She Loves Me

I came upstairs the other night, to find my bedroom door closed (an unusual occurrence, we never close the doors), and a note taped (well, Post-It flagged) to it. The first note (on the left) referred me to the second note, which was lying on the floor, tucked up against the door sill.

Of course I love you, sweetie, of course I'll write back.

There is nothing like getting mash notes from a six year old.

And yes, she was asleep in my bed.

Car Wash

Once upon a time, my husband worked for a construction company. One summer, they renovated all of the dressing rooms and back stage areas at a big non-profit theater, including the installation of fancy Toto toilets with washlet seats - you know, only the best. The job was ending just as a new production was moving in to begin previews. As there always are, a few punch list items had to be finished, even after the actors were in the dressing rooms. One of my husband's co-workers went up to the theater to install a handful of toilet paper holders. He knocked on the star's dressing room, and was greeted by the A-list actor in his Falstaff fat suit. "Hi, I'm here to install the missing toilet paper holder in your bathroom." The reply, in a fine Shakespearian bellow: "What the hell do I need toilet paper for? I've got a car wash for my ass!"


(With thanks to Vodka Mom, who reminded me of this story.)

This Is Not A Post

It's Friday, and my brain has turned to mush and is dribbling out my ears. Oh, and I have too much work to do.

So.

1) I'm guest posting at Gwen's, so go check out my riff on naked (what can I say? she assigned a topic).

And.

2) I dug up a video of people dancing in the Grand Central windows - more of a documentary, but you get the idea. I sent it to De last night; her reply this morning was "Thank you. My heart is bubbling over with joy into my brain. What a good way to start the day." It's cool. Watch.



Oh, and have a lovely perfect summery relaxing weekend, and let your heart bubble into your brain, instead of your brains out your ears.

Hidden in Plain Sight

When you walk through Grand Central Terminal and look up to the east or west, you see these huge windows. Really huge - they're about four stories tall. And you're awestruck at how big they are, and how the light comes through them just so, and how you can actually see buildings on the other side. It's marvelous, really, something to marvel at.

But if you're very very lucky, you know someone who can take you up and inside those windows. Because they aren't just big windows, they're double windows, with catwalks inside. And there are five separate catwalks in each of the two big windows, like five hallways traversing them, with glass floors and an intricate old mechanical system for opening the windows. They do, the windows open!



It's not for the faint of heart, or the acrophobic, but it is awesomely cool to get that bird's eye view of the commuters scurrying about in their unchoreographed yet oh so precise dance.

What Is It? Wednesday

(With apologies to Janet, from whom I filched the What is it Wednesday idea.)

Belief

You know that I'm an atheist, right? Yes, I believe there is no god. Parse that. Note that I didn't say "I don't believe in god", because that implies that there is a god that someone else believes in.

My sister, well-intentioned, gave me - for our good pagan Christmas celebration - a Flying Spaghetti Monster to stick on my car. It's still hanging on the fridge in its protective plastic wrapper.

Julie of The Mom Slant is an atheist too. Julie's husband has an FSM on the back of his car, and she thinks it's "the only one in town". But I haven't yet put mine on my car, because it ever so slightly rubs me the wrong way. I realize that it's parody, but it cuts a little too close to home. If I believe that there is no god, how can I believe that there's a Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Shooting From The Hip: Blue & White

I should have counted. On the train home yesterday, it seemed like every other person - male and female - was wearing a blue and white checked shirt. Or blue and white plaid. With a couple of blue and white striped shirts for good measure. Thin stripes, pale blues, vibrant checks, navy blues. A sea of blue and white.



It's like someone decided it was the summer uniform, and everyone complied.

RIP, even though I hate the Yankees

Yeah, whatever. I hate the Yankees. For several reasons: hubris on the part of the Yankees, a deep and abiding love of the underdog Mets, and the DH. I mean, come on, what is that business of the designated hitter and the pitcher not going to bat? I hate all American League teams, just because the pitchers are wusses.

Anyway, we were sitting there at the breakfast table yesterday, reading the New York Times as we are wont to do, and discussing the fact that George Steinbrenner was dead. The girlie looked up from her cereal at this photo, spread out in front of her, and said, "is that him in his box?"



Meaning, is that a picture of him dead in his coffin? Coffee came out my nose, despite the fact that it was a completely logical question what with the brown background and the hand placed just so.

More Posts I'm Never Going To Write

• The one about the ecological superiority of living in a small house.
• The one about (ditto) having only one child.
• The one about raising a gender neutral child.
• The one about "Baby X".
• The one about keeping a kid's gender a secret.
• The one about how irritated I am by sweeping generalities about "girls" and "boys" and what "girls" do and what "boys" do.

More About That Swim Team Stuff

After her somewhat less than stellar performance in that first swim meet, which was the "B" team, the takes-all-comers team, not the team that counts towards points in the regional standings, we got an email that her times were good enough to move her onto the real team, the "A" team. Go figure. She's competing in the six and under group.

So off she went to practice, and I got the following text from my husband:

I just looked up from my reading and there she went, diving (plunging really) off the starting platform and swimming a very respectable 25m for a small fry.

The swimming team business is surreal and sublimely entertaining.

Posts I Am Never Going To Write (Though I Reserve The Right To Change My Mind)

• The one about hospice.
• The one about the paradox of death.
• The one about hospice in jail.
• The one about palliative care.

Can you tell that death is on my mind? It has been, ever since my mother was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. I think about her death, which was as "good" a death as they come - at home, with two of her three children at her side (the third would have been there but for the fact that he'd had a baby 14 hours earlier).

I started a post about hospice a long time ago, mostly because I'd come across a paragraph about hospice workers in a comic novel called A Dirty Job, a paragraph that kind of flattened me:

"He turned to see a big, thirtyish woman in scrubs: another hospice worker - another of the amazing women that Charlie had seen in the homes of the dying, helping to deliver them into the next world with as much comfort and dignity and even joy as they could gather - benevolent Valkyries, midwives of the final light, they were - and as Charlie watched them at work, he saw that rather than become detached from, or callous to their job, they because involved with every patient and every family. They were present. He'd seen them grieve with a hundred different families, taking part in an intensity of emotion that most people would feel only a few times in their lives."

