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.
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.
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.
I started my Sunday with a wren warbling and dancing in the forsythia outside my living room window. It was my second wren sighting of the spring, and I’m pleased to know they’re in the neighborhood. They’re not uncommon here, but I don’t see them every year. I’ve set out wren houses more than once, and I once scored a nest, but it wasn’t the nest momma ultimately picked for her brood, so we didn’t get any tenants.
I wondered what symbolism attaches to the wren, and it seems to depend whom you ask. One Native American totem website associates it with confidence, energy, and gusto for life. Another tells me it doesn’t have much meaning in most Native American cultures but is, in some, a bird of war and believed to boost courage. The Celts apparently associated it with the old year coming to an end, and for that reason, more than one website (including the Smithsonian magazine’s) says the Irish traditionally hunted it on the day after Christmas.
Well, I don’t want to kill wrens. So I chose to associate them with industriousness and gusto, and took my wren sighting as a sign that I should get something done during the day. Amazingly, that’s what I did. By day’s end, my garden and yard were all tidied up for spring: birdbaths in place, fountains spouting, patio swept, yard debris collected, a second round of spring seeds planted, and seedlings starting to think about sprouting in my portable greenhouse. We exhausted the dogs by spending the day outside and giving them a walk. And I finally did the craft project I’ve been planning for two years, which has haunted me since the start of sheltering in place.
We sat outside for a lovely video call with the faraway son, and I saw my wren again, along with a woodpecker and other critters both winged and earthbound. I’m not sure what symbolic meaning attaches to woodpeckers—maybe industrious or mischievous? Leaving now to go look that up.
P.S.
I still haven’t looked up the woodpecker symbolism, but I did challenge myself to draw my sweet little wren, which is why this post is delayed. Here he is in black and white also.
Creativity comes in many forms. My primary—and professional—medium is words. But food is a close second that brings me a lot of pleasure.
I haven’t had much time to cook while sheltering at home, mostly because I’m fortunate enough to be able to work from home and my job is one whose demands have ramped up significantly in the pandemic. But occasionally I get a cooking urge when I actually have time to explore it.
Yesterday was one of those days. So I looked in the freezer, found some ground turkey that needed to be used, and went recipe hunting. The result: turkey meatballs seasoned with cardamom and orange, served over a bed of cabbage and brown rice, with grape tomatoes on the side.
My first pie ever with a butter crust
I started with this recipe and played with the seasonings a bit, substituting a smaller quantity of mace for the nutmeg in the meatballs and adding turmeric and ancho peppers. I also added turmeric and ancho to the sauce, along with a lemon-garlic seasoning that gets a lot of use in my kitchen. I didn’t alter the cabbage at all, except to skip the salt and use a slightly citrusy pepper blend instead of plain pepper.
It was tasty, and the cabbage is an absolute keeper, especially mixed with rice as in this recipe.
Dessert was peach pie I made the night before, and the weather cooperated so we could eat outside. Heaven.
Most people I know are having mood swings in this pandemic. On top of feeling isolated and penned in, there’s much to fear—for ourselves, our loved ones, our nations, and for humanity.
Reading poetry can help me when I’m in a funk, as can sunlight and the outdoors. I don’t think I can write my way out of a funk, but sometimes I’m able to put pen to page despite low spirits. There’s a chicken-egg conundrum to this; I’m not clear what comes first—whether writing helps me get away from the gloom, or I’m already on my way out and that allows me to give voice to my feelings. But they do often seem to go hand in hand.
Today, a poem I wrote near the darkest point of my recent funk—during a two- to three-day period starting on Holy Thursday of Easter week—made its way into the wide universe. “What I Fear Most” is published now on Headline Poetry and Press, and the editor who accepted it made my day by telling me it had struck home personally with them, voicing what they considered a common experience.
It’s gratifying and comforting to know that something positive can come from sadness. I’d rather not have gone through (or put my husband through) that 1 1/2-week funk. But having done so, I’m glad to think I might help someone else muddle through as well.
I intended this blog to serve as something of a social distancing diary when I started writing daily posts with the institution of shelter-in-place orders. Clearly that plan has crumbled, given the nearly two-week gap. But sometimes it’s hard to write, and hard to share. I’m forgiving myself.
Photos of the day
I used most of yesterday’s good photos in yesterday’s blog post. Here are a couple taken while the sun was out one day during my funk. Dogs on the deck—a recipe for contentedness.
Last time I was here was almost two all weeks ago, and I see that I was in a funk. There’s a surprise, eh?
Life is all ups and downs these days. Only two things surprise me about finding that I was blue the last time I wrote here:
That I managed to write at all while in a funk
How long the funk lasted (well over a week)
In any case, I’m back, and in a better mood. I think we’re all having ups and downs, better times and worse. Here in the Midwest, the weather matches the mood. It was clearly spring a week ago, sunny and warm. Now it has snowed three of the last four days. Not snow that sticks, thankfully, but snow. I actually woke this morning to news of a multi-car pile-up on one of the local expressways. It felt like I was in a time warp.
Today’s snow was thick and heavy and fluffy, very pretty and perfect for building snowmen though it didn’t stick around. It was nearly gone by early afternoon. Yesterday’s was light but hung around a little longer, though it never accumulated on streets. Different days, different snow, different moods.
Today’s mood started out as a cooking one, and I pulled out a couple of my lesser-used cookbooks to inspire a marvelous dinner. Then I looked in the freezer to see what ingredients I could work with and found so much food, already cooked, that I’m now banned from buying anything but produce and fresh dairy products for the near future.
I did manage to turn my personal yen to cook into an assignment for my husband to bake bread. So tonight’s menu is for Finnish cardamom bread and a lovely kale and lima bean soup I made some time back. I will bake a pie, both to feed my creative cooking urge and to use peaches from the freezer.
Does anyone else’s life feel a bit random these days? I wake up wanting to cook and instead write a blog post. I plan my garden and order seeds but have only started a handful in soil since they arrived. The first craft project I planned to undertake during social distancing is still waiting for me, the supplies I thought I had on hand having actually just recently arrived.
It’s all topsy turvy. I’ve actually come to appreciate cold and rainy weather because it keeps more people inside. And I take my longest and most relaxing walks at night, when fewer people are out and about.
Perhaps even stranger, I’ve had trouble reading anything but poetry. This has significantly increased the amount of poetry I read, but at the cost of a certain escape that I typically find in prose. I think I found a solution, though, in young adult literature. I wrote about that over on Escape into Life, in the column I’ve started calling “Accidental Coping.”
One thing I’m grateful for everyday, though, is the extra time I have with Old Dog, the 14-year-old cardiac patient who spends nearly every waking moment wherever I am. She sleeps behind me while I work, paws at me to join her when her day’s rest is over and she wants a walk, and lies at my feet when I’m on Zoom or FaceTime calls with loved ones. I don’t know how much time she has left, and I’m happy for every minute of it.
