Joan's Journal

Central Square, Cambridge, is home to three art supply stores (that I know of) which implies a considerable artistic community in the area. Which means Art Happens, and sometimes it spills out into the public spaces. In addition to a couple of really find murals and some impressive graffiti, I found ( this... )

"Sometimes getting to know people is easier done side by side than it is face to face."

That's from Communal Table: A Cob Oven and the 36-Hour Dinner Party, a long article in the New York Times by Michael Pollan. If you loved his descriptions of meals in The Omnivore's Dilemma, as I did, and want some more, this is for you.

It gives me another reason to hold still for a while. I've been thinking about this bucket list meme that's going around, the question "If, on your deathbed, you were to look back at your life, are there any things you would have regretted not doing?" Going to watch the space shuttle launch last July was definitely a bucket list thing. So was going to Spain to see the works of Gaudí. I'm still assembling the list. Many of the items on it are actually very old, but I never made serious plans around them before. Quite a few of them seem to involve going to Brazil, so I expect I'll be headed there this coming winter or the winter after. In the meantime, this article has given me a new item for the list: I want to build one of those gigantic ovens and host regular communal meals. Which means I'll need a place to do it, with a community to do it in.

I spent many years in search of community. I've even taken what purported to be a community building course or two, not that they actually taught me what I wanted to learn. Part of the problem is that a community can't just be about community. It's got to be about something greater than itself. I can see a community dedicated to the things I love, to good food and cooking it together, and based around the infrastructure needed to do that. It's something to keep in mind, anyway.

Lilacs! I walked into Harvard Square yesterday and the lilacs were opening.

Normally around here the lilacs open right around my birthday. (There was a time, when I was very small, when I believed that my birthday was the reason they bloomed right then.) So it was a surprise to see them open a whole month early, but not exactly a shock given how the unseasonable heat has pushed up the flowering schedule for so many species. The lilies of the valley, however, seem to be sticking to their regular schedule. They also typically bloom in May. As of yesterday, there were only a few that had flower stems up, and the buds on those still looked like little green beads.

###

Today, the granite counters came for the new kitchen. Rob picked out an amazing granite, mostly creams and pale golds and pale greys with some translucent crystaline bits and some bits that look like moonstone (they have that chatoyancy, like white tiger's eye but less orderly) and some scattered dots of dark red that I realized must be garnets or possibly low-grade rubies. At the same time, when I first saw it, and especially when I saw how the two counters that have sinks set in them have holes for the sinks that are slightly smaller than the sinks and the sinks are set under them, so instead of having a bit of the sink overhanging the counter, you have a bit of the counter overhanging the sink, and I struggled for a moment to remember where I'd seen that sort of thing and then it hit me: the bathrooms in fancy restaurants.

###

Formaggio Kitchen is an amazing store. It's like a dream of a gourmet store. Most gourmet stores are full of little jars and cans of pricey exotica, plus a counter where you can get the exotica made into sandwiches and special order a truffle. Formaggio Kitchen has three sections. The one in the west is the most like a standard fancy grocery store, with a produce section divided between organic staples (carrots, avocados, etc.) and rotating exotica such as bergamot oranges and raisins on the vine; a single freezer case full of stock and sorbet; imported and local microbrew beers and wines; fancy coffees and teas; uncommon snacks such as flaxseed crackers, crunchy fava beans and potato chips fried in peanut oil; bakery breads behind the counter; and a tiny florist corner. The middle section is the chocolatier. I try to pass through it quickly. In the east is the core of the store: the cheese department, full of small-batch artisanal cheeses, some aged in a facility built for the purpose by the store's owners. It is the best source of goat and sheep milk cheeses I have ever encountered. It costs every bit as much as you'd expect and a bit more, but as far as I'm concerned, it's worth it. They also have fancy aged meat products such as patés and bacon from pastured pigs, aged several months. Today I got my entire dinner there: a pound of purple-tipped asparagus, a tiny Italian goat cheese called Caprino Biaco in Cenera, and a French salami with a name that translates to, I kid you not, Little Rose of Lyon.

