My Green Vermont

Soup Of The Evening

2012-01-30T18:57:00.001-05:00

My freezer is full of jars containing the liquid essence of long-gone hens. There are also many plastic tubs full of the pureed prolific members of the cucurbit family--pumpkin and her sister squashes: acorn, butternut, and delicata.

It being, for the moment, slightly wintry outside, with enough snow on the ground to make it look less like late October, I made for supper my famous (to me) Curried Cream of Cucurbit soup, so simple that it qualifies as home-grown fast-food. Here's how to make it: into the blender dump a quart of hen broth and a couple of cups of squash or pumpkin, two tablespoons of butter and two of flour. Salt, pepper, and some hot curry powder. A splash of sherry or brandy. Then blend, heat, and eat.

The result lives up perfectly (except for the color, of course. But you can make this soup with green veg, too, omitting the curry powder) to the lines by Lewis Carroll:

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, Beautiful Soup!

Needlepoint For The Soul

2012-01-28T12:31:00.000-05:00

Last week I suffered one of my periodic attacks of "I've got to do something with my hands!" I've been doing quite a bit of writing lately (not here, I know), and writing often brings on an almost physical urge to do something completely different. Over-taxed as well as over-stimulated, my left brain begs me to let it go vacant for a while, and switch to the other side.

Drawing is a good right-brain activity, but not what I would call restful--for me at least, it involves too much judgment. No, when my cranium feels like a dried-out husk but it's still not time for bed, nothing soothes me like needle and thread. Crochet works sometimes, but it's too monotonous. And ever since the German nun who tried to teach me to knit in second grade yelled at me for dropping stitches, knitting has been way too fraught for me.

I got yelled at by various other nuns on both sides of the Atlantic for being a sloppy embroiderer, too, but they didn't leave the scars my knitting instructor did. Crewel is my favorite--it is close to painting on cloth, and the many possible stitches produce a variety of textures. But, after a stint at the computer, crewel is hard on the eyes.

For ease and mindlesness combined with color and tactile pleasure, nothing beats needlepoint. You buy a kit that includes a design stamped in color on canvas, a needle, and a bunch of woolen skeins in the appropriate shades. The work itself is a lot like coloring in a coloring book. You try to stay within the lines and to make the stitches as even as possible. The needle is sturdy and blunt--you don't even have to use a thimble.

Then the fun begins. There is the scratchy feel of the starched canvas, the satisfying thwack of the needle going in, followed by the pshhhhht! of the thread being drawn. Another thwack, another pshhht! and before you know it you have colored in the pale green half of a curvy leaf. You turn to the wrong side of the canvas, anchor the thread and cut it. Now it's time to work the dark part of the leaf. You gloat for a moment over the delicious collection of wools in your work basket, then thread the needle with the evergreen-colored wool, and before you know it you have a lovely, woolly leaf. Next you get to do a flower. The hardest part is stopping.

Since needlework is an old-timey pursuit and I feel deliciously old-timey while I'm doing it, I lean towards old-timey designs: overblown roses set amid generous foliage and spiraling tendrils. But it bothers me that these are someone else's designs, not my own. After all, how hard can it be to design one's own needlepoint? As far as I can tell, all you need to do is keep the design fairly simple and remember that different shades will be juxtaposed instead of shading into each other. Sort of like this:

When My Mind Is Elsewhere, Where Am I?

2012-01-18T18:15:00.001-05:00

It's been happening a lot lately. I'll have fifteen minutes before I have to leave the house to go somewhere and I think, "I'll just write a couple of sentences to start my next blog post." I'm a great believer in jotting something down as a pump primer and returning to it later. But inevitably, even though I firmly intend to stop writing and leave punctually for my appointment, I lose track of time, then come to with a start and have to rush out of the house like a bat out of hell.

The same thing happens every morning when I sit on the floor to meditate. I set the 30-minute timer, close my eyes, and focus on the breath. Next thing I know, I've planned what I'm going to cook for dinner and had exciting imaginary conversations with a couple of people I haven't seen in years. I return to the breath, and suddenly I'm writing the day's blog post. And so on.

I am prepared for this: meditation gurus warn against the tendency of "monkey mind" to jump all over the place. But I don't want to jump all over the place. I want to focus on the breath and achieve serenity. I want to write for fifteen minutes, hit Save, and leave the house. Who is this monkey in my head?

It's the same monkey that, every night, puts me to sleep. The difference is that, at night, she has my permission. I get in bed, close my eyes, take a few deep breaths, and invoke the monkey. I ask her to take me out of time and reality until morning, and she usually obliges. My mind grows dim, wanders a bit, and next thing I know, the dogs are whining for their breakfast. If you've ever had trouble falling asleep, you know that the monkey cannot be summoned at will. But neither, at least in my experience, can she be kept away.

I don't, of course, believe that I am inhabited by a monkey any more than I believe that I am possessed by a devil. But then who is it that, despite my best intentions, makes me forget the time while I'm writing, or plan menus while I'm meditating? Is the real me the one that sets the intention, or the one that seduces me into wayward avenues of thought? And just who is in charge here?

Please tell me I'm not the only one with this problem.

On Dog Drool

2012-01-17T19:30:00.000-05:00

Those dog books you read--if you are the kind of responsible person who reads books about responsible dog ownership before rushing out to get a dog--warn that dealing with dog excreta, dog hair, dog nails, dog ear dirt and dog tears is part and parcel of being a dog owner. But they don't tell you about dog slobber.

Yet dog slobber, or drool--saliva, if you prefer--is a fact of life if you own a dog. Very large breeds, especially those with proportionately short muzzles, such as mastiffs, are the most prolific slobbers, decorating the walls of their dwellings with soaring arcs of droplets worthy of Jackson Pollock.

But even Wolfie, who has a long German Shepherd muzzle and only weighs around ninety pounds, slobbers. As he sits and stays while I set out his food, long strings of drool issue from under his upper lip. That same lip, when he takes a drink of water, collects an extra cup or so of fluid that he then sprinkles over the rug or up the sides of the pine chest that stands near his bowl. True, it's not 100% slobber, but it's not pure water, either.

Whenever I open my laptop, he is there in a flash, wondering what I'm up to, ears back and tail wagging, sniffing and salivating all over the keyboard. It's a miracle the laptop works at all. Like a villain in a melodrama, he drools over the objects of his affections. Let me put on a black outfit preparatory to going out, and he immediately decorates it with a smear of saliva that shines iridescent in the lamplight. When Bisou went through her (first and only) heat, he drooled so copiously that for three solid weeks she went around with her hair all in gelled spikes, like a rock star.

Lexi, whose muzzle is much narrower, and who has been ever dainty in her indoor habits, also causes drool dramas. Our windowsills are less than two feet from the floor. Whenever a deer, a squirrel, a chickadee or even a mosquito passes in front of them, Lexi--followed by the rest of the pack--tries to crash through to get at the intruder, leaving the imprint of her moist nose and tongue on the glass. The sliding door leading to the back yard is doubly afflicted. The dogs slobber on one side of it when they want to go out, and on the other when they want to come back in.

Once upon a time, there was one window in the house that was free of slobber. It was the window behind the living room sofa, whose sill is just above the back cushions. Since the big dogs were never allowed on the furniture, at least we had one window through which guests could see the view. But that came to an end when we got Bisou, whose breed has been fiddled with by humans for five hundred years to produce the perfect lap dog.

If your lap happens to be occupied by a book or a plate of food, your lap dog has to sit on the sofa next to you. From there, it is but a short hop to the top of the back cushions and thence to the window sill, where Bisou, nose and tongue glued to the glass, alternately celebrates and mourns the arrivals and departures of our guests.

A few times a year, the slobber gets cleaned off the windows. For two or three days I rejoice in the light streaming through. Then the clouds return.

I moan about the slobber clouds as I moan about the clouds of hair--white, gray, black, tan, red--that waft over our floors and under our furniture. I can sense the non-pet owners among you thinking, "Why does she have dogs if she doesn't like their mess? Why doesn't she keep them outdoors, or just get rid of the lot?"

That, of course, is the sensible solution. But I don't want a solution. I just want to complain.

Of A Midnight Ambulance Ride, A Skid Off The Road In A Blizzard, And A Trek To Safety With Three Dogs

2012-01-13T11:54:00.000-05:00

There's a limit to the amount of narrative suspense I'm willing to inflict on my readers, so I'll say right now that we're fine: spouse, self, and the three dogs. The hens are fine too, but then, they never go anywhere.

I was reading Trollope in bed three nights ago when my husband announced that he was having severe chest pains. 911 is an easy number to remember, even in the midst of panic. I made the call and rushed to get dressed and put away the dogs so they wouldn't jump all over the EMTs as they attempted to save my husband's life.

I needn't have rushed. It was the night of the full moon, and the nearest rescue team was busy saving other people. Forty-five minutes later, I followed the ambulance down our driveway for the forty-five minute drive to the hospital. I don't much like driving at night, and doing 75 mph was almost as scary as imagining what might be going on inside that ambulance.

In the emergency room, nurses attached my suffering husband to various monitors, administered nitroglycerin, which didn't work, then morphine, which didn't work either. When asked to rate his pain on a scale of 0 to 10 he said "nine," then took a breath and said "ten!" Not just every breath, but every heart beat increased the pain.

We were left alone for a long time while x-rays and tests were being analyzed. Then an angel in the form of a (seemingly) teenage Indian doctor shimmered in and said that the test results and my husband's response to various proddings indicated that he was not having a "cardiac event." But he would have to be admitted, and monitored, and seen by a cardiologist the next day.

At four in the morning I arrived home and went to bed. Bisou jumped in and curled herself into a little bean shape against my stomach, and we both went to sleep.

When I awoke, the news continued to be good (less pain, more negative test results). Before I left for the hospital, not knowing how long I'd be gone, I asked my friend who runs the canine B&B to pick up the dogs and take them home with her.

That evening, having been assured by the cardiologist that my husband's circulatory system was in perfect health (the severe pain was due to a virus-caused inflammation of the membranes surrounding the heart), limp with gratitude and relief, we both returned home.

Ah, life without dogs! Do some people actually live that way? What do they do with themselves all day?

The next morning, after a luxurious lie-in--nobody to let out, let back in, or feed--I set out in the station wagon to pick up the dogs. The weather report predicted mixed precipitation, but in Vermont you can be basking in the sun at home while your neighbor down the road is being blinded by a blizzard.

A few minutes into the drive, it started sleeting. I passed several snow plows scattering sand, then noticed that there were no other cars on the road. The wind was howling, but I was in an optimistic mood. Hadn't I just driven at 75 mph behind an ambulance, in the dark? "I'm tired of being a scaredy-cat flatlander!" I muttered. Vivaldi was playing on the radio, and I hummed along, feeling invulnerable.

At the intersection of the highway and the dirt road leading to the B&B, the road curves steeply upward. I saw that its surface was covered in several inches of wind-blown--and therefore dry and slippery--snow, and wondered what the return trip would be like.

As I loaded the dogs into the car, I felt like a figure in a snow globe, one being shaken by a crazed six-year-old. We got underway, Bisou in her crate on the back seat, Wolfie and Lexi in the cargo space. More nice music was playing on the radio. We made it up a hill, then down. We were crawling along a flat stretch when the car hit a deep rut and was flung into a spin. I saw the white trunk of a well-grown birch tree advancing towards us, and then we were in a ditch.

I squeezed out over the passenger seat, freed a screaming Bisou from her upturned crate, then went to let the big dogs out the back, but there was a tree in the way, and I couldn't open the hatch. Wolfie promptly dove onto the back seat and out of the car. "Stay with me," I told him while I put Lexi's collar on and tugged, then tried to help her raise her front legs high enough to get over the back of the seat. But she laid her ears back and said apologetically, "Sorry, I can't."

What to do? I couldn't leave her in the car: she was scared, and the car was tilted at a perilous angle. I couldn't call for help because there is no cell-phone reception in that particular spot. And besides, nobody could have gotten to us in those conditions.

It's difficult to think clearly when howling gusts are flinging snow into your face and you can't see and your heart is pumping hard because of the birch tree. But it seemed that there was nothing for it but to walk back to the B&B, if I could only get Lexi out of the car. I went around to the back again and the obstructing tree (sapling, really) agreed to be pushed away just enough that I could open the hatch.

I lifted Lexi out and we headed back down the road, the three dogs on their leashes, and me trying to keep from spraining an ankle on the snow-covered ruts. Lexi was glued to my side, doing the best heeling of her entire 13 1/2 years. Wolfie was out front, looking out for malefactors. Bisou was having a great time, but every once in a while a gust would blow her back behind me and she'd tangle her leash around my legs.

I had no idea how far we'd have to walk. On one of the hills I felt a pull behind me--Lexi's arthritic hips were giving way. Would I need to carry her the rest of the way? But she managed to keep walking, and, after letting Wolfie (for once!) pull me up my friend's driveway, we reached our destination.

Then it was comforting words, strong hot coffee and phone calls. My husband dealt with the insurance and the towing. Because of the road conditions, it took two different trucks before the car was finally rescued. And so were we--after the town truck plowed the road--by my fully-recovered spouse.

In the early winter twilight, doubly limp with relief and gratitude, we arrived home, where there was barely a sprinkling of snow on the ground.

Forgiving Our Mothers

2012-01-09T16:45:00.000-05:00

Went to a meeting of women of a certain age yesterday to talk about mothers and daughters. The room was crowded, and I couldn't help wondering what an equivalent meeting for men would have been like. Would guys have showed up in such numbers on a Sunday afternoon? Would they have told intimate stories about their fathers?

In this meeting, the stories came pouring out. There was the woman who, the night before her mother died, dreamed that she was carrying her mother down a path towards a bridge whose other side was obscured by clouds; the woman whose mother could not attend her daughter's college graduation because she was giving birth to her fourteenth child; the woman (several women) who felt abandoned by her mother. Finally, there was the woman who, try as she might, could not bring herself to forgive her mother. The room had lots of advice for her, basically having to do with letting go of her feelings so she could get on with her life. Then, as the meeting was about to end, one woman spoke up "You can't just think about forgiveness." She clasped her hands to her bosom, "Forgiveness has to come from the heart."

What?

Talk about a perpetual guilt machine. I can imagine the unforgiving woman beating herself up for the rest of her life, saying "But I don't feel forgiveness towards my mother." Paradoxically, my often guilt-inducing Catholic education could have come to the rescue, had I had a chance to speak. "Feelings don't have anything to do with it," I would have told her. "All you need is the intention to forgive. Make an act of the will. Act as though you have forgiven, and things will take care of themselves."

There's nothing we can do about our feelings. Resentment, hatred, gluttony, envy, lust keep endlessly erupting out of that hidden volcano we all carry inside. They appear uninvited, sometimes a trickle, sometimes a torrent. And sometimes they vanish for good.

The only thing we can control is our actions. The practice of acting as though one has forgiven reminds me of the loving-kindness practice in Buddhism. You keep repeating "may all beings be safe, may all beings be happy..." and eventually you may end up feeling kindly towards your worst enemy. But it's o.k. if the feeling doesn't come, as long as the intention is there.

This approach to morality has helped in my own dealings with my mother. I can recall things my mother did or said that still arouse less-than-loving feelings in me. But in my mind and with my will I have forgiven her, and thus am spared the burden of guilt.

The process of forgiving my mother has been assisted by my being the mother of adult children--daughters at that. How can anybody who has bumbled and improvised her way through motherhood, armed with nothing but luck and good intentions, see herself through the eyes of her grown daughters and not cast a newly indulgent eye on her own mother? In other words, let her who is without guilt cast the first stone...

Despite my refusal to cast stones, I'm sorry to say, the resentment volcano still erupts. "Why did she...? How on earth could she...? Didn't she see that I...?" On and on, ad infinite nauseam. Isn't it time I got over this, I wonder? Will it ever go away?

I am beginning to suspect that this particular volcano will never go completely dormant. But after yesterday's meeting, hearing all those stories, at least I know that mine is not the only volcano that's still sputtering away.

Violette's Violin

2012-01-05T11:11:00.001-05:00

In these days when violins small enough to fit into a diaper bag are thrust into the hands of toddlers, my granddaughter Violette started taking lessons at the relatively late age of eight. She practices on a 3/4 size instrument that has tapes on the fingerboard showing her where the notes are. The kindest thing you can say about this instrument is that it is serviceable. She treats it as casually as an old teddy bear, setting the case down on the floor, dragging the violin around the house, letting it accumulate a fine powdering of rosin. I am both alarmed and charmed by her blithe treatment of her fiddle. From earliest infancy I was taught to treat any string instrument with reverence and awe.

No violin got more of both than my father's violin, which he bought from a gipsy who showed up unannounced at our apartment in Barcelona. As a toddler, I was allowed as a special treat to pluck a single string ("pizzicato" was one of my first words) while my father held the instrument securely in his hands. On our first Atlantic crossing on the way to Ecuador, in a fat Pan Am prop plane, the violin traveled with us in the cabin, like a person.

It is a good, though not an extraordinary, violin, rather small for a full-size, and with a clear, clean sound, just right for chamber music. It is accompanied by superb bow, made by the fabled and now defunct Hill's of London. Eventually my father had a new violin made for him, one with the big sound required by larger spaces. This, and his viola were sold by my mother years after he died.

But the gipsy's violin, the one with the worn varnish where for years his hand had hit the higher notes, came to live with me. For over forty years I carted it from house to house during our many moves. On a couple of occasions I had it repaired (violins disintegrate if they're not played regularly) and the bow re-haired, with a view to resuming my practice. But that never happened, and the violin would go back into its case for another long sleep.

Then this Christmas, when Violette was visiting, I remembered the violin in the closet and thought, why not? I could at least let her try it on for size. Our family, I am happy to say, is blessed with long arms, and when Violette, who is nine now, tucked the fiddle under her chin, her hand effortlessly reached the right spot on the finger board. I replaced a broken D string, tuned it up for her, and suggested that she play one of her pieces.

This violin, needless to say, had no tapes prompting her finger positions, and the distances on the fingerboard were proportionately larger than on her small instrument. Yet she adjusted her fingering quickly, by ear, like a real musician. And the whole family gathered around her sighed with pleasure at the clarity of the sound she made.

Four generations.... This violin paid for tuition at my German nuns' school, the Sunday paella, the airfare to Ecuador and, four years later, to the U.S. Now it's in the hands of Violette, who I hope was sufficiently impressed by my cautions to treat it with at least some reverence and awe. My father would be pleased to hear her play. He would, I'm certain, say she has "conditions." And then, like he told me a million times, he would tell her to practice her bowing.

Why I Asked For, And Got, A Kindle For Christmas

2012-01-04T18:09:00.000-05:00

It was the only item on my Christmas list, and it was underlined three times, and Santa, bless his heart, got the message. I have my own Kindle now, in its leather-like case with a magnetic clasp that closes with a satisfying flop.

Why a Kindle, when I am not a Kindle type? I wasn't an electronic typewriter type, either, yet became addicted and immediately started composing as if it had been plugged directly into my brain. Nor was I a computer type, or a laptop type at first. For all I know, I may be an Ipad, Iphone, and Ibrain type, too. I just don't know it yet.

But there are more substantive reasons than the charms of new technology for my desire to own an e-reader: blizzards and relapses. In my admittedly cosseted existence, I count as a disaster being stuck in a blizzard, or in a CFS relapse, without a stack of books beside me. Unfortunately, in the last seven years in Vermont, I have often been stuck without a book to read.

Each of the villages around here has, along with its adorable white-spired Congregational church, an equally adorable but tiny library on the town green. These are lovely white-painted frame buildings with tall multi-paned windows through which the clear winter sun shines on the wide pine floor boards, the antique card catalogs, and the sparse book collection, in which the works of Danielle Steel are generously represented. Not that I wouldn't, if driven to it by the hazards of weather and CFS, actually read one of Danielle's books--if I could only get to a library when it was open. Like the post offices and town dumps around here, libraries have charmingly erratic schedules, never the same two days in a row, never open when you need them.

The independent bookstore forty-five minutes from my house (practically next door, in Vermont terms), stays open from dawn to dusk, seven days a week. It is the cynosure of the region. You can get lost in its narrow hallways and book-lined nooks until the aroma of Green Mountain coffee draws you out of the labyrinth and into the land of panini made with local goat cheese. As well as books, you can buy children's toys here, scrumptious blank diaries and quirky jewelry. And you can listen to speakers about causes dear to a Vermonter's heart.

Alas, much though I love this place, it does not entirely satisfy my book needs. The writers I most like to read--Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, P.G. Wodehouse, Anthony Trollope--are not in fashion, are represented by a single or at most two volumes that I have unfortunately already read. I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect that 90% of the books on the shelves were published after 1990. I do not blame the store for this. As we all know, independent booksellers have to bend with the prevailing winds to survive.

Hence my Kindle. It's easy on the eyes and on the hand. The books in e-form are cheaper than their paper counterparts, and available at all hours in case of blizzard or relapse. Many of the books whose copyrights have expired--the Murdochs, Trollopes, et al.--are free. And they don't take up space on my groaning bookshelves.

I hope my owning a Kindle doesn't make me a traitor to good writing and reading. This gizmo gives me access to out-of-print books that I would otherwise not be able to read, just as Gutenberg's invention made it possible for a person to have her very own bible under her own roof, one that she could light a candle and read if the wind woke her up in the middle of the night.

Last night, with the temperature near zero, the coyotes were feeling frisky. Awakened by their unearthly chorus I fired up my Kindle, and read myself back to sleep.

A Golden Mean

2012-01-03T16:04:00.000-05:00

This is another post about CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). You should know that it is a good sign when I write about this illness, since when I am in relapse I will do anything to take my mind off it.

I've been thinking lately about how strongly contact with people--or the lack of it--affects my symptoms. On the one hand, when I am not feeling well, nothing tires me more than the human presence. And not all human presences affect me in the same way. I have learned through experience that, regardless of the degree of affection I may feel for them, certain people wear me out, while others don't.

I cannot say that all high-energy people fatigue me, since I find some of them stimulating and revitalizing. Other intense individuals, however, make me feel as if the very marrow is being sucked out of my bones. Nor are all quiet people restful and salutary. I can enjoy quiet/interesting for hours, but the most exhausting encounters are those with quiet/boring, probably because I feel obligated to provide all the fuel for the conversation.

When I am at my worst, the only presences I can tolerate are my spouse--and my dogs.

On the other hand, nothing is more crucial to my mental (and likely also my physical) health than contact with people. Isolation has a depressing effect even on those in the pink of condition. How much more so, then, on people whose illness features depression as one of its foremost symptoms. So I find myself in the curious position of simultaneously desiring human contact, and avoiding it.

The trick is to achieve a balance between social activity and solitude. Sometimes I perform amazing feats of calibration--say, lunch out, then a nap, and a phone conversation in the evening. But both lunch and dinner out on the same day usually spells disaster the next morning.

It would be easier if the planet's inhabitants existed solely to attend to my needs. That not being the case, my friends' schedules and obligations as well as their feelings and preferences complicate my attempts to calibrate my exposure to society.

For the most part, however, I manage pretty well. For one thing, I am now in the fortunate position not to have to confront co-workers on a daily basis. For another, I am comfortable with a degree of solitude that many would find intolerable (that's why I live in Vermont). And I have understanding and flexible friends.

I am just coming out of a period of extraordinary (for me) levels of human contact: a week in the midst of my descendants followed by an explosion of year-end celebrations. And yet here I am, sitting by the fire, writing about it, seemingly none the worse for all the fun. Does it--could it--mean I'm getting better?

I have learned, over the last fifteen years, not to attach to these resurgences. I have read my Buddhist books, and know that I should enjoy these good periods, while at the same time accepting that, like everything else in life, they are transitory.

This is one of the reasons I write about this otherwise boring, disgusting illness: because it distills the conflicts and dilemmas that all humans have to face. The need to balance social life and contemplation, activity and rest. The need to accept that we are more than the sum of our accomplishments. The need to realize that nothing--not the good times nor the bad--lasts forever. And that, while suffering is inescapable, happiness is not out of the question.

Why I Haven't Posted Lately...

2011-12-30T21:37:00.004-05:00

But I'll be back in the new year.

A Word To The Wise...

2011-12-19T19:09:00.001-05:00

My Carnivorous Childhood

2011-12-18T17:44:00.001-05:00

I grew up on the Mediterranean diet--the real thing, not the kinder, gentler version popularized in the U.S. by a culinary and nutritional establishment compensating for decades of over-consumption of beef products. In my Mediterranean diet, we ate animals twice a day. (Here, I am counting eggs--which we typically ate for dinner--as animals, since my grandmother's hens ran with roosters, which meant the eggs were fertile. Michelle B. and her legions will applaud me for this, I'm sure.)

