Tag Archive | Breezecatcher

Tea Towels

Jan31

As part of the decontamination project, I got the opportunity to wash all my clean tea towels and dish cloths. Wren helped me hang them out on the marvelous Breezecatcher line back by the compost. Tea towel culture is a relatively new thing for me, but I’m grateful that I finally get it.

The first tea towel I remember being given was this linen Y2K tea towel, and I thought of it more as a joke than anything else. But look, it’s 24 years old and as sturdy and useful as it ever was. The next time someone gave me a tea towel, I was disappointed: I had expected something more special, more personal, perhaps even more expensive. I was insufficiently grateful for both those tea towels, and I’m sorry for that. I didn’t really know how to incorporate tea towels into my daily kitchen routine. Only after I saw a stack of tea towels on Amy’s kitchen counter, and watched her reach for one to clean up a spill on the floor, another to dry a pan, another for something else, all in one evening, and then throw them in the wash that same night, did I begin to see the value in having a lot of tea towels.

Long before that, I had bought a set of embroidered days-of-the-week towels at a local antique shop. They were cute and inexpensive, but I was afraid to use them hard because — because I don’t know, I still didn’t get it: use them for everything, wash them, use them again and again until they graduate to being rags, and the more you use tea towels the more tea towels will come to you. Or something. Saturday and Tuesday are the last of these towels remaining in the kitchen, and Tuesday is so tattered it’s about to graduate.

Another towel that’s just beginning to fray is this gift embroidered by a friend no longer living. It will be hard to relegate, I mean graduate, this one to the rag bin. It gets light use these days, in baking rotation, covering bread or rolls as they rise.

This is the latest tea towel to join my collection, one of three tea towel gifts I received this holiday season. Where once I may have looked askance at a tea towel, I now appreciate the thoughtfulness and fun in these gifts from friends. They show that these friends know what I like, what’s meaningful to me; they remind me that I am seen and known. And I’ve learned to give a nice tea towel, too, from time to time.

There’s no need or time to share photos of all the tea towels in my kitchen, but here are a few more of my favorites. I’m grateful for tea towels, for their utility and their beauty, for the connections and memories they represent, and for the sense of belonging in a culture of wise women who love being in their kitchens, cooking and caring.

And in the kitchen last night, among the clutter of the half-cleaned, I made farfalle Alfredo, having no fettuccine but instead this wonderful pasta from Italy. I used mushrooms instead of chicken, and ate two-thirds of it last night because I couldn’t stop. So simple, so delicious!

Meanwhile, the Alluring Fox puzzle continued to delight, and offered up a final sweet surprise as I placed the last piece. As Liberty has an eagle mascot, the Unidragon emblem is a curled baby dragon that I saved til the end, and found that not only did it fit right in the center, the heart of the puzzle; it also completed a perfect miniature of the fox design. Noticing gave me a little jolt of joy. I’m grateful for other people’s clever creativity.

Georgia

Jan6
Georgia’s first African American US Senator, elected yesterday. Today, a Confederate flag was hung in front of the US Capitol by an insurrectionist mob of racist minions. Photo from the internet.

I woke this morning to news of Rev. Raphael Warnock’s win in Georgia, and thought Georgia! I’m grateful for Georgia! News later in the day cemented that feeling when Jon Ossoff was declared a new US Senator as well. This good news for our compassionate new president, and my intention to write more about how these remarkable wins came about in George, were quickly eclipsed by news of insurgents storming the US Capitol building. Hours later, the current president has yet to call on his minions to stand down. The desks and belongings of hundreds of our duly elected leaders have been violated by an unruly mob, while our Congress huddles in a single room during a pandemic. Disgraceful.

I’m grateful for the National Guard and the Capitol Police, for a Free Press, and for courageous American patriots everywhere who are calling out this siege of the Capitol for what it is: the direct result of an unhinged, maniacal, malignant narcissist in the White House, and his deluded, seditious coterie. Any death, injury, or financial loss that comes out of this chaos today weighs unequivocally on the current president’s karma. I’d say ‘conscience’ but he doesn’t have one. As a proud American patriot of immigrant ancestors, who have served in the US military in an unbroken line of generations since there wasn’t a United States (i.e., I am a Daughter of the American Revolution), I have a lot more to say about patriotism, what it really is and what it really isn’t, but now’s not the time.

Grateful for this laundry line, bright sun, dry air, and this incredible view, far from the madding crowd.

I’m also grateful today for the two young redtail hawks who circled low overhead as I hung out laundry, for the US-made Staber washing machine that has served me for fifteen years letting me do my wash at home instead of having to go out to a laundromat, and for the Breezecatcher revolving laundry line made in Dublin that I’ve been using long enough to need to restring it with a new cable, shipped from Dublin. I’m grateful that I have the discernment to turn off the television after hearing enough, and turn my attention to the great outdoors.