The salami, in paper thin circular slices about the diameter of a tennis ball, is intense, almost leathery in texture, and fatty. A little goes a long way. The cheese, well, most of the cheeses in the store, you can taste before you buy, but not the Caprino Bianco. But it looked interesting and the sign said "tangy", which I figured meant lemony, so I bought it. When I sat down with my plate of asparagus, parboiled until wiggly but not floppy (as tested by picking one out of the hot water by its big end with tongs and shaking it), the package of salami and the little cheese, I got my first taste of it. Bland? But the texture was lovely, soft like cream cheese but a little dryer and more crumbly. I was cutting a second taste for myself, trying to figure out how best to combine this flavor with the other two, when the tang hit, a delayed tang like the delayed bite some hot peppers have. It turns out that by "tangy" they meant "sharp" as in "this is why I never buy sharp Cheddar." But the tang was a minor element in the whole eating experience, and with some experimenting I figured out the optimal combination: lay a slice of salami on the plate, spread a tiny dot of the cheese, maybe a half teaspoon in volume, in a wide stripe down the middle, then break off two or three (depending on diameter) sections of asparagus. The first section, with the tip, should overhang a bit; the others should just fit. Roll this up and eat it in two bites. If any good eating was left on the stalk, I ate it like a carrot stick. This meant that the meal was about 3/4 asparagus, which was good, since the sausage and cheese were kind of like bribes for my taste buds, to convince them to accept most of a pound of asparagus. This strategy worked: there are about six stalks left. Nevertheless, Caprino Bianco in Cenera goes on the cheese list I keep on my iPod with the note "mostly sucks".

The Northwest Passage, a hypothetical commercial shipping lane passing north of Canada, connecting the North Atlantic with the North Pacific, ate up a lot of money and a number of lives during the Age of Exploration, all to no avail because, in those days, it didn't exist. Now it does. According to Wikipedia, there has been an open stretch of water, navigable by ships that are not icebreakers, open every August since 2007. It's also made a new world record possible: circumnavigating the Americas. A guy named Matt Rutherford set out to do it last June and he's just about done, expected at his starting point (Annapolis, Maryland) on the 21st. He's already set a record for the smallest ship every to do the whole Northwest Passage, from the Labrador Sea to the Bering Straits. His website is at http://www.solotheamericas.org/.

Those of you who follow the environmental issues know that this has become a problem for wild polar bears, which live on land and feed under the ice. There's now a significant part of the year when the ice is further from land than a polar bear can swim, so those bears that retain their old fear of humans are dying. The only ones that are still going strong are the ones that have become scavengers on our garbage dumps, and the ones in zoos, of course. Polar bears may soon become one of those species that are not truly wild anymore.

Meanwhile, we had another unseasonable scorcher yesterday. 89 Fahrenheit. And it looks like another one today: the thermometer has already passed 82. Massachusetts doesn't normally get temperatures like this before July. I went for a little walk, about five blocks to the garden center and back, and I was wiped out at the end of it. I need to start wearing a straw hat and carrying a water bottle again.

At some point last December or January, there was an evening when my brother Rob decided to try to use the seldom-used fireplace in his living room. This was when my little nephew, Nick, was really into the Camp Half-Blood series of kids' novels and therefore into the Greek Gods. While the fire was getting going, the little guy put something in, I forget what, proclaiming it to be an offering to Hestia, goddess of the hearth. I kind of caught my breath when he did that because I know that Hestia is entirely real and that sometimes when people say Her name, Whe notices, even if they don't mean it, even if they no more believe She exists than they believe that the American demigods who are the starring characters in the books are really out there somewhere. And I had a feeling that Hestia heard young Nick.

Then he did something that he proclaimed as a Poseidon action, symbolically throwing something wet on the fire. I cringed inwardly, because if Hestia was really paying attention, that was no way to get on Her good side.

