laura k bray

Yesterday was a spectacular spring day. After getting dumped on with a late snow in mid-April, and then days and days of cold wet rain, the sun and 70-degree weather was a welcome respite.  Gardening We headed into the garden early, just after breakfast, with carrot, radish, and lettuce seeds in hand. All cool weather crops, we usually have luck planting them early. If all goes well, we’ll be eating from our garden in mid to late May. The rest of our plantings will have to wait until Mother’s Day weekend or later, when the chance of frost is long past.  Cooking As we poked around the garden, we were able to harvest some kale and parsley which somehow survived the winter. To celebrate, I made a big bowl of tabbouleh which will take care of a few lunches this week and made creamed kale to go with the shrimp and grits my husband made for dinner last night. I don’t know why I feel so much happier when I’m eating food directly from my garden, but I do. I know it’s all in my head, ...

  A funny thing happened over the past decade. My inner critic got old. The last time I really looked at my inner critic, about fifteen years ago, she looked like the identical twin of my high school art teacher. The one who told me that I didn’t have any artistic talent, thus crushing my dreams of becoming a fashion designer. But I looked my inner critic up the other day and discovered that witch got old! She no longer appears as my high school art teacher but is a completely new character running around in my head messing with me. She tells me her name is Maude and she’s an old woman of the most crotchety type. Her skin is creped and full of wrinkles, her hair is gray, she is short (like me) and thin (not like me, which, She points out, is because I over-indulge and She doesn’t). She smells of camphor liniment and the peppermint candies she clicks against her teeth whenever someone (me) says or does something that She doesn’t think is “appropriate”. Tsk. She wears sag...

For the past few years, I have been struggling to figure out what I am going to do with the next stage of my life. I closed my business, and my daughter will be leaving for college in a year and a half. A new season of my life is dawning and I am feeling lost. The last time I felt like this was when my daughter was a toddler. I was winding down my career as a business consultant, looking for ways to live that allowed me to be the primary caregiver for my daughter and still feel fulfilled. It was an uncomfortable time, and I spent the first two years of her life flailing around, trying to find my purpose. The thing that saved me, that set my life back on track all those years ago, was reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron . I worked through the twelve-week program and came out of it an artist. It is fair to say that it completely changed my life and served me well for a good fifteen years. Now here I am again, feeling another momentous change is on the horizon and I am unsur...