Thursday, December 30, 2010

Epiphany is yet to come

Christmas is finished and all our photos and memories will join the others of Christmas Past. It is also the close of a decade rich in life and tumult. Although we began the turn of the century in China, we moved to Texas that year and began having babies while Brad simultaneously began and finished two graduate degrees and worked full time. I struggled to remain creative while raising the girls and working part-time. We packed and moved four times. Loved ones died, marriages divorced, friends moved away. But our girls thrived, our families moved closer, our friends discovered blogging and Facebook. Somehow the tapestries woven throughout our lives got stronger and more intricate and colorful.
This year, at the close of this amazing decade, we are once more in China. Out of necessity and desire, we all created a truly home-made Christmas. Throughout Advent, the girls spent all their free time making cards, ornaments, scenery, decorations - all from paper. It was all we had. We were too far away to receive snail-mail cards so we strung ribbon and hung all their creations. The potted plant we bought looks like a small fir and showed off all the sweet elves and gingermen and santas and stars and angels. Our Chinese tutor, who comes daily, taught us the Chinese words for everything Christmas. She taught us how to carol in Chinese.
I began to bake. I hadn’t made bread in twenty years and really hate to cook but oh how I craved homemade sweets. I’ve been reading a fabulous book about our spiritual lives and food, and the essays made me want to provide food for my family and my own soul, my own body. I craved the breaking of bread. I bought some flour and yeast and found an easy recipe. It worked. From the same batch I made cinnamon rolls. I could actually smell the yeast when I punched down the risen dough. (I have an incredibly weak sense of smell that probably half explains why food doesn’t mean much more than filling my belly.) My family ooh-ed and ah-ed and requested more. For three weeks of Advent, I made bread every Saturday.
Then I got ambitious. I began to cook more than fried rice or spaghetti. For the first time in years, I made an entire Christmas dinner (in a toaster oven) for our Chinese friends who visited from another province. And by necessity it was all from scratch: cornbread dressing, garlicked green beans with onions, squash casserole, steamed pumpkin (so naturally sweet!), salad greens with olive and balsamic vinegarette, splendid peach pie, rum balls and gingersnap cookies. The guests never had an American-made meal. They were awed.

We had to share. We packed the rum balls (yum for Meyers rum!) and gingersnaps, practiced our carols in Chinese and set out in the 15 degree wind chill. Our retired neighbors who keep cabbages in the stairwell, had a house full of guests for a birthday. We sang and offered cookies. Then on to the community center and the family who lives in their shop and delivers our water. We sang to the fruit seller and the vegetable vendor and the mantou lady. The bicycle repair lady and her Pekingese weren’t out but the shoe repairman was and we sang for him and his customer. Lastly, we found the lady who sweeps and puts the trash on her hand-pulled cart. We like her. She waves and greets us warmly when we pass. Someone found a clean napkin as she removed her gloves to take the cookies. We sang Silent Night in Chinese and wished her a merry Christmas, peace on earth, good will toward men. Epiphany is yet to come.






Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Vertigo

The Great Wall at Mutianyu in October
Here am I, in China once again, my upside down life creating vertigo as I absorb the land, her people, and the shock of losing the familiar. Most readers of this blog have moved on, for the dormancy in my posts belie the transitions and adventure of this massive move. I now homeschool, live in a frumpy Beijing community of cold-war era retirees, and own a new puppy, some fish, and even a cricket in a cage. Our cat is declawed and living with my Dad, a newlywed to a bride we adore. (The widow in my previous post - we named her Mt. St. Helen - finally imploded and she has thankfully faded into family lore.)


In short, a lot has happened in the year since I last posted and shame on me for being so quiet! My thanks to Wayne Leal and Trisha Swanson for prodding me back to blogging about my latest cairn. I've been so busy building our new life, I've neglected to erect the signposts so others can see what I see. (I have, however been an avid photographer and the best photos are next door on my Flickr page.) So I'm a bit selfish and bloated with fresh adventures, sights and sounds (I can't smell), and I don't know where to begin. Thus I'll end this year's only post with a promise of more in the days and months ahead. Indulge me if I ramble, take some rabbit trails, backtrack through the last few months and otherwise create vertigo as others follow along. It's so good to be faced again with a tabulae rasa, a clean white page to write on.