GrongarBlog – Page 27

52 Photos ~ On the line

http://youtu.be/wppll7UYFVs

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These photos and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

My first stop on the My Kitchen My World tour: Sweden

My very patient online baking buddy Margaret has been inviting me for several months to join the My Kitchen My World group, which is on an extended culinary tour of the world, country by country, month by month.

I finally decided to join for August’s virtual visit to Sweden, and then, of course, August slipped by and… “Hello, September!”

Luckily, Margaret is unendingly patient and encouraging, so here I am, slipping this little taste of Sweden into your day, a bit past the official deadline.

Me being me, with my predilection for all things bready, it didn’t take long to settle on baking a Swedish bread, and nothing seemed more basic or essential than the traditional knäckebröd, the crunchy cracker (or crisp bread) that can be served with everything from cheese to jam to smoked fish to soup to stew.

When I saw the picture of seeded knäckebröd on the Bread & Companatico site, I was smitten.

This is a quick cracker recipe that uses a combination of flours and seeds. Really, you can use whatever you have on hand. The traditional recipe calls for at least some rye flour, but Barbara also gives a gluten-free corn flour variation. I used a mix of rye, bread, and whole wheat flour. You can include whatever seeds you have on hand (I used black sesame, white sesame, and sunflower), but I think what gives this cracker its essential taste is the inclusion of whole cumin seeds.

Wikipedia informs me that these sorts of flat/crisp breads have been a part of Swedish cuisine for over a thousand years. No wonder. They’re easy and fast to make, portable, and, since they’re baked until very crisp, they last a long time without going stale or moldy. I imagine Swedish babies teethe on these things. And they’ll last in a ship’s hold for the Atlantic crossing.

The first night, we served our knäckebröd with goat milk ricotta and tomato jam (see? I told you I’m obsessed with that. To make your own, use this recipe from Food in Jars. I promise you’ll love it).

Since then, I’ve been nibbling on it plain as a snack, eating it smeared with tomato jam, or with a slice of cheese. Each time, I’m surprised, and delighted, by that hit of cumin. I think it would work perfectly as a scooper for a rich Indian curry. I think I’m going to like traveling with MKMW…

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To see the round up of the group’s Swedish recipes, visit the My Kitchen My World (MKMW) site after the first of the month. (You can also see where the group has already traveled.) To join in, just make a dish (or more) for the month’s country, blog about it, and put a link to your post in the comments on the MKMW page.

Caught off guard

The end of August.

Just two weeks ago we were in the full langour of summer. And now? It’s decidedly fall. You’d think after all these years I’d be used to the sudden tilt toward September, but it takes me by surprise every year.

Unlike the linear transition from spring to summer, this time of year has a somewhat Möbius logic, the seasons fighting each other for possession of each day.

The mornings begin in a cool autumnal fog, the ground between the house and the barn littered with freshly fallen maple leaves, the filmy webs in the grass speckled with dew. By mid-morning, the sun’s burnt through the fog and the slanting light glances off the apple trees’ browning leaves. In the afternoon, the puffy clouds are riding the hill ridge, and the air is warm and humid. Thunderstorms are possible. And cookouts. Summer teases again until the early sunset when the cool air rushes in. Fall again.

This time of year, I feel like I’m sitting on the pin of a hinge. Neither here nor there. I can see in both directions: backward to the long lazy days and the porch-sitting nights; forward to the apple pies and glowing pumpkins. I like both views. It would be nice to be able to stay here for awhile and savor the vista.

But, as it always does, time rushes forward and we must get to doing things.

School has begun. High school, mind you. And it’s grand. So far.

I didn’t take a first-day-of-school picture of H this year because it just didn’t seem right. She was in a hurry out the door in the morning and seemed too grown up for that. But I have a picture in my heart, snapped in the school parking lot at the end of the first day: her close-mouthed (grown up), wide smile, a pair of uplifted eyebrows, and a “thumbs up” sign. “I LOVE high school!”

And with that, the end of August has kicked us into action. The firewood is all stacked (oh, I have pictures to show you, I do!), M’s been building things. We made jars and jars of pickles. And we’re finally back to making real cheese. Tomato jam, we made that, too, and have been wondering if there’s anything it wouldn’t taste good on (so far, the answer is “no”, although Avgolemeno is probably an unlikely pairing).

And did I tell you I actually got brave enough to meet with a cello teacher, and I’ve now had two lessons and last lesson I played a whole song accompanied on piano by my cello teacher? A whole song.

Last fall, I remember feeling a sense of promise at this change of season, and I’m feeling it again. This is not like me, but it seems to be becoming me. I’d just like to linger here for awhile, feeling freshly woken from a warm, slumbery season. I wish it would last.

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What I wrote above, I wrote on Thursday, full of optimism. And on Friday, I learned that Seamus Heaney had died, and I was heartbroken.

I suppose that could seem odd. After all, I didn’t know him personally. I did meet him once, when he was visiting my university, a guest of my Irish literature professor. He briefly visited our class; he gave a reading later that week. I have the date, time, and classroom number penned into my copy of his collected poems. It was the beginning of my new relationship with poetry. When I learned what a poem could do to your head and your heart, how it could unscrew your scalp and let the universe pour in.

