Big families look really loony to me. I have caught myself thinking, “Holy cow, how does she DO it?” when I see a young mom surrounded by little kids on all sides, all of them bopping up and down and squawking and demanding attention. Sometimes I stop and discreetly do a head count of all the little heads that belong together, and I have a little revelation. Five, six, seven ….
… Oh. I had even more kids than that.
But it does look like a lot, from the outside. It is a lot. ANY amount of kids is a lot! One kid is a lot! But I had 10, after all. No wonder people were always staring at us. I get it now. Some of my kids have moved out, and none of them are really little, and while I’m not an empty nester yet, I’m out of the woods enough that I can see it from the other side. I see how we looked to other people when we were really in the thick of it: Beautiful, but undeniably loony.
Part of the reason for this is that, from the outside, a big family looks just like that: a big family. A unit. If you know a few big families only by sight, and not personally, you probably think of them as “the one with all the loud, redheaded kids” or “the one where they all look like farmers.” More than one person has told us we’re “that family with all the hair,” which I fully recognize is not the worst way we could be identified.
The point is, when there are a lot of kids in a family, it’s kind of a blur from the outside. Outsiders see that everyone in the family kind of resembles each other, and they’re sort of milling around the parents, and maybe you can recognize the oldest and the current baby, but in the middle — who knows? They’re just part of the bunch.
But believe me when I say that this is not how the parents see it, not unless something has gone very wrong in the family. Sometimes the wrong name comes out of my mouth when I’m calling a child, but this is just the general confusion of my brain, and it doesn’t mean I don’t know who they are. They are all unambiguously themselves and have been since day one.
I, like every decent mother of a large family that I know, take my children’s individuality extremely seriously, and they don’t seem like an undifferentiated mass to me, and they never have. They don’t even really look alike to me, except in little fleeting flashes here and there. I made them all individually, one at a time, and even when they were born very close together and raised under more or less the same circumstances, they have all always been so very different and distinct from each other. It has always been startling and bizarre to realize that, to people outside the family, we are just some kind of indeterminate welter of humanity, just a sort of Fisher borg.
The domestic church
We do have to treat our large family as a unit in some ways, buying large amounts of food and giant vehicles and sharing clothing and making plans based on the reality that parents cannot bilocate, and simply cannot accommodate every possible thing 10 individual children, no matter how cherished, would like to do. But in other ways, we tried (with varying success) to think of them as, and to convey to them that they are, distinct, and distinctly important; unique, and uniquely valuable.
Happy Friday! Are you ready for some PEPPERSSSSSS!!!!!!!
But first, just like old times, there’s a little dust-up going on in my combox, which began when one reader wanted to know how it is that I’m over here eating kale salads and lean protein crumbles, but yet feeding my kids buttered corn dog nuggets and hot salt slop noodle casserole pie. A few readers jumped to my defense, which I appreciate very much, but the real answer is simple: I don’t like my kids. Please address any further questions to my menu planning assistant, who can be contacted here.
I kid, I kid. I love yez all, more or less.
The real question of the day is, WHAT DO WE DO WITH ALL THIS RHUBARB?
Short version, I planted a rhubarb root in early spring, and it didn’t come up at all, but by the time I had given up hope, nobody in town was selling rhubarb anymore. Or so I thought! I stopped by the Cheshire Floral Farm, honestly mainly just to cheer myself up, because it’s so pretty up there. It’s a nursery built on top of a hill, and it’s the cleanest air I’ve ever breathed in my life. Even the birdsong has a special clarity, because the air is so clear. The man who owns it is 74 years old, and he has thousands and thousands of plants which he appears to know intimately, individually, and everything is thriving. He showed me the rows of pots with seedlings he has prepped for next spring. Next spring!
So I mentioned rhubarb, and he started hiking up to the top of the hill, and I panted up after him. There were half a dozen potted rhubarb plants about two feet high, and half a dozen smaller ones. He said, “This rhubarb has a history, you know.” It started as a plant in England that his grandfather grew, and they divided the root and brought it over, and he planted it here in New England, and off it went. I chose a smaller plant, and he knocked the seeds off and told me to dig a deep hole and fill it with manure. Then he kept walking up hill, so I followed, panting. We went through a gate, across a lawn, past a garden, and around a shed, and there, my friends, were three rhubarb plants, each as big as a Volkswagon Bug. He snapped off three stalks and presented them to me.
So now I have rhubarb! Rhubarb for now, and for tomorrow, and for all my days to come, if I don’t screw it up. Usually I just make strawberry rhubarb pie, because it’s expensive and I only get it once a year, and that’s my favorite treat. But now I have plenty! What else do you like to make? Pickled rhubarb? Rhubarb jam?
He also said you can chop up the poisonous leaves along with some tobacco leaves, boil them, and make an insecticide, which you use as a spray. I’ll probably leave that one alone, but I love knowing that there’s a use for the leaves besides murder.
Okay! So here’s what we ate this week. And I apologize in advance, but I added in a lot of medical complaining, because it was that kind of week.
SATURDAY Hot dogs
H.O.T. D.O.G.S., and I think fries
SUNDAY Cuban sandwiches, coleslaw, fruit salad
Sunday I took a big step forward with the patio, finally. I salvaged some pressure treated lumber from various old projects, and shoved them in around the perimeter, and staked them in place with lawn stakes. I rented a vibrating plate compactor and ran it over the soil. Then I roped the kids into trucking the gravel down to the backyard, spread that out, ran over it with a makeshift screed, and ran over it with the compactor several more times.
Then the dog ran over it several times, because of course he did. It’s fine. He’s helping compact everything. The gravel I ended up getting is not exactly what I wanted, but I did want to move forward, and I achieved that! So, hoot hoot. Next is sand, and then finally bricks.
A few hours in, I remembered “oh, supper,” and I had a boneless pork loin or something, so I threw it in the Instant Pot along with several giant glugs of apple cider vinegar, some water, a lot of cumin and garlic powder and some salt and pepper. I pressure cooked it on high for 22 minutes and it came out non-beautiful but very tender and quite tasty.
For the sandwiches, I had big pieces of sourdough bread, and I built them in this order: bread, mustard, Swiss cheese, pork, pickles, ham, more Swiss cheese, mustard. Mayo on the outside, fried in butter.
There is no particular reason this heavy, greasy, carby sandwich appears to be leering at you. You’re just imagining it.
I made a nice fruit salad with watermelon, mango, strawberries, and blueberries, and a quick coleslaw with cabbage and carrot with a dressing of mayo, cider vinegar, a little olive oil, and freshly ground pepper.
SEVERAL PEOPLE WERE RIGHT. I followed this recipe from The Mediterranean Dish, and made a triple recipe. It calls for two red bell peppers, but I had four red and two orange. I keep learning and then forgetting again that red and orange (and yellow) bell peppers are just green bell peppers at different stages of ripeness (and therefore sweetness). Red is the sweetest; orange is the medium stage. (Yellow, which I didn’t have, is the first “turning” stage.) But it’s all the same pepper.
Anyway, I oiled and roasted them peppers, which is something I enjoy.
So pretty.
These recipes always tell you to cover the roasted peppers with plastic wrap and let them steam themselves, to loosen up the skins; but I have found (by the scientific process of forgetting to do it) that this isn’t necessary. The skins come off just as easily if you just let them sit.
So I pulled off the skins, which I enjoy, and yanked out the core and scraped off most of the seeds. This is about half the pepper flesh.
And then you just whiz it up in a food processor along with toasted walnuts, olive oil, raw garlic, tomato paste, bread crumbs, of course pomegranate molasses, sugar, sumac, and salt. Now, this recipe also calls for Aleppo pepper, and says cayenne pepper is optional. I didn’t have either, and suddenly got an attack of the cheaps at the store, so I only bought cayenne.
Since I had so much dip, I divided it and added cayenne pepper (somewhat more than the recipe called for) to only one portion.
Friends, for something so earthy, it is heavenly. This is one of these profoundly nourishing, joyful foods. It just tastes like it’s feeding your whole being. It’s wonderfully tart but not in an aggressive way. The heat in the peppered one built gradually, and it tasted good with chicken, with vegetables, and with bread. And just by itself.
