Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 77

Sunday Snippets

Quote of the day, from Ultimate Silly Songs commentary: “Yeah! Barbershop quartet and German yodeling! Let’s put ‘em together!”

Ahem, now that I have that out of my system (sorry, this is what happens when you blog with kids around…)

Here I am for another edition of RAnn’s Sunday Snippets: A Catholic Carnival.

This week I’ll just share one post: Family Matters. I blogged every day, but it ranged from fiction to whether men should shave, and even I can’t pretend those have anything to do with Catholicism.

 

7QT

filedesc http://www.epa.gov/win/winnews/images05/0510keyboard.gif (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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What is it people say about summertime being easier than the school year, because there’s less to do? Uh…no. I cleared out my big nonfiction deadlines and told myself that this was the summer to finish my novel. But I’ll be darned if I can get two hours together to work on the thing. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m wrestling with the climax and denouement. You know, the part where all the themes and subplots you’ve painstakingly prepared over a hundred thousand words has to come together just so, tying up every loose end in a satisfying and believable way. In its last version, my novel strung out all those ends for forty pages. Figuring out how to compress it all into a couple of scenes has been kicking my behind. I spent the whole trip to Colorado thinking about it behind the scenes, and ever since I’ve been locked in mortal combat with it. I’m almost there.

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But you don’t really want to hear about that, do you? You’d rather I talk about Michael Mayhem. He’s hit the toddler stage running. And kicking, and rolling around on the floor, and hurling himself into any dramatic position he can find, frequently with head smacking into hard objects. I’m telling you, if the kid wasn’t so un-stinking-believably cute, he’d be a menace.

People have always remarked on how he looks like a) me, b) my dad, or c) my mother’s family. I had seen c, but not a and b, until one night this week I as leaving for a meeting, he ran into the living room and planted his feet and stared at me. It was surreal, like I was looking at a 3-D snapshot of my dad when he was a tot. A fleeting moment, but now that I’m sensitized to the image, I see it all the time.

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In recent weeks, as his hair has gotten way too long (we do haircuts on the deck, assembly-line style), he’s begun to be a mophead. And he’s decided his hair is best used as a napkin. Napkin, you say? You don’t mean…? Why yes, I do mean using it to clean his hands between the avocado and saucy chicken courses, and between the saucy chicken and ice cream courses, and after the ice cream course.

___4___

Speaking of haircuts…I’ve been giving Christian haircuts for over a decade now, and tonight I did something I’ve never done before. I completely, totally screwed up. As in, the guard fell off and I didn’t notice until I’d shaved a strip of the back of his head:

Can you see it, along the right side? Going shorter disguised it, sort of…

“You didn’t just do what I think you did, did you?” he asked…and then cracked up. See, he’s been wanting to go shorter for years, but I’ve been resisting. So we tried to contain the damage by going one setting shorter. Might as well have just shaved him, with his hair this short!

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I haven’t been writing music recently, and it’s really bugging me. I know it’s tied to playing flute. When the music muscle is exercised, it produces. When it isn’t, it doesn’t. (Funny how that works.) I tried earlier this year to start practicing regularly again, but after our studio recital in May I quit. I decided this week that the only way to get myself to practice is to give myself a deadline. So I am officially committing to giving a flute recital sometime in 2014. As of this writing (Thurs. night) I’ve practiced around two hours this week, which is impressive considering I was out of town all day on Tuesday with the kids.

Speaking of which…

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Real Pirates: the Story of the Whydah

My review: interesting for adults. Way, way, way overpriced if you’re taking kids under 8, and even 8-year-olds aren’t getting that much out of it.

___7___

I wrote a post about family this week that seemed to really strike a chord with people. Writing it in the hospital room by my grandmother’s bedside was a deeply moving experience. I was moved again by how many people commented via Facebook, blog comment and in person for days afterward. So I thought I’d share it with you, too.

Fiction: The Choosing

They called him Elder, because his eyes looked old although his face looked young. Alana had found him, all those months ago, face down in a clump of ferns beside the stream, wearing strange clothes and speaking no language anyone ever heard. Where he had come from, still no one knew, but Elder now spoke their language, and mothers plotted which of their daughters he would wed.

But Alana had no mother, no father. No one to speak on her behalf. And time was growing short. Tonight, at the full moon, the village would gather at the Broken Face and pull out all the Old Things, making music while those of age were bound for life, until only the Unwanted remained. Most years, everyone knew who would be paired with whom, but no one knew what the Elder intended to do, and so neither did anyone else.

