Back with the prego
Waiting, waiting, over due
Baby right on time.
Snowed In
As mostly happens, the snow storm that came through New England last weekend didn’t deliver the expected depths here in Northwood. New York and southern New England got slammed, but we only got about 8″, disappointingly less than the predicted 12″ — 18″. But I’ve been snowed in anyway, for reasons beyond the storm.
First, there was the storm.  We got home Sunday night after three days of visiting and parties, just as the wind was whipping up the flakes. We woke Monday morning to continued snow and got right out into it, skiing for hours. By the time we got back to the house, cozy and snug in front of the fire, the wind got truly fierce, blowing sheets across the fields so the view out the windows was nothing but white, white, white-out. Tuesday morning when we got up to go to work, there were two almost four-foot drifts in the walkway between the porch and cars. I decided to work at home and spent a good part of the daylight hours shoveling and listening to the beep beep of the back hoe backing up as it cleared the drifting snow from my road. The pastures to the west are slightly higher than the road, so when the wind drives the snow off the field, it dumps it in the road, often sculpting beautiful drift lines along the top of the bank. I’ve seen a plow truck stuck trying to clear the road — now the road agent is smart enough to send a back hoe over when the snow and wind combine in a blizzard like this one.
But as I said, it wasn’t all that much snow.  Still, I’ve felt snowed in all week, hovering in suspension. I’m waiting for a phone call from Adrienne, to tell me her labor has started. But I think I’m also waiting for 30 years ago to happen. As the dusk collected in the living room this evening I could feel the sadness welling up. Thirty years ago my labor started at dusk on New Year’s Eve, and Adrienne was born at 1:30 a.m. 1/1/81.Â
In many of the years since, Eric and I hosted what was for us, and many of our friends, the party of the year.  Eric and I would start planning the menu months in advance, and then would shop and cook and set up for days, throwing a gourmet dinner party for a dozen or so of our closest friends. The group varied a bit over the decades, but a core knot stayed with us. The New Year’s Eve after Eric died I had the party. I didn’t know what else to do. Late into the night, I was sitting at the table with a good friend. “Look at you,” he said. “You’re proof of the resiliency of the human spirit. Here you are, going on with your life, with the party.” “I think this may just be proof that I like to party,” I said, at least a bit drunk, I’m sure, as I proceeded to be for much of the next year.
I got over that, but the next year I agonized about the New Year’s Eve party. It had been an excruciating year. I’d let myself get conned into an email relationship, and then a date, with a literal genius I met at Vermont Studio Center. The process of deciding to possibly let another man into my life had been highly anxiety producing, and he turned out to be a cad, trying to cheat on his famous poet girlfriend. That was layered and intertwined, in complicated ways that make their own entire story, with losing my best friend in the fall out from her husband crossing some boundary of affection and imagined passion with me. Nothing ever happened, but I’d been too grief-stricken, and frankly intoxicated, most of the time to realize what was happening until too much damage had been done. So all I wanted to do that New Year’s Eve was crawl into a cave. I didn’t do that, but I came close.Â
This week the cad emailed me again. After 3 years. I figure he’s run out of prospects for a side cheat on his famous poet girlfriend (they’re still together, it was all I asked in my reply to him). Which makes me think of losing my best friend, who was with me 30 years ago tonight, there with me as I had Adrienne, there with me through Adrienne’s childhood and teenage years and young adulthood. There with me when Eric died. Eric who isn’t here tonight, cooking a fabulous New Year’s Eve dinner with me.Â
And now Adrienne is about to have a baby and here I am. Snowed in by sadness and memories and some regrets. But the benefit of staying present to all that’s happened all these years is I know how to carry whatever I’m feeling.  And I’m free to walk out the door as soon as the phone rings.
Christmas Haiku
Â
More than pajamas
My father knows how to dress
Patterns everywhere.
Haiku XXXX
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Holidaze blazing
Even a Jew gets swept up
Go home stay home twist.
Haiku XXXVIII
A cloud of sadness
Floats below our merriment
We gather fire.
Haiku XXXIII
Built in belly shelf
Baby curled and growing fat
What a world to come!
Funerals
Two summers ago when Aunt Freda died, David and I stopped in Worcester, where Sam was living, to pick him up on the way to the funeral in Connecticut.
“I told someone I was going to a funeral,” Sam said as we drove south. “And he said he’d never been to a funeral. ‘What?’ I said. ‘You’re a senior in college and you’ve never been to a funeral? I’ve been a pall bearer like six times.'”
Eric came from a close family, with small generations. His mother had four siblings, and of the five in that generation, only two had children, five total, and of those five, again only two had children, again totaling five. Three generations of five meant that my children, two of the third set of five, had numerous great aunts and uncles who were like grandparents. Every trip to Connecticut to visit Eric’s parents included all these aunts and uncles who’d never had children of their own. Adrienne and Sam were like grandchildren to them, and family gatherings and festivals and parties were rich with an older generation, full of love and delight in watching our children grow up.Â
But the other side of that richness is the loss.  Over the past 30 years, we’ve lost ten close relatives, and only Natalie, Eric’s mother, is left. Last Wednesday morning, Natalie’s brother Ben didn’t show up at schul as usual, didn’t make his usual morning calls, and his phone was continually busy. Burton, Eric’s cousin, went over to his house and saw through the window that Ben was sitting slumped in his reading chair. The newspaper was scattered on the floor and the phone was off the hook.
