DOMESTIC GODDESSES

For years I have loved movies and many of the better TV shows. I had a friend who had a different impression about movies and often disliked the ones that I recommended. “What’s the point?” She would say, after viewing one of my favorites. I tried to explain that it’s not just the story line that’s exciting, but the cinematography, character development, the script, the acting, directing and so on. So many things go into the art of building a good movie that it’s a shame to see only the story line.

As I grow older, especially in the Winter, I have days when I wonder, “What’s the point?” I have a ninety-two year old mother living close to me and a eighty-six year old mother-in-law living next door. I empathize with their frustrations as they age.  Old age is hard work, and I know that they will struggle their way through, day after day and then die, and I wonder again. The more I talk about “the point” the more nervous people around me get, especially middle aged people. The old ones and the young ones don’t care so much.

I’m old enough now to know that whatever I think about “the point” today, I will think something different ten years from now. It’s like pictures. When you think a picture of yourself looks awful, all you have to do is hang onto it for ten years and you will realize how good you looked.

This morning I saw the analogy between movies and life. There doesn’t have to be a point, maybe it’s just about how things look, sound, taste, feel and smell.  I walk outside and there are tiny buds on the trees all around. The bulbs are beginning to bloom and there are now enough flowers in my yard to make a small bouquet. There have been storms raging for days, but today there are moments of sunshine and hints of blue. The air smells fresh and seems new. There are a few surviving greens in the garden that we have been eating, and there are seedlings everywhere.

I have a twenty-year-old step-daughter, who has been staying with us for the past ten days. She has developed into a caring, capable woman, who is wonderful company. She has been doing a lot of cooking, taking over dinners for us and turning out gourmet meals on a regular basis. She helps keep the house tidy in the way that only one with a practiced eye can. She picks up and cleans throughout the day, and because of her, our home is more pleasant than it usually is, and I have more time for my business and creative endeavors. She is like a blooming flower and the days are brighter  because she is here. When I talked with her about “the point,” she suggested that I go out into the garden and look around.

Yesterday we both had non-creative days and we felt like we were unable to get anything done. It was windy, rainy and gray outside, so we both gave up and played board games for the afternoon. I got to win at Dominoes and for just that afternoon, that became the point for me. It was a luxury and it made me laugh.

Some days a good cup of tea is the best thing that happens all day. I am lucky enough to have a tea company, so I can luxuriate in good tea. On those days maybe it’s enough to watch the tea unfold and be grateful for all I have, for my loving family and the time I have to spend with them. In the current economic climate we have less disposable cash, but we have lots of time. We eat better because it’s important to create nutritious and tasty meals out of limited food choices. The focus has changed, and I can’t help thinking that this may be a better life.

I think I’m confused, and then I think maybe not. Maybe I’m being forced to pay attention in a different way. I feel as though I’ve had blinders on my whole life and they have just been removed. The result is a sense of confusion that’s not confusion at all, it’s just a bigger picture. There is no “point.” There is only all this to be grateful for, or not, depending on the day.

It’s time for another cup of tea.

It has come to my attention that for many people tea brewing seems to be a mystery. So many of us were raised with too many rules, and since we learned them as children they seem to be written in stone. It has helped me to figure out that every rule was invented by a person who may or may not have been as wise or well informed as I am, so now I have taken on the job of encouraging everyone to question rules and to seek simplicity. That carries through to the fine art of brewing tea.

Recently my friend Kathy agreed to film a video of me brewing some tea, just for fun, and to demonstrate how easy it is. I forgot to mention the temperature of the water which for some is a big deal. Here is a rule of thumb: if your tea is bitter, your water was too hot. It’s that simple. You can buy special pots that tell you the temperature of the water and pour it in at eighty five degrees for green or white tea, or you can pour your water in just before it boils, or you can add cool water to your boiling water. I prefer the simplest thing, which for me is the fact that I usually forget to pour the water until it has cooled some anyway, so I just pour it without reheating it. Personal taste is the most important thing to discover when brewing tea. I like my white tea strong, served with milk and sweetener, like black tea so I tend to brew it like black tea, with boiling water. Most people like white tea for its delicate, more subtle flavor so they brew it with cooler water like green tea.

