monday's mulling: good thoughts

Many thanks to my very talented and always spreading positivity friend Patricia Saxton for this sharing this joyful, optimistic, bright, sunshiny message for Monday! 💛

this is us

In the 1994 film Forrest Gump, the iconic quote "Me and Jenny goes together like peas and carrots" is used by Forrest to describe their inseparable bond. Narrating his childhood and later life, Forrest explains they were constant companions -"always together" - an inseparable connection, even when Jenny was far away.

My dearest friend's birthday was last week and she and I "goes together like peas and carrots," too. A couple of our children are the same ages; preschool and kindergarten were the connections that brought us together. 35 years of friendship...that's over half of our lives.

She’s the vibrant disco ball of energy, scattering light everywhere she goes, while I’m more of the soulful wanderer, moving quietly through the world. Somehow, we fit. A natural balance. Extrovert and introvert, spark and stillness. She draws me out of my shell, and I help her stay grounded. That's what friends are for.

on this day

On April 15, Facebook brought back several posts I’d shared on that same date in years past. It’s always fun revisiting those old memories.

April 15, 2020...In all of this Coronavirus craziness, our good ole tank of a washing machine is acting up. The UPS guy delivered parts to the house on Monday and Tuesday. Ted greeted him at the door yesterday and this was today’s delivery. It’s those little things...

April 15, 2021...

April 15...it's Monday AND tax day. There's a sucker punch for you!

Went down to the accountant's office to pick up papers and lighten the checkbook. A young lady seated me in the conference room and asked me to review the stack of papers on the table. (WHAT?) 

Do you think that happened with a view like this?

 

the friday feed: food for the soul and food for the bees

Last week, Aullwood MetroPark looked like a fairytale, with thousands and thousands of bluebells in bloom. Aullwood was once home to the Miami Valley’s own “godmother of the environmental movement,” Marie Aull, who lived an extraordinary life from 1897 to 2002. 

In 1957, she approached former National Audubon Society president John H. Baker with the idea of creating Aullwood. It would take another twelve years before the Cuyahoga River fire in Cleveland, a bold symbol of industrial pollution, to help ignite the modern environmental movement. Even then, conservation was only beginning to take root. Marie Aull was already ahead of her time, a true visionary.

"This is a valley where nothing ever happens, where people simply live, where there is sun and slow peacefulness of day following day. Walk gently...and may some of its peace be yours."

~ Aullwood Garden MetroPark

The bees were very busy flitting from flower to flower to collect pollen and nectar.

"It was the small things she took pleasure in. The faint hum of a huge furry bumble bee busily flitting from one flower to another, oblivious to the fact that it was completing a task on which the entire human race depended." ~ Kathryn Hughes

 

poetry month: april rain song

As they say, April showers bring May flowers.

Raindrops and smiles on beautiful Lake Hallstatt, Austrian Alps (2019).

April Rain Song

Let the rain kiss you

Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops

Let the rain sing you a lullaby

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk

The rain makes running pools in the gutter

The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night

And I love the rain.

~ Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was an early innovator of jazz poetry and is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance centered in Harlem, New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, it redefined Black identity, and blended African culture with urban American culture. Langston Hughes grew up in the Midwest and became a prolific writer at an early age. As a matter of fact, he attended Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio, where he began writing poetry in the eighth grade. (I'll give Ohio a shout out whenever the opportunity arises).

I enjoy taking walks in the rain, with or without an umbrella. There’s something deeply satisfying about it. The soft, earthy scent that rises when raindrops meet dry ground, the steady rhythm of water tapping against leaves and pavement, it all creates a quiet kind of calm. It lifts my mood and settles my thoughts.

I’m drawn to the way puddles mirror the world, turning sidewalks into fleeting works of art. And every now and then, the kid in me insists on splashing right through them.

There’s a saying that "there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing." I take that to heart. A raincoat, a hood, and a willingness to step outside are all it takes. A little rain never hurt anyone, and sometimes, it’s exactly what one needs.

be back soon

In Cleveland visiting my little sweethearts 💙 💗 and their wonderful parents.

monday's mulling: the moon

Today is Monday - the Moon's Day. 

What does the word mon look like to you? If you said moon, you’re right.

While the Latin word for moon is luna (and Monday is dies lunae), the name Monday comes from “Moon’s day” after the Norse moon god Máni. (https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/weekdays-weekend-evolution).

On April 1, Artemis II took humans the furthest they have ever been from Earth and past the far side of the moon. Humans had not been near the moon since 1972, when NASA's Apollo program ended. The journey spanned ten days and 694,481 miles from its launch at the Kennedy Space Center to its landing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.

