A Different Holiday Season

Who didn't have a different holiday season this year? 

Okay, Hanukkah was pretty much the same. Eight nights of lighting candles is always something I look forward to, and this year I used that time to read and reflect. I put my menorahs on a small table in our front window, watching out, as JewBelong reminds us, for the curtains and for anti-Semites. So far, so good. 

 The last night I didn't get the candles lit until late (because I had Poetry Group earlier), so they burned long into the evening. I own three menorahs and light them all, so there was a lot of light:

The last night

Christmas was a whole different experience this year. Normally, December is a rush of holiday concerts and performances for Warren, but in the pandemic world, live music is on hold indefinitely. That alone made December feel different. For example, we typically put off buying a Christmas tree until after the last performance (which would have been December 21 at the earliest); this year, we bought one out of sequence in part because there was no sequence and in part because, in Ohio at least, there were localized runs on trees, with various vendors selling out. We did get a tree. It stayed on our porch for several days until a windstorm made that a losing proposition, then it stood unadorned and unlit in our living room until, well, about the 21st. 

It wasn't for lack of enthusiasm; it was for lack of time and...time. Among other things, Warren was producing the first live (as in prerecorded concert) by the Symphony for the Symphony's Holiday Concert. (There had been an earlier prerecorded concert, produced and shot by the Farm Bureau for the annual Benefit in the Barn fundraiser; this one was solely a Symphony production.) Until it went live on Facebook on December 20, it consumed a lot of energy and time in this household. Want to see it? Here it is:

Actually, we had two trees this year. The first was a pine tree, the one I just wrote about. The second was a sculpture that we had bought back in January, in one of our Mayo cross country jaunts (the last of 2020, unbeknownst to us at the time). It sat outside all summer, but came in for the winter and Warren thought it would make a great tree. 

It did. And yes, that is a trout in the upper circle on the right. 

A tradition Warren and I started our very first Christmas is buying a special "us" ornament. We label these and keep them in a separate box. Over the years, we started buying an ornament from somewhere we had traveled that year as our "us"ornament, then expanded that to buying "us" ornaments from all of our trips in any year. So, for example, here is our 2012 ornament from Whitefish Point when we went to Lake Superior that year:

But guess what? We scrubbed all of our 2020 travel plans because of the pandemic. Other than the trip to Rochester for Mayo and Warren's Midwinter Conference in NY, both in January pre-pandemic, we went nowhere. 

Nowhere. Not Minneapolis (for the 2020 League of American Orchestras conference, which went virtual), not Rockland, Maine (to see our friends David and Vince in their retirement home), not to Indianapolis (for PASIC 2020, which went virtual) and, the hardest of all, not to Portland/Vancouver to be with our family out there. 

Not a single place. And although in the early years we bought an ornament unrelated to travel (that started in 2010), neither of us were going into a store just days before Christmas. And it wouldn't be the same, frankly.

I'm the one who solved the 2020 dilemma, shortly after Warren set up the second "tree." We still had the price tag from that sculpture, and, well, that was a 2020 trip:

(For the record, we paid $50.00, not $75.00, for our piece. I would also note that the sculptor is Tom Nelson, no relation.)

For such a screwy year, it is a perfectly heartfelt reminder of what 2020 held. 

We didn't hang a lot of ornaments this year. Our "us" ones, some others that held special meaning or just felt "right," three wood flowers that Mona, my grandchildren's beloved Nana, had each of them paint and then sent to me earlier this year:

Orlando's efforts

And one more. 

A very special one. 

Earlier this year, my good friend David (the one in Maine) announced that there would be "21 Days of Just David," and he would send me something by mail for 21 days. Sometimes it was a postcard. Sometimes it was a bumpersticker. Sometimes it was a heartfelt letter. Sometimes it was dirt. (There's a story behind that too.) One of the packages arrived much later (he had warned me) and turned out to be an ornament of Frodo Baggins as played by Elijah Wood in the movies "The Lord of the Rings." 

Seriously. David had found someone on line in Canada who turned these out:

Why? David, Vince, and I together watched each of the three "Lord of the Rings" movies when each was released and all of us made fun of the agonizing faces Wood made as Frodo. That was 12+ hours of Frodo agonizing over every single breath he took, mind you. It became a running joke over the years between us. Here, for example, is David being Frodo as he does dishes:

Frodo/David agonizing over the dishes

You get the point. 

