I. Beeswax Food-Wrap
Me at the Duluth Folk School last week, with a beeswax food-wrap I just made:
It's super easy:
1. Shave or slice bits of beeswax onto cotton cloth.
2. Place the cloth between parchment baking-paper,
3. and iron (medium-high heat) on top.
The heat melts the wax, which soaks into the cloth. And that's it!
To make the wraps more bendable and stick-to-themselvesable, so you can easily fold them around a sandwich, say, the instructor had melted the beeswax in a double-boiler and added a little jojoba oil (for suppleness) and pine resin (for stickiness).
She brought blocks of this blend to class for us to use.
It's nice, but I know from my crafty friend Julia that you can use the beeswax as-is. Easier to make, and it doesn't hurt anything if the waxy cloth cracks.
II. Weather Report
Whenever the weather changes, I miss my Auntie Vi.
After months of chilly gray weather, all of a sudden colors are popping out all over.
I want to email her this morning and give her a springtime update: I'd tell her that I'm sitting on the front porch with the cats, and the crab apple trees across the street are puffy pink and the new tree leaves are my favorite tender bright green.
I'd give her a tech update too:
the laptop battery I'd thought was dead magically recharged––(Marz discovered when she turned the laptop on)––so I turned it off again and gingerly carried it outside, here to the porch:
DO NOT LET IT UNPLUG WHILE IT'S ON, or it goes back to zero.
Tricky, because ever since I dropped it on its USB port corner, the power connector doesn't insert securely...
To hold it steady, I've clipped the cord to the computer with a chip-bag clip, like a big purple plastic clothespin.
Boring details! but the sort of thing that makes up a daily day.
Also clever-monkey funny though, too--like when someone has duct-taped their car's bumper to hold it on--these cheap fixes to expensive problems.
Anyway, the recharged battery means I can sit here on the house-sitting front porch surrounded by frothy spring colors and chat on my computer again.
III. Life at the Speed of Life
I miss BJ too.
Here's her photo from the thrift store's Instagram, where I announced her death (she was such a regular regular, other regulars knew her):
BJ, top left, holding Auntie Vi's stuffed Woodstock.
(In that funny way random posts line up, she's above an antique child holding a stuffed horse.)
That's the last time I posted for work, though I intend to post there more again, now I inherited a smartphone camera from BJ.
But I deleted my personal IG account after BJ died. (I'd already deleted Facebook.) Social media feels like constant low-level agitation--unwelcome to me now.
bink thwacked her head on a wood beam a few weeks ago and has suffered with a concussion ever since--light and motion make her sick. A concussion doc told her not to look at digital devices because their screens constantly refresh--too fast for us to notice, but it affects our brains.
Like so many things in the world, eh? flashing at us so rapidly and constantly we don't notice, but we're taking it all in.
Not having a reliable computer in the past couple months was frustrating, but it also meant I wasn't bombarded with nanoseconds.
I was taking in the world at the speed of blossoms blooming.
Or a friend dying.
Hanging out with BJ in her last months was ... Important in Slow Motion.
Body Time.
Even to write about it is too fast, too condensed, you know?
It happened at the speed of going-over-every-week-and-mopping-the-floor.
If I wrote about it, it would be what you already know--a list of platitudes.
Be present.
Do the little things that come to you to do.
Love one another.
A friend once surprised me by saying the Beatitudes are boring: "They're just a laundry list. Blessed are the X, Y, Z."
I agree. It's not the list that's interesting, it's the Doing of the List.