Sometimes We Must Begin Again

All beginnings are hard. 'Be patient, David...All beginnings are hard. You cannot swallow all the world at one time.'
I say it to myself today when I stand before a new class at the beginning of a school year or am about to start a new book or research paper: 'All beginnings are hard...Especially a beginning that you make by yourself. That's the hardest beginning of all.'

Abbreviated excerpts from In The Beginning by Chaim Potok.

A New Blog

When I began blogging in 2006, blogging wasn't new but it still seemed fresh. There was something satisfying about creating a space, writing words, sharing pictures and having friends and family comment or reply.  Grandparents loved it and I loved keeping up with my friends who were on this same homeschooling journey that I was on. It was encouraging to read their posts with my cup of tea first thing in the morning. It was so easy to share and the feedback was so positive that I began to share more and more of our lives on the blog. The boys were little and they were cute and the things they did were cute.

But as they got older and we became more 'connected' and people who we didn't know began to find their way to my blog there was this little part of me that cringed. That cringe grew over the years.  I watched other bloggers make up cute names for their children to give them some anonymity but that felt awkward for me. My dear friend Beth of Ebenezer Stories and I began to have this conversation.  As her children grew into adults and began leaving the nest she drew back from talking about them on her blog and even questioned having shared so much when they were children. Now she has grandchildren and she still shares on her blog but it is good to think seriously about these things.

When You Blog You Live Both In and Out of the Frame

At that same time bloggers began to have a conversation with their audience assuring them that they were sharing an edited version of their life.  They "lived outside the frame" and things were messy and life was not as perfect as it seemed on the blog.  I loved how some bloggers like Myquillyn Smith of The Nester and Ann Voskamp of A Holy Experience began to focus on the imperfectness of life.  My friend Kelly Keller of Kelly's Musings started a series I love called Proof of Life which reveals all those crazy things that we are tempted to leave 'outside the frame'. Another blogger that I followed Tonya Peckover of Study In Brown pulled back entirely for a time and that was also right and good.

How Does Technology Affect the Privacy of Our Children?

Along came Picasa and its' uncanny face recognition ability.  It was able to tell the difference between baby pictures of my boys when I often had to use environmental cues to do so.  Then my pediatrician began to ask to scan their palms when we went in for annual exams and I just put the brakes on. I pulled a lot of pictures and some blog posts down which I felt were too personal. By that point I had already changed the kind of posts that I wrote, but honestly - I just wanted a do over. So I stopped posting all together and made my blog private. I knew that if I began to blog again that I would do it differently but I just wasn't sure what that meant.

I still don't have this all figured out. I will be bringing over some posts from my original blog to here. Some of them I will edit. My blog will focus more on my thoughts, my reading, things I make, and my design and illustration work. I now use Facebook for the kinds of posts and pictures that I used to blog about so that grandparents and family and friends feel connected. I probably still tend to overshare there but I often ask the boys if they mind - especially the older ones.

I use Instagram and do post pictures of the boys there. Without realizing it when I began to use Instagram I did not use the boy's names.  That is an intentional choice now. I keep Twitter just for me - I share my silly thoughts and my thoughtful thoughts, sometimes about school, sometimes about family but nothing truly personal - especially about the boys. I want to post as things really are - a similar idea to Kelly's Proof of Life to show that life is not perfect but it is good. It is grace and mercy which carry us through - not our own goodness.

Life is Not Perfect But It is Good

So here in this space and moment I begin again.

In Defense of Mom or A Busy Kitchen and a Cold Hearth

(slightly edited from my original blog)

After my previous post, I feel that I need to write a post in defense of Mom!

My frustration with the way I learned to ‘not’ clean the kitchen (by procrastinating) is just a part of my own struggle with procrastination. There certainly weren’t many times that I did it without being asked or told until I was much older – like when I came home from college and was happy to be in any kitchen at all (or when I felt guilty when Mom was sick or taking her finals)! Mom has told me a story several times that I treasure.

She was sitting in a chair with me on one knee and my brother on the other reading us a book when her Mom came to visit. Nannie J made a comment about it being nearly lunch time and the beds were all still unmade. Mom told her that her babies were growing every day, and that after they were grown there would be plenty of time to make the beds. I'm glad cleaning the kitchen wasn’t a top priority for her, but our life together changed when both my brother and I went to school and she went to work, then to college, and then began teaching.

I can remember many things from when I was very young and Mom was home with us - or we were home with her...

Some of them are my own memories, and some of them I remember from stories and pictures. It’s hard to explain the difference that happened when we went to school and she went to work,. It just seems it wasn’t so much a life centered around our home and land as it was when I was very young – and maybe my world just got bigger… When I was actually ‘learning’ to keep house by doing it (or not - by procrastinating as I was saying before) it’s was in a family that all went to school and work and came home. Our house was empty all day long. That doesn’t sound too odd for people nowadays, but the following story will show you how different if feels.

In the winter our home was heated completely by wood heat, so the fire would need to be fed all day long. Dad would bank the fire at night and get up very early before anyone else did and stir it up before he did his chores, so in the morning the house was already getting warm. The first place I would go every morning was to stand or sit on the hearth. During the winters after Mom began working and my brother and I were in school (after we were old enough to get off the bus at our house rather than the sitters) we would come home to a very cold house.

