Bethany Bassett

2Apr

March Madness

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“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
~ Mark Twain

By the time we got home from the mountains last weekend, spring was already busy stereotyping itself—double rainbows arching across the sky, vain spiders sun tanning on the balcony, trees and meadows bursting into bloom, pollen, pollen everywhere. Spring! I immediately pulled the short sleeves out of storage and tossed the blanket off our bed, only to remember that late March is not quite as warm as it looks. Nevertheless… spring!

Clouds and sunshine have been flirting endlessly, my energy levels fluctuating in direct correspondence. My total emotional reliance on the weather amuses my husband, but it’s about as fun to live with as a pet harpy. Bursts of inspiration are washed out suddenly by tiredness; I go from supermom to horrible failure in sixty. (D: “But you’re not a failure.” B: “You’re forgetting the horrible.”) I feel hopelessly motivated and hopelessly behind, seesawing to opposite extremes in the capricious sunlight. I’m part honeybee, part slug, and three parts mad hatter all at once.

However, change is dancing in the breeze as it does every spring. I’m believing at least two and a half impossible things before breakfast, and the horizon continues to glow long after dark. Tomorrow, we pack up our new tent (Car Lingus finally inspired us to upgrade from our leaky 2-person budget model) and chase the scent of lemons down to Capri for the weekend; I intend to come back brimming with the magic of sunrises over blue water and hopeful enough to ditch the slug persona.

Welcome, you crazy spring.

(Thanks to Dan for sending along this gem of an April anthem)

31Mar

A Daily Dose of Beauty ~ March 2010

Posted by: Bethany in A Daily Dose of Beauty Comments Off on A Daily Dose of Beauty ~ March 2010

March 1^st – Whiling away the first warm afternoon of the year at the playground, meeting new friends, and sharing a fabulous pinecone stew.

March 2^nd – Catching up on This American Life while concocting a pink pudding birthday cake.

March 3^rd – Introducing my brand new five-year-old to the cherished Ingalls family.

March 4^th – Rocking out to “nerdy music”—They Might Be Giants—at Natalie’s request and catching her singing along to Meet the Elements, “Come on, come on, and meet the elephants!”

March 5^th – Bundling up and baking cupcakes to keep warm as our heater completed union negotiations.

March 6^th – Waking up to both girls in bed with us, discussing loudly and with giggles a-plenty which one of us was a king (Sophie), which one was a princess (Natalie), which one was a queen (Mommy), and which one was a mermaid (Sophie again). (After some debate, it was agreed Daddy could be co-king.)

March 7^th – Sharing the hilariously traumatic family experience of making bracelets with Natalie’s new, über-cheap jewelry wand.

March 8^th – Walking in on Sophie bouncing up and down and singing Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” on the potty.

March 9^th – Submitting my first short story in over a year.

March 10^th – Nibbling fresh strawberries, sipping tea, and giggling as the girls from Bible study launched into an in-depth discussion of boob jobs.

March 11^th –Spotting a bed of exuberant daffodils blooming in a neighbor’s garden.

March 12^th – Catching the look on Dan’s face when he heard me singing TMBG’s “Violin-lin-lin” to the girls.

March 13^th – Sinking into the couch with my husband and the passengers of Oceanic 815 after a long day of cleaning.

March 14^th – Hosting the kind of long, social lunch that I’ve so often enjoyed in Italian homes.

March 15^th – Starting my daily to-do list with “Write HGTV back” and feeling a brief celebrity glow.

March 16^th – Taking a big bite of New Orleans’ style banana pudding and tasting the stars align.

March 17^th – Saluting the Irish American spirit with homemade shamrock shakes.

March 18^th – Filling our day with the fairy-tale scent of baking cookies.

March 19^th – Zipping up the last suitcase with plenty of time left for drinks and an early bedtime—miraculous, this!

March 20^th – Winding through breathtakingly beautiful mountain passes on our way to the ski resort.

March 21^st – Watching the girls’ heads spiral into the stratosphere from the joy of snow (and, one hour later, plunge into the depths of despair over wet socks and imminent naptime).

March 22^nd – Playing Taboo with friends once we were all so tired that cry-laughing hilarity was guaranteed.

