Sitting in the living room watching the reeds blow madly outside — no fallen branches yet. Pelting raindrops.
A mouse scuttled up the wall, disappearing into the ceiling timbers, much to Oliver’s curiosity. Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, I suppose, it’s riled up by the storm.
Filed under Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature
Built a fire, carbo-loaded, watched the flying leaves fade into the dark, lit candles to get in the habit, knitted my David Copperfield scarf (raw wool from Jacob sheep, greasy with lanolin), scratched the dog’s belly, Walking-Dead-loaded.
Filed under Home, Jean Zimmerman, Knitting
Ominous outside. On the grass along the parkway, a dead bloodied dear in the shadow of a dozen wild turkeys — didn’t know they were carnivores.
The wind whips up the leaves. Children crowd the soccer field, laughing unable to imagine what’s ahead. Chores done, candles collected, Oliver and I await the storm.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Nature
I am inspired by a cider mill down the road that sells heirloom apples, some of which it grows and some it brings in. Weathered wooden crates hold one to two dozen varieties, bright green to deep red, all labeled with their place and date of origin.
Imagine biting into an apple Thomas Jefferson raised, about which he wrote from Paris: “they have no apples here to compare with our Newtown Pippin.”
At Thompson Cider Mill I can find apples of the perfect flavor and shape and texture to bake into the dessert I call Apple Bombs, flaky pastry fixed in a package around a whole cored apple stuffed with butter and brown sugar, so that each dinner has their own individual, spherical apple pie.
There is an intense, hard, black apple that looks beautiful in a bowl on the table. It’s so vintage, you feel you’d have to go through a worm hole back in time (not through the apple) to find it, but here it is for you in a neat shed in 2012, ready to be collected into your shopping basket.
The Apples of New York, published before the turn of the 20th century by Spencer Ambrose Beach and now digitized, spells out nearly 400 varieties of the fruit, with lavish illustrations. It is the Audobon of apples.
Thompson Cider Mill has all new machinery to press its complex, perfumey cider. You could be drinking a combination of a dozen or more varieties, including Macoun, McIntosh, Rhode Island Greening, Northwest Greening, Jonagold, Winter Banana, Golden Russet, Idared, Winesap, Jonathan, Mutsu, Monroe, Baldwin, Fuji, Cortland, Spygold, Red Spy, Northern Spy, Pippin, Seek-No-Further, or local Golden or Red Delicious. When you take a sip, you’re drinking history.
Maybe I like the place so much because I can find my namesake fruit there.
Filed under Cooking, History, Jean Zimmerman, Nature
End of October. Having had their fill of sunflower seeds — hanging upside down on the flopped over, giant heads as if they were hanging from a lampost — the tufted titmice (pl. titmouse?) have flown. It seems so silent without their cheee-cheee-cheee.
In Tarrytown, the streets are decked out for Halloween with witches hanging from lamposts and homemade scarecrows tied to parking meters, each one topped by a tilting pillowcase — faceless hoods worthy of Abu Ghraib. Did the town fathers think of that when they came up with the design? Or was the connection implied?
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Nature
It has come to my attention that there are myriad bottles afloat out on the ocean, more than I ever imagined. The messages contained within may sometimes be sentimental, but they might also constitute scientific inquiry. In fact, the oldest found message in a bottle, dating back 98 years, was part of an oceanographic study to find out the “Direction of the Deep Currents of the North Sea”.
A Scottish skipper found it near the Shetland Islands this year, just nine miles from where it had been dropped by the Glasgow School of Navigation in 1914.
Messages in bottles go back to Greek times, and have always captured the imagination — so much so that Queen Elizabeth I had to squelch the romantic impulse to read what was inside by appointing an Uncorker of Ocean Bottles who would prevent amateurs from doing that job. She was afraid of information being relayed across the seas by spies.
A passenger on the doomed Lusitania in 1915 set this message adrift: “Still on deck with a few people. The last boats have left. We are sinking fast. Some men near me are praying with a priest. The end is near. Maybe this note will—”
A scientific project in Canada today has sent out 6400 bottles, hoping to get back information on currents. They’ve gone all over the place. One circled Antarctica one and a half times before landing at Tasmania.
It seems science has come to dominate the message bottle gig. Next time I’m at the shore I’m going to jumpstart the poetry-in-a-bottle movement, inserting lines by Wallace Stevens and W.H. Auden into wine bottles and sealing them firmly with sealing wax and cork before casting them out on the tides. You never think they’ll come back, isn’t that what’s kind of great about it?
