Really?

Amanda and Tom came to Seattle with the girls, and we had a little fiesta last night to celebrate my birthday.  When that Beatles song came out in 1967, I couldn't imagine ever being that old.

And then, I blinked.

Hiding out in the back of Grandpa's closet...

 Modeling new hats...

Chicken enchiladas for dinner, and then a tres leche carmel cake from the Salvadorian Bakery. There was a slight glitch in the translation, and "Nana" became "Nena."

No one seemed to notice...

Thanks for making my birthday so much fun!

Good riddance, March

March came in like a lion...and goes out like a lion.  It will also go on record as the wettest March ever, and there still isn't a sunny day in the forecast.

It's been a tough time here lately, with the awful landslide and grim, tragic news. Also a good reminder of how very much we take for granted. We believe our lives are solid and indestructible, but nature can sweep everything away as easily as a fairy house.

The heavy rain knocked the hyacinths to the ground. This is a trivial complaint, plus it gave me an excuse to make a gorgeous, fragrant bouquet for the house.

There is some sunshiny news this morning, because our family will be making a short stop in Seattle on Saturday. They are heading home after a week vacation in Oregon.   We have not seen the little girls for two months!  Amanda sent these pictures, and it looks more like "big" girls now.  

Nova

Maya

Hermosa Beach reminiscence

Last week when I was sorting through old photos to scan I ran across this one-- my first home away from home.   I think that's skinny, young Jerry posing with his giant surfboard.  We lived upstairs, and for a short while in 1968 my mother lived in the first floor apartment below with my brother Dave.  As I remember, he had a bed in the closet. 

If you walked up those rickety stairs and opened the door, you would have found a dingy studio that rented for $78 a month, utilities included.  It was damp with fleas in the carpet and the only heat was the kitchen oven, but it was just a sweet block away from the ocean.  The Los Angeles beach cities like Hermosa, Redondo and Manhattan were the epicenter of the wacky 60's hippie and surfer lifestyle, exactly where we wanted to be. 

This 1970's photo of a Hermosa Beach back street is from a blog called Mindwrecker. I don't remember this dude in the cool vest, but he might have been a friend! Our street (an alley, really) looked exactly like this, littered with Volkswagens parked in every crevice.

The one room apartment came furnished with a rusty dinette set and a Riviera convertible sofa bed upholstered in turquoise leatherette.  Riviera Manufacturing Co. in L.A. was known for stylish, sturdy sofa beds designed not to sag.  It was hard as a rock.

Along with the private roof for sunbathing, the sofa was the status symbol of the apartment, although it had already seen some heavy wear by the time we moved in.  It was the source of many jokes, because everyone at the time knew the commercial slogan “Live on the Riviera…Convertible Sofa, That Is."

You could walk everywhere in Hermosa Beach-- the post office, library, five and dime, free clinic, bakery and Bank of America (not that we had much business there.) One of the first Taco Bells opened along the beach strand, and the four items on the menu were all 25 cents: taco, burrito, tostado and the unforgettable Bell-Beefer. Many a cheap supper.

Best of all, Hermosa Beach was home of the quirky Either/Or bookstore, the radical counter-cultural center of the L.A. beach cities.

It was nice to mill around and read books you couldn't afford to buy. After many decades on the same street,  Either/Or finally closed in 1999.  Some of us will always remember it as the best independent bookstore ever, along with a California beach lifestyle that seems almost unbelievable now. 

Thankful

You can't help getting older, 

but you don't have to get old.  

~George Burns

Here's a picture of our amazing parents Sam and Marge, both approaching their 90th birthdays and out shopping for a new recliner in Colorado Springs yesterday. In a week of awful news and disasters, it helps to remember how lucky we are.  Thanks, Marji, for the great picture.

National Pecan Day

March 25th is National Pecan Day.  In February, when we were in Green Valley, south of Tucson, we drove by orchards of enormous, dead-looking trees.  We found out later they were deciduous pecan trees.   The pecan is the only nut tree native to North America.  Their natural range looks like this:

The top pecan producing state is Georgia, but they're grown in other places too, like New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Arizona.  The United Sates produces 95% of the world supply from about 10 million trees. China now consumes more than a third of the supply. Prior to 2001, they didn't know what a pecan was in China. Now they're crazy about them.  

This year a pecan  shortage is driving up the price due to demand, bad weather and believe it or not, feral pigs, which have become quite a problem in some areas. 

The trees can grow to 170 feet, so pruning (called hedging) is a major operation with heavy equipment.  They can live almost 300 years. 

In the desert pecan trees are irrigation hogs, and the orchards are literally flooded with water.

Pecans contain plant sterols, and eating a handful of pecans each day may help lower cholesterol levels as well as cholesterol-lowering medications.  And pecan pie tastes a lot better than a pill.

 Happy Pecan Day!

Thoughts on practicing

Zen meditation and AA sobriety are both referred to as "practices."  But of course practicing is any activity where you dedicate regular time and effort. Walking, drawing, painting, playing an instrument, knitting, gardening, biking, quilting, building birdhouses...it doesn't matter.

The problem with practicing is that our world is addicted to outcomes, and only a linear progression of competency from beginner to expert is proof of real progress.  How many times have you heard, "Practice makes perfect?"  Maybe, but perfection is always around the corner.

If you practice instead for the sake of practice, you'll start to notice the small shifts and changes and the self-critical voice quiets down. When that happens, the practice becomes the practice.  It doesn't make it any easier, because any practice requires focus and commitment to a discipline.  In meditation practice, everyone admits to "falling off the cushion" now and then.  With hobbies, we give up when we decide it's never going to be good enough.   

I ran across my old 2009 sketchbook while cleaning out a bookcase last week.  Somehow I found time back then to sit and doodle, copying plants and flowers from old botanical drawings. This isn't fine art or anything (self-judging, again) but I must have put some effort into these little pen and pencil drawings. It was a sad reminder of a practice I once enjoyed and let go.  What happened to that extra hour in the day? And what would I give up now to get it back?

Simplicity is complicated

There's a company in Seattle called 1-800-JUNK.  I see their trucks all the time, so they must do a good business.  They'll come and haul your old stuff off to the expensive municipal transfer station (we don't use the "dump" word in Seattle) or, wherever?  Once you pay them, it isn't your problem anymore. They left a flier on our front porch a month ago, which was slightly insulting, like getting unsolicited negative feedback from a stranger. 

But, it made me take a hard look at our mess of a yard. There's a fine line between shabby chic and plain old shabby.  I was crossing over into trashy territory. To make it worse, I had those aches and pains last fall so I didn't do my usual tidy cleanup.

Our slightly falling down gazebo (which I dearly love for its Wabi-Sabi perfection) was crammed willy-nilly with lawn chairs, tables, mossy garden "ornaments" and all the other stuff I'd shoved in there to "store" for the winter.  No wonder it caught the eye of the junk man. The garden was littered with moldy and cracked pots full of dead or just plain ugly root-bound plants.  And the shed/garage?  Enough to make a 1-800-JUNK guy salivate.

So I've been on a huge cleaning out, cleaning up jag this week-- room by room, space by space, indoors and outdoors. I'm not nearly done, but starting to feel light as a feather. Yesterday two big loads went to the Goodwill: boxes of pots, vases, plastics, hoses made in hell, old yard tools, TWO spreaders for spewing chemicals on the lawn (really?) and so on.

It's going to be a beautiful spring day, perfect for ferreting out more clutter and dirt.  When the sun comes up, the plan is to clean the outside windows and pull the Christmas lights down from the arbor where the clematis is now starting to bloom.  Yes, you heard me right. Christmas lights.

Primavera

The Spring Equinox is at 9:57 this morning in Seattle.  In June, there will be some light in the sky almost 20 hours a day.  For those of us who go to bed early, it's kind of sad listening to your neighbors frolicking around outside on sunny midsummer evenings.  

I think the Equinox is the perfect time of year, when day and night are almost exactly the same length.  Like living in the warm tropics, where equal light and dark seems to have mellowing effect on all your habits.

