A Walk Below the Falls on a Spring Morning

It was just a few days ago that the nights here were so balmy that we left the windows open all night for the first time this year. I awoke early Tuesday morning, feeling the humidity in the air, hearing the birds, sensing the sunlight peaking under the partially raised shade of our east window. When it became clear to me that I wasn't going back to sleep, I decided to get up. It was about 6:30.

Up early on a spring morning, I decided to go for a walk. (And not knowing that soon the wintry chill would return yet again—I awoke this morning to see snow on the green grass. Yes, on May 3rd.)

We live just a half mile from Minnehaha Falls, so I walked down to admire the waterfall's abundance fed by the melt down of all the snow we got in April (more than in January!). 

I descended the many stone steps to the creek below the falls, which leads to the Mississippi River.

Spring is getting a late start around here this year, so there's not much color yet other than the stems of the red-twigged dogwood (seen on the left above).

But as I continued along the path and then the boardwalk, I saw a welcome smattering of green. Much of the ground surrounding the creek here is marshlike, and so there is a boardwalk to allow visitors to keep their feet dry and not disturb the soft soil, where bog plants like this skunk cabbage thrive.

I don't recall ever seeing skunk cabbage in bloom, so this siting was a real treat.

This stand of bloodroot in bloom was also a pleasant surprise.

I was alone for most of the time, except for the songbirds and this small hawk; we have two species of small hawks here in the city, Cooper's and sharp shinned, but I didn't see this one well enough to tell which it was. It was keeping a good watch on me, though. 

When I reached the end of the boardwalk, the trail up ahead was muddy and rutted, so I decided it was time to head back home. I did cross paths on my way back with a young couple out for a morning stroll, he with a cup of coffee in hand. Other than those two and me, there was nobody down by the lower creek on this warm spring morning, and no sound other than the creek and the birds.

I walked home from the park a couple of blocks on city sidewalks, waiting for a gap in the morning traffic before crossing 46th Street, up another half block, and in through my front door to make breakfast and tea. I'd been gone an hour but had only walked a couple of miles in that time. Yet it seemed as though I had been so much farther away.

Snow — just another spring ephemeral

A note: I wrote this for the March 8, 2004, edition of the late Minneapolis Observer, a short-lived newspaper that my husband and I used to publish. It's topicality is apropos this spring, while at the same time revealing how unusual it is even here in Minnesota to get this much snow this late in the season. Still, it's a reminder: it's all ephemeral, nonetheless. —Sharon

On Thursday, my friend Sandra was positively gleeful at the prospect of 6 inches or more of snow. She is an avid winter athlete and once cross-country skied on Theodore Wirth golf course after a particularly late April snowfall, much to the chagrin of the groundskeepers.

By March, my attitude toward winter is one of indifference. After 47 winters, I am no longer impatient for spring to begin—I know it will come soon enough. And I am no longer dismayed by late-season snowfalls, even after a long thaw has dangled the promise of an early spring only to snatch it away again. I know it won’t last.

I think of this snow as the first of the spring ephemerals. In gardening, we usually think of ephemerals as those early bloomers that disappear, leaves and all, once summer is underway: the bulbs we plant in fall; the woodland wildflowers that bloom before the trees leaf out, then retreat under the ground again.

But snow is one of these too. Consider how profoundly it transforms the landscape in winter—the mounds that turn our sidewalks into valleys, the mountains in the corners of parking lots, the bright white clingy coat that forces the arborvitae to bow down in homage to the forces of nature, the snow “flowers” on mugho pines. And then it all melts away. Vanishes. A re-creation of the great ice age, in mere months, and then nothing. I know I’m odd, but the whole transformation from winter’s snow-sculpted landscape to flat, muddy early spring—even before the greening of spring at its peak—fascinates me. Every year.

So as I went about my business on Friday while clumps of wet snow dropped heavily from the trees as frequently as the big sticky flakes fell from the sky, I was glad I didn’t have to look at the dirty grey-black patches of ice that had been everywhere and will be exposed again soon. We can put off cleaning the yard a little longer. I just discovered one of my boots has a leak but my wet foot doesn’t make me miserable because I’m distracted by the unfolding drama. I look around and marvel at a fleeting winter wonderland that soon will be no more.

