Still here

Yes, I'm still here.

Time has passed, holidays have come and gone. There was a snowstorm. Now, after three days of blue skies, green grass, and at least one day of sixty-something temperatures, it seems that more snow is on the way. Sporadic huge gusts of wind are causing miscellaneous stuff (stuff that I didn't quite get around to putting away yet, like the lightweight plastic chairs) to fly all over the yard. On the plus side, the winter solstice has passed and the days are getting longer now.

Various holidays have come and gone, as have various daughters and grandchildren. The daughter who lives nearby (that would be H) will be presenting me with grandchild number three - a baby boy - in the very near future. I can't wait! In the meantime she has been afflicted with a rotten cold, requiring much TLC, including vats of lemon ice.

Recent preoccupation: the ipod that Santa brought! I must have been muttering about all the educational content that's available now on-line, through MIT and any number of other places. I had been thinking it would be very cool to be able to listen to these things while "on the go". Still some fine tuning to be done, but yes, this is indeed possible. In the meantime I discover that there is something called "itunesU" - a source of free academic content from all over.

There, for example, I found a terrific series of talks by Umberto Eco - the "Ellman lecture" - given just this past October at Emory University. Any writers who happen to be reading this (you know who you are) would particularly enjoy the first one, called "How I Write". And for the impatient, there's quite a nice summary here.

Lots of reading, much of it worth commenting on, but that's a lot of work and organization, and that kind of writing doesn't come easily to me. December tends to be a time for more cookbook and general recipe browsing than the norm, and I found myself re-reading Laurie Colwin's wonderful two volumes: Home Cooking, and More Home Cooking. In one of them she lets drop: "basically all I do is read". Hey - me too. That made me feel a little less like a complete lump.

Right now I'm making a big vat of her easier-than-easy black bean soup. She invites you to set it on a flame tamer - long a favorite gizmo of my own - and - daringly - LEAVE THE HOUSE for five hours, which I am not doing only because of the aforementioned wind, etc.

My new year's resolution: to be a better and more frequent blogger. We'll see how that works out. A happy 2009 to all!

Carmina Burana

I'm a random concertgoer at best. It's usually a matter of a friend with an extra ticket. So it was for last Friday's remarkable performance of Carl Orff's cantata, Carmina Burana. I wouldn't have the musical vocabulary to describe such a work - but the rave review (at the link) does it well. You can see the setup in the photo: three vocal soloists in front, facing the audience; behind them, the conductor and the NJ Symphony Orchestra, and in the rear, the chorus, consisting of the combined voices of the Moscow Conservatory Chorus and the Montclair State University Chorale. 266 performers in total. What an undertaking it must have been to coordinate this!

My friend and I were both fighting the sniffles. She went for a cup of chamomile tea at intermission; I sucked maniacally on Cold-Eeze. I was OK until I got home, but spent the next forty-eight hours flat on my back.

Back among the living now, still savoring the memories of that exhilarating experience.

Dewey Defeats Truman

Yes, I was only eight, but we were Trib readers and I remember the headline, and my midwestern father's horror when the error was revealed (even though he had briefly, in his youth, been an FDR democrat). Nobody thought Truman could win. I think that's why nobody has dared to call this race in advance, even when it seemed impossible to be wrong.

I couldn't vote in the 1960 election (you had to be twenty-one then, and I had just turned twenty) but I remember watching the famous JFK-RMN debate on a rented dorm TV set (TV wasn't at all a part of college life then), and going to see Dick and Pat in a motorcade in downtown Boston. I remember staying up for most of the night to watch the returns (a different rented TV) and feeling disheartened and a little frightened when that young, untested senator had prevailed. What about Qemoy and Matsu? Even in that hotbed of liberalism I was still my father's daughter.

I've voted since 1964 (12 times for President -why does it seem like more?) and I'd have a hard time remembering which candidate I actually voted for in many of those elections. More than once it was for the third-party candidate, or even a "wasted" vote on the Libertarian. I always felt as if I were voting "against" someone, rather than "for" someone.

Yesterday was the first time I can actually remember casting a vote with strong conviction and the fervent hope that my candidate would win. It was a great feeling. And now that he has won, I can participate in the national euphoria - so like the one that followed the 1960 election.

As my ten-year-old granddaughter told her father, while being tucked in (way past her bedtime), "now I understand why you wanted us to stay up".

Where has the time gone?

When you haven't blogged for a while, it's hard to know where to start. It has been, and continues to be, a beautiful fall.

Just back from a good weekend with the kids in Boston. The usual gamut from the sublime (fabulous dinner with the whole gang at Blue Ginger, Ming Tsai's restaurant in Wellesley) to the ridiculous (spending an entire day sorting through 935,778 teensy and totally mixed up Legos -first separating by color and then transforming them into a fleet of helicopters, ambulances, fire trucks, various vehicles, houses....)

Dinner with H&D at Halcyon, the new "seafood brasserie" in Montclair. I don't envy anyone trying to open a new restaurant in this economy, but I predict that this one will endure. Can't wait to go back.

