CELEBRATE AUTUMN

Have you noticed the color of the sky at sunset, the change in the air in the evening, the arrival of spiders and their webs? Are you done feasting on tomatoes and other crops from your garden? You know that Autumn is here. I love to walk through the rustle of leaves, feel the chilly air in the morning, sweep our deck of leaves and maple seeds, and look for lots of acorns as a sign of a wet winter, and  to gather with friends. What do you like to do to enjoy the best of Autumn?

The Autumnal Equinox last Friday ushers in the season and represents balance before the coming of winter. This period is celebrated in ancient religions and marked by events such as Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The astrological sign for this period is Libra, with a scale as its symbol. In ancient Egypt, Horus and Seth, the powers of light and dark, battled each other as did similar gods in Norse and Aztec mythology. The Chinese celebrate with the Moon festival, honoring the harvest moon. From early times, we've understood the significance of the change in seasons.

At my monthly Craft Day, a friend brought me a decorated pumpkin to welcome Autumn. Our group sipped butternut squash soup, shared Stone Salad and homemade rolls, laughed, and talked while we worked to finish various projects some of us started a long time ago.

During the summer we sat outside, but last Friday we sought the warmth of a room with a fire in the fireplace. In California, the leaves haven't turned yet, but we felt the change in the weather and the change in ourselves as we reached for comfort and warmth as we head towards winter.

Butternut Squash Soup

2 tsp butter
1 onion, chopped
1 lb. butternut squash, peeled and cubed (I use the pre-cut version from the grocery)
2 apples, peeled and chopped
1 small potato, peeled and chopped
1 tsp grated ginger root
1 pinch of pepper
4 cups chicken broth
1/4 cup sparkling apple cider
1/4 tsp  each of cinnamon, ground cloves, nutmeg
1 tsp packed brown sugar

1/2 cup plain yogurt
Garnish with either more chopped apple or chopped pecans or both!

Roast butternut squash, 2 apples, potato in a 400-degree oven for 15 to 20 minutes.

Cook onion in butter in a saucepan until soft. Add squash, apple, potato, ginger root, and pepper. Stir in broth. Cover and bring to a boil.

In a food processor, puree soup, in small batches, until smooth. Return to saucepan. Stir in apple cider and brown sugar. Heat to boiling. Garnish with a dollop of yogurt and apples and/or pecans.



Stone Salad is a great way to have a potluck lunch. Ask each person to bring one ingredient to add to salad greens that you provide. Add dressing and let everyone help themselves. This way no one has to work too hard to provide a delicious lunch!

THE RIGHT SPOT

I've found that putting a plant in the right spot makes a world of difference in its ability to thrive. We have a sunny hillside that faces directly west. During the summer, the hill gets too much sun and many of the plants end up with burned leaves and drooping branches. Two bottle brushes grow on the hill. One of the bottle brushes is in just the right shady spot. Its branches are full of leaves, it looks healthy, and can withstand the occasional pruning of our deer. The other bottle brush is just a couple of feet away, but in more sun in the afternoon. Its spindly branches slump from the heat with a few leaves at the tips. The deer do further damage. The same is true of our three hibiscuses. Two are in the right spot and are shapely, while the third is in too much shade so the deer pruning is consequential.

Plants need their right spots. People do too. Do you know people who keep searching for their right spot? I think of large families where some of the siblings grow and thrive with vigor. Other members either don't connect well with their original family or suffer a series of difficult events, which makes resiliency hard to maintain. I was reminded how hard some people have struggled to find their right spot when Carl Nolte, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote about the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love.* The City became a destination for runaways that summer. Nolte wrote about Jaki Katz, a runaway to the West Coast. She said she ran away because "I was a child of middle-class parents who lived in suburbia. I was spirited and they were not...." She eventually made up with her parents and now lives as an artist in Idaho. She was lucky, she found her right spot.

When I look at my garden, I am reminded of one of my favorite gardening writers, Beverley Nichols, who wrote about gardening in his home in England. His stories about wrestling with nature gave me inspiration because of the life lessons he learned as well.

