Family History

As we packed for their move to North Carolina in a few days, I opened a box of letters my Aunt Vi had been keeping…not like me, who hoards every letter ever received, but selected cards from family that she held dear to her heart. 

It wasn’t only keepsakes that were saved in that box.  Each card opened to a story, a remembrance, a family connection.

Digging in it, I discovered a watercolor I had sent her with some photographs, and a poem celebrating her 82^nd birthday.  The pictures inside, though, were mostly taken 67 years ago come November, when she’d flown to Florida to meet my grandparents at their Miami house and surprised them with another guest:  me.

Though I’d been born in that city during the war, my father being stationed by the Navy there, we’d moved back when the war was over to where my parents had grown up, my grandparents eager to claim their first.  This, then, was only my second flight that far away from home (the first, at six months old, I couldn’t remember), and though it could rightly be called a journey to revisit my roots, the trip to Miami might well have been to another country for one so young as I.  So much to see, such a different landscape and lifestyle.  I loved the sun and bathing and floating around after my aunt and grandparents.

If Miami seemed a far country, we were yet to make, in fact, a real international jaunt.

Card, poem, photos all brought back to me not only that experience, but a more historically significant one, for from Miami we’d flown to Havana, where my grandfather had some business interests.  An inventor of machines for special industrial interests, he and his company had ties to the Cuban and American companies that dominated commerce on the island before Castro’s revolution. 

Since I was young at the time, the images I can recall from that marvelous visit are few, but still clear:  the balcony of our hotel over a street teeming with vibrant life…merchants, shoppers, music, a cacophony of different languages; a dinner at a client’s elegant ranch house farther out in the country where I’d seen my first finger bowl, in each a fragrant flower floating; a walk along the harbor where (remember how young I was) the push and pull of the foot traffic had me huddling between my aunt and grandparents.  How I would like to visit that city and country again now, when so much more of my eyes, ears, curiosity, and knowledge would broaden the adventure considerably.

Cuba today…having been closed to us Americans for so many decades, changed in its relationship to us, its culture and its own historical evolution…would be a wonderful juxtaposition to those small scenes of ancient memory.

But back to our own diggings: the watercolor I’d painted for that birthday emanated, as such images usually do, from the day and the recipient.  It was raining, but earlier that morning it had not yet swelled with dark clouds.  I thought of that first view and how I might preserve it on waking.

Inside the watercolor was the inscription, which rather than explain (we don’t explain poems, I kept telling my students for 40 years; they are what they are…and what you bring to them), I reproduce here:

RAIN, ON YOUR BIRTHDAY

It is a gray day, four hundred-some miles from

where we should be, and will be soon, lunching with you

in honor of your eighty-second birthday, laughing at old

pictures around the table by the window at the shore;

not there yet but here, the rain is falling in that steady, persistent

way you have always advised for growing—grass, flowers,

an even tide of white-edged waves coming in its wake.

And in appreciation, the bright zinnias dance in their pots,

the herbs unfold into dense plenty, the sanctuarial hydrangeas,

even now on their way out of season, preen and shine

becoming the character of the exotic, the faraway.

For I am thinking of other rains…not only there at the shore

years ago, when we play in the garage or bathhouse,

keeping ourselves busy with old slickers and puckered

cast-off hats from the cellar door, you laughing as,

rippling the wet boardwalk, we raced the molded carriage

up and down, soaking ourselves, or washed clam shells to paint

for a sidewalk stand when the sun and beachgoers returned,

but in other, farther places—Miami and Havana for me,

Scotland and the Hague for you—where as well the rain still falls

in our memory.  Small and leery of new shores, swarming

marketplaces, hustling streets crowing garbled tongues,

I balk and you coax me down from the high, ornate balcony

of our hotel, taking me to dinner in the tropical rooms of strangers

as if all this were only family again at our own complicated,

complicitous tables at home.

