Along the edge of the woods, scrubby pines are showing these cute capsules. Passersby might not enjoy my releasing allergens in the park, so I only played with a couple of the capsules, but it was interesting to see how the lightest touch triggers them poof! to release a cloud of gold pollen.
These Martian-looking doodads have been on earth for oodles of years. According to one plant expert in town, Horsetail contains both silicon and gold, if only we could figure out how to get the gold out.
These are skunk plants below. Do not eat or drink skunk plant products! Their oxalate crystals are the same compound that cause severe pain for people suffering from gout. In winter the plant emerges as a “spathe,” a streaked oxblood-red beak. Then it blooms with showy yellow flowery thinglets (looked up the botanical parts; couldn’t make heads or tails of it) and then huge leaves. According to this website https://www.natlands.org/news/whats-so-cool-about-skunk-cabbage/ they generate their own heat, and flaunt a “skunk-like/decaying flesh smell.” These skunk plants are done flowering for the year.
Salal flowers in a shady cleft in rocks:
Salmonberry flowers!
And, in a nearby garden, some superfluous fancy tulips to end our stroll today.
The moon was in the news for sure — nearly full, waxing gibbous at 97+ percent, in “Blood Moon” color phase, and expected to rise at 5:22 pm with a full lunar eclipse later in the wee hours. Commuting homeward from work I glanced outside and on the horizon caught sight of the moon’s rosy edgemost edge. Yanking the overhead bell cord for the next stop, I scrambled for the exit and hopped off the bus.
It was a foot race then with the usual bag & baggage, about a mile to the park on the water, hoping to get there in time for a nice view. The phone camera isn’t set for grand events in the firmament, and in my pictures the brightest moon appears to be a paper dot cut from a hole punch if it shows up at all. But the prospect was worth a try.
What an enticing idea, to follow this nature trail deep into the birch woods and downhill to the waterfront! But with regrets I passed up the solitary walk through this fairytale prettiness, and stayed in the populated parking lot. Other nature fans had gathered there, parents with baby strollers and carriages. Now if I had children, or so it seems to me, I would point out the moon and explain why this is a special night, and would invite them to watch for the first star constellations and listen to the flying killdeer and geese and other nature sounds. But these kidlets left to their own devices showed their nature appreciation in their own way — shrieking in high spirits, chasing one another, and stampeding round and round these garden paths:
The mile walk back to the bus stop is dark with abrupt and unexpected changes of pavement and footing, so it was high time to leave and pick a cautious path to the main road. Here was the last glimpse of splendor over that same living arch of vines:
There was nothing to wish for then but a companion to share the walk with me. A pretty evening, all the same.
Sure, it’s a milder winter than it ought to be, and maybe we’re running out of snowpack, and maybe we’ll pay for that this summer. Meanwhile, we can just look around and notice little moments day by day, attend to what’s happening in the sky and on the ground and in other people as they come along.
So first here’s an ordinary winter winter sight, some lace-like tall grass looking like frost flowers on a window pane:
Here’s another winter winter flower, some cheery rosemary growing out of the sidewalk.
But here’s an unexpected flower: daffodils in February?
And here’s another surprise, early in the season: some poisonous climbing vine Clematis armandii. It grows and takes over fences and walls all over town. I wouldn’t want toxic ornamentals on big messy vines in my own garden, but for one week a year it’s a nice elegant scent.
Lately the news, some of it sensational and distressingly scandalous, has gotten me down enough to bother my sleep and spirits. There’s not a thing I can do to solve any of it, and these scandals only call to mind frightening situations from my own past. Finally I resolved to turn off these sensational updates, and to shift focus on two other things instead.
The first was revisiting a sermon from last year by Father Seraphim Aldea. On YouTube it’s called “Bad thoughts and people? Don’t take the bait.” As usual, the sermon draws on the writings of the early Desert Fathers, to encourage the listener to “Keep engaged in your relationship with Christ and with prayer…. Try to discern if something good or bad serves your prayer, serves you in your journey towards Christ; if it nourishes prayer, if it nourishes love, if it nourishes a non-judgmental and forgiving and penitential repentant heart in you.” (It’s good to remember the Orthodox evening prayer asking God to protect us during the night from “vain thoughts, and from evil memories.”) Any ruminations waking or sleeping are better spent getting to know about Christ instead.
