Crunch and crisp and the pink light of late September. A bit quiet-feeling lately. I am busy, and hopeful, and anxious to get out into the woods. Maybe this weekend. I'd like to lay on a blanket under a tree and read for hours, with my head on my love's stomach, and my little dog's chin on my ankle (that's where she likes to rest it). The days feel brief and brilliant.
I slowed to a wander on Sunday. It felt good to be so lazy and slow. The weather has been gorgeous. Bright and dry and just generally so pleasant. Our yard has been suffering the drought. It's been months since it's rained, I think. I was watering a bit through the summer and then I got busy and stopped. Andy spent the day moving the hose around from place to place. He did an imitation of a hydrangea before and after watering that was spot on — I wish I had a video. "Before" was this sad, parched, drooping, reaching thing; "after" he was bouncing in place and looked like he was on his way to a birthday party. :-) Pretty cute. I think the yard is a bit happier now, but honestly, I'd be relieved to stop worrying about it. A good rainy day would be most welcome, but all week we're supposed to be mid- to upper-eighties, and clear as a bell.
Before the slow, we packed and shipped orders, cleaned the fridge, got some groceries, did some laundry, watched television. Every night lately we've been falling asleep before 10 p.m. I made the blueberry cake again with marionberries, and a version of this pasta for dinner, but with sage instead of rosemary. I need to get it together, and get back into my cooking routine. I feel like this happens every year at this time! I need to sit down with my cookbooks and get inspired to cook for fall. Maybe actually plan [shivers involuntarily]. I suck at that. I don't mind the cooking; it's the thinking of what to cook every day that hinders. "What should we eat?" "I don't know. What do you want?" "I don't care. What do you want?" "I don't know. Pizza?" And pizza, because unless I'm actually looking at a cookbook or a recipie or a restaurant menu it's the only food I can seem to remember. I have the palate of an eighth-grade boy now. Hrrmmmm.
Making a new little preppy-hippie quilt. It's very yang. Thinking about maybe putting together a little quilt kit this winter. I think that would be really fun.
Puppers worries so when her Andy is down in the front yard without her. . . . What if he should fall down? Or need help with the sprinkler? Or someone should walk by? Or someone and A DOG should walk by? "Could you open this thing please?"
Last year (or maybe the year before?) the dahlias were $2.50/bu. Inflation. Still, a bargain.
Another day, another hippie dress. Not like I don't have fourteen other things I should be doing. There is so much hand sewing on these things. The bodice lining is stitched in by hand, along with the entire hem, and the sleeve hems. Two entire afternoons of hand sewing. Good thing I like — love — that sort of thing. Especially because we have a new sofa. With the chaise lounge thing. Best invention ever. Except you can't get out of it. Literally; it tilts backwards (need wedge). Finally, we have enough seating. Comfortable seating. It's not the nicest sofa in world — kind of scratchy (compared to our old microfiber one), and from Ikea (it's the Kivik). But it's kind of frumpy in a way that is really appealing to me right now. We are very hard on our furniture. We wear it out. It serves us well, but we live hard on it. Now I have three offices: the studio, the office, and the chaise lounge.
My first hippie dress was Bloomsbury. My second one (which I guess I never took a picture of), Hefeweizen. This one, guest lecturer in medieval studies at Reed College. Last night I was thinking the next/fourth one would be Sigur Ros groupie but then I changed my mind to Joanna Newsom groupie (because I was watching her on TV last night [it was TiVo-ed], and took a picture of the TV). I wore the second one to the mall the other day. I took my extraordinary, luminous niece/goddaughter shopping for some school clothes. I got some interesting looks while wearing the dress. I think some people thought I was on my way to my handmade-soap booth at the Oktoberfest. Cool!!! Or about to serve them a hot pretzel and a pitcher. I said to Andy that I thought it might be a bit too "bar maid." He said, "You say that like it's a bad thing!"
There was a barbecue with lovely new friends, there was more curried soup, there are now eggplants in the garden, there was brown sugar–banana ice cream good grief. There has been almost no reading. I thought this was going to be my summer of reading and it's been my summer of no reading. I don't know what the problem is. I picked everything up and put everything down. And then I fell asleep. Summer kind of wears me out, I think. It was good to have the long weekend of lazy. I think I needed that.
The best part of this summer were the afternoons we spent sitting in the river on our chairs together, watching the rapids and the hawks. I think of those afternoons every day. I hope there's a chance to go back one more time before it gets cool. I really, really, really, really enjoyed those afternoons.
