Caravanserai

-

-

Caravanserai

Cords of silken blood flow in the peaks
and passes of my body, a traveling

miracle, while I read the news,
all of which barely reaches me—

economies of elections, wars, and
minerals harvested from asteroids

in the celestial commerce of billionaires.
Numb with armchair trade,

I remember the seduction
of the Silk Road. Quieted, I hear

spirit through the flutes of my bones—
the music of the steppes, the tinkle of pots

on your back. I smell the fust of Turkish
rugs on the floor and know

I would walk a thousand miles
to curl up on felt-covered stone with you

and these other traveling strangers, harbored
inside trusted walls, away from danger.

In the morning we finger sunrise apricots
in a copper breakfast bowl

before recommencing our planetary
journey, a mouthful of sweet chai, and I ask

what you know of the soul’s trade—
its breakdowns, its tinkerings

its thieves and swindlers? And you say,
Tonight we will come again to a caravanserai,

a courtyard of companionship, a warm stop
on the long road. Nothing else matters.


April 2012

Note: One of the thrills of my life was staying with Don, our two children, and my sister in a Caravanserai in Turkey, an outpost along the Silk Road where for centuries caravaners were given three nights free lodging, food and fodder for their animals. It was far from “free” as a hotel when we lodged, but worth every penny to me. These stone fortresses were built in a huge square, with one front portal large enough for camels to pass through. Rooms for sleeping were around the outer edge on the second floor, while service rooms, including a Turkish bath and shops to repair horseshoes, filled the lower floor. In the middle was a courtyard where goods and animals were kept. When we stayed at the Caravanserai in Kuşadası, transformed into a hotel, we dined in the courtyard. The best part of the experience for me was the two-foot thick stone wall that made our room’s window wells large enough for a small child to sleep in. My imagination has never rested since those nights.

Posted for DVerse Open Link Night, hosted this week by Brian Miller. Join the community.

 

-

-

Tulip

-

-

It is hard to imagine that these supple, sensuous flowers grew wild in the mountains of Central Asia before they were brought to Europe from the Ottoman Empire and became so wildly valuable in the Dutch Golden Age that some single tulip bulbs were worth more then ten times the annual income of a skilled craftsman in 1637. "Tulip mania" is still the term for a maniacal financial bubble. The wealthiest era of the Ottoman Empire is called the "Tulip Era."

I love these flowers myself (though I didn't ransom the farm for them) and decided I had to create a slideshow of my photos in their honor. Most were photographed here on the farm, but some are at my university campus and in Holland, Michigan, where there is a Tulip Time festival every May. Temperatures were hot in March, and tulips are already blooming here (though these photos are from previous years), so I don't know what tulips will be left for Tulip Time. You'll see some little ones dressed up in Dutch costumes at Tulip Time a few years ago.

Happy Birthday to my husband, with whom I lived in the Ottoman Empire once upon a time, . . . oh wait, I guess he isn't that old! It was called Turkey by then.

I've paired Carla Cook singing Duke Ellington's classic "Tulip or Turnip" which really warms up my spring fever. Full screen is best (at YouTube if you can't enlarge it here).

Tell me, tell me, tell me, dreamface,
what am I to you?

Of shared taxis and shared language

-

-

These are shared taxis, called "dolmuş" in Istanbul; photo from the late 1980s;
"dolmuş" (pronounced dolmush) is related to the word "dolma" — stuffed pepper, 
grape leaves, etc., because these shared taxis get pretty packed with passengers;
they may not look like much, but even Orhan Pamuk rides in these around Istanbul.

I’m one of those people you can tell who I’m talking to on the phone by how I’m talking. I had a boss who was a boisterous, theatrical woman everyone adored. She laughed a lot and spoke with all the drama of the theater, in which she had leading roles for decades in our community. She entertained every time she opened her mouth. When I was on the phone with her the one time she called me at home, I got off and Don said,

“That was Pam, wasn’t it.”

“How’d you know?”

