It's Good Friday on Easter weekend and I am feeling, well--good! There are rumors that the rain is actually going to stop today and when I asked my son to pack for a weekend away to visit my aunt for the weekend he claimed he did and declared, "I brought two of everything!" Perhaps with all the rain lately, bringing two of everything makes sense. And maybe I should build an ark while I'm at it, too. There is something about spring and Easter, in particular, when it feels like the real "new" year. Could be that the prospect of getting into the garden again makes me buzz with anticipation. Watching small green sprouts pop up from the ground is exciting. Renewal is emerging all around us. Even indoors, a plant category I usually don't excel in, is showing another flush of blooms emerging on my mother's Christmas Cactus that just bloomed in December. Perhaps going along with my New Years feel for life right now. I have tulip, daffodil and allium greens popping up all around my house and I pray the bunnies don't eat them all, helping my prayers along with some sprays of Repels All to round things out (prays and sprays--haha:). The bunnies are really only interested in the tulip greens. This past month has been a busy one for The Room to Write with our Young Writers and Illustrators Meet, Greet & Create event finally making a comeback after four years and all sorts of fun plans for April. In particular, I have been busy with details of a collaboration with the Arts Collaborative of Wakefield's April exhibit at the Albion Cultural Exchange titled "Tell Me a Story." If you'd like to see all about the event details, check The Room to Write's events page! We have a writer/artists exhibit where 13 writers write about 13 pieces of art. There will be a table with 20 books by local authors and their information. We are highlighting picture book authors with six authors reading their books during the day on three different days so that parents and caregivers of young children can have a fun activity for their kids and time to enjoy the art off-peak exhibit hours. Lastly, we are holding our quarterly Meet & Greet at a local ice cream parlor and then strolling over to A.C.E. to see the art and one of the very kind artists, Joy Schilling, will be touring attendees through the art and talking about the various art techniques. Even more like a New Year's celebration is that Easter is on March 31st and so the next day is April 1st! I'll be so happy to land in April knowing that May won't be too far away in the future. Warmer weather, greener landscapes, and knee deep in my garden. I have 6 raspberry bare-root plants on their way along with a River Birch tree, my second attend to plant that in a roughly similar spot as the last time, but with the knowledge I gained from the last time I failed. I haven't started any seeds, but I look forward to getting them going sometime next week. I hope:) Hopefully spring brings renewal to your life. Brings you a sense of starting again and hoping for the best! Happy Easter!! Ahhh . . . summer. It's a season when we collectively agree (sort of:) to take a break from life as usual. We can blame it on our childhood where the promise of sun, splashing in water, and no school set the precedent we would find ourselves chasing for the rest of our lives during the hottest months of the year. Some don't like the idea of children or adults having a long period of idle time, but I have to say I believe it's a necessity--for all ages. I have children and so I know that there is no truly "idle" time for me during summer, but I do enjoy the idea of blurred boundaries where shoes aren't always mandatory, bathing suits become acceptable attire, and meals are less formal--often eaten outdoors causing napkins to take flight, spills to become no big deal, and the ability to accommodate unexpected mouths at the table by simply throwing another something-or-other on the grill. Coming from a gal who appreciates structure and thrives under the scenario of too much to do with too little time to get it done, I deeply appreciate down time. In fact, I think I desperately need it. My engines need time to cool off and I really do feel like I'm recovering from life in the summer months. When fall arrives it's off to the races--and I love that, too. I thrive on a packed schedule all the other months of the year. So, with August now front and center I fully intend to press "post" on this blog entry and begin my recovery. This summer started off with a bit more adventure than usual as my whole family embarked on a three-week trip to England, Scotland & Ireland. We enjoyed afternoon tea, rode the London Eye with friends, walked by Big Ben as it rang out while we reconnected with a long lost cousin, hiked up the side of the mysterious rock formation of the Old Man of Storr in Scotland, walked by the Birnam Oak that Shakespeare passed, fed carrots to the Highland Coos, cheered on the County Clare Hurling team at a local pub, and surfed the waves off of the western shores of Ireland. Just to mention a few things. Now, I'm ready for the portion of the summer where I read for pleasure, sink my toes in the warm sand, eat fried seafood, and play cribbage.
