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Okay, this is not pleasant for almost everyone else, but this smell was certainly integral to my life as a teacher of human anatomy.  I taught in a dissection lab for over 40 years and the smell of the embalmed bodies is one that lingers – not in just memory but also on your clothes.  If I were in an elevator after class, there would always be someone who would wrinkle up their nose and say, “What IS that smell?” When the medical students joked about it, I’d remind them that I’d smelled like that for decades, whereas they only had a semester at best to deal with it!  My lab coats are wrapped in plastic in the closet because, even after years of washing, they still have the faint odor of my profession. 0 0

Of all the spices in my spice drawer, cinnamon is the one I use most often. In addition to its wonderful aroma, it also has medicinal properties: studies have shown that it relieves arthritis pain, lowers LDL cholesterol and blood sugar, and boosts cognitive function and memory.  What I like about it is that it can be used in both sweet and savory foods. By far my favorite use of cinnamon is in a recipe brought to this country from Poland by my great-grandmother in 1895: apple kuchen. I thought I’d share the simple recipe: MEMMERE’S APPLE KUCHEN ½ cup sugar 2 cups flour 1 tsp nutmeg 1 tsp cinnamon 3 level tsp baking powder 1 tsp salt 4 tbsp butter or margarine ¾ cup milk, more or less 3-4 Granny Smith apples, pared and sliced into wedges Sugar and cinnamon for topping Mix sugar, flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, baking powder, and salt. Work the butter into the dry mix with your fingers until it resembles coarse corn meal. Add the milk, enough to make a stiff batter. Spread batter in greased 10” by 8” glass pan. Press apple slices into the top of the dough, arranged in rows. Sprinkle well with cinnamon and sugar. Dot the top with small bits of butter. Bake at 350o for 45 min or until the cake is slightly brown and pulls away from the edge of the pan. Do not overcook as it will be dry. (It will depend on how hot your oven runs.) You can have this warm for breakfast or for dessert with ice cream. 0 0

I’ll bet not a lot of my readers have ever heard of this product.  It comes in a square green metal tin with a cow udder printed on the side and a cow’s head and flowers on the top.  This is because it was developed – way back in 1899 –  to soothe and heal cow’s teats when they become chapped and cracked from being pumped for milk.  Bag balm smells heavily medicinal, not surprising since it is made from hydroxyquinoline sulfate, lanolin, and petroleum jelly.  I was introduced to it by my Mom when I was pretty young, because I remember telling her that her hands had a yucky smell. Turns out the farmers who used it on their cows discovered it softened and healed their hands. It has lots of other uses too: dry facial skin, cracked fingers, burns, zits, saddle sores, sunburn, pruned trees, bed sores and radiation burns.  Not sure how it works on all that.  It was also used by Allied troops in WWII to protect their weapons from rust and on the paws of cadaver sniffing dogs at Ground Zero after 9/11. I used it on my babies’ diaper rash – they were too young to mind the smell and it worked wonderfully – and on my hands in the winter. Mostly it just reminds me of my mother. In a nice way. 0 0

Anise is a smell (and a taste) that had dire repercussions in my twenties. I love its taste and smell, and there are two liqueurs with that flavor: anisette and absinthe. Absinthe, also called wormwood or the green fairy, was banned in the US until the 21st century because of its supposedly addictive nature. But that didn’t keep me from the anisette! On a trip to Tijuana in the late 1970s with my husband and a couple of good friends, we decided to avail ourselves of the cheap prices for liquor and bought a bottle of anisette and one of Kalua. When we got home that night, while everyone else indulged in Black Russians, I poured myself a glass of anisette and added a ton of ice cubes. Several times. Later that evening my husband poured me into the car and the next thing I remember is being dragged off the floor of the car, where I had slumped.  You know where this is going, right? I spent the rest of the night in the bathroom, either clinging to the toilet or sleeping on the floor, and swore off anisette forever. However, when my children were babies and teething, I was advised to let them gum on zwieback, a dry toast that I remember my mother giving me as a kid.  And it’s flavored with anise. I always bought two packages. 0 0

     We’re having another dreary day of cold rain. We’ve had so many of them that my husband commented, “It’s like winter in Cleveland.”  Not to deprecate Cleveland, but we lived there for five years, and the winters were pretty depressing.    Having to curtail my activities because of another shoulder replacement, except for an occasional trip out for Pain and Torture (PT), has reduced my world to four rooms: bedroom (to sleep), office (to write), kitchen (to grab what’s available to eat; I’m not cooking) and family room (to watch revolting news and yet another death on Downton Abbey). Oh and of course the bathroom, but I don’t spend much time there unless I’m reading a good book.    I check my email twice a day and have been working hard on finishing up my interview notes on applicants I interview for UNC’s School of Medicine. Beyond that I’m waiting on returns from CreateSpace, where my first book is being massaged into something hopefully intriguing for Kindle.  All of which has left me in a singularly uncreative frame of mind.  So I’m now going through the critiques for all of the chapters on the new book (nine so far) that have come from my two critique groups.  This has just added to my mental malaise because I‘ve missed three meetings of one group because I don’t have a way to get there.  Driving is still a couple of weeks away.    So right now I’m channeling Annie and mentally humming The Sun Will Be Out Tomorrow.  Crap, another year until Downton Abbey returns. 0 0

