Roving reporter post: Nostalgic food

A real Southern meal is called "dinner," even when it's eaten at noon. Clockwise from top: fried green tomatoes, candied yams, butter peas, flat green beans cooked in pork, collard greens, and fried chicken livers.

I've been in Georgia visiting our relatives for the past nine days. Yesterday my sister and I took my parents to lunch at the Blue Willow Inn in Social Circle. Don't you love that name for a town?

The Blue Willow Inn is, naturally, in a big Southern house with lots of Blue Willow china. It may be a slightly exaggerated version of the Old South, and the food may not have quite the freshness that a foodie would prefer, but I did see lots of foods that made me homesick for my grandmother's kitchen--butter peas, collard greens, the flat kind of green beans that are cooked with a piece of pork until they fall apart, cornbread, biscuits, fried chicken and livers, fried green tomatoes, candied yams, one of those Jell-O salads that remind me of neighbors bringing food after a funeral, banana pudding, lemon meringue pie, and more.

When we arrived at the restaurant, the entire elementary baseball team of Athens Academy was sitting in the front yard listening to a man play Christmas carols on a plastic keyboard. A young woman was roaming around in a dress that was a cross between antebellum and 80s prom, serving lemonade. Flags were flying, and a bit of everyone, wearing a bit of everything, was lined up at the buffet.

We were there to celebrate my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary,
which will actually occur about the time we move to Italy. We would have raised a toast of sweet tea, but no one could have heard us in that festive atmosphere, least of all my hard-of-hearing dad. Nevertheless, as they say in the South, a good time was had by all.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Athens, GA

A belated Christmas report

Yes, it's way after Christmas now, but I thought a late report was better than ignoring the Christmas season entirely. In fact, the lateness is typical of this year, in which I just posted my last Christmas cards day before yesterday! (The first I've sent in three years.)

This Christmas trip to Georgia was remarkable because it was the first time I'd ever seen snow on Christmas day. (This is because, even though we've lived in New York for over a decade, we've never spent Christmas in the city.) We were opening presents at my inlaws' house on Christmas morning when I noticed the first flakes. As soon as we'd finished with the presents, all the cousins ran outside to play in it.

The Christmas snow was a sticky snow, the only sort we ever have in Georgia, because for snow to occur there, it almost has to be too warm for it. But it's great for building! CZ and her cousins built a small snowman in the afternoon, but they only really got up to speed towards dusk when they started a huge igloo. This was impressive considering that the total snowfall was about 4".

At one point, CZ and her thirteen-year-old cousin M., a boy who is going through the extreme growth stage, tried in vain to move a huge snow block towards the igloo. CZ hacked at it with a pickaxe to try to reduce its weight, but they still couldn't pick it up. Then along comes M.'s eleven-year-old sister E., who easily rolls the now roundish block into place. Chalk up one for E.'s common sense!

The next day, I found these footprints on the upstairs deck. I immediately suspected who had made them, and I was right, it was she-who-wants-to-be-Nordic. I'll leave you to decide how much common sense is displayed in this photo.

Needless to say, the dogs were greatly amused by both the snow and the igloo. I watched the lab puppy jump exuberantly onto the frozen pond and crash right through. It didn't seem to faze her; she just jumped out and shook off a lot of cold water. I moved away just in time.

Here's Bob reporting on snowfall totals in New York via Blackberry, and relating how glad I should be not to be heading to Jamaica Bay on the A-Train.

This Christmas was also notable for being able to visit with a lot of Bob's cousins whom we hadn't seen in years. That's always fun, too. We used to do a lot of things with them, so we didn't want to lose touch just because we live in a different state now.

And whenever we weren't doing anything else in particular, we played games of Taboo, Apples to Apples, and Buzzword next to the almost continual fire Bob's parents had going in the kitchen/sitting room. No one in the family plays these games quite as they are intended, but we all think it's more fun that way. Apples to Apples sets up the most absurdities, especially when certain people judge.

I'll end with some photos of things that just seem particularly winter-in-Georgia to me. I don't expect anyone else to understand why they're special to me; they're just things that I miss, and that I don't see in New York. The last photo is of the afternoon sun streaming into the bedroom that we use at Bob's parents. It still has our old bed and framed picture in it. Neither bed nor picture made the move up thirteen years ago, because we slept on a sofabed for our first seven years in New York, and after that it was too much trouble to ship things up. The picture says, 'There's no place like home."

