monday mini

On the way to go pick up Megan from school, walking down our driveway — which isn’t long but has a reasonable grade — Kira said, “This is a steep hill… it bends me back!”

Physics, toddler style.

Which takes us, in a roundabout way, to another mini from today:

We have this Howard Behrens print in our kitchen, and at some point I must have told the girls that their Aunt Elsa lives there, there being San Francisco of course, where the hills are really and truly steep, in case you missed the segue.

And this morning Kira said, out of the blue, “Aunt Elsa lives on that bridge!”

Me, striving for accuracy, though whyever why I do not know: “Yes, well, Aunt Elsa can see that bridge from her roof, where she lives.”

Her, insistent: “She lives on that bridge! On the TOP of it!”

And oh, what a view she must have, eh what?

a dessert to share

It’s probably a little strong to say that I love to cook, but there’s no question that I really enjoy it.  (Especially, of course, when I have a good knife on hand. Or maybe I should say in hand. But I’ve already written at least once about my love affair with knives, so I’ll avoid that tempting tangent for the moment.)

However, I’m really not much of a baker.  Yes, I make cookies at Christmas — right yummy ones, if I do say so myself — and I have a few other standbys that I can generally execute without too much stress.  But overall, baking is way too much of a scientific endeavor to suit my personality.  Unless you really, really know what the hell you’re doing, extemporaneous moments in baking lead most often to inedibility. At least in my kitchen. 

And c’mon, I’m all about the extemporaneous, the seat of the pants, the spontaneous. This is not a surprise to anyone who knows me, or probably even anyone who’s just read my mental meanderings. That it carries over into my cooking is just evidence of my continuity of character, and not of my inability to follow a recipe. Could if I wanted to, so there.

Quick, take the picture: there's a fork just out of view!

But I’ve made this cake three times now for various social events, and it is both disappearingly delicious and just about damn foolproof.  I even messed around with it to make it more nutritious and it’s still good.  So I’m sharing with you, my loves.

And do by all means take note that because of the changes I made, it’s practically health food and thus makes a superb breakfast, post-ride snack, or both. In the same day even. I can attest to this personally.

Homely Apple Cake

WHAT YOU NEED:
1.5c sugar
1.5c whole wheat flour
1.5c whole wheat pastry flour
2t baking soda
2t salt
2t cinnamon
1/4t nutmeg
1/4t cloves
2/3c vegetable oil
2/3c applesauce
3/4c milk (skim works fine)
2 eggs
2t vanilla extract
4c chopped, peeled apple

WHAT YOU DO:
1. Preheat your oven to 325F. Grease or spray a 9×13 pan. Mine is glass.
2. Dump all your dry ingredients into a big bowl: sugar, flour, baking soda, salt, spices. Stir it up to blend. Make a sort of hole in the middle with your spoon.
3. Add all the wet stuff together, in a big Pyrex measuring cup maybe. Stir to beat the eggs up a bit, and then pour the whole mess into that middle hole you made.
4. Mix until well blended. Don’t get too crazy, but make sure it’s mixed, no flour hiding on the bottom. It’ll be a little thick but that’s okay. Fold in the apples and spread all that glop into your greased pan.
3. Bake for about 75 minutes, until it’s firm and kinda browned, stick a toothpick in, you know the drill. My oven is a little off, but I can’t ever remember which direction, so you might wanna check on it before the 75 minutes is up.

And if you pour it into the pan, realize you forget to add the eggs, dig most of the apples back out, mix in the eggs, and add the apples back, it will forgive you. I can attest to this personally as well.

(Recipe broadly adapted from allrecipes.com).

family-photo Friday

We have some wonderful neighbors whose own children are getting to the age where they are gone more often than not. On Thursday I had both a happy-hour date with friends and an hour before Sean arrived home, so I dropped the girls off across the street at their house. They came home with big smiles… and bigger stuffed animals.

Megan with Moxie

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Kira wasn’t interested in having her picture taken with hers, a bear she named “Eeny-Meeny-Miney-Mo” — or maybe “Santa Claws,” depending on when you ask her — but this is how I found her one night last week. She always, but always, has something (often several somethings, often random, and always amusing) with her when she’s falling asleep.

Tigger watching over sweet sleeping Kira

AFB

I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook which I’ll meander on about someday, but today it’s all about LOVE.

