Hannah Kaye's Blog, page 2

Thyme and Tide

I’m making stew tonight.

It’s cold and blustery outside. December up here means the sun is already mostly gone as early as 3:30 in the afternoon. The wind howls around the house and one morning last week I woke up to see a troop of very confused ducks waddling about on top of the lake, which had frozen over in the night. It’s the perfect sort of weather for a nice, hearty, beefy, herby, vegetabley stew. (Click that link for the recipe! I highly recommend!)

But here’s the thing about a good stew: you have to let it… well, stew! For like three hours! And let me tell you, it smells really good. The. Whole. Time. And when it still has two hours to bubble away and its aroma is floating through the whole house and I’m already super hungry (so like, right now) it can be equal parts exciting and frustrating. Making stew is an exercise in patience, I think.

So humor me a bit here as I wax poetic while I’m waiting for my stew to stew. Actually I’ve been thinking a lot about waiting and anticipation recently, so tonight’s dinner is a pretty nice tie in.

Right now, I seem to be waiting and anticipating a lot of things. I have this “countdown” app on my phone that lets me set a time and then keep track of how much longer until I reach that time. I feel like a little kid on a road trip sometimes, pulling up the app and asking “Are we there yet?!” And the app is the driving dad whose patience is wearing thin but is still trying to be nice, saying, “No, not yet. Still 19 more days, hon.” Last year, during my final year of university, I set the “how many days to graduation” countdown way back in the middle of the fall term. Looking at it periodically helped me remind myself I was almost there, and this too shall pass.

There’s a lot of countdown going on this time of year. Unless you live under a very large rock, it’s impossible to be anywhere in the Western Hemisphere and not be aware that it’s Christmastime. Amid the December haze of gingerbread, carols, lights, shopping, and all the jingle bells, holiday films, and festive get-togethers, there’s a theme of anticipation. This is exemplified by the quieter, more intimate side of Christmas. If you follow the Church calendar at all, you’ll know that right now is the season of Advent–the time of waiting, preparation, and eager anticipation of the celebration of Christ’s coming. In Advent, readings of Old Testament prophecies and the Christmas scriptures, prayers of preparation, singing of hymns, and lighting of candles all serve to mark the passage of each day toward Christmas. Every day brings us closer to the real day. It’s not just a fun season. It’s a season of preparation leading up to something better. But heaven forbid I start humming that dreadful little tune “Christmas Countdown” that my orchestra insisted on playing every single year… those of you who know it I apologize to you for mentioning it.

I’m doing some countdown-watching of my own just now, though admittedly it doesn’t have much to do with Christmas. My handy dandy countdown app tells me I’ve got a mere 255 hours till I’m on a plane back home to see all my favorite people. Even though it’s 11 days out, I can hardly restrain my impulse to pack my bags right now, because man, I am ready to be home. Additionally, the occasional glimmer of a bit of precious rock and metal on my left hand will catch the light, a physical reminder of my other countdown–that in 108 days I’m getting married to my best friend and loyal adventure buddy. There’s so much goodness ahead in the future that it’s hard not to wish away the present.

There’s a saying that goes “Time and tide wait for no man.” Basically it means that time passes, proceeding ever forward, and you can’t stop it or ask it to hold up and wait for you. A few months ago, I sat alone on the shore of one of my favorite beaches near sunset. I picked a boulder to sit down on and stared out at the waves. After a few minutes I noticed that the ocean was a little bit closer than it had been; a set of paw prints I had seen near the waterline had washed away. I sat there and watched the tide gently come in, bit by bit, slowly but unswervingly creeping up the beach and closing in on my rock until I had to abandon it and get to higher ground. I couldn’t have sped it up or slowed it down if I had wanted to. And even if I had been able to, I would have missed the magic of the moment.

Life’s seasons are the same way. The opportunities that you have right now may not come again. In all of the Christmas anticipation, the Advent celebrations, wedding planning, or even in the act of cooking a stew, there is a state of conscious “active” waiting. Sure, I’ve got to hang out for two hours while that pot bubbles. But I can use that time to prepare other parts of the meal. Sure, I may still have two weeks before I can go home and see my family, but I can use that time to invest in the people who are with me here now. Waiting does not necessitate wasting. Today only comes once. Each day matters. I think that’s important to remember in a season of waiting. Passive waiting is just impatience; time spent wishing the present away is time wasted.

