Before and After

I have a big paper due at the end of the month so naturally, I’m working on decorating projects for our home and baking Ina Garten’s banana crunch muffins.

The wall above our fireplace used to look like this:

And now,

it looks like this:

I made Jesse take a picture of us on the hill that our building sits on.  It’s a great sledding hill and, coincidentally, the setting for an essay I once wrote called “Girl on a Bike.” On this day though, it wasn’t snowing despite our hopes it would be because we were off to get our Christmas tree.  There were still some flecks of brown and green on the ground and while I was hoping for a snowy woodsy sort of photo, the four of us standing on the hill of our first home seems just fine to me.

I painted the letters with extra paint from my chair makeover last summer (a project I started instead of writing an annotation on Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly), while Jesse and I watched a lovely movie called New York, I Love You and I said to him, “This movie is great and you need to read E.B. White’s Here is New York and you will love this movie even more.”

 You make the muffins crunchy by throwing in granola and walnuts and also shredded coconut.  I didn’t have granola or shredded coconut so I put oatmeal in instead and sprinkled brown sugar on the tops before baking them.

The girls were eating lunch while I was making them and at one point Harper asked Hadley what part of her lunch she was going to eat next (they’d both just finished their chips).  Hadley said she would eat her sandwich next and so Harper followed suit.

“So are you two the type of people who eat all one thing first before you move on to something different?”

“What do you mean?” Hadley asked, chewing on part of her sandwich.

“I mean do you eat all your sandwich first instead of, say, having a bite of carrots, then chips, and then going back to your sandwich again?”

They both agreed that they eat one thing at a time before moving on.

“Me too,” I say, “I’m not like Frances’ friend in Bread and Jam for Frances that makes everything come out even when he eats. What’s his name again?”

Harper says, “Oh yeah! I remember that part. Hadley’s what’s his name?”

“I think his name’s Robert.”

“Well,” Harper, otherwise known as “Her Highness” says, “you need to go look it up because I can’t read and I don’t think his name is Robert.”

 

The other thing I’ve been doing instead of writing my paper is staring at pictures of my niece, who was born on Christmas Day.  I look at her and I can’t remember what it is I’m supposed to be doing.  She has to be the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen and there’s just so much to tell her.

 

On Monday night, I went to the gym for a step aerobics class. I haven’t taken step in months and instead I’ve been doing running, and weights and kickboxing.  I’ve always loved doing step but it has been nice to change things up a bit.

I was nervous walking into the exercise room and setting up the step. I worried I wouldn’t remember what it was I was supposed to do when the instructor would call out, “walk the curb,” “mambo, cha-cha-cha,” or “rocking horse.” Plus, the class that I took happened to be the advanced class and the people who go to this one don’t mess around. You have to know the steps from the very beginning because the instructor makes them more complicated as she goes on. There’s very little repetition.

I stood in the back, where I always stand, and as I was waiting for the music to start I remembered the first time I took this class. It was about 10 weeks after Harper was born and I was dying to move. I barely got all the steps but it was so fun (perhaps relieving is a better word) to step in time to a strong beat and have somebody tell me what to do for 60 glorious minutes.

Five years later, I can tell a difference. I still don’t get all the steps, but I get a lot of them and I’m not winded and overwhelmed like I was when I first started. Some of the moves feel instinctual, and in other parts of the routine I can tell the instructor is setting us up for something more complicated: you think it’s going to be this, but really, I’m getting you ready for something else. Perhaps something you don’t think you can do, but watch me and then surprise yourself.

It’s sort of like following a recipe for banana crunch muffins and discussing a Frances story with your kids. Or watching a movie with your husband and realizing that there are some similarities to a piece of literature you were studying. Or just needing a break from Erasmus and whatever it is he’s talking about so you paint some chairs, all the while wondering what exactly is folly? And maybe it all starts to come back to you. Maybe it never left, but it just needed a break..

I think I can write my paper now.