lemon tart diary

My brother flushed a bar of soap down the toilet. Don’t ask me how he did such a thing because I have no idea. It seems that a bar of soap would not fit into the little potty hole thingy, but he did it (as he was a thing-flushing aficionado) and wreaked a flooding havoc on the tiny powder room.

The local plumber (who visited our home so many times that I still remember his name), Jimmy Coates,  came and removed the toilet in order to fish the Irish Spring out of the pipes. You may be asking yourself, where does one place a loose toilet at 7:30-ish am?, or maybe you can guess — the front yard, of course.

I am eight or nine, well into the humiliation years, and thoroughly horrified by the toilet sitting in the front yard as I wait for the school bus. Quelle horreur!

Then, like a flash, a swirl of  red cape sweeps past me on the porch and in the blink of an eye the toilet is gone. The bus approaches and I board, wave goodbye to my sweet momma standing there in the yard in front of the disabled potty with her red robe wrapped around it, puffed out like a cotillion dress.

This morning, Drew sent word back inside that he would like for me to stand on the front porch and wave at him as the bus departed. I rushed right out. It felt pretty Super.

This morning I ran out of lip balm.  Cameron took the honey one. Drew took the peppermint one. Bradley took the mango one. It was time to refill, but no time to run to Costco. Typically, I get it there—regular Chapstick—a dozen or so little tubes, a mix of the black one and the cherry and the blue one, for around six bucks. They just lose it anyway. Or eat it. Or whatnot.

So, I take a bath, listen to sad music, procrastinate on other important things and finally get dressed and drive to the local pharmacy to replace what was distributed (and that will also surely need to be replaced by this afternoon). I don’t go begrudgingly. I don’t actually even go to get lip balm. I go so that on the way back I can stop at the Corropolese Bakery and get yesterday’s calzone.

Yesterday’s calzone is better than today’s. It just is. And despite the brusque service and slightly offensive odor of cured meats, I make my way to the back of the tiny shop to find exactly one calzone in the refrigerator. Wrapped in saran, a little grease congealed in the underneath folds, I swipe it and pay my four bucks and speed home.

It must be treated with care, this savory little pastry,  as the outside is, for me, the pinnacle of the experience. The pinched crust, slightly crisp, but never hard, can’t endure much more browning past the first baking, so warming must be done in foil. After the cheese is ooey, I unwrap it and let the firm up a little under the crisper. The cheese glides out and sizzles ‘til it is hard fused to the silver aluminum. My mouth waters.

I like to eat yesterday’s calzone on a nice plate with a knife and a fork. I like the sound the metal against the crust, the idea that the bread, simple flour and yeast and water, is almost a deterrent to the perfectly machined stainless steel. Alas, the knife wins the battle, but the war … in this war, I am always the victor.

Today is October 30th. The day before Halloween.  Uh-huh. That’s right … the day before HALLOWEEN.

So, what we should do is BUILD A SNOW FORT.

Or, for the lazy crowd, assemble a fort.

Lazy people:

And even though they are really cute, this makes me go GRRRRRrrrrrrrr… like a monster … like on HALLOWEEN.

Which is supposed to be all crisp and cool with fluttering leaves and lots of little Supermen and Dorothys and Werewolves **WITHOUT COATS**. And treats and tricks and sixty degrees … minimum, like, really sixty is the minimum for trick-or-treating, you know. GgggrrrrRRRrrrrrr.

“Tomorrow,” they say.

Autumn will cease and winter will call on us with big wet flakes that leave a frosty stain on what remains of the yellows and oranges and deep greens of my yard. The trees, still sodden from an exceedingly rainy season, will lose their leaves before their colors fully develop and rise like fire into the pale grey sky. I can practically hear the whoosh of the season’s door closing swiftly in my face.

It makes me sad because there is this thing I love about fall, about the colors and crisp fullness of living. I first noticed it when I was in college, along the foothills of Virginia, climbing the long drive into Sweet Briar. The leaves fell in such a particular way there and the Sun peeked through the limbs of the ancient trees as if it were perched on a high branch. They came through that streaming light, silver and gold, wafting and floating, light as a feather, light as a feather. It was enchanting, mesmerizing and hypnotic, a true symphony of nature, and I would watch from behind the windshield as they danced across the hood of my car.

If you take the back roads and are prone to noticing such things, you know. It happens there, too. It happens here as you crawl out into fields and countryside that butts up to our suburban life. Sometimes, on the way to soccer practice, it happens that there is a car in front of me as we fly down the s-curves of Limekiln Road and the leaves roil out beneath it, across the unlined pavement and tumble through the air. I always slow down and take them full on the glass, listening for the tiny peck of the long dry vein on impact.