I made twelve little taboon breads. Last time I was a little unhappy with how they turned out, rather tough and chewy. Not sure if this is what caused it, but I realized that I forgot to put the pan in the oven to heat up before putting the dough on it to bake. This time I followed that step, and they turned out much more tender and fluffy. I love taboon.
It’s so easy, and you can start it less than two hours before you want to eat. Fast as a quick bread, but with the texture and heft of a yeast bread. So good. It doesn’t puff up and separate into a pocket like pita, so don’t expect that. It’s more bready, while still being a flatbread, so you could use it for wraps, or for scooping or sopping purposes.
I just made very simple roast chicken breast sprinkled with a lemon pepper seasoning mix and cut up, and spinach, black olives, and cherry tomatoes.
Damien and I ate the muhammara steadily for lunch and snacks for the rest of the week. It was wonderful with those flattened pretzel chip things, and also really nice with baby carrots, and with cucumbers. I am completely sold on muhammara.
Still happy to hear about more pomegranate molasses recipes, but if this is all I ever use it for in the future, diyenu!
TUESDAY Tacos
Tuesday I made a bunch of taco meat, put it in the slow cooker, and then I was like, screw it, I’m going to the ER. Here’s the most exciting part:
Yes, that is my blood pressure. No, I did not eat tacos when I eventually got home, even though they had ruled out heart attack, as well as cancer and pulmonary embolism. But I do not recommend this blood pressure, at all.
WEDNESDAY Shawarma
Wednesday I wanted to get back to normal as much as possible, but I had lots of help! Clara made the shawarama marinade, Corrie made the yogurt sauce and Benny cut up the cucumbers and gathered and chopped the mint, and I had bought readymade pita and hummus, so it was just a matter of finishing everything up.
And very good it is, shawarma.
At this point, I had learned that there was, in fact, nothing wrong with my heart, and all my lab work so far came back showing that I’m actually extremely healthy, except for when my terrible doctor takes me off my medication and makes my blood pressure go nutsy; so yeah, I had a big blob of yogurt sauce. Ugh, I guess I’m self conscious about my food pictures now. Boo.
THURSDAY Aldi pizza
Thursday I drove up to the pulmonologist in Lebanon and they did all the breathing tests. I stopped to check on my parents’ grave (they are still dead, whew), and the lilac tree and rose bushes I planted made it through the winter, so that was nice! I said a decade and went on my way. Damien bought and served Aldi pizza, and Moe came by and helped with the driving.
FRIDAY Spinach chickpea stew
Friday morning I found out that my lungs are very healthy, capable, and working fine! Which is great, except . . . you know, I still can’t breathe, and my chest still hurts, and my lungs still make a sound like bacon frying at night. Like, other people can hear it, so I can’t be making it up. I don’t know! I don’t know. I’m getting an echocardiogram at the end of July, and I’m going to look into chronic anemia and sleep apnea, because I don’t know what else it might be. It’s not the smoke from the wildfires, because this has been going on since November. Albuterol doesn’t help at all. Maybe I’m just making bacon in my lungs. If anyone could, I would.
ANYWAY, today we are having this lovely lemon chickpea spinach stew
Anyway, rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb. Allegedly that’s what crowds of extras on movie sets are supposed to say, in order to convincingly sound like they are having a conversation in the background. Someone smarter than me can write an essay about turning food into the logos. Imma go lie down.
You can make separate pieces, like pita bread, or you can make one giant slab of taboon. This makes enough to easily stretch over a 15x21" sheet pan.
Ingredients
6cupsbread flour
4packetsyeast
3cupswater
2Tbsp salt
1/3cupolive oil
Instructions
Mix the flour, salt, and yeast in the bowl of a standing mixer.
While it is running, add the olive oil. Then gradually add the water until the dough is soft and sticky. You may not need all of it. Let it run for a while to see if the dough will pull together before you need all the water. Knead or run with the dough hook for another few minutes.
Put the dough in a greased bowl, grease the top, and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm spot for at least an hour until it has doubled in size.
Preheat the oven to 400. Put a greased pan or a baking stone in the oven to heat up.
If you are making separate pieces, divide it now and cover with a damp cloth. If you're making one big taboon, just handle it a bit, then put it back in the bowl and cover it with a damp cloth. Let rest ten minutes.
Using a little flour, roll out the dough into the shape or shapes you want. Poke it all over with your fingertips to give it the characterstic dimpled appearance.
Bake for 10-12 minutes until it's just slightly browned.
Mix marinade ingredients together, then add chicken. Put in ziplock bag and let marinate several hours or overnight.
Preheat the oven to 425.
Grease a shallow pan. Take the chicken out of the marinade and spread it in a single layer on the pan, and top with the onions (sliced or quartered). Cook for 45 minutes or more.
Chop up the chicken a bit, if you like, and finish cooking it so it crisps up a bit more.
Serve chicken and onions with pita bread triangles, cucumbers, tomatoes, assorted olives, feta cheese, fresh parsley, pomegranates or grapes, fried eggplant, and yogurt sauce.
Here I am, waiting to go in for a pulmonary function test to find out what is wrong with me, IF ANYTHING. I have spent the last several weeks, including seven hours in the emergency room, getting lots and lots of tests — EKGs, x-rays, a CAT scan, and countless blood tests of various kinds — and they have ruled out a major problem with my heart, which is great. I would hate for there to be something wrong with my heart.
I would hate it so much that now I think it’s possible I scared myself into having chest pains and breathing problems, symptoms which led me to believe there’s something wrong with my heart, and/or lungs. Maybe! Or probably not. No, I definitely am having trouble breathing, especially at night. Or some nights. And chest pains, and palpitations. Even the doctor noticed it. Maybe?
Last time I talked to my therapist, I said that I’m always afraid people are going to think I’m just making things up, or exaggerating them to be dramatic, or to get attention. And I’m always afraid that they’re right, that I’m actually doing that. I’ve always been afraid I’m like this.
She asked who told me I’m like this, my parents?
Well, yes.
She asked if, in fact, I did used to make things up to get attention.
Well, no. I was definitely a dramatic, emotional kid, and I cried all the time, and I had weird problems that I couldn’t explain well, but I can’t think of a single time I was actually making anything up. If anything, I kept things to myself, and just silently cried because I didn’t know what to say.
Since that conversation, every time I get the nagging anxiety that I’m just being a drama queen, and I’m wasting everyone’s time, and they could be spending their precious energy and resources saving people who really are sick, I ask myself, “Do I make things up?”
Well, yes.
That’s what I do for a living. I make things up to be dramatic. I exaggerate on purpose, to get attention. That’s what writing is. Yes, even non-fiction essays, which is mostly what I write.
I don’t tell lies. I don’t say anything I think is untrue. But when someone asks that dreaded question about what my creative process looks like, I have to admit that it looks like making things up to be dramatic. It looks like looking around for anything that might be a tiny little ember, and cupping it carefully in my hands and deliberately blowing on it until it’s hot, and then showing everyone how hot it is. Or squinting at every smooth rock I find to see if any of them are the least bit egg-shaped, and then brooding on them as devotedly as I can, hoping something might hatch out. Or searching around in the dead dust until I find a speck that looks like it might be organic, and warming it and watering it, and breathing on it, just in case it’s a seed that’s ready to grow; and if it does grow, you are going to hear about it! If no one ever told you the facts of life, this is how 800 words get born.
But it’s one thing to find and coax into life an idea that you know is already real and true and big and important, something you will have the luxury of returning to again and again over the course of your life. You can write about motherhood or work or education or food, and be perfectly aware that you’re writing what seems truly true at the time, but you’re probably going to shift and change your understanding of it as your life shifts and changes. Only weirdos hold it against you if you change your mind; most people understand it’s normal to grow through different points of view.
The interviewer asked, “[D]does writing and performing stories about your life help you to make sense of them?” and Gadsby said:
“Oh, absolutely … but, you know, there’s a danger to it as well because as you tell it and share it, that works as kind of a seal to how you remember something that happened. So that’s why I’m incredibly careful about what I put on stage and how I talk about things, because it will eventually become the way you think and feel about things. And you can play with fire a little bit there.”
This is horribly true.
