Category Archives: Home

November 15, 2013 · 4:29 pm

Transcription Soup

A keyboard has no scent.

And yet manipulating the keys brings forth aromas, incredible sights, acoustical marvels. The sounds of conversation.

I promised Gil that I would do a fair amount of transcribing for him. He’s conducted many interviews as part of a book collaboration he’s involved in. None of this background is accessible without a keyboard to yield up the brilliant things that get said.

So I listen to the tape. I screw up my forehead and try to make out the words that are muddled – some of the interviews took place in a noisy restaurant. I shake my hands out, massage my fingers when they get sore.

And then I take a break. I make soup.

The ideal recipe, with a gigantic spoon, a spoon out of a Grimm story cottage.

Soup is the antidote, of course, for many ailments. But it’s also a good balance for tasks like transcribing, where you’re using your keyboard and your fingers and there’s a wee of drudgery.

I use a whole soup fowl if I have one, though disjointed pieces will do. Bring them to a simmer in your biggest pot and skim off the scum. Add carrots and celery. I use the last of the celery from my garden, which never stalked up but is fresh and good.

The piece de resistance: chicken feet I bought from a farmer.

Not pretty, these gams, but they really boost the broth’s flavor.

Turnips, parsnips, parsley, leeks. So simple. Salt, in the palm of my hand.

Julia Child says to bring the stock just to a “smile,” and to simmer for three hours or so.

In which time I will have tip-tapped each key hundreds of times, to deliver a three-hour back-and-forth conversation.

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November 9, 2013 · 5:20 pm

Squeezing the Juice From the Season

There is nothing like a Saturday morning in November to make you stand up straight and take clear-eyed notice of the world. Of the crisp air and fresh colors, the sweetly rotten smell of leaves being pulverized underfoot.

Both Gil and I could easily stay home and work all day, bent over our books, leaning into our computer screens. But we were drawn out into the Saturday sunshine. drive, he sd, as poet Robert Creeley wrote.

We remarked as we spun along the little roads on every jolt of red.

Some unexpected graffiti on the side of a concrete shed oddly did the opposite of marring the rural scene. It underscored fall’s beauty with its blast of a message.

Down the road from the Cabin we passed an arch of shrubbery above a stone gate that opens into a mysterious vacant pasture. I never get tired of looking at it.

And I never get tired of visiting Thompson’s Cider Mill, where Geoff Thompson combines up to twenty varieties of fresh apples into a juice that is pure nectar. He makes his cider every weekend, and every weekend it is a different brew.

When you buy apples at Thompson’s, you get to see each one’s heritage marked above the bin. The history of apples is vast and rich, and here you can taste history–when you bite into an heirloom Newtown Pippin, say, first grown from a chance seedling in the mid-18th century.

Out of the wealth of choices we’ve taken most of all to the Jonathans, which are grown right in this orchard and are sweet and tart, firm and compact.

If you come on a Saturday morning you can watch the thoroughly up-to-date press do its business, mashing the fruit into not only a liquid but also a paste that will later be tossed to the pigs at a local organic farm. Keats talked in Ode to Autumn about how by a cider-press, with patient look,/Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours. This is where those oozings happen. Geoff handed around small plastic cups to catch some of the new cider as it ran out of the press.

We sipped. “Perfect blend,” said Geoff. I agreed. “Wish I could figure out how to do that every time,” he said with pleasant self deprecation. This mill does make the best cider in the land, and that’s not opinion but fact. They also have on hand my namesake fruit.

Next stop, the Hastings Farmer’s Market, overlooking the Hudson River. A produce stand at the end of the season has its own distinctive merits. No sweet, fuzzy peaches, perhaps, but turban squashes and sugar pumpkins and the dark leafy kale your doctor wants you to eat more of. The singer Milton was performing his song In the City when we arrived.

I like the song. It does capture the effervescence of New York. Though it seemed less relevant today with the trees aflame in the cool, cool, quiet air.

The woman who worked the booth for Cowberry Crossing was off on a coffee run, so Reese and I together worked out the numbers for a pair of pork chops and a bag of chicken feet. Inaccurately, it turned out when mom returned.

He was a great little salesman anyway. I am devoted to using chicken feet to make stock – you need a soup foul first, then throw in the feet in addition – and I used to have a chicken farm down the road where I could buy them in five-pound freezer bags. I’ve gotten a little squeamish about how the toes resemble an old lady monster’s, with manicure-worthy nails. But they make such a velvety broth, it’s worth the psychic discomfort.

Over at Do Re Me Farms, they still had some green beans, zucchini and cranberry beans.

It was wicked cold behind the cash register, and everyone was shivering.

Mushrooms, a variety, were my choice. To add to a risotto or simply.saute and devour.

There was less produce than usual, more maple syrup, cider, pickles. Here they make a big thing out of offering pickles on sticks to children, like sour lollipops.

Painted Goat Farm is an artisan cheese producer located upstate in Garrattsville (now that is a true New York name). They offer goat cheese both fresh and aged, along with goat meat and what they call goat confections. They were out of the aged and I didn’t care for any goat confections, so I took home the fresh with garlic and chives.

The farm’s herd now stands at 85 – the females are “drying up” at the moment, I was told, and will give birth in February, when the babies will drive the count up to over 100. I’d like to pay them a visit then. If I had any kind of farm it’d be a goat farm. I love goats, both how satanic their eyes look, and their pure and total determination.

