Half Fail, Lessons Learned

 This looks fantastic, right? Mozzarella and feta, eggplant tomato sauce, lamb sausage. Those parts came together like a spicy, cheesy, melty dream.

 The problem was the crust. I bought a mix, a gluten free stir in water mess of a mix. It looked like pancake batter. All was going well though, it smelled pretty good while it was baking, before toppings were added.

Oh, and the entire thing looked like a success! It smelled good, a nibble off the edge gave me false witness to its true nature of.....yuckness.

The crust was soggy and spongy and...... moist. Like a gross thick noodle. Fail. FAIL.

Just about everyone in at the table ate the toppings off and tossed the rest to the dogs.

To make it just perfectly clear how awful it was? Holly quietly came to the kitchen and asked if I could maybe make a peach pie because she was still hungry and please mama because that was NOT pizza. 

Freezer gold, peach pie was on the table an hour later. Ready to eat. I didn't even get any.

Next time I will use my own go to for pizza crust, though it may be harder to make and take a bit more time. Lesson learned.

Tuna Salad- Pantry Style

Today, I had promised the kids tuna melts. We were out of bread. Out of crackers. I had intended to make bread but the morning got away from me. What to do?

Tuna salad. On sliced tomato! Yes!

Recipe:
One package of tuna, in water
Handful of dried cranberries
1/2 cup chopped celery
1/2 Braeburn or Granny apple chopped
1/2 cup of sour cream
salt to taste- salt is important here

Serve over sliced tomato and top with pretzels for crunch! (or walnuts!)

An easy, really good lunch that we pulled together from what we had. Week 2 of grocery spending strike and we are still going strong.

My Other Love

Last night I fell asleep wondering about my last 15 years. How did I walk away from poetry when I so clearly and deeply adore it? What happened? It wasn't motherhood. I had closed my books long before Lily was born.

Ah. Then this morning a picture of a lovely abandoned house, three storied, Italianate lines.....peeling paint, five gables, a hybrid Stick, Queen Anne style beauty. I wondered about the balustrade inside.

I fell for architecture. When I graduated college the first time, BA in hand, wisdom my adviser had given me casually, haunted me. Sure, you know how to write....but about what? What do you really know of the world? Don't write for a living, be a brick layer or farmer by day. Let the salt of the sweat of your days season the writing you do at night when the day slips away. Let writing be the mistress you run to, not the drudge of the mundane.

So, I fell forward into restoring houses. It was a family business but I am a solitary creature. We bought a three storied Victorian, plaster collapsing, floors unstable and moved in to live like homeless teenagers. It sometimes snowed and gathered drifts in the bedrooms. There were rooms we didn't know about when we bought it. Sometimes we would get lost inside the house. It was an amazing project. I interned at the State Historical Preservation Office. I got hired at a local museum. I spent my days and nights deeply immersed in old house restoration, history, and technology. I got so intensely involved in starting the restoration that I started taking graduate architecture classes. Then, easily slipped into the graduate programs for history, architecture, and non fiction writing. One thing flowed into another and I was in love.

Soon motherhood entered that world too. That was hard. Balancing my day job, a newborn, graduate school, and the house restoration. So very hard.

Why did I abandon poetry for the crumbling plaster and splintery fumes of the hard labour and physical work of house restoration? Because there is poetry in the grain of the wood, because the stories of the people who haunt these places with their lives are intoxicating, because the words of architecture filled my soul the way that Shakespeare and Leonard Cohen do. I was not without.

Even now, my heart quickens when I oil the hardwood of our old farmhouse. I mourn brokenhearted when I see an abandoned turn of the century barn that will soon fall with the seasons from neglect, slipping from our collective memories and memorialised with corn and bean chemical fields. Sometimes I break down and cry.



Now, as I re-open the poetry part of my mind, I have a life I can write from. That was not a waste, that time was not idle. I need not regret my chosen path, as sometimes I have in the dark when sleep is stolen by babies and frozen pipes.

Tell me, where is the poetry and beauty in your life?

Taking Myself Seriously

When I started reviving my wild mind, listening to the writer's voice again, and taking up the pen.....I was unsure. I still am. I am falling in love with word craft again. I know much more about love than I did 20 years ago though, and this time around I know that love is hard work and not all intuition and applause. So I set to work to learn this skill again.

I surprised myself. I was startled at how much of the vocabulary of poetry I actually remember. I was reminded of the parts I never understood and took to puzzling it out this time around instead of haughtily moving on, nose upturned.

I set a schedule. I stuck to it.

Then, I let go. I let other people read my work instead of hiding it.

At some point I was researching something for the farm, we raise Ossabaw Island hogs, and I came upon a website for the Ossabaw Island Writer's Retreat. Ah, that looks neat, I said. Aw, it is also way expensive and 2,000 miles away. I clicked the page closed and moved on.

A couple days later my father in law sent me the link to it. Again, I sighed heavily and closed the email.

A week later or so my dear husband Chad brought it up over dinner. Why this retreat? There are others close by! At better times of the year!

A conversation with a friend led me to the realisation that the piece I am missing to publishing is networking, is knowing people who publish, is being out there with published folks. I brought it up with Chad and he reminded me of the retreat again. I set aside money to travel later in the year, had almost reached my goal....why not use it for this instead?

No.

I went to bed grumpy.

I woke up thinking of an island off the coast of Georgia.

I brought it up with Chad again, we looked up travel cost. Well, that nixed it. Travel there was WAY expensive. Train, plane, rental car....all of it too expensive. So I lamented to a friend and she said, MEGABUS.

Wait, what is that? 5$ to Chicago from here is what that is. Another friend said once I get to Georgia she will drive me to the ferry (4 hours from her house!).

So.....I applied. I sent in the best work I had as an example for the application. I waited.

I waited. Waited. Days and days of waiting. I hate waiting.

Today, friends, I got the notification that I was accepted.

I nearly shook with fear. Yes, fear! To do this I have to ride a bus for 36 hours over the whole of the United States and take myself seriously as a writer.

The bus ride is easy compared to that last part.