Blurred in the background.

Juliana and I swelled up, last year, in time. Our daughters were born the same month. We shared a midwife, and I was secretly apprehensive that we would go into labor on the same day, and the midwife would miss my birth. We’ve shared a few play dates and dinners since our daughters were born. The girls have aged enough at this point to acknowledge one another’s presence long enough to take each other’s things. I’m not sure we should call this playing. But we do.

Since I’ve know Juliana she’s talked about leaving. The first thing I knew about her was that she was moving to North Carolina. And for this reason, I’ve been a not very wonderful, half-committed friend.   Living in a transient space like Bloomington, I tend to warm up most to those who buy houses and plant asparagus. I don’t care for the feeling of being left.

Juliana is leaving. And she is leaving to do a lot of the things I say I would love to: to build a yurt in the woods and write her demons away and her pleasures into being. I haven’t figured out how she manages to write at all with a child the same age as mine, but its what she’s got planned for the year, and I can’t help but be envious of the way she sees possibility in her approaching time.

Juliana is also someone I respect for her commitment to writing in community, something I tried once, but felt disheartened by and have not done again. She attends and leads workshops in town, and sets up writing prompts in her public journal to encourage her more distant writing community together. Just now, she has posted a self-portraiture prompt at her journal.

I’ve always been both too proud and too puzzled to do much with writing prompts and I almost snubbed my nose to this too.  But I got to thinking about how many photographs I’ve taken this year in which I am a prop, a balance. Here a child leans against my leg, here I hold her at her waist. You can see my arm in this one. It feels indicative of my year. My body has become secondary to hers, acknowledged only for the fragmented ways it maintains her: It feeds a child, holds a child, puts a child to sleep, cleans, dries, guides, protects, changes a child.

I wonder what an intentional movement from the blurred background to the center of a photograph would do for my sense of self.  I wonder what making time to reflect on a body, a little less small and round, and a little more my own, would allow me to discover.

I am afraid to find either a poor unnecessary pride or a violent shame. Or worse than both, perhaps, nothing at all of the self that was before her.  This project, if I’m honest, is a crying out. The sort of call you make to mountains, waiting for an echo. And I wait for this: I need a reconfirmation, be it only a hallow reverberation of the hullabaloo I make,  that something about the self I knew before was not forced to be forever buried now that someone else’s needs dictate mine.

And so, I’ll be taking this snapshot project up. I’ve impregnating the undertaking with a little too much planned self discovery. And I’m apprehensive for reasons it seems, a little different than the other women who are also committing to self-photograph. They seem afraid of their beauty value, I am afraid that the photographs will be a sham, an imposter’s depiction of a re-centered self. Because what I am really after is not the image, but the centering.

May Review

here it is, again: a monthly review for family and friends who decide to follow this blog and are interested in the actual goings-on in our life, rather than my less practical musings.  I have divided our month into categories, and provided the highlights.

life with a little one (abridged, and in pictures):

Andi is in to everything. We try to incorporate her in to our chores (and the bottom of the clean laundry basket) as best we can. We are needing to be more and more creative to allow for learning opportunities while managing her safety and the state of our home.                            ————————————-

She is on the move. Her crawl is perfected, and she’s cruising on her feet when she gets near enough to a wall or steady object. She loves her father’s toy piano, which was the first thing on which she pulled herself to standing.  -

Her sweet german swing, while more brightly colored than out typical household adornments has been a precious gift of time. we have attached hooks in the new addition and in the entry to the kitchen, so I can have a few minutes at a hot stove or a computer.  ————————————-

outside:

i) potatoes are growing fast, and we’re doing our best to keep them well hilled so we’ll get a good crop.

ii) The pear and apple suffered from blight, but we’ve pruned, garlic-ed and sulfured them, and they are recovering. the other fruit trees are doing well and are all producing- save the almond, which just went in this year.

iii) While the birds got to our cherries and grapes before we did, they haven’t been fast enough on the strawberries (or perhaps we planted enough to share). Strawberries have become Andjoli’s favorite food, and perhaps mine as well. They are interspersed through our front and back gardens and our orchard area, and the certain find of a ripe berry makes garden tasks in all of these areas more enjoyable.