Alana squatted with the other girls grinding grain, but her eyes followed the Elder as he climbed nimbly from one roof to the next, repairing thatch.

The sun climbed toward midday, the houses, the trees, and the people growing sticky beneath it.

When the grinding was finished, Alana gathered her things and looked up to see the Elder melting into the cool of the forest. She knew he sought solitude by the stream. She had often watched him, though always from a distance.

Until today. She rustled a palm branch to warn him of her approach. He looked up. The wary expression cleared. “Oh. Hello, Alana.”

Now that she was here, she didn’t know how to start. “Elder, tonight is the Choosing.”

He looked tired. “I know.”

“You have told no one what you intend.”

“I intend nothing.”

“But this is how things are done.”

“It is not how my people do things.”

“You are not with your people. You are here. And we need you.” Her voice shrank to a breath above a whisper. “I need you.”

She might have thought he had not heard, except for that tiny tremor below his chin, the only expression he allowed himself in public. But not here. “I know you grieve,” she said quietly. “I know you seek solitude to mourn those you lost.”

He looked sideways at her. “You see much, Alana, for one so young.”

“I am not so young.”

He sighed. “You belong with your own, Alana.”

Photo by SilverStack, via Flickr

“No one will choose me,” she said. “I am without family. Without bridal price. I am alone, like you. We are the same, you and me.” She crouched beside him and put a hand on his wrist, holding out the fine, clear bell her mother had bequeathed her for the Choosing. Once, it had stood upon a stand of some sort, but that had broken long before her mother received it for her own Choosing.

He glanced at it and shook his head. “Alana…”

“Elder, you say I see. I see you. You hold your grief as if it will keep you alive, but it will not. The living belong with the living.”

He eyed the object in her hand. “Do you even know what that is?”

“A bell.”

He eyed the Old Thing, and his lips quirked. “It had another purpose, once.” The smile faded. “So beautiful, and yet in the end, no more than a cup.”

It did look like a cup, but she had never seen a cup that stood upon a stand. “Every bell is just a cup until it is struck, Elder.”

He met her gaze, and the sadness in it softened to a smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. He took the Old Thing from her. “Call me John,” he said.

*

This is a departure for me. I never have felt very comfortable writing in sci-fi/fantasy/far-future-post-apocalypse kinds of genres, but that’s how this little proto-romance developed in my mind. Hope you enjoy. (Sorry it’s long. I tried to cut it, I really did.)

Should Men Shave….Everything?

Actor Jude Law at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As bloggers, sometimes we take ourselves too seriously. We get so caught up in the prettiness of our prose and the profundity of our thoughts, we start to think that the most important thing we do is get site traffic and lots of comments.

Well, yesterday I wrote a very heartfelt post, and your response warmed my heart. But I can’t possibly follow up yesterday’s post with something comparably profound, so here’s my contribution to taking the blogosphere a little less seriously.

So ladies: raise your hands if you have been irritated by the style of men walking around unshaven. I don’t understand this style at all. It looks so gross and sloppy. What is the attraction? Now, from the men’s point of view, yes, I can see the attraction: it would be nice not to have to shave every day. And your face needs a break from the razor once in a while. Got it. No problem. But to wear it as an everyday, all-the-time style? Really?

Ladies, what is attractive about this? You don’t seriously like kissing guys who haven’t shaved, do you? All that scratching making your chin raw and red? Do you really like him walking beside you looking like he just got out of bed, when you spent half an hour (or an hour, or two hours) doing your hair and makeup, and choosing an outfit? Someone please enlighten me!

On the other hand, there’s a counter movement that I find at least as creepy:

Whoa. Ew. Just…ew.

Give me my man clean-shaven on his face and leave the rest alone, thank you very much.

Okay, floor’s open. I know I’m not the only one with opinions on this matter.

Family Matters

 

Cousins, June 2013. Photo by Tina Sbrigato, http://www.fahrenheitnyc.com/

For the last two weeks, my mind has been on family matters. First, there was the long-anticipated trip to Colorado to spend a week with my cousins on one side of the family. My cousins and I grew up together–an odd statement, considering we lived on both coasts and halfway in between, such that we only saw each other once or twice a year, and sometimes not that often. In adulthood, there are oceans between some of us. And yet for all our sprawling distribution, both geographic and philosophical, the tie that binds us together is strong enough that we were all willing to spend our vacation in each other’s company, certain of love and acceptance, even though it would feel really, really weird to say it out loud.

