H-A-R-O-S-E-T. I used my blank as an S, a 50-point bonus for a 7-letter word. Aren’t I clever? However, I couldn’t make it fit anywhere on the board. Such is life.

November 26, 2011
Last night up north and Dad’s 71st birthday. Susan and David dining in Traverse City, thankful for a night out alone. Papa Jerry and the boys on a pilgrimage to the diner, to rate chocolate malteds. That left Mom, me and my niece. (Name: Miriam. Age: 13. Claim to fame: Our novelist and fearless reader. “To Kill a Mockingbird”? That’s so 2007.)

Grandma Sharon had the idea to play an open-tray, no-score Scrabble game to teach Miriam strategy. Conserve your S’s! Save your blanks! Don’t leave the triple-letter score open! And, I told her, sometimes you just want to use a cool word, even if it’s not worth many points. I taught her “laity” and Mom taught her “civet.” We shared “ak” and “ka,” two two-letter words whose meanings escaped both of us. No matter: “’Ka…’ mused our young friend, “isn’t that, like, an ancient Egyptian spiritual entity?”

The day before, after a post-Black-Friday nap (saving money can be exhausting), I found a game already in progress. I volunteered my services as a consultant (giving back to the community is a tradition in my family). No takers. My older nephew faced a trayful of vowels: “aeiweeo!!!” He exploded. In laughter. Peals and peals of it, unable to stop. He rolled on the floor, with an inhibitionlessness that I envied. Weeks later, I’m glad it’s still in my ear. (Name: Sammy. Age: 11. Claim to fame: Would not stoop to using a calculator.)

His big sister, in her Scrabble debut, was clogged with consonants. She was very serious, and seriously upset. “What’s so funny?” she whined. And as you know, it’s not the content of the whine but the tone and pitch that are its essence.

Dear Susan,
It’s 1982. I know this because we are wearing Fair Isle sweaters. The wool is itchy, but that’s the price of conformity. We are playing our game, just you and me. I am winning. You do not like this. As the point spread grows, so too grows your pout, seasoned with whine. I am pleased with myself, but I feel guilty about making you unhappy. I employ my proven strategy, for my favorite audience: “What? Of course ‘imple’ is a word. You know, when an imp gets a pimple.” I can see your forehead relax. A half laugh…then…no dice. You get up and you leave me.

And today? There are no bitter verbs between us.

November 27, 2011
Early Sunday morning and my younger nephew is staring at the closed refrigerator door, his post-breakfast ritual. I don’t want to disturb him. “moon mango man says smile,” reads his magnetic creation. (Name: Josh. Age: 7. Claim to fame: Has had remarkable success teaching the dog piano.) We are preparing to leave; we know the drill: Pack, launder, round up the toys.  The scrabble tiles have been corralled and returned to their box, then placed in the overflowing wooden toy chest/coffee table where they reside with jenga and the rest.

Find your iPad, fill the water bottles, empty the wastebasket. And a plea from our host, “Will someone please take home the leftover cranberry sauce?” Before saying goodbye and thanking my gracious parents, I reflect on the past five days with the people I love the most, and ask myself this question: If I take an English muffin to eat in the car, should I toast it first?

“Sorry, Sweetie, I’m using that,” I said, before she could pour the water for her tea.

In truth, I was on my way out for an early meeting. I planned to take my coffee in a travel mug with a lid, not the hippie/handmade one from the Purple Fiddle cafe.

There is very little a mother keeps for herself. The mug is a souvenir from a week in West Virginia’s Caanan Valley with dear family friends. I’ve never said so outright, but I don’t share it.

If I were a child, it would be the action figure I keep by my bedside, my favorite strawberry lipgloss worn to a nub, the best pencil for math homework.

That night at the Purple Fiddle, we ate ice cream and drank beer while our children played board games and snapped photos outside on the sidewalk. A blues duo sang for the regulars and visitors to this tiny mountain town. Or maybe the kids played cards and the music was bluegrass. I can’t be sure, but the details are beside the point.

My friend Amy has a shirt from the same evening. We talk hands-free on the way to pick up our children from school – Amy in New Jersey and me in Michigan. We have until 3:30, when we scramble to wrap up our conversation and emerge from our vans, moms on active duty.

Sometimes I’m careless and put the mug in the dishwasher. One day it might chip. Someday I might even share it.

But not yet.

“Guess what!” I’ll say at breakfast, cheerful as can be. “Onyx was chewing on Fiddler. Can you believe that silly dog?” Then I’ll show off my clumsy needle work and go back to pouring cereal.

