I am longing, longing, longing for those end-of-summer foods that are being spooned onto paper plates today, far from here: corn (how I miss corn! Buttered, creamed, baked into bread, even popped!), juicy tomato salads (the Kazakh ones are good, but not as good as I remember from Midwestern farmer's markets), sugary barbeque sauce, bright yellow mustard, creamy slaws and tangy sweet pickle relishes, real brownies (brazenly half-baked and almost frozen from the cooler), sugar cookies with m&ms in them...

Wow -- Scandanavia. Why didn't I realize before? More and more and more pictures to be found here.

We're off to Sweden and Denmark for two weeks.

Carl Larssen, Breakfast Under the Big Birch Tree, 1897

It has felt good to start a new project. And with EB again browsing through my histories of costume every day, the sky is the limit... I've only finished a Gibson Girl shirt-waisty dress so far, but if this keeps up, we might see farthingales, wimples, and maybe I'll whittle some little wooden shoes. Seriously!

High-strung today. Everything feels more poignant. The anklet stockings of the old women -- not nude, not subtle, and not, I imagine, breathable -- seem like a failed gesture. Not toward fashion, but toward gentility. Sad too are the people I don't know but I see again and again, inexplicably, as if this was a small town. 

Poverty manifested in the teeth and the shoes, workmen actually covered in actual dust -- so much Dickens in Moscow. There was an elderly one-man band in the underpass who, like half the people I see here, seem to invite curiosity through their very strangeness but then prove impervious, closed to contact. He played American standards on an abridged trumpet, a twelve-note keyboard, and a tiny snare drum, shorter than his knee. From behind inch-thick spectacles, his reaction to my rather pathetically large donation, or to EB's dancing, was impossible to read. 

But thank goodness for the people who demand "why?!" of their dogs. For God's sake we have a right to an explanation.  

And the B bus again. Thanks too for those self-appointed custodians of us, clucking nodding ladies who get me and the girls and the stroller on and off at the right stops, like the fare-gatherers and change-givers riding the marshrutki. Polish husband says disparagingly "they are so soviet," as if having a uniformed ticket collector, and a chance to cheat the system, marked a higher stage on the evolutionary path West.

An instruction sheet for constructing multiple puppets controlled by a single person ("Best of luck!")

Chinese puppet theater: a strange, rhythmic, unbelievably beautiful ruckus seemingly made of light and lace

Perfect simplicity: Alexandre de Caffinière's living marionette

There is a phrase I really like from Marilynne Robinson's novel Home: "miracles of thrift." In the book it is a cumulative, Protestant, productive thrift, that yields surpluses over time. So much Russian thrift seems, in contrast, desperate or futile, but in any case, women here are masters of the art. Our cleaning lady double-bags the trash, for example, for the walk downstairs to the dumpster, and then brings the second bag back up to the kitchen. Last night while we were out, Lena found an orphaned sock A. had thrown away and sewed up some pajamas for Lula's baby doll. Moscow takes a lot of expat criticism for providing no recycling opportunities (I've crabbed about this too) but really, there may be more of a genuine reduce/reuse culture here than anywhere we've lived.  

Tonight we saw Public Enemies. On the way, we bought a bag of pickles from a babushka with a bucket outside a railway station. We drank whiskey at the bar before the film (as the sushi bar in the theater lobby was closed). The movie was bleak and beautiful, placed in both Chicago and the surrounding countryside (Indiana prairie, Wisconsin backwoods). Why do gangsters, those urban creatures, become even scarier when they're removed to a rural setting? Marianne Cotillard was wonderful as a French-Indian coat-check girl (seduced by her outlaw with -- what else? -- a pelt).

We took the ring bus line home. I love the Tretyakov Gallery posters on Moscow bus stops -- prompted by a Jacob Jordaens painting of Cleopatra dropping one of her pearl earrings into her drink, EB and I had a really long conversation about (1) what acid is and (2) what happens when queens play truth or dare. And I love that, on the bilingual neighborhood maps hung at some stops, each cul-de-sac is labeled a "blind alley."

A friend of mine greets each issue of Real Simple with a squeal ("Porn!") and some intense alone time on the couch. 

Yes. I've been there. Martha, Dwell, Marie Claire Maison: the whole genre titillates... I remember well, among many tips, RL's suggestion to keep a "drawer full" of gifts, $50 or less, for "unexpected visitors," and once, a photo of some paper clips and rubber bands that had been sorted by color. It's so good that I cannot get that kind of healthy advice here.

