Unspeakable Things

A few months ago I was doing some research on the Mayas, and reading an article about their amazing genealogical records, I came upon this image. And when I first saw it, I thought, "I know exactly how he feels." Yes, that man's family history is doing unspeakable things to him, so badly he's had to go to the local Medicine Woman and get a salve. I don't care for family history. My grandmother and my mother-in-law both are quite keen on it, but I don't get it. My interest in my family goes only so far to the people I know or their immediate relations. But I don't care to know if I'm distantly related to the president (gosh, I hope not!) or anything like that. I don't care for name-dropping of the living or of the dead. Until last week.

Last week, it was my birthday, so I received the obligatory birthday phone calls all day long, often from members of my family from whom I don't hear very often, like my mother. So my mother mentioned proudly that my grandmother (the family history hobbyist) had discovered that we are direct descendants of Geoffry Chaucer. There was talk of divine birthright and the such, and I have to admit that there was a welling up of familial pride in my heart. I was tickled pink, and when I was off the phone, my grandmother sent me a guest pass to Ancestry.com so I could see for myself. Sure enough, there was a direct line of parent to child all the way down to me.

This in turn stirred up in me a longing for my oft-derided ancestral name-dropping, so I set about to learn of these famous people to maximize my bragging, starting with ol' Papa Geoff. G. Chaucer begat Thomas Chaucer who begat Alice Chaucer (m. 1430 to William de la Pole) who begat Jane de la Pole who be-- wait. Here's the problem. Because all of these people are famous, especially William de la Pole, there is a lot known and written about them. Like how William fought in the Hundred Years War, and on June 12th 1429 he surrendered to Joan of Arc at the Battle of Jargeau, and how 9 months later was born his daughter Jane -- to the nun he slept with the night before he surrendered. Only 8 months later did he then marry Alice Chaucer with whom he had only one child of note -- John. Which would mean that Geoffry Chaucer is my 21st great step-grandfather. Which basically counts for naught.

As I work my way down the line, the known history gets fuzzier and fuzzier as each person gets more and more mundane, so there may be other breaks in the line (but that won't be recorded by Henry VI's war historians), so I may not even be related to William de la Pole.

There are lots of contemporary descendants of Jane de la Pole who have found themselves no longer the distant progeny of the great bawdy poet from London (he never lived in Canterbury). And like them, I too feel like genealogy has violated me in some unspeakable way.

And now, I'm going to go get some salve cake.

The Sinister Infidel

Normally, I write about my own adventures, and only mention Ariel when he tags along. This is mostly because Ariel goes to boring and/or miserable places for the most part, and when he does go somewhere cool, he spends every waking moment in the Embassy or eating at groovy restaurants (which he tells me about over the phone at the precise moment when I've had Cheetoes (unfulfillingly) for lunch). But he never goes and sees/does anything cool.

Until this (next-to) last trip. The trip itself was to an rather uneventful location: Amman, Jordan. Ariel's been there once before, and true to form, he never plays the tourist (i.e. he doesn't bring me back anything nice). But he did have an adventure. In the airport Sunday night, he was carrying a big bag of heaviness with his thumb hooked under the strap, and the bag slipped off, pulling his thumb in the wrong direction backwards. He heard a melodious ripping sound that came not from the bag but from inside his hand. So the following day, he did what you do when you've ripped off your thumb and can no longer bend it -- he went to work. As the hand turned black through the day, his coworkers advised him to see the doctor. Not the embassy medical unit -- no, he went to the Arab Medical Centre -- yep, a Jordanian hospital.

Now, I have to admit that as far as Middle Eastern Countries go, Jordan is our #1 Arabic-speaking ally and is fairly Western, but let's be honest here -- when you think of a hospital in the Middle East, you ironically don't picture Mount Sinai.

This was how the conversation went over the phone (edited for brevity and humor):
Ariel: "The guys from the office took me to a Jordanian hospital."
Me: "Did they remove your thumb?"
Ariel (ignoring me -- the secret of our marriage): "They took an x-ray to see if I broke any bones."
Me: "Then did they remove your thumb?"
Ariel: "It turns out I ripped 2 of the 4 ligaments that hold your thumb in place, but didn't break anything."
Me: "So they removed your thumb?"
Ariel: "The doctor said I had what they call 'Goalkeeper's Thumb'-- it's a football injury."
Me (disappointed): "Football? So they didn't remove your thumb."

As you can see, Ariel came home with his x-rays in a groovy envelope marked with Arabic -- making it official. But no thumb in a jar (which I'm certain they would have confiscated in customs -- which would have made an even cooler story).

