Category Archives: Miscellany

Just like that, it’s December

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I’m not sure how December happened. My last post here seems to have happened at the end of May. Where have I been?

I guess I’ve been exactly where everyone else in the United States was—or should have been: at home. Or, if you prefer, nowhere. Those days have dragged and dragged, and yet here it is December. And what have I to show for it all? So much and so little.

I have a giant raised garden that yielded towering tomato plants, though not quite enough fruits on them, plus lettuce, carrots, chard, kale and kale sprouts, and so much basil that everyone I know will be receiving pesto for the holidays. Just this weekend, I was surprised to find a late crop of lettuce volunteers and delicious carrots, weeks after the first frost. My gardening books tell me that December is a month to slow down, and the garden definitely has done that, but it hasn’t yet gone into hibernation. Some of the carrots became part of a chicken cottage pie on Saturday night, and there are more waiting to be harvested.

I’ve also started teaching myself to bake bread. I started with a fairly simple oat-corn bread, made a sweet Swedish cardamom bread as gifts for local family at Thanksgiving, and just this past weekend baked my first loaves of Swedish Limpa bread. Limpa is part of my customary Christmas, but my Swedish bakery has gone out of business. I’m delighted that I can now begin making my own. I haven’t yet found quite the right spice combination, but I’ll keep experimenting.

I’ve spent a good portion of the last six months ill-focused (anxious) and unable to read books. Poetry has pulled me through for the most part, although for a few days around November 3 even poetry seemed daunting, and I started reading cookbooks instead. If you like to cook and are having trouble focusing on reading, try it sometime. It was a brilliant solution—and started me down the path of bread making.

I’ve also been sending a lot of postcards, and have started making my own cards as a kind of art therapy. Paper crafts seem to relax me (along with cookbook reading). The banner photo up top is from one of my postcards. Here are a few others:

I’m looking forward to making more, possibly some holiday-themed ones during December. I like the creation, and connecting with friends, and supporting the U.S. Post is a bonus.

Between the primary and general elections, I wrote about 1,000 postcards to help get out the vote in Wisconsin and Michigan. That’s an accomplishment that gives me pride. I’ve also been posting a poem a day on a chalkboard on my front porch (and on social media for friends) every day since June, inspired by a friend who was doing the same. I’ve found myself largely unable to write anything long during the pandemic—witness my absence from this blog. Sometimes just a three-line poem has daunted me. But I’ve kept at it, and sometimes I think it’s what’s keeping me sane.



I have managed to have a few poems published since the start of the pandemic, though. Two actually were products of the pandemic, both of which found homes on Headline Poetry & Press. I wrote Pi Day at the very start of the pandemic, when we had just gone into lockdown and the world seemed scary but I still had lots of hope. What I Fear Most came later and has lots more angst. More recently, Back Patio Press featured two very different poems by me: RIP Munchkin, and I Like My Life, but It’s Unexpected.

Writing all this down, I feel more like I’ve accomplished something during this pandemic. Hooray!

Nature lessons

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This week, I learned to identify opossum scat. This happened one morning when I took my dog out to the back yard and discovered that some unidentified creature had been hanging out on the lower portion of my deck long enough to poop. And poop quite a lot, actually.

So of course I grabbed my handy internet device and did a quick search on “opossum scat.” This was a good guess on my part, as it turns out. Opossum scat, in fact, it was.

Communing with Mother Nature

False potato beetle

This was just one aspect of my natural history education and experience this week. For me, it’s one of the advantages of sheltering at home. I spend a lot more time in my own yard then ever before—and I’m a person who has always liked my yard. In addition to my close encounter with opossum scat, I also met a new-to-me insect and, I believe, two new-to-me birds.

  • Insect: False potato beetle
  • Bird: Black-and-white warbler
  • Bird: Common yellowthroat

The name common yellowthroat is for me either misleading or a slap in the face. I’ve lived in Illinois my whole life, a good portion of that in rural Illinois, and never to my knowledge seen one before. Common? Pfui!

Life in the front room

I think one reason I’m seeing birds I’ve not noticed before is that I’m spending a lot more time on my front porch. I’ve always been a back yard person, but I think I’m craving public space, and the front porch is as close as I can get. So I’ve set up Adirondack chairs, plants, and even a metal shelving unit, and my front porch has transformed into my new “front room.”

This is especially handy for me when it’s raining, as I love watching a storm and breathing storm-fresh air. Getting wet is usually a deterrent, but now I can do it with a roof over my head.

When it’s not raining (and I’m not working), I sit in my new “front room” with a book, and read and watch the world carry on. I’ve learned that a different collection of birds frequent my front and back yards. In back, we have lots of robins, cardinals, goldfinches, house finches, and sparrows. The side yard is preferred by the mourning doves, and occasionally we get a Cooper’s hawk looking for a meal.