Hello! How are you? We are sleeeeeeepy puppies around here. I can't seem to get up and do anything productive thank goodness. I am having a wonderful day.
One of my dreams came true on Sunday night when the boys played "Tales of Coming News" at Edgefield. I apologize to anyone standing near me because I sang every word as loud as I could (we were standing right next to the speakers). The show was just awesome. It was our fourth year and fifth time seeing the Avett Brothers. The Crystal Ballroom show a couple of years ago (or maybe it was last summer?) was so great, but I have to agree with the people on the fanboards that Sunday night's setlist at Edgefield was epic. I can't say enough about how much I (we) love this band. In thinking about it, this song is probably more of a fans' song than a song that will make you fall in love with the band if you've never heard of them before. (They're repertoire is enormous, so you will find something.) But if you click on the video (and thank you again for sending it to me, Kari, and thank you marysstikal for posting it originally), be warned there's a guy in crowd who in the first few seconds of the video drops the f-bomb about five times in a row at the top of his lungs when he hears the opening notes he is so excited. I completely understand this.
Anyway.
All of those fabrics were from JoAnn's! All on sale, too! Two more new dresses for me. I am desperate for some fall clothes. I almost never buy clothes for myself but lately I want to. I've got new tights but now I need some clothes to go with them.
I love this book. A girl can dream.
I was thinking about fall colors. Stereotypical fall colors — that is, crispy golds and jewel-like reds and shocking oranges — are not really the fall colors I see out my windows. Here, our fall colors are dusky plums and russet reds and heathery grays and blue-ish greens. Not quite as brown and muted as winter's sunless, mossy, piney, muddy colors. But still somewhat dimmer, duller than classic, sassy red, or crackling-bright orange, or blazing yellow. Sunset-lit and smudged. We have these smoky-coated plums on the table. I picked some up off the street the other day while we were out walking in the neighborhood; a tree had dropped an entire branch in the road and there were piles of them all over the place, yellowy-blue, not quite ripe. I couldn't believe how beautiful they were. I put as many as I could fit into my coffee cup to take home. We have a plum tree (two actually) but the plums are nothing like these. (I wish they were like these.) I will take a macro picture of them so we can see them better.
I think I like fall. I think it's the shortest, and, in its own way, the most precious season in the Northwest. I hear a lot of people say that about summertime here, that it's the shortest and most precious season. But for me, the season I yearn for and try to hold on to is definitely fall. (Once the rains start, that's winter.) Andy is a summertime person. He really tries to stretch it out as long as possible. We have brilliant conversations about September:
Me: "That [whatever it is we happen to be talking about] will be in the fall, in September."
Him: "That's not fall, that's still summer."
Me: "September is fall."
Him: "No, it's summer."
Me: "No, it's fall."
Him: "No, it's summer."
Me: "No, it's fall."
Him: "No, it's summer."
I really can't tell you how many times we have had this conversation. We must like it.
He has a point. September sometimes feels as hot as July here. I sit in the hot wind and the fried up grass, holding my tights and my clogs, and hope the temperature will drop like a stone.
I finished my dress today and I just love it. The vast majority of things I try to make for myself look totally horrideous, which is why I hardly ever try to make anything for myself. But I love this (though I had to fuss with the pattern quite a bit). I used mostly cotton lawn, except for the bodice front/back which is regular quilting-cotton-weight. I apologize, but I don't really know what the fabrics are named or remember where I got them (but mostly all locally, and I have a decent size collection of Liberty Tana Lawn from local and various on-line sources). I just collect fabric whenever I see something I like, and am useless with the details. This dress is made mostly of rectangles or versions of rectangles. It's all very floaty and light, with lots of folds and drapes and gathers everywhere. Rather Vanessa Bell–ish, I thought.
The Sigur Ros show at Edgefield last night was exquisite. We have been big fans for many years but this was our first time seeing them live. Lovely, gentle, amazing people. The evening just couldn't have been more beautiful.
The garden is entering the late-summer phase. I think I'm supposed to be thinking about fall/winter planting. I replanted beets and kale already. Maybe I'll plant more beets where the potatoes were . . . ? Half of my butternut squash blossoms fell off, and a bunch of the leaves. A couple of the other little squashes just shrivelled up into little puckered things. Wah. :(
It's a quiet day here. Bright and breezy and we have no plans. Wonder of wonders. I shudder with pure delight.
Dude, did you see my garden potatoes? I AM PSYCHED.
Tonight, curried potato, corn, and shrimp chowder. And it's finally cooled off so we can make the choco cake. I'll write out the recipes when I get a sec.
