Posts Tagged ‘home and family’
Cindy on September 26th, 2010
To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.” — Laurie Colwin
As my closest friends will tell you, I’m your go-to gal if you need a good soup recipe. Come fall, there’s usually something simmering in my slow cooker or on the stove — thick-as-a-brick pea soup, creamy potato porridge, or maybe a savory minestrone.
It’s methodical but soothing, the whole process of making soup.
I begin with fresh produce from the market, then I gather the right combo of herbs and spices from the garden or the pantry. From the moment I start chopping onions and garlic, every muscle and nerve in my body begins to loosen or unwind. Sauteing the vegetables on the stove, I think about the people who’ll receive the first helping when my soup is finished and the flavor has mellowed.
Soup can be a meal by itself — especially if it’s a hearty recipe with everything but the kitchen sink thrown in. I’ll often order soup as my main course in restaurants, and have been known to serve it as an entree at casual company meals. Even the pickiest kid who doesn’t eat veggies will make an exception for vegetable soup laced with alphabet pasta.
The way I see it, soup is a remedy for nearly everything. It’s guaranteed to speed the recovery of a neighbor who’s nursing a broken heart or the common cold. It fortifies the dear friend who’s just returned from her second hip-replacement surgery. Homemade soup has a language all its own, and it’s one of the kindest ways to express sympathy to grieving families who’ve lost loved ones. And sometimes, when words fail, it also works to convey love and appreciation.
Cooking for my mother, for instance, has become a form of communication — especially now that her dementia is complicated by a serious hearing loss. Even with her hearing aids in place, she struggles to hold a conversation. Living by herself in a condo, she doesn’t nurture herself the way she nurtured her own family many years ago. So I try to bring her a pot of homemade soup at least once a week. Nourishing the woman who used to nourish me helps to fill a hollow ache inside me, too. I can’t change Mom’s diagnosis, or slow the sad progression of her disease, but I can make soup.
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The way I see it, soup is a remedy for nearly everything.
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Of course, the soup I make for myself never tastes as delicious as the soup from someone else’s kitchen.
So when I’m feeling cranky or blue or sorry for myself, it’s time to head over to Niki’s, my favorite local diner here in Royal Oak. At Niki’s, the soup is always homemade — the perfect prelude to my favorite Greek salad. I’ve known Donna, the owner and cook, for so many years that I’ve lost count of all the gloomy winter afternoons I spent hunkered down in her back-corner booth with my notebook and a pending column deadline. Those afternoons were totally redeemed by Donna’s chicken noodle, spinach-tortellini, or cabbage soups.
I like to remind Donna that she makes the best soup in town, and that I’ll always be her biggest fan. (Gotta keep that soup on the burner at Niki’s, especially with the long winter ahead!) But what I really want to tell Donna is something I couldn’t put into words until I started writing about soup this morning. When we’re in need of a little mothering — but our own moms are no longer able to provide it — we need at least one Donna in our lives. We all need someone who will ladle something warm, delicious, and comforting into our bowls.
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My favorite slow-cooker pea soup recipe:
16-oz package of Spartan (brand) green split peas
6 cups of water
1 large onion, chopped
5 or 6 small potatoes, peeled and sliced
4 cloves fresh crushed garlic
1 teaspoon dried oregano leaves
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil
1 bay leaf
1/2 cup sliced carrots
1 cup chopped celery
Use a large slow cooker; set it on high. Add the six cups of water. Rinse the split peas, then add to the water. Chop the onion and saute in olive oil with dried oregano and crushed garlic until onions are translucent and slightly brown. Add the cooked onions/garlic to the slow cooker and stir; add the remaining ingredients. Cook on high for five or six hours until the potatoes are soft and the soup is thick. (If you’re pressed for time, you can add a can of sliced/cooked potatoes to the batch during the last hour, instead of the fresh potatoes.) Add salt and pepper to taste, if desired.
I love making this all-day vegetarian soup in the slow cooker; I can leave it alone and let the flavors meld for hours. It tastes even better the next day, and there’s plenty to share. — CL
Cindy on August 1st, 2010
Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Riding my bike on a beautiful day last week, I noticed very few kids playing outside. Made me a little sad. The following piece from my memoir, Writing Home, chronicles a late-summer memory of my son’s childhood. First published in the Christian Science Monitor, it still gives me that “end of the summer” feeling every time I reread it . . .
