March 8th is International Women's Day. I have this lodged in my mind firmly, since as a child, growing up in Poland, I witnessed this annual recognition of women every year. The sale of red carnations boomed. Chocolate sales as well. And there it stopped. We didn't really talk about the contributions women made and hardships they faced. Women were unique and they deserved a flower -- that was the message I got from March 8th.
Then I moved to the U.S. and this holiday was unknown and unrecognized for the decades when I was a young mother, a newly minted lawyer, a household coordinator, a volunteer in my kids' schools, a vacation planner, a gardener, a cook, etc etc. [These days, I laugh at the category "vacation planner" since so little is required now as compared to say twenty or thirty years ago, where you had to write letters, wait for responses, secure travelers checks, visit travel agents for flight information, on and on -- none of this is necessary now.] In those decades I understood why we might want to give women a break on March 8th. Sometimes, as a joke, I would buy myself a carnation.
These days the holiday pops up on one's radar screen even in the west and indeed, I got an news-lettery email from a woman who runs a cooking school in Paris reflecting on her own development as a cook and entrepreneur and attributing much of her love of this stuff to her role models -- her mom and grandmother. And what was interesting to me was the fact that the half dozen chefs working with her in her school, male and female, all linked their love of their craft to mothers or grandmothers in their family, recalling poignant episodes of watching women knead, stir, dice, and slice, with heady aromas and bubbling pots and sweet treats coming out of that sacred place -- the kitchen.
I could not really join in on that bandwagon of female (or male!) cooking inspiration. My mother disliked cooking and never baked. My grandma did both, but she hated to have people underfoot in her kitchen and, too, you could probably describe her foods as on the bland side. Fresh and honest, to be sure, but she was a self taught cook (her own mother died when she was just a girl) and I think it was impressive that she could accomplish so much in a kitchen with a coal burning stove and scant access to ingredients, especially outside of the growing season. But not inspiring, in that I wasn't yearning to recreate her foods. They were comfy, they were healthy (no processed foods in Poland in those years), but I learned nothing from them.
Despite my utter dumbness in cooking, I was intensely interested in food preparation and flavors and textures and the minute I was on my own, I started clipping recipes. I'd been baking since I was a child (somebody had to do it!), but it wasn't until I moved to Chicago as a grad student that I attacked real food with a real determination that I would do right by it. Where did I turn to? Magazines, which I suppose is a very girlish approach to it! I quickly learned that Ladies Home Journal and McCalls weren't cutting it, so I picked up Gourmet and Bon Appetit from those magazine shelves they used to have in drugstores and I was hooked! I read the darn things cover to cover, every month. Eventually I added cookbooks, but by then I considered myself to be almost a decent cook!
So... what's Women's Day for me? Well, I still I want to buy myself a carnation for the hell of it. But mostly it's a time for me to think about women who really do struggle to make something of their lives, here, elsewhere, at the same time that they so often are charged with putting food on the table, with or without the help of a partner in life. Inspiring women, creative women, deserving women. Happy Women's Day indeed!
March 8th is also a date that brings us that much closer to spring. It's easy for me to show you signs of the new season -- they're becoming abundant!
Ed was up all night with his design project. Nonetheless he made it down to breakfast...
And indeed, he was quite willing to go out for a walk immediately after. To the park. By the lake. Which is melting rapidly because, you know, it's almost spring!
The walk nudges me to also spend some time in my own flower fields today: I rake, I pull out Creeping Charlie. The ground is indeed partly frozen so pulling out a weed is really a futile effort at controlling invasives, but on the other hand, it slows down their attack on my beds, so if I practice my usual bend and snip, I can at least feel that I have not surrendered! The effort continues! My hands are starting to get that springtime toughness to them.
At home, I bake. This time it's my simple blueberry-lemon-thyme yogurt loaf. The berries have been on the mushy side and they will fare better in a loaf than in a fruit bowl.
And in the afternoon Snowdrop is here.
In the evening I go out to dinner with a group of (women as it happens) former colleagues from the Law School. I rarely do this because I am so much a say at home in the evenings person that it hurts, but I decided to push excuses aside and venture out. Listening to friends talk is good for you!
Another night, another day closer to spring... and closer to the snowstorm that is supposed to pound us tomorrow night. Happy Women's Day, happy coming of spring. Sometime soon. I hope.
