a very full day

Yesterday was an unusual day. It was hectic and full and required me to wear heels. I drove to our old hometown, leaving our house at 6:00am, for an appearance in court. I arrived in good time for the 8:30am appearance and promptly signed in, just to sit and wait until almost 11:00am. Much back and forth, negotiating, and red tape. I actually appeared before the judge at around 1:00pm, with no break for lunch. I was famished and the room was cold as an ice box. The judge, however, was lovely. I was sworn in and answered two questions in about four minutes. Hardly worth the drive.

The really harrowing part was sitting in the crowded and too warm waiting room for so long. Court rooms and their waiting areas, especially in larger cities, are not very pleasant places. No one who works there seems to know anything at all except for the judge. Some of the people I dealt with looked like they were half asleep. I do try never to generalize, but I think government workers get a bad rap for reasons based in reality. No food, no drink and I really think they would prefer that you don't talk or breathe as it's inconvenient for them. There was one bit of excitement. A woman of about thirty stormed into the room through one door, practially ran across the room to the exterior door and left in an obvious huff, cursing all the while. Some joker in the room made the comment that if she came back it would probably be with a gun. Those in the waiting room laughed. One of the ladies that worked in the office gave him a dirty look and got up to see if the woman drove away.

Afterward I drove to my favorite convenient store in the free world to fill the car with gas, buy a sandwich for lunch, and just breathe in the atmosphere. It's a silly thing to miss, but I do miss them, so much. They are clean, spacious, and well stocked. The gas pumps are covered generously, car port style, so that you can stay dry in the rain. The whole parking lot is lit up like day time at the first hint of darkness. The convenience stores here are mostly 7-11s and I just hate them. They are small and dirty and everything is crowded into a space that's far too small. I write the company back home and tell them how wonderful they are each time I visit, then beg them to build one here. In between visits, I get used to the stores here and forget just how great the ones I left really are.

By the time I arrived home, the boys were home from school. The dogs nearly knocked me down when I walked in the door, they were so happy that I actually came back to them. I love that about dogs. The cats casually glanced my way and several hours later, came to sit on my lap and demand attention. My elder son was somberly practicing skateboard tricks on the driveway, running in and asking me to watch about every ten seconds. The little one did his homework and went next door to play.

The rest of the day was a blur of chores, homework, and dinner. It is a rare evening that we are all home together. My family chatted and laughed while I fed them quiche for dinner because the chicken was still frozen solid. I went to bed tired, but happy. And wondered how I ever managed to work and maintain a home at the same time.

Thanksgiving Day

Note: This post was originally called Thanksgiving Preparations, but I have been so busy it never got posted. Better late than never, I say.

I am preparing Thanksgiving dinner for my parents, my family, and my daughter's best friend. We'll have turkey with giblet gravy and dressing, whole cranberry sauce, a potato casserole, a corn dish, two kinds of sweet potatoes, freshly baked crescent rollls, pumpkin pie, pecan pie and a relish tray filled with olives, pickles, deviled eggs and the like.

In the past I have searched recipes and tried variations of traditional fare. Some were successes, some were merely serviceable. This year, I let my husband and children decide the menu. Almost every recipe was something I can prepare mostly in advance. As I write this, my Thanksgiving dinner is two thirds prepared, and it is Wednesday evening. Tomorrow, I will get up and roast the turkey, make a fresh pumpkin pie, put finishing touches on the sweet potatoes and bake everything. It has been the easiest Thanksgiving meal I have ever cooked.

Roast Turkey

Combine 1 part sugar with 2 parts salt. Season to taste. I use sage and chili powder, about a tablespoon each. Mix well and rub over the skin of the turkey. Refrigerate the turkey overnight without covering. (I put parchment paper in the bottom crisper of my refrigerator and pop the turkey in with the rub applied to the bottom, then apply the rub to the rest of the body and return the crisper drawer to the fridge. It works like a charm.)

