A Little Bit of Artistic Chivalry in Homer, AK

I took a little jaunt down the Kenai Peninsula to Homer one weekend a couple of years ago.  A woman in a restaurant suggested I visit the Norman Lowell Art Gallery, which would be about 12 miles on the way out of Homer back to Anchorage.  Of course, she meant I should visit it during summer or early fall and not in winter conditions, but I was in town, now, at this time.   I knew it would probably not be open for business, but I was very curious to just see the environment of an art gallery off in the Alaska woods.  Who wouldn't be intrigued by that?

I took the turn off and the road seemed passable, in the beginning, so I continued, but with a certain amount of caution.  By caution, I  mean I repeated the mantra "Boy, I hope I don't get stuck up here," several times over in my head.  (Like that redundant sort of sentence?)

I rounded the bend and there was the sign and turnoff for the Norman Lowell Art Gallery.  Of course it was closed.  The snow on part of the parking area was a bit tamped down and because I needed to turn around there, I knew it would be fine.  Necessity equals "do it," don't you know.  It wasn't fine.  I got stuck, spinning my tires on the snow-covered ice. (Stupid mantra!)  I was in a rented car and regretted not having my own car which had stood me very well in Alaska winters!

The place looked completely deserted.  A little cabin a few feet from where I got stuck.  An outhouse across from that.  A larger building behind the trees a little further off.  No signs of current human activity.

Hmmmm. A plan of action was clearly called for.  And I probably would have called for assistance on my cell phone if I had reception up there.  No plan of action was forthcoming, short of traipsing up the road and knocking on a door somewhere, which I was reluctant to do because that would probably have scared the "old couple" residents there.

Then, a door to the little cabin opened, and out walked a dog and an older gentleman who I presumed to be Mr. Lowell, the artist-resident.  He looked in my direction, but didn't seem to take much notice.  How odd that was.  What did he think a strange car was doing parked on his property?  He turned and walked off in the other direction.  Then I remembered the woman in the restaurant told me he was "blind."

So, I waited some minutes more, trying to decide what I should do.  I was far from panicking, because I usually don't panic.  Experience has taught me a lot about keeping calm and waiting for Inspiration to distill or for Destiny to show her hand.

A few moments later the man returned from the big house back towards the cabin.  I figured he really must have seen me and my white car sitting there in the glare of reflected light on snow, so I got out of the car and walked toward him.  He must have been used to strange things happening in his life, because he didn't act as though he was afraid of me.  I assured him, anyway, that I was just a nosy, hapless tourist stuck on the ice in his driveway, and not, as he might imagine, some crazed...um....me?


This unsuspecting nonagenarian listened to my tale of woe and offered me the use of a snow shovel which leaned up against his shed.  His son, he said, was due to come by a little later and I was welcomed to wait in the cabin for him, if I would rather do that than try to dig myself out.  Well, that sounded like an inspired plan of action to me, so off to the cabin I tra-la-la'd.

The Lowells in the early years:

Mr. Lowell showed me his working studio, but couldn't show me the real gallery because it was still closed for the season.  It was getting later and his son was not there, yet.  It was late winter, so we had some sun, but by 3 or 4 in the afternoon, our sunshine was going to give up on us.  I decided to go try to dig my car out by myself.  I dug and dug, and tried to drive out, but it just wasn't working.  There was too much ice under the snow.  

Eventually, Mr. Lowell came out and wanted to help and we argued vehemently over whether or not I was going to relinquish the shovel.  He got another, but I kept arguing with him, so he put the shovel aside, (AFTER I got a good picture of it.)

Shoveling wasn't working anyway, because it wasn't the snow that made my tires spin.  So then he suggested I get in the car and drive while he pushed!  WHILE HE PUSHED!  Did you hear that?  This 90+ year old blind man wanted to push my car out for me.  Now, I know I'm not so young myself, and I'm "out of shape," as was so diplomatically pointed out last year by a kid I was working with on the steeper than straight-up-hills of Seattle. In higher than 90 degree temperatures.  (Hey, little darlin', what's with that line of sweat beads on your own upper lip, may I ask.  That hill was seriously straight up!)

