Erstwhile Dear

It’s slow mud-gravel-snowmelt season, when the roads narrow between the stiff hedges of frozen snow and scattered mud potholes. We very nearly collide with our neighbors around the narrow bends. Once we safely pass each other, we hold up two fingers or a full hand, both a greeting and a salute to a successful driving maneuver.

In that perversely modern way where we plan for distant realities we can barely imagine, it’s also summer camp sign-up season (the extension of it, at least, of course official camp sign-up began crisply in January). So I’m thinking about how parents want new things for their children but they also want the things they had for them. So they want kite sailing sessions and wheel throwing class, but also long bored afternoons when you memorize the wood pattern of the steps out front the porch. We want manners and careful, fair language but also nintendo and pizza nights.

The sinister side of generational inheritance when we pass down our dusty animosities and jealousies. But the vibrant side is when you pull off potlucks and teach them to sing hymns and smoothly shuffle a card deck.

Some of the things I had that I can give my children are unstructured days outside, household jobs, allowance, sleep-in mornings when it doesn’t matter what time you wake up, mosquito bites, sleeping outside in the summer, church on Sunday mornings, lemonade from a frozen canister, squinting in the sun at 4th of July parades, and reading aloud together.

I can’t give them the same chance to tool around on a bicycle, going in circles, letting the handlebars drift to the side, turning the bike as you follow its lead. Our dirt road out front is too hilly and peppered in gravel for that. I can’t give them the constant access to a pool and a hot tub that I had. Instead we troop together to the town pool for an hour or two, and buy a popsicle on the way out, one child insisting she’d stay for another two hours, another begging, near tears, to leave immediately. They won’t be able to bike to their friends’ house whenever they want, the way I did. I hold these small things against myself, wishing they could have all of them. They are able to watch the garden, and stop by for cherry tomato snacks and berries that ripen overnight.

Some other things I want to tell you about this week…

I’m so thankful my friend Nikaela texted me about Rebecca May Johnson’s podcast Dinner Document. I love listening to Rebecca reading through what she calls “recipes and eating notes from the week.” It’s the English accent, it’s the ruminations on household kitchen cooking, its the frequent mention of chips, and the snacks she eats while she’s making dinner, it’s the frank way she braids observations of society with sharing food, it’s the way she mentions where she was sitting while she was eating. Listen on her substack site or any podcast site.

DesignMom posted some tremendously insightful thoughts about oversharing, over-commenting and over-caring in the fraught waters of families that share on social media.

I made this chicken and feta-yogurt dressed salad and found it to be delicious and simple. It even managed to make winter tomatoes taste good! I liked the way the feta just disappeared into yogurt dressing. (gifted article, you should not get a paywall.)

The kids and I watched this free PBS documentary My Garden of a Thousand Bees. I learned all sorts of things I hadn’t known, and I felt it was such a refreshing way to do a nature documentary.

This week I made a chili for dinner using ground venison from last year and for flavor, italian sausage. I used Melissa Clark’s recipe from her Dinner cookbook, Black Bean and Pork chili, and I didn’t have the fresh sage, but everything else was simple. The ground venison broke down into textured bites and the sausage stayed together in delicious lumps. There is something special about the way tomatoes from a can of diced tomatoes will hold their shape as soft red monopoly houses. We had it for dinner the first night with grated cheddar cheese, tortilla chips, and sour cream on the table. We also had leftovers of Ina’s sour cream cornbread, a slice of which you can place in the middle of your bowl and drape the chili around the edge, like a moat around a safe castle. The second night I had extra black beans which I kept separate, because of course some would rather have a pool of dark black beans instead of a bowl of complicated multi-textured chili. I didn’t know who would prefer which though, and I was curious to see that nearly half of us chose plain black beans over the chili. This worked out perfectly as we had enough for four bowls of chili and two bowls of black beans. Small economies like this are not the most important thing, but I end up keeping a tally of them in my brain anyway. (Wednesday Chef has the recipe written up.)

I can’t decide if the youngest is a greater eater because we never notice what she eats, or if in fact she is not a good eater and I just haven’t realized it because I never notice how much she actually eats. She doesn’t complain about the food and I don’t ask her if she likes it. Sometimes while she is telling us something–at dinner this is usually asking to “do the forms” by which she means “share your rose and thorns,”–I idly notice that there is still plenty of food on her plate. But then my attention immediately flits to something else and I move on. Somehow she became the 3yr old who asks if “they have salad?” at the airport, and for “the black sprinkles” of everything bagel seasoning on her avocado toast, and wants to know what I’m eating and if she can try it.

Earlier in the week I made a really rich but not particularly flavorful chicken stock and used it to make tomato soup. I asked the 11yr old to slice onions for me while making the soup. After that she could go back to her reading, but I said, “Any interest in opening the tomato cans for me?” And she said, “Yes I love opening cans.” Which was something I didn’t know.

I always make the same tomato soup, a very simple version from Martha Stewart originally I think, with sliced onions and garlic cooked down in butter for awhile, whole tomatoes added and cooked for a bit, and then about equal parts chicken stock added and the whole thing blended until the red color is lighter, more golden, from the onions. Unfortunately most of the children did not want the tomato soup (which I could swear on my life they loved this past fall), they wanted the chicken stock on its own, the supply of which had been greatly reduced, indivisibly.

