Pasture

Sometimes I imagine, and not in a morbid way, that I’m lying on my deathbed, remembering my life. Like everybody else, I’ve had moments of high joy: wedding day, childbirth, work-related stuff. But there are also more subtly-flavored memories. Pregnancy, once the initial excitement abated, was one. I would lie on the sofa in the afternoon, not reading the book on my lap, not crossing items on my to-do list, not writing letters to my mother, but content to simply gestate.

Nursing my babies was another. Those enforced breaks from the brouhaha of early motherhood allowed me to put aside laundry and work. Rocking slowly, listening to the little slurps and gulps, I might have been a mother cat, blinking in the sun and purring as she nursed her litter.

But that was long ago. The last time I felt this kind of contentment was in the field in front of my house, in southern Vermont. It is a cliché spring morning. The grass is bright green, and the dandelions are glinting in the sun. Up high on the house roof, against the clear sky, the bluebird sings his wistful little song. And, for the first time in months, I am letting Lizzie and Emma, my goats, out of their yard.

They are twin Nubians, one black, one fawn, with droopy silver ears and Roman profiles. The moment I open the gate they dash out to the field, their long ears flapping, and set to gobbling great handfuls of grass.

The field is not fenced in, so I need to stay with them. In the past I’ve tried bringing a book to read, but the moment I open it Lizzie and Emma rush to look over my shoulder, reaching their long necks to nibble the pages: “What’s this you’re reading?” Another time I brought paper and pencil, intending to draw them. But again, as soon as they spotted me doing something with my hands, they cast aside all thoughts of grass and ran over to see, and taste, my drawings.

Since multitasking is out of the question, I watch my goats eat. They tear off amazing quantities of grass and shove them down their throats with a few mighty chomps. Later, when their stomachs are filled to bursting, they will lie down and regurgitate the contents, give them a proper chew, and re-swallow them. It’s what ruminants do.

I sit on the grass and do nothing. Cleaning out the hen house; getting the garden beds ready for the chard and kale and broccoli seedlings that are waiting on the kitchen windowsills; thinning the baby apples that are starting to swell now that the blooms are gone will all have to wait until the goats have eaten.

For now, I watch and I listen. A lulling rhythm soon establishes itself as the goats move across the pasture: step, yank, chomp; step, yank, chomp. The bluebird has stopped singing. Maybe his mate has arrived and they’re at the back of the house, stuffing old grass and twigs into their nest box.

The sun—surprise!—actually feels warm now, and I discreetly take off my down vest and sit on it, to keep from attracting the attention of Lizzie and Emma, who will want to investigate. I breathe the clean Vermont air, chew on a grass stem.  Is this what they mean by “pastoral peace”? It’s a very ancient human thing I’m doing, sitting in a field, watching goats pasture. I think about the shepherds watching their flocks on Christmas eve two millennia ago, and about the even older psalmist who identified with sheep being led to rest in green pastures.

I think about those other peace-inducing states—being pregnant, nursing babies. Like watching goats graze, they are only seemingly passive. Lying on the sofa, rocking in the chair, sitting on the grass, I am doing nothing, but accomplishing a great deal: growing a fetus, feeding an infant, keeping goats safe while they pluck dandelions.

These are things that nobody ever taught me. For once, I didn’t have to take notes, or memorize lists, or practice techniques. They arose in me naturally, without recourse to the frontal lobes of my brain.

I hope that death is another thing that comes naturally, without conscious effort--something that, along with our animal brothers and sisters, we humans instinctively already know how to do. And I take comfort in the thought that in some future spring the molecules of my body will turn to grass for somebody’s goats or cows or sheep, and I will be part of that pastoral peace forever.

Camels, Not Reindeer

In my Catalan childhood Christmas was a time of manger scenes (the manger left empty until midnight Mass, when the long-awaited  Baby was placed in it); ancient carols (some of them funny, having to do with misbehaving shepherds); and my favorite dessert, turrons d’Alicant, the almond nougat bars that required a hammer to break them into individual portions.

