Cloudlands Journal

The Awful Archive

2011-12-27T12:08:00.003-08:00

I have started working on my scrapbook again. I have 28 years of accrued stuff to go in: shopping bags full of ticket stubs, photos, kids’ drawings and school work sheets, pictures of wonderful Halloween costumes, cards…. I contemplated sending a note to Martha Stewart, asking how I might go about tackling this project. Most of the questions she gets are along the lines of how one goes about

A Cat Farm

2011-12-06T09:34:00.000-08:00

A Case for Lipstick In deepest February, it doesn’t take long for visitors to our fair region to notice things looking, well, sort of gray. The snow banks, the tree bark, the sky, even the people (mostly Caucasian, still) take on an ashen tinge. The sun is a most welcome, but intermittent, visitor, so no wonder. The antidote is travel. The tropics are lovely, but

2010-02-09T18:01:00.000-08:00

Sabbath for the Rest of Us

2010-02-01T19:47:00.000-08:00

Sabbath for Rest of Us As a New Englander, the historical significance of the Sabbath has been drilled into me. This, I supposed was to highlight the contrast between the lives of my austere forebears and my own ridiculously cushy life. They had to stay in church for hours on Sunday, only to return home to more Bible study and quiet reflection. If

Wi-Fi in the Mountains

2010-01-24T09:37:00.001-08:00

Wi-fi in the Mountains Every since we moved up here six years ago, there have been promises to wire the state for high speed Internet. It’s come up with every politician I’ve seen interviewed. We had to go to the public library six miles away to use the high speed connection there. Every time someone sent us a picture of their dog (which a surprising

Post Oil Solutions

2010-01-18T09:11:00.000-08:00

Post Oil Solutions About a year ago, I signed up to be on the Post Oil Solutions mailing list, little knowing how vital the contact would be. As its name suggests, it’s a group dedicated to helping people come up with viable solutions to the challenges of trying to create thriving communities that are not oil dependent. In southern Vermont, there is an added

Playing in Snow

2010-01-12T18:46:00.001-08:00

Playing in Snow The way to enjoy winter, or at least get through it sane, is to play in the snow. This holds true for adults as well as children. Maybe even more so for adults. During Vermont’s five month winters, your life is dominated by snow: you shovel it, plow it, drive in it, fret about it, and try not to break your neck as you navigate through it. You ‘d better find a

Snow Days

2010-01-03T18:23:00.000-08:00

Snow Days Snow days provide the excitement of gambling without the expenditures, or the addiction. The anticipation, hope, growing excitement as the weather forecasts are analyzed and discussed all contribute to the euphoria when a snow day is finally declared, and kids don’t have to go to school. Snow days provide a forced, spontaneous vacation. Even our

Making Spirits Bright

2009-12-28T07:05:00.000-08:00

Making Spirits BrightI’ve been thinking about Virginia Wolfe’s classic novel, Mrs. Dalloway, which depicts, in painstaking detail, the careful preparation for a party: the food, the guest list, the flowers--these mostly female tasks that went-- and have gone--mostly unnoticed, even derided as unimportant. Clarissa’s childhood sweetheart once told her she “had the makings of

Buying Things

2009-12-19T11:27:00.001-08:00

Buying things Is this what happens a week before Christmas when the handmade zeal has fizzled? I do know that when I published last week’s blog on making socks, there appeared, as if by magic, an ad for felting yarns, right on the page! How ever did they know that I would be a sucker for felting yarns? How did they know that I love buying materials, more than

Making Things, take 2

2009-12-13T05:46:00.000-08:00

Making Things, take 2 I learned a lot in the course of getting ready for the fiber show in November. For one thing, why handmade articles generally cost so much: R&D, or rather in my case, trial and error. I blithely thought that I would retool felted sweaters into all sorts of attractive articles. Wrong. I made several pairs of mittens from recycled sweaters that

Pushing the Seasons

2009-12-08T09:27:00.001-08:00

Pushing the Seasons The irony is not lost on me that as our neighboring ski resort tries to drag in winter by making snow, I am out in the garden with my little spade, still trying to hold onto our luxuriously long autumn as I plant my wintering-over garlic. The snow machines on the mountain are groaning away, every snow gun arcing a blast of engineered crystals over the

2009-11-29T09:35:00.001-08:00

Colette’s Bathwater Over the summer I made a lot of flavored syrups. I got carried away, actually, and made not only basil, for Basil Gimlets, but also mint, rose and nutmeg geranium. The Basil Gimlet recipe I pulled from Sunset mag, and it gave me the idea that you can mix these syrups with rum, gin or vodka and come up with something potable.

2009-11-22T17:36:00.000-08:00

Tucking in the Bees I love keeping bees because they are both industrious and exciting. Plus they are healthy. Today, when my son came home from a weekend with the flu, I felt a sympathetic pang of nausea. But it was time to insulate the beehives, not baby myself. Out I tromped to the bee yard with a pile of Styrofoam insulation, tarpaper, lathe and a cordless drill.

Tonics

2009-11-14T10:32:00.000-08:00

Tonics If deep belief were the secret ingredient to effective health tonics, I would never ever get sick. I believe in and love them all with a fervency that surprises even me. My first idol was garlic. What’s not to love, I thought? There’s garlic bread, spaghetti with clams and garlic; it just makes everything better. The only small problem

Running Bear

2009-11-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

Running Bear Two nights ago, at about six, our lab mutt started whining, pacing and looking out the window. There followed the sound of a pickup truck, her very favorite vehicle. Most of the time, people just circle our drive and go back down the road, satisfied that nothing interesting is out here. Much to her dismay. In our dog’s world view, anyone, including any stray

Making Things-- a short manifesto 11/3/09

2009-11-03T12:10:00.000-08:00

Making Things- a short manifesto I’ve often wondered why people who live in rural areas seem so much more at home with making things than urban dwellers. In Vermont, very few of my friends and acquaintances don’t knit, sew, crochet, quilt, spin, paint, or do something creative. Is it that we have the space? I know that since moving back to Vermont, my

The Winter Countdown

2009-10-26T14:18:00.000-07:00

The Winter Countdown Oct 26, 2009 Around here, we are all very interested in when winter is going to show up. I think it’s the New England character, which combines dourness and fatalism with a certain almost jaunty interest in how your discomforts will manifest. When Chummy, our neighbor, shows up with his annual load of aged cow manure for the garden, we discuss the

Green Tomatoes

2009-10-20T13:30:00.001-07:00

Oct 20, 2009 Green Tomatoes It’s one of the garden’s many rich ironies that in the year of the tomato blight, my plants have more healthy fruit on them than I have ever seen. A hundred pounds, I’ll bet, on about 22 plants. Every fruit but one is green. I picked the red one, sliced it up and put it on a plate at supper. My dear, innocent family took it for granted.

2009-10-12T03:54:00.000-07:00

October 12, 2009 Our first livestock experiment was with bees. Four years ago, I took bee classes, bought and set up a hive and got a “nuk” full of bees. We loved having them over that summer of ’05. As my husband said, No matter how lazy we were being, the bees were always hard at work. My gardens flourished. I watched the bees work the creeping thyme,

2009-10-05T16:58:00.000-07:00

October 5, 2009 I was so stunned at how easy it is to get a blog up and running that when it came time to actually say something, I was more or less struck dumb. You may later wish this had remained the case—maybe we all will. At the time, though, it seemed like doing an end run around agents, editors, permission-givers, the very guards at the door of Publishing

2009-10-03T11:41:00.000-07:00

Time moves slowly on the farm, especially when your equipment is planted.