Sunday Scribblings

Lemon Drops

Posted by: Bethany in Sunday Scribblings 12 Comments

My somewhere over the rainbow is escaping me during these last stir-crazy days of summer.

Sophie is suddenly ten months old, which means first steps and wobbly-legged climbing. (Hooray! But also, heaven help us.) She goes on archeological missions through laundry piles and bookshelves and kitchen cabinets and the diaper basket, on her knees so both hands can dig, paperbacks and rash cream flying helter-skelter behind. Every mouthful of food glops immediately back out to be squished in fists, splatted on the floor, massaged into her babyfine red hair. She likes to play in the trash. She knows how to turn the stereo volume on max. She wonders what will happen if she unrolls an entire case of paper towels into that fresh puddle of lotion. I feel like a zookeeper, and a very poor one at that.

Meanwhile, Natalie’s in limbo somewhere between the exuberance of three-years-old and the self-sufficiency of four. School doesn’t start for another month here, so she wanders our tiny apartment looking for something new to occupy all this empty time. She’s good at relocating piles of toys, but not much else interests her these days; the August haze has sucked away her usual creativity. School will be so good for her with its structure and friendship and bright colorful learning, but damn. Another month?! Will we make it that long cooped up with our overworked fans and piles of toys? She has come to understand perfectly what “Give me a minute” means, and this swallows me in guilt, chomps through what little energy I have, belches up a mangled exoskeleton of my best mothering intentions.

This is the time of year when I decide enough with the hot weather already. Yes, I know it was basically yesterday when I was shivering in bed under piles of February blankets, begging summer to get here STAT, but we’re in need of some cool, swirly breezes. Invigoration. Just a touch of minty-fresh chill, and I think I’ll be able to see that chimney top again, one of those perfectly crooked pipes atop an enchanting blue Parisian roof, with my petty troubles melting away like lemon drops above.

16Aug

A Tablespoon of Time

Posted by: Bethany in Sunday Scribblings 9 Comments

Wednesday, August 13: Day 6 of Vacation (Day 3 here, Day 4 here, Day 5 to come… perhaps)

I had been looking forward to our lunch invitation today, old friends of my husband’s seeming at once new and homey to me. They have a little boy now who would be both a common denominator in those first shaky get-to-know-you conversations and an instant playmate, and the wife cooked up a beautiful Venetian meal. But the visit began to crumble two minutes in when the little boy bit Natalie, severely and without provocation. A minute later, he yanked out a fistful of her hair, and as we were busy comforting her, he wrenched Sophie’s nose. He hit them over the head with toys. He scratched their faces and stabbed them with drumsticks. I stopped him from biting my nine-month-old upwards of 30 times, but he did manage to pull her hair and yank her around on a regular basis. I have never dried so many little tears in one day.

The duality of my feelings hit me after lunch as I stood holding a crying baby in one arm and a glass of chilled prosecco with the other. As a mother, I was hurt. You cannot watch your own children sob without feeling their pain ten times over. I wanted justice, which is mostly unheard-of in Italian parenting; couldn’t they put him in time-out or take away his toys or send him to toddler juvie? But as a woman and, more importantly, a friend, I understood that two-year-old boys can no more moderate their own frustrations than their mamas can apologize away the guilt. I felt so sorry for our friends who find themselves trapped with “un mostro”—a monster, their own baby—and couldn’t bring themselves to believe me when I said it would get better.

I guess the thing to remember is time. Because with just a wee dash of it, the girls’ bruises will heal. With a bit more, maybe a tablespoon or so, our friends’ boy will learn less violent ways to express himself. And after a while, once the sprinkling of hours pile up into a new layer of life, our friends—and quite possibly we too—will find that we have the guts to be parents after all.

3Aug

Prisoner’s Fancy

Posted by: Bethany in Sunday Scribblings 10 Comments

Do I have to go to bed, do I have to, do I have to?

And of course I do, even though undiluted summer is streaming through my window with its heavy perfume of honeysuckle and ripe peaches. The grass is still leaping upward all across our back yard. The flowers are still awake, all color and careless joy like children, and daylight is still blazing trails through our giant pecan trees. Just beyond that door, the bright and busy mechanism of life is humming Come play! Come play!

But I am prisoner in my pink-and-white bed. Stuck until morning, no hope of escape.

I lie quietly, indignant and imaginative, listening to the cicadas playing tag. There go the bumblebees too, pedaling their bikes around the neighborhood, and butterflies cheering each other down the Slip ‘N’ Slide. The chickadees, of course, are playing hide and seek, and suddenly, I am with them, perched on the rafter of an old barn.