Gifts were out of the question until January 6^th, the feast of the Epiphany, el dia dels Reis. The night before, Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar guided by a star came swaying atop their camels to leave gifts on the balconies of apartment houses all over Barcelona.

As the days after Christmas passed—the feast of the Holy Innocents, those poor babies slaughtered by paranoid Herod; the feast of Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr--my anticipation grew. It was the culmination of a months’ long pregnancy-like state, which began every autumn with my spotting the doll of my dreams in the window of a toy shop.

Like a lover, I would bring up this doll in every conversation, point her out to my mother whenever we passed the toy store, and meditate on her every night before going to sleep. Finally, towards the end of Advent, I would write my letter to the three Kings, humbly imploring them to bring me my longed-for child.

After that, it was out of my hands, and all I could do was pray and wait until the night of January 5^th, when the ceremony of “the laying of the trays” took place.

There were two of these trays, one for the balcony of my grandparents’ apartment, and one for our own balcony. First, we went to my grandparents.  After my grandmother finished entreating my father not to kill himself by working so hard; my father’s younger sisters asked his opinion about some musical performance they’d just heard on the radio; and everyone had a glass of sherry “because it was such a cold night,” I was buttoned into my stiff winter coat and my grandfather flung open the balcony.

My father would lead me out on the balcony and point toward the heavens. “You see that bright star up there? That, I am almost certain, is the star of the Three Kings. It is especially bright to help the camels find our balconies tonight.”

My little black-clad grandmother (she had just lost her eldest son to cancer and malnutrition following the Spanish Civil War) would totter in on her high heels, bearing the tray, which held a dish with three pieces of nougat for the Magi and another with three leaves of lettuce for the camels. She handed me the tray, I set it down carefully on the balcony floor, and we all knelt while my grandfather led us in an Our Father.

Back in our apartment, my parents and I laid out another tray and, after another Our Father, I was sent to bed. There I would lie in a fever of excitement only equaled by what I experienced the night before my daughters’ births. Would the Reis really come, and would I find my doll, my child, on one of those trays in the morning?

Despite the anticipation, I always managed to fall asleep. But one year—I must have been five or six—I awoke in the dark and saw, standing at the foot of my bed, none other than Balthasar, el rei moro, the Moorish king, the most exotic of the three. He had a thin face and dark brown skin, and wore a turban and robe of a fine, scintillating green material. I still remember the look of otherworldly kindness in his eyes.

Although my night visitation only happened once, in the morning there was always the doll. One year it was a rubber doll with a hole in her mouth and another between her thighs. I could pour water out of a tiny baby bottle into the mouth and then experience the thrill of changing diapers. Another year it was a Black doll, dressed in ruffled white organdy. And one year there were two dolls, Pituco and Pituca, with arms and legs made of a spongy material that could be bent in all directions.

  

Those dolls were, without exception, infant or toddler dolls on which I could vent my maternal instincts and practice for what everyone anticipated would be my future career. If someone had handed me a doll with breasts and hips and feet in tiny high-heeled shoes I wouldn’t have known what to do with her. The last thing that Barbie looks like she needs is a mother.

The year I turned eleven we were living in Ecuador. That Christmas there were no grandparents, no turrons or manger scenes.  No laying of trays on January 5th. I was growing faster than my mother could let down the hems of my dresses, and puberty was around the corner. My mother thought it was time to have a talk.

 “You do realize,” she said, “that the gifts of the Magi actually come from the parents?”

“Sure,” I said. “I know. Of course.”

But I was appalled. Appalled that that world of ceremony, mystery, and feverish anticipation--and also the world in which I was la nena, the center of a watchful, loving circle of grandparents and aunts and uncles--had suddenly vanished forever.

 And I was embarrassed, of course, that I was eleven years old and starting to grow breasts and my mother had had to break the news about the Magi. But I was a backward kid, reluctant to grow up. I wonder now if my mother felt sad to dash my illusions, or if she was irritated by my stubborn naivety.

