Diabolical Clay

I have been experimenting with porcelain lately. Porcelain has a lovely transluscent quality and porcelain pieces, done well, have a subtle glow about them.

It is also bastard stuff to work with. It rips, it collapses, it shatters if you breathe too loudly and then once you have finally gotten it into the kiln it warps and distorts.Gah.

I have decided that porcelain is far too temperamental  for me at this stage in my life.It just doesn’t do anything for me artisitically, other than mess with my head. I need simple things at the moment. I need things to work as they are supposed to, with a minimum of fuss.

The last few months of Mum’s life were a whirlwind blur of doctors appointments,scans, radiation and all the minutae assosciated with cancer treatments. Nothing was simple or straightforward. Cancer is messy and awful and unpredictable.

Cancer also causes pain. Lots and lots of pain.

Friday 4th June (from Mum’s diary)

Ok this was the worst morning, reduced me to tears trying to get out of bed but I finally made it…

Looking back it really seems such a shame that we wasted so much time. We lived from scan to scan. There were four weeks in April/May when Mum was  feeling really good and she was almost pain free.We wasted those four weeks, waiting about for doctors and having the bone mets in her spine zapped. With the benefit of hindsight we should have just taken off to Sydney then and had all the useless treatments after Mum had done everything that she wanted.

Caring for someone with a terminal illness is very difficult. It puts things into perspective and skews your way of thinking. I would have walked barefoot, through the fires of hell if I thought that it would help my Mother. But in the end nothing helped my Mum and I am here, bereft.

So life is far too short to be messing about playing with temperamental clay. Time is too precious to waste fiddling and faffing about with pretty clay that will just break your heart when you get it out of the kiln.

I need some inspiration.

The last time I needed inspiration I had a giveaway. A giveaway that my friend Jientje, from Heaven is in Belgium won (yay). When I had my last giveaway Jientje said that she would love something inspired by my photographs of the Tasmanian summer sky. That comment of hers then inspired my ‘skydancer’ series of tall cups.

So now it is up to you my dear internetz. Inspire me. Leave me a comment telling me about something that you would like me to make for you. And I will try to make it. Bearing in mind that it will have to be posted to you so it cant really be a seven foot tall sculpture of the Goddess, or a 42 piece dinner setting for seven.

I will then use the random number thingy to pick a winner.

I have just reached 100 readers (woot) So this is also a chance for my readers that don’t normally comment to click over and leave me a comment. (pretty please)

Everyone and anyone is welcome to enter.You could be from Tasmania or Timbuktoo, I don’t mind. You could be a friend, a stranger, a relative of mine or even a colleague.You just need to be prepared to wait a bit for your prize. Petra waited 11 months and 29 days for her platter. Jientje won her cups in February and I will post them off to her in about two weeks time.

So come on my lovelies, help me to dream about clay again. This giveaway will be open for one week from today. I will announce the winner next Sunday, the 16th of August.

*edited to add You can comment more than once if you like, you can come back and comment every day for the week if you like. With a maximum of seven comments per person seeming  fair enough.

**Comments are now closed. Good Luck to everyone and thankyou very much for making me smile.

I was updating my ‘about me’ page and I added a line that simply said,

” … and my grief has stolen all my words”

I have been looking at the sky.

I have been working.

I am still crying.

My grief has stolen all my words

It has been 42 days.

I went to visit my very good friend yesterday, Tanni lives about two hours drive away from here so it is always a bit of an effort to get together.

We got the tears out of the way first off and Tanni was as sad as I, when I told her that Amy thought that Mum hadn’t died. Even now the thought of  Amy’s excited hope makes me cry.

Tanni had cooked me comfort food for lunch. Osso Buco with Milanese Risotto. When I got home late last night I found the very same recipe in Mum’s Italian cookbook.

So here is the slightly altered recipe. I use beef shins instead of veal. But really you could use any red meat that you liked, cheapo stewing steak would do nicely.

