2024 in Review: Blogging and a Bit More

This year started off wonderfully with family time on a visit with my younger sister and her partner, who live in Friday Harbor. Back from that refreshing break, I shifted into high gear for the legislative session, which always brings work with tight timelines that requires some deep thought for bill analysis. I love that part of my job so that's not a complaint, simply a reality. My sweetheart and I celebrated our 17th date-a-versary (anniversary of our first date), which happens to fall on the wedding anniversary of my parents. They were married for 68 years so I consider that fortuitous.

In late December 2023 I spent some time writing blog posts and setting them up to publish over the course of January so I could get off to a good start. Having some kind of recurring theme keeps me in the writing habit and for this year I took a run at having a round-up each month of poems about that month. I'll list the top 10 posts of the year below and we'll both know whether poetry draws as many readers as recipes.

January: Started the year off with A Year of Poems: January. Last year I wrote about my Grandma Humphrey's rocker and how I hoped to give it a new life; a local furniture pro took it on and gave me The Rocker, Refinished. Over on Bike Style I did my final post that revisited old posts with Riding Down Memory Lane: January. I didn't rely solely on those pre-planned posts, though; I captured a sunny-day ride to testify to the Senate Transportation Committee in First Ride of 2024. Slow Down captured some thoughts I've come to with time, age, and insight into what works for me. Reruns: January Posts Worth Revisiting was another version of reviewing old posts, both from this blog and from Bike Style.

Unfortunately, ride #2 of 2024 didn't end with me as happy as I'd felt from ride #1. A crash on my bike thanks to black ice in a shady spot resulted in a sprained knee and the ensuing thoughts, Thank Heavens for Kind Strangers and Transit. 

We spent the first 2-1/2 months living in a couple of different rentals while remodeling work continued on our house. Before my crash this meant walks to the park from a different starting point, a new perspective. 

February: Then it was time for A Year of Poems; February. Time sidelined on the sofa icing my sprained knee meant time to read through old drafts and decide if I wanted to finish any. That brought me back to Shared Streets: A Vision, based on a post I wrote years ago when we lived in Spokane. The transit story continued with my experience getting to a meeting in No Thanks to No Sidewalks! Time for another visit to the archives with Reruns: February Posts Worth Revisiting. My habit of collecting poems on various themes as I encounter them set me up to publish How We Get Where We're Going: Transportation Poems, the latest in a growing collection of poems about transportation over on Bike Style Life. Anyone who works with me knows I pay a lot of attention to the words we use. That led me to write Seeing and other Ways of Knowing, to prompt reexamination of common metaphors. 

March: As a word lover of course I own plenty of bike books; I've published a couple of lists of recommendations over on Bike Style and added another one in celebration of Women's History Month in March, Bike Books I Recommend: Women on Wheels. Even more word-nerd love thanks to my poetry reading came out in A Year of Poems: March. My trips down memory lane continued in Reruns: March Posts Worth Revisiting. March also brought A Thrilling Night when I received the Woman of the Year award from the Puget Sound chapter of WTS (Women in Transportation Seminar) International; such a joy to be there with my team and many colleagues! I take a run at #30DaysOfBiking more often than not and I've found some public accountability via social media helps me stick with it so I wrote Just Ride. Every Day. It's That Simple. 

A huge milestone: The remodeling of our kitchen and laundry and a bunch of other elements of the house wrapped up at last and we moved back in. It's wonderful! This is the last house we intend to buy and we're making it ours.

April: The first day of April brought not one but two posts on poetry, no foolin': A Year of Poems: April and Celebrate National Poetry Month. I celebrated the general niceness of people I encounter while riding my bike in Go Ahead, Make My Day and went back to more past posts in Reruns: April Posts Worth Revisiting. I celebrated Earth Day two ways: Earth Day Market Ride 2024 and Earth Day Poems for Every Day. And I quite happily wrapped up a successful biking April, as I described in How #30DaysOfBiking Rolled in 2024.

May: May is Bike Everywhere Month, which strangely I ended up not writing about directly as a thing to pay attention to. Maybe next year; after all, it does get plenty of national press. I added to my poetry collection with A Year of Poems: May and again rode down memory lane in Reruns: May Posts Worth Revisiting. While not a post about Bike Everywhere Month, Bike/Life Lessons Learned does share some reflections on what riding a bike has meant to me.

I got to attend the WTS International conference since I'd won the chapter award. Hehe in New Orleans, it was a fantastic exodus: seeing so many smart, talented women transportation professionals in one room. 

May ended with the fulfillment of a dream I've had since high school: seeing and hearing Billy Joel live in concert. So fabulous to be with an entire packed stadium, people of all ages singing along to every song. 

June: June got rolling with A Year of Poems: June and another collection over on Bike Style, Still Walking, More Poetry. Seems to me just about any topic can lend itself to a poetry collection if you're so inclined, and I'm inclined. I have plenty more collections started that will appear someday in the future when I feel as if I have enough to make it worth hitting Publish. My trips down Blog Memory Lane continued with Reruns: June Posts Worth Revisiting. In an echo of my posts for winter solstice in 2022 and 2023, I wrote Summer Solstice Readings to mark that longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. I decided one of my older posts was worth a refresh and updated If Electric Hand Dryers Were Bicycles.

I made it to Spokane for a celebration of another section of the Children of the Sun Trail being completed. My WSDOT colleagues, city leaders and the neighborhood celebrated with poetry, music, and of course riding along the trail. 

July: A Year of Poems: July opened the seventh month of the year. After fielding a request from one of my daughters to share our family's beloved bran muffin recipe with a friend, I realized I couldn't find an online version of the recipe I have committed to memory thanks to so many batches over the years so I put it out there for others to find in Classic All-Bran/Bran Buds Muffin Recipe: Best Bran Muffins Ever. I wrapped up my visits to the past with Reruns: July Posts Worth Revisiting.

