A woman's tools

Women's tools are always of interest to me. One of my Christmas presents was a different design of a whisk. While I am not a gourmet cook, I enjoy adding good spices, coming to new ways to cook something I think others will enjoy, and I love kitchen tools. Perhaps it all goes back to some primeval feeling that a woman feeds her family as a sign of love or her place in the scheme of things. Although some of that has been lost in a culture where many women work outside the home and with the ease of take-out, perhaps fine cooking has even more value when it's truly a gift.

Besides modern tools, I receive great pleasure from owning a few of the tools-- grinding bowls, mortars, pestles, mano, and matates-- left by the peoples who traveled this land before the settlers arrived (no, I don't grind anything in them).

When the Luckiamute peoples lived where I do, they moved with the seasons. Their stone tools were left of necessity in the places where they camped. They were sometimes buried, and generation after generation would know where to find them. One day those people stopped coming. The tools remained hidden until a flood or torrential rain would uncover them for another people to find.

It is easy to imagine the women gathered along the creek below their hide or cedar shelters and grinding the paste from nuts and roots that can be formed and cooked. Chattering as they work, they left their energy on the things they used. I know this is so because I feel that energy. I also know it as I prepare food or sit talking to another woman while she cooks. Can I help? What did you add to that? Mmmm that tastes good. Women gather many ways but one of the most enjoyable for me is in a kitchen with a glass of red wine while we laugh and talk.

My grinding stones have either been found on this creek or purchased in a store that sells artifacts gathered from private land. That last part is very important as there is no right to gather or even buy artifacts from public land. Private land or not, there is also no right to own funerary or ceremonial items. If those are found, even on private lands, they are to be left where they are. Sacred items are to be respected -- most especially if you are a believer in karma!

Sometimes such items are claimed to be old but in reality have been created for selling. Know your dealer, and buyer beware is a good warning here as elsewhere.

(The last image is a painting Parapluie did some years ago of one of my grinding bowls. She was yet another woman feeling the energy of the tool and desiring to capture it with her paints.)