A change

I am not sure when the change occurred, but it did and now I find myself being hyper productive. Not hyper-productive in a compulsive or neurotic way, full of shoulds which have troubled me in the past, but of true joy and excitement. I have so many ideas to write out, so much to plant, so much to pick, so much to can, so many people to write letters to, so many lovely photos to frame, I feel like I'm busting and sometimes I can't fall asleep til midnight, tossing and turning as I dream about my beets and how Harriet Fasenfest told me to cover up their shoulders a little longer to encourage sweetness, or about the sun-veil I'm going to rig by sewing together some sheets that will protect my lettuce starts from the July heat.

Oh, that Harriet. I love her. I love that she dedicated her gem of a book, The Householder's Guide to the Universe, to Wendell Berry. And I love Wendell, too. He is certainly my favorite author these days and I feel like the two of them are busy at work stirring up something inside me, a thing that has always been there, and it is sprouting and growing into something that resonates with my core. These are some wise old souls, Harriet and Wendell.

I think it all started with another book, a book that I didn't care for so much -- The Happiness Project. This was a book assigned for book club, and I read it with the same joy that I read Faulkner in high school: none. But I found it curious that reading a happiness book, of all things, would be so painful to me. And I realized something quite substantial in my distaste. The author, Gretchen Rubin, sets aside a year to do all of the things that one is supposed to do to be happy. She organized her closet, joined a gym, decluttered, forced herself to smile more -- and I just found it all so self-serving and silly. Why, why, why was it so hard for this woman to be happy? She even said that she was happy, but not as happy as she could be. It wasn't enough for the glass to be full, it had to runneth over -- and that gap between full and runneth over was so annoying that she had to devote a year to remedy it.

But Gretchen approached happiness in a way that I never have. I have always looked at my circumstances, whatever they are, and learned to be happy within their parameters. I am completely passive about my happiness -- I take what comes and if it doesn’t fit just right, I attempt to modify myself, my perception, to deal with it. I have never really tried to change the circumstance itself – to be more active about my happiness. That alternative way of looking at things really rocked my world. Isn’t that silly? To realize that I can change things, do things – really, whatever I want – without feeling like I have to ask permission? That it’s okay to be more proactive about my life? And that no one else is responsible for my life but me? I have heard it all before. But now it has my name on it.

So, I started getting up at 5:45 each morning and doing vinyasa yoga at a wonderful, soulful place downtown. I am amazed to see how the body follows the mind – and that where the body resists, the mind resists. I am unconventionally good at twisting my body, particularly my waist and back, in to whatever direction the teacher asks. And in my person too, I can contort according to another’s wishes. No problem there – I love pleasing, love accommodating. But – to hold a position, particularly those involving an open heart, and to allow myself to relax in the openness, wow. To breathe while being open. Now, that’s a challenge. It’s fascinating.

There are so many other things to share, so much that I have discovered I can do to be more proactive about my life, so many lessons I am suddenly seeing through yoga, in the garden, in cooking, and in raising Tate, but I think I will resist the urge to spill it all out here at once. I am writing a lot – in fact, I don’t have enough time in the day to write enough – and feel like the ideas are coming at me in a flood.

More soon.

Anticipating Strawberries

Anticipating Strawberries

After college, I decided to join the Peace Corps and was whisked away with twenty-some-odd other young idealists to a magical land called Georgia. (No, not the state.) This is the famed land of Jason and the Argonauts, a place known to locals as “God’s land” that is as abundant in fruits and vegetables as it is to towering mountains, sunflowered fields and roaring rivers. It’s part Hawaii and part Montana, and its lovely beyond words.

As I settled into my new home there and began to make friends, curious townspeople would invariably ask me questions about my hobbies and interests, and I always proudly announced that I liked to cook. So, of course they wanted me to cook them up something “American”. But I had a problem. First of all, what was “American” food? I couldn’t make Italian dishes because canned tomato sauce – or even tomato paste - wasn’t available. I couldn’t make Mexican dishes because they didn’t have that little yellow spice packet for which to make taco meat. They didn’t have cream of mushroom soup for my mom’s famous chicken dish, and they didn’t have the cans of pinto and black beans I needed for my favorite tortilla soup. They didn’t even have hamburger buns – or ketchup – for a good old fashioned barbeque. All they had was a market, in the center of town, open every day of the year, that sold seasonal, local, organic produce at ridiculously low prices. And I had no idea how to use it.