My new ridin’ buddy Laura, who blogs at SurlyGirl (no, she’s not mean and grumpy; she rides a bike made by Surly), is also a Facebook friend. She’s single, and her two dogs are her family, plain and simple.

This morning she posted on her Facebook profile that one of them, Izzy, had gone missing the night before, and it was pretty clear from the tone of the post that she was a complete basket case. I logged an appropriately sympathetic comment and headed off on my day. I’m not the praying type, but I held the thought of her in my mind.

Leaving my power yoga session (yes, I’m starting a new love affair in my life), my cell rang. Truth is I almost never have it close to hand, but there it was. It was Emily, who’d also seen the Facebook posting. She was driving and had spotted a german shepherd running along a main arterial on the outskirts of the city, and was trying to turn around to track it. She didn’t have a phone number for SurlyGirl, so she called me. We agreed it was crazy to think it was the same dog, way over there, but…

I had the number and called; passed along Emily’s number and crossed my fingers.

Not 15 minutes later I got calls from both of them, telling me it WAS Izzy, and thanks to Emily and a half-dozen of the County’s finest, she was on her way home with her desperately relieved owner, both headed for a bath and bed.

I hung up with a whole new appreciation for the benefits of social networking. So don’t be dissin’ Facebook, now. We’re tight these days.

summer stroll

Wednesdays are all about Kate’s blog carnival here at Fraught! I’m under the wire by a few hours — it’s not quite Thursday yet. Do stop by her place to see who else is playing along, or let her know you want in on the fun.

I spent a portion of virtually every summer of my childhood at a place painted forever in my memory: 4255 West Lake Road, Canandaigua, New York. It was heaven on earth, and hell at times, too. But I’ll focus on the heaven, because that’s what lives larger in my mind.

I don’t know who lives there now, though I suppose I could find out. I drove by about 10 years ago, with my face out the window, along with probably my entire upper body, craning, trying to take in as many details as possible, saying Don’t drive so FAST! to the MPM, who was certainly not topping 10mph. Changed over the decades, yes, but still recognizable.

We visited virtually every year until I think 1980, for weeks and occasionally longer. It was my mother’s sister’s place, my Aunt Diane — or, technically, probably her husband’s and not hers; it went in the divorce (passing nod to the hell aspect), in any case. To us, my brother and me, it wasn’t far short of magical.

Come to think, it was about the first home I ever had. My parents had returned from their years in Africa, my mother far-gone pregnant, my brother two and a half or so. I was born in May, and so the first months of my life were spent there on the shores of the Finger Lakes, though my memories don’t begin until a good deal later.

There was the house (the “cottage,” though it hardly fit any description of a cottage I can imagine), and then the apartment over the garage, where we stayed. Both are etched indelibly into my mind, their nooks and hiding places and particular smells. As a child, I would dream of being there, and wake terribly disappointed to be in my own bed.

Canandaigua is one of the Finger Lakes, in western upstate New York; about a mile wide, and deep deep deep in the middle. In those days, everything but drinking water came from a pipe that stuck out 10 feet or so from the base of the waterfront wall, so you bathed all summer long in lake water, whether it was off the dock with the bar of Ivory stashed along the beam underneath, or inside in the apartment’s metal shower stall, or the pink bathtub in the attic quarters of the main house.

There were boats: always a canoe (a 17′ aluminum Grumman; my parents paddled across the lake in it from my Gram’s cottage on the east side, arriving to say their official wedding vows in front of the assembled family. My uncle loaned Dad a pair of socks; he’d forgotten his, or thought them extraneous, perhaps), a Sunfish (you haven’t lived if you never solo’d a Sunfish at a young age), an O’Day Sailor, buoyed offshore, and for a time a rowboat, which gave way to the first of several Boston Whalers (the cousins all learned to drive one, a skill I envied greatly). And always, some substantial open-bow inboard model for skiing and such.

There was what we called The Raft: a float, anchored out a distance from the dock, where the water was something over a fathom deep. For years it had a platform trampoline spring-thing on it, which was all kinds of fun, as was swimming out, stealth-style, and trying to scare the bejesus out of whomever was obliviously enjoying a peaceful sunning session.