Eventually my brother got the fire going well enough so he could put the screen in front of it and we could all go to the kitchen for drinks and snacks. Gradually, as we ate and drank, the room got smokier until he finally figured out that somehow the flue had closed by itself.

Now, back when Rob and Martha first adopted Nick, they invited me to be his "goddessmother", to introduce him to Paganism, and I agreed. But in this situation, an excellent moment for teaching the little guy the absolute rock-bottom basic idea of Paganism as I hold to it, the idea that the Gods and Goddesses really are out there and really do act in the world and really do pay attention to what we do, especially when we say Their names, I stayed silent because I'm pretty sure that's not what my determinedly secular brother had in mind.

So, if I had to explain to them just what is involved for me in really being Pagan, what would I say? Probably something like this:

Weird things have been happening to me all my life, things I have a hard time describing and long ago learned not to talk about. I don't have visions of the gods or anything overwhelming like that, but I do sense things, for which the Pagan and New Age language of energies and entities is the closest thing I've run into that fits. I'd probably describe a few specific experiences. Say a few words about the Pagan worldview and values. I might even admit that part of my reluctance to share all this with Nick is that he might ask me about my own spiritual life, the acts of worship I engage in, and that it's not a topic I'm real eager to discuss because I don't do nearly as much as I think I should. I'm the equivalent of a Christian who sleeps in most Sunday mornings and then is plagued by moments of feeling bad about it all week, but not quite bad enough to actually mend my ways. I also don't have a lot of mastery over this extra sense or whatever you call it that I've got; I ignore it all too often and let myself get overwhelmed by it occasionally. So talking with a bold, intelligent child like Nick would be a real risk to my ego. Therefore I let it slide until some other visit, some other year, taking the easy way out. I'm a Taurus. I like easy. I'll wait until my Goddess gives me a swift kick, or an unmistakable opening, and then I'll speak.

Time to wake up this journal on the off chance that anyone out there is still looking at it.

I'm at my brother's, house-sitting while he and his family are in Singapore. It's a weird Spring in New England; we had that insane few days of July weather, middle of last month, and the result is that all the flowering plants that would have bloomed sequentially over the next month is blooming now: tulips and daffodils and bluebells and forsythia and cherry trees and vinca and that other little blue one that I can't remember the name of, and the shrub out front that I never knew the name of, which the bees were working hard at the other day. So even though the weather has returned to seasonal, it's still not a normal Spring. The lilacs seem to know what time of year it is, but they're not due until the middle of May, anyway.

As for how I'm doing, ( Read more... )

The memorial service for my mother took place on Saturday, April 23rd, as scheduled. It was preceded and followed by what I have come to think of as the usual for a trip to Medford: a frantic round of lunches, dinners and parties thrown by maternal cousins of varying degrees. A visit from an out-of-town member of the clan is an excuse to up the social velocity by an order of magnitude, and I was kind of exhausted by the time I left the following Tuesday morning, actually kind of looking forward to three and a half days of solitude on the road. I got to Cauldron Farm for the Beltane gathering last weekend.

Next Tuesday, Raven and Josh are flying to London for the start of Raven's first European book tour. They are leaving from Boston, so I offered to drive them, then go to my brother's for another week or two. My plans for after that are, um, totally up in the air.

Done! The evacuation of my mom's condo is done deedie done done done! Actually I had to abandon some things, including her recliner, which Goodwill wouldn't take because it had some wear on the arm upholstery. But I have handed the keys over to the front desk and left the whole thing to the mortgage company. So far as I know, I have no reason to set foot in Reston ever again.

Which is not to say I'll be a total stranger to the DC metro area. I found that the stuff I wanted (or had promised) to save amounted to more than a carload, and one of the things the Prius doesn't do is tow a trailer, so I have a few things parked in the basement of my friend Wittney's house in Maryland. He overtly said he offered to store the stuff for me so I'd visit again.

