her able hands

Thank you all for your encouraging words and for pointing out bits and pieces that I just might be glossing over. I spent quite a lot of time yesterday talking with several people, including Cheril, and writing down a list of my requirements and of what I’m looking for the next big adventure in my life to entail. When I got home I sat down with my neighbor for a bit and told him this:

We’re interested, but don’t like the space. We also feel that in order to open strong and memorably, we would want to have the menu focus on a few things and do them really well, and then leave room to add in other experimental items over time. We want as much organic as possible and to find a way into that niche. We recognize that it will be very challenging to develop a franchise using locally produced food, but still want to make that at least a tiny corner of the plan, where a monthly special uses a local, seasonal food item.

If he wants to do the sub shop in conjunction with the organic foods, we feel that’s just a marketing nightmare (healthy, whole foods and uh…submarine sandwiches!) and we’re not philosophically down with that. We’re two women in our forties who have worked hard to make other people wealthy over the years. We’re not doing that anymore. We’re ready to dive into work that is meaningful for us, and will be much more willing to put extra time into a project that aligns with our values.

I also said I’d done quite a lot of asking around (thanks Becca!) and using my own restaurant experience and my own fuzzy logic, I knew for a fact that his goal of opening his doors in three weeks (or his revised four) is absolutely unrealistic and way optimistic and is a recipe for disaster. And that his idea to have us hand over a menu and he take care of getting it all set up and just have us start when the store opens is crazy because we are the ones who know the food and would need to set up the line process, figure out the timing on everything and then train the staff to do what we do and to do it even better.

So if that’s his plan, he’ll need to find somebody else to help him with that, but we will joyfully provide him with cupcakes and cookies via our SugarBuzz home catering gig (our business cards arrived yesterday).

So it turns out he had a difficult afternoon with the man who owns the building, trying to iron out a lease that has quite a lot wrong with it. He’s having second thoughts and took in all I had to say and more. He said he loves our ideas but doesn’t know enough about the market and wants to do more research to see what the numbers are for health food restaurants. He also said that several other people have mentioned that it’s a bad location (a strip plaza with zero personality and a lease that states you can’t do anything to the outside of the building to make your store stand out from the others). He said “If I look for a place in downtown on Main St., would you be interested? If I found that space and turned you two loose in it to run with your ideas?”

Uh…yes. Yes, we would be very interested in a project like that.

So he went off to thinkthinkthink, and I went home to stop thinking and worrying about it for the night. And that felt so bloody good. It only took two days to go from white hot excitement to really seeing what is true for me. Phew.

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One of the most magical things about blogging all these years is the amazing people who have come into my life. People I would have not had the opportunity to meet otherwise because they live in other regions of the country and the world. I’ve also made connections with some remarkable folks who live just about right in my own back yard, but just far enough away and traveling in a different enough circle that we likely would not have crossed paths.

Jennifer, The Baklava Queen is one such almost neighbor, and I’ve enjoyed some lovely email exchanges with her about blog posts, local grain mills, baking and gardening. I’m so happy she took time to write a post on her own blog as a contribution to the Able Hands Photo Project.

“…the philosophy behind the project (at least for me) has a connection to how I approach cooking and preserving food and sharing it with others. Work has so often become a nasty four-letter word for many of us, but there is so much that we do with our hands to make life easier for others or to create beauty or simply to do what we each feel is needful in our own lives. Work can and should be a joy and full of meaning, and that’s what I try to practice in my kitchen as well in other aspects of my life.”

I love this. Check out her link in the quote, which is to another of her posts about the time it takes to make and eat local foods and fresh meals daily. Reading that has me thinking about my role as the keeper of the kitchen and how that has changed for me over the years from one of exclusion to inclusion. I used to hate having anyone in the kitchen with me. I couldn’t think straight or focus on my work, so I would shoo everyone out to play while I worked. But then I would get so spiteful and annoyed at the lack of help and at the sound and sight of the rest of my people off having fun while I toiled away in the kitchen.

Gawd, I was so bitter all the time. I still get that way sometimes, because everyone else has something just as pressing to do as getting food on the table. I sometimes resent the fact that I’m the only one who does any planning for meals — something that has to happen daily, and can get a little boring and uninspired. And sometimes, I just don’t feel like it. Sometimes I’d so much rather sit and read blogs or a good book. But those are pizza nights.