The second action was deciding here and now to open the garden patch for the year, as a little note of encouragement for the neighbors and our tiny world. This year the garden will be a memorial in particular for my own parents and the blessing and peace of their souls.
Well, it would be good to start with green peas. Why peas? They can be planted in the cold, and will even germinate if it’s snowy. They grow noticeably day by day; it’s entertaining for the passersby to watch them grow. They are good for the soil, they have nice white flowers, and we can eat not only the peas but the new tendrils as well. As a pleasant surprise, this year ‘s 2026 season pea seeds showed up at (of all places) Grocery Outlet. As time allows I can plant those perhaps even this week.
Then yesterday I hauled my clumsy self up on to the raised bed, both patches, and dug up several bowlfuls of the hardy greens still soldiering on from last season: kale, onion greens, kale, leeks, scallions, celery leaves, curly parsley, brussels sprouts. And yes, I can just leave them be; but I’d like to start fresh and create a new canvas for the new year. These greens made a strong nutritious broth for drinking, and also several meals of cooked mixed greens.
Then for the south patch I hacked at the top six inches of soil to loosen it up.
The north patch needed clearing and chopping too.
That yielded a new bowl of edible trimmings.
Next I called out for help to my former co-worker, trusty resourceful Sandrine. I asked her to drive me to the hardware store for dirt — specifically, organic soil mix for raised bed gardens. She very kindly showed up and drove me out for four bags, 30 pounds apiece. What’s more, she brought some spare stakes for my envisioned pea patch.
Today Sandrine and I tipped the soil bags out of her car to the ground near the raised bed. It’s an annual ritual: I cut open the bags, load handfuls of fluffy dirt into my bucket, and walk it around to spread across the garden beds. It takes about 40 trips to walk the soil around and spread it out.
Well, two neighbors (one girl in first grade, one boy just in nursery school) came running outside in great enthusiasm, all eager to help. They asked all about the bowl of edible trimmings, and what each plant was. After learning the names, the little guy bit right in to a bud tip of baby kale and happily chewed it up. (Next time I’ll tell him to wash his greens first, but he seemed happy with his kale foray.) The siblings asked permission to bring a sample of each vegetable to their mother. They scooped up handfuls of greens, and hollering with excitement went storming into the house to give the bounty to their mom, who is nursing a newborn and is likely to have little leisure to wash and sort these items. Still, it gave the kiddos a thrill to be symbolically bringing home the bacon.
In past years when they were smaller, they were pleased to ask oodles of questions, then would run off to explore further wonders of the world. But to my surprise, this time until their mom and dad called them in to go to the store, these energetic kiddos took buckets and trowels and worked on and on for one and a half hours! In 90 minutes we moved 90 pounds of dirt, scooping it all by hand and toting it in pots and pails. With their help, I had time to plant the primroses just in time before the sun set.
Here’s the south patch now, and the north patch.
It is an immense privilege to do this: to have money to buy the materials, to have a place to live and a little patch outside, to be able bodied enough to haul a clumsy toehold up on the raised bed, to have at least enough know-how and leisure to put these plants in the ground.
The forecast is rain on the way, and a chance of lowland snow. But outside there’s one extra bag of soil left. It would be nice to scoop some into pots and start a few seeds indoors. And meanwhile, even with strange news tugging at our attention every day, maybe God willing these flowers can stand for something cheerful.
The Village to Village Network nationwide has a chapter right up the street. They are quite the bunch of go-getters who have gone-got in life already, and are still at it now and full of new ideas.
The VVN has a new walking club. Last week our leader coordinated a hike. It was a perfect day, clear with pleasant sunshine and a bracing breeze. So a group of folks carpooled to the trail, and we set out.
The weather and the trail were on our side. The path is level, broad, and clear, about three miles through thick woods with towering trees but right along the lakeshore with its wonderful sky views of the downtown miles away.
