tidy, tidy

It's definitely late winter in the Northwest, and the spring cleaning bug is hitting pretty hard. Did you ever buy a calendar that you loved so much, you just didn't want to give it up after the year was up? I'm thinking I'll cut some sheets of lightweight newsprint and stitch them to these inky/watercolor-y moon phases, to make a dozen pretty little notebooks. I'll still have to give them up eventually, but it's an excuse to keep them around a little longer, and get some more use and enjoyment out of them.

I still have the images from The Wild Unknown's calendar from two years ago, tucked into a box upstairs. I want to use them to make embroidered samplers; now that Solvy makes a printable, water-soluble stabilizer, it'll be easy to scan the images and print, stick on fabric, and stitch away. I can't wait to get started! I have a baby gift to make first, which is rather unfortunate as I'm far more in the mood to do hand work lately than to cut 80 feet of two-and-a-half-inch strips. Meh.

(Yes, the crow is done - I figured I'd post a picture when I got it framed, but if you'd like to see it now, feel free to say so.)

This spring catches us putting more than just the inside of our house together; we've worked about 12 yards of compost and planting mix into our little suburban yard, tearing out a patch lawn, massive laurel hedges, and ivy to build a native understory/shade garden, and sunny berms for a cottage garden of flowering and fruiting plants. This weekend we finally started to unpack some of the many plants we brought with us when we moved. It'll be lovely as everything starts to leaf out and bloom in the spring. (For reference, those smallish-looking black pots in the middle of the frame are quart-sized; I was lugging some seriously large and heavy characters around today!)

a little on my lately

Well that was a week. A new client needed me to put in extra hours; twice this week I came home and crashed on the couch. Hm. Maybe three times; I can't quite remember! (So tired!)  I knew it was going to be a bit intense.  I tried to ready everything to make it easier. Sunday saw some serious food prep going on (here are chickpeas soaking for the dish shown below, almonds soaking for our weekly half-gallon of almond milk, red cabbage slaw pickling, and shrimp marinating in lime juice and tequila for these really good tacos).

I did have a nice weekend last weekend, though. Ever walk into a shop to buy a bar of soap and then find yourself asking the proprietor, "Can I buy that print off your wall?" I'd never done it before! (The lino artist is Kate Powel. I can't find anything about her on the web. But I'm thinking of going back for her bee print this weekend.)

But now, blessedly, it's Friday again, and I'm back to my regular work-from-home Friday schedule  -which means getting all the laundry done and running the dishwasher while working; it makes such an impact on my weekend workload! Plus, I get so much more done in the quiet, especially when I've serious thinking-and-writing to do. I've just treated myself to a little pre-workout fuel-up, comprised of this Chickpea of the Sea tunaless tuna salad recipe (one of my husband's favorite vegan meals), with a nice slab of perfectly ripe avocado, on a butter lettuce leaf.

TGIF! Happy weekend!

ceci n'est pas un sampler

It's one of those days. Actually, it's one of a series of those days, strung in succession like beads on a thread: pouring buckets, lowering sky, a bit too damp and drear for even us locals to bother with things like woodland walks and visits to the wetland pools (though they'd be wonderfully swollen with all this rain). As I type, the deep bank of clouds are taking on a rosy cast: sunset, observed from under our thick, wooly blanket of precipitation.

I'm curled up inside, making the most of it - working through this afternoon, then getting a bit of exercise before finishing this embroidery project off tonight.

This is more than a sampler; this is a ward and blessing for our first home, and once I finish it I'll have to find someone to cut glass for the antique, hand-carved frame that I created it for.

craving color

Looking at back posts on social media, I was making a lot of brightly-colored vegetable breads through the tail end of last year's non-event-winter. I think it's a combination of being kind of burnt out on heavy foods by the end of the holidays and craving the lighter vegetal flavors of spring that drives me to it. Whatever the reason, this beet bread (based on Twigg Studio's beet and walnut recipe, here) is amazing. I started dreaming up other combinations this weekend - carrot and dill was the most popular version I made last year, but what about carrot and dill and turmeric? Or parsnip and parsley and sumac! Cauliflower and nigella!

But this week, it's just plain old beet. I think it'll serve as a pinch hitter for lunches on days when I don't have a lot of leftovers to bring in; a slice of beet bread slathered with "Up in Smoke" smoked chevre, and topped with some of the last of my friend Amal's pickled cauliflower? Yeah, that'll hit the spot. Tasty and bright; just the thing to chase winter doldrums away.

mucking about

Such promise in a little plant! It is very early to be picking these fellows; last year I posted elsewhere about harvesting in the first week of March - the earliest I'd ever gathered nettles.

