Tomahto Sauce, by Kay H. Bradford

They grew up with the same parents (Betsy and Newlin Hastings), in the same house (18 Old Mill Road, Pasadena, California), attended the same grade schools and even colleges (Westridge and Smith), and yet my mom says Tomayto and Aunt Annie says Tomahto.

Over the years, I’ve wondered how could this be.  Annie is four years Mom’s senior and was born in 1946.  I thought possibly after the war there was a tomato shortage and Annie grew up only reading about tomatoes in books, thinking that it was pronounced Tomahto never having heard it in real life.  This theory wouldn’t  account for there never having been a great tomato famine – ever — and especially not in Pasadena where my grandmother had a prolific garden and fresh veggies were easier to get than fresh air at that time.

Possibly a British houseguest visited when Annie was learning to speak and Annie picked it up from her.  But, do the British even say tomahto?   Who says tomahto anyway?

Or maybe Annie chose sides on the jingle, You say tomayto, I say tomahto. It’s clear, though, who’s right in the song. You say tomayto.  I say tomahto.  You say potayto.  I say potahto.  Please!  No one says potahto.  “Well, I just can’t decide between the potahto salad or mashed potahtos.”

The strangest thing is that Annie is the only one in the whole family who says tomahto.  That’s just one of her idiosyncrasies.

She’s left-handed, color blind, hardly sleeps, travels with every free 12-hour period and will often bring a stash of liquor in her suitcase just in case there happen to be no bars at her destination, or if the drinks are watery and over-priced.  Annie loves a good time with good friends and good food. 

I can tell you that tomayto sauce and tamahto sauce actually taste different.  Everyone knows tomayto sauce, be it fresh or from a jar.  It’s simple and slightly acidic, which make it perfect for pizzas or pastas.

Tamahto sauce has a little something else.

First, it’s made from tamahtoes, which are a deeper red, sweeter, and grown outside of the 500 mile radius of where you grew up.  They vary in shape and size, and can’t be found at your local grocer.

The tamahto sauce adds further complexity to the tomahto's mysterious taste, with herbs that sound familiar, but again are more exotic.  Think oraygono and bahsíl!

On a Cold Day in Winter, by Mary Roberts

It's cold outside, but that's okay. You can make soup, take a hot bath, build a fire (or turn up the heat), learn to knit, sew or crochet, take up checkers, solitaire, euchre or spades. Listen to the radio while making dinner, your Danish language tapes while cleaning your room, a long-crazy-interesting book on tape while folding your sheets. Make your bed every day, and pull your curtains open just wide enough to receive the sun but not the draft. Rejoice when it gets dark at 5:30 instead of 5:00, laugh, talk, sing, spit, love. Make tea and watch it steep. Write a poem of words beginning with the letter "P" about things that are yellow, purple or orange. Tuck your houseplants in at night and make sure they get enough light when the day comes again. Make more soup and get lots of rest. Write a letter/postcard/send a random package to a different person every day, eventually going down the list of distant cousins and long-lost pen pals. Laugh as hard as you can, and go for plenty of walks. Bundle up and walk it out, walk it off, soak it up. Notice the dried flowers in your neighbor's garden and the crackling leaves under layers of snow, your feet and the solid ground. Wear your warmest socks and your brightest scarf.

Kaleidoscope, by Sue Norvell

It's a garden, English Cottage style, with flowers in pinks and purples and white and roses sprawling willy nilly in the space. A tousle of joyous bloom!

Ooops, no . . . . It's a quilt, that pattern of small six sided shapes, carefully, carefully cut and sewn to form flowers of lime green, forest green, ochre, lemon yellow, crimson circles formed by straight sided pieces: a bit of magic, all awhirl, blending the colors.

Oh-oh. No. It's neither. It's the entrance to deepest space: dark, darker indigo blue circular holes are surrounded by flashes of red and yellow neon lights beckoning us to the void beyond.

No. NO!! It's the green eyed monster! Its three jade green eyes, like those of some weird spider, each has three blue pupils rimmed with citron green and sparkling gold.

No. I'm wrong again. It's a bouquet, a gleeful collaboration of many-petaled turquoise flowers with orange centers, six-petaled pink blossoms with blue dots, pale sky blue blossoms with navy blue eyes, next to yellow with purple, their stems all wrapped in silk.

Here, take this bouquet; it's a brilliance of bits of colored glass, light and movement.

But hold it softly, softly — else it transform again before your eyes — perhaps to butterflies.

This / Offerings, by Rebecca Weger

Note: This was the last week of writing circles for the year and in each session people brought special objects to put out on a communal altar, to serve as our writing inspiration. The Saturday morning circle fell on the Solstice.

