Happy New Year

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Orange Flowers

New Year's Resolutions

To be more patient; to willingly move more slowly

To cook with lavender more

To rent the bike I talked about this year

To find out what’s in the white sangria at the Oaxacan Kitchen (lovely, with pears)

To be all I can be, and not give in to the constant diminishments

To take part in the dig at Hadrian’s Wall

To get my two novels published, and write the Mallorcan mystery

To love every day I have, and every friend

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Boat, Crete

Dessert with Bonnard

A low-calorie treat for the holidays. I must have more of these for my new year’s diet!

image: Pierre Bonnard, Dessert

Christmas

A quiet day, spent baking lemon scones (in the toaster oven I spirited away from the office) and reading A Child's Christmas in Wales. Wishing for a fireplace and fragrant piñon logs from Jesus Rios's woodyard on Camino del Monte Sol, but otherwise content to be. Here. Now. Satsuma tangerines and Andrea Bocelli's The Lord's Prayer and my blue Yellow Submarine socks.

Life is good, and I am so grateful.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Flora2

Christmas Eve

Lessons from Thendara Lane (while trying to cook for a Creole Christmas Eve party):

Never make Tangerine Butter in the winter. “Whisking” room-temperature butter the density of quartz is neither fun nor pretty.

Do not think you can listen to the Santa Fe Desert Chorale while baking Pecan Cornbread with dark rum and vanilla. The oven and cassette player will clearly short each other out.

Do not attempt to melt 5 Tbs. butter in a cast-iron skillet per the recipe instructions while cheering up the living room with the Christmas tree lights. The burner and the lights will clearly short each other out as well. You knew that about the burner and toaster, so shouldn’t you really have known better?

Don’t be silly. How can you imagine that you can turn on the oven and the oven timer at the same time? Turn the timer on after the oven’s safely off. This, too, will obviously overload the circuits. Where do you think this is—the Los Altos Hills? Never mind the blaze of outdoor lights on the mansion next door that makes you think of some Las Vegas casino. Like Las Vegas, it’s only a desert mirage.

Consider stationing a family member at the fusebox with a book, standing ready to turn the switch back on every five minutes or so during times of heavy cooking—such as boiling water in the teakettle for coffee.

Forget the oven. People can and do subsist quite happily on Gator Guacamole (lime and mint and black beans) and dark rum. All this new-age stuff like lights and heat is vastly overrated, after all.

image: Christmas tree in Piazza Portanova, Salerno old town, Italy. Christmas 2008., SOLOXSALERNO

Places I Would Rather Be Today

Wouldn't it be grand?!

Vivaldi in the upper reaches of a chilly stone palazzo
for Christmas; a good, hearty fish and potato stew; a string of gold-painted glass beads for counting off prayers for the year ahead; the irresistible lure of a little side canal . . .

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Venezia

Twas Three Days Before Christmas

I keep saying that one of these years I’m going to take December off, and actually appreciate the charms of the season. As it is, I have nearly a hundred Christmas cards left to write (and won’t have the five-hour flight to Kona on which to write them); spent all of Sunday in the office working on award nominations for books which don’t deserve the effort or the recognition; have two more days to despair of finishing myriad things with end-of-the-year deadlines . . . O deadening December!

There have been moments of cheer—making Creole Jambalaya with sausage and bay leaves; slicing oranges, limes, and lemons for Spanish sangria with rum; discovering Allegro French Roast decaf; hearing the golden-voiced Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja; visiting with a young friend who has happily launched into geology; turning on the Christmas tree lights every morning and evening; opening windows (mostly details from Dutch paintings) of our advent calendar.

And now on with the Christmas cards!!

