Summer Slowly

I've decided to keep both blogs running, though I will encourage you to sign up at my new blog at my new magazine, Living in Season in case I ever do abandon my beloved Blogger blog.

A long-time School of the Seasons reader and contributor, Taffy Hill, sent me a link to a blog entry by Beth Dargis of My Simpler Life about things that should be savored and done slowly.

I loved Beth’s list and was even more delighted to see the thread was started by my friend and colleague, Christine Valters Paintner, at her blog, Abbey of the Arts.

Let’s expand this idea here. I'd love to entertain your ideas about things that should be done slowly.

My favorite is walking slowly. I find this easiest to do while walking the dog. Right now my walking companion is Pepe, my daughter's Chihuahua. He likes to go slow, especially in the summer. He often plops down on the grass and refuses to move

New Blog

I've just created a beautiful magazine, and it includes a blog column. So look for new entries there.

Sillage

I'm finishing up my blogging about trying to capture the scent of flowers, as I prepare for my new adventure: eating flowers. Thought I would do a last blog on sillage. Such an interesting word and one you will add to your vocabulary if you haunt perfume blogs, as I do.

Sillage is used in the perfume world to describe the trail of scent you leave behind when you pass through a room. It is a French word, pronounced see-yazh, for the wake of the ship, from the same root as a word that also means furrow. In that sense it is an impression, but a transient one, one that will dissolve or resolve.

Michelle Krell Kydd at Glass Petal Smoke has a good story about stealing mojo from a man with her sillage. Patty White at Perfume Posse wrote this lovely essay on the sillage of her mother-in-law's life. An interesting concept. At Bois de Jasmin, another one of my favorite perfume blogs, a reader mentions that when people ask her about the scent she's wearing, she worries that she put on too much. She ends with the comment: "sillage is almost illegal in the U.S."

I have been feeling very self-conscious in fragrance-free Seattle about wearing scent. My current favorite is Mimosa Pour Moi by L'Artisan. It is a soft, powdery scent with a honey undertone, and so far no one has noticed my sillage.

The amazing photograph was taken by Rennett Stowe and I found it at Flickr.com

Waverly Time

In my last newsletter, I wrote about showing up late for a BBQ with the excuse that I was late because I was working in my garden, and later realizing that I was living in "plant time," an entirely different kind of time than clock time.

Well, this weekend, the same friend invited me to yet another BBQ (his apartment building is famous for their long, hospitable BBQs) and this time, when he left the message he said: "It starts at 3 PM people time, not Waverly time." And that got me started thinking about a whole new kind of time: Waverly time.

I didn't make it to the BBQ but that's because I was living in Waverly time. In Waverly time, you are never rushed and you do things when you feel like doing them. That's all I know so far about Waverly time. But I find the whole concept delightful.

Red Valerian: Fragrant or Stinky?

This plant (centhrantus rubra) blooms all over my neighborhood and I like its common name: Jupiter's Beard. I hoped there was some mythological association between the plant and Jupiter, but after checking extensive Googling and checking my primary source for mythology of plants on the web, Paghat, I couldn't find any. I suspect the name comes from the belief that Jupiter's beard was red.

I haven't paid much attention to it because it doesn't do much, except spring up exuberantly as early as April and continue blooming far into November. The bees love it but it's not edible, medicinal or fragrant.

Or so I thought until last month when I was walking by a large patch in bloom and I smelled a most heavenly odor. Knowing that I sometimes assume flowers don't have fragrance when they do (I was totally shocked by my first fragrant rhododendron), I bent down and inhaled. Quite a nice fragrance--it reminded me a bit of grape jelly.

But on a later walk, when I decided to validate my findings, I couldn't discern any scent at all. I wondered if this was one of those flowers that is fragrant only before it's pollinated and then loses its scent.

And during a quick search of the web today, before posting this entry, I found various descriptions of its smell, all contradictory. There are many entries which claim its fragrant, without describing the fragrance. One post said it smelled like vanilla. Another just said it smelled "divine." That was it for the positive associations.

