• It's raining right now. Snowing in the mountains. It might even snow in the valley later today. I can't believe I'm writing this, but everyone cross your fingers in hopes of no snow! There are too many leaves left on the trees and my flowering plum, especially, can't take it. There are still apples in the trees and pumpkins in the fields. No snow!
• A conversation this morning: "I love the rain. It makes me so happy," said Nathan. "Not me," said Jake. "Rain makes me sad." I thought about explaining that I love the rain because it makes me sad---a combination of both of their feelings---but it seemed too complicated.
• Another conversation in the car this morning, this one between Kaleb and his cousin Jace, who comes to our house before preschool some mornings. "Moms! Moms are just great!" Kaleb said, completely out of the blue, and I don't think he thought I was listening. "I love my mom so much. Do you love your mommy, Jace?" "Yes!" he replied. "I love her a lot." "When I really love my mommy is when I call her mommy," Kaleb continued. "When I don't love her as much I only call her mom." Jace had no comment.
• About three months ago, Kendell got a wild hair to organize the bookshelf where we keep our movies. He pulled out all the Disney VHS movies because we don't have a VCR hooked up to a TV anymore. They've sat in plastic bags underneath the sofa table in my front room ever since then. (Lovely decorating skills I tell you!) We can't decide what to do with them. Part of me is thinking "just donate them to the library," but then I find myself thinking. Remember how hard it used to be to get ahold of Disney movies? You could only buy each one for the space of like, a month, and then it was gone again. I worked hard to find some of those movies! And how can I get rid of, say, Winnie the Pooh, which was Haley's favorite movie in the entire world? She'd carry it around with her, tucked into her little blue purse. On the other hand, I don't really want to store them all. So there they sit, and I refuse to get out my Halloween decorations until we've done something with them. Tell me: What did you do with your VHS tapes?
• Can you stand one more Kaleb conversation? He's been whining quite a bit lately, and I am working on not giving him what he wants if he asks in a whine. A few nights ago, he whined for me to go get his white blanky for him. "I won't get it if you ask me like that," I said sternly. He took a deep breath, sat up in bed, and said, "OK then. Go look around in all the rooms of all the house until you find my white blanky. Please." I don't think he was being sarcastic...
• I think that sleeping when it's raining is always the best sleep. Even when the thunder wakes me up, I still sleep well. Last night's thunder was so loud I got out of bed at 4:00 a.m. to stand on the back porch and listen to it. I put a load of laundry in before I went back to bed.
• One thing that says "fall's here!": all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster. Don't get me wrong, though. I think seafood in general is disgusting and anything in the crab/lobster/shrimp realm disgusting and horrifying. I mean: you're eating sea bugs. Gross. Luckily they have a steak I like, and the Red Lobster mashed potatoes are my favorite. We went last night with Kendell's sister Melissa and her husband. I didn't have all-you-can-eat shrimp, of course. But I did get seven refills on my drink. Whooooops.

This morning while I was driving the boys to school, Jake asked me what car he would drive once he gets his driver's license. Amid my horror at the thought of any of my children driving, a vivid little image popped into my brain: the car I was privileged to drive as a teenager.

I didn't take driver's ed until the summer after I turned sixteen. Since I left school early, right after third period, to go to the gym, I didn't have room in my schedule for it. Plus there was the fact, the rusty, brown, embarrassing fact of the car I was going to have to drive.

I wasn't very excited about getting my driver's license.

Most of my friends had cars that weren't all that amazing. Well, Kristi had a new CR-X, but she was the exception. Chris had a Gremlin, I think, and we once had a terrifying moment driving up the canyon when we couldn't figure out why it had lost all its power (no one said you had to change gears when driving uphill!) Jenn had a Pinto. It seems like most of the boys I knew had old, 1950s-era cars, except for the guy with the Monza. The Monza! I can't even tell you how much stuff happened in that Monza. Second only to the Audi which came later. Amazing or not, though, the point was that I wasn't all that anxious to drive, since everyone else already had cars---cars that were less-embarrassing than the one I had to drive.

I wish, so badly, that I had a picture.

In fact, I wish I had a picture of all those cars, because they were each a fragment of our identities. A way of knowing who was who, the thing you looked for carefully when you were driving down the street, hoping to spot someone you knew. A space where things happened: conversations, crying, kissing. Music. A synecdoche object, car-as-person. Spot the little silver car, see Chris. Spot the Monza and your heart accelerated.