The other day my daughter told me she calms herself down when she’s upset by going into the woods and talking to herself. I told her this was good and healthy; that there is great power in naming things, and putting what you’re feeling into words, because then they are more yours in some way; they are contained, at least for a time.
But any power, even the power of describing your own life, can be misused. We’ve all seen people taking a popular narrative, complete with its own set of powerful, trendy words, and retrofitting their own past into it and applying emotional pressure to their memories until they fit into this story, whether that’s what really happened or not. People persuade themselves that some lost partner was a blameless, precious, irreplaceable angel; or they persuade themselves that their estranged parents were thoroughly toxic and malevolent monsters. When in fact the truth was (as truth is) perhaps more complex, less of a tidy narrative.
Memory is strange. It’s more malleable than it feels like it ought to be; and at the same time, words do set a seal on it, especially once you share those words with other people. We speak carelessly about the power of words, but maybe not enough about the great power of words to call into life things that simply aren’t true. It’s as if human words, in their fallenness, carry a dormant virus in them, and sometimes, carried on human breath, they enter into our minds and bind and reproduce with our living pasts and begin forming . . . I don’t know, zombie pasts. Things that resemble our lives, but are lumbering along animated by something other than order and truth. I know this can happen. I have seen it happen.
Fear of misrepresenting and retroactively malforming my own life even to myself has made it hard to pray, sometimes. I get into a state where I feel that I can’t trust anything I think, and I can’t bring myself to put anything into words. I also know this isn’t really a desire for truth or objectivity so much as a trap of anxiety, though. What to do?
The other day I was in my garden and felt so glad, so simply and plainly happy to be in the sun, smelling the sweet weeds, hearing the wrens and robins, and tending my little cucumber and squash seedlings, and I wanted to pray and praise God, but I couldn’t find the words. I felt myself headed into a snarl. What do I say? How do I make this right? How do I do it so it’s about the thing and not about me being clever enough to express the thing cleverly?
And I says to myself, I says, En archeen hologos. I remembered a sentimental little story I heard once of a kid stuck in a tree during a storm, and he’s so scared, he can’t remember his prayers. All he can remember is the alphabet song, so he sings that, and he figures God will take the letters and make them into something good. So that’s what I did.
(That’s what I do for a living.)
I will not be telling my doctor that I sometimes go out into the garden and sing the alphabet song. I hate to think what that might be recorded as a symptom of. But I’m telling you, in case you get into little binds like me: Keep it simple. Jesus is the word. His breath is pure. Give him the nod, and he sorts everything out, and he keeps the zombies away, and makes the cucumbers to grow, and the robins to sing. Next time, won’t you sing with me?
Sarah Breisch doesn’t really draw what she wants. Not yet. Breisch, 40, is the mother of eight children, ranging in ages from 17 to 4, and she only recently started showing and selling her work. It’s been a long time getting to this point.
Her artwork — primarily watercolors and lively linocuts of birds and other animals — is vigorous and arresting and sometimes comical. A frazzled mother bird approaches a tangled feathery nest stuffed full of fat, ravenous chicks, in a posture that somehow conveys both love and exasperation. A fox slinks under the moon, casting a knowing, uneasy eye directly at the viewer. A thrush grips a branch between its thorns and sings his tiny heart out into the darkness. They are just animals, but they all seem like someone particular, familiar and very alive.
But Breisch would like to do more. A demanding critic of her own work, she considers her pieces to be mainly decorative, and calls them illustrations without stories. She would like to make art that tells stories, because she has a lot to say.
Breisch had very little in the way of formal art training. Homeschooled from fourth grade through high school, she was free to pursue her own interest in art and artists, and taught herself through museum trips, by leafing through numerous art books inherited from her grandmother, and by using the miscellaneous art supplies she found in her house.
“At that time, art was intensely personal,” Breisch said.
So personal, in fact, that she could hardly stand to show what she had made to other people. And so, although her father, a skilled carpenter with an artistic bent of his own, encouraged her to go to art school when she finished high school, she chose instead to pursue other academic interests and entered the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in New Hampshire.
Inspiration in the Church
It was in the college’s chapel that she first encountered the beauty of the Catholic Church: the beauty of its theology and also of its physical art.
“In the churches I grew up in, art had no place, beauty had little place. Sentimentality and kitsch, what [founder and then-president] Dr. [Peter] Sampo called ‘the banality of received ideas,’ had a huge place. I never set foot in a Catholic church until I went to college, and the moment I did, I was overcome with a sense that this was what I was looking for. And it specifically had to do with the architecture and the art,” she said.
She recalls that the chapel was “not even anything fabulous,” but what there was looked like it had meaning and belonged.
“I came home exploding with joy and inspiration,” she said.
Talents that glorify God
Breisch, whose mother is ethnically Jewish, said, “I knew more than your average kid did about tabernacles and the Holy of Holies and those sorts of things. So when I saw the baldacchino [the ornate bronze canopy-like structure built over the altar at St. Peter’s Basilica], I thought, ‘I know what that is.’”
She thought her father might be open to hearing what she had discovered. But he was not able to.
“He suffered from that sort of mental divide of Protestants [in that] he was artistic and creative, but also an iconoclast, and somehow it felt wrong of him to marry the two,” she said.
As for herself, Breisch had never felt that her faith and her artistic drive were at odds.
“I thought, ‘I glorify my creator through my God-given ability by trying to imitate what I see in nature, because I think it’s wonderful.’ Because it was so private, it was almost like a private meditation,” she said.
Finding time to make art
It was obvious to her that art and faith belonged together — less obvious that what resulted was something that should be shared with other people, even after she decided to join the Catholic Church.
And soon enough, the decision about how to approach her art was taken out of her hands. Shortly after college, Breisch went through RCIA, married and began having children. Over the course of the next several years, she was simply too busy to draw, and too overwhelmed, and didn’t have the money to spend on art supplies. She would make flashcards for her children, or make materials for curriculum when she worked as a teacher, but it was always something utilitarian….Read the rest of this article, the second in a monthly series for OSV featuring Catholic artists.
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If you have a suggestion for a Catholic visual artist (including yourself!) you think should be featured, please drop me a line at simchafisher at gmail dot com with “Catholic artist feature” in the subject line. I am interested in all styles of art.
The other day, I performed the solemn rite of white women in their late 40’s: I shared a photo of my lunch salad on social media.
The ritual goes like this: I post a photo of my lunch, and I complain about trying to lose weight, and then I humblebrag about my plate full of nutrient-dense leafy greens and lean proteins, and I say that between this and yoga, I’m going to live forever. Then my friends commiserate about how, if I keep it up, I’m not going to live forever; it’ll just feel that way. Then we all anoint ourselves in the digital stream three times, sprinkle ourselves with irony, and we are cleansed.
This ritual has worked for me for many years. I’ve always looked at health fanatics with something of a jaundiced eye, thinking, “If that’s what it takes to extend my life, I’d rather cut it short, thanks.”
Jokes like this were very much a part of my family culture, growing up. My father, in particular, believed that life was worth living as long as you were enjoying yourself, and if you weren’t, well, maybe your time was up. Or at least, part of him believed that. He especially liked to eat whatever he wanted, as much as he wanted, and he really relished heavy foods, sugary, fatty foods, noodles and greasy briskets and things filled with cream. (And so do I.) He wasn’t exactly a hedonist. He believed in constant conversion of heart and the resurrection of the body and things like that; he really did. But in practice, noodles and brisket often got the upper hand.
I want to tread carefully, because it’s easy to get carried away when you’re telling the life of someone who is dead. I don’t want to speak for him just because he can’t speak for himself anymore. So I will just tell you what I observed, as I remember it, and maybe the conclusions I drew were wrong. Nevertheless, this is what I saw:
My father’s health was poor for many, many years, partly because of his personal habits, and partly because of terrible genetics. I remember him going in for serious medical procedures throughout my childhood, starting at about the age I am now. He had a hard time staying motivated to take care of himself, although he did keep trying, for his family’s sake.
But eventually, he really lost enthusiasm. He had the choice to correct a problem with heart bypass surgery, and he didn’t want to do it. It just didn’t seem worth it to him. His family felt differently, and we urged him to consider it. We contacted a friend of his, who had had the same surgery done, and was very glad that it bought him some extra years of life; and that finally did it. My father agreed, and he got it done.
