Christmas week in Harmony: Part One

We came up to the cabin two days after Christmas to play and relax in the silent woods of Harmony. Our little cabin was 34 degrees inside when I opened the door. My big plan to greet Spencer with a blazing fire in the stove was thwarted by my inability to coax anything thicker than a pencil to burn.

Without a fire, the refrigerator doesn’t run, the water in the toilet stays frozen and you can’t turn on the water.

Spencer arrived with the groceries and got the stove going, and soon the place was warm enough that we could deal with a host of other calamities: the toilet would flush but not fill; cans of seltzer left in the refrigerator door had frozen, exploded and expanded so that, once opened, the fridge wouldn’t close.

But by sunset, we had everything running smoothly, and the place was cheerful again. Good thing, because our friend John came for brunch and a walk through the snowy woods the next day.

That night, the temperature plummeted to single digits, and the wind howled through the trees. We left the kitchen faucet trickling overnight to keep the pipes from freezing.

On the third day, as I washed my hair, the rubber shower mat began floating around my feet. The drain was frozen. After bailing out the shower stall, we boiled big kettles of water and poured it slowly down the drain. It didn’t work. The water just pooled up and had to be bailed again. We still had another option: we could shovel a path to the crawl space door, shimmy inside and heat the drain pipe with a hair dryer, but we decided we’d rather just take bird baths in the sink until April.

Though bitter cold outside, in the cabin it was a balmy 60 degrees, quite comfortable if you wear long underwear, sweat pants, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a sweat shirt and a cardigan sweater.

Spencer worked on a model airplane from a simple kit to which he has added bits and pieces to create a work of astonishing detail.

I drew a piece of Celtic knotwork, the elaborate, interwoven ribbon art found in the Book of Kells and on Irish music album covers. It’s my latest artistic passion.

On Wednesday, we drove to Skowhegan to stock up on batteries, water, cider, canned spaghetti and cake, among other things, to prepare for a pending storm.

Today, New Year’s Eve, the temperature has moderated to the mid-20s, but we’re bracing ourselves for three days of snow that could accumulate to two feet. I could have left today, but I wanted to stay and play in the snow, and we’re having a lovely week hanging out and sipping hot cider.

Smokin in Boston revisited

Lightning strikes twice!

Spencer and I were in the neighborhood of Symphony Hall and Berklee School of Music today, and once again, I smelled a fine cigar. Glanced around, and there was the red-headed woman I saw in May puffing a slim cheroot. This time, her hair was very curly, possibly a concession to the drizzly day when the natural look is the best grooming option.

Our mission was to find architectural model supplies for Spencer to use in crafting airplanes. He builds model planes 1/48th and 1/72nd scale, primarily up to 1950. We went to Dick Blick's in the Fenway and Utrecht across from Symphony Hall in search of tiny aluminum rods and thin sheets of plastic.

The area between Fenway and Mass. Ave. is one of my favorites in Boston. It's a little seedy in places, a bit upscale in others, and just teeming with creative types of all stripes. We lived near Fenway Park for a few years; used to abandon our dinner and rush to turn on the TV when we heard a cheer rise from the ballpark on summer evenings.

The place got too expensive, and when we finally bought a condo, Allston was as in-town as we could get on a shoestring. We love being a 3-minute walk from places selling everything from molly bolts to mandolin strings.

The only time we hate it is Saturday nights at 1 a.m. when we wish the college kids would either find someone to screw or go to bed alone.

Chess Pie

Spencer's sister Barbara asked me if I had her mom's recipe for Chess Pie, a rich, gooey, family favorite that was as important to the Morrow Thanksgiving as the turkey. It's nothing but butter, eggs, sugar and flavoring (including vinegar) baked in a pie shell.

Well, I've baked Candy Morrow's chess pie a dozen times and always with the same result: a sloppy mess that does not at all resemble the divine confection I had at her house. It doesn't matter how long I bake it; it never firms up.

