There’s a reason I made all of those trays of lasagna one Sunday afternoon.
Just so I could pull out a section from the freezer, re-heat it, and package it all up and send it off for my son to eat on the bus his way to ski club.
Along with some just-baked oatmeal cookies.
Sometimes I wish I had a mom like me.
I gave up yoga the very month of WoYoPracMo: 31 days of yoga. Skipping yoga this month wasn’t intentional –I simply began shoving off my yoga mat as a way to catch up, here and there, on some sleep and deadlines in a world that gives me so few hours of solitude. Then, I started to rationalize, to my yoga friends, that maybe I was doing yoga everyday, because at least I always did Shavasana — relaxation pose.
The problem was, I got hooked on not doing yoga. Once I began calculating how much extra time I would gain by skipping a session here and there, I realized I had struck time-machine gold. I snatched up the minutes as quickly as if they were marbles scattering across a floor. Once I dipped my toe into those hours normally reserved for yoga, deadlines began to melt away, and so did my stress level.
Or so I thought. Truth be told, the only treasure I really found was Fool’s Gold.
As the month wore on, I found a new friend. Insomnia. At first, I didn’t catch the connection between my dwindling yoga practice and my newfound familiarity with the ceiling in my bedroom, my sheets, and my pillow. Without missing a beat, insomnia showed up on my pillow night after night with increasing frequency, first making its appearance known as restless legs. RLS is a syndrome I inherited from my mother, and one that must be managed to avoid a night of pain and lack of sleep. If you’re a sufferer of RLS, you know the drill; pick from the list of remedies and hope one works.
But, over the years of my faithful yoga practice, I forgot what RLS was. In fact, I thought I was cured from RLS. Yoga had sufficiently stretched out my sciatic nerve through the long, deep slow hip-openers, as the twists uncoiled the tensions built up through the day along my spinal column. I hadn’t realized that the benefits of pigeon pose (the queen of the yoga hip opener poses) wash away with water at the dawn of a new day.
RLS does eventually pass in the night, leaving your body exhausted and worn out from the tension to sleep – even if it takes until 2 a.m. Yet, just as my body was opened for sleep, molehills became mountains. Insomnia picked up tiny threads of anxiety that were hidden, tucked away in my brain, and exploded them in the form of movies that played out in my imagination while I watched, helpless. Insomnia showed me no mercy. Maybe, if I had heeded the words of Shiva Rae, and “made an orbit around the sun of the heart,” sitting Indian style, and making small circles, those nasty little demons would have left me before the hours of sleep, resolved.
As I lay there, staring at the ceiling, worrying myself sick, the manifestations spread to my shoulders and neck, magnifying kinks that did not get worked out through the simple stretch of downward dog. My sleepless state had reached, in my nightmarish, exhausted state, pandemic proportions. When morning came, and I realized how ridiculously inept my horrors were, and I laughed. Sleepily.
One night – the worst and last night of the entire nightmare – I walked all the way down the three flights of stairs to the kitchen to get a drink of water, I shielded my eyes against every digital clock along the way, as I couldn’t bear to see how late, or early, it really was. But, by the time I made it to the refrigerator, I couldn’t resist looking at that green light: 4:35. Horrifying to think my alarm would be going off in less than 3 hours; and I was still very much in need of a good night’s sleep.
As I walked back up the stairs, my mind started to recollect other nights, in my past, when I had confronted night after night with the dark, quiet house, worn out from exhaustion. That’s when I made the connection between my sleeplessness and lack of yoga. This nighttime wakefulness was precisely the problem of my pre-yoga days.
What had originally started out as a great time-saver had instead led me to the most exhausted I have been in a long time.
The best part about not doing yoga is doing yoga again. I took my time, and eased my body back into its familiar routine, giving myself lots of long deep breaths, and the freedom to not go as deep as I had in the days before, but, rather to ease myself back into the long stretches. That night, I did, sleep like a baby.
My family has discovered bacon grease, and it’s pointless to try and stop them. There is a glass jar full of rendered bacon fat on the top shelf of our refrigerator. The boys (my husband) uses it to pop popcorn. I’m sorry to admit this; but popcorn popped in bacon grease is but one thing: delicious. At first, I just ignored them; believing that at least they were not using Crisco — and my husband has been so neat and clean about saving and storing the grease — how could I complain?
Since then, I ventured onto Google and started researching… just a bit. Just hoping that maybe I would find some new tidbit of science that proves, perhaps, that bacon is the new health food.
I found nothing of the sort.
Other than reading about the dangers of fat going rancid, and the fact that most of this food source gets its nutrients from — here comes that word — saturated fat, I could find only aficionados who swear by bacon fat as a unparalleled food source for flavoring everything from green beans to potatoes, and popcorn. Besides, the idea was born from friends at our lake house.
If you have news to help me, please let me know.
Whether you’re making vegetarian with black or kidney beans, or chili loaded with beef, there are four magical ingredients to creating a deep rich flavor. The way you handle these ingredients is key. Here they are, in order of use.
You can certainly adapt these magic potions to any chili recipe you have. But, I’ve included here my recipe for vegetarian black bean chili:
Ingredients:
Method:
I volunteered at school this week, and I was to ask children to count to 100, record how far they could count and any numbers they repeated or skipped.
There were a couple of times when I got a little nervous about making it home that night. Two different boys did exactly the same thing. At 39, each one said, 30. From there, on to 39… and then, again 30. I was instructed not to coach or lead them to 100. After about 4 rounds of this, I began to wonder if I would be making it home in time to cook dinner. Finally, each one caught on.
One little boy looked at me and said, “I can’t count to 100. Only my brother can do that.”
“Why don’t you try and see how far you can go.”
He counted all the way to 99; no skips, no repeats. Then, he looked at me and said, “What do I do now?”
“Say, 100.”
His ship was arriving in a few days to take him back home. The war was far from over. He had read in a postcard from home that his baby sister had been saving a bucket of snow for him since Christmas – she was keeping it in the barn. Later, when she would take his hand and led him to spot, the mud squishy from the spring thaw, she would say, “Someone must have stolen my snow. It’s gone. All they left me was a bucket of water.”
This is where the story stops. I add this to the growing pile of mysteries that I left unsolved; the questions I didn’t ask before they all left me. My boys quickly, and efficiently, tucked this enchantingly beautiful currency into the vintage album, without a thought. Free from connection or memory. (At what age will they being to ask those questions?)
If I had the chance I would ask, “what did you sacrifice so that you would have this money to take back home? An egg salad sandwich on rye? A pair of boots to replace the ones you had with holes? Or are these dollars merely the leftovers, a souvenir, from your big-spending party night before you came back home? Tell me the truth, now. The suspense is killing me.”
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