There are no rules in Chickadee Hide & Seek. Just a lot of swooping and soaring, little feathered torpedoes zipping around cows and alighting like bobble-heads on a power line, our own trampoline of copper filaments and sky. I remember to bring my teddy bears—Fred and Katie, who are married but have not yet learned the juicy details of procreation—and we fly together, impossibly high. We hide inside chimney-tops and behind clouds, where Fred and Katie get carried away kissing (no tongue, though). My little brothers would never be able to find me in a million years; I am thrilled.

The scenery shifts, and I am Bride Barbie. Katie refuses to lend her teddy-bear husband to me for the occasion, but who needs a groom anyway? My long white gown is studded with diamond drops and teensy pink pearls. And draped with satin. And fringed with rubies. And covered with lace. And festooned with ribbons. And plated with gold. I am breathtakingly grown up, even if the only ones who see it are my woodland creature audience, come to watch me twirl and twirl until my veil is tangled in pine branches.

I live in my own stories for hours until I finally grow tired and drift to sleep somewhere in the South Pacific. But the next night, I am back. This time, my bears and I must escape a dismal orphanage, and the night after that, we take a tire swing up, up into space. My stories overlap and twist into complicated candycanes, yarn and fancy fraying together into fantastic landscapes. And night after long childhood night, I weave gossamer threads of imagination into a new home for myself, a place to retreat for those lonely times when summer is locked out of reach.

18Apr

The Importance of Disastercake

Posted by: Bethany in Sunday Scribblings 12 Comments

Have you ever dipped your hands into a bag of cake flour? (It is impossibly soft, like fluffed air.) Have you listened to the crackle of fresh bread crust? Smelled a spicy fruitcake bubbling in the oven? Seen the rich gloss of a half-melted chocolate chip? Tasted raw brownie batter? (Of course you’ve done that, with brownie batter being its own FDA-recommended food group and all.)

This is why I love baking: It provides unexpected treasures for all the senses. It is a whole-body experience, with love and delicacy and intuition being every bit as important as the baking powder*. I’m still learning the ins and outs, of course. In all my years of baking, I’ve only recently discovered that you can’t leave cream of tartar out of a recipe just because you don’t know what it is (though I’m not sure anyone really does). After 6,729 burnt candy bars, I’ve finally found the secret to melting chocolate**. And since moving to Italy, I’ve learned about baking’s greatest aphrodisiac: parchment paper. As long as your pan is lined with a buttered layer of paper, not even your Aunt Millie’s notorious Caramelized Rubber Cement Bars would stick.

Like any skill, the ability to bake comes through trial and error. (And error, and error.) For me, this little domestic pleasure has been worth every lumpy biscuit and soupy disastercake; however, I have trouble explaining why baking means so much to me. Maybe it’s because sending a plate of lemon bars to The Hubby’s office can brighten his coworkers’ entire day. Maybe it’s because I subconsciously want to be a Colonial housewife***, with my kitchen the warm and lively center of my home. Maybe it’s because baking is a tangibly creative endeavor, as if I were a composer and these were my masterpieces. Rhapsody in apple-cinnamon. Vanilla bean minuet. Opus n. 87 with a dark chocolate ganache.

Or maybe it’s just because a bag of flour costs 40 times less than a manicure.

—

*Which, just for reference, is rather important.

** It’s called a microwave.

***Hoopskirts! Embroidery! Taxation without representation!

12Apr

Bragging Rights

Posted by: Bethany in Sunday Scribblings 9 Comments

Mr. Freeze was, without question, the most horrible apparatus I had ever seen. 1,450 feet of icy blue track shot out of a dilapidated warehouse, performing grotesque twists and gyrations at breakneck speed, finally careening straight into the sky with only gravity as a harness. And THEN? A backwards free-fall, upside-down corkscrews, 4G forces yanking at the tiny magnetized cars. I involuntarily clutched my stomach. “No. No, no, no. No way, no. I wouldn’t ride that for a million dollars. Have I mentioned the fact that NO?”

As I waited on a bench for my brothers and dad to risk their lives on the deathcoaster, I considered that I probably would ride it for a million dollars. Maybe even fifty–think of all the lip gloss I could buy! But no one was paying, and anyway, twelve-years-old was far too young to die.

But! whispered an unfamiliar voice from a shadowy corner of my brain. You’ll regret it if you don’t try. You know you will.

“Uh huh. And what, exactly, about not committing 70 miles-per-hour suicide will I regret?”

The experience, whispered my brain. The adrenaline rush. The thrill of speed. The wind in your face. The chance to see the world upside-down and sideways.

“Sorry, but no. I just… I just can’t.”

Somewhere, in the back of my brain, a devious smile–Even for bragging rights?

