What IS This Blog?

The simple answer:  a journal, an online journal if you will, not entirely private, but a journal nonetheless.

I realized I had lost something, something important, and it took me a little while, and a bit of soul-searching to figure out what.  It seems that the internet, online communities, and social media have all moved on, but I have not.  I started this blog, or at least its previous iterations, as a way to keep a record for myself, yes one that I shared, but nonetheless a modified personal journal.  At first it was about sewing and knitting and eventually my general observations on life.  These were things I could have committed to paper, but I have a history of tossing bits of paper, including journals and sewing notebooks.  The internet remains here, although I suppose even it is not permanent.  

I don't mind people reading what I write; in fact it even makes me happy to hear from readers.  But I remain opposed to the idea of marketing, of packaging my blogs to fill a niche, to catering to the reader.  I suppose I reject the idea of the curated life, at least the curated life as it reflects outside expectations.  I do curate my life; most of us do to some level or another, but I curate my life for my own joy, and increasingly I feel that outside expectations do nothing but hamper that joy.  

I suppose posting to Facebook was my first mistake.  Initially, I did so at the request of a friend, so she could access the blog easily.  But then it became something else.  I was never shy about telling people I knew that I blogged; most of the time my friends thought it was something weird, and if they read my blog, they did not, for the most part tell me so.  But once I posted to Facebook, more and more people I knew would comment on my "secret" life, and I found myself wanting to please readers, sometimes at the expense of pleasing myself.  I was trained to achieve, to please, to rise to meet expectations, and I find I had not quite fully escaped those shackles. As soon as I began to think I "should" write, the joy in writing slipped away.

For now, I am forgoing Facebook and social media links, but I am still tossing my words out into the world.  Anyone who wants to find them can of course,  but I am feeling no need to make the process easier.  Besides, as I have learned, only 10% of my readers find me through Facebook, but that 10% plays an outside role in triggering my own demons, not through any intention of my readers but just through the medium itself.

So, what have I been doing since last I wrote?

I came home from Texas to an overabundance of sorrel.  So there has been some cooking, several kinds of sorrel soup, including a Russian Sorrel broth, and the chard and sorrel soup shown above.  I have also made, and frozen a large batch of spring spinach and sorrel soup, which doesn't look much different except that it is a darker green.

I have 12 jars of carrot green pesto, and an equal number of jars of canned carrots.  

I missed most of the snow pea harvest while I was in Texas but it looked like the squirrels and birds had a feast.  I also planted some purple podded peas and they were still producing in late May.  I thought they were spent, but we had a cool snap last week and I got another small flush of peas, which I have thoroughly enjoyed both lightly steamed and in salads.

The blueberry bushes suffered from neglect and did not produce much.  I just lost my late crop to something, birds or the bear that was wandering down my street a couple of mornings ago, but it does look like I will have a bumper crop of blackberries again this year.  The roses that are intermingled with the blackberries are also doing well, even though I fretted that perhaps they had been killed by a harsh winter frost. 

I continue to work intermittently in the garden.  Nature is ahead of me but I am doing more work than I have been able to in years.  Still not as much as my younger self once managed, but I am comparing myself to what I could accomplish 20 years ago, an unfair comparison.   I have done more this year than any previous summer since I moved into this house.  And I've finally admitted to myself that I did not lose two summers, but three.  My first summer here was the summer I broke my nose on my birthday, the summer I found out I was in atrial flutter, and probably had been for some time.  I can only accept that now because although my almost-65 year old energy level is not the same as my 45-year old energy level, it is higher than it has been for some time.  And if I am driven less than in former years, it is more because I am less inclined to worry about what anyone else thinks.

The other thrilling thing is that I found a roller frame in my stash of needlework supplies and assembled it to work on the next baptismal towel.  It is not quite the size I need, and I don't have any cotton webbing so I had to substitute quilting cotton on the sides in order to pull the fabric taut.  As you can see, there are still adjustments to be made to the tensioning before I begin work, but I am excited. I have ordered a roll of cotton webbing.  I have a box of various kinds of needlepoint and other frames and I think I need to sort them out to figure out what I have and work from there,  but that is progress.  I am slowly accumulating a set of embroidery materials and tools and am excited to work.  No the above is not perfect.  Yet it is an improvement over what I have done in the past.  My work keeps improving.  I tried something new with the last baptismal towel (seen at the top of this post), and I am increasingly excited about this work.

I might wish I had pursued this interest when I was younger, but I did not, and I have made the best decisions I could at any time of my life.  I'll never be a master knitter, or embroiderer, gardener, or chef.  Truthfully I never cared to.  I just wish to pursue what I enjoy for the pure joy of doing so.

In short. Life is simple.  Life is good. What more could I ask?