Resonance

 Photo credit: My Mama (no really, my mom took this)

It's springtime! Cue the happy band. Having recently (re)read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (highly recommended), I'm in a gardening kind of mood. Our lovely lawn has been taken over by dandelions, and my unpruned hydrangea bush is headed for another year without blooms, but that's okay because the soil I'm digging up is destined to grow delicious, kitcheny things.

We built some raised beds to house a vegetable garden this year. CPod and the boys played with power tools while I mixed batches of peat moss and compost. As I dragged the rake through the soil, over and over, I kicked off my flip-flops and felt the good, clean squish of damp dirt between my toes. My muscles strained, my breath came faster, and I caught myself smiling.

Enjoying the moment? Happy to be productive? Excited at the prospect of home-grown tomatoes, squash, beans, zucchini, broccoli, cabbage, spinach, basil, parsley? Definitely. All of the above. But more.

I had a flash of clarity, working there in that garden -- a fleeting glimpse of eternity as I felt a brief but poignant kinship with generations of women in my family who had done exactly what I was doing in that very moment. My muscles remembered, suddenly, what they had been designed to do. In that instant, I understood that it's not just my character that has been shaped by the men and women who came before me. The very molecules of my body are a reflection of who we have all been, collectively, over the years.

My mom likes to say she has always been a square peg in a round hole. And when she and my dad had children, they raised a bunch of square pegs. Try rhombus pegs. Or stars. Any polygon, really, as long as it's incongruent with Normal. But a few times in my life, I have found places, done things, met people who made me feel like my peg was just the shape that was missing: On stage, enthralled, drinking up my first full symphony orchestra experience. In front of a class, teaching -- any subject. With certain dear friends through the years. Meeting my husband. Holding my babies for the very first time. When the words are flowing, and I recognize myself in what I've written. In the wonderful church that I have embraced (and been embraced by) my whole life, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In Blogland, with all of you square pegs out there. Wandering around the medieval streets of a small European town. Exploring places, any place, indoors, outside, wilderness, city, museums, mountains. Always, with my family full of multifaceted pegs. And now, working in the dirt. (I should have seen it coming.)

I'm going to call it resonance -- a soul-deep recognition of something you were born to do. Tell me, dear readers -- what were you born to do?

The Terror of Chipman Hall, or Why My Husband Makes Me Fear Our Children

Disclaimer: I'm sure that somewhere out there in the gigantic blogosphere, someone is married to, or knows, or is, one of the BYU freshmen that my husband tortured so mercilessly his first year at that august university. To you, I sincerely apologize. Please don't hate me because I married him. I can assure you that he eventually matured into quite a civilized adult who has been threatened with his life if he shares any of the stories of his wayward youth with our children. Hopefully, this will ensure that the cycle will not continue should our kids all end up at some university together in the future. And I only share this stuff now because I figure the statute of limitations has long run out.

Do you remember the kids in your freshman ward at BYU who were always up to something? They were fun to be around, but you were never sure you wanted to stay too long because someone was bound to come up with a "great idea" that led to yet another encounter with Officer Wayne of Campus Police. Before the internet, what else would a group of rambunctious non-drinking or drug using college freshmen do with their time?

My husband knew Officer Wayne so well that if it looked like Campus Police was going to show up, he and his buddies would hightail it away from the scene of the crime faster than you could say, "One day they'll all be RMs."

It all started with his dorm assignment. See, CPod is a smart guy, but the whole honors thing? Not really his . . . milieu. Somehow, though, he was assigned to Chipman Hall, first floor: the honors dorm. Luckily (unluckily?), he found a few other guys who shared his love of a good time as well as his healthy disrespect for all things Dungeons & Dragons and/or a capella singing related. CPod, Dale, Nathan and Matt made it their mission to make their mark on the honors dorm by alienating as many groups of people as possible. RAs were not off limits; girls were, but only because these boys admired them so much. But the biggest pranks were reserved for the guys across the hall: The Freaksters. The disrespect was mutual, and pranks were volleyed in both directions. CPod claims they differed philosophically on a fundamental level -- they were destined to never see eye to eye, and I fear that if we still lived across the street, the pranks would still be ongoing.

