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Garden Progress

The garden, microcosm of the world that it is, continues to offer lessons in joy, in patience, in fortitude, in failure, in folly, and in grace. The other morning, after I mowed my rather small patch of lawn, I picked a handful of blueberries and sat on the steps admiring my handiwork with self-satisfied contentment.

But of course all is not as it seems. There are far more planting beds, intentionally so, that patches of lawn, and most of those areas remain filled with weeds, some of those extensive weedy patches in the front yard, the more public space of the house. It struck me that my neighbors may not be as contented with my manicured lawn but overgrown weedy beds as am I. Oddly enough I find myself unconcerned, marveling far more at this general state of acceptance of my own limitations, than at any concern over other people’s opinions. It has not always been so.

Despite initial intentions the planned order of work, from public to private, from street to back, exactly the opposite has occurred. In this rocky time in the world my imperative has instead been to create sanctuary. This too is a part of a long process, but I have created a space where I love to sit, where nothing is finished but everything is filled with potential, where I can sit and watch the birds, the bunnies, occasionally if I am very lucky a fox, or perhaps merely a cat or my grand-puppy hiding in the long grass.

Above is the planting bed at the base of the deck, to the left in the photo above it. It took me a good while to dig that up and plant it, but the plants have been in a couple of weeks now, and look like they are establishing themselves. There are a few stakes where designated plants were not available. Now that the ground is ready, these have been ordered for fall planting.

Furnishings remain unsettled and in flux. A dining table has been ordered but has not arrived. In the meantime I am not really holding dinner parties, and chairs remain scattered about for social-distancing. Eventually, I would like these beds to be mostly perennials, mostly for my own ease, but it is good to stick some annuals in here and there, as spaces evolve, grow, change.

Across the walkway is the bed designated #2. I have dug up and planted about half that bed, as seen here in a photo actually taken through the kitchen window. You see the undug, unplanted portion of that bed in the second photo from the top, on the right. Plants have been ordered for the rest of this bed, which means more digging is required to prep the soil for their arrival, but I am mostly done with planting until October. There is time and as my strength has grown so has my confidence that this bed will be ready when the time comes.

Also from the deck, I am looking across the driveway to the vegetable garden, which is thriving. There is a small planting of euphorbia nowthowlee at the end of bed 3, where the walk meets the driveway. I misjudged that planting. I have seven plants, 14 more are on their way which will fill that small quarter circle at the end of that bed, next to the path. I would like a similar patch on the other side of that walk, but due to availability that cannot happen this year. The delay gives me time to plan, even as I can acknowledge that plans are tenuous, at best.

The vegetable garden, though thriving, is a continuing lesson in munificence, in failure, and in hidden joys. The spring crops are almost done, the summer crops just beginning. There are lots of tomatoes. The eggplant have begun to set fruit.

I can probably still put some summer crops in as the first frost really won’t be until October. Even if they don’t fully yield, this was always an experimental year, and my attentions have been scattered between various projects. The point is to take joy in what works, and simply accept the rest. The peppers are heavily laden. I harvested my first shishito peppers yesterday and blistered them to serve alongside my eggs for breakfast. In retrospect I should have planted more peppers. My adventures with sauerkraut have me dreaming of condiment-making and chile-fermentation. Next year.

I suppose now we should walk around toward the front.

This small bed at the base of the circle is doing well: geranium max frei, and Siberian iris. A few of the iris died before the sprinkler system got connected, and there was a long period where I wondered if any would survive. That bed was rocky and the clay more packed than I would have hoped, I had trouble digging it up last fall when I planted it, but I am stronger now. It seems worth the possibility of redigging and replanting it when the bulbs come in during the fall. But that decision does not need to be made now.

The Japanese maple and the small bed around it that were not destroyed are doing well, although there a few plants that need moving, and as you see, an area to be dug and planted.

Much of the front remains a place in waiting. These shrubs are doing well, although the blueberries (center of the photo) were spaced far too widely and need to be dug and repositioned. Given the amount of rock and difficulty I had digging and filling in a gap in the boxwood border, this may be a rather time-consuming task. I had been waiting until the blueberries finished fruiting, the season began in early June and the late blueberries are just ripening now, but am now thinking I should just wait until fall, until shrubs are dormant and the weather is kinder to both plant and gardener. In this case I should just weed and mulch to make the bed look neater and forget about it. Laziness prevented me from doing this earlier; I was loath to put energy into mulching a bed I was about to dig up. Surprisingly enough, mulching is harder on my back than actual digging.

Across the driveway you see little lime hydrangeas starting to come into bloom. They too are in the wrong place, and will have to be moved, another tedious fall task, after which I can finally start designing the front beds and hopefully finish planting them in 2021.

