Regrets? I've Had A Few

And I will have a few more. For example, I will probably never get to see this view in real life: 
 (I got this picture from somewhere, but I've seen it all over, and now I don't remember.  I hope I don't regret not knowing more about copyright, etc.!)

And I want to.  I really want to.  I've wanted to since I watched Haley Mills hanging from that windmill back in the 60s.  Naturally, I mean the whole movie, and not just in part due to that other-worldly, romantic title, The Moonspinners.

I've just recently read this very interesting post by a "blogger friend," (and I take liberty using the word "friend," because I haven't asked him if I could, but there you go. At least, we're associates.)

http://gorges-smythe.blogspot.com/2014/01/still-learning-to-let-go.html

It has served as some sort of muse for me right now.  My blog posts have, for the larger part, been spun around places I have been and pictures I have taken to enhance the tales.  They have been factual, if not entirely honest in the sense that, well, I'm sort of a Pollyanna when I write about my life, and for the most part, when I talk about it in general.  Also, I'm pretty positive to myself about my life.  Only lucky family members and close friends get to hear the "minimal" whining and grousing.  And little-bitty notes of insecurity.

So back to the regrets.  Notice the past tense of that phrase.  I mostly get over the regrets, little thanks to my own efforts, but more thanks to recognizing the Divine Wind in my sails, propelling me through uncharted waters, as it were.  Maybe not uncharted, but places that have certainly not been on any of my own "maps."

 Some will disagree with my idea (or philosophy) that I have not really chosen, in this earthly, concious state of mind, my own destiny.  That circumstances have just popped up and I have had to either go with them or go with them.  I usually just go with them.

As a child, I moved and moved and moved with my family.  We moved.  A lot.  There was only one such period where we ended up in a situation that I didn't like very much.  Didn't like it at all, as a matter of fact, which is ironic, because it was a place I loved going to on vacation to visit my grandparents and other relatives.  But all of us children had a miserable time while living there, because of...drumroll please...nasty, nasty, unholy school.  OK...there were some things about it that I did actually like, said family being the main thing, and:

• One new friend across the street from my grandparents house.  
• An alliance with misery-partner in class who lived in an orphanage and who got picked on more than I did by the witch of a sixth-grade teacher and who had fewer resources for protecting himself than I had. 
• Being released from school to re-unite with my siblings, which was the definition of refuge at that time.
• OK, and yes, I did have a few moments of comraderie with a few other kids, but we were such temporary outsiders, that it was fleeting.
• And if we include the move-within-a-move, another friend whose mother drove the school bus.  I didn't like getting up at 4 AM to ride the bus with them, though, especially after staying up past midnight struggling to learn math from my mother because the teacher couldn't help me. 
• Weekends which were more like the vacation days we had spent in previous years staying at Pappy and Grandmother's house.
• Maybe a couple of other redeeming things.
• Necessary life experiences

I regretted the circumstances that put us in that circumstance and it was completely out of my control because I was not the one who lost job and home and had to go on the road to look for work.  I was not the government who kept capping oil wells.   And as hard as that was to do, I'm still impressed that my parents weathered those ferocious storms without going on "the dole." 

As a young adult, I felt I had begun to have some real power of choice and to move into situations I wanted to be in.  I had a friend I thought was almost an extension of myself and 19 was my year.  My age.  My halcyon period.  If we couldn't take on the surprising world together, and why couldn't we? I could do it myself!  And then, BAM!  Still haven't been able to figure out how that cemented friendship crumbled only a few years later, but I know it wasn't something I had control over.

Years passed, not uneventfully, but filled with opportunity and liberty and choices and dreams coming true.  Even blessed heartache confirming my ability to feel alive and connected and to pick up and carry on. 

Fast-forwarding to a time when I again began to recognize I really didn't have that much control in choosing my own life lessons, (because, that interim period deserves much more time than I'm going to spend at this writing,) I was living in Korea where I felt I belonged as I had at no other time in my life until then. My niche was carved to my exact shape and form and need, soul and body.  I had no intention of ever leaving.  Until it was time to get married.  What a choice.  Not a choice.  An instance of going with the Circumstance.  As the marriage didn't work out, some might say it was my choice and it was a wrong choice, and people who were with me struggling with the choice might think it actually was a choice, but I know it wasn't a choice.  It was a circumstance laid out for me, picking me up and putting me in that sail boat.  I couldn't have chosen differently.  I wasn't able to have been able to make the other choice. 

(OK, this is getting kind of deep and there are ideas here I can't explain that will probably sound not the way I intend them to, but let's move on.)