Summer Home
It began in June with a large cardboard box, just roomy enough to house my wiry eight-year-old son, Nate, and a scrap of old tweed carpeting.
“The fort,” as Nate dubbed it, was expanded throughout the summer to include several new rooms, each designed from salvaged appliance boxes of various shapes and sizes. By the time it was finished, the fort curled like a corrugated snake across the entire lawn. Other kids in our neighborhood added their own flourishes — round windows, paper awnings and banners, plastic pipes and tubes. (Whether these served functional or aesthetic purposes, only the children knew.)
By the end of July, Nate’s cardboard Xanadu had become something of a local landmark. It was such hot property, in fact, that you had to write your name on the official SIGN-UP SHEET to be admitted inside, a bit like the exclusive restaurants lining Main Street downtown. Since we live on a corner lot in a carefully maintained suburb, I worried that our neighbors would object to the ever-growing mountain of boxes in our yard. If you had no imagination and didn’t know you were looking at a playhouse, you might have guessed we were careless about storing our trash.
But no one complained. Other parents who had watched the fort’s progress were amazed to see that something as simple and economical as a stack of empty appliance boxes could keep so many children amused for so long. One afternoon, a local building contractor even stopped his truck to admire the fort’s design.
“Hey there, that’s quite a place!” he called out to Nate and his pals. “Are you renting space in your cardboard condo?” But the kids insisted they weren’t looking for more tenants.
“Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. We’re born with the desire to create a home, to build our own retreat. And while home can mean something different to everyone, the need for a sense of place is universally human. To a small boy, a discarded carton contains unlimited potential for a playhouse or a fortress of his own.
But to the homeless man who camps near the railroad tracks at the edge of our town, a cardboard box might be his only refuge.
Nate and I first spotted the shelter a few weeks after his fort was built. We were heading toward our favorite fast-food restaurant downtown, taking our time as we walked along a gravel service road flanking the railroad tracks. We noticed a crude assemblage of large boxes almost hidden behind a tangle of wild thistle and Queen Anne’s lace. Torn blankets and soiled clothing were strung on branches nearby; long sheets of blue plastic encircled the base of the boxes like small rivers. We agreed that the makeshift shelter looked remarkably like his cardboard fort back home.
“What’s all the plastic for, and why does the man live there instead of a real house?” he asked as we walked past the encampment. I explained that the homeless man probably used the plastic to keep the boxes dry when it rained. But I didn’t know how to explain the complexities of being homeless to a suburban second-grader who is tucked securely into bed on a full stomach every night.
Following a heat wave later that week, a powerful evening storm rolled in. It brewed so quickly that my husband and I didn’t have time to pull Nate’s fort into the garage. By morning it was scattered across the lawn. Even “the turret,” a sturdy refrigerator carton in its previous life, had toppled like an uprooted tree among the soggy ruins.
At first I was secretly relieved that we could finally dismantle all the boxes that had taken over our yard. But Nate was fighting tears as he tried to salvage parts of his handiwork, and I couldn’t help but feel his loss. Together we folded the sheets of rain-soaked cardboard and piled them near the trash in our garage.
Since then, school has started again. But we haven’t discarded a cardboard box without seriously considering its possibilities. And we often wonder about the homeless man who had set up camp near the railroad tracks. The last time we walked there, we noticed that his shelter, like Nate’s fort, had collapsed in the hard summer rain. – Cindy La Ferle
Cindy on April 1st, 2010
“If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have to at least consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.” — Douglas Adams
Americans do strange things to celebrate religious holidays. Consider Easter. There’s nothing particularly pious about hiding neon pink and blue plastic eggs in the back yard. And it’s not exactly Christian to give someone a milk-chocolate rabbit, especially if the recipient is on the South Beach diet.
But even more bewildering was the pair of live ducklings my uncle gave me for Easter when I was a child. I don’t recall the looks on my parents’ faces when my uncle handed me the cardboard box containing two fuzzy ducklings peeping at the tops of their tiny lungs. But I remember being told that I couldn’t keep them both.
