Days of Transition

North Carolina News

2011-10-01T18:10:00.002-04:00

This story won't make it to national news, but I know some of you will be interested.

The Republicans who were ushered into the state legislature as a result of the 2010 midterm elections lost no time reviving the same-sex marriage issue. They have scheduled a state-wide referendum on a constitutional amendment which declares marriage to be a union between one man and one woman. A majority of North Carolinians, 56%, are against such an amendment; this number has held steady over the past several years. More Republicans than Democrats are in favor of the amendment, however, as might be expected.

The Republican sponsors of the amendment scheduled the vote on this referendum to take place during the May primaries. Obama is running unopposed. Guess who will not be showing up at the polls in droves to vote in the primaries?

The majority of the citizens of North Carolina are against this marriage amendment, but the majority will not vote. The Republicans know this and have cynically rigged the outcome, the will of the majority be damned.

And my Republican friends wonder why I don't join them.....

WEATHER DRAMA IN THE ALBEMARLE

2011-08-30T10:50:00.004-04:00

On Saturday, August 27, Irene came to call as promised. For a week, we had been hearing about this major hurricane that appeared to be following the classic northeasterly path, laying waste to the islands of the Caribbean. As the days passed, we watched as it drifted substantially eastward, sparing, for once, the Florida coast, but bearing straight down on the Outer Banks, the barrier islands of North Carolina. Lovely as they are, those unstable sandbars where never serious contenders when we thought of moving to North Carolina. We settled instead on what is called the “Inner Banks,” the land directly north and west of the Albemarle Sound, off the Little River, which is one of the 5 major rivers that drain northeastern North Carolina and feed the Sound. (A “sound” is basically a bay. Chesapeake Bay could be called Chesapeake Sound and it would mean the same thing. Rehoboth Bay? Rehoboth Sound. That’s the easiest way to think of it. North Carolina's two major sounds, Albemarle and Pamlico, are enormous bodies of water that separate mainland North Carolina from the Outer Banks and the Atlantic Ocean.) We decided on this inland area because it is inland, relatively protected from the coast-hugging storms that frequent this part of the country at any time of the year. As unpleasant as Irene turned out to be, it could have been a lot worse, judging from the damage sustained on the Outer Banks themselves. We definitely made the right choice.

But of course we didn’t know that as we watched Irene approach. We had already experienced two major storms here: the already-legendary nor’easter of November, 2009, while we were still in the Edenton rental house, and Tropical Storm Nicole in September of 2010. It was during Nicole that we first witnessed two opposing phenomena: first our back yard filled with water as Lunker Creek, normally a gentle meander but now swollen with rain and pushed by the wind, crept ever higher into the wetlands that surround the rear of our house and eventually into the back yard; and then, as the eye passed and the wind reversed, the water disappeared from the yard and indeed, from the creek itself. It was the most graphic illustration imaginable of the wind tides (as opposed to the lunar tides the rest of the world is familiar with) that drive the waters around here.

Could Irene be any worse? Well, yes. For one thing, there’s always Hurricane Isabel to remember. This 2003 storm is the local benchmark for meteorological devastation, and our more seasoned neighbors always have it in mind when they hear of the approach of another Big One. We’ve seen the pictures of downed ancient trees and ruined homes; their fear is well-founded. And then of course there were the frantic reports of the TV talking heads, without which no storm of any consequence is complete. We hung on to their every word, avidly watching the various modeled storm tracks. On Friday, the day before the storm hit, we were told that it would make landfall early the next morning on the Outer Banks as a Category 2 storm (with winds of 96-110 mph), and then, strengthened as it made its 13 mph procession northeast over the local intra-coastal waters and got closer to us, momentarily increase to a Category 3 (111-130 mph). Whew!

By the time we heard that, we had already prepared as much as we could. We laid in extra food, secured in one way or another anything outside that could move, taped all the floor-to-ceiling glass doors that line the back of our house, and primed the generator (and stocked 25 gallons of gasoline to run it—we could have limped along on lights, fans, the gas cooktop and the TV for weeks). The thought of leaving never entered our minds--we wanted to be here in case anything untoward did happen so that we could remedy it on the spot. We’d never have rested easy worrying about our boat, porch furniture, etc., from a distance. We felt secure in our decision to ride it out for several reasons. We knew that this house was well-constructed and would weather the storm. We also knew that it was built high enough off the ground so that for creek water to breach the back deck, much less enter the house, this storm would have to be of truly horror-movie proportions. As worrisome as all the reports were, they never indicated anything approaching that magnitude. Last, but by no means least, we have a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) here, neighbors who have had specific training to deal with these very eventualities and offer their informed assistance. (We mean to take that training ourselves; unfortunately the most recent was the day after we’d hosted a big neighborhood party and could barely motivate ourselves out the door. This storm clearly demonstrated the usefulness of the training. Next time!) Storms, no matter how big, don’t last forever. We felt safe.

Saturday morning dawned blustery and very rainy. Our weather station, which measures conditions at the end of our dock, had collected about 3 inches of rain overnight, but the water at that time had not yet gotten into our yard. We lost electric power at about 9 AM, but the generator kept us going, and phone and internet service were so far uninterrupted. I spent much of the morning taking pictures and posting up-to-the-minute progress reports to our far-flung friends and family on Facebook. (Steve donned in his yellow slicker suit and took movies outside.) Internet and phone service went down at about noon, and then our only connection with the outside was the TV and very spotty cellphone service. (Up to then, I had been so prompt with my Facebook updates that I really became more concerned about our friends worrying about us than about anything in our immediate situation.)

The storm continued glacially upon its path and the hours rolled by. It had weakened to Category 1 (74-95 mph) by landfall (which occurred almost exactly where predicted) and never gained strength over the Sound, but the wind and rain were still steady and ferocious. The one bit of excitement for the rest of the day was around food (of course): I had planned on roasting a chicken for dinner but we discovered right away that the generator couldn’t support the draw of the electric oven. The generator conked out and it seemed to take forever to figure out how to make it work again. (We were neglecting a pivotal circuit breaker.) I ended up frying a 6 lb. bird. (Today’s chickens are regular Dolly Partons—it’s a mystery to me how they can stand on their spindly chicken legs carrying all that breast meat.)

Between 4 and 5 PM the eye passed us, over the Sound to the southeast of Elizabeth City. That’s quite near us but we did not have that other-worldly experience of seeing the clear blue sky and utter calm of the eye when it is directly upon you. The rain subsided a bit and the sky lightened, but we remained in storm conditions. We finally tired of the incessant yakking of the weather people on TV, so we watched a movie. By the time night fell, we knew that the wind had reversed and the storm was moving on. Steve suited up and took a flashlight to the end of the dock, and came back to report that the creek was emptying. That was the best news of the day, a sure sign that the worst was over. At around 9 PM, the house was still feeling clammy and too warm, and we were wondering how sleeping would be without air conditioning. As if on cue, the humidity and the temperature dropped as the strong back winds of the storm came in from the northwest. Sleeping was wonderful.

Sunday dawned gray but relatively dry, and with the normalization of the wind, the creek had filled up again, temporarily rain-swollen. (Our weather station had collected a total of 6.5 inches of rain.) Water was about 4 feet into our back yard at 7 AM; by the end of the day it had mostly receded and now, Tuesday, everything is where it’s supposed to be.

We came through pretty much unscathed, with one skinny, already-dead tree down in the wooded area of the front, and another tree and a couple of large wax myrtles fallen in the wetland on the south side of the house. The cleanup still feels massive, however, what with all the downed limbs and pine tails littering everywhere the eye falls. We got half of the front cleaned yesterday; today’s rain gives us a rest from all that stooping and loading. We’ll get back to work tomorrow and by the time we’re done it will be looking like nothing ever happened. (We are creating the mother of all burn piles, however!) The neighborhood as a whole came through well, and luckily Isabel remains a benchmark as yet unmatched. There are some downed trees here and there, and a couple large ones actually uprooted in the common area near the community boat ramp. But all the houses are undamaged and the main thoroughfare was never impassable due to downed trees.

We are all safe and sound, thanks to the vagaries of Mother Nature’s steering currents, and to the planning inspired and advised by our ever-wonderful neighbors. The wisdom, born of hard experience, of our “pioneers,” (anyone who’s been here longer than us!), and their willingness to share it, is priceless. We never want to go through something like Hurricane Irene again, but of course, we will, and there’s no doubt some future storm will be worse. We chose to live in this storm-prone region. How lucky we are to be in such a community.

My Comment to Congress

2011-07-18T14:29:00.001-04:00

On Wednesday July 20, Congress will be reconsidering DOMA (the "Defense of Marriage Act," one of Bill Clinton's most disastrous "third-way" compromises) for the first time since it was enactted 15 years ago. The Human Rights Campaign asked for comments from those whom this inhumane law affects directly. Here's what I said:

I am a 65-year-old federal retiree in a same-sex domestic partnership of 32 years. Because of DOMA, my partner is not eligible for any survivor benefits from me, nor can I add him to my health insurance. In order to ensure that he is looked after if I should die first, I have been forced by this situation to take out a life insurance policy. As to health benefits: He has a chronic health issue which we must cover in the individual insurance market at exorbitant rates; in fact, as I write, he is in severe pain which we cannot treat because on the individual market he cannot get coverage for the condition for a year. Members of congress: I am on the exact same FEHBP as you; imagine yourselves in this ridiculous position to know my frustration. The federal government is shooting itself in the foot with this outdated law, discouraging talented potential civil servants from applying for employment because they happen to be gay and can get humane treatment for their family members in the private sector. For heaven's sake drag yourselves into the 21st century.

What a trip!

2011-07-15T14:56:00.011-04:00

This promises to be a long read, so sit back. I've italicized some place names in case you want to scroll through to things that interest you more, and I've also linked the places either to a corresponding Picasa album, or to websites about them. Click on anything underlined to find some kind of link.

We returned from our big road trip this past Tuesday, July 12. We put 2500 miles on my little 2001 Prizm and it's still running like a top. First, we traveled from here, in the extreme northeast corner of North Carolina, to Raleigh, in the middle of the state, and from there to Asheville and Hendersonville in the far west. (If we were to go directly from here to Asheville, it would be the equivalent in miles to the distance between here and New York City. That's how long North Carolina is.) And we went on from there.

We visited our friend Ann in Raleigh who, even after all the times we'd been there, managed to come up with new things to show us. The North Carolina Museum of Art there is a cutting-edge design second to none, affording me, at least, one of the most satisfying museum experiences of any kind I've ever had. The stark white, rectangular simplicity of its exterior almost hides the fact that its sides are actually a series of louvers, set to open and close automatically depending on the intensity of the sun. The interior is also full of subtle but cutting-edge technological advances, all in exclusive service, like the space itself, to the art on display; there is nothing to draw the eye elsewhere. The collection is big and representative of every art form or era you can think of, from Egyptian sarcophagi to Greek sculpture to Roman glass, on through Meso-American, all the stages of Eurpoean, and on and on. If you are ever in Raleigh, visit this museum. You won't be disappointed; I've merely skimmed the surface of its features. Also in Raleigh, we visited the arboretum at NC State--useful for us to see what grows best here.

We had several revelations on this trip. The next was Asheville, North Carolina. If it were nearer the coast, and despite all the love and hard work we've put into where we are now, we'd move there in a heartbeat. What a fun, funky place! A mid-sized city of about 70,000, it's nestled beautifully in various valleys of the Blue Ridge and has as many fun things to look at and do as cities twice its size, only it's better, precisely because it is smaller and very accessible. Our hosts were Frank and Rick, old friends from Arlington--the guys who were the surrogate parents for our cats and kept us looking decent with good haircuts--who up and decided to move to North Carolina (but too far away!) about a year after we did. Features: restaurants, restaurants and more restaurants. We counted three Thai restaurants in as many blocks on one street. Architecture: Asheville crashed hard in 1929, after being home to the Vanderbilts and their ilk. It could never afford urban renewal; as a result, it is a city where, architecturally, time stood still. It has one of the highest concentrations of authentic art deco design in the country, buildings have been restored to their original luster, and are not mere museum pieces but are full of bustling life. Street life: the Friday night drumming circle must be experienced. It starts out simply enough in the main park downtown. As the evening progresses, it becomes more and more crowded, until towards midnight people are grooving shoulder-to-shoulder to the constantly-evolving beat. Sheer joy. On top of all that general grooviness, there are street musicians and performance artists on every corner. It's New York, it's New Orleans, and it's in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains. What a place! (And I dare not forget to mention The Grove Park Inn, a fabulous stone-faced structure built into the side of a mountain in 1913 and serving only the most elite clientele ever since. We were allowed in to avail ourselves of the buffet there--our first major pig-out of the trip. You simply couldn't stop yourself from going back for more, the dishes were so varied and so well-prepared.)

While in Asheville, we also took two major tours of Biltmore, the summer retreat built by George Vanderbilt. It's a beautiful place worth the time (and considerable expense to get in). Not only is it architecturally interesting, the reforestation of the surrounding land required post-construction gave birth to the American forestry movement. The "Cradle of Forestry" museum is nearby.

From Asheville we traveled about 20 miles down I-26 to the small city of Hendersonville, NC, where Peace Corps buddy Chuck and his wife Sandy hosted us in their gorgeous log home high on a wooded hill, and gave us a big dose of the mountains we had only looked at while in Asheville. We hiked to various waterfalls and peaks (in particular Chimney Rock) and got the workouts we were beginning to need after that Grove Park Inn orgy. All in all these two stops gave us a welcome megadose of Western North Carolina, causing us to marvel at the diversity of this state, from the flat, hot coastal plain we call home to the beautiful, green and rolling countryside out west.

Next stop: five hours west to Nashville. We fell in love with the place. It has great energy, almost entirely devoted to show business. We did the obligatory tours of the Country Music Hall of Fame and the home of the Grand Ole Opry, Ryman Auditorium. (Even if you aren't a country music fan, these places are iconic parts of the American cultural landscape and deserve attention. And some of the huge names associated with them--Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Conway Twitty--really transcend genre and are simply great in their own right.) Both these places were amazingly tourist-friendly, with photographs allowed everywhere, even inside the Ryman. The Hall of Fame tour included RCA's Studio B, where Elvis and other pop music legends created the sound tracks of most of our lives. The very Steinway grand on which Floyd Cramer played "Last Date" stands there in the middle of the room, and anyone is free to sit at it and doodle. There's no telling how many times the strings on that baby have been replaced, but the warm sound was familiar.

Aside from the expected tourist haunts we were also lucky enough to have had a real, live honky-tonk recommended to us in the beating heart of the city, on Broadway. Broadway in Nashville is a combination of Bourbon Street and Times Square, crammed by night with rowdy people rubbing shoulders as they snake up and down the sidewalks lined with storefronts. From every one of these doorways pours the sound of the best of the young musicians who've made their way to this music mecca, reaching for the brass ring, singing and playing their hearts out. We found our way to Robert's Western World, where the Don Kelley Band and an incredible 24-year-old guitarist, JD Simo, play. (The last song in the set in the linked video features him playing a "Ghost Riders in the Sky" the likes of which you won't see anywhere else.) Without question, Simo is the current generation's answer to Clapton, Richards and Hendrix. He is mesmerizing; we'll be hearing much more from him. Robert's Western World charges no minimum and provides free refills of non-alcoholic drinks. They serve burgers and fries; the bands make money there literally by passing the tip jar. (They all have regular, paying jobs in music--they just come to Robert's to keep their performing mojo in shape.) Our only complaint about Robert's was the volume. It's a tiny room but it is amped for an arena. The musicians were wearing ear plugs; they should have been provided for the audience, too. For a while there I was half expecting my ears to start bleeding, but they didn't, and we stayed because the band, and especially JD, was so damn good!

We loved Nashville and will be back, but July 4 beckoned, so we headed north to Cincinnati, to be with still more dear friends, Michele and John John's the cook; Michele, who was a Peace Corps volunteer with me in the same city in Ghana, is the hostess with the mostess. We had a relaxing and well-fed sojourn there, with just a couple of outings. One day was spent on a drive in the countryside along the Ohio River, where we saw Ulysses Grant's birthplace (it was closed) and then took a ferry across the river into Kentucky and the quaint waterfront town of Augusta, where a shrine to Rosemary Clooney has been erected. Clooney was originally from down the road in Maysville, but toward the end of her life she used this little house in Augusta as a retreat. Sad to say that aside from being able to say we've seen it, there isn't much to recommend this place. The house is entirely filled with Clooney's career memorabilia, with no attempt at all to re-create how it looked when she was in it. There are some rather yummy pictures of nephew Georgie as a very young man, and the docent has some interesting stories to tell. But in our opinion this attraction is not all it could be and would take second place to any other diversion you may have in mind.

Our next took stop took us across Ohio and just over the Pennsylvania line to Pittsburgh, and the nearby, iconic attraction of the Frank Lloyd Wright house, Fallingwater. Pittsburgh itself was another revelation, with hilltop views to rival those of San Francisco, looking down on gleaming, adventurous new architecture along its three rivers. Andy Warhol was from Pittsburgh, and the museum there devoted to his life and work is definitely worth the time it takes to explore its seven easily-navigated floors. And you must take the Monongahela Incline, a tram that carries you up the side of Mount Washington to Grandview Avenue and a series of breathtaking views of the city. It's hard to believe that with its smoke and coal dust (the U.S. bituminous coal industry got its start here) Pittsburgh was until recently one of the darkest and most unhealthy places in the country; those Grandview Avenue sights were barely visible.

And then there is Fallingwater. Brilliantly conceived and engineered outside, it is downright uncomfortable inside for anyone over 5'10" tall, and dark, to boot. Wright was 5'8" on a good day and built to his own scale (which he modestly referred to as "human"), right down to installing permanent benches in the great room that are so low to the floor they would present difficulties climbing off of for anyone of average height. He liked rooms to be havens of space and light, so he constructed the hallways between them to resemble caves, creating rooms that would seem to burst open as they were entered. In the guest room, my 6'4" frame literally could not extend itself to its full height. Fallingwater is far off the usually trodden path, a good hour southeast of Pittsburgh, beautifully situated in rhododendron-strewn hills. Despite this remoteness, its fame and the Wright mystique draw thousands yearly; we experienced it as a very busy place. Reservations are required; children under 6 years of age are not allowed. We were disappointed--Wright's hubris is evident throughout--but still recommend it as a destination, if only to see it in person and, if you are of a certain limited stature, actually enjoy being inside it.

Our next stop was a short hop from western Pennsylvania to Reading, in the east-central part of the state, to visit a nephew of Steve's. Reading is on the fringes of Pennsylvania Dutch country, and one of the main attractions we looked forward to was the Kutztown Folk Festival, hoping to find a Penn-Dutch hex sign to add a splash of color to our house. We need a big one--3 feet across--and didn't see any in that size that caught our fancy, so we'll end up buying one online anyway. The festival itself was fun, though, the biggest county fair you've ever seen, on steroids. It was definitely worth the trip. The big surprise for us about the Reading area is that it is a haven for antiques. We stumbled upon the city of Adamstown, which has more antique malls than we'd ever seen in one place. And that is "malls," not mere single stores. We did two of these malls and it took us 4 hours to look at everything. We found a jewel, too: a beautiful Murano glass bird for only $48. (But we found another one even cheaper--see below!)

Adamstown and its antique malls must be copying its bigger neighbor, Reading, when it comes to shopping, however. Reading, in case you didn't know, is the place where outlet malls got their start. The Vanity Fair Outlet Village sits atop a long rise in Reading, dominating the town like some Acropolis of the commercial. It must be seen to be believed.

From central Pennsylvania we headed off to our last stop, a very short drive into Sussex County, Delaware, where we visited another dear Peace Corps buddy, Marilyn, and her husband Wayne. We had a chance to visit our old haunts there, including two favorite antique shops in Millsboro, and the now-vacant lot, part of somebody's front yard, that was once our beloved little postage stamp with its trailer, where we spent 4 glorious summers. We took a day trip down to Berlin, MD, where we visited yet another couple of antique shops (and we found another Murano bird--this one for only $18!) and had lunch at the Atlantic Hotel--all old, friendly favorites ready for a visit. Marilyn and Wayne were the perfect hosts, great, relaxing, funny company. We walked the boardwalk at Bethany, and they sent us off with a wonderful picnic breakfast on the beach. It was the perfect ending to a perfect trip.

Humility

2011-04-28T11:23:00.000-04:00

This started out as a rare day, one with absolutely nothing planned. I got the idea to take a lot of pictures of the front yard and post them for you. I've been telling everybody about all the hard work we've been doing; might as well show the fruits of that labor. So I took the pictures early this morning, uploaded them, and posted them everywhere to my non-blog friends. Then came the wonderful responses, then came lunch, and then came something unexpected: the owner of the lot next door, whom we've never met, is having his land cleared. The sound of such industry drew us out to see what was happening, and what this heretofore heavily wooded expanse would give in the way of construction possibilities. (So far it appears to be a lovely piece of land.) And now here we are, it's 1:30 PM, several hours after I meant to sit down and do what I'm doing now. See why I haven't been writing much? Even when nothing is planned, life happens. And no matter what else you may think of that, it must be admitted it's much better state of affairs than the alternative.

* * *

Next day: OK, I'm back. Got waylaid with a trip to town, then dinner, etc., etc...

I want to thank all of you for your gently applied but steady pressure on me to keep writing. It makes me believe that all that stuff I wrote in the years before this big life change must have meant something to quite a few someones, and for that I am flattered and humbled. I wish I were a more dedicated writer and could just shut the rest of life off for an hour or two each day to produce something. If I were single (or had all those hours alone during the day, as I did before we moved here) there's no doubt these pages would be fuller. But what I call "F&B life" (for "flesh-and-blood") goes on relentlessly in this partnership, and it appears to have more compelling calls than this does, when calls there are. And so I write less. I've never been one to say "never"; I will not simply end the blog, because that would be as much of a promise to keep to as any other, and I know I will always want a place to write when the spirit moves. So I will slog along, even if my readers dwindle down to a mere two or three.

The discovery of a "gay scene" here in one of the notches of the Bible Belt has been gradual and very interesting for us. While we are perfectly happy with each others' company and that of the everyday people with whom we come in contact, it's still nice to have a stable of friends with similar life experiences, whatever they may be, to call upon. I've often remarked upon the kind helpfulness of the people we've met here. What I haven't mentioned is the fact that that helpfulness even extends all the way to helping us find other gay people (though the word "gay" is never uttered). First, our cross-creek neighbors made it their mission to introduce us to the guys who run The Onley Place up in Belvidere--the former square dance caller and his partner who now own and operate this wonderful, well-attended performance venue. We have had a couple of fun, laughter-filled evenings with them and see the possibility of a good friendship. Another time a painter, contracted by our builder to do some touch-up work, asked us, in the course of general conversation while he was here, if we "got around" much. Not knowing where he was going with that question, we answered that yes, we'd been here a while and had explored up and down the Albemarle, etc., etc., but he said, "No, I mean have you gotten to know any people, you know, folks you guys could hang out with." The light came on. It was amazing. This kind man, a total stranger, apparently saw us from a mile away and wanted to help us. He told us about another couple who live right up in Hertford. One of them is the main hairdresser for the ladies--and some men--of the county (wouldn't you know??? But stereotypes do have factual basis!); his partner is a mail man. The painter told them about us--gave them a call while he was here, as a matter of fact (big news!!)--and we eventually got around to making a haircut appointment and met them. So not only did we get the best haircuts we've had since we've lived here, but we've expanded our circle of gay friends by two, thanks to this kindness of a stranger. (We actually have haircuts scheduled for late this afternoon and then will go out to dinner with the guys. Blanche Dubois must be smiling from wherever she resides between Streetcar productions.)

I have had a pipe dream of gathering enough gay people here to have a good dinner party like the ones we used to have in Arlington. I envisioned myself as the keeper of a sort of salon, introducing interesting people to each other. Of course, it took very few conversations to realize that, this being a relatively small community, most of the gay people around here already know each other. Not only that, but they have definite opinions about each other, too, so you have to be careful about who sits with whom. I'd been naively thinking that in my big-city way I could create a network of gay people in this place, so benighted before our arrival. But no. We are entering a community already well established, and we'll have to learn to fit in with them, not they with each other. Lessons in humility are never out of date.

We are expecting our share of the big storms that have been marching across the South this week. Right now it's only partly overcast, but the wind is strong and it's clear something is on its way. We dodged a few bullets two weeks ago when tornado warnings were issued for a line very close to us. So far no dire warnings, but you never know....

A night on the town

2011-03-21T10:10:00.003-04:00

Friday night we went out with our new friends Gene and Steve to see the Belvidere Wagon Train. This historical observance, interesting in its own right, had the feel of a country fair, with happy crowds strolling among musicians and food vendors. It was a beautiful, warm evening that served as a great excuse for us to get together and to know each other better.

It's stretching things a bit to call Belvidere a "town"--it's more a collection of houses with a store, a restaurant, and a post office. But what a store and what a restaurant! The grocery carries all the staples you would expect in a country store and is unremarkable until you work your way back to where the meats are kept. There, your eyes suddenly feast upon hanging rows of hams, pork bellies, poultry and sausages smoked on the premises, and a cold-case full of beautiful steaks, cuts of pork, and home-made sausage. We didn't buy anything but I was reminded of the old joke about the lady standing in line at a fast food restaurant who says, pointing at the menu posted on the wall, "I'll just have side orders--that side and that side." I wanted it all!

The restaurant is in a converted historic home and serves excellent, homemade southern-style cooking at low prices, a good place to go for a simple, well-prepared meal if we don't feel like cooking. (And as for that post office: it serves all the people dotted in farms and homesteads within a radius of many square miles, so it is consequential despite its smallness. Its closure, if that ever happened for misguided reasons of economy, would create hardship for many.)

Both Gene and Steve are locals born and bred, with roots that go all the way back to the original English settlers in the region. Steve is, among many other things, a history buff, and has become the go-to person for anyone doing research on the area. (I joke with him that he is the local historical society, but for all intents and purposes he is precisely that, since the actual institution does not yet exist in the county.) He has traced real estate records and family trees deep into history; a drive with him along the back roads of this rural county--roads and scenery where the uninitiated would see nothing but endless fields dotted with occasional houses in various states of liveability--becomes as fascinating as a tour of any city.

The evening also had its share of big laughs, thanks in part to the fact that Steve has so many aunts and uncles. Practically everyone he passes, it seems, is a cousin. Once, as we passed some antique artifact, Steve said, "My cousin made that." He forgave me for observing that he seems to be related not only to every person in the county, but every thing.

The guys are in the middle of a project Steve and I know only too well: the re-creation and customization of a very old house into something that will be completely their own. As they walked us through the rambling old place, showing us rooms both original and added on, and walls that were put in to create new spaces, we felt we were in very familiar territory. They still have a way to go, but they have plenty of time, and the finished parts are on their way to being a comfortable place they can be proud of.

Of course, for all the familiarity, there are some differences from what we had in Arlington. Our old place just had a small yard with bird feeders in the back. Steve and Gene have a collection of peacocks, some chickens, a horse and a jackass--which they've tried to mate to get a mule, but the mare is so far having none of that--in addition to the usual dogs and cats. The closest we ever got to anything that exotic was the neighbor's pot-bellied pig, who occasionally escaped his back yard enclosure for forays into our petunia patch. When we called Animal Control, we had to repeat the story a couple of times before anybody would believe us. Here, Animal Control wouldn't even be involved--heck, I'm not sure it even exists. The critters belong where they are and nobody bats an eye.

Making sense

2011-03-15T11:11:00.002-04:00

This coming Saturday, the 19th of March, we will be in this house for one year. We mentioned this milestone to one of our neighbors the other day, and she said, "it seemed it took you forever to get here, and now it seems you've been here forever."

She was right. Those of you who accompanied us on the roller-coaster that brought us here know only too well what that "forever" was like. And now, since neither Steve nor I can stand to live in situations that seem only temporary, it does feel like we've been here forever. The house has that lived-in look. We were quick to fill the walls with our favorite things, from pictures to shelves of art glass that we have collected over the years--old friends which, for as long as we're both alive, belong nowhere else. The outside is still a work in progress (as it always will be), but the dreamed-of sweep of green in the front is now a reality, the splashes of color we wanted dotting the landscape are appearing, and the incredible natural diversity of the waterfront--a diversity made visible by the work we put into clearing out the invasive wax myrtle--is an endless pleasure. These early spring days are, in a word, delicious. We've had a few 70-degree days, when the breezes are perfect and the views in every direction are stunning, and we pinch ourselves to make sure this beauty is actually our reality.

We visited our old house in Arlington a few weeks ago. The new owners are wonderful, so respectful of the work we left behind, careful to remain true to our design, while looking to put on their own stamp, as well they should. They've done well by it. The place looks beautiful, but we were both struck by how small it is. The front and back yards combined would fit into our back yard alone here, and the house itself seemed tiny, like a dollhouse, a miniature. Without our realizing it, our personal horizons have broadened. As big a space as 2.5 acres is, it seems normal now. Driving 15 miles to the grocery store, the idea of which was once daunting--even irritating--is as nothing now. I do it nearly every day. We do still miss the compactness of the waterways in Delaware, where we could hop in our boat and actually go somewhere, to Lewes for lunch or out to Rehoboth Bay and be joined by hoards of others enjoying the water just like us, but the wilderness of the upper reaches of the Little River here, with its countless osprey nests, its wildlife sightings, and the seasonal changes in the landscape, more than compensates.

