I've not been running for almost two weeks. I got a cold, and then it finally went away, but as is my body's wont, I'm hanging on to the cough. Climb stairs? Cough cough cough. Take a deep breath? Cough cough cough. Start laughing hysterically? You guess it: cough cough cough. Tired lungs are not a good thing to take along on your run. Throw in some out-of-control hayfever (Singular is letting me down this year!) and running has seemed impossible.

But I miss it. I need it. So I went running this morning anyway.

Here's the thing I always struggle with, starting up again: my mind can deal with the long distances, but my body can't. Some runs are awesome; sometimes running feels like it does when I dream about running. Effortless. Today? Today was a hard run, even though I went slow. Every breath hurt, and my ITB hurt, and my feet. I was itching to go long but my my body got all sarcastic: yeah, not so much. I guess four miles was too long to start with.

In fact, I didn't even make my entire route. I did something I never, never, ever ever do: I walked the last quarter-mile or so. Lungs and knees were just not ready for any sort of distance yet. But even though it hurt, and I sort of felt like a failure for walking home, I'm glad I finally started again. Good runs don't require much mental coaxing, but the hard runs? The runs where you think "I want to stop right now" with every single step? They need lots of positive mental conversation. It's probably a very good thing that no one can hear what goes on in my head while I'm running. It's the only time I act like a cheerleader. "Just keep going! You can do it! Just a little bit longer! You're doing great!" There can't be any room for self-doubt or for negative mental conversations. I'm the only one who's going to make me keep going, and it takes all the positivity I can uncover to do it.

And like the runner's high that lingers on days when I've going running (even on hard-run days), the mental benefits of all that self-cheering stick around for the day. And that, really, is why I keep running. Not as much for the weight control and everything else that's good about exercising. It's because I need that time when, rather that my usual negative self banter, I'm cheering myself on. It's also why I think everyone should be a runner, but that's a different post for another day.

came over me today. Kaleb and I had rushed around all morning, getting stuff ready for the end-of-school party Nathan had asked me to do for his class. (I was their room mom.) At the party, we hung out on the little grassy hills at the edge of the school's soccer fields, flying paper airplanes and eating donuts. I could see Jake off in the distance, doing some activity with his fifth-grade class; I waved but he wasn't close enough to see me. Then, after that party, Kaleb and I went to Haley's honors award ceremony. One of those moments, her walking across the stage to receive her certificate (exemplary student of the year), seeing: she continues to change. She both is and is not the same girl as last year. Watching her laugh with her friends, knowing that she will continue changing, continue having more and more experiences that I am not a part of. Continue becoming herself.

After the ceremony (which did not go smoothly; the power went out, if you can imagine that: 50 or so 8th grade students and their parents milling around in a dark auditorium), Kaleb and I walked home. It was while we were on the short cut (which is a little trail cutting down the middle of the block so you don't have to walk all the way around to get onto our street, lined with thick grapevines, weeds, and wildflowers on one side, neat suburban yards on the other), after we'd stopped to admire other people's flowers, made a grasshopper jump, searched for a snake, and chased birds, that the feeling came over me. Within the span of two hours, I'd seen all of my children involved in their own worlds, the worlds the enter when they leave home each day. The feeling was built on the sudden contrast of remembering when I had three little ones, just like Kaleb, whose every moment, nearly, was lived in my presence, played against the sight of them involved in so much that has nothing to do with me. Entwined with the beauty of the day, of being alive at right that exact moment with the breeze, and the green, the shade and sun, the brown and yellow swirly colors of my neighbor's iris leaning against the chain-link fence. Kaleb's hand in mine, and listening to his chatter: "know why I love rolly pollies? It's 'cause they tickle, and they don't smell weird, and they roll into balls and they don't have stingees like bees do. And I won't eat one if I find it like Madi used to do. What I am planning is some chicken and stars soup for lunch, that's my plan, OK? Where do you think the snakes are? Why is it so hot? Will you not make the soup really hot, and make sure I have crackers?" Squeezing his hand, thinking of the shadowgirl, too, the other daughter I always wanted to have, who continues to be a sort of presence in my life even though I never got to have her. Holding his hand and knowing how few days I have left of this: a small child with perennially-sticky hands and an always-running nose whose nearly-every moment is lived with me, and how blessed I am to have had so many days already, and the thought of not having them anymore breaking my heart and yet also wanting to see how they progress, how they continue to change, how they'll each grow taller than me, becoming who they are along the way. I am amazed and their existence and I am blessed to be able to witness what they will do with their lives. How does any of it happen? We make people with our bodies and as impossible as it sounds, as much as it hurts, we let go a little, sending pieces of ourselves out into the world, and we ourselves are pieces of someone else, out in the world.

If someone smarter than me knows the word for that feeling, please let me know. I don't think there is one, but I wanted to remember, wanted to store up the joyful-ache of that moment for the times when it is all ache. And maybe with just one word to describe it, I could never forget.

A friend at work and I were talking the other day about recipe books with fast, speedy, quick, rapid, ready-in-15-minutes recipes in them. She said they depress her, because she doesn't want to have to cook quickly. "If I'm going to cook," she said, "I want to take my time and do it right."

