Inside life

 

Today being gray, I stayed in bed a bit longer, watching the rain and ruing the loss of my early walk.  I don't mind walking in the rain, but the morning seemed built for other things...later, I thought, I will put on my raincoat and go collect Alexander for the afternoon.   Good thought:  immediately the rain and wind picked up, or rather shot down, bringing a torrent over the garden and terrace.

In bed, I made a list or two, one practical and one fantastic, checked my phone for messages, then read another story in a book I had bought through the Friends of the Library sale, just re-opened in a new Covid way.

I should explain that for months, the town library had been closed...in your towns, too, I am sure...until summer, when they'd found a way to have us order books online and pick them up outside safely.  It helped me a little, but really I am more of a browser, and so I didn't use the welcome service much.  Then, last week, the Friends of the Library sent a message saying that they had found a way to reinvent their store, semi-virtually, and sent pages of titles they had for sale...all very inexpensive and all supporting the library, of course.  Many were new or scarcely read; lots were interesting.  I scrolled through and picked out more than a few, including Margaret Drabble's stories, which have become my bedside reading.  When they notified me that my order was ready, I went to the back of the library, where a window in a glass wall had been installed, and at the mention of my name out came a bag with my books.  I was proud of them and of me for getting these next weeks' reads.

You will notice on top of the pile above a book which came from John May himself, upstairs, a history of his family which begins at the beginning of time, just about, and which I have been reading chapter by chapter each afternoon, absorbing the chronicle of not only his family odyssey, but everyone's.  It is a fascinating book, part history, part fiction...both well-told.  I am glad to read it slowly.

As it happens, about the time John's gift arrived, I'd also picked up Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice Toklas, which somehow I'd missed the whole of in college.  But my Paris obsession now required it.  I alternated his with hers, enjoying the juxtaposition of language, history and intention.  I was sorry to finish Gertrude and Alice as quickly as I did, so I turned to a biography of Stein done by a woman I sort of knew.  Like a balloon deflating, I plowed through a while, then put it down.  Having been lifted by the prose of the two before, the pedanticism of this one made me wonder why I had spent 40 years in academia reading such.  It was well-researched and informative...I will give it that...and someday wanting information in its drier format I might pick it up again.

Meanwhile I have my Friends' books to enjoy.

This morning's read was a Drabble story about a woman, an actress, I think, although her occuption  wasn't much part of the plot...wait, perhaps it was, now I think of it, the whole motive of the piece...hmm.  Anyway, she fell in love with a house, a Dower House attached to a titled family pile crumbling over the centuries, wasted by the unwieldy marriages of two lines of sort-of nobles who couldn't, frankly, get it together.  But that's not the story itself, which, as I said, is about a woman falling in love with an old house, disrepair and all.  She doesn't particularly want to fix it up; she likes the melancholy, as she admits, in which the house and lands enclose her.  In the end, she has had the illumination to marry one or the other of the men on whom it has been entailed; she isn't sure whether she wants to marry the men or marry the men for the place.

Yes, well.  I could understand that, even though I probably would not follow her example if put to the test.  A house inhabits one as much as one inhabits it.  I know that from long experience with the places I have lived.

A place can call to you, not only from outside, but from inside, its call a murmur as well as a haunting. The choice today to be an inside day was a call from place, weather notwithstanding.

After reading, I went into the kitchen to do the next best thing:  cooking.  Yesterday, I had gone to the New Hope Market, a little place along the back road to Hillsborough and places north that has breakfast, lunch and produce from local farms.  I meant to pick up eggs and butter and whatever roots would make a good soup, but on the glassed shelves I found lovely zucchini and tiny eggplants and grabbed them as well.  So soup began and the roasted finds with a little tomato from my neighbor Betsy's garden and some basil that has so far withstood bugs and cool nights; alas the parsley has not.  

                                            

From the stove and oven now come inside-warm aromas.  I think I have just enough time 

to make Alexander something chocolate for his afternoon treat.  

Or read another chapter of The Mays of  Alamann's Creek.

Out my window...

 The wind is shaking the crape myrtles from not one but several directions, though the weather vane seems stuck on S. My windows are open to catch the breeze...cool, not yet past 65 degrees late morning.  Fall is arriving, a bit early for these parts, but most welcome after the humidity and heat I've been plowing through on my walks each day.  On the terrace, wet leaves stick to the chairs, the bricks, clutter the grass, yellow and brown mostly though an occasional red-tinged one enlivens the mix.

