Cherry Picking

 Anne had noticed that two cherry trees in neighbor's yards were ripening up and she spent several days gleaning the ripe fruits hanging over their fences.  I remembered the cherry trees in Clark Lake Park which we would visit in June and planned a return trip for a Friday two weeks back.  I texted Jeff and Linda about our plans as they live nearby and thought they might like to join us.  Linda replied she was getting her gas stove that day and did I still want her glass -top electric, which was clearly newer and better than the functional-but-not-amazing stove which came with my house, and also her friends had a truck and could help us move it.  

Yes, we would LOVE to have the stove and I immediately dove into the logistics of timing the move and offloading our old stove.  

Oops, the friends had just sold their truck two weeks prior. So Jared and I looked at vehicle rentals in terms of our ability to load a stove into the bed, location of rental facility, and pricing.

The big day came.  A path was cleared from the kitchen to the driveway.  The shed was partially unloaded and the furniture moving straps located.  After much online consternation (Jared suggested I just call, but I couldn't quite bring myself to do that) we had a rental van booked at the neighborhood UHaul.   (Actually I booked two vans by mistake, but they fixed that for me in person.)  We moved our stove outside and the floor underneath was swept up.  We loaded three kids, kicking and screaming, into the car and took off for the UHaul place.  Picked up the van and drove both vehicles to Jeff and Linda's.  Uninstalled our new-to-us stove in advance of their delivery and carefully loaded it into the back of the van. 

 Began the careful drive home.  There was a stop light round a bed on a down hill.  I was driving slowly, but not slowly enough....  We could have gotten straps and tied the thing down.  Or pushed it up against the wall between the cargo and passenger compartments.  Did we do those things?  No.  At said stoplight, there was a sickening crash and rolling noise-the sounds of metal bending, and plastic and glass breaking.   The forward momentum of the stove,  as dictated by the laws of physics, continued until it was broken by said metal wall behind my seat.   And the rest of the way home I heard the sound of water dripping, which I interpreted, accurately, as shatter-proof glass slowly dripping onto the floor, piece by piece until it numbered in the many hundreds.  As soon as we landed back home I opened the cargo bay for an inspection, and as feared, the thing was dead on arrival.  

Jared and I cleaned up a certain amount of broken glass with gloves, brooms, and vacuum cleaner.  Then we set the kids up with a video and drove less than a mile to the bottom of the hill to our handy neighborhood electronics recycler to drop off the new stove, rather than the old one.  And the gate was closed with a sign posting their new summer hours.  "New Summer hours: 6 am - 3 pm."  It was 3:45.  We only had the van until 5:30, so we dashed home and both frantically started researching disposal options.  Any other electronics recyclers?  Could Linda's stove delivery people haul it off when they came if we could get it back down there in time?  Benefit/cost analyses occurring as we pay for every mile we drive the van and look at pickup prices...  Nothing doing.

We hauled our old stove back into the kitchen and plugged it back in. Took the smashed up stove out of the van and set it next to the driveway, and finished cleaning all the glass out of the van. I drove the van back over to the UHaul place and walked home.

So we spent hours and a good chunk of change destroying a gift and now the debris sat glaring at students and passersby.  Oh, and we didn't pick cherries that Friday, either.

The following Sunday, both Father's Day and the Summer Solstice, the kids and I made another trip for cherry picking at Clark Lake.  It felt very real and good despite the warm day and prickly tall grass and smalll snakes.  Several cherries made it on to the top of a cake.  But most of them sadly spoiled before they could be eaten.  

The broken stove languished on our driveway for nearly two weeks greeting us, the mail carrier, and my students, until this morning, a generous neighbor with an SUV delivered it to the recycling center for us.

I have an even greater respect for the laws of physics now as I await berry season.

Expansive Horizons

I am cozy here in bed late at night between a sleeping toddler and a napping calico, listening to the occasional happy patter of much-needed rain on the roof.

As the days are longer,  the weather is more amenable,  and the adults are vaccinated,  I am spreading my mental wings in the education of my children, particularly my gradeschooler.  I am cataloguing ideas for field trips to broaden our experience and develop more connections to the natural world,  to history,  to science, and to culture.

Nearly every day I take the two littles to one of our neighborhood parks so they can play and explore, while I walk patterns around their zone for personal exercise and check in with them as needed.  Once a week or so, we manage to have Anne join us.   Every Saturday afternoon we make a family outting to a natural place.  

And the last two weekends we have done extra. 

On account of the near approach of the moon a couple of weeks ago, we had unusually low tides in Puget Sound last weekend, which I wanted to see.  

