Missy Diggs

What I am doing right now is making eggplant/yellow squash parmesan using veggies from our bountiful farm box. More about the farm box some other time, and more about the vegan/not vegan issues brought up by cooking for my family in general, and making eggplant/whatever parmesan for my family in particular. Right this very minute I am sitting down to see what kind of blog update will come out of me while I am waiting for the salt to draw any potential bitterness out of the eggplant. I am not salted, so hopefully what comes out of me will be some flavor other than bitter.

I’ll tell you right now, though: I’m not promising sweet.

It’s summer here, as it is in many places, though certainly not all. Summer means no school, which in the case of our very own Vivid Girl and her schoolmates, means three long months yearning for school. In the case of the dedicated and loving mamas of this Vivid Girl and her schoolmates, it means three long months of periodic fun, punctuated by guilt, tied up together with yearning for school. Mothering seems to have a lot of guilt built in, on one side of the equation or the other, and these days it seems to be the mamas who feel guilty (rather than the mamas making the children feel guilty, which was popular for a long time), and one of the things I find myself feeling guilty about is my inability to give my child the kind of summer I used to have. But during the school year, the guilt is so much lighter and smuggier because I know for sure that I am giving the Vivid Girl a school so much better and more life-affirming than the ones I had.
But right here, at the point of summer that is farthest from school, the guilt is at a max and the smugginess (though not the mugginess) is at a seasonal low.

To counterbalance that, and also to get myself out of the house and away from certain chores such as thinking of family-friendly ways to cook the vegetables in the farm box, I took the Vivid Girl to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.
Grandma and Grandpa live in what used to be a teeny-tiny rural town north of Dallas. To get to their house from Dallas, you drive north on the highway, drive east on a road that turns into a road with the same name as the town, and turn left at the little gas station/food mart/feed store. The sign on this store says:

Bait
Sandwiches

which is why I don’t go to that store. Also, my mom says it smells funny in there, though she allows that maybe that is because of the feed store aspect of the many conveniences offered by this store.

I am sure this store was much more convenient to the few people of the small town back when it was a small town, but now they have Walgreens, Petsmart, Target, and Jimmy Johns between them and the highway. Still, the bait sandwich business seems to be good, as the store is still there, unlike the junk store across the street that also used to mark the turn. Where I also never went, despite the fact that I love nothing more than shopping for junk, because I was never really sure whether it was actually a store, or just a house with a whole lot of stuff in the yard.

Anyway, turn left at Bait Sandwiches and turn left again and there you are. If you get to the lake, you’ve gone too far.

But even though I know how to drive to my parents’ house, I usually don’t actually drive there. Me and the Vivid Girl, we like to take the train. We get on the train in Austin, ride 6 hours or so to Dallas, with all stops in between, and then get on the MetroRail and take it as far north as it goes. Then we climb into the back of Grandpa’s pickup truck and he carries us the rest of the way. The Vivid Girl likes the train because she can walk around, do crafts, practice cup stacking in the lounge, and buy snacks.  When we travel in the car, she needs to do all these things too, but we usually aren’t getting any closer to our destination while she does them.

The Vivid Girl also loves the train because she gets a whole day of my completely undivided attention. If  only for this reason, the Vivid Girl would probably ride the train every day if she could.  All day every day. Though I am pretty sure that the quality of my attention is at its very best on Day 1, and might devolve into something quite unpleasant before we reached such a distant destination as Chicago or Los Angeles. Probably it would be best to just ride the same stretch of rail between Austin and Dallas, so we could be rescued and revived by the people who love us at either end. Even so, I’m pretty sure I would get tired of it way before the Vivid Girl would. Several days and a bottle of Xanax before, most likely.

One thing about going to Grandma’s house is that sometimes there are cousins there. This time there weren’t any, but Grandma took time off work to play with us and we had a good time anyway. Grandpa doesn’t go to work, but he doesn’t really play either, so we left him home to think of ways to cook the vegetables from the garden.

I’m running out of time because I have to go pick up the Vivid Girl and her schoolmate from Gardening Camp, which is very fun but not as fun as school, which also has a garden, though school doesn’t have a pink poodle and gardening camp does. The way to get through summer is to focus on such advantages. With Grandma, we went to an amusement park where the Vivid Girl rode her first roller coaster. It was a tiny little thing called The Little Dipper, I guess because of its size and its hilliness, but after riding it I think it should have been called the WhipperSnapper, because of its size and its ability to undo months of chiropractic work in such a short ride. Whip! Snap! Ouch! Ride over.

We also rode the bumper cars, which was super excellent fun because the park was so uncrowded that we were the only two cars running, and we could really zoom around the track and also smack into each other hilariously.

And now I must zoom around the track to get to camp pick up on time. The eggplant has been rinsed and dried and breaded and is in the fridge waiting to be fried. I don’t know how bitter it will be, or whether the rest of the day will be sweet, or whether I will end up fried as well. Ah, the joys of summer!

