her able hands

I finally moved about 2000 digital photos out of my iPhoto and onto a couple of CDs last night. I edited out the many, many duplicate shots of food and plants and in the process took a wonderful trip down the memory lane of this past growing season. Such a treat remembering the many ways our hands stayed busy all summer long and to see proof again when right now when it’s 17 degrees out and the world is encrusted in ice and snow, and it feels as if nothing will ever grow again. It’s SO good to review all we have put in place so far to become less dependent upon the grinding commercial food industry and to gain inspiration for growing that independence even more in the coming season.

I picked this first hand full of Vermont Cranberry beans too early because I grew impatient with the lack of sun on the pods and the weeks they took to even begin to blush.

I had a big helper in the garden all season and I thrilled to see Lila grow more conscious of what her hands should and should not do while moving in and out of the plants. She was my number one cherry tomato harvester.

Between my garden and the farmers’ market, I set out a giant bowl of fresh salad at just about every dinner we ate last summer. Next summer I’d like to learn some more homemade dressing recipes, I relied a little too heavily on Newman’s Own vinaigrettes which is fine but a little boring. If you have a favorite salad dressing recipe, please share!

Pinch me again! I almost forgot that these black raspberries grow wild right behind the gardens next door, and if we get some early summer rains, they’re plump and juicy just like the ones in this bowl. Mercy, they were so good. I can’t even find words to describe the wild berry explosion that occurred after I popped each one in my mouth. Heaven?

I won’t need to buy any seed potato in the spring because the harvest sprouted in the basement much faster than I thought it would. I guess it’s a little too warm down there, and I’d like to look at eventually turning one corner into a true root cellar by blocking it in with cement blocks.

In about six weeks I’m going to replant the greens boxes and then try not to stare out the window at them to make time move more quickly and bring us back around to that lush, glorious green of high summer. I’m still working on my seed list and narrowing down what to buy. I’ll be planting in the oversize cold frame that Chris built as well — the one with the much too high back and the big bay window that’s too heavy to lift and has a frame so flimsy that it feels as if it will shatter in mid-air. But it’s salad greens real estate and maybe I’ll figure out a way to modify it so it’s less deadly.

Looking back is such an inspiring way to examine the here and now in order to set forth the plan for the future, don’t you think?

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Can I get an amen and a hell yeah?!

I didn’t sleep in too long, up by 7:15 to pay some bills and get thinking on the week’s menu/shopping list. A small pot of oats is simmering on the stove with chopped almonds. I’ll add blueberries from the freezer and a spot of the last container of maple syrup from the farmers’ market. Listening to the Into the Wild soundtrack on itunes and letting some ideas percolate. They’re loosely connected bits and I’m going to toss them up here so I won’t lose them in one of my twenty three notebooks.

I’m working my way through Derrick Jensen’s books and enjoying the hell out of the conversational tone and the balls-out pronouncements about how unsustainable our society and culture are by their very nature. At the same time, he weaves a thread of light and love for relationships, for the shrinking populations of creatures on the planet and for the land on which we all play out our lives, throughout the work. I’ve read a lot of gurus works on kindness, empathy, compassion, being here now and they all had this backdrop of hope that I just don’t feel. The world has felt hopeless to me for as long as I can remember. I’m not calling Derrick a guru, I’m just noticing the level of consciousness he has in his writing and one can presume in his living. He doesn’t talk about hope for the future. I’m reading and questions arise. Some asked directly, as in: “How do you want to live?” Well, free, of course. Then he shows me how much of a pipe dream and illusion my ideas of freedom are—how we’re all caught in the mouse trap of our culture.

