gingerbread snowmen revealed

I always get surprises in my baking endeavors, because following the recipe precisely is real hard for me to do. I don't know why. It's an issue I'm working on. In this case, the candy I bought in a rush to decorate them simply wasn't ideal. I wanted a small bag of red hots and a small bag of mini-M&M's, you know, tiny candies for eyes and buttons, but could only find them in huge bags. So, instead I grabbed mini-Hershey's kisses and Twizler's pull-apart strings. Then, since I didn't want the gingerbread men to be that break-your-teeth consistency, I didn't bake them as long. The softness made them delightful to eat but not to stick together in 3-segmented snowmen. Invariably, one snowball kept falling off. This meant a 2-segmented cookie with one mini-Hershey's kiss on each segment. You get the point. They would've been appropriate cookies for a bachelor's party, not a big Thanksgiving meal with my inlaws. And, no matter how I arranged the red licorice strings, they looked like various innards. I ended up focusing more on circle cookie art rather than making my men decipherable.

Oh well! Here's a sampling photo of the least gory or perverted gingerbread snowmen (a.k.a. glow worms) and circles. How do you like the Olympic circles at the bottom right? Thank you. Thank you very much.

thankfulness, gingerbread men and circles

I've been feeling particularly thankful this holiday season. For family. For friends. For experiences. For dreams. And for gingerbread snowmen and circles (on account of not being able to find shaped cookie cutters at the grandparents' house). And for neighbors who stock ginger (on account of me forgetting to buy that wiley ingredient at the store).

I'm certain photographs will follow soon. I'm going to be darn proud of my snowmen and circles. Mark my words.

back to Indiana

Rain is falling but it’s warm out – one of several paradoxes we’re living right now. I’m sitting on the front porch of Jason’s grandparents’ in Indiana, both of whom are having recurring health issues, expected at 88. The family living close-by is stretched very thin at the moment, so we're here for a week or two to hang out, see to their medications and daily activities, rush them to the emergency room, etc. etc.

Their home, once so restful, is now a breeding ground for stress (theirs, and hence, ours). When the meds have worn off, we are the enemy, suspected of vague ill intentions and wished gone. Jason suddenly has to be assertive toward his grandfather, always a proud and respected man, about a number of private matters. There are mental matches to be wrestled from dawn to dusk. Now, it’s truly an honor to care for family two generations older, and we are fortunate to have the flexibility for it, but honesty says it requires agility of mind to switch between a jolly story of grandma’s parents waltzing across the living room floor to the Victrola, to having to explain the reason their little town has changed so incredulously is that we’re actually driving through Indianapolis!

I’m quite fascinated with the brain. Comparing the emotions and actions of elderly folks who have dementia and children is common because it’s so accurate, but caring for the two is not so similar. I suppose you’ve got to let everybody have as much independence as is healthy for them, but it’s easy to tell a kid you’ve had enough of their sassy mouth. Not so much with Grandma.

And then there are issues of fakery. Playing, pretending, experimenting – they’re part of childhood, how kids figure out life and roles, and we let ‘em go at it, right? Fine and good. But toward the end of life, when you’re no longer capable of cooking or paying bills, is it fair to be given a fake checkbook or dulled crocheting tools that don’t actually produce anything because you’ve injured yourself one too many times? At least you still feel useful, are still taking part in soothing routines. Sure, your world is being created for you, but to what degree is it always that way for us, adulthood included?

Gettysburg

A couple of days ago, Jason and I visited Gettysburg. There was an exhibit in the Visitor's Center that we'd never seen there: a giant relief map on the floor, with little, colored light bulbs embedded throughout. The bulbs lit up as the 1/2-hour presentation was given, showing Confederate and Union troop movements during the 3-day battle that so affected our nation. Of all the fields and woods and ridges and hills in that scene, Little Round Top struck me as the best blend of geography, chance or Providence, and human choice/activity. Little Round Top was not the highest hill and wouldn't have afforded the best battlefield view but for the fact that the town's inhabitants had previously cleared it of trees. The Union Army ultimately attained that spot and was greatly advantaged.

Here is a picture Jason took of Brig. Gen. Warren's statue on Little Round Top. It was he who realized the key position needed defending and called for troop arrangement there. Then there's a shot of a canon pointed toward the big field of the famous Pickett's Charge.

These events and others of our country's early history I've had a hard time envisioning over my life, not being from this area. Nearly all the town names end in -ville, -town, or -burg. The peoples' accents are strange. The traffic guy on the radio lists off three hundred million highways, biways, freeways, and turnpikes like everybody can keep track of it all! But Jason grew up knowing these place names, hearing them in everyday language, and understanding how the geography and history all fits together. What's interesting is that he could never get a grasp on the westward expansion, which always made good sense to me, having grown up on the plains of Nebraska seeing displays of original covered wagons and old homesteads, and then northwest Montana, a place of cowboys and Indians, where the names of innumerable mountains and rivers bear witness to the native peoples and their lives and struggles there.