Our next stop, Athens, has a very different sort pictures, so I'll put them in another post.

Helix online

Helix, Christmas 2008

I confess a soft spot for this gift store in downtown Athens, Georgia. I'd like it even if my sister and brother-in-law weren't the owners, but it happens that they are. And now you can shop Helix online. (They have no idea I'm posting this, by the way. At least not yet.)

It's also fun that when my sister comes up to NYC twice a year to attend the Javitz retail show, I get in a visit with her and also get a preview of what's to come. One of the items we talked about when she came up last month was Clocky. I know my sister didn't invent Clocky, but I must say, it's got her sense of humor.

I'm quite fond of CZ's Charley Harper cards from Helix, too.

And the Lomography blog looks fun!

All in all, I think this store stacks up nicely against many of the artsy stores in Soho. Not that I'm biased or anything.

Introduction to Castelnuovo

We're back from Italy, and there's so much to tell that I'm not sure how to tell it. Perhaps the best way would simply be to post a few of the best photos from each place and explain something about what it was like. So, first of all, let's go on a tour of the small town where we stayed for two weeks, Castelnuovo di Garfagnana. It's important because it sets the stage for everything else.

As with all small Italian towns, we start in the main square:

The square has traffic, but there are no clear lines, so people watch out for pedestrians as they drive. There is an order to it all, but it's not expressed in rules. In fact, all of Italian life works somewhat the same way.

The 11th C. castle, called La Rocca (pretty much all town castles in Italy are called that) is the main landmark, and gives the town its name, Castelnuovo. Garfagnana is the name for the general area, and it gets tacked on because there are "Newcastle"s all over Italy. The town is in a river valley surrounded by gentle mountains. A little to the west are much starker, higher mountains.

And the man with the violin case walking through the town square is Dmitri Berlinsky, CZ's teacher during the festival. He is on his way to one of their lessons.

Once you walk under the castle arch, the Centro is off limits to cars. In fact, there are plenty of Italian towns that are too narrow for cars at all, but more about this later.

The top photo is the main street in the pedestrian area. After a short walk (where you see the sun dipping down into the shadow), you turn right and find yourself at the Piazetta Ariosto (second photo above), which is where you enter La Rocca. It was also the main site for all things related to the festival, so during the time we were there you could usually hear someone playing in one of the upper rooms. Great acoustics!

La Rocca's entrance is more Baroque than medieval, and the red stucco gives a rosy hue to all activities within the piazzetta.

The fact that there's a pasticceria right there in the square helps with the rosy feeling, too. Here's Bob having his morning cappuccino. He never, ever orders one after noon, though! The chocolates in this pasticceria were works of art--little wrenches, paintbrushes, puzzle pieces, Mayan symbols, and of course, for the festival, violins and music notes.

As you keep walking, there are a few more town streets and a Duomo with a campanile, or belltower. As with most Italian towns, you could hear the bells all over town. And the swifts, of course. All Italian towns have screaming swifts.

If you keep going through the town, you soon come to a little stone garden and an arch (right) which is actually part of the city wall, and leads to a bridge. (One of the photos below shows the other side of the wall, and from that angle this garden is inside the wall just to the right of the gate.)

As you pass through the arch, you find yourself outside the town walls, overlooking the Serchio River:

There's more of the town on the other side of the bridge, but not much. That over-the-river section, though, happens to include our favorite restaurant in Castelnuovo, Triti, and a 19th century theater with box seats, where the festival held some of its performances. But the main reason I took this particular photo was to show how the Italians built up every available space within a town. The spot shown below is also a picturesque place to watch the sun set behind the river, though I never happened to have my camera handy at sunset.

Here's a view of the city walls from the other side of the bridge. I read on a sign that the walls were remodeled in the 18th century. I think the originals are from the 11th century. From some photos in Triti, the restaurant, I could see that there used to be buildings on either side of the gate, but those were lost in the bombing during WWII.