Yet, there are all of these stories of human connection that are used as examples of teaching and learning. He never comes out and says “Hey! Loving each other is the way.” But the spark in his writing lights up these examples of him experiencing or facilitating or witnessing his or another person’s moments of awakening. It makes me want to be more awake. It makes me realize just how far off the path of critical thinking I have wandered in my pursuit of a comfortable lifestyle. Would you believe me if I told you that in recent weeks I have felt areas of my brain tingling? Spots on top and in the back of my head that I wouldn’t have any awareness of unless I cracked my skull on an open cabinet door or on the door frame of the truck while lifting out sacks of groceries. But it’s not the surface, it’s way inside, this tingling. Interesting that I’m reading these books while detoxing and cutting out sugar. It feels as if a layer of sludge has peeled away and I can see myself and my surroundings more in focus. No idea what it all means other than recognizing that I’ve been hibernating for a long time and that waking up feels terrifyingly fantastic.

Dang, this oatmeal is delicious.

So my cast-iron Lodge wok finally arrived. Jeeze-oh-man, it took three weeks. See? I’m such an American. I almost left negative feedback on Amazon, but really, I got free shipping and when I contacted the company two days after the projected delivery date to ask for an ETA, they wrote back to say that they were waiting for a shipment and would send it out as soon as they had it on hand. And I thought to myself, well, I should have bought it direct from the manufacturer or sourced it in a local store instead of trying to save seven bucks. And providing the machine with more information about my habits.

My credit card statement arrived the other day and while I did quite a lot of Etsy purchasing for the holidays, I still managed to rack up some serious amazon mailings. While looking the statement over for inaccuracies, I noticed a credit at the top of the month from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Now, I had never noticed a charge from them and haven’t subscribed since we lived in the old house. Looking at that $5.75 credit, I saw this vast web of connected threads of digital information about me running all over the country criss-crossing with the same kinds of threads belonging to (no, not belonging to, but about) most of the other people in this country. The information belongs to corporations and the government. And I give it away every day.

But hey, I’ve only had one cup of coffee and I’m not ready for quite that much awareness this morning. Baby steps and all that bullshit.

So! A wok—seasoned cast iron with loop handles and deep enough to fry if I’m feeling like saturated fat is the way to go! My big Teflon coated Calphalon sauté pan is going out to the garage for Chris to use sorting parts while he rebuilds that motor for the Datsun. Dinner tonight? Stir fry!

Oh, and Cheril gave me a great faux snake skin covered journal that has lined pages on one side and blank on the other. I’m going to use it for a garden journal. The only real notes I kept last year were on this blog, and while it’s nice to know it’s recorded somewhere, it wasn’t very well organized and is beyond impractical to try to extract the facts from the narrative. I’ll use the blank pages for sketches and charts and the lined pages for notes.

Our stocking-exchange dinner at the local bistro was yum, but the rich food gave me a bit of a belly ache. We finished off the meal of shared appetizers and salads with a vanilla crème brûlée. The custard was a little more pudding-like than I prefer, but the burnt sugar was spiced with cardamom and topped with a few fresh blueberries. The combination? Sublime. I need to do some sort of dessert with cardamom and blueberries. After I’ve lost this baked goods belly and have strengthened my self-control muscles enough to have just a taste instead of emotionally stuffing my face with half a cake, one sliver at a time on the sly, over the course of a Sunday afternoon.

And now on to the question. Tell me…who or what is informing your thinking today?

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I gave myself a little mental break and boost yesterday after I had completed 11 of the 42 items on my to-do list by gawking at vegetable seeds from Italy. I have developed a taste for the flat Italian style beans that you simmer long in butter and stock after sautéing a bit of pancetta or bacon, but have never grown them.

Last season I had Scarlett Runner beans and if I caught them before they started to get furry looking, they did pretty well, but they went from tender to tough overnight on the vine. I’m looking for a more foolproof variety. Are they the same thing in the seed catalogs as Broad Beans? Or is that yet another world of beans I’ve yet to experience?

