This question was posed to my friend Wendy when she was in China adopting the darling Scott. Wendy had been describing something to one of her Chinese hosts about eating in America, and this woman just couldn’t believe that we bought fish dead in the grocery store. Who knows what you’re getting if you can’t see the whole fish — how can you tell how fresh it is if you can’t see the eyes or the gills? Better to buy your fish live, out of a tank, like sensible people, no? I got thinking of this because my garden is…
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Requiem for a Bear: R.I.P. Number 264 A couple of weeks ago I blogged about watching our friend Bill Campbell’s documentary Season of the Grizzly on Animal Planet (I’d give a link to the blog entry, but Blogger seems to have decided this morning that all of my archives are unavailable. I’ll have to work on that.) Bill followed bear Number 264 for almost a year and got amazing footage of her and her cubs (although, according to Shannon, the Yellowstone bear biologist who lives two doors down from Bill and Maryanne, Number 264 wasn’t a very good mommy, she…
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A Plug for the Ruminator Review The latest issue of the terrific Ruminator Review arrived the other day and I’ve been devouring it. This issue is devoted to “Cultivation: Rural Lives, Global Issues” and contains interviews with such thinkers on the subject as Gretel Ehrlich, Verlyn Klinkenboorg, Scott Russell Sanders and Maxine Kumin. (This issue also contains a small review of a childrens’ book by yours truly.) One of the unexpected pleasures for me of moving to this small town in Montana is how interested people are in food, in the origins of their food, and in eating close to…
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Breakfast of Champions Not to sound like an Alice Waters clone, but my breakfast these past few days has been local farm eggs (1 yolk, 2 whites, extra yolk makes dog very happy — it’s good to share), scrambled with some arugula out of my garden and eaten over toast with a little goat cheese crumbled on top. It’s so good that yesterday, when I was out of eggs, I found myself cranky that the local natural foods store (which always makes me grumpy because they seem way more concerned with supplements than with food — eat real food people!)…
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Summer Vacation in the Backyard I have this week off from my Big Corporate job, and I’m having an old-fashioned summer vacation … it feels just like when school let out and you’d get to hang around the house for a few days doing nothing (we went to camp every summer for eight weeks, which was wonderful, so I never had enough time to get really bored with summer, a week or two at each end lying around the house reading books and eating popsicles was usually plenty for me). They finished my fence yesterday afternoon, and I am now…
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Rhubarb My Rhubarb Not only did I get a vigorous rhubarb patch when I bought this house, I got a rhubarb patch with history. Apparently, mine is patch semi-famous in the neighborhood for its sweetness. Several people have pointed out my rhubarb patch and commented on this. But the true defender of the rhubarb is Betty, my 80-year old neighbor who comes running out of her house, screeching with alarm should anyone stray too near the precious rhubarb. Apparently, Betty has been coveting my rhubarb for years, and two or three years ago when the dear departed Mrs. Warnick was…
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New Blue Bike I bought a blue bicycle for forty bucks yesterday — it’s perfect. A Schwinn Collegiate — a blue “girl’s” bike with a front handle brake, three speeds, a big wide bouncy seat, and a coaster break. It’s much like the bike that was so fatally wrong that I was taunted all through sixth grade, but now, as an adult, it’s perfect. What I wanted was a bike I could ride around town, and which was old enough that no one would ever ask me to go mountain biking on it (don’t like mountain biking. I’ve never seen…
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Blooming Lilacs and a Runny Nose I have fifteen-foot-tall lilac bushes running down one side of my property line, and they’re gloriously in bloom this morning. It’s not eight yet, and the temperature is a balmy, sitting-on-the-porch-in-shirtsleeves sixty degrees. The sun is shining. The grackles are searching for bugs in the grass by the street. The puppy is lounging on the wicker sofa next to me. I love my life. Yesterday, I put the garden in. Such an old-fashioned phrase. I planted five varieties of tomatoes, and put their protective green wall-o-water hats on them. Since I started them indoors…
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Reading Lolita in Tehran This is one of those books that people tell you is really great, and you think “yeah, yeah, a book group in Tehran … sounds interesting.” I don’t know where we all got the idea that this book is about a book group of the sort we know here … a sort of hen night where a bunch of women get together and after a desultory discussion of the book at hand, retreat into drinks and gossip and general social activity. This book is not about that kind of book group. This book is about women…
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Blog in Progress I loved my old template, but alas, with my new laptop, I can hardly read the text … it’s a very faint grey and my poor eyes were having a terrible time with it. So, for the next couple of days I’ll be fussing with the template. I know, change is hard … but after my Powerbook died on me last week, I’m in that state where one must get used to a lot of computer change all at once. That said, I must admit I love my new iBook — it’s so tiny, so compact, so…