March 23^rd – Hearing the girls crack up over old Tom & Jerry cartoons like I did as a child.

March 24^th – Flying down the mountainside on fresh snow glittering in the early morning sunshine.

March 25^th – Braving a foggy mountainside journey on my board for the second time in a week and reveling in the superhero rush when I made it.

March 26^th – Getting several hours of guilt-free reading time out of my otherwise undesirable back seat station during our drive back to Perugia.

March 27^th – Watching a perfect double rainbow arch across the valley below our house.

March 28^th – Fashioning a sweet Mommy-Natalie date out of a routine trip to the grocery store.

March 29^th – Catching the backyard trees in the act of blooming.

March 30^th – Inviting Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles to breakfast. (We should do this every day.)

March 31^st – Glimpsing bedtime stories in the late-evening clouds and their vivid incantations of blue.

30Mar

Latent Swashbuckler

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As my last post made abundantly clear, courage is not something I come by easily. I assume God kept this in mind when he nudged single me toward single Dan seven years ago and then hid conspicuously behind a potted plant singing “Getting’ Jiggy Wit It” just loud enough for us to hear. At least, I fervently hope so. A girl could use a bit of divine reassurance upon realizing her husband considers mountain biking, racing through airports, and eating fist-sized octopi to be marital bonding activities.

Dan’s sense of adventure and gift for tenacity (sounds better than stubbornness, right?) have formed the perfect antidote to my sense of being a delicate flower and my gift for hanging out safely indoors for weeks on end. He brings out the latent swashbuckler in me, and I recognize this as a good thing. Usually.

A little less so two Sundays ago. It was the first full day of our settimana bianca—a week in the mountains nearly as important to Italian culture as a week at the beach in August (and involving nearly as much sunbathing). Some dear friends were chaperoning the girls’ naps, so Dan and I grabbed our snowboards and headed up the lift… straight into a cloudbank. Notably, we had forgotten a map.

“No problem,” said my undaunted husband. “We’ll just had straight across until we find an obvious trail.”

“Straight across the mountain?” squeaked his rather daunted wife. “Without a map? Inside a cloud that fancies itself opaque?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Because I am a gutless invertebrate, I didn’t say.

Twenty minutes later found me clinging to the snowy mountainside with the tips of my boots while trying to keep a grip on my board. Above and below me were sheer nothingness—emphasis on the sheer. In fact, the only things I could see were the perpendicular slope directly beneath my feet and Dan’s vague outline ahead. The rest of my vision had been smothered in whiteout. I hadn’t heard anything for a quarter of an hour besides my own footsteps and that landlocked fish flopping around inside my chest, and panic was turning my tired muscles to jelly. Granted, the circumstances didn’t really warrant panic… but I was raised on Laura Ingalls Wilder stories, and my imagination is nothing if not skilled.

We inched along the mountainside twenty minutes more, then another twenty minutes, then yet another twenty, and I really have no idea what I’m saying because time was swallowed up in fog along with the rest of the world. All I know is that each step was an exercise in panic-squashing bravery. And we took a lot of steps.

Want to see?

Why yes, we did cross the width of an entire mountain. In steep snow. Through blinding fog. Carrying our boards. Terrified of losing civilization forevermore and/or tumbling down a precipice onto razor-sharp rocks (this one might have been just me). With no idea that at pretty much any point, we could have snowboarded down easily.

Once we finally got a feel for our surroundings and made it to the bottom, my floppety heart decided it had racked up enough [imaginary] near-death experiences for the week. I was ready to race Dan to the cable car and spend the rest of our vacation communing with our hotel room. But then he got me laughing about our ridiculous mountain trek, and then he got me on my board again, and before I knew it, we were wrapping up a fantastic week on the slopes.

Our last morning, we found ourselves at the same starting point staring into yet another cloud.

“We have to get to the opposite side one way or another,” he said.

“Mmm.”

“And it would be so much easier to just snowboard across the top than to walk with our boards at the bottom.”

“Mmm.”

“And even if it is foggy, we at least know what we’re doing this time.”

“Sort of.”

“Just as long as we don’t lose momentum.”

