The day’s Ceres menu included sole with spinach, shitakes and goat cheese. And lentil soup with beets and coconut milk. Food designed to lift the spirit as much as provide healthy nutrients to bodies that need some special tending.

The meals that went out that night and every week, delivered to homes throughout Sonoma County, were created by volunteer teenagers in white smocks, guided by volunteer professional Wine Country chefs. Hopefully the kids also get hooked on eating local and organic and understand why slow food trumps fast food.  Then there’s the bonus of being part of a community doing something nice for others.

Those being people who have cancer or other serious illness, who need to eat as healthy as possible but whose palate may be off from strange new meds and whose families have other priorities than creating something enticing in the kitchen.

This is the Ceres Community project, which teaches young people to cook nutritious  inspired meals for sick people and which is becoming a national model for food  programs around the country.  The Ceres kitchen is in my neighborhood, housed in a bright new building painted spinach green with carrot colored trim. But I never got inside the operation until the other night when I accompanied my husband, who started driving for Ceres after a sick friend joined the list of clients.

It was one of those cold inky black nights when you’re glad for a car with a good heater and a radio with a strong classical music station. Lovely aromas came from the back seat. I guessed it was the soup.  Ceres operates year round but given the season it felt like the best thing to be doing, taking very fine food to very important regular people who are not out doing the eat, drink and be merry thing. Someone had also donated fresh wreaths with red ribbons to be included with some deliveries.

We drove down the highway against the commute traffic, remarking on how many years we had been part of that string of slow moving impatient drivers.  With our gift bags of food we crept through unfamiliar neighborhoods twinkling with reindeer and Santas,  trying to read obscure street numbers.

They were waiting. One woman introduced her grandson and we talked about the charm of two-year-olds. Another, her smiling face framed by a knit cap, seemed as thrilled to see the wreath as the meals.   She hadn’t done much decorating, she explained. This was her chemo week.

You can’t help but wonder how you would be if everything changed and you were trying to keep the holiday spirit, do the tree, wrap presents and imagining what the new year might deliver. Is it harder to be sick at Christmas? Does it feel like a milestone to reach another holiday?

I never did much volunteering when I was working full time. People who do say that it provides a sense of satisfaction and purpose and helps balance your karma. It’s a reminder that even if you can’t solve global problems or what’s going on in Washington you can do one more thing for your community. And trust that when you need a kindness, a neighbor will knock at your door.

We drove home with the empty containers from last week’s delivery. My gloves smelled like Doug fir. We took the back country route and some forest creature – maybe a fox or a coyote – darted across our headlights. I took it as a sign of grace.

With awards season upon us there are so many movies I vowed to see and they didn’t include “Precious.”

I had all the usual excuses for not going to a film about an illiterate, pregnant abused teenage girl. I knew from reading reviews that it was raw and relentless. And isn’t the news hard enough to endure without adding in extra cinematic suffering?
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We all have our limits on what we pay money to see. I avoid movies that involve torture, rape and sexual violence. I hate watching bodies being blown up and I don’t like war movies. I can’t stand to see people abusing children and sadistic killers.

Same with books. If a book starts out with the body of a murdered woman or a kidnapped child I usually stop right there. I even have a hard time with those nature movies where the grizzly bear stalks the baby buffalo and eats it, even though I know this is the natural way.

I would pass on “Precious,” I said. I didn’t want to spend time with that poor hopeless kid.

Then I sucked it up and went, mostly because I had two movie companions who know about the cruelty heaped on children – a friend who survived her own violent childhood and another woman I know professionally who directs a parenting program that works with abused kids.

If they could handle real life, I could handle a movie.

No one wants to watch abuse and suffering. In one of the more shocking scenes in “Precious” I threw my coat over my head. But maybe we need to see these things because if they don’t happen to us, they happen to others. It’s the same reason to see one more movie about the Holocaust, to not simply sit there and groan “how can people do this to each other,” but to bear witness so maybe those horrors won’t happen again.

