Something fun to share

Charlie and I are heading to Vermont to climb Mt. Killington. But before I left, I wanted to share this exciting link from daughter Sara about her hike up Mt. Olympus.

Mothers and Daughters

It has been eight months since Sara flew off to Macedonia to be a Peace Corps Volunteer. When she gets a chance, she updates her blog about her experiences but I thought this rainy Mother's Day Sunday might be a good chance for me to reflect.

Molly, who combines the roles of little sister and best friend is headed over for a visit. During her sophomore year, Molly worked two jobs, ate practically nothing and successfully bargain hunted for cheap airfare and on Tuesday, she will be flying first to Paris to visit a friend who is doing a semester abroad and then to Italy to visit another friend and then to Athens where Sara will meet her. They will spend a few days in Greece and then head to Macedonia. Oh, to be a beanie baby on one of their backpacks.

What I wonder is how did it happen that young girls now feel so strong and so empowered. Molly did all the working and saving and planning without any input from her parents. She set a goal, did what she had to do and now is embarking on it without fear. Sara did the same, although because of her personality, there was more conversation involved.

I am in awe of these women that are my daughters.

Anna Quindlen wrote a piece in Newsweek five years ago where she said that that having a daughter made her a better woman. My favorite paragraph in the article is this:

Each wave of feminism has believed in something called the New Woman. The woman who could vote, who could work, who could be truly free. I am the mother of the New Woman. She doesn't waste a lot of time tailoring the cut of her character to suit the demands of a world that has always had mediocre taste. She never milks her gender, and she is not cowed by guys. She has taught me to dare more and conform less, to cut down on my hypocrisy because she shames me by seeing right through it. Being her mother is like playing basketball with a crack player (and she is that);
she raises the level of the game of life
just by showing up.

From Macedonia

Yesterday Sara finished her training in Veles, Macedonia. The picture on the right is from yesterday's swearing-in ceremony and the lady beside Sara is the sweet host mother who has taken care of my little girl for the past three months as she learned the language and her way around.

Finally, in her new apartment in Vinica where she will spend the next two years, Sara has reliable internet service and for the first time was able to send me pictures from the last few months. The picture on the left is from a hike that she took into the mountains above Veles. I can hardly wait to go see this country!

On Monday, she will start working at the local high school and hopefully start updating her blog with her adventures. Vinica is near the Bulgarian border and there is bus service to Sofia and flights into Sofia from Boston---dream, dream, dream.

From Macedonia via Skype

Sara has been in Macedonia a month now and is settling in pretty well. Until late December, she will be in training with intensive language immersion that includes daily classes and life with a host family in the city of Veles which is smack, dab in the middle of Macedonia. She seems happy and is enjoying her adventure and learning about her new culture and language.

Sara is a picky eater, she does not mind eating the same thing meal after meal, day after day, week after week but there are only certain things that she can manage to eat. After a month of experimenting and without a common language, her host mother has figured out that she likes cucumbers and radishes and cheese and bread.

The host mother sounds very sweet and is taking good care of her. The first day that Sara was there, host mother walked her to school--holding her hand when they crossed the street.

Sara is a very petite person and, in addition to being particular about her food, she is particular about the length of her pants. She has to have them hemmed when they are new because we can never buy them the right length, but I have learned through years of trial and error that the hem must be barely above the ground at the back of her shoes. Host mother told Sara that her pants, carefully hemmed to specifications by me prior to departure, were not beautiful so while Sara was off at the internet cafe, host mother cut 2-1/2 inches off all of her pants and hemmed them so that she would be beautiful. Oh dear.

She is loving learning about the culture and while this culture misses her, the internet does make it all a lot easier.

What's for dinner?

So, a few days ago, Sara and I realized with a start that I had never gotten around to teaching her how to cook or mend or iron or really just about anything except how to tell a funny story and laugh at the craziness of the world. Those skills have gotten her through the last 22 years pretty well, but she's going to have to feed herself once she gets to her posting in Macedonia.

So, we decided that two decades of procrastination in learning the womanly arts was enough and this week she has been cooking and baking. We are trying to find easy meals that she likes and can make from ingredients rather than a box and we'll put them together in a recipe book before she leaves.

