Bedfellows

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scotti spent his afternoon calling people to ask them to vote for Hillary Clinton on the 13th.  The pundits say it was unnecessary; last time I looked at the polls, she was favored to take the state by twenty points.

I, on the other hand, have been a die-hard Obama fan since he first emerged on the national scene.  He talks to me like I’m an adult, and I rise to the occassion.  He says difficult things to me, and I am grateful. 

You’d think there would be arguments in the yellow farmhouse, but we are oddly able to each believe the other is completely misguided without feeling the need to bring it up. 

Of course, if one or the other of us were out rallying voters for McCain, it would be a different story.  Here is my favorite story about politics:

My parents had just eloped.  My mother was at Queen’s College in North Carolina, and engaged to someone else, when my father appeared out of the blue.  “You said to come back when I was ready to get married,” my father said from the payphone in the lobby of her dorm, “and so here I am.  Get packed and let’s go get married.”  Or something to that effect.  One hopes there was a little more romance to it, and that just gets left out of the telling for the sake of us kids.

In any event, my mother called my grandfather from the road to tell him the news, a little afraid of how he would react.

“Daddy, guess what?  I just married John Einstein!” she said.

“Well, that’s great, honey,” my grandfather replied.  “I always did like John.  He’s a good boy.”

“Now, Daddy, you know this is a mixed marriage, right?” my mother said, a little sheepishly.

My grandfather’s exact words are never reported when the story gets told, no doubt because he said some very ungrandfatherly things.  But there was some yelling, and some over-my-dead-bodying.  Finally, my mother was able to interupt with, “But, Daddy, you knew John wasn’t Jewish the whole time we were dating!”

“Jewish?” my grandfather said–and I believe this, because my mother won’t brook any lies about her father–”Who said antying about Jewish?  I thought you meant he was a goddamned Republican!”

So the little yellow house on Ridgeway Avenue can sleep peacefully behind warring Democrats, safe in the knowledge that once we finally have a nominee, we’ll both be standing behind the same person.  Everything will be fine, as long as neither one of us becomes a goddamned Republican.

Presents for Sidneys

Sidneys like presents.  (So, in the interest of full disclosure, do Sarahs.)  But both Sidneys are notoriously hard to buy for because each pretty much gets what she wants.  Sidney-who-is-my-mother has the resources to be sure that both she and Sidney-who-is-my-niece pretty much never have to pine away for something they really, really want.  At least, nothing that they really, really want and that fits into my rather restricted budget. 

But this year May has both Mother’s Day and the weekend we celebrate Sidney-the-smaller’s second birthday at this strange place filled with bouncy castles and such.  (It also has Haven’s birthday in it, but she is easier to buy for, because in the rush to buy presents for her daughter Sidney, everyone pretty much just tosses her a gift certficiate and an e-card.)

For Sidney’s first Christmas, I gave her a stuffed animal of some sort that made noises and played music and lit up… the exact same stuffed animal with batteries that her next-door-neighbor gave her. But that will never happen again, because I have (belatedly) discovered Etsy.

Etsy is a kind of Ebay for all things handmade.  But that’s not exactly right, because there is no auction.  The prices are set.  It’s also a little like a museum… I log on far more often than I buy, just to look at the clever things people make.  This Purple Big-Eyed Plush Monster (which is for Sidney-my-niece, because Sidney-my-mother might get scared if this were in her bedroom when it was time to turn off the lights) was made by CurlyQCuties, whose monsters will no doubt be appearing in birthday packages, under Christmas trees, and beside Menorahs for many seasons of present giving to come.  These are so creative and fun… and they don’t come from Wal-Mart. 

Sidney-my-mother is also getting a gift from Etsy, but you won’t see it here.  She knows how to Google.

I tried my hand at selling things on Etsy… you can find my one, sad hat (made special for someone who never came to pick it up) by searching “hilltrash” on their site.  The rest of last year’s hats were given to folk at the homeless shelter for warmth.  I loved the hats I made out of recycled sari silk… but apparently every other person on the planet realized they were, perhaps, a little ugly.  Recently, my husband saw a picture of me wearing one of them. “Oh, look, it’s you in that hat.” 

