~thankful thursday~ seed bank

Posted on November 12, 2020 by marybethrew

11/5/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5

I have kept a gratitude journal for much of 2020. It helps me in November, and this year I needed help in all the other months. I was also looking ahead with some awareness that this November might not be my finest hour either, and thought of it as an investment, but it’s not really money in the bank I’m picturing. More like a seed bank, like I was putting away seeds from the flowers I grew this summer, knowing I would need to have the memory of past flowers and the hope of future flowers tucked in a safe place in order to get through the flowerless days. In July I recognized this, and was grateful for, “this garden of gratitude I am growing, one which will be able to be visited in November and harvested from when I may not have enough of what is in season.”

A few of the summer seeds I collected in my bank:

7-12

Hummingbird having a snack of crocosmia while the sprinkler was watering the terrace garden, and then resting on the flower stem to have a little shower before taking off again.

8-27

Pulled over on Otter Crest Loop overlook and took pictures of the beautiful blue ocean, trees, rocks, Queen Anne’s lace. Whales came by to say hello.

9-1

The smell of fifty pounds of beautiful peaches ripening in the kitchen.

9-3

Egrets wading in the bay as we drove the bay road home for date night pizza night. Their reflections in the blue, blue water (so nice and sunny) were just stunning.

9-5

Having enough energy to chop two ziplock bags of peppers for the freezer and can nine pints of fresh chopped heirloom tomatoes in rainbow colors, the urgent care variety I salvaged from the compost bin at market. One green zebra tomato (with one tiny squashed shoulder) the size of my head filled two pints with one more chopped piece leftover… one pink damsel that was about the same size (with one hole poked in it from another stem)! By tomorrow these would have been slumping with mold. Some beautiful vegetables are so vulnerable that it defies all pragmatism to try to bring them home, but I do it anyway, to honor the farming wrought, against all pragmatism, to bring them into being.

9-17

Walk on the beach- a fun egg case, a new nudibranch, and the whole place to myself since I arrived at dawn in the fog. Just what I needed.

Date night. Always.

11-5 today:

Speaking of date night, it is date night once again… modified for the times we inhabit, but we still observe this weekly tradition. I am grateful my love didn’t look at my tenderness, my propensity to fall to pieces, and decide I was too vulnerable, grateful that he defied all pragmatism and brought me home anyway. Grateful for the gratitude seed bank today.

11/6/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 6

I am grateful for the tiny bird that visited my window this morning, when the sun came out (grateful for the sun). I did not think I would get any photos but this little guy really wanted to check out what was going on in our living room, and kept lurking long enough for camera retrieval, and even after Lisa kitty wandered over and settled herself down to watch the nature channel. (The bird did decide to depart when Bart panther-pounced up beside Lisa.)

I am no birder, but my Sibley guide said it might be a Ruby-crowned kinglet. They would like our spruce trees, and would be coming down out of the treetops this time of year to migrate, possibly. When I first saw this bird’s head, I thought it could have bashed its head on the window and been bleeding. No, it was a little more red violet than red, so maybe it had smashed one of my last few raspberries on his head (DIY raspberry beret?) and finally I got a good enough look to realize it was the actual color of the feathers. (Parsimony would have helped me here.)

I later discovered that the scientific name of this little bird is Regulus calendula, and, of course this magical creature would be named after a star and a flower. Not just any star… the first schooner bunk I slept in on my first semester at sea was also named Regulus. And not just any flower… calendula, one of the only things still blooming in my flower pots in November, a botanical healer, an edible salad topping, and of which quinn asked me as a toddler, “are you going to put calend-u-willa on that owie to feel it better?”

Basically, this little bird might as well have started singing to me, “you belong among the wildflowers, you belong on a boat out at sea, far away from your trouble and worry…”

So it was an easy choice today, though happy nacho day to those celebrating (we’re out of avocados, such bad form! We all know I will be grateful for nachos other days this month!)

