Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
Thanksgiving is not a harvest feast. Puritans were not notably inclined toward feasting. Leadership especially wasn’t, and the accounts we have of their lives is heavily skewed toward the elite men who had the leisure to write things down. Whatever the average New England settler might have thought about celebrating the land’s bounty with merry… Continue reading The Daily: 26 November 2025
Cranberry sauce was not part of Thanksgiving until the late 19th century. I feel this was their loss. This is the one part of the traditional Thanksgiving meal that I love, but not that jellied gunk that comes in a can — which is probably mostly sugar and red dye. The real sauce is delicious… Continue reading The Daily: 24 November 2025
Didn't I say last week that there would be ice on my walkway by this week? Well, yep, that happened. We had a doozy of a storm from Saturday night right through to Tuesday morning. Windy and cold and dark with about 2" of precipitation altogether. Mostly icy rain until Sunday afternoon, then mostly snow… Continue reading The Daily: 19 November 2025
Remembering is an act of resistance. Gaslighting is ineffective against a firm memory. The lies unravel when someone is keeping a close record. Want to be a true subversive? Then get the facts straight and tell the story. Footnotes help, but be wary of the oft-quoted sources. You can see who they're working for... I'm… Continue reading The Daily: 12 November 2025
Martinmas On November 11th at 11 in the morning, we practice a moment of silence for two minutes to remember the day we reached an accord and agreed to lay down arms after the brutality of World War 1. Over a century ago we stopped fighting. Soldiers came home. It was a time very like… Continue reading The Daily: 11 November 2025
This was the first weekend with no garden tasks. I had every intention of writing pages of prose and poetry. But did I? Nope... Instead, I had a weekend off. I made six pints of apple butter. Roasted a pie pumpkin and turned that into ginger pumpkin soup. Also made another round of spiced pumpkin… Continue reading The Daily: 10 November 2025
The Hunter's Moon rises full today at 4:17pm. The time of rising and setting varies by latitude. Those further north will see moonrise a little bit later, further south a bit earlier, but still somewhere around 4-5pm local time. However, the Moon will turn full at the same moment all around the globe, but at… Continue reading The Daily: 5 November 2025
Yesterday, the clocks all changed. No, I'll not use passive voice. Except for the Apple things in this house, the clocks do not change themselves. To spring forward and fall back, I have to wander around the house setting some dozen clocks, ranging from the phone system and thermostat to the enormous wall clock in… Continue reading The Daily: 3 November 2025
The Day of the Dead In Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom, he says that a “man” does not fear death. “Fear of death is our animal nature,” he claims. I don’t know that any part of that is accurate. To be sure, we have a very unhealthy relationship to death. We tell ourselves stories of our… Continue reading The Daily: 2 November 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 