Several worthy NYC adventures. The Morandi show at the Met. The prefab housing at the MOMA. Bryant Park! Former druggie heaven, now one of the most civilized and urbane places in the city. The lunch scene is amazing, fueled by great HEALTHY take-out places that have sprouted up along Sixth Ave and beyond: Wichcraft, Pret a Manger, Pax...

A peaceful day of bridge with friends in Mantoloking - "down the shore".

A lot of good reading. Notably:

Telex from Cuba, by Rachel Kushner. National Book Award finalist, about Americans in Cuba in the fifties. Written from multiple points of view, including children. Outstanding.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande. Thought-provoking essays by MacArthur Fellow.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, by Peter Godwin. Zimbabwe memoir. Author, who grew up there and lives now in NYC, wrote previous memoir about childhood. In this one he returns to visit aging parents (physician and mining engineer), describes current horrors under Mugabe regime and discover's father's surprising past as a Polish Jew during WWII.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer. Epistolary novel about Channel Island residents who lived under Nazi occupation from 1941 to end of war. Light and charming, despite the grim subject (maybe inappropriately so?).

The Size of the World, by Joan Silber. Glowing review in Boston Globe led me to this one. Six stories that take place across time and space, but with characters who are all linked. I want to read more of this writer's work.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski. An Oprah pick now, I see. "Hamlet with hounds", as described by Janet Maslin. I look at dogs differently now. But it's not really about dogs. How will they make it into a movie?

All highly recommended. And there are some others I'll save for another post.

News addiction

I thought it was just me.

Link to NYT article.

The letters

Still in need of peace and solace after a rocky week in the news. So here are a few more Adirondack pictures from last week.

A view of the field, from the road.

Same field, but looking toward the lake.

Another glimpse of the water, from down the road.

Here are the original main gates to the house. The driveway is kept mowed, but isn't really used any more.
Approaching from that direction, you'd see the house from this oblique angle. I can spend all day just walking around the house, and up and down the road. I think that by now I've taken hundreds of photographs. Always different, and yet always the same.

But remember those letters? Here we are in the attic. See that big box on the right, behind the wicker chair?

Here's a closer view.
This is the stash of letters I came across last summer. I knew I was going to have to revisit them sooner or later. I believe that they are mostly from the thirties and forties, covering the period when my mother and her sisters were in college (during the depression) and later, starting their families during the war. I assume that the letters are mostly from the three sisters to their mother, my grandmother, and to each other, and possible to Tante, their aunt. But I won't really know til I've managed to sort through them all. Where to begin?

The box is much too heavy to lift. You can see that the letters have been at least roughly sorted into groups, tied with string and ribbon. I finally decided to stuff a bunch of them at random into a black plastic bag and bring them home with me. I can barely lift the bag, and yet the box is still nearly full.

Never having done a project like this, I am not even sure how to begin. Will I want to arrange them chronologically? Or by writer? Or recipient? Subject? Stay tuned.

Stability and continuity

The Adirondack house provided welcome relief from last week's financial turmoil. Abraham Beecher, my many-times-great-grandfather, walked here from Connecticut and settled here nearly two-hundred years ago. Here are the fields he first cleared, and the stone walls he built. A survivor of wars, depressions, recessions, and more, the place never changes. It is an oasis of calm.

And something good to eat is always in the works. Here's daughter G turning out a batch of doughnuts for Saturday breakfast.

The main project for the weekend: the chicken house. The always hard-working grandkids, C and L, want to turn it into a "bunkhouse" - a place where they and their cousins and friends can hang out. It's been years since there were any chickens in residence, so there are decades of debris to be removed. That's my father's old boat in there. We'll have to find another place for it, I guess.

Bar Pie

Is this a common term? A New Jersey thing? Another place I could easily walk to (but don't) is the Star Tavern - an institution beloved by many, and believed by some to be the source of New Jersey's best pizza. I can't very well eat a whole one, and they don't sell it by the slice, so I never think of going there. But I had a craving today. And I found out that you can sit at the counter and order a smallish (and cheap!) "bar pie" - perfect! Who knew?

On the way I stopped at the high school recycling bins to load up on more big sheets of flattened corrugated cartons. The next phase of the lawn reduction program will be a large round strawberry bed in the middle of the upper back yard - at the base of the deck. To be planted in the spring. Is this getting out of hand or what?

Degrees of separation

1. David Foster Wallace's wikipedia entry states:

In The Top Ten (2006), a compilation of "top ten novels" lists by different writers, Wallace named C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters as his favorite novel.

2. I've forgotten the source (somewhere on youtube), but when Sarah Palin was asked about books, she claimed her favorite writer was C.S. Lewis.

What are we to make of this?

Steven Johnson

I've written before about the book club. We don't all read the same book - we read whatever strikes our fancy, then meet to briefly describe what we've read to the others. As one member remarked, it's a little like fourth grade book reports. Part of the deal is that the books are often made available for borrowing by the member/reporters.

So it was that I snagged the three in the photo above.

