K’s here this weekend and this was our cooking project–I’ve long wanted to try baking pureed camellia petals into something. They hide themselves very well in this quick bread/cake, with an almost completely neutral fresh smell and taste. Next, I want to try baking camellia blossoms into a strawberry-rhubarb pie, without pureeing them at all. My inner cooking fiend is showing up strong lately, partly because I recently finished Ultra-Processed People by Chris Van Tulleken, which I’ll recommend far and wide.
Crepes with brie and sautéed fiddlehead ferns: utterly delicious cooking project with S. a couple of weeks ago!
March into April 2023: A visit to Arizona, S studying for the MCAT, the Seattle Opera, keeping cozy with Tasha.
May into summer: house remodeling projects, a combo of DIYing what we can and employing talented craftsmen where we can’t. First order of business: taking down the protective shed around the old heating oil tank, getting it decommissioned, and having a heat pump installed.
Main bathroom saga begins.
July into August: Barbie movie, gardening and seed saving, visiting with family
Had to document this rhubarb leaf as a representative of its kind before it got chucked into the compost bin.
S and family made an astoundingly good Brazilian peasant dinner for us: feijoada com arroz e pao de quejo.
August into September: St Andrews again, one of my favorite places on earth.
Rural highway in the Kingdom of Fife (we took the back roads to St As). A was a good sport about doing a cold-water swim with me in the North Sea. The water was as warm as it ever gets, 59 degrees F (interestingly, just one degree warmer than the Puget Sound cold plunges I’d been doing all summer).
October: Weekend getaway to Harrison Hot Springs, BC
November: lots of reading along with teaching. Some of the best things I read this year include: Lessons From the Edge: A Memoir by Marie Yovanovitch (2022), which contains clear, compelling writing about diplomacy and the State Department, as well as the devastating way her career was cut short. Her closeness to her mother is remarkable, as is her mix of personality traits; she characterizes herself as crying relatively easily and being introverted, and at the same time it’s clear to the reader that she has addressed sensitive, fraught situations with tremendous backbone and grace throughout her life. Also, Western Lane by Chetna Marroo (2023) is a little gem: a Jain 11-year-old navigates the loss of her mother and her father’s grief as she hones her squash-playing abilities in Scotland. Gorgeous, quiet prose. Phrases from Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience (2023) are still ringing through my mind. And I’m in the middle of my favorite book of the year: Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang. From the front flap: the book “grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire.” Set in Oxford in the 1830s, it’s delicious and absorbing and thought-provoking.
In the last month of the year: a December x-country ski trip to the Methow Valley.
This has to be one of the best ways to re-see the relatively bleak February gardenscape—as a potential treasure trove of raw materials brimming with interesting texture. A friend and colleague showed me some of the gorgeous gel prints she’s recently done and lent me her supplies. After a whole-family painting party on Sunday, today S and I went on a walk to the waterfront specifically to find more grasses and plants with interesting seedheads.
S’s post-baccalaureate studies involve a biology lab in our basement. If you’re down there to hang laundry to dry, etc, she’ll give you a running commentary on what she’s doing–torturing eggs, using IKI solution, learnin’ stuff…
The garden kept producing this year clear into late November!
C made the most amazing special marshmallows for Christmas: gingerbread, peppermint, raspberry, orange blossom.
The encaustic I’ve been working on for so long is finished, with the help of all three of my kiddos–and then B and A made a hemlock frame for it. 🙂
This trip’s purpose was to settle A in at St Andrews, and we also spent a bit of time exploring Dundee. The V&A Dundee museum of design is gorgeous–we were so excited to visit Charles Rennie Macintosh’s Oak Room, a tea house first built in Glasgow which has been reassembled in the heart of the museum.
We stayed long enough to observe the first pier walk of the year! Our darling boy, one of some 8,000 undergraduates matriculating that week at St Andrews.
Oh man. I’m so proud of this kid.And a few days later, here we are in Windsor (not originally in the itinerary, but delays and changes of plans are de rigueur for the unflappable traveler nowadays). A, pulling his carry-on through Heathrow in the stop-and-start security line: “Come, beloathed.” (We didn’t realize before leaving, but it’s a little too short in the strap for his height.)
