TGIWB?

Yep, it's winter break. And while we've had breaks literally for winter, we desperately need one from winter. But, having missed something like nine days of school because of weather, we hardly need a break from school. In fact, this was the first week since the third week of December that both of my kids have been in school for five days. And now they're going to be home for a week? I'll tell you who needs a break! But we'll make the most of it, wearing pjs all day, having backwards meals and breakfast for dinner, watching our favorite movies, reading books, playing in the rapidly disappearing snow (about which Bud is sad), making arts and crafts, whatever we can think of (even if I feel like I used my best ideas to get through all the snow days). Still, another week of school, just to get the hang of it again (for all of us--I forget to have them do their homework packet this week!), wouldn't have been unwelcome. Well, to me, anyway. Because what kid isn't always ready for a vacation? We just have different definitions of what that is sometimes. So that will be my goal this week: making it fun for all of us.

Unraveling Prayers

We're outside again today and, having cleared another little bit of the deck of icy snow, I was tugging on the clothesline to free the Tibetan prayer flags. As I did so, the kids asked me what prayers were blowing from them through the wind all over the world. I asked them which prayers they would like to send (since I don't know the specific prayers on our flags).

"The end of slavery," Sis said immediately.

And though I believe she was recalling Lincoln, the Civil War, and slavery then, it's a good prayer even now.

Then we mentioned education for everyone everywhere, having discussed at Daisies yesterday how 52 million girls around the world--that's double the number of girls and boys in the U.S.--are unable to go to school.

Peace. Hope. The end of war.

"Do the prayers work?" Bud wanted to know.

They don't hurt.

Almost a Year

I am Many Women

When sky and street merge in sullen grayness

and black trees stir in sleep,

my stove becomes a hearth.

I am many women who have looked at rain

through a flap of hide, from a hand hewn door,

and felt secure against a threatening world,

blessed within warm walls and sheltering roof.

Hands deep in flour,

powdered grain from a million fields

garnered in sweating sunlight,

I am many women who kneaded resilient dough

with strong hands . . .

brown, red, yellow and white hands.

Folding and stretching, shaping

smoothly contoured loaves

rich with the smell of yeast.

(Bread is like nothing so much as bread,

sacred in its own identity.)

The sky trades snow for night,

and the scent of baking loaves

is calm benediction for my home.

I am many women who have taken bread from an oven,

and breaking it . . .

felt consecrated.

--Patti Linn, from Gourmet Magazine, as quoted in Ada Lou Roberts's Favorite Breads from Rose Lane Farm (Hearthside Press, 1960)

It was almost a year ago that bread changed my life. For a project at church, I pledged to make my family's bread for 40 days, in commemoration of the anniversary of Earth Day. The catch was that I didn't really know how to bake. Thus began this amazing journey with bread as my guide--generous lessons from a person whom I now call friend, getting to know other people and their bread stories (including amazingly, the past owner of my house whose bread cookbook quite coincidentally came into my hands some 50 years later!), reviving my own grandmother's bread recipe some 35 years after her death, the acquisition of new skills from kneading dough to forming loaves with a better understanding of "doubled in bulk" and other hazy ideas, receiving a bread lesson and sourdough starter from my friend at Bloodroot, feeling more connected to women of the past (as in this opening poem), passing along a little knowledge and a lot of enthusiasm by teaching a workshop on no-knead bread and encouraging other friends to try it, plus educating our bread palates so to speak, decreasing our environmental impact with all those plastic bread bags, even protecting our health from high-fructose corn syrup and preservatives, which never go into homemade bread.

The best part is that I've continued to make and learn about bread in the months following my pledge (I could use some metaphor about my interest growing like yeast but will refrain). I really am just a beginner, with so much more I want to try. And it feels good that my creations are nourishing, to both body and soul (which I've recently realized is important for me in choosing a hobby). If people are coming over, I bake a loaf or make biscuits. If the kids want a snack, they like warm bread with honey. If there's a potluck at church or a friend in need, I take bread. Sure, a lot of it comes from my bread machine these days because kneading dough for 10 minutes or so is hard on my back, but no one seems to mind. And yep, all that refined flour isn't healthy in excess, but I'm incorporating more whole wheat and grains.

