The Simple Poppy

The Letter Box

 

 

A quick sketch of me, done by my Grandfather when I was five

 

 

    Let's imagine what "the collected letters of so and so" would look like if email, texting, and social media had existed for hundreds of years.

 

The  Emails and Text Messages of Vincent Van Gogh

 met awesum prosty. she feeds me.

theo. yo. crap... ear still jacked up - c u soon

 

Select Emails from Jane Austen

met this really cute guy. lol. think he lives over the way. gonna tryn c if i can get new frock. am writing new story, i think it sucks. try to call on you l8r!

b in bath in 2 wks. you cum ova?

 

Communications of the Borghia Family

dam pregnancy mite screw up anulment plan

cesare. i hav sum poisin in a ring - will giv it a try?

 

    Yes, this would be laughable. These would not be the somber, the mundane, the poignant, and the sometimes piercing insights we now get from collected letters of various people. There would be no striving to connect emotionally with the recipient of the letter, no one would have bothered to finesse their script, to draft and re-draft a beautifully written and coherent missive. It was almost a craft, and now it's dying out, literally. People are losing the ability to write anything beyond absolute basics, and it's often done with a complete lack of grammar, and a lot of bizarre and unintelligible (to me) abbreviations. It lowers communication skills to that of a poorly educated small child. It makes me very droopy and irritated. Here's a real excerpt from the book Dear Theo, Van Gogh's letters to his brother to illustrate my point:

I got a deeper insight into my own heart and also into that of others. By and by I began to love my fellow-men again, myself included, and more and more my heart and soul revived, that for a time through all kinds of great misery had been withered, blighted, and stricken. And the more I turned to reality and mingled with people, the more I felt new life reviving in me, until at last I met her.

 

 

    It also makes me feel sad that many people, particularly younger ones, have not ever experienced a real letter. Pages full of exquisite food eaten, a provocative book read, how the breeze smells coming off the ocean right at dusk. These kinds of letters.

 

  

   My box of letters and cards is no bigger than a shoebox, with room to spare. I know this type of possession is exactly the kind many minimalists rid themselves of, but mine is small enough, and precious enough, to keep.  It's of no value to anyone but me, but I derive great pleasure from it. I appreciate looking at artwork that someone chose while they were thinking of me, wondering if I would love it, or knowing it was perfect. I am a word child (any Iris Murdoch fans here?) and I savour every morsel of prose in those letters. Of the wishes to me on my sixteenth birthday, the anxious but proud tone of my grandparents on the eve of my trip to Europe alone, my last birthday before I traveled nearly 800 miles away, to where I knew almost no one, to live and learn, and eventually love, marry, and become a mother. My mother's constant acknowledgement of my love for the outdoors, evidenced by pictures of fantastic tree houses, gardens, weeds, or the sky. To me, this box isn't a  box filled with old papers. It's a box filled with the voices of people who loved me even as I was a wee clot of blood inside my mother. It's the calls of my little sisters on hideous Lisa Frank stationary. The chatter across oceans as friends in far away places. This box means a lot to me.

 

A card, also sketched by my Grandfather while in Japan

    When my Grandpapa, an artist, sends me a card with a sketch of his on the front, I find it amazing and delightful to receive such a thing. It sets me to thinking, as I look at the inky details of some horticultural garden in Japan, dated just a few months before my birth. I wonder how he felt about becoming a grandfather. Did he ever imagine that he'd be sending his granddaughter a copy of this little drawing for her birthday thirty years later?

 

 

The last birthday card I received from my family before I flew the coop

    When I was writing this post I found a card given to me by a then-new friend, dated more than a decade ago. That friend is now one of my closest friends, our firstborn daughters are exactly one week apart, we have traveled (and continue to) much of this marriage, motherhood, morality journey together. The card instantly brought back the hours upon hours we sat in the leaded glass windowseat of my rented room and talked until we were hoarse, building this friendship.

 

  I'm not a perfect writer (I do edit - but still make mistakes!) and I do like email, I even occasionally tweet and text, but they don't replace the humble letter or card. It doesn't provide the same type of connection unless you choose to use it that way, and most people don't. It's often just a means of conveying the necessary, which often, to my mind, leaves out the beautiful, the harsh, the fun, the sorrow. I "get" the convenience of e-cards, emails, and texting, I just hate to see it crowd out what I consider to be a more sophisticated and fuller form of communication.

 

How do you feel about the death of letter writing?

 

 

A Minimal Birthday

 

 

     Last week I had an eight year old and now she's nine. Our birthday celebrations have always been simple, and this year was no exception. We're a family of shy introverts; planning the kind of birthday party that is common today in America is beyond my reach and desire. So perhaps I fail in this part of motherhood. I don't think I care. My girls are still  floating and dancing and giggling and shrieking, so I hope this is not creating a dark scar on their hearts to share with therapists in later years.  It's our tradition, an understated, family oriented gathering, focused on the food that someone spent the day creating - kneading, pouring, grating, and whipping their happiness at this person's existence into deliciousness. My mother's family had these kinds of birthdays, and when we came along, her five girls, this is what she gave us.