But I have a different weakness now. My porn is put out by logistics companies. I eat their stuff up; it makes me just grin. The commercials are all the same. The young man with ball cap and clipboard, handing a box to a delighted small business owner, first the diminutive florist in Japan (lanterns, flute music), then the cattle rancher (fences, hearty handshake), and then naturally his next delivery is for a child, whose birthday party is already underway (parents proffering cake, but no, can't stay, got a deadline) and now we see the truck, chugging cheerily along up a neon green hill on some Irish isle, past a red phone booth, or scrappily through an infested swap, or along the Great Wall, or one of Manhattan's bridges. Finally we glimpse the Warehouse, the pulsing heart of the whole operation, with forklifts humming around and waves exchanged before zoom, the logo jet takes off soaring into the sky, carrying packages probably intended for you. No matter that my experiences as shipper and recipient don't match the hype -- no way -- I'm sure never tempted to ship anything. But the enormous, smooth-running, tidy machine is a beauteous thing to behold. Like the Playmobile catalog. Or a Richard Scarry book. Love it.

Enamelware cups for warming milk at bed time

Two-dish scales with their army of fat weights tucked into a wood box

Canning jars still made from glass that waves a little and has no seams

If you look in the right spots, Moscow can be a gold mine for graceful, sturdy artifacts much like this. 

"To find out how reality works, [the child] works on it. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense... School is not a place that gives much time, or opportunity, or reward, for this kind of thinking and learning.

"[G]ive children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for, listen respectfully when they feel like talking, and then get out of the way."

John Holt, How Children Learn (1967)

I'm really getting into the idea of unschooling.

Moscow looks so lovely lately, especially its crumbly parts. A man in an underpass played Hello Dolly on the balalaika.

I braved OBI and Auchan at Mega Mall today. ("Khimki," a Russian friend once shuddered. "People touch you.") It's a huge, tacky, frequently crowded place that requires a metro ride to the end of the line and then a marshrutka or minibus. But it was okay.

I try not to react anymore to the usual air of distrust and suspicion with which customers are greeted. Everyone is probably going to pocket some valuables and try to smuggle them out: this seems to be the operative assumption driving Russian retail. Today I unpacked all thirty-something of my OBI purchases at the entrance to Auchan, so that a heavily made-up woman in a miniature sailor cap could roll them into plastic bags and seal the bags closed with a heated bar. Muscovites very often walk around their malls and grocery stores with their possessions (purchases, purses, portfolios) wrapped up in these rustling clear bags -- anything you bring into a store is supposed to be hermetically sealed before you grab a cart, so that you're not tempted to try to squirrel merchandise away. Russians line up quietly and obediently at the sealing station before beginning to shop. Normally I sail right past such inventory control, harrumpf, but today I was carrying too much (a laden two-wheeled shopper) and got stopped. So I submitted. Then at the check-out, the Auchan cashier eyed my wheeled shopper suspiciously and wanted to see my OBI receipts. Which were sealed into the anti-theft bags.

Once, in the pet supply aisle at Auchan, I was handed a box of cat treats by a Purina rep handing out samples. A few minutes later, when I failed to place it on the conveyor at the check-out, the cashier snarled and refused to believe it had no price.

What a pleasure to be in a hardware store again! Been a long time. Paint brushes, wire bundles, huge rolls of ready linoleum, hundreds of tiny plastic drawers containing large and small nails, pipe fittings, sledgehammers, potting soil, buckets, mops. Little Allspaugh Hardware in Ladue always smelled beautifully of grass seed and brooms when Dad let us tag along. OBI, with all the auto carpet and foam moulding, smells more like carcinogens, but still, I walked around and imagined making something, I mean assembling something, piecing and sanding and painting and smoothing and measuring. I remembered my brothers making models, the glue gun, tiny jars of paint, and decals. I even missed This Old House.

Sarah Sze, work from 2004 (Kanazawa, Japan) and 2005 (New York).

Rainy evening. 

Making pickled potato salad, zucchini basil soup, and chocolate layer cake with raspberry filling.

(Cocoa bean from Koehler's Medizinal-Pflanzen [Gera, 1887] via Wikipedia.)