Of course the Frodo ornament had to go on the tree. I went running upstairs to my study to grab him and bring him down. 

There is a quote from the final movie on the back of this ornament and I teased David that the first sentence (minus the "Sam") would be my response to inane questions for the remainder of 2020:

May 2021 be brighter for us all. 

Observations (Albeit Late) About November Spending

 

I know, we are deep into December. I have had November numbers available since, well, since the end of November. But the last three weeks have held more so much on all fronts that posting about November held on the food front has been beyond me.

So here is a very belated report.

November was a disaster if I look at my 2020 goal of holding food/household spending to $180.00 a month. An absolute disaster. (Note: Many, many goals of 2020 went by the wayside this year. I'll be writing about that later this month.) In fact, November was such a disaster on the money front that it has made me rethink how to approach our food spending heading into 2021 (again, a topic for later this month or early January). 

So how much of a disaster? $300.64 on food; $44.71 in household items (toilet paper, detergent). Grand total? $345.53.

I can't even begin to account for all of that. Some of it was stocking up. Some of it was buying baking supplies. Our garden did finally come to an end after snow, but we didn't buy whopping amounts of lettuce to make up for that loss. None of it, alas, was lobster, rack of lamb, caviar, or other such items. 

Year-to-date: $2559.06. Monthly average for 2020: $233.64. 

As I noted last month, even with a month like November, both our November spending and our year-to-date averages still come in lower than the USDA "thrifty plan" for a two-adult household in our age bracket. I won't wring my hands over November's dollars but, as I noted, it is food for thought, no pun intended.

An Update and an Addendum

 Back in September, I wrote my attempts to get an avocado seed to sprout. At the time, I noted how much of the issue was my impatience, even as I quoted Hope Jahren's reminder that every single tree in this world "was first a seed that waited."

Three months later, here is the result of that waiting:

The avocado tree today

That picture was taken a week ago. You might notice a small green blot on the left side of the pot.  That blot is the addendum in my title. Sometime in November, eating a seedless clementine, I spit out a seed. Warren looked at it and said, "So why not plant it?"  

That wayward clementine seed sprouted sometime in the last two weeks and here it is today:

Another seed that waited 

 I'm not sure what will (eventually) become of either of these trees. I am not in a warm enough climate to get either to ever bear fruit outside. What I have not investigated is whether I am even in a temperate enough climate that either would survive outside, even with the climate change that is diminishing our cold weather. 

But for now, I marvel at them: the seeds that waited, the trees that sprouted. 

This Week

 This entry will be short.

It has been a long, hard week. My mother—our mother, counting my two brothers—died Sunday after a long, weary, draining (on her, on my father, on all of us) struggle with dementia. 

Add to that a workload, both at Court and in the volunteer arena, that has skyrocketed courtesy of the pandemic. The stories I am hearing range from matter-of-fact to heartbreaking and are only going to get worse as the pandemic and its economic fallout deepen. My two coworkers in the mediation department are also swamped, which is why I held mediation for two and a half hours the morning of my mother's afternoon graveside service. 

I am exhausted. Today in trying to schedule a mediation while on a Zoom meeting with colleagues at Court and at our high school, I stopped and said, "What day is this? What day are we looking at?" One of the participants kindly said, "It's Friday the 4th, April." Thank you.

One small note and then I will close. While working today, I heard a knock at the front door. When I went to look outside, a delivery person was holding a flower arrangement in her hands. "April Nelson?" Yes. She set the container down on the porch and left.

The arrangement was a vase of yellow roses, my mother's favorite flower. My dad had a spray of them on her casket at the service. I knew it had to come from someone who knew my mom well. I was right; it was from a lifelong friend, Mary Lou, whose daughter Cindy has been my friend my entire life.

And that is a wonderful note to end this long week on. 

Observations About October Money

As I predicted in my post about our September food spending, October's expenditures were indeed higher. We ended up spending $226.83 on food last month, with an additional $12.83 spent in household items. That brought our October total to $239.66 and our year-to-date average to $221.35.

There were some food purchases in October that were worth the extra pennies. We bought bacon—regionally raised and locally cured by a farm family now in its 4th generation of small scale, high quality pork production—and at $9.99/pound, it was worth every tasty, savory, hickory-smoked bite. That was a little over $21.00 of our food purchases there. And there was another $24.00 at a local orchard: culled apples to peel and freeze for apple pies and locally pressed apple cider that was the best apple cider I have had in decades. It was a luxury at almost double the going cost of commercial cider and one that we savored over three weeks, stretching out that deliciousness for as long as we could.