For a moment, I was horrified when I walked into the bedroom. Onyx, the real life black lab, likes to sleep on Josh’s bed, which is usually no problem. He also likes to chew stuffed animals and shoes, but that’s generally only when he wants attention. The bed is a sea of stuffed animals. I should have known that one day I would find a half-deflated puppy between the dog’s paws and a pile of polyester stuffing on the floor.

They are not a predictable bunch, dogs and children. We love the dog, except when he grabs a friend’s eyeglasses from the table or mangles the housekeeper’s cell phone. We love the children too, regardless of tantrums, misplaced soccer cleats and the general confusion of adolescence.

Often, I’m winging it, glossing over stuffed animal disasters, acting like I know how to mend a bruised ego or make mushroom soup without a recipe. Most of my improvisation proves both convincing and effective. That’s motherhood for you.

The house is noisy and often messy. The kitchen smells like roasted peppers and lasagna. Everyone is sleeping now. I will return the stuffed dog to his owner’s bed, and all will be well … at least until tomorrow.

I could see us – five or six eighth grade girls huddled around a lunch table, frantically finishing our algebra homework for Mr. Robinson’s class. His system wasn’t fair – we were graded on correct answers, not effort – so every equation had to be solved perfectly.

Marge, the lunch lady, is yelling at someone, calling her “Ladybug,” or some other odd endearment. Rochelle is generously sharing her homework while simultaneously combining lunch leftovers into some vile new concoction.

We are thirteen, and we care how we look and how we smell and whether that cute boy noticed our nonchalant glance during gym class.

I have a clarinet.

I have a locker, and a locker partner named Linda who gets permed hair before I do.

I have a white five-speed bicycle that I ride to school.

I have a crush on a boy named Mike, but, when asked, I deny it.

I returned today as an adult, as a teacher for a two-hour community education class – merely a visitor.

As I walked up the steps to the second floor classrooms, it all came flooding back. Turn right, and there’s my old locker. Not the actual one, but that’s where it was. There’s Mrs. Resnick’s room – the language arts teacher who knew I was a writer, even in sixth grade. She is knitting something balanced on her ample bosom. She is why the word bosom was invented.

Science was this direction. Social studies over there. I am sure that the classroom where I taught today was the room where Mrs. Kosin taught Values Clarification. Or maybe it wasn’t.

I am caught between unreliable memories and the reality of my own thirteen-year-old daughter, the child who is both worldly and worried. The girl who can whip up a three-course dinner on her own, but who isn’t sure if the tone of her latest text is lighthearted enough. The child who tells me one moment that camp was heaven, and the next says she wasn’t sure who was really her friend.

The girl who believes that contact lenses are the answer to her prayers. The one with the dazzling smile, who writes like a dream, and made me cry during her final reading at Interlochen Arts Camp.

Sometimes it feels like I am my children, or that they are me, planted back in my life thirty years later. Of course this is ridiculous. My daughter is as different from me as she is similar. But in a few weeks she will begin eighth grade, and there is nothing I can do to save her from the glorious confusion.

Do you like blue best? Green? Chocolate? Pizza? Jazz?

My answers never satisfy. I don’t have a favorite. I am not being coy.

At our wedding, we danced a clumsy foxtrot to Van Morrison’s Moondance, not because we loved it best, but because Buster Poindexter’s growling take on Castle in Spain would not have been appropriate; nor Love Cats or anything by Tom Waits.

Today I am in northern Michigan, blessedly alone for a few more hours. Josh and I will fish off the dock tomorrow; our hands covered with fish scales and worm goo. I will eat oatmeal with blueberries and walnuts. I will go out in a kayak and follow the zipper trail of bubbles where the loons dive under and emerge halfway across the lake.

Last week David and I shared a perfect appetizer of goat cheese with honey and pistachios, a prelude to a less-than-memorable dinner. Lately, I have been dreaming of lamb chops seared with anchovies and garlic, though sometimes all I want is peanut butter on a spoon.

Josh and Sammy made pink lemonade before they left for camp: two boys perched on chairs at the kitchen counter, squeezing lemons and pressing strawberries through a sieve. The drink was intoxicating, especially the second day when the lemonade had become thoroughly infused with berries.

This house, this deck overlooking Cedar Lake. Today this is my favorite place – alone – because I know my family will be here soon.

1. Never put anything wet in your laundry bag.

2. When you unpack the first day, turn your duffle bags inside out.

Rule #1 is the result of the time my middle boy stuffed damp towels in with his laundry. It made sense in a third grade sort of way. They were dirty, right? Unfortunately, that leads to mildew. And many ruined shirts.

Rule #2 suggests that there might be a pair of navy blue Crocs hiding in the corner of your luggage. If you don’t turn the duffel inside out, you will spend half of camp wearing the same stinky gym shoes every day for every activity – to the beach, the shower, lunch and kickball games. Needless to say, those shoes didn’t make it back into the house when the boy returned home.

