GrongarBlog – Page 29

52 Photos ~ Chopped

He brought home a watermelon.

I was craving fruit and he brought me a whole watermelon.

A whole watermelon isn’t an extravagance in the scheme of things. But if feels extravagant. And somewhat like that old joke where eternity is defined as a ham and two people.

But I took to carving it up and made a big fruit salad that lasted for days.

And while I was at it, I peeled the rind and chopped that up, soaked it overnight, simmered it until tender, simmered it in spiced syrup, and put it in jars.

It won’t last until eternity, but maybe at least until midwinter. Which, at this moment, feels a blissful eternity away.

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Watermelon Rind Preserves

I got this recipe from the gorgeous book, The Glass Pantry, which I don’t use anywhere as often as I ought to.

Yield: 2-3 pints

Ingredients
1 pound watermelon rind
5 quarts water
1/2 cup salt
2 cups granulated sugar
1 lemon, thinly sliced, seeds removed
1 cinnamon stick
1 teaspoon whole cloves

Method

Peel the skin from the rind and scrape the rind free of any flesh.
Cut the rind into 1/2-inch pieces.
Combine 4 quarts of water with the salt in a large bowl, and stir to dissolve the salt.
Add the rind to the salt water and let soak overnight at room temperature.
The next day, drain the rind.
Place the rind in a stainless steel or other non-reactive saucepan with 2 cups of the remaining water and bring to a boil over high heat. Lower the heat and simmer until the rind is just tender when pierced with a fork. Depending on the thickness of the rind, this will take anywhere from 20-50 minutes.
Drain well and set aside.
In a saucepan large enough to hold the rind eventually, combine all the remaining ingredients (sugar, lemon, cinnamon stick, cloves, and remaining 2 cups of water).
Bring the mixture slowly to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Boil until the sugar dissolves and a syrup forms, about five minutes.
Add the rind to the syrup and cook over low heat until the rind becomes transparent, about 20-30 minutes (timing will, again, depend on the thickness of the rind).
Remove the lemon slices and cinnamon stick.
You can now pack the rind and syrup in jars and process in a boiling water bath for 30 minutes, or put in jars and keep in the refrigerator for shorter-term keeping.

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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.

52 Photos ~ Stripes

An ordinary Friday morning and I go out to the barn to feed the goats and do the morning check.

Everything is as it always is, or, at least, as it has been since the babies were born.

And then I notice little Doris, looking, well… poofy. She’s puffed up and her fur is sticking out like she’s a scared cat trying to make herself look big. She’s affectionate, but her spark is not there. She’s not jumping at my legs the way she usually does.

I know something’s not right, but I’m not entirely sure what it is because we’re still relatively new to this goat thing and our goats have been overall healthy so far.

I go in to ponder it, and do a little reading online. I’m pretty sure it’s bloat before I even start to look, but I look anyway.

I call the vet. She says, “Bring her right in.”

Right. Into the car I carry her. I have no goat carrier. I put her in a laundry basket, but she’s soon out of that (sick or not, she’s still got baby goat curiosity). I stop the car and she I finally agree that she can lie down on a pile of towels on the floor right behind the driver’s seat.

I’ve finally become one of those funky, Vermont women who drives around with a goat in her car. I want to smile at the notion, but I’m too worried. All the way to the vet, I’m singing to Doris. I’m singing her sister’s song (“Darcy Farrow”) over and over again to keep her calm. I keep getting to the part where Darcy Farrow dies, then I circle around again to the beginning and try to keep those thoughts out of my mind. I should have picked a happier song.

At the vet’s office, she’s examined.

After an x-ray (which reveals gas bubbles), the vet looks me straight in the eye. “This isn’t good.” I was already a little queasy, now I feel dizzy.

Doris is tubed (to remove gas from her stomach), aspirated (to remove gas from her rumen), given a dose of oil (to help consolidate the gas bubbles), given lactated ringers (for fluid and nutrition), given antibitoics, given her baby shots (since she’s due anyway).

Given the treatment.

Back into the car and we go home. I can’t put her in the barn because we’ve been warned we need to keep a steady eye on her and not let her eat anything. She’s still bloated; there’s only so much gas the vet can get out of her, and (the vet warns us) Doris is in guarded condition and may not last the night.

We put her in the downstairs bathroom.

Yes, in the span of one morning we’ve moved from people who keep goats in the yard to people who drive them around in the car and let them sleep in the house. I hear it eventually happens to everyone who owns goats.

We take turns being with her. The dog is inconsolable. He’s on the other side of that bathroom door and wants to be with us, with her. We even let him in for a bit. The goatling doesn’t care. She’s miserable.

