Spring Apex

I am in major garden mode. The plants are in, all but the second sowings of certain things that wither with the heat and harvest fast. On to the mulching! The budget is tight but it is mulch season and plants wait for no man. I have been covertly hauling home the dumped grass clippings of my neighbors and I discovered that the stump that the city ground in the fall, in front of our house has become a giant pile of chips that aren't doing anyone any good, spilling off the curb into the road....so I've been shoveling them up and spreading them on the flower bed I am slowly making in the front of the house out of plant divisions and a few precious annuals. Feeling frugal and mighty and only occasionally a bit mopey and pinched. I can do this! Beauty no matter what!

The weather is warming slowly and the boys are having baths every night, the bath water turning a healthy shade of beige before the plug is pulled. There is no end to the laundry but the upside is that the line is always full of beautiful buntings waving in the wind. Love pulling into the driveway and seeing all the clothes snapping on the line.

I am having a mini-hibernation time, feeling overwhelmed by the end of all the school year stuff (programs and family nights and presentations galore!) and nervously teetering on the edge of swept under when I look at the lists of things we will be doing this summer. June approacheth. Whew! I want to be inspired and I know I will be, but sometimes the enormity of it all makes me catch my breath. In true introvert fashion I am hiding to get over it. If I don't answer your call, don't respond to your email or am a strange no-show for your event, please try to understand that sometimes a girl just pulls inward and know that I will get my feet under me again very soon.

Just in case any of this has to do with the ten pounds that crept onto my body or the lax hand I have been using with myself and sugar lately, I've battened down the hatches and am trying make a green juice a day this whole week. Equilibrium is nigh. I am also going to try to make extra effort to be outside, get sunshine, be active and get enough sleep. Amazing how much more possible the world looks when we have nurtured our bodies!

Eyeball Color Theories

My sister brought the above book home from the library. We are now obsessed and up to our eyeballs in visual self-analysis. Its one of those "find your colors" kinds of guides and since I have spent years working on figuring out what colors I should wear and yet still feel a little befuddled....my appetite is handily whetted.

So confusing trying to sort out all the pieces and make sense of it. So much of color is psychology and meaning, personal taste layered on top of actual objective reality. For years I hated the colors orange and teal (I can't even remember why....I was insane.) and now I have trouble accepting colors like mauve and beige but I think its mostly about ideas and stories I tell myself about the colors.

My sister Foxy and I....plus a photo-bombing baby! She has my un-bleached, natural hair color.

I think I am a Summer or a Spring but its hard for my to sort out the cool and warm color bits. I wish in some ways we were still in the 80's when it was trendy to have your "colors done" and come away with a purse pocket swatch for handy referencing.

My sister Lockbox and I....similar but not exactly the same.

We are reading all kinds of cool things though....examine your eyes in detail and notice all the colors in them: the darkest colors, the rays, the softest muted shades, take a look at the veins in your wrists and look for shades of blue, green and purple, and take notes on the colors you blush when pinched and the darkest and lightest colors in your hair. So fun noticing the details of yourself! The artist in me loves these assignments. This is the nature of being a painter...not seeing "blue" skies but noticing that sometimes the sky is purple and sand and aquamarine but almost never just "blue." Real observing. Its a Buddhist kind of fashion assignment really. Being in The Now, truly present and fully aware.

Detail of my multi-colored eyes.

May there be clarity! May there be fresh green knowledge! May there be in my future a cashmere sweater in the perfect shade!

Space Sharing With Your Spouse

Feeling a little cramped in my own house today. A has been holed up in the office all week on important (must keep the kids quiet!!!) phone calls and dodging in and out of the house for meetings and gym runs. This morning he left while I was out with the boys and he locked up out of the house by accident. Its so hard to switch up your regular routine and toss a new person and new demands into it, right? It seems so cozy to spend extra time together but the reality is a little stickier.

