Being in the musical moment

I’m not sure how to explain the experience I just had.

I went to a folksinging song circle this evening held by the Eugene Folklore Society. I had a vague idea of what to expect, having gone to some Golden Link Folk Singing Society and festival singarounds in Rochester. But, still, you never know.

So I toted my guitar and songbook and followed the directions to a strangers house. (Don’t worry, it all turns out well.)

As I walked in the door, a woman was sitting in the stairway, tuning her guitar. I was in the right place. Good. In the living room, a dozen people sat around in a circle – only two with guitars, which surprised me. I quickly realized I was bereft of a copy of Rise Up Singing, which everyone else had. Ah, so it’s a sing out of the song book song circle, not a bring your stuff and we’ll join in if we can song circle. Which is fine. Someone had an extra copy to lend me.

I’m terrible at guessing people’s ages and heights. But I think it’s fairly safe to say I was the youngest in the room by a good two decades. Don’t other 30-something-year-old women like folk music?

We took turns going around the circle, picking songs from the book, everyone singing them together and the guitars all chiming in. With two song leaders across the room, I quietly strummed away on the songs with chords that I remembered.

I managed to pick a song each time it came around to me (from the book I was unfamiliar with). Fortunately, the Beatles were in it. And I found myself singing songs I didn’t know. Or didn’t know I knew.

As the evening went on, there came a point where I found myself singing and playing a song I’d never heard before — as if I knew it somehow. I don’t even remember what the song was now. But I noticed, in that moment, that all that existed was that moment, that song, all our voices moving together in the same direction.

It was like I found my way inside the music, into the notes and melody and rhythm of it. I stopped questioning it, stopped mentally critiquing my performance, stopped worrying and doing anything other than just being. Right then. Right for that moment.

It’s been a while since I’ve become so absorbed in something that times stops and flows by at the same time. I think I’ll go back next month. And get my own copy of the song book.

My hairytale story

Sometimes the things you stumble upon as a child affect you in surprising ways. When I found my mother’s container of henna powder, I felt a thrill as I opened it up and inhaled its earthy tones. When I asked her what it was, she said it gave her hair some shine and a red tint. Immediately, I wanted that! When would I get to do that?

As a 10-year-old, I remember standing behind my mother’s head, plucking the gray hairs from her scalp, one by one, while she applied makeup in the mirror. As the years went by, she told me to give up. The bottles of color came out then, reeking of ammonia. Didn’t the henna work anymore? Still, it was pretty cool.

I was obsessed with the one long strand of white hair that grew on the left side of my head, back behind my ear. I would search and search for it–the needle in the haystack of my mane–and then, when I’d finally found it, I’d fondle it and wind it around my fingers, then yank it from my head. Always with immediate regret. Because then it was gone.

It always grew back.

When I was 15, my mum let me dye my hair. I don’t know why she gave in so easily. Perhaps she had been worn down by the years of battles of begging to buy bras, shave my legs and get my ears pierced. Only henna was allowed at first. But that sneaked its way to “wash out” color and quickly onto the permanent stuff. The Christmas we went to France when I was 16, I’d unfortunately tried the black-hair look. Oh, it wasn’t my color. By the time I was a junior in high school, after attempting every available option to turn my hair purple (without first stripping it of all it’s color) it had developed into a stunning shade of maroon. It was ironic that was my high school’s color. I could have been a human pom-pom at a football game–had I ever deigned to go to one.

My obsession with purple hair faded to red. And it seemed that during every life change, stress or breakup, I became compelled to dye it red. I even wrote a song about it. But it was a lot of work to keep it up. When you have really dark hair, it’s hard to get it to take much hair color. You have to use a lot of developer to first take your natural color off the hair strand to make the new color show up. Which meant dyeing my hair every 3 weeks–or suffer with black roots.

On the morning of my 24th birthday, I was horrified to find that a true white hair had sprouted from my head, seemingly overnight. I was 24 years old and the mantle of aging pressed down upon me. I’d also just broken up with a boyfriend. We were still living together. It was awkward and I’d had to go out and buy my own bed. I went into work, bemoaning my white hair, and coworkers laughed at me. I was the young one, the unaged. Had I no idea of what was to surely come?

I was 28 when my son was born. After 2 hours of pushing (he was 9 lbs 3 oz) before I could hold my baby boy, I got up to pee and saw myself in the mirror–broken blood vessels on my face and, I swear, a white hair sticking straight up from my scalp. Had I pushed that out, too?