Then my daughter came into my world.  Then we were alone in our world until we weren't alone and were with family.  Then we were alone some more and had a rich, tough life in San Francisco, where again I began to feel that sense of rightness and belonging that would come upon me as we walked home from the grocery store, or got off the bus downtown, or spent time with new friends, or played on the beach.  For several years, it was so right to be there and the rightness was palpable.

Then, we needed to leave.  Another circumstance that compelled me like taking that first breath as you rise out of the water after having been submerged a little too long is compelling.  Oh how I regretted having to leave that life to the mercy of fickle and fading memory.

But, we encountered another life, just as rich and tough and rewarding and necessary; actually even more so.  I could not have predicted.  It was life turning again to itself, this time.  It was family refuge.  It was hearts shattering and the pieces being lost to oblivion.  It was unfathomable loss and separation and regrouping and redefining happiness and compassion and regret and forgiveness, and discovering inner resources and getting older. 

It was life knocking out teeth. 

It was love knocking out fear. 

And then?  AND THEN...Circumstances.  I had to find another job.  It wasn't my fault it was in Alaska.  I had never given the idea of living in Alaska even a minor nod.  I thought I "chose" Alaska over New Zealand because I needed to not be so far away from my daughter and her husband in Utah and my mother in New Mexico and my siblings in other places quite far from New Zealand.  Little did I know that Alaska was actually waiting for me.  It was putting clean linens in the guest room and a warm lamp at the bedside long before I even knew one could actually live an embraceable life in Alaska. 

Embrace it I did, as it embraced and cradled me.  And sent me jauntily forth to experience a world to which I still can't give due description.  By this time, you must know that I have learned to quit flicking pages ahead to see how the story ends.  No last page.  Ever.  I didn't know that after traveling so far away from a world I oh-so-ignorantly thought might have finally been a jumping off place, closer to family, I would land in a place that kept me traveling while holding me there. It kept me free and wheeling within it's swaddling borders. 

I don't know how that happened.  I didn't order that adventure.  And I really didn't want to let go of it, either, when I did. 

Ready? Say it with me:  Circumstance!  My daughter needed me.  Her world was roiling and racked with upheaval and the idea occured to us both that she could come to Alaska and need me there.  Of course her son was part of the consideration as was her son's father whose world was unraveling in its own way, and I suppose you could say I made the choice to move closer to the situation, because it was my thought that it would be better for father and son to be physically closer to each other than what being in Utah and Alaska would allow.  Washington is not extremely close to Utah, but it's where I could get a job...ANOTHER new job at this late stage in my employment life.  (I think it's a late stage.  Who knows, by now.)

I would rather the three of them not have lost their happily-ever-after than what they are going through at this time, but do I regret that I now live in Washington with my daughter and grandson?  

What.  Are you kidding me?!

 

 

Wait. It's Over?

 But, what about all those Christmas intentions I intended to post.  I had so many ideas in my head this year, mostly unprofound ideas about how profound reality really is, as if reality is a real thing.  Even at Yuletide.

 Well, at least let me put up a few pictures representing portions of our Christmastime activities.  It was pretty low-key this year for us.  And a little odd, in some ways, as well, which is actually right up my alley.  If I am nothing else, I'm all about "odd."  

 

 

 

 

 

 

My big Gift this year?  These two. Right here at home.

Katy grew up in the Bay Area where we went to the beach on Christmas day, a regular event that began when we first moved there and had no community, yet.  Christmas was taking a long time to get to us, so we inched it up a day and then when it was Christmas for everyone else but pretty much over for us, we needed something special to do.  We went to the seaside, which tradition she is sharing with her son.  I think he likes it.

Lights, Wonderland walk, tree hunting on the inlet, harbor time, chocolate orange cake, Christmas-cracker pulling, Santy, packages in the mail, chocolate-peppermint shakes at a newly discovered burger joint, making stockings and hats, marzipan pigs, Swedish pancakes, phone calls, friendly visits, thoughtful inexpensive gifts for each other, fake fireplace heater, life in a forest at Christmas!   The end of a year that required of us much energy.  An endearing and peaceful time.

 

Sugar Ghosts of Christmas Past

 



A few food-related Christmassies (which doesn't really look right spelled out like that.):  Tastes without which it just doesn't seem like the holidays to me, but without which I will spend Christmas this year, anyway.  Mostly.  And still have a wonderful Christmas time! 