I always thought I was extrovert until I realized that being an introvert is more about needing alone time than it is about hating people. Read this fabulous book all about introvertism and came away with a whole new perspective and an understanding about my need for space and recharging. Makes sense that having my little world invaded, even by my own spouse, would make me feel a little encroached upon now that I feel legit about my own wiring. Autumn feels like a season that pushes all the introvert buttons extra hard too, its all of the moment: stand at the sink peeling apples for hours and stock the larder with homemade apple sauce, read books alone in the dark by the light of a lantern, get up in the quiet and start a coffee cake before the children get up, walk home from work alone and take a shortcut through the woods to kick leaves....you get that right?

 

Sharing is good but admitting your own needs and boundaries is also good. Sometimes a little open-eyed clarity is the key to stopping the obsession and high-stepping past your own little stumbling blocks. I think one of the problems is that I also skipped my mama-night out alone this week. So, now I'm off to the library to look for a good book that I can take off and read alone after dinner just to get myself out of the house and breathing in a little solo space.

Shoes and Autumn Mornings

I got up this morning...actually when my alarm went off...and spent a half an hour alone in the living room, curled up under a blanket, reading my next bookclub assignment. It was so chilly, and I was grouchy/groggy when I first got up which was nothing that a private mug of chai tea couldn't cure. When off-track like I have been the past few days, (missed schedules, dropped self-care, over-tired....etc.)  the best thing ever is just to get back on track....and minimize the emotional self-flagellation and instead tell yourself that falling off the wagon is useful because it teaches you how sweet it really is to ride. Meaning is contexual.

 

This is the best time of year ever in some ways. I love the freshness of the Autumn. The way a day carries all the seasons in rotation inside itself. Wake up to the frosty chill of winter thinking of slippers and baked sweet potatoes but also spend a moment in the middle of the day weeding in the garden with a hot vernal sun baking down on your back. Have your cake and eat it too. Welcome to Fall.

 Ru has been growing a lot over the summer and Baby Pom is finally doing a little growing of his own (record breaking midget that he is!) and today I am off to Target looking for new footwear for them both. Pom will just get a new pair of leather crib shoes, no real soles yet but Ru needs yet another pair of long-suffering casual shoes. His current pair lolls open at the toes when he trips up the sidewalk like some kind of bizarre puppet. Must keep the children in shoes. These sorts of things look bad. Neighbors begin to ask questions.

Birthday, Peaches and Planes in My Dreams

This coming weekend will be our first time as a household celebrating my sister, Lockbox' birthday together. We are planning in some serious shore time, a peaches and cream pie (recipe here!), sparklers, some read alouds, some late night chatting and some cozy mornings sleeping in. We are all still enjoying her presence so much. We'be set up some nice boundaries for personal space and responsibility which are preserving but I think our warm friendship is the most important factor. I have cool siblings. I feel lucky.
We havn't been peach picking in quantity yet. We got a small bag of white peaches from a farm but I aim to pick more like a bushel for canning, fruit leather and freezing for smoothies in the winter.
The garden is clipping along nicely with tomatoes ripening every day, our first cabbages ever and several sweet dinners of baby beets in our bellies. I am really hoping against hope that our sweet potato vines bear.
I have a mad yen for a free plane ticket. A good friend was having a baby shower in Colorado, my sister Foxy is nursing my beloved, tiny premature nephew along in Michigan and I also feel like I am kind of desperate for a small,  careless foray into vernal Vermont. Nobody has shown up with a magic ticket though so I might have to stick with dreamships for transport.
I painting the house madly!!! The trim is starting to look reliably white and glossy around the house. Feeling awesomely capable after charging the drill up myself for the purpose of home rescue.
Tomorrow I do laundry.

Mango Mania!