And this brings me to my last point in my introduction to Castelnuovo and Italy in general. There are still signs here and there of all periods of history, and the slanting walls in the photos above are no doubt also remnants of the bombing. But generally, no one was interested in restoration until recently, so they would just remodel as they went along in whatever was the current style. La Rocca is medieval and Baroque. Many churches reflect four or five periods of architectural history. And one can usually find remnants of the previous periods in the basements. Italian towns are very archeological, very layered.

Our landlord, Sr. Bertolani, told us that he thought Castelnuovo was too busy. "You go up into the small mountain towns, and there are old people there. They say, 'Let's go have a drink and talk about the war.' Those people won't be around for much longer, and what they have to say will be lost." He spoke a combination of Italian and English, so I'm paraphrasing, but I'm sure that was the main idea. He says these things without bitterness, even though the building we stayed in, part of his family estate, was bombed. No one is even quite sure which side did the bombing, and the area, which is in the mountains, was a haven for the resistance.

When the Bertolanis asked me what I thought about Castelnuovo compared to New York, I had to answer very simply, because I was speaking Italian. So I said, "New York is to Castelnuovo as Castelnuovo is to the small towns in the mountains." They looked very thoughtful after I said this. I was thinking that the Bertolanis always had time to talk to us, and we learned all about the area from them, the same way they learned from the old people in the mountains. In New York, few people have time to talk, and most people are more interested in what's going on now. An ample sense of time and hospitality are typical of Italy and form the basis for everything else I'll write and post.

Next, our hosts and our house...

Does he know about this chair?

The Chair arrived yesterday.

I don't know when Bob started asking for it. We've never had enough comfortable places to sit in our living room, and when we have visitors, someone inevitably ends up on the floor with pillows instead.

Last summer, Bob told me that if I'd just get a chair, he'd get rid of the TV. I knew this was a golden moment, so I jumped on it: I disconnected the cable, and the doorman toddled out of our apartment with our ancient Sony. So then we had a hole, like a gap tooth, awaiting the Chair.

The problem is, I don't have many opportunities to buy furniture, so I'm sort of perfectionistic about it. I took two trips to a store to look at chairs, one with Bob. Then I started looking for fabric. There was only one more color I could pull out of the rug that would look good in the room, and that was a dark, cool charcoal--no pattern. I wanted a velvety texture...just because. I went through every fabric book in the store, and started on other stores. I'd bring home the little swatches and put them on the floor, then turn them a quarter turn to see how they caught the light. I'd get busy and forget about them. The one I liked best only came in a 1" x 2" swatch, so I had to order a yard. It got backordered. My mother-in-law came up and didn't like it. My sister suggested other colors. Six months went by. Finally I ordered cool charcoal velvet anyway.

Bob, patient man that he is, didn't complain, but he would occasionally ask wistfully, "When is the chair coming?" It's the same plaintive tone he gets when I cook vegetarian too many nights in a row.

Last week I got the call: When could they deliver the chair? CZ and I looked at one another and said in unison, "Shh, don't tell Daddy!" Yesterday, the appointed day, the delivery window came and went. Finally I got a call from the delivery man: "I'm at__________. Where are you?" Someone had given him our old address on the East Side! We rescheduled for later in the afternoon. That window came and went. Our phone went out (it's been doing that lately). It was almost time for Bob to come home.

Finally, at six p.m., the buzzer rang. The delivery man, obviously happy to be at the end of his day, dropped the chair into place with a smile and whisked off the plastic. Voila! My cell phone rang. It was Bob wanting to know why he couldn't reach us on the house phone. CZ ran into the bedroom to muffle the delivery man's booming voice and disco cell phone, and made excuses for me.

Was it worth it? Less than an hour later, we watched Bob walk into the apartment, talking about something else. He turned the corner to put his backpack on the chair, saw that it was a different chair, and jumped back in exaggerated surprise. "Ah!" he gasped. "The Chair! It's here!"

So last night after dinner we all got our books and sat in our places: I in my spot on the side of the sofa next to the table, Bob in his green chair with the ottoman, and CZ in the new chair. (After all, she was the one who usually got stuck on the floor.)

And there was great rejoicing.

