Oh, I have posts to come: December food expenses, looking back at 2020, looking ahead to 2021, but I couldn't let 2020 slide away without one last photo for a most mixed up, godawful, WTF year ever.
If when I am out walking and see a coin on the ground, I pick it up. This year, I picked up a total of 61¢, all but 7¢ of which was picked up BEFORE mid-March. There are several reasons for that date, the top one being that change disappeared from stores and people stopped carrying coins around. However, in the last three weeks, I found two pennies and one nickel.
The nickel sums up 2020 better than any quote or any meme. Is this how we all feel about 2020 or what?
Here's to 2021, everyone. May it treat us all more kindly than 2020.
My husband Warren read my last post and commented (on the actual post, not just to me) that he was there for Hanukkah as well as "an observer and a supporter."
I cannot say enough about Warren and his acceptance of my Judaism.
I have written about my faith before, including taking a long, hard look at it back in 2011, but Warren's comment caused me to think back about the support that I have had or not had over the years since converting to Judaism many decades ago.
I was introduced to Judaism through the children's series All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor. I had discovered these books while I was reading my way through my childhood in our local library. In the Lutheran church in which I was raised, Judaism was a religion that should have died out with the onset of Christianity. The realization to me when I was 8 or 9 that there were people out there— girls out there—who were Jewish was staggering. That began what was more or less a 15 year journey that ended in my converting formally as a young adult.
At the time of my conversion, I was married into a "culturally Jewish" (well, kinda sorta) family. My father-in-law was agnostic; my mother-in-law was an atheist, but they identified as Jews (to a limited extent) and observed some of the hallmark holidays (to a very limited extent). My then husband, David, was much the same: fiercely atheistic, but more than willing to play the Jewish card when it benefitted him. My in-laws were pleased when I converted, although my mother-in-law (who was and still is a force of nature when it came to respecting the beliefs of others) made it clear she thought all the "God stuff" was foolish and hoped I would soon abandon the religious side of Judaism.
David, on the other hand, was very opposed to my conversion once it became clear I was going through with it. So opposed, in fact, that he cornered the rabbi before the ceremony and tried to argue that the conversion could not go through without his approval. I still remember Rabbi Stampher politely but firmly informing David that he could either sit down and be quiet or he could leave, but either way the rabbi was moving ahead with the conversion and was not wasting energy on pointless arguments.
I was a believing Jew in a sea of non-believers. Judaism, though, is like that, running the gamut in faith and observance, so while my situation wasn't ideal, it was nonetheless manageable.
My second husband was a lapsed Catholic, albeit one with 12 years of parochial school under his belt. In the early years, he claimed to be very supportive of my beliefs. We attended a few seders together, I lit menorahs every Hanukkah. I took Ben as a very young child to the Reform synagogue in Stockton for some of the holidays.
That didn't last. For reasons mired deep in mental health issues, my then husband became opposed to my observing any Jewish holidays, let alone exposing our children to Judaism in practice or belief. I ended up raising my children without Judaism even as a belief system (apart from the observances), a loss I regret yet.
Fast forward to now, or near now. (Scrooge to The Ghost of Christmas Past: "The long past?" "No, your past.") Very early on, Warren and I talked about faith. He was raised in the Christian Science faith, which is a very minority church in mainstream Christianity. While he never joined the church, he nonetheless absorbed many of its tenets. He understood the reality of belonging to a minority religion, especially in this community. More important, Warren made it clear he would support my beliefs however and wherever he could.
So that brings us to now. Every Hanukkah when I light the candles, Warren is present (the exception in pre-pandemic years being when he was not home because of a rehearsal). He listens to me chant the Hebrew, watches me touch the shamash (leader) to the night's candles, even corrects me when I make a lighting error, to our mutual amusement. (My favorite menorah, the Konarski-Anderson menorah, has a shamash but it is not removable to light the other ones with; I touch an extra candle to it and proceed to light the others with the extra. Sometimes I forget the order.)
I have written about this holiday and the importance of the light. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner said it best: "At the darkest time of year, the tiniest bit of light reminds us that we are all whistling in the dark and hoping, by these rituals of miracles of candlelights and bulbs on evergreens, we remember the divine presence."
Yes, I remember the divine presence. And I very much look at my dear Warren, sitting on the couch watching me light the menorah, to know what a light he is in my life.
Who didn't have a different holiday season this year?