The cost of local food is one of those knotty issues that, gratefully, we are privileged enough to be able to sidestep. The locally grown food is far superior to what I can buy in a grocery. The dollars go directly to the grower—the orchardists in the one case, the pork producers in the other—so the money stays in the community. But if we were hurting financially with a severely limited income or job losses, the bacon and the cider and apples would be far beyond our reach. If we were not in dire straits but still on a tighter budget, I would have to choose between supporting our local agricultural community or being able to buy cheaper food. 

On the home front, our garden is done for 2020. A hard frost a few days caught the remaining cherry tomatoes, which were not ripening very much outside and would not ripen inside. The Bibb lettuce that flowered earlier in the summer reseeded itself and came up, providing us with some October/early November salads, but it was soured a little by the frost and is showing signs of wear and tear. I still had four cherry tomatoes, not very flavorful, and after putting them on a salad earlier this week, I bid goodbye to tomatoes until next June. 

Another knock to my conscience was seeing a recent reference to the USDA's monthly food reports. Call me a nerd, but I am fascinated what the official word is about food costs. The USDA presents four plans: thrifty, low-cost, moderate-cost, and liberal. The fine print at the bottom of each report spells out the foundations for the reports, including that "all meals and snacks are prepared at home." Other than exceptions for living in Hawaii and Alaska, where food costs bear little resemblance to the other 48 states, there are no other differentiations, such as dietary restrictions. 

Under the September 2020 report, the most current one, the thrifty monthly plan for two adults ages 51-70 is $381.90. Right now Warren and I are cruising well under that level. I'm okay with that.

I will share that for the first time in MONTHS, we had not one but two (TWO!) eating out (well, carry-out) experiences. The first was when we bought the bacon at Mom Wilson's, the local source of the best bacon ever. They also sell pulled pork sandwiches and we bought one to take home, splurging on the $8.00 "combo," which netted us chips and a huge dill pickle. Splitting it, we celebrated our 12th anniversary earlier this month. The second came when driving home after my infusion last week. Infusion days start with breakfast at about 5:30 a.m. and end with my getting back home and eating lunch around 1:30 p.m. When Warren picked me up to head home, he mentioned that the power was out when he left. All I could think of was I was tired, I was groggy from my meds, and I wanted food. Warm food. Tasty food. $15.12 later, we pulled out of White Castle with a bag of sliders, onion chips, and milkshakes. Money well spent on a long, hard day.

Eating the White Castle food brought back an old memory of the Minority Law Students Association (MLSA) at the law school I attended 40 years ago. The MLSA was holding a potluck gathering to kick off the year and I was there with my then husband, who belonged to the MLSA. Students were encouraged to bring a favorite ethnic dish from their family. We brought a Cuban dish. Some of the Filipino students brought rice dishes. An African-American student from Chicago walked in with a grocery sack and commandeered the stove and a frying pan. Chopped onions and little square hamburger patties went into the pan, while he set out small buns and a jar of dill pickle slices on the counter. By the time he placed the buns on top of the patties and put a lid on the pan to steam them, everyone had gathered around trying to guess his contribution. "White Castle!," I shouted and the student whirled around with a grin on his face. He pointed he spatula at me and said, one Midwesterner to another, "The best, right?"

Yes, they were. And sometimes still are.

On to November.

What Another Morning Brought

 It was quiet and moist and foggy this morning. I walked out to dump the kitchen scraps on our neighbor's compost and a shimmer in the pine trees caught my eye.

Another morning of small moments: the most fragile of constructions, the sturdiest of homes.

What One Morning Brought

 Earlier this week, I cut off a soft portion of a late tomato. It has broken open—the tiniest of breaks—and was weeping gently, so I sliced it off and tossed it into the small compost bowl I keep on the counter. The bowl has a lid, and I snapped it into place.

In the morning, a surprise greeted me:

Within the warmth of the lidded compost bowl, the weeping tomato turned into something else.

I was entranced. I was fascinated with its beauty and delicacy. I grabbed my camera and started snapping. 

I know. It's just mold. I get that. But in the early morning light, it was a wisp of a unicorn's forelock, a bit of fairy hair, a thing of beauty.

And that makes it a joy forever.