And yet there is more on my mind these days than mere rhapsody. Life in all of its chaos is upon us. Even as I revel in my own surroundings, horror, both man-made and natural, dominates the news. Events in the Middle East started out with such hope. Hope still exists, but at the same time Libya reminds us of the cruelty humans can visit upon each other. As I write, parts of Japan seem to be at a previously unimagined precipice, a possible nuclear holocaust even worse than the bombs we dropped on them 65 years ago. In our own country, events in Wisconsin and Michigan are distressing, and our national congress--the people we elected to represent our interests--are forever mired in grandstanding, constant electioneering, tossing red meat to "the base," interested, it seems, only in their own short-term survival as politicians instead of the welfare of the nation. We long for the "good old days," as if they ever existed.....

Like Candide, I cultivate my own garden. If I can create beauty for myself perhaps my example will influence others. It's all I can do; I am otherwise powerless over the Qaddafis of the world, the earthquakes, the nuclear meltdowns, the craven ignorance of the powerful. Beauty and its opposite have always existed simultaneously. "How can this be?" is a useless question--it just is. The best we can do is make our own sense of the senseless.

Eating

2011-01-26T15:29:00.003-05:00

A favorite story of my mother's ran thus: mere weeks after I was born, long before I was supposed to be on solid food, I cried all the time. She took me to the doctor, who took a look at me and simply said, "he's hungry." (Dr. Davis, my pediatrician, had already demonstrated great wisdom by pronouncing, as soon as I made my entry into the world, that I would grow to be 6 feet, 3 inches. I beat him by a mere inch). So my mother hauled me home, filled her baby bottles with oatmeal, cut the nipples off the bottles to allow me easy access, and I shut up. I've been eating on demand ever since.

I was lucky in that my mother, while not a "gourmet" cook (this was a rarefied designation during her 1940s and -50s heyday) was adventurous. She loved onions and was never afraid of garlic. She gave us milky oyster stew and smoked finnan haddie as a matter of course--these seafood delicacies were things she herself had grown up with. I can remember when oregano made its first appearance in our house--she called it or-a-GA-no, thinking it had come from Oregon, I guess--and it went into anything Italian. She loved eggplant but nobody else in the family did, so she went without until those breaded eggplant sticks went on the market. We all loved them. And then there were Chef Boyardee Raviolis. (Yes, raviolis. Who knew "ravioli" was the plural in Italian?) She opened up a can of them for lunch one day and I was hooked for life--I could barely stop eating them then, and as a guilty pleasure I will very occasionally snarf down a can even now.

As I entered my double-digit years I became interested in the sandwiches my parents made for their weekend lunches. There came a day when I decided I was tired of cream cheese and jelly and I asked my mother to make me a sandwich like the ones the grownups were having. She came up with a comely pile consisting of Lebanon bologna, Swiss cheese, onion, mustard, and lettuce, encased in two big slices of pumpernickel. It was my favorite sandwich for years. It's only in retrospect that I marvel that these exotic ingredients--smoky and sharp Lebanon bologna, pumpernickel bread--were regular fixtures in our suburban 1950s kitchen, but then again, they were always available in the plain old A&P store where my mother shopped. (So was liverwurst, another relative rarity today.) Maybe these foods were entirely run-of-the-mill back then and they only seem exotic now, since we have become so conscious and afraid of cured meats. Nobody eats these things any more. More's the pity, but I have to admit we are having fewer heart attacks.

Given this happy and loving relationship with food, it's only natural that I should have become a cook. My mother started me off down that road, too, leaving dinner ingredients in the kitchen for me to prepare when she and my father went out on a Friday night. I started cooking for myself in earnest when I finally got into off-campus housing in college. A favorite recipe was the "Pepper Steak" in a Good Housekeeping meats cookbook I found at a grocery checkout counter somewhere in the 1960s. I put the name of the dish in quotes because it wasn't fancy French steak au poivre--no, this was just round steak cut into strips and cooked in a tomato sauce with green peppers. Over rice. Delicious! And I had a favorite comfort food decades before that term ever even came into use: beef stew. I clearly remember calling my sister from my attic apartment on Maxwell Street in Lexington, Kentucky, where I was going to school, asking her how to make it.

As I moved into adulthood, I became friends with people who were actual gourmet cooks. They helped me put a few fine points on my native appreciation for good eats. And then came Julia Child and her inestimable influence on American foodways. She ushered in a true culinary revolution for which I, for one, was completely prepared. I and millions of others have been kids in the candy store (no pun intended but it is cute) ever since.

The very best part of this love affair with food, for me, was the fact that for the first three decades of my life I maintained the metabolism of a teenager. I stayed rail-thin no matter what I ate, or how much--there was never any penalty to pay for these profligate eating habits I was born with. It was only as I entered my 40s that I began to notice that my clothes were becoming tight in all the wrong places, and I was presented with a problem many people have always had but I was flummoxed by: I was gaining weight. At first it was a novelty, but soon enough it became a nuisance and a grave matter of vanity. Ralph Cherry? Fat? No way. My first encounter with the word "slender" was when I overheard my Aunt Grace use it in reference to me. I was less than 10 and I had to ask what it meant. "Thin" isn't just what I am, it's who I am.

So I came to sensible eating habits and exercise relatively late in life--and again, I was helped in these endeavors by the national revolution in health-consciousness that seemed to come hand-in-glove the fore-mentioned culinary awakening. I have ceded a few pounds to the years through compromise: I am not a natural exerciser, and if the weather doesn't allow me to take my usual strenuous walk I go without; and, dammit, I love my food! I've come to a way of thinking that sometimes allows food to be mere nutrition: breakfast is always nonfat yogurt with some fresh fruit (unless we are splurging on a Sunday brunch), and lunch is usually a salad, even when dining out. We do not have the usual American snacks in the house. No cookies, no crackers, no crunchy grease flavored with salt in plastic bags. My reward for all this discipline is dinner, which most times is cooked by me, and I let myself go with it.

The hardest things to deal with when you're perpetually trying to be "good" are the Christmas holidays, and visits with friends who are also good cooks. I enjoy baking but never do it because there are only two of us to feed, and a typical cake or batch of cookies will blimp us out in no time. I had great fun over the recent holidays making five different kinds of cookies to give away to our neighbors. I exercised some neglected kitchen muscles and we even saved ourselves a few cookies.

Cooking friends are something else again. How do you say "no" to the offer of yet more cookie recipes or a couple of jars of to-die-for home-made pimento cheese spread? Politely, I hope, and in the full and respectful knowledge that we're all just trying to share the love. All I have to do is try to button my pants to remember that too much "love" renders normal clothes downright uncomfortable and makes me short of breath going up the stairs.

FOOD!

2011-01-16T12:51:00.000-05:00

Bev's Potato Frittata

OK it's not Friday, but the food muse calls. I finally made something new this morning that's worth sharing, and since we're going on a little trip to Raleigh at the end of the week I won't even be here to put this up as a Food Friday post, so you're getting it now.

This stick-to-your-ribs breakfast dish is what I always ordered at our favorite Sunday morning breakfast joint back in our Delaware days. We'd drive into Rehoboth Beach to visit what we called "Bev's" after the proprietor. The place did have a formal name, but we never really knew what it was. It was attached to a motel on Wilmington Avenue, in the second block back from the beach. Bev always had a cheerful greeting at the door for us and, after taking care of other customers, she'd stop by our table and bring us up to date on the current conditions of the restaurant biz in that tourist town, and on the indignities visited upon her by the owner of the mobile home park where she lived. (The owner was a famous local fat cat about whom it was great fun to dish. You loved to hate him.) We were shocked the first time we went there after a season away to discover Bev had sold the place to her next-door competitor and retired. We never had a chance to say goodbye. Now, Bev's is gone and the lady herself is no longer a part of our life, but she lives on in this dish.

This frittata incorporates all the traditional "big breakfast" ingredients into a single, artery-clogging masterpiece. It has your sausage, your bacon, your eggs, your cheese, your home-fries with onions and peppers all right there. It's a once-every-few-months extravagance...and if you have a cholesterol problem there are low-fat substitutes.

The sugar in the potatoes adds depth of flavor and helps them brown.

For the eggs:

6 slices bacon

3 breakfast sausage links (I use hot links with sage), cut into chunks

6 eggs

1/2 cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated

1/3 cup chicken stock

1/2 tsp salt

pepper to taste

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

For the potatoes:

2 tsp. olive oil

3 small Yukon gold potatoes, cut into small chunks (I don't peel them--up to you)

1 medium onion, coarsely chopped

1/2 large red or green bell pepper, coarsely chopped

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp sugar

pepper to taste

Cook bacon until crisp in a large oven-proof skillet, remove to paper towels to drain. Crumble bacon. Pour off excess bacon fat from skillet but do not clean skillet. In same skillet, cook sausage chunks until no longer pink, remove and set aside with bacon.

Whisk eggs in a medium bowl, add salt and pepper, stir in grated cheese.

Over medium high heat, bring chicken stock to a boil in the skillet in which bacon and sausage were cooked. Deglaze the skillet, scraping all fond off the bottom of the pan until it is smooth. Continue cooking stock, stirring occasionally, until it has reduced to a syrupy consistency. When thickened, stir into beaten eggs.

Place pat of butter in warm deglazed skillet and allow to melt while preparing potatoes.

Cook potatoes:

Heat olive oil in a non-stick skillet, add potatoes, onions and bell pepper. Sprinkle with salt, sugar and pepper, toss all to combine. Cover tightly and place over medium high heat. Let cook without stirring 5-7 minutes to allow carmelization of potatoes to begin. Lift lid, toss potatoes once or twice to re-distribute, then cover again and allow to cook another 5 minutes without stirring. Repeat this process until potatoes are cooked through and as brown as you want them.

Assemble frittata;

Preheat oven to broil, if your oven requires it, and move an oven rack to a position immediately below the broiler, leaving just enough room for the skillet. Distribute bacon, sausage, and home fries evenly over melted butter in oven-proof skillet. Pour in egg mixture, shake skillet to make sure eggs settle into all crevices between meats and potatoes. Cook over medium heat for 5-7 minutes, or until cheese melts and eggs begin to set. Remove skillet from stovetop and place under broiler, cook for about 5 minutes more, or until top of frittata is set.

Remove skillet from oven and place on a rack, allowing residual heat in the skillet to finish cooking the eggs. Cut into serving-size portions and enjoy.

Words on a cozy day

2011-01-11T10:06:00.000-05:00

If there are ever days designed for staying indoors if you don't have to go out, this is one of them. The sky is leaden, filled with water liquid and solid, both of which forms are now falling upon the landscape simultaneously. The temperature isn't expected to climb out of the 30s. This house, its inviting glass facade designed for more temperate conditions, struggles to remain comfortable. The electric bill covering mid-December to mid-January testifies to the fact that our heat pump has been running almost non-stop. The lovely fireplace, designed mostly just to be that, lovely, does a little bit to remove the chill but sends most of its heat up its flue. So today we are socked in, dressed in fleece and soft woolens.

But this is only one day. Most of the time, though the air is still cold, the sun is bright and it invites us out to survey the scene. And life itself continues to bring smiles.

Yesterday we made the last major purchase that will be done with funds from that hard-earned home equity loan: a new engine for our boat. It's a state-of-the-art machine with less horsepower than the old one (which came with the boat when it was new in 1995) but as much or more get-up-and-go because of improvements in technology. We should be able to do what we always did in the boat, just more quietly and efficiently. The biggest treat will be for our neighbors and the wildlife with whom we share this space: huge clouds of oil smoke will no longer billow from our dock when we start our motor. We felt like we were driving a floating jalopy down the river whenever we started up. Now, with its new seats and engine, the boat is like new. We should be able to take longer trips without fear of engine failure or breaking the bank on fuel.

We have made friends with another gay couple here, both natives of the Albemarle whose roots trace back to the original English settlers and even the local native-Americans. This is a welcome event and, to me, surprisingly significant. We are in no way exclusive in our choice of friends--indeed, our closest friends tend to be childless couples more-or-less our age, hetero and otherwise; we seem to have the most in common with them. What we enjoy most in social life is diversity, and this was something of a discovery, possible only in this new place, where we have found the pool of potential friends to be overwhelmingly white, straight, and older. The homogeneity here made us appreciate--understand, even--the diversity we left behind in Arlington. Our little street was a smorgasboard of people white, of color, straight, gay, young and old. Columbia Pike, the commercial drag a mere stroll away, is a bazaar of multi-ethnic groceries and dining opportunities. We have come to miss that vibrancy, that stimulation. So meeting somebody here who is "diverse" like us is a welcome development. And these guys seem hungry for new blood--they are very clear that they want to cultivate our friendship and we look forward to getting to know them better. We are honored, really, because they are rather famous here for the quarterly "Prairie Home Companion"-style entertainment they write and produce--a showcase for very impressive local talent--at their venue, The Onley Place. They are confirming for us the impression we already had: there are gay people around here but, as with other sensitive personal considerations, such as politics, nobody is in your face about it. They just go about their business like everyone else, just happening to be, in this case, gay. We find this very comfortable because it's exactly the way we've lived our lives all along. We hope we can build a critical mass of gay people around us and then mix them with our "built-in" friends--our white, straight, old but wonderful neighbors--and be one happy group. We want people of color and of different cultures to be a part of the mix, too--they may be harder to come by here, but our doors are open!

An Albemarle Snowfall

2010-12-27T14:26:00.002-05:00

The term "snowed in," after having been used so lightly by us for untold years in Washington, D.C., has demonstrated its literal meaning now that we've experienced a major snowstorm here in the so-called sunny south. Coastal North Carolina received 6.5" of wondrous white in the previous 48 hours, and it wasn't ready for it.

Today was the day to get moving after too many days of that good thing we all dream of: a fire, good food and drink, and a favorite entertainment, be it a beloved movie on TV or a favorite singer coming through the speakers. The path between the fireplace and the refrigerator becomes ever deeper as the weight of the snacks consumed is transferred from the fridge to our bodies. Clothing other than the snuggly, loungey things we've been wearing to complete that homey picture seems foreign. The sun, dazzling against the uninterrupted blanket of white, beckons us back to life.

The first thing I did was to take a broom and knock the heavy snow off the young pines in the yard, hoping to help them stand upright once again. Steve replenished all the bird seed, three feeders depleted in a day by our usual chickadee and woodpecker visitors plus an entire flock of red-wing black birds that have just discovered the free feast. (One or two of these beauties are welcome, but this many will scare everybody else away, so we hope this is temporary, a result of the weather.) Then we went for a walk on our street.

Our constitutional completed, we decided to load up the SUV with our ever-accumulating trash--our normal output plus the extra Christmas boxes and paper--and take it to the dump. The two-mile trip there on Deep Creek Road was the first hint that we are in a place that officially Is Not Accustomed To This Weather. Deep Creek Road, the only way out of here, has not seen even the glimmer of a plow. (With all the farmers and their manly toys around here, you'd think otherwise, but maybe a plow is not a plow is not a plow.) We got out to New Hope Road, an even more vital artery, carrying the entire population of Durant's Neck out to US 17, and saw that it, too, was innocent of a plow blade. Ditto Woodville Road, which takes that same population north to Elizabeth City. And the dump was closed.

So here we are, socked back inside. The car is still full of trash. Tomorrow we have to take a 60-mile drive to Ahoskie so Steve can visit his pain specialist, all on heavily traveled but "back" roads, State-maintained, not part of the US Highway or Interstate system. That should be interesting. And we're looking forward to visitors from DC for the New Years celebration. They're arriving Thursday and some shopping in Elizabeth City needs to be done. This is the last day of indolence, voluntary or enforced. Tomorrow real life resumes, ready or not, slippery roads, closed dump and all.

Reluctant techie

2010-12-06T09:44:00.003-05:00

I know I've been away much longer than I'd led either you or myself to expect I'd be, but I do have a string of good excuses. Between enjoying the company of and cooking for visitors over a long and wonderful Thanksgiving weekend, and just performing the everyday functions that keep this Ship of State afloat, I've been deep in modern technology. You might even say deeply mired in modern technology.

The first thing that happened was completely unexpected: I got a Kindle for my birthday. I had been agnostic on this particular subject and hadn't planned on doing anything to jump off the fence. I have taken to some of the new media storage opportunities absolutely like a duck to water with no second thoughts: I was tired of the clutter created by hundreds of CD jewel boxes (not to mention nearly that many vinyl LPs) and had no qualms about digitizing all of them, storing them on my Ipod, and in one way or another divesting myself of the originals. (Yes, LP jackets were works of art and iconic of certain times of my life. But the memories sustain me and there is still, protein deposits willing, more storage space in my brain than in this house.) I am also a huge fan of Google's Picasa and other digital photo storage sites. I take more photos now than I ever did before, simply because I know I can "develop" them myself electronically, edit and enhance the ones I decide to keep, and print only the ones I choose to. I will never get rid of the old paper photo albums I have, but I have indeed digitized most of the photos in them.

The last bit of "old" storage I had to deal with was books. And somehow they were different.

While I am not one to re-read many books, and I never underline passages or make margin notes in any book I read, I like some of them enough to keep for no other reason than to have them around. They're pretty, they're architecturally friendly to a house's interiors--somehow they just "fit," in ways that plastic CD containers and LPs lined up in rows did not. I was getting worried about the ever-accumulating pile of books we created as we finished reading them, but was content with giving them away. And then came the Kindle.

This little gadget is a true Siren. It works via a wireless computer connection--I merely need to be sitting near my computer to purchase a "book" (I make no claim that it is the real thing) from the Amazon website (for prices much, much lower than the hard-bound versions). It appears on my Kindle in a matter of seconds and then is simply there, available for me to take it up when the time comes. I can store hundreds of these "books" on it, or, if I decide they are taking up too much space, I can simply delete them, knowing they are stored permanently in my account at Amazon for retrieval at any time. And the Kindle even has an embossed leather cover that feels like an actual book. In short, I became a convert in a matter of minutes--Steve pushed me off the fence with this unexpected gift and I'll be purchasing e-versions of books from now on when I can. (Some titles have not yet been digitized and I will happily buy them in the traditional form.) We won't get rid of the real books we already have and love. But we will be adding to that collection at a much slower pace now. To my more orthodox book loving friends: my apologies. To me, the word is the word is the word, regardless of the format. When the typewriter came into being there were purists who bemoaned the demise of ink and paper. Modern convenience trumps the old ways, and "tradition" becomes precious, antique. And it appears I'm OK with that.

That doesn't mean, however, that these new media storage methods don't come with their own special headaches. Somehow during the Thanksgiving weekend I found the time to travel to the Apple Store in Norfolk and replace my aging Ipod classic with a new one--still a classic, but with double the storage space. I had thought that the Apple people would have some way of simply transferring the content of my old Ipod to the new one there at the store, as happens when you by a new computer. But they didn't. You have to populate the new Ipod yourself.

In theory, that's not a difficult task. You simply dock your new Ipod, open the I-tunes app, and let the downloading begin. But I don't keep my music in the I-tunes app. I have way too many tracks to store on my hard drive--there would be no room for anything else if all my songs were stored there. Whenever I get new music, I load it into I-tunes so that it will be in the library and, most importantly, so the Ipod can retrieve it and store it. After that, I transfer the new MP3 files to an external drive and delete them from my hard drive.

So putting all my songs on the new Ipod has meant putting the music back on the Itunes app--back on my hard drive--so the Ipod can read it from the app. The storage problem was immediate--my computer got not even halfway through retrieving the external files before it told me it had to stop for lack of space. And then there's the Ipod itself--for some reason it doesn't sync properly. If I load ten new tracks, it may pick up only five of them. As a result, my Ipod is full of incomplete files, and the only way to fill in the gaps is to find the original album folders on the external drive, compare them with what made it to the Ipod, download the individual missing files, and then re-sync the Ipod, folder by folder. It is an unbelievably pains-taking and time-consuming process--the worst kind of nerdy detail work that only a retiree with time on his hands would ever put up with. Return the faulty, poorly-syncing Ipod? What? And go through all this again? I'm too far down this road to turn back, I'm afraid. I've been at this project for about a week. I'm up to Eva Cassidy. (Artists are listed alphabetically by first name. Yes, I'm only on "E." I just finished 300+ Edith Piaf files. That was special.)

So that's my life at the moment. I'm up to my eyeballs in MP3s. If you've read this entire mind-numbing account, congratulations--you're as crazy as I am. Now I'll wade back in.

Always the Peace Corps

2010-11-12T11:03:00.000-05:00

Autumn is finally creeping into coastal North Carolina. Above is the current view from our front porch. I think the mix of hardwoods and evergreens that grow naturally here and which we were able to keep on the property is beautiful--the hardwoods provide a year-long show as their leaves emerge and mature through a season, while the evergreens, almost all young-ish loblolly pines, so straight and tall, give a permanent splash of green through the worst of winter, and whisper soothingly as a breeze passes through their needles. It's a constant "sh-h-h-h," a gentle reminder to keep quiet. I know this is could be a generic description of any forested landscape; the miracle is that we own this little patch of one, or at least have it on extended loan. We know that if just the right wind storm blew through here, we could lose a sizable chunk of the wood standing out there, so like all other good things in life, it's best to savor and appreciate this beauty while it's there.

I have an interesting afternoon in store today. The Peace Corps, as part of the observance of its 50th anniversary, is interviewing retired employees for their impressions of the agency and how it has changed (or in many ways remained the same) over the years. I got wind of this project and presented myself and my unique history with the Peace Corps to their Public Affairs office, and the resulting video interview will take place today, here in my home.

I became a volunteer in 1969, when the Peace Corps had been in existence a mere 8 years. Though I never planned to, I ended up with a more-or-less permanent association with the agency (in the 1970s it was off-and-on) until I retired as staff in 2003. My professional work made me an integral part of almost every facet of volunteers' lives with the Peace Corps, from recruitment, through placement and preparation for overseas training, to the management of the programs in the countries where they served. And being gay, I witnessed and was instrumental in changes touching the experience of all minorities who seek to participate in the Peace Corps. In 1970, I nearly left service early because of an emotional crisis brought on by the fact that, for fear of being booted out, I felt I couldn't tell anyone I was gay. Now, because of initiatives that I and many colleagues helped put in place, diversity of all kinds within the Peace Corps community is sought and celebrated, and specialized training is given to staff in the particular needs and perceptions of various groups. Gay couples are now being placed together in overseas jobs! This is a milestone I never thought I would see (and still wonder at how it will work).

I will be 65 years old tomorrow. In 1969, little did that silly, gangly child of 24 dream that his words about this adventure, which turned out to last so long, would be thought worthy of capturing and keeping --in high-def, yet!

Music, music, music pt. 5

2010-11-10T14:18:00.000-05:00

I really didn't mean for this narrative to meander on for so long, but there is now an unexpected wrinkle which throws an entirely new light for me on this music business.

I have a very dear friend from college days who happens to be one of the most sought-after vocal coaches in show business, a behind-the-scenes power who counts some of the biggest names in all of music, from opera to pop to country, among his grateful clients. Feeling like one of those morons who go on about all their symptoms with their doctor friends but importune anyway, I worked up the courage to ask him for some pointers on how to treat an aging voice that has not been used for music in many years. I was embarrassed to ask this busy man for free advice, and expected something perfunctory as a nod to our friendship, and nothing more. Instead I got a whole session with him, over the phone. And that's where the "but...." comes in. I am now in a musical identity crisis.

In that coaching session I discovered that the musical part of my character has changed; that much of what feels "right" for me to perform nowadays really doesn't fit at all with the crooning, "pretty" sound by which I have, from my earliest memory, defined myself as a singer. (And that includes much of my own stuff,) An unexpected realization was that all that mellow tone can actually get in the way of a lyric and impede honest expression. If I really do want to perform honestly for people in any venue from my living room on up, I have a whole new singing technique to learn and internalize, a whole new identity to take on.

I know this "dilemma" sounds like nothing so much exaggerated self-importance in someone who has yet to take any step forward at all beyond recognizing an old dream. But it's a core part of how I identify myself to myself. The question I'm grappling with now is whether or not it might be best just to let fond memories be--at this age I'm quite satisfied with who I've been in the past and who I am now; I really have nothing to prove. Is all the angst of learning a new trick or two worth the chance to stand up on the stage of the Onely Place? Do I even care? The fact that I'm asking the question makes be think perhaps I don't......

If you've read this far, thank you for indulging me. I'm working this out as the words emerge. "Music," the issue, is now a work in progress. If there's anything new to report in the future, I will.

In the meantime, we'll go to the December show at the barn and enjoy it. And we'll become friends with those guys, whether I sing on their stage or not.

Music, music, music pt. 4

2010-11-09T15:16:00.004-05:00

So I told you all the preceding to tell you this: I've lately been inspired to pick up the guitar and take a few baby steps towards using my voice again for something besides conversation. The inspiration came from a visit we made a month or so ago to a local performance venue that was unknown to us, The Onley Place. Of course, there's a story there:

We had always wondered why, down here in the brass buckle of the Bible belt, our elderly cross-the-creek neighbors were so welcoming to us frankly as a gay couple. They welcomed us warmly from the very beginning and made no bones about the fact that they "got it" regarding Steve's and my relationship, and that they were fine with it. It turns out that for a good 20 years they were members of a large group of square dancers that met just for the fun of it on Saturday nights. Their caller and his male partner, both raised just a few miles from here, ran that enterprise. Everyone loved these men and the good times they created with their dance parties. As time went on, though, the dancing started going into decline. Dancers aged and fell victim to aches and pains that made movement no longer enjoyable, to the point where now, they get together to socialize but they no longer dance.

One of these two guys, the caller, inherited the family farm, deep in the country a bit to the north of where we live. For the past several years the two of them have been restoring the buildings on it, and part of the restoration was the conversion of the barn into a performance space, called the Onley Place after the family that worked that land for so long. Our neighbors took us with them to the most recent show to see if we would like it and also expressly to introduce us to the two entrepreneurs, knowing we had not met any other gay people here and very much wanted to.

We had a wonderful time. Every three months, these two men put on a sort of dinner-theater/Prairie Home Companion-style entertainment in which they feature local performers who represent a diverse collection of musical styles, everything from cabaret (a duo who have been regulars on the Raleigh scene for 17 years--who knew???) to jazz, to American standards, to country. The catered food is plain and pretty much what you get here: fried chicken, pork barbecue, hush puppies, coleslaw, potato salad--but very good for what it is. For all of $20 per person, you and a couple hundred other happy people from miles around get to enjoy a nice meal and a good, old-fashioned variety show, complete with corny skits and musical entertainment that is all good, at least, and sometimes really top-notch. (They featured a local 17-year-old saxophonist when we were there who is on his way to college and then, there's no doubt, to a stellar career in music.)

It was that experience that set my imagination going. It's exactly the kind of venue and audience that I would be very comfortable working in and for, and I realized that if I was ever going to get back up on a stage, this was the ideal situation. I decided to start working towards and audition.

My guitar work is, as expected, terribly rusty, having been unpracticed for at least 10 years. I have no callus on my fingers, so merely pressing the strings to make a musical sound is painful. The picks and strums I practiced so hard on for years are part of my muscle memory and are still there, but sloppy. The voice is still there and surprisingly undamaged by lack of use. I need a lot of work, but could with time get myself back to my previous level.

But.....

Next time: A surprising discovery--the final installment.

FOOD FRIDAY!

2010-11-05T08:00:00.008-04:00

TURKEY MUSHROOM MARSALA GRAVY

Sorry, no picture this time--I mentioned this gravy in a previous post this week and somebody asked for it, so I promised I'd share it today. Since I won't be making it until Thanksgiving, so have no picture of it (and gravy pretty much looks like gravy--not much to take a picture of, anyway), I going commando with this one.

A note on stock: I let my turkey stock simmer very slowly almost all day, while preparing the bird and roasting it, just adding a bit of boiling water occasionally as it cooks down. I use all the giblets and chunks of carrot, celery and onion, one each, straining them out when it's time to use the stock. The vegetables lend a subtle vegetal sweetness to the finished product, and the Marsala, though sweet itself, adds more of a nutty depth of flavor. You know something is there but would never guess it was a sweet wine.

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 teaspoon olive oil

2 cups fresh mushrooms--white, brown, or shiitake--thinly sliced

2 teaspoons brandy

1/2 cup Marsala

4 cups turkey stock (see comments above about stock)

2 tablespoons corn starch

1/2 cup cream (optional)

salt and pepper to taste

fresh lemon juice

Heat butter and oil in a large heavy saucepan. Add mushrooms and brown lightly over medium high heat, about 8 minutes.

Add brandy to the pan if using, raise heat, and cook until brandy is reduced to a syrupy glaze.