I hope the hardscaping implies the intentionality of it all. But I am not really bothered by the mix of manicured lawn and unruly weeds. The speck of orange flowers in the photo above is a daylily, the one seen at the top of this post. It is in temporary housing in a pot, and will be planted just outside the fence, near the post, once it has finished blooming. No point in moving it now, I will just lose the remaining blooms.

I don’t expect to see further visible progress in the garden this year. I will continue to dig beds so that they are ready to plant when the time comes. Aside from what those euphorbia and a few transplants here and there, fall bulbs and a few perennials, nothing else will be purchased or ordered until its home is ready and waiting, which means planting will, in all likelihood, be put off until 2021. But gardens, like lives, are things that evolve over time.

I hope you have enjoyed this visit to my work in progress. Some of these photos have appeared on my instagram feed, a site that feels somehow more suited to my current state of contentment with the slow, the small, the quotidian, a flower here and there. But the odd photo will appear here as well, depending on how things evolve, although perhaps not another garden tour for some time.

June 27, 2020
Happy In the Kitchen

It seems I have been a little too much in my head of late, and so I am going to concentrate on the more quotidian side of things for a bit. Today I am in the kitchen.

Sunday I did a lot of work in the garden, Monday I mostly read and puttered. I had a potato, two leftover roasted beets, and the end of the last corned beef, so I made red flannel hash. I also had a couple of fennel bulbs so I roasted those and made fennel pesto with the feathery green leaves. I had a dollop of the pesto for breakfast with my eggs and hash.

This was the second corned beef, the one I dry-brined, and my opinion is softening over time. See my initial comparison here. As I mentioned in that post, I liked that second corned beef thinly sliced and browned in a skillet, much like a corned-beef version of bacon, but I did not like it as much on its own. It kept reminding me of pastrami, and I thought I would reserve that technique for the next time I made pastrami. Now I am not quite so sure. The dry-brined corned beef definitely makes a better hash, and my initial complaints may have been more about the cooking, not the brining itself. Corned beef hash continues to be my favorite use for corned beef.

Yesterday I finally started the sauerkraut. I did something a little different than the way I have done it in the past. I sliced the cabbage into ribbons rather than shredding it. I have found that I like the toothsomeness of pieces of cabbage in kimchi, and I occasionally get annoyed with the fine threads of shredded cabbage in a traditional sauerkraut. So I decided to try slicing rather than shredding the cabbage.

Sauerkraut and kimchi are in many ways simply variations on a theme. Sandro Katz uses the term “kraut-chi” for the ferments he makes, a hybrid between the two versions. I like the idea of this term because it feels less constraining to me, and in the end, all ferments, like all cooks, are unique. I may simplify the term in my own mind to simply “chi”, and in this case I am making a simple cabbage chi, in the manner of sauerkraut. I am not flavoring this chi with caraway, or peppers or in any of the many ways sauerkraut can be flavored, just simple fermented cabbage in its own glory.

After slicing the cabbage, I began brining process, which basically involves using salt to pull the liquid out of the cabbage and begin the ferment. You slice or shred the cabbage, add salt, I used 2% by weight, and then massage or pound the salt into the cabbage. I had too much cabbage to fit in one bowl, 2.7 kg, so I needed two bowls. The work of massaging the cabbage was harder with thicker pieces, and my arthritis acted up. Since I started the sauerkraut in the evening, after dinner, I covered the bowls and left them on the counter overnight.

I wasn’t certain that I had massaged the cabbage forcefully enough. I had brine, but it felt like I needed to massage the cabbage a bit more, so I did. The contents of the two bowls now fit into one bowl, which is the top picture you see. The cabbage will sit in its brine for a total of 24 hours before I pack into a crock or jars for fermentation.

Once the bowls are free, I can start the kimchi. For this batch I am using David Chang’s version from Momofuku. This was my second-favorite version overall from my initial kimchi exploration in 2016. Chang writes that this is a kimchi best eaten when it is young, when it is still in its “prickly, sparkly” stage, and I agree. Chang specifies that the kimchi is fermented in the refrigerator, to extend its youth. This may be my favorite young kimchi, but it does not age well. It is markedly different from my favorite kimchi, the red cabbage kimchi I wrote about making here, from Aki Kamozawa and Alexander Talbot’s cookbook, Ideas in Food. That kimchi is good young, when it is funky and spicy; it grows increasingly layered in flavor through middle age, and at 2 years it has a soft, yet still complex roundness that reminds me of a fine old wine. I haven’t yet created a napa cabbage chi that hits all those markers, but I will continue to work on it. In the meantime, I love Chang’s version and consider it essential. Once I have it in house, I can once again start pursuing the idea of the perfect napa cabbage chi.