In front, though, I have all of the common back yard birds plus more. So far, in just the last couple of weeks, these have included a pair of wrens, an occasional nuthatch, the two birds mentioned above, one grey specimen with white belly that I’ve yet to identify, and my first hummingbird of the season. I also have a catbird.

The catbird seat

Let’s talk about catbirds a bit—because this is my very favorite front yard visitor to date. That might seem odd, because catbirds aren’t particularly uncommon. But they’re very friendly. I would even say sociable. Also, they tend to return to the same breeding ground year after year, so a catbird friend is a kind of friend for life.

I really became familiar with catbirds a few years ago when one befriended me in my back yard. I would sit on my back deck reading for hours on end during the weekend, and this catbird started hanging out with me. He’d perch less than 6 feet away and chip at me for such a long time that I would just stop what I was doing and talk to him. Far from being frightened, he’d just chatter back. I didn’t see him the next year, so it’s quite possible that he didn’t survive the winter. This is the first year I’ve had another catbird since then, and I’m hoping to make another fast friend. Already he perches with 10 feet of me and chirps. And it’s only May; we have the whole summer ahead of us.

Recipes new and old

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Today I’m reading cookbooks. I’m inspired by having just spent the last two weeks working my way through a fine book of food writing: The Reporter’s Kitchen: Essays by Jane Kramer. It doesn’t usually take me two weeks to read a book, but one of the hallmarks of good food writing is that I savor it rather than gobble it up voraciously.

I nibbled The Reporter’s Kitchen a chapter at a time, pausing often to menu plan, cook, bake, and borrow and read cookbooks. I have three borrowed cookbooks on Hoopla as a result, along with a list of dishes from Kramer’s own repertoire that I’m planning to find recipes for and try. Among these:

  • Parsnip and pear puree
  • Indian cornbread
  • Braised red cabbage

Those are all fall/winter foods, so it will be some time before I give them a try. In the meantime, I’ve been finding and experimenting with other new recipes, while also pulling out some of my standby favorites. My husband and I have feasted on all manner of simple delights in the last couple of weeks, including sautéed spinach both with and without pine nuts; pasta in many varieties, most often including grape and cherry tomatoes sautéed just long enough to start to wilt; pub burgers with mushrooms and black olives; fish with whatever seasonings seemed right; sesame noodles; a lovely salad of green beans, cucumbers and basil with lemon vinaigrette; slaws both new and old; apple cake; derby chocolate chip cookies; and no-bake peanut butter cookies.

Mom’s kitchen

Those no-bake peanut butter cookies

I’m working on (as in eating) some of those peanut butter cookies now, which means I’m thinking about my mother. This was one of her recipes, and I suspect it came from a peanut butter jar because I’ve come across at least one other person who was raised on exactly this same cookie but didn’t have the recipe from his mother and asked for mine. It’s dead simple with just six ingredients, and it’s the only cookie I make all summer long because…no baking. As I associate this with my mother, I suspect that my son and probably his friends will associate it with me.

Food traditions are a comfort to me. My mother’s and grandmother’s recipes call them to my mind, and recipes handed to me by friends never cease to summon memories of those friends when I make them. Holidays for me are interchangeable with the food I eat to celebrate them, and I think I would sooner skip Christmas entirely than celebrate it without my family’s traditional Swedish-based meal.

In general, my tastes in food differ vastly from my mother’s. I was raised on a diet of meat, potatoes, and vegetables cooked well beyond an inch of their lives. Aside from the vegetables, my mother was an excellent cook. But my adult tastes lean more toward pastas, rice, lighter (or no) meats, and steamed or grilled vegetables. I’ve inherited or retained my mother’s taste for fish, though, along with memories of standing next to her fishing along a riverbed. I’ve also inherited those recipes, some of which—her lentil soup, for example—I will enjoy till my dying day.

Missives of love

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“Letters are souvenirs of love,” says the headline on the newspaper article I read weeks after it was published.

The growing darkness, a poem by Kim Kishbaugh (c) 2020
Sometimes I even make my own cards or postcards—meditative in its own way!

I wrote four postcards today, and yes I think love was one of the reasons. Letter writing of any sort tells a person you’re thinking of them, they’re special, and you want to connect with them—specifically them, not just anyone.

I used to write long letters when I was younger, before I married and had a kid and got busy, busy busy. I’ve lost the habit, but the postcards and cards I’ve been sending lately might be a first step toward getting it back. I rather hope so, both because I value that personal form of communication as a recipient and because letter writing can be meditative for me. To write to someone about my life and my world is to think about my life and my world. Doing so with pen and paper takes a little longer than email and feels more…intentional, I think. The fact that I write emails all day for work might be another factor in favor of pen and paper for me.

