Quiet Reparations

Four Mile

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I took to my feet again, following the roads as they turned across the rises, a quick brisk walk to where the spine of my neighborhood runs along the river, down near the tail, to lean against a wooden fence and look down across the valley. I got there early. There were fifty or so of us there, by the fence; some brought chairs to sit on the slim flat spots above the wooded drop. A spotter plane circled. We took in the city, waiting for the start, looking down onto the dark waters and watching the tugboat with the coal barges furtively cast a spotlight out in front, waiting for the pool to clear: even in celebrating, the work goes on in this place.

They started more or less on time. We had no count; a moment of clear air over the lights of the city, and then fireworks began to erupt from the rivers, the park, the buildings themselves. The distance of them made the thunder of the thing soft and rumply, a low tide of rumble that rolled up the valley through the crisp air. The bursts and orbits and candles began brightly, sharp and star bright against the black sky, muting themselves as they left behind more and more smoke, becoming textured and softened but no less glorious. We chatted and watched, took pictures. Someone down the line said, Hey, we should sing and we did; a big handful of people on an anonymous ridge in the night, all standing against a wooden fence, singing Happy Birthday to Pittsburgh.

There was a finale, the last burst, and then the night came back in, the vast cloud of smoke still hanging lazy over the city lights, a reminder of other times, a proud history. We clutched our mugs of cocoa and coffee, waiting to see if it was really over. It was; the sky was quiet again. And more, too. Even after all of that, and returning to the simple skyline and the normal lines of office lights in their ladders marking the stories:

We have a beautiful city.

The Wind Up

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Earlier in the week, there was a wind. I took advantage of this, and carefully opened windows in the house to welcome in the air, pulling off mill runs from the rivers outside. There were some stacks of paper that took this badly, and some of the ornamentation shifted from their places on the mantles, but it was worth it. Air from the outside, filling the rooms, pulling in freshness and chasing the stale from every corner in a merry whirl. These recent mornings have turned cold, so I have shut the windows again, in part because of my own cold, nasty and lingering congestion that has taken up station in my head. I am beating it back with the harvest: tomatoes of many kinds, garlic and potatoes roasting in the oven under oil and pepper, cups and cups of tea. In the mornings I walk in anyway, through valleys of trees still fluffy from the winds, giant hands having reached down to shake them well.

Yesterday I was offered an unexpected ticket to sit a while in the ball park. I've said this before; we have a beautiful ball park. There is a dignity to the stands, built in their dark metals, but not an unkind one: it is not so proud a place to not offer protection when the rains come. There were no rains last night, as the evening ran through dusk and beyond, and the little blue lights came out to mark the structure in the darkness. The city was framed by the cozy space past the outfield, looking for all the world impossible, a thing too pretty to be anything less than expensive set dressing for a Hollywood picture about dreams, love, baseball. The broad sweep of the yellow metal of the bridge led our view up to that cheerful gathering of buildings, lovely in the night. The moon clambered over the tops of the bleachers, very nearly full, gaining clarity as the cool air came on. It was wonderful.

There was also a game down there, of course. They never do anything to formally begin; they just start. I love that.

I missed most of the carnage; I spent the second inning buying a sandwich. It says something about this place that the All You Can Eat section was neigh empty, while the line for the sandwiches was bizarrely huge. Or that one can even get a decent sandwich at a ball park, these days, in among the nachos and the odd hamburgers and other assorted things. It could be said that I should obviously not buy sandwiches and thus avoid angering the gods, but I would honestly fear the gods more for not honoring the sandwich, here in this place.

(Besides, I have no illusions; they are my ball team. I come to watch them play: I have no expectations they will do anything else.)

I was enjoying that sandwich and musing over the notion of karma and ball park food when I got to strike up a conversation with an usher. I lamented the absence of the Turn Back The Clock inning; he said he thought they did entire games like that, now. That requires further investigation; I would become a regular of those. I would also need to drum up support to ask (nicely) for someone to have all the damn signs on the tops of the buildings turned off for those nights. It is worth it, though: there is little like a ball game where the noises are crowd and crack of bat, the only music comes from an organ, and the scoreboard does what's it's supposed to do, and only that: show the score.

(The nine on the field did a bit better tonight, I hear. Well done!)

This morning, the hills lay under a carpet of fog, all distances made soft. The sounds were soft, too, engines becoming distant humming. A train whistle found its way up through the valley, but was too far away; a caution call from some other place, some other time. In short order the sun burned it all away, making the day warm again.

That trick will not work for much longer: there will be apples, soon.

Tensor

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A lute has fifteen strings.

This is not entirely accurate. Lutes started (for some value of start) with less. As the clocks wound down and time danced onward (wind them up again) the luthiers added more, and then more, and then even more. There is the tall imposition of the theorbo as a solution to this, as well as the fat and happy archlute, an alternate design. In the Baroque, the lute acquired a ridiculous amount of strings, and I can only imagine that those who played them had hands the size of dinner plates when spread, with fingers long to reach the courses, strong to press the strings against the fret, tender to coax the sweet notes. You know what they said about people with hands like that.