Osso Buco (ala Tanni and Kimmy)

4 veal shanks or knuckles approx 750g each (1 and 1/2 lbs) *

90g (3 oz) butter

2 carrots

3 sticks celery

2 large onions

2 cloves garlic **

flour,salt,pepper

2 tablespoons oil

2 cans of whole tomatoes

1/2 cup of red wine

500g (2 cups) of beef stock

1 tsp basil

1tsp thyme

1 bay leaf

2.5 cm (1 in.) strip of lemon rind***

1 teaspoon grated lemon rind (zest)

3 tablespoons chopped parsley****

Heat 30g  (1,oz) of the butter in pan, Add peeled and chopped carrots, onions, celery and one crushed garlic clove. Cook gently until onions are golden brown. Remove from heat and transfer to a large oven-proof dish.

Coat the veal shanks (or whatever meat you are using) in flour seasoned with salt and pepper. Heat remaining butter and oil in large frying pan, add shanks, brown well on all sides.  Place the shanks on top of the vegetables in the oven-proof dish.

Push tomatoes, with their juice through a sieve***** Drain away all the fat from the pan the veal was cooked in. Add the wine, beef stock, tomatoes, basil, thyme,bayleaf and strip of lemon rind. Bring sauce to the boil and season with salt and pepper.

Pour the sauce over the veal shanks. Cover the casserole and bake in a moderate oven for 1 and 1/2 hours or until the veal is very tender, stirring occassionally. Just before serving sprinkle the remaining crushed garlic, parsley and lemon zest over the Osso Buco. Serves 6.

The name means hollow bones and the traditional accompaniment is Risotto Milanese.

This is the traditional recipe for Osso Buco. I generally always adapt a recipe once I have cooked it. Years ago I used to live with a Hungarian girl and so I would add 3 or 4 heaped tablespoons of Sweet Hungarian paprika to the sauce as well as oomph up the ingredients a bit.

* Veal is almost impossible to find down here in Tassie and David won’t eat it anyway after he watched that episode of South Park. So I would use beef shin which has been cut into round sections. Failing that I would use whatever red meat I had in the freezer.

** I would easily use half a dozen cloves of garlic, (maybe more)

*** Tanni uses a whole lemon peel, cut into strips

****  I would use a good big handful of flat leaf parsley

***** Sieving takes too long and just makes more washing up. I would just mash the tomatoes up a bit with a fork.

Risotto Milanese

375g (12oz) long grain rice

60g (2 oz) butter

I large onion

1/2 cup dry white wine

3 cups hot water

2 chicken stock cubes

1/4 teaspoon saffron

30g (1oz) butter, extra

2 tablespoons of grated parmesan cheese

salt, pepper.

Heat the butter in pan, add peeled and chopped onion. cook until onion is tender, stirring gently.

Add rice to pan, stir until it is well coated with the butter.

Add wine and one cup of the hot water add saffron and the crumbled stock cubes. Stir well and bring to the boil. When the water has almost evaporated add another 1 cup of the hot water. Stir well again. Bring to the boil again. When this water has almost evaporated,stir in the remaining water. Reduce heat. Cook until the water has been absorbed.

Cooking time is about twenty minutes from the time the first cup of hot water is added. Cook the rice uncovered in this time.

Stir in the extra butter, parmesan cheese, salt and pepper, stir gently until the butter is melted.

These two just worked perfectly together.The richness of the sauce and the zing of the lemon combined with the creaminess of the risotto was just pure comfort food.

Thankyou Tan xox…

For my overseas readers wallabies are small kangaroos.

Small, tasty, kangaroos.

Actually, to be precise they are small, tasty,plentiful, kangaroos that are in imminent danger of providing me with a nutritious lunch, if they don’t stop eating my garden right this second!!!

*takes a deep breath*

Normally the wallabies and I get along quite nicely. They keep the grass down. They only eat the lower branches of my fruit trees and they aren’t as destructive as those rotten, bloody possums.