Its mango season, yo. Such a great way to celebrate the first day of spring! The big red and green mangoes are alright but my favorites (the ones I wait all year for because they're still blessedly seasonal) are the little, golden ataulfo mangoes. I buy them by the case and A balances them in long lines on all our shelves and windowsills, an ever-ripening  line.  Then one day the first one is ripe and they begin to pile down on us ripely ,we eat them end to end, slicing off the two cheeks and then gnawing all of the leftover flesh from the large seed in the middle.

I have many plans. There will be cardamom lassis, broiled mango halves a silken mango pudding and a saffron colored mango salsa over wild salmon. YUM.

The ataulfo mango is different from the standard mango on a couple of points. If selected properly they are sweeter, the color is richer and so is the depth of flavor. You get none of the stringy fiber in your teeth with these babies, the flesh is soft and melty, no ropy bits to be found. The pit is also more slender so even though the fruits are smaller the proportion of meat to seed is greater.

Having a naturalist in the house is contagious. We were eating one over breakfast one minute and the next thing I knew we were dissecting the seed and examining the embryonic sprout end vs the stem end and letting the boys touch the papery brown skin. Its living on the window sill now in a tiny metal pot of water. Google tells me I have good odds of growing a mango tree! I'm for that.

 Must be time to buy another case.

Why November?

November is one of those maligned months...it isn't very colorful, its the end of fall and before winter. And then the holidays come tromping and stomp right over whatever is left of November's own personal identity. Today we sing the unsung hero...what makes this month lovely in its own right?

10 Good Reasons To Love November 

1. All the leaves fall down and reveal vistas we forgot we had......suddenly the world looks all new again, even out our own familiar kitchen windows.

2.The bird feeder goes up in the window like ours did today. Its great to get personal with some of the birds again just as so many other are leaving for parts further south.

3.You can reliably light a crackly fire in the fireplace for the first time.

4.Our own local New England cranberries come into stores again! I love cranberries for their bright color, the way they naturally thicken when boiled down for a sauce or a jam, for their tart tang (I'm a tangy girl!) and the fact that they come so unmistakably from here. We don't get cranberries shipped in from Chile!

5. Hot tea becomes the thing again! I get to dig out my favorite, cozy mug and try to decide between English Breakfast, Chai and Earl Grey. Tough problems.

6. Roasting vegetables in the oven, low and slow sounds like a good idea again! Toasty carmelized parsnips and carrots and cauliflower and butternut squash is divine munching material. Toss any veg in olive oil and drop in snips of thyme or rosemary, generous doses of salt and spread them on a cookie sheet. Bake at 450 until toasty and fork tender!

7. Leaf kicking starts! October gets all the attention with the pretty displays but all through November the leaves are accumulating in drifts and piles and everyone is raking and leaf blowing huge heaps of crackling leaves. No time like the present to jump in!
 
8. Ticks, mosquitoes and other pests of the woods go away! I love being outside in crispy, worry-free November on a hike! Sets my mind right at ease.

9. Its stargazing season again! One of the things I love about summer night is their long light but it doesn't make for good star watching; for that you need early nights. I love that by the time we've come home from getting A from work the sky is dark and we can walk to the house with our heads tipped back enjoying the show.

10. The air gets cold enough to play dragon! I tell my boys that's what we're doing when we blow big clouds of misty breath in the cold. :)

The Fresh Apple

I forget every year just how good an apple tastes. A real apple. An apple that grew near you. An apple picked from an actual tree. An apple that drips juice on your chin and tastes like the rusty leaves, like the nippy wind, like the tart chill in the air.

Ru turning the press wheel.

Apple cider! At least in small quantity.

My boys wild apple picking with Big Grandpa (my dad) last fall.

I no longer buy oranges unless its the dead of winter and I think this year I'm done buying apples unless its fall. Yes, they are edible all year round but they become a bland, pale shadow of themselves, something that gets old so fast its hard to time it. I really love a good apple but every year when it is apple time I have to polish off my enthusiasm and convince myself to go apple picking because a whole year of completely pitiful, mediocre grocery store apples has stolen their thunder. I don't hate regular apples, they're edible I just don't actively like them either and they are so ubiquitous and so overdone that they completely steal the thunder of a real ripe tree fruit.