Since I don't have a photo, though, let me describe the car I drove once I finally got my driver's license. It was, as previously stated, brown. And rusty. The seats were black vinyl benches. The floorboards were covered with ragged rubber mats and there was a tear in the back seat. There was no air conditioning, of course, but it did have windows, the kind you rolled down with the knob, which was also black. It also lacked seat belts; some had been cut off by previous owners, and the rest were shoved down into that dusty, crumb-filled netherworld under the seats. It had an AM radio with a dial for tuning and those hard plastic knobs you'd push for your station presets. (If, that is, you could actually find a station you wanted to listen to. Not much alternative music was played on AM radio, even in the eighties.)

It was, dear reader, a 1972 Ford Torino.

I gave it a very foul name, as was tradition---all of my friends named their cars. Constantly shutgun (or shoved to the middle when I had passengers) was an enormous boom box, powered by batteries, so I was never without music. You'd think that black interior would make me happy, considering my black affection. After scorching the backs of my legs on the seats countless times, or the palm of my hand on the window knobs, however: not so much. It was old, and ugly, and unfeminine. I hated that car as much as I loved it.

Because it did have one redeeming quality: it was fast. Don't tell my dad, but sometimes I would race against the other fast cars. Sometimes I would be feeling desperate enough that I would win because I wasn't afraid of anything: police, or accidents, or the certain death that comes from high-speed impact. I would gun it, and I would beat the boys, and they would be both annoyed and sheepishly envious. Even the boy with the Monza. And as much as I wanted something new, and cute, and feminine, that ugly old car was often my refuge. It gave me a way to escape. If the odometer had worked, it would have counted all the miles I drove, drinking coffee and crying.

The odometer wasn't the only thing that didn't work, though. The gas gage, too, was broken. That car guzzled gas, and I was never sure how much it had. So I ran out of gas. Often. I'd have to walk to the nearest gas station, call my dad, and wait for help. And it didn't have brake lights, either.

Sometimes I'm not sure my parents loved me very much.

One of the first things I bought for myself once I had a job that paid decently was a car. Nothing new, of course; but it was, at least, small. The gas gage, odometer, and brake lights all worked. I think the Torino was handed down to Becky. It was a relief to give it up, but oddly enough I'd like to see it again. Down in that under-the-seats netherworld, mixed in with french fry bits, and donut crumbs, and dust and ash and seat belts, the cells of myself mingle with time. Awful and embarrassing and dangerous as it was, the Torino was, after all, a piece of my identity.

And I wish I had a picture.

What did you drive as a teenager?

The jacket copy of Little Bee forbids me from telling you what the novel is about. "Once you have read it," the copy says, "you'll want to tell your friends about it. When you do please don't tell them what happens. The magic is in how the story unfolds."

Hmmmmm.

I, personally, need more than a vague recommendation before I check out a book. What the subject is, at least. Yet, I also feel like the not knowing helps the novel's joissance. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about it.

Little Bee is the story of Little Bee, a refugee from Nigeria who is stuck in a British Immigration Center. After two years, she manages to get out, and heads to the home of the only people in England she knows. Andrew and Sarah had visited Nigeria two years earlier, where they met Little Bee and her sister, and experienced something horrific on a beach there with them. What exactly happened on the beach is the point the novel unfolds toward, and the movement's tension, sadness, and confusion give the novel its power.

Little Bee is an extraordinary character. Because she is foreign, she interprets the British in surprising and unusual ways. The novel opens with her unusual statement: "Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl." Her explanation of why---freedom of movement across borders, and everyone is happy to see you, and power. Plus, it speaks with Queen Elizabeth's voice, a voice Little Bee tries to emulate. She figures out that appearing British in her accent and her way of speaking is the only way she can gain any sort of power in her new country. Lyrical, and intelligent, and also made fierce by wounds: Little Bee's character colors the entire novel with courage, humor, and despair.

Because while it's beautifully told, it's not a beautiful story. If you are looking for a sweet, happy ending, this is not the book for you. If you're looking for gentle story, for events that won't haunt you, this is not your book. But if you want a novel that explores consequence, and redemption, and the contrast of the ordinariness of everyday living with the pervasiveness of evil, this is a book you will want to read. If you want to be reminded that our lives in Western culture are a sort of illusion, built to keep out the mutilations of developing countries,this is a book for you. If you need to be reminded that even with that evil, and mutilation, and horror, there is still love and goodness and hope, you should read this book.

