Day of the Dead

I stumbled upon Dia de los Muertos in October of 2001 while wandering around Pilsen on my lunch break. I had been in Chicago for about six months, and my dad had been dead for four. I had few friends in the city and even fewer at my job, so I spent most of my work day soaking in grief and wandering around the blocks adjacent to my office.

One afternoon, while approaching a small patch of grass the city tried to pass off as a park, I saw a folding table draped in a bright yellow cloth and festooned with marigold garlands. On top of the table, there were large cardboard boxes covered in bright paper and crepe garlands stacked up like a short pyramid. I got closer to investigate and saw a placard in English and Spanish proclaiming that this was a community altar for Day of the Dead. It was late October, so a few people had already started decorating the altar with photos, notes, and neatly packaged bags of candy and food. Mementos like toy cars, rubber chickens, funny figurines, and action figures were also tucked in to the growing pile, and I imagined these were whimsical inside jokes between the grievers and the deceased. I was drawn to the juxtaposition of festivity and grief - the first time I had seen a reflection of my conflicting feelings of mourning and celebration for my dad's "homecoming". I became obsessed with the idea of adding to the altar for my dad.

I wrestled with the idea of the altar for a week. I made a list of what I could bring: A picture of my dad, a photo of a lobster tail, a small toy gorilla. I went back to the altar again and again and watched the tiers become cluttered with hundreds of notes, objects, and squirrel-eaten food. The "pagan"-ness of it gave me pause. The fact that I was not really part of the community or the culture gave me pause. But the gut-churning longing to join with these anonymous People Who Had Lost, to add my ache to the pile of grief, to find a bit of humor and festivity in the darkness, kept me coming back to the altar.

Eventually, I wandered a little farther on my altar-watching trek and made it to the National Museum of Mexican Art and saw that they had a whole exhibit about Dia de los Muertos. Sugar skulls, dancing skeletons, paintings, sculptures, and helpful descriptions helped me put together a bigger picture for this new obsession. When I got to the very last room of the exhibit, my breath caught in my throat. I saw a small alcove plastered with neon post-it notes on every inch of the wall. Notes that people had written to their beloved dead. Notes, the description informed me, that would be collected and burned on the Day of the Dead as a kind of offering. Perfect. I cried with relief and sadness as I grabbed a green post-it and scribbled:

I miss you dad, but I'm so glad you're finally Home.

I stuck it on the wall with the hundreds of other notes of love and longing and release and I left. I didn't go back to the altar. I didn't want to see it succumb to the elements, as it was designed to do. I had fulfilled the need to be part of a collective mourning.

When my mom died a few years later, I thought about driving down to Pilsen and hunting for an altar. I didn't. We remembered her in different ways, and my Chicago circle was much bigger. More of my friends had known and loved my mom, so I had a communal mourning for her in a way I hadn't with my dad.

This year, my brain was pulled to the altar again. Another quieter, lonelier grief stirred fleeting ideas of a road trip to the city. This year, I thought about finding a community altar to grieve the loss of tiny twins who I should have delivered about a week ago. Miscarriage is such private grief. No one knew them - not even me! There are no photos, no favorite foods, no shared memories. The doctor didn't even print out the ultrasound picture. I saw them exactly one time, and that was on the day I was told "So, there are two, but neither has a heart beat".

I have been thinking about those twins a lot this month. I'm pregnant again, and everything looks good so far, but announcing it to the Facebook world was scary. I think about the fact that I would have been a mom of twins right now, but I try to trample down the sadness to embrace the new life.

We had a different kind of communal mourning for the twins, even though only about 15 people in the world even knew they had existed at the time. Like I had when my dad died, I was aching for a way to express some kind of public yet anonymous grief. I wanted to scream at everyone I met in those first few weeks "MY BABIES DIED!". I didn't actually do that, so there was a lot of pent-up emotion bubbling up in my heart. Easter was right around the corner. I read in the bulletin of the church we were attending that congregants were invited to bring any kind of flower to the altar on Easter Sunday, and they would provide small notes and floral picks so we could write a note with the memorial information on it and stick it in the plant. So this Easter, I latched on to the redemption story and let go of the festive macabre. I brought a small, double-bloomed hydrangea to the altar at church, pulled out a white square of paper and wrote:

With love for our twin stars.

