As someone who does neither gardening nor baking, it surprises me the extent to which I enjoy reading online about the gardening and baking of others, particularly since in the past I would have berated myself for my lack of competence and enthusiasm, respectively, in both areas. (I put this down to something like the general settling of life that has come out of being married, with our mown-lawn harmony and store-bought treats.)
The señor and I have been fortunate to enjoy in situ the baked goods of Amanda, whose Christmas baking continued the theme of abundance. While I retched and complained through the holiday season, she and her daughter were producing the house at right, whose reproduction here I hope she will allow. As one of a cluster of baked seasonal houses I saw online, it inspired in me a curious sense of generational solidarity. I may be sitting on a couch with my dogs and their dander, but my peers are tending their vegetable patches, mixing their biscuit dough and crocheting up a storm. It’s a feeling of togetherness but also the feeling that I don’t have to do everything myself. (Having a partner who has all but annexed the kitchen is one likely root of this beneficence that I extend into the ether.)
Meanwhile, Catherine at Sum in Horto similarly holds my attention with a flowering, fruiting kitchen garden. There seems to me something not only sweet but elegiac about growing things in progress, particularly during this last year when subtexts have flowed close to the surface in life. I keep coming back to look at this image (again, reproduced with the hope of permission). Tender, tiny, quiet grown things, made at home.
Some kind of key to my thinking might lie in Bronwyn Lloyd’s exquisitely-turned post made at the beginning of the week, who has this to say about her reading of a poem from Joanna Paul’s volume Imogen:
Through the process of writing about it I learned how Joanna channelled her grief into art in order to understand the nature of loss. … [T]he composition of her words and phrases express[es] ideas about presence and absence, and reveal[s] that creativity itself can fill the vacuum of loss and sorrow.
and finds in the completion of her PhD
the realisation that motherhood and maternity should not only be considered in terms of flesh and blood offspring, but can be expanded to include creativity in a much broader sense.
I am in the midst of abundance and the memory of recent loss, a hopeful but uncertain future (shared too by two of my dogs who may themselves be in pup) and a past whose little ghost doesn’t so much harry the present as insist, quietly but persistently, on the fact of its existence. The señor mows the weeds and the grass alike and I take a short car-ride to the Couplands Bakery for the odd biscuity treat. But there are networks upon networks around us, making and growing and harvesting and reading and making again. Look at what lies just over the hill.
Surprises so absurd
They leave the singer dumb,
A stockfish for a word,
One word, wherewith to thank
These quaint, as from her crucible they come.
DandyID
Blogger
Flickr
last.fm
YouTube
Twitter
Vimeo
Twitpic
Tumblr
Facebook Pages
Linkedin
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m flattered! And pleased you get something out of my accounts of my modest feats of home baking. I do feel it as a connection with the past. I have very fond childhood memories of baking with my mother so I wanted to do it with my daughter which is probably why I’ve gotten more into it over the last couple of years. Also New Zealand is my home by adoption not by birth. My mother is Scottish as were my grandmothers and I find it fascinating the way a lot of traditional New Zealand baking is so very familiar to me. And certainly it is a way of connecting with other people. There is something very satisfying about baking for people I like and having them enjoy it.
The last post by Amanda was What I did on my Holidays
Mum used to bake with us using Grandma’s recipes (which were written on recipe cards and stored in a card index) and I can remember what fun that was, so I see the appeal. The Scottish point is a very good one — both my parents grew up in Southland in the 50s where the Scottish baking traditions were strong, even in the case of my mother’s family which wasn’t of Scots descent.
I remember seeing an Alison Holst show when I was about 12 that pointed out it was possible to cook most bread-based recipes using scone dough, which was more malleable and less tricky for kids to make, if a little heavy!
Thank you for the mention, it was a lovely surprise to find my name mentioned while reading your post! As I know you understand all too well, the month of July completely shattered my world. I found growing little things in my garden to be a wonderfully time-consuming and healing process – a focus of pleasure and delight when things bloomed from tiny seeds. The process of then cooking the fruits of my labour and feeding others has also brought much happiness; I frequently remember your reply “small smiles, that’s what we’ve got” and that’s what my wee patch brings me, lots of small smiles (when I’m not cursing at the chickens who often find a way in!)
One of the things I think modern living has brought many people in New Zealand is the opportunity to have a go at gardening on a manageable scale, as opposed to the open-bed, quarter-acre, self-sustaining projects of the fifties and the sixties, which were to my mind akin to a full-time job shared by two people. (When my grandfather was unwell during his later years my father and my brother used to drive down to Oamaru to do the large-scale digging and weeding he would previously have done daily in his massive garden.) There’s a shift in scale that comes with this too, from the pleasures of enough corn for a family of seven or eight, to a handful of fruit. I know of which I’d prefer to take charge!
Ha – yes, I don’t imagine I’d take much pleasure from growing things if I were resposible for feeding eight people. Too much pressure!