Growing Your Hair

My hair had always been the same. I grows a few inches below my shoulder when I leave it to it's own devices, which is what I had done almost all of my adult life. I cut it myself, just trimming off the ends and otherwise leaving it on its own. When I was on the verge of turning 50 I briefly though about getting a grown up hair cut, but my husband's two sisters gasped in horror and I felt like I was breaking up the band, and literally said "I'll cut it when I need chemotherapy."

And lo and behold, a decade on, I needed chemotherapy--a lot of it and for a very long time, so I was bald for two years. When that ended, I just wasn't ready to let it go back into the wild. For one thing, my cancer had a terrible prognosis and I was pretty sure I would soon be making treatment choices that would not include keeping my hair. I am so grateful to have been wrong about that, but then there were the truly trivial things. My hair was a different color (black instead of brown) and less curly--I felt completely cheated--don't people usually get curlier hair? Well, not me. So it wasn't until I was nine years out and my dad was dying that I decided to let it go once again. I am not completely back to baseline, and I am certainly loads more gray, but it overall feels like a good choice.

Vermont: It Never Gets Old

Let's face it--Vermont is the best New England state--I feel somewhat chagrined to admist it, being of Maine roots and having recently driven from the bottom of the state to the top, avoiding the coast (which is both what Maine is known for and the attraction for the non-Mainiac to the state and not my thing, so take this with a grain of salt), Vermont has it beat. I was not a big fan until I met my future spouse and he took me there over four decades ago and I fell immediately and deeply in love with it. First there are the mountains, which are spectacular and everywhere. They interfere with it being much good for row crops, but the fields are ever green and so dairy cattle abound. They make for quaint scenery and also for excellent cheese. Artisanal cheese in Vermont has been a growth industry over the years I have been visiting. It started with excellent cheddar, which is always a winner with me, but now it is one of the best places to get a wide variety of high quality cheese that is locally made. Then there are the multitude of small towns that have good restaurants, a few breweries, a multitude of shops where people make things, and all in all, it is practically perfect. I hope to spend more extended time in state when I retire and have more time on my hands to fill with beauty.

Burying My Father

I have been lucky in parental support. My parents always made it known that they supported me, and they did so both financially and emotionally, for a long time. I wasn't an orphan when I signed up for Medicare, but I did lose my father that year. The fact that it was a long time coming didn't help. That surprised me, and I am still struggling a bit with it. So it has come to this--the time to bury him, whether I am ready or not, it is time to make it final. My father was not ready to die. The last conversation I had with him was when he agreed that it was time to enter hospice. Intellectually he agreed that he did not want to go back and forth to the hospital any more, but emotionally he was nowhere ready to die. He was, we all agreed, a terrible patient. He became moribound from his congestive heart failure, get rushed to the hospital to diurese, and then wake up and become ever so grouchy about why he was there. He made me promise that when he died that I would bury him next to my brother in a family plot he had bought when he was in high school in Northern Maine. That turned out to be a bit tricky, because the geography of the gravesite left only one spot next to my brother, and my mother was definitely pulling rank and wanted to be buried next to my father--thankfully, they both are opting for cremation and they can share a spot, allowing both of them to be next to my brother. On the other side my brother, who died as a child, is flanked by my grandmother, who died long before I could ever meet her, but I have her genetic mutation. It killed her, but not me, at least so far, but being in that place, with all of them, me and my mother alive, my brother and father dead, was emotionally complicated for me. I feel grateful to have had them, even for the short time my brother live, grateful to be alive, and grateful my family came with me to say goodbye. My father was disappointed that while his mind was clear, his body failed him--I am happy to say that we did not.

