NOTE: This is a birth story, featuring the words poop, amniotic fluid, blood, cervix … you get the idea. So if it’s your type of thing, just skip this one and we’ll be back to keeping chickens and sowing seeds before you know it. I had to write it, though, because I feel almost as if it hasn’t happened if I don’t, and this is the place where I put the things that I want to be able to find later. Plus, I love reading birth stories. If you do too, then carry on!

No matter how smoothly a pregnancy goes, there is no getting around that in the final weeks it’s pretty heavy going. I was at the point where turning over from one side to the other in bed was the hardest thing I did all day, and was feeling increasingly sure that gravity was my mortal enemy. I didn’t say anything to Ali about it, but one morning at breakfast he said, “Don’t worry, you’ll poop her out soon enough.” I immediately took umbrage at his choice of words. “It’s not quite as simple as that,” I sniffed.

At around 3 a.m. on January 18, the contractions began and there was a small, intermittent trickle of amniotic fluid. I lay in bed, dozing through most of it, since it was not particularly intense, but I did download a contraction timing app and I recorded them as best I could – every ten minutes or so, throughout the night. They stopped at around 6. My doctor had told me that my cervix was thick, so I should wait a few hours after contractions began before letting anyone know about it. This made total sense to me, since Baki took 27 hours to be born and Kaya took 15; clearly, I have a body that likes to take its time. That’s why I slept through the night and got the kids off to school before I called the midwife, Saadet Hanim, to tell her that things looked like they might be underway.

Ali had to go and feed the chickens, cats and dogs in the garden. I didn’t want to sit in the car for hours with him, and he didn’t want to leave me alone, so I asked Saadet Hanim, if I could come to her house. She cheerfully agreed – she had just been telling her daughter in law the story of Kaya’s birth over breakfast. “Let’s go for a walk,” I said to her, referring to the hours long walk that we took through the parks of Antalya while I was in labor with Kaya, six years ago.

We got to Saadet Hanim’s house at around 10:30. Her son and his wife of six months were visiting from Izmir, and her daughter and granddaughter were visiting from two floors down. “There’s a baby in her tummy,” Saadet explained to Arya, aged two. Arya handed me her baby doll, and when Saadet Hanim offered us coffee, produced a tiny yellow plastic cup and presented it to me with great ceremony. Ali left for the garden, and Saadet Hanim said she would examine me after we’d had our coffee.

No dilation to speak of, she pronounced – there was a long way to go. Furthermore, she had fractured her foot, so she was unable to walk outside the house at all. It was driving her crazy, she said. “The worst torture of all for me is to have to stay home,” she sighed, ruefully. It was easy to imagine that it must very difficult for her to be so confined – she is a very active person, and an avid walker. We both sat for a moment regretting that we wouldn’t be marching through the streets of Antalya together that day.

Fortunately for me, her daughter in law was feeling stir crazy and wanted to venture out; she had had corrective surgery on her nose three days earlier and hadn’t been out of the house since. She was self conscious about venturing too far from the house with her nose bandaged and her face badly bruised, but we walked a few circuits around the park in front of the house. When she went back in, I said I’d walk a bit more and showed her that I had my phone so there was no need to worry. As I reached the edge of the park, my waters broke. Luckily, I had a big fat pad on, but it was full of liquid now,  so my walk became a mission to find a supermarket where I could buy some Depends disposable underwear; I had some in my hospital bag, but I’d left it in the car, so it was on its way to the garden along with Ali.

It was past noon when I got back to the house, my mission accomplished, and my Ob-gyn Dr. Figen was there. She had been in surgery all morning but was free for the rest of the day, so she had come to visit while Saadet Hanim’s son was in town. She cheerfully offered to examine me, and said I was two centimeters dilated, but not very much effaced yet. Still, it was encouraging progress. “We can go out for another walk after we eat, if you want,” she said, encouragingly, leading me back to the kitchen where Saadet Hanim was dishing out green beans, cauliflower and turkey to the cheerful and hungry crowd around her kitchen table for lunch. After eating, we sat in the living room chatting and drinking tea when it began to pour rain outside. This put off our walk for a while, but by around 2 it had cleared up and Dr. Figen and I ventured out.

