{life with a curious and crazy officially 13 yr old}
These days it’s either work or the pool (best pandemic purchase ever! it’s not a big blow up pool but all three of us can be in it and she can still swim-dance/splash around) for this gal. On Tuesdays she’s known to be on her skates, in the shop, on delivery, at the Farmer’s Market — it’s become a signature of hers (as well as her ‘layered’ fashion sense). And at home she’s been cutting out retro Retro paper dolls (even their retro is retro now), upcycling (cleaning, repainting, and making wrapping paper) gifts, embroidering and sewing, reading, and putting on shadow stick-puppet shows. We came home to snacks, our coffee chairs in front of the table (like a theater), and were welcomed with a cardboard remote to change the puppet tv channels (hilarious – Chanel 4, Old Ladys Shop, This Bird, and others).
I am sad to say that there are still flower seedlings waiting to get into the garden. Those poor little potbound babies, looking longingly at the ground. If it’s not raining this Wednesday (our only day closed) I will do my best and get them into flower boxes. Meanwhile, the garden is looking scraggly but alive (it would like some sun, please!). The peppers, tomatoes, cukes, eggplants, tatsoi, and purple pak choi are thriving amidst the dahlia, zinnia, and companion plants of marigold, calendula, basil, sage, thyme, and sunflowers! The beans are climbing next to the blooming sweet peas, their footroom shared with chamomile and pansy.
We planted tansy in the fruit beds (where our Fall raspberries grow, the rhubarb awaits to be replanted, and where we usually-but-not-this-year plant ground cherry) and it is nearly 6 foot tall!! I have never seen it that tall – it was meant to be a lovely little dye plant/companion to the fruit beds but is taking over like a tree!!
Back at the shop, we’ve been putting on many readings and events – this week we’re part of a Lit Crawl! Starting at the adorable plant and lifestyle shop, Pistil & Page, at the end of the block at 5pm, you can see Gillian Burnes and Meghan Sterling be plant inspired, and then head up the block to our space for poetry with Claire Millikin and Katherine Hagopian Berry! It should be a lot of fun! Most of these lovely writers come out of Agnes Bushell’s Portland, ME publishing company Littoral Books. We love carrying their titles here!
The bread has been looking exceptionally gorgeous lately – this baker has worked out most of the new oven kinks. We’ve been making some lovely partnerships with the local Andrews Farm (check out their new farmstand in Gardiner! we’ve been getting their CSA for years now and it’s marvelous! You can find them at the Augusta Mill Park Farmer’s Market on Tuesday afternoons, too), Sweet Monkey Business – shortbreads and granola out of Belfast, ME (we can barely keep them in stock!), and Gremlin Workshops – handhewn and designed cutting boards, lathe turned wooden bowls (gorgeous! Veteran owned). We’re looking forward to making more community connections.
5 Quotes from Books at Hand (a peek at what I do when I’m not at the store):
“The post-anthropocentric ethics of expanded obligations becomes a way of taking responsibility, by the human, for various sorts of thickenings of the universe, across different scales, and of responding to the tangled mesh of everyday connections and relations.” (Joanna Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene)
“Buddhism is about cutting through delusion. I think most of us imagine that delusion is caused by forces outside of our control. We’re ‘educated’ by a society that doesn’t even understand itself. So how can we help but be deluded?” (Brad Warner, Don’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master)
“This fair homestead has fallen to us, and how little have we done to improve it, how little have we cleared and hedged and ditched! We are too inclined to go hence to a ‘better land’, without lifting a finger, as our farmers are moving to the Ohio soil; but would it not be more heroic and faithful to till and redeem this New England soil of the world?” (H.D. Thoreau, Essays: A Fully Annotated Edition, Ed. J.S. Cramer)
“We live in a world of tricksters. How we conduct ourselves in this world, the ethics of the trickster world, has to do with respecting that subjunctive, hesitant, might-be quality. It has to do with attunement.” (Timothy Morton, All Art is Ecological)
“All of us here have fought to defend our right to complexity in a society that demands we compress the totality of being into feminine woman. Unless that category is a comfortable choice, it becomes a suffocating compartment.” (Leslie Feinberg, TransLiberation: beyond pink or blue)
{life with a curious and crazy officially 13 yr old}
My adorable little pea is now a teenager – when did that happen? She is a glorious young person with certainly a mind of her own. She’s kind, she’s ridiculously fashionable and funny, she’s smart and creative. Of course, she is woefully undisciplined (in the sense of having goals and dedication to less immediate tasks) and she is uninterested in expanding her world at the moment (she’s only barely a teen)…but these things will come when she is ready. She is such a free spirit, we have no intentions of dampening her light. We offer the tools (and instructions on how to use them best) and wait for her arrival.
With that said, she’s working on a few projekts – reflooring her doll house with popsicle sticks (she’s giving them nice wood plank flooring!, likely her real wish for her room), she’s learning how to use pastels (thank you, Grammy!), she’s writing an adventure novel, she’s learning new dances (very swing!). She’s waiting for the sun to come out to practice her all-terrain/mountain skateboard, and fix up her vintage bike.
