O, Canada!

Little Brother Is watching you!

2011-07-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

You see that photo? That's the front yard of Julie Bass, resident of Oak Park, MI. She might end up in jail, and you're looking at the evidence right there: yes, those are VEGETABLES growing in her front yard. The nerve of some people!

I've heard of towns not wanting nuclear waste sites or prisons or halfway houses in their backyards, but making veggies in the front yard verboten? Are you kidding me? Town officials want her to rip out the garden and replace it with something "suitable" such as grass, which is of course a never-ending chore to maintain, not to mention the terrible waste of water required to keep a lawn green.

There's no down-side to growing your own, whether in the North 40 or curbside. Food gardens can be every bit as beautiful as any other kind of landscaping, but they transcend plants chosen only for their pretty faces. They provide healthy, nontoxic food for the family, they make the best possible use of natural resources such as water and sunshine, and they are living classrooms for neighborhood kids who think that all food comes shrink-wrapped from the grocery store. I'm sure Julie's garden provides a great spot to sit down and share some friendly conversation . . . especially since her plight and her plot have gone viral after Big Brother--or considering the size of Oak Park, Little Brother--tried to shut her down.

Meanwhile, in another small town on the opposite side of the country, a woman is arrested for speaking lawfully at a city council meeting in Quartzsite, Arizona. Watch the video on youtube, and you'll hear the mayor in the background, insisting that the woman be allowed to speak her mind under her First Amendment protections.

Still, the council members--afraid of what the woman is about to say--demand that she be shut up by two police officers standing guard. Before putting their hands on her to arrest her, a policewoman covers the microphone with her hand. It's clear: the woman's words are more dangerous than the woman herself.

C'mon, Small Town America, wise up! You can't get away with stuff like this in the era of youtube, Facebook, and Twitter, which makes us all neighbors in one gigantic small town. We're watching you like you're watching the tomatoes lazily ripening in the Michigan sun. We perk up and pay closer attention as soon as a cop's hand closes over a microphone.

The writer Robert Heinlein got it right when he observed that "the human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire." I'm standing up for freedom, the First Amendment . . . and broccoli for all.

These ham-handed measures always fail. In Quartzsite, the Police Chief is finally under investigation for accusations of felonious actions. In Oak Park, "neighbors" from across the country and beyond are coming to Julie Bass's aid. People are planting Victory gardens to show their solidarity. Yes, in their front yards. This is the stuff urban heroes are made of. The Oak Park administrators will be eating crow while Julie enjoys the far more nutritious and satisfying fruits of her labor.

It's time for small towns like these to grow up and behave themselves.

Dinner will be served in the garden

2011-07-06T20:48:00.000-07:00

Our garden got off to a slow start this year with a month and a half of rain and temperatures cold enough that we had fires in the fireplace to read by on many evenings. Now the real summer weather seems to have set in, and the garden is happily sunbathing. Cherries are blushing on the tree, tiny zucchini are forming from their flamboyant blossoms, and we can't keep up with the strawberries. (More on those rascals in another post.) The black currants are ripening this week in the greatest profusion we have yet seen. With the hot weather comes the hot, steamy, neverending work of jam-making.

One of our garden experiments this year is garlic, which is surprisingly easy to grow. It gets planted in the fall, and over the winter it grows tall plants that look just like onions. Then as it gets close to being ready to harvest, it grows elegantly twisting stems and seedheads called scapes. We first saw them last summer at a farmers market and brought some home to try in soups and omelets. This year we have our own. It seemed as if they would never develop as we watched as patiently as we could. Then suddenly there they were, serpentine and surrealistic.

Last night they were ready to cut. It's important to cut them soon enough to allow the plant to redirect its energy into forming the garlic bulb and to make sure they're tender enough to cook with. We'd been looking forward to using them for pesto, and the results were well worth the wait. The garden served us dinner tonight: garlic scape pesto over pasta and a salad made from our buttercrunch lettuce, strawberries, and green onions. All the work and the sweat and the dirt of gardening are worth it when you bite into something you've grown for yourself. Suddenly you realize that lettuce actually does have flavor--it's not just a receptacle for salad dressing.

The pesto is all the more delicious because it is a once a year event. It is reason enough to grow garlic, and it's super nutritious. I'm already looking forward to next year's batch!

Garlic Scape Pesto

1/4 cup walnuts
a dozen garlic scapes, roughly chopped
1/4 cup olive oil (approximate)
3 tablespoons Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, grated
salt and pepper
water to smooth out if needed

In a food processor pulse walnuts until finely chopped but not powder. Add scapes and pulse until combined, scrape down the sides and pulse again. With food processor going, stream in olive oil until you have a really thick consistency. Add cheese, and pulse to combine. Taste and adjust with salt and pepper.

Toss with whole wheat pasta and chopped fresh tomatoes.

O, Salmo!

2011-06-30T14:36:00.000-07:00

Well, there's good news and bad news about Canada Day. The bad news is that it marks the halfway point of the swiftly fleeing summer. The good news is that it means we'll be headed to Salmo tomorrow morning for one of the best small-town celebrations of anything anywhere.

It starts with breakfast at the funky, artsy Dragonfly Cafe. They make fantastic veggie breakfast burritos, and their walls are adorned with beautiful photographs and paintings for sale. Their bakery case offers one luscious treat after another, and some of them are even healthful.

Then we'll make our way downtown (one block away) to stake out a good spot for the parade. Every emergency vehicle in the area will be decorated for the parade, and every fireman and EMT has a bag of candy to toss out to children along the route. The Girl Guides will march, the Shriners will haul their clown cars up from Washington, and there might even be a llama again this year. It's a noisy and joyous parade full of civic pride. We'll get a rare glimpse of overt Canadian patriotism which--like still waters--runs deep and wide.

