Accepting Mercy On the Supermarket Line

I am watching the cashier at the local supermarket ring up my purchase.  $25.72. I pass over my singles, one at a time, then the two five dollar bills, then the four dollars worth of quarters I found in various nooks in my car. And I realize I am 72 cents short.

I am buying tonight's dinner - a full chicken for roasting, a bag of carrots and four sweet potatoes.

I am also buying a half gallon of soy milk, a dozen eggs, and a jar of applesauce because I plan to bake oatmeal raisin cookies on this rainy November night. I glance over my purchase. What don't we need tonight?

"Oh, let me put two of those sweet potatoes back," I tell the cashier.

The woman behind me in line smiles. She offers the cashier three quarters. "This happens to me all the time, " she says to me

For a split second, I feel embarrassed. I want to explain to her that my husband's paycheck clears at midnight tonight, that we are solidly middle class family with two jobs, a mortgage that is paid on time. Truly, I could have found those quarters on the floor of my sedan, I want to say.

But she's smiling and I realize none of that matters: whether I am temporarily without three quarters, or whether this is a daily occurrence.

She wants me to buy those two extra sweet potatoes and she was put in front of me so I could be humble and accept her gesture.

How often our pride gets in the way of seeing the hand of Our Creator. I like to think of myself as the giver, not the receiver: I'd spent part of my afternoon at the wake of a friend's father, a man who had had an often difficult life. I had actually been trying to list the  seven - is it seven? - corporal works of mercy on my drive home, patting myself on the back (figuratively of course) for driving to the wake and comforting this friend and never considering that I might be in need of mercy, too.

A world so free and profligate reveals your loving hand, O Lord. With dawn and all the gifts of day we praise you, Abba, breath and word.  
– Lauds and Vespers, Camaldolese Monks, OSB

Reflections on a Mother's Love: Milk, Cookies and a Carelessly Tossed Gym Bag

I snapped this photo this afternoon, shortly before leaving my parents' house after a brief overnight visit. The scene is a vivid reminder to me of what being a mother is all about.

I arrived at my parents' house close to midnight last night after driving from my graduate school class in Jersey City. My octogenarian parents were in their pajamas in the family room, waiting up for me, even though I told them they could leave the back door open and I could slip in. They turned off the television and my mom served us all milk and cookies.

We talked for nearly an hour, me sharing my tales from this fall's teaching, and they shared a story about one of their nine grandchildren, who recently found an excellent solution to a struggle.

How To Make Iced Latte Without Ice

I was inspired this afternoon to make an iced latte, following the directions of Danielle Walker, on her wonderful blog, Against All Grain. 

This, my friends, is not what my iced latte looked like:

Rusted Pipes and Homemade Chocolate Sauce: Making Do

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” 
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Right now I'm smack in the middle of my three-day weekend, All of us - my husband and our two sons - are home from school and work. Tomorrow, we will host friends for  ice cream on our front porch. Our home is never really ready for guests but we invite them anyway. I'm making chocolate sauce. This photograph is from Susan Branch's blog; my counters are stained and I don't have a pretty copper pot. I'm making the chocolate sauce anyway, and later, I will make caramel sauce.

Overcoming Burnout By Counting My Blessings

A loving and loyal husband. Two healthy sons. A working car. WQXR. A job I love.

These are the five things I wrote down today in my gratitude journal. I've had a long, tough winter and, toward its end, realized I was burned out. So I bought an online workshop called The Restore Workshop, developed by a couple of women, including Elizabeth Foss, one of my favorite bloggers. These are women who know all to well about burn out and they have just the right prescription for me.

Painting the House, Guarding against Greed

You know how they say one's physical space can sometimes reflect one's inner state? 

Baking Bread and Stumbling Through Lent

Today I am making challah. I found a great recipe online for something called Cinnamon-Apple Raisin Challah. On the King Arthur website, it looks like this before it goes in the oven: 

Let me tell you, my challah looks nothing like that.

Celebrating Valentine's Day during Lent? Yikes.

Lent is approaching. Many of us, including yours truly, have food-related Lenten penances, good habits we want to develop and continue after this season of preparation. So one day after Ash Wednesday this year comes the Feast of Saint Valentine but better known as a secular day designed for indulgence in everything sugary.

How can we keep our Lenten promises (mine involve eating only unprocessed food during Lent and seriously limiting my sugar consumption) while enjoying the day after Ash Wednesday? By the way, speaking of Lenten Loopholes, Ironic Catholic wrote a laugh out loud funny post about this here.

Candlemas at Our House

Candlemas, a nearly forgotten holiday which happens 40 days after Christmas, began this morning when our sons took the Christmas tree out to the curb and put the tree stand in the basement. 

Later, I had two girlfriends over and we made beeswax candles. None of us had made candles from scratch before, so we all learned together. I had bought the beeswax pellets this fall to dip autumn leaves and I had a whole lot left over.

Dismuke Discovered: Music to Bake Cakes By

Cookie baking eludes me - too much precision involved. But I've discovered a love of cake baking this Advent season, thanks to a couple of websites, including Deb Perelman's Smitten Kitchen and Jennifer Gregory Miller's Catholic Cuisine. I've baked a cake every Sunday since Thanksgiving, and my foodie sons and husband have weighed in on which ones they liked and which they didn't.  Friends are visiting in the coming days and I have lots of cakes to bake. But I need music to bake by.

Just for Fun: Christmas Decor Linkup

I haven't done a linkup in a long while and figured this one would be a way to show off how we have decorated our home so far. Right now, we are focusing on Advent; we plan to buy and decorate our tree over the weekend.

So....here's what we have up so far.