He said, "The greatest service of the amateur in the art of gardening--or indeed in any of the arts--is that he does things wrong, either from courage, obstinacy, or sheer stupidity. He breaks rules right and left, planting things in the wrong soil at the wrong time of the year in the wrong aspect. And usually, we must admit, the result is disastrous. But not always."        (Garden Open Today, 185)

Doesn't his remark fit our own search for the right spot in life too?

Other books by Beverley Nichols can be found at Barnes & Nobles online:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/beverley-nichols-bryan-connon/1100847787?ean=9781604690446


*http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/nativeson/article/Summer-of-Love-poster-child-is-found-12168609.php

FULL CIRCLE

by Martha Slavin

My mother loved the illustrations of Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane, artists who lived in the Victorian era. Their delicate and detailed drawings for children's books remind me of illuminated manuscripts. The two artists used common motifs and design elements, such as letterforms, stars, flowers, leaves, swirls, repetition, and awareness of positive and negative space. My mother painted similar designs on the delicate ceramics she made.

This last weekend I felt like I was channeling my mother while I took a workshop called The Enchanted Letter led by Heather Victoria Held, a calligrapher and illustrator, who paints illuminated letters. She kept us enthralled with her mastery and knowledge of illumination, which harks back to the Middle Ages, when monks sat at their desks hand lettering religious books. The books done by monks were used for liturgical purposes, but other artists began using the same skills to illustrate books for wealthy patrons. The artists filled in many of the spaces with filigree, leaves, flowers, animals, and insects. The hand-made book became obsolete with the advent of the printing press, but the beauty and appreciation of these books never died. In the Victorian era, artists such as Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane, created children's books using many of the design techniques of the illuminated manuscripts.

by Martha Slavin

In the workshop, we worked on drawing the acanthus leaf that can be found in many designs dated back to the Ancient Egyptians. We learned how to shape the leaf around "S" forms. We placed leaves around borders. We added gold-leaf or gold paint. We colored the shapes first with watercolor pencils, then we dampened the color to smooth out the shading. We added watercolor to bring out highlights and contrast. We drew filigree between the shapes, added shading with pastels, and, finally, we glued on tiny crystals to add a little bling.  As Heather said, "A little bling never hurts." Much of what we did during the weekend workshop, I used to do in college and for several years afterward. I had put aside this type of work for other things. I gave away some of the reference books I no longer used. But now I am back full circle, enjoying the pleasure of this detailed, delicate work.

by Martha Slavin

If you travel to Europe and want more inspiration, you might want to look at the Lindesfarne Gospels in the British Library, or visit the home of Carl Larsson in Sundborn, Sweden, or travel to Bayeux, France, to see the Bayeux Tapestry, an extraordinary piece of embroidery using similar design techniques to relate the history leading to the Battle of Hastings.

by Martha Slavin

One of my favorite artists, Sara Midda, uses many of the techniques of the Victorian era to illustrate her charming books. Look also in the children's section of the library or bookstore for artists, such Graeme Base, Elizabeth Doyle or Edward Gorey, who have all completed an abcderian book worth looking through.

Check out these websites for more information about

Heather Held    https://heathervictoriaheld.com

Illuminated Manuscripts    http://www.illuminatedpage.com/history.html

Kate Greenaway    https://www.clevelandart.org/research/in-the-library/collection-in-focus/k-kate...kate-greenaway

Lindesfarne Gospels     http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/sacredtexts/lindisfarne.html

Carl Larsson    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundborn

Bayeux Tapestry     http://www.bayeuxmuseum.com/en/la_tapisserie_de_bayeux_en.html
Sara Midda    https://www.workman.com/authors/sara-midda

Dover Publications, a great reference resource   http://www.doverpublications.com/about/

I LOST MY ROCKS

I made a 3-dimensional piece called Wings that features a flag-like structure with wings fixed to the main post. The wings have words, sayings, and poems written on them. To keep the column stable, I put the structure on a board with small, smooth rocks resting on it. Each rock has a word for a sound such as "Murmur, Whistle or Shout," printed on them. While cleaning our house, I put the column on top of a cabinet and put the board with rocks in a separate place. Somewhere. I've lost my rocks. I can't find them anywhere in the house. They seem to be part of that mysterious event called "Lost," such as lost socks, lost papers, lost fish.

