Southern Summer Memories...on a Stick

                                 previously published April 25, 2012 for www.thesouthernc.com


"You're dripping," I tell my daughter, as I open the back door and shoo her outside to the porch.  I smile at the nostalgia of the words from my childhood, not necessarily the drops of sugared popsicle that now dot my hardwoods from the kitchen to the den and back again. 

Yes, summer is almost officially here, in all its bug biting, sweat sopping glory. Why do we get so excited about the three hottest months of the year when our hair tends to frizz, our clothes like to stick, and the mosquitoes love to nip at our skin? 

Maybe because summer simply reminds us of our youth; that special part of the year that couldn’t come fast enough, when time slowed down, little things mattered, and nothing was more fun than riding your bike up and down the street.

Not to mention, who doesn’t love lightening bugs in jars, bare feet, the slam of a screen door, and ice cold popsicles melting down your arm before you can finish them.

These are the days summer's made of.

So if you are trying to beat the heat this summer go ahead and make something that is sticky sweet and fun to eat.  You may never be ten again, but there will always be a reason and a season to act like it.

Lavender Lemonade Popsicles

Now, we all know a watched pot never boils, and neither does a watched pot filled with:

      A gallon of water
      A vanilla bean
      6-8 sprigs of lavender
      3 cups of sugar
      2 cups fresh lemon juice
      ½ cup orange juice

Bring all of these ingredients together in a pot and start the boil. Go ahead and do whatever you do while you’re hanging out in your kitchen, like reorganizing your junk drawer, rinsing and labeling your fruits and veggies, or standing in tree pose, like me, over the stove flipping through a People magazine.  Whatever you do though, don’t venture too far because as soon as it does boil, it won’t take long before “thy cup runneth over”, if you know what I mean.  Here is the part when you turn off the heat, let it cool on the stove to room temperature, and then take out the bean and strain the plant matter because no one really wants to wear that in their teeth.

Once your lemonade has cooled, it’s time to pour the mixture into a popsicle mold or if you don’t have one there is nothing wrong with going old school.  It actually makes them taste better.  Just pour the lemonade into a small paper or plastic cup, cover with aluminum foil, then stick a spoon or a popsicle stick down the middle and freeze for four hours or until hard.  You can always run a little warm water on the cups to loosen the popsicle so it pops right out.

Now, here is the very special part for the 21 and over crowd.  You can always use the mixture to make Lavender Lemonade Martinis.  Mix two parts lemonade and one part vodka over ice in a cocktail shaker.  Drain from ice into a sugar rimmed martini glass and enjoy! Cheers to summer! Hurry on up and get here!

***Join THE southern social network site and brainchild of Cheri Leavy and Whitney Long, by visiting www.thesouthernc.com and sign up to receive their weekly newsletter hightlighting all the things we love about the South.  You will find me there as a regular contributing writer so look out May 9th for a new piece connecting stories with food, called Strawberry Pickin' and BBQ Chicken.

The Game Called Life

Previously published in the Coastal Illustrated, April 18, 2012

Life is hard. I just found out I am having another girl and no one seems too concerned that I am running out of room in my car.*  And it sure doesn’t help that I still haven’t paid off my student loans yet and now one of my pre-existing kids has decided she wants to go to med school after I paid ten thousand for a wedding reception so she could then elope with a struggling stand up comedienne that comes with an annual salary of five G’s, a double wide, and a flat screen TV.

This is the kind of stuff that keeps you up at night.

That’s why, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why my family likes to play Milton Bradley’s Game of Life right before bed.  It’s even getting to my nine year old.  She ended up paying so much money in back taxes she had one heck of a nightmare last night and had to spend the night wedged in our bed. 

But it got me thinking (as well as not sleeping.)  Is the Game called Life really a reasonable interpretation of the honest to goodness, real, breathing in and out, and putting one foot in front of the other thing it’s named after?