And then I reviewed myself as Pam for the past five minutes. I had spoken louder and funnier. I even scrunched up my shoulders with enthusiasm and smiled like a performer, as if I were Pam’s mirror self.

I don’t know why I do this. I think I want people to be comfortable, to feel good about themselves. I want them to think I like them so much I’m going to talk like them. I wouldn’t want to talk like me — boring, and heavens I wouldn’t want them to talk like me. I’d rather speak their “language.”

I think this trait is helpful for learning foreign languages actually. When you want to sound just like the person you’re talking to, you have a good chance of at least being intelligible.

When we lived in Istanbul I abhorred standing out as a foreigner. But nothing I could do would disguise the fact. Women in the dolmuş (shared taxi) would look me up and down to see if I had a manicure, how my hair was coiffed, where did I buy my clothes? They knew I was different. And when I opened my mouth and asked the driver in Turkish to stop at the next convenient spot, I was still me, an American in Istanbul, but I could speak their language, at least a bit, and I think they liked that I wanted to be like them. At the end of the day Don would massage the pads between my cheekbones and my nose, which were sore from speaking umlauts. We don’t have those in English. Those muscles screamed, “no pain, no gain.”

The truth is, at the moment I am reading Anne Lamott’s hilarious and helpful book about writing, Bird by Bird, and while she’s talking, I want to write like her. This undoes my theory about wanting the other person to be comfortable. She and I are not having a conversation!

me and my then boss Dr. Pam at my college graduation in 2001*

*Note about Dr. Pam:

There is probably no one who affected me finishing my BA in English more than Dr. Pam, who was my boss for seven years and gave me release time from work to take classes. If I remember right, in this shot she was telling me, "Ruth, YOU made this happen, young lady . . . " after I thanked and thanked her for making it possible. Dr. Pam is dyslexic and was told by her high school counselor that she would never do more than clean toilets. One day Pam saw a black woman walking down the street in PhD robes and decided that was what she wanted, and she did it, having to revise her dissertation 22 times, writing it as a single mom with a toddler bouncing on the bed, all the while battling dyslexia. Now she works with TRIO programs to help at-risk, low income, first generation and academically-middle-of-the-road kids set their sights on college.

-

-

Oscar night and Hobson's Choice in Black & White

-

-

I have a story from our first trip to the grocery store when we moved back to the States from Istanbul. Breakfast in Turkey had been pretty black and white: fresh white oblong-round bakery bread delivered warm by the doorman, fermented black olives, white goat’s cheese, and black tea. Take it or leave it. Lesley and Peter were five and four when we moved to Istanbul, and they remembered breakfast cereal in the States. They kind of missed it. Well they missed it a lot. Except for the occasional scrambled eggs with onion, green peppers and tomatoes (Don made them irresistible as “cowboy and Indian eggs”), black and white Turkish breakfast was the only option.

We came to enjoy it, but when we moved back to Michigan when they were seven and six, we promised to take them to Meijer where they could each pick out any box of breakfast cereal they wanted. We four turned the corner into the breakfast aisle with our cart. It stretched before us into the distant future, the far end in the chilly fog of the dairy shelves. The kids grabbed the first box that looked appealing and threw it in the cart. Within a few inches there was Tony the Tiger on a box of Frosted Flakes, and they grabbed it and put the other one back. Then we came to the Leprechaun and Lucky Charms, and another switch. Stretching on through the long gallery of cardboard art there were Cap’n Crunch, and Fruity Pebbles, Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms, Sugar Smacks, Apple Jacks, Kix, Chex and Trix, Honey Nut Cheerios, Count Chocula, Golden Grahams, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Coco Puffs, Rice Krispies, Coco Krispies, Frosted Mini Wheats, Sugar Crisps, Corn Pops, Alpha Bits, Ghost Busters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! Swap swap swap from the cart, then back to the shelf and back to the cart. By the end of the cereal aisle they were in a sugary chaos coated with salty tears. I have no idea which cereal boxes we took home.