It was overcast and cool after the rain, and it felt good to walk briskly in that weather – it had been fairly sultry when I was out on my own. We walked to the waterfront and watched the waves break against Antalya’s famous cliffs for a while, then walked past the old town and planned to take a proper walk there together some time. Dr. Figen dragged me across the street to a candy store, saying, “There’s something here I’d like to buy,” and she smiled mischievously over her shoulder at me as we entered the store. It was a roll of fruit leather stuffed with hazelnut butter that had caught her eye, and she bought a small box to take back with us, asking the man behind the counter to set two pieces aside for us to eat. We left the store arm in arm, eating the sweets as we walked, feeling complicit.

The wind was picking up and the sky was darkening, but our luck held out and we didn’t get caught in any further downpours. We did stop again to buy simit (sesame breads) – a bag for the boys and one for Saadet Hanim’s house. By the time we were nearing the house again, the contractions were coming every 4 to 5 minutes but only lasting about half a minute. I could feel them radiating down my legs, though, so they were getting stronger. Dr. Figen looked at her watch. “And hour and ten minutes,” she announced – the length of our walk.

Ali was back at Saadet Hanim’s house when we returned, drinking tea in the sitting room. We decided that he ought to go home to take care of the boys and we would meet at the hospital. I’d call him when we were on our way. He left shortly afterwards – it was about 3:30 by then. Saadet Hanim, her daughter, granddaughter, son, and daughter and law and I all sat in the living room chatting and drinking tea. Her 12 year old grandson came in and read jokes from the internet to us from his phone. Saadet Hanim said the she would examine me at four. Her daughter turned to me and asked me what the contractions felt like – both of her children had been born via C-section. “Birth is seen differently now than it used to be,” Dr, Figen had said. “Many women look at delivering babies as the job of the doctor, not of the mother. It is a service to be provided.” I wasn’t sure how to answer her question. The contractions felt like a hand closing inside me, like a rhythm gaining momentum, preparing to take me out of my mind and into my body.

Saadet Hanim took me to her bedroom to examine me and shook her head – only another centimeter dilated and still not very much effaced. She went back out to the living room to tell Dr Figen and I stood there, looking down at the pillows on the floor where I had lain to be examined. It was quiet in the bedroom, and suddenly I couldn’t face the thought of going back outside and sitting on the sofa engaging in polite conversation. I felt tired and a little lonely, without Ali or the boys. “It’s just going to get more and more uncomfortable from here on out,” I thought, and it made me so tired to think it that I gave in and just lay down on the floor, on my left side, with one pillow under my head and the other one under my right leg, in a position I’d seen in a book on birthing that had been labeled “active rest.” It made the contractions feel a lot worse, but I continued to lay there. I didn’t want to stand and I didn’t want to sit. Only laying on the floor made any sense to me right then. I lay on the floor and murmured words of encouragement to myself and began to faintly enjoy the growing intensity of the contractions.

Dr. Figen poked her head in, saying that she needed to visit a patient at a nearby hospital and that she would be back in about an hour or so. Saadet Hanim brought a heavy woolen blanket and lay it over me; the room was very cool, and she pointed out the heater to me in case I needed it. The blanket was nice – laying still on the floor, it had gotten cold. Eventually, it became too uncomfortable to be lying down, so I squatted a little, and stood leaning against the wall. I tried being on all fours but that felt awful — too much gravity at work on my tummy. The contractions were much stronger now, coming every three to four minutes and lasting about a minute each. I was having to vocalize to relax through them – high sighing sounds. I sighed breathily into the scarf that I was wearing around my neck.

Saadet Hanim came in. “It’s getting harder,” she said. I nodded. “It has to,” she said, sympathetically. “It won’t happen otherwise.”I just nodded, my face buried in my scarf. She examined me again – I was fully effaced she said, if not all that dilated. “I think I’d better call Dr. Figen,” she said. She was nearby, Saadet Hanim reported after she hung up. She offered to bring me her pilates ball; I had used it during my labor with Kaya, and I nearly made a lunge for it when she brought it back to me. I sat on it and it felt just wonderful. Finally, I was comfortable. Even the contractions at their heaviest were more bearable on the ball. I sighed, then moaned into my scarf. Saadet Hanim curled up on the bed. I bounced on the ball. I loved the ball at that moment and told Saadet Hanim I would happily marry it. She laughed and I realized that I was dreading having to leave the ball, could not even imagine getting up off of it. “We can take it with us,” Saadet Hanim said, seeming to read my mind.