 

Number One on my list is the ever-so-iconic Orange Slice Cake.  It's a heritage recipe from so far back I hardly remember how it originated.  Deep in Appalachia, but before that, I don't know.  I'm not much of a recipe cook and people are always saying that baking is a science so you have to follow a recipe, but the best cinnamon rolls and bread and orange slice cakes I've ever baked have been pretty much thrown together according to my food intuition.  I guess it could be true that I just did it so much for so long, I had recipes memorized and had incorporated the science somehow, and somewhere I do have the recipes written down, however loosely I may follow them.  Anyway, I'm not posting recipes for any of these merry wonders.  They would be easy enough to find online if anyone really wanted to make them.

 

The recipe for Orange Slice Cake calls for the candy slices, dates, coconut and probably walnuts.  I use the candy slices, even though that's my least favorite taste (and texture--gumdrops in a cake?!) in the cake, but it's my daughter's favorite and it is Christmas, after all, so you make for others.  I use other dried fruits (not candied fruits used in fruit cake,) such as cherries, sultanas, apricots, figs and maybe something else that happens to strike my fancy at the time I shop for ingredients.  I also stick to the traditional use of coconut and walnuts (black walnuts if I can find them.)  



 

Before taking the cake out of the pan, I poke holes in it and pour the orange-juice-powdered sugar glaze over it and let it soak in for at least a couple of hours.  The batter itself is pretty straight forward and not heavy, but substantial enough to hold up to all the additions.  Katy loves this cake so much, we used to eat only half of it during the Christmas season and freeze the other half for her birthday in July.  I haven't made if for a few years now and don't plan on making it this year.  My mother made one the other day and even though she's in a completely different state, it feels right now.  Someone in the family made a Texas Orange Slice Cake from my "recipe," and that strengthens the connections over the miles!

 

 
I think probably my next favorite is wassail.  The best apple cider you can find, preferably unfiltered and local, if possible.  I then mix in probably not equal parts pineapple juice, orange juice, lime juice, and lemon juice.  Sweet spices, of course.  Mulled and marvelously festive!  I've also spiced and heat-mulled home-canned grape juice which was very nice.  And good.  And tasty.

Even if we had plans to go to a family member's home for a Country Christmas Breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage, gravy and biscuits, Katy and I would always begin our day on Christmas morning with Swedish Pancakes or Christmas Crepes.  I usually have a store of jams and jellies that I put away earlier in the year during canning season, but this year we will use some jelly I brought back from Alaska.  Completed with a good dollop of sour cream and a shiny slather of butter.

 

 

Finally, a nod to my homeland, New Mexico.  (See what I did here?  I called it homeland as if it's a different country than where I'm living.  Lots of innuendo here.  First, when we left New Mexico, most people we talked to didn't realize we came from just another state.  Also, I feel very far removed right now and not just a little nostalgic and I wish we could be in Roswell with my mother for Christmas. The passing of so much time has made it seem like I'm in a very different world than when I lived in New Mexico as a child.)

 

Biscochitos are sort of like little short bread cookies but not so short, but plain looking like shortbreads.  They are usually flavored with anise and cinnamon, but I also like to add orange zest and a wee bit of orange oil or sometimes cardamom. 

 

 

 

My mother used to make a lot of candy for us at this time of year.  Peanut brittle, fudge, divinity, chocolate-peanut clusters, and my ALL TIME FAVORITE...well, next to fudge...FOURS!  They are a cube-shaped turtle-like confection.  Walnuts or pecans?, caramel, chocolate, butter and long-time love.  She got the recipe from a magazine oodles of years ago that featured a story of the Roswell Women's League who got together and made this candy for fund-raising.  Fortunately for her collector-daughter, she kept the magazine (with lots of others) and I now have that article in my kitchenalia box.  Somewhere.  Why are they called Fours?  I don't think anyone really remembers why. 

 

I don't make candy, except once in a great long while, fantasy fudge and once I tried Turkish Delights.  Rose-flavored.  Interesting.  I used to make honey and molasses taffy, but that was a really, really long time ago when I thought it was fun to pull it. 

 

There are other holiday-themed sweets I used to make like plum pudding and trifle, lemon sugar cookies, gingerbread and molasses cookies.  This year, I bought packaged crepes at Costco for our Swedish Pancake breakfast and I think that's all the holiday baking this household is going to get.  It's enough for me to remember and think about others eating all that sugar. 

 

OK, Life...What Are You Going To Do For An Encore?

 

 

 

 

The Parsonage Autumn (It Ends)

 Before we landed in our spring-board parsonage dwelling, we had traveled to Colorado on the train.  At night, of course.  We should have been used to it, because we took most of our trips at night.  We lived in New Mexico, for one thing, before cars had air conditioners.  What we had, in the early days, were rough burlap canteens (water bags) for the radiator and parents who could stay awake and drive through the night.  By parents, I mostly mean fathers, of course.  My mother was grown, married and had several children before she learned to drive a car.  We were moving in two vehicles and my mother learned to drive with a car full of children on winding roads at night.