We should never underestimate how important down time is in our lives. Slowing down allows us to focus on family, friendships & our faith:) Happy summer! This morning I walked the lake as I've been doing consistently two days a week since the new year. I suppose that is my resolution. I'm not sure if I knew it was at the time, but apparently that's how resolutions are made and kept at my age: make it small, tangible and achievable. Baby steps. Today the fog seemed to tell me something similar. Usually while walking the lake, I have a clear view of the opposite shoreline. It's only about 3 miles around, so it's not difficult to see the whole thing at a glance, but not today. This morning the fog was so thick--like pea soup, as they say--I couldn't see the water, let alone the other side. It was very striking, beautiful, unusual--other worldly. At certain points it seemed as if I was staring off into the ends of the Earth. As I walked I wondered what the lesson was because it felt like the fog was telling me something. The Universe was whispering in my ear and it struck me: focus. Focus on what is right in front of you and don't think or worry about the other stuff in the background. Fog forces this to happen. On a clear day the branch of a tree can be so easily lost among the colors of the water, the distant trees, the bird flying by at that moment, etc, etc. Fog erases all of that from your vision and the branch that never caught your eye before, stands boldly against the backdrop of the muffled grey mist. An ordinary blade of grass pops. The empty boat has never looked so desperately alone. The Universe pleads, "Slow down. Focus on what is right in front of you." Don't waste time thinking of the stuff off in the distance. There may come a time when you are there, but currently you are here. Forget "over there" for now. Appreciate, worry about, tend to, take pleasure in, suffer through, deal with, savor--what is right here right now. Be present. Let everything else fade off behind the fog. I can't say I'm sorry to see the year 2022 bid adieu. Goodbye! "Don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord . . . well, you know the rest." This year has been skipping to the same beat all year and it sounded like this, "What! A new month? Which one?! (Insert current month here) already!! No way." Even on the lead-up to Christmas week the song I remember hearing most was any Christmas song by Trans-Siberian Orchestra with its electric guitar and spastic musical climax. That could have easily been the theme of the entire year: hurried, admittedly painful, too much and yet not enough. So, there it is: my year in review. Uninspired perhaps. Soggy and a bit stodgy, as they say on the Great British Baking Show when they bite into a piece of cake that is supposed to be yummy, looks promising, but just isn't--at all. Let's hope that 2023 is all that 2022 wasn't. I did not dress up for this evening's ringing in of the new year. Wearing my favorite pair of sweatpants (with pockets of course), a well-worn t-shirt that has an image of Cape Cod's Sagamore Bridge and reads "Cross that bridge when you come to it!" beneath a long, cozy sweater (also, pockets:) and fuzzy, purple polka-dotted socks is how I will enter the new year: Comfortable. Hopefully 2023 will skip to more of a Nat King Cole beat: slower, steady and soothing. It's the little things, right? I had a great Thanksgiving! Love that holiday. It's my favorite, filled with eating and the ability to nap spontaneously, and the long weekend didn't hurt either. More time, guilt-free naps, and longer weekends are something I'd love to see more of in my future. Until that's possible I will celebrate the discovery of a reasonably simple dinner roll recipe that I found in my attempt to relax. Relaxing is something that needs to be eased into for me, so finding myself unable to just sit still and veg out, I thought I'd try my hand at making some dinner rolls. I googled "dinner rolls recipe" and the second recipe I found was a winner. I did a test run and THEY WORKED!! It is amazing that people have made bread and bread-like items since the dawn of time and here I am in modern civilization celebrating my ability to made dinner rolls. But, you see, I'm not a baker as much as I am a cook and I bake only when required by the need for a birthday cake, a big zucchini that is only good for zucchini bread, overripe bananas that must not be wasted, or a school bake sale assignment. Baking is a bit too slow-paced for me and I just don't have time. So, I found myself with some time. It was so exciting to make hot, pull apart and slather with butter rolls that my family devoured in short order. I watch British Baking Show and it always looks so complicated and takes so much time: the measuring, the water temperature requirements, the kneading, the proofing, the actual baking with the threat of something being "undah-baked"--the science of it all I'm not a big dinner roll person at Thanksgiving. I'd rather dig into all the other stuff, but my brother likes them and I thought his wife might enjoy a fresh-baked roll. The recipe I found, which you can find HERE, didn't require the greasing of bowls and it only made 12 rolls, which is a reasonable amount. I don't need the 24 rolls that many recipes yield. I did have a couple of tweaks: I had to use regular yeast I had in a jar (so activated it before mixing it by combining it with the very warm water and then a teaspoon of sugar and waited ten minutes), I used a wooden spoon and elbow grease to mix instead of the electric mixer in the recipe, and