The Sun Swings HighI have been exploring Marco's house in the early afternoons, when things are calm and heavy with heat, and it is nicer to be outside. The house grows quiet and empty, and I can move about undisturbed, looking at old things. I do not mind the heat so much, so I have been spending handfuls of minutes stealing up the back stairs to the third floor. Marco's house is like a lot of the houses here, built long ago in proportion to the third and squattest floor in the house; the second story being twice as tall, and the first one three times as much. The first floor is very airy with distant ceilings. The third floor is tight with boxes of old papers and books easily stacked to the low overhead, focusing the heat. I mind the heat somewhat less than the confines, and I do not really mind either.
I stumbled into an alcove four days ago under a high gable on the third floor. A man sat there, making no noise; I had caught him in the middle of some activity, but I had not heard him. He was Asian, from some province I did not know, most likely from the southern island states where I have spent no time at all. I did not recognize him from around the house, and I'm certain I would have remembered him. He was very slight and frail. He was sweating a little in the heat under the roof.
My own skin had made a paste of the dust on my face. I told him hello and tried to clean myself with my hands, but I think I could only have worsened things. He nodded to me, and offered me a bowl.
He was eating a lunch of new potatoes, cooked tender and coated with chives and parsley and garlic in oil. I do not know how he had prepared it; I could see no kitchen. He had a lump of cheese for grating, and although he did not take any himself, he offered it to me. The potato was cut small, and he ate with slow care, eating with a pair of pointed sticks as thin as reeds in one hand. He offered me sticks and I took them with the bowl, forced like him to slow myself.
I do not expect to find anyone else up there. I do not think I can speak any words he would understand, nor he me. He minds the heat less than I do, though, and we both mind it far less than anyone else. Because we have that in common I sit with him now, in the afternoons, and take him vegetables from the garden. I do not know why else he welcomes me, but he does.
RememberThe first time you see a completely stupid advertisement, know that someone, somewhere, thought it would work.
The next time you see it, know, too, that it probably does.
All The Merry StarchesThe other night I managed to make pasta by hand, completely by hand. I mixed the eggs into the flour by hand, I bruised my hands rolling the dough, and cut wobbly drunken noodles from the sheet, one at a time. The texture of the pasta was different and it did seem to hold sauce a bit better. There is a reason that pasta machines are popular in the land where ancient traditions of food preparations are venerated, and I now know that reason from below: rolling pasta is bitchy hard work. I will try it again someday, but I like our pasta machine very much.
We ended up eating it under oil and garlic and generous amounts of parsley, chives, and cheese, along with some salted slim wedges of new potato. We should have roasted the potato, but we didn't, and basil would have also worked well. If the carb-conscious people aren't openly weeping yet, we sopped up the stuff at the bottom of the bowl with good local Italian bread.
This evening, we took to table machined pasta under a coat of chicken and spinach in a chipotle-cream sauce. Then the guy who cooks butter for us made Hungarian Plum Dumplings, a brown sugar cube wrapped in half a plum wrapped in potato dough, boiled, and then rolled in a mix of sugar, bread crumbs, melted butter and cinnamon.
It is a pity it is not winter.
Then Again, It Might Just Be CubaThe shortwave radio is, once again, whispering hints of a world far stranger than I can imagine. To wit; I am here, listening to a pleasant-voiced female announcer speak at length about cabbages and kings (or, at least, Milan and Mexico). My Spanish is quite poor from passage of time and lack of practice, and I am catching perhaps one word in ten.
In between her speakings, the station plays Chinese music. I think it's Chinese. It sounds vaguely Chinese, in a 1970's, plum colored shag carpeted, full orchestra way (the entire horn section is wearing flares made from some horrid plastic material). The song is done: the pleasant woman returns with my one word in ten rundown of what I just heard, or possibly something else entirely.
This may all be a bizarre collision of transmitters battling for a slice of the spectrum. This may be a culture war in progress, directed by sinister minds. I doubt these things. But that leaves me with a (I think) Central American spanish-language radio program about Chinese Soft Pop. Which is too weird by a half.
The Other Pepper PastaIn an effort to rescue ourselves from the series of spectacular failures that was the string of Aleppo pepper pasta experiments, the idea was put forth this afternoon to try for white pepper pasta instead. Some quick recipe triangulation suggested one half tablespoon of finely ground white pepper per egg of pasta, so we went with that. We made the dough into farfalle.
The effect of the pepper in the pasta was very subtle. There was no pronounced peppery taste. What happened instead was a pervasive, gentle warmth. We ate the pasta under copious amounts of garlic (and the oil we fried it in), chives, basil and cheese, and still the low peppery oomph floated up through all of that. Next time, we will try it with black pepper. Highly recommended.
