Steph – Page 8 – Stephanie Sicore

June 26, 2009June 26, 2009

Rodeo

I love the pageantry of the rodeo!

The rodeo is ridiculous in many ways but if you put on your rodeo filter and drink a few lukewarm beers in plastic cups, things start to cancel out. The heat bears down and the dust cloaks your sunscreen; the smells hover of burning hot dogs and popcorn and manure and hay. The snorting, the sweat, stomping hooves, the lowing cattle in the holding pens–it’s all the fiber of my memories in Texas, and to immerse the boys at an early age in these textures is to paint a layer of experience that will bring others into sharp focus. I know I can’t expect to find a real John Grady Cole at the Rowell Ranch Rodeo but that’s okay; he’s somewhere where these cowboys end and Damon begins, right about here:

I still don’t understand how Damon can hate horses as much as he does… as much as I love them.

I think this boy of mine loves them, too. Would you take a look at his face in these pictures? He studied these guys all afternoon and when the heat was just too much, Chas holed up under the blue shade of an oak tree, right beside the roping calves, and played toy horses. And just like Chas, there was a Mama horse and her baby. Everything else was trivial.

Isn’t it, though? I mean, times two (maybe times more someday)…

I’ve been playing this game, myself, for a long, long time.

June 25, 2009June 27, 2009

Chicken Soup with Rice

This morning Chas woke up from bed and he told me that today was a good day to make chicken soup with rice. “Like Pierre!” (almost!) Not for lunch, not for dinner, but for breakfast. In late June. In a house that has no air conditioning, in the beginning of a high pressure heat system.

So to celebrate the end of the cool mornings (at least for a spell), I let Chas motor with the soup menu.

We have a proper chicken soup recipe (thank you mom–and subsequently mamaw) but on hand we also have a richly-illustrated, inspiring copy of Family Meals (Chas seems to like the pictures inside because they “are like it is in our house” –sort of minus the fact that this ain’t no vineyard) and made the Mediterranean style chicken soup: chicken soup made special and somehow summery by adding a tablespoon of fresh chopped dill out of the garden and the juice of half a lemon. It was out of this world delicious!

Chas, subjective critic, was cautious at first about the dill. But he totally caved and polished the bowl off and ate a second helping, besides.

Ford had seconds, too.
As did I.
And the cats had a bowl, too.

Which goes to show you that Sendak is, as usual, right:

“I told you once, I told you twice,
All seasons of the year are nice
For sipping chicken soup with rice.”

April 19, 2009

Spring Blow

The sun is panning upon the mountaintop like a crazed optimist, beaming on the last spring snowpack and the tiny sprouts of lupine that pepper the weak gray earth at the foot of the ski slope and the final week of the ski season and the velvet blacktop of the parking lot abutting the snow. A mother slides down to the foot of the slope as if on autopilot and unclamps her bindings with an aluminum pole while her four year-old son plows a serpentine stop to meet her and mimics her every move until both of them are hobbling to a parked Mazda SUV that barely looks blue beneath the ubiquitous crust of salt and sand, like the raccoon-eyed facial tans worn by every skier who has seen at least three days of this crackpot sunshine. These two are locals who don’t even need to stop at base for lunch because they will make sandwiches at home. As they pull out she rolls down the driver’s side window and hangs out to greet the next person waiting.

“You got lucky!”

Slowly the second car pulls into the empty spot, one car away from the foot of the slope, and the driver gets out smiling into the crystallized sunshine and back out across the parking lot. He pulls out of the back of his truck a long fluorescent multicolored snowboard and a beanie and a pair of reflective goggles and he locks his door and plods happily towards the resort, followed by two little boys in black snowpants and turtlenecks and three day-old bedhead and chocolate ice cream crust. Their parents watch passively as the boys meander from the parking lot to skirt the precipice of a retaining wall that stands perhaps thirty feet above ground level of the massive resort lodge while they hop from rock to rock along the wall, engrossed like young lambs with the craggy rock beneath them and oblivious to the heights from which they could easily topple, but of course they don’t; this is an upscale resort, as the family is coming to realize, that does not allow bad publicity in the form of tragic child-toppling.

+++

We’ve been in Lake Tahoe for the week, escaping all the seedlings and kittens and chicks and bunnies for jawdropping panoramic delights and one more ounce of snow. All along, we have missed home and those unspoken little nurturing rituals that make us innate farmers. All week we’ve flung our bodies around the sierras in pinball arcade idiocy, never really hitting the G spot but constantly ramming the bells. Tahoe, you are beautiful and all, but I have to admit: I’m just not that in love with you. You’re smokin hot, though! That’s why we keep coming back, eastbound and down without our senses. xxxo