Sullivan Street Curative

I woke with a touch of labyrinthitis.There are scientific explanations for this condition, all pertaining to the inner ear and “unilateral vestibular dysfunction.” But what it amounts to, what you feel, is dizziness. Vertigo in the extreme. I sat on my living room couch and watched the room whirl around me like a merry-go-round. Not fun.

When the show had subsided and after I conked out for a while, it was time for lunch. I steeled myself to go downstairs to the kitchen. An omelette. I gripped the counter. I was doing it. And the room stood relatively still.

There is not much in the way of medicine to treat labyrinthitis. You can take the pills more often prescribed for seasickness. I don’t have those in the house. I ate my food and watched the walls throb.

What I did have was bread from Sullivan Street Bakery. We go to the establishment on 47^th Street (not, improbably, Sullivan Street) in Hell’s Kitchen to stock up on baked goods whenever we’re in Manhattan. We often bring back what’s called a filone, which the bakery describes thus:

Large, tube-shaped loaf, baked dark to very dark, generously coated with wheat bran; open, irregular crumb structure and waxy-looking webbing. Mature fermentation; because of the unique baking method, flavor is nutty and sour with a slightly bitter aftertaste.

The bakery is famous for founder Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread, which you can attempt to make at home if you’re not near enough to do a drive-by like we do.

The bread is superior to any other – chewy, crusty, earthy, flavorful. I always think it’s the kind I’d want in my larder if the Barbarians were at the door. Why would we need bread at that time? For nourishment!

I buttered a slice of toasted filone and took bites in between spearing garlicky mushrooms. The room threatened to spin. But it hove to a stop when I swallowed.

Maybe I’ll sit very still and fill my mouth with bread all day.

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November 3, 2013 · 3:23 pm

Chocolate Poems

“Where are the reptiles?” the adolescent boy asked the guard at the door of the convention center.

“The what?”

Both heads swivelled to look inside at the crowded arena.

“The reptiles – are they here?”

No. The reptile show was last weekend. Here at Chocolate Expo there were only the chocolate fiends.

At two minutes to eleven, the lines stretched down the steps and around the sidewalk. “My friends are at the Marathon and here I am at chocolate world,” the girl behind me said wryly. “Stupid chocolate,” said a husband. “It’s gonna be fun, honey,” insisted his wife.

It was the annual gathering of people intent on buying and selling cacao-based products in all shapes, sizes and flavors – the more novel the better. I thought I’d see what the fuss was about.

I love chocolate, of course. Gil says my three major food groups are chocolate, coffee and milk. (That puts mocha at the top of the pyramid, I guess.)

In the convention center, people jostled to get free tastes. It seemed to actually be about half chocolate and half every other kind of artisenal food product, from honey to wine to dill pickles to maple syrup. I was surprised to find Cap’n Crunch gelato.

But there was also every kind of truffle under the sun.

Alicia at Two Chicks with Chocolate fed me a taste of rosemary lemon truffle, handpainted with colored cocoa butter, one of 60 different flavors, and I was on my way.

Pumpkin was big in everything. I saw chocolate-dipped waffles.

Chocolate-dipped fruits of all kinds.

Kids and adults alike with sticky hands, sticky faces. There was an awful amount of plastic wrapping, it seemed to me.

Chocolate culture is very high–low. I saw the most exquisite Indian truffles, created for the New Year, Dawali, by Aarti at Le Rouge in the shape of a “diya,” or lamp. Truffles with ganache came in exotic flavors with amazing “mouthfeel,” as the technical term goes. I tried the Kiser Pista Ganache, made with saffron.

Ethereal, I thought. So I couldn’t resist making off with a single specimen, the Paan Bahar truffle, made with betel leaves and rose petals.

More spirituality lay around the corner, where half-pound, solid chocolate Buddhas were cheerfully peddled at Oliver Kita Fine Confections, by a salesperson who told me, “Most people break them up to share when they chant with friends.” Okay.

Chocolate has only been the recognizable treat that we go crazy over for a relatively short chapter of human history. The Aztecs downed it as a cold, bitter, spicy brew – Montezuma alone was said to drink 50 cups a day. It became a sweetened beverage in the 17^th century, flowing from the cacao plantations of South America to France by way of Louis XIV’s Spanish bride, Princess Maria Theresa.

She gave the Sun King a chest of chocolate in 1643 for an engagement present, and his avid consumption of the beverage was said to fuel his ability to pleasure his wife twice a day even into his seventies.

Chocolate then emigrated to London, where chocolate houses became the fashion. Sir Hans Sloane, an esteemed physician, declared that milk afforded the delicacy special creaminess. New York philanthropist and bibliophile James Wadsworth, in the nineteenth century:

Twill make Old women Young and Fresh

Create New Motions of the Flesh,

And cause them long for you know what…

If they but taste of chocolate.

Samuel Pepys noted in 1657 that it was available.

“In Bishopsgate Street in Queen’s Head Alley, at a Frenchman’s house, is an excellent West India drink called chocolate, to be sold, where you may have it ready at any time, and also unmade at reasonable rates.”

Michael Pollan writes in his book In Defense of Food about a group of Americans being shown the words “chocolate cake” to discover their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. The response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.”

Everyone, no matter how-guilt-ridden, knows that chocolate is the love food. Someone should write a love poem to it.