11/7/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

I am grateful that a woman can hold the office of the vice president of this country, and not just in theory anymore, but in reality.

What it’s like for me personally, is I’m just now realizing how much it matters to me. I have been thinking for a while, like since maybe a little over four years ago, of how it matters to little girls everywhere, watching, listening, absorbing, that women be trusted with positions of power, but it hit me tonight that, as Quinn pointed out to me one time, I was once a girl. Tonight, hearing our Vice President-elect say, “I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” was the moment I could no longer hold back tears. The other thing this election outcome is like, for me personally, is like the time when I was leaving an abusive relationship and I was having a panic attack that I had almost forgotten to get some of his tools out of the vehicle we had shared, and my guy friend who was helping me pack my U-haul told me, “MB, someday, someone is going to say nice things to you.”

I’m getting pretty used to the person I’m married to saying nice things to me all the time, I mean it’s pretty relentless, all the nice things he says, and does. Also, when I showed up wildly unprepared for cold rain and gusting wind at farmer’s market today (pretty sure I’m not the only one with some of my ducks not in a row this week), I was so grateful for his XL hooded sweatshirt (and the fishing community who keeps him supplied with F/V swag from all the boats he works so hard to build and repair every day) stowed in the back of the car, which nested nicely atop my size M sweatshirt and kept me warm for the whole day.

I am grateful to be able to look forward to having a president very soon who, when he speaks, will not trigger memories of years of emotional abuse. A nice aside is that the President-elect is the very guy who wrote the legislation that enabled me to get a restraining order when I needed one. America, get ready, because someday soon, someone is going to say nice things to you.

11/8/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

I am grateful for the glorious weather today as my honey and I made our annual honey pilgrimage to obtain our four-gallon bucket of gold. I am grateful for the fully stocked chest freezer and pantry heading into the season of slow cookers and staying in. I am grateful for the way the god light was slanting through the conifers in the fog as we drove east, and for the colorful trees painting our journey into a rainbow road trip.

11/9/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

Today when I was waiting an extra long time for my grocery order, I was grateful I had brought along my book. I am grateful for the ability to order groceries from home and pick them up outside the store, and for the energetic youth who cheerfully hoisted two cubic yards of potting soil into my trunk, saying he does the same to help his grandmother, who also likes to garden. I’m grateful the store gave me a discount I didn’t ask for, just because I had to wait; I basically got paid to read fifty delicious pages. I am so grateful, in case I haven’t said it yet this year, for good books. Sometimes, they take me right out of myself, and sometimes they pour me right back in. I have leaned on them hard this year for both of these essential services.

11/10/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

There are days when writing a gratitude post is like plucking words from the air as easily as picking raspberries off the vines in the vase on my kitchen table. Even though I spent part of my day today studying word-crafting, tonight I am in percolating, not plucking mode.

I do have one gratitude I’ve been tucking away for a day when I was otherwise undecided. I have been having a much easier time waking up in the morning this November, having finally bought myself a full-spectrum light near the end of October. I’ve suspected myself to be a SAD puppy for a lot of years now, so I’m not sure why this took me so long. I’m grateful that when I mentioned it, my husband was also wondering why we didn’t already have one, and happily turned it on for me the first few mornings, during his usual wake-up (yes, I’m a grown-ass woman who has trouble waking up before dawn without help). The thing is, just a week or two in, I’m already awake enough to turn it on for myself, and more importantly, I don’t feel like rotten black death inside for the first hour of the day as my body rejects it’s-still-night-time like a mismatched organ. I don’t know what wizardry this is, but I know this little light is better than any supplement has ever done by me. We call it my sun ball.

When I was buying it Rich supportively said he thought it would help us both, though he felt he may not be as affected by shortening daylight as I am because, he said, “I generate light.” Boy does he ever. (He meant welding but I mean how he lights up my life.)