We even heard a tuneful twittering deep in the conifer cover overhead. The others immediately recognized this as the calls of bald eagles. In great anticipation I unzipped my waist pack, grabbed my cell phone, punched in my pass code, chose Photo, and leaned way back just as the eagle family soared on out of sight. Yes, Nature’s grandeur is what happens before and after I turn on my phone.
The conversation was lively with a pace of its own, sometimes with everybody chiming in together and other times with people pairing off and dropping back to delve into special topics and stories. It’s a pattern that reaches right back to shared traditions worldwide: people on the move, in groups, sharing their thoughts as they go. It was especially good to share it with folks who are so well prepared to be pleased.
It was a nourishing time to be treasured on a winter’s day.
Millions of people nationwide are facing dangerous weather, with low temperatures and heavy snow and sleet. And here we are, basking in the sun as our snowpack dwindles away. Here are more unexpected sights from this week, from a person who figures “Why not start worrying six months in advance of wildfire season?” Here’s the prettiness update for now.
At least the Hellebores are in season.
One of our many types of Sedum.
A little early for Camellias though.
White rose??
The plum trees are out, full of spring birds with happy courting songs. Oh dear.
Well, nothing to do but go look over the garden and hope for the best this year.
It’s a curiously mild winter this year; not a flake of snow, no frost yet really, and temperatures in the 50s all week. We had a couple of weeks of hard rain washing through, come and gone. If only that were snow, and falling 30 miles away in the mountains; the snowpack level is only 42% of normal. That could mean wildfire trouble this summer.
But anxiety does better with a walk to just look and explore the way things are right now.
Here’s a very close-up peek at some tiny moss, all different kinds, in early sun and dew.
Manzanita flowers:
Here is a small hedge of Sarcococca, “Christmas Box.” Earlier in the year it had shiny black berries; now it has little white flowers with a wonderful sweet fragrance. It’s really nice to walk through the winter dark, and step in to a zone of this lovely scent:
Here is Witch Hazel, another sweet scent that blooms in the cold; the flowers come in a whole range of shades from pale yellow to rich reddish amber:
This could be a type of Alkanet — blooming in January for some reason.
Elephant-Ear Saxifrage:
And Alstroemeria:
This little show-stopper bloomed during Christmas Week. It’s new to me, but according to my iPhone this is called “Kiss-Me-Over-The-Garden-Gate.”
At least the Where’s Winter? worries can still find something beautiful to appreciate while we keep an eye on the sky.
The Big Disclaimer: This reflection can come across as self-serving and whine-ridden, and of course despondency is a foundational sin to take to the Sacrament of Reconciliation on a regular basis. There’s always a keen appreciation that being able to walk in to a store and buy (or receive) a kraut cabbage is a modern miracle of our society, and so is having a long weekend in a dry kitchen to cook and eat it in. The point is that maybe someone out there reading this might feel a little less alone in their experience of what holidays can be like. -M
A holiday is like a rushing river cutting crosswise to the main path. The idea is to carry the gear, lay out plans and backup plans and more backup plans as little sticks and twigs, lay them out in a bridge, and then very softly step by step inch out across the river and reach solid ground on the other side and then climb up and away from the river bank. It’s a rope trick. And if the sticks and twigs hold up, then there might be some nice scenery along the climb over and some nice people on the way.
One tool in the kit is to mark the date three days after the holiday. Once the celebration is over, that is when someone can skid and fall backwards off the bank and be really downcast. This year that bottom-out happened three days after on the 28th. That day was dedicated to Little Wins, something to work on every hour of the day. The 24 short prayers of St. John Chrysostom gives us one prayer per hour around the clock to work with, so I made a chart of hours and copied in the prayers in Slavonic and put that in a clear page protector to carry everywhere, and set a timer as a signal to move on to the next prayer in an hour. Anyone can choose their own prayer set though; there are heartfelt little one-sentence prayers all over the Psalms, for example. These are a real benefit, as meditation on the Stair Master at the gym to feeling stressed by the noise level on the bus to waking up worried at night.
Before the holiday there was research to track down the exact schedule of church services and events and things to do, and the bus schedules to get there. That way, on an unsceduled day it’s clear where to be when, and how to travel.
