Blood.

I met my niece Ella today.

My dad is moving to Kansas in two weeks, so we had lunch at Ben and Katie's, I suppose as a re-introduction between his children before he goes away.

The baby had enormous cheeks. I said she was cute and Ben said, "Well, sure, she has our blood!" It was jarring, not so much that Ben and I are related, but to hear something that implies it's significant. I don't consider it meaningless; I just never considered it at all: that being related could have implications, that his children could look like me somehow, or that we share something based on family lines.

I went shopping with Caitie on Thursday. We don't look anything alike (in the face, at least). I've always considered her entirely my sister, but being family was about shared experience, not blood. Maybe our values or mannerisms or sense of humor, things I think we share most, were passed on genetically. These have value to me, and knowing that she's the only person who knows my childhood in detail, understands what it was like to grow up with my mom, her father on weekends, our stepdad. This knowledge that we'll carry certain profound impressions through our lives is what makes us sisters; that we're half related has little more significance to me than the idea that we're half un-related.

Rod and I had dinner with Ben and Katie once a couple years ago, and I went to their wedding a year or two before that. I saw Ben occasionally when we were kids, but I was maybe 5 at the oldest and my idea of family was pretty much shot -- or revised to include only a mom and baby sister. Comprehending that this older kid was somehow my brother didn't compute, and I never felt inclined to consider it.

If I had considered it more recently, I would have realized that regardless of my ambivalence toward knowing my dad, I would like to know Ben and Katie, and now Ella. Katie is a teacher, earned her masters at the UW. She maybe studied art history. Ben cooks, apparently, braises lamb shanks. They have a great house about two blocks from my Ravenna apartment, and judging from the decor they have good taste. I want to meet more babies; they have a baby. Presumably, I could try to get to know them now, but we've lived nearly within walking distance for years, so it's a bit odd to think of it today. And there are probably hundreds of Seattle couples with backgrounds and interests compatible with mine and Brian's, but apparently being family means a shortcut to friendship - you don't have to get lucky meeting someone at work, you can assume connections based on blood, then learn about them later.

So If I had considered it, I might have made some effort to know them. The implications of that, though, are barely fathomable. Would we actually have spent time together? Would I have known my dad better, seen some better side of him that made me like him more? Would the idea of having a brother mean something different to me (mean something to me)? It might have changed my concept of myself within some tenuous family structure, or might not have changed anything. Introductions are usually meant to resolve some mystery (Oh, you're the one. Now I see why everyone likes him so much. I didn't realize she'd be so tall.), but today was just questions.

The Dining Room Table

Pretty much everything about my life is great, except our dining room table.

We don't really have a dining room, just a space where our long living room runs into the kitchen, where the wall color changes from "Wilted Spinach" to "Fake Blood." Here, a laminate-pasted particle board and aluminum rectangle mocks my only real family value.

When I was growing up, we didn't sing together or go to church, and early efforts at family meetings by my stepdad were quickly abandoned; but we ate together every night. The only way to get out of eating with the family was to be eating with someone else's family -- it wasn't enough to simply have food, it had to be an intergenerational experience involving food cooked in a kitchen. I mostly hated the obligation, until one day a good friend who had (I imagined) a perfect family told me he only ate with his brother and parents on holidays and stuff -- most nights, his mom left tacos or something in the kitchen of their three-story, planned community house, and they ate on their own. Alone, I guess. And suddenly dinner together, across from each other, represented the kind of solid, stable, supportive structure I'd always yearned for. I still hurried from the table, but sometimes not so quickly.

And so it makes sense to me now that even though we were poor, my mom spent $200 on a heavy, dark table at a garage sale, shortly after marrying my stepdad. We were only four, but there was room for six at the least and 10 or 12 when both leaves were put in, for holidays or birthday parties. The chairs had high, carved backs, and the table legs curved down to heavy canine feet. Someone once put a pan down with nothing but a thin tablecloth underneath, so now there's a white moon burned into the top -- something painful at the time, now with a sort of sweet history.

I think when I moved out before junior year of high school, my family stopped eating together. My mom was a vegetarian anyway, my stepdad all meat and potatoes, and he and my sister never got along anyway. Without me as some sort of equalizer, I guess the structure seemed too flimsy. Even with the heavy, dark table.