Okay, Hanukkah was pretty much the same. Eight nights of lighting candles is always something I look forward to, and this year I used that time to read and reflect. I put my menorahs on a small table in our front window, watching out, as JewBelong reminds us, for the curtains and for anti-Semites. So far, so good.
The last night I didn't get the candles lit until late (because I had Poetry Group earlier), so they burned long into the evening. I own three menorahs and light them all, so there was a lot of light:
The last night
Christmas was a whole different experience this year. Normally, December is a rush of holiday concerts and performances for Warren, but in the pandemic world, live music is on hold indefinitely. That alone made December feel different. For example, we typically put off buying a Christmas tree until after the last performance (which would have been December 21 at the earliest); this year, we bought one out of sequence in part because there was no sequence and in part because, in Ohio at least, there were localized runs on trees, with various vendors selling out. We did get a tree. It stayed on our porch for several days until a windstorm made that a losing proposition, then it stood unadorned and unlit in our living room until, well, about the 21st.
It wasn't for lack of enthusiasm; it was for lack of time and...time. Among other things, Warren was producing the first live (as in prerecorded concert) by the Symphony for the Symphony's Holiday Concert. (There had been an earlier prerecorded concert, produced and shot by the Farm Bureau for the annual Benefit in the Barn fundraiser; this one was solely a Symphony production.) Until it went live on Facebook on December 20, it consumed a lot of energy and time in this household. Want to see it? Here it is:
Actually, we had two trees this year. The first was a pine tree, the one I just wrote about. The second was a sculpture that we had bought back in January, in one of our Mayo cross country jaunts (the last of 2020, unbeknownst to us at the time). It sat outside all summer, but came in for the winter and Warren thought it would make a great tree.
It did. And yes, that is a trout in the upper circle on the right.
A tradition Warren and I started our very first Christmas is buying a special "us" ornament. We label these and keep them in a separate box. Over the years, we started buying an ornament from somewhere we had traveled that year as our "us"ornament, then expanded that to buying "us" ornaments from all of our trips in any year. So, for example, here is our 2012 ornament from Whitefish Point when we went to Lake Superior that year:
But guess what? We scrubbed all of our 2020 travel plans because of the pandemic. Other than the trip to Rochester for Mayo and Warren's Midwinter Conference in NY, both in January pre-pandemic, we went nowhere.
Nowhere. Not Minneapolis (for the 2020 League of American Orchestras conference, which went virtual), not Rockland, Maine (to see our friends David and Vince in their retirement home), not to Indianapolis (for PASIC 2020, which went virtual) and, the hardest of all, not to Portland/Vancouver to be with our family out there.
Not a single place. And although in the early years we bought an ornament unrelated to travel (that started in 2010), neither of us were going into a store just days before Christmas. And it wouldn't be the same, frankly.
I'm the one who solved the 2020 dilemma, shortly after Warren set up the second "tree." We still had the price tag from that sculpture, and, well, that was a 2020 trip:
(For the record, we paid $50.00, not $75.00, for our piece. I would also note that the sculptor is Tom Nelson, no relation.)
For such a screwy year, it is a perfectly heartfelt reminder of what 2020 held.
We didn't hang a lot of ornaments this year. Our "us" ones, some others that held special meaning or just felt "right," three wood flowers that Mona, my grandchildren's beloved Nana, had each of them paint and then sent to me earlier this year:
Orlando's efforts
And one more.
A very special one.
Earlier this year, my good friend David (the one in Maine) announced that there would be "21 Days of Just David," and he would send me something by mail for 21 days. Sometimes it was a postcard. Sometimes it was a bumpersticker. Sometimes it was a heartfelt letter. Sometimes it was dirt. (There's a story behind that too.) One of the packages arrived much later (he had warned me) and turned out to be an ornament of Frodo Baggins as played by Elijah Wood in the movies "The Lord of the Rings."
Seriously. David had found someone on line in Canada who turned these out:
Why? David, Vince, and I together watched each of the three "Lord of the Rings" movies when each was released and all of us made fun of the agonizing faces Wood made as Frodo. That was 12+ hours of Frodo agonizing over every single breath he took, mind you. It became a running joke over the years between us. Here, for example, is David being Frodo as he does dishes:
Frodo/David agonizing over the dishes
You get the point.
Of course the Frodo ornament had to go on the tree. I went running upstairs to my study to grab him and bring him down.