My clever mother assigned responsibilities to each of us, things we needed to keep track of while traveling.  I had an overnight make-up case, a Samsonite knock-off, filled with various and sundry items, none of them make-up related, I'm sure.  The baby, our toddler brother had a pillow.  What the others had, I don't remember because I probably didn't pay attention.  By probably, I mean, of course I didn't pay attention...at least for longer than a few minutes. 

My father worked out of town a lot of the time and most of the time for our short spell in Colorado, following drillers and rigs where he could find work.  He borrowed a truck or shared rides and left us in the hills with the car.  When we came home from school early one day to report the news of President Kennedy's assassination, my mother sat listening to the updates on the car radio.  She stayed out there all evening and into the night, coming in to get a blanket and to fix a quick supper for us.  We had no phone, no television or any other communication device out there in the eerie, forsaken blackness. 

Sometimes it scared me to think of my mother being the only adult caring for the five of us.  I should have seen then how strong a woman she was, but she was just our mother.  One day, we drove into Grand Junction, less than a hundred miles from where we lived in Colbran, for groceries and supplies we were not able to get otherwise.  In those days, the trip was probably at least a couple of hours.  It was late as we traveled home, but Mom decided to stop at the drive-in so we could watch a movie.  A special treat that I tried to enjoy fully, but I was never able to shake the worry that something could happen to the car on the way back and we would be stranded late at night, far from home without my father's home-grown mechanic skills to take care of the situation.  I was no stranger to the fact that cars could break down, radiators could over-heat, tires could blow out and five noisy children could be quite distracting to the most experienced of drivers.

I needn't have worried, because, remember?  This was the year of our charmed and charming autumn.  Our 1st through 12th grade school building had a juke box in the library, riding the bus down out of the mountains was always a happy experience, and our teachers actually liked us and were nice to us...each of us!  (That didn't always happen for us.) We had family friends by way of one of my father's drillers, who were so wild and nutty, they made us look almost normal by comparison.  (And THAT didn't always happen for us, either.)  By wild and nutty, I mean the kids actually chased headless chickens whose necks they had just wrung, tromping barefooted through spilled blood mixing it in the dirt.  For fun and entertainment.  Of course, we ate the poor, tough old things, if we could.

When my father did come home on certain weekends or between jobs, he helped us crack and peel the windfall black walnuts in front of our house by driving over them with the truck he had borrowed.  We used hammers and rocks, too.  However difficult those odd-smelling things were to crack and dig out nut meat, staining our fingers for days, it was well worth it for the banana-walnut ice cream we hand-cranked in the yard. 

Other things I remember about his being there at that time were the breakfasts my mother would cook for him every morning:  fried eggs and toast, and sometimes bacon or sausage.  But it was the hot, over-easy fried eggs that he vigorously dumped salt and pepper over before cutting them into little pieces with a knife an fork and scooping them onto the heavily buttered toast that made me love fried eggs when I really didn't like them at all.

My father was, not surprisingly, an enigma to us, and when he was home that fall, we noticed a Bible sitting on his night stand.  My mother, who was a chuch-goer didn't even have a Bible on the nightstand.  That was enough of a surprise that we talked about it quietly, discretely among ourselves. This was not the father we knew and frankly, it was a bit worrisome.  What ever could have brought about the change?   For all we knew until then, he didn't believe in anything much at all. Was he becoming even more of a stranger to us?  Who could ask him about such a thing? And then he was off again.

We stayed there long enough to get a taste of winter.  Early, heavy snows, layers of ice on the still-running ditch out front, where we would suddenly see our dog Teddy swimming under the ice, and where we would dare each other to skate without shoes, pot-bellied stove needing to be fed and stoked often, and more little bodies in the same bed at night for more warmth and more protection against the mice. 

True to our way of life, the time soon--too soon--came for us to leave again.  We packed and loaded up, crawled into the car with the back seat made into a bed and drove away from our Halcyon Season, this time not in the lonely hours of dusk when one should be sitting down to supper, but on a frosty, pie-less, Thanksgiving morning.

The Parsonage Autumn (Part Two)

The next house we rented belonged to the farmers who had built a larger, more modern home up the road. They had a few children our ages and they had animals we loved to get up-close perspectives of, when we could.

