Daffodils are up. Snow fences are down.
Freedom. Lighter backpacks mean bigger items for show & tell.
Oh, spring. Ooh, you are so big. So absolutely huge. Gosh, we’re really impressed down here, I can tell you. You’re just so super.
I love that you’re here, but I hate that it took so long. I could do without the bipolar extremes, but that won’t happen in Iowa, will it? No. No, it won’t.
I just finished reading The Bean Trees, a novel by Barbara Kingsolver. The first Kingsolver book I read was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and I loved it. This one was good too. She surprised me at the end. Nice.
Quick. Anna Karenina and Barbara Kingsolver. What do they have in common?
Well, for one, they’re both pretty. Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle pleases the senses. The colors are pretty, as are the red-and-white vegetables in a cupped hand on the cover. I thought they were radishes. Shows what I know. They’re Christmas lima beans. I run my fingers over the cover. The letters are indented, and the cover feels like fabric. Nice.
Anna Karenina is a pretty little book. (Yes, it’s a library copy. No, I didn’t steal it. I bought it at a library sale.) It’s barely bigger than a postcard when it’s open. The pages are thin, almost translucent. I love the way it feels in my hands. There’s a nice weight to it. I mean, look at it. Don’t you just want to gobble it up? I did.
Except it was SO painful to read. But I was determined to finish that darn book, even though I hated it. (I have since learned that life is too short to read a book you don’t enjoy.) Yes, I know. It’s been called the “greatest novel ever written.” Doesn’t mean I liked it.
That’s the difference. I loved Kingsolver’s book. Loved, loved, loved. What these books also had in common was they both took me forever to read. The first one because I couldn’t stand it. The second one because I loved it so much I didn’t want it to end.
I did finally finish reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, though. Kingsolver wrote it with her daughter Camille Kingsolver and her husband, Steven L. Hopp. Daughter Lily didn’t write for the book, but she was often the star of its pages. The book chronicles the year they spent eating locally produced food as well as growing their own. I read the book after Ilina at Dirt & Noise recommended it. She wrote her own post about how Animal, Vegetable, Miracle changed her life.
I’m not sure why I hadn’t read Kingsolver before. Plenty of people told me I should. I’m glad I finally did. I took her with me to the Y, and she had me laughing out loud on the treadmill. I’m sure the folks without ear buds thought, “Um, hello? If you can read AND laugh? You’re not working hard enough.” I took her to the doctor’s office, and she had me laughing out loud there, startling others from their celebrity-mag browsing.
She reminded me, in part, of my father, who grew up on a farm and, as far as I can remember, planted a garden wherever he lived. All the houses we lived in were rentals, and some came with the job. The tiniest back yard we ever had was in Omaha. He turned the whole thing into a garden. The biggest garden I remember seemed a mile long, but I have no idea how big it actually was. It had just about everything in it.
That was the time, in the mid-1970s that we lived on a farm for a couple of years. We went without a book deal (darnit) and without a family pact to change our lives. We simply went back to the place my father grew up. Looking back, it seems like a very hippie-dippy thing to do, but my parents were as far removed from hippies as one could get. Well, there was Kumbaya thing. Some people joke about “holding hands and singing Kumbaya.” I was actually there when they did. And there was the baking of homemade granola at my aunt’s house. In Boulder. So, who knows. Maybe “hippie” is a relative term.
In any case, we didn’t just dip our toes into the farm experience, we did cannonballs in the deep end of the pool. If my parents had any formal ideas about “sustainable living” or anything like that, I wasn’t aware of them.
We raised chickens for eggs and meat. Gathering and selling eggs was my project. I learned my way around a henhouse from my grandmother, who at that time lived in town after farming for decades. We raised ducks and geese. I remember “harvesting” chickens, something not terribly new to me, since I watched my grandmother butcher chickens before. (Did we harvest the ducks and geese too? I can’t remember now.) There were rabbits, a lamb and even a pony.
I’ve actually thought about having chickens again for fresh eggs. I’m surrounded by farmland here in Iowa, and surely it’s not all corporate farmland. I’ve found several resources for farmer’s markets and locally grown produce. There’s even a group in Eastern Iowa that exists because of Kingsolver’s book and what they learned from it. The group is Corridor Locavore, whose goal is a comprehensive directory of locally grown food and goods.