I did feel love in the air today, at least love of chocolate, so it’s sort of a closed loop.

A company calling itself Rescue Chocolate offered vegan, organic, fair-trade, kosher chocolates, with all profits to be donated to animal rescue groups.

I thought I’d purchase one but the line was too long.

Masks, with a chocolate base, from The Chocolate Box NYC. Everything about their decoration was edible.

The proprietor, Sabrina, looked more like a ballet dancer than a candy maker.

Less artistic but just as tempting, hand-dipped Twinkies from a booth that won an award from Hudson Valley Magazine for its pies last year.

The Twinkies are one of their best sellers — since the confection was off the market for a while it drove up the demand. “We ran out last year, Gina Solari told me. “Anything Nutella is also a best seller,” she added.

Sick of chocolate, finally, incredibly, I retired to the stage area with two non-cocoa nourishments, strong coffee and a lemon-and-sugar crepe.

In the distance, convention-goers slurped up Cap’n Crunch gelato and sugar-dipped waffles. I recalled one of the most striking film food scenes in recent memory, in Hayao Miyazaki’s animated Spirited Away, when the 10-year-old Chihiro’s careless parents sit down at a counter restaurant for a snack and get turned into munching, slobbering, devouring giant pigs.

A chef-lecturer delivered informational nuggets about the subject at hand. Chocolate falls to the ground in South America, she said, after the monkeys have eaten the fruit around it. It’s a seed. She confided in the people whose sweet tooth had driven them to the convention center even before lunch on a beautiful Sunday in fall. “I know I’m probably wrecking your world, but white chocolate is not chocolate. It’s fat and sugar. You could call it fat-sugar!”

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October 31, 2013 · 4:51 pm

Freaky Filmography

There’s only one Halloween night, but you can scare you’re self silly any old time. It’s as much fun to scare as to be scared, said Vincent Price, who should know.

These are eight movies that had me literally hiding my eyes for large stretches, beginning with when I was a child and probably too young and vulnerable to be watching anything so chilling.

They all bespeak the creepiness of tight spaces, of claustrophobia. I guess that’s what horrifies me, and maybe it horrifies you too.

1. House of Wax.

An indelible experience, watching Vincent Price go mad in my grandmother’s rambling old house, the image of wax figures coming to life in a dank, dark cellar. It appeared on TCM the other day and I could barely be in the same room as the TV.

2. Funny Games.

In this 2007 version (a shot-by-shot remake of Michael Heneke’s earlier German film, by Michael Heneke, which Gil much prefers) with Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Brady Corbet and one of my faves, Michael Pitt, two very cleancut young men come to the door of a cabin and take the family hostage. Don’t do it! Don’t let them in! A friend of ours still hasn’t forgiven us for exposing her to this nightmare.

3. Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I’m in college, very blasé, watching the new flick from a seat at the front of a crowded auditorium. Just as Leatherface appears on screen with his saw, two students leap up onto the stage, their own chainsaws revving.

Hearts stopped.

4. The Last House on the Left. The first and best of the home invasion flicks, shot with terrifying hand held cinematography, in which teenage girls undergo unspeakable terrors. By master Wes Craven.

5. The Strangers.

More home invasion, from 2008. Do I detect a theme? Except here we have teens in masks terrifying other teens. Liv Tyler attempts to fight them off.

6. Games, from 1967, with James Caan, Simone Signoret and Katharine Ross, a period piece which involves kinky “mind games,” an ultra modern living environment and a dead body encased in a cast.

When I was an adolescent this messed with my head big time. What I remember most is murdered people stashed in a crawl space and telltale blood dripping through an immaculate white ceiling.

7. The Descent, 2005.

There’s a deep, twisted cave into which a group of reunioning young women have spelunked. It’s dark and dank. “Hey, there’s something down here,” says Holly. Yes, there is.

8. Saw.

I have almost successfully blocked out the one that started them all in 2004. It may be trite to cite Saw in a list of the best. Still. I can’t imagine how people watched any further movies in this franchise. It was so awful! And so great.

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October 30, 2013 · 7:44 pm

Historical Pork

I brought the porker totem home to a curious canine, though Oliver didn’t seem to feel the swine deserved an aggressive posture.

And though I debated on the drive back, porker clunking in the trunk, what Gil’s reaction would be – would he object to the creature because of its cost or size or general mien – he too was delighted by it. One of his favorite song lyrics, he said, was Dylan’s “I’m no pig without a wig/I hope you treat me kind.” Hard to hold anything against a grotesquerie that cost 24 dollars.

We decided the painted plaster pig with the voluptuous nose must have at one time enticed customers in a store or eatery. The woman in the antiques shop felt sure he had a former life as a piggy bank, but no piggy bank is thigh high. I snapped him up quickly, before anyone else could. If anyone else would.

My eye for art is my own. I’m the one who finds things at estate sales after all the “good stuff” has been bought, after everyone else goes home. In our storage locker the other day I went through our collection of two-dimensional pieces, some by friends, that the Cabin walls can’t accommodate. Space is extremely limited and 250-year-old logs hard to pound nails into.

I did hang a Currier & Ives print, an antique spoof showing a nineteenth century woman with a braid dangling to her knees, a cigarette and a riding crop. “The Girl of the Period” reads the legend on the only slightly stained image. The friends who gave me this know me well.

