Category: Food

Yes, there is half a tree on our roof.

And, no, it’s not the start of a joke. We’re all fine. So, blessedly, is the power which runs very near where the tree now rests.

I heard a bizarre – but not all that loud – noise Friday night. Like something falling. A quick phone call to Bill assured me that he was safely working away in his basement office.

Then, a text from our neighbor saying that her son said a big branch fell at our house and asking if we were okay. I peered out all the windows (with a rather wimpy flashlight) and decided we were, despite the mystery, okay.

The photo was taken Saturday morning… mystery solved! More hassle begun.

We’re still in the midst of the stove adventure from last week. The new one is here but there was more installing to be done today. And a switch-thing to wait on, so that the light in the oven actually goes off when the door is closed! In the meanwhile, we’ve been experimenting with strategies for getting the massive amount of sticky goop off of it!

And it is, of course, Memorial Day weekend which doesn’t bode well for speedy help.

I’ll confess that a come-apart was tempting.

There are several new creations bouncing around in my head like one of those old, brightly colored kids’ toys that pops when you push it, like a popcorn popper, demanding attention.

It’s really NOT a good time for hassles.

Then I had a conversation with a young woman who is food, housing, and possibly immigration-status insecure, due mostly to the pandemic.

And I decided that perhaps I might be grateful for hassles I can fix. (Well, not me, personally. But I can help cause them to be fixed!)

So far, my fixing has meant a sale for a local business and work for a contractor-friend. And, clearly, work coming up for a tree trimming company. (Let’s don’t think about the roof just yet!)

Then it occurred to me that, with a bit more work on a couple of my projects, I might just have some extra resources, allowing me to cause a few more things to be fixed.

But, before that, there’s a grocery delivery in our future. And some phone calls to make.

There are a lot of things wrong in the world just now that I can’t fix. And a few that I can. In fact, a few more since I got up this morning! And, while I’m at it, count on me voting!

And giving thanks for those who have served, and are serving, on all the front lines in this world.

As you know, if you’ve been reading along, we moved a lot when I was a kid. According to family gospel, when I learned that we were moving from Cleveland to Pittsburg, I had questions.

Did they have corn on the cob? And, did they have Romper Room?

Assured that they did, I agreed to go. (Yes, you can laugh!)

Miss Whomever must have done her job well for I survived, in our next move, from Pittsburg to St. Louis, a world without Kindergarten.

It’s true. I never went. There wasn’t a public option and the private choices were all filled to their over-running waiting lists.

My mom, who professed to believe I needed a teacher, signed me up for dance lessons. The teacher had royal blue eyeshadow that extended above her eyebrows and she scared me.

Mom, who probably really thought she needed a couple of hours here and there with only one small child to chase, finally relented when I was given a beat up used bicycle, complete with training wheels, and insisted on staying home to ride.

By the time I reached my first day of first grade, complete with painful, slippery new shoes, a plaid dress with a Peter Pan collar from Sears, and a too-short haircut that closely resembled the mixing bowl-on-the-head do’s so popular in those days, I was way past ready to learn!

Sally, Dick, and Jane rocked my world! In a matter of weeks I was ready to make the leap from, “Puff is on TV, ” to the complexity of Betsy & Tacy, eating supper on the bench at the end of their street, while I made up the words I didn’t know.

I have been blessed with much learning to do since then. And, like the artist known as Michaelangelo, I am still learning.

It’s been a big week for learning! I suspect that’s because I spend a great deal of my time hanging out with a tribe of women, connected by a red thread, and bravely learning, too.

You may have heard rumors of my unintended learning experience with an enormous pot of gorgeous bird bones and a stove that quit working during the step of the process known as simmer, with bubbles gently breaking the surface, overnight.

I was heartbroken. And frustrated. Those were lovingly roasted, local chicken and turkey bones, sustainably raised by farmers with whom I’m on hugging terms which, in these days more than ever, isn’t a bad way to get food! At least they were until they became trash.

Enter the need to learn a whole lot about buying a stove, as we own neither microwave, nor toaster oven. Thankfully, I was already in possession of categories for success on that decision and the new, improved version should arrive late this week.

That done, it was back to the business of art. Literally, for I am engaged in several conversations about how to do healing art in the world where we now find ourselves. Here’s a short list of what I know now that I didn’t know before:

How to get the very skippy new email signature in my laptop to also work in my phone.

New uses for adjectives in writing invitations… and ways to decide which ones!

How to get my toys to work together so that I can lead a Zoom workshop demonstrating an art process while still seeing and being seen by others on the journey.

And, possibly best of all for empowering the future, a link between the name my parents gave me all those years ago, and the medicine painting on my easel just now, which looked, in the early phases, like it might have come from Romper Room!

The answer to the tech-y questions is, on the one hand, YouTube videos and, on the other hand, whatever changed inside me such that I believed I could figure it out.

The name thing is a story for a different day.

If you click here, you will be magically transported to the place with the videos mentioned above and a photo of my new tech-y miracles!