The last two years haven’t been kind to me in the stress department–you can tell by my hair. I stopped coloring it for a while. I figured it was my last chance to not worry about it before I had to chose whether to age “gracefully” or not. I’ve never been accused of having too much grace, certainly not the physical kind. On my wedding day, as it poured with rain and I ran around happy in my muddy white dress, my brother-in-law complimented me on my grace. I remember that so distinctly because it’s not something I’ve often heard about myself.

I’ve gone back to henna these last few months, as the white hairs make themselves more apparent. Of course, no one else sees them. But I know they’re there, slowly greying me into oblivion. I know that plucking them out, even as they taunt me, is futile. Yet still…I can’t quite resist. And perhaps one day I will go back to highlights and salon color. Or not. Maybe I will find my inner grace again.

Update: I found a selection of my red hair photos to illustrate the many shades of red I once sported. I miss the red highlights…maybe I’ll get into them again.

You can’t get any fresher than this

Wow, the garden has grown. Everything settled in really well and has just taken off.

While I really enjoy eating food from our CSA, the Saturday Market or Creswell Farmer’s Market (what can I say, I can’t resist a farmer’s market), there’s something special about eating food from our own garden.

The most prolific producer so far is kale. I wasn’t sure about planting it — it’s not something we tend to eat a lot of. But I know it’s good stuff and I like to put it in soups. And I figure in the fall and winter we’ll be eating a decent amount of soup. So in the ground they went. And have since gone insane.

I took this picture when I first harvested it. Tonight we ate some more. And yet you still can barely tell I’ve been cutting it. After dinner, Kevin and the kids decided to eat it straight from the growing plant. You can’t get any fresher than that.

The idea came about after I told Duncan the story of going grocery shopping with him and buying kale for soup. He wanted to hold the bunch of kale and then started munching on it while sitting in the cart. I initially balked (as it hadn’t been washed) but then let him go for it. He wasn’t sure about that story, but decided to try it out again.

Planting a garden brings a sense of being home

Now that we’re moved in, mostly unpacked and I’ve started work, I seem to have developed delayed moving adjustment *. Now that we’re establishing a routine and have figured out the basics of our new lives, there’s a part of me that’s realizing this is what my life is now and going Aaaaaaaaagggghh!

That’s not to say I have regrets about moving. Or working. Or having my mother live with us. But it is an adjustment. I don’t like knowing that I don’t have local friends, even though I didn’t often see my then-local friends in Rochester. They were still there. I knew where they lived.

So, how to combat this adjustment uneasy feeling, other than just going through the motions until more parts of our lives fall into place? I’ll check out a Unity Church on Sunday–at least having somewhere to meditate and focus on my inner life will give me balance and strength to adjust to my new “outer” life. And I’m sure new friends will come in time. I want to make an effort to find kid-friendly groups that enjoy nature–think mushroom hunting, going for short hikes, discovering kids playgrounds–and hope to meet some other parents.

I have one other plan to feel more grounded and connected to this new place we call home. And it’s already underway. Planting a garden. There’s a small patch of flower bed that our landlord tried growing vegetables in this summer. He cleared it before he moved out. And we added compost and peat and dug it up and planted kale, broccoli and pea plants I found at the local farmer’s market. Then the kids and I planted lettuce, arugula, mesclun mix, beets, carrots and radish seeds–most of which are already sprouting!

Watering my little veggie patch in the evening after work and checking to see which new seeds have sprouted makes me happy. It brings me relief–from stress, from the unknown, from the strangeness of moving. It’s a simple thing I spend a few minutes a day doing, but it makes me happy.

* I am making this condition up. Perhaps there’s a name for it, perhaps not. But when you move, you get into the groove of what has to be done, what needs to get packed or unpacked, disconnected or installed, and you just get on with it. It’s not until the blur of activity settles down that you can look around in your new life and consider what it means.

How the intracontinental packing is going

People keep asking me how the packing is going. I confess, I haven’t been doing a lot. What I have been doing a lot of is finishing up work projects, working out logistics for the move (two families, 5 people – moving company booked, flights booked, hotel booked for arrival night, rental car booked, etc.) and looking for a place to live once we get to Eugene.

I’m also going through old files and getting rid of everything we can so that we have less to move across the country. Plus searching for jobs, enjoying the summer weather and spending time with the kiddos — I’m certainly not bored.

Looking through my old files that I have, for some reason, kept for the last 15+ years brings back old memories. Handwritten letters from my Dad that I cried while re-reading (and dried my eyes to e-mail the latest about our plans), old work contacts, pay stubs from my first full-time job as a journalist (I got a $0.65/hour raise. Woo hoo!).

