Living Small in my Small Town I’ve been home since Friday night and I’m only now beginning to recover enough to even think about adding to the blog. Five days in San Jose was simply draining … aside from the work things, which are too boring to blog about, just being around all those people, all that traffic, just the feeling of being in public for five days absolutely wore me out. Getting home was a trial, since there had been fog or snow or something in Salt Lake City that morning, which, since Salt Lake is the Delta hub,…
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Sometimes all you can do is iron the napkins. I’ve discovered that of the blogs I read daily, the ones I really look forward to are the domestic blogs, particularly Julie, and Leah who Struggles in her Bungalow Kitchen. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve been thinking a lot about domesticity lately, and the unexpected pleasures I’ve discovered in domestic life. I’ve come late to this, having spent much of my twenties and thirties avoiding domestic entanglement. I had one of those childhoods that make one want to get out of the house as soon as…
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Marion Cunningham, one of my food heros, has a great piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle about the demise of family cooking and mealtime. I don’t get it. My family life as a kid was pretty chaotic, but my mother always cooked, and taught both my brother and I to cook along with her. Most of my happy memories of my Mom’s house revolve around days we spent cooking, either experimenting with new dishes, or cooking things we all knew we liked. I’ll never forget the first curry I ever made, with instructions from a woman I remember only as…
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It’s over, thank goodness. Some years I’m all Christmas cheer, but this year I just couldn’t get into it for some reason. Because I’m new in town and don’t know when they pick up Christmas trees (and since we’ve had 50-75 mph winds the past three days) I compromised by taking all the ornaments off the tree and putting them away, but I left the tree, with its white lights, in the living room. It was sort of a Charlie Brown tree to begin with (but once you’ve walked into the Round Barn at the fairground, you’re pretty much committed…
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Christmas was perfect — I got almost no stuff. My brother bought me an adult ed class with a Master Gardener from MSU and a cookbook (well, a gift certificate for The Pleasures of Slow Food by Corby Kummer which is out of stock at the moment). Mom sent socks and PJs. And we all avoided the pile of interesting stuff that no one really needed anyhow. Not that I’m against presents … I love presents. I just hate the forced nature of Christmas presents … my perfect Christmas involves a bunch of people sitting around a long table having…