The making of farfalle was interesting, too; we had not yet done that on any grand scale. It took some time to do it, but it was a pleasant enough task that we did not really notice (it took us 45 minutes to finish off two eggs worth of dough; usually we manage to get through dough much faster than that). It was a useful way to listen to the news.
I am having a Brown Cow for dessert.
Brief NotesThe trick to swiss chard is to cook it in two stages. Cook the stalks first, in a little oil. Some onion or garlic or both is welcome at this stage. After two handfuls of moments, add the rinsed greens to the pot and slap the lid on tight. Maybe some wine, too, if you want too.
I put some new potatoes in along with the garlic and the stems, but I can only get away with that because they are new potatoes, in small enough bits to cook through before the greens get too far gone. A little salt and pepper and sage, and it's done, and it's good.
On the other burner a risotto is being pulled together from various corners of the kitchen. I am less clear on the concept on this one, as I was busy with the chard and I was not paying attention. It smells very nice.
I forgot to soak the beans until mid-afternoon, so the beans go on later with hocks in.
To Speak of MapsWe have maps scattered around the home. This is a welcome thing; it is good to know where things are, even if by representation. We have a large thumping hard bound Atlas, which is probably by now showing age; it is likely that it speaks of countries called something else again. We have maps of our home in various granularity: city, county, state, country. I particularly like the hot red books of state topo maps; we keep one in the car, for when we get lost.
We have paper topo survey maps from the USGS for here, there, and two other places have been important or perhaps will soon be. These things are treasures of line drawn art, well made maps from an era of maps made well, a time that I fear is slipping away under the digital onslaught. They were cheap, four bucks each, and they took months to arrive in the mail. They are printed on good paper. Someday, we will frame them.
We do not have a globe, but I have discovered something almost better. The desktop of my computer is now provided with an image by the excellent software Xplanet. Xplanet is flexible stuff, but my present and so far favorite selection is an updated image of our good blue planet, hanging in a field of stars. The camera of my eye (as it were) is centered over my country, state, county, city, home, myself; it is the terminator that turns under and over me, updated in real time, so that as I see the darkness sweep rightward on my screen I can also look out the window and see the dim come. Where the Earth lies in night, Xplanet helpfully draws in the splotches and dots of light that map the human presence. Xplanet, too, pulls cloud data from the world outside and shows me that as well, painted across the planet. Having lived near the fist of the ocean, I do not look forward to hurricane season, but I am somewhat curious about seeing one churn across the Atlantic, seeing it to scale.
(I expect at some point to have a globe that does this, but I do not know if we know how to build that yet.)
There are people who are putting together a world map, labeled with markers of what each country calls itself. Would that the world was more like that.
Like The SeasonWe have green pasta, a deep and thick green like fresh wet banana leaves. I expect the stuff to lighten upon cooking, and I am curious to find out by how much. The lights are out in the kitchen now, and it sits on the towel looking nearly black under the dim glow of the desk lamp in the other room.
Pasta Verde is nearly as straight forward as the usual stuff that has happened around here with alarming frequency this summer: in addition to the eggs and the flour, add some amount of cleaned and cooked spinach that has been wrung out a bit. The spinach needs to be chopped, too. A good way to get it into the dough is give the eggs and spinach a turn or four in the food processor, under a stick blender, or some other method of madness and mix the resultant gloop into the flour.
I thought I had enough flour in the dough to keep it dry. This was not the case for the first half of the batch, and the dough was very sticky from all the extra moisture in the spinach. Add more flour, or rolling the stuff will turn into a nightmare of self adhesion, topology, and tears for lost time. Add more flour. Add more flour. You may think the dough is full, but it can take more. I managed to misjudge it; it was still sticky. Liberal dustings of flour helped somewhat, and we managed to get the entire batch cut without too much incident.
Squid ink is an obvious toy to try next. I have not looked into it, but I fully expect to find that a little vial of processed ink can be had or more than an equal amount vanilla extract (even with the war in Madagascar). I would guess, too, that whole squid are somewhere available, sac intact, for very much less. All that is left for me to see how much of the kitchen I can stain.
PathingPick a place and say that you are there; pick the place where you call it home. Pick another place, some distant place, sufficiently distant that it requires the use of the car. I find occasional errands run to a distant shopping center are excellent examples of this sort of thing. Now: pick your route.
Do you opt for the quickness of the freeway, be it real (comfortable flight down clear roadway) or imagined (the long minutes spent merging, looking nervously backward)? The freeway has charms, too, in the easy presentation of options. You may go here, or there. It might be better to be somewhere in between to reach your destination, but the option is not presented, so the selection cannot be optimal. It is easier. I dislike the freeway, for it is fast and fraught with lane changes and angry people who want to be someplace else. I avoid it when I can, and when it makes sense to.