The dock was large enough to hold a substantial cocktail party, and it housed a flagpole. To this day, hearing the rhythmic wind-shudder clank of metal on metal takes me instantly back to that dock. As does the smell of petunias, the old-fashioned red-and-white kind, which my aunt faithfully placed in the dock planters every year.

There was a swing of the two-long-ropes-and-a-board variety that hung from one of the immense trees just in from the waterfront (my brother probably remembers what genus it was; I don’t have a clue). That was a swing to put other swings to shame — I’d be guessing at its arc, but it was considerable.

There was the Back Forty, across the private drive; I believe it was communally owned by the half-dozen or so properties on the small drive that dipped down off West Lake Road proper. There was a righteous treehouse platform; my eldest cousin fell from it one year, breaking both wrists. And raspberry bushes. Picnic spots and endless exploration to be done, if the lake ever fell out of favor for an afternoon.

Close enough to canoe to was a shaley cliff that was home to fossils galore. We spent hours there every year. And between the cottage and the fossilling was a crick, with all possible crick-type fun, including crawdads and upstream hiking.

My mother’s mother’s cottage (small and truer to the name) on the other side of the lake could almost be seen on the clearest of days, looking east across and a bit north, and could be canoed to or sailed to — solo as we got old enough to be out of sight on the water. The lake itself is oriented north-south, and one leg of the trip was almost always a hard beat to weather. I learned to watch the wind carefully before deciding to make the crossing.

There was a particular pattern of light that would play in the morning on the ceiling of the apartment’s front room, early sunlight reflecting off water rippled by a smart breeze. I can see that in my mind’s eye, and it makes me a little heartsick, that memory of the brilliant promise of a day; the knowing that it can’t ever be again.

If you’ve schlepped along this far on my stroll down memory lane, I appreciate it. There’s not much in the way of a destination here, other than to say that I hope to find some way to re-create some sort of that same experience for my girls.

Part of it is returning, year after year, to the same place. That part can be done.

And part of it is the relatively pristine nature of the lake in those days, and the lack of crowds on even the busiest of holiday weekends. I suspect that today, like most residential lakes, I’d no sooner let my kid sail or canoe across Canandaigua solo than cross an Interstate in the dead of night to fetch herself a Slurpee. So that part is gone forever, and that is a sadness.

Not that we could afford Canandaigua. Good golly molly. Today, it’s known as the priciest lakefront property in the U.S., outside of Lake Tahoe. Everyone in the family weeps openly when the subject of my Gram’s cottage comes up: it was sold in the mid 1980s for a pittance.

the smell of spring

On a recent afternoon I was part of nearly identical conversations on two separate playgrounds.

It was a warm and sunny day, in contrast to those preceding it, so there was quite a crowd sitting and chatting after pickup for Kira’s dayschool while the kids played. (All except for Kira, who — sigh — far prefers to hang out close to me and watch the action from an aloof distance.)

One of the moms said, “Phewww! I keep catching a whiff of something really nasty! Have you smelled it?”

Given that I was sitting there in my biking togs, following a good couple-hour ride, I felt obliged to point to myself as the likely culprit. “Sorry; I’m a little sweaty… “

She denied it. “No, it’s like a FISHY kind of smell. And I first smelled it in the parking lot, really strong there. Now it’s not so bad, just a whiff sometimes.”

Riding out of the parking lot toward home, I caught the smell — though I didn’t think fish so much as, I don’t know, just a cloying yuck — and recognized the offender: it’s March, and the Bradford Pears are in bloom.

Fast-forward an hour to pickup at Megan’s school, where one towers over the sidewalk leading out the center doors. “Phew!! What IS that smell? Like fish!?!”  It was like an audition run-through:  same lines, different cast.

I still hadn’t showered, though I’d changed out of my togs, but I felt confident enough of  the tree-bloom answer to offer it up. Everyone said, Oh, right, and then we got into a discussion about how they’ve been planted so extensively in our city.

Beginning several decades ago, horticulturists and landscape designers across the Mid-Atlantic developed such an orgiastically prolonged hard-on for this cultivar of pyrus calleryana that it’s now a ubiquitous feature across the region.

