We did an experiment in high school biology with a Petri dish. The instructions were to take our dishes to benign places in the school, leave them for 30 minutes, seal them and wait. Then we’d be able to view airborne microbial contaminants in our building. My teacher droned on, for a significant portion of the class, that if we walked down the hall with the dish open or left them next to the toilet—he would know. I was well past the point of believing things adults told me. By then, I’d discovered enough omission of truth to want to check for myself. So, I skipped down the hall with my dish opened, swirled through the bathroom and set it click to continue reading…
Stand in the wild
I don’t love to obsess about the tenths of grams in recipes or worry over liquid measuring versus dry measure. I’d rather cook quickly than precisely. Raising kids on a single income also meant improvising with what I had available on hand. So I substitute and wing it rather than fret. I am a believer that stress ruins more meals than procedure or ingredients. I use recipes, but now that I cook less often for fewer people, I realize my recipes were subconscious through repetition, more than intuition, like I previously believed. I say this because things I used to make without a thought will flop half the time now, unless I pull out notes and double check. Fortunately, I click to continue reading…
The hevel that you know
Tomorrow is the second Tuesday in November. I find myself happy that 2023 is not a presidential year. We hopefully have 12 more months before another civil war reenactment, where brother rises against brother and son against father. Maybe it’s our country’s legacy to fight our family to the death over state’s rights and racial inequality. I’ve always considered it a duty to vote, even though I was pretty young when I first heard Stalin’s discouraging quote about the one who counted the votes deciding more than the one who cast them. It still felt very American, since some countries don’t have an opportunity to think about their preference for one overlord more than another. However, I often treated voting click to continue reading…
On the floor, not at the table
A man once told me he would have become a Christian sooner if it hadn’t for some of the Christians he knew before he was saved. Specifically, one arrogant person turned him off from wanting to know God. I tremble sometimes, to think of the people I may have turned off in my arrogance, in my floundering that looked like arrogance when I put up a good front faking… Or in my sincerity when they weren’t in a place to hear all the words I have to say about God. The religious are usually a joke in the media, but it’s an old (pre-pandemic) complaint to dismiss Jesus because of his (professed) followers. And I hear often enough that you click to continue reading…
Where God guides
The first time I heard “Where God guides—He provides,” was during the time I desperately wanted to own a home, so we wouldn’t have to keep wondering where we’d live. I was standing on someone’s deck in Tahoe and staring at an expansive, grassy lawn. Bordered by pine and aspen, the lawn sloped down into a strawberry garden. It was that typical tour you get when you visit people’s homes for the first time. This is how my husband always gives ours: My first thought (and I probably said it back then because I’m still only an orange belt in watching my mouth) was, “I wish God would guide me.” Granted, I’m sure financial reward isn’t the original intention click to continue reading…