It doesn’t bring back all the memories, though. Who was Ed Fink and why did I write him a check for $20 in the summer of 2000? And what did I spend all that money on at Target?

Those old checks go in the shredder. Along with piles of other papers.

My shredding policy is that anything that has my social security number, bank accounts, financial information or anything that could be used to steal my identity goes in the shredder. This creates reams of shredding. I am now on my second shredder, having burned out the first one. While I do recycle the paper, I’m not sure how environmentally friendly this practice is turning out to be.

My preferred double-top-secret identity protecting method is to then put the shredded paper in one of the compost bins behind the garage. Generally we have enough “green” compost matter to make adding some paper OK. But not enough for all that I’m generating at the moment. Plus I worry about the ink in the compost. My old checks “printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks” will be OK, but all the bank statements?

We did a lot of packing before we put the house on the market, but there’s definitely more to do. Plus we still have a bunch of furniture items to sell or give away. And then there’s that house to rent, job to find, school to enroll the kids in….*sigh* better get back to it. The shredder should have cooled down by now.

Growing in the garden

When I planted the veggie garden this year, I didn’t know if we’d be in the house through the summer or already moved before the first tomato ripened. As it’s turned out, we’re moving in less than 4 weeks. The plane tickets are booked for Aug. 1. (Oh, boy, I have a lot of packing to do still.)

Which means we really won’t be eating those tomatoes I carefully selected at the nursery. Roma, an heirloom Brandywine, and two others whose names I can’t recall. I am enjoying the herbs, radishes, snow peas, rhubarb and asparagus, though. So it was definitely worth planting this year.

And while I may not get to reap the bounty of my hard work, I find the act of growing things relaxing and pleasing. We ate snow peas for dinner last night – snow peas that my kids helped me plant, poking the seeds and their little fingers into the holes I made for them.

Now that our time in this house is coming to a close, I’m getting a bit misty eyed at the idea of leaving. I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet. It took me a long time to get used to living in this house and I wonder how I’ll feel when it comes time to choose another one? It’ll be OK – it’s all part of the adventure. And there’s no point in holding on to something you’ve outgrown just because of the uncertainty of what else might be out there.

All things grow – snow peas, tomatoes, children, even me.

Lunch from the garden (well, sort of)

Pan-seared salmon salad with organic beets and asparagus from the garden

I ate my first asparagus of the season today. There it is on my plate (or in my bowl, rather). Joining it was a sliced beet that Duncan dug up earlier this week while playing in my garden beds. Who knew that it was hiding there all winter?
Before you get too impressed by my incredible lunch, I feel I should explain. It’s true, other than the salmon it was all organic — from the mixed baby field greens to the mostly-ripe roma tomato. And the beets and asparagus, of course. But, I know, I know, farm-raised salmon! What am I thinking? Plus it was leftover from what the kids and Kevin didn’t eat at dinner last night.

People close to me know that I don’t ordinarily care for salad. However, I have recently had 3 salad revelations:

1. Baby salad greens make it so much easier. Sure, they seem expensive in the store at $5.99/lb for the organic variety. But the bag I buy that lasts me multiple salads a week weighs only about a 1/2 lb. And it means I actually take salad greens out of the bag and put them into a bowl and eat them, rather than letting a head of lettuce rot in the fridge because somehow, pulling it apart into little pieces fit to eat seems “too difficult.” I realize I should probably be washing it, but, hey, it’s organic e-coli, right?

2. Warm weather = shorts (as in pants). Mine don’t fit. This is a problem. I’m not buying more pants. And I can’t ride my bike in a dress. Therefore: salad for lunch.

3. It’s a great gluten-free meal. And when I add fish (or chicken or lobster or egg or king crab legs) it has protein, too. (Just kidding on the yummy sea food. I can only wish!)

Plus, it’s an easy way to throw in whatever happens to be ready to eat from the garden. I’m so glad I got my first stalk of asparagus. I’d been prowling around the bed for days.

A plastic bag shortage

I’ve been working hard on doing the simple earth-friendly things — taking my own canvas bags to the store and composting our kitchen scraps.

At first, it was hard to get in the rhythm of taking my own bags to the store. Then I read about a challenge to not use any new plastic products for a week and, while that seemed too much for me right now, I did start re-using plastic produce bags. I admit, I do it on the sly, so that people don’t think I’m crazy. I’ve always disliked those flimsy produce bags that people take without thinking. Most of the time, I don’t bag my produce in plastic and, when Kevin shops and everything comes home plastic covered, I take it all out before I put it in the fridge (unless containing the vegetables makes sense, such as green beans).

