Back to Boring Normal Life

Posted on April 7, 2008 by cmf

Well, the dogs are on the mend — Ray’s stitches come out on Friday and I took Owen off to have his dressings changed today. I wish I’d had my camera with me — that external fixature is quite something. My little FrankenPuppy. His Fenatyl patch is also off, which is making him a little less groggy — thank goodness we have the mysterious “anaglesic elixir” because he’s still intermittently uncomfortable.
In other news — the tomatoes are getting their true leaves down in the basement, although I didn’t have the germination rates with the pepper seedlings that I’d hoped for –there are still plenty of peppers, but somehow, when nothing pops up in a cell I just can’t help but feel a tiny disapointment. This weekend I’m going to start some cabbages and greens — chard, maybe some frissee, things I can pop in once (if ever) it stops snowing.

I’m finally seeing the bulbs start to poke up out of the mostly-frozen ground, and if it’s warm I might transplant those roses that currently live where the new fence is going to go. The birds are finally back at my feeder — chickadees and finches for the most part. And the past few days we’ve started hearing birdsong –oh! and I saw a migrating swan yesterday when we were walking the dogs. They’re so beautiful and so mean …

Green Soup for After a Party

Posted on March 24, 2008 by cmf

I hosted Easter yesterday — sent out invitations and invited everyone I know to stop by — it was great fun, there were probably 30 or 40 people over the afternoon, luckily not all at once since my house isn’t that big. I did a big ham, cured and smoked by our local butcher, Matt. He does wonderful hams (we keep trying to convince him to eschew CAFO meat, and while he does do some local sourcing, he’s unconvinced people around here will pay for it. Considering half the kids in the county get free lunch, he might be right, but we keep trying nonetheless). Even though he uses commercial pork, he does a great ham, and unbelievable bacon — I consider it half-local — and I glazed that 16 pound big boy with a mixture of equal parts orange marmalade, mustard, rooster sauce and brown sugar (next time I might add some orange zest as well). It came out spicy and sweet and fabulous, and as always, people ate most of that ham.

I also made some delicious asparagus mushroom egg stratas using this recipe I found online — and made a big salad. Now because I have a horror of running out of food at a party — I had an entire uncooked egg strata left over, as well as 3 big bags of washed greens (a mix of red and green leaf lettuce, frissee, and watercress). I cooked off the last egg strata this morning, then portioned it up and froze it — that’s a lot of easy dinners for nights when work has been hectic. And I’m making soup from the leftover greens.

I love greens soup in the spring — and today’s mixture of spitting rain and sunshine screams spring like nothing else. I cut up a white onion and sauteed it in enough butter and olive oil to cover the bottom of my dutch oven. When the onion was translucent I added a dried chile pepper and 4 cloves of garlic minced. Then I started feeding in the greens, stuffing more and more in as they wilted. A good slug of leftover champagne (I know! sounds decadant — but it was leftover cava from the mimosas) and cook it until all the greens wilted down. Then I added a box of chicken stock (I have some homemade in the freezer, but I wasn’t thinking ahead), and a half pint of whipping cream leftover from this weekends fiesta. Cook it until it seems done but not dead, then get out the hand-held blender and puree. And there you have it, a big pot of liquid greenness — which feels like just the thing after a long winter of bean soups. As if we all need the tonic of greens after a long winter, even though we’re not exactly Greek peasants surviving on dried fish and salt pork all winter.

So, Spring is officially here. We’ve had a big fiesta complete with kids and dogs and everyone standing around my kitchen talking and drinking mimosas. There’s been a ham. The leftovers are dealt with, and I’m looking forward to a long summer of entertaining in the garden — that is, if summer ever comes!

Martha Stewart Cracks Me Up …

Posted on March 21, 2008 by cmf

I admit it, I love Martha Stewart. I love her drive. I love her insane love of crafts. She had Nathan Lane on the other day making plaster of paris bunnies — it was insane. She had these plastic molds she’d clamped together with binder clips and as she was making Nathan Lane file off the rough edges he looked at her and said “Martha! People aren’t going to do this! They have lives …” and her response was “Oh yes they will.” As though she was going to come over to each and every one of our houses and personally supervise the proper manufacture of decorative plaster of paris bunnies that we were all to paint to look like chocolate ones.

