Serendipity

Recently I spent an afternoon at my friend Linda's kitchen table drinking wine with Linda, Diana and Judy.

I had a lot of stuff I "should" have been doing.  I should have been home cleaning MY house, I should have been checking on room availability for the new Sunday school class, I should have been mailing out birthday cards and notes of encouragement to dear friends, I should have been putting a press release together for a film festival.

Instead I spent the whole afternoon drinking wine in front of a cheery fire in a stone hearth in Linda's kitchen talking about philosophy, politics, the French philosopher Montaigne, sexuality, romance with our husbands, children, and friends who occasionally annoy us--it was great fun!

Reflecting back on the day and how it all turned out, the house eventually got cleaned, the Sunday school class went off without a hitch, some of the birthday cards arrived a day or so late, and we decided to wait on the press release until we had more details ironed out.

I could have hurried home and missed out on Serendipity!

My dear friend Linda is my Serendipity Coach.  Just look at her house, it's full of little "moments".

Linda jokes that this is where her husband, Bob, pays the bills

Wouldn't you love this hornet's nest, minus the hornets of course, in your home? Linda confesses that there "might" have been just a few hornets left in the nest when she originally brought it in.  No hornets the afternoon we spent in front of the fireplace next to the nest!

I fell in love with Linda's orange chairs, 

and this little cutie (Annie) too!

Linda teaches me that laughter, friendship, good books, great conversation are all worth taking time from the "shoulds" of life.

In order to allow serendipity to sneak in, you've got to allow wide margins in your life.  When I studied art history in college, the professors talked about white space, or negative space as integral to design.  It wasn't "empty" space.  It serves a visual and harmonic purpose.  Just as wide margins in life serve a larger purpose. The only way to have time for serendipity is to leave empty space on your calendar.  Really can any of us accomplish more than three things in a day? 

I've found just trying to get three things done each day cuts into the possibility of allowing magic to occur.

Is there room at your table for magic, whimsy, chance?

If not, if your life is too crowded by "shoulds", how might you clear a little space for chance?!

When I lose inspiration, I just book a session with my Serendipity Coach Linda!

I'm as guilty as the next person of making life too crowded. Won't you share with me how you're making room in your life for Serendipity? 

Emptying out

Lately I've been feeling that my life is a little too full.  Too full of commitments, activities, promises. When I'm faced by a life dilemma going out to the garden can put everything into perspective.

Today I decided that after the last couple of frosts it was time to empty the planters that flank our garage doors.  They were a little tired.

They had been glorious earlier this summer and given me such pleasure.  But now I had a new vision. Life is trying to tell me that the seasons are changing too. I need to look at the  commitments and promises I made previously to see if they still fit in this new season.

When I made those commitments and promises several years ago, I loved participating in the events and activities.  But now I want to move on from some of those activities and groups to new things, new challenges.  A new vision for my life is tugging at my heart.

My new vision for the pots involved these guys.

I bought these at a road-side stand.  I got all of this for $20, such a steal!

But first I had to clean out the old pots.

Ta-dah!  Cleaning the pots was hard work. The plants had sunk roots deep into the pots and the pillars that these pots sit on are about chest high for me.  So to get leverage I had to drag out the ladder.

There was a surprising amount of wrestling, tugging, digging and pulling to get the old plants out.  Much the same as I wrestle with what groups to let go of.  I'm fond of these groups and the people in them.  It's hard to decide.  I'm like the plants in these pots, knowing my time has come, but not quite ready to let go.

The once beautiful flowers, especially the King Tuts, the tall plants in the middle of the pots, really put up a struggle.

Off to the compost pile with you all to make lovely soil for next year's pots.  

Here are the newly finished pots which should last through Thanksgiving and then it will be time to change them out again for Christmas.  Life has it's seasons too.  I need to do some deadheading and cleaning out of all these commitments so that I can find time to do some of the other things I find interesting right now.  These activities will have their season and then it will be time to make yet another change.

But for now, don't they look lovely?

Here's a list of what's in here, if you'd like to copy this look: pumpkins, gourds, boxwood, hydrangea, fern leaf buckthorn, service berry branches.  Have fun!

Ingenue

The roses are making their last stand. Ingenues who've arrived late to the ball.

They stand in fresh pink gowns among the other guests

weary from drink and 

Seasoned 

Dance, dance as the North Wind blows it's cooling breath

Soon your blossoms fades to blood-red globe of hard won knowledge .

Enjoy your late fall day.

Surviving the puffball mushroom!

I'm still here blogging having survived the puffball cooking adventure.

My friend and next-door neighbor, Megan, left a giant puffball with a lovely, hand-written note about how to fix the puffball.  Read about it here Notes.

I adore a challenge in the kitchen, so I viewed cooking a puffball, as a culinary equivalent to scaling Mount Everest.

I didn't have much time. The mushroom was starting to put out an "off odor" and Prince Charming was demanding to know when dinner would be ready. I found this site, http://www.mssf.org/cookbook/puffballs.html, contains a lot of useful information for cooking puffballs.

It recommends removing the tough outer layer as that layer can cause "intestinal distress" in some folks.  Yes, that's right, "intestinal distress".  I paused wondering if, in the balance of life, learning to cook and eat a puffball mushroom added significant meaning to life. 

Deciding for adventure and against complacency, I forged on.

This, gentle reader, is when I should have stopped.  You can see in this picture that the interior of the puffball mushroom is NOT white, like this

Tempted to try this in your own kitchen?  Remember these two pictures.  White go forward, brown throw away!

Once again I opted to cast my lot with the fates and continue.

This is when things got really interesting.  The aroma of past it's prime puffball mushroom sauteing in butter, is similar to inviting the whole barn yard into your home, leaving for a few days and returning to the smelly result.....awfully pungent.

The smell might have been another clue that conditions were not auspicious and one should retreat.  But sensing a heroic end just around the bend, I stayed the course.

Which raised another question, when is the puffball mushroom "done"?  The instructions said "when the edges are a golden brown". Which makes sense if you start out with a white puffball, but since my puffball was already a "golden" color to start with, how much more browning is required?

I decided this was enough browning. At this point the smell was almost overwhelming, but I, gentle reader, am not easily discouraged from a plan of action decided upon.  

A tiny piece of saueteed puffball mushroom with a bourbon chaser.

It tasted exactly like the floor of the barnyard it smelled like.

Which is when the whole mess ended up here.  

What you can't see in this picture is the red-faced Prince Charming demanding to know what I plan to do about dinner and the terrible smell which now permeates our home.

I'm not going to show you that picture. It isn't pretty.  

This story ends the way that all heroic stories and fairy tales end:

•  The couple lives happily ever after 
• and the hero learns an important and life altering lesson: Don't cook brown puffballs!

Notes

The art of letter writing is almost dead.  I can't recall the last letter I received.  My good friend Dixie who lives in Ohio used to send me letters, but now sends me nice long emails instead.  

I'm part of the problem. I almost never, as my far-away friends can attest, send a note, a card, a letter, even crafting an email is a chore I postpone.

Like many of the fine things in life, what I love to receive, I'm often stingy on giving.

And then Megan moved across the street.  Almost weekly I receive 

a lovely, hand-written note from Megan.

Look at the lovely detail of real flowers, (they were very prettily sitting on this wicker table when I arrived home one day--the flowers were fresh that day) the masking taped "Thanks".  Megan can make even standard stock envelopes clever, homey and fresh.

I've never received a note on the same stationary, or card stock.  

She even sealed one of the envelopes with a wax seal with her last name initialed into the seal.

Living next door to Megan, I've learned to expect the unexpected, like this lovely invitation

to a picnic.  A knife and fork, simple, and perfect....oh and the picnic on the banks of the lovely Cedar River was divine.

After dispensing some gardening advice, I received this 

lovely thank you note

With a proposed design for an address and sign for the front of our property.  As you can probably tell "Our" Megan is a lovely designer at Select Cabinetry and Design  www.selectcd.com. I adore living across the street from such a clever and generous woman.

Until, I walked onto my porch and discovered another Megan "note"

Note the clever screw holding the note to.....what is it you may ask?!

A giant puffball mushroom.  According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffball as long as it's not the stemmed kind, it's safe to eat. Megan may be taking cleverness too far?!

This thing is big enough to feed an army (note paper plate and coffee cup for scale.)  Prince Charming says he's having no part in this experiment.  Tune in again next week to see how the cooking of the monster puffball turns out!

The Blues

I've got the blues.

The low down, rotten, sunny day blues. It's clear outside, stormy in my soul.

I've got the walk-in the woods blues.

I've got the blue sky,

Blue Water,

Puddle hoping,

Sitting on the bank of the river

Watching my troubles float away blues.

You got the blues on a sunny day?

Take a walk in the woods, 

take a drive on a lane, 

swim with a friend

A change's just ahead.

Whatever the weather where you are, thanks for dropping by.