There is a quote from the final movie on the back of this ornament and I teased David that the first sentence (minus the "Sam") would be my response to inane questions for the remainder of 2020:
I know, we are deep into December. I have had November numbers available since, well, since the end of November. But the last three weeks have held more so much on all fronts that posting about November held on the food front has been beyond me.
So here is a very belated report.
November was a disaster if I look at my 2020 goal of holding food/household spending to $180.00 a month. An absolute disaster. (Note: Many, many goals of 2020 went by the wayside this year. I'll be writing about that later this month.) In fact, November was such a disaster on the money front that it has made me rethink how to approach our food spending heading into 2021 (again, a topic for later this month or early January).
So how much of a disaster? $300.64 on food; $44.71 in household items (toilet paper, detergent). Grand total? $345.53.
I can't even begin to account for all of that. Some of it was stocking up. Some of it was buying baking supplies. Our garden did finally come to an end after snow, but we didn't buy whopping amounts of lettuce to make up for that loss. None of it, alas, was lobster, rack of lamb, caviar, or other such items.
Year-to-date: $2559.06. Monthly average for 2020: $233.64.
As I noted last month, even with a month like November, both our November spending and our year-to-date averages still come in lower than the USDA "thrifty plan" for a two-adult household in our age bracket. I won't wring my hands over November's dollars but, as I noted, it is food for thought, no pun intended.
Back in September, I wrote my attempts to get an avocado seed to sprout. At the time, I noted how much of the issue was my impatience, even as I quoted Hope Jahren's reminder that every single tree in this world "was first a seed that waited."
Three months later, here is the result of that waiting:
The avocado tree today
That picture was taken a week ago. You might notice a small green blot on the left side of the pot. That blot is the addendum in my title. Sometime in November, eating a seedless clementine, I spit out a seed. Warren looked at it and said, "So why not plant it?"
That wayward clementine seed sprouted sometime in the last two weeks and here it is today:
Another seed that waited
I'm not sure what will (eventually) become of either of these trees. I am not in a warm enough climate to get either to ever bear fruit outside. What I have not investigated is whether I am even in a temperate enough climate that either would survive outside, even with the climate change that is diminishing our cold weather.
But for now, I marvel at them: the seeds that waited, the trees that sprouted.
It has been a long, hard week. My mother—our mother, counting my two brothers—died Sunday after a long, weary, draining (on her, on my father, on all of us) struggle with dementia.
Add to that a workload, both at Court and in the volunteer arena, that has skyrocketed courtesy of the pandemic. The stories I am hearing range from matter-of-fact to heartbreaking and are only going to get worse as the pandemic and its economic fallout deepen. My two coworkers in the mediation department are also swamped, which is why I held mediation for two and a half hours the morning of my mother's afternoon graveside service.
I am exhausted. Today in trying to schedule a mediation while on a Zoom meeting with colleagues at Court and at our high school, I stopped and said, "What day is this? What day are we looking at?" One of the participants kindly said, "It's Friday the 4th, April." Thank you.
One small note and then I will close. While working today, I heard a knock at the front door. When I went to look outside, a delivery person was holding a flower arrangement in her hands. "April Nelson?" Yes. She set the container down on the porch and left.
The arrangement was a vase of yellow roses, my mother's favorite flower. My dad had a spray of them on her casket at the service. I knew it had to come from someone who knew my mom well. I was right; it was from a lifelong friend, Mary Lou, whose daughter Cindy has been my friend my entire life.
And that is a wonderful note to end this long week on.
As I predicted in my post about our September food spending, October's expenditures were indeed higher. We ended up spending $226.83 on food last month, with an additional $12.83 spent in household items. That brought our October total to $239.66 and our year-to-date average to $221.35.
There were some food purchases in October that were worth the extra pennies. We bought bacon—regionally raised and locally cured by a farm family now in its 4th generation of small scale, high quality pork production—and at $9.99/pound, it was worth every tasty, savory, hickory-smoked bite. That was a little over $21.00 of our food purchases there. And there was another $24.00 at a local orchard: culled apples to peel and freeze for apple pies and locally pressed apple cider that was the best apple cider I have had in decades. It was a luxury at almost double the going cost of commercial cider and one that we savored over three weeks, stretching out that deliciousness for as long as we could.
The cost of local food is one of those knotty issues that, gratefully, we are privileged enough to be able to sidestep. The locally grown food is far superior to what I can buy in a grocery. The dollars go directly to the grower—the orchardists in the one case, the pork producers in the other—so the money stays in the community. But if we were hurting financially with a severely limited income or job losses, the bacon and the cider and apples would be far beyond our reach. If we were not in dire straits but still on a tighter budget, I would have to choose between supporting our local agricultural community or being able to buy cheaper food.
