Love Inventory

I did a 'love inventory' recently, a thing that sounded hokey and had me rolling my eyes, and came from of-all-places an Oprah book (insert judgey skeptical face here). I realized my inventory was woefully lacking. Not just in a not-very-diverse way, but in a nope-nothing-to-see-here way. 

"I deserve a love pantry bursting with quality inventory!" I yelled from the rooftop.
The birds looked at me as though I was going to get red-carded for annoying their peaceful morning. 
"well, i do" I muttered under my breath, lightly kicking a small pebble across the terrace, slightly abashed, but no less convinced.

Salad Days

Tomorrow the first farm delivery of the season comes, and I’m looking forward to a bag of goodness each week, a little bit of sunshine and love no matter how uncertain and bumpy the road is along the way. This week’s task list involves putting together the composted and ordering worms, cleaning the refrigerator shelves, and generally shoring up the organization to accommodate Tuesday afternoon processing and cooking. 

A friend asked a million years ago how to store vegetables, and I’m a big fan of using less plastic.

Ahhh, spring! 

That time of year when the garden starts sending out leaves and shoots of every variety! There's a reason that good times are called "salad days." 

For those of us with gardens or CSA subscriptions, storing the weekly harvest can be the most difficult part of the season. Here's a handy reference guide to keeping your lovely produce without plastic (and often without refrigeration):

Editing

Write with fire. Edit with ice.

Station Eleven: Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, set in a world a generation after apocalyptic flu erases modern society as we know it, is not a straightforward apocalypse novel. The wholesale removal of civilization as we know it is the conceit that allows her to explore what rebuilding looks like, and how we interact with ourselves and each other in a non-electrical life. 

The writing is graceful, elegant, and tender without triteness. The reader feels invited to walk with these characters, and I felt a tenderness toward them, exposed as flawed and human and beautiful. This is not a lecture on civilization and its discontents, but a gentle revelation of people in relationship with themselves and each other. 

The result is an elegant rendering of the interwoven nature of relationships and how small things, especially living our art, have such a meaningful and lasting impact on lives we glance through. What has power in the book are the acts of living in creativity -- the gift if the paperweight, the act of putting on a play or making music, the drawing of a story. These are the things that change others, even if we never see how they are changed, and they are the ways by which the characters know themselves. Art connects us to love and to each other. Through the pain, through the mistakes, through the inconveniences and difficulties of daily life.

Because survival is insufficient.

Welcome Home, Little Dog

Megan

I'm not into MySpace and haven't been for years, so this most recent atrocity of internet bullying resulting in suicide only just now came to my attention. I am horrified, of course, and appalled at the people, mostly girls and women, who would do such a thing. But the worst of it is that i'm not surprised. Not in the slightest. What does surprise me, though, is that this has finally been taken seriously enough to produce charges against the cowardly perpetrators. Way to go, Los Angeles. I'm so glad we don't have the internet at home. On the way to the bus this morning, the boys asked if they could each get their very own tandem dump truck load of topsoil for their birthdays. While i informed them that "dirt cheap" was misleading, i laughed and enjoyed hearing their plans to make their own version of a Meerkat Manor. When i think of how fragile our children are in the face of peer pressure, it just crushes me.