By this time, I had a minute or two between contractions during which I could talk, walk, and function normally, but during the contractions I was completely preoccupied and unable to do much of anything except sigh and moan. When the phone rang I wondered how on earth I was going to make it all the way outside to the car, but those interludes made it possible. I made it down the hall and into the elevator before the next one came, then leaned heavily against the wall of the elevator. Saadet Hanim’s son was holding the pilates ball and told his mother to go in the elevator with me while he took the stairs down. By the time we got down to the ground floor, I was good to walk out front. It was windy and cold out. Saadet Hanim held the ball and scanned the street for Dr. Figen in her car. I leaned against the wall. Finally, she sprang into action, grabbing my hand and pulling me towards a car that had pulled over by the bus stop. I got into the car while Saadet Hanim put the ball into the trunk and we left for the hospital. I was moaning louder by now during the contractions, and unable to think much, or to talk at all except for in between contractions. Some distant part of me was noticing that the car was really very comfortable as I pressed one hand up onto the ceiling of the car and the other hand onto my forehead.

We were stuck in traffic. Saadet Hanim’s house wasn’t far from the hospital, but it was in the middle of the city. Dr. Figen had her hazards on, and she and Saadet fretted quietly about getting to the hospital in time. “Do you think she’ll have the baby in the car?” Dr. Figen asked. Saadet Hanim didn’t seem to think so. My moans were getting deeper – they seemed to be coming from deeper inside me. No, it was that they were descending lower into my body, down into my belly and out through my legs. “Do you feel like you have to poop?” Dr. Figen asked. “No,” I managed to say before the next one came. Saadet Hanim’s phone rang – it was her grandson. I let out a mighty moan and Saadet Hanim explained that the baby was on her way. She put her phone on speaker so I could hear the excited cries of both of her grandchildren. “The baby is coming now? She is going to see her baby soon??” As the contraction faded, I laughed at their excitement and noticed that we were almost there.

When we got to the hospital, Saadet Hanim sprang out of the car and someone brought a wheelchair. I sank into it as another mighty contraction hit, and felt myself being wheeled about. We stopped and it transpired that an ambulance had parked directly in front of the shallow ramp, so we were stuck at the curb. Some people had gathered to help lift the chair up on to the curb and I wanted to say that I would just stand up to make it easier but I realized that I simply couldn’t, so I stayed put, my face in my hands. The wheelchair lurched through the emergency room and into the elevator, Dr. Figen and Saadet Hanim in quick pursuit. I moaned as we went down, but luckily I had a brief reprieve as we got out of the elevator. Outside the delivery room, I saw Baki and Kaya sitting side by side, iPads in their laps. I felt a smile on my face and I called out, “Hi you guys! I love you!” as they wheeled me past, and Ali stood to join us. There was a nurse at the door and I told her I recognized her from somewhere.

Inside the delivery room, I noticed a bathroom. “I have to pee,” I said, as I took off my clothes to put on the hospital gown that another nurse was handing to me. The nurse I’d recognized was on her way out and she gave me a cheery wave as she left. “If it’s just pee, go ahead,” said Dr. Figen. ‘Then I will examine you.” I went into the toilet, my gown only half fastened, and grabbed some toilet paper. I tried to sit on the toilet but it felt all wrong. And I couldn’t seem to pee after all.