Another absolutely fascinating piece on the closure of Cherkizovsky Market. The energy of that place was indeed churning, "raw," more vibrant than anywhere else in the city. I wonder if there is any way to help some of the stranded traders and their families? Any local organization that has become, in the last few weeks, their impromptu Red Cross? I can't seem to find any way to contact the Russian Federation of Migrants.

"Why are you so stupid? Everyone is staring at us," I might say if Yataro is slow getting out of the car.

Must stop regarding Russia always through the lens of hardship. One of example of a gazillion: women in Moscow seem to live in the filmiest of skirts, the floatiest dresses, and bejeweled sandals all the (comparatively chilly) summer, rain or shine. "It must be because they're stuck in boots and parkas eight months of the year," I'm tempted to reason. My reflex explanation leaves them no room for simple joie de vivre. 

On the other hand, Lena made the girls cherry compote this morning, and when they turned up their noses, she tasted it again and said thoughtfully, "Well, the cherries aren't very good. But we always loved when my mother made it. Then again, we were hungry."

News from the weekend:

Weird brand names lately passing through our kitchen. The muesli is called Master Crumble. The vanilla ice cream is sold under the label Morbidissimo.

I miss you, Dane County, Wisconsin.

I miss you, last summer.

PS: if I was still eighteen or twenty or twenty-six, i would leap!

Went for my annual haircut. 

Back in Chicago, it was dash without an appointment into a storefront with that pair of neon purple scissors in the window, past the sweet little red and gold altar to a god fond of grapefruit, snip snip, a little Ellen on the corner TV, and then maybe a fast and brutal brow wax in a rear storeroom where the holiday decorations were stashed. 

Today was different. I don't enjoy salons because I'm not in them much and I always expect the stylists to look at me and think, with grateful pleasure, "Now there's somebody I can really work on," but no, they usually seem to sense that any improvements they make will be lost within a day or two, and sigh. (I remember one manicurist in Saint Louis sort of snort-chuckling over my hands and saying, without looking up, "A real low-maintenance girl, aren't you?") And the long awkward silences. Today the stylist and I waited forever, without speaking, for my shampoo chair to recline mechanically to a full horizontal position. And I have to remember to drink the mineral water they give very fast before the combing starts, or stare longingly at it on the counter until the end. The best part was the forty-minute rosemary-scented brow wax -- each hair apparently received personal attention -- I went in steeled but it felt like a little flock of birds around my forehead, mostly fluttering, with occasional gentle pecks. I might go again before Christmas!

Me: "How would you say big shout out, in Russian?"

A: "Privet."

In any case, we're beaming big wishes to nephew T. on his seventh birthday. Enjoy the day!

More bad news this morning about the shutdown of Cherkizovsky Market, which -- I thought -- was the most amazing place to wander in Moscow. And I'm not the only one. 

Step into the place yourself for a moment.

I get lost in The Memory of the Netherlands.

More bathtub drama.

EB is pretty verbal for three and a half. (I swear this is not just mother's bias -- for example, when talking to me in recent weeks she has used both "experience" and "solution" -- though not together -- seemingly out of nowhere.) Thus tonight, as she was dawdling in the drained tub and suddenly started howling in this terrible way, not calling "Mom!" or "Help!" but simply howling wordlessly like an animal, I dropped the baby and dashed back in. Somehow she'd gotten the long-necked bathtub faucet stuck under her tongue. I found her kneeling in the tub with the tap in her mouth, lodged there, gargling furiously. The faucet's mouth must have almost exactly the same diameter as the curve of her bottom teeth. It was like the tongue-to-the-lightpost scene in The Christmas Story, only much more difficult to set up. I glimpsed a tiny bit of blood on the faucet, had an inner fit, pretended to be more annoyed than afraid, climbed into the tub and worked her head free, gave her some ice cubes and went back to diapering the baby.

The refrigerator died this evening too. One of our four landlords and a man with a toolbox called the "Master" have arrived to "reanimate" it. I've got a serious yoghurt-making operation underway on the kitchen counter, to salvage all the milk.

I've been fascinated lately with alphabet books and wanted to write about those, but after logging on, I left a pot on the stove that boiled down to a sooty crust and smoked up the kitchen, and having had to open the only window that lacks a screen, I am now preoccupied with the cats possibly falling out. I'm told that I dove out the window of my parents' second-story apartment at eighteen months. Perhaps that explains the fear. And maybe also the forgetfulness.