Maybe it’s because I was thinking about high school, and reunions, that has my mind wandering around in the past, or maybe it’s because in the summer my thoughts naturally turn to what summer is like for my daughter, the Vivid Girl, compared to what summer was like for me, Missy Diggs. Or maybe it’s because the summer solstice is my birthday, and this year it was a big milestoney one. Whatever the reason, I’m thinking about the way summers used to be.

I grew up in the Midwest, as I may have mentioned, in a time when no one had air conditioning. If you’re going to be hot anyway, you may as well be hot outside, so we spent most of our time outdoors, hanging out with kids from the neighborhood, riding bikes and climbing trees, and playing Gilligan’s Island under the mulberry tree that hung down over the canoe racks at the back of our yard. In the afternoon we’d bang in through the screen door to the kitchen to find our mother and beg for ice cream truck money or a ride to the pool. Our arms and faces were tanned, our knees were skinned, and the bottoms of our feet were tough as leather. At night, we’d be forced to go to bed well before the sun went down, and we’d lie there in the stifling twilight listening to the older kids playing tag and laughing. If our cousins were visiting, or if our parents had friends over for cards, we’d stay up late and catch lightning bugs in jars, putting the glowing jar on the porch while we played Bloody Murder in the dark, and then negotiating to be allowed to keep it on the dresser overnight if we promised to release the lightning bugs, outside, in the morning.

Most of our days followed this same drowsy pattern, punctuated by trips to the library or the grocery store, and summer dragged on forever. The big event of the summer would be our family vacation, which usually involved packing up the big red Chevy Blazer, tying the canoes to the top, and driving six hours to northern Wisconsin to live in a cabin in the woods at a Boy Scout camp. There were no boys in our family, just my sister and me, but my dad had gotten involved as a volunteer with the Boy Scouts, and that is how the Boy Scouts came to have such a strong influence on my childhood. We went to every Jamboree and every festival, and my sister and I knew pretty much every Eagle Scout around. In the summers, my dad would sign up to be the camp director at a small scout camp in Wisconsin, and the whole family would go with him, and that was our vacation.

At the camp, we lived in a cozy two bedroom cottage at the top of a hill overlooking a lake. The cottage had a big picture window with a hummingbird feeder hanging outside, and a stone fireplace with some Boy Scout motto carved into the mantle. Some summers we had the cottage all to ourselves, other years we would have one or two older scouts living with us while they worked at the camp as guides to the troops who would come in for a week at a time. My favorite of these boys, and the only one I really remember at all, was a tall brown-haired boy named Melroy. In fact, he has probably taken on characteristics from all the Boy Scouts I ever knew, but no matter how well those boys embodied the scouting life, none of them ever had the sparkle and personality of Melroy. (Ah, Melroy….sigh)

Even at the time I knew that other people, especially grown ups, saw Melroy as a gawky, goofy, kind of unfortunate-looking kid, but to me he was beautiful. I thought he looked just like Robby Benson, who –along with Jodie Foster– totally made me swoon. Plus, unlike many of the boys, who for some reason had very little interest in two little girls hanging out at Boy Scout camp, Melroy actually talked to us like we were people, and he taught us about the woods, and how to build a fire in the fireplace, and how to whistle through a blade of grass, and all kinds of Boy Scouty stuff like that.

And even when he wasn’t staying in the cabin with us, we would often see Melroy in Wisconsin because we would make trips up to the big council camp and he would be there. My sister and I would drink “bug juice” (that’s what the Boy Scouts call Kool-Aid, which even at the time I thought was juvenile) from dented aluminum pitchers and explore around the edges of the camp while my dad did whatever Boy Scout business he had to do at the camp. One year, a boy (it probably wasn’t really Melroy but in my memory it is;  in my memory it is always Melroy) was raising a litter of baby raccoons in a box and we got to pet them and feed them milk with a dropper. We also would go to the big camp for the Council Fire and the Order of the Arrow ceremony, where men dressed as Indian chiefs would paddle canoes across the dark lake to deliver silent and serious boys into the firelight for some kind of solemn initiation ceremony.

All very mysterious, and holy, and so different from Girl Scouts, which my sister and I were both in and which seemed to have a lot more to do with butter cookies, knee socks, and folk dancing than Boy Scouts ever did. I also went to Girl Scout camp for a week or two every summer, and while it was a really fun and in some cases even profound experience, nothing about it ever seemed to approach the level of priestly purpose that the Boy Scouts’ firelight ceremony had. (This, even though I had it on good authority that both our fire-building technique and our canoe-paddling method were superior by far. In fact, the worst thing my dad could say about a person in a canoe was that they “paddled like a Boy Scout.” Oh, the shame!)