I agree with her opinion. Plus, even with a cook-in-a-flash recipe, I still take forever to cook anything. Generally that's because once I start cooking, I don't want to leave it with just the one dish. I need bread, and a side or two, and of course (of course!) dessert. But it's also just...me, I guess. Take the first time I made risotto (once I had finally discovered where, exactly, one can find arborio 'round here). I used a Rachel Ray recipe. The one she did on her fix-this-in-thirty-minutes TV show. When she cooked it, she managed to do it in a half hour, plus a main dish. Ha! I only made the risotto, and it took 50 minutes. It was delicious, but seriously...how did it take that much longer?

I'm just slow.

Plus, I make big messes. Kendell has finally learned to just stay out of the kitchen when I'm cooking, because the big messes make him crazy. "Why can't you clean as you go?" he always asks, tidying up in three seconds what would have taken me 25 minutes. Imagine how much slower of a cook I'd be if I also cleaned as I cooked. Dinner would never be finished!

I don't cook as often as I'd like. Seems like, by the end of the day, I'm usually worn out, and so I just throw something easy together. Pasta and parmesan cheese, rolly-ups (like quesadillas, only rolled instead of folded in half), or even, on really desperate days, tacquitos---the kind in the box that comes from Costco. We used to eat fast food all the time for dinner, but we honestly never do that anymore, so I still feel better about my nights of cooking failure than I used to.

When I do manage to cook a good meal, I'm always torn: try something new, or stick with something I know is delicious (and, thus, worth the time, work, and cost). Tonight I did both: a new main course with never-fail biscuits and my current-favorite dessert, triple-layer lemon cake. When I had the cake in the oven and dinner half-way done, Kendell came in the kitchen. "You know," he said, "we appreciate you cooking for us, but you don't have to go to so much effort. We'd be happy with something easier."

I think he was trying to get out of eating the soup.

Because there are rules, people, when it comes to soup at my house. Rules! #1: soup must be thick. Period. Otherwise it's non-manly and a certain man won't eat it. #2: soup cannot have lumps. Period. Otherwise it's non-edible by four certain children. We don't eat a lot of soup at our house. But you know what? I love soup. And I wanted to try this one. So I modified the recipe to follow all the Soup Rules. And we had a delicious dinner that even Kaleb, once I got him to try it, loved. As we ate I wondered: is it worth it? The two-ish hours of cooking for a meal that's eaten in fifteen minutes? In my gut, I still say yes. In my gut, I was happy I cooked tonight.

Now, here are the recipes if you're so inclined.

Chicken-Corn Chowder
(I found this recipe on someone's blog, but I don't remember whose, so, if it's yours, let me know! Although, it's modified to fulfill the Soup Rules.)

3 chicken breasts
3 cans chicken broth, divided
2 tsp chicken base
juice of 1/2 lemon
pepper
1 T olive oil
1 T butter
1 medium onion, diced
3-ish tsp crushed garlic cloves
3 carrots, peeled and diced
1/4 cup flour
2 pounds corn kernels
1 cup cream
8 oz sour cream
salt and pepper to taste

Wash the chicken and remove all grody bits. Put in pan; add one can of chicken broth, the chicken base and lemon juice, plenty of black pepper, and 2 cups water. Cover, bring to a boil, and allow to simmer until cooked through. Meanwhile, dice the onion, press the garlic, and slice the carrots. Saute in the olive oil and butter until soft. Pour about half of a can of chicken broth into your blender, add the sauteed veggies, and blend until smooth. (You can skip this part if no one objects to lumps at your house.) (Although, I really liked the flavor and creaminess the blended-to-smithereens veggies added, and I would do it this way even without any lump objections. Carry on.) Pour back into the pan you sauteed in. Pour the rest of the can of chicken broth into the blender, along with the flour; blend until smooth. Add to pureed veggies along with the last can of chicken broth. Start warming over lowest heat.

Drain chicken, straining and keeping the broth. Add the broth to the other pan (the one with the pureed veggies & chicken broth); dice chicken. Add corn and chicken to the broth mixture and bring to a boil. Cook until corn is the tenderness you like and the broth is thickened. Remove from heat; add cream and sour cream and stir until smooth again. Salt and pepper as you wish. Serve with avocado and cheese on top.

Biscuits
(I love making biscuits and I think I make great ones. Not as good as Red Lobster's, but still.)

2 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
1 T sugar
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 cup shortening or butter or a combination of both
2/3 cup milk or buttermilk

In a large bowl, combine flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, and cream of tartar. Using a pastry blender, cut in the shortening/butter until a fine pebble. Add the milk/buttermilk. (If you use buttermilk, you might have to add just a titch more liquid...like 1 tablespoon or so.) Stir until everything clumps together, then turn onto a cutting board. Knead very lightly, just enough to get everything together, and then roll out. Cut until circles and bake at 400 for 10-11 minutes.

Two secrets for perfect biscuits. One: you really do need a pastry blender. There's always the "use two knives" option but it just doesn't work as well. And two: when you're cutting the biscuits out, don't twist the cutter. If you twist, it seals the edges and the biscuits don't rise as well.

And, of course, the dessert. Here's a photo (from Easter Sunday) just to grab your interest:

Triple Layer Lemon Cake
(This is my favorite dessert lately. I made it for St. Patrick's day (only I colored it green) and then I think I've made four since then. It's so good!)