I have learned that if anyone’s hanging around in the kitchen while I cook, they’re fair game, but I’m struggling with the dichotomy between my two kids and the way they regard work. Lila is happiest if she’s given a task to help with and gets so frustrated if we forget to include her in our work unless she’s off playing with a friend. If there are mushrooms to chop for dinner, she’s my girl working the paring knife with precision. If Ty’s the only one around? It’s hardly worth the heavy sighs and leaking air. Ty is a teenager and I don’t know if I need say anything else about that. But I see other teenagers with much stronger work ethics and I wonder if I dropped the ball somewhere along the line with him. I think I did. I think we all did, the grown ups in his life. I think we have all handed much too much to him. While we don’t do that anymore, we missed the opportunity big time during his formative years.

I think when he was Lila’s age, I made every effort to distract him with play or entertainment so I could get my work done quickly, efficiently and without having more mess to clean up in the end. I didn’t know how to deal with “mistakes” he might have made. I wanted things to be as close to perfect as possible. I’m pretty sure that the subtext my lovely young man has absorbed is “why bother? It’ll never be good enough anyway.”

If he saw me working, it was seldom joyfully. More than likely he picked up my frustration and my hurriedness. I know we’re supposed to improve with age, maturity and experience, and I have. I have much more patience this time around (not perfect, but greatly improved). These two kids have very different temperaments and proclivities. But they also have had two very different mothers, and obviously two very different fathers.

I try now with Tyler to talk about my work in a meaningful way, as if chasing behind the damage done, trying to gently, inconspicuously show him how good work can be. How important it is to balance the work and play, to not allow the need for entertainment to take us away from caring for and shaping our homes and our world into a better place. I tell him why I cook the way I do, why I grow food and preserve it, why I write. Why I clean the bathrooms and mop the kitchen floor every now and again (so our feet don’t stick to it and hold us in place so we can be devoured by the ants attracted to the sticky film from the constant cupcake baking frenzy). But it’s difficult and I worry he’s not getting it, or that he’s getting it much too late so that it’s just words bouncing off and him seeing me do my thing and he’s thinking, well good, so let her work. I’m going back to my game.

But I keep at it. Remind him to do his chores. Invite him to help me with projects. There’s always work to be done and opportunity to talk about it.

So how do you think about the work you do?

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If you’re on flickr, I hope join the Able Hands Photo Project Pool and share your photos of hands at work, rest and play.

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This is the new playground, set up in the spot where the rickety old death-trap once stood. You can see him just slouching over there in the yard all sad and rejected and looking even more dangerous than before now that the new kid’s in town.

You know that phrase, NIMBY (not in my backyard) that people toss around in regards to building that they don’t want to look at, or high tension wires, or landfills, or nuclear power plants? When we decided to buy this house, we had to consciously let go of a bit of NIMBY-tude. I mean because we moved from acreage to city and gave up the view of many trees and open sky to look at the back of a McMiniMansion type home. The houses aren’t very attractive and are the first thing you notice when you go in our backyard, especially when the leaves are off the trees. Of course, if that house ever sells, those poor people have to look at our toy-littered, trash-day furniture covered back yard. But if they have little kids, they’ll be happy enough to let go of their own NIMBY attitude because my backyard has become the epicenter for fun and adventure in the neighborhood, as well as for growth and renewal. I’ve been walking around for days, giggling like a little girl and shouting, “Yes, please! Bring it to my backyard!”

You can sort of see the open land behind us, to the left of that house. That’s the west edge of the five acres that are going to be turned into a gated senior village. There’s no way to stop that plan now (and it looks like a fairly sane plan), but other things are swirling around in the atmosphere here. Big things, but smaller than my initial ideas, more manageable scale things, more of a scale that I can take my time, learn and then expand. I don’t mean to be cryptic, I’m just not supposed to talk details with anyone until it’s finalized. But I do think it’s safe for me to say that if it goes through the way it sounds like it will, (I’m told it’s 99% a done deal), I’m going to have a half acre of open land on which to plant and teach and hopefully make some dollars. Half an acre of open, sunny land, in sight of my own home.

Needless to say, I’m trying not to count my chickens and all that, but I do think the last two weeks have been a trip in the river of life, and for once I have completely surrendered to the current. I’ve asked many questions, stated what I want, listened to stories and advice, taken action where it felt right, and otherwise waited and envisioned this scenario (or one very close to it) with all of me, in every free moment. New people have come into my life, people who might turn out to be excellent partners in whatever this venture turns into. Other people who might need my help in a part time, paid capacity. Things are lining up to make it possible for me to be at home.