Although the big council camp was a sleepaway camp with a big mess hall, a camp store, and little clusters of tents or dorms or whatever (we were never allowed to go to the part of the camp where the boys actually slept, or where they swam, either, now that I think about it), the camp where we stayed was basically just  a boat house and a dock, and the boys would come with their troops and leaders and paddle out across the water to camp sites on the lake, where they would stay for a whole week doing whatever boys do in the woods. (From what I saw of them, my best guess was that they were telling fart jokes and daring each other to eat disgusting things.) Unless someone was homesick or needed to go to the hospital, we wouldn’t see the boys after they arrived until it was time for them to check in their life jackets and paddles and go home. My sister and I would sometimes help with the checking-out and checking-in of equipment, especially if there were several troops arriving or leaving at the same time, but mostly we hung out in the cabin with our mom when the scouts were around. During the week, we would canoe, or fish, or inventory the supplies in the boat house, or carry all the dutch ovens and cast iron frying pans up the long hill to the house, where we would clean them, rub them with oil, and season them in the cabin’s oven. Then we would carry them all back down the hill, inventory them, and put them on their shelves, where they would wait for scouts to come and claim them. I complained bitterly about this chore at the time, but now that I see what a great workout it was, carrying cast iron dutch ovens up and down the hill, I wish I could pay someone to let me do it again.

During the week we would go fishing early in the morning, or late at night, and eat freshly caught fish for breakfast. We would sit out after dinner and watch the stars come out and listen to the loons. Twice we went with some scout (let’s call him  “Melroy”) to a nearby lake where we could hike in and see a pair of bald eagles in their nest. My sister and I canoed (and we did not paddle like Boy Scouts, thank you very much) and swam and fought and  played in the woods. There was no tv or radio, just cards and books and the lake and the big woods and us.

This went on for many years, until I was about twelve or so. One day I was wearing shorts and a tank top and hanging out around the boat house helping my dad get a newly arrived troop set up with canoes and paddles and dutch ovens and whatnot. I remember that one of the boys came over and talked to me, and asked if I wanted a piece of gum, which I gladly accepted.  Suddenly his scout leader appeared and barked at him to get in his canoe, and the whole troop paddled off across the lake and out of sight. Sometime that week my dad told me that it had been decided that I was “too old” to hang out at the boat house and interact with the scouts and that I would have to stay in the cabin whenever there were boys around.

So I was exiled, but empowered, and I hid in the cabin glowing like a firefly in a jar and peeking out the windows whenever male voices floated up from the boathouse. Suddenly I knew there was danger, and potential, in even the most casual encounter, and I hummed with anticipation for the day Melroy would come for dinner or to go searching for an eagle’s nest. But Melroy didn’t come that summer, and my family never went back, and as far as I remember I never saw Melroy again.

And then we moved to Texas, where the Vivid Girl now lives, and where summer days come with either a heat advisory or a tornado/hurricane/flood warning. We live in the air conditioning and all the neighborhood kids are off at magic camp, or yoga camp, or math camp. We occasionally see a few lightning bugs, but not enough to fill a jar. We do have a jar of change reserved for the ice cream truck, but we’re rarely home when it comes by and we can’t usually hear it anyway, because the windows are closed, the A/C is running, and the radio or tv is on. And so far, as far as I know, my daughter has not encountered her Melroy but I’m pretty sure he’s out there. That’s the thing about Melroy; he’s always out there somewhere.

Many thanks for the photo originally uploaded to Flickr by McMillan Memorial Library Portrait Gallery and protected under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License.

Halftime

You know how they say no two children ever grow up in exactly the same family? I think it also is true that no two teenagers ever go to exactly the same high school. And that goes a long way toward explaining how it is that my sister is currently traveling from Seattle, Washington to Small Town, Texas to attend her twenty year high school reunion while I am lounging around Austin in my pajamas, safe in the knowledge that my high school reunion committee doesn’t have my contact information, and would find a way to “misplace” it if they did. (Just like they did with all my Homecoming Queen votes back in the fall of 1987. Oh, yeah, little Miss Class President, I knew about that!)

Now, my sister is feeling a bit nervous about going to this reunion, as any normal person would, and she is wondering what she was thinking when she agreed to go.  She has been living in a beautiful blue island of liberalism and secular tolerance for quite a few years now, and it is safe to say that many of her former classmates are still swimming in the red red waters of their Bible belted hometown. But the reunion committee is headed by two of her best friends, by which I mean not just her best friends from high school but still her best friends now, because my sister is a loyal and friendly person who gets along with others and knows how to have a good time. I’ve made her promise to report anything crazy or scary that happens, but I’m pretty sure she’s going to have fun.

Now, I suppose it’s technically possible that I would find a way to have fun if I were to attend one of my high school reunions too (assuming I could find out when and where it was happening, that is). After all, I’m a woman who tried to make chemotherapy fun. And while I would definitely choose going back to high school over going through cancer treatment again (wait, is that right? hmmm, tough one. hopefully hypothetical), High School Reunion falls somewhere under Root Canal on my list of things I would like to do over my summer vacation. This is, of course, at least partly because my sister and I did not go to the same high school. Even though we did. oh, you know what I mean.

I started high school in the suburban Midwestern town where I grew up. It was a big school, academically competitive, crowded. I knew a bunch of the kids in my classes from junior high, but most of the kids I had gone to elementary school with had dispersed into different groups, and I only saw them in the band room or the cafeteria. Which was fine, cause I hadn’t really gotten through that whole 6th Grade Girls Are Mean thing very gracefully and I was grateful for a chance to reinvent myself and make a new start. And I was working on that, and it was hard (as it often seems to be) and then my family moved to Texas. And I thought, as have many before me, well, why not? If I’m going to recreate myself it might as well be in Texas.

