January Cozy-ing
January 4, 2024 § 1 Comment
Unlike many people, it seems, I’ve never minded making New Year’s resolutions. I don’t feel stressed about them. Instead I tend to find them inspiring. I like fresh starts. I’ve always, for better or for worse, liked the idea of reinventing oneself. Or perhaps rather to allow a tucked-away part of oneself to blossom. Resolutions can help with the unfolding.
If I succeed, lovely, but if I don’t, well, I usually find I’ve forgotten about the resolutions and don’t even remember to chastise myself (heh). So it’s all right.
That said, this year I’m finding myself to be a funny paradox. On the one hand, I’ve been reading about and leaning into the idea that winter is for coziness, hibernation, rest, renewal, ease . . . and that SPRING is the natural time to begin new things. I love this. I am a gardener. I feel this in my bones, in the soil in the creases of my hands.
And ALSO: this is 100% my year to get myself into financial ship-shape. After years of dashed hopes, an aching heart, and infertility, I finally had my dream baby at the end of 2022. It took surgeries and IVF to find this little love, and he had a pretty rough start (but now he’s chubby and happy and trying so hard to walk!). As a single mama by choice, I am the sole provider and daycare-payer for our family. I do have some savings and investments, but I need to increase my income and tidy up loose ends in order for us to be solvent, or better yet, to thrive.
I also miss writing terribly. My creative self has largely been tabled while I threw my heart into my nonprofit summer camp community garden all-the-things job. There has absolutely been creativity within that role – gosh, so much, of another kind – but I miss the writer, the dreamer, the girl who posts all the pretty pictures and imagines how to spin beauty around her with words and things.
Luckily, I have two circumstances attempting to bring these opposite tugs back towards one another.
FIRST, my writing, multiple-income-stream-developing, financial-self-education time has to happen when my little one is asleep. So I sit down with a cup of hot chocolate next to a heater that has fake flames and fake crackles (I scoffed at this heater when I read about it and then the reviews convinced me and I actually love it – it’s the littlest bit of easy ambiance, ok? Here’s the link! Not an ad, everyone just needs one). I pull out my computer and I remember how I like to wend my way through words. I remember graduate school in the yellow Victorian house in Iowa, the smell of spices coming from the kitchen, my first golden retriever lying beside me on the floor, so many curly-haired boys the five clever women in our house were crushing on, the late night cups of tea with my dear Japanese friend.
SECOND, my sweet babe has to have a surgery early this month and the recovery is expected to be rather difficult. So I took two weeks off from my job and we will be home. I anticipate mostly holding him, at least for the first week. We are going to be extra, extra cozy. And perhaps in between snuggles and consolation I will find time to write. And if not, the wonderful thing about an imagination is that it works while you are doing other things. I can hold a baby and plan out a book proposal. I can kiss his little head and think of characters for a story. I can have a tired cry in the bathtub while he sleeps and then lean back and remember the hope of new ventures, of easier days.
We push ourselves through challenging things hoping for better times on the other side. Human nature? Optimism? In any case, here we go (again)!
Muddy water morning
June 28, 2015 § Leave a comment
Summer is so much intensity. Heat, people, pouring sunshine, gardens demanding water and weeding, animals thirsty and shade-seeking.
There is great fun in summer – brightness, discovery, and a raucous kind of play, play, play outside! But it also comes with a push that, for some of us, needs to be ducked away from now and again.
Sunday mornings become the place to find cool and quiet.
This one was a slow walk in tall boots, a slight breeze, moss and muddy water at the lake’s edge.
Sometimes you have to look for what you need, to remember your right to it, to find the space and the time somewhere in the week for a place beautiful and damp and cool and still.
Having a jar of coffee in hand doesn’t hurt. A companion happy to splash in the water doesn’t, either.
This Sunday prayer seems to be hanging in the air around me. A Creator’s creation offering what I need: trees bending in the breeze, scattered sun over the water, and the soaking-wet, frolicking gladness of a good dog.