This

Look at what it is to have our hearts laid out on the table

to be seen and touched and felt.

Look at what it is to have our memories and pangs of loss and hopes for the future jumbled up together, mine and yours.

This is what it is, each week, me and you.

Offerings

empathy

joy

wisdom

power

creation

memory

hope

love

change

tears

beauty

promises

celebrations

grief

birth

death

kindness

fragility

strength

stability

outpouring

loss

family

words

light

flow

Once, by Phoebe Lakin

Once we rode a train to Java and became more riveted to ourselves.

Once the roof collapsed and I attained enlightenment.

Once in a quiet corridor she tied her hands in knots and looked into the corners of a book.

Once the fierce wind ripped a hole in my heart and I sewed it up with pine needles.

Once I baked cookies out of rosemary and wet wood and left them outside where they melted.

Once I looked at the scalloped edges of the known universe and wondered about going home.

Ghostwriting, by Rob Sullivan

conduits in the rain

water flows free

seeking its level

butterfly alights

beauty overwhelms

viewer responds with vision

specters flit between

darkness and illuminati

glimpsing truth and prettier lies

history tells his story

while heart speaks

of hers

titans and demigods

flex collective muscle

paupers still beg

dreaming the big dream

soothes great aching

sounds of suffering

she walks through

her life in beauty

so deeply, must look away

when will this race

be finished

may I borrow your legs?

songs, poems, stories

were still simmering

til the flame was no more

can you teach me

to sing, play guitar

write tunes, pen words?

how can I make out the signal

amidst static diversion

unmodulated frequency?

dust, smoke, rubble

settle to silent clarity

mind expands to receive

prepare the vessel

muse infuses as a ghost

writing for the ages

A Small Plot of Ground, by Melissa Hamilton

Before I found my birth family, characters I’d never met danced through my head.  Once, I dreamt that I slipped into their home during a holiday meal, hiding in their pantry behind the canned peaches.

The aromas of crab cakes and corn pudding wafted in as shoes tapped on linoleum.  “They must be southern musicians,” I thought, for surely that tap had rhythm to a song I knew.  But I dared not peek.  In awakening, I went back to assuming my mother was a Russian Ballerina, it sounded more poignant and romantic . . . the gift of creating when all is unknown.

The word “Family” always had a nip too it, I envied those who resemble their sister or have traits of a great great grandmother found on Ancestor.com. I felt as if those born into a family have been given a small plot of ground on Earth, a solid history and belonging to the human race.   Without genetic relatives, it seemed I wandered untethered, like a gazelle dangerously lost from her herd.

When I first heard “we found her,” from the Children’s Home, I was given basic facts.  She was a math major and scientist, she had no other children.   I learned she had German ancestry and my father was Dutch.  As soon as the phone was in the cradle, I went outside.  The night was comfortably clear, but the stars felt too silent and turned upside down.  Suddenly everything I knew, or imagined, was wiped clean, I was not Irish and had no reason to struggle with math!   In subsequent years, we would both need to rebuild our identities, but carefully, much like an archeologist assembling ancient bones.

For several months, my birthmother and I wrote to each other anonymously.  I painstakingly formed each sentence as if sacred text, and sent them to the Children’s Home.  They removed any identifying information and mailed the letters to her.  Back and forth we wrote, gingerly sharing details and clues to our whereabouts and selves.

One day, a small package arrived, inside was a Snoopy tie tack.  “What an odd gift,” I thought, but what can one give in such an awkward reunion?  There are no Hallmark cards to congratulate you on finding genetic relatives!  Some even shake their heads and shoot despairing glances, “you ought to appreciate those who raised you,” they hiss (as if expanding one’s family negates love and loyalty) . . .

Almost twelve years later, my birthmother and I talk almost weekly on the phone.  She’s given me the first photo album of my ancestors, carefully labeled in her looping script.  Each year I learn a bit more about Aunt Florence or Uncle Harold and don’t need to hide among the canned peaches, for I’m invited into the past. 

The Snoopy tie tack was my birth mother’s clue that she worked at NASA.  If I had looked closely, he was wearing a tiny Space suit.  This tack had gone up in the Space Shuttle and was presented to my birth mother at an awards ceremony just before we met.  “Most of my coworkers passed their awards onto their kids,” said my birth mother. “Now that I have a child, I can pass it on too,” she said.

This gift twenty-eight years later, a piece of metal from Space, tethered me back to Earth.  In meeting my birth mother, I found that small plot of ground.