Equinox, equator, equilibrium, equation, etc.   Good words that imply regulation and natural balance, whether you're teaching math, riding a horse, making a recipe, climbing a mountain or just living your life.

After such a hard winter across the country, welcome Spring!  I think some pretty paintings are in order this morning.

Botticelli, Primavera detail

Alma Tadema, Bluebells

Walter Crane, Spring

Arthur Buckland, Spring's End

Ford Madox Brown, The Pretty Baa-Lambs

John Waterhouse, Psyche

Sophie Anderson, Spring Blossom

Harold Knight, In the Spring

 John Waterhouse, Windswept

Alphonse Mucha, Study for Spring

Henry Ryland, Spring

A clean house

Well, I don't know about that, but there's something about spring cleaning that makes a natural-born housewife feel virtuous.  I've been working like crazy this week, inside and out. After the dark months, what could be nicer than sun shining through clean windows into dust free corners?  It's the small things in life.  

Spring Cleaning

Clean away the cobwebs
make light of dirt and grime
wave high those feather dusters
it's now spring cleaning time
for spring's first day has broken
and those windows must be cleaned
cold winter's grey has gone away
replaced with fresher scenes
ah! the joy of such spring cleaning
oh! the joy of household life
sometimes I am the paragon
of a 1950's wife!

David Keig

St. Patrick's Day legends

Guess what? Saint Patrick was not Irish-- he was a nobleman born in Britain about 400 A.D.  Patrick came from a religious family but was an atheist as a young man.  The legend goes that he was kidnapped by Irish pirates and found his faith while enslaved in Ireland.  After 17 years as an Irish slave, St. Patrick escaped and went home, but he returned to Ireland later as a missionary.

March 17 is believed to be the day of his death.  Unlike most unlucky saints, St. Patrick simply died of old age.

Legend credits St. Patrick with teaching the Irish the Holy Trinity by showing them the shamrock, a three-leafed plant.  The green shamrock was once sacred in pagan Ireland, representing rebirth, eternal life, and the "three goddesses."

Oh yes, the snakes.  The absence of snakes in Ireland gave rise to a legend that Patrick sent the serpents into the sea after they "attacked" him during a 40-day fast. (Maybe he was just in a bad mood, trying not to think about corned beef and cabbage.) 

Biologists say that post-glacial age Ireland didn't have any snakes to start with, just like New Zealand, Iceland, Greenland and Antarctica.  The poisonous adder and other snakes live across the way in Scotland and England, but terrestrial serpents can't migrate across open water.  But it makes a good story, even if there was nothing for St. Patrick to banish.

And everyone knows about leprechauns-- rosy-cheeked, boozy little men in green from Irish folklore. Hiding pots of gold and playing tricks on people on their way home from the pub.  They were not invented by Hollywood. The first recorded mention of a leprechaun goes back to the 8th century, coming from the word luchorpán, meaning "little water spirits."

There's also the Irish fairy Cluricaune, a cunning spirit who haunts cellars, where he drinks and smokes. These little men take it upon themselves to "guard" your wine and beer.

Cluricaunes supposedly keep the kegs and bottles neat and chase off intruders.  But the deal is they get to tipple from the cellar, and unfortunately they have a tremendous thirst.

How dull the world would be without the charming and entertaining Irish. When all is said and done, the best thing about St. Patrick's Day is the excuse to make corned beef, cabbage and potatoes once a year, even though this classic meal is more American than Irish.

The most affordable meat available to poor Irish American immigrants in the 19th century was corned beef. Brisket was tough and cheap. The brine for making corned beef is similar to the brine used for pickles. Corned beef is essentially pickled beef.

I used to boil up corned beef and cabbage into a soupy mess on the stove top.  But the best way to cook beef brisket ("corned" or not) is roasting in a heavy Dutch oven.  While the delicious smell drives you crazy for several hours, that pink slab of unappetizing meat is transforming into something fork-tender and succulent. A caramelized brown sugar and mustard glaze gives the finishing touch.  The condensed broth makes a nice salty gravy for the spuds.

If you don't gobble it all up, what could be better than a corned beef and Swiss cheese sandwich for lunch?  Happy St. Patrick's Day!