“I couldn’t pee,” I said, coming out of the toilet, still holding the toilet paper. “Never mind,” said Dr. Figen, gesturing to me to get on the weird delivery chair thing that I hated so much the last time I’d been here, giving birth to Kaya. It looked curiously welcoming this time around, though. It was covered in absorbent pads. They looked soft. I was beyond caring where I went – I would have stood on my head it they told me to. So I got up on the chair and put my legs up into the strange leg rests and Saadet Hanim told me to hang on to the bars at the front of the seat, no, not the ones on the side, the ones on the front. “Now push like you’re going to poop,” she said and I had a brief lucid moment of disbelief that we were all talking about this whole thing in precisely the manner that Ali had so offended me in. But the thought was swept away as I grabbed the bars and bore down, pushing hard. I felt the language center of my brain shut down as Turkish lost all meaning and I completely lost the thread of the conversations going on around me. All I could feel was a raw power building up inside me that needed to be released. I pushed again, distantly aware that I was making a sound, a deep guttural roar, with every push. I opened my eyes and saw Dr. Figen staring intently at something, her hands moving – massaging my perineum? I closed my eyes as another great surge of power built up inside me and clawed its way out of me. I felt a burning sensation, pushed again, and then heard everyone saying something. Ali was at my side, saying, “Breathe!” and I realized that was what Dr. Figen, Saadet Hanim, and the nurse were saying too, so I breathed, and they kept saying it so I kept breathing. Then they let me push again and Ali said, “She’s coming! I can see our baby!” and I gave another great push and felt something tumble out of me. “She’s here!” Ali said, and I opened my eyes to see a hand closed around a tiny leg, then a long body as the leg was lifted into the air and she was placed into my arms, eyes closed, warm and wet and, now, crying, and I was nearly crying myself. I said something like “Oh my God!” because I just couldn’t believe it. For hours and hours I had been laboring to deliver this baby, had carried her in my body for months, had seen her move on the ultrasound, had heart her heart beat, had felt her move inside me, but holding her at the end of all that was simply too much to comprehend. And my brain seemed to shut down again. I held my baby against my skin, Ali held me. I felt a warm gush of liquid over my chest and someone said she’d peed. I felt the placenta being delivered, felt blood, a slight sting as Dr. Figen dabbed alcohol on me. “No stitches needed,” she said, “just a few superficial tears.” I raised a fist into the air and cheered, and lay back and let them clean me up. My work was done.

Happy Halloween!

I’ve been silent for a good long while, I know, and it has been an eventful seven months or so. I had a sad sort of summer, but I didn’t really notice how sad it had been until the weather changed in late September, the air suddenly cooling and lightening as the heavy cloak of humidity lifted. I felt buoyant and energetic and realized that I had spent the entire summer in a deep funk. It wasn’t only emotional heavy lifting that got me down – I was also dealing with early pregnancy shenanigans, which are never pleasant. (We are expecting a baby girl in late January.)

I have always loved autumn, and this year I welcomed it gratefully. The boys went back to school, brimming with enthusiasm and eager to be back among their peers, and of course there’s Halloween. We’ve been gearing up for Halloween for a while now and Kaya burst out of bed this morning, dancing with excitement. There are parties at school (the boys were armed with treats to share with their friends and their costumes in their backpacks), we’ll watch Nightmare Before Christmas after school, and then they’ll go out trick or treating.

But the best thing about fall has nothing to do with today and everything to do with tomorrow. My favorite thing about fall, that I’ve been looking forward to all year, is National Novel Writing Month. It takes place every November, and during this month participants commit to writing a novel of 50,000 words – from scratch – in 30 days. It’s crazy, but it’s completely awesome.

I’m not sure when I first heard about NaNoWriMo, but I joined in 2011 and made no progress at all on my novel that year. For every year that followed, November would roll around and I’d be ready with excuses to get out of trying again, even though writing a novel is something I had always wanted to do. I would be traveling that month, there was a medical situation in the family, Thanksgiving dinner would need to be made – I rolled out every reason I could find. I’m not sure what changed my mind last year, but I decided to cut it out with the excuses and give NaNoWriMo another shot. I somehow managed to convince Baki to join me, participating in the Young Writers Program (where school-age writers can set their own word count goal and write), and thus discovered my secret weapon – a writing partner.

Baki and I spent an hour a day writing together – this is one of our work stations, but we moved all over the place. We would put in our earphones (I listened to a ton of Korean pop music – very upbeat but with lyrics I could not understand) and type away. Sometimes it was easy to get the words down, other times it was like pulling teeth, but having someone in the room typing alongside me helped more than I could ever have imagined. Baki had set his goal at 5,000 words, and he finished his novel early in the month, maybe by the 20th or so, a first-time novelist at the tender age of 11.

