Hello Stoneham voters! The daffodils are up, the sun is shining, and it’s time to go to Town Hall and elect our representatives for another year! I’ve been impressed at the transformation of the information available to voters in the 16 years since I first gazed in dismay at a local ballot with absolutely no idea who the candidates were or what they stood for. So much more is now available, mostly through the hard work of our local civil servants. But for those of you who still text me asking how I’m planning on voting, here’s the breakdown!
First some resources:
Election Tuesday April 2nd, 2024 7AM-8PM at Town Hall Sample Ballot Candidate Statements Candidate forum
I also read the candidate statements in the Stoneham Independent.
Now for my picks:
YES: Raymie Parker has been serving Stoneham for several years. It’s difficult, time consuming and thankless work that probably pays way less per hour than snow shoveling for the DPW. She’s always been thoughtful, prepared, present, hard working, honest – really everything you would ask for in a decision maker for the town. I appreciate that she continues to innovate and is very available to hear perspectives and concerns.
David Pignone is also a candidate for re-election. I have seen less of his work up front than I have Raymie’s, but his reputation and service in the community is deep, and with his work in the schools he has a front row seat in some of the big challenges facing our structures.
NO:
Stephen Ternullo (no publicly available site). I drive past his house regularly, and while I’m glad he recently took down the “F**K BIDEN” signs (note that his did not include asterisks) he still has up several similar signs using language I was not allowed to use growing up. His tag line on the yard signs is “I will be your voice” but I don’t have a potty mouth so I’m not sure that’s true. I do not want a town government that is uncivil, and the face he puts forward to his community is not one that speaks to collaboration or with whom I think it would be easy to work.
Robert Verner (no publicly available site). For this candidate, I rely on the information in the candidate statements. Our community will be opening a brand new high school in the fall, and a lot of his statements were around starving that school of resources – which is a bit like buying a new car and then not driving it because you don’t want to spend gas money. Cutting resources was pretty much the only thing he talked about, which actually seems wasteful to me given how much we’ve already invested.
I would love to be able to offer guidance on the Constable race, but I have no insights there. So if anyone has any thoughts, please drop a comment! See you at the ballot box on Tuesday!
What if you could possess a color? Own it, understand it, live with it through the moods and vagaries of light and paper? It’s been about three and a half years I’ve been painting with watercolors. The very first time I tried, the book instructed me to mix the blues and yellows in proportion. I squeezed out from a tube blue and yellow in the approximate proportions. It took me the better part of two tubes before I gave up and called it good enough. It seemed like a pity to throw away the rest, but what could you do?
Yeah, for those who don’t know like me? You can “resurrect” watercolor indefinitely by adding um, water. And when they recommend you mix it, they’re talking about the released watery watercolor you would paint with. A tiny dab of watercolor in a palette can last you months and many paintings.
Good thing it was the cheap student watercolors.
When I loaded up my palette yesterday, with a number of new colors, the watercolors were not the cheap ones. I try to tell myself that the hobby is inexpensive by comparison to, say, golf. Or bass fishing. But the contents of my paintbox are truly a treasure. Loading a palette is a labor of love – equal parts tedious and delightful. My left hand got sore from the threaded tops of the tubes, stuck on by paint. There was the planning and the labeling and the decision making … can I live without Bordeaux? Which yellows will I want for the desert? But the best part of all is the swatching, where you dip a tip of your brush into the thick virgin paint and then release it with water onto the paper. Will it be creamy? Transparent? Will it granulate? Will the color of the paint and the color of the watered paint be the same or wildly different? Will the water reveal one pure color, or a prism of many? And most critically – did you guess right about the variety and value and hue in your ordering of the swatch?
The desert palette
In light, I love all colors. Perhaps green most, since it’s the garment of my beloved nature in the places I have lived. But in paint, my heart belongs to indigo. Students of history know how important indigo was to the commerce of the colonized Caribbean. Blue pigment was always a problem in the history of paints. There’s the fantastically expensive lapis lazuli pigments. There’s the ecology destroying but fugitive woad of the Picts. Blues are hard to find. And indigo is not just blue, it’s exceptional. The indigo paint is so creamy and consistent, versatile, kind, assertive, trustworthy. When I have indigo on my brush, I have no fear. If I were limited to one paint for the rest of my life, it would be indigo. I remember the first time I tried to use Cerulean blue. It’s a pretty blue – like a robin egg or a spring sky. But it came across my page chalky, inconsistent. I thought it must be a defective batch but no. Granulating is the technical term. A wash with it is like rolling the dice on paint coverage. Per instructions, I loaded Cerulean into my palette, but we will never be on dear terms, Cerulean and me.
A thousand faces of indigo. All indigo, all the time. If you’ve ever seen me paint a night sky, it was almost certainly indigo.
The last year or two I’ve been reading my way through the histories of pigments and paints. My palette covers a hundred thousand years. I have the yellow ochre that neolithic priests painted in flickering firelight on deep cavern walls in the airless belly of the earth. I have the Venetian Red that colored so many lions and trousers and buildings in medieval and renaissance paintings. I do NOT have mummy brown, alas, since we no longer find the best use of mummies to be loading them onto our paint brushes (or burning them as fuel for locomotives). But I also have a whole palette of the unspellable quinacridones: gold, coral, magenta, rose, red, violet. Those paints “break” in this astonishing way where the thick paint and the watered paint are entirely different colors. The poisonous arsenic has been removed from the greens, and replaced with the perylene and the pthalos. What color does not come in cadmium? All these minerals and chemicals and discoveries (the history of mauve is a real page-turner – Wikipedia doesn’t do it justice) come with their own characteristics and traits – the personalities of the paint. Some of my paints I hardly ever use (Potters Pink, Terra Verte) but love for their connection to the earth and artists before me.
