Holding Pattern

Next month I will celebrate my 9th anniversary at Frontier Airlines. It’s hard to believe I have been a Flight Attendant for nearly a decade. It has had its ups and downs (pun intended), but I would not trade it for the world. I have traveled the world (29 countries and counting!), met the man of my dreams and boast friendships that will surely last the rest of my lifetime, long after I hang up my wings. 

There is a phrase in my industry that sums up my last 16 months: hurry up and wait. You hurry through security and wait in the boarding area. You hurry onto the plane and wait while the mechanics fix a computer glitch. You hurry to beat the impending elements, but the airport closes anyway due to nearby lightning. Your life becomes a series of frantic starts and stops.

My month is also broken into jarringly emotional starts and stops. Half the month is built in anticipation of something; the other half is spent in recovery of something. To be frank, you rev up your libido and pour wine and coordinate schedules and wait for the second line on the ovulation stick to appear and you hope and pray, and then you love. You plateau for a few days and rest before you spend the next couple weeks sidling down that very mountain you clambered up. And then your cycle--the cycle--begins again. 

“They” always say that waiting is the hardest part. And they are right. If I could know the following morning that our attempts the night before were futile, I could stand up, brush off, and go about my business relatively unscathed. But simple biology dictates that a two week wait is inevitable following ovulation. A mandatory pause button. Life in a holding pattern. 

Even as a small girl, I loved flying. I loved leaving somewhere (or something) behind and arriving in a completely different topography. I loved nestling into my window seat and gazing at the mirrored rivers that carve through the Earth’s surface knowing that-- in a few short hours--I would land. Arriving is imminent and the wait is over. 

There are no short-cuts on this journey, at least not for us. For some reason we are meant to endure detours and roadblocks. Maybe it will make the destination all the sweeter. I must believe that it will. I am a bird flapping my wings against gusty winds; I am a fish swimming against the current. It is incongruent to feel exhausted despite there being no forward movement. So we circle and we wait. We see the control tower in the distance and we are waiting for clearance to land. 

Turning Family Recipes into Art

The last time I visited my Oma, I stumbled across a large Ziplock bag full of family recipes. They were scrawled on scrap pieces of paper in the original script of my Oma and my aunts. The beauty of my Dad's side of the family is that there is no such thing as a recipe card. My Oma (and her 6 children) are guilty of scribbling lists and recipes and sometimes even birthday cards on the reverse side of plumber ads and auto mechanic coupons. I asked my Oma if I could keep them. Since then, I have been able to supplement all the half-paged, mostly illegible recipes from my Dad's side of the family with the neat and precise recipe cards of my Mom's side of the family. And splayed before me is a beautiful collage of half century-old, bacon-grease-splattered family documents--my heritage being served up in the form of a plum cake.

These prized recipes are worthy of display. I dare not stuff them into a folder where they would be referenced once a year. So here is what I did.

I narrowed it down to the best of the best. I tried to find recipes that truly represent my lineage of cuisine (cuisineage?): my Aunt Katie's Italian spinguni and my Oma's stollen; our family's famed frog-eye salad (made with acini de pepe as "eyes") and my mom's Easter pie. I also looked for recipes with a little color, either from the ink in which it was written, or the paper on which it was written.

I dragged out the canvas that I've had laying around ever since the last Hobby Lobby 50% off sale and placed it on a surface of newspapers.

And I did a dry-run.

And now for the Mod Podge.

I used a thin layer of mod podge for the glue, and after it dried, I used another thin layer for the sealant. *I would recommend using a straight edge or a ruler to try to smooth out some of the air bubbles. The reason I didn't, is because most of the recipes I chose are onion-skin thin and I didn't want them to tear. 

And.....

Drumroll....

Voila! 

Now my eating nook will have a beautiful, meaningful and practical piece of art hanging in it!

Parting Words: 

I photocopied every recipe front and back before I glued them to the canvas. 

If you don't have any of your original hand-written family recipes, no problem. You can either start accumulating now (send well-chosen pieces of paper to various family members and ask them to scribble out your favorite recipe. You can tea-soak these pages to acquire and aged look.) Or you can pop into a flea market or thrift store and search the shelves for old cookbooks. I found pages that were aged and also appropriate to my family. The typed recipe pictured above the small mason jar in the center of canvas is a "minestrone" recipe from a cookbook from the 60's. I think a canvas full of typed " recipes from "vintage" cookbooks could be pretty nifty, too. 

Please look for my next blog post: Fried Chicken with a side of Rouladen...coming soon!

Pendulum

I had to drag my winter clothes back out this week. Our 1929 house has itty-bitty closets that could never accommodate my winter AND summer clothes. Every year I am guilty of trading them out too early; there is inevitably a 60 degree day early in March that inspires me to box up all my coats and boots and exile them to our garage. Turns out the storm didn’t hit the way they thought it would and I  would’ve been okay to leave my coats sleeping in hibernation. But when I looked outside our front windows, I commiserated with the tulips: I felt a heaviness on me; I felt blanketed in cold. I felt ill-equipped to weather the storm.

