Nowadays

I do not have swaths of time for projects.  If anything, I have more editing than usual, and now my people are home all the time, so I cannot count on chunks of work time like I could before COVID-19 hit.

I am sewing masks  - have made about 50 and am glad I have skills and materials for this, but wish everyone would get masked already. I want to start a quilt for my sister who has a big birthday in a few weeks, but instead, I sewed her masks.

My mom loaned me The Chilbury Ladies Choir by Jennifer Grey, which is set in World War II England. I really liked it! It helps me to calm down to think of people living through wars where they wanted to carry on with normal life, wanted to "do their bit" to help the situation, and could not make plans for the future. That's how I feel right now, even though I acknowledge how fortunate I am that I am not deprived of any comforts of a first-world existence.  Really.  Sometimes the store does not have the exact groceries that I have on my list, but come on, I have lived in other countries where the store selection was spotty.  I do not think we will starve.

For a while now, I have kept a well-stocked, deep pantry.  I have flour and yeast!  Now I am not sure if we should eat to the bottom of my stores, or if I should replace my replacements.  I am confused.  I recognize this as a sign of the underlying grief and stress that COVID-19 brings and I just chug along, limiting grocery shopping to one market trip a week and the grocery store to 2-3 weeks. 

I am extremely proud of my menus, my resourcefulness with the food we do have on hand.  I know how to make do with odds and ends! I think my family is less impressed and wishes to know where I've hidden the chips. I am messing around with my sourdough as I have been since before Christmas, learning new ways and studying various methods.  When the library abruptly shut down lending, I won the jackpot with a full library basket that includes no less than four cookbooks, two on bread! Not that I have actually been reading them.  My big kids have been reading Harry Potter for the first time and coaxed me into reading along after I read the first book out loud to them. 

This is Phoebe's desk, her Christmas present; she loves it.

I have gradually come to expect nothing from the future, except that I can't wait to hug dear ones outside my family again and sing in groups again. Oh, I miss singing so badly! I am really not making any future plans so that COVID-19 can't steal my plans again. When I remember to look at my calendar, I usually see something that I need to delete. Sometimes I rage, sometimes I cry.

I like to walk the estate (we live in the city; we have a yard) and revel in all my growing plants: the three types of raspberries growing back, our little tiny oak tree, my big rhubarb, the persistent meadow tea, the peas and spinach coming up strong in the new raised bed.  Inside, I found a grow-light lightbulb and a lamp and trained it on my sweet little herb seedlings in the windowsill. All this green, growing hope.  I crave it.

 

How are you doing these strange, strange days?

Home-All-Day Beans

Now we are home all day, every day, thanks to COVID-19.  I'm a little distracted and I'm prone to teariness - is that what you're doing? I start something, walk off, and do something else, and stare into space, and burst into tears.

We are playing board games, doing chores, watching movies, eating our normal good food with extra desserts (morale booster!), and deliberately, consciously, running around in the fresh air every day. I am an introvert and a homebody, so overall, if I don't look too hard at what is causing this situation, I'm content to cuddle down and nest with my dear ones. 

So, the beans. I actually don't have a photo of these beans because they only look like black beans, a little bit soupy. Enjoy these photos of Phoebe playing her daddy Uno instead!

As I put the beans in my slow cooker this morning, I realized they are just absolutely what I want to be cooking in this strange time.  They are forgiving of my distraction, they do well with little check-ins throughout the day but they're fine without, they might get done early if the beans are fresh and then they can sit and wait for dinner.  They use pantry staples, and they are cheap and nutritious. They don't make a big mess, which is lovely because even though I have time - lots of time! -  to clean up the kitchen, I'd rather be sewing.  These beans are the kind of  simple, fundamental food we didn't realize we were craving.  They are creamy and salty and while they have flavor, they can be a side dish or the main dish of a meal.  Tonight we ate them spooned over cornbread with a crunchy purple cabbage salad with cilantro and lime and frying cheese. Also great next to garlicky greens and mac and cheese, or over rice with salsa.

Home-All-Day Beans
Put 1-3 cups dry beans, whatever color you like, in slow cooker in morning (I typically do 2 cups black beans in my 4-quart cooker).  Add water to cover by an inch or so.  Add a tablespoon or so of olive oil, a few shakes of cumin, a sliced garlic clove or two - I just slice it in my fingers with a paring knife, very quick and casual.  Turn on High. In an hour or so, stir the beans, add a little more garlic or cumin, and keep it all cooking.  I check on the beans intermittently, tasting and adding more garlic and cumin if I feel moved, and when they are almost soft, I add salt (the experts vary on when to salt cooking beans - eye roll - I get contrary sometimes and add it whenever I want to).  Sometimes I turn the cooker down to Low.  Sometimes I take the lid off mid-afternoon if the beans have more liquid than I meant them to have.