Wild Michigan apples come in a.....

....beautifully varied palette.

Our homeschool co-op plans field trips most fridays once the weather turns nippy. This week they planned a pint-sized, cider pressing instruction. Pretty darn cute! My little boys were big fans.  I think Ru would like a cider press for our backyard so that he could spend some time every day feeling really important, turning that big crank.

Fallen apples at one of our local orchards.

Red Delicious on the branch!

We don't really buy store-bought juice at our house but we do occasionally indulge in cider in the fall. (Especially if we can find it raw!) Cider feels more authentic to me than most juice. I fondly remember romping around as a little girl at chilly, annual cider pressings with our local congregation and also at least once as a deal split between two families sharing the sweet rewards of all the apple picking and the use of a borrowed press. I grew up in a place where there are wild apple trees on every corner. Getting fresh apples is as simple as harvesting them from an ancient roadside orchard or craggy wild tree down the nearest lane. Most of them simply go to waste although a few are gathered up for deer, bait piles for hunting season and never even tasted by a local human.

Big Grandma and Big Grandpa, my parents with Ru, after a wild apple ramble.

Here in Connecticut they are slightly harder to come by. I know where one wild tree is but mostly we pay money to be let into a cultivated orchard in counties north or east of us. I'm okay with that though, the fruit snaps when bitten and the flavors are nothing, nothing you can buy in May in the corner grocery store. 

Summer Leaves With A List

We are officially two days into fall and I think it's grand. Summer was lovely at our house this year but September is a very graceful month, slipping us slowly into a season of cool evenings and boots with a side of crackling leaves. I am thumbing through the pages of my cookbooks looking at roasting and broiling and braising and thinking vaguely about Thanksgiving dinner.

Before we leave it too far behind though...I think its respectful for us to give Summer her due and remember what she was to us this year. I'm following the pattern I set last year by making a list that details what epitomized the last few months at our house here in 2012.

This Was The Summer Of.....