There are other ways to go, sometimes. My own example involves a good bookseller, some miles south of here. It is possible to reach it via the loose alliance of interstate roads, but that does not really get one close. The direct route follows a state road, the kind that saw tremendous development some years ago and still today, the kind that is long, throttling stretches of auto mall and traffic light. I think it is the fastest route, but it is physically exhausting to drive it.
In the years occasional experiments made and maps consulted of offered something of a better way. Zip through a neighborhood or two. Take the bridge over the gridlock, and then wind up and down the hill. Follow the north bank of the river south to the bridge, then take the bridge. Follow the road soft left and hard right, up the river valley. Drive past the airport, drive under the runway. Turn right. Leap the first congested commuter route, then cut a quick left to mingle briefly with the second at the five-way collision of map and asphalt. Veer away, down and to the right, down towards the farms and slower ways. About halfway in, turn to the right on a road the color of the sun, carefully but demurely marked, an otherwise anonymous turning. This is the last of it; after some miles we pop out on the road of the bookstore. It takes perhaps 5 minutes longer, but I arrive refreshed and ready to do battle with the stockpersons.
There are people I know who cling to routes, knowing only thin strip after thin strip of this city, that city, the twin strips of weather grey to go both ways between. I sometimes go get lost on purpose, fighting off the blows of the others in the car. I do it because sometimes it works.
A Very Soft Vision Of ArtSometimes Marco opens the garage to bring a car down into town, to go shopping or run other errands that can only be done where people collect, down in the wells of valleys. I am sitting near the driveway on one of the little teak benches that are clustered there, so I see him open the huge panel door of the garage with deliberate care, disappearing into the murk and dust. Somewhere in there an engine wakes, squalling and eager to be gone. He gentles the car out into the sun.
He has selected the red one.
He sees me there and waves me to him. I would be stupid to refuse; the red one does not come out much. I hop in over the door, sliding into the cool seat. Marco fishes in the glove box for a pair of sunglasses for me: it is a requirement, somehow. With a smirk, we are off. We bounce down the hills and flow around the corners, testing physics with the tires and the wheel. We flow and slip across two lane roads, one lane roads, roads that would be pressed to be called so. Half lane roads. There is dust and sun and the only thing to do is relax and see what will happen.
We arrive at the village (Marco always does). Marco hops out even before the growl has fully died, and busies himself with pushing coin after coin into the meter. His tongue is showing a little as he concentrates on this, and it makes him look like a little boy. He looks at me.
"I knew a man who tried to cheat on these," he says, tapping the side of the meter with a coin. "Or merely be very efficient." He shrugs. "It came down to the same thing. He knew the patterns of the meter maids, and made guesses as to how long he would have to get back to the car after the coins all fell in his meter, racing their slow patrol."
"You have enough in there to keep us until Tuesday," I tell him.
"Maybe," he says. "We might get the shopping done and go right back, or stop for a coffee, or meet someone in the coffee shop, or get invited to go dancing, or spend the night in some small house up the lane with candles and an old man playing the lute and better food than we can make." Marco is a very good cook. "That man I knew worried a great deal, and it made him unhappy." He claps me on the shoulder and smiles at me. "You are too young to worry."
The Trick With The GarlicOn the way back from last evening's entertainments, we stopped at the local incarnation of The Donut Place (The Yeasted Ones) for a dozen. It was a bit of a drive, so we treated ourselves. This morning, after having eaten between us the better part of the box, our ever aging selves told us in no gentle terms that we really ought not do that. I will note that I have no complaint with the donuts themselves, just my inability to eat them. Or stop eating them, as the case may have been. In any event, we were feeling a little below decks for lunch, and dinner has become something of a scavenger hunt.
We have remnants of the spinach pasta and we need to use the summer squash, and whenever I am feeling poorly I make something with garlic. It works, most times. I've learned a trick for garlic: start by pulling down as many papered cloves of garlic as you think you'll need, then add another one. Cut the stem end off each clove, then slip the remainder of the peel away. Discard the stem ends and paper. Smash each clove flat the on cutting board with the flat of the knife and the keel of your hand (carefully, please!). Pile the smashed cloves in a heap, and liberally drizzle olive oil over the pile. Start chopping. I find chopping goes much easier this way, and in moments I can get the garlic to a fine mince. With a little more patience, I can reduce the stuff to a respectable paste. I have either forgotten where I picked this up, or I am embarrassed to say where from; I cannot recall.
So, then, into a hot skillet went the garlic and the oil I chopped it in (scrape the board with the back of the knife) and a little more oil. Into that went the sunny yellow disks of young summer squash, and the finely chopped leaves of two stripped stems of rosemary. The garlic started to stick a little, so I dolloped in a little bit of the good chicken stock from last week's roast when the pan needed more liquid. Serve over pasta with a bit of cheese (at the moment, Bra Duro) and a slice of bread to mop up the garlic when the pasta's gone.
