Quote du jour/Edwin Way Teale

For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.
Edwin Way Teale

Baptisia Australis (False Indigo)

Milkweed

Black Locust

Mrs Bale says it has been a beautiful day

Not what people usually describe as a beautiful day, but we've had no rain for a long time, and today we've gotten almost an inch. It rained steadily all day, and it couldn't have been nicer. Can you see the mist up the hill a bit? And that great puddle?

Quote(s) du jour/Tomatoes

Our regular Sunday supper is on hold this week because Tom just picked all these tomatoes! I'm going to make sauce and use it on homemade pizza.


A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.
Laurie Colwin

It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts
while eating a homegrown tomato.
Lewis Grizzard

And lyrics by Guy Clark:

Ain't nothin' in the world that I like better
Than bacon & lettuce & homegrown tomatoes
Up in the mornin' out in the garden

Get you a ripe one don't get a hard one
Plant `em in the spring eat `em in the summer
All winter with out `em's a culinary bummer
I forget all about the sweatin' & diggin'
Everytime I go out & pick me a big one

Homegrown tomatoes homegrown tomatoes
What'd life be without homegrown tomatoes
Only two things that money can't buy
That's true love & homegrown tomatoes

You can go out to eat & that's for sure
But it's nothin' a homegrown tomato won't cure
Put `em in a salad, put `em in a stew
You can make your very own tomato juice
Eat `em with eggs, eat `em with gravy
Eat `em with beans, pinto or navy
Put `em on the side, put `em in the middle
Put a homegrown tomato on a hotcake griddle

If I's to change this life I lead
I'd be Johnny Tomato Seed
`Cause I know what this country needs
Homegrown tomatoes in every yard you see
When I die don't bury me
In a box in a cemetery
Out in the garden would be much better
I could be pushin' up homegrown tomatoes

Today's picture/Cat and Mouse

Mrs Bale tries to keep a stiff upper lip

Mrs Bale and I are trying really hard not to whine, but geez Louise, it's 87 degrees at quarter of 6 in the evening! I can hardly breathe. I can't walk from one room to the other without boiling. It is too, too hot. A couple days ago the wood stove was cheerily burning away and today I just want to be in the air-conditioned car listening to my Mrs. Pollifax tapes.

The Joy of Baking - Cornmeal Muffins

Here's a recipe from Mrs. Appleyard, this one from Mrs. Appleyard's Kitchen.

Cornmeal Muffins

Mix together:
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup flour
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder

Add:
2 well-beaten eggs
1 cup milk
2 Tablespoons melted butter

Bake in greased muffin tins at 400º F for 20-25 minutes until crusty on top and bottom and soft inside.

I first made these exactly three years ago, and they are my favorite corn muffins. Don't they look just delicious?!

Book Report/Two Books by Martha Bergland

So often when I finish a novel, I wonder what happens to the characters afterwards. Does the couple stay together? Does the other couple get together? How does a job work out? It isn't that the book necessarily leaves the reader up in the air, but still I wonder.

A Farm Under A Lake was published in 1989, and Idle Curiosity in 1997. Do you suppose a writer, in this case Martha Bergland, also wonders about her characters and their lives? It might seem so since the second book begins literally where the first one leaves off. I read A Farm Under A Lake in 1999, and when I picked up Idle Curiosity to read this summer, I realized that I wanted to go back and read the first one over again. I didn't remember a lot of details, but I sure did recall the feeling of the book. My memory was of the importance of place and how doing simple "homely" tasks can heal the soul. My book journal entry from all those years ago says:

Wonderful, excellent book. Strong sense of place, which I love. I found this a very appealing book which left me with a good feeling.

Sadly, sometimes when we re-read a favorite book, we are disappointed and even wonder why we liked it so much in the first place. Definitely not so with this book. I loved it as I did eight years ago. It felt like visiting a beloved friend I hadn't seen in a while.

Not only is A Farm Under A Lake interesting, warm-hearted, lyrical, but it is also a portrait of the area in the mid-eighties. This is the land in John Mellencamp's 1985 release, Scarecrow.

