At the top of the map there, you can see I-20 running west to east. If you kept going west, a little out of the section here, you'd get to Dallas. If you kept going east on I-20, you'd get to Shreveport, Louisiana, a little faster than you'd get to Dallas from Tyler. 
I said I’d be making a sheath for the knife you can see a couple of posts back. I did it. I wanted it lean and black and shiny and elegant, with nothing on it that would distract from the beautiful handle. There are technical flaws in it. It’s the first I’ve made in six months, and there are things I’ve forgotten. The places where the stitches are out of a straight line are all I see when I look at it. (Yeah, I know.) It's got a loop on the back that'll fit any belt that's not more than 2" wide. I made it for a right-hander, but if you wanted to buy it and you're left-handed, I'd make another one.
The thing I got really right is the FIT. You put a welt between the front and back, where they’re sewn together. It gives space inside for the knife. It also holds the knife. The inside of the welt, that you can’t see, is cut to match the line of the blade. You can turn this one upside-down, hold it by the tip so you’re not touching the blade, and it doesn’t slip a bit. It still slides in and out easily when you’re doing it on purpose. But it’s never gonna slip out by accident and get lost in the woods anywhere.
“Therefore are thou happy.” -- Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet, telling Romeo what he had to be happy about when he was pining over Rosaline. One of my favourite quotations.
Here, in this little spot in
What makes the plan bearable in the long term is that we both see it as a gift from God. The plan is; the ability not just to stick with it but to love it is; the food is. And we both have a sense that the planning and preparation and eating is devotional, or a spiritual discipline.
That picture up there is a salad I’ve been making at least twice a week for the last month. Often more. It’s a cucumber and tomato raita. You start by putting a big paper towel in a sieve over a bowl and dumping a quart of plain yoghurt (we use whole milk yoghurt) into it, and letting it drain in the fridge for anywhere from two to 24 hours. Peel, seed and dice a cucumber into pieces about the size of a dried chickpea. Toss it with a little salt, and put it in the sieve over the bowl (take the yoghurt out first) and let it sit while you do the rest of the stuff. Cut up three Roma tomatoes into bits the same size as the cucumber. Chop up the leaves from half a bunch of cilantro. Mix the tomatoes and cilantro and yoghurt up with a teaspoon or so of roasted, ground cumin seeds (coffee grinder works great for that). Squeeze handsful of the cucumbers as hard as you can in your fist over the sink, mix them in with all the other stuff. Put it in the fridge for an hour or so if you can stand to wait that long, and VIOLA! You have a stringed instrument, and a great salad. Serves 2. It tastes good, it’s good for us, and I always feel like the food is really CLEAN and there’s something more than physical nourishment going on.
We talked about it this afternoon. I said I’d be happy to make one today, but I used the last of the cucumbers and tomatoes when I made it yesterday. Bob went to the store and got 2 cucumbers, a lot of tomatoes and some more cilantro, cuz we’ve got a full quart of yoghurt. When he came back he said it was too bad we didn’t have a Cuisinart or something, to chop up the vegetables. I don’t think it’s that much trouble to do the vegetables, and I said so.
But I thought about it some more while I made the salad just now, and we talked about it for a couple of minutes. Once, when I was living elsewhere with other people, I was dicing up vegetables for soup, and The Voice in my head said, “The gifts of God for the people of God,” just like the priest does about the bread and wine at communion. I realized it was true – I was preparing gifts from God – potatoes, carrots, onions – for people of God – my family. Made the daily task holy. I have that same sense, making the raita. I said tonight, “Preparing this specific food is always spiritual for me. I wouldn’t use a machine for the vegetables if we had one.”
There’s more than that to it. The salad is in a bowl that my friend Deborah Doran made – it’s beautiful, and it was a trick getting it 1,300 miles in one piece. That picture above is a set of knives and choppers that are now hanging on the kitchen wall. (And a dragon that appeared in the sawblade after the knives were cut out of it. Dragons appear unexpectedly like that – it’s their way.) I use the big, round-bladed one with the green linen micarta handle in the top right corner to chop up the cilantro, or garlic, ginger and/or jalapenos, if that’s what I’m doing. It just rocks on the board and cuts them up perfectly. I was using the smaller rounded knife on the bottom for the cucumbers and tomatoes. And below here is a picture of some things on the cutting board. I used that wooden spatula to mix the salad.