“Or look down.” Or think about Little House on the Prairie. Or use my memory in any capacity whatsoever.

“So, you up for it?” asked that irrepressible husband of mine.

From behind a ski lift pole drifted an unmistakable “Na na na na na na na.”

“Sure,” I answered. “Why not?”

18Mar

Carpe Defibrillator

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In two days, we leave for the Alps. The snowboards are out of storage, 4,372,690,114 freshly-baked vacation cookies are cooling on the counter, and, per tradition, my heart is hiding in the tightest part of my esophagus.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in prairie country, but mountains terrify as much as they thrill me. On the drive up, I always imagine our car hitting a pot hole and plunging us down 3,000 feet of sheer rock to perish in a fireball of Die Hard proportions. Once we reach snow, I think about the treacherous ice canyons [probably] gaping under the thin frost on which we stand. Riding the ski lift, I imagine the cable snapping or a gust of wind flipping my chair upside-down over the highest drop. Buckling into my snowboard, I consider the myriad of ways I could die or, at the very least, end up horribly mangled on my way down the mountainside with no effort on my part.

Then I factor in the girls. With stunning internal cinematography, I can see an out-of-control skier lopping off their heads with his pole. I can see the girls tumbling off the edge of a precipice, barreling face-first into a tree, heck, even stumbling on a flat surface and breaking a wrist (which may or may not have actually happened to a certain father of theirs). I imagine fatal icicles, avalanches, surprise blizzards, and death by snowmobile… and they’ve never even been on the slopes yet.

Christina’s post yesterday about mothers’ fear of taking risks set me thinking… or rather, stopped my overly dramatic thinking in its tracks. “What is it about nature,” she asked, “and high places and sharp that seem so terrifying that it’s not even worth the supervised risk?” Well, everything, I thought. Then I began to remember some of my happiest childhood moments—reading on tree branches with leaf shadows dancing across my face and soft air beneath me… jumping from one boulder to another over mysterious, bottomless crevices… sitting on our car windowsill with the wind full in my face as we drove through State Parks… strapping on rollerblades and letting my brothers sling me back and forth across the street with long ropes attached to their bikes… exploring woods alone, wading swift rivers up to my neck, running barefoot through grass… Danger was the big kid on the playground, sure, but he wasn’t an enemy.

I will not be letting my daughters sit halfway out of a moving vehicle anytime soon, but I recognize that my [dramatic and mostly unfounded] fears should not keep them from experiencing the wild joy of nature. So we’re borrowing a sled tonight. We’ll rent a pint-sized snowboard. We’ll save seats for the girls on the cable car and show them the world from snowy peaks. I will make every effort to encourage carpe dieming, to have fun, and to quiet the panic every time one of them peeks down a hill. All the same, don’t be too surprised to find out I’ve stashed a first aid kit and a defibrillator in one my boots.

16Mar

From Doorstops to Dishes

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“The dishes!” I wail, glancing into the kitchen on my way to bed. “Why are there always and forever dishes needing to be washed?”

Dan replies kindly: “Because we use them.”