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Reflections (Christmas Window, Rockefeller Center)

Duet

This is to mark the sad passing of a dog with noble heart and spirit, lovely Duet, two months beyond her fifteenth birthday. A dog who liked clam chowder, who was known to levitate on the cliffs over the ocean at Half Moon Bay; in whom the notion of play was amazingly advanced—yet who loved her quiet hours with the best of us. A dog I shall always remember as a favorite friend, a fellow being full of love who brightened every day she encountered, and whose reaction to the world was often as not joy in every bone. We shall dearly miss her.


image: black Labrador Retriever

Places I Would Rather Be Today

TIgerskin and cherries—what a luscious life!


image: Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Cherries, 1873 (private collection)

O Christmas Tree

The Christmas tree is up and hung with lights and clear glass balls like soap bubbles and smaller balls in hues of gold, copper, and bronze. (And then, of course, the California Quail instead of a Partridge, next to the Venetian blown-glass bell.)

Christmas trees have always seemed not just festive but a comfort, a benign spirit keeping watch over the month and me. When I was little and afraid of noises in the night, I somehow knew I didn't have to worry when the Christmas tree was standing guard in the front room; I felt perfectly safe and happy in its care.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, A Quail in a Pine Tree

Bright Moments in a Dark December

French Roast coffee in my little Cretan espresso cup

a bulldog tied to a signpost outside the California Avenue shops

warm spiced cider in an orange-cream bowl

students leading horses off into the dark

a pine wreath on the radiator of a fire truck

ropa vieja simmering in the crock pot

croissants at Douce France (and the thought of butter and strawberry jam)

a rain-washed red geranium—Venetian red, alizarin, or crimson


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Espresso Cup

Preserved Lemons

Someone has just been telling me about preserving lemons, in the heavy-lidded jars. Lemons layered with kosher salt. A warm thought for a frosty day.

Preserved lemons sold in the souks of Morocco . . . drenched with color and taste, texture and tangy smell. Lemons then used in salads or tagines.

(And while I was off researching lemon recipes, I came across the tempting trail of a Prune and Armagnac Tart! Thus do I get seduced.)


image: Mature spanish lemons, Johannes Pribyl

Places I Would Rather Be Today

Need I say more, as I look out at the darkness and the rain?

Perhaps the place I'd really like to be is just-about-summer, mid-May—my favorite, hopeful time, with promises of everything ahead. A place of mind, a place of heart.

Sitting quietly in a room is all well and good, but why not a whitewashed room, a room opening out on a small Greek harbor, so one has no need to go seeking aesthetic pleasures elsewhere? Drabness and gloom does make me restless, despite good books and Indian curries and visits to my favorite old Black Lab, settled contentedly, determinedly, on her own carefully-guarded pillow in the warm laundry room.

image: View of the church and a few yachts at Vathy Harbor on the Greek island of Siphnos (Takeaway)

Thought for a Winter's Day

Most unhappiness comes from not being able to sit quietly in a room.
(Pascal)


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Waiting for Thanksgiving Dinner

Thought for the Day

"Nothing can deflate a pretentious cocktail faster than a sharp poke with a paper umbrella."
(Pete Wells, Staging a Rum Rebellion, NYTimes.com)

From the same article, I also particularly like the following description of a drink that I would be glad to be sampling about now, leaves or no:

Adam Bernbach, who manages the bar at Proof, a restaurant in Washington, [says] that rum makes him think of colonial taverns, which led him to blend aged Martinique rum with maple syrup, orange zest, and chocolate bitters in the New England 1773. It calls out to be drunk after the leaves are off the trees.

Drinking December!

image: Cocktail Umbrella (Kona, Hawaii), Adam (AZAdam)

Yellow Leaves

On my way back from campus, a fine flurry of yellow leaves.

Dissettling December . . .


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Leaves in Fountain

December

It's shaping up to be a

Daffy December

Dastardly December

Deliquescent December


image: Hasegawa Tohaku, Pine Trees, left-hand screen of a pair of six-folded screens, 16th century, ink on paper, Tokyo National Museum

Thanks for Thanksgiving Week (Sunday)

You simply will not be the same person two months from now after consciously giving thanks each day for the abundance that exists in your life. And you will have set in motion an ancient spiritual law: the more you have and are grateful for, the more will be given you.

(Sarah Ban Breathnach)

image:  Old woman eating a mango. Dhaka (Bangladesh), Steve Evans from India and USA

Thanks for Thanksgiving Week (Saturday)

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.

