Awhile back, I wrote a little thing about comfort, family, and my favorite bread: Challah.
And it’s published in the current issue (11) of Remedy Quarterly, a beautiful, hand-crafted little magazine devoted to food, recipes, and memories.
I wrote something (non-technical) and someone else published it!
Wheeeee!
This hasn’t happened to me for a long, long time. To say I’m excited is a bit of an understatement.
By coincidence, the cool recipe and food community web site, Food52, published its Holiday Gift Guide last week, and Remedy Quarterly is on its list!
I know!
Wheeee!
(Uh oh. I’m getting awfully close to writing my first “Squeeee!”)
My copy hasn’t arrived, so part of me still doesn’t believe it’s true. Right now, I’m trusting that photo above, taken by Remedy’s creator and designer, Kelly Carámbula. And I’m keeping my eye on the mailbox.
p.s. The magazine has printed my piece about Challah as well as the recipe. You can see just the recipe here, in an earlier blog post.
Last week it was winter.
Today it feels like spring.
It’ll be winter again before the week is done.
I guess it makes sense to post about fall today.
And day dream about summer.
It’s not quite a marshmallow world yet, but this morning we woke to a frosting of snow lying quietly over everything and there was a definite almost-Decembery feel in the air.
November, get gone. December, how do you do?
The colder it gets, the more grateful I am for that heated stock tank we have for the goats. I get a little shiver of happiness every time I walk past that tank on my way to the barn and see beautiful, ice-free water shimmering in there. Still, even though it’s unfrozen, it’s probably only about 40ºF. The goats don’t seem to mind, but it always seems to me that they need a nice warm drink.
So, on a morning like today, I make tea for me. And “tea” for them.
Theirs is just a bucket of hot water with some molasses mixed in. They don’t need the molasses, but I figure a little bit of sugar is a good thing when you’re trying to stoke your internal fires on a cold Vermont day. When I first started doing this, I wondered if the water I was taking out was too hot for the goats, but they don’t seem to mind it hot from the tap.
Did I ever mention here how satisfying it is to watch a goat drink? None of that annoying, painfully slow lap-lap-lapping that cats and dogs have to do. No. A goat just puts her lips into the bucket and drinks deeply. Ahhh.
My usual tea is green, but today I started my day with a dark black Ceylon, steeped for four minutes, then served with a little bit of honey. It was just enough of a kick start to get me out to fetch logs and build the fires.
When I finally sat down to work, the old song, “Sweet City Woman”, came drifting into my head. Who knows why this silly summery song came to me on this bitter cold morning, but it was a welcome warmth for my brain. Say what you will, hate it or love it, it’s not a sad tune.
Who was it who said you can’t play a sad song on the banjo? Billy Connolly? Steve Martin? Willie Nelson?
Well, whoever said it was right.
Now that I think of it, maybe I ought to trade that cello in for a banjo?
You might have noticed that I’ve been posting a lot of pictures lately instead of writing a lot of words. I was feeling guilty about that…until I thought about it on today’s walk and remembered how much work each of those pictures takes. For every picture I feel good enough to post, I take at least twenty (often more), then toss the ones that don’t work out. I click click click, and then end up throwing most of them away.
(Remember when you had to mail a roll of film to the processing center and wait for a week and then you’d get back ten pictures of the floor or your knee, five out-of-focus pictures of your dog, slightly obscured by one of your fingers, two completely black pictures, and and seven half-way decent pictures of things you actually meant to take — if you were lucky? Digital camera, I love you.)
Okay, so some days the words just don’t come, and writing here is supposed to be fun.
So why do I feel guilty?
Maybe I’m just made that way. Somehow, no matter what’s going on, I have that prickly feeling at the back of my neck that I’m letting someone down, forgetting something important, disappointing someone. Where does that come from? Does everyone feel like this? I think a lot of us do.
But that’s no way to live. Always worrying about messing up, ruining things. In my saner moments, I realize I’m making things harder than they ought to be. So what if I mess up?
What’s the worst thing that can happen?
I read this today, about falling off the “grid” and trying to strike a balance in a world where everything is coming at you faster than you can blink. I nodded with agreement as I read:
The grid wobbles. Or maybe my life wobbles. Either way, as I try to navigate between online work, offline work, and that obtuse thing we call “real life” I’m more and more convinced that “balance” is a really deceptive way to describe this dance we do.
It doesn’t feel balanced. It almost never does. It feels like a drunken ride on the mechanical bull where we’re really just trying to hang on for eight seconds and not puke.
Okay. Let’s grant that. It’s a rough, bumpy ride, and a lot of the time we feel out of control. That’s never going to change, right?
Maybe we’re trying so hard to get it all right, to not let anyone down, that we just become a frazzled mess of wrong and sad. We’re dashing so quickly around that tree, chasing after “perfect” or “better”, that we turn into butter.