There are some subjects for books that seem to be irresistible to writers. There will always be love stories, of course, but I'm thinking more specific: the holocaust, and the world wars, and the Civil War; any war, for that matter. Or, think about American slavery, and I'm certain you can think of dozens of novels written about it. I think novelists return to these topics over and over because they hold a sort of power over our psyches. We want to understand the bad things that happened in the past because the difficult times are also extraordinary; they are where drama lies, waiting to fill us up with tension. Yet, because we know how events turned out, the reading is also tinged with a sort of learning: I knew there were slaves, of course, but I didn't know this thing happened to them.

It's when a novelist manages to uncover that unknown thing that I am able to love a book. Laurie Halse Anderson's novel Chains did that for me. Set in 1776, it blends both the slave experience and the Revolutionary War into a story full of those I-didn't-know-that moments. Plus, there's Anderson's characteristic fine writing; combined, it's one of my top-five favorite teen novels I've read.

Chains tells the story of the young slave Isabelle. Rather than gaining her freedom at her mistress's death, as she was promised, she's betrayed by the mistress's only relative and sold to a couple from New York. The Locktons happen to be Loyalists, working to undermine the revolution. They also happen to be cruel, both to each other and their slaves and servants. Isabelle fights back against their cruelty by spying on them for the revolutionaries, but it doesn't gain her much since they also see her as just another slave.

As you read Isabelle's story, the knowledge of how events work out---knowing that it will still be almost 100 more years before emancipation---is what makes you weep. The slaves who have been taught to read follow a certain logic: the revolution is based on the idea that people should be free. They are people, and hence: they'll be free, too. Knowing how long that will take, knowing how pointless their hope is, breaks the reader's heart.

In the end, I felt like this wasn't just another book about slavery. It is a book about overcoming obstacles and about finding your own inner courage. "Everything that stands between you and freedom is the river Jordan," an old slave tells Isabelle. "Look hard for your river Jordan." It takes Isabelle a while---and not a few excruciating experiences---to puzzle out the metaphor. When she realizes that Mrs. Lockton only has power over her physical body, the knowledge gives her courage. "She cannot chain my soul," she realizes. "What was one more beating? A flogging, even? I would bleed, or not. Scar, or not. . . she could not hurt my soul, not unless I gave it to her." She's crossed her river Jordan. And we, slaves or no, are glad to be reminded, too, that the world will try to break our souls but is only successful if we let it be.

Yesterday, while cleaning my bathrooms, I was thinking about success, and normalcy, and The Meaning of Life. (I was also singing along, in a vague and thoughtless way, to my "play everything" MP3 list, but that hardly matters to the narrative unless you happen to be fourteen and find your mother generally annoying but excruciatingly annoying when she's singing.) Because here's the deal: this weekend is my twenty-year high school reunion. And somewhere between the last reunion and this one, the edict that declared Amy Sorensen as Uninviteable to Reunions was lifted.

Meaning they invited me.

Meaning I had to decide whether or not I would go.

You have to understand: I keep in touch with one person I went to high school with, Jenn. And by "keep in touch" I mean: I send her a Christmas card every year. And I'm her Facebook friend, which allows me occasional glimpses into her life. The relationships I had in high school were all complicated by stuff like boyfriend stealing, socioeconomic levels, jealousy, and insecurity. Normal adolescent angst, I know, but nothing you could build a life-long friendship upon. (My one life-long friendship from adolescence, with Chris, maybe was helped along by the fact that we didn't go to the same high school. Well, and the fact that she is fabulous and wonderful and always has my back---in the non-backstabbing sense.)

And also there's this: I am a completely different person than I was in high school. And yeah, I know. People change. Everyone is different, twenty years later. But they all started out as normal, and changed from there. Not me. When those people knew me---as much as you "know" anyone when you're a teenager---I was a black-wearing, bleached-blonde, drinking-coffee-at-three-in-the-morning, sluffs-weeks-and-weeks-of-school, disdainful and pissed off and depressed kind of girl. I got in loud arguments with principals and I sat in silent back corners of classrooms, glowering; I mocked cheerleaders and football players and student body presidents, band geeks and AV geeks and AP scholars. They all, it seemed, tried desperately to obtain normal, while I scorned it. I didn't want to be normal. I wasn't destined for normal. My package of wounds was proof that my life would bring me anything but normal.

Yet here I am, twenty years later. And fairly normal. How do I show up to a reunion with my normal self on? I would feel like anyone I talked to was thinking "wow, she was a freak, but she turned out normal." Especially because stepping into that milieu would overwhelm me with my memories of trying so hard to be abnormal. "All that rebellion and weirdness," I think they would think, "and she still ended up in the same place we did: married, with children, living in suburbia." Well, sort of. Not in exactly the same place. A smaller house and smaller income than most of them.