1 1/2 c butter
6 eggs
3 2/3 c flour
2 1/4 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
scant 1/2 tsp salt
3 cups sugar
3 tsp lemon zest
3 T lemon juice
1 1/2 c buttermilk
3-4 drops yellow food coloring
lemon curd
lemon cream cheese frosting

Let butter, eggs, and buttermilk sit out for about a half hour, or until room temperature. Preheat oven and prepare pans. Mix flour, baking powder and soda, and salt in a bowl. In a separate bowl, beat butter on high speed for about 1 minute. Add sugar, lemon peel, and lemon juice, then beat until well combined. Add eggs one at a time.  Add flour and buttermilk, alternating between the two, starting and ending with the flour mixture. Add the food coloring with the first buttermilk turn. Pour into three pans; bake the first one for 25-29 minutes and the third for about 20 minutes, or until toothpick comes out clean.

Make the lemon curd
(try not to swoon...I'm not a fan of pudding-esque anything, but this is DELICIOUS.)
1 c sugar
2 T cornstarch
3 tsp lemon zest
6 T lemon juice
6 T water
6 egg yolks, beaten
1/2 c butter, cut up

In a pan, whisk together the cornstarch, sugar, and lemon peel. Add the lemon zest, juice, and water. Whisking the whole time, bring to a boil, then continue to cook over low heat until thick and bubbly. Slowly pour about half of the lemon mixture into the egg yolks, whisking constantly, then return that to the pan. Continue whisking (geeze, enough with the whisking!) until it comes to a boil, then boil gently for 2 minutes more. (Since it's raw eggs, I am always careful with this part, and honestly: I boil for three, even though the recipe says two.) Remove from heat; add the butter and stir until smooth. cover and chill. Use as filling between the three layers of cake.

Frost the top and outsides with Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting
1 tsp lemon zest
1 tsp lemon juice (that says 1 teaspoon there, not one tablespoon, really, not that I figured that out the hard way at all. Or anything.)
8 oz cream cheese
1/2 cup butter
4-5 drops yellow food coloring
4-5-ish cups powdered sugar

Juice and zest the lemon. Beat with the cream cheese and butter until soft; slowly add powdered sugar until frosting is stiff enough.

I used to love wearing short skirts. Back when I had great legs, of course. Now, my legs are just wrongly-proportioned, somehow, because no matter how much weight I lose, they're still chubby. Yay! I can wear a size six! Except for my chubby thighs, which need a size eight. No one makes pants with a size six waist and a size eight leg. Trust me.

But my legs are, at least, in much better shape than they used to be, and I have taken to wearing short skirts again. Not short like I wore as a teenager. Not short enough to cause another Short Skirt Debacle like the one my friend Midge and I caused during our sophomore year. And definitely not the flouncy ones that other people are wearing lately and looking cute in. (Those don't look cute on me...I look like a deflated balloon.) I like straight, modern, thirty-something short skirts. They solve the chubby thighs problem, they make me feel clothing-happy, they're easy to wear.

There's only one drawback to the skirts, and that's Kendell making fun of my white legs. And he's got a point: they are white. If I'm outside, I'm generally doing something like weeding the flowerbeds, or pushing Kaleb on the swing (the kid refuses to learn how to pump!), or even, you know, running. All activities that fail to get your legs very tan. But he kept suggesting that I NEEEEEEED to get some sun. He's worried that when we get to Mexico, my pasty-white skin will get fried, and I need to do something about it now, before I turn into a lobster-skinned gringo.

Plus he's always wanted a tan, skinny wife.

When he started insisting that I should lay out, I didn't even correct his grammar. I offered up some weak objections centered around skin cancer. And then I succumbed. Because, hello? He's going to watch the kids while I lie in the sun? Twist my arm. Then bring me an icy beverage.

So last Saturday, after I'd done all three of my traditional outdoor activities, I put on my swimsuit (trying to ignore the fact that while my thighs refuse to let go of their death grip on fat, my boobs are not so stubborn), grabbed a towel and a book, and I lay out. I think the last time I did that, Haley didn't exist. Since I really am pretty white, I thought twenty minutes on each side would be great. Perfect. I set the timer on my watch, just to make sure I didn't overdo it, and then I toasted myself. Envisioned a tan version of me in my favorite skirt.

Except, you know? Twenty minutes? Way too much. Ten probably would have been better. Because my legs got fried. And my shoulders...oh, my shoulders. I failed to take into account the fact that I went running in a tank top, so they'd already gotten a good 45-minute dose of sun. If my legs were fried, my shoulders were scalded. I've been slathering myself with aloe vera, walking around slightly sticky since Saturday. Worked on the legs, which are now maybe a little bit tan. Not so much on the shoulders, because I woke up this morning to discover one of life's best things:

my shoulders are peeling.

And just like I love picking my fingernails, I love peeling skin. That very faint crinkly sound the skin makes as it peels away? Love that! And the thin layers, separating? Love that, too. I'm not really sure why I love peeling. But I do. Only, it's really hard to peel your own shoulders. I just spent a half hour leaning into the bathroom mirror, peeling away. My eyeballs hurt from trying to rotate enough to see my own shoulder blades. But all the dead skin is gone.

And I'm left wondering: aside from my sister Suzette, who also loves peeling, am I the only human being who isn't creeped out right about now? Do you like peeling, too?