Sometimes I wonder how long we’ll have all the choices we have, or if they’ll increase! I learned when the kids went through finicky eating phases to just say, This is dinner, take it or leave it. I think it’s a relief not to have choices all the time. At the end of a draining day at work, I do not want Don to ask me Do you want Indian? Mediterranean? Thai? Mexican? I just want him to tell me, Let’s meet at Maru for maki rolls.

So this post is a toast (remember Post Toasties?) to Hobson’s Choice now and then! Which means, This is it, take it or leave it. There's no choice really, only one option, but you don't have to take it. Here's how it began:

Thomas Hobson, 1544-1631

Etching by John Payne at the National Portrait Gallery, London

What's in his bag? Remember letters? Hobson was a mail carrier between London and Cambridge, England, where he had a livery stable near St. Catharine's College, one of the constituent colleges of Cambridge. He had around 40 horses in his stable, and he rented them to Cambridge students. Some of the horses were very fast, and the young whipper-scholars always wanted to ride those fast ones. But Hobson didn't want them to wear out his best horses, so he developed a strict system of rotation. When a student came to the stable to rent a horse for a few hours, he had to take the next horse in line at the front of the stable: This one or none, he said. Take it or leave it.

John Milton, 1608-1674

Long before John Milton wrote the epic poem Paradise Lost in his sixties, he was a mere witty Cambridge student at Christ's College and soon afterward wrote humorous poems about Thomas Hobson. Milton must have rented a horse or two from Hobson's livery, for after Hobson died, Milton and other Cambridge alumni made up satirical poems and illustrations with horses, carriages, puns and witticisms, poking fun at the old guy. In fact, it was Milton who made him famous, "you can have any horse you want, just so long as it is the one nearest the stable door." Henceforth in literature, this was known as a Hobson's choice.

Henry Ford, 1863-1947

A couple of centuries after Milton and Hobson, carriages became horseless, and another man with a livery, Henry Ford, famously said a Hobson's choice: "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black."

Charles Laughton as Henry Hobson
in David Lean's comedy film "Hobson's Choice"

I never knew until a few weeks ago that David Lean didn't just make epic films like "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago." We watched his brilliant 1954 comedy "Hobson's Choice" and it is now one of my favorite shows ever. I had not heard of the term "Hobson's choice" before seeing the film, hence this post about its provenance. Lean's movie is about Henry Hobson, an arrogant shopkeeper who sells boots with his daughters and gets the rug pulled out from under him when his eldest daughter gives him an ultimatum one day: Take it or leave it. I am going to embed a clip from the movie below, so you can see how lithely a big man like Laughton can fill the screen as a swaying, slapstick drunk.

John Mills was absolutely fantastic as humble Willie Mossop, Hobson's prize bootmaker.

John Mills as Willie Mossop in "Hobson's Choice"

I take my leave with a movie clip from "Hobson's Choice" where Charles Laughton shows the grace of a ballerina as the drunk and annoying Henry Hobson. Take it, or leave it. Or as Dorothy Parker said, Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.

In light of the Oscars tomorrow, I'll also remind you that David Lean "was nominated for a total of nine Academy Awards: seven for Best Director, one for Best Adapted Screenplay, and one for Best Film Editing, the latter two being for 'A Passage to India.' Out of these nominations, Lean won two Oscars, both in the category of Best Director, for 'The Bridge on the River Kwai' (1957) and 'Lawrence of Arabia' (1962). With seven nominations in the category of Best Director, Lean is the third most nominated director in Oscar history, tied with Fred Zinnemann and behind Billy Wilder (8 nominations) and William Wyler (12 nominations)." (wiki)

-

-

My 5th blog anniversary, a winner, and salons

-
-
Thank you for celebrating five years with me this week. It has been beautiful to contemplate the rewards of blogging, and of knowing you, my friends.

My gift of gratitude

With the help of List Randomizer, I tossed all your pretty avatars from the previous post comments into the bag and came up with a very pretty blogger avatar indeed! Margaret Bednar, I will be painting you a bluebird on a piece of wood (see previous post).This may be a little like sending coals to Newcastle, since you are an artist! Margaret lives in North Carolina, has six gorgeous children, and still has time to create art, write poetry and maintain two art blogs: Art Happens (Painting & Sketching) and Art Happens 365 (photography & poetry)! Margaret, thank you for making this little salon sparkle with your presence.

