Time Sallies Forth

Time "sallies forth" sounds much gayer than "marches on".  Of course, Einstein might suggest that it "bends it like Beckham". No matter, today is the last day of 2008 and tomorrow the first of 2009. Blessings, good tidings, riches, and all good things to you and yours this coming year and for always.

These are a few photos taken recently: Maisie at home in her retro ski hat (can't really see the great Phil and Steve Mayer striping on the side), and then at Willard Beach last Sunday when it was near 60 degrees; tonight, after a day of snowing, it is 6 degrees with a windchill in the negative.

A little berry in the snow

People don't notice whether it is winter or summer when they're happy.  Anton Chekhov

Merry Christmas to One and All and Peace Be With You

I told Heather today that after listening to a radio program on MPR today, I almost wished I were English or Christian because of the language.  I may not be Christian in my beliefs, but I do strongly believe in the spirit of the season and the traditions of the Pagan/Druid roots, so it is in that spirit I offer you this gift:Once in Royal David's City.

Thanks Be to God.

Merriment

The Haynes family get together was Saturday.  Jack did his best interpretation of "What Santa Looked Like As a Baby".  On Sunday was the Benson get together, once again at the Masonic Temple in Gorham.  Maisie added to her piano playing reportoire with her impersonation of Stevie Wonder.

Happy Solstice. Bon Hiver.

Ghosts of Christmas' Past

It's been three years since I last saw my father alive.  They were on their way to visit me in Maine for the holiday and their truck broke down in Vermont, so they went back to NY after getting it up and servicable.  So, I went there.  For a few days.  Then it was maybe four, then five, then...I think I stayed a week. It was the first time I had been home in a while and in years by myself. Much to my surprise I had a good time. 

The thing I remember the most about the time I spent there is going to Northville in the truck with him and Abby to the feed store and then we went to the Adirondack Country  Store.  I bought a book about Bigfoot sightings in the Northeast, a bar of pine soap and some quilted coasters.

He died in his sleep four months later.

Memories...all alone in the moonlight...

Sometimes I am seized with a yearning for place.  It is often a composite landscape composed of real and realer than real components.  Usually this homeland of the soul is outside, artic cold, wooded, snowy.  I feel invigorated and at peace when I am able to conjure these "memories".  Sometimes, they are actual memories of growing up in the Adirondacks and especially of my dog sled driving youth, but even then the feeling of being on the sled gliding through the woods was so familiar and reminiscent. I have lately taken to checking the Lapland Lake website for the current weather conditions. (This is a place I worked one season) I want to say this activity leaves me fraught with homesickness, but it is something even more.  I feel the same longing when the wind blows into me a certain way, or the naked branches of winter trees rub limb against limb or the silent falling of the snow creates a hush over the landscape-even in the city. Some of the works at Dog Star Creations have the same effect. The poetry of Frost and Mary Oliver can drop me to my knees in a snowy field at dusk when I am sitting at my computer in July. What is this cellular pull?  I don't know, but I do know it makes me heartsick to imagine a world without ice and snow, frost and breath hanging in the air like smoke from a peace pipe. I fear that my daughter will never know this beautiful, bountiful winter scape...or even come to despise it as so many people claim they do. So for now, I will continue my love affair with winter  and revel in it's pleasures and pray for its survival and the survival of my remembered home.  I plead you do the same.

Thanksgiving 2008

We spent Thanksgiving proper with HE's Benson side of the family at the Masonic Temple in Gorham, Maine. There was an abundance of delicious food, beautiful old dishes, a coffee can moose call demonstration, and plenty of room.  We even had live music (see photo ) although the artist was reluctant to play requests...we got all original material, but it sounded alot like "Chopsticks".  Friday, we are to have another meal at HE's mum's and then Saturday we are doing a meal for HE's father and stepmother and my aunt. Thanksgiving is my favorite day, so I have no qualms about it being extended.

