Tag Archives: magic

Magic Spells to Try

Posted on November 25, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            A good friend of mine sent me an unexpected early birthday present. She’d posted tons of pictures of her summer trip with her son to Universal Studios in California, but it turns out she left out the picture of the replica of Hermione’s magic wand she bought for me at the Harry Potter store.

            I had no idea this was coming. She’d sent me surprise care packages early in the summer to help me through my second oral surgery, but I’m still not used to this kind of care, so when I opened this package and found the long box with a wand nestled inside, as if it had come directly from Ollivander’s wand shop, I was speechless and struggled even to take it all in..

            My first thought when I finally held the wand in my hand was that I should point it at Ellie’s heart – to heal her. I know it doesn’t work that way, but not so deep inside of me there’s a little girl who wants to believe in magic and really doesn’t want to lose another family member so soon, or ever. My next thought was of how, during my first year teaching synagogue school, I brought the kids pretzel sticks and showed them how to use them as magic wands, as part of a lesson on prayer, as a way to emphasize the power of words to create our reality.

            My next thought was that I really needed to try some spells, not only because I wanted to believe they could work, but to see if I could create some healing ritual, some way to remind myself that I’m really not so alone. I went online and googled “Hermione’s Spells” and found a long list of the spells she’d performed throughout the books and the movies. She had spells to open doors and fill a cup with water and disarm an enemy and freeze someone in place. She used practical spells, like making Harry’s glasses impervious to rain, or creating a fire to cook with, and powerful spells, like confusing enemies or making them forget what they’d just experienced. She used her words to cause harm, and to protect, and even to knit small hats for house elves, but I couldn’t find a spell to heal heartbreak, or anything I could use to stop Ellie from dying, or to bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians. I guess even Hermione wouldn’t presume to have that kind of power.

            I’m pretty sure that Ellie spends a lot of her time, when she’s sitting in front of the bookcase that holds her treats, whispering her own version of the summoning charm, hoping that chicken treats will start to fly directly into her mouth. Maybe if she had her own wand those summoning charms would really work. I wish that for her, and for me. I think we could all use a little more magic in our lives.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?         

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The Power of Magical Thinking

Posted on December 17, 2022 by rachelmankowitz

            In this season of miracles (for Hanukah) and magic (for Christmas) I’m always inspired, and a little bit confused, about what’s possible and what’s not. I don’t think Santa is going to come down my chimney, wearing a blue suit covered in Stars of David, with a bag of presents just for me; if only because I don’t have a chimney of my own. And I don’t think my Chanukiah (a menorah with an extra candle for Chanukah) is going to stay lit for eight days; in fact, I’ve never had candles that lasted more than half an hour at a time. But there’s something in the air, and in the lights and presents and TV movies and special foods and decorations, that makes it feel like anything is possible.

“Can we plant chicken trees this year?”

            I don’t really believe in magic, though I really, really, want to, but I’m intrigued by it and by all of the things we’ve called magic in the past that turned out to have understandable, if complicated, causes.

            Recently, my rabbi talked about how, when the ancient Israelites first entered the Land of Canaan, the Canaanites taught them all of the latest agricultural science, including the rule that you should only make unleavened bread in the spring, so that all of the leavening (AKA fertility) could go to the land itself. As a result, we have a Jewish holiday each spring which features unleavened bread, or matzah (at some point, the holiday of unleavened bread was combined with the celebration of the Exodus from Egypt, to become the single week long holiday of Passover). Over time we gave new meaning to the ritual of eating unleavened bread in the spring, combining it with the memory of the way the Israelites had to escape from Egypt quickly and therefore had no time to let their bread rise, but the ritual is the same and its source is a belief in sympathetic magic.

