Blog Posts

Love in the Time of Cupcakes

2/5/2017

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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Angels in the Snow

12/16/2016

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I wrote this essay several years ago, but remembered it during the current blizzard. Angels can take many forms...

I can still remember the snow falling in buckets and clumps, drenching the landscape, cloaking the interstate and obscuring any sense of where one lane ended and another one began, muffling the brightness of the far-off street lights like a scrim on a theater stage.

We could see the street lights above empty, wind-swept streets as we passed by the highway exit that was our best hope of finding a motel and waiting out the storm. We drove past because we had been in the left lane of the highway when the exit finally came into view, and the road surface was too slippery to change lanes quickly enough.

Surely, we thought, we’d get off at the very next exit. We weren’t in the middle of the Gobi desert or Antarctica. This was the American midwest. There had to be a motel somewhere nearby, somewhere with central heating and clean sheets and a bathroom, where we would admit that a blizzard in northern Wisconsin had proven that there existed some times you should just stay home and wait it out. I cautiously and slowly edged the minivan into the right lane—or what seemed to be a lane—and kept watching the dark side of the highway for a snow-covered green blur that would be the next road sign.

My daughter pored over a map of Wisconsin by a tiny reading light above the dashboard. If that last exit was Menomonee, there had to be smaller towns up ahead.

We had started the journey hours earlier, a familiar three hundred mile trek from our home in southern Wisconsin to the Twin Cities where my daughter was a college student. Sometimes her dad drove and I stayed home with the rest of the kids, and sometimes I drove. The trip one-way took a good six hours in good weather.
The weather had indeed been good when we started, that much was true. There were a few snow flurries going on as we pulled out of the driveway, but four-wheel drive will make you cocky. The weather forecasters were predicting snow in our path, but who ever expected total accuracy from the weatherman? We blithely set out in daylight, with the goal of making it to the Twin Cities not far off our usual schedule.

As daylight faded, the snow picked up. For about an hour we vacillated over whether it was getting heavy enough to justify benching ourselves at a motel until morning, or whether it was starting to lighten up. Wishful thinking can be so disarming. And with every mile we drew closer to our destination, the more tantalizing the thought of completing the journey without interruption.

As we sailed past the exit and watched the street lights get swallowed by a blanket of white, we finally knew we’d overreached. Still, we were confident that a room for hire would be ours soon. I drove cautiously, slowly, along the set of tracks cut in the snow by the drivers ahead. There appeared to be only one lane left to use, and every car on the road that night seemed to be following an unspoken rule to stay in that single lane, guided by the faint pinprick of taillights in the distance assuring that there was still a road to find, like hikers traversing a narrow ledge.

There are instants in your life when you don’t know if you will live or die, and we suddenly had ours. From out of the swirling, snowy blackness, a set of headlights perched higher than ours came up on our left. A semi-trailer whose driver had less patience than everyone else on the road inexorably crept up on us, bearing closer and closer. I could see the headlights casting their glow through the driving snow, and I focused totally on keeping the minivan straight and completely in its lane. The truck never touched us. But as it passed, the wind force it created caught the minivan like a giant hand and sent us sliding off at an angle, completely out of control. I remember that the sides of the truck were yellow and white as our headlights turned toward the giant machine while it passed methodically, implacably, like Leviathan cleaving the silent, wine-dark sea. As the truck drew away from us and disappeared into the dark, a drift of snow swirled off its roof and plunged us into total whiteout. We slewed and yawed blindly out of control. I turned the wheel desperately back and forth, trying to get some purchase beneath the wheels, but my efforts were useless.

After a couple of seconds that felt like a lifetime, we felt the front of the minivan hit something hard. A guardrail had kept us from sliding into a ditch or worse. “Honey, are you okay?” I asked. “Sure,” my daughter replied. “How about you?” I was fine too…but as I looked toward her, I could see the pinpoints of light signaling the approach of the next car in the single snow-covered lane. We realized instantly that our minivan, positioned crosswise across the lane of traffic, would be invisible in the storm to oncoming traffic until it would be too late to stop. I slammed the van into reverse and hoped that luck would go our way. If it didn’t, we’d be out of the van and over the guardrail before the next accident happened.

The wheels caught, and we pushed back into the lane of traffic. Slowly we drove on, and took the next exit. The road had barely been plowed. The map showed a small town a few miles north, and we aimed the damaged van that way with hope in our hearts. We were deep in the middle of nowhere. The few driveways that we passed were unplowed and uninviting. No sign announcing a town ahead was anywhere to be seen.

