July 10, 2010. Photo by S. Shattuck
I’m back after a yearlong hiatus, and I’m going to try and post weekly to this blog. The blog itself started out with a silly nickname my husband called me at that time, “Smidgens,” which turned into a slight variation on that spelling when it turned out that smidgens.wordpress.com was already taken (wha??). I’m not usually one for gratuitious misspellings, except when texting, so was happy to learn that the Oxford English Dictionary approves this alternative.
Anyway, a lot has happened since I last wrote in Spring 2010. It was truly a glorious spring, and that spring unfurled into an even more glorious summer — with temperatures consistently above 85 degrees and swelteringly delicious. We swam daily in Lake Champlain or at the Huntington Gorge, at the little green lagoon of a swimming hole to which we were introduced by Will and Jess. We woke up to the throb of birdsong and went to bed very late. I drove around with all my windows open, blasting 95.5 until I couldn’t stand to hear “California Girls” one more time. Dinner was a big salad with pecans and maple-syrup dressing and Anthony bought huge watermelons from Costco (Vermont watermelons don’t get very sweet) and we sat on our couch, half-naked, eating slice after slice like mouth-dripping robots staring blankly into the cricket night and moving hand from plate to mouth and back again. Oh yeah, and we got married, too, and went on a wonderful honeymoon trip to Europe: Berlin, Portugal, and Luxembourg.
Fall was nice, too, but busy. Some friends got married, others got engaged. I traveled to Torino, Italy to attend Terra Madre, the biannual Slow Food conference and food-tasting extravaganza. I made myself sick by eating way too many sugary sweets, especially Turin’s lush hazelnut-chocolate blend called gianduia, and because I drank four or five cups of espresso every day. The sugar binge continued through Thanksgiving and up to our winter trip to Hawaii, where I ate, on average, one-half pineapple, one papaya, two lilikoi (passionfruit) and some coconut candy each day. I didn’t write much about our stay on Maui, even though I’d have liked to. I did write a short story about some married weirdness we were experiencing at that time: being totally out of synch, resentful of the other’s less desirable character traits, disappointed in our partnership, at least the way it had been for the past couple of months, and apprehensive at spending another year (much less 30+) together. Maybe I’ll post the story here sometime.
Then winter arrived. Our friends, passionate skiiers, have been bragging about how many days they’ve spent atop some mountain since December. I only made it alpine skiing once so far, but got a pair of cross-country skis last week. This week’s earlier thaw made me anxious that it might be the end of the x-country season, but lo! There are 8 inches of snow predicted to fall on the town of Burlington tonight. I think there’ll be a couple more weeks of decent skiing yet. Anthony’s been really, really busy at work, and he loves it, but it hasn’t made for much wintertime outdoor fun this year. Oh well: we had a good time swimming, snorkeling and hiking Haleakala and the bamboo forest on Maui.
Now we’re back at March. (Jo March. Last night, a friend suggested that I change my name to “Jojo.” That was the name of Charles Muscatine’s Siamese cat, and it seems a good cat name, rather than a human name. I’m more inclined to return to my old nom de plume from when I, at age 11, was an actual writer: “Gus.”) I love March because it’s a painful month. For example, just this morning I was admiring the bulb shoots poking up through the soil that had been exposed along the foundations of our house by a spring thaw. Then the temperature plummeted 20 degrees, and those little shoots are now covered by four inches of snow. All the water that was pooling up against our back porch has frozen. Better for us: the basement leaks when it’s too wet. We get another couple of weeks to think about how to deal with it this time.
Listen to me write: basements, bulbs, weather, variations in temperature. What a boring blog this will be. What can I do to make it up to you? I can give you a list of my goals for spring 2011: Learn to like organ meats (liver and kidneys). Finish 2666. Learn to make Julia Child’s tart crust so that when strawberry season starts, I’ll be ready. Publish my article on Patrick Moser. Take the full Introductory Course to Hindustani Music. Find a great house for us, since we have to move from Adams Street. Get ready for backyard chickens and bees. Stop being so neurotic about my health body processes.
Or I could just give you a menu and a wonderful recipe for sprouted mung bean salad, courtesy of Madhur Jaffrey’s World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking:
