Falling

Does anyone else's heart beat faster with the first hint of crispness in the air? Fall has finally made an appearance here in sunny Southern California, and it's lovely and cool and I can finally wear tights and boots and sweaters and scarves. Even better, it's cool enough to bake turning the kitchen into a hothouse, so I can start making shortbread and cookies again on a regular basis. I'm especially excited to try this scrumptious looking recipe for Chocolate Earl Grey Tartlets from this blog. A cup of coffee, a chocolate tart, and a cloudy afternoon- what could be more perfect?

Bluebells

"The house they had built was quite modest--it even had a thatched roof--but their gardens soon became one of the wonders of the land. It was said that Abdullah had help in their design from at least one of the Royal Wizards, for how else could even an Ambassador have a bluebell wood that grew bluebells all the year round?" -Castle in the Sky, Diana Wynne Jones
I know it's fall, and I love fall, but these images from Bright Star and I Capture the Castle keep popping into my head. I love bluebells--I don't even think they grow in this part of California, but they're one of my favorite flowers, and I wish I could have a bluebell wood that grew bluebells all year round. Wouldn't it be lovely to wander about at dusk with a lantern lighting your way and revealing that perfect, autumn-sky blue around your feet?

Kindred Spirits (Time Travel Edition)

Thanks to Ken Burns' new documentary The National Parks, I've discovered another person whom I intend to befriend once I have my time machine up and running. Her name was Margaret Gurkey (I'm not sure about that spelling of her last name), and she and her husband traveled around the U.S. visiting National Parks nearly every year of their marriage, beginning in 1915 and continuing into the 30's and 40's. They began by taking the train, but quickly moved on to car travel and camping. Along with a succession of dogs, they criss-crossed the nation, taking in the scenery from Maine to California. Margaret's goal was always to get away from the crowds and experience what she referred to as the silence of the woods. At times this required a certain amount of adventure- rough roads, no easy access to supplies or assistance in an emergency, being at the mercy of the weather- and Margaret admitted that at times their decisions weren't exactly in line with common sense, but in her words, "to be sensible is to be commonplace, and to be commonplace is unpardonable."

Cheese Festival, Anyone?

The Great British Cheese Festival at Cardiff Castle.

I want to go to there.

And yes, that is a model of Cardiff Castle made out of cheese (via Light Reading).

The Bee's Knees

I may have been incredibly inactive here over the last few months, but the weather is (sort of) cooling down now that September is here, which means I'm back up to my old tricks in the kitchen. I recently checked Richard Bertinet's Dough out of the library, and the first thing I made was his ridiculously good lavender and honey wheat bread. The best part, in my opinion, is that Bertinet prefers to do everything by hand, so I got to play around with a bowl full of flour, rubbing in the yeast and dried lavender. Can anyone say baking win?
And the finished product (which, incidentally, was fantastic with the lovely soup that my sister made the following day):

Come Out to Ramble

It's been a lovely rainy day, with patches of sun breaking through and big heavy clouds. The sweet peas are blooming, the orange blossoms are opening, and I got my lettuces in the ground a couple of days ago. It smells like spring, all green and floral and damp. Here's a snippet of A.E. Housman, because hey, it's Wednesday:

'Tis spring; come out to ramble
The hilly brakes around,
For under thorn and bramble
About the hollow ground
The primroses are found. -from A Shropshire Lad

Of course, with so many nice things growing outside, one simply must bring something indoors. I've been putting little bunches of one kind of bloom (or tree, in this case) into tiny Moroccan-style shot glasses I found at Sur La Table this past weekend, and I bought a gorgeous bunch of ranunculus at the farmer's market that is a perfect fit for the Austrian pottery vase I stole from my mother:

More Midweek Poetry

Here, courtesy of Davey Talbot's PoemaDay, is a portion of a poem by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado:

From Proverbs and Songs (translated by Robert Bly)

XX
Sing on, sing on, sing on,
the cricket in his cage
near his darling tomato.

XXI
Form your letters slowly and well:
making things well
is more important than making them.

XXIV
Wake up, you poets:
let echoes end,
and voices begin.

XXV
But don't hunt for dissonance;
because, in the end, there is no dissonance.
When the sound is heard people dance.

