Shabbos – Merri Ukraincik

A Little Reflection on Heroes

September 25, 2020Merri Ukraincik

There are three women I consider the heroes of my lifetime so far.

The first was my grandmother, who from the very beginning, planted the seeds of grit deep down in my spine, who always said to keep my chest out to project confidence even if I didn’t feel self-assured, and to wear lipstick every time I left the house. She taught me to smile even when it’s hard, that I’d catch more flies with honey, that I would never be too old to learn new tricks, and that it’s good to know how to make things with my hands.

Then came Wonder Woman, played by Lynda Carter on our television one night a week. She showed me that costumed or not, each of us possesses unique strength – that it’s up to us to know this is true, that we should never wait for someone else to say so, and that we should use it to do our part to save the world. Our lives may be ordinary, may never be the basis for a movie, but we all have stories worth telling and we are all worthy of surrounding ourselves with people who will love us enough to listen and hold us dear, no matter how the plot twists and turns.

Then came RBG, who despite her short stature, struck me as the tallest person in the room, who had poise and always knew the right thing to say, who fought and won so many battles for women, precious things we now take for granted – which we should not, not now, not ever, not anywhere, for so many reasons, mostly so we’ll never let them slip through our hands. But she also stood up for others struggling to climb the ladder of equality, sharing her strength and conviction with generosity, knowing she had enough of it to go around.

So last night, I crocheted a collar in Ruth’s memory, put on lipstick for the first time in eons (no one sees it behind the mask, so why bother?) to honor my grandmother’s, and wore a cuff to muster some of Wonder Woman’s strength.

This Shabbos, I pray we all find the hero inside ourselves, that we will use our individual powers to make choices for the greater good, that our voices will take flight, reaching G-d’s ear, and that He will grant us the light to see and the wherewithal to patch up all the places where our world is broken.

Gut Shabbos! Shabbat Shalom!

❤ Merri

I made the collar by adapting a pattern by Kristen Stein/ModernLaceCrochet for use with a thicker weight wool.

Getting Used to a New Kind of Silence

September 4, 2020Merri Ukraincik

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. But the pandemic lockdown has rendered my sense of passing time wonky at best. It is hard for me to believe it’s already Labor Day weekend, and that Rosh Hashana is nearly here. I could’ve sworn it was still March and that I’d just sent out a blog post about Pesach.

Over the past several months, I have been thinking a lot about changes I want to make, though I haven’t made most of them. I haven’t felt any pressure to do so, which is good. Still, there are rooms I daydream about reconfiguring, closets I hope to declutter, and projects I want to undertake, among them a face lift for my website and a new format for my conversations with you.

For now, though, my focus is elsewhere, for I awoke to a loud, sudden quiet in our house this morning.

It’s not the quiet I recognize, the one that would echo after our boys, then small, had left for school. Nor is it the tired, afternoon silence they shattered when they’d come back home, arriving like pots and pans falling out of a cabinet onto the kitchen floor. Hungry. Loud. Edgy. Bumping into corners. Clomping down the stairs.

Delighted to see them, I still longed for the hush that would settle over the house again only at bedtime, when the stars would come out and we would read their favorite stories, then read them once or twice more. I would ask the angels to watch over them during the night, and I’d sing to them, to my boys, knowing I was still the center of their world.

This silence, the one I hear now as I begin to prepare for our first Shabbos as empty nesters, is unrecognizable. It’s like a new sweater I’m trying to break in, stretching the wool and folding up the cuffs on the sleeves so it fits just right, like an arm around my shoulders.

I have a flash of memory of my young sons shrieking with delight at the sea, gathering rocks and crabshells and jumping through waves, darting in and out of the water until they have exhausted themselves, falling fast asleep before our minivan reaches the highway. My heart has frozen that moment in time, just as I can still hear the sound of their youthful breathing in my head as I walk through their rooms now to straighten up, murmuring my prayers and eyeing their vacated beds with a pang in my chest, knowing this emptiness around me is the way things are meant to be.

We love them, care for them, trust in the strength of our relationship with them, praying that it will always hold, and then we let them go. It’s the natural order of things, and like breath itself, it is a gift of gifts to know they have grown, that they are men in the world, and that I am no longer the center of their corner if it.