And then this morning she was dyeing eggs. First, of course, she was wrapping them in scraps of lace, “you know, from your sewing basket,” or, as she also suggested “you could cut up that old wedding dress. You know, if you’ve gotten divorced or something.” And then, after taking the lace-wrapped eggs out of the dye and cutting the lace off them (they really were pretty) she put them on this egg-drying board she’d made by sticking a million pins through a piece of foam core. Like one of those beds of nails the freak-show guys lie on. “You could just have your kids make one of these for you,” she said. I loved the whole thing. The freaky attention to detail. Her genuine joy at how pretty the eggs were. The kind of mind that thinks of sticking a million pins through a piece of foamcore so your eggs will dry without spots.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I know that I have a little inner Martha, the one who took enormous joy in making 6 dozen pecan biscuits last weekend and freezing them for my Easter Brunch I’m throwing this weekend. My inner Martha likes projects — likes the way you get all focussed and keep trying to figure out how to make an actual object that matches that cool idea in your head. It was my inner Martha that got obsessive at Christmas about repurposing two tiny lunchboxes that I got for free at the grocery store into flower fairy lunchboxes for the twins. It was so much fun — finding the right paper then decoupaging it, then cutting the flower fairies out of the calendars and glueing them on, and of course, the glitter. What’s not to love about a project with glitter?

Here’s how they turned out:
Maybe it’s the bossy older sister in me, but I get an enormous kick out of watching the way Martha relentlessly orders her world. It’s probably not always a lot of fun to be around her as she’s forcing the universe to conform to her inner vision of how it’s supposed to be, but there’s something I find enormously touching about it. She seems to take such genuine joy in her ridiculous crafts — it’s a joy I get. There’s something wonderful in knowing you’ve got a supply of perfectly lovely plaster bunnies that look like chocolate, but aren’t chocolate so you don’t have to worry about them melting or the pets eating them. And you made them yourself. Martha’s flaws, temper tantrums, and generally difficult nature have all been exhaustively documented, but I just have to admit to a big soft spot for her. She’s so relentlessly herself, and ever since she got out of prison, she seems to have grown a healthy sense of humor about herself as well. What can I say? Martha Stewart cracks me up …

Wendell Berry’s Composting Privy

Posted on February 29, 2008 by cmf

Bookslut picked up on the indelible image of Wendell Berry mucking out his composting privvy by pointing out this really interesting interview over at Mother Earth News. Some of his points seem a teeny bit dated (Green Acres? Who has watched Green Acres in 25 years?) but as always, it’s the way Wendell Berry champions those old, unsexy values of work and fidelity and discipline and the hard work of learning a craft. Which sounds very grim, but like the monastic rules, it’s the idea that through discipline comes joy. For instance:

BERRY: It’s like having a milk cow. Having a milk cow is a very strict discipline and a very trying circumstance. It means you’ve got to be home twice a day to milk whether you want to or not, or else the cow will be ruined. Some days you’d rather do anything than go down to that barn and maybe some days you go and you’re kind of bored with it. But other days it’s a most rewarding thing and you realize that you get the reward and happiness of it because you stuck to it when it wasn’t rewarding. There’s some kind of wisdom in that fidelity, when you can say, “All right, every day ain’t going to be the best day of your life, don’t worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.”

Years ago when I was the graduate student indentured servant for the Art of the Wild writers conference at Squaw Valley, we had dinner one night by the lake and Gary Snyder told us about how Wendell Berry called him after his divorce from Masa. Now Berry has written extensively about marriage and fidelity and that he basically doesn’t believe in divorce. Wendell called him up, Gary told us, and said that he should know that if he and Carole came east, they were always welcome at his place. Gary said it really touched him, because he knew how Wendell felt about such things, and he would never have taken Carole there without that kind of an invitation. That it would have been rude. And so, that phone call meant a lot to him, he was really grateful to know that the friendship between the two of them could transcend even such a fundamental difference. (Although they’re really more alike than different — one’s Christian, one’s Buddhist, one’s long-married, one’s divorced, then widowed — but the bottom line is they are both country people, both poets of the country ethic.)