Maybe… wouldn’t it be better to take some of it a little less seriously? To have a little faith that things will work out okay? To drop your shoulders down from your ears where they’ve been clenched to ward off the imaginary blows and the cold November winds?
To imagine that you’re doing it right, no matter how you’re doing it?
I love this version of Ella Fitzgerald singing “Mack The Knife” on her 1960 Ella in Berlin album. Listen to what happens at about 1:40.
Let’s make a pact. Let’s make a brilliant wreck of it all.
Let’s do what Ella does: hang loose, follow the swinging beat, keep a sense of humor.
Improvise, make up the words. And when you run out of words, scat, scat, scat.
On the bulletin board at our amazing local country store, Dan & Whit’s. Look closely…
Note: If you go to the cartoon on its original page, you’ll see this text when you hover the cursor over the cartoon: “Or a cabbage, for that matter. Goats make sense. Goats are fine.” Amen.
Hyla: Write an ode to the fire.
R: That’s a good idea. What defines an “ode”?
H: I can show you one I wrote about Oyster.
R: Please do.
. . .
R: Oh, I like this! Can we post this today instead of something I write?
H: Sure!
Ode To A Cat
The gentle
cat
sits regally,
surveys his jungle-kingdom
and draws the curtain of
his private war chamber.
Sitting on the velvet cushion,
surrounded by his family, loyal courtiers,
the mighty cat sends out orders
to move this regiment here,
to send a gift to this nation.
Going through his daily routine,
he feels weary.
And one evening,
he meows to his faithful page, Hudson;
“I am hungry,”
the powerful rumble
of his voice fills the room.
His page offers;
“Anything, King Oyster.
I will go to the market
and buy it for you.”
The royal cat
shakes his head,
and his long white whiskers shine.
He wants to go to the market himself.
And so,
as the king wished,
they go to the market,
on foot,
the wind rips at their faces,
tearing up the feathery snow and dusting it
over their faces.
At the market,
the people stare and whisper:
“The king!”
And Oyster laughs;
leaping up to play with the kittens,
giving hard-earned rewards to their parents
and kin.
They pass large wealthy buildings,
bursting with delicious food,
and Hudson suggests them all.
The king shakes his head and walks on.
At the end of the path,
they come to a bleak hovel,
in which a wife cooks what she has.
The king orders the page to buy good milk,
cheese and meat, and to
bring them to him. Meanwhile,
he slips into the small house.
The wife does not recognize him,
and offers him some soup.
The king thanks her and laps it up slowly.
Hudson knocks at the door,
and Oyster opens it.
The kind cat and her family
revel in the delicious gifts
and thank the king
again and
again.
The king and page buy a cheese
and go home.
He enters his palace again
and curls up by the crackling fire
my father stokes.
Under the French horns of a November afternoon
a man in blue is raking leaves
with a wide wooden rake (whose teeth are pegs
or rather, dowels). Next door
boys play soccer: “You got to start
over!” sort of. A round attic window
in a radiant gray house waits like a kettledrum.
“You got to start . . .” The Brahmsian day
lapses from waltz to march. The grass,
rough-cropped as Bruno Walter’s hair,
is stretched, strewn and humped beneath a sycamore
wide and high as an idea of heaven
in which Brahms turns his face like a bearded thumb
and says, “There is something I must tell you!”
to Bruno Walter. “In the first movement
of my Second, think of it as a family
planning where to go next summer
in terms of other summers. A material ecstasy,
subdued, recollective.” Bruno Walter
in a funny jacket with a turned-up collar
says, “Let me sing it for you.”
He waves his hands and through the vocalese-shaped spaces
of naked elms he draws a copper beech
ignited with a few late leaves. He bluely glazes
a rhododendron “a sea of leaves” against gold grass.
There is a snapping from the brightwork
of parked and rolling cars.
There almost has to be a heaven! so there could be
a place for Bruno Walter
who never needed the cry of a baton.
Immortality—
in a small, dusty, rather gritty, somewhat scratchy
Magnavox from which a forte
drops like a used Brillo Pad?
Frayed. But it’s hard to think of the sky as a thick glass floor
with thick-soled Viennese boots tromping about on it.
It’s a whole lot harder thinking of Brahms
in something soft, white, and flowing.
“Life,” he cries (here, in the last movement),
“is something more than beer and skittles!”
“And the something more
is a whole lot better than beer and skittles,”
says Bruno Walter,
darkly, under the sod. I don’t suppose it seems so dark
to a root. Who are these men in evening coats?
What are these thumps?
Where is Brahms?
And Bruno Walter?
Ensconced in resonant plump easy chairs
covered with scuffed brown leather
in a pungent autumn that blends leaf smoke
(sycamore, tobacco, other),
their nobility wound in a finale
like this calico cat
asleep, curled up in a breadbasket,
on a sideboard where the sun falls.