Saturday, as it was hot with a high UV index, took us to the Pretzel Tree Trail at Squak Mountain SP, 20 minutes east of us.  The short interpretive loop in the forest tells the story of the Field Mouse who journeys into the woods to find the Pretzel Tree , and who meets many forest dwellers and learns about forest ecology on his trip.  This is a favorite trail, on account of the tale.  Later in the evening we went to Seahurst, a beloved city park in Burien, 20 minutes west of us on the Sound, with views of the Olympics.  Clearly we were there closer to high tide rather than low, but walking on the rocky beach, playing on the playground with an unbelievable view, and crashing through the underbrush and drift logs on the creek were wonderful anyway.

Sunday, I planned somewhat better by actually looking up the tide table.  We headed off to Dash Point SP in Federal Way, 35 minutes southwest of us.   I thought it would be the perfect place for an unusually low tide, as the sand beach which extends way, way out from the bluffs makes for a dramatic high-low tide differential on normal moon phases.  But the parking lot was full, and due to the local geography and road lay outs, there is no way to park offsite and hike in. Disappointed we headed up the coast to Saltwater SP in Sea Moines,  where parking was no problem.   Indeed the tide was WAY out, and I walked all across the intertidal zone.  You gotta wear shoes on this beach as the zone is rocky and completely barnacled.  Jared went for a trail run in the woods, and I painted the view in my watercolor notebook while the kids played on a pile of rocks and driftwood, in the small strip of sand, along the tiny trickle of creek, and on the pirate ship-themed playground.

Monday was Memorial Day,  and Jeff and Linda wanted to do a hike.  After much negotiation,  we ended up at Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park, 15 minutes away in Bellevue.  We took many hours on a hot day, hiking through shady forest to Coal Creek Falls, a destination I had skirted but never reached before on my previous hikes.  The kids went at kid pace and enjoyed playing at various spots along the way.

This Saturday, I thought we might try out a different state park, and after a bit of poking around, decided on Bridle Paths SP, 20 minutes north of us in Kirkland.  In addition to an interpretive loop (those seem to be motivating to our kids), the trails are all open to horses, and I hoped we might see a few.  Well!  Turned out to be horsier than I thought.  There is a competition arena near the main entrance and it was the middle of an all-day show-jumping competition.  We watched quite a lot of it throughout the afternoon, and Anne had ever so much to say about the horses and their riders.  We also managed to do the 1.6 mile interpretive loop with much moaning and parental running back to the car for snacks.  At the end of the day Jared went for another trail run while we watched the end of the competition and the reset,  which was quite interesting. Participants took down the jumping bars, the sprinklers ran, and a woman drove a John Deere round with various rakes attached to the back.  Then we walked over and watched riders caring for their horses in stalls by the parking lot and people loading horses into trailers.  Anne also asked if we could take the car to the empty church parking lot across the street so she could sit on my lap and drive (there is precedent for this activity.)  Then Jared made it back and we headed home.

Sunday we took off for another new-to-us city park in Maple Valley, called Wilderness Lake, 20 minutes southeast of us.  We met up with our dear Afghan friends whom we had not seen since before the pandemic.  It rained off and on, but we installed ourselves under a picnic shelter, and said friends brought my favorite Afghan delicacies - tea, rice,  sabzi, naan, and pickled vegetables.  We spotted a gaggle of ducklings with their mother (there were so many ducks!), a red wing blackbird, and best of all, a young male elk grazing near the playground. 

Next weekend will be a bit quieter on the fieldtrip front as there are recitals Sunday and Monday, and Anne is going to be taking some standardized tests if I can be creative enough in coming up with fantasy scenarios which will allow her to jump in of her own volition.  These, too, are life learning experiences.

Prokofiev Anxiety

 A couple months ago I was headed out the door for an early morning dentist appointment, when I realized that I was going to have airspace all to myself, so I gleefully popped back into the house and grabbed a neglected disc from my collection, which caught my eye.  This one contains Prokofiev Violin Concertos No. 1 and No. 2, as well as the two Bartok Violin Rhapsodies, in that order.  I turned on the car, and the haunting, otherworldly sounds of the opening of the first movement of Prokofiev 1 filled my ears.  Immediately my anxiety rises.

...I sit with it a while, and I realize where it's coming from... 

Honestly,  I am kind of intrigued, because until recently I have not thought of myself as an anxious person, but rather ambitious, outwardly collected, and ready to tread where angels fear.  Perhaps those traits are more a product of my perpetual inner analysis-and-improvement system and my lagging abilities to think through consequences in advance (which have improved with the addition of children to my life) and general masking. On the whole I think my anxiety (that I never really noticed) has gone down dramatically in the pandemic, because a lot of it is social for me... I *think* I come across as relatively socially capable, which is probably true, but at the same time... 

