Blog Posts

The Volcano Diaries

3/3/2020

I wrote this essay a decade ago for the MORE.com website, but alas MORE is "no more"!! I still remember what an adventure it was to travel with my youngest son right before he started college, and so I'm sharing it here!

“You can always turn back!”

This was not the most encouraging advice ever given to a hiker thinking about trekking up the side of a dormant volcano where the trail began at more than 8,000 feet above sea level and the difficulty rating for the two-and-a-half mile hike in the national park brochure was “strenuous.”

Gulp.

But then, I really hadn’t been looking for encouragement. I’d been looking for validation...or any other form of an excuse to not climb the mountain.

My younger son and I were on a week-long “mom and me” vacation on the West Coast, a trip of particular poignancy because he is the last of the brood, and his departure for college means that my nest will be empty for the first time in twenty-eight years. We had stopped at Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California at the suggestion of a middle-aged couple we met at Yosemite a couple of days earlier when I volunteered to take their picture.

I had only planned out the first three days of the trip, figuring that we would make it up as we went along, and so we let ourselves get carried to higher altitudes on the descriptive phrases of our newfound acquaintances. This was my most wing-and-a-prayer vacation since I had gone to Ireland when I was twenty-two with a backpack stocked with “instant breakfast” packets, a bicycle that required reassembly once I landed, and phone numbers for some of my Irish cousins.

This time I was (much) older, and (much more) out of shape, and without the resiliency of youth to cushion my missteps. And my left foot had been hurting like heck for the previous four months, making a reusable ice pack and a microwavable heat pack and a bottle of Advil part of my packing essentials.

My son and I had scoped out the park the evening before, after checking into our remote little motel. We picked this place on a recommendation two hundred miles before by the young man who had carved the wooden bear I bought at a gift shop. Are we finding a theme of random adventure here? We were certainly making memories!

One of the most memorable things my son said to me during the entire vacation was, in fact, at that very motel. “Mom,” he said, bursting into the room during a phone call to his sweetheart back home, “I think I just heard a cow get attacked by a bear. Do you want to come outside?”

What’s a mother to say? Of course I stepped outside for a listen. And when the porch lights went out unexpectedly behind us, you wouldn’t believe how fast we beat it back into the room!

While he was outside chatting on the phone, I had been poring over the pamphlets and maps we picked up by the park’s visitor center. And by the time I went to sleep, I was convinced that between my lifelong acrophobia, the troublesome foot, and the vivid description of altitude sickness that usually sets in at lower altitudes than we were even going to start hiking at, I was going to chicken out and insist on a more leisurely walk of half the distance to see a pretty waterfall.

All I was looking for when we pulled up to the park entrance the next morning was an excuse. I pled age, I pled infirmity, I pled forty extra pounds, I pled an appalling lack of stamina...and then I threw in the vertigo and fear of heights for good measure. The heights thing is no laughing matter for me. I get dizzy if I climb higher than the first step on a ladder, and it’s been like that for most of my life.

But the cheerful young lady in the Smokey the Bear ranger hat kept trying to steer me in the direction of optimism. Hikers of all ages and sizes were known to have made it to the summit, she said. Drink plenty of fluids to stave off altitude sickness, she advised. And remember, she said, “you can always turn back.” I didn’t even have to turn my head to know that my son was grinning at the exchange.

And so we drove on to the base of the trail that led to Lassen Peak, which topped out at 10,457 feet above sea level. We packed water bottles and granola bars and extra clothes in my son’s backpack. There were snow fields even at the trailhead.

I felt out of breath at the first switchback, which was still so close to the parking lot it didn’t even list how far we had traveled. I wasn’t going for glory here, just endurance, and so I simply kept putting one foot in front of the other, watching my son’s heels to keep from feeling dizzy. I had done the exact same thing a few years before as I navigated “Bright Angel Trail” down the side of the Grand Canyon with my daughter. Character building takes many forms.

Near the trailhead, we met a delightful pair of teachers from Florida, Pat and Jackie, who went on hiking adventures during their summers off and had decided to tackle Lassen this time. They each had a good dozen years or more on me, and were taking this adventure in stride. I didn’t want to wimp out while they were watching. We often overlapped each other’s rest stops along the way. They called out a lot of encouragement to me on the way up.

The higher we climbed, the more breathtaking the views became. The Sierra Nevadas were a distant blue under a nearly cloudless sky. Lake Helen gleamed azure in the park below us. Snow fields were striped pink and white, but the surrounding air was still warm. The forests below looked as tiny as the shrubbery on a model train display. As we scrambled over loose gravel and larger rocks and tree roots, a doe picked her way across the side of the mountain above us, twin fawns scampering quickly behind her to the cover of some brush.

Continuing in the vein of being practical instead of heroic, I took plenty of rest stops along the way, chugging water and letting the faster hikers pass us by. And sometimes even Pat and Jackie! There was usually a tree or two that I could sit under for shade, but inevitably we began to leave the tree line behind. Still, I kept going, watching my son’s feet in front of me, occasionally taking his hand to cross the rougher patches.

And then, with less than a mile to the summit, I came to one more switchback and stopped. Up to my left, I could see the trail cross back and forth upon the bare mountain face. And to my right, I could see nothing but open sky.

Right then and there, my fear of heights nailed me to the side of the mountain.

“Robert, honey,” I said, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t take one more step!” Of all the things that I thought would have shut me down long before—the extra weight, the lack of stamina, the thin air at 9,000 feet, the gimpy foot—it was such an anticlimax to call it quits because of this!

Still, there was no going forward for me, and I sure wasn’t going to go back down alone. I folded my fleece sweatshirt into a pad to sit on a nearby rock, took custody of the backpack, and settled in to wait for my son to make it to the summit and bring back some good pictures. It took him a good two hours to get back, which included the half-hour phone call to his girlfriend from the top of the mountain, a lot of picture taking, and some time spent just glorying in the achievement.

As I sat, I basked in the sun and marveled at the grandeur surrounding me, and the total serendipity that had brought us here. Who knew, when we set out on this vacation, that we would be setting out to climb a mountain to its very top? Or photograph a yellow-bellied marmot peeking out of his den near a set of volcanic vents? This was certainly an altitude on the side of a mountain that I never thought I would experience.

A very long time ago, when a friend of mine was getting ready to leave college without graduating and faced a very uncertain future, I sent him on his way with an inspirational poster that read something to the effect that if you set your sights among the heavens, even if you fail you will fall among the stars. I hadn’t thought about that in quite a long time, but I thought about it again that day while I sat on the side of the volcano.

At the tail end of our vacation, we drove the well-maintained highway to the visitor center of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. I realized that even though it looked rugged and awesome and high and imposing...we had both made it farther above sea level than this national landmark.
But for me, an even bigger victory was just in getting as far as I had.

I may not have made it to the top of the mountain as I had hoped...but I still ended up sitting high enough that I could nearly touch the stars.

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Tai Chi Knees

8/6/2019

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I have a short list taped to my bathroom mirror, writ large in black magic marker, to remind me of the priorities I set when I retired a year ago—pay more attention to my health, write more, see the grandkids more, and get rid of a lot of STUFF!