During this season, may the earth bless you and keep you.  May your loved ones be near in body and spirit.  And may all the gifts, wonders, kindness and abundance of life surround, guide, and protect you. Happy Thanksgiving.

one indignity down

Well, Maisie has gotten at least one indignity (in my experience and that of a number of friends anyway) out of the way...she shat her self in public.  You might think, "What's the big deal?  She's a baby.  She does it all the time."  Which is true, but this was really an exceptional episode as we were in Whole Foods and let's just say we came home with less food than we originally had in the cart.  That's right...the blast blew out or more like, leaked out,  her britches and into the cart.  I will qualify it and say she does have a touch of a GI disturbance, but still it reminded me of  my first retail related bruhaha.  I was in high school and shopping at a mall in Albany, NY with a girl I was trying to impress and her family.  I believe the scene of the crime was JC Penny.  I gave her all my money and asked her to go buy me a new pair of jeans.  After what seemed an eternity in the stall, I heard her mother calling my name and asking me what was going on.  Now, her mother looked like a hotter Shirley Feeney, so you can imagine the degradation.  There was also two sisters and an aunt involved in aiding me in my situation.  The decision was made (and not be me I might add) that we would not buy me new pants and we would go to the aunt's house and do laundry instead. This entailed all new levels of humilation from leaving the bathroom, riding in the car, stripping and borrowing clothes while the wash was being done to explaining to the 14 year old nephew and husband exactly why I had taken to bed in the middle of the afternoon.  I feigned illness to explain the untamed outburst from my nether regions, but the truth was I felt fine, although now of a more dimunitive stature.  To their credit none of them ever gave me grief about it, mostly likely because it or something similar had happened to them or they realized it was just a matter of time.  

INFO OLIO

I want to chronicle a few unrelated happenings, so it would appear we are lacking a theme, hence the olio.

We planted lettuce to see how late into the winter we could go.  It seems as though we have been pretty successful so far.  tonight will be the true test as it is COLD...18 degrees at 10 p.m.

I was walking the dog in the hood the other night (No, this is not a euphemism) and there was a relatively large skunk ambling across someone's yard...I am so happy to have a wildlife sighting, although it did remind me of when I lived in Alfred.  We had huge snow banks one winter there and I was going into the garage one afternoon in February. Suddenly, this sweet faced little skunk came up over the top of the bank and was eye to eye with me.  He was nonplussed and I actually had to get out of his way.  Later that week, our neighbor told a story about a skunk on someone's back porch who had porcupine quills in his face, but was letting the people at the house pet him and then a few days later I found him staggering down the middle of the road, like a drunken sailor giddily making his way home after a bender. The animal control came and ...well you can imagine the rest of the story.  Rabies is like the Alzheimer's of the animal world.

Also, we have discovered the secret to youthful looking skin.  Yo-Baby Organic yogurt.  Use it as you would a facial mask or hand cream...you'll never look more glowing.  Leaves one with a creamy, natural complexion.

The Power and the Promise

I spent today at a beautifully repurposed space at YAI in South Portland attending a Sowing Seeds workshop presented by The Institute for Humane Education .  It was a great mix of lecture, discussion, and activities exploring the arenas of animal rights and welfare, media literacy, environmental issues, and consumerism.  To be encouraged to think critically and temper it with kindness...what a concept.  I would recommend this group to anyone looking for more guidance regarding their own choices/dilemmas regarding "doing the right thing" and how to communicate the far reaching impacts of how we choose to live.  As part of the workshop we received the book The Power and Promise of Humane Education and I bought Above All Else, Be Kind, both by Zoe Weil.  The second one is about raising children to be compassionate and aware and intra/interpersonally powerful in a challenging time.  It is pretty mindblowing to think of Maisie as a changemaker...although she already is as she has transformed me.    

"She loves the bare, the withered tree"...from My November Guest by Robert Frost.

The Artist's Way

We were busy "creating" the past few evenings.  After living with Maisie for the past ten months I can honestly say "Yes, artists are tempermental!".

Redneck Baby Proofing

The title for this post is HE's contribution and refers to the duct taping of the liquor cabinet to keep one VERY active and curious 10 month old out of it.  At least this is not the door to where the actual alcohol is stored, but there is plenty for her to get into with red wine tumblers and vintage glasses.

