Como Se Llama?

Earlier this week I laughed to see the white alpaca in the yard next door, the fiestier of the two, come charging up to the fence to send the quails wildly scattering.  It was so clearly deliberate—but why on earth?  Devilment?  Whimsy?  Simply the instinct of a dog chasing a cat?  They look so comical, these overgrown French poodles, one likes to think they have an appropriately giddy sense of humor.  ("The one-L lama is a priest; the two-L llama is a beast . . . ")

Another happy discovery of the week:  Tibetan yak oven mitts.


image:   Alpaca in Rose Hill Farm, Chardon, Ohio, USA, Brian0918

Wednesday Poetry

Some humor for an end-of-summer's day.

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey's Version Of "Three Blind Mice"

And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,

how did they ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision
let alone two other blind ones?

And how, in their tiny darkness,
could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife
or anyone else's wife for that matter?
Not to mention why.

Just so she could cut off their tails
with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer,
but the thought of them without eyes
and now without tails to trail through the moist grass

or slip around the corner of a baseboard
has the cynic who always lounges within me
up off his couch and at the window
trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

By now I am on to dicing an onion
which might account for the wet stinging
in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard's
mournful trumpet on "Blue Moon,"

which happens to be the next cut,
cannot be said to be making matters any better.

—Billy Collins

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Thistles, Stratford-upon-Avon

Kenilworth

Hadrian's Wall

Cow and Wall

The feeling of vastness is  what remains.  And grandeur, a grandeur of the spirit, in that continuum of time and landscape.

images:  Christie B. Cochrell, Hadrian's Wall

Places I Would Rather Be Today

Living and writing in this ravishing house on Tinos.


image: Yatzer

And a Blue Pitcher

This from Pisarro, an autumnal scene.


image: Pisarro, Still Life with Apples and Pitcher, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Green Pitchers III

image: Natura morta con brocche. Self-made photograph of the original painting. Antonio Sicurezza

Green Pitchers II

Lovely Roman glass, with light pressed into it.  You can read time in its very fabric, but it wears the millenia well.

It's the shifting and the separating of its elements, they say, that gives the glass its luminosity; the patina is not inherent but acquired through its interactions with water and heat and earth over the years since it was made.

Nice to think that the extremities of our environment give us these irridescent colors too, as we weather and wear. 

image: Pitcher. Glass, Late Antiquity. Found in a grave in the Trastevere, area of the Conservatorio di San Pasquale. Jastrow

Green Pitchers

I am obsessing about green pitchers, on sun-dappled tables, preferably from Provence—but this one would do nicely, on a shaded table where a midday meal is being set out for a group of friends. Cold tea or cold white wine, either reminiscent of meadow grasses, with an earthy melon (musk by nature) and a bit of goat cheese for contrast. And maybe a vase of bronze or rust chrysanthemums, and a long-haired white cat dozing on a weathered wicker chair nearby. The friends have been reading Lawrence Durrell, Justine, the first of the Quartet, and one has just painted her toenails amaranth pink.


image: Small pitcher, Iran, 12–13th century. Silicate ceramic with molded decoration under a transparent coloured glaze. Jastrow

Light-Gathering

This is an amazing photo, and makes me remember how glad I am to live near San Francisco—even if it doesn't always look this way.


image: Out of fog Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco in fog and w:crepuscular rays, Mila Zinkova, sent to Dr. Andrew T. Young

Melons

There is a wealth of melons, now, in every market, round and pleasing in the hands. More melons than I knew there were, and more than I can sample to determine which is best.

Algerian
Navajo yellow
canary
cantaloupe
casaba
crenshaw
charantais
Christmas
crane
wax
winter
yellow watermelon
xigua
derishi
galia
honeydew
horned
musk
net
ogen
pepino
Persian
Russian/Uzbek
Santa Claus
Sharlyn
sweet
tree (papaya)
Tuscan
watermelon (seedless and otherwise)
yubari
Eel River
piel de sapo

And then the bitter melon, which features in sambals and in this poem with its amiable title, reminiscent of Basho and his travels.