In July I got to travel to Baltimore for a conference and heard the wonderful Veronica Davis speak, the author of Inclusive Transportation*. I added on a weekend with one of my brothers and his wife and we had a great couple of days of exploring museums and riding a small ferry around the Inner Harbor. If you ever go to Baltimore, know that the Museum of Visionary Arts is well worth the visit and they have a fabulous art museum. I appreciated the easy light rail connection from the airport and transit around town.

 

August: By now you can guess that A Year of Poems: August published the first day of that month. I had enough gardening chores and other activities beyond work that this was the only post for August. Sometime in late July or August my Bike Style blog went down. With all I had going on it was going to take a while to work through the technical issues and restore it so I let it go for a while.

September: A Year of Poems: September led into a busy month of harvesting and preserving—so much preserving that I ended up with highly painful hand cramps at one point from all the slicing, dicing, peeling, coring, prepping, lifting and toting. I captured my various searches for recipes in a series of posts that tell you what I did every weekend: Future Marmalade, Pears, Pears, Pears!, Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes!, Zucchini Tomato Salsa (Everyone Needs Salsa, or, What to Do with a Really Giant Zucchini), and Apples, Apples, Apples!. When I created my own version of a recipe I included it in the post along with links to the ones I made or was inspired by. This way next year after all those chutneys have had a chance to mellow and I find out which ones really turned out great I can repeat the winners and tweak the also-rans.

I also got the chance to return to my former hometown of Spokane for a conference and go on walking and biking tours of sons of the wonderful additions to the local networks. 

October: A Year of Poems: October took me into fall. The gardening and harvesting work wasn't quite done and I shared some inspiration in Keep It Growing: Poems about Gardening. As the nights got colder and the days got shorter I finally gave in and dealt with Green Tomatoes. So Many Green Tomatoes. 

October held travel I didn't have time to write about while it was happening, from a national transportation safety summit in Houston (really bad transit scenario: no light rail to the airport, a bus ride would take over an hour to the downtown area) to a great first-ever trip to Switzerland for an international committee meeting on transportation in urban and periurban (surburban) areas. I didn't have time to do a lot of touristing but it was wonderful to experience a country where trains, trams, buses, bike lanes, and sidewalks form truly connected networks for a carfree life. My sweetheart did the hard work of figuring out how to get the Bike Style site up and running and restored a backup from last year. Yay! I'd hate to lose all that writing and the memories I captured of so many rides and so much learning.

November: A Year of Poems: November kicked off my birthday month. I got back into bike blogging with Riding in the Rain, Wheeling through Winter: Bike Gear DEFGs (to follow the ABCs) as a long-overdue follow-up to one of my early posts on the ABCs of winter riding. I added to the growing collection of poetry roundups with A Dusty Collection: Poems about Dust, regular everyday dust and stardust too. I realized that with all my "canstravaganza" blogging I hadn't yet captured the recipe I used to make a batch of blackberry apple chutney. I closed out the month with Thanks + Giving: a bit of deconstruction of the word into its constituent parts and some poetry on each of the two terms.

December: With A Year of Poems: December I completed my poetic journey through the months of the year. In anticipation of the legislative session and thinking of the things I've learned along the way in advocacy and public policy, I published Actions You Can Take for Active Transportation: Homework. People tend not to think much about the state legislature until it's in session but some preparation now will help people get ready and be more effective. Listening to an episode of 99% Invisible while I walked in my neighborhood inspired How Many Minutes (by Bike) Is Your Neighborhood?. This year marks my third year of composing a post in honor of Winter Solstice 2024 with links to readings, a playlist, and my posts of the last couple of years.

We spent a really wonderful weekend with my younger sister and her husband at Point Ruston and Tacoma: Delicious food at several local restaurants, a visit to the LeMay Car Museum (yes, I know, unusual destination for me; they do have a few bicycles and did you know several auto manufacturers started as bicycle manufacturers?), and a walk on the pathway by the water, where quotations from Dune are inscribed on the walk because author Frank Herbert was born in Tacoma. 

Toward the end of the year we had a delightful, relaxed couple of days with my beloved sister-in-law snacking and watching Christmas movies, then headed home. I wrapped up the year with an unfortunate bout of some respiratory crud that made me miss the days of masking and no viral stuff being passed around. I get my flu and COVID boosters every time I'm supposed to but they can't catch everything. 

Thanks to being sick and ensconced on the sofa with generic DayQuil and cough drops, all those things I'd planned to get to before the end of 2024 will just have to wait for 2025. That's fine because calendars are a human-made imaginary line that doesn't relate to anything happening on the earth or in the sky. Tomorrow is always tomorrow.

Top Posts in 2024

1. Spokane Blogs: Help Build the List (2010). Note that I haven't maintained this list in over a dozen years since I moved away from Spokane. It's the power of lists on the internet at work, and older posts build up  more Google-Juice.
2. Is there such a thing as a lowercase Nazi? (2012). This one is a reflection on the power of words, inspired in part by "Seinfeld" and in part by my time representing the legislative district that housed neo-Nazis for a while.
3. Classic All-Bran/Bran Buds Muffin Recipe: Best Bran Muffins Ever (2024). Glad to find this delicious recipe, a family tradition, near the top of the charts.
4. I'm part Dutch, you know: What do YOU wear to bike? (2010). One of the shortest posts I've ever written, and an example of the kind of writing that led to me starting a whole separate bike blog.
5. Walking a Path (2021). My generally serendipitous approach to life, summed up well in this print by Oxherd Boy that I ended up buying for my office.
6. Kindness Matters (2018). Very happy to find this one in the top ten as well. This is one I'd include on a list entitled "posts I wish were in the top ten" if it weren't here under its own steam.
7. Paying It Forward: Why I Vote YES for Kids and Schools (2010). Not sure why a post about a school election from 2010 is so popular, but there it is.
8. Thank you for the gift of friendship: Goodbye, Christianne (2010). A tribute to a dear friend who died that year.
9. Seeing and other Ways of Knowing (2024). Thoughts on visual metaphors and how they leave people out.
10. Apples, Apples, Apples! (2024). Some of this year's harvesting, preserving, and canning.