On the home front, our garden is done for 2020. A hard frost a few days caught the remaining cherry tomatoes, which were not ripening very much outside and would not ripen inside. The Bibb lettuce that flowered earlier in the summer reseeded itself and came up, providing us with some October/early November salads, but it was soured a little by the frost and is showing signs of wear and tear. I still had four cherry tomatoes, not very flavorful, and after putting them on a salad earlier this week, I bid goodbye to tomatoes until next June.
Another knock to my conscience was seeing a recent reference to the USDA's monthly food reports. Call me a nerd, but I am fascinated what the official word is about food costs. The USDA presents four plans: thrifty, low-cost, moderate-cost, and liberal. The fine print at the bottom of each report spells out the foundations for the reports, including that "all meals and snacks are prepared at home." Other than exceptions for living in Hawaii and Alaska, where food costs bear little resemblance to the other 48 states, there are no other differentiations, such as dietary restrictions.
Under the September 2020 report, the most current one, the thrifty monthly plan for two adults ages 51-70 is $381.90. Right now Warren and I are cruising well under that level. I'm okay with that.
I will share that for the first time in MONTHS, we had not one but two (TWO!) eating out (well, carry-out) experiences. The first was when we bought the bacon at Mom Wilson's, the local source of the best bacon ever. They also sell pulled pork sandwiches and we bought one to take home, splurging on the $8.00 "combo," which netted us chips and a huge dill pickle. Splitting it, we celebrated our 12th anniversary earlier this month. The second came when driving home after my infusion last week. Infusion days start with breakfast at about 5:30 a.m. and end with my getting back home and eating lunch around 1:30 p.m. When Warren picked me up to head home, he mentioned that the power was out when he left. All I could think of was I was tired, I was groggy from my meds, and I wanted food. Warm food. Tasty food. $15.12 later, we pulled out of White Castle with a bag of sliders, onion chips, and milkshakes. Money well spent on a long, hard day.
Eating the White Castle food brought back an old memory of the Minority Law Students Association (MLSA) at the law school I attended 40 years ago. The MLSA was holding a potluck gathering to kick off the year and I was there with my then husband, who belonged to the MLSA. Students were encouraged to bring a favorite ethnic dish from their family. We brought a Cuban dish. Some of the Filipino students brought rice dishes. An African-American student from Chicago walked in with a grocery sack and commandeered the stove and a frying pan. Chopped onions and little square hamburger patties went into the pan, while he set out small buns and a jar of dill pickle slices on the counter. By the time he placed the buns on top of the patties and put a lid on the pan to steam them, everyone had gathered around trying to guess his contribution. "White Castle!," I shouted and the student whirled around with a grin on his face. He pointed he spatula at me and said, one Midwesterner to another, "The best, right?"
It was quiet and moist and foggy this morning. I walked out to dump the kitchen scraps on our neighbor's compost and a shimmer in the pine trees caught my eye.
Another morning of small moments: the most fragile of constructions, the sturdiest of homes.
Earlier this week, I cut off a soft portion of a late tomato. It has broken open—the tiniest of breaks—and was weeping gently, so I sliced it off and tossed it into the small compost bowl I keep on the counter. The bowl has a lid, and I snapped it into place.
In the morning, a surprise greeted me:
Within the warmth of the lidded compost bowl, the weeping tomato turned into something else.
I was entranced. I was fascinated with its beauty and delicacy. I grabbed my camera and started snapping.
I know. It's just mold. I get that. But in the early morning light, it was a wisp of a unicorn's forelock, a bit of fairy hair, a thing of beauty.
I see that in writing about my August food expenditures, I did not even make predictions about September.
As it turns out, September food dollars came in under the $180.00/month I set so optimistically back in the start of this year. How much under? A lot. Total dollars spent were $151.38, all on food. I think this is the first month ever we have not made any expenditures for common household items.
Year-to-date average? $219.32. I've done the math. There is no way we will average $180.00 a month for the year with only three months remaining. As I have observed before, the pandemic threw monkey wrenches in our grocery buying that I could not have predicted.