They could play the lute.

It is difficult to keep a lute in tune. The thing itself is wood, just wood, a natural product that breathes, seasons, and flexes with changes in temperature, moisture, and mood. Unstrung, it is bent backwards. The strings provide the tension to make it true, but there are fifteen of those bloody things, and each has its own taut to sing its proper note when plucked. This can make tuning tricky, as bringing one string up to note will change the balance over the whole instrument, sending other strings awry.

(I have a piano, too. It needs a tuning. Dad lent me a book. I've not yet tried it.)

Another difficulty with the strings is that they need to be quite taut to be true, to wiggle in the proper way. With some of the courses, I've found that proper tuning brings the strings right up to the point of breaking, sometimes leading to a kind of disheartening percussion which has no place. I've found that early on with an instrument I tend to be careful, wincing slightly as I timidly wind the string up to height. Eventually I give up and just go, finding the note with an authoritative twist. Sometimes, I can bring the whole instrument into a happy balance. Sometimes, I flinch when a string is tired and has decided to give up. I buy more strings.

This particular lute can be perverse, though. The other night while I was on the couch and the flat back of the lute was resting comfortable and quiescent on a stack of books in the far corner of the room, one of the strings, perhaps bidden by ghosts, just

snapped.

"You're a manipulator," they said. "You manipulate people to get what you want. And it looks like you're being nice to them, but I know you better than you think. You're subtle; you play a deep game. That's why people don't know that you do it. But I know that you do. Everything you do, no matter what it looks like."

I have no idea how to deal with people like that.

My lute has fifteen strings. It is enough for me. It is more than enough.

Fruit of Labors

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The quince turned out disastrously.

It all started well, if a little painfully. Quince are hard little nuggets, tough yellow things that dislike yielding to the knife. I spent a bunch of good time at the kitchen table pulling them apart, flicking out the seeds from the large seed casings, building up a pile of quarters. Each slice was mostly casing, little fruit, but that was alright: there is fantastic amounts of pectin in the casing: to quince for jelly, I need add none.

Then, into water to simmer for hours. What was supposed to come next was that the fruit would soften, turn pinkish amber, release delicious scents. This last bit happened, and soon enough the simmering pot was making the house heavy with the perfume of pineapples, vanilla, guava. What I had not counted on was that the quince bits would suck up water like sponges, and I managed to burn them when they pulled the pot dry. It was promising, though. I need to find more quince. And for that matter, bigger quince, for more efficient work. There is worth in taking found fruit and making good things of it, but I now have a fuller understanding of values of agricultural selection. Little bastards.

The blueberries fared much better. I had frozen six pints of them some weeks back, and took to using the low-sugar pectin to turn them out into jam. Again, a pot of blueberries simmering with sugar is a mighty thing. For the trouble, I ended up with a dozen half pint jars of well-set jam, dark and deep and lightly sweet. Myself and my house guest descended on them, spooning jam on toast, marbling it into yogurt. Other jars disappeared into the larders of others, given as gifts or sent on in trade. The rest have taken station with the small stack in the cupboard, waiting for winter: blueberry and black raspberry and sour cherry, so far. I am looking forward to the problem in the coming cold days of deciding which kind of jam to open up next.

Yesterday morning, I shuffled out onto the porch to get the paper and nearly tripped of a bushel of peaches that some anonymous donor had left for me. I seem to be gaining a reputation.

I took them inside; I found out who left them later in the day. It does not do to keep ripe fruit waiting: once home again, the evening was taken up with dunking them in a simmering bath, pulling aside the mottled skins, prising the fruit off of the stone. I should not be a choosy beggar: the fruit was found, free, and wonderful besides, but I note for reference that should one want to put up canned peaches that look pretty, one is advised to seek out freestone fruit. These were not.

So I sat at the kitchen table. The door was open, the cool breeze making merry with the flames under the canner, mixing the heat of the room. There was music tumbling in through the doorway. Over and over I pushed my thumb through a peeled and quartered peach, separating flesh from stone, juices pooling on the cutting board, spilling over into the place mat, making a mess.

Someone should be here to seduce me, I said, to no one in particular. Put her there, in the chair across the table, with one leg tucked up under to keep an ankle warm in the cool air around out feet. Put coffee laced with sugar and cream in her hands, steam gently rising from the cup. Have her tell me stories, should she wish to, a smile in her eyes, as I pull these things gently apart and the kitchen becomes dense with the scent of fresh peaches for both of us.

Eventually the bowl of peaches sprinkled occasionally with lemon juice became full. The fruit all tumbled then into a simple syrup for ten minutes of simmering and skimming, and the full power of cooking fruit came again from that pot, not yet failing to surprise nor delight. After this, into jars, then into the canner, then out again some third of an hour later, to sit on the towel, awaiting the pop of the lid that signals all is well.

All told, I ended with seven pints of peaches and (whoops) a good extra quart of peach syrup, which I am adding to things to make them tasty. I was only able to get to half of the peaches! For the person who left them on my porch yesterday, I was able this morning to put three pints of peaches into their hands. We'll see how long it is before we eat them all up.

