A Year, Sped Up Towards The End And Yet Static

Most books, you just pick up and read, more or less straight through. At least I do, unless I put the long complicated novel aside for a little detour through a fast mystery. But then there are the books that have a year as an organizing principle. And because I have some deep seated necessity to make order of things, I cannot read that sort of book in one go. Instead, I read the January chapter in January, the May chapter in May, taking a full year to read it. If it's a cookbook, like Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries, I might find myself puttering around in front of the stove, making something with rhubarb when the rhubarb is freshly sending up its pink stalks. A gardening book, like Henry Mitchell's One Man's Garden, has me making lists of bulbs for fall planting in April and contemplating the location of a plot for spring peas, to be prepared and dug in November for March planting.

Last year for Christmas, my mother-in-law gave me a book of Verlyn Klinkenborg's little essays, called The Rural Life. For a time, he had an irregular column on the editorial page of the New York Times, where he waxed rhapsodic about so many things, like snow in January:

By nightfall the snow in the fields was fox-deep.

And spending in March:

Living in the country you learn to spend money in the meanest ways, and you also learn the most extravagant parsimony.

Reading September in September, I was dumbstruck last month, when on September 11 I came across his passage about September 11.

On the first Friday after that sudden Tuesday, I took an afternoon train back homeward out of Manhattan and into the country. Do you remember the day? [snip] Life is bearing witness. In some superficial sense the morning of September 11 sifted us all into difference circles of witnessing. Some people narrowly escaped the collapsing towers. Others watched in terrified safety from windows and rooftops further uptown, Many, like me, saw it live on television from midtown, while an incalculable number of people around the county and the world watched as the tapes were replayed into the night and the coming days. But we're all witnesses, no matter what we saw or how we saw it. Our burden is very different from the burden the victims bore and their families still bear, but it's no less real. Witnessing is a matter of knowledge and of conscience. We know what we saw, and yet we watch the televised tapes play over and over again because we disbelieve what we know.

I've gone back and read that passage several times over, thinking on so many disasters, natural and otherwise, and how we do witness, disbelieving what we're seeing. This election year is a good example.

Yesterday, I found myself on the train to New York without the newspaper (I'd forgotten it) and with a pitiful charge on my more-than-three-years-old-phone (the only problem with which is the pitiful battery). Happily I had the Klinkenborg, but I had to break the rule of read November in November and read December in December, because what was I going to do? Be rigid, or read? I read.

He is a lovely writer and manages to make even a horrible destructive heavy wet December snow sound beautiful:

The snow that fell at home this past weekend was a predatory snow, heavy, wet and punishing. It fell hastily, clumsily, and by the time the storm ended, there was as much precipitation stacked overhead in the tangled woods, waiting to precipitate, as there was on the ground.

Precipitation waiting to precipitate.

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Fall is that time when trees change from green to gold and scarlet, the hosta looks decidedly rough around the edges, the tomato plants are mere skeletons though yet with fruit.

And on October 16th, my patient impatiens are still blooming their little hearts out. The suburban life, it is confounding.

End of Summer Vacation Tomato Pasta

I'm still digging out from weeks old emails and putting away the hiking boots and sorting through the many many pictures we took (on one camera and three phones), so the vacation re-cap is yet to come.

The day we got home, there was - predictably - nothing to eat. Except that the pantry had dry pasta, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, and the fridge had a tired but serviceable lemon, and the garden had parsley and basil and tomatoes! And so, dinner was had: Jack Denton Scott's Spaghettini Estivi.

This is a pasta dish that I grew up with - my mother had ripped it out of the New York Times and pasted it into her black notebook of recipes, with a note that it was from The Complete Book of Pasta. We used to eat it on summer Sundays, when we'd been at the beach all day (and weren't having a grilled London broil and some fresh delicious buttered corn). It's so easy - chop up a bunch of tomatoes, season them, and toss the uncooked sauce with hot pasta. If we're feeling fancy, we'll do a caprese version of the same - adding cubed mozzarella and subbing balsamic vinegar for the lemon juice. In fact, we eat that version more than this one because there's a guy at the farmers market with fabulous fresh mozz, so when we eat this more spare, lemon juice version it feels revelatory each time we decide to have it.

And even though it's called spaghettini estivi, I usually use a short pasta like rotini or orecchiette because I like eating it with soup spoon. But I still call it spaghettini estivi, just because.

You probably have all of the ingredients already, so try it.

Spaghettini Estivi, adapted from Jack Denton Scott

2 lbs ripe tomatoes, chopped
a few sprigs of flat Italian parsley, chopped
a good handful of fresh basil leaves, chopped
Juice of 1 lemon
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 garlic clove, finely minced
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1 lb spaghettini (or whatever shape you want)
Grated parmesan cheese or asiago cheese (optional)

1) In a big bowl, mix together the tomatoes, parsley, basil, lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper. Do not cook! Put it aside.

2) Cook and drain pasta, and add to tomato mixture.

3) Serve, with grated cheese, as desired.

Black Dirt All Around

It was a long horrible winter, but finally, FINALLY, it seems like spring. Sunday, one of the daffodils bloomed.

And yesterday, when I got home from work, there were enough open that I cut a handful for the dinner table.

I am very thrilled to be getting my gardening on FINALLY. We had to sit out all of last year, due to the construction project on our house. Not only could I not do anything, there were beds near the house that just got trashed, and there's a whole area where we took down some gigantic threatening trees - all of this needs work. Let me tell you, there is nothing as much fun as opening up cardboard boxes and unpacking all manner of little mail order plants.