Speaking of salon. I’d like to ‘splain, since I use the term salon in my comment box. The word sounds either hoi polloi, or hoity toity in the U.S, where the only rooms we call salons are for hair stylists and nails, but we vaguely know about the European salons. To call my blog a salon either sounds like I’m about to give you a virtual shampoo-massage, or that I delude myself by thinking I am a European sophisticate like Mme. Geoffrin on rue St. Honoré. (See Lemonnier's painting of her salon at the right/above, and read a wonderful essay about the history of the European salon at the Oxford University Press site here.)

But the word salon is quite special to me, actually. Until we moved to Istanbul, I hadn’t heard the word used much, except in books located in Europe when friends gathered in them, or as in the art and literary salons in France and other places where artists like Rodin submitted their work (and were sometimes rejected, yes even Rodin). So when we moved to Istanbul in 1985, we learned that the “living room” was called the salon. We bought salon furniture and satin drapes with tulle sheers, in the rather elaborate fashion of Turks, for whom hospitality, and the attitude of welcome at the very least, is one of the most important values. The salon was the room where guests were entertained, and believe me, in Turkey guests are still entertained, or at least they were twenty-five years ago. Whether accompanied by çay and börek in the afternoon with the ladies of the apartment building crocheting and gossiping, or çay, dolma and pastries in the evening with couples or families, it was the center of conversation. We kept track of each other's lives. If we had been better at the language, it might have been something like the salons you read about in Henry James or Edith Wharton novels (well maybe not so fancy) where friends came in from the cold to engage in stimulating discourse. If someone had a particularly skillful touch with delicacies from the kitchen, combined with an ease of hospitality and a gift for encouraging people to talk, and if the çay kept pouring into those little glasses with saucers, then their salon was rarely empty any given week. Friends would travel through the heaviest downpours or ignore wedding invitations to sit and visit in such a salon. (See Michael Naples' beautiful painting, above, of the Turkish çay glass and saucer -- ours were just like that; the tea doesn't have a chance to get cold in those small glasses; when I found his image on Google, I thought it was a photograph; do explore his Daily Paintings.)

I have nothing in my life like a drawing room, parlor, living room, or front porch where guests come regularly to sit and visit together . . . except this salon where my blog friends come. We can cozy up by the wood stove here on the farm and chat, never stiff or formal like Mme. Geoffrin's, I hope (though like her, I receive an education by listening to my guests!), and some days I kinda want it to be more like a saloon! (Yes, same word, anglicized . . . or americanized.)

Western Saloon, by Lee Dubin

Or I'd like to invite you to a warm, festive supper, like this:

Julaftonen (Christmas Eve), by Carl Larsson

-
However we drink our beverages here, coffee, tea, Christmas punch, or draft beer from the bar, I love having you come! Or in Turkish: Hoş geldiniz! ("We welcome you with pleasure!" Hoş is pronounced "hosh" -- long "o") Now you say: Hoş bulduk! ("We're happy to be here!")

Now, drink your tea. It'll get cold.

-

from Texas to Turkey to Haiti

-
-

Special post script note: I want to sincerely apologize for posting incomplete information about Turkish rescuers in Haiti. After the news program seeing Turks in the rescue effort, I searched online, even at the Hurriyet Turkish newspaper, for information about a Turkish contingent. I found many references to the Armenian group, and since many Armenians live in Turkey, I came to an imperfect conclusion that this was the Turkish contingent. I was unable, unfortunately, to find anything at that time about the Turkish group. I should have been more thorough and clear about that process in the paragraph about it. I have nothing but respect for Turks, who clearly in the last decades have come to the aid of not only their own who have suffered, but to those in other countries as well. In this post I have conveyed a personal story that reminds me that the Haitian tragedy, while massive, is about individual suffering and individual aid.

