lost restaurant not on the whiplash road

Finishing up another week in California.....and finding that my patience isn't what it needs to be.

Of course, it is not all the mother/dementia thing....it is also me taking her out for a last day beautiful lunch and getting lost on the upper reaches of Page Mill Road where it nearly connects to the ocean.
That is to say, the restaurant I was looking for was somewhere else and we drove for 90 grueling minutes on a whiplash road with countless switchbacks with me always thinking we'd gone beyond the point of return and might as well keep going.

It is a beautiful road with amazing views of the bay and surrounding hills at the top. And all the way up and all the way down are groves of redwoods, buckeye trees, madrones, oaks and ferns. Gorgeous. And the mothership loved it, except for getting very hungry and a bit tired of sitting and waiting for that wonderful restaurant. And then it started to rain.

Oh well. Back on level surface we had a rather late lunch, more good talk, promises of what to get/bring/remember for next time and a good goodbye. Til next month.

We, of the generation that serves.....elderly parents, overwrought grown children and grand children. We are a self reliant and hardy bunch. In my opinion.

scrim vision

Driving home along streets I have driven so often for decades allows me time to day dream. Even to the point of getting home and not recalling the drive ....but that is seldom, I promise.

What I vision often is a kind of scrim over the current landscape of telephone poles, car lots, fast food joints and gas stations. The scrim is a vision of what used to be there. How the street used to look, how this particular long corridor of cars four lanes wide used to be a lazy two with dirt shoulders and mom and pop stores and a few more trees.

Maybe just overactive imagination.....but when I was a child riding long hours in the car, I would see horses galloping along fence and telephone lines, keeping up with us. I don't see the horses any longer, but my scrim vision can produce an active farm scene where there is now only a collapsing barn....and it even allows me to see someone young in someone old. Doesn't work the other way around though. I don't have any future scrims. Probably a good thing.

Peace.

From potholders to macrame.....again.

Spending time with two of my grandchildren, girls, has my domestic seed pods stirring. I remember making pot holders of cloth strips and glasses cases of leather, wishing wells of Popsicle sticks and the occasional ill fitting doll outfit when I was a kid. Being pregnant at a time when maternity clothes consisted of lime green big sack dresses studded with white dots, drove me to sewing my own clothes for my three time motherhood largeness. At the time I was also doing window display and making/sewing the display things I couldn't find in stores. And naturally, it being the 70's, I also got into making everybody long patchwork skirts and purses. (Awful, isn't it? Can you believe I was also making tons of macrame wall hangings and plant holders to sell....I feel responsible for some of the residue of that stuff still around in the the thrift stores.)

Sooooo, I bought a sewing machine today. I gave the last one away ages ago. This one promises to be somewhat simple....I hope so, because I plan to bring my grandchildren into the fun house of making stuff. They too can learn to make things no one wants but will love because they made it. Another generation of the pleasures of making things with your hands....can't think of a better gift.

Peace.