"Now the people spoke among themselves and agreed with what their leaders had said. They agreed to be known for the place where they first planted corn. Now they spoke of themselves to other people that way. 'We are Juniper Tree Stands Alone People,' they would say to them....You see, their names for themselves are really the names of their places....That is how they are still known, even though they have scattered and live now in many different states, some in cities far from here."

--Charles Henry, a member of the Western Apache tribe,
as quoted in the book Wisdom Sits in Places

places

This is not the first time we've been homeless, but it is the first time we've been wandering with no solid decision on where to land. It's the most I've ever thought about place - how we define ourselves by place and are shaped by it. I cherish new places, being wooed by the tantalizing ones and coaxing beauty from the mundane ones, and wondering all along what makes a particular place home to people. I wouldn't make a good longterm homeless person. It has been just less than a year of traveling, and I am yearning for home.

We watched Into The Wild tonight at the theatre. There were scenes from many places we've been, places that have defined us, like the Northern California desert, the bottom of the Grand Canyon, campsights with other road rats, and most movingly, the mountains of Alaska. When I saw footage of the land, of caribou, snow, fireweed, and moose, my heart swelled with love and loss, fullness and emptiness. I miss her! Jason leaned over and said, "Let's go back. Right now."

We have so many ideas of what to do next in life, but unless they involve Alaska, they don't feel very permanent to me. Alaska's vastness is hard to be away from, especially now, when we drive for hours and are never out of identical suburbs. Alaska represents for me independence from the conveniences of society that insulate people from anything raw and real and enduring. And yet, people must be okay living out east here, because 2/3 of the US population is within a 500 radius of DC. I saw that in a pamphlet so it must be true.

Here are a couple of places that make life okay for now: the first two are at Catoctin National Park yesterday, and the last is today in Bethesda.

RV culture, revolt!

In our recent travels, Jason and I had the unfortunate experience of becoming familiar with the world of RV Parks. Unless you are a millionaire, hope to heaven you don't have to do the same. Let us stand as a beacon of warning to you: avoid them like the plague. Go to state park camp sights if at all feasible. Find pullouts along the road. When you're in the middle of civilization, even seek out the loving, plastic, made-in-China arms of Wal-Mart and her free parking lot. But don't stay in RV Parks.

Number one, they are very proud of the skinny little strip of gravel they're going to let you park on for one night. So proud, in fact, that they will charge you upwards of $40 or $50 to do so ($3 off with an AARP discount). And you, my friend, are providing your own shelter, your own linens, your own maid service, your own continental breakfast, your own t.v. Now they are letting you plug in to their electricity, which we can estimate to cost them, oh, maybe 65 cents for the night. And yes, you can hook into their water and sewer if you choose to, and you can use their bath-house, again, if you want to. But everyone parking there already has this stuff in their house on wheels. So all together, the cost to the Park has got to be less than $5 a night, TOPS. That is my main qualm. It makes no sense to charge so heavily, and furthermore, why the RV community is not outraged at this. But I'll go on, for good measure.

Number two, RV Parks don't like riff-raff, and that most definitely includes tent-dwellers - those wretched, good for nothing kids that want to stick up a tent and make this place look like a stinkin' hippy camp. Number three, RV Park owners have a problem with certain dog breeds - in our case, the rottweiler. That is, all parks but one in Arizona whose welcome packet read, "We don't care what your breed of dog is, as long as it's on a leash and well-behaved. We don't tolerate aggressive behavior from any dog, regardless of its breed." That reasoning impressed us a lot, but trust me, it was exceedingly rare.

And all this when an entire generation of old people is thinking outside the box. They're finally saying, "Look. We don't want to spend a huge chunk of our life, 20+ years of retirement, just wasting away. We want to see the country, we want to travel, we want to live in a long house on wheels and play Pinochle at a miniature table with our friends, dangit!" And how are they rewarded? By the evil RV Parks who charge them their hard-earned cash for strips of gravel. Crud, even at a conservative rate of $30 a night, that's $900 a month!

Is there something I'm missing here?

[Blogging is real fun, because you can vent this stuff to an audience of unknown proportions, and perhaps your words will be read by someone who will correct you, in which case, awesome! A debate! Or maybe they'll agree and get out there and start an RV culture revolt. If the latter happens, call me up. I don't have the inclination to start a revolt myself, but I will bring poster board and markers.]

We're here in Maryland!

Boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh. We have arrived. We are in a place we can park the camper and not move it for like weeks at a whack. Even as I write that, there is a surge of joy, of squiggliness, that is spreading to and alighting each of my cells. We're glad we had the chance to travel across the country for 6 weeks with J's Mom (and her cousin for 1/2 the time), but um, yeah, we would have some morsels of wisdom for anybody else with plans to attempt that particular feat.

