Laundry Line Divine

“What is to give light must endure burning.”
~Viktor Frankl

I am slowly putting this page back together again after a bumpy few days.
Life is good and full to the brim. This website it under a bit of reconstruction.
If you would like to subscribe, to keep up with Laundry Line news, please fill out the tiny box up there on the right.

I will doing dancing to this song while you do. If all you see is a blank space here, hit your ‘refresh’ button up there on your navigation bar and a YouTube video will appear.

Here are the much awaited winners of the ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’ blog drawing:

Corey Sprague and Lynn Amaral won a copy of my Rice Pudding recipe.
Lisa Millen and Angela Vuagniaux won a copy of Janet Elsbach’s brownie recipe.
Lorrin Krouss won an original letterpress print, first edition on archival paper, by me at PRESS as part of
the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers events.
And Peggy Barrett won Alana Chernila‘s The Homemade Pantry.

Congratulations people!
I am so honored to get to mail you these gifts.

Here is Peggy with hers. She is a long time reader of LLD. Thank you Peggy!

Look forward to more here on the Laundry Line. I have some new friends here, Jennifer Boire- who’s poem was posted here the other day and Miranda Hersey Helin, who’s Studio Mothers site feels like my home away from home here on the internet. And I still have some wonderful photos of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. I do have a new persona of ‘girl journalist’. Without the training, but armed with my camera and tiny notebook, I love to document events I am part of, which give me results like these.

Thank you for being here.
Love,
S

Look at what the light did now from Rochelle Schieck on Vimeo.

Love looking at the light with you,
S

Gingerbread Cookies
a month of cherishing

My senses are flooded in December. Advent rolls in on a wreath of candles. My daughter was the Advent Angel at her former kindergarten, the scent of pine in her hair, a gently laid hand on the backs of tiny kinderchildren illumined by the candle flame they carefully dip towards to light their own candles.

Hanukah. We did not even have the right candles to fit our Menorah this year and we still managed to light our table well enough to see the latkes and pass the sour cream.

Now, nearly 2 weeks to Christmas and I have no choice but to give you this recipe that was Mom’s classic cookie. She and my Aunt Ruth, as you can see from the notes, baked it when I was a tiny kid in Chicago. Then, as I got older, I helped in the baking. Mom showed me how to press lightly on the baking cookie to make an indent with my finger. If it did not dent the cookie, they were firm enough to be done.

I have played with this recipe over the years. When Ben was a baby and I had lots of time to bake, I fooled around with the flour ratio…whole wheat, pastry flour or not, all unbleached to my current favorite of all whole-wheat pastry flour. Then the molasses, of which my family loves the flavor, so blackstrap, is the most satisfying choice there. And, gives me the feeling of some nutrition in these delicious cookies that I could eat for every meal.

During those baby years of Ben’s, Mom always sent cookies or arrived with dough, if she visited during hunting season on her own. I loved her cookies next to mine; she used a lot more flour in rolling them out, and usually did not color her icing. I would let her cookies sit over the holidays so I could enjoy Mom’s box all to myself with Ben in January.

There is a medicinal quality to these cookies. Ben used to be plagued with whatever stomach bug was wintering in our neighborhood. I could tell he had rounded the mending bend when he would dig in to the gingerbread cookie tin and sit with his back against the outside door, which was cool- his face still warm with fever and flushed…sucking on a gingie, hard and clove scented. Somewhere there is a photo of this. Maybe I can find it for you.

Then, there is the cultural aspect of these cookies. My Mother-in-law was Jewish. She had never, ever, made or even eaten gingerbread cookies. In her years here in Massachusetts, we would save the decorating of these cookies to Christmas day afternoon and no one enjoyed this more than Grandma Nettie. They were a sweet Christmas introduction for Nettie.

I gratefully submit to you this recipe, originally from Betty Crocker herself, issued in the early 1960’s. My notes are there as are Mom’s.
Here it is written out to print for yourself.

Gingerbread Cookies
Yield 2 ½ dozen or so fat cookies
Add one extra cup of flour if you plan to cut gingerbread men

Mix thoroughly:

1/3-cup soft unsalted butter
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 ½ cup blackstrap molasses

Stir in 2/3-cup cold water

Sift together and stir in 6 cups sifted whole-wheat pastry flour
(This means sift it in to a bowl, and then measure out level cupfuls)

I like to sift the spices in to the flour before I go further here.

2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. allspice
1 tsp. ginger
1 tsp. ground cloves
1 tsp. cinnamon

When your dry ingredients are all sifted and happy, mix in the wet stuff.
Chill the dough for an hour or more…like a week.
Pre-heat over to 350 degrees. Prepare your cookie sheets.
Roll out on to a floured surface. Flour your rolling pin and hands.
Have your cutters all washed and ready to go here.
Cut away. Place well apart on a lightly buttered or Silpat surface cookie sheet.
Bake until, when touched lightly with finger, no imprint remains.

Let cool on a rack.

