staring at the sea

It is exhilarating and terrifying to stand at water’s edge, wind kicking at your back, knowing that you are at the southernmost point of the States. This is where borders melt into the ocean, no land for miles, a definitive endpoint. Jeff and I spent a beautiful week in the Keys with Sheryl and Rebby and Sheryl’s sister, Amanda, and sister-in-law Allison. We celebrated Sheryl and Rebby’s 10 year anniversary and a birthday with many rum drinks, a drag show, waking to rooster calls, breakfasts of tropical fruits with sweet pink Florida shrimps, lazing in the hot tub, finding pirate-eyed kitties and marveling that the icy, snowy world we left for a week had turned to days filled with sunshine.

tropic cinema

caroline street

a mysterious yellow house

saint mary star of the sea

an abandoned bible school

rooster

*

My self-imposed photography/writing break is coming to a close, but I cheated a little and went back to the West Virginia archives to rescue the one above. I loved the red hair against green grass, and how the deep colors only intensify my paleness (I love my pale skin, even though I’m always surprised to see how pale I really am when I see it in photos). It is snowing outside now, really beautiful and soft, and Jeff is making tiny cheeseburgers with chili sauce, which, like the photo, is a tiny taste of summer on a cold winter evening.

chocolate marshmallow squares recipe, 1980s

Months – possibly years – before my mother passed away, I had hounded her for my grandmother’s chocolate marshmallow squares recipe. More brownie than cookie, but definitely not either, chocolate marshmallow squares are studded with walnuts, drifts of marshmallow and glazed with even more chocolate. I can barely contain myself reading my mother’s recipe, thinking of eating those little squares after all this time.

It’s been so long since I’ve eaten one that I thought I had imagined them. Google searches proved fruitless – no recipe I read came close to this morsel of goodness. But this past weekend while organizing more of my mother’s papers, I found it – on a yellow scrap of notebook paper, letters fading – the recipe. I remembered the phone calls where she promised to get me the recipe,  but she’d have to find it first; the afternoons I visited and found her digging through those same scraps of ephemera: it’s gotta be somewhere around here.

It had been there all those years among the other recipes written on envelopes, the backs of  greeting cards, on even tinier scraps of paper. I am half-tempted to cook a chicken recipe she recorded, not knowing what I will be eating since there is no title to guide my palate – a surprise dinner from my mother, who liked the  comforts of cooking more than cooking the dish itself, much like my relationship with food. But this Sunday, you’ll find me in the kitchen, melting butter with chocolate and sneaking maraschino cherries for a taste of a childhood memory.

Chocolate Marshmallow Squares

For Squares:

1/3 cup butter

1 6 ounce-package of chocolate chips (1 cup)

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 eggs

3/4 cup flour

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1 1/2 cup mini marshmallows

Maraschino cherries (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a saucepan, melt butter with chocolate chips over low heat, stirring occasionally. Blend in sugar, salt, vanilla and eggs till a batter forms. Stir in flour and walnuts. Spread in greased 8 x 8 inch square pan. Bake for 20-25 minutes.

While the squares are baking, make the glaze:

Melt 1/2 cup chocolate chips and 3 tablespoons of milk in small saucepan. Add 1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar and 1 tablespoon butter. Mix well.

Once the chocolate marshmallow squares finish baking, sprinkle immediately with the mini marshmallows and drizzle glaze. If you want to make it fancy, add a maraschino cherry to each cut square.

*

1,896 miles: Roughly the roundtrip distance that Jeff and I travel yearly to Ocala, and the title of my travel photo series for January 6′s Unblurred.

I’m especially excited about 2012′s Studio 5013 window installation series, featuring a year of talented local female artists: Becky Corrigan, Jody Perigo, Sarah Wojdylak, Sara Rekrut, Masha Vereshchenko, Kirsten Ervin, Kim Rullo, Kate Hansen, Paulette Poullet, Daviea Davis and Julie Skidmore.

The back of the card says, "Zuski girls/Needham and Howard Nelson" or something close to it, the writing is difficult to read. I purchased this card in Savannah a few years ago and on that 90-degree day, it gave me winter.

I’ve taken a few weeks’ break from creative pursuits to do some nesting. Making potato soup, hand-washing musty vintage dresses, eating Sheryl’s pickled turnips for breakfast right out of the jar while standing at the back door, waiting for quiet blue mornings to turn light.

I spent more time than I care to admit watching good and bad entertainment – episodes of “Ancient Aliens,” Breaking Glass and Foxes, for some late-70s nostalgia. Not all I watch is gloom and kitsch though; I have a soft spot for historical dramas, and finding Everlasting Moments was a beautiful surprise. It’s a Swedish film about a working-class Finnish woman in the early 1900s who wins a Contessa camera in a lottery. Through mothering seven children with an alcoholic husband, she finds solace in photography. The moment when her first picture turns from white paper to sepia image in the developer bath (a gorgeous shot of her shoeless, bewildered children  sitting in their tiny kitchen) made me cry a tiny joy, reminding me of that excitement I get when the image that I see in my mind can be shared with others.

This photo makes me think of that time in history when photography had an aura of magic about it.

*

For the first time in months, I don’t have anything planned. No photo projects, no editing, and honestly, it’s a nice feeling to have no obligations. I come home and read a book, dance with Jeff around the studio. I sit in the middle of my living room floor, scooping last bits of daylight. All year I’ve unconsciously kept busy, writing and taking photos, organizing my mother’s belongings, navigating through grief. Now it’s as if the world stopped and I finally noticed what was around me.  Or I stopped, and looked around, wondering, where have I been? I’m steeling myself for the long winter ahead, just shy of a year since my mother passed away. Everything has changed.

*

*

*

*

*

I’m restless. I can’t stop, I have to be moving, doing something – reading (a lot), taking photos (a little). I thought this morning about what I would write, and realized I didn’t know what to say.  I wanted to talk about late fall, how the early setting sun makes me miss Osijek. Or how the deep blue sky settling into night around an abandoned factory in Cleveland made me want to scale the fence and run across the empty lot, just to stand under the building’s enormity. I get these urges when we travel to pull over the car and walk across a field, or through a town that I’ve never been before. I wanted these images to tell their own stories.

*

*

*

*

*

a brief moment of solitude in the busy market

cannolis from theresa's bakery

rooster roasters

meah

more pastries from theresa's bakery

a bustling saturday afternoon

a view from a bridge

euclid avenue

garfield monument at lake view cemetery

waiting for an early dinner at melt, cleveland heights

an empty storefront on the west side

getting lost, you never know what you may find.

"It's For the Best"

The final Unblurred window installation of 2011 with collage and mixed media by Mundania Horvath. reconstructing-ideas.com.

"You Just Know"