The Freaksters were a group of like-minded individuals who spent most of their free time playing Dungeons & Dragons and singing together in the shower. (I so wish I was kidding.) During Thursday night visiting hours, they would host a big Dungeon-fest in their room; people would crawl out of their respective caves, decked out head-to-toe in dragon-master, elf and wizard regalia, and congregate in the room across the hall from CPod's. They sat three-deep on the skinny beds and rolled their million-sided dice as they obsessed about their cards and hit points and whatnot.

One night, early in fall semester, CPod and his buddies knocked on the Freaksters' door armed with an industrial carpet dryer. As the door opened, they turned on the dryer and watched the players scramble in their cumbersome costumes as all of their important papers, cards, and dice were plastered to the window by the impressive wind tunnel generated by a commercial-grade fan.

This was only topped by the time they filled a huge trash can with water, propped it against the Freaksters' door, and knocked again. This time when the door opened, an enormous wall of water flowed through the room and back again, soaking Freakster costumes and gamepieces aplenty. Those industrial carpet dryers came in pretty handy then.

Not exactly an auspicious beginning.

The Freaksters, though, were by no means innocent. They reciprocated swiftly as the prank war escalated: a giant snowball was left to melt in CPod's bed. CPod's room was ransacked, drawers dumped, closet emptied, bed overturned, and pictures torn off of walls. They tried to outsmart the non-honors occupants of the honors dorm by leaving threatening notes quoting Star Trek, or written in Old English quatrains.

But CPod and his boys would not be put down.

One night, one of the Freaksters left his door open as he visited another dorm mate down the hall. CPod and his homies snuck in and stole all his underwear. I could stop there, right? But no, it gets worse. They scrounged together enough change to completely buy out one of the refrigerated vending machines: put in your money, open the little door, and enjoy your yogurt, or egg salad sandwich, or whatever. But behind each door, they replaced the yogurt or sandwich with one pair of underwear. Every time the kid needed a clean pair of underoos, he had to find $1.25 to buy it out of the machine. It took about two days for that vending machine to be removed from their hall for good.

CPod is a South Carolina boy. What does that have to do with anything? I'll tell you: it's the state of legal fireworks. And in the pre-September 11 libertine era of air travel, he could not resist the temptation to smuggle some contraband from the motherland when he came back after Christmas break.

The Freaksters had a strange bathing ritual that took place several evenings a week: four of them gathered in the communal shower and sang harmoniously together as they simultaneously took care of their personal hygeine. Let me be clear: they met on purpose so they could sing together, naked, in the shower. CPod and his friends thought this was a little beyond strange. And since the war was ongoing, they came up with an ingenius use for CPod's M-80s. They put the fireworks on a board (to protect the tile, of course -- they weren't about destroying property, just egos and self-respect), lit the carefully-timed fuses (to give them more time for escape, lest they should look guilty), and slid the wooden block underneath the bench where people could sit to wait their turn for the shower. The four singing Freaksters harmonized away, until the fireworks exploded and, in their panic and self-preserving, adrenaline-induced haste, all rushed for the same exit from the shower, resulting in the unmistakable smack of naked people crashing haphazardly into each other.

This one was investigated as a bombing. CPod and the gang escaped to his sister's off-campus apartment and stayed there overnight until things died down back on campus.

There are more of these stories. If I had had my wits about me, I would have made CPod sign a prenuptial agreement regarding the possibilities of future mis-education of our children. He claims he has since seen the error of his ways, but I've heard him eagerly tell these stories too many times to believe that one. The truth is, I'm a little worried it's in the genes, and our kids won't need to hear the stories to repeat history. Let's hope you don't have a reason to know my boys too well should they go to BYU in about 14 years.

Who We Really Are

Last month, our stake here in western North Carolina hosted an 11-stake women's conference. As a member of the Stake Relief Society Presidency, I was privileged to participate in planning and carrying out this wonderful event. Sisters drove from 5 states, some as much as 6 hours, to join us for our "mountain blessing" and hear from Sister Julie B. Beck, the General Relief Society President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Because of my calling, I had the opportunity to not only attend all four sessions at which she spoke, but also to interact with her and her lovely daughter in a more personal way.