I have put together a number of palettes in my short history of painting: for a particular book, for a particular season, as I learn which ones I love and those with whom I will maintain a polite distance. But this palette has an entirely different slant than my White Mountain or Northwest art. I need the yellows, the purples, the red earths, the subdued depth of the desert greens to capture Arizona.
I can hear the confusion now … Arizona? Do you not live in New England in January (which, btw, is mostly a hundred variations on blue and blacks palette wise). Well. Here’s how it is. I’m switching functions at work from one to another, and it was taking a while and I didn’t have all that much to do while we made the switch. And it was a quiet week on the ol’ calendar. And last weekend I started looking at watercolor retreats I might be able to do this winter/spring, since with graduation etc. we are not likely to travel as much as a family this year. And the best one that didn’t conflict with anything was … this week. I feel wildly impulsive and out of character! Who flies to Arizona at the last minute? Surely this is irresponsible of me. But yet, here I am.
Look! Proof! Definitely Arizona.
I’ve never been to Arizona (well, I may have driven through when I was 13 but that really doesn’t count). I’ve never seen a saguaro. I’ve spent far too little time in the desert of any ilk. I do not object to 80 degree instead of 18 degree weather. But in two hours I’ll land in Phoenix and wend my way to Tucson, for this workshop. I brought my hiking shoes (and yes, extra water bottles) in the hopes of hitting Saguaro National Park on the way. I have no idea what to expect: I haven’t done something like this before.
But that’s really more than half the point. In these middle chapters of life, we face the choice on whether to invest and focus on continuing to grow and change and learn new things – or whether to hone our existing expertise and enjoy the mastery we have worked for our entire lives. Of course, it’s a nuanced choice: we all have to figure out how to use the new way to watch movies, and every skill we once had comes on the journey with us. I find myself hungry for curiosity, and enthralled by the worlds out there I never knew existed. Who knew that paints had such personality and history? A child of the magenta/cyan/yellow screens would never guess such a truth. What other wonders await out there, just asking for me to ask the right set of questions to unlock them? I’m itching to find out. And see a few new sights in the process.
Edited to add:
I wrote that on the plane. Then I got here, spent an annoying amount of time in the airport and drove down I10 to Tucson feeling depressed at the nature of the billboards (casinos and personal injury lawyers mostly). But Saguaro National Park made up for all of it. The watercolors start tomorrow!
Golden hour among the cactusCan you make out the sundog here? (Parhelion for the pedantic.)If I told you that the sunset was far more vivid than the camera saw, you’d call me a liar.
Many people talk about how amazing their culinary heritage is. Nana made the best home made pasta. Or no one makes dumplings like my great-aunt. Or childhood memories are full of groaning tables full of latkes and love. If your childhood memories of food include things like “colors” or “vegetables” or “texture” – well, bully for you. ‘Cause I’m of Scottish heritage, and the one dish that always made an appearance when the Johnstone Clan got together was corned beef hash.
The recipe for corned beef hash is as follows:
– Half a pound of bacon
– Two onions
– Two cans of corned beef (the ones you open with a “key”)
– 5 lbs of russet potatoes (boil the hell out of these first in their skins)
– 2 to 3 cups water
– 1 tablespoon garlic salt
In a large dutch oven, cook the bacon. Add the onions. Chop up the corned beef (not slicing any fingers on the weird pot things that exist in no other food type than potted meats). Add the water, and then pull the skins off the potatoes (burning fingers in the process optional) and chop into large cubes. Add to pot with garlic salt, and then cook for a long time. Maybe a week.
Serve with (I am NOT kidding) store bought Italian bread and large curd cottage cheese. Proceed to die of scurvy. There is no part of this meal that has any color whatsoever (unless you put jam on the bread). It is also – and I am still not kidding – delicious. Even better as leftovers the next day. And hey, um, high in protein?
I loathed corned beef hash when I was a young girl, but I can hardly remember a family gathering where it wasn’t served. (I do not remember any of the other meals that may or may not have happened. I’m sure there was turkey and burgers etc. etc. but the corned beef hash is burned into my memory.) My grandmother became paralyzed when I was in high school, and following that my mother (who married into the Scottishness) took on the mantle of making the dish. Apparently, remembering the garlic salt was a challenge, and my grandmother never failed to point this out to my mother. I always think of her when I add the garlic salt.
Burns Night is just around the corner. The Scots may be somewhat culinarily deficient, but make up for it with their poetry and song and the power of their booze. I’ll put on some bagpipe music (also endemic in my childhood, and I also actually like it), and contemplate Rabbie and his works, and miss my grandparents. And heck, maybe I’ll have some leftover delicious corned beef hash for lunch.
Back when I was a girl, it meant something to be a girl. Namely, that you couldn’t join the Boy Scouts under any circumstance, you took Home Economics instead of shop, and that your acceptable instruments in band were flute, clarinet and saxophone (sax only for the rebellious). I was underwhelmed by this definition of girl, and picked up trumpet with a cussed determination which served me in good stead. I opted to take shop instead of home ec, making me the lone girl in a class of 26 boys (I am old, but not older than Title 9). Alas, I never cracked the Boy Scouts. But I came from a family for whom Scouting was a deep part of our identity. My grandparents ran a Scout camp in Washington State. My father and his three brothers (what can I say – my grandma also liked boy stuff better than girl stuff) were all Eagle Scouts. My godfather was such a foundational member of the Order of the Arrow that his license plate was “BSA OA”. And my undimmed passion for nature and survival and camping meant that I was as close to a Boy Scout as I could get. I was even given a Boy Scout axe when I was 13. This was less exciting than it could be because I was expected to USE said axe to help split the several cords of woods my family used to heat our house of a winter. But still, there was a deep satisfaction in the boy-sized blue-painted single-bitted axe with the gold embossing.