The one on the far right, "Everything Bad is Good for You", by Steven Johnson, is the only one of the three I've read so far. His premise is that - contrary to expection -there are certain aspects of popular culture that are actually causing a marked and measurable increase in intelligence among the general population. He calls it the Sleeper Curve. To make his point he focuses primarily on video games - the elaborate kind, such as Sim City, and Grand Auto Theft - and television shows - the "multi-threaded" plot kind, such as The Sopranos and 24. He argues that the brainpower needed to understand their complexities is far greater, and of a different sort, than what was needed to play PacMan, or watch the formulaic I Love Lucy, or Leave it to Beaver. It's an easy and convincing read.

I was surprised I hadn't heard of Johnson before, but then I realized that I HAD in fact known about him. I had read rave reviews of his 2006 book about the terrifying 1854 London cholera epidemic, The Ghost Map, and had meant to read it. Now it's on my library reserve list. And there's a new book coming out in December - about JB Priestley and the discovery of oxygen.

Johnson, a champion of urbanism, wrote a provocative series of essays on this topic called Urban Planet in the NYT, also in 2006. Well worth a click.

The eight of us at this meet-up mentioned over forty books. Most of these I won't ever read (mysteries, for example, are not for me). But I'm pleased that Steven Johnson is on my radar now.

A good cookie recipe

The read-what-you-want book club convenes here tomorrow, and I'll be setting these out. Not sure if you can tell from the hasty photograph, but these cookies are extremely thin and crisp and delicate. The kind that start out as tiny little blobs and spread out like mad while getting all bubbly and caramel-y. Very, very easy. And sort of healthy, because of the oatmeal. Here's the recipe:

Oatmeal Lace Cookies

1 c Rolled oats; quick-cooking
1/4 c All-purpose flour
1/2 ts Salt
1 1/2 ts Baking powder
1 c Granulated sugar
1/2 c Unsalted Butter; softened
1 Egg
1 ts Vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325 degrees; cover baking sheets with foil (or use Silpat or equivalent sheets), then coat with nonstick cooking spray.

In a medium bowl, combine the oats, flour, salt and baking powder; mix well with a wire whisk and set aside.

In a large electric mixer bowl, combine the sugar and butter and beat on medium speed to form a grainy paste. Add the egg and vanilla extract; beat until smooth. Add the flour mixture and blend just until combined.

Drop the dough by teaspoonfuls 2 1/2 inches apart onto the cookie sheets. Bake for about 10 minutes, or until the edges begin to turn golden brown. Let cool (this is IMPORTANT - they will be very soft at first), then peel the cookies from the foil with your fingers. Be sure to respray the cookie sheets between batches. (Note: I used Silpat, didn't respray, and nothing untoward happened. Also, I was able to easily remove the cooled cookies with a thin metal spatula - no "peeling" needed.)

I baked the sheets one at a time on the top rack. Watch carefully so they don't get too dark. Makes about 40

Guest photos

Daughter Z , back in LA, has just iphoned some of the photos she took of the gang.

So it wasn't all synchronized sliding. There was mini-golf, with G sinking impossible putts without ever putting down her purse. L thinks he's in Hawaii. C, newly interested in cooking and modeling her trendy new Hipchic outfit, prepared several wonderful meals for us. Here she's serving a sausage popover to H. Another night G and D took turns at the grill. Later there were Cranium matches - H and L were a formidable team. And checkers. Pigging out at Ginas - twice voted best bakery in NJ, and we could walk there, as well as to the market (middle bottom, taken by L) from H's house. Not shown: brunch at Raymonds, and, best of all, the amazing "helpers" - C and L - attacking my weedy brick path with vinegar, sharp knives, stone dust and a push broom for a truly professional result. Come back any time!

Synchronized sliding

Can two posts in rapid succession make up for a long silence? Probably not, but I will never be more than an occasional blogger. So - whatever.

Earlier today I had drafted a cranky post that rambled on about how discouraged I was about the garden. The combination of the Adirondack trip, and a long visit from the daughters and grandkids made for too much garden neglect, and neglect is not good for gardens. But then I came across this reassuring post, in which another gardener confesses to having neglected HER garden. Not only that, but a stream of commenters chimed in to confess that they TOO had neglected their gardens. So now I feel better. Isn't that a very good thing about blogs?

Anyhow, I didn't think I had taken ANY photos when the children were here, but when I downloaded the egg pictures I found just this one, which reminded me of one of the favorite activities. Both of them appear here, about to embark on one of many "synchronized slides", with Aunt H "judging" from the sidelines: EIGHT POINT THREE! she would call out. "Eight point three!" C would exclaim to L, and they would swim to their respective ladders, climb to the top, and try again. And again, and again.

I can always catch up with the weeds and the mulch, but who would want to miss a minute of synchronized sliding?

Exotic eggs and locovores

Does every Whole Foods Store have an exotic egg section? A LOCAL exotic egg section? Well, I already know that the answer is NO, because the smallish one in Montclair doesn't. But here we are in the West Orange megastore, which is much more fun when one is in a wandering, browsing mode, which is me, most of the time.