Reasons Why:

1. Somewhere during one of the several hundred middle-of-the-night coughing sprees I had, I managed to dislodge the half-dozen razor blades that were hanging out in my throat. It still hurts, but not as bad. My cold has turned a corner!

2. It's Thursday! Thursdays are always good days. I learned the other day, when we were trying out Wolfram|Alphra at work, that I was born on a Thursday. I never knew that! I don't have to work on Thursdays. It's almost the weekend. There's a sale at Nordstrom I'm going to check out, and the day is filled with kids' school activities. Yeah for all Thursdays, but also yeah for this Thursday! 

3. Perfectly ripe raspberries for breakfast.

4. Eating breakfast on the outside table in the sunlight. My cold is going away enough that my eyes can deal with sunlight again.

5. Perfect eating-raspberries-for-breakfast-outside temps.

6. Kaleb eating frosted flakes next to me, playing with his jungle toys. (They were making beds in his sandals.)

7. Kissing my Big boys as they left for school and being happy that they'll still kiss me goodbye, even in front of their friends.

8. Humming a few bars of "I Have a Dream" and remembering Haley's choir concert last night. (I bumped into my friend Jamie, who got to experience the Grumpy version of myself. That's what hot, crowded spaces turn me into as I try not to go into all-out clausterphobia mode: crazy grumpy. Jamie, it's Amy: I survived! Hope you did too!)

Hope you, too, have a good morning!

My thirteen different types of adolescent crazy have already been well documented on my blog, but what you might not know is that none of them included an eating disorder. Looking back with a critical eye, I am a little amazed that I didn't, actually, develop anorexia or bulimia. I had friends who were bulimic --- one of my most vivid eighth-grade memories is following them while they sprinted down the hall after lunch, completely baffled at why we were running towards the bathroom, and then listening to them throwing up and still being naive enough to hope they weren't contagious. Like it was just the stomach flu. I had one acquaintance (sorta/kinda on the fringe of my group of gothy friends) with anorexia, but not even her skeletal elegance managed to trigger that particular crazy in me. Maybe my laid-back father's personality counteracted my controlling mother's? Maybe my dislike of puking trumped my need to fit in? Maybe gymnastics kept me thin-ish enough? Or maybe it's just because, deep down, I simply love food, and yeah: I totally eat to comfort myself. Even during adolescent crazy, a great big, icy cold Pepsi and whatever candy bar was my current favorite (it's always switching, my favorite candy bar) made me feel a little bit better. Or, what I really think: my other kinds of crazy kept me too occupied, because probably, had I started down the anorexia pathway, I would have not ever wanted to come back.

For whatever reason, though, I managed to dodge the eating-disorder bullet. But I continue to watch out for it, especially since I've got a teenage daughter in the house. You can't ever be too careful. And when I learned that Laurie Halse Anderson had another new novel, Wintergirls, I of course wanted to read it; the fact that it's about eating disorders made it neither more or less inviting. I read all of her books, because she looks at difficult topics in such a clear way and because I love her writing style; she manages a lyrical feel without becoming difficult. The book opens with the death of 18-year-old Lia's former best friend, Cassie, under mysterious circumstances at a cheap motel. Cassie haunts the story, though, almost as much a protagonist as Lia.

As the story unwinds, you experience anorexia at a gut level, right along with Lia. Everything that goes into her mouth is counted, kept track of, and added to the day's running calorie total. She devises ingenious ways of making her parents think she's eating when she's not. The secret exercising, the stashes of diuretics, the uncontrollable binging, the careful weighing: all of these are something it feels like you live in the book, not just read about. (Again: that's why I love this author.) Lia is fully invested in her crazy, and as you progress through it with her, you start to understand why someone would do that to themselves. It doesn't have anything to do with being thin, really. It has to do with not feeling what is happening to her life: her parents' divorce, her mom's inability to love her for who she is, her loneliness at school, her friend's betrayal. The sum of her agony, which is different from everyone else's sum, but also the same number. Everyone hurts, and everyone has to learn how to live with hurting, and at their very most basic, the adolescent crazies come, I think, no matter their shape, from the desire to stop feeling what you  have to feel, and the way the crazies start to leave is by learning how to feel it all anyway. "It's easier to crawl into a bone cage," Lia realizes, "or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out." But she also, finally, realizes "it's a lie."

I loved the book, devoured it in a day. But I also kept thinking about Janssen's review while I read it. She wondered "who is this book for?" while she read, and I had the same thoughts. Someone who has overcome her eating disorders might not want to tempt the recovery by immersing so thoroughly into the old way of life; someone who's teetering on the edge of an eating disorder might just be pushed over. Maybe it's perfect for teenage readers who are as close to normal as teenagers get. Or for their moms. Even though I didn't have that particular struggle, I recognized how similar the thought patterns are between Lia's crazies and mine. In fact, Anderson makes the experience so real that I still felt caught up in Lia's crazy, once I came to the surface of my real life. I made a raspberry pie just to exorcize Lia's voice from my head.