No, I didn’t know him personally, but I think it won’t surprise you to know that I felt I knew him personally, or, rather, that his poems became personal to me, and that he and they became a thread woven through my life, our lives. The books and the readings (three in all I was lucky enough to attend, two with Michael). The orange and white kitten I named after him. The leather-bound volume M gave me one year for my birthday. The paperback copy of Seeing Things we bought in a bookstore in Dublin on our honeymoon. Precious because it was purchased in Ireland, and one of the few non-essential things I allowed space in my backpack.

But all those things aside, of course, it was the poems.

To think there will never be another one from him is part of what breaks my heart. I know I shouldn’t be so greedy. He’s already given us so many. And still I want more. To have my heart feel airy and full of wonder, huge and embracing, tender and concrete, filling with the air of September or October, neither here nor there, blown open by his words.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

–Seamus Heaney, from The Spirit Level (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)

52 Photos ~ Light and dark

The Forest at the Edge of the World

Today I left groceries by the playground on Hudson
and tried to haul, up toward my block,
a cross section of a maple grown too large,
chainsawed into manhole covers. Alphonso,
Super for All Buildings east of the projects,
stopped sweeping. He leaned his bald broom
against the stoop, nudged the wood with his toe.
“Nothing to do but roll it,” he said, hands
deep in his pockets. I nodded,
barely believing my luck in the midst of asphalt,
transistor radios, and the wet smell of dogs
as he squatted eye level with the log, heaved it
against his shoulder like a man who bears
a handmade cross for miles on his penitent back.
I saw a kind of glory in his eyes, he understood
the heft of the trunk, nicks in the damp bark.
I stood on the side and righted the thing
and together we rolled this boulder of tree
past the Indian deli, the Russian shoe repair,
the Caribbean bakery. “You can smell the forest,”
he said, as we reached my stoop, wood
in the crook of his neck, sawdust and humus and sweat.
And we hoisted the thing, one step at a time, stopping
only to breathe the scent of sap and after a good half hour
it was filling the whole of my apartment—
the shade, the damp smell, that enormous presence—
light brown rings so perfect my whole life
fell right down inside them, concentric circles,
tree within tree, the single slab a world within itself—
suddenly it was thirty-five years ago:
I stood on the edge of a forest, someplace upstate,
and looked up into the branches of my first
true and majestic tree, in the first real forest—trees
instead of buildings. Oh the breadth of those limbs—
after the taut geometry of elevator, fire escape, lobby,
to see through branches to the sun—I believed
the world was mine, there was sap in my veins,
the tree was limitless, the scent of the tree,
the bark and the branch and the six-year-old sightline,
which goes on to the edge of the known world.

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This photo and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Photos ~ Unusual and uncommon

http://youtu.be/Obo_Fbdt9OU

52 Photos ~ Childhood games

They don’t play games so much anymore, but, gosh, do they know how to laugh and have a blast.

And when the sun goes down, they still play a version of hide and seek called “Sardines”, which goes something like this: One person hides. And the group fans out to look for the person. And when you find the hider, you don’t reveal her or his location; you hide with the hider, silently. And the rest of the group keeps looking, as their numbers dwindle. Until, maybe, you’re the only one still looking. Everyone else is crammed together in a hiding spot, crammed like sardines.

It’s down to just you, alone in the darkening yard. But your friends are out there, and they can’t help but giggle, and you follow that sound. And what a hoot when you find each other.

No one is too old for that sort of fun.

For Hyla

Thirteen thoughts on your fourteenth birthday

When the moon shines on the water with the twinkling distant suns,
You would need a calculator just to count the lucky ones.
— Cheryl Wheeler

I
Before you were born,
you were always with me.
When I woke, I carried you
with me to the shower
to the kitchen, to the car.
I buckled the both of us up.
At work, we took a secret nap at 3.
You were always with me.

II
A girl and a Singapura
are one.
A girl and a Singapura
and a raccoon dog and a minnow
are one.

III
This first word we recognized was “dog”.
Or maybe it “dad”.
You said your word
over and over
to the dog
to your father
to me.
You named us all a word.
You claimed us all with a word.

IV
“Girls’ Wednesday”
You’re in a car seat in the backseat,
waving a hot dog in your hand.
We’re singing along with the radio.
“This is the best day of my life” you say.
And I think.

V
I love you.
I love you more.
I love you most.
I love you more than toast.

VI
Whatever is the now
is the only thing that counts,
The thing you have in your fist
is worth two in the bush.
The now, the now, the now
is what you remind us to hold.

VII
On the school swing set,
you sang the swing as high as it would go:
“Down in St. Mary’s county, headed south from Baltimore”.
You taught the littler girls to do the same.
In Chicago, you sang “O mio babbino caro”
In the science museum’s whispering gallery
In the art institute’s stock exchange trading room,
to an audience of two.
When I was a girl, I sang songs to myself
all the way from school to home.
Every day.
When you’re in a sunny mood, you hum
Christmas carols,
even in the summer.
Your father revs out “Jingle Bells”
with the brush cutter.
You come by it honestly.