If you re-infuse your green or white tea, you will want to use hotter water to bring out new flavor in your second and third cups. By your fourth cup, you will probably want to use the hottest water and a long brewing time to pull out all the best of the tea. Once again, your water temperatures and brewing times are all a matter of personal choice, preferences that will develop over years and change as your palette does. Each of us becomes an expert over time as we re-invent our own wheels.

I think that reinventing the wheel may be a good idea, because as you come to your own truth, it becomes part of you rather than having to be learned or memorized. Given this, I will tell you a few simple things about brewing tea, and then encourage you to brew lots of tea and find out for yourself how you like it best.

While water temperature is important, the amount of tea you use per cup is of equal if not more importance. I prefer to use more tea than is called for and to re-infuse it a number of times. I like my first cup of tea in the morning to be very strong, and often have two cups in quick succession. For the rest of the day I drink the weaker tea that comes from re-infusing the morning’s leaves, unless I have a mid-afternoon slump. On days when I’m moving slowly in the mid-afternoon, I take the British concept of tea time seriously and add more tealeaves to the pot for another strong cup of tea. After that I switch to either white tea or herbal for the rest of the day and into the evening.

I love living this way and hope I can continue to for the rest of my life. I seem to be in the best of health and live a vibrant life. I think that tea adds a lot to the quality of my life recommend it to everyone. I would love to hear comments.

Believe it or not, it’s time to start thinking about the best flowers and herbs to grow for wonderful teas. It is more proper to call them infusions, because true tea is made with a base of camillia sinensis, but for now I will refer to our infusions as tea. It matters little what we call our concoctions, they are fun to make, satisfying and healthy.

Now is a great time to shop for bare root roses. You will find them in catalogs and stores all over, and they are inexpensive. Find the most fragrant rose in your favorite color and buy it. Plant it in a pot until it gets warm enough to put it outside. For you urban gardeners, you will need to find a sunny spot outside, but a balcony will do.

My experience with roses is that they are amazingly hardy and will grow through neglect and mistreatment so don’t hesitate, just plant your rose bush in the appropriate time and manner for your part of the country and watch the leaves start to come out. Rose petals make a good foundation for herbal tea.

Mint is another nearly indestructible plant once the weather is warm, as are lemon balm and calendula. Investigate nurseries and peruse catalogs to find edible flowers and herbs to grow for your tea. Start growing them early so that you can put them outside as soon as weather permits. Find out which are the most hardy aromatic flowers and herbs in your area and then start planting.

Do buy yourself a book to identify which plants are edible and be really careful, as it would be embarrassing (and possibly fatal) if you poisoned yourself as you were working on being an earth mother.

Consider your first year a time to experiment. A great rule of thumb is to keep those plants that grow well for you and forget the rest. Tea is supposed to be about relaxation and fun, be sure your garden represents that for you. Once your plants begin to flourish, you will be able to harvest the leaves and flowers with great joy and they will nourish you like nothing else.

Experiment with smells and tastes to figure out what pleases you. If you like a sweet tea, try your hand at growing stevia. My stevia plants are inevitably smaller than I think they should be, but they produce such wonderfully sweet leaves I attempt them every year anyway. They are my one exception to my rule about forgetting plants that don’t flourish.

This theme will continue throughout the year, so I won’t attempt to write it all right now, but before I go, I implore you to try growing at least one true tea plant (camellia sinensis or camellia assamacus). If we all try, one of us may find just the right place for them to grow. If you have success with one or two, please let me know.

It’s hard to know what to call this post, or if it even matters, since I doubt that anyone will ever read it. So far my biggest writter’s block comes because I think of my life as “same old, same old.” When a take a step back, I realize that it only seems that way because it’s my life, but it may seem unique to others.

I look outside at grey drizzle. The trees are a rich green, thick firs, housing the birds as the await their turns at the feeders. Today I take the tree outside and hang feeders for the birds on it. Because it is so cold the birds come in by the hundreds to feed, turning our deck into a regular playground, teaming with life.

I know stuff, but it’s hard to remember what. I feel deadly dull. I have a big copper still and I make fragrant hydrosols, which are water and herbs and/or flowers distilled together. The hydrosols alone are reason for celebration, but I forget to spray them.

I make tea from the flowers and herbs that grow here nine months out of the year, but in the winter I forget to brew up those teas, preferring the black teas that I blend. It seems that in the wintertime I’m looking for the next lift at each juncture, and there are no lifts that get me high enough. I’m afraid of moving slowly. If I let winter take over I may stop entirely. Maybe I’ll die. I’m afraid that when I die I’ll leave a big mess.