So, I didn't celebrate Day of the Dead this year. I did, however, ugly cry through most of the church service today as we celebrated All Saints Day. On All Saints Day, we remember the famous, officially-recognized saints of the church (St. Augustine, St. Peter, etc) as well as all those who lived in faith but aren't famous (my mom, dad, grandma, etc). Those saints who have joined what the church calls The Great Cloud of Witnesses. All Saints Day seems like the perfect celebratory day of remembrance for me now. I can't say that the Twin Stars were saints, per say, but I believe we'll meet them some day, and that they're already hanging out with their grandma and grandpa. That's a reason to celebrate, even if I miss them all like crazy.

How to Get Rid of Stuff

As I surveyed our garage and home last Tuesday evening, I felt a happy peacefulness. We had re-homed 9 big boxes of belongings that day, in addition to the 1 Bin + 2 Boxes of recycling and 1 Bin plus 1 Box of refuse that was hauled away from our curb through our regular garbage pick up. I'm telling you, our space instantly felt a lot more spacious.

Even though we had been living with piles of boxes in our garage and lower level for almost a year now, in retrospect I'm glad we left those boxes alone for so long. We'd unpacked all the things we need and use regularly, so it was much easier to bid farewell to things we had not even seen in 12 months. I mean, if we haven't needed that toaster oven in the last year, are we ever going to need it? Or that coat that is now two sizes too big?

I also took a jumbo tub of new and like-new house essentials to World Relief, and 4 bags of books and CDs to the local library for their annual Book Sale in addition to these things that the Epilepsy Foundation picked up outside our garage. 

There are really two questions to ask yourself when you ponder whether you should get rid of something:

1. Am I using this?

2. Is it beautiful?

This simple litmus test is based on this quote from William Morris:

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

William Morris, according to Wikipedia, was a textile designer during the Arts and Crafts movement. I think these are pretty wise words, and I tried to employ them unsentimentally during our Great Stuff Removal of 2014.

Here's the thing. I'm sentimental. I like cute do-dads. I have had about 15 different apartments in my adult life. Les and I got married, and we both liked "our own" things. We had, and still have, a lot of stuff that we sort of like and sometimes use. But we've also gotten a lot better about scrapping things that no longer fit our present life. They may have been PERFECT in our living room 7 apartments ago, but they aren't part of our life today.

Here are some tips that I've found helpful when trying to clear out the clutter:

1. Designate a couple of boxes for "Maybes".   Maybe I'll wear this again. Maybe I'll decide to make creme brulee once a week in October and I'll need that pastry torch. Give your stuff a chance to prove itself. Put it in a box that's clearly labeled with the contents and tuck it into a corner of your garage or storage closet. MARK IT WITH THE DATE. If you haven't needed or wanted something in the box in, say, 6 months or a year, donate whatever is still in the box.

2. Use Boxes or Plastic Tubs as Visual Goal Posts. Decide "I will fill up this rubbermaid tub with like-new items to donate to the local refugee resettlement agency" or, conversely, "I will only keep as many photos of my chihuahua as I can fit in this shoe box". This was a tip I got from a friend who had had to clean out her parents' home after they died. She found herself wanting to keep everything, and knew that she would never need or look at most of the stuff again. So she told herself that she could only keep what she could fit inside 2 big plastic tubs, and promised herself that the lids had to close on both.

3. It's OK to Throw Away. Yes, in a perfect world, we'd all recycle everything or find a responsible charitable organization to reuse our old bed sheets for the Common Good. But let's face it: some of your stuff belongs at the curb. Don't donate junky stuff. And don't hold on to huge boxes of things because you don't know how to recycle all those CD jewel cases. Post your loot on Freecycle and see if anyone WANTS your old sneakers or chemistry textbooks from 1992. You never know! But if you don't get any takers, it's OK to throw things away. Let the pain of overflowing garbage bins be a challenge to you to be more judicious about what you bring into your home in the first place!