The bad news is, that as a result, Ariel learned to swallow pills. Yes, my grown-up husband couldn't swallow pills without gagging and spitting them back out. This is why it's by the grace of God alone my husband does not have malaria -- because he can't swallow his anti-malarial medication. But now, he learned on this trip (a sure sign that there was no Internet in the hotel room -- he must have been really bored). The reason this is bad when, yes, this is technically good news is that now I have nothing even meager of his to balance out my own craziness. When faced with potential mockery of my terrible phobia of human beings, I used to be able to retort, "Yeah, sure I'm deathly afraid to talk on the phone to the pizza delivery boy, but, um, you can't even swallow pills! So yeah!" Now, I got nothin'.

Just for fun, I added the word "kafir" in Arabic on the x-ray for a bit of authenticity. Yes, I have a list of weird neuroses, but can you write "Infidel" in Arabic? I didn't think so.

My Free-Range Chicks don't lay eggs

I don't watch the news, but I do pop over to CNN and Digg every once in a while to collect all the important stuff. So, I did hear in early April about a woman (Lenore Skenazy) who let her 9-yr-old son take the subway in NYC. I don't live in NYC. I have been to visit and found it generally to be a swell place. The only disagreeable people I found there were A) the street-side Rolex salesmen, and B) this one waitress in SoHo who looked at me like I was a complete idiot when I asked her how the heck it was 2:30 in the afternoon and they were still serving brunch. Look, I'm from the South, and I'm pretty certain that we invented brunch, and even if we didn't (we didn't), I'm fairly certain that a meal whose name is a portmanteau of "breakfast" and "lunch" should probably finish up before noon. I'm just saying.

What was I saying? Oh, yes, NYC. So I can't say that I would send Lena on the subway in NY, but that has a lot to do with Lena being completely unfamiliar with the city. If she had grown up taking the subway (Tube/Underground/Metro) daily, I think (I hope) that I would probably do the same thing that this woman did: set up a very controlled opportunity for my kid to show his mettle. I have done the same sort of thing for the girls, getting them accustomed to being home alone. When Lena was 5, I left her home for about 30 minutes. She was ill and a barf-o-matic, so I taught her my cell-phone number, had her practise dialing it, wrote it all over the house, and then went to pick up her medicine. She called me every 3 minutes while I was away, just tickled that I would answer when she got to make big-girl phone calls. That thrill improved her health vastly more than the medicine I was picking up.

This woman was dubbed America's worst mother, and I have to wonder at what sort of horrible standard of child-rearing that middle-class money affords us. Kids take public transport every day. They come home to empty houses. But are their mothers bad? Do we (and I mean the helicopter parents) think that if they really loved their children, they'd find a way out of the working-class tier they're in? they'd buy them a cell-phone? escort them to their friends' houses after vetting them and all of their immediate neighbors? Do we love our children more if we lock them in a very safe cage and keep them from any hint of danger? Our children have never been safer than they are in this generation. With the exception of the risks from traffic (and we all know my fear of children + traffic), the risks and rates of abduction, assault, and abuse have decreased since I was a child. The only increase has been in the reporting of isolated incidences, giving us a false sense of constant and imminent danger. This is why I don't watch the news. The very nature of my job as a mother is to make my job redundant -- my goal is to push these little chickies out of the nest and watch them fly away.

At this moment, I have no idea where my kids are. Okay, I have some idea. I could narrow it down to a postcode (we have a fairly small area covered by our postcode). Somewhere, Lena is riding her bike, and Livia is running behind trying to smack Lena with a bamboo pole. (This is an eccentricity that cannot be explained in this post). I let my kids climb trees until the tree top bends with their weight so high up. (Livia is famous for falling out of the apple tree three times in one week. The third time, she came in the house quite scratched up after I let her in through the front door. I was curious why she had gone around to the front door since the tree is in the back. She had fallen out of the tree, over the fence, into the neighbor's garden. To get out of their yard, she had to go through their front gate. We had a short moratorium on tree climbing after that.)