In some ways, yes, I think it is.   In life, just as in Life, it does seem more times than not, we close our eyes, spin the “metaphorical” wheel, and hope for the best.  Will we win the lottery, a TV game show, or five grand worth of free furniture?  No, probably not.  But see, there are all of these things out there we can’t control, like a recession, job loss, or medical bills, so we take three, five, ten steps forward-whatever we can get- and pray for the best.  It doesn’t seem fair.  But it’s all we can do.

Will we find a buried treasure or win the Nobel Peace prize?  Our odds are much better in the Game of Life than the real one, but in both, we have choices to prepare us for the “down the road” scenarios that will inevitably pop up.  Education, investments, spending wisely not frivolously, are all options for both that can better prepare us for life’s greater challenges.

But still, unforeseen circumstances happen all the time in the game and reality as well.  We might lose a hefty investment, have to take a pay cut due to no fault of our own, or maybe even be sued by one of your own family members.  All of these things happen in real life, but sometimes the responses seem to be the same as those thrown out around the game board: “It’s not my fault.  I can’t do anything about it.  It’s just life.”

Basically, suck it up….which are tough words to swallow.  So maybe this is where I think the two differ.  Real life is what happens when the rubber meets the road, when it’s no longer play practice, but the real deal.  And real life, unlike the game, should never be left up to chance.

When I was a freshman at UGA way back when, one of my favorite classes was a comparative lit class.  If I took one thing away from my studies that would shape the way I would look at life when I got out in the real world to live it, it would have to be reading Voltaire’s Candide. 

Voltaire was a French philosopher and writer during the seventeen hundreds, the period of Enlightenment, and is considered to one of the great thinkers behind the French and American Revolutions.  It’s true that our Founding Fathers were inspired by the very things we appreciate and practice now that were not available in Voltaire’s time that he advocated: freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.

In his satire Candide, Voltaire rejects the notion that everything happens for the best in the “best of both possible worlds.”  In the author’s own world at the time, great atrocities were dismissed by saying “it’s God’s will” or “fate” and no one could do anything about it except for smile and be optimistic it will all work out in the end.  What he concludes still sticks with me today, that in the end, like Candide, we must all “cultivate our garden” and not leave our lives up to chance.  In fact, we must all try and control our own destinies through hard work and persistence.  If you plant a seed and tend to it, it will grow.  Look at the seed Voltaire planted in his day and how we are all reaping its reward today over 250 years later.

For me, when life gets hard I think about cultivating my garden and about how impossible things can become possible.  No matter how many times I spin the wheel and how many spaces I more forward, it will always be up to me to figure out a way to get on down the road. 

My girl’s have taught me a lot while playing the Game of Life and our subsequent discussions of it before bed.  Whenever the Life tiled road diverges and you have a choice to take the risky path or the safe one, they tell me to take the risky one every time.  Some people think a safe path might be better they tell me, but it slows you down getting where you want to go every time.

For me, I think I’ll teach my girls something in return.   I am going to pick out a piece of earth in our back yard.  We can plant tomato seeds and fertilize and water them.

And see what grows.

   

*Writer's Note: No.  I am NOT pregnant! No baby on the way but thanks for all the well-wishes after this story came out in paper a few weeks ago!  This momma already has more than she can handle!  

A Mother's Mind is Mush

         previouly written July, 2010 for blog only

Mush has never been one of my favorite words.  Especially now, since it reminds me of all the things I have tried real hard to forget since my husband and I decided to procreate some ten years ago.  Things like strained peas, regurgitated peas, dirty diapers and the “stuff” under the car seats that can only be identified with a culture and a bio-hazard lab at the CDC.  I could go on, but I won’t, seeing as it could trigger something in my brain and make the memories of the mush come flooding back in. 

I don’t know what it is they do to you at the Maternity Ward, but the ID bracelets they tether you and your newborn to must have some sort of electromagnetic mind zapping device in them or something.   What else could single handedly erase (along with your privacy and the hope of ever fitting back into your size 26 jeans) every last one of your remaining brain cells?

Gone, like that.  Just when you need them the most, you’re no longer able to remember dates, times, appointments, ages, passwords, street addresses, birthdays, or names. 

