Documenting the Quarantine ed. 6: Stress + Strawberry Pie

When I was in labor with Tatum, I could feel his head trying to come out, but his head was sort of too big for the chute and I was sweating so hard that anything touching my skin made it feel like it was burning and I cried to the nurse I DON'T WANT TO BE HERE and she was pretty much like, SAME, BOO. But we gotta persevere. Because keeping that baby in your belly is not a legitimate Plan B right now.

I've thought a lot about that time particularly during quarantine. This too shall pass, but sometimes it doesn't pass through the chutes we want it to, with the ease we hope it will. We're strong enough for this, but this is very, very intense. Like everyone I know, I have wanted an exit hatch from this madness at every turn. I want to go out to eat and not oscillate between wearing a mask and sipping through a straw. I want to hug my friend’s children. I want to go sit in a dark movie theater and eat so much popcorn and not give a single thought to catching the ‘rona from the bathroom/reclining seats/doorknobs/air molecules we breathe. History reminds us that it rhymes, and right now this great unknown is rhyming with other great wars, depressions, and other epochs whose ending was always indefinite to those wandering through.

July has been hot and filling me with homesickness. I miss seeing my family in the summer and eating fish tacos on their back patios and swimming in their pools. I am trying to cultivate a rich outdoor life but it has been stupid humid here, so mostly I bop around to different beaches where the dog can splash and boop the noses of other dogs. I feel stressed that the kids are stressed and I’m learning my codependence on their moods is really unhealthy. I am working on this.

It’s pretty much too hot everywhere to turn on an oven, but we did find a lot of joy in picking strawberries last month, and I adapted a strawberry pie recipe to make it gluten free, so I’ll share it here.

Gluten Free Crust:

Ingredients

• 1 1/4 cups (184g) King Arthur Gluten-Free All-Purpose Flour

• 1 tablespoon sugar

• 1/2 teaspoon flax meal

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 6 tablespoons (85g) butter, cold

• 1 large egg

• 2 teaspoons lemon juice

• 1 drop cinnamon essential oil
  

Instructions

1. Lightly grease a 9" pie pan.

2. Whisk together the flour or flour blend, sugar, flaxmeal and salt.

3. Cut the cold butter into pats, then kneed the pats into the flour mixture until it's crumbly

4. Whisk the egg and vinegar or lemon juice together until very foamy. Mix into the dry ingredients. Add drop cinnamon essential oil. Stir until the mixture holds together, adding 1 to 3 additional tablespoons cold water if necessary.

5. Shape into ball and refrigerate for an hour, or up to overnight.

6. Allow the dough to rest at room temperature for 10 to 15 minutes before rolling.

7. Roll out on a piece of plastic wrap/ silicone rolling mat. Invert the crust into the prepared pie pan.

8. Preheat the oven to 375°F. Line the pie with tin foil and bake for 25 minutes. Remove the foil, and bake for an additional 10 to 15 minutes, until the crust is a light golden brown. Allow to cool.

9. Fill with pie filling:
   

Strawberry Pie Filling

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup sugar

• 2 tablespoons cornstarch

• 1 cup water

• 1 package (3 ounces) strawberry gelatin

• 6 cups sliced fresh strawberries

• Whipped cream, optional

Instructions

• In a small saucepan, combine the sugar, cornstarch and water until smooth. Bring to a boil; cook and stir until thickened, about 2 minutes. Remove from the heat; stir in gelatin until dissolved. Refrigerate until slightly cooled, 15-20 minutes.

• Meanwhile, arrange strawberries in the crust. Pour gelatin mixture over berries. Refrigerate until set. If desired, serve with whipped cream.