I will add that we had an eating out expenditure in September, the first in months! Two scoops of Graeter's ice cream (a regional ice cream chain). I had lemon sorbet; I don't remember what Warren ordered. Why ice cream out of the blue? Because I needed dry ice to ship blood (don't even ask and no, I did not ship blood after all was said and done) and every Graeter's sells dry ice for $1.75 a pound. Since we had to be there to buy the dry ice, why not treat ourselves as well?
That lemon sorbet was absolutely delicious.
The garden continues to putter along. I predicted last month that we would likely have zucchini until the first hard frost. Nope. Most of the plants started dying of old age in mid-September and I yanked all but one out. That one had a few potential zucchini at the time. I picked one (and gave it to an out of town friend) and left the other, which never developed into anything more than a twisted and skimpy squash, so I let it go. We have about 35 quarts of sliced zucchini in the freezer, and several packets of grated for baking, so with all we ate or baked fresh or gave away, I can't complain about the zucchini being done for the year. I am still picking tomatoes, albeit at a very slow rate. They are reluctant to ripen in the waning sun, preferring instead to go soft.
The last zucchini
I am also restocked in both cinnamon and canned pumpkin, whatever that shortage was about.
Even though we are early in October, I see that the food dollars will likely be higher. We did a major restocking at Aldi a few days ago, and with the limited other purchases we have already made, we are closing in fast on the September figure, let alone the $180.00 goal.
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, comes at sunset tonight. Rosh Hashanah marks the start of the High Holy Days, eleven days of self-reflection and self-assessment. I noted on Facebook that I was glad for it starting, then added I very much needed it.
The last two weeks have been raggedy on almost all fronts. Not bad, but raggedy. As I look back at what I have done in the last year and how I can better serve in the year to come, I feel the tattered edges of this week and last pressing down on the months yet to come.
Some mending needs to be done, starting with myself.
I love that we start our New Year in the fall, my favorite season. Outside, the days are starting to mellow. The skies are turning deep October blue. Out in Vancouver, Washington, where my son Ben and his family live, he noted they had rain today and the clearest skies they have had since the conflagrations began.
The garden is starting to slow down. In a few more weeks, I will be bringing it down for the year. But not yet, for the bees are still working intently, bringing in their own harvest to get through the winter ahead.
One of the last things I did today before turning to this post, after which I will shut down my computer for the next few days, was call a client of our Legal Clinic. She has a complex issue beyond the scope of our volunteers, and I am trying to match her up with another resource. I called to let her know I am still working on the match and that we had not forgotten her. She thanked me for the update. I had waffled whether to make the call at all; it is late on Friday, I'm tired, it could wait. But she needed to hear from us. I updated my Clinic cohort, Mel, on what I had done, adding that call was a good deed and it is good to wrap up the end of the year with a mitzvah.
"Every replete tree was first a seed that waited." Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
I love Lab Girl and have read it twice. But this post is not about that book or about Hope Jahren and why I find her an intriguing writer and scientist.
Rather, this post is about waiting.
I had long known that you could get an avocado seed to sprout if you removed the seed coat, poked toothpicks into it, and then suspended the seed over a glass of water, with the lower part of the seed submerged. Even in my college days, when this was popular, the only time I remember seeing that experiment up close was at the house of my first mother-in-law, who sporadically would try to coax an avocado seed into sprouting. Muriel was not the most patient person in the world and only wished he had a green thumb, so it was not unusual to walk into the kitchen, noticing the avocado seed/tumbler was missing from the sill of the kitchen window, inquire, and be told that she had "pitched the damn thing."
I have never once been tempted to try the toothpick/glass method.
But on the strength of absorbing some of Jahren's philosophy about being and waiting, I looked at an avocado seed differently this summer. Why wouldn't it sprout if it were put in soil and watered? Wasn't that what seeds are programmed to do? (I would help it along by removing the seed coat; unlike chicks, who have to peck their way out of the eggs, seeds are not weakened by being helped.)
What if I just waited?
My first attempt ended when I got impatient four or five weeks into the experiment and tried to rock the seed a bit in the soil. Crack. I realized I had most likely broken a tap root and on further inspection, it turns out I had.
Lesson #1: Don't be impatient.
My second attempt was cut short when an overreaching chipmunk or squirrel leapt onto the small table on the deck on which the seed in its pot had sat for two or three weeks. I came out one morning to find the pot overturned, the dirt scattered, and the seed on the deck floor, looking gnawed.
Lesson #2: Animals are part of that randomness of whether a seed becomes a tree.