It’s been a matter of public record and great personal lamentation that all of those things got swept clean off the table for many months as I dealt with serial family emergencies in 2018. But as the Old Year waned and the New Year waxed, I looked at the beginning of 2019 as a time to restart my engines. So I perused the catalog of the local YMCA and signed up for a twice-weekly Tai Chi class.

This is a bigger deal to me than it would seem. I haven’t made it to a regularly scheduled exercise class in thirty five years. My oldest child is thirty eight. You do the math.

For many, many years, given the random nature of being a soccer mom with four kids, I had given up any hope of ever arriving anywhere at a predetermined time once or twice a week. It seemed that there were always cookies to bake or diapers to change or lessons to drive to or… you get the picture. And so exercise became a solitary pursuit, squeezed in between checkups and field trips and toddlers who didn’t want to put their shoes on quickly.

For years I walked, swam, lifted weights, and rode exercise bikes at random times to keep the body moving. In bad weather I walked the track at the local “Y,” in good weather I indulged in walking around our home in the country. Three laps of hills and flat, woods and fields, added up to roughly two miles.

Then, after I started law school, exercise time was even more sporadic and lacking. But once I started working as a prosecutor in a charming Art Deco building only blocks from Lake Michigan, I picked up the pace of walking again. In good weather I walked along the lake front, and in bad weather, I paced laps in the allegedly haunted realm of the sixth floor of the courthouse. Then plantar fasciitis and a few other health hiccups got the better of me during my fifties, and my middle-aged spread just kept spreading.

I have often fallen short in the self-discipline department, and turning a page into 2019 seemed to be a good time to change things up and connect with a group of people who would be doing the same thing at the same time! Tai Chi had long been on my “to do” list, ever since I had turned my aches and pains over to a massage therapist about three decades ago who happened to also teach Tai Chi.

“Breathe,” he would constantly remind me as he stretched one body part of mine or another in therapeutic fashion. “Yes, Grasshopper,” I would reply, making sport of his enthusiasm. He took it in stride. I always remembered.

And so shortly after the New Year dawned, I found myself in the basement of the local “Y” amid an on-going Tai Chi group. To my delightful surprise, the instructors were a well-known local musician/songwriter and his wife, Jon and Jane Doll, who I recognized from several years of going to art gigs. He’d even composed a song to go with one of my photos as part of an art/wine/music event we’d participated in a year or two earlier. So I was in friendly territory already!

This, however, was not an “introduction to Tai Chi” class I’d landed in. This was a “keep up and learn as you go” event, and I dutifully tried to mimic and follow along. It was harder than I thought! Somewhere along the line and months after I started, Jon mentioned that the sequence of motions that we repeated three times during a class each contained 110 different positions, and required shifting our balance 220 times.

All I knew on that first day, though, was that during my first class ever, my quivering knees gave out after executing the first two “forms,” and I had to sit out the third, simply watching the rest of the class with admiration as they moved in grace and unison. On my way out of the building, my knees were so wobbly that I didn’t dare even try walking down the few steps to the sidewalk, but used the handicap ramp instead. And held on to the railing for balance.

Little by little, class by class, my knees grew stronger and steadier, and my shifts in balance became more natural and more fluid. I could still find myself hopping from one foot to another when my understanding of what position came next proved to be off by a mile. Blessed with a vivid imagination, I attached mental images to every one of the moves which involved, from time to time, repulsing a monkey, spreading wings like a white crane, parting a wild horse’s mane, and carrying a tiger up the mountain.

And a word about that poor tiger!! I’m sure that there is some well-grounded historical or mythological or folklore related reason for all these names, but when I have to navigate between shooting the tiger, boxing him in the ears, and then carrying him up the mountain I’m not sure that I could stitch together a narrative that reasonably covers all three. Mostly I just focus on the mental image of tenderly carrying a wee tiger cub up a mountainside while he purrs in my arms, and try to ignore what we plan to do with him later.

As time and Tai Chi classes went on, I noticed that it wasn’t just my knees that were feeling different and better. I seemed to be bending and stretching with more deliberation as well. My sense of balance, overall, felt subtly improved, and I found myself embracing a newly felt confidence of movement. Hey, it was all GOOD!!

But Tai Chi knees, it appeared, only got me so far. As I drove home after visiting friends in Iowa, I took the road less traveled (but still marked by a small road sign) to The Maquoketa Caves state park, which I’d heard were absolutely magnificent. I found a shady parking space, inspected a large map of the entire cave system, and set off down a large, wide staircase leading to “Dancehall Cave.”

“No problem” navigating the long staircase, I thought. “I’ve got my Tai Chi knees!” And so off I set, after tying my sneakers a bit more tightly, descending step by merry step closer to my destination in the mysterious underground.

The staircase was equipped, at first, with a handrail, always welcome on such an adventure. I stopped to take photos, and was absolutely overwhelmed by the beauty of the lush, green scene. Ferns and moss dripped downward like wet silk from dark rock walls. Trees arched overhead like cathedral vaults. Birds swooped diagonally across the incredible depth beyond. I felt like I was standing in a scene of primordial grandeur straight out of Jurassic Park.

I continued downward, but noticed that the handrail had disappeared. No worries, I thought, my knees and my sense of balance were doing just fine. Then a few steps later I noticed that the stairs were wet, no doubt a result of recent torrential rains combined with deep shade. No worries, I thought, I’d just take them a little slower. And then, a few steps further on, the steps went from being simply wet to covered with slippery mud. And I finally stopped short of the mouth of the cave which beckoned invitingly, and took stock.

The soul searching didn’t take long. Faced with the facts that I was 300 miles from home; absolutely NOBODY knew that I had taken this detour; and that if I slipped and broke an ankle inside one of the caves I wouldn’t get a cell phone signal and would have to pray for a random hiker to summon help, I called it a day. Reluctantly, I turned to make the trek back up to the parking lot, promising myself I would return to the caves again one day with friends along for the adventure.

And discovered, after trudging up just a few stairs, that despite my Tai Chi knees and improved sense of balance, I had no stamina whatsoever. Let’s face it, walking the dog on perfectly flat city sidewalks does not put much of a strain on the heart or the lungs. Huffing and puffing, sweating and sighing loudly, I finally reached the top of the staircase and came to two simple realizations—one, that those stairs would be much easier to mount if I lost twenty pounds, and second, taking Lucky for longer walks wasn’t really going to make much difference.

So nearly thirty years since I took a running step, I’ve invested in a new pair of jogging shoes. Lucky is being pretty game about this new development, although he’s happy about every step we take outside that gets the two of us out of the house. I jogged for a whole forty seconds the other day.

Clearly, this is going to be a long road toward getting into better shape and fighting trim for the next time I want to tackle anything like the Maquoketa Caves. One tiny step at a time, one tiny measure of progress after another.

Pretty much like my Tai Chi classes and the first time I carried that tiger up the mountain.

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Christmas Cookie Magic

12/31/2018

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I haven’t been in the most effusive of holiday sentiments over the past several Christmases, ever since I sold my empty nest with the two living rooms and the five bedrooms and the fireplace and downsized to a space that’s got room for two people in the kitchen and four in the living room…if they’re all standing up.

I haven’t been in Ebeneezer Scrooge territory…quite. But sharing this small space with the large dog and two cats has made for an easy excuse to not put up any traditional Christmas decorations for the past three years.