We don't exactly have a dining room, and we're not really a family, but Brian and I still eat, often together. Like my mom, I think it's not enough to just have food -- dinner should be a communal experience. I want placemats and place settings, and a pan burning a crescent into the wood. I want to clear the table before dinner, not just shove clean a space for my cereal in the morning. It's not the 22 minutes spent sitting, or the pasta, but the feeling of being with friends at a bar, or at church, if you believe, or even reading a book - just being connected to some other human presence in a specific moment.

So I've been looking on craigslist for a big, heavy wooden table, something dark, no mid-90s oak with padded wheeled chairs, nothing "Scandinavian" or minimalist, and definitely no metal and glass structures. It might be misguided to imagine a carved wooden rectangle will bring with it the gravitas of family, but it will be something -- at the least, it will help define the space between giant TV and kitchen.

After a walk to campus with Buster and half hour or so with A Tree Grown In Brooklyn (which is amazing), found myself three cookies deep into a freshly-baked batch of fantastic chocolate chip cookies. I added walnuts to half the batch, which probably adds some flavor but mostly gives them a fabulous "rustic" texture. After purchasing an array of cookie scoops in various sizes, I've decided I don't actually want them all perfect circles. I miss the organic, lumpy, made-from-dough look.

Brian's insistance I try Crisco paid off, though. The cookies are super soft with a mysteriously airbrushed-looking yellow creaminess. Am still disturbed to have a vat of solid white fat sitting warm in the cupboard, but I can overlook the greatest weirdness for a good cookie.

It was a happy, leisurey Friday evening, after leaving work a little early and discovering the sun even hotter than it had been at noon when I met Caitie for lunch on the Ave. She talked about the GRE and getting her nipples pierced; I talked about professional pet portraits for Buster. If we hadn't come to our standard conclusion that mom is a crazy lady, we'd have been very unlikely to appear sisters at all.

My weekend calendar filled quickly with food-oriented social plans: Cafe Campagne, birthday barbecue, dim sum, and Brouwer's. Sarah also hopes I stop by the Fremont parade where she'll be standing enthusiastically at a Cease Fire table. I hope the weather hold so I can wear new summer clothes instead of the same four sweaters I've been wearing since October.

In her NY Times' blog, Judith Warner writes on sexually-charged manifestations of patriarchy in the US and abroad.

The premise: the connection between hymen-restoration trend in France, driven by the cultural need for unmarried women to remain (or re-become) virgins, and similar efforts in the US -- particularly, fathers who lead their teenage daughters to chastity balls and assert that it is their duty to protect their purity.

Warner also brings up rape and incest as more extreme examples of patriarchy -- and while they do not equate, she says,"there is nonetheless a kind of horror to their [fathers'] obsession with their daughters’ sexuality. ... And there is even greater danger to the fact that this particular aspect of the nationwide “abstinence movement” has not been broadly denounced as the form of emotional violence against girls that it indisputably is."

Indeed.

And an interesting counterpoint to arguments against the over-sexualization of young women. I personally find this paternal obsession with virginity about as creepy and inappropriate as Billy Ray's audience to Miley's sexually-charged Liebowitz photos.

While it's definitely uncomfortable for bratty, ridiculous teenagers and awkward parents to have 'the talk,' it is entirely possible for normal families to address sexuality in a normal, healthy, non-creepy way. No need to venture into territory that causes bloggers to revolt nationwide!

No one tried very hard to protect my virginity, and I don't recall ever being afraid of losing it too early or keeping it too long. I'm sure there was some kind of mental turmoil over it, and my parents were not thrilled when it went the way of YM magazine and shopping in the juniors section. But I'm fairly certain fears were over pregnancy, primarily, and not purity.

Progressive in conservative's clothing.

Once, during high-school, just after my parents had removed to remote and unfashionable Darrington, I left for a date wearing a knee-length grey jersey shirtdress. As I walked to the car, my mom called out, "You're wearing that to see a boy? You look like a frumpy librarian!"

This is the same mom who now has an enormous closet full of floor-length floral skirts (though I guess floral's en vogue now, too, proving all fashion transitory and vaguely arbitrary, basically a game of roulette winnable by anyone with some semblance of personal style).