then just followed the recipe and let it "rise" for more than the 30 minutes in the recipe, but still they were really fast as far as homemade bread goes. I didn't brush them with anything before baking and they came out golden brown. A success! These days with so much going wrong all around us, it's nice to have a humble success to celebrate--and eat:) I just did something for myself. Well--not counting the KitKat bar I just asked my second born for. She obliged willingly taking it out of her sibling's bag. I shouldn't have accepted or condoned or whatever crime it was to allow my second born to take a chocolate from one of the other born's bag for my own craving--but it's Friday, so I did. Anyway, that was not what I did for myself. What I just did was participate in a poetry workshop. On Zoom, which I'm a bit sick of . . . but it was free, and I needed something. Like the KitKat, but for my creative spirit. I needed somebody to feed me creatively and force me to produce something creative. The workshop was sponsored by International Women's Writing Guild (IWWG) and facilitated by Warrior Poet Kai Coggin. She'll be offering a poetry intensive workshop if you are looking to get creative. Find out about that here. Here is the poem the workshop helped me produce. It's a draft--as everything is:) Joy ----- She sat there in our ordinary kitchen. My cup of tea, still hot, perfectly sweet and splash of milk. Ordinary black. Stringless bag. Sinking. Steeping. She sat there circling us--taunting knowing she wouldn't stay. She couldn't -- -- wear out her welcome -- be taken for granted. Expected. Sitting there--as if always. In our kitchen every ordinary, sleepy Saturday. Tea and talk, dancing. So simple until she slipped away to another kitchen, somebody else's unassuming moment. I've kept a journal since I was a teenager. However, writing in a journal was like one of those on-again, off-again relationships. I can't say I ever really wrote with any reliable level of consistency over a long period of time and often, when I was younger, the entries were more centered on "what I did" than "what I thought." But, when the pandemic started in March 2020, that changed. I started filling up a whole journal every three months, so I'd say I probably filled about six journals since then, alone. It was as if writing in my journal was my moment to take a deep breath at a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe. Today, the third page I wrote in my journal was my attempt to figure out why writing in my journal is something I have begun looking forward to as much as my morning cup of tea. I'm transcribing my thoughts here--in this online "Diary," to encourage others to find solace and sanity in the safe confines of a journal, diary, notebook or whatever you term it. (Warning, part of the perk of journal writing is no grammar, run-on sentence, spelling mistakes exist or matter--so I'm copying it in here as it was written in all its carefree format.:) Here's what I wrote: Anyway, I'm enjoying the pocket of time right now when I don't have to be anywhere and the kids are watching cartoons downstairs and I'm in this chair in the living room with a cup of tea and this journal. I can't quite understand why writing in this journal is so attractive to me, why it feels like such an "escape" but I almost crave it at times. Maybe it's because I'm safe here--as cheesy as that sounds. I'm able to say what I want whether I'm right or wrong or politically incorrect. I am able to sort out my thoughts, maybe make sense of them, perhaps vent my frustrations with anyone and everyone without worry of offense or disagreement, and also I am able to let out the leash to allow my ideas and imagination to run wild. To dream on paper and quietly out loud:) Silently out loud. Without fears of contradiction or being talked sense into. It's a vision board sans images. Sans color! A vision board of black and white that leaves the imagination of the reader to fill in the vivid greens and bright blues. Time and space and freedom. There are so many means available these days that allow people to escape, to breathe a little, loosen the collar--so to speak--and here is perhaps one of the healthier, most accessible, cost efficient and convenient of them all: Writing in this here humble Journal . . . Thank the Lord for paper and pen :) Every now and then the universe sends in something that tells me to "slow down!" The world has been moving at warp speed lately and this morning I took some time out to go into my garden and do some deadheading. Snipping or snapping off spent blooms can seem like an onerous task, but often that is the magic of the garden--many of the things you need to do in the garden are not exciting and take time. But, that's sometimes just what we need. This morning, while looking closely at the various Cosmos scattered in patches within my front and side garden, I saw something move. First it freaked me out and then I looked closer. Yes--nature is wild! A Praying Mantis was sitting on the plant and since their advantage is camouflage, I hadn't noticed it until it moved, perhaps in an effort not to also get snapped off by me. I once watched a Praying Mantis crawl on the outside of a screen door and they are extremely (painfully!) slow moving creatures. Watching paint dry pales in comparison to watching a Praying Mantis move. From that first sighting onward, I took the sighting of a Praying Mantis as an indication to me that I need to slow down. I hope to do some slowing down this weekend, but until then--it's full speed ahead. If you