Lucy's chutney

Lucy lived to be nearly 100. She was a woman of intense reserved passion--for her long-departed husband, art, the Adirondacks, Shakespeare's sonnets, learning, work (she retired at 82). Brightly intelligent, she had a photographic memory, and I learned early in our relationship that it was futile to argue history, or dates, or events--I was always wrong. In her 90's, her memory evaporated along with her mobility, and it must have been a very lonely existence for her.
I like to remember her making this chutney, stretching her full 4'10" to see over the lip of the large pot she used in order to check on its progress. This is the recipe she used the day I documented it; I'm sure there were variations over time. It tastes delicious, complex, great on sandwiches and everything else.

6-8 pounds of hard green pears, peeled and diced
1 quart of cider vinegar (add 1/2 quart more as it cooks down)
2 pounds of brown sugar
1 pound of white raisins
1 T mustard seeds
1 tsp salt
1 head garlic, chopped fine
6-8 chili peppers
ginger (candied, dried, or fresh)

Throw together and cook forever, stirring frequently, until it's a thick rich brown.

art--pushing the boundaries

"Life can seem mundane or even boring as we trudge through our daily routines. To me, art provides a way to push beyond the boundaries of the ordinary and find new ways to view life as the grand, unlikely spectacle that it is." Ben Tolman, in a statement accompanying his ink portrait of his wife, Jana, in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009.

wonder

Here's a loooong quotation from Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire. It captures something of the value of escaping the mundane. While Pollan's focus is marijuana, I seek the same sense of wonder in simple show-stopping moments like this weekend's snowstorm
"I'm not prepared to concede that these epiphanies [being high] are as empy or false as they usually appear in the cold light of the next day....We simply don't have the words to convey the force of these perceptions to our straight selves, perhaps because they are the kinds of perceptions that precede words. They many be banal, but that doesn't mean they aren't also at the same time profound.
Marijuana dissolves this apparent contradiction, and it does so by making us temporarily forget most of the baggage we usually bring to our perception..., our acquired sense of its familiarity and banality. For what is a sense of the banality of something if not a defense against the overwhelming (or at least whelming) power of that thing experienced freshly? Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.
It is by temporarily mislaying much of what we already know (or think we know) that cannabis restores a kind of innocence to our perceptions of the world, and innocence in adults will always flirt with embarrassment....By the grace of this forgetting, we temporarily shelve our inheritied ways of looking and see things as if for the first time....
There is another word for this extremist noticing--this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-theres and seen-thats of the adult mind--and that word, of course, is wonder.

Aramis, in buddha pose.
How could I not smile?

foxy marauders

Our niece and family live across the street from an iris farm in Boulder, CO, where we recently visited. We wandered through the fields, with the glorious Flatirons in the background, to catch the last blooms. I noticed: a child's pink Croc in a furrow; a fencepost with a runningshoe; another; a clothesline with a row of gloves dangling from it; more fenceposts with assorted shoes and gloves. What gives?
Amanda explained a family of foxes had denned under one of the outbuildings, and each night roamed through north Boulder gathering these human artifacts from yards and porches; as folks walked through the gardens, they put them wherever they could off the ground--fence posts, shelves, tree branches.
I retraced my steps a few mornings later and found a pile of fresh bounty--shoes of every color and size--in front of the den's entrance; as I watched, a fox trotted out, but turned tail when he saw me. I retreated and watched from a distance as he came out, grabbed a Nike, and carried it back to the den.
Are they running a thrift store? playing dressup? insulating the den for winter?

romance

After the old bird box, made by my uncle, fell apart, I did nothing for a few years. I had labeled it the House of Death after a black snake raided the wrens, dropping the dead chicks to the ground as it dangled like a necklace from the box.

This year, I realized how much I missed the nesting birds and so mounted a new box. The first brooders ignored it; I figured it might need a year to season before they deemed it worthy. Soon, however, these chickadees began their inspecting, building, brooding, and hatching. Here, one passes food to the other to feed the chicks. I am so joyfully entranced to watch them in their purposeful business.
A few mornings after this interchange, I was out early, chasing a rabbit who was wistfully gazing through my barricades at the lettuce. On my way, I noticed something strange on the chickadee box, thought it possibly a wasp nest, and circled back to check it out after the rabbit was successfully shooed. Approaching from the other side, I could identify the coiled checkered snake easily, lumped on top of the box.
While I am one with the wonders of nature, understand the natural balance of things, yadayada, no one messes with my chickadees. A 12' pole and a husband with a hammer later, that danger was dispensed with.
Three days later, soft down is protruding from the box. Another marauder? The flight of the chicks and the next tenants moving in? Were my gestures futile? Ephemeral? Wistful?

Day fades to twilight.
Nighthawk veers across the sky,
first one of the year.