At the end of that cousins reunion, I came home to sit for a few hours by the hospital bed of my grandmother on the other side of the family. People were flying in for final visits. In that room, there was no talking around the subject, no false cheer. Grandma asked us all to pray for death. At ninety-eight, she certainly has the right.

I thought by the time I published this post, she would have passed on. But it turns out she truly is the world’s most stubborn woman, and although she’s probably in the dying process, it’s not quite time yet.

Still, at the time it really did look like the end. My sister and I said a rosary with her, the words taking on so much more real a meaning than usual. When we were done, she rested a while, and when she woke I sat beside her. What do you talk about in such situations?

At last, I decided just to say what was on my mind. “I was thinking about Grandpa on the drive up here,” I told her.

“That’s been a long time.” Grandma’s speech was slow and labored.

“I hope you’ll see him very soon,” I said.

“Oh, he must be so far up in Heaven, I’ll never catch up.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s how it works,” I told her. “I’ll bet he’s waiting right on the other side for you.”

“It’s been an awful long wait,” she said. Which is true. It’s been since 1976.

Grandma, in her garden in 2003. To say this woman had a green thumb in her prime is a gross understatement. She kept up her garden and ours, too, and ours was, well….big enough to provide most of the vegetables for a family of six.

But then, out of nowhere, she was reminiscing in slow, halting sentences. We talked about her children, her nieces and nephews, her wedding day, on May 1: “It was snowing like nobody’s business when we came out of church. They held a paper over me until I got to the car.” And a new nugget I’d never heard–that her mother-in-law gave them five cows as a wedding present, to help them start their dairy farm.

I told her how I once climbed the steeple of the same church she got married in, while the rest of the family was a block away at a family reunion at the the Knights of Columbus hall. Her eyes popped open wide, her mouth pulled long. “Naughty, naughty!” she said, and on the far side of the bed my uncle shook with quiet laughter.

Most of the time, you go through life like a worker bee, buzzing from one task to the next, getting done what must be done, eyes focused in on the details. It’s only at times like these when all that other stuff, essential though it may be, fades a bit, gets fuzzy around the edges, and you clearly see what is real, and what is fleeting. Ephemeral. At times like these, you go home and hug your kids. Not because you think “What if I lost them, or they lost me?” But because you realize that in the end, those invisible, unbreakable bonds that draw us to distant mountaintops and sterile hospital beds–those bonds are who we really are. They are the web that underlies every endeavor, successful or unsuccessful, the safety net beneath our tight-rope walk, and the guy wire that allows us to fly. And the more family you have around you, the more ties there are to underlie, and catch, and draw you skyward.

Many times, immured in the madness of kids breaking things and bickering and falling to pieces if I dare to consider walking outside to move the sprinkler without taking them along, I think of all the reasons why I shouldn’t have had so many kids so close together. How hard it seems, how much managerial work it is instead of the nurturing I envisioned when I dreamed of motherhood. (The phrase “herding cats” comes to mind.)

But at times like these, when family matters lurch to the front, the veil pulls back on all those details, and I see the end result of all that I’m doing now. And I realize what I knew all along, but had lost sight of in dealing with the minutiae: it’s worth it. Every moment, even the bad ones. Because what matters is love, and family is love.

Sunday Snippets

Hey everybody! It’s been a couple of weeks since I was able to link up with Sunday Snippets over at RAnn’s place. In the meantime, we’ve been to Colorado, where we spend a week with cousins. I spent this week detailing that trip, along with photos and some of the recipes my cousins shared. If you’re interested, those posts are here, here, here, here and here.

My only other contribution is this news, which came to me while I was out of town.

Parting Thoughts (a 7QT post)

If you’re just joining me from the blog hop, we just came home from spending a week in Estes Park, Colorado for a cousins reunion. I’ve been blogging about it all week. Today, here are my parting thoughts…

Sunrise

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At 5:30 a.m., the sweetness of the ponderosa pine is stronger in the air. Or perhaps it’s just that, having eaten nothing, my palate is more receptive.