I do like things that are a bit stained, worn, faded or torn. Things that have the spirit of the vernacular in them. That show the human hand. It’s not outsider art when it comes from your own relative. One vintage artwork in my house was the creation of my great-grandmother Lockie Hillis, three landscape postcards she collected on a trip to the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915, which she mounted in a wood-burned frame (she herself burned the wood).

I greatly appreciate handmade signs, but I’ll only collect them for free. Our best sign, hanging outside on the porch wall, we collected off a telephone pole next to a cornfield on a midwestern two-lane.

The one above the fireplace makes an ironic comment on Oliver and the other beloved dogs that have lived with us.

Another perhaps more frightening comment, the mask hanging above the wooden sign. Leather of some kind, it comes from Mexico, and has dropped a few eyelashes since I picked it up 30 years ago. Gil has been known to put it on for Halloween and terrify small children.

The Cabin makes a perfect backdrop for a painted work like the one my artist friend Sandra bequeathed, titled “Cairo in the Garden,” named for a beloved tabby we owned with seven toes on each paw.

We don’t frame it because it doesn’t need a frame to show off its fresco-like charms.

Back to the pig without a wig. Where to exhibit his bulbous corpus? I think he needs to stand by the door, sticking out his tongue in welcoming us. Or by the hearth, though I wouldn’t want his fat to singe. Perhaps the kitchen would be the most logical, given the amount of bacon this household consumes. In a corner, where we can observe him observing us.

While I consider it I’m going to give my attention to a National Audobon Society “miniature chart” showing Twigs of Common Trees.

Here we have 62 ink-drawings of buds, bark, leaf scars and pith. The total effect is exquisite and I’d like to do the impossible: find it wall space. I fished Twigs out of storage and Gil said, You want that? Yes, as a matter of fact I do.

What this jolly pig reminds me of most of all is old-fashioned signage, when shops had a giant shoe or pair of eyeglasses out front, bespeaking loud and clear what they had to offer. That’s a history dating back to the middle ages, but you still find pigs today decorating barbecue joints. That might be this one’s origin. Oink.

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October 29, 2013 · 10:05 pm

Eat, Fly, Nest

“Birds like movement and sound – so bubbling water attracts them,” says Cary Andrews, the ornithological expert speaking on bird-friendly gardens at the Croton Free Library in front of an audience of two or three dozen intent locals. If you don’t have an exotically lovely koi pond, she says, a bird bath will do, or even a strategically set up plastic gallon jug tipped just so. Watch out for frogs, though, some of whom “can take out a hummingbird.”

In my bag, I carry a palm-sized nature guide dating to 1949, which I’d rediscovered in a box of old books earlier in the day.

The flyleaf is inscribed, “To Zan, from Mother, April 18, 1952.”

This is the last in the Green Living Series for this year offered by the Croton Conservation Advisory Council – earlier talks had focused on invasive plants and biophilia, or the love of nature – and Gil and I want to get some information on setting up a feeder. What we get is a lot more global. Water, food, nesting. The best plants so the birds can thrive. But also much larger questions of habitat, creating it and preserving it, and the survival of all the species, not just everyday sparrows.

I am tempted as the lecture begins to hand my book over to the cutest little four year old girls, who keep giddily crawling back and forth in front of the podium until they are stilled by their chaperone. I am eager to hear about migration of another kind, from our speaker, birds flying all the way up from South America, drawn by the Hudson. Birds love water – robins, report Cary, like nothing so much as a sprinkler going back and forth, plus it loosens up the turf “so they can get their worms.”

The talk includes great photos, still there’s something softly magical about these illustrations from sixty years ago.

The tufted titmouse, one of my favorites since moving to the Cabin, is a bird I’d like to attract. Now I’m hearing about raspberries that ferment when overripe so that they’re called drunkberries. Birds enjoy them. And among other pleasant digressions, Cary mentions that she’d like to organize a “garden tour of pink trees” in spring. And that she was once distracted when looking out a conference window by 10 cedar waxwings feeding on red berries. And that she and her bird-crazy neighbors put in their bird-friendly plants and tease each other: “You stole my birds!”

“Fifty percent of the wren’s diet is spiders,” I learn. Insects. They are more important than I knew. All those downed, rotting trees around the Cabin, they are gold. Bark crevices are what bugs love. And birds love bugs. And cats love birds.

No! Don’t go there. It turns out that cats are responsible for decimating billions of birds in the U.S. each year. Cary quotes a controversial University of Wisconsin study. And the bells assigned them by well-meaning owners help not a whit. They’re much worse than the hawks circling far above.

The bugs birds eat, especially the larvae babies require, grow on native plants. “Go native!” says our speaker, who admits that though she is a bird person, she was only recently educated about setting up her own bird-friendly garden. Smart and mildly self-effacing, she grants the audience “permission to be messy”: leave brush piles alone, stalks standing, the lawn grown out a bit more than most Americans think is decent. Even some weeds are good. The thistle. Even crab grass. Throw your Christmas tree to the side of your yard and a bird might take up occupancy. (We have one of those.) I also know for a fact that the fir trees close to our outside wall makes the bluejays happy.

This “tightly woven relationship between plants, insects and birds” sometimes leaves humans out in the cold. Poison ivy, for instance, is a delight for birds, it seems. Cary advocates preserving it where possible. This is the true bird’s eye view.

A few more nuggets before we dive into the cupcakes on the library table. Deer have been seen swimming from New Jersey to Staten Island. No joke. Hummingbirds will on occasion use spider webs to build their nests.

The robin’s nest found in Cary’s friend’s yard incorporated a length of her young daughter’s hair ribbon.

I start for home. In the back of my vintage bird guide I discover the following note, handwritten in neat pencil:

July 25, 1959.

Today for the second time,

a small red bird perched

on the picket fence outside

my window. He warbled

a few notes and then left.

I found out that it was a

cardinal through this book.

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October 28, 2013 · 9:15 pm

Children’s Books That Make Us Us

Most of the elegant exhibition vitrines at the New York Public Library’s show The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter stand at a height conducive to adult viewing. And wonderful as the show is, it’s really not a place for children – with the exception of a few nooks along the way offering copies of Goodnight Moon for young ones to handle – but a place for us well above knee height to get sucked back into our literary pasts.

The winding display was chock full of books and objects from the Library’s massive collection, and it ranged over the history of juvenile literature. There were picture books from China. There were vintage, quirky numbers, like The Cries of New-York, detailing children selling “various kinds of cherries” on Manhattan in 1816.

Another book, from 1727, represented the oldest known copy of the most important English-language primer, with an array of four-syllable words, fornication surprisingly found alongside exhortation.

I was interested in Instructions on Needlework and Knitting, from 1847, published in London, whose valuable pages had an actual doll’s dress sewn into the book.

But I found myself gravitating to my tried and true, the darling books of my own important and valuable childhood, when caring people made sure my library was stocked with the perfect pages to make my imagination fly.

All my old favorites were here in some form or another. I saw sketches by Hilary Knight as he worked up to a published Eloise, with the scamp lying on her stomach facing her turtle Skipperdee or making an island in the “bawth”. The collaboration between Knight and Kay Thompson was “intense, exhilarating,” I learned.

Harriet the Spy, 11-year-old brilliant tomboy, was represented along one wall with a pleasantly tattered copy of the book that could have been my own. That book taught me a lot about what it would take to grow up smart and sly in the world of adults.

The Phantom Tollbooth depicted a land I felt transported to when I was about ten, and going back farther, the Dick and Jane readers drew me in and gave me the creeps simulaneously.

I had forgotten about Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak’s A Hole Is to Dig, and the pages on display at the Library touched my heart.

Harold and the Purple Crayon. Timeless. Ferdinand. Charlotte’s Web: “Some pig.” “Terrific.” E.B. White wrote it while reporting on the founding of the U.N. for Harper’s Magazine, and it was no doubt shaped by a concern about who would save the world. The world he created was of course much more real than a big room full of serious old men.

I walked about adrift in nostalgia for my books, my bookcases, my bed where I read my books, my family’s club chair where I slouched with my summer pile from the library. “Libraries raised me,” said Ray Bradbury. I remember poring over tales of the creepy Loch Ness monster and the equally terrifying but also funny abominable snowman. I can relate to Eudora Welty’s memory:

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

I think that when reading I imagined myself to be Mary Poppins in another life (not the children who were her charges) and so I was fascinated to see P.L. Travers’s very Mary-like green-cloth umbrella with a parrot-head handle, and the Dutch wooden doll that served as the model for the magical nanny, which her American editor gave the library in 1972. “My favorite of all!” exclaimed the mom of two girls, who commenced to sing A Spoonful of Sugar.

I turned the corner and bumped into another historical nugget, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee parasol handle that Lewis Carroll bequeathed upon the former Alice Liddell, now “Mrs. Hargreaves,” in 1891. The original Alice. She held that ivory in her hand.

More heirlooms, including all the original Pooh dolls from the Milne family, which have resided at NYPL since 1987.

I was invited to craft an original story in a Mad Libs vein, with a digital setup on the wall. After I plugged in words, the narration involved a witchy persimmon and an oak turned into a sorrowful seed, reinvented from Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen. Anderson said, “Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.” All fun, but where are the fairy tales? Where are MY fairy tales? The ones I read and reread until the paper book jackets tore.

Oh, there, finally. The Blue Fairy Book. A first edition of the Andrew Lang collection, which had something like a dozen volumes.

Mom, Dad, Grandma—and I think it might have been Grandma—thank you for giving me The Blue Fairy Book, the Red, the Green, and the others, volumes I would crack open to release their dreams, their mystery and passion. Beauty and the Beast, which I read in The Blue Fairy Book, still gives me a shiver.

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October 27, 2013 · 5:29 pm

Pumpkin Pie Women

Coming home from the supermarket, laden with cans of pumpkin and condensed milk, listening to the cheekily wonderful tune, Thou Swell, Thou Witty, Thou Grand, which Rodgers and Hart collaborated on in 1927.

The girls are coming to my kitchen – the women, the college women, to spend an afternoon producing pumpkin pies. It’s golden and smoky around the cabin, warm and cozy inside.

We’re trying to raise money for a trip to Senegal in May, Maud tells me, cutting the butter into the flour, cracking a dozen eggs. BuildOn, the organization chapter she runs at Columbia, travels to other countries to build schools.

It’s this times three, right, says Jess, her school buddy, intent on the recipe.

We’re baking six pies for Maud’s campus bake sale tomorrow, to be sold by the slice. Lots of cinnamon, lots of ginger, lots and lots of canned pumpkin.

You are so graceful, goes the lyrics of Thou Swell: Have you wings?/You have a face full of nice things.

