Corny

When your childhood bedroom overlooks acres of corn, it stays with you. You can grow up, leave the farm, move to the city and put 31 years between you and the corn fields, but you can't entirely leave them. Corn, it turns out, stays in your blood.

Such are my thoughts this morning as I just finished blanching 14 ears of sweet, sweet Pennsylvania corn, cutting the kernels off the ears, and packaging it for the freezer. Soup season is not far off, and I'll need the corn for chicken corn soup. Oh, you can try using the frozen stuff from the grocery store. It's passable in a pinch. If you use canned corn (home-canned is OK, I'm referring to the grocery store stuff), I'm sorry, but we can't be friends. No – you need sweet corn, and it has to be fresh when you cut it off the ears. Trust me on this.

Here's the link to my "recipe" for chicken corn soup. 

I've written about corn before, a hundred years ago on my old blog. When you do many dozens of ears, as we did back in the day, it takes a whole squad of good country folk. But this morning, I was only doing a few. I started with this 

And ended up with this

I think about my wonderful grandmas all the time, but never more than when I'm sitting in the kitchen, cutting corn off the ear. One of my fondest memories of my Grandma Losch is of her sitting in my childhood kitchen with a big bowl on her lap, slicing corn off of blanched ears with unrivaled precision and speed.  I don't remember anyone else doing this job. But I paid attention, because I knew one day I would get to cut my own corn.

See those intact chunks of kernels? We would try to sneak our hands into that sticky bowl to grab those because they tasted so delicious. Some kids stick their fingers in the cake batter (ok, fine, we did that too), but we wanted corn.

Alas, August is almost over and school starts next week. Summer is winding down. I'm happy to have tucked a bit of golden summer goodness away for later, when the days are shorter and the temperatures are cooler. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Off they go (or not)

Ah, August. It's the time of year when many parents deliver their offspring to college. After four years of running the high school gauntlet – get the grades, take the AP classes, participate in extracurriculars, rack up the volunteer hours, collect the honors – your sweet baby child is suddenly all grown up and off on his or her next adventure, and it's one from which you will be largely absent. You spent all that time cheering their teams and listening to their concerts and shuttling them all around town and documenting the whole thing with video and snapshots, and now, it seems, you have made yourself obsolete.

You lug plastic tote boxes into your kid's dorm room, rearrange the furniture, make the bed, hang the twinkle lights, and fret over roommate assignments. After the frenzy of activity, poof – junior is gone. Launched. When will he come home next? Is asking for just one text a day too much? What if she forgets to [insert very important thing here]? Who will reminder her to do all the things YOU used to remind her to do?

These days, my Facebook feed is full of posts from emotional parents sobbing as they bid their progeny farewell, predicting they'll be a "basket case" on move-in day, posting emotional odes to their baby birdies as they leave the nest. Parents wondering how their infant, born just last week, can possibly be gone from the house already.

Moms and dads forgetting, for a moment, that this, after all, was the goal all along. 

Of my three sons, two are college age, and both chose, for a variety of reasons, to attend community college. This means they are living at home and commuting to a nearby campus so they can take general ed classes, probably for their first two years. I'm confident this was the best choice for each of them, and not just because of the significant cost savings. 

And yet, part of me feels like I've been missing something this month. My peers are experiencing a rite of passage that I am not. I joke about how I can't get mine to leave, how I say to them, "Are YOU still here?", and even as I am confident in their choice, I still have mixed feelings.

While the changes my family is undergoing are not as significant as the change that comes when a child moves out, there are changes. Post-secondary education is a big deal. Commuter kids must also find all their classrooms, manage their time, advocate for themselves, and continue to develop their study skills. All of this is challenge enough for the maturest of young adults. But I believe some kids need the extra advantage of being able to do all of that without also having to navigate the unique challenges of residential college life. Some kids just aren't ready to tackle it all at this age.

So, as you adjust to life without your young'un around the house, remember those of us whose kids are still around, and the unique adjustments we're making to accommodate this new phase of their lives. Even as I explain to my kids that my one job is to get them ready to leave home, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that part of me is relieved to be able to give them some additional time to transition. When it's time for them to go, they'll be more than ready in every way.

And so will I.

 

Orion is a-Risin’

Tonight, on a cold February night, Peezer had to work on part of his multi-day assignment on a president of his choice. For reasons too numerous to list here, I just was not up to helping him. Fortunately, his Dad was. And in exchange, I happily donned coat and hat and gloves to walk Mac – usually Curt's job, typically something I avoid, but I was eager for the trade tonight.

So the dog and I are walking up the road to the clearing where the power lines run through. I looked up and I saw A SHOOTING STAR! – and also Orion. And I can never see Orion in the winter sky without remembering 5th/6th grade in Mrs. Cameron's class in "the Annex" at Millerstown Elementary School – we had what seemed like lots and lots of time (which I anticipated and loved) devoted to music education – and when she would take requests, the song "Orion" was in heavy rotation. (And so were "Lemon Tree" and "There's a Hole In My Bucket" – both of which make me want to gouge out my eardrums to this day. But ORION!) She was an excellent pianist (I'm sure she still is), and we gathered 'round the piano a couple times a week and sang: 

        Orion is a-Risin' 

You can see his stars a-blazin' in the middle of the clear-eyed country sky

And it's never too surprisin'

That the sky is still amazin' way out here where nothin' hides it from my eyes

CHORUS

Sleepin' outside in a bag as a kid seems like the best thing that I ever did

Ohhhhh

Chasin' the shadows and the tracks in the snow, don't ya know…..

The day is gettin' colder

And I really start to wonder why they're cloudin' all the country skies to gray

The world is gettin' older

You can hear it in the thunder and the rain might come and chase us all away

CHORUS

Ohhhh

The moon is on the wane

And it looks like it might rain or maybe snow

How are we to stay here

If there's no room left to play here or to grow

Don't ya know, don't ya know

I didn't appreciate the lyrics then, though they have stuck in my brain as a perpetual earworm since the early 1980s, but I see now that they were about growing up in the country, which I did, and appreciating the wide open spaces we were fortunate to have – spaces that enabled us to see the night sky in all its expansive vibrance.

God, I was so blessed.

So I'm here in the suburbs and I'm walking the dog, looking up at the stars and humming my 35+ year earworm, relishing in the shooting star that was surely placed there JUST FOR ME, and I start thinking about Peezer, at home working on some poster about President Kennedy, and how last night he was tooting his clarinet at his school's winter concert:

 
And you know what? That group of fourth graders, who began playing those instruments just four months ago, who get about 30 minutes A WEEK in instrumental music instruction (seriously, how can anyone possibly think that's enough??) – they played several recognizable melodies. As a group. TOGETHER. And whenever a group of ANY AGE HUMANS performs any kind of music together – even if it's a bunch of out-of-tune woodwinds – IT'S MAGICAL.

MUSIC. What a blessing. 

Whether it's "Hot Cross Buns" on the (flat) Clarinet (I guess they tune in middle school?), or "Orion" in my head by a bunch of farm kids in the 1980s, or The Steel Wheels in 2015 (Roots / bluegrass by this band of guys that just has my heart lately), music is a universal language… and so are the stars, and maybe presidential homework isn't, or maybe it is, but February, which I really have come to dread in the past decade – maybe February is not actually the worst month after all. All things considered.