Something in the blood responds with a welcome, too.  Soup for dinner, oatmeal for brunch, apples in a pile, weekly replenished as the months go on.  Last week my friend Anne sent me a huge packet of tea including my favorite...Tazo's Wild Sweet Orange...there is a cup next to me as I type.  

The other day Joseph and Alexander drove up with a pumpkin and carved it right in front of the door.  Engineers, both, they first made a careful drawing, deciding on the proper angles for the best scare-factor, and went to work.  Can I bury this seed in your garden, asked Alexander?  And did so...I'll expect a vine curling around the living room window next summer.  Maybe a pumpkin on it?

But this is fall.  There's also the sadness of the change in light...dark til nearly 7 and evening light disappearing only a little after 12 hours later.  My evening walks have gotten fewer, my morning walks later.  My hands work to a different tune, the left one less cooperative.  

Images twenty years old appear in the fitfully moving branches.

This year it will be just us for Rosh HaShanah.  Nonetheless, I'm feeling, this weekend of the new year, like doing a brisket for the men...a recipe from my early married days (maybe one or two substitutions are in order now?) with noodle pudding, braised carrots, and an apple crisp for dessert...hearty stuff whose aroma will fill the apartment with the new season after the lighter fare of summer. (How I will miss Alexandra's spectacular sweets, though.) 

You are invited...

There is a lot more to celebrate...Aunt Sadie's 98th birthday on Sunday; my niece Stephanie's baby shower a week later.  So:  new year, new inspirations, new chances for hope.  

Let Fall raise our spirits and bring us welcome change in the atmosphere.

A tiny woman with a guitar

I was about to begin a new post, when I opened my mail to a message from a friend...in fact two messages from two dear friends, the best way I know to invite a new page and a new year.  One wished me peace; the other, wrapping her words in a calm, quiet (enviable) mood, inspired in me what she so perfectly called "the comfort in a familiar routine" that such holidays bring...breathing the aroma of apples and cinnamon while ironing table dressings and wiping wine glasses, looking forward to the songs of the ceremony, sung in her family's congregation by the cantor, "a tiny woman with a guitar".  She imagines that my dining room, like hers, will be where family will gather tonight.

Yes, the dining room will be our scene.  Instead of her apple cake, we will have rugelach, the nut-filled rounds with apricot. There will be ginger chicken, and potato gratin, and orange-carrot-fennel salad.  And apples and honey.

I hope to achieve as calm a space to prepare them as my friend has...my aunt will be out getting her hair done, and my uncle napping or reading, and the children not yet at the door.  I'll iron my tablecloth with some quiet music.

Years ago, I'd written a poem, Ironing on Shabbat, about that same calm achieved: the peaceful motion of the iron smoothing the cloth in a house "emptied of temple-goers", more religious than a formal ceremony.  Especially at a time when a little peace and quiet was a rare and most welcome gift for a young mother.

These days I've been making my own tablecloths and napkins by hand from fabric I find around on the remnant shelves; it's part of undoing a tangled day in the evening hours when I'm watching a movie or listening to music. Stitching without hurry, my hands can accomplish something for no required reason. There is sanctuary in the motion of the ordinary when calm prevails.

 

Even so, holidays like this one underscore the double edge we live with... as the table is plentiful and handsome with sweet things, so is the world outside (for too many, inside, too) full of terrors...want, war, megalomania, meanness.  We could drown in it if we didn't have these rituals which call us so firmly to our better selves.  Would that the whole planet knew how to untangle itself without pulling each other apart.

I too like the music of the service, for me the most spiritual part, like a mantle I wear for remembering.  Prayers for my children, for whom I keep it, the solemnity of halting the outside world to consider one's place in life, one's openness to peace...I do that for me.

With the friend who wished me peace today, I used, on the high holidays, to stay for the meditation service while most of the other congregants went home to nap til the memorial later in the afternoon.  We'd walk the gardens, or sit silently, or consider life awhile together.  Peace, acceptance...so little to ask of life and so precious, too often so far from reach.

And yet...may our tables shine with them, this night and always.

Storm Warnings

Ever since Ivan appeared on the scene, whirling out of the South Atlantic, I've been getting messages from family and friends by all sorts of media inquiring whether I've decided to evacuate.  The fact that the storm is nowhere near me, and, by at least some projections, not likely to do more than send a small tail of rain and wind our way, makes me wonder what use warnings of this sort, to the tune of the background noise of insistent newscasts, are.  And also makes me realize how little I pay attention to things like that.  For better or worse.