This was quite a departure from the former life, I’ll have you know, which featured colorful needlepointed stockings hung by the chimney with care and stuffed with chocolate and little gifts, and a nine foot “real” fir tree festooned with glass ornaments and colorful lights and strands of wooden “cranberries” and a plethora of small critters such as birds and raccoons. I don’t know if I could locate those Christmas stockings in a hurry now. I’m pretty sure they’re SOMEWHERE down in the basement, along with all the garland and the ribbons and the big plastic Santa that lights up and the Christmas ornaments I actually embroidered once in an earlier life oh, about a quarter century ago.

No, going into Christmas this year felt pretty much like going into the season every Christmas since I moved. Low key, with a touch of humbug.

And yet…I still was in the chute to bake Christmas cookies. Not because I had anyone else in the house to eat them with (although Lucky, the dog, would need not a second’s thought to wolfing them down if they fell to the floor). But because I knew I would be seeing two of my four grown-up children and the grandkids over the holiday, and wanted to share that link to a more festive, less complicated past. And also, even more, because the other two kids were living half a country away, and I obstinately wanted to give them that taste of the past as well, courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service.

And so a week before my “got to get it in the mail today” deadline, I pulled out my little mixer and my favorite recipes (usually undisturbed since I literally almost never cook anymore), and began to conjure up the Spirit of Christmas Past.

I began with the easiest recipe, for toffee bars, which is the batch that just needs one bowl, one baking pan and no cookie sheets, and got that out of the way. One batch down, two to go I thought as I snuck toffee bar after toffee bar out of the pan and scarfed down the rich, chocolate, buttery flavor. (I would eventually have to make a second “replacement” pan…)

A couple of days later, the traditional butterballs were on the list. Midway up the line in complexity and the capacity to fill the kitchen counter with powdered sugar, I efficiently lined them up on baking parchment, watched them through the oven window until the tops began to crack, and then quickly dredged them one by one through a bowl of sifted powdered sugar before they stopped steaming.

And then, finally, the cut-out butter cookies beckoned. The ones with the cookie cutters. And the icing. And the sprinkles and candies. The ones that my children decorated like little bloody Christmas Axes during the first Christmas after the divorce.

Now, a word about baking in my life, and baking cookies in particular. It has been something of a “through line” in my life since childhood, harkening back to when I was a little girl and would bake cakes with my Aunt Patsy. Through ups and downs, over years and traumas and stress, the action of pushing ingredients around in a bowl with a hand mixer to create sweet tasting magic has been a touchstone for me. (Read my essay “Cookie Therapy,” it explains A LOT!!)

Baking with my children over the years—making cakes, pies, chocolate chip cookies by the millions, Christmas cookies with sprinkles and sugar—always brought me a quiet sort of rapturous joy. And for them, self-expression in myriad ways. I recall one cookie making adventure that ended in a “flour fight” as the kitchen rang with their laughter. Then, of course, there is the tale of the iconic “Christmas Axe” cookies, which took on a creative life of its own, as the kitchen rang afterward with MY laughter.

And so into the home stretch I trod bravely, following familiar steps of creaming the butter and the sugar, adding the vanilla and almond extract, beating in the egg and then the flour to create a familiar magic. And what magic it WAS. Because as I flitted between counter and refrigerator and table and recipe box, I realized that I was SINGING, and I was DANCING. In my kitchen. All alone but for the dog who stared up at me from his comfy pad beneath the table as if I’d lost my mind but he still loved me.

Granted, I wasn’t singing to a Christmas carol but to the peppy beat of “Hard Candy” by Counting Crows, but still. The nearest thing to it was the scene in “Love, Actually” where Hugh Grant, playing the new British Prime Minister, finds himself suddenly boogeying through No. 10 Downing Street to the strains of the Pointer Sisters. It was nuts. It was thoroughly unexpected. It was GREAT!!

Eventually I quit dancing long enough to roll out the cookie dough and fashion some traditional snowman and gingerbread man shaped cookies and a few T-Rex and turkey cut-outs as well. As I boxed them up and got them ready to mail, I felt like I was putting a piece of my heart in there along with all the sugar and a pair of chocolate Santas.

The mixer and bowls and recipe box and cookie sheets have all been put away by now, but I still marvel at whatever alchemy caused such a spark of exuberance and joy in my heart on that day. I think it was pretty much the cookies, and the synapses they fired linking back to joys of motherhood and Christmas past.

I’m still smiling about it. I’m already thinking that maybe, just maybe, next December I may spring for a very small Christmas tree and break out a few of the old ornaments. And of course, I’ve now got a year to find that one particular cookie cutter that makes Christmas Axes.

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"CHANGE"

10/19/2018

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You can add “change” to that old truism that death and taxes are the only certainties in this life.

I got an unexpected lesson in that just last weekend, when I attended the artist’s reception for an art show titled “CHANGE: A Photo Exhibition on the Impermanence of Life” at The Arts Mill in Grafton, Wisconsin. I was one of the artists featured, and it was a juried show, and so this was big deal for me on several levels. For one thing, that I got anything into the competitive show at all, much less two of my three submissions. And for another, that I was exhibiting anything, anywhere, at all.

2018 has been a “lost year” for me in many ways. Despite retiring from my job as a prosecuting attorney a few weeks ago with great fanfare to ostensibly focus more on writing and photography and things that are by nature creative and fun, I’ve spent virtually the entire year responding to an ongoing, grueling family medical emergency. Shit happens. Plans change. Writing fell to the wayside immediately. Photography fell by the wayside as well. Creativity and self-indulgence and any semblance of self-care fell by the wayside. What’s left of me can be very un-pretty on some days.

And yet, when I saw the call for art for the “CHANGE” show several months ago, I was intrigued and inspired. And finally I forced myself to set aside my other worries and sit at my computer long enough to pull some images from my archives and my memory and formally enter them in the art show competition.

Two of the three images were chosen by the judge for inclusion. One, “Impermanence,” is a photograph of shadows cast by a group of sightseers against a giant outcropping of rock on the edge of the Grand Canyon. I think I’m one of the shadows, in fact. There is nothing subtle or nuanced about their image. They look like a kinder, gentler version of the shadows left by the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima. Evidence of our being on this Earth looks quite starkly ephemeral when compared with the thousands of years that the rock has endured wind and weather, driving snow and scorching heat.

The other, “End of the Line,” features a gloriously colorful old passenger train car far past formal retirement, decaying into rust amid weeds and rails and other hulking ruins. As an object lesson in how shiny functional things still can’t beat the onslaught of time, it works pretty well.

And so I ordered prints of the photos and framed them and dropped them off at the gallery weeks before the show opened, and marked the date for the “artist reception” on my calendar. I don’t have much time or energy for a social life these days, but for this I’d make an exception!

It’s always delightful to go to an art show and see what inspires other folks, and talk with them about where their ideas come from. Synergy is a wonderful thing! But as I chatted about my own photos, I gave voice to just what “changes” these particular images marked for me in a very personal way. This was nothing that I had had in mind when I chose them to enter in the art show, and nothing that I was even vaguely pondering as I dropped them off.