For her birthday events so far, we got rained out for Old Orchard Beach but instead found an arcade with similar attributes (no rides but plenty of games and baskets of half decent food) — she’s never really been to these sorts of places and felt like an alien, but that was charming in and of itself. She wasn’t into any of the shooting or fighting games and only moderately liked the driving games but enjoyed Skee-ball, Basketball, throwing rings and balls at things, the claw games — she’s a doer (but not the ax throwing)! Then we came home and she splashed around the hose sprayer mat while Josh mowed and I gardened, then she painted our toenails. It was a lovely day.
She’s working the store for the next couple of days and then we are taking a much needed break just to be together. I think again, our plans are rained out/postponed, but we have a lot of house/yard work to do and there’s a new mini golf in the area we need to check out. We’ll get some folks together for some food and cupcakes and all will be well.
The Emperor thought of his heart as a water wheel flooding the rice fields of all creation and bloodied the water for a better harvest. His warriors hoped for a life with wings. His swallowtails wrote him the same lines —the secret of life is a resurrected worm— He told them eventually time would run backwards in their hands, now empty where a crossbow went.
A theory works if it answers the exceptions. The writing in the air of swallowtails, from here to where the time changes at Mexico Beach, is like writing all the armies of the afterlife waiting underground in China.
We are attuned to shadows. They strafe the shore. An osprey spins above the trees. But when a large one stops suddenly above the house, all the laws have been broken. A theory that a moment is a warehouse where armies are stacked to the ceiling, then one falls, is the last exception. The osprey’s underside is streaked like a zebra swallowtail. It misses the fish that dove out of the reach of shadows as the lovers jumped into theirs from the Bay Bridge to Fort Walton. If any should meet hovering over a milkweed or reflection, they might say didn’t I know you in another life, the kind of thing said often in Fort Walton or the Orient and didn’t plum blossoms freeze in the Emperor’s courtyard.
All of a sudden, all the things are happening. This Summer Solstice is bringing with it a real start to a season!
This Friday, June 23rd, we are lucky lucky lucky to have a lovely poetry reading with poets: Audrey Gidman (her first, thoughtfully bound collection from Slate Roof Press, Northfield, MA is gorgeous), meg willing, and Maine Poet Laureate Julia Bouwsma. The poetry readings have been going well, nice gatherings with snacks and stimulating language images. The Open ‘no mic’ was a success (look for more of those every 2nd Friday of the month).
And then July 6th, 6-8pm the Good Life Center (Harborside, ME) is presenting Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down, a documentary about the attempted assassination, recovery, and activism of Arizona congresswoman. I think it will be inspiring and illuminating.
July 7th, 6-7pm local author Kirsten Reed will visit us for a reading from her new scary story set in Maine, Ghost Town. Looks to be a good time!
And somewhere in the middle, we’ll go to a wedding, have a big kid birthday at Old Orchard Beach, and go camping! So many things. Right now, I am just hoping the rain slows a bit on our day off so we can get the last of the peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes in. I’d love to seed the Asian greens bed (Purple Pak Choi, Tatsoi, Mizuna), and get the flower seedlings in the ground as well. Hopefully, this marvelous child will mow the fields of grass and clover we call a yard. We are also getting ready to move our old piano out to the firepit and plant it with hops – I think it will play more lovely out in the world!
Meanwhile, the bakery is cranking out some lovely breads — the humidity is a finicky partner, most of the time it helps all the good stuff come true. The rise is beautiful, the crust gets crispy, excellent fermentation results. But every now and again it catches you off guard and overproofs a batch. Living food is a gift and an art. We’ll have some new jams up soon, too. And we’re so excited to partner up with a great shortbread cookie and granola company here in Maine: Sweet Monkey Business, from Belfast, ME. Their goods are so delicious! So many good things happening and coming up! Stay tuned.
And so the time has come to say goodbye to ‘child’hood and enter ‘teen’hood for this gal. I’m sad but excited, she’s sad but excited, Josh is scared but excited (ha!). She’s so tall and friendly people expect her to be older but she still has this great sense of sweet youth and wonder. She loves to dance, sing, draw, swim, bake, and make crazy.
Right now, she is mowing the lawn on the rider mower (I think she likes driving all around, even if it does mean it’s technically ‘work’) and tonight she has her school assessment (8th grade! Yes, She passed!!!). I think she is ready, perhaps not as ready as we would like her to be, but she learns in ways we are not used to – different from us in our studious and academic ways. We are readers (practically from birth, maybe as some escape – but it is a love of reading), we are thinkers, we are expressers – she is a doer. She’s not a concentrator of big thoughts, she’s a mover and a shaker. Life’s a party, and we are in the way!
We’ve got some birthday plans coming up – likely a sushi dinner, a game night with folks, a day at the OOB boardwalk, and a camping trip. She’s already requested Djej Emshmel (Moroccan Chicken with Olives and Preserved Lemons) for camping – could you imagine as a kid requesting something so exotic for a family camping trip? Not that we ever went family camping as kids or made specific requests of our parents, it’s a different world. Her plans tonight after her (favorable) assessment is some mending on a hand-me-down cardigan and one of J’s aprons.
Rock Bottom Homestead 