Sometimes I think I’m the last living hippy in America.  Then I go to Etsy.  It’s not Burning Man, but it’s a small shot of the same kind of mojo.

Someplace Far Away and Long Ago

Sometimes when I think of my younger self, it is as if I am thinking of a person I knew long ago and have lost touch with.  An old friend, but not the kind one keeps.  The kind who fades into memory, whose path isn’t reported in emails or chatty phone calls.  The sort who sporadically sends a Christmas letter full of news about people you don’t know.  A husband you never met, children you did not know had been born to her. 

This self is nineteen, still wearing her grandfather’s old shirts, although he has been dead for seven years by the time this picture is taken.  His initials, ASP, are embroidered on the pocket.  This earned her the nickname Cleopatra in High School history class, but it is not a nickname that she could ever carry off, and so did not bring it with her. 

She is standing near the piano in the drawing room at Mallet–the men’s honor’s assembly–at the University of Alabama.  In the end, it will prove tragic for her to have made the choice to come to school here… a choice she made first because she had family there, and then later made again for boy, and still later than that, for a man.

I can barely remember her, and when I do, I blush for her brazenness and her selfishness.  I imagine that the others who remember her–at least, those who aren’t Jimmy, who has always been kind before all else, and Putt, who is the one enduring friend–think of her as a destructive force that blew through their lives for a moment or two and then went on, leaving only wreckage of one sort or another in her wake.

I do not like her, though I envy her the slim shoulders, the way her collar bones peak through her collar.  I can not envy her youth, which was difficult.  More for others, even, than for herself. 

I have no urge to look her up, to see how she is doing.  I do not think of her often.  When I am nostalgic for that time, she is not one of the people who comes to mind. 

Forty-two is not a glamorous age.  But I would not be nineteen again for all the world.

Preserving Spring: Ramp Pickles, Ramp Kimchi

Ramp season is drawing to a close.  The few I picked this week had yellowing leaves and huge bulbs; by this weekend, the season will be over for another year.  But the basement pantry is well-stocked with jars of pickled ramps and ramp kimchi so that we can savor the stench of spring in the winter, when the taste reminds us that February is always followed by March, and never by another February.

Both recipes this year are new ones.  Here they are:

Ramp Kimchi

Ingredients:  

• 1 long white napa (Chinese) cabbage, about 1 lb 3 oz
  1 cup  coarse or pickling salt
  5 cups (1 liter) water
  1 small long white radish, about 5 oz (160 g), cut in 1 1/2 in (4-cm) julienne strips
  1 cup ramp bulbs
  1 teaspoon finely grated ginger
  1 1/2 cup chili powder (Korean, not the stuff for making chili you buy at Kroger)– Or 3/4 cup chili powder and 3/4   papriki for a kimchi that won’t burn your face off
  1 teaspoon sugar 
  2-3oz pickled shrimp
  3oz salted anchovies
  1 large bowl to hold cabbage while soaking in water
   
  

Remove root end of cabbage without separating the leaves.  Put all the salt  in a large bowl and add 4 cups (1 liter) water.  Stir to dissolve all the salt in bowl and wter.  Fit the cabbage into bowl adding water if necessary so it is covered.  Place several heavy plates as weights on top of the cabbage and let sit at room temperature for 8-12 hours.  Drain the cabbage and rinse under running water, and squeeze dry.

In a seperate bowl, combine all other ingredients and mix well.  The red chili paste should look like the bottom left photo so your ingredient amount can vary slightly regarding the red chili powder.  Slightly separate the cabbage leaves and pack them well with the radish mixture.  Pack well into glass jar and press firmly to remove air bubbles.  Cover jar tightly.   If you decided to cut the cabbage into bite sized pieces before adding chili paste that is fine.  You can cut the cabbage into bite sized pieces before soaking in brine water as well.  Just a matter of personal taste.

Once thoroughly mixed, fill the jars with the Kimchi and seal with lids.  Allow the jar to sit in a dark room temperature area for 2-3 days.  Follwoing this early fermentation process place jar in the refrigerator and return to the fridge after each serving. 