June 24, 2020
Fermentation Time

It is cabbage season in East Tennessee.

I did not plant cabbage. Cabbages are space hogs. Cabbage is readily available from local farmers. The goal was never self-sufficiency.

The green cabbage was a planned farmer’s market purchase. Napa was a surprise, and a pleasant one at that. Sauerkraut and kimchi are the order of the week.

I made my own kimchi before I ever made sauerkraut. Initially, I made my own kimchi because much commercially available kimchi contains either soy sauce, or other gluten-containing ingredients and if I wanted kimchi I had no alternative. I first wrote about making kimchi in this post, in 2016. I ended up loving kimchi more than I imagined, ended up loving the process of fermentation, and eventually decided to try my own sauerkraut as well.

So in a way the garden was about having something I wanted and needing to make it myself, it was never about self-sufficiency. Nor really is it about independence, but rather about dependence, about connecting my life to the world beneath my feet and the air I breathe. The plan was to grow some things, but also to depend on local farmers for some things. It is about interdependence, about relationship. Fermentation too has reminded me that life depends on relationship, relationship to each other, relationship to the earth, relationship to the seasons, and processes and nourishment that this earth provides us, and also then about the cycle of life and the relationship between life and decay.

There is a myth in this country, in this society, that we are independent and self-determinant, that we can pull ourselves “up by our bootstraps” and make it on our own. But of course we can’t. We may be privileged beneficiaries of a system that allows us to perpetuate this belief. We may have invented many wonderful things that have allowed us to believe that our fate is not tied to the fate of this earth and its own cycle of life. We may think we can reduce life and food and even success to simple formulae, but in the end all of these schemes miss the essential transformation of community, of the community of elements, and minerals, and life that make up our bodies, our environments, our societies and ultimately that feed our soul.

Perhaps this time-out the world has been going through has only strengthened my already burgeoning understanding that we are really not separate from the cycles of this planet which gives us life, despite our repeated determination to prove ourselves masters of our own fate. Perhaps, for me at least, it started with kimchi. Fermentation, a process of slow transformation, renewed my connection to earth, to food, to life, to death, and to community. Perhaps kimchi, and sauerkraut, remind me also of the way we are connected to each other, and that our relationships, and our need for them, are not instant things that can be manufactured, that they are a process of slow evolution. Perhaps social distancing has reminded me of these same slow processes, reminded me that we need community, but not shallow community. We need the deeper community of connection, the community that transforms and makes something bigger than the sum of its parts. Perhaps it reminded me that control is an illusion, and a drug. The problem with control is that someone always pulls the strings, and everyone else buys into the illusion and is controlled.

This week, perhaps I will simply take my chances with cabbage, with sauerkraut and kimchi. I can control my own actions, but I cannot control the outcome. With luck, and there is always an element of luck no matter how we tell ourselves otherwise, I will end up with something wonderful. Or I will start again.

June 22, 2020
Musings and Mutterings

I really wanted to write a quiet post this morning. I wanted to write a post about food, about quotidian domesticity. And yet here I am, again, all caught up in the emotional unrest of the world and unable to settle my words.

More deaths. More anger. More protests. Frankly I am all for anger and protests and even for the toppling of symbols of control, symbols of repression. As much as I abhor violence, I believe anger and revolt is a necessary step toward change. I am all for these things even though I myself am not a direct participant in the current wave of marches and rallies. Admittedly, I have been to a rally here and there in recent years, although not at this particular moment. When I was young I marched; some of my friends were gassed and others were arrested, but I realized early on that this is not where my gifts lie.

I suppose this is the nature of my true strugglee: an internal struggle with the value of my words; the relevance of of the intention and purposes of this blog; of what is said and what is not said. With blogs, as with everything in life, what is revealed is only part of the story. What is discussed on this blog is reflective of my own internal struggles, as to whether writing about gardens and dinner and internal musings are even relevant to the world, even as I increasingly think that as our industriousness has managed to distance us from hands-on involvement in meeting the physical needs of life, of having our hands in the earth, of preparing to nourish ourselves, we have made our lives easier but also more fragile. As we become increasingly disconnected we find it easier to disconnect from each other, harming ourselves and others without intent really, but out of blindness.