Even though we had lived quite happily for many years on a dead-end street within easy walking distance of the library, the town hall, the elementary school, and the Tastee-Freeze, my parents decided to use the move to Texas to pursue some of their dreams as well, and this included Living Out in the Country and Having Land. At this time, in Texas, those things were very possible but did not usually come attached to what most people would call Good Schools. The first place my parents wanted to buy was basically a ranch on a lake and it sounded perfect until they decided to call the local school and make sure we girls would be able to go to school there and still get into college. The conversation went something like this:

My mother: So, my daughter is a freshman but she is taking Honors Geometry. Would she be able to do this at your school?

School representative: We have geometry.

My mother: Oh, okay. Good. Well, my daughter is taking French I and hopes to be able to take four years of French. Does your school offer that? (I know, French! What was I thinking? ah, les folies de la jeunesse!)

School representative: We-ell. Now, we did have a Spanish teacher, at one time. But she died.

So my parents let go of their lakefront dream and bought House2, which was still a respectable distance from town and still on a sizable piece of land. And which was on the bus route for the schools in the biggest town in the county, which also happened to be the only town that had a high school big enough to have both a Varsity and a Junior Varsity football team. Which, and let’s be honest, was basically the whole reason they had a high school at all.

But they did have a French teacher and a Spanish teacher (though we later discovered that these were actually the same person, a native Spanish speaker who really, really liked French food) and they later added a teacher of German, which is what my sister took when she got to high school. And that turned out to be a good choice, because when the Spanish/French teacher died the school got a new Spanish teacher but not a French teacher and there I was with only two years of language on my transcript and no desire, as a junior, to start over in Spanish with a bunch of freshmen.

Who were not at all like the freshmen I had gone to school with in the Midwest. No way. Those kids, maybe because it was a much more urban setting, knew how to fly under the radar. They played it cool and kept things quiet. They caused trouble, for sure: we had gangs, and teen pregnancies, and a “game” played in the hallways called Open Chest that actually sent several kids to the emergency room. These Texas kids, though, were a whole other deal. They were rowdy. They would get up and wander around during class, try on each others’ hats, throw things out the windows to their friends in the quad. In geometry we had an ancient teacher who every Friday would write out a quiz on an a transparency and leave it up on the overhead projector for the first part of class. Every other Friday this kid named Trey (half the boys were named Trey) would walk into class, pick up the spray bottle kept on the stand under the projector, and spray water right onto the quiz. The teacher would rise up out of her chair, flapping her arms in fury, and Trey would escape her grasp and run out into the hall laughing.

He was in my Trig class the next year, though, so I’m pretty sure he passed Geometry. Everyone passed Trig cause it was taught by one of the football coaches, though not the same one who taught World History. Football players passed everything.

If I could have attended high school in Texas as an anthropologist of some sort and not as an aching, lonely, bored, irritated teenage girl, things probably would have gone a bit better for me (though I’m still not too sure I’d be invited to the reunions!). However, I was wandering the halls looking for connection and meaning and damn if those things weren’t hard to find. When I was a junior the high school moved into a brand new building (we had been going to the same school that most of my classmates’ parents had gone to, and I think it was haunted by small town kids from an earlier, less college-bound, time), and my sister started school as a freshman. By then I had more or less branded myself as a Loner and an Outcast, though I still had some friends in less windy corners. Being an honors student helped. So did being in band.

My sister was in band, too, and she and I looked so completely different from each other and had such a common last name that no one ever suspected we were related. This was how it happened that when some older girls took her under their wing and told her what she needed to know about high school, they actually pointed me out and said, “See that girl over there? Stay away from her. She’s weird.” And my sister, bless her heart, said, “Oh, yeah, her. SHE’S MY SISTER!”

After which nobody really fucked with her, either. Though when the time came for the big “voted most likely” weird ceremony my senior year, my sister was nominated “Most Popular Girl” in her class. Another reason why I suspect she is going to have a pretty good time at her reunion this weekend. (I was nominated “Most Scholarly” but I didn’t win. Maybe if they had called the category “Most Eager to Get the Hell out of Here so she Can go to College and Have Some Fun” I would have had a better chance.)

It used to drive me crazy when grown-ups would go out of their way to tell me that my high school years were supposed to be the best years of my life. Literally, crazy. More sensitive but still grown up people would acknowledge that I would probably do better at college, especially outside the Bible belt. That did turn out to be the case, and I have been to several college reunions already (SO MUCH FUN) and you better believe I keep my contact info updated with the college alumni office, even though they mostly use it to ask me for money and not to invite me to parties. But I’m a grown-up myself now, and I can have my own parties pretty much any time I want to, which is why, as I always suspected they would be, these years right now are the best of my life so far, and I have every reason to expect that they are going to keep on getting better and better.