Italiano ancora

Each Wednesday morning, our family has our Italian lesson. We think our tutor, Paola, is the greatest! She has a great sense of humor with Bob's impertinent questions ("Are you sure you're pronouncing that right?") and she teaches the language with the subtlety of a native speaker. Most of which subtlety, of course, is lost on us.

Why Paola, who teaches Western Civilization at Columbia and is writing a book in English on Russian literature, would want to teach us, is a mystery. Teaching us Italian is like having breakfast with toddlers, only we're not nearly as cute! And not only does she speak with us patiently and give us worksheets that are much more interesting than the ones in textbooks, she even encourages us to e-mail her during the week. There's just one catch: Our e-mails have to be in Italian, she corrects them, and we have to send them back with proper grammar. As a result, I'm about three e-mails deep in corrections right now. Seems I can't resist trying to talk like an eight-year-old instead of a three-year-old, and I mess up a lot!

Earlier this week, I finished up an e-mail with:

"Ora devo comprare del cibo per la cena," which I thought meant, "Now I should go buy some food for supper."

But Paola responded, "Da mangiare--Per favore, dimentica la parola "cibo," si usa quasi esclusivamente per i cani, gatti, ecc.!" ("Say 'something to eat'--Please, forget the word 'cibo;' It's used almost exclusively for dogs and cats, etc.!")

Thank you Paola, for teaching us not to buy cat food for dinner! Ms. Stone*, as we affectionately call our old tutor, left us in the dark on that one.

And speaking of three-year-olds and cats, the clip below is sweet in a way that TV rarely is nowadays. I love the way the little girl smiles when she sings "gattini." (Kittens) And the boy and girl in the background are pretty entertaining, too:

*Someone at Bob's office heard him talking about the Rosetta Stone program and thought he was referring to a woman!

Snow adventures

My mother-in-law, dressed for a Georgia winter, surveys the Hudson during a New York snowstorm.

We've had some snow adventures lately.

One was last week's "snowicane" over Manhattan. It snowed 20" in two days, which may not seem like much if you live in Buffalo, but it's a lot for New York City. Whenever I looked at the radar, a ring of clouds was spinning right over Queens--our own personal snow hurricane. Sometimes the sun would break out, only to cloud up and start snowing again half an hour later. It was pretty.

But there was a catch: My mother and my mother-in-law were trying to get here from Georgia to see CZ in two weekend performances. I spent the better part of Wednesday and Thursday on the phone trying to get their flight changed, which meant that for each permutation I had to call the airline, then call my mother, then call my mother-in-law. By Thursday afternoon I felt like I was personally flying the plane. But it worked!

And it was fun. It's quite amusing to watch people you've known for your whole life (or at least twenty-two years) finally get to know each other. You get to see a lot of familiar traits in new combinations. And now my mother and mother-in-law are friends. After they left, I asked CZ what it was like staying alone in the apartment with both grandmas at the same time. She said, "It was interesting, but at one point they were both telling me I couldn't go out the door without my snowboots!" One teen, two grandmas. Heh, heh.

And where were Bob and I when this happened? We rented out a neighbor's extra apartment so each grandma could have her own bed, and we could have two bathrooms among us. And we could even watch the Olympics on the apartment's TV, which was handy since we don't have a TV anymore. All in all, it was a very nice arrangement. Of course, most of the time we were downstairs with our moms and CZ.

East coast skiing, as seen via cell-phone camera from a ski lift

The other snow adventure was the end of our second homeschool-group ski season. We ski in eastern Pennsylvania six times from January through early March. And I am proud to report that I can now ski blue slopes. Even if our blues are more like the green slopes out West, we have ice (alternating with slush), so it's still challenging! I'm actually having fun now. I'm still way wimpier than CZ, who started skiing at the same time, but who cares? (Except for CZ.)

And you know how skiing all day makes you crazy tired and hungry? Well, we have a favorite bakery that we like to visit with our other carpool family on the way out of town. The people at this bakery make yummy apple cider doughnuts, and the coffee's not bad, either. The only problem is, sometimes by the time we get there in the late afternoon, the doughnuts are all gone.

Once when this happened a couple of ski days back, we got danishes instead and were in the process of getting coffee on the other side of the bakery when two boys from another family in our group, the Ws, burst into the bakery like a commando unit. Unfortunately, one of the boys (I'll call him Z) is getting too old to do this without scaring strangers.

