hello!

just starting to visit blogs again on a regular basis.

random photos of Oberlin, Ohio

Morning photo of dinner rendezvous venue with blogger Kim:







New building for jazz at the Conservatory:

Gone, but Back

I know I've been absent, but there have been some very deep issues with family members who have been out of communication for years. Frankly, it's beyond bizarre and distressing. I'll just leave it all at that. I need to write about it all, but can't. Shh. Must never let anything out of the family circle. That's the way I was brought up. Hard to shake. I can't even keep a journal because of it, and it's the reason my blog posts are more blah than blog. Anyway,

***

here is a photo of my grocery store sheet cake–cover greenhouses. This year, I remembered to check on them after planting the seeds, and every one came up. We'll see if they make it to fruition or not, but it is satisfying to know that I can grow peppers and tomatoes from seed.



The garden plot lives, too. Two rows of chard, one of kale, and one of arugula wintered over. We've already planted radish, beans, zucchini, cucumber, broccoli rabe, spinach, and they've emerged. I hope we haven't jumped the gun on the warmer weather seeds. We'll see, as the night temps are dropping back into the 40s next week.

I think my rascally raccoon is back; do you remember she/he who ate my peppers last summer, said fruit almost beyond perfection at the point of ingestion?? hmmmm. I think the cats coexist peaceably with this rapscallion, so he/she/they come and go at will.



Just because I like this one, taken at a church-turned-social-venue during the Chapel Talk lunch for one of L's friends:

Music Monday!

making its return
I (L) have to give a speech in front of my WHOLE SCHOOL today! wish me luck!!!!

More Music!

Music Monday: Asleep at the Wheel

I do love Texas swing, plus I feel I've been asleep at the wheel of this bus. Blogging has taken a back seat to other pursuits, so I'm making amends:

Theme Thursday: Green

Well, of course I'm writing about going green. Which we have been working toward for many years. In New England, we were recycling probably long before many people were doing so in the South; in fact, it was mandated there. There was some grumbling at the dump (rechristened the transfer station), esp. when a shattering was heard upon heaving a bag into the depths of the bin. But everyone gets used to rinsing out glass, flattening cardboard, crushing aluminum.

Even there, we were regulars at the Brattleboro Farmers Market, more medieval fair than vegetable display. I think it was one of the few in the area at that time. We always came away with something unusual (then) or at least hard to come by. We also had our own garden, in which we also grew the unusual (then) or hard to come by. Celeriac did fantastically well; if only we had known what to do with it. Last year, we commenced again in the community vegetable patch, and we're looking forward to a better year here in the sticky southern heat

I suggest moving forward by staying put: eating locally grown food as much as possible, encouraging those who aren't yet farming organically to implement those methods by talking with them AND buying their produce. We are lucky to have Sequatchie Cove Farm and others within a hundred mile radius. There are many bloggers getting out the word: I just discovered GOOD, which I have to catch up on. Eat Real and FarmPlate on Facbook are at opposite ends of the country, but have lots of good information to share.

Greenward!

music monday!!!

Theme Thursday: Bottle

The word bottle led me to think about cellar holes.

Rambles in the woods in New England can often mean coming upon a sunken patch, with what looks like a stone wall around part of it. It's fairly regular in shape, and always has a lilac bravely holding on, somewhere nearby, even as the forest closes in. When I was a child, we found some of these in the Vermont forests around where we lived during part of the year. There are old roads, tracks, logging roads to explore. Going deep. Sometimes alone. Smell the moss, swim in the sunless green. Cracking twig just off to the left. A deer? or a bear . . .

Just off to the left again. There. The place where a house once stood. Then you start to root around. The dump is never very far from the back door. You find a cup handle, a broken plate. A spoon! But always bottles. Patent medicine usually. The turquoise faded. Or brown. sometimes clear. An intact one a prize.


New Hampshire
–Donald Hall

A bear sleeps in a cellar hole; pine needles
heap over a granite doorstep; a well brims
with acorns and the broken leaves of an oak
which grew where an anvil rusted in a forge.

Inside an anvil, inside a bear, inside a leaf,
a bark of rust grows on the tree of a gas pump;
EAT signs gather like leaves in the shallow
cellars of diners; a wildcat waits for deer

on the roof of a car. Blacktop buckled by frost
starts goldenrod from the highway. Fat honey bees
meander among raspberries, where a quarrel
of vines crawls into the spilled body of a plane

Music Monday!

What the kids are listening to, II:



Yeasayer's Ambling Alp

Theme Thursday: Bell

this was running all through my dreams last night. L used to watch Meet Me in St. Louis on video as a tiny child:



But I'll really be ringing a bell at 2 pm for Barry! Barry, I hope you've seen the last of that place.

Music Monday!

NRBQ, for those who knew

Theme Thursday: Mirror

There are two ways of spreading light: to be
The candle or the mirror that reflects it.
–E. Wharton

Here it is, Theme Thursday again. I had such plans for this theme, too. Genes appearing as mirrors of ancestors, or more recently, grandmothers. The Distant Mirror of the Middle Ages. The silvering mirror in my bathroom that give back a ghostly sort of reflection.

Then, BANG! Thursday has whirled around the carousel of the week again and presented itself in front of me. Well, I can supply a link to a program I try to remember to listen to every Friday evening (or Sunday morning, whenever).

Gene Zeiger

poet, writer, teacher, encourager.

Genie, I wish I'd known

Music Monday!

What the kids are listening to:

Oatmeal Chocolate Cookie recipe

Here you go, e and Betty!

From Mad Hungry, by Lucinda Scala Quinn

oven at 350 degrees F.

whisk together: 3/4 c flour, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 3/4 tsp coarse salt.

beat together, in another bowl, 8 Tblsp butter (1 stick), 6 Tblsp granulated sugar, 6 Tblsp light brown sugar, 1 large egg, 1/2 tsp vanilla extract, 1/4 tsp water.

Add flour mixture and stir to combine.

Stir in 1 c rolled oats (NOT quick) and 6 oz. semisweet chocolate chips.

Drop by teaspoonfuls onto buttered, rimmed baking sheets about an inch apart. Bake for about 10 mins. CHECK! ours got a bit dark. Still tasty, though.

college!

Oberlin College, class of 2014, welcomes L!!

Helen, I think Avery's Store are graduates.

5th Annual Cyberspace Poetry Slam

Solar Creation
by Charles Madge

The sun, of whose terrain we creatures are,
Is the director of all human love,
Unit of time, and circle round the earth.

And we are the commotion born of love
And slanted rays of that illustrious star,
Peregrine of the crowded fields of birth,

The crowded lane, the market and the tower.
Like sight in pictures, real at remove,
Such is our motion on dimensional earth.

Down by the river, where the ragged are,
Continuous the cries and noise of birth,
While to the muddy edge dark fishes move,

And over all, like death, or sloping hill,
Is nature, which is larger and more still.

Thanks, Reya, for inviting me!

Music Monday

Constance Amiot

snow

Snow day means baking oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, at least to L:

Reminds me of Narnia:

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