Anyway, it all came to mind recently when we picked up a used book at Bloodroot, one of the owner's old cookbooks, and found the quote above. She and I talked salt-rising bread, which recipe clipping she'd inserted in the book but never tried. I bought the book and know I'll be making that bread soon. It's a great journey, this bread thing . . . .

. . . but I wonder, if I could do something like it again this year for 40 days--not something Lenten like giving up chocolate or eating out or the like--what new thing would I like to try? What would you do?

Picnic in the Snow

Coat-free, the kiddos are enjoying an ice-cream picnic in their fort, having climbed across ice in their snowboots to get there. The sun is shining, the snow is melting (and it's louder than I remembered--it falls silently but melts in a cacophony of drips). It's not exactly "the green hour," but we're definitely outside. Did I mention none of us is wearing a coat? Yes, at 42F, it's balmy today here in Connecticut. I'm looking forward to many more picnics.

The Lone Star of Texas

Not because it has one star on the flag, but because, if I were handing out stars for taking care of its people, Texas wouldn't rank very high.

Yep, Texas was on the front page of the NYTimes website again, this time in an Op-Ed by Gail Collins. It's never good, ever, when Texas is in the news in New York.

Check it out . . .

• 47th in the nation in literacy
• 49th in verbal SAT scores
• 46th in math SAT scores
• used $3.2 billion in stimulus money for schools for other parts of the budget
• refusing $830 million in federal education money because Democrats are requiring it be used for students!
• and let's not even talk about the extremely conservative State Board of Education's stance on history or science, or recent textbook hearings . . . .

Are schools not important because all good religious people are homeschooling already? Or because minorities and "illegals" are in the public schools? Or because keeping the population uneducated is the only way to maintain the religious and political footholds of the conservatives and Republicans in the state? (Republicans hold all statewide offices and control both houses of the legislature.) Sarcasm aside, yes it matters to me, ex-pat though I am living here in Yankee Connecticut, because pretty soon, Texas, with its population explosion (more on that in a bit), will be educating 10% of the nation! (Or not educating, as it were.) And that affects all of us.

Now back to population:

• highest birthrate in the country
• 3rd in teen pregnancies
• #1 in repeat teen pregnancies
• and receiving $250 million in federal abstinence-only funds, because it works, Gov. Perry says
• a bill requiring only medically-accurate sex-education information was controversial, and defeated

And, even with a lesbian mayor leading Houston, don't get me started on Texas's GLBT laws. Or approach to health care for children. I'd like to be able to be proud of Texas. And I can say the people are nice and the land is beautiful and the food is good and the history is interesting and all that, but to paraphrase my fellow Texan Dixie Chicks, it's embarrassing. And sad.

I guess Texas doesn't need to warn everyone not to mess with it, it's doing just fine on its own.

When Red is Better Than Pink

When Sis earns her Red Belt in kung fu!!!! We're extra proud of her, especially because she was sick, missed classes, and couldn't practice.

Bring on those broad swords . . . .

Football Insights

"Mom," Sis said, "do you know why we rooted for the Packers instead of the Steelers?"

Pause.

"Because it is better to pack than to steal."

"I'm a Big Piece of Pink"

Whenever Sis gets her choice in what to wear to school, where there is a strict blue-green-white-with-brown dress code, she always chooses pink. Pink dress, pink tights/socks, pink tennis shoes (these, at least, she can wear everyday). And so as she got dressed for the kindergarten Winter Concert on Friday (our first: they sang, we videoed and photographed it, and I did not cry!!! Until we drove home.), she announced, "I'm a big piece of pink!"

Indeed.

But I have, perhaps righteously, perhaps judgmentally, definitely relievedly, been glad that her pink obsession does not include The Princesses. You know the ones; you must--there are actually 26,000 Princess items (and those are just the official Disney ones) on the market. They're everywhere.

That's my problem. I don't really believe liking pink or princesses, even those princesses, is bad. I don't really think it will harm her self esteem or self-image, limit her academic possibilities, or engulf her in artificial, superficial, detrimental gender stereotypes. I don't think she's "better" than the princesses per se, or the girls who like princesses and pink. I just don't want her to buy into it, emphasis on the "buy." I understand the developmental stage that Peggy Orenstein writes about in Cinderella Ate My Daughter (which I haven't read; I have read the original article, the book review, and the Motherlode post, among other things), in which gender rules are inflexible because gender itself seems so fluid to young children. But I abhor supporting the marketers making a quick buck (or billion bucks) by exploiting that.

