What I found in my boot this morning, 5

Okay, technically I didn’t find this wee present in my boot this morning. Officially, I found it on the morning of Friday, May 4, in Copenhagen, of all places. Which is where I have been. Which is why I have not been here, writing in this blog.

(Copenhagen! O, Copenhagen, land of beautiful buildings and bicycles and windmills and herring! And smorresbrod! To which I would relocate in a heartbeat if it weren’t for all those things like money and jobs and family and citizenship and language barriers, etc. But I digress: right now, we’re talking about things in boots.)

I found this little bracelet, lovingly made by Isaac, in my left ART Company boot

(… … and then she drifted off onto eBay in search of size 40 ART boots… …)

Hello!

…, the boots, you may recall, that I purchased in Chicago for approximately the cost of what my heart would fetch on the black market. And that was half price. But that’s okay, because they are the most beautiful boots I have ever owned and I adore them.

I was putting on said boots in order to go out for dinner with my girl to Aamaans restaurant, for what turned out to be one of the loveliest meals of the trip (and, o, there were many lovely meals on that trip, lo, yes there were), and finding Isaac’s bracelet seemed like a sweet omen, a reminder of my children, who had conveniently remained in North America while their mothers sojourned abroad in honour of my 40th birthday. (Look soon for a guest post from their caretaker, the indefatigable — or, more accurately, utterly fagged out, no pun intended — Rob, on what was like to take care of them for a week, solo. Heh.)

We were joined at the end of the meal by by this girl I had a fling with during the summer of 1995 my friend Lene and her girlfriend, Maria, who scooped us up and took us out to some bars where there were many younger women dressed up like Simon Le Bon (this seems to be a fashion trend, no? Babydykes in black fedoras with rolled rims and lots of eyeliner?), and who the next day scooped us up in their little Volkswagen and drove us three hours inland to the city of Århus, which I also promptly fell in love with.

We ate the original Danish comfort food at Teater Bodega (I had a dish called Biksemed, which translates roughly into “mixed food,” which is, of course, what it is;

Rachel ate some rock-hard yet delicious bacon with potatoes and parsley sauce and swooned), drank Carlsberg classic, and visited the rainbow panorama on top of the Århus Art Museum.

And we also went to a flea market, where out of the corner of her eye Rachel spied these ART boots.

In her size.

For 30 kroner.

Which translates to approximately five dollars.

And then she bought them. And then I tried very hard not to sulk. Mostly successfully, but with little episodes of sulking breaking through now and then like the opposite of the sun through clouds.

And then Lene, bless her Danish heart, said to Rachel, “You know, I have a pair of cowboy boots in your size that I love but I never wear. Why don’t you take them?”

And then I thought about killing both of them until they were dead, but instead I smiled serenely and encouraged Rachel to just say yes, until I couldn't help it any more and hissed at her out of the corner of my mouth, “I didn’t sleep with some girl 17 years ago so that YOU could get BOOTS.”

And she smiled back at me, equally serenely, and said, “Apparently, yes you did.”

Not a single resolution in this post

Well, hello there, 2012. I missed your debut, of course: I have not voluntarily stayed up until midnight for approximately seven years now, but on this particular New Year’s eve I flopped into bed at about 9 PM in the hopes of catching at least a few solid hours of sleep before our 3:30 AM wake-up call.

Of course, there was no solid sleep to be had. My brain is tricky like that: faced with a wee-hours deadline, it tends to go into panic mode, calculating and then recalculating at regular intervals throughout the night just how many potential hours of sleep the body that houses it may or may not get and at what point it might just be a good idea to cut everyone’s losses and wake up anyway and stumble through the rest of the day like a grouchy zombie.

Fortunately, at this point in my life, I am wise to my brain’s proclivities and have learned how to mostly ignore it. I imagine it as a gerbil running frantically to nowhere in its wheel. “Cute little gerbil,” I think to it, “you just go and run away over there until you’ve tired yourself out and meanwhile I will focus on my breathing.” This mindset, while far from perfect, is still a vast improvement over the sheer panic that constituted my mental life when Rowan was a newborn and the scarce chance I had to sleep uninterrupted (more formally known as hours between 3 and 8 AM when Rachel was on duty; I had the 9 PM to 3 AM shift) was entirely spent joining my brain on its gerbil wheel to nowhere, fuming and angsting about how tired I was and would be and would always be and whose idea was this baby anyway. (I remember writing thank-you notes for the piles and piles of gifts we got when he was born and suppressing the urge to write, just once, “Thank you for the so-called ‘sleeper.’ Unfortunately, it does not work and we are returning it. Please send a functioning one.”)

