Give Ridiculous Some Light

Last Thursday, I stepped out my apartment door and looked up to see my gentleman neighbor also stepping out of his. His face spoke all kinds of shock. On this mid-March, rainy afternoon, I was wearing nude panty hose, a ruffly black skirt (with unseen gingham bloomers underneath), white leather Mary-Jane tap shoes, and a bright yellow rain coat. He'd caught me on my way to clog.

I turned the key to lock my door, giggled through our expected "Hello," and followed with a simple request: "Don't ask." So down the stairs and to our cars we went, chuckling for different reasons. I'm quite confident I gave him a colorful quandary to solve. Maybe he thought I was planning to pop from a birthday cake or that I was the entertainment for a Civil War Reenactment. Maybe he reconsidered his relocation to the South or wondered how I got my legs so tan.

Little did he know I was on my way to meet a group of people dressed just like me, geared-up to clog (and for those of you unfamiliar with what clogging is, take a look at this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs2j8f7H2WY) for a room of red-faced, inexhaustible elementary schoolers. It was Heritage Night at Harris Creek Elementary school, where Latin American, Irish, and Appalachian folk dancers were to show these little ones vintage ways to bust a move, which they did without hesitation around and around a cafeteria-sized circle.

It's these little moments, these kinks in our chains, that cause us to look up and let the world surprise us a little. Too often we let our routines and expectations build walls around our imagination. Too often we let misfortune define our worth. But it's when I wear this ridiculous outfit into the light of day to see children absorb the elaborate dances of our past without an ounce of judgment, that the beauty of this world shines a bit brighter.

As for the neighbor, I look forward to the next time our paths cross. Hopefully I'll be wearing a pair of jeans and flip-flops.


Love and little jig,


Corrie Lynn

Busy Fingers and Boiled Bones

What to do on a day off? I find it hard at times to relax at home. There always seems to be a job, and I don’t see it getting any easier as I potentially have things like motherhood ahead of me. Sometimes it can be tricky to continue caring for yourself as you pass into and through adulthood.

Yesterday I decided to boil some chicken bones. I had been planning this for awhile, the boiling of bones. I planned it when I roasted a chicken that my friend Lesley gave me, by stripping all the remaining flesh off the carcass and giving the bones to the freezer to hold steady for awhile. Hold steady until I was ready. Yesterday was the day.

Stock is a simple creation, so why do we so often resort to the shortcuts that supposedly simplify? Why do we buy it wrapped in shiny paper and condensed in little parched cubes? The powder dissolves in hot water. To me this always feels wrong and unnatural. Boiling bones, I discovered, produces the most evocative smell. It helped me recover from the cold I didn’t know I had. The stock graced my house.

And what did I do with that stock? I spread it out too thinly. I gave the whole pot of chicken-bone nectar to an even larger pot of minestrone and then I added water. The flavour stretched until I had to beg my palate to find it. Could this be…. a metaphor?

When we strike upon a thing golden in our lives, we should always try and keep some for ourselves.

Same Hands, New Tricks: A Brand New Knitter!

A few nights ago, I was sitting next to Sherry, a very fine chef and friend. Her fingers were tangled in burgundy yarn; her cats, Robert and Ash, convinced that anything dangling was free for swatting until napping in our laps proved a better option. The first lesson in knitting, casting on, came deluxe this night with giggles at stiff fingers and cat snores.

I had almost forgotten there was a time my fingers didn't know how to hold the yarn taut to produce the right tension of stitch, how well my thumb and forefinger work together to slide each stitch onto the needle, how our hands are tools at all! How often we forget.

My lessons in knitting came under a beach umbrella in the thick heat of July. Emolyn, the daughter of a mountain woman who spins wool from her own beloved sheep, watched over my crooked and confused first scarf with the specific patience of a well seasoned knitter. And then we'd run into the waves of the Oak Island beach, where we never heard a car run but saw and swatted more mosquitoes than I cared to know exist. Regardless, I learned to knit with salt and sand coating my hands. If I were you, I'd stick to the cliche of winter nights by the wood fire, but nix the image of an old lady wearing a tight bun. I quite like my hair down, a glass of wine, and the right to toss expletives when I drop a stitch.

But watching Sherry knit for the first time reminded me how hard it can be to teach our old hands new ways to hold, maneuver. Our fingers want to act like a bunch of over-caffeinated kids on the playground, but eventually, when we realize there's no gun to our head, we begin to trust chance-taking and the fact that no thing is perfect. So let me shove the needle into this loop and wrap it with this yarn and pull it through and off and WOW! A brand new stitch. When we finally divorce the unhappy couple, creation and perfection, we can get on with better things, like creation and play or creation and healing.

So I wish Sherry very much luck in her new, volatile relationship with knitting. I may request a trade-off: a couple lessons in the kitchen. After all, we must learn to share!