After many weeks of packing and preparing, including trips to Target, pre-addressing envelopes for the littlest one and deciding which stuffed animals should make the trip and which should stay home, the time has come. Tomorrow they will all be gone.

My seven-year-old has been asking to go to camp with his older siblings for years. At last he is old enough for a ten-day excursion, which means we will have no children at home for a week and a half. Friends assure me I will miss them terribly. I’m sure that is true, but I still can’t wait for a reprieve from lunches, laundry and bickering. I love them, and they love each other, but we all need a break right about now.

The most unique question so far came from my youngest: “What if I don’t know how to turn on the shower?”

I assured him that there would be a counselor nearby to help if necessary. I didn’t tell him that he might not shower very often. I will be glad if half the clothes we packed come home dirty. I try not to think about the fact that little boys sometimes sleep in their bathing suits and can’t understand why they shouldn’t wear those same suits three days in a row.

I want them to go, because I know they will come back. Stinky shoes, damp towels and all.

This morning I ran wearing his backpack – key chains and strands of beads flying from the zipper pulls. We were headed to camp – Josh riding in the misty rain, me chasing behind with the dog. I looked like a normal jogger on the way home, after dropping off the boy and the backpack. I don’t want to know what impression I made on the way there.

I can’t get “Jazzy” out of my head. Oliver Sacks calls the phenomenon a brain worm, when you can’t let go of a tune.

This jazz thing, it’s a duet. He plays it over and over, one slippery measure at a time. When he finally feels it in his fingers, I know he’ll call me to sit with him. He’ll say, Play the low part, Mommy, as he slides over on the piano bench.  Josh gets the melody every time.

Here I was, a real live writer, swooping in with pearls of wisdom while their hardworking English teacher was out of town celebrating the birth of her first grandchild.

Every day they entered the classroom with the same two questions: “What is the baby’s name?” and “Does today’s assignment count?”

I didn’t know the baby’s name. But of course our work together counted! This was real live education — fresh and relevant and ready for the world. Or at least that was my take on it.

I arrived three days before a long school break, and would return for three days after. The year was winding down, seniors were gearing up for their class trip to Israel. Some of them wouldn’t even be back after break. All in all, not an ideal time to step in as a substitute.

But, as I told them, I was not there to babysit. I had been hired for this brief stint to help make the most of the waning days of AP English Language and Writer’s Craft classes.  Their teacher had encouraged me to actually teach them something while she was gone.

I brought the AP students copies of “Seeing,” my favorite essay by Annie Dillard. It is the second chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book I have been reading and rereading for 20 years.

The class had spent most of the school year learning about grammar and style and writing practice essays in preparation for the Advanced Placement test. “Seeing” was not on the syllabus.

“Why is this important?” I practically shouted.  “Why am I asking you to read this essay?”

Blank stares.

“Because you have to pay attention to the world,” I told them, more gently this time. “Notice the details. Be surprised by the familiar.”

We launched into an exercise that involved writing about the room around us. I encouraged them to include details in their own writing, whether for the AP exam or for other purposes.

I like to think at least a few of the students gained something from Dillard’s essay, if only because I love teaching it. I love the part about the disorientation experienced by previously blind people when they see faces for the first time. I love the idea of engaging the world in two-dimensions, allowing a tree to blur into a flat structure with lights in it.

Writer’s Craft presented a different challenge. The students were in the midst of a multi-week poetry unit that required each of them to write a collection of diverse poems, from a simple acrostic to a formal villanelle.

I am a poet, I thought to myself. I can handle this with my eyes closed.

Our first day together, I shared a poem by Li-Young Lee, “Peaches,” in which the speaker reflects on a day spent picking fruit with his father.

“The peaches in this poem really are peaches, I told them, “but they also serve as a metaphor. In a few spare stanzas, Lee brings us an entire relationship.”

Some of them couldn’t take their eyes off me. Others were not buying my story.

“What exactly is a poem?” one of the students asked, nonplussed by the free verse. “Why isn’t this just prose broken into random lines? Why are you telling us it doesn’t have to rhyme?” He truly seemed perplexed.

I mumbled something about distilled language and emotion, and then the bell rang.

I thought about his question all through the school break.

Our first day back, I brought in a stack of books — works by contemporary poets — and asked each student to read one selection and share it with the class.

“Tell us why your poem is a poem,” I said. “Tell us something you notice.”

Their observations were, by turns, insightful and mundane, and all of them were true.  And then we wrote some more.

The next class session was our last, so we worked on revision. “Don’t fall in love with your first words,” I reminded them. “Be willing to change anything.

“Show us the details,” I said again and again. “Save what matters; cut the rest.”