Most of these animals appeared on my plate with many of their attributes intact: fresh little sardines with eyes and heads and fins and tails; whole baby octopuses, less than two inches long, swimming in my favorite soup; squid, cut into rings but slathered in a magnificent black sauce made from their ink, which made the serving platter look like something from Goya's black period. And the mussels, clams, crayfish and tiny lobsters that inhabited the Sunday paella, complete with the black, gray, ecru, or translucent shells in which they had lived.

That was just the first course, for which my mother shopped in Barcelona's fabulous fish markets. It was my grandmother, from her farm in western Catalonia, who sent us the birds and beasts we consumed next. My grandparents kept pigs--huge, pink, sausage-shaped beasts--and slaughtered a couple every autumn. I was never present at this ceremony, but I loved every ounce of the results: rich, greasy serrano hams (today one of the most expensive foods in the world); crisp little cubes of fatback that brought to life a serving of beans; and garlands of sausages made by my grandmother's hands: butifarra blanca, butifarra negra (blood pudding), xorisso....

My grandmother kept rabbits--cheap to feed, prolific, and a source of high-quality protein. In the summer, I would watch her slaughter one in the courtyard of the farm house. It was like a speeded-up film sequence: grab rabbit by hind legs, stun with blow to head, cut off same. Hang body from hook. Cut circles around hocks, and somehow (my vision was hampered by my short stature) yank off skin in a single motion, like a glove. Cut open abdomen, scoop out entrails, call cats to feast.

An hour later, a rabbit arm lay on my plate, reddish-brown and transmuted by a sauce made with mortar-chopped almonds. Next to the arm lay a special treat for me, the single child among twelve adults: two small bean-shaped organs, what my grandmother called the ouets, the little eggs. Were they kidneys, testes, ovaries? I never thought to ask. Were they good? I don't remember.

There were chickens, too, and for Christmas, a couple of capons instead of a turkey. Not a part of these was wasted. Breasts and thighs and legs were brought to the table, but while we ate them, the next day's soup was simmering on the stove, made up of chicken backs, and heads, and legs. For some reason, the comb---la cresta--perhaps because of its decorative merits, was brought to the table. And yes, served to me. Can't remember how it tasted.

What else did we eat? Very little beef. No milk after age two. Gallons of olive oil, entire braids of garlic, ovenfuls of crusty bread to soak up all that oil and all those sauces. Seasonal vegetables in moderation. Every month or so, there was a religious holiday with its own special dessert, which you always bought ready-made: turrons at Christmas; tortell for the January feast of the Epiphany; crema catalana on St. Joseph's day, in March; la mona de Pascua at Easter....Otherwise, it was fruit and nuts.

If she knew what I eat today, my grandmother would be mystified. For some reason, I have become reluctant to eat anything that looks like an animal. Anything remotely anatomically accurate, I'd rather do without: chicken knees, turkey wishbones, the blood of a cow oozing off a steak. Is this hypocrisy? Does it mean I'm o.k. eating meat--say, "chicken tenders"--as long as it doesn't remind me of the death of a living being? Do I think eating meat is immoral?

I want to make it clear that I don't think eating meat is morally wrong--or I would be a hypocrite for drinking milk and eating eggs, which condemn to death 99.9% of the males of the species. I do think that consuming the meat (or the eggs, or the milk) of animals that have been kept in inhumane circumstances is immoral for those of us who have the resources to make other choices.

I don't know what's right--do you? It's possible that some people's physiology makes it impossible for them to thrive without daily servings of meat. On the other hand, other people's preferences/philosophies/aesthetics make it important for them to avoid animal products. This is a uniquely contemporary debate: never before have such choices been available in such abundance.

How do you feel about eating animals?

E-mailing The Spouse

2011-12-16T18:45:00.001-05:00

His study, where he sits in front of the desk-top computer, is at one end of the second floor. My study, where I sit on the desk chair or on the single bed with the laptop on my thighs, is at the other end. Between us a hallway leads past guest rooms and bathroom to our bedroom and his study. Just before you reach the bedroom, you have to step over Wolfie, who parks himself in the one spot from which he can keep track of human and canine activity on both floors of the house.

It's not like crossing the Alps, I know. So why is it that my spouse and I, alone together in the daytime for the first time since 1967, e-mail each other from room to room? He sends me stuff he thinks might make me laugh. I send him pictures of furniture that would improve the looks and comfort of our house, messages from family and friends that he may have missed, and medical alerts designed to keep us alive forever.

I could of course unplug my laptop, step over Wolfie, walk into his study, sweep aside the catalogs and promotions on the guest chair, sit down and say, "look at this!" Or--and this would be the sustainable, low-tech approach--I could memorize and deliver the messages, describe the furniture, and summarize the medical advice while standing in front of him and looking him in the eye.

Instead, I copy the links, cut-and-paste the messages, hit "send." Is this the new conjugal telepathy? It used to be that long-married spouses not only grew to look alike, but could read each other's thoughts, finish each other's sentences. And we still do that sometimes, when we're not staring at our respective computer screens, or at the TV screen, or listening to endless news of far-off disasters on our kitchen or car radio.

A mere generation ago, what was web-less retirement like for long-married couples? Did they chatter all day at each other, or did they observe a monastic silence? My father died young, so I have no model for being married into one's sixties. But even if my parents had both lived, their experience would have held few lessons for us, in this super-connected age.

But that's all right. My husband and I are inventing ourselves now as we did as a two-career, child-rearing couple in the 1970s. I'm o.k. with room-to-room e-mails. If we ever find ourselves eating dinner in front of our respective computers, however, I'll start worrying.

DIY Christmas

2011-12-14T16:48:00.001-05:00

I got into the habit of making Christmas gifts by hand during my penurious graduate school days, when dollars were few and relatives were many. My father in law, who liked to encourage my domestic side, which he saw threatened by my academic leanings, had given me a sewing machine, and it became my weapon in the annual battle to produce tangible objects without spending money.

The Christmas after I got the sewing machine I made him a shirt. Intended to be worn outside the pants, the shirt was rust-colored and Nehru-collared, with a generously wide trim around the collar and cuffs. Granted, this was in the early seventies, but what was I thinking, giving such a garment to a strait-laced engineer in his late forties? Needless to say, I never saw him wear it.

A more successful DIY gift was a reclining Snoopy-type dog that I made for my older daughter's first Christmas. The pattern was complicated, and the fur-like material wreaked havoc on the sewing machine, but somehow I pieced it together, and my husband stuffed it with cotton until it was as firm as a rock. This dog, which was as large as the baby herself, was much loved, and grew gray and dull with age, but the seams held to the end.

The days when I could sit up half the night making gifts are long gone. But every summer, when the lavender and the roses and the many mints are in full glory, I pick masses of them, tie them in bunches and hang them by the windows to dry, thinking what fabulous potpourri they will make for Christmas.

In the fall, when I should be stripping the dried leaves and flowers from the stems and mixing them with essential oils so they will have a good two months to ripen before the holidays, I am too busy dealing with the garden produce to even think about potpourri. I usually forget about it until a couple of weeks before Christmas, and then in a panic I strip and blend and oil, and hope for the best.

This year, I'm making sachets. Yesterday I got my sewing machine out of the deep recesses of the closet where it lives and made a bunch of little bags out of bits of leftover fabric. At the last possible moment, I will fill these bags with the half-ripened potpourri, tie a ribbon around the opening, and present them with a flourish.

The recipient will thank me, sniff the little bag, close her eyes in appreciation. Then, probably, she will sneeze. And I will bow my head and smile self-deprecatingly, as I inwardly congratulate myself on my thrift and industry.

Click!

2011-12-11T12:30:00.001-05:00

This being the season for it, I've been doing a lot of clicking lately: clicking to enlarge object, to enter selection in shopping cart, to proceed to checkout. The riches of the planet, including gold, frankincense, and myrrh, are at my reach as I recline on my studio bed. All I have to do is click.

I rewarded myself from a day of clicking by watching Almodovar's film, "Broken Embraces," on TV. At the end, as the titles were scrolling in their usual unreadable fashion, a flamenco song came on, slow and beautiful and sad. The singer was not afraid to take his time, to pause in the middle of a phrase, to let you anticipate the end. I love performers--speakers, singers, actors, musicians--who are sure enough of themselves to take advantage of pauses, and their effect on the listener.

But what was the name of this song, and who was the singer? I squinted at the screen, hit rewind and squinted some more, but couldn't make out a single word. That beautiful song, that soulful singer were gone.

It was late, and I got ready for bed, and while my husband was brushing his teeth, I idly googled Almodovar, then clicked the name of the film, clicked "music," and in a couple more clicks there was the singer, singing his song.

Now, of course, he sings whenever I want him to. And the song, "A ciegas," ("Blindly") still gives me goosebumps, brings tears to my eyes. But I know that if I play it too often, the goosebumps will go away, the tears will stop. That's why I'm not going to send for the CD, although it would be so easy, with just a click.

When Bach was a young man, he walked twenty miles to hear the organist Buxtehude play. And then I imagine he walked those twenty miles back, trying to fix in his mind what he had heard, and knowing that it would fade, but that the memory of the feelings it had aroused in him would remain until his death.

I wonder if the memory, not of the song, but of the emotion it evoked, would have been stronger if I had heard it just that once, at the end of the movie, knowing that when it was over I would have lost it forever.

"On ne possede qu'en s'abstenant," ("We only possess by abstaining") Colette said. In this season of buying, when the notion of abstinence is forced from our minds by the media, we might do worse than to let a few things go, to possess them all the better.

Here, in case you want to hear it, is "A ciegas," sung by the cantaor (flamenco singer) Miguel Poveda. Just click: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3CJiJX-qLE

Bad Hair Day

2011-12-08T19:44:00.001-05:00

In this odd semi-tropical winter, today is the third time I've had to shake heavy, wet snow off the young apple trees so their branches wouldn't break under the weight. But that is nothing comparing to what I had to do after my husband brought the dogs back from their walk. Wolfie and Lexi, the German Shepherds, came in bright-eyed and exhilarated by the cold. But Bisou, low to the ground and with five-inch, orange-gold "feathers" on her forelegs, collected so much snow that she came into the house hung with snow balls like a Chrismas tree.

When she's indoors, Bisou honors her five-century Cavalier King Charles heritage, lolling about on sheep skins and diving, the moment I stand up, into the warm spot on the sofa. But let her out the door, and she is all Spaniel, sniffing the breeze, running through brambles, collecting ticks or, if the temperature is right, five-inch snow balls. I quizzed my husband closely upon their return today, and he said that she had kept running the entire time, showing no discomfort despite the snow balls pulling her skin, weighing her down.

The snow balls were so dense and so big that I had to gently break them up with an ice pick. The next tool, and one that Bisou has always been wary of, was the hair dryer. But this time she seemed to understand her situation, and submitted. I let her finish drying off and relax the rest of the afternoon, and waited until evening to tackle the mats.

Bisou is not a show dog, and I am anything but a show-dog person. Still, of an evening, it is a joy to me to watch all that orange and gold rippling over the grass. But alas, no more. As the first snow balls glommed on to the end of Bisou's hair strands, her running made the hairs twirl around each other, which in turn collected more snow, whose weight caused the hairs to twist more tightly. In a word, her leg feathers were such a mess of mats that in the end I had to play Alexander the Great, and just cut through those evil knots.

Who cares? Not Bisou, who is snoozing happily under my elbow and making it difficult for me to type. Not Wolfie, who just gave her face a thorough washing. I do, with my human prejudices, the same prejudices, I suppose, that led the bewigged minions of Charles the Second to breed mini-sized hunting dogs with long-silky hair, the "spaniels gentle," who liked to sit on laps.

Nosegay

2011-12-06T16:27:00.001-05:00

Opened an old book the other day, and my prom picture fell out: two couples, the boys in dinner jackets, the girls in non-strapless dresses. Ours being a Catholic school, strapless dresses were forbidden, because they constituted an occasion of sin.

The other girl in the photo is wearing a corsage--a washed-out-looking orchid enhanced with stiff bits of tulle and ribbon, the kind that your date brought you in a plastic box, still cold from the fridge . Me, I am not wearing a corsage. Instead, I am holding a nosegay in my white-gloved hand.

I am not wearing a corsage because my date, who is standing behind me with his fingertips barely touching my waist, believed that corsages spoiled the look of a dress. Hence the nosegay, which he had designed after extensive consultations with the florist. It consisted of tiny dark violets and a larger flower of some kind, all carefully chosen to match the ice-blue of my dress. He had been talking about this nosegay for weeks before the dance, and was as excited about it as I.

Not only was I the only girl at the prom with a nosegay--I was probably the only one whose date liked to spend entire afternoons chatting with her mother. This boy adored my mother. He loved to examine her collection of Indian pottery and her 18th century polichromed sculptures. He could never get enough of her stories about our years in Ecuador, and she would happily oblige him while I sat in the background wishing he'd pay me some attention.

I loved his company. He made fun of everything and everybody, was crazy about French Impressionism, read books that were not actually required for class. Unlike many of my male classmates, he found my foreignness interesting rather than unfortunate. He was thrilled about taking me to the prom, and the opportunity to dress up, and to design the perfect nosegay. Amazingly, my conservative parents didn't mind my spending time with him.

Are you getting the gist of this?

At the time, I didn't. But then, I was a painfully naive specimen even by the standards of those pre-Woodstock years. It wasn't until we were having our picture taken at the dance and the photographer had to tell my date twice to put his hand around my waist that I began to feel that things seemed a little odd.

For a couple of days every year, our Religion class would be separated by gender, and we would be instructed in something called "Catholic Love And Marriage." I don't remember much about these classes, except that marriage was intended for the procreation of children and the allaying of concupiscence; that kissing was o.k. as long as it did not lead to arousal. And I remember this electrifying statement made by the Irish priest who instructed us: "Girls are like irons, which heat up slowly. But boys are like light bulbs." Issues of gender identity and sexual preference were never mentioned by teacher or students.

I can't imagine what it was like for that boy, in a Catholic school, in an ultra-conservative Southern city, to figure out who he was. I lost touch with him after graduation. But later, in the corsage-crushing embrace of some college date, I would sometimes think about the boy who gave me the only nosegay at the prom.

Wood Woes

2011-12-03T16:09:00.001-05:00

The wood piles in people's yards around here are to die for. When I drive down the road, it's not the Christmas decorations that draw my eye, but the wood piles stretching majestically across the frosted lawns with a minimalist beauty all their own. No matter how long the pile, it is the same height all across, and the end pieces are arranged in a cross-wise pattern that ensures that the vertical edge of the pile is perpendicular to the ground. From the front, the best piles are as regular and textured as honeycomb.

This fall my husband and I had an especially abundant supply of wood to lug from the side of the garage where it had been drying to the front porch. While he did the lugging, I took charge of the stacking. How hard can it be to stack wood, you say? Not very, I thought, at least at first. I figured that to keep the pile from collapsing, I needed to stack the end pieces of each layer at right angles to the rest, and I tried my best to do that. But it wasn't until the last log was in place that I stepped back and was horrified: while the pile looked more or less o.k. from the front, its profile was a disaster--logs stacked at perilous angles to each other, precarious diagonals giving an unfortunate dynamic feel to a structure that I had wanted to be restful and symmetrical.

Dejectedly, I pointed out the pile to my husband. "What's wrong with it?" he said, wiping his brow.

"It's the first thing people see when they drive up to the house, and it screams flatlander," I wailed.

The wood pile failure was an esthetic one, but it was followed by a second, functional one. Most of the wood that I stacked came from a big tree that fell across our driveway in a storm a couple of years ago. We had it cut and split, and gave the logs a long time to dry. That dry wood burns better is one of the two things I know about firewood. The other one is that you shouldn't burn pine because it gunks up the chimney.

Other than that, I thought, all non-pine wood was pretty much the same. How wrong I was became apparent the first time I built a fire with the home-grown logs, in the expectation of a warm evening cozily reading Iris Murdoch. Although they were light as balsa wood, they took a long time and prodigious quantities of paper to start burning, and had to be continually coddled and encouraged to keep from dying out. Imagine my dismay when I realized that, even after an hour of my nursing the fire--while Iris sprawled, unread, face-down on the sofa--the stove was producing very little heat.

That's when the memory came winging to me of some apple tree trimmings I burned in the fireplace once back in Maryland, and how blindingly white-hot those flames had been. (They had smelled good, too.) I have no idea what kind of non-pine it was that fell across our driveway, but it obviously wasn't much good for keeping one warm.

Clearly it's time for me to stop winging it in this matter of fire wood. Next year I'm getting a firewood mentor, a Vermonter or near-Vermonter who will tutor me in the fine points of choosing wood, and stacking it. And when I have a North-country-worthy wood pile of my own, I'll take a picture of it, and post it on this blog.

In His Prime

2011-12-01T14:30:00.001-05:00

Wolfie turned five last week. In human years, he seems to me to be about forty. Fully mature in mind and body, poised on the brink of the long, slow, inevitable descent.

Physically, the descent has already begun. I can't document this, but I'm sure he can't run as fast or as fast as he did when he was two. And there have been other changes: in the last year his neck has thickened, which makes his head seem even bigger than before. And a sprinkling of white hairs has appeared on his black chin.

With regard to his personality, a new gravitas has come over him. He is definitely in charge of Lexi and Bisou. If it's dark outside and Lexi ignores my calls to come in, Wolfie sits looking out the back door until she returns. When, because she can no longer hear the warning beeps, she wanders beyond the perimeter of the invisible fence, I tell Wolfie "find Lexi!" and he always does. He's not at ease unless there are three dogs inside the house.

Wolfie's desire to have everyone present and accounted for applies to humans as well as dogs. Out walking with his herding teacher and her dog the other day, she asked me to go ahead with the dogs while she made sure that some deer hadn't gotten stuck inside her fenced-in pasture. Her dog, who is young and playful, came with me happily. Wolfie, however, couldn't stand it that now there were three of us on the path, instead of four. He kept trotting back to retrieve his teacher, despite my calls to stay with me. At one point he ran off altogether and returned triumphant, teacher in tow.

With a younger dog, he holds his head high with dignity, and tends to boss the juvenile around, which only makes the juvenile adore him more. His relationship with Bisou is more nuanced. He lets her take bones away from him, but at ball-throwing time, even though she runs as far and as fast as he does, she knows not to touch the ball. He still hasn't given up hope of having children with Bisou, and he periodically gives it a try, despite the discomfort to his hind legs that crouching low must cause. She is good natured about this, but eventually slithers out of his embrace.

Of late his demonstrations of affection for human visitors have become less exuberant, and he obeys, albeit reluctantly, the "enough!" command. (None of this applies to his special beloveds--you know who you are--who encourage him with high-pitched voices and fond caresses.) The one thing time hasn't improved is his tail, and the devastation it wreaks. It is long and he wags it strongly (it has been known to knock small children to the ground), and is capable of clearing the coffee table of wine glasses in a single swoop.

Sometimes I take a look at Wolfie's baby pictures: the ones where he was fat and blue-eyed and stuck his little tail straight up, like a kitten; the ones where he's toddling in the snow after Lexi, the idol of his youth. And I wonder how it happened that I, who have long attained the age of reason, never once thought about the consequences of getting a puppy that would grow into a big, strong, take-charge dog. A dog whom I would not be able physically to control, since dogs are proportionately much stronger than people, and even a fifty-pound mutt can be a challenge for a well-muscled human.

But I believed in the effects of training on a sound temperament, and in Wolfie's case I was lucky. Still, when he was an adolescent, a single lunge on the lead inflicted damage on my shoulder that took months to stop hurting. In reality, Wolfie doesn't have to do anything I tell him. But he does, even when it involves hard stuff like waiting at the door before charging out to meet a playmate. It is a miracle to me that an animal will control an urgent desire for my sake, not out of fear of punishment, but maybe because he regards me as his alpha, or perhaps, even, because he loves me.

Or maybe because he has figured out that this serious loyalty, this kindly acquiescence, is the surest way to keep me bonded to him.

Inspired By Don Marquis

2011-11-30T15:50:00.001-05:00

"What in hell have I done to deserve all these kittens?" Don Marquis

Hibernation Hesitation

2011-11-28T16:53:00.001-05:00

Coatless and sockless in the four o'clock dusk, picking kale in the garden, I almost stepped on a woolly bear caterpillar that was crossing my path at a pretty good clip. By now it should have been curled under a thick padding of leaves, safely tucked against the rigors of winter.

We do a lot of tucking here in the fall. The hens get a thick bedding of hay to keep their skinny feet warm. The garden gets a nice duvet of compost. The young apple trees get hard plastic socks around their trunks to guard against the rabbits. The climbing roses get a layer of mulch hay around their feet, while the lavender is surrounded by a wall of hay that reaches halfway up the plants. The rosemary bush and the scented and zonal geraniums have been indoors by a sunny window for weeks.

Vermonters (and Vermonter wannabes such as I) tuck themselves behind massive stacks of wood that will feed the stove until late April. Every driveway is outlined with four-foot markers warning the snow plows away from the grass. And the shrub-proud among us (not I) put out A-shaped wooden contraptions to keep their plantings from being dismembered by avalanches dropping from the roof.

In a word, Vermont is tucked and ready for winter. But, as that 15th-century rake Villon put it, Ou sont les neiges d'antan? (Where are the snows of yesteryear?). Sure, we've had a couple of snows already, but they have promptly disappeared in the next day's 60F high. Reader, it's kind of hot here.

I'm worried about the lavender, sweltering under its thick coat of hay. I'm worried about the yellow butterflies that flitted across the driveway yesterday, worried about the geese flying in indecisive circles overhead--to stay, to go? I'm worried about the frogs, who tucked themselves into the gunk at the bottom of the pond on the first cold night, and can be seen clinging to the disintegrating lily pads in the weirdly warm noon sun. I'm worried about the woolly bears--will they be able to rush to shelter when the real cold suddenly arrives? And I'm wondering about their cousins, the brown bears. Are they in their dens by now or are they making sleepy, ill-tempered sorties, hunting for the last berries? Is it safe to fill the bird feeder?

People in the village store say, "enjoy this weird weather." Others say, "we're gonna pay for it later." And I wonder, who are the optimists, who the pessimists? Me, I hope we do pay for it. I hope I get to wear my new super-warm-yet-light-as-a-feather winter coat that is hanging in the closet with the tags still attached. I hope the cold kills the ticks. I hope a thick coat of snow both shelters my plants and leaches nitrogen into their roots. I hope the harshness of winter keeps those who would move here for frivolous reasons away. I hope another season of relative isolation teaches me to endure, to bend with the winds, to find sustenance within myself.

In case you're wondering--that caterpillar in the garden? It wore a wide brownish-orange belt around its middle: a sure sign of a mild winter.

Snail Hunt

2011-11-27T17:37:00.001-05:00

There's been a lot of talk about food in the Zeitgeist lately and, in these parts, talk about hunting: the local game supper (bear, deer, moose et al.); who shot at a deer with a huge rack, and missed; whose posted land was violated by out-of-state felons with guns. All this has brought back the snail hunts of my childhood.

My grandparents' farm was on a fertile valley just south of the Pyrenees, in the westernmost province of Catalonia. Summers were dry, and on the rare occasions when rain threatened, we would gather on the covered terraces at the top of the house and watch the storm come galloping towards us: thunder and lightning, followed by fat drops splashing down on the dusty roads. And the mineral smell of rain on parched ground.

It never lasted very long, but afterwards, while the last drops were still falling from the broad leaves of the fig trees, we would get our baskets and go snail hunting. A long, straight dirt road led from the house to the threshing floor and barn. The road was bordered with apple and pear and fig trees, and blackberry brambles, and long grasses, and that is where we looked for snails.

These were not the fattened molluscs, already evicted from their shells, that you can buy in cans in upscale markets. These were real wild snails (cargols in Catalan), their shells less than an inch in diameter, who after a rain came out from their hiding places and climbed to the very tops of the dessicated grass stems, leaving a slight iridescent trail behind them.

It seemed in those days that anything good had to be waited for a long time--Christmas, summer, a new pair shoes--and snails for supper were no exception. After the hunt, we turned the snails over to my grandmother, who would decant them into special baskets--vertical, narrow containers where the snails would fast for several days to empty out their digestive tracts.

When the time was right, my grandmother would announce the cargolada, or snail bash. My mother and her sisters would go into action, wrapping aprons around their middles, picking parsley, chopping garlic, fetching bottles of tomato conserve from the attic. While the maid scrubbed the shells with a brush, my grandmother would prepare the salt bath that would rid the snails of the last vestiges of slime.