    Consequently, we've raised our children to have, well, low material expectations on their birthday. They are both blessed to have been born in beautiful months, months that invite  humans out to play, walk, forage, run, and bike. We've shown them that they have our attention on their birthdays. They have our time and skillset for whatever they are creating that day. What they consider to be gastronomically delightful will be served with a flourish. We'll all spend time together. We're very casual about gifts; this year I'm planning on taking my brand new nine year old out to pick up some art supplies later in the week. I would say that our focus is less of a celebration of the day one person in our family was born and more of a celebration about the role and space that person occupies in our family and our appreciation of that.

    This is not a minimalist rant against birthday parties. I'm just sharing an aspect of our lives that has always been minimal and is probably even more so lately. I have been to some fantastic little parties; they were small, focused on playing rather than things, and not heavily structured. It's so easy to get carried away today - where only a 2K weekend in Manhattan with a gaggle of teens will do. Where some girl whose parents fall on the lower end of the income spectrum feels stigmatized because she doesn't have enough money to chip in on a piece of expensive jewelry for someone in her cliques birthday. That's a shame. A birthday, to my mind, has very little to do with belongings and places and everything to do with gratitude and love. If a length of streamers and some friends helps celebrate that, good. If debt, anxiety, and the feeling of being overwhelmed swamp you - not good.

 

For us, it was a lovely birthday weekend.

 

 

 

 

 

    A sunflower bloomed after nearly a week of constant checking on its tightly closed status. To me, auspicious. She's a sunny, mild child. Sweet mango juice runs through her veins. Her face is round and open; I hope this is never lost.  I also hope her days are filled with the splash of joy an open sunflower brings.

       Balloons, a novelty for the toddler; she called them her ears (WTH?).

    Requests for Key Lime Pie. It's a fresh favourite and pairs well with our weather now.

    Homemade pasta; a true sign of love as our kitchen is still dismantled and pasta paraphernalia was strewn across a messy table.

    Nine candles. I'm happy. I'm wistful. Her feet long ago shed their dinner roll chubbiness and now her mind is maturing - it's always too fast, yes?

    Blow by blow accounts of what my uterus was doing at this time or that time 9 years ago.

    Repeated trips with just Dad/The Simple Man to the hardware store. They come home with bits and bobs, copper tubing, wire, dreams of projects. Oh, and kitchen tiles. Lots of tiles.

 

  How  do you celebrate birthdays?

 

 

Kitchen Update and Others (Prettier) Things

 

Tiles down. Gray grout to be applied tomorrow. White paint finished, mostly. That light fixture will go, we'll be getting a ceiling fan, which should be nice in this weather. Still a long way to go!

 

    Last week was so busy I couldn't blog. The Simple Man laid the floor, a tile very deliciously named Rialto Terra. I have spent most of my life never seeing my name outside "Terra Cotta" (gardening pots and tiles) and "Terra Firma" (old maps), and now my name is impossibly hip; it's on anything and everything eco-conscious and chips and God only knows what else. It's very disconcerting. Anyhow, then I primed and painted the walls ULTRA. BRIGHT. WHITE. Yes, you read that correctly. I was hesitant about going this white, but my eldest was adamant. "Mom, this one is CLEANER. BRIGHTER. AIRIER. YOU WANT THIS ONE!" I cannot argue in Lowes with a 9 year old while my two year old is trying to eat grout powder and hide in a bidet. We purchased a no VOC paint and primer, both by Olympic. The primer didn't smell until you put your nose right in it, and even then it was mild. The paint was definitely stronger, but even then, if you walked out of the room, you couldn't detect any odor at all. I was really pleased because I wanted no VOC paint, but I didn't want to pay sixty dollars a gallon. While I painted I think the whiteness overwhelmed The Simple Man because he kept mouthing "insane asylum" at me and shaking his head. I refrained from a lecture on sensitivity because, well, he lives with me so he kind of knows what he's talking about. And he's building me a new kitchen. And I was happy.

    I think I'm really going to love the white.

 

View a gallery of subway tiles in kitchen here

    I also want white subway tiles for the back-splash. This presented a conundrum because our base cabinets won't be fitted into the wall, so do we tile the whole lower wall or just the foot or so of back-splash? I poked about on the internets, but all I could find was that it was better and typical to tile all the way to the floor behind the stove since it can be moved. So we decided to tile all the way down to the floor across the whole wall because it seems like it would look ridiculous to see a 12 inch span of tiles half way up the walls. Of course, after we made that decision, I saw several kitchens (mostly in Europe - all free standing) that had back-splash tile to the floor behind the cabinets. We were also a little worried about the subway tile because it's common in bathrooms, but I found a lot of great pictures of kitchens that use it, so I think it should be alright. We'll be using very white grout also; I saw some with darker grout, but dang if that doesn't look dirty to me. We haven't bought it yet, so if you can think of any enormous reason why this wouldn't be a good idea, please feel free to chime in.

 

    The cabinets. Gah. I went to Ikea to drag my exhausted self around their Swedish exuberance and I just can't get into the kitchen cabinets at Ikea. There were some I liked, but to be honest, I imagined my kitchen to be free of textures and materials not found (fairly) directly in nature. We'll forget the liquid nails, cement board, and five gallon buckets of joint compound and focus on what my family will actually be running their fingertips along in the end. I wanted wood, rough linen, earthen tiles, glass - I did not picture laminate. It's a laminate lament. I might have to cave and get them; it's basically what we had planned when we started, but we'll see. We still have a bit more to do before thinking about it becomes crucial, and even if the kitchen is ready for the cabinets, I have an island I can move in there for counter space and my makeshift sink - so that gives me some time to think about it.

