riding in cars

I've been thinking a lot about cars lately.
Now, as anyone who knows me can tell you, I'm blessed with one of those minds that can't tell cars apart (It was....white? With a....butt?) so to have me recognize a car on the road is no mean feat. 
(This is also part of the reason all the neighbors think I'm super-friendly. I wave at all the cars that pass.)
I'm not really going to go into how I can be counted upon to get into the wrong car at the grocery - who knew there were so many small red cars? Not me, obviously....
Or how I once followed who I thought was my husband home from the grocery only to have this very puzzled man pull to the stop at the head of his driveway.....My husband was following me. It all got sorted out. Whew.
Maybe it would be more correct to say I've been remembering cars that I've ridden in.
My grandmother took me on a trip across the country when I was fourteen. I still remember the smell of the leather interior and her Giorgio and how the flatlands of Kansas seemed to go on forever.  I curled up on the floor of the front, a sheet or something over myself to try and be in the shade, and dreamt of riding bareback through fields of grain. I woke running with sweat. When we stopped, we drank ginger-ale and I ate kiwi for the first time. I was just starting to come out of my shell then, discovering that maybe I didn't have to be shy all the time and I liked different things than everyone else.

---

My first serious boyfriend had a black Chevy Nova that was so battered it was a miracle it held together. It crouched at the end of the driveway when he'd pick me up, looking like a giant cockroach, setting my mothers' teeth on edge. But the front seats were good for necking, even if the car smelt of paint thinner and was littered with crunched cassette tape boxes.
When B and I married we had an ancient car, a real workhorse that ran us back and forth for years without complaining. When I was hugely pregnant with Rosey, we looked at the Eagle's tiny backseat and decided it was time to get a new car. Two kids, both in carseats? We needed the most room we could get.
So we bought an SUV. It was so big and foreign I wouldn't drive it for a few months, but soon I was used to it, and it became 'Mama's truck', hauling kids or whatever everywhere. I love that big carnow. The gas mileage sucks, but I know where everything is, and it fits me now, as a mom of two with all the assorted gear that brings.
B bought a new car last year, and all of a sudden my truck wasn't the shiny new mobile it'd been. Suddenly, it looked....big. And clunky. And the little new car was so speedy....
Today, when the kids and I were cleaning the SUV out, getting out the detritus of months of school projects, McDonald's wrappers, unidentifiable plastic toys and sticky things out from under the seats, I realized the new car smell is gone. There's not much joy about the Blazer anymore. It's ordinary now.
But I remember riding in it, bringing a new baby home, the rest of my family around me, back when the dash sparkled and the ride seemed smoother than possible. Back when having a family was new and the beginning of a grand adventure.....




Jessica blogs at daysgoby when she's not tooling around  and glancing sort-of-enviously at the newer cars on the road.....

making the bread

I have always baked bread in times of sorrow. Or joy. There's something about my chemical makeup that feels contented and useful and providing when I get my hands in the dough, mixing and pounding and kneading, making a minor miracle out of ordinary household ingredients.
You can get a lot of stress out, baking bread.
I can't remember my mother baking, nor my grandmothers, but there must have been someone - it's usually generational, isn't it? And while my daughter is eager to climb up on the chair, lean over the counter, and smack the daylights out of the dough, she's a bit young yet to share confidences with, or to work out possible solutions while wrist-deep in flour-dust and yeast granules. To ponder and think and make strategies that perhaps don't solve the world's problems, but bring me closer to center.

It's probably best that I have this time alone, when my hands are more useful than my lumbering brain. Pondering something over is hard when it's time for urgent talks about plastic ponies and school assignments and who's going after who on the playground.
She'll be grown soon enough. Some day when she's a bit older, some day when nothing has gone right, when it's all horrible and she can't seem to catch a break - that's when I'll ask her to come talk to me in the kitchen.
That's when I'll show her how easy it is to take your frustrations out on a lump of forgiving dough, and how the sweet smell of the rising yeast can make you think of new pathways, new ways of trying to work things out. How waiting for the next step of a recipe is a lot like life - good, bad, or indifferent, all things happening in their turn. How things usually - not always, but usually - look better in the morning.
That's when I'll show her how to make bread.

photo credit: foooooey
This is an original Canada Moms Blog Post. Jessica blogs here and sometimes here, and usually leaves traces of flour on the keyboard.