Rain on the scarecrow
Blood on the plow
This land fed a nation
This land made me proud
And Son I'm just sorry
There's no legacy for you now

This was happening all over the US farmland. Farms were being sold off and consolidated. People whose whole lives had been spent on the land had to leave it. But the book is not a polemic. This is just the background. The book is the people and their relationships.

I think a lot of us can understand what this grandfather says to his young grandchildren:

What people make the future up out of is what they play in when they are children. And what they play in when they are children is the past piled up in the lots. Under the saved fence posts leaned up around apple trees, in empty chicken houses, in hedgerows, in willows clogging the ditches, in hog houses. Let it lay. If you tear all that out, what you tear out are places to see from and ways to be.

This book takes place in rural Illinois and it is a story of this particular place and the people who live there. The book begins in the present, moves back twenty years, and then returns. The first words are:

Jack is the church I have joined, but he is a church without ceremony. I miss my old church; I miss the gathering together and the celebration and the incense, the songs and the clearing of air.

I love that. In those few words, the reader sees what the narrator's life was and has become. Janet is a nurse who takes care of the elderly so they may stay in their homes as long as possible, while her husband remains unemployed. He is displaced from the land he grew up thinking he would farm his whole life.

In this passage, Janet gives voice to an image we only fleetingly allow into our consciousness.

I could never picture myself both old and still taking care of Jack. I would rely when I was old, like Blanche DuBois, on the kindness of strangers. I am forty years old; I am taking care of an eighty-year old woman. I find myself thinking now and then of the newborn girl who will someday take care of me. I tell this girl things in my head and maybe I tell her out loud. I tell her to remember to speak gently to me and remember to say my name.

When the book takes us back, we see the farm sale as the young woman does, and I could feel the horror of the experience.

In the front yard, household goods were piled up on long folding tables that must have been borrowed from the Methodist church. Though it was still early, people were browsing over boxes of magazines, piles of clothes, stacks of dishes and pots and pans. There was the old clothespin bag that Grandma had used and the clothespins. There were the laundry baskets, the old electric mixer, and the slightly melted, red plastic radio we listened to in the kitchen when I was a girl. ... This was awful.

The detail is so strong - not just tables but tables "borrowed from the Methodist church," and we feel the memories they bring back in this young woman just out of college. Her age is significant, because I think we all know her; we all remember how we were at that age. It was all about us. We were pretty self-absorbed, and we had spent the past years escaping our childhoods and trying to become different people. But then a realization hits us - how much we love our past, our childhood home, the artifacts of that childhood. I remember my mother wanting to move into a smaller place after my father died, and I was filled with sorrow. I couldn't give up my childhood home. Happily, she decided against it. And I have found as my children have gotten older, they feel that same allegiance, that same protective love for this place, their childhood home. Martha Bergland describes this perfectly:

I felt light and clean. Ready for anything. The breeze on my face reminded me ... that I was alive? That I had escaped this brush with ... what? I had not been giving a thought to the things that meant the most to me, my father, the farm, and Jack who I began to think I'd always loved. I had not thought about them and I had almost lost them. Now I had another chance.

It turns out the farm was bought by a childhood friend, and she is allowed to live there, with hardly any furniture, in isolated joy. Again, the author gives us the most wonderful descriptions. They have stayed in my mind for eight years.

I didn't know what I would do about a job, but I was beginning to see why I had come home to the farm. I vaguely wanted to make some connection here, though I didn't know with what. I just knew, even then, that everything I truly knew, I had learned there on the farm. Since I had left for school, I had stopped learning with my body; I had stopped hearing stories. I wasn't finished with this house and these fields, with these farmers. I had spent most of my life among them waiting for my life to begin, and I wanted it to begin here; I wanted to set out from here.

Janet has a romantic period with a man, and when that ends (as we know it will), she cleans that old house for days and days, and then she begins to can.

I thought even then that canning is a fairly obvious purification ritual, but I was pretty sure it would make me feel better, help me deserve something, and I was right. ... The cheerful, neighborly bump of the crab apples on the sides of the sink scared off the ghosts of the past and the future, and settled me in to the here and now.

