Are We Down to Earth Enough?

You get boys outside in nature and after 6-8 hours they're pretending they're frogs or bears rather than Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader with light sabers. I say 6-8 hours because yesterday my son was playing with a friend at the Redwood Bowl in the Oakland Hills. After 2 hours he was still using a pistol-like stick with beautiful green lichen as a laser. My 4 year old draws a lot of aliens at school with laser see-all eyes inspired by his cousin who made a robot with see-all eyes designed to save the environment. I know his cousin isn't the only one influencing him; my own time spent here on this lap top, and the time I let the boys play on pbs kids.org contributes to their point of view: that the fantastical omnipotence of robots and futuristic objects trumps all. We love this stuff-- at least a lot of us do. An iPhone can feel more alive than something really alive like a stick or a towering redwood forest. I wish sometimes I could sail away on a small boat with the boys for a year and a day to where the wild things are. Not because I want them to know how to becalm them but because I want them to know that sense of belonging and being awake in wildness. In a way a hurricane or a Nor'easter wakes us.

Blossom Jack- fours years plus

Not that I write hundreds of entries a year-- but there is something of value to having a little history. I started Blossom Jack around the time my son Jackson turned 1 in 2007 and six months after my father passed away. The title came to me out loud as a dialogue with my husband. I wanted a name that might fit both genders and represent something that grows, grows beautifully and naturally. Blossom Jack came to me after a few tries and just coincidentally happened to be the name of the cow my husband had as a child in Sparks, Nevada. I had never known he had a cow before that conversation. Just for the record, his family cared for and got milk from Blossom Jack and then ate her, an urban homesteading tale from the early 70's.

Summer lovin': My plums, food trips and blogs to remember

Here's my plum tree humming with bees in spring. Missed my plum harvest this summer but Doug picked 8 or 9 pounds and froze them. Made one batch of vanilla bean plum preserves and my favorite plum upside down cake from Ruth Reichel's The Gourmet Cookbook and still have half the harvest in my freezer. Two remarkable food trips of the summer- neither necessarily new to foodies but new and lovely to me: Momofuku's ssam and milk bars in NYC in July and then today Humphrey Slocumbe's ice cream parlor. We had burnt butter, salted chocolate and the especially nice Irish Breakfast: vanilla ice cream with bourbon and cornflakes. Question: what's with the salt? Seems like it goes hand-in-hand with avant garde food. In any case, it worked today after a foggy morning at Ocean Beach. Two food revolution blogs to follow and fantasize about the days when I can hit all the Slow Food/ and Forage events around the country right at peak harvests: Forage Oakland and two recommended by my best friend Julie: Sweet Beet and Splendid Table.