As big as Earth is, all of humanity looks at the same moon. It's like a collective third eye. It shows us our common identity without borders. It gives us a sense of oneness, a constant reminder that we are all tied together in an intricate web, whether we believe it or not.  

a new piece of art

After my Chicago grandson was born, I stayed with my daughter and her husband to help them settle into their new life as parents. My daughter had delivered by C-section and my son-in-law never left his wife and son during their hospital stay. By the time they brought the little guy home, they were already running on fumes.

About a week later, the walls started to feel a little too close. Cabin fever had set in and we all needed a breath of fresh air. So we bundled the baby up and headed out for lunch and a stroll, a debut to city life for the new little Chicagoan. The first-time parents chose Wicker Park, a neighborhood bustling with restaurants and an ever-growing arts scene.

Lauren and Anthony suggested we stop by the Jackson Junge Gallery, a place they had visited before. Inside, we discovered the work of artist Anastasia Mak, and it stopped us in our tracks. Her paintings pulsed with color and movement, each piece filled with its own kind of joy.

One painting in particular held our attention. The original, a striking 36-by-48-inch piece, anchored the exhibit. Lauren and Anthony chose a few of Anastasia's prints to take home that day. I didn’t, but that image sure stayed with me.

It took a little over a year, but I finally ordered a print of "Red Rebellion" from her website. I took it to my favorite frame shop, where, after some searching, we found a frame that looked and felt just right. Now it hangs among my collection of red flowers and bird artwork, a sweet reminder of that day when my little grandson met his city for the first time.

 

6 years ago

A picture of a trash truck...who would have thought it was important? 

"Excitement for the day: Hearing the trash truck drive onto the street and rushing to the window to watch that arm reach out, grab the receptacle, and dump the trash into the collection bin. Woohoo! 😂 😷"

A Facebook memory.

This was the beginning of the pandemic, a couple weeks after Ohio's governor issued the "Stay at Home" order. At the beginning stages of SaH we could leave the house to go to the grocery store and to take walks around the neighborhood. Trash day was a reminder that some routines wouldn't change and normal would return...at some point. And we survived.

the friday feed: easy, cheesy bean bake

Recently I’ve been on a bit of a spring-cleaning kick in my pantry. You know how it goes...cans get shoved to the back, forgotten about, and then suddenly they’ve expired and they're headed for the trash. With grocery prices creeping up, I’m trying to be mindful about using what I already have before it gets bad.

The other night, I took stock and found a couple cans of beans (black and cannellini) and a can of tomato paste in the pantry, and in the fridge, a half a carton of chicken broth and a container of burrata cheese. That little lineup ended up inspiring dinner. I loosely followed Ali Slagle’s Cheesy White Bean Tomato Bake from NYT Cooking, but made a few swaps and added my own spins, including sautéed onions and chopped collard greens. 

There have been times when my husband gives me the side-eye that says, "Really? That's for dinner?" I thought this might be one of those nights but nope...he liked it!

1. Cheesy White Bean Tomato Bake

   
   

   ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

   3 fat garlic cloves, thinly sliced

   3 tablespoons tomato paste (I used the whole can)

   2 (15-ounce) cans white beans (such as cannellini or Great Northern...black beans were fine) 

   ½ cup boiling water (chicken broth was tasty and I added more to make a generous sauce for the beans)

   Salt and black pepper

   ⅓ pound mozzarella, coarsely grated (about 1⅓ cups) (I chunked the whole ball of burrata and used it all)

   
   Heat oven to 475 degrees. In a 10-inch ovenproof skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high. Fry the garlic until it’s lightly golden, about 1 minute. (This is where I sauteed the garlic, chopped onion, and chopped bunch of collard greens all together). Stir in the tomato paste (be careful of splattering) and fry for 30 seconds, reducing the heat as needed to prevent the garlic from burning.
   
   Add the beans, water (chicken broth) and generous pinches of salt and pepper and stir to combine. Sprinkle the cheese evenly over the top, then bake until the cheese has melted and browned in spots, 5 to 10 minutes. If the top is not as toasted as you’d like, run the skillet under the broiler for a minute or 2. Serve at once.
   

   
   

poetry month: the rearview mirror

The Rearview Mirror

by Robert Morgan

This little pool in the air is

not a spring but sink into which

trees and highways, banks and fields are

sipped away into minuteness. All

split on the present then merge in

stretched perspective, radiant in

reverse, the wild world guttering

back to one lit point, as our way

weeps away to the horizon

in this eye where the past flies ahead. 

Various people have gotten credit for inventing the car. But who invented the rearview mirror? And could that unsung genius have guessed what a marvelous, indispensable metaphor he or she has given to the world?

wednesday's words and wanderings and wonderings

Bloom where you are planted...Like a flower pushing through the cracks, you can thrive despite challenging situations. 