It didn’t rain in the parrot jungle,

or at the alligator farm where the wrestlers pretended to battle

the embattled; it might have rained once or twice the days

we planned to go fishing or bathing, but in those old photographs,

the sun seems ubiquitous—dancing on the picnic table in the yard

of palms and flagrant bougainvillea, chasing away territorial crows;

posing well-dressed and territorial myself against the tall,

white marble memorial to a forgotten city’s past, or sitting

like beauty queens on the sand—you always beside me, behind me,

guardian and guarded guest; still in your twenties then, and I only five,

we seemed like short and long echoes of each other, one practiced,

the other practicing for:  a good girl's dream of aunt and me.

That last line, I know, probably resounds in a lot of families...the aunt who took us under her wing, the aunt who was sweet, the aunt who gave us treats (and remembered what we liked best), the aunt who was a shoulder to lean on, an ear to hear what we had to say, the aunt who told us without hesitation family stories, and drew us into them.

It takes no digging at all to bring up the way our aunts all played such enormous roles in our growing years.  It hardly takes a photo, for we carry their leanings in us always.  But introducing this blog is one of my favorite photos, also found in that envelope with the Miami/Cuba images...three of my aunts at my mother's birthday party a considerable time later in time though not affection.  If you are an artist (and even if you aren't), look at the ease with which we arrange ourselves into this composition.  This is a picture of what I think of when I think of my aunts.

Life Changes

This time of year, there are quiet shifts in our neighborhood.  People leave and return from vacation, or leave permanently for newer horizons, like the couple who stayed in the house behind me, doing a fellowship here before returning to their home state where a job and their baby's grandparents awaited them.  The house is empty now, so we're all waiting to see who will next become part of our world.  Except for that cottage and a newly built house down the block with a young family arrived, there's been remarkably little removing among us.

 As summer has progressed, we ourselves have come and go (though not speaking of Michelangelo), by all sorts of means, connecting to families far-flung.

Life changes in less dramatic ways all the time:  children grow, heads and beards thicken or thin, strides lengthen and shorten, voices rise and lower, shadows in windows quicken and slow.  And on the horizon, changes  await our connection with them, some planned, some unplanned.

🔀

In this house, which I had begun to call The Inn for the frequent company I enjoyed, most of the rooms have these past few weeks been in an uproar, readying for some new residents to join me.  My aunt and uncle, now in a retirement village (think hundreds of acres, hundreds of "homes", a 30 minute bus ride across "campus"), will be my housemates.  Their changing health, until lately pretty good, and increasing blindness make watchful care more necessary.  I've certainly got the room to include them.  This is a house used to change, having been built as and remained a college rental until I took it over and changed its character.  Its spaces, perhaps oddly situated for newer houses, are nonetheless amenable to the shifts of various living requirements.  So it didn't take a lot of imagination to see that simply switching what was the large sitting room with what was the smaller guest room across the hall would produce a comfortable and private space for two, even given the usual multi-generational comings and goings around here.

But you know how renovations blossom:  once you begin to move and replace, other projects (not a few waiting in the wings for "some day") rear their heads, crying "What about me??"

For instance, I'd been wanting to paint the kitchen ever since I saw the wall color I'd initially chosen drain it of life.  What better time than the present when I am in the midst of change anyway?   This time I borrowed the tried and true Honey Gold from the dining room walls. As I cleared shelves and walls and counters to begin the job, the dining room, in consequence, drew itself up, affronted with piles of everyday pottery, ceramics, glassware, tools, piles of cookbooks, linens...how on earth does one collect so much in a kitchen?


Meanwhile, my own room, formerly Poetic Plum from a wild impulse I'd had when I moved in, found itself being repainted Quietude.  I have to say that none of the art, quilts or drapes turned a hair at the tonal shift; it's as if they were waiting for the restful background as much as the kitchen was for its new sunny disposition.





Thinking about whom I was trying to accommodate, I realized a few updates were due to the bathroom, too...a grab bar, uncluttered cabinets, and a lick of cleaner white, though after the first coat I realized I'd used the wrong shade...do you know how many whites there are?  I made a coat closet out of a storage closet, and rearranged the laundry room for easier use.  As stuff collected and as the back rooms traded identities, the mountain of Things I Don't Need and Wonder Why I'm Keeping grew and grew.  I sent out a plangent call for help moving, shifting, dragging out, fixing, restyling...and fortunately--and gratefully--I received agreeable responses.