But seeing them hanging on the gallery wall presented me with a view of “change” in my life that was profoundly deeper. I love photography for its ability to freeze the “instant.” An athlete’s moment of triumph or failure; the curl of a wave; a forest drenched in fog; a butterfly’s wing illuminated by a shaft of sunlight like stained glass. These two photographs, I realized, were not just instants to be preserved, but markers of some very long personal journeys.

I had taken the “Impermanence” photo twelve years before. At that moment in time, I was on a vacation out west with my older son, who had just turned nineteen and was leaving for college in just a few weeks. The dissolution of our nuclear family had been formalized less than a year before with the divorce. The “mom and me” trip was a ritual that I indulged in for all four of my children. This adventure was third in the lineup, but the first occurring since family contours had changed. We drove. We hiked up and down rocky trails. We watched the Perseid meteor shower from the rim of the canyon in the middle of the night. Another evening passed as we sat on rocks at the edge of the canyon, waiting for the sun to set, and talked about both the past and the future.

In the twelve years that have followed, he has grown from an incredible young man with a passion for justice to an amazing adult realizing his heart’s desires for making the world a better, kinder, richer place every day in his life’s work. In the twelve years that have followed, I’ve grown as well. I’ve adjusted to my once-full nest finally growing empty, experienced romance and heartbreak, found wells of resilience and reinvention that I could not have imagined. Neither of our paths to the present have been without stumbles or pain, but we are still standing, and still push forward, with our faces to the sun.

I took the “End of the Line” photo a few years later during a road trip I had taken with the man who shared my life for several years. Our formal destination was Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, which was the site of an annual “carriage horse” competition, replete with gorgeous period costumes and gleaming, fancy wagons. But before we got as far as the carriage horses and the grounds of the Victorian mansion that was hosting the show, we spied some decrepit railroad cars looking abandoned and derelict near an old grain elevator that was no longer in use. We couldn’t resist getting out of the car and looking around, both of us snapping away with our cameras.

The weekend itself was a happy snapshot, freezing lovely moments such as watching the sun set from a quiet boat dock on the Mississippi, in a relationship that experienced major ups and downs before it finally fell apart. When it began, I had never been so radiantly happy. When it crashed, well…no breakups exist that don’t leave scars. But I know that I have changed along the way, both by being with this man who introduced me to gardening, power tools, and the view from the back of his motorcycle, and then by learning to live without him. I’ve become…and had to become…stronger, more self-reliant, more accepting of my own flaws and strengths.

And so, without further fanfare or explanation…a salut to CHANGE! Because without it, we’re not remotely alive.

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The Catbird Returns

12/18/2017

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Sharing this "vintage" essay I wrote in 2009 about the late, great Meatball. He was, literally, "the cat who saved Christmas" for me one year, as you shall soon discover...

Meatball moved in a couple of days ago, a temporary gig until the end of the semester. He came with a cat carrier and a bag of “senior” cat food, in the arms of my prodigal college student son who was home for a 24 stretch of TLC and laundry service before returning to campus.

My son’s first official action upon returning home was to stretch out on the sunlit sofa in the living room and crash for three hours. Meatball’s first official action was to put Lucky, the forty pound puppy, on notice that he’d be missing an ear or an eye if he got too close. Lucky is part Border Collie, so he’s pretty smart for a five month old. Rambunctious, but smart. He took the warning to heart and is keeping a three foot radius from danger most of the time.

We’re all making some adjustments here, but for now I’m still basking in the afterglow of kicking into “mommy gear” for an entire day. I cooked dinner—turkey tetrazzini—one of my son’s favorites. I actually had the oven and three burners going on the stove at the same time.

This is no small feat. I use my stove so rarely these days that after the holidays last winter, a mouse moved in under the left rear burner. I thought that Smokey, the sixteen pound house cat who likes to stage death scenes for my enjoyment, would take care of business, but in the end it came down to me and a “live trap” I picked up at WalMart and a dab of peanut butter. After contemplating the frigid outdoor release options, I finally set the little guy loose in the garage with a handful of bird seed. He repaid me by getting in to my car a few days later and drowning in my half-full bottle of Diet Coke. Yes, I know, one mouse looks much like another. But in my heart, I know that this was the same little guy who had thought outside the box for his kitchen living quarters.

I did laundry—five huge loads of T-shirts and socks and jeans—and folded it too. This, too, was no small feat, and these days is completely out of character for me.

I made pancakes from scratch for breakfast, and served them with “real” hot maple syrup. This too, was a departure. Back when I still had four kids around the breakfast table and everybody wanted waffles or French toast, I bought the kind of breakfast syrup that comes out of a plastic squeeze bottle and costs a fraction of the genuine article.
And for the crowning piece of nostalgic motherhood, I produced two new “Looney Tunes” collections of cartoon DVDs to watch as we chowed down on breakfast. You just can’t beat the classics. I’ve always had a bit of the “kill the fatted calf” thing going on when one of the kids has come home from college.

It felt great. It felt deeply satisfying. It felt like being a retired firehorse and suddenly getting back into harness.

And through it all, Meatball kept chirping away like a canary. Yes, “meow” has generally been the expected cat commentary throughout recorded human history. Meatball just cones with a more interesting vocal range. I don’t know how else to describe it, but if you were listening from another room, you’d think I had a pet bird in a cage in there.

This wasn’t Meatball’s first trip home. He was the definition of Christmas for me just a couple of years ago.

Back then I was behind on everything because of simultaneous family disasters a hundred miles away that had started in early November with my mother's broken leg and gone downhill from there. I wrote no newsletters. I baked exactly two small batches of Christmas cookies before the kids came home, hung no garland, left the creche in the storage bin, looked for but never found the mistletoe ball. When the kids came home for a few days over the holidays, they were the ones who hauled out the ornament boxes on Christmas Eve and made sure that something was hanging on the tree. They made merry as they rolled out and decorated the traditional butter cookies in truly demented ways while I sat, exhausted on the living room sofa.
But Christmas day itself came and went with me driving solo on the tollway to Chicago and back, making a round of two hospitals and a nursing home to keep an eye on things on the only day without snow in the whole week. I was not a happy camper.

I was feeling very "Grinchy" that morning as I pulled out of the driveway at eight in the morning. But then as I drove, the sunlight and the season and the fact that I've got kids that I adore got to me, and I felt a spasm of generosity twitch in my heart that up until then still felt two sizes too small. A half hour into my drive, I called my older son, who at the age of twenty-one was most definitely deep in slumber, and left him a voice mail. Hey it's Christmas, honey, yes you can bring the cat home.

Simple words, but they masked a world of complexity. Mike had adopted Meatball from an animal shelter and brought him home to his student apartment about eight months earlier, where the eight-year-old cat promptly became known for leaving his odorous "mark" on his master's clothing. The problem seemed to be resolved by Christmas, but I was still wary. There was a very large cat who already owned my house, and so I drew a line in the sand at the plaintive requests to bring Meatball home for the holidays. I was thrilled to death that Mike had a cat, since I always think that life is far better with pets. But two adult male cats who were strangers sharing space in the same house? I could foresee only disaster.

So Meatball stayed home alone at the apartment with a big bowl of cat food and a big bowl of water while the rest of the family gathered and visited. And on Christmas Day, I wasn't the only one on the road—my son would be driving eighty miles back to his apartment that day to check on his pet.