After the parade we'll meander down to the park (another block or two away) for the homemade pie sale that benefits the Salmo Food Bank. All year long, volunteers pick and process fruit, roll out crusts, and bake pies for the Canada Day sale. For meat-eaters, it's the perfect follow-up to the annual barbeque. We'll wander around looking at floats and petting horses fresh from the parade. There are always a few vendors with interesting wares--one year I bought a flying cow whirligig to hang on our balcony.

Across the street there's a car show with all sorts of audacious antique cars and hot rods.

But the best event of all is the used book sale sponsored by the Friends of the Salmo Library. There are tables and tables of books--really GOOD books--and magazines to browse with boxes of books stashed under the tables to replenish the offerings as needed. It's my best source of obscure Canadian literature, and I always come home with treasures. We've accumulated so many in the past five years that we're thinking of boxing them up and sneaking them back under the sale tables this year.

Too bad Will and Kate won't be in Salmo tomorrow. They're missing the best Canada Day celebration going.

Ayn Rand's unpardonable sins

2011-06-25T17:34:00.000-07:00

There's an old saying that goes, "There's nothing worse than a reformed prostitute." It means that the worst sinners often turn into the worst zealots when they get religion, driving everyone else crazy with their newfound sanctimony.

When I think of this saying, I think of Ayn Rand. I'll admit right up front that I will never forgive Ayn Rand for the worst six weeks of my high school career when my sophomore English class was forced to read Atlas Shrugged--all 1200 pages of it. I can't think of any 1200-page book that makes compelling reading for high school sophomores, but Atlas Shrugged is nothing more than aversion therapy: Page after page of a former communist harlot gushing over the sheer beauty of selfish, predatory capitalism. Spare me.

It's the worst kind of fiction there is where tired old political ideas get covered in human skin and walk around for 1200 pages (did I already mention it was a very long book?) spouting off about how wonderful they are. It raises didacticism to a capital offense. It sucks the very joy out of a person's life to sit through mind-numbing class discussion as if there were any depth or breadth to these cardboard characters.

Not for a moment did I think she had a point. I had two guiding principles already firmly established by that tender age. I was growing up in the same Christian denomination that ordained Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.--the gospel that spawned and sustained his liberation theology (back before those turned into dirty words). It was a gospel that respected the poor (they will be first in the end, not having to pass through the eye of a needle to enter the Pearly Gates), commanded us to love and care for each other, and warned us against storing up treasure and losing our souls. It was, if you will, the most divine kind of socialism I know.

The second guiding principle I brought to English class was the product of growing up with many Jewish peers. As they began to learn to read the Torah in Hebrew, they were encouraged to test every bit of scripture against their own sense of reason. Now that was another kind of miracle to me because my church demanded unquestioning faith.

Every page of Atlas Shrugged clashed against those two principles. I don't think I knew the term "fascism" then, but I recognized it when I saw it. To swallow what Rand was preaching, one has to believe two things: (1) There is no such thing as a human soul, and (2) the accumulation of material, wealth, and power is the noblest goal of a brief human life. I knew even then that she was some sort of overzealous novice in the Temple of Capitalism. As I recall, Jesus had something to say about the merchants and moneylenders in the temple just before he scattered their wares and threw them out.

I hear there is a Florida summer camp for children that seeks to indoctrinate them in the ideas of Rand AND the teachings of Christ. Surely it is called Camp Oxymoron. That's not just cognitive dissonance--that's child abuse.

I ought to know: I am an Ayn Rand survivor.

A train wreck called Merlin

2011-06-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

Inside me there is a crazy cat lady yearning to adopt. I have a free-floating failure of impulse control when it comes to homeless animals, no doubt a carryover from the succession of stray animals my father brought home when I was a child. They'd be with us just long enough for us to get attached, and then my mother would find yet another sunny farm where they'd have butterflies to chase and lots of room to run free. Ad infinitum.

So I am driven by this animal animus, which is why we have six cats--five of them rescues. It's crazy considering we have to drag them across the border a couple of times a year, but there it is. And it's a lifetime commitment, as far as I'm concerned. Childhood was not lost on me.

Which brings me to an irrational impulse to look up "Scottish Fold" on Phoenix Craig's List a few years ago. Across the Valley, a family was desperate to place their three elderly cats because they were losing their home to foreclosure and moving in with relatives in another city. One of the cats--Merlin--was a Scottish Fold, whose life story was eerily similar to the first Scottish Fold I ever rescued: Merlin had been abandoned in a Tucson rental ten years earlier, and his description sounded a lot like the Fold I had loved and lost.

My daughters went with me to meet Merlin and his family. I couldn't speak when I first saw him because he brought back the grief of losing my first Fold, Laddie. So I listened instead to the story of this family who'd done everything right but still fallen victim to the economic crash. They had a toddler and an infant, and he had lost his job as a financial adviser. Her job couldn't sustain them. They had to move, and the cats just couldn't go with them.

Merlin was the soul of composure in the midst of this drama as he stretched out on the cool white tile of the kitchen and watched us in that way cats have of pretending not to notice or care. I felt it was only fair to mention that if Merlin came to live with us, he'd have to travel back and forth to Canada every year. Clearly, he was old and a little fragile.

"Where in Canada?" the young husband asked me.

"Nelson, BC," I said.

"I was born in Nelson," he replied.

