She Brings Me Water
An aeclectic look at the nearby worldArchive for Life
Blog Action Day 2008
“On October 15th bloggers everywhere will publish posts that discuss poverty in some way. By all posting on the same day we aim to change the conversation that day, to raise awareness, start a global discussion and add momentum to an important cause.” http://blogactionday.org/
Last year I participated in the first Blog Action Day, when the theme was the environment. What’s interesting to me about this year’s theme, poverty, is that it was chosen before the USA’s financial meltdown (followed by markets and economies all over the world). Here in the States, we don’t see much of the kind of poverty experienced in other places around the world; most of us here are relatively (compared to a lot of the rest of the world) affluent. Some of us, while others around the world and here at home are dirt-poor, are filthy rich. And now some, after the US of A’s financial crisis, have gotten richer, and some of us may come to experience poverty as we’ve never seen it or known it before. We live in interesting times.
When confronted with a problem as seemingly huge and possibly distant from ourselves as poverty, where do we start? Participating in the discussion taking place on blogs all over the world today is one action you can take. Clicking on the Blog Action Day link above will take you to hundreds of blogs where others will be sharing their experiences with being poor, or working to end poverty, or giving suggestions for what you can do to help, or be helped.
If you do make this journey around the Web, you’ll also see many easy ways to donate money to various causes and organizations. My problem with this, besides the fact that a lot of your donation will go to supporting the organization (yes, I know they do alot of good work and so on) instead of directly to helping a poor person is that it is so easy, and thereby impersonal, quickly over and quickly forgotten. To work on a problem this large, we need a more personal, more lasting experience and involvement.
For many of us, the only way we can experience real poverty is on a voluntary basis. There can be many reasons why someone would choose to do this, as many reasons as there are people, probably. I recently followed the month-long journey of one young couple who, for their own reasons, chose to eat only as much as one dollar a day could buy. You can read about it here, if you choose to. Or you could chose to do something similar yourself.
How does doing something like this help poor people? By increasing empathy, awareness and understanding- of what it feels like to be hungry, or to not be able to buy whatever we want, whenever we want. By putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes- or going barefoot, if you can’t afford to buy shoes. Doing something like this is a little more personal and potentially lasting, but how can one move this experience into the realm of long-term commitment and involvement?
Here are my suggestions and a challenge (I am making the assumption here that you are someone who is looking for ways to help, not someone who needs help). First, the challenge. How far from where you live to you have to go to find poverty? I mean real poverty, not poverty of the kind that laments not being able buy that new SUV. Can you walk to it? Ride your bike? Or do yo have to get in your car and drive till you find what looks to you like real poverty? That’s the challenge: find out for yourself how far you have to go from where you live to find real poverty.
When you have found the place that looks to you like it and it’s people are living in real poverty, get out of your car, and just begin by walking the streets, if there are any. See if there are any businesses, and what’s available in the grocery store, and what kind of resources the community may have. Have a bite to eat somewhere, if there’s a place to do so. Talk to the people you meet. Try to see life as they see it, smell it, taste it. Spend as much time here as you can. Try to imagine living here.
Then go back home. If the distance, physically and mentally, doesn’t seem that far, then maybe there’s not much you can do. But if it seems like you just came back from a Third World country, and you want to work towards shortening that distance, commit yourself to it. Sacrifice for it. How? Here in the USA we consume far more resources than most of the rest of the world, and we waste more. I believe that committing ourselves to reducing consumption of all kinds (food, energy, products) and not wasting what we do have (particularly food) helps not only the poor (the less resources we use, the more there are for others) but the environment, and ourselves.
So, ready to turn a desire to help into a lifelong commitment? Find a notebook or an old binder with some sheets of paper in it and get something to write with (no, don’t go buy a notebook or binder; we’re reducing consumption, remember? Use what you already have). At the top of one page write “How can I reduce my consumption?” At the top of the next page write “What am I wasting and what can I do to stop?” On still another page write “Community resources”.
Now, take a walk around your house.
See that pile of magazines and catalogs by your easy chair? On your reducing consumption page write “cancel all magazines and catalogs” and on your community resources page write “find out where to donate or recycle old magazines and catalogs”.