But I don't say this to brag. In all actuality, I am acutely aware that I am vastly over-protective of my girls. Here we are in the beautiful English countryside, surrounded by woods, streams, fields, and dozens of footpaths that spider out from our front door, and I will not let my girls wander as I did as a child (it should be noted that my mother was accused of teaching me "Independence through neglect.") I could disappear for the whole day if it were not for chores (which I admittedly shirked whenever possible.) I caught things and killed things. I hammered nails into trees, left the hammer out in the elements, and then tasted the pine sap (note: it may look and be sticky like honey, but it is not yummy) (2nd note: if you are the daughter of a forester, do not under any circumstance ever put a nail into a live tree. To this day, the sight of a treehouse makes me wince at the thought of how now that whole stand of trees will be lost to disease (so went the lecture I received -- and no, not a single one of our trees was lost)) (3rd note to my children: don't touch my tools.) Dana and I found a sleeping bat once, brought it home, named it, and then shrieked in horror when it awoke and showed how really uncute bats are. She and I built forts, swam in the pond, fished, mummified grubs (with the leftover raspberry candies that no one would eat out of Whitman's Sampler combined with perfumed filched from my mother -- no, I can't explain the logic behind the candy in the mummification process). Every 5th of July, I dug out any leftover powder from the bottle-rockets with plans to build a bomb (at this very moment, the NSA just flagged my blog). I whittled sticks into, er, um, sharper sticks. I also managed to whittle my thumb once. Only once. I fell on some lumber (upon which I was tight-rope walking), cut my leg on a very rusty nail, and probably needed a tetanus shot and some stitches, but when I went in to tell my parents, they were engaged in an afternoon "nap," so I risked lockjaw and gangrene rather than the embarrassment of admitting that I could hear them, and patched myself up with bandaids. My point? I had a great, wild childhood of solitude and craziness. I still love walking alone in the woods, taking things apart, and starting wacky projects with Dana that we never finish. And I now get excited about snow days, frog spawn, and bird eggs; bike races, books, and boys -- all the wonder and discovery that comes from being Free Range Children (or in my case, their mother).

Do you have a coat? Are you wearing trousers?

We had a few goals for this term break (all 24 days of it) and by the last week, we had accomplished next to none of them. The weather kept interfering, or our schedules, or any such excuse. One of my goals to which the girls had agreed was to go hiking here in England. So, Snowy Sunday we declared that unless it was actually pouring rain, we were going to get into the car and drive a few hours to some acceptable hiking location and not come back until we were sufficiently sore, tired, and blistered.

Monday we awoke to another dusting of snow, but the weather girl promised that the sun was going to come out for a mostly dry and cold day. I found a very lovely but long hike, and though the girls have never been on a hike of more than about 5 miles, when they saw that there were caves, they agreed. We scrambled to get everything together, including maps and food. Lena came down dressed in yoga pants, and I sent her back upstairs to change, specifically into something warmer. Those were almost my exact words for why she needed to change. Morning was wasting, and the girls with the food all packed went to wait in the car for me. The snow-covered car. I finally came out, dusted off the car, tossed the two layers of my winter jackets on the seat next to me, and we were off.

An hour up the road, 30 miles from the trail head, I pulled off of the Motorway to refuel and as I crested the hill of the exit, I could see ominous dark clouds in the direction we were heading. I commented over my shoulder excitedly that we might get to hike in the snow. There was a deep silence from the backseat until Livia spoke up, "I don't even have a sweater!" Turns out that the girls dressed and packed only exactly what I had mentioned to them. Lena had changed into warm pants, and they each had their thin waterproof jackets because I had told them to get them, but neither girl, while sitting for 5 minutes in the sub-freezing car under a blanket of snow had thought to bring a jacket. The flurries started while I pumped gas ($8.40 per gallon, so no whinging from you softy Americans), and I pondered if there was any way to salvage this trip. The service station sold beach chairs, 2-man tents, hard hats, and car-powered coolers, but no sweatshirts for the girls to wear under their rainjackets.
So we drove home.

Wednesday, we tried again. This time we packed 18 layers deep and somehow made it to Milldale, where we parked the car to begin our hike around Dovedale.
Dovedale is a lovely dale in the Peak District that is very popular with the tourists as it is a fairly flat 3 miles through the valley, so it tends to get crowded with yahoos. After passing a solitary twitcher, we did begin to encounter others along the trail.
Soon, the caves that convinced L&L to undertake this death march came into view.


As I said, this is a popular trail, and it isn't really a hike if it follows a flat, well-beaten path, so when we arrived at Ilam Rock, we turned onto the real trail -- that went straight up out of the valley (the path is the hardly noticeable dog-path that seems to climb up the side of Ilam Rock).

Halfway up we stopped for air and a bite of lunch when the trail cut sideways for about 10 yards. We were surrounded by gobs of wild garlic (all the green in the photo), and from our desperate hand-over-hand climb, we stunk in a sufficiently vampire-safe way.
We emerged from the trees, now at the top of the chasm which is Dovedale, having just climbed 115 meters (377 feet). We were tired, but happy for the view.

The top of the hills makes for great pasture, and we made the most of this being the lambing season by harassing as many sweet little lambs as possible.
Finally we arrived at the highest point, Bunster Hill, which is an ancient reef knoll -- a giant pile of calcium deposits back from the day when all of this was under water (which I'm guessing was last summer). We could see for miles and miles in every direction -- were it not for the fantastic haze. It felt like any minute we would just fall off the earth. L&L wanted to roll down and only abstained from fear of sheep poo, not because they would have rolled into the next county.