The funeral was Friday, early, because the burial couldn’t be done on Thanksgiving, the funeral home said they wouldn’t do it. To obey religious law, the burial needed to be completed before mid-day, which the Rabbi determined meant 11:35. So at 6:00 a.m. I was scraping ice off my car to make driving peep holes, and got on the road.Â
When I pulled into the funeral home, the men in dark coats were waiting. “Are you going to the cemetery?” When I said yes they had me pull my car into line, gave me an orange tag for my rear view mirror, and put a suction cup flag on my car. “Funeral,” it announced, black letters on orange. After the service, we made the familiar drive, headlights on high beams, emergency flashers blinking, through New Haven, across the harbor, to the cemetery in East Haven.
As we drove down the narrow lane with the fenced cemetery on either side, I watched the head stones flashing behind the iron fence rails. The clouds that had produced ice up north and rain in New Haven were lifting. Cars were turning in the muddy circle at the end of the lane and coming back towards me, pulling over to park heading back out to the main road. Cars in, cars out, fence rails slipping by black and straight, dark faced stones carved with name, Hebrew and Stars of David, people getting out of cars and walking through the gate to the small tent next to the new grave. I took Natalie’s hand and helped her to a seat.
After Aunt Fagel’s funeral, the year before Eric died, I said to him, “You introduced me to all these old people in your family who I love and now they’re all dying. It’s hard to lose so many people.”
“Ah,” he said. “But they weren’t old when I brought them into your life.”
Mining the Ricotta Vein
The guests were gone and there was a lot of cake left. The baby shower was lovely, but it was a lot — a lot of food, a lot of people, a lot of set up and clean up, a lot of cute onesies and receiving blankets and stuffed monkeys.Â
Once people had left, a few of us stayed and picked up used paper plates and cups half full of wine or juice, broke down tables and did the dishes. I collected all the big lavender balloons and popped them, before Kate, Adrienne’s good friend who hosted the shower at her house, went to get her dogs and bring them home. As the tight balloons popped, shreds of lavender stuck to the walls and my dress. Carrie, Adrienne’s mother-in-law who’d organized the shower, ordered the food, helped develop the guest list and planned the decorations and activities with Kate, finished packaging up all the leftovers, and left.
Finally, it was quiet. Adrienne, Kate and I looked at the big slab of cake still sitting on the kitchen table.Â
“I’m not going to eat that cake,” Kate said. Adrienne has gotten more gluten intolerant with her pregnancy, and hadn’t even tasted the cake. I eat very few sweets, generally avoid refined wheat products, and had already had some of the cake, which made me feel sick. Kate had eaten a piece earlier too, and we agreed the highlight was the cannoli filling — sweetened ricotta, laced with cinnamon, running through the cake between the top and middle layers.
“Let’s mine the ricotta vein,” I said. Kate and Adrienne and I looked at each other, grabbed forks, and got to it. I cut big pieces off the slab with the cake knife, the handle smeared with frosting which then coated my hand. Adrienne, Kate and I all broke apart the layers of cake and scooped out the ricotta filling. I sliced off another big piece, and we again ate the ricotta. And another. Once again. We laughed and ate and felt like we were breaking some rule, but all we were doing was not eating cake, piling discarded pastry into a miniature dessert dump.Â
We were eating our delight, and forgetting about the rest.
Pie Haiku
Count pies, count people
We had seven for fourteen
Rate your Thanksgiving.
November Run
The weather widget on my Droid has a red exclamation point, and when I click through to the Severe Weather Alert I find a Wind Advisory. The wind certainly feels severe as I start my run headed west, up the small hill past the cemetery.
Eight hours later: Just as I wrote the above the phone rang. Eric’s brother was calling to let me know that Uncle Benny died last night. So that changed the day, of course. The words that had been swirling through my head for this post, like the brown oak leaves whipping in the wind as I ran, swam away, and I spent the next couple of hours on the phone, rearranging the Thanksgiving weekend plans, calling Adrienne and Sam, checking in with Eric’s cousin Burton and my mother-in-law Natalie, figuring out what to do about the double Thanksgiving dinner plans, the baby shower plans, feeling the inexorable pull of life and all it brings crashing and thrashing around me, around all of us.
And now it’s another four hours later and the cooking is done and the table is set for tomorrow. Friday morning I’ll be on the road at 6:00 a.m. to get to Connecticut in time for the funeral.  More phone calls, more shifting of plans, more thinking about Uncle Ben.
Whenever a visit was coming to an end, Ben would say, “It’s been nice for you to see me,” grinning, loving his joke, the biggest joke being it was true, it always was nice to see Ben because he was funny and warm and interesting.Â
Today has been quite a November run.
Grace Mattern 