Lifescapes

Colors to Dye For

I love reading back through my blog: for me, it's a record of life lived. Scrolling through old entries, I found this photo of work I did two years ago. Bill had gone to Houston, and since I could skip cooking and washing dishes, I put the time into dyeing. The fiber shown here was dyed with Sabraset, and zapped in the microwave. Some of these fiber pieces are batts I've carded (a blend of Merino and a mystery wool); I rainbow-dyed them by laying the pre-soaked batts on plastic wrap, squirting the dye onto the wet fiber, and then folding the plastic wrap over to make a longish coil. The solid colors were immersion dyed in quart jars in the microwave. Just now, I don't have time to dye, but it only takes a moment to admire a colorful photo and imagine myself back in that moment of satisfying creation.

Reading Note, from Marcus Aurelius: Our lives are dyed the color of our imaginations.

Scarlet Firethorn

If we held a contest for the plant with the most descriptive name, I think scarlet firethorn would win easily. This is Pyracantha coccinea, showing off its bright red berries along a fence. A doubly-rewarding perennial, every one of these brilliant berries was heralded in April by a delicate white flower with a scent that drew all the bees in Burnet County. By early January, these tart berries will have been sufficiently frost- and sun-mellowed to suit the robins' taste, and the birds will eat every last one of them. I'll trim back the untidy tips, molding this lovely plant to the shape of the fence on which it grows, and wait for April's blossoms, the gift of another season of green gifts.

Reading Note, from Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden by Diane Ackerman: We're so detached from the passion and purposes of a plant that we can find its dried-up forms beautiful. I'm guilty of that, too. I love growth, but I also love form, and few things rise to the architectural beauty of a plant responding to the pep and peril of the seasons.

Book of Days Entry for Thanksgiving Day

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was “thank you,” that would suffice.
—Meister Eckhart

A Thanksgiving Potpourri For Sharing

Here’s a worthwhile craft that will keep the kids occupied while you’re busy with Thanksgiving dinner—unless, of course, they’ve been assigned to knit garters or pick cranberries.

This recipe for enjoy-it-and-toss-it-out potpourri is only a list of suggestions. Encourage the children to find other things to put into it that will be pretty to look at for a day or two and be beneficial to the birds, squirrels, and other wild creatures when they toss it into the backyard. They’ll also enjoy arranging it in pretty bowls or baskets around the house. This potpourri is not scented; if you want fragrance, put scented potpourri into a smaller bowl and nestle it into the center of the larger one, surrounded by this natural mix.

sage leaves, fresh or dried
goldenrod flowers
dried strawflowers or chrysanthemums
sunflower seeds
cup pumpkin seeds
squash or melon seeds
seed pods collected from the garden
shelled or unshelled nuts
popped corn
acorns
pieces of dried orange and lemon peel
dried cranberries or other dried berries
ears of Indian corn
bits of fern, twigs
pretty autumn leaves


Mrs. Beeton's Recipe for Goose Stuffing: Take 4 apples, peeled and cored, 4 onions, 4 leaves of sage, and 4 leaves of lemon thyme not broken, and boil them in a stew pan with sufficient water to cover them; when done, pulp them through a sieve, removing the sage and thyme; then add sufficient pulp of mealy potatoes to cause it to be sufficiently dry without sticking to the hand; add pepper and salt, and stuff the bird.—Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861

Lovely sweaters

Lucky Becky and Michael, my Juneau grandkids, waking up in a room hung with sweaters knitted by loving hands. Even if kids' handmade knitwear is not high on your list of Objects to be Prized, you'll have to admire Sheryl's display. Thanks, Sheryl, for sharing all those wonderful things. Love is the invisible thread that is knitted into every stitch.

Delivery Day

Yesterday, I delivered the mother-of-all-anthologies--502 pages, 93,000 words, in triplicate--to the University of Texas Press. A Land Full of Stories (that's the working title, which will probably be changed) has been in the making since spring, 2003 and will be published in spring, 2007. A long time to work on and wait for a book, but it will be worth it in the end. It's a unique effort: nearly a hundred writers are represented, all women, all writing about their experience of the landscapes of the Southwest.

One of the interesting things about this book is the way it was conceived, designed, assembled, and edited. The four editors--Paula Yost, in northeast Texas; Susan Hanson and I in Central Texas; and Jan Seale in far South Texas--never had a face-to-face meeting. We did all our work via email and through a website set up by Peggy Moody, whose technical assistance made the whole thing possible. We set up an "online office" where all the material was posted. Communicating through email, we read and evaluated the submissions, discussed the order of the material in the text, and did our editing--all of it through the Internet. The project was sponsored by the Story Circle Network. This is SCN's second book. The first, With Courage and Common Sense, is an anthology of older women's memoirs.

