Thanksgiving

The sun finally came out today. It has been rainy and cold. But we are grateful! For our health, our homes, friendship, family, jobs, animals, the natural world. For smells, stars, gardens, the moon tonight and ancestors. For the eggs we collected this weekend from two separate family flocks here in Lincoln. For the walk through Lindentree Farm a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) now shut up tight for winter, hay on fields, tractors stored away.

The Thanksgiving feast is a meal comprised of ingredients that are from the local harvest. Cranberries are from bogs on Cape Cod, a free range turkey from Vermont, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, green beans, all from New England fields. This is how the early settlers ate. Ideally we should eat food that is grown locally, not foods shipped from around the globe. Food transportation is a contributer to global warming. Planes and trucks emit large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. It is also good to know where the food you eat comes from and the conditions under which it was grown and harvested. I recently watched the film Food, Inc so this on my mind.

One hundred years ago, an orange was a covetted Christmas gift (think of the books Little House in the Big Woods and Little Women) Now I understand why! An orange had to travel far to get there in the days when they only ate what they had canned or meat they had smoked. The burst of an orange in your mouth after months of stored food must have been amazing. We are lucky to have such variety available to us year round. But although the produce may look good, the taste is often a disappointment. I have decided not to buy tomatoes this winter. The taste is nothing like that of a warm, sweet August tomato picked off the vine. I'll settle for canned.

People are hungry. Food pantries are running out of food. I have never had to worry about whether I would have enough food to eat. For that I am grateful. I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving!

In the Boston Globe

cohousing
"A model for the future, with an eye to the past"

We don't hear much from the fourth "Moccasin Hillbilly" here on this site. He must be busy doing other things, like designing and building a cohousing project in New Hampshire. The architectural correspondent for the Boston Globe, Robert Campbell, wrote about the project in today's paper. I have attached a link to the article for those of you who may not get the Globe. I took the above photo last winter when the project was in construction, before landscaping.

Sugar Nymphs

Writing at the
Sugar Nymphs Bistro
Penasco, New Mexico

I climb into the back seat of Sarah’s car, buckle myself in between Edda and Eliza and we take off. After a rainy drive winding through the mountains we arrive at a low adobe building with a blinking sign out front. “Sugar Nymphs Bistro” draws us in. This is what I think of when I think of being a writer in a cafe. Soft guitar music plays as we enter. The sound of a child giggling at the next table is so quiet it does not disturb, just creates a sound track of comfort.

We are welcomed in by the blue winged angel on the counter, arms outstretched. A wooden rooster sits on top of the espresso machine and photographs by a local artist adorn the walls. Cakes on pedestals sit on a red counter next to a pumpkin pie and a tray of chocolate chip cookies the size of CDs. Dessert and drink choices are written in pink and green chalk on two blackboards on the wall. Green and pink steam floats above a chalk coffee cup.

I am surrounded by writers intent on their craft. Heads bowed, hands moving across the pages of their notebooks. The waitress delivers hot chocolate topped with thick whipped cream. Edda looks up from the page and with a spoon, skims off the white, coolness and slides it into her mouth. I look down at my triple layered carrot cake with the cream cheese frosting and decide to eat the whole thing. No one gets fat at the heaven cafe. Nathanael sips his hot chocolate and is deep in thought with far away eyes.

I am floating on a cafe cloud suspended in the air. Does this place really exist? Will I come searching another time to find a pile of tires and a stray dog?
Tomorrow I will leave this colony of writers and drive down the mountain and fly home to sea level. To the land of ordinary coffee shops selling pastries wrapped in cellophane. There will be no bistro on a mountain filled with writers I have come to know without having to say a word.

The bistro will be gone but the writing will continue. We are together in heaven’s cafe writing for eternity and we didn’t have to die to get here. Just breathe deeply, pick up a fast moving pen and write like your life depends on it. Because it does.



dedicated to Natalie Goldberg who drew us together from all directions and to my fellow writing students. thank you.

Fun on US 64

I don't think we are in Massachusetts anymore. We were on the second highest bridge in the US highway system. It spans a gash in the earth that is 650 deep down to the Rio Grande. Oh, the power of water. Anyone for a swim?

Fame

I am ten years old. My brother is in boarding school in Massachusetts so I can enter his room whenever I want to and go through his stuff. The top drawer of his desk smells of lead pencils, erasers and ink stained wood. A protractor, a jack knife, and a couple of marbles rattle as I push the drawer shut. Nothing interesting there. A wooden box with a hinged top holds his record player. I lift the lid, turn it on and place one of his precious 45’s on the turntable. I lower the needle and hear scratchy rock and roll. This isn’t fun when he isn’t around to tell me not to touch his records. I turn the dial to OFF and close the lid.

Finally I end up where I always do in John’s room; sitting in the brown velvet worry chair in the corner next to the bookshelf. Behind me are windows looking out to the garden below. I don’t know why it is called the worry chair. Little sisters don’t listen to the details of stories that parents tell at cocktail parties. From my spot in the chair, I reach over and run my finger along the row of matching book spines. Which volume will it be today? I stop at the last one; XYZ all in one book. I lean over to grab the last volume of the World Book Encyclopedia and pull it into my lap. “What if I read every blue and red volume? Would I know everything?”, I wondered. I open randomly. Eli Whitney invented something called the cotton gin. Black and white photographs accompany the article. One shows black men with bags over their shoulders picking cotton. Another shows a machine with gears.

I keep flipping. George Washington. I learned about him in school. Our first president. He couldn’t tell a lie. He admitted to chopping down a cherry tree. What's so bad about chopping down a tree, I wondered. That’s nothing compared to the time Gay Parker and I stole clip-on flower earrings from the 5 and 10 cent store on Springfield Avenue to use as barrettes for our dolls. Will I never be president because I lied to my mother when she found the garish accessories and asked me about them? I said they belonged to Mrs Parker, who was a Quaker. She must have known.

What does it take to be in the World Book Encyclopedia? I wondered if I would ever do something impressive enough. I read about women but they were mostly nurses, like Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale. Eleanor Roosevelt was in there, but she was married to a president. I didn’t expect to be married to a president and anyway, I wanted to be famous in my own right.

Maybe we all wonder how we will be remembered and even if we will be remembered after we are gone. Being in print is not the only way. Encyclopedias are gathering dust on shelves or have hit the land fills long ago. We are all famous to the people that matter. To the people we know. It is like making peace, it happens so often we can’t even keep track. It’s all a matter of showing up.

write

Why I Write

I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue.

I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change. I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends. I write as a daily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure. I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams. I write to the questions that shatter my sleep.

I write to remember. I write to forget. I write as an act of faith. I write as an act of slowness. I write to record what I love in the face of loss.
I write as a bow to wilderness.

I write because I believe I can create a path in the darkness. I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write for the love of ideas. I write knowing words always fall short. I write as though I am whispering into the ear of someone I love.


-Terry Tempest Williams

Three chairs

"I had three chairs in my house;
one for solitude,
two for friendship,
three for society."

"In solitude, we grow like corn in the night.

Good friends elevate one another, they see
who the other can be as well as who they are.

Don't let unjust acts go unnoticed."

HD Thoreau
Walden

Aiming High

lapidary |ˈlapəˌderē|
adjective
(of language) engraved on or suitable for engraving on stone and therefore elegant and concise : a lapidary statement.

I certainly try.
Thanks, Robin.