LOST AND FOUND IN MADISON COUNTY

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Last year around this time, I spent a weekend with my friend Heather who lives in Des Moines and one of our activities was to make a Cheetos birthday cake for another friend’s son. Heather and I make a pretty decent Lucy and Ethel and the cake, while not being the tastiest, definitely was the funniest part of the weekend. This year Heather picked up a 3d lamb mold at an estate sale and I returned to help make a red velvet lamb cake. It was a short yet necessary visit and feels like a new tradition to occur at the end of April every year.

The drive from home to Heather’s is a very easy one. I don’t even need to make a stop for a break. It was a Saturday morning and This American Life was playing on NPR. I caught it right at the beginning. The topic of the day was graphing chaos and how to make statistical sense of the things happening in our world. So as I drove north, I listened to two American doctors about their experiences treating victims in Gaza. Both doctors were struck by the number of children under the age of twelve with fatal gunshot wounds to the heads. In one day, one doctor counted at least thirteen children in his hospital with one or two gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Once they were back in the US they started comparing notes with other doctors who had been in Gaza and they started piecing together a very horrible trend. The angle of the wounds were too precise, too deliberate, to be accidents. Israeli soldiers were, are, deliberately killing children. I listened to the whole segment, tears streaming down my face and then the program moved to the next story and I lost my NPR station. A quick radio search later and I was back to a new NPR station. This one was also playing This American Life, but I was catching the program near the beginning and once again hearing about Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian children. I pressed the seek button on the radio only to come back to this story on loop. Then I opted for no radio at all. Though, this didn’t really help. By the time I reached Heather’s, I had fallen pretty far into a black abyss.

Heather greeted me at her door with brunch and champagne and then we drank mimosas pretty much all day. We commiserated about the state of things. Her hip is in bad shape and she’s planning a replacement. I confessed to not ever feeling as hopeless about this country as I do right now. Not even after Chris died. Then she made cream cheese frosting and I turned coconut flakes green. She had already baked the red velvet cake in the 3D lamb mold and we marveled at how perfectly it had come out of the tin. There was a bit of debate over the best tools for frosting, but Heather found the right frosting tip to make curly lamb fur. We used dill pickle flavored jelly beans for the eyes and the green coconut provided a layer of edible grass. All in all, this cake turned out way better than the Cheetos cake from last year. Friends arrived and we ate cake and when they left, we swapped our champagne for wine and wrestled an entire block of cheddar cheese from one of her beagles.

And we laughed. A lot.

I left the next morning intent on making a detour to see the covered bridges of Madison County. As I exited the highway to make my way onto a gravel road for the first bridge, I thought about all the things I needed to do at home before the start of a Monday. My little detour was going to put a wrench in my chore list. Then I thought that maybe I shouldn't go searching for the next bridge. I should just get back on the highway and head home. But I resisted those thoughts and continued my drive through lush, green rolling hills. The landscape through Madison County is quite lovely. I didn’t expect it and with each curve of the road and crested hilltop, those thoughts about the chore list floated away. I suddenly realized that I just didn’t care if vegetables were chopped for the week or that I still might have a load of laundry to deal with. So what if the floors didn’t get mopped today. I stopped at four out of the six bridges and spent some quality time with my big camera at each of the four. I told Michael about them when I got home and he found a bicycle route map for the area. We’re talking about maybe planning a camping trip and taking the bicycles to see the last two bridges on my list. Now I want a dog stroller to attach to my bicycle so Josephine can go with us on bike rides. That way she can see those covered bridges too!

Anyway, by the end of my drive, I didn’t feel quite as hopeless. The combination of ridiculous amounts of champagne and laughter along with my photography scavenger hunt for bridges managed to scrape some dark bits of goo from my soul.

And this is something to be very grateful for this week.