Little Brother Is watching you!

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

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!

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

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

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

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

1. 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.
2. Place strawberries in baked pie shells; position berries with points facing up. Pour cooled gel mixture over strawberries.
3. Refrigerate until set. Serve with whipped cream, if desired.