I’m ready to break out of the rut with my Haricot Verts and Royal Burgundy Bush beans, although I’ll continue to plant those because they’re the most delicious bush beans I’ve ever eaten. So tell me my vegetable gardening friends/fiends: what are your favorite bean varieties and where do you buy them? Any tips for growing and harvesting?

Your comments will help me maintain my grip on reality as I trudge through the now 58 items on my to-do list at work today. Mwah!

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I wish I had my camera with me on the drive in to work this morning so I could have shared the nuclear winter sunrise that blasted out of the horizon in the rear view mirror. There were deep purple clouds layered just above the tree line and the sun a hot pink and orange ball sitting just perched on top of the frosted trees. Most of the storm had cleared out but it was still snowing lightly and bitter cold so everything sparkled. One thick, throbbing ray of orange-pink light shot straight up into the sky for miles and miles and the sky all around glowed and seemed to positively roil with light and shadow and energy.

Because I was less than a mile from my job at the time that I noticed this extravaganza going on behind me, the elation mixed with a dash of bitterness. Work. Meh. I gazed at that beam of sunshine shooting up at daybreak (while trying to keep the car on the road) and felt the ache in my jaw from the nighttime grinding of teeth that has apparently become a recent habit. My teeth hurt. A lot. Wouldn’t I have loved to just turn that truck around and head on home to write and fold laundry and listen to music without headphones? Why yes, yes I would.

Focus on the light, I told myself. Feel the warmth even though the thermometer on the truck readout says it’s 8 degrees. And just get in there and fake it for another day. And so I did.

I’m thinking a lot about intention. And about complaining less while I’m at work. So I intend to practice at at least catching myself when I’m complaining and zipping my lips. So I caught myself about a hundred times today, but not so much with the zipping the lips part, no sirree. No, it was more like Wow! I’m bitching up a storm here aren’t I! And aren’t I justified!? I sure am! And here’s why!

But I’m also thinking a lot about how much I’ve picked at and picked on myself in recent years, and about how that just makes me feel worse and even less like growing and changing. I’ll actually share something kind of gross and personal with you because hey! it’s a blog! that’s what we bloggers do, right?

I pick at every blemish on my skin. It’s a habit that has become worse with age and now I’m a 40 year-old woman whose arms and legs are covered with angry red-purple scars. I even do it in my sleep. All of my sheets have tiny blood spots from where I scrape off tiny blemish scabs with my fingernails in the middle of the night. My hands are always snaking up my sleeves and picking away at whatever tiny bumps and imperfections pop up on my skin. I haven’t worn a skirt in years.

So these are two big things that I believe are well and truly tied together in a nearly fool-proof knot, and two big things that I intend to work on every day until I no longer do these things unconsciously. Maybe then, once I’ve brought some consciousness to the habits, I’ll be able to let them go.

Happy New Year.

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So I’ve been experiencing this peeling away of layers. I’ve been looking head-on at some pretty old stuff that’s been hanging out in my heart and making me feel like I’m made of splintered bone and dog crap. Stuff I’ve looked at for a lot of years and mistakenly believed was part of me. I’m so sick of running into the little steaming piles of emotional turd all the time, when I’m trying to live a life that brings me a sense of fulfillment, and purpose, and joy. It’s hard to stay joyful with a mouthful of dog poop. And I don’t even have a dog. What’s that you say? Try the shit sandwich? Tastes great with relish?

Okay. Enough of that crap.

Bwah! I can’t stop. Someone please stop me.

Okay. I’m stopping. I’m here now. No, really. I am. And what I wanted to tell you about is singing.

I’ve always loved to sing. I spent many hours making elaborate house settings for my Ginny dolls and Barbie dolls on my bedroom closet floor while belting out America’s Top-40 along with the pea green Bakelite radio I inherited from GiGi when she died. It had a giant plastic dial that felt like one of the ridged circles from the Spirograph and Hotel California and Moonshadow sounded very far away coming out of its little square speaker. I sang and my father yelled up the stairs for me to pipe down with the howling. Yeah, so thanks for that, Dad.