Plants for the Future has a reference to it as smelling like perspiration. One gardener at Dave's garden complained that the cut flowers smelled like "cat pee." Web sites describing the flowers blooming wild in England said the smell was "doggy," as in "stale dog dung" or "catty."

I know that true valerian (the one that does have herbal properties) has such an unpleasant odor that early herbalists, Discorides and Galen, named it Phu. At least that's what Mrs. Grieves reports in her herbal. And the two valerians are in the same family.

What's going on? What does red valerian really smell like? I'm going out to smell some right now. If you have some in your neighborhood, please check it out and let me know what you think?

The photo came from the Washington State University site.

Flower Child

When I first decided to tackle the topic of flowers, I actually thought of flowers as a separate species, as in there are trees, plants and flowers.
It took a while before I realized that flowers are simply a stage in the life cycle of every plant, at least, all of the angiosperms. Trees have flowers. Right now in Seattle, the lindens are about to burst into bloom. The horse chestnuts are sporting the delightful red and white blossoms known as candles. And the laburnums have shed their petals, as have the locusts. Grasses also have flowers, although we rarely see them because they’re so small and fine. The fuzzy pussy willow buds that I wrote about in March are flowers, as are the catkins dangling from the birches and the alders.
All flowers exist to flirt, to lure the pollinators that will fertilize the ovules and swell into fruit and disperse the seed. And all flowers are transitory, existing only for a brief interval in the life of the plant. Lucky for me there is a far wider time range for blossoming than I imagined when I started my flower project. Now I know that I can find blossoms year round, like the curving yellow threads of the witch hazel in January.
The photo of a wisteria blossom was taken by my friend Michael McIntosh at Schreiner's Iris Farm in May 2008.

Sunlight Through Green Leaves

All last week I kept trying to capture on film the effect of sunlight seen through the new green leaves of summer. Then I heard this Basho poem and realized he had captured this perfectly in words:

Speechless before
These budding green spring leaves
In blazing sunlight
Basho, A Voyage to the Interior
Translated by Sam Hamill

Enfleurage

In my last post, where I featured Octavian’s suggestions for reproducing the smell of wisteria, I forgot to mention that it’s necessary to reproduce the scent of wisteria because it’s one of those flowers whose scent cannot be extracted directly. Many of my favorite fragrant flowers fall in this category: lily of the valley, gardenia, tuberose, jasmine, lilac, iris and wisteria. These fragile flowers crumple when exposed to the heat of the steam which is used to distill scent from other hardier flowers (like lavender and rose).

Of course, this didn’t stop people who wanted to capture the scent of these flowers from developing a method to do so. It’s been around since ancient times and it’s called enfleurage, a name which is actually much prettier than the process.

In its most developed form, as practiced in Grasse, the perfume center of France, during the nineteenth century, fresh flower petals are placed on panes of glass which are smeared with purified fat. The fat absorbs the odors of the flowers, which are replenished when they are spent, until the fat is thoroughly imbued with fragrance. Then the scented fat, which is called a pomade, is washed with alcohol which absorbs the scent. The leftover scented fat was often used to make soap. The scented alcohol is called an absolute. If the alcohol is allowed to evaporate, what is left is an essential oil.

There are more primitive ways of creating the same effect, including simply stirring flowers into hot fat until it absorbs their odors. This cheerful article at Mother Earth News explains how to do enfleurage in your kitchen. I’m not sure I agree that you can use rubbing alcohol; I believe my Natural Perfumery teacher (Jeanne Rose) would shudder at this, because rubbing alcohol has a strong odor of its own which would affect your end result.

The illustration of women handling the chassis used in the enfleurage process comes from Sacred Earth which also explains the process, along with other methods used to extract scent from flowers.

The Scent of Wisteria

I've been working on a series of essays for the past year about my experiences getting to know the flowers that flourish along the eight blocks I walk between my apartment on the top of Capitol Hill in Seattle and my work at Richard Hugo House, at the corner of Pine and Eleventh. I assigned myself a series of tasks, one per month (I love being a teacher and I love being a student). My task for June is to figure out how to capture the scent of flowers. So I plan to post entries on my experiments and let you know how they are going.