Documenting the Quarantine ed. 5: Thanking our bodies

Jen Hatmaker was on the Facebook Live this morning reading a passage from Fierce, Free, and Full of Fire about our bodies. That’s not triggering for any of us, I’m sure. No one out there began to squirm or cross her legs for fear of the varicose veins or cottage cheese cellulite showing. Not one dear reader has body shame or is still grappling with the same dang issues she thought were behind her but continue to pull her into their toxic loop as in the manner of changing for gym class in 7th grade. And because I am perfectly at ease with the own sacred vessel that is my body, I feel comfortable enough writing about the miracle that she has been to me in quarantine. In the manner of St. Jen, here she blows:

Cheers, cheers to your teacher body who has pivoted from her comfortable spot as a sage on the stage of the classroom, into a home office that doubles as a greenhouse and a kiosk for wayward Minecrafters. She has gone, without warning, from standing and making large swooping gestures across a dry erase board and occasionally dancing, to existing as a flattened pixelated head in a box. She knows that this is not what she was created to do but she has adapted. She adapts so well. Even when she hates it, she agrees to play along.

Huzzah to your mothering body who has carried babies inside of her and papoosed them on the outside. Now she mothers ones that are taller and some smaller than she but whose problems are vastly more confusing and amorphous and seemingly solvable but probably just want to be listenable. Salutes to that listening body that hears the plights of the socially distanced youths and shows compassion on her face and offers hugs and Sour Patch Kids purchased at Costco in bulk because sugar prohibition has no place in quarantine.

Kudos to the body that has been present in her marriage, that has relished car rides and impromptu walks and laughter—my word, the knock-you-breathless laughter that this quarantine has fostered. What a beautiful thing for your body to bask in, uninterruptedly and indefinitely and unabashedly.

Raise a toast to that body that has obeyed stay-at-home orders, who has worn her unfashionable mask so well it has achieved new heights in Corona Couture. Your body has walked and run and taken medically-approved puffs of her steroid inhaler, and taken roughly three zillion showers because it feels like a field trip, that stepping into the soothing soundproof booth of steam and song. Glory!

Let’s be honest with your body: this has been a terrible time to be a body. It would be much easier being a turquoise cloud that gets to move seamlessly along the contours of the earth without boundary. But we are contained in bodies and we will occupy them and shelter within them as we shelter in this space and place that we call here and now, until all the other bodies can handle everybody taking their bodies elsewhere.

Documenting the Quarantine ed. 4: What I Miss

I was inspired by writer Austin Channing Brown to consider what I missed from Ordinary Time that is not Quarantine Time. In no particular order:

• Riding the subway to work and listening to a playlist that I curated in order to take my mind far, far away.

• Not being aware of how my TMJ appears to think it needs to hold up the entire North American continent with a tautness that is, frankly, admirable. (Also, if anyone has any pain relief for TMJ, I am all ears).

• Dairy Freeze. I think 65% of my grumpiness is knowing it will soon be warm and I will not be queueing with all my neighbors and their dogs in wait of a Reese’s Razzle in a waxy cup with a tall white spoon.
  

• Clear breaks from caretaking. Each and every day feels a bit like parenting babies where there is no weekend and no real guarded sanctuary of rest. There is just caretaking: for my children, my students, and my dog (who has regressed to new levels of diva infantilism). It is interrupted by moments of having to do administrative things or clean the bathroom floor or walking through the cemetery. I miss going to night class and buying myself a coffee just because. They were little totems in my week, little flags in the sand of where I staked my territory of being a human with singular interests and joys, and not merely a mom in servitude of others.
  

• Massages. Not that I got one very often, but merely the possibility of paying a stranger to kneed my back like a stubborn slab of bread dough is a huge luxury I took for granted.
  

• My students and their three-dimensional human forms and colorful ideas and incisive questions. This semester started out difficult and it persists in being really difficult but I miss the living, breathing, electric classroom experience.
  

• The library. The dining hall. The buskers in Park St. Station. The sweaty barista at the Arlington Starbucks. The hopefulness I felt about Election 2020 and which I hope I might feel again depending on whom Biden taps as a running mate (?). Concerts. Holding other people’s babies.
  
  I could write endlessly about the things I miss, but the present reality is blessed and full all the same. My house is rarely quiet, a reminder that there are people in this house laughing and FaceTiming and making friendship bracelets to deliver—delivering us indeed to a little freeze frame when we all were as tightly wound as the embroidery threads my children cross and loop and knot with conviction. We are still good friends, same as we ever were, we are just a few threads unslipped through knots for now. Ready and waiting for the chance to wrap around one another’s wrist again soon.