So - these are cute! Little quail eggs. I can imagine some fancy ways one might use these.

The duck eggs are recommended for baking, and for custards. "Eggier", and a little larger than chicken eggs, apparently. Now these I might actually try.

But check out the ostrich eggs! One egg feeds ten to twelve, they claim - scrambled or in a giant omelet. Hmmm. Would that justify the $40 price tag? I wonder who buys these.

No such goings on at the more pedestrian A&P. Still, it seems everyone wants to buy stuff that's LOCAL. I read not long ago that Walmart (oddly, one store that simply isn't to be found anywhere around here) is now a buyer of local produce on a very large scale. This seems to me to be a very good trend.

A wedding and a discovery

Did I mention that there had been a wedding at the Adirondack house? Only the second in the history of the house, the first being daughter G's, in 1993. The bride this time is not a family member, but the daughter of the man who has helped maintain the property (plumbing, lawn, general repairs and upkeep) for years. Jim knows more about the house than all the rest of us put together. He knew, of course, that we still had the wooden arbor from G's wedding in the garage. (It's been borrowed for at least one local high school prom, as well. )

Some of us mingled with the invited guests; others (e.g. grandson L and I) decided to stay inside and view the proceedings from this unusual perspective:

A slightly different view from the library window. If we step back a few feet we would be able to see those old magazines, and the newspaper. But what 's that on the windowsill? In the tray. A little set of leatherbound nature and wildlife guides. They've been there pretty much forever, I imagine, but I've never noticed them before.

I pick one up:

And look inside. This was my mother's book! The inscription, in my grandmother's familiar handwriting, reads: "Catharine Justine Sinclaire. Oct 2, 1920. Gloversville, with her own money (received for taking castor oil.)" Notice that the book cost $1.00. I guess that was the going rate for castor-oil-taking in 1920. Seems like a lot!

Mom would have been almost seven then. And the family would be occupying the house for the very first season. Just two days later, baby Clothilde, the youngest daughter, would be born. In the house, of course. The only birth to ever take place on the premises, even now.

I did bring the little book home with me, after double-checking with a few sixty-something cousins. Kind of an unwritten rule, but we don't just TAKE stuff - even now. Maybe especially now. But I'm having second thoughts. Maybe I ought to take it back. What if somebody needs to look up a wildflower?

Back with a digression about sweaters

As you might have guessed, I've been back for a while. Hiding. But you must know by now how long it takes me to shift gears, and get back into "home" mode. This seems to be particularly true when I visit the Adirondack house, which is not only a physical sort of trip (even though not that far) but - more importantly - a form of TIME travel.


And so much for idle promises. I took almost no photos, and the pastels stayed in their boxes. Worse yet, I didn't revisit the old letters except to ascertain that they were still there, and notice that there were quite a few more similar-looking boxes. One, that I just peeked into, appeared to contain all of my great-grandfather's bank statements and cancelled checks from 1938 and probably before. Things like $2.50 for auto repair.




Sorry, but I just couldn't get into it. I was really more interested, this time, in being around the children, living in the present. And it's not easy to do both. So I just brought down a couple of magazines (randomly chosen from stacks and stacks). A 1927 Vogue. A 1948 House and Garden. I put them casually on the desk in the library, thinking they'd make a nice complement to the 1952 NY Herald Tribune that's been there for years now, though not since 1952. Leafing through them there, I imagined that my grandmother (and others) must have read them when they were new in that very setting.


Except for the cast of characters, which is always shifting, from one set of third cousins to another, the activities and backgrounds stay the same. Children digging in the sand at the beach. Roasting corn off the kitchen porch. Picking blackberries. Playing games in the library (OK, this time it was watching the Olympics). I could post photos that were several years old and nobody would be the wiser. So, in fact, that's what I'll do:

Not all of these photos are related to the Adirondack House. The common theme is my sister, whose last visit was just three years ago, and who died suddenly and unexpectedly barely three months later. The photo in the top right shows the house as it must have appeared in the 1960's, and was taken by her. Until the advent of digital cameras (which never interested her), she was the family photographer, well-known for documenting pretty much everything. There she is with Supermom and the gang in the top middle photo, and in the middle right (in the Adirondack house kitchen. The bottom row photos are all from 2005 (I think), and the middle row (center and left) show her as a teenager and as a brand new college graduate.

Can you see why I might think that she really never aged or changed?

The reason I'm dwellling on all this is that while I was in the Adirondacks, there was an estate sale being held at her home in Wisconsin. Supermom and Quantum Void had taken what they wanted of the "good" things, but there was still a heck of a lot left over. Like EIGHTY shetland and Norwegian-type sweaters. Eighty!? Who knew that my sister was the Imelda Marcos of sweaters?

But then I started to think: most likely some, if not most of those sweaters dated from her high school and college years - maybe even earlier. Not one to follow fashion trends, she had, early on, found a look that suited her and stuck with it. And, since her size never really changed, what reason would she have had to get rid of any of those sweaters? And could you blame her for wanting to add a new one once in a while?