Make a paste of the cornstarch and 1/4 cup of the stock. Deglaze turkey roasting pan with another cup of the stock and separate fat. Add cornstarch paste and the deglazed turkey drippings to pan with Marsala and remaining stock, stir and simmer until sauce has reached a light, creamy consistency, 10-15 minutes. This also where, if you want, you can chop up the giblets, shred the meat from the neck, and stir them in. (The liver will have added great body to the stock but will be inedible after boiling all day.)

Just before serving add cream if using and simmer a few minutes longer. Adjust salt and pepper and add lemon juice to taste (starting with a teaspoon) to brighten flavor.

Music, music, music pt. 3

2010-11-04T15:36:00.003-04:00

The Peace Corps became spiritual home for me and remained so until I retired from it in 2003. It wasn't a complete joy ride at the beginning--I left Boston in 1973 to become a recruiter, working out of an office on the Chapel Hill campus at the University of North Carolina. That wasn't a permanent position, however--had to be at headquarters in Washington, D.C., to land one of them. I moved to DC and discovered I couldn't even attract flies at the Peace Corps, much less a job: I didn't qualify for anything. Normally that makes no difference for returned volunteers, as long as they apply for a job within one year of completing their overseas service. During that window, they are given preferential treatment for staff positions--"non-competitive eligibility"--meaning as long as you have some relevant experience and you're not hanging from chandeliers you can probably get a job. My problem was that I had waited longer than a year, so I was treated like any civilian walking in off the street. I got temporary positions and was well-accepted by colleagues and bosses, but couldn't land anything permanent because I didn't have a year of qualifying experience under my belt. One thing led to another. Deals were made and broken. I spent most of the 1970s either doing temp jobs at the Peace Corps or working for the DC office of the AAA--and making music.

I continued to compose, sang at parties and had the occasional club gig. I really got pretty good--I'm still quite proud of my output from that period. But the essential pull of my life was still towards stability, and then a new wrinkle appeared--I actually wanted to settle down with somebody. I was nesting! This latter development was an utter surprise. I had never imagined myself "married" in any way; I truly enjoyed single life.

Nineteen-seventy-nine was a signal year in my life. I was 33 years old. I was still a green-stained map marker at the AAA, but I had also landed a regular singing gig at the Potter's House, one of the most respected coffee houses in DC. Then by sheer chance I ran into an old Peace Corps colleague, someone I knew from one of my temp incarnations at the agency a few years before. He worked in the Peace Corps travel office and told me they had an opening and that I should apply for it. (Lo and behold, all those years working at the AAA made a difference after all, giving me the year--and then some!--of relevant experience I needed to qualify for something!) I knew and liked everyone in that office, and they liked me--I was virtually assured I'd be hired; the application was a mere formality.

Then in July, 1979, I met Steve. Here at last was someone I could take home to Mom. Steve and I were perfect complements in virtually every way. He could do things I couldn't and vice versa. He was a loner by nature and so was I, though I was and am still a bit more "social" than he--another complementing attribute. I moved from the
DC rooming house I'd been living in to the little Virginia garden apartment complex where Steve was--we didn't move in together right away, but we were near each other. I literally forgot about the coveted Potter's House gig--I stood them up one too many Friday nights and they fired me. It was a relief. My starving artist days were over. I started the Peace Corps job at about the same time Steve and I rented a house together in 1980, and in 1981 we bought the house in Arlington, where we stayed until we left for this new North Carolina adventure in 2009.

I stayed with music performance for several more years. I still sang at parties, and I joined the Paul Hill Chorale, a prestigious choral group in DC which did several engagements a year at the Kennedy Center. Composing, however, which requires a great amount of solitude, came to an end. I didn't miss it because I no longer needed the singing as a crutch to make myself special. I was now living many of the things I had imagined in my songs, and the real thing was better.

Music performance receded in importance, as well--I quit the Chorale after 10 seasons. We still had my piano, taking up a huge space in the living room, and from time to time I'd plunk on it, but eventually I stopped that, too. (It was a big deal to give that old baby grand away, but I found a family whose young daughter was just starting lessons, and I knew the piano would get more loving use in a week than I'd given it in years.) Though music no longer plays the big role in my life it once did, I still identify completely with performers when I see them at the top of their game, and occasionally I fantasize about being back on the stage, performing. But other things became important and I have no regrets.

Next time: I said all that to say this.

Music, music, music pt. 2

2010-11-03T11:07:00.006-04:00

I was 27 years old when I got home from the Peace Corps. If I had any doubts about what I would do next, the stultifying, nothing-ever-changed atmosphere of hearth and home convinced me: singing was a way back into my own life as much as anything else, an escape from the conventional everyday-ness of living in suburbia and looking for a career in some office. (I admit I was in for a pleasant surprise from my parents when I sat down with them to tell them of my plans. They were entirely supportive of the singing idea--perhaps out of relief that I had settled on something as I marched toward the big 3-0; perhaps because they identified somewhat with the performer in me and wished they'd had a chance to do something like it themselves.)

A friend from my time in Ghana had settled with another friend of hers in Boston and had already told me I'd be welcome to join them. Boston, with its abundance of university students, and all those coffee houses with all those open mikes, was the ideal venue for a budding singer. So off I went, seeking my fortune. But I wasn't all starry-eyed, oh no...I knew it would be a good month or so--maybe even 6 weeks--before that music-fueled fortune started accumulating, and that some sort of job would be necessary to tide me over during the interim. A solution arose out of necessity: I had to get some maps of the city, so I went to the downtown office of the auto club--the AAA. The people who worked there were mostly young and cool looking, and I figured the work couldn't be too bad, talking to the public all day and interacting with copasetic co-workers, so on the spur of the moment I asked if they were hiring. They were, and they took me on, practically on the spot. Thus began my first life lesson, Reality 101.

It turned out that what I saw in the walk-in part of the AAA office was the mere tip of an enormous iceberg. Walk-ins were served in the lobby of a building in which the AAA occupied another floor, and the folks working in the lobby rotated in and out of it, probably as a tacit admission on the AAA's part that being able to see outside every now and then is a necessity for the maintenance of sanity. Most of the employees were working in what can only be called a public-service sweatshop. Upstairs, there were row upon row of tables in a windowless room where people did nothing but put green lines on maps, fulfilling orders for Trip-Tiks that AAA members had called in. There was a bank of 6 phone cubicles, staffed by other employees who answered phones all day, taking orders for routings or giving advice about tourist sites. (We kept a list of the crazy requests we got: a driving route to Bermuda--we told the member the bridge hadn't been finished yet; a "drive along the coast" from Boston to Los Angeles; a route that could get you from Boston to California in 3 days, hitting the Grand Canyon along the way; a tour of the "Fingering Lakes of New York....").

No matter where you worked in this tourism factory, there was a strict and universal dress code. Even if the public never laid eyes on you, men had to wear a tie, and, in 1972, pant-suits for women were forbidden.

The scariest part of the AAA experience was the lifers there--the middle-aged people who had never done anything in their lives but work at the AAA, and who were dead serious about the organization and the concerns of its members. It was quite an eye-opener after having spent two years on a life-changing adventure. I looked at these pale people whose imaginations carried them no further than the next order of Carlsbad Cavern brochures, and whose eyes were weakened from gazing at too much small print, and felt dread. Could I ever be one of them??? There's nothing like a scary alternative future to spur your ambition in another direction.

But I was in for another shock. I discovered I was emotionally exhausted after playing the good, buttoned-down AAA employee by day and didn't really feel like pounding the open-mike pavement at night. I did hit one or two, and I succeeded at least in being invited back, but in the process of "succeeding," I quickly saw that singing wasn't something you did for a mere 40 minutes once a week or so. Singing--show business--is a way of life. It requires faith, utter determination, overpowering ambition and the willingness to see yourself as a commodity in a competitive market place.

And you need to be young. The people I met singing were kids who did nothing but sing. They hung around with peers who had the same burning need for recognition. They compared notes on which venues were best, and they sang for and to each other. They were either fresh out of college or had never even attended, having committed to this life as teenagers. They were willing to live on the edge of poverty in their late adolescence on the chance that they would strike gold before they were 30. But I was already on the warm side of 30 and facing the fact that I was tired of being poor. I wanted nothing so much as a stable roof over my head and the predictability of an ordered life.

So there I was. The one "career" idea that had fed my imagination for years had come a cropper. I was stuck in a soul-deadening job that didn't even afford me the ability to drive to the places I was describing every day, digesting the discovery that I may be a singer but I lacked an important corollary attribute to make a living at it: complete, all-consuming ambition. I was clear about what I didn't want--the AAA was a great teacher. But what did I want? Whatever it was, it wouldn't be conventional. (Order I needed. Convention was still anathema, as it remains.) Returned Peace Corps Volunteers often jokingly ask, "is there life after the Peace Corps?" In my case, it turned out there was. And it was back at the Peace Corps.

Music, music, music

2010-11-02T15:48:00.000-04:00

I've mentioned here many times that I "used to" sing. Music is to my life as is my skin or my hair--I was born with it, and it's just there, whether or not I'm actually listening to music or not. (There is always a melody in my head.) When I was in the womb, my mother's voice singing "I'll be loving you, always," and "Five-foot-two, eyes of blue" was accompanied by her heartbeat. My sister, nine years older, was deep into the classics in her piano studies by the time I was born. Chopin, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, even the Czerny exercises...all of these, plus the popular music of the day, were my aural mother's milk.

We were not an especially cultured family, nor was formal education a factor. Neither of my parents finished high school. It's simply that as ubiquitous as music was in the 1940s and 50s on the radio, just as is today, it was also more personal. People made more of their own music then than we do now. Pianos were not unexpected pieces of furniture in living rooms. People played banjos and guitars, and house parties often ended with everybody singing songs, or indeed were held for the sole purpose of getting together to sing. Parties at our house always ended with everybody standing around the piano, highballs in hand, singing--harmonizing--while my sister played.

I was a kid who never gave much thought to what I would do in life. The only overriding ambition I ever had was to get into the Peace Corps. I did, and then it was done. At the advanced age of 27 I hadn't a real clue what was coming next, but the idea of singing for a living was always somewhere in the back of my mind.

I had a the kind of voice that in the 1940s would have consorted well with one of the big bands--I could have been a crooner. But my consciousness as a performer was awakened during the 60s folk era, so that was what I did. When Joan Baez hit the scene, the die was cast. I was completely bowled over, blown away, thunderstruck, by her entire presence. Her singing voice was indescribably beautiful, her guitar arrangements were simple but interesting (and always musical to the core), and her understated performance style allowed her songs to shine in all their ancient beauty, and the characters in them to come to life. Her first record came out when I was a senior in high school, and I made it my business to get all her subsequent releases as soon as I possibly could after they hit the stores. I shut myself in my room with those records and my guitar until I learned all of her picks and strums. By the time I got into the Peace Corps, I was the guy with the guitar. I led singalongs and sang some solos, mostly Baez material. Finally, towards the end of my time overseas, I began writing my own songs in preparation for what I had decided would be the next step, a singing career. (Cat Stevens helped me in that decision. I had begun to see that the Baez guitar style didn't really fit with the kind of songs that were coming out of me. Stevens's unique rhythmic strumming was the key that allowed me to compose.)

More next time.

One thing leads to the next....

2010-11-01T15:13:00.003-04:00

I've wanted to do a big Thanksgiving dinner for a crowd for a very long time. For the past 30-odd years, though, I lived in the area grew up in (and where the rest of my family was), so I never got the chance. My sister had the big house, she had all the kids and grandkids--even our parents, when they were still living, ended up near her. Perforce, holiday family get-togethers gravitated to her place.

In many families where all the kids are grown and on their own, mothers and dads, who by now are grandparents, are the glue that still holds family holidays together. That's how it was for us. Things have changed, though, in the decade since our parents passed on. My sister hasn't cooked Thanksgiving dinner in a few years, lately going to her daughter's house near her instead. One other daughter lives two-thirds of the way across the country; another lives nearby but does her own thing, and the fourth lives with my sister but does not cook.

So this year I'm getting what I wished for--my sister decided to get away from the DC area and come down here for Thanksgiving. (It will be her first visit to this new house.) We decided to invite a few more friends; finally, I'm getting my crowd to cook for.

I woke up this morning fiddling mentally with the menu. Soon enough my mind landed on the Marsala gravy I love to make with the turkey drippings. I remembered the recipe was in a pile of about a hundred others that I've collected over a relatively short time--maybe the past year and a half (if I have any hoarding tendencies at all, it is in the area of recipes, I fear)-- that have been lying about in messy piles. I couldn't put them away because the three-inch loose-leaf notebook I mount my recipes in is already filled to bursting. I needed a new one but had never gotten around to getting one. The Marsala gravy problem put the dynamite where it was needed to get me moving.

So instead of writing this morning, we decided to go to the office supply store to get a new notebook. And more three-hole plastic sleeves to protect the recipes. And some tabs for them. Oh, and we need groceries. And batteries from Wal-mart.

Two hours later we were back home. Had to eat lunch. Had to start catching up on the TV shows we DVR'd last week but never had a chance to watch because we had company all week who did not share our taste in TV shows. ("Who's Jon Stewart? What rally?")

Finished watching some of the shows, then finally got around to separating the recipes into piles by type (beef, pork, breads, salads...). All that's left to do now is to slip the recipes into their plastic sleeves, put the sleeves in the new notebook, and write the tabs. There'll be room in this new notebook for another hundred or so recipes, at least, so I'm good for another year!

And that's why I'm late today.

House guests all week.....

2010-10-25T07:59:00.003-04:00

No, I'm not crapping out on you already. We are entertaining guests this entire week and I probably won't have much time for navel-gazing. I might be able to squeeze one good post in, but if not, see you next week.

FOOD FRIDAY!

2010-10-22T09:02:00.005-04:00

PILAF

I don't have anything really new in the way of food, at least to me, to tell you about, but I did have this recipe, and the photo, in the files, waiting to be shared. Glad to have the chance today.

Despite its Middle-Eastern origins, it seems that "pilaf," at least in today's American cooking vernacular, is just about whatever the cook wants it to be. This is a version given to me 20-or-so years ago by a friend who lives in Baltimore, and it's come in handy over the years. It's a very simple yet delicious side dish that harmonizes well with more showcase entrées. As with all things that appear to be simple, the key to success is in the technique.

1 tablespoon olive oil
2 medium shallots, minced
2 cups rice
1 cup raisins, light or dark
4 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1 teaspoon salt
Pepper to taste
1 cup cashew pieces (salted is OK)

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Heat oil in a Dutch oven. Add shallots and sauté until soft. Add rice and cook, stirring, until rice is thoroughly coated with the flavored oil and just begins to color. Add raisins and stir to mix, then add broth, salt and pepper. Bring to a simmer, cover tightly, and place in oven to bake for 1 hour.

Meanwhile, pan-roast cashews in a dry pan over high heat until they take on a good deep brown, taking care that they don't burn. As soon as the desired color is reached, remove pan from heat, place cashews in a bowl and set aside.

Remove rice from oven and let rest, covered, for 5 minutes. Remove cover, sprinkle cashews over evenly. Fluff rice, distributing cashews throughout. Adjust seasoning and serve.

Update

2010-10-21T14:47:00.004-04:00

The best way for me to describe the gorgeousness of this day is to tell you I cut the grass just for an excuse to spend some time outside. It's in the 70s (mid 20s C) and there is a steady, strong breeze that makes all the pines whisper.

We are in the land of Bermuda grass. Bermuda grows easily from seed down here; it thrives in ungodly heat, can withstand drought and grows well even in poor soil. The major drawback is that it browns out over the winter, much like zoysia. The accepted solution to that, we have learned, is to throw down some winter rye seed. At first we thought this practice, very popular here, was for cosmetic purposes only--no matter what time of year, you can always have a carpet of green. Lame. Who wants to be mowing the lawn in the middle of winter? But when we learned that rye grass also nourishes the soil, we were sold. The dirt we have here is "soil" only by the most liberal definition of the word. It's half pure clay and half fill sand. The clay may have some micronutrients for plants blessed with the wherewithal to root in it, but there is little to no organic material. So we planted the rye, and now it is beginning to grow, verdant and thick. As long as we have days like this, I'll love mowing it.

I realized I never brought many of you up to date on the hamstring injury I had last May. I'm happy to report that the leg is entirely normal now, to the point where I've been able to resume my walking routine, which I had neglected since we left Arlington a year and a half ago. The worst part of that experience was really the wait to see a specialist who could teach me what to do--almost a whole week, during which I navigated on flat floors only via a face-up crawl I'd seen disabled people in Africa use. (Yes, they really were my inspiration for mobility. The Peace Corps pays you back in uncountable and unexpected ways.) That was something of a fun adventure for about a day, and then callus set in in places I'd never dreamed it could be. A week was more than enough.

The results of the orthopedist visit were dramatic, if a bit anticlimactic, because after all that pain and all that crawling, the solution was so simple. The doctor asked me if I had crutches. I said I did, but I couldn't use them because it hurt too much to hold my leg up. He had me stand facing a table, with my hands on the table. This I did, with my leg in a position that kept my foot off the floor. "Straighten your leg and put your foot on the ground," he said. I did. And just like that the pain disappeared. I was on two feet for the first time in a week.

When I got back home I started practicing movement on the crutches. In less than a minute I saw the that crutches were in the way. I called the doctor to ask if I had to use them, and he said I did not. So I put the crutches down, stood up, and voilà, I was walking.

Turned out that having the leg bent actually works the hamstring, flexes it. The muscle is relaxed with the leg extended. Who knew????

It was a few weeks before my leg felt entirely normal, and I had to be careful about some positions that caused a burn where the tear had occurred. But I was very glad to see that my body can still heal fairly quickly from such a nasty injury.

And how else could I push a mower around, anyway?

A rite of passage and other fun stuff

2010-10-20T10:37:00.007-04:00

Guess what? I go on Medicare next month! On November 14 I will hit the magic age of 65, when Uncle Sam takes over the bulk of my health care costs. (Sixty-five???? I am in shock, this is not possible! Remember when you couldn't wait to get older? I was so happy to turn 30, thinking I'd finally "arrived" as an untrustworthy adult! Somehow the current milestone lacks cachet. I'm no longer looking to "arrive" anywhere any time soon, that's for sure.

It's almost scary, the way Medicare just appears in your life. A big envelope from the Social Security Administration shows up in your mailbox about 3 months prior to the magic day. In it are a few boilerplate brochures that purport to explain how it all works, and a flimsy paper thing bigger than any other card you carry, but which happens to be your Medicare card. The idea momentarily flits through that this is just a sample, that a "real" card, made of plastic with a magnetic strip and that will fit with all your other cards, will be arriving, but no. This is the actual card which by necessity must be on your person at all times, or at least close by. If you don't get it laminated or in some other way protect it, it will never last the thirty or so years you intend to use it (if you're lucky).

The Medicare premium for 2010 is $110 a month. It will automatically come out of my monthly Social Security payment. I only net $116 a month from Social Security as it is, since as a career Federal employee the only Social Security-eligible quarters I have come from summer jobs I had when I was a teenager and a few other short-term private-sector occupations I had over the years. I called to ask if my premium could come out of Federal retirement pension instead, but was told that I had no choice in the matter. If you get enough in Social Security payments, your premium comes from them. So, what was once pin money will become--what? Dust money? In practical terms, I will not be aware that my bank account is being enriched by a whopping $6 every month.

As the saying goes, they get you coming and going. Under normal economic conditions, Social Security makes a yearly Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) to your monthly stipend. However, the COLA is pegged to inflation, and since OMB has ordained that there has been no inflation for the past two years, there have been no COLAs. There was none for 2010 and there will be none for 2011. But that doesn't stop Medicare from upping its premiums. If I had started with it in 2009, my premium would have been $96 a month and, since there was no COLA for 2010, it would have remained that amount for this year. But somehow, even though there was no COLA, the premium for 2010 is $110 a month. (If I had any sense at all I'd be sorry I'm not a year older, just so I could have saved $9 a month!) As long as there is no COLA, my premium will not go over $110, but that is small comfort.

Oh. And Medicare doesn't cover all of your medical costs. There are still co-pays and some conditions that are not fully covered, and for those costs, you must have a "supplemental" policy. The supplemental payment to a provider combined with whatever Medicare pays should make for no out-of-pocket medical expenses on your part. But the supplemental policies are the same policies that were available to me as a non-Medicare participant, the same array of plans offered under the Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan (FEHBP). And even though I will be using a plan only to supplement Medicare, thereby reducing my cost to it by a great deal, I get no break on my premiums. To put it in a nutshell, when you're on Medicare you end up paying at least two premiums--one to Medicare and one to the supplemental plan. Add to that optional plans, such as "Part D" for prescriptions and separate policies for vision and dental, and you're shelling out more than twice what you were paying just the previous year to keep yourself healthy. And of course, these private supplemental plans are under no constraint to freeze their premiums because there is no COLA. Those payments, which like clockwork rise every year, do come out of my retirement pension, which has also not increased in two years for the same "no inflation" reason. In 2011, therefore, I will realize a net loss in income because of all these new medical costs. If this is progress, give me the Dark Ages.

Don't even get me started about Steve's medical situation, the fact that he is now paying for an individual policy, and I can't get him on my plan because Congress refuses to recognize us legally coupled...

In defense of Facebook

2010-10-19T09:23:00.005-04:00

Speaking of habits, I've developed one new one that I count as good, but I know not everyone would agree with that assessment. It's Facebook. It has given me contact with wonderful friends I thought I had lost forever; it provides portals to fascinating news stories and new music; it has a couple of Scrabble-type games that I'm addicted to and which don't require you to give up any information about yourself in order to play. (Yes, all this wonderfulness does have the potential to get out of hand, but it can be controlled. More on that later.)

In the "BF era" (Before Facebook), my morning routine was to take a walk, shower, have breakfast, finish the two hours of Morning Edition on NPR (the first having been heard on my walk) and then head to the computer to write something here. Now when I head to the computer I first go to Facebook. I catch up on personal news of friends and interesting tidbits from all manner of media that those friends may share. Of course, I must also check the word games. All that can take long enough. On this particular morning, though, NPR music featured a new album by Bryan Ferry--a rare event by a unique performer whom I like very much. I ended up listening to the whole album. By the time I even started here, then, I'd already been at the computer for well over an hour. That's excessive, I agree, but, it's also rare. Facebook as a part of my morning routine is here to stay.

Facebook naysayers don't like the site because they think it's intrusive. Agreed, it can be, but it doesn't have to be. Just as plain old common sense comes in handy in all other of life's endeavors, its use need not stop at the Facebook door. Example: the site is full of fun questionnaires whose purported intent is to analyze certain of your personality traits and how those traits of yours compare with those of others. Don't fall for them. They're likely surveillance tools that transmit what you say about yourself to marketers who will then add targeted spam to your inbox. As to privacy settings: they're what you make them. You don't have to post a profile picture; indeed you don't have to divulge anything at all about yourself except an email address. Once you join, the "friend" database is easily searchable, making it possible for you to reach out only to people with whom you'd like to be in contact--others don't even have to know you're there. It's actually possible to join Facebook and then hide from unwanted attention.

As I mentioned above, Facebook is more than a mere social network; it's a matchless source for information that is either fascinating or important, often both. The Internet already allows us to sample literally any media source in the world. If you come upon a compelling article, you can instantly share it with your friends on Facebook via the link in the article, which these days is provided by all major media outlets. I get important information from publications to which I'd don't subscribe myself--indeed sometimes have never even heard of--and likewise I share articles that I know others would have no chance of seeing in any other way. I find this one of the most valuable aspects of the entire Facebook phenomenon.

Well. I had no idea I'd be going in this direction when I sat down at the keyboard. As some kind friend once told me, "it's your blog, you can write what you damn well please." All this verbiage demonstrates to me just how big a thing Facebook has become in my life. If you haven't tried it, do! We can play a game of Wordscraper!

Here I Am

2010-10-18T14:46:00.002-04:00

So I just got an email from an old work friend from whom I hadn't heard in almost two years. The last time I saw him was when I went to his house to collect a good 50 pounds of green tomatoes (he's what you'd call a suburban backyard farmer, and a good one) so Steve could make his mother's green tomato mincemeat pie filling. After that fun visit, there was utter silence. Couldn't imagine what had happened. Lo and behold here's this note today asking me what happened to Days of Transition and telling me he's worried! Who knew he was even reading it??? If I needed a reminder that there are lurkers out there care about me (why, I can't imagine) and were using this blog to keep up, that was it. (You know who you are. An occasional shout-out, even anonymously, would be most welcome, just so I can know you're there. I'm not at all averse to a private email, either, if you care that much about visibility.)

I've been working up to starting again, anyway. Most of the heavy move-in projects are done now; Steve's actually dreaming up make-work things to do just to keep his sanity. Can some sort of actual job be on the horizon?

And I've been writing all over people who never asked me to. Long comments on friends' statuses on Facebook. Longer replies to simple emailed greetings. I've been away from this daily exercise for too long and it's showing. I need to write.

I see no need to make any changes here. I'm still transitioning, even though that original, literal transition is now history. I'm still learning about living here in the country, meeting new people, getting new perspectives. Most are good; some are less so. There are plenty of impressions to tell about.

So I hereby promise to make an effort to get back into the daily habit, or at least as close to daily as I can make it. If habits there must be, this one is one worth keeping.

Crabby

2010-08-13T15:10:00.008-04:00

Yes, it's Friday. I know there's supposed to be a recipe here today. Alas, I am not prepared, but I am moved to put finger to keyboard. This is about crabs--so at least we're on the subject of food.

I had thought surely by this time I'd have been able to post a picture of some great crab catch of mine, either a harvest of live blue crabs in their steamer pot staring back at you, or that same harvest freshly steamed, spread out on layers of newspaper, all red and covered with Old Bay, just waiting to be devoured. Alas that hasn't happened.

The waterways around here are a virtual obstacle course of crab traps and gill nets. Local professional watermen know there is bounty in these waters and they actively exploit it. One professional crabber can put out hundreds of crab traps and make a decent seasonal living from what he (they're all "he's" down here) catches. But "professional" is the operative word. There is no acknowledgement whatsoever of the sports fisherman in these parts. From Edenton in the the south to Elizabeth City 30 miles north, there are any number of marinas that will sell you water craft and everything to do with them from cleats to charts, but there is not a single bait and tackle shop. You can't buy a crab trap anywhere, and the only sellers of menhaden, the bony, oily fish caught in the millions off the Delmarva Peninsula and known as ambrosia to crabs, are those who cater to the pros and sell only in 50-lb. lots. If you'd like to try catching a fish for dinner and need a pole and some hooks, Wal-Mart is your only choice. Need bait? Dig your own.

When you come here for the first time, you are struck by the preponderance of water. (It is, of course, what brought us here in the first place.) Five huge rivers that dwarf the Mississippi, in width if not length, run north-to-south along a stretch of about 70 miles of northeastern North Carolina, all feeding Albemarle Sound. The recreational and touristic possibilities would seem to be endless, but there is virtually no nod by the state or any of the local governments in that direction. I've spoken often of the various wonderful surprises we've had down here; this is one of the few disappointing ones. We were so accustomed to hopping in our boat in Delaware and running up to Lewes or down to Oak Orchard for lunch, or setting our crab traps out for two or three days in Herring Creek and getting enough "keepers" to make a few crab cakes. Here, the water distances from point to point are enormous, and if you should actually navigate to a town on the water, and should it even have thought to put up a public dock, there's not much to do once you tie up there. And the crabs? I buy my "bait" at the local grocery store--farm raised croaker meant for human consumption but which I wouldn't put near my mouth, and as cheap as the menhaden were in Delaware. With them I have caught many, many crabs, none of which have been legal keeping size. (We're using the traps we brought with us from Delaware.) Guess all the pros are beating me to the good ones.

A Friday the 13th story: today we decided to try one more time to catch a few crabs. A storm is brewing someplace in the vicinity, causing clouds, a stiff breeze and choppy water. It was to be a quick trip, just long enough to drop our two traps and come back.

The first trap went in just fine. The second one seemed to have got caught on something--turned out it was the engine's propeller. The wind and choppy water sent us right over the trap's rope, which tangled itself into the works of the engine, which in turn ceased running. (First thought: Oh great. A storm is coming and here we sit on the water with a dead engine.) The motor is old--the hydraulic mechanism that tilts the prop up out of the water stopped working a couple of months ago and we decided not to get it fixed, since a new engine is probably in our future next year. Nothing to do, then, but climb into the water to untangle the rope, which Steve, bless him, did. He had to cut the rope. I pulled the trap back into the boat, only to discover that the bait had fallen out of it. We turned around and came back home, then, with one empty, baitless crab trap--luckily it was just the tangled rope that was keeping the motor from running. Steve was able to dry off almost completely in the breeze. We now have one crab trap out there in the Little River, luring crabs with Food Lion croaker. We probably won't catch anything.

A Good Time Was Had By All

2010-07-18T13:39:00.001-04:00

You will allow me a bit of a smug, good feeling today. These higher-than-normal highs are always interrupted by life's normal bumps and bruises, so I promise this one won't go to my head. But our inaugural North Carolina party last night was damn good!