Normal, but less successful.

So I'm scrubbing toilets, and I'm feeling bitter that three clean bathrooms are giving me this overwhelming feeling of success. When did a scrubbed bathtub and the absence of that goo that gathers at the bottom of the toothbrush cup make me feel like I had accomplished something? All the angst and the heartache and the black velvet amulet full of wounds which were going to make me someone extraordinary didn't do much of anything for me. I still ended up with rubber gloves on, a toilet brush in my hand, singing along to the new Train song and wondering if anyone of the male persuasion ever learns how to aim. Which is, of course, where most people end up.

When I gave up my goth-girl ways, I thought that striving for normal would bring me, eventually, to normal. That being normal would mean being successful. Being happy. But now that I am here in normal---admittedly, somewhere on the fringe of it, barely clinging on, but here at least---I feel like somewhere I took the wrong path. Like I wasn't honest with myself; like "normal" is a sort of jacket I pulled over my naked and abnormal self while what I should have done was walked with a little bit of bravery in my own skin. 

And really, when it comes down to it, that is what the idea of a high school reunion does to me (and the reason I really didn't care that I wasn't invited before) :  it opens up this great big contradiction. I mocked normal because I thought it was a form of pretending, and then I turned around and chased it. I became the person pretending to be normal. The person who holds up a clean bathroom or two as proof: look, look, can you see how normal I am? Because I don't know what scares me more. High school alumni looking at me and thinking "after all that rebellion, she turned out so normal." Or if they thought "wow, something's still odd about that girl."

That's a whole lot to pack into one dinner with some people I used to know. After all, that's what I do. I take a topic, and I think about it, and I unravel its edges, and I worry it some more, and then it's all a grungy, tangled mess in my brain. That tendency to sit in my (metaphorical) corner and overthink things is part of what fed my adolescent troubles, and twenty years later, I'm still doing it. Maybe in that sense, I haven't changed all that much. Maybe you can take the girl out of her black clothes (well, sort of), you can get her to grow out brunette and to exchange coffee for sleep---but you can't take the dark out of the girl.

However: my bathrooms are clean now.

Sometimes I feel misunderstood by my husband.

That's shocking, I know. Certainly no one else feels this way.

It seems, however, that he cannot understand most of the things I am passionate about. Keeping a journal and blogging? Reading for pleasure? Scrapbooking? Quilting? Writing poems that no one reads? None of those things are worthy of my time in his eyes.

But this isn't a husband-bashing post. Honestly, plenty of the things he's passionate about are sort of eyeball-glazing in my perspective. Spotless house? Checkbook always current? Squeaky clean car? I just don't get it. Luckily, we do have plenty of stuff we're both passionate about together. But I do wish that he could understand my things just a little bit, so I could do them without feeling guilty.

Last Halloween (yes, last Halloween; I am getting around to writing this blog post only ten months or so later), my neighbor decided to take my kids out trick-or-treating with her kids. So I stayed home to hand out candy. Passing out the loot to trick-or-treaters is fun, but it's sort of frustrating. You can't really read in between knocks on the door, because you just get into the story and then are yanked right out again. You definitely can't watch TV, at least not if you don't have a TV near your front door. So, to keep myself occupied, I sat in the semi-dark room and worked on clipping the seams on my fall rag quilt:

 (pictured here with my kid who didn't want to cooperate with taking pictures when it was almost time to leave for school; you can also see it hanging from a tree in the post after this one.) 

I love this quilt. This year it was THE first fall-ish thing I pulled out of my storage bins. I couldn't wait to use it. It took me more than a year to find all the autumn-hued flannels, because non-babyfied flannel is hard to find. All the shopping paid off, especially that cream-colored paisley tonal; without it, there wouldn't have been enough contrast. I put an extra layer of flannel as batting, so the quilt is heavy and warm and soft and comforting. It might be my favorite quilt...well, I can't say ever. But I do love it so very much.

That Halloween, while I sat and snipped the seams, Kendell walked by the front room. He was grumpy for some reason I've forgotten, so I was sort of avoiding him anyway. "When did you turn into the quilting chick?" he asked me. "Why do you like it so much?" I didn't really answer him then (he was grumpy, remember? and this is an old and often-repeated query) but I continued to think about his question while snipping seams and passing out candy.