I was writing until the very last day of November, but I made it. Anyone who achieves their word count goal is a winner in NaNoWriMo, but it is really way bigger than that. I always thought I didn’t have a story to tell so I couldn’t write a novel, but I discovered last November how untrue that was. I started my novel with a handful of characters, a setting, and only the vaguest notion of a plot. As the month wore on, the story just grew on its own. I love to read, and the stories I love best are the ones that feel true, like they have some sort of skeleton or integrity that holds them together, separate from everything else. And as I wrote my own story I was amazed discovered that even my lowly attempt at a novel had resembling that inner logic – there was story there, waiting to be written. All I had to do was discover it. I mined everything in my day for clues – conversation, newspaper articles, random thoughts that popped into my head while driving. There were discoveries at every turn. This was not at all how I imagined writing my first novel would work, and it still amazes me. But something about the time crunch broke down all of my resistance to it, and I just pillaged every waking moment for plot points.

Not that what I wrote was a masterpiece. It was a crummy first draft, full of plot holes and typos, characters that morphed mid-story into something else, and motivations that changed as the story grew. It is a long way from being anything that I would let anyone read (except maybe my partner in crime, Baki), but it is my first novel and tomorrow I am going to start on my second.

So I’m going to throw this out there to anyone who might be reading – if you’ve ever toyed with the idea of writing a novel of your own, why not take the plunge and do it this November? Commit to something crazy and see what happens! Tell everyone you know that you are doing it in order to put some pressure on yourself (like I’m doing right now), and if you can, find a writing partner.

If you can’t find a partner, there are virtual write-ins on youtube (dates and times are posted on the NaNoWriMo website) and amazing word sprints on Twitter. The Twitter word sprints (@NaNoWordSprints) were an invaluable tool that really got me unstuck more times than I can count. They are going on practically around the clock, with themes and prompts that changed with their moderators, tons of support and feedback, and all around WriMo inspiration.

If all I ever do as a writer is bang out a wobbly first draft every November, I will consider it time well spent. Why not join in the fun?

takes talent

there are two
kinds of human
beings in the world 
so my observation
has told me
namely and to wit
as follows
firstly
those who
even though they
were to reveal
the secret of the universe
to you would fail
to impress you
with any sense
of the importance
of the news
and secondly
those who could 
communicate to you
that they had
just purchased
ten cents worth
of paper napkins
and make you
thrill and vibrate
with the intelligence
                   archy

Don Marquis, “the Life and Times of Archy and Mehitabel”

Although I wasn’t there, they tell me that she was asleep and that she simply stopped breathing. It was the death that everyone says they want. She was in her apartment in NY; we had returned from Turkey only ten days earlier. It was an abrupt end to a life lived with boundless generosity, infectious enthusiasm and plenty of laughter.
Her diagnosis this past August of ALS was a challenge that she tackled with her customary aplomb. Nothing, neither gradually losing her ability to speak and swallow nor the obstacles this posed to both communicating and eating seemed to dampen her spirits for long. She simply kept finding things to be delighted by every day. She found humor in the most unlikely places and never hesitated to share it. 
One night about a month ago, at my home in Antalya, I heard her in the kitchen in the middle of the night, so I got out of bed to join her. Her lips were dry, she indicated, and I brought her some lip balm. She carefully applied it, as if drawing her mouth on and then paused, sensing the gesture. Then she mimicked scribbling over her whole face with it and I laughed. She waved a hand dismissively, to say “I’m fine, don’t worry,” sending me, smiling, back to bed.
So we thought, “We have plenty of time,” and we thought “This thing has nothing on her.” And then in February she got pneumonia and stayed in hospital in Antalya for three days. She got over it – two weeks later she had a clean bill of health; she was tough. But it knocked her sideways. She had trouble breathing, and her optimism waned. Where once she towered over the puny threat of ALS, now she seemed cowed by it.
We returned to NY on March 17 and she was referred to hospice on the 20th. On the 22nd she was admitted, they brought a hospital bed to her apartment, and we arranged 24 hour care to supplement the hospice nurse visits. I left her, reluctantly, on the 25th, and she was joined by my cousin Pamela. On the 27th I received the news that she had died, at home, in her sleep. 
So here we are. We will gather at her apartment on Saturday, the 1st of April (no joke) between 11 and 4. And next week I’ll take her cremated remains to Turkey and bury them next to my dad’s, under the Bodhi tree in our garden. The boys will help me dig the hole and we’ll plant something with fragrant flowers over top. A wintersweet, maybe, or a variegated daphne. And we will all slowly, slowly get used to the hollow spot at the center of our lives.

p.s. – another article (with a stellar photo) here.

