Susan Branch

I have a few of her cookbooks on my shelves. She is an author who publishes these books - they are sort-of cookbooks, sort-of entertaining books, sort-of books of craft ideas, but they also have an element of the Commonplace Book to them, as she puts in quotations or stanzas from old poems that she likes, or that are appropriate to the topic.

Everything is handwritten (or set in a typeface that looks remarkably handwritten, though I really do think she handwrites everything and then lets the publisher set from her artwork pages). She has drawings on nearly every page - little birds, or flowers, or steaming pots of soup.

I've made a few of her recipes; they're not complex, but they're good and often use seasonings in unexpected ways.

I love the books. They are one of the things I look at when I start to feel my world getting small and constricted and unhappy. When I start to feel like whatever stress I'm under, whatever bad news I'm hearing, is beginning to take over my brain.

I particularly like the quotations. I keep thinking that I should get back more to doing embroidery, and that I should start keeping my own sort of commonplace book of short quotations I would like to make embroidery designs off of. (And, vaguely, in the back of my head, thinking, that if I can re-awaken my ability to do calligraphy and neat penmanship, and if I could swing doing it, and enough people liked the designs, actually selling them. Though it might be more work than what I'd get out of it). And her books are a fertile source of interesting quotations.

Her work (you can see some of it on her homepage won't be to everyone's taste; I know I have friends who would look at it and roll their eyes, or dismiss it as "housewife cutesy." (I guess she's a homemaker, though she does write the books and do illustration as a career. I know I have some friends who are not fond of the "domestic arts.")

The thing is - as much as I work outside the home, as much as I was kind of a tomboy growing up (in a lot of cases, my best friends were boys - I often found boys to be more direct and less likely to stab you in the back than girls) - I still love all the "domestic arts" stuff. I like being able to cook. I love the idea of decorating my home "just so," of going antiquing, of being able to do stuff like embroider or make centerpieces for the table. (I just don't want to build an empire of it, like Martha Stewart. And I'm not "perfect" the way Martha projects herself as being. My style is more "funky cottage" than it is "elegant home living.")

For me, it's an escape. There's something about being able to make a nice autumn bouquet of dried flowers for the mantel...I think part of it, for me, is that it gives me a sense of control over something in a world that I often feel is going to pieces around me. Where bad stuff happens to people I care about, where bad stuff happens in the world at large.

I don't know. Maybe it's very small and self-absorbed to want to focus on embroidering pillowcases or tending an herb garden in a falling-apart world. But again: it's something I have control over, something that makes me feel comfortable and sane even when the outside world isn't.

(Another vague thought: starting a lavender farm. I doubt a person - a single person - can run a farm, that I'd need at least employees and maybe a business partner, but it's something I daydream about from time to time.)

But looking at her books - reading her list of lovely things to put in a guest room to make guests comfortable and welcome (good old mystery novels, a carafe with water and a glass, extra soaps and things, space in the closet, a small blanket to wrap up in while reading...), there's a graciousness about it and a comfort. Perhaps part of it is the idea of being aware of other people's comfort and happiness, of caring about it. (That's what being a homemaker is, when it's at its best - you are caring for and about other people).

So in a crazy world, it gives me comfort to look at those books.