Those things are important, because we made them. Bob made those knives. Every once in a while we drive around to the junk barns and stores around here and buy up old, round sawmill blades, or cross-cut saw blades, and once a disc off a harrow. Then he cuts out blades with a plasma cutter, anneals and hardens them, makes the handles. See the handles? Those are all made of micarta, which is layers of fabric held together with a resin. The dark green one was a purchased block of Micarta. The multicoloured ones: we made that block of micarta last spring. Layered different coloured fabrics that we soaked one at a time in Bondo, and clamped them between boards that have pinto beans glued onto them, and that’s what makes the swirls. It’s messy and fun and you have to work fast and don’t know what you’ll get.
That spatula, the wooden one, is one I made a few weeks ago. The first in a series. I like wooden cooking utensils and there aren’t any here, but there’s lots of wood, and lots of tools to make things with. Lots of time too, and an attitude that you don’t know what you like doing or are good at unless you try it. It’s hard to screw up here. The second one of these I made is much too thin, and it will inevitably break – but I’m using it til it does, and being careful with it, and next time I won’t make the same mistake. Next time, I’m making one with a slot in the middle, and I’m going to mail it to Roo in
All of this makes making the raita more special, and more about the wonders of the world. Something to be grateful for. You’ll have to make the intuitive leap on that one – the best I can tell you about why, is, it puts love into the task. It makes the salad taste better. It makes the food preparation an act of love and devotion and spiritual gift, rather than drudgery.
It doesn’t only apply to cooking. Attitude is everything. Vacuuming the carpets and cleaning the toilet can be drudgery. It’s not though, when I’m aware that I’m making the place and life more peaceful and pleasant, for myself or for someone else. It’s a way to bring a little serenity, maybe even joy, into the world. Doesn’t even matter if someone else notices that it’s been done: they’ll notice the effect. I used to cook stews and breads and things that cooked a long time and smelled good, on very snowy days, because it made the house a better place to walk into, as soon as someone walked in the door. One of you reading this hangs her clothes on the line instead of using the dryer – it’s an act of good stewardship of the Creation, and so a spiritual discipline too.
I’ve started a new one today. I knit, for joy, and for serenity, and because I can’t smoke cigarettes or eat potato chips or ice cream while I do it. Well, that was why I started – now it’s mostly the joy and serenity. In the last year, I’ve started using (and paying a little extra for) wooden knitting needles. You have to go out of the way to get them. Most stores that have knitting needles at all have plastic or aluminum ones. And I’m less and less able to use acrylic yarns – I don’t like the feel. I use wool, alpaca, mohair, cotton, bamboo yarns. I’ve got a project in my head that I’ll want silk for. They feel better to me. I bought those needles, but I can and will make myself needles here. Bob made me a set of four short fat ones last year for something I made. The picture below is wool that came today, to make mittens and a hat for someone I like a lot. She doesn’t know, and won’t til she gets them. The wool is special – it’ll go in the washer with cold water, but not in the dryer. It’s all very fine – 7.5 stitches in an inch. That’s a lot of knitting. But I’ll think of her while I’m doing it, and say some prayers for her and other people; and be grateful for her and the project itself. The days are still fine enough in east
That’s a picture of my Dad and his dog, Jake, taken in the summer of 2008. We were in his back yard. The garden was a little weedy – it had really been my stepmother’s province, and she died in April 2007. Dad didn’t have the heart or the knees to take it on himself. He missed her very much. There were landscape gardeners, who came and did the lawns and the flower beds, but it’s not the same.
It’s hard to know what to say. Dad graduated from university the year I was born. He went to teacher’s college, and his first year teaching high school physics (and sometimes math) was the year I started kindergarten. 1960-61. There was me and my sister by then; my brother was born in the spring of 1962. Dad taught at
In 1967, Dad started teaching in the Halton Board of Education, at
I went to
Dad loved teaching, and he’d meet people in the supermarket and places, who’d ask if he remembered them – they’d been in his class in 1973. I used to take a taxi to church in Dundas, and one of the regular Sunday mornings had had my Dad for high school physics in Dundas, so in the first half of the ‘60’s, and he always asked about him.
Last year I was talking to my sister about something one day, and whether I’d tell Dad about it. She said, “He’s been worried about you since the minute he knew you were going to be born. You might as well give him something to worry about.”
This past summer, I was unemployed and income-less, in
Dad has had liver and heart problems for a few years now. He told me this summer his doctor had told him 20 years ago he needed a knee replacement, and Dad had turned it down. He regretted that decision now. And there was arthritis elsewhere too – he’d had to have his university graduation ring cut off this spring. I’d gone away in February, and the day before I left, he said, “I could die tomorrow, or it could be ten years. And I’m ready.” When I left in September, I knew I wouldn’t see him again.
