Green tomatoes, Indian treats, Fewer, Better Things, Misfits

 Misfits arrived promptly  yesterday

And some of the  blueberries got into a batch of blueberry muffins, one of which went home later with Gary for his  breakfast today.

He and I had a big food connection day. He'd stopped over late afternoon to see how I was, since I hadn't been out walking, too hot. That's when he left with the muffin, hot from the oven.

Later he came dashing in with these

Steaming hot, from the Indian neighbors on his other side, new people I don't know yet. They're crisp outside, soft inside, mildly spicy, savory. He split them with  me. 

I found out later it was an Indian festival day, one I didn't know about. Indian neighbors tend to include everyone in the food aspect of festivals. 

I don't know the name of these items. If anyone does, please say. The friends I'd ask locally are in India for the summer.

Later in the evening he showed up again, with a sad branch of tomato vine. He'd been trying to tie it up and broke it. So when I said you can cook the green tomatoes, he said, no, you can, take them. So here they are

I'll ripen them a bit then make something interesting of them.

Yesterday was definitely a rich and packed day, all in all.

Then I embarked on the lovely Jill Barklem books, starting with Spring Story. Her botanical accuracy is stunning as well as her watercolor skills and the story is really less important than the portrayal of a fantasy world. Here's one of my perennial favorite themes

The dollhouse insight into a series of lives, ss seen in their surroundings. Very similar to the attraction of the opening of Under Milk Wood, seeing into the houses of the sleeping people.

Originally written for children, her work is great at any age, beautiful, meaningful and so very well rendered.

Then there's Glenn Adamson, Fewer, Better Things. Aside from starting off on the right foot by correctly using "fewer", not the accursed "less", he writes very persuasively and knowledgeably and keeps saying things like this

Which stop you dead because they're exactly right. This book will take me a while to read, partly because he keeps saying things like this, partly because I get off on tangents because of artisans and artists he mentions that I need to learn about right away.

Such as Dorothy Gill Barnes,  worker in wood and bark 

She would incise designs in living bark in the tree, wait years to maturity before taking it to work it into art.

He's a wise man and a wise writer. Definitely read this!

Happy day everyone, make things, or read about making things, or go out and just look at the sky to see what it's up to today. 

Daring feats, weekend reading and full disclosure

Up front today is the news that as of yesterday, polls are showing a substantial increase in women registering to vote. Jaw dropping, is the phrase of the day. Dobbs may have been an ugly gift in an ugly wrapping.

And this is the midterms, traditionally a time of voter apathy and the party in power dropping congressional seats. So we're hopeful. We need to hold the House and increase the Senate.

In other news (!) I made a daring venture this morning, drove all the way to the library. This involves a couple of towns, many intersections and traffic lights, and is the furthest I've driven post op, as they say in the trade.  My brain can't believe I can see this well without the glasses I've needed for nearly fifty years.  Turns out I can.  Trala.

And here's today's haul, now that I can read regular print and can even fetch the books myself 

I'll let you know how it goes.

I also had an encounter of the nicest kind as I was leaving, reaching out to push the door opener. I noticed a little guy with his Mom watching intently, and asked him if he'd like to push? He leapt to it, I thanked him and pointed out he'd opened TWO doors, the lobby being designed that way 

As I left i heard him all excited "I opened TWO doors! I did. I did open two doors, I did" i have a feeling his mom will have to hear about this mighty feat for a while.  Not unlike old ladies, " I DROVE to the library, I did I did".. 

And I also did some Sock Ministry work, I did, I did, and my shoulder is okay up to now, it is, it is.

Speaking of mighty feats, Mary Moon cleaned her refrigerator. If you don't read her blog you should, she's a terrific writer, see her Bless Our Hearts. 

Anyway she's also a terrific cook, feeding husband, two generations of family, growing food, and canning and pickling. Which means her fridge is a real food workshop.

Mine not so much. I do cook, as you know, and it's usually for one. I bake a lot snd mostly that makes its way to handsome Son and neighbors, never lands in the fridge.

The reveal, complete with protest bumper sticker, visible from the front door.

It echoes. The bottom picture is the chest freezer, not self defrosting, which has a protective inner coating of ice

When Handsome Son was very young I had a big vegetable garden and a big chest freezer. I used to defrost in July, and give the ice chunks to him and the kid next door to have iceball fights in the hot sun. I don't have that motivation right now, so I'll get to it at some point.

Speaking of food, which we are, and self image we're smart enough not to take from the media, here's a take I like

Happy day everyone, we're in charge of the Great Us, and the people who've pissed us off this year, SCOTUS and others,  you'll regret upsetting the distaff side.  Dollars to donuts.

In other good news, Ukraine is holding off the pesky Russkies, and they're trying to invade by feet,  not miles, right now.  Go Ukraine!  Bye Putin.

Lovely walk, soup, thoughts of assumptions

 I finally got a walk today, cool and wet underfoot, and my neighbors in full bloom and art

 

This is a different rabbit, the one in the woods now having lost both ears 

Happy little elephant! I have the most cheerful neighbors.

