May 8, 2011
Spring has arrived in Michigan, and this is a good thing. It has been a rough winter, personally. January was particularly grim. I lost my dear friend and mentor Beverly Rathcke, we lost our long time cat companion Floyd. So it was good to start digging in the garden, always lifts my spirits and grounds me [...]
July 17, 2010
I love Michigan. I love living here for many reasons: The weather is fine for knitting much of the year, Snow lining tree branches is gloriously beautiful, Spring ephemerals and flowering trees are a miracle after ice and sleet, Fall is crimson, fiery orange, and golden leaves, enjoyed in crisp sunshine and then tossed by [...]
June 20, 2010
Happy Father’s Day. In May, my husband and I went to the Rock Shoppe in Plymouth, Michigan to find some stones for the edging of the pond in the back yard. It was a sunny spring day and we were wandering the extensive grounds looking for just the right thing – kind of greenish slate [...]
May 29, 2010
I just finished Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front. It’s at least in part an eco-survivalist guide to finding your way in peak oil, climate change, and the forecasted hard times that will come from energy crisis. I don’t agree with it entirely, I have to say that I’m not as doom-and-gloom [...]
May 16, 2010
Dave’s dad likes ponds. He put a pond in the backyard of the house where Dave grew up. We got a small man-made pond when we bought our house. It was at the edge of a slate patio in the back yard, ringed with a kind of perplexing boxwood hedge that blocks the view of [...]
November 29, 2009
We moved into a new place in August. For a while there we were almost camping because we had the kitchen ripped out…it didn’t feel exceptionally homey. Our fabulous Ann Arbor construction crew gave us a working kitchen in our bump out just before Thanksgiving. We moved our plates, spices, glasses, and cookware into the [...]
July 26, 2009
It’s sobering how much stuff we have, stuff we don’t need, stuff, stuff, stuff. Never more sobering than at moving time, when it is time to sort and pack and move all of it. We got into our new place on my Birthday last week, and in the last days we have been moving things [...]
July 3, 2009
Goodness is its own reward, but now and then there are actual, physical rewards for doing the right thing. We’re moving, so I’m trying to rid myself of items that are not in use. No sense moving them. The other week, I went on a Wednesday morning to pick up some flowers at the Ann [...]
November 29, 2008
The holidays is a time for family gatherings. We hosted my in-laws this weekend. Originally from Michigan, they love living in Massachusetts. Next weekend, I’m going to visit my sister in Tennessee. Born and raised in Michigan, my sister is happily now a southerner. But, I think that no matter how happy they are in [...]
October 19, 2008
Today was a day of fall chores: sweeping out the garage, tidying it and getting it ready to store the table and chairs for the winter, raking leaves from the back yard, and pulling in all of the “tender” bulbs (voodoo lily and calla lily) that I had planted in pots on the deck and [...]
not particularly objective musings on odds and ends – Dunrie Greiling, Ann Arbor, MI 48105