Either way, she did what she had to do, and I’m grateful she spoke up. But around this time of year I always wonder what it would be like to wake up in the night and once again see the Moorish King standing at the foot of my bed.

A Brown Christmas

Took the dogs on a solstice walk in the rain yesterday afternoon, and thought of Robert Frost stopping to watch his neighbor's woods fill up with snow on a very different solstice eve.  Instead, my snow was going up in smoke.  I'm afraid we're in for another brown Christmas this year.

I told myself that this heat wave was giving the field mice and the foxes and the deer and the birds who had survived the -18F temperatures a couple of nights ago a chance to recover before the next onslaught.  But I hated to see the snow go.

Where does this obsession with a white Christmas come from, anyway?   Certainly not from Palestine, where December temperatures hover in the 40s and 50s.  It must be solstice-related, like everything else this season.   It makes sense that the winter solstice and the birth of the sun god are felt more keenly by those in the dark, snow-covered regions close to the pole.

Still it's odd that the association of Christmas with snow should have migrated southward, and stuck so firmly.  My childhood Christmases in Barcelona were snow-free, and the popular culture had not yet been transformed by sleigh-riding, ho-ho-hoing invaders.  But the German nuns who were my teachers decorated the classroom with Advent calendars whose little windows were adorned  with pillowy drifts of snow.  And we sang O Tannenbaum in our Spanish-accented German, praising the tree whose green endures even im Winter, wenn es schneit.

But the snow thing wasn't just a phenomenon of my German school.  There was snow in our apartment as well.  Two weeks before Christmas my parents used to set up an enormous Nativity scene.  It went far beyond the stable, and included mountains made of cork, meadows made of moss, trees made of twigs, and a pond made from a mirror.  Over winding, sandy paths a procession of Magi on camels and shepherds on foot, accompanied by cows with calves, goats with kids, ducks with ducklings, and hens with chicks, made its way towards the stable, over which an angel proclaimed his annual Gloria in excelsis.

My father, who though city-born and -bred was reputed to have an especially poetic feel for Nature, was the principal architect of this landscape.  I didn't pay much attention to the creation of the mountains and the meadows, being more interested in the critters and in the tiny, pink Baby Jesus.

But I do remember, when all of first-century Palestine was finally in place in our living room, my father carefully sprinkling a handful of white flour over the cork mountains--the snow without which it wouldn't have really been Christmas, and for which I have since longed every brown Christmas of my life.

Why I Haven't Posted Lately...

But I'll be back in the new year.

A Word To The Wise...

DIY Christmas

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!

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

All Is White

A couple of hours of big flakes yesterday, and now at last everything is white--the hills, the roads, the meadows.  Time to get the driveway cleared, time to sweep the steps, time to watch where you step.

Stick season is finished.  Even though the days will grow shorter until the 21st of the month, the darkest part of the year is over now that the snow is on the ground, because all that white reflects and magnifies whatever light the gray sky has to offer. That is why I can get geraniums to bloom indoors in Vermont as they never did in Maryland, where the ground stayed brown until spring.

Christmas is barreling towards us.  I have made the best arrangements ever for the dogs at a B&B run by Bisou's breeder (here)  The hens will be diligently cared for by a neighbor who specializes in pet-sitting.

The humans are the only ones left to deal with.  What will make each of them feel loved and cared for?  The size and quality of the gifts is the obvious answer, the one that every retailer propounds.  But it is not the real answer, not the answer that I seek as I put on my boots to take the dogs out, and as I shake the snow off my boots and bring the dogs back inside.

My Holidaze

This has been a happy Christmas, but one that I will not remember.

The dark forces that at this time of year cause airline delays, lost luggage, and cases of strep in normally healthy people have converged upon my upper back, where they have seized my trapezius with hot pincers, which they twist at agonizingly frequent intervals. In other words, I have muscle spasms in my shoulder (and eight people in the house).

