Small Bird Arrives in America

If you are here because you clicked the wrong button on the Spirit Cloth blog, you already know that Saskia van HerWaarden lives in a magical birdhut.  It is a place where her wild creativity bubbles up from her soul, through her hands, and into all that she touches around her. She ecodyes fabric, she stitches, she prints,she saws and hammers all kinds of stuff together, and she builds kingdoms and their citizens from the treasures she scoops up on her walks through the Dutch lowlands. (She claims she also works in some sort of appliance service company, but that's just her cover story.A pretty lame one too, if you ask me.)

As a thank you for sending her some books, Saskia invited me to select a cloth from among the wonders that she created for a recent art show. And I just received it him. Small Bird has Left Home.

Do you see Small Bird, born in the center but taking his first steps to the left of the blue beading? Under the safety of the sun, the moon, and the waves, Small Bird flew all by himself across the ocean...

...carrying two items. First, a fortune from the fortune cookie he probably got from the Chinese restaurant at the Amsterdam airport.

According to Google Translate, it means "a pound of feathers do not fly if there is no bird in it." (Having just ordered a pound of feathers, this is patently untrue but I see no point in arguing with Small Bird on his first few days here.)

Second, pictures of his family that his mother tucked in his bag while he was ordering Chinese food.

Small Bird's Father

Small Bird's Mother

Uncle Louis,the black sheep. He is rarely mentioned except in a whisper, which makes Small Bird adore him.

We're keeping Small Bird away from Billy Dog and Clutch till his English gets better and he learns how to say "I am not food." We did introduce him to some of the smaller, less intimidating packs of critters around the house.

Indoor Finch Family standing very still

The Mexican Road Kill Ensemble, available for Bar Mitzvahs and Weddings

The Memphis Clay Quintet

Soldiers of Fortune

Board of Directors, The Raggedy Ann Preservation Society

Everyone is getting along beautifully, although they are staying up way too late at night listening to Small Bird's stories about his friends at The Birdhut.

Thank you, thank you Saskia. Your work is infectiously beautiful.

Spawning 'Shrooms

Yesterday, I went to a workshop on how to grow your own 'shrooms. Himself was very excited till I had to tell him "no, you dolt, not THOSE  'shrooms."  

THESE 'shrooms...

 

No, these are not beer nuts. They are "spawn plugs," sold online by Field and Forest.  Spawn plugs? Isn't that something Sigourney Weaver pulled out of her astronaut buddy's chest? And how could anything called "spawn" have such lovely surnames as "West Wind" and "Snow Cap?"

Well, it turns out that these spawn plugs inoculated into the right environment will eventually give rise to a nest of shitake mushrooms.  Our Spawn Daddy was Alex, who took 9 of us on to his back porch and showed us how to do exactly that.

Shitakes love a three-foot segment of red or white oak. And here's the kicker, if you live in the Northeast this winter: you can't use fallen logs. The wood needs to be so alive that you need to go into your woods with a saw within 30 days of Inoculation Day. If not, you run the risk that some other fungi or bacteria gets a toehold and eventually ruins the neighborhood for our poor Spawn.

Luckily for me, Alex actually trekked through the three-foot snow mounds day after day to bring us these oak logs, which, by the way, are really heavy little bastards on a good day and especially heavy since they've not been sitting on a woodpile drying out for a year.

Alex then showed us how to drill an array of 50-60 holes spaced 4 inches apart around the logs and then hammer the little plugs into said holes.  Once our Spawn were all snug in their new homes, we tucked them in with a covering of wax. The logs then go in a shady spot, where they should be kept relatively moist. And then, depending on the strain, 6 to 12 months later, the Spawn spawn and shitake mushrooms cover the log. That's called a "fruiting" and hopefully, it happens several times before the wood rots away and the Spawn are homeless.

This is Alex's sprawling Spawn Condominium Development.

 These are my more modest Spawn Apartment Towers.