So my adventures into trumpet involved bugle calls very early on. Reveille is fun to play, especially when you’re the first one up and the grownups permit you to be deeply irritating. Charge is also fun. Many bugle calls are more or less picked up by ear. But I had an ancient leather-bound manual, dramatically stained, that I think may have belonged to some ancestor of mine – a great grandfather of some ilk. As I recall, it was a 1918 Army Manual (although searches for it online claim that no such thing exists, so who knows – maybe this one?). And it had a whole section of bugle calls. Not just the three or four we all know, but mess and fix bayonets and a whole host of others. But of course most iconic was taps. Twenty four notes that look very complicated when written, with dots and emphases and fermatas. In the deep romanticism of my youth I played it mournfully in the dark of the cold church where I usually practiced. (My father also required me to learn Last Post, which I managed by dint of a battered third trumpet booklet bought in a used book store in Edmonton Canada. Ah, the days before the internet were hard folks. I was never quite confident whether that last note was meant to be unresolved or whether it was a chord and I was playing the third trumpet part.)
In high school, I contracted with the local funeral homes to play taps for veterans funerals – which only happened a few times. Memorably I played for several of my classmates as they met grievously early ends. I’ve played for the beloved veterans and relatives in my own family who have died: my grandfathers, my father-in-law, my godfather. It’s hard to play through your own grief, but the 24 notes are so familiar and almost instinctive that I have never yet failed.
You get a little bored waiting for the funeral cortege
For a long time, I volunteered with an organization that provides live buglers for veteran funerals. The color guards almost never have a live bugler anymore. (They have an MP3 player that looks like a bugle, which horrifies my heart for some reasons. In that role, I attended dozens of internments. It is a fascinating thing, to be part of the funeral apparatus. The time at the graveside is always approximate, and you end up waiting with the gravediggers and the color guards. The gravediggers were fascinating, with dirty boots, doing a job they did every single day. Some of them spoke about the inhabitants in the graves as you would about friends. The color guards were a real mixed bag. The Marines were always so buttoned down and proud (and uptight) and rarely spoke much to me. The Coast Guard usually was quite chatty. My favorite was the Navy because they were covered by the crew of the USS Constitution in their antique uniforms. You could almost tell which branch of the service by what vehicle they drove in. (Hint: Marines drive truck. Coast Guard drive sedans.) I played in funerals from an active duty death where I was carefully vetted and the brass were lined up in gleaming rows in the snow in Lindenwood to modest internments with just a few folks. I watched new color guards practice the folding over and over before the family arrived (and I have seen funerals where they had to fold the flag more than once). I’ve seen Catholic internments aplenty where the priest spoke the words without hearing them. I was privileged to join the family for a Chinese American veteran at Mt. Auburn, which was a very distinct funeral experience. Everyone turned their backs as the coffin was winched down, and they insisted I leave with a red envelope with $20 to avoid bad luck. I never accept payment for playing taps, but I kept that one. I learned to park where I wouldn’t be blocked in, to stand in a place where I could be seen but not blast the mourners, and exactly what invisible signal meant it was my turn. Almost without fail, a family that has held it together up to that point begin their weeping when I began my playing. It was an honor and a privilege and I miss it and I should really try to find a way to perform that service again.
This all comes to mind because I was recently enticed to join in Stoneham’s “Field of Honor” for the daily playing of taps at 5 pm, and I got to play today. (Full story here: look ma, I’m on TV!) I got to speak to some of the veterans afterwards, and it reminded me of how much does still unite us. We can come together and consider the flags that mark those who have made sacrifices: of time, of comfort, or the ultimate sacrifice of their lives for the common good. On this day, the eve of daylight savings, when the darkness seems to leap ahead and stifle the sun, we can remember that there have been dark times before. We all cry when taps is played. But the darkness will not last forever. The dawn will come soon.
Something like 25 years ago, I went skiing for the first, last and only time. I came down the very first slope I attempted on a sled, and didn’t walk without a limp for 9 months. But in the vast wisdom of a teenager who really didn’t understand how insurance worked other than it could go horribly wrong, never got it checked out.
About 12 years ago, I jumped off a small wall, and something went horribly, terribly wrong in my knee. Having mastered the art of insurance, I got an xray which showing nothing wrong and did a summer of PT which fixed nothing. I finally got an MRI which showed that I had no trace of an ACL left, two tears in my meniscus, two cysts, and a bone bruise. I went under the knife for the first time and emerged with a cadaver ACL, a lot less meniscal tissue and a script for PT.
In that dozen years, I have tried to keep my body strong and active, knowing that considerable residual damage lingered in my left knee. I’ve hiked 40 of the 48 4000 foot mountains in New Hampshire. I’ve run 5ks in scenic local paths to stave off weight and stay in shape for the summits. But I’ve always known that there would be a price to pay for all damage I’d accrued to that knee.
Last summer, we did a fun (and cold) two day backpack trip across the Carters. The descent was long and hard and I was wearing a heavy pack, and I could feel my knee go numb under the shock of miles of hard descent.
Last winter, I went for a run and my knee got swollen afterwards. I waited a week or two and went for another run, and my knee blew up again. Having learned from the last time, I immediately went to the doctor and demanded a full set of images of hard and soft tissue.
The knee bone is connected to the shin bone
We all knew that there was stuff wrong with my knee, and the images showed there was stuff wrong with my knee. The surgeon who had done the surgery lo those many years before recommended I get a Peloton. So I rented one (which is a thing, by the way) and worked on rebuilding strength and fitness and finding I secretly enjoyed Cody Rigsby. And the swelling went down, and the strength built up and I started edging my way back onto the mountains after a winter sidelined. I got a few good hikes in: Morgan/Percival. Welch-Dickey. Waumbek. There were also a good number of cancellations with the double whammy of the rainiest summer ever and a knee which just wouldn’t quite be reliable. We cancelled the Bond Traverse on Juneteenth when the temperatures looked dangerous with wet weather.