The long weekend, I wrote him a letter from here in
My sister called Sunday morning. Dad passed around
Except, you can really see them this time. Yasmin was out in the long grass and they were ALL peeping away like crazy when I went and got them. She heard them, and came running back, and was in the nest before I got her babies back to her.
I checked up on them, a couple of hours later. They are all silent, in that little nest spot. Either nursing or asleep. It’s a good idea to let sleeping kittens lie.
Here’s that knife. It’s got the stabilized buckeye burl, black buffalo horn, and red jasper. The fittings are brass, and the pommel is hand-cast. Be a great knife in a tackle-box. There will be a black leather sheath for it, but I haven’t made it yet. I’m hoping to finish the project I’m knitting by bedtime tonight (I gotta see what movies we have here), and then I’ll do some leather work.
You can see more pictures of it at http://bobwilson.us/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=3&products_id=142&zenid=35f85d4bf713306b33207f98c68e46de
And you can cruise the whole website to see more interesting stuff, some of which I made.
A little about rhythm of life here, for Saturday morning. We’re going to do this the way it says in Genesis – “the evening and the morning”. There’s a lot of cats. In the afternoon yesterday,
We both worked on projects last night. We looked at the materials available for knife handles together, and some of the blades. The blades we looked at were commercial ones – Bob was just looking for a place to get started, using what’s here already. I went out the back and picked an emerald-green Dymondwood slab (a dyed, laminated wood product) and black linen micarta to go with, with brass for the metal parts. There was a lovely block of greenish stabilized buckeye burl, and a small piece of red jasper, and that’s in end stages now, with brass pieces. Desert Ironwood’s beautiful, hard and greenish – there was a small piece of fossilized walrus jawbone left over from something else, and the colours are really good together. We put a piece of copper rod beside it, and decided that’s what to use with it. Then he decided that would be better with a big blade, so he’s using one he cut out of an old sawmill blade, that we annealed in the kiln last fall. And finally, we’d been looking at a piece of malachite/azurite composite, and wondering what it would be good with. Well, there’s a piece of bone left, I think it’s moose, and the deep blue stone looks fabulous with it. There’s enough nickel/silver left for one knife of that, for sure, and probably enough bone for two. There’s a green stone, I don’t know what it is, that I think would go well with the white and blue, and there will be fine black spacers between each different colour. So, after that, Bob went outside and put together the handle for buckeye burl knife, and started grinding two of the sawmill knife blades for something else.
While he was out doing that, inside the house was quiet. I took my knitting on the sofa, made a pot of Madagascar vanilla tea, took the smoke detector off the wall and buried it in the sofa cushions, lit some sage, and took my knitting and the tea on the sofa, with as many of the lights off as I could manage and still knit. Lovely, lovely. I was there for a couple of hours and got VERY happy. Then Bob came in and we agreed that both of us had said we’d cook vegetables yesterday, and neither of us had, so we finished the chicken curry, because it has vegetables already in it. After that, I made Chocolate Cream Tea, and took a mug of that to bed with my knitting, and listened to Moussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”, the one from the last night of the Proms in 2006, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, on YouTube. Superb. Bob came and listened to the last two movements with me.
It was cold last night. There was two inches in the rain gauge, after about nine hours of rain – no lightning, but lots of wind. The hydro went out for an hour Thursday night around
We’d bought bacon ends and collard, mustard and turnip greens the other day, and I’m going to cook them soon. This morning I thought a Western Omelette would be a good breakfast, so I started bacon and onions on very low heat, and thought I’d shower while they cooked, but I got the second shower, and the onions charred just a little. Then I put the eggs in, and some pepper jack on top and put the lid on and let it cook slow, like a frittata. There was enough coffee let in a pot in the fridge for about two mugsful, and I didn’t want it cold today, so I heated them in the microwave, and got berries ready for Bob, and that was breakfast. It’s time to make more coffee.
During breakfast, I could still hear that kitten under the kitchen. So I went and found her. Lying on your tummy on the wet ground, wiggling far enough to reach under the house for a kitten, in
We’d agreed Monday we do NOT want another house cat, and we weren’t rescuing any kittens. This morning I told Bob I’d put her back, and he said,
”We can get kitten formula and raise her by eyedropper again, if we have to,” But I don’t WANT to. It really ties you down. And then, you bond to them. Yeshua’s very bonded to me, who was his Mom in all senses from the time he was a week old. It’s not just biological bonding. Other cats grow up and are perfectly happy to abandon their mothers. Yeshua always knows where I am, when I’m here, and he stays close. If we have to eye-dropper feed that little one, she and I are going to have a terrible time giving each other up later – I hope Yasmin keeps her in the nest.
I'm going out to knit in the hammock now.