Barton Street, Presque Isle, Maine

When my spouse and I envisioned the trip to bury my dad, we did not have a crowd in mind, but our kids saw it differently. My parents had spent the eight years before he died living nearby and my folks had been a constant in my children's lives--they came annually if not more often, and this was the first death in our family since my FIL died over a decade earlier. So there was quite the crew and instead of staying in one of the hotels in town, I got three Airbnb's and one of them was on the street that my mother grew up on, just down the block from the church she got married in. The house here is the one that I knew, but it turns out that my grandparents built it when my mother was in high school and she only lived there a couple of years. They had the property long before that, but were unable to build during WWII--so what I thought of as the family homestead was not so much that, although my grandparents lived there until the mid-70's. The house she lived in growing up was just down the block, and one of the very fun things about the trip for all of us was my mother reminiscing on each and every drive we made between the three houses and to and from restaurants the whole trip--it is very likely her last trip here, and it was really great to see it once more through her eyes. My kids had the opportunity to fall in love with Maine as adults, and we all had a chance to see it as my parents did.

Eat In/Go Out

As we head into winter, which could also be called the season of respiratory illnesses, I have been getting vaccinated about once every week or two, and reflecting (once again) on the changes that the pandemic brought about for me. The first is that while I was an avid vaccinator before the pandemic, I am a militant one now. I now get the flu shot because I don't want to die of a respiratory illness, but for decades I got it because I work in health care and I didn't want to kill someone else. We seem to have lost that community focus, so hand onto it when you find it, make your own community, and while it is unnecessary when someone who chooses not to vaccinate themselves or their family dies, it is not a tragedy because they made that choice--the tragedy is that they kill others. The other, far less consequential change is that I am now firmly in the Eat In camp. I started out there, mostly because I like to cook, my spouse likes to cook, and we are not billionaires and would prefer to spend many of our discretionary dollars on something other than mediocre food out. During the pandemic I realized that if I cannot eat the food in a restaurant I would rather make something at home than get take out--it just doean't hold up. I also learned to deep fry. The quality of tempura at home is so much better than what I have had out that I don't order it out any more. It is so easy to make at home, and so much better. My fear of frying is gone, thanks to COVID, and it made me one step closer to rarely leaving my house.

The Calm Before The Storm

My spouse and I recently cooked for our son's wedding weekend, which consisted of a rehearsal dinner for 120 people and the wedding dinner for 250 people. We did a fair amount of planning ahead of time for the event, and we had the desserts for both events in the freezer long beforehand. We were roasting a pig for the big day and had some help lined up for that arduous task, but we hadn't quite nailed down what we were going to make other than that. So, what did we do? We took a quick 4-day vacation to clear our heads, calm down a bit, catch our breaths, and planned the menu. We went to my spouse's family house in central Vermont, a place that his grandparents bought before WWII and which he has been going to all his life, and I have been going to for over 40 years. When I think about it, it is the place that each of us has been going to longer than any other place period, and certainly as a shared experience, Vermont is it for us. We both feel a sense of peace there, and we have long established things we do as well as something new, but hands down, we have a reliably good time there. I have to admit that when we got to the airport on Thursday morning before the sun came up I had serious second thoughts. Is this a good idea? Abandon ship with very little actually done and take time for us? It turns out it was an excellent idea--my head stopped spinning with all that I had to do and say, all the meeting and greeting, all the emotions that such events are bound to stir up, and just focused on peace and place.

Longarm: Changing The Game

A year ago I took some classes at the American Quilt Society's meeting in Des Moines to see if I should get a long arm quilting machine. In the year before that my spouse and I plus two of our kids had all moved from queen sized to king sized beds, and I knew from preious experience that I could not quilt that size on my beloved Bernina 1130 machine. So it was a choice between sending them out to be quilted and quilting them myself with a new machine. I signed up for three separate classes and in between them I went up to the exhibit hall and tried out the various long arm quilting machines. They had similarities and differences, but I immediately discounted the ones that were way more expensive and the ones that were too industrial feeling for me. The later may be a mistake, as they are also ones that need less maintenance and are built to be used more than I will ever be able to use mine, but I was just too overwhelmed by them. I didn't feel that I could approach them, either physically or in my mind's eye, so I had to cross them off. I do not know anyone who has a long arm so I was going to be largely on my own if I took this plunge and I needed a machine I could wrap my head around. One year in, I have come a long way, and I have so much further to go! I have made mistakes often, but learned how to fix them, and I have made over 50 quilts, most of them small, but not all of them. I have started to think more about the quilting, not just about the piecing, and I have given away quilts to babies like I used to when I was younger. It was a very good decision and my only regret is that I didn't get to this point sooner.