In the end, what is the most interesting to me about this book is the question: how much power does a book wield? Can a piece of fiction be the thing that triggers something in someone? (There's an interesting essay and discussion at the NY Times about just this topic.) I have to say this: I believe books can be triggers, both for good and bad. Not all of them, but some books I have read have changed my life. Simply because most of those changes have been for the better doesn't allow me to think that a book couldn't change someone for the worse.  However, I don't think a book can bring you to the edge; good or bad, it can only push you over. A book about eating disorders isn't the problem, just as, really, the eating disorder itself isn't the problem, but the symptom of the problem. And I would never say a book like this shouldn't be written at all, because I also know the edge it could push a reader over might be the good one, the one that isn't a drop at all, but a turn. Just as it might trigger an eating disorder, I think it might also trigger any sort of recovery because it just might get someone to see, like Lia finally does: hard as it is, you have to learn to feel it.

Our cat, Emily, is a birdcat. Whenever she sees the chance, she snaps a bird. And eats it. I try to remind myself that this is her cat nature and not something that should bother me. Even though, in general, it does bother me.

Serves me right, I suppose; the being bothered is a sort of karmic irony. Because now that I really, really need her to catch a bird, she won't because she's too old (she turned 15 this spring). Lest you think I am into bird death, you should know that it's not just any random robin I would like her to eat, but a specific one. Namely, the one that keeps flying into our garage in order to eat Emily's cat food.

Seriously---what sort of robin dares to eat a cat's food? Especially when said cat is lying right there in her padded box next to the cat food. The cat food being eaten by a robin. Robin used to be Emily's favorite meal, and I'd imagine that this one, having gorged daily on Emily's second favorite meal (cat food!) would be a fairly tasty treat. If you were a cat, that is.

But no. She does raise her head when the robin makes its visit. She glares at it a bit. But she doesn't make her bird-hunting miaowgrowlmiaow. She just puts her head back under her armpit. Maybe Emily isn't too old; maybe she's just depressed. Isn't not finding pleasure in activities you used to love a major sign? And sleeping too much? Do they make Prozac for cats? Because I'm seriously tired of this bird. The fact that I want it to be devoured by a cat illustrates my cat-food-bird exhaustion.

So, alas, Emily's birding days are over, and somehow the robin knows it. It swoops in, dines on Iams, and swoops back out. Dive bombing everything in the garage on its way out. Do all robins simultaneously swallow and poop? Or just the ones that eat cat food? And I'll tell you what: the cat food is wrecking serious damage on the bird's intestinal tract. Bird poop should not look like that.

So whenever one of us sees the bird in the garage, we start yelling and waving our arms, stomping our feet and screeching. I wonder what the neighbors think? Even Kaleb knows to scare the crazy, cat-food-eating bird out of the garage. But it is impervious to any fear. Cats? Nah. Humans making obnoxious noises? Well, weird enough to flutter away for a few minutes, but nowhere near scary enough to actually, you know, not come back.

Does anyone know if they make scarecrows for robins? Scarerobins? At this point I'm willing to try anything.

Since in April I only read poetry, or books about poetry, I've got a feeling there'll be tons of book notes about poetry popping up on my blog. And as I am certain that my blog readers wait with bated breath for my book notes, AND you all love poetry too, there is a general cheer going around the blogosphere right about now, correct? ;) Here's my first one.

Ballistics  by Billy Collins

The poet Billy Collins is officially on my List of Writers I'd Like to Meet. (Not that I have, in reality, written down this list. But if I did, not everyone I like reading would show up there, for varying reasons.) (Who's on your list?) Of course, the few times I have meet authors on my imaginary WILtM list have been sort of disasters. Like the memorable day when I met Margaret Atwood, and I told her it was her fault I became an English teacher, and we talked about English teachers in general and one specific one that left an impression on her, but the whole time I was thinking she's got to be wondering exactly how my reading an excerpt of Cat's Eye in eleventh grade turned me into a teacher, and really it's my eleventh-grade English teacher's fault because I never would have found Cat's Eye had it not been for Mrs. Simmons, and surely someone as astute as Margaret Atwood can see my faulty logic and knows that my proclamation---like the first sentence of an essay, constructed with the goal of hooking the reader---was simply a good way to get her attention and actually spend a few minutes talking to her while the rest of the line behind us rustled impatiently. OK, maybe not a disaster, but not the immediate friendship I hoped would develop. (Because, yeah, I know, writers totally make friends with the people who come to their readings. Happens all the time.) Or the time I listened to the poet X. J. Kennedy talk in an intimate group of only ten people, and how when he spoke about all families having their poet laureate, or how they used to, and the way poetry is declining in the eyes of the general public, I wanted to hug him but knew it would be highly undignified to his very dignified grandfatherly self, and then when he opened it up for questions I couldn't think of anything to ask. "Do you know how much I love your anthologies?" isn't really a question he could really answer. So if I did meet Billy Collins, I'm sure I'd either be struck dumb or say something dumb.

But it would still be cool to meet him.

What I would want him to know but be unable to say is how much I appreciate his poems for their ability to be simultaneously accessible (meaning you don't have to know the entire history of everything in order to understand them, nor even aspire to impossible erudition of the English language) and yet, still, intelligent/thoughtful/full-of-that-double-meaning-thing that good poems have. I would discuss the limits of language, and how the word I want to describe his work with---delightful---is so pallid and wrong and yet, at the same time, exactly right. I would tell him that every once in a random while, some image or other from "Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes"  pops into my mind. That's the sort of impact his poems have on you. You start with one---just open to any one of them---and start reading, and you fall right into the poem; when you come out again, some little essence of the poem or of the poet himself still clinging to you. It'll never stop clinging, and you'll think about the poem at unexpected moments. He manages to get the everyday details of life, the little objects and times, into his poems, but in a way that makes you laugh, or stop to realize: although I have never thought of it that way, the poem gets it exactly right.