And so during my own Christmas drive, thinking of my baby spending half his day traveling back and forth just to make sure Meatball was okay, I took a leap of faith and relented. And felt better for the rest of the day. Three days of feline togetherness passed with no accidents and no bloodshed and a new era in terms of pet visitation. Meatball proved to be no-fuss houseguest with the mind of a simpleton and the peskiness of a two year old.

Things are a little more complicated now. You could tell that Meatball knew something important was in the works as my son was leaving when his master carried out baskets of laundry…but not the cat carrier. He stood on the staircase, chirping, as I got my last, heartfelt good-bye hugs. Then there was a final pat from my son, and the household was suddenly minus one young man.

And so we are all adjusting. Meatball has taken to dogging my footsteps like a puppy, driving the real puppy in the house—restricted to the kitchen most of the time—absolutely bonkers. Smokey the cat, sensing that this new arrangement may be lasting a while, has taken to dourly stalking around in an existential funk and curling his vast bulk into an empty laundry basket as though it was his Fortress of Solitude. I can’t bear to tell him that it doesn’t make him invisible. Lucky the puppy is putting up with the topsy-turvy reality of seeing the new cat sampling his dog food. It’s got to be a dominance thing on Meatball’s part.

And if you close your eyes and imagine, you just might think there’s a canary chirping in the other room.

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Empty Nest

12/15/2017

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My official notice that my nest was finally going to be really and truly empty for the first time in 36 years came, without warning, in the mail. After a thoroughly lovely, sunny morning spent at an art museum with a friend, I had returned home and then checked the mailbox by the front door. I leafed casually through the assortment of bills and catalogs and other junk, and then there it was.

A perky, colorful notice from the postal service verifying that my younger daughter was officially changing her mailing address to a city across the country.

This wasn’t actually “news” in the strictest sense. She’d been gone for several months, and this new location was something she’d been working at putting roots down in for a long time. It was a very good thing for my daughter, in fact, by any measure. She had had something of a love-hate relationship with that particular city for a number of years and had come and gone from there on more than one occasion, but this time the place just felt “right” for all the right reasons.

But all of that cool mature rationality didn’t stop me from standing at the kitchen sink and bursting into tears. Go figure.

Since my first child was born (the “training baby” that paved the way for the next three) I’ve tended a nest in one form or another. For most of that time it was a nest in the country that grew to have five bedrooms and was surrounded by acres of fields and woods, hawks and foxes and deer and birds of all feathers. And while my fledglings were young, there was plenty of hiking and cookie-baking and story-reading and minivan-driving that utterly and joyfully consumed my life and identity. I didn’t skip a beat at keeping that nest in place even after I went to law school and then the marriage collapsed after twenty five years. With teenagers still in high school, I kept trimming the Christmas tree and cooking dinner and baking cookies and keeping the spare bedrooms primed and ready for the older ones to use when they came home from college.

Then, at last, I sold that large place and moved to much smaller digs a couple of years ago. Now if I want to visit the forest primeval, I actually have to get in my car and drive there, though the drive is quite short. And yet…it still has a spare bedroom and that is very important to me.

For the past several years, my younger daughter has still called my location “home” as she has come and gone at various times to other parts of the country for professional or personal reasons. She is an artist who practices in a physically demanding art form, and she has a severe chronic illness, and she is the bravest person I know. And somehow the fact that I could still keep a safe landing pad for her kept me on an even keel despite the wrenching emotional upheaval of moving from the only stable home I’d known in my own life.

I’m pretty sure one could draw a direct line from my own life experience to the importance I place on having that “nest.”

The simplest way to describe my family’s functioning would be to say that my mother was in charge. Nothing of importance happened without her approval, and often times at her initiative. I remember that no matter where she was, she always wanted to be elsewhere. She is now 94 and widowed and has been crippled for decades. She lives in a very nice apartment with a good view of a river and a majestic historic building that she loves to see as the sun sets, and friends and excellent amenities for wheelchair accessibility, and she is still striving for one more move.

This did not generally lend itself to a feeling of tremendous permanence as I was growing up. But a particularly disastrous initiative had us leave my native Chicago when I was sixteen in order to move to an abandoned farm in northern Wisconsin with no plumbing except a kitchen sink. The nearest town had 143 people and that was two miles away.

In order to continue my education at a Catholic high school, I was sent off to a small city forty miles away and I boarded there, at least for the first few months, with a family recommended by the high school principal. It didn’t go well. I came back to the farm every weekend, and there was literally no room there for me. There were only two bedrooms in the unfinished farmhouse. My parents slept in one; my younger brother slept in the other one, which had just enough room for a twin bed nestled against one wall and a dresser tight up against the other. I remember having to sleep in a hammock in the living room when I came home for the weekends. And things only went downhill from there.

In short, any illusion of having firm ground beneath my feet vanished when I was sixteen, replaced by a yawning, inarticulate terror of abandonment and isolation that has haunted me through the rest of my life. It drove making some of my biggest life decisions, and blinded or paralyzed me from making others. My parents and brother moved back to Chicago four years after leaving it for the farm and picked up at the same address they had left off. It was too late for me not to have been utterly broken.

Fast forward to college, marriage and motherhood. As one, then two, then three, and finally four children arrived, I found an incredible source of fulfillment and happiness in making a stable home for them. With every bedtime story, every Halloween costume sewn, every batch of cookies baked, every Christmas stocking hung by the fireplace, I could feel something heal inside myself.

As they grew older, of course, their needs changed. Instead of fresh diapers, a corsage for the prom. Instead of lunch in a brown paper bag, money for gas. Instead of help preparing for a science quiz, reassurance that a major life decision was a good one. And so it went, through the college years and beyond.

Bringing me, inevitably, to the arrival of the change-of-address noticed that sent me, at least for the rest of that day, into a bruised and weepy tailspin. If there had been a pint of Hagen Daz ice cream in the freezer, I would have eaten it right out of the carton.

I have dried my tears since then, put my chin up, and claimed the entire bathroom counter for myself since I no longer have to share. And with the approaching Christmas holiday doings, I haven’t had much time or inclination to brood.

But there is a new year about to start in just another couple of weeks. The turn of the calendar from one year to the next is always a time for reflection on the past and optimism for the future. Sometimes I make resolutions, and sometimes I don’t.

This time around I hope I’ll make some adjustments in my thinking. I’m already known for relentless optimism as a coping mechanism, but let’s take the glass-half-full analogy a step farther and say that when all is said and done, my nest isn’t quite empty yet. None of my kids may be getting their mail sent to my house anymore, but I’m still here, along with the four-footed pets. And so I might as well start picturing and investing in my current surroundings as a warm, comforting nest for myself.

Because you know, after all these years, I have damn well earned it.

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Finnigan Vol. 2 is now LIVE!!

10/22/2017

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JUST IN TIME FOR THE HOLIDAYS...

The second book in my Finnigan series, Finnigan and the Lost Circus Wagon, is now LIVE on Amazon and the Barnes and Noble website!