Well, that’s all from me for now! I’m off to go finish dinner. And, as a quick moral of the story, I can guarantee that the stew will be all the more flavorful for the time it had to simmer and bubble. In the end, waiting makes the final result that much more enjoyable.

Also, I’d just like to mention that my stew recipe didn’t actually call for thyme. I definitely added it to the pot solely so I could make that pun in the post title. I am dedicated, you guys!

On the upside, thyme is delicious.

Lessons from a Sunken Sparrow

So there I was, thigh-deep in chill-inducing river water, with my sky blue kayak, my beautiful Ellie Sparrow, staring mournfully back up at me from a foot beneath the surface. My knuckles were white with a death grip on her bow handle, trying to keep a grip on her, but with the combination of the current and the fact that she was swamped with a couple hundred pounds of water, I was far more likely to be drug downstream myself rather than pull her to shore. Slick rocks don’t make good footing, but it was the best I had since the riverbank had eroded such that dry ground was nearly shoulder height on me. Not much chance of pulling my swamped boat up that way.  There was a little rocky beach not too far downstream that I had a chance at getting to, if I could manage to guide the submerged Sparrow to the other side of the river without getting caught in the rapids, losing my grip on the boat, or taking a misstep in river rocks and getting washed away downstream myself.

Let’s back up a little bit here. How did I get myself into such a mess? Simple really. All you have to do is wait for half of your float trip buddies to get far ahead of you and the other half to fall behind you so you’re alone on a stretch of river. Then just steer your kayak out of the center of the river in an attempt to avoid the biggest rapids and come in close to shore. A low overhanging tree branch will presently catch you on the side of your head and knock you out of your boat. As you scramble to get back in, the current will pull the kayak on its side and gently dump a gazillion gallons of water in it, effectively sinking it. Voila!

That was the absolute best weekend of my summer, hands down. The sunken kayak incident was only one of the adventures I had that weekend, and it was most definitely not the most exciting one!

I think maybe I come across as tossing the word “adventure” around a lot. I mean, it’s in the name of my blog. I really do have a fondness for adventure, but if I’m going to talk about it all the time, then it’s probably about time I let you know what I mean by the term.

I’d like you to understand that by calling something an adventure I imply quite a lot about the thing itself. My mind jumps to the passage from C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, my favorite of the Chronicles of Narnia. Here’s how it goes:

“They set out. It was good, springy ground for walking, and a day of pale winter sunlight. As they got deeper into the moor, the loneliness increased: one could hear peewits and see an occasional hawk. When they halted in the middle of the morning for a rest and a drink in a little hollow by a stream, Jill was beginning to feel that she might enjoy adventures after all, and said so.  ‘We haven’t had any yet,’ said the Marsh-wiggle.”

Good old Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle, keepin’ it real. I think he and a few others have grasped the idea of what an adventure is. I asked my good friend Meriam to weigh in—Meriam-Webster, that is—and he says an adventure is “an exciting or dangerous experience… (verb form) to proceed despite risk.”

So I’m with Puddleglum and Meriam. In an adventure, there is always some element of the unknown. There’s danger, there’s risk. A mere walk in a wild place is not an adventure, not by default.

Also, I need you to appreciate just how long it took me to find that Narnia quote. I was convinced it was in Peter Pan. You know, along the same lines as the part where Peter asks if they’d like an adventure now or do they wanna have tea first. Google didn’t turn up much, so I read through chapter 4, where I suspected the quote would be. Twice. I read the entirety of chapter 4 twice in search of one measly little quote! After that I was a little befuddled and started wondering where on earth this quote came from. I looked on IMDB to see if it was a movie addition that wasn’t in the book. I switched stories altogether and looked in the Hobbit and LOTR. I googled every possible variation of the quote that I could think of, so much that I thought Google was going to revoke my search privileges.