Pumpkin is the simplest pie, the easiest to please. Like pudding, nice and sweet. Almost as sweet as these two at the kitchen table.

Each person has to raise $2,000, says Maud. We have $275 so far. That’s okay, she’s easy. At Fall Fest a bunch of other organizations will get together and raise money for her group. They do that, help each other out.

We’re also collecting dresses on campus and giving them to a consignment shop – we get sixty percent of the profit, says Maud.

So we need six teaspoons, says Jess. People die from overdosing on cinnamon.

Jess is a fan of buildOn, though her own time is spent as the treasurer of a new group called Scientista, which promotes women in, you guessed it, the sciences.

They’re so busy, these women. They dig in to everything. If you’re the first person to contribute fifty dollars or more to buildOn this season, you’ll get a free copy of Walk in Their Shoes, by Jim Ziolkowski, the president of buildOn, which tells the story of founding the outfit. Maud’s staying home this year but she’s still raising money.

Both thine eyes are cute too;

What they do to me.

Hear me holler I choose a Sweet lollapaloosa in thee.

How do they manage it all? Jess: You’re doing something wrong if you’re not rushing around doing xyz.

This is a vat, says Maud, stirring.

There’s some swooning over old Gavin deGraw, Chariot, and amazement at the tale of a friend he plucked off the concert floor.

Some bemoaning of chipped nail polish.

Crimping uncooperative pie dough isn’t in the customary lesson plan, but they make do pretty well.

People have different love languages, Maud says, quoting some psychologist.

Six pies go in the oven.

I’m going to bake a pumpkin pie when I go home next, says Jess, My mom’s going to freak out.

Thou swell, thou witty, thou grand.

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October 26, 2013 · 3:55 pm

House Plants on Parade

There are certain people, and I won’t name them, who believe that house plants are boring.

For the most part these are men.

My Thanksgiving cactus has decided to get an early start this year, so it’s pushing out the new, light-green segments that are called “articles” with abandon, and showing off plenty of exciting hot pink buds.

There, reader, are you male or are you female?

Today, inspired by my Thanksgiving cactus, I went down the road to Kitchawan Farm and saw Linsay, who manages the place, and who was offering a pop-up sale of geraniums and other house plants, along with a warming fire, hot tea, fresh-dug jerusalem artichokes and the last field flowers of the year.

On my way to the stuga, the cottage where the sale was taking place, I fed an apple to a horse with a splendid white blaze named Trix, who polished it off in a single bite. We had just come from Thompson’s Cider Mill and were loaded down with heirloom apples, Crispins and Russets and Jonathans, the kind that can’t be obtained in any supermarket, plus three huge Northern Spies for pie.

Linsay knows quite a bit about house plants, among many other things. She has a hundred in her own home, and the ones on the two tables she’d set out came mainly from her own cuttings. Three dollars a pot, a good deal, expecially when it comes with a cup of hot tea on a bracing October day.

In the shade beside the stuga she explained the habit of the walking iris, which might get away from you in a garden bed. At home I’ll keep a watchful eye on it. Some day soon it’s going to give me showy flowers that look like a cross between an orchid and an iris. I hope in the dead of winter, when there are snow drifts against the window.

The epiphyllum, in the cactus family, hails from Central America, where it climbs trees and makes a strong hallucinogenic drink. It also promises a large red or white bloom, and, since it comes from the jungle, doesn’t expect much sun. Good, because sun is in short supply in the Cabin. Count me in.

The geraniums were irresistable, especially the heirloom double rose type. Linsay has Sweden in her blood and convinced me that bright windowsills need at least one of this flower. So, realizing I did in fact have one sunlit spot, I got two.

Why is it that geraniums have become associated with old ladies? Anyway, is there anything wrong with that? Even such a hipster as Bob Dylan liked them well enough to use the turn of phrase “geranium kiss” in Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.

Old ladies, I guess, have always known more about purifying the environment, keeping the air around you sweet-smelling and healthy. Spider plants as vitamins.

It had been a hard frost last night, the first of the year, and at Kitchawan they’d managed to harvest all the cutting flowers. Dahlias, my favorite, and zinnias, and a dozen other varieties with the spice of fall. Lavish, bursting with color, unlike the demeanor of some house plants, which might be demure and even a little forlorn at times.

Linsay was making a specially crafted bouquet for every person who bought a plant. It was kind of sad, she said, and kind of a relief for the season to be over. Now she could get to her other projects, her writing and her art, and do her other job of helping people organize their lives.

She organizes her plants with equal dedication. And here’s the thing. People who take these cuttings and nodules and hopeless-looking sections of stem, pot them up, test the soil, sprinkle in the proper quantity of water – they have a strong desire to organize, to fertilize, to nurture. To make things right. My mother, my best friends, the finest women I know have been wed to their house plants. Not that there’s anything wrong with a shockingly beautiful fresh-flower bouquet.

I’ve divided my last year’s overgrown aloe vera into four new pots, found the offspring four new homes at windows where the light is just right. I want to be an old lady.

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October 25, 2013 · 5:49 pm

Tweet or Not to Tweet

The gloaming is coming earlier these days. The Cabin, cozy as it is, can be small.

Our winter is heated by wood more than sun.

Fewer outdoor adventures, unless you want to really bundle up. A dive instead back into a small pink knitting project.

Oliver wants to lay down on the already-cold grass. I don’t.

