When Tucker was a little guy, he’d fashion fishing poles out of sticks and string and hang his “rods” over the back of the kitchen sofa. A bite from a big one, would require great effort and lots of groaning until he successfully reeled in his imaginary catch.

His first “real” rod was red and all of three feet long, with Mickey Mouse on the reel and a little, yellow rubber fish attached to the line.

It wasn’t long until the reel without a hook was no longer satisfactory, and Tuck graduated to a new real rod, hook and all. He learned how to put on worms and release the fish he’d caught. Every vacation, he made sure his fishing pole was the first thing in the car.

But as he grew older, his interest in fishing waned, replaced by more active endeavors like skateboarding, biking and basketball.

Yet just this past Memorial Day, there he was casting a line way out into the water. “I haven’t seen him fish in ages,” I said to my husband who was sitting nearby, changing the lure on his rod.

“Look at the picture on the camera and you’ll know why,” he said.
I turned on the camera and saw the picture they’d taken just before releasing the large-mouth bass Lee had caught.

“No wonder he’s inspired,” I said.

By late afternoon, Tucker had caught five small perch.

“He won’t let these fish go,” Andie complained, staring into the bucket where the six-inch fish were swimming around.

“I want to cook them for dinner,” Tuck said, flipping his hair out of his eyes, which were big with excitement. I noticed the sun had lured a few new freckles out on his nose.

“Dinner?” I asked, thinking of the nearly packed car and the early bedtime I’d wanted for the kids.

“Yeah.  I’ve made dinner before, but that was food from the grocery store. This is dinner I caught for my family.”

Looking into the wide eyes of my soon to be thirteen year old son, I knew this was a significant event.

“OK,” I said. “Go ask Daddy if he knows how to clean a fish.”

Andie was distraught. “You can’t kill those fish,” she cried.  “I won’t eat them.”

“Andie you love fish,” Tucker reminded her.

“Those are fish from the store,” she said, prompting a discussion on food sources. Later she “accidently” let one go, but Lee helped her catch a replacement, which she reluctantly put in the bucket with the others.

As Lee and Tuck covered the picnic table with newspaper and sharp knives, Andie hovered nearby.  She squealed when Tucker cut the heads off the still wriggling fish, but his squared shoulders seemed to be say Look at me providing sustenance for my family.

Five little perch isn’t a lot of sustenance, but with baked beans and left over pasta, it amounted to quite a meal.

We each had a few 1×3 inch fillets that Tuck had dredged in milk and breadcrumbs and fried in butter.  Andie, who wasn’t going to eat her little friends, pleaded with everyone to share a little more off their plate with her.

The fish was truly delicious. But even more delicious was witnessing my boy take a step toward manhood, swelling with pride as he demonstrated his ability to care for those he loves.

 

 

On a recent morning visit with my friend Eleanor, I sat on the loveseat in front of her warm woodstove and picked up a book from the coffee table. The cover was a photo of a woman in jeans and clogs leaning against hay bales in the loft of a big red barn.  The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food and Love by Kristin Kimball, I read. “I’m only half way through, but I think you’ll love that book,” Eleanor said.

She went on to tell me the premise. (Eleanor is from Tennessee, so feel free to hear the words in a delectable southern accent.)  The author was a stylish Manhattan journalist writing an article on the growing local food movement. She ventured to Pennsylvania to interview a hunky farmer running a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and on her first day ended up helping him slaughter a pig in her white designer blouse.  Before you know it, she’d fallen in love with the man and his livelihood, trading in her city life for life on the farm.

Eleanor read me one of her favorite passages about the author’s visit to her parent’s suburban home for Thanksgiving. As Eleanor read (don’t forget the accent) I closed my eyes and pictured the entire scene unfolding in my parent’s very clean, very white kitchen.

“We arrived loaded with food. I was full of the zeal of the newly converted, eager to show off the  gorgeous vegetables my boyfriend had grown… Mark had helped his Amish friend slaughter turkeys that  week, and he’d brought us one… I’d forgotten how very clean my mother’s world is until we walked in  with those boxes, which were smudged with field dirt, a few limp leaves clinging to their bottoms. It appeared we would contaminate any surface we put them on, so Dad directed Mark to the garage, and  my mother asked me quietly if I was sure it was safe to eat the turkey, which was wrapped in a drippy  white shopping bag, its headless neck sticking out obscenely.”