The banana bread is my tweeked version based on Marjorie Standish's recipe from Cooking Downeast.  I add chocolate chips, walnuts and coconut and undercook it a little bit...it is d-e-l-i-c-i-o-u-s!

November is my favorite month.  I love the bare bones of the trees, especially at night when the stars peek through the branches. I love the squeaking sound the trunks make as they rub against themselves in the cold. I love the first dusting of snow and the way the cold air catches in your throat...it reminds me of a line from an all time favorite poem of mine about November...it is joy, and joy outright. There is so much more I adore about this month...the smell of woodsmoke...I could go on and on. When I was growing up this was the time of anticipation for dogsledding seasons arrival. There are many Saturday nights I am wistful for the Greystone; a local dive, really, in upstate NY.  The worn wooden floor, the jukebox playing old country tunes, the woodstove, cheap drinks,the smell of the cold clinging to patrons jackets as they come in the door, playing pool, the stars twinkling like frost in the sky, snowmobiles lined up in the parking lot...it is a palpable yearning for a different time in my life; a time when people I loved were alive and everything seemed so much more innocent. I am lucky I had the opportunity to relive some of this with my family and friends in my adult life. It and they were the balm that held me together through the deaths of my parents and for this I am ever so thankful.

I hope you all have your own love affair with this season.  Blessings upon you.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

We went to Wolfe's Neck Farm today for an outing.

It was simply stunningly beautiful today, made all the more so by my rapid recovery from yet another gastrointestinal bug that ripped through my system on Halloween. 

With regard to what is beautiful, these turkeys were iridescent in the sunlight and the flesh of their wattles are polychromatic, even though taken as a whole their appearance can be be quite shocking.

And Maisie finds her stroller to be mesmerizingly beautiful...glad she appreciates good design.

Fun

We all make our own fun...if we are creative and engaged.  Maisie's new fun is standing up under her own power.  Here she is looking out the windows alongside our front door.  THEY PROVIDE HOURS OF INTRIGUE for TYLER and ABBY too.

The adults had their fun with another installment of knitting group.

And we had a sighting of Tyler van Pelt.

* I promise we will figure out how to match the text with the photos soon.

The weekends  go by so quickly.  We started ours off with an anniversary dinner at Walter's on Friday night.  Saturday morning Maisie and I participated in the Lighthouse Foundation Walk around the Back Bay in Portland. Saturday night, we took our little monkey to Saco to Pumpkinfest.  Sunday has been more an at home kind of day with chores and NFL and such.

Hope you had a great weekend and a good week ahead.

Grateful

H.E. here dipping my toes into the blogging pond after pissing and moaning to H.T. about my lack of time to do things like blog, read magazines or contemplate my navel...These days, and particularly these weekend days go by too quickly.  We reconnected with friends Clark and Holly at their annual cider fest in York on Saturday-lots of kids, dogs, great food and dueling manual cider presses cranking out gallons of cider. We stayed a bit later than we'd expected in order to take in the beginning of the bonfire.  The little miss was a trooper in spite of the cold. This morning, we bundled her up for a stroll on the eastern trail and she tolerated this with equal good humor (in spite of what the scowl here may suggest).  The trade off for having so little free time and a lengthy list of obligations not completed is the delight that comes from having this little person with us.  My long history of Sunday melancholy has been replaced with gratitude for all the goodness in my life. And while I still have my share of pissiness, as well as a lingering postpartum mental retardation, I am so much better at appreciating each moment.

Grubby Biscuit Hooks

We have a grub problem.  It is not a problem regarding the health of our lawn (which in the long run is not so important as we plan on having quite a bit of it converted to gardens), but it certainly is a problem when it comes to these same  gardens and the hordes of Japanese Beetles we fed this summer and I expect will for more to come. We have roughly 1/2 acre of property, on average there are about 5-7 grubs per foot (at least where I have been digging; this photo was taken on Monday when I was planting the Cucumber Magnolia we bought to celebrate our first Mother's Day[thanks Grampy for helping get it in the ground]). Simple math tells me there is, as a low estimate, potentially 108, 900 grubs on our little patch of earth.  Nematodes and parasitic wasps are some organic solutions to the problem, as well as continued hand picking of the beetles. Apparently, you can tell the species of grub by examining it's poop shoot and the small hairs surrounding it. Not quit sure how I feel about taking up that little hobby...although, I can imagine some nice Liberty Graphic tees  from this sort of thing.