“Matzah does not count as food.“

Sympathetic magic is magic that derives its power from a connection between similar objects, like a voodoo doll, with a lock of the enemy’s hair on the doll to create a link, so that whatever happens to the doll happens to the enemy. You don’t have to believe that this is magic in order to understand the metaphoric value of a ritual like this: the voodoo doll creates a catharsis, so that an individual can cause harm to a lookalike doll instead of going out and physically harming their enemy, allowing the person to work through their pain, and the fantasy of killing the other, without actually hurting someone else or putting themselves in danger. Isn’t that an incredibly powerful, and even magical, thing for a ritual to be able to do?

The Jewish ritual of Tashlich, where we throw our sins into the water (in the form of bread or birdseed) on Rosh Hashanah, has power because it offers us the chance to feel unburdened, as if we’ve really released a weight from our lives. It’s similar to the therapeutic practice of having a patient who has lost a limb use a mirror to create the illusion of two healthy limbs, so that she is then able to relax the muscles and nerve endings leading to the missing limb, creating real change in the body as the result of an illusion.

Some sympathetic magic hasn’t aged quite as well, like using herbs with yellow sap to cure jaundice, or eating walnuts to strengthen the brain (because walnuts look like miniature brains), or drinking red beet juice to benefit the blood. And yet, at the time that these cures were used they must have seemed like powerful magic, or even the science of the day.

            And that makes me wonder, what if the ideas we call magical thinking are simply hypotheses we’ve come up with over time to explain phenomena we don’t yet understand? When there is proof that a hypothesis is wrong then it would be delusional to continue to hold onto that theory, like eating walnuts because they look like brains rather than because of their actual nutrients, but when there is no means to prove or disprove a hypothesis then is it really so unreasonable to hold onto these magical ideas if they offer us comfort?

            Another example of sympathetic magic that resonates for me is the horcruxes from Harry Potter, where part of the person has been transferred into an object, and therefore the person can’t be killed until the object is destroyed. J.K. Rowling made this concrete in her books, to prolong the life of Voldemort and make him that much more dangerous, but don’t we often use works of art, or clothing, or photographs, to represent our connection to the person who owned them, allowing us to feel their presence even when they are gone?

Miss Butterfly
Miss Dina

            There’s a reason why the Harry Potter books were so successful with adults, as well as with children: because the magical logic resonates. Magic is a powerful metaphor for the things we struggle to give full weight in our emotional lives. It is often used in fantasy stories and superhero movies to bring hard-to-explain feelings to the surface, like the Dementors in Harry Potter who represent the unbearable feelings of grief in physical form, so that they can be seen and fought off. Or like Superman’s one weakness being kryptonite, because it is the raw material of his home planet; this is powerful sympathetic magic and deep psychological truth all at once.

In Harry Potter, Voldemort’s name was replaced with he-who-must-not-be-named, because they believed that saying his name would make him appear, and we have this in Judaism too. We are never supposed to say the “true” name of God, the unpronounceable four letter name in the Torah – the Tetragrammaton – that some pronounce as Yahweh, and we are supposed to save the other names of God only for prayers and blessings, because we’re not supposed to say God’s name in vain, or for no meaningful purpose. All of this is because we recognize that words have power: to create, to shame, to guide, to honor, to express love.

            There are lots of things that I don’t believe in literally that bring me comfort and allow me to keep going, even when reality is deeply disappointing, and I think that’s often the purpose of magic, and religion too. And sometimes, inexplicably, the magic works: a call comes just when you prayed for it, you wish on a star and the wish comes true, or you get a feeling about someone you love far away, and it turns out to be true. Maybe it’s a coincidence, or an educated guess based on deep knowledge of the other person, but it feels magical, as in, unexplained and powerful. And who’s to say it’s not? Especially at this time of year.

“If we put our heads together and think hard, maybe the chicken will come!”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?         