One of the reasons I loved a cargolada was the sound. No other dish was so musical. The shells being dumped out of the baskets, swished around in the salt bath, stirred in the pot, made a unique and musical clacking. This, together with the smell of garlic and parsley sauteeing in the big red earthenware cassola, and the continuous arguing of the cooks ("don't burn the olive oil! don't stain your blouse!") filled my senses to overflowing.

Like all mollusk dishes, the cargolada didn't take long. I helped set the table while my grandfather swatted the heat-dazed flies in the dining room. And then we sat down, ten or twelve of us, glasses of rosy wine at each place (my water barely tinted, but enough to taste), and the cassola was brought in and everybody went ohhhh! My mother sliced thick slices of bread for sopping up the sauce. My aunt passed around little sword-shaped plastic toothpicks.

A portion (very small, snails supposedly being hard to digest) was ladled, clack, clack, onto my plate. I picked up a shell, grabbed my green sword, stabbed the snail and gave a little yank. At the spot where the muscular foot joined the beginning of the intestine, I pressed down with my thumb and the two separated neatly. I popped the snail into my mouth, discarded the shell, soaked some bread into the sauce, drank a little pink water....

For dessert there was melon sweet as only dry climates make them, picked by my grandfather and sliced by my mother. I always interpreted my mother's slicing of the melon as a sign of her special standing in the household.

I have since lost my taste for snails. The idea of buying them in cans, then stuffing them into shells, seems as absurd as wrapping orange peel around the orange sections in Southern ambrosia. Even in Spain, the last time I attended a cargolada, the thought of those little snails starved, brined, and cooked alive made me concentrate on the sauce alone.

The thick sauce of my childhood, redolent of garlic, parsley and tomato and, because this was Catalonia, the sweetness of ground almonds. And a big slice of bread, crusty on the outside and yeasty on the inside. And my grandmother looking over at me saying "Don't eat too fast now. Chew it well."

How Sleeping Dogs Lie

2011-11-26T10:06:00.001-05:00

When my three dogs return from their stay at the B&B, they are delirious with exhaustion. Lexi walks into the house, gets a drink of water, lowers herself carefully down on the kitchen floor, and does not move until the next morning. Bisou becomes more aggressive in her snuggling, pushing hard against my thigh while we sit on the sofa and somehow keeping up the pressure even after she has fallen asleep. If for any reason I have to dislodge her, the effort is entirely up to me. It is surprising how heavy an 18.5 lb dog can make herself when she doesn't want to be moved.

But it is Wolfie whose reentry is the most dramatic. After a cursory sniff of our luggage, he becomes at-one with the floor the way a fried egg becomes one with the frying pan. His collapse is so complete that I catch myself checking his ribcage for signs of breath. He doesn't look like a dog lying on a rug: he looks like a dog pelt that has been flung on the floor.

All this is good news for me, since it allows me to recover from the trip that was the reason for the dogs' stay at the B&B. They have had so much entertainment that I can go a good couple of days without having to think up diversions for them.

After four days in the bosom of her Cavalier tribe--which includes her mother, a couple of aunties and two of her sisters--Bisou is glad to swap her enfant terrible mask for a temporary lapdog disguise. Lexi is happy to lie all day with her nose in her empty food bowl. As for Wolfie--whose exhaustion comes mostly from having to keep track of Lexi and Bisou among all the other canine guests at the B&B--you can almost feel his relief at getting his little pack home, where nothing will interfere with them, except himself.

Will Someone Please Explain About Vampires?

2011-11-20T13:22:00.001-05:00

Every ten years or so I try to read a book about vampires, and fail. I would like to be able to read vampire literature, since the fiction shelves of the nearby village libraries are mostly filled with contemporary popular fiction, and often it's hard to find something to read. As I browse dispiritedly through the shelves, I see lots of vampire books.

My problem with vamp lit is the biology. I've just never understood how vampires work.

My first stumbling block is the bite, and how it is made. If I wanted to suck someone's blood--and wanted to do so unobtrusively, maybe while the victim thought he or she was being nuzzled affectionately--a small hole in the carotid artery would be the way to do it. The hole would have to be small enough to heal quickly by itself, otherwise the person would bleed to death and I would have killed the goose that lay the golden e. A set of sharp incisors would be best to deliver such a small but accurate bite. But vampires are well known for sporting huge canines which, as any cat will tell you, are great for slashing and tearing. Apply real vampire teeth to a vulnerable human throat, and there would be no second helpings.

There is another problem with vampire dentition. If I close my mouth and run my fingers down over my canines, I can feel that if these were long and sharp they would run into my lower teeth. If they somehow got past those, they would puncture my lower gums. I opened Wolfie's mouth and checked his set of inch-long canines. Despite their length, they don't pierce his lower gums because his lower jaw is quite narrow, and fits well inside the upper. But that is not the way human mouths are made.

A thick erotic fog surrounds vampires and their victims. Something about sucking someone's blood, and having blood sucked out of one, is supposed to be highly sexy. I assume that a vampire's desire for blood is caused by anemia. The universally pale, wan skin--there are no rosy-cheeked vampires--is a clear diagnostic sign. As someone who is closely acquainted with anemia, however, I can attest that the feelings it generates (fatigue and an overwhelming desire for sleep) are anything but erotic. The anemia theory is also at odds with the vampire's great muscular strength, which is not a trait associated with low red blood cell count. From the victim's point of view, losing large amounts of blood at one time cannot be pleasant. If there are people who derive sexual satisfaction from making blood donations to the Red Cross, I have never heard of them.

If you want to become a vampire, you have to be bitten by one. But you'd think that if becoming a vampire also gave you great strength, you'd be able to fight off the original vampire when he came around for another meal. I really wonder what happens when a vampire and his victim-turned-vampire meet. Do they have a big fight? Do they take turns sucking each other's blood? Exactly what do they get up to?

If I could get past these questions, I'd be able to deal with the nocturnal habits, the stakes, the crosses, the garlic. Come to think of it, maybe it's all the garlic I eat that not only keeps vampires away from me, but keeps me away from vampires.

If any of you are versed in vampire lore, please enlighten me.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight (In My Woods, I Hope)

2011-11-19T15:41:00.001-05:00

A neighbor was going out to her compost pile one bright evening last July when, about forty feet away, she saw an animal lying down with its back to her. From its size and earthy color, she thought it was a deer. But then it turned on its belly, and she realized that it was a really large cat, with a long, long tail. Not a bobcat, not a lynx, not an overfed Scottish shorthair. A mountain lion.

She was standing there transfixed, the compost bucket in her hand, when a woodchuck leaped by the creature's head, flopped down and flew up again in a very un-woodchuck-like manner, but exactly like a mouse that is being tormented by a cat. All kinds of thoughts rushed through my neighbor's head: "I must rescue that woodchuck" (fortunately she thought better of that); "I should run into the kitchen and grab my camera" (instead she decided to stay and live the moment--good for her!).

After three or four minutes of tossing the woodchuck around, the lion turned and looked at my neighbor. My neighbor looked at the lion. Then languidly the lion stood up, woodchuck in mouth, and disappeared into a brush pile.

This magnificent event, I am proud to say, happened a mere mile from our house, and I am basking in its reflected glory. A mountain lion's range is between 50 and 100 miles, so I like to think that one of these days my neighbor's lion might honor our compost pile with a visit. I know it sounds insane to wish this, especially with Bisou around, who is practically woodchuck-sized. But I am told that mountain lions (puma concolor) on the East Coast are less dangerous than their brethren in the West, because our woods and fields are crawling with critters that they like to eat.

This is not the only sighting of a mountain lion in our area. A couple of years ago, an even closer neighbor told me that he had seen one in the meadow by the river that runs between our houses. And Wolfie's herding teacher, who lives just over the border in New York, saw one on a summer evening as she was driving down the road from her house. She stopped the truck. The lion looked at her, she looked at the lion...then he gathered his hind legs under him and gave a leap that took him almost across the two-lane road.

The lion (or lions) that roams our neighborhood is not, alas, the fabled catamount. According to the Vermont Department of Wildlife, the Eastern Mountain Lion is extinct. But their cousins from Canada and the West are coming this way. Last summer, a mountain lion was killed by an SUV on a highway in Connecticut, and DNA analysis shows that it came from a population that makes its home in South Dakota (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/07/27/138748682/connecticut-mountain-lion-likely-came-from-the-black-hills)

To these wild immigrants, I say, welcome to the neighborhood. Welcome to the mountain lion. Welcome back to the wild turkeys rescued from the brink of extinction and who, this summer, outnumbered the chickens on our yard. And welcome, if it should choose to come this way, to canis lupus, the gray wolf. Its DNA is already evident in the extra-large and furry coyotes that run around these parts. The habitat is perfect, and I would dearly love to see one before I die.

Veni, veni, canis lupus, puma concolor et al. Come reassure me that all is not lost, all is not yet predictable. My scraggly woods can be your shrine--you'll find all sorts of sustenance here, from deer to fisher cats. (For your sake, stay away from the porcupine that's eating our garage; and for mine, don't eat Bisou.) Come and make yourselves at home. Just don't make me wait too long.

From The Forest To The Trees

2011-11-16T22:12:00.001-05:00

I've always been a "forest" rather than a "trees" kind of person; more macro than micro; more into ends than means. Something inside me always propelled me to get the thing--whatever it was-- over and done with, and not fuss too much over the details, but to keep moving towards the goal.

To this day, when I listen to a presentation, as the speaker launches into the introduction I start tapping my mental foot. "Fine, yes," I mutter to myself, "but what does this have to do with the main topic?" This makes me an impatient audience, and in the days when I worked with other people, it made me an impatient colleague.

Part of this had to do with years of combining motherhood and career. I wanted meetings to run efficiently so I could take the kids home from day care, fix dinner, and then grade term papers before I got too sleepy to think. I had to keep my eyes firmly trained on the forest as a whole--the family, the work, the survival of both--and could not afford to dawdle or give in to a fascination with a particular tree (forget the fancy recipe and the interesting article--there was dinner to get on the table, and a lecture to prepare).

When Chronic Fatigue Syndrome entered my life, the old familiar forest--ultimate goals, long-range plans, daily discipline and efficiency--went out the window, leaving me only trees, and scrubby saplings at that. The frantic but meaning-bestowing days were gone. I couldn't work. I couldn't take care of anybody but myself, and that barely.

Last year, Elisabeth Tova Bailey published a brilliant and moving book, The Sound Of A Wild Snail Eating. She was bedridden with a severe CFS-like illness when a friend brought her a violet in a pot, and put it on her bedside table. In that pot, there was a snail, and the writer, barely able to sit up in bed, devoted a year to watching that snail and writing about it. How is that for letting go of the forest and focusing on the trees?

I don't know that I can ever match that level of tree-gazing, but in the almost two decades since getting sick, I have made some progress. This blog bears witness to it. In it, I often feel, I'm writing more and more about less and less: putting a log in the stove; making stock out of my old laying hens. Then there is always the variegated past, in which things used to happen. "Faire quelque chose de rien," to make something out of nothing, is a time honored tenet of the French classical theater, and later of the psychological novel. Still, how much substance can you squeeze out of a life in which very little happens?

That all depends on who is doing the squeezing: look at Elisabeth Tova Bailey with her bedside nature preserve; look at Thomas Merton, who was a Trappist monk. Look at Emily Dickinson shut up in her room. Do you see why I feel out of my class?

The shift from macrocosm to microcosm is not easy. These days, microcosms are not fashionable. I read other blogs; I read Facebook; and I am overwhelmed by the sheer mass of external stimulation that enters daily into these writers' lives, as it used to enter mine. Sitting on my Vermont hillside, listening to the silence, I often feel like a hermit and wonder what I am doing here. This is what I wanted with all my heart. The question is, am I worthy of it?

When as a child I used to complain that I was bored, my father would answer, "intelligent people are never bored." True, if they are not only really intelligent, but have considerable spiritual resources. Nelson Mandela through his decades in prison must have delved deeply into the microcosm. And so I add Mandela to my pantheon of tree-gazers.

Deep into stick season, when the leaves are down and the snow is yet to come, it's hard to focus on the trees. But I know a forester who can look at the grayest stick and say, "this here is a nice little sugar maple." In his footsteps, I hope to wean my gaze away from the forest and onto a single tree, and not just at the tree, but at its bark, the way its branches angle from the trunk, the almost invisible leaf buds, and the way it holds inside the promise of sweet-flowing sap in the spring.

I Put A Log In The Stove

2011-11-12T18:41:00.001-05:00

Days are short now, and chilly, and lighting the wood stove in the evening feels more like a luxury than a chore. I sit on the sofa, my feet on the coffee table, rereading the tragic story of Tristan and Iseult. Just as they drink the magic philter and their passion flares high, the flames in the stove dwindle. It's time to add another log.

There are, between me and my goal, three dogs. The first one, Bisou, is sprawled across my lap. I have to dislodge her before I can get up, but have you ever tried to un-lap a dog bred for over four-hundred years for the exclusive purpose of lap-sprawling? The minute she feels my hands under her body she becomes a dead weight, and it's all I can do, while murmuring apologies, to shift her 19.5 lbs to the side.

Now my lap is free, but I cannot put my feet on the floor. That is because Wolfie, who despite his East German sheepherding father is a lapdog at heart if not in looks, has laid his long black body in the narrow space between the sofa and the coffee table, leaving no place for me to put my feet. I hate to disturb him--I feel sorry for him because he cannot ever sit on anybody's lap--so I stretch my legs as far from his head as possible, heave myself up with my hands on the sofa cushions, and teeter to a standing position.

In front of the stove lies Dog Number Three, Lexi, the dowager queen. My guilt towards Bisou and Wolfie fades to insignificance compared to my guilt towards deafish, blindish, lameish, 13 1/2 year-old-Lexi. A few pages ago, as Tristan and Iseult first laid eyes on each other, I watched Lexi waddle over to the stove. She stood, head lowered and hind legs a-tremble, thinking things over, then slowly lowered herself onto the hearth. Positioned as she is, there is no way I can open the stove doors, much less put a log in.

"Lexi, move," I say. Then, more loudly, "Lexi, move!" She lifts her milky eyes towards me and gives me a reproachful look, but stays her ground. "Dammit, Lexi...." She sighs, heaves herself up, and waddles off into the kitchen, where I hear her plop down on the floor like a sack of potatoes. I put the log in the stove.

Straddling Wolfie's bulk, I reclaim my spot on the sofa. Bisou wakes up and snuggles back on my lap. I pick up my book. And in the guilt of Tristan and Iseult vis-a-vis the betrayed King Marc, I find an echo of what I feel towards my old dog, who is lying alone on the cold kitchen floor.

Google In The Kitchen

2011-11-11T15:54:00.001-05:00

I butchered my crop of seven pumpkins a few days ago. "Butcher" is the proper term for something that requires a strong stomach as well as strong muscles.

Mind you, my pumpkins are the medium-sized ones intended for eating rather than carving. But cutting them open, even with my razor-sharp Chinese chopper, is by far the most strenuous thing I do in the kitchen. It's kind of like sawing a tree: the minute I get the chopper blade a couple of inches into the pumpkin, it gets stuck in the crack. The only way to resolve this is to lift the chopper with the attached pumpkin as high as I can, and then crash it down onto the counter. Eventually I win, and the pumpkin splits raggedly in two.

Then comes the gross part. With my bare hands, I scoop out the innards--the slimy, sticky filaments, the flat, slippery seeds. The only way to get it all is to scrape the inner walls with my fingernails. Ugh.

I didn't have enough space in the oven to bake the fourteen pumpkin halves at once, so I had to make two batches. While the first batch was baking, I took the pumpkin guts out to the hens. I know, I know, I should have scrubbed those 1200 seeds clean, seasoned, and roasted them. But I had, as the French say, other cats to whip that day.

When the pumpkins were done, I scooped out their flesh and rushed the still-warm rinds to the chickens, who loved them at first but soon turned up their noses at them. I don't blame them: fourteen pumpkin rinds for eleven hens is a lot.

When the baking was over, I had several impressive mountains of orange pumpkin meat, which I divided into portions and froze. Then I had to figure out a way to use it. Sure, I could make pies, and if we ate a couple of pies a week we might empty our pumpkin stores by spring...by which time we'd be too obese to walk out the door to plant the new garden. I could make pumpkin bread, which has more redeeming nutritional value than pies, but seven pumpkins would probably yield forty-nine loaves, which we also don't need. I could make curried cream of pumpkin soup, which tastes great and would be good for us, but might lose its charm if we ate it every day.

Pies, bread and soup exhausted the resources of my modest cookbook library. What I needed were recipes for pumpkin main dishes--concoctions that would use a lot of pumpkin and no sugar and would even taste good. Can I sing enough praises of Google's recipe sites? Like a helpful grandmother, Google comes to the rescue whenever I have too much of anything from the garden.

Although 90% of the pumpkin recipes were for bread or desserts, I found quite a few for main dishes, and a lot of those seemed to be of Italian provenance. If they named green summer squashes zucchini (little pumpkins), Italians must grow a lot of zucca, and have come up with ways to use it. I found a recipe for pumpkin gnocchi; one for baked pumpkin, sausage and ziti; and one, which I decided to make right away because I had all the ingredients, for pumpkin polenta with cheese.

It met all my requirements: it used up a lot of pumpkin, was reasonably easy to make, and tasted good. I'll make the gnocchi next. Sure, one of these days I'll take out my 1977 Fannie Farmer and make a pie. But until then, thank you, Google!

More Tales Of The Red Baroness

2011-11-10T11:01:00.000-05:00

Shall I bore you again with Bisou's exploits?

Here goes anyway.

She needs to lose a couple of pounds, so she's been on a diet. Two pounds doesn't seem like a lot, but if at your plumpest you only weigh 21, it's close to ten percent of your total weight. I've put her on the house version of Weight Watchers and she's almost at her goal. The weight loss has been aided by her perennial state of hunger, which revs up her desire for exercise. Have you noticed how hyper a dog will get if you take him or her out for a walk just before feeding time? My interpretation of this is that the stomach is screaming at the brain, "make the muscles hunt down something to fill up this dreadful emptiness!"

Accordingly, my perennially hungry Bisou has set new records of physical exertion. For example, it is impossible to wear her out throwing balls for her with the ball thrower. She can retrieve at almost the speed of light for fifteen minutes straight, and when I beg for mercy she moans for more. After one of these sessions, she was so outraged that I had stopped that she ran to the garage wall where I keep a bag of extra balls hanging from a high nail, jumped up, tore a hole in the bag and got herself a ball.

Then there was the day when we were walking with her brother Bear and his owner on a steep hill that rises behind Bear's house. At the bottom of the hill there is a ditch with a little stream. On the way back, Bisou was running so hard that she left the ground halfway down the slope--legs splayed, ears fanned out like wings--flew over the stream, landed on the other side, and kept going.

The last time my dogs stayed at their B&B, Bisou's breeder told me that Bisou was acting more like a German Shepherd than a Cavalier. There was a litter of toddling half siblings of hers in the house at the time, and she spent her days herding them around, pushing them into corners and making them stay, maintaining order. This is not as far-fetched as it seems: I read somewhere that a dog trainer who believed that you could train any dog, regardless of breed, to do any task, proved his point by training a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel to herd sheep.

Like her mentor Wolfie, Bisou takes her guard dog responsibilities seriously. When I let them out into the spooky darkness before bed time, and Wolfie charges out at top speed to kill whatever is there that shouldn't be, she's right on his heels. This behavior does not manifest towards visiting humans, onto whose laps she leaps the minute she gets a chance. (Wolfie would like to do the same, and is deeply envious.)

But Bisou has non-athletic talents as well. She is an excellent bed-maker. She sleeps on Lexi's discarded old bed, a big lumpy pillow that sits on the floor next to Wolfie's bed. I have given her an extra-large bath towel that she arranges to her taste, like a chimpanzee making its nightly nest as the sun sets over the jungle canopy. The other night I folded Bisou's bed in half, thinking to make it more comfortable, and put the towel on top. But she didn't like the new arrangement. She grabbed the towel with her teeth and lugged it over to an empty corner of Wolfie's bed, right by his head. With the corner of the towel in her mouth she turned around and around until she had made a perfect doughnut. Then she dropped the towel, gave a couple more turns, plopped down inside the doughnut and went to sleep.

Sometimes on chilly nights, when I see Wolfie and Bisou sleeping blissfully on their beds next to mine, I am seriously tempted to join them. But I feel that for my spouse's sake I must keep up the illusion of sanity, so I don't.

Z Is For Zoo

2011-11-07T17:23:00.001-05:00

It's usually just a couple of lions in my basement, but occasionally they are joined by a tiger or some other big cat. Although I am the one who hid these animals in the house, my dreaming self worries about their welfare.

How can they survive with no sunlight or fresh air? The basement walls are cinder block and windowless; the floor, under a bit of soiled straw, is cold cement. There is no food. The water in the buckets hasn't been changed for days. The animals don't look too good: their fur is dull and matted, and their ribs show.

The reason they have no food or water is that I am afraid to go down there. What on earth possessed me to get these scary animals in the first place? What was I thinking? I am trying very hard to come up with some way to get rid of them. I could call the Humane Society, but I'm sure they wouldn't want to come in one of their vans to pick up a couple of lions and a tiger. I could call the police, but they would want to know what I was doing with these big dangerous cats in the house. I could put an ad in the paper....

Over and over, I curse myself for getting the animals. I am appalled at my lack of judgment. I don't recognize myself: it's as if some unknown part of me had suddenly surfaced, turned the basement into a zoo, and then disappeared again, leaving me to deal with the situation.

Guilt about the starving lions, fear that they will eat me, frustration that they are still there--in the dream I bounce from one to the other, looking for an exit. But no matter how hard I try to dispose of the lions, I never manage to get rid of them. So while I get on with my life, they lurk in the basement, waiting for the next opportunity to surface in my dreams.

(P.S., And now my alphabet is finished.)

Last Words

2011-11-03T11:59:00.000-04:00

I must confess that, since stories by survivors of near-death experiences surfaced in the media years ago, I have been fascinated by them. Those lights, that tunnel, that...joy--what do they mean? Are they the final flashes of dying neurons, or are they glimpses into what Shakespeare called "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns"?

The dying are necessarily brief in their accounts of what is happening to them. My father was comparatively descriptive when he whispered ecstatically his last words to my mother: "I feel God so close to me." My maternal grandmother, who had certainly never heard of near-death experiences, at the very end smiled, exclaimed, "Oh, such light!" and died.

In the New York Times' recently published eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs, (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1 ) Mona Simpson says that his final words were "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."

I find solace in these stories. I am consoled when I read that people who have come very close to dying often say that they have lost their fear of death, and live out their lives in serenity and peace. Is it foolish to find comfort in something that seems to answer our deepest hope, but hasn't been proven by replicable double-blind experiments?

I don't own an Apple, an iPod, an iPhone, or an iPad, and I've never watched Toy Story. But I'm grateful to Steve Jobs for leaving life's final gate ajar for just a second, before closing it forever.

Y Is For Yoga, And For Young

2011-11-02T13:04:00.001-04:00

Some people believe that running marathons will keep them young. Others think that abstaining from eating animal products will do the trick. Others join societies whose members eat almost nothing at all, in the hopes that this will enable them to live forever.

Me, I believe in yoga. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, my gut tells me that as long as I can do a forward bend and place my hands flat on the floor, I will not be truly old. As long as I can sit in a half lotus, lean forward and touch my face to the mat, there is still hope. As long as I can pick up one foot and touch my nose with my toe, I'm o.k. If I could stand on my head--which I can't--that would guarantee immortality, but I'm not aiming for that.

I don't want to climb mountains or swim across straits or lift huge weights. All I want is for my arms and legs and hips and neck to continue making most of the gestures they made when they were three years old. All I want is to be able to control my limbs within the space of my yoga mat. This strikes me as a self-contained, reasonable, even humble goal.*

The fact that I have CFS imposes certain limits on my yoga practice--which is o.k., because if it didn't I'd be doing nothing but yoga all the time. The disease lets me do just about anything I want in class, but takes its revenge afterwards. If I indulge in one sun salutation too many, I can be nailed to the bed for a week.

Yoga has done some very good things for me. It was my flexibility going into hip-replacement surgery that allowed me to recover in record time and regain complete range of motion in the new hip (having a great surgeon helped, too). When I developed severe neck pains that traveled down my arm, doctors took x-rays and mumbled about pinched nerves, NSAIDs and physical therapy. But I remembered the yoga dictum to hold your head as if you were hanging from a golden chain attached to the top of your skull, chin tucked in and back of the neck extended, and behold, the pain went away.

Best of all, yoga has enabled me to have a conversation with my body, every part of it. Before yoga my feet were vague appendages flapping at the end of my legs. With yoga I have gotten to know them personally--heel and arch and all ten toes. After several years of practice, the weird things my teachers said about the breath finally began to make sense. Now if I'm told to breathe into my hip, I know exactly what to do. And I have learned, both literally and metaphorically, to listen to my gut, whose small, quiet voice had gone unheeded for my entire life.

