Tell your children that when you are 17, you do stupid stuff :)

Lately - since a friend introduced J. to them - my children are experiencing a Beatles kick. We were driving somewhere listening to them and my children asked questions about the singers. I told them about my past obsession with the Beatles and that I was a fan in the true sense of the word of being fanatic. I explained how important my home town Hamburg, Germany was in their early history and how Obladi-Oblada was the first pop music I consciously remember. I told them about traveling to England with 17 to see a lot of relevant places and how I almost got run over while taking a picture to the entrance to Strawberry fields. I also told them that I waited a whole week for Paul McCartney in soho square park in front if the MPL building and that in retrospect I think that was rather stupid and I could have done something much better with that time, like visiting some more museums or take the train to Oxford like my friends did. "But then again, one does a lot of stupid stuff with seventeen, it just seems to be that way." I said and my 9 year old replied: "Thank you for telling me that. I will try to remember that and not do stupid things when I am seventeen, good that I know that."

And right there it struck me that it is really important to share with your children and to be honest about your life and your past. I do not think that this will have any impact on the stupidities my children will do when they are seventeen, but I do think that showing children that parents a) had a life before them and b) made mistakes and learned from them, is important for relating to each other. Sometimes we ask so much of our children and forget our own childhood, how unfair life seemed at times, how misunderstood we felt or how we just had to make our own mistakes. When I tell stories of my own past, I do not gloss over and I try not to exaggerate, though logically there are some things that I leave out, because they are not age appropriate or because I do not want to taint their relationship to certain people. I loved to hear stories from my grandmother when she was young. The beautiful thing about listening to that kind of personal oral history is how close it is to your life through relationship, yet how removed it seems because things have changed so dramatically in just a few generations.

The frame work in which this is related to our children plays a vital part in the effectiveness, because we all know the nagging parent that in a confrontation brings up the typical "and I walked 5 miles to school in the snow and without shoes" and usually just gets an eye-rolling. It is a whole other story when you are hanging out with your kids in the evening with the lights dim and the books are read and it is almost time for kisses and lights out. This is the perfect time to talk about things that happened that day, about highs and lows of everybody and maybe there is a story that touches upon some topic that comes up. My mother and her siblings actually had to walk very far on very cold days through deep snow, not dressed very warm and sometimes somebody could not attend school, because there where just not enough pairs of shoes for everybody. Once my great uncle had to whittle wooden shoes for my mother and since he was a man of ideas and not execution, they were not smooth enough, my mother got a splinter, then blood poisoning and almost died. If I bring this up after reading Harry Potter 7 and how cold they kids are in the tent, my kids would probably open to it and could reference it somehow. If I bring this up when I angry because my seven year old strangely enough and yet again misplaced all her shoes, it will just come over as annoying or threatening and probably just be ignored - I always imagine it sounding like the adults in the Peanuts cartoons: 'wha hwah wha bla wha...". I prefer to talk about my past in a humorous way anyway. When I was eight though, I was not able to see the fun in trudging through deep mud in the middle of the night while shivering in my nightgown and being guided by a flashlight that was just bright enough to highlight all the scary spiders in the outhouse, but in retrospect I do think it is quite hilarious.

Anyway, it is wonderful to have connections between my past and my children's present and stories are a good way to express these connections and to live them out. Returning to the Beatles, I enjoy tremendously when we break out in song together and can have fun that way. I have this very old and taped poster of the Beatles in 1965, my birth year, and I had it matted and framed when I attended university. Since then it has been kicking around in basements and attics and now it gets another round of display in my older daughter's room and I think that is just awesome. And just maybe it will make her smile when she is reminded of how silly her mother was when she was 17.

Snags

At times it appears as if life is nothing like a string of snags following one each other and we turn to un-kinking the kinks and un-snaggin the snags.

In regards to my last post about my laundry spider I encountered the first snags. I hung the laundry in the evening and as a result had a few mosquito bites to show and the hanging of the laundry was not peaceful with me swatting frantically about me. And then today, while I was standing outside and painting something - as I often do - a sudden storm came up and I was standing there, messy with paint and not in the position to scoop all the laundry off the 'spider' and so I had to let it get wet again. Therefore timing and weather seem to be a greater factor than anticipated.

I encountered a more difficult snag regarding this blog. I am very thorough and a perfectionist and I aim at being so complete, that I keep reading and thinking and collecting and researching, as if I am writing an article for a magazine. Blogging of course is different and I am not finding an easy way into it, even though I know that this is the perfect forum to post my own questions, to ponder and contemplate, after all, I am on my way, not there yet. I have also noticed something else in my process. Since I have been reading and researching so much, it has been changing my mind set, as if I am sensitized to the topics I am learning about. For example I cannot believe the huge mountain of shiny and colorful wrapping paper and packaging at a birthday party, I can't help but get angry at all the idling cars I notive everywhere (why are they usually really big cars?) and I feel guilty wasting water while waiting for it to get warm. Every styrofoam cup makes me cringe and bottled water elicits anger. Overall this is a good thing though, since it will give me more ideas about little changes everybody can do.

Some snags can be quite funny. Wednesday I set out with the children to visit the farmer's market in Worcester. We were very excited, expecting all this local and maybe even organic produce and just a wonderful time strolling along the stalls. Imagine our surprise when we arrived, since there were four vendors all together. One with bread for $6.25 a loaf, another with watercolor paintings, a little one with pies and finally one with tomatoes and pale looking small cucumbers. We bought a few pounds of tomatoes and then had a chat with the market's manager. He promised it would be different in a few weeks and told us that most of his regular farmers did not have enough produce yet, since spring was too cold. Just for comparison: the market around the corner of my first apartment in Germany had about 200 stalls over roughly half a mile and offered produce, meats, fish, cheeses herbs, tea and spices, bread, home made candy and pralines, even things like antiques, candles and clothing and really anything else one can imagine. The would be numerous places to eat wonderful foods of different ethnicities and often even live music.