Tonight as I walked home on a sunny summer evening I was noticing the scent of wisteria. To me it has a pleasant, creamy vanilla scent. So I was pleased when I went searching online to see that Octavian, one of my favorite perfume writers (I know him from his comments on Luca Turin's perfume blog) has written an entry at his own blog, 1000 Perfumes, carefully analyzing the scent of wisteria with much more precision than my nose can register.

I hadn't considered the difference color might make in the scent of a wisteria until I read Octavian's entry (though I know from much experimentation that I love the smell of purple irises more than any other color). All of the wisteria on my walk was purple.

A few years ago, when I was learning about wine (in the process of researching a wine mystery novel which never got written), I developed much more discrimination in my ability to identify flavors and scents. As I learn about scents, I am trying to increase my scent vocabulary as well. (Oddly enough many of the scents I encountered today reminded me of banana (and I love the scent of banana, especially artificial banana flavor. I don't know what caused this olfactory delusion.)

What does wisteria smell like to you?

Osoberry

One of my friends asked me about the plants at Hedgebrook and I had to laugh because I spent a good amount of time in my cottage writing about plants and not so much walking around in the woods and meadow and garden. Finally one sunny afternoon I grabbed my favorite plant identification book, Wild Plants of Seattle by Arthur Lee Jacobson, and went for a walk in the woods.

There are people who walk through a museum reading the captions and then stepping back and looking at the pictures, and people who just look at the pictures and let them soak in. I have to admit I am one of the former. Likewise there are people who walk through the woods, thumbing through the pages of a book trying to identify plants and people who just commune with the plants. Guess which one I am? Actually I had a good excuse. I was working on an essay about identifying plants.


I didn’t get too far into the woods because I was struck when I walked into a nearby clearing by a plant I had never seen before. It seemed to be alight in the dimness of the woods, all the leaves lifting straight up towards the sky like bright-green candles. I was able to identify it because Jacobson captured this quality in his description of the plant: “as the young green leaves awaken, they illuminate the woods with tender fresh greenery.” The photograph taken by Alyss in Portland really captures this quality. The leaves have the delightful smell and flavor of bitter cucumber.

This deciduous shrub is an osoberry, so named because bears (oso is the Spanish word for bear—I know that from going to Camp Osito as a Girl Scout) like the berries. Jacobson also gives alternate names as Indian Plum or Cherry, Squaw Plum , Bird Cherry and Skunk Bush. The scientific name is Oelemeria cerasiformis and it’s a member of the rose family (as are plums and cherries).

The common names refer to the fruit: bluish-black berries which are favorites of the birds. Jacobson says they are “juicy and melon-flavored [but] marred by a bitter tinge and big pits.” The name Skunk Bush (I assume) comes from the stinky flowers. I brought just one spray into my cottage to sketch and quickly regretted it. The flowers are delicate looking, tiny packages of petals held on drooping stems, almost like lilies of the valley, with raggedy edges but they have a terrible smell.

Every time I learn about a new plant, I fall in love with it and osoberry is my new emblem of spring.

Goat Willow Catkins on Whidbey Island

Growing up in Southern California, we never saw real pussywillows (except as imported curiosities). They were captive items, like peacock feathers or Mexican jumping beans. They stayed frozen in their soft furry grey velvet form forever.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t recognize them at first in my Seattle neighborhood. I had walked around the same block for years without ever seeing them. Then one March, on a walk with the dog, I noticed something plopping down around me. They were spent pussy willow catkins that had thrown off their pollen and were dropping to in an orgy of dissipation.

From then on, I kept my eye on the bush and came to know all its phases. I love it best when the buds are just showing that flash of milk white, before they open. No, I love it best when the stems are studded with those soft, furry grey velvet puffs, like tiny rabbit feet. I have a vase of them sitting in my window in front of me at my writing retreat. They were blown off this tree in the high wind that came up several nights ago and I found them on the side of the road. They don’t seem to be opening despite the warmth of the cottage, which is just fine.