And he got better. He recovered well, even in his old age, and he started doing so well. He had a lot of health problems, still, but he accepted this; and my overall memories of him from this time are of him smiling. Smiling at my kids, smiling up at the sky, smiling at the brilliant clouds, at birds singing, at snow melting, at records playing. This was something new for him, or something he hadn’t felt in decades. He seemed to be enjoying himself in a way that I had never seen him do, ever.
But how strange it was, to see him looking small. I had to keep correcting the image I had of him in my head. I still thought of him as a powerful, deep-bellied, overbearing, heavily bearded man, taking up as much space as he wanted. Never bothering to whisper in quiet places, never bothering to follow signs that said “no admittance.” I still thought of him as doing what he wanted. And he wasn’t like that, anymore. His clothes hung loosely; the top of his head showed through his brittle hair. His voice was muffled, as if wrapped in cotton. He was so physically diminished, and he shuffled, and tipped over sometimes. But he smiled so much.
It was also during this time that some personal reconciliations happened, or started to happen. He knew he was at the end of his life. But that was the key: He knew it, and he was getting ready, rather than dolefully sliding along. He said that the Lord was taking more and more things away from him, and he was glad, because it was getting him ready for death. He smiled when he said this, too. He was grateful it was happening—the getting ready, not the dying.
So, then he died. It happened quite suddenly, and I’m not sure if it was COVID or not. He went to watch TV in his reclining chair, and when my brother went to check on him, he was on the floor. It was very hard when he died, and I won’t pretend he made his peace with every last person, or that he had righted every wrong, before he went. There were a lot of wrongs. But those last few years were undeniably, irreplaceably fruitful. For him, and for many of the rest of us. Fruitful enough that they are not yet over, even though he is dead.
If you are halfway imagining that people live the real bulk of their lives when they’re hale and hearty and doing as they please, and that they slowly dwindle into a less and less meaningful existence as the standard earthly pleasures drop away, well, possibly that’s true for some people. There are many ways for the course of a life to run, and not all of them are within our power. The end of my mother’s life looked very different from my father’s. But even that was not what you might think. Strangely enough, caring for her in her profoundly vulnerable and inert state was a huge part of what transformed my father’s final years, which makes me almost quake with fear when I think of my mysterious mother and her strange, quiet power to change people, for good and for ill. A power that continues to burn and insist, like the light from a star that is already dead.
As I said, I am reluctant to tell you what someone else’s life means. So I’m not going to tell you that the last two years of my father’s life were his most significant. I’m just telling you that there was a time when he thought he could have done without them, and he was wrong.
Take care of yourself. Take care of your poor, dumb, needy body. Your body’s time will run out eventually, because it isn’t meant to last forever; but it isn’t meant only for pleasures and satisfaction, either. Most people are joking when they say life isn’t really worth living if you’re just eating salad, but most people also halfway believe it. Don’t you believe it. Your time on earth is your time on earth. If you’re still here, it’s for a reason.
Once again I come to throw my feet at your mercy, and apologize for not having written anything (or, I did, but nothing that showed up directly here). The good news is, we finally got Damien’s car back from the shop, yay! The bad news is, it cost, like, all of our money. (Yhes, this is separate from the other unexpected car repair we had last week. That was my car, and Damien’s car repair was . . . sweatily doing math . . . five times more expensive.)
But more distractingly, I spent the whole week kind of in limbo, agonizing over some medical nonsense which is … not really cleared up, but probably not as bad as I thought? If only there were some way for doctors to communicate information to patients! Say, via phone, or email, or text, or mail, or on that stupid portal they’re always urging us to use. Sadly, this is not possible. Their hands are tied. So this week just plain sucked. I don’t know if you realize this about me, but I don’t like being frightened and in pain and not knowing what is going on. I’m different from other people! Not to mention the whole thing was set to a soundtrack of the world’s worst hold music. But, nobody dropped dead at any point; not at all; so *at least three cheers.*
HERE’S WHAT WE FREAKING ATE.
SATURDAY Brats, fries
We used to have brats all the time when we had a fresh diabetes diagnosis and we discovered brats are low carb, but we eventually ate too many brats and didn’t want any more brats (some of us). But now, enough time has passed and the brats are roaring back!
Let’s just sit back for a moment and enjoy that mental image, and maybe also the mental audio.
I forgot how delicious beer brats are. Nothing like coming into a house extremely hungry and hitting a humid aroma cloud of hot beer, onions, and meat.
Damien makes brats by boiling them for about twenty minutes in cheap beer with lots of sliced onions, plus chili powder, garlic powder, red pepper flakes, and salt, and then grilling them. The brats are great, but I truly cannot get enough of those beer-boiled onions. Heavenly. I went back for thirds on onions. Six-year-old me would have been aghast.
SUNDAY Chicken caprese burgers, broccoli
Just frozen chicken burgers with sliced tomatoes, fresh basil, and sliced cheese, with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper.
I was doing a million yard work and gardening on Sunday while Damien worked most of the week on draining, repairing, and re-filling the pool after the freak dog accident last week, very exciting. He had the brilliant idea to fill it with creek water, reversing the sump pump to draw it up. We’re not in a drought or anything, and the water is quite clean (it’s an extremely rocky creek, which is a good natural filter, and the kids already play in it all the time and nobody gets exotic rashes or anything), and he is filtering and chemically treating the heck out of it, so I don’t know why we didn’t think of this sooner. (The alternative is filling it with the hose from our well, which would take all week and/or burn out our well pump, or buying water, which is SPENSIVE and would also take weeks.) Yay pool! We’ll be swimming soon, and that will be lovely.
I don’t seem to have a photo of my chicken sandwich, so please squeeze your own mind grapes and supply a nice one here.
Oh, that looks delicious. You even remembered to take the sticker off the tomato before slicing it! Nicely done.
We had some kind of red Twinkies for dessert, for Pentecost. We. Are. Trying.
MONDAY Burgers, potato salad, chips, watermelon, Oreo ice cream pie
Monday was Memorial Day. Our town didn’t have a parade this year, for some reason, and the next town did, but I slept too late to get to it, thereby ruining any chance of feeling self-righteous about the lazy people in my own town. The kids did have a little memorial service for Kyat, which parents were not invited to, which is okay because we didn’t want to get off the couch.
I did make dessert, though. Benny had seen an Oreo ice cream cake in the store that looked pretty inviting, but the dang thing was $12.99, and the box was big but the cake itself was about the size of a donut. SO I SAYS TO MYSELF, I SAYS, we can do better than that!
So we found a deep, round plastic dish. I made graham cracker crumbs in the food processor and mixed in some melted butter, pressed this mixture into the dish, and then microwaved it for several minutes until it was sorta solidified. (This would have been better in the oven, but I realized that too late, and had already chosen a plastic dish. It also would have been better with a bit of sugar, but I forgot.)
Then Benny mashed a bunch of ice cream with a potato masher until it was soft, and we spread this on top of the crust. She jammed a bunch of Oreos and Oreo ice cream cookies into it, piped some Kool Whip ornamentations on top of that,
and drizzled the whole thing with chocolate syrup, and put it in the freezer for several hours. Boom, giant ice cream cake/pie.
Ice cream pies are a GREAT way to use up little bits of leftover ice cream, nuts, candy, syrup, sprinkles, cake decorations, or whatever sweet stuff you have in the house that isn’t enough for a full dessert in itself, and it’s a fun project for kids that they truly cannot screw up. Just remember to do it in advance so it has time to re-freeze.
To my delight, both Dora and Moe came over, so I had all my little flock under one roof.
We had yummy burgers which Damien grilled, chips, watermelon, and potato salad (just a standard recipe with potatoes, celery, hard boiled eggs, and a dressing of mayo, olive oil, apple cider vinegar, salt, and pepper), and big wedges of ice cream pie for dessert.
Just a nice ol’ summer meal.
Here I might mention that more than one family member is struggling right now, so if you could spare a prayer for my dear ones, I would appreciate it.
TUESDAY Pizza
Tuesday I was supposed to drive out to the seacoast to do an interview, but ten minutes down the road, my check engine light came on. Normally I’d be all “dooby doo, nobody cares about a check engine light, YOLO”and so on, but the Fates have been showing me certain things lately, and I says to myself, I says, I am not going to drive out to the seacoast with the check engine light on. Not today.