 

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    Other happenings around our house? Our neem tree has exquisitely tiny white flowers blooming on it, and the scent is heady and exotic. It's similar to lily of the valley but with an intense, but light, green note. Our entire front porch is olfactory heaven.

 

 

 

 

The Simple Man has a miniature pomegranate tree. It was poorly looking all winter, being inside and everything. The moment the weather warmed he put it outside and now it has these amazing buds/flowers all over it. I'm not sure we'll actually get edible pomegranates, but it's look alone is worth it.

 

 

 

Made my own mayonnaise. This was more out of a desire to placate a hungry horde and cover up my inadequacies in grocery shopping than some foodie wish. BUT . . . this is the third time, and it's so easy, and inexpensive, and yummy that I've just stopped buying it.  ETA: The recipe I used is from the fabulous and local (to me) Food In Jars blog. Many delicious canning recipes on there. I differed from the recipe in that I whisked my eggs with about a Tbsp. horseradish mustard. Nom. Nom.

 

 

   

Each year my neighbor, whose entrance adjoins mine, has this hydrangea bush that explodes in the most perfect, purplish blues. I've sadly killed about six of my own, hoping to recreate her magic, but now I just enjoy hers.

 

 

 

The delight of finding wild raspberries in the wooded park near our home. It was particularly awe inspiring to the toddler to find food in the "foyest" - she didn't want to leave.

 

 

 

    

Knowing that this small, pale, lavender coloured flower is going to be an eggplant sometime soon.

 

 

 

 

Our mint is flowering. Looks wonderful. It's amazing how incredibly lovely fruit, vegetables, and herbs can be in the various stages of their life.

 

   And that is that. We hope to be finished by August, or at least mostly finished. We're both heartily sick of the kitchen, though we know it will be worth it, and I am about tolose my mind with all the mess it's made! Want to get back to normal!

 

The Halfway Point of Kitchen Hell

 

 

 

    Of course that title is a joke because I don't actually have a kitchen. My kitchen right now is a functionless room containing a hunky, sweaty man with a disgruntled expression on his face making a lot of noise with saws, drills, and heavy sighs. We are, however, at the point where there is no more demolition. The dry wall is all up, it needs a little more joint compound and sanding, and there is only a  bit more of the subfloor to screw down before we start painting and laying the tile.

    A few things we've decided on:

 

• White. White walls, white tile back-splash, white cabinets. I will add blooms of colour later in the form of some linen dishcloths and curtains I intend to make once everything is installed and finished, but the main colour is white.

• Wood countertops. It will warm the whiteness of the kitchen and I really like the look.

• Terra Cotta coloured floor tiles. They are not actual terra cotta, but a little bit darker and of different material - more durable for the kitchen, and in an old world style. I had wanted wood floors, but when I mentioned this to The Simple Man he looked at me like I was speaking in tongues and then choked out: "In the kitchen?!?!" Well OKAY THEN. We mutually vetoed beige; we're both sick to death of beige and my mom and good friend (two people with better taste and eye for colour than myself) suggested terra cotta tiles.

• No upper cabinets if we can possibly help it. The kitchen is claustrophobic. With everything arranged differently, I think we will be able to swing having no upper cabinets. I toyed with the idea of open shelves instead, but I'm not up for the maintenance at this time. We might install one shelf.
  

• Freestanding cabinets. It's a bit of misnomer, since obviously the sink hooks up to the wall and the counter will connect everything, but they will, essentially, be easy to move like regular furniture. We've decided to do this because the very urban area we live in will always provide us with more than enough vermin to drive me to frothing insanity, and we've discovered that a favorite place for them is in the built in cabinets. There are channels we can't get into and of course there is a lot of empty  space - so we are eliminating that.

•  Skinny, vertical storage. We decided, for more storage in lieu of upper cabinets, that we would go ahead and build very simple, tall, narrow book case shelves and attach a door to it. These will also be white, and should do the job.

 

    Some inspiration I found helpful:

 

 This is basically what we'll do, with the white, wood, and terra cotta.

 

This kitchen almost made me rethink my white tile back splash. In fact, I really can't look at it for too long without becoming all confused again because I love that shade of green.

 

This kitchen is a little bit too country for what we're doing (no beadboard!) but I still like it.

 

A very small kitchen;  I love the colours, and again, the lack of upper cabinets makes it feel more airy.

 

I still come back to white. It just makes sense.

 

    The look we're aiming for is small, a little rustic, and simple. It goes with the rest of our house and it's something we can both agree on, unlike any other style. I found it difficult to find a lot of small kitchen inspiration online because "small" in designer speak is usually quite a bit larger than my kitchen and an enormous farmhouse kitchen with islands, a butler's pantry and two ovens is not really helpful to me. I did end up finding lots of partial shots of smallish kitchens that helped me understand more of what I wanted. I loved the colours in some of them, but I've committed to white because I like it, but also because trying to match colours sends me into the fetal position. I feel paralysed and I also don't like being tied to a certain colour scheme due to permanent fixtures, like cabinets.