"No, you weren't!" The coincidence overwhelmed me (my husband was born in Nelson--a town of 7,000), and I was getting that dangerous feeling that Fate commanded me to adopt Merlin. But yes, he was, and his grandmother lives in Vernon.

"OUR granny lives in Vernon!" my daughters chimed in.

Small world. So Merlin came to live with us, and from the moment he stepped out of the carrier, it was as if he had always lived with us. Our other cats glanced at him casually, rolled over, and went back to sleep: nothing to see here. He just fit in. I knew Merlin wouldn't be with us long. When he was found in Tucson, a vet estimated his age at 4, and that was 10 years earlier. I was merely doing a good deed for a struggling young family: they could rest easy knowing that Merlin would be comfortable in his last days.

I honestly believed that we could manage not to get attached to him because he wouldn't be with us long. I was even more sure of that when I took him to the vet and was subjected to a litany of Merlin's health problems caused by irresponsible breeding: he has arthritis that puts a major hitch in his git-along, a heart murmur, dozens of royal-blue tumors that fill his ears, dangerously small nasal passages, a sebaceous condition of his coat, and he appears to be wearing someone else's tail. When I described him to a cat rescue friend, he nodded and said, "Yep, a train wreck."

But here's the thing: Merlin is the sweetest soul who ever walked on four paws. He never complains about anything, and he's always content wherever he is and whatever is going on around him. He's a grandfather figure who patiently endures affectionate head-butts from the other cats. Nothing ruffles his lethal white fur. He is a living reminder that it is possible to take what comes your way and remain placid. He is a feline Buddha.

But lately he'll just begin crying for no apparent reason. It's not a cry of pain--it sounds more like confusion. All we have to do to quiet him is say his name. That seems to call him back from wherever he has wandered off to. We know he's in the process of leaving us. And we also know it was inevitable that we would fall in love with him--train wreck or not--and dread the day when we can't call him back from that lost place.

Pie for supper

2011-06-22T16:33:00.000-07:00

We have great success with strawberries in our garden. Five years ago, we planted two small plants--one of the runner type and the other a non-runner--and they're both still going strong. The runner plant has now populated almost an entire row of our 900 square foot garden, so here in the middle of the summer we have seemingly infinite strawberries.

Strawberries are one fruit that we tend to have year-round, even though we generally try to eat locally and seasonally. They're just so hard to resist. But the first time I tasted one of our homegrown berries, I suddenly realized what we've given up in taste just to have strawberries any time of the year. Donald said the other day that we've never grown a crunchy strawberry, and he's right. Crunchy, bland strawberries were unknown in my childhood. Strawberries didn't travel far enough for shipping to be a consideration in growing them. In fact, in the backyard of the first house I remember, there were plants left behind by a former resident that produced berries that I was always the first to discover, being the shortest and most earthbound member of the family at the time. Those berries never had the pleasure of traveling even as far as our kitchen. I ate them right from the vine.

It is a flavor I thought I would never forget, but it turns out that over the years I did forget. The berries in our garden remind me every June. There's something about having a food only at a certain time of year that makes it that much more enjoyable. In Ohio, our vanishing delicacies were tomatoes and strawberries. Those summers in Ohio were festive with family gatherings, and the women on both sides of my family were phenomenal cooks. The best strawberry shortcake I ever had was made by my Great-Aunt Addie, using berries from her garden, cream from her cows, and shortcakes that were closer to biscuits than to those sponge discs sold in grocery stores. I remember sitting at her kitchen table on a little farm in Mechanicsburg, Ohio listening to the women gossip about relatives who weren't lucky enough to be there that warm summer day.

Then there was my Aunt Jeanne's black raspberry pie--a gold standard of pie deliciousness that I have never quite been able to match. She grew those berries on bushes way back behind their funky little house in Springfield, Ohio, and she'd send any kids who were hanging around to pick them because that was a nasty and prickly job. But every scratch was worth it in the end.

So today, as I am overwhelmed by quarts and quarts of berries we've picked the last two days and with countless more ripening as I write this, I started thinking about my Aunt Juanita's fresh strawberry pies. She knew how to make that translucent red goopy stuff that sweetens the tang of the fruit--she wouldn't be caught dead buying it in jars at the grocery store. She's in her 90s now in a care facility in California recovering from a broken ankle. She's gotten frailer and more vulnerable these last few years, and we've tried to celebrate every occasion we can with her. Sometimes we have pie suppers--everyone brings a pie, and that's all there is for supper: more kinds of pie than anyone should ever eat at one meal.

So this pie's for AJ and for all the women in my family who taught me the magic of growing and cooking real food and bringing people together to enjoy it. I hope I can live up to their legacy.

Fresh Strawberry Pie (Makes 2)

2 (8 inch) pie shells, baked
2 1/2 quarts fresh strawberries
1 cup white sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 cup boiling water
1 (3 ounce) package strawberry flavored gelatin

In a saucepan, mix together the sugar and corn starch; make sure to blend corn starch in completely. Add boiling water, and cook over medium heat until mixture thickens. Remove from heat. Add gelatin mix, and stir until smooth. Let mixture cool to room temperature.
Place strawberries in baked pie shells; position berries with points facing up. Pour cooled gel mixture over strawberries.
Refrigerate until set. Serve with whipped cream, if desired.