With apologies to Brittany Spears: I just had another shoulder replacement.  This is the consequence of my competitiveness – competitive swimming, tennis, field hockey, basketball – that lasted long after a normal person would have put some of these activities aside,  mainly because I wanted to get better at each sport. But there is a genetic aspect as well. I remember thinking how sad it was that my parents were both crippled with arthritis when they were in their 70s. I never even considered it would be my fate, too.  Double whammy. But modern medicine came along just in time to help me out. I’ll be back in the pool in a couple of months and will pick up a tennis racket for the first time in years this summer. Can’t wait. So how does this relate to my writing? Well, it’s the competitiveness. Not with my fellow writers but with myself this time.  I need to write to get better at it.  Need to submit my writing for critiques to get better at it.  Need to submit pieces for publication to get better at it.  Sitting back and hoping your writing will get noticed won’t do it. You need to compete. The publishing world is a morass: lots of writers, too few agents, too few publishing houses and too few editors who decide what the public wants to read. So I’m going to self-publish.  Can’t wait. I’m too competitive. 0 0

Below is an excerpt from a newsletter written by a Canadian plein air painter – Robert Genn.  He writes two letters a week and sends it to a vast subscriber list, among them a friend of mine who is a plein air painter and lives in California.  She finds people who talk constantly about their art in progress with me-me-me syndrome very annoying, and she found this letter right on topic. It also introduced me to a new concept: humblebragging. “Now that everyone’s blabbing, tweeting and Facebooking minor and major glories, there’s a new way to deliver your stuff. It’s called humblebragging.  This is where you lace your accomplishments with enough humility to get your stuff across and yet soften the blow to others. After all, it’s not nice to let people think your life is better than theirs. ‘That crummy painting I struggled with and almost threw out got sold to Lindsay Lohan.’ You get the idea?” As an artist, Genn doesn’t believe in any of this stuff.  He’s worried about what bragging does to art learning and art quality. “This is just another reason why I try to talk about you, not me. Oh dear, that sounded a bit like humblebragging. Here’s the rub: If you transpose your doing thing to a talking thing, you might just be changing the dynamics of your doing thing. And if you decide to add a shot of humility, especially false humility, that might just screw things up even further. We are our words. We are what we say. What we speak, we become.” “We all know of artists who constantly need to verbalize their weaknesses and failures. Is the lousy self-esteem they project because their work is actually lousy, or is their work lousy because they’re always saying how lousy it is?” While I agree with a lot of what Genn wrote in his newsletter, writers are artists who paint with words, and thus people who write, especially ones who find critique groups helpful to improving their writing, need to talk about their work in order to get feedback and to get across their ideas. We just have to try not to be humblebraggers. Genns definition (taken from Jen Doll, a blogger):  “The humblebrag is a way to brag while also seeming humble. It’s a subtle brag, a brag with a wink and a nod, the inside joke of bragging.” Examples from Genn’s letter:  “Full humblebragging baloney often comes with the well regarded institution of the Artist’s Statement: ‘My folks were very poor. I was born in an old paper bag in the middle of Highway 401.’  Truly noble heights are attained when artists write about themselves in the third person: ‘As a child Joe Bloggs was always interested in mud puddles, hence his current fascination with marine subjects.’ ‘Mary Pinnacle’s father was an undertaker–she grew up surrounded by flowers.’” Hmm, this concept could make for some interesting writing. 0 0

I’ve been walking back and forth in my pool to keep my body going while my little red blood cells regenerate after my recent shoulder surgery.  They actually made an appearance right on schedule: fourth week, lots more energy. Since walking is not so great at raising the heart rate, I decided to jog.  Good choice – 30 or so traverses pushing against the water and moving as fast as I can had me panting. Which made me think about resistance. What came to mind is the 1 lb weight my Dad put on the end of my tennis racket when I was seven or eight. He was a damned fine tennis player (New England singles champion, played at Wimbledon), and I think he was hoping for another champion in his family.  I complained loud and long at the extra weight, and my arm could barely hit a forehand, but he said my arm muscles would develop quickly against the resistance.  And he was right. When the weight came off the next year, I had a zinger of a forehand and backhand. Which made me think about writing.  I’ve run in to resistance this year. Resistance at finishing the final editing of my first book, resistance after the first two chapters of my second.  I had parents who drummed into me that there was nothing I couldn’t do if I tried, and if I ran into resistance, I just had to buckle down and work harder.  I took it to heart, and it helped my academic career.  Writing, not so much until just lately.  When I flagged with the book rewrite, I took time off and wrote a story about lobsters.  It was a breeze. I was reinvigorated.  I finished the book rewrite.   A sense of accomplishment and on to the new book and the next chapter.   Now I am bogged down in querying editors about the first book, but no matter, I’m flying with the second.  Soon I’ll be pushing on with querying. So resistance in writing, at least for me, seems to be a signal to try something new and creative for a while, get back the old enthusiasm and push forward.  Feels like the weight is off my racket. 0 0