Some areas, including ours, have begun gradually replacing them over the last half-dozen years; they’re very weak trees and our climate is such that we’re prone to ice storms. And, lord, what a mess that combination makes for.  Once the Bradfords get any size on them, a quarter-inch of ice and they either split right down the middle or drop branches like rose petals down a wedding aisle.

Nature, 1; Municipal Arborists, 0.

But it made me think about the fact that the Bradfords were chosen so widely for specific reasons:  They have a pretty white bloom that holds for a good  while; they have a nice appealing ovally symmetry; they don’t get too toweringly big; and they have a fantastic rich burgundy fall color that, again, holds forever.

So from a purely visual standpoint, they’re a great  tree, and a perfectly sensible choice for mass planting along charming thoroughfares.  My mother-in-law to this day gushes about how beautiful it looked all up and down the streets when the MPM and I were married; our anniversary is during the peak of Bradford bloom time.

However, to my mind they speak volumes about the fact that we’re no longer a pedestrian, open-air society, but one that lives largely inside cars and  climate-controlled environments year-round.  Because I am utterly certain that no one who has ever strolled under a blooming Bradford Pear, nor smelled its scent wafting in their window on a warm March day’s breeze, would ever choose to plant a single one.  Let alone an entire avenue or, god forbid, a veritable city’s worth.

It’s an interesting, and sad, testament.

The other notable arborial example of this hermetic folly is the female gingko tree.  Gingkos are spectacular, and fun.  They have a wonderfully graceful shape and reach, with sweet fan-shaped leaves that turn pure gold in the fall.  And the remarkable and amusing trait of shedding all their leaves in about a three-hour timespan on a single autumn day, covering the ground beneath in a glorious gold carpet, thick and shuffling and smelling of fall.

And the female bears — and drops, in gruesome quantity — a fruit that smells exactly like rotting, rancid, meat.  Or sewage.  Or something.  It is spectacularly noisome.  And there are a half-dozen or so of them planted close by our downtown public library, which has an area well suited to outdoor play for little ones.  Except for a few months of the year, when it’s best suited for a haz-mat mask.  And surgical booties.

Nature, 2; Municipal Arborists, 0.

Back to the Bradford Pears that pepper our fair city,  I learned today that the Callery Pear (of which the Bradford is a cultivar), originally believed to be sterile, is not.  Which means it now appears on invasive lists in over 150 counties in 25 states.

Nature, 3; Municipal Arborists, 0.

The best thing I can say about them?  Well, some things drift off my radar more easily than others, so I have to admit it’s mighty handy to have an olfactory reminder that my anniversary is drawing nigh.

family-photo Friday

A bit tardy, but I’m fond of this new weekly tradition, and I can do what I want, right? My blog, my rules. Bend em if I feel like it, too.

Kira, wearing PJs and PBJ.

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Megs, who already believes they are a girl's best friend

(Not the greatest photo quality — I’m still learning the new camera; in my amusement at capturing her punny neckware, I didn’t notice it was on some funky setting.)

good medicine

One day recently when I wasn’t having an All-Conference kind of stellar day, I found this post-it stuck on the counter:

… and suddenly, perspective hove into view.

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Me, I, or whoever

(Note: It’s Wednesday, Carnival Day — Kate’s blog carnival. This week’s topic was “Friends.” I got kind of caught up this morning with my response, below, to some fallout from an earlier post, but it’s technically about friends, so she linked to me anyhow. Thanks Kate! Stop back next Wednesday, and I’ll try to be on-topic again.)

I tend to believe that blogs, or at least this one, should be about cutting it close to the edge on occasion. I’m hardly setting out to offend people on a regular basis, but I don’t mind putting something out there that might not sit well with every last person who ends up reading me.

However.

When it comes down to whether or not I’m being mean-spirited, I will take a stand and say this: I may well be mean-spirited on occasion. But you, out there reading, can be pretty well certain that it will never be about someone I’ve described as a friend. And if you have interpreted something I wrote about such an individual in that way, well, I hope you will take the time to read it again and see if you can find another way to think about it, because I surely did not mean it that way.

Word on the neighborhood street would suggest that I need to clarify that my reason for indicating the occupations of my three friends in last week’s “Not I” post was to draw attention to their intelligence and education in saying that they, along with Mr. Obama and many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, MANY other well-educated and bright, smart, articulate people, make the same grammatical error.