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I spent the last morning in Colorado running up and down Devil’s Gulch Road. It’s a long, slow descent into Estes Park–on the order of four miles long–and everyone who tried it this week came back moaning about how hard it was to get back to Overlook Ranch (elevation 8110) after running downhill for so far. I lengthened my runs over the course of the week, but instead of going downhill for ten minutes and uphill for ten minutes, I went out for ten and back for ten, and repeated, only shorter. And I’ve got to tell you, they’re right to have athletes train at high altitude. Coming back home, I dropped my mid-run walk break and didn’t even notice.

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The last morning at Overlook Ranch, when I finished running, I climbed the mountainside one last time, crossed the fallen barbed wire fence into Rocky Mountain National Park, and sat on a rock for twenty minutes, trying to memorize the feel of this place that I think is my favorite place on earth…at least, it’s the only one that keeps tugging my heart to return, to put down roots. Colorado, I mean, not Overlook specifically. The deep quiet, the smell, the feel, the cool, the rugged beauty. And then I sighed and went back down the hill to dress four children and pack a too-small rental SUV for the long trip home. And I thought, well, I can’t stay here forever like I want to, but I have a beautiful life waiting for me at home, too.

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And that’s just the suitcases…there were also the book, DVD, and snack bags, the cooler, and so on, with which we had to coexist in the cabin. Whoever rolls their eyes and says an SUV has plenty of space is, well, just wrong. Good thing this sucker had a backup camera.

Speaking of SUVs, can I rant for a minute? Three months ago Christian reserved a minivan. Two days before we left they decided they didn’t have one, and gave us, instead, a Chevy Traverse. I liked one thing about it: the headrest adjusted forward and back. In all other ways I wanted to stick a piece of dynamite in it. For instance: it’s too small for a family of six to pack all their things for a whole week. And, packed to the gills, we still had to get in the back end and fasten the kids’ seatbelts, because they could NOT get them fastened. In fact, we could barely get them buckled. It took me about six hot, sweaty battles before I realized the distance between the buckle and the wall of the car is too narrow to fit a booster seat. The buckle was practically under the edge of the seat! Now, what IDIOT designed THAT????? What is the bleepety-bleeping purpose of having a 7-passenger vehicle that can’t accommodate a car seat? I mean, how likely are you to have a need for a vehicle with that passenger capacity unless some portion of them need car seats?

Then there’s the rear atmosphere controls, which are positioned in such a place that all week they kept getting whacked. Alex periodically would begin to wail, “WHY IS IT SO HOT IN HERE????” and I realized, by moving the five things that were in between me and the controls (because there’s no room in the stupid vehicle), that the rear cabin controls had gotten knocked all the way over to heat!

___5___

I don’t remember the dust being so bad last time we were in Colorado. It probably was, but this time my contacts were in a pitched battle with the environment. I had to carry solutions with me everywhere I went. And the kids? Wow. Adults don’t get as dirty, somehow. We ran out of clothes for the kids, even though I ran laundry midweek. And Michael thought those piles of soft dust were the coolest play toy ever. Sit. Roll. Pound. Sift. Lick. (Yes, I said lick.) And then? Then, Christian left his empty bowl of ice cream and brownies on the step. Michael dove in to finish it, but, realizing there was nothing to finish, he decided to dig in the dust with the spoon instead. And then dip the dust in ice cream remnants, and eat it before I got to him to stop it.

___6___

This was a cousins’ reunion. Many of us grew up getting together at holidays. My bestest cousin and I became friends when we were five and I visited her on vacation. Thirty-plus years later, she’s Michael’s godmother. This week, Nicholas discovered, not a first cousin, but a second cousin–a boy! His own age! At four and five, they are just the age to discover how much fun a family reunion can be when you have a friend.

___7____

We were dreading the drive across Kansas and Colorado so much that we split it into two days both directions to allow us to stop periodically. We were pleasantly surprised at how much there is to stop and see in Kansas, in particular. Abilene is on the list for a long weekend trip at some point.  There’s an Oz museum. There are forts and historic sites periodically. And if you stop in Quinter, KS–a town of 200 something, I think–you can have ice cream at Ray’s Drug Store, which has an old fashioned soda fountain:

It was verrrrrrry delicious. Quinter, KS. I’m telling you. Stop.

And at the Colorado border is Burlington, CO, where Kit Carson County has a 1905 carousel with an original Wurlitzer “organ” and exquisite artwork that you can’t find on any modern carousel. Nor can you find a modern carousel that will try to throw you off, it goes so fast–twelve mph! And all for 25 cents a ride!

