Eighteen trees were delivered today for the house up the hill. Fortunately the diesel rumble and forklift beeping was short-lived.
Scaffolding coming down from what appears to be an elevator shaft on the project around the corner.
I did make those peanut butter cookies. They’re good! Like the recipe recommends, I dipped the cross-hatching fork in ice water instead of flour. What a difference. After making these cookies dozens of times, I somehow never read that part (no comment).
But mostly I’m here to say it’s hot. Too hot to walk the full Langley-Cypress loop, so we cut through the schoolyard. My guess is this heat will last until the end of September.
I can’t believe I haven’t take a single dunk in water yet this year. Maybe Crystal Lake later?
After spending an hour or so adding to the History Page on this blog, I hit DISCARD instead of UPDATE (also no comment). I was not a happy camper. Of course I found no way to restore the revisions.
It was too shaggy. It barely held together when being shaped into disks for the fridge. Rolling the dough out later was tricky and getting in into the pie pan, trickier still. It was friable, cohering with mashing and not finesse.
And yet. And yet! It turned out to be delicious, making for one marvelous quiche and one delicious apple pie.
What’s the lesson here? Something about the perils of relying on the standards of previous efforts, perhaps. Something about holding low expectations…
I know I’m home because I’m typing to jackhammering.
I know I’m home because I didn’t sleep well two nights last week.
I know I’m home because the garden calls like a Siren.
I know I’m home because I’m looking forward to writing with my Tuesday writers this morning.
Back to dog walks. Back to really tasty salads.
One male. One female. Posse of five
My son returned to Colorado with Covid. If biting your tongue made a sound (regarding masks, which he not once wore), he would hear it from Massachusetts. How hard is it? I truly don’t understand. It wasn’t just him — in almost every mode of transport and crowded venue, I was the only person masked.
Too much?
Lest you think me extreme, a woman coughed (goopy, wet) for all six hours of this flight. About five rows back. It did not sound like she was even bothering to cover her mouth.
Washed, pressed, ready to cut for sachets!
PS. Flight was a red-eye and the coverup helped me sleep too.
I just walked to PT in my spiffy new sneakers, filled my backpack with a few tasty items from the grocery store below the medical building, and am ready for my second cup of coffee.
Here are two grocery store measures of money:
When my credit card chip malfunctions, I know it’s them and not me. I never have to panic, merely reinsert.
On the other hand, when I see marcona almonds (which I love) priced at $11 for roughly two handfuls, I walk on by. Maybe for Mother’s Day?
Muscular and assertive shadows with claims to the olden days. Wisteria.
Shadows that process.
A delicate shadow that refuses your judgment.
Shadows warmed by wood.
A shadow with secrets.
A bevy of shadows? Or perhaps a parliament. No, a convocation!
Happy Monday all! We walked out with Finn this morning, flexible in our gear. Hats on, hats off, gloves on, gloves off. Langley windy, as usual. Warmed up by the bottom of the Cypress slope, as usual. We feel spring arrive through the lens of habit and garments. Finn sleeps now. Pooped.
This year on my birthday: 66. This year four days after my birthday: my mother will be gone for 27. It’s easy to keep track of her absence because she died a month before my younger son was born. I will always know how old he is.
Come a week in March, both boys will roll round one year older. THAT same week will mark my sister being gone four years.
The confluence of dates is not my doing. My mother died four days after my birthday and my sister died on one of my son’s birthdays.
Noticing is inescapable, in other words.
And it’s not morbid as it turns out. Listening to a conversation between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert while walking Finn this morning opened up some pockets of gladness or recognition or something. They talked about grief. How it’s a gift. Or rather, how still being alive is a gift. It’s more nuanced than that though, given how grief acts as a vessel for remembrance, celebration.
Both of them experienced devastating losses early. Cooper’s father died of heart disease when he was ten and then eleven years later his brother jumped off a building, killing himself (while their mother watched). Colbert also lost his father at age ten, but in an accident. That accident also claimed the lives of two of his brothers. Their conversation is really worth a listen.
I was born just after sunset in a hospital that no longer exists. Here’s a haiku I wrote last week.
Cooper is documenting cleaning out his mother’s apartment. She died in 2019 and apparently she left notes for him everywhere. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while.
Looking at this doll without a note, how would D know that I dyed the wool, cotton strips, and linen myself? Or that I knit the legs in the waiting room of Children’s Hospital while a surgeon put pins in his arm, all the while praying for his bones to knit (get it?) and heal. Or that the striped top came from a shirt I wore frequently when he was little, the collar from a cuff of a sweater of his dad’s?
PS it didn’t occur to me until after posting this that year zero for me would’ve been sixty-seven years ago. But the syllables don’t work for the haiku form!