4. Get Inspired. Check out the Becoming Minimalist blog, read the book 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess, or other simple living inspiration to rev up your motivation to simplify, simplify.

5. Give Yourself a Break. Our home is always going to have roughly 4,000 books. I'll always have an overflowing stash of DIY supplies. We'll probably have actual DVDs in actual cases on actual shelves at least until Netflix starts streaming our favorites. We have bins of holiday decor in our garage. Auggie's little toy basket is ridiculously stuffed. That's OK. Those things are, in a lot of ways, part of who we are as individuals and as a family. It's unlikely we'll ever have a streamlined, mismatched-mug-free minimalist home, and we're OK with that. The idea is to put a stop to the accumulation of unnecessary things, and things that don't add any joy or beauty to our home, and to clear out everything that weighs us down.

Flowers are My Spirit Animal

Last week a new friend shared an article with me about seeing God in nature - Through the Creation to the Creator. She and I had been talking about my love of trees and flowers, and so she copied the article and gave it to me the next time she saw me. It's a fairly dense essay. I think it may have originally been a seminary lecture.

Here's a taste of it, including a fantastic chunk of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem:

The world is a sacrament of the divine presence, a means of communion with God. The environment consists not in dead matter but in living relationship. The entire cosmos is one vast burning bush, permeated by the fire of the divine power and glory:

                 Earth's crammed with heaven,
                 And every common bush afire with God;
                 But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
                 The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

I've been thinking of that stanza this week as I've watched our new yard surprise me with bright new bursts of color every day. It's our first spring in our new home, so I had no idea what, if any, early blooms to expect. Auggie's morning perambulations are a blissful scavenger hunt. Daffodils! Crocus! New shoots of to-be-determined flowers muscle their way through the winter debris, impaling brown leaves with their shocks of green. And today, on this drizzly, stormy day, my heart thumped with joy when I realized that the Random Twiggy Bushes In the Back were, in fact, Forsythia. Forsythia! In my yard! Not even the threat of new snow flurries tomorrow can dampen my spirits. There are forsythia in my yard.

Can blossoms be a holy thing? They feel like that to me. My mom and I used to call each other the first day that one of us saw an actual bloom on a flower somewhere, often when snow was still melting, winter taking her dear sweet time to drip away. "I saw a crocus today!" was usually how that phone exclamation would start. When you are watching, scanning every berm and bed and patch for that first pop of color, the first flower of spring is like a burning bush. It does seem a bit like holy ground. Hope just forced her way through the frozen dirt to explode right in front of our feet..

Not from our yard, but still amazing.

I recently started a job working for a florist. It's pretty much my favorite thing ever. I may go back to the Non Profit life eventually, but for me, in this season, working with flowers all day is the source of a deep river of joy. It feels like a gift, and I'm choosing to wrap my arms around it, at least for a while.


The only thing that keeps me from being off-the-rails ecstatic about the job is the knowledge that the floral industry has an enormous environmental footprint. It takes a LOT of water, chemicals, fossil fuels, and intense human labor to bring the beautiful blooms from field to vase. I'm just putting that out there, because some days I really wrestle with being part of it. I've talked with florists, including my current employer, about "greener" options like locally-grown flowers and pesticide-free or Rainforest Alliance Certified flowers, but I've been told that there just isn't enough consumer demand for those things, and so people aren't willing to pay the extra cost and a business would struggle to stay competitive. Local flowers in Illinois are a very seasonal commodity, so that would only be an option for a few months a year anyway.  

I assuage my queasiness about it by telling myself that my choosing not to work at a florist is not going to revolutionize the industry. A job boycott? Of one? I don't see a lot of ripple effects from that, other than the effect of my being sad to not get to be around flowers all day. Maybe I can find some simple ways to green-ify what we do, or connect to local options when they are in season. I don't know yet, but I'm going to be on the lookout. 

What do you think? Is it an ethical compromise to be part of an industry with a negative environmental impact? Do the emotional and relational benefits of brightening someone's day with flowers or bringing the beauty of God's creation into people's Big Life Events counterbalance the squickiness of the fact that those particular specimens of creation were produced with the help of noxious pesticides and through the back-breaking labor of field workers? Some may say that I'm just looking for new topics for my Debbie Downer repertoire. Maybe. But I want to be a conscientious consumer AND worker. It ain't easy.

I'm thankful that there are flowers popping up of their own accord all over my yard. I'm thankful that I have a job that speaks Beauty to me and sings quiet songs of gratitude to the Creator while I work.  I marvel that God is so incredibly good that it occurred to God to make all these crazy flowers in the first place. Presumably, there could have been a less beautiful way to ensure pollination and honey-making. A blander option for nectar or seeds for birds or ingredients for healing teas. But no! Myriad variety, fragrance, color, and purpose. What an extravagantly beautiful way to orchestrate an ecosystem!

Spring in the Midwest is kind of a communal healing and restoration. Especially after this winter. I think of these early flowers as the main ingredient in a tincture of renewed hope and thanksgiving. The huddled bulbs and bushes have made it through the winter under their thick coats, and so have we. New life from the daily dread of snow and gray. Our yard, at least, is aflame with green and yellow blessings.

What Do Grain-Free Vegetarians Eat? Birthday Edition!

I turned 36 on Saturday, which means the blog turned 3. I have started drafting three different birthday/blog goals/life aspirations posts and then I've scrapped them all. The truth is, I have no idea what lies ahead this year. None of us do, right? I could set goals, muse about changes I want to make to my daily routines or the ways that I pray God will be at work on my heart this year. I am thinking about all of that stuff, and I have PLENTY of time to think about it these days while still jobless.

But here's the stone-cold truth: I'm thinking about food today, and every philosophical post I tried to write kept turning its way back to food. So I'm going to follow where my heart leads me, and my heart leads me to CAKE.

Whenever I tell someone that I try to keep a grain-free, vegetarian diet, the next three words uttered are inevitably "What do you EAT?!".

Good question.

Here's a snapshot of a Day in the Life of my food  (What I actually ate yesterday):

Breakfast - frozen berries, flax seeds, and cherry juice blended into a smoothie, plus an apple with almond butter.

Lunch - home-made lentil salad with dill and tomatoes, a few tapioca-based crackers with guacamole.

Dinner - baked potato with sun dried tomatoes and goat cheese and a green salad

Basically, I eat what a lot of vegetarians eat, but I replace bread and rice with things like plantains, sweet potatoes, quinoa and veggies. Disclaimer: I am not perfectly consistent. I occasionally buy gluten-free things that are made with rice flour. I eat corn chips sometimes. They make me feel kind of crummy, but I choose my battles. Sometimes a minor chips-and-salsa digestive hangover is worth it.

I'm learning and cooking and baking my way through this, and I hope to have enough recipes in my repertoire soon that I can get away from any corn or rice cheats and lean more towards a mostly-vegan diet. But that's for another blog post.

What about the cake? 

Ok, so in January I decided that I would invite a few friends and my dear siblings over for a Birthday Brunch to celebrate. Party prep would give me something to do and a fix a deadline for getting the house more or less in order. I wanted to make a menu full of food that everyone would enjoy, but that I could eat with the gluttony one reserves for one's own birthday.

Yum.

One thing was for certain: There had to be macarons. 

The original French recipe for macarons is totally grain-free and made with almond flour. Learning how to make a pretty macaron absorbed many wintery hours in February. They are pretty much the hardest thing I have ever tried to bake, but they turn out sooooo pretty, even the imperfect ones. And they are filled with things like jam and chocolate and Nutella. What's not to love? Here's the best macaron recipe and tutorial I found in my trial and error. After the 4th pan, I really had the hang of it! Now I want to make them all the time.

So, one sweet option was settled with the macarons. But it seemed that there should be something savory in the spread, so I made some little omelet cups in muffin tins. They ended up being a melange of a couple of different recipes I saw online, but essentially I baked scoops of frozen hash browns in muffin tins until they got a little crispy and made a bit of a "crust", and then poured eggs that I had whisked together with milk and seasonings into the cups. Top with omelet fillings like peppers, cheese, herbs, and other veggies and bake them up. Easy! 

And now, for the Cakes. Yeah. That's right. Cakes, plural.

It just wouldn't be a birthday party without chocolate cake, as far as I'm concerned. I made this grain-free dark chocolate espresso cake and it was simple, tasty, and chocolatey. Honestly, I expected it to taste even darker, so don't be afraid of it if you are not a dark chocolate fan. 

The other cake was definitely the surprise hit of the brunch. Lemony, soft, almondy grain-free perfection. The recipe is converted from an Australian cooking blog. I've made this twice now, so if you want to make it, message me and I'll send you my notes. I found I had to tweak a couple of things to make it turn out, but in general it is a simple, quick and elegant cake to make. 

As you can see, I'm really not at a loss for what to eat on most days. If I could get away with eating cake and omelet muffins every day, I would, and I'd be fine (if spherical). Being at home for a few months with little to do besides cook and scour Pinterest for new recipes has really turned out to be a blessing. I'm optimistic that a job will come around eventually, and I'll be much better prepared to eat things that are working with, rather than against, my body every day. And when I do get a job, I'll celebrate with cake.

My 40-Hanger Winter Closet

Our house is mid-level chaos these days. We spent Les's winter break unpacking and situating and tackling projects. Now that we have everything unpacked, we're shin deep in piles of things we haven't figured out a place for yet. These piles are totally stressing me out - mentally and emotionally. Sometimes physically. (I'm looking at you, box of random formerly-hall-closet-contents now just box-in-the-middle-of-the-hall on which I keep stubbing my toe).

Everyone has stuff that they don't use that often, and it's hard to know what to toss and what to keep. No one wants to end up in the position of re-buying something you just donated or tossed. But the fact remains that we have more belongings than we actually need, so some of them are going to be re-homed. It has been overwhelming to figure out where exactly to start.

I've been stewing about all this for a couple of weeks, and apparently I'm not the only one. My dear sister and my dear Jackie are both in the midst of some Epic Closet Simplification. They inspired me to take a hard look at my clothing stash. The closet is as good a place to start as any, right?

I took one look at my closet, and then re-read this blog post from Living Well, Spending Less. I had read her 40 Hanger Closet post last year, but I wasn't quite ready to commit. Today, it turns out, was the day.

Behold, My 40 Hanger Winter Closet

• 9 sweaters (including one not pictured because it is on the drying rack downstairs)
• 7 cardigans
• 1 printed hoodie sweatshirt (which I am wearing right now)
• 3 skirts
• 8 tops
• 6 dresses
• 2 pairs of pants - one corduroy and one black denim
• 4 pairs of jeans

Whoa. I have a LOT of navy, gray, and camel-colored clothes. 

I chose my favorite, best-quality, best-fitting, most versatile pieces and decided that I would attempt to get through the end of March by wearing these and only these pieces. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be to choose. In fact, it was kind of a no-brainer. If I'm honest with myself, I wear the same things over and over and over again all winter. Especially sweaters. And guess what? If you limit yourself to the items that you like the best and look the best, I suspect it will be even easier to get dressed in the morning.

What's not included:

• Underthings
• Leggings/tights
• shoes & bags
• layering t-shirts
• workout / yoga clothes
• hooded sweatshirts that you wear around the house for days on end because it is in the negative double digits outside.
• Formal wear. We're going to 2 weddings in February, so I'll need to pull out the glam for those. 

My version of the 40 Hanger Wardrobe is actually a mishmash of the blog mentioned above and other minimalism writings that encourage a strictly seasonal, minimalist wardrobe. So I'll change up the 40 items when spring rolls around, which is why I haven't actually discarded any of my other clothes. 

I am actually pretty psyched about a truly seasonal wardrobe. I have a few items that will get a workout all year-round, but I'm eager to swap those sweaters for bright dresses in a few months. Let's face it, I am not the best dressed gal on the block, and that's OK with me. But if this simple discipline of a seasonal wardrobe helps me focus on the best I already have and look the best I can, then Yay For Me.

Eating mealy tomatoes in the middle of winter just feels "off", right? Well, so does seeing a 30-something year old woman trying to rock a sundress with a lemon yellow cardigan in January. No more.