Category Archives: family

beautiful formations

family, grief, poetry

Thanksgiving, and my children and grandchildren… This morning Kate and her husband “Tom” are arriving at my house, and tomorrow at Pearl’s bunches of us will be together and glad to be so. It will be our first holiday without Papa, Grandpa, without my husband. We will miss him terribly but we will pray in hope of the Resurrection, and be comforted.

I was amazed to run across this poem just this week, in my own ninth month of mourning. Every time I read it I feel more connection with the poet, another woman who has grieved for her husband, and who has more than survived. She captures the sense of wildness in grief, the forces beyond our control, even to the degree that we can’t so much as name them.

I had never thought before about how the places that we find so sublime are the result of winds and raging currents and upheavals that in themselves are often fearsome. It’s a mystery how all of this comes to be, but of course it doesn’t “just happen.” If after endless waves of storms we can behold beauty and feel peace, it’s a work of God.

Mourning, Ninth Month

If I am altering,
trying to intercept my inner targets
with some shift in aim,
lighting the bales with the old moon’s shell
neither meaningful nor purposeful
just looking well,
I’ll change
with some obedience, wishing I could recognize
the force. I don’t know yet if it is thoughtless.
Many beautiful formations on earth
are made without hope, but with winds and rivers
in its stead.
Is my national park
a widow, carved then saved, and a draw
for visitors
whose pity erodes to awe?

–Sandra McPherson

It’s a Eureka.

agriculture, birds, family, food and cooking, friends, my garden, nature, ,

I am now the proud owner of a lemon tree, for the first time in my life. Unless you count my father’s ten acres of lemons that I helped to pick when I was about twelve; I also learned how to drive the tractor down the rows a few yards at a time to catch up with the pickers and make it easy to load boxes on the trailer.P1020744

When I tell people that I am planning for a lemon tree, without fail they ask me if it will be a Meyer lemon. No, it will not. I don’t know if Meyers are often grown commercially, but my father always showed scorn at the mere mention of a Meyer lemon, because they weren’t Real Lemons. All of my experience my life long has been with the old standard variety, Eureka, so that is what I wanted.

The Meyers are more frost hardy. If there had been a market for them, my father might have been wise to consider Meyers, because his lemon crop was ruined by frost so many times that he eventually pulled out those trees and planted more of the orange trees that were safer and more profitable. I’ve been living most of my adult life where we don’t get a citrus-killing frost very often, but just in case, my tree will be planted under the canopy of my huge pine. If temps in the 20’s are predicted I can cover my baby, and/or put Christmas lights on it for a little extra heat.

This would be a good time to give you one of my recipes using (Eureka) lemons. I see I’ve already shared my favorite Lemon Poppyseed Sandwich Cookies, Lemon Curd, and Egg Lemon Soup. Here’s a different one, a recipe it seems I’ve never transcribed into a computer document, which is also one of my favorite savory dishes. Lemon juice is not cooked into the stew, but juicy lemon wedges are served alongside bowls of these beans at the table and squeezed over in the desired amount.

When I discovered this recipe and tried it for the first time — maybe it came from Organic Gardening magazine in the 70’s? — it reminded me so much of the beans I ate in Turkey that I wrote the Turkish word as the main title of the recipe copied into my funky notebook.

GREEK BEANS

Greek Beans original-1

I don’t want to take time to type in the recipe right now because I have been so busy for several days, I am about to crash, and  hope to get sleep for another busy tomorrow. Much of the hubbub has to do with the garden project. At times four or five people have been working at once, on three different parts of the plan.P1020680

Soldier son came over again and finished the planting boxes. He also got the Craigslist playhouse off the driveway and into its final resting place, after building a foundation and floor and then moving it on to the spot that he had carefully leveled. P1020697

These pictures were taken a couple of days ago and already a lot more progress has been made; I hope that next week I can show you the paths all complete in their several layers.