A neighborhood playmate agreed to adopt one, but after a couple of weeks the poor thing was sent to her grandmother’s farm up north, where it became a holiday dinner entree the following year. For lack of a better idea, my parents bought a small swimming pool and reluctantly allowed me keep my duckling in our back yard.
Like most suburbanites, my mom and dad were totally clueless about livestock, so our new pet initially stirred up some gender confusion. As the weeks passed, the duck I had named Oliver matured and sprouted a mass of dazzling white feathers.
Raised on a farm in Scotland, my grandfather knew immediately that Oliver was really an Olivia.
“A male duck has a curl at the end of his tail,” Grandpa insisted. “The females have a plain tail like Oliver’s.” The tail story seemed far-fetched, at first, but it wasn’t long before Grandpa had indisputable evidence. One morning, Oliver left a large egg in the small shed where she slept. And from then on, we found a fresh egg in her bedding every day.
It took the neighbors a while to get used to having a duck in the ‘hood. Some were startled when they first heard Oliver’s daily wake-up quack at 7:00 a.m. Mrs. Ritchie, who lived behind us, says she still remembers watching the duck waddle next to me whenever I visited playmates around the block.
If her morning wake-up quack didn’t produce the desired result, Oliver would nibble at the screen on my bedroom window. When I appeared outside, she would bow and stretch her long neck in greeting, which always thrilled me. Later in the day, Oliver knew it was feeding time when she heard the sound of a spoon clanging on the side of a dish. Her dinner consisted mostly of dried corn from a nearby feed store, or a plate of finely chopped, hard-boiled eggs. For dessert she enjoyed the pansies in my mother’s garden.
Oliver wasn’t the easiest pet to care for, and today I wouldn’t recommend keeping a duck for a pet in the suburbs. Back-yard captivity isn’t fair to any creature that ordinarily thrives in a rural setting. (If you’re still not convinced, a phone call to our local Code Enforcement department confirmed that there’s an ordinance against keeping live ducks and chickens on residential property.)
So what happened to Oliver? At the end of her second summer, we returned from a family vacation to discover she had died in our back yard. The neighbor who was caring for her could only guess that she’d been attacked by a predatory animal.
Second only to the passing of my beloved Grandma Ruby, Oliver’s violent death was one of my first encounters with loss. I grieved for weeks. Her stay with us was brief but eventful, and it sparked my near-religious devotion to birds and animals. Years later, I can’t think of Easter without remembering her. – Cindy La Ferle
– This post appears in slightly different form in Writing Home. It was first published on Easter Sunday in The Daily Tribune (Royal Oak; April 2004). —
P.S. My son is home for the Easter holiday, so I’ll be offline, spending time with my family. Happy Easter to all of you!
Cindy on January 1st, 2010
And now, let us welcome the New Year/ Full of things that have never been.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
It’s perfect — how the month of January is named for Janus, the Roman god of gates and entrances, beginnings and endings. With his two heads facing opposite directions, Janus inspires us to look backward and forward as we step over the threshold and begin again.
Last year was a year of change and transition for me and my small family.
My only child, who moved to Chicago after graduating from college in 2008, purchased his first condo in the summer. On moving day, his dad helped him haul boxes up and down the elevator of his new residence while I organized his kitchen. Unpacking my son’s dinnerware and utensils, I recalled other “firsts” in his young life. First day of kindergarten. First formal dance with his girlfriend. First day of driver’s ed. First day of college at Notre Dame. How quickly those days flew off the pages of our family calendar.
Meanwhile — almost overnight — my widowed mother lost her old spark. Independent for years, she began forgetting things. Important things. She forgot that certain people in her life had died. She forgot phone conversations we’d had the day before. When tested by the neurologist, she couldn’t recall the name of the county we live in, or what day of the week it was. Not surprisingly, in November she was diagnosed with early stage dementia — a diagnosis that immediately reordered my priorities and changed the shape of my days.
Looking forward; looking back. My son moves ahead with his new life in Chicago while my elderly mother’s world grows smaller and smaller. Clearly, the seasons of family living are unfolding exactly as they should. And despite the inevitable heartache, I find myself feeling deeply grateful for every step, stumble, or leap that brought me to this path, this life of mine.