And not — NOT — to point a belittling finger at those three girlfriends. Who maybe now SHOULD walk into a bar together, with me, and let me buy them all a round of drinks, or two, for defending me to others who thought that they were the butt of some snide pettiness on my part. (Fortunately, they themselves know me better.)

Should I have chosen to simply say “three of my very own intelligent, articulate, well-educated friends” to make the point? In retrospect, my, it certainly would’ve been prudent. However, this is my blog, and I write it because I enjoy writing. And I will allow as how my enamoration with the bar-joke line was such that it blinded me to the potential for it to be misread, for those inclined to see things in that way, as personally directed pettiness.

So. Since apparently some of y’all took that post way, WAY too seriously — nope, I don’t really feel THAT strongly about grammar — entirely overlooking what I believed was recognizable as a tongue-in-cheek tone, it’s time to say thanks for the reminder that I should watch how, exactly, I write what I mean to say. Lest it be misinterpreted.

And for those who have something to say about what I write here, I’d love to point out that there is a handy “comment” option down there at the bottom. I encourage an open forum, even an anonymous one.

edible inspiration

Yesterday an idea popped into my head.

I’m almost tempted to stop right there, because heaven knows that sometimes in this fulltime mommy gig, just the notion of having a new, novel idea feels post-worthy. Ta-DAHHHHH!

But oh, okay. I’ll share.

I was looking over the week’s menu plan and making my grocery list, an early-week routine I try to be faithful about because it is truly a time- and sanity-saver. I’m not rigid about it in a Wednesday-is-meatloaf kind of way, but I attempt to come up with four or five meals, which with leftovers and such (read: delivery pizza) I figure will get us through the weekend, and then I have everything on hand, one trip only and no frantic it’s-four-o’clock-what-in-HELL-am-I-going-to-make-for-dinner? With, let’s see, a package of corn tortillas, three leeks and four eggs on hand?

I’d landed on stuffed shells for that night, not something I make often but we were sorely in need of something new in the rotation. Since it’s not something I make often, I had none of the ingredients on hand, not even the shells.

And as I wrote them on my list, I found myself putting little (2)s next to each one, because the vision had come whole and entire into my head: invite a friend to bring along a 9×13 dish and we’d do a little assembling and a little chatting and the kids could play, and voila! A lovely rainy-day afternoon complete with dinner in the oven. For both of us.

So I called B, friend of savior status from the whole earache/barfy day not long past, and she said Sure! So I went to the store and she picked up our kindergartners and came on by.

Not to give myself major arm strain from reaching around to pat on my own back or anything, but this was like a stroke of genius. No question, it should, and will, become a regular tradition. Not a big weekend make-ahead marathon, but just one evening’s meal, prepped with good company.

She even swapped me out some home-smoked salmon in repayment, which I thought was a far better deal, not to mention much tastier, than a check I’d feel a little petty about cashing, if I remembered to.

I’m not going to list the recipe for the stuffed shells, because they were edible but not incredible. But take away the concept instead, adding a wine pairing if desired.

veritas

You know the phenomenon that occurs sometimes, when you learn a new word and all of a sudden it pops up repeatedly in your life?

I’ve had something similar going on in the last few weeks, which is a post that’s been fermenting, and now I seem to keep finding myself in conversations/situations/email exchanges where the topic arises.

I am, I have reason to believe, an unusually honest person. It has not ever been thus. No George Washington by any means, I told lots and lots and lots of lies in my younger years. Bigger ones more than little ones, even.

But the older I get, I find, the less dishonesty works for me. With the passing of years, it gets ever harder to keep up with a purely factual history, let alone trying to remember what fibs I’ve told and to whom, certainly. But there’s a bigger piece to it, and one which has less to do with the weakness of an aging memory and more to do with a philosophic shift.

I can pinpoint this transition, or at least the beginning of it, somewhere along in my late twenties.

In the field in which I worked at the time, promptness was crucial. It was also one that saw me, several days a week, driving to unfamiliar and/or out-of-the-way places. In those dark, near-unimaginable days before Mapquest, etc., this aspect was a real hazard when it came to the promptness end, and there were inevitably those occasions when I would miscalculate travel time and — cursing and frantic — be late. Not hours, but more minutes than was kosher.