Traveling with a Bitter Melon
by Ping-Kwan Leung (Hong Kong)
Translated by Martha Cheung

I cooked it at noon,
sliced it, then stir-fried it.
It was delicious, a little bitter, a little sweet
carrying the good wishes you brought with you from another place.
On your way back you had it for company.
It must have gradually turned tender and soft beside you.
How did you carry it?
Did you check it in? Or hand-carry it?
Did it look about curiously in the plane? Did it
cry because of hunger? Did it get airsick?
I said it was raining outside; you said where you were
it was sunny, you were about to set off to my city
so you thought you could bring it with you, carry it
across different climates, different customs and manners.
I believed you when I set eyes on it,
thanks to you I saw its color— so unique.
In what climate and soil did it grow and from what species?
This child from a poor family has grown into a body like jade;
has an endearing character, kind of a soft gentle white,
not dazzling, but glowing as if from within.
I took this white bitter melon with me onto the plane
and arrived at a foreign land, stepped onto foreign soil;
only at Customs did I wonder if anyone had asked you:
why isn't it green like most bitter melons?
As they examined its dubious passport, ready to stir up trouble
the innocent newcomer waited patiently, a heavy past on his shoulders,
while it remained endearing as ever, neither bitter nor sour,
but gently making allowances for those overworked and disgruntled
weary-eyed grim-faced immigration officials.
I took it with me and went on and on, like my words, further and
further off the mark, trying harder to be inclusive —
because I didn't want to leave out any details, about how a bitter melon
tossed and turned at night, missing its mates,
gasping – was it torn by memories of that
familiar place under the melon-shed, by feelings some may find trivial?
You're so kind towards my clumsy language habits, when I asked:
when will you be back? You just said:
when will you go? One leaving, one
returning. You accepted the tenses I used,
tenses slippery and imprecise. I always eat bitter melons.
I ate one before I boarded the plane.
Why then did it come all that way back to my table?
Did it want to tell me the bitterness of separation? Of frustration?
Did it want to let me know it had a tumor? That its face
was wrinkled with loneliness?
That it kept having bad nights, kept waking in the early hours
and with open eyes waited for the arrival of dawn? In the rippling
silence, was it telling me it was illness that made it bitter,
or its inability to make whole the fragments of history?
Or was it the bitterness of being misunderstood by strangers,
of being misplaced in a hostile world?
It still looked so translucent, like white-jade,
so soothing the thought of savoring it eased one's nerves.
I was saying what everyone should say,
expressing amidst lucid phrases what I wanted to say
in confused sentences. Alone, I set the table,
the ocean between us; how I yearned to be with you
and share with you the refreshing melon.
There are so many things that do not live up to expectations.
The human world has its imperfections.

image: Half cut of Yubari melon, Captain76

Fall Colors

I'm thinking of fall colors—
aubergine
persimmon
pumpkin
flame
Byzantium
sangria
Tyrian purple
thistle
Portland orange
tomato
tea rose
mahogany
Tufts blue
Egyptian blue
terra cotta
fire brick
old gold
goldenrod
citrine

Which leads me to the citrineforktail (like an oriental bamboo paintbrush used for forming perfect Zen circles), above, and the lovely little citrine warbler.

❈❈❈❈❈❈
Salad of the day: Watercress and heirloom tomatoes with hard goat cheese and bouquet garni.

image: Citrine Forktail, male, Mitternacht90

Settling Back

The long, lazy days of summer are past, and all the possibilities they might have brought with them. Whiling away the hours in a hammock with a good, old-fashioned book, Henry James or Hemingway, To the Lighthouse, The Last of the Mohicans, The Mill on the Floss—Sitting crosslegged on the dirty-blond sand of a northern California beach, typing witty letters on an inherited old Smith Corona, or a raw, pithy memoir—Riding horses north of Half Moon Bay, flying kites on some high hillside, haunting the Cold Stone Creamery, grilling corn and peppers over charry coals, paddling out to the Farallons in a red kayak—and beyond—Learning to play the ukelele, growing heirloom tomatoes, building a model of the Taj Mahal—Sleeping until noon, or rising at dawn to run on quiet streets while others slept—The possibilities were endless, and the hours too; but now things have settled back down to familiar routines.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Gone to Seed

Places I Would Rather Be Today

I'd love to be milling around with these Northumbrian sheep, in greener pastures, instead of fretting about booklists and schedules and things that knot my neck and shoulder muscles.