Here is the Hurriyet article posted 6pm today, about Turkish rescuers and the generous ten tons of goods donated to Haiti. Clearly in 2010 our friends Cemal, Hassan, Dilber and Ali would have something different to say.

"In Turkey, she would die."

We looked over at Cemal (pronounced Jeh-mahl) in the blue TV light. Hassan, Dilber and Ali all nodded in agreement.

"If a child fell into a hole here, no one would try to rescue her. We don't have the technological resources, and besides, we would just consider it her fate."

I don't remember how far the emergency team was into the 58 hours spent rescuing 18-month-old Jessica McClure after she fell 22 feet into a well in 1987. She was just a few years younger than Lesley and Peter. We looked like lemurs in our Istanbul apartment staring at the television news footage of Midland, Texas workers at night under floodlights leaning over her far below, talking to her, passing food and water down the narrow hole. She was still a baby, crying, the only word she said was "Mommy." They drilled a rescue shaft next to the well and dug over to where she was. Even cavers came in to help.* I don't know how many worked on her rescue, I couldn't find the total. I'm guessing dozens, maybe a hundred, or hundreds. The whole community around Midland donated time, equipment, tens of thousands of dollars, food, diesel fuel, and more for the effort of saving one child.

Fast forward 22 years, 3 months. On the news Friday we watched a Turkish rescue team with a Haitian man trying to find his missing wife who was trapped under a broken cement building. They had been tapping, and she had been tapping back. But the last tap they heard was an hour before. The Turkish rescuers and the husband weren't going to leave until they removed all that cement rubble and found her. They knew from experience that it might not be too late, and they had to find out. In India, after the 2004 tsunami, those Turks had rescued a woman - alive - after 7 days. Today is the sixth day since the earthquake hit Haiti.

From what I could find, it seems that the Turks who were sent by air across Africa and the Atlantic to Haiti were 52 Armenians. At least 30 countries have sent rescue and relief teams.

A lot has changed in 22 years. And a lot hasn't.

18-month-old Jessica McClure

Haitian boy - Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

*NOTE: Scanned newspaper image from the Amarillo Daily News found at caver.net, on their page devoted to Jessica's rescue.
-
-

Aşure - Noah's pudding

-
-

Pronounced AH-shoo-REH.

In İstanbul in the late eighties when Don was selling kilims and copper to the U.S. market hot for Turkish stuff, and we four lived in a "marble palace" apartment (Turkish homes are sparkly with chandeliers, marble floors and countertops; we broke a few milk bottles on that unforgiving marble), on a certain special day two or three neighbors brought a dish of Noah's pudding to us. Aşure günü (say the ü with your lips rounded and a u just behind your teeth) is the holiday celebrated in Turkey on the 10th day of the Islamic lunar month of Muharrem, this year December 27. Noah's is one of the biblical stories shared by Christians, Jews and Muslims. In the Qur'an, Noah is a prophet.

The story goes that when Noah's ark landed on Mt. Ararat (in Turkey), after so much time bobbing on water with no land in sight, the inhabitants celebrated by making a pudding out of the remnants of what lay in the hold: nuts, dried fruits and grains.



The apartment neighbors who brought our bowls of Noah's pudding took a bowl of it to every neighbor in the building. Tradition says that your "neighbors" are inhabitants in forty houses to your East, West, North and South. I imagine "everyone in the building" is the adaptation for modern times. When we explained this tradition to Inge and Lar when we served them some aşure for dessert Saturday (the first time I made it), Inge (of the German steel trap mind) asked, "you mean everyone took some to everyone else? Doesn't that sort of cancel the whole thing out?" Well since we weren't taking aşure to anyone, I never thought about it.

The aşure holiday is about keeping up good relations with neighbors no matter what their religion or beliefs might be. It is common Turkish practice to make big cauldrons of aşure to distribute to the poor. Everything goes into the pot, and what is in the pot goes to everyone.