Intellectually I understand that it’s time to rest in winter, and every year I look forward to the opportunity to slow down, knowing that I can write and knit during the slow time, but I am afraid that if I am not obviously busy my time will appear to be unimportant.  Someone will try to commandeer me to do their bidding rather than leaving me to my own creative endeavors. I have bad boundaries. I have also eaten too much chocolate in the past week.

Today is the day that my house should go back in order. That’s a tall order, since it’s almost never in order, but I will take the ornaments off our sad, bare, spindly tree and take it outside to decorate for the birds. They won’t care if it has lost all its needles as long as we have food for them on it.

The tree was wonderful and did its job diligently, standing up to constant abuse from the kitten and holding whatever sights and decorations it could. It made us laugh regularly and when I sent a picture of it to a friend, it cheered her holiday up by bringing the gift of laughter. I cannot ask more from one little tree.

I still love traditional Christmas music. I think it has to do with the memories that the music envokes. From the mid-sixties, when I moved here, we have had a wonderful time with music. In those days we had no televisions, video tapes, DVDs, or even, for some of us, telephones. There were televisions, radios and telephones in existence, we just didn’t have them. Instead we read, visited, sang and played music.

I had a number of friends who had beautiful singing voices, a few of whom were classically trained. I loved to sing but hadn’t had much opportunity. One of my friends offered to teach me the alto harmonies to most of the traditional Christmas Carols. A bunch of us would get together and sing the carols for a month or so before the actual holiday. It’s one of my favorite memories.

Then we got the great idea to go into Mendocino and walk around the town singing the carols on Christmas Eve Eve (December 23rd.) I think it had been a long time since anyone had gone caroling in Mendocino, because the first year we sang the shopkeepers all came outside to hear us sing, some with tears in their eyes.

The children always came along, running down the street playing games, complaining and laughing. I thought that they never heard the carols. Now my son, who is nearly forty, seems as fond of the carols as I am.

Each place we went we came away with some sort of treat. Invariably someone gave us a bottle of brandy, which made the carols a bit looser as the evening progressed. I remember one year ending up on Main Street in a big circle singing “May the Circle Be Unbroken.”

We liked singing the carols together so much that the rehearsals got earlier every year. I remember two years when we started them in the last week of October. Each of those times we had gathered to celebrate a birthday party for one of the kids.  It was warm enough to build a fire outside and sing into the night. I’ll bet we drove the neighbors crazy, we most certainly drove the kids crazy.

Eventually real choruses were created and people got serious about caroling. It began to feel like too much of a good thing. My dear friend who taught me the harmonies began to have a solstice celebration instead, with a huge bonfire. We would go outside after dark and watch the sparks fly up melding with the stars. We still sang our hearts out year after year. Our children would find their way home even after they were grown and sing with us.

The bonfire became well known and the celebration changed as it grew. Those of us who were older stopped going. Now we prefer to meet in the quiet of our homes, but we still sing, and I listen to Christmas music when I’m alone and remember.

The weather is stunningly beautiful here on the Northern California Coast so far this month. There are a lot of people worried about drought. It’s my experience that it’s best to enjoy the weather you have because it will change and you’ll wish you had been there for it. It’s a microcosm of real life. We especially enjoy it because during the summer we are often shrouded in fog.

We are having a Craft Fair in Albion on Sunday. Albion is a tiny town on the Coast about ten miles south of Mendocino. I mention the fair because it is rich with opportunity for entertaining prose, and I will probably be writing more about it later.

Writing this, my world view is broadening, and I realize more intensely than usual that I lead a charmed life.  I hope that by sharing it I can help bring charm to your life as well.

Soon, I will step away from my computer and go outside with my husband to stack firewood. Then I will finish packaging tea for a pending order, and then, when I go to Albion to mail off the tea, I’ll stop at the building where the Fair will be held and hang lights, but first, I’ll have another cup of tea. Yes, I know there’s a recession going on, and we feel it too, but we all owe it to ourselves to live the best lives we can. This is our opportunity, right now.

I always thought that I would magically find a way to retire when I was in my sixties, but that will probably always be out of the question for me. I like to say that I retired in THE sixties, And now I will have to work at earning a living for the rest of my life. It’s a good thing, otherwise I might not have this great tea company.