And now, I just think, Well, this sucks, but the worst thing about it is that I’m going to be tired tomorrow.

PERSPECTIVE. TOTALLY. RULES.

Okay, fine, but where were you going at 3:30 in the morning, Susan? Well, Toronto, of course. And Cleveland, obviously. Followed ultimately by Florida, where we finally stopped. And stayed for a glorious week of lounging and swimming and ping-pong and Solitaire playing. (“If we just moved to Cleveland,” Rowan mused as we climbed onto our third airplane of the day, “then it would take a lot less time to get to Florida.” This is true. It is also true that perhaps we should have booked our flights a little earlier on in the season. And it is also true that it was a lot nicer when there were direct flights to Minneapolis from Thunder Bay, but I’m not in charge of that.)

Our first night in Florida, the kids’ grandparents ever so graciously babysat (a favour they granted twice more during the week we were there, bless them) while Rachel and I bucked up and went out for our now-traditional dinner at the totally awesome Rhythm Café in West Palm Beach with Fiona and Jen, Toronto friends whom we see, naturally, only in Florida. (Increasingly, this seems to be the way things roll in my circles: why would you see someone in Winnipeg or Toronto when South Beach or Deerfield or Delray beckon?) “Fake it till you make it,” Rachel and I vowed to each other as we got in the car and navigated the I-95, bowing to the premise that if we acted well rested, we would be. It totally worked: the four of us ate and bitched about travel and — lovingly — our children and caught up in general and then rounded out the meal with three desserts and four forks ( the peanut butter pie was the surprise favourite). Our waitress looked like Leslie Feist (I told her that and she had never heard it before). And you know what? After 18 consecutive hours of wakefulness, we closed the place. Because, apparently, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Happy 2012!

Be here now

Summer is slipping away, like minnows slipping through his fingers. I’m trying not to pine already for the easiness of it all, for the way we can just slip outside in bare feet, hop on bikes (not in bare feet), pick dinner vegetables directly out of the garden — Isaac eating a carrot after carrot, getting mad if we cut off the green frond tops — throw them on the grill. I’m trying not to pine for Rob, who is here for only four more days of his four weeks with us, for our communal dinners and games of chase and water fights in backyards and adult conversations about writing in broken moments. (And babysitting. I’m trying not pine for the free and easy babysitting, even as Rachel and I prep for the second of the two overnight getaways Rob’s presence has afforded us this summer; two whole nights away, dinners out and sure, let’s split the whole bottle of wine, because we can sleep in the next morning. Nothing like the luxury of a hangover with no one to care for.) I marvel at Rowan, riding his bicycle as though he’s always known how; now we head out for an hour to the school playground after dinner — “I wonder who my teacher will be,” he muses, looking through the glass of the locked doors of the building — go around the block a few more times before bed. I forage for back-lane raspberries as though they will somehow save my life, taking Ziploc bags on walks and Tupperware in my bicycle panniers, just in case I happen upon a patch or two on my way somewhere, anywhere. We’re harvesting beets, and Rachel and I steam the greens with the idea of freezing them to sneak into sauces through the winter, but end up eating them directly out of the pot. We walk through the farmers’ market at the moment and there’s very little to buy that we don’t already have growing in the boxes I’ve built at home, and what we don’t have the kids are already trading with our neighbours across the street (“We’ll sell it to you for free,” Rowan tells Relia, whose kids were this age 20 years ago, as he picks yet another zucchini to add to her pile and then can’t believe his luck when she takes each kid by the hand to her garden across the street and they return with cucumbers, Swiss chard, peas.). No, there’s very little to buy that we don’t already have in abundance, all around us, and so I’m trying to remember to enjoy it now (and maybe not write about it so much) and to remember just how much I love the smell of autumn air.