 Look at this cute little pansy! Don't you just love its face-like markings?

A pretty bouquet for the Easter dinner table grown by a young woman who has a small-scale flower farm in Dayton's Historic Inner East neighborhood. She sells the bouquets at Pink Moon Goods, a gift and stationery shop in the neighboring Huffman Historic District. Two women-owned businesses helping one another out.

A walk through downtown's RiverScape MetroPark. The ducks are waiting for the small pools to be filled with water. 

The Miami Valley Bikeways is the nation’s largest paved trail network.

Two US Bike Routes pass through Dayton and RiverScape. US BR 25 North begins at the Michigan border and passes through Toledo, Lima and Dayton before ending just north of Cincinnati. This route runs along segments of the Little Miami Scenic Trail and Great Miami River Trail. USBR 50 in Ohio connects West Virginia in the east through Columbus to Indiana in the west. A few bikers were riding a long the river but had a few detours because the river was flooding the trail.

Saturday my daughter-in-law and I went to see Suffs, a musical based on the suffragists and the American women’s suffrage movement. It focuses on the historical events leading to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920 giving women the right to vote. Both of my grandmothers were born in 1904 and were 16 years old when this amendment passed. I wonder if their mothers were involved in the suffragist movement. One of my grandmas was from Chicago where Ida B. Wells, a black woman, a pioneering suffragist and civil rights activist fought for women's voting rights while battling racism within the movement. She founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago to mobilize Black women voters and famously refused to march in the segregated back section of the 1913 Woman Suffrage Parade. She walked with the Illinois delegation, not behind it. Suffs will be on TV beginning on May 8. I highly recommend watching it.

tiptoe through the tulips

The daffodils are at the end of their blooming season and now it's the tulips' time to show off their spring colors. We are under a freeze warning for the next couple of days and I'm so hoping these beauties will laugh in the face of the plummeting temperature and escape undamaged.

 

monday's mulling: grand-aunt leta

Easter dinner was quiet and casual. It was just the four of us -  my son and daughter-in-law, Todd and me. To set the table, I opened the cupboard for the everyday dishes. Practical and familiar. But then something in me paused. "No," I thought. "Easter deserves a little bit of pretty." So I brought down the set my mom gave me, the one edged with delicate violets. The same violets now peeking through the yard, bright and cheerful beside the dandelions.

One thing led to another and white paper napkins felt too "blah." I opened the buffet drawer, the one filled with hand-embroidered cloth napkins, each one stitched with care by hands I never knew. As I sifted through them, I reached the very bottom and found something tucked away: an embroidered dish towel, a bit of brittle paper still taped to it.

"Made by Leta for your hope chest."

Leta Ophelia was my grandpa’s only sister, 3rd child in the line up of four siblings, born in 1902. She stitched this piece for her brother’s fiancée as a bridal shower gift, something pretty to begin their married life. My grandparents were married on June 17, 1925.

This careful work has traveled a full century to reach my hands - one hundred years held together by thread, memory, and love.

Out of curiosity I googled "What is my relation to my mom's aunt?" I thought the answer would be great-aunt, which most people assume. But it's not, my grandpa's sister is my grand-aunt. Ancestry.com gives this explanation: "A grand-aunt is the name that should be given to the sister of a person’s grandparent, indicating that they are the first generation of an aunt or uncle beyond your parent’s siblings. So, just like with grandparents, saying grand-aunt indicates the familial relation is two generations away." Isn't life grand?

happy easter and it's national dandelion day, too

Happy Easter to all! Wishing you blessings of love, joy, and hope.

National Dandelion Day celebrates a flower that many overlook. It's often labeled as a weed but the dandelion brings color, food, and healing to the world. The flower’s strong roots dig deep into the earth and its bright yellow blooms appear early in the year. After winter’s cold and gray, these bright yellow flowers dot the greening yards with sunshine. This day reminds people that beauty and purpose can grow where least expected.

 “I am born as the sun,

But then turn into the moon,

As my blonde hairs turn

Grayish-white and fall to

The ground,

Only to be buried again,

Then to be born again,

Into a thousand suns

And a thousand moons."

HYMN OF THE DIVINE DANDELION by Suzy Kassem

“...I love dandelions. They make me feel like sunshine itself, and you will always see some creature resting on an open bloom, if you have a little patience to wait. This vital source for all emerging pollinators is a blast of uplifting yellow to brighten even the greyest of days. It stands tall and proud, unlike all the others opening and swaying in the breeze. The odd one out.”

~ Dara McAnulty, Diary of a Young Naturalist