Rhubarb Ginger Jam

2009-06-16T17:20:00.000-07:00

For all the time I've known Donald, he has sentimentalized (is that a word? I like it!) about his mother's rhubarb ginger jam. I don't remember seeing much rhubarb in Arizona, but once we had our own prolific plant in the garden, I started looking for ways to use it. I've perfected rhubarb pie (modestly polishing fingernails on my collarbone), so it was time to move on to jam. ;-)

His mother's recipe calls for massive amounts of ingredients, so I researched a number of recipes and adapted them to what I had on hand:

4 cups rhubarb cut in 1/2" pieces
3 cups sugar
1-2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 ounces candied ginger, chopped fine

Combine rhubarb, sugar, and lemon juice, and let sit to draw out rhubarb juice. Bring to boil and cook for 15 minutes. Add candied ginger and boil 5 minutes more. Put into canning jars. (Made 1-3/4 pints)

The result was a big hit. It's a gorgeous deep burgundy color (I swiped the photo--it's not my actual jam), and it set up absolutely perfectly without any pectin. Donald says it tastes like his childhood memory, but he wants to double the ginger next time. I wonder if the ginger taste will permeate the jam more fully as time goes on.

We put in a second rhubarb plant this summer, but we won't be able to use it until next year. My next project is rhubarb rosemary jam. How good does that sound??

Book report: I'm gradually working my way through Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food, but really, with three summer classes all going full-tilt, who has time to read?

PS) Trying these for Father's Day breakfast!

Rhubarb Ginger Muffins
an original Shazamer recipe with help from Mary Margaret McBride

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

3 Tbsp sugar

1 egg, well beaten

1 cup buttermilk

3 Tbsp melted butter

1 stalk rhubarb, minced

1/4 cup minced crystallized ginger

Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and sugar. Combine the buttermilk, melted butter, and egg in a separate bowl and then add to the dry ingredients stirring just until combined. Fold in the rhubarb and ginger.

Line a muffin tin with papers and spray briefly with cooking spray. Divide the dough between 12 muffin cups. Bake in a hot oven at 425 degrees F. for 20 minutes, or until golden brown.

Wild Turkey!

2009-06-10T14:03:00.000-07:00

And I am not talking about whiskey. I was outside a few minutes ago when something caught my eye as it silently slipped into Willie's forest. If I haven't already explained this, one whole side of our property is lined with fir trees that the previous owner (Willie, of course) planted years ago. He set out 2,000 fir trees, thinking he would sell them as Christmas trees. (That is something of a failing business proposition out here in the bush where people tend to help themselves to the queen's trees at Christmastime. ;-) But as the trees grew, he found--like Robert Frost in his poem "Christmas Trees"--that he didn't have the heart to see them cut down and sent off to town as decorations. So he thinned them to 1,000, and they make the best privacy screen you've ever seen. Because they form a long, narrow border on our property, they also provide a secure thoroughfare for any wildlife coming down from the forest across the road from us.

I have only seen wild turkeys once before when we had to stop for a flock that was crossing the road a few miles from our house. Someone up the valley apparently feeds them. They are amazingly beautiful and agile birds--not like the domesticated, over-busty ones raised for meat.

Fortunately, I saw the bird, but our dog didn't. She dares any bird to land on her property, and she would have run it off if she'd got the chance. I wonder what else is out there that we haven't seen yet.

Book report: I am about halfway through a book I picked up at the library because I loved its title: If No One Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor. The premise is fascinating. It begins with an ordinary street scene in a town in northern England. We get to see all the sights and hear all the sounds of street life. Then a tragedy happens. We don't know what it is. And the rest of the novel (so far) details the personal tragedies and worries of the residents of an apartment building on the street. It's not clear if there really was a big tragedy outside, or if each is so caught up in his or her own drama that it is as if everyone has experienced something awful. Very captivating novel!

Nine pounds of peas?!?!?

2009-06-02T13:19:00.001-07:00

So a little while ago I was making potato salad for dinner (a sure sign of summer when there's potato salad and watermelon for dinner!) and I went looking for peas in our big freezer out in the garage. When I say big, I mean big! Donald likes to say you could store an entire corpse in that thing. Actually, if you stack them, you could store three. We inherited this freezer when we bought the house, and it seemed like such a cool thing to have. (That is, until we paid our first electric bill in Canada.)

Well, I hit the jackpot of peas. There is a bottomless supply of peas in that freezer--I stopped searching after the first 4 kilos. I don't mean to complain about abundance, but the fact of the matter is that I don't really care for peas. I like those little canned messes of bloated, oversalted, olive-colored things that pass for peas. They don't taste like peas at all. And I certainly never would have bought nine pounds of them. I'm going to have to figure out something to do with them, especially since we have future peas sprouting in the garden as I write.

Lately I've been thinking about those moments in life when we make a discovery that upsets our little apple cart. It may seem like a potential disaster, an irredeemable theft, or an insoluble problem. How often do we look back on those events later as gifts that we nearly rejected because we didn't care for the gift wrap?

I'm dealing with that now. Someone has indeed upset my apple cart and caused (to borrow a phrase from Grace Paley, RIP) "enormous changes at the last minute." My first impulse was to stand my ground and fight back for the principle of the thing. My second--and better--impulse was to accept the changed circumstances and look for the pony amidst the piles of @#$^.

Now I'm thinking of sending an anonymous gift to thank the person who has wronged me. I wonder if I can send peas through international mail??

;-)

Book report: Not a lot of time for reading as summer school begins and my three classes are launched. I am halfway through a quirky novel called Family Planning by new novelist Karan Mahajan. The title is somewhat ironic since the protagonist of the novel, which is set in Delhi, is an Indian bureaucrat who has 13 children because he finds his wife attractive only when she is pregnant. The oldest son, who bears the brunt of caring for his siblings, has asked the father why he and his wife keep having children. That question sets the novel into motion. Another light summer read.