“Is David feeling any better,” I ask my friend after I literally bump into her at the grocery store with my shopping cart.

“Oh, he’s fine,” she tells me as she waves a hand with what looks like one of those Henna tattoos all over it, but on closer inspection, seems to be her grocery list and a reminder to pay the power bill and get the oil changed.  “His fever broke the night it rained.”

See, events are no longer referred to by date, but by catastrophic events and changes in the weather.  For example, the summer of 2008 might be replaced by the summer it was so hot the air conditioning blew up and Junior broke his arm falling out of his bedroom window.

But let’s get back to the grocery.

Earlier in the frozen food section, I witnessed an exchange between a sweet, unsuspecting elderly lady and an overtired Mom with crazy hair pushing one of those stock car grocery cart thingamajigs with a bunch of tiny arms and legs sticking out of it.  It went down like this:

“What a cute little boy! What’s his name?” the elderly lady coos over the toddlers head. 

“I’m not really sure seeing as he’s number three, I think.  It’s Jimmy, Sonny, or Spot,” overtired mom tells her has she pushes s few stray hairs out of her face.  “ All I know is that he likes Lego's but I can’t give him the small ones ‘cause he’ll stick them up his nose, he throws up on long car rides, and he’s allergic to penicillin.  Basically lady, your guess is as good as mine.  Anymore questions?’

The elderly lady, as you can imagine, walked off in a huff.  But the one I truly felt sorry for was overtired Mom.  See, I feel her pain.  As a mom, we don’t have a lot of time for idle chit chat and reminiscing about things we can’t even remember anyway.  We have better things to do, you know, like keeping them fed, clean, and out of the ER.

I can’t remember my own phone number, but I know the number for Poison Control by heart, the genus and toxicity of all wild, liver-killing mushrooms, and how much laundry detergent one 50 pound child can drink before he’s gotta get his stomach pumped.

There does seem to be one exception to this mom’s mind is mush rule and that would be Martha Stewart.  Now don’t quote me on this, but if you open up her brain….I’m pretty sure you’d find a tea strainer or two, a rolodex, and one of those all purpose labeling gadgets.  Oh and let’s not forget Hilary Clinton, seeing as she’s got a whole village or something up there helping her plug away through life while trying to achieve world peace.  I just want to know where you get one of these villages, seriously y’all.  Can you download one from the internet or Pinterest or something?   Or better yet, make a bid for one on EBay?

Now in the case of my husband’s brain, you’ll definitively find some mush that’s accumulated on account of all the video gaming, beer drinking, and ESPN watching, but it’s quite cleverly concealed under a rather larger button, that when activated, makes it look like he’s paying attention to everything I’m saying when he’s really not.  He also has one of those selective hearing buttons, not to mention the ability to keep a whole strain of code intact, that when broken, reveals twenty years of stats for the SEC.

I can’t help it that I’m jealous of all the cool gadgets he has going on up in the big noggin of his, but what really burns me up is my kids (who haven’t hit the double digits by the way) are now smarter than I am.

“Where are my sunglasses,” I ask no one in particular, as I dump the entire content of my purse and the three kitchen junk drawers directly onto the floor. 

“Mom, really,” my youngest rolls her eyes without taking them off the Disney Channel and True Jackson VP.  “They’re where you always lose them….on top of your head.”

Here’s another example of my inferior intellect:

I find myself wandering around the house with a knot in the pit of my stomach, wondering aloud what it is I should actually be doing instead of burning holes into my Orientals.

“Mom, it’s Sunday,” my oldest tells me, as she holds out a list free hand.  It does, however, have a smudge of chocolate and the equivalent of a five pound bottle of glitter all over it.  “You’d better call your own mom or she’s going to get mad at you.  For that daily piece of advice, please dispense.”

Well, I guess I better get going so I can call my Mom and scrounge under the seat cushions for a dollar in change to pay off one of the precious little lamb chops that helped create the mush in the first place .  The problem is I just gotta remember where I left the phone.

Talk with you soon, if remember my blogger password, that is.