This past Monday night, I made myself a cup of herbal tea as I always do, adding a scoop of collagen powder for good measure (this will likely make perfect sense to a few people and strike others as bizarre, but I won’t get into it now). It’s a nightly routine, and I mostly do it automatically. But last Monday night it was simply heavenly and I felt so deeply grateful for this daily treat.

By way of background information, I ought to mention that my mom was diagnosed with ALS (also known as MND and Lou Gherig’s Disease) in August of 2016. Her initial symptoms were a very slight slurring of speech that only a few of us could hear but quickly progressed into difficulty swallowing. It took almost a year to get to the bottom of what was causing her troubles, and I then spent the hottest weeks of the summer grappling with her diagnosis in Antalya while she mulled it all over in NYC.

My mother, for those of you who do not know her, is a feisty lady, and she has dealt with all of the challenges thrown at her with great aplomb. When swallowing became a tiring and scary prospect, she consented to have a feeding tube put in and has adapted marvellously to her new way of eating. She still cooks, of course. Although she now eats pretty much nothing at all by mouth, she spotted three overripe avocados on my counter this evening and whipped up a quick guacamole so they would not go to waste.

So when she got into a real flap on Friday morning because she couldn’t breathe properly, I was alarmed. And when it happened again in the afternoon, I declared that it was time to go to the hospital. Ali and I spoke on the phone briefly and decided that I’d better take her to the Akdeniz University Hospital because we had heard that there were doctors there dealing with ALS, and the university hospital had a reputation for being a sensible place where the doctors are not in the least profit driven, which cannot be said for some of the private hospitals.

We went in to the emergency room. “Can’t breathe easily” is a vague complaint, but they were quick to bring my mother in and set her up with a nebuliser, and before long she was breathing easily and seemed more relaxed. They took some blood and did a chest X-ray. And we sat around a lot – I’ve been to the ER with my a few times now, and there is invariably plenty of waiting. It’s like being on a plane – you just have to let go of the time and let it pass unobserved or you get edgy and despair tugs at you.

A neurologist came to see my mom and encouraged us to visit the neurology clinic the following week, because a professor there was doing work with ALS patients. “They’ll admit her tonight because they found pneumonia,” he said, conversationally, “so she may still be here on Monday.”

“They found pneumonia??” I echoed, aghast. Pneumonia is no walk in the park for anyone, particularly once you get past a certain age, but it’s especially bad news for people like my mom who can’t cough without assistance from a machine, or spit stuff out. It can be a serious danger, so I found myself suddenly grateful to be in the hospital.

My mom was admitted that night and moved into a room with a diabetic woman who was apparently completely chock full of cortisol and no one could figure out why. I went home to get some things for us both and tell Ali and the boys the latest.

When I got back, my mom was writhing in pain. “The IV needle hurts,” she wrote on her board. I went to find the nurse and told her what my mother had said and she tutted sympathetically. “It’s the medicine – it burns the veins.” 

“Wow,” I thought, “that really sucks,” and went to break the news to my mom.

So for the next few days we found ourselves caught up in the routines of the hospital ward. Lights on at 6, blood pressure, temperature, antibiotics. Breakfast cart at 8:30, but no food for my mom. When they heard she had a feeding tube they were happy to leave her feeeding to me. I got food though, from the Companions food cart. 

More antibiotics at 12 – the burning one. Lunch at 1:30. And a blood thinner at 2 and more antibiotics at 6 and more fire water at midnight, with the dinner cart in between. Sometimes there were other, weird things like the time that they got my mom out of bed at 4:30 a.m. to weigh her. And the days passed surprisingly quickly with all of these regular occurrences to mark the time.

Her room was almost at the end of the hall, across from a bright lounge area. People drifted in to the lounge to compare notes, commiserate, or sometimes to just nap. I discovered that my mother’s roommate had been there for three weeks, while the young man from down the hall had been looking after his diabetic mother there for two weeks; her foot was infected. The day we left, he told me strickenly in the elevator that they were going to amputate it in a week’s time.