*You should support, cherish and thank your local bookstore if you have one. Same goes for your local library. If you don’t have easy access, you can use the Bookshop affiliate link to order Veronica's book. If I ever get any commission through such links I'll donate the proceeds to organizations that support equity and accessible active transportation.

Winter Solstice 2024

In the Northern Hemisphere where I live, winter clamps down cold and dark. Wet, too, now that I'm in western Washington, and if it isn't actually raining it's cloudy or overcast. But then, that last condition is pretty common from October to June, according to a very detailed description of Olympia's weather.

Winter here is more like a long, gray slog than a magical season. It isn't like what we used to experience in Spokane with icicles hanging from the eaves, snow deep enough to build snow caves and enough on the ground to have a good snowball tussle when our kids were younger. 

And yet, and yet.... We have the turn of the seasons. We have the transition from the heat of summer to autumn's cool temperatures and blazing leaves. We have the closing down, the retreat into waiting and stewarding our energies, that comes when the light grows shorter and the darkness longer, longer, until we reach the longest night. The earth has tilted away from Sol, which rides low in the sky.

My ancestry is primarily from England and northwestern Europe, followed by Scotland, Germanic Europe, Wales, Denmark, and a bit of Ireland. In other words, my ancestors lived even farther north than my current latitude. My genes have survived through many, many long, dark winters. I'm good at this.

This is a quiet season, but not a dead one. As poet M.K. Creel writes in "Before the Longest Night" we can "Take inventory of what is becoming—". Seeds lie underground awaiting the signals of temperature and light to awaken, insects go dormant, trees deepen their root systems because they're not expending energy on leaves, blossoms, fruits and nuts. We human animals can learn from this and take this time to rest and restore.

Taking care of ourselves, taking care of others, matters more now than ever. The winter solstice can serve as a reminder to reflect on time passing, on our lives we live moment by moment, day by day, on tending our interior as well as our exterior selves. It can serve as our personal New Year's Eve, the pause between one season and the next.

How might you care for your body today? You might feed it lovingly with good food. You might move it around, gently or vigorously, indoors in the warmth or outside in the cold. How about a walk or a bike ride? Years ago when we lived in snowy Spokane I wrote A Solstice Post: Gifts I Give Myself by Riding in the Winter. Perhaps this is the day you commit or recommit to trying a practice like yoga. You might give the body you inhabit every day a nice, long nap or a hot bath.

For your brain or your heart, maybe you'd like poetry about the winter solstice that I collected a couple of years ago.

How about your senses? Last year for the winter solstice I compiled a selection of ways you can experience the winter solstice through your senses (and more poems). I'll add the Winter Solstice playlist on Spotify from the All We Can Save Project.

For your spirit, I offer these readings, excerpted here with a link to the complete piece:

"Winter Solstice"

Ray McNeice

Late December grinds on down.

The sky stops, slate on slate,

scatters a cold light of snow

across a field of brittle weeds.

Interview with Ross Gay and reflections from Carrie Newcomer and Parker Palmer on The Growing Edge newsletter and podcast.

"Thank You"
Ross Gay

If you find yourself half naked

and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,

again, the earth's great, sonorous moan that says

you are the air of the now and gone, that says

all you love will turn to dust,

and will meet you there, do not

raise your fist. 

"On the Winter Solstice"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Let’s reach toward each other

with gazes gentle

as midwinter sun—

with a seeing so generous

we can’t help but turn

toward the other

to let ourselves be seen.

"Winter Solstice"

Hilda Morely

It is from

the moon this cold travels

It is

the light of the moon that causes

this night reflecting distance in its own

light so coldly

(from one side of

the earth to the other)

A brief excerpt from a long and wonderful essay, "Burn Something Today"

Nina McLaughlin

"What now? Now it’s now it’s now it’s now and we are burning. Light the fire. We move through flames. We clutch hope in our palm like a tiny burning globe of snow. It’s painful, the flame of the snow of the hope that you will be okay and I will be okay and we will be okay, we will be here to see another season, to see, second by second, the light return to the world."

A beautiful gentle blessing from William Ayot on Philip Carr-Gomm's site, reproduced here in its entirety:

May the stars in their circling comfort and guide you.
May the great oak give you strength in troubled times.
May your hurts be healed and your soul be deepened
And in turning towards home, may you know you belong.

A Year of Poems: December

As a child perhaps you, like me, made snow angels: Lying on our backs, scooping snow away with arms and legs to leave the scalloped shapes. The trick was to get up, still within the angel's shape, then jump as far as you could to get away from it without leaving tracks. But then you realized you'd left tracks to the spot where you lay down in the cold white blanket. You marked the inviting whiteness the minute you entered it.

Several of the poems about December describe the tracks left by animals in snowfall, each poet choosing their own way in. Others describe the gritty gray of an urban setting or the unseasonable warmth of a California winter for someone raised in Vermont.

For this collection I resisted the easy choices: poems about Christmas or New Year's Eve. The winter solstice, as an astronomical fact independent of human calendars or belief systems, is worth its own consideration, as my 2022 winter solstice and 2023 winter solstice posts attest.

If these leave you cold and shivering you can always hop over to my collection of poems about soup for a warm-up.

"Winter Afternoon, Early December" by Tom Montag

The grey lid has been
lifted off the day.

Sun spills everywhere—
on snow, on house, on

me at the window.

"A December Day" by Sara Teasdale

Dawn turned on her purple pillow,
And late, late came the winter day;
Snow was curved to the boughs of the willow,
The sunless world was white and grey.

