Day 117, 118, & 119: A Beautiful Blur

Day 117, 118, & 119: Our first kid-free weekend in 117 days!

Taiya and William's Gammie and Poppie thrilled everyone in our house by offering to have the children over this weekend. I haven't seen Taiya and William so excited since Christmas. Taiya woke up at 6:30 Friday morning, got all her stuff ready, and then bounced around in a giddy whirl until Jeremy finally took them to town at around nine. Taiya brought her doll along with all the accompanying furniture and accessories, William brought a bunch of his snuggle toys, his new micromachine toy, and his books about octopuses and coral reefs. When they left the house, a strange silence descended. It was uncanny and so, so welcome. I felt my brain sigh, slowly relaxing like an ice cream cone melting on hot pavement. I finished up my work-work in the morning, then was done with all work and child-related responsibilities for the weekend. 

So I started cleaning. I spent the weekend alternating between cleaning, sitting down in the rocking chair with water or tea and chatting with Jeremy, cleaning some more, eating something delicious, then doing a little more cleaning. I watched The Great British Baking Show while cleaning upstairs. I listened to several episodes of On Being and another great On Being production, Poetry Unbound, while cleaning downstairs. It was so satisfying. I actually like my house when it's not a disaster zone. 

Friday night Jeremy and I watched The Old Guard (loudly, late at night! Oh, the freedom!), a new action movie that was pretty good though it stressed me out. Action movies always stress me out with all the fighting, but this one had some powerful female leads and a female director, so it was different enough from the normal male-led films in the genre that it was tolerable stress. We did have to watch a West Wing afterwards so I could go to sleep. Saturday night I got to pick the movie and went in a drastically different direction: Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. It was absurdly funny and I even got a little teary at the end. I particularly enjoyed all the insults Will Ferrell's character hurled at the group of American tourists he encounters. "Go sit in a traffic jam and eat your chili dogs!" was one that sticks with me. Oh, America. 

Our dinners were delightfully grown-up. No complaints that things are too spicy, or different from the last time we made it, or weird looking. Or William's latest favorite, "I like it, but I just don't want it today." Friday night we had smoked salmon, potato salad, sesame and soy slaw, and cucumbers. Saturday night Jeremy grilled pork chops and I sauteed homegrown kale, leftover rice, and tomatoes as a side dish. Both meals were deeply satisfying, probably more so because we could eat them slowly, focusing on each bite. 

Sunday morning the house was mostly clean, so I set to making peach jam. I'd never made it before, but I love eating it and I love the local peaches we get here in the summer so I figured I'd give it a go. Jam-making is really no different from any other cooking project. You prepare the fruit, you cook it for a bit, you put it in jars, you boil those jars. I follow the detailed instructions on the low-sugar pectin package very closely so we don't die of botulism, but that's basically what it boils down to (ha ha). I only made seven half-pints (it was supposed to be eight, but you never know when measuring chopped fruit by volume rather than by weight), so it was a pretty quick, fulfilling, and very tasty morning project. To do the final step, the hot water bath, I boiled a big pot of water on a propane stove out on the porch so as not to heat up the house. I highly recommend this method. 

After that was finished, Jeremy and I went up to the farm to pick blackberries. There are a few wild brambly patches that have been there since before his grandparents bought the land in the 1960's. It wasn't easy picking (they're definitely not thornless) but we got a couple quarts and will be able to pick more next week. 

Picking blackberries was a beautiful way to spend part of the morning. The sun was high but not too hot yet, birds were chirruping up and down the scale, shiny Japanese beetles were competing with us for ripe berries, the breeze cooled me, my big floppy straw hat only got caught in the brambles a few times. I spent some time thinking about Jeremy's Granny who passed away in December. She was always a very determined blackberry picker. She used to reverse the pickup truck into the berry patch and open the back to stand on and pick those hard-to-reach berries without getting too torn up. She just couldn't stand to leave behind those ripe berries that were outside her reach. She always wore a big floppy hat, white coveralls, and rubber boots, and her spry old self would get lots of berries to make into jams, jellies, and cobblers. I miss her. 

I made a delicious blackberry syrup with 1.5 lbs of the berries - just cooked them with sugar and strained out the seeds. It will be so good on pancakes, on vanilla ice cream, in sparkling water, straight from a spoon... 

After we were done picking, I did a little more cleaning in the kitchen. I even dusted the ceiling fan. I'm so proud of myself. Jeremy went to get the kids in the afternoon and during the time he was gone I finally let myself sit down to my poetry writing. I enjoyed the last hour and a half of time to myself playing with a series of poems I've been working on. But when they pulled into the driveway, I was so glad to see my kiddos. It was just the right length of time for them to be gone - long enough for me to relax and start to miss them, not so long that anyone got homesick. I got to hear all about the fun they had with their grandparents (They had lime sherbet! William helped Poppie feed the cats and the birds! Gammie taught Taiya wisdom about high heels! ("Walk in, sit down, walk out, take them off.") They ate pre-made frozen waffles!). And they loved how clean the house was. "It's like a whole new house!" Taiya said.  

We went for a swim after dinner. It was shady by this time of day. Swimming was a sweet way to bring the weekend to a close, returning to each other in the blue water in the late-day slanting light.