Making Do

Back in 2002, I celebrated the holidays in Lindsay, Oklahoma with my Gramma Francis. It was the last Christmas she would live to see. My sister was there, along with Mom and Dad and the two men who would eventually resign themselves to marrying the troublesome Williams sisters. We scrapped and staked out territory as we each attempted to fashion a down-home Christmas according to our private stockpile of childhood ideals. From the safety of her powder blue recliner, Gramma alternated between the agitation of directing traffic and the blissful calm of watching all her chicks peck around her.

To pretty up the tree, we hauled out the boxes and bubble-wrapped parcels of ornaments from the storage closet. As many of her contemporaries did, my grandmother favored a holiday motif of turquoise and sea-green. We slung the tree with aquamarine garland and blue lights, then dug in vain for the tree topper.

Each of us remembered something different. A silvery glass tower? A twinkling star? A praying angel? Gramma rubbed her head and tried to recall when she had last seen whatever was supposed to be up there. It was Christmas Eve, no one wanted to trudge to the Wal Mart yet again just to buy a cheap plastic tree topper, and did we really need one anyway? Oh, YES WE DID!

So, with tin foil, a cereal box, and several strips of green and blue ribbon, I went to work. Bravely withstanding the derision of my so-called loved ones, I fashioned a workable Christmas star that sat proudly, if a little tilted, atop the tree that year.

After my grandmother passed away, we began the bittersweet process of gutting her closets and puzzling over what to do with dozens of porcelain cherubs and glass perfume atomizers and size-6 dress shoes. Toby and I gathered up an assortment of the Christmas ornaments and carried them home to add a little 1950's flare to our home at the holidays.

Every year since, we have draped our tree with aquamarine and finished the top with that sorry cardboard star. This year, however, it was just too sad. It bent in the middle and flopped over in defeat. "Maybe it's time," Toby said. I sighed. It's hard to advocate for a thing when it won't even stand up for itself.

I've thought about purchasing something glittery and perfect for up there. I really have. But our budget only has room for the kind of ornaments the underpaid Chinese factory workers can't even afford on the wages they earn making them. I'm not sure this is the sentiment I want staring me down from the highest point in my house for the better part of a month. Besides, I'm halfway through Carolyn Chute's The School on Heart's Content Road, and I'm ready for a little grit and dirt on the clean, plastic aspirations of my life.

So. I poked around online. Found a template here for an angel made from a soda bottle. While I don't have any lace or doll's hair on hand, I do have about 150 scarves unearthed from a steamer trunk at Gramma Francis' house. I did a little cutting, a little hot-gluing, a little sewing. A few burns and curses later, I finished our latest handmade tree-topper.

Maybe she's not a perfect angel. But who is?

Pink Haze

We have lived fifteen minutes from the Adirondack Outlet Mall for nearly a year, yet I have not once set foot in that consumer mecca. Until today. With Gramma Genie visiting just weeks before Christmas, the holes in Eliot's wardrobe have became painfully evident. Hand-me-downs and Goodwill are adequate most of the time, but sometimes a kid needs snow pants and fleece in his size in December, not May. So, off to the madhouse we went.

A sale rack of snowsuits greeted us just inside the doors of Osh Kosh. Sixty percent off the already reasonable price. I started pawing through the colors. For boys, the choices were black, a blackish navy blue, and poop brown. For girls, I could choose salmon, magenta, or sherbert-colored psychedelic flowers. I sighed. No neutral green or sunny yellow or even plain old red. If I let Eliot see the rack, he would immediately go for the floral neon. So, I did not give him that option. Instead, I grabbed a brown and a magenta (could be purple, right?) and let him choose. "Purple," he said, barely glancing. Of course.

Mom tried to steer me gently towards the navy blue. Maybe if it were the blue of ocean or sky, Eliot would go for it. But this was the blue of discount office furniture. Dung beetles. Chemical spills. I tried again, offering Eliot the choices. He didn't even bother speaking. He just jutted his chin towards the magenta. "As if," his jut seemed to say, "the question is even worth asking."

We approached the checkout. The clerk chuckled as Eliot, posing before a display case, tried on a sequined tiara, pink sunglasses, and a fuschia patent-leather pocketbook. She rung up our clothing and it somehow came up that I was buying the snowsuit for Eliot. "This?" Her eyes grew wide. "Is for him?"

"My little princess," I laughed. The woman's lip curled. She dropped her gaze, but I could see her eyes rolling as she shoved the snowsuit in the bag. She may have kept her mouth shut, but she certainly did not keep her opinion to herself. I wanted to reach across the counter and smack that sneer of her face. What does it matter to anyone which color my little boy has chosen as his favorite? I can't quite grasp how Eliot tromping around the snow in magenta pants upsets the balance of the universe.

