Cherry blossoms

Inside a Manhattan apartment...

Some things I'm enjoying right now

A combination of being busy during the week and Bob needing the computer on the weekends is keeping me offline.  But that's okay.  It's early spring, and there's so much to enjoy!  Here's a sample:

My "granny" cart after a trip to the farmers' market

The farmers' market:

Last Friday I went for the first time in several weeks. The few vegetables at the market all have the look of having been stored since fall, but the egg vendor had his April stock hens out, and I bought one. These hens often have eggs forming inside; Apparently this is considered a delicacy in South America, where our egg guy Tello is from.  The first time I bought one, I was scared to cook the eggs, but I've since learned that there are uses for them, too.  So, I'll be making stock again soon, and perhaps poaching some unlaid eggs.

Also, we bought some cherry branches.  I bought them because I just wanted something natural in the apartment. Between the concrete and the bare branches, New York can become relentlessly gray by April.  I confess I wondered why it was exactly that I was buying a bunch of twigs that had been severed from their trees just when they were about to bloom, but they looked pretty, so I did.  A day or two later, I realized that they too were going to bloom!  Now I'm really glad I bought them.  

(If you think that last paragraph shows my ignorance about all things growing, you'd be right.  I humbly admit that despite great interest, my horticultural knowledge remains quite stunted.  I think someone needs to write a book called New York City Organic Roofdeck Gardening for Dummies.)

I also bought two Sweet 100s tomato plants from a nearby plant store. Sweet 100s are by far my favorite tomato that will grow on a roofdeck. We eat them by the handful in August. We planted ours today, since I'm hoping that last night was the last possible night of freezing weather. 

Sweet 100s

And I bought a lavender plant.  I'll buy more herbs as they become available and when it gets warmer, but I couldn't resist this one.  The smells of lavender and mint make me inexplicably happy!  

Lavender

We missed the challah at the farmers' market, Passover having already begun and the supplies low, but we picked up some at Silver Moon.  Ah, there's nothing quite like snatching a warm chunk of minutes-old challah on the way home from the bakery!

Challah from Silver Moon Bakery

Books:  

Susan, her kids and our family had a big book list exchange.  We got the better end of the deal for sure.  And it gave me a good excuse to go buy books.  And I bought a few new cookbooks from Susan's kitchen blog as well.  So now Bob is reading If On a Winter's Night a Traveler..., and I'm leafing through Amanda Hesser's The Cook and the Gardner, thinking that pork tenderloin with peaches sounds really, really good, even if it is a late-summer dish, and wondering if I can tackle learning to make preserves anytime soon.  

And while it doesn't have anything to do with the list exchange, I'm reading N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope as well.  That's more Easter reading.  At present he seems concerned that I'm going to misunderstand Christian theology and become a Platonist.  I don't think he need worry, especially in April!  But the book makes a lot of good points, and I'm learning from it.

Birds!

Oh, joy!  Birding season is beginning.  Exactly what is it that we like about spending all day in the park, craning through binoculars at some wiggly speck, high in the trees? It's really not explicable, except perhaps that by doing so, we notice things that we'd never notice otherwise, and besides, the birds are so colorful! And of course, we're outside.

This photo has no other purpose than to illustrate the irony of taking the subway to enjoy nature in the park! (Photo by C.Z.)

Today C.Z. talked me into hopping on the subway and going down to the sailboat pond at 72nd St. to see a Yellow-throated Warbler, evidently lost.  They're usually Southern birds, but I don't remember ever seeing one growing up.  (See what I mean about not noticing things otherwise?) Our little celebrity warbler was extremely cooperative, hopping around on low branches in plain view, getting its picture taken by birders with very nice zoom lenses and cameras.  

A Yellow-throated Wabler (image from Wikipedia Commons, but Lloyd's photos are better!)

If this doesn't quite sound like a natural experience to you, at least it makes it easy to find the rare birds!  And most of the birders are pretty nice, too. Since we didn't have a zoom lens, C.Z. couldn't take a good photo of the bird itself, so she took a photo of the birders! Here's a link to one of their websites. We like Lloyd because he's so helpful.

The birding paparazzi (Photo by C.Z.)

We walked up through the park, where we saw some more birds, particularly Goldfinches, but mostly got some exercise and enjoyed the first flowers.  Whereas my relatives in Georgia have had daffodils and azaleas for weeks now, we're just getting our daffodils and tulip magnolias.  It's worth the wait.  New York is no longer gray!

Tulip magnolias in the Shakespeare Garden, Central Park

(Photo by C.Z.)

I guess I should have written three posts, not one!  But I'm making up for lost time...