To be fair to the dark forces, they gave me plenty of warning. They started out about the beginning of Advent with minor twists and stabs which I studiously ignored, then got a bit worse, and finally exploded into major fireworks around Christmas Eve.

Since Christmas fell on a Friday, I was left to my own devices until I finally got to see a doctor this morning. These devices included:

Ingesting increasing doses of ibuprofen, tylenol and whatever non-prescription pain reliever I could find in our medicine cabinet.

When none of these worked, having recourse to one, then two tablets of a well-aged prescription narcotic that I had hoarded for just such an emergency.

Moaning, groaning and occasionally yelping—all these involuntarily. The noises would just come out of my mouth all by themselves as I tried to turn over in bed or pick up the dogs' water pail.

Gradually giving up my hostessing duties, such as cooking, setting the table, making fires in the wood stove and throwing out gift wrapping paper. Fortunately these tasks were cheerfully picked up by the other five adults in the house.

The last device caused me the most regret: I stopped milking my goats. Twisting my body to get the pail and my hands under their low little bellies, not to mention having to do a furious tango with the rebellious Blossom at each and every milking, became unbearable. This means of course that much water will pass under the bridge before I have home-grown milk again: the goats will have to come into heat and be bred and then gestate for five months, and the new babies will need to grow old enough to be separated from their mothers at night. The best-laid plans of mice and milkmaids....

While I was going through my tribulations, Christmas swirled around me. Fires were lit, meals eaten, presents given and received. But me, I was hunched over my pain, thinking how else to deal with it, how to avoid bending over one more time, what effect all those meds were having on my liver. Anything not pain-related ceased to exist.

Then this morning I went to the doctor, and he prescribed serious pain meds and told me how to take them, and referred me to a physical therapist. It's been a much better day. We've had a lovely snow fall that has made everything look soft and cottony, kind of the way I've been feeling. I'm not sure I had lunch. But I do have vague memories of reading a Trollope novel, then drifting off, then looking at the snow, awash in gratitude and relief. As I said, I don't think I'll remember much about this Christmas.

A Minor Christmas Miracle

“Bisou,” I said to my little red dog before the holidays, “you know about those issues you've been having with pooping in the house?” Bisou wagged her tail. “You know how the only way to keep you from doing that is to watch you like a hawk and take you out a million times a day? And sometimes you just sniff and hunt for rabbit poop instead of getting down to business? And then when we go inside I either have to put you in the crate or tie your leash to my waist?” Bisou jumped up and licked my nose.

I put her front paws on the floor and went on, “When our guests arrive, there will be eight people and three dogs living in this house, and stumbling into your petites horreurs just as we're about to sit down to dinner would drive me over the edge. So, Bisou, much though I hate to do this, I'm going to make arrangements for you to spend the holidays elsewhere.”

Bisou started sniffing the floor about then, so I took her out and when we came back inside I called her breeder and asked her if she could board Bisou if circumstances turned out to be more than I could handle.

And here is the miracle: since the house filled with people three days ago, Bisou has not had a single accident. This, in the midst of tree trimming and meal cooking and joyful shrieking and present wrapping and unwrapping and generally such chaos as would cause many a dog to forget her training.

What is behind this miracle? Bisou's adorableness, what else. People have fallen in love with her and she has spent three solid days sitting on somebody's lap, or being taken out by a compliant family member, or stroked by a child, or carried off for a nap in one of the guest rooms. I have hardly caught sight of her, and it's been quite a...delightful break.

I'll be glad to have her back all to myself when her admirers leave. I just hope the Christmas miracle lasts into the new year.

Almost Christmas

When an entire loaf of rhubarb bread gets consumed at a single sitting...

When you can't find anything in the fridge because it's stuffed to bursting with dishes made in preparation and dishes brought just in case...

When the dogs, who at first terrified the children with the exuberance of their welcome, now lie motionless and exhausted as the children race over and around them...

When major surgery has to be performed on the tree (this year we'll just get a little one) to get it through the door...