KAFM

2009-05-22T13:16:00.001-07:00

Or Keyboard Away from Me.

Two days without internet (a lightning strike fried our modem), and we begin to feel very isolated. It was nice to see Selby for more than a few minutes at a time, though.

;-)

Donald is away in Vernon because his mother's being discharged from the hospital today. She's made an amazing recovery so far, and she's going back to her apartment where she lives very independently. Selby and I are keeping the home fires burning. (It actually is cold enough for a fire in the evenings!)

While he's that close to Princeton, he's going to stop and visit with his Aunt Grace as well, and he will be back on Sunday.

The most excitement we've had in his absence was a coyote performance (howling and barking) in the neighborhood sometime after midnight last night. Selby and I took the industrial strength flashlight (or is it a floodlight?) and checked on the rabbits and chickens. As I panned across the forest with the flashlight, I saw a pair of glowing orange eyes looking back at me, but I think they belonged to a deer. Either that, or that was one tall coyote. They drive our dog Maggie insane, and she's not about to let them on her property.

I listened to the so-called "dueling speeches" on national security yesterday and was struck by the paradox we find ourselves in: what was "new" thinking in the last administration is now "old" thinking, but what is new thinking now is old in its commitment to our Constitution and our founding values. I'm with Green Day on this: "Silence is the enemy. Give me revolution!"

Speaking of which, I am waiting impatiently for my pre-ordered copy of 21st Century Breakdown to arrive. Lindsay has already listened to it, and she seconds the Rolling Stone's comment that this album makes American Idiot sound like a warm up. I can't even imagine that.

Book report: Finished The Birth House. If you can suspend your suspicion of too-convenient conclusions, it is an excellent read. Now I am on to--should I confess that I read this series??--Miss Julia Stands Her Ground by Ann Ross. These are light novels about the very provincial concerns of inhabitants of a small Southern town: the literary equivalent of eating M&Ms. What's summer vacation for??

Farm and Garden Report 2009

2009-05-19T12:44:00.000-07:00

A rainy day gives me a chance to start this year's blog from Canada. As usual, we hit the ground weeding, preparing to plant our garden. How can all that stuff grow underneath snow?? On the other hand, we've already had a crop of rhubarb, which we enjoyed in a pie for Victoria Day yesterday. (Or, as it is known to local anti-colonialists, Long Weekend in May. ;-)

It's wonderful to be home again. This year I made the 1500+ mile drive alone for the first time. Well, I wasn't really alone--I had a collection of books on CD with me (David Sedaris, I love you!). On the way up, I saw an amazing assortment of roadkill, including the debris of an accident scene caused by a perfectly beautiful black steer that looked as if it had merely been tipped over instead of killed. Then after I crossed the border, within the first few miles, I had to stop three times to wait for small herds of deer to clear off the road. I also saw a gorgeous elk and a fat coyote between the border and home. The coyote are having a boom season, so our chickens are confined to the henhouse and yard.

A day or two after I got here, I was sitting in the family room talking to my daughter Selby when I saw a flash of a white tail sprinting across the backyard. Two fawns were chasing each other in and out of our little cedar forest. I've seen plenty of deer in the yard, but this is the first time I've ever seen them playing.

Speaking of Selby, we saw her last high school drama performance--Romeo and Juliet at the elegant, old Capitol Theatre in Nelson this weekend. I hope she'll continue to dabble in theatre, at least, when she goes to college.

Mostly we've been busy trying to get the garden in. I arrived home with a long list of orders to fill--thimbleberry jam, zucchini relish, spicy dills, applesauce, etc.--for family and friends in Arizona. It's been a cold, wet, even snowy spring, so everyone's a little late with planting this year. We're trying some new things this season. We got a couple of those upside-down tomato planters (if the plants survive being wrestled into those planters, they must be very hearty), and Donald has built some garden boxes for plants that need vertical support, such as cucumbers, peas, and beans. Our raspberries are taking over the garden, and we're trying to propagate more blackberries as well. Our two strawberry plants have miraculously turned into seven plants and are already blooming. I've planted winter and summer squash, radishes, carrots, peppers, spinach, and lettuce, and now we're building up a potato and beet hill. For herbs, we have basil, oregano, dill, parsley, rosemary, and thyme.

I thought of a way to take some of our chicken eggs back to Arizona in August: pickling them. The first two experiments are in the fridge as I write this. They are black (balsamic) and yellow (turmeric). I'm told these are very good on salads.

We're reading Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food, which is very sobering in its discussion of the "nutritional industrial complex." It motivates us to get out there and weed the next row. Here is his sage advice for healthy, sustainable eating: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Book Report: Just started The Birth House by Ami McKay, which takes place in World War I era Nova Scotia. The protagonist, Dora Rare, is the first female child born in her family in five generations, and she is taught midwifery by a Cajun woman regarded locally as a witch. So far, I am really enjoying this book.

Thyme flies

2008-08-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

It's been almost two months since my last post. In the meantime, I taught two summer classes and kept busy with gardening, raising chickens, late spring cleaning, reading, and all the things I love to do in the summertime.

So here are some highlights. The title of this post comes from a very strange occurrence in the garden. We have grown a variety of herbs this summer, including a very nice thyme plant that was growing slowly but steadily. Then one day we noticed that it had simply vanished. There were no signs of disturbance, no tracks around it to indicate a hungry critter, no stubs of stems or leaves--absolutely no evidence to show that it had ever been there. Now that has to be a metaphor for the swift speed with which this beautiful summer has passed. It simply flew away.