Benevolent Valkyries indeed.

Let me just say this: hospice is a good thing, a very good thing. It gives grace to death.

Cherry Quilt

I love that someone at the Greenmarket took the time to arrange many pints of three different kinds of cherries into a table top quilt. I didn't buy any of those particular cherries, but I did buy two quarts of sour cherries. I'll use one quart for a pie this weekend, and I'll pit and freeze the other quart for a pie in January when it will be an oh so happy reminder of summer.

What kind of pie are you going to make tomorrow?

Trophies!

The six year old was in her first swim meet yesterday. She wasn't even supposed to be on the swim team, but the "pre-team" practices are in the morning when she's at camp, so she kind of ended up on the team by default. She was a little nervous beforehand, "I don't want to lose, Mama", but she persevered and swam three races - two freestyle and one backstroke. If you look very very closely, you may be able to see that she received two sixth place ribbons, and one for fifth place. She was beyond delighted with her "prizes", and I am tickled at her delight because coming in sixth means, um, she came in last in the two freestyle races.

My husband, who was roped into timing, said that the child who finished last in the backstroke - that is, after our little fifth place girl - went off course, veering across the pool and under two lane markers, to finish the race two lanes over from where she'd began. If I'd been the one timing, I think I'd have been laughing too hard to click the button at the right moment. I guess that's why I have a desk job.

Twenty twenty Olympics? Here we come!

Accuracy At All Times

I have trouble with language sometimes - I'm too precise or it is or we both are but at cross purposes. How do I refer to my husband, who happens to be the father of my child? "We" means her daddy and I, or, my husband and I, or really both of those things. If I call him her Daddy, it sounds like we're not married; but if I refer to him as my husband, it can sound as though she's not his child. So complicated, this language of ours.

An Afternoon on An Island

Pro: It is salt water.
Con: It's not the ocean.

Pro: It's pretty close to home.
Con: The sand is coarse and rocky.

Pro: You get to take a tiny little ferry to get there!
Con: Beach pass, plus ferry ticket, plus parking adds up.

Pro: It's an island! The child can't get lost.

Over all, and even though it's not the ocean, we had a great afternoon at Island Beach - a tiny little public island park in Long Island Sound off Greenwich, Connecticut. It's totally charming, the girl loved building moats and sand castles with similarly sized strangers, and I'd go back in a minute. Hat tip to my next door neighbors; I'd never heard of it until two days ago.

Happy Fourth Of July!

Hoarders

In the summer, we always eat outside, unless it's raining. One day last week, I was out on the deck drinking my morning coffee in my bathrobe, when I heard the unmistakable sound of a large truck backing up. From around the corner of the house, we saw a dumpster backing gingerly down the neighbor's driveway. I thought, maybe they're doing some construction, or a new roof.

This particular neighbor has lived in his house for a long long time, and he's kind of a odd ball. He blows his leaves and snow blows his driveway at night, in the dark - not because he has a day job, he doesn't, but because he's a night owl. He spends hours moving boxes and traffic cones from one side of his garage to the other. While I've been in his house, an ordinary enough house, I've never been in his basement, which he once described to me as Collyer-Brothers-like. I can believe it, based on what I've seen in his garage.

Two mornings after the dumpster drop, I heard the truck backing down the driveway again. The now full 20 yard container disappeared - and was replaced with an empty one. Days later, it seems full again. Periodically we hear something clang in, though mostly all I can see are cardboard boxes. No construction work is happening. But occasionally, I see the neighbor out there pulling things back out of the dumpster. And then his wife or one of his grown children comes out, and gently escorts him back in to the house.

To all appearances, the wife and children are staging a hoarder's intervention. I'm torn between sadness, pity and desperate curiosity as to what the hell is in those dumpsters.

Wordless Wednesday: Ferris Wheel

[At Rye Playland, looking up while waiting to get on.]

Still Lifes

One of the comments on my daughter's end of year report card was that she makes up great stories, but gets bogged down in illustrating them at the expense of getting the words on paper. I think she tends towards visual description, rather than written.

Periodically, she finds and commandeers my camera, and days later I discover a set of photos she's taken without my knowledge. Not long ago, she shot about 25 pictures in under 10 minutes, probably while I was upstairs getting dressed in the morning.

I'm intrigued by her eye. I cropped this picture at the bottom, because (in my opinion) there was too much table top in the shot, but it's otherwise as she framed it side to side and along the top.



The original, uncropped, is on Flickr, along with the rest of the series - which includes a few goofy self-portraits, and some where the hand of the artist is visible manipulating objects. We signed her up for a week long "Seeing Stories" class at the nearby art theater media lab; I hope she eats it up.

When Worlds Collide

So there I am, cutting my six year old's long dirty fingernails, a horrid task because she loathes it so much she runs away and screams and cries, but she's finally settled down so I'm doing a nice tidy job, when out of her mouth comes "you're making it look like I have hobo fingers!"

The first thing that went through my mind was "she's been reading The Bloggess?"

I composed myself and asked her what hobo fingers were and where she'd heard about them. "iCarly" said she. "iCarly bites her fingernails to the nub and she's got hobo fingers."

Okay then. Maybe Jenny can find the hobo fingers she needs in the dumpster outside the iCarly sound stage.

Playing Hooky

I played hooky the other day.

Our anniversary was on Thursday, and the last day of first grade was on Friday, and Thursday was a half day anyway, so I took Thursday off. We indulged in subterfuge; I pretended to go to work, but actually I hung out at Starbucks until the girl was safely on the bus.

A few hours later, we headed to the bus stop to get her - she was duly surprised to see me, and thoroughly excited when we told her we were going to Rye Playland for the afternoon.

Rye Playland is a local small amusement park, hard on Long Island Sound, with an ice rink, a pool, a beach, and a wooden roller coaster from 1928. I went there a bunch as a kid, but except for a trip to the ice rink last winter, I hadn't been back since. It's a total blast. Luckily, it wasn't crowded - probably because it was a Thursday afternoon and school wasn't yet out. It's funky, and charming - sort of art deco meets Chautauqua Victorian.