Yesterday was cool enough to make stock

Then use it in a powerhouse soup of kale and celery with barley. Plenty of berbere seasoning and Old Bay, sprig of Italian basil on top.

The kale was easy to cut down, just had it frozen then hit the bag sharply, result small pieces, fine for purpose.

Last visit from Kira the Stringmaker last evening to thank me again, before she goes home, tell me she liked it, and is going to do it again, using the kit I gave her. 

She's teaching her Mom and aunt on Friday evening, all arranged! She not being big on talking, Gary filled in the details. So cool. The string going out into the world! Each one teach one.

The drawing of shrubs, no, people, reminded me of another couple of similar experiences, where the customer insisted I knew nothing!  

One was back when I was making a lot of paper beads and selling at festivals. One necklace made from shiny coated paper with a black and white abstract design was snapped up by a lady who said I'll take these porcelain beads, please. 

Not wishing to commit fraud I explained they were paper, and she swept that away with "No, they're clearly porcelain!" and went off with them, happy with her buy. 

Later I realized her knowledge of beaded jewelry extended to people who bought and strung beads for sale. The idea of making them didn't fit in there.

I also quickly found that when someone needs an artwork they are not interested in chatting with the artist. More than once I've been waved away from explaining the methods by the buyer saying none of that matters. I need this! Happened with  prints, drawings, miniature needlework, same thing.

I think this is probably quite right. The work matters, not the maker. In the best work you feel as if it was just out there waiting for you to make it, not something you thought up! You assist it into existence, rather than force it. 

And here's a lovely Maggie Rudy tribute to one of everyone's favorite destinations

And to the continuing brave struggle in Ukraine

Fiber and friends

Yesterday I tried that idea of blending roving with daylily foliage to make cordage.

Here's the silk roving at work, now being added to whatever this thing is. It might become a table mat for hot dishes.

Happy about how that worked, and the timing, because yesterday afternoon Gary and granddaughter suddenly appeared, ready to learn cordage. Perfect.

I had her pick a faded daylily leaf and split it several times end to end, to see how to start collecting her materials. I'd already prepared and damped a batch for her and Gary to use.

Which they did, very excited about it. 

Then, Kira proving very adept, we added in a bit of silk roving, her choice, showed her how to splice to get an endless string, then went on to use some wool roving, too . 

She was smiling happily throughout. I noticed how quickly she figured out how to move her fingers to keep the threads moving into place.  She's very good.

and here's the giant string she made!

So a seven year old can make a very good mixed yarn thread. Cool or what?

I explained to Gary about z twist and s twist, and  how plying works, and he knows now just how technically interesting this simple skill is.  Kira now plans to teach her mom, Janee, whom I've known since she, too, was a little girl. 

Happy students, happy teacher. Just half an hour, and years of benefit. Learning to make for yourself is an important step to a lifetime of feeling capable. Also fearless in making art . And anyway it was great fun for me.

Then Textiles and Tea was a bit of an anticlimax, the guest being Rebecca Winter, formerly an acclaimed doll maker using her handwoven fabric. But not a word was spoken about doll making, to my disappointment. 

She's now written a book about shadow weaving, highly technical, unintelligible to anyone without floor loom experience , and that was her focus. So I show you her beautiful weavings, and the weavers among us will understand

She was wearing a scarf she'd spun and woven from pima and natural green cotton

And she does paper weaving 

An artisan of many talents, including bookmaking, with handwoven covers. She binds using the Coptic stitch.

So there was still plenty of interest, but doll making will have to wait for another guest I guess.

Yesterday was a day of art all round. Intersectional, intergenerational, interracial, intercultural, you name it! Just a lovely time with friends.

Happy day everyone, weave on, make your own string, you'll be glad you did. This sounds like a late night TV pitch "Never buy string again!"

Return to yarn! and pruning

Yesterday was another beautiful day, eyes going along nicely, shoulder ticking over okay, so I ventured on

a return to the Sock Ministry.  After a few rounds my shoulder was fizzing and whining, so I set it aside till later, the sock, not the shoulder, then later did a bit more, and today it seems okay. 

So that seems to be a good way to proceed. After I finish this sock, I'll have two pairs to send off. 

And since I had to stop knitting for a while, I did a bit of pruning. The cherry bushes which yielded nothing this year, are now tamed

And since the morning glories never budded, just developed massive foliage, that went too, ready for when I need to put out bird food on the shepherd's crook.

The cherry tomatoes are booming, very hopeful there, and the butterfly bush cluster is looking better and better, growing rapidly. 

It will give food for birds since I won't deadhead it, and shade next year for The Great Me.

Bit more knitting today, maybe even risk a bit of cord making. With an endless background of audiobooks from The Number One Ladies Detective Agency. He must have been writing even in his sleep.

Today the NYT has finally crumbled and admitted that Biden and the Dems are doing well. You can see how it hurts, crying and screaming I shan't, no, it can't be true there has to be bad news somewhere, Dems in disarray and all that.

