This time of year around the Holidays I think we all feel a sense of nostalgia, and silently ache for days long ago when all the family gathered together in preparation of the holidays. My mom draped with apron and handmade potholders would cook in the kitchen days on end, dancing a Polish Polka to Brenda Lees’, vinyl LP album, Rocking Around the Christmas Tree, blasted away on the consol stereo.
I was 27 years old when she passed away so there were very few phone calls dialed asking, “Ma, how do I make your chocolate mayonnaise cake?”
My father bestowed me her cookbooks filled with magazine clippings, ruffled inside between pages were hand written notes–on how to pickle and can a garden harvest. Each tattered page now tinted through age, stained of flavored extract and dressing like a work of art, a story to tell.
All these years later I find the cookbooks a blessed treasure, like a warm hug comforting to hold. Sadly, many old recipe books have become a lost art.
Especially, today in a chaotic hurried life we run out to the grocery store grab a packaged box full of all the needed ingredients, purchasing frozen pie shells, or foolhardy visit the local pastry shop filling up on artificial flavor, after all there is no messy cleanup.
Stay well my friend and have a Blessed Happy New Year!
I just completed my 2011 calendar project, now it’s time to look forward into 2011, and come up with a magical cinquain and let it happen no make it happen.
My 2011 cinquain will be ‘Growth.’
Growth
expansive creative
spiritually, abundantly, authentically
deep within my soul
ripening
I’ve been working on ” A Seasons Change,” a photography illustrated contemporary Haiku book, for a while now. Completing this project will be one of my creative goals for 2011. A personal leap as well. By putting myself out there I will be held accountable to – get ‘r done!
If you have a cinquain for 2011 please share it here in the comments so we can support and encourage one another in the up coming year!
Stay well my friend and have a warm blessed weekend!
Cold dark and dreary outside, but inside is all a glow.
The year of 2010 has been a healing journey for me. A self-discovery of acceptance, forgiveness, and letting go of things I can’t amend in order to move forward.
I let the artist out after she had painted herself in to a depression that had consumed and pretty much pulverized her world. I use the pronoun she here, because I am no longer that girl.
After an inward cleansing of looking deeper in to my life and partaking in Susannah Conway’s e-course, (I highly recommend)‘Unravelling’, I peeled back the layers, petal by petal and just let it all go. I can only change myself, and the way I feel, or react to oppressive events that life sometime slaps you up side the head with.
I may be a work in progress, but today, I am what I am and that’s enough for me.
**Inspired by Reverb#10
Stay well my friend!