(Albert Schweitzer)

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Uncle Les Leong, Hawai'i

 

Boston Again

Reflections on Boston.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Boston Window

Thanks for Thanksgiving Week (Friday)

I am thankful for Pierre Bonnard, and for the joy his paintings always give me, and the inspiration for the novel I've written about that joy and life-transforming color, Nude against the Light.

image:  Pierre Bonnard, Nude against the Light (1908)

Thanks for Thanksgiving Week (Thursday)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Native American - Navajo Song 

It is lovely indeed, it is lovely indeed. I, I am the spirit within the earth ... The feet of the earth are my feet ... The legs of the earth are my legs ... The bodily strength of the earth is my strength ... The thoughts of the earth are my thoughts ... The voice of the earth is my voice ... The feather of the earth is my feather ... All that belongs to the earth belongs to me ... All that surrounds the earth surrounds me ... I, I am the sacred words of the earth ... It is lovely indeed, it is lovely indeed.

image: Male north american turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), en:User:Lupin

Thanks for Thanksgiving Week (Wednesday)

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Cloud (Lake Louise, Canada)

Saint Cecilia's Day

Happy Saint Cecilia's Day—patron of music (and an only child).

St. Cecilia" by John William Waterhouse (1895)

Thanks for Thanksgiving Week (Tuesday)

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. 

(Thornton Wilder)

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Koi (Kona, Hawai'i)

Thanks for Thanksgiving Week (Monday)

Every object, every being, is a jar full of delight. Be a connoisseur. 

(Rumi) 

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Ginger Jar (Cape Cod)

Shopping Lists

My shopping list for today in Boston:

• a lavender sachet
• rain boots
• apples
• toothpaste

 Not originally on my list:

• a purple striped Italian sweater
• an antique map
• a bundle of mountain firewood
• an apartment in Beacon Hill with “sun-splashed” bedroom and wood floors
• pink peonies flown in from Holland

image:  Vase de Pivoines (Vase of Peonies), oil on canvas painting by Henri Fantin-Latour, 1881, Honolulu Academy of Arts

Saturday in Boston

Good morning from Boston.

My 30^th-floor room in the Back Bay looks out on a bit of the Charles River; the overgrowth of the fens; a lot of red brick and flaming fall leaves; six or seven typical New England church steeples and the big clunky Christian Science mother church; one of the colleges; and in it all, two tiny walkers along Huntington Avenue, passing in opposite directions.

The Peet’s French Roast is brewing in the bathroom, and all in all it’s a lovely November morning—except that I will have to spend the day indoors, setting up books for an exhibit and then selling them (or not).

Coming in last night:  a blood red line of sunset between two vast darks; a little crescent moon observing from the upper, somewhat below us on the plane.

image:  Acorn Street, Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts. These houses were built in the late 1820s by Cornelius Coolidge. July 2005.

Letterpress

I've been thrown for a loop; I don't know what I think. I love the feel and look of letterpress type, and spent some of my happiest hours creating lovely things on the Mills College letterpress. The reason I never owned my own press, as I've written here before, was the weight and cumbersome logistics that would have plagued moves into and out of less-than-spacious apartments up long, spindly stairs.

But now Paper Source has come out with a lightweight, easily portable option, apparently easy to maintain . . . and has thrown temptation again my way. But am I really tempted? Or have I moved on, beyond any desire to work with slow, old-fashioned, hands-on methods involving ink and paper? Since I began this blog, and went happily digital, and learned the wonders of Blurb/Booksmart for producing book pages the way I want them (mostly), have I gone utterly into the ether? If so, that's rather sad, and I should pull myself back.

image: Printing press at the Roycroft Community campus (displayed in the Copper Shop), Dave Pape

Quails

The quails are back this morning, twenty-three quails and a towhee. That effortless flow of quails across the drive, into the grass . . . A scattering of quails, a long skitter of quails . . . I’m always trying to find the right verb, the right collective noun. Bevy is too busy; Solemnity too grave—not taking into consideration the delightful sudden dash from one side to the other, the sometimes giddy syncopation of the otherwise stately procession.