Remove turkey from the refrigerator in the morning and rub off the seasonings (do not rinse). Apply olive oil to the skin. Do not stuff. Place celery and carrot sticks in the bottom of the roasting pan. Halve an onion and slice; add it to the pan. Cover just the bottom of the roasting pan with chicken broth (about one cup). Place the turkey on top of the celery and carrots. Place in a 325 degree oven and roast for 3 to 4 hours, depending on size, until it reaches the desired internal temperature (I like 170 degrees). The skin will be crisp and beautifully browned. The dark meat will be cooked through and the breast meat will be moist. Every time.

I used to brine my turkey. This is much better and requires infinitely less preparation.

Traditional Southern Dressing

Brown one pound of bulk Italian sausage. Add a sweet onion, diced, and two stalks of celery, diced. Cook until the vegetables are tender. Drain. Return to flame and add four cups of chicken stock and two tablespoons of butter. Simmer while you prepare the bread.

Cube one 8" x 8" pan of cornbread. Add one tablespoon of rubbed sage. Combine with one 16 ounce package of herbed dressing mix (I use Pepperidge Farms). Add several tablespoons of chopped fresh parsley.

Combine sausage mixture and bread mixture. Mix well. Add chicken stock to achieve desired moistness. Turn out into buttered 3 quart casserole dish. Bake in 375 degree oven for 30 to 45 minutes.

I don't think I have ever made dressing the same way twice. This is the basic recipe I use. Sometimes I add chopped pecans or dried cranberries or both. My mother uses oysters and adds green peppers to the onion and celery. The result is always delicious.

Fresh Cranberry Sauce

Combine two cups of cranberries, one half cup of sugar, two tablespoons water, one tablespoon fresh orange juice, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and a pinch of salt in a large, heavy saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until cranberries burst, about six to eight minutes. Serve warm or cold.

I like this spooned over vanilla ice cream when still warm.

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As it turns out, this really was the easiest Thanksgiving ever. I got up and put the turkey on to roast at 7:30am, then baked the pumpkin pie. I have two large ovens, so I could bake the dressing, potatoes, sweet potatoes and corn dish in one oven as the turkey finished roasting in the other. The crescent rolls were baked last while the table was filled with food. Dinner was served about 12:30pm. Everything was warm and everything was delicious. Best of all for me, it was easy since I did most of the work on Wednesday. The children cleaned up while I put away food. I spent the afternoon visiting with my parents and my husband. I don't ever remember having such a leisurely and pleasant Thanksgiving. Well, not when I was the one cooking, anyway.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

My First Fun Monday

Karisma is hosting Fun Monday. All my blog friends have been participating for weeks and it looks like fun, so I decided to join in.

Karisma says:

I want you to take a trip down memory lane, and keep right on going, right back to your childhood. And I want to hear "THAT STORY". You remember the one? Yes, you do! The one your parents, siblings, extended family or friends, would never let you forget, live down or get over!"

Dead laptop equals no pictures of Kaycie as a kid.

But, there is absolutely no lack of embarrassing stories. In fact, I am having difficulty deciding which one to tell. The one where I fell from the swing set while showing off and cut my back open then cried, not because I was hurt, but because there was blood on my brand new sundress? Or the one where I ran up the stairs into the very clean, very closed sliding glass doors and did a somersault backwards . . . in a skirt . . . on Christmas Eve . . . in front of my father's entire family? The one where I told my parents the Sonic reached out and hit my truck? Or maybe the one where I put a hole into the hollow core bathroom door with a kitchen knife trying to get to my brother? No, definitely not that one. Hmmmm. I know.

I was eighteen years old and a senior in high school. My father had just bought me a new car. It was a Volkswagen Rabbit to replace the incredibly cool but ridiculously dangerous fiberglass Bradley GT Daddy gave me the summer I was sixteen. He wanted me to have something reliable to drive to college. It was blue, had a stereo and I could get more than one friend in it. I thought it was SO cool. There was just one problem: it had a standard transmission and I could not drive it.

