by Sara Barry | Nov 19, 2014 | abundance, it takes a village, traditions, what I love
Sometimes community is rooted in place, feeling part of where you are.
It’s the librarians knowing my name and running into friends while we’re checking out books. It’s the cashier at the market asking my little one where her big sister is. It’s my three-year-old having a “usual” at the coffee place.
It’s saying hi to all the other people out walking their dogs or their kids. It’s a quick walk around the block taking twice a long as you intended because you ran into one person and then another and then another.
It’s the shared work of clearing snow and helping those who can’t. It’s meal trains when a baby is born and the neighbor who takes your trash or lets your dog out or ties up your tomatoes when you can’t.
It’s watching a high school senior go off to the prom or a kindergartener get on the bus for the first time—even when neither one is your child.
It’s working together on the playground at the end of the street or the garden/greenhouse at the school. It’s leaving toys in the sandbox for others to play with (and finding them there when you go back) and picking up trash whether it’s yours or not.
It’s traditions like first day of school muffins and our neighborhood egg hunt and the Halloween gathering across the street.
All this is my community, the one grounded in place and people who take care of each other and what they share.
What does community mean to you?
Tell me about your community—one built around people and place or one built around shared experience.
What’s one thing you can do to build or strengthen your community today?
by Sara Barry | Nov 12, 2014 | grief, writing
The summer after my son died, I got a massage. I was naked on the table ready to begin
and Courtney asked me to do a brief visualization before we got started.
“Imagine all your fears and worries and sadness are a bunch of balloons. Put the balloons outside the door. Tie them up. They’ll be right there when you come out, but leave them out there for now.”
I began to cry lightly. I’m not sure why. Was I afraid to let go of the fears and sadness? Was I relieved to put them down for a while? Did it feel that strange to even try to leave them briefly?
I knew grief was a long, convoluted process, but it took me a while to learn that letting go is a multi-step process too.
I let go of my expectations.
I let go of Henry’s spirit and then his body.
I let go of stuff he used and stuff he never did.
I let of the need to remind people that I’m sad and hurting.
And I learned that sometimes letting go is really just loosening your grip a little.
When Courtney is done with the massage, I moved slowly. I felt lighter and looser, but drained. And when we stepped out the door, she was right, my fears and sorrows were right there waiting for me.
I thought how good it would feel to take them outside and let go of the string, watch them float up into the sky away from me. Hard to imagine they float at all. But I held tight to the string, not ready to loosen my grasp, somehow reluctant to release the anxiety fully, afraid of losing the joy and the love that might be tangled up in it.
Since that day, I’ve loosened my grasp, let go of more, found that what I want to hold onto isn’t so easily lost. Still, I see those balloons hovering ahead of me in the darkness of mid-December and I wonder what else I can let go of.
What have you let go of? What would you like to let go of? What stops you?
by Sara Barry | Nov 5, 2014 | grief, writing
Silence is early morning—rosy gold peeking through gray, snores and shifting bodies upstairs. Silence is no interruption to my thoughts or actions. If the coffee grows cold, it’s my own fault.
I love the silence of early morning that isn’t really silence. The furnace hums (more and more often these days), the coffee maker sputters and drips and hisses, and some days the birds outside are downright raucous.
Is it ever really silent?
The house grows quiet when the power goes off, all the underlying hum we don’t notice until it is gone stops.
A house goes silent, beyond quiet, when somebody has died. Even when the furnace and the coffee pot and the birds keep doing their thing, whether or not the power is on. A silence envelops you. Nothing really fills it. You can turn on music or a TV, talk to people, fill up the house, but still a silence lingers. Even when the person missing is a baby who slept a lot.
It is perhaps an absence of energy, not noise.
I had to learn to love quiet again after my son died, because for a long time I remembered that empty silence. These days, I settle into quiet again, even seek it out, because as much as I love the noise and life and exuberance, I need the quiet too.
Today, I woke to singing in the next room. With the time change they are up before me. I miss my morning quiet, when the silence is broken only by snores and shifting bodies upstairs, the sputter-hiss of the coffee maker and the hum of the heat turning on. We’ll settle into new rhythms, and I’ll sit comfortably in that silence again.
What about you? Do you love silence or are you always trying to fill it?
Usually for Write with Me Wednesday, I share a prompt related to whatever I’ve written.
This week, I was stuck. I was staring at the blank page, wanting to just dig back into my past writing rather than write something new, so I looked for a prompt myself, something to get me started. This one is from Old Friend from Far Away:
Tell me about silence.
by Sara Barry | Oct 29, 2014 | fall, garden, what I love
The other day I was out in the garden in a misty almost sprinkle.
I had to drag my self off the couch, away from the computer, out into the gray. I didn’t want to go out, but I knew the garlic needed to be planted.
For years, I’ve said I should grow garlic but come October or November, I’m not programmed to plant. I’m programmed to harvest and preserve. I’m pushing myself to get the garden cleaned up before it gets too cold. I’m ready to nestle inside with something in the oven to warm the house and meet my need for comfort food.
But this past weekend, I pushed myself out into the mess of weeds and the fallen leaves choking the bed where I planted late lettuce.
I looked at the carrots ready to be pulled and the potatoes ready to be dug. I noticed the three green pumpkins on wilted vines, dry grass, and wilted weeds, and the cosmos and zinnias that had finally succumbed to the cold.
“Garlic,” I reminded myself, and I started to dig.
I loosened the soil and dug weeds just where I needed to. I rolled the creaky old wheelbarrow over to the open face of the compost pile and pushed aside the mulched leaves my husband has started to pile there.
I added the compost to my beds, pressed the paper sheathed garlic into the soft, cold ground. I didn’t worry about watering. The weather would do it for me.
I worked until my glasses started getting to spotted, and I found myself smiling and relaxed and invigorated. Instead of a chore, I was doing what I loved. I was outside, moving my body, gettin my hands dirty. I starting something new during a time of wrap up, getting ready for winter and getting ready for spring.
I should get out there today. It’s not even raining.
Write with Me Wednesday
Write
What makes smile, even unexpectedly? Write about something you love doing even though it’s uncomfortable or messy or hard or mundane. You might start with
What do you love doing once you get yourself get started?
by Sara Barry | Oct 22, 2014 | abundance, cooking, fall, grief, use what you have, what's for dinner, writing
Some people waste away when under stress or grieving.
I eat.
When my son was in the hospital, I ate cookies and candy because I had them, big, heavy restaurant-sized meals. I ate whatever plate or dinner people brought me. It didn’t matter how hungry I was or if it was what I wanted (don’t get me wrong, people brought us good stuff); I just ate.
But after he died, when I was home, I cooked.
I made soups and stews, mac and cheese, scalloped potatoes, chicken pot pie. I sautéed greens that I got at the farmer’s market. I toasted bread from the bakery, rubbed it with garlic, drizzled it with olive oil, sprinkled coarse salt.
Maybe I was trying to satiate a hunger not related to food. Maybe I just needed food from home after not being there for three months. Maybe the rhythm of the kitchen soothed me, kept me busy enough without requiring too much thought or energy.
I cooked and I ate, and although the grocery store was a gauntlet of anxiety—ignore the birthday cakes, don’t go down the baby aisle, hold your breath hoping the cashier won’t ask anything about kids—I shopped for food. I went to farmers markets. I paid more for cheese than I should have. I got a farm share of meat and bought local eggs and honey.
I hadn’t worked for almost seven months and was limping along trying to get my sluggish brain to function enough to get through the projects that fell on my desk. B. was going to quit his job come fall to go back to school. I had no business spending extra money on food, and months later when B. actually did quit his job and I readied for another self-paid maternity leave, I gave up the farm share, started buying conventional eggs more and more, cut back on the cheese.
But still I cooked. Still I ate well, and I still took comfort in food.
These days, I still cook, still like to choose good food, still like to do something with the veggies I bring in from the garden. Though with little ones pouting, “I won’t eat that” without even trying it, some days I want to go on a hunger strike, holding out on making food until they are hungry enough to eat whatever it is.
Last night I made potato leek soup with potatoes and onions and carrot and herbs from our garden. I served it with garlic toast with cheese. We started dinner with two whines, but eventually one ate the soup and one at the grilled cheese (it worked better when we put the toast together and called it that). I sat back and enjoyed both.
It was a chilly day, and soup was comforting and warm as the darkness gathered. Comfort food isn’t just for hard times; sometimes we just need to feel cozy at home.
What’s your favorite comfort food?
Potato Leek Soup
olive oil or butter
1 stalk celery, diced
1 large carrot (or equivalent), chopped in half rounds (or quarters if the carrot is fat)
1 ½ cups chopped leeks* (approximate)
salt and pepper
2 quarts broth **
5 medium potatoes, peeled and diced
2 sprigs rosemary
2 sprigs thyme
1 bay leaf
large splash heavy cream (optional, but recommended)
- Sauté the carrots, celery, and leeks until softened. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
- Add the broth, potatoes, and herbs. Bring to just a boil and lower the heat. Simmer for a long time until the potatoes start to break down.
- Look at your soup and debate whether to bother puréeing it. Take a taste. Wonder if you should add milk like you usually do. Take a Facebook poll.
- Use an immersion blender to smooth out the soup, leaving some small chunks. Taste again. Add a hefty splash of heavy cream if you have it.
- Serve with garlic toast, cheesy or not, and hope your kids will eat it without too much of a stink.
Notes
* I actually used Egyptian walking onions in this version. I included any green parts that looked vibrant. They fade as they cook, but still taste good.
** I used homemade chicken broth this time, because I happened to have it in my fridge and wasn’t in the mood for chicken soup, but I’ve made great soup with canned/boxed chicken or vegetable broth. I went heavier on the salt because I knew my base was lower in sodium.
Sometimes community is rooted in place, feeling part of where you are.
