Holding it all together

Life can embrace extremes, and sometimes it's hard to hold those extremes together. If you put one in each hand, your left hand would drag your shoulder down towards the floor, and your right would shoot up above your head. 


I am thrilled by the act of taking a box of cast-off books to our local second hand bookshop, and receiving $9 for them. It feels like a good deal. I like the idea of them finding new homes, and helping the bookshop on its way. And $9 is better than nothing. Today we are going to talk to our realtor about dropping the price of our house. What will she suggest? $2,000? $5,000? More? So why did $9 feel so good? Why is my purse stuffed with coupons: 75 cents off a box of cereal?


I am enjoying seeing my everyday people and doing my everyday things. I also have a bucket list (hate that term, but it's convenient short-hand) of things I want to do and see locally. When I do those, I say "I can't believe we've been here five years and I've only just discovered this". The familiar and the unexplored. Both feel important, but they are competing for time. Not only time. Mental space, and emotional space too.


Blogging can be at the extremes too. I read the posts of people for whom life is pottering on, and the content is about school sports day, or chicken pox. I also read the posts of people for whom life is intense, and the content is about dealing with their child's serious long-term health, or a bereavement.


The universe must be reading as I write. I've just been interrupted by my daughter in her dressing gown. I thought we were going to have our usual conversation. 


"Can I go on the computer?" 
"No, I'm busy writing something."
"When can I go on the computer?"
"Ten minutes. Maybe twenty minutes. Go and play for twenty minutes and then you can." 
"I'm bored. I don't know what to do."


But today she cut to the chase.


"I feel sad."
"Why do you feel sad?"
"Because it's June."


So we had a hug, but now she's pottered off, and here I am, still "busy writing something" on the computer, but yes, it's June, and when June is over, we will no longer be here, which has been home for the past five and a half years.


That would be a good way to conclude this post, but wait, I haven't finished yet. Here's another pair of extremes. In my email inbox the other day, one above the other, were three emails asking for my attention, and for air time on my blog. One was telling me all about how I could join in some PR event to try out new strollers. I replied, pointing out that my youngest child is eight years old. That one served only to make me more receptive to the other two, which were personal, thoughtful, and worthwhile. So I offer you, one in each of my hands, the following:


Gemma Robinson, who has sniffed me out as a fellow tea enthusiast, and whose hand-made art prints I am happy to draw attention to. You can find them here. "Parsnips are the enemy" made me laugh (though I really love parsnips, so I'm not sure why).


And Syria. I was invited to write about the horrors that are happening in Syria, to raise awareness. Many other bloggers are doing so today. You can read their posts in the links here. I am shocked and horrified by what I've read. I want to care about Syria. I believe that (as Edmund Burke said, and Potty Mummy quoted)  'All that's necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.' But I can't feel and do very much for Syria at the moment.  I just can't.

Life at the extremes. Sometimes all you can do is hold out your hands.

Letting it all hang out

Day Seven of 'The Daily Post'.

Since we’re on the subject of laundry, let’s talk washing lines. Green Stone Woman pointed out in reply to my last post that your need to iron is reduced if you tumble dry your clothes, and commented “It's different if your clothes dry outside on the line, but nobody in the States does that as far as I know”. Well there is one person who does that… One in 300 million… Yes, you’re reading her blog.

I know it’s all a question of what you’re used to, but it does seem to me ridiculous to put a load of laundry in a tumble dryer when it’s 95 degrees outside. There’s just something in me, that couldn’t, just couldn’t, use a machine to dry laundry, when drying conditions outside are so perfect. Perhaps to appreciate the luxury of it, you have to have lived in Scotland, and done your laundry according to the weather. You probably just wouldn’t understand, unless you’ve had the experience of listening to the weather forecast before putting on your washing machine, feeling smug as you hang your washing out in bright sunshine, and then sprinting out an hour later to rescue it as the rain begins to fall (only to find that it’s still very damp because the sunshine, though bright, didn’t actually have any useful warmth in it). Midwesterners don’t even have an excuse in winter, because they heat their houses so high, that washing would dry perfectly well on a rack. Many homes have a spacious laundry room where the rack could be left out of the way. It’s not as if the damp laundry would need to be draped on radiators round the home, British style.

I understand, from the blogs of Americans in Britain, that line drying leads to crunchy socks and rough towels. Toughen up, people. It was crunchy socks and rough towels that got our men off the beaches at Dunkirk, and made steady the hands of our archers at Agincourt. In return I say to you, at least fresh air doesn’t shrink all your clothes as the drier does, and making use of it will certainly shrink your electricity bill.

Hanging out the washing is one of the few household chores that is pleasurable. Why on earth would I give up that one, and give myself more time for all the other tedious jobs? It wouldn’t be that much more time in any case; hanging out the washing isn’t very time consuming. I’m not going to wax lyrical about how much I enjoy hanging out the washing, because that does sound a little pathetic, but I honestly would miss it, if I converted to tumblianity.

I’m not going to get on an environmental high horse. The thing is, round here, people look on a tumble drier as a standard modern day convenience, and hanging out the washing as something that their mother’s or even grandmother’s generation did. I wonder what my answer would be if someone challenged me over my use of the vacuum cleaner. “Just think of the amount of electricity you use” they could say. “What’s wrong with a broom and a dustpan, and a carpet sweeper? Don’t you care about the environment at all? And why do you have a machine to wash your dishes? All that electricity and all that water too!” My environmental complaints at tumble driers would sound like those, to American ears.