And yet, this is a silence that will take some getting used to.

I look forward to sharing the ways I hope to fill it in the months to come.

Gut Shabbos! Shabbat Shalom!

❤ Merri

Trying To Do Nothing At All

May 22, 2020May 22, 2020Merri Ukraincik

Hi everyone!

It’s been a while since I’ve written and it feels good to be back with you in this space. I hope you are all safe and healthy and managing well.

This week was exhausting. Lots of doing with little progress, as if I’d been running in place.

I cooked like a short-order chef, cleaned until the house smelled of Clorox, ran the bajillionth load of laundry since we locked down, and choreographed a series of staggered grocery deliveries to arrive between now and Shavuos. One night, I colored my hair, but missed a splotch of grey. The next morning, I gave myself a mediocre pedicure. I tried to write, but instead spent two days trapping an elusive fly the size of a fighter jet that buzzed non-stop around my office. I told him he could have my chair before I gave up and left the room. I sunk a basil plant into the ground, knowing I haven’t the energy to fight off the bunnies. And after reading too many articles about the pandemic, I resolved never to leave the house again.

But more than anything this week, I was sad. I schlepped that hopeless funk around – daydreaming in mid-vacuum, worrying about the present, worrying about what comes next. I felt conquered. I cried. I wished for certainty, or at least a window of clarity, both of which seem to have slipped through my hands, if they were never mine to hold in the first place. I sat outside in the late afternoons to get some sun, to bring in a bit of light, but it didn’t help as much as I’d have liked. And I prayed, asking G-d for a lot. Maybe even a chutzpadik amount.

As the week draws to an end, I’m starting to think I’ve gotten it all wrong. Maybe sad isn’t the right word for what I’ve been feeling. Perhaps it’s more apt to call it the frustration born of trying to move forward, only to discover that all the roads are being repaved, that the map of the world has been redrawn, that we really know very little for sure. Yet my gut tells me that it’s likely also acceptance of my own very human limitations at the hardest of times.

Thank G-d, thank G-d, Shabbos is here, come to save me from myself. To remind me that I don’t always have to be strong, that I can lean into my faith to keep me standing, that I don’t have to carry the weight on my own. That it’s okay if I can’t always hold the pieces together. That sometimes, doing nothing at all is what gets you where you need to go.

Wishing you all a beautiful Yom Yerushalayim and a restful, peaceful Shabbos.

Love,

Merri

A Horseradish Reversal

April 17, 2020Merri Ukraincik

Every year, I take the head from the horseradish root we use at the seder and plant it deep in the ground. But inevitably, just as the new greens emerge the following spring, one of the garden-eating wild things in our yard will devour the entire plant, root and all, leaving us with nothing.

By now, our recent sedarim feel as ancient as our slavery in Egypt and we no longer require fresh horseradish. Like so much else that’s gotten lost in our COVID-induced isolation, I’d forgotten about the root I planted right after last Pesach until this morning, when I noticed these bursts of green in the garden.

Shocked that they’d not been eaten (perhaps the hose has served as a fortress), I brushed away some of the dirt to check on the roots. They have to stay a little longer in the dark underground to fill out, to be ready for picking. But still, there they were in all their hideous, knobby-topped glory, and I smiled a smile I haven’t mustered in weeks.

The leaves are another story. Unbothered by rabbits and deer, they stand, when fully grown, like a proud gathering of fans, rippled at the edges and ribbed in the center. A verdant crown atop such an ugly, biting vegetable is a lesson unto itself — about silver linings and finding good and not allowing bitterness to consume us. To have played the tiniest role in bringing something forth from the earth, a bit of new life, gives me the taste of something hopeful, and that’s no small thing right now.

Who knows what this week will bring, our dishes packed away and Pesach behind us? Perhaps the animals will leave the plants alone, finding something sweeter to nosh on, and I will be able to offer friends fresh horseradish root with which to prepare an array of quarantine condiments. But mostly it’s the hope I’m clinging to. I’ll lop off the tops and stick them back in the ground.

Wishing the whole wide world a peaceful day of rest, and a Shabbos filled with hope.

