Jon and I have five more books for sale. A mix of novels, mystery and non fiction.
Each book is $10 + $5 shipping. All are in excellent condition. If you’d like one just email me at [email protected], and let me know which book you’d like and how you’d like to pay for it. I take checks, PayPal and Venmo.
There are links to information on each book, just click on the title.
Our Amish neighbors are riding by in their buggies with big black umbrellas like an opaque windshield, open in front of them. They don’t need to see, the horses know the way. I’m messaging with my Bellydancing sisters to see who will show up for class and who won’t. Kathleen will be there, she lives minutes away. But some of us drive over mountains and on dark winding back roads. The hens are staying dry under the table on the back porch. I’ve filled up the bird feeders and Jon and I are wondering if we need to pull the generator out from the barn.
The rain is here already, a light patter on the windows. But sometime this afternoon, evening or night it may turn to ice or snow or both. There might be lots of snow, the winds may pick up, there might be flooding.
Or it might just rain a little.
I won’t know if I’m going to Bellydancing Class tonight till just before I leave. I’ll see what it’s doing outside my own window and wait to hear from Emily about the weather in Vermont. Snow there might be rain here or vice versa.
Even five minutes north or south of the farm weather is often not the same. But that part isn’t new.
It’s the warnings, the unusual and extreme weather that I’m only lately getting used to. Soon I’ll forget there was a time when it was different. The weather was never really predictable, but the patterns have changed. And it hasn’t been long enough for me to be able to figure out the new pattern.
Just two days ago it was frozen white snow. Today it’s richest of mud.
The kind mixed with manure. Deep hoof, boot and paw prints filled with the soup of the season.
It splashes high above my boot, just below the back of my knee when I bring out the hay. I leave Fate and Zinnia in the back yard, where they rub themselves in what remains of the snow, cleaning off the muck before coming into the house.
But the smell lingers.
Mud season comes in through the back door like the rest of us.
And why not.
In the fall it’s the leaves scattered on the kitchen floor, in the summer the mosquitos, spiders and flies, in the winter the cold and in the spring it’s mud.
The “Backpack Bags” at the Cambridge Food Pantry filled with breakfast, lunch and snacks for kids.
As many of you know Jon has been working with the The Cambridge Food Pantry for the past month. They have an on-going Amazon Wishlist that Jon has been posting on his blog everyday with the food they need. Thanks to all of you who have already fed so many people using the Wishlist. If you’d like to donate food you click here for a link to the Amazon Wishlist.
There’s a long table with jars of peanut butter, jelly, Cheerios, individual cartons of milk, a box of apples and servicing size packages of Oreo cookies.
At one end of the table are plastic shopping bags marked with the number of children in each family who need food. The boxes of cereal don’t fit in the bags, so we take the bag of Cheerios out, fold up the box then put it all in the bag so parents can see what their kids are eating.
There are three woman who have been filling the “Backpack” bags for a year or more. Today Jon and I are helping them. Harry stands at the end of the table taking the bags we fill, tying the handles and putting them on another long table.
It’s more confusing than it seems, a bag for more than three kids gets a big box of cereal. Four kids or more get milk cards from Stewarts. There is one bag of micorwave popcorn for every two kids.
But Joan who has been working at the food pantry for seven years says when in doubt, always give too much rather than too little.
Later in the day someone from the food panty will bring the bags to the school parking lot which is across the street. A group of fifth graders will come out with wagons and help distribute the bags to the kids who they were packed for.
I’ve put food in the box at the Village Market and Dollar Store in town for the food pantry regularly. A jar of peanut butter or a couple of cans of tuna fish. But the first time I was ever actually in the building was a few weeks ago with Jon.
We got the tour as Jon took pictures and began his work with the Army of Good helping to buy food for the people in and around our town who need it.
I know that a lot of people don’t have enough food.
I hear about it on the news, how people with two and three jobs can’t afford to feed their families. I see the requests from our own food pantry on the sign outside the building when I drive by. I see the parking lot full of cars on Saturday morning when then pantry is open.
But this morning, when I opened a plastic bag with the number 2 written on it in black marker and put two packages of Oreo cookies in it, I though about the two kids who would eating them. I imagined the kids opening the packs of cookies, gobbling them up and wishing they had one more. Or maybe they savored the cookies, trying to make them last.