I had been driving almost two years and drove about as well as any other teenage girl. Which means badly. My father never rode in a vehicle with me if he could help it. It always ended in him yelling and me crying. However, my mother did not drive a standard, so it fell to him to teach me.




The Rabbit was parked in the driveway. I got into the driver's seat and my 6' 2", 225 pound father folded his big frame into the passenger seat. I remember being amused because the top of his hat touched the ceiling and even with the seat all the way back, his knees were almost touching the dash. He told me to start the car. Without depressing the clutch (!), I turned the key. The car lurched forward and died. It came to rest on top of the air compressor that was between the car and the house, the front bumper pressed against the siding on the house. It was a miracle nothing was damaged. I immediately asked Daddy why the car was in gear. In a snotty, teenaged girl kind of way. For some reason I thought the car should have been in neutral because the parking brake was set. Choice words came out of his mouth and there was something said about me being ignorant of driving and a smart ass on top of it. Anyway, we went around the block a couple of times without me killing the car and Daddy called it done. I am sure it was to keep from murdering me.

Later that evening, my mother sent me to the store to get some cheese for the tacos she was making for dinner. Daddy decided I should take the Rabbit for practice and sent my brother with me to help me through shifting gears. My fifteen year old brother. Yeah. That didn't work out so well for us.

After much fussing (me) and threatening to walk (my brother), we finally made it the six or seven miles to the grocery store. My brother complimented me on driving through the parking lot without killing the car. It was most definitely sarcasm. The grocery store was just south of the Sonic and they both sat right off Interstate 169 which ran through the middle of town. After successfully buying cheese and starting the car, I turned out of the parking lot headed north, and just as we were passing the Sonic, an enormous rendering truck ran the stop sign on the other side of the street and hit the Rabbit right in the driver's side door. The impact of the accident threw the car into the driveway of the Sonic. I'd had the Rabbit three days.

My brother remembers having his eyes clenched tightly, afraid to look. Without opening his eyes, he said my name. I didn't answer. He said my name again, louder. Silence. After a few seconds, he got the courage to open his eyes to look my way. The door was standing wide open and I wasn't answering him because I was gone. He got out of the car, stood up, and looked at the truck that had hit us.

I was about 5' 4" then and 110 pounds soaking wet. I had climbed up onto the running board of the truck and was furiously yelling at the guy who had hit us, waving my finger in his face. My brother says it went something like: "Don't you know what that stop sign means? I have had that car three days! Three days! My Daddy is going to kill you when he gets here, you just wait!"

I yelled at him until someone came up and gently led me away. Nowata is a small place, and the people who owned the Sonic knew who we were. They called Mom and Dad who were there in no time. The police barely beat them. The guy driving the truck tried to blame me for the accident. Shrinking violet that I am, I began yelling again.

Anytime that anyone in my family talks about accidents, sooner or later (usually sooner), someone tells this story. My parents seem to take special pleasure in telling it now that I have a teenager driving. My brother, of course, laughs with glee, then tells anyone present how he was scared for his life anytime he was forced to get into a vehicle with me. The jerk.

My husband takes this story as evidence that I have never been smart enough to be afraid of anything or anyone.

Hey, at least I can take care of myself.

Our Town

The play was really wonderful. All of the kids were fantastic in their roles. Kevin, the young man who played the stage manager and narrated the play was amazing. Sometimes when you see kids take on a play as sophisticated and stylized as "Our Town", the result is lackluster. But this young man committed himself to the role and had no inhibitions about the way he might appear onstage. He set the tone for the whole play. I was impressed.







The play is staged with minimal sets and no props. Our lovely daughter came down a set of stairs to the raised platform holding a table and chairs that served as her home. She pantomimed her way through making breakfast as Kevin narrated the scene. When she called to her "children" halfway through the scene, I was startled by her voice. She had changed her intonation and meter, and she sounded almost matronly. My husband leaned over and said, "She sounds just like you."