I thought we wanted our sons to learn that there is more to manhood than defending and providing, that there is great meaning in caring for their homes and the people inside them. Don't we want them to learn the value of tenderness? Our daughters can be pilots and firefighters, so it should be fine for our sons be dancers and divas. Doesn't Eliot's ability to plant a tulip bulb as well as he wields a hammer make him more of a boy, not less of one?

When we came home and dumped our purchases on the kitchen table. "Wow," said my mom. "That's really pink." She was right. The fluorescents at the store had fooled my eyes into seeing purple, but afternoon daylight told a different story. "Are you sure you don't want to consider exchanging it?"

"It's not like I'm dressing him in eyelet blouses," I said. "There's no glitter on it. It's just a color. Why can't pink be boy?"

"It can be," my mom said. "But why stop there? Why not ruffles and lace, if he likes them?"

She has a point. But it is going to be hard enough sending Eliot to preschool with a pink snowsuit for playground time. I worry as much about what people will think of me as a mother as the flak my son might get from his classmates. Am I a better parent if I caution him not to trust his preferences and desires? If I push him toward the choices everyone around him thinks he should make? The world is going to come down on him soon enough. Wouldn't it be nice if this little boy could have a few, sweet years to like what he likes?

Come to think of it, perhaps I will return the snowsuit. Take it back, tell that clerk I want to exchange it for the neon flowers. Let Eliot know I'm delighted with my wonderful little boy, just exactly as he is.

The African Queen

On this, the fourth day of my son's full-body rash, we have taken to ending every day with a gooey colloidal oatmeal marinade. Tonight, Eliot wanted to help sprinkle the packet of powder into his bathwater. We looked around for something to stir the big cauldron of comfort. A bubble wand was too flimsy, a mermaid doll too bendy. I poked around the bottomless kitchen utensil drawer until I happened up a thick wooden spoon with a flat bowl. I had forgotten I still had this monster, a stirring stick brought back from my travels in Zimbabwe 15 years ago.

"What's that?" Eliot asked.

"A mugoti," I replied. Stunned. From somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain, I had retained this piece of Shona vocabulary. During my stay with host families, I had used a mugoti several times. Poorly. Most nights, I watched my sisters and mother draw and slam the flat, round end against the increasing thickness of the sadza in the cooking pot. The mealy-meal sadza, a mash made from milled, white maize, boiled and popped menacingly as it approached the consistency of roofing spackle. Most Zimbabwean women could put a rhino in a headlock with their upper arms alone.

Eliot stepped into his bath and chased the chunks of oatmeal with his wooden baton, mashing them against the porcelain edge of the tub. "I like this mugoti," he said to me.

"You do?"

"Yes. But let's go to the store and get a pink one."

Quarantine

Sick, sick, sick. Around and around, up and down, all one, two, three of us.

This week, I figured I had contracted the dreaded hinny, and had Toby call his fabulous physician sister to find out if it is possible to get the killer flu without a fever. "Oh, not only possible. Totally likely." Great.

Fatigued and unable to get a breath on Sunday night, I cooked myself in the hottest shower I could stand till the tank ran dry. We had only one humidifier in the house. While I longed for the steam in my room, the motherly instincts nagged at me to bestow that singular comfort on my wheezing child. Toby suggested we all sleep together. Maternal, perhaps. Masochist? No. I plugged the bubbling wonder into Eliot's room and sank, into my own too-dry flannel sheets. I figured I would survive the night, and anyway, Toby knows how to run a hot shower and call 911.

Now, another humidifier happier, the pain in my chest has moved downward and my fear of a 2am visit to urgent care has abated. Eliot, true to his nature, has only grown more demanding and unstoppable as I have grown sleepier. Toby has been a saint. The past few mornings, he has risen at the now 6:00 wakeup time (preschoolers don't understand the concept of Daylight Savings Time) to entertain our energizer bunny while I grump and languish in steamy splendor behind a latched door. My dear husband has donated his lunch hour to the cause, running Eliot ragged around the backyard, leaping into piles of leaves and returning endless, errant pop flies. I have slept.

Today, a nausea-inducing dizziness gave my brain, as well as my sense of balance, a free ride on the tilt-a-whirl anytime I stood. When Eliot finally woke up from his nap, I was still horizontal on the couch, as I had been when he'd gone down two hours earlier. I decided to forgo the wheedling call to my husband to save me. I could tough out the afternoon on the couch.

I directed Eliot to get his doctor kit, and he did a full workup, testing my blood pressure, temperature, and reflexes, and finding something in my ears that shouldn't be there. "A kitty," the wise doctor concluded. He applied a bandage and declared me healed. Then he combed and trimmed my hair with play-doh scissors, provided a rousing round of karaoke on his battery-operated tape microphone ("Look at this stuff! Isn't it neat!"), and played several versions of Candy Land on my stomach. Somehow, we made it through till Toby's late return from the trenches without me ever having to rise from the sofa or summon our pal, Walt Disney, to take over.

