My Kindle And Other Miracles

Thanks to all of you who sent good wishes both here and by e-mail.  It worked:   my survival now appears inevitable.

Two days ago I left the house on non-medical business (lunch with a friend) for the first time in a month, and was amazed to see that, while I was suffering my attack of shingles, fall had arrived in Vermont--the time of year when the drive to the post office is so beautiful it hurts.

Between the pain and the pain meds, my memories of the last few weeks are hazy, but I do know I could not have survived without my Kindle.  In the days before the diagnosis, when the pain at night would keep me pacing, trying to hold out for another hour before waking up my spouse to take me to the ER, I slogged through a big chunk of the Journals of Thomas Merton.   I was unable to follow a plot or a line of argument, but Merton's oscillations from self-doubt to elation fit the rhythms of my mind as it was brought to focus, over and over, on the physical pain.

After Merton, when my brain started to clear a bit, there was a Trollope novel.  I don't know what I'm going to do when I run out of Trollope novels--I'm almost through his entire oeuvre.  Perhaps I should start saving them for emergencies.  Finally I read a hugely entertaining biography of the six Mitford sisters (Love in a Cold Climate, by Nancy Mitford, is one of my favorite novels).  Compared to what their mother had to endure, having shingles seemed a piece of cake.

Thanks to my beloved Kindle I could, in the middle of the night, my breath sour and my hair unwashed, press a few keys and have a book come winging to me out of the ether, as precious and consoling as a percocet.

But the shingles wasn't all bad, and in fact it worked a small miracle:  I lost ten pounds in two weeks, literally without lifting a finger (I didn't have the strength to lift a finger).  As someone who can go whole decades without losing her appetite, when it went away and stayed away I was filled with curiosity.  Why wasn't I hungry?  Why was I, a lifetime member of the clean-plate club, now pushing away most of my dinner untouched?  Why did nothing--not a ripe tomato still warm from the sun, or an apple from my tree, or a slice of home-made bread--hold the slightest appeal?

Then a couple of days ago, as I was sprinkling blueberries on a small dish of yoghurt---drearily thinking protein, antioxidants, acidophilus--I suddenly noticed a wet sensation in my mouth.  I was salivating!

Since that moment I've been thinking about food a lot, and wondering how I might recapture that elegant standoffishness towards meals that I enjoyed so briefly.  How can I hang on to that viral windfall, those vanished pounds?  I have no idea, but I suspect it will require lifting a finger or two every once in a while.

Troubles And Tribulations

It is about time I came out of the hole where I've been hiding the last couple of weeks and explained the reason for my silence.

I've been suffering from a hard-to-diagnose case of shingles which necessitated a couple of trips to the ER, two treks to a distant medical center, and treatment with an antiviral that I couldn't tolerate.

The pain is mostly gone now, but I feel like I've been hit by a fleet of UPS trucks.  I hope to be able to resume writing soon, and to find that you're still there when I do.

P.S.  For those of you who are wondering:  I did have the shingles vaccine a few years ago.  It does not guarantee that one won't get the disease, but supposedly makes it less virulent.  (I cannot imagine what the virulent version must be like.)

Canning Jars For The Soul

Although I have never canned so much as a single bean, my kitchen is full of canning jars.  Some are squat, some tall, some blue, and some clear.  Some have bubbles in the glass, and many have the old bail fasteners, grown gray and dull with age.  The oldest have glass-lined zinc screw tops, also gray and dull.

I collect jars the way some people collect cats--I wait for them to come to me.  It started with some wide-mouth, gallon-size jars that were left behind by the couple who sold us our first house.  The jars, with their geometric embossed designs, have a 1940s look. Their green tops have been screwed and unscrewed so many times that the threads are hopelessly worn, and the only way to get them to stay on is to line them with wax paper. We have lived in eight houses since that first one, and in each house those three jars--one holding white flour, one holding whole-wheat flour, and one holding the incredibly hot red peppers that I grow and dry--have held pride of place on the kitchen counter.

 
 But my most important acquisition, the one that told me in no uncertain terms that the universe intended for me to be a keeper of jars, took place at the town dump.
Unlike many of my friends and neighbors, I do not enjoy my monthly trips to the dump.  In fact, that is the one time when I wish I lived elsewhere than in my green Vermont--somewhere with curb-side trash pick-up and recycling.  But one hot summer day, while I was concentrating on breathing through my mouth to avoid the dump fug, I saw, next to the old recliners and dinette sets and boxes of paperbacks, two cardboard boxes filled with antique canning jars, the jetsam of some dead grandmother's pantry. 

I rushed them home as if they were a box of kittens, gave them a good wash, and set them out on the counter.  The afternoon light coming through the window shone right through them as I ramsacked the pantry for pasta, beans, quinoa (the ancient grain of the Incas!), chia seeds, scottish oatmeal, barley, and lentils.  Then I cut open the store packaging and poured the contents into my heaven-sent  jars. 