You know how when your one sister goes out to lunch with your other sister for the afternoon and you should be doing some chores that you've been blowing off while you're home alone but instead you decide to make an Afghani nomad dress? So weird when that happens, I know.
Ah, yes. It speeds up now. I remember.
Summer seems to have truly arrived! I know this because I've had my air conditioner on for two days and am afraid to leave the house.
Thank you so much for all of your incredibly kind comments yesterday. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoooooo
I got four of the books you recommended! I am excited! I am very drawn to books that have very strong plots lately. I need the plot. My life feels overly busy lately, so I like that feeling of following a line (doesn't have to be straight) through a book. I want to be hooked and pulled through the water. By a tugboat. Towed in.
Do you make good iced tea? I'm trying to learn. I love iced tea, but half the time mine is really disgusting.
*To those who have asked, yes, the crewel embroidery is from Embroidery Companion, and the Tanglewood bag pattern is here :-). Thank you!
No, it's not exactly the first time that, in the midst of general reorganizational chaos and general way-too-much-going-on, I've found it impossible not to stop everything else and (yeah) make a quilt.
A Serenity Now quilt? Well, okay.
Except for the tiny squares of fabric falling all over the floor.
(Thankfully, no, each little square isn't sewn individually [though some are]; long strips of fabric are sewn together, alternating the cream with the colors, then chopped into 2" strips, then resewn into checkerboards. More on this later.)
I also have 97 ridges of garter stitch in fingering weight wool in progress for the center section of my Quill. I think I'm about 1/3 there. Garter stitch in the midst of chaos while watching reality TV? See, like, that I get.
When I was a little girl there was a lady on our block named Mrs. Schleeter. (I have no idea how to spell her name, but that's what it sounded like.) She lived across the street from us and one house down. Her house was like a little brick cabin; it was very different from the other houses on the street. For one thing, it was small and only one story. It had a large side yard, and a winding path down to the sidewalk. The forested train embankment rose up behind the little house, the way it did for all of the houses on that side of the street. Mrs. Schleeter was old. Long black calico skirts and aprons, long white hair pulled into a bun, a men's plaid wool coat in the winter, men's boots, a cane in a bony hand. I remember my father telling me once that she had told him (possibly in the only conversation they had in the twenty-five years my parents lived there) that she and her husband had bought the house many decades before, when the street was still sparsely populated with houses, because her husband (who was long passed) worked for the railroad, and she liked the railroad. My dad liked the railroad, too, and so did I. Soo Line freight trains rode those rails above our street several times a day and through the night. It's still a sound that I love, and a sound that feels, along with the coo-coo-coo of the mourning dove, just like home.
I think my dad liked her and respected her. Mrs. Schleeter was not a friendly lady, and I think he liked that too. She didn't socialize with anyone on the street. She never said hello, never waved. If she was outside and other people came out, she would go in. We were told to give her her space, and leave her property alone, because that was what she wanted. Weeks would go by without a glimpse. There were probably twenty kids on our block. I think I can count twenty. We lived on a cul-de-sac, and we kids had free reign over the wide, quiet two blocks that made up our world. Oak trees towered from either side like flying buttresses and formed a vaulted ceiling of green. The houses were large and old and pretty but weathered; people lived here for a long time. Lilies of the valley, hosta flowers, rusty wire fences, long grass. The only cars we ever saw there were owned by our various parents and we knew each of them; if a strange car came down our street we all stopped at stared at it, wary, until it moved on. We knew everyone and everyone knew us. I had been in almost every house on my street (except Mrs. Schleeter's), and if I hadn't been in the house I knew the people who lived there.
There was a school yard at one end of the street, down near our house, and that was our school. The other end of the block butted up against the elevated Metra train tracks, which went downtown to Chicago (another world), and that end of the street had a slightly more refined, more cosmopolitan air. Our end was the woolier end. We were wild kids then — the minute we finished dinner we were outside until dark. It was the '70s, and, as everyone will tell you, things were different. No one watched us. We knew to come home when the street lights went on. If we were late, my dad would come out onto the front porch and call for us. That was not preferred; he would not be happy if he had to do that. We almost always came in before we were called. If one person got called in, the whole group would disband. Fireflies lit the humid air. Every seven years the sound of cicadas sizzled, constant and frenzied. We had many societies, most of which were focused on fighting with each other, competing with each other, or generally doing things we weren't supposed to: going up into someone's crumbling attic, sitting on the roof of the Miller's garage (their parents were divorced, and their mother was never home) with a pack of cigarettes, climbing over the fence to the railroad embankment behind the school yard and throwing rocks at stuff. Every summer there was a new, very competitive game: Kick the Can, Running Bases, Rummy 500. Fall was miserable, as it was always Acorn Wars. There were tears, tattling, and bruises during Acorn Wars. We spent the time after school collecting hundreds of little nuts in dozens of coffee cans that we'd hide from each other (it was usually boys against girls, which got complicated if you had brothers, which I didn't), and then after dinner we'd race back outside, excavate our cans, and whip acorns at each other for hours, until someone went home crying and someone got in trouble. I hated Acorn Wars, was pummelled mercilessly, and was usually one of the ones who went home crying.
