she made us go next door and apologize. But we were too afraid to knock on a stranger's door, so we just sat in the front yard and cried. Then my mom came out and marched us over there. Our neighbor, Mrs. Huddleston, was very forgiving, but we never did that again!

Life Lesson: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is!

R is for Rainy Days

The soft patter of the rain on our deck and the warm air floating in through the sliding glass door this morning reminded me of rainy days on summer vacation when I was a kid. As long as there weren't too many of them, it was always fun to find a way to occupy ourselves indoors.

A forced break from the sunshine and pool allowed us to listen to records and play spoons and pinochle, drink sweaty glasses of iced tea with lemonade, and read books out on the covered side porch. Sometimes the 4 O'Clock Movie would capture our attention and we would lose ourselves in some old black and white B movie, or else spend hours at the dining room table working on a jigsaw puzzle.

After dinner, if the rain had stopped, we ran around barefoot in the wet grass catching fireflies and putting them in a peanut butter jar with holes punched in the lid. The rule was that we had to let them go at the end of the evening, so we left the open jar on the back porch when we went inside to watch summer replacement variety shows before bed.

It seems like back then we slept soundly every night and woke up every day rested and ready for whatever the day might bring, rain or shine.

I think Sarah Dessen captured our lives perfectly in her novel Along for the Ride: "In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible."

Life Lesson: Summer is almost here!

Q is for a Question of Fairness

We walked over to pick our dog up from her friend Beckett's house this afternoon, and peering inside I could see the movie Jaws was on the television. It was the scene where first the dog and then the kid on the raft gets eaten by the shark.

"I was so young when it came out," Heidi said, "I don't really know the movie very well."

I know the movie quite well. I was 13 the summer everyone was talking about Jaws. "Don't go into the water" and "We're gonna need a bigger boat" were catchphrases and punchlines that everybody got. Everybody, that is, except me and my brother and sister. We were not allowed to see PG-Rated movies, and so Jaws was out. That didn't keep us from pestering my mom about seeing the movie, though, and I think when my aunt let my cousins, who were around our ages, go, that my mom decided we could see the movie of the summer, too.

I was excited for all of two minutes until I decided that if I had to wait until I was 13 to see a PG movie, then it was only fair that my brother and sister should have to wait, too. My mother dismissed my complaint out of hand, which shouldn't have surprised me, because we were one of those families with the same expectations and restrictions for all of us, same bedtime, same allowance, same number of chores. Even so, I chose this battle, and I pitched a fit, perhaps the last tantrum of my childhood.

My mother was unmoved. "Either you all go or none of you go," she told me, and it was clear she didn't care which I decided. My brother and sister on the other hand, were furious with me both for jeopardizing the movie AND for making the case at all. In the end? We saw the movie. For me, it did not live up to all the hype, but I liked knowing what the hype was about. I also regretted making such a big deal of the situation, not because I thought I was wrong, but because of the hard feelings.

Life Lesson:  Choose your battles wisely.

P is for Partay!

One of my teammates devised a plan to have a Dance-Off during his office hours this week. He even produced a video, complete with his adorable nine-month-old son, which made it pretty hard to turn down that invitation. So at 12:30 today, about 20 or so of us gathered virtually, familiar faces peering out from the tiles of the screen. It was by far the best attended session of online schooling so far, and we all happily chatted as we waited for the main event. Oh, there was a giggle of a dance-off, but when it was through, we played the Cha-Cha Slide, and everyone got a chance to show off some moves. The thirty minutes slid by, and there were smiles all around as we said good-bye.

Life Lesson: Sometimes just showing up is enough.