When someone discovers the horn ornament “that really works” and runs through the house making merry...

When behind every closed door you can find: a) someone wrapping presents; or b) someone taking a nap; or c) someone staring into space, having quiet time...

When someone is shivering (build a fire!) or sneezing (get some Claritin!) or running out of Scotch tape (what time does the store close?)...

When someone reads “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” aloud during dinner...

When one by one people yawn and say good night, and the dogs have been let out and in, and the fire dies down, and the deer come into the front field to graze...

...then you know it's almost Christmas at our house.

J.S. Bach And Holiday Stress

I don't know about you, but a lot of Christmas music makes me nervous. I hear Jingle Bells and my breath begins to tighten, and the Rudolf song gives me the jitters. It's because of the association, over endless decades, of these tunes with stores, and gifts, and Time's winged chariot hovering near, plus the anxiety of finding perfect gifts for all the perfect people on my list.

So to destress these days, I put on some Bach. Bach without words is best. Bach without organs or harpsichords. Stripped down Bach, Bach for horse hair on cat gut: the Cello Suites.

The great Pau Casals, who discovered the long-forgotten Suites and performed them as no one else has, when he was in his 90s and couldn't play the cello anymore would play a single Suite on the piano every morning, as a kind of meditation. Casals was something of a Zen master, although he didn't know it, and the Suites were his mantra.

Bach has always induced a meditative state in me. I remember when I was in college, coming home in the afternoon and listening to the Brandenburg Concertos. “Why do you always play that record?” my mother asked one day. “It puts things back in order for me,” I told her.

Now that life is considerably more complicated, it takes the Suites to put things in order for me. But they always work, for reasons that I can't understand. And they work especially well in this, the most disordered of seasons.

Speaking of disorder, can you imagine what Bach's Christmases must have been like? With 20 children in the house? And little Johann Christian and Carl Philipp Emanuel tootling on flutes and the lady of the house, Anna Magdalena, practicing her harpsichord? Sure, he had two wives, but only one at a time (his first wife died young). And he didn't have a ton of money. How did he manage to write such peace-inducing music, in the midst of all that chaos?

Maybe in the coming days, when there will be a mere eight of us at our house, I can channel Bach, and keep my wits about me.

Belated Potpourri

I made my belated potpourri today.

It's belated because, in order for the content of the pot to become properly pourri (which means rotten...but a lot of almost-rotten things are really good—think stinky cheese) it's supposed to be mixed and left to ripen for at least two months. But two months ago I was in the throes of infant dog care, so I didn't get around to it.

Today I got out my two-gallon glass jar and poured into it my summer harvest of dried lavender blossoms, orange mint, lemon balm, rose-lemon-scented geraniums and a ton (well, almost a ton) of rose petals. I also poured in my jar of dried citrus peels—from all those clementines we ate last winter--to act as a fixative, and then sprinkled lavender and rose oil (the peels and the oils being the only non-home-grown ingredients) and mixed it all well.

The colors, seen through the glass, were lush. The scent, even before I added the oils, was divine—summer in a jar. I have never made potpourri this good. But then, I've never had a semi-wild, endlessly flowering, scented rosebush at my back door, or its cousins blooming generously at the edge of the woods. Every morning in June and July, after the dew had dried, while the birds were still singing, I would go out with my scissors and basket and, feeling vaguely Edwardian, snip off every single bloom. I would bring them inside, strip off the petals, and set them out on paper towels to dry. Meanwhile, behind the house, the rosebushes were busy making more roses.

Encouraged by the survival of the lavender that I had experimentally planted by our front stone wall, I put in half a dozen additional little bushes this past summer. Amazingly, they all bloomed and kept on doing so well into October, and I kept cutting. Through the fall, my curtain-less windows were adorned with little hanging bunches of drying lavender.

There is nothing like a ton of roses and a ton of lavender to make a good smell. In making potpourri, this time, for a change, I didn't worry about the proportion of leaves to flowers. I didn't follow a recipe. I just threw in everything I had, anointed it with oils, and said a blessing over it.