Anyway, I occasionally did feel like a prudish aunt trapped in a teenage world of magazines lined with navel-skimming J-Lo necklines and department store shelves overflowing with thong-baring 7 jeans. All I ever wanted was to be a responsible adult, with a job, an apartment, a kitchen-aid mixer, and a nice pair of pumps. My first crush was Alex P. Keaton, and I while I quickly was bred into liberalism, my biker/hippie mom was obviously unable to break me of my affinity for pinstripes. It may never be my work wardrobe, nor (more unfortunately) Brian's, but I do love a nice suit.

So it was with enthusiasm I read the The Newly Uptight in the NY times. Blazer-loving women unite! Next week's NY Fashion Week promises a wealth of pencil skirts, pumps and properly-fitted strong lady pieces.

Beyond my general appreciation for the conservative aesthetic, these structured suits are safely non-trendy (read: timeless, not boring), and more flattering than most contemporary fashion -- designed in the 1950's/early '60s, when important women drove markets and not their troubled teenage daughters. It may all be fashion, but knee-length wool skirts are not equal to skinny jeans.

I can only hope the Jackie O manicured, first-lady-waiving, perfectly coifed image will actually replace the now-popular Mary Kate and Ashley O stringy-hair, anorexic-hunched, boho image for some significant duration. If the Times' quotations on this movement as "fashion comfort food" for the current/impending recession are to be believed, I imagine it may be safe beyond autumn.


Photo: Old ladies, Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton

christmas in the mountains

I desperately need the gym to open at 6 again. A month of aerobics replaced by Christmas baking has done me no good at all -- although my hair looks great from all the extra time I have in the morning.

Really, great.

All presents were excellent this year. I really can't think of one I cringed at. Much much fine tea, some candles probably, a good little wear-all-day scarf, a culinary miracle in the form of a rice cooker, two (2!) Martha Stewart how-to-be-perfect books, delicious lotions and soaps, perfect big gold stud earrings, an ice cream maker (egg nog + rum + frozen = amazing. repeat, gym must open soon), knitting lessons. Which may begin next week. I should check on that.

I survived a couple days in Darrington. I could definitely (and has) been less enjoyable, but I couldn't help lying awake desperately thinking how incredibly pointless it was for me to go Sunday for a Tuesday Christmas. I was good for the first two wine-enhanced hours at Grandma Joy's. Then everything went boring boring boring until Caitie showed up at 2 Christmas morning. Not only was her visit nicely limited, she got Christmas Eve-generous tips till 1.

But I did get a large amount of knitting done (one polite way to distract myself from the magnitude of Darrington's blandness and family's incessant chatter -- I ust don't understand how some people find so many words to say). Fingerless high-fiving handwarmers for Cait, scarf for mom, more of the Fancy Hat that Melissa and I are both doing. Because I obviously have enough to rant about - I don't need to be chilly as well.

Darrington today. Left around 11:30, arrived around 1:30, with a slight delay for Starbucks.


The weather was nice and the visit was short. Caitie arrived just after Brian, Buster, and me.
Said hello to everyone, spent a little time inside talking to mom, looking at a box of cookbooks she was sending home with me, and the quilt she finished for us -- pinks and purples and blacks and creams, with lots of hearts and words quilted in. Across the bottom, she wrote, "Small quilts help keep you close."

My mom and stepdad have 10 acres, a log house built by a logger who was a pretty big name in the early days of the town. Flower and herb and vegetable gardens, a river a few minutes through the woods, wild bunnies and birds and porcipines, occasional bear. The driveway overlooks Whitehorse mountain.



Buster's rarely off-leash -- I like to hope apartment puppies don't know what they're missing. He didn't go outside until I led him to the back, to introduce him to the chickens. We found them retreating behind a tree, but Buster drove them out in a flurry of flapping wings and squalking -- I've never seen him run so fast. Like the crafty hyena on Planet Earth, he seperated one from the pack chased it across the lawn, where it brilliantly cornered itself behind a potted plant an a shovel. They had a bit of a stand off, until Buster was distracted and the chicken ran home.



Dinner, acorn squash from mom's garden, pie from Caitie's restaurant, then the drive back. With one more stop at Starbucks.