Making your own polish for wood and other things

One of the toy sets from Arty Didact

The little tins of "stuff" that I assemble as quirky amusements for kids usually include a few wooden objects, as do my "respite boxes" for adults.

In order to give these wooden components a nice luster and to  provide a pleasant tactile experience, I have taken to rubbing them with a beeswax-and-oil polish. It's a simple homemade concoction that's quite versatile—you can use it on stones and on your skin, as well—and it's a good way to reuse beeswax candle stumps and bits of beeswax cakes that have become too dry and brittle to use on thread anymore.

I thought I'd share it here for others who, like me, derive some satisfaction from finding a practical reuse for something that would otherwise be discarded.

Expecting to find that the process of making one's own polish is somewhat complicated, I was pleased to come across Amber Dusick's charming blog, where she offered her simple recipe using only two ingredients: oil and beeswax. My adaptation is to use scrap beeswax and whatever oil I have on hand at the time. The first time I made it I used grape seed oil, which resulted in a very green polish. My current batch is made with olive oil, which did not alter the color of the beeswax in any noticeable way. Neither polish changed the color of the wood I rubbed it on, other than to darken it, so I don't think it really matters what oil you use.

As a frequenter of estate sales, I found a nifty little metal pitcher with a long handle, which seems to be made for just this sort of thing. I put my beeswax bits in it and added olive oil, attempting for a ratio of 2–3 parts oil to one part beeswax; but as I don't actually measure anything, I don't know whether that's quite what I've got here. That's a lot less oil than Amber's ratio, which is 4 parts oil to 1 part beeswax, and I do end up with a rather stiff polish. I'll probably try getting closer to her proportions next time, for a softer polish.

I also don't bother to grate the beeswax as she does, I just break or chop it into chunks. For the small amount of polish that I make at one time (about a half cup), that seems to work just fine. I place the metal pitcher in a pan of water on the stove and let it simmer until all the wax has melted.

Since the wax has bits of thread in it—and if I were using leftover bits of candles, there would be a wick and that little metal thingy that's in tea lights—I pour it through a tea strainer into a small canning jar.

A little thread lint captured by the tea strainer

Then you just let it sit until it cools and sets. The outside will set first, of course, which will insulate the center and keep it from cooling as quickly. 

You could go have a cup of tea and read the paper while you wait for the rest of it to cool, I suppose. 

Or, if you're impatient like me, you can stir it to speed the setting process. 

Here are a few wooden cubes, half rubbed with the polish and half not. See how it brings out the wood grain and generally prettifies them nicely?

Oops. Better put the cubes away before they disappear under the furniture.

Who Said What: Why I Don't Repeat Quotations Found Online

Today my local newspaper reprinted an article from the Columbia News Service about the common practice of finding and repeating false quotations on the Internet. The article by Jennifer Hollander leads with the example of a quote I saw often on Facebook after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which was falsely attributed to Martin Luther King Jr.: "I mourn the loss of thousands of previous lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one. Not even an enemy."

In  fact, writes Hollander, it was the Facebook status of an American living in Japan, who followed her eloquent statement with a quote from King. A friend reposted it, dropping the quote marks, after which it went viral, with the false attribution.

The article reminded me of a little project I undertook a couple of years ago, to make a little booklet of quotations from children's books that offered humorous "good advice for all occasions."

The project started with a quote I remembered from a book I had read to our children more than once, Talking to Dragons, by Patricia Wrede, the last book in her Enchanted Forest series. The lead character, Princess Cimorene, had, in the very first book in the series, run away from the pampered and boring life of a princess (as she saw it) and gone off to seek adventure or at least intellectual stimulation in the company of dragons, which turned out to be rather erudite creatures.

In the last book, Cimorene was sending her son, Daystar, off on adventures of his own, and her parting words to him included the simple advice, "Always be polite to dragons."

Alice illustrates a quote from the Red Queen. 

I filled the six-page mini book with a few other favorites I remembered from reading various books to the kids when they were little, and which I could easily check because we hadn't gotten rid of any of the books, even though both kids are now in their twenties. But I needed one more quote and so turned to the Internet to find it.