I have always been absent-minded. I'll remember to pack extra wipes but not my wallet. I've given doctors my incorrect age without meaning to. I've left bath water running until a pond, a pond complete with surface ripples, formed on the floor and the neighbors downstairs knocked on the door. Worse, I did this while living in New York, where the first thing you're supposed to grasp is how to cohabit tall stacks of boxes. If I feel hot or chilly while walking outside, I often check my watch to see the temperature -- I have done so all my life. I have not yet forgotten either of my children, at least not for more than a minute or two, and surely there's a grace period on that. 

So. Over the years, living with a handicap, one develops coping strategies and a sixth sense for danger. Hopeless with names, I've become devious in avoiding having to produce them in conversation. I depend absolutely on detailed lists and piles -- setting out ahead of time everything I might need, and forbidding anyone to touch, even when the tower falls over and blocks the front door. There's a time window, between five and ten minutes I think, that spells trouble for me: the time it takes the tub to fill, or tea to cool, falls somewhere outside my awareness of the present but short of my capacity to remember -- so I cannot be trusted with baths or tea. 

Been about twenty minutes -- I'd better go close that window! Alphabet books tomorrow. Perhaps.

Above, the fortified wall around Novodevichy Convent, near the rooms where poor Sophia Alexeyevna was imprisoned by her brother Peter I (who apparently also dangled some of her executed supporters outside of her windows, just to be clear).

We spent the afternoon sightseeing in the city, like so many weekends last year. And I found myself feeling the same confused nostalgia... I mean enjoying the quaintness of certain Russian places while feeling uneasy about whether that's right.

"Today is Sunday, the nineteenth of July!" said the loudspeakers in the metro, as we followed the crowds through long underground passages and up and down stairs. "The day of the metallurgical worker, who creates wonders out of the earth!" These announcements seem rare, but listening today while trudging through the subway transfer tunnels alongside hundreds of other, mostly silent people, all moving in the same direction... it was too Orwellian to ignore. Just as the voice wrapped up, we passed one of those subterranean militsia closets, the door propped open for once, presumably because of the airless tunnel heat, and glimpsed inside a sweaty young officer, slumped at an old and enormous wooden desk, reading a book. The whole tiny room was painted institutional turquoise, without a single paper on the walls or on the desk, only the boy and a rotary telephone (which always look noirish now), and at the back there was a chain-link cage, low and dark, with a padlock on the door and a low wooden bench inside. I'm not made nervous by these things -- at that moment I think I was wondering where to go for lunch -- but somehow, I feel superstitious about enjoying these glimpses as a tourist. On some level they really do represent past (and present?) suffering. And there's always at least a chance that I'll run afoul of the law here; it happened more than once back in Chicago, usually over an animal, and even here I've got into it briefly with OXPAHA over their badgering of a collapsed woman drunk. It's like the moustached impersonators and the Red Army souvenirs: absolutely interesting on one level, but then, should I be having fun with this?

Today in the city we ran into friends, though, and that's a nice change from last year: a Russian family from EB's school. They are headed into the woods four hundred kilometers north of Moscow, with other parents and children, for a week-long camping expedition with a Little Red Riding Hood theme. The parents enact the story throughout the forest, the kids make art and sing around the fire... maybe next year.

Along the boulevard, art students were trying to hang 8x10 photo prints on unwieldy, three-meter lengths of sticky tape. Some puppeteers from a well-known national theater were trying to sell an antique marionette to passersby for 25,000 rubles. We wrapped up the day with cream puffs, a splash in a fountain and a cup of kvass. (Yes, that's a plastic cup. It's also an alcoholic drink. And a naked man washing his pants.)

I had modest goals for this morning: buy some food, and cook some. Milk, veggies, maybe even reintroduce meat at our table. 

Not so simple. I've been meaning to go to one of the big farmers' markets and find out how much the butchers there know about their goods: was this chicken ever outside? How was it slaughtered? And that requires some prep time with the Russian-English dictionary. And I've been meaning to put more effort into finding milk that hasn't been ultra-zapped; the Finnish stuff is fresher than the Russian, but it's sure not organic. Now it's lunch time, I am not dressed, and I am clicking back and forth between California phthalate awareness websites and Moscow aqua-filter vendors, and worrying about early onset puberty. Turns out the Nestle water cooler bottle next to our sink has a seven on the bottom! Bad news! Maybe it's facing another year here, but today worries that I grappled with and then shelved last fall are resurfacing and demanding another think. It's also partly Nicholas Kristof's fault. I would like very much to sigh and chuckle in a we-all-gotta-go-sometime way, but I'm not really feeling it. 