*Buddhist Note: I realize that this wanting to control my body within the space of my yoga mat, etc. is a sign of attachment to outcomes, but I can't help it.

Sustainable Entertainment

2011-10-31T16:17:00.001-04:00

The first meeting of the Cabin Fever Abatement Salon took place yesterday afternoon, while the sun shone brightly on the new snow. A young woman, the farm manager at that pearl of West Pawlet, Consider Bardwell Farm, told the touching, often sad but ultimately victorious story of her father, a fifth-generation farmer, and his struggles to continue working on the land. It was clear as she spoke that in her own case the farming vocation has not, as so often happens, skipped a generation.

Afterwards, I sat by the fire rewarding myself with some leftover hummus and a glass of wine, and thought about those seventeenth-century Parisian ladies who, sick of rowdy parties where drunken noblemen got into fights, spat on the floor, and abused the servants, invented a kinder, gentler entertainment: the salon.

It should have been called not the salon but the chambre a coucher--the bedroom--for that was where the gatherings were held. The hostess lay on her bed (I never could find out whether she got under the covers), which was on a slightly elevated platform. The space between the bed and the wall, technically known as the ruelle, or little street, was occupied on one side by the servants standing ready to pour more of that exotic delicacy, le cafe, and on the other by her friends. Depending on the degree of their favor with the hostess, some friends sat on chairs, others on mere stools.

As the drafty palaces and spartan furniture of the 17th century gave way to the cozier interiors and welcoming armchairs of the 18th, the gatherings moved from the bedroom to the salon proper. Eventually, the in-home salon was replaced by the more democratic coffeehouse around the corner. But the custom of living room entertainments persisted until the early 20th century. The young lady playing the piano for her parents' dinner guests; the fledgeling poet reciting in a tremulous voice; the returning traveler astounding the company with stories of naked savages--all are examples of the human talent for making entertainment out of home-grown resources.

Then, with the advent of radio, the movies, television, and the shopping mall, people stopped looking to themselves and their friends for entertainment, and the salon was no more.

Now that foes both natural and man-made assail us on every side, self-reliance--that grandmotherly virtue--is once again looking like a good idea, even an attractive one. Some people are growing their own vegetables; some are making their own soap. Some discover that within their friends and neighbors lie rich deposits of wit, adventurousness, quirkiness and passion, just waiting to be exploited. And the quaint old salon, updated as locally-grown, sustainable entertainment, makes its long-deserved comeback.

X Is For Xenoglossophobia

2011-10-28T10:52:00.000-04:00

If xenophobia means "fear of foreigners," xenoglossophobia means "fear of foreign languages." Like Lyme disease, xenoglossophobia is endemic in many parts of the U.S.

This fear causes many parents to want to protect their children from foreign language instruction, resulting in a dearth of public schools that offer bilingual immersion (only 440 in the entire country). In some states, programs that immerse children in another language are actually banned, because, a recent NPR report states (http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=141584947 ), "a majority of voters don't think children can learn proper English and at the same time hold on to a foreign language and culture."

Xenoglossophobes hold firmly to this view, despite a wealth of evidence that becoming not only bilingual but literate in a foreign language is really good for kids' brains. For example, according to the NPR story, most of the students of Miami's Coral Way elementary school, which has been offering a rigorous English/Spanish immersion program since 1963, come from low-income families, yet many of them are accepted into the city's best high schools.

I've often wondered what xenoglossophobes think happens in the hundreds of sites around the globe where the entire population is, for political or geographic reasons, bilingual. To pick an example close to (my) home, in Catalonia most natives speak both Catalan and Spanish, the two official languages. It is said--mostly by Catalans--that we are the most intelligent people in all of Spain. If there is any truth in that, it's probably due to the enforced bilingualism. But then the Basques (who speak their own utterly weird language, and Spanish) and the Galicians (who speak a language related to Portuguese, and Spanish) probably maintain their own superiority.

Then there is the Vall d'Aran, a tiny valley high in the Pyrenees, in the northwest corner of Catalonia. Its 7,000 inhabitants have not one, not two, but three official languages. The first is Aranes, a variant of Occitan; the second is Catalan, because the valley is in Catalonia; and the third is Spanish, because Catalonia is in Spain. Xenoglossophobes would assume that the poor Aranese are barely able to walk, much less think, with this linguistic turmoil in their heads. But not at all. The Aranese are proud defenders of their endangered tongue, and insist that it be taught in their schools. In addition, because in winter it snows really hard and the passes into Spain used to stay blocked for months, they all also speak French.

W Is For Water

2011-10-26T11:39:00.001-04:00

My swimming suit didn't have bra cups yet, so I must have been eleven the summer my mother signed me up for swimming lessons at the base of Pichincha, the lively volcano that periodically covered the streets of Quito with a light coat of ash.

It was the rainy season. This meant that every day, shortly after noon, dark clouds would gather overhead, thunder would rumble for a while, and then the heavens would liquefy and fall upon the land.

The class, which met at midday, was composed of plump girls in their late teens who, to me, looked about the same age as my mother. Our teacher, Senor Padilla, a former Olympic swimmer, was short and muscular. He wore a tiny bathing suit, and the rest of his body was covered by a rich pelt of black hair. I didn't know why at the time, but being in that class with those plump girls and hairy Senor Padilla made me uncomfortable.

Not as uncomfortable, however, as being in the ice-cold water of the outdoor pool. On the very first day, after a cursory introduction, Senor Padilla blew his whistle and yelled, "Senoritas, al agua!" There was nothing for it but to jump in, so I did. I felt every muscle contract and my body turn to stone as the waters closed over my head. I surfaced spluttering, my nasal passages burning from the chlorine, and looked up. The dark heights of Pichincha were slowly disappearing under masses of lead-colored clouds. I looked down at the water and saw that it too had grown dark and threatening, along with the sky. I heard the faraway rumble of thunder.

The class ended just as the downpour began. I went home shivering, and with a violent headache from what must have been chlorine-filled sinuses. The altitude of 9350 feet, to which neither my parents nor I had adjusted, probably added to the discomfort. Needless to say, I begged not to go back to the class. Needless to say, I did go back.

Every day, my embarrassment grew as I watched Senor Padilla enjoying himself as he taught, and especially as my unathletic-looking classmates mastered the crawl and went on to the back stroke, the side stroke, the breast stroke, the butterfly. Meanwhile I, frozen and stiff as a board, hadn't even learned to float. If I floated face down, I inhaled chlorine. If I turned onto my back, I saw the dark, leaden, threatening clouds rushing towards Pichincha, and feared I was going to die.

The last day of class finally arrived. Senor Padilla had arranged to exhibit our skills before our loved ones. One by one, my classmates dove in and swam the length of the pool, each in her favorite style. When my turn came, Senor Padilla said that all I had to do was dive and float across the pool.

As I stood shivering at the water's edge, I glanced up towards Pichincha and saw the black clouds galloping overhead. I closed my eyes and threw myself in. Eventually I surfaced, sank, surfaced again and was making my way towards dry land when something bumped against my hip. It was Senor Padilla, who, worried that I was drowning right in front of my parents, had jumped in to save me.

Several weeks later, I went to a different swimming pool. The sun was out, the water was warm, and the pool was almost empty. I got in, turned on my back, looked up at the blue sky, and, since nobody was watching, tried the back stroke. I managed not only to stay afloat, but to cross the pool. Then I turned onto my stomach and did the crawl, the breast stroke, the side stroke, and the butterfly. I couldn't believe it, but it was true: despite the cold, the terror, and the embarrassment, Senor Padilla really had taught me how to swim.

V Is For Violin, And For Violence

2011-10-22T12:55:00.000-04:00

My first violin had tooth marks on the rim, where I had bitten it in a rage. The bow was missing several hairs from being struck on the back of my parents' sofa, and certain pages of my method books retained the marks of crumpling no matter how carefully I later tried to smooth them out.

I was a violent violinist when I was a kid. I hated my violin as if it were a living thing, and wanted to kill it. I wanted to kill it so it would stop making those offending sounds that, week after week and month after month, never seemed to get any better.

Not that the violin had been forced on me. My music career had begun with the piano. But after a year of struggling with fingerings and trying to keep my wrists level with my hands and my fingers curled just so, I thought the violin had to be easier, more rewarding. Besides, studying the violin meant that I would have my father for a teacher.

Why didn't my parents warn me? Perhaps they did, and I didn't listen. So on my tenth birthday, I got a violin, and my first lesson. My father showed me how to tuck the violin under my chin and support its neck with my left hand so the instrument would be parallel to the ground. Then he told me how to hold the bow, and how to draw it across the A string, halfway between bridge and fingerboard, with the hair tilted towards me at the frog and flat on the string when I got to the tip. Less pressure at the frog and more at the tip. This I should do very carefully, over and over, fifteen minutes a day, every day, until my next lesson.

"You mean just drawing the bow across the A string?" I asked.

"Yes. It's very difficult to do right." He lifted my left arm, which by then was pointing dispiritedly towards the ground, and left.

This was well before Suzuki, before the helpful fingering tapes on the fingerboard, the accompanying CDs, and the frivolous idea that playing the violin should be fun. By the end of the second practice session, I was bored out of my mind and longing for the days of the Anna Magdalena Bach piano book, the little Minuets and Sarabandes that actually sounded like regular music.

A year passed. My father pronounced me to have basic talent and a good ear worth cultivating, and raised my daily practice time to an hour. Leaving my mother to enforce the regimen, he went off to earn our keep as a musician. This required him to work quite hard, and in retrospect I can see that expecting him to give me a weekly lesson, like his regular students got, was perhaps too much. So I would go weeks, sometimes months, without a lesson. Occasionally, if he happened to be home while I was practicing, my father would swoop into the room saying "Flat! You're flat! Here, let me show you..." If I was lucky, sometimes these interventions would develop into lessons.

The years passed and, as I advanced, I fell deeper into musical despair. The more I learned about the violin, the more I hated the way I sounded. Having heard the sound of his violin from the day I was conceived, I considered my father's playing the minimum acceptable level of proficiency, so by comparison my own playing seemed beyond disgusting. I was eighteen before I could stand to hear myself.

But by then I also realized what a jealous master the instrument was. I was in college, majoring in Biology and French, and taking violin for one hour of credit--yet practicing for that single credit took as much time as the rest of my courses combined. I played for another two years and then, without thinking too much about it, I put away the violin, the methods books, the music stand. The calluses on my fingers slowly faded, and life rushed in to fill the now-vacant practice hours. My parents had the grace not to make a fuss.

And after that, for years and years I never gave the violin another thought.

Why I Shop At The Dorset Church Rummage Sale

2011-10-18T22:21:00.001-04:00

There are twelve items in my recycled garbage bag: a couple of heavy sweaters and several long-sleeved tees--all of them wool, cashmere, cotton, or silk. All of them bearing brand names that even I am familiar with. I hand the gray-haired lady $30. She gives me change, looks into my eyes, says "thank you so much for coming."

Before I came to Vermont, I had never darkened the door of a vintage shop, much less attended a rummage sale. But--blame the apocalyptic Zeitgeist, or the Vermont ethos, or the fact that the chicken shed has replaced the office as my early-morning destination--I now attend the Dorset Church bi-annual rummage sale religiously.

So does everybody else. In Vermont you can normally drive right to the front door of your venue and park. But for this particular occasion, you sometimes have to park the equivalent of two blocks (there are no blocks in Dorset) away. That tells you something.

It's usually brisk on the morning of the fall sale, and the wily church ladies have set up the tent with the coats, heavy sweaters and ski-wear right next to the (Vermont marble) sidewalk. Indoors there is the "designer room," where cashmere and pristine labels abound; the coat room, the shoe room, the children's room, and a huge room where you can buy dresses, skirts, pants, tops, sheets, blankets, comforters, not to mention clothes for guys, for practically pennies.

The place is so crowded that reflective shopping is out of the question. This is a relief for me, who tend to go into existential crises in a mall. Here the rule is: buy first, think later. For some reason, I don't feel overwhelmed by the crowds, but oddly serene, and wealthy. Though we barely stop to talk, I run into several people I know. One friend is buying wool sweaters that she will "felt" by washing them in hot water and then cut up and sew together into a vest of many colors. Another friend carries her purchases in her arms. "I won't let them give me a bag," she says, referring to the recycled paper or plastic bags that shoppers are offered. Awed by her environmental conscientiousness, I vow to bring my own canvas bags next year.

And there you have the first of my reasons for shopping at the rummage sale: it's environmentally friendly. I'm recycling all that cotton, all those dyes, all that labor. It saves my own resources: I'm keeping myself warm and satisfying the remains of my feminine vanity for a fraction of what I would pay at a regular store. I'm contributing (albeit not a lot, given the prices) to a local charity. I am helping in a small way to make our region self-sufficient.

Finally, there is the issue of who makes the clothes we buy in the stores. My husband's sister, Jodi Cobb, an intrepid photographer for National Geographic, shot a powerful story about slavery in the 21st century. (You can read her post on the subject by clicking: http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/2011/archives/21940#more-21940 ) There is nothing I can do about young girls being sold as prostitutes in Eastern Europe. But by limiting my purchase of new goods of uncertain provenance (and aren't all those "made in..." labels inside our sweaters signs of uncertain provenance?) I can minimize the profits of someone who makes his or her living off the skinny backs of six-year-olds. It's a golden opportunity to do a little good in this sad old world.

The Lazy Gardener's Guide To World-Class Compost

2011-10-17T19:45:00.001-04:00

Here's what you do: forget those instructions about gathering your various compost ingredients, layering them carefully, wetting them down and turning them frequently. Instead, get two or three hens--or six, if you are ambitious--and put them in a shed. If they have access to the outdoors, and they should, an 8'x8' space will accommodate six layers luxuriously. You want your hens to be able to go outside: the air and grass and bugs are good for their bodies and their souls.

You get a couple of bales of hay that is too old to be fed to cows, technically known as "mulch hay," and spread some of it on the floor of the shed. The hens will rejoice in this, pecking at the hay seeds and scratching around until even the longest stems are nicely shredded. This is the beginning of your compost pile.

As the hay in your chicken shed--the term of art is "bedding," or "litter"--becomes soiled, just sprinkle some more hay over it. This will keep the surface clean and free of smell, and the hens don't care what's underneath. Even better, as the bottom layers of hay start to decompose with the help of the chicken poop, they will help to keep your hens' feet warm in the cold weather.

But hay is not all you add to your bedding-cum-compost. All your garden waste--your overgrown zucchini, your spent broccoli plants, your Halloween pumpkins--goes into the hen house. So do your kitchen leftovers, including eggshells, which the hens eat to recycle their calcium. You can throw in coffee grounds and tea leaves, too. Although the hens will not eat them, they make great fertilizer. Your birds will love bits of meat and fat, but bones will attract rodents, so put them into your (now greatly diminished) trash.

Then in the fall, when the garden is finished, you shovel the soiled bedding into your garden cart and dump it on the garden. You will notice that the hay has been shredded, the poop has mostly vanished, and there is a good bit of fine dust: this is the organic fertilizer that your hens have made for you out of the kindness of their hearts, the super-nutritious manna that will give your young plants a terrific start in life next spring.

Since chicken manure is very rich in nitrogen, it needs to age before it comes in contact with plants. I let mine sit and ripen in the empty garden, absorbing rain and sleet and snow, from October to March. If you are in a climate that allows year-round gardening, you will have to pile the soiled bedding somewhere and let it age for several months before using it.
When you've finished dumping the litter on the garden, go back and spread a clean layer of hay on the shed floor. Give the hens a couple of apples, sit and talk with them a while. They have fertilized, turned and shredded your compost for you. Backyard alchemists, they have transmuted your kitchen waste into golden-yolked eggs. They deserve a bit of thanks.

Why Vermont Should Change Its Name With The Seasons

2011-10-13T23:19:00.001-04:00

Driving to yoga this afternoon through the annual foliage follies, it struck me that at this time of year the state's name, which means "the green mountains" (les verts monts) becomes a misnomer. "Vermont" is only descriptive of the state in summer.

During the fall woodland pyrotechnics, there is precious little green around, so the state name should change to Rougemont, or Montorange, shifting to Beigemont during stick season. After the first snow, Beigemont would become Montblanc. In March, the state should be known as Montboue.

And when spring finally comes, and lilacs burst into bloom, Vermont should be called Montlilas. Which is rather pretty, I think.

How I Became An Internationally Famous Blogger, And How You Can Too

2011-10-12T18:37:00.002-04:00

Several weeks ago, the number of daily hits on MyGreenVermont suddenly skyrocketed. It's always good to know that one is not just a voice crying out in the desert, so I was pleased. What is more, my readers seemed to be spread not only across the United States, but all over the planet. While I slept in my bed at night, people in England, Sweden, France, Austria, Italy and Poland were reading my blog. So were people in Turkey, Ghana, the Philippines, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.

I couldn't figure out the reason for this explosion of my faithful but modest readership. Then it occurred to me to check the search terms that my new fans were using.

About a year ago, when Bisou came into heat, I wrote some posts about the reaction of my big German Shepherd, Wolfie. He followed her around day and night, whining. He stood over her and washed her face and drooled over her until her hair stood up in points. He lost weight. It was intense but entirely platonic, Wolfie being neutered. The posts were humorous, but hardly salacious. They didn't even have drawings. On the labels at the bottom of the posts I listed: dogs, dog behavior, dog sex.

And that is what my international fans are googling: dog sex.

I have several questions about this. First, who are these people, and why are they staying up all night researching this subject? Have we wandered so far from Nature that the sex life of dogs has become exotic and mysterious? I would think that my readers in third-world countries would be especially familiar with dog sex, having only to look out their windows to witness the real thing.

Second, why do people keep looking for this topic in as unrewarding a site as MyGreenVermont? You'd think that the dog-sex aficionados who find me would be so disappointed that the word would get out in the international weirdo community and interest would quickly die out, but not at all. To these frustrated but persistent hordes, I can only say: I'm sorry, lo siento, tant pis!

Third, why do so many of my new fans come from Muslim countries? Don't they know that their religion considers dogs unclean? And aren't they risking the ire of the Prophet by googling not just dogs, but dog sex?

I may never find the answer to these questions, for who knows the ways of the blogosphere? But to anyone out there seeking fast fame through blogging: now you know what to do.

Nursing Bisou

2011-10-11T16:47:00.003-04:00

Took Bisou to the vet at the crack of dawn today. She was suffering mightily from a two-inch-wide impacted gland. I will spare you the location of the thing, and how I came to miss such a big hurt on a little dog. Suffice it to say that she showed little discomfort until the last day, that she is wiggly and has a lot of long red hair, and that I was not channeling my veterinarian grandfather while this was developing.

At the vet's I held her while she was shaved and the first measures were taken. When the vet showed me what we were dealing with, I almost passed out. But, turning bowels into heart (as we say in Spanish), I paid attention while the vet explained about the pain meds and oral antibiotics I would be administering, the many hot water compresses I would be applying (four or more daily, for ten minutes each), and the external antibiotic I would have to put inside the wound--deep inside, the vet said, looking me in the eye.

So far Bisou and I have survived the application of four compresses and one dose of in-the-wound antibiotic. Every time I see the abscess I feel less queasy. She, on the other hand, has become the very image of sorrow and mortification, not because she is in pain any longer, but because she is wearing an Elizabethan collar. She refuses to walk, much less go up and down the stairs, while she's wearing the thing, so she gets carried around a lot. I take it off to let her outside, and she scampers around as usual, but then starts licking the tragic spot and I have to put the collar back on.

By early afternoon, what with the trauma of the wound and the collar, plus the effect of the pain meds, Bisou was limp with exhaustion, and so was I. I put her on the bed in my study, took off the evil collar, climbed in beside her, and we both had a restorative nap under a nice soft afghan.

Between now and bedtime, I'll do two more compresses and one more infusion of antibiotic. And maybe by tomorrow I'll be more confident and she'll be more comfortable, perhaps even willing to take a few steps in her collar. And with the help of good Saint Roch, patron of dogs, we will slowly make our way out of the woods.

Attack In The Night

2011-10-06T19:56:00.000-04:00

Something bit a chunk off Lexi's ear last night. My dowager German Shepherd, Lexi, is long of tooth, hard of ear and dim of eye, but she can still outrun me.

Around eight yesterday evening, the dogs began agitating to be let out. I normally make them wait until nine, but this time I relented. It wasn't until a while after I'd let them back inside that I noticed Lexi's ear, which was missing a half-inch-long, u-shaped piece right next to the tip.

I checked her over, but she seemed fine, and was busy licking the drops of blood that spattered the floor and walls every time she moved. I cleaned the wound with a wet paper towel, set up one of the big dog crates and put her in it, to contain the bleeding. I did my best to ignore the hurt looks she was giving me (she had house-trained herself as a puppy, and after her first week with us, thirteen years ago, I never crated her again) while I tried to reconstruct what had happened.

True, the dogs had seemed eager to go out earlier than usual, but they often do this, since they know that I will give them a treat when they come back. Also, the weather had turned windy and brisk, which always makes them jumpy. They usually run barking out of the house and across the grass and disappear into the woods, until they hear the warning beep of the invisible fence. Had they barked longer or more furiously this time, I would have noticed. Even allowing for the ear being less sensitive than other parts of the anatomy, you'd think Lexi would have yelped when whatever it was bit her, and I would have heard it. And so would Wolfie and Bisou.

And if they had, surely they would have gone over to investigate, and there would have been a confrontation with the critter. If there was a critter.

Other than rabbits in winter, turtles in spring, and the black bear who made a historic visit several years ago, nothing much comes out of the woods and into our yard. The deer, turkeys and foxes stick to the front field, where they know the dogs aren't likely to be.

We did once glimpse a fisher running parallel to the house, just inside the woods, and the fisher is my prime suspect. A coyote or a fox would have taken a bigger chunk. But even if Lexi had gone after the fisher, he could have outrun her. Perhaps she accidentally bumped into him. But you'd think she would have smelled him--or does a dog's sense of smell also fade as she ages?

A friend thinks that maybe it was a shrew--a tiny but fierce animal with (depending on the species) a poisonous bite capable of killing a mouse and cause pain to a larger animal. Again, though, shrews are supposed to be quite musky, so you'd think that might have warned Lexi off.

At bedtime, not wanting Wolfie and Bisou to encounter the mystery attacker, I went outside with them, kept them close, and quickly brought them inside. As for Lexi, I knew that if I let her out she would disappear into the woods and wouldn't hear me calling, so I didn't let her out. I trusted that her excellent sense of house hygiene would hold through the night, and it did.

Things get dicey when a dog who is still relatively fleet of foot goes almost blind and mostly deaf. Right now it's dark outside. I let the dogs out a few minutes ago, and Wolfie and Bisou came back when I called them. As for Lexi, she's still out there, staying away from shrews and fishers, I hope. Wolfie is keeping vigil by the back door, looking out for her.

Last winter, to keep her safe, I tried attaching Lexi to a light chain that ran on a line suspended above the yard. But she was miserable. One of her few remaining pleasures, aside from eating, consists of ambling around on her own outside, sniffing stuff and thinking old-dog thoughts.

A gerontologist told me recently that, in nursing homes, the policy has shifted from safety at all costs to one that tolerates a certain degree of risk in favor of allowing the very old to retain some feeling of self-determination. That is how I hope to be treated some day, and it's how I'm treating my old dog right now.

U Is For Uppers

2011-10-04T21:06:00.002-04:00

"Honey," the obstetrician said (for that is how we girls were addressed in 1969), "you're two months pregnant and you've gained four pounds. If you keep this up you'll have a bad delivery, you'll get varicose veins, and you'll look awful."

"But Doctor S.," I replied, "I have horrible morning sickness all day long, and food is the only thing that helps. Plus I keep falling asleep in the library stacks, when I'm supposed to be doing research for my dissertation."

"Here's something that might help," Dr. S. said, handing me a prescription. "Take one in the morning."

The next day, having taken the new pill, I went to the library. At noon I met my husband and some friends at a cafe on campus. "You'll never believe what a day I had!" I said, before even sitting down. "It was terrific! I found just the sources I was looking for, lots of them! I wrote and wrote and wrote until I ran out of index cards!"

"Don't you want to eat something?" my husband asked when I stopped for breath.

"What? No...I'm not really hungry. I think I'll go buy some more index cards! I'll see you at home this afternoon!" and, waving gaily, I sped off to the campus bookstore, got the cards, and returned to the library.

