Sun Crest Peaches

You can rarely find Sun Crest Peaches, but I found some today. They taste like a peach should, eaten just washed and unpeeled. They're featured in this book by David Masumoto. He's a little like a Japanese-American Wendall Berry, I suppose. I would love to share our peaches and the book with you.
Love, Mom

PS: This time of year, SO MUCH fresh produce. More than you can consume--the melons, the corn, the tomatoes--pears coming. My neighbors are bottling and making salsa, etc. Once or twice we made our own fruit cocktail at this time of year with grapes from Stucki Farms. : )

Institute and Plants

We're signing up for an Institute class. Any BYU graduate, such as myself, took required religion classes, so I didn't focus on Institute, but graduating from Institute is a wonderful thing. Megan did it. I love Institute in the same way I loved Seminary. Wonderful teaching programs. Some teachers are better than others, but I think the effort is made up to the student who tries. (They have two classes at USU for young mothers that include child care trading.) We need a schedule in order to learn best.

I noticed that Heavenly Father invites us to learn on a schedule. We show up at church every week, and He expects us to have Family Home Evening once a week. That's over a hundred sessions a year if we don't miss any.

Judy Burns' houseplants were the best I knew. Thriving, healthy plants. No wilting. No plant gasping for water. No dried up or yellowed leaves. Every Thursday Judy watered the plants, checked the leaves. Feritlizer added on schedule, too.

Love, Mom

Digital Dark Ages

The curator of USU's Special Collections says his colleagues label our era "The Digital Dark Ages." We were in the basement of USU's Library looking at a table full of old books and documents: genuine pioneer journals, letters written 150 years ago, and autograph notebooks, all penned in script. Today we write all sorts of clever things, but they disappear--into a Digital Black Hole or into cyberspace.

I'm not lamenting the loss of phone texting and IM's, the equivants to "notes passed in class"in former days.

I'm talking about computer files and email and blog-style discourse. (I won't even mention all the first drafts lost during typing. ) Computer compositions are gone at the first bad crash--or at the purchase of the upgrade. "No worries! Just back it up." I've heard that since the days of our Texas Instrument in 1983. I still have some of those TI dot-matrix documents, but nothing left on a drive or disc. And it's happened again and again. A newer model shows up and instantly everything's obselete.

Last year we took a floppy disk to Roger's USU techies, hoping they could retrieve old data. They laughed out loud. They couldn't even help with a seven year old zip disc.

So what's to be done? I know we can't save everything--shouldn't save everything. I'm counting on "the angels in Heaven recording our every action" for that. But I'm advocating a few hard copies. How much trouble is it to print out some of our work every now and then? File drawers will hold things. And if the stuff is in the way in ten years, we can "delete"it then.

Otherwise, what's left? I mean, the curators will be right.

Love, Mom


PS: It's true in film, too. Journalists had switched to digital cameras, but the only photographer who had a picture of Bill C. in the crowd with Monica L. was the one using film. Now if that doesn't convince you....

Furniture

A Japanese sea chest at the Flynns caught my attention early on. I don't have a picture but it was similar to this . Jack showed me all the little doors and drawers and hidden compartments. When Dad and I were in SF we found one at an Asian Antique Mart, but we couldn't spare the $300 it would have cost back then.



The two Japanese consort chests in the pictures were acquired after I left the Valley. (If Kathy comments, she can tell you the Japanese names). I don't know the history of the silk painting above them. The black vase on the left would hold a branch of quince that Jack would bring from the back yard. (The boxes and things are for moving out.)

I suppose what I liked were the principles, gathering together things that were beautiful and creating a look of its own. The wood wall in the LR, for instance, was created by Jack out of grape stakes from an ordinary nursery. They're unfinished rough wood. Although Kathy notes that the look is now dated, it was innovative for the 60's, besides being attractive.

¿Donde esta la iglesia?

Home Alone

I miss my children. I'm glad so many of you have blogs so I can get a glimpse of whatever you're doing. This summer was good because I got to see almost everyone.

I miss my grandchildren, too. It doesn't seem too unnatural to me to be apart because my Grandma Harriet Pack lived in SLC when I was a girl, and our only contact was an annual card, sometimes a visit.

In this picture, Lyle is greeting her and various cousins on our driveway. Everyone gathered at our Hart St. home in Van Nuys for a BBQ for her birthday, August 1956 or 57.

Sleepless in Motherhood

I like some thoughts and photos in this little gift book—maybe because the pictures remind me of my growing-up era.

The other night I didn’t get enough sleep—we had several interruptions--and I was a wreck the next day. “What a luxury,” I thought later. “I get to sleep through the night all the time!” I remembered all those interrupted nights: hungry babies or a child’s bad dream or another’s fever. I did try to be patient in the night, at least—so they had a safe haven. It’s hard to be a young parent and not sleep.

If you add anything else to the parenting mix, such as a holiday, the pressure mounts. It’s a wonderful thing if a mother can let go of her unmet expectations and laugh and shrug it off, focusing on Real Life instead--but it's not easy. I admire my daughters and my daughters-in-law who are mothers, each one fabulous in their own way.

These thoughts showed up in a student paper this summer:

Parents frequently think of their children as infinitely flexible and as such, able to adapt easily to adult schedules, needs and interests. Stresses experienced by parents induce them to put their own needs ahead of those of their children. Indeed, all too often, parents are led to think of childhood as a period free of conflict, fear, struggles or stress. (Latchkey Kids, Lamorey, 1999)

[Children] soon learn that their survival depends on their ability to adjust to change without admitting fear, confusion, pain or stress—to themselves or their families. (Handbook for Latchkey Children and their Parents, Long, 1983).

The Moor

Years ago Kathy Flynn mentioned that she liked shopping with her father, Jack, because he wouldn't nickle-and-dime away his money, but would buy only quality things. It was also years ago that the family acquired this small bronze statue--valuable then but more so now.

Their house didn't look like one of the furniture display windows on Van Nuys Blvd. or like something from an ad. It was all their own.

Blue and White Dishes

Blue and white dishes are popular in cultures worldwide. Since no real food is actually blue, dinner fare looks appealing on the contrasting plate. It's a fresh combination, sort of like the planet Earth itself. And then, here's a dish, which is nice because it means you're problably going to get something to eat.

When I was a girl, my mother read me the story of Blue Willow from the Book of Knowledge, an encyclopedia for children, and I think I had a little Blue Willow tea set. In fact, Albertson's gave Blue Willow dishes away with groceries a few years ago.

The next dishes I noticed were Delft of Holland. The kitchen in the home of a fellow Girl Scout had little shelves filled with blue windmill motif dishes. I didn't care for the windmills, but I loved the freshness of the blue against the white clapboard kitchen walls. Delft makes tiles like the one we were given when Jordan was born.

The Flynns had Blue Danube because it was reasonably attractive but easy to replace while raising a family, so they explained to me once. I loved the look of it against the dark wood of their table. Danish and Scandanavian dishes are often white with a blue trim. I'm drawn to Scandenavian design, so when I was married, I chose Dansk dishes. There's another pattern I love, too, but I can't remember the name.

Since I saw the Spode Blue Room display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, a Blue Room has been my goal, with all those Spode plates and mugs and platters.

In San Francisco two weeks ago I bought blue and white rice grain bowls in Chinatown. I gave them all away, but when I was at the Flynns last week, Kathy gave me her parents' little stack rice grain bowls, all the more valuable to me since they were the Flynn's. Other cultures make rice grain bowls, too. Appraently actual rice grains placed in the clay make the little translucent spots.

I can't figure out how to place pictures or I'd show you more. Love, Mom

Jack and Jane Flynn

In California last weekend I attended a memorial service for Jane Flynn who died recently. Jack died a year ago. They were the parents of my VNHS friend, Kathy (in the picture on her parents' porch). I always looked forward to going to visit the Flynns and their beautiful house. It wasn't a big house, but everything about it was tasteful.

We had a high school project to work on one afternoon, which gave me a reason to go there in the first place. I loved it from the start. I loved the wall of books in the living room. As if that weren't enough, when Jack came home from work, he went to the mantle to light the beeswax candles. I stared. Were Dads allowed to do that? When I got home, I told my mother every detail.

Through the years the Flynn home changed. For instance, the books were all moved into the study (formerly a bedroom for Kathy's two younger brothers.) When I came to visit, I always looked forward to something new.

One Christmas when I was in town they called me to come and see their Christmas tree because they knew I would be happy about the bunches of different sized clear balls they hung that year.

I'm so sad that Jack and Janie are gone. They were the only real contact I had left in Van Nuys.

The picture in the study includes a photo of Jack Flynn in front of a few of his books. More about these friends later.

Ben and Me

Last weekend in Southern California, I was in Laguna Hills visiting Salem and Megan and Ben. They're all great. You can see them at the beach here. Megan took me by the Newport Temple ; the architechture hints of early California Spanish Missions. Then we went to Fashion Island where Ben loved the merry-go-round. We made a quick stop at Salem's work. I love the OC Stanleys.

Wordsworth

The world is too much with us, late and soon;
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Wordsworth lived here.

Web Log

So, here I am, writing too.