But I do love the next stage. Here they are on the same tree a few days later, popping out, covered with yellow pollen. I will be eager to get back to Seattle and see how the ones in my neighborhood are progressing.. I think because Seattle is warmer they will already be littering the ground.

I’ve been reading Bill Felker’s list of March Zeitgebers from Poor Will’s Almanac. In Yellow Springs, Ohio, he predicts pussy willow catkins will break in the second week and pollen will appear on the catkins in the fourth week.

city dogs and country dogs

I was thinking about the difference between city dogs and country dogs, when I was walking into town yesterday. My daughter's dog, Pepe, seen above in a nest of down comforter, is definitely a city dog.

Though we both harbor the fantasy of buying land in the country, partly so Pepe could just run outside whenever he wanted to pee, I don't think he would last more than a few days. There was an eagle drifting overhead as I was walking into town and I think Pepe would look like a great snack to an eagle. Ditto to an owl. Last night one of the resident owls at Hedgebrook ate one of the resident bunnies.

It struck me that a dog like a Chihuahua (and probably other toy dogs), are designed to be city dogs. They are status symbols, like long fingernails or white carpets, that say, I don't have a dirty job. They signal class and wealth, which is probably why Paris Hilton flaunts them. (I'm not sure what Mickey Rourke is doing with a Chihuahua, but it is adorable to see that ravaged, rough-looking man cradling the small, big-eyed dog against his chest.)

The country dogs here seem to be working dogs, dogs like collies and shepherds that are bred for herding skills, or guard dogs, like the yappy Chow mix at the farm down the road. On my way back from town, I saw a border collie mix crossing the street in front of me. He just stopped in the middle, his ears cocked in my direction. He stood there for about 45 seconds, then loped up a long drive into the woods. About three minutes later, a car approached from town and turned up that same drive. The dog had apparently recognized the sound from miles away and was heading to his post, to greet the members of his family when they disembarked.

what I'm missing

A picture of the window seat in my cabin where I sit and look out at the trees (and occasional snow flurries) and read some of the books I've brought: the Culture of Flowers by Jack Goody and Essential Oils and Hydrosols by Jeanne Rose.

Here I am on a two-week writing retreat. I imported all the books I thought I needed (and the ones I didn't bring I ordered at the local library). I brought my new cute laptop and new flash drive and found the recharger for my digital camera so I could take pictures and show them to you. And I brought notebooks galore, warm clothes, some earrings, even. But what am I missing the most?

Post-it notes.

I went into town to try to buy some and I couldn't find any at the store. It seems silly. Even wasteful to use post-it notes when I have scratch paper, but I find I'm very attached to them.

Hedgebrook: The Residency

I realized that while away on my writer’s retreat I could still post entries to my blog because the Internet is everywhere. Even here in this idyllic retreat for women writers called Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island.

We don’t have internet access in our cottages but we can walk a brief distance through the woods (a spooky walk at night by the feeble light of my eco-friendly flashlight) to a little shed called the Pumphouse which connects us to the outside world via phone and an internet connection. (Cell phones don’t work too well here. At least mine doesn’t.)

We’re encouraged to stay off the grid as much as possible, since we’re here to write. And I have been writing for the past four days. Working on a commissioned piece for an art jewelry journal. Beginning an essay on plant identification. Polishing up one I wrote long ago on the names of plants. Considering new possibilities for my Victorian ghost novel.

It’s an amazing gift for a writer. To have nothing on my schedule but writing. That and sleeping and eating and reading and making tea and keeping a fire burning in the wood stove.

I want to live in this cottage for the rest of my life. Finally, a desk big enough so I can spread out all my projects. A tiny kitchen, perfect for one person. A cozy armchair with a footstool and a lamp. A windowseat that looks out on the woods. A wood stove to stoke; it keeps the kettle hot enough so I can make a cup of tea anytime I want. The bed is up a ladder in the loft. The windows have leaded glass panes so prisms dance around the room when the sun is out.