There I came across a charming quotation attributed variously to Kenneth Graham or more specifically his book Wind in the Willows: "Come along inside ... We'll see if tea and buns can make the world a better place."

Such a sweet sentiment. So I did a drawing of tea and buns to go with it. Then I realized that I needed a more specific attribution for the quote—which character said it and to whom? So I took out my copy of Wind in the Willows and started perusing. I couldn't find it. Maybe I skimmed right past it, I thought. I found an online searchable copy of the book and looked for it there. Nothing.

I found an online source of other works by Kenneth Graham, yet still could not find the quote.

In the end, I gave up. Not knowing the true source of the quote (it may still have been said/written by Kenneth Graham, but in what I do not know), I decided to use a different quote. But I already had my drawing of tea and buns, and I wanted to use it, so I remembered that Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn had said something about drinking tea mindfully, and I set out to find that one to use instead. On the Internet I found several slight variations; fortunately, we have several of his books, and I guessed correctly that it must surely be in The Miracle of Mindfulness, which it was.

"Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole world revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future." —Thich Nhat Hanh

And that's how my little booklet of quotations from children's stories ended up with one quotation from a book for adults about living our lives with intention. (And why I illustrated a Buddhist quote with a drawing of a very English-looking cup of milky tea and brioche buns.)

What?! More snow?! No! We want flowers in the house!

Here's today's forecast for Minneapolis, courtesy the National Weather Service:

"Snow likely before 1pm, then a chance of light snow between 1pm and 2pm, then snow with patchy blowing snow after 2pm."

Can you use "snow" four times in one sentence? That's on top of the 7 or 8 inches already sitting on the ground. You might notice how white it looks through those windows.

Ah, but I see from visiting Jane's flower party, that I'm not the only one with shoveling rather than gardening on my day's agenda. Actually, I expect gardening won't be one of my tasks for several more weeks, but that's pretty standard around here. All the more reason for flowers in the house.

If you're new to flowers in the house, you really must click the link on "flower party" above and have a look at all the lovely blogs featuring flowers today, thanks to Flower Jane and her Small but Charming blog. Thank you, Jane, for continuing this cheerful monthly tradition. Come to think of it, I have nothing to complain about.

And, fortunately, somebody knows how to grow flowers at this time of year around here, because when I went to the co-op, I was pleased to not only find a rather decent selection of flowers, but a sign indicating that they are locally grown. (Well, not outdoors, obviously.) So I selected some cheery orange tulips and a bundle labeled "filler." I chose a filler bouquet with a bit of violet purple in it to complement the orange.

I feel better already.

And it looks like the big meltdown begins on the weekend, with temps in the high 30s.

Cheers!

Tres on a balmy day last summer

And as you can see, I'm not the only one dreaming of spring! (Did someone invite cats to the party? Oh, yeah; they invite themselves.)

Happy George Washington Day

George Washington pop art by Brenda Johnson

I could say happy President's Day, or happy Washington's Birthday, but since I can sometimes be a stickler for accuracy, if for no other reason than to be contrary, I say happy George Washington Day.

Today is officially designated as Washington's Birthday (even though it's not actually his birthday), according to section 6013(a) of the US code that specifies holidays for federal employees. Although it is popularly known these days as Presidents' Day, the name of the holiday has not changed on the books; it was President Richard Nixon who first called it President's Day in 1971, three years after the Monday Holiday Law was enacted (in 1968), moving this observance to the third Monday in February.

So, just to clarify, Washington was born on February 22, 1732.

Mind you, I'm not objecting to the Monday holiday law or to taking this day to honor all (or as many as you like) US presidents, either. I'm just being persnickety.

Cherry note cards by Cindy Lindgren

But what I do object to is telling schoolchildren a fabricated story about Washington's childhood, especially since the tale is supposed to exalt the virtue of telling the truth. You know the story I mean, the one about the cherry tree. It was made up by a parson named Mason Locke Weems in a biography he published about Washington shortly after his death, and at some point was included in the McGuffy readers used in grade school.

I just remember learning as a teenager that this story wasn't really true and feeling a certain moral outrage at the hypocrisy of it all! Outrage, I tell you! Okay, that was mostly because I was a teenager when I learned that it was a myth, and so prone to moral outrage just generally. But, still: using a lie to exalt the virtue of truth-telling? I still shake my head at that one.