Not that some major adjustments didn't become necessary as the hours leading to the event wore on. Early in the morning there was a true disaster: one of the cakes I had made a week or so before and frozen--the chocolate one--slipped out of my hand as I picked it up off the counter and landed, splat, face down, on the floor. Unfortunately, it had thawed out, in all its moist, oil-and-buttermilk richness. Not only did I have a hideous brown-black mess to clean up, but I had to whip up a duplicate and fast--it had been promised as a surprise to mark the birthday of one of the guests. Thank God the day was still young.

The purpose of the party was to show off the new deck, so we were all set up for outside. Zero hour was 4 PM. At 3:30, the heavens opened and a downpour ensued that lasted most of the rest of the evening. As the first drops fell, we switched gears and set up inside, moving the dining room table up against a wall to create buffet space, clearing coffee and end tables of their knick-knacks to make room for plates and cups, and moving chairs to unaccustomed places so lots of people could sit more-or-less convivially.

We learned several useful lessons. One: we will never, ever, plan another outdoor party here for the middle of summer. It's too hot and the weather is too iffy. It's enough like the tropics to expect a thunderstorm in the afternoon, as if it were a "rainy season," but it's still temperate enough not to guarantee such a storm, so you're never really sure what it's going to do before it's done. Two: the house has room for 30+ people to mill about and feel comfortable. As hosts we sometimes had to break up groups who gathered in crucial spots next to the oven, say, or who blocked a thoroughfare, but that was the worst of it. Any more than the number we had would be a bit on the sardine side, but we'll probably never encounter that problem. (And besides, we want to graduate from these cattle-call get-togethers to smaller, more intimate dinners. I take it that isn't done here very much, but I think it's because people have been intimidated by one guy in particular who fancies himself a "gourmet" and apparently has dinner gatherings that include all the starch of a nun's habit. Not fun. I cook good food--sometimes even fancy--but I'm more in the Julia Child tradition. If the soufflé falls I'll serve it, call it a savory pudding, and pass the wine.)

And three, not least: we have some pretty great neighbors. I don't know the religious or political beliefs of a single one of them and I hope it stays that way. Though none of these people are native to the area, they seem to have been infected with the wonderful local habit of smiling and waving first, inviting friendship rather than argument. You quickly grow accustomed to greeting a group of strangers in a waiting room, say, as they look up and smile as you enter. That really is the biggest and most pleasant surprise we've had here--how everyone is just plain nice. It's a quality that makes for a really fun party.

Oh. And the food, especially the pork, was a hit. And that chocolate cake? To quote one guest: "The best chocolate cake I've ever had!" I saw no reason to mention that I'd had extra practice.

FOOD FRIDAY!

2010-07-16T08:00:00.002-04:00

SUMMER SQUASH WITH ONION AND BACON

I mentioned last week that I've been learning new things to do with the bounty of produce we find here in this agricultural area, both at the myriad farm stands and, it turns out for us, from our neighbors. A few days ago a neighbor showed up out of the blue with 6 pounds of cucumbers, along with a welcome to whatever else we may want from his garden. And our cross-the-creek neighbors have blessed us with more yellow squash than I ever thought I'd want to see in one place--and a recipe for them that makes all that squash much more welcome.

I've always thought those backyard garden old reliables, yellow squash and zucchini, were fine, in their place. Good sources of fiber and good vehicles for other things, such as a version of moussaka I know, or in vegetable soups and stews. After my first year with a garden, I resolved never to grow them again because they take up enormous space and you get enough of them to feed the surrounding county, and face it, they don't have much flavor on their own, even when consumed as mere infants straight from the vine. But this way of presenting yellow squash is a real winner. You may have heard of it, but it was a revelation to me. Thanks to Paul from across the creek.

(Note: I chop these squash instead of cutting them into the traditional discs. Much easier to get a good mouthful on your fork.)

4 strips bacon

3-4 cups yellow squash, cut into bite-size chunks

2 medium onions, coarsely chopped

Salt and pepper

In a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet or a large non-stick pan, fry bacon until crisp over medium heat. Remove bacon to paper towels to drain; retain rendered fat.

Add squash and onions to hot fat, sprinkle with about a teaspoon of salt and pepper. Fry 4 to 5 minutes without stirring, or until vegetable pieces have begun to brown. Stir well to redistribute vegetables and expose the other sides of the squash to the heat and fry another 5 minutes, again without stirring. Keep this up until veggies are tender (but not squishy) and caramelized to your liking. Remove from heat, check seasoning, crumble bacon over all and serve.

31 Years

2010-07-14T08:48:00.004-04:00

I'm supposed to be pulling weeds today, but it's pouring rain. The new grass and the seed still germinating love it. So does our water bill. (And me, I'm not complaining!)

Today is July 14. Yes, Bastille Day. And Steve's and my anniversary.

We met on a weekend getaway to the Maryland mountains hosted by a mutual friend whose parents opened their doors to us. Of the crowd of people there, we each knew about two, and that did not include each other. I was in one of my starving artist periods, singing all over everybody. Steve liked what he saw. We were both in deep nesting phases. We started dating. A short time later, Steve put it this way: "My lease is about to run out. I have to move and I want you to move with me. If you don't want to, OK. It's been nice." How's that for romantic?

The adventure continues 31 years later. The gifts I have received from Steve are immeasurable and innumerable; I pinch myself at least once a week. Oh, nothing in this world is perfect, least of all human beings. Our relationship has taught us both important lessons in the meaning of true adulthood. If you ask me the secret to a long relationship, that's what I'll tell you: you must be grownups. The relationship itself takes on a life of its own, it's a living creature you both make, and as adults, you both choose to give it paramount importance. Your own childish interests never go away; the trick is in acknowledging that inner baby and even humoring him when you can, but never at the expense of the relationship, the precious thing you have created together.

Is this marriage thing for everybody? Apparently not. But for us it's worked beyond our wildest dreams.

Here's to 31 more.

P.S. Take a look a the new masthead photo. We're almost there.

FOOD FRIDAY!

2010-07-09T08:00:00.002-04:00

BLUEBERRY SOUR CREAM ICE CREAM

This is one of several dishes I've learned to make here in this agricultural area that uses the local produce to its most beautiful potential. I bought the berries at "Bright's Delights," a farm stand on US 17, just within the limits of Elizabeth City. These days it is bursting with gorgeous stuff: huge, sweet beefsteak tomatoes, just the right size to cover a slice of bread, at least 10 varieties of sweet corn (I bought bi-color this time, and next will be Silver King), blackberries the size of golf balls, blueberries, just-shelled baby limas for succotash with some of that corn...I could go on. We are in vegetable heaven here.

First things first: thank you to a former work colleague, Sharon Forrence, for giving me the idea for this decadent concoction via her Facebook newsfeed. What she made was blueberry crème fraiche ice cream, and the very idea set my mouth watering. I was determined to make it for myself.

I figured it would be a pretty tall order to find crème fraiche in these country-and-proud-of-it parts, and a survey of the grocery chains at my disposal--all two of them--proved my suspicion right. So I figured I'd just make my own--there are recipes galore for crème fraiche on the internet, and they're all the same: inoculate warmed heavy cream with some buttermilk and let it ripen. Couldn't be simpler. The catch is that the cream should ideally be fresh from the cow (as it is in less squeamish countries such as France), or, if you don't have a willing cow nearby, the cream can be pasteurized, but not ultra-pasteurized, because that process just doesn't leave enough bacteria for the buttermilk culture to do its magic. Wouldn't you know that the stores here sell only ultra-pasteurized dairy products. What I found interesting, once I was made aware of this pasteurized/ultra-pasteurized distinction, is that the food manufacturers seem quite proud of the ultra-pasteurized state of their milks and creams. It's written in huge print on the packages, obviously a major selling point. The great, lowest-common-denominator American marketplace, with heavy influence from the paranoid FDA, rules. So much for crème fraiche; ergo the sour cream. Having said all that, I can't imagine how the end product could be any richer or more pleasingly tart than this, sour cream, crème fraiche, or whatever.

You'll note that this recipe is heavy on the cholesterol, with all its dairy fat and egg yolks. And it involves a double boiler, the best thing to use if you don't want a scrambled-egg custard. If it all seems like too much work, search out simpler basic vanilla ice cream recipes on your own. They're certainly out there. I just prefer this French custard style for its extreme richness, and figure we have it so seldom it qualifies as an occasional guilty pleasure.

For the berries:

1 pint (2 cups) fresh blueberries

1 tablespoon water

2 tablespoons sugar

Combine ingredients in a small saucepan over medium heat. When simmering starts, cover and let cook about 10 minutes, until berries soften and begin to burst. Remove from heat, mash berries with a potato masher so that some whole berries remain but the rest is a slurry. Set aside to cool.

For the ice cream:

2 cups half-and-half

1 cup granulated sugar (divided)

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

8 large egg yolks

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 teaspoon ground cinammon

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 cups sour cream

In a heavy saucepan combine half-and-half and 3/4 cup of the sugar. Cook to scalding (just when bubbles begin to appear around the edges of the milk in the pan) stirring to dissolve sugar. Remove pan from heat. In a large heat-proof bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and remaining sugar, then whisk in the hot half-and-half in a steady stream. Place bowl over boiling water (so it does not touch the water) and stir yolk-cream mixture until it coats the back of the spoon and it reaches 170º F on an instant thermometer. This will take 5 to 7 minutes.

Remove bowl from double boiler and whisk in the vanilla, the cinnamon, and the salt. Mix in the sour cream and reserved blueberry slurry and stir all to combine.

Place blueberry cream in refrigerator for several hours until thoroughly chilled. Process in ice cream maker until thickened, according to manufacturer's directions. (I use a Cuisinart with a removable freezing tub kept in the freezer between uses. It takes about 30 minutes.)

At this stage the ice cream will still be runny, like very soft frozen custard. If you can wait, remove ice cream to a container and freeze until it hardens. (Or if you can't wait, eat it right out of the ice cream maker!)

Water, water everywhere

2010-07-06T14:48:00.000-04:00

We seem to be settling into something of a routine that gives me some time to sit here and write. As a matter of principle, I try not to make promises about the future, but I can say that maybe, just maybe, I'll have time to do a little bit more of this now. I actually fulfilled an ambition of over a year this morning and went out for a good walk. I am shamefully out of shape--my legs feel like lead weights now and my heart rate was elevated to true exercise mode in a matter of mere minutes once I set out, but I know these signs of rust will polish away with a little practice.

One year ago today we were in the midst of clearing the property. We'd get here in the cool of the early morning and suit up against chiggers: long pants tucked into our socks, long sleeved shirts, a do-rag for me to keep the sweat pouring off my head out of my eyes, and clouds of Deep Woods Off. It was sheer, unadulterated drudgery, but it didn't last long--we could only work until about noon every day before it got too hot, and our progress in those few hours a day was dramatically visible.

Now, the land is still cleared and my job is to water it. We finally had what we now call our mud flats--the 2 acres or so of land that was cleared to make the septic field in the front, as well as the two side yards and the back--seeded for grass. It's Bermuda grass, the kind that wants to grow here because it loves the heat (the soil temperature must be at least 80F--26C--before Bermuda seed will germinate) and it needs to be wet. So my job these days, while Steve makes sense of his sanctum sanctorum, the garage, is to water.

When the house was built, Gary, the builder, made sure the plumber put standpipe hydrants at various strategic locations around the yard. Now we know why. I water area by area from 6 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, an hour at a time, using three 100-foot hoses stretched to various spots in the yard. The seed really needs to be saturated, and, in case you haven't heard, we're in the midst of a prolonged heat wave. It's a dry heat, which means the water that lands on places unprotected by any shade, including the vast expanse of septic field where there can be no trees, evaporates quickly. We had a couple of days last week of heavy rain, and that gave everything a jump start. So far, I've been able to keep the ground moist enough to actually look wet, and the work is beginning to pay off. Our yard looks like the beard of a 13-year-old boy. That is to say, spotty. Here is what the back looks like as of today:

It's actually a little better than the front, which has long, narrow stripes of green surrounded by dirt containing various amounts of moisture. This is the three-week point. There are times when we despair of ever getting rid of the dirt and mud, but I strive for faith that these doubts, too, will pass, just as all the others have. A few months ago, when we first moved in and a lawn was still imaginary, a neighbor told us we should just get some sod. They had put down seed, and they'd never do it again. "It was so much work!" she said, and I simply couldn't understand what she was talking about. How much work can there be to turning on a hose and letting it run for an hour? Now I get it. You become obsessed with maintaining an even level of moisture all around. You're governed by the clock, going out to re-position sprinklers every hour. Sometimes the sprinklers get clogged with mud, and a simple operation that should take a few minutes stretches to half an hour or more, as you turn on the hydrant, maybe 100 feet away from the sprinkler, and discover that the sprinkler has become clogged. You turn off the water, walk the hundred feet to the sprinkler, unscrew it from the hose, walk back to the hydrant, turn the water on to clean off the sprinkler and force the clog out, screw the sprinkler back on the hose, put it back in the place you want it 100 feet distant, walk back to the hydrant, turn it on, and hope for the best. You've spent at least a good 20 minutes at this. And then there are the times the only way to move the sprinkler to the next area is to walk over the dirt you've just watered, which has become shoe-sucking mud. Perhaps reading all that is as monotonous as actually doing the work? Good, I've shown you what it feels like! But the photo above makes it all worthwhile. Pretty soon we'll have a lawn.

There are those who would probably love to point out that all this effort to create a "lawn," an artificial meadow, is unnatural, a colossal waste of a precious natural resource--water--and that we are polluting the very creek whose vista we so enjoy with the fertilizer needed to make this artificial meadow green. Carry the argument far enough and you'll have stopped us even from building the house: we should never have had those trees cut down, nor removed that natural thicket of green just to create a view. All I can say in response is, "I know, I know, your arguments are unassailable, and I don't care." I invite the environmentally sensitive among you to pitch a tent in the woods somewhere and be one with nature. Me, I'll take my greensward, my lovely, flat, green meadow, shimmering in the Carolina sun.

One Year On

2010-06-20T11:53:00.001-04:00

Was it really a whole year ago? It still doesn't seem possible.

On June 19, 2009, after nearly two years of preparation and seemingly unending months of anxiety brought on by an unfriendly national economy, Steve and I closed on the sale of our signature house in hyper-urban Arlington, Va., the one we'd spent 27 years re-creating into something that was ours alone. We picked up the cats, the fish, and the plants, and drove six hours straight south into a completely new life in deeply rural North Carolina. All we knew was that we were headed for a rental house and that our landlord would be the builder in whose hands we'd decided to trust the plans for our dream home by the water. Would we feel dislocated? Would we be accepted? Would the Klan burn a cross on our lawn? All of those questions crossed our minds. But we had each other, and we had the knowledge that up to then we'd been able to fit in anywhere. Heck, I'd spent two years of my life in Ghana, West Africa, the equivalent of another planet. If that dislocation didn't do me in, a move to the sticks would be more like re-locating to another house in the same neighborhood. Never did we feel we were making an unwise move. And a year later, we are all the more confident in the wisdom of our decision, and happy about it.

Oh, there have been changes in attitude. In my urban life you wouldn't have caught me dead or alive in a Wal-Mart, unless there was some bargain that simply couldn't go unheeded. Here, the Wal-Mart is the only big-box store for 60 miles in any direction. (There is a Lowe's nearby, thank goodness!) It stands in lonely grandeur on the outskirts of Elizabeth City, awaiting the mixed-use housing planned for its surrounds. It stands shining in the distance along with the strip mall that came with it, which includes a good pet store. Since this is the only such store for miles around, it must be many things to many types of people. It succeeds more than it fails.

Also in my previous life, I used to shop for food à l'européenne, making a daily trip to my beloved Harris-Teeter to be inspired by its gorgeous produce and wonderful meat selection for the day's dinner. Here, you can't go around any corner without running into a Food Lion--truly the Starbucks of the rural North Carolina, making up in utter ubiquity for it's complete lack of corporate style. I admit to an irrational prejudice against the chain, probably because of its name, which I find just stupid, thinking of it as an overgrown country store. (Capers are in the foreign food section, when you can get them. Fresh thyme was an unknown in the produce aisle until I asked for it.) But I shop there because the prices of this most base of basic selection can't be beat. There's a very nice store, a Harris-Teeter ripoff, called Farm Fresh in E. City. I go there for things like copper polish, Swiss chard or fennel bulbs, great cheeses, and my beloved Batampte pickles. I can even pick up kimchee there when my tastebuds so dictate. (And when it comes to produce, in the summer we are abundantly blessed with several farm stands to choose from.)

We do sorely miss a few things about the big city. Bed, Bath and Beyond is a marvelous place that seems downright miraculous upon entering one after a long absence. The occasional foray into Target. A Thai restaurant. (Mexican and Chinese are well represented, and there's even a Caribbean chop bar in Elizabeth City.) A selection of first-run movie theaters--we have to go all the way to the Outer Banks for a multiplex. Netflix has never been so welcome or necessary.

And we miss the proximity of our friends in Washington, but we don't miss the city itself. (Our best friends tend to be scattered all over the country, anyway, so being here doesn't make such big difference.) We miss the funky diversity of our Arlington neighborhood, but little by little we are learning where the weird people are down here--which is most certainly not among our lovely, well-meaning but totally homogeneous neighbors--we are the diversity in this little enclave, and they actually seem grateful for our presence. We are on a search for fellow-travelers and know they are out there. Meanwhile, our pink flamingos and the rainbow flag speak for themselves. What they may say to the literal-minded, camp-challenged locals is another story entirely--("all those flamingos...you guys really like the tropics, huh?") but we are making our statement.

We love looking at "our" creek every day, through the forest of cattails and bog flowers whose lives we made possible through the sweat of our backs. We love the starry nights, where the spilled-milk inspiration for the name of our galaxy is still visible. We love that through the good offices of a couple of very modest but pivotal people in our life here--our real estate agent and our builder--we have access to a network of first-rate craftspeople whose word is so good they don't even require contracts. When they say they will do something, they do it. It's a very high moral standard to live up to, and one reason the recent troubles with the home equity loan (finally resolved) were so distressing--it's not fair to make these good people wait so long for their due, since they have shown you such good faith. Where else could we be honored with such a tender obligation?

Most of all, even though we have not said it in so many words, Steve and I love that we have each other. Each of us made this life-changing adventure possible for the other. Without me, Steve would still be sitting in Arlington, stressing impotently over lost property values. Without Steve, his genius for design and his hands-on skills, my life would be far poorer and less filled with beauty. When it comes right down to it, that might be the best thing of all about this new life. With each other, we've seen without any doubt that we can do just about anything we set our minds to. We're coming up to 31 years next month. May the next 31 be half as good.

A very special song

2010-06-20T08:50:00.001-04:00

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MP3 File

Meanwhile

2010-05-21T09:22:00.004-04:00

The rain that seemed to go on endlessly just a few days ago has indeed ended and given way to bright sunshine, cool morning breezes and a clear blue sky. And that cozy feeling you get when you can sit inside and do not very much because weather won't allow it gives way, in my present circumstances, to feelings of jealousy that Steve can be outside, carrying lumber around as he prepares to make railings for the deck, while I'm still inside relatively immobile. But I can marvel at what Steve has shown me from the outside, and told me about. And yesterday afternoon after the sun had gone behind the house I actually maneuvered myself out to the deck and enjoyed the fragrant air and the evening views up the creek.

We are in the middle of a natural wonderland. Henry the blue heron makes daily, swooping forays up and down he creek, often landing right at the end of our dock to stalk some delicacy he sees in the water. If Henry happens not to show up for a couple of days running, we ask each other where he is. "Where's Henry?" has become one of those comfortable private catch phrases that mean more than they actually say. (We had a "Henry" in Delaware, too. We imagine that he found out where we went and followed us here.)

Yesterday Steve saw two enormous turtles on the wetland fringes of the back yard. One of them left some scratch marks behind--is this egg-laying season for these turtles? What kind are they? We need to find out. A hummingbird hovered over us as we sat on the deck, attracted to the extravagant salmon pink of the kalanchoe I bought to brighten Steve's office over a year ago. The plant has thrived here, as if celebrating Steve's freedom, and the hummingbird's reaction to it suggested the sort of company we may have if we were to plant something with actual nectar, like a trumpet vine. A trumpet vine requires strict, brutal discipline or it will become invasive, but the potential for crowds of hummingbirds may convince us it would be worth the trouble.....

Busy little Carolina chickadees and bluebirds flit and fuss incessantly from tree to tree along the water, and a tiny Carolina wren perches on the railing of our front porch at 4 o'clock every afternoon, like clockwork. He "serenades" us with a teasing, single-note call that is way too big to emit from that afterthought of a body. (The tiniest creatures seem to have been given voices that compensate for their lack of physical stature.) On the other end of the size scale, there are at least a dozen osprey pairs nesting in the tallest of the cypress trees that grace the banks of the Little River, just beyond our creek. At least one of them does graceful reconnaisance over us every afternoon. And then there are the crows, their raucous conversation announcing their arrival like so many ladies who have over-enjoyed a liquid lunch.

There are more wildflowers growing in the wetland than we ever dared hope. I've shown you a picture of the wild iris. They have now been joined by spiky little water hyacinths and a buttercup yellow ground cover whose name we don't yet know. A wetland rose of sharon is growing almost within reach of the dock--we hope it is the scion of a plant whose seeds we collected along the river last fall. It's still sprouting leaves and growing towards its full-season height, too early for blossoms, but the leaves and growth habit are unmistakable.

When I am once again ambulatory I promise to take some pictures of all these wonders and show them to you. Until then, daydream a little....

Laid Up

2010-05-15T10:03:00.002-04:00

I was walking yesterday morning, minding my own business, when I tripped on a wire and inflicted more long-term pain upon myself than I have experienced in my life. There are some times when you know you've done something that is potentially serious and will require more intervention than mere first aid. The burning pain at the base of my pelvis was my clue. I had torn the hamstring in my left leg. I "knew" it before I knew it. I just lay there in the dirt for a good half-hour while I tried to figure out some way to drag myself into a chair, using my arms and one leg. I knew I had to get to a hospital, but had no idea how I'd propel myself into the car, much less survive the ride, sitting, due to the nature and location of the nature of the injury, on the tear itself. I felt like a big baby but had to face the fact I needed an ambulance. I called 911, grateful for the system but apologetic at having to bother them with my ridiculous problem.

"Life is what happens when you're making other plans." A rare day off when we were planning to take the boat out and set the first crab pots of the year, and when I had intended to buy a big pork shoulder to try out my never-used smoker, was instead taken up by an ambulance ride to the hospital in Elizabeth City (two firsts: the ambulance and the hospital visit for myself) and then seemingly endless waiting on a bed in the emergency room. At the end of it all I was given confirmation that it was indeed a tear, some pain meds (motrin and percocet, both of which, despite their splendid reputations, are taking their sweet time to kick in), a pair of crutches, and instructions to contact an orthopedist first thing Monday, there being none on duty at the time in the hospital.

Straightening my left leg from anything but a completely prone position is still excruciating, though slightly improved (maybe a 9 instead of a 10 on a 1 to 10 pain scale) over yesterday. The crutches are useless to me because they require me to keep my leg in the only relatively pain-free position I can find, bent at the knee. In a standing position, the remaining muscles in my thigh can't help with that under their own steam--they end up cramping from the strange position, adding to the pain. For locomotion, then, I've taken to crawling around the house like a crab, face up, pulling myself along with my legs, then pushing the rest of my body forward with my arms, dragging my butt on the floor. (The bamboo needed a good scrub anyway!) In this manner I managed to push myself into the shower this morning and cleanse myself for the first time in two hot and dirty days, sitting on the shower floor.

Dear Steve, meanwhile, has been living out the "in sickness and in health" part of the traditional marriage vows. It goes without saying this ordeal would have even more difficult without his patient assistance, waiting on me hand and foot. He's also getting a little insight into the myriad small but vital maintenance chores I carry out in our life together every day, making the engine run smoothly. Not that I needed reminding, but this experience drives home once again how grateful I am to have him in mt life.

Other news: the lien situation drags on. There was indeed a debt against this property, and it was our purchase of the property that erased it. Unfortunately, it's that debt satisfaction that was never recorded. Dealing with bank bureaucracies to get that done is taking forever. There is still light somewhere at the end of the tunnel, progress is being made. But it's glacial.

And now for a crawl to the great room, or maybe to the deck.

Night Sounds

2010-05-04T13:31:00.001-04:00

We recorded this last night on our deck. You don't know whether to laugh at the comical sounds, be amazed at their volume and variety, or curse the fact that they are keeping you awake. The creatures making these sounds are not 30 feet away from the recorder, and we have no idea what any of them look like, especially those making those "bubbling" noises.

Welcome to the woods!

MP3 File

There But For Fortune

2010-04-24T14:05:00.000-04:00

It's a cool, gray morning that promises to evolve into more of the same in the afternoon and evening. We find ourselves with the first day of "nothing to do" in the new house, between projects, or waiting for various stars to align to start some. A very dear friend, an old Peace Corps colleague now living with her partner in Australia, has offered to make us a quilt for the house and deliver it--in person--sometime in 2011. So one thing that has kept me busy this morning is this website which has dazzled me and taught me in one session more about quilts than I ever imagined existed. Steve and I have been tasked with choosing a pattern. Once our choice passes muster with our quilting friend, we will delve into details of color. This promises to be fascinating, an experience topped off with a visit from Roz and Lib, whom we have not seen since our once-in-a-lifetime visit to Australia and New Zealand in 2005. It's one more lovely thing to be grateful for.

I also read the online version of the Washington Post, something I try to do fairly regularly, if I can stand yet more reports of the ever deepening chasm between viewpoints in this country, and the lunatics who really do threaten to take over the asylum. I saw that the IMF has prescribed a remedy for our current international economic ills: somehow getting the "developed world" to scale back its consumption and, concomitantly, its relatively luxe way of life. The dollar must lower in value or the Chinese must raise the value of their currency. Either way, it would mean that Steve and I may no longer be able to go to Ollie's overstock outlet and pay cents on the dollar for a dining room rug, say, or buy cheap nuts and bolts for our new deck. Such prospects bring home for me one more time how incredibly lucky we have been in so many ways, for so many years. When I say "we" I speak specifically of Steve and me, but the good luck has applied to countless of our contemporaries who happened to find themselves making their lives in Washington, DC, and other big cities, during the past few decades, riding the gravy train of good salaries that higher education could command, and not really too long ago. In Steve's and my immediate case, we decided what had to come next, got out while the getting was good, and had the means to build, literally, our future. Yes, we were smart enough to make plans. But we were just plain lucky to be able to realize them.

There is one gift from my time on the planet that just keeps on giving, and that is my time spent in a poor country with the Peace Corps. It continues to remind me to take none of the good life I have for granted. I know that there are people elsewhere who are exactly like me except for the opportunities that are my birthright, and from that difference flow so many others. "There but for fortune go I" is an old saying I became familiar with when Phil Ochs worked it into a song in the 1960s. Never a day goes by that I don't remember it, especially now, during such personal good times. Steve and I may have been smart. But we had a huge, undeserved and completely accidental leg up along the way.

FOOD FRIDAY!

2010-04-23T08:00:00.005-04:00

BAKED PORK AND NOODLES

This one is so easy I can't believe I never ran across it before, and even though a big part of is it is a couple of canned soups, I'm not proud, if it tastes good.

What I was really looking for was a way to make what my mother called "pork and noodles"--a good name, really, because that's all it was, plus some onion. Somehow she could boil egg noodles, pork chops and onions together and make it come out a rich, delicious wonder instead of a gluey mess. It can't have cooked for a very long time--the noodles take only 10 minutes to boil--and the pork not much longer. Anyway, I never found a recipe for boiling pork and noodles together, but I found a slew of them for baking them, all about this simple. Pork in North Carolina is a delicious and cheap protein, and I'm looking for more ways to use it. But you don't have to live in the Tarheel State to enjoy this.

Just one warning: give yourself some time. I takes 1 1/2 hours to cook.

6 country-style pork ribs

salt and pepper to taste

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1 can French onion soup

8 oz. uncooked egg noodles

1 medium onion, sliced

Preheat oven to 250 degrees F.

Pat meat dry, sprinkle with a little salt and pepper, and brown thoroughly in bottom of a Dutch oven. Remove meat from pan and set aside.

Mix soups together (do not dilute) and pour into Dutch oven. Raise heat to a boil and deglaze bottom of Dutch oven with the soups.

Distribute uncooked noodles evenly through soup mixture, making sure they are submerged, then nestle browned pork among the noodles. Separate onion slices into rings and distribute evenly over all.

Cover tightly and bake for 1 1/2 hours, until meat is fork tender. Serve with salad or your choice of vegetable. Yum!

All's Well!

2010-04-21T17:43:00.000-04:00

Please forgive me for the longer-than-usual hiatus--I'm dropping just a few lines now because some friends have expressed concern that there may be something amiss, especially since I mentioned that pain-in-the-ass lien in the last post. Really sorry to have given you reason to worry--there's enough of that already in all of our lives....

