Thankful for You

Perfect for eating or for feasting the eye on a Thanksgiving Table.

It all came together perfectly, the definition of Synchronicity.  A perfect growing season for Persimmons, enough time and focus to prepare token gifts, an exquisite ball of yarn in all the right colors bought years ago with no possible project in mind, leftover paper lunch sacks from my husband's working days all came together to provide a tangible comment of appreciation to the neighbors who live on our dead end street.

Plus a note inside on what to do with Persimmons!
Not many people know.

I'm thankful for them. And I'm thankful for YOU.

Karma

I love to stack wood.  It was my special reward and privilege to stack the wood in my woodshed when it was finished.  I enjoyed every stick of it.

My neighbor, on the other hand, does not like to "work" on his wood piles.  He's been collecting them for years and has about four of them covered with slowly-deteriorating, woven, blue tarps.  But yesterday he was inspired to remove the tarps, survey the situation, and begin making order of it all. He stacked wood.  I'm not an expert on this, and I've had to restack (several times) various wood rows around the property before I built the wood shed, so I took particular notice of his supports for the row and its ends.  That it held up at all was a small miracle.   By evening a strong gust of wind took his efforts to the ground.  I shook my head, smug in my stacking know-how, amazed that it lasted even three hours.

Not so smug as I viewed my own stacking project!

And now this afternoon I'm adding "stack wood" to my list of Things I get to do today--soon.  For some reason (karmic, perhaps?) my own wood refused to stay stacked--even in its tidy, little, custom-made shed.  Room for thought here.

Did I mention that I love to stack wood?

Italian Generosity

Tony just gave it to me--a mound of parsley seed so generous that it spilled over the edge of my outstretched hand. My neighbors are the best.  Hand-picked, every one of them, for their unique qualities and contributions to my life--this time in the form of never-ending Italian (flat leaf) parsley.

I planted two types of parsley this last spring.  Each seed was blessed and coddled and watered and stroked and loved and tended and watched until it grew big enough to live on its own outside.  And when the summer was done, my Italian parsley was slender and sparse.  Disappointment was the flavor of all those efforts.  And as I think about it, the planting and tending process was very much from my Norse heritage and not my Italian side.  Truth be known, genetically I don't have an Italian side, and I think I was just too stiff.  They don't do it that way.

Old pot with dirt and parsley seeds.  Even the rooting around
of a pesky squirrel did not derail the process.

So Tony told me how to plant my spilling-over gift so that I would have parsley forever: find a big, old pot with dirt; throw the seeds in the pot; scratch the dirt a little bit; keep it moist.  That's it.  I'll need to do that again next spring or summer.  The plants will grow.  They will reseed on their own the second year (that's why I'm supposed to do it for them the first summer) and the cycle will just keep going.  Parsley forever.



If all the Things I get to do today were flavored with "lighten up," "let go," "ease," "flow," "throw it in the pot, scratch it and keep it moist," how easily would life spring forth and grow with abundance--forever.

Lush, large, Italian Generosity