Reader, those pills changed my life: my nausea vanished, as did my appetite and my need for sleep. The dissertation research was going famously. True, after several weeks I noticed that a vague feeling of apprehension would come over me when the pill's effects started wearing off, a littler earlier every day. But it never occurred to me to wonder about the pills. They had been prescribed by Dr. S., and it was his job to take care of me and the baby.

In January, 1970, when I went for my four months check, I saw Dr. P, a partner of Dr. S. "I no longer have nausea," I explained, "but the pills that Dr. S prescribed give me energy, so I'm still taking them."

Dr. P looked at my chart and looked alarmed. "Do you know what you've been taking? Those are diet pills! Do you know how addictive they are? I advise you to stop taking them right now." I went home, put the pills away in the medicine cabinet, and waited apprehensively for the agonies of withdrawal to begin. Miraculously, they never did.

The pregnancy progressed, and, thanks to that early pill-fueled burst of research, I finished a paragraph-by-paragraph outline of the dissertation. When my mid-May due date came and went with no signs of labor, I felt betrayed by the universe. It was hot, and I was so uncomfortable that I couldn't even read, much less work on the dissertation. One especially sweltering afternoon, I remembered the pills. I got the bottle out of the medicine cabinet, split a pill in two, and swallowed a piece.

In a flash, I was in the fabric store buying material and patterns for not one but five dresses to wear after the baby came. I flew home, ironed out all the fabric and all the patterns, pinned the patterns to the fabric, cut out the five dresses, and went into labor.

The next day, I was nursing my plump and sprightly daughter when Dr. S came into the hospital room and stood beaming by my bed, "Honey, I'm so proud of you," he said. "Your baby weighed eight pounds, but your total gain was only fifteen pounds! You'll be able to fit into your clothes in no time."

T Is For Telepathy

2011-10-03T18:47:00.003-04:00

Telepathy is not one of my fortes, with some exceptions. At certain times, my spouse of the last several centuries and I experience uncanny episodes of thinking/saying the same thing at the same time. It's as if the buckwheat hulls that fill our pillows become a conducting medium for our minds.

Otherwise, I'm neither a transmitter nor a receiver of notions. If I want somebody to know what I'm thinking, I pretty much have to come up with some words. As for receiving, my head is full of thoughts. I suspect that few of them are my own. I just don't know whose they are.

The couple of books on intuition I've read insist that we are everyone of us intuitive, and capable of sending as well as receiving ideas. We're not, however, attuned to this power, and so it goes unacknowledged and uncultivated. I want to believe this, since I would like nothing better than to be able to communicate thoughts and feelings without having to go to the trouble, and taking the risk, of putting them into words. This would simplify many social situations. If someone was boring me to death by going on about, say, car insurance, I could send a suggestion such as "Stop already! Talk about dogs instead."

The books advise paying attention to those times when you have achieved some degree of telepathy, however slight. Somehow, I hardly ever manage to do this, and when I do, I reflexively attribute the event to coincidence. But I love hearing other people's telepathy stories. Do you have one?

The Enigmatic Cellist

2011-10-01T22:50:00.000-04:00

I was meeting two friends for dinner at the tiny restaurant in the upscale village. It was warm enough that tables were still set up on the patio under a canopy. We were led to one of these, but there was a problem: between our table and the indoor dining room a mansat playing the cello.

It was a fine sound, deep and clear. I knew that I would not be able to eat, let alone talk, next to those thrumming notes, so I asked to be moved. The waiter looked annoyed, but went to arrange for a table inside. The cellist glanced up from his score, and I felt sure he'd caught the gist of my request. I was mortified that he must think I wanted to move because I didn't like his playing.

We followed the waiter indoors, and as I passed the cellist, I wished I could make eye contact, maybe smile--do something to let him know that the reason I wanted to move away from him was that he played too well. We sat down and the wine arrived, and the basket of crusty bread, but I couldn't taste any of it because, through the chatter of the diners and the clatter of dishes and silverware, I could still hear the cello. And it was distractingly, disturbingly good.

I looked at the people around us. They were talking and eating, seemingly oblivious to the stream of high art wafting through the air. Somewhere between the main course and dessert, the cellist began playing the Bach Cello Suites, one majestic, soulful movement after another--allemande, courante, sarabande, gigue.... Here is this man, I thought, pouring out this sublime stuff, and behind it lie years and years of lessons, scales, and auditions, performance anxiety and bouts of despair. And now it had come to fruition...and here he was, in a restaurant, playing while we chewed our food.

I mentioned to the server how extraordinary theplaying was. "Oh, he's good," he said, "he plays with the --- Symphony," and named one of the top orchestras in the U.S. I couldn't believe it. There are thousands of accomplished string players in the land today, only a handful of whom make it into the best orchestras. I know that symphony orchestras have been having a hard time lately, but this guy's orchestra is still alive and active. What was he doing playing in a restaurant?

Musicians have always supplemented orchestra salaries with other jobs. My school uniforms and tuition were paid with the money that my father, a violinist, earned from chamber music gigs, recording sessions, or--steadiest but most disliked--private lessons or college teaching. I know that in his early years as a musician, well before I was born, my father played waltzes at an exclusive tea-house in Barcelona. But never again, after I knew him, did he play background music at a social event, much less at a restaurant.

Is the state of classical music today so dire that fine musicians are forced to play in restaurants, I wondered? Perhaps the enigmatic cellist was just a friend of the restaurateur...or he was a musical masochist who enjoyed playing while people ignored him. Eventually he stopped, and I was relieved--the tension of trying not to listen to the music had been wearing me out.

As we were leaving, I saw that the cellist had joined a couple at a table, and was eating with them. Were they avid music lovers who, amazed to find such a star in their midst, had asked to buy him dinner? Away from his instrument, the cellist looked affable but unremarkable as he cut into his roasted duck. Again, as I walked by him I wanted somehow to let him know that he had been heard. But he was munching away so contentedly that I figured he was happy with things just as they were.

Requiem For Three Hens

2011-09-29T21:14:00.002-04:00

Last Monday I did my least favorite farm chore, one that I dislike even more than cleaning the chicken house: I took my three oldest layers to be slaughtered.

They hadn't done anything wrong. They'd just grown old--perimenopausal, to be exact. They still laid an egg every once in a while, but not often enough to warrant feeding them through the cold months, at which time their laying would decrease even more. I had anticipated this back in the spring, when I bought eight day-old pullets whom I expected to begin laying in the fall. This has now happened, and these teenage hens are laying like a house on fire.

The perimenopausal hens were only three years old--time passes quickly if you're a chicken. They were Buff Orpingtons, big-boned, blond and plump like Walkyries, with calm dispositions seldom found in the operatic world. Orpingtons are a "heritage" breed. This means that they don't lay as early or as long or as consistently as modern hybrid hens. They also exhibit a strong tendency to become broody, to sit on eggs for weeks at a time in the hopes that something will hatch. They don't care that there's no rooster in sight, and the eggs are therefore infertile. All they care about is sitting with Buddha-like concentration on the nest, keeping all the other hens at bay. This results in broken eggs and in eggs laid in odd corners of the coop by desperate hens. And while a hen is broody, she doesn't lay eggs.

I hope I have convinced you by now that slaughtering the three Buff Orpingtons was the rational and sensible thing to do.

In our many years together, my husband and I have occasionally slaughtered a chicken or two. The slaughtering part we do beautifully, choreographing each step so the chicken is hardly aware of anything (I keep my hand over her eyes the whole time). The plucking and gutting and cleaning, however, are a mess. I know that this is something that our grandmothers did routinely every Sunday, in the interval between church and dinner, but the reason they did it so efficiently is that for them, unlike for us, it was routine. When we did it, it was hard, sweaty, smelly, uncertain work ("What is this thing on the liver? Don't nick it, it might be the gall bladder!").

Slaughtering our chickens at home, I believe, is the humane thing to do. The chicken dies in familiar surroundings, by familiar hands--as happy a death as a chicken can hope for. So in opting to take my hens to be slaughtered elsewhere, I was thinking not of them, but of myself. My comfort and convenience, because I am human, overrode the chicken's quality of death, because she was a bird. This was not a decision I felt good about, though I made it anyway.

The night before the slaughtering, in the dark, I went into the chicken house and plucked the three hens, one by one, from the roost and put them in a roomy, ventilated box without waking them. First thing the next day my husband put the box in the car and we drove a few miles to the farm where they were to be killed.

The friendly chicken-slaughterer offered to do them right away, while we waited, so we handed him the box and went to sit in the car. We listened on Morning Edition to news of other slaughters all over the globe, and eventually the man emerged with our hens in plastic bags, pre-cooled and looking just like supermarket chickens. We handed him $9 and took the hens home and put them in the freezer.

It will be a while before I can look at them again. But one day I will put them in a pot with onions, celery and carrots and simmer them for twenty-four hours. Then I will strain the broth and freeze it, and bone the carcases and save the meat for the dogs. And our three friendly hens will become part of our bodies.

But I'm not there yet. Right now, left to my own devices I would become not just a vegetarian (because milk and eggs imply the slaughter of bull calves and rooster chicks), but a vegan. And I would steer clear of all the writings that prove that plants too are sentient, want to avoid pain, and want to live and prosper.

S Is For Sensual, And Snake

2011-09-28T20:13:00.003-04:00

The letter S is the most sensual of the alphabet. First, there is that small descending curve: sen-, then the big downward swoop and that little flick at the end: -sual.

In my mind's eye, S is always a rich golden yellow.

The plant world abounds in S's--ferns unfurling, leaves curling, tendrils twining. Our most basic ideas of beauty are entangled with the S shape, from the capitols of ionic columns, to cabriole legs, to the whiplash curves of Art Nouveau.

What makes a swan more beautiful than a duck? That S-shaped neck. Horses are full of S's: the line that begins at the top of the arched neck, goes through the shoulders and ends at the bottom of the rib cage; the line that starts at the belly, goes through the loins and over the croup; the tail. The ideal female body is also a collection of S curves, even if in contemporary Western culture those curves more and more approximate a straight line.

Snakes, which mimic the letter S with their bodies, possess a number of other S qualities: they are sinuous, sibilant, secretive. They are also serene, having 100% sang froid. Except for vipers, they are solitary, and the ones that haunt our gardens are salutary, preying on pests from slugs to (small) moles.

Looked at objectively, snakes are beautiful, so it's unfortunate that they get such bad press. Sure, some snakes can kill you, but most neither can nor want to. I believe that because snakes look so sensual our culture has cast these graceful creatures as evil (see the book of Genesis). But not all peoples have reviled the snake. From the charming little statues that have come down to us, it looks like the snake priestesses of ancient Crete regarded live snakes both as semi-divine pets and as wardrobe accessories.

R Is For Rustic

2011-09-26T19:57:00.000-04:00

I remember exactly when I fell in love with the rustic life. I was eight years old. It was summer and I was reading under the pear tree next to my grandparents' well, into which two bottles of wine had been lowered in a bucket, to cool before lunch. The book was Heidi, by Johanna Spyri.

I was at the point where Heidi, after a long, hot climb up the mountain, arrives at her grandfather's hut and scopes out the place: the wooden bench by the front door for gazing down into the valley; the tall, dark, whispering firs behind the hut; the shed for the white goat and the brown goat.

Indoors there is the spacious, almost bare room with the big fireplace and the iron kettle hanging over the logs; the cupboard in which Grandfather keeps his folded clothes, his bedding, and, on a separate shelf, a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, and Heidi's wooden bowl. How neat and convenient, I thought, to have everything you need--clothes and food--in a single cupboard. Almost everything in the hut is made of wood--the table, Grandfather's chair and stool, as well as the new stool, just Heidi's size, that he makes for her.

There is a loft in the cabin filled with sweet-smelling hay for the goats, and that is the spot that Heidi picks for her bed. She piles up hay for a mattress and Grandfather spreads a heavy sheet of homespun over it. There was a hayloft, too, just behind my grandparents' house, above the stables. My grandmother would take me there sometimes to show me a litter of newborn kittens (before she drowned them, something that was kept from me at the time). I would have liked to make my bed up there, like Heidi, but knew better than to even ask.

For dinner Grandfather toasts some cheese (it must have been Raclette) over the fire and spreads it on bread. He milks one of the goats right into the wooden bowl and hands it to Heidi to drink. Heidi thinks it's the best meal she's ever had.

Before the chapter was over I had fallen in love with the cheese, the wooden bowl, the homespun sheet, and the little stool, not to mention the goats. I envied Heidi for being allowed to go barefoot, to follow the goats up into the Alpine meadows, to sleep on top of real hay. But I also had what I now recognize as a strong aesthetic response to the grandfather's domestic interior: simple, uncluttered, with a single object for every need and a place for every object. And I loved the wooden furniture and the wooden bowl, and the heavy sheet of homespun.

Many years later, I read in The Mother Earth News an article on how to make a wooden spoon. Although no wooden spoon is mentioned in Heidi, I recognized it right away as a Heidi-type object: simple, functional, made of wood. I borrowed a whittling knife from my husband, got myself some wood, and for several nights sat at the kitchen table, making spoons.

As it turned out, a spoon's simple aspect is deceptive. There is nothing straightforward about its design. The three spoons I produced before my wrists gave out had handles that were too short and bowls too deep and narrow to be of any use. Nevertheless, I sanded them carefully, oiled them until they shone, gave one to each of my daughters, and kept one for myself. Today, my spoon sits in a place of honor on the sideboard, useless but revered, and occasionally re-oiled, by me. And every time I pick it up, I think of Heidi, and her wooden bowl, and those goats.

Q Is For Quandary

2011-09-23T16:47:00.001-04:00

Step into my clogs for a moment, and consider the situation.

You live in a place where the winters are long, and to mitigate cabin fever for yourself and your friends, you have organized a salon that meets during the non-gardening season.

One Sunday a month people come to your house, shake the snow off their boots, and settle in for an afternoon of wine and talk. Each time one of you speaks informally about work that you feel passionately about--sheep herding, art, writing, politics, early music, bee-keeping. And for a while, as you sit together, the weather seems more clement, the season less dark.

The salon, about to start its fourth season, has not bombed: by now, the mailing list has grown to twenty. Not all twenty, of course, come to any given salon. But they could. And because your living room can reasonably seat only a dozen at most, and people listen best when they're sitting down, you worry every month that there won't be enough room.

Clearly, you have to find a way to limit attendance. But it has to be a kind and gentle way: these are your friends and neighbors, whom you wouldn't for the world offend or depress, especially in this tiny community, especially in winter. Various ways of doing this have been suggested to you. The most promising is to close "admission" after twelve people have said they're coming. If one of these must later cancel, his seat can be announced to the group that didn't make it, again on a first-come, first-served basis. This seems fair enough, but you worry about how the ones who don't get in may feel.

The first salon is scheduled for October 30. What do you do?

P Is For Pesto

2011-09-22T12:39:00.000-04:00

P is for Pesto, which makes all things palatable--even kale.

I have gone on at length before about the industrial quantities of kale that each year burst forth from a single 4'x4' bed. I should count myself lucky. Nutritionists adore kale, richest of all foods in vitamins, minerals, and the moral satisfaction that comes from eating what is good for you.

But, nutritionists aside, I haven't met many people--and nobody under age 35--who like kale. I haven't even succeeded in talking myself into liking it, not even enhanced with that all-purpose enhancer, bacon. Not even made into cream soup. Nothing, not a long boil, or my blender, or my teeth, is able to break down the mighty cellulose in those cell walls. At best, kale's flavor reminds me of inferior broccoli. And yet kale keeps on growing, spring through fall, undeterred by frost or wind.

Undeterred by bugs, too. Squash bugs destroy the squash; the caterpillars of the white cabbage butterfly devastate the broccoli. But nothing, not even Japanese beetles, goes near the kale. What does that tell you? But I should amend that: Wolfie and Bisou love kale. Every afternoon Wolfie breaks off a couple of leaves, gives one to Bisou, and I can hear them out there crunching on the stuff. I think they think the leaves are a kind of bone.

But my relationship with kale changed the happy day when I heard about kale pesto. With the help of massive amounts of garlic, olive oil, pine nuts and Parmesan, kale becomes a barely-there vehicle for those infinitely superior flavors. A vehicle full of vitamins and yes, moral satisfaction too. Who says that virtue has to taste bad?

O Is For Order

2011-09-20T22:02:00.000-04:00

I like and need order. I have to have clear surfaces on which to rest my eyes. Pictures must be hung straight, rugs aligned, or I cannot think well.

My ears need order, too: no background music, no background radio chatter. Above all, no television noise--unless, that is, I'm watching television

The beings I love all bring clutter into my life. For decades, spouse, descendants, dogs--not to mention chickens--have been scattering paper and machine parts, shoes, toys, hair, and feathers all over the house. My days are a perennial muted struggle to maintain some minimum level of order. The fact that I have added these beings one after another to my life and that they are indispensable to my happiness shows that I'm not completely insane about order. But I am getting to like it more all the time.

I did not inherit this compulsion from my mother, who, despite the minimal disruption caused by a neat husband and a single child, was not disturbed by a bit of chaos in the house. I got it straight from my paternal grandfather, a quiet and reserved man who worked in a bank. Before he came home in the afternoon, my grandmother would adjust the living room shutters to a precise angle so the light would shine on his newspaper. Only she knew how to slant the pocket-watch stand on his bedside table so he could see its hands from the pillow without turning his head. When he came to visit, he would walk straight past us at the door to fix a crooked picture. That done, he would turn back to us and give us a papery kiss. One of the few things I remember him saying to me was to please fix the corner of the rug that was caught under my chair.

Most people need order more as they age. I don't remember knowing any spontaneously orderly children or teenagers, do you? I myself used to do my high school homework with the radio playing. But with time the brain loses its ability to screen out distractions, and we shout at our kids to turn down that music and clean up their room, for crying out loud, how can anybody think, much less learn anything, in such chaos!

I believe, though, that there is more to the desire for order than deteriorating neurons. One could argue that there is a moral element in the wish to attend to each thing fully, whether it be a piece of music, a book, or a person. The desire for order also has a strong aesthetic component. After all, Baudelaire ranked order first among the qualities of his ideal environment: " ...ordre et beaute / luxe, calme et volupte." Lose order, and there go beauty, luxury, calm, and pleasure. The French are an orderly breed.

But then, on the other hand, there is Robert Herrick's Delight in Disorder:

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:—
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distractión,—
An erring lace, which here and there	5
Enthrals the crimson stomacher,—
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly,—
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat,—	10
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility,—
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.

Must not forget that erring lace, that winning wave.

N Is For Nevermore

2011-09-19T19:05:00.004-04:00

Nevermore will I sleep with my hair in rollers.
Nevermore will I wear a garter belt.
Nevermore will I walk long distances in spike heels.
Nevermore will I keep goats (alas).
Nevermore will I invite 100 people and cook all the food myself.
Nevermore will I try to learn to knit (I'll crochet instead).
Nevermore will I listen patiently while narcissists yammer on.

Nevermore will I eat sauerkraut.
Nevermore will I plant peas.

Do you have some nevermores of your own you'd like to add?

The Cat Pascal-Pazuzu, Part The Last

2011-09-17T17:15:00.000-04:00

I was telling how my daughter and I were marooned by the side of the interstate with a broken timing belt when Pascal-Pazuzu somehow opened his crate and ran out of the car towards the traffic. I shrieked. My daughter executed a perfect flying tackle and managed to catch the cat before he could be flattened by the wheels of a Carolina commuter.

In Maryland, since my husband and I both had long drives to work, we had to install a dog door so the dog could get to the yard when he needed to. For the first time in his life, Pascal-Pazuzu had access to the great outdoors, and he became a hunter. According to cat authorities, kittens learn to hunt by watching their mother and playing with the mice she brings to the nest. But you'll recall that when he came to live with us, Pascal had never seen his mother, let alone a mouse, because his eyes hadn't opened. Needless to say, as he grew older, I didn't bring him mice to play with.

As a hunter, he was as passionate as a member of the British aristocracy, and generous about sharing his bag. One summer evening, as we sat on the deck watching the sun set pinkly through the air pollution, P-P emerged from the hedge with a mole in his mouth, dropped it at my feet, then disappeared again. A couple of minutes later he was back with another mole, then another, and so on until darkness and the mosquitoes drove us indoors. Before leaving we counted nine moles, laid out in a straight line next to my chair.

One day after work I went down to the basement to dispense cat food and found on the floor next to his dishes a dead yellow-bellied sapsucker (a very large and colorful woodpecker). While P-P wasn't looking, I took the bird outside and flung it with all my might across a creek that ran along the edge of our yard. It landed on a bank overgrown with ivy, and sank into the greenery. The next day I went to fill the cat dishes and there, slightly the worse for wear, was the sapsucker.

If Pazuzu was a great hunter, Pascal was an insistent lover. He never saw a lap onto which he didn't leap, and I never took a nap without him curling up on the crest of my hip. Like all overly affectionate people, he could be annoying sometimes. He was addicted to sweaters, knitted afghans, good wool skirts. He would plop down his 20lbs of pure muscle and spread out his front toes, unsheath his claws, and knead away at the material and the person underneath. At these times he would purr like a Daimler, while strings of drool dripped from his mouth. He would also (squeamish readers, stop right here!) become sexually aroused.

Ah, Pascal-Pazuzu, you were a silver lining trailing shreds of cloud. You went through life shedding white hairs on our black garments, black hairs on our white, and died in your prime from that scourge of outdoor kitties, a drop of sweet-tasting antifreeze on someone's driveway. Not for you the slowly stiffening joints and iffy stomachs of long-lived indoor cats. To the end your fur was bright, your body supple, your breath sweet.

I think of you often, but never so much as at this season, when the field mice feel the coming winter and rush in droves into the hen house, the tractor shed, the garage, the basement. You would have loved Vermont.

The Cat Pascal-Pazuzu, Part The Second

2011-09-16T15:04:00.003-04:00

I need not have worried. Pascal made it through the night, and the next morning, relieved but bleary-eyed from all those feedings, I put him in his shoe box, packed milk and the trusty washcloth into my briefcase, and took him to the office, where he spent the day sleeping contentedly under my desk. Every couple of hours I would feed him, sneak him and the washcloth into the bathroom, and then put him back in his box.

Several days later, a slit appeared between his eyelids, revealing bright blue pupils, and Pascal suddenly turned from a mostly passive embryo into a real kitten. He started eating solid food, and could go for longer periods between meals, which was good, as he refused to be contained in his shoe box and I had to leave him at home. He also outgrew the wet washcloth. I thought he was too young to be litter-box trained, and worried about what the interim period between washcloth and litter box would bring. I went out and bought a litter box and some litter anyway, and the minute I set the litter box on the floor, before I'd removed the cardboard band that held top and bottom together, before I'd put any litter in it, Pascal jumped in and made a tiny poop.

At that time we had a young Irish Setter, Jeremy, whose purpose in life was to please. Pascal, at age six weeks, made him his personal slave. He would ride around the house on Jeremy's back, clinging to the wavy red coat with his tiny claws. He would cuddle up to the dog if he was cold. If Jeremy was sleeping, the kitten would squeeze himself along the points of contact of Jeremy and the floor, pushing with all his might until the dog turned on his back. Then he would crawl onto Jeremy's belly and root among the forest of red and gold hair until he located a vestigial nipple, latch on, and purr and knead to his heart's content.

As was the custom in those days, we had Pascal neutered early. As a result, he never developed a tomcat's characteristic blocky head, but his body and legs grew long and rangy, and he ran and jumped so fast that he really seemed to fly. As a result of being handled early by humans, he was so completely without fear that it was all but impossible to correct him. If we caught him walking around on the kitchen counter we would hiss at him, we would clap loudly, in desperation we would hurl the car keys at his feet. Nothing worked. If we wanted him off the counter we had to pick him up, at which point he would purr happily and nuzzle our necks, and we would lose the battle for good.

One night we were awakened by a strange crackling noise in the kitchen. It grew louder, and seemed to be coming towards the bedroom. We opened the door and saw Pascal propelling a large, full--but fortunately closed--trash bag along the hallway. In our sleep-befuddled state we were too slow for him, and he and the trash bag disappeared into the darkness of the living room. It was about that time that I came across mention of a Babylonian demon named Pazuzu, and appended that to the cat's original name.

I forgot to mention that Pascal was born and lived the first year of his life in North Carolina. Eventually we moved back to Maryland. It was arranged that my husband and the moving truck would go first, and I would drive up a day later in the station wagon with all the stuff the movers had failed to move, one of our daughters, and the dog and Pascal in their respective crates.

It was a hot, bright July morning. We were driving north on the interstate when the timing belt broke. I pulled over onto the shoulder, put the emergency blinkers on, and tried to think what to do (this was in that bygone era before cell phones). Since the temperature was in the nineties, I opened the windows and the cargo door so the animals could have some air. Traffic was whizzing by, and I was wondering what I would do if nobody stopped, and what I would do if someone did. That was when Pascal-Pazuzu worked open the door of his crate, bolted out of the car, and headed towards the road.