In a week in which my blog seems to have been obsessed with do-it-yourself, and basic skills, and those things that Gary Snyder called “the Real Work,” it seems fitting to end with Wendell Berry, someone with a deep and unsentimental love for the physical world, and for the work it takes to live in honest relationship with that world.

More on Reviving Lost Skills

Posted on February 27, 2008 by cmf

Funny the way synchronicity works — I’ve been thinking a lot about how skills like learning to knit, or sew, or garden, or cook — skills some of our mothers (or in my case, my grandmother) discounted as being the kinds of skills that keep a girl tied to a domestic existence that stifles other opportunity — are for me a fulfilling way of refusing to cede control of my basic lifeskills to the corporate behemoths that seem to have taken over our lives. If I can sew a skirt, I’m not entirely beholden to clothes made in factories. If I can knit a sweater, I am not entirely beholden to some corporate entity for personal warmth. If I can put up my own pickles, I’m not relying on Clausen any more … none of this negates my existence as a cyber-worker, as a person who bought a new car a couple of years ago, as a person who still shops in stores and is in no way living off the grid. I just like knowing that if I have to, I can take care of some of my basic needs myself.

So this morning I pull up the SF Chronicle (another wonder of technology — I can read five newspapers a day) and Georgeanne Brennan has a really fabulous piece about how traditional pig-butchering celebrations are becoming, if not common, at least less of an anomaly than they once were:

The “day of the pig” also has renewed meaning now, when many people are concerned with the source of their food and with humane treatment of animals. Yes, there would be a slaughter, but it would be done with respect for the animal and the food it provides. Using every part of the animal – or as much as possible – would also show our respect for the life given. We would try not to waste a thing.

There’s a real value to keeping all these older skills alive, and in the case of the DIY crafts movement, to re-inventing them and making them hip and alive again. Skills like these brign us into contact with one another — there’s a reason knitting shops have become centers of community for many women (and some men) around the country. Keeping a garden gives me something to discuss with the folks at the farmer’s market in the summer, and because I produce more than I can eat, sharing food brings me into my community in ways I might not experience if I was simply buying all my food at the supermarket. Industrialized food production has been so successful at divorcing most of us from the animal and vegetable nature of our food that it’s no surprise to me that in much the same manner as the absolute conquest of wild nature caused Americans to go back and re-evaluate their relationship to and how they valued wilderness, that the success of industrial agriculture has spurred many of us to go back and re-evaluate our relationship to our food sources.

My First Sweater

Posted on February 26, 2008 by cmf

Here it is — my first sweater. It only took me four years — well, it really only took about a month of actual knitting — I started it a couple of times and had to pull it out a couple of times but finally, it’s done. I’m wearing it now. It’s cozy and heavy and although the sleeves are a little long, it actually fits and the proportions are right –

I’m going to do another one in this same pattern but using Becky Weed’s gorgeous wool she mills over at 13 Mile Ranch. This will be my locavore sweater — the wool was grown and processed just over north of Bozeman — I’ve written before about buying Becky’s lamb and I’ve been wanting to knit something from her yarn for a while now (but I told myself I had to finish the sweater I’d started first). I love that she converted an old barn on her place to a mill, and that she’s working so hard to develop multiple revenue streams for local sheep ranchers. Plus, the wool is gorgeous …

I think I’m going to do this one in a different stitch — seed stitch maybe? With a dark mohair trim and wooden buttons? This is one of those things like learning to sew a skirt, or make jam and pickles, that makes me feel good. I like being able to make something myself, something that doesn’t look like what everyone else is wearing, and that I can tweak so it’s exactly the way I want it. I also take great comfort in not being entirely reliant on the consumerist corporate world for basic things like feeding and clothing myself — there’s some real bottom-line security in knowing that I can take care of my basic needs, that I haven’t entirely lost those skills.

My Grandmother’s Voting for Hillary

Posted on January 31, 2008 by cmf

My 97-year-old grandmother asked for an absentee ballot for the Democratic primary so she can vote for Hillary.

My grandmother has never voted for a Democrat before in her life, but she wanted to “vote for that woman.”

My grandmother was a crack polo player in the 1930s, when polo was a hugely popular public sport (30,000 people took the train up out from Chicago to see the 1938 East-West game, when Will Roger’s team beat the best players from the East coast). Because she was a “girl” my grandmother wasn’t allowed to play — she could play practice matches when someone got hurt, but she never got the chance to compete.

She was also offered a full scholarship to the Northwestern Medical school, which her father convinced her to turn down because she’d be “taking a place from some man who would need to support a family.” Instead, she married my grandfather, and then when he was debhilitated by alcoholism, she supported her family without the aid of anything useful like a medical degree. She was an impatient mother, a woman who would have been much happier running something — a company, a hospital, something other than the Pony and Pet Show she put on with her best friend every summer.

When I was growing up she told me over and over again to stay in school, to get a degree, to go out and make my own money because if you have your own money “no one can tell you what to do.” She told me at about sixteen, long before I even had a boyfriend, that if I ever “got in trouble” to come to her and she’d take care of it. (This from a woman who wanted to abort her fourth child, but couldn’t find anyone back on those days of illegal abortions. My Aunt Molly doesn’t really take it personally, and in fact, she’s the one taking care of my grandmother in her very old age.) And of course, she’s the one who gave me Mrs. Baggot’s ring while whispering fiercely “now you have a really big diamond, and you didn’t have to marry anyone to get it.”

However, there’s always been this weirdly reactionary side to her — I remember her praising Nancy Reagan for walking several steps behind her husband (we mocked her openly for that one). And the only way my mother and two aunts could get out of the house as young women was to get married. But there’s that pissed-off part of my grandmother, the girl who was told she couldn’t play, the woman who had at least two more children than she wanted to, the woman who was convinced not to go to medical school. And that’s the woman who even at 97, is determined to vote for the first woman with a real shot at being the President of the United States. Even if she is a Democrat.

Who knows how many pissed off old ladies there are out there? There’s a group the pollsters haven’t been talking to …

Knitting as Antidote for Frantic Busy-ness

Posted on January 22, 2008 by cmf

I’m about to go log in to my job at the Big Corporation, the job that I’m hoping will see me through whatever impending financial doom is rising on the horizon, the job that isn’t my dream job, but which I like nonetheless. As much as I’d love to be able to write full time, it’s good to have a real job, especially for a writer — it keeps me engaged with the world outside my little circle of writers and artists and handymen and hunters and ranchers trying to make a go of it selling milk and eggs and wool. There was a piece in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago about telecommuters fighting off loneliness that I found interesting because it’s not really a problem I run into — for one thing, I’m weirdly happy to spend enormous amounts of time alone, and for another, I work with a group of people spread out between San Jose, Miami, Galway Ireland, Seattle and here in Montana. We’re all so electronically connected to one another at my job, that I don’t really feel like I’m alone all day. Between our group instant messaging program, email, and web-based meetings it’s hard to feel disconnected. In fact, when it gets as busy as it’s been the past few weeks, it’s amazing how fried and frazzled and pecked-at a girl can wind up feeling after another 10 hour day in her own front room.

And so, I’ve taken up my long-neglected knitting project again. Knitting and Netflix — a couple of hours working on the sweater that I’ve knit, pulled out, and knit again so many times now (it’s taken me a long time to figure out how to count stitches and rows, what I really like is knitting the big swatches of body parts, not the v-neck or sleeves where you have to pay attention). After a long day of emails and fires that need to be put out and very long technical documents that need to be edited in too little time there’s something essentially calming about putting in a movie, something that’s going to run continuously for an hour and a half or two hours without the interruption of commercials, and knitting. It gives you something to do with your hands. It keeps a girl from surfing the internet aimlessly. It makes you concentrate a little — not as much as working, but just enough to smooth out those jangly places that are left from the day’s work.

And who knows? This time, I might actually get this sweater finished. Considering it’s been ten below for days now, a nice, warm, raspberry-colored sweater would be a good thing.

Perfect Vacation — at Home

Posted on December 31, 2007 by cmf

Inspired by this article in the Times of London, I holed up and took a lovely, restorative vacation at home after Christmas. Christmas was lovely — we all had a great time. There was lots of food and wine and by ten that night we had six kids under five doing the Toddler Disco in the middle of the living room floor. Perfect.

