We’re going to compile them all, and we’d love to invite you to write a letter too. You can upload it and send it along to me at katrina@beinginlovethere.com

Here’s the first page of what I clumsily wrote,

We’re embarking on a new project. My otousan is an amazing chef and he wants to teach me all the recipes he knows and loves before he dies. My dad isn’t dying in any obvious way, just in the way that all of us are, but we’ve been thinking about death a lot recently.

This is a recipe of his for Kamemeishi, a traditional Japanese rice dish with fresh Takenoko (bamboo shoots). You could use canned, but they have a metallic preserved flavor and aren’t nearly as good. This one’s Kyoto style.

Oh, and preparing the fresh bamboo has to happen the day before. You peel off its crazy brown layers. Past the dry layers it looks like fur, silky baby animal fur and past all the fur, it’s yellow and shaped like a horn. Once you’ve shaved the brown bits off, you cook it in rice-water, the water you wash your rice in (you do wash your rice, right?), for a few hours.

Sparrow Discs, $12

Knife & Fork, $12

Sister’s Sparrow Discs and Knife&Fork Earrings are precisely carved into light-weight pine. The loops are copper.

Wall Hanging, $10

Small Hanging, $8

She also cut the sparrow theme into matte board to make wall hangings that measure 4″ by 6″
or 8″ by 10″

Each has a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, that reminds me of that feeling of being home,

In, Out, Deep, Slow. Calm, ease. Smile, release. Present Moment. Wonderful Moment.

Shipping=$3

To order, email me at katrina@beinginlovethere.com

More like what Tony Hiss calls Deep Travel, delving into the experiences of familiarity.

In Boston, it has been all about fermentation. After listening to the Splendid Table’s Lost Art of Bread, we started on a yeast-making adventure. That lead to a three-different-kinds of  kimchee adventure, and the realization in this week’s New Yorker that we were now part of a trend of fermenters.

Living in the house I grew up in has made me fall in love with home a little more. Draping myself over the radiator in the living room and watching the sunset, new each time. It took me months to find that exact viewing spot. Waiting for that moment in the morning when the kitchen goes from being filled with sunlight to dim and dreary–I love the changing moods of our kitchen, and just the anticipation of that change gets me out of bed in the morning. I imagine never leaving the house and watching the snow fall and ordering groceries. I delight in dishes with strange ingredients scavenged from the kitchen and carefully folded clothes. It’s a subtle kind of love, loving things that have been there all along.

Like family–mine, and Jonah’s, and all of them together for Thanksgiving feasts. It’s the interconnectedness Hiss mentions, it’s that winter we had in Nicaragua. Everyone gathered around. The rhythm of family doesn’t feel stifling the way it felt when I was younger, I look forward to dinners, I run to the answering machine when I hear my sister saying funny things into it, telling me to stop screening calls. We talk more when I’m not moving around, and I love hearing about what she’s cooking for dinner, or what is making her laugh, or the one-inch of Seattle snow that has shut down the city. Pah, we say, one-inch is nothing, we are Bostonians.  I like being a Bostonian again.

And I love what she makes. So here they are for you to love too.

More family artisans to come.

Check it out.

Oh, and for those of you who don’t know, the organization we volunteered with is called Atraves. And we love it.

Where we write and sketch and brainstorm and google image search, all in the hopes of figuring out where to fall in love next.

We use dried chickpeas to represent weeks.

This leg is also fondly called Via Singapore for the places that are cheap to fly from there…Cambodia, Bali, Vietnam, Chennai, Kochi, Manila…

And before we leave,

I want to share two Artisans from our time here in Boston. Coming soon…

We see her first like a fantasma, a ghost, drifting along a white wall with her blue kerchief and sky blue shawl. I hold my breath and follow her journey, ancient and tiny and beautiful.

And then at every pottery class she appears in the same blues, worn from years of washing on the traditional stone washboard.

Every class, asking me the same thing, “ya puede?” “Can you do it yet?” And then launches into a well-worn speech on how she hates the wheel, and how she makes everything by hand, pointing to a large water carrying vessel that is chipped and growing moss. My teacher, Patricia, rolls her eyes towards the low ceiling of the little shack.

She was the first to work with barro, clay of San Juan de Oriente, the first of the artesanas.