"December Thaw" by Milton Burgh

For three days the warm sun has been pulling
The silver wedges from the ground,
Until now it is soft and free.

"December" by Sarah Freligh

On the fire escape, one
stupid petunia still blooms,

"Chicago and December" by W.S. Di Piero

Vague fatigued promise hangs
in the low darkened sky
when bunched scrawny starlings
rattle up from trees,
switchback and snag
like tossed rags dressing
the bare wintering branches,
black-on-black shining,

"December in Los Angeles" by Timothy Steele

The tulip bulbs rest darkly in the fridge
To get the winter they can't get outside;
The drought and warm winds alter and abridge
The season till it almost seems denied.

"December" by Christopher Cranch

Like agate stones upon earth’s frozen breast,
       The little pools of ice lie round and still;
While sullen clouds shut downward east and west
       In marble ridges stretched from hill to hill.

"Deciphering the Alphabet" by Francine Sterle

Winter advances
leaving its white tracks
bounding over the hills
I climb each December
to get to the river
where velvety shrews,
voles and squirrels
crisscross in the snow,

"December Moon" by May Sarton

How much can come, how much can go
When the December moon is bright,
What worlds of play we'll never know
Sleeping away the cold white night
After a fall of snow.

"December Notes" by Nancy McCleery

The backyard is one white sheet
Where we read in the bird tracks

The songs we hear. Delicate
Sparrow, heavier cardinal,

"Pupil" by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I invite in December’s chill and the vast blue sky

and the dark before the moon and the moon.

I invite in the braille of rabbit tracks

and I invite the rabbits that made them.

A Year of Poems

• A Year of Poems: January
• A Year of Poems: February
• A Year of Poems: March 
• A Year of Poems: April
• A Year of Poems: May
• A Year of Poems: June
• A Year of Poems: July
• A Year of Poems: August
• A Year of Poems: September
• A Year of Poems: October
• A Year of Poems: November

Thanks + Giving

I visit grateful.org as part of my morning poetry + coffee routine, so I don't wait for the fourth Thursday in November to think about gratitude. That said, I am extra thankful for the four-day weekend. 

With the history I've learned in recent years that they didn't teach me in school I think more about Indigenous people than about Pilgrims. Friday is Native American Heritage Day now, making Thursday Native American Heritage Day Eve. I share Indigenous writers year round on social media and make an extra point of doing so around this time of year.

The quotation from Thich Nhat Hanh below and the graphic I borrowed from Rebecca Solnit's post on BlueSky point to something else we may forget when we give thanks: How is whatever we're thankful for possible? Whose hands and which resources were used to create what we appreciate? Have we thanked them directly? What's going to happen to the waste created in all these processes? (Go watch Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy on Netflix if you're wondering about that.)

"This food is the gift of the whole universe: the earth, the sky and much hard work. May we live in a way that makes us worthy to receive it. May we transform our own unskilled states of mind and learn to eat with moderation. May we take only foods that nourish us and prevent illness. We accept this food so that we may realize the path of understanding and love."
—Thich Nhat Hanh

Yes, yes, it's still an occasion for food celebrations. With my mom and her delicious pies long gone there's no big clan gathering for this meal. Each of my siblings has their own practices and nuclear families to think about and we live far away from each other. Now the "gathering" consists of sharing photos of turkey prep and pie decor.

A few years ago when we still had four kids in their teens/20s who would be with us for Thanksgiving I changed my approach from “must produce amazing spread all at once” to “Favorites Four-Day Weekend.” I asked everyone their favorite foods, especially ones you might associate with Thanksgiving traditions but that wasn’t a requirement. I committed to making at least one favorite for everyone over the course of the weekend and laid in lots of cheese, crackers, and other noshes. 

Each day I cooked what I felt like cooking from that list, never attempting to have a full meal available at an appointed time. We might have pie in the morning and dressing for lunch along with whatever else people felt like snacking on. Meals weren’t scheduled; people ate when they were hungry.

It was fabulous.

I love to cook but the timing and variety are killers for one person to produce. My mom had a systematic approach that extended to planning which serving dish and utensil would be used for each mandatory food item. I’ve done it occasionally, I’m capable of it, but that’s not fun for me any more.

Now those kids are far-flung adults and my husband has a very restrictive diet for health reasons. On these long weekends I cook what I feel like cooking over the four days to continue the tradition and have video calls with the kids, whom we visit at other times of year when it isn’t such a travel nightmare.

Also fabulous.

I'm breaking the words "thanks" and "giving" apart and sharing some poems on the topics. I like the older-sounding "giving thanks" as a phrase so I'll start with giving. As always, I'm excerpting the poems and not necessarily providing the opening lines. But first:

Giving Ideas

• American Indian College Fund
• Potlatch Fund
• Laurel Rubin Farm Worker Justice Project, Latino Community Fund
• Northwest Immigrant Rights Project
• Refugee Women's Alliance
• Cesar Chavez Foundation

Giving

"When Giving Is All We Have"
Alberto Rios

We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

"A Prayer Among Friends"
John Daniel

Among other wonders of our lives, we are alive
with one another, we walk here
in the light of this unlikely world
that isn't ours for long.
May we spend generously
the time we are given.
May we enact our responsibilities
as thoroughly as we enjoy
our pleasures. 

"On Giving"
Kahlil Gibran

There are those who give little of the much which they have—and they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome.
And there are those who have little and give it all.
These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.

Thanks

I remember one Thanksgiving when my quiet dad, sitting down for our very secular feast, pulled a "Dear Abby" clipping out of his pocket and shared this reading as grace. This was so out of character that we all sat quiet for a few moments after he stopped reading. It's by Pauline Phillips, AKA Abigail Van Buren, and is posted every year by her daughter Jeanne Phillips who now writes the Dear Abby columns.