A violinist's point of view

C.Z. is taking a photography class at co-op. The assignment was "something I like." She was trying to show what playing violin looks like from her perspective.  

She's now able to practice again--fifteen minutes, twice each day. Hurrah!

City evening

About this time many evenings, I watch people walking home from work, see the lights coming on across the street in apartments here and there, and wonder, Who are these people I'm seeing? Do they have families?  Are they happy?  Do they know the grace of God? And who is that man who walks through our neighborhood every night at about 10:30, yelling, "Love God! Love God! Love God!" in a Haitian accent?  

The scene at dusk often reminds me of a certain illustration from The Paper Princess, an old favorite picture book of C.Z.'s.  There's a particular two-page drawing that shows the paper princess flying over a town in the evening, and you can see the families inside each home, feeding their children, putting them to bed, worshiping, or reading.  (I also like this book because it really makes me want to doodle!)  

City families don't often have fireplaces or cuddly farm animals (although I did hear about a homeschooling family adopting a lost chicken recently).  But we have lights at dusk.  We have dinners.  We have books.  We also have constant reminders of those who are in need, which is probably a good spur for those of us who have enough, because the Lord is the Lord of the city for all.

Create your own artwork

Ever since someone sent us a link to this website, I've been creating special effects with our photos.  They're not really big enough to print, but you can order prints from the site, I think.  And they're awfully fun to play around with!  Effects vary from the "Warholizer," which makes your photo look like an Andy Warhol pop print, to "Stenciler," which makes your photo look like a faded daguerrotype.  It's sort of like the iMac Photobooth, except that you can use any photo you want.  

Have fun!

There is a balm...

Bob handed me Marilynne Robinson's Gilead this morning and wanted me to read the first two paragraphs to refresh my memory about the prose.  I kept reading, and came upon this passage. The narrator is an old pastor writing a letter to his son:

My mother's father was a preacher, and my father's father was, too, and his father before him, and before that, nobody knows, but I wouldn't hesitate to guess...They were fine people, but if there was one thing I should have learned form them and did not learn, it was to control my temper. This is wisdom I should have attained a long time ago.  Even now, when  flutter of my pulse makes me think of final things, I find myself losing my temper, because a drawer sticks or because I've misplaced my glasses...

A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.  Above all, mind what you say.  "Behold how much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire"--that's the truth.  When my father was old he told me that very thing in a letter he sent me. Which, as it happens, I burned.  I dropped it right in the stove. This surprised me a good deal more at the time than it does in retrospect...  

Well, we see but do not perceive, hear and hear but do not understand, as the Lord says.  I can't claim to understand that saying, as many times as I've heard it, and even preached on it.  It simply states a deeply mysterious fact.  You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between the but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

My point in mentioning this is only to say that people who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you're just quietly going about a life of your own choosing.  They make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be a severe distraction and a waste of time.  This is a thing I wish I had understood much earlier than I did.  Just to reflect on it make me a little irritated.  Irritation is a form of anger, I suppose.

One great benefit of a religious vocation is that it helps you concentrate.  It gives you a good basic sense of what is being asked of you and also what you might as well ignore.  And if I have any wisdom to offer, this is a fair part of it.

Why did I quote this?  Because it calmed me.  I think it was as much the sheer beauty of it as it was the message.  I like the way Robinson has Ames mention that he burns the letter on anger, and even as an old man he gets irritated that it took him so long to become wise. That's realistic. When we're feeling ornery, sometimes there's not much we can tell ourselves about it, rationally. Better to laugh it out, or cry it out, or look at something beautiful.  Read a Psalm.  I know that when I am stressed, I get way too analytical.  No one who is feeling hyper-analytical about themselves should blog.  Thus my silence lately.

Midlife meets adolescence.  C.Z.'s physical therapy twice a week meets with my need for a small surgery, and a longer than expected recovery. February meets April; it's called March, and it suits my mood.  The world doesn't stop.  It lurches.

I've read lots of good blog posts about margin lately.  Susan's entire blog is about margin, more or less.  Yet for me, it seems that margin means that I don't blog.  It means I sit quietly and read what others have to say, try to learn wisdom, and hold my tongue.  For now.

At MoMA today

Our co-op went on a field trip to MoMA.

Afterwards C.Z. and I walked around in the galleries with a friend.

We always like the design section.

This was a polyprolene screen hanging from the ceiling.

C.Z. "got" the irony of this stuffed mushroom cloud.

And this is an anonymous gallery visitor in a room full of Mondrian paintings.

But almost as much as the artworks, we like the museum space itself.

And that's why I took my camera today!