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a cooking narrative

second-rate Trader Joe's Bing cherries headed for the freezer
so I can enjoy my fresh Door County ones guilt-free;
tiny sour cherries from the farmers market.

a cherry pitter is nice. but this is still a lot of work.

dinner's main event:
pretty cherry cobbler where the tart ones ended up.

too bad I dropped Ricky's bowl on the floor.


he was a good sport about eating floor cobbler.


and what we ate before the cobbler:
polenta with zucchini and tomatoes
recipe here.

I cheated and used prepared polenta
but the herbs were from my garden.

summer is nice.

working from home.

a giant stack of books in various stages of read and unread,

chocolate rooibos chai in my favorite mug,

zucchini bread with cream cheese,


and a cat.

[[obviously, i can't concentrate.]]

greenish weekendish

[green copper verdigris moose turtle loitering in the green garden]

[delicious green zucchini pizza]

[green beans to match]

getting lost.

[my houseplants are outside enjoying the sun]


[six pounds of rhubarb is a lot]

I was shocked the other day when I realized it was July--the summer is sliding along quickly for me. I've mostly been dividing my time between tasks at home that always seem to be on the verge of disaster--the lawn, the weeds, the garage full of dead mice--and the more steady pull of my exam list--not disastrous, just constant.

I've been cooking a lot, hence the sink-full of rhubarb. The produce at the farmers' market is so amazing, particularly after a month of traveling and too much eating out. Crates of tiny red potatoes, heaps of red and white onions with their tall green stalks, small rubber-banded bundles of baby zucchini, rainbows of beets--it's almost enough to make me forgive Wisconsin for the months of January-May. Cooking is fun again, rather than just a task--I read all day and then make something. And take a walk. And water the plants in my garden. It's pleasant.

I feel almost like I have a real job that begins and ends at certain times--prelims reading is daunting, but since my days are free it's been much easier to keep it contained than the writing and grading that are always spilling over during the semester. There's nothing better than the days I decide to get lost in a novel instead of battling with the frequently bad prose of secondary sources--I'm not working off of a schedule. Just impulse. There are many days when I'm strangely grateful for the heft of many of the items on my list; grateful to take the fattest novel I can find out of the stack on my desk and just spend all day with Jane Eyre, Mary Barton, or Catherine Morland rather than shuffling through the cacophony of other people's claims on those books. Reading all 800 pages of Vanity Fair was somehow luxurious; I loved Waverley (relatively short at nearly 500 pages). In spite of the pleasure that I take in crossing them off of my list, I'm actually sad when these books end--something that I haven't really felt since maybe 1993, when The Baby-Sitters Club reigned supreme.

rings and things

I'm back in Madison in the heat, trying to read. I'm feeling pretty fatigued after rushing through a re-reading of Jane Eyre yesterday--naturally, my mind is wandering to other things and other places. I took this rather strange picture of my hand while I was at my mom's house. There are many, many interesting things in her house--tiny clay food, for one--but also all the detritus of both sides of my family, remnants of the society-page lives of one half and bits and pieces of the farm run by the other. The house is in upheaval right now, due to a pipe that froze and burst during the winter. Everything from the lower level has been piled high upstairs so that a new floor can be laid. The result is a rather striking intermixture--a pink silk quilt from one grandmother's trousseau alongside a rifle rack made by the other grandfather; a rusted butter-churn beside the towering glass-front secretary.

In the midst of all of this, I went looking for a blue ballpoint pen. Woolf begins her essay "Street Haunting: A London Adventure" with the pretext of a lead pencil; so I began my evening with that of finding the perfect pen for underlining in some Victorian novel or another.

No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner.

Now, a pen seems like an easy enough thing to find, especially given that my mother writes exclusively in blue ballpoint pen (I admit to the inheritance of this prejudice). But these things are never as simple as they seem. My mom and I frequently joke about the apparently straightforward task of locating a small, sturdy table somewhere in the vast inventory of furniture that populates her house--this jest dates back to some time early in my parents' marriage when a visiting friend requested such an item in order to position a slide projector or some such thing. My father responded that it was unlikely that he'd be able to locate one amidst those rickety, fragile leftovers from grander times--times when people perched more delicately and rested only transparent china cups on their tables. Intricately ornamented Victorian chairs with carved backs and plush needlepoint seats are numerous: small, sturdy tables--nonexistent.

The finding of a pen proved a similarly futile undertaking. But in a likely-looking drawer I did find some pens--albeit they were fountain pens from the last century--and this hastily personalized base metal ring. Eleanor--who likely owned this trinket, unless it was intended as a gift for another--was my great-aunt, the last owner of the family farm in Pennsylvania, a beautician who had wanted to fly fighter planes instead of curling hair, who worked through WWII in bobby pins instead of rivets. Just last week, my mother shot a rabid raccoon with Aunt Eleanor's deer rifle (you can take the girl out of the country, but--you know how it goes).

And so here is Aunt Eleanor's ring, on her grand-niece's finger, resting above a pile of polished rocks--gathered by my mother at some waterfront or another--and a small, not altogether un-sturdy table.