Apparently women spent a lot of time snapping beans at the turn of the century. And cooking. Other than attending her "daughter's" wedding and funeral, our lovely daughter and the other young lady playing a mother were cooking or snapping beans most of the time they were on stage.

A heart to heart with her daughter, about falling in love. (They talk while snapping beans, of course.)

The mother of the bride had a little monologue. Standing on stage in the spotlight, she voiced her concerns, worries and hopes for her daughter's impending marriage.

I don't have a good shot of it, but one of the most poignant moments in the play, for me anyway, came during the funeral scene in the third act. My daughter had no lines, but she was grieving, held in the arms of her daughter's husband. I could see her shoulders shaking. She was clutching at the young man's shoulders as he held her and seemed to whisper in her ear. I was quite surprised how much emotion she was able to convey with her back to the audience.

It was only later that she told me the young man spent the entire time telling her that he had killed his wife, and how, varying his method during each funeral scene. She was laughing, and trying desperately not to laugh out loud.



When the poor, dead girl left her grave and returned home to re-experience her twelfth birthday, it was heart wrenching. I have to admit to shedding a few tears.


"Way down deep, there is something that's eternal about every human being." Indeed.

This shot is of the entire cast and the crew. Our lovely daugher is middle left in her mama costume.

wild kingdom

Autumn has finally arrived here in The Sooner State. Night temperatures have dropped into the high thirties and during the day we're not quite reaching the seventies. I am in heaven. This is perfect weather for me, and we get it all too rarely.

At this time last year we had just settled into the old house in town. It was spacious with a big yard and a wonderful large living area upstairs with the bedrooms, complete with a little kitchenette. The house was dated but so livable that I didn't mind at all. We had two cats and two bettas, but hadn't yet gotten Jack. Life was much . . . quieter.

We got Jack last December, and we lost one of the bettas after the move. Instead of another one, we got a larger tank and got Nemo, the remaining fish, an African Dwarf Frog and a golden colored snail for tank mates. That frog is the cutest dang thing you've ever seen. I love feeding him. He pops up to the top and snatches food so quickly you miss it if you blink. It's almost like watching a cartoon frog catch a fly with his tongue.

The back yard is full of rabbits, squirrels, blue jays, cardinals, all manner of finches and a pair of red bellied woodpeckers. I love feeding the birds. Every few days we see deer walking through the field behind our yard. There are five of them, and three are small, probably born this past spring. As soon as the weather cooled, I put out suet and seed in feeders in our blackjack oak tree. The blackjack oak is native to Oklahoma and Texas in an area called Cross Timbers. It is a scruffy looking tree, especially when it's young. We have a large one in front, about 30 feet tall, and a small one in back, just about 10 feet tall, with a cedar tree next to it. The oaks can grow as high as 65 feet and live up to 400 years. Our trees are just babies.

All the wild life in the back yard gives Jack and the cats fits. Jack whines and yelps, racing from one window to another, keeping up with his latest sighting, usually a squirrel. The cats especially love watching the birds. They both make an odd little clicking or smacking noise when one of the birds gets close. It makes me laugh every time I hear them. There is a yellow cat that looks just like Streudel who wanders into our backyard every now and then. My heart always skips a beat until I find Streudel safe inside. Losing Lucy has made me paranoid.

On Sunday my husband and I were watching birds and squirrels in the back yard. I wanted him to look at a squirrel and a bluejay playing a game of chase. It was so funny to see the squirrel run for the bluejay, the bluejay take to the air, and the squirrel retreat back to the fence away from the tree. The bluejay would then swoop over the squirrel back onto the ground and they'd start all over again. They were fighting over seed that had fallen on the ground from my feeder. I was delighted. As I was watching and pointing this out, my husband started laughing. I wanted to know what was so funny. He said that he thinks it's hilarious that I am so interested in all the animals in our backyard. When I asked why, he told me it's pretty funny for a farm girl like me to be so easily amused. Hmph.