I knew when I started the series, about a tiny "rescue kitten" who finds a happy home flying under the radar at a small town circus museum, it would be just a matter of time before I worked my fascination with circus wagons and imagery into one of these stories. I've been going to the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, for years, admiring the imagination and craftsmanship of these gorgeous wagons that brought the wider world to folks watching the extravaganza of circus parades in the days before TV and internet and even movies, when nothing was instant and the age of being jaded wasn't so young!

I even worked some sketches into the book that are drawn straight from the wagons at the museum--the pair of Swans, the King of Beasts, and the small ornamental tiger heads that are the clue to the origin of the mysterious wagon that turns up at the Farnsworth Circus Museum.

The story features Finnigan and his two "circus mice" pals, Maximillian and Leroy, as they plot to keep the family from being fleeced by a pair of swindlers who turn up just after the wagon arrives. Leroy even has to go undercover as a rat!

From the back cover... Finnigan and his "circus mice" pals Max and Leroy are puzzled when a broken-down old circus wagon mysteriously shows up at the family circus museum. Finnigan, who arrived at the museum as a "rescue kitten" smuggled in by little Lucy Farnsworth, is still flying “under the radar” because Lucy's dad is allergic to cats.

At first, nobody knows that the wagon really comes with a valuable secret. Nobody in Beechville that is. But when two shady characters come to town with plans to fleece the family and steal the treasure the wagon holds, it’s up to Finnigan the Circus Cat and his friends to find it first and then send the crooks packing!

Chock full of charming illustrations by the author and circus history from the Golden Age of circus parades, Finnigan and the Lost Circus Wagon will charm young readers and the grownups who love to read with them.

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The Starter Cat

9/2/2017

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It was such a small request, in the face of such cataclysmic and wrenching upheaval.

I had just broken the news a few days before to my children that a divorce was imminent after twenty-five years of marriage. The oldest three were not surprised, and offered their good wishes and moral support. But it had hit my youngest son, then only thirteen, pretty hard.

For the next two days he looked ashen, a sad shadow of his usual cheerful self. But on the third day, I noticed he stood a bit straighter and there was color in his cheeks again. I asked him how he was doing.

Better, he replied with a hint of a smile. He was adapting to the new world order. But, he added, he was trying like heck to find a silver lining in all of this turmoil. And so came the eternal question.

“Mom, now can we get a kitten?”

I had raised a family of animal-lovers. I had rarely known any time in my life that had not been accompanied by a dog or two. I got my first horse when I was sixteen. I’d had a cat for a pet for a as a child.
But for the quarter century I’d been married, a cat had been impossible. My husband was deathly allergic to them. But that was then. Faced with the dissolution of the family unit, the wheels in my honor student son’s head had started to turn.

“You know, honey,” I replied. “I think so!” I reined in his enthusiasm almost immediately. We would certainly have to wait until his father was no longer under the same roof, I cautioned. My son took the qualifier in stride. But…that didn’t mean that we couldn’t start looking!

I called around to local humane societies, inquiring about kitten availability. Nobody seemed to have any right then, and suggested that I call back in a month or two.

As the formalities of marriage unraveled and my husband moved into an apartment nearby, my son’s enthusiasm for a kitten only grew. I finally handed him the newspaper and suggested that he start looking at the classifieds.

He took the advice to heart, and soon afterward ambushed me in the middle of a painting project. A small ad was circled in red. “Mom, would you call this lady about this kitten?” I put the paintbrush aside, pulled off my rubber gloves and made the call. The woman lived twenty miles away. She had just one kitten left, but another person wanted it first. If that buyer didn’t show, we would be welcome to drive over and take a look.

A few hours later, my husband arrived to pick up the kids to take them out for dinner. My son stayed home with me, ostensibly to keep me company. In fact, he’d had his eyes on a bigger prize. Twenty minutes after they left, the cat lady called—the other buyer had not shown up. My son could not stop grinning at his good luck.

“I just really thought that she might call tonight,” he explained, “so I wanted to stay just in case.” As we drove, a plastic carrier for the family rabbit in his lap, he was nearly quivering with excitement. I tried to dampen his anticipation. We were “only going to look” and there was no guarantee that we’d bring this kitten home.

Inside, of course, I was praying hard that this kitten would turn out to be a good one, because I knew in my bones that unless it had three legs and a bad case of mange, it would be coming home with us.

The kitten was perfect. Tiny, friendly, inquisitive, a dynamic eight-week-old short-haired fluff ball of black with white accents. He had long white whiskers, a white tuxedo front, and white front paws that looked like they’d been dipped in heavy cream. Mottled black and white fur on his hind feet made him look like he was wearing “footsie” pajamas.

Money changed hands, and we raced back to the house, stopping to buy a litter box, some food and a few cat toys. Then we whisked it all inside and hid the evidence.

Dad dropped off the kids and left, none the wiser. It took him two weeks to catch on.

The rest of us, however, were enchanted. We spent the next two days passing the kitten, who we named “Smokey,” from lap to lap, and watching him leap and pounce chasing a cat toy with a bell and feathers. I immediately hid the Easter tree that traditionally sat in the bay window, festooned with fragile eggs I had blown and hand-painted myself.

After Easter, the girls returned to college, my older son was occupied with tennis practice and a job, and I went back to the office. I had worried about how my youngest would cope with the loneliness of an empty house during spring break. In fact, he couldn’t wait to have the house to himself. It meant that he could play with Smokey all day long without interruptions.

From being a wee, short-haired bundle of fluff, Smokey grew…and grew…and grew. His white paws, which always seemed oversized, became enormous. The short hair grew out to be a three-dimensional coat of gossamer fluff as soft as goose down, and shed fur balls the size of tarantulas. And at sixteen pounds, he turned into a very big boy.

When, after five more years, my youngest son finally left for college, Smokey became my personal lap anchor. And I let my heart expand to love this perfect, miniature predator, and all the personality quirks that he brought to the table.

What I didn’t know when we brought him home was that the one small purchase of one tiny kitten would open the floodgates for more cats to join the family. First my younger daughter and her college roommates adopted a kitten. Then my older son brought home a rescue cat of his own. And then my younger son—the one who I’d bought Smokey for!!—and his wife adopted a tiny rescue kitten as well. I can’t complain, the kitten that they named Finnigan later became the inspiration for my first children’s book, Finnigan the Circus Cat.

But now, twelve years later, Smokey the “starter cat” is still with me, a fluffy constant through thick and thin. He has outlasted the family dog; the family rabbit; my former car; two other cats; a move from the country to the city; and the motorcycle-riding, cat-phobic boyfriend I kept company with for seven years after the divorce.
Smokey still leaves fur balls the size of tarantulas around the living room. I haven’t knitted a stitch in twelve years. And those hand-painted Easter eggs are still in storage.

But at night, when the lights are out and I am about to fall asleep, Smokey leaps to the side of my pillow for one last round of purring, one last reassurance that we’re still in this game together. And I think, as I smile and drift off to sleep, that for a “starter cat,” he sure has proved to be a keeper.

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Walking the Meatball

5/16/2017

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I wrote this essay a few years ago, and anchored it in a lovely Scottish website called "Shortbread Stories." Alas, Shortbread Stories has perished...as has the beloved Meatball of legend. Still, he was an incredible feline, and he changed my world vastly for the better, and so, without further ado, let us once more go "walking the Meatball."