If I could just solve that little snag of being unable to customize the blog's appearance the way I want to...

The laundry spider

I am scared of spiders, but I just got the most awesome spider for my garden: a laundry spider.

This is an umbrella design clothes line and it actually looks more like a spider web. When I grew up a lot of people had either a laundry spider - as it is called in German - in the yard or the typical laundry lines between poles. For winter or city dwelling a lot of houses have attic or cellar spaces dedicated to clothes lines. It was not that I really loved going up into the attic to hang or take down laundry or running out because of a sudden impending rain storm sweeping through and you try to get the almost dry laundry before it was soaked. Just like other daily chores, it was just that, a chore.

Until a few years ago I did not have a dryer, but somehow thought when having children and doing laundry for a few more people - more messy anyway - it would be logical to have a dryer. It did not even occur to me NOT to buy a dryer, after all every other family I knew had one. But even though a dryer is more convenient, it is neither good for the environment nor for the clothing itself. Add the whole fire hazard to it, even though we clean the lint trap after every load and the exhaust pipe is less than a foot long, having had more than one house fire in my past, it sticks with you. And so in my quest to change the things that I can change and make at least a small difference, I decided we needed a clothes line. My own clothing for the most did not make it into the dryer anyway, because my first encounter with those machines during living in student housing taught me the lesson of never ending shrinkage. So the idea of a clothes line was just taking it a big step further.

At first we just wanted to have a regular line from the deck to a tree with a pulley system, but being under the pine tree did not seem like a very good idea and it would have only given something like 30 feet, which is not enough. So I looked into the laundry spiders I knew from Germany and if they are available here at all.

My search found a company that has been around for a while making a system made of steel, which I think will rust too quickly.(Whitney) I also found the Belgian company Moerman offering these umbrella dryers made of aluminum and also way more stylish. I could not find any reviews, since they are very new to the American market, but since we are not talking a major purchase, I contacted the company selling these for some more information and felt comfortable ordering it. They came in 4 different sizes and I decided for the second biggest. It has 170 feet of clothes line and it spins in the wind - appropriately it is called the Super Spin. It has a cover to put over it when it is collapsed or one can just take it out of the ground sleeve and bring it inside. I do not think we need to have it out when we have a party.

I ordered it at Shop-at-Clares an actual store in Pennsylvania and not a big box retailer. They have been good about answering emails. It was delivered within days and so my husband was very nice and put the stake/sleeve into the ground, we might have to redo it though, since it sticks out a tad bit and is also not a perfect vertical.


When I threw out my back in the fall I started to share laundry duty with the children. I would do the sorting and they had to the moving into the washer, out of it and into the dryer and out again and then I did the folding and putting away. This helped tremendously with the strain on my back, but that system does not work the same now and I have to come up with a different routine. Besides the schlepping of the wet laundry, I actually quite enjoy standing in my backyard and hanging the laundry. I am sure there are days when it will be a hassle. I am not sure yet how I like to stand in slushy snow and turning my hands into icicles while attempting to freeze-dry my laundry. There still will be days I will decide to use a dryer and I will keep putting socks and underwear in the dryer - until it makes me feel to guilty. At least I have a gas dryer, which uses less and cleaner energy than electrical powered ones.

So being the paranoid person I am, now I am less concerned about the house burning down, but I do wonder if somebody comes to steal clothing, but just as I revel in my bravery in the presence of spiders, I just ignore these thoughts as best as I can :)

My quest

Come and join me on my journey to a more conscious life, my quest to find ways to a more meaningful, richer and fuller, but yet simpler life. My cardinal points are the real life green, frugality, an enjoyable family life, contribution to society, my mental and physical health, nature, happiness and of course cooking and the kitchen garden.

How can we make conscious decisions that are economically sane while good for the environment and contribute to our communities and the world at large? How do we create a life for ourselves and our family and friends that leaves us content and at peace, healthy and strong? Each moment only comes around once and what are the choices we are making? What are the consequences of our choices?

From recipes for the peasant gourmet to running an environmentally friendly household, from doing exercises to finding one's own center and intent, comments on society and the human psyche, analysis of things that are going on around us to wonderful spots in New England. I have studied media, sociology and literature, so naturally there will be posts pondering and analyzing issues tangent to these fields. I have worked many, many different jobs - graphic designer, festival coordinator, journalist, photographer and educator being just a few of them. I build furniture, love gardening and I work with anything paper or textile. As a legal alien German, living in suburban America I am often offered a slightly different perspective. Essentially though and most importantly I am bringing to this an unquenchable thirst for research and the iron will to make the most of what is left of my life - practically and philosophically speaking. Consequently this blog will appear quite eclectic - just my life and my interests.

In a way this is an all encompassing blog, yet trying to focus on the main points, on priorities - hence the name cardinal compass. This is a goal as wide as I can think, making it easy and difficult all the same. The connectivity of all things makes everything relevant and yet, I want to stay focused. There has to be a threshold of what falls within and what stays on the outside. But rather than constricting myself into categories, I have decided to just start. To 'just start' is a big thing for me, as I tend to over think, -plan and -analyze. But that is a whole blog topic in itself ...