If you look at the knees here you can already see severe swelling
In July, we had a few weeks before our planned Katahdin Knife Edge three day camping trip. And we needed to know if the knee was up for it. So we headed up Madison by Airline Way. Several thousand feet of elevation, bruising terrain and a nice mile long scramble up from the hut. I made it up, although looking at pictures my knee was ballooning well before I summited. And on the way down, I slowed to a crawl – a mile an hour – and gritted my way down, wincing with every hard landing. When I got to the parking lot, my left knee was a vast swollen moon of pain.
One of these things is not like the other
It took three months for the swelling to fully subside. The Katahdin trip fell prey to the dual threats of not being able to walk and also hyperthermic rain. It has been a consolation that the wet summer has meant I’ve missed fewer opportunities than I might have otherwise. But tomorrow will be 80 degrees on a Saturday and I cannot cancel my plans and go grab Chocorua or make an attempt at the Bond Traverse under a full harvest moon. I limp when I rise, and my knee has just now been able to be crossed again with a full range of motion.
Fine, I’ll also add in kayaking.
I’m too young for a knee replacement. There’s no obvious surgery to do next. My doctor, when I saw him again, recommended getting a new hobby. “Have you thought about kayaking?” I turned 45 this year. That means that if I have as much ahead of me as behind, I’d live to an honorable 90 years old. It’s both old enough to have accrued permanent damage, and too young to accept that damage will forever limit me. But I can’t imagine four more decades with no more summits. No more times gazing across at a mountain range with the dawning realization that the peak over yonder is where you were planning on going this afternoon. I cannot relinquish the quiet of the trail down, when mind and body are exhausted and friendship is quiet in the glinting late afternoon light. Nor can I pass by the vistas that are only attained by strength, determination and the persistence of the body. I’ve loved hiking since I was a wee sprite, imagining myself a Bilbo crossing the Misty Mountains. Since I remember I’ve turned my eyes to the mountains, from whence comes my help.
When I was reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time, breathless in disbelief of the glory of it, I was also the nuisance of my neighborhood. I decided once to be entrepreneurial by selling hand-drawn pictures door to door – which earned me a remarkable number of ribbons candies and long conversations with lonely old folks in quiet houses with lace curtains and antimacassars. After the lecture my parents read me stopped ringing in my ears, I had a favorite of these new friends. Ernie. He was a few houses down the street, in a three story house on a tree-lined quiet street in a small, rural agrarian town. In the year or so I knew him, he never rose from his recliner. But he had an encyclopedic knowledge of every crook and drawer of every floor of his beautiful and packed house and would send me on quests to the crammed third floor (which in retrospect showed a feminine decorating hand that no longer had a matching recliner), or to the manly shop in the basement where odd devices and “tiger eye stones” were stored. I was 8 at the time. I have long since wondered about Ernie. My vague primary-colored memories of him were mostly wrapped up in the glorious book he had of pop-up elves or the tiger-eye stone he gave me (“I have been carrying one for 70 years and never saw a single tiger since I started carrying it”). But looking back, he was a man who had lived a rich and interesting life – almost certainly a combat veteran and a world traveler, as well as possibly an accomplished engineer. He knew many places, but visited them now only in his mind’s eye, and through the sun-drenched legs of curious young girls who could still venture to the mysterious lands of the second floor – wondering if some wardrobe there might transport them to another world.
I know it is the way of some things that only the fortunate get to be Ernie in his recliner with good-hearted but mischievous young visitors. How many friends and loved ones did he lose before he lost his legs? But I also think about the last adventure. The last mountain climbed. The last swim. The last road trip. The last time you visit your own attic. The contraction of the world to the recliner, the remote, the phone.
You might say that 45 is too young for such thoughts, but few of us know when our last time comes. What I do know is that I am NOT READY to have hiked my last peaks. I would like another 30 years, please, of watching the clouds break like waves on the shores of the Whites, tearing themselves apart on Franconia Ridge.
PT during the middle of the day is one way to feel young and fit
So now what? Do I hike twice a year, and limp for four months between? Do I take up kayaking with extreme prejudice? I got a second opinion, and now have a PT who has ALSO hiked the 48 4ks and can advise me with great precision “Yeah, so we start with Monadnock and we work our way UP to the Bond Traverse”. There’s hope that with very specific strengthening I can work around the damage that exists. And maybe compression braces, anti-inflammatories, ice and poles. Keep my strength up with the Peloton. Let the inflammation fall to nothing. Maybe I can make it work. Or maybe a scoping of the knee can clear out junk that’s getting caught in the joint and leading to swelling. My choices after that get grimmer.
I think every generation is shocked to discover ourselves aging. I look at the glorious strength and beauty of the children I have brought into this world – and how poorly they take care of that glory and how little they appreciate their resilience. Youth is wasted on the young – as it was on me.
But when I next stand on a windy summit, eyes turned hungrily to horizons that have welcomed generations and will intrigue generations yet to come, I will be grateful for another chance.
It’s been a quiet and calm end to the summer. A lot of the things that keep us busy are in abeyance or not happening. I’m nursing my knee, so no hiking. Everyone’s back from school, camp, Camp Gramp, whatever the summer travels are. Somehow the last few weeks there’s been time to lounge in the hammock and read, or play video games under the labile blue skies. It’s easy to feel like this is just how things are now – easy. Relaxed. Calm.
