Solar PowerCertain domestic disasters have fallen upon us. I would moan the question of why we rent our home, but for the knowing that did we own it, we would have entirely different problems that would make us turn the question back to the happy days of rent checks and calls to supers. What remains: bits of our place are damp that should not be. Our hands thrown up: we go out to eat.
We stomp down the streets to the little Italian place which we have shamefully been neglecting. We sit outside, forgetting that the arc of the sun travels so as to pour its might down onto our table should we eat there too early, which we have. I do not mind this, but it makes my companions hot. The sun has other effects.
For the first course, the sun pours in and makes play with the glass of wine at my left hand, casting a bright straw colored shadow from the stem and gentle slash of pure ruby from the wine. These two colors happen to be framed in perfect symmetry by the bread plate when we first notice them. The sun, too, illuminates the anitpasto plate. Things on it glisten in the strong light of the sun, the oils making jewels of almost everything. Come the third course, across from me sits a fish stew, blinking and rippling in the light, wet with seafood.
I do not know why people do not eat outside.
You Would Have Overheard It
- What I leaned from Under The Tuscan Sun today...actually, are you planning on reading that?
- I want to read it, at some point.
- Okay. In the meantime: you don't like figs.
- Sure I do.
- You think you do. But you don't.
- Maybe I don't want to read it?
- I think you probably do, actually. But you still don't like figs.
The Falling SpheresJuliet is teaching me how to lift together lettuce and onions in a large wooden bowl when I absently put an elbow into one of Marco's wine glasses and send it floorward. The wine glass is thin, and well made. We have spent evenings dipping thumbs in the little pool of ruby wine at the bottom of these glasses, gently running them around the rims, making the glasses tremble with pure descant song. This one taps the floor once and turns to shards.
We stare at it.
"Marco is very wealthy," Juliet says. Her voice is shaped in the careless way she tells other people's secrets. I am not surprised. "He has cases of those in the bottom of the study." Neither of us have anything on our feet. I feel the need to flex my toes.
She turns to me, spilling her hair over her shoulder in the strong light from the window. "Do you know the little machines?" She waves her hand at the chaos of the garden. "The machines that are too small to see. The machines that sit in the lawn and keep the grass short, and the bushes smooth." I think of Marco's front garden, immaculate. I think of the drive, free of weed of blemish. The machines are new things, and still quite expensive; I cannot remember what they are called in the stores. "Marco made those. He has a lot of money."
I frown at the back garden, look around at the gentle patina of a kitchen well used. An ant has crawled an and steps daintily over the shards of glass on the floor, tasting the residues of the wine.
"He does not use them in the house," I say. "Or the kitchen garden, or the grounds."
Juliet is watching the ant, too. She nods. "Just the front," she says. "I asked him once about it, and he told me that it is better for us to live the lives we earn." She shrugs. "I will ask him again, maybe."
As we watch, the ant has selected a small shard stained with red and begins to drag it back to the door. I find myself expecting all of the other pieces to move, too, ordering themselves neatly in a small pile and then marching in a shaggy mass in the direction of the waste bin.
Juliet gingerly moves off her stool, testing the floor with her toes. "Be careful," she says, and "look for the dust pan by the sink." She moves off towards the cupboard, looking for the broom.
You Cannot See It, As It Isn't ThereI have discovered within myself another culinary blind spot.
We received a monster helping of basil as part of the haul, and we have learned: before nightfall, turn it to pesto. I did that, in a scattershot mix and taste method, using up all the leaves, using up all the pine nuts from the cabinet, using the good oil and the Montasio for no good reason. After much mixing and tasting, it tasted very good, but hollow. At table, she said, "I'd have put more garlic in it."
This is, thankfully, and easy save.
Number TakenBaking is something we have done for a good while now. For myself, I have come a long way from the days of initial blundering, turning out weeks upon weeks worth of dense, blunt loaves. I was lucky then to have housemates, who would return home for lunch to eat slice after slice under peanut butter, with glass after glass of iced tea. I know a bit more about bread now, and the other evening we pulled together a respectable apple tart, largely from the shoulders of our own experience. It was pretty good; we have gotten better.
There are things we are not yet able to do, though, and I do not know if we will ever be able to do them. Pillowy egg bread that crumples like tissue under any but the sharpest and toothiest of knives, or the uniform, gentle crumb of a loaf of white bread held in an exquisite thinness of chewy, golden crust. Delicate shortbread under a glop of raspberry or apricot jam. Burnt almond tort. The magic of a Black & White cookie. That sort of thing.
For such stuff we turn to a local bakery. They all have different specialties: down a river some sits a place that churns out breads, all shapes, all light and sweet, available warm from the oven most any time of day. Over another river and into a dell is an unassuming French bakery that puts forth crusty, strong loaves that are meant to be tucked under the arm and brought home on a bicycle weighing thirty pounds. Over no river is the Biscotti factory, cranking out handmade, crispy heaven. Ours makes a mean pastry.
We are blessed to have it. In our little chunk of commercial hospitality, the neighborhood bakery seems to be hanging on, hanging on, surviving against the onslaught of the Ultramarket, still making small batches of gold and sweet. We have done well to seek them out when we could, and then return enough to discover for ourselves whatever it is that they did well there. More often than not, knowing that is enough to find reasons to return, again and again.