We finally drew near what seemed to be a farm, with a tall yard light silhouetted in the snow, and a large sign out front that gave it an air of respectability. The driveway looked as if it had been plowed at some point during the storm. We drove up to a small house. I left my daughter in the car, and knocked on the door.

A young woman answered, her eyes cautious and wary. We’d been in an accident on the interstate, I explained, and were trying to find a place to stay. The map said we’d find a town in this direction. Were we on the right track?

No, she answered. The town ahead no longer had any type of lodging. More important, she said, there was a dangerous and winding hill not far ahead of us on this road, and we should not try to navigate it in this storm. Well then, I replied. My daughter and I clearly needed a place to stay in this storm. We were easy keepers. Could we just pay her forty dollars to sleep on her kitchen floor?

She was sorry, she said, but she would have to refuse. She had young children in the house, and her husband was away from home, and she just did not feel comfortable with letting two strangers in the door while he was away. We would just have to get back on the interstate and keep driving.

I returned to the car, crushed and stunned. Ahead of us lay a road we had no business being on. Behind us lay the interstate where we had nearly died. The seaworthiness of the van was a wild card. My daughter busied herself with brushing and scraping the snow from the windows as I tried to inventory the damage to the front end and tell whether or not the van would be able to make it much farther. I called my husband to report on the night’s events and tell him that we were safe so far…but uncertain as to where we would end up.

A man with a beard and a dark snow-covered jumpsuit came up to my side of the van as I said goodbye on the phone and tried to figure out what to do next. I was startled, but rolled down the window and explained our situation. He thought for a minute, then had us follow him to the trailer located behind the home we had just been turned away from. His wife was out for a little while, and so he couldn’t commit just then to letting us stay the night…but at least we could get out of the cold.

We followed meekly…and when the pair of them were finally together, they must have decided we posed no hazard to them and folded us into their tiny, cramped home. As the snow continued to mount outside and we finally tucked into some warm food, we exchanged our stories. The young woman who had turned us away was in fact their daughter-in-law, they said. Until recently, the man with the beard and his wife had lived in a state farther east. But their only son was a farmer. And when it appeared that he needed help to keep the farm running, they had left their comfortable life behind and moved here to help him keep his business and his family on solid ground. It was not the life they had predicted, but it was the one they chose without hesitation.
My daughter and I slept in their bed that night, exhausted but warm and safe. By morning, the storm had ceased and the skies had cleared and the sunlight positively glistened on the newly fallen carpet of snow. We scraped the heavy coverlet of white off the van and said our goodbyes and heartfelt thanks. I slipped a fifty dollar bill on to a nearby shelf before we left.

My daughter and I retraced our path eight miles back to the exit we wished we had taken the night before and dropped the van at an auto repair shop to get checked before continuing on. The whole world seemed swept clean, a glorious radiance and purity to the snow cover that extended to the horizon. The highway surface itself, plowed clean in the middle of the night, looked as well-maintained as if Martha Stewart had been running the road crew. We chowed down over pancakes and sausage and pondered the strangeness of fortune and the kindness of strangers.

It has been a good eleven years since that desperate night in the snow. A snow- covered road still frightens me more than it used to. When I look back, I know that I have never been closer to being dead than at that instant when our car spun out of control in blinding snow in a blizzard on the interstate. I wonder at the workings of fate, and the hand of God, and the presence of angels. There’s a lot that I’ll never know.

But I know for sure that every so often angels appear without wings or halos, celestial choirs or golden flutes or harps. Once in a while, they just show up wearing a watch cap and sturdy Sorel boots and a snowmobile suit

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WALDEN...in a smart phone world?

5/30/2016

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Would Henry David Thoreau have written Walden if he’d had an iPhone? I think not.

This random thought occurred to me one afternoon when I discovered, on a routine run to the store (for sundries) and then to the lake shore (for sanity), that I had left my cell phone behind at the house.

I felt unnerved. I felt anxious. I felt unmoored from my familiar electronic tether. I briefly considered turning the car around to retrieve it, but discarded the idea. For heaven’s sake, I’m from a generation that grew up not only without smart phones, but without phones that traveled any distance further than the spiral cord they were plugged in to the wall with. If I wanted to have a phone conversation with my best friend when I was in grade school, I had it while talking on the black rotary dial phone in my grandparent’s foyer, about ten feet from where my grandfather sat smoking his pipe and doing the crossword puzzle.