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The New Couch

Posted on January 29, 2022 by rachelmankowitz

            We finally, finally, got rid of our old couch. We’d gotten it when we first moved into this apartment, nine years ago, and it was shiny and new, black (faux) leather, with a convertible bed (because we were sure, or Mom was sure, that the grandkids would be sleeping over all the time). In the past, at least since one of our dogs ate a whole couch when I was growing up, we bought our “new” couches from charity shops. But when we bought this apartment, after many years of renting, Mom decided to put aside her prejudices as the daughter of a consumer advocate and avowed penny pincher and spend some money on real furniture (though we still got a lot of IKEA bookcases, because…I like to put things together). The big purchases at that time, other than the apartment itself, were the couch and a dining room set (which we almost never use because we don’t eat at the dining room table and because our dining room is really just an entrance hall and not big enough for the table and chairs we chose, though they are beautiful).

Cricket claimed the couch when we first moved in

            Anyway, it became clear early on that the faux leather of the new couch was really really faux, because it started to flake. Neither of our dogs at the time shed, but the couch made up for it, spreading tiny pieces of black material around the apartment, and no amount of sweeping could eliminate the trail of black fabric pieces.

            But, we’d spent so much money getting the apartment in shape, and the couch still worked, even if it was quickly becoming a naked-fabric-couch that had to be covered with blankets (and then with a special couch cover that still couldn’t prevent the shedding underneath), so we kept it. It was like a snake constantly shedding its skin and never getting a new one – not the most uplifting metaphor for a new start in life, but it was comfortable, and there was that convertible bed, just in case, so we tried to ignore it.

Ellie, Mom and Cricket ignoring the shedding couch
Ellie, enjoying the first couch cover

            Until Mom hit a wall. I can’t say what finally caused her to hit the wall. She has an incredible ability to tolerate things other people could not put up with, but then, all of a sudden, she can’t anymore, and last year, the switch flipped on the couch. But she was still her father’s daughter, so she had to do a lot of shopping and price comparisons (if Consumer Reports reviews couches, I’m sure she checked in with them). She finally found the couch she wanted, but it wasn’t available right away, so we waited, and finally, a few weeks ago, the new brown leather (non-convertible) couch arrived.

            When the delivery guys took away the old couch, and we’d swept away as many of the black flakes as we could, we decided to also get rid of the carpet runner we’d bought from Costco a few years ago, because it was holding onto the leftover flakes from the couch. I’d ordered a new runner before the new couch came, but it would be a few more days before it arrived, and I thought it wouldn’t be terrible to have a bare floor for a few days, to go with the shiny new couch and the sudden lack of tiny black flakes all over the floor.

Ellie claiming the old rug

            Except, the new couch was a little bit higher, and a lot more slippery, and neither one of the dogs could figure out how to jump up onto it. I put a towel on the floor, which made it possible for Cricket to jump up, but Ellie still needed to be picked up, and even then, she couldn’t find her footing on the couch and seemed to think she was on a skating rink, sliding along on her butt.

            As soon as the new rug arrived and we’d put it down in front of the couch both girls were able to jump on and off the couch with ease, and all the world was right again.

            I hate change, and clearly so do they, but once we’d addressed what they actually needed – solid footing – everything else became manageable. And it got me thinking.

            I wanted a new rug because the old one was drab and cheap and couldn’t quite get clean, and I chose something colorful and better made and machine washable – but I didn’t think about what the dogs needed: that the rug had to be here now, not a day, or three days, later. They didn’t care what the rug cost or what it looked like or if it could be cleaned easily – they only cared if the ground felt secure under their paws, so that they could get up on the couch when they wanted to and feel like they had some control over their world.

Ellie and the new couch
Cricket sniffing the new rug

            There’s something here that I’ve been trying to piece together; a lesson about the difference between what matters to me in life, versus what I think is supposed to matter to me, or what matters to other people. It feels like I’ve been missing a lot of these cues, not just from the dogs but also from myself, and ignoring the real underlying need in favor of what I think my needs should be. But when I don’t check in with my real needs, or discount them, I end up feeling insecure and as if the world is an incredibly slippery place. I think the girls are teaching me that I need to pay closer attention, and give more weight, to my feelings, especially when I have the sense that something is missing. Because without solid ground under my feet, I’ll never be able to jump.