Mrs. Schleeter's house was in the middle of all of this. But we never walked on her lawn, never congregated on her sidewalk, never played Ghost in the Graveyard on her part of the street. There were rumors that she shot squirrels and ate them. There were rumors that she had kidnapped kids, or at least had yelled at them which, as someone who was scared of getting yelled at, I thought was almost as bad. In spite of the fact that I had once wiped out on the sidewalk in front of her house (it was winter but there was no snow, I was getting over a cold and my legs were wobbly, I was running past her house and faced-planted in front of it, resulting in a long scrape and subsequent string of scabs running from my forehead to the tip of my nose to the space above my upper lip [scab mustache] to my chin for the Christmas picture — see, I shouldn't have been near her house!), I had secretly always liked it. I thought it would've been perfect for me. My own cabin. Rust-colored brick. A little tremble of smoke constantly coming from the little chimney. A big front window made up of rectangular panes, the skinny trim of all of those panes painted black. Crooked, ancient-looking apple trees in the side yard. A raucous, old-lady's vegetable garden out back (rhubarb, rutabaga, cabbages, turnips?). The edge of the weedy driveway was lined with two dozen blousy, blustering peony bushes, white, light pink, and dark burgundy wine. She, and it all, seemed like they had been there for a hundred years. A fairy tale crone-cottage on Forest Avenue. I liked it, and looked at it a lot.
In early summer, on only one night (one very special night that I think now she probably waited for all year), she came slowly out of her house. She would wait until we kids were somewhere close, learning the Bus Stop in the Papienski's yard or playing volleyball in front of mine, and she beckoned to the closest one of us. "Come here." The child would drop the ball, and, walk, looking back nervously, across the street. "Come here" — a crooked finger gesturing toward the rest of us; a small herd of small sheep, we'd walk as a unit toward her house and our nervous friend. It was very quiet. She didn't speak. She had several pairs of big black scissors in her big patch pockets. She handed them to the oldest kids among us. Our little sisters and little brothers were close on our heels, wide-eyed. She walked to the long row of peonies and we'd follow. There must have been of a hundred enormous flowers, perfectly in bloom or bud. One by one, she'd point to exactly where she wanted the stem cut — that one, there. That one, there. This one, there. One flower, and one child, at a time. The stems were thick and crunched when you cut them. The scissors were metal, dull black, huge and oiled. The peonies were heavy and twitchy with ants. Blossom by blossom, kid by kid, she directed each cut until our arms were filled with flowers, and our little hands could hold no more. Those great bushels put my wedding flowers to shame. When she was finished, she collected the scissors and moved, in her long skirts, back off toward her house like a ship, until next summer. Chagrined, thrilled, still slightly terrified, we whispered our hoarse, peony-scented thank-yous and skittered away to bring the bouquets home to our mothers. Our mothers would say, "Did you say thank you?" and we'd nod, still nervous. I remember that my mom would put the bouquet in the middle of the dining room table. I'll have to ask her if she remembers. Along with fragrant handfuls of square-stemmed lily of the valley from next to the front stairs and billowing clouds of lilacs from under the dining room windows, peonies are the only cut flower I remember us having in the house, and only Mrs. Schleeter's, and only for that one week.
We have ten pink peony bushes, all coming into bloom just now. None of them seem like the right varieties to me, though when I bought them (as dried up little roots, in a box) ten years ago I was trying to get the same ones Mrs. Schleeter had. The smell of the bouquets in the house takes me right back. When I was in River Forest this past summer I saw that Mrs. Schleeter's house had been seriously remodeled, the yard tamed, the peonies gone. If I see some big black shears at an estate sale, I'll get them.
My name is Alicia Paulson
and I love to make things. I live with my husband and daughter in Portland, Oregon, and design sewing, embroidery, knitting, and crochet patterns. See more about me at aliciapaulson.com