They will go into a shady part of the yard as soon as I can find the yard.Which may be soon, according to my Snowman Thaw-O-Meter...

In fact, winter must be nearly over because I have completed my project for Winter Camp, ie, piecing together a Gridlock Quilt for our bed. I threw Billy off and threw it on so I could see how it will be as a blanket instead of wallpaper.

I still have all the handstitching and embroidery stories to tell across the top. And,eventually, some type of border, perhaps of words or more little stories, will take shape. And that will help me name it, I hope. But even at this stage, I am very pleased with it.

First of all, it has all my story cloths in it. They all work together and I am excited about making their stitches travel onto their neighboring blocks.  Second, I made it completely out of fabric that I had here (with the exception of one fat quarter of blue/white dot that I deemed essential but ran out of, so sue me). I even cut apart old blocks that I had bought at flea markets and got lots of 2 1/2 inch squares of shirting fabric from the early 1900s.  That connection...my hands to those of some woman 100 years ago cutting up her husband's shirts...well, I just FEEL woven to her when I look at them.  And finally, I only used fabrics that I LOVE.

I did worry while I was stitching that I would feel protective of this quilt and not let the dogs come up and inoculate it with slobber, shedding fur, yesterday's mud, and whatever spawnlike phenomena come with eight sets of padded toes. But keeping my dogs off the bed would be a complete negation of my lifestyle, which is heavily dependent on warm canine breath in the morning (no, you dolt, not yours).

So using this quilt in my life will no doubt be like stepping out of the house with brand new sneakers...white and clean as a fleeting moment in time.

Life in the Northeast

How it was.

 

How it is. 

A Week of Weather

Monday brought in 10 inches of snow.

Although the lines at the cafeteria were a little longer...

...for most of the natives around here, it was business as usual.

While I was shoveling, the two words that came to mind for the snow were "myocardial infarction." But it didn't take long for that Michigan girl to burst to the surface.Yes, its "good packin!" So I did what you do with that. Right at the street, to make the sourpusses smile.

I finished every household chore that had been on the list since 1997, paid all the bills, read all the blogs on six world wide webs, and ordered seeds for the garden that must be there in the yard, somewhere. I made a pot of veggie chili with every thing in the refrigerator that once was a vegetable and not yet quite a fungus. And then, because I still had energy even after the treadmill, I got out the ladder and washed every single white beam in our bedroom.

It was all so soft and fluffy.

And then came Wednesday. Which was not.

It started like this.

And then turned into this.

And then this.

The tree didn't do any damage but it sure was a scary sound. One of many, actually. And even though we lost power for the day,we have a generator, which worked. So many around us are still without power, which isn't expected to return until Sunday. Folks have trees in their bedrooms, on their cars, at the foot of their driveways. Its pretty sobering.

So, with all chores done from the Monday storm, what else can you do but this?

No, not a Polar Unicorn. I just started on the head.

Back to Beastly Basics

Those of you in other countries may not know that the Northeastern United States has been annexed as a suburb of Greenland. The extreme cold, with its spears of gusting winds, has no mercy for this 200-year-old wooden house. Even little Billy sticks his head out the dog door, pulls it back in with a low moan, and retreats into a little ball on my his futon.

On one hand, the weather blows the winds of gratitude through me. A warm home, plentiful food, and no real need to brave the elements except by choice. That is, as the man from Motown says,some kind of wunnerful. I've been trying to maintain some balance by tooling away at my Gridlock quilt.

But, in truth, these past few months have formed a creative gridlock of theirown. Jude's What If series is really over:no matter how many times a day I click on the icon, she does not post something new there. So I found myself going back through her video class called Patchwork Beasts (which you can still get over on the Spirit Cloth shop). At first, I felt a bit like my 19-year-old self when Ricky broke up with me and all I could do was read his letters over and over again.

But eventually, I came to two realizations. First, Jude did not break up with me. Probably. And second, getting back to basics is a great way to (re)kindle creative embers. I just love her beasts, I just love her way of getting me to find my own.