See the food going bad in the fridge and the pantry? On your what am I wasting page write “food” and jot down ideas for how to stop this waste. And no, eating out for every meal does not qualify as stopping food waste nor does it help eliminate poverty. Restaurants waste large amounts of food and use large amounts of energy, and the food is generally less healthful and more expensive than what you could make at home. Better ideas for controlling waste would be to only buy within a set food budget, freezing leftovers, and composting scraps if you can.
See all those clothes in your closet that you don’t wear or can’t fit into anymore? Find a place that makes them available for free to the poor (many churches do this). See those old cell phones, gadgets, whatevers? Use the phonebook, walk your neighborhood (or the impoverished one you found), or use the Internet to find places to donate these unwanted items to that make them available to the poor, or homeless shelters, or community centers. Continue throughout your house until you have finished each room, then the garage if you have one (do I really need 3 cars?), then your yard (if you have one, and if you do have one, plant a garden and give the extra produce to a food bank).
Now, why are you writing all these things down? Because now you are going to make them goals by putting dates on each item and using the binder/notebook to keep track of each commitment and to remind yourself of them. So, by “cancel all magazines and catalogs”, you’ll put a “due by” date (”I will have called or sent cancellation notices to each magazine and catalog by Nov 15th, 2008″). Schedule a day to do your community resource search, and write down all the things you learn in your notebook. Keep this notebook in a prominent place on your desk, near your easy chair, wherever so that you can refer to it frequently. Zen Habits says that a person needs to do something every day for a month to make it become yours for life- so commit yourself to doing something in your notebook every day for a month. By changing your life, you change and touch the lives of others as well, and reduce that distance between yourself and that Third World country across the street and around the world.
Mid-Summer, Litha or the Summer Solstice
Whatever you choose to call it, now is the time to celebrate the shortest night of the year, and the longest days, and the burgeoning fields and gardens. There are many, though, that at this time will not be celebrating, because of the destruction of their fields and gardens and homes through floods, drought, or some other catastrophe exacerbated by global warming, mono-culture agriculture, destruction of wetlands and flood plains, or Mother Nature just fighting back. So we might also take this time of year to reflect on our lives in relation to the world around us and what we can do about the problems we see.
Treehugger has posted a few suggestions for observing this time of year; which you can read about here. They also have suggestions on greening your life, as well as environmental news; I recommend them as well as Grist for great reads on being green. Mother Earth News, the “original guide for living wisely”, has a post here on how to help the Midwestern flood victims. At all of these and many other places online, not only can you learn about greening your life (and possibly life as we know it), you can also glean tips for saving money, becoming healthier, reducing waste and chemicals, and maybe score some great recipes into the bargain.
As I’ve talked about before, one of the major ways you can achieve all of the above-mentioned goodies is by cutting meat out of your diet, in particular red meat, or at least reducing it substantially. We have also cut out chicken and have changed our fish-eating habits based on evidence that some types of fish have been drastically over-fished and that the “farm-raised” ones are as full of chemicals and hormones as feedlot cows (salmon is an example of both of these categories; natural populations are dwindling and the farm-raised ones, just like feedlot cows, are being fed corn which is not their natural diet and so they must be fed antibiotics and hormones to help them stay alive until they are big enough to kill).
This brings us back to the celebration of the Summer Solstice, or Litha, the festival of enjoying the summer sun and warmth, and sharing the abundance of the fruits (and vegetables!) of our labors. So for my part, I’ll share with you a few meatless ways to partake of your garden’s produce (or your local farmer’s market, or even your grocery stores’)…
For Father’s Day, we were going to my dad’s for a covered dish/ barbeque and I decided to bring something based on what was available in our garden on the day of the gathering. The day before, I dug some red potatoes from the four hills we have of them, and cut a zucchini squash and a yellow squash. We have bunches of lemon balm pretty much all over the yard, so with all this mind (and in hand), I made a garden potato salad: first, I cut the potatoes into chunks and steamed them until just tender, then I cut the squash into chunks and steamed them till just tender along with some chopped onions. All of these I rinsed in cold water to stop them from cooking after they were done steaming. Then I combined them all together along with handfuls of chopped lemon balm, some lemon pepper seasoning, some chopped garlic and sour cream, and put it into the refirgerator to let the flavors “marry”. Later my husband added dry mustard, garlic powder and paprika. If we had been having this at home as a meal, I probably would have added some steamed greens as the “side” dish, and that would have been our entire meal.
Later in the week, I took more zucchini and yellow squash, steamed them and combined them with couscous, chopped roasted red peppers, some leftover alfredo sauce and parmesan cheese in a casserole, seasoned to taste with lemon pepper, garlic and coarse salt. This morning, our burgeoning basil plants needed cutting, so I cut a large basket full and made three batches of pesto (pine nuts, garlic, basil leaves, parmesan cheese, lemon pepper season and garlic powder) and tied two handfuls together to hang and dry. I don’t add olive oil to my pesto while I’m making it because it tends to “cook” in the food processor as you are whirring the ingredients around, and I think it keeps longer without it. I put my pesto into tight-lidded jars, label and date them, and keep them in the freezer till I’m ready to use them, except for one jar I keep in the fridge for quick access. I add the olive oil when I use the pesto; for example, when I put some on my salad, I pour a little olive oil over it and stir it around in my salad. Same with pasta: cook your pasta, drizzle olive oil on it, then sprinkle on the pesto. This is particularly good when making a primavera (spring) pasta: another chance to pick and choose whatever veggies you want in your dish, steam them separately or cook them right in with your pasta, drain, season with pesto and parmesan cheese and there’s a complete meal.
Now get out there and enjoy the Mid-Summer Litha and/or Solstice, whatever you choose to call it and however you choose to celebrate it.
Meet the Neighbors
In previous posts I have mentioned our strawberry-eating pair of foxes; here’s one of them who stopped to pose for my husband to take a few shots of him. This one has a beautiful long tale, tipped with black, that supposedly means he is a gray fox. I don’t really know that he is a “he”, but the other one, who has no tail at all, looked earlier this year as if she were pregnant. Why does she have no tail? We don’t know, but last year she had half a tail, and this year, no tail. There’s a tale there somewhere.
Our human next-door neighbor, the one who tends a larger garden than ours, says he thinks the parent foxes are bringing their babies out at night or in the early mornings or late evenings to play in the loose dirt/sand in a back corner of his garden (where the wild fields and trees begin). He hasn’t seen them, he says, but he sees the messed-up dirt with fox tracks all around. This neighbor came over a few evenings ago to show me his hat. Here’s a picture of it:
Yes, that’s duct tape on his hat, and one of those rolls of sticky fly trap paper. A couple of years ago, when the deerflies were biting us all, my husband gave this role of sticky fly paper to our neighbor and suggested he stick it on his hat to trap the flies. So two years later, he’s finally done it- and it works.
Our neighbor says he’s going to get more rolls and put them all over his hat.
I’m not sure if this next neighbor is really a neighbor or not, he might have been just passing through, searching for females. One morning several weeks ago, it was drizzling slightly, and I looked up from my computer to see this little guy crossing the yard:
He’s an Eastern box turtle, and I do know for a fact that he is a “he”, because the males have orange eyes (females have brown eyes) and slightly concave shells underneath, so that when they are mating they fit neatly over the female’s convex upper shell. Box turtles can completely close up their shells to protect themselves from predators; that’s what this turtle did when I walked up to him, not knowing that I was not considering using him for turtle soup.
“Is she gone yet?”
P.S. Yesterday evening, which was Father’s Day, my farmer/neighbor’s wife told me that they had seen the fox pups! Two of them, playing hide and seek in the beans while mom watched from the sidelines. So Happy Father’s Day to the male fox at the top of this post and congratulations to mom too.
Contest Winner
In the absence of a PriceWaterhouse Cooper representative, I wrote the contestant’s names on little slips of paper, folded the slips in half, and placed them all in a pottery bowl. Then I swirled them around till they felt done and drew out a name- and the winner is…
Jennie! Congratulations and I’ll be contacting you by email so that we can try to tailor the seed choice to your area. And thank you to everyone who came to read my blog over the past year and to everyone who left a comment. I’ll leave you with a quote from Marcel Proust, my favorite author:
“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
Why Bother?
“But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.”
The title of this post and the above quote are from an article in the New York Times (April 20, 2008 ) written by Michael Pollan (author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals) in which he talks about why one might want to plant a garden and why one should, if one can, and why one might have to whether one wants to or not. The “Problem We Face”, of course, is global warming. Did we plant our garden because of global warming? Not really, but other reasons that Michael gives for doing so do are, among others, ours as well. You can read the article here.
In a previous post I wrote about the blueberry plants we planted and how I was really hoping they would bear this year; well, one is trying to live up to my hopes. The picture is of our Legacy blueberry with clusters of small, green blueberries. There are still some strawberries in this patch of ground but our two resident foxes generally eat those. Speaking of the foxes (which I believe are gray foxes, because of their black-tipped tails), they are becoming more accustomed to our presence and trot by us unconcernedly as we work outside. One even came onto our porch one night (through the cat door) in search of popcorn.
There’s been more planting in the Native American garden: the Southwest quadrant is planted in Ruby Queen corn; after they have come up we’ll plant Mexican cucumbers (which are supposed to deter the raccoons), King of the Garden lima beans, and Golden Honeymoon and Tigger melons. I also planted nasturtium seeds on the sides of the zucchini and squash hills to keep away borers, and transplanted marigolds to the corners because of their ability to repel all sorts of pests. And speaking of pests, some sort of bug nibbled holes in the basil and tomato seedlings, so yesterday we whipped up a batch of soap spray and sprayed all the seedlings.
Today I sowed some radish seeds in the cucumber hills, as they are supposed to keep away the cucumber beetle. And I planted three mounds with Detroit Dark Red beets. Beet greens are good just steamed by themselves and seasoned with lemon pepper, garlic and butter or olive oil. The beets themselves I like to peel, slice and cook till tender, then add some hard-boiled eggs till the eggs turn a lovely red-purple. Then I use them to make a salad with chickpeas and feta or mozzarella cheese.
Since this garden post seems to be turning into an eating post, I should also mention that our asparagus is coming up thinly, so I bought some from Cullipher’s Farm Market to supplement it. Last night, I steamed them and seasoned them (lemon pepper, garlic, butter and olive oil), sauteed some mushrooms (a la Julia Child: slice some very dry mushrooms, put about half a stick of butter in a pan, heat pan but don’t add mushrooms until the butter foam has just begun to subside, add the mushrooms and brown on both sides, add as much red or white wine as you want, salt and pepper to taste), added some shrimp, combined this with the asparagus and feta cheese and served it all over couscous. There’s leftovers, if you get here quick, and don’t forget to go read Michael Pollan’s article.
Back in the Garden
Winter is on it’s way out, spring days come and go, on sunny days the causeway to the island is lined with turtles basking, piled up on each other like dominoes after the fall. The turtles are mostly sliders; I tried to photograph them last week but they were too wary of me, even though I pulled the truck over across the road from them. They all were sliding into the water before I even walked halfway across the road to where they had been. I did see a snapper walking through the mud alongside the causeway, there’s usually water there but sometimes the water is so low it’s nothing but mud in some places. So I took this snapper’s picture as he/she slogged along, leaving a trail behind and no place to go to escape me, but you can’t see the turtle well in the picture, so I decided not to post it. Here’s a picture of some of our irises instead:
Planning this year’s garden began with the decision to plant more of a variety of things instead of sticking to the traditional three sisters- corn, beans and squash. Last year, we had ears of corn coming out of our ears, more lima beans than we hardly knew what to do with, and no squash. So we pulled our seed packages out of the fridge, went through them all, drew up a new diagram of the garden, and began to plan. Outside, the garden needed digging and weeding and re-making of the mounds, plus the addition of compost and good soil into each mound. Inside, we started tomato, basil, green pepper and swiss chard seeds in peat pots, and because this garden gets full sun, we acquired (from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds- www.rareseeds.com) new seeds to try out there- Poona Kheera cucumbers from India, Mexican sour gherkin cucumbers, Tigger melons from Armenia, and Golden Honeymoon melons.
These are red potatoes coming up from eyes I cut from some potatoes just before we ate them (the potatoes, not the eyes):
Earlier, in our smaller gardens, some of which don’t get much sun, we planted spinach, lettuces, beets, turnips and okra; some of these seeds are old and didn’t come up too well last year, and aren’t doing all that well this year. Which is why we have bought new replacements for some of them. We store our seeds in the refrigerator year-round to keep them viable, but they eventually just get too old.
So this past weekend, I got all the seedlings planted in the garden formerly known as the Native American garden, now informerly known as the “big” garden (see the blog’s previous posts). On our diagram we laid out where everything was to go, consulting our copy of “Carrots Love Tomatoes“ by Louise Riotte so we’d know who likes to be next to whom and who doesn’t, also called companion planting. The weather people were promising (or threatening) days of rain coming up so I also got in as many seeds as I could, even planting some where they aren’t supposed to be, just to get them started. This was Rod’s suggestion, a good one I think; we can transplant them to their permanent places after they sprout.
Here’s a picture of one of the Tiny Tom Tomato seedlings with deer tracks around it- that was close!
Here’s a list of all the plants and seeds that are now in the big garden:
10 tomato (Tiny Tom, Delicious and Rutgers) seedlings, 18 Italian Sweet basil seedlings, 3 California Wonder green pepper seedlings, and 6 Fordhook swiss chard seedlings. I forgot to mention that there’s already three mounds of red potatoes coming up as well, and two swiss chards that over-wintered from last year:
Now the seeds: Fordhook zucchini, Emerald okra, Dixie yellow squash, Table Queen acorn squash, Early sweet sugar pie pumpkin, Kentucky Wonder pole beans, French filet bush beans, Cherokee wax bush beans, Poona Kheera cucumbers, and the Mexican sour gherkin cucumbers.
One-quarter of this garden will still be for corn, and with it we are planting the Tigger and Honeymoon melons and the Mexican cucumbers. They’ll be planted next, and we’ve also marked some places on the diagram for beets, and there are still some empty mounds! Any suggestions? And since today is Earth Day, how about telling us your plans for what you are doing today to celebrate our Mother’s Day for the Planet? Here are some links for inspiration:
http://www.thegoodhuman.com/2008/04/21/lets-make-this-earthday-a-real-earth-day/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080418-pope-environmentalism.html
Since it has stopped raining, I’ll be out in the garden. See you outside.
February Eve~ Imbolc
Today (in this hemisphere and Time Zone!) is February Eve, also known as Imbolc. From Chalice Center:
“The First of February belongs to Brigid, (Brighid, Brigit, Bride,) the Celtic goddess who in later times became revered as a Christian saint. Originally, her festival on February 1 was known as Imbolc or Oimelc, two names which refer to the lactation of the ewes, the flow of milk that heralds the return of the life-giving forces of spring. Later, the Catholic Church replaced this festival with Candlemas Day on February 2, which is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and features candlelight processions. The powerful figure of Brigid the Light-Bringer overlights both pagan and Christian celebrations.”
I encourage you to go to this article at Chalice Center to learn more about Imbolc; it’s beautifully written and detailed. Anything that heralds the return of light and spring and warmth is welcome! As for us, we’ll be lighting white candles and browsing heirloom seed catalogues in preparation for this year’s garden. And trying to keep warm while awaiting spring.
So you don’t have to…
I have a cyber-friend who occasionally puts up a post on her blog that she calls “I surf so you don’t have to”. The posts usually contain many links to interesting, informative and creative sites that she’s run across on her travels through the Web-o-sphere. So I’m taking a page from her book today and posting a few links to some things of interest I have encountered to share with you, beginning with her blog: http://quinncreative.wordpress.com/
I belong to an online community of people who love books; it’s called Library Thing and today they posted an idea they have come up with for the holidays called Santa Thing. It’s sort of a Secret Santa project where you can sign up to secretly give $25 worth of books to someone (chosen by Library Thing) and sign yourself up to receive books as well. They say it’s better to give than to receive but I may be on the fence with that one when it comes to books. Just kidding. Maybe. Oh well, here’s the link: http://www.librarything.com/blog/index.php
Speaking of communities, perhaps you’ve been searching for just the right place to jump into the Web 2.0 world but don’t know where to start? Some places are too huge and impersonal, or have no “real-world” components, or no mission in cyber-life other than to make as many “friends” as possible…here’s a place, a new-kid on the block, where there is a mission and a real-world aspect. It’s called Avanoo and one of it’s founders has just set off on a trip across the US to “Share the World”. Whose world? Go see: http://www.avanoo.com/
But wait! Perhaps you are put off by that term “Web 2.0″; what does that mean, anyhow? Learn all about it, how to participate in it, and all kinds of other interesting things along the way at http://www.dailywriting.net/Wild%20Gardeners%20eLearning/Advent2007.html. Start at step one and work your way down the path. Be sure to bookmark this journey because other steps will be added as the days count down to Christmas. Brought to you by the good people at Soul Food.
Okay, you have a lot to do now, get going on all these links and when you have mastered it all, head over to Web Worker Daily and write up a post (for your new blog or for Avanoo) so you can have a chance at winning a prize! http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/12/06/wwd-giveaway-look-forward-to-2008-and-win/ And if you win, remember who tipped you off! Me!!
And to end on one last shameless plug for myself, a recent commenter on my Proust blog revealed to me that Starbucks (I’m not putting a link here, we all know where they are) carries madeleines! I am not a frequenter of Starbucks but I had to check this out, so last Friday, while on a shopping trip, I stopped in at Starbucks. I didn’t see any madeleines so I asked and sure enough, from behind the counter in a little fridge, they pulled out a box of them. “How many would you like?” the barrista asked. I said, “I was told you had them and just wanted to see if you did”. So they showed me the package (3 madeleines for $1.95!!), I decided to buy one and was asked what I wanted to drink with that? Nothing, I said. Strange looks all around. I put the madeleines in my purse and ate one with my homemade chocolate coffee when I got home. How were they? Okay. But here’s a link to the post, which also contains a link to recipes for regular and chocolate madeleines. Much better and cheaper made at home: http://marimann.wordpress.com/2007/08/06/twice-as-nice-marcel-sightings-4-and-5/
Garden Update
It’s really beginning to be fall-ish here, the past couple of nights we’ve had temperatures in the mid-40’s and northerly winds…last Fiday and Saturday we even had a “northeaster”, very cold, high winds and low temps. So I thought it would be a good time to get an update on the Native American garden and see what’s still growing.
In the Three Sisters garden, the corn stalks are completely dried up and are only acting as supports now for the lima beans. It was a good crop of corn and we still have shucked ears in the freezer, waiting to be cooked, and there are still lots of lima beans on the vines, some drying but some still ripening and I’ve been picking and shelling them periodically. We’ve discovered that the best way to have them is in a soup, takes some of the bitterness out of them. I also discovered, through the magic of Google, that they were heirloom-type limas, called “King of the Garden”, a high yield variety introduced in 1883. Supposedly they will keep bearing until frost! I see a lot of bean-shelling ahead.
Also still producing in the garden are some volunteer cherry tomatoes, and the green beans we planted are still putting out a bean or two. We did get some yellow squash planted but not in this garden, we put four seedling plants in over on the west side of the yard. They have blossoms and small squashes on them right now but these past two cold nights have set them back and the northeaster injured their leaves; it’ll be a race with time to see if the plants can grow their fruit large enough before the cold kills them. But, no vine-borers (yet!) Probably too cold for the little dears.
A Visitor from Australia
This week we’ve had a visitor here at our house on the island. She came all the way from Australia, and her journey was sponsored by a group called Soul Food. She came for a purpose, besides just wanting to see the world. Soul Food is a community of artists, writers, and creative people of all stripes who have expressed a desire to commit to a practice of daily writing or of daily art work. Some people in the community write on blogs (like this one) for the world at large, some write in journals just for themselves, others use their creative abilities to inspire others. There are also visual artists, photographers, digital artists, textile artists. You can visit Soul Food here, or visit Riversleigh, an online community where many of these artists have virtual rooms where you can read or see their work.
The visitor, whose name is Priscilla, has undertaken this journey to foster unity within this artist’s community and to spark their creativity through her adventures as she travels the world. She came from Australia, and is now here in North Carolina, and she’ll be traveling to other states here in the USA, then on to various countries in Europe, and then back to Australia. She has a blog, which you can visit here, and she also carries with her a small journal to draw or paint or visually record her journey in. She’s very artistic.
She’s also somewhat of a character. Here she is, communing with the dead cornstalks in the garden.
I encourage you to check out her blog if you are interested in reading about Priscilla’s adventures and to see pictures of her touring Knotts Island, and visit Soul Food and Riversleigh to spark your own creative muse. G’day, mates!
