191

So a few of my Minnesota girl friends and I have gotten together and are chatting on a blog I've loosely called "homesteading." The idea behind it came from this post of my friend Angie, where she suggested we get together and trade skills: crafts, home improvements, gardening, whatnot. We're united by wanting to live more eco-conscious lives, more slow fooding, more gardening, more sustainable lifestyles, more handmade gifting, and on. I have kept it Minnesotan, mainly to share resources: farmer's markets, CSAs, shops, classes. And, I hope, maybe we'll be able to have get togethers too, where we can teach each other in person: where we wrestle with sewing machines and knitting needles, try new recipes and trade seeds, check out worm bins and glass studios.

If you're wondering what the above might be all about: homemade dog treats.

It's a learning process, and we welcome any suggestions and ideas. And baby steps. It's the slow pleasure of it that makes the change permanent, turns it into a habit.

190

We're due for snow again tomorrow, the sort that people call weather, you know, with the italics in their voices. I can't remember when we saw bare ground last here, and that's even unique for Minnesota. Some years I wiggled at the window like a five year old, crossing my eyes and my fingers, hoping for a white Christmas. This year, it started around Thanksgiving and just didn't stop coming.

Despite all this, it does not stop me from dreaming about next year's garden. Last night, I dreamed the snow all vanished, that I had put seedlings in the ground, that it was still January, and because the little bits were so easily fooled, I had two eggplants, two beefsteak tomatoes (strangely square shaped too), snap peas, carrots, perfect zucchinis, all coming up, popping right off their stalks. In January. In Minnesota.

I picked up one of those monthly gardening guides for Minnesota while doing inventory at work (ah, the curse of inventory: organizing and checking those shelves is like watered down shopping; I tried to pick sections I wouldn't salivate over as much, but I wound up being assigned to science and nature, gardening, sociology... Fortunately not fiction, but still, I did not have a chance). I don't know if I've ever read a reference book such as this cover-to-cover, but it's my intention to do so with this one, along with a book Chris gave me: Worms Eat my Garbage. Part of my reasoning behind not reading these sorts of books but browsing instead is because facts simply don't stick in my brain, no matter how excited I get by learning. I am working to change that.

Tonight I signed up for a class called From Farm to Fork: Becoming a Part of the Slow Food Movement. I'm looking forward to settling in with a community of people who are at the beginning stages as I have been, who have been dabbling maybe for a few years (as I have been), and who want to make more of a commitment. Who look out into their yard, see the debris of last year's garden, and can only imagine possibilities.

189: sa-gah

Photo: by Ryan, on his camera phone
Me, reading with Penelope and Gatsby curled up on top
Also: hat, hand knit by my mother, plaid shawl made by my sister,
blanket on far right made by my mother-in-law.
That's a lot of love and cozy. :)

I caved. I read the Twilight sa-ga, back to back, with little breaks to eat, sleep, shift more books around at work. I am not ashamed of my delvings, though, unlike Emily, I will puff out my chest and admit that I am entirely a book snob, that I want the writing to be good in order to be enamored. This does not, however, mean that I can be sucked in by mediocre writing (or that my own writing is anything more than mediocre). Dan Brown: case in point. I wanted to pull my hair out, his prose was so awful, but I read each and every one of his books, staying up quite late and abandoning many responsibilities simply because I could not put them down.

And here too, I marathoned through these books.

But with a wary eye.

Pluses:
+ I loved the setting. Give me the Washington coast any day. Ferns and moss and towering trees and the ocean.
+ I loved that Bella loves books. Sadly, the only mention of the pleasure of shopping for books (in Seattle) never came to fruition, though occasionally the main character speaks of tattered copies of Wuthering Heights and Romeo and Juliet. It fades fairly quickly in the book.
+ Bella is humble. I like humble folk. Probably one of the driving forces behind my powerful admiration of my husband, who is hugely smart and talented, and denies every last bit. Sincerely.
+ Kindness and family. This book is about love, and not just about boy-and-girl love. Bella's best friend is a subject of unwavering love too--and how family isn't just Mom and Dad and brother and sister. Family takes on all kinds of forms. I ought to know.
+ And putting family first is good. Learning is good too, though it doesn't always have to take on ivy towered forms. (Says the girl on her third degree.) I know there's a lot of criticism about this issue (and if I'm being cryptic, it's because I hate spoiling it for those who haven't read it, though I may do so inadvertently anyway--sorry!), but I am of the school of thought that one ought to follow one's happiness and not a formula for said happiness. (I do wish the author hadn't mentioned Bella was in AP classes in the first book, then professed her ordinary throughout--of average intelligence, etc. Not that I didn't encounter my fair share of ordinary in AP classes; I'm probably a good example! But my point is not to mention something casually like that, something that could be important in character development, and change that aspect of the character later.)