How I would love to let out a good "baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"

And I do like this quote about sheep:

Another night I dreamed I heard heavenly music sounding in my ears, and a flock of sheep was gathering round it. When the music ceased, the sheep leaped for joy, and ran together, shaking their heads; and one shook his head almost off, and seemed to have nothing but ears.

—Joanna Southcott (religious prophetess—perhaps not an unenviable occupation?)

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Sheep near Humshaugh

Thought for the Day

Fig tart!


image: John Feneron, Fig Tart

And Inland Waterways

This in York, where I could be wandering happily through The Shambles (different, somehow, from the shambles that is my desk) and eating Yorkshire Curd tarts instead of mundane cantaloupe.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, York

Autumn Beaches

A perfect fall day, that makes me think of distant autumn beaches, patches of momentarily warm sand under defiantly bare feet, layered striped sweaters, a lobster roll—well wrapped—and paperback mystery in my cloth bag, bitter espresso in a paper cup at the deserted ferry dock, the feeling of endings, loss, a wistful lessening of chances, imperceptible diminishment of light and time.

I am reminded too of Graham Greene's poignant short story Cheap in August, and reminded that there is much of Greene I should reread.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Cape Cod Canoe

Grace Notes from Opera in the Park

* an airdale terrier wearing large sunglasses
* an apple-green balloon escaping through the streaming fog
* Nicola Luisotti’s headlong, wholehearted conducting
* on Stanyan Street a three-story Victorian the color of pistachio ice-cream
* our other salad: orzo with fresh corn, cherry tomatoes, green beans, and basil

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Victorian Rose Garden, Warwick

September Sunday

Off to Opera in the Park (Sharon Meadow), with today's salad—Chilled Pork with Walnuts, Cantaloupe, Jicama, and Cumin Raspberry Vinaigrette (Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter), and with watercress and carmelized onions. I've cut the most delicious cantaloupe I've ever tasted, and browned a pork loin to perfection. I hope the melony wine I found will be a good complement—a Pine Ridge Chenin Blanc Viognier. "Think of a spring flower garden oozing with melon and citrus blossom notes." Will it work as well in the fall, I wonder, with that soberer, bittersweet edge to the sunlight? Spring flowers are so four months ago . . . Our thoughts turn inwards, though we stay outdoors each evening as long as we can. The baby quails are big now, and migrataing birds begin to appear.

I love September, especially when we're in it.
(Willie Stargell)

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Yellow Flowers

Thought for September 11

We mark this day of sad remembrance all in our own ways. I like this thought, on the subject of memory and photographs and the ephemeral or lost—

We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.

(Henri Cartier-Bresson)

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Bird on Hadrian's Wall

Some Things I Love

Some things I love:

* this purple door in Durham, England

* folded-over potato chips

* the little dark-eyed juncos

* weekends

❈❈❈❈❈❈
Salad of the day: Wild rice and herbs with ground turkey sauteed with Bouquet Garni.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Purple Door, Durham

Places I Would Rather Be Today

At Bamburgh Castle.

In a pleasant anecdote about the beach below the castle, Swinburne swam there, as did the novelist E.M. Forster—who adopted the Forsters of Bamburgh as his ancestors. (I've just adopted the apple farmers and Calvados-makers of Normandy as my own ancestors, not without linguistic cause.)


❈❈❈❈❈❈

Salad of the day: Kale with feta and onion mixed with quinoa, radish, and cucumber, and given radiant color with slivered carrots and beets.

❈❈❈❈❈❈


Iced tea of the day: Zhena's Gypsy Tea, Red Lavender



image: Christie B. Cochrell, Roses, Bamburgh

California

Happy California Admission Day.

We were admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the thirty-first state. We are currently the most populous (one out of every eight United States residents lives in California).

More turkeys are raised in California than in any other state in the United States. Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge contains the largest winter population of bald eagles in the continental United States.

The Hollywood Bowl is the world's largest outdoor amphitheater. Inyo National Forest is home to the bristle cone pine, the oldest living species; some of the gnarled trees are thought to be over 4,600 years old. San Francisco Bay is considered the world's largest landlocked harbor.