But then when we sat down as a family to review the schedule for the coming week, panic set in. The kids are starting school on Wednesday. Soccer has already started and it’s like EVERY DAY and the practice schedule seems to only be communicated via screen shots of someone’s calendar sent on Snapchat. (I am not kidding. I wish I were.) And school starts on Wednesday. The rising Freshman has an academic load that looks like it’s going to hit him like a freight train – before we add in the 2 hours a day of soccer. The rising Senior is balancing school with driving lessons and drama (the on stage type, not the other type).
And then it turns out that the trip that my husband has been planning for “Fall” is suddenly “Thursday”. I’m deeply unprepared to run this household for an extended period of time without him. It’s hard enough with two of us! I’m starting to wonder if the next time I’ll take a deep breath will be early November. Hello fall – you’re welcome here. Let’s buckle up, kiddos.
As I emerge blinking into the middle stage of my life, firmly ensconced in children, career and suburban householding, I find myself increasingly aware of the oversized role “Naya Nuki: Girl Who Ran” by Ken Thomasma (see prior post) has played in my moral, educational and skills development.
Since I can remember, I have been fascinated by the question of “can I eat that?”. Oh, the wild independence of living off the land! Naya Nuki was followed in turn by all the greats of survivalist literature in my pantheon of imagination. Of COURSE there was “My Side of the Mountain” with the acorn pancakes and the algae. I mean, which of us didn’t want to run away from our families and support ourselves living in the hollow of an ancient tree with our forest friends? I also read “Robinson Crusoe”, obviously, and liked it well enough. But I read “Swiss Family Robinson” until the cover fell off (not realizing that it was closer to the fantasy of Tolkien than any historical account). How easy it was for the knowledgeable and hardworking to look to the land for all one needed! And lest you think that I only read white-savior-survival books, “Island of the Blue Dolphins” and “Julie of the Wolves” were also well-worn on my shelves. Heck, even in Tolkien Aragorn saves the day by finding kingsfoil by scent in the dark after the Nazgul attack on Weathertop, and Sam finds herbs to spice the survival meals he and Frodo subsist upon up to the gates of Mordor itself.
It was clear to me that in order to be the self-reliant, capable person I wanted to be – to be ready for anything from ringwraiths to shipwrecks to poverty – I would need to be able to forage competantly.
I even tried to take ethnobotany – a 300 level course – in college in order to accomplish this task. (It was pointed out to me that given that I hadn’t taken ANY botany classes this was probably not going to work. Alas. And also it didn’t teach foraging, so pthfft.)
Then I started a job, and lived in the city (compared to where I grew up), and had kids and you know. Somehow I’ve never been shipwrecked, lost in the woods, or on the run from orcs. But I’ve never lost my fascination with this idea of the virtue of knowing what it was you were looking at – and whether you could eat it.
For many years now I’ve had a farm share. It’s taught me a lot about the background skills of foraging. For example: spring greens. How to not by hungry by eating them. (Answer: not gonna happen. Please add cheese/eggs/beans/avocados etc.) It has also helped me understand the spikiness of foods in temperate climates. There are the hungry times, and the times where you can’t possibly eat it fast enough to prevent it from rotting. Foraging is all well and good when you’re on the run from your Blackfoot captors, but you need to also preserve foods if you have any intention of eating in February. And spoiler alert: most of the ways I know how to preserve especially fruits involve significant quantities of white sugar – an element likely to be in short supply in a shipwreck.
But there are pleasures that come with knowing your local flora beyond the practicality of eating it. Sure, I nibbled on a beach plum as I walked the Greenway Monday. (It was bitter still – needed to leave it longer.) But to look and not just see a wall of green but individual plants with their own personalities and uses. That particular quarter mile of Greenway has the easy ones: dandelion, crabapple, knotweed. It also has wild grape, the beach plum, staghorn sumac, chicory, milkweed, wild rose and many other plants crowding to our attention on overgrown verges – some edible, some not, so many invasive. I don’t usually eat them (except the crabapple when it bears), but I do enjoy saying hi to them. And I always VOW that NEXT year I’m going to try sumac lemonade.
The plot of land on which I live is devastatingly small – a tiny tenth of an acre mostly taken up by house and cars. But there are a few corners on which I may place a plant or two. And each of those plants is as attended to and beloved – my gaze falling upon them many times a day.
As avid readers know, I originally planted a Damson Plum, under the influence of yet another book (“Miss Buncle’s Book” by DE Stevenson). It was felled by disease before it ever bore a crop, although it was beautiful and gave glorious shade. But watching a British fruit felled by American disease (ah, how the tables turn!) I vowed to plant only natives in this small patch of Massachusetts I call home. Well, except for lilacs which are the “Pocahontas” version so clearly a North American native*. But I wanted these plants to be edible, in case of future food scarcity in which we would clearly live or die by whether my .01 of an acre bore food or not. I’ve discussed the paw paw investment I’ve made (only two of the original 4 pawpaws I planted yet survive – harassed by human intervention but those two are thriving and I’m hoping for flowers as early as next year). But in the corner of the yard, where I might plant a hydrangea or rose bush, I planted an aronia bush.
The varietal I planted is “Autumn Magic” – bolstering the bright autumnal scene of the back yard, with the invasive Norway maples looking all local in their coloring. Not chokecherry, mind, but chokeberry. I was searching for a North American native fruit I could turn to jam, jelly and sauce but couldn’t buy in a grocery store. This is a much easier task than you might think – so few of the delicious plants available are suitable to mass market production.