Apparently, the American food that I knew how to “cook” required someone else (in a factory, far away) to do all the heavy lifting for me. They put the Alfredo sauce in the jar, and my job as the “cook” was to open that jar, heat it up, and dump it on some noodles – also premade. So, I wasn’t so much a cook as a jar opener. But now, being faced with the raw ingredients alone, I had to learn an ancient art that the people of most non-western societies had learned from childhood: how to cook good, healthful, simple food using time tested techniques. Hands were used for measuring, pinching, pulling, testing, knocking and kneading, and they held a vast amount of wisdom in them. There were no cookbooks – just a visceral knowledge of how to cook good – really, really good – food with what was available at the market on that particular day. The two years I spent there were a lesson not only in culture and fortitude, but also in fruits and vegetables, nuts and cheeses, flours and herbs. I had to learn how to use them by making daily use of the beloved market that was the heartbeat of our town, and I had to use what was available during each passing season.

And so slowly, my friends and colleagues began to teach me, as though I were a child, the very basics. “Bread dough feels like this – but dumpling dough feels like that.” I stuck my hand in and tried to come up with words to describe the difference, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t a cerebral exercise. When I got out my tattered notebook to write out the steps to their recipes, they would give me instructions like this: “Add enough water to the beans.” But how much was “enough?” I finally got out my ruler and determined that two inches above the beans was “enough,” which has been my rule of thumb since. To try to learn what they just felt and knew intrinsically – was a challenge that I’m still trying to overcome by figuring out how to cook with my eyes, ears, nose, mouth and hands instead of tuning out and dutifully following package instructions. Try it sometime. Listen to how a mushroom sounds when it’s sautéed over high heat, compared to an onion. They are vastly different.

In America, we have become so accustomed to getting what we want, when we want it. Which, at first glance, sounds amazing. But there is a great loss in not having to wait for something – like strawberries, for instance. Strawberries, all over the world, are a huge reason to celebrate. They are the first fruit of the summer season (no, rhubarb, you don’t count), the harbingers of all of the bounty that is to come. When they first show their cheery faces on a spring day, amidst all of the potatoes and onions and cabbage, its enough to make a girl cry. Eating seasonal produce grown at a local market brings an unexpected joy – the joy of anticipating the turn of each season and the food that comes with it. Each season is ushered in with a specific fruit or vegetable at its side, appearing in every recipe in one great big flurry, and then vanishing again until the following year.  Strawberries are eaten in juicy handfuls for dinner after a long, meat-laden winter. Figs, sitting with a friend behind a fence, juice dripping from your chin in the heat of August. A shiny gold persimmon is for the first day of school. And mandarins, sitting around a fire and throwing the peels in as you read a book. To eat watermelon in February, just because you can, is missing the point.

Each daily or weekly visit to your local farmers market is showing up to witness this miracle.

Market Kids

I'm currently blogging for the Portland Farmer's Market and writing a weekly newsletter the Hollygrove Market in New Orleans. Here is a little snippet:

Market Kids

If you happened to stop by the Ancient Heritage Dairy booth last Saturday and found the wonderfully talented cheese maker, Paul Obringer, fighting a losing battle to keep his sample plates filled, I apologize.

It was my son. He’s two and just barely tall enough to reach his chubby little hands over the top of the table — and yet with a ninja-like accuracy he is able to obliterate the samples in the blink of an eye. And there I stand, dumbfounded, as he smiles up at me with scio feta oozing through his widely spaced incisors.





Every variety pleases him – soft and mild, hard and sharp, or creamy and smooth. On one hand, I’m a little embarrassed by his voracious appetite and complete disregard of social convention but on the other hand, I’m insanely proud. While most toddlers wander around with goldfish clenched in their sweaty little fists, he has pecorino romano in his.