Mousou DairininThe pasta verde turned out well, and has given rise to further talk of coloring pasta. I am tabling experiments with ink for a while. We had cause to discuss other possibilities with The Guy Who Cooks Butter For Us while we were waiting for the play to start.
"Tomato," I had said. It was pointed out that I'd need a pretty fierce reduction to get color into the pasta dough. I figured I'd look for a tube of deeply concentrated Italian tomato paste and use that. I report that I have found some, and there sits a lump of blushing dough sitting in plastic on my dough board, which I will try to roll out as soon as I am done here. More interesting was the further talk of pastes in tubes, and possible pastas that will likely get us all in trouble.
A while back I was investigating mung bean pancakes, and I was looking around for some plum paste to use in mixing up condiments. I found some in the little Japanese Grocery down the street a bit. "Make some pasta with that," he said. And: "oh! And how about Tamarind paste?"
The tamarind pasta has been made, but not eaten. It is strange stuff. We shall see.
AdministriviaThe old contact address has become, sadly, too poisoned to be useful. There is a new contract address.
Marco's Other KitchenMarco has another kitchen.
This is possibly overstating it. The second kitchen is largely a slab of concrete, covered over with fitted slate tile. There is a well head here, made of old brass. It is pumped by hand, and pours water out onto floor in gasping spurts if there is no bucket there to catch it. The floor is wet. There is only one wall, one low wall of brick and topped with tarred wood. There are holes in the floor, filled with dead leaves. Marco says he has poles and a wine red canopy to give the kitchen shade in summer, but he cannot find them. The plants have grown wild and thick out here, on the other end of the garden. There is little need for poles or canvas.
I am sitting in the reclining chair of slatted wood turned grey by the battery of the seasons. The only other furniture is a table, even greyer than the chair, knocked out of true by time and use. It looks as if it barely be able to support itself. Juliet is thin enough that for her to sit on the table would look only mildly dangerous. Juliet is sitting on the table. She is swinging her feet beneath her in careless, deliberate arcs, and the table creaks and sways with the movement.
Juliet asks me, "do you think Marco built this himself?" Her feet make work of the air beneath her, and she has turned out against the table. I stare at the slate below by feet. I do not know too much about stone or building. I imagine how much work it would be, to mix and haul enough concrete to make the bottom part of this place. I am briefly gripped with the image of the two of us, sitting on a thin square of stone bridging some secret and terrible pit of ragged walls that reaches deep into the earth. It passes.
I imagine bringing up the slates, two at a time and heavy, piling them perhaps there or there before putting them down in mortar. I have a little experience with brick walls: the wall would have been hard work, but simple work. I think one man could be capable of it if the concrete came from a truck. I can certainly imagine Macro out here, younger, hair back under a kerchief, building because he wanted to.
"Perhaps," I tell her.
Juliet nods at me, oddly in time with her feet. Her skin is darkening, now, even as her hair is turning lighter under the days of unstemmed sun. She does not look at me, but keeps her eyes on the thicket of wilds beside us, on the opposite side of the kitchen from the garden, where things grow dark and strange.
"I've been here longer than you," she says. She is looking at me now. There is little challenge in her voice, and I wonder now how many days she has been staying at the house. "In the winter, I've watched him come out here and bank coals against this wall." There is a spot down the wall that is blackened, and she points to it without her eyes leaving mine. "He roasts things over them." She gestures towards the floor by my feet. "He sits here, out of the wind, under a blanket."
Around us it is hot, and growing hotter. The air is thickening into a summer afternoon. I try to imagine the private comfort of the blanket on the cold wind, pulled together at the chest, but the sun shines on around me and I cannot. The green around us is pure and deep under the tempered blue sky and the light, golden and strong. For the moment, Winter has been made impossible in this place.
The Luxury of HeatIt is good to live in a climate where air occasionally spills south, ushering in short stretches of cool amber afternoons and dry, quiet nights. It is a delight to walk in such weather, to take in the colors and the whispers of the season without the heavy hang of water in the air. These days seen stolen, lifted from the back of the van in the early morning and tipped quietly into the register of hot, grinding summer that should somehow be our due. I have learned to take opportunities on such days. Today in part I threw open the windows and fired up the oven.
We have too much squash and a distinct lack of muffins; one carelessly standard quick bread recipe (with a bit of nutmeg) has largely solved this. I have now twice tried the trick of using egregious amounts of shredded squash, well near twice what the recipe requires. It may be because the squash is fresh, but: each batch took time and a half again to bake, at least, and each batch in turn was deeply moist regardless, even for lack of butter, even on the next day. I do not know if this trick would work so well on larger sized loaves.
