Death by fruit, part 3; dinner; goodbye

You guys, I've started to resent the fruit. The blackberries, raspberries, purple plums, most yellow plums and the majority of peaches and tomatoes are successfully put away. It has been a damn marathon. Mostly fun, now less so. 

Today I made lightly spiced plum jam, froze an arseload of peaches and berries and made a peach-blackberry pie which is, admittedly, divine. The highlight was the off-the-hook fabulous tomato-saffron tomato sauce I put atop paccheri for dinner. Blissful. Every single bite.

peach and blackberry pie, pre-top crust

paccheri with tomato-saffron sauce

Because I am now retching on the couch whilst trying to block my ears from the Republican clown car "debate," I am going to go pack because I leave for Amherst, MA, first thing in the morning. 

Why am I going, you might wonder? I am heading to what promises to be an amazing writing retreat with the inestimable Jena Schwartz and six incredible women I've gotten to know by writing with her. We are heading there tomorrow, like bees to a hive, to connect, write and laugh for forty-eight glorious hours. I'm so lucky! 

I'm considering taking the weekend off from Em-i-lis so that I can leave my laptop at home and simply be present there. If I'm radio silent until Sunday night, that's why. 

Thank you to everyone who read my essay on Mamalode today and showered me with love and support about it. Love you back! And I'm so glad it resonated with you.

Death by fruit, part 2

The mountain of fruit in my kitchen has threatened to topple several times, but I am determined to prevail. 

So far, I've put up nine quarts of tomatoes, six pints of brandied peaches, four pints of ginger peach rhubarb jam, four pints of raspberry jam, god knows how much blackberry jam, 1 pie (gone in 24 hours; mostly Jack), several pints of plum basil jam, millions of cups of blackberries frozen and vacuum-sealed for the deep freeze and this morning created a roasted ginger-plum jam with a hint of vanilla and a splash of Cognac.

It's been both delightful and exhausting, but mostly, just a beautiful exercise in planning for the future while avoiding waste.

prepping plums for jam; #nofilter; incredible, yes?

prepping peaches to be brandied; #nofilter; incredible, yes?

ginger peach rhubarb jam

I believe this looks familiar, yes? Progress though, y'all! Progress!

When kids should be neither seen nor heard

There are days, and today was such, I could stand to do without spending much time with the boys.

They are loud and messy and uncouth. They whine and argue and burp lyrics to songs. They scratch their butts and chew hangnails. They hide their clean and folded laundry instead of putting it away. They negotiate, futilely but aggressively, for dessert at breakfast. It is tiring to argue about nonsensical things before 8am.

We got to the camp bus stop and because Oliver insisted on bringing a robot, derby cap and walkie talkie in the car, he’d accidentally left his lunchbox at home. I knew where I’d find it: near his closet where he put it down to fetch the houndstooth cap from its hook. Another sandwich bites the dust.

Home later after the gym, I found and unpacked the lunchbox and saved what I could. I surveyed their rooms and saw dirty underpants crotch-out on the floors. Open boxes of now-stale anything littered their desks and the dark spaces under their beds. The sink looked as if they'd tried to frost a porcelain cake using toothpaste. A Jackson Pollock had been crafted on the wall with rebounding pee.

“This is what ‘I know you can do it by yourself! Independence, darlings!’ gets me,” I mused aloud.

The sheer number of crumbs that Hansel & Hansel had dropped on the breakfast table and then along the path upstairs was staggering. Surely it could wrap the Earth. The dustbuster’s battery petered out before I sucked the crap away.

I was so glad they were at camp. I was so grateful for their lengthy day away.

So I caramelized shallots...

Days like these sometimes blindside me although I'm starting to think that if I carefully mapped my life, Mondays would really be off the chart in terms of the kids being annoying and my tolerance, or lack thereof, for it. 

Weekends are anything but Sabbathy. Come Sunday night, Tom and I often look at each other askance and ask, with both worry and hope, “Will this ever be less depleting?”

Although it is exhausting to be an at-home mom of little ones, I watch Tom leave each weekday morning and think, “How the fuck does he do it?” On, on, on. All the time on. I try to give him down time when I can because, if only for a few hours, I get a taste of that most days; if you count errands and laundry and wiping pee walls and vacuuming up the Earth’s belt as down time which I often do because at least I don’t have to be on.

Or dressed in any quasi-professional way.

I hit a wall today. Was it the training run on Saturday? The play dates + produce + family get together over the weekend? Was it being awakened well before 7am for oh, nine years now? Was it latent anxiety that just wears and erodes?

I dunno but come this evening, when Ol wouldn’t pick up the Legos that he’d cycloned throughout his room but wanted to get out the Halloween bag-of-bones (and naturally cyclone out and then not pick those up either) and then cried and went boneless over my refusal to unearth said bag-of-bones without first seeing a Lego-free floor, I just wanted to quit.

When Jack came down again and again and again from bed, despite the years we’ve spent talking about what bedtime means, I just wanted to quit.

I wanted to finish making dinner for T and me, to try and connect in the thirty minutes during which we’re both just awake enough to talk.

for this tart that actually came together...

Another hug, another kiss, another sad glance at the newspapers that will be recycled instead of read.

“Tomorrow is anothuh day,” I intoned a la Scarlett.

It is.

I think it is.

Is that a good thing?

I think so.

I hope so.

I’m tired.

and really hit the spot.

Tom has banished me, with all the love in his being, to the basement; our secret hideaway. I accept!