Tomorrow everything will be wetted down, pushed beneath the slush and glum of a Winter-come-too-soon. And while I don’t dislike winter, I am against it arriving just now, somehow predictable and still not so, the way death is always too sudden. It’s startling and lonesome and unfair, and yet it will come, without concession and soon after, as it pillows on the windowsills and mulching, I’ll say, “Oh look! Isn’t it pretty?” But I will miss the leaves and what they stood for, what they fell for, and so, today, I will drive on the back roads and walk among the trees. I will watch the leaves swoop and fly and gather them with icy fingers only to toss them back to the sky and watch them come again, silver and gold, as they always have. As I hope they always will.

It’s funny how things come together sometimes ~

Last evening, I was at loose ends–two sons with football practice in two different parks, a daughter with soccer practice at yet another park, and two babies who desperately wanted to stay at home and ride bikes with their friends. Typically, the feeding and dressing and complaining begins around four-thirty and lasts until everyone is either dropped off or picked up, chased down and/or captured just before six. It’s enough to make scraps of a perfect day.

At some point, I turned to Facebook and sent up the white flag, begged for a coxswain. Turns out, not everyone knows what that is.

The role of a coxswain within a crew is to:
Keep the boat and rowers safe at all times by properly steering the boat (according to the river or regatta rules and safety for the crew)
Be in command of the boat
Coach the crew when the coach is not present
Provide motivation and encouragement to the crew
To provide feedback on the crew performance both in and out the races
Make any necessary tactical decisions
Organize and direct the crew at all times, including when putting the boat away etc.
Be responsible for the vessel; in the event of a collision, the coxswain is accountable under maritime law as ‘Master of the vessel’ (although the stroke may be sometimes the captain of the boat).

I desperately needed motivating and encouraging, organizing and directing.
No one actually volunteered, but at least one person secretly told me where to go all evening. Ha!

So, that’s where the story began and then, somehow, today, it ended on scenic Kelly Drive in Philadelphia at Boathouse Row where the elite crew teams from LaSalle and U Penn and Drexel (to name a few) manage their teams on the Schuykill River.

It was a fluke that we ended up down there, in the shadow of the art museum, among the joggers and dog walkers and cyclists, but it seemed kind of poetic to me (free verse, obviously) and definitely interesting beyond coincidence.

Our original destination was Reading Terminal Market where we gorged ourselves on Bananas Foster Whoopie Pies, Meyer Lemon Pound Cake with Sweet Tea Vodka glaze, Bassett’s Ice Cream, Barbecue, Turkey (sandwich with dressing and cranberry chutney), and fat perfect croissants from Metropolitan Bakery. If these photos didn’t exist, I might think that being on the river was just a hallucination or a dream from a calorie induced coma.

But back to the point …

From “coxswain” to crew. Walk with me.

And what better way to end than by finding a Sweet Briar Rose.

Some things are just meant to be.

After all this time, I am still surprised when this:

Turns into this:

I’m still surprised by how a warm muffin can spin my mood.

By how a smear of honey butter changes everything.

And then, I’m always surprised that it’s over almost as quickly as it began.

I’ve been baking a little. Not much, let’s be clear on that, but a little. It’s been fun. And relaxing. The kids have thought it awesome. I haven’t even minded the clean-up. (Well, maybe a little, but not much.)

I’ve also been thinking that it’s kind of funny—the way things get away from us. Not haha-funny, but weird-funny, like magic or amnesia or dreams. Things that we know well, people that mean something, ideas and desires and memories, all banished from this present moment or that future vision. Unintentional and often regretful, consumed by work and children and duty, those things boxed away in the darkness—how do we ever find?

I had dinner with my very best high school girlfriends a few weeks ago. It was amazing. Each exactly as I’d preserved them in my mind. We remember-when’d and caught up and shared some amazing food. Hours passed, patrons came and left the rough-hewn tables around us, but we laughed and reminisced until they locked the doors. I wouldn’t trade that night for a million dollars, but here’s the punch line: As we left, one of them asked an employee to take our picture. She said, “Will you take our picture. This is our friend we haven’t seen in fifteen years.”

Fifteen years. Two of the three were in my wedding. Two of the three were involved in the biggest lie I ever told my parents. Most, if not all, of the firsts in my life happened with these girls. And I hadn’t seen them in fifteen years. One had lost her mother. There were divorces. There were children, six of them. I’ve now met two.

I’m not okay with that. It should be more. I should do better.

Of course, there’s facebook and email and text and a million other ways to communicate, but there’s no way to make up for lost time—just like there’s no way to salvage cookies that have been in the oven two minutes too long. All you can do is start over.

And I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. Starting over.

I burned the cookies this week. Start over. I’ve been slack on training for my City to Shore bike ride and lost my groove. Start over. I let the laundry get so out of control that nobody had any underwear. Start over.

Start over. Start over. Start over.

Oh what the hell, I’m on a roll: