Backyard Farmgals

I lived in Taiwan as a little girl, I don't remember everything about the place, but some things never have left my memory.  The smell of the place, the Buddhist monks chanting and walking up the street the night we got there, my friends, Chinese New Year, and the flavors.  Taiwan is where my taste buds became adventurous.  I tasted everything.  I had my first sip of wine, tasted my first caviar (which I loved and still do), and developed a palate that was traveled and a bit sophisticated for a child my age. One thing I can't shake is the smell of beef noodle soup at The American Club.  My parents used to gobble the stuff, bowl after bowl.  There was a very distinctive smell and flavor to it.  My mother recently came to me begging for me to find a way to make it.  She had lived without it for thirty years and she literally couldn't go one more day without it.  Funny what we will do for a flavor that is attached to memory. So I s...

I had this crazy idea.  For a minute, while looking at my little farmhands this morning, I thought that maybe I should be writing down all of the things I love about them.  I write in a journal about once a week, but I forget all of the little things they do each day that melt my heart.  So, I grabbed a couple of empty notebooks, some craft paper, sticky glue dots, ribbon and a marker and got to work. In about a half hour I had two cute little notebooks that I can fill with all of those little things that I love about both of them everyday.  Between sips of morning tea, I wrote a little note to each of them in the front of the journal explaining why I felt like I needed to do this for them.  One day I hope they will get a good belly laugh or, even better, they will know how much I love them.  What better gift to give your children than love? I jotted down something that I loved about them.  It doesn't have to be long, just a quick little sen...

Not my usual kind of post, just some words gushed out onto a page to express how I feel.  Hope you all don't mind. I need to say that this week I have been very grateful for faith, for balance, and for knowing who I am and why I am here.  It's funny how things pop up in our lives that shake us, attempting to throw us off course.  My grandmother died on Tuesday.  I was never really close to her, she always kept me at a distance, and that's okay.  I won't pretend to understand, but over the years I have grown acceptance for the fact that I was sometimes hers and sometimes not.  I was a child caught in the middle of deep feelings that I knew nothing about.  An innocent bystander lost in all of the emotion. She is my father's mother, a beautiful woman in her day.  I have always loved how beautiful she was.  I have her eyes and delicately arched eyebrows.  I can bring a person to their knees with a twitch of a brow, one of my best and...

I have been confined to the sofa a lot the past few weeks.  Just before Christmas we were "blessed" with an ice storm.  Curious as to whether it was really slick (duh), I stepped out onto my front porch to see if the carpool drive to school would really be treacherous and slipped off the porch.  I landed on the concrete steps and gave myself a great Christmas preset: a minor concussion, whiplash, and I messed up my back in three places.  Oh crap... I guess I didn't fall gracefully. Going from being an overly active person to a mere heap piled on the couch has been a rough transition.  I can't lift anything and I spend three days a week in therapy which feels like a huge waste of time even though I can see it helping.  I would rather be doing something else.  One very unexpected thing that has helped cheer me up while being flat on my back is my bird feeders.  I have a few in my front yard.  I moved one a few months ago to a...