Another 9-11

I was here in this house.  My sister was visiting from Seattle.

The phone rang; our younger son's voice was on the other end.  “Wanted to tell you one of the Twin Towers has been hit by a plane in New York.”  He realized we were isolated and might not know.

I was stupidly naïve at first (my usual default) and thought, “What a bizarre accident.” We turned on the TV and saw another plane penetrate the second tower.  No mishap this time.

People on the streets ran frantic-crazed with terror.   Cameras recorded the billows of refuse and reporters estimated deaths.  It was all so surreal.  I stood frozen in place, trying to comprehend.

I’d grown up in the 50’s thinking the United States had fought “the war to end all wars” and we were home free. Safe and sound.  True, the world had become more volatile, but not HERE.  We were exempt, HERE. Terrorism was a word without a reality.  Now I was watching it happen on home turf.

Something quaked – the earth beneath me, or my own core? Meanwhile sunlight danced on the lake and swans paddled idly in front of our house, icons of powerful beauty. My small world was untouched, still unbroken.  As the smoke billowed on the TV screen, my sister talked of changing her flight plans to go home.  Should she take a train instead? I wondered how anything could ever be the same again.

Today I stood in the same spot in our TV room, reliving the shock.  Eleven years later the sun still sparkled and the swans still idled by: status quo reigned.  And yet the quake still trembled with little shivery tremors….quivers testifying to ongoing volatility and the truth that planet earth has a timeline, and the seconds are ticking.

Our New Neighbor!

Our friends half-a-mile down the road own two miniature horses, a white stallion and coal-black mare.  Although they keep them separated in different stalls, the persistent stallion managed to finagle an intimate moment some months back, and on Friday morning, a foal was born.

I saw him tonight – a cinnamon colored, diminutive equine with quivering ribs and delicate hooves that look like little chunks of shiny black coal. His face wore a white mask, and his thin wisps of mane and tail appeared to have black roots.

He seemed fragile and vulnerable, like a one of the china horses I collected as a child, and yet very full of the gift of life so recently bestowed.  An un-planned-for surprise, he is the new joy of the owners, and will be the object of a forthcoming welcome-to-the-world visit from our grandkids!

Plum Dumplings

On a crisp late-summer day like today almost exactly 40 years ago, Grandmother Minnie (my husband’s grandmother) tutored me in a culinary fine art.  We spent the entire day making Hungarian Plum Dumplings, and each step was a lesson in itself.  She wanted to make sure I learned the small nuances of methodology as well as the basic principles.  “Yoose brown the crumbs slowwwly, like theees.  Stir and stir.”  And as for the potato dough dumplings, “Peeench and shape the dough.  No theeen spots. Make sure the boiling water rolls HARD. Use theees spoon - big wood one, not metal.  It won’t cut and let out the juices.”

(I'm making her brogue sound more Italian than Hungarian - it was such a long time ago.  I only remember that her voice was thick and slow and spicy with decisiveness, like apple butter.)

Freestone Italian Prune Plums are required for this recipe, small plums with a short growing season.  I found some recently, and so today was my dumpling-making day in honor of Minnie (yes, the same woman with the ironing board mentioned in yesterday’s blog).

First, I boiled potatoes while browning crushed cracker crumbs.

Here are the toasted crumbs with the plums.  The crumbs would be used later to coat the outside of the finished dumplings.

I mashed the potatoes on a flat surface with a fork, and allowed them to cool to room temperature (a la Minnie instructions – no potato masher or mixer, please).

Next, I added eggs and flour and mixed with fork and one hand until sticky.

I rolled the dough into two “sausages” (Minnie’s word) and cut each into 8 pieces, then wrapped the dough around the plums making sure they were tightly sealed inside.

Into the pot of boiling water for about 20 minutes, until just a hint of blush color began to show.

After a few more carefully monitored minutes, they came out to be rolled in crumbs.

AH!  Then it was time to sample and critique!  A chosen dumpling was cut in half and the pit removed, then cut into bite-sized pieces and sprinkled with extra crumbs and sugar.  Then down the hatch!  The connoisseur said his sample was just as good as Grandmother Minnie’s (and very reminiscent of her).  He was happy, and so was I.

About Ironing

I’ve owned several full-sized ironing boards in my 41 years of marriage. Perhaps my favorite, for sentimental reasons only, was an old wooden board with persnickety spring-loaded metal legs that collapsed (not often, but yet too often) without warning.  It originally belong to my grandmother-in-law, a staunch woman of Hungarian descent who, no doubt, didn’t have the same problem.  She would never have put up with such shenanigans.

But alas, that board was taken to the Salvation Army some years back.  Now I own one of those cheap portable boards with an ironing surface that is maybe 1/3 the normal size.  It looks squatty, like a flat little blue pig, when it stands with stunted 4” aluminum legs on my dining table.  Those legs fold up flat against the board when it is not in use, so it takes up very little space.  Oink, oink.

I was using this pressed-down little piggy today, thinking about how many (hundreds?) of times I had ironed these same man-shirts (three of them) and man-slacks (two pairs).  My man doesn’t buy new clothes very often, but rather he wears the old ones until they’re unwearable.  These are specimen are getting close to that standard.  But who notices frayed edges around the collar and pockets, he wants to know?  I’m not sure, but the ironing lady certainly does.

I usually procrastinate when it comes to ironing, but there was a certain fondness attached to the job today - an affection for steam huff-puffing from the iron, and the memories of ironing these same articles of clothing over and over and over, in-between wearings.  Thoughts of the person they clothe.  And the life we've shared.