And that was the right thing to do, even though after I cancelled, I plugged the car in to one of those computer things and it turned out to be just an oxygen sensor. And I didn’t even feel guilty, thinking, “oh, I made the wrong choice, I overreacted, this turned out to be nothing after all,” because SOMETIMES, my friends, you don’t have to do everything the hardest and most stressful way possible, even if the hard and stressful things won’t actually kill you. There aren’t any prizes for being brutal to yourself all the time, I promise. You’ll just wear your teeth down and give yourself ulcers. Be nicer to yourself than you would be to some random raccoon you meet in a parking lot, and see how that goes.
Anyway, on Tuesday this random raccoon made some pizzas for supper: One cheese, one pepperoni, and one really cute one with prosciutto and arugula. You make a little salad with the arugula, some olive oil, and fresh lemon juice, and salt and pepper. It’s also supposed to have thinly-sliced red onion, but I forgot.
Then you cook a regular pizza, but first throw lots of fresh garlic slices and chopped-up rosemary on it, and some olive oil and maybe salt and pepper. Then, when it comes out of the oven, top it with torn-up prosciutto, spread the arugula salad on top, and grate a little parmesan over the whole thing.
Then the raccoon can have a treat.
It’s pizza that makes you feel special because [wipes away single crystalline tear] you are special. You are one special random raccoon.
WEDNESDAY Jujeh kabab, cherry walnut salad, taboon bread, and rice
So, we’ve had a few good Middle Eastern meals from Saveur, and I got a hankering for something along those lines, so I poked around to see what else I could find. I got two recipes from them: Jujeh kabab, spicy chicken and tomato skewers; and a cherry herb salad that works as a kind of relish or side salad.
Spoiler, they were both denicious, as one of my kids used to say. Denicious! I will say that the spicy kebab marinade for the meat was way more exciting than the actual finished product, and although it was very good, I was a tiny bit disappointed, because the ingredients were so thrilling: orange zest, fresh lime juice, saffron, plus coriander and cumin, garlic and onion, and a few other things.
This is all in a yogurt marinade. Next time, for real, I’m going to make a double recipe and save half the marinade just to dip bread in, because it was so dazzlingly rich and piquant.
So I marinated chicken thighs for several hours, and then threaded them on skewers, and also skewered a bunch of cored Roma tomatoes, and Damien grilled them all over the coals.
I think I will make this recipe again, but maybe skip the saffron, which is expensive, and tragically you couldn’t really taste it. It was good, don’t get me wrong! I guess maybe I just expected it to be explosively good, and it was not that. I also probably should not have combined a tomato dish with a cherry dish. But I made a point of tasting the chicken by itself first, so I could see how it was on its own, and it was still a tiny bit meh.
The cherry salad, on the other hand, was tremendous. Just a few ingredients, and I really didn’t see how it could miss. Cherries, roasted Fresno chiles (it actually called for Holland chiles, which I could not find), lots of cilantro, toasted walnuts, olive oil, fresh lemon juice, and POMEGRANATE MOLASSES.
Yeah, it was good. And I’m very excited to have something non-pie to do with cherries, which are just about in season. I can see this salad jazzing up lots of different meals, especially if they’re a little on the bland or earthy side. Or if you had a vegetarian meal, this is quite hearty, with the nuts.
I was a little worried about there not being enough food (which is what it will say on my gravestone), so I made a pot of rice and chopped up some fresh wild mint. I also made 12 little taboon breads.
This is the first time I’ve done this recipe with separate little breads, rather than one giant slab of bread.
Turned out fine, except I overbaked them by a few minutes and they were a little tough. Still nice to have hot, fresh bread with a very savory meal like this.
Not gonna lie, I was proud of myself for this whole meal. It was beautiful and exciting. I served the skewers with lime wedges and a little sumac for sprinkling.
And I need to find more recipes that call for pomegranate molasses, which is AMAZING INCREDIBLE STUFF. It tastes exactly like I imagine Lucy Pevensie’s healing cordial. Restorative, and juicy.
THURSDAY Carnitas
The carnitas also turned out a little bit meh, probably because I seasoned the meat with salt, pepper, and oregano, browned it, and then made the highly dubious choice of cooking it in Cherry Coke Zero. I did throw in some oranges and cinnamon sticks and a jalapeño that was floating around the fridge, but it just tasted kind of weird, oh well, and then I just left it stewing in the Instant Pot on warm and the liquid didn’t have a chance to cook off, so it was tender, but more stew-like. Oh well. Here’s the recipe, and if you actually follow it, it’s tasty.
I was pretty burnt out by Thursday and just squonched up the meat and threw it under the broiler to crisp up.
and served it on tortillas with sour cream, shredded cheese, and jarred salsa.
No frills, oh well. Damien had volunteered as a chaperone for Corrie’s second grade field trip to Squam Lake, which is two hours away, and I feel like he deserved more than meh carnitas after a long, screamy day like that, but sometimes life be that way.
FRIDAY Quesadillas
Look at us, we made it to Friday. At some point during the week, two dump trucks arrived, because I told them to (?), and dumped sand and gravel, respectively, so now are two big heaps sitting in the driveway waiting for me to do something about them. And I will! I always do something about heaps, eventually. You know me.
Tell me about Turkish food. Tell me about pomegranate molasses.
Very easy recipe transforms pork into something heavenly. Carnitas are basically pulled pork tacos with the meat crisped up. Serve with whatever you like.
Ingredients
pork butt/shoulder, cut into chunks
salt and pepper
oregano
oranges, quartered
cinnamon sticks
bay leaves
1canCoke or Mexican Coke
1cup or lessvegetable oil
Instructions
Sprinkle the chunks of pork with salt, pepper, and oregano.
Put them in a heavy pot with the oil and Coke, oranges, cinnamon sticks, and bay leaves. Bring to a simmer.
Simmer, uncovered, for at least two hours. The oranges will start to get mushy and the liquid will begin to thicken.
When the meat is tender, remove the oranges, bay leaves, and cinnamon sticks. Turn the heat up and continue cooking, stirring often, until the meat has a dark crust. Be careful not to let it burn.
Remove the meat and drain off any remaining liquid. Shred the meat. It it's not as crisp as you like, you can brown it under the oven broiler, or return it to the pot without the liquid and fry it up a bit.
You can make separate pieces, like pita bread, or you can make one giant slab of taboon. This makes enough to easily stretch over a 15x21" sheet pan.
Ingredients
6cupsbread flour
4packetsyeast
3cupswater
2Tbsp salt
1/3cupolive oil
Instructions
Mix the flour, salt, and yeast in the bowl of a standing mixer.
While it is running, add the olive oil. Then gradually add the water until the dough is soft and sticky. You may not need all of it. Let it run for a while to see if the dough will pull together before you need all the water. Knead or run with the dough hook for another few minutes.
Put the dough in a greased bowl, grease the top, and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm spot for at least an hour until it has doubled in size.
Preheat the oven to 400. Put a greased pan or a baking stone in the oven to heat up.
If you are making separate pieces, divide it now and cover with a damp cloth. If you're making one big taboon, just handle it a bit, then put it back in the bowl and cover it with a damp cloth. Let rest ten minutes.
Using a little flour, roll out the dough into the shape or shapes you want. Poke it all over with your fingertips to give it the characterstic dimpled appearance.
Bake for 10-12 minutes until it's just slightly browned.
Hey, sorry about the radio silence. It’s been a rather purgatorial week. Both cars broke down unexpectedly and RATHER EXTHPENTHIVELY, the washing machine and pool repairs are ongoing, plus there’s some kind of mystery medical baloney shit going on, and this morning the cat died. We don’t exactly know what happened — likely he tangled with a bigger animal. Poor guy. He was terrible but beloved, and did not die alone. Here he is on Monday, doing what he loved best:
Rest in peace, Kyat. And may we all merit a day that is all chicken and scritches.
NEVERTHELESS, people still needed to eat every day, so we kept on chooglin’. Here’s what we had:
SATURDAY
I don’t even know. Aldi pizza?