There is no excuse for my not writing more other than the usual one: it's busy around here and seems to have become moreso, if that's possible, since we moved into the place. We settled in and set ourselves up in record time--by the time we'd been here a month it looked like we'd lived here all our lives--but that's because we're both freaks about living out of boxes. We must have order in whatever passes for home or we go nuts. And once all was in order on the inside, we started with a vengeance on the outside. Now we're finally getting to build the deck, and I must say I'm surprising myself at the hammering skills--and general coping skills--I'm developing through the process. I generally hate construction. You have to hit things hard and half the time what you plan doesn't pan out the first time--something doesn't fit, or nails miss their mark, or I have to bend this ungainly body into positions I was never meant to assume. But today I did a pretty good job of some pretty hard stuff involving all of the above: pieces that didn't fit, nails that didn't go through, and positions I needed aspirin simply to get into.

The lien: I finally did what I should have done from the beginning. I called the law office that handled the closing on this land purchase. They were able to solve the problem literally overnight. Turned out our purchase enabled the seller to retire his debt, which he did, but nobody bothered to tell the county about it. We are simply awaiting the paperwork from the seller's lending bank certifying the payoff, which I will then hand carry to the county here to have registered. We have a month for all this to happen before our loan application would have to be re-done, so we're not worried.

Thanks for your kind wishes and your expressions of solicitude. If you want to know what's up on a more regular basis, I'm a lot more present on Facebook these days than here, simply because Facebook requires less of a time commitment. Join me there--I love friends! And I promise to try to do better here.

Random Notes

2010-04-08T07:30:00.017-04:00

I set out on a real post yesterday, and then the phone rang all hell broke loose (I'll explain later) when I was mid-way through it and I had to quit. I looked back at it again just now and realized it was just a meandering recount of all the work we've done since we moved in March 19. Not to minimize, it was a lot of work. The retrieval from Delaware of all the things we had left there meant another whole moving-in, this time of well-loved but admittedly too numerous things we "de-cluttered" from the house in Arlington as we readied it for market, not to mention all the things we had collected for the Delaware trailer itself over the four summers we enjoyed it. In a nutshell, we consolidated three dwellings into this one, and in the process filled thrift stores and giveaway bins with several trips' worth of usable but extraneous stuff, both here and in Delaware. I think we can safely say all the jigsaw pieces that had been scattered around the mid-Atlantic are under one roof. We're moved in, and now we can start on the list of projects that will lend completion to the home. That list is endless, of course, and it's just the things we know about and can plan on! (People have told us that the house looks so complete they'd think we've been living here for years. The truth is, we'd imagined most settings for months and it was a mere case of putting things where we knew they belonged. The hardest part of the job was hauling it all in.)

The hell that broke loose yesterday concerns a home equity line of credit we are applying for. We want to take advantage of our excellent credit ratings and of the fact that we own our house free and clear. The application process, however, has taken on the potential to turn into a nightmare because a very sizable lien was found on the property--a lien that supposedly has existed since 2005 but did not show up in the title search when we made our purchase in March, 2009. Some title company, either the one that did the original search for our purchase or the one working for our lending bank, has made a big mistake. There are myriad things to ponder and worry about in such a situation--my initial inquiries following yesterday's phone call from the bank led me to inexplicable dealings in the next county. All we can do is wait for the thing to play itself out, and that's frustrating for a born "fixer" like me. We should have more details, and maybe a resolution (for good or ill) next week. At least one thing has come out of this: now we know what title insurance is for!

The house may be looking lovely on the inside, (today's photo is of my favorite vista) but outside we're still all dust or mud, depending on the weather. Dwayne, the landscaper, doesn't want to do anything until Joe, the the bulkhead guy, puts in a retaining wall next to the wetlands on the side of the house. Joe can't start on our project until he's done with the job he's on now, and of course last night's soaking rain didn't help matters anywhere heavy machinery is needed. Landscaping will be an ongoing saga. I did plant a couple of trees yesterday where no machines will have to go.

The pollen you have either been reading about or contending with personally over the past few days hit us like a yellow nor'easter. It's record-breaking in these parts (we seem to have arrived here during a time when records were scheduled to be broken)--the air itself was a greenish-yellow fog as we drove on US 17 yesterday. We left the cars outside the garage last night for the express purpose of allowing the rain to relieve them of their dusty burdens. According to local authorities, most of the pollen we're seeing here is from loblolly pines, which the wooded part of our property is full of. We thought the oak and maple pollen in Arlington were bad, but we've never seen anything like this.

We got the boat running yesterday for the first time this season. Took about a half-hour of repeated attempts, but the old bucket of bolts finally kicked into life and purred like a kitten. We saw on our short boat ride that here in early April the Little River is already an obstacle course of crab pots. I bought some crab bait yesterday. Can't wait to start hauling in a few of my own!

Finally: Kat's recent fatal run-in with the copyright police has led me to a decision not to post music anymore, at least not in the MP3 format from my own collection as had been my pleasurable practice heretofore. I will miss the exercise because choosing the songs forced me into my library to refresh my memory of what I have, and gave me many hours of joy as I sampled and chose. But I dare not lose my space on Blogger, and truth to tell I no longer have the hours needed to luxuriate in my music collection. I may decide to go the Youtube route, as many of my friends do.

Signing out from this house

2010-03-18T18:04:00.004-04:00

Tomorrow we take possession of this magical house that we've been dreaming about since I started writing to you here. March 19 is 9 months to the day from when we closed in Arlington and moved here to this little rental house to begin this adventure. (How's that for hitting you over the head with symbolism? But really, this moment has been much longer a-borning, as most of you know.)

We are packing in earnest, and as we make progress, it's dawning on both of us that we're only moving 25 miles this time, not 500. All weekend, we'll be able to take things to the house ahead of the movers, who will come Monday. I remember the day we moved here, trying to put things away in the kitchen during the chaos of having furniture moved in, balancing intricate placement decisions in the kitchen and big ones about furniture at the same time. This move should be much, much easier. We can hang towels, put rugs on the floor, and, best of all, I can get the kitchen mostly put away over the weekend and concentrate on other things on the "official" moving day. (Of course, another "moving day" is also on the near horizon: the week after next we head for Delaware to bring all the things we thought we would be using there. That's a pretty substantial load, since as we consolidated the rooms in Arlington and moved furniture out to show the house, we took all of those things to Delaware. There are two large china cabinets, to begin with. And there are things we bought in Delaware that we want here, a rowboat, picnic table......Oh, we won't be finished moving in by a long shot when we clear out this house.)

So busy days are ahead. We'll arrange the inside, then get to work on the outside, mostly finishing the deck and landscaping. Still, I intend to make every effort to inject some discipline into my life once I'm under my own roof again. I can't wait to start my daily walks. And I do mean to write more regularly here. Connection speeds will probably be a bit better, making music less frustrating to upload. We all know what they say about good intentions, but I promise to do my best. I really do miss this wonderful part of my life.

There will probably be another long silence after this as we get through the nitty-gritty of moving in. But I hope I can start plumbing my brain once again for things other than the minutiae of changing residence. See you soon!

FOOD FRIDAY!

2010-03-12T15:32:00.004-05:00

CHICKEN AND BROCCOLI CASSEROLE

"Well," you must be saying (if you even still bother to subscribe), "look what the cat dragged in!" (And I don't mean the food!) I actually have the chance this rainy afternoon to get this recipe written down for you (and for myself, actually), and I'm glad. We are still commuting every day to the new place, if not to do anything specific, then to watch final preparations being made. Shelves are being hung, mirrors and towel bars put in place, and construction of the deck is beginning. And we are beginning our move in small pieces. The weather has warmed enough for the houseplants to stay outside, so we moved them all from here to the yard at the new place. I have heeled in all the iris and peonies that we brought with us from Arlington, letting them get used to conditions there. (They'll be moved once again once we decide on a landscaping design.) This weekend we travel to Raleigh to help a friend hang pictures in her new place, then we begin packing in earnest, preparing for the movers, who will be here early Monday, the 21st of March. Does all this sound familiar? It does to us, too!

I made up this recipe all by my lonesome after overhearing a woman in a hardware store the other day tell her friend that she was making "chicken and broccoli casserole" for dinner that night. It's one of those dishes we've all heard of and maybe even made--well, I'd heard of it, but never made it because I imagined most recipes probably called for a can of soup or two, and it didn't seem very inspiring. But this time I thought a good version, made more-or-less from scratch, should be delicious. I was in the mood for something new, so I whipped this up. The binder is a cheddar cheese sauce flavored with the broccoli stems that I cooked along with the florets and then puréed, and I took a shortcut and used a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken. While eating those overcooked supermarket birds by themselves can be a terrible experience, their meat really isn't bad if it's mixed into something else. This is a quick and easy weeknight meal that I'm going to make a permanent part of the repertoire. Hope you like it!

3 broccoli crowns (about a pound), florets cut from stems

1 medium onion, chopped fine
1 large clove garlic, minced
1/4 cup unsalted butter
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 1/2 cups scalded milk
1 12-oz.can mushroom pieces and stems, drained
2 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper

1 store-bought rotisserie chicken

Juice 1/2 medium lemon.

10 oz. short pasta, such as radiatore. (Elbow macaroni will do.)

1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cook pasta according to package directions.

Remove meat from chicken, discarding skin and carcass. Tear breast meat into bite-size pieces--you should have about 2 cups of meat. Reserve legs and wings for another use.

Steam broccoli florets and stems together. Remove florets to a bowl and set aside after about 10 minutes. Continue cooking stems for another 10 minutes or until soft. Put stem pieces into bowl of food processor and purée.

Melt butter in large saucepan over medium heat, taking care not to let butter brown. Add onion and cook until just soft but not brown, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and stir until fragrant. Sprinkle flour over melted butter and and onions, and combine well, cooking until bubbling subsides and no flour lumps remain. Slowly pour in scalded milk, whisking or stirring constantly. Turn heat to medium high, continue stirring or whisking until sauce bubbles and starts to thicken. Add drained mushrooms, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper and Worcestershire sauce, stir to combine. Add all the cheddar and stir until the cheese is completely melted and incorporated into the sauce. Stir in chicken breast meat, heat everything through. Off heat, stir in lemon juice. Check seasoning and adjust if necessary.

Pour sauce over cooked pasta and mix well. Grease a casserole with cooking spray and add chicken-pasta mixture, smoothing top so it is evenly distributed. Sprinkle Parmesan evenly over all. Bake, uncovered, until bubbly and browned on top, 30-35 minutes. Remove from oven to cooling rack and let rest 10 minutes. Serve.

News

2010-03-01T15:13:00.002-05:00

We take possession of the new house Friday March 19. We'll install the window treatments over that weekend and move in Monday, March 21.

The 19th of March, 2010, is 1 year, 1 month and 5 days after our first drive down here, when we found the property that has been at the core of our life ever since.

More later.

The home stretch

2010-02-23T12:54:00.002-05:00

It may not look like much, but that trench with the pipe in it is important. A guy was finally able to drive his heavy tractor over that rain-drenched fill yesterday and not sink to his axles as he dug a place for a drain pipe to run from the house to the septic tank. At last, if we bring water into the house, there's a place for it to go when it leaves. The last structural hurdle has been passed. We are celebrating our ability to dispose of our sewage. Who knew????

Detail work on the inside is becoming finer and finer. The wood floors are all in; carpets are now being laid. Trim details are being looked after, as are a couple of small projects that had to wait for this stage in construction. A "preliminary final inspection" will be made this week; after that the electricity will be turned on and the house will be heated. Protective covering from the finished floors will be removed, so we can enjoy that golden bamboo in all its glory. The process begun nearly 18 months ago with the removal of the first strip of paper from a wall in Arlington, this obsession with real estate and houses, builders and yes, sewage pipes, will soon be over. We will occupy our new house within three weeks!

I have no idea what this new life, so long anticipated, will really be like, but I can barely wait to start living it in what I know will be gorgeous surroundings. It's not time to write a valedictory to our current limbo existence, not just yet. Rest assured, though, ideas are percolating. We have been given much. We've experienced abysmal lows that have made subsequent highs seem stratospheric; we have made the happy acquaintance of people in places and walks of life we'd never have imagined, and we have learned.

As long as we are transitioning, that's what I'll continue to report on. Soon, though, it will be time for reflection and just plain enjoyment.

Onward.

The fish tank

2010-02-03T08:42:00.003-05:00

What you see above is a fish tank, but it's not just any fish tank. It's actually an old apothecary jar for which Steve's mother macraméed that hanger more than 30 years ago, back when macramé was all the rage, and which has been hosting a fish ever since. If you look closely, you can see Tiny, our bumblebee cichlid, swimming at the top.

In the house in Arlington, Tiny and his cool house were seldom seen because they hung upstairs in the "private" part of the house--few guests ever went up there. In the new house down here, however, he'll be on regular display, hung dramatically in the great room on a 30-foot chain from the vaulted ceiling. He'll be right next to the fireplace, the first thing you see as you look straight ahead upon entering the front door.

One of the many wonderful people we've met through our home-building adventure here is a guy named Richard, who works as a handyman for Gary, our builder. He came here to the rental last summer to do some work on the floors, and the first thing he noticed was the fish tank. Turns out he loves pet fish, has had a sideline for years building unique wood stands for standard aquariums, and happens to have a larger apothecary jar (the one above is 5 gallons; his is 10) that he's been wondering what to do with. At the time, he said he'd give the jar to us when we got settled into the new place, and there the matter lay.

Now Richard is the one putting the stain on all the oak woodwork in the new place, and we've caught up with him as we're there painting while he does his staining work. Yesterday he mentioned our fish tank again, and was excited when we told him where it would hang in the great room. He told us he'd bring his 10-gallon jar to us whenever we were ready for it--and he also wants to give us some cichlids! (We discovered that Tiny doesn't appreciate company in his 5-gallon quarters: he ate the roommate with whom he came to us within a day of their arrival. Maybe he'll do better in larger accommodations.) These jars are not inexpensive and they are hard to find. This is a true gift, one of the many that have come to us unbidden in this new place.

So now Steve has another project on his list: replace the macramé hanger, which is starting to dry-rot and won't hold a larger jar anyway. I tried macramé--it didn't work for me. Steve enjoys doing it just because he likes it, and it's also a way of honoring his mother. It's wonderful to be able to surround yourself with things that are not only beautiful but have such great backstories. You don't just admire them; you love them.

Update: the neighbor cabinet-maker came in with a price we can live with, especially considering that armoires for today's wide-screen TVs are not yet being manufactured for the mass market. So we'll have a truly unique and distinctive piece of furniture as a focal point in the room instead of an ugly TV screen.

Furniture, furniture

2010-01-27T08:15:00.003-05:00

Oh goody! I have a rare hour or so of isolation while Steve goes to a physical therapist to learn some exercises for his shoulder, which has been afflicted with bursitis because of some of the heavier-than-usual lifting we've both been doing in the past couple of months. I'm interested in whatever routines he's sent home with, because I've had the same problem, just not to the extent he has. With all the walking I've done all my life, my lower body is in fine shape. But I've neglected maintenance of the scaffolding and infrastructure above the waist, and it shows. I guess carrying occasional heavy grocery and trash bags does represent a minimum of upkeep, but I could use more....

Today should interesting. We've been looking at (and buying) some of the furniture the new house is going to need: a couple of love seats for the great room, tables, dressers, pictures, etc. I've mentioned before that the main TV, a 48-inch flat screen, is going to be in the great room in this house. It's an arrangement neither of us is fond of--we don't like making a huge TV screen the focal point of an area meant for conversation--but it's what the space configuration of the house permits. (In the old place, we converted the basement to a media room, problem solved. No basement here.) The solution is an armoire that will stand alone as a piece of furniture when we are having people over, hiding the TV screen while at the same time allowing access to other techie components, such as a good mp3 player. Armoires for today's huge screens, however, are hard to find in most furniture showrooms.

We know North Carolina is renowned for its furniture industry, and have been contemplating a foray to the furniture outlets in the western part of the state to see what we can find. But such an outing has seemed daunting, frankly. We can both get overwhelemed by too much choice, and what we've learned about these furniture outlets is that they are basically a series of airplane-hangar sized buidlings crammed with every style of furnture imaginable. My first impulse upon entering such a place would be to run back out, screaming. Enter Creswell Furniture.

Creswell is a little town about 30 minutes south of us. The furniture store there had an inventory sale last fall which we decided to check out. We were delighted to find beautiful stuff at good prices, and ended up buying almost everything there, thus making the awful trip out west less necessary. Needless to say, we and our furniture dollars have become "best friends" with the manager there, and we mentioned our armoire conundrum to her. It turns out she had exactly the same problem, for the same aesthetic reasons, when she built her house a few years ago, and she found a cabinet maker who happens to live right in Hertford, where we're building. She praised his craftsmanship, as well as his reasonable prices, so we gave him a call. Lo and behold, it turns out he's actually building a house right across the creek from us. All we need to do is bring him a picture of the type of piece we want, and he can make it, adding the custom touches that we'll need. We'll be meeting him today--he'll even be able to come to our house and actually see the space the armoire will occupy.

An armoire is a massive piece of furniture any way you slice it, and it should be fun to play with design details. It will be placed in the part of the room that is under the highest part of the vaulted ceiling, thus making the big size appropriate. We've never had that kind of space to play with, so we're looking forward to what we can do with it. Don't worry, pics will be forthcoming when it all becomes a reality!

We're expecting another major storm this weekend--thank you, El Niño, for creating storms that make mudslides in California and then travel our way to create huge nor'easters. All the rain we've been having is starting to interfere with our house construction. Rain makes mud--too much of it for a heavy machine to be able to dig the 50-foot trench for the main drainpipe that will carry waste from the house to the septic tank. No drain means no water hookup; no water hookup means no installation of indoor faucets, showers, toilets, etc. Now is the time all that should be happening, and it can't. Other interior work is continuing, and Gary is still talking about an end-of-February occupancy. He's been known to have a rabbit hidden under his hat in the past--we're hoping he does now!

Comeuppance

2010-01-21T11:00:00.006-05:00

Here we are in the last week of January of the new year, and I've written nothing at all for the entire month. I hope you can forgive my negligence; my absence hasn't been for lack of desire. (I feel the loss more now that so many of you have told me you enjoy these meanderings and miss them when new ones aren't around. The conscience is a bit easier on you when you think nobody's paying attention.)

Coming down the homestretch of house construction is a busy time. Since so much detail work is being done now, we are needed on hand to decide what pieces of trim go where, how high bathroom lights need to be, etc., etc. It's all the little things in a home that you take entirely for granted in daily life, mainly because they work. Well, they work for a reason. There's an art to the placement of mirrors and lights.

We've also been busy with more clearing, this time of the waterfront. That job has been especially satisfying because the water view was what brought us to the property in the first place. By now we've cut everything down that needed to be, so that when the water returns to the beach we will have only cat tails and native aquatic flowers to look at. Not bad for a few hours' slogging through the mud. If you're interested, here are the pictures of the waterfront (you only need to look at the last 20 or so), and these are of the construction. (Don't let those 300+ construction photos scare you away. Just go immediately to the last page to see the latest.)

For once, I'm thinking today of something that has nothing to do with housing. It was planted in my mind by an encounter with one of our neighbors-to-be, though, so it is a result of our being here.

It has been dawning on me over the past while that we early Boomers, as much as we'd like to think we changed the world back in the 60s, were really not the monolithic presence we were given to believe by all those Time and Newsweek covers that etched themselves into our brains. The times, our laureate told us, they were a-changin'. The girl pleading for help as she knelt by her injured compatriot at Kent State was a symbol for all of us righteously angry young folk.

But take a look at the reality of 2010. Have the times really "a-changed"? It doesn't seem to me that they have, or if change has occurred, it isn't the kind I, for one, had in mind. We may have created a temporary craze for bellbottoms in crazy colors and loosened the nation's sexual and drug mores. We and those just before us, those born in the late '30s to early '40s, also produced incredibly good music, both lyrically and musically. The Age of Aquarius definitely dawned, but sunset came early. The wonderful new world we thought we were creating has not appeared.

What happened?

I'm beginning to think maybe our number wasn't so great, after all. True, the politically liberal among us were the ones who garnered all the attention back in the day. (The outrageous always steal headlines from the run-of-the-mill.) It could very well be that the media made us legends in our own minds and no one else's. Others of our cohort, the quieter ones, were busy doing what 20-somethings usually do: getting married and having children, maintsreaming themselves. They were taking their places in suburbia, identifying with their elders. The politically active among them joined YAF (Young Americans for Freedom), wore coats and ties to class and kept their hair short. They saw what was happening on their campuses and in their streets and were either unfazed by all the hoopla, or angered by it, or just didn't understand it. Their own worlds were as fine as they'd hoped they would be; they were following the paths set down by generations before them, and they weren't interested in anything else. To make a gross generalization, they are now the Boomers who are fine, thanks, with their own health care and therefore see no reason to change anything for anyone else. They are today's Republicans. Which brings me back to our new neighbors.

The overriding impression we have had of the people among whom we will be soon be living is that they are as nice and as kind as the day is long, but not very interesting. They're all about our age, but seem older--I'm 64 and I liken them mentally to my parents. They are all white, all straight and all in late middle-age. At a Christmas party, Steve and I fell into a conversation about movies with one of the women from the neighborhood. She mentioned that she had just discovered "a movie called Harold and...and..." ...she couldn't remember the whole name. "Maude! Harold and Maude! I love that movie," Steve and I both exclaimed simultaneously. And at the same time we were saying how much we liked the movie, she was saying how weird she thought it was, how she just didn't understand it at all. It was a bit awkward. This nice lady, with whom I'm sure I'll be exchanging recipes, is my age or younger, and had never heard of "Harold and Maude," a movie iconic of its time. Moreover, once she finally saw it, she quit it mid-way because she didn't get it and evidently had no desire to. This is a reaction I would have expected from either one of my parents, who were born during the first decade of the 20th century. It was something of a comeuppance, however, to see someone of my own generation reacting in the same way.

We've been aware for a while now that we will have to make it a special project to find people who are like us as friends once we are settled down here, and, ironically, that the phrase "like us" really means "nothing like us." As a couple, Steve and I have never lived in such homogeneous surroundings. Our little street in Arlington, Virginia, was a cross-section of that diverse county. We were one of two long-settled gay couples. There were young and older straight married couples who were American black, Hispanic, and African. Columbia Pike, a 5-minute stroll away, offers literally a world of food, almost too much choice. While I lived in Arlington, I worked at the Peace Corps, the most comfortably liberal sliver of the federal government that could be imagined, even when run my conservative administrations. All those years, I was content to believe I was in the mainstream. Now, however, I'm beginning to believe it may have been nothing more than an echo chamber. I was happily surrounded by people who thought the same way I did, and extrapolated my cozy little world to the bigger one at-large.

Now I look at the current American political scene, at Massachusetts replacing a Kennedy of 40 years' standing in the Senate with a Republican, and I look at my kind-as-can-be new neighbors and I have to wonder. Did so many of my fellow 60s idealists backslide? Have they been bought out by middle class prosperity? Or were there just fewer of us than I thought?

Farewell 2009

2009-12-31T07:43:00.004-05:00

OK. But believe it or not, Saint-Tropez itself once looked just like this. It's a start!

We end the year 2009 doing what we've been wanting to do since we bought this little piece of watery paradise in North Carolina last February: clearing the waterfront so we can enjoy the view. Why did we wait until now? Because winter brings winds out of the north and winds out of the north blow the water out of the creek so we can walk on the beach. We have wind tides here, not lunar ones. When the cold north wind is blowing, we know we can once again take up a task we've become very, very adept at in 2009: clearing brush.

This job is a little different from the summer version we learned in July and August. It's colder, for an obvious start. More significant: that's mud you're walking on, "walk" being chosen politely and advisedly; it's really more of a slog. If you're lucky you only sink to your ankles, and you don't know where the weaker spots are, where you sink to the tops of your boots, until you're standing on/in them. And then there are all those little pointy things sticking out all over the place. They are cypress knees, federally protected. Between them and the occasional mud hole, you're lucky to remain upright as you drag your felled wax myrtle across the mucky obstacle course to the pile you're creating (seen right foreground) to be burned later. (Yesterday I fell once and I'm sure it won't be the only time. It's OK. Everything is washable.)

But picture this same scene in the summer. The mud will once again be under 2 or 3 feet of water. Cattails, wild irises and roses of Sharon will grow. Those old cypress trees will be full of green needles and hung with limpid Spanish moss. It'll be idyllic. And that's the whole point. Break an egg, make an omelet.

We knew 2009 would be a life-changing year--a challenge we prepared ourselves for and indeed were ready to take on as circumstances around us crumbled. January was bleak; we found ourselves strangling on a dream gone bad in Delaware and faced with Steve's imminent unemplyoment. The instinct for survival kicked in: we took control of our own destiny, and once we did that, things happened fast. By sheer grace, we were able to sell that gorgeous Delaware albatross for almost what we paid for it four years earlier, despite a tanked market. We settled that sale on the first weekend in February; the following weekend we came here to North Carolina for our first and only foray into real estate shopping, and just like that found that door that always opens when another one closes. In the ensuing months we worked hard, but we also had equal measures of good luck never expected and help never asked for, given by more big-hearted people than we ever knew existed. Once we finally settle, we have a lifetime of cheerful paybacks to perform. Not a bad thing to look forward to, and we can look back proudly on a big accomplishment. When both your future and your immediate past are pleasant vistas, you're in a pretty good place. I'm not complaining.

Thank you for being with me through all of this--your support and interest have contributed not a little to making this journey worthwhile. "Transition," indeed!
One of my real hopes for 2010 is that I will be able to get back to more regular visits. I do miss those empty morning hours in Arlington that gave me the time for them, but by now that feels like a former life, not to be retrieved. A new life is on its way--we're officially told by our builder that move-in will be late February or early March, about a year after all this started. We'll still be busy with flesh and blood life, but I'll also still be here, I hope on a more predictable schedule.

Happy New Year.

Rudely interrupted

2009-12-16T08:31:00.002-05:00

I'm on something of an enforced vacation these days. Current work at the property (fooling around with the boat, removing old seats and carpets to make way for new) is of the type that doesn't require two. Steve says when I'm along on a job like that all I do is "hover," and it's true. There's nothing worse than somebody standing around just watching, hoping to be useful. So this week my mornings are at home. Yesterday I intended to use the down time to play around in the blogosphere. I got waylaid.

When I booted up my computer yesterday morning my McAfee security app notified me that my subscription, which had been free to me as a Comcast customer, had expired. Since the Comcast freebie was a vestige of Arlington and the relationship no longer exists, that meant the time had come to take advantage of another free McAfee promotion, this time through my bank. It was a simple enough operation on the face of it: uninstall the old Comcast McAfee so that a new download wouldn't recognize a twinned image of itself and abort, go to the McAfee site and establish a new account via my bank, and then download and install the new virus protection. Even at my middling wireless speeds the operation would take an hour at most.

Wrong.

The McAfee installation refused to finish. It would go through every slow-as-molasses step, checking my computer for old versions and viruses, downloading the six components of the "security suite," and then trying to install them. Always, at the very end of the process, the word "failed" would appear.

I made my first call to McAfee tech support at around 10 am. I would make 5 more such calls over the course of the day. Until 6 pm I was mostly sitting in front of this screen, either explaining my situation to unfailingly courteous Indian citizens whose accents ranged from Simpsons Apu-esque, fun and totally understandable, to the utterly incomprehensible, or watching the slo-mo progress of another ultimately failed installation. At the end of the most frustrating phone session--the one with the diligent and hardworking man 95% of whose words escaped me--I thanked him for his hard work, congratulated him on his knowledge and his seriousness, and urged him to get training in American English if he intended to stay with McAfee so that all that knowledge could be put to its intended use.

In the end it turned out that somehow my computer had become infected with Trojan horses, applications that appeared normal to a virus scanner but were really spyware, and that my Windows security settings were wrong. These discoveries were made when I turned over control of my computer to the technician on the phone with me in India. I watched as the cursor drilled into the nether regions of this piece of machinery I so take for granted and discovered rafts of stuff that shouldn't have been there. It was an eye-opener to learn that even though I may be conscientious about scheduling regular virus scans and emptying temporary files, the control a lay user really has is limited. I always wondered why so many temp files remained after I "emptied" the folder. Still don't know why, but the removal yesterday of all of them doesn't seem to have hurt my computer.

It was on one of the earlier phone calls that I had the fear of God struck into me about using Firefox. The fact that I was trying to download through Firefox was the first theory about why installation was failing. McAfee, I was told in no uncertain terms, does not like Firefox. I dutifully uninstalled Firefox and worked all day only through Internet Explorer, which only added to the fun--IE is exponentially slower on this computer than Firefox. It was a relief to put Explorer back to bed and welcome Firefox back as my default browser.

How's that for a boring day? Geeze, we can blog about anything, can't we? For relief I put up a picture I took a couple of months ago of the beautiful Perquimans (rhymes with "persimmon") River, one of the great, completely unheard-of streams that water this part of the country. It's brackish, doesn't taste salty but has enough salt to support a very healthy population of fish and blue crabs. The picture looks south, towards the river's mouth (not visible) at the Albemarle Sound. We make this crossing every day on our way to the property.