In a sense, though, his newest book, Ballistics, was just the tiniest bit of dissapointing to me. Not because he doesn't do all the magic he did in his previous poems---he does. But because I wanted the magic to be bigger. I wanted it to be the new Billy Collins book: the Collins-esqueness, but newer. Which isn't to say I didn't love the poems. As I read, I tried to decide which one was my favorite---which had left the strongest impression. I wanted it to be "What Love Does," because it is a non-mushy love poem, a little bit edgy, even: "It turns everything into a symbol" and "it may add sparkle to a morning," lines that are almost mushy, but not quite, that build to the unexpected point: "but mostly it comes and goes. . .it will arrive like an archangel/through an iron gate no one ever seemed to notice before." Or maybe "The Effort," which runs along the lines of "Introduction to Poetry,"  how misguided some attempts at reading poetry are. "The Effort" pokes at the perrennial "What is the poet trying to say?" question that pops up in English classes. (I love poems set in English classes!) "As if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson/had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts---/inarticulate wretches that they were." I especially like the last line: "and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed." When I finished it, though, I couldn't really pick a favorite. So I'm ending with this poem, which is neither grandoise nor particularly poetic in the traditional ideal:

Oh, My God!

Not on in church
and nightly by their bedsides
do young girls pray these days.

Wherever they go,
prayer is woven into their talk
like a bright thread of awe.

Even at the pedestrian mall
outbursts of praise
spring unbidden from their glossy lips.

But still satisfying, still with that particular Collins-esque zing. I think I love this one so much because it bothers me how often people say "Oh, My God!" Maybe that sounds churlish but instead it goes to the power of language itself. Remember playing with words, saying one over and over and over, until its very sound became something foreign, its meaning a pile of dust? That happens in a broader sense to phrases that everyone uses, all the time, and there are some phrases whose meaning I'd like to keep. But here, like he always does, he turns the idea upside down, making the "Oh, My God!" squeal into something that isn't meaningless, but a prayer. Of course, he's also being sarcastic. Still, when I hear the phrase squealed in a girlish voice in the mall, I will stop to think a bit about how miracles are everywhere, and how maybe those girls are able to see it better than I am. In the end, that's exactly what I go back to poetry for: it helps me see things better than I did before.

I'm not sure I've ever met a mom who loves Mother's Day. (Are you one? If you are, you should let me know!) I do know that it's not my favorite holiday. Remember how I feel about Valentine's Day? Well, I feel that way about Mother's Day, too. Only worse, because not only is there all the commercial, buy-me-a-gift hoopla, there's also the perfect-mother thing. I always especially dread church, where it seems that all the talks praise mothers for doing all the miraculous and wonderful things they do, and it feels like a check-list for the things I don't seem to do.

Sometimes the second Sunday of May finds me a wee bit grumpy.

This was a nice M.D, though. I slept in a bit, then went outside to get the paper and discovered that my purple iris are blooming. That cinnamon-floral scent is the smell of late spring to me: upcoming freedom and the very edge of hot weather. I made the pancake batter, but Kendell cooked them. Plus he hung a ceiling fan in the computer room for me. (No more sweaty scrapbooking!) Haley gave me a scrapbook about our trip to Niagara Falls, and Nathan gave me an art project he made at school. I suddenly remembered a Mother's Day talk I'd heard one random Sunday we happened to go to church. It was my used-to-be friend's mom talking, and she spoke about how much better Mother's Day is when all your kids are teenagers, because they give you real presents, not those goofy handmade things you get when they are little. I thought that was a weird thing to say even then, in my teenage haze; now, as a mom myself I have to say she was completely wrong. I love the homemade gifts, with whatever imperfections they might have. They are perfect for me, because I know the love and effort that went into them.

Since the morning went so pleasantly, I decided that come what may, I'd not be grumpy today. I'd focus on the good stuff and let go of the expectations. And rather than picking my I-should-be-a-better-mother wounds, I thought about my own mom. That worked well, as instead of buying her a gift, I suggested that we all show up at her house and weed all her flower beds. (Dad used to do this.) We got a ton of weeding done, and then had dinner.

My relationship with my mom is far from perfect. Sometimes, when I listen to other people talk about how they are with their moms, I get a little bit envious; I wish we were closer. We fought with especial bitterness when I was a teenager, and while we have of course forgiven each other, there are scars still. And quite often, life gets in the way. It seems like, try as I might, the things I need from her are the polar opposite of what she needs to give me, and the opposite is also true. I wonder if she looks at me and thinks "how did I end up with a daughter like this?" Sometimes quilting is our only common ground.

Don't misunderstand me: I love my mom. I wish things were different quite often, but I do love her and am grateful for her in many ways. So, instead of wallowing around in my dislike of M.D. today, I tried to keep thinking about my mom, all the good that is in our relationship, the things that I love and admire about her.