 

My uber nifty makeshift sink. It's very high and it makes doing dishes much, MUCH easier on the back. I even debated making our kitchen sink this high, but decided it would be too weird. I don't know how you tall people wash your dishes without aching all the time! Also, please ignore the mess, we have the kitchen crammed into the dining room.

     I have to really hand it to The Simple Man. He has done everything in his power to make this easier on the whole family. In the beginning, we were thinking it was possible that we were going to have several weeks without running water downstairs or a range. Well, so far I've spent exactly a half a day without water and a few days without the range. He spent extra time rigging up an ugly but perfectly functional sink in our dining room, made out of our old sink, leftover decking, two hoses, and hose nozzle head. While it's not very easy to wash dishes without a counter, it's a thousand times better than lugging them up to the bathroom, which I was having mental issues with anyway. He also put our range out on a small porch we have next to the kitchen and hook it up from there so I can still cook and bake. Plus, he works almost ten hours a day in a physically taxing, dirty and dangerous job, then comes home and works some more on the kitchen.

    In a few more weeks we should be all finished, and it can't come soon enough!

 

 Photo credits:

http://bit.ly/mlA3L5

http://bit.ly/jyPhGK 

http://bit.ly/hES2tR

http://bit.ly/liM4aV

 

Dude, Where's My Natural Foods Store!?

 

 

  Whole Foods just isn't cutting it for me. I'm warning you now, this is a rant/lament.

     The Whole Foods five minutes from my house is located in one of the wealthiest suburbs in the US. As if Whole Food wasn't intimidating enough with its slick and expensive hipness, I have to go and live near one where almost every customer and I are separated by an annual income of several hundred thousand dollars or more. I have more in common with Cajun gator hunters than I do with these people. A lot more in common.

    We drive up in my car, one that was considered a luxury vehicle fifteen years ago but now boasts ripped leather seats and hopeless outdatedness. My children are in day old braids, wisps making a halo around their faces, clothed in an eclectic and slightly filthy mix of handmade, hand me downs, and deep discount; they're like the bright little gypsy girls you see in the Paris Metro, delightfully disheveled, bobbing up and down, hands open like butterflies. No Lilly Pulitzer or Hannah Anderson here, and I'm wearing the same Old Navy jeans I've worn every single day for 6 months.

    I am self-conscious about going there. It is crawling with elephantine Lexus and Range Rover SUVs. Moms are lean and toned due to the personal trainers who work with them while their children attend 30k a year private schools. They come shopping in their insanely expensive Yoga pants, planning their next holiday abroad on their phone during checkout. Every park in the area is packed with the nannies who care for their children and at 4PM there is a veritable exodus of household workers plodding tiredly down the street to catch a bus that will carry them back to West Philly and beyond.

    It's usually tense inside Whole Foods, because a lot of privileged people have privileged places to go and they want you out of their way. Immediately. And they can see, hear and smell that you are not one of them. The difference is palpable, reinforced by ageless class struggles, resentments, and disdain. It's so clear that the cashiers will ask if I really want to buy something if it rings up at an extravagant price, like seventeen dollars for bing cherries, but do not ask those who can obviously afford it. I certainly do not want to spend that much and they know it; the cashiers usually hired are from my neck of the woods.

    Mine is a beautiful life. There's dirt, hard work, grease under the fingernails, laughter, spats, gypsum dust freaking everywhere, toddler talk, sweat, and happiness. I don't wish to live in anyone else's life, nor am I ashamed of who or what we are. I don't want to fit in, but I don't necessarily want to be noticed. I'm a naturally shy person and now that I'm in my thirties and over dyeing my hair the colour of flowers and rocking a septum barbell, I prefer to live under the radar as much as is possible.

     It all makes me very much miss the co-op I grew up in. I miss the customers, who were  an explosion of such variety that everyone "fit in."The woman who actually bothered to figure out what percentage of her taxes were going to support what, and then didn't pay for those she disapproved of or considered unethical. She miscalculated one year and the IRS sent her a "HA HA! You paid us!" letter - she fumed at the register about it. The radical feminist who couldn't understand why we kept taking down her anti-porn flyer that depicted a naked woman bound to a chair (we thought it wasn't, um, kid friendly enough), the enormously tall transgendered male to female who effected this change over years and was gracious when I apologetically got my pronouns mixed up and couldn't remember her female name. And the usual assortment of tiny girls with giant dreads and hairy armpits, Rastafarians, bearded bluegrass musicians, and jocular, butt pinching pagans. It was like going to a circus where Tom Waits was the ringmaster.

    I miss the comfortableness of it. Jokes such as putting the nightly floor sweepings in a package labeled Floor Granola: Dust, oats, mud, dessicated spider...Or the closing time log that began as a way to communicate what we had done during the day but ended up being a raunchy, swear fest of a throw down between made up characters who wrote in impossible dialect. The 5 gallon bucket of homemade bulk tofu people raved over until we weren't allowed to sell it anymore due to "health regulations." The itinerant assistant manager, moonlighting as a puppeteer, teasing me at seven, and deciding that at fifteen I was old enough to be told, in a softly Georgian accent, that boys can't always be believed. All with a fatherly expression, while wearing a yellow baseball hat with silver wings, REM wailing in the background.