Important: Never use a reactive metal container to store kimchi; use porcelain or stainless steel.  Plastic will be permanently stained by chili. Store kimchi in a cool, dark place - a fridge is best.  

Cloved Ramp Pickles

• Ramps
  1 cup water
  10 cloves
• 1 cup vinegar
  3/4 cup sugar
  1/4 teaspoon alum

1. Clean ramps, keeping bulbs only. Pack tightly in jars.

2. Add 1/4 teaspoon alum to each pint.

3. Bring liquid mixture to boil, pour over ramps.

4. Continue making liquid, enough to cover all ramps to be pickled.

5. Process sealed jars in boiling water bath for 5 minutes to seal lids.

Bruhaha: Miley Cyrus and James Frey

Vanity Fair is getting on my nerves.  First, they write a long apologia for the literary dickhead of the decade, James Frey.  At the same time, they are oddly silent about the photos of Miley Cyrus taken by Annie Leibowitz and, while the whole world clucks their collective tongue at the teenager and her father, they can’t seem to find anything worth adding to the conversation.

I am tired of bruhaha.

First, let’s all just go ahead and admit that Frey doesn’t matter, and never has.  The reason he’s gotten so much play has nothing to do with his book or it’s lack of veracity.  Show me one person who is genuinely shocked that a junkie lied for money.  Seriously.  We aren’t shocked or appalled, and we certainly aren’t more shocked or appalled than we are at Misha Defonseca, Margaret Seltzer, and Ishmael Beah.  I mean, they lied about important lives–Frey just lied about the extent to which he was a bad ass.  Which, it turns out, is easy to do because he’s not one.  So let’s all fess up folks.  We’re still talking about James Frey because it gives folk who like to think of themselves as above-all-that a chance to pick on Oprah. 

Vanity Fair wrote a shameful piece about Frey in this month’s issue.  The author attempts to turn him into an everyman, a victim of the New York publishing world and, even more bizarrely, of Oprah.  They seem to credit his account that he was tricked into his second appearance on the show, and that afterwards that he was told by Oprah, “I know it was rough, but it’s just business.”  Are you kidding?  When did Frey become a credible witness?  So let’s call the fray over Frey what it really is–the chance to engage in a little back-biting gossip about Oprah because, well, she isn’t Vanity Fair’s kind of person. 

And then there is the fresher, and even more ridiculous, bruhaha over Miley Cyrus’ pictures in this month’s edition.  Really, give me a break.  Everyone keeps asking this teenager and her father–who happens to be the same sort of hill trash as me, from the same part of Appalachia–what they were thinking.  I can tell you what they were thinking.  “Annie Leibovitz is one hell of a photographer.”  They were thinking, “When you get an offer to do a photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz, you rely on her judgement, because she’s a frigging genius.”  Isn’t that what you’d be thinking?  Would you have the balls to edit Annie Leibovitz mid-shoot, to question her choices? 

I didn’t think so.

Vanity Fair has gotten old.  These silly contraversies have gotten old.  I’ve bought my last copy.  I can no longer pretend that this is anything but “The National Enquirer” for people who like their gossip to have glossy photos and big words. 

From now on, I’m sticking to The Sun. 

Full Spring

In West Virginia, the seasons overlap… winter seeping into summer nights, summer flitting back for a warm afternoon in mid-January.  Weather, then, is not the defining element of a season.  Instead, we know them by their artificacts.  Winter is defined by skeletal, sculptural trees and dried brown grass.  Autumn by the return of the scent of woodsmoke to the air and the oft-rhapsodied colors of the dying leaves. 

 

The first artifact of spring is the algae bloom in the creek beds and drainage ditches.  Within a few weeks, these will become fetid pools, but when the first snows melt they are bright and fresh-smelling. 