I convinced my knight to get in the car and drive while I pushed the car from the back.  Who looked at whom with more incredulity?!

So, that's how the story of "Getting Penny's Car Unstuck in Homer, Alaska" played out.  He got in the car (I had to demonstrate, tactily, where the gear shift was and which position was which.)  Then I got behind that behemoth vehicle and pushed, rocking it forward, letting it settle back, rocking it forward, letting it roll back until it got itself into the swing of inching forward without rolling back over my shins.  

Like giving birth, one last concentrated push and that sucker was out of there...being steered by a driver who couldn't tell which direction he needed to turn.  I hustled around to the front of the car to try to flag and direct, but when he almost ran over me, I just jumped aside and let him go for it.  I did have the presence of mind to pull out my camera, by the way.

Here's what I didn't get to see:  The Norman Lowell Gallery of Alaska 

http://normanlowellgallery.net/#permanent  

If you visit this site, you will get a treat.

Here's what I did get to see:  

Scenic Beach State Park, WA

YOO-HOO  Anyone to home?

Ummm...do you think it's safe to check it out?

Joe Emel House built in 1911. 

Lincoln-log-looking cabin built by Grandpa Joe when he was 16.

Doesn't take much to imagine how this place will look when it fully greens up.

The clear gray pool in that knot hole was teeming with mosquito larvae.  We tried to convince ourselves they were dragonfly naiads, but the truth is the truth, enough so that I was glad we were here in the spring while they were not yet out and about!  (And sorry Katy...I do have to point out that your feet look like they have on white socks, but those are bare feet in those sandals.)

Which is brighter...the reflection from her feet or from the sunlight glinting off the water behind those trees?

Texas Jelly Bean

I mean, it's just a piece of candy, right?  I think you might be exaggerating about how hot it is, Penny. 

Ummm...well, it is getting kinda warm...but I'm cool.  I'm cool.  It's just a piece of candy.

Asbestos tongues pretty much run in our family, most of us having been weaned on toothpicks soaked in cinnamon oil, red-hot Fire Stix or those really hot square cinnamon suckers, not to mention New Mexico peppers, but this little blazing blast from my past packs a hot wallop like no other.  

Hand it to these two troopers!  Witness the pain, but did they spit it out?  They might have, had the thought ever crossed their minds, but I think their brains just kind of shut down and didn't allow for any rational thought for a while.  Survivors just getting through the moment.

Regrets? I've Had A Few

And I will have a few more. For example, I will probably never get to see this view in real life: 
 (I got this picture from somewhere, but I've seen it all over, and now I don't remember.  I hope I don't regret not knowing more about copyright, etc.!)

And I want to.  I really want to.  I've wanted to since I watched Haley Mills hanging from that windmill back in the 60s.  Naturally, I mean the whole movie, and not just in part due to that other-worldly, romantic title, The Moonspinners.

I've just recently read this very interesting post by a "blogger friend," (and I take liberty using the word "friend," because I haven't asked him if I could, but there you go. At least, we're associates.)

http://gorges-smythe.blogspot.com/2014/01/still-learning-to-let-go.html

It has served as some sort of muse for me right now.  My blog posts have, for the larger part, been spun around places I have been and pictures I have taken to enhance the tales.  They have been factual, if not entirely honest in the sense that, well, I'm sort of a Pollyanna when I write about my life, and for the most part, when I talk about it in general.  Also, I'm pretty positive to myself about my life.  Only lucky family members and close friends get to hear the "minimal" whining and grousing.  And little-bitty notes of insecurity.

So back to the regrets.  Notice the past tense of that phrase.  I mostly get over the regrets, little thanks to my own efforts, but more thanks to recognizing the Divine Wind in my sails, propelling me through uncharted waters, as it were.  Maybe not uncharted, but places that have certainly not been on any of my own "maps."

 Some will disagree with my idea (or philosophy) that I have not really chosen, in this earthly, concious state of mind, my own destiny.  That circumstances have just popped up and I have had to either go with them or go with them.  I usually just go with them.

As a child, I moved and moved and moved with my family.  We moved.  A lot.  There was only one such period where we ended up in a situation that I didn't like very much.  Didn't like it at all, as a matter of fact, which is ironic, because it was a place I loved going to on vacation to visit my grandparents and other relatives.  But all of us children had a miserable time while living there, because of...drumroll please...nasty, nasty, unholy school.  OK...there were some things about it that I did actually like, said family being the main thing, and:

• One new friend across the street from my grandparents house.  
• An alliance with misery-partner in class who lived in an orphanage and who got picked on more than I did by the witch of a sixth-grade teacher and who had fewer resources for protecting himself than I had. 
• Being released from school to re-unite with my siblings, which was the definition of refuge at that time.
• OK, and yes, I did have a few moments of comraderie with a few other kids, but we were such temporary outsiders, that it was fleeting.
• And if we include the move-within-a-move, another friend whose mother drove the school bus.  I didn't like getting up at 4 AM to ride the bus with them, though, especially after staying up past midnight struggling to learn math from my mother because the teacher couldn't help me. 
• Weekends which were more like the vacation days we had spent in previous years staying at Pappy and Grandmother's house.
• Maybe a couple of other redeeming things.
• Necessary life experiences

I regretted the circumstances that put us in that circumstance and it was completely out of my control because I was not the one who lost job and home and had to go on the road to look for work.  I was not the government who kept capping oil wells.   And as hard as that was to do, I'm still impressed that my parents weathered those ferocious storms without going on "the dole." 

As a young adult, I felt I had begun to have some real power of choice and to move into situations I wanted to be in.  I had a friend I thought was almost an extension of myself and 19 was my year.  My age.  My halcyon period.  If we couldn't take on the surprising world together, and why couldn't we? I could do it myself!  And then, BAM!  Still haven't been able to figure out how that cemented friendship crumbled only a few years later, but I know it wasn't something I had control over.

Years passed, not uneventfully, but filled with opportunity and liberty and choices and dreams coming true.  Even blessed heartache confirming my ability to feel alive and connected and to pick up and carry on. 

Fast-forwarding to a time when I again began to recognize I really didn't have that much control in choosing my own life lessons, (because, that interim period deserves much more time than I'm going to spend at this writing,) I was living in Korea where I felt I belonged as I had at no other time in my life until then. My niche was carved to my exact shape and form and need, soul and body.  I had no intention of ever leaving.  Until it was time to get married.  What a choice.  Not a choice.  An instance of going with the Circumstance.  As the marriage didn't work out, some might say it was my choice and it was a wrong choice, and people who were with me struggling with the choice might think it actually was a choice, but I know it wasn't a choice.  It was a circumstance laid out for me, picking me up and putting me in that sail boat.  I couldn't have chosen differently.  I wasn't able to have been able to make the other choice. 

(OK, this is getting kind of deep and there are ideas here I can't explain that will probably sound not the way I intend them to, but let's move on.)

Then my daughter came into my world.  Then we were alone in our world until we weren't alone and were with family.  Then we were alone some more and had a rich, tough life in San Francisco, where again I began to feel that sense of rightness and belonging that would come upon me as we walked home from the grocery store, or got off the bus downtown, or spent time with new friends, or played on the beach.  For several years, it was so right to be there and the rightness was palpable.

Then, we needed to leave.  Another circumstance that compelled me like taking that first breath as you rise out of the water after having been submerged a little too long is compelling.  Oh how I regretted having to leave that life to the mercy of fickle and fading memory.

But, we encountered another life, just as rich and tough and rewarding and necessary; actually even more so.  I could not have predicted.  It was life turning again to itself, this time.  It was family refuge.  It was hearts shattering and the pieces being lost to oblivion.  It was unfathomable loss and separation and regrouping and redefining happiness and compassion and regret and forgiveness, and discovering inner resources and getting older. 

It was life knocking out teeth. 

It was love knocking out fear. 

And then?  AND THEN...Circumstances.  I had to find another job.  It wasn't my fault it was in Alaska.  I had never given the idea of living in Alaska even a minor nod.  I thought I "chose" Alaska over New Zealand because I needed to not be so far away from my daughter and her husband in Utah and my mother in New Mexico and my siblings in other places quite far from New Zealand.  Little did I know that Alaska was actually waiting for me.  It was putting clean linens in the guest room and a warm lamp at the bedside long before I even knew one could actually live an embraceable life in Alaska. 

Embrace it I did, as it embraced and cradled me.  And sent me jauntily forth to experience a world to which I still can't give due description.  By this time, you must know that I have learned to quit flicking pages ahead to see how the story ends.  No last page.  Ever.  I didn't know that after traveling so far away from a world I oh-so-ignorantly thought might have finally been a jumping off place, closer to family, I would land in a place that kept me traveling while holding me there. It kept me free and wheeling within it's swaddling borders. 

I don't know how that happened.  I didn't order that adventure.  And I really didn't want to let go of it, either, when I did. 

Ready? Say it with me:  Circumstance!  My daughter needed me.  Her world was roiling and racked with upheaval and the idea occured to us both that she could come to Alaska and need me there.  Of course her son was part of the consideration as was her son's father whose world was unraveling in its own way, and I suppose you could say I made the choice to move closer to the situation, because it was my thought that it would be better for father and son to be physically closer to each other than what being in Utah and Alaska would allow.  Washington is not extremely close to Utah, but it's where I could get a job...ANOTHER new job at this late stage in my employment life.  (I think it's a late stage.  Who knows, by now.)

I would rather the three of them not have lost their happily-ever-after than what they are going through at this time, but do I regret that I now live in Washington with my daughter and grandson?  

What.  Are you kidding me?!

 

 

Wait. It's Over?

 But, what about all those Christmas intentions I intended to post.  I had so many ideas in my head this year, mostly unprofound ideas about how profound reality really is, as if reality is a real thing.  Even at Yuletide.

 Well, at least let me put up a few pictures representing portions of our Christmastime activities.  It was pretty low-key this year for us.  And a little odd, in some ways, as well, which is actually right up my alley.  If I am nothing else, I'm all about "odd."  

 

 

 

 

 

 

My big Gift this year?  These two. Right here at home.

Katy grew up in the Bay Area where we went to the beach on Christmas day, a regular event that began when we first moved there and had no community, yet.  Christmas was taking a long time to get to us, so we inched it up a day and then when it was Christmas for everyone else but pretty much over for us, we needed something special to do.  We went to the seaside, which tradition she is sharing with her son.  I think he likes it.

Lights, Wonderland walk, tree hunting on the inlet, harbor time, chocolate orange cake, Christmas-cracker pulling, Santy, packages in the mail, chocolate-peppermint shakes at a newly discovered burger joint, making stockings and hats, marzipan pigs, Swedish pancakes, phone calls, friendly visits, thoughtful inexpensive gifts for each other, fake fireplace heater, life in a forest at Christmas!   The end of a year that required of us much energy.  An endearing and peaceful time.

 

Sugar Ghosts of Christmas Past

 



A few food-related Christmassies (which doesn't really look right spelled out like that.):  Tastes without which it just doesn't seem like the holidays to me, but without which I will spend Christmas this year, anyway.  Mostly.  And still have a wonderful Christmas time! 

 

Number One on my list is the ever-so-iconic Orange Slice Cake.  It's a heritage recipe from so far back I hardly remember how it originated.  Deep in Appalachia, but before that, I don't know.  I'm not much of a recipe cook and people are always saying that baking is a science so you have to follow a recipe, but the best cinnamon rolls and bread and orange slice cakes I've ever baked have been pretty much thrown together according to my food intuition.  I guess it could be true that I just did it so much for so long, I had recipes memorized and had incorporated the science somehow, and somewhere I do have the recipes written down, however loosely I may follow them.  Anyway, I'm not posting recipes for any of these merry wonders.  They would be easy enough to find online if anyone really wanted to make them.

 

The recipe for Orange Slice Cake calls for the candy slices, dates, coconut and probably walnuts.  I use the candy slices, even though that's my least favorite taste (and texture--gumdrops in a cake?!) in the cake, but it's my daughter's favorite and it is Christmas, after all, so you make for others.  I use other dried fruits (not candied fruits used in fruit cake,) such as cherries, sultanas, apricots, figs and maybe something else that happens to strike my fancy at the time I shop for ingredients.  I also stick to the traditional use of coconut and walnuts (black walnuts if I can find them.)  



 

Before taking the cake out of the pan, I poke holes in it and pour the orange-juice-powdered sugar glaze over it and let it soak in for at least a couple of hours.  The batter itself is pretty straight forward and not heavy, but substantial enough to hold up to all the additions.  Katy loves this cake so much, we used to eat only half of it during the Christmas season and freeze the other half for her birthday in July.  I haven't made if for a few years now and don't plan on making it this year.  My mother made one the other day and even though she's in a completely different state, it feels right now.  Someone in the family made a Texas Orange Slice Cake from my "recipe," and that strengthens the connections over the miles!

 

 
I think probably my next favorite is wassail.  The best apple cider you can find, preferably unfiltered and local, if possible.  I then mix in probably not equal parts pineapple juice, orange juice, lime juice, and lemon juice.  Sweet spices, of course.  Mulled and marvelously festive!  I've also spiced and heat-mulled home-canned grape juice which was very nice.  And good.  And tasty.

Even if we had plans to go to a family member's home for a Country Christmas Breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage, gravy and biscuits, Katy and I would always begin our day on Christmas morning with Swedish Pancakes or Christmas Crepes.  I usually have a store of jams and jellies that I put away earlier in the year during canning season, but this year we will use some jelly I brought back from Alaska.  Completed with a good dollop of sour cream and a shiny slather of butter.

 

 

Finally, a nod to my homeland, New Mexico.  (See what I did here?  I called it homeland as if it's a different country than where I'm living.  Lots of innuendo here.  First, when we left New Mexico, most people we talked to didn't realize we came from just another state.  Also, I feel very far removed right now and not just a little nostalgic and I wish we could be in Roswell with my mother for Christmas. The passing of so much time has made it seem like I'm in a very different world than when I lived in New Mexico as a child.)

 

Biscochitos are sort of like little short bread cookies but not so short, but plain looking like shortbreads.  They are usually flavored with anise and cinnamon, but I also like to add orange zest and a wee bit of orange oil or sometimes cardamom. 

 

 

 

My mother used to make a lot of candy for us at this time of year.  Peanut brittle, fudge, divinity, chocolate-peanut clusters, and my ALL TIME FAVORITE...well, next to fudge...FOURS!  They are a cube-shaped turtle-like confection.  Walnuts or pecans?, caramel, chocolate, butter and long-time love.  She got the recipe from a magazine oodles of years ago that featured a story of the Roswell Women's League who got together and made this candy for fund-raising.  Fortunately for her collector-daughter, she kept the magazine (with lots of others) and I now have that article in my kitchenalia box.  Somewhere.  Why are they called Fours?  I don't think anyone really remembers why. 

 

I don't make candy, except once in a great long while, fantasy fudge and once I tried Turkish Delights.  Rose-flavored.  Interesting.  I used to make honey and molasses taffy, but that was a really, really long time ago when I thought it was fun to pull it. 

 

There are other holiday-themed sweets I used to make like plum pudding and trifle, lemon sugar cookies, gingerbread and molasses cookies.  This year, I bought packaged crepes at Costco for our Swedish Pancake breakfast and I think that's all the holiday baking this household is going to get.  It's enough for me to remember and think about others eating all that sugar.