Do I need to say the entire weekend was a fantastic experience? It was also a whirlwind. Her schedule was packed: a fireside for our stake on Friday evening, a training meeting on Saturday morning for Relief Society and Priesthood leadership for all 11 stakes, and two general sessions in the afternoon for the women of all 11 stakes. In all, nearly 2000 people attended at least one session.

I took six pages of notes. I'm not kidding. On graph paper, in very tiny script. She opened the floor up to questions in every session and I recorded every answer. I've been rereading those notes for a month now trying to figure out why I was so affected by her words, and I think I've finally figured it out.

Sister Beck is a normal person.

That sounds really strange. And maybe a little disrespectful. That's not how I mean it to sound. Let me explain. She talked about how many extremely qualified people there are serving in this church today, specifically in Relief Society: heads of corporations, great scholars, political servants, women who have experienced much and made invaluable contributions to society in general and to the church. Her qualification to serve as the General President of Relief Society? She worked on the PTA. She took care of her children and raised them in the Gospel. She served in many capacities in her local ward and stake.

I don't know this for sure, but I bet if we dug up some people who knew Sister Beck before she was the General RS president, they would tell us that she is still the same old Julie. That she laughs at the same things, that she still folds her laundry the same way, that her food storage is maybe a little out of date, that she gets tired and weary and worn out, and that she loves to serve the Lord. Just like she always has. And all of this makes her extraordinary.

So what is the difference? I think the key is in this quote from President Ezra Taft Benson:

“Men and women who turn their lives over to God will discover that He can make a lot more out of their lives than they can. He will deepen their joys, expand their vision, quicken their minds, strengthen their muscles, lift their spirits, multiply their blessings, increase their opportunities, comfort their souls, raise up friends, and pour out peace. Whoever will lose his life in the service of God will find eternal life” (The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1988], p. 361).

What I saw in Sister Beck was an example of a willing servant: someone who has turned her life over to God, and discovered the very thing President Benson spoke of, that He will magnify us if we will allow Him to do so.

I have since been pondering what keeps me from doing the very same thing, and I just might be lacking in faith. It requires a great leap of faith to give back to God the things that seem to be essentially ours -- the only things that will leave this life with us when we go, our essential characteristics and the knowledge we've gained as a result. But those very things that we will take with us are the direct result of those characteristics that were ours when our spirits were created -- in other words, He gave them to us.

This makes so much sense to me, and yet . . . and yet. I hold onto things that prevent me from being able to serve wholeheartedly. I cling to little pieces of the world while simultaneously trying to figure out why I can't find the time to do the most essential things in my life. I have a suspicion that were I just to hand it all to the Lord, every single piece of my life, the good, the bad, and the ugly, He would magnify me, as well.

I find great irony in the fact that we struggle to give ourselves up to the Lord, when what He would do with us is make us more essentially us, better than we can do alone, happier, stronger, more joyful, comforted, peaceful. Please, God, let me lose myself . . . so that I may become me -- the me that He can see even when I cannot.

And me, magnified? Well, I hope it will be even half as wonderful as Sister Beck.

Soup

Today, my grandmother came to visit me. Not really. But I made her soup, and it was almost as though she was here.

I've been feeling a bit under the weather as of late -- not pregnancy-related, so don't worry. Just some sniffles that have now morphed into an elephant getting comfortable on my lungs, which cough frequently in ill-fated attempts to rid themselves of the heavy beast.

I think of my grandmother often: whenever I laugh; whenever I eat popcorn, pot roast, applesauce, frozen peaches, or anything with her Pennsylvania Dutch salad dressing; whenever I watch a beauty pageant on television; whenever I shop for or fold linens and towels; whenever I look through my cookbooks and find her ambidextrous, spidery hand-scrawled notes in the margins; whenever I hear a joke that makes me blush a little; whenever I catch myself humming.

Today, I wanted her to scratch my back with her crooked, arthritic fingers while I fell asleep in her big guest room bed. I wanted to open her linen closet and inhale the scent of clean sheets that equals comfort way back in my hippocampus, the primitive part of my brain. I wanted her to give me a stick of gum -- Wrigley's white. I wanted her to let me try on all of her peep-toe pumps, slingback heeled sandals and costume jewelry while she made her soup.

