her able hands » Writing

Time to launch

Kelly — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 15:27:49 +0000

Well, I finally carved out the time needed to rebuild the new blog that I horked over the summer. I still have recipes and garden tips to pull from here to there, but I’ll do that over time.

I hope you’ll pop over and say hello at Kitchen Garden Table!

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Boo hoo

Kelly — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 15:24:15 +0000

Well, I had my new project ready to launch and decided to do a few more tweaks and it disappeared. I have no clue what happened and even less of a clue how to fix it. Back to the drawing board, apparently.

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New project

Kelly — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:00:50 +0000

Helloooo? Is anybody here?

Wow, I have really missed this space on the web. Missed the ongoing conversation about food and life and gardens and kids and self. Work was super busy over the winter and spring, but has stalled out the past couple of months. Meanwhile, I’m putting extra energy into some volunteer projects that have added a whole new layer of Yes, Indeedy to my world.

I discovered so much about myself in the last year and I want to tell you all about it. One of the biggest things I learned is that it’s good for me to feed my passions with action. It doesn’t matter so much if I’m not getting paid to do every single thing I spend time on, because pay comes in so many forms. However, I’m ready to make more of this food and garden thing into my living.

Towards that end, I’m in the process of pulling the recipes and garden posts off of this blog to put on a new online project that I’ll be launching in the next couple of weeks. If you’re still here, be a sweetheart and drop a comment in this post to let me know you’re still around. If you want to be notified when the new project pushes live, leave your email address and I’ll let you know. One more thing if you wouldn’t mind: tell me what you enjoy most about this blog and tell me if there’s anything that doesn’t work for you.

Thanks so much, and see you soon!

xok

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Taking a hiatus

Kelly — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:30:06 +0000

I know posting has been spotty the last few months. Work is super busy, which is a wonderful thing. I’m so grateful for the work right now. I’m also itching like mad to do some writing for me and I’ll sit down to do it, thinking about my novel and thinking about this blog and end up frozen in front of the keyboard unable to choose.

Well, I need to choose and I’m going with novel for a while. I’m going to keep the blog up because I still see a lot of hits for some of the recipes and I like knowing folks might land on them and have an enjoyable meal for the effort. At the moment, I don’t feel like I have anything much to add to the story here. I’m so grateful for the connections and friendships this blog has brought to my life. It doesn’t feel right to say goodbye, so for now I’m going to say see you soon. I’ll just be over here working and getting that story out. Wish me luck and much love to you all.

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Thank you

Kelly — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:36:31 +0000

To the kind person who sent me Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man.

On our way out of the driveway for our three week trip to the east coast, I pulled the truck up to the mailbox and had Tyler reach out to grab the previous day’s mail. It contained a small padded envelope addressed to me with a return of Hobbs in Huntington Beach, CA. No note inside.

We’re still here on my home ground and I’m watching from a distance, the death of a certain kind of hanging on inside of me. We begin our trip back to Ohio tomorrow and arrive on Friday, my mind and heart full of so much letting go. This is the perfect soundtrack.

Thank you!

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Writing fiction — the magic’s all tied up in the details

Kelly — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:31:56 +0000

Despite the thirty-six fast-moving and unrelated balls I have in the air right now, I’m thinking about my novel again. The characters keep whispering bits and pieces to me as I build bamboo trellises and snake cotton string through ferny leaves to support the tomato plants. Lucy tells me more about her uncomfortably strong feelings for Charles, who is old enough to be her father and is married to boot. Henry wishes he didn’t look exactly like the father he never met because he hates seeing his mother’s eyes cloud with confusion and longing then morph into forced cheerfulness when she’s looking at him over her coffee cup some mornings.

I hear dialog while I’m squatting in front of the wall of snow peas, reaching, grasping and picking, and making hardly a dent in the harvest. James snarks at me with his know-it-all idealism that if I did a better job of motivating volunteers, I could be doing something more interesting, like building a pizza oven, or writing this novel. Lucy stands behind James rolling her eyes at his back and wondering how she’ll manage to make herself stay with him when every breath he takes is like dust in her eyes and a rock in her boot on a really long hike.

My life and the story merge in quivery shadows and rays of light slanting through the trees. The past few days it’s felt as if I have a crowd of people around me while I work, but I’m the only one who can see them. If you stood at the edge of the woods and watched me, you’d see me bent to my task, swiping my hair out of my face with a sweaty forearm. You’d hear me talking to myself out loud like your kooky Aunt Myrtle.

At the root, I know what the book is about, but I haven’t been able to translate it from my head and heart onto the page for such a long time now. Fifty thousand words and the story barely moves an inch. How does it happen, this taking of a basic idea and turning it into 250 or so pages of an engrossing tale? How does one make a story about renegade farming during a modern global depression engaging enough to hold the interest of someone who doesn’t care one whit about farming or food security?

My questions and their answers started to gel this week while I’ve been reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Now, I didn’t notice the Oprah badge on the cover when I picked it up off the New Fiction shelf at the library, so I unwittingly broke my promise to ignore Oprah for the rest of my days. In this case, it’s a promise worth breaking.

You guys! This novel is everything I want mine to be. It’s a story about people and place and choice and consequence. It’s about nature and nurture. It’s about redemption (thank you for naming that part about my novel, Barry). Here’s the thing, though: it’s also a story about breeding and training dogs—a topic that interests me just about as much as… oh, let’s be honest here… it interests me not in the least. Dogs? I really and truly couldn’t care less.

