Six joyful things that happened this week (and one bummer)

1. The chicks hatched in the library and I am in love with them. This is a program we do every year called Bring the Farm to You. A local farm sends us seven eggs and we keep them in an incubator in the Youth Department until they hatch and then we put them in a big cage and they wobble around and chirp and look adorable. 

2. A second bonus butternut squash grew in my garden and I didn't even know it was there because it was hidden by the windy vine and floppy leaves, but the other day when I was digging around, pulling out the spent tomato plants, I found it. I will never get over these surprise veggie gifts. 

3. I reconnected with an old friend and we had such a lovely time catching up. Do you know how certain people remind you of certain times in your life and when you talk to them again, those parts of your life come back and you wonder how you ever lost touch with them (the people, the parts) in the first place?  Well, it was exactly like that. 

4. Friends invited my husband and me to a fundraiser dinner for Franklinton Farms, an urban farm that grows food for people in an impoverished area of the city, and one of the speakers talked about how conversations about gardens and food have led to deepening connections in the community. I've found this with my own garden, how I want to talk to people about what I've grown and give stuff away (butternut squash, anyone?) But also, how nice it is when a more knowledgeable gardener shares their wisdom with me. 

5. (The bummer) I had a routine bone scan and found out that I have osteoporosis and for a day I was so distressed about it, thinking about holes in my bones and feeling weirdly fragile and then joking about how what if I fell down the stairs and broke into a bunch of pieces like at the end of that movie Death Becomes Her. But now, I'm mostly okay with the idea. I mean, I've been walking around like this for years and not knowing it, so what does it really change? Except, be careful around stairs. 

6. Back to the chicks. We had a contest of sorts where kids could suggest chick names and we got lots of cute ideas like, Pumpkin Spice and Butterscotch and Mr. Fancy Pants. But also, one joker wrote:

Chick name: Butt Hole

Your Name: Your Mom

Which we didn't choose, but it still makes me laugh, and to be honest, Butterscotch does sorta give off a Butt Hole-ish-y vibe. 

7. Another invite from a different friend-- (this NEVER happens to us, TWO invites out to dinner in one week!)-- to see a play she wrote (which was great, funny and moving and thought-provoking), but first, a dinner out to meet her friends, and as we were all getting to know each other, one of them asked me if I was a writer too. This is actually a hard question for me to answer because what do I say? 

Um, yes?

But then the inevitable follow up is What do you write? And that is always harder for me to answer. My husband piped up and said, She writes a blog about whatever random things happen to her during the week.

One of the people said, Like tonight? Like us? My husband laughed and said, Yes! And tomorrow, you might be in it! 

And here we are. 

This is for you, new friends. 

One little goat has blues eyes

and his little horns are just beginning to poke out. When he tries to jump on my shoulders, he slides off. Note to self: next time you sign up to do Goat Yoga in the park, don't wear a slippery shirt. 

But the other goats manage to clamber up, no problem, so maybe it's only Baby Blue Eyes. I can't stop laughing at his little clompy hooves. The way his mouth scrunches up when he's eating grass out of my hand. When he piddles on me, I surprise myself by laughing. 

Maybe this is me now, finding joy in the little things. The toad I find nestled in my thyme. The cupcakes a regular patron brings into the library to share with the staff. The free mocktails my husband and I are handed when we stroll into one of the trendy shops in our neighborhood. 

This is a thing now, apparently. Mocktails. The bartender who makes the drinks explains it to us. We want to be inclusive, he says. Why should drinkers have all the fun drinks? 

The drinks are fun. Refreshingly cold and gingery. There are mocktails at a party we go to later in the week too. The party is outside, at an urban farm downtown. Between the interstates and interspersed around a struggling neighborhood are twelve city blocks of vegetable and herb gardens. The volunteers raise money by selling the food at farmers markets. They give food away to people who live in the community and teach anyone who's interested how to garden.  

My husband and a friend and I wander under the trees, carrying our mocktails. Teens from the neighborhood give tours and guide us through the interactive stations. Paint a rock. Make a nature-inspired collage. Assemble teabags out of freshly cut herbs. And here, says one of the volunteers, pointing at rows and rows of greens, is the U Pick Garden, where everyone is invited to take whatever they need. 