There are seven writers here at the moment and all of them are fabulously talented, so talented I sometimes wonder what I’m doing here. At night we meet at the farmhouse where we are served a fabulous dinner. We talk about writing over this gorgeous food and that is a luxury too.

When we leave to go back to our cottages, we are carrying our flashlights and our baskets laden with the lunches that were made for us (mac and cheese tomorrow) and the fixings for breakfast (I’ve been grooving on oatmeal).

Tonight I walked up the road under the stars. The first quarter moon was so bright I didn’t need my flashlight. The frogs were chirping in the pond besides my cottage as I crossed over the bridge and saw the welcoming lights of my cottage.

I’m already counting the days until I go home (ten), not because I’m eager to leave but because each one is precious.

out of Time

You might have noticed that I disappeared for a while there. I've been struggling with a persistent cold ever since the last week in December. It recurred twice, once in January and once at the end of February, knocking me out for a week each time. Meanwhile I got the news on February 4 that my mother was dying.

It was not a surprise. She has been in a long decline starting in 1999 when she had a major heart attack. She was already suffering from short term memory loss and that progressed into Alzheimers. She lived in a succession of nursing homes and rest homes for the past nine years. In the last few months, she slept most of the time, like an old cat.

My daughter, Shaw, and I rushed down to Ventura and were able to be with her in the hospital for two days. We took shifts and I was with her when she died in the early hours of February 6. Although her death was peaceful, being with her was not easy. I wished I had taken more time to think through how to create a sense of sacred space in the hospital room. I should have talked to my friend, death midwife, Nora Cedarwind, who has made it her life's work to bring dignity and beauty into the dying process.

We were blessed with the presence of a priest who came to give my mother the Anointing of the Sick, after my daughter insisted my mother would want this Catholic ritual. And after my mother died, we were comforted by the services provided by the funeral home and the rituals of the Catholic Church. It was clear both were the result of years and centuries of considering what people need when they are experiencing loss and grief.

Perhaps the most surprising moments during this whole process happened at the cemetery. My sister, who is an engineer, wanted to see how they would lower the coffin into the ground. So after the burial service, we stayed to watch as the cemetery workers with shovels and bulldozer lowered the coffin into the vault and the vault into the ground and then shoveled the dirt back over it. (I wish we had stepped forward at this point to shovel dirt ourselves but we weren't invited to do so and so we didn't.) Then they carefully laid back down the strips of sod they had removed and replaced the headstone (which marks my father's resting place) and laid the big bouquet of flowers on the green grass. It was an amazing end to an intense process, to look back, as we walked towards our rental cars, and see the lilies and roses lying on the green grass.

Although it seems my mother's death should be a sad event, it was not entirely sad. It was also beautiful and disturbing, peaceful and exhausting. Here's a picture of my daughter on the beach that captures a certain sense of grace about our trip:

Signs of Spring

I spend the entire month of January dreaming about what I want to grow in the New Year, and doing a process of sorting those dreams into themes and goals. This year I'm sharing that process with the students in my New Year Dreams class.

I'm still in the thick of it, generating lots of ideas. Launching an online magazine. Writing a historical novel. Writing essays about plants in the city. Promoting my Slow Time book to coaches and writers. Sponsoring week-long Slow Time retreats. Contributing to Wikipedia, Library Thing. Joining Facebook. Teaching a year-long Slow Time class. The new ideas keep springing forth.

I'm at the point in the process where I need to make choices. It's clearly impossible to do everything. But I'm having a harder time choosing this year than in other years. I like to choose a word for the year that distills my intention for the entire year and this year I'm having trouble with that as well. In previous years, I've picked Fun and Frolic. This year it's something more like Connecting but that's too abstract for me.

Meanwhile I'm enjoying all the signs of spring around me. The red twigs on the maples. The green blades of tulips kniving through the dark soil. The single yellow bloom on the forsythia. The fuzzy buds on the goat willow. I saw my first robin three days ago.