  The people who worked and shopped at the co-op mindfully chose a lifestyle that set  them apart from others.  Most embraced living outside the mainstream and their choices were often not the easiest ones. Like feeling that the best way to cut down on your waste, carbon and household, was to bike miles to your co-op, laden down with glass containers, so that you could fulfill your volunteer work for the week and then go bulk shopping. Or to not partake in the status quo of anything, including: gender roles, religion, sexuality, employment, lifestyle, food, consumerism, etc. They were non-conformity warriors. Our co-op and what it represented was what these people believed in; it was never just a place to buy food.  It was a community for those of us who either couldn't or didn't want a place inside the norm. It was interesting and alive and my education. Co-op life was like a souk, bursting with hawkers, vibrant goods, and lively clientele. Whole Foods is like going to the mall.

 

    I miss you, Good Neighbor Co-op. If there's a co-op heaven, I know you're there. Sniff.

 

 

In the Spring of My Discontent Part II

 

Sand Dune Garden

  My goal as a child was to soak up every livable outdoor minute of the day that I could, pausing only to chew and swallow what my mother handed me, and ignore her warning calls in the gathering dark. I lived outside. I did not imagine, even as a teen and adult, working 40 + hours a week that I would not spend my life outside when I could.

    My vision of the future has obviously changed over the years, evolving from the bizarre; me as a sharpish Katherine Hepburn type, living in an isolated cottage but needing a butler (?!), to the simple - my plan of just backpacking continually until one day I collapsed, died, and decomposed on a moor covered in heather.

    I ever only planned the outdoor spaces that would be mine. Interiors were fleeting thoughts . . . windows, reading nooks. As a young teen I had a folder, plump with scissored pictures from discarded gardening catalogues; over and over again I cut out tiny shots of teak benches beneath drooping wisteria. I thought I would live in an actual greenhouse, wending my way through a tangle of plants to the kitchen.

     As I grew older, my future environment became more ordinary. I would have a potato field. I would wear boots and overalls for the rest of my life. I'd grow asparagus and brush my face against their feathery tops. My plan, up until the moment The Simple Man squeezed my heart with his calloused, tobacco scented hand, was to graduate, buy a truck and Go. Go drive around the country: Biloxi, Texas, Savannah, Oklahoma, the Badlands. Then I would return to my first real land love, Scotland.  What I would do once I hiked out of Glasgow (don't let anyone tell you Edinburgh is better, if you want real, and you like grit, Glasgow is it) no longer matters because it's been replaced with my life now. I have only a handful's worth of mourning in me over missing out on my wee adventures, because it's all been so, so good.

Outdoor Daybed

 

    Good except for where we live. One third of my life has been spent in the urban northeast, an area famous for unrelentingly smashing humanity together as close  as possible. I think I'm suffering from a deficiency in greeness. I am advised to take advantage of the park. This isn't what I wanted. I want to live outside. I want to cook outside. I want to grow my own food outside. I want to camp in my garden. I want to fold my laundry on a broad tree stump. I want to send my children  outside. I don't want to stroll through the park a few times a week and then watch my kids scatter around the playground. That's visiting outside, not living outside. I want my children to live the seasons, not merely watch them from a window and feel their differing temperatures on their skin.

    My indoors would be small, but filled with light. There would be enough land to yield the bulk of our yearly food. A tiny orchard, a grape arbour, and a pond. Chickens or quail. Energy efficient - possibly off grid - that's not a deciding factor for me. I want to breath early morning air from my kitchen garden and hear the subtle but unmistakable sounds of nature beginning the day, unadulterated by humans honking, polluting, talking on cellphones, spilling Starbucks, and the ever present thumping of the bass that occurs at all hours of the day in my neighborhood. I want quiet.

    When I look back, it's easy to see that a life of voluntary simplicity, minimalism, and environmentalism have always been in my nature. These are the directions I drifted until I became conscious of this and made it intentional. For me, they are all interrelated, though I understand if it's not that way for everyone. I see my best life as one that is low impact on both myself and the earth, where the superfluous has been excised, leading me to appreciate the rest. The good news is that I can live my best life anywhere, as most people can, the sad news is that I'm living it where I don't want to be living it. And that's what my struggles over contentment are about; where we live. What, you thought I was tired of The Simple Man?

 

 

Sunset dinner

 

    As I read over this post, I grin at the irony because here I am, endeavoring to live a life of less, reducing my desires one at a time, and all I've written is "I want." So be it; I've made my peace with what I really want. It's something I can't entirely control, passed down in my mother's description of her Dziadek's potager, the warm raspberries my Grandpapa grew, the joyously intense look on my mother's face as she plans her own garden for this year and the future; it was born in me.

   I consciously strive every day to want less, accept what I have, and be grateful for the enormity of what my life has been so far. But this is the one thing I cannot get over, give up, or forget about. I suspect most of us who are mindful of our wants have that one item, or dream, we refuse to give up. My dream of the future never once included a lifetime spent inside, which is where I am most of the time by default, since we don't have a real outdoors space to retreat to. The day might come when I have to realize that it's not going to happen and readjust my view of the rest of my life, especially as this isn't a monetary issue, but rather a spousal issue (he was born here; it's complicated!). Ahem. Until then, I'm still saving those inspirational outdoor pictures . . . digitally!

