Eating Local We have a little local farmer’s market – when I moved here last fall it was pretty much just one good vegetable merchant and a lot of crafts. Well, they’ve done a great job getting new vendors, and Wednesday there was a local family selling their own pork, raised naturally without hormones and allowed to roam outside. Mr. Miller told me they started because they thought the local 4-H kids were paying too much for their weaner pigs, so they raised some weaners, and then when the weren’t all sold, well, they were in the pork business. So…
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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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Spelling for a Cure There’s a woman in town who has cancer. Since she’s your basic writer/musician/storyteller, and since she lives in the good old USA where if you don’t work for a big corporation you’re hosed, she has no health insurance. And now she has cancer. So what did the good citizens of Livingston do? Had a spelling bee. A spelling bee that put the local writers on the spot. So at seven o’clock last night, there they were: Elwood Reid, Tim Cahill, Thomas Goltz, Diane Smith, Alston Chase, Jim Liska, and a bunch of other people who I…
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Signs of Spring in Livingston, MT Sandhill cranes flying over the dog park in the morning. One pair. Clacking. The 2 year old bird dog loses his mind and chases after them for ten minutes. Marks In and Out is open again — authentic 1950s drive in, white tiles so clean you could do surgery on them, and the best authentic cheeseburgers made with locally grown and processed meat. A cheeseburger you don’t have to feel guilty about. And for 2 bucks, no less. Bare root roses for the garden — 2 Yellow Persians, 2 Fairy Pinks, 2 Therese de…
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Forsythia and chickens It was sort of a crappy day here in Montana … weather looming, dogs digging up the weed-barrier-cloth I laid around the soon-to-be-raised-beds and shredding it all over the yard, and I was just off all day. So I did what all good Americans do when feeling out of sorts, I got in the car, drove to Bozeman, and went shopping. But what I love about living here is that shopping includes stops like the Big R Ranch & Home Supply where you can buy everything from clothes to dog food to garden supplies to Bantam Chickens.…
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The dirt of my dreams. Of my dreams! We’re having a thaw — today was gorgeous, sixty-five degrees, sun shining, a little windy but then again, this is Livingston and we’re used to wind. So outside I went, spading fork in hand, to turn over some dirt. Now my last garden, in California, was a wonderland of clay. Turning over soil was a marathon activity which often involved me standing on my spade, bouncing up and down, trying to wiggle it into the dirt. And my first garden was in Telluride, at nearly 9000 feet with a 45 day growing…
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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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Small Town Life Here’s what I love about living in a small town. My block has about six houses on each side of the street. Ed is my neighbor across the street. He’s an older gent, and he was in flooring for his working life. When I first moved in, Ed brought me a trivet he’d made from leftover flooring samples … it’s perfect to go under my rice cooker. Well, Ed owns a snow blower, and it snowed last night, about a foot and a half. Now Mike lives on my side of the block, two houses down from…
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Book Alert When two writers become friends there’s always an interesting moment when you exchange books. It’s fraught, especially if the new friend is someone you really like, because there’s always that chance that the book will, well, not be quite what you had hoped (we all have writer friends who we like better than we like their books). I spent the weekend totally engrossed in my friend Maryanne Vollers book Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron De La Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South (try Alibris since this fine book is…