Letters from 1943? Bank statements from 1938? Eighty sweaters doesn't seem so unreasonable. It must be a family thing.

Hiatus

Taking a blogging break for a while. It's unlikely I'll be able to post from the Adirondack house, though there's always the local library, should there be something urgently blogworthy. I'll be
connecting with family there - daugher, grandchildren, cousins - including two of the very youngest of the new generation, one of whom I haven't yet met. We are so lucky to have this beautiful and unchanging family refuge.

I'm anxious, of course, to get back to that stash of letters in the attic. There won't be any gardening chores, which will seem a little weird in a cold-turkeyish sort of way, especially since I'll be fretting nonstop about what's happening at home. Gardeners really can't just LEAVE! But I'm taking the pastels. And the camera, of course. Oh, and a little spade. You never know what you might want to dig up a little of. Last year it was the variegated bishop's weed. We'll see how it goes.

Jam

This is the yummy jam I made out of the free peaches, along with a handful of supermarket raspberries. I'll have to keep it in the fridge and use it up fairly quickly, since I didn't have any official canning jars on hand. Somehow, I don't think that will be a problem, though there is quite a lot of it. One thing to note: I didn't bother to peel the peaches, and it didn't seem to be an issue. Nothing at all unpleasant about the texture or the taste. The skins just sort of dissolved, I guess, in the cooking. Another thing: most of the peaches were a bit underripe, but apparently that is a GOOD thing when it comes to jam-making qualities.

Blogging: doing it backwards

What do I know of blogging, really? I kind of stumbled on it. Some of the first blogs I noticed were food blogs. After a while I began to see a pattern: blog often, blog well, and, with luck you'll end up with a book deal.

One of my new favorite bloggers has turned the tables. Margaret Roach, of A Way to Garden, had, after a long career in garden journalism, including the writing of numerous books, reached the pinnacle of success as the director of all editorial content for Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Nowhere further to go. So, what does she decide to do, but chuck it all - ditch the corporate life, and retire to her gorgeous upstate New York garden and BLOG! What she really really likes to do is garden and write about gardening. So that's what she's doing. Lucky for the rest of us, she is really, really good at it.

Free mulch and peaches

I should have taken a picture. I'm driving home through Bloomfield, on one of those little side streets off Broad St and suddenly, on the curb, I see an enormous pile of black plastic trash bags and a hand-written sign: Free Mulch.

So of course I pull over to investigate. (I had scored a super-huge bag of fresh grass clippings just the other day, so my yard waste radar is working full-time.) The bags are all neatly closed with little knots. I open one. Inside, there's one of those brown paper yard waste bags, tighly sealed with plastic packing tape. I peel off the tape. Inside I see what appears to be dark, finely ground up wood. Perfect for the lawn reduction project!

So I cram what I can inside the car (trunk and back seat). Roughly half. I'll have to make a return trip. I zoom home, unload the bounty, and head back for more. While I'm loading up for the second time, a lady emerges from the house and greets me enthusiastically. I tell her how thrilled I am to be getting exactly what I need. A tree was taken down, she explains. She, having gone to all the work of bagging it all up, is equally thrilled that it is going to be put to good use.

She wants to help me load up the car. Then she wants to show me where the tree had been. (I am basically getting an entire ground up maple tree, neatly bagged.) It's one of those great old-fashioned back yards that makes you think it's 1952. Right in the middle is a peach tree, heavy with ripe peaches.

Wow! I say. Look at all those peaches! Want some? she asks. Of course! Aren't you going to use them? No - there might be bugs..... She has lived there for 45 years. Peaches aren't a novelty. Just a nuisance.

Sometimes I think I just live right. Don't ask about the swing, however.

Beets, Eggplant, and Apricots

My tendency, at the market, is to buy what looks good, then figure out what to do with it later on. So it was that I found myself with a counterful of fresh apricots, eggplant (4 different colors), and beets.
The apricot tart recipe came from Orangette, and it's based on a Zuni Cafe recipe.

I made it exactly as described. Easy and wonderful. If only fresh apricots were more often available. The eggplant went into this poorly photographed but delicious concoction from Simon Hopkinson's "Roast Chicken and Other Stories", blogged about (and much more temptingly photographed) here by Adam Roberts, The Amateur Gourmet. It's one of those sweet/spicy things: currants, tomatoes, onions, cumin, coriander, mint.... I wouldn't call it a quick summer dish to be thrown together in a flash. Au contraire - I was standing over a hot cast-iron skillet for quite some time. But the end result is very much worth the effort.

And here are the beets. Can you believe I have never in my life made a salad of raw grated beets? It is about to be my new favorite thing. A simple recipe from the Everyday Food cookbook, it's just raw beets and carrots shredded in the Cuisinart in a dressing of lemon juice, olive oil, honey, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, salt, cayenne, parsley.

