Jean Zimmerman

Category: Dogs

  • Little Green

    Spring brings with it a kind of happy sadness. Ferns beginning to emerge. And yet the air is cold, endlessly. We’re still looking at the downed trees in our front forty, felled during Sandy. Our neighbor took home a dozen planks from one, and it is pretty great that he could use them to build…

  • The Algorithm of Curvy Passion

    Whale bone doll. Greyhound vs. great dane. WTF? I get a regular report from WordPress, the outfit that hosts this blog, which tells me the search terms used every day to find my site. I love to read these oddly linked words and imagine the people that typed them into a search box and, even…

  • Pruning Links

    Damn. My cup runneth over with links. My computer wouldn’t let me save another bookmark, it was so stopped up, so I had to prune. Throw out and organize. Floss. Figure out what I really needed to save, what I might need – need being a relative term – and what could be relegated to…

  • A Lion, a Pit-Hound, a Bud

    The warmth has hit. The sun pours down. The day reminded me of the scene on a Mexican plate from the early 1800s that I saw recently at the Hispanic Society. Except I was sporting a ball cap rather than a parasol and my companion was a pit-hound rather than a lion. Gil and I…

  • Minnies Land and Audubon

    What would John James Audubon have made of the transformation of his Manhattan estate in the years since his death in 1851? He called the 44-acre property Minnies Land in honor of his wife – her name was Lucy, but Minnie was a Scottish endearment, the term for Mama, and it was what he and…

  • The Fires of March

    Meanwhile… back at the Cabin, a guest post from Gil: I’m thinking about Lars Mytting, who has a best-seller in Norway with his book, Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood — and the Soul of Wood-Burning. Mytting’s book has not yet washed up upon these unenlightened shores, and the closest you can get…

  • Happy Birthday, Edith

    Edith Wharton (1862-1937) at the age of 27, posing with her beloved long-hair chihuahuas, Mimi and Miza. Her eye was keen, her sense of the tragic rich. I think she knew fully she was capturing her age and class in a way no one else could. At the start of A Backward Glance, her memoir,…

  • The Thaw

    Birds on promenade in this wet warm weather: a downy woodpecker and a cardinal side by side on the magnolia this morning, each with their bright red, and a humbler chickadee foraging on the ground. Yesterday a ring-necked pheasant fluttered across the road in front of the car, its bottle-green collar glowing in the dusk.…

  • Update

    Gil drove home from Wisconsin over 23 hours (4 for sleep) and crossed the Tappan Zee without getting blown off the bridge.  When you see an empty Interstate highway, he says, you’ve seen the apocalypse. Wisconsin cheese and beer in hand. Out the cabin window, the reeds bowing low in the marsh. A gigantic crash.…

  • Storm Update

    The pot roast in the oven smells great, Moby Dick online sounds great, and the scarf I’m knitting is now a good seven feet. Oliver is keeping tabs on the mouse, which has crawled out from the bathroom and behind a bookcase. And the blowing outside has only increased a bit. So we’re fine for…

  • Places of Magic II

    The first thing I saw as we hiked out from the Cabin this afternoon was an eight-point buck bounding across the face of the woods, and of course Oliver gave chase. When we reunited at the leaf-carpeted clearing (I saw dug-out hoof indentations in the soft dirt all the way up the hill) the dog…

  • Places of Magic

    I’ve always liked this vine-topped stone gate about a half mile down Cedar Lane from the Cabin. So mysterious. It would appear to lead nowhere, but appearances can be deceiving. Maybe it’s the entry to the skeleton dance, or the blue jay coven, or maybe it’s where Oliver goes when he disappears at night, where…

  • Croissants at Rest

    The butter being whacked first thing this morning, as per Julia Child’s intricate instructions, with an attentive audience. After the dough is done “resting” a few more times, we undertake the following steps with military precision. We don’t have the specialized cutter Child prescribes (it looks an awful lot like a mysterious wedding gift we…

  • The Bafflement of Animals

    I’ve always wondered what goes on in Oliver’s head when I look into his pit-hound eyes. Maybe this is the answer. I heard Jonathan Schwartz read these lines on his Sunday show… they’re from Edith Wharton’s journal in 1924. ”I am secretly afraid of animals…. I think it is because of the usness in their…

  • Homecoming

    Driving east on I-90, a change after yesterday’s guinea chicks toddling along the pasture edge after their mother. But return home to Cabinworld we must. Gil craves his writing desk, I want my own bed and down time after the last, Midwestern leg of the book tour, Maud to trade her tractor and farm boots for…