A guide to recognizing your springtime saints

My daughter just experienced one of the rites of AAPS 5th grade on Friday.  She went on her winter survival field trip.  She did, indeed, survive.

In the past, I've known kids who had considerably more wintery survival experiences on these outings in the bush north of Ann Arbor.  Sometimes wearing inappropriate footwear and/or bringing food that may never cook, those kids returned exhilarated, smokey and perhaps a little cold and hungry.

Not my girl.  Not this year.  Some great saint of spring was watching over these children from Pittsfield on Friday.  What a glorious day they had.  All fires going, all food cooked.  My daughter said she was in charge of grilling - that's my girl!  The oo-ing and ahh-ing over the food went on for days.  Oh, yeah.  That is my girl!

This got me thinking about my own winter survival efforts and the various, palpable markers I use to recognize the arrival of spring.   Food, cooking, and entertaining in my home tend to be at the heart of it.  If it wasn't for my bright, small-but-mighty kitchen and all the special occasion meals my girls and I cook up in it, I truly believe I would not survive.  If you've never seen it, it is quite small.  The floor space is 4ft by 5ft-ish.  The compact stove is to the right in this photo, the fridge is just to the left.  It's compact but powerful - the Mary Lou Retton of kitchens.

We celebrate any and all potential holiday dates, people, and events with some kind of special meal or party in my small Village indoor space.  And year after year, it works.  Amazingly, exhaustingly, it works.  We start out the fall with Canadian Thanksgiving and just never stop having a reason to tidy and clean the house, cook or heat up, as the case often is, eat and drink with friends.  In fact, I'm itching to have a party again.  It has been almost 3 weeks since our last dinner event...

But soon I can leave the confines of my kitchen behind and begin grilling whenever I please.  I can sense it already.  E's talk of grilling burgers - and the description of the kids eating them bite-by-bite - really got to me.  Simple, wonderful, grilled hamburgers...   Oooo...  Ahh...

I just have to wait for the foot of snow to melt in the backyard - a full northern-exposure enclave, sheltered from most of the day's sun by our home.  It gets only a slice of the morning sun.  I'll have to get out there and shovel it out.  There is so much hardened snow and ice on our deck right now - a 53 degree F, gorgeous day - I had to crawl outside the window by the deck to take this picture this morning.

By late February, I do tend to feel like I am hanging on to so very much by the tips of my fingers:  my budget, my waistline, my sanity.  After months of being cooped up inside, coping through food, friends and Netflix, I see light in early March when the bulbs pop up in my garden and the roads clear.

I can run again  - outside - and I actually want to run again.  Running outside helps me out all three ways - the road is cost-free to run, I trim down automatically, and I feel like myself again - body and soul.  I think more clearly, I feel more positive, and actually get more accomplished when I have that little daily run on the road back in my life again each spring.

Starting up again is as easy as walking.  I use a modified, shortened version of a Couch-to-5k Plan.  As a merely lapsed runner and not a totally new convert, I can get into it a little quicker and often can run the 5k on the first try after many months off.  But not always.  In those cases, I start over by walking, then adding as many steps of jogging (I don't think you can call my early pace actual running) as I can.  Then I walk again until my heart rate comes back down, I can breathe more easily, and I feel like I can do some more jogging.  I keep going like that each time until, eventually, I am running more than I'm walking.  In just a few of these, I can "run" the whole 5K or 3.12 miles.  I usually start this routine again just after a doctor's visit, getting a baseline on my overall health.  That usually offers the final incentive to get going on the road once again.

Although I discovered that the girls and I are too late to register for Shamrocks and Shenanigans 5k race this year, I started "training" for it almost 10 days ago now and could do it easily - if not quickly - but for the 5k registration being capped and full now.  No matter.  The running is back in my life again and the kids can still register to run the Kids Kilometer.  It's a fun event - check it out!  Downtown Ann Arbor is always packed for it and buzzing.   I will run my own 5k race on St. Patrick's Day instead to mark the occasion.  Others will undoubtably celebrate the saint in other ways...

One of the other things I look for after a long winter indoors, are the Passover items at Hiller's at Arborland.  We don't celebrate Passover but we take full advantage of the shopping possibilities and options.  I stock up on kosher products because they are corn-free.

The corn allergy in the house is a tricky one to negotiate.  My daughter has been a hivey mess for a while now.  The corn-free treats I pick up at the front of the store in their Passover display are lifesavers at this time of year.

And the four bags of Bazooka Joe kosher bubble gum is going fast, too!  I've been chewing gobs of it on my runs every day for a week.  This is literally blessed gum - and in its strawberry incarnation it is a powerful evocation of childhood, springtime bike rides around my hometown of Espanola.  But these cartoons are written in Hebrew.  I love it!  Yet another sign of spring...