And at some point, rather than make whatever excuse — “Traffic was a nightmare,” or, “There was a train” — I simply began saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t leave myself enough time to get here by 9:00.” No excuses. And oddly enough, no one ever seemed to think less of me for it.

That led, eventually, to the contemplation that the vast majority of lies I told — of whatever magnitude — were to one end: to impact, alter, or ameliorate the opinion someone held of me.

Hmmm.

Perhaps, began the train of my thinking, it would be better to a) chart the course of my actions to achieve the same end, and/or b) care less about others’ opinions.

So. Here I am, some years later. For me, this is clearly the right path, despite being often, sometimes painfully, reminded that I think about this topic very, very differently from most other folks. But for what it’s worth:

There are white lies, and there are the other kind, and I do differentiate between them. But I am stringent: White lies reside exclusively, or very nearly so, in the domain of opinion, not fact. This allows me to tell my mother-in-law that her new lamp is lovely, because to her it is, and for me to say I feel otherwise is pointless, not to mention harmful to our relationship. It does not allow me to tell someone that I didn’t return their call because I was, say, out of town when I wasn’t.

And if you ask me, as a friend, for an honest opinion, you will surely get it.

Yes, I’ve been known to omit, judiciously, details that are more hurtful than relevant. But not simply to save my ass, or make it look better, or avoid saying something uncomfortable.

Because overall, this late in my life, I’ve got little time for prevarication. If I’m investing enough time to engage with someone, I’m not particularly interested in tippytoeing around. Why bother? Facades are, I believe, big ole orange detour arrows in the road of connection.

Which isn’t to say that I feel compelled to volunteer random details of a TMI nature in the name of openness — but if you are interested enough to ask, I will tell you just about anything. I am who I am, and while I’m as insecure as the next person at times, I also have enough of a sense of myself to say that what you see, and get, is the real deal.

I believe people lie or prevaricate for one purpose: to manipulate. Yes, often the only thing they’re attempting to manipulate is someone’s opinion of them — but the question remains: to what end? In the larger scheme of things, how is my life enhanced by someone seeing me differently than how, who, I really am?

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through the generations

It’s Wednesday, which means Carnival’s in town — Kate’s blog carnival. Click here to see who else is playing along, or play along yourself!

This week’s theme is “Generational Hand-Me-Downs,” which I decided could be interpreted a couple of ways. While I have a few lovely and/or highly sentimental things that have been passed down to me, my finest legacy isn’t tangible at all.

I wrote about it not long after I began this blog, and since I’m scrambling to get out of town for a few days this morning, I’m going to simply reprise it here:

My grandfather was a man who overflowed with words, both the ordinary sort that old Sam Webster would endorse and his own as well, a bubbling fount of exuberant expression.

He buttressed the English language with so many of his own creations that his eldest daughter eventually sat down and drafted a Family Lexicon, a typed pamphlet that was itself enough of an inside joke that it required later appendage with an official and collaborative Glossary, for those outside the immediate sibling circle.

Some of this linguistic play is not just fun but functional. Take the “eggie.” Defined by the Lexicon as “Christmas all year ’round,” an eggie is anything at all that you give to someone at an unexpected or undetermined time. Presents are what you receive for your birthday and standard holidays; eggies are what come at other times. And an eggie can be anything from the first backyard raspberries of the season, to a book of poetry left at your door by a friend, to a rather spendy something special — though often the best eggies are either free, cheap, or reused in some way. It’s truly the thought. Both my girls are solidly on the eggie wagon, and I have faith that this one will live on. What’s not to love about an eggie, after all?

Other bits of the family patois will have to stand the test of time, though I’m doing what I can to ensure my next generation owns the knowledge that if you have a “botts” you are ill, from a tender tummy to pee-neumonia and all between. That “gaum” is anything sticky, like bandaid residue or dried popsicle juice; if you gaum something up, you make a mess of it, in a literal or figurative sense. A “grinse” rubs in a bad way, like asphalt on skin or a pesky dresser drawer. A peepka is, at G rating, a valve on a tire tube; boy babies sport them as well. A monie (say: moanie) is a small hiding or sitting spot, special to a small person. And a small person is a frammis.