Personally speaking, I'm glad to have the project off my desk (I was the lead editor) so I can get on with other things. But working with the other editors and with Peggy was a great delight, and it was fun to see the book take shape. An enormous, challenging project that required me to learn new skills (I had to learn to use a scanner!) and develop a new process for editorial work online. The doing of it was fun and interesting. Now I can't wait to see the book! Stay tuned--you'll be hearing more about this.

Reading Notes, from Kathleen Dean Moore's introduction to A Land Full of Stories: I rejoice in the voices of the women in this book, almost a hundred, raising our voices in celebration or warning, the words echoing off the canyon walls and the border fences, whistling through ocotillo wands. This body of work expresses what so many people most deeply feel and most clearly believe: gratitude for the gift of this place; astonishment at what each moment presents—peach jelly on the table, rain on the wind, fear in a standing wave, ghosts in the soil; an abiding love for this sere and mysterious patch of earth; and the terrible understanding that we cannot wreck this place without destroying also ourselves.

Indigo Redeux

Lovely in blue. My personal feet, in new blues.

There's something soooo soooothing about knitting socks. Mindless and mindful at the same moment. And for more on indigo dyeing, read Yarn Harlot's latest: Indigo Addendum. Wonderful pics.

Reading Note, from the China Bayles mystery Indigo Dying: Christine Utterback, in an article entitled "Indigo: Mystic Blues" [The Herb Quarterly, Winter 1991] writes that women indigo dyers on the Eastern Indonesian island of Sumba transmit the craft secrets of the "blue arts" only along female bloodlines. It is thought that the spirits and deities assist indigo dyers and herbal healers to perfect their skills. This knowledge, mixed with practices of withcraft and divination, are passed along, woman to woman, to the next generation.

First Freeze

I often think with nostalgia of the vivid autumn colors at the farm where I grew up in Illinois--the orange maple and yellow birch trees outside my window, the warm brown of the hickory trees that lined the lane, the brilliant red of the sumac. The brightest color we have here is our cypress trees along the creek: a rusty orange-brown, a beautiful contrast with the still shiny green leaves of the live oaks and the dark green of the junipers. Last night's freeze, our first hard freeze, has brought out the colors of the cypress. Lovely and bright as a flag against the gentle gray of a November sky.

But with the freeze comes the big job of toting and hauling all the patio plants into their winter quarters. I seem to collect more plants every summer, and of course I can't keep them all. It's always a difficult choice, a kind of botanical triage, deciding which ones will go into cold storage until next spring and which will go gentle into that good night. The annual sweet potato vines (Ipomoea batatas) slept outside last night. At dawn, when the dogs and I went out for our early morning walk, they were stiff and rigid with frost. By noon, they were a limp, unresisting mass of stem and leaf. It's all part of the natural cycle of things, I remind myself. Time for cold and dark, time for the silence of the season, for cups of hot tea, for a fire in the fireplace, for a feeder full of sunflower seeds hanging in the juniper tree. I say goodbye to the lush summer annuals and and looping hummingbirds and hello to the jaunty chickadees and feisty titmice who fly to the feeder even before I was back in the house. It's time, they say. It's time, it's time, I reply.

Reading Notes: I am pilgrim on the road to age and, needing guideposts and way-stations, I covertly observe my grandmother, now ninety-two. I watch her shuffle, cane in hand, from one room to the next, give her my arm on uneven sidewalks, boost her by the elbows when her joints have stiffened from sitting. For long periods she sits silently, tatting a chain of lace or, more often these days, simply doing nothing. She tends to drift into sleep at such times, as though the passageway between waking and sleeping has become widened with age so that the brain's tide slips freely back and forth between the two. Watching her, I can easily imagine that death comes gradually as increasing sleepiness until finally the eyes never open from that last, tempting doze.--Janice Bowers, "Ripeness is All," in A Full Life in a Small Place.

Indigo Dyeing

If you enjoyed Indigo Dying, you'll love this wonderful description of the process of indigo dyeing on Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's knitting blog. This is a three-part "indigo adventure," with lots of pics and readers' comments. When you've finished reading, go back to the top and click on the next installment. China and I had a great time following the photos--especially the one where the fiber turns blue, in Part 3. A little herbal magic there!