Wellington, Capital of New Zealand

Sitting at the heart of New Zealand, the Wellington region has so much to offer. Nestled between green hills and a sparkling harbour at the south end of the North Island, the city is full of things just waiting to be discovered. We got off to a rocky start with our visit to Wellington--we had a wonderful time in the departure lounge in Christchurch waiting for the short and affordable flight to Wellington. We were pleasantly surprised that there is not security check, no restrictions on liquids to be carried on and a sense of stepping back in to a pre-9/11 world of air travel. We boarded our old school plane, and buckled in, only to be told 20 minutes later that the plane had an unfixable mechanical problem, and we would need a new plane. That was the end of our troubles though. We had what had originally seemed like a too late dinner resrevation that suddenly was just perfect. We landed about 6:40PM, hopped in a cab within minutes, and arrived at our apartment hotel at 6:57PM (desk closes at 7PM)--we dropped all our luggage and went back down the elevator to scoot down the block for our dinner reservation--arriving at 7:03PM, just a few minutes late and lo and behold our table wasn't even ready. Our luck held, and we had good food and nice walks around Wellington. You can skip Auckland but don't skip Wellington!

The Streets of Christchurch, New Zealand

Happy Canada Day! The three countries besides the United States the British colonized that were largely unpopulated when they arrived are all worth visiting, and are populated by very nice people, much nicer and friendlier than my own country (especially if you consider I am a native of one and a visitor in the others).

Christchurch is the largest city on the South Island, and unlike Queenstown, it is largely flat and not a mix of residential and commercial. We stayed in a late 19th century house that is now a bed and breakfast and right across the street from the art museum. The old houses in the neighborhood have not been engulfed by high rises or businesses.

There is a lot of public art on the streets, and I recommend walking everywhere.

South Island, New Zealand

I recently returned to the South Island, for the first time in almost 40 years. New Zealand has grown from a country of one million people to one with 5-6 million, so there has been an accompanying increase in building and expansion of cities. But while the population has quintupled, the thing that I remember most about the South Island is it's natural beauty.

Our cab driver in Queenstown said it best, "You can't drain the lakes and you can't shift the mountains." We spent a day driving from Queenstown to Christchurch, and while we did very little, we stopped often, and really enjoyed the views. I could spend a month here. The thing that I worried most about planning the trip is driving on the left, which has been varying degrees of difficult in the past, but it was okay.

This is just a smattering of what you can see without getting off the road. I do not remember these rock formations from my first trip, but in addition to the lakes there are many mountains (they were mostly encased in fog when I was there), some with glaciers.

Savannah Cotton Exchange

It is very hard for me to be in the American South and to enjoy the history around me because so much of it is tied directly to slavery. This building was built in 1887, so after the Civil War, and was embarked upon because Savannah was the leading exporter of cotton in the United States and second in the world. Prior to the Revolutionary War, cotton was imported from the West Indies through trade within the British Empire, which decreased after America gained independence and tried to achieve economic autonomy. The need to find industries to support Georgia’s economy after the war was the first catalyst pushing cotton towards becoming a major Georgia crop. Georgians found that long-staple cotton fibers could easily be separated from its seeds, but it only grew on the coast. Short-staple cotton grew inland but separating the seeds from the fibers was labor intensive, increasing the cost of production. The patent of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1794 allowed cotton plantations to spread further from the coast to grow short staple cotton. The lucrative cash crop also increased the heavy dependence on slave labor by cotton-producing states and directly tied those states to the slave economy. The cotton gin became popularized just before the Creek War, which resulted in a massive loss of Creek Indian lands in western Georgia and Alabama. The Creek’s loss of land allowed more people to venture west and become part of Georgia’s profitable cotton industry by managing their own cotton plantations (that were heavily dependent on enslaved labor) in the newly acquired lands. Soon settlers began turning their sights to northern Georgia, where the Cherokee Indians resided, setting the stage for Georgia’s, and the cotton industry’s, expansion into northern regions of Georgia. So cotton was emblematic of both financial success and subjugation.