Many faces of aronia
With the example of the plum before me, I assumed it would be years (or never) before my Aronia bore any fruit. I didn’t get too excited when it laid out a glorious spread of blossoms: I’d seen that play before. I was pleased when flower turned to green fruit, but I thought that it was unlikely to be my own harvest. The nativeness in the plant was evident by the absolute deliciousness evidenced by the rabbits. The poor shrub, fast growing as it was, was of the utmost appeal to the coneys that invaded New England this year. No faster did a shoot appear than it was cut down by sharp tooth to feed the rapacious bunnies of the back yard. I clad it first in a plastic bottle, now in a vinyl sheath in an attempt to allow it to grow enough to survive the onslaught. And to my great surprise, the birds are far less interested than the rabbits in this ripe and appealing fruit.
And I’ve been rewarded to my great surprise with effulgent, ripe berries. I tasted one – tart on my tongue in the August heat. Adam muddled and decorated with them for a gin bramble. I ordered “The Forager’s Pantry” which features Aronia on the main cover, to extend my set of books and recipes for ingredients you can’t buy at Stop and Shop. The remainder of the unharvested berries is far too few for any serious purpose: pie or sauce or jam. But it gives me hope that my tiny back yard, with its stance on native plants, might yet provide a harvest of treats that are new to me, and old to this continent and those who have lived here so long.
One of my Facebook friends posted her Goodreads account with the lure that she actually posts updates and reads the updates of others, with the poignant comment “I’d like it if more of my social news were about reading”. In an era where all of us are thinking about how to game the algorithms to see content that makes our lives better, not worse (which is a great time to note that Facebook absolutely will do everything in its power to hide my blog posts – subscribe at http://mytruantpen.com), this plea struck me.
I’m spending a week in a cabin in the woods with my husband. We have to work during the day, but there are no chores (or even TV here), so I packed an unreasonable amount of books and art supplies in case my mental curiosity was piqued. (Last time I did this, I also brought a number of reference books for the book that I would totally write if I had the time. And by “the time” I mean “locked in solitary confinement for several months or that one time I knocked out 10k words in a weekend”. As opposed to the book I actually did write and is halfway between a novella and a novel and I can’t bring myself to edit – access to the file upon request. It involves local history and werewolves, and I really need to go about changing some of the names.)
ANYWAY, my point is that this is a stack of books I brought to a cabin in the woods without the intention to show off. So it’s very authentic. Except for the bit where it represents who I wish I was to myself, as opposed to whom I am (which is a person who reads a LOT of comic books before bed, and trashy novels in the bathtub).
My only regret, such as it is, being that I JUST finished one of those gnarly and deeply intellectual books of a level of academic interest and vocabulary that one leaves conspicuously on the coffee table for years praying someone will ask if you’ve read it so that you can affirm “Yes, it was excellent. Let me tell you about the Appalachian Orogeny.” According to the image search I just did (I found it unlikely I had not managed to SOMEHOW work it into the social media record that I was in fact reading such a weighty tome), I have been reading it since January. The fact I finished might be a miracle on the order of the weeping statue of Akita.
Is it even legal to read a book like this and not let people know?
But How the Mountains of North America Grew was actually a GREAT book, if only consumable one chapter a week. When backpacking last year, I had a life-changing encounter with a geologist at the Carter Hut who spent a captivating two hours regaling an enthralled hut about the history of the world leading to his truly novel proposed solution for combatting global warming. I loved his enthusiasm, and was thrown back to a teenage romanticism about the name of the proto continent from the Ordivician upon which my home is built: Avalonia. So while I was making bad decisions in a book store this winter, I came home with this tome of geography with the intent to be able to look at the rocks under my feet with greater understanding. I still can’t tell a schist from a gneiss, but I did find the books strangely reassuring. I actually also learned a bunch of stuff I didn’t know before. Like about how the planets moved in their orbits as they formed. That the earth at some point had rotated north to south (part of why there are tropical fossils in the Arctic). That there’s a single geological corollary to global warming (much slower, but we can learn). That big continents lead to iceball planets and smaller ones to more temperate, or even warm planets. How much hotter and how much colder it’s been. That our planet has had three vast universal continents and will have a fourth and final one before Earth’s heat is spent and we move no longer – and that to-be continent has already been named. That it looks like agriculture staved off an ice age in the Holocene. That the boundaries between eras are geographically specific with a golden spike – and that geologists have just selected the spot for the distinction between the Holocene and Anthropocene. I love learning new things, so it was worth having to look up some of the more confusing vocabulary multiple times, and STILL not having him talk about the gigantic 10,000 foot volcano that exploded in New Hampshire 122m years ago leaving behind its magma chambers (an element in my new book, which is why the omission is so tragic).
ANYWAY. That book isn’t in my current “to read pile” so I will not speak of it here.
What is in my pile? Let’s go bottom to top: A Deep Presence: 13,000 Years of Native American History by Robert Goodby was just added to my collection today in another ill-advised trip to a bookstore. In my defense, it was raining. I’m also really, really interested in the history of the folks who lived in these lands before us. And it’s surprisingly hard to track down anything readable on the topic – never mind having had even the vaguest introduction in formal education. I was answering a QR code on a lamppost in Cambridge about how I learned about indigenous people in school and was contemplating just how profoundly influenced I was by Ken Thomasma visiting my elementary school in 2nd grade. I spent the next five years pretending I was Naya Nuki. But the East Coast folks had 200+ years more erasure than the Shoshone, and it’s much harder to find their stories. I’m pretty pumped about this one.
A Cabin in the Forest by Roxyanne Spanfelner. Completely and totally unrelated to my desire to be Naya Nuki, I’ve decided to feed my fantasy of a cabin in the woods with some books so I can claim to be doing research. Why, just today on a long drive I solved the problem of my husband not wanting to do hot tub maintenance by putting a hot springs on my imaginary property! This is the kind of innovative thinking you get when you read. I have not started this book. I probably should write to the author with the “hot springs instead of hot tub” tip for husbands who don’t want to use their degrees in chemistry.
