coming full circle, part deux.

Since we've come home from New Jersey (nearly a year ago, officially as of July 7), we often marvel at the things that we've settled back into here that we really enjoyed.

Like the Hyde Park Blast.

It's a July 4 (ish) run/walk/community celebration that we really like. Today, Rob ran, and Wrigley and I walked. Rob finished third (hooray!) and looked mighty fine doing so. Wrigley and I made pretty good time, with the dog pulling at the leash the whole way and feeling good. One person (of the many folks who asked about Wrigley's breed) said he looked happy. He did. And does. It was such a joy to watch him trotting along, healthy and happy. We all scored some eats at the end of the race (and a Christian Moerlein, which tasted amazingly good for 9:00 in the morning).

Life is good. Ridiculously good.

Now, we're on the Side Porch, enjoying some fan-freakin'-tastic wine and some good tunes. Wrigley is cashed out. There are delightful summertime sounds coming from the pool across the street. A gentle breeze blows. The sun is setting behind a scrim of clouds, casting a neat glow through the lattice on the west end of the porch. A young cardinal chirps on the overhead power line. Fireworks pop in the distance.

Life IS good.

the wayback machine.

Prompted by a bit of summer nostalgia (and a bit of wine) last night, I headed to the basement in search of some old Gnaw Bone Camp memorabilia. All of the ephemera from my grade school-through-college days is sorted and stuffed into a plastic bin under the basement stairs. I didn't manage to get down deep enough into the bin to find what I was originally after, because I came across some old letters from Rob at the top of the pile. We wrote each other weekly, sometimes several times a week, when we were dating and apart during our summer breaks. The letter that grabbed me had a return address of our first apartment: 2200 Madison Road, #17, Cincinnati -- with a parenthetical note that read, "OK, so I'm not living here yet, but I will be in a couple of days." Rob wrote about "the place" (which we called the apartment; technically, it wasn't OUR place) and about how much fun we were destined to have not just the next time I visited Cincinnati, but in all the years to come. We hadn't, at that point, talked outright about getting married, although it was just a few months before our engagement (I'll save that story for another post!) and we knew we wanted to spend forever together.

Rob was right: things ARE great in all the years to come.

some things don't change.

Sometimes I like to play a game with friends where I ask them what they would be doing at that given moment when they were, say, 10 years old. It's particularly fun during the summer, when it's great to think back to those uncomplicated, unobligated days of summer vacation.

So let's play that game now:

It's 7:45 on a mid-June night. I'm 10 years old. Maybe it's a Tuesday, maybe it's a Saturday; it pretty much doesn't matter, because the days were the same. Chances are, Bill and I woke up around 8:00, had breakfast, dawdled a bit and then headed outside. (Having a brother just 3 years younger meant that together we were part of the larger group of neighborhood kids. During the school year, we may have never acknowledged each other in the hallway, but in the summertime we were content to play together.)

We probably met up with Erin Jones, maybe the Weber kids, perhaps the Hugheys (the whole lot of them), maybe Cris Crowder, Erik Stevens and of course my best pal Kirsten Grimm (and her brother Adam). We all lived on the same side of Coventry Way, our houses backing up against woods populated by old, big trees, not much underbrush and a trickly creek that wound around until it ran directly behind the Grimms' and the Stevens'.

The woods was the source of endless imagination: Days would begin with someone proposing, "Let's pretend that ..." and we were off. We'd carved out a whole village back in the woods, cleared spots that served as our "houses" and raked bare-dirt paths between them. My "house" had at its epicenter a rather largish boulder with a divot in the top that I imagined was the candle holder in my dining room table. We imagined that the disintegrated remains of downed trees was our food, we played in the creek, we used rocks and bark for commerce. We were outside all day, save for lunchtime (which, ideally, involved grilled cheese sandwiches and Lipton Noodle Soup, consumed with Al Pell's noontime farm report on WIBC as the soundtrack).

We spent entire days outside, running around, exercising both our bodies and our imaginations. I can't envision a better way to spend long summer days.