However, if they ever want to offer up a recount of those Homecoming Queen votes, I would still like my chance to ride around the football field in a golf cart wearing a tiara. And I probably wouldn’t even insist on wearing the outfit I had picked out for the event: my mom’s prom dress, torn longjohns, and green hightops. Though it might be fun to get a tattoo of a girl dressed like that to commemorate the event as one of the best days of my life.

Thanks for use of the photo, originally uploaded to Flickr by Mad African!: (Broken Sword and protected under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.

Outdoor Academy of Sweden – Ice Hotel

I used to be the kind of person (if this is a kind of person) who didn’t really think much about Sweden.

That, however, was a long time ago.

I started to think seriously about Sweden the same day I tried sushi for the first time, when I was in college. The way it came about was this: I danced (and flirted) with a very charming young man at a waltz party. Then I asked this young man out on a date, after which he revealed that he was gay, but also that he wanted to go out with me anyway, but not on a date. Up to this point, there is nothing Swedish (or, actually, unusual, at least for me) about this story.  Because I had a car, I picked the guy up at his apartment (he lived alone, off-campus, which was one of the things that would have made him such an awesome boyfriend) and he gave me a little gift that he had made for me. It was like a card, sort of, in that it was made of cardstock and there was an outside part that had my name written on it in fancy letters filled in with colored pencil. The inside part, when slipped out, turned out to be Sweden. By which I mean, he had drawn a picture of Sweden on a piece of cardstock, and colored it in, and cut it out, and written the word “Sweden” on it. It was actually quite lovely, though really very puzzling. When I expressed surprise at being given the country of Sweden, he seemed puzzled that I would  be surprised and explained simply that I seemed like a Sweden sort of person to him. Then we went to dinner, and he tricked me into eating raw fish, which I was sure I would not like at all but which of course turned out to be one of the loveliest and most wonderful things you can eat.

Time passed and we were friends for a while and then he graduated and I took a year off, and I lost touch with him and with many other Scorpio boys both gay and straight. But I never stopped eating sushi. And because he was so right about me and sushi, I had to wonder whether he also knew something about me and Sweden.

But I was busy trying to be an adult and start a career and find love and all that stuff, so I didn’t think about Sweden too much or too often.

Until my parents moved to Ireland. They were going to be there for two years, and they were going to pay for a trip for me to come visit them and do some traveling and exploring around those parts. See, I had never been overseas but my sister had been to England on a college trip. And in our family, fairness is important and it means that no kid gets something that the other kid doesn’t, and so they owed me. I didn’t go visit them the first year they were there, because I was so busy with the career-starting and the love-finding and also the giant-puppy-training, which was not even part of the original plan. And then my dad’s company closed their Dublin office and my parents got sent home a year early and they still owed me a trip but they weren’t in Ireland for me to visit anymore.

So then I realized that I could go anywhere I wanted. And, for reasons that I can’t remember now, because this was a long time ago, I decided that I wanted to go to London. And also I wanted to go to the Ice Hotel.

The Ice Hotel is a hotel made entirely out of ice. It’s in Sweden, and it’s only in the winter. In the spring it melts and then in the winter they build it again. To get there, you take the train to Kiruna, which is north of the Arctic Circle, and then you travel by dog sled 15 km or so to the hotel.  When you get there, you get to drink hot lemonade or other drinks that you order at a bar made entirely out of ice, and you get to sit on chairs made of ice and sleep wrapped in furs on a bed made of ice.

If reading the last paragraph did not make you want to go to the Ice Hotel yourself, I don’t know what to say. I spent a lot of time reading about the Ice Hotel and thinking about the Ice Hotel and talking about the Ice Hotel. Ice Hotel Ice Hotel Ice Hotel.

Strangely, I couldn’t really find anybody who wanted to go to the Ice Hotel with me. So I decided to go on my own.

I was planning this trip in the summer, in Austin, and it is hot here in the summer, and that may be part of the reason why the Ice Hotel appealed to me so much. Also, I was born on the summer solstice, but I have always been a night owl, and so the idea of spending long hours of darkness in northern Sweden on the winter solstice had a definite appeal for me. Also, it was 1999 and the last full moon of the millennium was going to be on December 21, my half-birthday and the winter solstice. How could I resist? I booked my reservation at the Ice Hotel seven months in advance. For the rest of the trip, I decided to fly to London, spend a week hanging about there, then fly to Stockholm, spend a night, and take the train up to Kiruna the next day. It is a 12-hour train ride from Stockholm to Kiruna; the train leaves in the evening and arrives in Kiruna in the morning, although morning is a funny thing to think about in a place where the sun won’t even come up.

It was a perfect plan, and when the time came I embarked on my trip with a little bit of fear and a whole lot of enthusiasm. I had a great time in London, staying in the Holland Park youth hostel, singing Christmas carols at St. Martin in the Fields and then enjoying mulled wine and mince pies in the cafe located in the crypt. I bought a pair of Doc Martens in the shop at Covent Garden and then gave myself terrible blisters wearing my new boots and walking all over the city. Up and down the steps of the underground stations, in and out of parks and shops and museums and churches. I had no schedule and no commitments and so I just did what I wanted all day every day. It was lovely. I went to the movies and to the observatory at Greenwich, I searched out the street with all the Indian restaurants and spent long cozy hours reading in pubs. Looking back now, after six and half years of motherhood, I can’t even imagine having that much freedom and independence.

