Busha Full Of Grace

this moment

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

Full Up With Love!

OK, remember that productive weekend I had back in January when I knitted this cocoon bunting and hat for my little cousin who was having a baby?

 

Well as of early Sunday morning, when the pink blossoms were falling from the branches in Syracuse, NY, it got filled up with a bundle of soft, velvety baby girl sweetness!

 

 

 

                                                  Welcome to the family,

                                                Isa Rose

this moment...

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

 

Oz and Broccos

Thank you for your thoughts yesterday. I was in a slump, but it was just a bad day. I'm back on track today. And I'm opening new doors. Thinking both inside and outside the nanny box. I had a conversation with Brooke this morning that offered me some new ideas. So here I am in Oz, standing at the big door. New ideas that inspire movement are so freeing.

This morning I headed out to the vegetable stand to pick up some ingredients for a big pot of red sauce, and then headed over to Whole Foods for some bread and milk. On the way home I stopped at Brocco’s Old Barn for cat food. I just love this place that has been in Sonoma as long as I have.

 

It really made me smile: slopping through the muddy gravel and hay carrying a big bag of Diamond Cat Food on my shoulder. Little chicks peeping inside the big barn. Hay bales. Livestock troughs. Salt licks. Bird seed. Leashes. Hoof picks. Rusted flatbeds. Happy people.

 

Hearing John Denver in my head:

Sometimes this old (barn) just seems like a long lost friend…

(And now I'm hearing my kid's voices in my head, "Mom, you're a dork."  Oh well.)

The other day I was taking a walk in my neighborhood and I had to head down Fetters Blvd. to see if one of my favorite, most beautiful gardens was still there.  And yes, it was and thriving.  I love how they took these:

 

And created this:

 

 

I’m home and the house will soon smell like simmering pasta sauce, the clouds roll about in the sky letting the sun peek through every now and again. I hear birdsong and a dove cooing somewhere.  And now I’m going to sit at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and try to put some sense to Mom’s finances.

(Oh Lord, I already want to crawl back in bed.)

KIDDING

Weary and Torn

St. Helena family was not the job for me.  I was stretching myself pretty far to think I could make that drive everyday.  And that was that. I do, in my heart, believe that there is a plan for me within all this uncertainty.  But for now back to the drawing board. :( Part of me just wants to throw in the towel on the California job market and head back to my little babies in Chicago. A big part.

 

  

It's rainy and dreary this morning. My house is cold, and so are my hands.  It's garbage day and I can hear the trucks stopping and lurching forward along the streets of my neighborhood.  I'm wracking my brain to find what I can pull out from my sadness and worry and toss away in my trash can before the truck gets past my house.  But I haven't got the will nor the energy right now, so I will just hold onto it all and try to create something better out of it.  Being unemployed is something foreign to me.

At the crack of dawn I promised myself that if I got up, made my bed, showered, dressed, and got out to take my Mom to the foot doctor as planned, I could crawl back into bed when I was done if I still wanted to.

El Molino Central

 

 

I live across the street from one awesome little restaurant in Boyes Hot Springs. It's a small little place that serves organic mexican food and pours Blue Bottle Coffee.  The food started as a wholesale kitchen primavera years ago.  We always called to order tamales for our parties. They were very customer friendly, and if you didn't know what you were going to cook for dinner you could knock on their kitchen door and buy a family-sized order for a buck a tamale, whip up a salad and have dinner in a few minutes.  And then someone (some crazy person) reported them to the licensing board for selling retail and that had to stop.  But you could continue to put in special wholesale orders as well and buy them from the refrigerator section of the local market.  Their goods are also sold at Bay Area Farmers' Markets.  So Karen is the owner, and not quite a year ago (Memorial Day Weekend 2010) she rented a little storefront on the corner of Sonoma Highway and Central Avenue.  And it is amazing!

 

 

 

 

Many a morning I head over for a cup of Blue Bottle Coffee which they make by pouring it through Melita drips, a dozen hand-made, warm, organic corn tortillas (wrapped in brown paper) to eat buttered and served with fruit for breakfast. 

 

 

This little restaurant has fast become a family favorite!

 

 

this moment....

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

 

Interviews

I have been to some amazing homes and met a wide array of interesting people during this interview process since I have been back in Cali. Working through a very good agency offers a new perspective on how different the realities of life can be. Yesterday took me winding over Petrified Forest Road down through Calistoga and on into St. Helena where an interview family lived. Even though I am from this valley too, I rarely venture over the mountain east (always opting to go west toward the ocean), so yesterday I felt like I was on vacation.  Oh how I wished I had brought my swimsuit with the plan of soaking in a mineral pool for a few hours when I was done.   A trial week is being set up through the agency and when that is in place I will tuck my bathing suit into my purse first thing!