"Aaaaaauuuuuuggggggh!" he yelled, turning towards us and stamping his foot in a too-convincing mock fury. "We're too late! You got the last doughnuts!!!" Heads turned. Perhaps the other customers in this quiet, rural bakery could be forgiven for looking at him as though he might be unstable. Or maybe they were the ones who got the last doughnuts.

Well, the W family just happened to be walking beside us as we left the ski lodge this week, and someone, somehow, mentioned the doughnuts. The next thing we know, the same boy is yelling to his dad and brother, "Come on! We have to beat them to the doughnuts!" and suddenly people from several families (including a bewildered guest) were stampeding across the wooden bridge towards the parking lot, bags flapping.

When we caught up with Bob and our other carpool friends, they took up the challenge too. "Quick, everybody in the van!" yelled the mom. Having thrown in our bags and slammed the doors, we looked up just in time to see the W dad tearing full speed across the parking lot.

The scene of the doughnut crime

Unfortunately, they were nearer the exit and got to the bakery first. Z greeted us at the door with, "They were out of doughnuts, but they're making our family a dozen." He looked very smug. He then proceeded to buy an enormous cupcake with frosting, which he couldn't eat, so he kept breaking off bits for other children in our ski group as though they were sparrows. (By now the whole bakery was flocked with home-skiers.) Elsewhere, a boy who comes from a family of five children was hoarding an enormous crumb cake. CZ and her guest were politely sharing their different varieties of danish. The third girl in our carpool, fresh off a gluten-free diet, was happily devouring a cupcake and a danish, and not sharing. But not to be outdone, our group ordered a dozen doughnuts, too, and everyone left the bakery happy.

I guess our exhilaration, plus an alarming intake of sugar, accounts for the chaos in our car on the two-hour ride home. All three teenage girls were in high gear. Even younger brother J, clearly disappointed that we had bypassed Dairy Queen for the bakery, perked up when Bob started teaching him Italian, starting with the words that are the same in English, like il iPod (pronounced ee-pode). They got so silly that finally J, despite years of acquaintance with our family, asked Bob in confusion, "Are you a dad?" His mom and I split a warm doughnut and talked so much that she missed a turnoff. A good end to another ski season.

Thanksgiving

Having started and abandoned several thoughtful posts because of interruptions, I am going for the newsy.

It was a lovely Thanksgiving. I took not one photo of turkey, wild rice salad, pumpkin pie, or any of the rest of it, but if a turkey doesn't get blogged, it's still a turkey. We had another family over for dessert, which was a nice compromise between preserving some tradition for just the three of us, and sharing hospitality. When she wasn't involved in preparing the dinner, CZ was strolling through the house with her violin, alternating between 19th century violin concertos and "Old French" or the hoedown. I thought the fiddle pieces fit the feel of the day nicely.

In between dinner and dessert, I called my sister, who entertained me with a story about how she and my parents had agreed not to cook a Thanksgiving dinner this year and only have dessert, yet each had privately started cooking, and they wound up with more than enough dinner for two families after all.

My heart was at least partially in Georgia already, since between cooking tasks, I sat down and read most of the journal I kept for CZ between the time she was born and our move to NYC when she was three. I thought to do this because of a conversation I'd had with a friend about CZ's funny habit of memorizing states when she was two. So I went back to make sure I had the timing right, and then read the rest of the journal as well. The two-year-old CZ was, of course, endearing, and I even came to the conclusion that I was a better parent then than I am now. (Maybe the job was simpler.) I also came to the conclusion that CZ's personality was well established before her third birthday. Simply by writing what I observed, I had made an uncannily prescient sketch of who she is today.

But what struck me most was the simplicity of our lives. When we lived in Georgia, our lives had a definite and given structure due to our status as a student family, our roles as the parents of a toddler, and the small size of the town where we lived (Athens). I had never heard of the MacLaren stroller that is the staple of Manhattanites, much less the Bugaboo. I was happy to have something decent to wear and didn't worry about being hip. CZ wore hand-me-downs. About the only extra-curricular offering for toddlers was a gymnastics class, and our other outings included watching the UGA marching band practice and going to the library. I spent CZ's naps painting portraits, for grocery money. (CZ carried on conversations with these two-dimensional children, as though they were dolls, and tried to share her sippy cup with them.) I cleaned a lot, left the windows open and turned the heat down, and cooked really inexpensive food. And when exam time came, I went to Grandma's for a few days.

I was reminded of all this yesterday, not only because I read the journal, but because I spilled some water from the drip pan into the oven and smoked up the whole apartment. We opened all the windows as wide as they would go, and somehow with the cool breeze and the smoky smell, I felt was in Georgia in fall. Smells can evoke very specific memories, and these were just what I needed to get some perspective on our busy fall.

Riding for Hope for New York

Updated photo: Here's Bob finishing the bike ride today (Saturday the 26th). He enjoyed himself immensely and now I think he's looking forward to a nice nap and then some dinner!

As you may know, my husband Bob is just a little bit goal-oriented. This summer when he sustained a minor calf injury and took up cycling to make up for miles lost running, he really got on the band--um, bike. Now, as part of his goal of becoming more involved at Redeemer Presbyterian Church here in NYC, he's signed up for the Hope for New York (HFNY) Cycling Team for this Saturday's Escape New York bike ride.

Bob plans to do the full 100 mile route. He's created a sponsor page for himself so that anyone who’s interested can donate to HFNY through this event. To make things more interesting, an anonymous donor has agreed to make a $500 matching gift for the first 40 riders who raise $500. (We’ve made sure that the threshold amount has already been donated so that we’ll receive one of these $500 anonymous donor donations.) In addition, Bob is matching each additional dollar donated through his site, up to $1000. You can also click the logo at the top of the page for more information on the Bike-a-Thon.

Hope for New York is a Christian organization which donates time and money to the poor in New York City. If you've ever been to Redeemer, you’re undoubtedly familiar with HFNY. It's a good cause, and a good opportunity to make your donation dollar go farther. This is Bob's first time to try fundraising for a charity, so he just wants to spread the news. But please do not donate if the time or event, or the whole idea of donating through a blog, is not right for you.

A post about a little pink pig

The pig game has been going on for about two months now. I don't really remember when it started, but somehow C.Z.'s tiny pink plastic pig that lives on my nightstand (who knows who long it's been there?) started having adventures. I'd find it balancing on the picture frame above my bed, poised by the light switch where I'd see it when I turned off the light, reading the title of my book through my reading glasses, observing the time on my clock, trying to climb up into my water glass, swathed in Kleenex (after it fell into the water glass) and doing various other things.

With time (and desperation, I suppose) the adventures grew more elaborate. One day I came in to find a Post-It Note on my night stand instructing the pig to climb to the top of my bed post and retrieve some basil. I looked up, and there was the pig, tied to a dental floss rope and taped securely to the side of the bed post, as though it were scaling a cliff. At the top was a film canister full of basil.

A few days later came the pig seamstress, complete with a dress pattern. That's when I started taking pictures:

And soon after that came a note instructing the pig to measure and cut five inches of dental floss. I still had no idea where the pig itself was, though, until I opened the drawer:

Last week when C.Z. and I got on the 1 train to go do our Jamaica Bay heron survey, she suddenly got the giggles and pointed over my shoulder. I turned around to see a pink pig, very similar to hers, in a NY Lottery Ad. "Oh, dear, it's following us!" I commented in mock alarm. We transferred to the A train. Another pink pig ad. But we didn't see a single pig ad on the way home. "I think the pig must have stayed behind in the North Muck," mused C.Z., referring to a mudflat we had explored on the East Pond.

I thought nothing of it until I sat down to read in bed that night. At some point I realized that the pink pig was missing, and a search of its usual haunts turned up nothing. "I told you I saw it in the North Muck," C.Z. replied. I went along with the joke, nodding, and said nothing more. But the pig didn't turn up the next night, or the next, until I eventually forgot to look for it.

Today we went back to the bay for our second September survey day, stopping off first at the East Pond. I sat down on a rock, pulled out my binoculars, scanned for herons and located two. I asked C.Z. to bring the clipboard and start timing, then I refocused on the first heron. Suddenly she exclaimed in a loud voice, "Look!" I turned around, expecting to see her pointing at some bird. But instead she was pointing at the ground beside me. And there in the mud, was...the pink pig, of course.

