Last Day

By Erin | Published: January 11, 2012

Today is my last day of winter break. I celebrated yesterday by spending the whole day–the whole day–cooking and running errands.

Which means, I spent an hour running errands and the rest of the day cooking.

I wanted to bake a pie. A chocolate pecan pie. Specifically, this one. This pie is the easiest pie in the world to make. Assuming that you have pre-shelled pecans. Which I didn’t. I had a giant bag of fresh pecans my aunt and uncle had given us from Charlotte. How hard could it be to shell a cup and a half of pecans? That’s nothing! Or, so I thought.

About five hours later (I am only exaggerating slightly), I emerged victorious with my shelled nuts and turned my attention to the pie crust.

(Insert pie-crust-making-and-errand-running here. I really need a food processor. I hate cutting the butter into the flour by hand. Really really really really hate it. I’m bad at it too. Which is part of the reason I hate it.)

For dinner, I made roasted butternut squash soup, pan-fried salmon with spicy honey mustard sauce, and Israeli couscous. I told Jesse this was the most involved meal he’d eat for the next four months. The dinner was really just an excuse to use some toys I got for Christmas, specifically my immersion blender and my new Bialetti pan (love!).

Then Jessica came over to hang out and play music, and she bravely taste-tested the pie with us. The pie crust had kind of fallen over in one spot, so it wasn’t the most attractive pie ever, but…

…

Ohmygoodness.

Let’s just say, if shelling those pecans wasn’t so gosh-darn difficult, I might make this pie on a weekly basis. And then I would weigh 200 pounds. But I wouldn’t care. That’s how good this pie is.

Today being my last day of break and all, I think I’ll celebrate by eating the rest of the pie.

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Quiet

By Erin | Published: January 9, 2012

The semester will begin soon, and all will be noise and motion, but in the days leading up to that, I’m trying to consciously enjoy the quiet.

Last night, Jesse and I took a walk around the neighborhood with a couple neighbors we recently met. Later, at home, Jesse sat on the living room floor and tinkered with a computer issue he’d been working on while I read magazines. I stayed off Facebook. When we were hungry, we went for dinner at a taco place near campus–it was practically empty. In a week or so, the place will be packed with students, but not yet. After dinner, we meandered over to a coffee shop–also nearly empty–and talked for hours over a shared cup of hot cocoa. We talked about the future, our dreams, our fears…and chores. (Because that’s how we roll.)

The rest of the evening was equally slow. Jesse continued the project he’d been working on. I finished this month’s Bon Appétit and got a good chunk of the way into the most recent Atlantic. A candle burned softly, and the cats slept. After a while, Jesse and I read a book out loud to each other.

It was a nearly perfect evening, and a wonderful reminder that the best evenings are often the quietest and simplest.

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Christmas Snapshots

By Erin | Published: January 6, 2012

While opening presents, it’s pretty much a requirement that you wear at least one element of the wrapping.

I swear, there was nothing in the egg nog. No, really!

Mom and I decided to take silly self-portraits. At first, she didn’t get the “make silly faces” memo. But, she’s a quick learner…

Mom and Dad have a “small local farm” radar, and they manage to find every place in a 75-mile radius that sells fresh eggs, milk, produce, citrus, etc. This time, they found goats Mom could pet. Happy day for Mom!

This was our 11th Christmas together. Say it with me now: Awwwww!

I finally got a shot of my parents both smiling at the same time. A Christmas miracle! (It was so cold that day that Mom and I had to wear light jackets. Oh my!)

On New Year’s, we celebrated my in-laws’ anniversary. Thirty-two years and counting. Say it with me now: Awwwww!

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Transition

By Erin | Published: January 4, 2012

The holidays, in scenes:

We host a Star Wars-themed Christmas party, and I bake and bake and bake, and our friends come over and howl with laughter over the notoriously bad Star Wars Christmas Special we torture them with. The house is full of happy sounds–talking, laughing, eating. The Christmas tree glows. Our friends compete for the title of Best Wookie Impersonator. At the end of the night, we are exhausted but happy.

The week leading up to Christmas is a blur of present wrapping and suitcase packing and house cleaning. We drive to Florida on Christmas Eve and launch ourselves immediately into present-unwrapping and eating. Lots of eating. My mom makes a chocolate-pecan pie, and I eat so much I feel sick. It’s one of the best Christmases ever. On Christmas morning, we open presents with the Bonds, and it’s the first time in years that we all wake up there on Christmas morning. We are all making the most of it. Whatever it is. We snap pictures and cuddle with the new gray cat and then we eat more.

And after Christmas, everything falls apart. We get news we didn’t want –not the worst possible news, but perhaps the second-worst. We yell and cry. We spend the rest of the week in a state of shock and confusion, going through motions. We visit a friend whose wife has left. We can’t believe it either. We celebrate New Year’s with strangers. We stare off at nothing.

But, still, we manage to find moments of lightness: eating a lovely meal for Jesse’s parents’ anniversary, walking by the river with my parents and watching a dolphin swim by, spending time with my grandmother. Already, the time has grown fuzzy, and the memories feel years old.

We come home. I am in transition, lodged between the holidays and the semester, one over and one not yet begun. My syllabi and schedules are done. The decorations are all put away, and our house feels sparse and empty–but clean. I am looking forward to the year and not looking forward to the year. It is what it is. I repeat this to myself, and–somehow–it does not feel like a lie.

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New Year

By Erin | Published: January 3, 2012

So, 2011 is over, and I can’t say I’m sad about it. Last year was rough. And it wasn’t just rough for us; if you’re one of the lucky ones whose 2011 was phenomenal, more power to you, but I need at least two hands to count the friends and family I have who had quite a difficult time last year.

That being said, I’m not exactly gleeful about the new year. Because if I learned one thing from 2011, it’s this: Things can always be worse.

(Pollyanna has officially left the blog.)

I’m not grumpy about it; the realization itself has brought quite a bit of lightness. I try to enjoy what I have, even if I’m not thrilled about it, because I know things can look much bleaker. I thought the first half of last year was pretty crummy, and then in the second half of the year we found out Jesse’s dad has advanced cancer. So, the first half of the year wasn’t so bad, in light of what came later. I’m trying to keep this in mind as I walk into the new year, knowing that change is life’s only constant.

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