An Cultural Experience

[kaberett]

I made Marillen- and Zwetschgenknoedel over the weekend; this evening, I roped the woozl in to help me make my first Nusspotitze. We're still working our way through the last bottle of Inlaenderrum my Grossmutti brought back from Austria.

My mother will get to eat fresh Potitz for breakfast on Christmas day, and I am just a little weepy about how much that's going to mean to her.

The woozl, meanwhile, is being very good-natured about the extent to which in-group conversations with my mother tend to involve three or four different languages; references to Visigoths and caterpillars getting mixed up with one another; especial family in-jokes and word-plays; and the like.

I... do like it when friends get to meet my family: I like people having the opportunity to see where I came from, in several senses, because - I am the ghost of my own past lives (thank you, CN Lester), and some days that history weighs heavy on my shoulders, and some days I feel like it's all that's holding me up.

It's been a hard year and a long year and a year I'm emerging from in a far better state than the one I entered it in; I've loved fiercely and gently, I've laughed, I've cooked and I've fed people, I've curled up with my books and I've sung my heart out. I'm a little older and a whole lot wiser and - tonight, right now, I can recast hollowness as dormancy.

I didn't start this post meaning to talk about depression, but apparently I want to, and I think what I want to say is something a little like this: the days are short and the nights are long and it huddles close for warmth, but: love lives again, that with the dead has been: love will come again like wheat that springeth green.

The solstice has passed, and so too will this: and in its wake I will remain myself, and I will become someone wholly new.

Comments

[frith_in_thorns]

Your words are beautiful. Thank you for sharing them. ♥

[jamfish]

the days are short and the nights are long and it huddles close for warmth, but: love lives again, that with the dead has been: love will come again like wheat that springeth green.

well, damn. I must have some dust in my eye.

you are doing so well and doing so many brave, funny, interesting, brilliant things and it is an inspiration to me.

happy new year!

p.s. your icon is awesome.

[rysmiel]

I am very glad to hear this has been a good year for you. It is certainly one in which I am pleased to have met you.

[sorrillia]

*hug* Best wishes for your spending holidays with friends and relatives!



Also, food comments:

You people eat makowiec, too!? Congratulations on making it for the first time. I've only done so once (for the Polish Food Club's one international dessert night, and it was tasty but very messy and didn't really roll up correctly). I'm curious how your first attempt came out? I really should try making it from scratch again, but having a proper Polish market here has made me lazy about things. (I bought makowiec and premade pierogi for Christmas dinner because I didn't feel like I had the time or energy to make them from scratch. But I will be making placki from scratch, though my previous attempts to do so have all been disastrous. I am not very good at frying things.)

I should be very interested in your Marillen- and Zwetschgenknoedel recipe if you are willing to share it. A very vaguely Hungarian friend from Tech used to make them on occasion, but I never managed to get the recipe from him.

What is Potitz?

[steorra]

"love lives again, that with the dead has been: love will come again like wheat that springeth green."

I really like that hymn, but I'd forgotten about it.

[pteranodon]

<3