Speaking of mysteries, there was also the mystery of our one-eyed tree. We have a big, gorgeous maple in the backyard on which we put a sculpted face. To be honest, it creeps some people out, but it reminds me of the trees in The Wizard of Oz. (Come to think of it, those trees were pretty creepy, too.) Early in the summer, the tree lost its right eye. I found it broken at the foot of the tree and glued it back together and put it back. A week or two later, the tree lost the pupil of its left eye, and this time there was no trace of it anywhere. This is especially odd because I was sitting outside at the time and saw it fall. We combed through the grass all around the tree, but no eyeball. So we glued a toonie (that's a Canadian $2 coin) in its place, but I'm pretty sure the tree has no sight in its left eye.

I have no idea what the metaphor in that might be.

Then there was the disappearance of our last brown hen. In late June, she vanished for several days, and after a while, we thought the worst. She was old, after all, and there are a lot of predators in the woods that surround us here. But on the third day, she returned ravenous with hunger and thirst. Then she left again. Just when we gave up on her for the second time, she reappeared, gobbled up food and water, and took off again to parts unknown. This went on for several weeks.

Then one Sunday morning I was out enjoying the sun when I noticed a lot of color and bustle in some ground cover. There was the brown hen with a flock of 11 newly hatched chicks. Now we had already hatched 10 chicks in the incubator, and that was a few more than we really wanted. (We put in extra eggs because we didn't believe they would all hatch.) Suddenly we had 21 chicks. Good thing they are so cute when they first hatch!

The lesson there is never to count your chickens before they're hatched, I guess.

Life here is full of lessons, some ordinary and some profound. This summer I've learned to make two really excellent kinds of rhubarb pie and some respectable hummus. I learned that saskatoon berries are great for baking, but the jam is absolutely disgusting. I've learned about the four kinds of snakes most common to BC when one appeared in our garden one evening. (That time I was the one who vanished without a trace.) Mostly I learn to love this place more with every passing year.

Reading report: On Canada Day, we celebrate in a nearby town called Salmo that features a parade, a homemade pie sale, and a remarkably good used book sale to support the library. I got a whole stack of mostly light reads this year and worked my way through them on warm afternoons. The last I read was Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. Funny--I knew a few pages into it that I had read it before (probably when it was first published in 2001 because I read everything she writes), but I remembered so little that it was like reading it for the first time again. Now I'm reading a really interesting and edgy novel called American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It's all magical realism all the time, and yes, I recommend it . . . so far.

Chicken Trauma Unit

2008-06-02T10:23:00.001-07:00

Well, it's been a hectic and traumatic few days in the hatchery (which also happens to be my home office). Let's start with the good news: since this photo was taken, we are now up to 7 chicks.

The bad news is that one of those was born by c-section, sort of. On Saturday, we had an egg that had pipped early Friday but wasn't making any progress toward hatching and seemed to be weakening in its attempts to break through. So I googled hatching problems and found instructions for helping a chick in trouble.

I don't know about you, but I always heard you should never, never, never, ever help a bird out of its egg. This had something to do with them needing the stimulus and exercise of breaking out themselves. But apparently that is not always true.

I'll spare you the gory details, but I followed instructions to help this chick hatch, and she is doing fine. But let's just say I was not cut out for any sort of medical career, and for a half hour after doing chicken surgery, I felt like passing out.

Yesterday we lost one that no one knew had pipped. That was our first loss, and it was hard. If I'd realized that chick was in trouble, I would have saved it, too. That's when we started feeling like a Chicken Trauma Unit.

To end on a positive note, Chick 7 hatched without incident and with all three of us watching late last night. There are three more eggs in the incubator, and then we're done for the year. We need some time to recover, but I know that next summer this will seem like a good idea all over again.

Reading report: Back to Canadian lit., I am reading The Spirit Cabinet by a new favorite writer, Paul Quarrington. (His novel King Leary about an aging hockey star won the Canada Reads competition this year. Another novel Whale Music won Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award.) It's hard to describe his work except to say that he's the Tom Robbins of Canada. He writes about eccentric characters in crazy circumstances, and yet they are essentially so human that we can all imagine ourselves behaving exactly the same way in the same situations. This one is about two European magicians who perform in Las Vegas, and the focus is on their relationship, how people appear and disappear from our lives, and what constitutes "magic."

Crimes of nature

2008-05-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

In some ways, Sugar was everyone's favorite chicken. She was the Tiny Tim of our little flock, the fragile, lame banty hen that had a harder way to go because of her deformed feet. But she was also a trooper because she managed to keep up with the other chickens.

Sugar had a charm all her own. The other day Selby told me she loved Sugar's tail because it was "like an enormous rudder on a tiny boat." And if chickens could talk, Sugar would have been the one to hobble forward and say, "God bless us, everyone!" just like in Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol.

That's why it was so upsetting this morning to find out that a coyote got her last night while we were asleep. Our chickens have free range of our place during the daytime, but they always come back to roost in the chicken house at night. Last night, though, Sugar decided to nest under a huge cedar tree right outside our back door.

Donald was concerned about her, and he waited as late as he could to close up the chicken house. Still, she didn't come out from under the tree. Then sometime overnight a coyote found her there and carried her off to our pasture to kill her.

The coyote was still hanging around this morning when Donald went to let the other chickens out of the henhouse. It approached within feet of our back door, and even when Donald charged at it, it ran off only a little ways and stood and stared at him, waiting for its chance at another chicken.

That's how the day started. Life in the country has moments like these, and the fact is that most farm chickens live relatively short lives because when they stop laying, they end up in the stewpot. And when you think about it, you realize that it's all part of a huge cycle that goes on forever and ever. Every creature needs to eat, and most of them--ourselves included--eat other creatures.