This time around,I heard something that skipped past me on my first viewing: name your beasts as you create them. It gives them personality and helps define their story. I had a name in mind before I picked the first piece of cloth. So here it is, the first beast of 2014, ready to be stitched and storified.

Meet "The Polar Vortex."

What's in My Tree Today

This bird's nest was in the bare tree right where above where I haul the trash to the street. Mama Bird apparently created wax paper nest liners.

Less mess, I guess.

The Mystery of Patches and the Moth Hole

No, I am not writing a Nancy Drew novel. I am presenting the mysterious tale of my favorite sweater. Which, over last summer, appeared to turn into a food court for moths.

Things were looking grim, until I looked more closely at this.

The sweater, which I bought at a local crafts fair, is an amalgam of a bunch of thrift shop sweaters that the artist recut into one. When I looked closely at the bits and pieces scattered across the top, I thought, "These are bits and pieces scattered across the top. Another word for that is 'patch.'"

So I rummaged through a box of wool squares that I had just been thinking about giving away. My romance with wool quilting was a hot one, but I had broken things off between us awhile back and really didn't see any chance of reconciliation.

But, with a scissors and some wool yarn, the squares became patches.

Patches, meet moth holes.

 And now all I have a sweater again.

But here's the mystery. I patched up every last hole the other night and when I took it out, I see new ones. I don't see moths. I don't see holes in any other wool anything of mine. Does anyone know what's going on? I will just keep patching away until someone answers...

The Wish Thing

What is up with this wish thing?

I celebrate being wishless.Which, as Grace points out, really just means feeling content.
But, then, in the blink of a "send" button, I am not so fine with it.

My brain starts doubling back over itself. What if it is not "content?" What if it means I am in a rut? Or, worse yet, in a place where "rut" would look good? Because what if it means that...

...I have just given up?

Even as I type this, I know it is ridiculous.So the big question is what triggers the doubt?

The answer is so simple and, boy, does it make me feel small. It happens when I lose track of me and start watching what happens around me. Specifically, when the creative people who are in my life or its periphery get big contracts, great reviews, public recognition. Things I once thought I could reach for but,in the end,required a path that simply was not right for me.

That happened twice last week. 

Why does it still affect me? I think its because I am new and a bit unsteady in the face of the age-appropriate but polar shifts in the ground beneath me.  I have entered the year of turning 60 and it feels like Nature is doing something to me besides putting hair on my chin. On one side, it is pulling from me things that Used to Be. Fierce ambition, independent and immortal parents, 20-20 eyesight, little girls with problems no bigger than their pink barrettes, the adamant refusal to settle for anything less than exactly the way I wanted it.

On the other side, it is making me tighten my grip on what I cherish: solitude, pine forests, lettuce in my garden in the spring and the fall, muddy dog paws leaping on my clean pants, snores from the pillow next to my own. Good talks with good friends, learning a new word in Hebrew and actually remembering it when I get to Israel. Finding that my words here made a difference to someone in another hemisphere.


Both are really powerful forces right now. No wonder I got caught in the middle.Just writing this makes me feel a whole lot better.

On my way to work

Thanks for listening.

Eyes Outside

Another Snow Day

 I am going out to shovel the four or so inches that flew in here last night. And then,as long as I'm dressed for it, I will go rob a bank.

Wish List

I strongly believe in a spiritual underpinning to the universe. I try to access it through Jewish ritual, by spending my time as much as possible with what is real, and by keeping my eyes and heart wide open. I don't subscribe to psychic stuff. (Ok, I confess, I love the occasional tarot card reading but not like I love the Rabbi of Ger.) 

But I do love this.

Specifically, I am a sucker for the exercise called "Pot of Goals" on page 81.It takes 7 days. On Day 1, number a page from 1 to 20. After each number, you write, "I wish.." Then you fill it in with wishes for "what you want to do, to be, to experience, more than on what you want to consume or own...for example, wish for 'living in the mountains in a big house' instead of 'a big house in the mountains.'" 