A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. Fun fact: my parents got my name from a Nevil Shute book called “Crooked Adam”. “A Town Like Alice” is on the list of books I’ve always thought I ought to read, that everyone loves and raves about, and that I have never read. If we’re being honest, I will never read this book. Unless that whole “solitary confinement thing” happens. For the record, that did actually happen to me once and it STILL wasn’t enough to get me to crack the covers on Piers Plowman which will still be unread when the Anthropocene turns into the Cockrochocene.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mendel. This book looks really good. I’m sure I will enjoy it. I will definitely read it BEFORE “A Town Like Alice” and WAY before “Piers Plowman” – but I think it’s been traveling in my to-read pile for a year, and this is likely its last chance before I actually give up on it.
The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker – I read the first book in this series and enjoyed it. I am about halfway through the second book and er… not gripped. The several years between readings have not improved my recall of secondary characters. This has a very mild chance of actually getting read so that I can stop thinking I should finish it.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I’m wanting this to be a bit like Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. I mostly listen to Scalzi on audiobook (which might have something to do with Wil Wheaton as the narrator), but mostly because his plots and characters do not require full attention to consume. This is in the Station Eleven likelihood zone.
The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins. Unusually, I don’t remember why this book entered my collection. I know I put it on an Amazon wishlist, and my husband dutifully bought it for me for Christmas. But why it was on the list? I do not recall. One of my friends just started an MFA in poetry and our back yard fire conversations have been a little hot and heavy on the meaning of poetry lately, so in my packing I thought it would be salubrious if I were to read up on some poetry that had been written in the last two centuries. Salubrious is the kind of word you suddenly know when you have taken up reading poetry for fun. I promise that I’m likely to read at LEAST three poems in this book, none of which will be limericks or start with the line “Roses are Red”.
Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries I’ve always liked cemeteries and living in New England we have some very high quality examples of the art. So I’m always game for another discussion of how embalming is a Civil War artifact. This one actually had a couple interesting moments for me – it’s much more social commentary than I was expecting. But somehow in all my Naya Nuki heroine worship I’d never absorbed that NINETY PERCENT of the people living in North America died when Europeans arrived. Holy cow. It’s staggering to imagine what that does to society, and when paired with an invading force with novel technology. Well. It’s amazing we have as many survivors and surviving stories as we do. Anyway, I’m about halfway through this book. I’ll finish it, but it wouldn’t be my top recommendation on the topic of dead bodies and what we do with them.
When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through. I’m not sure I would have dared buy this one today if I’d realized it was a Norton Anthology. I believe by law those can only be purchased by students taking the class and that you are actually forbidden from reading them cover to cover. But this builds on my theme of desired American understanding, and intent to read poetry that is not iambic pentameter (as much as I adore iambic pentameter). I read the introduction and first chapter on the front porch this afternoon, and really wish they had a map. My knowledge of tribal geography and the current names of tribes… well, let’s say the only reason I know that Diné = Navajo come from having free-based the complete works of Tony Hillerman in my bathtub reading time. (Which I highly recommend, btw.) Anyway, hopefully the book police don’t find out about me reading this one.
I like reading with real paper books best. But I also read on the Kindle (mostly novels that I can read in one or two sittings and by sittings I mean “in the bathtub”). I also listen to audiobooks on my drive. I prefer books I’ve already read or that aren’t too complicated, given my divided attention. I just finished “rereading” the “Rivers of London” series on audiobook (brilliantly narrated, may I add) and am looking for my next commute companion if you have any ideas.
So…. that’s what I’m reading. (Except I’m not reading, instead of reading I’m writing this post, which is deeply ironic if you think about it.) What about you? What are you reading? How much do you read? What do you make sure you always have with you but never read? What will you definitely read if you’re ever put in solitary confinement, but definitely not before? What do you wish you were reading? How do you read? Let me know!
Four years ago, my kids were just getting to a point where the guilt of leaving for a day to go hike a mountain was less than the desire to hike a mountain, and a friend and I scarpered our ways up Osceola East and I pushed past the chimney to the summit of Osceola. I wasn’t aware of it then, but I had just bagged my first two of the 4000 ft mountains on “the list” for the AMC badge for hiking all 48 of the 4000 ft+ mountains in New Hampshire.
I’m doing my best Megan Rapinoe impression
A climb up Mt Waumbek in buggy weather last weekend has me with 8 left to go, and a steely determination NOT to end my quest on Mt. Cabot. (For those who care, I have the whole Bond Traverse: so Bond, Bondcliff, Zealand and West Bond, plus Cabot (ugh), Isolation (ugh), Jefferson and Madison.)
It’s been heavy going lately. I’ve done all the easy and close mountains – the ones where you hike for longer than you drive. This winter I did something to my knee which an orthopedic surgeon and MRI showed to be akin to “getting old” which took me 6 months and a Peloton to come back from. (To quote my surgeon, “Yeah, you’re no longer a runner.”) So I WAS going to knock off Isolation, Waumbek and Cabot at a minimum in the snow but nooooooo. (Isolation is a lot easier in the snow. Go figure.) Then I could day hike the Presidentials and have a glorious Bond Traverse overnight backpacking on Juneteenth. The best laid plans went aft agley, though. The Bond Traverse was still ON, the prep hikes had been done, and the discussion about exactly what summit foods we could make to inspire jealousy in our fellow campers was in full flight when the forecast got grim and grimmer. Look, I have hiked in rain. I have hiked in cold (-17 at the trailhead!). But hiking in rain AND cold is somewhere between dumb and dangerous – and definitely not fun. And theoretically this is a hobby I do for fun. So there was a deeply reluctant cancellation and rescheduling for fall.