In a few days, I will decant the mixture into little jars and press my improvised, unripe, garden-grown and heartfelt potpourri into the hands of people I love.

Mint, Anyone?

I just counted 22 jars full of various kinds of dried mint leaves in my kitchen. These are old canning jars—big blue glass ones with screw tops, smaller ones with those wire thingies to keep the top on. Some are brands I never heard of: Atlas, Lightning, Telephone. They make me think of little old grandmothers of yore putting food by, keeping their loved ones fed through the long winter.

I am proud of my canning jars filled with mint. I think they look neat, all lined up in the dry sink I inherited from my mother in law. The thing is, what am I going to do with all that mint? There is spearmint, and apple mint, orange mint and lemon balm. A lot of it will go into winter teas...but how much tea can two people drink?

Why do I have so much dried mint, you ask? The answer is: lack of self control. In the summer, when it grew thick and fragrant all around the back of the house, I liked nothing better than to pick great armfuls of it and bring it into the kitchen, tie it in bunches and hang it from the curtain rods in the dining room, where it looked kind of magical and medieval and so much more interesting than curtains. And every time I rounded the corner on my way upstairs, I would get a sharp whiff of apple, or orange, or whatever.

“This,” I would say to myself, bringing in yet another day's harvest, “will be fabulous in winter.”

And now here it is, winter. The chimney sweep visited us today and tomorrow evening I will light the first fire of the season in the wood stove. Snow flurries are forecast. Christmas is galloping towards us. Time to do something with the mint.

But my dry sink holds more than jars of mint. There are small jars of oregano, sage, rosemary and thyme. There are big jars of lavender, rose petals, chamomile flowers and even dried orange peels. The latter are supposedly a good fixative for potpourri, and with the lavender and rose and mint I could keep my family and friends in good smells until next summer.

Thing is, potpourri is supposed to “ripen” for a couple of months, and here it is, a mere 25 days until Christmas. Yet again (this happens every year) my loved ones are going to get unripe potpourri. I feel the holiday angst rising up within me. Where has the summer joy gone?

I'd better make a cup of chamomile tea, and then I'd better get to work.

Catalogs

'Tis the season, already.

Soon after we moved to Vermont, we were inundated with sales catalogs. Part of the cause may have been our children, who had to travel far to join us for Christmas and reasonably decided to save space and time by having gifts mailed directly to our house. As with mice and fleas, for every catalog you see, a hundred more are on the way.

We became especially sensitized to catalogs because in our new location, any waste that we don't compost we have to take to the dump. And “dump” is a misnomer for a place where you do penance for your non-sustainable lifestyle by handling every single piece of waste material you have produced and classifying it according to some (I'm not kidding) fifteen categories: cardboard, box board, newsprint, newspaper inserts, magazines, phone books, office paper, clear glass, green glass, brown glass, tin cans, aluminum cans, and a number of different plastic categories--PETA something or other. All this in the sleet and rain and blizzards and summer heat.

The catalogs added pounds to our dump load. Also, because my husband saw “Alice's Restaurant” at a critical age and became sensitized to the dangers of throwing items with your name and address into the dump, every single piece of paper has to be scrutinized for personal information. As you know, in catalogs this involves not only the address label on the cover, but the information on the ordering form that is cleverly concealed inside the book.

All this made me angry enough to sign us up on-line on various “do not send” lists. I also made it a point, every time a catalog arrived, to immediately call and ask to be taken off their mailing list. This took a lot of time, a lot of listening to inane music while on hold, a lot of conversations with strangers of various national origins. The catalogs kept coming, but I persevered. Eventually, the torrent slowed down to a trickle, then all but stopped.

But around this time of year, a few catalogs start to appear again, like field mice looking for a winter home. I call and am reassured that my name is being taken off the list. “Nevertheless,” I am told, “because catalogs are printed in advance, you may get another two or three issues that are already in the pipeline.”