Oh, Heavenly Father,
We thank Thee for food and remember the hungry.
We thank Thee for health and remember the sick.
We thank Thee for friends and remember the friendless.
We thank Thee for freedom and remember the enslaved.
May these remembrances stir us to service.
That Thy gifts to us may be used for others.

Amen.

Then there's the gratitude that comes from awareness of the details.

"Thanksgiving"
Tim Nolan

Thanks for the Italian chestnuts—with their
tough shells—the smooth chocolaty
skin of them—thanks for the boiling water—

itself a miracle and a mystery—
thanks for the seasoned sauce pan
and the old wooden spoon—and all

the neglected instruments in the drawer—

Feeling grateful takes many forms in the body, as Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer describes.

"A Partial List of Gratefulnesses"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

There’s the giddy gratefulness that sparkles
like morning sun on the river and the peaceful
gratefulness that soothes like warm wind.
There’s the gratefulness that almost hurts
as it squeezes tight around the heart,
the gratefulness that arrives quiet as cat’s paws
in the night, and the gratefulness that thrums
and swirls in us as if we’re a sky full of starlings.

"To Say Nothing but Thank You"
Jeanne Lohman

All day I try to say nothing but thank you,
breathe the syllables in and out with every step I
take through the rooms of my house and outside into
a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden
where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

"Thanks" 
W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

"Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude"
Ross Gay

thank you what in us rackets glad
what gladrackets us;

and thank you, too, this knuckleheaded heart, this pelican heart,
this gap-toothed heart flinging open its gaudy maw
to the sky, 

And finally, the ultimate gratitude for the world we're a part of and all who came before, everything that makes our lives possible.

"Remember"
Joy Harjo

"Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth."

"I’m going to eat some turkey. But not in honor of some mythic coming together of Natives and colonizers. Because it’s delicious. The fight will still be there after that turkey, and I’ll be ready."
—Adrienne Keene, citizen of Cherokee Nation, founder of Native Appropriations

"The path to reconciliation starts with honest acknowledgement of our past, with open eyes and open hearts for a better future." 
—Matika Wilbur, Swinomish and Tulalip, photographer

Related Reading

• Whose lands are you living on? Native Lands map
• Thanksgiving is an act, not a menu
• In Which I Give Thanks for Biking
• Giving Thanks for Bicycles
• "We Are Still Here": Indigenous-Focused Bicycle Programs

Blackberry Apple Chutney Recipe

Invasive so-called Himalayan blackberries clamber over much of western Washington's terrain. Dubbed "Himalayan" by Luther Burbank as a marketing move even though they probably originated in Armenia, these blackberries aren't the thornless variety he had hoped to breed by a long shot. Not even close; when I pick them along the roads near my house I wear long sleeves, some hiking pants with a smooth finish, and a glove on one hand to push the vines back.

Like my gleaned apples, they're free for the taking so I end up thinking up things to do with them. 

• Fruit leather: I have a batch waiting in the freezer for me to decide whether I'm turning them into fruit leather along with plums I got from a Buy Nothing offer.
• Flavored vinegar: I soaked a big batch in white wine vinegar to make this for gift-giving. I used a sugar-free blackberry vinegar recipe, although other recipes involving sugar would be fine if you'd like to start with a sweeter base. I didn't take the longer-term route of extracting and then fermenting blackberry juice to turn it into vinegar. I hung onto the soaked blackberries and used a bunch of them in the chutney, which provided vinegary quality. Now pink, with much of their color along with flavor transferred into the vinegar, a few of them wait in the freezer for a future something or other.
• Blackberry chutney: If you've read my other recipe roundups about tomatoes, apples, pears, zucchini, and green tomatoes, you know I love me some chutney! So of course I had to riff on a few recipes I found. This turned out not to be as tangy as most of my other chutneys, more along the lines of a complex jam than anything. Well worth putting on a cracker with some cheese though

Blackberry Chutney Recipes

Where I started for inspiration, considering proportions of ingredients, whether or not it included apples (most did and that seemed like a good medium to carry the blackberry flavor), and the spices used:

• BBC Apple, Blackberry and Cinnamon Chutney
• Larder Love's Easy Blackberry (Bramble) Chutney
• Wellington Bakehouse Blackberry Relish: No apples
• Feast Glorious Feast Blackberry Chutney
• Foraged Farmacy Spiced Blackberry Chutney

I had a lot of blackberries even accounting for the ones waiting for fruit leather so this recipe uses large quantities. All the reference recipes use about a third of the quantities here. I scaled up and checked the spicing levels along the way.

Blackberry Apple Chutney

• Blackberries: 1,300 grams (mine were soaked in vinegar; refer to note with the vinegar amount)
• Apples: ~415 grams, approximately 3-4 apples depending on size, diced small
• Onion (red or yellow): 400 grams, diced small
• Brown sugar (white okay; brown sugar gives a caramel element): 450 grams
• Apple cider or any other vinegar with 5% acidity: At a guesstimate, 350 grams; taste and adjust after it's all cooked together. I used blackberries soaked in vinegar so the vinegar amount is based on proportions from the source recipes
• Garlic: 3 cloves, diced or crushed
• Ground cumin: 1/2 t.
• Crushed red pepper: 1/2 t.
• Fine salt: 1 t.
• Cinnamon: 1 t.
• Cloves: 1/4 t.
• Optional: Zest of 1-2 oranges

Yield: 4 half-pints and 8 quarter-pints

Prepare jars for canning following best practices such as those on the National Center for Home Food Preservation or Food in Jars.

Dice the onions and start them cooking at a gentle heat. After five minutes add the apples, blackberries, and spices and cook until the fruit is soft. Depending on the apples this will run around 15-20 minutes. Add the vinegar and sugar. Stir the sugar in and allow it to dissolve. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and cook for about 20 minutes, stirring often. At about 10 minutes taste and adjust sweet/sour balance by adding a bit more vinegar or sugar to your taste. Cook until you can drag a wooden spoon through the base of the chutney and leave a clear trail in the pan before the thickening liquid fills the line back in. 

