Category Archives: 4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons
Forward Looking
The boy.
Gavin comes over on a Saturday to help his grandpa with some car stuff. Looking spiffy in his army shirt while they enjoy their fast-food breakfasts, he watches the military channel with his grandpa and thinks maybe the army would be a good career. Although, he muses, being a fireman might be something he would like. He has been thinking about it and how to put out fires without inhaling the smoke that could kill you.
The need for speed.
Awhile later, he comes in to cool off from these hot days we are having. He carefully unpacks the by-permission-only tote full of his grandpa’s very old, original Hot Wheels set up and races some new cars they have just purchased to see if they are as good. He likes them a lot. Upon pondering the fact that his grandpa played with those very toys at his age, and then his Uncle Rocky and even his mom played with them and now him, he very thoughtfully sees ahead, “And someday I will give them to my kids.” There is a catch in my throat.
To him that seems a million years away, but I know the truth – that is just around the corner and yes, God willing, even Gavin’s children will play with those Hot Wheels on miles and miles of that old orange track.
Working on a Saturday.
“Nonna, come and see my office,” he tells me after we had watched 10 minutes of the Hurricane Irene coverage. He’d been explaining how he is good at science and is seriously thinking of a career as a weather-man, the kind who does reports from a helicopter. He has a computer and headset and he is feeding reports to a TV newsroom.
When his little cousin Averi arrives, he explains to her that he will be giving her reports from the helicopter while she sits at the news desk. She runs off at will talking on her little play cell phone and tells him she is too tired to work. He explains to her that she has to get back to work because he needs to give his weather report to some one. She is the perfect on-air personality. He keeps flying around and doing his thing, reporting on the very inclement weather somewhere in the world.
Wise beyond his years.
I ask Gavin and Averi if they’d like a snack. Averi checks the pantry for something sweet and wonders if I might have candy. I offer them tortilla chips as an alternative. But Gavin says, “I’d like a tomato, please, and the salt.” The kid is genius, truly. I slice a red, red beefsteak up for him and he enjoys it thoroughly. And this is undeniable proof that he came from me.
He carries heritage and our whole family history and probably all the quirks, too, and is carefully planning to pass it on in a rich, giving, hard-working, enthusiastic, imaginative life. He is better than I ever was, or will ever be.
Dave is happy because Gavin said, “Maybe I could spend the night so Grandpa and I can watch some Gilligan’s Island. Ugh. See what I mean?? That is a QUIRK!
BLT for Breakfast?
Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu betcha!
Except there was neither B nor L involved. Just T. Oh, the T. LOOOOVE the T!
It was tomato on potato bread, or to-mah-to on po-tah-to, whichever you prefer. With real mayo and sea salt. And the bread was toasted, naturally.
And all I really wanted to tell you was that you should try growing your own tomatoes. You should, really. Try. And pick them just before you think they look red-red and bring them inside to become better acquainted for a day, maybe two. And don’t refrigerate – let them get sweeter and juicier and riper. You can’t hurry love.
Then, you’ll just know. You’ll know.
And all those transparent, disgusting, greenish-slices of rubbery-engineered-spheres those {fake-food purveyors} have slapped on your part-time-lover-fast-food burgers will fade from view.
Me and T :: Our love is here to stay.
DINNER :: Carbonara Rigati with snow peas and plum tomatoes (bacon, mmmm); garlic-green-beans; cucumber and red onion-toss; bruschetta (fresh tomatoes from my garden) on extra-virgin-olive-oil-drizzled and toasted baguette and panko-crusted zuchinni, fried in Roasted Garlic Grapeseed Oil
So some dork…
…broke into my car Friday night to steal the radio and sorta got it out and all broken and cut himself and bled all over my interior and the driveway and dropped pieces of my stereo on the drive everywhere and attempted to get into Dave’s car, but didn’t which is very lucky (for reasons I cannot mention here) and must have gotten spooked away as he bled because he left everything in disarray and turned on the hazard lights and drained my battery dry and apparently broke into some one’s home and ended up stealing a truck 10 houses down and because I had the blood evidence, the Brighton Police brought a DNA kit and I hope they catch the jerk and all his friends so I can sock them in the face {j/k…sorta}.
I don’t want your blood on my stuff, terd-head. Next time wear gloves and clean up after yourself. Geesh.
UPDATE :: {8.23} I had to go in and give a DNA sample for the investigators. Now, I am on file. I will never get to be a totally law-abiding citizen who commits a crazy awful crime that can never be solved because they go back to being law-abiding and there is just no trace…if I had ever even had a ridiculous thought like that cross my mind. sigh.
Bouquets of Sharpened Pencils
Kathleen Kelly:
What will NY152 say today, I wonder. I turn on my computer. I wait impatiently as it connects. I go online, and my breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words: You’ve got mail. I hear nothing. Not even a sound on the streets of New York, just the beating of my own heart. I have mail. From you.
I swear I can practically smell these freshly sharpened pencils…
Joe Fox:
Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address. On the other hand, this not knowing has its charms.
