All posts by GretchenJoanna

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About GretchenJoanna

Orthodox Christian, widowed in 2015; mother, grandmother. Love to read, garden, cook, write letters and a hundred other home-making activities.

October Flora

food and cooking, garden


Swiss chard is the most beautiful thing in my garden right now. I did make a tart using it, but the recipe needs work. You can see how crumbly it was, with currants and walnuts falling around.

Also I cooked it too hot, forgetting to reduce the heat, so the crust got too brown. But it was yummy.


I don’t seem to have the flowers that bloom this time of year, but that’s not because they aren’t prolific in some places around here. Like the church garden, where I couldn’t take pictures this week because my camera is not working. I found this hollyhock from last October in my files, so I could show something in the light-and-bright category, and leave my last post behind in its Oreo dirt.

Worms are Tempting Me

art, food and cooking, odds and ends

I don’t like Halloween, and we never participated in the “festivities” with our kids, but we do usually give out candy if we are home. I hate spending the money for it, too! When I was a trick-or-treating child, many people would give us homemade cookies or candy. I know that’s not cool these days.

I think the uncoolness started with evil people giving poisoned cookies, or was it an urban myth? You’d think that would discourage parents from sending kids out, period, but it just means that the homey treats will be thrown out.

Children who carry around pillowcases full of sugary junk can afford to turn up their noses at a mere cookie. BUT I doubt they would find this treat cooked up by Macheesmo boring. I am sorely tempted to get more into the icky Halloween spirit just so I can make them.

A Little Can Give You the Whole Thing

poetry,

Today started out with lots of little annoyances, including a tendinitis flare-up in my elbow, from working on my upright freezer to prepare it to be hauled off. And from hacking frost and ice off the food to prepare it to go into the new freezer.

Now I’m waiting for the delivery of the new machine (and what a useful homemakey blessing that is!), and as just about every sort of housework I need to do is irritating this elbow, I sat down to read some poems.

Wendy Cope has written quite a few that I only recently discovered with delight, and here is one about enjoying the little things, and how one’s mood can help in that endeavor. It’s from an anthology put together by Garrison Keillor, titled Good Poems, which some of my children pooled their resources to buy me for Christmas many years ago. Wasn’t that sweet?

As I’m forced to slow down and leave many things undone today, it’s the perfect reminder. It seems to me it works both ways: If you stop fretting about the past or the future, enough to see what is around you and notice what or Who is near right now, it can improve your perspective and give you some helpful momentum for noticing more lovely ordinary things.

This poem also carried a couple of specific gratitude pokes for me: the thought of how many gorgeous big oranges I have eaten in my life, picked from my father’s trees. And the wonder of having children who would give me a book of poems.

The Orange

by Wendy Cope

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange–
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave–
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.