with our minds on our hearts and our hearts on the line....

I baked bread this morning. Tried a new recipe, a new technique. It's cooling now and the kitchen is full of that thick smell of yeast and heat. I've been spending some time reading about Barbara Kingsolver and came across this wonderful bit she writes in her book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life".

"When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable."

springtime and the promise of an open fist....

I've been real crap at blogging lately. I don't know why. I want to blame it on lack of time...but that's not true. I want to say I've been doing other more useful things, but quite frankly, I can't call watching back seasons of America's Next Top Model particularly useful. So while I was reading all the new posts from my lovely blogging friends this afternoon, I had an idea. A new idea for blogging for the summer. At least once a week, I am going to post something that has inspired me or caught my eye or something I am thinking of. It might be a poem or a photo or a song or a bit of a book I'm reading, something I had to eat that day...anything really. And in doing so I hope that the rest of you all who read this will find something interesting or inspiring in it too. I will begin this trend today with this poem:

Scenic Route

For Lucy, who called them "ghost houses"

Someone was always leaving
and never coming back.
The wooden houses wait like old wives
along this road; they are everywhere,
abandoned, leaning, turning gray.

Someone always traded
the lonely beauty
of hemlock and stony lakeshore
for survival, packed up his life
and drove off to the city.
In the yards the apple trees
keep hanging on, but the fruit
grows smaller year by year.

When we come this way again
the trees will have gone wild,
the houses collapsed, not even worth
the human act of breaking in.
Fields will have taken over.

What we will recognize
is the wind, the same fierce wind,
which has no history.

Lisel Mueller


and I took this photo recently that makes me think of this too: