Love made visible

I'm now living and working at Pendle Hill, the Quaker center where I spent last summer. (Not going to Kazakhstan after all. Ask me if you want.)

One of the things I love about this place is the small objects that show great love put into them over the years. A decade ago when a 225-year-old oak came down, one of the maintenance workers saved some of the wood and made it into things like new seats for the stools in the craft studio. It probably would have been easier to just buy new stools, but I'm sure people were sad about losing the tree and were glad to have it preserved in some way.

The other bit of handiwork I found moving this week was the hotpads in the dining room. They're worn print cotton and corduroy, sewn into rectangles and stitched across with embroidery floss to keep the layers together. And where the fabric is shredding with age, you can see through to some previous layer of the hotpad from a previous generation, the cloth deemed too ragged but re-covered instead of thrown away. The potholders have certainly been around for longer than most of the people here, made and re-made by someone's careful hands.

At the top of the weekly chore chart here are the words Work is love made visible. These small objects made it particularly visible to me this week.

My two newest favorite things

1. Flannel shirts on cool days.

2. The FWCC, or Friends World Committee on Consultation, because it sounds like a parody of a Quaker committee but is in fact real. I made food for them this weekend, as they came to Pendle Hill to, um, consult. It seems they're a gang of old Quakers getting together to talk about how their various branches of Quakerism should stop being so crabby with each other. Vies with FLGBTQC (Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Concerns), which has its own song so that people can remember it, for best Quaker acronym.

Looking at vegetables

After half a summer of farming, I'm afraid the most profound thing I have to say is that vegetables are really beautiful. I'm not the first to notice that food can have visual appeal - the different colors of beans and grains in the bulk foods aisle, the way broccoli turns brighter green when you steam it, the oranges and reds of salsa with bell peppers. But I'd never enjoyed food like this until I was growing it.

I wish I had pictures of the rainbow chard with its red and yellow stems and vibrant green leaves, or the shine on the skin of strawberry still hot from the sun, or the deep purple stain of beets when you slice them. Organic farms produce plenty of weird and imperfect-looking vegetables, but the lettuces especially look so perfect nestled in the boxes when we've harvested them (especially compared with supermarket lettuce, which is inevitably starting to rot). I enjoy the vegetables at least as much visually as I do any other way.

So, today's lesson: look at your food.

Weird.

My sister's assortment of makeup jars at least make for interesting reading while I'm brushing my teeth. "Dream matte mousse foundation"? Who dreams about foundation?

Then again, last night I dreamed my environmental justice professor was dating the president of Haverford College. When I woke up I was really glad I wouldn't have to think of a polite way to ask if she knew he was already married.

What we carry with us

I've graduated from college and feel oddly homeless. The hardest part is leaving the co-op, knowing I'll never see most of my housemates again. What makes it easier is the feeling that I carry parts of them with me. There's some comfort in drinking from the cup Becky threw on the potter's wheel or wearing the sweater that belonged to Max. The way I spice the dinner came from Sissi; the way I think about art came from Jenny; the way I finger the penny whistle came from Jeff. I can't know what parts of myself the others are carrying to California and Austria and New Hampshire, but I trust that I do go with them.

If we were like the seeds of a dandelion that had grown gold and big and eventually turned white, this weekend was the puff of air that sent us scattering in the wind. I feel dizzy and lost now, but we'll land in new places and fill the field with new flowers.

A boat of one's own

People who teach nineteenth-century literature love to talk about homosocial spaces. Men had the military, the courts, the government, the businesses, the clubs, the bars, the Masons, most schools, you name it. Women basically had the home and eventually the beauty parlor.

Except now . . . there's Bryn Mawr. On Monday I was reminded this of how totally beautiful that can be and how old it can get. Part of the week before graduation is apparently the seniors and a bunch of professors going on a riverboat cruise, which ended with people dancing. If gyration-type dance is going to happen, I definitely like it better with all women. I've heard there are sketchy women, but I've never met any who hold a candle to your average sketchy man.

I looked out at the crowd of writhing women in little black dresses thought: we finally get our own. This is what Virginia Woolf wanted for women instead of getting chased off the grass at Oxbridge. We're eating sashimi instead of prunes and custard. And not only that, but there are hardly any male spaces left.

Then two of the professors (one male, one female) started ballroom dancing. And I would have swapped nearly everyone on that boat for a man with a decent lead. I guess I can't have things both ways.