We started off on the Dragon Coaster - the girl screamed and cried and refused to ride it again. Every ride thereafter, she asked the attendant, "does this go fast?" We did a carousel, the ferris wheel, the Old Mill boat ride (twice), some of the kiddie rides (the ones she wasn't too tall for!), the bumper cars, the log flume (twice) and the Yo-Yo and the Kite Flyer and I can't remember what else. I wanted to go back on the Dragon, but there was no convincing the child.

After we got home and destickified, we went out to dinner at a good restaurant, where the girl decreed the chicken fingers "better than McDonald's or Burger King or my school" and I had Prosecco and pork belly and a cheese course in lieu of dessert, but I got dessert anyway when they brought us a complimentary crème brûlée because it was our anniversary after all.

I think it might have been the perfect way to celebrate our anniversary.

By The Numbers

1 first kiss (in front of Tiffany's)
2 cats (Slinky and Yoyo, one of whom was named after a toy, and the other after a cello player)
2 apartments (on 78th and 88th)
1 memorable dinner at Le Pré Catelan (with fireworks for a stranger's birthday, and an argument about asparagus)
1 irascible child (the 6 1/2 year old)
1 little house (where we live now)
4 cars (the little Ford, the intrepid Saab, the workhorse Jeep, and Kate)
3 wedding rings (because I "needed" two, one in white gold and one in yellow)

What do these add up to? Our fifteenth wedding anniversary.

[And honey? No crystal, because it just gets broken, and no watches, because the cell phones have obviated them. Rye Playland with you and the girl will be just fine.]

Making Up Stories

When I noticed the discreet "Gramercy Tavern" embroidered on his messenger bag, I figured he'd get off the train at 23rd Street, and he did. But then I had to wonder about the scar, an inch or so long, running northeast up his forehead from the bridge of his nose. Was it a kitchen accident? A knife fight with a dishwasher? A spat with the waitstaff over tips?

Was it a girl? A long ago playground fight? A car accident?

Or domestic violence? Or maybe an incendiary device?

So many possibilities in that one little scar.

Lillian

I had a really great part-time job back when I was in graduate school. I worked in the back office of a big white-shoe law firm, doing odd jobs for my boss, who was head of office services. I got to do things like find a new cafeteria vendor and figure out a better system for distributing office supplies, and make contingency plans for a threatened NYC transit strike. That strike never came to pass (and I confess that I was a tiny bit disappointed, because I wanted to see if my planning would work), but we’d taken the threat seriously because it wasn’t all that long after the eleven day strike in 1980. That’s the strike when hordes of female office workers forced to walk to work across the Brooklyn Bridge took to wearing running shoes with their tidy suits, changing to pumps only when they got to their desks. After the strike, lots of women continued to wear sneakers to work – hell, I still see it from time to time.

One of the women I worked with was a file clerk named Lillian. Lillian was from far away in Brooklyn. She lived at home, and spent all her money on shoes and clothes, and all her time moping about looking for a husband. In contradistinction to the sneaker-clad women, she wore sunshine-yellow patent-leather fuck-me heels on the train and changed into bedroom slippers in the office – you know she was hoping to find a date on the subway.

But big-hearted Lillian had a tragic flaw. She had a growth on her gum, near one of her canines, so big it was kind of like an extra tooth sticking out in a place it didn’t belong. A visit to an oral surgeon would have gone a lot farther towards finding a guy than all those many pairs of shoes.

I wonder what ever happened to her.

How To Make A Cat Love You

It's easy, really.



Just pet it some more.

Once A Ponatime

I am organizing and collating and weeding the many many pieces of paper and "books" and artwork that are coming home as the kidlet cleans out her desk in preparation for the last week of school. Indulge me if I post a gem or two, like once a ponatime.

Right Now

Right now, the girl is watching television after a day of playing hooky - "my throat hurts, Mama". I think she just needed some mommy time, so I took her to work with me.

Right now, I'm drinking a glass of unoaked Chardonnay and feeling glad that the day is nearly over.

Right now, the sun is low in the sky but still bright - the tree trunks are sunlit, their leaves are radiant green, and blue peeps out behind the glow.

Right now, my heart aches for a friend.

Right now, all's right with the world, and so much isn't.

---

Filched from Nora and Jennifer.

Tweeting Inconsistency

Yesterday at 5:57pm, I tweeted a complaint about tourists, after having forced my way through clumps and clumps of them while trying to get to my train:

I'm such a curmudgeon. Tourists may be good for the economy, but they're so annoying.

Then, at 9:37pm, I queried my twitter peeps for travel suggestions:

Where in New Brunswick/Nova Scotia should we go in August? By car, via Maine. With 6yo.

There is some deep irony in the fact that within the space of a few hours I went from hating tourists to wanting to be one.

White

Upon investigation, it turns out that she was describing the properties of ICE, not I.

Alchemilla, Pulsatilla

Dear Very Mary,

I am remiss. I am chagrined that I am remiss. You are a dear and generous correspondent, and you have not been thanked for the last most joyfully received little lagniappe. You, of all people, have not been thanked.

Very Mary, your stamped garden tags are divine. I can't wait to fabricate little hangers for Alchemilla, Pulsatilla, Kerria, Rudbeckia, Allium, Astilbe and Loosestrife. It's poetry - read them aloud. Alchemilla, Pulsatilla.

But best of all? The necklace you sent along for my daughter. It's perfect. Every little girl needs her name on things, lots of things, and the tiny blue bead is nearly the color of her eyes. Did I say perfect? It is.

Thank you, Very Mary, for the little treasures you send our way from time to time, and I promise that my thank you notes will be more timely in the future. I love having you as a pen pal.

Abashedly yours,

Magpie

Seventeen Dollars

One of the seriously great things about our town is the annual library book sale. If, like me, you wait until Saturday, everything is half price. When we swooped through this morning, we got thirty books for seventeen dollars. Mostly, we got stuff for the girl: 6 Magic Treehouse books, 4 from the Junie B. Jones series, and 3 of the Boxcar Children, plus a mess of other books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Trumpet of the Swan, and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

And if I go back tomorrow? The remaining books are FREE.

