life skills

There’s a knife-sharpener guy who has been sitting out by the side of the road near the grocery store for a couple of months now. Every time I drive past Mountain Man Knife Sharpening, I think I should take my knives to him, and yesterday, when I saw he was in his truck, I...
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Tennis was my bête noire as a child. I took lessons, dressed in my proper white tennis skirt and tretorns, from the time I was about four until I was fourteen. And in all those years I could never hit the damn ball. It was a trial. My mother desperately wanted me to be...
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Walking around town this morning with Raymond, I noticed we’re in full sunflower season — every alley and garden and roadside is suddenly illuminated with sunny yellow flowers. The cosmos also did really well this summer — lots and lots of big banks of pink and white cosmos around town. I love this time...
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When my stepmother Susan was here last week, we went mushroom hunting. It’s been an uncharacteristically wet summer, and we really cleaned up. We found this gorgeous big bolete, which was nearly entirely clean of maggots (not always the case with these big ones), as well as a bunch of smaller boletes. It was...
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We went on a little camping expedition this weekend, and it wasn’t until the afternoon of the second day that I managed to find any of these beauties. Boletus Edulis. Also known as penny buns, porcini, cep, and steinpilz (depending on which European grandparents you had …). I’d been finding plenty of other boletes...
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Cooking in clay is one of those things that you read about in cookbooks and wonder what the fuss is all about — or at least I did, until my mother gave me this funny little pot one year for Christmas. I have no idea where she found it, it was an odd gift,...
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NPR has been running a series this week about how people are changing their eating habits during this recession and I’m finding it really depressing. So far, it’s all about how people aren’t eating out, or ordering in, but they’re eating prepared foods out of the frozen food aisle. They had a home economist...
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Funny the way synchronicity works — I’ve been thinking a lot about how skills like learning to knit, or sew, or garden, or cook — skills some of our mothers (or in my case, my grandmother) discounted as being the kinds of skills that keep a girl tied to a domestic existence that stifles...
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Here it is — my first sweater. It only took me four years — well, it really only took about a month of actual knitting — I started it a couple of times and had to pull it out a couple of times but finally, it’s done. I’m wearing it now. It’s cozy and...
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I’m about to go log in to my job at the Big Corporation, the job that I’m hoping will see me through whatever impending financial doom is rising on the horizon, the job that isn’t my dream job, but which I like nonetheless. As much as I’d love to be able to write full...
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