(To be continued.)

M Is For Meow

2011-09-15T11:48:00.000-04:00

This is the story of my cat, Pascal-Pazuzu, and how he came by this two names.

When the workers who were repairing the roof of the administration building brought down the nest of kittens, each was no bigger than a large egg. Their eyes were closed, and their skin showed pink through their sparse coat. They had that generic look of the very young: they could have been bunnies, or mice, or even puppies. Their mother, one of the dozen feral cats that roamed the campus, had taken good care of them, though: their skin was warm, their stomachs full, their coats spotless.

I chose the black-and-white one and named him Pascal, in honor of Blaise P., who wrote that the heart has its reasons which reason does not know. And certainly reason had had nothing to do with my decision to adopt the kitten. I was in a demanding new job, and had a house full of dogs and teenagers and moving boxes that I hadn't yet unpacked. But once I felt the warmth of that little body in the palm of my hand, there was no way I was giving him back. The registrar, who was a serious cat lady, handed me a pamphlet on fostering kittens, a can of special milk, and a tiny bottle with a tiny nipple. I put Pascal in my pocket and took him home.

As I read the pamphlet, I began to wish I'd ignored my heart's reasons. First of all, Pascal's survival appeared extremely doubtful unless I could somehow get him to accept the nipple. Secondly, he had to be fed every two hours, round the clock. Thirdly, since kittens that young cannot excrete body wastes on their own, I would have to simulate his mother's tongue after each feeding, with the aid of a washcloth dipped in warm water. Fourthly, he had to be kept warm at all times....

Feeling that I had taken on a desperate cause, but realizing that I had to get Pascal through the night before I could make alternative arrangements for him, I filled the doll-sized bottle and gingerly brought the nipple to his little pink mouth. He latched on in an instant, and began a loud, ferocious sucking. But as he finished the bottle I knew we were not out of the woods yet. What, I asked myself, were the chances that he would accept my warm washcloth instead of his mother's tongue? Visions of death by constipation ran through my mind as I swabbed Pascal's nether parts with my washcloth. I needn't have worried: the washcloth worked right away.

Limp with relief, I dried off the kitten, made him a bed inside a shoe box, tucked him in and poured myself a glass of wine. Later, as the alarm woke me in the dead of night for another feeding, I hardly dared to look into the shoe box. Would I find his cold, inert little body among the blankets or, worse still, would he be writhing in pain that I wouldn't know how to relieve?

(To be continued.)

L Is For Longing

2011-09-13T11:32:00.000-04:00

These days my longing--and I'm not the only gardener to feel this way--is for a killing frost. The vegetable garden is in its late-summer, decadent, disheveled, yet curiously productive stage.

The squashes that I managed to save from the squash bugs are curing in the shed. The vines, with their cargo of killer eggs, nymphs, and adult bugs are returning to the Earth somewhere out in the front field. Meanwhile the pumpkin vine, which somehow escaped the bug plague, is succumbing to a different scourge. This one turns the green leaves first silver, then brown, but doesn't bother the pumpkins.

I have, for the first time in my gardening life, given up on the broccoli. The thirty-two plants that I bought in a blizzard in March have not stopped to take a breath since I put them in the ground. I have frozen all the broccoli that my freezer can hold. I have given away pounds of the stuff. Now I'm just letting it bloom its heart out, and as soon as I can spare five minutes I'll pull out all the plants and give them to those magicians, the hens, who will transmute them into eggs.

The tomato plants have died of some mysterious disease that killed them from the bottom up. That has not, however, prevented them from producing quantities of fruit, many of which are still clinging to their parent's cadaver and ripening slowly.

The beans, which as usual I planted late, are just starting to set fruit, and there is frost in the forecast for later this week. I know I should leave the beans to meet their fate on their own, but my maternal nature rebels against letting those tender babies freeze to death. Since they're in a 4'x4' raised bed, it should only take me a couple of minutes to throw an old shower curtain over them. And remember to take it off in the morning. And put it on again at night, and take it off....

The coming frost, unfortunately, will not help where the kale and chard are concerned. These will continue to haunt me well into November, demanding to be picked and washed and chopped and blanched and disposed of somehow. Thank heaven for the local food bank, which gives meaning and raison d'etre to the otherwise absurd productivity of my nine 4'x4' beds.

I cannot figure out how so much food can come out of so little space--and no particular thanks to my gardening talents. All I do is throw the used hen house litter on the beds in the fall, bung in some seeds and transplants in the spring, pull a couple of weeds while the plants are young, and then harvest until my arms give out.

Yesterday I gathered seventeen pounds of veggies for the food bank. (Wolfie helped by breaking off a number of kale branches for himself and Bisou to munch.) You think that finished my harvest season? Alas, I barely made a dent. I finally had to stop picking because of the mosquitoes, who were bent on storing up my blood for the winter. As I walked towards the house I could hear behind me the whisper of the kale and chard, growing new leaves.

K Is For Kiss

2011-09-10T14:23:00.001-04:00

I kiss my pets. Don't you?

Vermont To Maine And Back

2011-09-09T20:45:00.001-04:00

We're back from our little trip to Maine, having traveled circuitous back roads to get out of, and then back into, Vermont without running afoul of road-repair crews. What with the car's GPS; the Google Maps printout of directions; the stack of folding- and book-maps; and the road closings--both announced and impromptu--that we encountered, getting to Maine and back was as labor-intensive, confusing and uncertain as life itself.

The Maine coast, I'm happy to report, looks like all the (competent) oil paintings of the Maine coast: rocks, pine trees, lobster trap buoys, more rocks. On our second gray and drizzly day there I saw Wyeth's gray and drizzly watercolors at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland. And when I came outside and looked around, Maine looked more like Maine than ever. I love places, and people too, that look like themselves.

On that same gray day we went out on a lobsterman's boat to check his traps for "bugs" (Maine's entomologically accurate argot for "lobsters"). As we chugged over the steel-gray sea, it occurred to me that what I perceived as an essentially homogeneous and monotonous body of water, to the lobsterman was a busy neighborhood teeming with lobster routes, lobster suburbs and lobster hangouts, on the accurate mapping of which he depended for his livelihood. The sea was his office, his workshop, his studio. We humans may all belong to one species, but we each inhabit a different universe.

Back at our house, the dogs are in their usual post-B and B stupor, having had way more fun than they are accustomed to in their monastic existence with me. This coincides perfectly with my own post-holiday stupor, and we are all recovering together.

The Uruguayan Shawl

2011-09-07T22:40:00.001-04:00

Maryland not being as wool-centered a state as Vermont, yarn shops, particularly those selling artisanal yarn, were few and far between. So I was delighted, years ago, when I found a store with a stash of skeins that had been spun and dyed by an Uruguayan women's cooperative.

The wool looked as if the women had just passed the mid-term in Spinning and Dyeing 101. The yarn, which in places was almost a quarter of an inch thick, shrank to silk-thread dimensions in others. Its color swung from a barely-there grayish blue, through an electric ultramarine, to almost purple. But I liked those imperfections. I could see in my mind's eye the women, their black braids hanging down their backs, trudging over the Uruguayan pampas to the workshop where they spun and dyed, and felt empowered and affirmed in the process. To encourage them, I bought a stack of skeins.

I crocheted an immense shawl, almost a yard wide, and long enough to wrap a couple of times around my neck and shoulders. During most of the relatively balmy Maryland winter, I could wear the shawl in lieu of a coat. When we moved to Vermont, however, the shawl was useful as outdoor wear only in the fall.

I liked the shawl's warmth inside the house during the coldest winter days, but it was too long and unwieldy for doing anything other than sitting reading a book. Even then, I would periodically have to get up and put another log in the woodstove, and the shawl was forever snagging bits of kindling and getting tangled with the poker and stained with soot. Eventually, I put it away in the closet and forgot about it.

Every year, when the light begins to ebb in the weeks following the summer solstice, as the orb weavers get busy spinning their late-summer webs I get a deep-seated urge to make stuff with wool. Sometimes I give in to the urge, and spend too much money on yarn for a garment that may or may not turn out as I anticipated. Often I redirect the urge into something more practical, such as stacking wood.

This year, just as the urge hit its peak, I ran into the Uruguayan shawl. There was all that wool, yards and yards of it, in a form that was useless to me. I decided to unravel the shawl, and make it into a more convenient design: a poncho.

It took me hours to deconstruct that shawl. My spouse, who is naive about the cost of wool, kept suggesting that I simply buy more wool, and make the poncho with that. But I persisted, and ended up with a basketball-sized sphere. I found the process of unraveling, watching the shawl disappear row by row, as satisfying as the actual crocheting.

Now the yarn ball is softball-sized, and the poncho is almost ready to be assembled. Then I'll light a fire in the stove and see if all the unraveling and crocheting have yielded a more ergonomic garment than the old shawl. I wonder how that women's cooperative in Uruguay is doing?

How I Became A Dog Pusher

2011-09-06T23:13:00.000-04:00

My spouse calls me a dog pusher because he says I'm always pushing dogs on people. I think of it more as inter-species matchmaking, and it's true that I delight in it. For example, I "pushed" Bisou's brother Theo onto my daughter and her partner, with terrific results. I am presently "pushing" one of Wolfie's relatives onto dear friends, who would be perfect for the dog, and to whom the dog would, I feel sure, bring years of happiness. How do I know this? I've watched my friends around my own dogs and...I just have a feeling.

My most daring instance of dog pushing happened many years ago, when I air-mailed a dog to my newly-widowed mother. My mother had never owned a dog, and she firmly believed that dogs, being basically "dirty," belonged outside the house. The very thought of house training a puppy, and cleaning up the occasional mess, made her feel faint.

At that time, my husband and I had a young Lhasa Apso, named Alexandra, whom I had successfully steered through the chewing and house-breaking stages. Then we got an Irish setter puppy, and Alexandra contracted a serious case of sibling rivalry. If I so much looked at the new puppy, Alexandra would jump up onto my lap and bark at ear-splitting decibels to get the puppy to go away.

I read all the dog books I could get my hands on (there weren't many in the 1970s) and tried the stuff they recommended, but nothing worked. Alexandra was losing weight; the puppy was becoming withdrawn; and we were going crazy with the tension and the barking. What to do with this intransigent but charming, perfectly house-trained purebred dog? Then it came to me that, on my mother's previous visit, I had come upon her petting Alexandra as they sat side by side on the sofa--the first time in my entire life that I had witnessed my mother touching a dog.

I'm not sure that I would now have the nerve to do what I did then, which was to buy Alexandra an airline crate and a one-way ticket to Alabama, where my mother lived. I sent my mother a telegram instructing her to be at the air cargo terminal at a certain date and time, but I gave no information as to what was coming to her.

Long story short: my mother was utterly surprised and completely charmed by Alexandra. She could not believe that a dog, a mere animal, could be so civilized and well-behaved. And so clean!

Alexandra lived a long life as a petted only dog, and she gave my mother a lot of joy. As for me, I was pretty proud of my gambit. Sure, it could have been a disaster, but I had had a feeling that it would be a good thing for Alexandra and my mother to be together. And it was.

And that is how I became a dog pusher.

My Own Personal Irene

2011-09-04T17:16:00.001-04:00

I said a while back on this blog that I would no longer conceal the effects of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) on my life. So, in the interest of full disclosure...

It was going to be a terrific Labor Day weekend. The annual Art on the Green festival in Pawlet was going to include a silent auction to benefit local victims of Irene. Just as important, the event would be the first chance after the disaster for the community to come together to commiserate, offer help, rejoice in its togetherness, maybe even share a few laughs.

I was looking forward to going around the tents and tables and stalls of my artist friends, seeing their latest work, and exchanging views on the glories and tribulations of the artistic life. After that, if my energy held up, I wanted to drive to the Garlic Festival in Bennington, something that for one reason or another I've never yet managed to do. I was curious as to what a festival in honor of that divine bulb would be like, and I hoped to come home with an impressive bunch of locally-grown garlic braids.

The next morning we were going to drive to Maine to spend a couple of days with our beloved descendants and celebrate an important birthday. I'd made reservations for the dogs at their usual B&B. I'd arranged for the chicken-sitter to take care of the hens. I could practically hear the sound of the surf and feel the salt spray on my skin.

Before heading for Art on the Green, however, I decided to make a pot of sauce from the tomatoes I'd picked earlier. And it was while I was browning the onions that my own Irene struck, a CFS attack harsher than any I've experienced in a long time.

I crawled upstairs and lay down. I wanted to call my husband, who was not home, but the phone number I needed was downstairs, and I couldn't face the effort of going down and back up again. My mind slows down to almost zero at such times, but I did remember that I should mix up and drink the electrolyte mixture that has been helpful in the past. But that too was in the kitchen, downstairs.

I lay inert and scared, and finally went into a sleepy torpor until my husband arrived. But there was little he could do besides call the descendants, the dog boarder, the chicken sitter and cancel, cancel, cancel. That night, unable to even change into pajamas, I slept in the dress I'd worn all day.

Today I'm still horizontal, though a bit improved--I'm writing after all, aren't I? I have some hopes that I'll be able to walk around some tomorrow, and even more hopes that the day after we might actually get to Maine. But I can't count on anything.

That's the thing with my personal Irene. She comes with little warning, stays as long as she likes, departs. Then as soon as I get a little confident, wham! She's back. She silts up my life, washes away my plans and goals, weakens the foundations of my being.

Over the last twenty-four hours, I have thought a great deal about the people around me who are struggling with the aftermath of the other Irene. In my horizontal state, I have felt a new kinship with them, and by extension, with all those who are suffering right now--which, if you think about it, pretty much includes all humanity. In one way or another, we all have our own personal Irene, to deal with as best we can. It helps, in my horizontal state, to periodically recite that old mantra, "may all beings be at ease...."

After Irene: Pulling Together, Pushing Ahead

2011-09-02T17:48:00.001-04:00

Drove to a village south of here this bright morning with bags of clothing and bedding for a flood relief effort that a young woman organized, with the help of Facebook, seemingly overnight. Along the sides of the two-lane highway the yards and meadows close to the Battenkill river were covered in a gray coat of mud. Up in the trees, however, untouched by Irene, the autumnal Vermont extravaganza was getting underway.

When we arrived, big tents had been set up in front of one of the churches in the center of town, and an army of women were taking in and sorting through boxes and bags and crates of donated stuff--shoes and sheets, freshly-picked chard, plastic bottles full of some kind of bright-red juice, winter coats. They wore t-shirts with "Volunteer" printed in big red letters (where did they get those so fast?), and they looked like they knew exactly what they were doing. At a certain point during the day they would stop accepting donations and then the "customers" would arrive. I hope everybody finds at least something they can use.

In the village of Pawlet, the annual Art on the Green fair is taking place tomorrow. Taking advantage of the event, our business-savvy Lampshade Lady (click here to see her website) has organized a silent auction to benefit local families in need. When I stopped by with my contribution, her tiny shop was filling with donations.

Micro-events such as these are taking place all over the state, and I wish I could contribute something to each of them. I also wish that Irene had been fairer and distributed her damage more evenly. I would gladly have put up with a couple of days without power in exchange for sparing some farmer's pumpkin crop. Instead, we didn't suffer so much as a fallen tree branch, whereas others lost everything.

Wherever you are, if you would like to ease the plight of a hard-hit Vermonter, you can make a donation by clicking on www.redcross.org/Hurricane_Irene Thanks!

J Is For Jump!

2011-09-01T18:38:00.000-04:00

"Jump!" said my yoga teacher as I contemplated moving to Vermont, "and a net will appear."

Socializing Puppies

2011-08-31T16:38:00.001-04:00

Because the roads between her house and mine were passable, and her twelve-week-old Cavalier puppies needed to be exposed to big dogs, my friend brought three of Bisou's half siblings to our yard to play yesterday.

But before we let my dogs out, my friend, my husband and I set about putting up a makeshift fence of chaises longues around the fishpond. The yard is large, the pond is small, and the human-to-puppy ratio was one-to-one, yet no sooner had we put up the first chaise, than one of the puppies fell in. No sooner had he been fished out, than he fell in again.

As I ran indoors to get a towel, I wondered why that puppy, who could have wandered anywhere in the yard, had instead chosen to fall into the very pond that we were trying to keep him out of. It occurred to me that this was another instance of the "dogs-on-the-rug" behavior: have you ever bent to straighten a crooked rug without all the dogs in the house instantly converging on that rug?

The diving puppy and the dogs on the rug exhibit the trait that is responsible for the early domestication of the dog as hunting companion, a trait that no other animal--not even ASL-speaking primates--possesses: the tendency to focus on whatever their human is focusing on.

After we got the puppy dried off and the chaises aligned around the pond, I brought out Bisou. She was delighted with her two half-brothers and -sister, and showed it by growling at them and standing over them as they rolled onto their backs. Bisou is a great growler at dogs, but only those she likes.

Then it was time for the piece de resistance, Wolfie. Lest he overwhelm the puppies, who were barely as big as Wolfie's head, I put him on the leash, and it was all I could do to slow him down a bit as he catapulted towards them. As he bent to sniff them, the two males scooted under a chair, but the little female ran around behind and sniffed him. "There," I said to my friend, "goes Bisou's true sister."

Speaking of Bisou, when she's around my two shepherds, she looks to me like a mere wisp of a dog. Next to the puppies, however, she looked amazingly powerful and robust. Size perception is so relative. I remember changing my two-year-old daughter's diaper after bringing her newborn sister home from the hospital and thinking "What is this huge child doing still in diapers? She needs to get toilet-trained right away!" And she was.

Eventually we put Wolfie on a down-stay and the puppies each had a cautious sniff, after which they collapsed into a pile and fell asleep. We recognized that they had absorbed all the socialization they were capable of, and called it a day.

After Irene: Vermont's Apple Trees

2011-08-30T17:58:00.000-04:00

In the long litany of disasters that fills our eyes and ears these days--houses washed away, roads caved in, seven covered bridges destroyed--that other Vermont icon, the apple tree, is mostly doing fine. Sure, some old and sick ones, some very young ones, have perished. But on the whole, Vermont's apple orchards and the upcoming apple harvest have survived Irene.

My own micro orchard of two tiny trees, Liberty and Freedom, is prospering. They are loaded with big, healthy-looking apples, and throughout the storm I kept checking on them. I was ready to see those apples of my eye roll to the ground like balls in a bowling alley. But the trees stood firm, and every single apple clung staunchly to its branch.

I love Vermont's apple trees: wild unkempt ones that shower their sour fruit onto the roads; a single ancient one respectfully preserved in a manicured lawn; old orchards guarding genetic treasures behind crumbling stone walls; new orchards laid out in trim military ranks. And I love the festival of apple harvest with its cornucopia of cider, cider donuts, apple pies, apple sauce, apple fritters. In Vermont there is an apple for every taste: red, green, yellow, sweet, tart, crunchy, mealy, good for baking, good for pies, good for cider, good for you. I had no idea that such a tiny state could grow such variety of apples.

I had no idea that such a tiny state could harbor so much destruction, so much sorrow. But I look at the apple trees and I know that the coming harvest will provide the first opportunity for joyful gatherings around the state. An apple, after all, is a happy thing. A tree loaded with reddening globes is a sight to gladden even the weariest of hearts. I'm glad that 2011 is turning out to be a good year for apples. Heaven knows we need them.

I Is For Irene

2011-08-28T20:35:00.000-04:00

Enough, already. Good night, Irene.

H Is For Hurricane, Hurrying Here

2011-08-26T20:12:00.001-04:00

We've been practicing for Irene for the last week, with two prolonged power outages brought on by relatively minor storms.

Now that we have a generator, we are spared the worst: lack of water from our electric well pump. The generator also ensures that the season's harvest stays frozen in the freezer, and the leftovers in the fridge don't morph into deadly poisons.

Otherwise, we have some choices to make: running the microwave vs. the computer, the chicken coop light vs. the TV. I can take a shower with hot water, but not blow-dry my hair, because that takes too much power. Ditto for the electric stove.

Meanwhile, in the garage, right next to the living room, the generator blasts on, making more racket than the battle of the Somme, upsetting the dogs--Bisou takes refuge between my ankles--and wreaking god-knows-what havoc in the psyche of the hens, whose shed adjoins the garage. And yards of thick extension cords snake through the house, tripping us in the dark.

Can you tell how spoiled I am? Here I enjoy, in the direst emergency, luxuries unimagined by the chieftains of Amazonian tribes, and I complain. Where are my mettle, my spirit of sacrifice? Power outages force us--except for the cans of gasoline needed to run the generator--to save a bit of energy. What will I do when (not if, alas) Armageddon strikes?

So, a grudging welcome to you, Irene. Next week may well prove the dress rehearsal for the man-made disasters that await us. And we need all the practice we can get.

G Is For Glad

2011-08-24T14:41:00.001-04:00

...so glad I finished construction of my tabs.

You can now see my sculpture and illustrations, and read a speeded up version of my life and miracles. And you can tell me what you think.

F Is For Food

2011-08-20T17:14:00.005-04:00

...and also for Fate, which has decreed that our garage shall be devoured by porcupines.

In June, our drawn-out battles with the porcupine who'd been eating the garage all spring came to a bloody end (you can read about it here).

At the time, one of you commented that she hoped he was the only one. After a post in which I wrote about hearing hair-raising screams in the night, another of you said that perhaps it was a porcupine in mourning. You were both right: he was not the only one, and now one of his survivors is gnawing on the garage.

Is it the porcupine's widow, trying to assuage her grief by feasting on the painted wood? Is it a son or daughter bent, like Orestes or Electra, on avenging the father's murder? Or is it just a random porcupine, one of the procession of deer, fisher cats, turkeys, bears and moose that casually roam our land? Was he waddling his way down to the river, perhaps, when the irresistible smell of our garage wafted across the field, into the woods, and drew him like a magnet?

In any case, we are at war again. This time, however, we will not fool around with humane traps, hardware cloth or sprigs of mint, but will go straight for deadly force: Grandma Rube's pheasant-hunting gun. But first, of course, we have to be made aware of the creature's presence, which means once again rigging up the motion detector that will turn a radio on in the house. Which means extension cords snaking through the kitchen, and the radio coming on every time a butterfly flits by. It also means keeping the gun in readiness by the front door, and hiding it when anybody comes to the house. And it means a killing, which, however justified, is never less than awful.

Somebody once wrote that the peace of the countryside is an urban myth. So true.

Summer Of Love, 1967

2011-08-19T10:41:00.000-04:00

It was a hot and muggy summer in Alabama. In the afternoon, terrific thunderstorms would roll in. Skirts were short, hair was long, and "Puff, the Magic Dragon," with its deliciously illicit resonances, played on the radio. We were mere infants, and I'm surprised that our parents allowed us to get married. But, of course, they were young too....

Can you tell who's who?

Requiem For A Squash Vine

2011-08-17T21:34:00.000-04:00

My vegetable garden is going to hell in a hand basket. Well, not the whole garden, but the two beds in which I planted a delicata and a butternut squash vine respectively. The vines have fallen prey to that arch-enemy of cucurbits, the squash bug.

I have been growing vegetables off and on since 1975, and this is the first time I've had a problem with bugs. Sure, there were always a few Japanese beetles nibbling at the bean leaves, and cabbage butterflies laying eggs that would hatch into gray-green caterpillars in the broccoli, and slugs making holes in the lettuce. But I've never had bugs come anywhere near killing a plant.

The squash bugs have. Their first victim was the splendid delicata vine, which bore seven beautiful green-striped squashes and a dozen flowers promising more. One day I noticed a bunch of odd-looking orange-colored eggs on top of a leaf. The next time I looked, there were thousands of gray bugs of all different sizes hanging like bunches of grapes from the stems, the leaves, the fruit. In a week, the plant was dead.

I picked the seven squashes, which hadn't quite reached maturity, roasted and pureed them and put them in the freezer.

Having sucked all the nourishment out of the delicata vine, the bugs have now assaulted the butternut plant. It is full of glorious big squashes that are nowhere near ripe. I doubt that the vine will survive long enough for them to mature.

Short of blasting them with heavy-duty insecticides, there is not much you can do about squash bugs other than pick them by hand. I could spend the rest of the summer doing just that, but I would have to stop writing, drawing, reading, cooking, and living to dedicate myself exclusively to squashing squash bugs.

I thought that if I lived right and used plenty of compost, my vegetables would be invulnerable to pests and disease. But it turns out that in gardening, as in the rest of life, being righteous is no guarantee of anything. If there is any justice in the universe, when good gardeners die we will be given allotment plots in heaven where we can spend eternity growing organic veggies free from the scourges of mildew, bugs, drought, and untimely frosts.