Viva la postal service

The meditative nature of letter writing is only one reason why I’m doing it these days. The other reason—indeed, the primary one—is because I believe in the inherent value of and need for public mail delivery. The U.S. Postal Service is under threat, and we need it. Using it is a small way for me to show my support.

I’ve started seeing signs in support of mail carriers on doors and windows in my neighborhood, so I know I’m not alone. I’m pleased to see these essential workers getting some thanks and praise for continuing to do their work in this trying time. I do know someone who doesn’t properly appreciating them, though: Old Dog, aka Rolo. Like many dogs, she doesn’t welcome the mail carrier to our door (unless you consider furious barking and growling a welcome). That’s OK, though. Our mail carrier knows and waves to her as “my friend” when we see him on our walks in the neighborhood.

Of course, we stay safely on opposite sides of the street from one another while we wave.

Whoring on Mother’s Day

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I call this tulip a whore every year. It grows up tall and elegant in the garden, willowy and waving gently in a breeze. Then I bring one inside, and eventually it splays itself wide open for all the world to see what it’s got.

I love this tulip.

I don’t recall its name, but every year it adds graceful beauty to my outdoor garden and then puts on a garish, boastful display indoors. That’s this year’s picture above. Here’s last year’s:

I’m pretty sure if I looked back further in my photo archive I’d find something similar for the past 10 years, or for however long it has been since I ordered these bulbs and put them in the ground.

These guys are nearing the end of their bloom time this year, and the lilacs are chasing close behind them. Come to think of it, lilacs are equally boastful in their own way, bathing themselves in a perfume you can smell down the block. Nothing subtle, but ecstasy to inhale.

Today on Mother’s Day, I celebrate the whores of my garden.

Hungry reading

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I just started reading a book of food writing, and all I can think about is food. I’ve only an introduction and one essay into The Reporter’s Kitchen, by Jane Kramer, and already I’ve made chicken salad, am planning dinner, and have borrowed two cookbooks from my library (thank you, Hoopla!).

Kramer is The New Yorker‘s European correspondent, but what’s important here is that she also has written about food over the years. The Reporter’s Kitchen is a compilation of those essays. I read The New Yorker only irregularly and wasn’t familiar with Kramer’s writing before this book caught my eye at the library (you know, back in the day when libraries were buildings you could walk into). So far I’m a fan. Even Kramer’s introductory essay had me starting to think about ingredients in my kitchen, and that might be the best response possible to food writing.

Tonight’s menu will take shape around some sort of pasta with tomatoes, kalamata olives, and probably green beans. I’m thinking about sautéed spinach on the side, and I also have an urge to bake. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Ground to table

I’m looking forward to a summer and fall filled with great cooking made possible by garden-fresh ingredients from the brand-spankin-new raised bed my husband just built for me. It’s 16 feet long and will hold everything from tomatoes and beans to cabbage and kalettes (aka kale sprouts). We took delivery of 4 cubic feet of soil this week and have spent the last three days moving it wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow into its new wood-framed home. I’m tired and a bit sore, but oh so happy I could write a poem.

Mineral-black soil,
Fertile, dark promise rich with
possibility

Or something like that. I’m reading a lot of poetry while sheltering in place, particularly after treating myself to a birthday purchase of books delivered direct to my door not by Amazon but by the distributor(s) for my local independent bookstore, which is able to continue bringing in income with this service while not able to open its doors. My order included three books of poetry, and I’m making my way through them slowly, savoring and re-reading.

My current obsession is The Madness Vase, by Andrea Gibson, one of my favorite poets. These poems are powerfully strong, anthems of survival shot through with vulnerability. They celebrate life without ever pulling punches, and I can’t get enough of them. That has been pretty much the case for me with every book of Gibson’s poetry I’ve ever picked up, and if you’ve never read any … well, I think you’re missing out.

I’ve seen Gibson in performance as well, and they’re equally powerful on stage. Here’s a collection of videos of their performances—don’t miss.

Non-fiction for the birds

Also included in my bookstore purchase was an enormous hardcover book, What It’s Like to Be a Bird, by David Allen Sibley. This one, too, is a joy, not meant to be read cover to cover but intended rather for wanderlust reading, choosing your own topic and following it wherever it takes you.

One place It took me was to my drawing pad, after reading about wings inspired to draw feathers of all varieties. I sense years of enjoyment ahead of me from this book, reading and re-reading, learning about different aspects of birds’ lives, reminding myself how and why they fascinate me.

Spring is a good time for reading about birds, when I also can sit on my front porch or back deck and watch them in the trees and at the feeders. That’s where I’m headed now, probably with a book.