pedigree

christmas day around here is always spent among my family, a group made up mostly  of nordic-european mutts. we all just completed our ancestry.com tests, and there is nothing very spectacular in our backgrounds. a lot of scandinavians, a lot of germans, a lot of eastern europeans, all jumbled together. on a related note, my husband is reading a book about the history of the french language. one of the unexpected english words that comes from french is the word “pedigree,”  which is an adaptation of the french word “pied de grue” (pee-ay-duh-groo), which literally translates as “crane’s foot,” referring to the forking nature of the family tree of a royal or noble family. my pedigree would not look like the elegant three-toed crane’s foot, but rather something like the webbed feet of a duck or a coot. or maybe the random scattering of a rorschach test. i’ll take it that way.

two dried winter leaves

detox

supposedly this anthurium plant is particularly good at detoxifying the air inside a home. today we had a day full of cooking followed by an extended-family cocktail hour and then a long coursed dinner full of conversation. it sounds so simple as to be a little lame. but no phones were consulted and no TV was regarded and we learned a little bit more about my mom and her best friend over the course of six courses, a couple of bottles of wine, and an oak fire.. i feel a little bit tired and a little bit cleansed. here’s wishing you the same.

dried anthurium

curl up

take a few minutes today to curl up. in bed. on the couch, behind someone who matters. with your dog or cat. with a book of poems. or a single poem. or just yourself and your breath. this leaf knows. let everyone else do the bustling.

curled leaf

different scripts

today was the annual sausage making event with my family. i am half romanian and as a result, we spend one whole day each year making romanian sausage the old fashioned way, mixing ground pork by hand, and adding salt, pepper, and garlic until it tastes “the way it should.”  this year, we were joined by my niece who is living in dublin, my nephew who is living in vegas, my soon to be niece by marriage, whose parents, also present, fled from viet nam in 1975. i was surrounded by a veteran who fought in the gulf war, a veteran who fought in the vietnam war, the widow of a marine, the owners of a family farm, several small business owners, several corporate career employees, several federal government employees, several of those who voted for the current president, and several who voted for his opponent. we all had different scripts for our lives, and we weren’t presented with two options to choose from, but a near infinity of options, from which we chose our own scripts, none of which were repeated among any of our fellow revelers, all of whom we loved, and valued, and felt a part of. a one-room melting pot, so to say.

grape vine tendrils

welcome winter

minneapolis sits at 45 degrees latitude. a factoid that i find fascinating for some reason. we exist halfway between the north pole and the equator. and today, we are halfway between fall and spring. i could be happier if this day were not quite such a quintessence of middleness.

tall grass seed head