But that’s typical for my son, a kid raised with farmers markets central to his understanding of food, its origins, and its celebration. That’s not to say that we don’t go to the supermarket – we do, and he sits passively in his little plastic car/shopping-cart, watching the parade of rain boots, high heels and shopping cart wheels pass before his 18” high perspective. If we make it to the checkout counter without a meltdown – and then over that final hurdle of resisting the barrage of toys and candy offered right before you hand over your credit card – it is a successful trip.

Our outings to the farmer’s market are on the far other end of the spectrum. When our train makes its final stop at PSU and we disembark, his little legs start kicking with wild enthusiasm, knowing what lies just up the hill. As soon as we reach the market he leaps from my arms and walks amongst the crowd, a proud member of the group, rubbing shoulders with other toddlers, fingering the leafy kale that hangs over the table’s edge, and staring into the eyes of banjo-strumming musicians that recline on the grassy knoll.

The market for a toddler isn’t just a place where food is sold; it’s a place where food is celebrated. It’s where wooden coins and broad smiles are readily exchanged, where shouts about the health benefits of local wild honey mingle with the hiss of coffee brewing, oil popping and tote bags bristling against each other, filled with seasonal bounty. It’s a sensory rich carnival of colors, sounds, people and products that he only finds here, in this great cultural gumbo where food and people collide. I couldn’t find a playground or a prescribed “enriching toddler experience” that offers him as much as this reality.

And to me, this experience is as nourishing to him as the food itself.

One year later

A year ago, Chad and I planted two apple trees in our front yard and I snapped a photo of Tate standing next to the taller of the two. It was just a twig, and so was he. If he looks a little sullen in the photo, it's because about an hour later he began retching...and didn't stop for nearly three days. (More disgusting details could follow here, but won't.)

I can't get over how teeny he is here. 

A year later, here they are again. The tree looks like a teenager -- spindly and gawky, but it has its first wee apple buds starting to grow, which thrills me to no end. And Tate is still holding on tightly to his toddler belly but is getting longer and leaner everyday. 

Who knows how long we'll stay in Portland and how long I'll be able to document my son's growth versus the growth of a certain Pacific Rose apple tree. I have visions of him coming home from college or even high school -- this strapping lad that rests his arm on the sturdy girth of our blossoming apple tree -- we snap a picture, post it on our blog, and all go inside to eat homemade apple pie. Because of course, in dreams like this where boys come home from college to see mom, apple harvest is in springtime.

Flora, Fauna, Taters

In the two years of Tate's little life, I have made it a priority to get him out in nature as much as possible, to teach him to appreciate all of the different flowers and critters and trees of the great Pacific Northwest. Ever since we moved to Portland, we have gone on weekly hikes in the spectacular Forest Park and the whole time I prattle on about flora and fauna, greeting all that we see. "Hello, moss. How are you, slug? Hi there, yellow finch." For the first year, he bounced along silently in my trusty (and indispensable) Ergo, seemingly more interested in pulling my braid than anything else. But lately, he is looking outwards more. And apparently, he has been listening. Here is his current list of correctly identified living things that he himself can point out in the wild. Domesticated and zoo animals have not been included but for the record, he is bananas about otters. 

Finches, blue-jays, crows, chickadees, seagulls, and twice now, bald eagles. Spiders, bumblebees, ladybugs, slugs, squirrels, moss, ferns, tulips, daffodils, crocuses, dandelions, and his favorite -- lavender. He will spot lavender from a mile away and run towards it, full tilt. Okay, a block. He loves the stuff. My mom used to take me on walks as a child and point out the names of flowers (as her father did) and I have always appreciated that.

He can only learn as much as I can teach him and sadly, I am reaching my limit. My list is sort of similar to the one above....I know my flowers, a handful of birds, some plants, and hardly any trees. It's kind of embarrassing. Oak tree, maple tree, cypress tree......uh, big tree, little tree. I'll have to get a guidebook of sorts to help me keep learning as this kid is gaining on me fast. I love it, though. I hope to teach him to hear a bird song and know what it is, to take a hike through the woods and to truly appreciate the company of the trees he is among, and to learn all of the sweet lessons that non-humans have to teach. 

