Marking Yahrzeit and a bit of life

 

Yesterday was my mother's 9th Yahrziet.  My sisters marked that day last month. This is a leap year with two months of Adar. As with many points of Jewish law, the issue of when to mark the Yahrzeit is up for debate, do we mark it on the first or on the second Adar. One of the things that I love about Jewish law is that  it is possible to hold two opposite ideas in our heads at the same time. 

The rabbis that my sisters consulted suggested that they observe the anniversary of  our mother's death during the first Adar. my rabbi told me to observe the day on the second Adar. My mother's death came after a particularly hard Boston winter with snowstorm after snowstorm including one that took place the night before her funeral. One of my sisters remarked that she liked marking the Yahrzeit while it was still wintery in Boston.

Our mother's funeral had to be delayed by a couple of days because of all of the snow. The path to the grave for each and every funeral had to be hand dug so that mourners could bury their dead. there are just so many hours that the team could shovel those paths by hand so the funerals got backed up. My fervent with was that my mother's funeral not take place on Purim.  My mother's funeral took place the day before Purim. 

The punch line to the multiple yahrzeits is that my father marked day that could possibly count as a birthday ( Hebrew and English daysm his birth Torah portion, the anniversary of his bar mitzvah...and I may have forgotten one or two.)

Now going forward into eternity my father has one Yahrzeit and my mother has two. I suspect that they would both get a chuckle out of that one.

I went to attend afternoon services at the Orthodox synagogue a couple of blocks away. I have no photos of the interior but it always makes me feel like I am inside of a beautifully decorated cake.

On my walk home I was rewarded by beautiful bits of  dusky sky.

So often the clouds over New Jersey look like a mountainscape to me.

Perhaps because my mother's name was ציפורה, bird My eye was caught by birds hanging out on the street lamps earlier in the day

We and the birds live parallel lives in this landscape, mostly not particularly intersecting with one another.

I have also been working away on restoring and mending Judith's old tallit.

At the same time, I am beginning work on her new tallit. We ordered the silk from one of my favorite vendors. The silk isn't quite the colors we had seen on my screen.

Each of them is just different enough that what we assume would hang out together in harmony is having a not very pleasant conversation.  I suppose that I just could have returned everything to the vendor. But finding This beautiful quality silk tussah at a a reasonable price at all isn't easy because the textile mills in India got hit really hard by Covid and are struggling to get up to pre pandemic production levels.

I know that by adding another element into this color conversation I can get all of these colors to sing in harmony.

Some hand dyed silk will make all of the colors play nicely with one another. I have spent the last couple of work sessions cutting strips of silk to size and edging them. I think that this will work but I have a couple of other tricks up my sleeves in case I am wrong.

And now a completely different topic. Any of you who are regular readers here know that my husband and I love what we call "Supermarket Tourism" which is either visiting supermarkets when we are in a different country or visiting ethnic markets both here in New York and in our travels.

We are likely to purchase a product just to see what it is like.  Sometimes that product is a hit. That's how we discovered gochujang, Korean sweet/hot pepper paste. Mixed with molasses there is nothing better on turkey. A bit of gochujang can make anything pallid delicious.

The corn shaped and sweet potato shaped ice creams from H-Mart,the Korean grocery, are both a little weird but oddly delicious. 

Rye bread soda from the Russian grocery is worth trying but not worth buying again. We have fallen in love with Russian tarragon soda that looks like Lestoil and has an earthy flavor that has grown on us. You just never know where these culinary adventures will take you.

Our last visit to Netcost, the Russian market, we purchased a bag of frozen berries.

We didn't know what they were, but figured they were worth a try. The other day I opened up the package and put some over a hand full of almonds and heated them up in the microwave. My usual breakfast is frozen fruit and nuts cooked for a few minutes.

Well. I was in for a surprise. The berries, as I have since learned are buckthorn, that have all sorts of excellent medicinal qualities are a beautiful yellow color and have large soft seeds. The berry is intensely bitter and tart. Have you ever eaten unsweetened cranberries? Buckthorn is much more bitter and much more tart. Cranberries have a bit of bitterness. Buckthorn is really bitter. I did finish my bowl of buckthorn. I hope that all of the health benefits outweigh all of the terrible things about buckthorn. My husband laughed at me as he watched me eat the bowl of bitter sour berries.

Well, I guess we won't be buying buckthorn again.

I'm ending with this photo of the  new building just north of our house. My feelings about this building are mixed to say the least. It does punctuate the sky in a dramatic way.