I feel like magic has been going on under the surface of that river where I can’t see it, but I can feel it gently move me in new directions. Sometimes it’s so scary to feel that tug out in to the middle where the water moves faster and my instinct is to start paddling for shore. But then I remind myself that shore isn’t working anymore. That living in the relative safety of the shallows is making me sick and unhappy. That I’m ready. I’m ready to live my life and earn my living in a meaningful way.

The guy who wants to do a land contract for the house contacted Chris yesterday and they hammered out the terms. Chris goes to see Titus, The Octogenarian Barrister today to get the contract drawn up. They want to move in two weeks from now. We’ll be holding the mortgage for three more years, but they’ll be paying most of it this year, a little more next, and then full the third year. See what I’m talking about?

Also, I attended the second (my first) Akron E4S (Entrepreneurs for Sustainability) event last night. The topic was building a sustainable local food network and industry, and was very well attended. I met beekeepers, CSA owners, landscape designers, writers, large scale farmers, two guys who are starting a distribution program to get local food from the grower to restaurants, the man who runs the Countryside Conservancy, people who work from grant foundations, a woman who manages a Cleveland farmers’ market and is starting a beautiful new glossy magazine on local foods, a chef who uses a lot of locally grown food, and many, many more. My head hurt when I got home, from the hundreds of ideas ringing in the space between my ears.

I forgot how much I hate driving at night, and a forty minute ride on the highway that’s mostly under construction, with my head pounding and my night blindess made for a stressful journey back to Kent, and I slept like a coma patient last night. My dreams were all about organic food, interesting people, writing about gardening and farming and the people who make it all happen, and feeling connected and successful and alive. My headache is gone this morning, and the sun is shining. So we’re meant to get some snow on Sunday…okay, it’s April in Ohio. That’s not a big surprise. My tomatoes and peppers are almost all up, the broccoli and brussels sprouts need transplanted this weekend, and I need to get another half dozen flats of culinary herbs and medicinal herbs started.

Onward into the season!

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Hoo boy, how did it get to Wednesday morning already? I meant to tell you about the seeds I finally started on Sunday, but I must have fallen down the rabbit hole again.

Lots on my mind right now as we wait for the family who thinks they might want to do a land contract with us to finish crunching their numbers and make up their minds. Chris is having lunch with the guy on Friday to talk dollar and time details. In the meantime, I’m in a heavy research and development mode. I need a plan. Let me tell you all what’s going on, it’ll help me to organize my thoughts and maybe some of you will have some suggestions for how I can move forward.

I think I’ve made it pretty clear around here how much I dislike spending the majority of my available time on this earth sitting in a beige/gray cubicle, under fluorescent lights, in front of a giant computer screen, doing mind-numbing, soul-sucking work that makes someone else rich and just helps me keep one nostril above water. I don’t really need to tell you any more about that. So I’ve been putting steps in place to hopefully transfer out of that debtors prison and into a more rewarding life of working from home. I’ve had a chance to work on some pretty cool projects, and I’ll be able to point you to them soon, they’re almost live.

But one thing has come crystal clear in this period of intense work at work and work at home in the evenings. I don’t want to sit in front of a computer all day, every day. And I need to stop distracting myself from the hard work of achieving my very real goals with all of this computer work. Part-time, yes. But all day? No. No. And no.

So what do I want to do? Food, garden, community. Grow food, teach people how to garden and build community. And I want to do it right here.

I’ve mentioned the acreage out back, right? The housing development that’s come to a screeching halt as the economy tanks and developers run out of money? Well, there are still five empty acres, starting behind my MILs property (where some of my garden beds are). It’s the land that the house we live in used to sit on before the owner sold off the greenhouse/nursery business and had the house moved to this location. There’s this gorgeous, old red maple and lots of perennials growing in the overgrown field. It’s a mess back there—dirt piles and boulders and downed trees—all going back to forest. It’s amazing how fast it grows up.

I’ve been thinking about that land since the day we looked at this house. I stood in my MIL’s back yard and looked out over the acres and pictured a whole lot of people busy growing food. I saw chicken tractors and kids and old folks and a little barn. Over the last two years (next month is 2 years from when we looked) I’ve wondered how to go about it all, but never spoken with anyone about it. The job keeps me so busy and jeeze oh man, it’s so much work just trying to build up our little homesteading act here.

But food prices are going through the roof and the land is just sitting there. I wonder. So I’ve started talking to people. And a whole lot of folks around here would be interested in a cooperative CSA program. We just need the land and some cash. No small order, that. We’re waiting to hear what the lot price is, but also found out that next week there’s a city meeting about the property. Another developer is hoping to put in either senior housing or apartments for students at the university, which is right over the hill.