The closets needed emptying and clearing, too.  For a few nights, I dug in, unearthing boxes of photographs, each a home for a different era of life...old relatives (a few nameless, though I might recognize a face), childhood, parents' lives, college lives, children's lives, husband lives, houses and towns, friends, travels, keepsakes from all sort of situations and circumstances.  Didn't that set my work schedule back a day! But on they went to their new memory closet.  Along with six file boxes of letters, calendars and cards, a set of graduation portraits, a stack of unhung diplomas, awards, citations for work I'd forgotten I'd done, etc. A bin of family history took up the whole bottom shelf; it's still uncatalogued after two decades.  Another bin (my grandfather's old suitcase, actually) of memorials, firmly shut since I stored them, remained so.  As did files of old stories and manuscripts, and odd clippings.  But alas their new storage was only half the size of the previous one, and so the mountain rose, nonetheless.

How does so much get crammed into a life, I wonder?  How does one ever get so far carrying all that baggage?  Not to mention those six bookcases of books that had to come down from their dusty shelves and be replaced...somewhere.

At first, all the clutter of lives past shifting from room to room appeared so beside the point. Perhaps by then I was tired of the shoving and stretching and rolling, the undoing and the redoing. The recycling bin yawned temptingly. One by one, though, each photograph and souvenir had brought up a whole world of not only memory but perspective, and even invention, forecasting analogies to come.

One item in particular reminded me of the move I made forty-one years ago last month, halfway across the country to a new home: two babies, a suitcase each, diaper bags and toys, purse and papers...and no promised airline aide in sight (thanks, Delta).  I got a cart, piled everything and everybody on it, and somehow we made our connecting flight and arrived at the right future.

Where then, I ask myself, looking at time's detritus surrounding me these days, do all those other former lives, belong in the present and future I step into day by day?

Yes, yes, I'm getting a bit too metaphysical, I know.  Aristotle and Descartes would have words on the subject, but, I'm sorry to say, wouldn't solve the problem.  (Philosophy mostly fails when presented with actual life situations.)

Where are the boundaries of a life?  Are our eras simply short stories unveiled in monthly series?  Are they novels, where chapters fall into one another, if not seamlessly at least relatively?  Are they shelf-fulls of encyclopediae kept for reference, or infinite databases that link the known and the unknown in sometimes scary connection?  What do I save?  What can be left, safely, like the children in Amy Tan's story, along the way?

Please don't suggest that I digitalize everything and put it on discs.  The horror of that storage system (at least for me) is best exemplified by considering the difference between a still, constant photograph of one's grandchild, framed on the side table one passes fifty times a day, and the photographs stored on a flash drive one catalogs efficiently but never thinks to download and open.  Well, but, my niece reminds me, you could still have a digital photo frame on the table to show one by one...

Or maybe I ought to project a screen on a wall, like those photographic art exhibits in museums: in frame after frame, the artist in period costume, taking eccentric poses, and the people around her, some related, some not, appearing over and over again mouthing words no one can hear, in places one has to stand and wonder over.  It's tempting.  If only I had a free wall.

In any case, it does take a life change to remind us where we've come from.  I'd like to believe that we'd also find the map to the future in those same frames, too.

From Where I Sit

[Note:  I'd written this a few weeks ago and forgotten to publish it, so consider it a letter lost for a while in the mail...]

I sit here writing

The heat surge the last weeks feels almost August except for the fan above, cooling me. This porch is the best part of this house these days; it was inevitable that I'd add it on here, as all the houses I've inhabited have had a place like it where, thanks to breezes and shade, you could be in the garden but not among the bugs and heat.

People around here consider the porch a Southern thing, but I think that's a bit provincial.  Growing up, the porch on our first house made a play area in rainy weather out from under our mother's feet.  The front porch at the shore slept men coming in late from work at night (the women and children all crowded into the beds upstairs) and provided a good place to hide with a good book during the day on the swing.  It's still the place to chat, read, write letters, nap, enjoy tea, coffee, wine or a gin and tonic with people who drop in.  