SUNDAY Vermonter sandwiches, raw broccoli
Vermonter sandwiches are ciabatta rolls or sourdough toast, thick slices of roast chicken or turkey, thick slices of sharp cheddar cheese, bacon, Granny smith apples, and honey mustard dressing.
I forgot to buy apples, though, and got cheap with the bacon, and the sandwiches were decidedly subpar. Very sad.
MONDAY Smoked chicken thighs, chips
Damien made these with his lovely spicey-sweet sugar rub.
and made a big pot of rice, and served it with cilantro, sautéed sweet peppers, shredded cheese, sour cream, corn chips, and some very fine black beans.
I was very happy with the beans. I still had quite a bit of kale leftover from something or other, so I chopped up several handfuls of that and added it into the pot when I was cooking up the onions, and, yes ma’am, I’ll be doing it this way from now on.
It just added a little extra layer of smoky flavor and texture and was not overpoweringly vegetablly at all. I’m turning into a kale enthusiast right before your eyes! Me and the ducks.
Here’s another picture, because I have two, and it was yummy enough to deserve two pictures.
And aren’t we all.
WEDNESDAY Spaghetti with Marcella Hazan’s sauce
Requested by the kids, made by Damien. Always quick and delicious, with a very few ingredients
and used most of the sauce for marinating, and set aside the extra half batch for brushing on while it was grilling. Damien made these on the grill outside, on his Interchangeable Cinderblock Meat Altar Situation.
Served with fresh pineapple and raw sugar snap peas and some hot pretzels that were cluttering up the freezer.
Slightly weird meal but it hit the spot. Sophia can now sound out enough Korean characters that she could read what it said on the side of the gochujang tub (it said “gochujang.”)
FRIDAY Tuna noodle casserole
Look at us, we made it to Friday! Hope you did, too.
Oh, here is the source for the gorilla sounds:
Sounds a little fishy to me, but it’s too good to look up.
Mix dry ingredients together. Rub all over chicken and let marinate until the sugar melts a bit.
Light the fire, and let it burn down to coals. Shove the coals over to one side and lay the chicken on the grill. Lower the lid and let the chicken smoke for an hour or two until they are fully cooked.
Pour over beef, sliced or unsliced, and marinate several hours. If the meat is sliced, pan fry. If not, cook in a 350 oven, uncovered, for about 40 minutes. I cook the meat in all the marinade and then use the excess as gravy.
Put olive oil pot of Instant Pot. Press "saute" button. Add diced onion and minced garlic. Saute, stirring, for a few minutes until onion is soft. Press "cancel."
Add beans with liquid. Add cumin, salt, and cilantro. Stir to combine. Close the lid, close the vent, and press "slow cook."
Happy Friday! This week I seem to have broken away from recipes, and just free-wheeled a lot of stuff. I think everything turned out okay, but it’s possible I was just so busy that I was ravenous by supper time every day, and would have eaten anything.
SATURDAY Nachos
Yea verily, I don’t remember Saturday. Somehow the week went by extremely quickly, and yet last Saturday was a million years ago. I remember people complaining that we just had nachos, and I said no, we just had tacos; this is different. It’s spelled different and everything.
My spice mix for tacos (or nachos, which is spelled different) is: Garlic powder, onion powder, cumin, chili powder, paprika, red pepper flakes, and salt. It tastes about the same as any packets you can buy and it’s not really easier to open packets than it is to sprinkle from a bunch of jars, so I stopped buying the packets. I don’t really miss the violent orange color.
Speaking of spices, this week I did buy a bunch of empty spice jars in an effort to Do Something About My Spices, which previously looked like this:
(My kitchen island is not always this wrecked up, but, sometimes it is, so there you go.) Well, after filling and labelling several jars, I admitted to myself that I had bought the wrong size. Too small. So I cussed a little bit and then went out and bought some mason jars, and got most of the contents of the rest of the bags and packets jarred up. It’s still cluttered and chaotic, and my kitchen is still wrecked up because I have had QUITE A WEEK, and I probably just need to bite the bullet and put in a new shelf. If it ever looks like anything, I’ll take a picture and show you!
SUNDAY Italian sandwiches, grapes, strawberry rhubarb pie
Mother’s day! I spent the morning clamping my jaw through a migraine at Mass because I forgot my medication, so then I got home and took it and then took a nap for a while, and then I spent the rest of the day working on my patio, and only feeling slightly guilty that I wasn’t flying a kite or going on a hike, which is what the younger kids wanted to do. I will do those things! Just some other day.
Damien made tasty Italian sandwiches (I had prosciutto, a few kinds of salami, provolone, tomatoes, basil, and olive oil and vinegar)
and Clara made me some gorgeous strawberry rhubarb pies
and the kids showered me with flowers and plants and snacks and thoughtful gifts. It was a lovely day!
MONDAY Chicken berry salad
I roasted up some chicken breasts, sliced it, and served it over salad greens with strawberries and blueberries, toasted almonds, and crumbled feta cheese.
A fine spring salad. Diced red onion would have been good, but we were out. Don’t forget, you can easily toast nuts in the microwave, and you don’t risk burning them unless you try really hard. Two minutes should do it.
TUESDAY Meatball subs
I had five pounds of ground beef and dumped in a few grated onions, a ton of grated parmesan cheese, five eggs, two or three cups of panko breadcrumbs, and I don’t really remember what seasonings, but more than looked reasonable. Probably just salt, garlic powder, and oregano. The grated onion is a hassle but it really makes a difference in taste and texture.
I cooked the meatballs on a broiler pan in a hot oven for about 25 minutes and then moved them into the crock pot with some jarred sauce for the rest of the day. And that’s-a my meatball story.
WEDNESDAY Bibimbap, pineapple
This was my favorite meal all week. I had a big pork shoulder or something, which I sliced into bite-sized slices and marinated in the basic magic: soy sauce, brown sugar, maybe three inches of fresh ginger, minced, and several cloves of fresh garlic, minced. I let it marinate all day.
When it was almost time to eat, I sautéed the meat along with all the marinade, because I wanted lots of sauce to go with this dish.
While it was cooking, I made a big pot of rice, and I chopped up a bunch of sugar snap peas and shredded some red cabbage, and just before supper I fried up a bunch of eggs in hot oil. And I stuffed a little bit of spinach into the bowl to wilt under the hot rice. LOOK HOW PRETTY.
I drizzled mine with a little of that Polynesian hot sauce from last week’s poke bowls and ladled some of the sweet marinade over it. I like to fry the eggs so they’re crispy on the bottom but still a little runny in the yolk.
Hot damn, it was delicious. I also put out some crunchy Chinese noodles and some fresh pineapple chunks, and it was such a good meal.
THURSDAY Chicken nuggets, chips, cucumbers
All week was busy, but Thursday was an especially crazy-go-nuts day. I can’t even remember what-all happened, but I was just running around like a duck all day, until finally I did the final pick-up of the day after dinner, and I was so tired, I just pulled into the driveway, turned off the engine, and fell asleep in the car. BUT!!! The dog still had plenty of energy, and there was some kind of fluke accident where he got startled, and jerked on his lead so hard that it flew out of the wall of the shed, and the end of it hit the pool and split the seam, and water started gushing out. Sooooo it was time to wake up and have a little unscheduled dip, because the pool holds 9,000 gallons of water, and when there is a hole, you have to patch it from the inside as well as the outside.
We did have some Flex Tape in the house, but not enough, so Lena went to Walmart for more, and I got it more or less patched up. And you know what, we had a frost the other day, and it’s been in the 30’s at night, so that water was somewhat less than hospitable. The whole thing was so dumb, I couldn’t even bring myself to blame the dog for it. Very high levels of dumbness.
So what, it’s still spring. We have a Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal coming to our feeder (the dude stands on the fence and stares irately at the world while his wife has a snack) plus lots of purple finches and yellow finches, and I think I spotted a bluebird, so I hope there will be more, because they come in gangs. And hummingbirds! And my Karl Lagenfield peony that I planted a few years ago has some buds for the first time this year, and the lupines seeds I planted over a year ago finally decided it was safe to come up, which cheered up both me and my neighbor Millie, whose seeds they were.
