i have never figured out how to make this camera do what i want, but here you go!
it’s a tag for a thing i knitted for a belgian baby! i took the picture to have my personal crafty belgian confirm it is legible and more or less accurate to my meaning. i found the vocabulary by google image searching “laundry symbol meanings” in dutch and pulling up one of those charts.
broth failure. it’s been in the fridge over 24 hours and hasn’t turned to jelly. i cooked it for nine hours on low which theoretically should have been enough? maybe i did the math wrong when i cut the recipe amounts to fit in the crock pot. wonder what i can do to use up 2.5 quarts of chicken-flavored water so i can try again.
Imagine, if you will, a hot New England summer in the year 1702. It’s August in Massachusetts, and the humidity is oppressive. You’re a subsistence farmer in the small agricultural town of Wenham, on the post road between Newbury and Boston. It’s time to harvest the flax, and the sun is blazing down on your field, blazing down on you. It’s far too hot today to take on work this hard, but it must be done. From flax comes linen, a valuable textile.
As you begin to pull the flax under the unyielding heat of the sun you think, “No one’s around. What if I just shimmy out of these clothes? Who is to see? Who is to care?”
And so you do. You are alone.
Time grinds by, the sun grows higher, you bend low, you pull flax. You sweat, your naked limbs ache, you bend low, you pull flax. Your muscles burn, your hands bleed, you bend low, you pull flax.
After a good while you pause in your labors, stretch up to your full height to relieve the unbearable strain on your back and directly in front of you, you see:
You start, and he stares at you, agog, from atop his horse.
It all takes a moment to register, and perhaps you’re a bit dazzled by the sun, but then the sickening drop in your stomach confirms that you know this man. It is Judge Samuel Sewall of Salem, of witchcraft trials fame. He is a frequent guest of your pastor in Wenham, Reverend Gerrish. And his face is quickly turning a garish, arterial shade of crimson.
You look down. You are utterly naked, covered in flax stalks and dirt. You feel an errant bead of sweat travel slowly down your shirtless chest and lodge in the muddy cup of your uncovered navel.
“Goddamn it,” you mutter, and the flushing judge, apoplectic, opens his mouth to speak.
(At least, that’s how I imagine this entry in Judge Sewall’s diary from August 11th, 1702 came about:)
today, aged grown-ass adult, i made chicken broth by myself for the first time.
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mother’s crock-pot! i took it (even though it doesn’t really fit in our kitchen and we also have some past roommate’s instant pot, which i don’t know how to use) because father was threatening to throw it out in one of his downsizing frenzies. seems to work fine!
Brother and Sister trying to race a train on their horse in Chiapas, Mexico
“Chiapas Racers” - Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by Don Bartletti
“I made this photograph from the roof of a lurching freight train in Chiapas, Mexico, where I perched along with 60 other stowaways – all illegal immigrants from Central America. For weeks I’d been riding northbound freights through Mexico to document the journey of Honduran children hoping to reunite with mothers who’d left them behind to find work in the U.S. Appearing out of the countryside, a boy and girl gallop their horse alongside the train. The race brought cheers and laughter from those clinging to the top of the train – rare moments of joy shared with migrants bound to El Norte.” (x)
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