Oh, why not

It was a week a bit low on the social meter, and hours upon hours of design work for M. So, despite our weariness when the bell rang on Friday, we jumped in the car...and our weekend kind of exploded. Only a few events had the camera along.

Drive up and join friends and cousins for dinner and singing, home later than planned? Oh why not.
Why not spend the next day in old stomping grounds, hours south of here, celebrating graduation with family.

Why not drive home that same night so we can, the next morn, attend worship in our homes with small group and then all troop in to the all-church potluck.
Oh, what the heck, why not strap two canoes on the car and hit the lake with friends who invited last minute?

Sure, why not book it home in time to go kayaking with a new local friend?

And why not celebrate the holiday with family and delicious homemade feast on a hill in the country?

All told, we logged over 11 hrs in road travel, Friday to Monday. But in the end, why not? We burn this fuel out of a desire for relationships, and trying to make the best of the here and now. (Don't be fooled, this chipper perspective is not always part of it.)

Perhaps one could paint our life in splats and splotches on a broad-stroke cucumber-green background. This might represent the lurches and halts and us learning to keep an underlying even-keel. The painting of course is also impacted by where the canvas is mounted and how the two of us hold the brushes.

Ten for Ten

We marked ten months together this week. So here are 10 photos of ordinary life around here.

17 May: Ten months of marriage. We're in a cloud on top of the blue ridge parkway.
We went up with M's aunt and cousins to see if we could get up through the heavy weather system
and look out over the valley.  Obviously didn't get quite high enough. 

You never know what will be arriving next at our house these days, as the inventor is at work...

What, pray tell, is that? 

Okay, so they sent slightly more foam than was needed, to the tune of 90lbs.

What's not to love?

I have taken this break between semesters to "unpack".
Moving out of cardboard boxes and reading old journals,  letters, and photos has been a symbolic and emotional passage.
Here is my creativity supplies in their new home. Sister M, fear not, my "Do Box" is still in there!

One evening, I sorted and played through old sheet music from years ago.
Ripped the skin off my thumb with an ol' glissando.
(anyone remember that "Joshua Fit the Battle.."?). It was really fun.

The wild strawberries flushed ripe all of a sudden on Saturday.
They've got runners all through the orchard and seem to survive the mowing.

I planted cucumbers and purple beans at the base of this bamboo shade trellis that I made,
at the unprotected end of the house.  While jabbing the poles into the ground,
a little splash of water made mud through which the tip could deepen the hole.
This was a trick M saw in Bangladesh as a kid. 

Sweet pea update.

Forager II

Foraging tools:

1 Basket, draped on arm

1 snippers, to exterminate poison ivy

1 pocket book:

1 belly full of food I don't normally eat, ready for a light and fibrous supper

1 orchard

1 field

1 woods

Mix Together:

Ingredients: sour grass, dandelion leaves and flower, redbuds, violets, wood cress leaf and flower, plantain leaves, and wild asparagus. Optional adds: olive oil, balsamic, salt, sunflower seeds, some little dried berry perhaps?

Serve at evening's fall:

 

This turned out to actually be a lovely salad. A sweet dried berry might have helped. I wanted to add the buttercups swaying in the grasses, but the book says they're considered to be slightly poisonous.

Also blooming now is Mustard. It's yellow flowers look much like wood cress, but they're milder and look more like plants in the col or brassica family. I harvested some  this morning along the roadside and fields. 

The Weeds book was a gift from Mom and Dad, I think for Childrens' Day, when I was maybe eight (judging by the hand-writing). I still love it! 

road-side finds

I walked about 2 miles for my groceries this morning: roadside vegetables.

A forager friend of ours introduced me to the profile of wild asparagus growing along road-sides.  Especially in the fall it's easy to spot, since feathery yellow stalks and red berries flag attention. In the summer of course you see its wispy bunches of green.

