Greens, grains and roasted roots

urban girl in the country

green in concrete For the last lot-of-years I’ve lived in urban areas. I’ve become a city girl with hints of a flower child mixed with hipster nuances…translated I like to wear skinny jeans. This is the total opposite of how I grew up, which was on a farm. My paternal grandparents grew, raised, caught and hunted for everything they ate – radical organic, free-range stuff. On my Mom’s side of the fam tree, there were green grocers and orchard growers. Heck, I was in 4-H raising feeder calves and a small flock of wooly sheep. Gardens, canning, freezing and preserving everything was the ordinary. I carried on the gardening-preserving, saving the spoils piece, until I found myself in fresh veggie-at-a-farmer’s-market heaven! The foreign city I found myself in had a temperate climate where fruit and vegetables could be grown year ‘round, and … it was sold at a giant open air market every week. Yippee! I no longer needed to squirrel away for winter; it was there in cr

In full abandon, straining on tiptoes

A scrap of paper tucked in my journal is full of scribbled notes and words, people’s names – really it would appear to be miscellany. One phrase is “in full abandon.” The expression had a reference, but now reading it almost daily, it takes on new significance and worth. a.ban.don: to leave and never return (Merriam-Webster) The word “abandon” conjures negative thinking; abandoned lot, abandoned project, abandoned people. Places and things are left for trash or individuals that have been discarded and tossed aside. This definition certainly leaves one feeling rather desolate and, well … abandoned. On the sunny side of the street, abandon is also yielding without restraint, to give up control. It’s bursting with exuberance. Picture being in full abandon: there’s a child running down a hillside, arms flailing and legs barely able to keep them upright. He is on the verge of tumbling head over heels, but somehow if that happened, his giggles would turn into fu

lent, not lint

says it all - the grotto It sticks to your clothes and shows up splendidly on black, it gets caught on the screen in the dryer and socks elaborately decorate your toes with the stuff. Yep, lint: the fuzzy, ravelings of fabric that cling to everything; like Velcro, only different. Lint actually has a purpose. By scraping it from linen it can be made into a soft, fleecy fabric. Cotton staple – lint fibers – are spun into yarn. While all of this is riveting, especially while staring at the lint in your belly-button, there’s more to Lent than its sound doppelganger. lint: fluffy, minute shreds of yarn lent: a season of preparation These two tiny words sound similar in our vernacular, but have massively different implications in our lives. We clean-up lint and toss it in the trash. Lent, however is a prepping time for us to realize we’re not great at cleaning up our own stuff. Lent was originally a season between winter and summer, now called spring. The s

Isabella Bird Miscellany

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