Except maybe going to the wholesale nursery with a "connection" and heaving pots of this and that onto a flatbed tractor. Yeah, that was pretty fun.

* * * * * * * *

About a month ago, I was walking through the Greenmarket, on my way into the office, and I happened upon a vending machine. In the market, parked right there between a table of will-winter-never-end turnips and a booth selling Hot Bread. This vending machine was just visiting though - it's not a permanent installation, though wouldn't there be something cunning about dropping a quarter in and getting out a beet or an apple? I digress. This particular vending machine was sponsored by Seeds of Change, and it had a twist that I've not seen before: it was twitter-enabled, so if you tweeted a particular code, it made the vending machine whirl and spit out a brown paper bag of seeds.

I'm totally jonesing to get my hands dirty. @seedsofchange #pledgetoplant #ny832
— magpie musing (@Magpiemusing) March 7, 2014

I was thrilled to walk off with three packs of seeds: lettuce, broccoli, and peppers. I promptly planted them, inside in little improvised greenhouses, and they sprouted! Yeah! Green thumb! Alas, the stinking rotten cats have nibbled most of the leaves off of the broccoli seedlings, sparing the lettuce. Feh.

* * * * * * * *

In addition to my ambitious and possibly overactive seed starting, the girl's been doing an after-school gardening program. She brought home a clever little homemade self watering pot, upcycled from a small plastic water bottle. The top was cut off and flipped over and into the bottom, and a chunk of sponge descends from the neck down into the water, wicking the water up into the dirt that some lettuce is planted in.

We are rich in dirt these days, rich indeed.

B Kind 2 Earth Day

Yesterday, we made little pots out of strips of newspaper.

Yesterday, we filled them with potting soil.

Yesterday, we planted sunflower seeds in our little homemade pots.

Today, we will be kind to the earth.

Tomorrow, we will plant our sunflowers, so that they may grow nine feet tall and grace our garden with their yellow faces and provide seeds for the birds next fall.

What will you do?

Wordless Wednesday: My Garden

Okay, shut up, there's nothing "wordless" about this post, even though I sort of thought it would be when I took all the pictures after I was asked for them in the comments on Monday's post. Whatever.


Allium, in a bed with hosta and rudbeckia and astilbe, and a variegated Kerria japonica behind (which might be 'Picta' and is nearly done flowering). The kerria came with the house, the allium came by mail, the rudbeckia came from my mother, and the astilbe came from her or maybe from her neighbor Mary. There's lots of plain big leafed hosta that came from my mother's house, and lots of a smaller shiny leafed hosta that was here when we moved in.


Fancier hosta in the front yard, with azaleas behind - a small flowered lavender one which kind of hangs over a wall and a lovely pink one. Most of that hosta is divisions from other people's houses, and it's tucked into a bed that was once just patchy with pachysandra - I'm letting them fight it out.  The azaleas came with the house, though the pink one has been moved more than once.


A close-up of that pink azalea - a nice strong pink, not too too fuchsia.


An iris, from my mother's house, in front of astilbe and a buddleia, and one of only a few patches of bare dirt left in the back bed. I have lots of astilbe - pink, white, and red - all pass-along plants.


Pulsatilla (done flowering) and alchemilla (about to flower) - I love the foliage on each. I bought the pulsatilla by mail, and I can't remember where the alchemilla is from. It's happy though - it's self-seeding like crazy.

My Garden

In mid-summer, we'll have lived in our house for six years, and I'm finally feeling like the garden is coming into its own.

I spent yesterday morning happily puttering around, rearranging the shrubbery, as it were. I was tired of looking at bare dirt under the blueberries, so I dug up some woodruff from under a boxwood, and tucked it in under my blueberries. I then hacked up a couple of clumps of liriope, and edged the berry bed with it.

From one small pot of white forget-me-not, I've now got a hillside - forget-me-not living up to its name - so I moved a clump into a pot and gave it to my mother-in-law. I also gave her an alchemilla that had self-seeded in a crack in the corner of the stone steps. The alchemilla might not make it, but I couldn't just pull it out and toss it in the compost. In turn, she gave me a baby spirea with pink flowers and yellowish foliage that she'd found under her big one. I don't know what variety it is, but I think I'll stick it in the privet hedge that borders the neighbor's driveway. I hate that hedge, and I am desperately trying to turn into a mixed hedgerow because the privet is both boring and labor-intensive. I have, thankfully, trained the neighbor to not clip the privet with the help of strings staked alongside; the ensuing straight lines made me twitchy.

There's a bed in the front of the house that got planted out a few weeks ago, mostly with stuff I bought by mail order. I'm a sucker for Bluestone Perennials; they sell tiny perennials in cheap three packs and even though I lose a fair share of them, I keep going back for more. Since I planted that front bed, and drew a little picture to remember what's what, I keep adding and moving. The poor little things are like pawns on a chessboard getting shoved hither and yon, and my little drawing is increasingly hard to read.

I'm also trying to beautify the wooded lot across the street - it's owned by the town, and completely unmaintained. So, every time I dig out more wild tawny daylilies or the gooseneck loosestrife that's meandering over from the other neighbor's house, I tuck it in across the way and hope it takes off. Since they both tend towards the invasive, I'm hoping for a riot of flowers uphill.

And, because I like to cook too, I like that the garden provides bits for the kitchen. Over the weekend, I made a rhubarb pie-cake (it was called a cake, but it was more like a pie, and while it was fine, I don't think I'd make it again), and two rhubarb upside-down cakes to give away. And snips from the chives and the Egyptian onions found their way into a beet-quinoa-grapefruit salad.

What's growing in your garden?