Christmas Day

Christmas Day after the presents were opened. My daughter insisted that one must rip the paper off the packages and throw it over your shoulder, so a new tradition was born. This contrasts with my mother's habit of carefully smoothing out and folding up each piece of paper, as presents were unwrapped. In this photo, Pepe is sleeping in front of my favorite present, a painting of Pepe sleeping that my daughter painted.

We also enjoyed one of our newer holiday traditions going to a movie on Christmas Day. We both wanted to see Bolt, an animated Disney movie about a dog who thinks he's a superhero, mostly because it also stars a hamster in a ball. (We have both had hamsters as pets.) So we went to the 12:50 showing downtown, sloshing through the slush to get there. It was a great Christmas movie, in many ways, sentimental and charming at the same time. But I think it would be upsetting for kids: there were many scary scenes, and I cried through about half of the movie, as did many other people in the theatre judging by the sniffling.

Under the Christmas Tree

This is what it looks like on Chistmas Eve at my house.
Pepe is snuggled in his little bed (that Shaw made for him) under the tree.

This was a new kind of tree for us, a noble fir, I believe. It's a hard tree to decorate, because it's so bushy. For some reason the red and yellow lights on the Christmas light set didn't work so that set the theme. My daughter Shaw decided to use only blue and silver ornaments.

For years we argued about whether or not to get a real Christmas tree. The artificial trees seem to be returning in popularity, partly because they're so
kitschy, and partly because they don't use up natural resources. I understand the reasons to abstain from getting a real tree but I love the smell. I consider it partial compensation for taking the life of the tree that I buy the tree from a charity and we burn the tree after Christmas.

This was a practice that began when I was a college student. It was great fun to drag the tree out onto the street and light it on fire. (Warning: don't try this at home! Christmas trees are highly flammable.) As I matured, instead of burning the tree in front of the house, I would take it to the beach on Candlemas and burn it. I remember doing this with a boyfriend, Jerry, huddled in the cold wind on a beach in the Pacific Northwest, with our daughters running around waving branches with lit ends, and making patterns in the darkness, like sparklers. For the past ten or fifteen years, I've burned my tree at the Summer Solstice bonfire. That means storing it in the closet. I cut off the branches and store the bare tree trunk, along with garbage bags full of the branches and needles. It makes the closet smell like Christmas for half the year.

Happy celebrations to you.

Snow Art

One of my readers commented last year when I was posting pumpkin pictures about how pumpkin carving was a true folk art. I recognized that this is an activity in which every person feels they can participate, strives to make a unique design and is proud to display it in public, all unusual in other creative activities. And this year, in the midst of our snow storm, I'm realizing that there's another unique folk art form: snow creatures.

I have to say creatures because some of my favorite snow sculptures depicted animals like this dog and the cat below.

I found them all in Cal Anderson Park. The whole park was dotted with them,
strange white shapes emerging from the snow, quiet presences.

Berry Walk: Yew Berries

I focus on different plants at different times of the year. Through most of the spring and summer, I'm looking for flowers. Around August, at the time of the Assumption, I begin noticing the grasses which are in flower. And beginning in Lammas, it's the berries. I thought I would feature some of the local berries over the next few days.

Yew berries. They're not actually berries but arils. I first learned about them a few years ago when I noticed a flock of bird twittering in a yew hedge. They stripped the tree within an hour, gorging on the berries.

I just finished taking a class with master teacher Priscilla Long. I was working on an essay on foraging and one of my fellow writers was writing about a patch of dirt in her yard that is next to a yew tree. She mentioned the "poisonous looking" berries on the tree. I told her they were not--I think it's just the fluorescent pink and the gelatinous texture that makes people think they're poisonous.

Then I got a couple of books on edible plants from the library and learned the seeds (there are hard brown seeds inside those bright pink fruits) are quite poisonous. I was so relieved to see Chris in class the next week and hastened to let her know she should not eat the berries. Apparently birds can eat them because they don't digest the seeds but simply poop them out, thus helping the yew to reproduce.

The yew's reputation for toxicity is well-deserved. Both bark and leaves are poisonous.