Dinner consisted, as all meals have for several days, of things like jarred baby food, cold turkey, and sliced apples. Even while I slept through both breakfast and lunch today, Toby managed to feed himself and Eliot relatively healthy things ("He ate his broccoli, sweetie!"), wash up the dishes, wipe noses, and arrange magnificently expensive car repairs with the mechanic.

Maybe the bathroom sink is unrecognizable under a layer of old washcloths and toothpaste scuzz, and perhaps I haven't returned a phonecall or written my daily pages or set foot in the Y in days, but Eliot ate his broccoli. No one in the house is running a fever of 102. And my kid is managing to play his way through this bout of illness as if it is just an awesome game his mommy and daddy have worked out just for him.

Scraps in the Kitchen

Driving into town for our morning at the Y last week, I heard an NPR story about composting. Okay. So if the good people of San Francisco can do it because it's the law, I should be able to manage it voluntarily. A hundred years ago, when I lived in Vermont, composting was easy peasy. I either had a backyard garden myself or I could take any food scraps I accumulated to the section of the Intervale dedicated entirely to compost. It didn't hurt that I knew half the people working at any of the farms or businesses scattered throughout the Intervale, that it is a beautiful place with a path snaking down along the river, and that it is right within the city limits of Burlington.

Since leaving Vermont, I have given up on composting food waste. First, suburban living, then apartment living, then bear-country living provided me with an ample supply of excuses. Then, we moved to Camp Chingachgook.

Several years ago, our camp invested in the Earth Tub, an industrial green machine that stews and chews kitchen waste into rich, delicious nourishment for the beautiful things camp grows. It sits right outside the dining hall, closer even than the dumpsters. All acceptable scraps and the special biodegradable napkins used for camp meals go into the tub. Campers collect and weigh their food waste, separating out the compostables into tubs at the cleanup station.

Whenever our little family eats at the dining hall, I feel a little glow of pride as we toss our modest heap of apple cores and half-chewed carrots into the bin.

Of course, most meals are consumed at home. And prepared at home. The cabbage middles, pumpkin guts, watermelon rinds and slimy spinach all end up in the trash. Why, you ask, with such a fabulous composting opportunity just a short walk through the woods, would you glut a landfill with such things?

While we have avoided most of the pitfalls of the sub-prime mortgage mess, not having ever taken out a mortgage, the answer can be found in our own real estate crisis. It takes place in our kitchen. This delightful little room, the smallest in the house with the exception of the bathroom, happens to work several full-time jobs. It is our foyer and parlor, as the front door opens right into its counter-space. It is our mudroom, our coat closet, our mail dump, our dog-leash storage area. It houses flashlights for evening walks, stacking bins for scarves and mittens, and hooks for a wide variety of headgear.

Because our camp has a dumpster for every kind of reusable material and because New York has a bottle law, our kitchen is also our recycling headquarters. This means each odd corner serves as one of six distinct recycling areas. The seventh, for beer bottles, is in the stairway, because, really, it's just too much.

On occasion, I actually cook in the kitchen, too.

The thought of adding a compost corner to this jumbled mess makes my brain hurt. Not a single inch of counter goes unused. Toby installed extra shelf space on the high walls for cereal and bread, and the few inches of space under our island shelters shoes. No tub the Container Store sells will mash into the narrow gap between the stove and sink. I keep wondering how others with small kitchens and small children have solved the compost conundrum.

Hearing that NPR story made me realize that if some hidden pantry has not magically revealed itself in the past 10 months, I'm probably out of luck. So, just yesterday, I hauled out a big plastic bowl, set it on my counter, and topped it with a dinner plate. Into it I dumped the breakfast eggshells, the lunchtime pear cores, and the dinner stems. It's in the way, sure, but it is also right in my workspace where I will actully use it. I figure I can trot over to the compost bin once a day and dump it before the fruit flies discover its bounty.

In just two days, I have filled the mixing bowl twice to the brim with kitchen waste. The sheer quantity of what goes uneaten is stunning. The weight of the bowl under my arm as I cross the bridge and approach the dining hall is enough to remind me how important it is I keep feeding the camp garden and not the landfill. Perhaps the next task, however, is learning how to feed my family more efficiently so we are not wasting so much to begin with.

Sick Day Souffle

A second round of bronchial distress forced me to keep Eliot home from preschool yesterday. He stayed with Toby in the morning while I dragged myself to my first ever mammogram. Toby headed back to work after I returned, Eliot and mommy both took too-short naps, and we grumped and dragged through the afternoon. Cough, hack, blow, fuss. We hauled ourselves out into the blustery afternoon to force a few scouring breaths of autumn air through clogged lungs. By dinnertime, I was feeling dizzy and listless, itchy-throated and headachy. As we put on jammies and settled down to read, Eliot looked at me and said, "Let's have a sick day again tomorrow."