A month ago, I tried one more time, again removing the seed coat, but this time finding a space inside on the overcrowded plant table. Other than watering the seed from time and time, I left it alone.
I waited.
And the seed, true to its internal program, responded.
Lesson #3: Wait. Wait. Wait.
I realized this weekend that the avocado seed had indeed sprouted. It has sent up a tall stalk with delicate small leaves (or presumably they will be when they unfurl).
"Each beginning is the end of a waiting," writes Hope Jahren.
We're not big maple syrup consumers. We only use it on pancakes, and maybe, maybe, I make pancakes once every five or six weeks.
Maybe.
The large jug of Ohio maple syrup that a good friend gave me for my birthday three or four years ago lasted a long time. But all good things come to an end, and that includes maple syrup. After years of pure maple syrup, I was not going back to "pancake syrup with real maple flavoring."
One jug of maple syrup: $17.00.
August in Ohio is when sweet corn hits the market or, in our case, the parking lot. A friend from my high school years (we were in 4-H together almost a half century ago) posted on Facebook two weeks ago that they had just picked 40 dozen ears of sweet corn and would be selling it out of the the truck at a small shopping plaza that morning.
Three dozen ears: $12.00.
Two weeks later, just Monday in fact, she posted that they had just picked the grandchildren's corn.
Another three dozen ears: another $12.00.
So right there is $41.00 of food purchases which are either extremely seasonal (the corn) or extremely rare (maple syrup). The corn amortized over a year comes to $2.00 a month. The maple syrup, amortized over two years, comes to 71¢ a month. (It's even cheaper over three years!) I can live with that kind of extravagance.
By the time I add up all the food purchases ($235.60) and add in the household items ($18.06), we spent a whopping $253.66 in August. Some of those food dollars included some larger ticket items (olive oil, coconut oil), which, like the maple syrup, will not need replaced for several months, but it is what it is.
For the year, we are averaging $227.81 a month.
Not what I had hoped for after a low-spend July, but pretty much what I have predicted for Covid-19 shopping. One high month (only one, I hope), one low month, repeat. It is interesting to see what gaps appear at the market. Canned pumpkin is almost nonexistent. So, apparently, are canned beets according to my good friend Margo, but given that I have made zero purchases of canned beets in my life, that one doesn't impact me. Ground cinnamon is hard to find at times. Fruit has stayed high, even summer melons. (I'm hoping the fall apple harvest will help bring down those prices.) On the other hand, there will be LOTS of zucchini and corn to eat all winter long in this household. Looking at my garden, I predict the zucchini will go on merrily until we get a hard frost.
A few years back, a reader commented, somewhat kindly, somewhat tongue in cheek, that maybe I was a tad obsessed about tracking my food purchases and maybe I just needed to lighten up. Clearly I ignored that advice as I have gone on tracking our purchases ever since. Loooking ahead to 2021, when I will be retiring, not drawing social security right away, and living on a greatly reduced monthly income, watching these food dollars will become critical. So I do not regret the tracking.
Yesterday's post was not a teaser. Truly. It was the best I could do after almost an hour of staring at a blank screen.
Last night Warren and I talked about many things, as we so often do: how his day went, how my day went, Court issues, Symphony issues, what the weekend holds. You get the idea. (Yes, our offices are only about five yards apart, but there are days where we can spin off into our programs and meetings, not reemerging until supper.)
For the curious, the weekend looks a lot like the week, except that I do not turn to Court work at all, and Warren tries to minimize Symphony work. Warren works in his shop; I do laundry and read. Our at-home weekends never fail to disappoint my close friend Cindy, who often starts her Monday email to me with asking me about my weekend, this past week asked "Did you do anything FUN over the weekend?" Keeping within our Covid-19 restrictions in this state, she buys feed, buys groceries, shops at Goodwill, and sometimes eats out during her weekends. When I pointed out that I am still pretty much on medical lockdown, she emailed back that I "must be" getting restless by now and ready to GO DO SOMETHING.
Not really. The one thing I really wanted to do—travel west to my family and then northeast to friends in Maine—got scrubbed months ago. Those trips aren't coming back this year and I have made peace with that. But otherwise, while I would like matters to be different, I am more than satisfied with my stay-at-home life. I have not been in my office at Court for over five months; all of us have had to learn new ways to do our old jobs. Life rolls on.