And so the question returns. Should I write about the frivolous? And who is to determine what is frivolous? I often refer to this blog as a frivolous thing, not because I believe it is true, but because of my own struggles between the importance of the small, the intimate, the quotidian and some culturally imposed belief that the only good work is work toward the greater good. I am part of a generation of women taught to turn our backs on the domestic. And yet I know that whatever other things I do in the world, it is this that brings focus, calmness, and even strength to carry on. These things inform my ability to do more, to give more, to be more. So then, why do I struggle so?

I haven’t yet read Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, and I therefore do not know how the author defines anti-racism. But I do know this: I know it is not enough to claim to not be racist, because all of us, every one of us that lives in this society is shaped and touched by racism; I know that every decision we make or fail to make matters; I know that for all we take pride in how the human race has evolved, how can we say we have evolved at all if we cannot address our recurrent inability to treat each other inhumanely? This all means that we all have much to learn, both about others but also about ourselves. It means we need to make active choices to do our part. It also means that each of us has a different part to play, and it does not further anything to judge one part as more important or effective than another. We are notoriously bad at judging the impact and repercussions of our own actions, and judging people by their gifts is not much less superficial and specious than judging people by the color of their skin. Our only strength is our humanity.

I don’t know where are all these mutterings are leading. I will probably write about something contentedly small in the next few days. I may yet struggle. These are not easy times. Thank you for attending to my mutterings.

June 15, 2020
The morning after…

I hosted book club last night on the patio with social distancing…

Eight chairs. I managed to scrounge up 8 small tables, although a few had to be dragged outside from the house — those have to go back inside at some point, preferably today, but at the moment I am stiff and my back is still a bit too sore to carry them up the stairs. Never mind. They can always reside in the garage a day or two if necessary.

This morning I am in no rush, instead settled into that contentedly contemplative zone, the morning-after-a-party zone, reflecting back on conversations and community. Every good party deserves a follow-up morning of happy repose. The furniture must be put back in place, the dishwashers emptied, the linens washed, but there is really no reason to rush. The morning after a party is almost as important as the party itself.

Not unusually, my back is a bit sore. Too much standing in the kitchen I suppose, plus carrying tables outside. Would I do anything differently? No. Not really. Cooking, even the simple preparation of salads, is both labor-intensive and meditative. And I seem to have needed this time to be reminded that the important things in life are not the fast things, not the busy things, but the slow and connected things, like sitting and talking for a few hours with friends, discussing a book, but also discussing the world and our lives and then coming back around to the book, the way reading is a conversation, and a conversation about reading also sparks other conversations, about the complicated web of human interaction.

Not a lot of dinner came from my garden. The fava beans that are in the rice salad. I pulled out the fava beans this week as the temperatures had gotten too hot and the plants were dying. Admittedly, I knew I had planted them a bit too late, but was happy to have about 2 cups of shelled and de-skinned beans, enough to share in a group of 8 only as part of a salad. Also an opportunity for contemplative anticipation as the beans were shelled, par-boiled, iced, skins removed, and only then allowed to finish cooking. This labor-intensive part of food preparation is something our ancestors knew as part of the inescapable rhythmic of life, not even that long ago even. I don’t expect the world to change, or anyone to agree with me even. But I wonder what we have lost and what we have sacrificed for convenience.

The herbs and micro greens were also from my garden. Chervil, oregano, parsley, cilantro, beet thinnings, fenugreek thinnings, mint. Well the mint was actually from a neighbor’s garden, but I dug some up to plant here as well. I’ve been using a lot of chervil this summer and wonder now how I lived without it. And the herb garden isn’t what I want it to be yet. The thyme is still too small; so too the sage. I haven’t even planted lovage yet: I intended to go to an herb nursery and buy plants, but I should have just bought seeds. Celery leaf would be good. So much potential. So much gratification to be found in pulling dinner out of the earth.

The fava beans were not the only plants pulled out of the garden this week. The sugar snaps as well. Hidden peas were harvested. I think I picked 2 cups or so of peas every day for 2 – 3 weeks, but I found another 6 or 8 cups of peas hiding in the vines, a few a little larger than ideal but still better than anything in any store. Peas were steamed and frozen. A dinner of stir-fried shrimp and peas materialized when I realized I had forgotten to pick bok choy before dark and was too tired to go back out in the garden.

The last peas became a salad with chervil, bok choy blossoms, and fennel pollen, shared with friends. You can see the yellow bok choy blossoms at the back of the photo of the herb and salad garden above. The scattered leaves of the bok choy are still edible, but those too will have to be pulled soon. In the meantime the sense of discovery remains. Before this year I never even thought about bok choy blossoms.