Steve just called to tell me the electricians are back, putting in light fixtures and switches. One more step. Electricity to the house can't be too far behind....

FOOD FRIDAY!

2009-12-04T09:31:00.004-05:00

BRAISED BEEF SHORT RIBS

Here's yet another recipe from Cooks Illustrated that must be shared. It's a perfect meal for a cold day, with its lengthy braise creating wonderful aromas through the house, and a stick-to-your-ribs (no pun intended) finish. I offer the recipe here exactly as it appears in the magazine. Unflavored gelatin is called for because no bones are used in this recipe; therefore the thickening effect of the natural gelatin found in bones is lost. I didn't have any gelatin on hand, so I skipped that step to no noticeable detriment. The sauce is already so rich and delicious (and yet so simple--it's all about reduction and strengthening flavors) that the additional unctuousness of gelatin would be a cherry on an already over-the-top cake. (You can use bone-on ribs if you want, but they take up a lot of room in the pan and produce at least six times the fat as their boned counterparts. Substitute 7 pounds of bone-on ribs with at least an inch of meat on the top.)

I used rice as a starch to carry the sauce just because we were mashed potatoed-out after Thanksgiving. The peas added sweetness to the whole. But accompaniments, of course, are up to you.

3 1/2 pounds meaty boneless short ribs, at least 4 inches long and 1 inch thick, trimmed of excess fat

Kosher salt and ground black pepper
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 large onions , peeled and sliced thin from pole to pole (about 4 cups)
1 tablespoon tomato paste
6 medium garlic cloves , peeled
2 cups hearty red wine such as cabernet
1 cup beef broth
4 large carrots , peeled and cut crosswise into 2-inch pieces
4 sprigs fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
1/4 cup cold water
1/2 teaspoon unflavored powdered gelatin
Instructions

Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and heat oven to 300 degrees. Pat beef dry with paper towels and season with 2 teaspoons salt and 1 teaspoon pepper. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in large heavy-bottomed Dutch oven over medium-high heat until smoking. Add half of beef and cook, without moving, until well browned, 4 to 6 minutes. Turn beef and continue to cook on second side until well browned, 4 to 6 minutes longer, reducing heat if fat begins to smoke. Transfer beef to medium bowl. Repeat with remaining tablespoon oil and meat.

Reduce heat to medium, add onions, and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and beginning to brown, 12 to 15 minutes. (If onions begin to darken too quickly, add 1 to 2 tablespoons water to pan.) Add tomato paste and cook, stirring constantly, until it browns on sides and bottom of pan, about 2 minutes. Add garlic and cook until aromatic, about 30 seconds. Increase heat to medium-high, add wine and simmer, scraping bottom of pan with wooden spoon to loosen browned bits, until reduced by half, 8 to 10 minutes. Add broth, carrots, thyme, and bay leaf. Add beef and any accumulated juices to pot; cover and bring to simmer. Transfer pot to oven and cook, using tongs to turn meat twice during cooking, until fork slips easily in and out of meat, 2 to 2½ hours.

Place water in small bowl and sprinkle gelatin on top; let stand at least 5 minutes. Using tongs, transfer meat and carrots to serving platter and tent with foil. Strain cooking liquid through fine-mesh strainer into fat separator or bowl, pressing on solids to extract as much liquid as possible; discard solids. Allow liquid to settle about 5 minutes and strain off fat. Return cooking liquid to Dutch oven and cook over medium heat until reduced to 1 cup, 5 to 10 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in gelatin mixture; season with salt and pepper. Pour sauce over meat and serve.

Carolina Mudpie for a Crowd

2009-12-03T14:55:00.003-05:00

Before I get to the local specialty promised in the title, I bring your attention to the new masthead photo. It's what you see at the driveway entrance as of today. Our imagined concept of seeing a lovely house peeking out of the woods is becoming a reality. The color looks a bit drab now, but it's the effect we were after: a large-ish structure that looks like it belongs in its environment. We will add splashes of bright color to bring it to life after we move in.

The siding guy must have a sadistic streak, because he came the other day and finished the entire job except for the shutters on the room above the garage. The box containing the shutters is there, waiting to be used. It means he'll have to make one more trip all the way out there just to hang two more shutters. We don't get it. He's not paid by the hour. Sadistic, like I said. Has to be.

The piles of brush in the front yard are the leafy, twiggy parts of five trees that had to come down to make way for the septic field. If it ever dries out enough, we'll have bonfires to dispose of them. Outdoor fires are legal here with a permit that is free and downloadable. (All of a sudden we are once again savoring the spicy aroma of burning leaves--an experience I haven't had since the practice was outlawed in my suburban Virginia neighborhood when I was a teenager.) We dodged rain yesterday to get the trees cut into logs; we ended up with at least another cord of firewood, and we decided it was just too much for us--we already have enough wood to last a couple of lifetimes. We found a young couple on Craigslist who needed it to heat their house, so we let them have it for free.

CAROLINA MUDPIE FOR A CROWD

1/4 acre sandy clay
10 dumptruck loads sand
Rain

Before rain begins, dig six trenches, each 6 feet deep by 4 feet wide by 50 feet long, in the quarter-acre. Fill each trench halfway with sand, then place porous PVC pipe on top of sand in each trench and surround with heavy-duty styrofoam popcorn held together in huge mesh bags. Cover pipe and styrofoam with sandy clay originally dug from trenches; keep adding clay to come to top of each trench. Smooth remaining clay over entire surface of the quarter-acre and leave to settle. This is a septic system, but that's not the point.

Do a rain dance if necessary to summon 3 (three) days of Biblical, torrential downpour.

Invite friends over. Wallow.

In a hiatus

2009-11-21T08:54:00.004-05:00

We've reached the point we knew would come: we've temporarily worked ourselves out of a job. The last big project was splitting the firewood, which we completed a couple of weeks ago. There is still much clearing to do, but it's on the waterfront. The waterline backs up sufficiently for us to walk on the shore, enabling us to do that work, but not until deep winter, when there is a more-or-less permanent north wind blowing water out of the creek. (Our tides here are almost entirely driven by the prevailing winds instead of the moon.)

And so, what to do? Psychologically we are are not permanent yet because we really don't "live" anywhere--this current roof over our heads is a mere way-station, populated with as many of our things as necessary to make life possible, but it's not really ours. We have done all the day trips in the region that can reasonably be done between sunrise and sunset, and haven't really discovered anything anywhere that makes us want to return. Our two home bases, Edenton and Elizabeth City, are well served by restaurants, but very poorly by movies, so we are well fed, but other entertainment comes mainly via either Netflix or DVR'd movies off the TV. We do scare up the occasional odd job: we're working on the boat and dock at the moment, preparing to install new seats on the boat and making the lift run more efficiently. We want to paint the wicker furniture we've found in antique stores--the pieces are in excellent shape but their white needs touching up, and it makes sense to have that done before we move. It seems to be staying warm enough here well into autumn for us to be afforded the occasional 60-degree day that makes that outdoor job possible.

Otherwise, strings of empty days loom ahead. I'm more OK with that than Steve, who was not raised for introspection or a life of the mind. He does welcome the occasional day off, but usually as a reward for some just-completed hard work, which is his normal medium. When he gets down to spending hours playing Monopoly on the computer, it's clear he's scraping bottom.

We've been in one stage or another of "move mode" for about two years now, from the disruption of preparing the Arlington house for sale, going room to room dismantling and re-creating (remember that?), to the emotional roller-coaster of the selling process, to the physical move itself, to making ourselves ready to hit the ground running when we finally take possession of the new house, free to tackle all those new chores with the big exterior work behind us. We're very smart, very efficient.

But we've been living in anticipation all this time. Our present has been completely filled with preparation for the future. I'm the first to acknowledge it could be a hell of a lot worse--at least we have a future, and a very bright one at that, to prepare for. But what I wouldn't give for a group of friends who were a mere phone call away for an invitation to dinner and conversation. That day will come, I know. But it's not here yet.

Ida Comes Calling

2009-11-11T08:56:00.004-05:00

We are all warm winds and driving rain today as what's left of Hurricane Ida makes herself felt. She'll be here today and tomorrow, another house guest, less welcome than the ones to whom we've just bid farewell, but here for a shorter time. Since we can't work outside on anything, a big chunk of computer time is available. And that leads me to some random musings.

I was recently found on Facebook by one of the boys who made my first couple years of high school (high school for me was grades 8-12) a living hell. He actually "friended" me. Like all bullies, he appears totally oblivious to the havoc he wrought all those years ago, and comes to me all friendly-like. I took him up on the friend offer just so I could take a look at what he considers worth sharing about his life today. There he is, those familiar features now encased in rolls of fat, smiling out at me, the happy grandfather. His interests and his politics are the polar opposites of mine, which is not surprising. I'm pondering taking the opportunity to thank him for teaching me some important lessons in life--patience and perseverence in the face of extreme unpleasantness being the most important--but will likely instead simply ignore him. Still, it was a shock to get the message, and interesting how those ancient insults to the soul still resonate. It's also remarkable to reflect on how far behind I have left that life and those people.

We bought a canoe! One of the houses we pass every day on our drive to the property suddenly had this shiny red number in the driveway with a For Sale sign attached. It's a fiberglass 2001 model in very good shape, and we got it for less than half of what it would cost new. The creek we're on is ideal for a canoe and we had been toying with the idea of getting one, especially since Gary, our builder, actually designed a large, overhead space in our garage specifically for hanging a canoe. So now we can fill the space. Can't wait to take her on her maiden Lunker's Creek voyage. A canoe was pretty far down on our list of needs/nice to haves, but when you're faced with a deal like that.....

This is harvest time. The ubiquitous soy and cotton fields we pass everywhere in this part of the state are beyond ready to be relieved of their burdens, and little by little they are being emptied by combines and their fruit hauled away. Farmers actually defoliate (and kill) the plants in order to prepare them for picking, making it easier for the machines to do their work. And we're learning that mechanical harvesting is a labor-saving but inefficient process--right after picking, there seem to be as many cotton bolls left in the fields and scattered by the side of the roads as there are packed in tractor-trailer sized bales, and the birds are enjoying a bonanza of fallen dried soybeans.

And speaking of birds: lately there is amazing activity among the starlings here. Thousands upon thousands of them are flocking, flying in a westerly direction in the mornings and then coming back eastward at dusk. They stop to rest in the trees surrounding the property and create a racket that requires you to raise your voice to be heard. I've checked the obvious websites, including the Cornell bird program, to find out what's going on, but so far have come up dry. Since starlings have colonized the entire continent, there isn't much migration really going on. So what gives? Maybe they're flying from soy field to soy field, gorging during the day and returning to their home roosts at night? Whatever it is, Alfred Hitchcock's imagination had nothing on this spectacle.

Collards and hamhocks for dinner tonight. Yum! Am I in the South or what?

FOOD FRIDAY!

2009-10-30T08:00:00.003-04:00

PORK GOULASH

I'm making time today to get this into the queue so I won't forget to tell you about it. It's a real winner that I had tucked away for a good 25 years before I ever even tried it, just last week. (One more reminder that it pays to go off the beaten path and try something "new." Obviously, since I had gone to the trouble of collecting the recipe in the first place, I must have thought it had possibilities. I just never got around to making it.)

Once I decided to post the recipe, I had to figure out a good name for it. I collected it as "Rindfleisch und Schweinenfleish-Gulasch" but that seemed pompous, and besides, "Rindfleisch" is beef, and I left the beef out. I thought about "Hungarian-Style Pork Stew," but "goulash" is a word everybody knows (and it was part of the original name), so that's what I settled on.

Goulash is usually served over buttered egg noodles, but I put it on mashed potatoes and it was scrumptious. Do whatever you want!

2 lbs. pork shoulder, cut into cubes for stew
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 cup Hungarian paprika (smoked, if you can find it)
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 large onion, coarsely chopped
2 medium carrots, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup low-sodium beef broth
1/2 cup dry red wine
1 15-oz. can mushrooms stems and pieces, undrained
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
6 thyme sprigs, tied in a bundle
salt and pepper
10 oz. frozen peas
1 cup sour cream (can be low-fat but not nonfat)
1/4 cup fresh parsley, minced

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Heat oil in a dutch oven until shimmering. Add pork in batches so it is not crowded, sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper, and brown thoroughly on all sides. Set meat aside as it is browned. Add third tablespoon of oil to same dutch oven, then add onions and carrots and stir until they begin to deglaze the pan and turn brown. Add garlic and cook just until fragrant.

Sprinkle paprika over onions and carrots and stir to coat vegetables, then sprinkle flour over all and stir to combine. Add the broth, the wine, the mushrooms with their liquid and the Worcestershire and cook, scraping bottom of pan to completely deglaze, until sauce begins to simmer and thicken. Stir in thyme bundle, along with reserved pork and any accumulated juices. Cover pan tightly (using foil between lid and pan if necessary) and bake in oven for 2 hours or until pork is fork tender.

Remove goulash from oven and set on rack. Remove remains of thyme bundle. Stir in peas, cover, and allow them to cook in the hot sauce for 10 minutes. Just before serving, stir in sour cream and adjust salt and pepper as needed. Sprinkle parsley evenly over all and serve over mashed potatoes or buttered egg noodles.

In which I discover life outside The Project

2009-10-27T08:36:00.004-04:00

This backyard visitor may be the most exciting thing that happens today. There's still hope, since it's only 8:30 in the morning, but rainy days like this one cause life as we currently know it to screech to a halt.

I think I've either created a false impression that we are constantly busy with The Project, or maybe it's a kind of vicarious fantasy life that my reading friends have conjured for us because of the things I usually write about these days, but allow me to set the record straight: we have no life whatsoever outside The Project as long as it remains a "project" instead of a home. We are in limbo, in purgatory, in-between, and a rainy day like this one makes that abundantly clear. Even after a rain, when the sun is back out and the weather is dry, we still can't do much because where we "do" things is on a construction site where there is only dirt. Dirt becomes ankle-sucking mud after a rain. There is nothing. to. do. I suppose that should make me happy because it gives me a chance to write here, but look: all I'm doing is complaining!

But even as I write those words, I am reminded that we actually are getting a few other things accomplished during these waiting days--things that we had almost given up hope of ever doing. For one, we're having my chair re-upholstered. The current upholstery is showing its 25 years of daily use; the chair needs a face-lift to feel comfortable with whatever sectional sofa we eventually buy for the new great room. Our Deep Creek neighbors came through once again for us, this time with the name of a favorite upholsterer up in Elizabeth City, and we took a picture of ther chair to her last week. We're waiting for an estimate.

Another long-put-off project was the repair of our three antique clocks. Over the years in Virginia they had all stopped working, and because of prices there we despaired of their ever again being more than beautiful but non-functional conversation pieces. (The repair of just the clock pictured in the linked post would have been $300.) Once we got here and started haunting antique stores, we asked the proprietors if they knew of anyone who repaired antique clocks, and always came up empty. So in a spare moment I simply googled "antique clock repair" in eastern North Carolina, and came up with two local shops, one, again in Elizabeth City, and the other on the Outer Banks. I called the E. City guy and he came all the way down here to look at the clocks and give us his estimate. He fixed all three clocks, the one pictured, a companion to that one, and an Emporer grandfather clock, for less than the price of the one clock in Virginia. Repairing the grandfather clock had special meaning because my father had made it from a kit, his first retirement project, back in the 70s. So now we have three lovely clocks ticking away here, keeping (more or less) accurate time. We already know where they will go in the new house.

It's now an hour later than it was when I started here, and guess what? There is something happening today more exciting than the goat visit. We got the estimate on the chair. We're off to Elizabeth City!

Life's a beech

2009-10-20T16:27:00.013-04:00

Among the scores of trees on our 2 1/2 acres was a magnificent and ancient beech. It stood at least 50 feet tall and had a circumference at the base of over 6 feet. It stood within touching distance of our spanking new garden shed and, alas, it was rotten at its roots. Huge holes had been dug into it by everything from microbes to insects to, no doubt, snakes. With regret, we had to face the fact that it must come down.

Dwight was the man for the job. He was the foreman on the framing crew, the man who directed all the very intricate carpentry that made all those peaks and valleys on our roof a reality. He's a master carpenter and also a nice guy who's always hustling a few extra bucks. That's what we paid him to cut the tree down--it was on the ground, cut into immense, even logs, when we returned from our Nags Head vacation in September.

It goes without saying that the eventual destination for this wood bonanza is our fireplace. To get it ready for service, the next step for us was to split the logs into hearth-size pieces, and Dwight said we could borrow his gas-powered hydraulic log-splitter to do the job. We still had to finish building the shed and then siding it, so the task had to wait a few weeks. And in those few weeks Dwight, that sterling character of a master carpenter, made like a contractor and disappeared. "Oh, yes," he said, when we called him to confirm he would still lend us the splitter. But he never showed up on the appointed day, and he stopped returning our calls. He'd gotten his money and had no sentimental need to continue the relationship.

So there we were with many many beech logs to split and nothing to split them with. We looked at renting a splitter and were prepared to do that, even at $69 a day, because we thought we had no choice. Then our Deep Creek Shores neighbors stepped into the breach. One of them stopped by for a chat and in the course of the conversation he mentioned that another neighbor had a splitter we could probably borrow. Relieved, we called that neighbor to talk log splitters. He said we were welcome to his, but it hadn't worked in months and he'd trashed it. He'd ordered a new one, but it wouldn't be delivered for weeks.

Back to the rental idea. Since these splitters are big machines that have to be towed, and none of our vehicles has a trailer hitch, our plan was to borrow the truck and trailer from the same guy (yet another neighbor) from whom we had borrowed them to clear brush. But he had major qualms about letting us drive the rig all the way to the rental place in Elizabeth City. Insurance concerns. He was very apologetic and it was clear he felt bad about leaving us in the lerch, but we understood, probably would feel the same way if we'd been the lenders. We went back to square one with our plans, preparing to actually rent a trailer to pull the splitter down from E. City, when the truck-and-trailer neighbor called us to say he remembered yet another neighbor who had a splitter! That was the middle of last week. We called neighbor number 4, and we got the response with which we were becoming depressingly familiar: we were welcome to borrow his splitter, but it wasn't running at the moment. The difference this time, however, is that this guy is a whiz-bang mechanic who can make anything with a carburetor run. He said he'd be able to fix the splitter over the coming weekend (this previous one), and we'd be able use it for as long as we needed it after that. Since it rained all last week anyway, no untoward time was lost. We found other things to do on the property while it rained.

Finally, last Sunday, Mr. Mechanic delivered the splitter. A noisy monster that applies 14 tons of hydraulic pressure to split the biggest log we'll ever see (and that's not even the biggest, which comes in at 20 tons), it will be our boon companion all week. It took us a mere two days to reduce the mighty beech tree to the stacks of wood you see in the photo above. That is about 132 cubic feet of wood, slightly more than a cord. It will last us several lifetimes. And we aren't even finished. Tomorrow we'll tackle this pile, which was saved from the original land clearing. It's oak and cypress, and there's at least another cord there.

Need some firewood?

An update

2009-10-10T09:11:00.011-04:00

Accuweather and NOAA are unanimous in stating that at this time, clouds are supposed to be gathering for a coolish, rainy Saturday in these parts, but you couldn't prove it by the clear blue sky, brilliant sunshine and delicious, cool breezes we are enjoying as I write. This would be a perfect day for the beach, but it would be our luck to get there just as the rain started--for it's bound to start. It's just a little late. Last night was incredibly beautiful. We sat on the deck and looked at the sky, so clear that the Milky Way was literally just that: a cloud of light so dense that the stars in their indistinguishable billions looked like nothing so much as milk spilt across the sky.

The clearing work is done! That's Steve up there in the picture, standing on top of the last load we took to the dump yesterday. (There is actually still quite a bit of clearing to be done on the waterfront, but we can't get to that until mid-winter, when the water recedes and we can walk on the shore. We're so good at this particular job by now we ought to have the beach done in a matter of a few days, and then, North Carolina being a state that allows such things as long as we get a permit, we will burn it. So we can truly say our huge yard-waste dump runs are over!)

I just wrote an email to a friend with an update and realized everybody else may be hungry for the news, as well, so I thought I would share the interesting parts:

The house is coming along, mostly on the inside, so there hasn't been much in the way of photos to share. The HVAC rough-in is done, plumbing is about 3/4 done, and wires for electricity are being pulled now. It's at times like this that we are so glad to be here to watch the process closely. We can talk to the guys on a regular basis, establish relationships with them, learn a lot (especially good for Steve, who has the technical basis to build on) and catch errors, sometimes of judgement but mostly of omission on our part. We forgot a few things when designing the kitchen, for instance: a place for trash, and dedicated lights over the sink and over the cooktop. We've been able to add those things on the spot by talking to the right people. And then Gary, our otherwise sainted builder, took it upon himself to assume that the deck along the back of the house would be a step down from the house, instead of mounted flush with the interior floor. That to us was a series of accidents waiting to happen, with people having to negotiate a step as they went outside, lawsuits in the making. Plus, the big deck off the kitchen will be a dining area. Can't you see someone (me, of course) armloads of food or dishes spreading dinner all over the deck because I missed the step? We fixed that.

Since electric is in process, Steve and I have been focused on fixtures: deck, dock and driveway lights, lights on either side of the garage door, a doorbell, and various interior lights that aren't part of the standard package. (And we're talking a lot to the electrician about outdoor electrical needs: trenches for the lines to the dock, to the driveway, which at 450 feet needs plenty of lighting, and to the garden shed. Since we're here, we can easily stay on top of all those things.) The Lowe's down here in Elizabeth City is pretty good in the electrical department, and after looking at all the specialty stores, we ended up buying all of our fixtures there. Their selection was huge and the bill was a fraction of what it would have been at an electrical supply place. We actually like everything we chose, didn't have to "settle" on anything. (And no, I'm not being paid for this plug!)

Siding is going on the house now. It's a painstaking process because of all the peaks and soffets, but it's looking beautiful. The next good pic to share will be of that job when it's finished.

Steve and I are fine--I'm OK once I just accept the fact that this is a limbo time, and for now I can't do some of the things I love, like listen to music and write. The luxury of those couple of hours a day just doesn't fit into the current schedule. Also, I'm in the worst physical shape I've been in for years because there's just no place to take my walks and our days are often so busy, lunchtime is just too much food--salads, mostly, but big restaurant ones with a lot of extras that I of course finish. So I'm putting on a few pounds. (Nobody else would notice, but I do, and so does my blood pressure.) Again, I quell those worries with the reminder that this situation is just temporary.

And now, sure enough, the clouds are beginning to gather, and it's becoming humid and more uncomfortable. The rain is on its way, just in time to do whatever the day demands in the form of errands. If I play my cards right, that may not amount to much.

Sorry for the weird font and color changes. They come from copying from the meail format to this one. I did what I could to fix it, but it isn't perfect, because Blogger isn't......

Still in limbo, still busy

2009-09-28T14:21:00.006-04:00

Here's a picture of what the house looks like today. The most recent additions are the roof shingles and all the doors and windows. Inside, plumbing and duct work are being installed, and the electrical rough-in should be done by Friday.

It used to be that when our September vacation was over, that signaled, essentially, the end of the old year and the beginning of a new one. It was a throwback to the school calendar mind-set, I guess. Maybe next year it will feel that way again, but for now, in this limbo state, I don't feel as though I'm on some sort of threshold, except for the very long one before us as we wait for our new home to be finished. Another analogy: it feels like my old Peace Corps job, at the change of presidential administrations. While we waited for the new political appointees to be installed at the top, all initiatives and pending projects came to a standstill. We couldn't do anything until the new folks, charged by the president with new initiatives based on his platform, had a chance to review what was currently in process. I'm in the land of in-between, treading water with work that needs to be done but doesn't represent anything new, just maintenance. I know how to live here but I don't like it very much.

The routine we established in early July continues. Early every morning we make the 25-mile drive up to the property and take up chores that still need to be done while the house is a-building. The clearing is mostly finished, at least until the winter, when the water recedes dramatically from the beach front and we can actually walk there and do some much-needed clearing. What has been cleared must be maintained, which is done with a combination of mowing, weed-whacking, and herbicides. (There is a very aggressive, thorny vine called greenbrier that can only be controlled with chemicals. If you cut it down, it simply pops back up, in multiples of what you cut down. The irony of naming this noxious weed after the luxurious, palace-sized resort in West Virginia is not lost on me.) Steve continues work on the garden shed, now putting shingles on the roof. A big job ahead, this week and next, will be dealing with firewood: we had a couple of very large trees taken down and cut into logs, which we will now split into pieces for the fireplace. Steve will split with the gas-powered log-splitter loaned to us by the guy who cut down the trees, while I stack. And these are only temporary stacks. They'll be moved when the construction project is finally over and we can grade and landscape the land immediately adjacent to the house. When that's done, we can determine the spot that is most convenient to the fireplace, and move it all there. Oh, there's no dearth of things to keep us busy.

So busy, of course, that I am still unable to transcribe my jottings here with any regularity, much to my continuing regret. I am still not complaining about the work. I just wish there were more hours in the day so that I had the two or three I need to do this well. But I don't, so there we are. I'll try to check in again in less time than it took me to get here today.

Life is a beach

2009-09-06T10:32:00.003-04:00

We are back to whatever passes for normal these days after a great beach break with DC friends who were in Waves, one of the tourist villages far down the barrier islands known as the Outer Banks. The house was nothing short of palatial, with, in addition to the usual great room and decks, 8 master bedrooms, a media room, a Viking range in the kitchen in addition to wall ovens and two, count 'em two, refrigerators, and a dining room table for twenty. We were 12, but we weren't just rattling around in the extra space. Nature abhors a void, and so does a crowd of gay men. We filled the spaces. It was a great break--a teaser for our own week in South Nags Head beginning the 19th of this month.

The hosts in Waves were Jim and Kemp, friends from DC whom, when we were living there, we'd see a couple of times a year for dinner if we were lucky, because of the distance between our homes. It was great having a chance to spend some extended time with them, and fun and interesting to watch the dynamics of this group of people we became a part of. Just as we have a set of "Nags Head friends" with whom we now get together almost exclusively when we are at the beach (though we met at work or through mutual friends), and with whom we have built up a rich history over the years, they have their set of close friends from college and other earlier days, and their stories and memories are every bit as funny and/or intense as ours are. It speaks well of the group that we never felt like we were horning in on their special times--we were welcome. And we even found time for a card game--that's a picture of me learning (for a second time) h0w to play euchre. I like it!

This was the first time we drove "home" from the Outer Banks and were still in North Carolina at the end of the trip. What used to be a 5 1/2 drive was just 1 1/2 hours. And we aren't really "at home" in this rental house. The whole situation brings home to me state state of limbo in which we find ourselves now and the mysteries still ahead. Steve has yet to have to deal with the fact that he is retired. We went from one way of life in which he worked and I stayed home to this, in which he is still working, but on different things, and I am working again. At some point all this house-related hyperactivity will be done, and a new "normal" will make itself known. I hvae no idea what it will be, but I look forward to that day.l Until it comes, though, we just roll with the very strong flow.

I miss you!

2009-08-26T16:51:00.002-04:00

Life has changed, folks. This is me riding a symbol of the new times. Our new mower was necessary to stay ahead of Mother Nature's abhorrence of a weed vacuum. Time was when we used a little electric mower to cut the grass and the job was done in 20 minutes. No longer.

If we aren't clearing land, we're building in the garden shed. The bottom line is, my nine-to-five weekday bachelor mornings, when I had the hours to indulge my love of music and the written word, are a thing of the past. They may come back when this construction/moving adventure is done early next year, but for now, we get up and go to work every day. We're back home around noon (too hot to work past that) but then I find myself occupied with the other important mundanities that keep life rolling.

Honestly, I'm not complaining, but this new reality is keeping me away from you and this place and I regret that. I still swear I will not give up this blog, but really, I don't know how often I'll be able to write anything. For now there is no news on the "transition" front except that the house continues apace. I've shared weekly updates with many of you via email--if any of you are curious to see what the transition is literally about, visit here occasionally. It's really all my life is about these days. If you save the website you'll see weekly updates, usually on Saturdays.

I'm still following all of you, my friends, and enjoying your words and pictures. I'm with you in the ether like always. I'm just not contributing to it as much as I used to (or would like).

FOOD FRIDAY!

2009-08-21T08:00:00.001-04:00

AUSTRIAN POTATO SALAD

I think I've said elsewhere that potato salad is one of those things I'll always try at a home-style restaurant because how cooks deal with potato salad tells me a lot about how they'll deal with more complicated dishes. Granted, there are as many ways to make potato salad as there are cooks (and I'll bet you've never seen this one), but that implies, along with democracy, that there are good ways and bad ways. Undercooked, overly vinegared potatoes swimming in a "sauce" of only mayonnaise, which by the time it reaches your table has turned into a soup because of juices released by other ingredients, is a desecration and does not bode well for whatever else may be on the menu.