The book goes on, telling us her life then, and continues with how it turned out and what she might want from it now. We care so much about Janet, and all these people.

Idle Curiosity is told to us through the eyes of Ed, Janet's dad. We see some of the characters from the first book, and get to know some who were only names mentioned there. Again, Martha Bergland's descriptions set the stage and steal the show. Descriptions, not only of nature, but of human nature. And they are of a piece; the nature around these people helps them to be better human beings, helps them to figure things out. A man takes a walk around town:

At the bottom of the street he turned the corner onto Edge Street whose houses faced the corn and bean fields.

He goes to sleep in a bean field after testing the beans to see if they are "about ready." And "Ed woke up knowing what to do."

For this woman who has grown up and lived in the mountains my whole life, the Illinois landscape is just so different. The idea of a town melding right into a field of beans is beyond my comprehension.

The beautiful land went past my eyes like a cool hand on a brow. Close wet trees flickered across blue far-away groves and those groves shifted to hide red farms. ... I was feeding on all the colors in a grey landscape, on all the detail to be seen on flat land, wondering how anyone could call this boring.

This is just unimaginable to me. I am surrounded by mountains, hills, curves, and trees, which have formed me, just as that place with its expanse of earth and sky has fashioned these characters.

The two books are examples of perfect writing to me. If I had loads of money, I would make sure they were reprinted in paperback and made available in a special display on bookstore tables. She is an excellent writer with such a gift for detail, such a way of bringing the reader right into this landscape, and she tells a story of people I became interested in and truly cared about.

A Fun and Funny Quote du Jour/Onslow

Maximum chic for me is your laid back slobby look.
Onslow, Keeping Up Appearances

What color green are you?

Another fun little blog thing. This is pretty much me.

You Are Olive Green

You are the most real of all the green shades. You're always true to yourself. For you, authenticity and honesty are very important... both in others and yourself. You are grounded and secure. It takes a lot to shake you. People see you as dependable, probably the most dependable person they know.

What Color Green Are You?

New books

Have you seen the Bill Murray film, The Man Who Knew Too Little? In it, he says, "you guys can't be making a dime on this." Well, that's how I feel about Book Depository. They will send me books way across the Atlantic with no shipping charge. I'm in real trouble now.

Dog Stats

I was thinking today of all our dogs over the years, and came up with these interesting (to me) statistics.

In 34 years, we have had 9 dogs: Casey, Bray, Lucy, Sam, Oreo, Little Ann, MacIntosh, Ben, Sadie.

5 males: Bray, Sam, Oreo, MacIntosh, Ben; 4 females: Casey, Lucy, Little Ann, Sadie.

3 we got because the previous owners couldn't keep them: Casey, Bray, Sadie.

4 were purebreds: Bray-Weimaraner, Lucy-Belgian Sheepdog, Little Ann-Chinook, MacIntosh-Collie.

3 we paid money for: Lucy, Little Ann, MacIntosh.

2 were 8 weeks old when we got them: Lucy, MacIntosh.

2 were 4 months old when we got them: Oreo, Little Ann.

5 were older than puppies: Casey, Bray, Sam, Ben, Sadie.

6 we named ourselves: Sam, Lucy, Oreo, Little Ann, MacIntosh, Ben; 3 came with names: Casey, Bray, Sadie.

2 were strays: Sam, Ben.

Mrs Bale stops by to say...

Today is a perfect day for drying clothes on the line, with temps in the high seventies and a constant breeze.

Sunday Supper - Raisin Bread Pudding

Raisin Bread Pudding

1/2 loaf of bread, 6 or 7 slices
2 cups milk
2-4 Tablespoons butter
1 egg
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 - 1 cup raisins

Cube the bread slices and place in a bowl.
Lightly scald the butter and milk and then add to the bread cubes.
Stir well and let sit a few minutes.

Beat the egg.
Add the sugar and vanilla and continue beating.
Add this to the bowl.
Stir in raisins.

Put mixture in a greased 8 x 8 pan and bake in a preheated 350º F oven about an hour.