Thankfully I am well fed, as the progress on the swing assembly is stalled for the moment. H and D came over and put together the A-frame end pieces. But they got stuck trying to attach the big top crosspiece to the ends. Perhaps those 6 inch bolts will grow an inch or so in the night, and I'll be able to properly attach the washer and nut on the other end in the morning.

Swing

Another assembly job in the works. I got the seat part together with relative ease, but am having a little trouble with the A-frame. It will replace the plastic chair in the far northeast corner of the garden. Years and years ago the children had a swing there, hanging from a tree. Both the swing and the tree are long gone. Now it's my turn to swing.

Nature

No complaints, really, as I have easy access to such a diverse range of activities. But one thing that's in short supply around here is open, untouched countryside. So I was surprised to hear from an acquaintance about this little nature preserve that is actually within walking distance (not that I'd be apt to walk there) and that I'd never known existed. I went over there this morning to check it out.Here we go!A more rustic trail leads off to the left:Water!And this pathway, back at the main entrance, leads to the pond:
And here's the pond. There's a concrete dam of some kind - apparently people fish there.
And so, that's pretty much it. A pond, and bit of woods squashed between a school playing field and the Garden State Parkway. Access is from a nondescript dead-end residential street. Nature in New Jersey. We take what we can get.

Lawn reduction update

Big progress today on the lawn reduction. H&D were having some trees and shrubs trimmed and kindly thought to ask if I wanted the trimmings. Of course I did! Well, technically what I got were other peoples' trimmings - stuff on the truck that was already shredded and ready to go. So much the better. Now the "coverage" is complete - i.e. no cardboard or newspapers showing. Now just a matter of gradually building up the layers, aiming for October planting readiness.

Blue

Painters have been at work across the street for weeks now. Scraping, sanding. I really liked the way it looked with the natural wood shingles (still visible at the left). But this is what confronts me when I open the front door this morning. Blue! It's hard to see in the photo, but the handsome old brick and stone chimneys have been painted DARK blue.

Looks like there will be some new street trees in my very near future. I am feeling very blue about this.

Catching

Catching grass, that is.

When I bought the gas mower a few years ago, the idea was that I'd use it only until the lawn reduction program was advanced to the point that I could realistically just use the old-fashioned push mower. There was a grass-catcher included, but I didn't pay any attention to how to attach it since my intention was just to let the clippings fly.

Now, however, I desperately need clippings to layer over the cardboard and newspapers which are artfully and attractively spread all over the front lawn. So today I had to figure out how to attach the catcher. I am SOOO un-mechanical, and those multi-lingual user guides drive me nuts - the worst part being the way they COMBINE the instructions for a million different models so you aren't even sure which parts apply to you.

Well I finally got it figured out - just before the rainstorm (a daily event, it seems) began. Oh well. In the meantime I've been clipping and deadheading everything like crazy just to create other layering material. The neighbors are used to my "science experiments" by now. It will all come together in time.

What else? Oh, the pool. I actually went there three times in the past week, as compared to not at all up til then. This has to be the rainiest summer in history.

Technical difficulties

A few weeks ago I was without on-line access for a few days. After conferring with Sid in India, it seemed that the best solution was to forget about the wifi/router thing and just connect the laptop directly to the modem. As in the olden days.

This would be fine. And it IS fine. Except that for no apparent reason the ethernet cable that connects the laptop to the modem is unreliable. I am constantly (like right NOW, for example), losing my connection and having to jiggle or otherwise reset the cable. In virtually every case there is absolutely no physical reason for the disconnect.

The minimalist in me likes the fact that I can just LOOK at the modem (it's right there, not in some far away room) and see whether all the lights are on. At least I know what to do about it. But the crabby old lady in me wishes they would just all STAY on.

Would a replacement cable help, o gurus who might be reading this....?

Update: After posting this I decided to root around and see if I had another cable. I did. And it seems fine now. Sometimes life is simple.

Update 2: Rarely is life simple. The second cable is also showing signs of flakiness. Which makes me wonder whether the problem is in the computer - maybe something wrong with the place where the cable connects? I dread having to go back to Sid, but it might be necessary.

Taking the bridge

Having the new Starbucks to walk to is turning out to be a very nice thing. Until now, there was a choice of two routes: the busy, most direct, Bloomfield Ave way, and the "back way", along a shady residential street. No question which to choose.

But now there's a third way. There's a new bridge in the glen.

First, walk around the corner to the train station.

Walk down the steps to the westbound platform.

Here's the view of the station from down below. It's not actually in service as a station any more. For years (ever since we have lived here, and before) it was the local real estate office. More recently it has been acquired by the town to be used as a community center. Count me among the skeptics who thought nobody would use it. Count me among those who were WRONG!

Walk east along the platform, and you soon come to this.


And here we come to the new bridge. This will take us to the other side of the glen.

Looking back, after having crossed:
With a waterfall like this less than five minutes from home, why do I think I need a pond?

There's even a pretty gazebo to relax in. Probably I don't need one of those either.