As I mentioned yesterday, August has held some hard times. A close friend/colleague had a serious medical crisis erupt in her family and that hurt both professionally, because we had to work around her absence and the uncertainty of her return, and personally, because we are such good friends. The major medical crisis started to resolve positively when she found herself in ER. None of this was Covid-19, for which all of us are grateful. Other close friends are dealing with the death of a beloved dog. Someone else near and dear to my heart is struggling with major depression. There are some family stressors (larger family, not me and Warren) going on. In none of these situations can I show up and hug the person, which is what I want to do. I can only talk on the phone or text or send wishes into the air for them.
August has been heavy at times.
But the rest has been good. Today was the livestream funeral mass of a longtime friend and colleague who died back in the winter; watching that brought back wonderful memories even while I cried. I had a wonderful, uplifting long phone call with a young friend who is headed back to college for a career change and our talk reminded me of the joy and power of direction. Our Legal Clinic continues to operate virtually; I am the volunteer who assigns the attorneys so I have firsthand knowledge of who we are serving and how our attorneys are providing these people hope and advice and direction. The Symphony participated in its 6th Benefit in the Barn, tackling hunger and food insecurity in our county and one adjoining county. Go here to watch it; that's Warren speaking in the beginning. Between the Clinic and the Symphony, I am reminded how I am always humbled with the strength of our community.
And our Poetry Group started meeting again, by Zoom. That was a good thing, because Emily had been sulking. We meet again this Sunday and I can't wait.
Emily D. sulking
And then there was a surprise this month: a stunning, amazing, never-saw-it-coming-ever surprise. About a week ago I received an email from a name I did not recognize, titled "Uncle Ski."
Uncle Ski was my uncle, an engaging, wonderful man who died seven years ago. I blogged about him after his death; you can read my words here. So the title on the email was so specific that I thought it was not spam or a phishing attempt, and opened it.
It was a lovely email from someone, a man named Sam, who read my blog post all these years later and reached out to me directly. After thanking me for my words, Sam wrote "I really appreciated reading it because it gave me some perspective on myself." Then he dropped the bombshell: "Your Uncle Ski was my grandfather."
I had to catch my breath. I'm still catching it.
Sam and I have exchanged several emails. My stepcousin once removed (his mother was my Uncle Ski's daughter) is a writer and blogger. Imagine that. You can find his blog at All the Biscuits in Georgia. He just saw his oldest son ship off to his first Navy deployment, a fact that would have made Uncle Ski, who served his whole life in the Navy, immensely proud. I have given Sam my dad's phone number and encouraged him to call him; my dad, when I told him what had happened, marveled at the connection, then said, "Oh, I have a lot of stories to tell him about his grandfather."
So after speculating about our shopping patterns in May and June, and reading comments about pandemic shopping on this blog and elsewhere about what other bloggers were noticing in their own households, I am relieved to report that our July grocery expenditures were $156.61 for food and $19.23 for household items (including name brand parchment paper because no stores have anything but that these days).
The grand total was $175.84, which is the first time since April we have come in under the monthly goal of $180.00.
Since April.
We seemed to have finally fallen into a pattern of stocking up the basics as they run low, and filling in here and there when something unexpectedly comes up short. We were doing that before (or so I thought), but it seems there were such gaps in the basics that stocking up to a level we felt comfortable with, even a modest one, took more dollars than we had realized.
It doesn't hurt that the garden is running full steam these days.
And maybe there's not a lot more to say on this topic for our July grocery expenses. As the pandemic continues to surround us and we continue to shelter at home, I am grateful for the privilege of having food to eat and a roof to provide that shelter. To borrow from Matchless by Gregory Maguire, "they had the warmth of one another, and enough on which to live, and in most parts of the world, that is called plenty."
July is winding its way down and I thought it would be a good time to update some previous posts.
Volume #5 of my commonplace books
That commonplace book I started two weeks ago? The first quote went in on July 16. Francesca Wade, author of the book Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars, had this beautiful observation about cities, although her comment could apply to many communities:
Cities are composed of roads and buildings, but also of myths and memories: stories which bring the brick and asphalt to life and bind the present to the past.
The book was superb, incidentally.
Sourdough doughnuts
I continue to live in a sourdough world, as I first noted in April. Every weekend I feed the starter; every weekend I come up with a different use for the discard. This weekend I made sourdough doughnuts, a repeat from an earlier weekend. I'm still working on the glaze (I want something that hardens better) and I bought a new cooking thermometer because I doubt the veracity of the one I have been using, but they are pretty tasty all the same.