Repetitive jobs have the most potential for boredom and procrastination, true?  But they also offer insight about the threads that motivate us and hold life together.  (In this case, literal threads….sorry for the pun.)  I’ll keep an eye out tomorrow when cooking meals ahead for my two bachelors (hubby and son) who will be on their own in a different town next week.  It’s not primarily about the food, really, it’s about helping them ahead of time.  Just like ironing isn’t primarily about the clothes, but rather serving the one who wears them.

So there.  Now you know what I think….about ironing.

Unexpectedly Enlarged

I had some thoughts while driving down a country road in the car this morning…  

Life is delicate, softly present for a while, a sheer wedding veil of gossamer fog that abruptly vanishes without warning.  It passes like those maple leaves, the first dozen yellowed ones that tumble down and down like grounded feathers.  Or those bunches of fluffy, mustard goldenrods that shake gold dust from their bushy blooms, nodding first here, and then there, at wild pastures full of dense but fragile matching plumes, exploded.

Time is fleeting, requiring constant change even as the car’s wheels press the road - impermanent time that will run out on earth’s promised last day.  Within time’s womb, we live a new birth every day, a new order with possibilities that have never been seen before, not by us, not by mankind.   See?  New wild grapevine tendrils grab the branches of that pine tree, pulling the vine up and up where it never dreamed of going before.  Amidst new sights, and new combinations of old ones, God works His ongoing creation in us in the present moment.

The time that is ‘now’ is sacred, even ten fleeting seconds driving beneath a leafy green cathedral ceiling of hovering trees. On the other side of this sanctuary, pregnant time seems to burst open amidst blinding sunlight dapples, and there, surrounded by fields of almost-dead corn stunted by summer’s extended drought, I am unexpectedly enlarged.

On Beauty

I am reading a book entitled A Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp, and just finished a portion when she describes running frantically, kitchen apron still tied, dinner waiting to be served to her family of 6 kids, into a field behind their farmhouse toward the moon – running magnetically toward beauty, transcendent Beauty, then falling down, kneeling first, then lying with heart pounding beneath the moon, fully fed and energized and ALIVE.

From the book:

“Is worship why I’ve run for the moon?  Not for lunar worship, but for True Beauty worship, worship of Creator Beauty Himself.  God is present in all the moments, but I do not deify the wind in the pines, the snow falling on hemlocks, and moon over harvested wheat.  Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all things.  I know it here kneeling, the twilight so still: nature is not God but God revealing the weight of Himself, all His glory, through the looking glass of nature….

“And whether I am conscious of it or not, any created thing of which I am amazed, it is the glimpse of His face to which I bow down.  Do I have eyes to see it’s Him and not the thing? …. True, authentic Beauty requires of us, lays claim to us, and it is this, the knees bent, the body offered in obedience. A pantheist’s god is a passive god, but omnipresent God is Beauty who demands worship, passion, and the sacrifice of a life, for He owns it.  Do I have eyes to see His face in all things so I’m not merely dazzled by the trinket…?”

The Beyond

Last night I hobbled into the bedroom and barely pulled back the covers before collapsing onto the bed;  my stiff board-of-a-body managed a groan-sigh mixed with a laugh on the way down … and dowwwwwn, aaaahhhhhh.  The air conditioner streamed my still-wet hair from the vent at the end of the bed, and I fluffed soft flower-printed sheets until they softened around me like a bouffant cotton-cloud.  I was drained, but filled.  Heart-hard-pounding exhausted, but also rejuvenated.  

I flopped a pillow covered with baby-blue-and-flowered quilt squares across half of my face (a comfort thing left from childhood when I half-buried my head in a special small turquoise pillow), exposing half of an old-lady version of a theater mask.  It seemed serious, almost frowning – you know the look, the dramatic over-emphasized expression.  However, the other half that couldn’t be seen was laughing and chuckling to itself.  Delight and joy over here.  Sacrifice over there.  They fit together nicely.

Looking back, the Labor Day weekend had been a perfect lake holiday featuring hot-hot sunshine, comfortable lake temps for swimming, water sports behind the boat, a superb fireworks display, and rubbed pork loin fresh from the smoker plus all the side-trimmings and more.  It was better than visiting a theme park or festival, and the food far surpassed fried elephant ears, hot dogs, and cotton candy. 

BUT.  Come time for bed, my body felt like a rigid board sprinkled with hard-hard knots, reminding me of the knotty pine planks on the roof of my dad’s old lake cottage.  Literally pressed from within.  I ached.  And way down deep, my heart kept drumming behind the rib cage like some crazy jazz drummer trapped in jail, slamming the bass with reverberations that echoed in the snares of my ears.

Memories coursed as if to narrate the rampant heartbeat.  I’d spent the weekend witnessing discoveries (“Watch me go under the water, Nana!”), counting heads at the waterfront (“where’s Clara?  Clara?  Clara, where are you?”), assisting the little kids in their flexaboard tutorial between the piers (“Now stand up straight, don’t bend, don’t sit, and hold on tight, alright, I’ve got you, I won’t let go until you’re started, just trust me”), screaming for rescue (“SHE FELL off the pier, GET HER QUICK!”), changing little bodies into swim suits and then dry clothes, and from dry clothes into swim suits (“Let’s pull this up, now tuck your arm in this hole…”), preparing a mega-meal to seal the festivities (a silent task involving juggling many balls in the air, many foods in the oven, on the stove, and all over everywhere), and  cleaning-up general aftermath on top of aftermath.  

I finally collapsed in bed, both overflowing and empty.

I say all of this to highlight one thing. I’m convinced we are more than we know.  On a clear day, when we throw off the blinders of self-protection and the Buckingham Palace guards of our hearts go off-duty to set us free, we expand in the midst of sacrifice to discover the beyond that lies within us: transforming love.