Kristen Anne Glover

Five in Tow

First Flowers of Spring

I had never been a fan of rhododendrons until we moved into our first house and I inherited the one in the front corner of my yard.  I was tempted to dig it up and toss it in the  compost pile until the neighbor across the street told me that the bush had been her gift to the old neighbors.  I  sort of had to keep it after that.

The next year, when Christmas was over and the handmade Valentines were taking over my fridge, I looked out the window and was shocked to see that my rhododendron was on the verge of blooming.  Soon, it was covered in bubblegum pink blossoms.  I picked some bouquets and brought them in to the house.  Every year since then, I look forward to that rhododendron brightening up the rainy days of February, when everything else in my yard is soggy and dead.  There’s something cheerful about fresh flowers, and something hopeful in knowing that these are the first of many more to come.

 

 

The Pasta Plates

It all started with the discovery of a set of pasta making attachments for my Kitchenaid mixer.  They were hidden in a box labeled “Kitchen Things—not important.”  In the chaos of a cross-country move, they had been shoved into a storage room and forgotten for ten years.

Then one day, I went down to our storage room on a quick errand and ended up spending two days organizing, sorting, rearranging, and opening boxes I hadn’t seen in years.   I didn’t expect to find much in the “Kitchen Things” box.  After all, the Sharpie said it was unimportant.

But the Sharpie lied.

There, underneath a few extra pieces of flatware and a stack of manuals, was the box of brand-new pasta plates. These were the pasta plates I wished I had owned, the pasta plates I had drooled over whenever I ventured into the kitchen section of my local Fred Meyer.  These were the pasta plates that could transform this lowly domestic housewife into a bustling Italian grandmother who served up copious amounts of fresh pasta to multiple generations of little Glovers as we gathered around our dinner table in the glow of the setting sun.

Now, that dream was within my reach.

I rushed upstairs and showed the kids.  “Can you really make spaghetti?” Faith asked, wide-eyed.

It was 5:30 pm, but how long could it take to learn how to use my new gadget?  I had watched enough Iron Chef to know that making pasta was child’s play.  I fished the instructions out of the box and soon I was on my way to making some mean linguini.

The kids were anxious to help.  I could almost hear a little violin playing in the background as we ground the sprouted wheat and threw in some fresh eggs and a little water.  Soon we had a lovely dough.  At least it looked lovely, but my inner Italian grandmother was taking a while to warm up, so I wasn’t really sure.

“We’re going to make spaghetti!  We’re going to make spaghetti!” the kids chanted.  All five of them crowded around the machine.  “Put the dough in!”  They pleaded.  I stretched over their heads and dropped in the first ball of dough.  We waited.  Soon little strands of pasta began to appear.  The twins clapped.  It was official: Mommy’s mixer was the coolest Play-doh fun factory of all time.

My husband walked by.  “What are you guys doing?” he asked, peering into the side of the bowl.

“We’re making pasta!” I said cheerfully.

He looked confused.  “Can’t you buy pasta?  At the store?  For like, a dollar?”  I sensed I was about to receive the “Isn’t-your-time-worth-anything?” speech.

“Of course you can buy it at the store,” I said, resisting the urge to smack him in front of the children.  “But look!  I can make it myself!”  I thought that said it all.

“Why?” he asked. The question took me aback.  Why?   Because I can, that’s why!   Isn’t that reason enough?  I thought back to my childhood, where dinnertime discussions often led to a search through an encyclopedia or manual and ended with a trip to the barn to look for just the right scrap that might just work to make that thing that somebody wondered if they could make.  The question of whether or not we could do something was always more fascinating than question of whether or not we should.   We had a litany of successes and failures to prove it.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and tried to come up with an actual, rational reason for making pasta myself.  But before I could, the kids piped up.

“We’re making pasta because it will taste better!” Faith said.

“And it will be better for us!” added Kya.

“Don’t you know that everything Mom makes is better than the store?” Jonathan pointed out the obvious.  I secretly resolved to buy those children a pony.

“We’ll see,” Jeff grinned as the pasta started oozing out of the machine at a frighteningly rapid rate.   For a chaplain, that man has remarkably little faith.

He walked out of the kitchen and left me with my project, which was beginning to take on a life of its own.  The little strands had gotten longer, and longer, and the pasta began to come out faster and faster.  I wasn’t sure what to do.  The instructions cautioned against letting the pasta stick together, so I threw some flour at it whenever it seemed appropriate.

“Mom’s throwing flour!” the kids squealed with delight.

The pasta kept on coming, faster and faster.

“Should I cut it?” I asked my sous chefs.  The instructions hadn’t said anything about cutting the pasta.

“Yes, cut it!” Jonathan shouted.  He was always willing to support any activity that involved knives.

But cutting pasta while it was oozing out of the machine and attempting to keep it from sticking together required more dexterity than I proved to have.  The beautiful linguini clumped together hopelessly.

“Is it supposed to do that?” began the chorus by my side.

“I’ve never seen any pasta that looks like that.”

“It looks like a big pile of worms!”

“Eeeeeeew!”

“Yucky!”

“I’m not eating that!”

“Do you have any macaroni and cheese?  I’m hungry.”

I stared at my pile of pasta.  The kids stared with me.  Many adjectives came to mind, but most of them involved the kinds of words I had banished from our family thesaurus.

“Well,” I said, trying to sound positive, “I guess we let it dry for a bit and then we’ll see.”  But secretly I was thinking, I’ve totally messed this up.  I wasted three cups of flour and an hour of our time and now dinner is going to be hopelessly late and the kids are going to be scarred for life because they will forevermore associate pasta with dried up worms!  What was I thinking?

