Salt water cure

(Assateague Island. March 2007. © Robin)

The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.

~ Isak Dinesen

We leave for San Diego in a few days. I’m looking forward to spending some time at the beach. Hopefully the sun will shine for us this time around.

I’ve been pushing myself through the necessary exercises, using ice and heat, resting, and just generally doing what needs to be done to get me walking like a normal person once again. It’s going fairly well. I’m still in pain, but I’m having pain-free moments and that’s a good sign.

My grandmother used to say that salt water cures anything and everything that ails you. If that’s true, a quick dip in the Pacific (brrrrr!) later this week ought to have me hale and healthy once again. I’ve already done the prerequisite sweat and tears work.

Slightly askew

(Looking through the window of an abandoned house. Harpers Ferry, WV. September 2007. © Robin)

The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made.

~ Edmund Waller

Walking through the tidal marsh

(Tidal marsh. Assateague Island. March 2007. © Robin)

You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, in pain, experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain and learn to accept it, not as a curse or punishment, but as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.

~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

The music.

Finding serenity

(Delaware shore. March 2007. © Robin)

It is always in the midst, in the epicenter, of your troubles that you find serenity.

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Detour

(Somewhere in Marin County, CA. April 2006. © Robin)

The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore, common sense, and everyday experience. Love moves the flesh, it pushes matter around … Throughout history, ‘tender loving care’ has uniformly been recognized as a valuable element in healing.

~ Larry Dossey

I feel like I’m back at square one.

Old aches, pains and injuries are revisiting. I hurt. A lot. I was up all night with the pain. I suppose pain is one way of knowing you’re still alive.

It’s hard not to get depressed about it. I was making such great progress. But I don’t want to think of this as a set back because that way leads to depression.

No, not a set back. A detour. A chance to explore another road.

Anyway, if you don’t see me around for a little while, I’m off exploring. Healing. Taking care of myself.

So, you know…do the same. Take care of yourselves. I’ll be back when the pain isn’t quite so brutal.

And because it’s been a while:  The music.

A rainbow trail

(Point Reyes, CA. © Robin)

Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song,
and all about you will be beauty. There is
a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.

~ Navajo song

Playing in the meadow

(Emma in the meadow. April 2007. © Robin)

There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.

~ Elizabeth Lawrence

Red beet eggs revisited

(Red beet eggs. March 2007. © Robin)

Last year I posted a photo of red beet eggs along with a recipe. M and I were living in our temporary digs in West Chester, PA at the time, and I didn’t have my recipes with me. The recipe I posted was one I found on the internet which I tried to tweak in order to come up with a recipe closely resembling the one I use.

The red beet egg post is popular around Easter. I reckon everyone is trying to figure out what to do with all those hard-boiled Easter eggs once the coloring and Easter egg hunts are over.

Pickling is a good way to go because they’ll last a few weeks. Perhaps more than a few weeks, but they always get eaten in under a month in my house, particularly when M the Younger is at home. (Side note: You can thank M the Younger for this post as he put in a request yesterday for red beet eggs. I’ll be making a batch of them tomorrow.)

I’m once again getting lots of hits from folks searching for red beet egg recipes. Now that I’m home, with recipes at hand, I thought I’d post my mother-in-law’s recipe for red beet eggs. It is, as far as I’m concerned, the superior Lancaster county recipe for red beet eggs.

Jane’s Red Beet Eggs

• 2 cups cider vinegar
• 1¼ cups sugar
• 2 cans (16 oz.) sliced red beets
• 1 cup water

Mix ingredients and heat until sugar dissolves. Pour over hard boiled eggs (up to a dozen depending on the size of your container) and refrigerate.

It’s best to put the eggs, beets, etc., in a glass jar for storage in the fridge unless you don’t mind some staining of your plastic ware. I use a big pickle jar.

As stated in the previous post on this subject, you can reuse the pickling mixture for another batch of eggs. After that you should dump it as it loses its flavor. Or eat the beets if you like pickled beets. (I don’t.)

Happy Easter to those of you out there celebrating it!

A fungi

(Winter growth. March 2008. © Robin)

How lavish is Nature building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful.

~ John Muir

Note:  I decided to post this instead of yet another shot of snow.  We had about 6 inches of snow overnight.

The pond and meadow

(First day of spring reflections. March 2008. © Robin)

I am made to love the pond and the meadow, as the wind is made to ripple the water.

~ Henry David Thoreau