So there you are. Road trip tips from Kate.

Next week I’ll be back to regular programming. Promise.

Travelogue, Day 4: Gumbo Recipe

Thursday:

All tuckered out

Today about half of the cousins go up the Estes aerial tram while most of the rest go horseback riding. Initially I’m worried that it’s a tourist trap, but it turns out to be a great place: rocks to climb, a breathtaking view, even a trail we don’t end up having time for. Then we head down to the Alluvial Fan for our last excursion in the Rockies, and spend the evening laughing, chatting and playing corn hole (bean bag toss) and Nerts (um, that one defies definition).

Today’s featured recipe: Agatha’s Gumbo, provided by her grandchildren Russ and Eric.

(with variations and comments from the boys, who grew up in Louisiana, to confuse clarify the matter.)

Roux:

4 large onions, white or yellow, chopped
1-2 bulbs of garlic, minced
4 bunches green onion, chopped
4 bell peppers, any color, chopped
3-4 stalks celery, chopped
4 sticks margarine (Imperial, Rusty says)
2 c. flour (non-rising)–sift so it’s super-fine. “You don’t want lumpy roux,” says Eric. “It goes faster,” says Russ.
3-4 bunches flat-leaf parsley. (Eric likes cilantro, but only 1/2-1 bunch. He also puts cinnamon sticks in his. “Dear God! says Rusty. “You’re messed up!”)

Instructions to make the roux:

Rusty: The parsley, you chop up fine and put it in a bowl off to the side. The garlic you chop up and put in a bowl as well.

All the other vegetables, you put them in one big-ass bowl by themselves, and you melt the margarine down over high heat and slowly add the flour while stirring swiftly with a whisk. You have to stir and stir and stir for about 45 minutes. As it gets hot enough it turns to a liquid. When it gets to the layer of darkness you want, you dump all the vegetables in and turn it down to simmer. (Eric: it’s close to the color of chocolate syrup. Rusty: careful, you go too damned dark, it’s too damned dark! Eric: It starts turning very, very quickly.)

Russ: Dump the vegetables in about a third at a time and stir it up. After you’ve stirred all that, then you add your garlic, let that simmer down until they all release their liquid, and then in the last 5 minutes of cooking, you add the parsley and garlic. Then you use as much as you want. It’s a thickener, a base, with the vegetable seasoning.

Finished roux

Stock:

Eric: Simultaneously, you want to be starting your stock. You boil your chicken, one bouillon cube to every two pieces of chicken. (For our group of around twenty-five, they used 10 chicken thighs, 6 bouillon cubes, and enough water to submerge it, plus 4 pounds of Andouille sausage.)

Rusty: I cut up half the Andouille into slices and cook it with the chicken. The other half I kept chopped up to add later. You can’t have too much water. Once the chicken’s tender, I fish them out, strip the skin, and the grease comes to the top and you skim it off. What you can’t skim, put paper towels down to soak up the oil. Put in the second half of the Andouille then.

Then you put it all together: meat, broth, roux. We used about 2/3 of the roux. You salt and pepper to taste. Use Cajun seasoning if you can find it. (They used both black and red pepper.) Bring to a boil, then reduce to simmer and let it cook for 5 hours. If you want you can throw eggs in, too. Eric: “I wouldn’t do that.” Russ: “Well, I wouldn’t put cinnamon in it!”

Kate’s comments: In the end, it makes a stew in which you remove the bones. The chicken should pull apart. You can serve it with rice–Rusty pulled some of the broth to cook the rice in–and with crackers.

Gumbo, ready to serve

Travelogue, Day 3: Fun City, More Hiking, and Family Photos

Tuesday

I’ve reached the point in a vacation when I’ve lost the date. I only know the day of the week, and that with effort. We spend the late morning at Fun City, going down crazy slides and doing bumper…uh, everything. Julianna insists she wants to do bumper boats, but spends the entire ride shrieking because she’s getting wet.

Fun City Exhibit A: The Slide

Fun City Exhibit B: Bumper cars

[image error]

Michael Mayhem strikes again. “I swear, I only touched it, Mommy!”