I couldn’t wait to read it, but Eleanor needed a couple of days to finish. So I went out that afternoon and bought a copy of my own.

I could fill the page with my favorite passages, but I won’t. I will say though, when I finished that book (after two days in which I occasionally forced myself to set it down), I was looking at the world through new eyes.  Kristin Kimball’s love for Mark, farming and food were contagious. For the first time in my life, I thought about the rich soil hidden beneath our grass covered lawn and fantasized about a vegetable garden. Her descriptions of the beautifully nourishing meals they created were palpable on my own tongue, and renewed my love and appreciation for the foods we are so blessed to eat. I joined our local CSA and ordered ¼ of a locally raised pig (which was the best bacon we’ve ever had). We trimmed our apple trees in hopes of pressing cider this fall, we’re planting raspberry and blueberry bushes this summer and plan to tap our Maple trees for syrup next spring. We’ve even talked a bit about raising bees and chickens (separately, of course).

While most of my changes are newly instituted or future possibilities, Eleanor and her family have been walking that walk for some time now. They drink milk from their cow, Clover, eat eggs from their chickens (or the ladiesas Eleanor calls them) and harvest veggies and fruits from their extensive gardens.  In fact, I just got off the phone with Eleanor who reported that their evening meal consisted of their first asparagus of spring and a frittata that was bright yellow because the chickens are free ranging on the dandelions in their pasture. After hanging up, my mouth was watering, and I made a little wish that maybe someday, if I’m lucky, my life can be just as dirty as hers.

Every year we take the kids to Florida for spring break. We stay with my parents and lounge on the beach, swim at the pool, hit tennis balls and bike to the nearby café. The kids love it, I love it, Lee loves it (even though he can only come for a few days) and of course my parents love it, too.

I started looking at dates and airfares in early March while the snow was still falling and we were packing up every weekend for another ski race. A couple of times I came close to pressing the “reserve tickets” button but for some reason I didn’t. Something was holding me back. My dad kept asking if I’d booked the tickets, and by the end of March, I still hadn’t. As the price of oil went up, so did those tickets, and I still hadn’t made any reservations.

And then I decided that this was the year we just wouldn’t go.

Everyone was disappointed. I tried to explain how the winter had been so long and exhausting, seeming as if it would never end. We even had an inch of snow on the ground the day before Easter! But warm southern weather is exactly what you need everyone argued. And I agreed, but try as I might, I couldn’t muster up the energy to even think about the trip.

So we stayed home. A “staycation,” my neighbor called it.

Staying home is really a whole new concept for us. We usually don’t have time to unpack our bags from one weekend driving here, there and everywhere before we start packing for another.  But as vacation week arrived, and we had no suitcases to pack, no time schedules to adhere to, I felt my tense shoulders start to relax.

As the days have passed, we’ve turned off alarm clocks and become reacquainted with our pillows.  The kids have rediscovered their love of Lego building, modeling clay and drawing comics.  We’ve replaced the wordsneed to, have to or must with the words feel like, want to or maybe. We’ve eaten lots of thick slices of French toast with strawberries and syrup and the cold sore on Tucker’s lip has finally cleared up.  We’ve played wiffle ball and taken lots of slow walks in the woods and watched the first Harry Potter movie during a big, loud thunderstorm.

I planned to take the kids to the coast or into Boston to the science museum, but even traveling just over an hour from home somehow seems too far.

Our big outing yesterday was to the local diner in the next town over. After the kids devoured their chocolate chip pancakes, we wandered around town and discovered a park tucked behind the main street. We followed the path that wanders along the river and dropped in leaves to watch them float down stream. We even caught a glimpse of a beaver running along the opposite shore.

We walked to the town green, and I snapped pictures of the kids sitting on benches next to the bronzed statues of children that we’d never even noticed before. I wondered if the statues were new, but realized we usually cross the green to the chant of Let’s go, Come on or Hurry as we run in to pick up take out or cross some other errand of our list.