“Oh. Right.”

~~~

On Valentine’s Day, 2004, I kicked my brand new husband out of the house for four hours so I could make Chicken Parmesan as a surprise. To this day, I have no idea how a pile of chicken-topped spaghetti could possibly have taken four hours, but it’s fair to say I had no idea what I was doing. (The consistency of said chicken, which could have better served as packing material, agrees.) However, I so longed to make something beyond our standard fare of Campbell’s and Kraft. Surely, surely, with a little effort and the clucking, grandmotherly help of that red plaid cook book, culinary pleasure could be found in our dining room.

We ate Taco Bell the next day.

A lot changes when one moves to a country without fast food, though. When we first arrived in Italy, I mostly fixed packages of risotto mix and frozen chicken cordon bleu, and we picked up pizza a few times a week. However, I took mental notes each time we were invited to an Italian meal. One friend taught me how to make melt-in-your-mouth gnocchi; another gave me her recipe for amazing oven-roasted potatoes. I learned—thanks to my longsuffering husband—how to make cappuccinos, and I started auditioning new dessert recipes with his co-workers each week. I made a New Year’s resolution to learn how to cook meat so that people would rather eat it than use it as a doorstop. The next year, with a tasty repertoire of brining and braising techniques, I made a New Year’s resolution to make friends with vegetarian fare. I started jotting down menus and grocery lists for the first time in my life.

This year, my attention is drawn more toward my desk than toward the kitchen, but the process of cooking still engages my heart in a way I couldn’t have imagined six years ago. There’s something sacred in the challenge of planning meals to nourish my family’s bodies and souls while guarding our time and finances. There is mindfulness in rubbing fragrant herbs into a pot of soup, serenity in rolling pastry dough. Food preparation is no longer just a means to survival—it is a classroom, a laboratory, and an art studio. A love song. A risk, an exploit, a gathering of the usual five senses plus a few more. A thrice-daily dose of beauty to share and savor.

It is also, as reluctant as I may be to admit this, worth every single always-and-forever-dirty dish.

11Mar

Conscience on a Ledge

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Over the last few weeks, throughout early morning writing sessions, late night socializing, and the swirl of multicolored tasks that make up the in-betweens, my heart has had trouble resting easy. For once, it’s not due to any great dissatisfaction with life. My days tip more toward busyness than boredom, but I’m grateful for the creative luxury of molding my own time, for the daily check-up with my priorities. I’m happy with our family life too and our current balance between stability and excitement. Strong friendships are in the works. Opportunities abound. We can see the light at the end of the credit card statement.

However, my thankfulness and energy buzz have slunk away in shame following each new mention of Haiti. Stories like this and this, not to mention the news reports, aid auctions, and countless pleas for money, forced tragedy into my periphery. Millions without shelter or food or medical supplies… airports blocked, adoptions halted, supplies looted… impulsive relief groups stealing children… the chaos of some trying to do the right thing and others trying just to stay alive compounded with whether I should donate €10 with a text message or buy a cookbook or bid on a painting or empty PayPal’s pockets into any number of beseeching hands… I felt like I was examining calamity through a thousand microscopes.

Around the same time, a friend asked me to read her boss’s new blog exploring social justice issues like human trafficking, burdensome charity, and water allotment. Our church took up a drive to help impoverished leprosy victims in India. Compassion International brought bloggers to Kenya to report on local children’s living conditions and the need for sponsors. I heard the refreshingly-controversial Derek Webb’s “Rich Young Ruler”… and my conscience went into dizzy overdrive.

What am I supposed to do with the whole world’s sorrow at my fingertips?

It’s an honest question. I believe we humans were made to care, deeply, about each other. I see it as part of our divine imprint, the throb of compassion when we see someone in pain, the ability and drive to meet each other’s unique needs. Discomfort over suffering in our world shouldn’t be shrugged off easily; it’s what makes us humane. However, the accessibility of information makes it especially difficult for me to find my place among seven billion wishful thinkers.

Should we stop paying off debt, forget about retirement savings, and send the money to charity? Should we move back to the States where we could make a lot more and live on a lot less? Should we do away with date nights, family vacations, and birthday presents? How can we possibly choose between the desperate situations stippling the globe?

My heart chimes in from time to time to talk my conscience off the ledge. It tells me that unfocused guilt is neither healthy nor helpful. It looks me in the eyes and says that I cannot cure the world and that even if it were possible, my job is not to do so. My heart is convinced that the needs I should be attending to belong to the people already in my life—a refugee mom at church without baby blankets, a lonely landlord eating supper alone, neighbors with health problems, a friend who’s struggling in her marriage, another caught in a messy divorce, yet another mourning the death of her child. Every day, I have opportunities to ease specific burdens, to spread kindness face-to-face.