Fun City Exhibit C: Go Karts

In the afternoon I take Alex and his cousin on a real hike up the mountain behind the ranch. We cross a fallen barbed wire fence which is the border of the national park, and we climb the enormous boulders as far as we can. I’m so, so careful with them, knowing I’m in charge of more than my own child. We make it up and down without mishap…until my niece trips over the barbed wire fence fifty yards from the lodge, and slices her knee on a barb. I spend an hour in a panic I’m trying not to show to her, because she’s already being dramatic enough about it. I’m so freaked, I look up the DTaP schedule to set my mind at ease that she’s surely up to date on her tetanus shots. Meanwhile my cousins laugh and joke about how her mother did the same thing on a rusty auger when she was a teenager.

Today is our turn to cook our signature dish: Christian’s maternal grandmother’s red sauce and pasta for 36. We also throw in ice cream pie. It’s a quiet day, because most of the adults went rafting.

We end the day late at night on a blanket beneath a sky you can’t begin to imagine back home. Without light pollution, without humidity, the entire sky is a dazzling, spangled starscape. If I could spend a year here, I’d know all the constellations, and not just the few we can sort of see back home.

Wednesday:

I’ve grown tired of doing my Jazzercise video, so the last two mornings I’ve tried to run. It’s hard work. I get to feeling faint. Our trip is half over, and although I’m looking forward to the DCT I didn’t think to bring for my poor chapped lips, and to my skin not being so dry, I’ll be very sorry to leave. It’s 106 degrees at home today, we hear, and instead of hibernating in an air-conditioned cave, we’re spending the day outside, wearing jeans and jackets.

Sunrise

But more than that, I’m different here. More at peace, less frenzied. Maybe it’s vacation, not this specific locale, but I don’t remember feeling this soul-full since the last time we vacationed in Colorado. The world fills up my soul here, saturating my senses: the quiet, the way the colors on the mountain shift as the light changes, that heavenly smell of cinnamon and butterscotch, or perhaps vanilla. The smell of ponderosa pine makes me long to plant a grove of them in my back yard. After our last trip to Colorado, I ordered aspen trees for our back yard. I lost one, but the other is now twelve feet tall. If we ever leave our house, that tree will have to come with me. It makes me so happy.

Every morning I have an encounter with a family of chipmunks who live, apparently, on the roof of my cabin. They’re cute.

Today most of the cousins are headed to Fat Tire for a tour, so we’re on our own. We pack up early and head to the south end of the national park. I had been thinking this park was not as big as it seemed, but by the time we reach Wild Basin I know better. It takes forty minutes to drive there, and when we arrive multiple rangers tell us a young black bear has been seen often lately. They think a ranger scared it off yesterday, but stay together and be careful.

We break out the backpack for the hike up to Copeland Falls, which turns out to be a true “easy” trail, not like the “easy” one to Alberta Falls at all. We take it at an amble. Julianna’s favorite part is the streams that cross the path. She huddles over the edge of the bridge and stares at the water intently. We have to physically remove her from every one. Nicholas and Alex go with me on a side trail up to a big rock formation, which we climb. Michael’s fine on Christian’s back, as long as I don’t get more than three feet away from them. When we reach the upper falls, we let him down, and he gets to walk most of the way back.

We stop at Church on the Rock on the road back north. Mental note: must look up retreats at this place. Michael falls to pieces as we leave, but we have no food to give him, having eaten our peaches up at the falls. Not a fun ride home.

We eat lunch, and while I put the kids down for nap, Christian takes Alex back to the park to get his junior ranger badge. Nicholas won’t go to sleep. Eventually he joins me outside, and while I soak in the quiet, he plays on a rock behind our cabin that looks like a turtle. We go downtown for a little souvenir shopping, and when we come back it’s family time for the evening. Tonight we’re taking pictures and celebrating my niece’s birthday. The last two cousins have arrived, and one of them brought a just-five-year-old. He and Nicholas are in love with each other immediately, and are glued to each other for the rest of the evening.

There are times in your life when you really recognize the blessings you’ve been given. This night–this week–is one of them. Love you all, cuzz’s!

Today’s featured recipe: Ice Cream Pie. You can find that recipe by clicking here.