I loathe possums.Possums will seriously damage a young fruit tree in order to nibble on one or two blossoms. Possums will break half a dozen branches climbing to the  top of a young tree and then once they are up there they will break another couple of branches, just for fun as they go about their possummy business.

I went outside today and found that parts of my flower garden had been seriously nibbled. I had planted out some chrysanthemums, pansies and marigolds. The wallabies, thanked me for my thoughtfulness and chomped away merrily. They also had a snack on a pot of geraniums that I had been thinking about planting out into Mum’s garden.

My flower garden is in a constant state of flux. Sometimes it is quite nice but mostly my garden is in a state of rambling neglect. The plants need to be able to tolerate severe frosts, occasional snow, baking heat and prolonged drought. When you factor in wallabies, possums and the occasional passing deer, combined with my she’ll be right attitude you have a garden that looks like this.

Which brings me to the point of this rather rambly post. Mum’s garden.

I have been thinking a lot about the plants that I want to use.They need to be colourful and fragrant, drought tolerant, frost hardy and not on the local wildlifes most nommed list.

This is going to be the site for Mum’s garden. There is a natural hollow there that is filled with the remains of a bonfire at the moment. I am going to put two kiddies clam shells in the hollow and voila we have two frogponds.

Mum liked proteas as well as those giant banksias that were the baddies in snugglepot and cuddlepie. I know those plants fit the climactic bill and are pretty inedible as well.

I have lots of bulbs already. White Nerines in a pot, that I gave Mum one year for her birthday. Red Jacobean lilies that Mum and I got from Nan’s garden. Nan has promised me some orange Tiger lilies as well as some white Christmas lilies.

Mum and I had also gathered other plants from Nan’s garden. An orange climber thing that has bell flowers and seems to be quite hardy, whether it gets eaten or not is another matter.

I have a bell shaped trellis thingy that I was originally going to set up out the front here over an Amy sized wading pool. I had planned to grow kiwi fruit over it and the idea was that Amy could eat kiwi fruit whilst she was paddling in the pool. The kiwi fruit turned out to be the sookiest, thirstiest plants ever and the wallabies adored them. Oh well, the best laid plans…

So I will put the trellis thingy over the frog pond and grow the orange climber up it, along with a lovely white, super smelly, honeysuckle. The small honey-eaters will love it. There is a bird bath down at Mum’s that I am sure was a gift from one of her brothers. I will add that into the mix as well.

I am going to buy some mushroom compost and sheep poo this week and then I can make a start. That is the plan so far. Stay tuned..

I took Sharon’s advice and I went for a long walk today. David came with me and I think the walk did us both a lot of good. I took a gazillion photos (yay) and here are some  that I like.

I was driving home from the studio yesterday, listening to a programme on the radio that Mum liked. (Hamish and Andy you are total idiots btw) I was thinking about Mum and I was mentally congratulating myself on the fact that I was able to think about Mum without crying.

I hadn’t been home for long when Veronica rang and told me about Amy’s joyful hope that her Nanny was not died. I have lifted the following  text in italics, straight from Veronica’s post, Heartbroken

As we pulled into the driveway and parked, Amy looked at me happily.

‘YAY! YAY! MyNanny is not died! We go visit!’

I looked at her, with tears in my eyes.

‘I’m sorry sweetheart. MyNanny did die. We’re all still very sad.’

‘Oh.’ She said and went quiet.

When Veronica told me about her conversation with Amy I started to cry. I cried when I thought about Amy’s hopeful little face shining with excitement at being able to see her ‘Mynanny’ again. I am crying now as I write this and the need to hug my grand daughter is very strong.