For those of you who were worried about it (or offered me alibis), I have not killed any of my children. It was touch and go there for a while, but I have managed to control myself. Just.

We have three children, two cats, one dog, one betta, one frog, one snail, and a back yard full of squirrels, rabbits, birds, and the occasional deer. No wonder my husband calls our new home Wild Kingdom.

happy birthday

Today my baby boy is nine years old.

He arrived exactly a week before Halloween in 1998. At 4:15 in the morning. Three weeks early. Since the moment he arrived, he has been completely different from his brother and sister.

My first two arrived on time, one even arriving on his exact due date. They came into the world at perfectly reasonable times instead of putting me through night labor. They were easy, sweet babies that I nursed from the day they were born. They were both bald.

My youngest had a head full of thick, black hair when he was born and even three weeks early, he weighed seven pounds. He was jaundiced. The first time he nursed, he gave me a blood blister. On my breast. This is perhaps the most unpleasant thing imaginable. The nurses gave him suck therapy in the hospital. Suck therapy. I am not kidding. After we took him home, a home health nurse visited us to assist me with nursing. I thought it was ridiculous when it was scheduled. I had nursed two babies to their first birthday (well, one beyond, but that's another story); I was an old pro, what could they possibly teach me that I didn't know? Turns out, quite a lot. Tears ran down my face every time I nursed him for a week. I was so pitiful, the nurse came back. That time she brought a light for the jaundice that slipped underneath his little gown and made him look like a glow worm. He did sleep like a little angel.

He learned to nurse properly and the jaundice passed. Turns out that he was sleeping like an angel because he was jaundiced. Then he developed colic. I thought I was going to die. No, really, die. My husband would walk in the door from work, and I would almost throw a screaming baby into his arms, go into our bedroom, shut the door and run a bath. Then I would sit in the bath and bawl. For an hour.

That, too, eventually passed. And for a little guy that started out his life giving me nothing but trouble, he's given me joy ever since. He's sweet, sensitive, and mild tempered. He is as big as an ox. Huge. He towers over the other boys his age. He's only a foot shorter than his (admittedly not tall) fourteen year old brother. When I look at him I see his father's dimples and big brown eyes lined with heavy, long lashes. He has my chin, complete with a little cleft, and just a touch of my olive complexion. He is built just like my tall and slender husband, but he is bulkier, like my father. When I look closely, I notice he has my father-in-law's hands.

The baby in the picture is all but gone. There are fleeting glimpses now and again, in the way that he laughs childish giggles with his head thrown back, or the peculiar way he falls asleep with his feet tucked up under his tummy. I miss the tiny, chubby hands in mine and the way I used to be able to hold all of him curled in my lap. He is my last baby, and he's growing up. But I love the little boy he has become and I cannot wait to see the young man he will grow into, although I know even now that it will be a bittersweet journey.

cimetière visitant du Pere-Lachaise

When I made a mental list of all the places in Paris a sixteen year old girl might want to visit, a cemetery did not make the cut, no matter how famous. Much to my surprise, Pere-Lachaise was high on my lovely daughter's list of places she could not miss.

I had always wanted to visit Jim Morrison's grave. I was something of a Doors fan in my teenage years. When the Val Kilmer movie was released in theaters, my daughter was an infant. I took her with me in the middle of the afternoon. That must be where she gets her affinity for the Doors.

I visited the cemetery's website before our trip to get an idea of where the grave was situated. I found the graves I knew were there that I wanted to visit: Jim Morrison, of course, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Eugene Delacroix, Moliere, Isadora Duncan, Edith Piaf. To my surprise I found Bizet, Chopin and Maria Callas were also laid to rest in Pere-Lachaise.