Side note—did you know Google can refuse to search for things for you? One time in college I was writing a paper on a topic I knew nothing about and was relying pretty heavily on Google for all my quotes, facts, and sources. Apparently I searched too many similar things in too short of a time period that Google thought I was a robot and sent me a message saying I couldn’t search anymore. To be fair, I was searching intensively for information concerning espionage and free speech rights during the Red Scare, so maybe Google didn’t think I was a robot—maybe Google thought I was a Communist spy. Whatever the case, Google locked down and I had to wait like 10 minutes without searching for anything to get back in Google’s good graces, like a little kid who gets in trouble for running at the public pool and has to sit in shame on the grass for 10 minutes before the lifeguard lets him back in.

I must return from this rabbit trail because heaven knows I am never ever going to catch that bunny. Where is my brain today?  (I’m gonna play the ‘I’m jet lagged’ card this time. Give me grace for my rambling mind; I casually crossed the Atlantic a couple days ago.)

Ah yes. I remember. I was defining adventure.

All this to say, there is an element that separates an adventure from a leisure vacation, and that element is the acceptance of risk. Sometimes adventures throw wrenches in our plans, and we find ourselves stranded in the middle of a river current with a sunken kayak, or wind up 4,000 miles away from the person we want to be with most. I’m not saying that you can’t have an adventure unless things are going wrong—the difference lies in the reaction: when your plans go askew (because they probably will) and things surprise you or get hard (also pretty much a guarantee) if you’re in a vacationer mindset, the slightest issue can stress you out and spoil everything. An adventurer mindset looks at an unexpected situation, takes courage, and adapts. Often these setbacks are the very thing that make adventures memorable and valuable, because in overcoming them, an adventurer grows stronger. Would you read a novel where the hero accomplishes their quest with no opposition or hardship along the way? Yeah, me neither.

It’s a complicated adventure, this life. But it’s a grand one, full of twists and turns and journeys that take you where you never dreamed you’d go, and you get the benefit of having grown through it all. It is so worth it.

In case you’re wondering, I did save the kayak. I pulled it to the beach, got all the water drained out of it, relaunched it—and managed to capsize it twice more that same day. Trip ruined, right? Not a chance! It was an adventure worth having.

When my little sister went on an eight-week summer trip to Europe a few months ago, I made her a sketchbook with the words “Adventure is out there!” on the cover. I think what I wrote to her in the front cover sums up this whole “what is an adventure” train of thought pretty well:

“…but the point is, adventure is not a trip, and excitement is not a destination. Adventure is an everyday lifestyle—as long as you choose to be an adventurer.”

[image error]Also just for giggles, here’s a hedgehog who needs to read this post.

Dimes and Pennies and Other Change

There’s a lot I love about the English language. It’s complex, beautiful, and odd in a becoming way. But I imagine it would be a nightmare to try to learn. For my multilingual readers, I just want you to know I’m super impressed with you and a little apologetic about the weird nuances of English.

One of the things I love most about English is that I haven’t yet gotten to a point where I think I’ve mastered it. And that’s coming from a writer. I’m not just a casual user who reads and speaks English cause it’s my native method of communication —I’m a big English nerd. I study and explore and dig into the weirdnesses of the language. Grammar, etymology, all that jazz. It’s kinda my thing. And even with all that, some things still boggle me. Like when did people decide they needed a word for the word “word?” (Probably after reading a sentence like that.) Or why do though and cough not rhyme but pony and balogna do? Or do true synonyms even exist if every word actually has its own distinct and unique meaning and usage?

Recently in my quest for English nerdom, I’ve been really into discovering where sayings and turns of phrase come from. You know, those little things everyone says and seems to understand but really if you asked them why it meant what it did they’d have no clue. For example: recently I caught myself saying that something “turned up like a bad penny.” That made me pause. I know what I meant by it—someone or something kept showing up where it wasn’t wanted. But what’s with the mention of the penny? And why is it bad?

Turns out—according to my good friend Google– that the saying originated back in the 1900-somethings when pennies were worth a lot more than they are today. Since they were serious spending money, lots of shady characters were making counterfeit pennies. So if you reached into your pocket and found a fake penny, it was super annoying and you would try to spend it as quick as possible and hope someone would take it as real money. Unfortunately, everyone was trying to get rid of bad pennies, so your odds of encountering them were pretty high. So maybe you got rid of a fake penny today, but tomorrow you get stuck with another one–or even the same one you already had. Hence the expression – a bad penny is an “unwanted thing that keeps showing up.”