A year ago in August, my son asked if he could park his eleven year old cat “Meatball” at my house for a couple of weeks while he sorted out some new living arrangements in his college town. I said “yes,” of course. If I look at a calendar, I can discern without eyestrain that that was quite a long while ago. Kids and pets, they are really never predictable.

This is not Meatball’s first “stay” here. Michael has been bringing him home for short vacations for several years now. This middle-aged feline, who my son picked out at a shelter largely because the cat stuck his tongue out at him, was the essence of Christmas for me on a day when the holiday itself involved driving 250 miles and visiting elderly relatives in two hospitals and a nursing home. He has, alternately, been amusing, infuriating, annoying and purely a pest. While the man in my life can be laconic to the point of muteness, this cat never shuts up. Colored black and white like a Holstein cow and with all claws intact, he has bullied my dog, wrestled my other cat leaving large tufts of fur on the carpet, and sprayed the dog’s favorite blanket in retaliation for my shooting him with a water pistol as he trekked across the kitchen table. And all this came AFTER the warnings that he likes to chew on electrical cords and “mark” piles of unattended dirty laundry.

Still, until now, Meatball has been a short-term guest whose psychological similarity to a stalker and garrulous vocalizing (he can chirp like a canary and trill like a pigeon) could be considered transitory adjustments.

However, as two weeks stretched into four, and one month became two and then three, somewhere along the line Meatball went from being just a houseguest to being one of the gang. The rest of the gang consists of Lucky, the border collie mix, and Smokey, the twenty-pound housecat who used to claim my lap in the evenings until Meatball jumped aboard and said “mine!” In “cat,” of course. Over time, the four of us have adjusted to co-existing within the contours of the house, with certain expectations governing morning treats, clean litter boxes, and playing nice. Indoors, I am the arbiter of good manners and affection.

In the great outdoors, though, things have taken a much more unexpected turn. I often take Lucky out for a walk around the property, which passes up and down hills, through woods and around a meadow. There are delightful smells and no end of wild animals to encounter and for Lucky to chase. For the record, he is fast…but not quite as fast as a full-grown deer. Not that he didn’t give it his all for nearly the length of a city block. No one day is exactly like the next as the seasons change, and forests turn green, then gold, then leafless grey with winter’s approach.

One day last fall, though, serendipity skipped to another level as I glanced behind me on the trail, and discovered that Meatball was trailing behind Lucky and me on one of our daily walks. I tried to keep a close eye on him—there are things in these woods, like coyotes (and possibly cougars), that might enjoy a tender house cat for dinner—but Meatball was going to travel at his own pace. Sometimes he kept a few feet behind me, but at other times, he would lag behind by a couple of hundred feet, only to race to catch up…and then start the cycle of straggling all over again. I’d never seen a cat gallop before. He looked, crazily, like a little piebald cow pony hustling home at the sound of the feed bucket. The sound that he makes on the grass as he comes up behind me at full speed and shoots past is a faint “thippity, thippity, thippity.” I felt like the Pied Piper.

“Walking the Meatball” has now become a daily routine for me when the weather cooperates. Technically, I’m walking both Lucky AND The Meatball, but really, dogs pretty much have a happy-go-lucky sameness about a walk in the woods. It’s the cat that’s the wild card here. Since I still worry about him running into something in the woods that might eat him, our excursions take on the “hurry up and wait” quality of walking with a curious toddler. Sometimes my waiting stretches are longer than others, and sometimes I end up backtracking half the usual journey just to make sure that he rejoins the caravan at some point.

And while I’ve been on these “catwalks,” there are a few life lessons that have occurred to me as I'm waiting...and waiting.

Things are not always as bad as they look. A while ago, Lucky flushed a turkey hen from the meadow, and the dog and the bird sped toward the edge of the woods like cannonballs crashing through the brush. Movement on the left caught my eye, and I turned to see tiny turkey chicks—backlit by the afternoon sun and still too small to fly—popping straight up out of the tall grass in the meadow, then fluttering down a few feet forward, away from the sound of drama. Meatball was nowhere to be seen, and I started back down the trail, thinking “I wonder if Meatball saw those chicks.” He was crouched off the path, with a “WHAT???” look on his face, and when I caught up with him I found that indeed, he had found one of those baby turkeys. It lay on the ground, its head mashed under its body by a pristine white paw, neck bent in what suspense novelists invariably describe characterize as “an unnatural angle” when they’re writing about a corpse. Still, ever the optimist, I gently peeled the cat’s paw from the fluffy little body…which then unfolded its neck, stood up and shook itself off, and hopped straight up like its siblings and glided toward some nearby trees. I picked up Meatball and said “you’re coming with me,” and carried him under protest for the next hundred yards. It’s never over until it’s over.

If you have to slow down…you might as well look around. To be honest, I’d valued getting some real exercise on these wooded hikes with Lucky. Let’s face it, the dog can run so much faster than me and covers about five times as much ground as I do in the same amount of time. Walking briskly was my goal, and he never slowed my progress. With Meatball in the mix, though, the equation changed from go-go-go to stop ‘n’ go…and then stop again. I ground my teeth at these interruptions at first, bemoaning the fact that my cardiovascular workout plans were going down the tubes. And then I finally just simply… surrendered. Instead of focusing on putting one foot in front of the other in efficient fashion, I focused on the bark patterns of the pine trees at one of my usual “wait for the Meatball” rest stops. I started to use a familiar tree at the end of a glade as a stretching point, doing leg lifts while Meatball picked his way along the trail, stopping to use a tree trunk or two as scratching posts. I brought my camera along and took pictures of wildflowers and leaves. I savored the smells of wild roses and bergamot and evergreens and green grass and melting snow, and located another couple of stands of wild asparagus near the trail. And considered myself thankful for the opportunity to stand there in the arms of nature and just soak it in.

He ain’t heavy, he’s The Meatball. Somewhere along the way in this new routine—I think it was when the snow was melted in patches in spring—I started to give Meatball a lift from time to time. This started when he was dragging his heels at the thought of crossing a stretch of snow or slush, and I didn’t feel like waiting around in the cold, fingers turning to ice and nose turning numb. So I portaged the cat across the cold, soupy stuff. And lo and behold, Meatball clearly understood, because he didn’t squirm to be set down until he could tell that there was going to be grass under his feet again. Well, the snow finally melted away, and I’m still portaging the cat from time to time. My usual motivation for sweeping him up in my arms, rhetorically asking him whether I should “sherpa the kitty?” is that I don’t feel like always taking every single golden opportunity to wait for him. And if I can make a hundred feet’s progress without worrying that he’s behind me getting eaten by a coyote, I’m happy. It’s a win-win proposition—I keep the game moving a little faster, the added ten pounds amounts to a little weight-training, and judging by Meatball’s purrs as he drapes himself across my shoulder, he’s getting something good out of it too.