California is known variously as The Land of Milk and Honey, The El Dorado State, The Golden State, and The Grape State. There are more than 300,000 tons of grapes grown in California annually; California produces more than 17 million gallons of wine each year.

The highest and lowest points in the continental United States are within 100 miles of one another—Mount Whitney measures 14,495 feet and Bad Water in Death Valley is 282 feet below sea level.

Castroville is known as the Artichoke Capital of the World. In 1947 a young woman named Norma Jean was crowned Castroville's first Artichoke Queen. She went on to become actress Marilyn Monroe.

state bird: California valley quail
state flower: California poppy
state tree: California redwood
state motto: Eureka (I have found it)
state song: "I Love You, California"
state animal: California grizzly bear
state fish: California golden trout
state colors: blue and gold
state bread: sourdough
state fruit: avocado, figs, and apricot
state salad: Cobb

For other California facts and trivia, see here.

❈❈❈❈❈❈

And speaking of salads, today's was: Baby lettuces with mint, sage, feta, lemon vinaigrette, and roasted chicken.



image: Christie B. Cochrell, Poppies

Spinning Straw to Gold

Happy discoveries of the weekend:

* Pear and Pecorino Ravioli (Santa Cruz Pasta Factory—wow!)
* the empanada cart at the end of the Ferry Building

❈❈❈❈❈❈

Today's salad:

Calafia's delicious New Bohemian Pork Salad, with queso fresco, avocado, basil citrus vinaigrette, organic baby spinach, and braised pork shoulder.

❈❈❈❈❈❈

Today's iced-tea:

Something ominously caffeinated which will keep me up all night. At least I have The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club on my iPod to keep me entertained.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Spiderweb

A Year of Salads

Oh why not indeed! Having just read that if you eat a salad a day for a year, as either lunch or dinner, you can lose some thirty pounds. And remembering a similar story in the introduction to my favorite Mediterranean Light—in that case salades Niçoise. And finally seeing a coworker's lovely plate of carefully combined tofu and bright-colored vegetables.

Today's will be leftover wild rice with herbs, greens, and herbed chicken.

And my iced tea of the day: Zhena's Gypsy Tea—Pom and Petals (decaf green with pomegranate and rose petals).


image: Grape Tomatoes, Zeetz Jones

Values

After some thought, but not surprisingly, my five most important values out of fifty turn out to be, in alphabetical order:

Autonomy (places importance on freedom, independence, and individual discretion)
Creativity (placing importance on imagination, inspiration, and inventiveness)
Education (placing importance on learning and education)
Friendship (strong ties with family, friends, co-workers, or members of a certain community)
Pleasure (enjoyment, delights, satisfaction, or fulfillment)

The next five, also alphabetical, and given up reluctantly when having to reduce down to the final group, are Competence (ability to solve problems, demonstrates mastery), Fairness (placing importance on justice, decency, and equality), Health (placing importance on physical and emotional well-being), Privacy (the need for solitude or separateness), and Recognition (acknowledgment and/or validation).

An interesting self-assessment. I was sad about weeding things out like Spirituality, and Order—but clearly had to exclude Decisiveness from the very beginning!


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Hexham Abbey

Bounty

I’ve got watercress, chervil, and mint to go into my wild rice salad for tomorrow’s picnic, to be flavored with a garlicky Dijon and lemon vinaigrette. And for the fresh fig tart—some tangled thyme, bacon, onions to carmelize, and goat cheese.

I must run to the farmers market now for pimientos de Padron, a wicked orange-zest scone, and more plums for our favorite plum pistachio salad with mixed greens. Maybe some heirloom tomatoes and sausage for pasta sauce. No more olallieberry jam this week; it’s too addictive (and there's just a dab left from before).

I love this time of year when the weather behaves, the light slowly turning gold.

image: Cooked Wild Rice, ElinorD

Thought for the Day

If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.