Low Country Local Cuisine

Georgia is really lovely in April, even when it is storming. Not often too hot and humid (avoid the sun at midday, of course, but it is more managable than even a month later--like now), lots of beaches on the barrier islands (although they are washing away), and lots of birds everywhere. All of that is lovely, but the thing that I enjoyed most about my recent trip below the Mason Dixon line on the Atlantic Coast was things that came out of the water.

I loved the local shrimp, which I had every which way, and the grouper--a fish that is rarely on the menu in the landlocked place I live most of the time. My traveling companions really enjoyed the oysters as well, and the thing about these exceptional local ingredients is that where you eat becomes less important because you are eating local food prepared in the usual way.

The only exception to this was the grits--during the pandemic I made so many things that I used to only eat out, and shrimp and grits was one of them. In the aftermath of the public killing of George Floyd, I turned to Toni Tipton Martin's cookbook, Jubilee, and made foods that black Americans have made for centuries, and shrimp and grits is one dish that I make just perfect for me, and I did not ever have great grits when compared to mine. Otherwise, I was satisfied.

Cast Iron: Cookware or Weapon

We tried to carry this frying pan onto our flight when we last went to our short term rental. We are trying to make the kitchen almost as equipped as our home kitchen and a good cast iron frying pan is one such piece of making that happen. It did not make it, though, because TSA sees a frying pan as a weapon. It is not that I cannot see that a frying pan of this heft could harm someone. I definitely get that. What I don't understand is how these decisions are made. It is likely to be based more on convenience than safety alone. A laptop can definitely be a weapon--when there have been issues with passengers over the past 20 years, the weapon weilded most is laptops. So much more effective than hand to hand combat for the majority of us. It is just impractical to have everyone check their laptop, and a weight limit is also going to slow things down at security checkpoints. So we will need to bring it when we are checking luggage, but oh that we would treat guns in our communities with the same scrutiny we give to frying pans going on airplanes.

Tea Time

I bought this ceramic tea set at an estate sale for a price so reasonable that I wasn't concerned if the kids were to break it, and it turns out the magic of pouring imaginary tea is a constant across generations. As far back as the 1500s, the Dutch were making Delft earthenware (a soft, easily chipped ware). Then, in 1602, the Dutch East India Company was founded, bringing Chinese tea—and porcelain, to European shores. With tea being pretty much an instant hit, the first tea sets designed for children came out of Germany as early as 1687. Finally, a mathematician and alchemist team hit upon the formula for porcelain, and the Meissen factory opened near Dresden in 1710 (Malone 1976). Unsurprisingly, much of their ware imitated Chinese motifs. The one that I purchased came from Colonial Williamsburg and so has those rather than more traditional themes, but is just as popular in my home as in American homes 300 yearas ago.

Earth Beautiful

This is a view I have seen dozens of times--it is on the road between our house in the Tetons and town, and yet every single time I pass it, I am struck by it's beauty, it's simplicity, and it's link between the present and the past in the American West. Today is Earth Day, created in 1970 as a day for environmental education, stemming directing from the publicationin 1962 of Rachel Carson's SIlent Spring, an indictment on man's assault on the earth, using DDT as the index poison. Here is a paragraph from that thin volume: "Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this ever-widening wave of death that spreads out, like ripples when a pebble is dropped into a still pond? Who has placed in one pan of the scales the leaves that might have been eaten by the beetles and in the other the pitiful heaps of many-hued feathers, the lifeless remains of the birds that fell before the unselective bludgeon of insecticidal poisons? Who has decided—who has the right to decide— for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight?"