This morning I have been out in the garden watering. Three zones on the sprinkler system are not working so I must water by hand, which is not such a bad thing. I saw the first of the Costuloto Genovese tomatoes on the vine, a photo I also shared to Instagram. I admired the tuscan kale, which I have been eating two or three times a week for over a month now, and which looks almost like some kind of pre-historic artifact. It is all that remains in the bed that contained peas and faves, and will next hold cucumbers, bitter melon, and my first ever crop of belgian endive. I am wondering if I can plant endive beneath its tall structures, or if I should perhaps plant some other smaller, cutting green between its leaves. As usual there are no answers, only questions and opportunities for conversations and growth. This is as true with each other as it is with the earth. Life is an ongoing experiment its seems, here in the garden, with friends, in our societies and interactions. And there is no doubt that mine is a fortunate life, something not to be taken for granted.

June 13, 2020
We Choose…..

Sometimes I wonder if the biggest lesson to be learned from history is that we never learn the lessons of history…..

I have been settled here in the silences. This is not because I don’t care. I do care, care deeply. I honestly do not want to live in a world where something as meaningless as the color of one’s skin makes one a target. I do not want to live in a world where fear and hate rule the day. Honestly, I don’t believe anyone wants to live in such a world. I think we all simply want to love and be loved and to find something meaningful to do with our time on this earth.

And yet here I am. Here we are.

I watch in horror. I watch in hope. I watch beautifully outraged noise. I see violence: violence stemming from hatred; violence stemming from fear; violence stemming from the safety of power; violence stemming from oppression; violence stemming from despair. Violence is not only physical; violence arises out of our words, our thoughts, our refusal to show compassion.

But I also see hope. I see and hear voices of refusal, of non-acceptance. I see people feeding others. I see people arm in arm, masked out of compassion not fear — people standing for love. I see people standing together in shared outrage against oppression.

Violence and hope. Hope and violence. It seems there has been a lot of both of these in the world right now.

I don’t want to live in a world filled with riots, with protests, with strife, a world of fear and hatred and denial. And yet these are only the symptoms of a greater disease, a greater evil, one that most of us never think about, never asked for. I never wanted to live in a police state. I cannot bear to watch the news. History shows us that most people never ask to live in oppression, never ask for dictatorships, or police states. But I also see that, much as I never asked for this world, I have also been remiss in challenging the assumptions that created it. I am angry, saddened, appalled.

There is no neutrality in a life of humanity. Apathy is and of itself a form of violence, and a deceptive one at that. Apathy puts of a false front of calmness, but it actually does more than that, it colludes and allows hate, fear, oppression and violence to grow unfettered.

We are a cautious species, but also a daring one. I cannot deny that humans are driven by conflicting web of complex emotions: by fear, by a need for security, by creativity, by faith, by love. None of these things are passive. We choose. WE CHOOSE.

A song from South Pacific has been making the rounds, a bit of a resurgence of optimism, “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught”. It reminds us that fear, hatred, racism are drummed into us, often in subtle ways. But I can’t help but wonder if it is also only part of the story. We also have to be carefully taught to love, to care, to nurture. Yes, it comes naturally, but so does fear. We also have to be guided, “To Be Carefully Taught” how to overcome our own fears, how to vanquish selfishness and darkness, how caring is actually the stronger choice. We have to be taught that strength, true strength, is not about beating others down, either physically, financially, or emotionally. Strength is not about bullying. Strength is not about having more but about being more compassionate and caring.

I choose kindness and beauty. I don’t know where that choice will take me, where your choices will take you. But I hope for the future. I hope the next generations can overcome the selfishness and apathy of my own generation. I hope we can find the strength of caring, the care that is implicit in the word humanity.

June 8, 2020
Delaney and Baldwin, Redux

This morning I awoke to find my brain filled with images of this painting by Beauford Delaney:

Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald, 1968. Delaney had never met Fitzgerald, explaining that he “just painted something I saw in my mind” and that, exactly, is the beauty of this painting, one of a few paintings that has jostled about in my thoughts since I last saw the Delaney Exhibit in the Knoxville Museum of Art in February. I always thought I would go back and see more of that exhibit, felt that I only had only managed to just begin to plumb the depths, when everything shut down. I wrote about those first impressions in a blog post on February 22nd, over three months ago now. And then the world changed. I didn’t forget, but somehow in this whole slowing down, this worldwide introversion, my thoughts have meandered only slowly back into place.

As I wrote in February, one of the aspects of Delaney’s portraits was his abstraction and modernism, and his use of light and color to explore something deeper than just the image of a person. Delaney’s portraits of Baldwin’s for example explore human relationship and each painting feels simultaneously like a complete conversation but also a part of an ongoing and open-ended relationship. This is also what I see captured in this portrait of Fitzgerald, although it is admittedly difficult to get the sense of the painting itself from a photographic image.