First, the front door Chez Trevor:

Our front door. I bought the "family basket" many years ago at a Christmas craft show. The Saint Nicholas is actually a puppet I ordered online this year from the fabulous Holland, Michigan-based St. Nicholas Center. 

First the Good News: Noone Will Ever Mistake Our House For Cheese

That's because the new paint color on the exterior of our house isn't Velveeta yellow, as is the house across the street. In fact, once upon a time, before the days of GPS, we would use that house as a landmark  when giving directions. "Just turn left at the Velveeta House.".  The owners, now grandparents, didn't mind; in fact the house's color is a point of pride. "Our house used to be Dunkin' Donuts pink," the matriarch told me once. You see, they let their eight kids vote on the house color.

So it was my 13 year old and I who decided on the new house color. At first, we liked a Benjamin Moore color called "California Blue." The paint would be only on the first floor of the house, since the second floor is white siding. And are white wooden front porch will stay white too.

But then, I got to thinking: let's go with something a little more sedate. Let's go with Number 805, "New York State of Mind." (Imagine getting paid for coming up with these paint color names). And so that's what the painters bought and have been painting the exterior with. But instead of this....

Our Graffit-Covered Garage Teaches Me a Lesson

Our garage is not attached to our house, which is more than 100 years old. Our garage is built of concrete and our house is so small that it has been years since we actually put a car in the garage. Instead, our garage became the dumping ground for all kinds of stuff - broken bikes, empty paint cans, rakes, rusted garden tools and lots of leaves. It really was one of the grossest places on our property. I think it had been months since I had stepped foot in it. Still, I didn't expect to discover in the early fall that a certain preteen, because he was "bored" this summer, had chosen to spray paint the walls and floors of this most unlovely garage.

To say my husband and I were not pleased is an understatement.

I am not even showing you the worst of it, because his graffiti included a vulgarity. 

Etsy Score: This Time A Mirror

I've mentioned before how much I love www.etsy.com, that site where crafters from all over the globe can post their wares. Today I made another etsy score: this groovy mirror.

Thanks to the U.S. Postal Service, I don't care what corner of the country I order stuff from. I bought a wonderful book bag from a woman in Arkansas, and an iPad case from a woman in Wyoming. My wallet was crafted in Connecticut. Turns out the person who hand paints these vintage mirrors lives just a couple of counties from me. 

Teaching Our Son to Knit and Learning About Motherhood

In this fuzzy cell phone photo you can see piles of unfolded clean laundry in the background. In the foreground, you can see our 12 year old. Knitting. Yes, our soccer goalkeeper/first baseman/basketball guard boy asked me yesterday if I could teach him how to knit.  Yesterday, I started knitting after a break of several years. Today I taught him how. Today I learned once again that my child doesn't need a perfect mom. He needs me.


The thing is, I barely know how to knit. I can cast on, in my own way. I can knit. I can purl. I often lose count, rip everything out and start all over. I have only knit scarves. Nothing more. The rest is way beyond me.

As the New Year Approaches, Begging for Simplicity

A few days ago, our family, led by our teenaged son, began the Great End-of-Year Purge. Already we have boxes of outgrown clothes we will deliver to the Good Will store and bag after bag of garbage. The stuff we have accumulated over the past 15 years of living in our small house is, well I don't want to say shameful, but that is the word that comes to mind. There is stuff we no longer use and stuff that is not usable. Out it goes.

I am not one for making New Year's Resolutions. Perhaps, instead, this year I can make a New Year's Prayer: God, help me find simplicity, help me understand what is essential in my life. I  hope and pray, no, I am begging that by decluttering our lives, my family is making room for Someone else.

The writer Rev. Mark Connelly tells us "Simplicity is the origin of freedom." Rev. Connelly is talking about a simplicity of heart and how that can lead us to a richer relationship with the Divine. I also think that externals can reflect one's internal life. And our home has become so crammed with stuff - jammed into closets and onto shelves and various horizontal surfaces - that has been distracting us from our interior lives.

How to Celebrate Christmas Without Hurting Yourself

I mean that mostly figuratively.

My friend Dee is a new grandma, a retired teacher, and an ovarian cancer survivor. She blogs at Women of Teal. She has spent two Christmases in treatment and today offers "Advice from my Christmas past" (Gee, the English teacher in me loves the Dickens' allusion!)  for recovering cancer patients on how to manage the holidays. As I read it, I realized her advice applies also to moms, particularly to the mothers of small children. Boy, how exhausting that time of life can be. So please stop by her blog and leave a comment!

(As an aside, Dee and I met when we were fellow parishioners. We're both in new parishes now; she and her husband moved to a community many towns away and my family decided to switch back to the parish where our sons had been baptized. Funny thing, I know Dee better now via our blogs and facebook than I ever did when we saw each other every week at church!)

Dealing with So-Called Durable Goods in our Civilization of Consumption

I waited at home for four hours today for the  Sears' repairman to visit to tell us how much it would cost to fix our 10-year-old oven's door. His answer? More than $400. "That's what the parts cost," he told me. (We're talking a couple of bolts, maybe a new handle. )And by the way, he said, a new Sears oven would cost a little over $500. He showed me a few models in the catalog he carried.

I don't blame this man for the consumer economy. Appliances, he told me, are designed to last a decade. This is why our household currently has a broken dishwasher, washing machine, microwave and oven. And no, we don't have hundreds of dollars sitting around to replace these machines. We haven't relied on credit cards in more than 15 years. So we've been washing dishes by hand, cooking on the stove top and on an electric grill, and trekking weekly to the laundromat in town.

Pay It Forward: Artist Susan Branch

"Home artist" Susan Branch, who grew up the oldest of eight children, is a self-taught artist, cookbook writer, seamstress, gardener and so on...Why do I love her blog? Let me count the ways!