Minuses:
- I've already picked apart Disney, that guilty pleasure where the worlds have often been filled with no mother figures save the evil stepmother and the storyline that falling in love is the only happy ending, so it seems I can't resist here either: there is a deep rooted desire to be taken care of; I love it when Ryan is gentle and kind when I am unwell or sad and all I want is to curl up against him and feel protected. But! Three and a half of these books are all about this helpless person who cooks and cleans for her father and whose mother is a flake. And how many times was Bella carried or cradled by a male figure in the book? Though, I must admit, being a vampire isn't about gender, nor is the strength derived from being a vampire about gender. I might just be bristling from the section of her thank you's where S.M. thanks her family for putting up with going out to eat so often--I'm doubly grateful my husband and I are together in the kitchen, together in home repairs (though we do err on the side of traditional gender roles in who "leads"--with my parents, it is the opposite, and some day I will re-dedicate another post to that).
- The prose is plain and repetitive.
- The plot is (fairly) plain and repetitive.
- If I have to read "liquid topaz" or "statue" or the "planes of his chest" again to describe a character, or nearly anything, I shall scream. I swear it.
- Likewise, or "trembling" or anything about breathing or heartbeats ending while kissing or the way glass or skin fractures like diamonds...
- There's also the "chaperoning" issue. And the cliches. Most of my issues are related to style.
- The author is none too subtle with the literary references. I realize this is a teen book, but allow those connections to WH and R+J come about with allusion. Slappity-slap-slap in the face.
- OK, I love a good love story. But vomit and over-the-top. Yes, I loved staying up until the sun rose just talking to Ryan, I still do. My favorite moments in this house are when we sit down and have conversations that trail around for hours. And the subtleties of brushing up against one another, etc. But really? All those clueless doe-eyed moments made me squirm. It was a soap opera, to be un-unique in my description. I'm more impressed with subtle shows of love.
- Each book could use some serious editing for streamlining the story. One issue here is that the books are so "addictive," so the reader plows through them in less than a week. Of course we don't need reminders, gentle or otherwise, or loops in conversations / descriptions. We're hooked; we can't stop reading the dang things. Not get rid of the excess so we can get to the story faster.
- And the characters can be clueless. I like a little surprise; certain twists are obvious to the reader for dozens and dozens of pages before actual revelation occurs. Not painfully clueless though. Just a bit dopey.

Other items of interest:
~ The first book in the series is on the syllabus for the class I'm TAing next semester. Huh. The class is geared toward freshmen and folks who are using this as a requirement and won't take many other English classes in the future, so our goal is to give the students a little glimpse into the joy of reading and discussing. Perhaps you could call this my warm-up, though I promise not to wrinkle my nose too much in discussion.
~ I am in love with this book review. Hilarious!
~ Atlantic Monthly has an interesting review discussing what girls want and focuses on the success of the Twilight series.

188: Reading

Come, if you can!:

POETRY READING:
Greg Watson & Molly Sutton Kiefer
Thursday, February 19th at 7:00 pm
Barnes and Noble at Har Mar
2100 Snelling Ave N in Roseville, MN (just off Hwy. 36)

187

My path up the hill is punching through icy snow; I look back, and it appears a giant has broken the crust of this white earth. When the dogs play, they burrow their muzzles into that crust, and it sounds like glass tinkling. Everything shines; the bokeh is glorious when the sun is lighting up the tips of branches. We didn't last long at the park though; it was in the single digits and the tips of our fingers, our chin, our noses began to burn and I'm still wearing my winter hat, hours later, along with two layers of socks and two pairs of flannel pajama pants. I'd crowed of how adapted to this weather I was to the incoming MFA students, those from the coast, from farther south, but this winter has been so much more brutal thus far: snowfall records being broken in neighboring states, ice storms making the backyard a rink. It's too beautiful to stay long indoors for long.

186: Knitted Cloths

In the recent years, it was scarves. Endless garter stitch scarves.

This year, it's washcloths, dishcloths, whatever you wish to call them. Here are some shots of the ones I made for the holidays and the links to the patterns, should you feel so inclined to make one of your very own:

For Grandma: Obama and Hummingbird.


For Chelsea: Don't Mess With Texas.


For Dad: Armadillo


For Mom: Eiffel Tower


For my Parents-in-law: Paw Print (we don't need to discuss my whoops on this one)


Kelly's son, Christian: Skully and Big Rig

(All the red comes from a cone my mother in law passed along to me--and I still have a lot left!)

185: the way to spend the first of the year

"Get used to this," Kelly tells her cartoonishly happy son. "This is the way Auntie Molly is."

He's warm, he's sweet, he's just over six months old, weighing in at nineteen pounds and Lordy, this kid can smile. Kelly was blessed with a relatively easy pregnancy and blessed with a relatively easy baby: even the nurses comment on how content he is, how bright he can be. He loves to be read to too, which is good, because books are nearly all he's gotten from me.

Kelly's had a rough go of it recently though: her husband, whose face emerges in their son in frightening ways (no milkman's child, this!), now spends nights away at a stretch, his long haul truck taking him across the country full of cabinets and whatnot, and Kelly is left to face the messy diapers and the singing to sleep. Nothing can be more delightful than that early love of a child, but what I've realized about this family is how important the husband-and-wife love is too: rare are those couples that wear their love on their sleeve after years of togetherness, but Richard's devotion to Kelly is fantastically undiminished. I imagine Kelly as they wait for a more locally bound job to arise, she in the dim of the holiday lights, the television glowing, the warmth of her son's little torso bearing down in her arms, the goodness of that and how she probably tries to hold it tight, bottle it up somehow in her memory so she can find a way to give that back to her husband--a thousand minutes missed, those clever little smiles of his.

Tonight Ryan and I were lucky enough to spend a bit of the first of the year with Kelly and Christian, and I am reminded again of how deep my oldest friend's patience can be: Ryan chasing Logger about into a frenzy, this little dog leaping onto couch and against Christian, the dog barking, the cats yowling, her son's drooly little fingers twisting around book's pages. It wasn't quite chaos, but the sort of energy that would leave me spent as an observer, and there she is, smiling away, her burbling son miming the smile right back.

Good people. We all need to surround ourselves with good people, and today, that's just what I did.

PS: Feel free to go check out the outtakes. :)