Ladle into sterilized jars and process in a hot water bath for 15 minutes. For best flavors, wait at least two weeks for the chutney to mature before using.

A Dusty Collection: Poems about Dust

I'm not the world's most meticulous housekeeper. If I look at a dusty surface and feel guilt for not dusting more often, I'm missing the chance to think of it, or of myself, as a collection of protozoa, ocean salt, stardust. Made up of so many tiniest fragments of ourselves and our lives, dust is unavoidable, metaphorical, even astronomical in these poems. Put down that duster and read a while.

"The Dust Speaks" by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I am the memory
of everywhere you’ve been
and I am the memory
of what you do
and I come from places
you’ll never go.

"Dusting" by Marilyn Nelson

Thank you for these tiny
particles of ocean salt,
pearl-necklace viruses,
winged protozoans:
for the infinite,
intricate shapes
of submicroscopic
living things

“The Joy of Sweeping” by Maya Stein

the settling of dust
or its disturbance,
the silence
or the song.

“View with a Grain of Sand” by Wislawa Szymborska

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

"Belonging" by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

we are the dust, the dust that hopes,
a rising of dust, a pitch of dust
the dust that dances in the light   

"Porcelain Musician in a Child's Bedroom" by Brenda Hillman

dust, the noun & verb that is
   a thing & isn’t, drifted, its dreamy
abstract qualities sent
         off with a cloth till nothing
    said you had to or you didn’t,—

"Memo to Self Re: Meditation" by Ron Stone

Slowly learn the lesson about who you are:
dust of the earth, dust of a star.
The stuff that is you has always been here
fulfilling its purpose in losing its Self.

Until you.

"In Any Event" by Dorianne Laux

Nothing is gone forever.
If we came from dust
and will return to dust
then we can find our way
into anything.

"Stardust" by Kay Ryan

something like
sugar grains on
something like
metal, but with
none of the chill.
It’s hard to explain.

"Saltwater" by Finn Butler

Everyone who terrifies you is 65% water.
And everyone you love is made of stardust,

A Year of Poems: November

I have a particular reason for appreciating November: It's my birthday month. According to my mother I was supposed to be an October baby but I hung in there an extra month. In a fun twist of fate that meant I ended up being born on Election Day, and then when I was elected for the first time to the Idaho state legislature it was on my birthday. Quite a big present from the voters of Kootenai County, Idaho!

November has come to mean more to me beyond my birthday and Election Day, in particular becoming the birthday month for my first baby, Eldest Daughter. 

As the poems below describe, for all of us in the Northern Hemisphere it's the month when days really feel shorter, sun really rises later, autumn really does turn around and hand us into the cold arms of the waiting winter.

"Monday" by Cindy Gregg

On this first day of November
it is cold as a cave,
the sky the color
of neutral third parties.

"Why You Should Go Outside at 4:40 am in November" by Rosemary Royston

Because it is more silent than you can imagine
and above you the moon is a nickel
glinting from the unseen sun,
surrounded by broken crystals.

"Enough" by Jeffrey Harrison

It’s a gift, this cloudless November morning

warm enough for you to walk without a jacket

along your favorite path.

"Praise Song" by Barbara Crooker

Praise the light of late November,

the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.

Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;

though they are clothed in night, they do not

despair. Praise what little there's left:

"November for Beginners" by Rita Dove
(Bonus for me: The site where I found this posted it on my birthday)

Snow would be the easy

way out—that softening
sky like a sigh of relief
at finally being allowed
to yield. No dice.

"The Crazy Woman" by Gwendolyn Brooks

I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I'll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.

"Like Coins, November" by Elizabeth Klise Von Zerneck

We drove past late fall fields as flat and cold
as sheets of tin and, in the distance, trees

were tossed like coins against the sky. Stunned gold
and bronze, oaks, maples stood in twos and threes:

some copper bright, a few dull brown and, now
and then, the shock of one so steeled with frost

it glittered like a dime. 

"November" by Maggie Dietz

Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge

On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster
Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin,
Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.

"November" by Ben Howard

These last warm days are telling a funny story
whose punchline never comes. You could put your hand
on the iron railing of your neighbor's steps
and feel, in its frigid core, the steadiness
of winter.

"November" by Lucien Stark

 First frost, the blue spruce
against my window's shagged, 
and the sky is sombering. I

draw close to the fire, inward
with all that breathes.

"November" by Jay du Von

And the earth was heavy, the roads
soft with yellow mud and lined with coming
and going. Always the days were shorter
and now the evening came far on the road
to meet us.

A Year of Poems

• A Year of Poems: January
• A Year of Poems: February
• A Year of Poems: March 
• A Year of Poems: April
• A Year of Poems: May
• A Year of Poems: June
• A Year of Poems: July
• A Year of Poems: August
• A Year of Poems: September
• A Year of Poems: October

Green Tomatoes. So Many Green Tomatoes.

Twenty-two and a half pounds, to be precise (ish). That's how many green tomatoes I picked on Oct. 19 on a rainy day at the end of the growing season. Around 12-1/2 pounds of bigger tomatoes of various varieties from Roma to San Marzano to Black Prince to an heirloom yellow one, about 10 pounds of cherry and grape tomatoes. These plants have been prolific all summer long and I've already processed a lot of tomatoes.

What to do, what to do. 