Her soup. I don't remember the first time I ate it. I don't remember not eating it. I remember sitting at the table in her kitchen, air redolent with the scent of simmering soup, looking for patterns in the strawberry wallpaper. I remember the same soup cooking in my house as I grew up. My mom served the soup with it's divinely-inspired counterpart: fresh homemade whole wheat bread.

Today, I needed the soup. I didn't have the energy to make bread, but the soup . . . oh, the soup. It was perfect. And delicious. And if I could have taken some to my sick sister, MommyJ, I would have.

Grandma Ayres' Hamburger Vegetable Soup

(I am not strict with these measurements. In fact, I kind of made them up. Because mostly, the soup is a list of ingredients and a big pot. So just go with it.)

1-2 lb. ground beef (lean)
3 medium carrots, diced
2 medium stalks of celery, diced
1 large potato, diced
2 medium onions, diced
1-28 oz. can diced tomatoes
2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. brown gravy sauce
1-2 bay leaves
1/8-1/4 tsp. basil
Water, to cover

Brown the ground beef, and drain off the fat. (MommyJ rinses hers.) Put it in the pot with everything else. Cover. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer. Cook until it smells right. Eat it. Then eat it again the next day -- it will be better.

Make it when you don't feel good. It will make you feel better. Make it for other people when they don't feel good. It will make them feel better, too. Make too much, and then give it away. Make way too much and give some of it away, then freeze the rest. No matter how you make it, comfort is sure to follow.

The Marriage of True Minds

I can't believe I'm going to be this sappy in front of so many people. Oh, well. It is what it is.

I had this theory when I was young (and thinking about love) that for a marriage to succeed, those who entered into it had to be opposites: that on a big continuum of qualities and characteristics, each partner needed to be equidistant from the center line. This was largely based on observations of my parents, a definite marital success story, but by no means the only type. My mom is intense and expressive and passionate and (don't get mad, Mom) a bit of a reactionary and full of bluster. My dad only raises his voice to call the dog in, takes everything in stride, never gets ruffled, and, if I'm being honest, has a lot less to say than my mom does. This also means my dad is a bit oblivious to many of the little things that go on in a marriage, but never misses when it comes to the really big, really important parts. They were, individually and together, excellent examples for me as I was growing up, observing, and formulating my own ideas about what a truly committed partnership should be like.

When I was a teenager, I vividly remember watching some sappy, sad tv movie with my mom and my sister. They both cried through all the appropriate parts of the show, and while I could understand why they were moved, and I could have told you that it was sad, I did not react with the same level of emotion. It was always like this. I thought I was missing something, like part of my girl-genes were not plugged in the way they should be. It wasn't that I didn't feel things intensely -- I have always felt personal feelings and experiences with great intensity and passion -- but when it came to other people, or depictions of other people designed to evoke emotion, I still, somehow, remained detached, with rare exception. This makes me sound cold. Maybe I was -- engaged in my own life, but standing apart from everyone else's. Then, I could have waxed poetic for hours about a Dvorak symphony, and was frequently reduced to tears by a musical experience; I dove head-first into literature and identified acutely with the works and characters of the masters; but I was, to say the least, intense, more than a little self-centered and seriously lacking in the empathy/sympathy departments.

I don't honestly know how my family tolerated me.

I've already written The True Story of CPod and InkMom. Go read it if you haven't yet. It was fun to write, because I got to remember all the fun parts of dating and courtship. And while all the fun parts are an important part of the story, probably the best part, they barely scratch the surface of the changes that I underwent when I met this man.

Suddenly, I cried. At stuff I wouldn't have cried over before. I remember coming home for Christmas that year, getting teary-eyed over a vacuum commercial, and wondering what was wrong with me.

It's taken me a while to realize what happened, what strange power CPod held over my emotional self. But I think I've finally figured it out. For the first time in my life, I was thinking more about someone else than I was about myself. And it opened this door into . . . reality. I walked through it into a place where everyone, not just me, was experiencing heartache and happiness and shame and love and disappointment and joy and pain, and it was a world full of colors that I hadn't noticed before because I had been so focused on myself. He literally held the key to my heart, and with it, he flipped the switch on my ability to empathize, to see things from another perspective, to love.