Here's a potato salad you're not likely to find on any menus, at least here in the States. It's the latest can't-miss from Cooks Illustrated, and I'm happy to share my adaptation of it. I've made it twice, and the second time was even better than the first, because it sat in the fridge overnight before we ate it. The flavors--very simple, really--blended wonderfully into a rich, sweet/savory whole. The magic is that the "dressing" is made by coarsely mashing a few of the potatoes and mixing them into the flavored potato cooking water, which you've reserved. The affect is something like the pungent German potato salad we all know, but there is no bacon, it's served room at room temperature instead of warm, and it's more mellow.

My own adaptation: the magazine couldn't find the German pickle (sauergurken) used in Austrian kitchens, so they substituted French cornichons. Well, I couldn't even find them down here, but I can get capers (in the "foreign foods" section of the Food Lion, mind you), and they add the sharp, rather briney flavor I think the cornichons would. I guess you could also use crispy cold-pack dill pickles, too, but I do like the sharpness of the capers.

If you do as I did and refrigerate the salad to develop the flavors, bring it to room temperature before serving.

2 lbs. Yukon gold potatoes (about 4 large), peeled, quartered lengthwise and cut into 1/2-inch thick slices
1 cup low-sodium chicken broth
1 cup water
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar, divided
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 small red onion, chopped find (about 3/4 cup)
6 cornichons, minced (about 2 tablespoons) or 2 tablespoons capers, drained
2 tablespoons minced fresh chives
Black pepper to taste

Bring potatoes, broth, water, salt, sugar and 1 tablespoon of the vinegar to boil in a 12-inch heavy-bottomed skillet over high heat. Reduce heat to medium low, cover, and cook until potatoes offer no resistance when pierced with a paring knife, 15 to 17 minutes. Remove cover, return heat to high (so cooking liquid will reduce) and cook 2 minutes.

Drain potatoes in colander set over a large bowl, reserving cooking liquid. Pour off and discard all cooking liquid but 1/2 cup (if you have less than 1/2 cup, add water to make 1/2 cup). Whisk remaining 1 tablespoon vinegar, mustard, and oil into cooking liquid.

Add 1/2 cup cooked potatoes to bowl with liquid and mash with a potato masher until a thick sauce is formed (it will be slightly chunky). Add remaining potatoes, onion, capers, and chives, folding gently with rubber spatula to combine. Check salt and pepper, serve at room temperature.

Simple, huh? Enjoy.

All the news...

2009-08-20T14:41:00.005-04:00

It is beastly hot. Hot, hot, hot. It's not 100 degrees (it's only in the mid-90s) but when the sun hits your skin it feels like it's being concentrated by a magnifying glass. It burns on contact. It's this hot in DC every summer; the difference between there and here is that in DC I had the sense to stay inside out of the heat. Here, we're working like dogs right out in it.

Clearing continues, sporadically. It rained so much last week and there was so much mud as a result that we couldn't maneuver truck and trailer into locations that were easy to reach with arms or barrows full of cut trees, bushes and weeds. So this entire week until today, we've been working on the garden shed. We decided today, since it's been dry the entire week, to get back to clearing. After a false start caused by Steve spending an hour trying to figure out how to take the string-trimmer attachment off the weed whacker and put the saw blade on, we tackled the back yard. The back yard really is the most important space on the entire 2.5 acres--it's what gives the water view we paid for, when it's cleared. And those are the operative words: when it's cleared. We purchased the land in February, after last season's growth had died back and obviously before any new growth could take place. That's how we know there's a view...by the looks of things now, you'd never guess it. After we clear the land, we'll keep new growth under control with a mower. (See below) We'll still have several yards of actual waterfront to clear as well, but that will have to wait until winter, when the water has receded and we can walk there. Little by little....

The big news is that we found a riding mower! We've been looking since we got here, waiting for prices to fall on the models on which we had narrowed our search. We finally found one at a Lowe's all the way up in Virginia Beach (yes, that's another state), and they won't deliver it to our "home" store in Elizabeth City. So tomorrow after the clearing work, we'll empty the trailer of the yard waste and then borrow it and the truck that pulls it from our neighbor and go get it our wet and smelly selves. Having a mower finally means we can stay ahead of re-growth in all the areas we've worked so hard to clear, and we won't have to do it again. In our brave new life down here, this is a red letter day!

A day off

2009-08-13T10:23:00.004-04:00

The weather has switched on us. We've gone from the early-August heat wave everybody else here on the Eastern seaboard has experienced to a series of rainy and (relatively) cooler days. Rain means mud, and mud means we can't do much clearing at the home site because we either can't maneuver truck and trailer through the mud to where they need to be, or we can't get into the boggy wetland areas because they're too boggy and too wet. We went up there anyway this morning to check out the remarkable progress on the construction (floors are down on the first storey and most walls will be up by the end of the week), and then I left Steve to do some easy, one-man work on the shed while I came back here. Later we're treating ourselves to a trek to the Outer Banks to see a matinée of Julie and Julia and then dinner. We may have to travel an hour to see a good movie (well, Bruno, of all things, made a brief appearance at the local theater in Edenton--so brief, in fact, we missed it) but that's OK. Gives us an excuse to splurge occasionally.

Sorry for no Food Fridays these days. I do have one new recipe to share, but it still needs perfecting and a picture. So, no recipe tomorrow, but next week, I promise there will be.

Just checking in because I can....

Service with a southern smile

2009-08-11T09:07:00.011-04:00

Our new house is being built in Perquimans (rhymes with "persimmon") County. Local lore tells us that "perquimans" means "the land of the beautiful women" in the language of the Yeopim Indians who once dominated this area. These beautiful Yeopim women and their menfolk were part of the Algonquian nation. Their name lives on in the name of the road on which we are currently living, not to mention one of the huge rivers that water this place.

Perquimans, with an area of 329 square miles, was accommodating 12,856 souls as of July, 2008. Just for comparison's sake, Arlington County, Va., from whence we uprooted ourselves, stuffed 210,000 people into its scant 26 square miles during the same month. You see the sort of expectations we may have of county government.

Our garden shed needed a permit. We thought it didn't, but when the inspector came to look over the foundation of our new house, the shed, which by that time had two walls up, caught his eye. We grimaced at the thought of the impending bureaucratic hassle and asked our builder to take care of it. He punted it back to us, saying the shed would have a "lower profile" if we did it. That made sense, so we bit the bullet and set off for the county seat, Hertford, to take care of business.

We first went to the inspections office, where we were greeted by the same guy who had informed us at the property of the need for the shed permit. He's a friendly type who remembered us and was prepared for our visit, whenever it may be. We happened to arrive around lunch hour on a Friday, so he was alone in the office--the receptionist was out. He looked at the paperwork he had at hand and told us it wasn't enough; we needed something else from the zoning office, which is located in the 1852-vintage courthouse pictured above.

We strolled over to the courthouse, checked the building directory, and then headed up the creaky stairway to the zoning office. On our way there, we passed and nearly knocked over a young man dressed in slacks and polo shirt. He was engrossed in a document he was reading as he walked and we were barging along in our Arlington County way. We apologized, had a friendly chuckle over our clumsiness, and continued on.

When we got to the zoning office, no one was there except an extremely friendly young woman who apologized up and down for her colleague's absence. "I wish I could help you," she said, "but I'm the finance officer." That is, the county CFO. She shares office space with the zoning commissioner. She told us we could probably get everything we needed from the County Manager and directed us to that office, at the opposite end of the hall. It seemed rather outlandish that the County Manager would bother him or herself with such minutiae--a permit for a garden shed--but figured the receptionist would be able to take care of it.

But there was no receptionist. We walked through the open door directly into the County Manager's office, and there at the big mahogany desk sat the same young guy in a polo shirt we'd nearly felled a few minutes earlier. County Manager Bobby Darden looked up at us with a friendly smile and asked how he could help us. We rather sheepishly told him we were directed to his office to take care of a permit for our garden shed. Without further ado, he got up, walked down the hall to a file, extracted the appropriate papers, initialed them, xeroxed them for our convenience (!), and sent us on our way. In the course of about 30 minutes, which encompassed a block's amble from the inspections office to the courthouse and back and talking to a total of three very friendly people (two of whom were top-tier county executives), we had our permit in hand. It cost 25 bucks, and we learned yet another very pleasant lesson about small-town life.

More life in the country

2009-08-04T11:45:00.000-04:00

Little by little I'm learning. I uploaded the photo above two days ago in anticipation of today, when I knew I'd have the chance to post. I started uploading the song about a half-hour ago, ran some errands in town, and it was done when I got back. Anymore, if a daily posting depended on two songs (my old pattern and still my preference) and a picture every day within a couple hours' time, it would never get done. It would take my entire allotted two hours just to get the songs. Forget about the picture.

Speaking of the picture, this is of the little cactus that is really spoiled in the warmer (oh, hell--hotter!) weather we have here. For it, the warmer the better--you can see a bumper crop of blooms is on the way. Always a silver lining--our using the deck of an evening is out of the question, but the cacti love it out there in that bright and hot all-day sun.

I have this morning off. Recent rains have made the terrain on the property so muddy that moving the truck and trailer around for the continuing clearing job is impossible, so Steve's using the time to make progress on the equally important garden shed. The sooner the shed is done, the sooner we can get a mower to store in it, and the sooner we can get ahead of vacuum-resistant Mother Nature, who is as I write working very hard to undo all the clearing work we've completed so far. I hate to say it, but a gasoline-powered noise factory is the only thing that can make co-existence possible.

I think I've discovered the essential difference between this place and Delaware, where we almost ended up. In various places I've talked about bigger distances here and the lack of emphasis on seafood and the seeming lack of importance some public eating places seem to place on the quality of any food at all they may serve. The difference is that little Suffolk County, Delaware, is essentially driven by the resort economies of the coast. The beach towns of Rehoboth, Dewey and Bethany have become magnets for the relatively well-off vacationing crowds from DC, Baltimore and Philadelphia and their money. Over the years, many of those visitors have ended up settling there (as we almost did), and their expectations eventually drive an upgrade in goods and services in general. The tourist economy has raised the standards for everyone, native and transplant alike. Add to that the relative smallness and resulting convenience of the place and you have a tourist paradise. You're never more than 30 minutes away by car from a first-class restaurant, or by boat from the ocean.

It's different here. The three counties that make up this inland northeastern tier of North Carolina could swallow in one gulp the entire state of Delaware. The Chowan River, which is the next tributary down from us feeding Albemarle Sound, is a river the world at large has never heard of but which dwarfs the Mississippi in most places--it's literally miles wide. Despite all this water and recreation potential, tourism and its benefits have emerged almost exclusively on the ocean-bound Outer Banks. We who move here looking for water recreation can find it easily--the fish and blue crabs are huge and plentiful (the crabs so much so that they are routinely caught here and then shipped north to be marketed as "Chesapeake Bay crabs"). But the other amenities we may have been looking for are largely missing. This is not a tourist economy; it's mostly a farm economy, a laboring economy. Indeed, for a DC native for whom "work" meant nothing but sitting in a chair an office my entire life, it's a revelation to be surrounded for the first time by people who actually work for a living. No quotes around that noble word. They work, with their hands and their backs, demonstrating the original meaning of the word.

Now, I'm not going all "noble savage" on you, but I like these people. They're simple. They live life where the rubber hits the road, producing things the rest of us either eat or use. The political intrigue of Washington, which I still find fascinating and which does effect their lives directly, means less to them than the bottom line--am I better off now, or worse? The recent Yankee-baiter notwithstanding, I've run into no ideologues who mount soapboxes to spout off their "beliefs"; in fact not much overt political or religious symbolsm at all, in the form of in-your-face bumper stickers or vanity license plates. I'm sure the people with whom I've had the pleasure of passing the time of day do have beliefs, but whatever they may be they haven't gotten in the way of any conversation that I've had. All I've found is common ground and the same concerns as people the world over: they want to be able to feed their families and have a little fun.

So we have to travel a bit to get to a good restaurant. We still get good food. You can't beat the peanuts we buy every week from the very guy who grows and roasts them. He's happy for our business and we're happy to support him. Sounds like a good relationship to me.

FOOD FRIDAY!

2009-07-31T13:26:00.013-04:00

PORK TENDERLOIN WITH GARLIC-HERB MARINADE

We had a couple of adventures last night. First, we bit the bullet and got our hair cut. This was something of a signal event, because our friends Frank and Rick in Arlington had been coming to our house every six weeks to cut our hair and hang out for more than 20 years. We hadn't set foot in a hair emporium of any kind--hadn't even thought about it--in all that time. So many questions came to mind. Do guys down here go anyplace but barber shops? If I went to a barber shop would they snicker if I gave them a few directions about what I wanted done? (Thin the sides so I don't look like a Kremlin dome, among other things...) Finally I discovered Edenton Hair Solutions "for Gals and Guys" right downtown and made appointments. A matronly lady named Anita, who, she told us, has been cutting hair since 1964, welcomed us to her one-chair operation.

There was a slightly shaky start when she asked us what we did for a living. When I told her I was retired from the Peace Corps, she said, "So. The military." It's been so long since I explained what the Peace Corps is to another American (have I ever?) I wasn't quite sure where to start. I told her it was a government program that sends people to live and work in poor overseas countries to help them. No glimmer of recognition from Anita--not even a perfunctory "that's nice." I had no idea what reaction the word "Kennedy" might elicit and wasn't particularly anxious to find out, so we left the Peace Corps and moved on.

Anita was clearly grateful for our business and chatted about how things in Edenton are changing. She bemoaned the fact that most of her customers are newcomers anymore, replacing the old timers who have either moved away or passed on. More and more businesses are catering to tourists instead of locals, and that can be hard...and I agree it's ridiculous that people in this relatively prosperous little pocket have to travel more than 30 miles to get to the Elizabeth City Super Wal-Mart to get cheap groceries, or to Lowe's...and the nearest Home Depot, if that's your preference, is all the way up in Virginia. We asked her about the county fair, coming up at the end of October. She told us she's with the American Legion and is there every day cooking. We used to love the Arlington County Fair and visit it to sample the various ethnic foods available. Now, down here we aren't expecting satay with peanut sauce, not even kielbasa with peppers. But chili dogs? Not a word about barbecue in this literal hog heaven. But, strained conversation aside, Anita did a good job on our hair for less than half what we used to pay Frank and Rick, so we'll stick with her until we move up to Hertford. Then we'll probably find someplace else for our haircuts in (relatively) urbane Elizabeth City. (We hope once we're in our house we can entice Frank and Rick down for an occasional weekend visit. Maybe every six weeks???)

Speaking of barbecue, our other adventure was a barbecue dinner at Captain Bob's, a big roadhouse on US 17 we pass every day on our commute to the property. There's always a lunch and dinner crowd there, so we figured it must be the place where the locals know they'll find the best BBQ around.

The official name of the joint is "Captain Bob's Barbecue and Seafood" (emphasis mine), and its sign has a picture of an old salt with a parrot on his shoulder, so we should have been clued in to the preponderance of seafood on the menu. Yes, they do have barbecue: minced or sliced pork, which is done with vinegar-pepper sauce, the way I like it, and sliced beef barbecue, which is also not too bad, at least not cloyingly sweet. I ordered a plate of the minced pork with coleslaw, potato salad, and corn bread. How's that for a great sounding Southern spread? My mouth was watering.

Well. Ever had potato salad so soupy you needed a spoon to eat it? I drank it out of the bowl. (Yes, there were a few lumps of potato, but clearly the stuff had been sitting around so long the vegetables had given off all their juices and watered down the mayonnaise to the consistency of soup.) Same with the cole slaw, whose main ingredient besides cabbage was sugar. (I poured it over the pork to moisten the meat a bit and it wasn't too bad.) The meal was served with a golden-brown hockey-puck thing sitting on top of it. That turned out to be Captain Bob's version of Elvis Presley's death-wish corn bread. What they do is take a slice of perfectly presentable corn bread, and then they dip it in batter and deep fry it. Is this some regional specialty the rest of the country has never heard of? If so, I understand completely the South's desire to keep it a secret.

We figure we'll give the place one more chance for the seafood. At least we know what to stay away from next time: the potato salad, the coleslaw, and the "corn bread." Steve had an order of onion rings and they were good, light and beer-battered. And the pork wasn't bad. But mine's better.

So far I'm amazed at the lack of imagination--or local pride, really--we've seen in restaurant food here. We're not looking for gourmet and certainly don't expect it from roadhouse food. But freshness doesn't seem too much to ask for. We'll keep looking. (And I have to admit that the three sit-down restaurants in downtown Edenton are not bad at all.)

Today's recipe is a very simple but delicious treat, made with the same marinade I use for shrimp kebabs, but with a little brown sugar added. I like pork tenderloin, but I don't often grill it because it cooks so fast. After firing up the Weber and waiting for the coals to heat, the 20-minute cooking time seems anticlimactic. But it's good to eat, and perfectly suited to the faster gas grill.

Herb-Garlic Marinade:

6 large garlic cloves
1/3 cup packed fresh thyme sprigs
1/4 cup packed tender fresh rosemary sprigs
1 cup fresh lemon juice
1 1/2 cups olive oil
1 tsp. salt
1/4 cup brown sugar, light or dark, whatever you have on hand
Pepper to taste

1 package pork tenderloins, 2 1/2-3 lbs.

Mince garlic, herbs and salt together in a food processor. Woody stems on the herbs are OK--they will not be eaten. Add lemon juice and olive oil to herbs in processor bowl and process until emulsified.

Remove tenderloins from shrink-wrap, run under faucet to remove moisture, and pat dry with paper towels. Place meat in large ziplock bag and add marinade to cover. Refrigerate at least 2 hours or overnight, turning meat occasionally.

Remove meat from marinade and pat dry. Discard marinade. Allow meat to air-dry at room temperature while you prepare grill for the indirect roasting method.

When grill is ready, place meat directly over coals (or burners) and sear for 5 minutes to develop surface carmelization. Turn and repeat to brown other side. (The sugar will brown quickly, so mind well the size of the flame on a gas grill.)

Move meat to opposite side of the grill, cover, and continue roasting with indirect heat another 10 minutes. Remove meat to a cutting board, allow to rest about 10 minutes. Slice into inch-thick pieces and serve.

Epilogue

2009-07-29T07:20:00.001-04:00

An update and some closing thoughts await your eyes today in the Rainbow Room.

Learning along the way

2009-07-25T16:03:00.005-04:00

I've had the picture and my song ready to go since early Saturday morning, but this is the first chance I've had to sit down and write something. Between playing tourist and taking care of business both on the construction project and everyday living, there has been little time for this. Today is different because Steve went to the property by himself to work on the garden shed, which I'm not much help at. We'll start clearing again tomorrow or Thursday, and the morning labor routine will begin again. We're almost finished with that job; now we have to get a tractor mower to stay ahead of Mother Nature, who appears to abhor an underbrush vacuum. When the shed is up, we'll have a place to store the mower. You know how it is, one thing leads to another....

The picture above is a closeup of the Roanoke River at Williamston, NC, about 40 miles south of here. As you drive south on US 17, you cross the river at that point on an enormous bridge, and you see what appears to be a complex of walkways. In the same proximity along the road are signs bringing your attention to the Roanoke River Wildlife Sanctuary. A stranger to these parts can be forgiven for putting two and two together and concluding that the walkways are part of a walking tour of the Sanctuary. At least, that was our conclusion, and we set out Saturday morning to take a trek and see some wildlife. Wrong. Turns out the walkways you see from the bridge are all there is; they don't "go" anywhere. They're just part of a small park. Interesting enough, for about 5 minutes. We drove into the town of Williamston itself to check out the tourism center. On this sunny summer Saturday, when tourists may be expected out and about, it was closed. Weekdays only, 9 to 5. What, one may reasonably ask, is the point?

We continued on to the town of Plymouth, whose name we had seen on road signs since we've lived here, and was intriguing. It's a harbor town, it has the same name of the more famous town in Massachusetts, and there might be something there to explore.

We discovered another barren little viilage, hanging on by a thread. We stopped for lunch in the only place that was open, the Plymouth Bakery and Café. The owner/hostess/waitress, an older woman, turned out to be a transplant from New Jersey who engaged us enthusiastically once she found out we were new to the area and from "the North." She asked us what we were interested in, and we said activities like antique stores, walking tours... she became a fount of information about out-of-the-way restored plantations and emporia. Plymouth is trying hard to rejuvenate itself, but like so many places we've seen in this depressed pocket of the state, it has been hit hard by the economic crash. People like us are bringing a little cash in, but it's a mere trickle at this point.

It wasn't my intention to write something depressing today, but this is what came out as I followed the words. We still like it here very much, but as is to be expected, we are discovering things we hadn't anticipated, such as these dormant local economies. In Edenton we find ourselves in a capsule of relative prosperity, and when we move, our little neighborhood will be the same. Our "big city" then will be Elizabeth City, and collectively we will be contributing to that economy by spending our retirement pensions there on restaurants and good grocery stores. Little by little.....

FOOD FRIDAY!

2009-07-24T07:06:00.003-04:00

SUCCOTASH WITH TOMATOES AND BASIL

I was hoping to get this done before we went out into what is now our workaday world this morning but the picture took so long to upload I didn't have time for anything else. It rained buckets last night, and I thought maybe we'd have a day off, but the sun came out in the morning, so we went ahead and continued the clearing work on the property. The eye-popping "before-and-after" views are all created now; we're down to nitty-gritty places that aren't as attractive but still need to be done. And when it rains a lot of that forest floor turns to shoe-sucking, tire-burying muck. It's so hot so early in the morning that before long all those long sleeves and long pants--necessary to keep away the bugs--are sticking to you as if you'd been wading in the water. There is no way to put a "whistle while you work" spin on this uncomfortable drudgery. Its only reward is its completion, and the fact that what you've done has made a visible difference. Next week the foundation bricks will be laid, so I'll have more pictures to share.

We are still enjoying the bounty of all the little vegetable stands nearby. When I saw baby limas at the place down the road I knew I'd have to make some succotash with them and some of the sweet corn I still had on hand. There's nothing very complicated about the succotash I've always known--corn and limas--but to make sure I got the proportions right I went to Epicurious to find a basic recipe. What I found was this instead, a great variation on the classic standby that uses two more gifts of the season: tomatoes and fresh basil. And it happens that this is a dish that truly does improve with a few hours to let the basil flavor develop fully. I liked it the first day and LOVED the leftovers the next day. If you think succotash is a plain-jane side, you may change your mind after you try this.

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 1/2 cups chopped onion
Coarse kosher salt
1 large garlic clove, minced
3 cups chopped red tomatoes (about 1 1/2 pounds)
2 1/4 cups corn kernels cut from 4 ears of corn
2 cups fresh lima beans (from about 2 pounds pods) or 10 to 11 ounces frozen lima beans or baby butter beans, thawed
3 tablespoons thinly sliced fresh basil

Heat oil in heavy large skillet over medium heat. Add onion and sprinkle with coarse salt. Sauté until soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add garlic; stir until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add tomatoes, corn, and lima beans. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer until corn and lima beans are tender and tomatoes are soft, about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Stir in basil and serve.

"A bunch of Yankees"

2009-07-22T16:09:00.003-04:00

First: take a look at the new masthead photo. Since we're all about transition here, I thought it was time to get rid of that tentative image from the time we were merely hoping to be able to make the property into something, to an up-to-the-minute representation of what it looks like now. We finished clearing the land all the way to the house site today and now you can actually see where the house will sit the at the end of the curving, shaded driveway. Lovely, if I say so myself!

I'd always heard there are southerners for whom the Civil War never ended. We saw one such soul today. It was at the dump. The guy was at a distance and he must have heard us say hello to the attendant in our accents, which mark us as not from these parts. "A bunch of Yankees," he said to no one in particular, was filling up the yard waste bin with pieces that weren't cut down to four feet. Huh? After at least a dozen runs to that same bin at that same dump, the people working there have never said anything to us about a size limit. But leave it to us "Yankees" to fill up the waste bin too fast and make it harder for an honest Reb tryin' t'do the rat thing.

Steve and I have probably been called much worse, of course, but never to our faces. We had an epithet--Yankee--actually thrown at us! You think of all kinds of snappy comebacks later, of course. (My immediate reaction was what I wrote above: "huh?" because we didn't know about any four-foot rule, and as far as we're concerned, until an attendant at the dump tells us about it, we still don't.)

I could have said, "I'm no Yankee, I'm from Virginia, but I outgrew the accent." But it would have been too subtle for such a sledgehammer brain. You think about a possible conversation with somebody like that and you mentally ascribe all the worst prejudices to him because he called you a Yankee. Jews, queers and n-words are what's wrong with this country. Can't you just hear it?

I think the reason I'm so taken by this incident is that it was the first negative vibe we've received in the month-plus we've lived here, and in all the visits we made before moving here. Steve and I aren't the most obvious gay men swishing down the trottoir, but we figure it has to be clear to anyone with two eyes that we're more than just good friends, the way we finish each others' sentences and appear together everywhere. And yet we are welcomed everywhere we go--indeed have at times been overwhelmed by the kindnesses we have been shown.

Ignoramuses like that "Yankee" slinger have been around since long before I set foot on the planet and will no doubt continue to reproduce. God bless America because they can say and think what they want. As long as they remain under their rocks while I'm out cutting my 6- to 8-foot brush, I'll be fine.

Progress

2009-07-20T15:50:00.005-04:00

Arrgh! Between Blogger taking its more than sweet time to upload these pictures and the new, slower speed I still need to get used to, my attempt at the proud papa act of pulling out photos to show you is being short-circuited. Just these two photos took 20 minutes to load. The other two I wanted to share just weren't moving at all. So I'll settle for these today and try for the other two another day.

Our days are falling into a routine. We are still clearing the front couple of acres of the property--the subject of these photos--so we get up there at around 8 o'clock so we can work while it is still relatively cool, quit around noon, come home, have lunch, and then tend to whatever town or home chores await. It is very hard work I would never do for anyone else, even for money. But it's also fantastic cardio exercise over a period of a couple of hours, so I'm not complaining--I'd be getting the workout somehow, anyway. And the pride of accomplishment and ownership is worth every drop of sweat--which is profuse, bundled up as we are in long pants and long sleeved shorts against the chiggers and ticks.

Here's what the area to the right of the driveway looked like this time last week: The camera's back is to the road and it is looking towards the area cleared for the house and the septic field, which is just barely visible through the thick grass and the tree suckers. Here's how we left it today: it's the same view taken from pretty much the same viewpoint. It's starting to look like a yard! The clearing in the distance is the septic field, and the house site is behind the last clump of trees on the left. We have a total of 2.5 acres and I'd estimate that the house will take up the .5 or perhaps .75. The rest will be cleared forest land. The initial clearing is by far the worst part. Maintaining it should be fairly easy with a riding mower,which is inching up to the trop of our list of things we need. We have a backup generator scheduled for delivery this week (that's in case a hurricane knocks out power, and also to operate our boat lift before the house is finished), and then next week our garden shed will come, just in time to keep usn busy after the clearing job to be done. The shed is coming as a kit, which we'll put together ourselves. (When it's built, there'll be room for the riding mower!)

Initial ground breaking on the foundation happened today; that was the subject of the other two pictures. We now have trenches with re-bar in them. (I hope to show you on Wednesday.) Next step: inspection, then concrete in the trenches, then some actual carpentry.

We're on our way!

FOOD FRIDAY!

2009-07-17T06:58:00.002-04:00

ANDRÉ'S CORN, TOMATO AND BLUE CHEESE SALAD

I'm really pushing to get this done within the next 20 minutes; otherwise the day will take off and leave Food Friday in the dust. According to the weather forecast, we have only a couple of hours to do some more brush clearing on the property before the heavens are scheduled to open with heavy rain for the rest of the day. We'll work until we are rained out, then come home and get cleaned up. Then we'll be off to the big city to see about a dock permit. Yesterday we took a one-day trip up to Delaware and back to get up some things for the boat we had left in storage there. Four-and-a-half hours up and the same back, with about two hours in Delaware itself eating lunch and loading the car. We took the time to look at the old property and see what has become of it. You won't believe it. Traces of our idyll there have been completely erased. I'll post pics tomorrow. No time now.

Our friend André Miller brought this scrumptious salad as his pot luck offering for our Farewell to 12th Street party. Anything André makes is a treat; this stuff was gobbled up before many people even had a chance to sample it. It's a perfect way to showcase some of summer's bounty. Try it once and I guarantee you'll be going back to it again and again as long as corn and tomato season lasts. I used the last of the delicious corn we had bought from our neighbor.

Notes: you don't have to grill the corn. I just cooked mine conventionally on top of the stove, and it came out fine. The blue cheese is an unexpected addition and absolutely makes the dish. Substitute at flavor's peril.....

1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil leaves

1 teaspoon sugar
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
8 ears corn, grilled in the husk, kernels removed
1 sweet onion (such as Vidalia or Walla Walla), halved
and thinly sliced
1 pint grape or cherry tomatoes, halved
8 ounces blue cheese, crumbled
Fresh basil sprigs, for garnish

Combine the vinegar, basil, sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1/4
teaspoon of pepper and oil in a blender and blend until
smooth. Can be made 2 hours in advance and refrigerated.
Bring to room temperature before using.