I sang in front of crowds a few times, once to great acclaim as Dolly Parton singing 9 to 5—the guest star in the 7th & 8th grade production of The Muppet Show. I rocked it in my mother’s friend’s bra stuffed with plastic bowling balls and big, blond wig. I assumed the ability to rock it would stay with me. Which, you know? For some reason it didn’t. So in 9th grade I sang You Light Up My Life in front of 500 people after practicing for weeks and weeks, and I tanked so hard that the auditorium echoed with the sounds of silence—and not the good Simon and Garfunkel kind, but the holy crap are we supposed to clap after that kind—for at least a minute after the song blessedly ended. The stage manager patted me on the back as I exited stage left and said, “It’s fine, but honey, you really have to breathe when you sing.” Yeah. I will SO try to remember that next time. And oddly enough, there was a next time. But it involved a Jr. Miss Pageant, black leotards and white ballet slippers and un-choreographed interpretive dance to Moog Synthesizer music instead of singing. Oh, and 500 people. Probably a lot of those same 500 people who had to sit through my rendition of Debbie Boone’s only hit.

Oooh, she is H-O-T-T!

No, silly. Not Debbie Boone. Me. I’m hott.

A few other events like that drove home the idea that yes, indeed, Dad was right. I sound like a chicken in the death throes when I open my mouth to sing. Which kind of sucks because I really, really love to sing. Put me in the car and point me in any direction on any interstate highway with a stack of CDs and a tank of gas and I’ll end up wherever I’m supposed to be with a throat that’s close to bleeding. If there’s anyone else in the car with me they’ll tumble out with fingers stuffed in their ears begging for a room of their own where they can go to be quiet, please. Please? And until recently, I’ve done it knowing that I sound terrible.

But here’s what’s happened this year. I joined a harmony-singing group that’s run by a woman who is one hell of a singer. She has an incredible range and gives great advice to those of us who are floundering and feeling insecure. And why, yes, that would be me over there on the far side of the circle looking all furtive and as if I just stuffed ten packs of Bubble Yum down my pants in the grocery store—floundering and insecure. The first few times I attended the meeting I thought I would stink up the room with my fearfully sweaty armpits. I kept my arms locked tight to my body because yeah, they were definitely sending up smoke signals.

H—E—L—P M—E!

And it took me at least seven or eight weeks to stop apologizing at the end of every song we sang. We work from the song book, Rise Up Singing and do a lot of spirituals and gospel songs because they’re easier to harmonize.

I kept going back even though I feared I would never really get it, because on the first night we did a chant called Hava Nashira which we sang in a round, and slower than what you can hear if you click on the sound clip on the linked page. During that song I felt as if a channel opened up from the top of my head right down to my feet. I felt the song move through me and lost all sense of time or thought while I sang. I didn’t lose my place in the round and the rhythm became part of my body. I wasn’t doing anything but being the song. When we finished, the leader, Saunis, turned to me and she said You have a beautiful voice. And I knew it was true. For that brief moment, I knew with every bit of me that I had a beautiful voice. Then we moved onto the next song and I went right off the rails.

At first I didn’t even try to sing harmony, finding it nearly impossible to manage the melody without losing track of it halfway through. I coughed and sputtered. I felt my chest get tighter and tighter. I saw the other participants eyes cut across the circle towards me. People brought their hands up to press a finger into an ear. They sang louder. They shifted in their chairs. I believed it was all because of how chicken-dying-terrible I sounded. They weren’t asking me to leave because they’re good, UU Church-going folks and their mothers brought them up to be kind to the disabled. And you know, because everything is about me. Everything.