(Anatole France)


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Steps, Scarborough Castle

Birthday Wishes

Happy birthday to my Father, who would have been ninety this September 4.  My Mother, in Santa Fe, will drink a martini for him—Tanqueray, straight up with an olive, very dry; and since I never inherited a taste for gin, I'll mark the day with a passage from his war novel (translated into Swedish and Italian).  He would have been happy that the Iraq conflict has officially ended, all this time later, though saddened that it started in the first place.

"Well, what I was getting at is how much gardening always amazes me. For example, you dig up glads in the fall, and you'd think that alone would ruin the poor things. But you don't stop there. You knock off all the dirt, whack off the stem, break apart twins, tear off new shoots—in other words disrupt everything the plant has done during the summer. I may be a lousy gardener, but that's the way I do it. Then I toss the bulb in a basket. They're really corms, but let's call them bulbs, the little nubbin that's left. You'd think they'd never grow again, sitting five or six months away from all moisture and light and everything conducive to life. But stick them back in the ground next spring and they actually grow. Each one becomes a beautiful plant, true to type, with fine big leaves and blossoms."
"Yessir."
"I don't want to be stuffy and labor the point, but it seems to me mankind is like that. You boys were uprooted, carted off to impossible places for long months—years in your case—with nothing conducive to growth and life. It's a wonder any of you survived, apart from death in battle itself. Yet the vital nubbin is there. Roots will go down as soon as you're stuck back in the right place."
"I suppose so, sir."
"Don't ever doubt it, Andy. I may be as poor a minister as I am a gardener, but in my opinion man is hardier than a gladiola bulb. He doesn't have to be coddled, although it's nice. He doesn't have to be preached at, although sometimes it helps. If his little nubbin of life gets good earth, sun, and fresh water—bingo, you've got roots taking hold, leaves forming, buds coming. Of course not all bulbs grow. Some rot, some are crowded out, worms get others. But a good bulb in good soil usually thrives, no matter how long its winter away from the sun."
"Yessir," Willy said. The chaplain winked at him.

Boyd Cochrell, The Barren Beaches of Hell

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Lake Como Flowers

September Occupations

Would I want to be a gardener this time of year, my rakes poking—dare I say rakishly?—out of the back of my old turquoise pick-up truck, spending the day in hilly orchards out back of some fancy mansion off Arastradero, Fremont, one of those streets with the name of a Spanish explorer or a native tree, coaxing from dry summer's-end grasses ripe fallen fruit?

Or the man who sells rotisserie chickens at Sunday's farmers market, with savory chicken juices dripping down onto the bed of potatoes roasting and browning too, his shears neatly cutting quarters and halves, for supper, early lunch, crisp skin slathered with herbs?

Or maybe the vice-chancellor of some far northern university, sitting in my wood-panelled study with its tiny ancient panes of glass, dipping a ginger biscuit in my morning Earl Grey tea, readying mentally for the new students to come?

Or like my father, back in Yellowstone, watching for fires from a lonely lookout, high above the expansive forests of evergreen, with lots of time alone to write of human foibles on a Smith-Corona with a broken letter "r"?

Or currying the feathered stockings of a Clydesdale in a Pennsylvania barn, picking stones calmly out of one heavy hoof?


image: Paul Gauguin, The Harvest, or Man Picking Fruit from a Tree, Hermitage Museum

Possible Cures for the Doldrums

* Il Fornaio's Festa Siciliana
* a new tablecloth from Provence in oranges and greens
* the mini-massage roller sold at the National Trust shops in England—lavender and sweet orange essential oils blended with coconut, sweet almond, apricot kernel, jojoba, and wheatgerm oils
* a daily dose of Coupa Café's decaf Flamingo Chai, sweetened with just vanilla
* a romp with a Black Lab
* reminiscing about favorite sights on the North Sea, like these donkeys


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Donkeys on Beach, Scarborough

embers

September—month of the seventh embers? Month of raking over the coals . . . finding all those things undone back from the hopeful early months, the energetic months, the months when promises were made and ambitious projects begun. And in the meantime books and papers have piled higher, weeds have grown tall again, the windows gotten no cleaner, the sunflowers out front—once brave and bright—now bent from the weight of their heads and netted tightly against the squirrels.

I must devise some kind of cure against this negative thinking.


image: Sunflowers_Sonnenblumen 1sep2003, Hedwig Storch