The Tangled Nest is still breathing! Sort of. Like an amphibian breathes through its permeable skin in a frozen pond. I am plotting the best ways to integrate this blog with my upcoming email letter Wander but since so many of you have been writing with kind, curious, generous questions (thank you!) I think a […]
Category: Blog
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First Egg: Light, Life, and the Wild Spiral
Like all of us, chickens are creatures that respond to the seasons, to cycles of light and dark. Many breeds of chickens will lay eggs throughout their first winter, but once they get a little older, their egg-laying will usually dwindle and then stop completely as the winter darkness falls. Some people install lights into […]
Creative Paths, Wild Lives (and a Magical Red Knit Hood)
Sometime last year I began to have recurring dreams of walking on forested pathways, wandering off the large path onto smaller, hidden paths. And in most of the dreams, I was wearing this hood. I couldn’t stop thinking of the dream, and I am a believer in following obsessions, so: I read every academic article […]
The Pace of Creation: How Rumpelstiltskin Wrote My Book
I have spent the last ten days at Whiteley Center on San Juan Island, a residency for writers, academics, artists—anyone trying to do focused work on a project (I call it my Beautiful Writer’s Prison). I am here to almost-finish a draft of my next book. There are deer and otters and seals wandering around, […]
February: New Year, Take Two
A few years ago I began the personal tradition of celebrating the New Year in early February. Getting it all together before January 1st is just too much pressure: reflection on the past year, dreams for the new one, resolutions, intentions. Yule tree down, calendar up, house cleaned/heart cleaned, all in readiness for the Fresh […]
Chickens in the Winter Garden
It’s a wet blustery day here in Seattle–a good day for braised kale and quinoa with tahini sauce, or a nice plate of kale chips fresh from the oven. Kale is one of a few veggies that can overwinter in Seattle without a cold frame or garden cloth tunnel (we can also grow broccoli and […]
He Saw It, He Loved It, He Ate It: Maurice Sendak on Real Food
This may be the highest wisdom I’ve heard in support of the Food Revolution–it’s not just about Kale, is it? It’s about life, art, celebration, wildness. “Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — […]
Gardening Around the Weather
Here in Seattle, we like to repeat the words of Mark Twain: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in Seattle.” (Don’t quote us. For one thing, the original phrase read “San Francisco,” not “Seattle,” and for another thing the quote is apocryphal–Mark Twain probably never said it at all. But let us […]
Soporific Salads and Lettuce Opium: One from the Archives
Well, one thing growing in this cold Seattle spring is lettuce! Last night while picking a head of Romaine for the dinner salad, I saw the familiar “milk” rising from the cut. Such amazing organisms, the plants among us–full of life and secrets. I decided that as long as my photographer-husband is on a little […]
Spring Woodpecker Drumming
In her book, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, the wonderful desert nature writer Ellen Meloy wrote, shortly before her sudden death (a great loss to us all) about a flicker that had been incessantly drumming her house. She had named him Stalin, and one morning she found him trapped in her […]
Indian Plum: First Forest Flowers
Amdist the brown branches of February woodlands and urban forests in the Pacific Northwest, one native shrub always turns out the first flowers and bright new leaves– the Indian Plum. The pendants of tiny greenish-white flower clusters fall beneath glowing green leaves that stick straight up, like the ears of a rabbit. The flowers will […]
The One Pot: Lodge Cast Iron Dutch Oven
Every morning it’s the same. I wake up in the darkness while my loved ones still sleep. I tiptoe into the kitchen to make coffee. The Pot sits there on the stove, in the shadows. And out of the silence, it speaks: “Well, Haupt, what’s for dinner?” What a rude question before I am even […]
Stand With Haiti
Dear friends, I hope you won’t mind an off-topic post this week. Many of you know that Tom, my husband, works for a global health program at the University of Washington, and that his group has an office in Haiti with more than thirty local staff. Because of this, we’ve been receiving queries from friends […]
Homemade Knitting Needles, Knitting Evangelism, and a Pretty Scarf Pattern
For my seventh birthday, my mom gave me a pair of light blue knitting needles and a ball of white yarn. She didn’t know how to knit, but sent me across the backyard to our neighbor’s house, where the retired librarian Marion Milligan took me under her wing. Marion taught me to knit and purl. […]
Heirloom Tomato Tart
It’s the peak of tomato season in Seattle–the plants are covered with the most beautiful shades of green, orange, yellow, red, and burgundy. We are canning tomatoes, drying tomatoes, making salsa, carrying baskets of tomatoes to neighbors, concocting tomato recipes, and of course eating cherry tomatoes like they’re potato chips. Last night I made this […]
Hazelnut Foraging for Humans, Birds, and Mystics
Every year I happily, and rather naively, plot out my plan for hazelnut foraging in the neighborhood: which park trees look hopeful, which neighbors have fruitful hazelnut trees in their yards and might be persuaded to let me harvest a few. My aspirations are simple, and mainly even symbolic. I don’t need heaps of hazelnuts, […]
A Little Break (and Pajama Planting)
Though The Tangled Nest is still quite new, and it may seem early to be going on a blog vacation, I will nevertheless be taking a short spring break from: 1. The List (you know the one) 2. The cold Seattle weather 3. Extremely edifying books 4. Things that plug in I was going to […]