Nettle Diaries

As I'm posting for the first time my own blog, I feel compelled to say a word or two about the title. Nettle Diaries. Here I'm in the remote Zoersel, a leafy area of Belgium in the Flemish speaking part, once again an alien as I've been throughout my life. I'm surrounded by woods where nettles grow freely and abundantly. They are stinging plants, though milder and weaker than poison ivy, they have terrific health effects. They are loaded with iron and despite their frail, lowly appearance they battle successfully against the rheumatoid threats hang over our head under a cloud loaded sky. you can enjoy the wonderful culinary taste it offers by making nettle soup, nettle flavored mashed potatoes or nettle infusion for the elderly pain of arthritis to name a few. So you guessed right! I'm planning to write some stinging stuff prickling, nettle like, the politically correct with curative overtones...But also about things I love, such as a good book (recently I much enjoyed Muriel Barbery's 'l'élégance de l'hérisson' or 'hedgehog's grace') or delicious recipes, food shared around a joyful table with friends and family, indeed cook&book rhyme perfectly or how it feels to be forever a DF. A Denizen Foreigner that is. I've been pondering this two words for a while. they define better than the old world diaspora the experience of scattered and exiled people like myself. Denizen foreigners actually belong to the places they live but their identity have a mythical dimension shaped out of the actual "being through this and that", living here and there in the temporal.So here I'm now and five years of living in Zoersel gives some perspective to write in this Flemish setting alike to Ingeborg Bachman's Nebelland setting. Nebula, I saw. Nebula's heart, I ate.
Flora