One perennial favorite is a live music event with demonstration instruments to test out and play. This year the live music was fine, but for once absolutely no one was in the classrooms and that part of the building felt empty, as if we weren’t really supposed to be back there. Out front during the performances it was all young couples and happy kids running around. After about 10 minutes my spirits fell so far so fast that I had to leave.
Earlier that day was the office party, folks who brought their families and introduced new boyfriends and girlfriends, and announced their engagements and baby due dates. One colleague stood up with a toast to say “Nothing matters as much as family. Nothing! Why, you hear about these people who don’t have children; they just go off and live for themselves and die all alone — it’s just inhuman.” She and I are on a very friendly basis, so I gave her a little nudge and smile and said “Are you describing me?” She waved me off and said “You have all of us. For you, family is this whole department.” She repeated her toast for everyone at the table, and as they applauded warmly I slipped away and went home.
At one church, the friendliest member in the whole congregation greeted me to ask me how I was spending Christmas. “Praying a lot,” I told her, and showed her my chart of 24 hourly prayers. She described how her family all travel to be together, and how wonderful that was every year. I gave her warm congratulations on her large family event and how much the relatives all enjoy each other’s company. “There is nothing like it,” she said. “John and I and the kids look forward to visiting them too. There is no feeling in the world like relaxing on the sofa, watching your parents and aunties and uncles and cousins, and we can just all bask in one another’s company.” I kept congratulating her, agreeing on the importance of family, and my eyes picked that moment to start pouring tears. It soon became obvious enough that she stopped at a loss for words, and asked “So… is your… do you have any… are you from this state?” I explained No to all of the above, and she very courteously went and started a conversation with someone else. Now here’s the thing: she has had this same exchange with me for five Christmases in five years now, and every time she’s trying to grasp that some people are on their own, and she can’t picture that at all and has no idea how to react. For those five years I’ve been making myself come back here and talk to people. This time I went off to wash my face and go sit outside for a bit, and had a heart to heart talk with, well, my heart, saying “You know, it’s ok. You don’t even have to come to this church any more. We can just go home now.”
Christmas Eve is my most holy night of the year, so I picked out a 5:00 pm Vigil service and got all dressed up to go and was feeling happy about it. Then on my phone I found a series of voicemail messages and texts. Please call us! It’s urgent! It was a dear family with wee kidlets, and they had lost a valuable item. They were out of town visiting their folks for the holiday, and really needed help. It was raining hard by then and the streets were completely deserted, but with a flashlight I retraced their path including a creepy alley, looking everywhere for their lost item. After an hour I just didn’t know where else to search, so I had to text them that their item was gone. Well, it turns out that they had called another family, who found the item right away, and now everyone was off at church with their relatives! By then it was too late for Vigil, and I had to go home and change and get dry and warm up. So that was Christmas Eve.
But one nice thing was a trip to Fruit & Folks on December 22. Before their holiday break I picked up as many super-sized sturdy vegetables as I could carry home — including the indulgence of a Kraut Cabbage, 39 cents a pound. I brought home the very smallest one, about the size of a basketball. At the cash register the staff just laughed at my purchase. Apparently they were under orders to watch out for Mary, and to give her all her Christmas food for free! Insisting that my money was no good here, they helped me load up and I headed for the bus stop while they waved goodbye.
After toting the food home, as a rest break I watched a Mull Monastery cooking video on YouTube, with Father Seraphim Aldea and Mother Abbess Ita. If you would like to watch two lovable monastics in the kitchen, you can search their channel for “When I was a kid in Communist Romania: cooking stew and remembering our childhood.” This hearty chunky stew is meant to fill in wintertime comfort and flavor chimes in their usual monastic diet, which includes little meat and quite possibly no meat at all.
With their inspiration, I cooked up the whole gift bounty for the fridge and freezer. Here’s the start of some soup.
So instead I started rewriting an old story about what it was like, to work in a Produce department 40 years ago at a food coop on Christmas Eve, and all the adventures going on with the business and customers, and how the team members pulled together to get through the evening. At our own food coop now, the Produce staff and I got talking about how produce departments were so different back then, and when they asked to read it I promised them a printed copy. They were really happy about it! The Produce manager offered to post it in the break room. I told them he could tell folks it was written by the Mary who walks there every night to buy a refill gallon of filtered water from their machine. “Mary?” he said. “Everybody here knows exactly who you are.”