A search yielded a number of options:

• Fermented Green Tomatoes: A comment on Reddit/Canning suggested these might resemble green olives, I assume in appearance rather than flavor.
• Pickled Green Tomatoes: Small Batch Pickled Green Tomatoes by Food in Jars, Pickled Green Tomatoes by Creative Canning with several spice options; Crunchy Pickled Green Tomatoes by Brooklyn Farm Girl, a quick pickle version that will need to be kept refrigerated so nope, not good for lots and lots of tomatoes; Pickled Sweet Green Tomatoes by National Center for Home Food Preservation
• Green Tomato/Tomatillo Chutney from Brooklyn Farm Girl: I still have around 3 gallons of tomatillos from last October's final harvest and this would be a way of using them up. But do I really want to add any volume at all to 22-1/2 pounds of green tomatoes?!?!
• Relish: Not my favorite condiment 
• Salsa and some other ideas, but that salsa recipe reads a lot like salsa verde and I still have some of that left from last year along with all those tomatilloes
• Cake?! : Not a recipe for long-term preservation, but interesting
• Green Tomato Ketchup: I know from experience this will take for-absolutely-ever to cook down but I have so many tomatoes I'm tempted to try it out, and maybe it could work in a slow cooker. Several recipe options: Mamta Gupta's Green Tomato Ketchup; Green Tomato Ketchup by From the Larder (which calls for British Mixed Spice and she kindly includes the recipe for that; it sounds great for oatmeal, quick breads, baking, other uses); a 1940s Green Tomato Recipe from Gourmet; a Quebec Green Tomato Recipe posted on Reddit that says to soak the tomatoes and celery in salted water overnight so that would mean planning ahead and a quantity of "20-25 green tomatoes" with no reference to either weight or volume so that's a bit vague; a Green Tomato Recipe on Spruce Eats; and then there's the seasoning mix suggested in my edition of The Joy of Cooking, copyright 1975 (which matters because they changed things for more recent editions) for Tomato Catsup that could presumably work in a green tomato ketchup, although I'm surprised they didn't have a recipe involving green tomatoes. Looking for more versions of the Quebecois recipe, I learned that for some people, particularly in the American South, a reference to Green Tomato Ketchup labels something that's more of a chutney or even chow-chow, which I made last year with some of my green tomatoes and which includes cabbage as an ingredient. If I go this route I'm going to make a smooth ketchup/catsup more similar to the red kind in texture.
• Dehydrated Green Tomatoes: I just loaned out my dehydrator to a friend who needs to process 50-60 pounds of chantarelles so this won't work for me, but something to bear in mind for the future. Drying Green Tomatoes by Healthy Canning mentions reconstituting them as “Pomodori verdi secchi in olio di oliva”, which sounds good. Good discussion on Garden Web of drying green tomatoes and other produce with some tips and ideas for use. Video on slicing them with a mandoline and making "chips" with a bit of sugar and salt.
• I could throw them in the freezer until I decide what to do with them, or can them plain for future reincarnation mid-winter when I want to fill the house with the scents of summer.

Last year I'd made green tomato chutney and that was delicious. I have several kinds of chutneys already, although I'm never opposed to having more on hand. Thanks to Mamta Gupta  I learned that the word "chutney" comes from the Hindi word Chatni, "a tangy and spicy sauce/paste that makes you smack your lips." Yes indeedy.

Lip-smackin' goodness, here I come. The list of recipes I worked from to develop mine below, with a note on whether it includes a specific element beyond green tomatoes and onions:

• Green Tomato Chutney with apples, Food.com
• Green Tomato Chutney with apples, Blue Dot Living
• Green Tomato Chutney with apples and green bell peppers, Culinaria Eugenius (wildlly optimistic cook time here; don't believe it)
• Green Tomato Chutney, Food in Jars
• Spicy Heirloom Tomato Chutney recipe, Food in Jars
•  Green Tomato Chutney, Swasthi's Recipes
• Green Tomato Recipe, Mamta's Kitchen
• Easy Green Tomato Chutney, Lovely Greens

Handy tools: My food processor with the sharp blade serves as one of the key tools for dealing with this many tomatoes and associated ingredients. I picked this little trick up from a ripe tomato chutney recipe and realized I'd been doing a ton of unnecessary hand slicing and dicing for things destined to go into a pan and break down as they cooked. Integrity in hand-crafted artisanal slicing and dicing truly not required.

Another trick I came up with on my own: Using my strawberry capping tool to nip the stems off the tops of tomatoes. I don't core tomatoes and the little bit of skin at the top where the stem attached softens in cooking so I'm not worried about making sure I get every last bit out.

Spices: Most of the recipes I found had fairly low key (boring) spice combinations, not nearly as inspiring as the ones for chutneys made with ripe tomatoes and other ingredients. Dried spices don't affect canning safety so I looked up a few chutney recipes like this Green Tomato Chutney from Swasthi's Recipes (not designed for canning) and this Green Tomato Recipe from Mamta's Kitchen that provided a lot more inspiration. The Food in Jars recipe was also seasoned in a more interesting way than others, one of which just offered up chili powder and salt. Excuse me, do you know where chutneys come from and what makes them delicious??

This looks like a long list of spices and it is. My garam masala was a bit old so I reinforced it with some of the spices that are typical ingredients in this tasty spice blend. You could certainly start with just the seasonings from any of the recipes linked above and decide for yourself what to increase or add.

Fruit: For some reason, several of the recipes didn't call for raisins, which I 100% associate with chutney. Food.com was the exception here. I like to use dried cranberries for some or all of these, and this time I also went for some dried dates. (Yes, home botanists, tomato is also a fruit.)

Quantities and ratios: Quantities can be adjusted based on tomatoes as the core ingredient, bearing in mind that bigger quantities take a lot longer to cook down. 

The ratios were very different between a couple of sources. For comparison:

• Food.com: Tomatoes 10 lbs., Apples 3 lbs., Onions 3 lbs., Raisins 1 lb., Brown Sugar 1.5 lbs, Vinegar 1 qt.
• Culinaria Eugenius adaptation of Ball: Tomatoes 16 cups, Apples 16 cups, Onions 3 medium (resulting in maybe ~3 cups?), Bell Peppers 3 medium (~3 cups?), Brown Sugar 6 cups, Vinegar 4 cups
• Food in Jars: Tomatoes 6 cups, Onions 1-1/4 cups, Brown Sugar 1-1/2 cups, Vinegar 1 cup
• Lovely Greens: Tomatoes 1 kg. or ~6 cups, Onion 1 kg or ~6 cups, Brown Sugar 500 grams or ~2.5 cups, Vinegar 1 liter or ~1 qt.

