Family

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Mountain Time

I have just returned from the loveliest two-week trip: a drive through the Canadian Rockies with my husband, bracketed on either end by precious time with my parents in their mountain home. I feel a little jet-lagged, water-logged, flooded with the joy of a truly pleasurable vacation.

Let’s not bury the lede: I got to meet Nicole, in person. She is, unsurprisingly, gorgeous and warm and generous and kind. She and her husband showed us the most delightful time. We drank really good wine. We ate a dinner of quinoa, roasted veggies, and lentils that I am still thinking about, plus a kale salad with the best Caesar dressing, followed by a luscious lemony cake topped by homegrown raspberries. I got to meet REX, and give him pets and tell him to his face that he is the softest, handsomest boy. I got to chat with Nicole’s son, who is one of the most charming, attentive, interesting young people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, and he allowed me to hug him even though I am apparently of the age where I refer to twenty-somethings as “young people.” I got to ogle Nicole’s garden, and admire her prolific zucchini plants (she gave me three monstrous zucchini to take home; they were delicious). I did not take nearly enough pictures, or spend nearly enough time with Nicole. Our husbands are, obviously, fantastic, and I think next time we will allow them space to do their own thing so Nicole and I can cover all the extremely important topics we didn’t get to during our much-too-short time together.

An extremely distinguished gentleman.

Driving through British Columbia and Alberta with my husband was magical. Spending time together, just the two of us: It feels both simplistic and true to say that I enjoy his company. We travel well together. He’s a thoughtful and careful planner, and I like to think I’m an agreeable and supportive companion.

We listened to a podcast recommended by Engie, DNFed one audiobook and got a good chunk of the way through another. We giggled over Canada’s road signage (it seemed to us that things like “no services 110 km” would be more helpful before we’d passed the last town for 110 km) and wished that all US highways would follow Canada’s lead with the number of passing lanes they include. We stared in awe at the landscape and pulled over many, many times to try to capture the jaw-dropping beauty of the mountains and turquoise lakes with our phones. We ate tons of delicious food (my favorite, next to Nicole’s home cooking, was a meal of birria tacos in Banff) and did lots of sightseeing.

We visited multiple local bookstores, and my husband encouraged me to buy some souvenirs. (I also bought a really excellent book for a friend and had the author sign it.)

We encountered a lot of wildfire smoke. Sometimes it obscured almost everything.

Sometimes it leant an ethereal magic to our views.

Sometimes it disappeared at just the right moment for us to experience the pristine splendor of the landscape.

We didn’t see any wildlife at all, beyond a few birds and mammals that we can see in our own backyard, thank you very much.

Speaking of wildlife, we did admire our cat, via the cat cam. He spent a lot of time sitting glumly on the counter, waiting for someone (me?) to come tell him to get off. He also spent one morning exploring my mother-in-law’s set up for making hot fudge. He went so far as to get in the pot, which is horrifying and hilarious in equal measure. (Don’t worry: we did let her know that her hot fudge vessel had been contaminated before she started cooking.) I love that he looks directly at the cat cam. He knows (I fully believe) that he’s doing something we would not approve of, and he knows that we know what he’s doing, and he wants us to know that he knows we know, and he’s doing it anyway.

We had a wonderful time together, and loved the parts of Canada we saw. I hope someday soon we can explore other provinces… and perhaps visit Allison and Elisabeth in their corners of their stunning country.

Even though it’s a place I visit regularly (although nowhere near often enough), my parents’ mountain home is no less stunning or special.

Spending time with my parents feels both mundane and precious. We do things we’ve been doing for decades – walk the same mile-long forest loop, brave the black cold of the same lake, sit on the deck listening to hundred-year-old aspen gossip in the breeze – while knowing there will be a last time for each of these experiences.

Being among the mountains makes me feel small and insignificant and acutely aware of the vastness of time and the ephemeral nature of our lives.

I’m an introspective kind of gal, as you are well aware, and I spent a lot of this trip thinking about time. The mountains wrap me in a paradoxical kind of time warp, where I feel both the speed of time passing by and a simultaneous timelessness.

My parents are aging, I cannot deny that. In fact, several of our conversations this trip centered around estate planning, on things my husband and I need to know when their mountain home becomes ours. My daughter is now a teenager, nearly my height, about to begin eighth grade. My husband and I are solidly, undeniably middle-aged.

And yet: everything is the same as it’s always been.  

Even though the individual aspen that make up the skyline around my parents’ house have been around for a mere century, their underground root systems are thousands of years old. The peaks I admire as my dad guides our thirty-year-old boat around the lake were thrust into being fifty million years ago. Glaciers and water and tectonic shifts have sculpted the mountains and valleys into their current form over the intervening millennia. It is astonishing to me that I can admire the artistry of forces so enormous I can hardly conceptualize them, that I am alive for this eyeblink of a moment, that I can choose to spend my time with the people I love most while surrounded by such extraordinary beauty.

I am bobbing, breathless, in the same lake I’ve been swimming in since I was a little girl, the same lake my father visited as a boy, and his father before him. My daughter, shrieking, leaping into the bracing deep beside me, simultaneously thirteen and five and two and ages I have yet to experience. Around us, a crenellation of stately serene peaks that have stood sentry over each of us in turn, in a valley that was once itself a massive inland sea.

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How We Veer from the Meal Plan

In the comments of yesterday’s post, Engie asked: “So what do you do when the meal plan doesn’t go? Do you have go to easy meals? Does everyone just eat scrambled eggs? We meal plan and then follow it to the letter because we don’t have a deep enough pantry for substitutions. I want to know how other people handle this!”