I pressed on, crossing my fingers that no disaster requiring my immediate response would happen before I got home and go to voicemail. God only knows, I have initiated and received my share of awful news on my portable phone over the past couple of decades—illness, death, auto accident, arrest, house fire, elderly relatives in distress. Some involved family members, others were calls from friends in my orbit. But there have been many, many times I have blessed the advances in technology that have made us instantly reachable in times of disaster and emergency.

I made it through Walmart without phone and without incident, my valiant quest for what… Dog food? Toilet paper? Bananas?...both successful and short. And then I turned my attention to the state park nearby, whose sandy beaches and tossing birches and aspens have always been balm to my soul.

Time was, even when I had my phone along, the reception quit before I reached the shore, putting me in a zone of splendid unreachability and physical and emotional seclusion. But that was a couple of smart phones ago. Either the coverage has improved or this new iPhone gets better reception, to the point that the only problems I have being instantly available involve Instagram and Twitter.

I parked the car, pulled the plaid beach blanket out of the back, and parked myself near the water’s edge. It was all I had hoped for. The rhythmic lapping of waves. Sunlight dancing and glinting on the water’s surface. The call of seagulls and songbirds along the coastline. The rustle of wind through nearby branches and grass. It is a vital and necessary replenishment in my life, a detachment from the mundane and artificial and a reconnection to the magnificent, mysterious whole.

And yet…I realized as I sat cross-legged at the beautiful shore, if I’d had the phone along, I would have surely by now snapped a couple of shots and uploaded them to Facebook to share the beauty with my friends. And possibly tried to tweet one or two as well, complete with hashtags. I quelled my impatience, and dug my fingers into the sand, still damp from the rain the night before, feeling the smooth, cool texture. Phone-less, I quit thinking about angles of light and framing shots and instead stretched out full length facing the water. It rolled toward me in slow, undulating waves like molten glass. It was hypnotic.

Eventually I dragged myself and the beach blanket back to the car and reentered “reality.” And as I drove home, I thought about how life with a smart phone has changed the way I respond to nature. In the days of yore, if I visited someplace beautiful and inspiring like Washington Island, Wisconsin, or Lassen Volcanic National Park, I thought about it and then wrote about it later, hoping to share its grandeur and its effect on me through vivid descriptions.

Now, as I walk through a forest and admire a stand of birch trees I may eventually write about it…but half of my passion and enthusiasm has already been shared by “mobile uploads” to my Facebook page, posted instantly from some solitary spot deep in the woods.

I stewed on that thought for the rest of the ride home, and tried to imagine Henry David Thoreau out there in the glorious solitude of Walden Pond with an iPhone. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Would he have, instead of meticulously studying the battle of the ants, taken a few photos and then started comparing the two varieties of warring insects on Wikipedia? Would he have possibly become more fixated on capturing a good back-lit photo of a woodchuck in his bean field than reflecting on the give and take of nature and the eons of habitation that had preceded him? Would he have developed a minor obsession with taking a good “selfie” with his hoe? And would his distraction have derailed his focus and reflection that resulted in Walden?

Perish the thought.

I pulled the car into the driveway, entered the house, greeted the dog, and checked the phone. No voicemails, no texts, no emergencies, no loss. I thought back to the feel of the sand under my fingers, and the mesmerizing appearance of the molten glass waves in the sunlight, rolling slowly and repeatedly toward me, drawing me into the whole of nature and the world. It was a gift.

I have got to return to the past and leave that phone behind more often.

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Enter my GOODREADS GIVEAWAY!!

5/11/2016

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From now until May 30, you can enter my Goodreads Giveaway to win one of 15 copies of my new children's chapter book, "Finnigan the Circus Cat." The book, which revolves around a rescue kitten who finds a home in a small town circus museum, is inspired by the real-life Finnigan, who was a rescue kitten who joined our family several years ago. While the real kitty doesn't live in a circus museum, his fictional counterpart shares a LOT of the same traits--the mustache, the swagger, the "pouncing," the daring-do! And, of course, the need to fly "under the radar" because someone in the family is allergic to cats.

This book--the first of several that will feature Finnigan--is a total departure for me, and has been a total hoot to write. In the "fools rush in where angels fear to tread" category, I leaped before looking and decided to also draw the sketches that begin each book chapter. I have an entirely new appreciation now for all those artists who can put pencil to sketching pad and let the contents of their minds flow on to the paper without hindrance. There has been a definite learning curve in play. Luckily, Finnigan is so darn cute in his baby pictures!!

