A surprising service

The scent of my mom’s home-made “vertabrod” was wafting into my room on a wave of warm air as I woke up from my afternoon nap. My bedroom was filled with sunlight shining in from the windows lining three walls of the spacious, upstairs dwelling my parents built for me. I was in highschool and getting ready to leave home to go sail the seas by the time the room was finished. Until then, my bedrooms had been little attic-like spaces under the eaves. I am actually pretty good with small spaces, making them into cozy little nests, but by the time I had reached the end of highschool, I had too much stuff for my tower/loft above the living room and I was so excited to be able to explode into my new room in the addition.

The floor is all wide, pine boards, and the walls are plastered and then painted a peachy-pink color that my mom and I mixed in “milk paint”. When I was home for Thanksgiving last month, I removed the screens and got through cleaning half my windows. I guess the nice thing about having the job only half done is that now I appreciate the clean ones more. I’ll probably get around to the other half of them next spring right before we put the screens back on.

As I lay there visualizing the warm Swedish tea rings that my mom would be pulling out of the oven soon, I heard my Uncle’s and Aunt’s voices at the door. It was the day before Christmas and they had walked through the woods to deliver our presents: a screech owl house for my mom and dad, and a pair of slightly bulged envelopes for my brother and I.

The topic of conversation was the recent memorial service for my great aunt, the late Peggy Jones (my mother’s namesake, though the first was her great Aunt Margaret, I think.) My uncle Curry had chosen the Presbyterian church because he didn’t see eye to eye with the minister at the Episcopalian church. The Presbyterian minister turned out to be quite the evangelical; He requested 15 minutes of the funeral service to speak and spent that whole time trying to convert them to the church. Apparently my mom and her cousin were laughing so hard they were crying, and crying so hard they were shaking their pew. And her cousin’s husband just wondered why they there were quite so moved at that part of the ceremony. My grandma said later on that it was the sort of thing that made you just want to get up and leave. Uncle Curry said to his daughter, “You’d be surprised how much your mom would have liked that service”, and Carol said, “Yes, you’re right, I would be surprised.”

It’s funny how there are things that I look forward to all year long, like our Swedish tea ring for Christmas breakfast, and fresh tomato pie in the summer, and grape jelly in the autumn, and I wonder, would Vertabrod ever taste quite as good if we had it one morning in August, or would tomato pie be quite as delicious if I made it once every couple of weeks?

Funny Features

Ben's been bugging me lately for a new post, and I promised to write one on the bus, on my way back up to Maine from the Vineyard. And I did. On my laptop. Which is in the car. In the parking garage. And I am upstairs in the windowless office on the third floor being not-quite-content to be here, without even a glimpse of the celestial dance between sun and clouds today.

The massage business is picking up somewhat and I am thankful for that. And I turned down the heat in here so it's no longer a sauna-type atmosphere. The thermostat has this funny feature where it will suddenly start whining shrilly, and the only way to make it stop is to turn the temperature up or down. Apparently, recently, the preferred direction had been towards sauna, and the counteracting movement had not yet been applied. But it's behaving today, and I am happily chillin' at 70 degrees.

Unlike last night when I had mistakenly worn my flannel pajamas (it being winter and all) to bed at Ben's house. He does not have the same funny feature on his thermostat, but he does like the temperature in his bedroom to replicate a sunny summer afternoon, complete with fan to blow the heat around. SO, NEEDless to say, last night I didn't have the NEED for any covers.*

I think I may finally have succeeded in using my time at home on the Vineyard to relax. I was a little under the weather, so my health necessitated taking naps and hanging out at home, and by the time I got back to Maine yesterday afternoon, I was in quite the spaced-out state. Bizarre. So very different from the way I left for Christmas: running around making and wrapping last minute gifts, packing and re-packing, making plans and running out the door. I have to say that I am a lover of the Christmas holiday, and somehow, even though Christmas morning at our house often starts off with someone being grumpy and me threatening to call the whole thing off, we usually manage to have a really nice day.

This year Christmas had an added bonus of babies. Not mine, but close enough to count. Two of my dearest friends have had babies in the last year, and while playing with them, the rest of the world seems to just fall away and I find myself splashing about in baby heaven.

mmmmmuffins....that melt in your mouth.

Sunday morning means it's time for muffins and I'm about to go make 'em. Melt-in-your-Mouth muffins are the variety that the Knight-Morris family likes to make.

This evening's specials, HICCUP.

On Saturday evening I served dinner to a father and daughter and I had somehow gotten the hiccups just before they were seated. I can usually get rid of them pretty quickly (the hiccups, that is), but I didn't have the time while running around the restaurant, so I stood at their table to recite the specials, and, hiccup, it was table 4 - right next to the kitchen and Harding (Chef/Owner), so I couldn't just give them my notes about the specials. I started off, and made it all the way down the list managing to hiccup in the middle of pretty much every dish. The father and daughter just looked amused. They even remembered some of the specials, despite the distracting, inappropriate punctuation that my spasmed diaphragm provided.