In the glen, looking west from the gazebo:

Here's the last part of the trip. From here we emerge onto Bloomfield Avenue. I'll spare you the view of the final, ugly block. Not so bad, all things considered.

The Sun, and a Brooklyn itinerary

I've mentioned the NY Sun from time to time. If I don't happen to be breakfasting at Raymond's (that would be most of the time), I have to read it on line. Even the libraries don't have it. It's a weekdays-only paper, so no thousand-pound Sunday behemoth to plow through. I must have subscribed, at one point, to a daily "recap" of some kind, since I now get a morning email with a roster of headlines and a brief summary of each article. Even THAT they do really well.

The puzzle is as good or better than the one in the Times, and respected as such by afficianados. The politics are conservative. (I'm still behind Obama, so far, but that doesn't mean I don't remain open to all points of view.) And among the real treasures are the "Abroad in New York" columns of Francis Morrone, the architectural historian.

Today he is writing about Brooklyn's historic Brighton Line, part of the NYC transit system. Just when Mayor Bloomberg is exhorting New Yorkers to vacation at home this year (and I love that idea) comes a specific itinerary that really does sound like a vacation. And I've always wanted to try Di Fara's legendary pizza; now I know how to get there. I'm saving this one.

Passing, persicaria and ponds

Today's main accomplishment was getting the car to - finally! - pass the state inspection. I had been driving around with a big "failed" sticker on the windshield, and a 45-day window to correct the various problems. The new sticker announces that I'm good til 2010. Hooray! Now I can think about something else. Ponds, for example.

I had to go all the way to Wayne for the reinspection, since the Montclair place where I've gone for 35 years has just closed down for good. But there's a big garden center up in that neck of the woods, and I hadn't been there for several years. And I needed to celebrate, right? Most likely they were having a sale, so better check it out.

So now the driveway is full of huge plants that have to be dealt with. Three "Fragoo" strawberries - a new hybrid designed for containers or hanging baskets. All are lush, healthy, covered with blooms and berries - and marked down from $15 to $2. How could I resist?

I've haunted garden centers for long enough now that it's not often that I see a plant that is completely unfamiliar to me. This gorgeous "firetail" persicaria, or "mountain fleece flower" completely won me over. I have a couple of ideas about where to put it, but I think it will somehow fit into the grass reduction program in the front. It's such a large clump that I may be able to divide it soon, and put some back on the plateau, since it would also look great among all the hydrangeas back there.

If you've been to any biggish garden center in recent years you've noticed the trend: more and more space is given over to "aquaculture". A garden is simply not a garden unless it has a pond, preferably with a waterfall, or some kind of bubbling action going on. Just seeing all the equipment and chemicals are enough to make you want to run very fast in the opposite direction.

But I've been reading a lot of Henry Mitchell lately. His books - compilations of his columns from the Washington Post - are garden classics. Hilarious, yes, but also full of wisdom and sound, practical advice. The centerpiece of his Georgetown garden was a rectangular concrete fishpond.

In "One Man's Garden", pp136ff he describes his criteria for the building of a such a pond in some detail. "The pool should be in full sun". OK. (The middle of my back yard would be fine.) "The pool should be twenty-four inches deep". OK. "The pool should always be larger than you thnk is right". Hmm. I had been thinking about 10x10 max, and round. He suggests 10x12'. OK.

But then we come to the important and far more radical stuff: "Some gardeners install filter systems to keep the water absolutely clear. I would not have one if it were free... the few I have seen in operation have not worked, and ... there is nothing uglier in the garden than crystal clear water with filter systems visible". "The pool should have seaweed in it - meaning oxygenating grasses that live beneath the water. He suggests "common ditch grass", or elodea. He "never puts chemicals in the pond and does not intend to". AND - get this - "The fewer pipes in the pool, the better. I have none." He cleaned the pool, he explains, once every year or two by siphoning out the water with a hose.

Well, Mitchell died in 1993, but what has really changed since then? I didn't have the book with me, but I tried to talk with the guy who was manning the pond department about this, and he pretty much told me I was an idiot. The fish will DIE without a filter, he explained. Of course I couldn't remember the name of the seaweed or any of the other details. But it is sounding to me as if it could be possible to just build a big concrete TUB in the yard and then just start filling it with water and fish and waterlilies and seaweed. How hard could that be?

Montclair wandering

The appointment at the Volvo dealer for the repair of the mysterious emission problems that led to the failed state inspection (NJ is tough on these things!) was for 8:15. I knew it would be a long day. But it's pretty easy to kill time in Montclair, so I left the cell number and off I went.

First stop: Raymond's.

I usually go for the steel cut oats with caramelized banana, but today it was the orange ginger pancakes with fruit. Coffee is excellent and keeps on coming - you get your own little refill pot right on the table, and they are happy to refill the refill pot. Can you see the rack of papers? Always there with today's NYT, WSJ and - the best of all - the NY Sun. I catch up on the news and do the crossword and the sudoku in the Sun.