VIII
Three weeks old,
September evening.
You and I had a day.
You were not yet you,
and I was still learning how to be a mother.

You sat in your buzzy seat,
my little growly monster,
and watched as I
hustled around the kitchen
piecing together a dinner
one-handed.

I stopped in my rush to
watch the slanted evening light fall
across your face.
Your eyes were wide
with some emotion neither of us knew.

I smiled to reassure you,
and said something, maybe your name.
I saw the twitch of your first smile
as subtle as the first flutter
I felt when you were a mere seed inside.
And I knew who you were.

IX
The iron-tinted river is flowing.
You must be swimming.

X
I love you this much.
I love you from here to the moon.
I love you from here to the moon and back.
I love you from here to the moon and back.
Plus infinity.

XI
The perseids were sailing across the sky
all night.
We were oblivious.
Focused only on the brewing storm,
of your arrival,
and the thunder outside.

XII
Your bedroom floor,
is littered with books
like leaves on a forest floor,
or bones around an ancient fire pit,
radiating out from your bed
where you devour one by one
toss the finished one away
and reach for the next course.

XIII
Every day, you
write, you breathe, you blink, you
write, you see, you eat, you
write, you laugh, you think, you
write, you furrow and bristle, you
write, you crave, you sleep, you
write, you write your
first sentence
of the novel
of your
life.

52 Photos ~ Fresh

This summer hasn’t been the summer I expected.

I’m not talking about the weather for the first six weeks or so, which, let’s face it, left a little to be desired.

It’s just… well, I haven’t been basking in the happy summer glow I inhabit most years from June to August. I don’t know what this is. Mid-life woes? Trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up? Realizing that we have only three more summers like this with H at home?

Sigh.

Maybe I need a sports car. Or a horse. Or a trip around the world.

Or lunch with a friend.

Here’s what I do know: the nights lately are hard. They’re filled with restless and even very bad dreams. I’m late. I’m lost. I’m trying to get in touch with family and I can’t. I’m in trouble. I’m cast aside. I’ve lost my shoes and the road is wet. I meet my mother in an abandoned train station and she tells me that she’s sick, and scared. And I can’t help.

I wake up most mornings frazzled and not at all relieved. In spite of the gorgeous weather we’re having. In spite of the sun. In spite of M by my side. In spite of everything I have and hold, and health and (relative) youth, in this peaceful and green valley.

I’m unsettled.

But here’s what calms me: I go down to the kitchen, and quietly, methodically gather the milk pail, the tote, the clean bottles, the funnel and its filter paper, the strip screen, the udder wash. I step out on the porch and Wellesley spots me and nickers. Then her babies start to cry, because they’ve been separated from her all night so that we can have the milk that’s collected overnight. And they want their mother. Now.

But the crying doesn’t bother me now the way it did at first because I know they’ll calm down as soon as I get Wellesley on the milking stand where they can see her.

And then I milk. I press my forehead against Wellelsely’s flank, while she’s grunting with happiness over her morning grain. Her milk comes easily and she never kicks. She’s a pleasure to milk. The babies watch through the slats in the gate of their stall. Quiet. Bright eyed.

For these ten minutes, I’m complete and competent. I know what I’m doing and things… work. The animal smells are sweet. The foam on the top of the milk fizzles as the minuscule bubbles pop. Nothing more is asked for.

The day and the milk are fresh, and unspoiled.

52 Photos ~ Down below

Over the weekend, we went to western Massachusetts to gather with family. We’re fairly wide-flung these days, so getting us all in one place always takes a bit of effort. But it makes for a great excuse for a vacation in a beautiful place that brims with music, theater, dance, art museums, hiking trails, delicious restaurants, and gracious homes.

Among which, Edith Wharton’s The Mount, the house she designed and had built to her specifications (following the design principles in the book she co-authored with her architect friend, Ogden Codman, Jr.).

Simplicity (keeping in mind that this is, of course, a mansion), open space, uncluttered rooms, symmetry, classically-inspired designs, influenced by nature. These were the principles by which she built the house.

To which I’d also add practicality: wide doorways; large, light-welcoming windows free from heavy drapery; rooms that open into each other and onto a central hallway to give easy access to each room (several architectural features, I now realize, that it shares with the great Brick Dwelling at the Hancock Shaker Village, located not far from The Mount).

She looked back to an aesthetic from an earlier time, but she looked forward for comfort and convenience. The house is equipped with an elevator, and electric call bells to summon the staff (simplicity is all well and good, but Edith wasn’t about to clean her own house or cook her own food).

I stood for a long time in her bedroom, staring at her bed, where it is said she did most of her writing (including the novel The House of Mirth), long hand, tossing finished pages onto the floor for her secretary to later collect and type up. And I thought about simplicity, and sunlight streaming through windows in a corner room, and words flowing onto leaves of white, fluttering down around her bed.

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These photos and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.