We celebrated our 12th anniversary a week or so ago, and as I've reflected on our experiences together, I have marvelled at the Lord's visible hand in our lives. What if I had, actually, married another narcissistic musician? I shudder to think what a trial like, oh, I don't know, 7 years of infertility would have done to a marriage like that one. But for us, that trial solidified our commitment to one another, to live the Gospel, to be satisfied with the incredible blessings we already had just because we had each other.

I would argue that ours is one of the greatest love matches of all time. I hope everyone feels that way about their marriage. But I know it about mine. We are supremely, divinely, perfectly compatible. My heart still skips to feel the delicate touch of his hand on my arm, to meet his eyes across a room full of people and know that he is mine, to catch a glimpse of his tall and lanky figure in the audience from the stage during a concert, to see him chase around our clutch of rambunctious boys who all, contrary to genetic probability, look just like him.

William Shakespeare wrote many sonnets about love. My favorite is Number 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose Worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

This is what we have -- the marriage of true minds: that mellows and intensifies its flavors with age; that lasts through tempests (don't think we don't have them!) and stands constant while our ships, though moored together, float independently on the water; that inspires in its participants a desire to be better, and as a whole, accomplishes more than ever could be done individually. My successes are his successes, his triumphs, mine, and our sorrows are ours together. He humors my intellectual excesses, tempers my emotional instabilities, strengthens my spiritual frailties, encourages my outside endeavors, and keeps me laughing through all of it. And while I have been known to fail here and there, and my efforts sometimes fall short, I know that my presence in his life is just as essential to his happiness as his is to mine: equally yoked in more ways than one. Blessed. Lucky. Loved. Forever.

Happy anniversary to us.

Atrophy of Roots

On our first anniversary, CPod and I graduated from BYU. We spent that week taking finals and packing up all of our earthly belongings, and the morning after graduation, we headed out to Memphis, TN where CPod would embark of the next stage of his education.

We rented a little apartment in Midtown close to the school. We only had one car, and once I had a job, I would drop CPod off for class, drive out to the other end of town for work, then pick him back up after I finished working, or at 11PM if he was closing the library.

Here's what they don't tell you about Memphis: it's patchy, in a strange way. You can go from well-maintained 100-year-old estates a city block in size to housing projects to slums to buildings with signs that announce "Drug dealers evicted here" by just crossing over to the other side of the street. Once you know the safest route through to your destination, you don't look for shortcuts because you're never sure what kind of area you will encounter on the way.

Our apartment complex was safe enough. After all, it was surrounded by a chain link fence topped with three feet of razor wire, and an armed guard manned the entrance at all times. It felt like a prison compound, and the cockroaches didn't do much to dispel my gloom whenever I thought about our living situation. You just never get used to pouring bleach down the drain before you take a shower. You can try. You can pretend. But you will never like it.

I had a good job -- a great job, really. And CPod had his work study job at the library (which I still hold single-handedly responsible for any honors he received at graduation) as well as another job that accommodated his limited student schedule. Housing is cheap in Memphis, and after crunching some numbers, we decided to look for a house to buy. If we played our cards right, we could end up spending less on a house note than we were on rent. For cockroaches.

We searched, and found a great little house. And it had a tree in the front yard. I was sold. It was one of the only trees on the street, and it was lovely: tall, and broad, and it provided shade to the little flower garden by the front porch. I had been longing to get my hands in some soil, and it looked like I would have the opportunity.

I loved that tree. I fertilized it, and pruned it, and took great care to keep it healthy. In return, it ensured lush grass and blooming flowers in my little planter. It's H.O.T. in Memphis -- the kind of sticky, humid heat where you just become complacent in your discomfort, when your clothes always make you feel like you are encased in hot dog skins, when your sunglasses fog up between the front door and your car even if it is only 7:30 in the morning.

The tree was a Bradford pear. Do you have one? You should get rid of it. They're useless.

One early Sunday morning, we were experiencing one of those Memphis storms, with a lot of wind. (It's the only place I've ever lived with tornado warning sirens. Scary.) We heard an awful crack, and when we checked the front yard, our beloved tree had split down the middle and half had fallen on our neighbor's new truck. Nice.