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The Backstory about Blogging

3/25/2016

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Nearly a decade ago, I thought that I had thoroughly switched over from being a writer to being a lawyer. I had, after all, been a happy journalist for nearly twenty years. When I entered law school at the age of forty, I had the tremendous certainty that the shift—which had been preceded by surviving a ghastly accident that put me in a body cast for three months—was permanent. I viewed it as a pretty exciting transformation! I had stepped out of that fiberglas body cast like a moth who had spun a chrysalis, and entered a new stage of development.

And my budding career as a prosecutor was—and continues to be, to this day—challenging, rewarding, incredibly varied, and incredibly satisfying. And yet…several years in, I realized that I still missed the siren call of writing. That act of sitting down at a keyboard, or slouching into a sofa with a pad of paper and a fountain pen, and putting thoughts into words for the sheer joy of it.

My yearnings may have stayed as just that—yearnings. But here is where the power of friendship comes in, and the valuable lesson that if you are lucky to have friends who believe in you, sometimes you should just shut up and take their advice.

A friend of mine who worked as an attorney in the same courthouse, and her husband who blogged about his adventures of being a stay-at-home dad of a preschooler, nudged, pushed, and prodded me to start blogging. It took months of entreaties before I finally took the notion seriously. One factor was that my life was entirely too haphazard to carry a long train of thought needed to write anything longer than an essay. My dreams of finishing a suspense novel featuring a plucky female prosecutor had been shelved by the necessity of keeping up with serial family emergencies, ailing pets, and three hundred commuting miles a week.

And so, bolstered and buoyed by their encouragement—and the husband’s tech savvy—I cautiously dipped my toe into the water. We picked a name--“Running with Stilettos”—and bought the internet domain. I took a bag of my favorite high heels to the shore of Lake Michigan and lay belly-down on cold, wet sand in late December to capture a photo of my shoes by the water to post as the blog’s signature image.

And then I wrote my first essay, about my children decorating Christmas cookies to look like bloody axes that first Christmas holiday after the divorce. I had no idea whether any more essays would follow, but at least I took that first step, just as the old year was about to turn over to a new one.

Well, the essays followed. And it felt quite liberating to write about whatever I felt like writing about, without tailoring it to a market, or a magazine’s “style,” or an editor’s priorities. And so, as new chapters in my life unfolded, I wrote about them. About facing a fence emergency and buying my first power tool, a cordless drill, to deal with it. About taking my elderly father to Germany with my two teenaged sons so that he could see his sisters once more before he died. About dating after the divorce. I wrote about friendship and motherhood and chocolate and spike heels and riding “pillion” and gardening and moving on.

And a year later, I took what I’d written on that blog and turned it into my first book. Naturally, I called it “Running with Stilettos”! It won several awards, including a "first place" from the National Federation of Press Woman in their annual communications contest.

The adventures…and the books…continue. And I am so grateful to my friends who pestered me enough, and believed in me enough, to make me start down this new--and old---path.

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Lake Moments

3/15/2016

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The other day, I spent my lunch break at the shore.

This is nothing new.

You will usually find me there when weather permits, getting in a brisk half-hour walk to break up a work day spent sitting either at a desk or in a courtroom. This time was a little different. I wasn’t walking, since one of my knees had picked up a mysterious ache and demanded that I slow down for a while. I had no shopping errands to run either. So the lake nearby beckoned, and I followed its siren call to a parking spot overlooking a rocky shore and an endless horizon.

I was impatient at first. This was my usual time of day to move! To pound the pavement and get my heart rate up and my muscles stretched out. But the weather was too cold to even get out of the car and sit on a nearby bench, so I simply stared at the waves through the front windshield. And briefly, heretically, I asked myself “now what exactly am I getting from this?”

And then in short order words and impressions began to form. The waves were a dusty sage green under a grey and cloudy sky. They rolled toward me not in a riot of crashing, foamy crests, but in undulating swells whose crosshatched texture and pattern and sheen brought to mind silk fabric cut on the bias.

In that moment, and for the remaining time I had until duty called, I “got” what Lake Michigan shore has always given me. A source of peace, and nature, and wonder, and inspiration that is never, ever the same.

Driftwood shapes on the sand, polished by wind and water and resembling sea creatures cast up from the deep. A layer of swirling vapor rising from the surface in sub-zero winter temps, resembling a witch’s cauldron. Mosaics of light rippling crosswise across the sand ridges beneath crystalline water. Fog so thick that when you walk toward the lighthouse, you can stand on the breakwater and see neither shore behind you nor structure ahead. I could go on and on… Every visit to the shore is different, from moment to moment and day to day.