You can eat it hot, warm, or chilled.
Such a wonderfully warming, delicious supper.

Today's poem - Fairground by W.H. Auden

In my part of the world, Labor Day weekend is fair time. I'm not sure that we are going this year, but our daughter went last night with a group of friends, and her stories are much like what Auden writes about. I love the way he evokes all the facets of the midway, and what he says about the stages of life. I like particularly the words:

all hours of amusement counted, requiring
caution, agenda

That is so much how we are as we get older. We set times, we arrange, we plan. So little is spontaneous. Tom and I were talking about that if we go, we'll decide on when and with whom, and set up a time, on and on. Our daughter worked a full day yesterday, used her phone to talk to, and text friends, and they were off for a night at "the dazzling archway of colored lights."

I think the "thumping old tunes" are now mostly new tunes, but when I was a kid, the music on the rides was often old songs.

Fair time is like Christmas in the way I remember all those that have gone before. The fairs when I was really little and wanted to spend time in the agricultural section with the lambs. Then a few years older, I wanted to go on the small rides, or rather the rides for small people, such as the merry-go-round. Then suddenly, I was a teenager longing for the words of Freddie Cannon's Palisades Park to be part of my experience.

You'll never know how great a kiss can feel
When you stop at the top of a ferris wheel

And then, in the blink of an eye, I had little ones of my own to begin the cycle all over again, and blessedly at the very same Fair.


Fairground

by W. H. Auden

Thumping old tunes give a voice to its whereabouts
long before one can see the dazzling archway
of colored lights, beyond which household proverbs
cease to be valid,

a ground sacred to the god of vertigo
and his cult of disarray: here jeopardy,
panic, shock, are dispensed in measured doses
by fool-proof engines.

As passive objects, packed tightly together
on Roller-Coaster or Ferris-Wheel, mortals
taste in their solid flesh the volitional
joys of a seraph.

Soon the Roundabout ends the clumsy conflict
of Right and Left: the riding mob melts into
one spinning sphere, the perfect shape performing
the perfect motion.

Mopped and mowed at, as their train worms through a tunnel,
by ancestral spooks, caressed by clammy cobwebs,
grinning initiates emerge into daylight
as tribal heroes.

Fun for Youth who knows his libertine spirit
is not a copy of Father's, but has yet to
learn that the tissues which lend it stamina,
like Mum's, are bourgeois.

Those with their wander-years behind them, who are rather
relieved that all routes of escape are spied on,
all hours of amusement counted, requiring
caution, agenda,

keep away: – to be found in coigns where, sitting
in silent synods, they play chess or cribbage,
games that call for patience, foresight, manoeuvre,
like war, like marriage.

June 1966

The Joy of Baking - Apple Buckle

This is my mother-in-law's recipe, and could also be called Apple Crisp. The original recipe calls for an egg, but I like it better without.

Preheat oven to 350º F.
Grease a 9 x 13 pan and put sliced apples on the bottom.

Mix together:
1 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
some cinnamon
some chopped walnuts
1/2 cup melted butter

Pour over apples and bake about 45 minutes until browned and apples are soft. Delicious!! You could top with whipped cream or ice cream, but we ate it plain and it was just fine.

Quote du jour/Charles Dudley Warner

In these golden latter August days, Nature has come to a serene equilibrium. Having flowered and fruited, she is enjoying herself. I can see how things are going: it is a down-hill business after this, but for the time being, it is like swinging in a hammock, - such a delicious air, such a graceful repose!
Charles Dudley Warner, Summer In A Garden

Van The Man

In the great, great movie, Groundhog Day, Bill Murray says:

I'm a god.
I'm not the God, I don't think.

In our household, "not the God" has become the phrase of highest praise, and we use it sparingly.

The man about whom we say it most often is Van Morrison, who is 62 years old today. If I had to choose just one musician to listen to throughout eternity, it would be Van. I believe someday, long, long after I have departed this earth, he will be taught in colleges along with Yeats and all the other great poets who have ever lived. His work encompasses all human emotion from the depths of melancholy to the heights of ecstasy. He writes love songs and loss songs and spiritual songs and nostalgic songs.