Turns out, Bradford pear trees are the antithesis of delayed gratification. You plant one, and just a few short years later, voila! You have a big, beautiful shade tree. But all of that growth you can see comes at an extreme sacrifice: very little growth under ground. The Bradford pear expends all of its energy branching out above the ground without building the necessary support system underneath, and when a little wind comes along, it doesn't have the strength it needs to stand strong through the storm.

It only took a few days for my flowers to die. You see, they relied on the shade of the pear tree to protect them from the brutal Memphis sun. And when the tree was no longer there to shelter their delicate blossoms, they did not have the resources they needed to survive in their environment.

Lately, I've been feeling pretty drained. I've had a few strong contractions that have worried me a bit, but I've taken it as a cue that I need to slow down. (Don't worry, my doctor is in the loop. I'm talking, like, 5 contractions. Total. Over the course of a week.) I mean, I'm supposed to have 14 more weeks of this! I've figured out (duh) that I don't eat enough, I don't drink enough water, I don't sleep enough, and I don't rest enough. And I don't take care of my spiritual roots enough, either.

I'm determined not to be that Bradford pear tree, because my responsibility to shelter my family is one I take very seriously. But taking it seriously means, first, strengthening my roots: caring for myself physically, and paying attention when my body tells me I need to take it easy; partaking of the spiritual sustenance that comes only through the activities of personal discipleship and maintaining a relationship with my Savior; saying "no" to outside activities and additional stressers when it's time to slow down.

How many of us look great to the outside world, but are really withering inside because we have neglected our roots? I would wager there's more of us out there with atrophied roots trying to maintain the facade of well-being than we would imagine . . . like, maybe, all of us, to a degree.

We are responsible for so many things -- as my mom used to say, semi-jokingly, when I was growing up, "If there's a war in the middle east, somehow I'm responsible." But the thing we are responsible for first and foremost is our own well-being. My ability to provide shelter, to bless others with my talents, to care for those both in my own family and out of it is directly related to how much care I have been taking to ensure my own physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. And yet. It's those very actions that demonstrate care for others that I choose to do instead of first working in my own vineyard.

I will not be that Bradford pear tree. The winds come every day, and I pray that my roots will be strong enough to support me, to withstand the buffeting that, certainly, will not lessen before my job is through.

Confessions of a Food Snob

When I was in the eighth grade, we had a writing assignment in English class: describe, in detail, the MOST PERFECT MEAL. I still remember mine. While my classmates' menus included things like hotdogs and popcorn and food you buy at a ball park, mine included things like spanakopita and shrimp scampi. My mom, who has always been my best editor, read the essay and just shook her head. Where did this kid come from? When it comes to my food choices, she's still shaking her head.

Consider my culinary roots. My dad attends the ACC basketball tournament nearly every year. He doesn't miss a game, at least until his beloved UNC Tarheels are eliminated from the competition, at which point he sells the rest of his tickets and heads back home. Best case scenario: Carolina takes the whole thing and Dad gets to enjoy a solid four days of non-stop basketball. This past spring, I asked him in passing about his attendance at the event.

"So, Dad, do you just eat hot dogs all day long?"

"Oh, no, they have nachos, too."

He was serious. For four days (well, three . . . they didn't win) he ate nothing but Georgia Dome concession stand food. Willingly. Now. The man makes some mean cornbread, and my husband only aspires to make breakfast the way my dad does. But still. Nachos?

My mom dislikes cooking. She loves being in the kitchen, because that's where everyone usually congregates in her house, but for her, cooking is a little like cleaning the bathroom: sure, it's nice when it's done, but who enjoys the process?

Growing up, we ate well, and consumed lots of things fresh from our garden, but my most vivid gustatory memories take me back to the respective kitchens of my two extraordinary grandmothers. I hope to inherit from my mother THE POT that my Grandma Clare used to make a pot roast. I can nearly duplicate it in my Le Creuset dutch oven . . . but only nearly.

I wish I had inherited Grandma Stella's flour board. She made biscuits at least once a day, and never measured an ingredient. The board stayed on the counter, full of flour, covered by a dish towel. To make biscuits, she brought it to the table, scooped some lard with her fingers, poured in some buttermilk, and mixed it by hand. And by hand, I mean, without a spoon. Then she shaped the biscuits, pinching off just the right amount from the large ball of dough, and baked them in her wood stove. I can smell them right now.