Compact Fluorescents

Call this a public service announcement.

Last week, my husband was home in our unfinished but completely serviceable basement. We spend rather a lot of time down there; our desks and computers are there, the laundry is there, the sewing machine is there, the crafty supplies are there. It's lit with bare light bulbs in plain porcelain sockets, and in a nod to energy efficiency, all those bulbs are spiral compact fluorescents. Well. While he was sitting there folding the laundry or something, one of the bulbs started crackling and smoking. He cut the power and removed the bulb before anything bad could happen, and I fired off a letter to the manufacturer.

I got a polite email back, which included the following:

CFL's have a unique "end-of-life" characteristic. As unpleasant as it is, in certain circumstances, a CFL may emit smoke and a melting, plastic-like odor at the end of its life. This is a common occurrence in all brands of CFL's and is not considered dangerous. Bulbs burn out when the ballast overheats and an electronic component, the Voltage Dependent Resister (VDR), opens up like a fuse in your home’s fuse box, shutting off the circuit and generating heat and possibly a small amount of smoke. This might sound dangerous, but the VDR is a cut-off switch that prevents any hazards. The melted plastic you are seeing where the glass coil connects to the ballast is simply a sign that the heat is escaping as intended in the design of the bulb. Please look for ENERGY STAR logo on the packaging, the seal of quality which means that the bulb is safe because it has undergone stringent test procedures.

The email also included links to several websites to corroborate this oddness, one of which was Underwriters Laboratories.

I have to say that I think this is incredibly peculiar. My husband and I both reacted the same way: the light bulb seemed to be failing in a spectacularly dangerous way, like, if we hadn't been home, there wouldn't have been a home to come home to. But according to the manufacturer and Underwriters Laboratories, this is a common way in which compact fluorescents die at the end of their life span.

Did you know this? Why would this not be better publicized? Or, why aren't the lights designed to die coolly and quietly?

#!@?&*

We threw a big shindig for my father-in-law's birthday over the weekend - tent, bartender, surprise guests, kielbasa, lobster rolls, strawberries, Cool Whip, fat cherries flown in from California, Flying Saucers, and champagne. [He has an expansive palate, ranging from a taste for fine wine and lobsters to a deep love of the highly processed.]

During the planning process, someone suggested getting custom M&Ms to tie up in little bags as party favors. You can only have two lines of 8 characters each, but we cleverly came up with:

Nick's

#!@?&*th

My sister-in-law went ahead and ordered them, only to get a phone call from the company telling her that they wouldn't print #!@?&* because it was a bad word and they were a family company. Despite Cathy's protestation that #!@?&* isn't a word at all, they wouldn't budge, and we ended up with:

Nick's

Big Bday

It wasn't nearly as much fun as #!@?&* would have been. Weigh in. Is #!@?&* a dirty word? Hell, is it even a word?


[I see that Blogger doesn't much like the characters either. Check out the way it converted the permalink.]

The Distribution of the Thousand Dimes

Remember how I asked you to vote on four charities, each of which would receive a share of $100 based on the percentage of votes received?

I wrote the checks:

Edna Hospital = $24

Partners In Health = $31

Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen = $33

Nothing But Nets = $12

And then I sent another check to the Henry Louis Granju Memorial Scholarship Fund, because Henry's story breaks my heart.

Punch Line: Diesel Fitter

I used to go to Mets games. I used to be lucky, in that my father's wife's father had box seats at Shea, about five rows back from the field between home plate and the Mets dugout, but because he lived in Florida, his tickets were frequently up for grabs. I remember once taking the #7 train to Shea with my sister and her friend Adam, while he told a joke. He stretched it out, elaborated it to a fair-thee-well, embellished it with accents, and had the entire packed subway car listening raptly. It's another one of those jokes where, once heard, the punch line lives on - kind of like you can conjure up the whole of The Cutting Edge just by singing out "toe pick".

* * * * * * * * * * *

Joe and Larry were brothers, who worked together in a bra factory. Work slowed down, and they were both laid off, and so they trotted down to the local unemployment office.

The clerk called Joe into her office and asked him what he did. Joe said "Cup stitcher. I sew two pieces of fabric together to make the cups for the brassieres."

The clerk looked up cup stitcher in the big book of jobs. Finding it classed as unskilled labor, she gave him $300 a week unemployment pay.

Larry then went into the clerk's office. She asked Larry his occupation. Larry told her he was a diesel fitter. The clerk determined that diesel fitter was a skilled job, and awarded him $600 a week.

When Joe found out that Larry was getting twice as much, he was furious. He stormed back in to find out why his brother was collecting double his unemployment pay.

The clerk explained, "When I looked it up, cup stitchers were unskilled laborers and diesel fitters were skilled laborers."

"Skill? What skill?" yelled Joe. "I sew the cups together. Larry puts 'em on his head and says 'Yeah. Dese'll fit 'er.'"

If It Was My Home

If the oil spill were near my home, it would envelop all of Connecticut, and reach from Boston to Albany to New Jersey and half way across Pennsylvania.



Use If It Was My Home to superimpose the spill on your part of the world - it will likely shock you and sadden you.

Ice Cream and Brownies

The other day, we celebrated my father-in-law's birthday, one of those big round numbers which I'll keep to myself. I tossed around ideas for a dessert, but my husband kept rejecting them: he doesn't like x, he doesn't like y. Finally, I rifled through the big pile of recipes that I've printed out off of the intertubes (because I don't seem to be organized enough to use Delicious like a good index) and picked out an ice cream recipe that I've been meaning to try for a long time. And, because ice cream needed a little something, I made a batch of brownies.

Heaven in a bowl.

First, the brownies. My all time favorite brownie recipe is one that Laurie Colwin claims came from Katherine Hepburn's family; it is available on Epicurious. The Colwin-Hepburn axis is nearly enough to love something, but these brownies are seriously good and totally easy. So easy, in fact, that my six year old can almost make them by herself. You melt the butter and chocolate together in a small saucepan, and add everything else TO THE POT. One bowl! Easy! Delicious! No frou-frou ingredients! And a stellar pedigree!

