This year, I am intrigued by the idea of delighting in truly good food. I can be a very haphazard cook, as I can be haphazard in almost everything I do. My daughter Maurya was sweet and told me that she loved that her mother is so spontaneous. Well, whether it is spontaneity or haphazardness, my family (and guest/victims we lure to our home to feed) eat at their own risk. Sometimes, the fare is sublime, conversation flows, the world is good. Sometimes not. So I’ve made a goal of focusing, of planning, of actually following recipes. Of educating myself. Of making at least some of our daily meals delectable, beautiful Events (in terms of hospitality and warmth and enjoyment). I can’t wait to start my garden and my little orchard, to facilitate these grand schemes. But back to the Danish. [continue reading…]
This was Sunday, three days ago. I actually finished making this dress about a week before Christmas. Sunday was the third time I wore it. It is a special dress, made in a lonely two evenings to seduce my husband. I should qualify that. I suppose if it were made absolutely exclusively to seduce my husband, it would look a lot different—more scarce, perhaps, and I certainly wouldn’t be posting a picture of me in it on a blog for the world (that would be my friend Gaylynn, some cousins, and an in law or two) to see. So, it was made also (secondarily) for picking my husband up at the airport, for going out with him, and ok, yeah, I could wear it to church too. If Frank happened to be with me. Which he isn’t a lot lately–he travels so much. [continue reading…]
Dragonflies are on my mind and absolutely everywhere right now. They struck (or re-emerged from) my consciousness a year ago, when a very large one took a very long nap in a window of my house-under-construction. I thought he was dead, an inert, grey-brown surreal thing gathering dust (keeping company with a broken shim, a paint lid, and some bent nails) on the sill. I was installing flooring at the time, working long and late and hard, often alone. This was a time of restless nights and strange dreams for me… like the dream about cows grazing on acres of my newly installed oak flooring. Cows slipping and tipping and help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up and what was I thinking, laying down acres of hardwood in a cow pasture? Anyway—the supposedly dead dragonfly was an object of interest and conversation when I brought the kids to the house one night. We looked at him, talked about him, and left him there because he was so very big no one wanted to touch him. We were tired of cleaning, and he was sort of an exotic trophy worth keeping anyway. Even if keeping only meant leaving him there. [continue reading…]
Dancing with angels in the high blue sky,
I sang and loved, and loved and grew
So fat with love I fell
To the mud behind a house
With windows, and a door I painted blue.
(No pillow, lamp, or chair, Nor even my own room.
Just a kitchen, and a broom.) [continue reading…]
Lynaea invited me to be a guest blogger in her blog. Well, actually I might have asked her if I could a long, long time ago. But I am thinking that her recent invitation is because she adores my writing not because she has to paint four pictures a week for three weeks in a row to get ready for her art show.
While Lynaea is hard at creative work, I have been puttering. And it is this that I want to write about. I adore puttering. I believe in puttering. I am happy puttering.
So what is puttering? Puttering is all about scale. It is doing little jobs around the house. It is reodering, fixing up, tidying up, sprucing up, or dolling up in small increments instead diving into large, lumbering, or ambitious tasks.
Puttering has nothing to do with redoing a kitchen, painting the house, or sending out Christmas Cards to all one’s acquaintances. It is about finite tasks that give one an immediate sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. [continue reading…]
Looking through past photos, I found this one, taken by my daughter Maurya. She would have been…hmm, twelve or so when she took this picture of early spring at our Last House in Washington. Maurya was a newly emerging photographer/talk show host at the time. Aka Minnie Guinea, championing the transient beauty of flowers and sunsets. Also interviewing the chickens (“and what do YOU think about the Animal Protection Laws?”). Yesterday she reminded me that once, she got locked in the chicken coop. The door latched on the outside, and the wind blew it shut during one of her chicken interviews. “I was locked in there for an hour at least, and nobody missed me!” she remembers. It happened to Frank too that year during a family Christmas party (oddly enough). We didn’t miss him either…luckily, he had his cell phone with him. Imagine our wonder when someone answered the phone and learned that Frank was calling from inside the chicken coop. [continue reading…]
I bought fabric tonight, craving color and warmth. Textiles…threads.
For the holidays, Frank and I took the kids to see grandparents in the Northwest. We left them for awhile with their Brand grandparents, and drove over to Seattle to celebrate (belatedly) our 20th anniversary. I loved Seattle with its mild ocean breeze (paperwhites bloomed OUTSIDE our hotel! And rosemary, spangled with blossoms, trailed from planters along Alaska Avenue). I loved downtown, its old buildings and the purple glass in the sidewalks—skylights of a half-forgotten underground. We spent a couple of mornings at Pike Place Market. In one shop, we saw beautiful quilted wall hangings, which the sales ladies said were pieced together from remnants of ceremonial dresses, handmade by women in India. I was transported by one quilt in particular. The fabrics were silk and velvet, in rich reds and fuchsias and and roses and oranges. Nearly every quarter inch of each piece of cloth was saturated with beads and embroidery. Just to touch that quilt! Textural ecstasy. And then to slowly unfold it and catch my breath at its full blushing glory! I think the ladies were sure I was sold. In my heart, I was. Frank took their card. But (and perhaps this is sometimes a character flaw) my budget is too far from my heart’s epicenter, and remained untouched. The quilt stayed in the shop, the threads dropped. [continue reading…]
Today, the first Monday after the New Year (surely I’m not the only woman in the world with Monday issues), was at first typical of a January Monday. The phone rang around five, waking me from a sound and sorely needed sleep. I have a cold, and it was still dark, and the kids don’t have school today. I could have slept in! There was a wadded pile of used tissues on my nightstand and another remnant rolled into wispy abstract art, twining on the carpet next to the bed. My youngest was nestled on my husband’s pillow (our usual arrangement when my husband is out of town). Frank sounded bummed when I checked in with him on the phone. It’s Monday where he is, too. After some grapefruit and herbal tea and incessant sneezing (and after I said goodbye to my parents, who’d found refuge and a small party here last night at the tail end of their holiday), I faced off with the laundry room, which hasn’t yet recovered from its post-holiday-travel deluge of clothes. And thought, these boots were made for walking.
