Sleeping, waking and baking

Winter spreads its arms in welcome

Check in

Pussy-willow day

I am out today in my wheelchair. Hooray for winter! It’s cold and a little windy. The pavement is wet, the colors are grayed by the moody light, and the sky is so open! All the trees, bare and arching and yearning, point and strive toward the sky.

Winter reveals the innards of trees, including squirrels’ nests. Fran Gardner photo

I love this season. To some, winter is about dullness and death, but I experience a season of potential and surprise. All the grass, all the bushes, all the flower beds—sleeping and waiting, waiting and sleeping. Crocuses are poking through leaf mold. Camellias’ pink bombs explode.

Waiting at a bus stop, I am hoping the bus doesn’t come too soon. I want to keep enjoying the rapture of this day.

The air is soft, like a pussy willow. A pussy-willow day. Smudgy clouds move in stately manner across the horizon. Pussy-willow smudges.

In a landscape wrung of bright color, my eye is drawn to the yellow flashing light at 25th and Belmont, where traffic is diverted right to create a one-way couplet the rest of the way to the river.

Flash on.
Flash off.

Fran Gardner photo

Later, I get off another bus near the river to take photos of the day’s dramatic clouds.

Stately mountains of clouds mass above the Ross Island Bridge. Fran Gardner photo

Word play

Some concepts to contemplate.

Blind

Like so many words in English, blind has more meanings than first meet the eye.

Go momentarily blind now by closing your eyes. I hope you find it peaceful back there, behind your eyelids.

You will have to open your eyes, however, to read about the word.

As an adjective, blind marries with many words:

• Blind corner

• Blind panic

• Blind tasting

• Blind drunk

• Blind alley

• Blind ambition

It’s an adverb when you fly blind.

A famous line from “Amazing Grace”: I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.

Blindside is a verb, and you can blindfold someone with a blindfold.

As nouns, blinds cover windows or shelter hunters waiting for game.

Words have weight and meaning. Blind is a word of concealment, of failure (to see). Is it a bad or negative word? No, it is just a word.

I hope these rambling thoughts inspire you to think about words and meaning, to play with words as images, to explore.

Or you could turn a blind eye and move on to . . . Whatever is next.

Blond or blonde?

Blond without the “e” is an adjective meaning, well, blond. Ashen-haired. Tow-headed. Fair-haired. Flaxen. Hair lightened by sun or chemicals or genes. I was blond as a child, as was one of my daughters. We have honey-blond hair now. Not quite brown; still with golden highlights.

Blonde with an “e” is the noun for a girl or woman with blond hair. In the early days of my life, the ’50s and ’60s, blond women had a reputation as “dumb blondes.” We all know what a crock that idea was.

Lorelei Lee was no dummy. She’s the main blonde in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a terrific musical made from the book of that name by Anita Loos. The movie has some terrific lyrics by Leo Robin. I love the eternal internal rhyme in “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

A kiss on the hand may be quite continental
But diamonds are a girl’s best friend
A kiss may be grand but it won’t pay the rental
On your humble flat
Or help you at the automat

Here’s how clueless I was as a kid: There was a commercial on TV for shirts made with Dacron, a synthetic polyester manufactured by DuPont. The jingle was “Dacron is a man’s best friend!” I was blind to the fact that this jingle referenced a musical. I had also heard the phrase “gentlemen prefer blondes” but didn’t know it was a book title. Naive young me thought men must be very stupid if they chose a woman friend based on her hair color.

There was a jingle in a hair-color commercial, too, by Clairol. “Is it true blondes have more fun?” it teasingly asked.

Anita Loos wrote a biography, A Girl Like I, about writing scripts in Hollywood and being married to John Emerson, the director of The Birth of a Nation. I read it more than 40 years ago and still remember it, so it must be good.

Baking in an 8x8-inch pan

I love gingerbread, keto diet be damned, and I’m entranced by a recipe published by David Leibowitz for Edna Lewis’s Gingerbread. It calls for 1-1/2 cups (!) of molasses and is baked in an 8x8-inch pan.

It’s been so long since I’ve seem a recipe calling for an 8x8 inch pan! For many years, I had a battered aluminum baking pan, scratched and scored by knives from cutting brownies and shortbread.

I got that pan in about 1970, when my former husband and I, who lived in adjacent dorms at college, “borrowed” it from another resident and never returned it. I don’t know where it is now.

But it got a lot of use in its time. I made endless batches of brownies and shortbread, as well as an easy toffee that is basically Almond Roca. Try this and you’ll never spend big cash for toffee again.

Never Fail Toffee

Makes about 1 pound
	•	1/4 pound (1 stick) butter
	•	3/4 cup packed brown sugar
	•	1 cup crushed nuts (I always use walnuts)
	•	1 6-ounce package chocolate chips
Boil butter and sugar 7 minutes, stirring. Spread the nuts in bottom of a greased 8x8-inch pan. Pour the boiled mixture over. Let set 2 to 3 minutes. Sprinkle the chocolate chips on top. When they are melted, spread the chocolate evenly over the top. Refrigerate the candy for several hours. Break into pieces to serve.

Brownies

I have never in my life made brownies from a mix. Why would I? They are the easiest thing to make. You can mix the batter in the same saucepan you melt the butter and chocolate in.

And I know exactly what’s in them—including walnuts, which are nonnegotiable in my brownie universe.

	•	2 eggs, lightly beaten
	•	1 cup sugar
	•	1/2 teaspoon salt
	•	1 teaspoon vanilla
	•	1/3 cup butter
	•	2 1-oz. squares unsweetened baking chocolate
	•	3/4 cup sifted flour (who sifts flour anymore? Just fluff it up with a spoon before measuring. Level the top of the cup with a knife.)
	•	1 cup chopped walnuts
Combine eggs, sugar, salt and vanilla. Melt shortening and chocolate together, let cool slightly, and add the sugar mixture. Stir in flour and walnuts. Pour into a greased 8-inch square pan. Bake at 325 for 30 to 35 minutes. Cool in pan. Cut in squares.

Oh, by the way, “blondies” is a term for brownies made without chocolate. Why anyone would do that is beyond me. Maybe they like butterscotch.

Shortbread

The best shortbread has just three ingredients: butter, sugar and flour (add salt if your butter is unsalted). I’ve already shared this recipe, about 150 postings ago. Rather than make you click on a link, here it is again.

For an 8x8-inch pan, make half the recipe.

• 1 cup butter

• 2/3 cup sugar, preferably superfine

• About 3 cups flour

Cream the butter and sugar together and then blend in the flour, using as little as possible to create a short dough.

Don’t work the dough any more than you have to or it will be tough. Just pat it into round or square baking pans, about 1/2-inch thick. Don’t push it too hard or, again, the shortbread will be tough. Score lightly to make it easier to break apart later. You can use a fork for this.

Bake at 375 for about 30 minutes. The edges should just begin to color.

Adapted from from Crumpets and Scones: Indecently Delicious Teatime Fare from Around the World, by Iris Ihde Frey.

On my keto diet, I can’t enjoy eating these delicacies anymore. But I’ve make each of them dozens of times, and they are woven into the fabric of my life.

Sleep

I don’t suffer from chronic insomnia. But sometimes I just don’t sleep. It has taken me many years and the gaining of some self-knowledge to realize that I don’t always need hours of uninterrupted sleep to function well.

I usually get six and a half to seven hours of sleep at night, and this is adequate for me.

Sometimes I feel sleepy in the day, but I’ve noticed that such periods of sleepiness are most often due to information overflow than to inadequate sleep. I read a lot, but at some point my brain is full and I start to nod off.

I need to put my mind out to pasture for a while. Get up, move around, drink some coffee, ride the bus. Let the brain cells relax.

I have a proper bedtime. I practice good “sleep hygiene.” But I don’t avoid caffeine before bed. It doesn’t seem to matter. I can drift off easily into sleep a few hours after an after-dinner espresso.

I sleep with a plush chicken. I made the quilt and embroidered the sleepy owls on the pillowcase. Fran Gardner photo

Sleeping and waking

1.
While I slept,
The sun woke up and washed the world anew.
Gold tips on trees amid red leaves.
A thought caught like a piece of lint.
Blow on it like a dandelion head,
Maybe the seeds will land and sprout.
Maybe I will go back to sleep.

2.
While I slept, the world was birthed anew.
I missed the christening. The dew had dried before my tongue could reach it.
When I arrived, the world was dry and scabbed over, leaves rustling like old women’s speech.
I could not catch my breath.
Blood clotted my lungs
My eyes turned inward and found . . . 
I go back to sleep.

3.
This time, when I awake, the sky is lead. The birds croak like frogs. The world is upside down,
I like it this way.
So now, time to be up and about. 
I dreamed this world; now choose to live in it.
I don’t go back to sleep.

Check out

Remembering to write

Writing is the theme for February here at Becoming.

One of my first postings, from October 24, 2022, is about writing—and sleeping. It has two contemplative photos in my favorite color combination, orange and teal. The post is both restful and interesting, varied in the way my posts tend to be.

And, oh, wow. I just checked it out and it has a photo of my chicken, Pepper, as shown above. I totally do not remember running that before. That bird gets around.

Overwhelm

Mason Currey, writer of the Subtle Maneuvers Substack and leader of the weekday Worm Zoom writing group that I belong to, posted this update on the Worm Zoom message board:

Fighting a lot of overwhelm lately — intend to do one thing, then think of several other things I need to do, then start a to-do list to get all these things organized . . . but then just making the to-do list is overwhelming! And finishing the list takes a lot of willpower — but if I don’t finish the list I feel unsettled/unmoored. In either case: Finally I will turn my attention to one thing but then I often end up jumping ship to something else, without finishing the first thing; and so the day proceeds — like being in quicksand. Is this burnout? The only thing that feels good, really, is writing, but I also spend a lot of time putting that off (it feels good once I finally dig into it).

When we’re overwhelmed, thoughts fall off the edges of our flat world. Like this:

Can’t recall

The name of your pet escapes me,
Those of you children, too.
Wait, wait, I know I’ll remember.
Just give me some time
To shake out my synapses,
Time to mourn
Time to sparkle and shout
Like panning for gold, what I’m seeking
Is hid amid handfuls of gravel.

You are the thing I am seeking,
Your fine spirit, your twinkle
Your eye on the ball. Swing
For the fences, now, hit the ball solid.
Ah, yes, I remember them now.

Winter color

As an antidote to all those gray skyscapes I’ve been showing lately, here’s a little fountain full of duckies I found in the neighborhood. Just for luck, I tossed in a few pennies.

I live in the sort of neighborhood where nobody walks off with the duckies. Or the painted rocks. Fran Gardner photo

Till next week

Thanks for reading. Thanks for subscribing. Thanks for supporting me, with cash or just good wishes.

On PayPal, you can tip me in $5 increments. Or use the button below to buy a subscription. A year’s subscription costs less than $1 a week. Tell me I’m worth it.