But it feels a lot different when you know the victim. Then it feels like a crime.

We did a lot of work outside today so we could keep an eye on the other chickens. Now we're down to three adult chickens. We talked about how fortunate we are to have two of Sugar's chicks who just hatched earlier this week. And considering that we eat storebought chicken on a regular basis, we felt ridiculously sad at the loss of our little lame hen.

As the day ends, our sixth chick is working its way out of its egg, and our five new chicks are peeping sweetly from the brooder. Right now I can't imagine ever letting them out to range in the big, wide world, but of course we will . . . eventually.

That's just the nature of things.

An ordinary miracle

2008-05-28T22:29:00.001-07:00

When we bought our little farm a couple of years ago, we inherited a rag-tag flock of eight chickens. We knew absolutely nothing about raising chickens, but we were open to the experience, especially as people who are concerned about the healthfulness and sustainability of food production.

Those weren't spring chickens we inherited, and over time our flock has shrunk to just half its original size. This was a problem since we'd gotten hooked on truly fresh, truly free-range eggs. So last August we purchased four "laying hens" that were about 8 weeks old. After raising them to maturity, we discovered that every last one was a rooster.

The problem, of course, is that you really can't have more than one rooster in a small flock. They will fight to the death for supremacy. And as the little guys were growing up, we got attached to them, so it was sad to have to find homes for them. (No, we don't eat them.)

So this year we decided to try the old-fashioned way of growing a flock of chickens. After all, we already had the raw ingredients (that dominant rooster did come in handy!), and it was easy enough to buy a secondhand incubator on Craig's List. One of my online students from the spring semester gave me perfect and simple instructions to follow, and we put several eggs into the incubator, turned them several times a day, and--voila!--on Monday, our first two chicks hatched like tiny, ordinary miracles.

The first two eggs to hatch were from our banty hen Sugar (more about her in another entry), and they seemed impossibly small to hold anything that would turn into a chicken. But the chicks popped out singing in their high, flutelike voices. Within an hour or so, they were on their feet exploring the incubator.

On Tuesday, two standard size eggs hatched out two yellow chicks that are identical except for a dark spot on one's head. (We named that one Smudge.) In the wee hours of this morning, a fifth chick hatched, this one obviously the offspring of our brown hen because it is honey-colored.

At this point, there are six more eggs in the incubator, though two (not ours--we bought these) might not be viable. They are too dark to candle to see if there are chicks inside.

It's hard to describe how something so ordinary and in many ways so trivial can seem almost like magic or--well--chicken alchemy. Putting an egg in the incubator is a lot like planting a seed. It requires faith and patience and imagination to believe that life is so inevitable.

Reading report: I'm currently reading Isabel Allende's novel The House of the Spirits because it's on the list for my course in Banned Books and Censorship. It's full of magical realism (which is another term for ordinary miracles, now that I think of it) and fascinating characters. I can see why it has been challenged by those who want to control what the rest of us read, but it is a gorgeous book.

Memorial Day and memories we didn't know we had

2008-05-25T11:58:00.000-07:00

Warning: Don't read this post if you're hungry!

So this is Memorial Day weekend, and we have a family tradition on long summer weekends of making an enormous cook-out so we can have leftovers for several days. That's why I found myself in the kitchen this morning making side dishes and thinking about the episode of Unwrapped that I saw last night. Unwrapped is a food network show about how various food items are made, and it alternately inspires me with American ingenuity and depresses me about American laziness and our disconnection from the food we eat.

The episode last night covered a new business concept in which people come into a store to choose from several dinner recipes, all of the raw ingredients of which have been chopped, peeled, etc., by store employees. Customers dump the raw ingredients into a pail that looks too much like our compost bucket and then into a Ziplock bag, which they take home and freeze. Then when it's time to make the entree, they dump the contents of the bag into a pan and heat it up.

They do this to feel like they are actually cooking for their families (as opposed to, say, buying processed food in the grocery store and heating it). I sat there and wondered how much time and effort it takes to drive to the store, dump your ingredients, pay an exorbitant price for them, drive back home, and plop your Ziplocks into the freezer. If you're going to go to all that trouble, why not just chop your own onions and peppers?

I just don't get the concept, I guess.

That's what I was thinking about this morning as I prepared sides for today's cookout. I had taken requests, and each of us had chosen a favorite. For most holiday dinners, we share the cooking because I want to make sure our kids know how to prepare their favorite holiday dishes in case they ever find themselves far from home, hungry, and homesick on a holiday. But with cookouts, I "call" sides, and others do the grilling, make appetizers, etc.

I made green Jello with cole slaw floating in it for my daughter and that nasty stuff with Cool Whip, Jello, cottage cheese, and mandarin oranges for my husband. (OK, I admit: it tastes delicious, but anything with Cool Whip is automatically gross to think about.) I rarely use Jello in anything, so using it in two dishes for the same meal made me reminisce about my childhood when every festive occasion required at least one Jello "salad" (most of those "salads" could rot your teeth with sugar), and many of them featured--you guessed it!--Cool Whip.

Coming of age in the 1960s and 70s, we were the children of convenience foods and mass marketing of highly processed foods. For example, we were the first generation to think of "green bean casserole" (you know, canned green beans, canned mushroom soup, and canned onion rings) as every bit as essential to Thanksgiving as turkey. Processed food appealed to our mothers beyond all reason--or maybe because many of their own mothers and grandmothers had grown up on farms where producing the family's food required huge amounts of time and energy. It was hard and dirty work.