And so, without further words, here are moments of Lake Michigan.

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The Milwaukee Domes and the "nick of time"!

2/6/2016

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It was the kind of mid-winter day in Wisconsin where it's hard to remember anything outdoors that had green leaves at one time, much less flowers. And so my daughter and I decided to make a soul-restoring run to Milwaukee, heading to both the Mitchell Park Domes--an internationally known trio of beehive shaped botanical gardens under glass--and then the Milwaukee Art Museum.

We got what we were looking for, even though one of the three domes--the "desert" display--had been recently closed for safety reasons. Falling debris, linked to years of neglect, had posed a safety hazard. But both the "show" and "tropical" domes were still open to the public. And later THAT SAME DAY the entire complex was closed to the public because of those same concerns.

Here is THE LATEST STATE OF THE DOMES's future now, reported a few days later. A complete overhaul, after years of deferred maintenance, is estimated at upwards of $50 million.

But blissfully unaware of any hazards at the time, we made straight for the tropics and breathed deep in the warm, moist air. Sunlight flooded the tropical dome through the glass panels above, but was diffused by the tall trees throughout. There were orchids in varieties that ranged from pretty and fragrant to mesmerizing in a is-that-a-spider-or-space-alien way. In the background, water tumbled musically down a fountain amidst diverse vegetation that included a banana tree, a rattlesnake plant and "elkhorn" epiphytes.

I've been going to the Domes for nourishment of the soul and the senses since before my four adult children were born. I had my wedding pictures taken there. I've been romanced at the Domes, pushed strollers containing babies and toddlers (and sometimes both) through the domes, brought out-of-town visitors there, and dressed my daughters in frilly dresses for pictures among the flowers. It provided a needed respite from the stress of law school nearby when I changed careers at the age of forty and embarked on a new personal journey.

Now it is vividly real that that the future of the Domes is in serious jeopardy. An recent article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel notes that in 2014, the county board allocated a half million dollars for repairs, a drop in the bucket compared to the $32 million master plan to renovate the Domes that had been broached in 2000, but rejected. A local architect that had been involved in the larger renovation plan had told the newspaper in 2005 that while the Domes had been groundbreaking at the time they were created, by now "whatever magic was there is gone."

I couldn't disagree more. I've never failed to find "magic" at the Domes every time I've visited. And here is just a sampling from yesterday's visit, before the doors closed behind us.

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"Makeshift Christmas" past...

12/25/2015

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I have many Christmas memories to pick from over the years, from bare-bones and sparse (in terms of material trappings) to full-bodied and fully festooned (again, in terms of material trappings). The people I love and keep close to my heart do not change from year to year, but the circumstances (or chaos!) in which we celebrate Christmas can vary quite a bit. This year has been running pretty smooth...and sedate...so far.

The other day, just two days short of Christmas Eve, I encountered a woman around my age whose father was recovering from quite serious and immediate surgery. He wasn't "out of the woods" by any stretch, and yet she still was keeping her chin up, facing the public with a smile in her job, and counting her blessings while steadfastly putting one foot in front of the other. As life, with grace, demands.

I told her that I empathized, and had gone through something similar a few years before, cataclysmically different from the holiday before.. And so, without further fanfare, is the "Makeshift Christmas" essay I wrote back then. Enjoy, and may you have a blessed holiday!!

Imagination stood in for Christmas wrap this year.

“Sit down,” I instructed my various children and my new son-in-law, “and shut your eyes!”

Then I exited stage left, grabbed their bundles of unwrapped presents from the spare bedroom, and returned to the living room where one after the other followed instructions and sat with eyes closed and hands face up on their lap to catch the goods.

“Okay,” I said, “now just imagine there’s a big bow! And shiny ribbon! And gorgeous wrapping paper, all sparkly and shiny! And when you tear that off, there’s a box inside. Then you take the top off the box, and imagine there’s some tissue paper! And you rustle it and rustle it, looking for what’s under it, and finally…”

That’s when I’d hand them their unwrapped sweater…or gloves…or flannel-lined pants…or scarf. We laughed, I got by without a nervous breakdown trying to find two extra hours for present decorating I didn’t have time for, and there was no cleanup of tumbleweed sized balls of cast-off wrapping paper. I guess there’s an upside to this after all.

It’s been that kind of a Christmas. Never tried the “Emperor’s New Clothes” approach to holiday wrap before, but hey, they say necessity is the mother of invention.