There ya go. You learned something new. You’re welcome.

Another saying—also having to do with coinage for some odd reason—that’s been bouncing around in my head recently: change on a dime. Every time I get dramatic and worried about the future and what am I doing with my life (which happens more often than you might think) my Mom likes to remind me, “At your age, life can turn on a dime.” The meaning is clear—things can change quickly, abruptly, and in unexpected directions, but why is there a dime in there?

Glad you asked.

This saying has its origins in the realm of high-performance vehicles–ships, airplanes, cars, etc., and their ability to change course on very little notice and often at high speeds. Since the dime is the smallest coin in US currency, being able to turn “on a dime” implies that the vehicle is so awesome that it only needs a space the size of a dime in order to execute a change in course.

Just call me Queen Random Fact Lady. (Actually don’t, that’s weird.)

On the subject of loose change: Traditionally I try to keep my wallet empty of change—it’s heavy and jingley and awkward to fish out. People always give you weird looks when you try to pay for things with it. (Which reminds me of that time I graduated from high school and my sister and brother in law gave me 50 bucks entirely in one dollar coins, all wrapped in burlap because they wanted to give me “pirate treasure” as a present. Definitely got some stares while trying to spend that stuff!)  Despite my commitment to a change-free wallet, right now it’s pretty heavily weighed down with a handful of currently unspendable coins—amounting about £8 and €3.50. The presence of that particular loose change serves as a constant reminder that life is changing. More specifically, as can be inferred by the presence of pounds and euros in an American coin purse, my location is changing.  

Life update time!! In about six weeks I’ll be hopping onto a shamrock-bedecked Aer Lingus jet headed out across the Atlantic. From September through Christmas, I’ll be back in my beloved and beautiful Emerald Isle, living, working, and writing. (For those of you who are worried about me, I will not try to live for three months on £8 and €4… that’s just my head-start European cash that’ll buy me a cup of coffee in the airport and a bus ticket to my house. Hopefully. How much is coffee in Dublin these days?)

When I first started planning this trip, I was pretty convinced there was nothing in the world I wanted more than to disappear into the Irish mist and never return. I figured I’d fade into contented obscurity as a tea-drinking shepherdess and live happily ever after.  (Ok, maybe not really, but a gal can dream, right?) When I told my roomie (who will be getting her graduate degree in Ireland at the same time I’ll be working) that I got the Ireland job and we’d be moving to Belfast together, we held hands in the kitchen, jumping up and down together and squealing with the unbridled joy of a couple of happy piglets. It was like a scene from a movie, when the protagonist lands the publishing deal, or scores the lead role in the school play, or wins the election. Glorious, untameable delight.

Fast forward to now, 39 days from liftoff.  I’m still excited, still counting down, and still daydreaming about moss-wrapped forests and impossibly green hills. I can’t wait to get my hands wrapped around a very large cuppa, breathing in its fragrant steam. I long to feel the spray of north sea breakers on my face. I’m excited to see sheep again–we don’t have them here where I live and I love the little guys.  I smile at the thought of being the one in the crowd with the foreign accent. (A “posh-American” accent, as a very dear Irishman once told me. I still have no idea what “posh-American” is but I’ll take it.)

And yet, there’s a catch. In spite of all the excitement and anticipation about moving back across the Atlantic, some things have changed. I’ve let go of the wild shepherdess dream, for one thing.  Ireland is no longer the ultimate goal, the culmination of my adventuresomeness. It’s merely a step in a lifelong adventure. I’m thrilled to go on my trip, and even more thrilled to come back home.

Why, you ask? Because my mom was right. (Aren’t moms always right though?) Life can, and does, change on a dime, and when you least expect it, too. My hopes and dreams and plans that I have today are not the same ones I held last week, not to mention when I graduated back in May. And they hardly even resemble the plans I had back in March when I decided to go to Ireland!  

A whole lot can change in a short amount of time. And I have a feeling that as wonderful as my 3 months abroad promise to be, there are even greater adventures waiting for me right here.

You can add that to the list of random facts about change.