Here, Neighbor, I am sharing a bowl of aşure with you. It's nice for breakfast. If you make it, share with your neighbors and tell them you appreciate them. You can do that with fruitcake too, which is sort of the same idea, but I like this better. No, that is pudding it too mildly. I would rather toss a fruitcake than eat it. I've co-opted aşure and sharing with neighbors as a new Christmas tradition at our house. Hey, Santa Claus started in Turkey too, and look how far he got!

Aşure - Noah's pudding

2 cups instant barley, it will be much more when cooked
1 cup canned white Northern beans, washed and drained
1 cup canned chickpeas, washed and drained
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
10 cups water
10 dry apricots, soaked in water overnight, cut in pieces
10 dry figs, cut in pieces
1/2 cup raisins

Garnish:
1/4 cup walnuts, crumbled, slivered almonds, currants, pine nuts, pomegranate seeds

Cook barley according to directions on package. (If using non-instant barley, get it to boil on high heat. Then as soon as it boils, turn it down to medium-low heat and cook for about half an hour.) Set aside 1-2 cups of cooked barley and put into a food processor or blender. To the barley in the pot add the beans, chickpeas, vanilla, apricots, raisins, figs, sugar and 6 cups of hot water. Simmer for about 45 minutes on medium to medium-low heat. Stir occasionally. Process 1-2 cups cooked barley that you set aside in a food processor or blender, mixing water if needed to make it pudding-ish. Add this to the pot to thicken it. Cook a couple more minutes, then pour into a large service bowl and let cool.

Keep Noah's Pudding refrigerated. When serving, garnish with crumbled walnuts, roasted slivered almonds, currants, pine nuts and pomegranate seeds. The garnish is the best part, and you might think of different ones.-
-
-

Turkey season

-
-

Don keeping watch over his flock by day

Has it really been almost a year since we saw Sarah Palin talking with a reporter about being Vice President and pardoning a turkey from being killed for someone's Thanksgiving table, while turkeys were visibly being slaughtered behind her? It was a grisly example of someone being out of touch with their surroundings.



In the U.S., if you call someone a "turkey" it's an insult, meaning the person is stupid (out of touch with their surroundings -- yikes). Or if you say some project was a turkey - like a movie - you mean it was a failure. Apparently this arose from the fact that turkeys are thought to be stupid. You know how we call someone a "bird brain" if they don't seem to have terrific mental capacity? Well of all the birds, turkeys have the smallest brains in proportion to their size: 2%. Domestic turkeys have supposedly been known to drown standing out in a rainstorm - looking up, mouth open, "hey, what just hit my little head?" as it pours down their throats.

Some say turkeys get a bad rap, since their mortality is not good, and they die from other things more than from drowning. But there is some truth that domestic turkeys have been bred away from their wild instincts to find shelter from the elements.

After we lived in the country of Turkey we encountered a few individuals out of touch with their surroundings who, after chuckling a bit asked in disbelief, "You lived in Turkey? What do you mean, there's a place called Turkey?" Actually the real name for the country is Türkiye. If you pronounce it correctly by rounding your lips and putting that ü just behind your teeth, no one thinks you're talking about living inside a big bird. (Did you know that Sesame Street's Big Bird was made with 4000 turkey feathers?) I remember going to bed at night after speaking a lot of Turkish and my cheek muscles were sore from all those ü's and ö's. Here's an exercise in something close to stupidity for you: When you go to the turkey farm with the kids this year, try saying "göbble göbble göbble" and make the correct sound for the Turkish ö. Öh, and in Turkey they call a turkey a hindi. Now what's that about? I think it went something like this: Turkeys have to do with American Thanksgiving -> American Thanksgiving has something to do with American Indians -> Indians -> Hindi. Phew. I feel like I just flew around the world.

Two of the big toms in the photo at top - the ones with tail feathers fanned, and big pink and blue drooping gobbledy-goop under their little 2% heads, one bronze and one white - died recently after each breaking a leg. See, I told you they die from other maladies. Don doesn't know if they were in a fight, or just too heavy for their drumsticks. :| They have another two months to grow before Thanksgiving dinner - one for us and the rest to be given away. I'm afraid the one tom that's left won't fit in an oven.