With small smiles and flashes of recognition, they read their revised poems aloud.

One girl wrote breathtakingly about being slammed in the stomach with a soccer ball. Another compared love to crab claws. A boy brought a pigeon to life as a stand-in for powerful emotions. There was a computer box poem and a touching description of children on a playground. Specific children on a specific playground.

Magic.

They were being writers. For a brief moment. For real.

Did I say I took this teaching gig because I had something to share?

Did I say I did it for the students?

That’s what I told myself, but when I heard those poems aloud, I knew it was just as much for me.

Magician to prepare an entire week’s worth of meals from scratch. Even the most accomplished chef sometimes reaches for the Trader Joe’s crunchy tilapia. But not this week.

Archivist because the seder wouldn’t be the same without the exact apple kugel we eat every year. And three kinds of charoset. And one green vegetable. And apricot squares. How many preschool afikomen holders can one family use? How many cups for Elijah? How many decorative seder plates? We have them all, ready to adorn the seder table yet again.

Plumber for when the cook (that would be me) stuffs too many carrot peels down the garbage disposal. You know how the water makes a whirlpool in the sink but doesn’t go anywhere?I have been down this road before. Usually it’s because of green beans. I am an impatient sink stuffer. I know I should compost more. It’s just that the compost bucket is upstairs, and I was cooking in the basement. And, well, you know how it is when you’re preparing three dishes at once – peeling onions and cracking eggs and slicing apples and throwing all the bits and pieces in the sink.

And then you finally flip the disposal switch, and everything’s going great … until it’s not.

Step one: Wait and hope.

Step two: Turn on the disposal again.

Step three: Sink plunger.

Step four (and WHY must we always get to step four???) Unscrew the PVC pipes under the sink. Don’t forget to put a bucket or a soup pot under there. The water does eventually have to go somewhere.

After much mopping and twisting and panicked searching for a missing piece of pipe, I got the sink under control. The carrot dish was in the oven; I was cleaning up. And I got to thinking about my Aunt Debbie and the time we cooked together in my basement kitchen.

I had wanted a Pesach kitchen for most of my adult life. Of all the things I have wished for, this is the one that has exceeded my dreams. I can start cooking two weeks before Passover; I can leave the sink full of dishes; I can store all my holiday pots and pans in the cupboards instead of lugging them up and down the stairs. For a person who takes “Kosher for Passover” pretty darn seriously, a spare kitchen is an unthinkable luxury. In general, I am pretty low on luxury, but this room is one indulgence I never regret.

The year my aunt and I cooked together, the kitchen didn’t have a tile floor; the ceiling wasn’t finished; but the counters were in, and all the appliances worked.  She baked for three days from handwritten recipes she’d carried with her from Florida. I’m fairly certain apple kugel was on the menu.

We only cooked for Pesach together that one time. There were too many reasons why not in the years that followed. And then her health declined, and travel became too challenging.

My aunt died almost a year ago, and I miss her. She gave me my first taste of herbal tea – Celestial Seasonings cinnamon apple – and told me I was beautiful even when I didn’t feel it. She took me shopping and out for lunch – salads and black bean soup and usually dessert. We walked barefoot along Clearwater Beach, where I once found an intact sand dollar.

I doubt she ever fixed her own sink. But magician and archivist?

Most certainly yes.

“I love you, too, Daddy. Here’s Sammy,” he said as he navigated the dog gate and handed the phone to his brother.

Like mother like son, I suppose. And I laughed; but I also stopped short. I am trying to re-learn to do one thing at a time. For an inveterate  multi-tasker, this can be painful.

Just chop the broccoli.

Just drive the car.

Just swipe the bottom domino from a pile of six by whacking it with a ruler.

That last one was a fifth grade physics demonstration, and I almost put it off till after dinner. That would have been a mistake, because we spent much of the meal talking about inertia and force and motion.

I am trying to turn off my cell phone between 4 and 8 p.m. Trying to leave my work at the office (no easy task, since the office is 14 steps from the kitchen.)

This morning while I supervised breakfast, I noticed a bat mitzvah invitation that required an RSVP. First thought: “I’ll just pop into my office and email the response. I’ll be back in time to make sure lunch boxes are in book bags.”

Then I caught myself.  One email too easily turns into checking Facebook, reviewing my calendar for the day, assessing the to-do list. So I dropped the invitation on my office chair and figured I’d either have to respond to it or sit on it all morning.

Last night we watched The Secret of NIMH, an impromptu movie night, snuggled on the couch. I could have been paying bills in a corner. I could have been folding laundry on the floor.  The basement playroom was dark and cozy. The animation from the 30 year-old film was occasionally stunning.

Ninety minutes curled up with my children. What could be more important than that?