What to do? Something new.

First I asked an intern to escort me through the twisted corridors of Twitterdom. Why do this at all? was my first thought, my eye wandering over the overwhelming Twitter feed. Well, said Carlos, my intern, you might find something interesting.

Ahhh, that.

I went to the Metropolitan Museum’s profile to see who the greatest art institution in America was wont to follow, and discovered a thousand crazy, creative persons and places I didn’t know existed, that I want to know more about.

Only connect, as Forster said. Easy for him to say. He didn’t have FB, Twitter, Tumblr, etc., etc.

Catch me at @jeanczimmerman and we’ll tweet.

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October 20, 2013 · 6:53 pm

What’s the Story Morning Glory?

As some things in the garden wither, others go full tilt.

A friend of mine came over with a shovel and a Beautyberry plant earlier in the summer. I didn’t know how Callicarpa Americana would take to the Cabin. Now its purple berries are practically fluorescent, a perfect complement to the orange leaves that have begun to carpet the grass around the bush.

I hauled out the brown tomato plants in the sun today, the wind whoosing through the tops of the phragmites. Sorted out the tall stakes for next year. One lone green tomato dangled from a shriveled branch.

Yet the purple cosmos are raging. And the bees are storming them.

I’m cutting them by the armful and bringing them into the living room, a bit of summer still in front of a roaring fall woodfire.

The rosemary in the garden stands tall, waiting for its time in the stew pot with a leg of lamb.

My celery is insane, a veritable hedge of the stuff. It never headed up but it still would be a great bed for a whole sea bass. I’ll have to go out and get me a fish.

Most impressive, though, are the morning glories. Dozens of blossoms open every day, their petals scrunched until they unfurl in the morning sun.

They don’t seem to understand that it’s fall, the time to fold up their tents. Well, they do fold up their tents, every day, since it’s the of the flower to bloom for a single day. “A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books,” said Whitman. The Japanese have led the world historically in cultivating varieties of the morning glory, and as of this count there are 1,000 odd species.

The ones going crazy in my garden are Heavenly Blue. As for their hallucinogenic properties, Aztec priests started that practice, though we’re perhaps more familiar with love generation baby boomers who ingested the seeds to open themselves to new experiences, as the blossom does the bee.

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October 19, 2013 · 10:18 am

A Pear Tree at Ground Zero

I waited a long time to go.

I had all sorts of excuses. The 9/11Memorial stood behind too many fences. The lines were too long. It was filled with gawking out-of-town sightseers. But then some sightseers of my own came to visit. And off we went, to the Memorial, a broad plaza studded with small trees under the shadow of skyscrapers. It was one of a few things my sister-in-law knew she wanted to do when she hit town.

There were in fact probably a thousand people at the site on a Friday morning, including some incongruously attired tourists – incongruous for a place of mourning, not for being tourists in New York. They’re always wacky.

Guards ushered us through an endless line. You could see a scrap of the Freedom Tower along the way.

Then we were there, in the open plaza with its great, deep South Pool, whose waters seem to flow down into an abyss.

An abyss of longing, of sorrow, of wonderment? Of absence? Of wordless pain? Everyone decides for themselves. You can read about the 9/11 Memorial, you can read what I’m writing now, but you’ll only understand the power of it if you’re standing there.

We could see the Freedom Tower clearly now, still unfinished, seemingly created as a photo op.

Cameras, of course, proliferated.

All around were construction sites. Various projects are energetically in progress. As is the memorial itself.

And at the pool, there are the names.

Taking a picture is a way of touching the nearly 3,000 names of the dead inscribed in bronze around the pools.

The deeply carved letters, cut out with a laser to symbolize absence, invited touching with the fingers. Touching. Wrenching, some especially.

The names are not rendered alphabetically but instead arranged based on layers of “meaningful adjacencies,” where the deceased had been that day and the relationships they had with each other, taking into account the wishes of kinfolk.

It must have been hell to figure out. Visitors access the location of their loved ones’ names through kiosks to the side of the pools.

But powerful as the pools were, as the names were, they paled slightly for me alongside what is being called the “survivor tree.” All but one of the trees planted on the plaza are young white oaks. One, though, is different. A Callery pear tree dating to the World Trade Center plaza of the 1970s, it stood on the eastern edge of the site, near Church Street. It lived through the 9/11 devastation, though reduced to a stump of eight feet, then was nursed back to health in a city park, was uprooted by spring storms in March of 2010, but came back once again. New branches, buds, flowers, everything. Life, amazingly.

Now the pear tree stands beside the South Pool, braced by guide wires as it takes root, and visitors migrate across the plaza to stand beneath its thick branches, to absorb its legend, its poetry.

The parable of the pear tree that would not perish has its bookend in another historic Manhattan pear tree. Peter Stuyvesant, the legendary governor of New Amsterdam, planted one on his bowerie in the late 1600s. Way out in the country then, the location eventually became 10^th Street and Third Avenue.

That pear tree survived the creation of the New York street grid plan in the early 1800s, and everything else the developing city had to throw at it. The tree lived over two hundred years, only giving it up when a dray mowed into it in 1867.

The people of the city mourned the loss, as they celebrate the life of the Ground Zero pear tree today. A tree that stands, gnarled, unbowed.