If you have extra fruit, feel free to leave it on my porch. Please me patient, though; I'm out of Mason jars.

Fifteen

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Let us bring it back a bit.

There is a pile of quince in the kitchen, sitting comfortable in a brown paper bag, down at the bottom of the fridge. This is found fruit, pulled down from shaggy branches of bushes that live in an equally shaggy yard some miles away. I was given them in a sack, standing in a hallway, a simple hand off of fruit from friend to friend. I don't know of anything to do with them but make jelly.

I've been making some progress in that area, building on the success of the blueberry jam of last summer. This year, I and a friend have been able to put up into the pantry shelf several pints of wild black raspberry jam, deep purple and only just holding to itself. We were also able to come away with many little jars of sour cherry preserves, although those did not firm up as well. I hear tell the ancient world called it spoon fruit; the cherries have always been ornery about becoming set. I have blueberries in the freezer, but not yet, not yet: first I must deal with the quince.

The procedure here seems to be to first cut the fruit to bits, removing stem and seed (but save the pectin from the seed cases; they are loaded with pectin). Then: simmer the hell out of the things. Once done, they turn from green to the lovely amber I remember from the thin shelves against the cool wall of my Grandmother's basement. The recipes say to go after the fruit with a potato masher, then pour the glop into a jelly bag. Let gravity take its time: let the juice run out into a catch below. Squeezing the bag makes for cloudy jelly. Then: reheat the juice with sugar, heat up into a syrup, then jar and process. I might try the whole thing tomorrow; I have new gadgets and implements littering the kitchen, a small evil workshop there on the table, eager and ready to to generate villains that will enter combat with nut butter for supremacy of the entire sandwich. We will see how it goes.

I will say this, too, and I am somewhat looking forward to this part: there is little in the world as intoxicating as a big pot of slowly cooking fruit.

Phial

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The Archer appears in the doorway, a gentle form. She uses poise to offer a small bottle of golden syrup, something she has told stories of. It is strange to have the glass in my hand, the actual manifestation, glowing gently in the bent and battered sunlight that tumbles through the window. She grins: Sekanjabin, she says, naming it. It is but a moment before she is gone again.

The recipe she gave calls for vinegar, sugar, water, mint, and duration. The trick is this: combine the first three over low heat and then simmer for a prescribed time. Take the pot from the fire and cast in the mint; the leaves will poach, sizzle. Let cool. Strain off the syrup, and you have an Andalusian drink mix.

I am no small fan of Andalusia, and the bottle was quickly gone. I thought to make it myself, but to try honey in place of the sugar and the water, with temperature instead of time. I found a good vinegar, and put one part that and two parts honey in the bottom of a pot. Over heat, I took the mixture up to 235F, keeping the sides of the pan clean and careful. Once done, off heat and in with the mint, which chattered and spun sizzle as it sank into the gold. Some time on the counter to let out the heat, and it was ready.

To use, put a bit of syrup in the bottom of a tall glass; fill the glass with ice water and give a vigorous stir (the spoons on the stove fit this and other purposes admirably). The drink made with sugar is brighter, sharper; the drink made with honey is rounder, deeper, more golden in the sun. They both cut through the thick air of summer. They both offer savor in stillness.

Tell Us The Name Of The One You Lost

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There is a gate, strong and iron, standing proud in the gathering evening. It is gently open, only one small placard to betray what waits behind it, up the path to the herb garden, atop the crest of the hill. A gentleman stands waiting, careful. We trade no names. He asks me, are you here to see the play?

So, then, began Cymbeline.

The walk up the hill was itself an evocative thing, following a soldier's line of unlit torches, not yet necessary. Up in the herb garden, a young woman recommended a small risk: use this number, she said. With your cell phone, send a text to it. She had a small card, with words written. Send it this. Then, up and around to the seating. I found friends, and took place by them. A simple set, more natural than not. With trumpets, the play began.

I was interested to see Cymbeline. I have always been done better by seeing the plays first, cold, and then on to the text, the movies. This is getting more and more difficult to do, and the play proved to be a delightful surprise. The company moved with ease through the machinations of the thing, as much so as they strode and bowled and tumbled on, across, through, and under the set. They brought us love, they brought us war, they brought us betrayal and Gods: they brought us blood, and by the end had all of us.

The set held other secrets, too: through our phones we tied ourselves to the play in surprising ways. This city is celebrating many things this year; one of them is robots, and this was a play with robots. I will say, though, caution. These are not those kinds of robots. Their role in the production was a careful thing, quiet, gentle, well done.

Somewhere in there, the sun set behind them; somewhere in there, the fireflies rose up to add their own accompaniment. There was mist that wrapped us as darkness fell. I grinned like an idiot when we clapped for the players as they thanked us from their stage, and we clapped for a long, long time, even as the players disappeared laughing into the darkness. After, we took the careful walk back down the hill, passed from torch to torch now lit to show our way, stepping out into Pittsburgh through a simple metal gate.

Quantum Theater is staging a production of Cymbeline. I thought it wonderful. I recommend it well.