To my delight, a tall stand of it, seemingly out of nowhere stopped me in my tracks the other morning and I came home squeezing a handful of green, crisp, dripping-sweet chompo bar (a family joke).

Our road is positively loaded! This morning I discovered another section of the road nearest us with at least 10 more plants. These seemed to be younger plugs with more spindly shoots. You can see the variety I found. I was astounded at how sweet they are- as much or more than sweet corn.

 I'm already wondering if I could transplant some plugs? (Any advice here?) Some of them are obviously well established, putting up finger-thick stalks.

Speaking of stalking, it's such fun to walk along and train the eye for the elusive vegetable. They blend in with the current color of thick-bladed grasses and are often just the same height. I took M hunting with me once and he said "Aren't you going to get that one?", a tall succulent stalk that I could not see right in front of my eyes!

The asparagus is helping to tiding us over while we await more greens and veggies from the garden. I also harvested some wild plant from the brassica family and some land cress or mustard, I'm not sure which. The wild garlic harvest is also big. This has been a real delight.

Fuel

I drive over breathtaking Afton mountain every week to a grand institution of learning, whose founder turned 250 yesterday. It's my day to go to the city, use the buses or walk, be small and yet part of vitality, conversations, and notice faces from other continents. It's my day to explore what I dream of and soak in the minds and lives of others and ponder...which is one of my favorite activities.

I arrive in time for business and leave the fresh morning streets for finger-grunge-work on a laptop pad, indoors, floor three. I've been hired by a team of professors to assist in the work of a funded grant that facilitates the higher education goals of nurses in distant areas. I feel like the mouse who had the luck of chewing a hole through the right wall, conspicuously getting the insider's view, and gobbling scraps of expensive fair. These professors eat food that I like: public health leadership, rural health, community health.

By afternoon, I close the computer and join the ranks of graduate students piling in for an intro-course on research. We're much like all students, plus work/life experience and families. Nurses are a scrappy lot- quick to fight for what they think is right, generally eager to learn, and quick to criticize even their own. This research class is all women.

Back at the satelite parking by bus or foot, rush-hour finally squirts onto the interstate, rising over the mountain. I re-enter home-world with a brainful buzzing, fresh light on my own life, grateful for my husband, stirring some novel idea in realms where I may or may never go.

These school-days are stimulation and connection, and I'm growing on the fuel.


P.S. For an example of my latest inspiration: In historical research, we learned that FDR invested money in photographers during the Great Depression and that is why we have the records today of that period. During this health system crisis in this country, if we could deploy photographers, using the networks already within the healthcare system, we would literally look at what we're doing from a third-person yet intimate perspective. I think this could be a powerful tool for evaluating what's happening, and envisioning new ways. Of course the answer I got to this was: "You should really do your doctorate on this." But that's always the answer in academia. I'm more interested in putting solutions into motion.

Snaps from the home ship

Run up the sails!

View from the deck. Sugar snaps in the floating tire life-boats.

The captains' study. The birds distract me from school work.

Evening sun, the last night of daylight savings. 

Doors flung wide!

Voyage motto: Make [lemonade] while the sun shines!

Garden again

Hello spring!

Our new garden plot. I want to be able to stand in the grass and reach all the plants.

Previous residents laid these tire-beds and, being one to make use of what's around...

and since it's one spot that the soil isn't clay, I planted sugar snap peas and hope to help them climb the side of our house. Later on: squash and pole beans.

Cress, from last fall, came sproinging up before I could stammer the word "thaw". Feisty little greens!

And the mighty broccoli is crowning! They huddled all winter under a lame but leaf-insulated cold frame. I'm right proud of them.

Yesterday digging, I found I was smiling and wanting to jig. I wanted to show off my garden, as if there was something to see. Colors, blooms, and flourishing plants grew in my mind from the muddy clay, newly overturned. Even a worm wiggled to say he was present and on the team. This morning I had the urge to go out and talk to the peas and see if they were growing. Nothing yet, ...above the surface that is.