Not that I wouldn't move in a hurry if I lived in a Miami high rise and the storm was at my door, as it seems to be there today.  We have, in our time, sat out more hurricanes than I can count, and lived to tell the tale, but only after judicious consideration, or blind indifference.  Hurricanes shift what the weather people design as their "paths" all the time, so projections are little use to coast-dwellers, who, if they have been born and bred to the climate, know better than to expect the expected.  One takes shelter in different ways, depending on a lot of things both at home and in the sky.  My mother and aunts liked to tell a story of a day they spent in the kitchen at the shore, baking, when one of them looked out the side window and noticed that the ocean was running down the street only a few feet from the side lawn.  How a hurricane could sneak up on you like that is beyond belief, except that I, who was small and there with them at the time, must have inherited their cluelessness.  They stayed put, of course, put out candles, I suppose, and listened to the wind howl.  I don't remember hearing how the baking came out.

My husband and I, who had eighteen years earlier traveled through a raging hurricane to our new home near the sound, sat out Irene five or six years ago, along with all our neighbors, despite "mandatory" evacuation orders.  We weren't scofflaws; we lived in 100-plus year old houses and figured that they'd lasted this long without suffering defeat.  Irene too felt right at home and so stayed atop us all day and night until, in the morning, we all looked out at the fine day and fell to picking up the trees littering one another's yards.  Right now, one Floridian of my family has moved north; another, with ailing parents less able to make a trip, has hunkered down to ride it out.  A third southerner, like us nowhere near its path, has made elaborate plans to be somewhere else, where exactly he hasn't decided.  My friend talks about her friends who live in a double-wide in Irma's path, but can't decide whether to stay or find a last-minute motel.  There's nothing like hurricane warnings to show us our tendencies.

Meanwhile, other warnings ride the waves of the air.  I'm not sure I pay enough attention to those, either.  Along the way, things I should have had at least an inkling of have caught me by surprise, like that ocean hurling past my mother and aunt years ago.  A job cut.  A friend's betrayal.  And yet there are others I can feel in the wind right to my bones.  A child in danger (the worst of the worst).  A need to get away.

Close friends I'd planned to see today have had to cancel; his health won't permit the visit...he's at a dangerous crossroads, suddenly brought on, and his wife is on tenterhooks.  While the cancellation is understandable, it's thrown me off this morning in surprising ways.  Coming home from the aborted trip, I changed and began to think of what I could get done instead...there's quite a list...but somehow I couldn't organize myself to what are, after all, pretty simple tasks.  I really wanted to see my friends.

I put on a recording of some Cajun music I like (my friends are from New Orleans in the most entrenched way) and thought about making shrimp remoulade for dinner.  To the tunes of the Breaux Brothers, I began to make some cookies, then went out in the yard to prune the overindulged tentacles of what's known in these parts as ugly-agnus.  The cookies crumbled; the pruning, which I usually consider therapeutic, seemed tedious.  Coming back into the house, I tried a few phone calls, but the work I really have to get done...art I've long neglected (and me with a November show coming up!)...just wasn't in me.   I'm thinking of my friend, blank of mind about his condition, and knowing I probably won't know how he is until much later.  That seems to have drained me of any focus except on him and on his wife, whose voice on the phone was uncharacteristically heavy with portent.  It's difficult to be so far away from those I care about and want to support.

I used to like storms...still in a way, do...but so much experience with those inner ones life throws at us have warn me down.  I believe I'm good at coping with what comes, but these days I think to myself, what next?, and not in a cheerfully anticipatory way.

I'd say that I'm just temporarily out of sorts (I used to tell my husband that, to his puzzlement; "What does that mean?" he'd ask), except that outside it's a beautiful day, one of the nicest we've had in a week of gorgeous weather, and one of my favorite seasons, fall, is in the air, and I've a workshop full of potential just waiting to be realized.  There is every reason to be hopeful, to be full of life, to be engaged in the future.

Instead, all I seem to be able to do is shrug, and wait for it to pass, hoping whatever storm is roiling through me leaves me grateful for the rain, inspired again, and, most important, facing no great loss.  Evacuation isn't really possible in such circumstances; neither is gathering candles and stockpiling peanut butter and water.  We just have to ride it out and accept the yard full of broken trees.  If the dam breaks, it breaks, and we ride its muddy wash out until our feet touch land again.  Then we get up again and start over.

___________________________________________________________

A few days later, we're still waiting for rain stronger than a drizzle, but the weather has cooled a bit, and to counteract the gathering clouds I decided that I'd use up a week's leftovers by making a meal (I'd give anything to share it with my ailing friend) that seems to warm everyone.  Those of you in the same boat might try it, too:

Pot Pie

1. Dice leftover (cooked) chicken and set aside.  If it's been dressed while it was cooked...for example with pesto or balsamic reduction or even BBQ sauce...so much the better for flavor.