I am astonished by the highs and lows of this process of trying to conceive.  One day I can fawn all over a baby. I coo alongside its mother and am practically drooling myself over their sweetness and chubbiness. The next day I turn into a wild dog with my hind leg stuck between the metal jaws of a trap. I glower and snarl at anyone who draws near, despite their efforts to help free me. I sniff out the various peace offerings that are tossed my way, but ultimately leave them where they were thrown. I retreat into my cave where I can lick my wounds alone.

On good days I feel capable and hopeful and sometimes even blessed to be granted this extra time. Eric and I play scrabble every day and indulgently thumb through our Rolodex of favorite restaurants come dinner time. We can get on a plane to anywhere and not worry about anything except whether or not we’ve forgotten our passports. We sip wine and watch Chopped  and sleep in and go to the gym.

But on bad days I am touchy and prickly and feel like someone whose house has just been broken into. My personal space and comfort has been invaded as I cautiously navigate each room of the house. I glare at everyone who passes by. I am critical and accusatory and hateful towards no one and everyone, nothing and everything.

I know my condition is not unique. It’s universal to experience seasons of discontent and helplessness. I know people who are unemployed, going through a divorce, grieving the loss of a loved one. I feel petty and selfish when I allow grief to knock me on my ass. But that’s the thing about grief--it barrels through your door, uninvited, and stays as long as it wants. You can turn out all the lights and change into your pj’s and it still might not take the hint that it has overstayed its welcome.

Today the sun blazes. We are in Santa Barbara for a wedding. Eric is golfing and I am tucked inside our boutique hotel room sipping coffee and watching our gauzy white curtains flutter in the breeze. Two people will exchange vows this weekend and I am humbly reminded of the life that pulsates just outside my set of circumstances. There is a pair of binoculars resting upon a stack of vintage books in our hotel room. They are meant for bird gazing. I will use them to step out onto our balcony, broaden my lens and try to grasp a glimpse of the bigger picture.

Thinking Down the Line

Eric and I found paradise on Earth. It came in the form of a little Tuscan village near Sienna called Buonconvento. Months prior, when planning our trip to Italy, we booked our farmhouse on a wink and a prayer that it would be half as charming as the photos indicated. It ended up being twice as much. We traversed the Italian countryside in our Fiat, the wind in our hair. Surrounded by rolling hills of lavender and sunflowers, we found the entrance to our Cyprus-lined driveway. Our car coughed and hiccuped as it climbed higher and higher. Our home for the next several days sat perched atop what seemed to be all of Italy; the clouds and the vineyards and the olive trees extended as far as the eye could see. 

We picked fresh vegetables and herbs from the garden to add to the  pasta we had purchased in town. Buonconvento:  the cobblestone corridors gave way to the butcher shops that sold mortadella the size of a whiskey barrel. The cheese mongers offered samples of creamy mozzarella as the scent of rosemary and oregano perfumed the fall air. Long banquet tables were joined together and cloaked in white linens where five generations sat and broke bread. Chianti glasses clanked and the laughter was boisterous. And this was no holiday. This was just Sunday. 

In Italy (and every country I have visited outside the United States) I have been moved by the tremendous value placed upon family. I am especially gripped by the reverence and respect that is bestowed upon the elderly. It goes back to the provenance that I wrote about a couple entries ago--knowing your point of origin. Lineage is linear, a line woven through a family from its earliest descendant to the baby being born today. We lose that in the United States. We are caught up in a white-picket-fence notion that family is a nuclear thing that exists within the walls of a house. Lineage is severed and families become islands, independent and isolated. 

I have always been a nostalgic person. My Mother-in-law, Linda, gave me a set of shrimp forks and butter knives that date back to the early 1900s. They came from Eric’s great-grandmother. Linda knows that it's not the silver or the cocktail fork itself that interests me. It's the story. It’s the symbolism of something being passed down from generation to generation. It’s broadening a lens and belonging to a greater purpose, one that involves more than an SUV and a Golden Retriever. It is equally important for me that my child be bounced on the knee of his/her grandparents as it is for him/her to be cradled in my arms. 

***

I stood behind an elderly man in the grocery store earlier this week. He was probably about 85 years old and took great pride in his ability to run his own errands. He wore pressed khaki pants and a button-down shirt and carried a worn, leather wallet that matched his worn, leather belt and shoes. He counted out exact change for his handful of purchases. The cashier and the two customers in line behind him and in front of me treated him with impatience and haste. They clicked fingernails on the counter. They heaved great sighs of annoyance and shifted their weight from foot to foot. It would never dawn on them that, in Italy, this man would be seated at the head of the table for Sunday dinners. He would be looked upon with respect  and his words of wisdom would fall on receiving and teachable ears of the generations laid before him. He would bounce babies on his knee and they would know their role in the story that God set in motion at the dawn of time.