Still! I cannot put the book down and have turned pages as silently as possible late, late into the most ridiculous late hours of the night while Chris snores next to me. The details about breeding and training are so skillfully woven into the character development and so precisely advance the plot that I don’t even notice how much I’m learning about something I never even wanted to learn about in the first place. It reminds me of Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. I learned more about biology and botany and ecosystems than I ever cared to while gobbling up the words in that novel. Once again, I am utterly smitten and fascinated.

And this is the really cool part: ten days ago I wrote down in my journal that I want to understand what’s missing in my writing. The next day I went to the library and grabbed this book off the shelf. Oh, man you guys. The magic that’s going on lately is giving me the shivers. Later I’ll tell you about the offer I just got for space in a restaurant kitchen to use for the pizza business. Oh, wait. Never mind. I just did.

So, this is my goal. I want this story about Lucy and James and Henry and Charles to fascinate, and I think I’m beginning to truly understand how to make that happen.

And yes, yes, I know…I need to sit down and bloody well write. You’d better believe I’m bringing my laptop with me when I travel east and am letting Miss Lila have her full-immersion Pink Gramma Carol and Grampa Steve summer while I sit in the shade and write.

***

(I just counted it up, and today I knocked 11 action items off my to-do list–two of them towards starting my pizza business–and tomorrow I am rewarding myself with writing time in the morning. I will finish this novel. And it’s going to be good. After all, the story’s just sitting there waiting to be told.

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How does your garden grow

Kelly — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:19:09 +0000

Oh, my. Summer is at the gate, straining at her lead and ready to gallop. So much growth happening so fast and always the sense that I can’t ever catch up. Clearly I’m still too fragmented in my efforts.

Two years ago I began to envision work that allows me to be at home, pay the bills and have plenty of time left over to manage my gardens effectively, work on my own writing and get my home and family life in order. A year ago the opportunities began to present themselves and I started taking the steps. Shortly after, it all fell apart and it’s been an upstream slog to get this new home business lifestyle working for us. I’m nowhere near close to where I want to be, but I’m facing the right direction.

Looking back over this last year, I see what looks like a million moments of me staring down yet another obstacle and feeling the fight rise up with balled fists, stamping feet and petulant whining. But I’ve managed each time, after a bit, to bow my head and look away from the sparks and stop feeding the fire, then to will and witness my feet taking another step forward.

I’ve told the story less. Sure, I’ve told it, trying to at least put a funny spin on it, acknowledge the ridiculous nature of getting caught up in this financial snowball as it hurtles downhill. Then I dealt with the emotional hangover. I don’t know if it’s just a function of age, or maybe maturity, but it gets harder and harder to process that particular brand of toxic. So I’ve become quieter, which is not an easy thing for me. I’m a bridge-maker. I fill the silence with sound and story so I don’t have to hear the wind whistling its lonely song in all the crevasses of my life.

I don’t know how to not worry that you take my quiet as a sign that I’m upset with you. Even if you never say so. So we’re there together and I don’t know what to do with the quiet or how to make small talk without pulling faces, and I tell myself to shhhh, keep my own counsel, it’s OK to just be quiet. Until it’s not and maybe you ask a question, so I mention the lack of pay, or the renters moving out. And we’re off and running and my stomach begins to churn and here we go back to the start again.

We’re skating along here. Nothing has stabilized and the phone rings 50 times a day because the bank would like some money. But they’re not going to get it unless they let us sell the house for less than what we owe, and so we dance.

I work every day on envisioning and opportunities pop up –some days two or three. Many are volunteer. Some with potential for pay down the road. All are related to building a local food economy and educating people about sustainable practices. They’re all projects I feel passionate about, but there are only so many hours in the day, and as one new friend said “you can’t feed your family altruism.”

So I ask for more clarity. I write in an effort to find it. I listen to the thumpity thump of my heart and continue to meet with new people. I speak less and listen more. I work on trying not to finish these people’s thoughts for them when they pause and I fail because oh, how my ego wants to bridge every gap.

But here’s what I bring myself back to every day when the panic sets in: I’m finding my tribe. I’m opening myself to Ohio and Ohio is unfurling her Buckeye leaves and presenting me with all her hope and beauty. There are people here who want to do good work. They’re inviting me to step out on the road with them.

How can I see that happening and not believe that what I want is possible?

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Nourishing Downtown and the home front

Kelly — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:48:45 +0000

Summer paid a visit over the weekend, bringing temperatures in the mid 80s and filling the neighborhood with the sweet coconut scent of sunblock. I enjoyed the mornings and evenings outside, but otherwise stayed under cover of the roof to do my deep cleaning. We’re looking at one more day of high temps today, so I’ll continue on my quest to eradicate the winter funk from the house with the help of Meyer’s All Purpose cleaner (geranium scented).

In other news, The Ethicurean graciously let me guest post about the Heritage Ohio training event I attend at the beginning of the month. Pop on over and read about all the ways Ohio is working to build a strong local food economy.

And one other piece of news–our farmers’ market has incorporated and is in the process of filing for 501c3 status. We had our spring meeting yesterday and I’m one of nine folks elected to the first official board of directors. We’ll be writing the bylaws, seeking grant funding, and mapping out a plan for the future of the market, which is growing leaps and bounds.

The five day forecast promises the return of spring (temps in the 60s, amen), so I’ll be back outside working on those garden beds and mowing the lawn for the first time this year. What a crazy, wonderful spring!

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