When we taught in New Hampshire or visited my parents there on weekends, the porch in either house was the first place I'd take my cup in the mornings, whatever the season.  One memorable dawn, I looked out to a mother bear raiding the garden, while her cubs sat in the patio chairs below me, picking at the pillow ticking, obviously having been told to "be good and sit here now, while I get us breakfast".

At our old home in Washington, the open front porch quickly introduced us to the neighborhood, and the back screened porch became so much an extension of the kitchen that most of the year the door between them stayed wide open as we wandered in and out, to bring the day or the groceries in, do the crossword, plan the next garden shape or escape from a crowded kitchen.  On warm days in December, even, it was a place to retreat from winter.

front porch on main street

In quieter moments, I could paint there, the light perfect.  I did one of my best works at that table, a complication of watercolor, wire, screen and beads worked into a folding, falling-open sort of book I called Back Porch Journal.  (Amazingly, the fine art show judge that year actually got what it was...)

back porch journal, 2011

These days, sometimes at the near-end of a walk, I'll park myself on a bench in the arboretum, a kind of porch itself, to contemplate the quiet. 

view from a bench in the arboretum

The other morning, likewise, I stopped on campus to sit under the wide porch of one of the buildings, and talked to my aunt on the phone for a while.  There was a huge tree in front of me I couldn't name, but its arches made a kind of canopy over the sidewalk, and it gave me the feeling of facing a high foyer where summer's glare was kept at bay.

view from a porch bench on campus

 You can see all sorts of things from a porch, like looking out a window without frame.  Not only who or what passes by, but interior passages, too.  You can hear yourself think, and that's not a bad thing, especially these days, when (often deliberately) distracting noises from everywhere seem to cloud our brains.  You can hear others...really listen to children, friends, neighbors, passersby, whether you are the intended audience or not. You're not eavesdropping, but you are connecting with the world as it comes and goes.

The word from the porch or the street, the casual remark of a stranger in passing...they're all clues to the reality beneath the reality shows that seem to pass for what is.  Leaving aside the generalities of opinion polls and flash-talk, and listening instead to the personal and highly individual thoughts of people who speak and act as themselves, means that we can adopt the human values we practice one person at a time.  On the porch, they tend to come out in more reflective, considerate, and respondable ways.

We may not like everything we hear or see, but that vantage point, from where we sit, gives us leave to try to understand it and put it in perspective, whether we agree with it or not.  And then we can think about where we really stand.  And why. The three-second (or 10-word) spits we've been encouraged to adopt as communication too often tend to degenerate rational thought into fallacy. Porches slow us down, make us take a wider view of the neighborhood and the world where we belong.

Porches bring us back to calm reason and sense, and to belief.  They return us to ourselves.

Old Houses

These days I am in draft mode...everything I begin to write, except grocery lists, mostly fades off  the page unfinished.  Posts like From Where I Sit and Out of Grandmother's Kitchen lie in wait for reclamation, though from the first they seemed the word of the day--along with probably something else I've meant to say that's left the field now.  I blame the heat, but I think it's something more pressing I can't name.

Meanwhile, searching for inspiration of the tactile sort, I drift over the surfaces in my studio (lately invaded by youngsters seeking their own inspiration), picking over pieces of rusted wire, pink silk thread, mother-of-pearl buttons, copper fragments, and dried paint and glue, also waiting.

In a box at the edge of my work table, which my father had built when we moved into our old house in Washington twenty years ago, I find the watch face and works that my Aunt Sadie had given me a few weeks ago.  She took it from her jewelry drawer, saying, as she prefaces all such heritage, "And what am I going to do with this?"  She means for me to take it, and I do, along with the story of how it comes to be in this box, bare and unhoused for so many years.

"It was your grandfather's gold pocket watch," she tells me, "but during the Depression they had to sell all their gold..."  She doesn't remember who gave him the watch, or what the occasion, but his early history was so rich with possibilities that it could have been anyone, anywhere, whyever.  He'd traveled a good bit as a young man, seeking with his father homes for their family...Italy to Argentina, finally to New York and Philadelphia where, married by then, he began his own regeneration. For an engineer, as were the men in his family, a watch like this would be an important accessory.  But when the time came, it proved its worth by giving up its gold.