I can't say that I think turkeys are dumb, but they look dumb the way they stand and stare at you inside your personal space. Or maybe they just look curious, because they certainly are that. In fact, they look the opposite of being out of touch with their surroundings if I really think about it. Can you be dumb if you're this curious?



So this is what you can say if you don't want to call someone stupid, or a turkey:







-

figs on a plate

figs on a plate

reflections on the 11th of September

The first time I tasted a fig (not counting Fig Newtons) was 20-some years ago when we lived in İstanbul, where there was a fig tree in our yard. I was 30. I remember feeling the luxury of it on my tongue. A fresh fig! Not coated in thick, sticky sweet gel with a few gritty seeds for texture (Fig Newton cookie), but the cool flesh of a fruit that is delicately sweet. In Midwestern U.S. homes like mine when I was growing up in the '60s, fresh figs would have been unheard of. We don't have a fig tree on the farm here in Michigan, obviously. Too bad. Don bought these imported figs at our local grocer's. Rarely do we look past the plastic bags of apples at the more exotic fruits. Wonderful things happen when you open up to new tastes and new ways of looking. Don't be afraid of what you don't know, open up. The real deal might be different than you expect, and maybe you'll find it as delectable as figs on a plate.

* * * *

Added at 9:15pm: I did not originally write this part, because I didn't feel like overtly talking about 9/11. But, since it isn't apparent what I'm getting at above, here goes. On this anniversary of 9/11 I am not afraid of more terrorist attacks. I don't even think about it much, until I go through security at an airport. And then I am angry at a few who gave us cause for fear. What happened in 2001 was beyond imagining, so horrible it was. But I refuse to let it close my heart in fear or suspicion of Muslims in general. And now, according to some, there are possibly over a million dead in Iraq since the U.S. attack in 2003. Who should be afraid of whom? This is my point here, that it's too easy to establish a perspective based on insufficient information. We don't understand the vast complexities of another individual, let alone another culture, with thousands of years of history, conflict, wars, arts & culture. I abhor the arrogance of interference we force on the world. I am trying to be open.

evil eye zinnias

Asteraceae, Z. elegans

Native of Mexico, state flower of Indiana.

Fifteenth century Spaniards who came to take the Americas for their king and queen thought zinnias were ugly, so they called them mal de ojos (evil eyes). How's that for the pot calling the kettle black?

Interesting tidbit: When I Googled mal de ojos I found a downloadable font called mal de ojo, which is type scanned from old letterpressed Mexican religious pamphlets. Fascinating. Oh! By the way, back in Roman times a charm to ward off the evil eye '. . . was called fascinum in Latin, from the verb fascinare (the origin of the English word "to fascinate"), "to cast a spell", such as that of the evil eye' (from the site linked in 'Here,' below).

I realized when we lived in İstanbul that I could be considered to have the evil eye because my eyes are green. Here is a very thorough account of the history of the evil eye.

hands on

I suppose it's partly because of reading the wabi sabi book that an overhauling mood is upon me. My clothes closet got done. I mean completely emptied, sorted, and only what I absolutely want and wear back in. All other piles disposed of properly. Almost.

Following the flow, after looking for that quilt in storage in the barn, I suddenly had 3 tubs and one trunk full of fabric and quilt pieces in the house.

I sorted by color.

What will I do with all this fabric, now that I don't quilt any more? My hands and wrists are weak now, and they ache if I do too much close needle work.

Oh, looking through the folded cotton fabrics took me down Memory Lane.

Dresses, doll clothes and a Wizard-of-Oz Dorothy Halloween costume I made for Lesley.

Old curtains, even some from Istanbul (that small yellow and taupe flowered print in the yellow pile, which was in our kitchen there). I need to tell you the story behind this fabric some day.

Old pieces that were my mom's, like the two doilies on the same pile, which I remember from my childhood.

Silks and linens from Thailand, China and India, brought as gifts to my parents by the foreign students who lived with us when I was in high school.

Even a sari that must have been given to my mom, although I don't recall her ever wearing it. I'd like to get a blouse made for it and wear it myself.

