fragility

A flame for those who are suffering.

Myanmar cyclone, China earthquake, US tornadoes, and all the everyday suffering that keeps on whether I notice it or not.

I'm going to add links for helping, as they come up, if you're interested:

Myanmar: UNICEF
China: Red Cross Society of China

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the laundry line

Under the sun.

A spring wind.

Woven basket
holding cotton towels,
wet and heavy.


Wooden pins with simple spring mechanisms,
invented by David M. Smith
of Springfield, Vermont, in 1853.

A wicker basket.




Spare pins weathered.








Two strong, simple Y design posts with four lines.

Cotton sheets
bleached in the sun

ironed by gravity, wind and heat -
smooth on the bed.

An apple tree, blossoms as white as cotton sheets, and as light, as transparent.

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waking up

Do you ever feel that spring is too suddenly upon us? That life is so abruptly growing out of its dormancy you can't keep up with it?

Don't get me wrong, I was longing for spring at the end of a very long and harshly cold winter. But during the long sleep, I got used to the quiet and not worrying about missing something out of doors.

I need to quicken my pace and spend more time outside, with a spring in my step!

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elements of a getaway

Warning: photos might not appear as they should in Firefox. I recommend IE or another broswer.














~ Local Culture ~




Wander around the local towns and walk the piers and beaches.

Hang out with the teenagers downtown at the java hut,
or the fishermen at the lighthouse hut.



















~ Shopping ~

If you're me, you don't like shopping. Browsing antiques is fun though. But when the antique market is closed, what are you going to do?




You go "photo shopping," snapping away under the watchful eyes of Mother Mary and a golden-eyed cat, who make sure you don't take more than photos.

~ Walking ~

If at all possible, walk in the fog.

~ Nature ~

And if you want the most rejuvenation, get it from nature. Walk in a nature preserve with a back-dune forest of hemlocks and beeches (your favorite trees), knowing this is the only place in the world with dunes and forests like these.












































A rain shower is not at all detrimental to a getaway. It makes you stay indoors to read and write. And when it stops, everything is clean, clear and covered with drops.

~ Hosts ~

Your hosts should have a lovely, restful home a half mile from the big lake, serve you coffee, let you read in bed, and let you come and go as you like.

Your brother's name is James, and he and his gracious wife offer you their guest room. They live on James St. near Lakefront Drive.

And they should walk you to the big lake at least once for the sunset.

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smiley face

I am at Lake Michigan for a couple of days - retreating and recuperating from the always-hectic spring semester. The stones on my beach blanket are more brown than they show in this photo. I need Don to tell me what kind of stones they are when I get home. (In my family, when we don't know the answer to any question, we say, 'Where's Don when you need him?')

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quail eggs & morels

It seems like Don's quail were just hatched in his classroom. And they are so grown up now. A week ago this one, above, was a little over 4 weeks old.

Saturday, when they were five weeks and three days old, one - or maybe two - laid their first eggs! All we know for sure is that there were two eggs in the brooder. None of the birds 'fessed up. Don is trying to figure out which are male and which female. (Sharon?) We can discern at least one rooster: he crows incessantly. Maybe you already read about this monumental event over at Don's blog (or in your newspaper).

It takes about four quail eggs to equal the size of one large chicken egg. They are fairly common on sushi menus (cute on top of the salmon eggs) and you'll see them on fancy menus in other restaurants too. I found a recipe for Quail Eggs with Toasted Sesame Salt we're going to try.



Saturday I threw the first morel mushrooms of the season (!) into a pan, and Don cut open the quail eggs with a knife (they're too fragile to crack on the side of a bowl) and slid them in too. Wow, did they ever bubble up!




You can see the top egg was double yoked. But even if it hadn't been, a quail egg yoke is higher in ratio to the white than in chicken eggs. But they're little, so we're not too worried about cholestrol. (I suppose if we ate their equivalent to chicken eggs, like 4-6 of them, we'd need to watch it. BUT, Don read that eggs from free range hens have 1/3 less cholestrol than grocery store eggs; maybe that is also true of quail eggs. The math is starting to hurt my head.)

We each had three morel mushrooms and one quail egg (let's see, it took five bites each - two for each egg) as an appetizer before eating a bowl of Don's venison chili. We drank a toast of 'three-buck-Chuck' to our egg-layin' quail and our finger-nail sized morels and gobbled them up. The eggs were refined, the mushrooms fresh and tasty, having been soaked in salt water, then milk, then dredged in flour, before salting and peppering them and sauteeing in butter and oil (oil helps keep the butter from burning).

And below, in the fridge, is the lone egg from Sunday, waiting for more mates in the carton Don's quail eggs came in before they hatched.

Don broke this latest quail egg open this evening (after we moved the chickens into the chicken coop) and wasted it because it looked deformed, and he didn't think we should eat it. It was a double yoked model. Don said first eggs that are laid can be strange.

We didn't know the insides were blue.

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unfinished quilt top

When Gwen posted her phenomenal feathered star quilt, it brought back my quilting days from twenty years ago, when we lived in Istanbul. So I went hunting for this one, first upstairs in a dresser, then through several trunks and tubs in the barn. Finally, after tubs of fabric scraps, there it was. Poor neglected thing.

I made several quilts in those days twenty years ago, mostly simple ones to be used daily by my family.

I started piecing this one with fabrics I'd brought with me from the States.

Because I didn't have a sewing machine in Turkey, and I had lots of time on my hands, and because the Turkish women spent afternoons at tea doing handwork, I pieced the quilts by hand.

I don't have anything against machine piecing, but I think I can be more precise with hand piecing.

The border with the white, mauve and blue squares and triangles should be hanging down the edge of the bed. It would make the top look more unified. But I am too lazy to take another set of photos. :-D

I have one more row of border to sew together and onto the quilt top (up there at the head of the bed). Then I can layer it with batting and backing, baste, and start quilting.

Unfortunately, my hands and wrists aren't what they used to be, with all my computer work at the university, so I don't know if I'll ever finish it.

This is our little guest room upstairs, where I spend Sunday afternoons sometimes reading, writing and looking out the window at the farm. We bought the brass bed at a flea market for $20 and painted it.

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