We have been fetching our bread from the bakery down the way, but the oven was on and the stone was hot, so I had planned ahead with a simple dough of water, wheat, yeast and salt. The dough happily massaged its way through three risings, then turned a lovely caramel upon the stone, ending up toasty, wheaty, and everything else that makes bread a wonder. It sits nicely under trimmed slices of Toma tonight; if we can get our hands on some other Paglia cheeses tomorrow, it will sit well and strong under that.
Menu PlanningWe are in the kitchen, the usual kitchen. Marco is at the far end, coring strawberries, and I am at the big table carefully peeling potatoes with an ancient metal peeler that feels near collapse. I am moving slowly, drawing brown peel away from the creamy flesh beneath, mounding the peels in a loose pile under my hands. When it comes time to remove the eyes, I flick them out with the tip of the peeler and try to get them to sail across the table into the stainless compost bucket. I have made a game of it, making soft noises in the otherwise quiet kitchen as we are bent to our respective work. I fail to hit the bucket far more than I succeed.
Juliet is cutting carrots, concentrating. Her hands are steady as she grips each one, then brings the knife carefully down only as far as she needs to and no more, all with impressive speed. The curious thing about this is that she is using the cookbook as her cutting board, open to the pages of her recipe. The book is one of the old ones, bound by some old man's hands in red coastal leather, the gold leaf on the spine and the boards all but a mystery. The book contains engravings of oddly shaped men standing and slaughtering and roasting sideways, always sideways. The paper flexes a little under each sharp snap of the knife.
I watch her for a while. She realizes this, stopping to look up and meet my question.
"I am careful," she tells me, wiggling the knife in my direction. "But it remains that books like this must live in the kitchen." She returns to the chopping. "They become part of the kitchen," she says. "The sops and spills in here become part of them, give them history." She points to the Carello in the corner. "I cracked an egg over the almond bread in that one. It turned the paper like oilskin." She looks over her shoulder, and nods to her self. "All of the bottoms of the pages in Fortune's Fool are stained purple from a bath in good Barolo. All of these books bear traces of what they taught to make." She has paused again. "It is right that it is this way."
Marco coughs on his end of the room. "It is true, too," he says, "that angels live in books." He looks at us, smiling. "They rest in the threads, in little beds hung between the folds of the signatures. It is good to let a little food fall into the cookbook, for they eat it, and they thank you." With a shrug, he is back to work.
The kitchen once again becomes a quiet collection of the sound of hands on ingredients and the occasional shake of insects outside and in. I may have heard Juliet grunt, but I am not sure. I flick a bit of potato across the table, and I have many yet to do. It hits in inside wall of the bucket and sticks for a moment before tumbling to the bottom. I am getting better.
No Grilling Involved At AllWe have been slowly learning to win the running battle with the weekly load of vegetables we get from the farm share. They have been sending us cabbage, and we needed to use the stuff. A very long time ago I ate a pretty good bowl of cabbage soup someplace on Long Island, so I thought to try that. It also gave me opportunity to relearn that the compact heads of cabbage, so innocent, blossom into giant heaping piles when shredded. We had enough for soup, and a little experiment of sauerkraut, which I hope goes well.
Working from dim memory, then: slice to pieces some two or three links of good sweet italian sausage, and set them to browning at the bottom of a pot in a little olive oil. Shred a pot-worth of cabbage (a head and a half for us) and also finely slice some onion. We had green onion lying about in large quantity, so we used that. When the sausage becomes nicely browned, fill the pot with the cabbage and onion. Let that cook down, turning gently, until the mass has settled somewhat. Add chicken stock and a bit of water, enough to just cover, and then simmer until the cabbage is tender. It might need some salt.
It is still cool enough here to make soup a welcome supper. We ate it with crusty bread that had been slathered with garlic, oil, and cheese, and then broiled quickly. We kept the windows open, and did the dishes when we were done.
AddendumI did not realize until somewhat into preparations that all of the bread was going to be used under the cheese and oil and garlic, so the new batch of bread got started a little late (in truth, a little later then that, as the first biga failed).
For the last little while I have been searching out Paglia-style cheese. I am somewhat hampered by the fact that this is not a D.O.C. cheese, so the constraints are somewhat broad on the manner of making the stuff, and the producers name them all sorts of things. I am equally hampered by that fact that I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I press on. I have not yet found any, but the quest has been worth while: we came home the other day with a siren block of Robiola, smelly even though the stout plastic wrapper. It was warming on the counter through dinner, and now that the bread has cooled from the oven a little we are eating the two together.
The Royal Observatory DisagreesI let two clocks burn on in the corner of my computer screen. Local time sits on top, flicking by in digital hours and minutes. I keep local time in a twelve hour format. I have configured the widget to not blink, or shout, or otherwise cause a ruckus. It makes no more movement than once per minute. It does not steal the focus of my eyes from me. For no good reason, local time is blue.