The good news is our soil is quite healthy and also supports a very large (probably equal to the grubs) colony of earthworms.

The MMC ER really wasn't that creepy at 1:30 a.m. with an approaching fullmoon

Yes, we were there early Monday morning with our little miss...we were concerned about her breathing, which seemed rapid and somewhat labored. She had been fighting a cold for a few days and had a few bouts of upchucking, but generally seemed quite pleased with self and the world. At the ER she had a fever of 101.7 which explained alot...some Tylenol and whamo, she was back in business.

She also has a "little chiclet", as HE calls it, of a new tooth popping through her upper choppers.

A Glorious Fall Weekend in New England

This weekend we decided to take a hiatus from doing any chores and spent our time enjoying each other's company (I hope) and doing fun, autumnal things. On Saturday, we went to the farmer's market in Portland and Heather E. got to chat up her beloved Ramona Snell, we bought some great and cheap stuff for Maisie at a used kids clothing store in Falmouth and we went to Skyline Farm to an fundraiser art show.  This place is beautiful and open to the public, skylinefarm.org. Last night we made a beef pot pie and an apple pie and had the company of Carmen (who rules according to the pie).  Today we started the day off with a visit to Heather E.'s Bates roommate, Susan, and her baby daughter, and then we checked out the Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church. From there we went with Mimi to Thompson's Orchard in New Glouster for donuts, apples, and cider and then for a scenic ride to Quaker Ridge in Raymond.  Now, I am ready for some football...Go New England.

I tried to post the other night, but lost the draft with some internet problems and I don't have the energy or memory to recreate it, but I encourage you to read the interview, Everything He Wants to Do is Illegal at motherearthnews.com.  R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

This is the post I thought I lost, the other night:

I've been working on a project for a workshop presentation called The Ecology of Loss.  It is in three parts and focuses on the natural world and loss, companion animals, and climate/species extinction and the grief that accompanies (or should) it.  I am always trying to discover novel and powerful ways to introduce participants to the concepts and get them to a place of caring about "the other" at a corporal level.  Today I was reading an interview  at http://www.motherearthnews.com with Joel Salatin (Everything He Wants to Do Is Illegal).  He speaks eloquently about respect and honor vs. abuse and disregard in the section talking about meat. At his farm, they are trying to offer people alternatives to cultural extremes when it comes to food.  His husbandy is based on respect and gratitude and a wider angle view.  It is hard though to break through the "trance" a lot of folks are in so that they even consider their actions. 

Today, may  you receive and bestow respect.

Mexican cage wrestling and knitting circle

It's been an exciting day here at the grange hall.  We started the morning before school with Maisie's exhilarating round of crib rail rattling and mattress jumping wearing a lovely pink and black Scottie dog poncho and ended the evening with a good old fashioned knitting circle.  I think we are all glad tomorrow is Friday.  I am taking Monday off because Maisie's daycare is closed, so I get to have three days with the girl.  Yippee!

The Remains of the Day

It's10:30 p.m.  and since I picked Maisie up 

at day care I have played with Maisie, changed, Maisie, fed Maisie, gone to buy yarn for our knitting group tomorrow night, gone to the grocery store, fed Maisie, fed myself, made spinach squares for tomorrow night, attended my online class, did dishes twice and updated the blog.  Whew!  This doesn't even account for what Heather E. has been doing...no wonder we are tired.  Look at poor Tyler even. At least he landed on one of Maisie's soft blankets.  One of my friends reminded me that Maisie is Chief Iron in the Fire so here are some pics of her reading before bed, with her most beloved 'tween, Caleb, and modeling her new winter hat.  Off to bed for now because tomorrow is a big day...KNITTING GROUP!