MindSpinner

She’s a vibrant, smart young woman, a natural leader. When we teachers sat around a table in November and brainstormed about how to help some of our struggling students (beyond what we teachers can manage), I suggested that we recruit a handful of especially capable seniors as peer tutors. She was one of three we named, and she was glad to help out. She’s thinking of teaching someday.

She did an especially creative yearbook page for our middle school cheerleaders. She learned how to use Photoshop to turn portions of photos to black and white, while her cheerleaders popped with color. I’ll doublecheck her proof changes on Monday and see how far she got with pages for our next deadline.

She won’t be finishing them.

I learned yesterday that she hydroplaned on Christmas afternoon on rainy roads. Her car wrapped around a tree. She’s still unconscious, and the prognosis is not good. I lay awake late into the night last night, praying. Sometime in the night I dreamed that she had died. I hope my dream means nothing at all. But brain damage is suspected, and her other injuries are extensive. If she recovers, that recovery will take the better part of a year, doctors say.

“Fight,” I whisper into the air. “Fight. If anybody’s got the stuff to be a miracle girl, you have.”

I teach in a very small school with a strong sense of community. The senior class, which I co-sponsor, has fewer than three dozen students. For the most part, they’ve grown up together. This is going to be tough.

I don’t think a mother ever brought a child into the world so that he might lay his life on the altar of war, that monument to human stupidity and aggression.  But little boys grow and look to become men, and mine looks to men in uniforms and seeks to give his life meaning by serving a cause.  He has enlisted now in the Guard.  His father took him to sign the papers. He will serve the usual monthly weekends after basic training but is not eligible to be deployed until he finishes a couple of years of college and possibly even all of it. I hope the world is a better place by then.

Merry Christmas, everyone. On this shortest day of the year, keep hearts bright and warm together .

We aren’t really having cereal for Christmas breakfast at our house. Cereal just doesn’t seem like something to tempt teenagers out of bed.

We are having fruit, ham biscuits, and sweet potato muffins instead. The sweet potato muffins are my favorite, and even people who disdain sweet potatoes find themselves liking these. I tasted them first at Christiana Campbell’s Tavern in Williamsburg back in my William and Mary undergraduate days and have made them ever since from a recipe in The Williamsburg Cookbook, with minor adjustments.

Here’s the recipe for a dozen regular-sized muffins. (I like them best as mini muffins, which is what the recipe calls for, but I don’t have mini muffin pans anymore.) There are versions of the recipe on the Web, but these seem altered from the original, with more sugar than I like. I’m writing out the directions rather more fully than the cookbook does because I envision making a small recipe collection of some family favorites for my children sometime soon, and I may as well start with this one. Catapult Kid has studiously avoided the kitchen all of his life, but may take up cooking in order to stave off starvation or, more likely, impress a girl. Such things are possible. Dark-haired daughter alternates between an occasional desire to make edible, recognizable dishes and whimsical, mad scientist sorts of experiments involving ingredients I’d originally intended for human consumption. Results vary. Anyway, someday, these two may want to know how to make these muffins. That is my fantasy, and I’m sticking to it.

2/3 cup cooked fresh sweet potatoes, well drained
4 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg (I use two.)
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon (doubled from original recipe)
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup pecans, chopped
1/4 cup raisins, chopped

Directions
Boil a couple of sweet potatoes until they are tender. When they cool, skin them. They are easy to skin once cooked - no potato peeler required; a fork lifts the skin off easily.
Chop 1/4 cup of raisins.
Chop 1/4 cup of pecans. (I go a little overboard on the raisins and pecans. I also coat the raisin pieces with a little bit of flour after chopping them and then mix them up with the pecans so that the raisins don’t all stick together. We don’t want raisin gob muffins.)
Puree (totally mash) the skinned sweet potatoes with a potato masher (my choice, takes up less room in dishwasher, no assembly required), a food processor, or a blender.

Grease muffin tins.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
With a mixer, cream the butter and sugar in a medium-sized bowl until smooth. Beat in the eggs and pureed sweet potatoes.
Sift the flour with the baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg into a small bowl.
Add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk. Mix gently by hand until ingredients are just blended - i.e., there’s no dry flour at the bottom of the bowl, and there are no balls of flour that puff open when you stir. Instead, the batter will have lots of little lumps. These should not be persecuted by over mixing, or your muffins may be hockey pucks. Gently stir in the chopped nuts and raisins.

Spoon batter into the greased muffin tins, filling each about 3/4 full if you want 12 standard muffins out of the recipe. These muffins are not fluffy and tall but rich and moist.

Bake at 400 degrees F for 25 minutes for mini muffins, 10 minutes longer for regular-sized ones.

Meds are working, and I am, relatively speaking, chipper.

With all this renewed energy (having spent considerable time curled up in bed), I began to plan Christmas breakfast, which happens to be the Christmas meal I have with my kids. I told them they’d better plan to go to bed reasonably early, because they aren’t going to sleep in until 11:00 and then just scurry around to throw their things into bags to head out to their dad’s for three days. We are going to have Christmas breakfast at 9:00. (Fact is, they just got home from their dad’s house after lunch today and are at a Christmas Eve gathering tonight, a venture I blessed when incapacitated.)

Having established expectations, I asked Catapult Kid, “What would you like for Christmas breakfast?”

“Oh,” he said, “whatever you do, Mom, just don’t make pancakes.” I make good pancakes, real ones, just not very often. “And please, no bacon.” I thought of the bacon languishing in the fridge. “Don’t cook eggs or grits either.” I wasn’t actually going to go as far as to make the grits. “I ate all that stuff every morning for six months.” Confound the National Guard, they have sabotaged Christmas breakfast by feeding him every day what I work up to fixing only on the occasional Saturday morning for a treat.

Momentarily stymied, I asked, “Well, what would you like for Christmas breakfast that would be new and different?”

“Cereal.”

When I was a girl living in the mountains, Christmas came twice. It came Christmas morning with the opening of a scandalous number of packages under a tree adorned with 600 ornaments, but it came quietly the midnight before, too, when I would rise from my bed in my little girl’s room, light a small white candle, and watch the stars at the window, the horse sleeping in the pasture below, the silhouette of the apple tree. Christmas came in the quiet of midnight, in the flame of an ordinary white candle, in waiting and wordless silence, in just breathing all that is.

Now Christmas is fragmented across households, and because I have the children more of the rest of the time, they spend time with their father over holidays. This Christmas will be quieter still, for I am ill - able to get about the house, but no better. There won’t be a trip with the kids to my childhood home in the mountains; instead there will be a test or two to be run as soon as doctors return to their offices after the holiday. So it will be a different sort of Christmas. I’m picking out books to keep near my bed, for if there is a silver lining to illness, it is that you really do have to ignore the house chores you should otherwise be doing. I’m settling in to finish a book long interrupted, and I’m eyeing the fattest, yet untasted volume on the shelf. I won’t say I wasn’t moping about the bad timing for an illness and for that Christmas filled with feast, family, and bustle that isn’t going to be, but I’m settling into the idea of opening whatever gifts Christmas brings.