So when I got Barbara's request, I didn't know whether to send her mom's version or my own, The Joy of Cooking's pecan pie without the nuts that includes a heretical ingredient, corn syrup. I also add the all-important vinegar. Spencer thought it would be silly to give her a recipe that doesn't work, and that I should just send mine without comment. As far as he is concerned, it's Chess Pie.

But given my love of family history, I felt obligated to preserve the authentic recipe from Barbara's mother's kitchen, so I sent it to her with the explanation that I can't make it work, and also sent my Pecan Pie Without Pecans.

And guess what?

Barbara has Candy Morrow's recipe, but it has never come out right for her either! She thought maybe she wrote it down wrong because she always ends up with a sloppy mess too, and that's why she requested the recipe in the first place.

So this year, she's making the kind with corn syrup, and I know from experience that it will be marvelous.

November in Harmony, Maine

At our little cabin, the rusty leaves are all down covering the yard and the floor of the woods.

The pointed evergreens, deep green cones reaching for the sky, dominate the landscape against the gray net of naked branches around them.

Mornings everything is frosty: cars, leaves, milkweeds. The milkweeds and cattails have exploded, sending their genetic messengers out into the world.

Second-time empty nester

After a stint in Europe, my son Jesse moved in with us for a couple of months. Most of the time, Spencer was in Maine, so it was just the two of us.

Having him as a roommate required adjusting shower schedules, different shopping habits, brewing more coffee each morning, and watching more ESPN. He slept on the fold-out and stowed his worldly goods next to the recliner. Not a very happy living situation for a 36-year-old.

It was stressful for him and for me, but it was also a gift to spend time with him. We haven't done much of that in recent years. We looked up stuff on the internet, went hiking in New Hampshire, talked on the fire escape, cooked dinner.

He's moving out this weekend, sharing a place with his old roommates. It will be great to have things "back to normal" in the apartment, and great for him to be able to do his own thing without his mom in the mix.

But a gentle sadness wells up inside me. I'll be away this weekend, and when I get home Monday, he and all his stuff will be gone.

I skipped the empty nest syndrome when he left at 18 because his father was very ill, and my mind was otherwise occupied.

To my surprise, I'm having it now.

Birthday Barbie

For my birthday last week, Spencer got delicious cupcakes with bright green icing that made our fingertips look like the Jolly Green Giant’s.
I thought back to my 8th birthday, when I received a Barbie doll.
I already had a “Babette”, a disappointing knock-off that could wear Barbie clothes, but was made of squishy, unnaturally pink plastic like dolls won at a carnival.
However, my birthday present was the real thing by Mattel, sturdy, substantial, and beautifully tan, the classic Barbie with a blond ponytail and black-and-white-striped swimsuit.
She came with a wire stand, and I stood her up on my dresser and admired her that night before I went to bed. I loved her pouty, red mouth and her tiny feet permanently molded to accept little plastic high-heeled shoes.
I was totally infatuated with my Barbie, but more than the doll itself, I was infatuated with ownership. The next day at school, just knowing that she was on my dresser made me feel good, and I rushed up to my room that afternoon to look at her.
Few possessions have given me that Barbie feeling since. I felt the same thrill when I first walked out the door with a cell phone in my purse, even though I had not particularly wanted one and only got it when it became a business necessity. The feeling came back when I took my perfect, white Mac iBook out of the perfect, white box. Most recently, I got the Barbie joy when I took my new Dahon folding bike for a spin.
What do these items have in common?
I had coveted the Barbie, the iBook, and the bike, but I hadn’t cared about the phone until I had it.
All are well made. All but the bike were practically required equipment to be a contemporary human being (although the laptop doesn't have to be a Mac; any brand will do, as long as you use it occasionally in a coffee shop), and even the bike has a certain up-to-the-minute cache. Bicycles skyrocketed in popularity when gasoline topped $4 per gallon two years ago, and the Dahon is billed as “personal transportation.” Its advertising depicts hip, unique people always on the go and always ready for anything.
Perhaps what gives me the Barbie thrill, then, is becoming part of the contemporary community of owners of a well-designed thing.