A hawk sits watching, impassive. A bushy-tailed squirrel goes about its busy business in between.

The quails gladden my day.


image: California Quail (Callipepla californica), Gary Kramer, Fish and Wildlife Service

Friday the 13th

As Walt Kelly's amiable turtle Churchy LaFemme would have said, from his cowering position under the nearest bed, "Friday the 13th come on a Friday this month!"


image: Walt Kelly, Churchy LaFemme, www.cartoonartoriginals.com

Bonnard Flowers

A Bonnard for a November Friday.


image: Pierre Bonnard

Jujubes

Our landlady has given us a bag of jujubes—like tiny, intense apples, with a single seed resembling an olive pit. At first they looked like crabapples, which I used to hate as a child despite my mother's lovely jewel-hued crabapple jelly and pancake syrup, because they fell into the grass by the hundreds (tens of thousands!) and had to be raked up, often rotting soft brown by then and resisting the rake.

I see that the jujube is thought to come from southern Asia, between Lebanon, northern India, the Korean peninsula, and southern and central China, and was likely introduced later to southeastern Europe. Of the buckthorn family, it's also called Red Date or Chinese Date.

From Wikipedia:

 Chinese and Korean traditional medicine believe the fruit alleviates stress. An Australian jujube drink is recommended "when you feel yourself becoming distressed." The fruit is also used to treat sore throats.

 The jujube's sweet smell is said to make teenagers fall in love, and as a result, in the Himalaya and Karakoram regions, men take a stem of sweet-smelling jujube flowers with them or put it on their hats to attract women.

 In the traditional Chinese wedding ceremony, jujube and walnut were often placed in the newlyweds' bedroom as a sign of fertility.

 In Bhutan, the leaves are used as a potpourri to help keep the houses of the inhabitants smelling fresh and clean. It is also said to keep bugs and other insects out of the house and free of infestation.

 In Japan, it's given its name to a style of tea caddy used in the Japanese tea ceremony.

 In Korea, the wood is used to make the body of the taepyeongso, a double-reed wind instrument.

 In Vietnam, the jujube fruit is eaten freshly picked from the tree as a snack. It is also dried and used in desserts, such as sâm bổ lượng, a cold beverage that includes the dried jujube, longan, fresh seaweed, barley, and lotus seeds.

According to infohub.com:

Many scholars also identify the jujube as the biblical atad, mentioned in the "Parable of the trees" in the book of Judges.

After valuable trees such as the olive, fig and vine have all declined to be king, the trees turn to the atad and ask if he will rule over them. He responds thus: "If you truly annoint me as your king, come and shelter un my shade and if not may fire come forth from the atad and consume the cedars of Lebanon!" (Judges 9:15)

The jujube tree is common in Samaria, where the story takes place. While its fruits are edible, they are not exceptionally tasty and it is very much the poor relative of the other native fruit trees mentioned in the parable. It can grow very large, easily providing shade for these small trees.

I'm reminded of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky,

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

And sure enough, others are too—

"Since sound is such a significant feature of this poem, it seems justified to take the sound of 'jubjub' as being close to the word 'jujube,' a candy named for a fruit tree, and to assume an association with the sticky sweetness of the fruit the bird eats."

How fun to be given so much in just a little bag.


image:
Ziziphus_zizyphus_foliage.jpg: Júlio Reis
Azufaifas_fcm.jpg: Photographer: Frank C. Müller
Red_Dates.jpg: Richard from Vancouver, Canada

Thought for the Day

Écrire est un acte d'amour. S'il ne l'est pas, il n'est qu'écriture.
(Jean Cocteau)

Writing is an act of love. If it isn't that, it is nothing but handwriting.


image: Love message on a wall in Italy, 8888jazz

Dieting

Starting a diet, I'm happy to have this list of Best Choices for Weight Loss (Ethnic Foods) from nutritiondata.com:

1 Cattail, Narrow Leaf Shoots (Northern Plains Indians)
2 Fireweed, young leaves, raw (Alaska Native)
3 Lambsquarters, raw (Northern Plains Indians)
4 Lambsquarters, steamed (Northern Plains Indians)
5 Sourdock, young leaves (Alaska Native)
6 Cranberries, wild, bush, raw (Alaska Native)
7 Chiton, leathery, gumboots (Alaska Native)
8 Fish, blackfish, whole (Alaska Native)
9 Salmonberries, raw (Alaska Native)
10 Plains Pricklypear, raw (Northern Plains Indians)
11 Melon, banana (Navajo)
12 Sea cucumber, yane (Alaska Native)
13 Cloudberries, raw (Alaska Native) [baked apple berry, salmonberry, yellowberry]
14 Rose Hips, wild (Northern Plains Indians)
15 Moose, liver, braised (Alaska Native)
16 Fish, herring eggs on giant kelp, Pacific (Alaska Native)
17 Stew, moose (Alaska Native)
18 Bear, polar, meat, raw (Alaska Native)
19 Raspberries, wild (Northern Plains Indians)
20 Blueberries, wild, frozen (Alaska Native)
21 Agave, raw (Southwest)
22 Mush, blue corn with ash (Navajo)
23 Walrus, liver, raw (Alaska Native)
24 Oopah (tunicate), whole animal (Alaska Native)
25 Fish, whitefish, broad, liver (Alaska Native)
26 Fish, whitefish, eggs (Alaska Native)
27 Stew/soup, caribou (Alaska Native)
28 Huckleberries, raw (Alaska Native)
29 Rhubarb, wild, leaves (Alaska Native)

I can see that I will really lose a lot of weight with this quickly.


image: Fruits and vegetables from a farmers market. circa 2007, USA, California, Long Beach

In Memoriam

O! fond farewell to savages and explorations!—and to the great explorer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropologist, philosopher, and author (most gloriously, of Tristes Tropiques), dead this week at 100, who wrote about so many things, from face-painting to tribal magic and its sorcerers to scented rums; finding a better way of being, in the canny glances of a cat; hearing a fragment of a Chopin Etude in a foreign place that brings one's own beginnings back. His might well be a guide to the considered life. 

There's a wonderful tribute in The New York Times from November 4, "Other Voyages in the Shadow of Lévi-Strauss," by Larry Rohter, telling of his lasting influence on the tribes of the Amazon, not just on those of us who've been transformed by his profound and lyric masterwork.

__________________________ 

A tribute also to Wallace Stegner, whose hundredth birthday year this would have been. There's a nice article in Orion this week about his work in connection with the environment, "Putting Things Back Together," by Rick Bass. 

I am especially drawn to Stegner's work (especially Angle of Repose and The Spectator Bird), because I've been living and writing in his footsteps. Behind the Cathedral and its park in Santa Fe is the old St. Vincent’s Hospital, where I was born and where (though I was here by then, in his Palo Alto) Wallace Stegner was to die, after a car crash there in Santa Fe during a trip to give a lecture.

The allure of the little cottage where we live is its location—on a lane that has just three houses—in the Los Altos Hills. The township of Los Altos Hills was founded by Wallace Stegner and incorporated in 1956 (my birth year!). Strict zoning laws require every house to have at least an acre of undeveloped land around it. Altogether it’s eight and a half square miles of gently rolling hills and valleys, wooded areas with creeks and streams, vineyards and orchards, and seventy-five miles of walking, biking, and horseback riding trails.

Living here is almost like living in the country—or another country, even. There were sheep in the pasture beyond our fence when we moved in, and red clay tennis courts above, like some that charmed me in Aosta on my way to the St. Bernard Pass for the archaeology. Next door is a Jewish temple. The sheep are gone now, but a matched set of alpacas, like overgrown French poodles, has replaced them, and watch over the fence, hopeful for fallen pears.


image: Two indians of the brazilian Pataxó tribe, in traditional attire, during a demonstration ("O Abril Indígena") in Brasília, April 4th, 2006. Photographer: Valter Campanato/ABr.