April begins
April 6, 2013 § Leave a comment
Today was spring for real, the kind of day where you start out in layers and end up in shorts and a t-shirt by afternoon. Mine began with feeding animals and ended with new books from the library, and a cup of hot milk and coffee, and plans to write (well, after this).
Gosh, I love planting flowers! All around the house and yard on this afternoon off. Cosmos and flax and alyssum and forget-me-nots and a few others. Isn’t it nice that seed costs so little yet turns into such a bounteous sort of thing? And I love that the woods are white with spring ephemerals. I think I have followed trails through spring beauty, and/or hepatica, and/or wood anemone. (I will look closer next time.)
And I love that we are putting pollinator-friendly shrubs and perennials in our farm garden and that it will bring lots of life and beauty to that place. Yesterday I got to visit a nursery called The Unique Plant and the inviting, lush landscape and blooming shrubs there nearly had me giddy.
My camera-less-ness is really just sad when there is so much to capture!
Oh, well. For now, here’s a shot from last weekend, when we went to the beach for my sister’s birthday. Sand and sun! And a salty dog.
March is . . .
March 23, 2013 § Leave a comment
“March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.” – Hal Borland
Collections
February 16, 2013 § 3 Comments
Sometimes, and especially in new places, I start keeping a kind of list, a collection in my head, of things that nature impresses upon me. All along the way there are these gifts; do we notice them? When I start collecting I seem to remember to notice, to make it habit, and to receive them with gratitude. Here are a few from the past week:
1. Two coyotes playing in the woods at Occoneechee Mountain. They looked like they were fairly young and were bounding about quite happily, until they saw us – Tass with her ears perked up, and me peering closely, and fighting the urge to go and join in the fun. At night we can hear packs of coyotes howling, howling, long strains breaking into yips, voices joining one after another. I love it, this reminder that I am not alone nor solely among humans, and that the night, when we grow still and quiet, brings forth others who have much to say.
2. A bird’s nest made of horse hair, glittering with beads after a rainy morning. The walk in the woods that day was splendid, damp. There is so much green here, even this time of year, all the mosses and lichens, the trunks of trees. I knelt down in the leaf litter and dug through the layers, through the forest floor to the clay below. I just needed to touch it. The soil here is so unfamiliar; I know it is not as “good” as what we have back in the Midwest, but it fascinates me. I am beginning to love its redness. It belongs here, this way, you know, and it’s important to learn how we might grow things well in this place – respecting what a garden needs while also appreciating what the earth is.
Nearby a tree had fallen, and its base formed a wall of clay soil and various rocks; I dug at it a bit, shaped the clay in my palm, pulled the rocks out and felt them, ran my fingers over the velvety green at the foot of the trunk, and hungered for a book on regional ecology.
3. The moon hanging like a crescent-bowl in the sky on Valentine’s Day. The stars so, so spangly up above the pines. That, my friends, is a love-gift.
4. Yesterday Tass and I went walking a near trail, and we found a spot where we could slide down the muddy banks and climb onto a couple small boulders in the river. I sat there while she waded all around me, and the early afternoon light struck the water upstream of us. Everything was brown and golden; the water is murky green and moves just fast enough to be noticed; the temperature was 60 degrees and the sun warmed my face. I sat there and smiled, for I knew we had found a favorite spot, to be visited again, to watch change over the seasons.
5. And then, today! What happened today nearly outdoes the others – in any case, it was certainly winter flaunting herself (which I always appreciate). We woke up to snow falling – in such delicious wet flakes, big as a quarter, tumbling down slow as you please. I stood on the porch and looked up at the gray-white sky, at all those specks and each one of them different. Later the flakes grew smaller and fell faster, and soon the ground and all the limbs of the trees had a proper white coat over them. When I’d finished helping a friend pull up her floor, I went home and had a cup of tea and let the dim of evening settle in, and then I went walking through the woods. I love the white mysteriousness of snow at day’s end, especially inside a stand of trees. They say this kind of snow hardly ever happens here. I’m inclined to think North Carolina did it for me. Welcome, Northerner.