2. Saute some onion, celery and carrot, also diced, until the onion is almost translucent.

3. Add the chicken dice, about a cup of vegetable broth mixed with a small can of evaporated milk, and some parsley, sage, and thyme.

4. Add some small-diced sweet potato or butternut squash (or both) and cook for a few minutes, 

then add some green peas and cut string beans, maybe some corn kernels, asparagus, sauteed mushrooms, whatever.  Season with S/P (red pepper is best).

Either:

5a. Mash some potatoes with butter.

or

5b. Make a short pastry and roll out to about 1/4 inch thickness.

or

5c. Mix up some cornbread batter.

6.  Pour the chicken mixture into your prettiest casserole dish and top with the mashed potatoes (5a.) or the pastry (5b.) or the cornbread batter (5c.)  

If you use the mashed potatoes or the cornbread batter, just mound it here and there over the top.  If you use the pastry, cut out a pretty design to vent the steam.

7.  Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes while the house warms and smells delicious.

If, like me, you don't do meat, just substitute all the vegetables you can think of for the chicken.  If you're vegan, lose the butter and milk.  Won't make any difference to comfort.

If your refrigerator goes out during the storm, you can reheat it on your outdoor grill, 

or share it lukewarm right out of the pot.
A bottle of your favorite wine, red or white, isn't a bad idea, either.

Philly, or Travels against the Wind

A few weeks ago, rounding the corner of Hurricane Matthew, I flew to Aruba with the children for their family vacation.  I'd held as my beacon for a long time a trip to Paris I've been saving up for in early spring, so at first, when they asked me, I waffled a bit, thinking about the lure of cafes and walks through elegant parks on my own time.  I'm not good with resorts ("That's a great first line for a story," Jill McCorkle joked when I told her about it). But I did want to spend relaxing time with them, and I'd never been anywhere in the Caribbean.

So off we went, and the pilot, though he'd warned us apologetically of a bumpy trip, made in fact a pretty smooth affair of it, gliding around the storm, costing us barely an hour and saving the journey from Miami to Orangestad.

 Aruba is a small island, only about 20 miles long and barely 6 miles across, nearer to Venezuela than anywhere else, but it was a Dutch possession for so long (with farther back Spanish influences and even farther back Amer-Indian) that one's impressions of it are shaped by the fantastic architecture, smooth-faced low buildings with the curled accents of European inhabitants, but in bright island colors.  At least, those are what built the original towns--the capitol's back streets, Santa Cruz, Savaneta, San Nicolas among them.  You could hear its roots tangled in its language.

On the other hand, the resort area of Palm Beach, where we stayed, is another story, pretty much indistinguishable from those photos cluttering websites and print ads of beach resorts everywhere...high white hotels with uniformed guards (the more expensive the place, the more they frowned at passing intruders), miles of blue lounge chairs facing the sea, low pools whose central gathering place is the floating bar.  And on the streets behind them, fancy shopping of the kind found anywhere from Fifth Avenue to Nice to the great mall at Tel Aviv.

Because of Matthew, the famous white sands were, when we first arrived, gray with rotting seagrass and pieces of sponge and coral, and the equally famous seas, known for their clear blue-green jewel tones, were dulled (Aruba isn't hit with hurricanes directly, but does receive the resulting ocean debris nonetheless).  Hotel staff spent all day trying to rake and cart away the mess, but it took them most of the week, and only on the last day were we able to enjoy its return to the advertised normal.  On that day, we floated and dived under the morning's bright sun, watching the fish school in and out around our legs. Ah.

What I wanted most to do every day was walk on the beach, but debris and the jutting hotels made that difficult to do for more than half a mile or so.  Instead, we built rock forts and walls with Alexander, lounged around the pool while he splashed with other children from everywhere (resorts are wonderful for the younger set), and in the hot afternoons, took drives to the outer limits of the island.

For me, those drives were the highlight of the trip to Aruba.  We saw the brochure-touted landmarks, yes--brilliant white lighthouse, tiny precious chapel, the beautifully, perfectly restored historic museum and the Fort downtown where there was an intriguing textiles exhibit, both historic and contemporary.