11/11/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

Today I am grateful for and in awe of the connections… the unseen order of things… the cosmic consciousness. This may not make any sense to anyone else, and I’m okay with that. (I’m not taking this class for a grade!) I was told to “just obey it” yesterday when the wrong scene came to my mind during my writing workshop, and I spent ten minutes writing descriptive language about a scene I had no idea was connected to the piece I’m writing. Turns out it was so integrally connected, I spent the next twenty-four hours with wave after wave of profound revelations crashing over me. A significant breakthrough. In the earlier part of the class, when asked to explain why I was the most qualified person to write what I’m writing, I wrote why I’m the expert on mothering my son, including a sentence about the placenta that it still in a ziplock in the back of my freezer. Then today, as I was reading more of my book (my teacher is one of the authors), I came across a passage where she announced to her teen daughter that her placenta is still in the freezer. Shortly afterward, a rainbow came pouring across the page as the low and lazy November sun streamed in through the glass block window.

In other literary news, Rich and I discussed this morning what constitutes a nacho (singular). Grateful for November nacho nights, a pair of placentas, and rainbow connections.

~thankful thursday~ trilliums are red violet, shop towels are blue

Posted on April 23, 2020 by marybethrew

~timeline/gratitude~

Saturday 4-4 With all of the mask-making theory coming across my screen, it’s no wonder I woke up thinking about the people sitting at their sewing machines to produce PPE to donate for health care workers. It called to mind a saintly woman I haven’t thought of in a long time, Grandma Jo, who used to lead us in rolling torn bedsheet bandages for missions when I was a small child. She was not my grandma but she was everyone’s grandma.

When Rich alerted me that some studies are showing that blue shop towels provide a superior material for making masks, I had to admit that I was not surprised.

Quinn is back in a phase of wanting to binge watch all of Vi Hart’s math videos. Today, after Quinn and I spoke, she put out her first-author publication about contact tracing to digitally slow the spread of the virus. What an amazing woman. Vi Hart is extraordinary, and I am not sad that Quinn idolizes her. She is the Isaac Newton type, and I’m not even going to hold that against her.

I was visited by birthday santa yesterday, then a birthday easter bunny left a big pile of veggies on the door step. Then camp boss must have been birthday tooth fairy, because she made lasagna rolls for dinner and a peanut butter pie for me tonight, with a card and flower bulbs. I am so grateful for my dear friends who made sure my pandemic birthday didn’t slip by uncelebrated.

~timeline~

Sunday 4-5 I slept in (it felt super late) until 7:30. I made coffee and we ate more peanut butter pie to give me the energy to cook potatoes, eggs scrambled with spinach and garlic and topped with leftover sausage gravy.

Q and I spent almost two hours on hangouts today doing math doodles. His choice of activity lately is to watch Vi Hart videos “with me” meaning he’s watching them, I’m watching his face in hangouts and maybe also playing the video on my phone. But mostly just looking at him because it’s all I want to do. I suggested that today we bring graph paper to our hangout and do some of the math doodling she talks about and we worked on Pascal’s triangle and Ulam’s spiral and then he wanted to do a Fibonacci spiral. When he had drawn the squares and it was time to draw the spiral he said, “the perfect spiral in any given square of your series is the same as the infinitieth iteration of the net thingie…. I think for my next programming assignment in javascript I should program a Fibonacci spiral and have it draw the spiral using the distance between two pixels, I could have a totally netted up Fibonacci spiral … hmm, where did I put my pencil?” Absent-minded professor Quinn.

Grateful that some are using this time to kick coronavirus butt. Grateful that it is also okay to not be a super-efficient pandemic producer and to be just managing to do the daily necessities and not invent gravity or write King Lear or cure any diseases or sew a hundred masks or write any books or even any chapters.

Cooked stir fry, joking with Rich that he could do it (it is fabled by his children that his stir fry is the yummiest in all the land, but alas, I have never tasted this mythical ambrosia.) In the middle of cooking the carrots, I had to turn off the burner and go outside with my camera to witness the rainbowiest rainbow I have ever seen. It hung out over our house/forest for a very long time.