What kind of idiot do they take me for? I wasn't born yesterday! This is just the marketing department's ploy to make sure I get my full allotment of catalogs before Christmas, regardless of my objections. I can imagine the catalog marketers laughing at my feeble efforts to defend my house from their intrusions.

I don't want to vent my venom on the poor souls who answer the catalog phones. But asking them to pass my complaints on to their superiors is worse than useless. I feel weak and taken advantage of. Resentful, too.

The holidays are almost here.

Good Food In Bad Times

Thinking about good food and good fortune this Christmas Eve...

The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, leaving the country in ruins. By the time I was born in the following decade, in Barcelona, decent food was still hard to get. Meat was tough, eggs and milk expensive, even bread was sometimes scarce. But I ate like a queen, thanks to my grandmother's basket.

It was an ordinary laundry basket, made of reeds. My grandmother, who lived on a farm, would fill it with whatever was in her larder that week, cover the top with a piece of burlap, fasten it with thick thread to the top edge of the basket, and send it by messenger on the train to Barcelona.

The contents of this horn of plenty varied with the seasons. In spring there were cherries wrapped in layers of grapevine leaves, and eggs for my nightly omelette, each carefully wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. In autumn the basket disgorged grapes, dried figs, filberts and roasted almonds. After the olive harvest, there would be a two-liter can of dark, fruity oil. My mother would sprinkle this on a slice of crusty bread, season it with salt, and add a piece of dark chocolate for my afternoon snack--pa amb oli i xocolata—a Catalan tradition.

After the first frost the basket brought sausages made from a pig raised under my grandmother's watchful eye: sweet black sausages that I only learned much later were made of blood, white sausages, red chorizos. There was also salt pork, to be eaten with white beans, and best of all, a grand serrano ham, salty and substantial.

But the most exciting thing my grandmother sent was the capon, which would arrive, annoyed but alive, just before Christmas. For a day and a night this stout beast became my pet. It lived in the laundry tub, and I sat beside him for hours, feeding him bread and inhaling his hot poultry smell. I don't remember making any connection between the empty laundry tub and the succulent main dish on the Christmas table. I just remember that, unlike the tough cow meat that we bought in the city, I had no trouble at all digging into my grandmother's capon.

In summer, there were no baskets. There were instead three entire months at the farm, where I gorged on rabbit in garlic sauce, lettuces picked as the table was being set, melons served still warm from the sun, all accompanied by wine which had spent the afternoon cooling in a bucket inside the well.

A day of rain was a cause for rejoicing: the minute the sun came out my grandmother would send me out on a snail hunt. When I returned, she would dump my harvest into special cylindrical lidded baskets where the snails would spend a couple of days “fasting, like we do in Lent,” as she put it. Eventually my snails would appear at dinner, in an orange earthenware casserole, still in their shells and swimming in a sauce of tomato, garlic and parsley.

Now that I have entered my grandmotherly years, I too I live in the country. My grandchildren live in a city that offers every imaginable food from all over the world. Yet these are also difficult times and food is again a source of worry—not because of scarcity, but because of what might be in it, how the people who grow it are treated, how long we can sustain this way of living and eating.

So I too grow food for my grandchildren. When we visit we take along a blue cooler filled with rhubarb, broccoli, spinach, green beans, sugar snaps, eggplants, and the inevitable zucchini. There are also jars of tomato sauce, dried peppers, and a couple dozen eggs.

All of it is organic, as my grandmother's provender was. All of it is more than food. Like my grandmother's basket, the blue cooler holds love as well as vegetables, biology lessons (you don't need a rooster to get eggs from a hen, and yes, manure is good for plants), and also the message that food is serious business and serious pleasure, grown and nurtured by human hands in collaboration with the earth.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Preparations

Here are some things that, from the beginning of my married life, I have done in preparation for Christmas:

--Sewed shirts for my husband's father and brother. This was when men--some men, anyway—wore attractive—to me, anyway—peasant shirts with decorative trim at the neckline and at the bottom of the (loose, flowing) sleeves. Not having much money to spend or experience shopping for men, it came to me that Ed's father and brother might enjoy some funky shirts. I was a mere child at the time, which is why it never occurred to me to think about these two men and what kinds of shirts I had ever seen them wearing. I remember staying up way past midnight at my sewing machine to finish those shirts so we could send them in time for Christmas. I remember my husband getting a puzzled look in his eye when I showed him the shirts. I don't remember ever seeing his father or brother wearing them.

