A study finds that “The consumption of preprepared convenience foods, many of which are packaged as individual meals, stand alongside busy schedules as a root factor in undermining dinner as a family event.” And also that convenience foods don’t actually save people time.
Christmas cookies the kids can roll and the adults will eat
The winter solstice party was cancelled on account of winter weather, and the world failed to end after all, so we spent Friday evening at home decorating sugar cookies. My nine year-old art director had just received a new box of extremely fancy cookie decorations from her grandmother, and so each batch, two cookie sheets’ worth, took nearly an hour.
“You know, in my day, we only had the red sugar and the green sugar.”
(Pause for dramatic effect.)
“If we wanted white, we had to use salt!”
“Daaaad.”
The road to perdition is paved with nature study
I am a couple of weeks late for Mother’s Day, but here’s some timeless if not timely advice for those of you who are mothers, or who have mothers, or who know of someone who is or has a mother.
You can’t tell the birds anything
Spring is entering its second act. The bluets are fading, the last of the dogwood flowers fluttered off today in the downpour, but the trees all have their leaves, the birds have paired off and spread out to claim their nesting spots, the robins to a poplar, the jays to the brush in the woods, the wrens to the sheltered cap of the propane tank. This is what the wrens do, year after year. You leave three-quarters of an acre of open woods and they nest in your propane tank, when they don’t claim the shelves in the shed.
The cardinals have been courting for weeks, a big scarlet male bringing food to a female — the one who broke her leg last summer as a fledgling and has survived the winter darting back and forth to the feeders and now, it seems just possible, is going to beat evolution and reproduce. The Little Lame Cardinal, balancing one-legged on the edge of the birdbath, nesting in the bay laurel, passing on her clumsy genes, and also her plucky ones. Winning! That’s the thing about nature; you can’t predict it. You can identify grand strategies and see broad sweeps and make educated guesses about generalities, but you can’t predict the details. The details are the good stuff. The stories are in the details. You think you know how they end, but sometimes nature likes to play little jokes on itself, and all you can do is wait for the punchline.
Beet greens
Originally published in The Northern Agrarian, May 2008.
When I was young my parents tended a small garden: Peas, tomatoes, lettuce, parsley, zucchini, beets. All this in the small backyard of a small house in a medium-sized northern town, sheltered from a major highway by a cinder-block laundromat. My mother pickled beets, canned apple butter and pear preserve, baked wheat bread twice a week. A cry of rebellion against the confines of urban life, I might say, but my parents are not the cry-of-rebellion type. When I was seven we moved to the country, to a bigger house with a vast backyard in one of the most fertile patches of land on the planet. That first summer they planted a big garden, maybe too big. I grew a dozen ears of corn. Zucchini swelled. Groundhogs descended. The following year they never got around to the tilling, and they never gardened again.
Over, gracefully
Hiking the hills above the Eno River. By a stream that feeds the river the long stem of a wildflower, heavy with blossom after a sudden rain, hangs in a gentle arc a foot over the path. Sadie pauses to sniff. She could go around the errant stalk or shove its petal-weight aside, but she hesitates a mere moment before leaping like a cat, quickly, delicately, her basset legs splayed briefly along the curve of her body, the flower undisturbed.
Feynman, heavier built, could never have lept a twelve-inch obstacle from a standing start, but could she, ever the showman, she would have glanced up at me afterwards to make sure I’d been watching. But from Sadie there is no glance, no need for my applause. She lands with less drama than her bulk would imply and trots on, nose to the ground, content, her moment of grace meant only for herself.
Pretend men tell no tales
The Monkey hands me a beanbag.
“Um, thanks.”
“It’s a flyer,” she said, and bounces off to the living room, where she has arranged a dozen of her stuffed animals on chairs and the couch. She places a beanbag in front of each animal.
“I’m passing out flyers to all my animal friends,” she explains, in case I hadn’t figured this out on my own.
“That’s great, honey,” I say, wondering where my daughter got the idea to pass out flyers, hoping that she is playing political activist and not Jehovah’s Witness or guerilla marketer. “What do the flyers say?”
She stops and looks at me with as much disdain as a three year-old can muster. “Pretend things don’t say anything, Dad.”
Fair enough.
We like to dance real slow
The Monkey likes to watch basketball with me, or rather she likes to be in the same room while I’m watching basketball. Or football. She is only vaguely aware of who is playing, unless it’s the Philadelphia Eagles or Carolina basketball—though during the early rounds of the NCAA Tournament I can’t claim much better for myself; I frequently have to Google a set of initials before remembering which university it stands for. On Friday I asked her whether we should root for Memphis or North Texas; she considered the matter briefly before saying, as if pronouncing judgment on a fine wine, “North Texas, I think.” Then she returned her full attention to her Leapster, which binged its approval and cheerfully inquired whether a sea turtle might be larger than an orca.
The point isn’t the particular sport, or which teams are playing or who happens to be winning; it’s the experience of watching together. It would be male bonding if she were male, but hey, it’s the twenty-first century, and we could just as easily be watching women’s sports.
Because it’s silly
This evening at bathtime we discussed aesthetics, science, and epistemology.
“Do these match?” She hols up two rubber ducks.
“Um, yes.”
“No, daddy, they’re not the same color.”
“Oh. Well, they’re both made of meatballs.”
“No they aren’t!”
“Sure they are.”
“No, daddy.”
“They might be.”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, daddy.”
“Well, suppose they are made of meatballs which are themselves made of rubber ducks.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“And those rubber ducks are, perhaps, in turn made of meatballs, which are in turn made out of rubber ducks!”
“No.”
“It’s what philosophers call ad infinitum.”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s silly.”
This is not bad as epistemological declarations go. It might not pass muster with, say, Heidegger, but assuming silly things to be false is further than a lot of people get even as adults, so I say points to her, and move on.
“Oh. Well, what are you made out of?”
“Skin!”
“You certainly have skin on the outside.”
“And bones, and then they put the muscles on the bones, and then they put the skin on top. And they closed up the skin.” (stretches the skin on her leg to demonstrate) “They had to close it up. It was really hard.”
“Oh! Did they have to use tape.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Glue?”
“No, I think they used a lot of things. But I don’t know exactly what.”
“It’s one of the Great Mysteries of Science.”
Chinese
This morning I was standing in the frozen-foods aisle of the Asia Market, puzzling over which brand of vegetable gyoza I bought last week because the packages all look the same to me and I can’t read Chinese, when the Monkey burst into song. I found this somewhat disconcerting, because she was singing in Chinese, and I don’t speak Chinese, and I had no idea what she was singing about.