Wild Encounters

2011-08-16T16:41:00.000-04:00

Heard some blood-curdling screams the other night. I am often awakened by bizarre noises in the woods nearby, and in my semi-conscious state I promise myself that I will remember exactly what they sound like, so I can reproduce them for knowledgeable locals who can identify their source. I never do remember the noises precisely, and so am left to imagine that we live in the vicinity of ghouls and catamounts.

I ran into the neighbor whose house is at the bottom of our field a couple of days after I heard the screams, and he said that he had heard them too. We both agreed that they didn't sound like coyote communications. Then he told me that a brown bear had climbed onto his porch recently and upset his can of birdseed. And that a moose had wandered past his window.

I have been alternately cursing myself for missing these critters, and congratulating myself for living in a place where bears, moose, and the anonymous night shrieker--not to mention porcupines--amble so casually. I've become blase about the does and fawns grazing on the lawn, or the turkey hens leading tiny poults single file down the driveway. But a bear's presence still thrills me. I've only seen one once, about four years ago, dismantling our bird feeder about four feet from the house.

As for moose, I've never seen one in the wild, much less on our land. But I'll never forget the one in the opening credits of Northern Exposure. That show, to which I was addicted in the 1990s, made me dream of living in a small village in the frozen north, where people know each other by name and moose wander the streets.

And now I do.

D Is For DONE

2011-08-14T11:46:00.000-04:00

...my laundry, that is.

Sculpture That Spooks

2011-08-12T12:39:00.001-04:00

Phyllis Kulmatiski , who makes beautiful figurative sculptures inspired by Romanesque art, posted an article by Michael Kimmelman in which he laments the near-oblivion into which traditional European pre-modern sculpture has fallen.

Baudelaire seems to have put his finger on what bothers us moderns about figurative sculpture when he called it “Carib art,” by which he meant art that is too close to its primitive, religious, animistic roots. Somewhere inside our brains, we all still carry the three-year-old who endowed dolls and teddy bears with souls and personalities, just as we still carry the paleolithic carver who believed that his round little "Venuses" had the power to ensure the fertility of bison, reindeer, and women.

Because three-dimensional figures touch us at a level we would rather not acknowledge, we turn away from them, and won't have them in the house. Interestingly, we are more comfortable with sculptures in the garden--that middle ground between the wildness of Nature and the civilized space of the house--where mystery and imagination are still allowed to have some play.

Me, I am not spooked by figurative sculpture. In Spain in the 1950s, religious sculptures were household objects as common as soup tureens. Every room of the house had its appropriate statue. A crucifix hung above my parents' bed; a wooden carving of the Sacred Heart presided over the dining room; a terracotta Immaculate Conception stood on my dresser. At Christmas, our Nativity scene included, in addition to the Holy Family, tiny painted clay figures of kings, shepherds and peasants with their retinues of camels, sheep, cows, geese, chickens, and pigs.

Next door to our apartment building there was a statuary maker, and I could watch the progress of his work every day on my way to and from school. On Sunday, in church, there were statues everywhere, and I used to imagine that at night, when the great doors were closed and the church was dark except for the lamp that burned perpetually in front of the Blessed Sacrament, Saint Joseph with the infant Jesus in his arms came down from his plinth and went to visit his wife on her altar, and Saint Francis and Saint Theresa walked around in their brown habits, talking quietly and breathing the incense-saturated air.

No wonder Luther banned sculptures from his church.

Not long after I was married, as my father lay dying, my mother took down the crucifix above their bed--the crucifix, she reminded me, under which I was conceived--and gave it to me, to hang over my marriage bed. As crucifixes go, this one was pretty subdued. Both the cross and the corpus were metal, and the look was stylized and vaguely Byzantine.

I thanked my parents and put the crucifix in my dresser drawer, under a stack of sweaters, where it lies to this day. I never could bring myself to hang it over our bed. I found it...spooky.

C Is For Cat

2011-08-11T12:29:00.000-04:00

...the true King of Beasts.

Montaigne said, "When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a
pastime to her more than she is to me?"

I have been catless for years, but I will not be catless forever.

B Is For Book

2011-08-10T15:14:00.000-04:00

...preferably a long one.

Dona posted a Facebook link to an article by Alan Jacobs in The Chronicle of Higher Education (see below) about "long form" reading and the quality of deep attention that fewer and fewer people are able to bring to a text:

Some people—many people—most people—will not experience that internal necessity of being in books, in texts. But for [some]people...books are the natural and inevitable and permanent means of being absorbed in something other than the self.

If there is anything--legal, cheap, not harmful, and for which you don't need another person--better than being in a book, I'd like to hear about it. I learned to read before first grade, but my earliest memory of being in a book, of being carried off by the current of another mind, dates from the summer when I was eight and reading Kipling's Jungle Book. I sat enraptured in my grandparents' solarium, with the shades closed against the blazing midday sun, hoping that my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and the maids would sit down to eat lunch and not notice that I wasn't there.

My childhood was a long series of interruptions from Heidi, Mary Poppins, The Wind in the Willows, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin (all in Spanish translation, since I read them long before I learned English). "Put down your book and take a walk/take a nap/write a letter/practice the violin/go to school..." I would surface like a diver, blinking at the light. After a minute or two getting oriented to the world of tables and chairs and well-intentioned adults, I would put down the book and do whatever was required, inwardly counting the minutes until I could take the next dive.

Things haven't changed much since then. Falling into a book in the evening is still my preferred reward for a day well lived or simply endured. And I like my books to be long ones, so that I can swim at leisure among the reefs and trenches of another mind. The brief dips offered by magazines (including the updated New Yorker), not to mention the medium I'm using right now, just aren't as satisfying.

Sometimes I wonder if my addiction to reading isn't equivalent to a TV addiction. After all, not every book I read is a masterpiece, and there are sometimes masterpieces on television. Still, given the choice between a book and a TV program, I'll pick the book. I suspect that a major reason may be that when I read I'm in control. I decide when to speed up and when to slow down, when to stop and take a second look. With a book, I'm the driver; when I watch TV, I'm on a tour bus, and tours have never been my thing.

Do you like your books short or long? How do reading and watching TV compare for you?

Alphabet

2011-08-09T13:16:00.000-04:00

I've always loved those Art Nouveau alphabets in which a single motif is
carried through and adapted to each letter. For those days when words fail, I've begun an alphabet of my own. Here is the first letter:

Mouse On My Toe

2011-08-06T12:30:00.000-04:00

Went to give lunch to a litter of Bisou's half siblings yesterday, while their owner took a well-deserved break. On the kitchen counter were copious instructions, and also a note saying that Zen, the cat, had released a live field mouse in the house earlier that day.

Following instructions, I carried the four puppies one by one to their outdoor pen, cleaned their indoor pen, and made lunch. Then I carried the puppies in, one at a time, to eat, starting with the single female pup who, like her half-sister who lives at my house, acted like she hadn't seen food in a week.

I was on the second or third puppy when I felt something warm and soft on my foot. I looked down, and there was Zen's mouse, sitting on my bare toe, watching the puppy eat. I bent down to get a closer look, but the mouse scurried under the fridge. He made a few more sorties while I finished up, but kept his distance.

I'm going to feed the puppies again today. Maybe I'll get lucky, and Zen's mouse will still be there.

All Those Prayers...

2011-08-04T19:59:00.000-04:00

During my years in Catholic school, from age six to seventeen, I spent a lot of time praying. I'd say my morning prayers while I was putting on my uniform. In school, at the beginning of each class, we would stand up and say a short prayer, like a Hail Mary. Sometimes we would sing. I especially liked "Come Holy Ghost," the English translation of the 9th century Gregorian chant, "Veni Creator Spiritus." In times of stress, such as before an algebra test, I would sing it silently to myself as I waited for the test paper to be placed on my desk. At the end of each class we would all stand up again and say another prayer.

Two prayers per class, six classes a day, five days a week makes 240 prayers a month. And that was not all. My high school had a chapel where daily Mass was said before first period. Attendance was not required, but sometimes I would go. On Fridays confessions were heard in the chapel. You said your prayer of contrition--mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa--and then whatever prayers the priest assigned you as penance . During lunch period--and this seems incredible now--my friends and I would often whip out our chapel veils and stop by the chapel for a visit to the Blessed Sacrament.

At home, before dinner, instead of a formal blessing we would just cross ourselves. But sometimes in the evening my parents would pray the Rosary, led by my father: five Our Fathers, fifty Hail Marys, five Glorias, and the litany of the Virgin Mary. My father recited the litany in Latin, and it used to feel like a reward for sitting through those endless Hail Marys:

...Mystical rose,
Tower of David,
Tower of ivory,
House of gold,
Ark of the covenant,
Gate of heaven,
Morning star...

During the long May evenings my parents and I would kneel before the statue of Mary that lived on the chest of drawers in their bedroom and say the special prayers of the "Month of Mary."

And in all seasons, before falling asleep, I would do an "examination of conscience" before saying a prayer to my Guardian Angel to which my mother had added various petitions directed to God Himself, such as "let Daddy have plenty of good work," and "let me have a little brother or sister." The latter was granted the year I turned sixteen. Who said prayers don't work?

On Sundays we went to Mass and Communion.

After I married, and my father died, and the Church messed up badly on its birth control policies, I stopped all that--morning prayers, evening prayers, the Rosary, the Mass, the works. Suddenly I had a lot of extra time on my hands.

Now that, a half century later, the vicissitudes of life have steered me on the path of Buddhist spirituality, I meditate in the morning, reciting a mantra that often feels as mechanical as the Rosary used to, and doing my best to tame my "monkey mind." As I undertake various tasks during the day, I try to remember to center myself. Before I go to sleep at night, I focus on my breath and do a little metta.

It feels amazingly familiar and recognizable, like an old friend you haven't seen in years and who shows up wearing exotic clothes. The habit and discipline of inwardness, instilled by my parents and by the nuns who succeeded each other like beads on the rosary of my school years, has come back into my life.

Women On Stage

2011-08-03T17:55:00.000-04:00

Went with friends to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra some days ago, in its summer residence in nearby Saratoga. The guest conductor was Marin Alsop, on loan from the Baltimore Symphony. She is known not only for her talent but also as the first woman to conduct a major American orchestra. The soloist was the violin virtuosa, Sarah Chang, who played the Max Bruch Violin Concerto.

I'm not going to write about the artistry of these women, however, but about their outfits.

Ms. Alsop wore a gender-neutral cream jacket and black pants that could have fit Toscanini or JLo equally well. And you can see her point. First of all, if you are a conductor, you have to be able to move around a lot, not teeter off the podium in your high heels, and not risk wardrobe malfunctions. If, as happened to Ms. Alsop in Baltimore, your musicians rose in rebellion when your appointment was first announced (they now adore her, and with good reason), you might want to play it safe and minimize your female attributes. On the other hand, if, like Ms. Alsop, you are open about being gay, that outfit might feel just right to you.

Sarah Chang strode on stage in a sensational clinging, blood-red dress that emphasized her resemblance to the violin she carried. She played with furious drama, kicking her flounces with her feet like a flamenco dancer and doing amazing back bends. She raised her bow arm towards the sky. She flung her yard-long hair about. When, during the rests, she would break off the hairs that had come loose from her bow, I worried that she might accidentally break off some of her own by mistake. Also during the rests, she kept hiking up one of her straps, causing 99% of the audience to worry that a high-culture wardrobe malfunction was in the offing. Fortunately, she had total technical mastery of her outfit as well as her instrument.

Why even write about these women's outfits and physical styles? In recent years many young classical musicians of both sexes have abandoned the standard uniform of tails or dark dress in favor of more liberated--and often Liberace-like--clothing. As far as extravagant physical mannerisms, there is honorable precedent for them. In the 19th century, Liszt looked like a demon at the keyboard, whereas violinists like Paganini and Sarasate were said to be demons. The utterly discreet and very short Casals groaned audibly while playing like an angel. And Itzak Perlman, who has to play sitting down because of childhood polio, puts more drama into his facial expressions than the entire cast of a silent movie.

I take it as a sign of progress that Sarah Chang amazes audiences with her dresses and gyrations, and that Marin Alsop feels free to wear what feels comfortable to her. It made me happy to see the maestra and the virtuosa, at the extreme opposite poles of female attire, on stage with that Amazon River of an orchestra
behind them, making really good music.

Carnelian

2011-08-02T14:16:00.001-04:00

Years ago, in a Hecht's department store in a Maryland mall, I came across a silver ring with a carnelian cabochon that I couldn't resist. I bought it and wore it all the

time, and subsequently lost it. (I could fill Ali Baba's cave with jewelry
I've lost through the years.)

But after that first encounter, I was gripped by carnelian fever. Luckily, carnelian is a semi-precious stone, so I could indulge my passion without spending a fortune. I bought a pair of carnelian earrings. For a few pennies, I got a couple of loose carnelians that I sometimes carry around in my hands. One is a dark brownish red, the other a pale orange. Not only are they beautiful, but they make a satisfying "clack" when I strike them together.

I also own a silver pentacle pendant with a dark red carnelian at its center. Having a pentacle does not, unfortunately, make me a witch. I wear it in the same spirit that I wear my First Communion medal with the Virgin Mary on it, as an acknowledgement of the Divine Feminine. (When I wear the pentacle, people think it is a star of David.)

Speaking of witches and weirdness, I found a number of websites that describe the many mystical properties of carnelian. In fact, if you were to add up all the things that all the websites say carnelian will do for you, they would cover the universe of mystical properties. But all the sites agree on this: that carnelian gives energy and spurs creativity. If I were so inclined, I might conclude that the Divine Feminine Herself took me by the hand and led me to that Maryland mall, to the jewelry department at Hecht's, and to that particular carnelian ring. Clearly She knew what I was most desperate for.

Things get really spooky when I look at my dogs. Take a look at Wolfie's eyes: two carnelian cabochons. As for Bisou, whom the Cavalier people refer to as a "ruby," except for her nose she is carnelian from head to toe.

Do these two living carnelians give me energy, spur my creativity? Often they sap my energy. But they do make me awfully happy, and I cannot ask for more than that.

(Photo by Bisou's breeder and dog boarder extraordinaire who can be found here)

On The Lake Of Guinea Pigs

2011-08-01T17:50:00.000-04:00

It's August, 1955, so despite their formal attire these people cannot possibly be survivors of the Titanic. You can tell by the look on their faces that they're not worried about survival on their crowded life boat.

Actually, it isn't a life boat, but a canoe, with an Indian pilot taking us out on Cuicocha, the lake of guinea pigs, in the Ecuadorian Andes. The child in the baseball cap, center back, is the pilot's son. He is staring into Cuicocha's unfathomable depths. In front of him are an Ecuadorian couple. He is an intellectual and a poet, the first to translate Walt Whitman's Leaves Of Grass into Spanish. She is the mother of his sons.

The woman sitting next to the poet is a lyric soprano, born in Austria, who in the nick of time fled the Reich to South America. She is also, I find out much later, the first divorced woman my mother has ever met. One day in Quito she showed up with two puppies, male and female, as a gift for me. Therefore, I adore her.

Across from the lyric soprano is the violist of the string quartet (of which my father is first violin) that the Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture has imported from Barcelona. He is engaged to a woman in Spain, to whom he writes every day. She cannot honorably cross the Atlantic to meet him as a single woman, so they will marry by proxy (my parents will sit up drinking brandy with him on his wedding night), and many months later she will arrive by boat, wearing the latest European fashions.

The cellist of the quartet, in sunglasses and pipe, sits next to the violist. According to my father, he is a splendid musician who doesn't practice enough. He is a ladies' man, and answers the phone with an affected "'Alloooo..." I am contemptuous of him.

Across from him is my mother, in her glory. She is thirty-seven, and she is having an adventure in an exotic land. In fact, she is planning to send this photo, which my father is taking, to her parents on their farm in Catalonia. "You can't imagine how beautiful this is!" she writes on the back.

The fourth member of the quartet, the second violin, is not on the boat, but back in Quito. He is handsome and aristocratic, and has an ocelot kitten that I covet. In retrospect, I think his absence on this and other trips must have had something to do with a woman.

And that's the ten-year-old me, surrounded by adults, as usual. I am emphatically withdrawing my gaze from the natural wonders around me. I am sick of natural wonders, sick of Indians who smell because they are so poor, sick of endless talk about music and art. I am looking into the bag in which I have secreted a tiny doll for whom I have improvised a miniature apartment where I can visit her.

Cuicocha is a quechua word composed of cocha (meaning lake) and cui (guinea pig). Guinea pigs are everywhere in the Andes, especially in people's kitchens, and especially in their cooking pots. Like rabbits, they provide high-protein meat, and like rabbits, they reproduce like mad. But my mother, brought up on her mother's hand-raised rabbits, find cuis too much like rats, of which she is deathly afraid. So that is one Ecuadorian delicacy we do not taste.

Cuicocha is a lake in the crater of an extinct volcano. Its bottom has never been found. None of the people in the canoe know how to swim.

Summer's Subsiding

2011-07-31T14:31:00.000-04:00

Did a couple of garden jobs today that I should have done long ago: pruning the lilacs and planting beans. I told myself even as I pushed the seeds into the dirt with my chopstick that there is no way these plants will make it to maturity before frost, but I had just pulled up the pea vines and couldn't bear to leave a garden bed unused. The beans are the last planting of the 2011 vegetable garden, which is headed for the home stretch. The squash and pumpkin vines are seemingly taking over the earth, and the white cabbage butterflies are having their way with the broccoli. I ate the first tomato a couple of days ago: a single marble-sized gold nugget. Before I know it it will be apple-picking time.

I realize we're still in July, but summer is definitely on the decline. Driving down the country roads you can see that the trees and bushes are getting that blowsy, overripe, middle-aged look. An almost invisible wash of brownish yellow--the plant world's equivalent of the first gray hairs--has come over the foliage. The verges are lined with goldenrod and black-eyed susans, both colored the mustard-yellow that succeeds the clear lemon shades of spring. The poison parsnip flowers, which at their peak look like a yellow version of queen anne's lace, have turned an unequivocal brown.

It doesn't bother me that summer's on the wane. I dread the prospect of hot, humid weather, and I rejoice that with each passing day we are closer to the coolness of September. We had a couple of days in the high 90s a while ago, and it felt so miserable that, after resisting for six years, and with the specter of global warming growing more real all the time, I finally threw in the towel and asked my husband to get an air conditioner for our second-floor bedroom.

Without ever having been turned on, that air conditioner has already made a huge improvement in our quality of life: as soon as the unit was installed, the weather turned dry and cool, and looks to stay that way for the next ten days. And after that, it will practically be September.

Mozarts Of Maternity

2011-07-27T12:54:00.000-04:00

Back from a long string of days wandering in the deserts of CFS, I read an article in last week's New Yorker about the French intellectual and feminist, Elisabeth Badinter.

Talking about the dilemmas faced by mothers, Badinter says,

"If you're a mother, you are either too present or too absent; you can't win. You have to be a Mozart of maternity to reach the right absence-presence balance."

Ah yes, Mozart--that feather-light touch, that depth of sentiment, that endless inventiveness, that total mastery--that's what a mother should be.

My own mother's style was more along Wagnerian lines: persistently present and passionate, rich in color and drama. In reaction, my own mothering was minimalist, sort of in the style of Philip Glass. For example, my mother chose my wedding dress for me. As a consequence, by the time they were three, my daughters were deciding what to wear to pre-school. Often the outfits were less than becoming, but I fervently believed that as long as they were protected from the weather, it was my duty to stay out of their way. I also believed that a major justification for a woman to have a career was to protect her children from becoming the sole focus of her energies.

Of course what you're getting here is my version. I'm sure that my daughters found me way too present in some ways and too absent in others. And I know that my mother's oppressive hovering, in her view, was only the expression of her ideas about love and duty.

In my family, mothering styles seem to skip a generation: my mother's mother allowed her to leave the village for high school and then university. After age fourteen, my mother never lived at home again.

Surely my family is not the only one where mothers lurch from pole to pole of the maternal dialectic. If so, somewhere out there must exist that perfect synthesis: a Mozart of maternity, with that lightness of touch, that depth of feeling....

If you know one, please let us hear about her.

Phoebe Mishap

2011-07-21T11:14:00.000-04:00

Every summer for the last three years, the phoebes have raised two batches of babies in their nest inside the eaves of our front porch. They make a mess on the porch floor, but that is a small price to pay for their close familiarity and conscientious bug eating. Between the phoebes and the frogs, I have yet to see a single mosquito around the house this summer.

But yesterday afternoon I saw that the nest had fallen to the floor. It was actually two nests, one built on top of the other, and there was a dead nestling trapped beneath them. Right up against the wall of the house was its sibling, alive and cheeping weakly. It was smaller than a soup spoon, all beak and new feathers. I turned and walked away from the disaster scene.

It was the best I could do. Even if I'd known what kind of bugs it liked, and in what quantities, there's no way I could have caught them. It probably needed water, too, but how much, and how to give it without drowning it? My only hope was that the parents were aware of their surviving child, and would take care of it. I left the nest debris and the dead baby right where they had fallen, so as not to alarm the parents. It occurred to me that the flies gathering on the little cadaver might provide some easy meals for the parents to catch.

A couple of hours later I checked again and the nestling was still alive, and cheeping louder. I wondered how it would survive the night, away from its sibling's warmth. I wondered whether the critters that hunt in the dark would find it, and was glad that at least we had nothing to fear from the porcupine.

Today, he or she is still there, glued to the same spot, cheeping. There is some poop right near him, which I'm interpreting as a sign that he's being fed. The last time I checked he was quiet, and I had to get really close to see the tiny vibrations of his feathers. I guess even baby birds have to take breaks from eating.

The parent phoebes are flying back and forth from the bird feeder which they use as a perch (they don't eat seeds) to the plum tree in front of the porch. I'm sure they know their child is there. Now I'm worried about the temperatures in the mid-90s that are forecast for this afternoon--but the porch faces north, so he will at least be sheltered from the sun. I've put a small dish of water nearby. It's the best I can do.

My Gay Hens

2011-07-18T19:01:00.000-04:00

Before I plunge into a narrative of what I saw today, I should set the scene. My current flock consists of, in descending order of age:

A. Three Buff Orpingtons, fat and yellow and indistinguishable from each other. Poor layers all, two of them have been broody since the beginning of summer.

B. Two Rhode Island Reds and one Barred Rock, all in their second year, and laying well.

C. A gaggle of eight pre-pubertal pullets of various breeds who keep to themselves and have a wonderful time.

Another fact worth remembering, and one that I have documented in these pages, is that one of my hens has, in the past, occasionally been heard to crow. This has always happened early in the morning, before I serve them breakfast, so I've never been able to figure out who was doing the crowing. But somebody was definitely sounding rooster-like.

This evening I was outside reading Elisabeth Bailey's The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating when I looked up and saw two hens...mating. I have had roosters before, so I know whereof I speak. What I saw was not the half-hearted, playful reciprocal mounting of cows or bitches in heat. What I saw looked earnest and businesslike.

The usual scenario runs like this: the rooster struts a bit and does a little sideways dance with one wing pointed downwards, then looks around and mounts the nearest hen, grabbing her neck feathers with his beak, "treading" her back with his feet and doing his best to stay balanced. Then there is a shuddering and a fluffing of feathers and he jumps off and the hen fluffs her feathers and they both go about their separate business.

What I saw today did not include any strutting or dancing (but then, I was deep into my book, so I may have missed it), but one of the Orpingtons got on top of one of the Rhode Islands, and the neck grabbing, the treading and the shuddering and the fluffing of feathers happened exactly as it used to when there was a patriarch in the flock.

I have not looked up "gay hens" on Google, because I'm afraid of the sites it might lead me to, so I've no idea how unusual this behavior might be. I'm just a clueless country dweller reporting the extraordinary stuff that goes on right under my nose.

A Fragile Balance

2011-07-17T14:06:00.000-04:00

Yesterday two friends and a baby Belgian Sheepdog came to visit. We sat outside drinking wine and periodically fishing the puppy out of the pond into which she kept falling. She'd forget it was there because she was fixated on getting Bisou to chase her.

Bisou was not her usual dashing self--she's on antibiotics for Lyme--and after giving the puppy a few good runs she had had enough. This made the puppy go stand under a chair and make mad barking sallies at Bisou, with no effect other than making Bisou growl in an annoyed way I'd never heard before. When our ears started ringing, the puppy's owner, who used to be Wolfie's herding teacher, suggested that I bring Wolfie out.

He emerged from the house, and instantly peace descended: no more barking from the puppy, no more growling from Bisou. We could hear each other talk.