Meanwhile I go around practicing an underrated Russian Christmas carol of the Blessed Mother singing her baby Jesus to sleep. On YouTube the search title is
The guest soloist (and ticket seller for the show) is Valeriia Psiukalova, and the folk ensemble is called Azure-Golden Shore of the Beyond. Apparently they are followers of Sri Chinmoy and that tradition of chanting, but they also interpret Russian spiritual songs.
Then for last thing at night as bedtime reading there’s a secondhand bookstore discovery: St. Thérèse of Lisieux, The Last Conversations before her death in 1897. It’s normal to think of Thérèse as a sentimental girl tossing flower petals at statues and writing poetry dismissed as saccharine rhymes, but the real medical story shows a 24 year old with a titanium character submitting to 19th-century interventions that enormously magnified her suffering. (She was also prescribed morphine injections throughout her illness, but died without receiving a single one; the Mother Superior at that time didn’t believe in pain remedies for nuns, and Thérèse was adamant about obedience to monastic rules.) Her sweetness and humor and determination to cheer her companions shine all through the book.
Christmas is hard for many many people. Like a sailor with the sea or a farmer with the sky, we know to not turn our back on it and to regard it as a formidable adversary that takes planning and work. It’s a relief that this one is over for another year, with help from God and good people.
Quince fruit (Cydonia oblonga) was a welcome new discovery, one that to more knowledgeable cooks is not new at all. This month two co-workers and one neighbor all shared their harvest supplies of quince, so it was time to study up and go test it out in the kitchen.
Apparently quince used to be common as a source of pectin in fruit canning, but with the rise of pectin powder people relied on the fruit less over time.
A quince fruit is like a giant heavy pear with a nice fragrance, tough skin, and woody flesh. They are not sweet as is. To peel and cut them takes some extra muscle and determination. Here are a few, staring me down:
Finally peeled, cored (don’t eat the seeds!), and chopped:
Quince simmered in water, then blended to a puree:
Quince pureed, simmered on low heat with regular stirring, for eight hours to half its volume:
A popular recipe for quince is membrillo, a sliced gel eaten with Manchego sheep-milk cheese in Spain. The idea is to cook down the puree, add an equal volume of sugar and heat again to blend, then season with lemon and lemon zest and vanilla. The pantry is fresh out of lemon and vanilla. So I melted in some fair-trade crystal sugar (less than the 50% called for), and a dash of pumpkin pie spice.
The purees goes in to a baking pan lined with parchment paper, and into the oven on low heat until the pectin forms a gel.
It’s been baking for several hours and Lo, it’s developing a fruit-leather skin on top.
Whether it sets and gels or not, at least it has a rich intense fruit flavor.
Here it is, after hours in the oven at 250 F. All those quince yielded 3 cups or so of halfway-gelled candied spread with fruit leather on top. Maybe it will thicken as it cools?
Would I ever try the membrillo venture again? Well, no. Last week’s set of quinces made an excellent stewed sauce blended half and half with pureed pears, and that’s plenty good enough. Still, this will make a novel holiday confection for the three people who shared their fruit with me, and at least this venture saved them 12 hours of kitchen fuss.
It was nice to experience a whole new legacy fruit, as a symbol of harvest generosity among our neighbors.
The neighbors have a medlar tree. It’s not my tree, the neighbors don’t know me, and it’s too early in the year for harvest. But after days of hard wind and rain, some medlar fruits fell off the tree and were beaten into the mud. That made it feel ethically okay to pick up three weatherbeaten fruits and bring them home.
This would be the place to pile on details about how to “blet” and prepare the fruits. But looking up medlar history and recipes will be so enjoyable (well, for the people out there who enjoy looking up food history and recipes) that it’s only fair to let everyone have their own heritage plant fun.
These fruits have a long respectable colorful history that is worth learning. In colder climates the tree has been prized for its ability to lighten the winter by bearing us something sweet. Maybe our apartment complex will let me plant one here?
consolationland 