This Is As Much As I Can Reveal At This TimeGo.
As slowly.
As possible.
My Newest Old TechnologyTwo pieces of an older world came upon my path this weekend, from completely opposite directions, matching pace with a bit of a journey to places south; in fact, farther south than I have ever been before.
I keep notebooks around. They collect things, accruing taped in bits of paper from our travels and words that I managed to nail down on the page with a pen before they can get away again. The previous volume was close enough to full to be retired. It is a handsome work of Nepalese paper craft, reinforced now with slightly frayed white gaffer's tape. It has become a pillowy thing: there is perhaps half again as much paper in it now as there was meant to be. Sometimes the writing side of the paper (proper) was a bit rough, but I liked it very much. A second example of such book craft is waiting in the wings, but I think if it is to become a journal it will stay at my desk.
Travel sometimes requires fresh starts; I bought a blank book. I have had several recommendations for Moleskine Journals slide past me. My experience with the thing is limited, but I will add mine to the pile: these are fine books. The pages at thick and take the ink of the most generous of pens with ease, with little show through. The bindings are sewn, and seem strong. The cover is simple and seems robust. The little extras like the ribbon and the fan-fold pocket in the back to not get in the way (but I do not think I will stuff this one as full as the last). I cannot yet speak to the durability of the thing, but I imagine it will do well, and others claim it will, too.
Also new is the happy pen I've used to cross it: a Namiki (Pilot) Vanishing Point fountain pen. These are wacky things: retractable fountain pens. They work, and work well. Near the tops of pages the pen turns my handwriting soft and rounded, better to read and write. The pen was a surprise, and a glad one: it has stepped to the front of the collection, and I like it much.
Bitter, SweetJuliet has sent me a note.
This is unlike her. Most of my time with Juliet has not been the result of such planning. The paper feels tender between my fingertips. It asks me to come to the last terrace.
The sun is bright when I get there. She is waiting for me, sitting simply beneath a tree.
She does not get up, and squints at me in the sun. She asks me, "do you know about olives?" She motions me down.
I sit next to her. I tell her I like olives fine. She searches me for a moment for something, but I do not think she finds it: she shrugs. "Here," she says. She hands me an olive. She says, "it's fresh."
I have never had a fresh olive before. I cannot believe the bitterness. I spit and it lingers, crawling across my tongue.
Juliet is peeling a peach. "Do you know about peaches?" I make no motion of knowing anything. She is so calm, pulling strips of skin away from flesh the color of the sun, trembling with juice. "Peaches are only worth eating now, in the sun, when they are best. The only way to eat all of them, which is almost enough of them, is to eat too much. It is easy to make oneself ill." She is gentle with the fruit as she carves a piece away from the stone for me, gives it to me gently with a thin hand. "It's fresh," she says. It is impossibly wet on my tongue, and sweet, sweet.
"The trick," she says, "is not to eat the peels."
Good, Bad, Indeterminate ThingAfter one and one half weeks, my considered review of that Molskeine notebook I mentioned before is, in its entirety, this:
I use it every day.
Buenos AmigosI cannot see them, but Juliet and Marco are in the kitchen, and I hear Juliet swear softly. Marco can fill his voice with sunlight, and I hear him ask her, "Juliet, Juliet. What did the carrots do to you today to call them so?"
I know her answer to that. The carrots have done well this year. We have filled baskets with carrots, barrels with carrots. The sand box in the root room is full of carrots, and Marco is building another for the potatoes. We have pickled them, salted them, eaten them. We eat quickbread of them in the mornings with the coffee. We have taken a hint of color to our skin from them.
We have pulled carrots of all colors from the rich patch of dark soil where he grows them. Some are the yellow of the sun at morning, but most take their rich hue from the burning sky on days of good sunsets. We even have some in purple.
The carrots from Marco's land are rebels, all. They twist and spin and tangle. The branch and branch again. Some of them are thick, but with a wasp's waist. They are impossible to peel, I have given up for the day. Juliet has not.
In town, the carrots are straight and strong, lined up on rows on the old wooden market benches. I had asked Marco about them: they looked easier to peel. They looked firm, and crisp. They were proud carrots. He shook his head sadly for me, letting curls fall into his face. "No, no," he said. He bought me one then. I watched him peel it for me with his pocket knife, the peel falling away with straight pulls of the cloudy blade. He asked the seller for some salt, then handed me the carrot.
It was a fine carrot. But: it did not speak of the earth it grew in, or the clads that turned its path. It was crisp, but it did not clutch the teeth for that moment before giving in to the hard chomp. It was sweet, but the only that. A light, flat confection, without any hint of bright sun or hot days.
Marco said: that is why. I will help Juliet peel more tomorrow.
All content under copyright by the author. Dancing is permitted. The strange deltic glyphs in the sand under tidal flow are a pleasure to watch in their deepening. Offer not valid in Kansas. We put it down and then we lost it. It all happens in the corner of the eye. Commentary accepted at pen@goob.com, although the traps are agressive and the pointy bits simply drip with dark liquour. We have a dog, but we do not own it. Thank you.