And then I flew to Stockholm. I had prepared myself for this part of the trip by taking a Swedish class at UT Informal Classes. The class was taught by a very cute and idiosyncratic young American woman who had been an exchange student in Sweden in high school and was currently the only PhD student in the Swedish program at UT. She told us that Swedes have a very high opinion of their own country and that they will often say that “Sweden is just like America, only better.” She explained that Swedes are more physical and less verbal than Americans; so, for example, if a Swedish person finds that your cart is in their way at the grocery store, they will not say, “Ahem, ahem, excuse me,” like we might. They will not even step over, move your cart out of the way, and then push their own cart through. Oh, no. They will take their cart and they will RAM your cart with it. They mean no offense. They are simply being Swedish.

Also, in Sweden, it is very important to be self-sufficient. Therefore, it is considered quite rude and insulting to offer help to people. For example, if you see a young mother with three small children, a dog, a stroller, and four grocery bags struggling to get on the bus, you might think it would be polite and friendly to offer her a hand. In Texas, you would be right. In Sweden, you would be oh so very wrong. Way out of line. Astonishingly rude.

Also, in Sweden they have vowels that we don’t have. I learned how to pronounce most of them, and I learned how to say please, and thank you, and a few other things like that. And I learned that in Sweden high school is conducted in English so in most cases I would not be called upon to use any Swedish at all, which was good, because Swedish is hard and that class was short.

When I got to Sweden I learned a few other things. For example, if you are allergic to the species of juniper that we here in Texas call cedar, you probably should not go to Sweden in the winter time. Cedar Fever hit me as soon as I got off the plane, though it was so bad and so unexpected that it took me a few days to figure out what it was. Also, it is not so easy to get a train ticket from Stockholm to Kiruna the week before Christmas. I never expected that there would be so many people traveling north of the Arctic Circle at that time of year! But when I went to the train station, all the trains were full. The girl at the ticket counter explained that she could sell me a ticket, but I would have to stand (all night!) and there would be nowhere to put my backpack, so I would have to hold it in my arms (all night!). I stood there, shocked, blinking my red allergic eyes and wiping my runny nose, and I stared at her for so long that she finally said, in her crisp clear English, “I don’t know what you want to do.” I wanted to go to the Ice Hotel, is what I wanted to do, so I left the train station and went back to my youth hostel, which was in an old prison and where I slept in one of the cells, and I called the airline to see if I could fly to Kiruna instead. And they said they would sell me a ticket, but it would cost more than my whole trip, which I simply could not afford.

And so I did not go to the Ice Hotel.

And I spent a couple of days crying in my prison cell and trying to figure out what to do and when the desk clerk told me that I had to leave the hostel because they were closing for the season I gave up. I came home early, and instead of celebrating the solstice at the Ice Hotel and spending a gloriously independent Christmas all by myself in Stockholm I spent the next few days curled up on my parents’ couch and playing with my giant puppy, who was very glad to see me, in a way that no Swedish person had been.

And I have never been back to Sweden. Though I have been to IKEA many times, and with much better results.

And now I have a Swedish car, who is a big white Volvo station wagon, and who is named Vendela, which means “wanderer” or “Vandal” or something like that. It’s a Swedish name. And my family is very very safe inside this wonderful car, and we drive her to the chiropractor and all around town, and when the Vivid Girl and I go wandering through parking lots looking for our lovely car we call out, “oh Ven-DEH-la!” until we find her, and this makes us happy.

And once again it is summer in Austin, which is hot, and which means that the Vivid Girl is not in school and instead has wanted to spend all her time with me and I was going crazy because she was even following me into the bathroom and she would follow me when I took two steps into the laundry room to toss a towel into the basket and she would get in between me and the fridge when I opened the freezer to get out some ice and then finally I found something that would keep her busy for a few minutes at a time so I could catch my breath and gather my thoughts: the Swedish Chef, on youtube.

And tonight I finally got a chance to write because when I came home from my new book group the Vivid Girl was already asleep, even though we are so very close to the longest day of the year. And the book that got me out of the house tonight? The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which is, of course, Swedish.

Sweden. There’s something about it. I’m just not sure what it is.

Tack så mycket for use of the photo from flickr, originally uploaded by VisitSweden and protected under a creative commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license.

Regardless of what I may think about the American Cancer Society and other “big box” cancer organizations, (read this essay if you didn’t know there was anything to think about) I have found myself very pleased to see the big ACS billboard in town that says “‘Happy Birthday’ is a victory song,” especially as I noticed this sign a few days before my actual birthday. I am now 39, two years older than I was when I was diagnosed with stage IIIc IBC, and at that time I didn’t know if I’d be here now. Also, at that time things had been stripped down to their barest elements, and everything in the future was completely black and white: I’d either be alive, or dead (or, possibly, dying). I couldn’t imagine that I would be alive, still healing, energetic enough to take my daughter swimming several days a week but still needing a nap on the weekends. I couldn’t imagine that I would have the stamina and energy to swim for an hour in Barton Springs but not the immune system strength to protect from bacteria in the water. My diagnosis was a huge disruptive obstacle and I couldn’t see past it at all.