Just when I thought I couldn’t like Kingsolver any more, she made it clear she loves Italy almost as much as I do. She’s Italian by marriage and visited Italy after planning for 10 years. I’m Italian by way of my heart. There’s not a drop of Italian blood coursing through my veins, but I fell in love with Italy when we were there 10 years ago. (I hope to get back one day — maybe to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary? That gives me about three years to plan!) The sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, the people. Oh, what a delicious country! The people we met were kind, generous, loud, funny, beautiful and hospitable. Hospitality in Italy always involves food. Amazing food. No matter how simple or elaborate.
We were “welcomed” to Italy with an unannounced train stop, dozens of police with guns drawn, checking everyone’s passport. We were told they were looking for a fugitive, and, no, this wasn’t standard procedure for welcoming guests to the country. It was thrilling. You know … in a death-defying rollercoaster kind of way.
But our real welcome involved food. We shared a compartment on the train with a young couple. They had packed a large lunch, and they insisted on sharing with us. How could we say no? We couldn’t.
Everything we ate and drank in Italy was so much more than satisfying. Everything else was a feast for the senses.
The young women who zipped through Florence on mopeds, which you would think would be quite a dirty business, but, no. They would stop and step away without a hair out of place, perfectly ironed, manicured and looking as if they belonged on the cover of a fashion magazine. Stunning. And the men. There were groups of them posing together in their clean white shirts, crisp pants and shiny shoes. Gorgeous. There were others dressed as gladiators in Rome, speaking dozens of languages to passers-by (sometimes to one person relunctant to speak, in an effort to determine which language she spoke) — hugging, kissing and cajoling them into signing on for a guided tour.
Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don’t tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It’s fairly sexy. Of course I don’t know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. I realized Mediterranean cultures have their issues. Fine, don’t burst my bubble. I didn’t want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch. (Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, p. 247)
The Italians we met were never ones to give up on us. We stopped at a small shop in Pisa. It offered pizza by the slice, which was freshly made and under glass. Their version of fast food, I suppose? I was tired and ready to give up with my questions in not-even-close Italian. The woman behind the counter sensed my frustration. She came around front, took me by the arm, speaking the whole time, pointing, gesturing, smiling. She didn’t want to let me go without eating some of her wonderful pizza. And it was wonderful. So was she.
As is Barbara Kingsolver. Hands to my heart, she’s better than a cup of perfect cappuccino — when it’s offered, don’t ever pass it up and then savor every last sip. (And, no. She didn’t make me cry about turkeys, not one little bit. OK. Maybe just a little bit, dangit. But all the laughs made up for that.)
We finished watching Season 1 and Season 2 of HimmelblÃ¥, a Norwegian television series about the people who live on Ylvingen, an island in northern Norway. The show makes good use of very strong dialects. I would probably miss a lot if it weren’t for the Norwegian subtitles. But what a great show! Can’t wait to watch more. Season 3 is showing in Norway now. While we thought we’d wait for the next DVD, we might actually lose patience and try to watch it online.
Listen up, yo. I’m sure you think of yourselves like this. Sorta poetic and all.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.
I’ll tell you what, though. You keep trying to build a nest in my dryer vent? I’ll be singing this song.
Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie.
Fair warning.
In case anyone thought I was joking with the plague references, here’s what just one (of half a dozen) flypaper strip caught in a matter of hours, and the ones not caught still swarm and divebomb you when you walk in the room. Just another sign of spring, I guess, although I like the daffodils better.
I just finished reading Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food is Making us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer — And What You Can Do About it, edited by Karl Weber and compiled as a companion piece to the movie, which I also just watched. I actually watched the movie (by Robert Kenner) first, not realizing that was the correct order of things.
I’ve read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation
In any case, if you eat, you might be interested in this book and film. The film was done first. The book contains information from people who weren’t in the film. Schlosser says the film and the book are not just about food. They’re also about threats to the First Amendment and the corrupting influence of centralized power.
Contributors include (listed in order they appear in the book)
I think the information provided by this book and film is very important, though not half as fun as reading Barbara Kingsolver’s take on food issues in her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which I’m reading now. In fact, her book was written before Food, Inc., and I wondered, hey, did they read Kingsolver? Because if they didn’t, they should. But sure enough. She was listed in the “to learn more” section at the end of the book.
Remember the critter in our barn, the one that turned out to be an ermine? Yeah, it didn’t make it. I was surprised at how small it was. I thought maybe it had a nest. But this one can’t be fully grown, can it?
