Insights on the Book "Sweet Winds from the Precipice"
When my mother Cindy wrote the manuscript for her book in 2003, she did not know how devoted I would become in preserving her legacy and ideas. I believe she would be overjoyed to see how forces in the cosmos worked together with me to make her ideals accessible to all. This newsletter gives a small glimpse into our lives together and offers alternative perspectives based on conversations we had when she was writing. I also share many of her passions, quoting favorite bible verses she collected on scrap paper and business cards throughout her life.
Figs of Summer...Then and Now
Cindy loved to garden. She collected vivid hues of narcissus, iris, roses and meadow flowers from seed, arranging them beautifully in her yard. One of her favorite trees was a Lattarula honey fig tree that grew beside the front yard steps.
Cindy's fig tree harvest in 1999.
Figs and fig leaves.
I inherited an interest in fig trees from her and grow several varieties. She gave me four of her choosing: Lattarula, Violette de Bordeaux, Chicago Hardy and Fignomenal. Our second Lattarula is not quite the same as her first, having pink flesh. Of the four trees, my favorite is Violette de Bordeaux, great for fresh eating or making slow cooker jam with lime slices, which is phenomenal on homemade oatmeal fig bars.
Lattarula, 2024.
Violette de Bordeaux, 2025.
Each season when the rain falls on the main crop I am reminded of one of Cindy's favorite bible verses, Isaiah 55:7-11:
Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return to Yahweh, and he will have mercy on him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says Yahweh. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain comes down and the snow from the sky, and doesn't return there, but waters the earth, and makes it bring forth and bud, and gives seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so shall my word be that goes forth out of my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing I sent it to do.
I still have the Morton Salt label whereupon she wrote out each line in red ink. On the back of the notepaper is the picture of a girl holding an upended cylinder of salt under an umbrella in the rain.