    Do you have a dream that won't shrivel up and die no matter how much easier it would be if it did?

 

Navigating Contentment

 

  An issue I've dealt with for a good part of my adult life is contentment. Before you think I'm about to blast some Zen platitudes at you - I'm not. No one could be further from Zen than myself; I'm a worrier, a do-er, a planner, a can't sit still, frenetically paced sort of person. Though I see and understand the value of the sit and just "be" philosophy, I admit that my personality is particularly ill suited for it. Being content with something I feel could be ameliorated, however little, goes against my nature.

     I have had, and continue to have trouble differentiating between contentment and what I think of as being either indifference or fatalism. If I think something needs to happen, I do my best to figure out how to bring that thing about. I've never understood inaction; it makes me uncomfortable.  Now that I'm older, I realize that those feelings are due in large part to my inability to relax, breath deeply, and stop twitching, thinking, doing. I've always equated inaction with apathy, and many times it is, but it can also be a quiet assessment of the situation. It can be the ability to know that it won't work now, but might work later, so there is wisdom in contentment.

    At this  point, I'm trying to see contentment as a way of making the best of any current situation. I think you can actively be trying to change even while you are working on contentment. It's clearly a state of mind - contentment in what is now and what will come, while realizing that to get anywhere you must move forward.

    It's hard to manufacture contentment, though. In many cases, it begins falsely, with you telling yourself that the now is just fine, until maybe one day it is. One of my biggest fears is that somewhere along the road of contentment, the ruts begin to get too large to climb out of. I'm terrified that in allowing myself to be content with the now, I will be "settling" for less than I know is possible in my life. I dread looking back on any part of my life with resentment towards myself (or others) over not trying hard enough. Yet at the same time, I don't want to be less than present and grateful for what my life is now.  

    So there you have it, my fractious feelings about contentment. I'm sure other people must feel the same way, especially as there is so much talk of contentment juxtaposed with an attitude that settling for less than anything you desire is cheating yourself. I don't necessarily subscribe wholly to either idea; I'm still at the mull and ponder stage. In fact, I might stay there my entire life.

    What do you think about contentment? Do you believe that it's a must for a peaceful mind or do you think that rejecting it is the catalyst for change? Or perhaps you think I am completely mistaken on my definition of contentment?

 

Ripping a Kitchen and Discovering that Minimalism Doesn't Actually Mean No Organizing

    We had planned to gut our kitchen and completely redo it last year. Then we needed to replace both cars and unfortunately the car The Simple Man replaced his with ended up needing a new transmission. So we put it off in favor of other projects and recently decided that spring would be good because of the weather.

This is after I've taken the floor up and one cabinet down. It's all gone now!

    We decided we would take on the kitchen by ourselves since it's so small, 12 by 8, with 3 doors and 3 windows, so hardly any space to actually "do" much of anything! The kitchen was in terrible condition when we moved in, but I could not convince The Simple Man of that. Consequently I have cooked every day in a dilapidated kitchen, from its upside down top cabinets (oh yes), to absolutely nothing being flush, closing properly, foul pinky coloured tiles, and the permanently stained counter top being supported by the dishwasher. I could go on, but I won't. I have pictures. I plan to whip them out the moment I scent the merest whiff of recalcitrance on the part of The Simple Man the next time I want to fix something, as proof that I am not a complete harpy, and I did wait ten entire years before he decided the kitchen needed redoing.

 

One wall where the pink tile was - you can see a remnant of it at the bottom. Concrete was behind it.

    But I have nothing but good things to say about him because he works like a horse all day at his job, and then comes home and works on the kitchen. I think of myself as being helpful, I'm definitely not as knowledgeable about home repair as he is, but I'm never afraid to get my hands dirty. The first day I was so excited because I ripped up maybe half the floor tiles with a tire iron and then took down one of the two wall cabinets. The Simple Man was not impressed. I felt very indignant. A few days later I realized why my enthusiasm for my job was not properly appreciated by him. In one day, after work, he removed the rest of the floor, most of the wall tiles down to the lathe because someone thought 3 inches of concrete would be a good way to put them on, removed the dishwasher, cut out the counter, removed the base cabinets and cleaned up a dozen times in between. And he wasn't pleased with himself at all, damnit. Not only was it clear to me that I am a weakling, it must have been pretty obvious to him, too.

 

No more sink :(

    One thing I was hugely grateful for was that I had already spent a lot of time trying to make my kitchen as minimal as possible. It helped with the transfer of items from the kitchen to the dining room, and also aided in lessening the incredible messiness of smashing the two rooms together. It hit me though, that my kitchen, despite it's minimalism, was still sorely in need of organization. I was never able to do a great job keeping everything tidy or grouped because I was lacking in good storage. I've had exactly two overhead cabinets, one trio of small drawers, and a revolving corner cabinet. I could never store anything under the kitchen sink because the bottom had rotted out of the cabinet long ago. Many in the minimalism crowd have cried:  "Don't organise! Minimize!" and for the most part, I heartily agree. But at some point, you have to organise. I thought about this fact a lot in the beginning of my minimalist journey, in part because I have always liked organizing. I wasn't sure what our house would look like once I was finished (mostly) with minimizing so the question of organizing anything was in the future. I was a bit of a fantasist, half hoping our collective belongings would be so skeletal as to not need organising, but I don't think I really believed that would happen. And so it hasn't. I'm not too disappointed; I knew it was unrealistic.