On Monday morning, a head nurse marched in folllowed by an orderly pushing a cart piled high with sheets. “Let’s clear that window sill,” she said briskly, pointing at the thermoses and feeding paraphenelia I had lined up there, “and put your bag in the cupboard.We’ll  change the sheets. Can you untie that plastic bag from the bed? That’s not allowed. Doctor visits today – the room should look it’s best.” So I hid everything away, and they changed the sheet while my mom was in the bathroom. When she got out she raised her eyebrows at the lack of plastic bag for her tissues – “it’s forbidden,” I explained. She shrugged. Later that day she spat into a tissue and held it aloft for a moment before defiantly throwing it on the floor. We laughed behind the curtain dividing the room, feeling complicit. Then I told my mom that in Hong Kong when you blow your nose in a tissue it’s called “making won ton” and we laughed over that. “Give your won ton to me,” I said.

The nurses had alluded to the fact that my mom would be discharged on Monday if she improved when they changed shifts, and a doctor breezed in and asked for a blood test and phlegm sample. Once these were tested, my mom had a green light to leave.

Of course, leaving a hospital is never especially straightforward, so it took us all afternoon to manage it and we didn’t get back home until 7, after a stop at the pharmacy to buy her antibiotics. I made a quick dinner for us all and my mom went to bed and the kids got ready to go to sleep and I put the kettle on to make my customary cup of tea. 

What a joy to be standing in front of my own stove, waiting for the water to boil, and to pour the water over the tea and smell the scent of it. What a pleasure to walk down the hall to my room and settle into bed – my own bed, not a fold out chair, in pajamas not my days-old clothes. Oh and what a relaxing and lovely feeling to take a sip of tea and reach for my book!

(My mom is on the mend, though the antibiotics don’t agree with her and she’s still kind of congested. It is pneumonia, after all…)

I always see this sign on the way to JFK airport. There are plenty of billboards and signs along that road, of course, but this one doesn’t change from year to year and it makes me smile every time I see it. Finally, I had the presence of mind to snap a quick photo of it as we crawled past in heavy traffic.

Kaya and I flew in to NY to help my mom attend to some health stuff (Kaya was there for morale, me for logistics) but nothing dire. While we were there the story about the Egypt Air flight “disappearing” broke. Is it just me or would anyone else rather the media not talk about planes vanishing? I feel like this is something I would say to my kids, but just because you can’t find something doesn’t mean it’s gone. 

Anyway, as our flight home took off, there was a persistent beeping sound in the background. It didn’t last long (no doubt someone had noticed it was unsettling and turned it off) but as I listened to it I had a moment of clarity. I looked over at Kaya who was gazing out the window as the plane lifted off and I thought that if our plane were to “disappear” it would be a horrible shame for his life to be cut short. I’d have done anything to spare him that. 

On a certain day in September, a friend of mine was on his way into a certain building when a plane crashed into it. He looked up and saw stuff falling out of the sky. There was a woman standing next to him, frozen to the spot. He grabbed her and ran. I always thought that was pretty revealing – he wasn’t thinking, he just reacted to his circumstances purely reflexively. Seems to me, those are the moments when you know what you’re about.

I sometimes wonder what my impulses would be in an emergency, and in that moment in the plane I felt a little closer to knowing what I might do. It wasn’t a hugely emotional thing, it lasted a second at most, and afterwards we both promptly fell asleep.

Actually I can’t believe that Popcorn Chicken is an actual thing. For those of you lucky enough not to have encountered this disgusting idea, it may come as a relief to learn that the thought of it is more horrible than the thing itself, which is innocuous. It is basically small scraps of chicken aggressively salted and battered and then deep fried. It is, like chicken fingers, merely a food with an extremely unfortunate name.

We have been running incubators in our apartment to hatch chicks. We used to do it the natural way, you know when a hen gets broody and sits on about 20 eggs and gets nasty when you try to move here. The thing is, once the chicks hatched (rarely more than half the eggs, for us) the other adult chickens would attack them and eventually they all ended up dead. This was a huge turning point in my relationship to our chickens. I mean, I grew up watching cartoons with motherly hens wearing aprons showing their chicks what’s what, so I was unprepared for this descent into the harsh realities of nature.