Now, I have become quite accustomed to grabbing the reusable bags along with the shopping list before I leave the house. And I’ve found a lot of satisfaction in seeing a whole cart load of groceries finding their place in a half-dozen bags, rather than 20+ plastic grocery bags. You can fill resuable bags right up, making it easier to unload the car and get the groceries in the house. And then there are no crinkly bags to deal with. I’ve never liked the sound plastic bags make. It grates on me.

However, I have become so good at this that we are experiencing a dire shortage of plastic bags. We’ve been reusing them in the house for years — mostly as garbage bin liners, but also for cleaning the cat’s litter box and using as lightweight packing materials. I haven’t bought a box of garbage bags in years. But now, apparently, I need to, as we have no grocery bags left!

I’ve decided the thing to do here is not to get plastic grocery bags from the store. The thing to do is to find biodegradable plastic bags and buy those instead. I might have to do some hunting around.

So far, I’ve found BioBags which come in both 3-gallon and tall kitchen bag varieties. That would be great for lining the compost bin so I don’t have to trek out into the cold, snowy backyard every time it’s full. Now I just have to find a local store that carries them — perhaps when I go to pick up our winter shares from the CSA tomorrow or refill our supply of kiddie multivitamins.

Composting food = less methane in the atmosphere

I’m taking a course on Global Climate Change this semester (one more week to go!). It’s been eye opening in some ways, depressing in many ways and all around confirms so many things I’ve known for what seems like my entire life.

By confirmation, I mean that the things I’ve taken for granted that we all should do — like recycling, using less, producing less waste, growing some of our own food, investing in alternative energy, etc. — really are the things we ALL need to be doing.

It’s been a tad depressing in that, once you learn about the various climate tipping points — melting land-based glaciers, rising sea levels (due to melting glaciers and thermal expansion from increased air temperature), release of methane from thawing permafrost — you wonder if we can have enough of an impact quickly enough to prevent our world from becoming a very different, and less hospitable, place.

The eye-opening-ness of the course has comes in realizing just where we are, how far things have come already and how much scientists have known for so long.

Reducing my carbon footprint

One of my exercises has been to reduce my own carbon footprint by 20 percent. Some of the ways I chose to do this are by buying more local and organic food, taking my reusable shopping bags to the grocery store (which I’m really bad at remembering to do) and composting all our fruit and vegetable scraps. Plus, I switched the house (and office) to an ESCO that provides 100 percent renewable energy. I think that brought down my carbon footprint by 43 percent overall.

Composting food scraps

I’m blathering on about this because I didn’t realize how important even some of the simple things I do are. For instance, composting our organic waste. I’ve always hated to put vegetable peels in the trash. I’d prefer even to put them in our garbage disposal. But, when the compost bucket I keep in the kitchen is full and there’s snow outside, I don’t want to make the (albeit very short) trek to the back of the garage to empty it. So I end up putting things in the sink disposal for a few days.

However, our disposal seems to be a bit backed up right now, which means that veggie peelings go in the garbage can. Very very bad. Not only does that increase the amount of garbage going into landfills (and our taxes, as municipalities pay per ton of waste they need to get rid of), but it doesn’t just naturally decompose like you’d think. Garbage gets compacted to as small a size a possible (so you can fit more in the lanfill). This produces an anaerobic (without oxygen) environment — a compost pile needs oxygen to decompose. And, instead of not even decomposing, it produces methane — a greenhouse gas that’s five times as destructive as carbon dioxide.

So, even with enough snow that Kevin had to shovel our driveway and sidewalk, I’m going to make it out behind the garage today to empty my compost bucket. Eye-opening isn’t so bad.

Our paper family

An except from our dinner conversation tonight:

Duncan: I’ve got a job to do!

Daddy: What’s your job, buddy?

Duncan: My job is to cut paper.

Mummy: Oh, is Berry’s job to color on paper?

Duncan: Yes.

(This seems about right to me. After all, isn’t what each of us in the family does somehow related to paper?)

Mummy: Then it’s my job to write on paper. What’s Daddy’s job?

(Kevin says something totally unrelated to paper here — like it being Daddy’s job to water plants or eat bacon)

Mummy: I think it’s Daddy’s job to read paper! (I.e. the newspaper, textbooks for school, etc.)

Duncan: Yes. Now we can all like our jobs.

Then he asked me how my cut finger was healing and if it still hurt me. What a great kid. Especially compared to the meltdown monster we dealt with trying to leave a fun activity before lunch today. How does he go from one extreme to another so readily? And how did he know that one of his friends from school would be there, too?