We had many Indian friends, and they were so generous giving gifts to us.

I found this skirt at the bottom of one of the bins, a sorry place for a treasure whose value I can't even begin to understand. I bought the British (Liberty, I think) fabric somewhere, in the States I think. I took it with me to Istanbul and had a tailor make it into a skirt that I wore and wore. As I hold it in my hands now, I think it may be one of the most precious things I possess.

Oh, and look what I found googling "Liberty fabric": J Crew came out with Liberty fabric skirts last year. Styles always come back around, eh? And oh by the way, this is one of those full skirts I was admiring earlier from the Paris show. Won't I just be the cat's meow wearing this vintage skirt (if I can lose about 1 inch from my waist)?

I think I know what I want to do with some of the fabric: braided rugs.

Family Reunion II

For our annual 4th of July reunion, over the course of 5 days 40 people descended upon "Hukilau" - our family cottage.


It rained Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, when Don and I were there alone before anyone else came. The rest of the week it was sunny and beautiful.

I'm not going to concern myself with sequence or what day was what. This is just a little photo album.

This pair of swans toured the lake throughout the week.

All 7 siblings were there (Bennett alone was not there; he died in 1996). This is Nelson, the eldest. See his t-shirt? We all have "HUKILAU" t-shirts.

We celebrated Peggy's 65th birthday, she's Nelson's wife, here with their daughter Tammy.

Susan is #2, here with her husband Rodger.

Here is #3, my blogging sister and close friend, Ginnie (aka "Boots") and # 6 Jim (aka "Jimbo")

Forgive me, Nancy (#4) for this terribly blurry photo - the only one I have of you! with grandson Asher. It's not easy to catch this baby in a still moment.


John, #7 (in that other, obscure Michigan university's t-shirt, poor man)

And here's me, #8, at Ginnie's request, so I've added it. These birthday glasses of Nicholas' made the rounds, as you see.

And there were lots of kids and grandkids.

Audrey is Todd and Lisle's 4-year-old (Nancy's granddaughter)

Amy is Ginnie's daughter, from Atlanta, with her fiance Dennis, in from California

Wilma (Jim's wife) with daughter Stacy and granddaughter Greta

John's wife Sandy with granddaughter Ever Eden
Nicholas (Ginnie's grandson), Eli and Lydia (Jim's grandkids) and Audrey (Nancy's granddaughter) watching Wilma, Stacy and Greta in the kayak. Owl is watching over them.


Some of us swam across the lake and back. Here is Simon (Stacy's husband) in the water, with Sydney, Eric and Todd. Eric and Todd are Nancy's sons, and Sydney is Eric's daughter.


Greta, Jim's granddaughter


Lisle, Todd's wife, with Asher, their son

Ginnie and her domestic partner Donica (in the Wahiawa shirt), with Ginnie's daughter Amy and fiance Dennis playing Spades. That's Nicholas in the background.


When I needed to be quiet, I got away and read. I think I read one entire page over several days.

Nicholas, our son Peter, and his girlfriend Caitlin weren't resting with this book that Nicholas got for his birthday. (Our Lesley in NYC couldn't make it this year. Boohoo.)

Don with Audrey and Nicholas in one of many boat rides.


Amy and Dennis celebrating the holiday (and Nicholas' birthday). Please notice Dennis' MSU hat (he's a USC fan, being from southern California). How nice of him.

Nicholas (hiding), Caitlin and Peter in the paddle boat, that needs fixing - mostly goes backwards!

On Friday night we did our fireworks. Here are Lydia, Audrey, Sydney and Nicholas with sparklers.

Eli (Jim's grandson) with Uncle Don, shooting bottle rockets

There were fireworks all around the lake for several nights.

Here's most of the gang in one spot. Nelson, Peggy and Tammy had already left. Even though I didn't get a closeup of everyone, they're all in this photo (I think). That's me in the middle in the white pants right after hitting the auto timer on the camera and running to sit.

There are many family members in New York, Georgia, Florida, Alaska, Arizona, Michigan and Australia who couldn't make it. We missed you!