We hiked along the ridge line, heading toward the very prominent Thorpe Cloud (which as true blue Americans we had renamed Volcano Hill). Lena wanted to climb it too (though it is slightly shorter than Bunster Hill). But we hit a small snag in this plan as we hit the edge of this ridge...





Yep, it was almost straight down. An 85° decline seemed a little daunting to me, the voice of reason. But we still had to get down. Those tiny little people down there were walking on our route back to the car (on the far right, the nearly invisible dots are the people). We decided to take a longer, switchback route down, and before we set out, Livia stripped off her jacket, packed it into her bag, and then set the bag down -- from where it promptly started rolling down this hill. She went to chase after it (since of course she had also packed some of her non-outdoorsy treasures), and being the great mother that I am, I went sliding down the scree after it, finally stopping when I couldn't compete with gravity unless I surrendered to the gravity completely. The bag came to a rest on a little ledge, and I was able to retrieve it. Woohoo! Wouldn't want to lose any of those sparkly pencils Livia brought!
Near the bottom, we met up with lamp #2. A few weeks ago, I was in the car with a British lady, and there was a field near her home with many frolicking lambs, each with an individual number spray-painted on the side. I joked about picking out Sunday Dinner by number, and she replied that actually the lambs are owned and raised by the village butcher and last year she had #17, and he was delicious. Seriously.
There came a point in the trail when to proceed, we had to cross these stepping stones. Unfortunately, the first 4 were under fast-flowing water. Remember how I'm such a great mother? Yep, I carried each of my lead-bottomed children to the dry stones as they cried and wiggled in fear of falling in. Then, on the other side, they wanted to do it all over again. Of course. We saw a natural arch. Actually, this occurred at about Mile 6, so I wasn't paying attention and nearly walked right past it. Kudos to Livia for being observant enough to see giant limestone formations 30 yards from the trail.
When we were nearly back, I made the girls take a picture of me, just to prove that maybe I had been there. Between the two of them, they took about 10 pictures of which only this one was even slightly passable. To be fair, the camera kept doing funky things with the exposure for me too, so I can't put all the blame on the girls.

We had some really interesting conversations. #1: Lena is as deaf as a post. We had numerous times when I'd say something and she'd hear something totally different. Lena, "What are you eating?" Me,"Cough drop." Lena, "Pasta?" Then later I said we could go into the caves. She heard, "...go into the pigs." This became a running joke as there were about 7-8 caves during the course of the trip. #2: Lena refers to Snickers Bars as "Sneekers." This took a little getting used to. #3: We encountered a man fly-fishing. Livia promptly replied, "Why would anyone want to catch flies?"

We had a stunning time despite the lack of blue skies and the boot-full of stubbed toes from a rapid descent. The hike was a total of 7 miles. When we were near the end, I asked, "So, where do you want to go tomorrow?" Lena was raring to conquer something even bigger while Livia declared that she never wants to do this ever again. For the rest of her life.

Weekend Weather

After a week of hit or miss rain with a bit of sun on Friday, last Saturday came up beautiful and clear, so we prepared ourselves to go to Stowe Gardens nearby our home. We had about 20 minutes of sun there before fiercely dark clouds came rolling in, bringing with them a sharp drop in temperature.

Livia can't resist the opportunity to pull a face.
This abrupt weather change was simply setting the stage for what we'd wake up to the next morning.


There was enough snow for long enough that the girls had a good play in it. We finished off the afternoon by making homemade chicken noodle soup with homemade noodles. I adore fresh egg noodles made with our fresh eggs.

The Map Game

We played the Map Game today.

First Lena asked, "If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?"

Livia: Mexico

Lena: Fiji

Ariel: Thailand

Me: Over there (pointing out the window)



Next, "Where would you send your enemies?"

Livia: Libya

Me: Antarctica

Ariel: Somalia

Lena: Bangladesh ... just before the rainy season ... in 1998



Finally, "If you could own a country, which one and why?"

Livia: Mexico because it's big and filled with people who I could make do things for me, but I would let them be free.

Lena: Hungary, because it makes me feel hungry (and later) because it makes me think of Atilla

Me: Italy or New Zealand

Ariel: China because China owns the U.S.



Geography and social studies at their finest.

Spring into Easter

Easter came early this year, but it still fell after the Vernal Equinox, so this was technically spring. Easter also marked our best snow of the year. Which had nearly all melted by the time it was time for church and photos.

Lena escaped at full speed after pictures were taken.