find life is moving too fast--go outside, into a garden and try to find a Praying Mantis. Sometimes weekends away are relaxing. Some are more along the lines of work. Other times they are a hybrid of the two and you come away exhausted but content. But, definitely exhausted:) Two weekends ago I went on a "retreat" that I had no business going on because life was rather ramped up at the moment with four kids back to school and sports exploding all over the calendar in addition to those not-so-savory things a person has to do--like clean the house, do the laundry, break into the fall wardrobe while still floating the summer shorts. Don't even get me started on the socks! Socks. On the floor. A basket of matchless singles growing and growing. Smelly socks stuffed in shoes. Inside out socks in the middle of the stairs. Even socks OUTSIDE! Enough about the socks. On this retreat there wasn't a sock in sight. :) There I was, on a writer's retreat to Squam Lake. What a beautiful location! So beautiful that it was a challenge to not spend the whole time walking around exploring or jumping in the lake. I was there to focus on my writing, so I soaked all the nature in from a comfortable and semi-productive distance. What was so exhausting about that? Well, it was a bit like a mini-conference and anybody who has ever been to a conference knows there's a lot of talking, meeting people, introducing yourself, figuring out what it is you might tell them, wondering more about them, and sharing a room with a stranger. Sure, she'll feel like a friend by the end of the weekend, but there's a process and so sharing a room can add to the lethargy. Throw in a wonderful old cabin that doesn't muffle anything and only amplifies every footstep and shift of weight. A toilet flushing? Sounds like Niagra Falls has just dumped down the walls and onto the floor. It's all part of the charm, but also the process of allowing yourself to be uncomfortable, a little awkward, and eventually feel a bit like family when it's all said and done. It was a great experience and it felt so good to meet so many wonderful, creative, nerdy minds like myself. People who wrote, researched, animated, edited, agented, revised, read, made dolls and were all interested in each other. It's a great feeling to be surrounded by people committed to creativity! The weather was perfect. Everything was photogenic, as you'll see below, and the whole experience helped me to grow a little bit more as a writer, a reader, and a member of the big wide creative community I love being a part of. This has been a hot summer to say the least. My kids have been in the pool a lot and so have plenty of frogs! Wow, who knew there were that many frogs in the area? It seems unnatural--there are that many! I just took two out of the skimmer. They were among the lucky ones, still kicking and when I put them down they hopped off. How long before they are back in the pool? Yesterday there were baby turkeys. I didn't see those but my family and my neighbor did. Last week a skunk waddled out from the bushes mid-morning as if it was the most ordinary thing to do. Maybe it was--for him. Later he hung a right around the back of the shed and then faced off with a bunny. The skunk rolled on its back and the bunny hopped perhaps to appear more threatening than he really was. It was like nothing I've ever seen. The week before that my children were running a wild petting zoo with four baby bunnies having been born after the mother made a den (nest?) in my raised vegetable garden. I went out to water one morning to hear thumping every so often. Finally after some investigating I realized it was a baby bunny running from the water and into the sides of my raised bed. The next day there were two little sets of ears huddled together hiding beneath the cucumber vine and among the marigolds. In the evening there were three bunnies where there had been two. Within a day there were four bunnies total. I couldn't believe my eyes. (Side note: My vegetable garden beds are raised to keep bunnies out. Now they serve as a maternity ward for them.) Later I came out to see my girls and a neighborhood girl each holding a baby bunny lovingly, patting them and telling me their names: Squirmy, Gucci, Chubs and Lily. Two evenings ago, I found what looked like another bunny nest in the same place and we all watched as the mother bunny circled and finally jumped in to feed her babies. We watched goldfinches visit our feeder and what we think is a wren flying and perching on my vegetable gardens, then swooping under our deck to where we think she may have a nest of her own. This afternoon one of my daughters came across three baby birds in the pool. Two died. One sat in the grass at her mercy while she sat patting it wondering what to do. Four more kids gathered around the bird wanting to help. Finally, I scooped it up with my shirt and put it into my raised vegetable bed so nothing could get at it. While my son bent over to see the baby bird, he spied a Black Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillar that must have been feeding on the dill growing in abundance. Perhaps the baby bird or its mother will be feeding on that catepillar before long or it will be left to grow into a beautiful butterfly. Who knew my raised beds would serve as a functioning animal hospital for animals of every sort? The walls I thought would be a barrier for my vegetables has become those of a sanctuary of sorts. Gardens are definitely sanctuaries--for animals and humans alike:) Happy gardening! |
Archives
February 2024
Categories
All
|