Today the workers didn’t need me to make decisions or anything, so I caught up with some friends. First Elsie and I took a walk, which we’ve been trying for months to coordinate our schedules for. I took her on my favorite bike path loop which doesn’t require getting in a car to go anywhere.

When we got back to the house we stood out on the sidewalk looking up at the sunflowers and wondering why the birds haven’t eaten the seeds. Her eyes traveled up a little higher and spied a kestrel on the roof of my house! I am a great one for not seeing birds; if I had seen this one I wouldn’t have known what it was. But Elsie once saw a raptor like this grab a blue jay from her back yard so she read all about them. She also told me a story about an Australian woman she met who had lost her small dog to a hawk who swooped down and carried the tiny creature off.

I decided that today was the best day to cut the sunflower heads off, because if the birds don’t want them, I do, and I don’t want them getting rained on again and getting moldy. I went into the garage to get my loppers, and lop, lop, lop — the three plants with the seeds big enough to find and eat were down. I gave one seed head in a pie tin to Elsie — the seeds were falling out without us doing anything — and she went home to roast them with olive oil, salt and pepper.

Mrs. Bread hadn’t seen my yard since the real landscaping has started, so I phoned her and she was able to come over. She helped me to harvest sunflower seeds, but we found the seeds toward the middle much harder to extract. We got tired of this digging and went to the store together to buy me  a handbag.

P1020745

I am having an improved blogging experience tonight. Since last winter I have acquired a laptop and an easy chair, so now instead of sitting in front of the desktop in the corner of the house we call Siberia, I can sit comfortably and toast my toes by the wood stove. At first I noticed how much easier it is to think when I’m warm, but now….I’m getting sleepy…very…sleepy. I’ll be back another day.

Days that glow with butter.

family, food and cooking, poetry, ,

This poet’s experience was not my own, except perhaps during my brief visits to my Grandma, to whom I am forever grateful for not being a buyer or consumer of margarine. I can still see the giant pat of butter that she would lay on top of a baked potato that she had slit and pinched open to receive the gift.

That mystical event of the tiger spinning himself into a pool of butter on the ground was early etched in my memory, too. It’s a food with special powers.

BUTTER

My mother loves butter more than I do,
more than anyone. She pulls chunks off
the stick and eats it plain, explaining
cream spun around into butter! Growing up
we ate turkey cutlets sautéed in lemon
and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles,
butter melting in small pools in the hearts
of Yorkshire puddings, butter better
than gravy staining white rice yellow,
butter glazing corn in slipping squares,
butter the lava in white volcanoes
of hominy grits, butter softening
in a white bowl to be creamed with white
sugar, butter disappearing into
whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple,
butter melted and curdy to pour
over pancakes, butter licked off the plate
with warm Alaga syrup. When I picture
the good old days I am grinning greasy
with my brother, having watched the tiger
chase his tail and turn to butter. We are
Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite
historical revision, despite
our parents’ efforts, glowing from the inside
out, one hundred megawatts of butter.

–Elizabeth Alexander

butter art 97 crp

Your taste for the mundane grows.

family, my garden, poetry,

This weekend Soldier and Joy were here with Liam and Laddie. Soldier spent most of his time building two redwood planting boxes for my future vegetables. The first day I helped him at the table saw in the surprisingly burning sun, but he was at it for twice as long by himself and appreciated the iced ginger ale that Joy carried out to him.

The second day he worked just as hard (after church) in spite of drizzle turning to rain, having to work in the dark at the end, and still without the satisfaction of completing the job. The rest of us (including a couple of friends off and on) had less work and probably more P1020554 GLfun, feeding children and wiping them up, taking them to the potty, reading stories, putting them down for naps, calming quarrels, picking up matchbox cars and puzzle pieces, laughing and chasing, kissing and hugging.

It all reminded me of this poem, which I share with you because I can’t write a custom one that might more perfectly capture our own family’s contentedness.

The Continuous Life

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

–Mark Strand