I liked pink. I loved Princess Leia and Snow White and Belle. I was Tinkerbell, a princess, and a fairy for various Halloweens. I had Barbies, which I dressed in pink tutus. I liked to pretend I was Queen Guinevere. Mama had similar experiences (even if she was more interested in building a Lego garage for her Barbie's car!). But we couldn't overdose on princesses and pink the way girls can today; it just wasn't possible. Which meant we played with other things--Star Wars, Legos, coloring books, generic dolls and stuffed critters, board games, and such. We're both pretty confident and successful feminist women not beholden to antiquated societal definitions of "female" (well, I say that, as a SAHM giving up career for kids and making cookies and crafts at home. But it's my choice, one I'm fortunate to have the luxury to make. And I didn't do it because of princesses.). Princesses, pink, Barbies, whatever are fine in moderation, like most things (even Star Wars and Legos!). Which is why we painted our fingernails last week--you guessed it--pink! If Sis wants to be a princess, let's go for it. And while we're at it, let Bud explore gender rules and fluidity too . . . and so to be fair, Bud painted his, too, but blue--his choice--and then he painted my toes, one foot blue and one foot pink. I see it as a normal expression of her age's obsession with super heroes (in addition to their obsession with gender roles)--because who are the female superheroes in our culture? You guessed it.

Except, usually, those movie princesses aren't enticing enough. Sis likes her superhero models male--Luke, Harry Potter, Simba--maybe because they do more than dance around singing with animals (okay, except that last one!) while waiting for their prince. So, let's not reject princesses.

Let's just encourage more interesting ones.

Which is why I liked Motherlode's list of books about non-traditional, non-Disney princesses.

That Robin-Blue Box and Other Treats

Mama doesn't like Valentine's Day. Like many of the older, long-married people quoted in a recent NYTimes article about gift giving, Mama resents being told when to show her love, preferring to spread gifts around throughout the year. Additionally, many of her gifts aren't physical objects, but gifts of time, generosity, thoughtfulness--letting me sleep in, unloading the dishwasher before I get to it, bringing my shoes inside before I go out in the cold, finding just the right show ("Downton Abbey"!!!!) to watch on Netflix.

Except this year.

Because Friday night, she nonchalantly said to me, as we were preparing tea and scones for our "Downton Abbey" marathon, "I did get you something for Valentine's Day. Do you want it now or later?"

Surprised, and never one to delay gratification, I laughed and said, "What, chocolate? A little blue box?"

And it was!

There was a little robin's egg blue box from Tiffany's, with a pair of dangly, rose quartz earrings. Beautiful. Unexpected. Special. Surprising. Typical of her. Especially because we'd agreed, as usual, not to bother, and so I hadn't, beyond a homemade card. It reminds me of my mom's story about one of my dad's most romantic gestures: as they were heading out to dinner around Valentine's Day years ago, he reached under the car seat and handed her a much-desired Swatch watch.

I guess you do look for someone like your dad. Even if he's a she!

Otherwise, we had a relatively low-key Valentine's Day. The kids barely finished making their 20 cards for class--Sis made foamy-sticker covered cards, with pencils attached when she learned that other kids would be giving treats, while Bud signed his name to paper-airplane valentines from the store, since I remembered how hard it was to get him to make cards last year.

At church, the kids had made several cards for the congregation, which they helped distribute Sunday morning before their own party. One of the little wooden baskets my kids had decorated with their names on it went to another young mom in the congregation, I noticed. I had (more than) half-hoped she'd offer it to me, since her child had made one for her specifically as well (which I actually made sure she got after service, it having been left on the table), but she didn't. I'm trying not to care.

In perhaps true twin fashion, the most important valentines for the kids came from each other, cards they'd both worked on at school and were eager to exchange. Bud also made a giant paper heart with other hearts for Mama and I, which he'd kept under his pillow all week as a secret. We had cards for them, plus fleece scarves in pink and blue. Sis wondered where the chocolate was!