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October 16, 2013 · 8:18 pm

What a Wonderful House

The walls can talk in Satchmo’s house. Literally. Standing in Louis Armstrong’s den in his longtime residence in Corona, New York, we heard his perfect rumbling tones describing his inspiration for What a Wonderful World – the children of his neighborhood in Queens. The docent had pressed a button. The effect was magic.

We were visiting the Louis Armstrong House Museum, where the atmosphere created by Pops and his wife Lucille has been impeccably preserved. It was the house’s tenth anniversary as a public destination. A celebration was underway. A group called The Hot Sardines had a throwback style and even a peppy tap dancer, dressed in the current men’s fashion of skinny, tight suits.

There was a powerful trumpet player who might have felt a bit under Armstrong’s shadow.

The singer called herself Miz Elizabeth and the dancer was Fast Eddy. Basin Street Blues and Ain’t Nobody’s Business mingled nicely with the jingle of the Mister Softee truck making its way through the neighborhood.

Waiters came around bearing paper bowls of gumbo — “based on Louis’s own recipe” according to the museum — prepared by The Cooking Channel’s Tamara Reynolds and her company, Van Alst Kitchen.

The cornbread squares were properly crumbly-chewy. We went back for thirds on the gumbo.

“There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them,” Armstrong said. Anyone that couldn’t feel the swing in the air of this little Japanese-inflected garden in Queens would have to be unconscious.

After Miz Elizabeth delivered a soulful rendition of Sophie Tucker’s great signature tune, One of These Days, we ventured inside.

A time capsule. Everything was exactly as it had always been, down to the knick knacks and the vacuum cleaner.

Lucille, a Cotton Club dancer, made this a showplace, a glitzy but cozy habitat. She had found the house while Armstrong was out touring, she bought it, fixed it up, and gave him the address, so when he came back from the airport in a taxi he drove up and didn’t believe it – That’s not my house! he said. Or so a docent told us.

Everything is from another age. The kitchen has glossy turquoise cabinets.

And a stove to which a personalized nameplate was affixed.

You could see the Armstrongs’ recipe box.

Duke Ellington called Armstrong “an American original.” Pops liked all types of music, not just jazz, and kept a well-used reel-to-reel tape deck with a collection of 750 tapes. He once made a country album and among his first recordings was a duet with Jimmie Rodgers.

His den was his sanctuary, the only place in the house he could smoke weed. Pot, he said, insulated him from racism.

What about that 14-carat-gold-plated bathroom? High style for Corona, Queens.

A young woman with cat eye glasses was giving a guided tour to her boyfriend as we passed through the upstairs rooms. She had been there many times before. Look at the wallpaper, she said. I just love the decor, she told me, it has so much of them.

So many things change. This hasn’t. The telephone number for the museum is the original for the Armstrongs’ house.

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October 15, 2013 · 8:54 pm

A Recipe for Meatballs and Longevity

I told Gil I’d make him meatballs for his birthday. His 60^th. I assembled the beef, the pork, the eggs, the breadcrumbs. Plenty of cheese.

I was making the same meatballs I always make, from the delectable recipe served at Patsy’s restaurant on 56^th Street in Manhattan. Frank Sinatra’s favorite joint.

That was a man who knew how to age gracefully. (Maybe eating Patsy’s meatballs helped?)

So does Gil. He said he’d take part in the meatballs’ production, though he had other things he could have been doing this afternoon. I showed him how you roll the meat in a pile of breadcrumbs. Good breadcrumbs. The better the quality, the better anything you make with them.

I asked Gil how it felt to be almost 60. “Quoting Danny Aiello in Once Around,” he said, “just when you feel like putting a gun in your mouth everybody wants to come over and celebrate.”

Mortality on your mind? I went on scooping meat. An ice cream scoop cures a myriad of cooking ills. The right size works for cookies and meatballs alike.

“No,” he said, “I don’t really feel like putting a gun in my mouth. But I do feel like quoting Danny Aiello.”

The meatballs sizzled in hot oil. We split a few open and almost burnt our mouths stealing a savory bite.

“How does it really feel,” I persisted.

“It feels great,” he said. “Everyone’s telling me I look 50.”

Gil’s had a habit, ever since I’ve known him (that’s about 20 hundred years now) of doing kitchen work with a towel slung over his shoulder. “No woman ever shot a man who was doing dishes,” Gil says. Now he’s of a certain age, he could give husband-ing lessons to the younger generation. Love and marriage, love and marriage…

We play Ry Cooder’s One Meatball — he couldn’t afford but one meatball — and toast the perfect specimen with cider.

Gil’s someday epitaph: He chopped the onions for his own birthday meatballs.

Patsy’s Meatballs Recipe

Combine ¾ c. breadcrumbs and 6 T. whole milk in a small bowl.

Heat 2 T. oil in a skillet; fry 2 medium onions chopped fine and 6 cloves garlic chopped fine.

In a large bowl, combine 1 ½ lb. ground beef, 1 ½ lb. ground pork, 3 large eggs and 3 egg yolks, slightly beaten, 3 T. chopped parsley, 3 T. chopped oregano, 1 ½ c. grated Parmesan. Salt and pepper. Combine well.

[Now, Patsy’s recipe entails an elaborate method of rolling out the meat mixture, cutting it, rolling it, etc., which I find too burdensome. I take a simpler route, which gets the meatballs to the finish line faster.]

Roll small balls of meat mixture in bread crumbs and fry them well in oil. Invite all your friends over, as this makes around six dozen meatballs.

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