    I have definitely seen some people's possessions (usually the "counters," as I call them) who have so little that there is no need for organizing. I have yet to see a family that can do without it. Families with small children will always have enough to organize because of their need for some toys, art supplies, extra sheets and towels (yeah, babies and youngsters spew often, from every orifice) books, and other sundry items. I feel that now, especially after my kitchen is done, I'll be entering a new phase where organizing will take priority over minimizing simply because most of what we have left, we'll be keeping. I might not be totally happy about it, but as it's not my things, and I adamantly believe in not tampering with other people's belongings, it will have to do for now. Of course, I expect that at some point, the strain of keeping loads of ephemera, childhood knick-knacks, unwearable clothes, and other items my beloved family thinks the removal of heralds the End Times, will prove too much and they'll slowly start to unclutter themselves. I intend to be a total martinet about the organization, so I doubt it will take long!

    Now, you can either tell me about how you organize, or what your kitchen would look like if you had unlimited time and funds. Or both. Either way, it will distract me from having to look at my kitchen and give me some good ideas!

 

 

 

 

 

Getting CLEAN. Mostly.

 

 

  I decided to do a detox this spring. It had been hovering about in my mind for some time under the "possibly interesting" category, but as long as the weather was nippy, it wasn't going to happen. Then spring finally arrived and all the sluggishness of my winter habits hit me full force. I still have a metabolism like a rocket (though I expect any day to wake up having put on 40 pounds over night) and in the winter, buried in SAD and cozy blankets, I tend to just eat bread until I can barely move. Bread and I have a soaring and lifelong  romance, saturated in evocative memories involving both my mother (a dedicated bread baker) and tomatoes and avocados. This winter, with all the snow and the realization that damnit, SAD only seems to get worse as you age, was particularly heavy on bread and cheese.  Spring came and I felt that I was still hibernating. Or dead. I had so little energy that I was beginning to wonder if I was suffering from adrenal exhaustion again, which leaves you feeling like the only human at a vampire buffet. Utterly drained. But then I remembered my detox aspirations.

    I feel like now I should say that the detox I attempted to do specifically said not to detox if you thought you were having adrenal exhaustion. I blithely ignored this because I was fairly sure that it was my demon lover, Bread, who was causing the problems. I purchased CLEAN, By Dr. Alejandro Junger.  In hindsight, I don't think I needed the book. The research I should have done before downloading it would have shown me that the CLEAN website not only provides a free list of the foods you can and can't eat during the detox, but recipes as well. If you are familiar with the way detoxing works, you probably don't need the book unless you want it.  I also don't agree with everything he says, for instance, he claims that a huge part of what is making Americans so unhealthy is meat. Too much meat, and most of it not organic or pastured. Later in the book he says that he feels you need a PHD in nutrition to be a healthy vegetarian. Seriously? Because what it sounds like to me is that humans need a PHD in healthy eating, period. Omnivore, vegetarian, or vegan. Anyway, I soldiered on.

   The detox requires you to stop eating processed grains (white rice etc.), dairy, caffeine, sugar, gluten, soy, corn, and a small selection of other fruits and vegetables that Junger feels inhibits the detox process. He does allow some meat, mainly fish, chicken and lamb, all of it organic and/or free range/pastured. I believe I've mentioned before that I'm not a vegetarian per se, in that I occasionally pop open a tin of wild salmon, usually during some kind of wild hormonal craving, but this is a rare occurrence of a few times a year, and I don't eat any meat beyond that. I can't do caffeine, I eat an extremely low sugar diet, and the only soy we eat is organic tofu. The big issues for me were dairy and gluten. The detox can be done for a week, two weeks, or the ultimate cleanse, three weeks. I intended to do the whole three weeks. I made it ten days.

    Benefits

• My skin cleared up dramatically around the 5th day.There wasn't anything very wrong with it, but my complexion was muddy and rough, and I just looked tired. I was also breaking out frequently. Now my face is bright and clear; it looks and feels so smooth it's like I've been airbrushed.

 

• My acid reflux is gone. It appeared mysteriously a few months ago and got so out of hand I stopped eating dinner for awhile in an effort to be able to sleep without it bothering me. Occasionally it would calm down, but it's been gone since during the detox and has stayed gone.

• My energy level is greatly improved. It is not only high, but very sustained. Unusual for me because I'm definitely a sprinter type, intense bursts of energy followed by fatigue.

 

• Allergies. I will admit that I was very curious to see if Junger's claims in this area held true. Essentially, the theory is that your body can't handle allergens because it's bogged down with toxins. I've had moderate hay fever since I was 6 or 7. I also don't take any medication for it because . . . I just don't. It was nothing for me to sneeze fifty to a hundred times during the course of an afternoon outside. That hasn't happened yet and the pollen here is exploding. I don't know what to think.  I've experienced a very mild runny nose and a few sneezes here and there, but absolutely nothing like before. Part of me is still skeptical, but I've since read that many other people have had the same experience.