Eventually of course I'll just get hungry, and go get some food. 

Before plunging into the new pile of books I've been gathering all day, thought I'd take note of what I read in Spain. I see now the list might be summed up as farming fantasies, Spanish orientalism, and some collapsarian fun... a mix of escapism and apocalypse!

The World Without Us, Alan Weisman

Andalusia, Sketches and Impressions, W. Somerset Maugham

Life is a Dream, Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Family Romance, John Lanchester

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver

The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, John Seymour

Tales of the Alhambra, Washington Irving

Raising Milk Goats Successfully, Gail Luttman

Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin

The Steep Ascent, Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Parenting for Primates, Harriet J. Smith

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

Moscow. A stressful, fly-all-night journey home, with our usual mountains of luggage and, naturally, several last-minute crises. But we made it.

It's nice to be home. (All these good books piled around, as if they had been selected just for me!) Set immediately to deep cleaning the apartment, pulling out art supplies, throwing away food that A. had willfully ignored since May, enjoying the unfamiliar sound of rain, and willfully ignoring Russians' remarks that it was "not real rain," but condensed somehow around particulate pollution from nearby factories. Best of all, no more waiting for visits -- everyone again in one place.

The girls got haircuts. They were absurdly expensive. A bob was the goal for both, but EB looks surprisingly chic and Lula looks like the guy who sang "Come On Eileen."

On another topic entirely, when I read this sad kind of thing, which A. sent me under the subject line "seems relevant," then I feel no rush to get back to the US. Women are made to live in burqas so that men nearby are protected from their own thoughts. Little children should forego the exhilaration, the sheer joy of streaking around wild all summer, for about the same reason? Yes, say the Mattel and Disney people. Thank goodness for parents with more imagination and more empathy than that.

Meanwhile, in Moscow... 

This morning they played "when you're late for your plane and it's about to take off!"

Our only souvenir still in one piece from Amsterdam's best toy shop... holding out with the strength of one hidden rubber band.

I bought a creamy, cracked, antique bowl from a decrepit ceramic shop in Lucena, where the merchandise was piled to the ceiling beams. Crates of cracked and broken pieces, to be pounded down into dust and reused in clay, waited in the back room, where the crusty wheels were also parked, one still damp. "No olive oil in it!" warned the enormous, swollen old man, pointing his cane. Something not right in the firing means fruit and flowers only. I cannot wait to give it a real home.

There are miraculous moments. And we are, of course, living in a sundrenched paradise. Still, if this mothering gig was a job, I'd have resigned: equal parts scullery maid, nurse, cook, teacher, entertainer, referee, valet/general attendant, slave. But without any of those titles. I also think John Lanchester is right in Family Romance: calling something a duty makes it easier than calling it "care-giving," because you're freer to honestly dislike it.

Maybe because the girls have been my primary company for a few months now, and I see them as friends of mine as well as tiny tots, I find myself exasperated by what seems to be, before I catch myself, their immaturity. Why are they screeching and quarreling over that little plastic horse? What a waste of our time, I'll think to myself. Then, too I'll remember that in their fledgling relationship as sisters, territories are still being fought over, rules drafted, roles forged.

Noon, blazing sky, just back from a long hike to the village and back. I summoned the courage to enter one of the bars this morning (they seem to enforce an unwritten men-only rule) and ordered a cafe con leche as if nothing was unusual... certainly not the double stroller parked outside, rocking back and forth like something Dr. Dre would drive, small voices within suggesting, audibly from the street, "Mom? Cookie? Mom?"

And so it goes. Girls are supposed to be napping, but it sounds like a frat party down there, all thumps and howls and egging each other on. I am drinking cava by myself in the cool and complete darkness of a room with all windows tightly shuttered; this always disorients me, this midday night, and when I step out again I stumble, blinking, eyeballs seared by the sudden ferocity of the sun. Not unpleasant.

We have a wasps' nest in one of the copious keyholes of the old barn door (at first, couldn't figure out why we were getting stung daily). Everything else here is perfect peace.