I woke up on the 26th a tiny bit hung over, and decided the tree was coming down. It was a pretty tree and we had fun decorating it — the big girls came over to help me. But I was done with Christmas. I’d done so much cooking and wrapping and festivity in the run up to the big day that by the 26th, I was over it. Plus, I kind of like taking down the tree — it’s quiet, and sort of meditative. Packing everything up again for another year.

And then I started my lovely lovely vacation at home. A dog walk in the mornings. Chores — a little cleaning, some food shopping, a quick stop at Nina’s to see what the kids are doing. Then home by noon or one, and a whole quiet afternoon stretches ahead of me and it’s down into my basement office to work in peace on my new book. It’s been a great vacation — nearly 4000 words and I’ve still got today and tomorrow before I have to go back to work. Then a few quiet evenings in a row to read or watch Netflix movies that have been piling up — after the string of parties before Christmas, parties that were fun but left me feeling all talked out and with that jittery energy that too much socializing instills in me — four whole days to settle back into my book was the best holiday I could have imagined.

Tonights festivities are going to be very low key — dinner with Nina and the kids who are leaving to go back to LA on Friday. We’ll cook some food and then watch the ball drop in New York at 10, and then home. I’m superstitious about the New Year — I hate welcoming a new year hung over. I like to greet New Year’s day bright eyed and well rested — I’ll do a little housecleaning — take the recycling out — and we’re off into 2008. Happy Happy everyone ….

Creature of Habit …

Posted on December 3, 2007 by cmf

The last few months I’ve gotten into a writing rhythm that has really been working for me. I’ve been doing a blog post every day during the week, and weekends have been devoted to my new book. When I decided to get serious about the blog and to write on a regular basis, it was really to bring this little blog back to life. It never occurred to me that the discipline of taking care of the blog would bleed over into my creative work and prove a boon to that, but it has. Because I’ve written something of my own every day during the week, I find on weekends when it’s time to get back to the book, it’s much easier to pick up the thread. So, steady progress has been made, and although I have no social life, I’ve really been terrifically happy about it all.

And so it was something of a surprise how off-kilter I was all last week. LA was great, and I was thrilled to see my pretend children — I didn’t get a chance to blog about it, but the twins third birthday was an all-day affair involving much chirping of “It’s my BIRTH-day!” out of both of them. Three is such a fun age — and although infant twins are something of a logistical nightmare — they’re so funny now that they can talk to and play with one another. Their conversations alone are worth the price of admission — very very funny.

But it got me off my schedule. And then my internet connection was screwy all last week — I had no connectivity at all at home from Tuesday until late Thursday and it really threw me. I had to go out there in the mornings — out to the coffee shop where there are other people, where I had to get dressed in real clothes and where I ran into people I knew. It wasn’t a bad thing, but it did throw me off my game.

And so this weekend was lovely. My internet was back. I had my precious two days of silence, and puttering around the house, and descending into my basement office to pull up the book I’m working on. I did laundry and shopped for groceries and lo! my book had not actually turned into a pile of drek while I was away from it — nor had it gone entirely feral, snarling in the corner of my office where I’d neglected it. I finished a chapter. I started a new one. I read On Chesil Beach. I did laundry (the washer/dryer is in the basement, and I’m afraid I’ve become a little pavlovian in my love for the white noise of the laundry while I’m writing.) I even managed to outline a few topics for blogging this week.

My routine has been restored and it feels like my world is back on kilter. (Michael Ruhlman writes about the importance of a writer’s routine in his memoir House — it’s a terrific story about the importance of a home to a family and to creative work.) I know writers, like my friend Nina in LA, who can get work done among the chaos of family life — but I have never been able to do that. It takes me a lot of silence to be able to hear what’s going on inside my own head again — walking with the dogs helps, as does knowing that on the weekend I have two whole days stretched out before me where I’m not beholden to anyone else’s needs — like I said, I have no social life at the moment. But it’s winter in Livingston, a time when the wind howls, when darkness falls early, and when all the writers in town retreat to their offices and try to make up for the time we wasted playing outside during our short summer.

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