Since then I have added to my collection by more traditional means.  I have bought a few old jars at a yard sale, and a couple of brand-new Italian ones from a fancy kitchen store in a mall somewhere.  And when people give me little jars of jelly or preserves that they have made, I always find something to put in them after I've eaten the contents--herbs for tea, or a small bag of pumpkin seeds.

Why so many canning jars, when I don't can?  I like their looks--I'd rather have a row of bright jars full of staples on a shelf than a row of cellophane bags or cardboard boxes.  And the jars allow me to fantasize that my food comes not from the supermarket but from the bins of some idealized and non-existent village general store.

Most of all, the jars enable me to maintain an illusion of old-fashioned domesticity, without the unremitting labor and monotony.   I can pretend that those homely and charming vessels are daily used by a cheerful female presence, the angel of the house--someone not remotely like me.

Sometimes I look at those jars and imagine my daughters kneeling among packing boxes--some marked "trash," others "Goodwill"--in the kitchen after my death, saying to each other, "Why do you suppose she had such a thing for canning jars?  God knows she never canned anything."

The Plopping Breed

After flying like a bullet through the late-summer fields, Bisou comes back covered with burrs.  They are tiny and sticky and in less than a minute her silky hair forms big tight mats around every single one of them.

I put her belly-up on my lap and go to work--her long ears first, then the pale gold hair on her chest, the feathers on her legs, the weird long hairs that grow between her toes and are a mark of her breed.  No matter how careful I am, pinching the hair between the mat and the skin to keep from tugging, and making short strokes with the comb, it hurts.

Yet she stays in position, her wide eyes firmly fixed on mine, reaching up periodically to lick my face.  I have brushed a lot of dogs in my life--large and small, long- and short-haired, tough and sensitive--but never one like this.

This is what more than four-hundred years of selective breeding gets you.

Cavalier King Charles Spaniels became popular in the 17th century under King Charles II of England.   The King was never without his pack of "spaniels gentle," and published an edict allowing the little dogs to appear in public anywhere in the kingdom.  (I would take Bisou everywhere with me too, if I didn't feel guilty about leaving Wolfie behind.)

After the burrs and the mats are gone, Bisou shakes herself and plops down on my lap.  She is an excellent plopper.  It seems impossible to me that a dog with her muscles and speed and passionate drive can turn it all off in an instant, and just plop.  I wish I could be like that.

Four centuries of breeding do not come without a price, however.  Cavaliers are plagued with heart problems, neurological problems, eye and ear problems, so it's crucial to pick from healthy stock.
But before you even think of getting a Cavalier, you need to be prepared for the plop issue.

Whenever she's not chasing balls or frogs or butterflies, your dog will want to be on your lap.  In the hottest hours of the year she might temporarily desert your lap to lie down next to you, but the entire length of her body will be right against your sweaty leg.  Then the minute the temperature drops, she will, with a groan of deep satisfaction, plop down on your lap again.

If you own a Cavalier, make sure before you sit down that you have at hand your phone, your book, your computer, your coffee, and your reading glasses, since once a Cavalier has plopped on your lap, you don't get up for trivial reasons.  She will be deaf to your commands to move, and if you try to shift her she will somehow make herself infinitely heavier than her eighteen pounds.  You will have to lift her bodily, and when you come back to your chair having retrieved whatever it was you thought you had to have, she will have moved into the warm spot that you left behind, and you will have to shift her again.  Fortunately, she won't hold that against you.

Over the four years that Bisou's been with me, I've gotten used to my little red shadow.  In the beginning, she would periodically disappear and I would search all over the house for her.  Now I know, if she's not either on me or within a couple of yards of me, to check the bedroom closet.  She follows me in there when I get dressed, and sometimes when I leave she's busy sniffing shoes and I shut the door before she can get out.

King Charles was a man of taste.  He wore little heels and long curly wigs and liked to have fun.  He made it legal for women in England to act on the stage, and without him we wouldn't have  Dames Vanessa, Helen, Judi or Maggie.  But worst of all, I wouldn't have Bisou.

Bisou and the King

A Winter's Worth Of Wort

In Vermont, people spend much of the summer preparing for winter.  They garden obsessively, and then they can, freeze, dry, pickle and jell the harvest.  They scour the countryside for sources of well-cured hay for their goats, horses, donkeys, llamas and sheep (people who have cows usually grow their own hay).  And they chop, split and stack wood into piles that are viewed with as much admiration as the rows of canned beans, tomatoes and apple sauce in the pantry.

I do a little of all the above, though now that my goats are gone my hay hunt is limited to what I use for mulch and chicken bedding.  But these activities only address the body's needs, for warmth and nourishment.  This year, I wanted to address the needs of the mind and heart as well.

