Aubergine

Oh, hello.

It has been a while since I've been around here.  So let me tell you where I have been.  Here, for starters: 

In January, I launched a new blog, Nurtured Mama as a place to write in a more focused way about self-care and motherhood. It took forever for me to get through the tech stuff to get the site live, but I'm really happy with it and am enjoying the small but growing community there.  Please come visit! I wrote a series of posts about the importance of dreaming in January.  In February I covered love, and this month I've been writing about rejuvenation. Next month the topic will be Simplicity.

I've been writing essays that mostly haven't seen the light of publication yet and a couple of pieces that have, like this guest post on The Happiest Mom that I'm really proud of.

I've also been enjoying this kid, who I really can no longer call my baby:

I will still be posting here from time to time, as I write things too personal or two funky for other places, but if you want to keep in more regular touch, please sign up for updates from Nurtured Mama, connect with me on Facebook, or follow me on Pinterest.  Or email me!  I'm always happy to connect with you!

Ordinary Moments: naptime

Ordinary Moments

We voted.

We took Bean with us to the polls this morning and took turns playing with her while the other filled out a ballot.  She is too young, certainly, to understand what we are doing or why, but it feels important to involve her in this process, even now.  I remember going to the polls with my mother when I was young and it impressed on me the importance of having one's being counted.

I have never missed an election since I became old enough to participate.  A few times I have chosen not to vote for a particular measure or position when I don't know enough or have a strong opinion either way, but I have always cast my vote for president.

I was excited to see that a number of other parents had young children in tow this morning, too.

In other news, I am working on a project that is taking my attention away from this space, so I may be a bit quiet for a while.  I'm looking foward to sharing what I'm working on with you when it is ready for prime time!

Ordinary Moments

Make This At Home: Bowl of Soul

There’s a new coffee company that has exploded onto the Santa Cruz scene recently. A scene, mind you, with no shortage of already established coffee houses. But somehow Verve Coffee is shouldering its way into the crowd and making waves.  They have three shops now, as well as two or three other cafes that have some sort of lease and training arrangement to sell their coffee (beans and drinks).  I hear tell you can also buy their coffee beans as far east as NYC. They are active in the competition scene (did you know there was a barista competition scene?) and many of their baristas are award-winning. 

Their coffee is very good, but I’m not writing about coffee today.  What I’m writing about is the drink I’ve recently fallen for on their menu called a Bowl of Soul.  

Now I should say that this coffee company is really hip.  The interior design of their shops is all recycled industrial, with walls covered in large paintings by local artists that I don’t really get (and I’m an artist!).  The music is just the right amount of loud but not artists I recognize. There are only a handful of things on the menu and the baked goods are displayed like art.

At my ripe old age of 39, I’m probably a good 15 years older than their average customer.  I’m never sure if me drinking coffee in a Verve shop is increasing my hipness quotient or decreasing theirs.  So it took me a few visits before I had the courage to admit to the person taking my order that I had no idea what a bowl of soul was.  She was very nice and didn’t laugh at me. She said it was tea steeped in warmed soy milk with honey and cinnamon. She said normally it was made with chamomile tea, but they could make it with any tea on their menu. I ordered it that day with the Art of Tea cinnamon fig black tea they carry, because I needed to be awake, not lulled to sleep.

And it was awesome. Rich and just barely sweet in a big enough mug to sip while I worked.

Now it is one of my favorite drinks. But since I can’t afford the bar(ista) tab of drinking my tea out all the time, I have recently been making it at home.  This is so simple a recipe it is kind of silly to call it a recipe, but if you don’t live within range of a Verve cafe, I do recommend you try this drink at home!

 

Verve’s Bowl Of Soul

 

Heat enough soy milk for a large latte cup.  

In the cup, place your tea bag, a spoon of honey, and a cinnamon stick (or 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon).  

Pour in the soy milk and let steep for 2-5 minutes. Stir and enjoy!

 

You can make this with a range of teas, so try your favorite!

 

Guest Post: Momiji's Annual March

I'm pleased to again have a guest from my friend Joan Bailey who writes at Japan Farmers Markets. Japan is one the places I have not yet traveled to, but when I go I hope to time my trip to either the sakura or the momiji season. This post describes why!

Fall is my favorite season. The cold winds feel like old friends as they whip up leaves in a swirl of gold,red and orange turn my cheeks pink and make me pull my hat down a bit further over my ears. The golden light, somewhere between the vision of the Dutch realists and the bright splash of Manet and Van Gogh, seems so perfect to me. I feel in autumn, more than any other time of year, that my days are lived in a painting. 

In Tokyo, I roam in a somewhat similar but more urban masterpiece, but without the need for a hat. The cold winds are coming, but temperatures still loiter in the mid to high seventies. The shortening daylight comes in at a low angle casting a similar glow over the tightly packed houses and high-rise buildings. The trees along the nearby Tamagawajousui, in the parks and at our Tokyo farm are beginning to show tell-tale signs of color. The sakura (cherry) leaves, replacements for those beloved pink blossoms of spring, are the first to fade to yellow and then drop. Other will soon follow suit, including the maple.

Momiji's (Japanese maple) five to seven-fingered leaves come in a brilliant green that dims to yellow, but the star of autumn's show is the red maple – Iroha kaede a.k.a. Iroha momiji a.k.a. Acer palmatum. Unlike it's cousin, the red maple burns varying shades of red. Just as they do in spring, citizens of these fair isles gather on party sheets (otherwise known as tarps) under brilliantly colored leaves with friends and family for kouyou (leaf viewing). There in the warm glow of the trees, as they start toward their well-deserved rest over the winter months, the Japanese drink and feast before cold winds chase them indoors. Soon weather reports will include a map of Momiji's red path southward, the reverse of sakura's slow pink sweep northward in spring.

