Seeing ( and making) the Forest and the Trees

First of all, to everyone who has been sending me messages to delete my data from 23andMe, the task has been done. Clearly so many people were trying to do the same thing that the site was/is terribly slow and glitchy. It took two days to get my code for two step sign in. Once I got into the site it took several minutes for each page to load. So thank you and the task is completed.

At long last,

the forest stripe is stitched.

I clearly still have to trim all of the loose threads.

I love drawing with the sewing machine. I guess it is the textile equivalent of carving with a chainsaw. This is 45 inches of forest all stitched freehand. I suppose I could have sketched out the design on the back of the fabric but i liked figuring out each tree individually and adding bits of color to trees as I worked my way across the fabric.

As I worked I thought about Nini's photos

and I also thought about my own memories of my first conscious trip to Halifax when I was five and the looming dark evergreens that lined the roads from the airport to town. They were so dark and looming and so different from the evergreens i knew from home.

It is soon time to create some other bits of the Nova Scotia coast.

But before I begin on those tasks my home is beginning to pivot towards Passover. I have been pre-cleaning getting ready for the big switch on Tuesday. Until then I have been working on getting rid of Chametz.

I started this bag of yeast right after Passover last year. The bag lives in my freezer along with

this jar which I keep refilling from the big bag of yeast. I know that normal people will go through such a jar in a year or in many months, but this is a house where bread baking takes place on the regular.

This is the second loaf that I have baked since Shabbat. Since you asked it is mostly white flour but enhanced with lots of coarse cornmeal and rye. It has a really nice texture and a wonderful crust. I ate a slice with our dinner last night. Most of the bread eating is done by my husband.

My mother always looked forward to the blooming of the pussywillow and the forsythia. She used to send us to the local woods to cut branches so she could arrange them in a ceramic vase on our kitchen table. Those early blooms always felt like a promise of springtime. Like my mother seeing the forsythia bloom always makes me happy. I guess it is the springtime equivalent of the first snow of the year.

The photo was taken looking into the empty lot a block from my apartment.

After I took the photo of the blooming forsythia I noticed the glimpse of my building with the green cornice. I quote from one of my children's favorite books from their childhood, "Hello House!".

The other day I got my hearing aids tuned up. Today I get my eyes checked so I will be functioning among the hearing and seeing once again.

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today. Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things. When we were at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

sarah in nyc

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