So now we're in Maryland, parked at the 1936-built home of J's sister and her husband (and two kids and one dog). It's in about as rural of a place as you can get around here, and there's a clothesline running right past the camper! We have little country roads to run on, and Beth can lay on the grass by the trickling stream all day long, with only their male (read non-fixed) dog, Hunter, to ward off. We have found a coffee shop with internet access in town and a couple of delightful markets. Pretty much, we're in hog-heaven.

It's a matter now of organizing ourselves to see all we want to see, and of figuring out what our next step in life will be come January. One current possibility is to become backup singers for Allison Kraus. Ha ha ha ha ha. No, serious. Wouldn't that be fun? She wouldn't have to pay us much - just enough to keep us alive, and that's negotiable. Anyway. Other ideas, anyone?

O-Hi-oh

The last official stop on the trip was to stay the night in Ohio with Nate and Nicole and their two daughters. Nate and I graduated from high school together, and I'm so glad our families have kept in contact. Highlight memories of my friendship with him, his brother Brett, and their neighbor, Gabe, include a bunch of us sneaking into a gravel plant in the middle of the night to slide down the gravel hills, planning a train-hopping venture (which Gabe actually carried out with other friends - boo!), and scheming how to get down into the floor vents at the high school in hopes of making our way to the unsuspecting Spanish class, so we could hop out of the floor wearing sombreros. Nate and I also went to junior prom together (the first and only time for either of us; neither of us were the prom types). And now to see him with a beautiful and adept wife and two gorgeous kids - man. That's the good stuff right there.

Conversation centered around the communal living dream, organic gardening, fighting The Man, a literal interpretation of Genesis as it relates to science, and catching up on mutual folk. Nicole sent us on our way with homemade cinnamon rolls and fresh garden tomatoes.

Indiana

Indiana was another of the states we spent longer in, because Jason's grandparents live in a weensy town there called Dupont. The quiet contrasted with the busyness of the rest of our trip, but things are different now because of G & G's age-related dementia. There's just a different feel about it, and it makes us sad. There's a whole lot less story-telling, for one thing. We mostly sat around and watched television, read magazines, took walks, fiddled with the camper, went out to eat, and visited with a few other relatives. One of my favorite times was singing old hymns with Grandma at the piano. She didn't remember she'd done so 1/2 hour later, but I do and will.

One morning Jason and I went to breakfast with Grandpa and Grandma at the Railroad Diner in Dupont, where very few meals were priced over $3. Coffee was 85 cents and came in free mugs from varying businesses in the bigger surrounding towns. Young men wore camouflage shirts and hats (but we could still see them against the simple brown booths), everybody smoked, and the walls were covered in Nascar paraphenalia, most notably a life-sized poster of Dale Earnhardt Jr. on the bathroom door. Jason and I love experiences like that where you're all of a sudden in a long-forgotten realm. You look around and think about Dupont's opposite, someplace like Seattle, and you think, "My gosh. This is all part of the same country. Our country!"

Jason smoking pipes with Grandpa

night shot of the rairoad tracks that run by the house

We ended our time in Indiana by having lunch with some old pals from Alaska - Steve and Kim and their three boys. Yay!

Kansas (a couple weeks ago)

As everyone knows, it takes a lot of time to drive across Kansas, and there's very little payoff scenery-wise. The primary tidbit Barb's guidebook offered about the state was that early pioneers there frequently suffered apeirophobia (fear of infinity). We camped at Lake Scott State Park because it was one of National Geographic Magazine's top 50 "must see state parks," and while it is an oasis of sorts among the fields, quite frankly, we decided that either the author of the article was himself suffering apeirophobia when he named the park thus, there was a passing of dirty money in the naming, or there are only roughly 50 state parks in our nation.

However, don't be mistaken; I found our travel through Kansas to be quite pleasant. Not mind-blowing, but pleasant. I liked seeing the old windmills and farm houses, especially against the dusky evening sky. We purposely took the highway rather than the freeway for seeing small towns. The antique stores of the midwest are amazing - for deals and town gossip. At one store, I found a lovely old necklace and learned that the old man who'd brought it in permanently swapped wives with his brother about 15 years back, after each couple raised their own kids and everything. They all still live near each other on the family farm too.

Toward the end of Kansas, we happened upon a sign that said the Wizard of Oz Museum was a mere 18 miles off freeway, so we naturally turned off to have a look. When we couldn't find the museum in town, we pulled into a gas station for me to run in for directions. But on my way in, I caught sight of my shadow on the pavement and started giggling, then laughing, and finally, I stopped walking and couldn't go inside. For you see, I had my hair in two pig-tail braids, banded off higher than usual so that the free hair at the bottom was extra fluffy. I was pretty much Dorothy, but completely by accident. I ran back to the pickup instead, where Barb and Jason were already in a tither, because they had noticed the same thing of me as I headed in. Good times. By the way, that story is more entertaining than the Museum itself appeared to be once we found it, and we decided against throwing good money at it.