The NYT who wrote 38, count them, articles on Hillary's emails. And zero, count them, you can't, on her policies. I must admit to schadenfreude here.  I'm usually more forgiving, but they are truly not an admirable bunch.  And Dems are very much in array. Large helpings of crow on the NYT menu.

Happy day everyone, we're all in array. If there's a bit of disarray here and there, well, bear with us.

Mackerel skies and memories

Yesterday I sat out, weather now settled into a lovely series of days in the mid eighties, and here's the mackerel sky we had

Gerard Manley Hopkins used that wonderful term in his poem about dappled things, which I highly recommend for pure joy. 

And I remember as a very little kid being taken out in a small mackerel fishing boat on vacation at Staithes, on the north Yorkshire coast, 

and being scared to dapples when a live mackerel was brought in and leapt around my legs, ooh-er. His body was dappled and silvery, hence the name of that cloud formation.

Staithes, locally known as Steers, goes back to Viking times in recorded history, and has entertained more eminent people than your humble blogger, Captain Cook, for one, who apprenticed here. 

I know his stamping grounds pretty well, Marton, listed in the Domesday Book, Great Ayton, where I've never been able to get into the Captain Cook Museum.  Over the years on visits I've asked and always been told sorry, the key's lost! 

On to today, August Fifteenth, Feast of the Assumption of Mary, great big holiday in several countries in Europe, also the Americas.

I worked as an au pair in a French family in rhe late fifties before going to the uni, where my by-then-fluent French stood me in good stead in a competitive degree program in French Studies, with students with much better preparation from schools better than mine. 

That year my Parisian au pair family was in St Briac on the Breton coast on the Fifteenth. Then it was a fishing village, but now, looking for pictures for you I see it's gone up in the world.

First summer of actual sunshine I'd ever experienced, England at that time in a period where summer temperatures were lucky to get above 60°f and there were summers where you wore your coat over your hopeful summer dress. Quite a contrast to recent years.

Anyway the Fifteenth was a huge festival, parades, a procession with Breton bagpipes, playing right into church for High Mass. 

At the Elevation of the Host, a very sacred moment, usually there'd be just a bell chiming gently three times, once before the host in the monstrance was lifted, one at peak, as high as the priest could reach, one after it was lowered back to me altar.. 

On the  Fifteenth in St Briac, the bagpipes burst out again, big joyous shout!  It was great, people I'd seen around the village all now in traditional costume, most of them playing instruments. 

Brittany and Cornwall, county in the southwest of England, with its own Cornish language, have a long connection in language, myth and fable. Tristan and Iseult, all that.

They also have red haired people! My late Handsome Partner's hair was flaming red, from his Cornish heritage as well as his Scottish family. And some of the Bretons I met had his build and size and coloring. 

I didn't know him then, but years later I gave him a fisherman's sweater, my brother had passed on to me,a real one, with tarred waterproofed wool, which was the best fit he ever had. Shoulders broad enough,  sleeves short enough, clearly designed for his people.

Later that summer my au pair family finished up the season in Prades, in the Pyrenees, famous for being the home of cellist Pablo Casals. Too late for  the Casals music festival, oh well, they were not into music 

Wonderful history there, St Michel de Cuxsa one of the festival sites, ancient church. I still remember the warm southern smell of ancient stone and the foliage in the hot sun, fruity and dusty.

Again, different language, different local words, this being the land of southern French, not the language of Paris you learn as a student. 

The Parisian family was also struggling a bit with that, I was happy to note! I was permanently struggling with their two year old Bruno, whose own language frequently confounded me.

Then, suddenly, a few weeks earlier than planned, with the proposed return of deGaulle, the Algerian conflict, all that,  there was the very real prospect of civil war and my possibly being unable as a foreign national, to leave. 

My family, the Fontaines, scrambled to get me on a flight home, along with crowds of other foreigners. They rushed me to a small plane out of Nice airport, change in Paris, home to the UK. 

I'd already got special permission to defer my precious rare university place for one year, to allow for the time in France, and they wouldn't have accepted a mere civil war as an excuse to be late again.

I was a pretty intrepid teen, come to think of it. At this point I was 18, I'd made all the arrangements for the job and travel from England to Paris, to the au pair agency myself, as well as the uni details, there being nobody in my life with any knowledge of any of this. 

It being in the midst of the Algerian conflict, Paris streets were perilous for young girls. I was repeatedly warned never to walk on the edge of the sidewalk because there were car abductions for ransom, nor too close to buildings because of snatching from doorways and alleys! 

Abduction of young respectable girls for likely ransom was a form of rebel fundraising. Some hair raising tales of failed ransome attempts, too.

No wonder emigrating a few years later to the, then peaceful, US, knowing nobody but Handsome Partner, husband at that point , didn't seem like such a big deal. I mean, I wasn't even alone! 

You can accomplish a lot when you don't know any better.

Happy day everyone, ignorance is not always a bad thing, but courage and interesting adventures always come in handy. 

Photo AC