Now I’m older and hopefully wiser and definitely more psyched to be here than I ever thought possible. AT one point in the early stages of my treatment I ran into an aquaintance at the toy store, where we were both shopping for presents for the same birthday party. I didn’t know this woman well, but felt that I knew her well enough to answer somewhat honestly when she asked, in a meaningful way, how I was doing. I said that I was tired, that treatment was hard, that I didn’t have the energy to get through the day, but that other than that, I was doing pretty well. She said brightly, “But it’s gotta make you love life, right?”

Well.

I can say now that cancer diagnosis and cancer treatment did not so much make me love life. Sometimes I felt guilty abou that, especially when I was afraid that I might not have much life left and didn’t want to spend what time I had in misery and fear. But cancer SURVIVORSHIP, now that’s different. There are some things about my life as a cancer survivor that really suck, and some that are just nuisances, but YES, by golly, surviving cancer sure as heck makes me love life.

It makes me love life so much that it’s sometimes scary. Because there is still that shadow circling around…. or maybe it is a flock of shadows, because there are the more likely scenarios (recurrence being statistically quite likely) and then there are the things that are not cancer but that could still cause my untimely death…. some of these are related to my cancer and its treatment (infection, for example, or heart damage caused by chemotherapy) and some of them are the random unexpected things that could happen to any of us at almost any time, but that we usually manage not to think about much. Car accident, you know, or seemingly minor head injury…. blood clot to the lung,.. hanta virus….swine flu… whatever.

One of the things that the cancer experience has left me with is a tiny little case of PTSD. This is pretty common among cancer survivors and so it was fairly predictable, but still it was something I couldn’t imagine living with, back when my only concern was whether I would get to live at all. So far, for me, it has mostly just meant that I am more aware of those circling shadows than I’ve ever been before. Though it has also made me a more difficult patient (for the first time in my life I am afraid of needles) and made it impossible for me to drink bottled water or any kind of icy drink out of a styrofoam cup. At least those last two are potentially better for the environment!

It has also left me with a poor memory, a weakened immune system, and a permanently damaged lymphatic system that requires lots of daily maintenance. I hope to post soon with pictures of the various garments, machines, and accessories that are required to keep me from swelling up in a painful and disabling way. (Won’t that be nice for you all?)

But this is a post about my recent birthday, and how glad I am that I got to have a birthday, and how much I hope to have many many more. And how I hope to enjoy them in good health and good spirits, and how I enjoy once again having a future that (though I am aware I really can’t see it at all) I can once again imagine in color and texture and light.

It makes me want to jump up and march around to some kind of fight song or victory song. The Notre Dame Fight Song being the one I know best of all, it’s the one that comes to mind first. I can hear it now:

We never stumble, we never fall

We take chemo infusions of wood alcohol

We’re the young adult cancer survivors

And we want to have more birthdays!

Or something like that, anyway.

We haven’t done it yet, but I’m hoping that this year we will manage to do some outdoor ice skating at the Whole Foods downtown. My current plan has us there on Christmas Eve (would be convenient as I have to pick up a certain something at Book People right across the street). Here are the details, from the Whole Foods Calendar site:

Friday, November 28th through Sunday January 11th

Fourth Annual Ice Skating on the Plaza

10:00 am – 9:00 pm $10.00 includes rentals

The Holiday Season is here!  Bring the family out to Whole Foods Market for Austin’s only outdoor ice skating rink.  $10 a ticket – includes skate rental and 50 minutes on the ice.  Tickets are available for purchase an hour before desired skating session.

40 people maximum capacity on ice (50 during private party)

To reserve a private party, please call 512-542-2225

Regular Hours 10am – 9 pm

Special Holiday Hours:

Dec 24^th – 10 – 7
Dec 25^th – closed
Dec 31^st – 10 – 7
Jan 1^st – 10 – 8

One of our freezers is full of old coffee cans, which in turn are full of water (now ice). Mr. B has plans to make some robot face luminarias following this method:

http://www.diynetwork.com/diy/ca_crafts_projects/article/0,2041,DIY_13721_2269907,00.html

Poor guy, I don’t know when he will ever get a chance to make them! I just hope the cans of ice have a shorter stay in the freezer than Vivi’s placenta (five years and counting…..)!

One of the things I loved about Christmas time when I lived in New Mexico was the lighting of the luminarias. I just found out that there is a luminaria trail here in Austin, for two nights only, and tonight is the second night.

I haven’t found much about it online, but here is a post from the Austinist three years ago.

