Weave Your Own Coffin

Looking for an earth-friendly burial for yourself and your loved ones? A burial vessel made of willow might just be the answer. It’s hand-made, natural, and 100% biodegradable.

Once Lasswell realized she wanted to weave willow caskets in 2019, she reached out to Carolina Memorial Sanctuary in Mills River, North Carolina, a conservation cemetery within 60 miles of her farm. l. They were thrilled. At the time, Lasswell said, there were only two weavers selling willow caskets in the country: Mary Fraser in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, and Maureen Walrath in Port Townsend, Washington.

Through their work, Fraser, Lasswell, and Walrath lower green burial’s carbon footprint even. Whenever possible, they grow or wildcraft their own willow. They weave their vessels for local populations, lessening the need for imported biodegradable caskets. For Lasswell, it was the willow casket that brought her to green burials, and it is the plants, the creations she makes from them, and the connections she makes with those grieving that keep her inspired.

Fraser and Lasswell also invite people to help weave. “That time between a death and a burial, you’ve got this few days where you often feel very helpless,” said Lasswell. “It’s very meditative. It’s quiet, it’s tactile, it’s beautiful.” Some people have woven their own caskets — and use them in the meantime as storage vessels, coffee tables, or even a bookshelf with removable willow shelves.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/ok3RTEV

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/ghUfnBV

San Francisco’s 24-Hour Diner Stops the Cosmic Clock

Meet George and Nina Giavris and their labor of love: the Silver Crest Donut Shop, an icon that’s been open for nearly 54 years straight at 340 Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco, California.

Their stretch of Bayshore is like any grungy thoroughfare in any industrial zone—greasy body shop, gloomy carpet place, growing camp of homeless people alongside a Lowe’s—but then there it is: a strikingly red building, a flash of weathered neon, an improbable promise issued since 1970. We Never Close. From the Vietnam War through AIDS and OJ and 9/11 and Iraq, the same couple from Loukas was behind the same counter, pouring the same coffee.

You’ve already eaten, but Pam gauges you need eggs. She’s new here—started a mere three-plus decades ago. She puts in the order, and you sit. The wind blows, the doors creak open, a leaf skitters in. Hard to pinpoint exactly when the clock stopped, but judging by the fonts and the color scheme and the pinball and the fried ham and the jukebox selections and somehow the quality of the air you breathe, the planet’s orbit of the sun halted in the late ’70s or early ’80s. So thorough is the effect that occasional intrusions of modernity—the chime of a phone, a person under 40 entering—register simply as glitches in the code and thus fail to break the spell.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/LR7TanQ

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/ghUfnBV

Matthew Perry’s Radical Honesty About His Addiction Battle Helped Us All

Sarah Hepola, author of the memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, remembers Friends star Matthew Perry, his personal struggles, and how he worked tirelessly to help other substance users get and stay clean.

Of course, Perry’s biggest claim to fame will always be Chandler Bing. Could that be any more obvious? But by opening the door to the humiliations of his life, his failures and not-good-enoughs, he gave untold companionship to the lost and lonely, and he showed that change was possible. Fleeting at times, excruciating at others, but: possible.

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing turns out to be the obituary he did not know he was writing for himself. As sad as that is, consider how few people get to write such an extraordinary obituary. One that doesn’t merely document a life but might save them, too.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/AibDRYI

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/rkUvVnB

Who Is the Real Buffy Sainte-Marie?

Since the early ’60s, singer-songwriter and Indigenous icon Buffy Sainte-Marie has claimed to be a Cree woman who was born in Canada. But this thorough, carefully reported investigation by CBC News reveals that she’s not Native at all.

A simple Google search shows that virtually every available source says Sainte-Marie was born on the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan.

But that was contradicted late last year when a tipster provided CBC with a copy of what appeared to be Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate, obtained from a small town hall in Massachusetts.

That record said Beverly Jean Santamaria, who started going by the name Buffy Sainte-Marie early in her music career, was born in 1941 in Stoneham, Mass., north of Boston, to Albert and Winifred Santamaria — the couple Sainte-Marie claimed adopted her.

Mother, father and baby were all listed as white.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/IMD98vf

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/rkUvVnB

25-Year Lasagna, Special Ops Oatmeal, and the Survival Food Boom

Sadly, survival food has become a booming business in the wake of the pandemic. For Wired, Jacopo Prisco samples the “ready-to-eat” lasagna in reporting on this disturbing trend.