• She always looks nice. I don't think she ever goes anywhere without makeup on, wearing something she loves. I hope she never finds out that sometimes I go to Costco with my sweats on.
• She taught me about good food. My mom has always been a great cook, and while she didn't teach me a ton of stuff about how to cook, she taught me by her example to work hard on making good meals. We never had a dinner at home without vegetables, there was almost always fresh fruit in the fridge, and the low-fat thing? She was doing low fat twenty years before everyone else. But we're not all about healthy: caramels, fudge, and hand-dipped chocolates at Christmas; coconut cake on summer Sundays; apple crisp while we watched Little House on The Prairie. It wasn't just eating, it was making food part of the event, and it was working hard to make sure the food was good. One particular food memory that springs to mind: one winter, she learned a recipe for homemade scones. She'd make this enormous batch of scone dough, and keep it in the fridge, and then on cold mornings she'd fry scones and serve them with honey butter.
• Random bits of info about my mom: she was once the second attendant in a beauty pageant (I have never been able to get the right name for the pageant, even when I was very little). She was on the ballroom dance team at BYU. She's loved to sew since she was a very little girl. One of her favorite vacation spots is Las Vegas. She doesn't like to be cold. Her favorite thing to buy is shoes. She is not a fan of the color brown or of sunflowers. She used to collect Beanie Babies. 
• Before she married my dad and had me and Becky, she was married to someone else. Her first husband is my two older sisters' birth father, but when she married my dad, he adopted my sisters. I don't know very much about her first marriage because it is a topic she just does. not. talk about.
• Even though it didn't turn out the way she had hoped (like about 99% of my life), I am grateful that she was encouraging and supportive of my efforts in gymnastics. How many Saturdays she sat through gymnastics meets, just to see my four routines! I don't know how she fit it all into her life. We were talking tonight about my sister's daughter's dance competitions, and how boring they get, and I looked over at mom. "Sort of like compulsories?" I asked her, knowing she'd know exactly what I meant. "Oh no," she said, and the way she replied made me absolutely certain that she was sincere, "I loved going to your and Becky's meets." It wasn't just the meets, though. It was driving there every day, and doing without new cars and fancier stuff so she could pay the tuition, and nursing me through the little (my hands were nearly always a bloody mess) and large (the time I badly sprained my ankle right before my Very Big Meet) pains that go along with being a gymnast. And the thing that would have been hardest for me: dealing with all the other parents, the ones who didn't struggle every month to pay the tuition. Playing the gymnastics-mom game. She did it well. I still feel bad I quit and disappointed her.
• She is a shopper. She knows how to get great deals on clothes, and she passed this knowledge down to me.
• I admire that she was also able to mother my friend Chris when she needed a mom. Chris even stayed with us for awhile. I would like to think I could do that for someone else's daughter, but I'm not 100% certain. We used to joke that Chris was my mom's fifth daughter.
• She taught me the concept that your family is the most important thing. Where would I be without believing in that idea with all of my being?
• Name a craft and she's probably tried it. Not just sewing and quilting, either. Hand-made suckers, porcelain dolls, beaded Christmas tree ornaments, gingerbread houses, string Easter baskets, crochet, counted cross stitch, and others I am probably forgetting. She didn't let a summer pass without canning green beans and beets, salsa and tomatoes, and (particularly memorable events) pinto beans and apple-pie filling. Not in the same jars, though! She also froze corn and fruit, bottled jam, and always had homemade sweet pickles in a big crock in the basement. If something needed to be made, she could do it. In fact, maybe the only craft she's not tried is scrapbooking!
• Random clothes-sewn-by-my-mom memories: a yellow dress when I was about seven or eight that I loved because I thought Laura (of Little House on the Prairie) would love it. Leos and sweats for gymnastics. The blue dress I wore to church on my twelfth birthday. The pink flannel nightgown. Swimsuits. The cheerleading uniform for the very, very, very brief time in my life when I wanted to be a cheerleader, during the summer before eighth grade. (That was a total disaster that to some extent shaped all the rest of my troubles.) My bridal veil. The dress I wore for Michelle's wedding. The dress Haley wore for Becky's wedding. The dresses my bridesmaids wore in my wedding. Suzette's wedding dress. 
• Did she love going boating? I don't know if my parents owned a boat because they both wanted to, or just because Dad did. Or maybe my mom did. But some of my clearest memories of mom come from the times we were out in the boat. Utah Lake, Lake Powell, Deer Creek, even Flaming Gorge once (one day I must write about that Flaming Gorge trip!): she always made sure we had suntan oil (WAY before things like SPF or skin cancer bothered anyone), snacks, sandwiches, and fun.
• She's never made me feel stupid. In fact, she has always made me feel like I am a brilliant person who could do anything I wanted. Exactly how a mom should make her daughter feel, right?
• Even though she made sure to take us to the library all the time, and we always had a new book under the tree at Christmas because of her, I didn't get my love of reading from my mom. Because my mom does NOT love to read. At all.
• And, last, a photo. This is Becky, me, my mom, and my sister Michelle on Easter. We are missing our other sister Suzette. (in real life, Becky is taller than me. I am, in fact, the second shortest daughter. But Suzette is a LOT shorter than I am!)  