At the time, I experimented with attempting to take pictures of the physicality of the paint, the brushstrokes, the layers, the addition and subtraction of color. I am not convinced that it was successful, but the images remind me of the sense of rhythm that seemed to emanate from the painting, as if Delaney had managed to visually render something essential about music. Yes, one sees Fitzgerald’s face in the center, but not clearly, more of a memory of the person as it is interwoven with her music. I heard the music as soon as I saw the painting, felt its harmonic vibration, felt Fitzgerald even before I knew the subject matter — a visual representation of Jazz and Blues, melody and harmony, tragedy and joy. This is the thing we cannot capture, cannot explain, and the reason art is so elemental, universal, and necessary to human experience. It has always been so.

Admittedly. I don’t exactly get that sense from these photos. They serve as reminders, visual cues that my brain can link to specific experiences. But that is much the way memory and experience work. The more literate we are, the more we experience art, music, literature, philosophy, science, the more we explore the complex emotional and physical makeup of humanity, the more we are able to see and experience the world with depth and consideration and even conscience. Literacy is more than book-learning. The more we know, the more we experience, the more we can see that the seeming contradictions that define our human experiences aren’t always so much oppositional as they are representative of our inability to express complexity in a straightforward manner. These things all speak to very real aspects of our lives and our beings; they speak to expereiences and feelings that we cannot easily put into words, but which are no less valid, if not more so, than that which is easily explained away.

Delaney has also resurfaced in my thoughts this week because Marble City Opera is hosting a watch party tomorrow night, Friday May 29th, at 7PM on Facebook live where they are showing Shadowlight, an opera by Larry Delinger and Emily Anderson about Beauford Delaney, which premiered here in February. Above is a preview, and I hope you will be enchanted and encouraged to watch with me.

I saw the opening night performance of Shadowlight, and it was one of the most beautiful and emotionally powerful opera experiences I can currently recall. Everything seemed to come together: Anderson’s poetic libretto, Delinger’s score, alternating between dissonance and soothing jazz riffs, the exploration of art and madness as Delaney, confined to St. Anne’s Hospital in Paris, sings of longing, of light, but also of lifelong struggles with internal demons and schizophrenia. Delaney’s random, sometimes erratic and jerked movements, sometimes alternating between softness and turmoil are offset by the sparely geometric and angular movements of the chorus, a spareness that is often emphasized by the angles created by images of paintings projected onto the set, highlighting and obscuring facial features. Order, erraticism, tragedy and love, yes, love, in James Baldwin’s words as he delivers the eulogy for his friend. The magic of this piece was how it captured and transmitted emotion, of love, of art, even of madness, in a way that made it all palpably real. One left stunned, perhaps transformed. I never reviewed this piece, feeling emotionally overwhelmed until well after my thoughts had settled into other grooves.

The actual experience of this performance felt like audience and artists were all of a piece, much the same way I feel that Delaney’s art vibrates, blurring the lines between music, art, literature, and experience. I do not think I was the only person in that audience who felt emotionally pulled into the vortex of that experience. I also do not believe the experience of the video will carry that same sense of envelopment, but I do believe it will still be a powerful experience, and I am highly looking forward to it. I hope you will join me.,

May 28, 2020
A Miscellany

Although I seem to have no difficulty keeping myself busy and entertained, I continue to struggle with blogging. In fact I also struggle with keeping up with social media and that seems odd because of the social aspect and the fact that I am once again struggling with balance, albeit in a very different setting than my previous struggles. It seems that once I struggled with having enough creative time, alone time. I admitted to myself that I said yes to too many things, that it was time to let go of that youthful and erroneous idea, that I could only be liked if I was useful. I admitted to myself that sometimes I went out too often, that I was avoiding being home alone, especially at night.

Would that simply admitting to one’s self-perceived failings in an insecurities, to one’s loneliness even, could be enough to turn the world around. It seems like there is always something new to learn, something new to overcome. I do not believe that this life, this physical world and life that we all share is the be all and end all. Often it seems like a proving ground, a place where we get to be tested, to spread our wings, to find out who we really are.

I struggle with the idea that if I am not going somewhere, doing something, hopefully something interesting I have nothing to say. Perhaps then, I continue to struggle with the question of what is a worthwhile life.