So, enjoy the day off if you've got it. Tell the truth. Eat some cherries.

(The images in the post are from items for sale on Etsy. The highlighted words in the captions will take you to the page where each is sold.)

Enjoy, Then Repurpose: Why I Make Journals from Beer Boxes

There's something about packaging design that often makes me want to find another purpose for small cardboard boxes, especially certain craft beers and sodas and tea.

It started when the city wouldn't collect the boxes from six-packs of beer for recycling, because the box board is reinforced in such a way as to make recycling difficult. I hated adding those boxes to the waste stream; especially when some of them are works of art, besides. And if they're reinforced, wouldn't that make them especially well-suited to reusing in some way?

So I started using them as covers for small journals and notebooks. Often, I cut a tag from another part of the same box.

 A selection of the recycled journals available from my Etsy shop, Arty Didact

My bookbinding knowledge and skills are limited. I really only know a couple of types of stitches: the three-hole pamphlet stitch and the chain or coptic stitch. But these, as it happens, are well-suited to my purpose.

The pamphlet stitch is simple and sturdy, is sewn through the binding (hence useful for a folded book cover), and can be begun and finished from the outside or inside, allowing you to decide where you want the "tail" to end up. Starting from the inside gives you a fairly smooth spine and hides the ends of the cording amongst the pages.

Handstitched notebook from Brooklyn Lager box, with bead and cat charm, from Arty Didact (me) on Etsy.

But starting from the outside gives you a tail on which you can string beads or other ornaments.

Notebook made from Tazo tea box, with collaged cover and original lino cut print

You can also adapt the tail to provide a closure for the book by leaving part of it long, then wrapping it around a kind of button (cut from more packaging, in this case), like an old-fashioned envelope with a string closure.

Notebook made from a B.T. McElrath Chocolate box, with collage on cover.

The coptic, or chain stitch, allows for sewing several signatures to a cover without needing the cover to wrap around the spine, which means I can cut two different pieces for the covers without needing to fold them or cover them.

Journal made from Lost Trout beer box,  with coptic stitch binding

Of course I'm not the only one who likes to repurpose box board and other such materials to make journals and notebooks, there's a whole host of them on Etsy.

Here's one using vintage postcards and an actual button for the string closure:

Postcard minijournal from Macedoine on Etsy

Here are some beer box notebooks using a stitch I don't know (yet!):

From Repaper on Etsy

Clearly I'm not the only (or the first) to think of repurposing boxes in this way.

And I do use them myself, as well. I find the covers hold up well even after being tossed into the bottom of my tote time and again. The box board really is quite sturdy.

Collecting ... or not

When I once commented to my husband how I marveled at the quantity of stuff some people manage to amass in their lifetimes, as witnessed by the overflowing abundance offered at the estate sales I am fond of attending, he said, "Maybe they liked to go to estate sales."

I take that warning to heart, I really do, and try to limit my estate sale purchases to things I can actually use, especially quirky little items to include in my tins of "Stuff!" for kids, which have become a fairly popular attraction in my Etsy shop (of course you want to pop over to the toy section to see a few examples, right?)

So when I picked up these sweet little ceramic figurines that were scattered amongst the usual clutter and chaos at one recent estate sale, that's what I had in mind. Although I wasn't sure they were quite small enough to fit in the little boxes, which are the same size as an Altoid tin, but at something like a buck apiece, I figured it was worth the risk.

I like to see what I can find out about items like this when I acquire them, so I looked on the bottoms for any clues as to their origin, and found that the turtle had the words "Wade England" on it. The others simply had little ridges. And so I began my search.

Ceramic figurines like these have been manufactured by Wade Ceramics of England since the 1950s. They are known as Wade Whimsies and are apparently popular collectibles, according to several sources, including the Wade Ceramics website, which promotes a collectors' "club" and continues to manufacture a variety of animals and characters, from Pokemon to Disney characters (according to Wikipedia) to Bette Boop. Their primary market these days is distillers, though; they make ceramic whiskey flagons, too.