inside:

i) the summer work has been more overwhelming than I anticipated. I have a lot more on my academic plate than I originally realized, and the fact that I had planned to rest and am substituting that rest out for more work makes it all more daunting.

ii) We have moved into the addition- as it is the coolest place in the house. We have spread mattresses to lounge on in the living-area. It is not the most put together, but is a soft landing for an experimenting child and it makes family bed bigger- so we can spread out in hot weather. It also affords a beautiful view of the back gardens. The true bedroom is stifling hot, as we are (intentionally) living without AC this summer to save natural resources.

iii) for a long time we have been focusing on eating local organic foods, with the regular addition of dry bulk items. The changing season is making this more palatable, and we have been forced out of our winter standards now that we have an abundance of fresh greens. Some of our favorites this month were homemade falafel on homemade crepes stuffed with all the spring garden green. Also: savory oatmeal. yes, you heard me. we’ve added spring onions and green garlic and a bit of local cheese to our oatmeal and it is wonderful.

iv) we are trying to do all of our indoor cooking in the evening time, so the house has a whole night to cool off after the stove heats it up. We have created a miniature outdoor kitchen for the day that houses our toaster oven, rotisserie and crock pot. B is excited to build a more attractive and efficient outdoor kitchen for the summer, complete with clay oven, and an induction burner, and perhaps a solar cooker or thermal cookers. For this year, we will probably add the induction burner and build a solar cooker, and look at the more complicated (clay oven) and expensive (thermal cooker) projects for the future. I am excited that my husband is excited about cooking- even if it is the energy saving/green technology/building kitchen side of things.

A side note: it is funny that even when I try to write about indoor things, it somehow bleeds in to writing about outdoor things. This is rather reflexive of the way we live life. and I like it.

v) In order to ameliorate this tendency to focus on the outdoors as much as we do we are making plans to bring some of it inside, in the form of houseplants. We have some overwintering edibles that stayed at a friends house for the colder months that might return to our home: a banana, lemon and pomegranate. I planted some ginger (and await more plants from my mother) and we hope to add vanilla, cinnamon, figs, limes, indian coleus,  and bay to our indoor plant collection this year, so we will have a good deal of green things to keep in our home when the world turns brown outside.

creation:

i) I submitted a short story to a writing contest. this is only the second time I have ever done this. I do not know when results will be published, and don’t want inquiries. just forget I said anything.

community, work, politics, and the rest of the world:

i) all of these things keep happening. I’m just too tired to recall much of it.

April Review

here it is, again: a monthly review for family and friends who decide to follow this blog and are interested in the actual goings-on in our life, rather than my less practical musings.  I have divided our month into categories, and provided the highlights.

life with a little one (in pictures):

Row 1) Andjoli is getting filthy. many of the things we hope will make it in her mouth never get there. Aim is impeccable, however, with less desirable objects.

Row 2) We’re starting to give her more frequent baths. It’s the first time she’s really needed them, and they don’t make her as crazy as they used to. Here are some clean pictures of her in her bath robe . . .

Row 3) she’s loving the outdoors. We’re doing our best to make sure she doesn’t choke herself on the smaller parts of it. Even though she seems to dislike the taste of dandelion fluff, she keeps going back for more.

outside:

i) Some of the winter-sown starts survived my lack of attention, and are now in the ground. For the most part, we’ve tended the front yard and acted like the more expansive back yard doesn’t exist. It’s tall with a lot of things we didn’t plant. The areas we cleared and planted in the earliest days of spring have been over-run again. We’ve got an almond tree, grapes, blueberries, peppers, tomatoes and eggplants to set out back in the next few weeks . . . so we’re going to need to pull out some of the un-invited green.

ii) the fruit trees seem to be in good form. I love the fuzz of the miniature peaches setting out. The apples and pears, which flower later don’t have their fruit sets yet, but everything else looks like it will be in production this year. The nectarine had a little leaf curl, but I plucked off the mottled leaves, and there’s no reoccurrence yet.