We spent this past New Year's Eve at my sister MommyJ's house with most of the extended family. We all brought lots of delicious things to share, and my mom, at the request of Little Brother, brought pigs-in-a-blanket. If you're unfamiliar with this delicacy, they're pretty basic: wrap Lil' Smokie sausages in crescent roll dough. Bake. Eat.

Except I didn't eat. Because there were MUCH more delicious things to choose from: mushrooms stuffed with bacon, cheddar, parsley, and chives, anyone? Spinach dip? Boursin, and brie, and gouda, with gourmet crackers? My brother gave me grief for turning my nose up at ordinary food. I told him I simply chose to spend my calories in more delicious ways.

I do not deny it: I am an unapologetic food snob. I read Bon Appetit and Cook's Illustrated religiously and regularly try new recipes from both. I find myself wanting to take Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking and just work my way through the whole book from start to finish. I consult The Joy of Cooking more regularly than I check the dictionary.

When I have an extra dollar to spend, I head to our local gourmet grocery store -- not your ordinary earth-nuggetty hang-out specializing in all things organic or natural. This place only specializes in one thing: Food that Tastes Good. I push my cart and meander through the store, taking in the visual feast of the produce aisle, selecting some strawberries, endive, or Brussels sprouts still on the plant; I stop by the deli and window-shop, wishing I could justify spending $20/pound on prosciutto, but settle for their house brand honey roasted turkey; I linger at the cheese case and agonize over the choices of Gruyere and Brie, Tillamook cheddar and chevre and mascarpone.

The store is not large, but they stock an array of choices for the discerning palate. My brother served his mission in Germany, and he gets mustard and sauerkraut there. I buy salad dressing and arborio rice in bulk and vanilla almond granola and Martinelli's sparkling apple cider and sea-salted dark chocolate caramels. And I love every espresso-scented minute I spend there.

Yes, I love food. And while there are certain packaged staples that I rely on (Kraft Mac & Cheese, but please don't tell anyone), and a few treats I like to sneak when no one is looking (peanut M&Ms, Pepperidge Farm Chesapeake cookies, Minute Maid triangle popsicles, chocolate milk made with Quik powder), I hold myself to the ultimate standard: deliciousness. And, my, oh, my, how we are enjoying the culinary journey around our kitchen, across the farmstands, and through the restaurants of our little corner of the world.

(Another entry for the Scribbit Write-Away contest here, folks. You should try it, too!)

Flush. Repeat. Flush. Repeat.

The highlight of my day so far:

Feeling a lovely breeze on my bare backside while trying to finish my business as MayDay flushed the toilet over and over and over again. Did you know you get a breeze with every flush? Yeah. It's awesome.

When I was little, my (older) cousins Richard and Robert told me all kinds of awful things: a witch lived behind the furnace in my grandparents' house (I still run up ANY basement steps); an old man lived in the toilet and every time I flushed, the doorway through which he could escape and capture me was open (I still refuse to flush while I'm still sitting, although after today I may reconsider, and I usually flush and run); nocturnal snakes lived under my bed and if I got out of bed in the dark, they would wrap around my ankles and suck me underneath to become a part of their scary, snaky realm (I still sleep with my sheets tucked in so tightly that my 6'5" husband's toes curl backwards if he sleeps on his back). They would also convince me and their mother, my favorite aunt Linda, to watch a scary movie, then hide in the woods between my parents' house and my grandparents' and laugh like hyenas when they "Booed" one or both of us into peeing like a toddler in the middle of the driveway.

Those were the good old days. Yes, my tender psyche may have been deeply and unalterably affected by their abominable stories, but we always had a great time. Because we would also take my grandfather's hand-carved walking sticks and use them as guns to hunt for Bigfoot through the rhododendron thicket in front of their house. We would go fishing in the pond with their dad, my favorite uncle Robert. We would hike, and play, and run, and eat strawberries and watermelon in my grandmother's kitchen. We would run all over the mountain playing and chasing the dogs and pretending all manner of things. Great fun.

And to think I stumbled upon all these memories because my son flushed the toilet while I was still sitting on it.