207/365 Snowbaby

206/365 Just about done with the snow, people

Seriously. Will it ever melt?

205/365 Happy Snowy Birthday!

To my January boys!

204/365 Snow Day Bento

203/365 More Snow Pictures

202/365 Snow!

201/365 City Boy in Winter

200/365 Snow pictures coming soon

They're in the kitchen on the camera right now. The house is so big it's hard to turn around when you realize you've forgotten the camera in the kitchen and you've just sat down at the computer. But the milk is out on the front porch, too, in a cooler, and you really should go bring it in as well. Milk, butter, no eggs this week. But it might freeze and separate if you don't go get it. Go get it. It and the camera. Really. If only it weren't so cold.

199/354 Lamb Stew

We slide down Reservoir Hill. I scream the whole way down, completely involuntary. I haven't been on a sled in 18 years. And Reservoir doesn't look like much till you're at the top and those people at the bottom are sooo teensy.

I'm covered in snow, glad about borrowing a pair of long underwear from Mike.

"Hey," he says. "Dinner plan. Wouldn't lamb stew be good tonight?"

I shake my head at first. I don't have any lamb, for one thing, and another, it's a crock pot meal in my house. Then I realize what he means.

Irish pub for dinner.

We go on over and sit in one of their back rooms. The kids wander outside onto the patio, covered for winter, to see the fire pit and waterfall covered in ice.

Indeed, the lamb stew is perfect.

On the way out, the hazy Irish music and Fiona telling me it's a reel, mom, that's a reel, and dancing just a bit, the crowded atmosphere and the dark wood paneling with Guinness posters above, and there are the Paxtons in one of the center rooms. Daisy goes and hugs Bree. I say hi to Travis and Zelda--they're there with Travis' family and I don't want to be that person. But I say hi. Tell them the story of sledding. They saw our car and knew we were in here somewhere.

I walk back out into the cold with Daisy. Jake and the other two went out the back door and missed the neighbors. We climb into the car with shivers and leftovers, head back home.

198/365 Big Snow

Six inches. That's a nice solid snow for St. Louis.

No school. Whew. We're out of snow days (our last one was kinda unnecessary) but we took one anyway. Because my kids wouldn't be going either way.

The street is all off, except Zelda and her kids. Why Arch Street decided to have school is a mystery--they're not state funded, they don't have the same rules about snow days and make ups and all that. Fiona calls in the morning: "Bree didn't answer, and their porch light is out already."

I look outside. It is. "Maybe they had somewhere to go for the day. Sledding, maybe," which is something I don't do with the kids alone. Not with Billy only 2 (today!).

"Yeah," she sighs. But she keeps herself plenty busy with Eliza.

197/365 Day Off

"What are you doing tomorrow?" Tara asks Zelda.

"Oh, we're going to the dentist," she smiles sheepishly. "And I'm taking Noah to get new glasses."

"Ah, a big health care day on your day off," I shake my head.

196/365 Mah Jongg and School Choice

Lots of schools were discussed. Where were we sending our girls? The four of us each have a girl in 4th or 5th grade. Middle school is coming. Fiona is probably got things sewn up at our school; Iris maybe not as well--or maybe middle school is but high school isn't: "I think she'd do so well at a big county public school," Tara lamented. That currently isn't one of our choices.

Gretchen lists the two all-girls options for Eliza. I'm confused at first--she left out several good ones--but then she explains. Those two have 7th and 8th grade and the others do not.

Zelda and Travis have probably chosen, with Bree's input, what's coming next. They're surprised at what the choice is, but Zelda sums it up: "There's a net there." And she's not talking about the basketball hoops. I completely understand. Slipping through the cracks, one way or another, is what middle schoolers do. Maybe they make it academically, but not socially. Or socially but not emotionally. Or both of those and then they flunk every core class.

You need a net.

It's a long pause in the play. Our walls are set up and we've traded around already--Charleston is what it's called. I worry about the future, but I remember that it's a day and a year at a time. Moments of choice and crisis, but it doesn't all happen at once. There are hundreds of mah jongg games between here and there.

195/365 Mah Jongg as Medicine

Gretchen knew. She knew before I left that I would need to detox after I got home. What, a funeral? Family crisis? Confrontation?

No. A girl scout camping trip.

She sent out the message to the usual suspects: Come over Sunday night and play at my house. Bridgett is getting home from camping with the girls and we need to play.

Zelda, Valerie, Tara, and I say yes. That's enough. Five is good. I am looking forward to it already, sitting in my car waiting to go to camp.

194/365 Girl Scouts Sew

Just the beginnings of the process. I sometimes wonder if we'll make it to and through the bronze award. It's a lot of work. But here was our beginning.

193/365 Epiphany Night on My Block

I love sunset all times of year, but it's especially haunting in wintertime, even without snow.