 

Cons

• If you're vegan or vegetarian, you will be hungry. And not the pleasant, omnivore I-just-had- -a-juicy-chicken-for-lunch-and-am-now-mildly-hungry-I-shall-eat-a-few-almonds-to- satisfy-myself. No, more of the I'll-rip-the-throat-out-of-anyone-getting-between-me-and-food kind of hungry.

• Smoothies are boring. Once a day is doable. Twice a day feels like you're relegated to baby food. While everyone else is only halfway through dinner, you're sitting there empty handed picking chia seeds out of your teeth.

• It's extra work. Depending on your life and what you choose to eat, it's a lot of extra work.

• I don't like cold smoothies. I don't like cold food or drinks in general, it really hurts my stomach. So if I was using frozen fruit, I had to warm up the almond or coconut milk before drinking. Perhaps in the heat of July this wouldn't be much of an issue, but any other time of year, certainly for me, I can't stand such cold food.

 

 

    How come I didn't do the full three weeks? My weight. Junger addresses the concerns of underweight people doing this detox by assuring them that the people who lose the most weight the quickest usually need it, and that if weight is lost, it can be put back on with strategically healthy food after the cleanse. He also advises those who are underweight to double up their smoothies, which I did. I lost eight pounds in ten days. Even though I felt good, I hadn't wanted to lose weight at all, especially considering that while it's easy for me to drop weight, it's hard for me to put it back on and I still had eleven days to go. I can't see being able to do the full three weeks until my metabolism slows down. 

   I was interested to see whether I would react poorly to certain foods after the detox. Well, I was actually only worried about finding that I was gluten intolerant, because, you know, life wouldn't be the same without bread. I'm happy to say that I found myself having no allergic reaction at all that I could see, so I'm assuming that my body was just overburdened with carbohydrates and dairy and that's what was making me feel so exhausted. I decided I'm going to limit bread and dairy anyway, because I've seen what a difference it has made, but I'm pretty happy that I can still eat them!

    I thought I'd like to share this because it seemed pretty fantastic to me and Spring is a great time to do something like this if you feel you need it. Have any of you ever done a cleanse or detox? Did you experience anything similar?

Mea Culpa

 
    I truly did not mean to go an entire month without posting. One day last month,  I was suddenly struck by the fact that I had to assemble a homeschooling portfolio for my daughter's evaluator and school district soon and had yet to begin. That seemed taxing, but doable. It was at this time I realized that, due to my overreaching minimalism, I had applied it rather too thoroughly (code for thrown out) to a hell of a lot of schoolwork that would have been "proof" that I was not giving her Koolaid for breakfast and letting her spend her day bashing car headlights out while dressed in a loincloth. There was much panicking as I searched for wisps of this "proof," interspersed with irritation that I have to prove my kid is literate when my city graduates, or as they like to say "push(es) through," high-schoolers whose literacy skills are below basic, which means they can't understand simple prose. Meanwhile, my kid is plowing through Little Women right now and she's (nearly) nine. Literacy, at least, isn't a problem in this house.

    So I had to take a blog break in order to get this together, and I'm happy to say that we are wrapping up her portfolio this week.

    It also makes me happy that I'll be able to relish our slowly warming spring now. Here are some things I've been enjoying when I'm not furiously photocopying.

 

 

Tiny and translucent, my first gooseberries ever. Bought on a whim, because they are hardy and suitable for containers. Now that I see their veined berries illuminated by the sun, I'm thinking they are worth growing simply to look at, but I've always thought fruit was beautiful.

 

 

Blueberry flowers. I have never seen these before because every time we've gone to pick them they are obviously already full fledged blueberries, and I somehow managed to kill the other container blueberry we had years ago. This one belongs to The Simple Man, whose prowess in gardening makes my black thumbs cry with rage. I would love to have the natural touch that he does, but I have to work hard at coaxing my plants to live.

 

Now that it's warmer in the house I'm able to place rising dough on our sun porch. The sun porch . . . where there isn't a baby gate. Where when I come back to look at the bread I see that it has been molested by teeny tiny baby hands. What it is about puffy dough that is so fascinating to children?

 

Making our deck more livable by knocking down a yellow jackets' nest built inside the patio umbrella. They insist on building on our deck every year and the girls, who are very girly and screamy when it comes to stinging bugs, refuse to go out there if it's swarming with bees and wasps. I'm still amazed by the natural world's architecture.

 

Taking my daughters to a homeschooling program (okay, the 2 year old mostly follows the 9 year old around) at the oldest botanical garden in the US; this particular program focused on birds' nests. After wearing the kids out by walking them all over the property in search of nests, they went back to the barn and built their own nest. Decorated with flower petals. No, I don't allow reality to get in the way of my kid's art and nature projects.

    How has your spring been so far? I know people who do gardening are crazily planting while a lot of the country has suffered from those severe storms and floods. I am frankly delighted to see the last of snow for awhile and am looking forward to being outdoors more than in!