Second, the ice cream. I love caramel. I love dulce de leche. I love all those butterscotchy flavors. And I love a hit of salt in my sweets. Also, I'm in one of my occasional periods of insane love for my ice cream maker, because it turns really simple stuff into wonderfulness. So, naturally, the recipe that leapt out of the pile was David Lebovitz's salted butter caramel ice cream. Oh, dear lord, it is the ice cream of my dreams. It didn't even matter that I screwed it up because we always keep a 1/2 cup measure in the sugar canister (and a one cup measure in the flour) and not 'til later when I was making the brownies did I realize that in fact there was a 1/3 cup measure living in the sugar bin which means that I made the ice cream with 1/3 less sugar than it should have had which could account for the fact that it was distinctly salty but no matter, it was still excellent. [When I make it again, I'll do it with the right amount of sugar. Also, I did pour my praline/caramel out onto a silpat sheet - and when it was time to crush the praline, I just rolled up the silpat. Clever, no? I am full of labor-saving tricks.]

---

Incidentally, I availed myself of Blogger's recent addition of static pages, and added a recipe index to my site, which you can get to over there in the right sidebar. I did it for me as much as for anyone else, because I find myself rooting around in my own archives looking for thus and such, but maybe you'll like it too.

Bon appétit!

Wordless Wednesday: Antique Fire Engine

Free Books!

I am probably the last parent in the universe to know about this, but thanks to Raising Weg, I now know that you can download summer book-reading forms from Borders and Barnes & Noble: kids read books, write 'em down, and redeem the list for a free book. That sounds splendid to me, and I bet I can get my increasingly fluent little reader on board.

Incidentally, she is currently mad for the Magic Treehouse series and last week, she brought Dingoes at Dinnertime home from school. As you can imagine, its title prompted a round of "a dingo ate my baby" which the girlie can now do in a nice Streep imitation. (I can't find Streep doing it; here's Elaine.) I mean, don't you have to say that out loud every time you hear the word "dingo"? It's kind of like I can't drive through Yonkers without saying "Yonkers, where true love conquers", but I digress. Free books! Get your kids to read!

Happy Memorial Day!

I do love a parade. I hope there's a good one in your town too.

What Was For Dinner?

I'm not usually given to taking pictures of my dinner before I eat it, but this was such a beautiful plate that it cried out for documentation: pork chop (grilled with a sort of teriyaki marinade), asparagus (with lemon and butter) and a salad of quinoa, beets and grapefruit.

If I may say so myself, the salad was excellent. I cooked up a half a cup of quinoa, let it cool, and added diced cooked beets, snipped chives, and the flesh of a grapefruit. It's a pain in the ass to segment the grapefruit, but it's worth it. Do it over a bowl so you save all the juice, then use the juice and some olive oil (and salt and pepper) to dress the salad. I liked it so much, I made it twice last week.

Lighter Than Air

In the pantheon of cookbook writers, everyone talks about Julia Child and everyone talks about Irma Rombauer (though she usually just gets called "Joy"). Your personal pantheon probably includes others - the utilitarian Mark Bittman, the idiosyncratic Tessa Kiros, the scholarly Elizabeth David. For me, one of the books that has permanent shelf space is Craig Claiborne, also known as the New York Times Cookbook. It's less frou-frou than Julia, more elegant than Joy. My copy falls open to page 488 because that's our go-to waffle recipe. When I want to make a gingerbread house, I add some extra flour to the recipe for gingerbread men that's on page 579. And Craig, not Julia, taught me how to make a souffle. Well, my mother probably helped, but it's Craig's recipe that I turn to when I need to make a cheese souffle.

And you know what? It's easy and delicious and you probably have all of the ingredients you need. Because I have a family of three people and a smallish souffle dish, I scaled the recipe down to fit my dish, and because I'm nice, I'm giving you both sets of measurements. Make one. Serve it up with a salad. You can make it on a school night, and your six year old will probably even eat it - because really? It's not much more than fancy eggs.

---

CHEESE SOUFFLE à la CRAIG

For a 2 quart dish		For a 1 1/2 quart dish
4 T. butter (1/2 stick)		3 T. butter
1/4 cup flour		3 T. flour
1 1/2 cups milk		1 1/8 cups milk (9 ounces)
Salt		Salt
Worcestershire sauce		Worcestershire sauce
Cayenne pepper		Cayenne pepper
1/2 pound grated cheddar*		3/8 pound grated cheddar*
4 eggs, separated		3 eggs, separated

1. Preheat oven to 375° F.
2. Make a white sauce: Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat. Add the flour and stir with a wire whisk until blended. Meanwhile, warm the milk**, then add it all at once to the flour/butter mix, stirring vigorously. Season to taste with salt, Worcestershire and cayenne.
3. Take pan off heat and let cool for a couple of minutes. Add the cheese and stir until melted. Beat in the egg yolks one at a time and cool.
4. Beat the egg whites until they stand in peaks. Cut and fold the egg whites into the cheese sauce (you can do this in the saucepan). Put your nice light fluffy stuff into the souffle dish you chose at the beginning and bake for 30-45 minutes. You don't have to grease the dish, but I like to butter it and then sprinkle it with grated parmesan.

*You have no cheddar? Use swiss, or gouda, or pepper jack, or whatever you have. Or a mix. I'm easy. But I think you might want to avoid Velveeta.

**Or don't. Instructions for a white sauce or a béchamel usually tell you to scald or heat or warm the milk. I tend towards the lazy, so I don't always bother and it's not been a problem.

A Grand

It is, this post, my thousandth.

To celebrate, I'm going to give away two things:

1) A copy of the best book I've read in years: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It's so good that I want to share - it's social and medical history all intertwined with racism, poverty, philosophy, morality and family, in a book that reads like a thriller. All you have to do is leave a comment by the end of the day on Friday 5/28; I used a random number generator to pick Stimey who will get a brand-spanking-new copy. And hey, if I don't didn't pick you, I love you anyway and go find a copy at your library or bookstore.

2) One thousand dimes (because I'm not flush enough to give away one thousand dollars) - allocated amongst the following charities. You get to vote and it's not winner gets all - each charity will get the dollar equivalent of the percentage of votes so 17% of the votes gets $17.