Ali’s approach to this problem was to suggest that we get an incubator, but I couldn’t see it. Why buy a machine to do what an animal could do just as well? We could separate her from the flock to raise her chicks. Well, we tried that and ended up with a hen that had nowhere to go once she lost interest in her chicks after three weeks because her old coop-mates wanted nothing to do with her. So I relented and we got the incubator.

And that is how chickens became the fastest growing aspect of our garden life.

We got chickens in the first place almost by accident; some friends brought us our first group – a rooster and three hens. We had one little coop and we didn’t let them out for the first year because we wanted to protect the plants. Then we realized that chickens are great pest patrollers and that they are particularly fond of eating scorpions, which we had plenty of, to our dismay (and ticks too – the first year was pretty horrific. I even saw a tick crawling on the wall. And it was moving fast!). So from then on our chickens have ranged free and we have caged in our flowers and vegetables, creating chicken-wire perimeters around vegetable and flower beds.

Soon we outgrew our first incubator and got a bigger one. The smaller incubator became the hatchery, where we would move the eggs on day 18. Because here’s the thing: eggs hatch on day 21 like clockwork. Which brings me to popcorn chicken.

Chicks can live for two days after hatching without eating a thing, because they hatch with some yolk stuck to them (and they will peck at one another to get at it, which made me nervous but nothing came of it). That’s why you can order chicks in the mail. And they can stay in an incubator for up to 24 hours after they hatch without suffering any ill effects. Anyway, you can’t really take them out until they dry off – they hatch wet and scrawny looking and will catch a chill if they are taken out into a drafty cage right away. You want to move them when they are fluffy, like the chicks you would imagine.

Sometimes the chicks hatch while we are in the garden and we get there 12 hours or so after the fact. If it is light out and the chicks are energetic, they all cheep like mad and when we lift the lid of the incubator they start leaping about and if you are not careful they will spill out on to the table.

Popcorn chicken.

 

Baki is learning about the Bubonic Plague in his Social Studies class, and came home talking about fleas and rats and doctors with beaks, so naturally the first thing that sprang to mind was pomander balls, especially with Christmas around the corner.

Plague doctors wore masks with beak-like protrusions on them (you might be familiar with the Venetian “doctor” mask, which is quite similar to the one in this picture, if a bit more ominous). This was because the beak area could be stuffed with aromatic herbs; it was believed that sweet smells could ward off the disease. That’s where pomander balls enter the picture. (picture credit: Paul Furst (1608-1666), “Der Doctor Schabel von Rom”)

Every year at Christmas time we open up the boxes of Christmas ornaments and the same smell rises from them – oranges and clove, with faint scents of pine. This is the smell of Christmas to me, and it is mostly coming from the pomander balls in the boxes, some of them decades old.

My mother said that she learned how to make pomander balls when she was in high school, but couldn’t get more specific than that. All I know is that for as long as I can remember, the clove studded oranges have made their appearance at the end of every year. In my mind they were synonymous with that time of year and I didn’t think much about it beyond that.

Pomander balls in their present incarnation as clove studded oranges showed up in the 19th century; a gift of a pomander ball at that time was said to indicate “warmth of feeling.” Making pomander balls is pretty straightforward – just cover the orange with cloves. You want to leave a little space between them because the orange will shrink a bit as it dries, but not too much or it will look patchy and balding. When we set Baki to the task, though, it was about thirty seconds before he was complaining of sore fingers and declaring himself bored to death.

Then my mother had a wonderful idea.

“Why not use a fork?” she said.

I had on occasion used a toothpick to poke holes for the cloves , but by using a fork you make the holes and ensure even spacing. A dessert fork is best for the meticulous (me), a dinner fork for the underachiever (Baki).

In this manner, we were able to make our pomander balls in record time.

And of course there is the added pleasure of the smell – cloves smell great, and there is something heartening about the smell of orange peels. Make one and see – and keep it for decades! It’ll still hold up, smelling of the Spice Isles and bringing a whiff of the Plague to your holidays.

Merry Christmas to all and sundry!