 Early in Japanese history it was the aristocracy who first picnicked under the branches and fostered the development of more than 250 different varieties. It was, as Sumiko Enbutsu writes in A Flower Lover's Guide to Tokyo, the eighth shogun, Yoshimune (ruling from 1716 to 1745) who ordered momiji  planted around the edges of the nation's capital. As a result, everyday people found themselves stopped short in their daily routines by brilliant color. Naturally, they gathered some snacks and drinks, called out to friends to do the same, and took a moment to admire this passing phenomenon. (It is worth noting that Yoshimune did the same for sakura, beginning a tradition of public plantings of these seasonal favorites that still continues today.)

Such celebrations and attentiveness to leaves and flowers not associated with a particular holiday seemed, at first glance, almost absurd. There is no great historical event being marked nor a religious holy day being observed. Yet, with little prodding, groups of people stream into parks or gather on benches to share a snack, drink a little something, and chat the sunset away. Such things – the first blossom in spring or the first hint of red in fall – mean that even in the most urban of spaces like Tokyo nature and the turning of the seasons are never far from heart and mind.

Read more about seasonal displays and food at Joan's blog, Japan Farmers Markets.

Ordinary Moments

Conflicted

I slump against the counter, crumbs under my bare feet, palm on something sticky.  The LHM is still sitting on the floor with Bean, where she patted the floor to indicate we should join her. “Eh?” she said, using her all-purpose question word. “What is this? How do you do it? Will you help me?” She looks at me with her eyebrows raised and I translate it to mean, right now, “Will you come sit here?” After I sit, “Dah-jee? Eh?” to her father, patting the floor on her other side. He joins us, holding his tumbler of water, which she immediately appropriates.

Drinking out of grown-up cups is her newest skill, but pouring water is one of her favorite activities and this is a heavy glass cup, so who knows how this is going to go. She takes a drink and sets it on the rug next to her. She looks around, then signs, “Book,” which she has spotted up on the edge of the counter opposite us. I get up get it and hand it to her father. I have already read my quota of board books for the day. I stay up, because while resting felt good, sitting on that dirty floor was grossing me out.

“I know an old lady who swallowed a fly,” he begins. Bean picks up the tumbler again and peers into it.

“Honey, be careful,” I warn. She doesn’t even look at me. It is 5:30 PM and I’ve lost most of my authority, and my belief in my authority, by now. Especially now that Daddy is home. Now her hand is in the glass, up to her wrist in water, and she is twisting it, making the water swish back and forth. The LHM is holding the base, but I know this is going to end in a mess.

I watch, pondering whether I should mop the whole floor while it is wet, or if I can get away with just sponging up that section. I’m glad he’s drinking water and not milk. She pulls her dripping fingers out of the cup and watches water fall from them onto her lap. She brushes her palms back and forth against each other, signing “Clean!” and grinning up at me. Water droplets fly out across the floor.

In the morning, at her water table in the yard, or in her bath, I love to watch her experiment with the world this way. But by the evening I have grown tired of picking up, cleaning up, and changing clothes. I need to start dinner and am thinking forward to all the things I need to finish before I can fall into bed. And the list is always longer than the time remaining before a reasonable bedtime.

“It is hard to find the line,” I say, to myself, to him, to her, “between letting her explore and maintaining some kind of order in this house.” I want to be a fun mom. I want to join her in seeing the world as a science experiment. I want to let her remind me that the world is a fascinating, wonderful place.

But in the evening I want a tidy house and a quiet, obedient child. In the evening these things are beyond elusive. They are so far from the reality of the situation that some nights I just want to sit down on the filthy floor and cry in frustration. She would probably come over and crawl into my lap. She would hold my face with her little hands and look into my eyes. Which would just make me feel guilty. I’m so relieved when he walks in the door after work each night and she runs to him.

The LHM smiles sympathetically at my distress but doesn’t answer. And doesn’t take the glass out of her hand. I know I usually err on the side of order. He errs on the side of fun. He can handle more chaos than I can. And he hasn’t been managing this particular kind of chaos all day.

She puts her hand back in the water and swishes some more. This time I say nothing more and let her play.

Desperately seeking autumn

Where I live we have an elusive autumn. Non-natives who live in the Bay Area joke that we have no seasons here.  We do, but they are subtle, and the edges are sometimes hard to identify.  Here on the coast, where I live, we have fog in the summer and then Indian Summer in the fall and then *bam* it snaps to cold (where cold=mildly cool to most of the rest of the country).  Sometimes in between those things we get a little hint of autumn. But not so much this year.

I need something to mark the transition between summer and winter, because if I don’t mark it that onslaught of rain and chill and soggy leaves in the gutters that signals fall is over feels a bit like a slap in the face. This year, especially, I have had to go looking for signs of autumn. Summer flowers are still blooming in my garden (though they are getting scraggly). The unusually warm days this month and dry weather last spring have sent most of the trees straight from green to brown. Even the liquid amber trees, common around here, are not so vibrant.  The maples are mottled, but not vivid.  The evenings are cool, but don’t have the delicious crisp scent of fall that I miss.

It seems odd that I crave this season, as if I had lived somewhere sometime where I experienced it.  I miss it in my cells, though I have lived in this 50-square-mile patch of California all but one year of my life.  Even that first year of my life, when we lived in Virginia, my family left the country to travel before the fall. I have never lived through an east coast autumn. But still, I crave the trees turning, the apple picking, the knitting of warm socks and mittens, the stacking of wood for winter and hot chocolate to warm my fingers after and the smell of smoke from the first cozy fires.

What is fall like where you live?  Do you miss a season you no longer get to experience?