--Stayed up (again) stuffing a large Snoopy-like dog I had sewed for our firstborn. My husband helped with the stuffing, and by the time we finished our arms were sore but that dog was as solid as a rock. Unlike the shirts, the dog was a success, and both our girls drooled on it, slept with it, and hugged it for years, until one day it disappeared from our lives.

--Made from scratch every crumb of food for a party of seventy-five guests, fellow faculty and administrators at the college where I worked. I still have the long-range planning document that I drew up a couple of months ahead of time, detailing every step of the process. Can't remember much about the food,, besides some pates and dozens of petits fours. What was I trying to prove? Amazingly, the party was a success, and I stayed up having fun till all hours.

--While grading final exams, made breads and cakes and god-knows-what-all in preparation for the Christmas guests...lovely and loved relatives who came from afar to spend the holidays (a week or two) at our house. One year we hosted twelve people and nine dogs....

--Fell in love with all things herbal and decided that everyone on my list would receive a basket of herb-related products made with my own hands, from my own herbs: bowls of potpourri, jars of herbal teas, lingerie sachets, sleep pillows, bottles of herbal cordials, pomander balls, and bags of herbal bath salts. Our relatives are probably still sneezing from all that grassy stuff.

Ah, the days of wine and roses, the snows of yesteryear....

And now?

Our descendants and their beloveds are due in just a few days, and here I sit, blogging.

The Geese In The Cathedral

This is the time of year when my mother would take me to Barcelona's Gothic Quarter, where the Christmas Fair was held held right up against the walls and buttresses of the big cathedral. We went to get supplies for our Nativity scene: fresh moss to simulate meadows, tree bark to make into mountains (with a sprinkling of flour for snow), and one or two clay figures to add to the wisemen, angels, shepherds, peasants and assorted hangers-on that populated our Nativity.

But before we hit the Fair, we would go into the Cathedral, to see the geese.

I don't know how many cathedrals have geese in their midst, but Barcelona's Cathedral of Saint Eulalia has a whole gaggle of them, thirteen in fact, and has had since time immemorial.

It would have been bad spiritual manners to go straight to the geese, so first we used to stop before the main altar to pray. Already as I knelt there, with the grit from the kneeler digging into my bare knees, I could hear them, their cries echoing against the stones. I would look up at my mother, “Can we go now?” My mother would answer by closing her eyes and praying some more. She knew the art of sharpening anticipation.

Eventually we would rise, make the sign of the cross, brush the grit from our knees, genuflect as we passed the altar, proceed in a dignified manner to the holy water basin, make another sign of the cross...and walk into the cloister.

Before I even saw the geese, I would be overcome by the feel of the cloister—a space that was neither indoors nor outdoors, where light and sound bounced oddly among the stones and the palms and the orange trees, a space that spoke to me of beauty for its own sake in the midst of the serious business of religion. A space that had geese.

In the middle of the large courtyard was a raised stone platform, surrounded by an iron grille. In the center of the platform a moss-covered fountain trickled water into a basin. And that's where the geese were, white and majestic, honking and waddling around on the flagstones, making the most amazing green droppings, then casually gliding into the basin and floating, looking pleased with themselves.

Those geese, in the center of the cloister, in the heart of the cathedral, in the middle of the city, were a miracle to me. With their serene disregard for the holiness of the place, they reassured me that at the center of buildings and beliefs, pavements and progress there is always something warm, alive and untamed, something that is perfect just the way it is.