“Much better.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Ellie’s Magic Carpet

Posted on August 17, 2019 by rachelmankowitz

 

For a year now, Ellie has struggled to jump up onto the living room couch. It seemed odd, since she can easily jump up onto my bed, which is significantly higher off the ground, but Mom pointed out that there is a rug surrounding my bed, and no rug next to the couch (because when Ellie first moved in she peed through the rugs in the living room and hallway to the point where we were afraid to replace them).

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“Oops.”

But it’s been a year, and we were at Costco recently and saw a (very) cheap area rug that would fit right in front of the couch. It wouldn’t be a terrible loss if the flood of pee returned to wash it away, but, maybe, we thought, it could be the magic trick to allow Ellie to jump up onto the couch instead of needing the Mommy elevator (that would be me) every time.

I was not especially optimistic: one, because Ellie still pees on the exercise mat in my room on occasion, and two, because I didn’t really understand Mom’s logic about wood floor versus rug as effective transport up to the couch. But it was worth a try.

We got home from Costco too exhausted to set up the new rug (this is a constant. I always look forward to going to Costco and I always come home feeling like I ran a marathon in cement shoes), but later in the day Mom set out the area rug, trapping it in place under the coffee table (or whatever you call a low table on wheels that sits in front of the couch and holds all kinds of miscellaneous tchotchkes).

At first, Ellie didn’t seem to notice the new rug. She saw Cricket sitting up on the couch and came over to me, as usual, with her front paws up in the air, asking for the Mommy elevator. But Mom said not to lift her up. “Encourage her to do it herself,” Mom said, sounding loving and sweet despite the horrible cruelty she was asking me to carry out.

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“But why, Mommy?”

I got distracted by something (dinner, TV show, news alert, whatever) and then noticed that Ellie was stretched out next to me on the couch, with Cricket looking extra grumpy next to her.

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“Harrumph.”

And that was it. The magic carpet had done its job! Ellie has been up and down, with no help from me, dozens of times since then. She still can’t figure out how to jump up onto Grandma’s bed – which is no higher than mine and surrounded by a fluffy rug – but I think that has more to do with Cricket’s dirty looks. It is, after all, Cricket’s bed. She kindly allows Grandma to sleep on it, out of noblesse oblige, but that courtesy clearly does not extend to her sister.

There have been no pee puddles on the new rug so far. It’s possible that Ellie has finally figured out that wee wee pads and carpets are not the same thing. Now if only that knowledge could extend to exercise mats…We’ll have to see how things develop.

I might also have to carry a piece of rug with me to place next to the car, so that Ellie will remember that she can jump onto the backseat by herself. Usually she only jumps in after she’s seen her sister doing it, but maybe the rug could work its magic there too.

 

In the meantime, I started to think that this metaphor might fit me too. Just like Ellie only needed one extra, small step to allow her to make a big step forward, something to help her feel a bit more secure and supported, would the same trick work for me?

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Will it work for Platypus?

I’ve been struggling with the social work job search ever since I passed my licensing exam in the spring. I’ve written cover letters and sent out resumes like a good girl, but inside I’m terrified that someone will actually offer me a job, or even an interview, and call my bluff. This next step just seems too enormous to me. Internships and classwork and graduation and the licensing exam were all big things, but they seemed doable. This next jump feels more like jumping off a cliff.

 

But after watching Ellie’s transformation into a jumping bean, I started to think about what could serve as my area rug, or magic carpet, to make the next step in my life seem more possible. And then I got an email from one of the rabbis at my synagogue, asking if I’d be interested in teaching in the synagogue school this fall. They’d only need me for two hours a week, to teach Hebrew language and Jewish holidays, and I thought about it, for maybe a second, and wrote back: Yes!!!!

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“Yes!”

I couldn’t believe I’d written that, and I was even more shocked when I went in for my meeting with the rabbi and couldn’t stop smiling. Teaching? Me? Children?

