About the Elephant in all of our Living Rooms

All of us are currently living with an elephant in our living rooms. But like the proverbial elephant in the room, I am going to avoid speaking about it until a little further into this post.

I was about to make some gifts for some people. I decided to go shopping in my stash. I am glad I did. I found a length ( about three yards and change ) of a beautiful wool boucle with a windowpane plaid. I had purchased the yardage at my local thrift. I think that the contents of the home of a serious sewer were donated to the thrift. There were several lengths of wonderful wool. The black boucle and a heavy white wool coating that may one day become high Holiday Totan mantles came home with me. I left behind a wonderful magenta and green boucle.

I found the price tag on the wool. It cost me less than two subway rides but retail would cost anywhere from $35-$150 per yard. I cut just over two yards of the fabric and then cut the long length in half.

Probably thirty years ago a nice salesman at a fancy fabric store explained to me how to make a man's scarf out of 5/8th of a yard of fabric. I remember listening to his directions carefully despite knowing that his excellent directions were beyond my then sewing abilities.

There are many things that I can never remember. Oddly enough, sewing directions even from decades ago all get neatly filed in my brain ready to be taken out whenever needed. The nice salesman's voice kept running through my head as I made two identical generously proportioned scarves that are large enough to wear as shawls.

I remembered to trim off a couple of inches of selvedge so I could fringe the shawl ends.

I used my specialized tool to pick out the weft threads.

Yes, that is just a big old needle.

Here is the fringed result.

This is a scarf to wear wrapped around your coat to give you an extra layer of warmth and a little bit of style.

I am now kicking myself for not buying more of the beautiful wools when I had the opportunity. I assume that the wools all went to good homes and are giving their new owners lots of joy.

And now for the elephant.Covid. All of us and by this I mean every person on the planet had hoped, had assumed that by now things would get better. After the horrible late winter and early spring of 2020, the months of lockdown, the months of endless ambulance sirens, of deaths, and of fear....now that we had the vaccines and the boosters we hoped could once again get back to sort of normal.

There are grandmothers who were hoping to be reunited with their grandchildren, parents hoping to visit their children on the opposite coast, musicians hoping to earn a regular living once again. For several months we had the start of life actually cautiously returning to normal-ish. Well, we have all had to pause again.

It's hard. Things aren't as terrifying as they were in April of 2020. But now we all had plans, and hopes. My youngest was supposed to perform with his band. We were planning to host a party for dear friends. For us, none of these plans were huge but we were anticipating re-tasting the sweetness of being among others. We were starting to think about possibly traveling, maybe not in a plane yet but still, that was in the future.

So many of the people I care about are feeling deeply sad right now. We all have to figure out our next steps after facing our communal disappointments. I can't tell any of you exactly how to shift your heads around this unpleasant reality.

As for me,

I baked an excellent loaf of pumpernickel bread with a lovely crust that breaks into shards when you bite into it. It solves none of our problems but it was comforting to eat with a bowl of hot soup for dinner.

I wish all of you the emotional strength and resistance to figure out how to get through the waves of disappointments we all have to plow through in the next while.

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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