That number “2” written on the bag brought me a little closer to the kids who were going to be eating what I had placed in their bag. And even though I’ll never actually meet those kids, they no longer felt anonymous to me.
I was already there intellectually, but filling up those bags brought me closer emotionally.
I have a little ice in my heart. I keep it there to protect me. When Jon asked if I wanted to volunteer with him at the food pantry, I was reluctant to commit. I have enough to do with my work, the farm and the volunteering I already do.
But I didn’t expect to feel what I did today.
Actually doing the physical work of packing up the bags allowed me to imagine the kids who would be eating the food I was putting into them. I felt a direct connection to them.
And that melted the ice a bit and opened me up to wanting to give the Food Pantry some more of my time. Which means I’ll be back at the Food Pantry next Thursday morning, packing up more bags with breakfast, lunch and snacks that will help feed a lot of kids for a couple of days.
“The moon is calling me,” I said to Jon. But he was fast asleep.
I kept waking up, and each time I did, the pale blue light that filled the windows tugged at me. Each time I looked out the window the long shadows of the maples shifted like a sundial.
Finally, I slipped out of bed and pulled on yesterdays clothes. Downstairs, I put on my winter coat, wool hat and gloves. Zinnia and Fate followed me out the door and into the night.
Moon light like sunlight.
Through the gate and into the barnyard. Lulu came out first to see what was happening. Then Fanny and Asher followed. They watched as we passed the apple tree.
I dug my heels into the snow, breaking the crust to keep from slipping as I went down the hill.
I could count the stars and barely make out Orion’s belt.
In the back pasture the snow was so hard we walked on top of it leaving no footprints. A field of hard, shiny white.
The dogs sniffed at the snow, and I walked, showered in moonlight.
I don’t know why it seemed wrong to be sleeping, to be inside when the moon was so bright. It felt like snubbing a gift, not appreciating what the moon was offering.
So I took the gift of light in the night the only way I knew how. By being in it.
And when I got too cold to stay out any longer, the moon laid a carpet of sparkles in the snow to usher me home.
Usually, right now, I’d be in a dance studio with anywhere from five to eleven people warming up to music that Julz, our teacher, chose just for today. My mind would be focused on how my body was moving, I’d be sweating even if I was cold when I first walking in to the room and I’d be smiling or reminding myself to smile.
I’d be enjoying every moment of it.
Instead I’m sitting in my blogging corner of the living room. My computer on my lap, Fate sleeping on the floor next to me, Bud snoring on the couch. The wood stove is ticking with warmth and the window is beaded with melted snow.
The birds have abandoned the feeder. Snow is falling in a crazed cross-hatch. Instead of the bright red head and soft gray feathers of a house finch, the window is a rectangle in shades of white.
Last week I strained my back opening all the old wooden windows in the house. Some stick and others are blocked by furniture and plants. I should have been more careful, but in my hurry to let the fresh air in on that 60 degree day, I moved wrong. That evening my lower back and pelvis was one big ache.
It’s gotten better. I’m fortunate to have a husband who is happy to massage my back and encourage me to rest.
But I haven’t been able to take walks and move my body the way I’m used to for a week. I’ve been low all day because of it. I know Bellydancing would have brought me back, it always does, but not tonight.
After a morning of doing my shipping (thank you to everyone who bought my Meditation Trees) the afternoon slipped away. I never got to my studio. So I decided to take a short walk in the woods hoping it would help.
The thing is, I was looking for something. Something to bring me out of myself, a sign, or one the many little miracles of the woods. But as I walked even the small wonders that would usually call to me, felt empty.
That’s when I knew I couldn’t look outside of myself to feel better. It had to come from within.
Then the snow came.
A rush of heavy wet snow blowing in all directions at once, taking up so much space it was if a white cloud had descended on the farm obscuring the world around us.
And with the snow, I felt myself surrender.
I surrendered to feeling low. To not being able to move the way I’m used to, to not going to dance class to feeling what I felt without qualifying it.
The snow was an excuse, a rationale, a giving up, giving in and letting go. The solace of a snow day.
I decided to take it.
Some time after that my iPhone pinged. “The skunk cabbages are coming up” my friend Jackie texted me with an enticing photo of the “dinosaur plant.”