They got enough of that at school. Even though Bud was borderline sick, with runny nose and a sleepless night, he didn't have a fever and so I wanted him to be able to participate in that important school rite: the valentine exchange. She'd decorated a shoebox, he a bag, and they passed out their cards (a fair-to-everyone unlabeled batch of 20 to prevent them from favoring one child, ignoring another) in an impressive ritual. But they couldn't sort the loot until they got home, dumping it out on the table and exclaiming over all the pencils and candy hearts and chocolate kisses and lollipops and fruit-by-the-yard and tattoos and gift baggies and stickers and . . . and . . . and . . . figuring out what was from whom, who liked Princesses and who chose Spiderman. The collection was much more impressive than I used to get. And clearly just as awe-inspiring and impressive.

Eating the treats off and on throughout the day, the rest of our Monday was pretty routine until they hit exhausted meltdown midday. So we didn't call anyone, didn't finish the cards we were behind on for the whole family, didn't refrain from greedy-grabbing and throwing and crying, except long enough to rest while watching Ratatouille.

With bedtime at 6:30 because of all the tears, Mama and I had plenty of time to continue our "Downton Abbey" marathon, this time with orange-chocolate truffle cake. All in all, a pretty good Valentine's Day.

Our Six-Word Love Story*

Following the trend this Valentine's Day, here's one for us:

Summer friendship warms women long after . . . .

What's yours?

(*It's more cheerful than, though not nearly as evocative as, Hemingway's famous six-word story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn.")

Revealed

Blue sky, between the parting clouds.

Even some sun, glaring off the still-white snow.

Green grass on the melting edges of the sidewalks.

Squirrels out of their nests and eating all my bird seed.

A party of birds--dove, sparrows, blackbirds--near the creek, singing their spring songs.

There was even the first robin!

The sound of moving water, melting or flowing through the creek.

Dog poop, long hidden in the snow.

Christmas decorations not removed before the Boxing Day blizzard.

One of the three bushes in front of our house.

Part of our little garden fence.

That spring smell.

My light jacket, not my heavy winter coat!

Food for the Mind and the Soul

There was a sermon on church which has fundamentally altered the way I perceive religion, the Bible, and, ultimately, God. Not bad for 20 minutes, right?

I'm going to recap what I understood or feel to be the most salient points, the ones I have mulled for a full day now. And, because I try to keep my blog relatively anonymous, I'm not linking to the text or the minister, but can help you if you send me an email.

What I Have in Common with the Religious Right

Shocking, no? Me and the Southern Baptist Convention?

We're both, the minister suggested, literal interpreters of the Bible, though with totally different outcomes and agendas: (in my case) they because they believe it word for word and me because I don't believe it word for word. Gone is any appreciation of the subtle art of metaphor, perhaps a better way for a religious liberal like me to approach scripture. Surely as an art historian and educator I can do better than black and white.

"Be still, and know that I am God" (Psalms 46:10), which Mama learned as "Be still, and know that I am," apparently has a different connotation in the original Hebrew, the minister told us. "Be still" is closer to "let go" or even "unclench." Is that like "relax"? Stop being uptight? Stop taking it literally? Let go of the baggage of your indifferent atheist upbringing in a Southern Baptist world and your existence as a feminist lesbian mom in a country where feminism has become a bad word and same-sex marriage and/or parenthood is illegal in the majority of states? No wonder I find that so hard to do. Who wants that God?

As the minister pointed out on Sunday, much of the misunderstanding starts with the word "God." Taking the word literally, as a conscious patriarch on high, I can't open the King James or New Revised and flip the pages in any seriousness, much less belief, especially considering how the Word has been used by its enthusiastic and literal followers. I hadn't given much thought to taking the word metaphorically, at least not so specifically. Sure, I've heard "God is love" (1 John 4:8--didn't even know it was a Bible verse til Sunday. And yes, unless it's a medieval altarpiece or Cecil B. DeMille movie, I am biblically illiterate), but still tripped over that first part. And so when the minister began substituting "love" for the name of God (taking John literally, I suppose), particularly in Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (part of the traditional Jewish prayer, Shema, and utilizing a Jewish tradition of questioning scripture to more fully understand it), it transformed the verse:

Love our God, Love is one.⁵ Love Love your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. ⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. ⁷ Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. ⁸ Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. ⁹ Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

And got us all thinking . . . .

What Color is Your Ultimacy?