I sort-of answered this question later, but I left something out. An enormous reason for why I am a quilter right now in my life (as opposed to the mostly-older women I see in the fabric stores) is that I didn't get to have a second daughter. During the years between Nathan and Kaleb, I gave the best new baby gifts. I considered it a sort of calling to find sweet little newborn nightgowns, or delicate crocheted sweaters, or perfect pastel dresses. If I was shopping for a girlbaby, and I found a great deal, I'd buy two: one for the new mom, one for the other daughter I was certain I'd have one day. Those bought-on-clearance baby clothes, and the shopping itself, became a sort of inspiration for me, a way of keeping real while I waited to conceive the second daughter I thought---knew---I would have.

After I found out Kaleb was a boy, I gathered up everything I could still return to Gymboree (whose return policy was, then, six months) and, bawling the entire time, returned all that pink stuff. I had a great big credit to spend, so I took a deep breath and turned towards the blue side of the store. And I never looked at pink things again. I couldn't allow myself to even see anything pink, so I shuttered off that part of me, which was harder than it sounds. And was also a problem, because I couldn't bring myself to buy anything pink, not even for friends having girls.

That's when my baby rag quilts were born.

I'd never made one for anyone. I'd never planned one for my never-to-be-born second daughter. So there wasn't anything painful attached to them. They weren't a symbol of heartache. I could buy pink flannel; I even managed to enjoy buying pink flannel. And I've loved making every single one I've made, for boys and girls. I discovered that by making the quilts I felt a little bit more attached to the babies they'd be wrapping up. A sort of surrogacy, I suppose. That's why I keep making them, even though I have just very recently managed to buy something little and pink and impossibly soft from Gymboree: because even though I won't ever get to have one of my own babies again, the recipient would, and it brought me a silly sense of comfort to know that someone I loved would get to have their own baby moments. By making and giving the quilts I get to experience that, just a little tiny bit.

The unborn daughter is a topic Kendell and I never discuss. She is a sore spot we avoid. None of this has anything to do with me wishing Kaleb had been a girl. He is himself, my caboose-baby who I love with every bit of myself. It is about me wishing that I could have had her, too. About the feeling I continue to have that I've lost someone. In a real sense, I had to mourn for the daughter I didn't have. I didn't know what to do with the years of hoping, planning, and dreaming I'd done in her behalf. The realization that she wasn't ever coming to me didn't happen at my sonogram with Kaleb, or on the day he was born, or at any other specific moment. It was a gradual gathering of reality, a long, slow dying of the hopes, plans, and dreams. Probably that death isn't over yet. Maybe part of me will always grieve some. Even though I have the knowledge: you don't get to be her mother, I still dream about her sometimes. 

Looking back at the thoughts I've written about quilting, I realized that I'm nearly always trying to defend my creative impulse to Kendell. Yet, in a sense, the quilts---which, obviously, have become more than just baby gifts, but are my newest hobby---continue to be about her. At least connected to her. I can't use my body's creativity anymore, but I can still use my spirit's. Something about quilting, about the making of a functional and pretty item by cutting and reassembling, makes me feel better. It is a realization, every quilt: I thought that not having her would leave me forever numb, without the ability to make anything, but that is not so. Look! I am making something. Limping or no, I'm moving forward. Reassembled.

And maybe that's why I'm still thinking about Kendell's question, ten months later. And why, even though his non-understanding continues to bother me, I continue to make quilts. Whether I give them away or keep them for me, they are a source of creativity that brings me a comfort I need.

Blackberry Jam

Pumpkin muffins, plus new orange & cream plates

 Leftovers from last fall

new Pretty Spot in my kitchen

Kitchen table

My fall rag quilt, usually in the front room, but easier to photograph in a tree

 Blurry on purpose

I'm  99% convinced that the only reason the library offered me my job is that I had both an English degree (meaning that, in theory, I could have reasonable conversation about books, literature, writing, and history, even though I did not illustrate that skill during my interview ) and a secondary ed degree (meaning I could work with teens and be knowledgeable about YA lit). That blending of my bookish part and my teaching history continues to crop up in my job in different ways, but my favorite is when one of my old students wanders in, sees me, and gets that vague "I know you from somewhere" look on her face. I try to make my smile say "Yes, I remember you, too, so come over and say hello," and the students usually do.