Busy fall post

Little Blue Heron

Things are really picking up this week, with a bike ride across the Brooklyn Bridge for pizza, another heron day at Jamaica Bay, the beginning of co-op, Bob's birthday (today), and music school starting up this Saturday.

We've really enjoyed the heron survey, and if the weather is decent and we have an ounce of energy left over at the end of the day, we usually walk around to see what other birds we can spot. Fall migration has definitely begun, because we saw lots of warblers in semi-fall plumage on Tuesday. We had our Peterson "Confusing Fall Warbler" page bookmarked for easy access, and I was pleased when I spotted a juvenile Chestnut-sided Warbler, which looks quite different from the distinctive adult male of spring.

But our favorite new (for us) finds were a Little Blue Heron and a Wilson's Phalarope. They look a lot like other shorebirds, except that they spend more time floating in the water to look for food rather than walking along in shallow water. Phalaropes are known for spinning around in the water to draw prey to the surface. The one we saw kept flying around in circles above the pond, chasing a larger Lesser Yellowlegs.

I particularly enjoy walking gingerly along the tiny plants of a quiet mudflat in the late afternoon, with Least Sandpipers scattering in front of my feet almost like little crabs. It feels almost like an open, though extremely scaled-down, tundra, flat and deserted. I can just hear someone saying, "What do you mean, tundra? This spit is about 30 feet long, smells like low tide, is surrounded by marsh grass, and besides, it's 80 degrees out!" I don't know; it just does! I don't even mind my shoes getting muddy.

This Wilson's Phalarope is in non-breeding plumage, like the one we saw

***

This morning was the first fallish weather day of the year. I walked up to the Columbia Farmer's Market, as I hear it might be raining too hard tomorrow to make the trip down to the one at 97th St. And besides, I was on a birthday cake mission--I needed beets. Beets and ice cream.

The wind was whipping up bits of leaves and swirling them in circles. No colorful, whole leaves yet, of course. I think this wind is from a storm offshore. Still, it was all I could do not to buy pumpkins and butternut squash. I need to see what turns up in my vegetable share first. But beets are fallish enough for now.

This afternoon we've been baking the cake. During our time in the kitchen, we've been listening to the American Quartet and the Cello Concerto, and C.Z. does a running commentary. "The violins don't even play here for six whole minutes...Ooh, listen to that trill. Don't you like that part? I would never have thought of putting a trill there...Oh, don't worry about trying to heroically scrape all the batter into the pan before the end of the movement. This cadence material lasts forever. He tacked it on at the end of composing...You like that part? That's an oboe. See, don't you want to rent me an oboe? I promise I'll learn that part for you!...And this part is really hard! Dvorak isn't always fun for strings to play, but he's so perky you don't care." During breaks, C.Z. sight reads Dvorak. I guess she's trying to get all this extra sight-reading energy out of her system because she has her first regular lesson this afternoon, and she knows she has to whip her old pieces back into shape for her make-up jury.

The cake is in the oven. Spaghetti prep time, and then the lesson!

***

If I'm not back for a while, it's because we're starting school. I do have more to say. I always do!

(All images from Wikipedia Commons.)

Italian night on the roofdeck

Roberto's almost-flourless chocolate cakes, signs of cross-cultural friendship

Last night we had dinner on our roof for several friends, all of whom spoke some measure of Italian and some measure of English. Most were lawyers, but that was only important because it's how they met. One person was going back to Italy this week. So we decided to get together for an evening of conversation in both languages.

I have been cooking lots of Italian dishes lately, but I didn't want to cook them for people who know the food much better than I do, so I decided to serve Susan's salmon and asparagus instead. Asparagus just went on sale at the farmers' market this week, so that was excuse enough. To lend a theme, we served the salmon with Pinot Noir and called it Oregonian cuisine. Then we added some challah from Silver Moon for a New York twist.

But ah, the desserts! Roberto brought two low-flour chocolate cakes, translated from the metric just for the occasion, and sprinkled with powdered sugar so that one read "USA" and the other "Italy." Vera brought the best tiramisu I have ever eaten, and I was already a big fan of tiramisu. And Silvia brought Prosecco. That wasn't for dessert, of course; I just mentioned it because it fits in with the Italian tradition of hospitality.

