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| A monarch butterfly enjoys the zinnias in our front yard |
As you may have noticed, it's been very quiet on the blog lately. Part of it has been me just utterly losing any motivation (again) to write anything— not sure what caused that, but I haven't had the will to fight it— and part of it is this mental block I get when I'm trying to write about a trip and I feel like I can't write anything else until I finish "the story." So I have a big fat draft about the Olympic Peninsula tidepools/rainforest sitting in a document on my desktop, but finishing it feels like an impossible task, and OF COURSE I can't write anything else until I publish my overly-adjectived mind-dump about the glorious riot of life among the acorn barnacles and ochre sea stars.
So this is a blog post to let you know that I'm still here, and I'm doing okay, and to let myself know that it's okay to write things out of sequence and I will eventually get around to the tidepool blog post.
In the meantime:
Mending
On our trip to Portland, I fell off a little wheeled sled on an alpine slide while going approximately 20 miles an hour. The resulting slide on rough plastic not only took off a huge chunk of skin on my hand and knees, but also completely shredded one sleeve of my backpacking shirt. Although I only paid a couple bucks for the shirt at Goodwill, it was a rare find and a high-quality brand, so I came home determined to figure out the best way to patch, mend, and restore this garment.
I know basic mending and have a sewing kit, but the shredding was so bad that I knew I needed to learn some more advanced patching techniques than just whipstitch and iron-on patches. So I did what I always do when I want to learn something new: check books out from the library! Thanks to Instagram recommendations, I picked up the gorgeous Mending Life by Nina and Sonya Montenegro and Wear, Repair, Repurpose by Lily Fulop, both of which I highly recommend. I bought an iron and a massive pack of embroidery floss at the thrift store (only $8 for both!) and set to work practicing my skills.
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| Shortening some thrift-store curtains to fit our window |
The past couple weeks I've been patching and reinforcing seams in our clothing, including an almost nine-year-old t-shirt of Zach's and a pair of capri leggings that I bought at the mall for $4 when I was 19. I'm practicing stitches, patches, darning, basic embroidery (although I need a hoop to really do it properly), and decorative sashiko stitching. I even altered some curtains to hang in our bedroom.
Mending is a not only a useful skill for making clothes last longer, but it's providing a much-needed break from work that doesn't involve mindlessly scrolling through the Internet. It's an endorphin rush to finish a project and find that you've put another year of life into a garment.
As I mend, I think about the clothing. The fields where the cotton was grown or the factory where the synthetic fibers were made. The underpaid workers fighting to make a living wage. The approximately 70 pounds of clothing that the average American throws away in a year. The overwhelmed thrift stores, the huge clothing exports that wreck local economies halfway across the globe. Mending won't stop this cycle of waste and abuse from happening, but it's a tiny act of standing up in the current and saying "No!" to fast fashion and "Yes!" to respecting the huge amount of resources, effort, and time embodied in the clothes.
Anyway, I'm pleased with what I'm learning, and hoping to move from basic repair mending to the more artsy stuff, including altering or redesigning garments. I might even visit my mom's sewing machine at some point, although I'm keeping my projects small enough to hand-stitch for now.
Gardening
Gardening, like writing, has been something that I've just had a really hard time caring about lately. I don't want to tend, don't want to water, don't want to pull up weeds: I just wanna grab raspberries from the canes as I sweep by on my way to take a walk or go on a picnic.
A couple days ago, though, I forced myself outside with gloves and long sleeves to protect myself from the plants that make me break out in hives (which is, frankly, most of them— everything in the squash family, tomato vines, and sunchokes, which is like 90% of our garden). Soon I fell into a rhythm, and slipped into the flow state where time had no meaning.
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| Marigolds in front of our fig tree |
I pruned tomato plants and harvested five pounds of beefy slicing tomatoes. I picked the tiny red birds-eye Thai peppers and clipped off handfuls of chocolate mint, and threw them in the dehydrator together to preserve for the winter. I tore out the almost-dead cucumber plants and got the last few fruits, and harvested the thin ears of popcorn, although most had been lost to disease or birds. I tested all the pumpkins (so many!) for ripeness, and found a couple of keepers, as well as some butternut squash. I cut off big bunches of pokeberry to use for dyeing, and cleared dead collard leaves so the parsley could get more sunshine. I harvested a massive bouquet of kale, wondering how much longer it can keep putting out new growth, since it's on its second year as a biennial. I weedwhacked the edges of the yard, chatted with the neighbor, wondered how I'd managed to almost kill the peppermint in the backyard, and rewarded myself with fresh raspberries and— a surprise— the first figs of the year.
Last night we ate our first real autumn feast of the year: stuffing made with butternut squash and kale (topped with a generous helping of gravy, of course), followed by pie made from the first pumpkin harvest of the year. I'm ready for autumn!
Seed-saving
One of my favorite new garden chores is harvesting the seedheads of my flowers: a couple days ago I picked giant bowls of zinnia, black-eyed-susan, bachelor's button, calendula, echinacea (purple coneflower), and, my favorite, marigolds. The marigolds are particularly meaningful to me because they're descended from my grandma's seeds. She died when I was young— and was hazy with Alzheimer's for all of my memory— but I still have vague recollections of her garden. The heady pollen smell of marigolds always makes me think of her house, of sitting on the swing with her and making quiet conversation. My mom began saving the seeds and growing them, and a few years ago, she passed some on to me. Each seedhead I pluck is a promise to keep the line going, to honor the memory of the person that I can hardly remember.
Gathering seeds is also, to me, a profoundly hopeful act. I've honestly not been able to even think about 2021: my anxieties and uncertainties for the future make it too difficult to imagine the future in anything other than the vaguest terms. However, while collecting the flower seeds, I imagined their future. I imagined labelling them and bringing them to the seed swap in January, or passing them on to neighbors. I imagined planting them next May in my garden, pressing the needle-shaped pockets of life into the warm earth. (And who knows what kind of native flowers might just totally randomly show up in nearby parks to increase the biodiversity?) As I worked, I suddenly realized that I was envisioning a clear picture of May 2021, which I hadn't been able to do until now. With seeds in my hands, I am preparing for the future. I am helping the Earth bring forth flowers.
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| I'm holding echinacea seedheads. Zinnias are in the paper bag, echinacea and black-eyed susan seeds in the pie tin, glass gem corn with the husks, bronze corn without husks, and bowls full of calendula, bachelor's button, and marigold seeds to the right |
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I hope that you're finding time to do what brings you joy, gives you strength, and helps out the future you— even if the future is hard to picture right now. Take care of yourselves!
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