Monthly Archives: October 2009

Baby Week

family, food and cooking, home, nature, pie, travel, ,


During the week that Seventh Grandson was born, I did take quite a few pictures, but I only lately managed to make them available to my blog. I present a sketchy photo journal of my time here with the family so far.

When I arrived in town, walking was the order of the day. Behind the hospital nature paths wind about, surrounded by ponds and trees such as these birches.

 

 

I am sleeping in a room with this quilt. A grandma in H’s church made this quilt as a wedding present last year. This year she sewed a smaller quilt for Baby.

During the waiting time I sat in a corner of the hospital room and worked on potholder tops. This one uses some scraps from the crib quilt I made earlier.

After a while I did a second free-form design in aqua and purple.

In my sewing basket were two ratty and thin potholders I had basted together already. While H. was in early labor I put a bright spicy new cover on them/it. That item doesn’t need to go home with me and get stuffed and backed, so I gave it to her potholder drawer already.

 

 

Fast forward to Day 3 or 4, and Baby is wrapped in The Quilt, showing its cozy Minky backing.

I took a video of eight deer on the back lawn, while the fawns were prancing about playing with each other. And this still shot of one of the deer looking into the laundry room window. The deer often study us through the windows when we are watching them.
It was raining the first two days of Baby’s life, and when the rain stopped, the leaves had become autumnal.
Some Jonagolds that we got at the apple farm ten days ago went into this pie, which I baked in H’s convection oven. Maybe the oven is the reason it came out looking so perfect? It didn’t taste perfect, though, because those apples don’t have enough complexity in their flavor.

Eleanor of Aquitaine is one of the household cats, and the most curious about this new resident.

She caught her first mouse this week.

 

 

 

When Baby was six days old, H. wrapped him up in a Moby wrap and we three took a walk. We ended up at the back of their property, with its big Ponderosa pines…

 

…and their cones.
The maple tree in the back yard is changing. Baby is changing every day. I wish we lived in clans all together, so I wouldn’t have to leave one part of the family to go be with another. It’s a reminder that this world, always leaving something longed-for, is not our true home.

Prevention?

odds and ends



I used to read Prevention Magazine when it was about wheat germ and megavitamins, so when I was offered a free subscription last year I said Why not? There might be something useful and inspiring in there.

Wrong. After reading a few pages of the first two issues that arrived in my mailbox, I couldn’t get interested, so I started tossing them in the trash as soon as they arrived.

But not before I began to notice a theme to the cover displays. I am not clever enough to come up with a more appropriate name for the periodical, but I’d like to.

 

Any ideas?

Ordinary Grace–and Two Books

books, church, quotes, ,

I should have taken warning from these lines on the third page:

“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous….But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.”

So writes Anaïs Nin in her Diary from the 1930’s. Hers was a name I had often run across, perhaps because she seems to show up a lot in collections of quotes. I didn’t know anything about her, so I bought this used paperback book last month. It’s yet another that I will stop reading now. Why did I go on as far as I did, to read such lines as, “To be fully alive is to live unconsciously and instinctively in all directions….”? I don’t know.

But I know that I find this self-absorption and drama almost laughable, and definitely boring, in its gushing descriptions of feelings. Her prose is good; it’s the content that is lacking in concreteness and pervaded by an avoidance of reality; even the erotica she is known for is infused with her self-psychoanalysis and psychobabble.

Then there are the dreaded “ordinary” activities. If Nin can’t find her “state of grace” in the concrete here and now of Everyday, in nature and housework, I would give her condition a different name.

I should start doing a little more research on authors before I take time and/or money to learn about them the old-fashioned way. Wikipedia is easy. I could have found several reasons not to read her.

Annie Dillard is the opposite of Nin in some ways. She finds God, or at least looks for Him, in every rock and cloud and human she meets. When I threw For the Time Being into my sewing basket to take to the hospital for the waiting and laboring, I didn’t know that scenes from the hospital OB ward figure heavily in the book. I read a few passages to Pippin before her labor got very laborious.

“These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this? Or who will consider it?” Dillard asks, as she, like Nin, considers the ordinary, but as a member of the human community, struggling with many questions that concern us all and sharing her ruminations with the reader.

She includes categories and section headers with labels such as Now, China, Sand, and Clouds, and cycles back to the topics again and again through the book. I skipped around and read a few of the Birth paragraphs aloud, and I haven’t yet read from the beginning to see how the author ties all these parts together, but I know from her other writings that she sees the philosophical interrelatedness of everything.

I recall words from G.K. Chesterton about how it is really the common everyday occurrences such as the sun rising or the train running on time that should astound us. But the best version of his thought I can find at the moment is: “The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.“ This is how Dillard thinks.

Of the OB ward, she writes,

“There might well be a rough angel guarding this ward, or a dragon, or an upwelling current that dashes boats on rocks. There might well be an old stone cairn in the hall by the elevators, or a well, or a ruined shrine wall where people still hear bells. Should we not remove our shoes, drink potions, take baths? For this is surely the wildest deep-sea vent on earth. This is where the people come out.”

Her appreciation of the Numinous pervading our existence brings to mind another quote from Chesterton that will be my wrap-up:

“There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject;
the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.“

Blanket Love

art, family, home

My lifelong greediness for blankets might have had its beginning when I was a young girl in a small town where a house burned down. Someone in the community was taking up a collection of household items for the victims, and my father and mother, not ever known for almsgiving, collaborated on taking blankets from the household supply to donate to the family in need.

From this event I learned something, that blankets were not a given for everyone, and the new knowledge was strongly impressed on my young mind. For years it was merely an appreciation for the blessing of being warm under the covers in an intact house, but as an adult responsible for making up my own children’s beds, the formative thankfulness has combined with my sinful tendency to hoard, so that I have collected many more blankets than I need.

Many of them are hand-me-downs, even electric blankets from which I pulled the wires and sometimes even sewed up the holes. Some veteran wool military blankets were so thin I had to retire them, but even then I didn’t throw them away, but lacking linen closets I stored them between mattresses and box springs until such time as I could use them for quilt batting.

Most of these thrifty blanket plans I never carried out. My blanket love was fed by passing through the bedding department at Macy’s or Target. More sinful impulses rose up in those places.

This week, I sit here at the computer and use the mouse in my right hand to browse web pages displaying gorgeous works of love and art in fabric. My left arm cradles my sleeping grandbaby wrapped in his own cozy layers of love demonstrated through time and creativity. I feel a wealth of blankets in the world.

One particular story on the Quilt Festival site was of another house that burned down, and a woman who took her own recently completed wall-hanging Christmas quilt to the suddenly homeless and blanketless as a gift. It was many years ago, but the sacrificial act goes on warming and strengthening the original recipients and many more of us who need to get a proper perspective on making a house a home.

Lately I’ve been lightening my hoard, as pieces devolve into moving pads or cat beds, or go to my children who are setting up their own households. With the increasing mental and physical space I hope to better exercise my homemaking skills. I might even make a new blanket!