homey clean

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Finally, after years of intending to make a home cleaner from natural stuff, I did it. None of the recipes had allured enough to push me past lethargy until Design Sponge shared this one (I've posted my version below). Read here some of the disturbing reasons you should consider it too, such as the fact that 17,000 petrochemicals have been approved for home use, but only 30% of those have been tested for impact on humans, and that the average American home has 10 gallons of harmful chemicals hiding in cabinets and drawers.

There are many things to like about this recipe, but the best for me is adding my favorite scents with essential oils.

Homemade All-Purpose Spray

Ingredients (I bought them all at a health food store, except the empty spray bottle, which I got at Bed, Bath and Beyond):

• 1 empty 32 oz. spray bottle
• 3/4 c. Distilled White Vinegar
• 1 c. Hydrogen Peroxide
• 1 1/2 tsp. Castile Soap*
• 30 drops Tea Tree Oil
• 30-45 drops Essential Oil of choice - I used 15 rosemary drops and 15 spearmint, then I added 15 drops of lavender to rise above the smell of the vinegar (other choices include lemongrass, lemon verbena, clove, cinnamon, anise, sage, grapefruit, lemon, and lime)
  

Mixing:

• Place all ingredients into the spray bottle using a funnel or measuring cup with a spout.
• Add water until contents reach top of bottle.
• Shake vigorously and clean with pleasure!

I can still smell the tea tree oil on my fingers (I had to be sure it was coming out of the dropper). Tea tree oil is also known as melaleuca oil, something that was in Australian soldiers' first aid kids in WWI for its natural antiseptic properties.

With an initial investment of over $30 in the various bottles of stuff, I thought this homemade cleaner might be more costly than a ready bottle of GreenWorks natural all purpose cleaner, but I was willing to pay extra. When Don and I calculated the cost (by the way, apparently there are 600 "drops" in one fluid ounce), we discovered it was only $2.13 total for 32 ounces. (Compare: GreenWorks $3.39/32 oz.)

Squeaky, streakless. I've just increased my chances of becoming a clean freak.




*Castile soap alone is a profound discovery for its simplicity and pure, gentle cleaning qualities.

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Juliette & Julia

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I haven't seen "Julie & Julia" yet - the new movie about chef Julia Child and Julie Powell - and I think I need to, but I was thinking about two other movie women recently: Juliette & Julia.

Don and I watched "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" a couple weeks past, and we were sure the daughter of Cate Blanchett's character was played by Juliette Binoche, which just shows that even an earnest fan like me can mix these two up. It was in fact Julia Ormond who played Caroline in Benjamin Button, of course. Well, can you blame me for mixing up two brunettes with chiseled cheekbones, dark eyes and names that sound similar? I mean, they were even born less than a year apart - Juliette in 1964 (March 9) and Julia in 1965 (January 4).

Two of my all time favorite characters in the movies are Binoche's Hana in "The English Patient" and Ormond's "Sabrina" in the revisit of Audrey Hepburn's 1954 role. These two movies, like the actresses, are also one year apart - 1996 and 1995 respectively. One reason they are favorites is because I'm a Francophile, and Sabrina goes to Paris to study photography, while Binoche is just, well, French. If I were an adolescent again mimicking actresses, these are the ones I'd want to see looking back in the mirror with their eager and eternal eyes. (I didn't mean to alliterate that.)

Both films are about women growing up. Sabrina is the chauffeur's daughter in love with the prodigal prince of the estate, David. She is viewed with class prejudice by David's older and steadier brother Linus, the way Mr. Darcy and his rich aunt viewed Miss Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice. The pain she suffers in this romantic comedy starts in unrequited love as a teenager and develops into downright rejection for her station in life even after becoming a respectable career woman. In "The English Patient," Hana is an army nurse surrounded by death and injury, including her dearest loved ones. The dying burn patient she sequesters in an abandoned convent is upper class like David and Linus, a Hungarian Count. She is the listener to the patient's stories as he flashes back to before his accident. He educates her:

PATIENT: Heroditus is the father of history, did you know that?
HANA: I don't know anything. (She says this as she is peeling a plum to feed him, like a mother bird.)

It is an old fashioned theme - the feminine innocent being taught and shaped by wiser, more powerful male players, either in the male stratosphere of high finance in "Sabrina" or in the bloody fields of men's war in "The English Patient." Sabrina and Hana are written and played by Ormond and Binoche as modern women who make their own choices within the limits and flaws of a world that has been conceived for millennia by men. And more than that, just like Florence Nightingale who scrapped a life of wealth and ease to nurse the poor and helpless, there is a sense that these two want to transform the damage they find with their simple touch.

When Linus asks Sabrina where she got her name, she tells him her father found it in a poem:

"Sabrina fair, listen where thou art sitting under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, in twisted braids of lilies knitting the loose train of thy amber-dropping hair."

Linus asks, "So, your little poem...what does it mean?"

Sabrina replies, "It's the story of a watersprite who saves a virgin from a fate worse than death."

Linus: "And Sabrina is the virgin?"

Sabrina: "Sabrina is the saviour."
















Here is a music video of Sting singing "Moonlight" from "Sabrina."

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letting the deeps settle back down

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Oh I loved my birthday weekend, thank you so much for the wishes you sent, which started it off very happily. I meant to write in that last post that the mercies around me are as plentiful as acorns, but it came off sounding as if I love acorns. Ha, well among other things I do love them . . .