This is the kind of object which turns up often among my aunts' keepsakes, the kind I can never turn down.  This one creates in my mind, almost the instant she hands it to me, the book I will make around it, to make up for the housing it has missed for nearly 90 years. I can practically see it finished, though I haven't even started to gather the materials.  It's a book about time, and what time brings us forward and also back to.

Consider the clues in this time-in-a-box.  My aunt must have barely begun school then, those desperate transactions taking place as far beyond her ken as parental discretion would allow, though even she must have known what it cost to put a meal on the table.  She was the youngest of four children, and sometimes eating meant going down to their cousin Annie's farm, where other relatives gathered to help and to take nourishment in that generous place.  In photographs (I hope I can dig one up...it's around here somewhere), they look happy enough to be pictured among the greens and squashes at the edge of the field.  The stories of oatmeal for dinner and home lost, a good business suddenly curbed and other means invented to earn a bare living...sons having to leave school, daughters taking in piece work at night...they carry on generation by generation, so that, if only in the abstract, we understand what they endured.  And, more important, how the workings of life went on anyway, sans gilt.

So this watch, still its unhoused self in its box, comes to mean all that history and more...it also comes to mean, looking forward, that we are never without the possibility of privation, even in such spoiled-rich times as these.  Food on the table and a house to live in, a useful way of life, are always going to be the primary goals of our lives; everything else we believe we hunger for is needless, easily disposable.  It's ironic that our mechanism for timekeeping is also a reminder that there are timeless struggles--and ways of endurance--living invisibly among us, and it's well not to forget them.

At The Shore

My aunt tells me, "I'd like to see the shore once more..."  My uncle agrees that it would be good to have a break from the usual, their very nice but more restrictive apartment life in the retirement village they moved to last year.  My aunt will be 98 in a month, and with both sight and hearing challenges, and her heart giving us pause, a breath of sea air seemed understandingly appealing.

To be truthful, there was a lot of resistance, others wondering, protectively, at the sense of such a journey at her age and in her condition.  My uncle, too, also a late nonagenarian, might find it as difficult to be driven the three hours from their present home to their old one, and adjust to the different space.

But in all her years, she hasn't missed one shore stay for the 72 years the house has been in the family, and strangeness wasn't part of the equation for either of them.  So why not go once more to the place where, as my mother used to say, life was "easy in, easy out" and at the very edge of the world find some well-deserved peace and familiarity?  Sometimes, safety is a excuse we use (though with all good intention) to save others, and sometimes ourselves, from the risk of living well.

So off we went.  The weather for the most of our week was grand--beautiful blue skies, calm ocean, refreshing breezes even as the heat soared inland, the early-season pleasure before the vacation crowds began.  One day we even managed to sit on the beach, watching the waves roll in.  As the weekend approached, the wind shifted direction, the waves grew frillier, and the currents drew in their brows, promising rip tides.  But the sky only sprinkled now and then on us those days, leaving plenty of time to walk the boardwalk a few times a day, sit on the deck in sun or shade, shop for new shoes and beach clothes, meet with family we don't see often, and entertain visitors.  At night there were cards and cribbage, and the fishing boat lights and the corp of engineer dredgers at work (the effects of hurricanes linger) against the blackness. In other words, shore life as usual.

The week went quickly; I was sorry not to have scheduled us a bit a longer, as it was clear how invigorating it was to them.  They walked longer and longer; they took stairs more surely (and sometimes startlingly more independently), and were up for anything.  It was, as my aunt kept saying, "a good change".

And for me, it was a hopeful and instructive lesson in how to live.

Change is most of the time good for us.  It's always a risk turning blind corners (all corners are blind, even the ones we think we can see around), not knowing how the future will turn out.  But it can also be a means of believing that, yes, we're still alive and up for anything.  That we still have the courage to face the unforeseen and the strength to accept it.

Especially when we're at the very shore of the biggest life event of all.