XXVI
What the poet is searching for
is not the fundamental I
but the deep you.

.........................

XXXIV
If a poem becomes common,
passed around, hand to hand, it's OK:
gold is chosen for coins.

XXXVI
Sunlight is good for waking,
but I prefer bells --
the best thing about morning.

XXXIX
Now, poet, your prophecy?
"Tomorrow what is dumb will speak,
the human heart and the stone.

XXXI
Pay attention now:
a heart that's all by itself
is not a heart."

Midweek Poetry Fix

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring--
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.-- Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worth the winning.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Said the Three-Year-Old Boy

As he colored his map of the United States: "We live in California, over here are the other states, and this one in the middle is Mashed Potato!" Also, "Lions only ride on trains if they can bring their books with them."

Signs of Spring

You know spring is in the air when you spot:
Three boys in aprons (two out of three with flowers!)

Flowering fruit trees (peach and plum, to be precise)

One grey cat dozing amidst the flowers

And daffodils, of course!

I know, I know, it's only February, but in Southern California we have to take what we can get. Days of rain alternating with sunny, breezy days, blossoms and new leaves on the fruit trees, and blooming bulbs are as springy as anyone could wish.

Why Write?

"It seems vain to add to the litter. Who can design a new leaf? The patterns from bud to unfolding, and the colours from spring to autumn were all discovered by men long ago. But that is not true. The seed of the tree can be replanted in almost any soil, even in one so smoke-ridden (as Lang said) as that of England. Spring is, of course, not really less beautiful because we have seen or heard of other like events: like events, never from world's beginning to world's end the same event. Each leaf, of oak and ash and thorn, is a unique embodiment of the pattern, and for some this very year may be the embodiment, the first ever seen and recognized, though oaks have put forth leaves for countless generations of men."
From "On Fairy-Stories" by J.R.R. Tolkien

Regarding Richard Wilbur

For those who want to know more about Richard Wilbur, here's a lovely article from the Harvard Magazine- the author, Craig Lambert, describes Wilbur as having a "Mozartean felicity with verse." Isn't that a beautiful phrase?

The Care and Feeding of Small Children

In true spinster fashion, I have now become a teacher of small children. I'm teaching a pre-school playgroup of three-year-olds two days a week. It is a hallmark of a certain type of spinsterhood to borrow other people's children to make up for not having your own, and these kids certainly are a joy to be around- they are bright, funny, curious, and loving, and they view the world in that astonished, joyful and yet completely serious way that young children have. Because I've been spending so much time with small children, I've been thinking about what a responsibility it is to have the care of young minds and souls. This poem by Richard Wilbur has been on my mind, so I thought I'd share it.

The Writer

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

Dream Theories

Since I haven't written anything on this blog in such a long time, the first new post was going to be a photo montage of all the things I've been doing since I posted last. Unfortunately, all of the photos from the past month and a half were moved to an external hard drive before I got around to posting them, so until I find out how to access them you'll have to be content with text alone.

For the most part, the reason I haven't been posting is that I've been doing other things, such as baking, cooking holiday dinners, catching up with Battlestar Galactica in anticipation of the season 4.5 premiere, writing the middle third of a novel (I haven't written the first third yet- I'm trying not to be bothered by that and not entirely succeeding), and, of course, reading. After tallying up my reading for 2008, I discovered that of the 234 books I read only 18 were non-fiction (I am aware that I have no life). This year my goal is to read more non-fiction, beginning with actually finishing the many non-fiction books I begin and then forget, so in January so far I've read a collection of Patrick Leigh Fermor's writing called Words of Mercury, and I'm in the middle of both Owen Chadwick's book on the Reformation and a book about hedgehogs. Of course, I've also re-read Tender is the Night, finished re-reading Richard Wilbur's collected poems, and finished reading Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes' anthology The Rattle-bag. I've read three books about eccentric family highjinks on the Yorkshire coast (Hilary McKay's Porridge Hall books), three books that are addendums to well-known fantasy series (Philip Pullman's Lyra's Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North and J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beadle the Bard), and two books about alchemical space travel in the Victorian period (Philip Reeve's Larklight and Starcross). On reflection, it's probably no surprise that I have strange and sometimes terrible dreams- what a mish-mash to put inside one head.