The other thing that had me giggling that weekend was the sermon at the Woodford Corners Congregational church for the Sunday morning service. The church was half empty that morning and Susannah and I suspected that it was because everyone was exhausted after putting on the church fair the day before and didn't want to get up for church. So the folks in church were the ones that maybe just attended the fair and then also the real go-getters who planned the fair, worked there all day, and gosh-darn it, they were going to be in church on Sunday to get their recognition. Well, it was a worthwhile morning to come to church, I think, if not just for the lovely job on the organ by my roommate Susannah's dad, then certainly for the comic value of the sermon. The church has two ministers and both were involved in delivering the sermon that morning. The first one got up in the pulpit and pulled out the "heavenly news". Apparently in this week's celestial newspaper there was a help-wanted advertisement for new members of the "God Team". It sounded like a pretty powerful position from the ad. You got to have dominion over all the plants and animals.... The minister pulled out his cell-phone and dialed the number: 1-800-god-team. God (the female minister in the back room) answered and they proceeded to have a long conversation about what it means to be a member of the god team and all the responsibilities that it involves.

We had just watched Keeping Mum a few nights before and as Susannah and I were riding our bikes to church that morning, she said to me, I keep hoping it will be Rowan Atkinson (who plays a minister in the movie...not for the first time - Remember Four Weddings and a Funeral?) delivering the sermon. He had taken it one step further in the movie to the point where he was actually delivering jokes as part of his sermon. The things that the church will do to keep people interested and amused...

Intellegence (Kloog, ger.)....a different kind.

1. Sprechen Sie deutsch?
2. Est ein underst campingplatz en der near?

Number 1 I said to Amie just before she went into her massage, and she replied, "No, but I love to sing in German. I can understand a lot of it, I just can't speak it." Number 2 is the one sentence I've committed to memory after listening to the Berlitz guide to German over and over again. And today, as I was finishing up the exercises (Ubungen) in my German lesson, I laughed at myself as I answered the question, "Sind Sie klug?" (are you intelligent?) because, not minutes before, I had been writing down the vocabulary (der Wortschatz) words from the lesson and had written klug = intellegence. Hmmmm. I know that intelligence doesn't necessarily have to do with one's spelling ability, but I have to wonder....

Last night at the Front Room I cut off the tip of my thumb, a very tiny tip mind you, but enough for it to take four hours to clot, and for me to panic just a bit about how it was going to affect my other profession -the one that I actually went to SCHOOL for. We had, just minutes before, been talking about how we liked this bread knife, how it glided through the fresh-baked foccacia bread; I had even called it SEXY! And then it became my enemy. On the bright side, it got me out of closing the restaurant and home to my freezing apartment where I lay in bed watching Al Jazeera cover the beginning of the war in Iraq (movie: The Control Room) and propped my left thumb up above my head while I pinched it against an ice pack. Around midnight the red stuff finally stopped flowing and I let my droopy eyes close and I slept. I was so tired I didn't even brush my teeth.

Now, brushing my teeth is not a practice that I skip often but it seems that desperate times call for desperate measures. I've been interested in the idea of practices lately. I've started a writing and meditation practice in the mornings and it's not nearly as ingrained as my practice of brushing teeth, but I hear it takes awhile to make a habit of something.

Other things I've made habits of or wanted to make habits of are: playing violin or piano, running, yoga, a morning cup of tea, eating a sit-down breakfast looking out over Casco Bay, emptying my capture tool, writing in my journal, keeping my room tidy, washing the dishes, locking my bicycle, watering the plants, practicing a foreign language.

Habits I've tried to break: drinking out of the milk or juice bottle, eating in front of the refrigerator, having a bowl of cereal before bed, leaving my clothes and bags and other belongings strewn about the house, letting the tea kettle boil itself dry, leaving all the kitchen cabinets open, having 5-7 different programs running on my computer at once....

I'd love to hear what those habits are that you've tried to make or break over the years....

chronic cupboards

"Lily, I think you have a chronic problem called leaving kitchen cupboard doors open...." That's not exactly how she said it, but you get the point. I replied, "I know, we don't have cabinets at my parents house, and everywhere I've lived since then, I've been know to have all of the cabinets open at once. You can't see everything inside when they're closed". And said Susannah, "that's the point." I begin to wonder if it annoys her to come home and have all the cupboard doors open...or if maybe it is just amusing. Something I'm known for....that I blame on my upbringing. Just like the way I seem to be very good at ruining nice old wooden tables by placing steaming mugs of tea directly on their shiny surfaces, leaving milky rings of white behind. Or even better was the time I placed a steaming hot pizza box on the coffee table of Ben's new roomate and left a nice white mark from the heat. Ben spent the rest of the first evening in his new apartment massaging mayonaise onto the stain to make it disappear. I have to say he did quite an admirable job. We didn't have fancy tables with old finicky finish when I was little. We had homemade, durable furniture that could take all sorts of loving without complaint. And that's the way I like it.