More trips to the vet’s office that afternoon, the next morning, the following Monday. More of the same treatments. She’s not getting worse, but she’s not getting better.

Eventually, we put her back in the barn, in a clean stall, so she can be near her mother and sister. When you’re a goat, goat company is better than human company.

Little by little, she starts to get smaller. She nurses vigorously. She starts to generate “output”. The sparkle comes back into her eyes. She moves around more and doesn’t just lie or stand there trying to breathe.

Today, if you looked at her, you’d never know how sick she was. Eleven days later and she’s as slim and healthy seeming as her sister.

She’s not out of the woods yet, though. For now, she’s still indoors, resting her system, rebuilding the bacteria (slowly) in her rumen, biding time until she’s bigger and healthy enough to face the fresh green growth outside.

Oh, but it’s lovely to see her play, and jump on our laps, and chew a mouthful of dry hay, and nurse from her mother, lined up against her sister, two little stripes of perfect contentedness.

We all finally feel like we can breathe.

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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.

Day one

Our first day of summer vacation and it’s a rainy one.

I say “our”, but it’s really just H’s summer vacation. I’m horning in on her well-earned time off.

Not only that. I’m full of plans.

I read somewhere this morning about one of those super creative moms who bought these amazing scrapbook sets for her kids and they hang out in the afternoons and fill these scrapbooks with notes and ideas and pasted-in movie tickets and postcards and bird feathers. Presumably, they spend the rest of their day doing all the cool things that they later memorialize in their scrapbooks.

For 10 minutes, I had a little daydream about the scrapbook adventures H and I could have this summer.

I told her about the scrapbook idea and she said, essentially, “Yeah…”.

Ah. Understood.

Back, off mom. Let’s just spend some time reading, hanging out, watching grass grow. You know, the way summer’s supposed to be (with the regular application of “Doctor Who” episodes, naturally.)

I get it. When we were kids, my sister and I had large chunks of summers to ourselves, unstructured and unfettered. My parents were both in town, at their full-time jobs. We had our bikes, the neighborhood, the bus and train into the city. We did as we pleased during the daylight hours and no one made plans for us.

It’s my blessing and H’s curse (to some degree) that I work from home. I get in her face a lot. I have… ideas…. I want to do projects. She wants to, oh, wake up a noon, eat something, be a teen.

She is very patient with me. And very good about not rolling her eyes continuously.

I did have one idea she liked, though, because she’s a word nerd like M and I are. And that’s to have a sort of at-home, mother-daughter writing/art camp. Every Monday, one of us will announce a theme (this first week is my turn; I chose “summer solstice”), then we’ll each write (or draw, or photograph, or whatever we like) based on that theme, and share the results with each other on Friday.

I don’t know yet if we’ll share these projects with anyone outside the house. We’ll see how week one goes. But first, we have some rain drops to stare at.

52 Photos ~ Crimson

So This Is Nebraska

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

The beating of these fragile wings

Gryfe turned five this week. He’s in that wonderful doggy sweet spot between puppy and old dog. He doesn’t chew things up that don’t belong to him (he never actually did), he doesn’t need non-stop activity and attention (he begs to differ), but he’s got energy to go hiking for as long as I want (always longer than I want), and he hasn’t yet started the slide into old, grey dog.

This morning, after singing him “Happy Birthday,” we were talking about how, if it hadn’t been for him, we wouldn’t have Darcy and Dory bouncing around in the goat yard right now.

You play this game, too, right?

The one where you reconstruct the trail of connections from one event to another that otherwise seem wholly unconnected.

Let’s see. How does this one go?

Oh right. If I hadn’t been looking for a Vizsla litter five years ago, and if I hadn’t looked online that one day and found a breeder whose dog was expecting a litter that week and who let me put our name on the list, and if we hadn’t gone to visit the puppies at four weeks old, and if we hadn’t gone to visit a Nigerian Dwarf goat breeder who lived near the puppies on that puppy-visiting trip, and if we hadn’t been talking goats with that breeder, and if she hadn’t mentioned the Golden Guernsey breed to us, and if we hadn’t been intrigued and later looked up the breed and made contact with a woman involved in the breeding program, and if we hadn’t bought three does from her…

There. From Gryfe to baby goats in one short paragraph.

Of course, we could go further back and trace the path that got us to looking for a puppy in the first place (start with our decision to get our first Vizsla, Phoebe, and work back from there).

How about this one? Darcy and Dory exist because…

M’s sister S moved to Boston. And because she was in Boston, M moved there. Which is where we met. And became friends and dated and married and moved to Pittsburgh and moved to Vermont and bought a dog, Phoebe, and then another dog, Gryfe.