Well, the bull, we steered away from (I swear I didn't see that pun coming!) He chased us if he was close enough when we took a shortcut through the field. And the sow we were cautioned to leave alone so that she wouldn't gobble up her newborns.  The other animals, however, were subjected to a good dose of Armstrong hands-on curiosity.  Some of the more intrepid of us would let the still-nursing calf suck on our whole hands and then use his furry back to wipe the thick slobber off.  When I say "our hands," I don't mean I ever did that.  I could play with grasshoppers who leaked brown tobacco spittle on my hands and pull slick and muddy night crawlers from flooded lawns or even land a bare foot right smack in the middle of a cow paddy without making much to do about it, but that calf-nursing on human hands was a bit more than I was ever tempted to try.  The kids said it was a very interesting feeling, though, and that little cow sure had a mighty pull!

Our favorite, of course, was the mare they let us ride bare-back.  Big brown mare with a big bare back that we clambered upon and fought mightily to stay on when she trotted across the field.  We could fit three of us...sometimes four...on her back at a time, but if the front rider couldn't manage to stay astride, the whole rest of the train would hysterically slide right over the "healthy" bulging rib cage and fall in a howling heap onto the hard-packed ground.  Unadulterated delight and joy, that!

When we weren't discovering the delightful world of domestic farm animals, there were plenty of wild creatures to get to know.  Jack rabbits that would pop up right before our eyes, causing the younger ones to exclaim that they had met a kangaroo, skunks that tempted our Teddy out at night to give fearless, chivalrous chase, and little round-eared field mice scurrying and scratching our bedposts, probably very angry that a human family had moved in and threatened to disrupt their warm wintering.  But threaten we did, with girly screams and swipes of the broom under the beds and taking the rodent-slaying dog to the bathroom with us at night. 


Not over yet...


 

The Parsonage Autumn (Part One)

 

 

When we lived in a parsonage, I slept on the fold down couch with at least one of my sisters and our dog woke me up one morning by licking my face.  Not a pleasant experience, that.  As a matter of fact, I hated it.  How do people like to let their dogs lick their faces?!  That's when I traded places with my sister and slept on the wall side of the couch.  Other people in my family were more tolerant of Teddy and his affection. 

 

Teddy was as loyal and protective a dog as anyone has ever described and he was with us for quite some time.   He waited by the door at ungodly hours to see our father off to work, even on his days off.  We all have memories of his following each of us all over the place and we were not always together.  It was if he could be in several places at one time.  All this to say that our annoying, barked-too-much little dog is a fixture in these memories, as well.  Magic little mutt.

 

There were five of us seven siblings, at the time, living with our parents.  One hadn't been born yet and the eldest was in college.  My father was a roughneck, an oil rig worker.  I remember a time when I didn't feel as if I needed to explain what that term meant.  Mostly, to us, it meant we had to move a lot.  Had to follow the work, and pull up stakes, as it were, at any given time during the year.  During this particular year, I attended five different schools in two different states. 

 

The year we lived in a parsonage, we lived in a couple of different houses in a couple of different towns for little longer than a  couple of months.  I can't even remember how long, really, which is very puzzling in light of the fact that it was one of the most favorably memorable times in my childhood!  My sisters have similar regard for that time, and we often mention something about it, but still I'm just not sure how long we were there.

 

This much I remember, some of it quite vividly and some of it very vaguely: 

 

My mother went to a PTA meeting one evening, or maybe it was a Town Hall meeting, or maybe it was both in one,  leaving her rag-tag brood at home to wonder what in the world went on at a PTA/Town Hall meeting!  It got dark early in the Colorado hills and I remember that evening as being very mysterious and even somewhat dangerous.  I mean, weren't we living in a parsonage with an off-limits, most certainly haunted, boarded-up second story floor? We had no phone, our father worked graveyards, and where was this weird PTA meeting, after all? 

 

Did a couple of the younger ones go out in search of her?  Down the road maybe, where there were some lights glowing in the distance?  Was my mother embarrased when her kids came looking for her?  Someone got scolded that night.  Probably some older children for not preventing the younger ones from going out after dark alone in a strange town.  But really, what did we know?  They were probably the safer ones, with who knows "what-or-who" might have been hanging around behind locked doors upstairs! We had grown up playing out in the dark, after all, often escaping impossible to sleep on backyard army cots in the middle of hot, Southern New Mexico nights, to go in search of whatever creatures inhabited those fleeting cool, dark and refreshing hours.  Outdoor dark was much less scary than inside unknowns. 

 

A few days, weeks, moments? later, we moved from the parsonage in one town to an old farm house higher up in the hills in another close-by town, but of course, only within town-limits, as we were not in town.  We were in the glorious, wide-open, adventure-rich countryside!  Never before had we had such wild and wooly wonder at our fingertips and right under our beds, too, if you will.

 

To be reverently and longingly continued...