My boy got his wish. We stayed home for the second day, and he was ecstatic. No school, no swim lessons, no supermarket, no car seat. He stayed in his underpants, jammie top, and fleece slippers till 3:30 in the afternoon. We piled up blocks, made ferryboats travel around the living room rug, forced Snow White into a string harness to rock climb up a 3-foot dowel balanced in a flowerpot. We read at least 15 books before lunch. We dug through a small mountain of French Toast at 10:00 in the morning. We napped until nearly dinnertime.

Toby walked into the wreckage at 5:30. My big plans for a Canadian split pea soup supper had long since been abandoned. I had barely managed to clean up from lunch, let alone start scrubbing potatoes and mincing garlic for yet another meal. We considered heading over to the dining hall -- always a nice backup -- but really, how awful would it be to spare Eliot's classmates his germs, only to inflict them on our fellow staff members and the kids from a visiting school? We figured we could just heat up something from a can for dinner. Same as we did for lunch.

But Toby had a package under his arm. A belated birthday gift from Aunt Nancy and Uncle John in Dallas. Eliot tore it open, and found one of the greatest sick-day birthday presents a boy and his mom could wish for. Silicone baking cups! A kid-friendly cookbook! A project! "Let's cook dinner," Eliot said. It's on, baby.

We dug out eggs, some frozen chunks of ham I had put in the freezer for just such an occasion, and a little wilted spinach. Eliot was a champ, whisking his eggs and asking, "Are they all mixed up?" He made sure every cup had an fair number of ham bites, and included himself in the rotation. "I am testing them to make sure they are good for cooking."

With a steady hand, he poured the egg mixture into the cups. I was amazed at the care he took to do this job well. With the addition of a few slices of apple and toast, dinner was on the table in twenty minutes. The mini fritattas barely lasted five. Eliot finished all three of the ones he had grabbed and started making covetous glances towards Toby's plate.

Of course, no culinary task with a three-year-old ends smoothly. The mixing bowl and apron reminded him of baking, which made him crave something sweet, and the rest is history. For the allergy-inflicted, even the simple act of baking cookies takes an added degree of artistry. Oat flour, almond butter, coconut oil melted in the microwave, and vegan chocolate chips. No recipe. We've had enough practice by now to be able to whip up something delicious without too much effort, and thank goodness for that. Because, by this point in the evening, I was feeling ready to fall over, and the dishes were piling up, and, needless to say, I was a little sick of the kitchen. But I stuck with it, Eliot mixed and poured some more, and a fabulous bedtime snack greeted us with the beep of the oven timer.

We all may be sick around here, but that hasn't slowed down our appetites. I can guarantee you these cookies won't last the night.

Wetlands Hike

On a whim, we met up with our 11-year-old neighbor on Sunday afternoon at the center green. A scattering of girl scouts wandered around with compasses to finish up their badge day activities, but otherwise, camp was quiet. Blustery fall in the Adirondacks. It was a year ago this month that George Painter brought Toby and me out to interview, and wooed us with the rusty golden tapestry draped over the hills surrounding camp.

After a few turns on the bike, Eliot grew bored and Fenway needed to run. So, with Eliot's big buddy in the lead, we ducked into the woods. A trail between the staff row and the horse's paddock leads into a damp, muddy wedtland made up of the beaver-dammed waters of Butternut Brook. Soon after the trail begins, it narrows and becomes navigable only by a track of boards built up above the swamp. Through the cattails and marsh grasses we clomped.

Behind me and ahead of Toby, Eliot hopped easily up on the thin boards and began to hike, his walking stick tapping along beside him. Never mind the slippery footprints, the angles and occasional yawning gaps between 2x6's. He refused a hand and walked with nearly as much confidence as any of us, barring the four-footed Fenway. On one particularly nerve-wracking bridge over a leg of the creek, Eliot shooed away my offer to help. There, suspended on a few open boards several feet above murky water, my son simply grabbed hold of a drooping rope handrail and sauntered right across. He never even hesitated. Never, like his mama, looked down at that water too far below and felt his knees go wobbly.

Past the thick, wet brush which probably houses any number of mallards, turtles, frogs, and insects, our little hiking party tromped. We made our way to a plywood platform jutting out into the center of a small pond. On all sides, beavers have built up thin ridges of mud and sticks to contain the water. Eliot scooted down on his tummy and lay with his stick swishing in the water, the ripples catching and reflecting flashes of bright autumn sunlight. A lone dragonfly hovered near for a moment before dipping and rising again, off into the tall grass.