Love,

Corrie Lynn


PS. A poem I wrote about the Oak Island adventure with Emolyn: http://poetryspark.sparkcon.com/poems/white/crossing_carolina.html

PSS. A link to Sherry's catering business: www.cateringbychefs.com

PSSS. Here are the precious Robert and Ash!

A Poem for Winter

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.


xoxo Corrie Lynn

In the Absence of Much To Say

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 13 of East of Eden, by John Steinbeck:

"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may be have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -- the glory -- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.



"I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economies, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.



"At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?



"Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness likes in the lonely mind of a man.



"And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.



"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost."



Love,

Laura xoxo

Spot the Canaries in Southern Italy

Last Saturday night my husband answered the door to welcome our guests wearing his own homemade version of Madonna’s cone bra – instead of cones he wore protruding plant pots covered in glitter. A rural Madonna. After the initial shock it seemed the guests warmed to him. The idea was Italian-American and we were hinting at the theme of our first wine tasting – wines from Southern Italy.

It was the first time I’ve entertained (along with David) for 12 people around a table, and I felt my inner Mother Mitzi came to life as I spent the whole day buzzing about in preparation. However I did feel the benefit from all the planning ahead as an unexpected calmness arrived just as the guests did. A good group of people makes all the difference. Your little mistakes won’t be held against you. The effort, the act of making something for someone, giving to the people you care about and whose company you enjoy, is what tops the cake.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."



One tasty by-product of our efforts was a handmade pesto (courtesy of chef Nigel Slater) with watercress. The recipe can be found here,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/hand-made_pesto_with_64346. With a borrowed pestle and mortar I crushed these ingredients into a green nutty sauce to be mixed with warm pasta. I supplemented the pine nuts with cashews to save on cost and traded the parmesan for grana padano and this recipe became a keeper, and justification for buying my own pestle and mortar!

As far as the theme of the night, Southern Italy, in addition to these 4 wines we sneaked in two from Tenerife, (a Spanish Canary Island) and hence, the title. Our guests had to decide which two were the oddballs among the bunch. Several of our friends were hot on our tail.

It occurred to me that quite of a few of the elements of the night formed a heart-warming convergence of people we’ve met, places seen, and experiences had. We served an Italian wine made the Negroamaro grape, a type of wine we first tasted in Rocco’s restaurant in Corfu. Rocco and Hilary introduced us to this wine from Rocco’s place of birth – Puglia in Southern Italy. My dress for the night – a thrift store treasure dug up in Kannapolis, NC from Value Village – was used for the whopping second time, being first worn (by me) at the Halloween party in 2009 thrown by some much-loved friends. (Thank you Amanda & Sarah for giving me a reason to buy that frock and bestow upon it an extended life). David’s bra incorporated flowerpots, giving a due nod to gardening and my father-in-law who has supplied me with a surplus of pots for my endeavours.

This time, I did manage to finish the night without showering anyone with liquid from improperly opened bottles. Hooray!

Dusty Keys & Sun Drop Cake: Another Trip Home

Last Saturday night, I sat around a table with a belly full of chili, cornbread and Sun Drop pound cake. Like every November 7th, it's my Daddy's birthday; dogs are smearing cold noses on the door and daylight savings is distracting us with colored leaves before his elusive exit. I see him now: creeping down the hall, pointer finger to mouth, careful not to wake his sleeping sunlight mistresses. But there we were in the sunroom, tissue paper and candle wax leaving evidence of year 57, a year I hope to walk with half my dad's bouncy step. Through the windows we could see the bonfire he built at dusk, settling into cherry wood embers, asking quietly for more fuel.

I stood up to stretch. My mom and my friend, Vanessa, were knee deep in childhood stories, adding a tear or two to the pile of tissue paper and dripped wax. (Anyone who knows my mother, knows she could coach the heart out of a light pole.) I looked at my dad in the midst of all this estrogen and had to giggle. What a man!

I relocated to the living room, where our old piano sits and uncovered its keys. Growing up, piano lessons came once a week, and I associated this spot with stress, with making my fingers do the right thing at the right time. I knew if I played The Entertainer loud enough, my hard-of-hearing grandmother would come into the room, bend her knees a bit like she saw them do on the Lawrence Welk Show. I loved to see her dance. And I knew she loved a chance to listen.

But this night, I laid my stiff fingers over the keys and remembered their sounds: together, separate, in a row. Like the words I gather when writing poems, I realized that each sound has infinite potential when pushed by emotion. And this wood and ivory piece of potential had been sitting quiet for too long. However many songs I'd memorized sitting there, I'd never sat there with their sounds to make something new.

I see it now: a brisk walk up my stairs, a cup of green tea and honey, warm light in the corner, a keyboard. Maybe it's my Winter project, a reason to stretch my creative landscape. Year 25 isn't too late or 57, for that matter. Maybe Daddy will take up dancing while I play. A little girl can hope.


xx Corrie Lynn