As the kids posed for the photos, Andie said, “Mom, we’re like those people who travel somewhere and take lots of pictures.”

“Tourists?” I asked.

“Yeah, tourists,” she said.

And I realized she was right. We are tourists, finally discovering this whole new world that’s been hidden right in front of us, waiting for us to slow down enough to see it.

 

As a young, newly married couple, Lee and I spent many a weekend driving to visit family and friends. As soon as the tires hit smooth highway, I’d want to play my favorite road trip game Let’s Think of Baby Names. We were nowhere near the point of starting a family, and Lee was not into naming something, someone that didn’t even remotely exist. But I rattled off names anyway ignoring the way his grip on the steering wheel tightened until his knuckles turned a bluish gray.

Years later, when my growing middle proved that a baby was no longer a hypothetical, Lee surrendered and played Name That Baby. We settled on a boy’s name quickly – a first and middle name after his brother and mine. The girl’s name didn’t come as easily but that gave me the chance to write long lists of names that I no longer remember, yet have saved in my pregnancy diary buried somewhere on my overflowing bookshelf. Toward the end of my pregnancy, I’d flip-flopped though a dozen different girl’s names. Lee continued to smile and rub my back. Then just days before my due date, I picked one (which I can’t even remember now) and Lee happily agreed. We were ready. Until… I decided the boy’s name no longer felt right.

“What?”  Lee asked through his end of the phone line. “You want to change the name now?”  His voice came through in a panicked work whisper. I looked at the books spread across the kitchen table –100,000 and 1 Names for your Baby, The Baby Name Bible and The Best Baby Name Book Ever and nodded into the phone.

After going through all the books and not finding a single name, I called my friend Shandy. She’s the one who found my wedding dress when she stormed into the back room where customers weren’t allowed.  It took her no more than 45 seconds to say the name I hadn’t seen in any of the books – Tucker.  Just like the wedding dress, I knew instantly.  When Lee answered the phone I whispered the name.  “That’s the name,” he said without missing a beat.
Andie’s name is a whole other story entirely. You’ll have to read about that one when my book comes out.

Which brings me to why I’ve been thinking about the subject of names in the first place. As I begin this new phase of my book’s journey, sending out query letters to agents, hoping to find the one who will find the perfect home for my book so it can reach all of the folks meant to read it, a new title blew in with the first warm breeze of spring.  When I heard the name, short and simple yet so encompassing of the whole story, I felt the same certainty I felt when I first heard the name of my boy. So please dear readers, join me in visualizing the book Preemie, a memoir on bookshelves all over the country, heck… let’s visualize it all over the world!

So you’ll see a few changes on the website this week as I prepare to move forward and begin the next chapter of this premature journey!

At the urging of my publisher I began writing a blog to promote my book before it was published.  “You need to build a platform, an audience,” the publisher had said. But I don’t want to write a blog I whined in my mind, and then I began a blog. And a funny thing happened.  I discovered that I absolutely love keeping a blog. And then a not so funny thing happened.  My publisher, like so many others, was looking at an uncertain financial future. Which meant that my book was also looking at an uncertain future. More to the point, it meant I was back at square one looking for a new home for my “baby.”

More often than not, I’m a “look for the silver lining” sort of gal. Yet, this time, as much as I tried saying out loud, “I’m sure my book will end up in an even better place!” I had a terrible stomachache and even whispered the words, I don’t care if the book ever gets published and I don’t want to write anymore.

I tried pulling myself out of the shock, depression and grief, but long walks, frequent naps and chocolate bars only left me feeling more sick, exhausted and hopeless.

When I went into premature labor with Andie 10 years ago, I looked desperately into the eyes of a nurse and said things like this don’t happen to me and she looked right back at me and said they do now.
Now, 10 years later I’ve learned that the book about my daughter’s uncertain birth faces and uncertain birth and I cried to a friend and said, things like this don’t happen to…  and even though I caught myself before I could finish, it didn’t matter. My friend and I laughed at what I’d almost said. And I know now, as I knew then, that yes, things like this – uncertainty, grief, sorrow, trauma – do happen to me.  And that I am strong and that I can overcome and that I must trust and believe and know… that anything is possible.