Only the earliest figurines had the "Wade England" stamp on them; soon they started putting the ridged texture on the bottom instead, which became a kind of trademark and also has a practical function—you can strike a match on them. Although it's not clear to me whether that was the intention, they were supposedly used in this way in kitchens and pubs, according to the Red Rose Tea company, which has given away Wade Whimsies in some of their boxes of tea as a promotional item since 1967.

 I don't know whether the currently manufactured figurines have this feature, there's probably not a lot of demand for things to strike matches on these days. But it's a novel idea; I may just try it out sometime. Oh, wait—I think our matches are all "strike-on-box" types.

Even though they are considered collectibles, the little figurines are not particularly valuable; at least, not the ones that I have. Some of them are offered for sale online for up to $50, but most are in the $2–$5 range. And I'm not so keen on the cynical world of buying and selling "collectibles" for speculative prices, anyway.

But I still don't know if they'll fit in the little tins because I haven't tried them out yet. I'm kind of inclined to hang onto them.

Counting Crows—and Wrens and Chickadees and More

Cooper's hawk (drawings by Sharon Parker)

Today begins the 113th Annual Christmas Bird Count, a comprehensive bird census conducted by fans of birds all over North America and coordinated by the National Audubon Society.

With tens of thousands of birding enthusiasts tallying up millions of birds, the count provides useful bird information to scientists, allowing them to track the distribution of birds in winter and bird population trends, which in turn can be indicators of threats not only to birds but to the environment in general.

But it wasn't really started as a citizen scientist project. Rather, American ornithologist Frank Chapman introduced the idea in 1900 as an alternative to the then-common tradition of the Christmas Side Hunt, in which gangs of hunters joyfully went forth on Christmas Day to slaughter as many small critters, both feathered and furry, as they could. The game was to see which party could count the highest number of little carcasses after the hunt.

Black-capped chickadee

The origin of that tradition may stem from the custom of hunting the wren on the day after Christmas in parts of the British Isles.

Chapman suggested that people skip the hunting part and just go straight to counting instead. Twenty-six others joined him on that first Christmas Bird Census—in Toronto, Ontario, and Pacific Grove, California, along with several cities in Northeastern North America. The number of participants has grown tremendously ever since.

Chapman was an officer in the recently formed Audubon Society, and he was among the scientists and amateurs in the fledgling conservation movement who were concerned about declining bird populations in North America.

The count continues through January 5 and anyone can participate. The Audubon Society website has all the details for those who would like to head out into the snowy field to count birds alongside fellow (peaceful) avian enthusiasts.

Don't look in pear trees for partridges to count, though. You won't find them there; they don't like to perch in trees.

Wild turkey

Hanging of the Greens

The greens on my front step

Today being the first Sunday of Advent, churches everywhere are festooned in the rich evergreens and glittering ornamentation that have come to symbolize the entire season for so many of us. I remember our church's hanging of the greens festivities, when congregants cheerfully gathered to decorate the fragrant trees that had been brought into the sanctuary, and hang garlands about the halls, then join in a convivial meal that we had all contributed to.

It felt like the true beginning of the Christmas season, and it didn't bother us a bit that our Puritan forebears would have been appalled at such an ostentatious display that incorporated pre-Christian —pagan!— customs.

Modern Christians seem to have gotten over that, though, and our midwinter observances are much more cheerful for their having done so. Although it can be a bit ironic when the occasional disgruntled individual complains about all the other holidays and customs that crowd into December, insisting that there is only one "reason for the season." Indeed there is, but it's a purely scientific one: the tilting of the earth's axis. The festivals of many religions are tied to this one dispassionate fact.

All of this leads me to share a rather interesting discovery that I made recently, when researching historical customs around Christmas for a planned self-published chapbook on the 12 Days of Christmas (which, unfortunately, has been set back again, so it won't be done for this Christmas season).

In Medieval times in England right up until the Puritans tried their best to do away with Christmas altogether in early America, advent was not a time for decorating our homes and churches or shopping or parties. It was observed in a manner more comparable to Lent, with dietary restrictions and general austerity. It was a period of spiritual preparation for Christmas, rather than one of material preparation for the holiday, writes Ronald Hutton in The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1994)

In fact, going even further, author and historian David Cressy writes in Bonfires & Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England that advent was one of those periods, along with Lent (and one other season known as Rogations that I know too little about), when weddings were forbidden.