I scavenged a bunch of felled aspen trees, and I’m going to use them as posts to hang strings of lights from, if I ever get my patio done. I’m so close to being done digging, and this weekend I’ll level it and order some gravel and sand, and then I can start laying brick! Very excited.
Do keep Millie in your prayers. She fell last weekend, and has been needing more help than she wants, so I’ve been driving her around a bit. I love spending time with her, but it’s frustrating for her. She just wants to be out raking and weeding, and instead she has to be at the doctor constantly. She is about 140 years old and starting to slow down a little.
FRIDAY Seafood lo mein, steamed dumplings
Today, my brother is coming over, and also Moe and his girlfriend! All people who are either okay with the house and yard being a complete wreck, or else they aren’t gonna say anything about it.
I’m going to make a big batch of seafood lo mein, and steam some dumplings I got at the Keene International Market. Maybe I will get some more sugar snap peas or something. Or just, yanno, not.
The first time we almost bought a duck was 25 years ago, when my oldest daughter was a toddler, and very duckling-like herself. The one bright spot in our awful neighborhood was an agricultural supply shop that occasionally had ducklings, and they were so charming and appealing, we almost got one. But even dumb as we were, we had to admit that people who live in a one bedroom apartment with no yard whatsoever should really not own livestock. So we forebore. For 25 years, we forebore.
But look at us now! We have no end of grass, and our ducks are thriving in the back yard. It is finally the right time. I’ll tell you a little bit about it, because I’m openly pressuring you to consider whether it might be the right time for you, too, to get a duck or four. They are quite low-maintenance, at least so far, and they are a delight.
We have four Pekin ducks that we ordered from our local Agway supply center. We ordered them in February for $12 each, and they arrived in the middle of April when they were about a week old. We took them home in a little cardboard box.
They were unreasonably adorable. They looked exactly like a plushie or a cartoon of a duckling.
They just ran around like maniacs going “PEEP-PEEP-PEEP-PEEP-PEEP-PEEP-PEEP” or “WEEB-WEEB-WEEB-WEEB-WEEB-WEEB-WEEB.” They liked being cuddled, and they would huddle up and fall asleep in your hand or on your lap, or sometimes scramble up your chest and crawl around behind your head.
They liked exploring,
but mostly they wanted to be together. If you ever separated one of them from the group, they would all set up a huge racket and keep it up until you reunited them; and then they would just huddle up together and go to sleep.
They are still kind of like that. They sleep together, and have a habit of piling themselves on top of each other, and resting their heads on each other.
As soon as we got them home, they started growing like crazy. I mean like crazy. They were visibly bigger day to day. First they were just round heads, round bodies, and little leggies and feet. Then their bodies started to get a little bigger and elongated. Then they got shoulders; they they got necks.
Then their legs and feet started to grow, and their heads changed shape. Their fuzzy yellow down started to turn whitish and real feathers started to grow in. There have been so many awkward stages in between. Sometimes the down-to-feather transition is very comical, and the new feathers look like place markers, like “tail goes here, insert tab B.”
Their feet grew faster than their bodies, just like on teenage boys.
Their feet still look a little big for their bodies, so I think they’re not quite full size yet.
Their wings are also hilarious. I feel guilty thinking so, but they look exactly like, well, you know, wings, like you could just snip them off and fry them up with hot sauce and blue cheese dressing. (I am not going to do this.)
They’re starting to get some longer wing feathers now, so the shape of them is less naked, but they’re clearly still pretty useless. Every once in a while, the ducks will rear up tall and vigorously stretcccccch and FLAP-FLAP-FLAP their wings, and then fold and tuck them back behind them exactly like a fussy little man tucking his thumbs into his vest or something. It’s so funny.
We chose Pekin ducks because they are hearty, friendly, and relatively smart about predators (meaning they will run away, rather than just stand there going “duh” when something wants to eat them). They make good pets and don’t get sick a lot, and they’re okay in cold weather; and they’re too fat to fly. When you think “duck,” it’s probably a Pekin duck you’re imagining.
Here is what they look like now, a little over a month later.
They have thighs and chests and everything!
Let’s see, what else might you want to know?
Other equipment we bought for the ducks: A big sack of protein crumbles (the same brand they’d been eating in the store, about $20 that lasts about ten days), a feeder, a watering tray, a heat lamp to keep them warm, especially at night or if they got wet; several giant packs of pine shavings, and a big plastic tub. That was enough for the first month or so.
When ducklings are with their mother, she grooms them with her oils and waterproofs them; but when they’re on their own, they’re not really ready to go swimming right away, so we resisted the urge to toss them in the bathtub when they were little. But we did give them a tupperware tub with some holes cut in it for water when they got to be a few weeks old, because they needed to be able to clean their nares (nostrils) out.
These ducks are the most disorderly creatures on the face of the earth. Utter agents of chaos. You put them in a box of clean, fresh pine shavings with a little tub of a food and a little drinky-drink of water, and within three minutes, the water is gone and the tub is upside down, half the food is sprayed all over the place, and two of the ducks are soaking wet and standing on their brother, and the fourth one is running around in circles meeping his head off, and there is a giant turd on his back. What happened? Nobody knows! MEEP MEEP MEEP MEEP MEEP MEEP MEEP!!!
Oh! Let’s talk about duck poop! My friends, if you are not okay with duck poop, I mean really, truly okay with duck poop, then do not get a duck, not even a little bit. They poop . . . . . . . . . . . so much. Like you have never seen any living creature poop this much, and you probably never imagined it was possible. And maybe you are thinking to yourself, “Oh, if they poop that often, it’s probably like a newborn baby, where it’s so fast and so constant and so pure, it probably doesn’t even small that bad.” NOPE. If you are indoors, it smells like Satan threw up in a microwave! It is so heinous! You (by which I mean your husband) will change the pine shavings twice a day, and it will still smell like someone has done something illegal to a corpse and then concealed it in a sauna for several months. It’s just the stenchiest, and I don’t think I would have been able to handle it if I had been pregnant.
They do slow down with the pooping as they get older, but I’m not kidding when they say that if you have these creatures indoors, you will KNOW IT. Outdoors, it’s fine. I honestly don’t even smell them when I sit by their pen in the open air. It’s just kind of comical how fluffy and angelic and etherial their down is, and they gaze at you with this blank, innocent expression, and all the time they’re producing this criminal stank.
The upside is, their poop is so liquidy, you can put it (or the shavings or hay or water it’s mixed into) directly onto your garden, and it’s supposed to be amazing for the soil. Most animal manure has to be composted or rotted for a while, because it’s too high in nitrogen or something, but not duck manure. I quickly got in over my head with composting information, but I did mix an awful lot of duck-smelling pine shavings into my raised beds this year, so we’ll see how that works out.
When we first got the ducks, you could hold one in each palm of your hand.
Now, just over a month later, it’s all you can do to catch one of them with both arms while they run away, squawking, and wrestle to stuff them into their duck house because they don’t WANT to go to bed and it’s not FAIR.
The kids are learning to wear long sleeves when they handle them, because the little claws tipping their webbed feet are no joke, and can really scratch you up. They like us and they know us, but they’re not especially placid creatures. I would classify them more as “hysterical morons.”
One of them, EJ, is quite a bit bigger than the others, and I suspect he is a male. EJ has a paler, pinker bill than the rest, who have orange beaks (that doesn’t seem to signify anything in particular; it’s just how we can tell he’s EJ). Coin, the other somewhat larger, feistier one, had a bald spot on the side of his head, which has transformed into a lighter feathered spot that is fading as he turns all white. The other two, Fay and Ray, are smaller and more docile, and are harder to tell apart.
They’re much more amenable to being picked up and snuggled.
It’s actually been a while since I’ve been able to tell them apart. Today I bought some colored plastic bands to put on their legs, so that should help.
We still don’t know if they’re male or female. The males have tail feathers the curl up and over fancily, but the female duck butts are more plain. Our ducks are still growing their adult feathers in, so it’s too soon to say.
I would be delighted if we got some eggs eventually. Pekins lay about 3-5 eggs a week starting at about 20 weeks of age (so around August, I guess). Duck eggs are large and rich and delicious. But honestly, we mainly got the ducks as pets, and also as a way to get used to having poultry. I figured once we had ducks for a while, it would be easier to transition to getting chickens, which really would be for the purpose of having eggs. I’m not especially interested in chickens, but fresh eggs are freaking fantastic.
