My Mom, Jackie

November 10, 1925 - September 20, 1988

I love you, Mom.

May your memory be a blessing.

Poozer Puttin' Up Scatch

Above is my son, Mister C, putting up the scatch, the roofing. (Enlarge the picture, so you can see that joyful punim!) The featured sheet is courtesy of my ex-Marine California niece and her three kiddoes.

Our final sukkah open house was last night. I have been surprised both by who has visited this week and who has not. Two more neighbors came by, one with his 2 month old baby girl, too sweet, my festive, wonderful sis-in-law came from Austin, a really nice couple from the havurah and my son and DIL (even though they were clearly exhausted from working all day...) It was amazing how many of us in that small group are in animal rescue - either officially or non-offically. Bonnie the Basset came out to schmooze.

Nice night, and I'll be sorry to see Sukkot end tomorrow morning. More pix to come this week.

Sukkah Pix , More to Come!

I cribbed these great pix from my DIL's blog, and will add more of the 300 that she took later! I'll post pix of the three other hand-drawn panels and of our ushpizin. The Tuesday night open house was so much fun. Two neighbors, a co-worker, and two members of our havurah came and brought their children. My now-retired therapy pet, Bonnie the Basset was a big hit with everyone, and she enjoyed playing the friendly livestock. The cats watched and wondered from the front windows! We drank kosher wine and had hummus, halava, dates, brownies, dried apricots and figs, pickled turnips, chips, and goat cheese. There will be one more big open house Saturday night! Come on over!

Stormy Sukkot

It is storming!! :>( We have needed rain badly since Ike, but why today? Some of the wonderful Sukkah panels bled slightly yesterday from the humidity…I can’t bear thinking about the wonderful designs drawn in “permanent markers” by my family and friends dissolving in this torrential downpour.
Earlier this morning, when it was still lightly raining, after two slightly hysterical e-mails and one voice mail from me, my Hub called me back to say that the panels all looked fine. That was before it started to rain cats, dogs, buckets and frogs. I have to stop myself from careening home to check on something that it’s too late to save anyway. I know I should focus on what is real, what is forever, what is never-ending, but I HATE real-life lessons. I prefer mine in books. They are so painlessly inspirational and neatly resolved with titles like, "Nothing Lasts But The Things That Truly Matter."
Impermanence. Fragility. Impermanence. Fragility…Sukkot.

The Sukkah Cometh

I bought (16) pine 2 x 2 x 8s and a bag full of 3.5 "long bolts with washers and nuts for the sukkah frame and assembled a practice side today while I was waiting for a load of laundry to dry. I wanted to make sure that my loosey-goosey design was actually going to work, so no one will find me sitting in the front yard the evening of October 13th, wrapped in a gaily decorated sukkah panel, pinned under the fallen frame and sobbing with my thumb in my mouth.
Oh, I've built things before, yes...yes, I have. Not that anything I've ever built is remotely plumb - somewhere from the great beyond, my master carpenter father is trying to grab the hammer away from me and show me how to fix that SOB!- whether it's the huge arty shelves in the living room, to the precarious but wonderful screened-in cattery tacked onto the back of the house where our cats go to sun themselves, commune with birds and squirrels and eat grass ( that is thrown back up promptly inside the house; that's just how they roll). I throw myself into these projects with bold abandon and a vague plan. From then on, all bets are off.
Stop the presses! More sheets have landed. My sister's came in, and yes, it has Palm trees (see my previous post), a Magen David and "that thing Jews put next to their doors." It's really very sweet and much appreciated. One of my nieces sent one drawn mainly by my 8 year old great-nephew. It's replete with stick-figure prophets and grapes. I love it. They evacuated from the Beaumont/Port Arthur-home-of-Janis-Joplin area during Ike and still made time to finish the sheet. My son & daughter-in-law worked on their contribution during Ike. Two cats with swishing tails watch a silhouette of a woman inside a brightly-lit sukkah while a Cardinal settles into her nest (see my Post-Ike post) high above in a tree. Touching, personal and beautiful. It's beginning to look a lot like Sukkot!

My Sister, Lucy Van Pelt

I didn't think that anything scared my sister, who I've always seen as a combination of a tough-talking, two-fisted old broad (and no, she doesn't read this blog or I wouldn't still be living and breathing to post another day) and a force of nature that had to be tracked - like a hurricane - if she was headed for Texas. During some Jungian workshop thrown by a friend of mine years ago, we had to pick from hundreds of picture cards ones that represented members of our family and arrange them in order of importance. The person of power for good or bad was placed in the center. Guess who was in the Center Square to Block as the Wicked Witch of the West...and... guess who got to be Dorothy?
But, oh, how the mighty have fallen. I have found her Achilles heel. She called me last week in a near panic because I asked her "TO DO SOMETHING CREATIVE!" Days passed and an e-mail announced that the upcoming weekend was "Sukkah sheet weekend!" I told her to calm down, not over-think it, that she could just draw a Palm tree and sign her name to it, and I'd be perfectly happy. Over the weekend another phone call: she found a video on YouTube with instructions on drawing a Palm Tree, but needed to buy a yard stick and she couldn't figure out where to spread the sheet out to draw on it and she's not creative and she can't believe that I'm asking her to be creative and...

Payback is sweet.

27 September 2008 4:30 pm

Remember that scene in Ghostbusters when Sigourney Weaver opens her fridge and is blinded by the light (among other things...)? That same scene played out in my kitchen yesterday (sans the appearance of Zul, although nothing much fazes me post-Ike!) when the power (FINALLY!) came back on at 4:30pm. I had scrubbed it to within an inch of its life -I am pretty sure that it wasn't this clean when it was new - once we started seeing power trucks on our street and was fairly blinded by its bright, clean, cool beauty with its beckoning shaft of light at 4:30 pm yesterday. Nothing quite like a natural disaster to get me to clean the refrigerator.

All kidding aside, some 250,000 in the Houston-area still have no power and/or running water and 400 people are still missing. Hoping that most of them have simply been unable to re-connect with loved ones...may they turn up safe and sound.

And, on another sad note, Friday we said goodbye to Paul Newman, a wonderful man who made a difference in so many lives, completely without fanfare. May his family have peace and privacy in this time of loss and grieving.

We will have Mr. Smith's birthday / Rosh Hashanah dinner after all: honey-tasting with challot and apples, baked honey-mustard chicken, baked leeks with olive oil and rosemary, mashed sweet potatoes (Garnet Yams to be precise), spinach, orange and pomegranate salad, and rice followed by a bangin' banana split cake.

Wishing you all a L'Shanah Tovah Tikatevu! May you be inscribed and sealed for another good year.