Phoebe lost the Uno game, can you tell? Be well, friends. Let's keep in touch and lift each other up.

The Results

We got back our test results for our backyard soil, and it is contaminated with lead. This has been keeping me up at night, stirred into the dire climate/environmental situation, worried about my family's health and the future. In all the years we have gotten extra blood tests for our children, they have never had elevated lead levels.  So I'm thankful for that.  

But I'm so sad about our soil!  Now that the black walnut tree is gone, I have sun and so much growth in the mint and the berries.  I am going to do a more focused soil test, to see if the beds are all contaminated, or just the area by the house which is typical of old houses with their former lead paint. 

I still have my raised beds with their clean soil that we brought in, so I'm growing edibles there; I may need to rip out my berry bushes and mint - I'm assuming that once a plant has been grown in lead-tainted soil, it doesn't help to transplant to clean soil. 

New this year, I colonized a ledge with two big planters filled with nasturtium seeds.  Little babies are coming up! I will never get over that excitement. I had wanted to plant grapes to climb up our side porch posts, but given our lead situation, I planted a clematis instead.  Perhaps I will become a flower gardener and rely on the excellent farmer's market 2 blocks away for my local produce.  Perhaps that is my silver lining - that I can plant all the flowers, instead of prioritizing for edibles. Poppies! Peonies! A lilac bush!

We planted our little oak tree, free from a city grant program.  It's barely taller than the irises, and I'm trying to be all mature about "planting for future generations" when I just want it to hurry up and give us some sheltering shade. 

Our street tree, a zelkova, is growing tremendously.  I planted some red creeping thyme as a groundcover in the tree well, and now I'm going to add some fencing because I think the neighborhood dogs are peeing in a corner and killing my thyme. 

I feel better for having written this all down.  This helps me have some perspective and cling to the good parts of this story and my life, instead of focusing on the bad and chewing on it to feed despair.  Today is a beautiful, breezy spring day, and I'm going to go out and sow some cilantro seeds in my  raised beds.  Onward!

Spring Things

It's all happening, and I want to pay attention, truly I do.  Something new and pretty happens outside every day!
My oregano plant came back, which astounds me because I thought it was an annual.  I hope that I am gaining gardening skills every year, but man: I don't seem to make much progress overall.  The profusion of spring, green everywhere! all the pink flowers! weeds sneaking everywhere! It's just a little overwhelming. I signed up to get a red oak tree for our backyard, but I don't exactly know where and how I will plant it.
We are finally getting our soil tested after eating food from it for years - city soil can be laced with heavy metals, oh dear. But I have a serious vision of a grape arbor, so I'm checking the mail every day for our test results. My raspberries, both black and red, are growing by leaps and bounds; I pruned off old canes (I think) and got some nasty old thorns stuck in my skin.  I have started wearing my gardening gloves more faithfully.
Some days, I can only manage to grab at a weed as I take a break from writing and editing projects, or hang up and take down the endless laundry that my people require. We bought a badminton set, which the children love, and which caused my neighbor to look wistfully at their leaping and shrieking and tell me about her spring badminton matches with her four older siblings.
All of this eases my heart a little: my dear uncle died on Palm Sunday morning. He was full of juice and fun and nothing about spring or any season, actually, was wasted on him.  He paid attention, and he made everything into an adventure.  I cannot really believe that I will never see that adventurous gleam in his eyes on this earth again.  So my heart is a little broken, but I have vowed to Uncle Ron, wherever he is with God, that I will take inspiration from his approach to life.  See? Spring is so lush and vigorous, and I am looking.

I Almost Left You Here

But I think I'm back to blogging. 

Not only was I struggling with the overwhelming nature of the holiday season (I mentioned it), but then poof, the company I worked for evaporated and my job with it.  So strange the way my lovely job came out of the blue and disappeared again just as suddenly. 

So I've just been feeling all the feelings and deliberately not making any decisions during this time of change. Truly I've been through much worse in my life, but nevertheless, I miss that job and the world it was in.

And I didn't feel like blogging since the layoff.  I just kept up with the daily house and family work and occasionally enjoyed a little creative cooking or sewing spurt - but I didn't pull out my camera and document anything. 

This blog was born from a chaotic change in my life and perhaps something new will be born out of this time, too.  I don't know.  But for now I'm sticking around to tell you about it.

Feeling Perky

I'm joking:  I don't personally feel perky, but I love our new percolator.