Two months ago I couldn’t have foreseen that my eighty-five year old crippled mother would break her leg and need to go to a nursing home for three months, that my eighty-five year old father would need to follow her because of his own serious health problems, that my--ahem, never mind how old—godmother would suddenly wind up in the hospital only a month later in serious pain and distress, and that my father would then deteriorate suddenly and require hospitalization himself.

Two months ago I was still envisioning the kind of Christmas I wrote about two years ago in Tale of the Christmas Axes. The kind of Christmas that evokes echoes of Norman Rockwell with the seasonal decorations around the house and garland around the banister and the tree festooned from top to bottom with hand-embroidered ornaments and a glorious angel atop, a mistletoe ball hanging in the living room, family around the dinner table for a fabulous meal, Christmas music playing softly in the background. I’d even found the crèche this year that had been lost for the past two holidays.

But then life got in the way, and a few thousand miles got put on the car running back and forth again and again to my hometown of Chicago to deal with the unfolding dramas, and Christmas shopping and Christmas baking and Christmas planning and Christmas cards went right out the window. My younger son and I had managed to pick out a live tree a few weeks earlier and get it into the house and upright with the assistance of his lovely girlfriend, but with less than twelve hours left until Christmas officially arrived, the only thing the tree had on it was a few strands of lights. And bah humbug, I was about ready to leave it that way.

But somehow things went right anyway. By the time it was afternoon on Christmas Eve, the kids had come home and the ornament boxes got dragged out of the closet, and then some of our favorite decorations made it onto the branches through no effort of mine. While a new fire crackled in the grate, they then set to rolling out the batch of cookie dough I’d made the day before, and the usual irreverence and laughter and the smell of coffee lit up the kitchen as they came up with new demented ways to decorate the axe-shaped cookies and their “victims.” Yes, we have Christmas stars and bells and pine trees and Santas. But we also ended up with a gingerbread man wearing a Speedo, a couple of Christmas giraffes, some Christmas pineapples, a pirhana, and a cookie decorated like a liquor bottle.

Then after the cookies were baked we raced through passing out my gifts before driving over to a family gift exchange, because I knew I’d be on the road to Chicago and back on Christmas day, visiting at hospitals and nursing homes and basically crashing my cousin’s delicious family dinner on the way home. Not the best timing in the world, but it was the only day in the week that the weatherman could guarantee I’d have dry pavement and clear skies for two hundred fifty miles. I drove home in the dark to an empty house, since the kids had spent the day with their dad. Christmas dinner at my house is going to be a day late. I hope the chicken in wine sauce that I made a few days ago is still good.

Taking inventory of this year, there are a few things we missed. The percentage of ornaments is a little thin this year…though the kids still managed to get the strands of wooden “cranberries” threaded through the branches. We’re missing the angel and the mistletoe ball, the crèche never made it out of storage, and I can’t begin to imagine getting out the garland. Never bought a wreath for the front door, left the big electric outdoor Santa down in the basement, and the singing moose that chimes “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” is nowhere to be seen. We skipped the tinsel on the tree too.

But we had warmth, and love, and laughter, and delight, and once again, Christmas cookies shaped like little bloody axes. As for the rest of the traditional things that got left undone, well…

We can always imagine them too.

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Ode to "Bones"

9/13/2015

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With apologies to Will Shakespeare, I come today not to bury Bones, but to praise them.

Oh lord, that was a cheap attempt at a pun but… I am still seized by the impulse to describe just why I'm a devoted (or rabid) fan of the TV series “Bones.”

Viewed from one perspective, I should be about the last person on earth to opine about anything on television, given that I’m nearly always too busy working, writing and unpacking boxes from my recent move to watch it. I got satellite TV a few years ago so that I could stay in the conversation with my youngest son, who is a football fan. I am now down to perusing three channels once in a great while, looking for any partial episode of “Law & Order" to get me through my dinner and give me an excuse to sit down for ten minutes.

And yet, the series has seriously set its hooks into me, and I’ve turned from being a casual fancier to being occasionally spellbound by its emotional depth and resonance. Go figure. It’s a series that revolves around a gorgeous forensic anthropologist with the people skills of a lump of granite, and her evolving relationship with a brash FBI agent who likes to go with his gut in his investigations. There are gorgeous teeth and high cheekbones and cleavage and sexy, form-fitting outfits in overabundance. And I try not to hold that against the series, and instead just vow to upgrade my own work wardrobe some day when pencil skirts and form-fitting spandex and I can coexist without embarrassment.

