always dishes

It seems I always have dishes needing to be washed, and sometimes it's tiresome.

But then I remember that this is a working kitchen, not a "show" kitchen, so of course there will always be dishes. And I feel better.

Memorial Day, anyway

The sunrise was so pretty that I thought the weatherman must be wrong, but he wasn't. It was another one of many gloomy and rainy days lately, and rather cool, too.

But inside we had company, and peanut butter cookies.

tomatoes from the old country

A friend stopped by and brought us three tomato plants: a Polish one like we had last year, and two Italian. From Italy - his grandfather's tomatoes, the seeds saved every year by his family! 

That's exciting.

hoping for hummingbirds

For a change, I bought a yellow hanging plant at the sale; it's lantana - something that's only an annual here. They said it should attract hummingbirds.

neat and organized

This is how it looks when my brother does the garden.  I'm glad he's found time for it again.

the second thing

"...the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are. That's my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often...So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life...Well, there we have the first thing I said we need. Quality, texture of information."

"And the second?"

"Leisure."

                                                -  Fahrenheit 451,  Ray Bradbury

coy peas

Today it was plenty over ninety, but I reveled in it - we've had so much chilly, rainy gloominess; it felt great! I made this favorite pasta salad.

And if you make it with pipette, the peas try to hide in them.

it isn't perfectionism

"It is not doing perfectly this or that particular work or exercising a particular profession perfectly that grafts us into union with the Church; it is being so driven by Christ, wherever we are, that this small action of ours in the world is truly his.

It is not because we can organize the world that we will be grafted in marriage to the Church, but it is in carrying within us each person in the world, each person that we meet; it is not in organizing their lives for them but in giving them the right to live in our life; in sharing with them everything that we are, all that is ours, from our bread to God's grace."

-   Madeleine Delbrel,  from  Magnificat, May 2017

A Light Exists in Spring

A Light exists in Spring

Not present on the Year

At any other period -

When March is scarcely here.

A Color stands abroad

On Solitary Fields

That Science cannot overtake

But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,

It shows the furthest Tree

Upon the furthest Slope, you know

It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step

Or Noons report away

Without the Formula of sound

It passes and we stay -

A quality of loss

Affecting our Content

As Trade had suddenly encroached

Upon a Sacrament.

-  Emily Dickinson

"like a jewel from the bottom of the sea"

"The object of salvation is that which is unique, irreplaceable, incommunicable - that which is myself alone. This true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.

We must be saved from immersion in the sea of lies and passions which is called 'the world'. And we must be saved above all from that abyss of confusion and absurdity which is our own worldly self. The person must be rescued from the individual. The free son of God must be saved from the conformist slave of fantasy, passion, and convention. The creative and mysterious inner self must be delivered from the wasteful, hedonistic, and destructive ego that seeks only to cover itself with disguises.

To be 'lost' is to be left to the arbitrariness and pretenses of the contingent ego, the smoke-self that must inevitable vanish. To be 'saved' is to return to one's inviolate and eternal reality and to live in God."

                                        -  Thomas Merton, from Magnificat, May 2017

clouds of white

I had to put up this photograph of a local crabapple tree. Fabulous.

let us rise

Let us rise in early morning,

And, instead of ointments, bring

Hymns of praises to our Master,

And his Resurrection sing:

We shall see the Sun of Justice

Ris'n with healing on his wing.

Go ye forth, his saints, to meet him!

Go with lamps in every hand!

From the sepulcher he riseth:

Ready for the Bridegroom stand:

And the Pascha of salvation

Hail, with his triumphant band.

-  from Magnificat, May 2017

When I bought this skillet last summer, I did wonder if I wasn't being greedy. After all, I had one very similar at home, one with the same heavy bottom and the same diameter on top.

This Calphalon is narrower at the base and a bit deeper, different enough for all kinds of cooking. and cleans up like a dream. I'm not feeling greedy anymore - I'm glad I bought it!

more from Mother Goose

There's been a chickadee flapping against our front windows yesterday and again today. I heard a tapping in the spare room and saw him trying to get in. It was so cloudy, it can't be that he was seeing his reflection; still, I headed over to pull down the shade but Dolly was there before me, leaping onto the sill and trying to get him through the glass. I think that scared him off.

Once I saw a little bird

Come hop, hop, hop;

So I cried, "Little bird,

Will you stop, stop, stop?"

And was going to the window

To say, "How do you do?"

But he shook his little tail,

And far away he flew.

-  from Mother Goose