Summer’s Over Summer appears to be, rather suddenly, over. The temperature dropped early this week, and this morning my (highly unreliable) thermometer reads 50 degrees. Highs have been only in the 70’s and with the light rapidly receding, well, I’m not feeling hugely optimistic about all those green tomatoes out there. We had hail on the solstice, and here at the end of August I would estimate a hard frost is only a couple of weeks away. The challenges of short-season gardening. Sigh.
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Granny Got A Brand-new Hip My 93-year-old grandmother had her hip replaced on Monday because she wants to ride again. It’s been three years since she could sit a horse, and since riding is her greatest joy, she willingly went in and let them, well, cut her leg off and put it back on again. (Although my cousin Jason tells me that her old horse, Ben, died last month. He swears he’s not buying her a new horse, but I have a hunch there will be one in that barn soon.) And since she’s 93, they didn’t want to risk…
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Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwiches It’s that time of year — there are ripe tomatoes in my garden, which means, it’s time for BLTs. Because what’s the point of a Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato sandwich that isn’t made with a real tomato — a tomato grown locally, a tomato grown to ripeness and juicy perfection? A BLT made with a supermarket tomato is a travesty. It isn’t a BLT at all, it bears the same relation to a real BLT as silicone breasts do to real ones. It is a Bad Thing. Whereas a real BLT, made with a real…
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Pink! Over the weekend I renovated my office .. it is now a deep, bright, wonderful raspberry pink. The trim and the ceiling are bright white, as is the new desk, and the shelving (although I painted the cardboard backings for the shelving units the same pink as the walls). There’s a sort of spiffy-looking track light that gives me these dramatic pinspots and the whole thing looks like something out of a magazine. It makes me inordinately happy to be in here, which, since I work at home and spend most of my time in this room, is a…
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The Burning Season Sometime in the night I realized the wind must have changed, because through the gurgling of the swamp cooler I could smell smoke. It’s disconcerting to smell smoke in your sleep, and I might have been more worried but that even asleep I knew there are two large forest fires in the area, and the smoke just means the winds have shifted. And this morning, it’s true. The air is a hazy apricot and the usually-clear outlines of Livington Peak are a soft grey. There’s a big fire behind the peak — 300 acres by last afternoon’s…
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Freezing the Harvest Meg, over at Meg’s Food and Wine Page blogged this week about the plethora of fresh produce she encountered on her weekend in the Hudson Valley, and how this time of year what she eats is largely dictated by what’s ready to be eaten (and how rare this necessity has become in a world where we’re flying apples from New Zealand for out-of-season produce) … at any rate, her post is much better than this summary so just go read it. But Meg’s post got me thinking about my summer here with my garden — yesterday I…
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Rest in Peace James Welch has died. I only met him once, years ago, at the very first Art of the Wild conference. He led a workshop with a participant we’d been really worried about — he was this older man from Alaska who had, to our enormous alarm, sent us the entire manuscript of his novel, and it was typed. During the months we were planning the conference, we worried about losing the thing, since it was clear it was probably his only copy. So this gentleman appeared, and we scheduled his workshop for the end of the week…
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Lurid Soup Beet Soup! It’s so gorgeous that it is right up there with the Oxford Magazine Music Issue. It’s a soup that will make you do the snoopy dance all over the room. It’s absolutely fuschia (which, by the way, is soon to be the color of my office), and tastes good, and generally is just so beautiful that it will make you happy. Now, I was a beet-a-phobe for a long time. It was those nasty pickled beet slices you’d sometimes get as a kid — the ones that leak nasty canned pickled-beet juice onto the perfectly innocent…
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Yesterday my horoscope said something to the effect that I should stop being so determined and dogged and take the day off to do nothing. Did I listen? Of course not. I had it in my head that I had to pull everything out of my office closet, build shelves in there, and paint the whole thing so that next weekend I can paint the office itself (and build more shelves and put in the new desk and lighting — a whole trading spaces makeover). Now is there any actual schedule here? Any schedule, that is, other than the one…