As most habits do, this one started by accident. I was flipping channels for several evenings at the dinner hour, and could not find a Law & Order episode running. As a prosecuting attorney, my comfort zone with that program is total, like a pair of familiar bedroom slippers with fleecy linings. Drop me in any place in the plot line—police investigation, charging decisions, suppression motions, appellate courts—and I don’t need to play “catch up.”

However, at the same time, there were multiple episodes of Bones lined up back to back on another channel, and so I gave it a shot. What I saw, I instinctively liked. I found myself appreciating the fact that here was a female lead character who was unquestionably, simply RIGHT about her scientific deductions. While much sport was made of her lack of social awareness, if she said the dead guy’s tibia told you something, by golly, that’s exactly what it told you. Her team of researchers relied upon that precision and anaylsis to arrive at a broader picture of a cause of death. She didn’t have to flirt her way into cooperation with anyone. She didn’t have to fight with her superiors do have her viewpoint recognized. She didn’t have to weigh multiple possibilities as to what a particular fracture meant. In short, the bones didn’t lie, and she didn’t have to coyly conceal or reveal just what they told her.

It was a nice, nightly shot of “girl power.”

The series spanned several seasons by then, however, and I was not catching them in sequence. I eventually got absolutely dizzy trying to keep up with the lusty romantic attachments of the various cast members, as well as Temperance Brennan’s—that’s the main character modeled on real-life forensic anthropologist and author Kathy Reichs—evolving relationship with her FBI partner and her once-absent father.

And so I bit the bullet, and used my Netflix subscription to watch the series from the very beginning, not even skipping the episodes I had already seen.

And that’s where I got drawn into the people and the writing rather than the crime solving. If I had to sum up the essence of the series for myself, it would be that love is complicated and damage is permanent. And that while love may not conquer all, it is still our saving grace.

The crime solving is always brilliant, of course, and multi-layered with many red herrings preceding the “eureka” discovery of whodunnit, and why. There are gruesome methods of dispatch, and equally gruesome discoveries of murder victims in various stages of decomposition and slipperiness and, for want of a better word, "goo." There are interesting locations, and rapid pacing, and comic banter, and a shared sense of noble purpose.

But that’s taken a back seat for me lately to the finely limned portraits of affection and connection and frustration between the characters. A bit like the way I look at the combination of sweet corn and butter. Each has their strengths and values. But when you get right down to it at a picnic on a hot summer day, the ear of corn pretty much exists as a vehicle for consuming melted butter. I’ve started to regard the plot lines in Bones as merely the pretext for enjoying the interplay between Brennan and her hit-man father, and her parolee brother, and Booth, and her best friend Angela.

What’s past is prologue for all, and Temperance’s history of abandonment and time spent in foster care is baggage she will never escape no matter the emerging closeness and faith she has in Booth, by now her husband, with his own issues to carry. And I am continually surprised at how well the series avoids large denouements and happy endings in favor of leaving those loose ends hanging just as they do in real life.

Okay, real life plus money and spandex and great cheekbones and fabulous teeth.

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A writer's retreat

8/9/2015

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I wrote this essay about taking a giant step off the beaten path about two years ago. The thirst for the shore is just as strong! Better "late" publishing than never...

The writer in me was craving some peace and quiet, some long-term sitting time, some mental room in which to grow and nurture a thought plucked from thin air.

The rest of my daily life was having absolutely none of that idea! The last few years have gone by with the speed and fury of a cyclone, carved up by job, commute, new grandbaby, elderly relatives in decline, funerals, household chores, writers’ conferences, wrestling with nature rather than ceding the field of battle over my ten little flower beds, and…of late…the addition of two “spare” cats to the household while their owners (my children) went temporarily overseas.

It seemed that I could hold no train of thought for longer than five minutes, and I was wilting from the lack. A dear friend of mine who I had first met at an idyllic writers’ retreat led by the late poet Norbert Blei was headed back to the idyll earlier this summer for a glorious full week away from reality.

I knew full well the value of that environment, and that recharging of the soul. I had experienced it for myself three times in the past decade, driving north along the western shore of Lake Michigan to “The Clearing” in Door County, a collection of log cabins and larger gathering places and campfire pits set on the shore of Green Bay, augmented by three hearty meals a day with the plates whisked away by the staff so that “the writers” could get back to work…or not. Another year, when my checking account permitted but my work schedule forbade my going up to The Clearing I rented a tiny cottage on the lake and repaired there for a week of replenishing solitude. I hiked shaded trails, lived mostly like a hermit, and wrote…and napped…a lot.