As a freelance writer with a supportive husband, I’m lucky to have the flexibility to help my mother when she needs me. Impromptu trips with Mom to the doctor’s office or the emergency room aren’t fun — but they’re not as much of a challenge now as they would have been when I had office jobs.
Still, there’s no denying that it’s been a very tough year for every writer and journalist I know. If there’s a silver lining in any of it, the sad state of journalism here in Detroit forced many of us to try markets we’d neglected or overlooked when we were employed full-time or working other assignments. Out of necessity in 2009, I developed new writing workshops. I worked harder at promoting Writing Home. I outlined a viable idea for a new book project. Several of my personal essays were published in national anthologies and magazines. Best of all, a piece I wrote about my Zen garden was accepted for the March/April 2010 issue of Victoria — a lifestyle magazine I’ve read and admired for years. Regardless, freelance writing is a crazy business, so I’m forever grateful to my local writer pals and support groups for keeping me (somewhat) sane last year.
Typing these notes, I’m also overcome with gratitude for all of you who read my reflections here. Your comments and support always cheer me. And I apologize for not visiting (and commenting on) your blogs and Facebook walls as often as I wish I could. Too often lately, real life has made it impossible to spend as much time on my computer.
I’ll be offline for most of next week too. It’s time to pull down the Christmas decorations and begin the ritual of clearing out things I no longer need — holiday treats and leftovers; old clothes and grudges; bad attitudes. Getting started this morning, I opened our front and back doors to let the old year out and welcome the new one inside. It’s an old Celtic custom that’s still praticed in parts of Ireland and Scotland, and it makes perfect sense to me. The first cold blast of January wakes me up and hurries me back to work.
So there you have it. Doors opening and closing. Endings and beginnings. I wish you all a peaceful, healthy start for your own new year. — Cindy La Ferle
Cindy on December 29th, 2009
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” — Zora Neale Hurston
For several years I’ve kept a small garden statue of a woman by our side entrance. I named her Hestia after the ancient goddess of home and family. In Greek mythology, Hestia’s role was to keep the flame of the hearth burning. This week she’s dressed in snow — and looking a little overwhelmed by the onset of winter and the challenges ahead. I can relate.
It’s been a mixed bag of a holiday in our household. My husband and I have been enjoying a week-long visit with our son, who flew in from Chicago for Christmas last week. We’ve shared some cozy meals at home together — I love to cook with my family — and we’ve made time to visit extended family, old friends, and favorite haunts around town.
Meanwhile, real life also paid us a yuletide visit. On Christmas Eve, my mother (who was just diagnosed with early-stage dementia last month) came down with another serious infection. I spent most of Christmas Eve morning at the doctor’s office with her, and the rest of the holiday bringing meals to her.
At times it felt awkward to celebrate with the rest of the family while my mother stayed in bed in her condo, watching television. And so, with regrets, I canceled out of several parties and gatherings, all the while feeling guilty for lacking the social energy and enthusiasm required of the holiday season. I know I disappointed more than a few people for not showing up in one way or another.
My mother’s doctor asked me to come in with my mother for a consultation this afternoon. As the doctor put it, we need to determine the next step for Mom’s ongoing care. I’m guessing, from the doctor’s tone on the phone, that 2010 will be a year of changes. But there’s hope too. Mom agreed, after several arguments, to take a new medication prescribed for her dementia. She adores her condo — keeping house is the thing that gives her life meaning, shape, and routine. So I’m hoping she’ll be able to stay in her own place as long as possible.
At this point in the holiday season, I’d usually be drawing up a lengthy list of New Year’s resolutions. In the past, most of those resolutions would have included ambitious career goals and pie-in-the-sky dreams of self-improvement. This year, I’m asking only two things of myself: To sustain the energy I’ll need to keep the fire burning — and to find the patience to ride out the changes ahead. — Cindy La Ferle
– “Hestia” garden statue photo by Cindy La Ferle –
As my closest friends will tell you, I’m your go-to gal if you need a good soup recipe. Come fall, there’s usually something simmering in my slow cooker or on the stove — thick-as-a-brick pea soup, creamy potato porridge, or maybe a savory minestrone.