Since our flight was late coming into Heathrow, we were automatically assigned the next available flight, 9 hours later. So we checked our carry-on luggage into a locker at the airport and got a taxi to Windsor. 41 pounds flat rate for the 4 of us. We walked through the town center up to Windsor Great Park, which is a lovely expanse of grass and sycamores, chestnuts, oaks, birds, nursery school children running about, and several dogs cavorting off leash–the local flora and fauna are charming. St Andrews at long last! S and L made an Arrival Dinner for us: pasta, sautéed courgette with peri peri, asparagus, feta, grilled halloumi, white beans, cashews= amazing. Prelude organ music at S’s graduation ceremony.
The ceremony itself was riveting, and one quite moving moment came with extended applause for a PhD recipient from Ukraine who wrote her dissertation on the processes of displacement and the disruption of human-plant relations as a result of imperialism, especially Russian aggression against Ukraine.The great expanse of West Sands BeachA’s new home starting in September–we’ll be back again soon!Inverness and Scottish strawberries in June: two things that are better than anticipated.The ceiling of St Giles Cathedral, EdinburghAndy Goldsworthy’s Cone at the Royal Botanic Garden, EdinburghA and S atop Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh
Overall, these two weeks in June were two of the richest, most joyful, most heart-bursting-with-parent-pride weeks I’ve lived through, full of catching up with old friends and meeting new ones, hiking, traveling by rail (nipped in just before the strike), seeing, walking, listening, learning.
One of our resident wild bunny family sunning himself this morning.
Elsewhere in the garden:
The gorgeous green and white solitary tulip is nearly open. I wonder who planted it, and how long ago? Right around it, the snowdrops are getting ready to open.
The camellia is in full spring splendor, as are the primroses.Setting lots of blossoms: blueberry, lilac, strawberries both Alpine and everbearing, the large Japanese maple, peony.
A’s 18th birthday! A birthday party, music composition software, attending the (in-person!) symphony, and almost all the college applications in. He’s such a joy.
Inordinately proud of my bundt ring o’ stuffing and pecan-pumpkin pie. Dear B made most everything else; K made amazing mashed potatoes and C wowed us all with her lemon-blackberry fruit tart; best gf shortbread crust EVER.
The front table has turned into a bit of a shrine to S in St. Andrews–we’re missing her this year already!
Lookee: I made hooded towels for the nieces and nephews!
Excellent crop of little golden yellow bok choy seeds coming along:
Foxglove:
Simply glowing: the small Japanese maple
So much low-growing holly cleared away to make space for other good things:
Into the envelopes: saving seeds for gifts and next year’s plantings. These are white rose campion, which does best when planted in the fall for a spring germination.
A. helped harvest and make mulled jam from blackberries!
The kale is quite happy this year:
Lavender ready to be made into simple syrup:
Apple mint
Nascent roses:
The oregano flowers haven’t attracted the same number of pollinators as in previous years and it makes me wonder what’s happening in our neighborhood ecosystem.
Perry pears:
The bamboo grove made quite a lovely backdrop for A’s senior photos!
The last of the raspberries:
The next flush of everbearing strawberries is coming along:
The indigo rose tomatoes are slow this year.
Useful things from holly-wood: hair sticks in progress
Very cute friends: the tiny bunnies and the big gray squirrels frolic on the lawn every evening around 5. The bunnies look like Nuttall’s Cottontails and the squirrels are almost certainly Eastern grays.
The wisteria’s little last hurrah:
A few pictures of an extra-cute Tasha for S, who turns 21 today in Scotland. So much love!
Yellow lady’s mantle:
This zucchini is up to something here–cross-pollination magic?
The Night Watchman was announced last month as winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Set in North Dakota and Minneapolis in 1953-54, during the Termination Era, it addresses the part Mormons played in efforts to eradicate Indigenous cultures. The novel traces the line of influence from Joseph Smith, to Utah senator Arthur Watkins, to young missionaries trying to proselytize on the reservation. Also addresses violence against Native women, particularly when they are subsumed into cities. These parts of the book are juxtaposed with the richness of traditions that have been keep alive, families that assiduously care for each other, and the nuances of identity as it develops. So, so good.
I read Klara and the Sun with an eye for whether it would be suitable for freshman English students. I made my way through this novel during the same period that I was listening to Braiding Sweetgrass, and the two kept intersecting as I considered gift economies, assuming good intent, personification of the natural world.
There was an aching emptiness at the end that made me cry. Klara is, in some ways, the most moral creature I’ve ever seen written. Everything she is is in service to others; her life’s purpose is curiosity, noticing details of others’ emotional landscapes and assuming good intent on the part of others. But does it make her happy? Does it create a life of fullness? At the end, in her Slow Fade, she reassures the Manager that she was well treated and that her life was a good one. But I didn’t feel she was well-treated.