Oh, another change they’ve been going through is learning how to quack! EJ started quacking first, and it was just exactly like when an adolescent boy’s voice starts to crack: Startling, unexpectedly deep, and pretty funny, and clearly not in his control. Some of the other ducks have started mutter-quacking more and more, and now they “peep” and “weep” about half the time and quack the other half. Hilarious. They quack a lot, but they’re not very loud. They do set each other off, and if one quacks, they all quack. Sometimes they quack at the wind.
When we’d had them for about a month, they were so big that they had begun to squabble with each other in their tub at night, and were panting because they were too hot indoors, but kept spilling their water so they had nothing to drink. So it was time to move them out! Damien built a lovely solid duck house.
A duck house just needs to be a big, secure box to protect them from weather and predators, that is off the ground so their feet don’t get too cold, and had some ventilation so their humid duck breath doesn’t make it moldy in there. It has a slanted roof so the snow will slide off it, and it has a giant door in front for opening up to clean it out, and smaller door inset in that, for the ducks to go in and out on a ramp (but we need to add some kind of grips to help them get up and down). The floor is covered with hay that needs to be changed once a week. It’s painted inside, and we still need to paint the outside.
Pekin ducks are quite cold tolerant. You mainly have to give them straw, and protect their feet from getting too cold (which is why the house is raised up on cinder blocks). When it gets below 20 degrees this winter, we’ll move them into a dog crate in the basement, which is unfinished but heated.
Their duck house is surrounded by an old upside-down trampoline frame with chicken wire zip-tied onto the legs. Ducks are not clever escape artists, so this is enough to keep them enclosed, and they’re very happy to eat grass, hunt bugs, and scrabble in the mud. They are in sight of the house during the day, so we can keep an eye on them, and we put them into their duck house at night, to protect them from predators (raccoons and skunks, and occasionally coyotes, foxes, bears, and anything else that might wander through. We have a highway on one side of the house, but conservation land on the other, so you never know what might be in the yard).
They also have a kiddie pool for drinking, splashing around, and washing themselves, and a tray for their protein crumbles. We have also been giving them more and more kitchen scraps, like peas, kale, lettuce cores, and strawberry tops. They go absolutely bananas when they eat. Like the Cookie Monster, but even more so. It’s like they’re blind and in a panic and the food is running away and there are sirens going off. And then they just suddenly lose interest and stroll away, with a streamer of kale dangling casually off their head. They’re so entertaining!
We don’t plan to give them meat, because it can make them a little mean, but they do love bugs and worms. Boy do they love worms.
They love to splash the water out of their pool and make mud. They are constantly making themselves filthy and then washing and fluffing themselves. It’s a full time job, which is good because I don’t think they can read or anything.
There is absolutely zero brain power in them. They’re so dumb, they’re not even dumb. Like, you wouldn’t call a bunch of dandelions or a sky full of clouds dumb, and a bunch of ducks exist in the world in the same way. They’re just a little force of nature, and they are what they are. For some reason, this makes them very soothing to watch in action. I like to just sit down on a rock and watch them duck around. Sometimes they give me a little duck side eye, which is hilarious.
The other animals adapted to the ducks very quickly. The cat took one look at them and just decided, yeah, this isn’t happening. This was smart, as the ducks work as a team and would have beaten the crap out of him, even when they were little. It’s hilarious, though. He won’t even look at them. He goes outside and literally looks anywhere besides in their direction.
The dog ADORES THEM. He thinks they are his AMAZING FOUR NEW BEST FRIENDS and they SMELL SO INCREDIBLE and they DEFINITELY WANT TO SEE THE COOL STICK HE FOUND and SOMETIMES THEY BITE HIS FACE HA HA GOOD ONE DUCKS and LET’S HAVE ANOTHER SMELL. He is constantly begging to go outside, and as soon as you open the door, he rushes right over to the ducks. Just can’t get enough of them. They either ignore him or jump at him and bite his face. They have never been scared of him. They don’t especially dislike him, but they’re not as impressed as he thinks they are.
The parakeet has started imitating their peeps when he wants attention. The lizard just keeps his own council. Never know what that guy is thinking.
And I think that’s it! Go ahead and ask me anything. I love these ducks. Not one second of regret so far.
When I was planning my wedding, I had a very small budget, and any time I could get away without paying for something, I did.
Borrowed music, homemade cake, amateur photos. I remember carelessly telling the florist that I wasn’t too worried about flowers for the church, because there always seemed to be flowers there already.
He tactfully explained to me that the reason for this was that other people had put them there—people, in fact, who had been married in that church the previous Saturday, and had purchased flowers and decorated the church with them for that purpose.
Oh! Duh. All my life, I had been going to Mass and seeing fresh flowers every week, and it never once occurred to me to wonder how they got there.
Without realizing I was thinking this way, I halfway believed that I was the main attraction at this church, and that it was just sitting there, flowers and all, waiting for me to show up and enjoy them.
So I bought some flowers. I didn’t spend very much, but I did purchase a few pots of flowers for the side altar, and a few stems for the front, and of course a nice bouquet for myself to carry.
This memory came back to me the other day, as I happened to be in church (although not the same one) for a rare daily Mass, and the reading was a letter from Paul.
Poor Paul, even at that late date, was still a little shocked that the Christians in his care were not … better.
They weren’t acting, in fact, any different from anyone around them. He comes right out and tells them he is trying to shame them for their behavior. He reminds them of their past life, and of the baptism that marked the beginning of their new life, and how awful they used to be. And now … they’re supposed to be different! Get it together, guys! Remember who you are.
I’ve been hearing several Catholics lately expressing how much they’re struggling with something they notice: They’ve been hearing all their lives that the graces they receive in the sacraments should transform them.
And yet they look around them, and their fellow Catholics are very clearly no better—no kinder, no more generous, no more willing to make personal sacrifices, no more gentle—than any random agnostic or atheist or pagan they might happen to meet. If the Gospel is true, then why isn’t it blindingly obvious when someone is a Christian?
There is a certain amount of comfort in realizing that this mismatch is a very old problem—one dating back to the absolute babyhood of the church, as the Pauline epistles demonstrates.
But that only takes you so far.
Here is where I have landed. I tell myself, Look. You spend your whole life going to church, and it always looks pretty, and you never really think about how it gets that way. Until one day you’re planning your own special day, and you realize the church is empty and bare. Catastrophe! What to do! Somebody do something!
So guess what? It turns out the very one who’s in charge of making the church beautiful is M-E. Just me. Nobody else.
Horrible. But what other answer could there possibly be?
I really do think of this, every time I go into a church. I see the flowers, and I think about who put them there. Some bride, some wedding planner, some gardener, someone. Someone who realized there was an empty vessel standing there, waiting to be filled, and decided it was up to them.
Sometimes it’s a matter of beauty that’s needed — literal flowers, or something liturgical, music or art or some wonderful new program that draws people in and attracts them to our faith. Sometimes it’s a matter of goodness; sometimes it’s a matter of truth. I’m definitely not just talking about programs and official groups. I’m talking about individual choices: How we comport ourselves, how we treat each other, how we respond to each other. How honest we are with ourselves about ourselves.
Sometime there is an emptiness in the church that I cannot fill, being who I am, or an injustice that I cannot fix. But I need to be there. I need to be in the church, and I need to be willing. The church isn’t a backdrop of decency and virtue, waiting for me to swan in and enjoy it as if I were the main attraction, and everyone else merely readymade spiritual scenery. I am the church. Just dumb old sorry old me, either choosing or not choosing to make it beautiful and good and true by bringing what I have, even if it’s just my presence. Even if it’s just my failure.
Grace is the kind of thing that only transforms people if they want it to, and if they’re willing to be transformed over and over again, with constant conversion of heart. And that means realizing that the work that needs to be done is personal.
It means reading phrases like “constant conversion of heart” and thinking, “How can I, myself, turn that cliché into something real before I go to bed tonight?” What is one little thing I can do? One little flower I can bring to the Lord?
It’s such hard work. But there really is no other answer. How could there be? If I think the church ought to be good, then I need to bring the flowers.