Sunstruck EB's evening trances, complete with chanting... bathtime outdoors, as hoses are unraveled and the dusk watering begins... daytime skies so blazingly clear and navy that stars really should show, and crystalline airplane trails that last for hours... floors that burn our feet at midday, and the patchwork bridges we make of towels and clothing to get across... soup with ice... the way the breeze picks up when the sun is setting, and rustles the fig trees' big lobed leaves... waking up early to find a gecko in the kitchen... around the old paved threshing circles, low walls of hand-stacked stones, stiffly embroidered with lichen... the initial shock of real palms, growing out of the real ground, not quite believably... coming around the corner to the swimming pool in the morning, first to arrive, arms full of sunhats, books, towels, toys, pulling the folded chair cushions out of the closet, half the patio still in shadow, and EB patting one of the chairs and shouting "This one will be mine today!"... sparrow infanticide and the way swallows end their statements with clicks, like punctuation... oleander, bougainvillea, and santolini...

Two weeks left, and we will miss Spain so much. Watching these rocky hills bloom and shrivel over the past two months, feeling the heat steadily intensify, has been gorgeous, and it will be wonderful too to have flashes of memory later, on very clear evenings or in southern places...

http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/time-wastes-too-fast/

Woke up in Moscow after traveling all day yesterday. The girls are out with good old Lena, searching for ducklings on the pond. The alders sparkle here, and the little bits of green between buildings seem still flush with spring momentum, while back in Andalusia everything in the landscape is browning into a coffee-colored desert. It is so good to have this quiet, to let the shock recede, to just rest. I can already see there'll be no "home to the states" anytime soon; we have not gotten around to making that home yet. I'll take the girls back to the cortijo next week and finish our stay, declining any repeat invitations from neighborly men to pick cherries in the evening, and everything will be fine.

Micro is dead. The Russian vet said kidney failure, a direct result of his withholding urine over the transatlantic flight.

I was held down by the wrists behind a spring house two evenings ago, with the girls locked in a car out of sight, but thankfully I am not delicate and I fought hard enough to break away. Spanish farmers dress their scarecrows in their own old clothes and panama hats, and for two days I've been scared even of scarecrows. Now I am going back to Moscow a month early (somehow feels familiar, this frantic navigating of cheerful vacation websites with shaking fingers, rushing through the name-date-passport forms toward that six-digit confirmation number that says we can leave, we can leave). Perhaps home to the states soon after that. This ostensibly jetsetting life is taking too heavy a toll on the little ones I love, human and animal. I feel today that everyone precious should be close enough to hold, otherwise they wander into trouble the moment you turn your back, and then cannot be saved.

Chippers went home! That's pretty goddamn fresh.

It is heaven to be back at the cortijo in olive country. We are brown and dry like raisins. We sit on loose dry stones, suffused with peace, lulled by the spectacular views over the steep valleys, squinting at distant farmhouses through a watery veil of pure heat, or watching at close range lizards and swallows busy at their work. I am sitting near a great bank of lavender, thyme and oregano at the moment, and a butterfly just landed on the keyboard. (Where are my dwarves?) This morning we simply stood throwing rocks down a hillside for an hour. This being a largely British household, the girls are known by fat, carnivorous names like "sausage pies" and "cheeky chops." The sisters who run the place have become, in recent days, not merely hosts but friends.

Two weeks in Granada dragged on and on. I longed for these quiet hills and the girls got peevish from too much restaurant food and the claustrophobia of hotel rooms. I unexpectedly fell out with my sister, in grand fashion (what is it about trips to the beach that bring on catastrophe in this family?). Still, once a decade or so, applying an acid peel to a relationship that has developed a thick and festering crust of bullshit feels bracing and ultimately good. I've been trying, I think, to compensate for our often chilly mother by stroking and applauding and cheering ad nauseam. After a while we lost all space and all language for disagreement, over values, over each other; even implied criticism felt dangerous, and as Sister put it quite rightly, our visits became exhausting dances on eggshells. I must do a better job of acknowledging (and examining of course) my judgments as they come, so that we don't ricochet ever again from mutual pandering to furious confession. Better to brave small disagreements along the way than store them up for someday. Pretending we do not judge each other is workplace protocol, not sibling reality. The question is, where to put those judgments? Shelving them indefinitely is not, I realize now, admirable restraint, it is a form of dishonesty and disastrous in the long term.

We are in Spain until mid-July.