The weather had been iffy all day, but the rain held off and the weather was warm, so we enjoyed a good three hours around our outdoor meal, Italian style. Since Vera's English was somewhat limited and our family's Italian was even more limited, the languages switched freely back and forth throughout the evening. I was surprised at how much Italian I understood, considering that I hadn't even studied it in a long time. And Vera didn't seem to have any trouble understanding our English.

There were, of course, lots of conversational tidbits about both languages, and plenty of humor. Bob confessed his inability to properly roll an "r" (in Italian), and Silvia confessed that her use of the English "h" comes and goes. The three Italians showed their regional differences when Bob asked for a word that apparently has three different translations depending on whether you are from Venice, Como, or Ferrara.

Some of the talk was about the two cultures. Vera is homesick (I would be too if I lived on a lake that looks like something on the Riviera!), but Roberto likes the US so well that he married an American. Or perhaps, he likes the US so well because he married an American.

Today we received an e-mail from Vera with a recipe for her homemade tiramisu--in Italian! I'll let you know how it goes once I make a proper translation of both the measurements and ingredients and try it out. So far I've at least figured out what she was referring to last night when she said she mixed the "reds" with sugar. Egg yolks in Italian are rossi delle uova--"egg reds."

Buon appetite!

West Point, 40 years later

Today, the NY Times ran an article about my old hometown in Georgia.  It's about a new Kia plant and the hope it brings to the town. I'd heard about the Kia plant from my aunt a couple of years ago, but I did a double take at the photo of the mayor in the middle of the street. Could that man in the obviously colorized photo be little Drew with the shiny blondish hair from my younger sister's class?  He had to be, with that name. As you can tell from the caption, names and families are important in West Point.  I moved away when I was ten, but many years later when I was visiting, I walked into a store and someone I never met called me by my mother's maiden name.  These days I would find it touching, but it was unnerving when I was eighteen!  

You can tell that the NY Times is being slightly ironic about the article. They think they've captured a slice of middle America. Perhaps they have. 

The Valley (as we called West Point and the towns across the river in Alabama) was a happy place to be a child. I ran around the neighborhood with my older cousin and her friends. I'm sure somebody knew where we were, but I could even ride my bike along dirt roads by myself.  I remember going to Darden Brothers shoe store (once on the left side of the street in the article photo, but now long gone) twice each year. I got saddle oxfords and a pair of black patent Mary Janes every Labor Day, and blue canvas Keds and a pair of white patent Mary Janes every Easter. I wore gloves to church, and my grandmother sewed me monogrammed and appliqued dresses (when we didn't buy them in nearby Columbus or LaGrange). I loved my moms' parents, who stayed with us while my mother taught school, and I enjoyed sitting on the porch with my dads' parents up the road. There were less-than-perfect things about the town and that life that I would discover later, but I didn't know much about them then.  

Would I go move back if I had the chance?  I don't know.  It doesn't seem possible. I'm not at all sure the town as I knew it exists anymore. Even my 82-year-old aunt has moved away. But evidently it's still home some people I knew then, like Drew Ferguson.  And I love the addition of kimchee to the local menu!

West Point is a town that has long depended on large employers. Originally it was a railroad town. When I was growing up, most everyone worked for West Point Pepperell, a towel manufacturer.  The mill took up block after block along the Chattahoochie river. I think West Point Pepperell eventually turned into West Point Stevens, but it's long gone from the town now. The last time I went visited, two years ago, the main street looked like a ghost town. The people who now want to work for the Kia plant are mostly descendants of the farmers who moved there during my grandparents' time to work for West Point Pepperell. Some of the next generation went on to college, while others were content to work for the mill.  From the looks of the place recently, it seemed that those who were loyal to the mill got left behind.  I know there must be many such similar towns.

My great-grandparents' house near West Point

It's strange to see a place I used to look up to, quite literally, from the point of view of my new hometown's paper, and after such a long time. It's sort of like going back to the house where we once lived and noticing that the hallways aren't nearly so long as I remembered them.  But still, it's home.