This strikes me as true religion, every bit as significant as disaster relief for third-world countries. It’s how I can make a positive, lasting difference even with limited resources and my own family to care for, and it feels fundamentally right. So why is my conscience still crouched halfway out a windowsill obsessing about the wide, wounded world that needs a cure?

4Mar

Heirloom

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Yesterday, the resident princess woke up one year older. She bounded out of bed, thrilled as any newly minted five-year-old and radiating enough energy to make her tired mother see stars.

Our pre-breakfast interview went thusly:

Me: “What is today?”

Natalie: “TOMORROW!” ::begins jumping up and down::

Me: “Uhh.. and what is tomorrow?”

Natalie: “My birthday! It’s my birthday! AHHHHHHH! I’m FIVE!” ::throws a balloon over her head repeatedly::

Sophie: “Sophie’s a five.”

Natalie: “And I have one heart balloon and other balloons, and I even got a heart balloon that’s the color green!”

Sophie: “Mine’s a purple.”

Natalie: “I want to do all kind of things today! Mommy, you know, I can look up and down and left and right, and I can do lots of jumps!” ::demonstrates:: “I can jump on one leg! Watch! I can do it with one leg! You know I like pink all the time?”

Sophie: “Orange balloon.”

Natalie: “I can do it so well now, but not when I’m four. Only five-year-olds are good at things. Just now. You like my long legs? My birthday! My birthday! You know? You’re probably right, it is my birthday. Woo-hoo-woo-hoo! You see the heart on my head?”

Sophie: “The color of all balloons!”

Me: “What are your favorite things to play with?”

Natalie: “A colorful piano, the pirate Legos…” ::goes to investigate:: “I can see a monkey, a shark, an alligator, a skeleton, lots of pirates with fish, there’s LOTS of pirates and a mermaid and a king, and I like ballet and my little toys and computer games and Super Mario Brothers.”

Sophie: “And Wii ‘ports!”

Natalie: “Mommy, you know I’m being good? You just know that I’m five now? When I go to sleep, I don’t suck my thumb anymore.”

Sophie: “Sophie’s sucking the thumb.”

Me, trying to stick to the script: “What can you do now that you’re five?”

Natalie: “Play with Barbies and open presents and play with some other toys. Oh, reading! I just know how to look at the pictures on my own, okay, Mommy? I can just look at my pictures. You see? I’m going to look at these pictures. Wow. Look at these letters, wow! Hey look, here’s my number that I turned!” ::points to the page number:: “FIVE!”

Me: ::nods and smiles while backing slowly toward my warm bed::

I was under the weather all day—as in, I couldn’t manage to lift my outlook above the low-lying clouds—but I loved watching her luxuriate in the occasion. It’s not every day a girl gets a custom-made pink layer cake and is finally allowed to use scissors at school. All the same, my mind would only grant that she was twenty-four hours older than she had been the day before, that the date was less worthy of celebration than the girl herself. The difference between five years old and four-plus-364-days wasn’t enough to coax awe, much less jumping jacks, out of me.

However, my stoic perspective lasted only as long as the tissue paper on her second present. It was a ring—a dusky pink jewel set in a gold circlet, misshapen from its former career as my fifth birthday present.

Natalie tried on the ring, admired it for approximately three seconds, and put it back in its scuffed velvet box. Oh, I thought. Knowing the kid’s adoration for all things pink and sparkly, I had assumed she would love my little heirloom… but she was more excited about the 49-cent pencil sharpener in the next package, and I wasn’t offended. I was jolted though. Watching my daughter twirl the ring in the kitchen light reminded me of the day I had gotten the ring. I remembered it. And the true weight of five-years-old landed squarely on my consciousness: She’s crossed the threshold from impression into memory.

The realization hummed in my background the rest of the day. Twenty years from now, would Natalie remember me sitting down to draw princesses with her? Would she remember me leaving the table to clean? Would she remember my frustration over the confounding Disney Wii game? Would she remember me leading her into the pages of Little House in the Big Woods and illuminating mysteries like venison and headcheese? What about me picking up my computer as a respite from several straight hours with the girls? Or me kissing the grumpiest part of her neck until the giggles burst out at bedtime?

It’s a sobering discovery that my parenting from here on out is being archived rather than evaporating with the moment. (Frankly, it’s terrifying, but that may be only because my brain hasn’t taken its Valium yet.) I have about twenty hours’ total experience raising a five-year-old, and I’m guaranteed to botch the job over and over again as I figure it out. Will enough standout parenting moments cancel out the flubs that go on record? Can my core-deep love make up for my core-deep imperfection?

I certainly hope so, because otherwise… ::starts backing slowly toward my warm bed::

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