Originally published at Substack, 12/6/2020 I spend a lot of time thinking about home.  My driving ambition all through my 20s and 30s was to find a way to buy a house. Not just any house, but a house I could stay in. A house I could live in. I was the kid who went to six grammar schools, who switched custodial parents, whose brother died of cancer. Every time we got settled in, every time I made friends, some crisis arose and we had to go. As an adult, neither of my parents were much good at keeping themselves…

Originally published at Substack, 11/29/2020 I’ve spent much of the pandemic on a kind of crash course of garden design. It started when I went down the rabbit hole of Monty Don garden series videos on YouTube — Gardens of France, Italy, the World, America … what is a garden? What does it mean to build a garden? Is a garden a form of art? What do gardens mean in different cultures? When is a garden a symbol of power, and when is it a means of sustenance?  It’s something I was thinking about as I tore out my old…

Originally published at Substack, 11/22/2020 I made a cheeky Twitter post the other day about Thanksgiving being the worst of all the holidays, and hoo boy! Someone with a huge following chimed in to tell me how wrong I was, which sent my tweet out into a pool of people I don’t usually interact with (the only reason I’m still on Twitter is because I have it pretty buttoned down). People were in their feelings. They were offended that I find Thanksgiving tiresome, and find the food even worse. I wound up having to mute the post because really, who…

Originally published at Substack, 11/11/2020 The wild is not only full of bones, but it’s full of shit. Or to be polite, scat While we were waiting for the election results, Himself suggested taking advantage of the last of the nice weather and going to Yellowstone for the day. Knowing your scat is a crucial skill when you’re walking around in places where you are not the apex predator, and where there are large animals like bison and elk who could, if startled, really do a number on you. Hiking with Himself entails finding a trail that heads in the…

Originally published at Substack, 11/2/2020 Hank has been carrying this elk bone around on our morning walk most of the week. He’ll hide it, then find it again, then hide it someplace else. It’s one of the things that surprises people, how many bones there are. The outdoors here is full of bones. We live among one of the largest herds of wild ungulates left, and eventually, each of them dies. Just last week, we rented a Forest Service cabin for a couple of nights. On the way home, we stopped so Himself could check out a side stream. I…

Originally posted at Substack, 10/24/2020 It’s been a race around here to get the garden harvested and put to bed. Weekends have been filled with chores like planting 100 tulip/daffodil/grape hyacinth bulbs, along with lavenders and a couple of new rugosa roses in the front yard, to stacking wood, to harvesting the last of the tomatoes, kales, chards, herbs and then burying everything under a layer of straw for the winter. It was a race I think I won, by mere moments, as today we woke up to a full two feet of new snow, with temps projected to go…

So let’s make “Persian” Sour Plum Chile Garlic Sauce Originally posted on Substack, 10/5/2020 Aside from (waves hand) all this going on … it’s fall, which means that my evenings and weekends, which is when I read and try to make headway on this book, are taken up with garden and kitchen chores. It’s also that time of year where all of us leave fruit on one another’s doorsteps. Sophie left a bag of apples a couple of weeks ago (they’re in the basement, keeping, but I need to do something with them). Jamie left half a wine box of…

Originally published at Substack, 9/27/2020 One of the few good things to have come out of this pandemic, for people like me who live in far-flung places, is that we can call in for author events and even little workshops in ways that were unheard of in the Before Times. Last week, I Zoomed in for a terrific conversation with Helen Macdonald and Jeff VanderMeer about her new book, Vesper Flights. It was a terrific conversation, especially when you consider that Macdonald was basically calling in from the dead of night in the UK. Toward the end, VanderMeer (whose work…

Originally published at Substack, 9/13/2020 When I was young and very broke in NYC, I figured a girl has to eat, and so cooking became my main source of entertainment. And because I was brokety broke broke broke on my $8/hr editorial assistant salary, I started researching the cuisines of places where folks didn’t have much money. Books like Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed, or Linda West Eckhardt’s American Gumbo, and even the James Beard Theory and Practice books — all of these taught me how people who liked to eat had gotten through lean times. Lean times are…

Originally published at Substack, 8/29/2020 One of my major coping mechanisms during this … time has been Monty Don garden videos, especially his garden tours series: Around the World in 80 Gardens, French Gardens, Gardens of Italy, American Gardens. Most of them are available on YouTube, (with a few weird gaps) and it’s been an interesting crash course in the history of garden design, as well as a meditation on my favorite cluster of ideas: what is a garden? What is nature? What is the wild? This is a photo of one of my favorite spots in the valley. It’s…