Oh, and Hyla exists, thanks to S’s move, too. (I’m skipping a lot of small steps in there so that I don’t bore you.)

Okay, now this is interesting (I think). Let’s follow another branch. We moved to Pittsburgh because I accepted a TAship there for graduate school (if I’d made another choice, we might have ended up in Austin or Ann Arbor or elsewhere). Because we moved to Pittsburgh, M’s old friend (also M) decided to move there. And there he met his future wife, B, and because they met and fell in love, they had a bouncing baby boy. Now they also live in Vermont, and have dogs and cats and friends and bake amazing things and write stories and do all those things people do.

So the fact that S moved to Boston resulted in at least two marriages, two babies, two families living in Vermont, many dogs, cats. And, of course, Darcy and Dory. And who knows what else? This sweater I’m wearing. The books on my desk. The slope of my handwriting.

(By the way, thank you, S!)

Play this game enough and it becomes dizzying. You begin to realize (if you haven’t already) how unlikely it is that you—yes you, right there—or I exist at all.

What accidents of fortune and misfortune, what paths taken (or not taken), what choices made, what innocent, seemingly insignificant decision made by our great great great great great great great great grandparents resulted in me here, you there, me writing, you reading?

What did you do today that will change the course of your destiny? Or someone else’s?

I met a woman on the trail today; her three dogs greeted my one, and she and I talked. That was unusual. My walks are usually solitary. I’m thinking about her as I write, and wonder what tiny disturbances were set in motion when she and I stood talking in the mid-day glow.

It’s mind boggling.

The dog, however, doesn’t care about any of that. He had his walk. He had his visit to the goat barn. He had his extra treats with dinner. He chewed his squeaker-filled penguin toy until it squeaked for mercy. And now, birthday boy, he’s asleep on the sofa next to me, his paw twitching with a dream.

Could life be finer?

Not if you’re a goat, four weeks old, healthy, and playing in the browse with your mom and your sister on a lush June afternoon.

Uncommon Shapes: Bonus

Hyla captured this great Oyster pose the other day. Oh, to be as relaxed as this….

52 Photos ~ Uncommon Shapes

Observation

It occurred to me to check the other day how long I’ve been writing here. Turns out, it’s been eight years today. 2,922 days.

When I started, the house was over there, up the hill, an arm’s reach from the road. (That’s a picture of it, up there, the way it was when we moved in.)

That road, when we first moved here, was quiet. On our commute to work every day, we might be joined by one or two other cars. Many nights, on the way home, the road was ours alone.

Eventually, traffic picked up, the road got louder, and we decided either we had to move, or the house had to move (knowing full well that the road had already moved once in its history and was not likely to do so again in our lifetime).

So we moved the house. And began writing here.

When I started, H was just about finished with Kindergarten. In a week-and-a-half, she’ll be a high schooler.

When I started, my mother was alive, as were her parents.

When I started, we had an old dog named Phoebe, and this current goofy dog, my shadow, hadn’t been born yet. Neither had the cats. Nor the goats.

When I started, I was in my first year working for myself, and wondering if it was possible to make a living that way. I guess I’m still wondering that.

When I started, I didn’t know how to make cheese, and was proficient at making just a few breads.

When I started, I borrowed H’s point-and-shoot camera to take the pictures.

When I started, I barely knew what a blog was, and social media wasn’t yet a thing. I just wanted a way to easily share the status of our house move with our far away family and friends.

And here I am, eight years later, still writing.

And even though a lot of big things have changed, most of the essential stuff hasn’t. It’s still the three of us against the world, with a pack of animals to amuse us. The waterfall below the house still roars all night and all day. The house is still unsquare and uneven. We make chaos in the kitchen, spending days to make a feast that takes less than an hour to consume. And we enjoy the heck out it. We shop at the local food co-op, which we joined the first morning we lived here. We gather with family and friends for holidays and birthdays. We make messes, come up with grand plans, fall asleep on the sofa on a hot Saturday afternoon, and, for some reason, I write about it here.

I don’t fully understand why.

I don’t really know what this place is. It’s not a house renovation blog, or a food blog, or a farm blog, or a mommy blog, or a poet’s blog, or a photographer’s blog, or any of those things. It’s me, and us, our lives, what I’m thinking (or worrying) about today. What I saw today. What I read, or wrote, or liked.

It’s an eight-year-old, interested in language and pictures and making things, but, like me, not yet settled into what it wants to be when it grows up.

It seems a silly thing to mark this day, but why not? Marking time. Observing the moment. This is what we do.