• Edna Hospital - a maternity hospital providing reproductive health care and fistula repair in Somaliland.
• Partners In Health - a Boston-based medical organization "partnering with poor communities to combat disease and poverty"; they've been on the ground in Haiti for years.
• Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen - they feed 1200 people a day, no questions asked, in Manhattan.
• Nothing But Nets - a UN Foundation program to provide bed nets to combat malaria.

A thousand thanks to all of you, for being here, for reading, for indulging, and for enriching my life.

---

Tell Me How To Allocate My Dimes:

Weekend Update

Somehow, we managed to have a most peripatetic weekend without really going too far from home.

Saturday, we went to Randall's Island for free hotdogs, thanks to Hebrew National. I didn't ride the mechanical bull, I had no idea Cheryl Hines was there, but we ate our share of hotdogs with bloggers and marveled at Randall's Island. Really - it's kind of astonishing. I've driven over the Triborough Bridge thousands of times, and never ever descended down. There are a hundred ball fields, in the shadow of the Triborough and Hell Gate bridges, sharing the island with a psychiatric hospital, a fire department training center, and a wastewater treatment plant. The park was packed with people, and you could only smell the sewage when the wind blew in the wrong direction. Oh, that's not fair - it's a terrific public amenity and I'm happy to have been there.

Sunday, we traipsed in the other direction, because I wanted to see Margaret Roach's garden and it was on the Open Days tour. It's lovely, by the way, with a human quality to it - we walked away thinking "I can do that", which may or may not be true. The girlie was thoroughly entranced by the frogs in the frog pond, though I think she liked the flowers too. I was amused that she was able to identify some things - "that's a bleeding heart, mama, and we have some of those [alliums]". Afterwards, one thing led to another and instead of heading south (and home), we headed northeast to Great Barrington (yeah, Massachusetts). With the help of Yelp (and their really good iPhone app), we found an great pizza shop on the main drag, followed it up with some excellent ice cream, and - finally - headed home.

We probably put more miles on the car than we really needed to, but it was fun.

The Etiquette of Lying

Oh, the drama.

The six year old was invited to a birthday party last week, so Saturday morning, we traipsed off to Target to buy a present. We ended up getting a Harumika – it’s a doll-sized dress form with fabric bits that get poked into a slot in the back so you can design your own fashions over and over, kind of like a three-dimensional paper doll. I thought it was sort of cool, and my daughter approved, so we wrapped it up and went off to the party.

Well. Monday afternoon, she came home from school and burst into tears. She’d asked the other child if she liked the present, and the kid said "no, not really" and she wailed "can I ask her to give it back to me?" and I felt shitty about the whole thing.

On the one hand, you’re not supposed to ask "did you like my present?" – but on the other hand, you’re not supposed to say "I didn’t like your present". Then again, you're not supposed to lie - but sometimes a little white evasion is a valid response in a social situation. The protective bear in me wanted to call up the other kid’s mother and tell her that her kid had hurt my child’s feelings; but instead I let my rational side try to explain the etiquette of present giving and receiving without getting into the art of prevarication.

It's awfully complicated, this raising of children.

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?

Visiting Popsicornia

Remember when my child dressed herself up in onion goggles and announced that she was a Popsicornian? Hold onto that thought.

A couple of weeks ago, she and I were in the public library, picking up a DVD that we'd reserved. [I love my public library. I love that I can put things on hold via the internet from my bed. I love that they send an email when things are ready for pick-up. I love that they remind me by email when things are due back. I wish they had something like a Netflix queue for books I want to read, but I digress.] While there, we wandered into the children's room where she spotted a large blue and yellow striped papier-mâché dragon up atop the stacks. "Oh", said she, "it's my father's dragon". It turned out that her first grade teacher had read the whole series of Gannett's books to the class, but the girl wanted me to read it to her, so we tracked down the librarian, who led us to the right shelf and we borrowed a copy of My Father's Dragon.

I read it to her and I'm astonished that I'd never read it before, even though we had a copy on her bookshelf which I'd picked up on the recommendation of a friend but had completely forgotten about because apparently I have a mind like a sieve. Anyway, it's entirely charming with lovely illustrations and a vaguely subversive undercurrent, and if you don't know it you need to remedy that right now. We finished the first book and took it back and got the other two. Towards the end of Elmer and the Dragon, the dragon is flying Elmer home over the sea and says "I think I see land ahead!", to which Elmer replies "So do I, and I think it's the coast of Popsicornia!"

POPSICORNIA.

I was dumbfounded. Not only had she not disclosed the origins of Popsicornia, she hadn't even reported that her teacher was reading chapter books about blue and yellow dragons. What's she not going to tell me next?



(Illustration from The Dragons of Blueland)

Girls and Boys

There is some deep irony in the fact that I bristle when I'm sitting in a meeting with my (male) health insurance broker and he makes reference to a "girl" at the insurance carrier - and hell yeah I corrected him - because I work in an industry where grown professional dancers are routinely called girls and boys. Apollo? It's for three girls and a boy. Antique Epigraphs? Eight girls. And it's not just in the ballet world - someone sings "How many boys, how many girls?" in A Chorus Line.

It doesn't rankle me that the dancers are girls and boys, but it's reflexive for me to get on a high horse when someone calls a grown woman a girl. Why?

On Sports

Mayberry Mom wrote a post (a long time ago) about how few women were coaches for extracurricular sports. Me? I have neither the skills nor the inclination. Furthermore, I do so much vis-à-vis child care, that were there to be a need for a parent to participate in a sports activity, I’d volunteer the husband as a way of forcing his involvement in her life. Okay, that's not at all fair - he makes lunch and puts her on the bus and arranges her playdates and takes her to swimming and the after-school farm program - but still. I suspect I’m not alone in that. Plus, if you’re looking at a weekend event and a once traditional daddy works/mommy doesn’t family, lots of daddies will want to step up and volunteer...which means that in our mommy works/daddy doesn't family, I should be signing up to coach soccer. Oops. Not going to happen. Luckily, she's evidenced zero interest in sports.