Clearly a somewhat flexible set of proportions for the tomatoes, onions, and apples. Smashing all these together I decided this would have to be a taste-and-adjust on proportions to get the right level of tanginess across tomatoes/onions/apples/peppers, building on the ones from Food in Jars and Culinaria Eugenius for sugar and vinegar. 

Sugar and vinegar: Sugar levels are mostly for flavor since this isn't a jam in search of pectin setting qualities, vinegar is for food safety, and both of the recipes I relied on have a ratio of sugar 1.5 to vinegar 1. I started with 4 cups of vinegar, 4 cups of sugar, so I could taste and adjust the sweetness factor.

I also had to deal with the quantities I had available to me. For apples I used some of those I canned earlier this year.

Green Tomato Apple Chutney Recipe

Read this first: Start this recipe early in the day when you have time to tend it and stir often. 

Read this too: Wear an oven mitt when you stir the pot. The mixture will tend to splatter but you can't keep a lid on it or it won't cook down the way it needs to. Hot tomato is very very hot and will burn you. It may look tame, then when you start to stir and loosen the solids the liquid part will suddenly boil up like wild and throw hot tomato droplets at you. Every. Time. You. Stir. Ask me how I know.

This volume completely filled my biggest stockpot. It's a lot.

• Tomatoes: 16 cups chopped
• This was the output from around 6 pounds, whirled briefly in a food processor to create a diced size or chopped by hand if you want to do this the hard way. No need to remove skins.
• Onions: ~7 cups, finely chopped
• For me this was output from 4 truly giant yellow onions, close to 3 pounds, also whirled in the food processor but not until reduced to onion paste.
• Apples: 4 cups home-canned with the juice they were canned in
• No need to chop as these will fall apart into applesauce. If you start with whole apples then yes, reduce to dice. Your call on whether to peel or not.
• Green bell peppers: 4 cups finely chopped, approx. 1-1/2 pounds, output from 3 really giant ones
• You could substitute hotter peppers for some of this if that meets with your family's Scoville settings
• Dried fruits: 2 cups, chopped if they're big to create pieces the size of raisins
• I used dried cranberries and dates
• Optional: Crystallized ginger: 1/2 cup, chopped fine, mostly because I had some left from earlier recipes like my version of Chai Ginger Apple Butter
• Optional: 2-4 T. chopped mild to hot peppers
• Vinegar: 4 cups of a vinegar with 5% acidity
• I used 2 cups each of red wine vinegar and white wine vinegar; you could use apple cider vinegar
• Brown sugar: 4-1/2 cups
• Taste and adjust when the volume has cooked down a bit. I started with 4 cups and added the additional 1/2 cup later.
• Garlic: 8 cloves, crushed, grated, or chopped fine
• Feel free to add more!
• Salt: 2 T.
• Garam masala: 1-1/2 T.
• Curry powder: 2-1/2 T.
• Powdered hot mustard: 1-1/2 T.
• Ground black pepper: 2 t.
• Crushed red pepper: 1-1/2 t.
• Adjust this amount for the heat level you want
• Cumin: 1 t.
• Powdered ginger: 1/2 t.
• Cinnamon: 1/2 t.
• Coriander: 1/2 t.
• Cardamom: 1/2 t.
• Cayenne pepper: Pinch or two, maybe a dash
• Nutmeg: Dash

Stir all ingredients together in a large non-reactive stockpot, or divide between two smaller pots so it can cook down a bit more quickly. 

Bring to a boil, stirring frequently, then reduce to a simmer. Cook, uncovered, stirring often, at a simmer over medium-low heat 2-3 hours or more, or until it has reduced by approximately half. Wear that oven mitt to stir! Be sure to stir completely from the bottom and scrape across the entire bottom of the pot to avoid any scorching of the ingredients.

It will thicken and eventually be scoopable, more like jam than soup. If you get tired of waiting for that phase and it's reasonably thick with a fair amount of the liquid cooked off, no one can stop you from canning it at that stage. I don't think mine had truly reduced by half when I was four hours or more into the cook time but it was late and I was tired so into the canner it went.

When you start seeing it thickening enough that you think this marathon may finally end, prep for hot water canning. Get your canning kettle started toward boiling, sterilize the jars in an oven at 250 degrees for at least 10 minutes, and warm the jar lids in hot water. For more details on hot water bath canning consult the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Process quarter-pints and half-pints 15 minutes and let sit for 5 in the rack above the hot water before removing to a baking rack covered with a towel.

This was my first time trying out one-piece canning lids, following instructions from Food in Jars. They look so nice! And they pinged just fine, some of them before I even took the jars out of the canning kettle, which is always a good sign of lid quality. I got these from Fillmore Container and they're going to become my standard. Much more attractive when I gift a jar to someone, with more utility.

My yield from quantities above: 16 half-pints, 14 quarter-pints. 

That's probably enough chutney considering I already have zucchini chutney, apple chutney, blackberry chutney, and a couple of jars of last year's green tomato chutney on hand. I'll eat it with cheese on crackers, spread it on sandwiches, maybe put it on scrambled eggs.

As I said, lip smackin'!

And I still have pounds and pounds of green tomatoes.

I like putting a tiny illustration representing the contents on my canning jar labels. This helps me find things at a glance when I'm looking at my garage shelves packed with food in jars.

I like putting a tiny illustration representing the contents on my canning jar labels. This helps me find things at a glance when I'm looking at my garage shelves packed with food in jars.