We visited late in the week, a day or two before we returned home. We started out with the group, taking the Metro from Oberkampf, changing lines at Republique and deboarding at Rue St. Maur. We walked up Avenue de la Republique and turned onto Boulevard de Menilmontant. The neighborhood was different from the area around our hotel which was situated between Avenue de la Republique and Boulevard Voltaire. This area seemed more common, more like everyday people might live here. The smells coming from the boulangeries and food shops were heavenly. I wanted to stop and look in every window.

The day was gray and we walked through a light drizzle. It was unusually cold for March, and I wore an ankle length sweater skirt and wool cape to keep the chill away. From the street, the cemetery was not that impressive. Once we walked through the gates, though, it was old and musty and absolutely spectacular.


The first thing we did was search for Jim Morrison's resting place. The graves are laid close to one another; some large, some small, some very old, some recent. The cemetery is on a hill, and we started walking up, following curved paths and the occasional graffiti marker (the one below was scratched onto a bench).




Like everyone else, I'd seen pictures of the stone adorned with a bust of Jim Morrison and we'd seen postcards of it in some shops in Paris. I couldn't remember just how the new headstone looked, all I could remember was the odd Greek inscription, "kata ton daimona eaytoy", which has been variously interpreted as "according to his own demon", "down with his own demons", "true to his own spirit", and "to the divine spirit within himself", just to name a few.


We walked through the cemetery, following the winding cobblestone paths. The atmosphere is eerie and a bit macabre, especially on such an overcast and chilly day. Some of the crypts and graves we saw along the way were gorgeous with age.

We had heard there were sometimes crowds around Morrison's gravesite and were expecting to fight our way through or wait in line to get close enough for pictures or to place a flower on the headstone. But when we arrived, there was no one in sight.

It was obvious others had been there, the headstone and the grave were covered with flowers, along with the occasional joint, and empty liquor bottles were nearby. We added our flowers and one of the girls had a picture of her father's rock band that she left on his behalf. My daughter and I lagged behind so that I could pour my little bottle of vodka on the grave without other teenage eyes watching. My daughter hummed a bit of her favorite Doors tune as I poured the libation:

All your love is gone

So sing a lovely song

Of a deep blue dream

Seven horses seem to be on the mark

Yeah, don't you love her

Don't you love her as she's walkin' out the door

She stopped short and told me to turn around and look behind us. There was a cat watching us intently from the top of a coffin shaped crypt. He continued watching us for a moment and then turned his back as if we had bored him. I think I've mentioned before how imaginative and dramatic my daughter can be. She became quite convinced that the cat was inhabited by the spirit of Jim Morrison, come to watch the ridiculous rituals that fans perform at his grave.

We walked through the stillness alone, just the two of us, taking our time and snapping photographs. There were graves, crypts and memorials both beautiful and haunting.

My lovely daughter had to stop by and give Oscar Wilde a kiss and sing a little "La Vie en Rose" to Edith Piaf. We wandered through the narrow, curvy paths and along the wider ones paved with cobblestones, reading names both foreign and familiar. We lingered at holocaust memorials and spring flowers in bloom. A couple of hours later we found ourselves at the entrance on Rue des Rondeaux opposite where we entered. We decided to walk around the cemetery rather than backtracking.

We walked on the sidewalk along the high stone walls dotted with moss, turning to go back to Boulevard de Menilmontant. The stone wall stretched out in front of us, but the sidewalk ended abruptly along with the street we were on. We took a pleasant detour through quiet streets, passing an old church along the way. We passed apartments where we saw young boys playing soccer in a courtyard and followed a young mother pushing her baby in a stroller while her toddler ran behind to catch up. On a corner we were greeted by young men passing out flyers for a coming election, each one advocating a different stance, and good naturedly competing for our non existent vote. We smiled and took the colorful papers lined with French, pleased that we didn't look like the lost tourists we were. Just as we decided we had been wrong not to turn back, we came upon this staircase that led us back to the street. The Phillipe Auguste Metro stop was a welcome sight, and we descended underground to plot the path to our next adventure.

Paris is a wonderful place to be lost.