So, for the paltry prize of bragging rights, I rode Mr. Freeze. I trembled through the entire line, sweating and nauseous and imagining my funeral, but I got on the coaster nonetheless. Once buckled into the harness and staring straight into the first tunnel, the tracks underneath me buzzing with barely-leashed energy, I died at the rate of four thousand times a second. My fears spiraled madly. I pictured my head exploding into bloody shards of stupidity or gravity suddenly taking a lunch break. I was spectacularly dramatic.

However, the instant that rollercoaster took off, I became a different person. For the first time in my life, my heart pumped more adrenaline than blood. I felt the wind–really felt it–and the speed and the movement like an enormous daredevil ballet. I felt an entirely new kind of alive, the kind that comes with risk and determination. I loved every second.

The whispering stranger in my brain found a voice that day, and I have treated it as a friend ever since. Admittedly, it is the kind of friend that mothers tell their children to stay away from, but that just makes it more enticing. It has talked me into small things like jet skiing and eating grubs, and it has talked me into huge things like traveling the world and taking off down a snowy mountain with both feet strapped onto a flimsy board. My stomach still knots up whenever I face a daring situation–I would hardly call myself fearless–but I’ve learned to embrace what scares me for the sake of a full and vivid life, for experience. And, of course, for the bragging rights.

4Apr

Worth [very nearly] 1,000 Words

Posted by: Bethany in Sunday Scribblings 13 Comments

If my week were a photograph, it would show a tiny corner kitchen. Crusty dishes swell like a wave out of the sink–a new black plate already chipped on one side, five (thousand?) saucepans stacked like Russian nesting dolls, a spaghetti server caked with dry tomato pulp that might as well be rubber cement for how easily it will come off. Brown-rimmed coffee cups lurk on the stove, under the dish towel, behind the water filter–self-medication for restless naps. That filmy tangle of plastic wrap in the corner is left over from Wednesday, when it shut out air from my morning and stuck my afternoon in all the wrong places. That gummy wad of Cheerio crumbs, smashed peas, and stray Playmobil pieces? Used to be the floor.

In the high chair, just visible to the side, sits a tired baby adorned head to toe in rice mush. Her cranky pout could be due either to boredom or to the angry red hives popping up around her mouth from tasting formula. From where I stand, it looks like a prescription: Exclusively breastmilk, five times a day, until college.

I am the one crumbling by the sink with stringy hair and yesterday’s makeup, looking exactly like those moms I used to pity. That white patch on my shoulder is spit-up, naturally, and that green glint in my eye is all the bad words I want to say…

…but won’t because of the short girl tugging on my shirt. It’s not evident from the photo, but she is chattering in Ancient Mongolian: “Fleeshle waboom botchgoin mickaiwogo toks meegwam clombish lobblelobblelobblelobble popcorn for breakfast?” She may have been wearing those stripey pink socks for three days straight now, but her mother declines to comment.

The photo shows grease splatters on the range hood, rainy pockmarks on the window, and dust bunnies curled in the least-reachable corners. It shows the nuclear fallout from last night’s souptastrophe. It shows the disparity between sticky note to-do lists and hours in a day. What the photo doesn’t show, however, is the front door, just out of sight around the corner. It doesn’t show the moment tonight when that door will open and my husband will be home again. It doesn’t show Natalie shrieking “DADDY!!!” (in English, praise be to Webster) or Sophie bursting into giggles or me sinking into his arms like a damsel quite suddenly out of distress. It doesn’t show the dirty dishes fading into the distance or smiles eclipsing my lack of makeup… but who cares? This is the point when I tear the photo into Cheerio-sized bits and toss it into the mess that used to matter.

30Mar

When I Think About Heaven

Posted by: Bethany in Sunday Scribblings 9 Comments

I imagine our gauzy sapphire of a world new again.
Snowflakes twirling like crystal confetti, untouched by smog –
Newborn flowers breathing, blooming, stretching their souls in unpaved meadows –
Deer laughing as they leap in the open, unafraid of bullets –
Turquoise waves lapping jeweled sand, ignorant of tattered plastic and toxic waste –
Pure skies, undiluted clouds, stars like celestial spotlights –
An innocent earth, inviting, intimate.

I imagine the colorful mosaic of humanity new again.
90-year-olds salsa dancing in the prime of their youth –
Children exploring the vast bounds of imagination in perfect safety –
Languages entwining around an international soundtrack of
laughter –
Sex, food, friendship, and work each a passionate celebration of
life –
Art flowing through individuals and communities like endless spring water –
Hearts bursting with enough love to light up the universe.

I’ve heard it described as an everlasting harpfest,
An endless church service somewhere in the void
With halos and wings and the insufferable weight of being good.
But someone who knows promised to make everything new;
No more death or mourning or crying or pain,
The world–this world–as it was always meant to be.

Beaming,
Breathgiving,
Beautiful,
Beyond imagination.

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