Right below local time in blue sits a sister clock, this time UTC, and in tan. While local time flexes with the seasons to give my poor eyes more light, UTC remains constant, locked on the turn of the earth marked (more or less) by a telescope. UTC is always ahead, and sometimes determines a different day. UTC is in 24-hour format. Because the formats spin to zero at different paces, I sometimes confuse myself.
Sometimes, they do not change at the same time.
Men of MannersTwo men have come to the door. They have come to the front door of the house, where we almost never go, up the drive that no one ever uses. The gardens are kept over there, to be sure, but not by us. The northern door is surrounded by ordered plants and is approached on swept stone, clinical and clean. We prefer the soft mess of the kitchen and the garden and everything beyond it.
They came from the North. They came on the drive that Juliet says no one but the salesmen use, or the real estate agents who come to beg Marco for the property. The drive is kept clean, too. Marco tells his friends to approach from the south, and often ignores the north door. To think about it, it seems odd now that I have never seen anyone tend to the paving or the plants.
They came in a large black car. We can see it through the thin windows of the upstairs closets, leaning still against the wall in the shadow of some old sport coats. Juliet sits beside me with her head on my chest to see. The car is black, a deep black, and glossy as if wet in all this dry valley. The car is smooth and curved. I frown at it; it is an impractical vehicle. It is low to the ground and has no room for packages or more people than two. Juliet mumbles her own thoughts. Somehow the car is clean, clean like the plants and the drive, far too clean of the dust and the rain and the world. It is clean enough to let the eye slip past it, searching for rougher purchase.
They are wearing light suits of warm tones over crisp white shirts, and the cloth moves effortlessly with them as they stride towards the house after locking the car (I have never seen anyone lock the car, here). They wear leather shoes that look very comfortable. Their arms swing freely, and they walk with purpose. They are both tall men, and strong, and wear their hair short and slightly slicked against the day. They somehow make sunglasses seem sinister.
We hold each other still in the quiet heat of the closet, trying to make sense of the muted stumblings of the conversation taking place below us. The heat makes the air thick. I imagine that we listen to them as if they were underwater below us, or perhaps it is us that is at depth. We do not move. From the tenor and pace, we can be somewhat sure that Marco dislikes them. We recognize his farewell, and watch as the men move away again, back over the gravel to the car, which spins away and spills down the hill and a furious rate. I smile for a moment, knowing that whatever else is true of them, they enjoy this part of their job, even though it means they may want to come back this way again for the most trivial of reasons to test these hills with that beast of theirs.
We are still. I imagine telling Juliet that we should go down stairs, behave as we do, meet later to compare notes. I imagine meeting her in the canopy of the willow by the stream, exchanging secrets. I feel her shiver a little. We do none of these things. The air is a muffler cast over everything, smoothing the edges of the noise from Marco knocking around downstairs.
The Salad Comes AgainWe march ever onward in our war against the produce. We were given cilantro this time, and peppers too, and even more cucumbers. I did not manage to fully solve the cucumber problem, but all of the above suggests salsa. Those together, finely chopped, with some toasted cumin and the tomatoes growing reluctant on the windowsill and the juices from the lemon and lime in the bottom of the crisper are all now in a bowl on the table with a bit of green onion. It is all collapsing into something wonderful, and will be more so by the morrow.
We were given more fennel, and more potatoes, too. The other bowl on the counter holds these (chopped, and cooked and chopped) along with the parsley, the dill, some capers, mustard, pepper and salt. I will add the rest of the dressing shortly. It ought to be good.
TartsThe days roll on; today is a day that half of us gets older. It was this day that the Earth (more or less) made the same step as it trod around the sun. We celebrate such things. This year, she gets a tart.
Tarts remain easier than I think. They begin with crusts; pie crusts, more or less. Except less; the crusts are meant to be shorter, so much of the care and noodling that goes into a class A pie crust can be flung out the window. Perfectly serviceable tart crusts may be mangled together in the processor. One may take the effort to roll the stuff out for one's tin, or simply grub about with fingers, guiding the dough into a lumpish flatness. Bake the thing blind in the oven. It will turn out fine.
Tarts need pastry cream with which to fill the pastry. I will point out that all one needs for whipping up a pastry cream is a good, high-class pot, a whisk, and the demented attention of a hawk. Pastry cream is a good place to sneak in flavor: extracts (vanilla, almond, lemon), zests (lemon, orange, lime), spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper). Cool the shell and cool the cream and fill up one with the other.
We put fruit on the cream, we do. There is a history to that. Growing up, I saw tarts pass the table from the kitchen. Upon these tarts lay fruit, arranged by wiser hands than mine, long fingers carefully laying in deep orange slices of peeled peaches in locking geometric patterns to rival the Alhambra. A lesson from those days is to always use the best fruit available. I am in luck: we are in the season of blueberries, and they tumble pleasantly over the cooling cream. I need do very little work to make them pretty.