Tea

I’ve just gotten an assortment of teas—
pear and white tea (white tea from China flavored with real pieces of pear);
Darjeeling Silvertips white tea (delicate, sweet, and balanced, “the most wonderful white we’ve found”— something I’ll have to compare with my favorite Snow Leopard);
Kir Royale (a mixture of various red berries and fruits, set apart by the tangy flavor of black currant);
Lady Hannah (no tea, just a mix of whole fruits— blackberries, strawberries, raspberries—and herbs; a “very refined cup with character”);
Rote Grutze, Red Groats (a wild herbal infusion blended with rose hips and dried fruits);
strawberry apple (real strawberry and apple pieces highlight this delicious fruit herbal tea).

All from Tealuxe, the little shop in Boston (where I will soon be), where you can get grilled sandwiches and a pot of fragrant tea, escape from wading through snow on the Commons, warm your fingers, meet with a friend— currently writing her dissertation on medieval mystics, holed up in a vintage farmhouse in upstate New York.

In the meantime I drink Blue Mill sage tea from the Persian market in Mountain View where lamb and vegetables are often grilling, sending a fragrant cloud of smoke into the air.

I’ve often thought I would like nothing more than to start a Tealuxe franchise here, maybe a teashop and gallery in Allied Arts, with terracotta floors and whitewashed walls with matted photographs of favorite places, green French park chairs and tables set out in the courtyard; low ceilings and cushioned reading nooks like The Teahouse on Canyon Road in Santa Fe.

I wish I could embed fragrances and tastes in this blog, not just sounds and videos. Then I could throw a virtual tea party!


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Japanese Teapot

Flames

More flames, for the coming days of failing light—
(These in a monastery in Crete.)

I shall light candles everywhere. At evening table, in orange-painted mission churches, in glass hurricane globes reflected in the glass of a cold window, against the night.

A bumper-sticker asks, how do you measure a life?

Maybe through the light it sheds on others, I wonder? In hundreds of thousands of kilowatts, if one lives faithfully and well.

I am reminded of Buddha's teaching, too—how do you weigh an elephant?

How can you weigh a large elephant? Load it on a boat and draw a line to mark how deep the boat sinks into the water. Then take out the elephant and load the boat with stones until it sinks to the same depth, and weigh the stones.

How do you weigh a life, then? I think the answer must be much the same. Stone by stone. Word by word. Or, igniting, flame by flame by flame.


image: Arkadi Monastery / Moni Arkadiou. Candles in the church. Photo by Wouter Hagens.

Fall Fruit

Some pears in honor of the season, with grape leaves yellowing in the vineyard across Arastradero from the end of our driveway, and sun coming dappled through backroad trees late in the afternoon, between visiting writers (two this week) and Pilates at the barn.

And for a quiet clearing in a busy week, a Billy Collins poem to savor like one of the perfect pears.

Thesaurus

It could be the name of a prehistoric beast
that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up
on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,
or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.

It means treasury, but it is just a place
where words congregate with their relatives,
a big park where hundreds of family reunions
are always being held,
house, home, abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs,
all sharing the same picnic basket and thermos;
hairy, hirsute, woolly, furry, fleecy, and shaggy
all running a sack race or throwing horseshoes,
inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile
standing and kneeling in rows for a group photograph.

Here father is next to sire and brother close
to sibling, separated only by fine shades of meaning.
And every group has its odd cousin, the one
who traveled the farthest to be here:
astereognosis, polydipsia, or some eleven
syllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool.
Even their own relatives have to squint at their name tags.

I can see my own copy up on a high shelf.
I rarely open it, because I know there is no
such thing as a synonym and because I get nervous
around people who always assemble with their own kind,
forming clubs and nailing signs to closed front doors
while others huddle alone in the dark streets.

I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,
wandering the world where they sometimes fall
in love with a completely different word.
Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever
next to each other on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, can take place.

Billy Collins

(from PoemHunter.com)

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Pears (Lake Como)