I’ll be going to that meeting and I’m going to make an appointment to speak with one of the city council members who is a neighbor and has one of the most gorgeous urban gardens I’ve ever seen. I’m flying blind with my ideas and need to focus and take fast action.

If that land is not available, then maybe if it’s going to be a senior housing situation, the developer might be interested in donating part of the land, an acre or so, to a program that pairs the seniors with children in our community, growing food, flowers, herbs and relationships.

Since I began saying all of this out loud two weeks ago, my inbox has been inundated with articles about CSAs, urban farm and garden programs, sustainable food practices, food security and community. People have brought up wanting a CSA (the only 2 around here are full, with massive waiting lists). More and more people ask me what it takes to grow a garden in their yard and what they should focus on planting.

If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them. Please bear with me as I figure out all of this stuff.

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It took a few days longer than I expected to announce my new project, but did you know that it’s really hard to take a picture of your own hand in action? Especially when you don’t know how to use the timer function on your camera (or if there even is one)? Really hard. I used the beautiful new-to-me tripod that Chris brought home from his mother’s house. Apparently his father’s father had quite a photography equipment collecting habit. Alas, no Nikkor lenses. Boo. But a 50 year-old, in perfect condition tripod in its original box. Actually, it looks as if it has never been used. Well, needless to say, I gummed up the works with flour last weekend.

Have I mentioned how much I love kneading bread dough? My dear friend Lorin taught me how to bake bread, way back in 1995, I think. She suggested I start with The Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown, and I made starter from a helping of her sourdough mother and got busy one afternoon while Tyler roared around the kitchen pretending to be a dinosaur.

When I reported back to her, I mentioned that I loved the whole experience, and that the bread came out almost as good as hers, but that the instructions for kneading just felt so cumbersome. To fold the dough, roll with two hands, turn, fold, roll with two hands, just felt forced and unnatural. She laughed and said she agreed, and that she just did it the same way she kneads her clay (she’s an amazingly gifted potter) with one hand on the dough at all times, and the other hand cupped around the edge to help guide and turn it in little eighth turns.

Now, I didn’t get that lovely two-handed shot because as I said, no clue if I can or how to use the timer on the camera, so the turning and guiding hand was busy reaching back to press the shutter.

So the next week, I tried her method and it was bliss. I overworked the dough because the motion was so bloody therapeutic. Because I wasn’t thinking, oh wait…I’m supposed to turn and then fold…wait…did I roll before I turned…my whole body sank into the motion and I lost myself in the rhythm. But that was 13 years ago and my body hurts more now, so I sometimes employ the dough hook on the Kitchen Aid for the first five minutes, and then finish the kneading by hand. Arthritis runs in the female line of my family, and while I haven’t suffered with it in a major way, my hands, elbows and shoulders hurt quite a lot after physical work.

And, you know, I’m aging. I don’t notice it very often, but looking at a photo of my hand brings it all, please forgive me, into sharp focus. I’m not 25 anymore, am I? But then, I can do so much more with these hands for having had those 15 years pass through them. Time brings such perspective. Many moons ago, an exquisitely dashing young man held my hands in his and swore they were the softest things he had ever touched. I suspect he would revise that statement now that he’s had a child, because we know there’s nothing softer on this earth than the skin at the nape of a newborn baby’s neck.

And all of this to say that I hope you’ll participate in The Able Hands Photo Project.

Send me a photo of a hand or hands, at work, at rest or at play. Your own or someone else’s. Include a few sentences of description. Say anything, I don’t want to influence the shape of the story, I want to hear it. What do you do with your hands?

Photos should be no larger than 500 pixels wide. I’ll assemble them all on their own page as thumbnails with a slide show for viewing. The individual slides will include the story and your name. Still trying to work out having link-backs within the slide show and I may have to list participants in a blogroll format. You’ll also see an album with rotating photos in the sidebar, and a badge that you can download to put on your blog if you like (as soon as I design it). This will be an ongoing project, so no deadline or cutoff.

Send photos to kelly AT herablehands DOT com and put Able Hands Photo Project in the subject line.

Okay, people! Show me your hands!

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ETA: I started a flickr pool: The Able Hands Photo Project for those of you with flickr accounts, so head on over to join and get busy uploading your awesome hand photos!

If you don’t have an account, you can still send your photos to me via email.

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