Oh, this year as my friend prepared to launch into her writer’s Eden, I was so jealous! But a combination of scheduling problems and finances conspired to keep me from going with this time. A week away from home at a place like The Clearing is never cheap. Add to it the post-divorce costs associated with parking the dog in a kennel for a week and paying someone to drive over to feed the cats and make them feel validated, and the idea of a week-long getaway rapidly rose to the level of “pipe dream.”

Still…I knew I needed to recharge. Badly. And so I improvised.

I co-opted my youngest son and his wife, newly returned from a semester abroad “across the pond” in Ireland, to move in to the house while I’d be gone and play zookeepers to Lucky the dog and the four felines who had kept me in conversation, kitty litter and carpet shampoo for a number of months. One of the cats was theirs, and while I had grown incredibly fond of little Finnigan over the course of seven months, there was payback to be reaped. Knowing that the cats would not be “home alone” and full of mischief was a HUGE weight off my shoulders.

Then I got on line and started looking for a cheap motel room for an entire TWO DAYS that my other commitments didn’t cut into. And lo and behold, I found a lovely place just two miles from Kohler Andrae state park, site of what I consider the loveliest beach in the state of Wisconsin. SOLD!! I booked the room and started to pack.

My needs, when you got right down to it, were very simple: a bed and a bathroom, breakfast, free WiFi, and above all, peace and quiet. Armed with my laptop computer, a picnic basket full of “gluten free” snacks and fruits, and several cans of Diet Coke, I set out to recharge my batteries.

It didn’t take long. I could feel both life and creativity flooding into me before I even stepped on to the sandy path leading from the parking lot to the beach. I felt my state of eternal vigilance and rapid responsiveness—dog, cats, elderly mother, kids, work, laundry, boyfriend, and the occasional raccoon in the garage—relax, and new trains of thought start to grow and evolve. I felt the daily realities and timetables and litter box maintenance fly right out of my head on the breeze, to be replaced by whimsy, and mischievousness, and, dare I say it, imagination.

Leaving the motel for the first time to head toward the beach, I drove past the ruins of an older motel, in full swing of being reclaimed by nature. It gave off the disturbing feel of the Bates Motel…about twenty years after abandonment when Norman Bates got locked up at the end of “Psycho.” It was desolate…and atmospheric…and I stopped to snap a lot of photos. A place that creepy has just got to find a spot in a story some day!

n early morning trip to the shore revealed that I was indeed the first person there, and I walked into sand shrouded in mist rising from the rains of the night before. The sand between the grass in the dunes was still pockmarked by raindrops, and I set my little blanket a few hundred feet from a gathering of seagulls at the water’s edge. While I am a rabid fan of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book “Gift From the Sea,” I admit I broke her cardinal rule that the shore is no place to work, but a place to replenish. And so I wrote.

I was writing “old school,” of course. I had left my iPhone in the car’s glove compartment, and the laptop back at the motel room. I was equipped with those most antiquated forms of writing accoutrements—a pen and a pad of paper. But sitting there, surrounded by wind and waves and footprints in the sand, the thoughts and images just kept coming as though Pandora’s box had been opened. And every piece of dialogue that I jotted down, every shred of character development or backstory that emerged, invariably led to more. It would have been criminal NOT to write it all down! Nefariousness, clues, atmospherics, troubled families, emotional scars, observations of modern society—they all would have flared and then disappeared on the wind like leaves in autumn, gone for good if not pinned to the paper.

There were breaks in my action, of course. I can’t sit by the shore and not be lulled by the sight of rolling whitecaps. Or stretch out full-length and watch clouds pass by…or even just close my eyes and listen to the sounds of the wind and water. This is truly my favorite beach, reminiscent in size and endless, unbroken horizon of the shore at the edge of the ocean. While you may not spy any dolphins playing in the surf at daybreak, I personally find that the dearth of sharks and jellyfish is more than a fair trade-off.

And so it went. A trip to the beach followed by the trek back to the motel to read and research and type, after a quick shower to remove sand and sunblock. Write, rinse and repeat.

I will drive back toward reality and routine in a few hours, but not before I return to the beach one more time with pen and paper in hand. As I chatted the day before with the motel manager, he offered up the location of yet another “inspirational” place for a writer to visit, known to the locals yet off the beaten path. If I had another day or two to spare, I’m sure I’d find my way there, drawn by the promise of broken foundations and ruined buildings, grown-over gardens, and cliffs at the shore. I’m keeping the exact location of that one to myself.

Because I just know there must be a “next time.”

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