Our old drip coffeemaker (one of those free Gevalia ones from the late 90s) was feeble and plastic.  We wanted to see if we could avoid plastic, but our French press is only 8 cups and you have to do the 2-step boil and pour and the coffee cools off. We're lazy, I'm afraid (I call it efficient).

Meanwhile, my uncle left his vintage percolator in our car by accident, so we tried it out and absolutely loved it.

Delicious coffee: strong, not bitter.  Stays hot for a long time without burning.  No filters, no plastic.  Classy exterior.  Sold!

We love it.

And to return the beginning of the post, I am feeling the creep of holiday busy stress already.  My shoulders are high and tight and I'm waking up early with too many niggling details on my mind.  I'm following standard practices I've learned the hard way over the years:  exercise, sunshine on my face, prayer, sleep, being kind to myself, and saying NO to anything extra.

Breathtaking

I'm coming back to this space with the thing that keeps taking my breath away:  four years after he was laid off, my husband has a job.  A full-time job.  We are giddy as we lay out all our plans for the money, deferred for these years as he snatched every tiny freelance job that came along, including landscaping and church cleaning (he's an architect). 

 

This blog, although I never stated it explicitly, was born out of the chaos of my husband's layoff.  All options were on the table and we tried, oh, how hard we tried! to choose the life-giving, hopeful options. 

But I couldn't blog about the job situation because the pain and fear were too close.  And the newness of my husband's new job keeps washing over me, changing yet another plan or fixture of my thrift.  Because I do wonder:  how much thrift will I retain now that it's not urgently needed?

I'll keep you posted.

 

Recent Kitchen Flops

Since I was writing about the "abundance of a certain material to make an impact" in my last post, let's talk about my spate of kitchen flops as a blog post.  Here they are in order.

1. I didn't use my sourdough starter for a week or so because I made a batch of oatmeal bread with regular ol' yeast for my mother who was convalescing from a terrible bout of flu.  The bread was like manna from heaven for her, so that warmed my heart.  But. But. But. I mixed up a batch of sourdough bread.  I left the sourdough loaves to rise overnight and in 12 hours, they had hardly risen. I, the old kitchen genius, baked them anyway and handily underbaked them while I was at it.  So they came out like bricks with doughy centers.  I'm pretending nothing is wrong and I just toast it before it gets eaten, but it's embarrassing.  I will not neglect my starter again!

2.  Around the time of the pink living room, I made a batch of Jeni's black coffee ice cream that was truly the most divine thing I put in my mouth this year.  Then last week I made a second batch, dreaming of that flavor, and lo, I messed it up.  It acquired too much liquid (milk? water?  did I just totally space out and add water???) and it's so hard and ice-crystally and the intoxicating flavor is totally diluted.  Very sad.  Tonight I pried a few icy scoops out and added them to vanilla seltzer to make floats, but still sad.

3.  I was charging through my excellent recipe for hot-and-sour soup when I reached in the back of the fridge to get my staple box of tofu and it was a frozen-solid brick.  Apparently the cold spot had gotten really cold.  Bless my husband for grabbing up a whiny kid and whipping out the car and returning with tofu in hand.  It wasn't exactly my fault, but on the heels of these other flops, I was not cheered.

4.  Yesterday I was making a lemon sponge pie when I realized I had poured in 2 1/2 cups of milk instead of 1 1/2 cups.  I was horrified.  All that butter, eggs, sugar, wasted?  I had nothing to lose, so I poured off a cup of the filling and baked it beside the pie like a custard.  I actually put it in the fridge and did not look at it yet - maybe it's a sauce?   The pie itself was oozy and watery around the edges, so I put it in the freezer for an hour before I served it today and guess what?! It was fine!  The flavor was not diluted too much and the custard was just set from the freezer.

Want to share any of your recent kitchen woes?  I could use another laugh.

How the Stomach Flu Did Not Overwhelm Us

1.  The house was clean and the laundry was nearly caught up. I attribute most of my sanity to a clean house.

2.  We had several small plastic buckets that the sufferers kept in arm's reach.

3.  I had a cache of ginger-ale for just such an occasion.  I did go down to the corner store and get Gatorade (and added it to my grocery list to keep for later; because the stomach flu always finds you later).

4. There were warm rice bags for hurting tummies and cold feet. I had, on a whim, made this rice-bag heart a few days before. I had been planning to show it to you on Valentine's Day for a cute heart post.

 

 

the other side

I am so happy with how this patchwork turned out.  I love to look at it.