Readywise’s best seller is a four-week, one-person bundle that retails for $300 and supplies 2,000 calories a day. It includes breakfast and dinner options, such as pancake mix, pasta Alfredo, and dried banana chips: “With a month’s worth of food, you get to put together a good plan,” Lawlor says. “And so that’s what most people want to do. But we do have a very big celebrity that is buying up to $50,000 worth of food—that’s five years.”

Nutrient Survival’s best seller is a 14-day emergency food kit that provides roughly 1,400 calories per day. It retails for $315 and includes mac and cheese, apple cinnamon oatmeal, and chocolate crunch. It is more expensive than Readywise, but not at the top end of the scale: A similar kit from Mountain House, which provides about 1,700 calories per day, costs $438.

“Our largest purchase ever from an individual consumer was $55,000,” says Christianson. “That’s a Mercedes-Benz. But preppers don’t just buy one set of food—they’re coming back every single month. It blew me away when I got into this business that our repeat rate is 40 percent. The reason is simple. They don’t have all the money that they need to buy all the food that they want. So they put a little away, just like you put away a little bit of savings. This is truly an investment for them.” He adds that the delivery addresses don’t have a specific regional pattern and are mostly “modest, middle American homes.”

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/W807I1K

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/rkUvVnB

1978

Experience New York City in 1978—complete with a trip to Studio 54—by reading Amy Margolis’ immersive personal essay from The Iowa Review.

The bar is in a narrow street behind a door with no sign. The music is so loud and percussive, it makes the long, low building’s tenuous roof jump. Outside, the cracked sidewalk trembles underfoot.

Paul and Philip install me on a stool at the bar. Men in leather pants and white muscle shirts, the shirts we call wifebeaters where I grew up, rush to pet and embrace me. I’m the only woman here. I wish I had taken more care with my outfit, with my face. The men stroke my hair. One leans in close and says, “You’re flawless.” He gives me the softest kiss on my forehead, like the kiss Glinda the Good Witch gives Dorothy.

The men lock elbows with Paul and Philip and dance them away, into the crowd of other men.

I’m so painfully shy, it’s a misery for me to speak, but here I’m not expected to. The bare-chested bartender brings me sweet drinks—the kind no real drinker drinks—and I perch demurely, fishing for cherries and pineapple chunks in my frosted glass. I nod along to the music. I enjoy my rich interior life.

Read the essay

from Longreads https://ift.tt/QFb4YUD

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/mEukIiT

Inside the Psychiatric Hospitals Where Foster Kids Are a “Gold Mine”

There simply aren’t enough foster homes to take in children across the U.S. For the for-profit companies that run child psychiatric facilities—like Universal Health Services (UHS), a Fortune 500 company—the solution is simple: lock ’em up. In this Mother Jones investigation, Julia Lurie describes how thousands of foster children have stayed in psychiatric facilities for months and years, even when they’re mentally stable and it’s not medically necessary. Over a yearlong period, Lurie combed through thousands of pages of court filings and medical records and talked to foster kids like Katrina Edwards, who had been in “treatment” for roughly five years in abusive, UHS-owned facilities like North Star Behavioral Health in Anchorage. In this unsettling but important piece, Lurie calls attention to the “symbiotic relationship” between child welfare agencies and companies like UHS, whose sole aim is to fill beds and make billions in profit.

How was it possible, Edwards wondered, that passing thoughts of suicide had landed her in a “mini prison for children”? She says that when she mentioned suicide to her foster mom, she hadn’t meant it literally; she’d meant that she felt miserable and wanted someone to sit down and listen to her. The chaos of the facility felt like the opposite of what Edwards needed.

In recent years, the company has been the subject of several high-profile lawsuits and investigations, including a blistering BuzzFeed News series in 2016 and a Department of Justice probe that resulted in $122 million in settlements in 2020. The claims of these investigations bear a striking resemblance to Edwards’ experience: UHS facilities admitted patients who didn’t need to be there to begin with, failed to provide adequate treatment and staffing, billed insurance for unnecessary services over excessive lengths of time, and improperly used physical and chemical restraints and isolation.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/6JdB7xe

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/mEukIiT