Don't think too much about each wish. Just write.

And then do follow the rest of this schedule:

• Day 2, narrow your list to 12 wishes. 
• Day 3, to nine wishes. 
• Day 4, to seven wishes.
• Day 5, to five wishes.
• Day 6, to three wishes.
• Day 7, to three final wishes. Which, Sonia says, usually reflect your truest desires at this time.

She says to tape this list somewhere where you see it everyday. Me, I just put it away. And when I check back with it a year or so later, well...damn, stuff has come true.


Ok, I get the part where the simple act of focusing helps drill a clean hole into your subconscious so that your soul's yearnings drive your conscious choices. There's no psychic voodoo attached to writing "I wish I could go on an adventure trip every year" one year and finding that two years later, I have hiked the Cotswolds and The Jesus Trail. To writing "I wish my quilting would be more artistic" and then finding myself a student of Jude Hill's Spirit Cloth. Or scribbling "I wish I took myself more seriously as a writer" and finding myself the author of a blog.

But here's where the soundtrack gets a little eerie and the spirit world starts to giggle at my arrogance. One year, in desperation, I wished that "I get to be in my backyard without the insanity of the Evil Neighbor." (A guy who, at his finest, would leave his radio outside blasting Rush Limbaugh into my yard while he ducked back into his house.) We all know you can't change other people. So you'd expect my wish would produce a change in my behavior, right? That I would find my way to tolerance and equinamity?


Guess again. Because my wish for peace and quiet in my backyard culminated in him getting 10 years of Federal prison for embezzlement and fraud and money laundering.  How does THAT work??? (But the real moral is just don't fuck with me, baby, because I am Connected!!)

So I am a believer after all. I thought I would try a new list tonight, when the New Year's zeitgeist is all about resolutions, intentions, whatever you want to call it.

I numbered from 1 to 20.

And then I just stared. Because at this moment, well, I feel no yearning. No deep desire to change anything. Oh sure, there are those 20 pounds, but they've been on the list so long that the statue of limitations has kicked in. And yes, I want to learn how to work those stupid remotes,but that's about as realistic as "world peace" in a beauty pageant.

So this new year's eve, how about I turn instead from wishing to enjoying? A few glasses of Prosecco, my homemade mu-shu chicken with lettuce wraps and my homemade hot and sour soup, with that man of my dreams.  After the kitchen is clean, we get a rerun of Columbo and maybe a movie (although there is an inverse relationship between drinking Prosecco and remaining awake.)

And before I do, let me say this.You have all touched me so much this year with your attention to my words. Thank you so much.

And the best of all your wishes for you in 2014.   

Hey y'all

Just got home from a week in New Orleans, where the trees grow some mighty odd fruit.

The natives apparently dry them out in the sun...

...and then use them in graveside rituals...

 

Or as offerings to their gods.

Then, just an hour away from all this silliness, is 20,000 acres of this.

As always, I have wonderfully clever yet profoundly meaningful observations to share. But first, I need to go grocery shopping, vacuum up muddy paw prints, and play with my dogs. The best of all good things for the new year to you all.

SNOW DAY!!

The phone rings at 5 am. I then trudge into my little girls' bedrooms, manuevering my way through a minefield of opened books,wet towels,single shoes, my socks, spoons,and bowls full of some petrified mass that may or may not have once been spaghetti and I thought I told you no food in your room...

...and I search for their warm little heads buried beneath the covers. I push back their hair and whisper into their ears. The words every child longs to hear.

"No school today. Snow day."

Snow day. It means wiping the slate of Plans for Today clean and just letting the snow--and whatever else--fall all over the calendar. Now, without any kids in the house, I can experience the thrill of Snow Day without the agony of spilled hot cocoa, encrusted pancake batter, and layers and layers of wet clothes piled in a heap on the kitchen floor.