May favorite parts of today were watching Stella be amused by a bucket of tupperware lids, like someone had just given her the most ingenious game on earth. Then having her fall asleep in my arms, belly full of squash and apple sauce from east end apples. And then, the last favorite part was the fact that I had a full day of massages (which means 4 sessions) and I had fun, and my clients had great sessions, and one of them rebooked, and now I really do look forward to a hard day's work.

Tempeh Reubens

Nostalgia will apparently have people do crazy things they wouldn't otherwise consider doing. And specifically the kind of nostalgia that occurs when you hear a song that leaves you feeling a certain, intense way. I was listening to This American Life yesterday while we made tempeh reubens and a girl was talking about why she joined the navy and when you get right down to it, she said it was because of a commercial she saw on television for joining the navy instead of going to school. The people looked happy and in the commercial there was a song she knew and connected with. I was remembering the way I feel when I'm in the car listening to a song I love, that I have a connections with, and singing at the top of my lungs. It can be a pretty intense emotion. I said to Ben, "that feeling would probably have me sign up to sail on a ship for four months right now." He said, "it would probably have you do anything."

The tempeh reubens were amazing. Just the way I remember my first veggie reuben being. I think the guy's name was Dave; It was the middle of winter, and I had taken the bus to Saugerties, NY to volunteer on the sloop Clearwater for a week or so. All day Dave had been talking about his famous tempeh reuben as we worked outside in the bitter cold, taking the boat apart for the winter. That evening the apartment smelled amazing, of golden fried tempeh, melted swiss cheese, toasted rye bread. And they were really good, just like he said.

The restaurant where I work sells reubens and apparently they are quite good, maybe even the best around. Housemade corn beef and russian dressing, local dark rye bread and gooey swiss cheese melted over the whole mess. And it is a mess. I always smile when little old ladies order reubens because it seems it would go against their nature to really get down and dirty with their reuben...but some of them do. The restaurant across town sells reubens, only they call them rachels and I know that they are a little different for some reason, but I can't remember why. Ben says those ones are his favorite. Until yesterday.

Last year, I came across a recipe for Tempeh Reubens with Carmelized Onions in a cookbook I had just purchased called the Healthy Hedonist: More Than 200 Delectable Flexitarian Recipes for Relaxed Daily Feasts. By that time in my life I was beginning to know myself as a flexitarian ("primarily a vegetarian but may eat some animal products on occasion") and this looked like the cookbook for me. A healthy hedonist "anticipates a good meal, savors it, and feels energetic and nourished afterward" - woohoo! I gathered all the ingredients and made a reuben-centered feast for Ben and I that evening. Those famous greasy sandwiches were, again, absolutely delicious. Who needs corn beef anyway?

I'd recently picked up that cookbook again and after watching a co-worker at the restaurant revel in her real reuben sandwich, I was inspired to try the recipe again. This time it was even better. Last time the reubens had been to impress and please Ben. This time it was a joint venture. We went to the grocery store together and had fun choosing the right sauerkraut, and rye bread, and getting distracted by a new Putamayo CD, Gypsy Groove. We also cooked the meal together and we have really become the best "team-cuisine". As we smiled at each other acorss the table with sauerkraut juice running down our chins, Ben said to me, "This is the best reuben I've ever had", which I've come to understand means, "it's just perfect". And it was.

speaking of strewn light

In the living room the conversation is called, "catching up". What to do with life. It's a little distracting to my ears. The same way my room is distracting to my eyes - strewn with bags full of different parts of my life, and pieces of material from the project of making Stella a pillow. Pink with velvet. I have lots of different lights in my room - more than one for each area. The littlest light is on my old black singer sewing machine, my mom's before me and my grandma's before her. As a little girl, I sewed doll clothes, and doll quilts, then my first dress - won second or third prize at the agricultural fair that year. And then I sold sewed scrunchies, and pillows and bags and scarves. Scrunchies were fun with all different colored fabric. Made sure the elastic wasn't twisted, like emily was doing with the waist of her crinoline for halloween. To poof out her plaid 50's housewife dress.

On the window sill: The angel card I picked the last day of massage school is Indriel - the lightworker. I like color and I guess color is made of light. I like light too. The room I've lived in since july has the right kind of light. The all-day kind of light. My room faces South-East and the sun comes through my windows all day until the evening. Then it shines only into our little hallway at the top of the stairs where Susannah has set up the neighborhood viewing station, complete with binoculars, a blue chair and a white board to record neighborly activities. And it shines into the kitchen through the leaves of the big, late-turning maple on Morning St. The light bounces off the disco ball hanging in the window and leaves squares of yellow strewn about the ceiling.