It is also a terrific pleasure when three people can talk and laugh and there is still a balance, like when you step into a boat that sits so gently and alone on calm water but you are certain when you get in it will not let you remain standing long enough to sit properly, but it does. Then when three of you manage to get in, stay in the boat, stay afloat and even skim across the water, there is an ease that surrounds you.

I didn't know I would need this time away with friends before embarking on a new fall semester of university activity. But I did, and the post-wedding restlessness I felt has settled. I am ready for a new school year. (Please remind me of this in a few weeks.) I feel a sense of composure returning, as if there are forty feet of cool, still, fresh water under me the way there are in our pretty lake.
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be back soon

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Friends, forgive a slight delay responding to your gracious comments and reading your newest posts. I will be romping in the oak trees at the lake cottage for a few days with friends, very nice friends who are driving hours and hours to be together. It happens to be my birthday weekend (which you might guess from my URL), and I am taking stock of the many mercies around me like acorns.
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cherry, cherry

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The light red ones are tart and mouthwatering with sugar in pie. The dark ones are sweet - a delectable snack. A lock box waits for payment in the honor system. We drove up North for the day Sunday, looking for good things.

Michigan produces 80% of the world's tart cherries. That little finger (Mission Peninsula) in the yellow circle is where we spent the day Sunday after a three hour drive north from the farm.

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Stopping by the road on a summer evening

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It took us almost six years to stop. Every time we drove an hour to the Detroit airport or to Trader Joe's in Ann Arbor - the first 30 minutes on country roads - we passed by the Genuine Broaster Chicken place that also sells ice cream. "What's Broaster Chicken?" I asked myself somewhere in my parietal lobe as we curved out of town. If I'd known it's a fancy method for frying chicken, I would have slammed on the brakes long before this.

Our waitress, who talked with us a while, explained how Broaster Chicken is cooked. This is a specific brand, and vendors buy their chicken, mixes and machines directly from the company. First the chicken is marinated in Broaster's special mix, then deep fried in their special pressure cooker ". . . in the chicken's own natural juices, limiting the absorption of cooking oil and driving the marinade deep down to the bone while searing the chicken with a golden, crispy-crunch coating."

Ahhhhh. Did I say I love fried chicken? I think this is the best I've eaten.

To top off the salivary heaven, we sure enjoyed chatting with the owner Doug Mills, as well as with the waitress (the lady smiling in the photo with model cars, above). Doug is not describing the size of a fish he caught but his gorgeous flower plantings and how our chilly summer has inhibited growth. He also explained how he's been fixing the place up like a genuine diner.

My mom, who moved from metro NY to the South when she married Dad, would mimic Southerners who appreciate good-but-not-always-healthy food, "sometimes I just need somethin' FRAHed." It may not be the healthiest, but once in a while, aahhhh. Stage Stop's Broaster Chicken is a short ten minute drive from the farm. Don't worry, I'll try to limit myself to no more than once a month. I wonder if this really was a stage stop back in the day, since it is on one of the oldest roads in Michigan.

Both times we've eaten at the Stage Stop, Mr. Mills the proprietor has been busy weeding outside, which explains his dirty dungarees in the photo below.

I think when Doug painted his restaurant these colors he had ice cream in mind. The ice cream I chose to balance out the savory chicken? Moose tracks.

Begonia ice:



Stage Stop Broaster Chicken
Stockbridge, MI

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Not getting to Woodstock

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In August 1969, a couple days after Woodstock ended, I turned 13. I would have my first real kiss the next summer. I was a straight kid, didn't carouse in high school and only went to one drinking party in a farmer's field one hot summer night where I took a couple of nasty sips of beer from a flimsy plastic cup. My older and wilder brother had taken me to the party, but he watched over me. That Michigan meadow party was about as close as I got to Woodstock, and the girl in this photo is about as far from my experience as she can be. For years I bemoaned my protected life, being a preacher's kid. But any secret grains of recklessness never took root.

For different and very annoying reasons, Joni Mitchell never made it to Woodstock, yet she wrote the song about it, which David Crosby said captured the gathering better than anyone who had been there. She said herself that the deprivation she felt not being there, watching it on television, provided an "intense angle" for writing it.

In writing classes, my mentor Diane Wakoski always said it is hard to write a good, happy poem. It's difficult to avoid cliches. Truly, I found it easier to write poem after poem venting angst about growing up in a churchy life. She also said the best art and writing comes from those who have had to overcome obstacles. Think of your favorite artists and writers and see if that isn't true.

One month after Woodstock, at the Big Sur Celebration, Joni sang her new song for the first time publicly. I wonder if she isn't partly glad now that she didn't get to Woodstock, so she could write such a song as this. Below is that Big Sur performance.

And no, I'm not sorry I was protected. I've gotten over the regret of being a goody two shoes. I also recognize the oddity of seeing the thoroughly good life of a pastor's family as an "obstacle." Another funny thing is that I looked the part of a hippie in my tattered blue jeans and long wavy, wildish hair, and many people - including the staff at the church camp where I worked one summer - were convinced I smoked pot with the best of 'em.

By the way, did you know that Joni Mitchell considers herself "a painter first, and a musician second"? See her paintings.

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