There are dozens of these, all my grandfather’s genius and quirk, in my working vocabulary, down from probably hundreds in the generation above. I hope my girls end up with at least a handful, maintaining some fluency in this ancestral argot, and to that end I’m inordinately pleased when I hear my husband spout one off like he was born to it.

And I hope they, too, feel that it connects them in a special way to the people who make up their family tree.

a three-hour tour

The weather here was insane this weekend. We had the big snow thing on Monday and the silly snow-day thing on Tuesday, and then generally seasonable temps all week. And then Saturday? I was out riding on the Blue Ridge Parkway, with huge clumps of snow along the road, and it was a good bit over 80 degrees.

Me, I get nervous when the temps head so high this early in the spring. Two years ago it happened, and along about the second week in April a nice freeze came on through and BAM, there went all our local fruit for the season. No strawberries, cherries, blueberries, peaches, pears, apples. A few late raspberries and the ever-hardy wild wineberries, but it was so, so sad.

So I am anxiously eyeing the buds and such these days and sending them mental energies in the “be patient” range. Because I loves me some fruit, and the closer to home the better.

But back to my ride on the Parkway.

It was intended to be right around three hours, and I met up with my wonderful ride partner Emily and we headed up the long climb just south of town. From there we took a left, and headed straight, on along for a bit, and came to a small town with a handy gas-station-cum-general-store, right there at the crossroads, with right much commerce, mostly of the pickum-up truck variety, along with one ancient Lincoln Continental, as we sat and rested a bit.

One fellow in the driver’s seat of a truck, waiting on his shotgun buddy, asked if we’d seen the movie Deliverance, “Because they’re ’round here, y’know. Don’tcha get nervous, ridin’ out here?”

Funny thing is, Emily and I agree: dogs scare us way more than people when it comes to being out on our bikes. The run-ins I’ve had with dogs have twice now led to the shed of my blood and on several occasions the truncation of a chosen ride route; the ones with humans have led merely to annoyance on my part.

Though come to think I did once hurt my hand after chasing down some teenagers who’d gotten a big kick out of startling the hell out of me as they drove by, yelling out the window. They didn’t know I’d caught up to them, and the whacks and thumps on their window and roof startled them. Perhaps even more than they, the kids, had startled me. Ah, sweet satisfaction. But owwww; a bit too enthusiastic on my part.

But back to my ride on the Parkway.

We’d taken our little break at the store, about two hours in to what I was still thinking was going to be a three-hour ride, more or less. I ate my Kashi bar and refilled one of my water bottles. More water? No, thanks; next up was Five-Mile Mountain Road, and I’m no fool. I know better than to carry more water than I need up a hefty climb. Since we’re only looking at an hour and a bit left to ride and all. Buy something more at the store to eat? Nah. That Kashi bar’ll hold me for another hour and some, no problem.

So. An hour later, having covered some of the most gorgeous terrain I’ve seen in a long time, we were at the top of Five Mile Mountain Road.

And, as it turned out, almost two hours from home.

At some point, I realized I was no longer enjoying the ride. At all. Despite the glorious weather, the fabulous terrain, the great people.

In fact, I was starting to feel like … wait. Complete and utter hell. Yes. Goosebumps on an 80-degree day? Oh. Oops. Yes, that would be my body bringing its general lack of fuel to my attention. Finally recognizing the classic signs of an impending hard bonk, I asked if anyone else had some eats — since, of course, I’d just brought my one bar, previously consumed.

Emily handed over all but one bite of her last “model-endorsed” fruit bar. I chewed and rode, and wondered when I’d ever eaten something that tasted so damn good. And her boyfriend ante’d up something for us to split three ways, leaving himself just a nibble. And we rode on.

As I drained the last of my water bottles, I saw the road that marks the last two uphills before the big descent, coming down the climb we’d started with back up there at the beginning, all chipper and fresh. And silently chanted, “That which does not kill us serves only to make us stronger.” Over, and over. And tried to love the ache in my legs as the muscles working, strengthening; to bless the pain as pleasure.

Grateful for friends, grateful for food, I felt a little better by the end, but oh my aching bod, neck back crotch hands, because if you’ve been doing the math, you’ll notice that my three-hour ride was in fact right along about five hours, start to finish. And I’m not used to that amount of time on the bike, not these days.

Can’t wait to do it again, though. And hopefully enjoy the middle part just a wee bit more.