Even when the vegetables are canned and the freezer is full and the wood is stacked, Vermonters shudder slightly at the thought of  winter:  the long dark evenings and the sporadic isolation that the weather imposes on even the hardiest souls.  At one time or another, between November and March, most of us complain of winter blues, cabin fever, seasonal affective disorder and generalized Weltschmerz.

Saint John's Wort  has long been revered in Europe as a remedy against moderate depression, PMS, insomnia, SAD, OCD, and a number of other ills .  I've always liked it that this plant, with its supposedly cheering effects, looks so cheerful, from its bright yellow flowers to its blood-red sap.

I like it so much that this year I went slightly overboard.  I filled a couple of big trash bags with flowers and leaves and macerated them for a month in two half-gallon jars filled with the cheapest vodka I could find.  Yesterday I gave them a final shake, strained the contents through cheese cloth, and decanted the wild-looking red tincture--the mere sight of which made me feel instantly energized--into bottles:

I threw the extremely alcoholic vegetable detritus into the chicken house and waited around to see what the hens would do.  They sniffed it and turned away in disgust, but the stuff will make terrific compost anyway.

With more than I could possibly use of the potent tincture at hand, I feel well armed against winter--practically looking forward to it, in fact.  I can see myself now, dispensing largesse from the top of our hill, squirting dropperfuls of the red panacea onto the tongues of melancholy friends...

(To those of you who are knowledgeable about herbs:  do not be disturbed by those bottles in the sunny window.  I  put them there just for picture-taking purposes.  I have since stowed them safely in a darker place.)

Good Bread And How To Make It

After my recent post lamenting the decline of bread as a wholesome food, Jaimie sent me a link to a website that offers an older, healthier variety of wheat. 

I then searched for local sources of this flour and didn't find any.  But I did find a Vermont farmer who produces organic stone-ground flour from hard red winter wheat.  Bread purists say that the only way to make good bread is to grind your own flour, but since I neither own a grinder nor can deal with the minimum purchase of 50 lbs of wheat berries at the farm, I compromised by driving 40 minutes (which is as nothing around here) to a co-op that sells this flour in bulk.

I scooped what looked to me like fifteen pounds--after all, winter's on the way--into a plastic bag and came home and put it in the fridge.  The next day I looked up some recipes and stumbled upon one in Countryside Magazine (unfortunately I cannot find it again on their website without signing up for something or other) that looked reasonably easy.  Here is my version:

Put 3 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour into a bowl and add 2 tablespoons brown sugar (next time I'll try honey instead), 2 teaspoons salt and 2 teaspoons yeast.  Mix well.

Add 2 tablespoons coconut oil or butter (I used coconut oil, but will try olive oil with the next batch) to 1 1/2 cups of water that's been heated to 100F-120F.  When the fat has melted, pour liquid into the flour and mix. Add one egg.  Mix well and gradually add another cup or so of flour until the dough reaches the right consistency for kneading. 

Knead, in the bowl or on a floured board, for ten minutes (the recipe says to knead it in a mixer, but where's the fun of that?).

Put the dough in a greased bowl, turn it to grease all sides, cover it with a cloth and let it rise in a warm spot for about an hour.  Then punch it down, divide it into two loaves and place them into greased loaf pans.  Cover and let rise for one to two hours.

Bake the loaves at 350F for about half an hour.  Then let them cool in the pans for about ten minutes.  Remove the loaves and finish cooling them on wire racks.

Although this is nothing like the crusty bread of my childhood, it is sweet and nutty, easy to slice and surprisingly light, considering that it's made with 100% whole wheat. I froze one loaf and made some inroads into the other.

The bad news?  I gained a pound.

A Change Of Tempo

As I write, in the kitchen tomato sauce is bubbling, eggplants are roasting, and bread dough, I hope, is rising.

This is only a fraction of what I should be doing:  making pesto out of kale, and freezing industrial quantities of broccoli, chard, arugula and rhubarb.  It's the time of year when I almost dread going out to the garden to see what is screaming to be picked right now.

And then, of course, I want to write here about it, all of which sometimes leads to mental as well as physical exhaustion.  If I am to survive this season--and I do realize that choosing this moment to start baking bread again is insane, but I found a source of terrific flour that I'll tell you about soon--I am going to have to slow down the pace of my posting.

I could, of course, choose to not harvest, not bake, not walk the dogs, but then what would I write about?

So I hope that you will be more patient than the tomatoes and the eggplants and the peppers and the greens and not dry up on me or turn away in disgust.  My aim is to post regularly, two or three times a week, with illustrations, and in between give the well time to replenish itself.  Writing and drawing here gives shape to my life and joy to my days.  I wouldn't dream of quitting.