Next stop: the bookstore. What a luxury for a town to have TWO old-fashioned, independent bookstores. This one -the musty-dusty one - has a combination of new and old, similar to the Strand in NY, and to Powell's in Portland, OR. It's much larger than it looks from the outside. Because I have gardens on the brain, I settle mostly in the garden section.

I read the both of the following (both serendipitous discoveries) cover-to-cover.

The Nivola book tells the story of Nobel Peace prize winner Wangari Maathi and her one-woman campaign to restore beauty and agricultural self-sufficiency to her devastated native land. Reminiscent of Miss Rumphius, with lovely illustrations by the author.

Then I stroll for a while: On a whim I go into the bike shop and ask if there's anything I could safely and comfortably ride - never having had such a thought before. Yes, it turns out! Well, perhaps another day there will be a test drive!

I never get tired of the beautiful Avis Campbell garden, behind the library.

I note that I really would like to get some of those pale pink poppies going in my own garden. The trick, apparently, is to scatter the seeds in February, in the snow. And I'm reminded that it would be very lovely to have a pond of my own.

Quite a few hours have now gone by, but the phone is silent. So - might as well hang out in the libary for a while. There is a new photography exhibit to see, and a well-stocked magazine section with big, comfy chairs. In contrast to my own library, these magazines don't circulate, so the latest copy is always availabe, in addition to all the earlier ones. I picked up the June 30 New Yorker and read a wonderful Alice Munro story called Deep-Hole, and a beautiful memoir, Altered State, by Andrea Lee, about growing up in a well-to-do black family in Pennsylvania. I wasn't familiar with this writer (now married to an Italian and living in Italy), but intend to seek her out. Also in that issue - an article by Paul Goldberger about the changing face of Beijing - specifically the most recent architectural mega-structures and their effect on the city. (For an ongoing view of present-day Beijing I try to keep up with James Fallows' wonderful blog.) I read a years' worth of Organic Gardening, flip through Real Simple, House Beautiful, Horticulture.

I check the time. 3:45! Surely the car must be ready! Might as well wander down there and check. Yes, it turns out it is "almost ready" - just the paperwork remains. They were about to call. Should I be resentful of having to "waste" a whole day on this? Well, probably. But the truth of it is that I had a very pleasant time. I should be forced to walk the streets of Montclair more often.

Currants

Last summer I planted a red currant bush. We always had a row of them at the Adirondack house. I think that they were originally planted by my grandfather when the house was new, circa 1920. My grandmother and, later, Aunt Lucy, always made little jars of currant jelly. It was a big production, as I recall, involving a muslin "jelly bag" contraption. I'm sure all the paraphernelia is still there. And the recipe - most likely from Fannie Farmer.

So now, with no effort whatsoever from me, other than sticking it in the ground in the back of some other shrubs, I have my first crop. A bare two cups, as it turns out - so not enough for jelly.

But what? Currants are a northern crop - more common in places like Scandinavia than Provence. So off the radar, so to speak, from mainstream recipe sources. But a quick google led me to this tempting photo. Since I also have a productive rhubarb plant this idea seems worth exploring.

Can you even see the currants? What I ended up doing was freezing them in a plastic container, planning to use them by the decorative spoonful in compotes such as this. Besides the rhubarb, there are some Alpine strawberries in there (also from the garden, though I am losing out to the birds on this one), and some regular strawberries from the farmers' market. Very tasty. Very satisfying.

Weeds

All this rain we've been having (pretty much every day, it seems) has brought with it a bumper crop of weeds. Once again, "showing up" is proving to be the answer. Getting out there and pullling what I can, usually early in the morning, is at least keeping them at bay.

I went the extra mile in the new shrub border next to the deck. One step up from the "newspaper trick" is the "corrugated cardboard trick". I can get plenty of ready-to-recycle (already flattened) cartons from behind the liquor store. Spreading them around, like mulch, in thick layers, to be covered with "real" mulch once it's well wetted down, is making quick work of that area.

Sad to say, some of the weeds are of my own making. Why did I ever think it was a good idea to try morning glories? Pretty, yes, but apparently once you have them you have them forever, and they twine themselves around everything they encounter, and not so charmingly, either. "Strangle" is a word that comes to mind. Now is their sprouting time, and, thanks to the birds, they are finding new and clever places to hide themselves. I found one just this morning coming up under a garbage can in the asphalt driveway.

I am similarly responsible for the gooseneck loosestrife, black-eyed susans, and the yarrow, all of which seemed like good ideas at the time. Ack!

Showing up

You have to assume that things I've blogged about in the past as regular occurrences are ongoing. Puzzles. Bridge. Cooking. Reading. Yawn.

But it's been a while since I've mentioned the figure drawing. It continues on a twice monthly basis. Last night was the most recent session. I had to swap for an afternoon bridge session, so I arrived a bit tired and unprepared. Still, I think it was Woody Allen who made the quip about 95% of life being about "just showing up". By just showing up, I'm realizing I've churned out quite a number of drawings, and am beginning to get my sea legs again.

These are a mixture of very quick gesture studies (1-2 min) and some slightly longer ones - mostly in the 15-20 min range.