She started 84 years ago when she was a little girl of 6, and remembers how her father’s job was to walk the 1.5 hours down the steep hill to the laguna, the volcanic lake, and haul up large stones on his back. “Mi madre vive alli,” she says, pointing across the street. And I remember how my own grandmother would call for her mother at night, wandering through the house in her nightgown. She was 90 too, with holes torn in her memory from Alzheimer’s.

Her mother, she says, told her that women shouldn’t work, but that even as a little girl she worked because she loved it and because she didn’t want to see her father doing such hard labor.

Underneath a shelf in my teacher Patricia’s little shop, Jonah finds a little black footed tray, covered in dust and cobwebs. He borrows a rag and wipes it off, as we marvel at the detailed animal heads that act as the feet.

“My mother made that,” Patricia says shyly, and our eyes get big.

The Cenizero

But it is in Nicaragua that I realize that winter is a coming together, the way it sounds in Little Women—all the family gather in the living room to stay out of the torrential rain. The corrugated steel roofs make sprinkles sound like pebbles falling and a regular rain like sticking your head in a waterfall. Nothing can dry in this weather, and Jonah says one morning, “we may not do laundry again before we leave.” I’m a bit disappointed by this, since I have began to love the solid, sweat-producing scrub of laundry by hand. Here a one-piece sink and laundry station has a section like a washboard, but all set in concrete, the ridges pull and bother the clothes, getting out stains and thinning fabric. I love the movement of it and of hanging the clothes in the burning sun to heat.

Right before the rains start we do a load, and a few days later our towels and underwear are still not dry. I think about what a luxury windows and washing machines and dryers and heaters and air conditioning and roofs are—the elements of climate control.

But everyone is calmer and a little stir crazy in the Nicaraguan winter.

Our family, formerly loud, sunny, humorous, stands by the doorway in silence, eyes downcast, watching the rain. Nancy is still in her bright yellow low cut tank top with its weave along the bust and yellow and silver braided sandals. It feels like there’s been a death—Dona Clara who always looks her best and seems to take her shop very seriously is still in her pink silk nightgown and says there is no point in working, no point in going to the shops because no one will be there to buy.

The winter rains are the enemy of work. Clay can’t dry, ovens can’t be fired, and the one tourist who comes during Nicaraguan winter stays grumpily in his hotel. Alfredo says that it is a time to sleep all day and eat nothing, because there is no money coming in. “Como osos,” Jonah remarks, like bears.

Even Alfredo or Urraca, our ebullient host is quiet. Urraca is the word for a bird that crows constantly, won’t shut up, and everyone in town knows Alfredo by that name. Patricia, my pottery teacher, already reserved, sinks into a deeper contemplation. In class she tells me how sad the rain makes her and about the baby she lost years earlier, the twin of Juan Felipe, an especially bright boy in our class. In the winter stories fall into place.

Only little Ale seems to be invincible to the rain, trying to rush out in the downpour as a moto takes her papa to work, where he expects to sell nothing. Her fingers spread out like little wings as she strains forward to follow him and Nancy holds the back of her sweater

And I love the rain at night.

Usually nights in San Juan are an armageddon of animal sounds, like that scene from Lady in the Tramp, where the dogs bark signals out to each other and wake up the whole town. And if they’re not howling at each other, they’re taking offense at a concrete wall, and the roosters join in even though the sun won’t rise for another 4 hours. Then there are the teenagers with radios, the men shouting to each other, and the sellers that arrive at dawn shouting, “Pan y pan!” and “Atooooooooool e atooooooool e atoooooool!”

But this rain thunders on the corrugated tin roofs at a volume that drowns out all other sound. I jump out of bed to witness what gushes of water must be falling from the sky and my eyes pop open at the way the tin roofs funnel the water into streams that catch the light of the streetlights and fall like molten gold.

I get in bed and for the first time since my arrival, I sleep through the night.

They look mighty, but these are really only about 2 inches high.

Caballo Vallos are traditionally used for cooking in Nica. The big ones hold coal behind their faces like a Jack O’Lantern and cook rico meals in the pans on their heads.

$5 each, $27 for the set.

Order ‘em till they’re gone. Items ship when I am home and rested, 25th June 2010 ($3 for US, $10 for Japan)

Objects come with a handwritten and invented certificate of authenticity
Quantities are Limited to What I can Carry
Profits go to the Artisans
Order at katrina@beinginlovethere.com