Allston graffiti

Here's a couple of enigmatic graffiti declarations found around Allston, both done in an even hand in black spray paint:

JESUS IS A SHOE COMPANY

I AM THE LION KING

Pyrography

It's a fancy word for wood-burning, as in drawing with a heated stylus on wood, as kids once did at scout camp before things like environmental studies and Photoshop came along. It's very earthy, the perfect craft for our cabin in Harmony, Maine. I've been playing with it for a couple of years drawing birds and making plaques with people's names.

My hairy woodpecker plaque won Second Place last year at the Harmony Fair. But it didn't go to my head because there was no first place, and the only other wood burner did a tray featuring Mickey Mouse and all the gang. I received a red ribbon and four dollars, which I squandered foolishly.

This weekend in Harmony, I made a plaque for my brother's upcoming birthday. It took me hours to draw the design and transfer it to the slab of wood, but only about half an hour to actually burn the image.

There are a couple of problems with this craft. I'd like to take a class or join a club so I can improve my technique, but I can't find any. Wood-carving clubs open their membership to wood burners, but most have few or no takers. I've also seen some fine work online by very talented artists, but the subject matter gives me pause. They favor portraits of John Wayne, eagles, and deer. And they all seem to be in Arizona and New Mexico.

So for the moment, I'm a New England wood-burners club with one member.

Omaha, October 2009

As my plane descended on its approach to the Omaha airport, it flew over an emerald baseball diamond completely surrounded by farmlands brown after the harvest but still showing their even furrows following the contours of the land.

Reflecting its surroundings, Omaha is an orderly place with clean, wide streets: no random storefronts among the tall office buildings, no irregular jutting in the architecture, no meandering streets. Everything is rectangular and spotless.

The occasion was my niece Julie’s wedding, a stylish celebration in orange and cream that spotlighted the creative genius and profound love the couple shares. On the door of the reception venue, a dance club, a sign said, “Closed for a private event.” What fun to be among the invited instead of the disappointed. We Kush sisters comprised the old generation, the gaggle of aunts at the elders’ table.

Three of us yukked it up in the hotel elevator after the party and told another passenger that we were sisters.

“Who’s the youngest?” he asked.

We froze.

That would be Betty. We had last gathered in Omaha four years ago for her funeral.

But in a flash, we recovered the festive mood and replied with good humor.

I’d opted to return to Boston at the crack of dawn Monday, and by mid-afternoon Sunday, the rest of the family had gone. Alone in a hotel in the heartland, I felt like the last person on the planet.

I wandered the streets of “NoDo,” the up-and-coming neighborhood north of downtown. I saw signs of an artsy community on the verge of bursting out: the Tip-Top Apartments in a rehabbed, 90-year-old factory; a sculptor’s studio in a low, orange-painted building, the lawn and driveway covered with metal creations. The place was deserted; no sensible person walks around downtown on Sunday evening.

At a squeaky-clean bar in the Tip-Top, I drank a Tall Grass beer brewed in Kansas and watched football while waiting for a to-go sandwich.

I was a long way from Boston, but even farther from the Midwest I knew when the nine Kush kids lived in Lake Zurich, Illinois, more than 50 years ago. We were together in that house for only a few years between Betty’s birth and Jackie moving out for college, but the experience still defines a part of each of us. We ended up in nine different states. Betty landed in Nebraska when our parents moved there, and she stayed.

Although Julie and Jason reestablished the Kush connection to Omaha after Betty’s children moved away, I sipped my beer and doubted I’d ever return. I had a strong feeling that at first felt like sadness, but before my sandwich arrived, I knew it was something else, an intimate awareness of the passage of time.

Smokin in Boston

Walking down Massachusetts Avenue toward Symphony Hall, I picked up a rare and earthy aroma, and a glance around me revealed the source. A woman of a certain age with neat red hair puffed a slim cigar.