iii) the asparagus came up and was had a few times before we let it unfurl to the small trees it hoped to be. fresh cut asparagus is really something.

inside:

i)papers finished. grading finished. A breath, and then a quick leap to summer session.

ii) the addition is usable and has been used. B’s family came in to town at the end of the month, and we spent good time in the new space together watching a film, eating at a table, and they, of course, slept there.

iii) We’ve started fermenting our grains much more frequently, and it makes me feel worlds better. We also are whey fermenting baby food, and finding good uses for the sourdough start that keeps growing and needing to be used (biscuits and pancakes were wonderful, the sourdough banana bread, not so)

creation:

i) sigh. someday.

community, work, politics, and the rest of the world:

i) all of these things keep happening. I’m just too tired to recall much of it.

On youth and Easter hats.

I have grown old enough to no longer recognize myself in the spaces that claimed me for my youngest years. But they keep claiming me.

My godmother still buys me Easter dresses and Easter hats. I obligingly don them, and, on parade, am still shown off in my Easter get-up. My daughter, new to this old tradition, is also dressed and hatted.

My godmother frowns at my lack of sentimentality, which is how she refers to my disinterest in being dressed up.  I frown back, because I fail to see it the same way.

Greek Easter has been marked these last few years by the signs of age on the whole old crew and a deep sense of avoidance about it. We all know that I am no longer the child I was, and that they have aged around me accordingly. But the masquerade of my youth keeps on, in a new dress.

And the newest dressee–my child–makes the curious nostalgia all the more obvious: Our roles are all changing, must change, around her.

march review

here it is, again: a monthly review for family and friends who decide to follow this blog and are interested in the actual goings-on in our life, rather than my less practical musings.  I have divided our month into categories, and provided the highlights.

life with a little one:

i) Andjoli slept for three hours. twice. hours slept may not seem like the first and most important thing about a month to you, if you haven’t had children yet. but just you wait.

ii) chapstick and toothbrushes make much better toys than expensive organic non-toxic actual toys.

iii) We celebrated Andjoli’s first name day on March 25th. Hronia Polla. She had peas. For those unfamiliar, name days are similar to birthdays, void of cake and commercialism. Andjoli is the namesake of my godmother but we were unfortunately too busy to make it up for them to celebrate together. Perhaps next year.

iv) girl’s got bed head for the first time, and this crazy little hair woosh that i wouldn’t quite call bangs. she’s lookin’ good.

v)you’d probably just prefer pictures, anyway, so I’ll let them speak for themselves. Here are a few of her rolling around on our couch, and ready to go out in the last of the cold weather.

v) I’ve finally inserted pictures of the wool longies i made into the february review. i promised you these pictures last month, but it took this long to take and post them. I know pictures of pants don’t really compare to pictures of babies, so I put the baby in the pants,  hoping that it might increase the chance that you actually care. scroll down to the old post if interested.

outside:

i) I have winter-sown 12 different varieties of beneficial flowers, and they’re in their mini greenhouses on the front porch.  I know it’s spring now, but I still insist on referring to this propagation method as winter-sowing. we don’t remember to water them as frequently as we should.

ii) we’ve seen a good number of early spring flowers blossom and fade: lenten roses, snowdrops, bird footed violets, and a few others that i’ve never known the names of.  The early tulips and daffodils have set their flower heads up and are waiting to open. the lilacs have miniature purple mounds, and green leaves starting to unfurl. all the bushes, berries, nuts, fruits are leafing out nicely.

iii) all the spaces left unmulched are leafing out too. i wouldn’t call it “nicely” though. I might actually refer to it as a “problem.”

iv)B’s brother (and brother’s girlfriend) helped us weed the entire front yard and put up grape and raspberry wire trellis on the west fence. Since they left, we’ve weeded about a third of the back yard  and put in a few hundred strawberries between front and back, and twice as many onion and garlic sets. I also seeded the entire front yard with veggies and herbs, but there is a lot still to do in the back plots.

v) Our compost grew by several feet since we’ve started on this spring rampage. We built a large compost hoop to contain it all, but have not transferred the compost material into the hoop yet.