I began to wonder if the skunk cabbage were up in my neighbors swamp. I pictured the strange sculptural flower melting the snow around it.
I didn’t mean to put the cardboard over the garlic bulbs. I must have misjudged where I planted them. It was only the flap of the cardboard box that covered them.
Each fall I layer manure, leaves or old straw then cardboard to replenish the soil and keep the weeds from growing in my vegetable garden.
I can see how determined, how hardy the garlic that my friend Kat gave me really is. It didn’t just grow all squiggly and yellow under the cardboard, it poked a hole right through it.
I removed the cardboard from this and a couple of other garlic plants. Although it was probably a nice blanket in the winter.
On this first day of Spring we woke to a dusting of snow.
But I’m not worried about the Garlic, it needs cool weather when it first starts growing and can stand freezing temperatures as long as it’s not too far below zero.
This is only my second year growing garlic. My first year was a success which makes me think that garlic is easy to grow.
And if the garlic isn’t letting a cardboard box stop it, I’m not sure what will.
Jon and I have four more books that we are selling as part of our Bedlam Farm Book Sale.
Each of these books are once read and in excellent condition. They are $10 each + $5 shipping.
If you are interested in any of them, just email me at [email protected]. Let me know which book you’d like and if you’d like to use a check, PayPal or Venmo to pay for it.
The shipping is so inexpensive because I can send them out as media mail, which also means it may take a little longer to get to you.
Below is a list of the book we are selling. Click on the title for a link to a summary of each book.
I always pick out the most interestingly shaped carrots from Carrot box at Long Days Farm. I let the carrot above dance with the other veggies before cutting her up for pea soup.
I don’t really like to cook, but I have come to enjoy making soup.
We used to have a couple of places in town that made good soup, but when they stopped due to Covid, I realized if I wanted good soup, I was going to have to make it.
So now, usually on Sundays, I make a big pot of soup. Jon and I eat some and I freeze some. I try to make sure there is always soup in the freezer.
My soup menu includes Borscht, Lentil soup, Pea soup, Chicken soup, and Butternut Squash in season. My recipes are simple and basic. As long as I can chop it up and throw it in a pot, I’ll make it.
This time of year, I can still get carrots, beets and onions from Edwin and Debbie who own Long Days Farm, at the Farmers Market. And the Co-op always has bulk lentil and peas.
It took me longer than it should have to realize that the base for all my soups are basically the same, onions, carrots, celery. Although the last time I made pea soup I didn’t have celery and it still tasted good. I did notice that the more onions I use, the more tasty the soup.
Then, last week, I saw a recipe for Curry Rice on the bulletin board at the Co-op.
Like soup, all I had to do was add a bunch of ingredients together and dump them in a pot to cook. And the recipe made enough that I could store two more meals in a jar. All I had to do was add water and cook.
So now, thanks toBliss who posted the recipe from the Cambridge C0-Op Cookbook on the bulletin board, I’ve added a delicious rice dish to my easy-to-make healthy homemade meals.
I’ve shared the recipe because it’s too good to keep to myself.
Fruited Rice Curry Mix Recipe from the Cambridge Co-Op Cookbook
4C uncooked rice (I used brown rice) 1C chopped dried fruit (I used mango) 1C chopped almonds 1/2C golden raisins 1/4C dried onions (I used scallions) 2T +2t curry power 2T veggie broth or bouillon
Combine ingredients.
Put 1 3/4 C of mix, 2T butter, 2 1/2C of boiling water. Simmer for about 40 minutes. Makes 4C of cooked rice. (I cooked up some veggie based sausage and added it to the cooked rice.)
I haven’t been to Jon’s Meditation Class at The Mansion for a while. But I went today and brought with me the Mary Oliver Poem “Work” to read.
The class was special, (you can read about it on Jon’s blog here) the conversation thoughtful and even for those who were quiet, I could see how intently they were listening. It felt meaningful to me and I believe to the people in the class.
I’ll be teaching my next art class at The Mansion in a couple of weeks. I was glad to be there today.
Below is just a short excerpt from “Work” by Mary Oliver
“I am a woman sixty years old and of no special courage. Everyday-a little conversation with God, or his envoy the tall pine, or the grass-swimming cricket. Everyday-I study the difference between water and stone. Everyday-I stare at the world; I push the grass aside and stare at the world.