The thing is, as I approach 40 next month, I'm still pretty much hard-wired to spend days outside: playing golf, puttering in the garden, reading on the side porch, walking with my boys.

Some things don't change. I imagine my innate need to be outdoors never will.

Now that's an odd piece of cheese

Our friend Wrigley shows a special interest in the BBQ grill. Being the ingenious dog that he is, he noticed long ago that the square shape to a slice of cheese is not compatible with a round hamburger. (He's not only ingenious, he's also good at geometry.) I mean, why waste those corners of cheese to just melt and drip right off the burger? Wouldn't it be more responsible to just cut off the corners and share them with a hairy friend?

Yes, the dog has a point. And Wrigley, thanks for sharing your burger with me last night! Tasty stuff.

smokin'.

Two weekends ago—Memorial Day weekend—was smokin' weekend. Rob hauled out the charcoal-fired smoker and had that bad boy goin' all day, slow-cooking a couple of roaster chickens, a pork loin, a couple of onions and, finally, pasta. That's right: Pasta. We'll get to that in a minute.

In my mind, there's a uniform for smoking: a wife-beater T, jean shorts, tube socks and a trucker cap. Fortunately, Rob was wearing none of these. Although he tended the charcoal starter and fed Miller Lite and wood chips into the smoker like a real pro.

Tonight, we truly enjoyed the fruits of his labor: the Mooth house specialty: Smoked Chicken Risotto with Smoked Onions, Peas and Tarragon. Delish!

The smoked pasta is a recipe that comes from a cookbook that we've had forever: it's a ridiculous combination of cooked fettuccine, fontina, parmesan, wine, chopped parsley and cumin seeds. You toss the whole lot together, dump it into a foil tray of your own making and set it on the smoker for a half hour or so until it all gets this gooey, smokey, delicious character. The perfect foil for grilled or smoked seafood. Unusual, but really memorable.

peas be with you.

In March (on St. Patrick's Day, per Grandma's instructions), I planted peas: the English, shelling kind, in a variety from Burpee called Peas 'n a Pot. (Yep, I planted them in big pots.) Peas are one of those vegetables that are incredibly hard to find in their fresh state -- even the farmer's market vendors at Findlay don't have them. If ya want 'em fresh, ya gotta grow your own (or visit a you-pick farm like Grandma and Hans do every spring). So I grew 'em.

I envisioned a two- or three-week period where we'd have all the fresh peas we could eat: freshly picked, shelled, blanched and doused with copious quantities of butter and salt.

Not so much. Our whole crop -- two and a half months of growing time -- yielded just one dinner's worth. A nice colanderful of pods turned out to be two big spoonsful of shelled peas on the plate.

They were good. Really good. But I don't think I'll plant them again. Not that it was costly, or a whole lot of work, to grow peas; it was the harvest that was a letdown.

coming full circle.

Looking back to this point one year ago, we recall going through a tough patch: Wrigley was incredibly sick, with an undiagnosed illness that required major surgery, icky meds (which probably did him as much harm as good in some cases) and a ton of worry on our part. We were longing simply to get home, back to 645 Kroger Lane, our silly little home that holds such attraction for us. Rob told me at the time that we'd be moving back from New Jersey to Cincinnati in July -- and I didn't put much stock in the notion (knowing that corporate moves aren't entirely in one's own control).

On this day a year ago, I was just days from leaving for the HOW Design Conference, my major work event of the year, and I was terrified that something dreadful would happen ...

[Rob just came over to wipe off the grape mustache from my upper lip. True love.]

... to Wrigley while I was away. Taking care of him took such energy, patience, persistence, love, hope. It was trying.

And then, I came back to New Jersey from the conference in Las Vegas, and both my guys were waiting at the airport. It was one of the best days of my life.

So here we are, a full earth-around-the-sun rotation later, and things are indeed coming full circle:
• We're having dinner at the Side Porch Cafe
• We hit the local church festival this past weekend (viva Junefest!)
• We're enjoying Findlay Market in its full glory
• Our yard is lush and the vegetable garden coming into summer bloom
• We've patronized all the local spots we love: Carl's, Zips, Coffee Emporium

We are blessed. Things are good.