In the meantime, I also started hanging out with the Lunchtime Band at work. They (we) meet for lunch four days a week in the sound room out in the model shop. We eat and tell stories, and then play for about 40 minutes. Lead and rhythm guitars, bass, keyboards, conga drums (very handy for those lunchtime Santana riffs) and me and another woman sing. It’s a stretch for me because it’s rock and roll and I don’t have that kind of confidence or presence at all. But I keep showing up because they’re a great bunch of people and it’s making me sane, this facing my fears a little bit every day thing. For a long time they couldn’t really even hear me, so I knew I sucked but didn’t worry too much about it. They play loud and I pretend I can’t hear them when they suggest I use the microphone.

So now I’m doing two regular activities that chip away at my fear and self-loathing. One night at the harmony sing, I really struggled with staying on key. It seemed like every third phrase I went screeching off on some dissonant harmony line (but hey! I was harmonizing, so that’s something!) I apologized every two minutes. This guy (a really beautiful singer) turned to me and said, “You seem to have some serious issues around singing.”

Oh no. Oh, no, no, no. Oh shoot, there she goes. Total meltdown. Snot running down my face and everything. In front of a whole bunch of people. Yeah. That? Was SO awesome.

But see, Saunis is gifted. Not just as a singer, but also as a teacher, and after they all watched me spew snot everywhere for a few minutes she got me back on track with a few pointers. Some things she’s taught me have really helped, and they’re useful every single time I struggle:

• When you find you’re going off-key: sing louder.
• When you find you’re going way off key: slide up the scale a little, or down until you find it.
• When you find you’re going way, way off key: don’t sing the words, just make an ooo or an aaaah sound to the melody or the harmony, whatever you’re trying to work.

So as you can see, one of my major issues has been staying on key. I get going and feel like I’m cranking along just really working that melody like a pack mule (in a nice way). Oh wait. That doesn’t work at all. Oh, never mind. I just mean to say that I was doing pretty well.) Then all of a sudden I’m not doing very well at all and it’s like grinding gears in my head and all of the sound waves in the room are crashing against one another instead of blending and building the vibration. So I practice. A lot. Sorry family.

Meanwhile, the Lunchtime Band figured out a few songs that I feel like I can manage with my limited range and we keep them in rotation. It’s all very casual and playful. Until a couple of weekends ago, when Cheril & Greg had their annual Halloween bonfire and potluck—which is when I made friends with a microphone. Two local teenage bands played and then our little lunchtime gaggle took the stage in the freezing cold to a dwindling crowd. The guys played a few boogie-woogie tunes (which rocked and made me happy, as did the four glasses of wine I swilled before-hand) and then we girls gave it our best shot. We sang Moondance and I screwed up the melody on the first verse and had to turn away to compose myself. We did White Rabbit and Come Together and Riders on the Storm and Me and Bobby McGee and a slow rendition of Summertime. We two girls don’t sound too great together and hadn’t practiced together in a while, so I think if we ever get the chance to do it again, we should trade off verses or whole songs. Either that or really, really practice to figure out who sings melody, who sings harmony.

I’m pretty sure I kinda sucked. But not too hard. And I think I hit it pretty damned good for a few lines. Nobody could hear us over the drummer anyway. And isn’t that always the way? But the main thing is I did it. I got up there shaking in my boots and stuck my face into the microphone and sang. And I didn’t die. Much.

Within an hour though? I felt sick. Really sick. And by the next day I had a massive ear infection and a lump in my throat the size of a chipmunk. Yeah, Ew. When I coughed up the chipmunk after 12 hours of the liberal application of garlic and mullein oil drops to the ear. Double Ew.

And the next day after that? When I sang, my voice came from deeper in my chest and stayed more on key. Aside from the grossness of that chipmunk in a Kleenex, it was pretty frickin’ cool.

Then I got walking pneumonia and have been down all week, so what the hell do I know? Now I can’t sing at all.

But after these antibiotics? Move over mediocre singer you’ve never heard of (hell no I’m not going to say move over Anne and Nancy Wilson, or move over Pat Benetar, or move over Janice Joplin. That would make me look foolish indeed).

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