________________________________________

Meanwhile, the younger generation, still oblivious to the vulnerability of age, picks up where we leave off.  They're crabbing this afternoon, after dowsing each other with water balloons on the deck and shoveling their way to buried treasure in the sand.  Nights, they do puzzles, try bingo and an ocean version of Monopoly.  Just as we did.  Sometimes the years bring no change at all, a most welcome, most gratifying thing to behold...part of the pleasure of growing older.

This is the Song

Home now, I am listening to the soundtrack that some months ago my brother asked his brother-in-law Mo to put together and give us for his memorial this past weekend.

It's a peaceful, beautiful, still-cool June morning, sun filtering through the trees and warming up to the idea of warming us as the day grows.  I've waited until this moment to play it so I could hear it pure, if you will.  Elton John's on now.

My gift is my song and this one's for you...

As with the soundtrack of everyone's life, its lines are what we remember Tom for.

Keep Me in your Heart for a While

The Weight

Over the Hills and Far Away

Heart of Gold

Friend

How Long Will I Love You

Peaceful Easy Feeling

Uptown Funk

Message in a Bottle (I hope that someone gets my)

Closer to the Sun

Time of Your Life...

Lots more.  Two discs full.  I started, unintentionally, with disc 2, entitled Follow the Sun. 

But the sun's been quite kind while I wrote this song

It's for people like you that keep it turned on

Ironically, there wasn't much sun for our gathering; it rained every single day for a week, and in the few hours when a vague clearing allowed, we could walk on the beach, go for a swim, stretch our limbs a bit, keep umbrellas at the ready.

 All the other 90% of the time we were together in one house or another, where there was a lot of talk and a lot of food (we are who we are), some drama, some pain, a lot more things to laugh over, and much more than that to be thankful for, mostly each other.

And you can tell everybody, this is your song

It may be quite simple but now that it's done

I hope you don't mind that I put down in words...

And there was music, lots of music every night.

Music in the ceremony, music in the video his son and niece made for us to reflect on his life, music long into the night when we played, one by one or in twos and threes, and everybody sang.  My brother Charles had written a song for him, which Tom had gotten to hear back in February, and he sang it again for us.

I hereby apologize to poor Jean's neighbors for the din of forty grownups shouting Boardwalk at the top of their lungs, but I also admit I'm not sorry. For a moment, whoever we be on our own, we who gathered were singing the same song.

...how wonderful life is while you're in the world

In my mother's youth, every family event rang with piano, strings, voices...opera, folk, popular, dance. Meanwhile, children ran in and out, cooks cooked, aunts danced, men weighed matters, stories passed on.  She and her father would think ours was nothing new, but would surely be pleased that somewhere in the genetic material passed on to us, the impulse to song continues.

So, yes, we got the message in the bottle, Tom.  We know who you were and still are. We know who we are, too...the ones who keep playing your life, who keep it turned on.

There's a reason that our favorite time of day, the one we get up in the morning to meet, the one we take most photographs to keep, is sunrise. 

Even if on some days, as my sister's wall reminds her, you have to make your own sun.

Rain

This past week, for five days straight, we have had heavy rain.  Finally the other day some blue, a lovely blue, began to show itself behind the thick cloud cover we'd gotten too used to.  I'd gone to visit Eileen and Jim last weekend when the rain began in earnest, so our usual treks to gardens and trails were reduced to a fast few hours at Biltmore between the drops.

Instead, we spent the weekend on two of our favorite indoor activities:  we did a puzzle (the one I brought, birdhouses in a mess of leaves sunny and shaded, drove us mad), and we baked.

Rainy days, it always seems to me, inspire filling the house with good aromas.  I will be quick to note that not all baking does well in damp weather (this from experience), but mostly the effort yields soul-satisfying results.

What we worked on were treats for our upcoming Florida return in early June for our brother Tom's memorial.  So much of the family will be together...a too-rare occasion...that we thought some family comfort would be welcome.  Tom's brilliant wife Jean had already sent us the message that mourning clothes were prohibited ("No suits and ties!" she wrote), only bright, cheerful array, please.  We were quick to agree.  It reminded me of another funeral seventeen years ago, when the dress I most wanted to wear (and did) was cardinal red; black just didn't seem to reflect what my heart was pounding out, no matter how devastated.

