“Greta Who?”

The year is ending and to most people's manner of thinking, so is the decade. (Yes, I know that the third decade of this century begins in 2021, but all logic aside, that is not how most human beings view the calendar, and the calendar is a human construct after all, so there we are.) …

GOOD FENCES…

You go girl! A friend just sent this to me. Isn't it wonderful! This must have been originally published by a knitting or UK journal. No mainstream American newspaper or magazine would mention the 23 stitch repeat.   I was right about the source. It seems to track back to a Scottish blog post from 2012. …

LATKES

We have family coming for dinner next week, and I am test-driving family recipes and trying out a couple of new things. I hope to serve Waldorf salad (without nuts or brown sugar), cold poached salmon with sauces no one is allergic to, the mushroom-and-wild-rice casserole (without flour or butter or cream), Brussel's sprouts, and …

CLEARING AWAY

Heavy rain. Hard blow. High tides. The holidays. And knitting. We went to bed too early last night and we are awake too early. Over the past ten days, the high tide has washed all the way into the hedge and everything moved around. Sand shifted in and off shore, basalt stones revealed and tumbled …

HAPPY HOLIDAY

from A New Zealand Prayer Book: "It is night after a long day. What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done; let it be." Find time to not do a thing but notice. Last evening my husband and I watched The West Wing episode, "In Excelsis Deo." …

CLOTHES HORSE

Gary sewed a button on the other day. A few months ago I made repairs to quilts I'd sewn for our older son—quilts that are decades old and have been through the wash too many times. I recall my dad talking about learning to darn socks in the Army. I know, in theory, how to …

BREAK A LEG

Some of this story is fiction, but it doesn't matter which parts because that's not the point. When you are seventeen, riding a borrowed bicycle, you are stuck by a car and suffer what they used to call a compound fracture. You could search online for what they call that kind of break today. But …

MEDIA MOB

My husband and I love films and we have seen a great many of them. We avoid the bad ones, when we are aware they are going to be bad. Lately, "bad" has become such a relative term that even Rotten Tomatoes seems unable to warn us away from films we dislike. We wasted over …

BRING BACK OUR MIGHTY DREAM

Let America Be America Again Langston Hughes  (1902-1967) Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be …

WILD PLACES

When I was in high school the last of my grandparents died. And then in my twenties so had all the step parents—a lot of divorce in my family. My maternal grandfather's third wife had taken a fancy to me and her second husband was fond of Gary. I've written about this before. It's how …