For now, I’d love to know what you’re learning in this place we’ve never been before which may actually be the place we’ve always been… a world that changes. There’s a place for comments if you scroll down a ways. I hope you will!

To talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax. Of cabbages and kings.

Well, sort of. The things on my list are different than those on the long gone list of Lewis Carroll. But, the time has, apparently, come.

This is a good thing, in the way that newness often is. And a challenging thing in the way that new things often are. You see, on this particular Wednesday, I am even more conscious than usual of being my own Work-in-Progress!

As you may have noticed, one of the owl eggs in the painting on the right is beginning to hatch!

But first, a bit of reflecting on a couple of other art forms. The massive bone broth cauldron is enthroned on the stove. No heat yet. Just raw bones bathing in very cold acidulated water. Bird bones, in this case. But no owls!

And, in addition to the beginnings of a pot of bone broth, quilts.

Last night I dreamed of the endless hours I used to spend, staring at quilt fabric strung across the back of my couch, trying to feel which ones belonged in a particular project and which ones needed to return to the stash for a different moment in the sun.

It seems I am doing that internally at the moment. And the scraps for the project hatching inside me are books and symbols and stories, collected over the last couple of decades, interesting individually and increasingly fascinating as they jockey for position in the mental quilt I am composing which will be called something along the lines of Making Sense Out Of The World.

Perhaps you are hatching such a project as well!

I hope so. I find comfort in the notion that there are many of us at work, creating new patterns and perhaps even comfort in the face of – well – current events.

And I’m really grateful for a host of brave and brilliant teachers through the years. I’ve shopped, in a sense, through classes and books and experiences, for just the bits of knowing that feel so much like brilliant scraps of quilt fabric in my heart.

There will be more to come about all of this.

Soon!

First, I need to learn a bit more about Zoom and what happens if my new project thinks it needs two cameras at once. Right after I ship some art supplies to Texas and Tennessee.

Should you happen to be a wise soul with knowledge of such unquilt-like wisdom, PLEASE leave me a comment, below, or email me at suesvoice@gmail.com

If ever there was a time when we’re all in this together, it seems to be now. Blessings for you and yours. And for the symbolic baby owls hatching in your heart.

ps… A very, very happy birthday to Kelly who “hatched” my favorite owls!

Thirty years ago, almost exactly, I was preparing to graduate from Columbia Theological Seminary, planning a wedding, and exploring options for a call to serve a church.

One evening I went to a meeting on campus. It was an opportunity to talk with pastors of small, rural churches in a southern state and their wives (!). One of those pastors’ wives asked me if I could can.

A few questions helped me realize that she meant putting lots of veg in glass jars.

The answer then was the same as it is now. No. I don’t can.

With a few more questions, I learned that for the first three years her husband served a particular church, his “raise” came in the form of one of the members plowing them up an extra acre of garden.

All of which feels even more real now than it did then!

There’s a big online conversation happening in the corner of Atlanta where we hang out made up of folks who are wanting to learn about urban agriculture, given the current grocery shopping situation.

Who knew we’d be ahead of the curve???

Even though there isn’t much happening in the garden yet this year, there are 3 things on my list for today. The first is an online Red Thread Circle event around the topic of Medicine Baskets. (It’s an Intentional Creativity® thing.)

Then, there’s painting. I have three “in progress” just now.

This is What the World Needs Now. She’s almost finished!

And, then, there’s freezing. I still don’t can but we do have extra veg and they’re headed for the freezer, some blanched, some roasted, and all wrapped, ready for the soup pot. Especially the asparagus!

There’s also one other thing on my list, though it’s more of a non-thing.

I am fed up with crooked, fear-mongering politicians so I’m weeding my email list.

I’m unsubscribing to all the many, many emails that pretend to want to know what I think but actually want to scare me into “chipping in” to change things. I’m unsubscribing, with best wishes, to requests to help elect this candidate or that in places where I can’t vote. I’m unsubscribing to name calling and doom & gloom.

Instead, I’m going with gratitude and hope.

Gratitude for honest, concerned representatives of “we the people.”

Hope for some new names in the news, standing up for all of us.

And the kind of hope that comes with a contribution or two to people and causes focused on a future where as many of us as possible have what we need. I’m truly grateful for them.

I can’t do it all. Neither can you. I can stay home. Mostly. I can freeze veg. I can encourage loved ones and reach out to friends. And I can paint stories of hope.

Fear doesn’t help us learn and grow. It makes us angry and separates us.

But, because fear is a feeling, we don’t get to choose not to feel it, if we do.

We DO get to choose not to act out of it. Not to be defined or limited by it. And, usually, it’s a choice we need to make over and over again.

That’s okay.

Just think about what the world might be like if we all joined in and kept choosing hope, over and over again. Even if we can’t can!

ps… Earlier, I sat down with my lunch and flipped on the tv. What appeared was about the last 20 minutes of the movie, E.T. Context is, indeed, everything, which had me first hating/envying all the haz-mat suits and then giving thanks for the courage of those kids in helping one who was different, even in the midst of great unknown. May it be so for me, as well. And for us. ALL of us.