This year it's January. I've been feeling particularly impatient to be out, picking weeds in the woods again. A little late-winter itchiness, if you will.

Crouched in deep, wet leaf-fall, stepping gingerly around ferns, we picked in silence, listening to the constant drip-drip-drip of moisture gently gathering and falling. There are days in Seattle when the weather reminds me of nothing so much as life inside a giant terrarium. Little birds twittered in the misty rain and fog as they drifted overhead, and off in a soggier depression somewhere, frogs sang their amphibious romances to each other.

A nice soak in cool water, and picking-through (with tongs!) to remove the muck and detritus.

Then a quick, 1-minute blanch, a shock in ice water, and gentle draining before pureeing into beautiful, nutritive emerald paste. Buccatini with nettles, pancetta, and black pepper is on the menu for this week, a first taste of something wild and green and woodsy-deep since summer faded last year.

Cozy

Oh, this face! Tonight she was reunited with her favorite blanket in the whole house: the handmade quilt. Naps ensued.

I've been eating Yumm bowls all week. Our favorite version is rice (arborio, because that's all we had on hand) and beans (borlotti, this time), with shredded carrot, sprouts, sliced tomatoes, avocado (leftover guacamole this time), and Cafe Yumm sauce. Soo delicious. And yes, a bit out of season with those tomatoes and avocado, but sometimes you just need a little tomato goodness in January, you know?

Also hopping on the golden milk train. Mine turned out super thick (did I cook it too long?) and tasted kinda like cooked squash. Been using it in everything from smoothies to lattes; it does seem to be helping with my back pain!

And finally, a cozy tableau: the mattress for the sleeping nook in our guest room finally came today. At first I was feeling kind of bummed by the mishmash of patterns and colors involved in setting up the bed (sheets, duvet, quilt, pillows, handmade rug - nothing really matched or felt cohesive), but when the sun sets and the room is lit by the glow of some twinkle lights, suddenly this room glows with a special magic. And do you see the little face peeking around the corner from the foot of the bed? I think anyone who stays here will have to expect to share the nook!

taking in the woods, the woods taking in me

It's a funny thing; the older I get, the more porous life seems to be.

When I was a kid, I used to think of myself as a solid entity, a single individual (the famous American individualism!), hermetically sealed off, really, from the world. I was an individual living and moving in the world, yes - but inside my skin, that was ME, and outside my skin, that was NOT ME. I remember experiencing something of a shock the first time I really conceived of the fact that I was permeable. And not just through my mouth or nose, my ears or eyes ... but my skin. That I excrete through my skin the foods I eat, that my skin breathes in and absorbs the environment around me. 

Yeah, I think it was realizing the porous nature of skin that really started to shake my sense of myself as a solid being, a singular entity: if chemicals, molecules, could pass through my skin - if things could come and go through me - then how could I be certain what constituted me? 

The older I get, the more everything feels ... impermanent. Just chemicals, elements, atoms constantly reconfiguring. Energy transmitted, passed, shared. Touch, go, leave something behind. Maybe it's my yoga practice; maybe this is what it means to start to conceive of one's existence as but a wave in an ocean.

It's a little unsettling. And at the same time, comforting.

In particular, lately, I've been thinking about states of matter. I touch a wall or a crystal or a piece of wood and think about the fact that its solidity is, in some ways, just an illusion of my limited sensory capacity; really, if we could excite the atoms to loosen the molecular bonds connecting them, this solid item could melt and run through my fingers - or evaporate into air, and I could inhale it into my lungs. I think about the act of swimming, about myself as a collection of more densely packed atoms moving in a body through more loosely arranged atoms.

(nettles are just starting to come up; I have half a mind to go pick these young things early, just to satisfy an early craving for the flavors of the woods. It'd take a long time to gather enough for a meal, and I'd have to range over a lot of territory, but my mind fixed on them some weeks ago and I have been contemplating them with something bordering on obsession.)

(miner's lettuce, too)

 

Even our experience of sound and light are determined by varying resonances of vibration; red could so easily be green; treble could so easily be bass. (I have no idea what these fat, juicy little mushrooms are, but aren't they delightfully plump and succulent-looking little fruits?)

I think, too about the conservation of energy in all this, the recycling, the recombining of elements, particles. Nothing is lost, the physicists tell us. 

I don't know to what end these thoughts are tending, but I feel like my sense of my own existence is shifted by them, in subtle ways.

I wonder what changes these changed and changing perspectives work upon me?