Indefatigable Basil

Some basils never know when to quit. We had a light frost a few weeks ago. Getting ready for it, I snipped all my basil (big bunches of it!), chopped it, and bedded it down in olive oil in ice cube trays, then put it in the freezer. I've rebagged the frozen cubes for soups and stews this winter. For fun, I put one of the basil tops into some water and left it on the kitchen window sill. When I got back from Massachusetts on Tuesday, I saw that it was putting out roots. There won't be enough sun to keep it happy this winter, so it's destined for soup, too. But before it disappears into a pot of really yummy tomato basil soup (I often make it with canned diced tomatoes, which seem to me to have more flavor than the cardboard tomatoes in the supermarket) I thought you'd like to see it. So here it is: a basil's brief moment of glory, immortalized by the magic of digital photography.

Reading Notes

Wonderful tales had our fathers of old—

Wonderful tales of the herbs and stars—

The Sun was Lord of the Marigolds,

Basil and Rocket belonged to Mars.

Put as a sum in division it goes—

(Every plant had a star bespoke)—

Who but Venus should govern the Rose?

Who but Jupiter own the Oak?

—Rudyard Kipling, “Our Fathers of Old”

More on plot

I've been continuing an email discussion with several readers about this business of "book-bridging" plot lines: plots that begin in one book and continue into another. For me, this is one of the most interesting possibilities offered by series form. We've gotten used to the idea that characters are going to reappear in book after book, and grow and change in the process. It may be a little harder to get used to the idea that a sub-plot may begin in one book and be developed as a central plot in the next.

That's the way I handled McQuaid's paralysis, which begins with LOVE LIES BLEEDING (#6), is a major plot issue in CHILE DEATH (#7), and is more or less resolved by the time China and McQuaid are married in LAVENDER LIES (#8). I'm doing something of the sort with Ruby's current flame Colin Fowler, who is introduced in BONES. His plot begins in that book, continues into BLEEDING HEARTS (out in April), and is resolved in SPANISH DAGGER (currently under construction.) For me, these book sequences function as trilogies within the overall series.

I understand that some readers are frustrated by these continuing plots--although I hope they will be less frustrated when the trilogy is complete and they can read the entire sequence without interruption. In fact, I know this happens, because I get letters from people who have just discovered the existence of the "hidden trilogy," find it interesting, and wonder if I intended it that way.

And if you're one of the readers who are frustrated by the developing Colin Fowler plot, maybe you'll consider what Barbara Paul (another mystery writer) has said about this issue. She doesn't address the potential of the book-bridging plot, but she does have something important to say about the artificiality of the "neatly-tied-up" plot, which follows the conventional problem-solving pattern of the mystery but in many ways trivializes the subject matter that most mystery writers work with:

I've long made the claim that people who read mysteries hate mysteries. What we like are solutions. The mystery novel is the only kind of book a reader can pick up knowing ahead of time that questions will be answered, that problems will be solved. Every mystery writer makes a promise to the reader that order will be restored by the final page. It's that guarantee, from writer to reader, that I think accounts for the mystery's continuing popularity.

And yet, that traditional ending of tying everything up neatly has been showing signs of change. Occasionally a mystery writer will deliberately leave some minor thread untied (because some questions simply don't have answers) and thus runs the risk of seeing a reviewer denounce the book for leaving a problem unsolved. Or once in a while we see a book in which all the loose ends are tied up, but not in quite the way we might want them to be. Order is restored, as promised, but sometimes this restoration comes at a price that is perhaps too high.

These changes are good in that they add a more realistic touch to the conclusions. They do away with the old-fashioned parlor-game aspect of earlier mysteries, an aspect that keeps the horror of violent death at a safe distance and is appropriate for comic mysteries (but for little else). Instead, we're seeing more and more mystery novels that ask the reader to recognize the sheer ugliness of the act of murder -- a development that can only benefit the genre. And all these changes demonstrate one significant fact, that the rules governing mystery writing aren't nearly so rigid as they might appear.

I like working with genre fiction precisely because it has a strong form that sets up certain expectations in the mind of the reader. But I also like to challenge that form. I like to surprise readers by breaking a rule, by turning a convention upside-down, by thwarting expectations. I'm not always successful. Heck, I don't know--maybe I'm almost never successful. But that's what lies behind many of the things I do in the China novels. And that's one of the things I'm doing with these book-bridging plots.

Reading Notes: To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.--Jose Ortega y Gasset.