If you live south or west, apparently there may be a similar event at the Wildflower Center: (from KVUE)

Luminations
Dec 13-14
Holiday celebration includes more than 3,000 luminarias, twinkly lights and torches in the winter gardens. Enjoy music, crafts and a special menu at the cafe. Hours are 6 to 9 p.m. Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, 4801 La Crosse Ave.
AUSTIN
Call for info: (512) 232-0100
www.wildflower.org

As we get to this most craftiest time of the year, I am busy making lists of crafts I want to do. Of course, I have to add all these new craft ideas to my list from last year… which was added to the list from the year before that…  It’s turtles all the way down.

My biggest priority this year is to get an advent calendar made for the Vivid Girl before December 1. Here are some of the advent calendars I find inspiring:

magnetic advent calendar from love, joleen

Tiny Christmas Tree Advent Calendar from Scribbit

the classic felt tree Advent Calendar, this one from Kaboose.com

this gorgeous advent calendar from Craftster

the adorable Stocking Advent Calendar from Soule Mama

And there are more. Many, many more. In one dream (the one in which I have a differently-themed Christmas tree in every room of the house, natch) I have advent calendars all over the place. Maybe I can make one a year and soon they will definitely add up.

Last week I went through all our books and picked out the best holiday choices. I put them in a basket and stashed them away. I want to make sure I have 24 good holiday books so I can wrap them, put them in the basket, and use them for an advent calendar like this one:

Charlotte Mason Advent Book Box

Of course, I haven’t even gotten started on the Advent Calendar and I am already looking around at other adorable crafts. The Vivid Girl and I got all stocked up on the stuff to make these cinnamon dough glitter birds from Martha Stewart, but the dough recipe didn’t turn out on our first try (too sticky to work with, then the glue started to dry) and we haven’t had time to try again. Looks like there are some good troubleshooting ideas in the comments.

The next thing I want to work on is a wreath for the front door. After lugging around a box of wreath making supplies for years, but never getting the darn thing made, I realize I need to choose a different kind of wreath to make. Something easy and fast. My favorite is the gumdrop wreath from Kiddley via Martha Stewart, but Mr. B (perhaps wisely) is not too excited about all that candy hanging at the Vivid Girl’s eye level. Still, so pretty!

So now I am all about the button wreath. There are so many different possibilities! And it will allow me to dig into my button stash: about 20 years ago I bought two antique jars full of vintage beads from a junk store in Attica, Indiana, and I have been slowly working my way through them ever since. The Vivid Girl, of course, has gotten her hands on them and she is working through them much more quickly! Which means that to make the wreath I see in my mind, I will probably need more buttons. And this is where I may need help, because I have started bidding on buttons on eBay. Oh yes! Wonderful buttons, in beautiful materials and Christmas colors! I hope I will find the time to work on the projects I have in mind for these buttons, because right now I am very excited about them. But it does often seem that I am very excited when I buy the materials, and then… something happens.

Here are some links for buttony inspiration:

Button Wreath from CraftStylish

Button Flower Wreath from In the Treetop

A Button Wreath Tutorial on flickr

the button wreath ornament

Just popping in to write a quick pre-holiday post.

This Sunday is the 12th Annual Empty Bowl Project. Always the Sunday before Thanksgiving. This year it will be at the Mexican American Cultural Center from 11 to 3. It’s super fun and for a great cause. For $15, you get to choose your own handmade bowl, then take it to volunteers who gently wash it, then you can choose your soup (you get a roll too!) from the tasty offerings of local restaurants. Then you get to sit around at big tables with lots of other local folks, listen to music, eat soup, compare bowls…. yum! When you’re done, wipe out your bowl, wrap it up in newspaper, and take it home. We have a fabulous collection of bowls from past years, and the Vivid Girl was even featured in a TV news story about the event when she was a toddler.

The Chuy’s Children Giving to Children Parade is the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving. The parade starts at 11 and lasts about an hour, but you’ve gotta get there early to get a good spot along the route. It’s a pretty good parade, with the big floaty character balloons, dressed-up ponies, and tumblers galore. Local bands perform Christmas songs on floats. So fun! At a certain time, the whole parade stops and volunteers collect new or gently used toys from the kids. These will be used by Blue Santa to provide Christmas gifts to children who otherwise might not get any.

And don’t forget the KUT John Aielli Christmas sing along and tree lighting ceremony on the South Steps of the Texas State Capitol Building, Saturday December 6, starting at 6 pm. This has become a huge Austin event and is fun fun fun. This year the Austin Farmers’ Market will even be setting up across the street starting at 5:30.

Finally, the Zilker Park Trail of Lights will be open from December 15 to December 23. We love to take the bus from Waterloo Park and walk the trail, ending up under the Zilker Christmas tree where we spin and spin and then buy huge bags of the best kettle corn on Earth.

These are the holiday traditions where our family gets to really feel like a part of the city we live in, and we love them and look forward to them all year. I like having them spaced
a bit so we can take things at our own pace and enjoy cozy nights at home as well as big boisterous community festivals like these. As we tumble along into the holiday season this year I find myself feeling incredibly grateful for all the communities that have so lovingly supported my family, as well as for the fact that I feel good enough to get out there and really celebrate again!