But we also saw the everyday island.  That's what interests me about a place.
Along the roads, there were coves that dipped protectively in and out of sparsely inhabited shores, cottages with porches where people gathered after work, larger estates, once the neighborhoods of the all-but-defunct oil industry, now barred and mostly for sale, the corner bodegas and grocers, dogs and children roaming street to street, a neighborhood fair where green-iced homemade cakes and Dutch fried breads competed for tasters and music filled each street-end.  Out even farther, in the desert that covers a good deal of the island, fields of tall cactus, thick as forests in some places, formed mileposts.

Aruba's best art is as much her artless countryside as it is her artists' native expressions.  I was inspired by both.

One afternoon, we drove out up the narrowest of roads, bumped every few feet by rocky drainage spurs, and found ourselves at the Quadirikiri caves, black and pitted from the spray of the nearby sea, storm-spurred, crashing against the bulwark of cliffs.  We walked down toward an abandoned house wide open to the elements (it could be yours for a single year's underpaid academic salary, and then two more years' overpaid salary to make it habitable again) and found there the remnants of two gardens, a flowing creek pooling under a canopy of graceful limbs, and, inside, the once beautiful floors still tiled coolly against the heat.  I imagine a life there, at the edge of the world, just the right size house, nearly self-sufficient (though supplies would be a long long trek, or helicopter delivery, each month), the bones of the desert white in the moonlight, the hardscrabble ground blinding day, and this calm outpost the shelter of the mind.

Travel, even the kind one waffles over, brings such surprises, such visions, and, eventually, such art.  Like houses, being shown the parlor isn't seeing what's really a home. I think of the stereotype of the place I imagined, and how, though some of my reasons for it turned out to be true, there is always a reality worth realizing, a life beneath the mask tourism paints on a country.

And by the way, if you are puzzling over the title of this piece, you'll have to wait until next time to realize that one.  When I started out, I meant to write my more recent trip last week to the City of Brotherly Love, using Aruba as only a short preface, but this is what writing is like, isn't it?  You never know where it's going to take you. So consider this Voyage I, and Voyage II (the Real Philly) to come walking in just after it.  And walk we did.

Cinnamon

Tuesday, September 06, 2016

Though the temperature reads almost 90 this afternoon, there’s a real difference in the air that smells like Fall.  This morning’s early walk around my neighborhood circles was cool and light, the sun just coming up above the rooflines.  And I’ve still got the doors open with a breeze floating through now and then.

Cathy Burnham, copper bracelet

In the studio, at work painting some cards for Holiday with Friends , the November Open Studio I’m doing here at Rachel’s House with my neighbor and talented jeweler, Cathy Burnham, I noticed that the color most enticing me was a dab of yellow, with crimson and ochre.  Together, they’re cinnamon.  Soon the center of my palette was an effusive variety of that spicy mix. "Fall Garden",the first miniature painting, which is really what my one-of-a-kind cards are, seemed to shine with it, even on the flower petals.  

I remembered that  Asheville Bookworks  has a two-day workshop which includes using rust to stain paper (sign me up!).  The model bookcovers on the webpage looked so rich you could eat them. And later, I picked up a piece of Cathy’s leftover copper, thinking about what I could do with it in a hanging.

So, cinnamon is everywhere today.  And no wonder.  Down in the kitchen, rice pudding was baking (my mother’s recipe, low temperature, stirred often) with plenty of that spice in it.  The whole house smelled of it for hours.  And outside, given our mostly rain-less month so far, the landscape itself is turning toward those earthy shades.

It’s interesting the way nature finds its theme no matter which of the senses we’re using to take it in.  Oh, there’s plenty of green left, and the reign of purple blooms—Liriope, verbena, bee balm to the fore, typical of late summer—isn’t abdicating yet, but across the street, Jean-Marie and Maureen’s dogwood has been shedding leaves more fit for a carnival than for early September in these parts.  The breeze brings an invigoration that calls us outdoors, or at least calls the outdoors in.  It pushes us farther into the season than the calendar allows.  On the front door, I've hung a ring  that brings October to mind.  Something in the air makes me disdain sunflowers in favor of nutty, leafy arrangements, and in my studio leaves and branches fall out of the paint onto paper, instinctively knowing it's their season, no matter what the calendar says.

Mom's Creamy Rice Pudding
1/3 cup rice, uncooked
4 cups milk
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon (heaping)

1/2 cup raisins

Wash rice thoroughly and drain.  Grease a medium glass baking dish.  Mix rice with remaining ingredients and pour into baking dish.  Bake in a slow oven (325 degrees F.) about two hours, stirring often during baking until the last fifteen minutes.  The mixture should never boil.  Serve hot or cold.                                                                                                                                                              from A Family Cookbook