Some of them went to the family of four who are neighbors on one side, some of them went to the elderly neigbor on the other side, and we ate the rest. Pete (the elderly neighbor) texted to say they were very good; Alice (who is almost 5) came springing across the lawn to say (from a safe distance): "Thank you for the doughnuts, April. They are DELICIOUS!"
Alice expressing her doughnut delight
On the garden front, after a slow cautious start and then my announcing the first tomato and first zucchini, we have sailed past (way past) keeping track of the harvest. I am slicing and freezing, baking and eating, and will be making tomato sauce in a crock-pot (and then freezing it) for the first time ever.
Some of the tomatoes. Some.
And some of the zucchini. Some.
We harvested the cabbage, which went from tiny starts to behemoths. One we know tipped the scales at 5 pounds, 10 ounces, because our neighbors (Alice's parents) weighed the one we gave them. Another huge one went to Warren's daughter, Elizabeth, for ham and cabbage soup, and we kept the two "smaller" ones.
Three of the four. Note the tomatoes photobombing the shot.
We continue to shelter in place, with both of us still working from home. It suits us both well most of the days. Warren and I have had workday lunches together more in the last 4+ mounths than the last twelve years...and for the last nine of those years we have worked within two blocks of each other's offices!
Somewhere back in the annals of this blog, I wrote about the fact that I collect quotes. I'm not scrolling back to find it (and my labels do not include the word "quotes") but I probably wrote about my love of writing down (or photocopying and taping in) quotes and excerpts that moved me at the time and important to keep over the years.
"Years" is an understatement. My current collection dates somewhere from the late 1980s, looking at what it contains. I did not start dating the collection until somewhere in the middle or end of the second volume, when I realized that an occasional chronological reference was useful. Even if I take 1990 as the start point, I'm holding 30 years of quotes.
I had an earlier quote collection, one I started in the 1970s. It is long gone but I remember (vaguely) one quote in it was the beautiful observation by Christopher Milne (yes, that Christopher) about the original Pooh and friends being donated to the New York Public Library and having to explain that he had no attachment to those stuffed animals. The quote was something along the lines about he did not want them to be reminded "here was fame" and certainly didn't need them to be reminded that "there was love."
My first book starts with this observation by Sarah Orne Jewett, a late 19th century Americn novelist, from her novel In The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896): "More than this one cannot give to a young state for its enlightment; the sea captains and the captains' wives of maine knew something of the world, and never mistook their native parishes for the whole instead of a part thereof..."
The book I finished filling last night ends with this quote from Love, Roddy Doyle's newest novel (and the first one I have ever read):
—This place hasn't changed, he said.
He pointed at a line of old photographs.
—The dead writers are still dead, he said.
How could I not include that quote?
Book 5 is waiting. I can hardly wait to see what it will hold.
Pardon me while I roll on the floor in a fit of uncontrollable laughter.
Okay, let me add this clarification: our June expenditures would have come in below the $180.00 monthly target (at $169.18) had we not done a stock-up shopping through Aldi on June 25. Cost of that (all food, no household items)? $115.37. Total June expenditures? $284.55, of which $25.00 represented household items and the rest food.
Year-to-date monthly average? $232.17.
Yeah.
So what was that end-of-the-month Aldi purchase all about? It was about the latest pandemic numbers nationwide and in Ohio, and our realization that we probably need to hunker back down in our household with as little going to stores, even including getting groceries delivered, as possible. Warren and I did a survey of our freezer, cabinets, and pantry, made a "stocking up again" shopping list, and, $115.37 later, considered ourselves stocked. (Well, except for the July 1 complete-stocking-up at Kroger. So now we consider ourselves stocked.)
Musing on pandemic grocery shopping, that may be the way this year goes. I wrote as much in May, but was more optimistic in predicting the pattern would be alternating lean month, heavy spending month. Instead, looking at my year-to-date figures, the pattern seems to be two heavy spending months, followed by a lean month.
I want to make a prediction for July, but my crystal ball, faulty at its best, has indeed gone dark. It should be a lean month per my last paragraph, but at only three days into it, who knows?
On the bright side, the Hej garden has taken off with a flourish and there are blossoms on the zucchini as I discovered when we went to water it this morning. No ripe tomatoes yet, but we're getting close. All the lettuce in the planters has bolted and withered as the summer heat comes on, but the Bibb lettuce is still going strong, and we are eating fresh salads daily while that fortune lasts.