Maps and Tigers

The first grader has been working on maps at school, and brought home some mapping homework one day. As it happened, she went directly to her grandmother's house that afternoon, where she got to hang out with her visiting aunt. As I know I've mentioned before, my sister-in-law has a blog on creating books with children. She also has a sneaker for maps and map-making, so she dove right into supervising the homework - and then blogged about it. Click over to Bookmaking with Kids and see if you can find the tigers.

Punch Line: Beige

In last week's Punch Line post, my sister left a single word comment: "beige". It's like a thrown gauntlet - I have to post the beige joke. And honestly? Once you've heard it, beige will never be the same.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

What's the difference between the whore, the mistress and the wife?

The whore rolls over and says "that'll be $200".

The mistress finishes and says "honey, that was awesome, that was the best, you're the greatest".

The wife lies there and says "beige. I think I'll paint the ceiling beige".

She's Going To Be An Interesting Teenager

On the left, Mommy and Daddy as aliens, with a small person described as her "arch enemy".

On the right, the supreme controller with the trophies that she's won.

When asked why she wanted to control her mommy and daddy, she said "because it would be fun, you would always let me eat candy, and you would never put me in time out. Also, then I could have all the playdates I want and I could sleep on your heads. Also, I would get a cat and a dog, because I love them both."

Oleo

If you do crossword puzzles, you know oleo. If you grew up during World War I, you know oleo. If your mother was born during the depression, she might well have bought margarine, because it was cheaper than butter. Mine did, anyway. She’d buy both butter and margarine, butter for toast and popcorn and baked potatoes, margarine for chocolate chip cookies and brownies and chicken liver pâté. In other words, she used butter as a condiment, margarine as an ingredient.

Don’t get me wrong – she loved butter. As a child, I’d catch her sneaking a knifeful of butter off the butter dish and I’d call her “butter slicker”. Later, when she was in her long decline, we’d have to push the butter dish to the other side of the table or she’d go after it with a spoon.

I don’t buy margarine. I don’t want to eat it. I’d rather save money in other places. But I find that a faint current of that depression-era mentality creeps into my cooking.

Not so long ago, I ended up with most of a quart of buttermilk, because I’d needed a ½ cup for something. Not wanting to waste it, I decided to make buttermilk ice cream. The recipe called for 2 cups of buttermilk, 2 cups of heavy cream, and TWELVE EGG YOLKS. I was going to cut the recipe down by a quarter anyway, because I only had 1 ½ cups of heavy cream, but that would have meant NINE EGG YOLKS. And my objection to TWELVE, or even NINE, egg yolks isn’t that it’s a lot of yolks, but what the hell do you do with the egg whites? You see, I’m constitutionally incapable of pouring the whites down the drain – too wasteful and my mother is whispering in my ear “put them in the freezer until there are enough for an angel food cake”.

So I mucked with the ice cream recipe even more, and used only four egg yolks to make the custard, and it was just fine. Really. Perfect even. And I was only left with four egg whites.

They sat there in the fridge for a while, until I consulted The Cake Bible, where – hallelujah, and thanks to the sub-index by all yolks/all whites/no flour – I found a recipe for a spiced pound cake with, yup, four egg whites.

The cake was excellent (and devoured by the office vultures in short order), but almost better was that I made the yolks and whites come out even.

Are you cavalier about your eggs? Or do you abhor wasting even one yolk? And what do you do with 7/8 of a quart of buttermilk anyway?

Wardrobe Wednesday With Tulips

Orange top, hot pink skirt, tie-dyed blue leggings, mismatched socks*, and hiking boots = a good costume for traipsing around on a Garden Conservancy Open Days tour.



*not visible in the photo but I know they're there.

Highway Sights

I've seen some weird stuff on the highway recently.

Like, a car with balls. Yes, balls. As in testicles. As in, hanging from the rear bumper where a trailer hitch would be. I pointed it out to my husband; he noted that they were blue. He then pulled in behind the car while I tried to take a picture, which proved to be unnecessary, because they seem to be really easy to find on the intertubes. Who knew? I'd never seen a car with balls before. Are they more common in your neck of the woods?

Scarier, in addition to weird, was the day I was driving along on a crowded but moving parkway in the Bronx, when a pod of 12-15 bikers came up from behind, weaving through traffic, passed me and started POPPING WHEELIES. In traffic. On motorcycles. I was horrified.

I am completely unable to figure out the writerly transition from the wheelie poppers to the dead motorcyclist YouTube link that Barbara Card Atkinson posted last week, but they are related. Aren't they? Those Bronx bikers would surely like to be embalmed on their cycles when the end comes.

Seen anything weird on the highway recently?

Punch Line: The Duck Won

You know how sometimes you get a joke in your head, and it's such a great joke that just hearing the punchline is all you really need to bring a smile to your face? This is one of them, which I first heard told by a Circuit Court judge from Louisiana, who had just the right drawl and pitch perfect delivery.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Down in a county in the bayous of Louisiana over towards Texas, the Sheriff got wind of some Saturday night cock-fighting down at an old abandoned sugar, so he sent his deputy down to investigate. When the deputy came back, he said to the sheriff, "They's cock-fightin' goin' on down theah, all right. And they seems to be three criminal elements involved: Aggies, Cajuns, and the Mafia."

"Now hold on a minute, boy," said the sheriff. "The Mafia? You better tell how you done come to this heah conclusion."

"Well," said the deputy, "You know they's Aggies for sure, on account of somebody done entered a duck in the cock-fight. And sure they's Cajuns, 'cause somebody done went and bet on the duck."

"Well, but how about the Mafia?" said the sheriff, "How kin you 'splain that?"

"Well," said the deputy, "The duck won!"

* * * * * * * * * * * *

(Shamelessly copied from the website of The Prairie Home Companion, and yup, I'm still cleaning out my drafts folder.)