My Puppy Year

A little over a year ago I rather impuslively adopted a puppy. She had good genes. Her mother is an Australian Shepherd and her dad a lab. She favors her father in coloring and shape, but she is is a true mix of the two, with strong herding and retreiving instincts. She is my twelfth dog, but only my third puppy and very soon after bringing her home I realized two things: I had no recollection of any of the raising of the previous two, and I had sorely underestimated the burden it was on my child care providers. I am now silently begging their forgiveness. The year has been filled with lots of joy, many antics, and overall the entertainment has been top notch. The thing I didn't realize would happen that I love and have started doing again is being outside with her. In the winter it wasn't good for me, and it wasn't good for her either. It was so hard to have very short fur and a love of fresh air. I got her a coat to help some, but she would come in, throw herself on the heating vent, thaw out, and start the cycle all over again. Now we are back to spending time together soaking in the songs, sounds, and smells of spring.

Celebrate April

Passover and Easter travel together on the calendar--the last supper was, after all, a seder, it makes a lot of sense--and this year Ramadan, which travels around the calendar, falls in line with these other two major celebrations. The fact is that this overlap is not being celebrated, but rather highlighting the differences. I am not one to be tribal when it comes to religion--I mix with all sorts and enjoy the differences. I see it as a point of learning at best, and at least not something to drive a wedge between people, and I feel like many people share this view. That is unexciting when it comes to filling up a 24 hour news cycle, so instead what I hear and read are stories of violence related to religion. So I am on a bit of a media slow down--I did check on the elections in Wisconisin this week, but otherwise giving the news a hard pass and enjoying the celebration.

The Spoils of Travel

I live in a small Midwestern town, which has more resources available than many it's size, but one of the very best things about traveling away from this town is bringing back the things that we enjoyed about our destination that can be transported back with us. There are so many things that cannot--an abundance of seafood being the thing we love to indulge in when we travel. When I retire I hope to live in some cities for longer than is possible as a full time employee, and the cities that I dream about doing this in are almost universally on the water--not quite all, but over 90% of them. This is the haul from a recent trip to the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy, where we opted out of much in the way of clothes (our apartment had a washing machine and a very good drying rack) and instead brought home the three things the region is known for--proscuitto, parmesano-reggiano, and balsamic vinegar (not pictured, as we had it shipped). It has been such a treat to have these on hand and available. Now we have to try to perfect our tortelloni game, and eat a bit more pasta than before we went and the trip will live on!

The Books Ahead

While I never really get completely through the list of books to read that I develop and maintain from year to year, I do spend time in January every year thinking about the year ahead as it pertains to me and reading. Last year was the best year of reading that I have had recently, maybe ever. The pandemic left me home and with more time on my hands, and as it became clear that by 2022 it was the have's and the have not's--those who were vaccinated could take more chances in public places and those who were not could not safely do so. Even though my whole family fell into the fully vaccinated camp, we still spent more time at home or with each other than out and about. So it is true that I had more time to read than ever before, and while I read almost a book a day throughout last year, there were still many things on my Ro Read list that I did not get to, and hoping the 2023 sees me reading just as much.

Gondoliers and Canals, Venice

The buildings that make Venice famous are on par with, but do not necessarily exceed other historical buildings and places that I have been in Italy, but the canals and the gondoliers that populate them are definitely something wonderful to behold. There are under 300 working gondolas with less than 500 gondoliers today, and I never tired of watching them, even chancing a ticker by sitting on a bridge in the sun to watch them ply their craft.

Here's what we know: The word “gondola” was first used by the Doge Vitale Falier back in 1093 C.E., but it’s origin stem from a boat, “scaula,” in use since early 900. Compared to today’s gondola, the original version was much broader, much shorter, and symmetrical. Bow and stern laid flatter than those of today, and the front and rear ornaments of the ancient gondola were but simple metal blades. In late 15-hundred, gondola makers started changing the shape of the gondola. They made longer and thinner hull, whose extremities came out of the water. These changes were necessary due to the growth of the city and the need to navigate through a multitude of narrow canals. The new gondolas were easier and faster to maneuver as a smaller portion of the boat was submerged, diminishing friction. During 1800, the gondola’s length reached 11 m, the same as today, and its stern and bow were lifted even farther. It was only at the beginning of the XX century, however, that the gondola reached its final shape, with an even higher stern and bow, and a strong asymmetry, which makes it easier for the gondolier to control the boat. And so much fun to watch!