Ethical relationships are characterized by some degree of reciprocity, of mutual care-taking. There was very little of that in Klara’s life.
The slow fade. Is that the most any of us can look forward to? It feels graceful and yet not enough. Is that all our life is?
The book is set in a future world in which there is an over-emphasis on cognitive intelligence and not enough emphasis on emotional intelligence–not so different from our own world. I absolutely think it would be good for 9th graders. The parallels to Frankenstein are quite interesting. In Ishiguro’s world, we ourselves have edited our genes and made monsters of ourselves by risking the health and lives of children, and Klara is the artificial creature who is the tabula rasa, curious, noticing, keen observer of others, always assuming good intent on the part of others.
There are errors built into her, though; she assumes that because she is solar-powered, others will benefit massively from the sun as well. Or maybe the book is part magical realism, with the sunshine actually helping to heal Josie. I don’t like that as much as a natural explanation, which is that Klara is making a primary error.
Maybe am I resisting magical realism. I don’t like Klara bargaining with the sun or bargaining at all. But is that part of the gift economy? Or is that counter to a gift economy?
I’d like to know more about the features of a gift economy.
Braiding Sweetgrass has been on my to-read list for a long time, and it’s the ultimate gardening listen. So much of this book resonated deeply, from approaches to teaching and practicing gratitude, to honoring indigenous wisdom and re-making traditions that draw from old and contemporary ways of being that center gift-giving and reciprocity.
Ok, Eileen was a strangely compelling listen. Summer literary read (shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize).
The Comfort Crisis is part science reporting, part personal narrative. Some of my favorite bits:
–Solitude’s healthy properties have been shown to improve productivity, creativity, empathy, and happiness, and decrease self-consciousness. Matthew Bowker, PhD, professor of psychology at Medaille College says, “If you develop that capacity to be alone, then instead of feeling lonely, you could see solitude as an opportunity to have a meaningful and enjoyable time to get to know yourself a little better. To essentially build a relationship with yourself. I know this sounds cheesy, but it’s critical. I think a goal we should all have is to try to transform feelings of loneliness into feelings of rich solitude.”
–The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, the gold standard for gauging creativity, is a threefold better predictor of children’s future accomplishments compared to IQ scores. And one of the main drivers of creativity is mind-wandering, doing nothing overtly productive with our minds.
–“In the early 1980s, as Japan was becoming more urban and tech focused, the country’s forest agency created a nature-based wellness program. They even coined a marketing term, shinrin-yoku, which translates to ‘forest bathing.’ The program essentially promoted sitting or walking in the woods and ‘taking in’ nature. The Japanese government told its citizens to improve their health by forest bathing. They even created parks across the country to do so. Japanese scientists then started to probe whether the tax-funded program had any positive impact. They’ve since published a flood of studies on shinrin-yoku–and pushed biophilia from hypothesis to hard science.”
U.S. scientists studying the same thing have found that even a 20-minute stroll through a city park can cause profound changes in the neurological structure of our brains. The state of ‘soft fascination’ in lightly focusing outwardly on the nature around oneself lowers cortisol and triggers a cascade of other health-promoting benefits.
–Rucking may be the ultimate life-long exercise, as carrying weight in a backpack while moving at a sustainable pace is strength training and cardio in one. “It takes an approachable exercise like walking and allows a person to increase the strain to their heart incrementally.”
Forest Bathing is a beautiful book just to page through; it’s filled with photographs of various forests and the text is large-print, blocked in thought-sized paragraphs. Reading it is akin to taking a walk through a forest in a state of soft fascination.
The Menopause Manifesto is so good. Gunter discusses the ramifications of the patriarchy having colonized women’s medicine, the grandmother hypothesis, the pitfalls of using compounding pharmacies for hormone supplements. Credible and useful information throughout.
The Alcohol Experiment is a title I read for the clinic’s library; I really like this approach that seems to draw a good deal from CBT techniques and the idea of replacement rather than willpower.
Bill Bryson’s The Body is informative for the lay person, worth having in a clinic library.
The Emperor of All Maladies has been on my to-read list for a decade, and it’s just fascinating. The “slow crawl of cancer” is one of the things that’s on my mind. Also, the complexity of the importance of catching pre-cancerous lesions on one hand and the incidence of false positives and indolent cancers on the other.
Island Ashley 