Motherhood: The Great Humbler

Ah, it's Mother's Day. I never considered Mother's Day to be a day for me until one day it happened, and there was Tate, gripping a little box in his three month old hands as a hand over from his papa. It sort of floored me - that I was suddenly a member of this group of women that I had always honored. Since then, it's been one of my favorite days of the year -- maybe after Thanksgiving and the Christmas-Tree-Cut-Down-Day. 

I have pondering Mother's Day all month this year. Reflecting on all of the women in my life who have shaped me and who continue to be enormous, inspirational influences in my life. Today as I was running in a park and wished another woman a Happy Mother's Day, I realized that somewhere along this journey of female-hood, all competition between me and other women melted away and they truly became sisters, teachers to me. I am pretty sure that it was the same time that I became a mother myself, although some of the women in my life that are my teachers are not necessarily mothers themselves. Perhaps this is because motherhood is the great equalizer, the great humbler, and I opened myself up to their lessons. 

It's a time in life when you are so sleep deprived that you are sure it should be illegal for you to share the road and when you find yourself sleeping on a carpet next to a crib, straining to recall the last refrains of Michael Row the Boat Ashore because your toddler is mumbling "more, more." Women go through the weird wonders of pregnancy and the barriers begin to break down as you laugh about how you can't sneeze without peeing your pants and how this-weird-thing-happened-today-and-is-that-okay.  And then when the baby is born, you find yourselves leaning over cups of steaming tea with wide eyes, whispering about chaffed nipples or the time that you lost your patience with your toddler or how terrified you were when your child had a febrile seizure or the horror you faced when you had a miscarriage or the time that you were so overwhelmed with the love of your child that when he took your face in his sweaty little hands and said, "Hi, angel", your heart burst into a million pieces. 

There was a time in my life when I cared if Girl A made a 98 on an English paper when I made a 93. I actually used my elbows against girls when running the 1600 back in high school, and yes -- they were pointy. When you are a child, none of that competition exists -- if they are on the playground and so are you, well then it's a good match. It creeps up when you are in high school, college, and then a bit after. But then when the gravity of things so much bigger than yourself creep onto your lap, you find yourself looking across the table and asking each other for help, for understanding, and for grace. This has been one of the biggest gifts of motherhood to me: genuine sisterhood with other women. 

My mom has taught me that she has such an abundance of love to give me when I open up to her. 

My sister has taught me that when I am in trouble, she is the first person to have my back. And she will call incessantly until I am better. 

My sister-in-law, Erin, has taught me about the strength of being gentle.

My dear Molly has reminded me to stay true to myself, to the Leslie that hung upside down with her on the monkey bars in my backyard for most of my childhood.

My lifelong friend and mentor Lynne has shown me an incredible example of happy individuality, happy motherhood, and a happy marriage. She has been both a rock and a soft place to land on when I'm exhausted. 

My grandmother has shown me strength in her ability to be more vulnerable, more seen, even as she gets older.

My friend Bekah has shown me what courage there is in admitting that you need help when you do, and what freedom and joy comes as a result of that.

My friend Erin has taught me about the joy of providing a wholesome, warm, peaceful environment.

These are just a few that I wanted to share. Tonight, in addition to the wonderful blessing I have in my sweet Tate, I am thankful for these women that have taught me so much about being a woman, about being a mother. 

Everything Shows

On Saturday night, Chad and I watched the wonderful classic Frank Capra film - You Can't Take It with You - and turned it off feeling re-aligned, having had the two life choices about preparing for happiness or simply being happy now  - placed squarely in front of us. We were going to be the ones in the film playing the harmonica when chaos abounds, taking the elevator down from an unsatisfying job and not coming back up. If you haven't seen the movie, do -- it resonates with a struggle that has been going on in America for nearly a century. Plus, I don't think you can have too much Jimmy Stewart in your life.