 

The Napa/Sonoma Valley is Majestic.  That is my word for it.  After my 3 PM interview (which went very well) I strolled through downtown Calistoga, stopped into a deli for a sandwich and then another little shop for an ice cream cone.  It was 85 degrees and the cottonwoods were shedding and filling the sunny, breezy air with white fluffs. 

I think I'd like very much to work for this family.  They are winery owners with a staffed household and one baby.  But I liked that he made reference to a daily meal they serve to all employees of the vineyard/winery where they all sat together for rest and food.  Everyone employed at the winery.  No hierarchy tables.  It was "a family meal".  I liked that they shared that they lived by a pitch in attitude about life. No work "was above or below" them.   I liked that their gardener has been with them for 22 years and their housekeeper for 15.  I liked that we had comfortable conversation and easy laughter. I liked them.

So I will keep you posted on the job front.  Today I have a housekeeping job....my house.  My bedroom to be more specific.  Clothes strewn all about as I tried things on and flung them off again and again trying to find just the right thing to wear to my interviews.  And standing here with hand on hip, I look around and notice, I wear an awful lot of black since I've let my hair go silver.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that their speciality is Chardonnay.  So is mine.

Figment Of My Imagination?

It is so weird to check your stats and see that in the last week you've had 1046 visitors to your blog with but seven comments. It makes you wonder if Typepad is just trying to make you feel good. ;)

I'd love to hear from you if you have a moment. It is great to see who is visiting.

Pillow Talk

Today, Mother's Day, I took my own dear mother over the Golden Gate Bridge, through San Francisco and to the National Cemetery in Colma, CA, to my Grandmother's grave. My Busha. It was a great day full of conversation and memories "and laughs" (as she would say). We retraced our lives up and down the streets of San Bruno. I took photos of my childhood home, the neighborhood where I grew up and the places I played. It was a wonderful day with my mom.

Cedar Avenue: the hill where I grew up. High above the world, a little girl full of wonder looking out of her window.  The airplanes, when travel on them was still a mystery to me.  The San Francisco Bay, along the Peninsula.  And the cloud formations!  A main source of enjoyment for this artsy little double Scorpio child.

Our home, that stands like someone you haven't seen for years that grew up so differently than you expected. No more the soft yellow with the white shutters or the wooden garage door with greasy hinges or the hedges and flowers. There it stood wearing just a bit too much make-up. But still, the home where I grew up.

 
My school, first through eighth grade. The place where I learned about friendship, and education, and authority, and respect, and spirituality and religion; and where I learned to love words in all forms. I learned to love the English language right here.

And San Bruno Park, where I played in the creek and on the slides and swings; and later waved poster boards with hand drawn bubbly lettered peace signs while protesting the Vietnam War, learned about boys, and made the choice not to do drugs when "everyone was doing it". The place that always smelled like pink popcorn and hot dogs. The bleachers where I shared my first kiss (and sat there thinking he smelled like mandarin oranges), the swimming pool where I hung out on summer days after I stuffed my t-shirt, shorts and flip flops into a mesh bag in the girl's locker room and pinned the locker key to my bathing suit. Transistor radios and cool guy's cars lined up along the street. The Doors, The Beach Boys, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.  Braided hair and incense sticks.  Hippie wanna-bes that our middle- class, parochial parents would never allow.

My mom and I did all this today and then I held her frail little arm as she walked unsteady across uneven turf to her mother and father's grave.

 

 

And then we went home to her house, where my boy, her grandson was waiting with her favorite cheesecake. And then I kissed her good-bye and came home to my home and found a love note on my pillow from Camille. And then this moment hit me,  as if I was in a movie, and I had died and was watching my whole life before me and then was whooshed back through the tunnel into the present moment, just as I had left it. The whoosh resounding in my ears. A milisecond of confusion as I tried to readjust my psyche from the day. And this is what I found:  

 

The Lanyard - Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly

off the blue walls of this room,

moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,

 from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one into the past more suddenly—

 a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

 by a deep Adirondack lake

 learning how to braid long thin plastic strips

 into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

 or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,

 but that did not keep me from crossing

 strand over strand again and again

 until I had made a boxy

 red and white lanyard for my mother.

 She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

 and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,

 lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,

 laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,

 and then led me out into the airy light

 and taught me to walk and swim,

 and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

 Here are thousands of meals, she said,

 and here is clothing and a good education.

 And here is your lanyard, I replied,

 which I made with a little help from a counselor.

 Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

 strong legs, bones and teeth,

 and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

 and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

 And here, I wish to say to her now,

 is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

 that you can never repay your mother,

 but the rueful admission that when she took

 the two-tone lanyard from my hand,

 I was as sure as a boy could be

 that this useless, worthless thing I wove

 out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

 

It was a full Mother's Day. So very full. xoxo