We formed a self help society
The entire working/hiking community in New Hampshire has had a deeply frustrating season of it. Every weekend seems to be clocking in rainy, buggy, cold or an amazing mixture of all three. Or the forecast will be “appalling” and the day will be great and we’re left at home gnashing regretful teeth. Or the forecast seems doable, but the bugs “Biblical”. Or everything looks amazing – but it’s Wednesday and we all have two many meetings.
My hiking buddy and I can tell you in brutal detail about every mountain we’ve hiked (and will, as anyone who’s ever locked themselves in with us for the 14 hours of driving and hiking can attest – in fact we cannot be stopped). Every mountain has the litany of remembrance. Hancocks, amazing when you can glissade (aka butt sled) down them! Owl’s Head is underrated, and the best shape we’ve been in! (Only time we’ve ever trail run out after 17 miles wearing a pack – come hike with me to hear the full story!) The time we BOTH brought two summit beers (after a hot and thirsty hike the time before) – and it was snowing so we didn’t want any of them. How many months of the year we’ve been snowed on while hiking! (11). The crazy people we’ve met on the trail! Our not-so-secret desire for AT trail names! On every hike, we remember every other hike, adding in the sun-dappled streams, spectacular vistas, exciting weather, and insufficiently grippy shoes to our tale. (Flume Slide led to the creation of our “high friction” line of clothing.)
Garfield looking into the Pemigewasset wilderness across at Owl’s Head.
Four years seems like a reasonable number to take in order to summit 48 specific mountain peaks, although of course I’ve hiked many more in that time. Not all the mountains I hike count for the list, either for lame rules reasons (looking at you Mt. Hight) or because they aren’t tall enough (like my beloved Chocorua). By this year, I’ll have hiked more of the mountains than I am years old. But here’s hoping my knee and the rest of me holds together long enough to mail in for that great badge of honor, and I’m not stuck at 40!
I’m away for a week between roles in a cabin in New Hampshire. As you may know, big layoffs happened at my company on Friday. I was not laid off. My previous role was extremely vulnerable – the group I left was one of the hardest hit. And I know a ton of people impacted, so I’ve spent this week not in blissful disconnection, but checking in with the person who worked for me last Friday and is now unemployed, trying to figure out who I still work with and who might need me to keep an eye for roles, etc.
I picked this PARTICULAR cabin in the woods because I wanted to hike two four thousand foot mountains (Waumbek and Cabot), and these are a full three hour drive for Boston, which is a brutal one day trip. So I figured I’d knock them off (they’re not too difficult) while I was up here. But I’ve done … something …. to my knee. I think I have a meniscus tear (in my problem knee) which is causing instability and swelling. I’m having trouble with stairs. Did I still consider solo hiking a pair of 4000 foot mountains alone, in winter, with a bum knee? Of course I did. But the weather is also rather iffy, and that was one strike too many. So instead I went and did a super easy, completely flat 4 miles walk along a rail trail. Laaaaaame. The parking lot was snowy, but that was fine – our car was in the shop due to a rear ending that my husband was subject to, so I rented a 4 wheel drive just so trailheads would be no issue. I got in just fine, and did a lovely walk in which I saw no other living creature. It was gloomy and morose and like hiking in an old oil painting. I loved it. I got back to the car, texted my husband I was safe, and headed to the road to go get some dinner in the building gloom.
There’s a spectacular view of the Presidentials there. Right behind the clouds.
Less than a foot from the road, I lost traction, and got stuck. “No problem,” I thought “I’ll throw it into 4 wheel drive.” It didn’t work. I dug out the wheels with my hands. Didn’t work. And every attempt to power my way out I slid a little closer to the 8 foot ditch to my right side, where I would definitely be in trouble if I slid all the way in. A light snowfall was poetically falling against the pines, and I finally conceded my better judgement and called AAA. I told them where I was (thank you GPS!) and they patched me through to the towing company which said they’d be here in an hour. So I waited, increasingly hungry and in need of a bathroom, for an hour. At the appointed time, the dispatcher called me back and drawled. “We’ve gone the whole airport road in Jefferson, and we can’t find you at all.” “I’m at the Pondicherry parking lot, just shy of the Mt. Washington Airport” I replied.
There was a long pause.
“Which state are you in?” she asked. I replied, with growing unease “New Hampshire”. “Awww…. honey, we’re out of North Carolina. I’ll, uh, call AAA for you.”
I sat there in my car, waiting for a phone call (which never came), when a car pulled over – an old silver Ford Taurus by the look of it. “Are you stuck?” said the driver? I assured her I was, and darkly updated her on my predicament. “I’m going to call my boyfriend and he’s got a truck. He’ll get you right out of there.” Now normally I like to do things the proper way, but in this case, I said I’d be delighted if her boyfriend might be of assistance. It took maybe 20 minutes for them to assemble the full posse. The ladies in the car stayed with me the whole time. But two trucks, packed to the gills with young men with nascent beards and overflowing slightly dangerous energy, pulled up. In less than five minutes they had me out of that ditch and back in action. I think they were disappointed they didn’t end up needing the chain or shovels that they’d brought for the fun.
But it was 3 hours after I’d first stopped a foot shy of the road. I attempted to pay them, which was a complicated social dance, and then was on my way, chastened, sobered and deeply irritated that even my very safest possible alternative had still ended up being so complicated. I was also very grateful that only time had been lost: I was fine, the car was fine, it was like it had never happened. So I picked up some heat-and-eat from the grocery store right before it closed, came back to my cabin, and decided what I really needed was some comforting reading (Miss Buncle’s Book was just right) and maybe a new plan for roadside assistance.
Mood: 19th century oil painting with darkened varnish
My Truant Pen 