Glaze goes on this now, to make the fruit shine nicely. I have forgone the glaze this outing, but simple ones can be made by heating a favorite jam with brandy, or without brandy.
This is not the only way to make tarts. This is the way I do; they are celebratory things, special events for excellent people and all that they touch. They are meant to be shared things, passed around the table; I cannot make them for myself. And so: happy, happy birthday.
(And don't look in the closet.)
To Follow Is To FallJuliet and I are walking the long sandbank in the lazy turn of the stream far below the house. The light is dappled here, partitioned and slotted by the leaves in the trees above, sending down thin beams where it is dim enough for the motes to glow in the light. Juliet is behind me when I hear her squeal and then splash into the stream.
I turn; I find her sprawled leftward with her arms in the stream, shaking her head. The tips of her hair have become wet. She sits up and checks her hands for damage. I see none. I ask her if she is alright.
"Your footsteps," she says. "I was walking in your footsteps." The most recent examples have been scuffed somewhat, so she points down the sand a bit. "Did you know you walk in a straight line? It made me fall over."
"What?" I look where she is pointing.
"You put," she says, "one foot right in front of the other. It's maddening. I can't do it for long." She brushes sand from herself.
I look up the bar to where we had been, and there are my feet, one after another, in a slightly weaving line. Farther back there is a another set of prints to one side and then the other, finally mixing in with mine. The prints end here at my feet. I help Juliet up.
"There used to be a book," I tell her. "When I was little, I liked to read a book about the Indians of America." I stop a bit, it was long ago, and difficult. "The book said they walked in straight lines, one foot right in front of the other. The book said they did this to walk quietly through the woods, like ghosts." I look at my feet. My toes used to point out, but they point in now. I do not know why. "I wanted to do that, too, then. I spent a summer learning, walking through the woods in a straight line, one foot in front of the other, always."
She rubs the water from her arms, and holds herself a moment. "Go on," she says, nodding up the stream. "I need practice."
One BellMarco is on the phone. The only phone in Marco's house is in the big room. It sits on a small table next to a comfortable chair. It is an older phone, and very plain. It is made of a smooth black plastic, and looks heavy. Marco rarely uses it, and I have no one to call. I have never seen Juliet go near it; if there is a reason for that, she has not mentioned it. The phone almost never rings of its own accord.
We are all in the big room, for no particular reason. We are spread out into separate spaces, each working on private projects. I have taken over the big table, covering it with a collage of maps. Juliet is curled in the opposite corner from Marco, next to the cookie jar. She is eating cookies and knitting. She is doing both things quite slowly. Marco is on the phone with someone named Privet.
"No, Privet," he says. He says it again. "Cooperate with them. Find out what is wrong." When he is agitated his voice booms from his corner of the room, runs around the rafters, shakes spare motes of dust loose and spills them down onto my maps. He seems to remember himself, then, and lowers his voice into the smiling calm of his usual self. I cannot overhear him then. I go back to my maps.
I have never seen so many shades of green as there are on these maps. I have discovered the map drawers in Marco's library just off this room, long shelves of flat treasure. They are printed on creamy paper that has begun to brittle slightly at the corners, and are made out in a thin, well-conditioned hand. The watercolor shadings bloom from embattled corners to large swaths of colored wash, mottled and grained and inconsistent. I do not think they were done without skill. The effect is pleasing.
Marco is angry again. "No, that is secondary." I look up to see Juliet, taut like a cat in her chair, legs folded beneath her, back straight, and eyes alive. "Let them go where they wish." The chair by the phone is large with a wide back, and I cannot actually see Marco. He voice returns to normal, and he is placating Privet.
I find too many of the lines before me too fine to have been drawn by a human hand, but I know all of them to have been. It is a marvel, what we are capable of with time and effort. The maps speak of strange lands on the table, some of them old enough to refer to notions of the world that have long since been broken by actual exploration. I imagine those first boots on alien sands, those impressions that marked the end of the land on the map, and the beginning of the land as it was.
Marco hangs up, and strides quickly through the room, out into the hall. Juliet's hair moves a little in his wake as he passes her, but her eyes are intent on her knitting, and the soft touch of the needles seeps into the new silence in the room. I reach for the maps and shuffle them, and they make feathery noises as they slide over the table and each other. It sounds good.
Later, I ask Juliet why she sits in that chair in the big room.
"It is easy to hear from corner to corner in there," she tells me. "I can hear someone on the phone as clear as a good day."
I do not ask her anything else.
Things Come TogetherThe cool weather has afforded us the opportunity to make bread every few days. This has gone well; we have had chances at experimentation. We had an extra half cup of pesto, so into the dough it went, resulting in a lightly tinted loaf that slept well under a snowy light slice of fresh mozzarella. The most recent effort ended up with a half cup of flax seed meal added. The resulting loaf is chewy, deep, and run through with dark shot of flax.