I am also spending way too much time analyzing my grief, I tend to over think things sometimes. The tears aren’t as intense as the first week after the funeral and I am certainly not as vulnerable as I was then. Things that were said or done, that hurt me in those first weeks certainly don’t have the same power now. There is a fine line between sorrow and anger. I am also not afraid that I will start to cry when Mum’s friends ask me how I am, which is a relief because that was annoying, as well as slightly embarrassing.

I thought that I was travelling along nicely,that I had put the worst of the tears behind me. Obviously not. There isn’t a time-frame for grieving, nor is there any set way to grieve. I want to be able to write about my work but the words just aren’t there. My camera is getting dusty and my clay is going hard.

*************************************************

It is now much later in the morning and I am not feeling quite so sad.

Veronica and I are going down to Mum’s later on today to pack up some more of Mum’s things. It is an incredibly sad task, packing someones life into cardboard boxes. It is also a job that I find I am quite unable to do by myself. I just keep on wandering aimlessly around Mum’s house picking up her things and putting them down again.

Small things make me sad. The library book that Mum was reading that I keep on forgetting to return. A book of sudoko puzzles that I gave Mum when she was having chemo. Mum’s gardening shoes just inside the front door.

On a lighter note it is a sunny winters day up here today, the sky is a clear cloudless blue and there is some warmth in the sunshine.

I have stopped sobbing now.Previously I only had to think of my Mother and I would start to sob. The tears would flow for five minutes or so and then I would be right.Ten minutes later I would start again.

I have a zillion half written posts in my drafts folder. Posts that start off like this.

All I want to do at the moment is crawl into my bed, pull the covers over my head and pretend the real world doesn’t exist. Yesterday by three o’clock in the afternoon I was knackered and the idea of just going to bed was so tempting, that I very nearly did just that. Sometimes I think that Eliza Bennett’s mother in Pride and Prejudice had the right idea when she just declared it,” All too much!” and took to her bed.

I want to ring my Grandmother to see how she is going but every time I even think about my Nan I start to cry.

Then there were posts like this one.

I am sitting here in the dark trying desperately not to think about the lump in my daughter’s breast. Ha! Epic fail.There are two distinct voices in my head, one is telling me that everything is going to be okay. Von is breastfeeding. She found the lump early. We have a history of fatty lumps. Don’t panic.

The other is the voice of pure terror and it is whispering  the words, my daughter might have breast cancer, over and over at me. I truly don’t know if I have the strength to deal with a cancerous lump right at this moment in time.

I was supposed to return to Tafe that week but I went to the ultrasound with Veronica and Nathan instead. I cannot even begin to describe the relief that I felt when Vonnie was given the all clear. It was just a fatty lump. YAY.

We then went to visit my Grandmother, herself a breast cancer survivor. I hadn’t seen my Nan since the funeral and I couldn’t stop my tears. Nan held me close and I sobbed like a child bereft.

We three women who had been there at the end, sat and talked and cried. We shared our pain and our memories. Nan talked about Mum’s first day at school and we consoled each other with our recollections. With each memory shared and each tear shed we affirmed our love, not just for Mum but for each other. Our visit started with tears and ended with laughter.

It has been 25 days since my Mother died and the sharp edge of my grief is changing into a softer ache.

My Mother loved to cook and I have her cookbooks here with me. I am using Mum’s saucepans and her oven mitts hang in my kitchen. Small things of Mum’s that give me a great deal of comfort and pleasure.

I was using Mum’s pots the other night and I had emptied a pan of spaghetti sauce that I had made into a bowl. Harry the dog was looking at the pot longingly, hoping to lick the bowl.I  distinctly heard my Mother telling me, “Don’t even think about it Kimmy!” I smiled to myself as I did as I was told and put the pan on the sink to be washed.

Isaac had a seizure on Thursday and we are waiting to see if he has epilepsy, or if it is related to Ehlers Danlos Syndrome as well. When Veronica rang me and said she was in the hospital with Isaac, my first thought was, right I will just let Mum know. Then I remembered and I sighed with sadness but I didn’t start to cry.