It was easy to convince them that growing, preserving, and even chopping one's own food was too much trouble, especially since more and more of them spent their days in offices, classrooms, and other workplaces. As their children, we never thought twice about the dubious nutritional value of boxed macaroni and cheese, Jello, or canned peas. We ate what was put before us without much thought.

Grateful as I am for the Women's Movement of the 1960s and 70s that opened so many doors for my generation of women, it also presented a marketing opportunity for food that barely deserves to be called food.

Eating has become such a speedy pit-stop of an affair that we rarely think about how many memories food evokes or how it reflects the place and time in which we grew up. I thought about this as I assembled my own favorite cookout side dish--macaroni salad (which bears no resemblance to the stuff you can buy at any grocery store deli and--for reasons I don't understand--tastes like aluminum foil). I always forget that macaroni salad requires relish, and when I thought of it, I panicked because living out here "in the bush" (that's Canadian for "out in the sticks" or "the boondocks" or "the toolies"), you don't just run down to the corner grocery store when you run out of something.

Then I remembered that I have six pints of homemade zucchini relish from last summer's garden. (If you've ever grown zucchini, you'll know how relieved I was to find a recipe for relish when I had run out of ideas for using it up.) I thought about how one of our daughters grumbled incessantly last year that we were spending more time and money growing our own vegetables than just buying them at the grocery store. She demanded to know why we would do such a foolish thing. And her father--in one of those rare perfect moments of parental wisdom--replied, "Because it is a worthy thing to do."

We give our time and energy to what we value. How did marketers ever convince us that preparing and eating food isn't worth the time it takes?

Once I'd taken care of the old favorites, I decided to try something new with a bowl of leftover sauerkraut. I made an Amish sauerkraut salad, a recipe I've been wanting to try for a couple of years. I'm interested in Amish cooking since discovering that somewhere in my family's past, there is "Pennsylvania Dutch" or Amish heritage.

This discovery also came by way of holiday food. Growing up in Ohio, I assumed that everyone celebrated New Year's Day with a mandatory pork roast with sauerkraut. When I moved to Arizona, I was stunned to find that not a single grocery store had pork roast on sale for New Year's. Turns out that pork roast and sauerkraut is not the universal fare to kick off a prosperous new year (in our family we always joked that if what we were experiencing was "prosperity," we couldn't afford not to have pork and sauerkraut for New Year's). It is distinctively German.

Those of us who grew up with only the vaguest sense of our cultural heritage--and let's face it: so many of us Caucasians are really mutts from various European traditions--need to search for clues of where and whom we came from. When I teach storytelling and we're digging for family stories and cultural folktales, I often recommend that people think about their families' holiday traditions, especially foods that are always prepared for certain occasions. These can provide important (and delicious) clues about our family backgrounds.

They are rich memories we didn't know we have. They satisfy more than our appetites.

No amount of convenience or time saved in the kitchen can replace those memories once we've lost them.

Home again . . .

2008-05-23T11:57:00.000-07:00

After a busy and productive spring semester (during which I taught an all-online schedule for the first time and loved it!), I am home again in beautiful BC. Actually I arrived in early May, but we've been so busy digging out from under winter and getting ready for summer that I haven't had much time to write lately. Too, living in two places causes just enough confusion that it takes me a bit to adjust to where I am.

Our biggest accomplishment so far is to get the garden in. (This photo shows our garden at the end of the season last fall.) Selby planted some seedlings in milk-jug "greenhouses" before I got here, and that gave us a jump start on planting. This is only our second garden season here, so everything we do is still experimental. Last year we reclaimed garden space from the lush, verdant grassy pasture behind our house. We had no idea how deep those grass roots ran, but we battled them all summer. This year we got smart and spent a lot of time pulling out tap roots and covering the aisles between rows with plastic to keep down the grass. (Yes, this is very hard on the back, but then so is weeding.)

Some of our garden residents are perennial--bless them--such as raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, currants, and rhubarb. But the rest have to be planted annually, and we always begin with more ambition than expertise. Here's what we planted this year:

Sunflowers
Corn
Beans (yellow and green)
Tomatoes (5 kinds)
Hubbard squash
Cucumbers (2 kinds--I love to pickle them)
Chives
Lettuce (2 kinds)
Cauliflower
Broccoli
Radishes
Green onions
Peppers (2 kinds)
Cilantro
Basil
Thyme
Rosemary
Savory

Along with that, we've been tending to other planters, hanging pots, etc., because I am still fascinated by the fact that anything we plant here actually grows and thrives.

Our other big experiment for the summer is incubating chicken eggs. We have a tiny flock of chickens (a rooster and 3-4 hens, depending on who shows up at the henhouse at night) that we want to grow and diversify a little. Right now we have 10 eggs in the incubator, and the farthest along are due to hatch in about 4 days. (I will post photos when the babies arrive.)

I'm looking forward to teaching two online classes this summer--ENG101 and ENG217. I'm also still finishing up my online Canadian literature course for Fall. There are so many wonderful Canadian writers that we in the States never have a chance to read. Right now I'm reading The Piano Man's Daughter by Timothy Findley, whose novel Not Wanted on the Voyage (the tale of a cat who stows away on Noah's ark) was one of the five Canada Reads selections for this year. He creates such richly complex characters, especially women (Not Wanted is really the story of Mrs. Noah), that I am totally absorbed by his books.

Remind me one of these days to tell you why we've come to think of the town of Winlaw as Scofflaw and how our banty hen Sugar turned a tragedy into a triumph (a real-life fable!).

Until then . . .