Maybe after you watch a movie about a teenager who has every reason to scrawl “Why me?” on a piece of paper, you end up donating money to a safe house. Or you become a Big Brother or Big Sister, or work to keep social service programs alive. But you don’t leave untouched.

Let me back up to what I said about Precious being this poor hopeless kid. She isn’t hopeless.

I saw the movie when the Haiti earthquake disaster was in its second week. I heard a pediatrician cry on the radio about the children she watched die because medical help came too late. But I saw a man find his wife under a building, alive after days without water, food or daylight. And there were triumphant rescue workers on the TV, crawling out of the rubble with a 15-day old baby.

There’s hope in Haiti and there is more than a spark of life in Precious, even in that fierce face, scrunched up against a world which seems to deliver only misery.

Tough important movies are best watched in a matinee which gives you time to shut down the awful images before you sleep. We went to the movie on a wet afternoon when rain pounded the roof and thunder rattled the theater. When it was over we went for tea. We all needed to talk.

We talked about unloved children and the importance of intervention when families can’t do it themselves. We talked about the unlikely places people find friends. And praised the kind determination of overworked teachers. We talked about the need to keep art museums open and children writing.

No surprise, the woman who runs the parenting program said stories about children like Precious are not unique to Harlem. They happen right here in beautiful Wine Country.

Susan Swartz is an author and journalist in Sebastopol. You can also read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear her Another Voice commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is susan@juicytomatoes.com

Photo courtesy of ingridspeak.wordpress.com

In the 1970s there was a bar in Sebastopol called West of the Laguna which had live music and stand up comics. This was back before our part of California turned into Wine Country and when houses were affordable enough for beginning artists and musicians to live here and where you could go out at night and hear new talent for the price of a beer.

West of the Laguna was a good place to do that, but what intrigued me most were the grainy black and white photos on the walls of real people on the old fashioned Laguna de Santa Rosa. They were leisurely summertime photos of men in straw hats and women in white dresses drifting along in canoes and rowboats. The kind of dreamy scene you see in an impressionist show at an art museum.

It was hard to imagine boaters on the Laguna because for so long this stretch of Sonoma County fresh water has been pretty much in hiding. It’s not just that the boaters went away but that the Laguna became hidden as it was turned into a flood control channel and remodeled by agriculture and business interests.

It’s there in glimpses. Sometime the winter rains will turn a skinny strip of it into a magical lake, or from certain roads you can catch a quick delicious view of glistening water and oak trees. But mostly only cows and private property owners get to visit its natural wonders close-up.

For most of us the Laguna is a bump in the road, the water that’s under the bridge you race across on the way to work. If you’re stuck in commute traffic maybe you get a longer look at the tangle of trees standing hip deep in water. But you seldom see anybody in or on the water itself.

We need our green, wild watery spots where we can go and be still.

This summer I got to do that, thanks to a friend who shared her auction prize from a fund-raiser which was a guided trip of the Laguna by kayak. We paddled one balmy morning for three hours, our kayaks low in the water below the reeds. It was like a scene in the “African Queen,” except there were no leeches and no German warships coming to get us. We saw egrets in their long Katherine Hepburn necks. And osprey, blue heron and otters. Bushes of pink wild roses hugged the banks and a western pond turtle sunned himself on a log.

This is where the owls head when they fly over our roof at twilight. This is where the ducks born in the pond in our neighborhood park will go when their mother duck tells them to fly off.

But save for a few trails that provide only limited looks, the Laguna is still a drive-by for most people. And that’s too bad because we need our green, wild, watery spots where we can go and be still.

Whether there are more paths and launching docks in this waterway’s future will be up to the Laguna stewards and government. But when and if the Laugna comes out of hiding, I’ll be there. In my kayak and my white dress.

Listen to Laguna Time Out on KRCB’s Another Voice.