Yesterday at work I kept smelling my grandmother O'Brien's lemon bundt cake. No one was eating anything lemon-flavored and there was no bundt cake around either. It was very strange how I could smell it so clearly that I could almost taste it. I remember pulling a stool up to help my grandmother put the sugary-lemony glaze on the bundt cake when I was little. I didn't really like the glaze that much, but I loved helping and I loved my grandmother. I remember the cake being very moist and not too lemony. I remember picking up delicious little crumbs from the center of the bundt where the cake was the most soft and moist. Yesterday, I even looked up lemon bundt cake recipes to see if there was an easy way to whip one up when I got home, but I got overwhelmed when I saw that most of the recipes require more than 3 ingredients. (3 is really my limit right now.)
Anyway, that intense craving has passed, and how I am obsessed with lemon-colored wedge sandals from Boden. Technically, the color is called "straw" but lemon sounds springier and happier to me. I write this as a little winter snowstorm that is expected to yeild about 1 inch of snow is blustering outside my window. (The snow actually looks like it is falling upwards because the wind is so intense by the lake. The PERFECT weather to dream about lemon sandals, no?) This obsession with these shoes is not helping my secret vow to be less driven by consumption and more attune to enjoying what I have (and to my budget given I am about to embark on a 14-week unpaid expedition into motherhood). But, damn those shoes make me think of hope: hope that my legs will be able to support my body in those fine shoes even as a mother of a toddler and a newborn. Hope that spring will one day (soonish?) descend on the stark Midwest. Hope that I will have a place to go that will require me to be shod in buttery/lemony wedge sandals.
This all sounds ridiculous, but I can't control where I find my hope. By the time I am sashay-ing around this city in those shoes, the question of how our son is born will be resolved and already processed in the memory bank. He will have a name. He will have preferences. Given how long it takes spring to come in this area of the country, he'll probably also be eating solid food. The yellow of that sandal matches the yellow tops of the Medela bottles we'll use to feed him breast milk I have pumped (maybe while wearing the shoes). Time will march on. These wedges will give way to the next shoe obsession of Fall 2011-- the perfect boot; the updated UGGs, the shoes that will bring hope for whatever psychological ailment plagues me at the time.
We'll have two children. We will all have plenty of shoes, a fact I pray ardently not to take for granted for one second. Sadie either will or will not be accepted into Montessori School (for which we either will or will not pay premium Montessori prices) and I either will or will not be able to drop down to 80% work so I can spend time with my children. (And my shoes.)
It would be way more "responsible" to find hope in a learned text or some internal resource I tapped into through yoga or meditation or even pilates. That's not the provenance of this particular brand of hope. It's from an on-line website, which, for the record, I have never ordered anything from. But, when you need a little hope, do you care where it comes from?
No comments:
Post a Comment