Combine the corn kernels, onion and tomatoes in a large bowl.
Add the dressing and toss to coat, season with salt and
pepper. Let sit at room temperature 30 minutes before
serving. Top with crumbled blue cheese and garnish with
basil sprigs just before serving. Salad can be made 1 day in
advance and served cold or at room temperature.

The final Peace Corps installment....

2009-07-15T15:57:00.000-04:00

....at the Rainbow Room.

It rains here too....

2009-07-13T09:51:00.002-04:00

We had torrential downpours last night that left everything wet this morning, which means if pavement is wet, then the clay at the property is muck, so what we thought would be a working morning is turning out to be something else. We've both been sitting at our computers all morning long--another unexpected luxury. Not sure I'd like a whole string of days like this, looming fairly empty, especially when we have a house to build, but a few are just fine.

One of the perks of living in North Carolina, of course, is all the furniture that you can get here. I took a preliminary gander at that scene this morning. It looks like the place to go is Hickory, about 6 hours away, and it'll be a trip of a couple of days because there are at least 25 big-name outlets there, not to mention any one-off local places we may find lurking when we get there. We'll need a sectional sofa and maybe a cabinet for the TV, although there is still discussion about the final location of that dominating but necessary appliance. We've never had a television in the living room until now, in this rental, where lack of space demands it. Practice proves the theory: neither of us likes the look that a huge (42-inch plasma TV) piece of technology gives to a room that is supposed to be a comfortable refuge. Add to that the all TV paraphernalia--the magazines, the remotes, the wires, the DVR and DVD and what-all else, and you've got a room that looks more like a computer lab than a living room. But. We eat dinner in front of the TV and it sure is convenient to cross a single threshold from the kitchen. At least, that what Steve keeps saying. And that's where a TV cabinet comes in. He thinks it would be fine to have a nice-looking cabinet to hide all that stuff when we weren't using it. But as far as I'm concerned we're used to carrying plates of food around the house from 28 years of doing it in Arlington. As far as I'm concerned, that's what we can do in the new house, too. Just have to find a painless way to make it happen.

The sun is trying to make a soggy appearance. The pavement has dried. It's time to stick my head out the door and seek some inspiration.

Transitions, changes, evolutions....

2009-07-12T09:59:00.013-04:00

Well, for a while there I thought it would be easy to start doing regular postings again, but what I call the "f & b world" (for flesh and blood) keeps getting in the way. The bottom line discovery I'm making is that I'm living as two now 24/7; I'm no longer a 9 to 5 bachelor with a lot of time to stare at the computer screen. And between the move, settling in here at the rental and working on the property, we're busy. I have these few hours this morning as we wait for the dump to open at 1 PM. I can do laundry and write. It's a luxury. I find that I plenty of interesting things to share but less time to share them.

The hours of the dump figure into today's plans because when it's open is when we can fill the car with the brush we're clearing off the property and take it to the yard- waste bin at the dump. (Here they call it a "convenience center.") The property is 2.5 acres total. About half that acreage will remain a neat-but-natural looking woodland. The driveway will meander through it to the house, which will be visible in the distance through the trees. The photo above shows Steve with his brand new toy, a weed-whacker with a serious, rotating saw blade at the end, that he's just finished using to clear about a quarter of the property of warm-season growth. He cuts it all down, then I cut it further into car-sized pieces and drive it to the dump as the car fills up. Made just three trips yesterday--the stuff compacts. (The clearing for the house is in the distance above Steve's left shoulder.)

Here's the the exact same view taken just before the weed-whacker magic:

Quite a difference, no? In that picture, the gray area in the lower right corner is the driveway. We'll be working on the other side of that over the next few days.

All the work in these pictures took about 4 hours, in the early morning, before the heat of the day sets in. We must suit up up for the job--the first innocent walk we took through all that brush in sandals and shorts we both came home one giant chigger welt, and I found a tick on me. So we put on clothes with legs and sleeves--long pants and long-sleeved shirts, and we tuck the cuffs of our pants into our socks and then tape them together so nothing can get in. We sweat a lot as a result, even before the heat sets in. But that discomfort is a hundred times better than 20 chigger bites. (We hear there are also snakes in those woods, but so far we haven't seen any. Steve will drop his weed-whacker and go running for the next county if he does.)

So there you have it, the latest chapter in our grand adventure. I will try to be more regular but can make no promises. Just rest assured I'm not stopping this blog. I have way too much fun with it and enjoy your company too much. I'm still around. I even have a couple of things ready for Food Friday!

Life in the country

2009-07-08T08:00:00.004-04:00

We live about two miles away from this view, the downtown waterfront of Edenton. For my morning walks I now hop into my car and drive into town, where this spectacle awaits. The first thing I do is walk all the way out on the concrete fishing pier, where nothing separates me from the water, just to savor the sight. It was exceptionally clear this morning: I could see the land on the far side. The water is Albemarle Sound, the huge, shallow bay that separates North Carolina's barrier islands--famous as the Outer Banks--from the mainland. After seeing the water, I turn north up the main drag, Broad Street, and walk straight for about 20 minutes before choosing a side street to explore. Each house in this lovely town seems more beautiful and gracious than the last. I've never seen the mansions of Charleston or the fabled squares of Savannah, but Edenton will do just fine until I do. When our house is finished we will be living about twenty miles away from this lovely place. We'll miss it, but we'll always know it's here for the occasional visit.

Yesterday, my next door neighbor--that's the one with the goats and the chickens--came over to tell me he was selling his sweet corn. A whole trailer load of it, $2 a dozen for the biggest ears you've ever seen. I paid for a dozen and got fifteen. We ate four of them last night for dinner and the rest will go into a special salad I'll show you this coming Friday. Sweet and crunchy, all it needed was a little butter. It just doesn't get any better.

Today we go to the big city--Elizabeth City--to check out some flooring for the new house and do a little shopping. Then it'll be back here to the goats and the chickens. Care to join us?

Rainbow Room....

2009-07-07T10:42:00.000-04:00

I'm back there today.

Back home

2009-07-06T12:19:00.002-04:00

I really do mean to try to be more regular with my posts from here on out, but if this morning is any indication, it will be a challenge. What used to take seconds is taking hours at the internet speeds I have here--at least that's the case today, when my air card has to try to read signals through a cloud cover. It literally took 2 hours to upload pictures of our Cincinnati trip to Picasa, and a half-hour to upload the one song I'm playing today to Hipcast. I had intended to show you a photo album of the trip, but half the day is already gone. If I didn't start writing now, I never would, so I had to put off arranging the uploaded pictures into an album until later.

The picture above shows the status of the construction project as of last Tuesday, before we left for Cincinnati. The ground clearing had been completed and the pad for the actual house was laid and flattened--that's what you see there. The driveway meanedering through the woods is becoming a reality, and the idea of the house peeking through the woods as you approach it is becoming clear. We're going to visit the property later today to see what more, if anything, was done while we were gone. If there's anything to show, I will.

Really the thing to talk about today is the wonderful time we had in Cincinnati with Michele and John. Michele was the other Peace Corps volunteer in my city, Kumasi--we've been close friends since that time 40-odd years ago. She and John were scientists with Procter and Gamble. They started their careers with the company in upstate, rural New York, and we used to drive up there from Arlington for great, sometimes snowbound Thanksgivings. After many years they moved to P&G headquarters in Cincinnati, so now we go there to see them. John is the foodie to end all foodies. He loves the chance to cook for an appreciative audience, and for three days he had three happy captives (here's Steve, Michele and John after Wednesday's repast)hanging on to his every pinch of salt. Pulled pork with coleslaw and 3 other sides awaited us when we arrived after the 12-hour drive Wednesday. Thursday was a "round the world" sample menu of 10--yes 10--different dishes, starting in Mexico, and ranging through Germany, France, Asia and the Caribbean as we progressed for three entire hours. Friday was pork tenderloin night, and Saturday we had a traditional July 4 feast John-style, with, among many other things, a mixed grill and my potato salad (I was beyond flattered to be invited to contribute).

Michele and John also love to show off their adopted home town, so in addition to all the home-cooked food, we toured the best breakfast places (oh, we didn't just pig out at dinner!) in fascinating and beautiful little corners of the city, and did a walking tour that took us across the Ohio River into Covington and Newport, Kentucky, the two cross-river suburbs that have their own distinct charms. Cincinnati is a beautiful city I wouldn't think twice about living in except for the dominant rightward trend of its politics....

We're off to inspect the property now, and maybe find a Goodwill store to buy a secondhand microwave oven to heat up our Cincy leftovers.....

Checking in

2009-06-29T12:37:00.008-04:00

Whew! This moving and building business makes you busier than you think you'll be. We broke ground on the property today--actually, guys were there at 8 o'clock this morning taking down some trees in preparation for leveling the building site. (That's what the picture is about.) We were there to ceremonially watch and photograph the first lick of work to be done, then we had an appointment with the kitchen contractor to talk about some design details we had previously not thought of (this rental house has reminded me of one thing I can't deal with in a standard kitchen: deep cabinets with stationary shelves under counters that make me scrunch this tall body down to its hands and knees looking for things. For another $1000 we added some drawers and pull-out shelves. We'll save that much in back pain meds.), then we went about getting our cars registered here. Must have a state safety inspection first, and the only place that does inspections for cars from miles around requires an appointment. Each inspection takes a half hour and we could only get appointments an hour apart. So that shoots the day for everything else. We still have to go to Elizabeth City, the nearest sizeable town, to see about a cell phone for Steve. That'll have to wait until tomorrow. Etc., etc. etc. I used to say, "that's life in the big city." Now it's, "that's life in the country."

I've entered a brave new world on the internet, as well. I'm coming to you via a broadband aircard that allows me only so much space per month and then I'll have to pay extra. Suddenly concepts like kilobtyes, gigs and megas have direct application to my life and I'm watching my usage like a hawk. I have no idea how much space posting pictures will take up, nor music, nor even sitting here on the blogger site. My posts will be fewer and further between at least this week, because we are traveling Wednesday to Cincinnati to visit our friends Michele and John for the July 4 holiday. After that, I'll just have to see what's doable.

The stars here are as visible as Mother Nature intended, and we've been getting what I can only call a phantasmagorical display from lightning bugs as they congregate in the trees surrounding this property. It's the biggest mass of twinkling light I've ever seen, and it only grows more intense as the night progresses. The goats next door came to greet us the day we moved in. Know what? Up close, they smell like goat cheese!

That's why we moved here.

it's so great to feel my fingers on the keyboard again! I hope to be back soon.

The last word from this perch

2009-06-17T07:54:00.003-04:00

I'll be shutting the computer down and putting it in a box in a few hours, one of my very last acts in this house before handing it over to its new owners. My email address will be changing when we get our new ISP in North Carolina--my current account will be disconnected on Friday the 19th. If you have any comments or last-minute counsel, please try to send them before 3 pm EST or they may be lost forever.....

At a time like this I can say nothing better than what I said in 1973, when I wrote a song upon departing Boston to begin my Peace Corps career. Maybe someday you'll hear it, but the words are what counts.

See you in North Carolina!

ONE MORE WALK DOWN THE ROAD (THE MUSIC GOES ON)

One more walk down the road,
One more tear, one more load.
One more page to be turned,
New lives and loves with new ways to be learned
So let's all have one more toast to the past,
One more hand for the cast.
And then I'll be gone with the break of day.
When more has played out, we'll find the way
Back to each other.
The music goes on.

I'm not perfect, I know,
Now too fast, now too slow.
But love has filled all I've done,
And I know this time I've lost much less than I've won.
I know they say, "Out of sight, out of mind,"
But I hope you know that I was never that kind.
I'll take all that comes, I'm bound to explore,
I'll fly to the moon and maybe much more,
And you'll still be with me;
The music goes on.

So bring out the bottles and empty the jars,
For I know right now wherever we are,
We'll still hear the laughter.
The music goes on.

Rainbow Roon Day

2009-06-16T10:43:00.002-04:00

I'm afraid I leave you hanging this time to make room for the move........

Final Days

2009-06-15T08:01:00.003-04:00

It really is just about over for us here on 12th Street. The party Saturday was as wonderful as we had hoped. It started as scheduled in the afternoon, and then went on until midnight as our closest neighbors moved themselves from the back yard to the front porch for one last get together in that grand spot where so many fine times have been had before. We laughed so much, reliving the legends. The prank phone calls. The shopping basket that would mysteriously show up in peoples' living rooms. Stories of the incomparable Brian, who no longer lives here and couldn't be with us but whose ears must have been burning as we remembered story after story about his shenanigans. A lot of love came our way Saturday, and far from sad, I leave this place with the knowledge that our friends will be with us no matter where we happen to live. Life will go on as it always does and we will make new friends, of course, but they will merely add to our wealth, not substitute for anyone.

Yesterday we packed the kitchen. This week, we're eating breakfast and lunch out of the fridge on picnic supplies left over from the party; we'll be eating out or carrying in for dinner.

I'll see you one last time from this perch on Wednesday.

FOOD FRIDAY!

2009-06-12T09:46:00.004-04:00

PULLED PORK

This will be my last Food Friday for a while. After we serve what's pictured above tomorrow at our farewell party, we'll be packing our last-minutes things, including computers, and will be living mostly with pre-computer communications until we're hooked up again in North Carolina, supposedly sometime during the week of June 22, but we'll see how that goes. I hope you'll have me to kick around until next Wednesday, anyway. But on Friday we'll be on the road.

Real barbecue is not something I grew up with. I came to the joys of smoked pork in all its various forms relatively late--sometime in my 30s-- I can't really remember when I first had it. Once I did, though, there was no turning back, and while my first taste of it came via the usual "sweet" school, probably made with store-bought, sugar-based sauce (and I liked it!) there was a more determined no turning back once I learned about Eastern Carolina-style vinegar-based barbecue mops. It's now the only way I do barbecued pork in any form.

I've shied away from sharing this recipe in the past because it requires special equipment (a water smoker) and lots and lots of time. Ideally, the meat will rest in a spice rub overnight, and then it will take the better part of a day to smoke. It's definitely a special occasion treat, but it's always a hit at the occasion.

If you don't have a water smoker, you can certainly do this on a kettle grill and get almost the same results, and in less time, though the moistness provided by the water smoker won't be there (the meat itself is so tender, though, that this is not a big problem), and less cooking time means less exposure to the smoke flavor. I'd certainly do it in a pinch and not complain about the results. (I guess it even can be done on a gas grill with a smoke box but I've never tried it.)

1 pork shoulder, bone-in, 6-8 lbs.
*Spice rub
*Mop

Cut crisss-cross gashes across fat cap of pork deep enough to reach the meat below the fat. Coat meat thoroughly with rub and massage it in thoroughly. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. Remove plastic and bring meat to room temperature before putting it on the smoker.

Prepare smoker: soak mesquite or hickory (or your choice) chunks in water while coals heat. Completely fill charcoal pan at bottom of smoker with charcoal and light. Allow to heat until all the charcoal is tinged with gray. Add wood chunks. Place pan full of water on rack above the heat source, put meat rack in place above the water and place pork shoulder on the rack. Cover and allow meat to smoke at least 5 hours, or until a thermometer in the thickest part of the meat reads 160 degrees. Check charcoal level every three hours or so and add more as needed, and add wood chunks as they burn away. Open the smoker as seldom as possible in order to preserve heat and not further prolong cooking time.

When meat is done, remove it from smoker to a large bowl and mop with sauce. Allow meat to cool enough so you can work with it, then pull the meat off the bone and either tear it into chunks with the grain, or (easier) cut it into chunks. Lightly chop the meat in a food processor so that some bite-size chunks remain, put in a large bowl, and pour mop to taste over. Taste for salt. Reheat, either in the microwave (my preferred method) or in a sheet pan, covered with foil to prevent drying, in a 350-degree oven for 30 mintues.

Serve on hamburger buns with your favorite coleslaw, either on the side or as a topping.

*Spice rub:
1/2 cup chili powder
1/4 cup brown sugar (light or dark, whatever you have)
2 teaspoons garlic powder
2 teaspoons onion powder
1 heavy teaspoon black pepper

Shake well to combine, stores indefinitely in a cool dry place

*Mop:
1 cup cider vinegar
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/4 cup chili powder
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons paprika
a few drops tabasco (optional)

Shake to combine, store indefinitely in refrigerator.

A good excuse: preparing for some changes

2009-06-11T09:02:00.004-04:00

One thing led to another on the computer this morning, one of the very few I will have left for a while to sit here and let the ether muse drag me hither and yon to places unknown. First I opened Itunes. For the umpteenth time, "Genius" started to gather information about my library so it could make recommendations on music I don't have but would probably like. Unlike all other times, when I stopped the process in revolt against Big Brother Apple examining my stuff for marketing purposes, I let it go this time.

Lo and behold, it came up with stuff of which I'm ashamed to admit I was completely ignorant. (Or maybe had mentally filed away for future reference so effectively that I had forgotten about it.) I sampled the music and loved it, of course, and wanted to buy it.

Then began the rationalizing process for spending the money. It didn't take long to come up with a good excuse. These are the last few days I will be able to enjoy internet speeds measured in the "megas" instead of the "kilos." In the remote corner of North Carolina that will soon be our home, internet and TV cabling have not been priorities for counties with villages teens of miles from each other. Our houses, both the rental and the one about to be built, will be festooned with at least two satellite dishes, one for TV and another for internet service. Neighbors in Deep Creek Shores, our little development at the end of a 12-mile road, tell us that TV reception is great, includes HD and a DVR box and everything, just like we have here with love/hate Comcast. But internet will we much slower than what we have become accustomed to, and my hours spent in front of the computer may be filled with just downloading rather than enjoying the fruits of it. And just for internet, not counting TV or phone, we will be paying $70 a month for the privilege! Who said things were cheaper in the sticks? To communicate with the outside world, we will be paying substantially more for less service. Mais c'est la vie. That's apparently what we've signed up for. We'll make up for it with lower taxes. (We hope!)

So I bought two albums. I'll be sharing the fruits those purchases today and tomorrow.

Still more drama today....

2009-06-09T11:48:00.003-04:00

....in the Rainbow Room.

Homestretch

2009-06-08T09:14:00.002-04:00

It's 9 AM and already the house, all the windows open, is filled with the aroma of smoking meat. This pork shoulder will smoke until 1 or 2 this afternoon. Then I'll shred the meat off the bone, mix it with a vinegar sauce, and freeze it in preparation for the feast this coming Saturday, when our friends will come for one last reunion at this house. If the weather holds and everyone comes who says they will, we're expecting 60+. It will be a wonderful memory to savor as we begin the final countdown next week.

The recent days leading up to this time have been just about idyllic. Yes, the house is topsy-turvy and full of boxes, but the major packing is done and we are free to contemplate last-minute arrangements without panic. The weather has been good, for a change, and not as hot as one might expect for this stage of the DC springtime, so we've spent a few hours on the deck just enjoying the breeze and watching the birds. This much relaxation is almost unheard of for Steve--I was afraid he'd have forgotten how to use it. But it all comes back, just like the proverbial bicycle.

This week includes but little cooking for me, as we will be visiting friends for dinner twice and we'll go out to eat at least once. Next week I'll pack the kitchen and won't cook at all. Hope I don't forget how! (Oh yeah. That bicycle.)

FOOD FRIDAY!

2009-06-05T08:29:00.002-04:00

GUMBO

These days I'm emptying the freezer of soups and sauces that have been patiently awaiting use these many months. I ran across a container marked "gumbo" a while back and saved it for a special night when we were hungry for something that was special, but wouldn't take forever to cook. I knew I only needed to add some shrimp, andouille sausage and okra, so I pulled it out and defrosted it for dinner yesterday. Imagine my surprise when what I finally poured out of the plastic freezer container was pumpkin pie filling! (Well, they look alike when they're viewed in a rock solid state through Tupperware!) It was approaching 5 in the afternoon, but I braved rush hour traffic to pick up the rest of the makings. I had all those shrimp, after all. Luckily, gumbo doesn't take long to cook. And it was delicious.

What gives gumbo its distinctive flavor is its thickening base, the roux, which can be a bit scary upon contemplation, since it involves slightly burning the flour, but with a bit of care and common sense this step is not complicated. This recipe is an intuitive amalgam of my own based on watching an old New Orleans friend make it and backed up by what's found in many cookbooks.

1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup all purpose flour
1 medium green bell pepper, coarsely chopped
1 medium yellow onion, coarsely chopped
2 medium ribs celery, coarsley chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, chopped fine
2 bay leaves
2 tsp. oregano
1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
1 lb. okra, trimmed and sliced
1 14-oz. can diced tomatoes with their juice
1 lb. smoked andouille sausage, sliced into chunks
1 lb. medium shrimp, peeled and deveined

Cooked rice

Pour oil into large saucepan and whisk in flour to incorporate completely. Over medium high heat, stir flour and oil until flour begins to brown, about 5 minutes. Continue to cook, stirring constantly, until flour is nut-brown, almost cocoa-like, in appearance and has a warm, nutty aroma. Remove from heat.

Add bell pepper, onion, celery, garlic bay leaves, oregano and pepper flakes to roux and return to heat. Cook, stirring constantly, until all is well coated and vegetables slightly softenend, 5-7 minutes.

Add sliced okra, stir to combine, add andouille and tomatoes, stir to combine, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to simmer, cover, and cook about 20 minutes. Remove from heat, stir in shrimp, and allow shrimp to cook in residual heat for about 5 minutes. Adjust salt and pepper. Serve immediately over rice.

Boxes boxes and more boxes...

2009-06-04T08:29:00.005-04:00

...and still more to come! We decided there was no more room in the garage to store the boxes we brought from my sister's house yesterday, so they're all in the living room now. And as we continue to pack, more will be added. We're hip-deep in boxes at the moment, and soon it'll be neck-deep. As you can see from the picture, actual life continues amidst the chaos, so we leave oases for it. Ivy kitty, relaxing so peacefully on the easy chair, has no clue what's about to hit him.....

Project for the day: defrost the stand-up freezer in the basement and get it ready to move. It ensues as I type.

I was up to watch our President's speech in Cairo. I am proud to be an American.

Coasting, and on a roll

2009-06-03T08:19:00.004-04:00

We continue to bask in relative relaxation these days as the countdown to moving day continues. Today we will work a little bit. We're renting a truck to retrieve the roomful of boxes we took to my sister's house a couple of months ago so they can be here for the truck. A little exercise. That's a good thing.

A couple of other good things have also happened for a change. We had a meeting with Steve's financial advisor yesterday and learned that Steve's retirement account is actually in better shape than we thought it was, meaning a higher combined monthly income. Every penny helps! And the really big news: a bi-partisan committee in Congress is set to vote next month on a bill that would, among other things, allow domestic partners of federal retirees (that would be Steve) access to those retirees' health benefits (those would be mine), and it is expected to pass! That is just about the best news we've had in nearly 30 years.

And so timely, with Steve's work insurance ending this month. It's as if my exhortations to America to start treating us like humans are finally being heard. Well, mine and thousands of others.

Thanks.

Catch the dramatic developments....

2009-06-02T11:05:00.001-04:00

....in today's installment at the Rainbow Room.

We've earned it

2009-06-01T08:38:00.002-04:00

Friday was the last day there will be for a while dominated by labor related to the move. After I finished here, I spent the next several hours moving all those boxes from the dining room (there were more on the other side of the room) and the basement out to the garage, (pictured above) which will be the final staging area for them until the truck comes to take them (and the rest of our earthly possessions) away. We still have a pickup's worth of boxes stored in a room at my sister's house, which we will get this week and, believe it or not, stuff into the scene you see up there. (It can be done!)

Yesterday we did the last bit of boxing up of things that we know we won't be using for the next three weeks. All that's left now is last-minute kitchen stuff and the lamps. So we find ourselves with a little time to kick back and plan some actual fun.

We spent a good portion of Saturday with the woman buying our house and her partner. We always imagined that if we ever sold this place, it would have to come with its own user's manual; we invited them here to start that process with a little walk-around tutorial on how things work, everything from the various gardens to the sprinkler system to the water filter. We had a wonderful time with them and will probably see them again once more before closing on the 19th. They kept swearing they will keep doing things exactly as we've done them, right down to the color of the petunias in the garden out front. All we could do was laugh. We know they'll take possession of the house and make it their own...at least we hope! A museum, meant to be kept as it is now, it most definitely is not.

We're having a very big farewell party on the 13th of June, which will be so crowded and busy there will be very little chance for any quality time with our favorite people. With that in mind, we're planning a very small dinner the week before just with them so we can savor each others' company once again--and I can start emptying the freezer! The soup and dessert have been waiting to be used for months. Now's their chance.

Steve's in his long-anticipated decompress mode, the worst of the time-sensitive work behind him, and his physical office closed down. He'll do light work from home for another two weeks, and then he's officially free. It's nice to have him back.

FOOD FRIDAY!

2009-05-29T07:50:00.003-04:00

COUSCOUS WITH CHICKEN AND GREEN OLIVES

The rain is back, this time with the kind of mid-summer mugginess that forces you to turn on the air conditioning even though it's not really that hot. I await trash and recycling pickup today so I can get out and start filling the bins again with more trash stored in the garage awaiting its turn--it wouldn't fit this time around. Once the garage loses the trash, it will gain as many of the boxes now adorning the rooms in our house as possible. That will be the last staging area before the truck comes on June 18. With boxes out of the house, we'll have room to start filling a few more....

Tomorrow we are having our buyer and her partner over for a little tutorial on how to run this place--what's what in the various gardens, how the water filter system works, the sump pump...all the little things that are integral to smooth sailing here. It's something we had always imagined we would have to do when we sold this place, anyway, and she asked for it before we ever even suggested it. We always said this place needed an owner's manual. We'll give them the overview tomorrow and if they still need written directions, I'll be happy to supply them.

This is one of the recipes I collected last year during an email round robin at Christmastime. That exercise turned out to be more of a success than I'd dared hope it would be, netting several delicious looking dishes. This is among the best. Don't let the bland colors in the picture fool you--the salty shock of the olives and interesting spice mixture create a different sensation with every bite. It's very quick and easy and will become one of our staples. Credited by the donor to Rachel Ray.

2 tsp. olive oil
1 lb. skinless, boneless chicken breast, cut into bite-size pieces
3 medium shallots, coarsely chopped
1 zucchini, coarsely chopped
2-3 cloves to garlic (or to taste) minced
Zest and juice of one large lemon, separated
1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
Pinch ground cinnamon
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup stuffed green olives, chopped
4 cups chicken broth
10-oz. box instant couscous
1/4 cup parsley, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup fresh mint leaves. chopped fine

In a skillet with a tight-fitting lid, heat oil over medium high heat. Add chicken chunks, lightly sprinkle with salt and pepper, and sauté until lightly browned, 3-4 minutes. Add shallots, zucchini, garlic, lemon zest, pepper flakes, fennel seeds and cinnamon and salt and pepper to taste. Toss for about 5 minutes, or until chicken is just cooked through and vegetables begin to soften. Add olives and stir to combine.

Stir in chicken broth and bring to a boil. Stir in the couscous, cover pan, turn off heat, and let stand for about 5 minutes. Fluff with a fork.

Add parsley, mint and lemon juice, toss lightly to mix, and serve.

It's getting interesting....

2009-05-27T10:48:00.003-04:00

..over in the Rainbow Room....

Resting

2009-05-26T07:56:00.004-04:00

Today will be as close as I ever get to living out that retiree dream of lounging around eating bonbons. It's something of a guilty pleasure, because Steve is still working his butt off at the office, supervising the loading of trucks, maintaining records and schedules as tight as only he can make them as the office itself is dismantled and returned to its owner, Uncle Sam. Today through Friday are his last four days in the office. He will work from home two more weeks, which should be a relatively easy time of decompression until June 12, when he will be free. I'm positive that as harried and oppressed as he feels now, he won't know what hit him come Monday, June 15. But it will only be a short period of dislocation for him: on June 18 the truck comes to pack us out, and on the 19th, after a 10 AM closing, we will be gone.

We worked a lot this "holiday" weekend, packing into boxes most of what we can do without until we are in the North Carolina rental. The photo above shows you what the dining room currently looks like. (The basement looks the same.) Note the fake fruit in its fancy bowl on the table, put there for showing the house. Oops! Guess I overlooked a small detail....

Cleaning the garage was a truly gargantuan task which Steve nevertheless completed in two days. In the process we filled two trash bins and a recycle bin, and are working on a second recycle bin. Some things that were just too good to throw away found good homes via the miracle Freecycle; whatever else we couldn't give away will end up, alas, in the landfill.

There is still more packing to do, but it will create more trash, for which there is simply no room until what's currently gathered is taken away Friday.

The last-minute stuff is the hardest to keep track of. What will we need after all the boxes and furniture are gone and we want to clean the place up one last time? A vacuum cleaner. A duster. Some rags. Toilet cleaner. All this will take up space in the cars, along with all the other things not going on the truck: the cats, their food, water, and litterbox, the fish, the house plants.....

But I'll think of that tomorrow. Today is a day of rest.