 

It’s only two hours a week, so that explains some of the doable-ness, but I think the real magic is that the job is at my synagogue. That’s my safe place. I’ve always been able to do things there that feel impossible everywhere else.

Of course, after I accepted the job, the anxiety flowed in and I started feeling like I had to write out all of my lesson plans for the year within the first twenty-four hours, and all of my internal monsters had to have their say: about what could go wrong, and how badly I could fail, and who would hate me, and on and on. But, surprisingly, but I still wanted to do it. How strange!

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“Very strange.”

It’s possible that some part of me is thinking that this two hour a week job will be instead of a part-time/twenty-hour a week job in social work, but I think it’s more that a deal has been struck internally, if I can have this, then you can have social work. I didn’t even know I wanted to do this, or that I could do it. Just like Ellie didn’t know she needed an area rug to get up onto the couch.

I don’t know where any of this will lead, and it’s possible that I will need a few more metaphorical area rugs to get to the long term goal of becoming a therapist, but now I think they might actually be out there, waiting for me to be ready for them, or waiting for me to imagine them into existence.

We’ll have to see. But for now, I really need to memorize the Alephbet (Hebrew alphabet) song, and practice my Hebrew print writing, and figure out what a lesson plan might be. Wish me luck!

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Amazon page and consider ordering the Kindle or Paperback version (or both!) of Yeshiva Girl. And if you feel called to write a review of the book on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Izzy. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. Izzy’s father then sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, as if she’s the one who needs to be fixed. Izzy, in pain and looking for people she can trust, finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

 

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Ellie, the Love Bug

Posted on May 4, 2019 by rachelmankowitz

 

The other day, when I was driving home from the drug store, the front of my left foot started to cramp out of nowhere. It didn’t impact my driving, but stretching my toes didn’t help, and even the walk back up to the apartment didn’t make it go away completely. The pain was just annoying enough to make me wonder what I might have done to cause my foot to cramp. Was I doing ballet in my sleep? Have I been pointing and flexing my toes without realizing it?

As soon as I got inside, the dogs were desperate to get outside, so Mom and I leashed them up and followed them out the door. I wasn’t watching the dogs closely, because I was too preoccupied with my own thoughts, about ballet and such, but then Mom pointed out that Ellie was limping and I looked up in time to see Ellie hopping around and then flexing her leg back into an arabesque – her left rear leg. The same foot that was bothering me.

I picked her up and touched her paw, to see if she had something caught between the pads (because Butterfly used to get pieces of kibble stuck in her paw on a regular basis), but there was nothing obvious there. Ellie gave a little shriek when I touched her toes, though, and pulled her foot away. I put her back down on the ground and she proceeded to run, hop, stretch, run, and jump in quick succession. She stretched her left leg back in the arabesque position a few more times but then she put her foot down with her full weight on it. She wasn’t crying as she walked on it, so I left her to finish her dancing and peeing and then led both dogs back into the apartment.

Once inside I figured I could get a better look at her foot if I was sitting down on the couch. Thank God it wasn’t Cricket, because she would have ripped off my hand before letting me touch her foot. Ellie is much more trusting, or at least tolerant. I held Ellie in my lap and picked up her left rear paw to examine it more closely, and that’s when I saw the blood. Some of the blood had rubbed off on the top of her right rear paw, but the wound was clearly localized on the left paw. Mom brought out a damp wash cloth to dab the blood away so I could see what might have caused the injury. I worried that one of her paw pads had gotten cut, or that she had glass in her paw, and I started to catastrophize and plan ahead to calling the vet for an emergency appointment and… Mom calmed me down and continued to dab the paw until I could see more clearly. There was no obvious cut, and I couldn’t see any foreign objects, no glass, or pebbles, or needles, or anything else. Mom found a piece of sterile gauze in the medicine cabinet and managed to wrap it around the top of Ellie’s foot and tie a little knot. Then she suggested that we wait and see if the wound was still bothering Ellie after an hour or two, because Ellie wouldn’t thank me for dragging her to the vet just for a scratch that could easily heal on its own.

