Independence Day looked a bit different this year. The ultimate mid-summer holiday, the 4th of July is officially the day we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, our liberation from British rule: the birth of our own nation. Those fireworks we set off represent the guns and cannons that got us here through
Read on »Posts By: Ellen
Leaps of Faith
Coming in from my daily walk, I shut the door behind me a little harder than intended. Somewhat frantically I peel off my Hawaiian-print mask and drop it in the bag of contaminated-clothes, destined to be washed in hot soapy water later tonight. I take a deep barrier-free breath. My shoes come off next and
Read on »Becoming Unstuck
Stuck at home in early December with a cold, I found myself too cranky and restless to just curl up with a good book and get better. When my eye fell on that overflowing underwear drawer I’d been telling myself I’d clean out one of these days, I dumped the contents on my bed and
Read on »Sisters of the Tiles
The sound of mah jongg tiles clacking against each other is one of my earliest memories, yet I had no idea at the time what those tiles would come to mean to me. Having grown up watching my mother play mah jongg, I started playing myself as a young mom in New Jersey. When we
Read on »Hineni
I was ten years old when I walked down the gray corridors of the hospital to visit my mother, as she sat in a wheelchair, wrapped in a pale blue hospital gown. Three days earlier she had found a lump in her breast, had it biopsied, and the doctors performed a mastectomy on the
Read on »Lessons from the Loaf
I have always wanted to learn to bake bread. In the long dark days after losing Nicky I decided it was time to start, without really understanding why. I suppose it seemed comforting, life affirming, nurturing for all of us. It was something to do at a time when, in fact, there was nothing any
Read on »For Nick
Last Wednesday had been a crummy day but I made a valiant effort to shake off the gloomy mantle weighing me down as I prepared to see my favorite band in concert: Portland home town favorites Pink Martini. I had been so excited when I bought the tickets, vowing to pretend to be young and
Read on »One Day, Not Day One
By now I should know to laugh at myself when I make plans. I am famous in my family for my detailed “To-Do Lists,” but in recent months – years even – the quiet moment in which I actually write the list is followed by a storm which blows the ambitious slip of paper right
Read on »Garlic and Gooseberries: A Deep Well of Goodness
We have a new system in the garden: we now have pretty red flags on little sticks to put in our garden plots when we are away. The flags alert fellow gardeners that our plots may need watering. When we are tending our own gardens we can easily spend a few minutes spraying our neighbor’s
Read on »Garlic and Gooseberries: New Spring, New Plan
Spring, summer, fall, winter, and then back to spring. The rhythm of a year is both reassuring and haunting. When you are going through a new experience – a job, a new school or city, or any life change – the first year is unfamiliar and every season is unexplored territory. Then suddenly, you are
Read on »Garlic and Gooseberries: Light Streams In
I walked out the door without a jacket this weekend. An unfamiliar warmth and exhilaration swept over me, quickly followed by a wave of distrust. Not sure if I could really believe that our long winter is finally over, I went back inside and got an extra layer, just in case. The plants and blossoms
Read on »Food Friday: Sweet Freedom and Passover Treats
I have always loved Passover: the chaos, the rituals, the food. I love the reclining, the storytelling and the matzo-ball soup. I love the charosis – apples, walnuts, wine and cinnamon – layered into matzo sandwiches with horseradish that makes my eyes burn. I love the parsley dipped in salt water and the gefilte fish,
Read on »Garlic and Gooseberries: Lessons from the Garden
The inevitable darkness of winter has arrived. In November I cleaned up our tired garden in preparation for its long rest, pulling up and composting the yellowed vines and spent plants, and removing the buggy broccoli stalks. The cilantro and arugula had shot up, flowered and gone to seed, so I scattered the little
Read on »Garlic & Gooseberries/Wednesday Wandering: Gilroy Garlic
When I was a child in California, my family often went camping. So many images are woven into the memories of those early days, our car pulling a trailer over miles of highways, the scent of pine trees in the campgrounds, the barren, dry hills of southern California. Somewhere in the basic vocabulary lessons of
Read on »Garlic & Gooseberries: My Runaway Pumpkin
As I was leaving the community garden the other day, I happen to glance back and I gasped. From where I was standing on the path I could see into my neighbors’ plot, and there, on their side of the fence between our gardens, was a sweet little pumpkin. MY sweet little pumpkin. A vine
Read on »Garlic & Gooseberries/Food Friday: Saving Sage
All summer I have been drying herbs to keep for cooking during the year. My kitchen table always seems to have oregano or sage, tarragon or thyme laid out on paper towels. The lemon balm, lemon verbena and chamomile never got too robust, but I did get a bit of them dried and put away
Read on »Garlic & Gooseberries: Flowers, Flowers, Everywhere
The calendula has arrived! I planted seeds early on, but never knew if they had taken hold, not quite sure how to distinguish their green sprouts from weeds. Suddenly though, there are beautiful orange and yellow flowers everywhere. It makes me happy to see them, bright and cheerful spots of color. Soon I will be
Read on »Garlic and Gooseberries: Benign Neglect
A month or so ago, I was already feeling the melancholy of fall approaching but my garden ignored my dark cloud and just continued growing. I visited a bit less often as I was out of town and other tasks were calling for my attention. Somehow I felt the garden was winding down but it
Read on »Red Sox and Black Quilts
I was at a Red Sox game this summer, thinking about quilting. It wasn’t my fault. I was trying very hard to concentrate. I like baseball, in theory. I have been a Red Sox fan for almost 30 years since my husband brought home a Red Sox T-shirt for me from a business trip. Now,
Read on »Garlic and Gooseberries: Melancholy
When I came home from the garden the other day and started to make dinner, I found myself overcome with sadness. I stopped washing the zucchini – from Trader Joe’s, not the garden, since only one has been harvested from my enthusiastic plants – and let the melancholy wash over me. Why was I sad?
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