As part of the farm share, we have been receiving green onions. We call them green onions; I have heard them referred to as those, or as long onions, or as bunching onions, or even as scallions (although I am not sure that it is correct to do so, the swampy feet of local dialects aside). They are mostly green, and lovely, too, a deep waxy vegetal green that gives way at the bottom of the stalk to a cream white. Sometimes, the very end is a blushingly dense purple. The remarkable thing about the particular onions are the size; we have been getting onions a yard long. We attempt to eat them up quick.
The cheese of the week was Baita Fruili. We do not know much about this cheese. Under a thin rind it is smooth, and light with the color of straw. It is creamy, with a gentle tang near the end of each piece. We had never had it before, and we will well have it again.
These pieces come together simply: a piece of bread, a folded strip of onion, a slice of cheese. Hold the onion in place with the cheese as the teeth make work of tearing the bread beneath. The cheese is soft, and enfolds the bright crunch of the onion over the drumbeat chew of the bread. It makes a good lunch.
Of The DayWe have gone down into village for supper, Marco and Juliet and I. Macro took us down in the red car. He would not ordinarily do this: the red one is close inside, and meant to vigorously defend the luxury of needing only two seats. The arrangements had put Juliet somewhat stretched across my lap. Marco would instead I think have taken a more sedate vehicle to make us more comfortable, but he deeply enjoys the red car, and he has been troubled lately. He is a believer of relaxing when eating at restaurants.
Marco arrived in the village refreshed. It is lucky that Juliet is so slim, as her weight on me was pleasant, and I do not think she would have fit otherwise. I had thought it improper, but halfway down she gently pulled my hand across her and I held her as well as I could the rest of the way. After Marco had pulled to a stop, we wobbled from the car, spent from spending so long on the edge of such terrible forces. I cannot claim that I did not enjoy it, but it did not relax me. Juliet's thoughts are inscrutable as she calmly leads us to the restaurant.
Marco spoke to us of the place on the way down the hills. The Bel Canto lives in the rebuilt remains of what used to be a church, the back half of which is something of a legend for the habit of being blown apart in war. It has been built and rebuilt many times. The front with the carvings over the door and the tall, blunted bell tower stand quietly in one corner of the square, humble in their lasting. The lines are thick tonight, with many waiting for their supper in glittering evening gowns and inky suits with constellations of neckties. As we approach them from across the square, their conversation builds from the silent animation of hands to a low collective mumble. They take no notice of us as we walk past them to the top of the line at the door.
The man at the podium is gently dressed, ticking off and adding names to a page of creamy paper in precise lettering under the soft point of a fountain pen. I am beginning to feel out of sorts; Marco is dressed in a cotton arab shirt and painter's trousers, both of which show ample evidence that he was indeed painting earlier, and with some vigor. His hair is its usual raggely mass. He is wearing no shoes. Juliet is not wearing shoes, either, and I know both from her minimalist leanings on such things and the frightful descent that she is wearing cotton shorts and a linen shirt, and that is all. Her hair is soft and smells sweet. I am somehow wearing shoes, but for the rest of me I cannot imagine how I appear to these people. The man at the podium is uttering strings of perfect honorifics in three languages, and I fully expect to find myself in the gutter in moments, rubbing a sore ear. Marco and Juliet seem unconcerned. I follow as best I can, trying not to look at anyone in the line we are disregarding.
Marco steps up smartly to the podium, and we are mercifully ignored by everyone but the man behind it. I am curious as to what honorific Marco will rate, but the gentleman with the pen simply says "Marco," then "three?", then "please" and with a sweep of an arm leads us through the doors. I briefly see the main dining room, murky and lit by candles on the tables, but the man with the pen leads us instead to the left and up the stairs. They are old and dark, and take us up at least a turns' worth of the tower. We emerge into the soft air of evening in the open space of the bell above us, safe in the top of the tower and unmoving. I am staring at the bell.
The man with the pen touches my shoulder. "It will not ring, sir," he says. He slips down the stairs.
The four walls are open up here, offering a breathtaking view of the village. All are roofs, everywhere, the soft shades of tiles interlocking. We can look down on the square as we please, at the long line of men and women snaking out past the cafe. Better, we can see the hills, heated by the setting sun. The air is cool, and moves playfully past us. They have set out a table, three chairs, three places, three glasses and a bottle of wine. The wine is beading slightly in the breeze.
"There are no menus," I say.
Marco has settled into his chair. He looks very comfortable. "We do not get menus," he says. Juliet has already found her way into her chair, curled and unfurling the napkin across her lap. Marco has begun pouring wine from his seat with a long arm, almost carelessly. He spills nothing. "All will be well," he says. "Please, sit. We eat."
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.