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“Can I have my paw back, please?”

And mom was right: the bandage came off quickly, and the bleeding stopped even quicker than that. Within an hour, Ellie was back to her usual cheerful self, with no sign of an injury. I kept an eye out for the rest of the day for any possible delayed reactions – severed ligaments, swollen ankles, blood, tumors, etc. – but she was fine.

Which left me time to contemplate the weirdness: why did I have that random pain in my foot right before Ellie had an injury in the same freaking foot? Is this some new form of ESP that psychics forgot to mention? Am I the dog mommy of the year – literally able to feel my baby’s pain? Or was it just a silly coincidence that I should ignore, and maybe make sure to do my foot and leg stretches more regularly?

I have no idea. I prefer the magical explanation (for everything), so I tend to over-compensate and be very skeptical of magical explanations, and try hard to find a rational explanation instead. And there’s always a rational explanation available. But…

I think we are all connected, and I think love connects us on an even deeper, more unfathomable level. And I think, maybe, that this was a sign that Ellie and I have found our wavelength, not just because I happened to be lucky enough to be on a call list when Ellie needed a home; not just because she’s cute and lovable in a generic way; but because we’ve done the work to get to know each other.

me and the girls

Cricket has her very own wavelength.

Ellie has become more and more of her own self over time, sleeping flat on her back with her legs in the air, speaking with her own voice (louder and louder as time passes), and running with her own unimaginable joy as she tries to chase the mourning doves as they escape up into the trees. She is a love bug, burying her head under my chin, leaping up for scratches and hugs when we’re out on a walk, following me everywhere (but especially to the kitchen). She loves me, she loves her Grandma, and she even loves Cricket, who sort of, maybe, tolerates her in return.

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This doesn’t look comfortable to me, but Ellie loves it.

I’m not saying that I want this connection to continue to express itself in foot pain, in fact, I’d rather it find a nicer vocabulary in the future. But it means something, at least to me.

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“We don’t believe in this…stuff.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Amazon page and consider ordering the Kindle or Paperback version (or both!) of Yeshiva Girl. And if you feel called to write a review of the book on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish girl on Long Island named Izzy. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes is true. Izzy’s father decides to send her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, as if she’s the one who needs to be fixed. Izzy, in pain and looking for people she can trust, finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

 

 

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My Snow Day

Posted on February 12, 2017 by rachelmankowitz

 

Up until the middle of this week, I was working on a post about how little snow we’ve gotten on Long Island this winter. It is therefore possible that Thursday’s massive Thunder-snow-bomb-aggedon was my fault.

The thing is, I like snow. Even more than that, I like snow days, when the whole world seems to be at home watching the same news shows, and not a word of politics is spoken. Theoretically. I love zipping up my tall boots and taking the dogs out for picture time. I love watching Cricket hop through the snow searching for treasures (a leaf!!!!!). And I even like trying to console Butterfly about the weird texture of the ground under her paws.

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“I see something!!!!!!!”

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“Now I see it over there!”

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“Mommy, why can’t I feel my toes?”

We were having all of the negatives of winter: the severe cold, the biting wind, the gloomy lighting, and every kind of cold and flu imaginable, without the benefit of snowball fights and hot cocoa to lighten the load. Even Cricket and Butterfly had to suffer through the short daylight hours, and even shorter walks, and the plinking rain on their heads, with no reward.

We had one day, recently, when the air was full of snowflakes that blurred the world, but added up to almost nothing on the ground. I had to drive carefully, and wear a warm jacket, scarf, and gloves, but I still had to go to work. I felt cheated.

Summer will come along too soon, and it will be relentlessly hot and humid and full of smog and sweat and swarms of bugs. I just wanted a few snow days in my memory bank, to shore me up for those long months of heat, when I would barely be able to go outside and would have to sit with my head right up against the air conditioner just to be able to think.