192/365 Scouting Out

"Hi Bridgett, this is Nick," says the voice on the phone. "Have you had my daughter there all afternoon?" He's laughing.

"Yes, but only the first hour and a half was the girl scout meeting--she did run home briefly with cookie stuff, but, yeah, she's still here."

"Could you have her start cleaning up and head back home?"

"Certainly."

191/365 Patina

190/365 Wall

This white rock.

I have a small retaining wall that runs between my walkway stoop and my neighbor's gangway. It backs up an equally narrow strip of dirt that my grandmother planted one Easter Monday, I guess in 1999. Came home from my inlaws and there she was, planting in my front yard. I miss that, by the way.

I built the wall, about 18 inches high at its tallest, out of field stone. We got a pallet of it at a stone supply place in town. I didn't use it all in the front, and it shows up in all sorts of projects and bed borders and neighbors' yards. I built it with field stone and didn't mortar it. It's a dry stack stone wall. Except I cheated, considering the size and location along my sidewalk and my inherent laziness to repair things--I didn't want to constantly have to rebuild it and stack stones again. So they're held together invisibly with liquid nail.

But that white rock. What was I thinking? It catches my eye every time I walk past it. Hey, I'm out of place! You picked me out of the yard and not from the field stone and you were being frugal in some kind of weird misplaced way and now I'm here! And I'm white! And I'm wrong!

Nobody else, of course, cares.

189/365 Stand in the place where you live

188/365 Rubble stone

This is the foundation of my house. It is 106 years old. I never have standing water in my basement, although this corner is sometimes damp to the touch. We've fixed that, though, with better guttering.

It always amazes me that things built 100 years ago are doing fine but things built, say, 25 years ago, look shabby (and not in a good way), and often are not holding up. I hate how this trend has occurred, and continues. Cars, refrigerators, pantyhose, children's clothing, whatever. We've moved to fast and cheap, faster and cheaper, more quickly and more cheaply, but we lose in the long run.

187/365 Chimneys

They're useless, you know. Each of our houses has three, at least, some have four. I have two that have fireplaces attached, and a third that must have had something to do with the kitchen originally but now is just a vestigial ornament, like the appendix. They do me no good. They are unlined, or lined with ceramic tile (the house is 1905 so ceramic tile, I read, was en vogue to line chimneys by that time, but who knows?). So I can't light a fire in them. Wait. I can light one fire. But never a second because my house will probably burn down.

If we ever wanted to light a fire, we'd have to get the chimneys lined and in one case, probably rebuilt, at least part of it. We could do a ventless gas insert, but that's not why I want a fireplace. I am not at a stage in my life where I can sit in the big leather chair and stare at a fire, real or gas or whatever. I want a working chimney to have a backup heat source, like a wood stove insert or standing wood stove. I have fear of being without electricity for 5 days in the wintertime and having to expend a great amount of cash or effort to find a hotel or a relative's house where we can stay. I'd rather stay in my own house, and knowing what my friend Astrid went through in the winter of 2006 when that very scenario occurred, well, I'd rather be prepared.

It would only be one chimney, probably the one in the dining room because that room doesn't have a mantel and is the most centrally located of the chimneys. It runs past our room, too (we have a foursquare house, which is like a child-designed floorplan of four rooms on the first floor, four rooms on the second, triangle shaped attic on top). I don't want it to replace our nicely efficient lovely new HVAC system. I just want it for when we need it (or when we want it, frankly). Living in the city means wood is not easy to come by for free, it's not like we have a back lot of 100 acres to thin out. But we do have a giant mulberry tree's worth of logs well-seasoned in back, and there's always some tree coming down.

I want to do it. But it's not cheap. And there are other things on my list, like a first floor bathroom that doesn't suck, or the Great Separation of the attic into smaller bedrooms. And the front porch (sigh) needs to be on the list. But this? This is taking a spot in the top 5 big projects. It's not smart to put it off, I have a hunch.

186/365 Sycamore Winter

185/365 Street Tree

This is the trunk of my favorite street tree, a black oak that technically sits just over my western property line on Big Ed's lot. It spreads out beautifully above, not a typical oak shape as I think of them. Acorns are big, stain the sidewalk.

Trees, for the most part, aren't suited for tree lawn life. This one hasn't compromised its principles. It folds over the curb, roots making pockets that are deep enough to fish in--if you want to catch mosquito larvae. I'm going to probably fill them with dirt and plant some innocuous. But who am I kidding? This tree is Fairy House Central. I'm not wasting my time for it to be dug up and presented as offerings to our tiny invisible neighbors.

184/365 My House is Marked

and on entering the house
they saw the child with Mary his mother.
They prostrated themselves and did him homage.
Then they opened their treasures
and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod,
they departed for their country by another way.

There. Blessed for the coming year.

183/365 Happy New Year Blue Skies