I would open the door expecting to feel the warmth of the fire and there was nothing, it was just cold. That was when I realized that our house had been empty all day. Our house now is hardly ever empty – there’s almost always some combination of us here. My kitchen has to function different than Mom's did. The way I learned to function in a kitchen hasn’t been working for me. It has taken me 10 slow years to figure that out! Now I'm trying to dredge up those early memories of when we were very little and all home - how did the kitchen function then when it wasn't me in charge of getting it clean?! Mom, if you read this sometime you can help me out!

Laurel's Kitchen: Tennessee Corn Pone Recipe

My friend Beth has leant me (almost on permanent loan) two very wonderful cookbooks by Laurel Robertson: Laurel's Kitchen and Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. Maybe on another post I can tell why I like them so much (even though we aren't vegetarians) and why I have been so reluctant to return them (I've recently decided I just have to get copies for myself), but for now I'm going to post Laurel's recipe for Tennessee Corn Pone since Beth posted about it here but didn't have her book to type up the recipe!

Tennessee Corn Pone

A homesick friend from Knoxville described a dish his grandma used to make. After several false starts, we came up with this - a dead ringer, he says, and certainly one of his favorites. (This is Amber talking, not Laurel -- I'll have to tell you where the phrase dead ringer comes from in another post, but this is one of the reasons I like Laurel, people just came into her kitchen and she cooked for them. She got to know them through food.)

4 cups very juicy cooked and seasoned beans (especially pinto or kidney)
2 cups cornmeal
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 quart of buttermilk
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1/4 margarine

Heat beans until quite hot and pour into a lightly greased 9" x 13" baking dish. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Mix the cornmeal, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. Melt the margarine and combine with buttermilk and eggs. Stir the wet and dry ingredients together until smooth and pour them over the hot beans. Bake on the top rack of your oven until bread is a rich golden color and the sides of the corn bread pull away from the sides of the pan. This takes about 30 minutes. Serves 10 to 12.

Laurel says this about beans:

Even if you weren't interested in cooking them, you'd probably like to have several jars of beans around for decorative value alone. Their rich, earthen colors are a feast for the eye. Our Red Bean Mix is designed to maximize nutritional value, but its appearance would delight the most exacting artist. It may be because during the Depression people could afford nothing else, but a good many people have a mental block against beans. We did at first, but it quickly gave way with a little experimentation.

She goes on to talk about how to cook them and even about flatulence when we aren't used to eating them. In one place of Laurel's kitchen she even talks about eating beans for breakfast!

Turn Dreary, Dull Tasks into Pleasures

(slightly edited from my very first blog)

Ok, so I really don't like to clean the kitchen. Rather, once I get started I can dig right in and love the satisfaction of a clean counter, but it's the getting started that I have a problem with! It's been that way since I 'gained' responsibility for cleaning the kitchen when my Mom went back to college. Piles of dishes and greasy pots and pans left till the next day (and sometimes even the day after), no dishwasher, bowls of scraps for the dogs, YUCK!!

Those jobs were overwhelming, and I dreaded and procrastinated to the very last moment- it just wasn't any fun. Growing up I used to contrast our cluttered and serially messy kitchen to my Nannie J’s spotless, glowing kitchen. It positively sparkled. But when we ate dinner there it was a hurry up and come to the table, finish your last bite, and whisk away the plates to be washed kind of experience. There was no lingering at the table and the dishes absolutely could not wait. That really wasn't very pleasant either. It was clean, but left something to be desired and I understand why Mom left that way of cleaning the kitchen behind.

When I came to college and moved to Charlotte I ate at least once a week with my other grandmother, Nannie D who I only saw several times a year as a child. At the time my Mamaw was also still living. We had wonderful dinners. (This is lunch for most all of you, – we have supper while you are having dinner.) Conversation at the table lingered, the table was cleaned off so your eye and stomach can rest, and then the conversation usually moved into the living room before any attention is given to cleaning the kitchen – the dishes can most certainly wait! They are attended to, normally with everyone pitching in together sorting, washing, rinsing, putting away leftovers (which is another difference - Nannie J throws away a lot of food while Nannie D saves even the tiniest portion) and wiping down the counters. Conversation and laughter continue the whole time. I remember a couple of days when we were all laughing so hard that we began laughing at each other laughing and just had to go sit down for a bit until we could make another attempt.

I have been reflecting on these two different styles of homemaking recently after reading parts of the book Home Comfort by Cheryl Mendelson that I found out about on Kelly's blog. Mendelson begins the book by talking about the different housekeeping styles of her grandmothers, and how she has selected from each of their styles to create her own. These thoughts about homes and houses and housekeeping have been playing in the back of my mind for weeks because I've been reading Home Comfort, House Thinking, The Not So Big House books, and Wind in the Willows. Then I ran out of dish detergent. I know that sentence is a jolt, but I found myself in the detergent aisle picking up yet another bottle of Dawn because it get's the job done, is 'tough on grease', etc. It's what Mom used, it's what Nannie J used, and it is attached to the 'Ugh' memories of dishwashing for me.

Then, with all of those housekeeping ideas in the back of my mind I had a sudden inspiration to pick up a bottle of Palmolive instead - you guessed it, it's what Nannie D uses in her kitchen. I came home, ran a wonderfully scented sink full of hot, sudsy water and washed away. The smell even triggered a memory of Nannie D teaching me how to wash the dishes - what things to wash first and how to fill the dish drainer. All week I've smelled and smiled my way to a cleaner kitchen, and I'm seriously thinking about getting a dish drainer!