On Friday September 23, 2011 at approximately 5:05 am, the sun will appear to cross the celestial equator from north to south and will mark the beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere. Day and night will be almost equal length at that time. It’s a month away…technically.
But the grandbebes are in the classroom and small children with backpacks skip along happily at very early hours these days. And, living just 2 blocks from a school, the air is filled with uproarious energy and laughter several times a day as recess comes and goes in joyful rhythm.
It is still summer, but the fall is announcing its’ imminent return.
Quotes from: You’ve Got Mail, (1998), Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan
Awesome Digs
Remember those little wax bottles? You’d bite off the “cap” suck the 1/16 teaspoon of colored water out and then chew the wax – because gum was not always available? They still have those!
We did not dig in the dirt today.
The pool is still up. But today we officially started Pre-K for Gemma May. Once a week with Nonna and every day with mommy and daddy. She and I have been hanging out pretty much all year, but “school work” was mostly “playing school” and making crafts! Good times. Today she came with her backpack and school supplies, so grown up and so ready to read! First order of business? She made a “family’ of butterflies.” “Mommy and daddy, Gavin and me and then Guini! There we are. We are flying!”
The speed of life has at least doubled since my kids were young. And quadrupled since I was. It really does fly. A gazillions miles per hour!
Booooooooooo – Operation : : KILL the Grasshoppers
There is a whole scurrying, jumping, munching, flying, plant-destroying army in my backyard and they are grossing me out.
Even though I read that once they have grown to adulthood and are thoroughly enjoying your garden you cannot win, – oh, win I intend to!
The organic method:
Water plants and then sprinkle with good old-fashioned all-purpose flour. The flour will gunk them up as they try to eat and like a large Thanksgiving dinner, will swell up in them as they drink to clean out their insides. They deserve it.
The more direct and “Jeanie-ous” idea:
Carry a badmitton racquet with me into the garden.
Uh-huh. We’ll see, suckers!
It’s on!
Stuff Riddle
QUESTION: What do
a two-story fireman’s pole
a red English Telepone Booth
a gigantic drum pendant
some old, metal school lockers
a re-claimed school gymnasium wooden floor
and
75-foot zip line
have in common?
I need them all for my house, please.
Oh, and a painter, too. Who can paint walls and canvases. :)
WHAT IF….
Information overload
Eve.
I guess if she’d passed the test and all other women between her and me had too, I’d eventually have messed it all up anyway.
But sometimes I want to ask her: was it sweet enough? Was it satisfying enough to carry you the rest of the way, partaking of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil? You ate and you suddenly, having lost your innocence, knew the difference between them.
Of course we know the answer is that it wasn’t. It wasn’t enough.
Genesis 2.16-17 And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
Information junkie.
Once I started reading Seventeen magazine at the age of about 14 and found that I loved the center section full of facts and figures and studies and how-tos, I knew I was in to knowing, to discovering and learning and ingesting as much fact and data as I could. I’d been that way earlier, from about the age of 4 when President Kennedy was shot and I became a newspaper reader, carefully devouring the pictures and headlines, impatiently waiting daily for my dad to be finished so I could spread the large newsprint on the floor and check out the world from my safe haven: unrest on college campuses in the 60s, the scandal of Jackie marrying Ari O. Dear Abby, Dear Ann Landers and all the rest. I was hooked. In fact, in an effort to keep a holy day, my parents didn’t allow Sunday paper reading on Sunday. Oh, the agony – seeing the giant bundle, so full of world news and events, yet so far from my reach…But at 14, reading Seventeen, that is when I knew I wanted to accumulate knowledge – about anything. I craved it, I searched for it. I inhaled it.
Then I pounded the living daylights out of everyone else with the mountain of info I’d accumulated. Since we didn’t have TV for many of my growing up years, it worked perfectly with my encyclopedia and dictionary-reading enjoyment.
If I’d applied myself to actual school studies as carefully as to knowing something about everything in the universe, I’d have been a phenom.
And then, omygosh, came the world-wide-web. I know. I know.
Ecclesiastes 1.18
For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.
I may know more about the people I know more than ever, with social media, updates, blogs, posts, statuses and the texts, o-the-texts. Yet, I don’t think I know them more. Yahoo news bites (where I sadly get most of my news these days) and google.com have made it hard for anyone to sneak up on me with information on the state of our world and its very weird people. I have read just enough to know I have read too much on too many inconsequential topics and I am worn out trying to make my own mind up.
Take a completely wholly-a-matter-of-opinion topic like how to best arrange your closet for optimum organization. You look, read, study it a bit and decide, yes – this will help me get out the door quicker in the morning. But before you have even printed the designer labels for all the new containers you just purchased, some one comes along and revolutionizes the whole thought process, and dang it – there it was in your Sunday paper, if only you’d waited!
I don’t even have time to respond and grow with info anymore. There is no time to react to it, to consume it and then let it live through me in whatever way it might have been helpful, before I am inundated with new info, a better way, here’s how, that-is-last-year-try-this. Mental Floss Magazine – Where Knowledge Junkies get Their Fix, is both wondrous and killing me.
Hang up and talk.
It isn’t just news outlets, publishers and the internet that are both feeding my addiction and killing my soul. It is the smart phone. When we all go out to dinner and spend all our time checking our messages and Twitter and FB and whatever else because we are afraid we won’t know when some one we know has purchased a Billy shelving unit from IKEA or saw the latest movie before us or that they are blue or having the best day ever or whatever, well. What a waste.
One woman recounted, recently, how romantic it felt to her when a first date turned off his phone when they sat down at the restaurant. She knew she was getting his undivided attention and guess what? They are a couple.
Am I really so important that a friend can’t have have a meal with me now without my having to check messages/FB/Twitter/etc and take calls? Really?
Soapbox on the side
Please replace this: Oh – I have to take this call.
—with—
Do you mind if I take this call?
TMI or TMC (Too Much Connectedness) ?
I don’t know. I just know my mind is worn out. And I can’t keep up. And I don’t care. And maybe it just means I am TDO (Too Dang Old).
I used to think the simplicity-kick people were just kill-joys. The most important thing I did today was color with the grandkids. With crayons. On paper. No Sunday newspaper. We drew apples, and caterpillers and kites and spiders.
And Guini was explaining to me, with our little smiley-faced spider, that it didn’t really have enough eyes. Should have eight, she shook her head. I think I knew that once…
S E R E N I T Y Now!
Moslander Reunion 2011 :: For the Mamala
Arriving in Chicago on a Friday night. We get real Chicago-style pizza near Midway Airport where planes fly just above our heads. Near the south shore in Hobart there is a wedding rehearsal with the other half of the family. We will all gather for a celebration of a new marriage on Saturday.
BBQs at Dan and Dawn’s, corn-holing competitions, waffle-ball in the backyard. Even the matriarch and patriarch got into the games! There was the beach at Lake Michigan and driving the old neighborhood. Remember 4995 Roosevelt Place and all the baseball dings in the side of the garage from the 3 Moslander boys? Oh, they are still there. Our giant spruce is nearly dead now, but there is the house, the one we all finally lived in together before growing up and moving away began. Schools and businesses and streets we travelled. A Vienna Red Hot at The Village Shopping Center. I could still smell J C Penney’s even though it hasn’t been there now for almost 20 years. My first real-life job was there.
Once green-grass, established neighborhoods with distinct ethnic identities, houses where people had lived for over 40 years in a thriving steel-mill industry and could be counted upon , like clockwork to be edging their perfect lawns at exactly 6:15 pm every Wednesday evening now have the signs of transience at best. Bars on inhabited house windows, boarded up openings on empty, beautiful brick homes on hills. You can buy a million-dollar Denver-type home there for $15,000, cash. So says the hand-written cardboard sign. The city waits to be revived.
But we remember our life and times.
And the vivid colors come flooding back and our hearts are warm in the remembrance. These were good times and good places. This is where we finished growing up and where our parents had to let us go. There are altars in every direction, signs that point to God’s faithfulness in our lives.
Jordan and Alise start their life as husband and wife. We dance and eat and make merry. We see old friends and catch up on 30 or so years.
Joe and Robin and their family couldn’t come this year. We are remembering them always, bringing them up constantly, missing their presence…
The boys wrestle and play pool and work out to get pumped up. I give my mom a perm, which, though a bit kinky to begin with, of course, turns out just fine. I get lots of time with Averi & Amelie Belle and they are truly the “belles of the ball!”
Southlake Worship Center – home church
We got to attend church at Southlake on Sunday. So sweet. More on that later. But Pastor Sam Abbott and congregation welcomed us fully. Rocky and Tara led worship, with a small acoustic, all-family band. It was lovely.
Back to Chicago
On Tuesday there is a trip into the city: Navy Pier at Chicago. Then an authentic Puerto Rican meal to. die. for. at Tami and Gerron’s church, provided by some ladies of the congregation. Sitting on the front stoop at the church, we get a taste of a busy Chicago neighborhood. The sounds, the smells, the accents – colorful and unique. Tami and Gerron are perfect there.
Before we part we have our standard Family-Mass, a time of worship and fellowship around Him whose mark on our lives keeps us one, Jesus Christ. It is informal, it is easy. I wish it really could be captured in a way everyone could experience it. Somehow, we just blend. We just are :: The Moslanders. The descendants of Ross and Norma Moslander, 4 generations of us, declaring God’s faithfulness from one generation to another.
In all my dad pastored in Des Moines, the Davenport, then a short time in Cedar Rapids, and a short time in Robert, Louisiana before we got to Gary, Indiana. I kinda call it home and Dan and Dawn are still there. And with all of us there, it felt like home. But home really is where my mom and dad are.
These are just a few of the moments, especially dedicated to my mom.
HOME is wherever I’m with you.