Last night she made chicken and dumplings. Chicken and dumplings are a true favorite for everyone in our family and she discovered that it was surprisingly easy. She boiled some chicken pieces with onion, garlic, salt and pepper and then when it was tender she mixed up the dumplings.

Dumplings
2 cups flour
4 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
4 tbsp. soft butter cut into the flour mixture
1 cup milk
The dumplings were dropped into the boiling chicken stock and rose back up to the surface moist and fluffy.


Tonight, she made a pizza from scratch--not a box or a vacuum sealed pouch to be found.

Pizza Crust
2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
1 1/2 cups warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
Knead the dough and let rise for an hour in a well-oiled covered bowl, punch the dough down, roll out and top to your taste. She used a very small amount of tomato sauce and lots of mozzarella cheese. She cooked it for 15 minutes at 425 and we all enjoyed it.

Tomorrow night, it will be homemade macaroni and cheese.

While keeping an eye on her pizza crust creation, I was busy canning tomatoes from the garden. These will be nice to open for a soup or a stew over the winter.

Tomorrow, along with the macaroni and cheese we will tackle hemming pants and sewing on buttons. Wish us luck!

Lonesome Lake

It was a misty rainy hike up to Lonesome Lake hut on Friday afternoon. Sara and I hiked the 1.6 miles in just under an hour and discovered that only five other people had made their way up.

There was a man who had hiked to the hut with his two little children and over dinner we learned that he was a photojournalist and had spent time in Macedonia ten years ago covering the Albanian refugee situation. Then we discovered that one of the croo had a friend visiting and that the friend was headed to Mozambique for the Peace Corps. What a small world.

Saturday the weather cleared out and we were able to enjoy a spectacular view of Franconia Ridge. The photojournalist and his children headed down the mountain and the hut filled up with day hikers and a large group that was staying for the night. Sara headed back to the car to drive home and Charlie switched places with her and hiked up to spend Saturday night with me at the hut.

The hut was totally full with 48 on Saturday night. There was one large group of friends and two smaller family groups all talking and laughing at once. Because Lonesome Lake hut is so close to I-93 (only an hour hike--1.6 miles and 1000 feet in elevation) it is a great "starter" hike. Folks who haven't hiked much before or families with young children can access the hut and get a taste of the back country. The AMC croo takes care of providing a hearty supper and breakfast and the bunks are comfortable and equipped with three woolen blankets and a pillow.

The huts through the white mountains are also convenient to the Appalachian Trail and they provide a place for through hikers to stay and in exchange for some chores they can get a meal and a place to sleep on the floor.

Overnight heavy rain started and the 48 people at breakfast were all a little quieter wondering how miserable it would be getting back down the mountain. One thing you learn and acquire as you hike for a while is the correct clothing for weather in the mountains. The secret is synthetic fabrics that dry quickly--it took me a few years but I now have a wardrobe from undergarment to outerwear that will minimize the amount of moisture next to my skin and maximize the preservation of my body heat.

The weather in the White Mountains can be mercurial and coupling that with the accessibility of trails leading to the high peaks, every year there are accidents, injuries and fatalities due to the weather and judgment errors. Tom posted an entry about a terrible death and near-death on Franconia Ridge that occured this past Winter. There is an newspaper article about the survivor here.

Many of the rookie hikers at the hut on Sunday had blue jeans, sneakers and sweatshirts for their walk down the mountain in the rain. The temperatures were warm enough that nothing but discomfort would result from their cotton clothing but it wouldn't have taken much of a drop in temperature for the situation to be more concerning.

Macedonia

Before Thanksgiving, Daughter Sara was accepted into the Peace Corps but didn't know her country. She has suspected that her invitation would be to the Ukraine. She was wrong.

Today, she got her posting and it is to Macedonia! How many of us whiled away our time in Vacation Bible School or Sunday School looking at the colorful maps of Paul's journeys in the back of our little Bibles? Well, I hate to say it but until today that is about all I knew about Macedonia.

I think the world has shrunk since those days of daydreaming in Sunday school. The country looks beautiful and Sara is so happy.