inside:

i)after good time in the garden, it was next to impossible to force myself to come in and work diligently on all of the papers, grading, lesson plans etc. that I had put off in order to get my fingers dirty. but i did it, and it’s done. most of it was accomplished past my deadlines and in a disorderly fashion, but it’s spring and there’s no keeping us in here any longer.

ii) a first coat of stain is down on the addition floor, and we hope to get the second on just under the march wire- we plan to finish the staining on the 31st. I’m jumping the gun and writing a review a day before the month is over, so I can’t report on this accurately, but it’s a plant based all natural stain, and I’m a little skeptical about the final outcome. If nothing else, we have a lot of good wool rugs to cover it up.

iii) the juicer is back in order (it was actually down less than a week). I can’t wait for the summer season to kick in to production, so we can get more local vegetables to put through this little machine. every other function it serves in my kitchen is back in working order. I really love kitchen order.

creation:

i) I’ve started outlining a chapbook that starts in the 6th month of my pregnancy, goes through Andjoli’s birth, and details vignettes of her first months. Essentially I’m drawing up a collection of essays that weave this year together. If it doesn’t end up publishable, it will still be a story worth sharing with Andjoli later.

ii) We’re still stuck in our rut of functional production, but we’ve talked about it, and determined it is not worth complaining about in the least. We really rather like it. We’re discussing ways to use our resources so that we can engage our community through creation.  We’re considering growing flowers, teas, herbs and medicinals on our plot in the coming years to sell at market.

community, work, politics, and the rest of the world:

i) I decided to cut out the categories of “school” and “work.” This does not mean we are actually cutting those things out of our lives, but sometimes we wish we were. Future updates on work and school will be highlighted under this new, more expansive, category. There is little in the way of news to put in these just-retired categories, excepting that, despite huge financial cuts in the department, I was offered one additional semester of teaching for next year, which should perfectly correspond with the completion of my PhD coursework.

ii)the neighbors are out! it’s so nice to run in to our hibernated friends and to again exchange stories, seeds, meals, and baby clothes. we are reminded: we were made for community.

iii) We found a small plot of earth about a mile from our house that is more than reasonably priced– and it has made us start to think about getting a little more land to work. We’re up to our elbows in work in our existing yard, but we’ve got spring in our noses, and ideas to boot.  We’ve already talked about putting a woodstoved yurt on the plot as a writing house and building a composting toilet. Of course, we don’t have 15k to put into property or dreams right now, and we don’t make enough to get another mortgage. It gets us thinking, anyway, about ways to increase our small urban homestead.

iv) After blood sampling and multiple interviews I have been accepted to donate my extra milk to the Indiana Milk Bank. The bank is a non-profit that provides breast milk to premature and newborn babies when the mother is unable to feed them (due to birth complications, maternal death, etc.). I’m excited about this, because it’s a rather unique way for me to provide a resource that’s pretty hard to come by (human milk), that I happen to have in abundance.

v) I am heading up a delegation for Amnesty International to talk to our Senators and Representatives (both State and National) about the crisis of Maternal health, and the possibility for access to education and transformation in policy to decrease  maternal complications and outrageous spending.  I don’t have time for this, but no one had volunteered in the whole state, so I’m putting myself through the Amnesty training and traipsing up to the (state) capital a few times next month to see if we can’t do something about a pretty serious issue in our country.

vi) we were considering getting a full-blown meat CSA from an amazingly wonderful local farm called maple valley. Because the CSA included large portions of chicken, turkey, and lamb, we decided to do some taste testing before we began, most specifically, to address our lack of lamb experiences. We have tried to love it, prepared it a few ways, and have decided we are not fans of the animal. Though the lamburgers with meg were tastier than I would have expected, I firmly believe that it is because we doused them in enough local condiments and spices to make the lamb unrecognizable.  And while I successfully consumed one whole burger, I’m not sure we would know what to do with a quarter of a lamb in our freezer. So, we’ve opted for a chicken share from the same farm, and will be getting a slew of free ranging hens to set on our table this year. I am on the hunt for an inexpensive rotisserie to make this experience even more enjoyable.  I love few things more than local, sustainable, home prepared, delicious food and am glad that the meat we eat this year will be all of those things. and not made of lamb.