Think about my mom really did the trick. I didn't hate Mother's Day. It didn't hurt that none of the talks at church were about perfect moms. Kaleb's recent spate of being extra-loving wasn't bad, either. The kids and Kendell made big efforts to just be nice and get along. (That is what I always say when they ask me what I want for M. D.: a day when everyone is nice to each other and just gets along.) I need to work on letting go of my M. D. dislike!

I love books set in boarding schools. There's something that draws me to the boarding-school concept: all that freedom, all the pressure to succeed, the mingling with other like-minded students. And, of course, the inevitable shenanigans that are bound to happen when a bunch of parentless teenagers get together. (As a parent, I also feel a sense of boarding-school abhorrence for the exact same reasons. In another life, I would like to come back as the daughter of wealthy parents, just so I could attend boarding school, but I don't want to ever send any of my kids to one!) Some boarding-school novels I've read:

• Of course, there's the classic A Separate Peace (which I read in eighth grade, thus kicking off my boarding-school-book affection; I still have my copy of it in some box or another)
• Prep  by Curtis Sittenfield (which I wanted to like more than I did)
• The River King by Alice Hoffman (one of my favorites)
• The Lake of Dead Languages  by Carol Goodman (which also mixes in a bit of gothic creepiness)
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (boarding school/dystopia-ish combo)
• Others I am certainly forgetting. (Do you have a favorite boarding-school novel? Tell me!)

In theory, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is a book about a girl's adventures at boarding school. Frankie Landau-Banks was an on-the-fringe freshman during her first year at Alabaster Prep, hanging out with her popular older sister, but comes back her sophomore year having significantly changed: body and attitude. She lands a boyfriend (the Matthew she'd been crushing on the year before). She starts digging into his occasional suspicious absences, helped with a few hints from her father (an Alabaster Prep alumni) about the school's secret boy's club) and the knowledge---especially about the panopticon---she's gaining in her favorite class (Cities, Art, and Protest) and becomes, in her words, "possibly a criminal mastermind." See, I told you: that inimitable prep school mix of romance, knowledge, and hijinks.

But that's just the surface. Because what the novel's really about is how power is wielded, what it means to be a woman, the line between right and wrong, and the way people change, how a person can discover his or her own real self. Of course, that last is what all good teen books are about. What makes this so remarkable---did I mention that I absolutely love this book?---is Frankie's voice. She is intelligent, curious, inventive, courageous. If I'd known about her illicit activities, I'd've wanted to be her friend (in my other life of course, the one with a prep school in it). Plus she's funny, in ways she doesn't realize as being funny. The geekier part of me loved her musings on the "neglected positive," a term she invents that's inspired by her reading P. G. Wodehouse. "Prefixes link "In," "non," "un," "dis," and "Im" make words negative, yes? There may be grammatical particulars I am not addressing here, but generally speaking. So you have a positive world like "restrained," and you add the prefix "un" to get a negative: unrestrained. . . When there's a negative word or expression---immaculate, for example---but the positive is almost never used, and you choose to use it, you become rather amusing. Or pretentious. Or pretentiously amusing." Some neglected positives are real words---"maculate," for example, means the opposite of immaculate. Others aren't, and Frankie calls them imaginary neglected positives---inpeas.

She? She's more and more the girl I want to be friends with.

Plus, she's able to study the world she lives in, to try a bit to look at things critically. One of my favorite parts of the book is the midnight party Frankie gets invited to. Despite all the drama---it is a secret party, but she finds out about it; she's not, initially, invited; there are elaborate invitations that must be burned after reading)---once she gets to the party, she realizes it's just about hanging out in the cold, drinking beer. She's able to do this with quite a few of the social constructs at the school: who sits at what table, which girls are popular, the lack of fresh vegetables in the cafeteria. Frankie could come dangerously close to being the teen-novel stereotype of a preternaturally wise protagonist; the author avoids that by writing from the third-person omniscient perspective. She's the all-knowing narrator, in other words; she includes pieces of Frankie's essays, describes her motivations, writes descriptive asides, all of which serve to shift the stereotype out of the text.

I've taken a long route to get to the story's main plot: Frankie's discovery and infiltration of the boys-only secret club at Alabaster Prep. Via email, she wrests control of the club out of the hands of its leader, Alpha, and starts sending them on larger and more volatile pranks than they've ever planned before. In true Frankie form, though, they're not mindless; she creates the pranks and the interpretation of the pranks as she goes along, and then gets annoyed when no one else sees them as anything but, well, pranks.

One last thing I loved: the way the author nails adolescent romance. The unexpected and thoroughly miraculous experience of The Boy, who's previously barely seen you, suddenly seeing you; the way there is both power and a stripping of power in the relationship; how, once you're in with The Boy, you're also in with his friends and the danger that goes along with that "in-ness" (because if you break up with The Boy, you're also breaking up with his friends, and his friends' girlfriends, and his friends' girlfriends' friends, and the whole social group). It's a sort of clear-ish eyed approach to loving someone that I wish every teenage girl could get a glimpse of because it is so true.

I loved, loved, loved this book! I will recommend it without hesitation to nearly everyone; boys might even like it. There's hardly any swearing (actually, I don't think there was any, but don't quote me on that); the word "sex" does appear, but is never described nor even had, for certain. But it's a good book for far better reasons than those: because it might just force a reader to think beyond what is obvious, to dig into motivation and interpretation and thinking.