Why, thank you.
Beginning Farmers: Learning, Networking, and Connecting to Place
February 8, 2013 § 1 Comment
Check out the article (title above) that I wrote for A Growing Culture! Here’s a link, with the first couple of paragraphs below:
It’s no secret that more and more young people in the U.S. are looking to establish careers in local, organic, and small-scale farming, despite the risk, instability, hard work, and moderate income. Even many well-established career adults are abandoning their corporate jobs to start farms – and writing books about it. Most of these folks are unapologetic about their choices, choosing instead to either shout to the rooftops about why they’ve chosen a lifestyle such as this one, or to quietly go on doing what’s important to them. Yet as much as farmers enjoy their independence, getting started and continuing successfully depends upon a network of support from other farmers, researchers, landowners, and the general public.
Khaiti and Andrew French, who run Living the Dream Farm in Clayton, Wisconsin, were drawn to farming because “of loving good, real food and caring about how animals are raised in agriculture.” They are famous for their duck eggs in Minneapolis circles, and also raise turkeys, rabbits, chickens, and goats. Farmers such as the Frenches, inspired by voices such as Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschenmann, seek meaningful connection to the land, family-centric lifestyles, and practices that are in line with their carefully considered ethics.
Among other species
February 1, 2013 § 1 Comment
Here’s a passage I came across in my reading yesterday that made me pause, re-read it, and ponder for a bit:
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Thoreau, and his many heirs among contemporary naturalists and radical environmentalists, assume that human culture is the problem, not the solution. So they urge us to shed our anthropocentrism and learn to live among other species as equals. This sounds like a fine, ecological idea, until you realize that the earth would be even worse off if we started behaving any more like animals than we already do. The survival strategy of most species is to extend their dominion as far and as brutally as they can, until they run up against some equally brutal natural limit that checks their progress. Isn’t this exactly what we’ve been doing?
What sets us apart from other species is culture, and what is culture but forbearance? Conscience, ethical choice, memory, discrimination: it is these very human and decidedly unecological faculties that offer the planet its last best hope. It is true that, historically, we’ve concentrated on exercising these faculties in the human rather than the natural estate, but that doesn’t mean that they cannot be exercised there. Indeed, this is the work that now needs to be done: to bring more culture to our conduct in nature, not less.
– Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education
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(thoughts?)
Bronze leaves
December 10, 2012 § Leave a comment
A favorite shot from the photography workshop I took this weekend. More to come.
Big Snow
December 10, 2012 § 2 Comments
So much snow fell yesterday and into today. 15 inches, maybe?
Imagine you are here. You would slide into long johns and boots and mittens and take great strides through the snow with the dog and me.
The snow came nearly up to Tassie’s belly in some places. It covered our boots. It put tall caps on the beehives.
It is the kind of snow that makes you work around it, that makes you clumsy, that makes you pause and look at how the world around has changed. The kind of snow that makes you laugh and even shimmer a little bit yourself.
I think everyone around here is secretly or not-so-secretly thrilled. I swear there is more spring in our steps, more cheer in our voices. Last winter had scarcely a decent snow in this part of the country, and so this one feels like ice cream long waited for. It tastes sweet.
Evergreen
November 30, 2012 § Leave a comment
This is the time when the evergreen takes center stage.
The rest of the year we are giddy about the spring buds opening into flower, the broad and flickering deciduous leaves, the fall colors. But in winter, the pines and firs and spruces get their fair due. While the other trees make striking silhouettes with their naked branches, the evergreens bring color onto our landscape. They make us look at them; we want to look at them. And even better when they catch snow, to sparkle under the light of sun or moon.
Such is our admiration of evergreens in winter that we invite them into our homes, feed them honey and water, bedeck them with ribbons and lights and jewels.
It is so nice to have their thick outline against the white sky, their weighty branches, their plucky needles. They remind us of life when so much else has died, browned, gone to sleep.
Kinds of Honey 