february review

I’ve decide to provide a monthly review for family and friends who decide to follow this blog and are interested in the actual goings-on in our life, rather than my less practical musings.  I have divided our month into categories, and provided the highlights. This means that you can not complain that I never get to the stuff of it in this journal.

life with a little one:

i) Andjoli and I still do not sleep for more than two-hour windows. I am resigned to this. B sleeps six to eight hours but often still looks less rested than I. We all need (and take too few) naps.

ii) teeth hurt- both for her, and for anyone who gets too close to her mouth.

iii) Andjoli is slightly obsessed with the cat, Ossel. She gets the jitters when she is in close proximity.

iv)The little lady made it through RSV, and is now breathing again like a normal person. It is amazing what a blessing a steady breath is.

v) She has grown out of everything she used to wear this month- diapers, diaper covers, pants, boots. I’ve done my best to hand make or alter new clothes to fit her. My favorite creation is four pairs of recycled wool longies, balaclavas from her old (now too small) hats, and new booties. perhaps I’ll post pictures for anyone who cares.

outside:

i) I have yet to complete my winter sowing. I have all of these containers saved, but haven’t found time to actually get my hands dirty.

ii) some of the early bulbs that are in our front yard are poking their green heads up. spring buds are bulging on the trees and bushes.

iii) all of the fruit trees have been pruned. or butchered. I’m not sure how, exactly, to express what it was that i did to them.

iv) we have not winter mulched or prepared the beds. this spring smell is making me anxious.

v) we have too much green matter and not enough brown matter in our compost from the winter, and as it warms, it is looking more pitiful and soggy . .  we need to track down some leaves or waste wood chips to remedy our compost slop.

inside:

i) we spend more time here than we should when it is dreary outside. I look forward to having a more hardy little person next winter so that I can drag her out in weather like this.

ii) B finished laying the wood floor in the addition, and we are deciding if we should just go ahead and stain it and forget about sanding it. We’d prefer a more natural look over an even look anyway, and since we are using an osmo non-toxic stain/sealant rather than polyurethane I don’t think it needs to be perfectly level . . .

iii) the front cap to our juicer cracked. They will replace it, but mailing replacements takes time, and  I currently don’t know what to do with myself in the kitchen. How do you, for instance, make flour, nut butters, sauces and juice? I did not realize my dependence on the machine before this.

iv) having a laundry room upstairs is exceptional.

creation:

i) I have started this journal, which I suppose counts as “writing,” but I’m not writing well enough or consistently enough to satisfy my desire. I’d like to get something publication ready. hopefully I’ll have something positive to say about that in future monthly reviews.

ii) We have been limited to creating functional things: wool diaper covers, lullabies, breads, sauces and juices from ugly organics (local waste produce that is slightly too unattractive to sell or eat fresh), etc.  there has been no painting, no real music, no poetry- no simple extravagance. this must change.

my perpetual schooling:

i) no I am not finished. stop asking.

ii) A proposal for my second master’s thesis is due March 1st. It was not accomplished by the last day in February.

iii) I’m looking for impressive literature from authors who use their writing as a forum for dissent. Suggestions? (This does not need to be limited to the US, but does need to be available in English or French)

iv) We should deflect: B is finished with school! That might be old news to some of you, but all the same, you should congratulate him.

work:

i) I prepared this month to start teaching a short intensive course at the University on Food and Industry. Starts March 8th. Should be exciting.

ii) B is learning about translation software and getting his name out in the translation world, and he is also hosting weekly neighborhood Spanish classes in our home.

iii) We are both considering summer work, but our criteria makes it difficult: we want to work in a place we believe in, where we can learn useful skills and support useful growth. We do not want this work to take the place or time of the rich and rewarding experience of being part of a family and a community, nor do we want it to strip us of the time necessary to create and self reflect as individuals. Because of these standards, it currently looks like we may not be working, or, I should say, we may be working on things we love and not making much of an income.