Gut Shabbos! Shabbat Shalom!

Keeping Up With Hand Cream

April 3, 2020Merri Ukraincik

I bought this at Trader Joe’s back in January. I was away for a few days and realized I’d forgotten to bring hand cream. And hand cream, I know from my grandmother, is something we should never be without.

Her beauty regimen was simple, selected from drugstore stock. She assured me you didn’t need fancy-fancy, but you had to be consistent in applying your chosen unguents to keep yourself youthful. As a little girl, I’d watch her with wild-eyed fascination as she went through these paces. She never left the house without putting on lipstick. Before bed, she’d scoop Pond’s from the jar to remove her makeup, and once a week, she had her wig set at the beauty parlor across the road. I hung on her every ritual. But the only wisdom that really stuck was the one about creaming your hands. She’d say that a woman could moisturize her face all she wants, but her hands would give her age away if she didn’t tend to them, too.

Washing so frequently now, I’m finding that hand cream just isn’t cutting it. Levi says my palms, once soft, feel like sandpaper. My knuckles are scrubbed red and raw. My hands are aging before my eyes, as much as all of this is taking its toll on my soul.

But last night, after I’d done the dishes and washed down the kitchen, I picked up this tube of hand cream and noticed the tagline for the first time. “The perfect precursor to your next meeting!” Indeed, whenever that might be, I wondered, allowing myself a full-bodied guffaw.

Lately, especially in moments when fear of this dark shadow that hangs over all of us becomes sharp as a knife in my gut, I miss my grandmother especially. I conjure up her scents for comfort. Sometimes it’s her violet talc and her perfume. At others, especially on the eve of Pesach, it’s frying onions and Sanka. I realize that even if she were alive, I would not be able to visit her or feel her kiss on my cheek. The thought of it pains me because I know so many of us are now separated from those we love. So I will persist, creaming my hands as a way to cling to what I can of what life was like before.

We have arrived to Shabbos Hagadol, the great Shabbos that comes before Pesach, which for us is the third Shabbos our shul is shuttered. May we somehow find grace in this ongoing silence apart from our community, and may G-d hear our prayers to bring this plague to an end.

Gut Shabbos! Shabbat Shalom!

Sending love to all of you.

Merri

What To Do About The Granny Squares

January 17, 2020Merri Ukraincik

I did not crochet these granny squares.

Two years ago, a friend’s mom offered me a bag of wool when she was relocating. Turns out that one bag was really two large storage bins and two industrial garbage bags filled with beautiful skeins of wool in assorted colors. I was pleasantly shocked by the bounty of it.

“Hang on. There’s more,” she said, heading back to the car while I stood there with my mouth open.

She reappeared, this time with four garbage bags she refused to let me carry. They teemed with granny squares, all made by a friend who was also downsizing. Together they decided I’d figure out what to do with them.

The wool was a boon. I’ve transformed most of it into afghans, baby blankets, and hats, and my friend’s mom gets nachas from the photos I send her of my handiwork. The nearly 1,000 granny squares are another story.

Though I devised all sorts of plans for them, I followed through on none. When our basement flooded last year, the bags came untied and the squares floated like lily pads on the rising water. I gathered them up after havdalah, washed them, and restashed them in bags with a better seal.

Yesterday I decided to reclaim the space they take up in the basement while giving the squares a purpose in the world. I was going to start the first project I have in mind last night, then thought better of it, figuring I might feel compelled to complete it, which would distract me from Shabbos preparations today. I’ll begin tomorrow night or on Sunday instead. Watch this space for all the things I come up with.

But as I prepare for Shabbos, I keep thinking how freeing it is to put away our pens and brushes, cameras and crochet hooks, to power down our laptops and phones, and to tell the voice in our heads, the one driving us to always produce and create, “Hey! It’s time for your Shabbos nap!”

Because it is in the Shabbos rest we take from creating that we nurture our creativity most – by connecting with the source of it, with the Crafter of Crafters who endowed us with it in the first place.

Wishing everyone a Gut Shabbos! May we treasure the separation between the sacred and the everyday that enables us to rest now and make beautiful, productive, lasting things in the week ahead.

Gut Shabbos! Shabbat Shalom!

Merri