"Do you see what Wolfie's doing?" the puppy's owner said. Whenever the little Belgian went near Bisou, Wolfie would silently get between them. He did this over and over, so discreetly I'd never have noticed it. He didn't look angry or annoyed-- just focused on ensuring that there was peace in the herd. Good boy, Wolfie.

Me, I loved every minute of the puppy hullabaloo, and the talk about dogs while evening fell. Today, on the other hand, will be a day of perfect silence. I could, and probably should, go to the farmers market. I definitely should go to the nursery to buy the eggplant and pepper transplants that will replace the peas in one of the garden beds. Everything I know about growing vegetables in this latitude tells me I should do this right away.

But if I really listen, something else tells me that a day of perfect silence is what I must have. I think the something else is the voice of my mitochondria, who are trying their best to keep me going while under siege from CFS. Their voice is so thin and feeble that I ignored it for years. Often I still ignore it--because I really want to go somewhere or see someone or do a bit of weeding. But the next day as I lie in the misery of a relapse, prey to a restless, paralyzing discomfort that I can only compare to a combination of flu and severe jet lag, the whine of the mitochondria comes faintly through: "we told you so, we told you so."

So my days are spent trying to keep a precarious balance between too much and too little. One dropperful too much--say, going to the supermarket and seeing friends on the same day--brings on a relapse. Too little mental stimulation and human interaction, and I plunge into boredom, sadness, depression. The need to maintain such a delicate balance sounds farfetched even to me, but I have to act as if I believed it, because it's the only way I can keep myself at my optimum level.

The trick of course is to find pleasure in the quiet times. I often think of our hilltop house as a kind of unisex Trappist monastery, with certain allowances such as not having to get up in the middle of the night to pray. Some days--not always--the silence feels just right, and then I can hear the voice of my mitochondria like a distant bell: "we're doing fine, we're doing fine."

Some Recipes I've Abandoned

2011-07-16T15:54:00.001-04:00

I got married in August of 1967, so I must have cooked my first-ever meal that September, my skin still mahogany brown from my honeymoon tan. Those early meals took a lot out of me. My full load of graduate courses was a snap compared to the challenge of putting varied, colorful, nutritious and economical dishes before my brand-new husband for lunch and dinner every single day.

These meals, both lunch and dinner, included dessert (we had tiger-like metabolisms). Once I tried to make a cake to celebrate the end of finals. The recipe said to cook the icing to the "hard ball stage," which I interpreted to mean that all the icing ingredients had to be cooked until they became a hard ball....

Here are some of my early adventures in cooking, now mercifully discarded:

1. Tuna casserole. This was probably the first dish I mastered, made with Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup and enhanced with a sprinkling of crumbled potato chips on top. I still make it, but with bechamel instead of canned soup, organic whole-wheat noodles, lots of veggies and, needless to say, no potato chips. It takes longer to make and doesn't taste as fabulous as the original, but then, I don't get as hungry as I once did.

2. California dip--the ur food of graduate-school parties. You mix half a pint of sour cream with an envelope of onion soup mix, grab a bag of potato chips (left over from the tuna topping) and go put on your long hostess gown.

3. Jello. I used to give it to my kids as a kind of healthy dessert. Being an enlightened parent, I used a recipe that called for twice the amount of jello powder and resulted in a stiff, psychedelic, bone-building snack that a toddler could hold in her hand, thus saving the aggravation of spoon and bowl.

4. Peanut butter balls. You mixed peanut butter, honey (because of the enlightenment factor), and dry powdered milk until you got a stiff mixture that could be formed into balls. You rolled these in powdered sugar and fed them to your offspring.

5. Chicken livers in sour cream. My husband used to love these over rice, and they were cheap, too. But we didn't know that they were toxic.

6. Chicken friccasee, another spouse favorite. It involved browning chicken pieces in Crisco, then putting them in the pressure cooker along with bacon and cream. More poison.

7. Dark steaks. We discovered that our supermarket, where we could never afford any meat fancier than ground beef, would sell us their slightly darkened steaks at ground-beef prices. I knew from my European upbringing that dark meat is infinitely preferable to the bright red still-warm-from-the-animal sort. We got so that we grilled only filet mignon, and relegated cuts like T-bones to humble dishes such as soups and stews. This spoiled ordinary beef for me forever: I haven't eaten a steak in thirty years, and can only tolerate ground beef if it is well disguised with onions, mushrooms, and red wine.

8. Fish sticks. The only reason I can conceive for eating these is that fresh fish was not readily available in Southern supermarkets in those days. And a toddler could pick up a fish stick with her hand (one without ketchup on it) and eat it all by herself.

(Fish sticks, jello fingers, endless boxes of Cheerios..a lot of what we ate in our early married days had to do with what a toddler could manage on her own.)

9. Ice cream. I served this with a clear conscience, and not just on special occasions. It is the one item on this list that I really miss.

I'd love to know some that recipes you've abandoned.

Haying

2011-07-14T13:04:00.001-04:00

They hayed our fields a few days ago, taking advantage of the dry, crisp weather, and now the bales have been left to cure, sitting like hair rollers on the earth's scalp.

For a couple of days after the mowing, hawks and vultures wheeled overhead, looking for any beasties that had fallen victim to the blades. I was glad that the doe that gave birth in the front field had long since taken her fawn to the shelter of the woods.

While the grass was being cut and baled, I kept having visions of those paintings by Brueghel of plump peasants cutting wheat and sitting in the shade to devour huge lunches. And I remembered my childhood summers in the Catalan countryside--I am ancient enough that I can still hear the swishing of the scythes....

But this haying was largely a one-man affair, loud not with carousing voices but the sputtering of engines. Brueghel's well-fed farm wives bearing the mid-day banquet were replaced by young women in shorts who drove up in cars several times a day and stood chatting with the farmer. I don't think they brought him any lunch. But the smell of the cut grass was the same as I remember from childhood, the same that filled Brueghel's nostrils as he painted.

The mower took down several good-sized stands of Saint John's Wort, which had punctually started blooming on Saint John's Eve (which coincides with the solstice). I was sorry to see the plants with their delicate yellow stars and their leaves pierced with pin-sized holes go, but somebody's cows are going to be extremely relaxed this winter.

Farewell To Lettuce

2011-07-11T12:56:00.000-04:00

We're headed for the dog days now, and last week I pulled up the lettuces, which had grown to the size of small trees, as well as the mustard and arugula. That marked the beginning of our annual period of abstention from lettuce.

From late April through the beginning of July, we eat lettuce every day, lots of it. Then, it's over until the next spring. When the tomatoes ripen in August I serve them in splendid isolation, with oil and salt and pepper. The notion of tomatoes and lettuce together in a salad is an oxymoron, and an abomination unto Nature. Or just about.

We are not left entirely without raw greens by the lettuce's departure, however. Until November I can count on the young leaves of Swiss chard (de-stemmed) for sandwiches and things like pasta salads. But chard is too strong, both in flavor and texture, to use as a main salad ingredient. After the killing frosts, we abstain from raw greens altogether, and proceed to devour the broccoli, spinach, kale, chard, peas, beans, pumpkins, squash, eggplant, zucchini and tomato sauce that glut our freezer.

When the snow flies we eat raw carrots, which I don't grow but can buy at the farmers' market, and apples. (The latter, by the way, are the only locally grown item in the supermarket.) But supermarket lettuce and salad greens are shipped in huge trucks from god-knows-where, and it just doesn't feel right to eat them, in these apocalyptic days.

This kind of seasonal eating reminds me of an advantage of the rhythm method that I once saw listed in a Catholic publication. It said that by forcing couples to abstain from intercourse for certain periods each month, the rhythm method functions as a powerful aphrodisiac.

It's true: absence makes the mouth water. After a nine-month separation from lettuce, we seasonal eaters pounce on those first buttery, tender leaves like a horde of sex-crazed fiends.

The Womanly Art Of Hemming

2011-07-10T23:06:00.000-04:00

I just finished shortening, and hemming, seven dresses and two skirts. Some of these items I'd been wearing for years, while others were recent acquisitions from the fabled church rummage sale in a nearby village. They all were way too long for me--clearly meant for giantesses--with the hems hovering in the vicinity of my ankles.

The cutting and sewing brought back memories of the elaborate hemming rituals of my childhood, conducted by my mother with the assistance of one of her sisters or the maid. In those days, the women of my family left serious dressmaking to professional seamstresses, limiting their own participation in the process to choosing the fabric and the pattern, and critiquing the result. But they all mended assiduously: they darned socks with the aid of a wooden egg; they turned my father's shirt collars when they got frayed; and when sheets started showing wear in the center, they cut them down the middle and sewed the edges together. And, because I was a growing child, they were forever letting out my seams and letting down my hems.

Letting down a hem involved my putting on the garment in question--the old hem having been previously ripped out and the fabric ironed flat--and standing in the middle of the room while my mother or her assistant orbited around me on her knees with a mouthful of pins, muttering "Stand up straight! Turn to the right--no, this way. Not that far. Go back! Stand still for a minute, child."

When the hemmer determined that all the points in the circumference of the skirt were equidistant from the floor, she removed the dress and dismissed me. She then carefully turned under the raw edge of the hem and basted it in place. She removed the pins. She threaded a fine needle with thread the exact shade of the dress and, without using a knot to anchor the thread (knots are sloppy!), started sewing the hem, making sure to pick up just a single thread on the right side of the fabric with each stitch. We owned a treadle sewing machine, but nobody would have dreamed of using that coarse instrument to make a hem. Just as the Parisian haute couture workshops do to this day, hems at our house were always made by hand.

When the hem was finished, she snipped off the thread with scissors (never with the teeth, because doing that would wear grooves in the enamel) and ironed the finished product by placing a wet cloth between the dress and the iron. This gave off a toasty smell as delicious as the smell of fresh croissants. She pulled the dress off the ironing board, placed it on a hanger, and stored it in my armoire (there was not a single closet in our Art Nouveau apartment).

That was long ago and far away. In the following decades, life and the course of history changed radically, to say the least. Here is how I--who learned to hem in that apartment in Barcelona, with the balcony doors open to the sun and the sound of streetcars clanging by--hemmed my seven dresses and two skirts.

First, having no assistants, I put on each garment, stood in front of the mirror, and stuck a single pin in the approximate region where I thought the edge of the skirt should be. Then I set up the ironing board and got out a ruler. I measured the distance between the old edge and the proposed edge all around the skirt, sticking pins where the ruler more or less indicated. With a sharp pair of scissors I then cut the fabric from pin to pin, doing my best to keep a straight line.

I removed the pins, folded the raw edge over about a quarter of an inch, and set the fold with a hot iron. Then I folded the edge again, and ironed that, thus avoiding all that boring basting. I threaded my sewing machine with a thread the approximate shade of the garment (it's a 45 minute drive from my house to a store that sells any shade of thread other than black or white), and sewed the hem with--and my aunts would be dismayed to know this--a straight stitch.

I realize that all the points on the circumference of those hems I just finished are not equidistant from the ground. And you can definitely see the stitching on the right side of the fabric, in an imperfectly matched thread shade at that. But I'm content that the job is done and I won't have to go around looking like an elderly child playing dress-up anymore.

My Green Pond

2011-07-08T23:33:00.000-04:00

My little garden pond, now in its second summer, is very green. It is green because it does not have any of those gizmos--pump, filter, aerator, fountain--that use electricity. It does have a tiny fountain and an aerator, but they both run on solar power. Since this is Vermont and not Morocco, the fountain and the aerator run very sporadically. This makes the pond green in the second sense, i.e., full of algae.

I am pleased with my green pond, and so are the frogs--some as big as squirrels and some as small as my thumb--and the water lilies that are slowly covering its surface, the water bugs and the dragon flies. For a while, I thought there was going to be a problem getting fish to like it. The first year, against the advice of my pond guru, I bought two shubunkin (beautiful little spotted goldfish that look like koi). The minute I released them into the pond they disappeared into its murky depths. I didn't see them again until I found their dead bodies during the spring cleanup.

This summer, thinking that by now the ecology of the pond should be well established, I bought two more shubunkin. I rushed home from the store, floated their bag on the pond to equalize the water temperature, and released them. They instantly vanished into the murk, and a week later one of them floated to the surface, dead. I fed it to the chickens, and started to think that my pond just wasn't good enough for fish.

I concluded that the problem was the depth to surface ratio. We had made one end of the pond three feet deep, so that it wouldn't freeze completely solid and critters could hibernate on the bottom. But the surface area is relatively small--about four by ten feet. I theorized that the pond was too deep for its surface, and despite the efforts of the little fountain, not enough oxygen was getting into the water. Pretty soon, I thought, even the frogs would start dying. So I bought a solar-powered bubbler.

With the fountain and the bubbler going and the water lilies blooming and the frogs disporting themselves, the pond was looking quite nice I thought...but it badly needed some fish--something to provide a flash of orange in all that green. This time I would be conservative, however, and buy plain feeder fish. On the way to the store, I had an attack of guilt. "Aren't we condemning these poor animals to death?" I said to my husband. "But these are feeder fish," he said. "In a way, we're giving them a chance to live." We bought four, and brought them home.

For the third time I floated the plastic bag to equalize the water temperature; for the third time, I released the fish into the pond; for the third time, they disappeared. I resigned myself to having just a plain old frog pond, to enjoy the splash of the fountain (if the sun was out) and the lilies and the water bugs. I let go of my desire for fish completely.

And then one day when I was sitting watching the frogs I thought I saw a flash of orange in the water. I blinked, and it was gone. I looked again, and there it was, under a lily pad--a fish, and not just a fish, but the disappeared shubunkin that I had assumed was dead. And next to it--oh joy--was a plain orange shape, one of the feeder fish that had also somehow survived.

Since that day two weeks ago, there have been a few more sightings. Once I saw three fish at the same time. Clearly there is fish life in the murk, but the fish are so small and the murk is so thick that you can only see them if they come close to the surface. This of course makes the sight of a fish a far more exciting event than if they were visible all the time.

It's a funny thing about water. When I'm on the patio there's a lot to look at: the flower beds, the apple trees, the vegetable garden, the woods, the chickens. But most of the time, I'm just looking at the pond.

(Please note: I am working on improving this site, but am managing to make things worse in the process. Let us hope that that is only temporary.)

A Little Respect, por favor

2011-07-06T19:49:00.002-04:00

For the last couple of decades, multiculturalism has been a revered concept in this country. Little children in kindergarten are taught that difference is to be not only respected, but admired. Authors from places no one heard from before write about those places and rise to bestseller status. And authors from right around the corner, not to be outdone, buy airplane tickets and do years of research so they too can write authoritatively about places and people heretofore ignored.

It is mostly a good thing. But unfortunately this regard for other cultures often does not extend to their most significant artifact: their language.

I have been reading Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, published in 2009 by HarperCollins. The first part of the book takes place in that most colorful of foreign lands, Mexico, in the colorful 1920's and 30's. And it involves the era's most colorful trinity, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky.

The author has done a huge amount of research, and has surely traveled in Mexico. There are endless virtuosic details about the temperament of tides, the smells of food, the sounds of monkeys that she had to witness in person in order to transcribe them.

To intensify those bright hues and make them seem even more "real," she does what many other writers do: she lards the text with Spanish words. Open the first third of the book at random, and your eye immediately jumps to the italicized words and phrases sprinkled over the page: pez volador (flying fish), el tiempo cura y nos mata (time heals and kills us), sergente...wait--what? No such word in Spanish. She must mean sargento (sergeant). Just a typo that nobody caught. But no, sergente appears in page after page--it's not a typo.

Then there are the accent marks. Sometimes they are put where they're needed. Often, they are neglected. And sometimes they are applied where they don't belong, for sheer effect.

Worse than the accent problem are major grammatical mistakes such as--to mention just one--lo fugar (which makes no sense) for lo fugaz (which means, that which is fleeting). Strange how that last consonant makes such a difference. The main character is given several opportunities to reflect on the fleetingness of things in general, and every time the mistake is repeated.

If the writer could not trouble herself to straighten out her Spanish, surely HarperCollins could have spared a few hundred dollars to hire a graduate student to proof for language errors? Literate Spanish speakers are as close as the nearest college. We're not dealing with Serbo-Croatian here, but with a language that some say will soon be spoken by more Americans than English.

I have often laughed at the way restaurant menus scatter accent marks randomly over their lists of entrees* for flavor, the way chefs sprinkle thyme over the wild-caught salmon. But The Lacuna is not a menu, and HarperCollins is a premier publishing house.

Obviously, neither the writer, nor the editors and publishers cared enough to make sure that the Spanish was correct, and that is a depressing thought. Americans are enamored of multiculturalism, but multilingualism doesn't seem quite as romantic, and it is a lot of work.

I would have much preferred the book to use English throughout, reserving Spanish for proper names and where absolutely necessary. It's the use of Spanish as a decorative artifact that offends me, and that surely has Sor Juana Ines* de la Cruz, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and other Mexicans of genius writhing in their graves.

(* Both words need accents, but my software doesn't allow it. But then, I'm not HarperCollins.)

Pema Chodron To The Rescue

2011-07-04T20:36:00.000-04:00

A friend recently told me that Pema Chodron, the renowned Buddhist nun, writer and meditation teacher, has CFS. As soon as I heard this I ran to the computer. "This," I told myself, "is too good to be true. I've been waiting all these years for someone with a real understanding of the illness to shed some light on the spiritual aspects of life with CFS, and it turns out that this deeply wise woman is struggling with it herself. If anybody can show me how to deal with CFS, Pema can."

Google did not disappoint. It gave me a number of sources--interviews and biographical articles--that confirmed that Pema Chodron does indeed have CFS. Furthermore, she was diagnosed the same year as I, 1994, and like me her symptoms had begun to appear gradually several years earlier (the more typical pattern for the illness is the sudden onset of symptoms).

From Pema herself, however, regarding CFS there were only some quotes from a letter that she wrote to a fellow sufferer. This is what she says:

The key to working with what is so deeply unwanted, is to let go of the ideas...about how we shouldn't be sick and what will happen to us if we remain sick. Somehow we have to respect the illness, welcome it, enter into it...we surrender and say, okay, what have you to teach me...about letting go of control, about slowing down...about tasting the full experience of a moment...the light, the sound, the quality of our mood, of our pain, the sight of dust or birds or nothing special...respecting all that. It's a kind of death, this illness, the best kind of death if we'll let it be. It's the death of old stuck patterns and opinions and habits and it makes way for something new to be born in us.

I must confess that I was disappointed. Her words struck me as generic Buddhist advice on how to deal with life and its inevitable contretemps.

But then, as if on cue, I went into another relapse, a quite severe one that kept me essentially bed-ridden for three days. In my thick mental fog, I tried to remember Pema's words, but all I could recall was, "it's a kind of death, this illness...."

Gradually, however, something else came back to me--the part about "tasting the full experience of the moment." In my case, the full experience of the moment had to do with a long list of things that I dearly wanted to do (pick peas, walk the dogs, redesign this blog, start a new clay piece, have lunch with a friend) but couldn't, and heavy feelings of the futility of undertaking any project, since I never know when I will be grounded by a relapse.

In the past, my strategy has been to try my best not to think about all the things that I need/want to be doing, and especially not to contemplate the feelings of futility and hopelesness about ever accomplishing anything of even the smallest significance. This time, instead, I let myself feel it all, particularly the despairing part. "I am feeling that it's no use starting another clay piece," I said to myself, "since I've been having such frequent relapses that it will probably take me forever to finish it." And, when the next feeling arrived: "Now I'm laughing bitterly at myself for even thinking of redesigning my blog, since I can't even manage to post regularly on it." And then: "Now I'm having that familiar dread of committing to anything, since I to have to beg off so often."

Well, it was a long three days, and I can't say that they were easy to live through. But with Pema's words swirling through my brain, this time the bad feelings, instead of appearing as accurate perceptions of reality, seemed discrete and detached from reality--as if they had quotation marks around them--and didn't overwhelm me so completely.

The relapse eventually faded, as I knew it would. Sooner or later it will return, as it always does. Better not attach to feeling better. Better learn to respect the illness, as Pema advises. Better let it become "the best kind of death," if there is such a thing.

All this has an oddly Catholic ring to me: the value of resignation, the idea that pain is an aid to salvation. Maybe those first twenty years of my life, spent in an atsmophere of beeswax and incense, are going to come in handy now, after all. How the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, the Sisters of Mercy, and the Benedictines who taught me from first grade through high school would chortle if they knew that it took a Buddhist nun to get me thinking this way again.

Meditation Comes In Handy

2011-06-29T16:16:00.000-04:00

I've been on a meditation tear for the last three months or so, sitting half an hour every morning on the floor in my study, with Wolfie curled up against me and Bisou snoozing on the bed (if I close the door and don't let them in they sit in the hallway and make pitiful sounds). This is the longest stretch of daily meditation I've ever done, but it's still mostly a wrestling match with my monkey mind while my breath refuses to "come and go naturally." So I've been going on blind faith that somehow this is doing some good.

Yesterday I went to the dentist to have a crown and a filling replaced. For an hour and a half (I checked my watch) I sat in the chair with my head tilted down and my feet tilted up and my mouth open as far as it would go--no, farther--while the dentist and his assistant drilled and sprayed and vacuumed and said "bite down, please," and then drilled some more.

I was lying there with my eyes closed and sort of scanning my body for points of tension and then one of the phrases I sometimes say when I meditate popped into my head, "May all beings be at ease," and I said it a few times. Then it occurred to me how lucky I was to have all my teeth, to be lying with not a twinge of pain while these two gentle people did their best to give me a toothache-free future, and to live in a century when these things were possible.

I was feeling grateful and dreamy and as though there were three of us working on the crown and the filling: the dentist, his assistant, and I. During a break in the drilling I heard him mumble into his mask something ending in "...so relaxed," and then the assistant laughed and said "If she were any more relaxed, she'd be asleep."

At the end, when she was putting in the temporary crown, the assistant said "It's so much easier to work when the patient is relaxed. How did you do it?" I hesitated whether to tell her the truth, but I finally said I meditated.

"I've read about meditation," she said, "but I always think my mind would be thinking about all the things I've got to do."

"Oh, don't worry about that," I answered. "It happens to everybody. It's just monkey mind."

She gave me a look, and then said "Be careful when you floss on that side. You don't want to pull your temporary out."

In Which, With Trepidation, I Broach A New Topic

2011-06-27T18:20:00.000-04:00

A number of people who know me well have asked, "Why don't you write about CFS?" Although Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is the central factor of my existence, and has been for many years, I have mentioned it in passing but I have never really written about it.

The truth is that, whenever it lets me, I like to forget about the thing. After sixteen years of it, I can hardly tell you how much it bores me, and I can imagine how it must bore those who hear about it. I disclose it to new acquaintances only on a need-to-know basis, such as when at the last minute I have to cancel going somewhere with someone. They are invariably surprised when they find out I have CFS. "You? But that can't be! I'd never have guessed it." That's o.k. with me. I like to pass.

And that is what I have been doing in this blog, mostly out of fear of boring you, my readers, to death. But lately I've started to think that maybe this well-intentioned pretense that I lead a 100% idyllic life on my Vermont hilltop ignores a major portion of what makes me who I am. Besides, with 800,000 people in the U.S. alone having been diagnosed with the illness (and who knows how many more wandering around wondering what is wrong with them), what I have to say might prove helpful to someone.

These days, I do very little reading about CFS. A couple of times a year I scan the medical literature to check if there is something I should mention to my doctor (there usually isn't). I have found that a steady diet of the stuff literally worsens my symptoms. There is a lot of writing being done by CFS sufferers themselves, and that too I tend to ignore. Quite often it is a depressing catalogue of assorted but very real miseries, and filled with anger, mostly justified, at the medical establishment.

My writing about CFS will necessarily mention at least some of its miseries. But there will be no anger. I have been lucky in that, since I was diagnosed in 1994, I have not encountered a single insensitive or skeptical doctor. Although they have not been able to cure or even alleviate my symptoms, and some have erred on the side of over-medicating, the doctors I have consulted have been well-intentioned people trying to deal with a condition for which no cure exists. And I have been extremely lucky in that from the very beginning colleagues, family and friends have done what they could to help me. Best of all, they have believed me, even when I haven't believed myself.

These days, I think of living with CFS in existential terms. The disease brings into relief many basic questions relevant to the human condition. For example, if action is essential to my being, what is left of me when I cannot act? How do I live when, as I fall asleep at night, I don't know whether the next day I am going to be bedridden or "fine"? Where exactly is the line between acceptance and defeat? You get the idea.

I am at the moment just coming out of several days in relapse. It's a dangerous time because I tend to try to catch up on all the things I've wanted to do, such as writing on this blog. I have to remind myself to stop even when I would like to go on. Which is what I'm doing now.