We turned it off, ready for bed, when amazing footage flashed across the screen. Pristine squares of carefully tended farmland and rows of neat little homes were being ungulfed by silent, calm waters. Like toys in a bathtub, cars and trucks and silos and airplanes swirled in tidal pools. It was so different from watching the destruction of a hurricane, which shakes its fists and curses and kicks the door at you. The tsunami didn't seem to have anything against the land or people. It was simply following the rules of nature, simply doing what water is supposed to do. As we watched this spectacle on live television, we realized that this gently flowing mass of water was taking lives as we watched from our living room. There was silence from the television, but somewhere in that mass of destruction, someone was crying, screaming, gasping. What a helpless feeling to sit and watch from your couch with a bowl of popcorn next to you.

Yesterday on NPR, I listened to a first responder talk about the calmness of the Japanese people during this tragedy. "Is there still mass chaos?" the interviewer asked. "Oh, chaos isn't how I would describe it" the responder replied. "People are orderly, calm, patient, obviously devastated - but following rules and order and being just - well, very patient." I recalled the words of my Georgian mentor in Peace Corps after her own country was torn apart by civil war and the country had shut down its banks, lost its power, its water source, its gas lines -- and mass poverty and hysteria resulted. "In a disaster, everything shows" she said. People who, until that time, had been normal and good citizens - began stealing earrings right out of the ears of women if they looked valuable enough to take, while others began opening their doors to others, even if they had very little to give. Everything that is inside a person comes to light. If you are a hero, it will emerge. If you are selfish, that will come out too.

Then, I remembered Hurricane Katrina. I think that that disaster gave me an opportunity to see both sides of my own soul. I evacuated first to College Station and crawled into bed at my dear friends' home, considering my situation. In the morning, my friend Ginger tapped on the door and said, "Leslie, the levees have breached." I turned on the television and saw those now iconic images of New Orleaneans slogging down Canal Street, belongings on their back, and was aghast. My heart broke at the sight of the Superdome. But as the day wore on and the coverage turned to the looting and violence that was taking place, I am embarrassed to admit that my compassion turned into shame and disgust. I had recently had some incidents in New Orleans that had hardened my heart to some of the people  in New Orleans, and let's be honest - this was the poor, black population. (I had been chased down the street by a crazy woman who had taken her shoes off and was threatening to hit me with them for no apparent reason, I had been harrassed by a masturbating man in his car near my house, and a car of teenagers had thrown stuff at me while running.) And here they were looting. And then here they were, on their rooftops with their misspelled signs. I was sorry for them, but I also felt a sense of justice that the very people who had terrified me, were now terrified. My heart hurts now, remembering the ugliness of my reaction. But, I'd like to be honest. My sense of entitlement reigned supreme.

By the end of the day, it was apparent that my work and schooling at Tulane University would be cancelled indefinitely, so I hatched out three plans for what to do with myself:

1. Go to Colorado and run the Boulder marathon, which I had trained for, then find work and play and just wait it out.
2. Go to the Harvard School of Public Health, who had extended an offer for me to attend, and get a head start on my schooling.
3. Work for Emergency Corps, a branch of Peace Corps that had set up in New Orleans to respond to the disaster. They too had offered me a place within their organization.

I considered each carefully. And I chose option #2. I attended Harvard for one semester of my life and had an incredible experience living in Jamaica Plain, spending my days studying at Harvard and my evenings sipping cappuccinos in the Italian north end. I got a boyfriend, ran the New Hampshire marathon, and just had a jolly good time. Everything shows. I still regret that I did not choose option #3.

When I say that "everything shows" -- I don't mean that because the people in Japan are calm and orderly and the people in New Orleans were hysterical, this means that one population is superior to another and we should cathect one and and despise the other. What is inside -- your internal resources -- are not something you should be praised for having or blamed for not having. Maybe the Japanese patience and order comes from the confidence in their government to take care of them, which the New Orleaneans lost when the  government failed to respond, day after day. And maybe the looting and violence that took in New Orleans was out of a lifetime of desperation of not-having, or maybe it was because that internal voice of what's wrong and what's right had not been sufficiently developed. I'm not going to judge. When we are given the opportunity to view our internal resources, the state of our souls, we can note if we feel that we have an abundance from which we can give to others, or whether we feel a dearth, a need to take from others.

To have the former, I believe, is to have true wealth. And those without it should not be blamed, but provided for with compassion and grace.