I am feeling a little withdrawn. I know that social distancing is really a physical thing in time and space, not a social thing in terms of connecting with our loved ones, and that connections matter even more right now. And yet, I feel very depleted and unable to handle much connection, cannot handle much discourse without totally wiping out everything I have left in my emotional reserve, and defaulting to less is more when it comes to communication. Trying to find a balance with connecting in ways that do not contribute to the depletion, but instead help to replenish the reservoir.

Monday 4-6 Having mutual pep talks with Lau, about how we need to cut ourselves some slack. I could not get started on work this morning, so I graded camp boss’s son’s home school science labs and swished the toilets. Now I’m feeling like I can tackle some work with audio Harry Potter for company. Something has got to give. We have to be kind to ourselves.

Tuesday 4-7 Today was sunshine and birdsong. Today I parked a lawn chair in the bayou and did an hour and a half of data analysis overlooking the trout lilies.

John Prine passed away today, such very sad news. I have loved his music since the days I dragged my guitar along on schooners and we would sit around on deck at night and sing Angel from Montgomery and Paradise, all the way until now when I burn his songs onto my love’s mix cds, because “in spite of ourselves, we’ll end up sittin’ on a rainbow.”

~4-8 gratitude~

I spent an hour in the bayou this morning while it was sunny on the trout lilies. Heavenly.

Quinn and I sink into an hour and a half of hexaflexagon making on our hangout, easily folding ourselves into this comfortingly familiar activity. Like a plate of nachos or a hot bath, it soothes us to just sit together and crease paper strips into a long accordions of triangles, then twist them into a foldy hexagon. His face smiles at me through the curve of the tape dispenser among the screenshots I have gotten in the habit of capturing while we spend our space phone call together each day. I started drawing butterflies on my hexaflexagon, so that when I fold it, they can trade wings, change directions of their flight, and reunite their wings in cycles.

~timeline~

Wednesday 4-8 Grocery store run – first in two weeks and two days. Needed coffee and will soon need dairy products. I buy organic milk as usual. I think about dairy farmers as I place the carton in my cart and push it towards the self check-out. Without the restaurants and schools they normally supply with milk they have been dumping it into their manure pits. I am not sure the organic farmers are in the same predicament – I suspect not. As a dairy farmer’s daughter, this whole category of thought makes me want to weep.

It was announced today that Oregon schools are closed for the rest of the school year. I know we all saw it coming, but the response among fellow parents seems to be dismay. I feel that ship had already sailed for me – I was already operating under the assumption of done for the year, but I also have a much easier schooling situation than some, with just one thirteen-year-old. He is not a senior, he is not a small child. It is an oddly “good” time to have a pandemic, middle school (raise your hand if spending some of your seventh grade year at home would have been okay?). He is fairly self-tending, without any major high stakes like graduation and college entry looming. If anything, this is freeing him up to pursue his chosen learning endeavors, and I secretly hope he really likes it and wants to choose to continue it (but please let it be by choice in fall 2020, not because of pandemic reasons.)

Amanda Shires’ iso-lounging show tonight was a tribute to John Prine. Amanda and Jason shared that the advice to couples they had received from John and Fiona, the most important thing from their perspective, was to stay vulnerable. Both Rich and I seem to have been overcome at the same moment by a sudden cloud of cat hair in the living room.

Thursday 4-9 Rich’s 50^th birthday!

I gave him his painting right away in the morning, I couldn’t wait! He loved it. Then I made him french toast and sent him off to work. I ordered us Sorella’s for dinner: lasagna, rigatoni and meatballs, caesar salad, garlic bread, a half rack of ribs, and chocolate cannoli for birthday dessert. I lit the tall taper rainbow candles, sat on his lap and sang him happy birthday. Then we both got sleepy in our chairs and fell into bed as usual.

all found artistry is on etsy and is the same artist who made my wedding earrings; check her out!