In a lot of neighborhoods, it would be awkward to have a washing line, as plots aren’t fenced, so yard space is very open to public view. I’m lucky in that my neighborhood, being an older one dating back to the 60s, has fenced yards. Nonetheless, I have wondered if there’s a rule somewhere that prohibits washing lines. Fortunately, our back yard isn’t very overlooked, and the trees hide the line, so I think I’m safe. I have an argument prepared, in case I’m challenged. I’m going to say that in Europe, hanging out laundry is a historic craft handed down from generation to generation. I’m very concerned that it is dying out, as spinning and weaving have done, and so I’m taking care to teach the art to my children. I will toss in terms like ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘ancient lore’. If pressed, I could demonstrate the various techniques for hanging, I could show the traditional tools: the clothes pin and the clothes peg. I could quote Shakepearean references such as “The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes, when down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose”, explaining how Shakespeare’s audience would have understood this as an allusion to the politics of Queen Elizabeth the First and her relationship with Spain. I think that would swing my case.

Of course it’s Shakespeare.

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Top tips for a crafty Christmas

I might have been a preschool teacher in another life. Trouble is, it involves too many preschoolers in close proximity for too many hours of the day, and these days, too much filling in of forms and assessing which child has mastered which skill and when. Don’t get me started. But the little hint that gives me away is this: I love pottering about doing crafty-type things with small children. Actually, I love doing them without small children, but I didn’t know that until I had small children. Now I have small children, they are the props which make it possible for me to fiddle around with cotton wool, foam shapes and glue, without feeling silly. Of course now I’m in America, I could take up scrapbooking, which would probably fill the need, nurture the talent, help me express whatever creativity lurks behind the enjoyment of glue, shapes, googly eyes and pom-poms, but I can’t quite see the point of scrapbooking (sorry, all you dedicated scrapbookers out there), and I do have at least a few years left of small children before I have to turn my pottering about into something more credible. Maybe by then the phase will have passed.

Now don’t build me up into some kind of craft supermum here (I know you were about to…) I don’t hover round the kitchen table, sticky backed plastic in hand and clever ideas from the internet in head. My house isn’t filled with cute and kitsch home-made items that are both attractive and useful. It’s not a frequently-indulged pleasure, and when it is indulged, the result is some mournful object that hangs around on the side somewhere, until I judge that no-one except me will notice or be sad if it transferred to the trash.

Christmas is the perfect opportunity to indulge myself. I have a couple of books of beautiful craft projects for the season, so I flick through those. I always get put off by the words 'oven baked clay' though. Do people really know how to handle oven baked clay? I don’t. Sounds difficult. No. Trust me. There are only two things you need for Christmas crafts. Glitter and enthusiasm. That’s it. Simple, you see. Glitter and enthusiasm.

The glitter is easy. These days you can buy it in glue, which means it’s less messy. That, in my opinion, defeats half the purpose. I like the old stuff, in tubes, which you sprinkle daintily over your glue patterns, until the lid insert falls out and the whole tube empties in a great pile. You won’t be vacuuming glitter out of your carpet till September if you use the glitter glue, which would mean you missed half the fun. For me, glitter and sparkle has always been inseparably part of Christmas, but having a daughter has been a challenge to that. The inevitable pink that invades one’s life – the hospital pretty much delivers it along with the baby - is all too often accompanied by sparkle. ‘Pink and sparkly’ have become a classic duo, similar to ‘warm and cosy’, ‘hale and hearty’, ‘safe and sound’, ‘gin and tonic’. I’m not sure what you can do about that, really, except just use ever more copious amounts of glitter at Christmas time, and add it to the list of parental ‘when I was a child’ laments, along with out of season strawberries and having to eat up your food even if you didn’t like it.

You have to dig a bit deeper for the enthusiasm, but we all have a little Joyce Grenfell in us somewhere. You just need to brush up a bit of vocabulary. In America, this is easy, because (as well as the trusty ‘good jahb’), you can use ‘ahsome’ for every eventuality. For emphasis, you can say ‘totally ahsome’, but usually just good old ‘ahsome’ will do, especially if you add a bit of extra ‘aah’ to it. In England, we say ‘spiffing’ a lot at this time of year, supported by ‘splendid’ and ‘top notch’ (British readers, what ho, back me up on this one).

The other failsafe enthusiasm-generator is the Christmas CD. I’m not talking carols from King’s College Cambridge, or pop classics by the original artists. I’m talking Jingle Bell Rock or Fifty Festive Favourites. It’ll have unadventurous bass lines and a relentlessly annoying drum beat, it’ll have children singing out of tune and twee breathy whispered Christmas greetings, it’ll contain irritating mistakes (ours has “deck the halls with bows of holly”), but you know you’ll love it deep down.

The rest is easy. You just cut out shapes, and put lots of glitter on them. You can do snowflakes (white paper, easy), or reindeer (brown paper, might need a bit of advance shopping, or rummaging through the trash for an old brown envelope), or Santa (red paper, cotton wool), or a stocking (come now, even the most creatively challenged of us can cut out a stocking shape). See, it’s easy. You just have to remember that this is not an occasion when less is more. More glitter is more.

The final stage is to put up the decorations. Now there are some people whose artistic sensibilities may be offended at this point. If your house looks like something out of Country Living magazine, you may want to debate this suggestion, but come on, it’s only 12 days, and what are you afraid of? Even if the neighbours come round, what are they doing to say? At best, nothing, and at worst something along the lines of “oh, these are very… um… festive, aren’t they?” You may even enjoy watching them pause and struggle for the right word (should have thought the whole sentence out before beginning it). No-one is going to remark “your children don’t have very good fine motor skills do they?” or “what a pity your creative urges weren’t adequately satisfied by three experiences of childbirth”. You have nothing to fear in polite society, and you will make your children happy. What more could you want?