My cousin called last night from Telluride. “Remember that year you sent mushrooms to me in New York?” she asked. “That was so amazing, and I was so busy that year. We’re having the best mushroom season here in ages. Can I return the favor?” I told her yes, I’d love that. I said we’d finally got some rain, and I’m seeing social media pictures of mushrooms, but I’m working too much to get out in the middle of the week, and it’s too crowded on weekends. I’m under water on about six different fronts just now. “What do you…
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I made a little soup this week. Sautéed some onion and backyard garlic in a nice glug of olive oil. Added diced potato and carrot, salt, water to cover. Let them simmer until they were getting soft, then added local green beans, not mine, mine didn’t come in this year, but nice local green beans, cut into soup-spoon lengths. Let them cook until they were done. No crunchy green beans for me. Then some orzo added at the end. No stock, a splash of fish sauce was all it needed. Topped with the first few garden tomatoes, some basil, a…
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I’ve been trying really hard not to write about how difficult this summer has been, but I can’t seem to find a way around it. I want to be cheerful, really I do. I’m so tired of being filled with fury and grief. I thought I knew something about grief, having lost both brothers, one as a child, the other as an adult. I thought I knew about grieving after our father left the country when I was in my twenties, after our mother chose the bottle over us time and time again. I thought I knew how to do…
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“But where would we go?”It’s the question that keeps coming up in conversations. Our funky little town has gone the way of all the other funky little towns in the West. Housing prices went through the roof last year, and we’ve seen an influx of both really aggressive dumb white Trump people, and less toxic but nonetheless annoying rich retirees and second homeowners. No one who works here can afford to live here anymore. I ranted a little bit about it on the bird site this morning, and got responses ranging from Ugh to “you should move because it’s like…
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I hit a writerly speed bump the past couple of weeks. This happens. I’ve made a lot of progress on this book project since New Years, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. There’s a shape I can see. There are several new essays that need honing, and some older ones that need reworking, and it feels like a narrative trajectory is shaping up. I’ve been sending things out, and a couple of them have caught, and a few have come back and for the first time in years that process does not feel life or death, does not…
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This is my great-great aunt, Marie Plamondon in her WW1 Women’s Auxiliary uniform. For a while, I used her as my Twitter avatar, from this photo. She grew up in Chicago, in a Catholic family of some wealth, with two sisters and two brothers. Her parents were industrialists who died on the Lusitania when she was in her twenties, a death that rocked the entire family. They were close. They loved one another, and Marie and Charlotte, my great-grandmother and namesake, were close companions their entire life. Years later, when the settlement came through from the German government, Marie inherited…
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Himself has a stupendous collection of garage sale art. He grew up in an antique-y family, his mother had booths in group shops for years, and he remembers childhood weekends spent in the back of the station wagon, way too early in the morning, heading off to find treasure. The art collection has themes. For example, one room in the detached motel bungalow at the cabin is birds, and the other is vintage western travel swag. The main room at the cabin has a collection of three-legged ungulates, mostly elk, including a needlepointed scene I found at our now-closed Senior…
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Head on over to Edible Bozeman and check out my new essay, Seeds of Hope. With a charming illustration by my MSU English Department compadre, Mindy Misener.
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The spring onions have come in, the chickens are laying again and I’ve been thinking about bodies. My yard is full of bodies — chickens and cats and the dog and myself. Himself, my love, likes the cats, puts up with the dog, but really does not like the chickens at all. Mostly because they shit in the yard. I clean up after them, but chickenshit is a factor in this space. It doesn’t bother me, but I grew up in horse barns, and mucking out was one of my first childhood chores. The neighborhood is full of bodies too…
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I’ve really enjoyed the newsletter format, and being able to send you all a tiny essay once a week or so on some issue I’m thinking through for the book project I’m working on. It’s been enormously useful, and I’ve used a number of these posts as jumping-off points for real essays. However, Substack has a few issues — I’ve been writing online since the dark ages, and I’ve always preferred to host my own content. I mean, I’m so old I nearly lost my PhD qualifying exams, which are pretty formative to all my work, in a floppy disk…