I had a moment where I needed to clear the table so Rich could eat his ribs there (instead of his chair in the living room), but he came to the kitchen before I had a chance to clear it, and I found that I could not let him clear anything, as this is now my work place as well as my virtual parenting space. I’ve been camped at the kitchen table for weeks now, and I’m going to need to be there again tomorrow and know where to find things. It took me a few minutes to realize why clearing the table was such a big deal but when so many things feel out of control, it amplifies one’s need to control the little things when one can.

Planning ahead for Friday game night hangout, Quinn decided we should design our own d and d dice (4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, 12- and 20-sided) out of paper and then make up a game to play using them. I knew it would take us far longer than Friday to make such a thing, but agreed it sounded fun and we started in on our project.

~meme of the day~

“It’s just that masks are terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.” ~ the Dread Pirate Roberts

~timeline~

Friday 4-10 Today might be a little hard. It is day 14 since the family visit but Quinn has been thinking it over and he wants to stay at his Dad’s until “we hit our peak” and then come back here to “ride out the rest,” and I am struck by his maturity level and how literate he is on this subject. So I am supporting his decision and he is not going to come home today as we had tentatively planned, and I’m trying not to think about how our peak is still estimated to be in the future and how this estimate can change based on so many factors out of my control.

~4-10 gratitude~

I am feeling grateful today for our continued incomes, our solid relationship, and strangely, the timing of this in my life’s timeline. Lauren and I talked about how there were times in our lives that would have been so much worse to have had to live through a pandemic. I mentioned last post about having had far worse birthdays – those were spent under the same roof with a person I am so thankful to not have been stuck in shelter-in-place with back at that time because, oh, lord. It makes me mindful of those who are stuck in homes in abusive circumstances, and seeing how high emotions are right now, I know in my gut, without having to check statistics that I am sure would only confirm, that abuse is skyrocketing behind so many closed doors. Just like I’m grateful for this timing for my son – who is neither a toddler nor a 17 year old, and who is dealing very well with missing seventh grade, I am ever so grateful for my life situation, safe at home under the same roof as a wonderful, kind husband. I am also grateful to have heard from my parents on my birthday and hear my dad jump briefly on the line to tell me, “I had a cold but I got over it.”

This week has been a sunshine daydream and I’ve spent many of my work hours in my bayou office beside the trout lilies. I keep my camera handy in case a hummingbird visits again, but mostly I’m pressing data through the playdough fun factory at a pretty high level of efficiency, considering this is a pandemic and all. Today I did see an osprey briefly circle above the spruce boughs, and the sun shone through its fanned tail feathers so brightly that the light spots shone like stained glass, outlined by the dark feathers against the clear blue sky.

The trout lilies are starting to drop petals and some of them have seed pods starting to swell, but the late bloomers still have their petals and have been throwing them back in a sun dance all week. A time to mourn, a time to dance.

The trilliums, too, are beginning to age, but while they look a little more weathered, they are also turning the most beautiful shade of red violet. This makes me think of Glennon Doyle’s pep talk the other day about how we need to burn the memo we received that says, “my role as a parent is to protect my child from pain.” She says it better than I could paraphrase, but the gist is that pain is going to shape our kids, is shaping them right now, in this painful time, and they are going to be all the more amazing and strong and resilient and brave and wise and smart and compassionate because of it. Burn the memo, because our job is not to protect them from it. I don’t mean that I won’t protect him from physically catching this virus – I will – that is my job, as much as it is in my power, to protect him from physical harm – but protecting him from the emotional pain of knowing about it, from understanding the impacts it is having on his community and the world, no. He is grappling with that in his own way and I’m not going to try to keep him from experiencing that. I wonder just how many young people are deciding to pursue medical careers as this pandemic unfolds. I would not be surprised if there is a surge in nursing and pre-med enrollment in the years to come. At the end of the day, humanity is still humanity, and we create new meaning even as we mourn the death of our old normal. We may come through this season of shadows more weathered and beat up, but we are also turning a deeper shade of red violet.