Even flowers, she says, because don't we all deserve something beautiful? 

At the farmer's market close to our house, one of the farmers is selling mocktail mixes. Mango and orange it says on the label. Our daughter is visiting for the weekend, and she immediately perks up. Mocktails! she says. I love these!

We buy a bottle, and after we clean up from the Goat Yoga goat piddle, we crack open the bottle, and my husband joins us on the patio. Okay, the truth is, it's just mango and orange juice and... is this really worth fifteen dollars a bottle? 

The evening is so unbelievably lovely I don’t even know how to describe it to you. 

Yes, we decide. 

Yes. 

 

Existential Crisis with a Serving of Oreo Cookie Brownies

Typically, I am not a person who buys Oreos. 

When the kids were little, I wouldn't let them eat them. Something about the partially hydrogenated fat and/or the high fructose corn syrup. I don't even remember now but it was important to me at the time, so in our home we only served the supposedly more nutritious Paul Newman brand called Newmanos. My kids, I figured, would never know the difference. 

(Side note: when my son was in fourth or fifth grade, he came home all excited from a birthday party and asked me if I'd ever heard of this much better tasting Newmano cookie called an Oreo.)

Anyway, the other day I bought a package of Oreos so my daughter and I could make a recipe with some friends. We've been doing this thing where we alternate choosing a recipe and do a facetime-bake together. This week our kitchen smelled like a candy store and I ate my fill of Oreos--partially hydrogenated fat and/or high fructose corn syrup be damned. 

I mean, really. Who cares. 

We are moving through uncharted, inevitably rising, waters. 

My son, who still probably gorges on Oreos because of the deprivation of his childhood, shared a link to an article with me back in March, the gist of which is about how we've lost the narrative thread and without a narrative thread, we can't make sense of what the hell is happening. Remember the morning of 9/11 when the planes crashed into the towers and the newscasters could only express horror in real time? 

That's like now, except the Global-Pandemic/Shit-show-Presidency/Long-Overdue-Collapse-of-White-Supremacy/Looming-Climate-Change-Disaster is still unfolding. Basically, the towers have been falling in slow motion for eight months and there is no end in sight.  

In the meantime I signed up our family for a Cooking-with-a-Chef fundraiser program run by a local urban farm. I didn't even know this place existed, but it's an actual working farm smack in the middle of an economically depressed area near downtown Columbus in what's known as a Food Desert. (My daughter corrects me to say that we should actually refer to these areas where there are no supermarkets/places to buy affordable, nutritious food as: Food Apartheids, because that implies a purposeful, systematic problem and not something that just kinda happened, like a desert.) 

Franklinton Farms has been operating for thirteen years. They distribute food to families in the community and help people start their own gardens and a do host of other cool things, and last night they had a virtual program to raise money that featured Chef Del Sroufe (best-selling author of Forks over Knives: The Cookbook). 

We were not using Oreos (or Newmanos) as an ingredient. My daughter and I went downtown to pick up the bags of farm-grown produce and then we had a blast putting together the meal with the chef and all of the other people who signed up for the fundraiser. 

For the record we were making Black Bean Sweet Potato Enchiladas with Sweet Potato Cashew Cream and a side salad of Wilted Kale. Before the program started my daughter and I prepped all of the ingredients and were feeling very proud of ourselves as the chef began his cooking lesson by slowly peeling a sweet potato. Not that this was a competition, but we were so much further ahead of the people who were just unpacking their produce bags. 

But then suddenly we were rushing around smoking our spices and blender-ing our cashew mixture sauce and lemon zesting our kale and cracking up at the comments, that one poor soul saying, Wait, I'm still peeling my potato, what's this about spices? and someone else, Help! I don't have a third pan!

The dinner was good. 

Maybe not oreo cookie brownie good, but filling and warm and it was nice to sit down and eat it together. 

We can’t see the way ahead. We have no narrative except for what we do now, this moment, the Oreos we line up in rows on our brownies and the lemon zest we toss on our wilting kale. The people we love around our table 

or far away and smiling at us through our glowing screens.