On the one hand, I am content to putter about here at home, content for the most part to not wander far. I have been cooking, knitting, sewing, gardening, reading. I have been watching television. I have walked around my neighborhood. I sit and watch the birds in the yard. I love my field of long grass, in back, where the slope is too steep for me to mow easily, where birds and bunnies cavort and play, and where my grand-puppy loves to collapse when his family brings him over for a walk. I mostly walk in my own neighborhood, and am oddly content to see the changes in the same space, day after day. When Tikka loved to walk for miles every day we travelled around, walked the many parks around Knoxville, and part of me wishes to do that again, wonders if perhaps I should go to the Smokies, but my focus has always been on the small, the everyday. I would go if I had someone to go with, but for myself I am oddly content with wherever I can get on my own power.

I am reading, a lot, news and magazines, which I have been gradually shifting from paper to digital formats. I don’t want to be drowning in paper. But books also. I am currently reading the third volume of The Last Lion, William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, as finished by Paul Reid, as well as Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, which I am rereading for book club. I am thoroughly enjoying it; perhaps enjoying it more than I did with that first reading. But I tend to think of reading as an active intellectual pursuit, a conversation, and in a way a relationship that builds between the words and the reader, the author and the reader, not so much a relationship of people, but of ideas and awareness.

The birds get most of the blueberries, but I am not surprised at that. The crop is small this first year, and the bushes are too widely spaced, an issue that still has to be addressed. I do manage to grab a small handful of sugar snap peas every time I walk through the garden. None have made it in to the dinner table, but several handfuls of peas are consumed every day. I am reminded of a few essential truths: the sweetness of a pea freshly plucked, the subtle delicate life of freshly harvested lettuce, berries warmed in the sun, hands in the dirt, flowers you have grown yourself.

Some parts of the garden are doing well although there are a few failures. My bloody dock never germinated. I admit that I am moving slowly. I can only manage a couple of hours of garden work a day, and alas, in this stage of building and digging, progress sometimes seems slow. I started out all gung-ho in the vegetable garden, but then lost momentum as the spring remained chill. There are gaps in my planting. But I see little pockets of progress and they make me happy.

I made cilantro pesto yesterday and froze it in 2-tablespoon blocks for use later in the season. This was from the first planting, which is still going strong. I am about to put in the third cilantro planting, and i want some of the fleshy roots, but never having grown cilantro for the roots, I see that I will have to allow a patch to grow old and woody, to flower. Cilantro, when picked frequently for its tender green leaves, never develops a substantial foundation of thick roots. Once again, always learning.

I see I haven’t answered any of my questions, especially not my question of blogging. Does writing come out of some sense of discontent, of a need to express something intangible. What about comfort? Does one need to write when one is content, like Dash above, to stop and simply lie in the long grass? And does it matter? Perhaps there is time for all these things in this world. And then again, perhaps times of contentment, times of not rushing about can yield their own surprises. Only time will tell.

May 26, 2020
Kitchen Chronicles

Yesterday was stove cleaning day. Never anyone’s favorite task, but happily for me, this new stove is one of the easiest stoves to clean I have ever owned. This is also true for the Stove Vent. Everything pops out, everything is easily washable, and although the tasks still takes time, I find I can make fewer excuses to avoid it.

It also helps that the new farm sink is large enough that I can submerge the burner grates. The sink is divided, but the divider is only half-height, so there is plenty of room for large things when needed.

Soak. Wash. Dry. Replace.

Start the next round (stove vent panels) (oven racks and panels where needed). The whole process still takes me much of a day, admittedly because I take breaks between stages. I am learning to accept that I can no longer stand for a full day without significant breaks. But acceptance is one of life’s major lessons, and one with which many of us struggle.

Today I made biscuits. Not the best biscuits I have ever made, but still tender and flaky and good, especially considering they are the first biscuits I have made in what 13 years? 15 years?

When I was in college, I spent two summers living with my maternal grandparents in Pasadena Texas. The summer job opportunities were better in metropolitan Houston than in Stephenville, especially considering that I got out of school at the end of May, two weeks later than most Texas universities. One of the conditions of my residency was that I get up and make the biscuits for my grandpa before going to work in the morning. I got pretty good at biscuit making. Since I love biscuits, and George enjoyed biscuits, I continued making them for a long time.

One thing I did learn over the years is that biscuits can be frozen. Although my grandparents may have made fresh biscuits every day, we rarely ate more than a biscuit or two at a time, and although I grew up with cold biscuit sandwiches, George never quite adapted. But I learned that if you freeze the just cut biscuits on a tray for 30 minutes, you can then toss them in a container or freezer bag, and bake them at will from frozen, and although they do take a few more minutes to cook, the advantage of having a bag of biscuits (like having pie crust, or cookies, or scones) in the freezer ready to bake is a treat. So I made the biscuits but only baked a couple for my breakfast, placing the rest in the freezer.