Travelogue, Day 2: Overlook Ranch and Rocky Mountain National Park

Sunday-Monday, June 23-24, 2013:

After Alex falls off the zipline and sprains (jams?) his wrist, and after a “.6″-mile trail to Alberta Falls (so notated because, for reasons I can’t fathom, they don’t count the .3 miles from the trailhead to the official start of the trail in the distance) spent dragging a 6-year-old child by the arm as she whines the entire way up and down, I’m ready for some down time. We didn’t expect that “easy” trail to take more than an hour round trip, so we didn’t pack lunch. Eating lunch two hours late always makes me cranky, and hoo-boy, does Michael need a nap. So I stay behind in the cabin and send the rest of the family up to the lodge, currently devoid of cousins. When Michael falls asleep I take myself to a rocky outcropping above the cabin, where aspen and ponderosa pine quake and sigh beneath a gorgeous blue sky studded with puffy clouds. Whenever vehicles go by on the highway, it’s really noisy, but in the gaps between? Absolute silence. Almost uncanny silence. There aren’t even any insects.

There seem to be a ridiculous number of Harleys coming up the “low-gear” hill beyond the ranch this afternoon. Finally I realize they’re trying to get someone to take a picture of them driving down the hill toward the mountain vista that gives Overlook Ranch its name. So they keep going up…and down…and up…and down….

After an hour or so, Christian calls; the cousins are returning from their rambles and assembling for the evening up at the lodge. I wake Michael, and we head up the hill.

In the course of the evening, Rusty and Allen build a blaze in the fire pit. Paije and Cassie go to town for s’mores, and after the kids go to bed, the adults enjoy the rapidly-cooling evening around the campfire. I’m kind of surprised we’re allowed, as dry as it is, but Cassie says the owners told her the fire ban doesn’t start until Tuesday. A joke goes around the family: imagine if we accidentally started a wildfire, and for the rest of our family history everybody would say, “Remember that time Rusty burned down Rocky Mountain National Park?”

Fortunately it doesn’t come to that, either Sunday or Monday, when Rusty puts a piece of copper wire he found on his morning rambles in the wild country above the lodge into the fire, and it turns blue and green and purple.

However, there is adventure: Sunday night Allen plays the mother of all practical jokes after Christian and I go to bed. He buys a “bear growl” app, climbs on the roof of the stable, and hits “play.” It scares everyone half out of their mind. (Have to say I’m glad I missed that one. )

Monday we caravan with my bestest cousin along Trail Ridge Road as far as Medicine Bow Curve. It’s very, very cold, and the wind is brutal. We go out on the Alpine Tundra walk, and once again, the little kids are whining the whole time–until the ranger decides to have everyone sit down on the lee side of a tundra tree, also known as krummholz, where it’s twenty degrees warmer. Afterward, we go back up to the Alpine visitor center for lunch, after which Julianna promptly throws up. Since Nicholas also feels pretty bad, we assume it’s altitude sickness. Everyone goes to sleep, so Christian parks at Rock Cut on the way down and offers Alex and I the chance to climb that trail on our own. Walking back down, we are going into one heck of a wind.

Monday’s featured recipe: Paije’s honey-glazed sweet potato and peaches, adapted from “Fine Cooking: Cooking fresh.”

1 medium sweet potato (about 3/4 lb.), peeled & cut into 1 1/2-inch sections
1 c. sherry vinegar
1/2 c. plus 1 T. honey
2 T. canola oil plus some for the grill
kosher salt & fresh pepper
1/2 small sweet onion, cut into 1 1/2-in. chunks, layers separated (about 4 oz.)
4 small ripe but firm peaches, quartered & pitted (about 1 1/2 lb.)
1/2 c. pecans, coarsely chopped
1/2 tsp. cumin
1/2 tsp. pumpkin pie spice

Steam the sweet potatoes until almost cooked, 10 to 12 minutes. Cool slightly.

Put vinegar, 1/2 c. honey, 1 T. oil, 2 tsp salt, and 3/4 tsp. pepper in a 3-qt. saucepan. Simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally until reduced to 2/3 c., 13-15 min. Brush/toss with peaches and sweet potatoes. Paije, Cassie and Terri also used this to glaze the chicken we had for dinner.

Grill vegetables for 4-5 minutes.

Meanwhile, toss pecans in a small bowl with remaining 1 T. honey and 1 T. oil, cumin, pumpkin pie spice, 1/2 tsp. salt, and a pinch of pepper. Put a large piece of foil on the other side of the grill & scatter nuts on the foil. Grill until nuts are bubbling, 3-5 min. Toss with peaches & potatoes and serve.

Serves 4.