I can’t speak to how you do it in your family – although I would love to hear about it, right alongside Engie – but here’s how we are able to come up with last-minute, off-meal-plan meals.

Step 1: Overbuy. 

Sigh. Was I like this before the pandemic? Probably, to some extent, but I don’t remember. During the 2020 pandemic, and since (although to a lesser extent), I have always been Very Aware of our food and household goods inventory. If something is getting low, or, in some cases, if I open a new jar/package/bottle of something, I will add it to the grocery list. I even have a special category on the AnyList I share with my husband for “not urgent but need eventually.” (He only does the shopping very rarely, but he dislikes having mayonnaise under “Condiments & Dressings” when we just opened a brand new bottle of mayonnaise.) 

I will also buy staples in multiples when they are on sale. Things like black beans, tomato puree, shredded cheese, Fage yogurt, chicken, ground beef, flour. Things that used to be pretty reasonably priced – I am looking at you, cereal and tortilla chips – I now only buy when on sale, and I usually buy at least two of the items my family loves. 

This means that I usually have a huge stockpile of ingredients to choose from when I deviate from the meal plan.

Because I always have plenty of flour, say, and plenty of tomato sauce, and because Carla is obsessed with pepperoni and cheese, I can usually throw together a pizza. We almost always have eggs, and some combination of veggies, so omelets or scrambled eggs are usually a possibility. Every time I do my weekly grocery trip, I buy some sort of lettuce. So a salad is always possible. I stock up on black beans and tortillas when they’re on sale, so I can always make a burrito. There’s usually plenty of chicken, salmon, and ground beef – and probably a few pork chops – lying around our freezer. 

Step 2: Plan for spontaneous nights.

My husband and I have been together for nearly a quarter century; we both know that some nights I am not going to feel like making dinner, or that the planned meal will be unappetizing, or something will come up that makes cooking unappealing/time consuming. So we usually buy things to have on hand in those cases. Microwave meals, frozen pizzas, the occasional box of macaroni and cheese. Mainly frozen things we can heat up in a hurry.

Step 3: Build a repertoire of go-to easy meals.

Roasted salmon and a baked potato takes fifteen minutes (not including defrosting time for the salmon). Ground beef tacos is another fifteen/twenty minute meal. Scrambled eggs takes five minutes. Burritos take about twenty or thirty minutes, unless I have black beans already in the fridge, in which case that’s another fifteen minute meal. 

Snack dinners are a family favorite: whatever cheese we have in the house, crackers, a handful of almonds or cashews, pickles, pepperoni. Slice up some bell peppers, cucumbers, carrots, which I usually have on hand. Apples, grapes, blueberries, plums. Put a bunch of random stuff on a plate, with some ranch dressing and/or peanut butter for dipping, and you’re good to go.

Then there’s always the breakfast route. Toast with butter. Yogurt with granola, or fruit and chocolate chips. A smoothie. Cereal. 

Any or all of these things might make it onto our dinner table in a given week. And of course there’s always takeout.

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Party Like It’s 2020

Well, all my carefully calibrated Thanksgiving plans have evaporated – poof! Everyone is fine and feeling well so far, but I think we all understand that when an uninvited guest like Covid shows up to the party, most people will opt out of the festivities. 

This is life. Things happen. We are so lucky that it was a mild case of Covid and not something so much worse or more devastating. So very lucky. 

Nonetheless, I’m feeling…

  • Disappointed. It’s always nice to see family, especially when it’s been a while. (That came out snarkier than I intended, but I’m leaving it because it’s true.) I haven’t seen my niece in far too long, and I wanted to squeeze her and marvel at how much taller and more brilliant she’s become since I last saw her. And I had managed to orchestrate the exact houseguest experience that I preferred: everyone in my house, while we were ALL on a break, for a fixed and doable amount of time. None of those things is happening now. Carla is bereft. She was SO excited to see her cousin. And now: nothing.
  • Cranky. Now my least favorite type of houseguest experience is going to happen. My MIL has a doctor’s appointment the week after Thanksgiving, and instead of staying in a hotel as planned (after staying with us for Thanksgiving for six days), she and my FIL will now be staying at our house. Which is fine in the sense that we DO want to see them both, and spend time with them. But is less fine in the sense that now they will be staying at our house when Carla is in school and my husband is at work and I have all the normal challenges of keeping our workweek schedule running smoothly on top of hosting houseguests. (Who wants to throw me your best Using Up Thanksgiving Leftovers recipes I can try out on my in-laws next week please?)
  • Relieved. All of the pressure of hosting has been postponed by a week. 
  • Deflated. The most prevalent feeling is one of deflation – of all that anxiety and energy being stored up for weeks of planning and then having none of the fanfare of the fun part of hosting: showing people around the house, gathering for a big meal, playing games as a family. Add to that the fact that I have to gear myself up again, a week from now, to host – when I haven’t planned for THAT at all… and I’m reeling a little. 

I am hopeful that Whole Foods will allow us to dramatically downsize our turkey. I am hopeful that they will allow me to not bring home the two enormous veggie sides I already paid for, and that they will refund me. (And, if that’s not possible, I plan to make some Szechuan green beans out of the leftovers.) I am grateful that my little family of three will have time to ourselves. I am grateful it wasn’t something more serious that’s keeping us apart, and that there will be (God willing) opportunities to get together again.