Because the minister asked us to name God. Think of the value, the "ultimacy," that is most important to you, the one by which you guide yourself on the path of life, the one which matters to you most above all. Substitute the word "value" for "God" and we religious liberals are all over that. We understand what we value; we have a list of principles to help clarify it for ourselves and others. Anything to avoid using that extremely laden word.

Do you have one? Had you thought to name it before? Some said family, others hope, still others children, some interconnectedness, some peace. And, of course, love. What for me, existed before, exists now, and will exist after me and is more important than anything? I paced (because I still don't sit in church) and contemplated it. Do I live (or try to live) a value, a single value, that encompasses all? Does it really need a word (even if, "in the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1)? "Family" seemed too constricted, leaving out the importance of community. "Community" seemed too limited locally. "Love" struck me as too cliche, which makes it hard to think on, especially during the month when love is literally for sale for Valentine's Day. For now, I've settled on "compassion," which I think includes love and respect, care and concern, locally and globally, for people, animals, the earth, my vegetarianism and non-violent communication and mindfulness/meditation practice and Unitarian Universalism.

Lingering Questions

But is compassion "God"? Do I need to call my values "God"? Aren't I still an atheist, since even if I name God "compassion", I don't believe in heaven, hell, or a divine patriarch? Don't such spiritual matters really transcend language, which is imperfect to capture what we mean, much less the truth, which I find unknowable (see the fascinating Rabbi Lurie's "The Rabbi Who Believed in Zeus")? Would the Religious Right and I really be communicating if I were thinking metaphorically and they were thinking literally? And why do we need to communicate? Does the religious left need to engage the Religious Right on their own playing field? Doesn't that give the Bible more authority than I think it should have in our society, our government, and our laws? Would I be willfully misunderstanding the intentions of the authors of the Bible? Does it matter? Or can I find value in the Bible the way I do in the spiritual texts of other faiths, past and present, letting go, "unclenching" so to speak, my prejudice against it? And what do I tell the children? Is "God is Love" literally and metaphorically the answer?

Definitely something to chew on . . . .

-=-=-=-=-=-

Food for the Stomach

And there was soup!!!

Spicy sweet potato and coconut soup

(you might cut this in half, this recipe feeds 14)

3 1/2 lbs orange-fkeshed sweet potatos

2 tablespoons & 1 teaspoon vegetable oil

2 1/4 (2") pieces fresh ginger root, thinly sliced

2 tablespoons &1 teaspoon rede curry paste

2 1/4 (15 Oz) cans unsweetened coconut milk

7 cups vegetable broth

1/2 cup lemom juice

2 1/4 teaspoon sea salt

2 tablespoons & 1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

1 cup & 3 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro

Baked the Sweet potatoes at 400 degrees for about 45 min. until tender , remove from over let them cool.

Heat the oil in a large soup pot over med.heat. Add the onion and ginger, cook and stir until tender, about 5 min. Stir in the curry paste and heat for about a min. then whisk in the coconut milk and vegetable broth, then reduce heat to low and simmer for about 5 min.

Remove the skins from the sweet potatoes and cut into little bite size chunks. Add to the soup and cook for 5 more minutes so they can soak up the flavor.Stir in the juice and season with salt.

Ladle into bowls and garnish with drizzle of sesame oil and a bit of cilantro.

Today I forgot the cilantro, Sorryyyyyyyyyy.

Miss O

Happy Valentine's Day!

May your day be rosy!

Love,

Mommy Hungry

Seeing Red

Bud successfully completed his kung fu test today, completing two forms to earn his red belt. We're very proud of him. And after all the nerves, he's very proud of himself.

Yay, Bud!!!

Good Luck, Bud!

Bud is going for his red belt in kung fu today. It's a long process, where he attends a review class, performs, watches and waits while all the other levels perform, and then learns in the final ceremony if he's earned his next belt. He started getting nervous last night but held it at bay most of the morning. I think this might be the first time he's actually been nervous like that about something. Test anxiety, I guess. Just another American childhood rite of passage?

We know you will do your best, Bud!

TGIF

The kids are at school. There is no new snow (even if it was 12F this morning). And I'm getting caught up.

Have a good weekend!

Tidbits

From the week of illness:

Sis cried because she wasn't going to school; Bud cried because he was.

-=-=-=-=-=-

On the day that Sis was at the doctor, Bud was thrilled to find me home alone, "I get you all by myself."