I got a Snow Day this week, the day after hitting my moody bottom in Pencilville. The Snow Day brought me this:

It brought me a glorious romp in the field with the dogs, who ran in a continuous spiral for 20 minutes, zeroing in only to get their treats. Which were snowballs. (Nobody ever accuses boxers of high level cognition, the kind that would make them realize that they could master their own treats just by looking down.)

Like the best snow days of all, the snow on this Snow Day was good-packing. Does anyone else remember this all important criterion? Good packing. It means the pickings will be ripe for a most excellent snowball fight, a great snow man, or a double-wide snow fort--in fact, I remember one fourth grade recess where the entire class worked on one snowball until all 30 of us could no longer push it forward.

Yes, in Michigan in the 1960s, unlike Pennsylvania in the 2000s, we went to school when it snowed. (We also had 30 kids in the class and apparently managed to learn how to read and write anyway.) We had recess on the playground, not in front of a video. Great recess in fact, because girls got to wear pants, if only under skirts and dresses. We were allowed to throw snowballs at each other, always mindful of The Boy Who Got Hit in the Eye by a Snowball and Went Blind (a close relative, no doubt, of The Girl Who Looked at the Sun During an Eclipse and Went Blind).

Oh, damn, I am just sentences short of lapsing into an angry post about what is wrong with childhood today. So I will stop here and say what I came to say: I love Snow Days.

A Week of Two Cloths

Several years ago, I borrowed a pattern called African Huts and created a baby quilt for the shop that showcased a funny fabric of Kaffe's called "Pencils." I called it "Pencilville" and was so excited when it made its way into Quilt Magazine.

Not sure where the hypen came from...or the young boy, who I am sure would really be turning those crayons into aliens and mobilizing them into an attack on the wall. (Ok, blatant stereotype but,hey,I had only girl children and their little boy pals always seemed to be animating inanimate objects with superpowers and launching them against various surfaces...like my face.)

This week, I made a new Pencilville because so many of the original fabrics have been discontinued. My design wall blossomed with brightness and simplicity as Pencilville, Too came to life.

But handling those confetti pinks and daffodil yellows really strained my heart. Its enough to say that the Big Black Dog of maternal doom and gloom is once again trying to climb into my lap. I am having to make adjustments to what it means to be the mother of my forever wayward Thing Two. My struggles feel anything but simple or bright.

They feel like this:

This is my Sad Cloth, which I started several years ago when my discovery of Spirit Cloth coincided with Thing Two thudding into the darkness.

 The quote is an excerpt from a poem called "Kindness" by Naomi Shahib Nye:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth. 

I am not in the red heat that dominates this cloth, but more in its shades of umber.

I am going to work on Sad Cloth for awhile. I used to feel frantic in the face of sadness. But cloth (and some extra years, I presume) steadies me, makes me able to just sit with the Black Dog until he goes back into his house. This week, then, is about two cloths. One for babies, who need something to clutch when the world of Becoming becomes just too much...and another for moms.

Who feel the same.

The Tale of E 20

This post is not about making stuff or about Jewish text. It is not about my dogs. It is a story about appliances. And why they are not your friends.

I hit the "start" button on the dishwasher last night, to make room for the dishes and utensils that are the dirty little secret of holidays. (Here, that will be the confluence of Thanksgiving AND Chanukah. Himself offered to cook for the next one...a very generous offer since that will be,and I kid you not, 70,000 years from now.)  The racks were crammed full, since I wanted to make sure I could run it at the last possible minute, thereby ensuring ample parking for all the detritus of cooking, dining, and drinking. Especially drinking.

So you probably already know where this is going. Or rather, not going.

Because instead of the rush of water in its bowels, the dishwasher gave forth the sound of one hand clapping. And the display started blinking.

 "E 20!" "E 20!" "E 20!"  If it had audio, I am sure we would hear a siren and Scotty screaming, "I've giv'n her all she's got,Captain, an' I canna give her no more."