Life is slowly returning to a familiar rythym. David is back at school. I have returned to my studies. The house is full of clay and Jeffrey is growling about the mess I make. Things are as normal as they can be and I am starting to think about picking up my camera again. I have pots in my head screaming to be made and Barbara’s bum is morphing into a ladybird instead of a stag beetle. I am still not dreaming but I know my dreams will return and when they do I will follow them.

When Mum had to be admitted to hospital, eleven days before she died, there were a lot of friends and family wanting information and my phone ran hot. So I decided to give anyone that wanted it my blog address. I was then able to write one or two blog-posts telling how Mum was going. I also avoided the stress of the phone ringing off the hook.

Previously my blog had been a semi private affair, well as private as anything on the internet can be. Now it seems that every man and his dog has my blog address and I feel that some sort of explanation of how I use my blog is required.

When I first moved up here, to the block of land my Mother gave me, I struggled with the isolation. I didn’t know how to drive and I found myself  spending days alone with my toddler Veronica, whilst Jeff was off pretending that he was still a single man. We were both in our early twenties and we still had a lot of growing up to do.

I kept a diary. I wrote long  letters to friends and I found a kindred spirit in my Mother in Law, who was a passionate letter writer as well. The simple act of writing eased my loneliness and in my MIL, I found a ready ear for all my dreams and aspirations for the future. Sadly Deanna passed away when Vonnie was small and writing this has reminded me to ask Jeff’s Dad if he still has those old letters.

I also found that once I had written out my pain or anger or frustrations into my diary they didn’t trouble me any more and I was able to get on with the business of raising my family and building our home.

My blog is a lot like those early diaries. Here I can dream about the future as well as write out my anguish.

Mum understood what my blog meant and she understood how I used it to get all the words out of my head.

I am an artist and I read a quote somewhere that I have mangled but the gist of it is, “when the pain of not working is greater than the pain of working”  That is how I feel about my ceramic work. The simple act of making Boganvillainy was enough. The making of the work was the important part, the fact that I actually exhibited the work was secondary.

The work needed to be made and sometimes when the work demands to be made I end up going places that are quite unexpected.

The words are the same. I need to get them out of my head. This blog is the place where I dump all my excess words, not quite the literary equivalent of a toilet but the act is very similar, cleansing and cathartic.

At this moment in time I am grieving my Mother and my brain is still not working. I am struggling to stay afloat in a sea of tears and I do feel as though I am drowning in sorrow.

But I am going to taunt the ‘Weather Gods’ and say it anyway, “It can stop raining anytime it likes now.”

Living in one of the lower rainfall areas of Tasmania, I tend to obsess a bit about the weather. At one stage in the previous drought when I heard the first spattering of raindrops on the roof, I wouldn’t even say the ‘R’ word for fear it would stop. The drought had become so bad that buying water in winter wasn’t unusual.

It seems like it has been raining forever. A steady drought breaking rain that has filled farm dams and turned the parched brown land a soft green. All my frogponds are overflowing and the rain has soaked right into the subsoil. Everywhere I look there is water. Winter creeks that had been dry for years are running, and to use some Amy-speak, my yard is full of Muddy Cuddles

I haven’t taken my camera out of its case for a while now. The last photos I took were of Mum in hospital and that seems like a lifetime ago.

So on this grey, rainy day, in an attempt to lift my grey mood, here are some photos that I took last summer.

I had titled that one Blue tongue lizard hunting snails. But now that I think about it snail hunting is a bit of a misleading title. It’s not like the snails leap up and lead the lizards on a merry dance now is it?

And now whilst I am on the subject of snails here are some more…

I am taking Miss Amy to kinder-gym today. I will be taking my camera but I fully expect that I will be far too busy to even get it out of my bag. Kinder-gym used to wear me out when I was a fit new mother all those years ago. God knows what it will do to me now that I am an unfit old granny. (eeek)

…. to be continued