Similarly, Sis literally skipped through our grocery run today happy to be a single child. Or just happy to be out after 3 days at home.

-=-=-=-=-=-

Today Sis embraced doing homework with great zeal. And even did an extra packet which we must have forgotten one of those incomplete snow weeks. Bud, as usual, whined and moaned dramatically through it all.

-=-=-=-=-=-

This is the first full week of school Bud has attended since two weeks before Christmas!!!! So used to the words "delay" and "dismissal," he commented earlier this week that he "dismissaled all my soup!"

Crisis in Faith

Not that faith. Not real faith. In fact, if I'd embraced my UUism and lessons from Buddhism, it wouldn't have been much of a crisis.

But last night, when we realized that Yahoo had erased, obliterated, annihilated, deactivated one of my email accounts--the one that included all of my professional work from all my museum jobs, an account I obviously don't check often because I haven't needed them--I too felt erased in a way. That professional identity--with all my contacts, my documents, my work history--gone in a flash. And I had wanted them more than I had in the last 6 years because I'm starting a new volunteer position as an educator at an historic house museum and am writing curricula and other materials. So I tried to log into my old account. But Yahoo's new policy is to deactivate email accounts, erasing everything, if you haven't used it in four months. And they never told me.

I cried myself to sleep, in the glow of the computer light.

Because Mama was convinced that somewhere, somehow there was a backup, that she had been careful, conscientious, and cautious six years ago.

And she had.

Only not with the email account, because it's not possible to download Yahoo, but with my work files, which were carefully labeled on a CD which she'd backed up to an external hard drive, way back when. So, even though the emails and contacts and such are gone, I have anything that I wrote and stored on my own computer.

Bless Mama, who stayed up very late to retrieve the documents. (And she is now double-backing up and/or printing out all manner of things--a decade worth of pictures, 500 pages of a cookbook, the entire text of this blog, our address book.)

Though, I tried hard to convince myself it hadn't mattered in that 12 hours I thought it was all lost. Telling myself that I needn't be attached to those files because I could make new ones, or even more importantly, be attached to that old professional identity, which had little to do with my life today. If/when I ever go back full time in museum education, here in a new state, my contacts will have moved on, my documents will need to be updated, everything will have changed. The security blanket of data that I have held on to--the one that offers the protective cover of tools should I ever need or want to go back to that work, proof that I'm capable and employable--really holds little safety or protection, I realized. But it had held, very tangibly, who I used to be. And that is what I mourned last night.

Looking through the documents this morning--pre- and post-visit activities, tour confirmations, docent training manuals, public program announcements, class syllabi, lecture texts, conference presentations, grant proposals--brought back all sorts of memories from about a decade of work. It was both bittersweet, remembering all that I used to do, but also confidence-building, here as I begin a new journey.

Beyond learning to have faith in myself (and in Mama!) and in the way things unfold, I was reminded not to put too much stock in perceptions (or ideas/beliefs about myself, career, past) or in things.

Especially computers.

(Yes, some of you will note that, in the end, a computer did save the documents. True enough. But I think it's more the symbolism of it. I could've had printouts of everything, too. Might, even, in the basement somewhere. It's the faith in the belief that I needed these things, truly needed, not just wanted because I'm attached to them--that I couldn't be happy or survive without the documents, or my recipes or blog or even pictures--that was false (even if we're still gonna back it all up, because there's more than one lesson we're working on here.) That, and Yahoo sucks.)

Distraction

Sis painted my fingernails recently. Pink. Pretty, glittery pink.

And I haven't removed it yet, even though I find it utterly distracting. Every time I do something, I find myself looking at my hands moving. It all feels very disembodied and disconnected, as I observe myself. I'm like my own flâneuse.

Fair is Tough

I wrote a few weeks ago about how I was inspired to go fair trade in my purchases of tea, coffee, and chocolate. I'm finding that decision much harder than I expected. My usual stores don't carry fair trade chocolate chips (candy bars are easier); in fact, I didn't see any at Whole Foods either. And there might only be one flavor of fair trade tea, never decaf, at the regular grocery. As for coffee, that is the easiest, but not easy. I'm not giving up; I just need to develop a supply line that doesn't rely on last-minute grocery store runs or trips to Whole Foods. I guess I'll be buying online. But I'm disappointed . . . because, out of tea this morning, I picked up my old brands.