What does E 20 mean? It means I have to find the instruction manual, that sacred text containing Secret Meanings of Thy Error Codes. Come on, why do they have to use codes, anyway? In case Enemy Combatants take over the kitchens of America and we want to make sure they can never ever clean the ovens? My secret decoder instruction manual has six illustrated pages on how to arrange juice glasses vs goblets (in each of three languages) and another two pages warning me not to allow small children to take up residence in the lower racks...but it hath not a word about E 20.

I lasso Himself away from Ebay and enlist his input. To his credit, he makes only a few idle remarks about wives who refuse to rinse dishes before loading them into the machine that rinses dishes. So together, we Google. And we discover many pages of people asking what the E 20 error code mean. One thing leads to another and we wind up on You Tube, watching a video on E20 that was vaguely reminiscent of the film strips we watched in science class on the making of igneous rocks.

Well, I'll be. "E 20" means "something is wrong with the drain. Or the pump.  Try removing the drainboard, cleaning the filter, returning the drainboard, removing the jets, cleaning the jets, and returning the jets.  At which point you will find out you will need to call a repair person."  Yeah, they're right, there's no way all that would fit on the display.

I do all this and am successful: I learn I need to call for repair. I decide first to call the manufacturer, who makes me read off tiny numbers engraved in the side of the door and has me push a series of buttons while holding other buttons while cradling the phone under my jaw. Together, we are successful: I need to call for repair.

She is happy to help with that. I give her my zip code, she gives me appliance repairers in cities four hours from here. We try again and get two more companies.  She is happy to contact them for me, assuring me that she should be able to have someone at my door sometime early next week.I spew and sputter, but she's immoveable. I pepper my vocabulary with words like "unacceptable" and even threaten to, gasp, blog about them. She encourages me to spend my time how ever I would like.

In the morning, Himself wakes me with an offer to go out for Thanksgiving if the dishwasher remains in E-20tude. Tempting, but I have already offered to dogsit for J's dog and don't want to go out in case Billy and Clutch eat him when we're not looking and I would have to look up at my friend of 25 years and say, "what dog?" I counter with a request that he wash his breakfast dish before he leaves but his forehead flashes an E 20 sign.

I get up, call the first appliance repair on the list. They are happy to come next Tuesday. I work Tuesdays. That's ok, they will call first. But I won't be here because I work on Tuesdays. Well, that's the only day they are in my area. Ok, what time do I need to be here?  Its a secret. They will call on Tuesday morning to reveal the time. But I won't be here on Tuesday morning because I work. That's ok, they will call first.

Now, the E 20 sign on MY forehead starts flashing and we agree to something, I am not sure what. I dial the other repair service and am utterly shocked when she says, "can we come out today between 4 and 6 pm?"

I feel slightly disappointed that the story will be coming to an end. It would have been fun to roll my eyes in martyrdom and tell my as yet unborn (I hope) grandchildren about the time I had to wash all the Thanksgiving dishes by hand. And here's the real truth: I actually don't mind washing dishes.  I put on my the audiobook de jour (this week it is Wolf Hall, a brilliant tale about Henry VIII read by one man and his 5,000 voices) and just wash...rinse...wash...rinse. Peaceful and present. My dad, even at age 86,  is Dishwasher Extraordinaire and I was beginning to look forward to sharing that time with him.

So maybe I won't tell anybody that the dishwasher is fixed. That, of course, is assuming 1) Mr. Repair Guy actually shows;  2)the machine is fixable; 3)the manufacturer still makes the part;  and 4) he has the part in the truck. If you've been around appliances long enough, you know that the confluence of these things is about as common as Thanksgiving and Chanukah colliding.

Nearly 24 hours into the saga, I learned the true meaning of E 20: "Wash everything in the dishwasher by hand before repair guy gets here. It will only take 10 minutes."

And it did. 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.