5.  When the sufferers were climbing out of their pit, I served them warm jasmine rice with salt in a ramekin with a tiny spoon.  Then a little applesauce.  Then an inch of banana.  And later, homemade chicken stock with kluski noodles and thyme.

6.  My husband threw away toothbrushes and washed handles, lightswitches, and bathroom with assiduous care.


It was, surprisingly, a peaceful weekend.  Or maybe that was because all our social plans were cancelled.  I had been disappointed to miss the northeastern snowstorm, but it turns out we were housebound by the stomach flu. 

Going Home

My grandmother died last week, peacefully, mercifully.  Her funeral was yesterday.  She chose the scripture and songs, one of which was Dvorak's "Going Home," a sweet, simple song.

There are two things I have grudgingly come to appreciate about funerals:  the reunion-like quality of all the people who gather, and the way death cuts through my trappings and gives me a chance to reflect.


Ben made a potholder for his granny (my mother), Grandma's eldest.

 

He thought Granny would be sad because her mother died.  He was right. 

I'm going to be reflecting on Grandma's legacy for a while.  But these are my initial thoughts:
1.  She chose to love her family above all else, even when we changed in ways she could not approve of.  Other people in her generation judged their families unrelentingly.  My grandma chose to let that go.

2.  from the tribute I gave at the funeral: 

"Grandma always was as neat as a pin with firm ideas about cleanliness and tidiness.  Her home was always so soothing to me because it was clean and neat.  Everything always seemed right in Grandma’s world.  I am not so naïve as to think Grandma had a perfect life, but I loved how she created order and serenity around herself.  This is a skill that inspires me."

3.  from the unabridged tribute which I did not read at the funeral:

"Grandma clung to her homemaking ways when she and Grandpa downsized and moved into their cottage.  I remember Aunt Esther shaking her head because she wanted to take Grandma to buy a new coverlet for her bed, but Grandma wanted to cut patches and sew a coverlet herself.  I totally understand.  Grandma was from a generation of women who found their identity in making a home and caring for their families.  I know some of them resented it, and some of their daughters wished they would take time for themselves, but I guess I, a granddaughter, saw the rosy side of this nesting." 

The potholder, wrapped.  Everything chosen by Ben.

 

4.  My uncle Ron, whose own mother died when he was 16 and who married into our family, observed that our family is "fiercely together."  He said his family is "cordial" to each other, but nothing like this.  It's true.  Sometimes I get weary of the fierce part which leads to competition, jealous tiffs, and snide remarks, but yesterday I saw the gold.

Pondering.  Counting my blessings - I'm humbled and grateful.

A New Journal on the First Day of the New Year

I read this yesterday:

"'Unless a person has a lot of psychological tools at her disposal, the mind is not a pleasant place to inhabit,' says Germer.  'We have evolved for survival, not happiness, and thus we have a natural tendency to focus on the negative.'  When the brain is at rest, he adds, it tends to get busy revealing problems from the past and anticipating problems to come.  Once we scanned for predators and poisons, now we fret over the unemployment stats and what our mother-in-law had the nerve to say at dinner."  (quoted from Real Simple, January 2013, page 92; Christopher Germer is a clinical psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School and the author of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion)

To counteract our negative fretting, the article goes on to recommend paying attention to what's around us with our senses.  Touch the flower.  Sniff the baby's hair.  Taste the bread.  Look at the sky.  Listen to the violin.  It's also called mindfulness, or living in the moment. 

For the first time in my life, I get it. 

And for the first time in my life, I am starting a new journal on the first day of the new year.  My old journal is actually filled up; it's got ranting, crying, poetry, prayers, and touchstones.  But my intent for this new journal is to fill it with gratitude, to make lists of where I notice God's mercy in my life.  I noticed Christian and Beth doing this - I finally caught on! 

The old journal on the left; I made the collage on the cover.

These last few years have been difficult years for me - this blog was born out of some of that difficulty as a way to take note of the good things in my life, to gently discipline myself to focus on the good.  The flip side of that discipline is that, unless you know me in real life, you may not know of my difficulties and bad days.  Please know that my life is not perfect because nothing damages our sisterhood more than pretend perfection; however, the public forum is not the place for me to tell every negative thing that passes through my heart and mind.  Face-to-face, oh yes, I'll tell you!

So, my gratitude journal is what amounts to a New Year's resolution for me.  I'm pondering some more resolutions, too, but although I am a goal-oriented person, I do not take them on lightly.  I'll report back if I add some more goals. 

The new journal had no spiral to put a pen, so I made a little sleeve to hold one.

Happy New Year, my friends!  I'm so grateful you're on this strange, joyful journey with me.