This week I have a few things to deal with related to taxes, getting the Prius inspected, etc. Next week I drive to Wisconsin for the memorial service. After that, well, my intention is to stay in the Boston area for the summer, but I've emailed about four sublets advertised on Craigslist and nobody has responded to any of them. So maybe I'll be back in western Mass.

In the fall, I'm thinking of going someplace warm. As in the Caribbean. Swim in warm water, process emotional stuff. If anyone has been there and knows about specific places, I'm open to suggestions.

One more thing: I'm sorry for not posting for three months. It was bad of me. I'll endeavor to keep up better in the future.

Been back here more than a week and, in terms of what I'm supposed to be doing here, I've accomplished pretty much nothing.

Part of the problem is that, for most of that week, the muse has been riding my ass. Among the children's movies I was subjected to over the course of my visit to my brother's household was Megamind, which my little nephew could see as a good, silly animated comedy-action-adventure while the adults could see it as a Superman satire. And, well, it may be my own pervie perspective, but I was pretty sure I was seeing gay sensibility in the aesthetic of it. I don't mean homosexuality, although you could read some of that in there, too, if you stretched a little. I mean theatrical, attention-grabbing, over-the-top queeniness.

And why not? The original Superman was created in the 1930s, the era of the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet, and other masked vigilantes ultimately based on The Shadow. The idea of the hero who keeps his (in those days it was always his) heroic activity secret was very appealing to the audiences of that generation. These days, with the love of fame so much more out in the open than it used to be, why wouldn't a person with superpowers use them to get attention?

But I digress. Over the day or two after seeing it, I found Megamind embedded in my imagination, with the cartoon characters morphing into complex adult versions of themselves and their story putting out tendrils that thickened into stems and bore fruit: scenes and situations, chunks of dialog, plot twists. By the time I got on the train to come back to Virginia, it totally had hold of me, and I gave over four or five days to just letting my imagination run wild.

Then the iPod ate two days. My brother bought me an iPod for Christmas and I ended up spending two days just loading CDs into iTunes and shopping in the iTunes store. Mostly what I bought was music that I used to own and lost, or that I only ever owned on vinyl or tape. Dropped about $70.

I was just about done with that yesterday. I actually got my boots on to go out to the one farmers market still operating in this area, but then I just sat there. I was back in the story, trimming it and shaping it in my mind. I ended up taking a walk instead, because walking doesn't interfere much with the imaginative process.

I've lost most of today that way, too. The muse has a way of pulling up trivia from the back of my mind that I didn't even know I knew. She wants me to use a future Earth setting in which the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts. I hadn't remembered that the Yellowstone caldera is a supervolcano. Now I have to do some research. The Mount St. Helens eruption is the obvious source. Particularly I'm hoping for something about the long term effect on agriculture. Was any cropland permanently lost? Did the ash boost soil fertility? News media accounts of the disaster won't have this.

In the meantime, we've settled on a date for the memorial service for my mother: April 23rd, in Medford, Wisconsin, the town nearest to the farm where she was born and grew up. The single largest group of people related to her, mostly descendants of her siblings, lives there.

Ingredients:
One organic chicken
One lemon, cut in half
Six peeled whole cloves of garlic
Pepper

Equipment:
One large plate
One roasting pan just big enough for the chicken
Kitchen scissors
One offendable vegetarian

First, cut the plastic packaging off the chicken with the kitchen scissors and take out the bag of giblets. Rinse the bird thoroughly. Let it stand on the plate for an hour or so to dry out and approach room temperature.

Start the oven preheating to 500 F. Put the lemon halves and the garlic cloves into the chicken. Put it in the pan on its back. Pepper it. Take the batteries out of the smoke alarm. Wait five minutes, then put it in the oven.

Over the next 20-25 minutes, the kitchen will fill with chicken smoke. When the vegetarian comes out of her room to complain, turn the oven off (but do not open it!), get the entire household into warm clothes and go sledding for an hour. When you return, the chicken will be perfect.