• Beets. I grew my first this year. Been trying for years. Woot!
• Baby Pom. Although he wasn't born in summer this summer season has been very focused on him for us in many ways. We've seen him change from tiny, pink scrunched up person to a very alert, lovely, blue eyed soul with his own set of little ideas and preferences. We're so incredibly glad he came.
• Mosquitoes from hell. The mild winter and hot summer weather meant they proliferated in crazy numbers, even in our city storm drains. Hello West Nile Virus high for our state! Gah!
• Our first honey harvest. We had a really small one but it was ours none-the-less. 10 glowing pint jars of honey from our own backyard. Next year I plan to not have a baby right when the supers need to go on for honey loading. Maybe we'll have a real harvest next time. 
• Cousin visiting. My boys saw every single one of their cousins this summer and made lots of happy memories rolling in sand, toasting marshmallows and giggling. 
• My great sugar detox. I can honestly say that besides honey and maple syrup on occasion or the very, very rare tiny cheat I am sugar and white flour free. I feel amazing. I am in for life.
• The heat wave of 2012. We had really high temperatures this summer, breaking several records and stressing plants to the max. Thankfully in our part of the country we also had steady rain too which meant we missed the drought that hit the American Midwest full on. 
• Our first homegrown tree fruit. See this post for an account of how we finally picked the first fruit off a tree of our own planting.
• The guest room. We had my parents, A's parents, and even Miq and  Penny come to stay this summer! More company than we've ever had before over the summer! May there be more in the future! So fun to use our guest space.
• My first art show. I have one piece hanging right now in a local gallery. Just a small one..and only one. But such a coup! Am very motivated.
• The return of the barbeque! So wonderful that this spring A figured out what was wrong with our grill and fixed it himself so that this summer we could finally enjoy grilled goodies after a whole year or so of wishful thinking.
• The seared eggplant. I grew two kinds of eggplant this year and they were very happy so we were rolling in this vegetable we were only newly acquainted with so we broiled them, we fried them and we stir-fried them allllll the time. So good. We're in love.
• Guinea pigs. Even though they really came in the spring before the baby I am letting them be included in the list. They are a very fun addition to the house, happily nibbling bits of swiss chard stems from our hands now after a lot of petting, getting to know them and bringing them fresh grass and maple twigs to gnaw. 
• Illness. I hate to remember it but its so true. I think we were sick on and off for all of June. So rotten. So bizarrely timed. So not something I ever want to repeat.
• Lawn "camping." This is a family classic and I realize that, its not like we invented anything in this respect, it was just something we'd never tried that will certainly be repeated as a tradition. Ru's idea. He's a bright boy. 
• The lily beetle. We had a mysterious influx of these bright red little beetles that eat lilies of all kinds this spring. They were on almost every lily plant we have. Never saw them before in my life....but there they were....way too bright to miss.
• Birding. The boys have been learning birds busily, collecting and identifying feathers and we've been reading slowly through The Burgess Bird Book For Children which has been the engine and fuel for the fire. So much fun! :) Keep meaning to take them over to the local Audubon Society.
• The wild lawn. Having a baby + insane mosquito population in our yard has meant that I've spent less time than maybe ever in the history of our marriage in the yard and garden. All that really happened after June was an occasional mowing. Yipes! Its a jungle out there. Looking forward to the frost so I can get out there and hack it into shape.
• The great mushroom famine. I am pretty much always find a few caches of wild mushrooms over the spring and summer but this year between our very hot temperatures, the mosquitoes again (which stopped the huntress not necessarily the fungi) and having a newborn....we didn't find any mushrooms at all. Not one. Sounds really odd to say that.
• Computer games. They came. I tried to fight it but they're here, unstoppably and undoubtedly with a long career ahead of them in our house. Ru now has his own allotment for daily game time (its a matter of minutes, don't worry....nothing ridiculously out of control). I cringe, but what can you do? We still have no Gameboys or Segas or Xboxs.

I hope your summer was a good season and if it wasn't I hope Autumn comes into your life trailing a woodsmoke scented  peace and lots of new adventures that will imprint themselves on your memory. Maybe you should make a list of your own to remember this summer's now before it sifts out the door. Or one up me altogether and make one for Autumn at the end of this season. Its a concentrated kind of processing and appreciation to distill your memories and impressions into firm bullets on a list.

Poetry Friday: A Botany Poem

I have been soaking in Amy Merrick's stunning blog An Apple A Day whenever I get a spare minute. Between that, spring being present and spring cleaning addling my brain a bit my thoughts have become quite blossom-soaked. Why fight it? Spring wants to be center-stage...so let her.

Flowers on Dancing Woman (Photo credit: TheArches)

My poem today is all about this very favorite season of mine...and maybe explains a bit of the madness we all feel suddenly at this time of year. May she ever shake her blossomy mane on my street....

Sunlit leaves in spring with and without backlight (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Once A Sensualist Dame...

Spring is doing her passionate tarentella
All down our block and the next one too
Pursing her bold red tulips and fiercely
Kicking up chartruese, grassy spears.
She shakes her tinkling forsythia mane
And drops rings of daffodil at every door.
She lays herself a rosy, blossom rug on
The corner under the lush magnolia tree.
Where she blows a flirty kiss of pear petal
Confetti after every oblivious, passing car.
She winks a forget-me-not eye in each yard,
Reaches her long, leaf-tipped limbs skyward
And performs a saucy, hosta-fringed hip-roll
That always leaves my old house open-doored
Lolling dusty rugs from every window.

Wall painting from Stabiae: Flora with the cornucopia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You can find the other Poetry Friday participants contributions over at Book Talk, today's host blog. Feel free to chip in with your own additions too! Participation is open to all....just link up and join the throng.