We did end up going outside every morning after breakfast every day since I last wrote, and it has been remarkable. It has involved getting everyone out of bed earlier than we are accustomed to (around 7:30) and coming down for a briefer breakfast. There have been statements, made from pillows, such as “Not a walk today I hope?” and, “Well I don’t think I’ll come.” But after walking out the door, we’ve found new things to notice every morning. It’s been in the twenties and thick sheets of ice have formed on all flat surfaces, but once outside we quickly realize that it’s not as grey/cold/dark/ as it looked from the inside. All of us feel emboldened by this success so far.

Here are 23 very particular ideas of mine for this year. It is worth writing these down because, as Gretchen Rubin observes, studies show that we are far more likely to accomplish or be satisfied with our goals if we write them down.

Here we go…

1. Getting outside first thing in the morning with the kids. If there is a time of life we can do this, it is would be when homeschooling! Getting outside first thing has never been a priority for us, but admittedly it did happen more easily when we lived in a tiny apartment. This year, it’s a priority. Check out these these fun free downloadable trackers for hours spent outside together (I’m not going to use these, just do it on a lets-go day-by-day basis).

2. Drinking more mugs of chai tea in the winter months. I love a spicy chai tea, with its light shoosh of caffeine and warm simmered milk. There are so many chai options in the world, always room to enjoy another! Ones I’ve enjoyed in the past are dona, Bellocq, and Chai Wallahs of Maine.

3. Keep knitting with the kids. In December Lux and I started knitting next to each other on the couch, and then suddenly Joan and Alma were also interested in learning. It felt easy and fun (as opposed to two years ago when we tried and it just didn’t work). The most relieving part about it is that we had absolutely no ambitions for how good or bad it was going to look. I hope we can do some more of this during the inside months.

4. Get this book and learn more about Classical music.

5. Settle on cycle of ten dinner meals that we all love and get the kids integrated in helping me make them on a daily basis.

6. Settle on simple and clear lunch options and daily snack options so the kids can start making their own lunches and allowed snacks without asking me. This one is inspired by Jodi Mockabee’s book (which I did get for Christmas!).

7. Reengage with my sense of style. As part of my general re-emergence from early motherhood (which I feel ended March 2022 when Esme turned three) I feel that I’m sort of grasping at my personal style these days. I ruthlessly paired my closet down to tops that could get stretched and stained, and I haven’t had more than a few pieces of clothing that I actually love for a long time. I’m ready to spend some time (and ahh…money) figuring this out again. I may try a subscription service like Nuuly for a few months, just to experiment.

8. Learn to make homemade yogurt. At last we have a great reliable source of raw milk! This will be fun to try.

9. We had a better garden last year than we had the year before, and now I have even more ambitions for this year. I’ve dialed-in some vegetables that we love that grow well, and am ready to try for our biggest harvest yet.

10. Another gardening goal: plant a sage section. Sage grows easily around here and wouldn’t it be fun to have enough sage to lop a bundle of it off and make your own smudging sticks?

11. Work on my teeth. Sigh…I’ve been putting this one off for awhile. It’s going to be expensive and slow and probably painful at times; and it would be just so easy to ignore! But I have two fake teeth and bridges that are a little over twenty years old and need replacing. And one central tooth that died awhile ago and is steadily turning permanently yellow. I have gum recession, and I need braces to ever-so-slightly realign my upper jaw. It was really easy to delay when I was pregnant/breastfeeding but the time has come!

12. Thank Joe consistently for all the things he does for our family. Some of them are how he always has new songs for us to listen to, how he takes project ideas and turns them into actual things in the world, how he helps me clean the whole house on days when it just has to happen, and how he patiently helps the kids do things I hate like measure stuff and cut straight lines. I also want to make a point to say these things in front of the kids.

13. Work on my book! I’ve been going through all my private writing from the last ten years, and I am teasing it into a concrete piece. I have a goal of trying to send out small selections to writer friends for their perspective and critiques. I feel squeamish about committing to a timeline, but a goal of sending one email with attachments once a month seems doable, I think?

14. Use a sticker chart to encourage my writing just like Catherine Newman does.

15. Make some plans with Joe for a dream kitchen renovation. We have lots of ideas for improving our kitchen, but an actual plan feels a long way away (to say nothing of a mood board). Just want to start pulling together concrete ideas. I’m convinced there is no more important room in the house.

16. Visit my friend Ashleigh in Mississippi.

17. Make a mood board for a writer’s cabin in the back field (and I could imagine more than one out there, if any daughters eventually wanted one!).

18. Savor my babies. I have an oldest who loves to talk and celebrates the moments of conversation we have alone together. I have two middle kids who pop up to give thanks and hugs for things that they are excited about. And a youngest who loves to snuggle, giggle and read together. It’s a noise overload every day and the moments are often a blur, but such a stage of life!

19. I must quote at least two from this brilliant collection of goals by publiclibraryquilts: “We are loving our wholesome hobbies. We are planning lots of books we might never write & that’s just fine.”

20. Get away with Joe for two weekends. Could be a long way away like an island off the coast of South America, could be close like a hotel just around the corner.

21. Memorize more Bible verses as a family. Believe it or not, one of the children suggested this one to me!

22. Find 6-12 clean wines (ideally biodynamic) that don’t bother me with headaches or heavy hangovers. You can subscribe to services that will do this for you, but I know my local grocery has good affordable options, I just need to figure out which ones they are, and then only buy those ones.

23. Every month, try to make granola, Heidi’s cashews, and sprouted almonds. All delicious and nice to have around.

pretty fresh-start-feeling art by Rebekka Seale