It wasn’t celiac that stopped my biscuit baking, although admittedly that did slow me down. I had a lifetime of expectation to overcome, and a lifetime of baking skills to recalibrate. Gluten-free doughs simply are different than wheaten doughs. But I actually stopped making biscuits when George had cancer and the nutritionist that worked with him during chemotherapy put him on a very low carb diet. Somehow we never fully went back.

But during this time of sheltering at home, and less social contact, perhaps I have been craving carbs a little more, and perhaps I am trying to ameliorate my tendency to go through carb-binges followed by fasts. This week, talking to my family about their recent adventures in biscuit-making, and then later with a friend about scones, I realized I wanted to make biscuits. And so I did.

The experiment was only a partial success, which is not surprising. I made baking powder biscuits, the basic kind I started with oh so many years ago. The flavor was good, they are tender and flaky, but they could have risen more, and I have not quite figured out temperature regulation and baking on my new stove, even though I have lived in this house almost a year now. Well, I have cooked; I have roasted; I have braised; but I haven’t really baked. The learning curve continues.

Several things could have gone wrong. I believe I picked a good GF blend. Although I made my own years ago, I have since experimented with several packaged gluten-free flour blends and I used one I think would yield good biscuit results. Biscuit results vary even with wheat flour, and although I am a Texan rather than a “true” southerner, I prefer a biscuit made with softer, lower-protein winter wheat, or its gluten-free equivalent. I would never make a biscuit with bread flour, whatever the components of that bread flour might be.

My baking powder could also be old. The can was unopened, but it is possible I bought it soon after I moved in. I don’t know if baking powder keeps as long as it is vacuum-sealed, only that once you open it it fades quickly. I also think I overworked the first part, where one works the fat into the flour. I did not over-mix once I added the liquid, or overwork the folding and turning, but that first part may have been critical. The oven was too hot, the biscuits cooked too quickly, and I am certain this also had an effect.

But overall they were good biscuits and I am looking forward to the challenge of refreshing old skills and perfecting technique. To me this is like a game.

May 15, 2020
A Walk Through the Garden — Very Much in Progress

I thought I would walk through the yard today. Not all the photos are lovely, but as I’ve been occasionally been posting pictures of pretty flowers, I also want to document that this is very much a work in progress, with far more that is undone than in any way ‘finished’. Not that I believe a garden is ever finished. This one is, however, still very rough.

Walking out the front door, looking across the driveway to the front circle. Those tall things behind the wall are very much weeds, in a future flower bed that has not yet been designed, much less prepped.

But in front of the wall, the ‘max frei’ geraniums are starting to bloom, even though they are still quite small. It has been a cool spring. I don’t yet know how the Siberian iris behind the geraniums will fare, but at least they are up, and there is promise for the future.

To my right (east) is the Japanese maple (previously posted to instagram) and more landscaping in waiting.

Walking toward the back we see the tomatoes, which i staked the other day. A deer had made a romp through the garden — I could see the deer prints in the soft soil — and had broken one of the tomatoes, a costoluto genovese tomato I cannot easily replace. I wrapped it and hope it wills survive.

The peas and favas are finally blossoming. I hope not to late. It has been a long cool spring, but this feels more like Hudson Valley timing than Tennessee, and I hope the heat will not set in too soon, giving these cool weather crops a bit of a chance. It could just be that I got them in too late, and the shade came out too early in their development. But then, I have known all along that this, my first vegetable garden in decades, and the first one in Tennessee, is a bit of an experiment.

I am starting to plan, dig, and prep the back beds. There are a few dwarf sedum in the front bed along the driveway. They will spread. I planted bloody dock seeds which have not yet sprouted. I wonder if they will, or if I have to start over. Still much to clear, but the bunnies (and the cat) love to hide in the weeds. And so far the bunnies prefer nibbling on the weeds over my veggie garden, so I am loath to uproot their hiding and dining spots.

First bloom on the fringe tree.

Various things have been transplanted to this bed by my small back patio. So far, they seem to be settling in, but only time will really tell.

The peonies are blooming profusely in my secret garden behind the garage. I decided to keep this cozy space and transplant them after bloom, probably after the blueberries bear fruit as well, as they will go up in that bed, where everything needs to be dug up and rearranged, as the landscape crew could obviously not follow a planting diagram and I was not here when they showed up to do the planting. Never hire a landscaping crew who sneaks in and plants when one is away. (although admittedly that was not my intention)

And there is Moises, walking along the eastern pathway. The oak leaf hydrangea has leafed out, the established hellebores are doing well, and there are plenty of areas that were dug up and need to be replanted. Much space for dreams and imagining along with getting hands dirty.

May 12, 2020