It’s not that I’m thrilled with having to shovel my car out of the deep snow. I would actually like to have a magical shovel that removes the snow without any help from me. And I could do without the black ice on the roads, and the slippery walkways, and the bad headache that inevitably comes with extreme changes in air pressure. But the snowstorm was a relief just the same. I could turn on the TV and watch weather for as long as I wanted to, with only short breaks to hear about the national political dramas. Every local newsperson was out in the snow, wearing silly hats, and asking random snow-covered strangers some very silly questions. My local government officials were all too busy keeping people safe, and making sure the snow was getting removed from the roads, to cause trouble. One mayor was even driving the snow plow himself, with a reporter along for the ride to make sure the event was recorded for posterity.

I need days like that. I need a few days each year when all of the pain and disorder are muted under Mother Nature’s snowy blanket. Now if only we could convince her to lift up the blanket of snow again once we’ve rested, and not leave it to me to remove pounds of wet snow with my non-magical shovel, then I wouldn’t need three days in bed to recover from my beautiful snow day.

019

“We’re going back inside now, Cricket.”

045

“I can’t go inside yet, Butterfly. There’s still a leaf under here. I’m sure of it!”

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Walking The Bread Gauntlet

Posted on July 26, 2014 by rachelmankowitz

 

One of my neighbors, I’m not sure which one, believes that the tiny birds in our communal backyard will enjoy huge crusts of French bread that would suffocate a goose. We live in an apartment complex and share this backyard with a lot of people we rarely see. And Cricket makes sure to bark at anyone who dares to be outside, so I feel bad complaining about anyone else’s foibles. But the scattering of bread felt like a field of landmines to me. The last time the French bread was thrown out into the backyard was over the winter, when we discovered that my other dog, Butterfly, is diabetic.

The bread in the grass.

The bread in the grass.

Putting white bread in front of Butterfly would be like leaving bowls of whiskey in front of an alcoholic dog.

Butterfly loves the food she’s allowed to eat. She loves her chicken treats and kibble and chew sticks. It’s just that, if I am sitting on the couch eating a piece of pizza, she will stretch until she can reach the pizza and try to chew off the side of the crust. She is very short, but white flour gives her magical powers.

Butterfly is finding bread...

Butterfly is finding bread…

Everywhere!

Everywhere!

Cricket was interested in the bread too, but not more than she was interested in the squirrels, and the birds, and the sticks. When I pulled Cricket away from a piece of the bread, she basically shrugged and said, “whatever,” and moved on to try to rip my arm out of the socket as she ran towards a squirrel who was already miles out of her reach.

A conference is required to sniff this bread.

“Look, Cricket, bread is falling from the sky!”

Of course, my first thought when I saw the bread scattered on the lawn was to do a blog post about it. So Mom brought her camera and I brought the girls and we had to pose Butterfly close enough to the bread to show the temptation, but not so close that she could actually eat the bread. Of course, she gobbled a piece down before I could pull her away.

"Mine!"

“Mine!”

I don’t know what to make of my behavior here. I was worried about Butterfly being tempted by the bread and falling into a sugar coma and dying in front of me, and yet, another part of me just kept thinking – blog post!

The bread was gone by the end of that day, and it hasn’t returned. I have no idea who was tossing the bread out there, but it’s possible that they were watching me and Mom and the girls out on the lawn feverishly trying to get pictures, and decided to scoop the bread back up. Or, the maintenance guys saw the bread and grumbled about how they could possibly mow around these stupid obstacles, and picked them all up and threw them in the garbage.

I didn’t even realize how anxious the bread gauntlet had made me feel until it was gone. Not having to grip Butterfly’s leash in a fist made the bread-free walk, even in the heat, almost blissful.

And yet, I almost wish the bread gauntlet, with its connotations of manna from heaven, would return. I don’t want Butterfly to get sick, but the glee on her face when she sees those magical pieces of bread is overwhelming and, selfishly, I want to see that look again. Is there such a thing as low sugar manna from heaven?

 

"More!"

“More!”

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