Anyway, the first thing we thought to make was, of course (family will understand this qualifier), biscotti.  Though over the years Aunt Sadie came to prefer Judy's Biscotti, a recipe she found in the newspaper, we relatively younger ones tend to start out with our grandmother's, the first one of three or four in the family cookbook.   This time, though I'm often caught tinkering with it, I stuck to the traditional recipe, which the occasion seemed to call for.

But variations are always so tempting.  Add grated lemon peel, add cranberries, add almonds, add walnuts, add chocolate...

To wit:  a few days later, just returning home, I found an email from Alda Widmer, a new friend from Milan, which prompted a dinner together the next evening.  Alda, a photographer, is planning a book that highlights her work with vegetables and fruits. When I met her earlier in the year, she and I had a linguistically challenging but entertaining chat about its possibilities, and I'd promised to help.  I'd also promised that, next time she and her husband Franco Bocci came to the US to visit their son Paolo and his family, they would come to dinner.  So I made good that promise first of all.

The rain still on its determined downfall, I decided to bake another batch of biscotti to welcome them.  The thought had occurred to me, even while I was at work on those traditional ones, that there would be nothing wrong with a savory version.  One could pretty easily cut the sugar and add herbs and/or spices and have something a little different.  Though Eileen seemed lukewarm about the idea ("Let me know how they turn out," was her comment...to the tune of I probably wouldn't do it), I set out to experiment on my company.  I'm sorry.  Despite advice to the contrary, I do that, I'm afraid.

With all this sky-fall, you can imagine how the herbs in my garden are proliferating, so I was, as the Scots say, spoiled for choice.  But as I also had some ginger in the cupboard, I reached for rosemary as a natural companion.  I left the sugar mostly out, along with the vanilla, and sprinkled in a little powdered ginger to go with the crystallized dice.  It worked, not only for me, but for my Italian guests and cousins who joined us.  With scoops of lemon ice and blackberries, the biscotti shone.

But that was later the next day.  While the biscotti cooled, I went on cooking as the ground outside soaked.  I'd gone to the only market I could think of that might have the main ingredient of what I really wanted to cook for my Italian friends...a ragu of coniglio...but, alas, rabbit was not to be found. Six or seven years ago, there would surely have been a package in my freezer, but (also alas) no longer.  So I picked up five lowly chicken breasts and made do with the same recipe.  It wasn't bad. In fact, I was pretty proud of the whole menu, if I say so myself.

Antipasto of marinated artichokes, tuna, and pickled beets

Tomato-ginger relish, goat cheese, and ciabatta

Ragu of chicken over polenta

Orange and fennel salad over mache 

with orange vinaigrette

Lemon ice with blackberries

Rosemary-ginger biscotti

In case you are thinking that guests, being guests, will, whatever they are served, politely compliment a host's dinner, I offer for proof the facts that, first of all, the conversation, in at least three languages, some unintended, was lively, and second, on the next day I fed the leftovers to my children and had no complaints whatsoever.

As far as I was concerned, the hit of the evening was what became of some spectacular heritage tomatoes--bright yellow, orange and burgundy--I'd grabbed on sale.  Beautifully ripe, they were.  So I thought more about that ginger and found online a recipe for tomato-ginger relish.  I tweaked it only a little to produce my prize.  (That recipe is now stuck in the family cookbook forever.) We could have made a meal just of the relish, the chunks of ciabatta I cut from the table basket, and a log of goat cheese, but I would never do that to dinner guests, at least not the first time a tavola.

Anyone who has been on the receiving end of what I've cooked knows too well that I am also capable of making spectacular culinary blunders, so please be generous in forgiving me for bragging a little.

I do think, however, that our upcoming neighborhood Memorial Day picnic will garner another success from my kitchen.  Look what I gathered at the Saturday Farmer's Market this morning.  Can you imagine the possibilities?

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And another thing:  on this Memorial Day, don't forget to celebrate all the people who have given our lives their most valuable gifts...life, freedom, friendship, and a good table

to bring them together.