The Alchemy of Potato Salad

As I grabbed the recipe for Grandma's potato salad, my second favorite food as a kid, I intended merely to scan it to see if I needed to buy any ingredients for the family reunion tomorrow. I stopped short on the first line, though: "Boil and mash lots of potatoes."

I am a decent baker. I enjoy creating food by following precise steps, using carefully measured out ingredients, and I'm pretty good at it.  I am also an excellent sous chef; I love to obey whoever is actually in charge of the food. I immediately knew that "lots of potatoes" meant that, despite the tablespoon measurements of mustard and Miracle Whip listed below, making Grandma's potato salad wouldn't be easy. 

In fact, my first reaction was to call my mother, who had written up the recipe for me when I graduated college, to tease her a bit and demand to know how to measure "lots." But I knew what she'd say: "Fill the pan. See if that's enough." I already knew she had just guessed on the tablespoon measurements in hopes of avoiding this type of phone call. 

So I did just fill the pan to see if that was enough. And it seemed like it would be. But as I began mixing it all together, the texture wasn't quite right; my first taste of it clearly needed more mustard. 

That's when I caved. I called Mom.

Moments after saying hello, I asked how much more mustard to add, and without really answering my question she told me it might need more pickle juice or Miracle Whip, too. She reminded me that Grandma never followed a recipe, and that I had to just add to it until it was right. 

I kept mixing as she told me her travel plans for the next day and about where they'd had dinner that evening. I muttered that the mustard had helped a little, but I was going to try more pickle juice next. She paused for a moment, and my thoughts tumbled out of my mouth. 

"I am much better with a specific recipe. Like your cookies. I'm great at making those. This alchemy of making potato salad is just not the way I work." 

"What's alchemy?" she asked. 

"It's the word they used a million years ago when people tried to make everyday things into gold. They just kept fiddling around with things trying to make it work. Like what I'm trying to do with this potato salad. Only they never figured it out..." I trailed off. 

I just don't like cooking like this. I'm not good at it. I like a detailed recipe. I like steps, with specific requirements. 

And as the thoughts formed in my mind, I realized I sounded an awful lot like my students when they say they just can't learn our math lesson. I never let them stop there -- we always buckle down together, keep practicing, and even if their results aren't a perfect 100%, we see growth.

I've learned recently that most times if I need to hear the advice I would give my students, God is nudging me to hear it.  

The monologue in my mind sounded familiar. I've been telling God something like this for months, years. I like plans. I like knowing where I'm going. I like having goals to work toward and to-do lists to complete. I would like to know what life is going to look like around the next corner. And the next. And preferably the one after that, too.

But I'm slowly learning that's not how this whole life and adulthood thing works. And it's not how faith works, either. God's not giving me a five-year plan to follow or even much of a big picture these days. I think sometimes we do get that kind of vision, but that's definitely not where I am right now. God's been asking me to trust Him more and more, live today in His grace the best I can and then try again tomorrow. 

See if it needs more mustard, and then try again. Maybe try pickle juice if that doesn't work. But always try again. No one is on the sidelines saying I should have followed the recipe; it was always meant to be made one step at a time, taste-tested, and adjusted as we go along.

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Afterward: I finally stopped fiddling with the potato salad after a while and just put it away, unsure of whether or not it was really ready. When we tasted it the next day, my whole family agreed it was just right. It's amazing what waiting a bit can do...but that's a lesson for a different blog post.

Sprinkled with Stones

     When I was growing up, my sister and I would sit in the decorative rocks that surrounded our house, sifting through the stones, searching for interesting ones. Pink ones, blue ones, multicolored ones; ones that showed fossils of what was surely a prehistoric lizard, ones that showed a million years of sediment gathering in a single space. Our dad worked with rock quarries, too, so sometimes he brought rocks home for us -- some were smooth and chipped off in thin sheets; others were crusty with layers of other rock or even concrete. Some he'd break open with a hammer, and we'd look over his hands, hoping he would reveal colorful crystals. By the time I was ten or so, we had two ice cream buckets full of stones sitting in the shed where we kept our bikes. We wanted to keep them separate, in their place of honor, revered as the beauties we believed them to be.

    As an adult, I started picking up interesting stones whenever I was out and about on adventures of different kinds. I kept them on my knick-knack shelf next to my framed family photos, my tiny china teacup, my penguin statue. The stone on the footpath in France that looked like an eye gazing back up at me as I finally felt God walking with me. The flat worry stone from Spain, found on a day when worries were hard to find. The handful of tiny stones from the beach on Lake Michigan, from that afternoon when we knew our friendships were changing but still held hope that they would last. 

     I wanted to keep something from those days that I could hold -- something tangible from those places that held so many fleeting memories, so many lessons, so much emotion. I wanted to be able to point to one and say, "That's the evidence. That day was real. I was there. I won't forget."

     Now I've been collecting these stones for over a decade, and they sprinkle my home in a dozen different places. Some still grace my shelves for all to see.

     But I find others in the most unexpected places. Next to my jewelry box, all mixed up with my hairpins and makeup brushes. In the bottom of a tote bag. On top my bookshelf in the corner of the living room. These stones still tell stories of lessons learned and adventures had and the spectrum of tears wept to laughter shared. But I can't remember which of them came from which place anymore.

     The path on the day I spent quietly watching the deer work her way around the pond.

     The top of the Great Wall of China.

     The banks of the lake after we'd all just floated there together, laughing, when hours felt like days. 

     Did I bring one home last summer?

     As I held the rough, pink one in my hand and thought of the smooth, brown rippled one in the next room, I knew it doesn't matter where they're from anymore. Doesn't really matter which one is which. They're now as much a part of my home's landscape as they were once a part of the places where I gathered them; this is now where they belong. They still strike a chord within me each time they catch my eye, and the memories -- whichever they happen to conjure -- are so woven into who I am that I no longer need to hold the stones just to relive the moments.