It's a strange mixing of worlds. Those students knew me when I was caught up in the contradictory way it felt to be a teacher, a mix of heady control (my classroom, my lesson plans and assignments and exam questions, my desk and supplies and whiteboard, my ideas helping to shape people), heartache (I was not ready, emotionally, to stop being a stay-at-home mom when I had to), exhaustion (I lived on 2-4 hours of sleep most days), pleasure (life revolving around novels, writing assignments, and occasional grammar lessons, plus hanging out with other like-minded adults), frustration (grading papers. Grading papers. Grading papers.), and the deep affection I felt for my students (it took me by surprise, how deep that affection was). When I see them now, I am reminded of how it felt to be that version of myself. Their faces always carry the familiar look, a question: you're not teaching anymore? Sometimes I explain, sometimes I don't. It isn't something easily put into words: how I loved teaching, and how it sapped everything out of me; how it dredged up long-forgotten memories, and how it healed them.

They also remind me of that affection I felt for them. You'd think after five years, I would have forgotten. But their names come to mind as easily as if I'd been asking them about their research papers yesterday. Yet, they're not the same. They were high school seniors when I taught them, dipping their toes in adulthood. Now they are grown ups, swimming in the adult world. The girls from my creative writing class, who I loved like younger and much more stable versions of myself. The AP kids who made me laugh and gave me hope. The students from senior English, most of whom went willingly on the (metaphorical) trips I tried to take them on. Dystopias! Feminism! Poetry! Come with me! They appear, they say hello, and I wonder: what, of the things I tried to teach them, has stuck? Did my hours of stress and hope and exhaustion help them at all? This speaks to one of the primal reasons I became a teacher in the first place. I wanted to do for them what no teachers did for me: I wanted to help them direct their choices to take them along an upward path. That is also one of the primal reasons I had for leaving: I didn't feel like I had accomplished that.

Still, they show up, appearing on some random Thursday evening. We talk, they tell me what they are doing with their lives. We laugh. Our lives come back together for a few minutes, and then they move on again. I am left feeling something that, like everything related to teaching, is difficult to put into words. Like the connections we made in the classroom, discussing English stuff, continues to be a viable strand. Like maybe the affection I hold for them is something they still need, and life will let them find it every now and again.

Like maybe they did learn something from me.

The Internet can be had for both good and evil. Take recipes, for example. Google what you want to cook and viola! Thousands of recipes to choose from. Recipes with reviews. The only problem with thousands of recipes? Thousands of recipes! Every single one claiming to be the best. The perfect one. They can't all be perfect though. How do you choose which one is really worth your time and ingredients?

Tonight I wanted to make focaccia bread.(To go along with the spaghetti I had planned; I was hoping the bread would counteract the inevitable Spaghetti War that happens every time I make my favorite meal; not so much.) I vaguely remember reading on someone'sblog about the. perfect. focaccia recipe, but I couldn't pinpoint whose blog it was on. So I started searching, and it seemed every recipe had a slightly different twist. Finally, I gave up. Hobbled together a few different seeming focaccia trends. What was I out, save a few minutes and a little flour? The result was surprisingly delicious. Probably not the perfectfocaccia yet (if you know the p. f. secret, you should let me know!), and not the texture I had hoped for. But delicious anyway. Mostly I'm writing it here so I can A: update my pathetically-neglected blog and B: remember how I did it, so I can tweak it in the future. Seriously, though: If you have the perfect focaccia recipe, will you let me know?

Not-Yet-Perfect Focaccia

1 T yeast
1 tsp olive oil
2 T butter
1 T sugar
1/2 c. milk
1/2 c. water
2 1/2 c. flour
2 T dried rosemary
1 tsp salt
1 tsp dill
fresh black pepper
mozzarella cheese

Scald milk. Add butter and stir till dissolved. Add cold water and sugar. Allow to cool until it won't kill the yeast. (You know...it's warm but not hot on your inner wrist. Like baby bath water, without the Baby Magic. Or the baby.) Dissolve yeast in liquid, and let sit for about 5 minutes under a cloth. (I always stick the cloth in the microwave for a few seconds before I put it over the bowl, for extra warmth.) Add spices, then mix in flour. (For the pepper, I put in about ten seconds' worth of grinding, but I think next time I will put in more.) The dough will be a little bit on the soft side. Knead until smooth. Let rest under a warm towel for about 1 hour. Divide into two pieces. Place each in a square baking dish that's been sprayed with Pam and sprinkled with a little bit of cornmeal. Sprinkle the top with salt. Bake at 400 for 20-ish minutes. Halfway through, sprinkle some mozzarella on top.

Hope you like them!