From On Hyndford Street, Hymns To The Silence, 1991:

Take me back, take me way, way, way back
On Hyndford Street
Where you could feel the silence at half past eleven
On long summer nights
As the wireless played Radio Luxembourg
And the voices whispered across Beechie River
In the quietness as we sank into restful slumber in the silence
And carried on dreaming, in God
And walks up Cherry Valley from North Road Bridge, railway line
On sunny summer afternoons
Picking apples from the side of the tracks
That spilled over from the gardens of the houses on Cyprus Avenue
Watching the moth catcher working the floodlights in the evenings
And meeting down by the pylons
Playing round Mrs. Kelly's lamp
Going out to Holywood on the bus
And walking from the end of the lines to the seaside
Stopping at Fusco's for ice cream
In the days before rock 'n' roll


From Sometimes We Cry, The Healing Game, 1997

Sometimes we know, sometimes we don't
Sometimes we give, sometimes we won't
Sometimes we're strong, sometimes we're wrong
Sometimes we cry

Sometimes it's bad when the going gets tough
When we look in the mirror and we want to give up
Sometimes we don't even think we'll try
Sometimes we cry

Well we're gonna have to sit down and think it right through
If we're only human what more can we do
The only thing to do is eat humble pie
Sometimes we cry


From Bright Side Of The Road, Into The Music, 1979

From the dark end of the street
To the bright side of the road
We'll be lovers once again on the
Bright side of the road

Little darlin', come with me
Won't you help me share my load
From the dark end of the street
To the bright side of the road

Into this life we're born
Baby sometimes we don't know why
And time seems to go by so fast
In the twinkling of an eye

Let's enjoy it while we can
Won't you help me sing my song
From the dark end of the street
To the bright side of the road


Though I own a lot of his albums, there are still some I need to complete my collection. Some people point to one or another as "the best." Some people speak of certain periods of his writing as "the best." To me, it is all of a piece. It is his "oeuvre." One album flows into another, one year flows into another.





I am a fan, not a scholar, but I could happily ensconce myself in a wood-paneled study for the rest of my life and "study" Van's work. There is so much there, so much symbolism, so much passion, so much of both the material and the spiritual world, that one could listen forever and never know it all. Just like Shakespeare or Yeats or Keats or Donne. He's in good company. And he is worthy.

The song playing is Star of the County Down from an album done with The Chieftains.

Thursday Time Away

I'm going to start taking Thursdays off from the computer. I'm not even going to turn it on. No looking things up, no emails, no reading of blogs or writing my own, no ordering. A totally disconnected day each week. I'm interested to see how this will feel. I love my computer. I love connecting with people and learning new things. I love reading about books and music. But too often I get "caught." I plan to do one thing that will take five minutes, but end up here an hour later. :<) You all know how that goes. So, I'll see you on Friday.

Evening Light in Late August

A Birthday Remembrance

Today my mother would have been 94. An impossible age for me to imagine. She died at 59. I think of all the birthdays she has missed. I think of all that these 34 years have brought. Her daughter's marriage, two grandchildren now in their twenties, and in the wider world: Watergate, Nixon's resignation, the end of the Vietnam War, videos and dvds and cds and cell phones. Her last vote was cast for George McGovern. When she died, most of her brothers and sisters, as well as my dad's, were living. Now just one of her sisters is still alive.

I think that had she lived, she would still be full of curiosity, she would still delight in young people, she'd be hoping for a Democratic win, she'd be baking bread, and playing solitaire, and probably watching Grey's Anatomy and Lost with such pleasure. We'd be exchanging book titles. My kids would spend tons of time with her. She'd be telling them stories of me when I was little, and about Tom and I when we first met, and what an advocate she was for long-haired hippies, and how important family is. She'd be going to communion at her Episcopal Church. She would delight in women ministers.

This is her high school graduation picture when she was 16 (!!) years old. They started young in those days. By the time she was 20 she was a registered nurse. I wish she were around to tell me about the forties on the home front. And how she and my father met. Oh, I have a million unanswered questions and a sadness in my heart that never goes away.