Friday favorites

1. Favorite month. November marks the start of real fall: no more silly warm days, brilliantine skies and frivolous scarlet leaves. Time to think about mortality and the ultimate random nature of all things: my favorite month. At least while I am in it. Plus there is the little reprieve at the end that reminds us that molecular disassociation aside, the real purpose of life is a full turkey dinner eaten after a long day of skiing in the company of family and friends (even if not all the family and all the friends.) That reminds me: it's time to book a condo for Thanksgiving.

2. Favorite holiday. Er, not Halloween. I am intrigued by the Day of the Dead (more on this here), but it is not really mine to celebrate.

Aside: Pros and cons of instituting new holidays/ traditions

Pros: Step outside your comfort zone
         Find rituals that address needs not covered in current holiday plan
         Feel pioneering and multicultural
         The creation of new traditions is a beautiful thing (according to parenting magazines, anyway)

Cons: The artificial quality emphasizes the absurdity of all holidays
          Feel like a dork
          Feel like an impostor
          The kids keep asking why are we doing this?
          So do I.

3. Favorite meal this week: the delicious pork and pepper stew my Mom made when Si and I flew out to visit them last weekend, or possibly the accompaniment, pasta and mushrooms made with the succulent fresh oyster mushrooms they picked on the walk we took. Man, oyster mushrooms are good. They make me revise my previous stance on mushrooms as food (which, succinctly: eh). On the same walk we stepped down to the muddy shore of a pond where there were hundreds - well, scores - of dime-sized froggies.

Second aside: I have mentioned before that there is a woeful lack of frogs in the lives of my kids. The frogs probably don't mind this, but it makes me ache a little that we don't live in a place where the perennial absurdity that is a frog can be a common experience. It's partly a climate thing: the high plains is not kind to amphibians. But it's more a situational state: it's because we live in the suburbs, near a creek and a marsh. Our waterways are frogless. And, possibly not coincidentally, largely kidless as well.

4. Favorite book I'm reading this week: The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Short, clever, damning yet generous and manages to open a drafty window on a different world before it slams shut at the end. Close runnerup: A Visit from the Goon Squad. I'm often leery of obvious experimentation - okay, we get it, you're brilliant - but here it is funny and it works.

5. Favorite powerpoint. The one in A Visit from the Goon Squad. Obviously. When else is a powerpoint presentation even going to be mentioned, actually. Which makes me wonder about the realism of using powerpoint for personal expression the way she does here - unless you think of it as a revived technology, some remnant from the past dragged up and put to new and vastly better use. That does happen.

8. Favorite work thing: that niggling nervous tummy feeling of always being late and behind the ball. Oh, wait. Different list.

Home from home

So Helen are back from our awesome adventurr!!!1! and after a few days of shock & outrage that we are actually expected to get up before 9, we seem to be back on track.

It's been 19 years since I claimed Ohio as my permanent address, which means that Colorado has been my home state for longer than the Buckeye state, but part of me is still based on the equation that Ohio = home. This despite the fact that I am surprised when the radio there plays non-80s music (you mean they've heard of Lady Gaga here, too?)

Obviously, my homing instinct is based largely on the presence of these good folks:

Helen, grandparents & her new monkey. Not pictured: the inaugural photo series featuring monkey.

It also has something to do with leafy deciduous forests and briars and poison ivy and cardinals and old cornfields grown up with cedar trees. I'm never adverse to visiting the Big City, of course, and it has its delights. We visited the art museum, ran boisterously along the splendidly redone waterfront and wandered the cute and quaint Mt Adams neighborhood. We ate dinner in a kiln at the Rookwood Pottery. It was fun, but then we drove home, and that was still the best part.

This is the kind of neighborhood that makes me forget I don't like living in cities.

I'm always comforted to get back to my parents' house and the woods around it. I like to think that my kids will always have this little piece of outdoors that feels like theirs, that they've known and roamed around on since they were small. At one point I kind of hoped to give them that in Colorado, except that a) not the right tax bracket and b) just the thought of a second home and all the extra painting, scraping, winterizing, vacuuming, etc, that would entail makes me want to lie down and cry.

Two hours after an all nighter on the plane, Helen grabbed an umbrella and dragged my Dad out into the Woods. That's my kind of child.

Sometimes I think about how, someday, I won't actually have a home base in Ohio anymore. The thought panics me a little, and not just for the obvious reasons (although those are there, too). It makes me want to rush out and buy up old farming properties. Which, hahaha, no. Not the kind of second home I was thinking, thanks. 

It's also a trip to take my offspring to things like the Maple Sugar Festival at Hueston Woods, which has not changed one iota since 1978. I even bought the same soft crumbly maple sugar candy at the end. (And I'm not alone; other grownups on the tour, including a woman my age with a son well into his twenties AND a two-year-old daughter and quite a few in between--I am strenuously resisting the urge to tut, And THAT'S why left this town, folks--was reminiscing about the maple sugar candy from when she used to go as a child.)

Tastes like water.

Same trees, same buckets, same sugaring off house.

Meanwhile, on the home front, this:

M. took five different photos of Si in the pitcher's wind-up, and in every one he has the same expression. It's uncanny.

One of many. Baseball season has officially begun: four practices a week and up to six games. I start to feel sorry for myself and then I remember poor Silas is required to attend it all.