Ropography 1.31.24
Maybe one day you will go there with me, and we'll dance underneath the ceiba tree
Inputs
The View from Breast Pocket Mountain by Karen Hill Anton: Autobiography of KHA who ended up on BPM in rural Japan raising several children in a farmhouse with no running water in the seventies after traveling around living crunchily (there’s a cameo by the founder of Erewhon). That’s a glib way of describing the loneliness and grief she experiences at times, but she does dispatch very efficiently, for example, the murders of her brother and father and the experience of being for several decades probably the only Black woman around probably for a radius of several hundred miles. This is the kind of book that triggers discomfiting musings about how my life would have been turned out if I had been willing to tolerate more risk and absence of creature comfort. My biggest complaint is the number of times she says some variation on “And while I was at the culty dojo/cooking in a Danish castle/driving from Holland to Turkey, the baby just played quietly in the corner so it worked out great!” which, ok lady. But then she talked about the trials of teaching a toddler to use a precarious squat toilet while she was pregnant and all was forgiven.
Output
My grandmother was in the hospital so I went to Florida to visit her. I wheeled her down to her physical therapy appointment, where she and the therapist batted a balloon back and forth to each other. I recognized the exercise as one a gym teacher had recommended to my parents when I was in kindergarten because of my sub-par hand-eye coordination. When we weren’t with my grandmother, my mom and I spent most of our time surveying the contents of the sewing room- the domain of a woman who had been retired for thirty years and had spent a lot of that time trying just about any pursuit involving fiber and a sharp tool. And she was born during the Depression, which meant that in addition to the stuff she bought, she snipped buttons, zippers, and linings from discarded garments to use later, cut up shirts to make quilts, and could clearly not bear to get rid of a half-finished project even when it turned out that punch-needle was just not ever going to be her thing (guess what I brought home!).
I recognized a trait that is already starting to creep up on me big time: the insidious delusion that anything can be transformed into something useful and therefore, nothing needs to be thrown away. If you identify more with the latter half of arts and crafts than the former, maybe that impulse is inevitable: this is just a pile of matter, but I will make it something vaguely useful. I will have something to show for those hours. The promise of those hours was what I saw when I looked at her closet full of neatly folded fat quarters, and what I imagine my kids will see when they eventually have to deal with my far more unruly stash.
Condiment Corner
No condiments at the moment but I do want to give a shoutout to this product that I tried at my grandparents’ house. If you’re not familiar with chevda it’s sort of a spicy/savory South Asian trail mix with nuts and crunchy bits usually made out of puffed rice or chickpea flour. There are a ton of variations but now that I know there’s a version with potato chips, will I ever want any other kind? My grandfather can be a little particular, which manifested in the detailed instructions I was given with regards to:
Preliminary consideration of what I was going to do with the uneaten portion after I opened it
My suggestion of a chip clip was apparently too ridiculous to acknowledge
Choosing the appropriate storage container
Using a funnel to decant into said container
Moving closer to the sink so I could sweep away any spillage
I almost said “I won’t spill” but restrained myself, and was I ever glad because spill in fact I did
But you know what? I get it. It’s too good to waste!