This period of fasting — all rich foods were avoided, including eggs, meat, dairy and, of course, sweets — fell between the end of the various harvest feasts, which began with Lammas ("Loaf Mass") on August 1 and continued through Martinmas (St. Martin's Day) on or around November 11, and the beginning of Christmastide.

Churches and homes were decorated on Christmas Eve, and after church services on Christmas Day, the feasting and festivities of the 12 Days of Christmas began and lasted through Epiphany, January 6 (which is actually 13 days, for which I have yet to find a truly satisfactory explanation).

Maybe if we observed Advent in a similar manner nowadays, we would curb some of that holiday weight gain!

Confessions of a Calendar Nerd

The Useful Calendar has been my annual project for about eight or nine years now (I think the first one was 2005, or else it was a 2006 calendar I made in 2005), and it changes a little every year, both in appearance and content.

I have really come to enjoy the whole process, from researching the dates to drawing the main image, to tweaking the design a little each year, and even the rather tedious task of putting it all together: printing it, cutting the little cards, and assembling them.

It started out as a simple one-page calendar of national and local observances, which I conceived as a promotional giveaway when my husband, Craig Cox, and I were publishing the Minneapolis Observer.

You've probably received several promotional calendars; sometimes they're kind of cool, but too often they are just too generic and not very useful.

Which brings me to the Useful Calendar. What I wanted — and so extrapolated to everyone else because everyone is just like me, right? — was a calendar that you could look at without having to lift pages to find out when is Easter this year or on what day of the week is the Fourth of July, and things like that. So I designed my own, and endeavored to include all the dates that I thought would be handy to be able to check quickly and easily when making plans of one sort or another.

I decided that it should include various cultural observances so that a person planning a luncheon or other food-based get-together could be considerate of their Muslim friends and business associates and avoid scheduling it during Ramadan. Or a ham dinner during the Jewish High Holy Days. Soon I was also researching major Hindu, Buddhist, and Bahá'i holidays, doing my best to ascertain which ones called for some sort of restriction in activities, again so that a non-adherent of those religions could be considerate when planning events.

When we stopped publishing the newspaper and started a little quarterly journal of "the bucolic city" I continued the annual calendar as a gift to subscribers and a promotional item to give away at the Twin Cities Book Festival.

When we stopped publishing the quarterly as well (publications as business enterprises are challenging enough, then you compound that by our lack of business acumen and you get a good formula for going broke in a hurry), I wanted to continue making the Useful Calendar, but it didn't make sense as a promotional giveaway anymore.

Also, with my obsession over inclusiveness, the little one-page calendar had begun to get a bit crowded, so for 2012, I went to a larger format (11x17); and I also made a second version as a set of cards that could be carried in a purse or pocket.

And I started selling them in an online shop on the e-marketplace Etsy.com — Arty Didact.

It has continued to grow and change each year. Since I no longer had a strictly local audience (in fact, most of the calendars last year were purchased by people from all over the country), I changed the calendar's focus for 2013 to be about as inclusive internationally as it has been culturally.

But I hate to disappoint those who are in the Twin Cities area, so I added a Twin Cities Supplement card with those local observances.

Several sets are now for sale in my Arty Didact online shop, and I'll have them with me at the Women's Art Festival on Decmber 15 in Minneapolis, as well.

I expect to have the 11x17 poster version ready in another week or so.

Whichever version you look at, I think you'll still find that it's pretty darn useful.

The Bloomsbury Group in Gordon Square

We biked to the Bloomsbury Farmers' Market today, and after a little breakfast and a cup of coffee, took a walk around nearby Gordon Square, that hub of early-twentieth-century intellectualism known as the Bloomsbury Group.

Gordon Square Gardens, directly across from the row of houses also on the eponymous street, is a lovely little park, with a pretty little café (if we hadn't just had coffee, we would have taken some there),  some gorgeous roses in the lush but not overly tidy gardens and a monument to Indian poet Tagore.

The sign at the entrance to the park offers a nice little overview of the Bloomsbury group, identifying which house numbers were theirs. Interestingly, I did not see a plaque on No. 46, which the sign identifies as most strongly associated with the group. (You should be able to read the signs below if you click to enlarge.)