Hearts expand to fit. When I said I’d let Meatball bunk with me for two weeks that turned into more than a year, I had absolutely no idea how much affection I would come to feel for this eccentric small-scale predator. I could not possibly have predicted how much laughter he would generate, or drama, or worry, or tenderness as the days and seasons and miles of walking in the woods have passed. There is no such thing as having a completely full heart. There is only a heart that has room for more. In the children’s classic “The Grinch That Stole Christmas,” there’s a scene where the Grinch feels his crippled heart grow three sizes bigger. I felt that happen to me several year ago when I called my son as I was heading out on my dire Christmas Day odyssey and told him that I’d changed my mind, that he could bring his problematic pet home for the holiday. I think it’s grown yet another size in this chapter, to make room for this middle-aged cat who talks all day long, makes me laugh, brings me live mice from the garage, and follows me through the woods. I know that if and when he ever leaves again with my son, there will be a hollow space left open, waiting for him to come back.

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Love in the Time of Cupcakes

2/5/2017

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Since February is a month where signs of love and Valentines Day are everywhere, drenching the landscape with red hearts and satin, it seemed a good time to bring this out of the archives, since love takes many forms. This essay was a finalist in the 2010 Royal Palm Literary Awards for "creative non-fiction"!!

The last of the "tennis ball" cupcakes set sail this morning, a small but telling harbinger of the fact that I'm going to be facing an empty nest in the fall. Twenty seven years of "hands on" mothering symbolically reduced to two dozen clumps of devil's food cake in little foil baskets. They swooshed out the door with my youngest son, for what would turn out to be his last tennis meet of high school. He graduates in another couple of weeks, heading for college in the fall and instantly turning any use of the words "high school" into the past tense.

I've been making cupcakes decorated like tennis balls--light yellow frosting with the slightest tinge of green, arced with curves and swoops of white icing--for fourteen years now, ever since my oldest daughter signed up for high school freshman girls tennis before the school year even started. Call me OCD, I don't mind! I consider it a badge of honor.

There are fundamental differences between "girls tennis" and "boys tennis" and only some of them have to do with testosterone levels. Girls tennis season starts in late summer and continues barely to early fall, guaranteeing splendid and warm afternoons and entire weekend days watching budding young ladies flit around on the court in bouncing pony tails and miniskirts, suntanned legs flying. Girls tennis, from my experience on the sidelines, has involved matching hair doo-dads with color coordinated ribbons, team posters, lots of conversation, and a great appreciation for cute snacks. Hence the tennis ball cupcakes, a big hit for both my daughters and their teams for a bunch of years.

Boys tennis, on the other hand, starts just on the cusp of very early spring, when winter hangs on for dear life. And here in the upper Midwest, winter's claws are deep. More than one tennis season for my sons has started its first practice as snow flakes were falling. The weather leans more toward rain, and cold, and wind, and if there's coffee involved for blanket-wrapped spectators under grey, stormy skies, it's been hot, not iced. Very few boys sported pony tails, and nobody wore matching barettes. The guys still appreciated the cupcakes...but I don't know that they even noticed the decorative flair right before they inhaled them.

And still, despite the fact that for years my cupcakes have been nearly vaporized in haste (and without a single squeal of how "cute" they were) by their entirely masculine patrons, I clung to tradition. At least once a season I needed to send those sweet, fluffy treats along to a meet, even if, as the years went by and my job schedule got less flexible, another tennis mom would actually have to deliver them for me. Call me crazy, it's been done before.

While the tennis ball cupcakes stretch back fourteen years, the cupcake thing has actually been a fixture for something more like twenty four. Long ago enough that my oldest daughter would have needed to bring a birthday treat for kindergarten. Or preschool. So through the next two and a half decades, the miniature confections were a constant and a comfort amid the multi-tasking, crisis-response mentality that goes into raising four kids with a minimum number of trips to the emergency room. There were cupcakes with sprinkles for birthdays, cupcakes with candy dots for art shows, cupcakes decorated like little ghosts and jack-o-lanterns for Halloween.
This last tradition--the Halloween cupcakes--nearly drove me into the ground once. I had three kids in the same grade school at the same time. The youngest wanted Halloween cupcakes for his second grade class party. I signed on for two dozen, half of them orange and half of them white, with little ghost outlines and pumpkin smiles drawn on with melted chocolate, eyes made from chocolate chips. Then the fifth grader chimed in. I signed on for another two dozen. And then as I started the baking, when I thought of my daughter's class in eighth grade going without my cupcakes on this festive day, I threw caution to the wind. Halfway through decorating seventy two little ghosts and jack-o-lanterns with dribbley chocolate I rethought my enthusiasm...but it was too late to turn back.

I was planning to dress up for the second graders' party, and I tweaked my daughter with the thought of showing up in costume to deliver the goods. She's got a dark, sultry beauty to her, and she warned me off. "Mom, don't you dare!!" she said ominously, her eyes flashing like the fiery gypsy in Carmen. I filed that thought in the "hmmm..." pile. Made some soothing mention about bringing a change of clothes.

The next day I dutifully and precariously loaded six dozen cupcakes into the minivan, and set off for school. Fifth grade cupcakes were dropped off and put out of mind. The second grade Halloween party was so cute it could make your back fillings hurt. I think that was the one where I'd made my son a little royal blue cape with fake ermine collar, for his part as the "king" in a teeny tiny little play.

And then the lunch bell rang. I grabbed the last two dozen cupcakes from the van and walked them down the length of the school to my daughter's eighth grade classroom. As I stood in the doorway, her back was to me. A friend she was chatting with looked up, and announced slyly, "Sarah, your mom is here." Slowly she turned... and there I stood, a shallow cardboard box filled with treats utterly overshadowed by my appearance in a Pocahontas style beige fringed tunic with red embroidered trim, black leggings, and a feather in my hair. I bit back a grin, but it was really hard.

My daughter flashed daggers at me with those dark brown eyes. If looks could have killed, I'd be writing this from the great beyond. But at the same time, despite her fourteen year old peer-reviewed fury, I could see the corners of her mouth start to turn up in a smile in spite of herself, at the sheer perversity of my guest appearance. I delivered the goods and quickly exited stage left, fighting back a laugh.

Eight years later we were chatting on the phone as I drove to drop off yet another batch of tennis ball cupcakes for her younger brother's meet the next day. I was going to have to miss this contest too, and so once again the cupcakes were going to stand in for me, making me feel like I was still sharing a part of the adventure. We shared a good laugh about the day I showed up looking like Pocahontas at her eighth grade classroom. At the age of twenty-two, you develop a lot more perspective and forgiveness for antics like that.

I bemoaned the fact that with her in college, I didn't have the opportunity to bring festive or seasonal or downright ridiculous treat to her classes anymore. "Mom, you can bring cupcakes to my class any time!" she assured me. "We'll eat 'em!" I could resist pushing the envelope. If it was around Halloween, could I wear the Pocahontas costume again? There was just an instant of hestitation, then..."okay!" I could just imagine her eyes rolling across the miles between us. Maturity comes in many forms, and learning to humor a mother during a fleeting moment of insanity is a remarkable milestone for a daughter of any age.

I never did drive eighty miles to a college classroom after that to bring a sugary treat to a bunch of accomplished and sophisticated college students. Life just got a little too busy, it seems, though in hindsight I wish I'd grabbed the opportunity. But I still remember laughing at the memory with her, and the beautiful thread of give-and-take the offer and acceptance held, binding us tightly and preciously with love and affection despite the distance.

They were just cupcakes. And then some.

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