On Fertility, or Infertility, as the case may be

The older I get, the less I care what others think. After seven years of infertility, I got pregnant with child #1 at the age of 42 via in vitro fertilization. I'm 49 - no more kids are coming down the pike. So when I get the question about more kids, I tell them I'm too old, it was too hard getting this one, and I usually I tell them it was an IVF pregnancy. And I find that by opening my mouth about the IVF, it usually results in something like "oh my friend, blah, blah, blah" or "my sister, blah, blah, blah" or "yeah, me too". The more I talk, the more other people talk, the more it's out in the open. I don't think that's a bad thing – infertility tends to run under the radar for the general population, yet it's a big issue. If I'd known, maybe it wouldn't have taken seven years to get pregnant, maybe I'd have gotten into treatment sooner. But I just didn't know.

Why this now? It's National Infertility Awareness Week. And I'm cleaning out my drafts folder.

Eleven Into Fifty Minus Three Equals EIGHT

Crap. I'm not accomplishing very much. Or, not very much on my list anyway.

I have actually started item #4: running. I started on Easter Sunday, and have been out there two weekday mornings (at 6:30 thank you very much) and one weekend day (accompanied by small child thank you very much) each week since then - until Monday, that is. On Monday, I had failure:



The track, which has one of those synthetic surfaces, was COVERED with worms. Alive and moving, happy to be out in the drizzle. I went once around, and decided that I really didn't need to be out there avoiding worms in the rain, so I bailed. The high school track team probably squished them all later, but I haven't been back yet to see. Maybe tomorrow.

The Ramps of Spring

We are, happily, swimming in ramps this spring - rampant with ramps, I dare say. I've been buying them at the Union Square Greenmarket, and we cook 'em up and toss 'em with pasta and are happy little clams. The other night, I augmented the sautéed greens with some potato "croutons" - cooked potatoes, diced and tossed with olive oil, and run under the broiler until they were crispy. They added a lovely rough crunchy texture to the otherwise unctuous dish. While I was slicing and dicing, my sister-in-law stopped by with a bag full of ramps that she'd dug up herself, somewhere up in the Berkshires. We might be going to try some pickled ramps next. Or grilled, alongside a hamburger. Or maybe scrambled eggs stirred into a pan of sautéed ramps. Or ramp marmalade (which sounds more like chutney than marmalade, but sounds good none-the-less)! And, when I remember to buy some sparrow grass, we'll have a bowl of ramps and asparagus.

What's your favorite thing to eat come spring? What greens do you pine for in January? What makes your heart sing when you find it in your garden, or at your farmer's market?

Where Else You Might Want To Be

The funniest blog you aren't reading yet:
Ellen
Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

The wisest blog you aren't reading yet:
Julia
Lotsa Laundry

The tastiest blog you may or may not be reading already:
Deb
Smitten Kitchen

Tell Ellen and Julia I sent you. Find something on Smitten Kitchen and make it for dinner. Report back.

Why Bribery Never Works

I resorted to bribery recently. Not the "if you eat your peas, you can have a brownie" kind of bribery. No, the real thing - with money.

My brother's kid was turning one, and they were having a birthday party, and I had a pile of toys in the basement that my kid never ever ever played with anymore, including an inflatable horse which I knew would be the hands-down perfect gift. So I said to my child "let's give Rody to your cousin for his birthday". And she burst into tears and refused. This went on for a week or so - I'd propose giving the horse away, she'd cry. My husband thought I was poking it with a stick, as I am wont to do, but I kept hoping she'd see reason. No dice.

So I offered her money. Ten dollars. She refused. "I love Rody; he's my favorite toy!" I tried to talk to her about what she could get for that ten dollars, like a Barbie, the Barbie that I flat out refuse to countenance. But she didn't want ten dollars; she wanted Rody.

Eventually, I had a brainstorm. I was willing to give her ten dollars which she could use to buy the Barbie of her dreams. So I cut out the ten dollar bill and offered to buy her a Barbie. "Mommy, let's go to Target now!"

Off we went to Target and she picked out a Barbie and we went home and made a tag for Rody and the next day she gave Rody to her cousin and showed her new Barbie to everyone else at the party.



And then she asked "if I give Big Elmo to Tiny, can I get another Barbie?"

Thin end of the damned wedge.

The Mania

Hard on the heels of that garden talk I went to the other night, I ordered a whole mess of plants by mail:

• Amelanchier stolonifera
• Amsonia elliptica
• Hylomecon japonicum
• Ilex verticillata (two kinds, male & female)
• Malus "Ralph Shay"

And bought others at a "native" plant sale:

• Mertensia virginica
• Phlox divaricata "Blue Elf"
• Asarum canadense
• Tiarella "Oak Leaf"
• Dryopteris marginalis

And bookmarked a few others for purchase in the fall.

Clearly I've gone off the deep end, especially because the shipping on the Ralph Shay was more than the plant! Margaret Roach has a lot to answer for.

Learning to Look

My day yesterday was bookended by gardens.

In the morning, I had a meeting right near one of the entrances to the High Line. I got there with a few minutes to kill, and instead of heading inside to eat soggy pastries with strangers, I climbed the stairs and reveled alone in the curious and beautiful meadow. Gazing downtown, taking in the whole of the vista, the plantings merge into a swath of green cutting through the industrial grit.

A closer look, though, reveals a multiplicity of color, texture, leaves, flowers. Blooming now, April, there were grape hyacinths and daffodils and salvia and little red species tulips. A fat bee was working the salvia, and but for him, I was alone in the glorious sunshine in my city of eight million people.



In the evening, I played suburban dowager (not really - 95% of the people in the room were older than I am) and went to a talk at my public library - a talk with slide show by Margaret Roach, gardener and blogger. It was packed, and she was excellent. Funny and self-deprecating, she tripped over the latin names of some of her plants and claimed to have buried old boyfriends in her compost heap. I'm ready to plant Ralph Shay and Molly The Witch, respectively, a crab apple and a species peony - but lord knows where I'll find either one. Esoteric garden material can be awfully hard to dig up (ha ha, I said dig up). The "title" of her talk was Nonstop Plants: A Garden for 365 Days - and it was really about looking at the little things, and at the big picture. Plant things that look good in the snow, plant things you can see from your bathroom. Plant tulips under the rhubarb so they peep through the big leaves.

Somehow, I think I'm going to be getting dirty this weekend.

Wordless Wednesday: Capital A

For Heidi.