Meanwhile, mix up the easiest icing:

Blend
1 cup sifted confectioner’s sugar
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp. vanilla or lemon or peppermint extract. I like lemon.
1 tsp water or cream or milk to smooth icing. Add a tiny bit more if needed.

Ice the cookies and decorate with cut up dried fruits and all those lavish sweet things I never concede to buy, except when Grandma Nettie was around, we always had because she loved them so much.

I hope this weekend is sweet for you.
People keep telling me that this holiday will be hard without Mom.
It has been a number of years since Mom has mailed us boxes with all sorts of gifts and cookies all wrapped and lovely.
But, without her on the planet, I will continue to wrap my days with memories of favorite things Mom instilled in me.

These cookies are sublime with a cup of coffee and my sisters at a table.
Also enjoyable with tea, a dark tea with no fancy flavor.
Lunchbox-able, if you have any left when school starts.
And, in the shape of a farmer, delight my young friend who lives on a farm in Sheffield.

Love, S

I can’t resist a smile from my Mom on this chilly day.

Listening to India Arie singing about learning to live without you, I know she is singing about a lover, but verses like this tap the well of my tears and here I am, weeping. My oral surgeon’s office called this morning to see how I am doing. Do I even remember I had surgery one month ago, with all I have lived these last weeks? I’d forgotten. And when the receptionist named April asked how I am doing, I could not speak for a few moments, which was not because of having my root canal repaired.

Songs, since they are so associated with Mom, are an easy wellhead of rivers of tears. My heart is shattered with sadness. Despite all the words I have ever said to any one experiencing a death, how the person is all around you, what, like a cloud of dust? Or the deceased’s presence encircles you with light….all those thoughts are empty when I think of Mom and the cavernous opening her passing leaves in my days.

I spent the weekend quiet at Kripalu. I needed to stop talking, stop trying to chat, stop thinking about meals and the accoutrement of a busy family. I slid in to a single room, something I have never done before, to be solo and silent for 2 days. I even ate in the silent dining room.

What I uncovered in this silence was a deeply comforting revelation assisted by my hero, Rumi. The poem for the day, in my handy, Daily Rumi, edited by Coleman Barks, was this:

Silkworms

The hurt you embrace becomes joy.
Call it to your arms where it can change.

A silkworm eating leaves makes a cocoon.
Each of us weaves a chamber of leaves and sticks.

Silkworms begin to truly exist
when they disappear inside that room.

Without legs, we fly.

When I stop speaking, this poem will close,
and open it’s silent wings…

Rumi

Sometimes a poem can penetrate me. This one penetrated and dragged my heart out of the well of sadness I’d sunk in to as I hid inside my grief. It has given me a map for my way out. Or more accurately, for the way in.

It is this:

I embrace the hurt of loosing Mom; I carry it close to my chest, next to my beating heart. I take it in to my veins and begin to learn to live with it. I let it fuel this writing and so much of my reflections, actions and creativity. I begin to know, intimately, what it is to mourn my Mom. Learning to live without her means harvesting my memories and taking stock of those gifts. This for me is grief changing to joy.

Then I begin to dine on these memories, I digest them and begin to weave a chamber for myself. I have repeatedly said that Mom has turned to golden light. She had a glow about her, my friend David mentioned that her light is not gone from this world. Looking out on the landscape of fall in the Berkshires, I am surrounded by golden light! Mom, thank you for dying now, when I can be sheltered in this arbor of alchemical wonder, botanic and spiritual all at once. Thank you Mom! So, as Rumi says, I weave my cocoon, My Golden Chamber of Angels.

Which brings me round back to the period of time, now 2 years ago, when I was about to have a hysterectomy, a complete removal of my uterus, one ovary and my cervix. Yeah. It was a big deal for me. I was newly 50 years at that moment.

I took time then to mine the gold for me in that period too and began to call my uterus my “Golden Chamber of Angels”, for here was where my sweet babies had cuddled years before. There, carried in my own mother’s womb, my own femaleness had nurtured. I was all about celebrating the Sacred Release of my Golden Chamber of Angels. I traveled to see my Mom for Mother’s Day that year, just weeks before my surgery. I sat with her, my hand on her belly, thanking her for carrying me to birth. Thanking her for my Golden Chamber.

So, you can imagine my surprise when I discover myself back at that metaphor, back in my Golden Chamber. I will not edit this because I want you to know that losing my uterus was a huge release of potential that rather than dissipating, expanded to encompass my whole being. My creativity exploded. And, now, here, at this time of loss, surrounded by the light of my Mom’s being, I am firmly seated, safely existing in this constructed womb.

Where, I fly. My heart beats. I open and close my wings, I turn, as silkworms do in the cocoon state, I turn and become something that takes flight.

Thank you for reading me here.
I love your comments.
Love and Light, S

Post Script: First, ‘dewormer’ is an official word. My wordywordsmith sister Julia sweetly pointed that out. Sorry for the bad reputation I was giving you Mom.
PPS: It was my sister Becky who suggested “Edelweiss” for the memorial service, not Elsa. Sorry Beck.
PPPS: See? I do love your comments and I even take them to heart. xoxoxo S