As I drive down the hill today to Albion, I will have a stunning 180 degree view of the Pacific Ocean, maybe I’ll see a whale headed South. Occasionally there is a straggler that comes late and we catch a glimpse of him swimming by on these crystal clear days. It has been so warm this month we even have some confused rhododendrons blooming by the side of the road on the way.

This evening I hope to get my tree decorated so that my kitten has something new to play with. I have decorations that I’ve been saving throughout my life, and lots of them are unbreakable. They had to be to survive all the kids and pets that found their way into my life in Christmases past. Anything breakable will remain packed away. Undecorated, the tree has been pulled halfway over already. Fortunately it’s a wild tree so it isn’t too heavy.

Having a young pet brings such light to our lives, I don’t mind the chaos that comes with him. We are helping both my mother, aged ninety-two, and my mother-in-law, aged eighty-six to grow older in whatever comfort we can provide. We have just lost our sixteen year old lab/shepherd mix and our lives have great possibility for daily grief. Our kitten and our chihuahua/jack russell terrior mix keep us laughing, and remind us of the fun of youth.

December is a wonderful month, and I’m enjoying sharing it.

Word has it that we are to expect cold weather by the end of the week, so I have been out doing the final harvest of our pears, calendula flowers, chard, lemon balm and mint. The weather has so balmy this year on this Northern California Coast the plants looked as though it were early spring. It’s a real boost for me to have these extra herbs to dry for use over the winter and spring months.

This year I intend to experiment adding herbs to white tea as well as making strictly herbal teas. I love caffeine, I have to admit it, and the addition of white tea will give those herbs and flowers the slight lift that I have grown to love.

I have put off getting the Christmas tree until I can clean, process and dry the herbs. They will bring us pleasure far longer than Christmas, although I can hardly wait to get the tree up for the kitten’s sake. Christmas seems very different this year. I find it fun and interesting finding ways to enjoy it that are in keeping with the times. I have thought for years that it should have less to do with money and more with celebration of life’s goodness, now I get to put that into practice in a realistic way.

Recently I have received an email from a woman asking about making home grown herb and flower teas for her won consumption and to be sold at the local farmers market. I will be sharing that in the weeks to come. Let me know if any of you have questions that need answering now.

This year we are cutting our tree from the woods on our property. When my son was young, ot was a yearly ritual to find and cut our own trees. After he left for college, in the late eighties, I started buying trees. The trees in lots were impressive because they are so much fuller than the ones in the wild. At first I found that daunting because I couldn’t figure out how to hang the ornaments. They didn’t hang so much as they sat among the branches.

This year they will hang again. This is a perfect year to go back to the wild tree for another reason. We have an adolescent kitten in the house who sees himself as a wild thing. Because of that I will only be hanging soft ornaments. I fully expect him to climb the tree at some point and we’ll see if he can manage to knock it over. Instead of trying to train him away from the tree (have you ever tried to train a cat?) I think we will view him as an ornament that moves. I’ll try to get some pictures to share.

We all know that there are five seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Holiday. Around the time we go back to standard time I slip into holiday mode. I start thinking about baking, cleaning clutter, lighting dark corners, filling the house with delicious scents and hauling out the decorations. Then I gather boughs to make hydrosols and the inevitable wreaths and swags.

I’m sure you visualize something right out of Martha Stewart, but it’s not like that. They are fun to make and smell good, but the boughs, water and mud turn my house into something like a barn for days. It’s worth it.
In the woods here we have pines, firs and redwood. There is a bush called cotoneaster that is covered with berries and holly grows like a weed.

While gathering boughs, we often find edible mushrooms to bring home for dinner. The mushroom hunts begin after the first rain and last through the season until our first frost, which is usually in late November.

Our families get together over the holiday season, and by January I’m ready for a change of pace and a new start. Usually the guests go home by Boxing Day, and at that time we start counting down the twelve days of Christmas. It’s dark and damp over those days, so we leave the lights in the corners of our house. We take the tree out to our deck and decorate it with ornaments that are edible for the birds. It’s a lovely way to extend the holiday to include wildlife and help them through dark days and cold.

The twelve days of Christmas begin on Christmas Day. Next year, when I have more time, I’ll tell you about each day, but for now I will only include day seven which is the day for Wassail. This year was a particularly good one for fruit, and while some say it was because of the weather, I think it may have been because of a Wassail Ceremony.

Here is a loose recipe for Wassail