The lost fish might make you sit up. Not everyone would put lost fish on their list of Lost Things. We have a fountain in our backyard that we decided last fall to fill with goldfish: 30 2-inch specimens, orange, orange and black, orange and white, and black. Beautiful fish that mesmerized us as we watched them swim to the surface of the fountain's lower bowl to snatch up the flakes of fish food. We set up camp chairs so we could watch them in the evening. We added water lilies to the bowl. We didn't pay attention to the filtering system so eventually, the water became murky. We added barley, which helped some. We continued to watch the fish through the winter until one day in April when winter seemed to have exhausted itself, the fish stopped coming to the surface for food. We tried to entice them each night with fish food flakes, we tried different food, we finally abandoned feeding them entirely after Bill learned that when goldfish die they sink to the bottom, and we couldn't see the bottom.

For a month, we ignored the fountain and mourned our fish. We put away the camp chairs. I tried contacting fountain cleaners, fish stores, anyone who might be able to help us. One day, just as we finally decided to drain the fountain and clean it out, I spotted a 6-inch long goldfish under the lily pads. Bill threw some food in and out came more large orange streaks. We counted at least ten (it's hard to count large numbers of fish. They don't stand still.) We waited a couple of days and added more flakes to the water. More and more fish appeared. We now have our orange, black, and multi-colored ones back--only larger. Where were they for a whole month? On vacation? Sitting under the lily pads? We don't know, but we are now back to standing beside the fountain, dropping in food occasionally, and waiting for the open mouths of the fish as they snatch a flake and then dive down below the lily pads.

We can take our fish off of our Lost List. I still haven't found my rocks.

HERE IS HOME

Hurricane Harvey made me think of home: what home means, what home means to people when they lose theirs. Under entirely different circumstances, I asked myself that question when we prepared to move to Tokyo. It's a question all of us can ask: what does home mean to me?

MOVING TO TOKYO

I stand in the backyard and stare back at our house. Like a Peeping Tom, I look through the windows at the golden glow that the lights cast on the fawn-colored walls, on the well-read books, and the blue paisley sofas of our family room. It is early evening and I am saying goodbye to our house.

We are about to leave on a journey that will take us out of the country for the next five and a half years. I know as I stand on the ground in the backyard that our life as we know it was over.

I ask myself, "How will I ever bring this sense of 'home,' this feeling of warmth and stability, to a high-rise apartment in the middle of Tokyo? How can I uproot our eight-year old son and expect him to fit in easily in a new and very different place that is thousands of miles away?"

View from our apartment overlooking Hiroo shopping street

My husband Bill is confident that moving is a good thing. By the time he started high school, he had moved across the United States from Newport News, Virginia, to Philadelphia, to Cincinnati to Decatur, Illinois, to finally, Los Altos, California. He learned to make friends quickly by joining extra-curricular activities. He felt he benefited from the challenge of being the 'new kid' in each place.

I had moved away from home only when I left for college. By then, I was ready to extend my roots and explore new places. But that was my decision, not my parents.

Bill and I moved to Danville when we were 30, changing houses there three times before we found our present house,  before we moved to Tokyo. We had long time friends, our son Theo was in a small public school that was well-suited to his temperament, we had a dog and cat, and I volunteered at Theo's school and with various groups in Danville. We were established in our community. I knew, by moving, that I was giving up my dreams of going back to work now that our son was older. (I wasn't allowed to work while we were overseas.)

I was looking forward to our move to Tokyo, to the adventure of living overseas in a culture that I had been fascinated by since college. I was excited by the possibility of living in a place so different from our own. But as a mother, I was concerned about the transition for Theo with this move.

Little did I know as looked at the scene in the window how much of a life-changing time this move would be.

Theo and his friends in our Tokyo apartment. His friends came from Japan, India, Sweden, Australia and the U.S.

International Food Fair at Nishimachi International School, the school Theo attended.

MOVING TO TOKYO is the first in a series of essays about our life overseas called LETTERS HOME.


Watching the events unfold in Texas shows how much we have learned from our experiences in dealing with major disasters since Katrina. People have stepped in to help when help was needed. This week those helpers showed the best of ourselves.

Home is not only a building but the community that comes forward to help others wherever you may be.