The magic was over.  The violin players turned back into a Veggie Tales CD, the fresh bread sticks turned back into Cheerios, and my inner Italian was transformed back into an Anglo-Saxon mixed breed who was genetically programed to boil things.  I should have made potatoes.

Instead, I boiled up the pasta and served it piping hot at exactly 7:15.   By then, the children were so hungry, they didn’t mind eating worms.  They chewed through their clumpy strands of pasta with valor, oblivious to the fact that al dente shouldn’t require the use of molars.   Epic failure, I thought to myself.

“I’m sorry the pasta didn’t really turn out,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Jonathan asked between bites.  “It’s the best pasta I’ve ever had!”

“It’s beautiful delicious!” Kya proclaimed, munching happily.
“Mmmm!  Nummy!” Micah said with his mouth full.

Paul just nodded.  The sauce on his face matched his hair.

“And next time we make it, it will be better,” Faith added.  “Not many people get it right the first time,” she said knowingly to Jonathan.

I thought I could hear that violin again.  I looked at my family gathered around my dinner table, and it occurred to me that one day, when I am old and the grandchildren gather around my table and my children tell stories about their mother, they probably won’t remember the time I attempted to make pasta for the first time.  They probably won’t remember how it all clumped together in one massive lump, and how dinner was so late, it almost qualified as breakfast.

But I hope they will remember that their mother was infinitely curious and recklessly determined.  I hope they will remember that their mother was not afraid to try, to investigate, and to learn.  I hope they remember that she threw flour and served worms for dinner.  I hope they will remember that their mother did not always get it right the first time.  But she tried.  And if someone asks them why they make pasta themselves, they won’t have to think up a reason.  I hope they’ll know why.

The Rules

ImageI’d like to pretend it was a day when I had been bombarded with unusual inconveniences and unruly behavior from my children.  But it wasn’t.  I’d like to pretend that I had suffered through the day and my behavior was justified.  But it wasn’t.  I’d like to pretend that I was sick or tired or under a great deal of stress.  But I wasn’t.

Truth be told, it was just an ordinary day, filled with nothing more than minor irritations.  A child spilled her milk, another took his brother’s toy.  Someone threw a temper tantrum.  No one got a nap.

But for some reason, it did not feel like an ordinary day.  It felt personal, like every little irritation or inconvenience was aimed directly at me.  I could not stand to hear one more whining tone, or listen to one more argument.  I did not want to determine who had what first, or tell someone to stop doing something to someone else.  I did not want to clean up one more spill or get one more person something he couldn’t reach himself or remind one more child of the rules.

It didn’t seem like anyone was remembering the rules, even though they were the same rules we’ve had in this house since the dawn of time.  So I was astonished, simply astonished, to find my seven-year-old sitting in the living room with my sharpest pair of scissors in his hand, the scissors he’s not supposed to touch without asking, the scissors he’s never, never to use except at the table.

“What are you doing?”  I exclaimed as I came over to him.

I looked down and saw him sitting on the carpet in a pile of red shards.  He was holding one of my new folders in his hand.  It had been cut to bits.

“What are you DOING?!” I said in a much louder tone.

He looked up at me, but no words came out of his mouth.  I couldn’t believe he was sitting in my living room cutting up my folder with a pair of scissors he was not supposed to use—ever.

“You’re cutting up my folder?!”  I was shouting now.  I would like to believe I was simply speaking sternly.  But I wasn’t.

“You’re using my good scissors to cut up my folder!  I can’t believe you’re doing this!  You know better!”

“Mom, I…” he began.

I didn’t want to hear it.  There was nothing he could say that would make it any better.  He knew the rules, and he had disobeyed.  He had taken something of mine without asking, and he had destroyed it.  I was in utter disbelief.

“Go to bed,” I demanded.  He put his head down and headed for the stairs before the tears began to flow.

I got the rest of the children to bed.  No stories.  No cuddles.  Mommy was not in the mood.  I came downstairs and looked at the pile of red on my carpet.  I couldn’t even stand to see it.  I turned off the light and went to bed myself.

In the morning, that pile of paper was still there.  I fully intended to make my son clean it up himself.  But I wanted to put the scissors away before the twins woke up and used it to cut their hair.  Or worse.  That’s why we have rules about scissors, I thought, remembering the time my son cut his hair down to the scalp and spent the rest of the summer looking like a holocaust victim.

I picked up the scissors.  Something caught my eye.  It was a heart, crudely fashioned out of red.  Then I saw another.  And another.  Three little red hearts made out of my red folder were stacked up on the floor.  They had scribbles all over the backs, but the biggest one was decorated on the front with washable Crayola.  “I Love you,” it said in second-grader handwriting.

I felt the sob in my throat.  And I cried.

I cried because I had forgotten the rule, the greater rule, the rule about love and kindness and believing the best about my son when all the evidence was against him.  “Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Love never fails.”[1]

Love is everything I had not been to my son.   I called Jonathan upstairs.  “Look what I found,” I said, not really knowing how to begin.

He nodded.  “Yep.  I made those for you because the boys scribbled on your folder, and I thought that since they had ruined it, I would make you feel better.”

I didn’t think I could feel any worse.  “Oh, Jonathan,” I said, squeezing him to me.  “I’m so sorry.”

He nodded again and smiled, but he had tears in his eyes.  We sat and hugged for a long time, both of us thinking about how much better it is when love reigns.

“Let’s put this up on the fridge,” I said, taking the biggest heart.  We stood back and looked at it up there.  “It’s good to be reminded of the rules, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” he said.  “Love is always a good rule.”

“Yes, it is.  It’s the greatest.”

[1] I Cor 13:4-7, NIV