Filed under History, Jean Zimmerman, Poetry
A person contacted me, curious to see whether I had come across anything about her grandfather in my research on I.N. Phelps Stokes. Said they were friends, that she had pictures of them together at a Paris fancy-dress ball in the 1890s. Fancy dress equalled cross dressing in the terminology of the time; the two men were got up as Greek peasant women — wish I had a copy of that one. Who was your grandfather, I asked. Howard Cushing. I couldn’t recall any specific reference, though the name sounded familiar. Was he a banker, I said. Errr, no, she said. He was an artist.
Afterwards I did a little digging and found the man’s diaphanous work, which hangs among other places at the Met and the Whitney. There would have been more had he lived longer, but he died suddenly at 47. These two canvases depict his wife, Ethel Cochrane, whom he is said to have sketched or painted over fifty times.
Quite beautiful. I would have liked to see his rendering of Edith Minturn.
Filed under Art, History, Jean Zimmerman
A new version of Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm by the great Philip Pullman is about to come out in November — reviewed here with a preview, The Frog King.
If all the frogs in the marsh at the Cabin became princes we’d have quite a party.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Writers, Writing
Guested at a book club today, one of two I’ve been invited to this week. Book groups are great — you get to talk about literature, and they feed you good chocolate cake.
Cakes by Wayne Thiebaud
There were about 20 members gathered in a living room overlooking the Long Island Sound. Beautiful, though my chair had its back to the view. I tried to appear scholarly, as this was a group that had actually read Anna Karenina in a month (last time I partook it was a 12 month commitment).
I find that people like The Orphanmaster a lot, but they love the idea that it’s been optioned for Hollywood.
I spoke about all the research I’d done for The Orphanmaster, how most of the details and textures of the time were as accurate as I could make them. Oh, so it was faction, one member said. Well, historical fiction, I said.
But faction is a pretty good description after all, when you’re under the spell of that chocolate cake.
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman, The Orphanmaster, Writing
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 was still roving in circles, nose stuck to the ground. He seemed pretty pleased with himself.
After the Chase
In the clearing, a blue jay muscled around from branch to branch around me, showing off. I saw a building foundation down the slope that I’d never seen before, and realized I was standing atop a berm created by a wall of giant boulders.
On this particular dreamy afternoon, it would have seemed almost normal to run into some gargantuan natural apparation, like the Stratosphere Giant of the Redwood National Park in California, 370 feet tall (the Statue of Liberty is 305 feet).
Filed under Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature
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 he hangs with the foxes.
Went to another magical location this afternoon — Oliver led me through the raspberry prickers in the woods to a mystically open hillside with a spread of golden leaves, the glow of autumn hanging in the air — a Brothers Grimm kind of place. Then I pried out of the pit hound’s smiling mouth a small yellowed bone with a knuckle, exactly like the orphan’s digit in The Orphanmaster. The signet ring in the book would have been too much to ask, I guess.
Filed under Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature
Sometimes things happen for a reason. Today, for example, I broke down with a flat tire on the Sprain Brook Parkway and had to wait an hour for the garage to come put on the spare. I was much later getting home on this perfect fall day than I wanted to be.
But. As I got near home on my spare, the same road I drive down every day, my road, Cedar Lane, and pulled up to the stop sign, what did I see caroming along the property right next to where I was halted, about ten yards away? A red fox. Wild-looking, brushed with black. It had a look of slight puzzlement: how did I land in this stretch of suburbia? Then it turned tail and dove into the woods, toward my house.
I’d make that trade any day, a flat tire for a fox sighting.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Nature
What do you do with a quince? Or a bushel of them. I have a quantity on hand courtesy of my brother.
The romantic mythology surrounding quinces is marvelous. In ancient Greece, well wishers tossed fresh quinces into the wedding chariot of the bride and groom. It’s believed by scholars that the apple in the Garden of Eden was actually a quince. And Lear had his honeymooning Owl and Pussycat nibbling on slices of quince “which they ate with a runcible spoon.”
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand.
They danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
Lacking a runcible spoon, I’m going to have to come up with some concoction to employ my mythical quinces. Any suggestions?
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman, Poetry
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, The Orphanmaster
The winter firewood came today, three face cords worth, and stacking it had its usual perspiratory pleasure.
What it made me think of was The Odyssey (we’ve been listening to Ian McKellen’s superb rendition) and that incredible moment when Telemachus and Odysseus recognize each other in the hut of Eumaeus the swineherd. I see their amazed reunion as taking place beside a blazing fire in the center of the shelter, an open hearth, and just imagining the scales falling from the eyes of son and father makes me shiver. Fires have been witness to the most sublime moments of history, and the worst.
“Chop your wood,” said Thoreau in Walden, “and it will warm you twice.” Or thrice, with the memory of the fire afterward, or four times, with the heating pad on your back. Bring on winter. Our bear of a fireplace is ready.
Filed under Home, Jean Zimmerman, Poetry
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