There is a family owned place nearby I want to buy some native plants from, but one has to call for an appointment, and I have not been able bring myself, for a year and a half, to pick up the phone, because they might ask me questions I don't know the answers to, and I can't plan the conversation ahead of time.  (Don't worry.  Jared has now called them for me.) Even though I prefer family owned place to big box stores for so many intellectual reasons, I am drawn into the big box places if I am shopping alone, because No Employees Will Try To Talk To You. If I am with someone else who will chat with the employees, "boutique" is totally fine.

And there was the wedding of two good friends Jared and I attended 17 years ago in Houston where I walked out of the sanctuary at the end of the ceremony, past the food line, and out the door into the heat where I led the way as we wandered the neighborhood noticing the rhododendrons and the vaguely irritating Houston architecture until I got up the nerve to go back inside at the end of the reception.  I even surprised myself that day with my discomfort.  But I knew I could not open my mouth to ask the caterers what the various food items were after our stay on a mission trip in Mexico, and I had no stamina left to find a random table to sit at and to converse with strangers. But I digress...

The funny thing is that I have never played Prokofiev 1, and usually when I have had a visceral anxiety reaction like that to a piece of music, it is because of a situation where I had to perform it underprepared.  I chose and played Prokofiev 2 my junior year at CIM, because a number fellow musicians whom I respected immensely were digging into with deep artistry, and I wanted that complexity and mystery, too. 

When I was around 15, I listened to a disc with the first suite from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet and Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet every night after lights out for probably a year. I loved Prokofiev's use of the orchestra to create such weird and diverse colors and was so intrigued by the emotional impact of the sudden semitone modulations which seems to be one of his pioneering signatures. 

Back to CIM.  Mrs. Cerone, one of the two violin teachers I studied with weekly during my undergrad,  was very top-down in her approach to assignments.  At the beginning of the semester you would receive a list of precisely which scales and etudes, which movements of Bach and concerti, which sonatas and short pieces you were to have learned and played at each weekly lesson, along with when they were to be memorized and when they were to be presented with piano.  She meant to prod us to greater heights, and on the one hand, it was sort of exciting, like I had arrived at the Real Deal.  But on the other hand, it was sort of artificially unrealistic and irritating to me, because I did not always love her repertoire choices for me, and I have tended to work much better from a self-directed place which matches my inner obsession, which is honestly quite intense and less predictable.

In addition to the weekly lesson, we had the weekly 8 am Saturday morning studio class in Mr.  Cerone's office.  All ten or so of us had to perform something from memory each week at the crack of dawn (sunrise isn't particularly early in the chilly Cleveland winters) and without any warm up (the building was unlocked at 7:45 so that Prep department classes could start at 8:00.)  Mrs. Cerone told us all the hours of the day and all the days of the week were the same to her, but I have never been a morning person, and being up early on too little sleep for Important Events has often left me nauseous and cold.  

(Incidentally I has terrible thermoregulation the first 23 or 24 years of my life, always having frigid extremities if the outdoor temperature was below about 80 and the indoor heating was uneven.  Within a few days of trying out a whole foods, plant-based diet in my 20s I found that my thermoregulation improved immensely.  I still can run quite cool in the winter,  and we had some years without much functional heat in Rochester, NY, which was miserable.  But now I am acclimated to the cooler North and feel uncomfortably hot at 80 degrees....)

So here we were performing Paganini and Bach and three-octave scale accelerations from memory before breakfast (the dining hall opened at 9:00 on the weekends) and before any of us were quite awake, receiving teacher-directed constructive criticism from our comrades.  "I loved your energy. I think you need to work on your tone more - it was kind of scratchy. Try practicing with looser fingers."  Honestly I learned So Much from those experiences and I am grateful. That's not to say it wasn't very stressful. We were all there putting our worst foot forward week after week while doing things we cared immensely about, and which were part of our future artistic career.  It was so very intensely personal.  It was also like being sent into small scale Olympic-level athletic exhibitions weekly without any stretches or hydration beforehand.

The greatest exposure I had to Prokofiev 1 was on those Saturday morning classes, played by bleary-eyed, vaguely panicked, Mrs. Cerone students, hoping for someone to appreciate their extraordinary skills, which were often not quite evident without a proper warm up. 

In my car on the way to the dentist two decades later, I was feeling the performance anxiety of Alina Costaras. 

I have left that disc in the car and on the few other occasions I have been out by myself in these last couple months, I have let Prokofiev 1 keep running.  The anxiety upon hearing it is gone, and now I think I love it even more than Prokofiev 2. In a perfect world I would head out to my studio and start learning it Right Now and have a chance to perform it with a stellar orchestra next year. And though I would have it memorized I would not play it from memory.