Next will come to the spring onions and ramps that spring up seemingly overnight and signal the beginning of the spring planting season.  Only frost hardy plants can be put in the ground before mid-May here.  No, that isn’t true.  Only frost hardy plants SHOULD be put in the ground before mid-May.  It’s certainly possible to plan earlier.  I’ve ruined many a crop of seedlings by getting cocky and planting them early.  Killing frosts can come late in the season, long after the daffodils have bloomed and died back again and the strawberries and lettuces are producing their first crop.  Gardening is at least as much an act of faith as it is an act of creation.

Full spring is here when the ground is littered with the shells of bird’s eggs.  The shard of light blue from a robin’s nest, or deep blue from an eastern bluebird.   White with dark brown speckles for a house sparrow, or lighter brown for a white-breasted nuthatch. There is an egg broken and spilling its golden promise on our porch this morning; I guess it to be the unrealized offspring of the muthatch couple who has set up a nest in our ancient chestnut tree, but am not enough of an ornathologist to know that it is not from the house sparrows who live in the eaves ’round the back of the house.  My guess is based more on proximity to the nest than on the egg itself. 

It has been cold and rainy the last few days; the threat of frost hangs in the early morning hours when the last of the previous day’s warmth is given up to the air and the real chill sets in, but so far we have been spared.  It’s been a good spring for magnolia trees, arugala, and mint.  Already my front yard smells like a cup of herbal tea.  The lemonbalm has taken over the herb bed, crowding out the spearmint.  It’s the new bully on the block… last year, it was the spearmint crowding out the chamomile.  I suppose I will intervene; weed out big colonies of lemonbalm to give the other things room to grow.  But I am hesitant.  There is a beautiful poem, “The Stray” in the April issue of The Sun by Eric Anderson.  As I put on my gardening gloves and go out to kill off a good amount of the lemonbalm, I can’t help thinking of the lovely and haunting way it ends.  “And yet I can’t/even kill these rodents, and want/to protect them from you,/and also want you/not to starve but will no longer/feed you or let you stay./This, then, is being human./ This, then, is not being God.”

Why West Virginians Should Support Obama…

 

Does anybody else remember that West Virginia used to be a “yellow dog Democrat” state, meaning that we would rather vote for a Democratic candidate who was a yellow dog than a Republican, no matter what his/her qualifications?  There was a good reason for this:  more than most of the country, the people of West Virginia deal with poverty, disability, and the issues of rural communities.  We voted for candidates who stood behind labor, were willing to fight the war on poverty, and supported initiatives to ensure that people living in rural communities had good schools, good roads, and the chance to raise their children to have good lives. 

Then, somewhere along the way, we let ourselves be told that those things didn’t matter.  That, in fact, the folk who wanted to build roads, improve schools, and care for the elderly and disabled were, in fact, the bad guys.  Why?  Because somehow we let ourselves be tricked into believing that “Christian” and “Republican” were the same thing.  We let ourselves forget that Jesus gave us not The Ten Commandments, but the far more difficult and demanding Sermon on the Mount. 

I believe that if you look at the issues, you can’t help but come to the conclusion that Obama is the best candidate for West Virginia.  He supports strengthening the supports for persons with disabilities–a key issue in the state with the highest percentage of citizens with disabilities in the entire country!  He supports initiatives to ensure rural small business can compete by bringing high speed internet to currently unserved areas, and he supports keeping the market open to these small businesses through net neutrality.  He has the best plan for providing health care to everyone–a key need in a state that only a few years ago saw the head of DHHR refuse to answer the legislature’s questions about how their healthcare reforms were impacting West Virginia citizens!  On these, and so many more, issues, Obama is clearly the candidate with the best plan  West Virginia’s future.

It is time for us to have hope again.  That’s not something that comes easy here in West Virginia, where wave after wave of reformers have come and gone without providing much relief from the hard times that seem always to hit us the hardest.  But Obama isn’t offering us a hand-out.  He’s offering us the tools to carve out our own prosperity, and better lives for our kids.  And isn’t that what we all want?

 

Stink, Stank, Stunk

Nothing is more Hill Trashy than a ramp.  This sublimely stinky, insanely pungent weed is the hickster’s harbinger of Spring.  I grew up believing that it’s illegal in at least one West Virginia county to feed your kids raw ramps and then send them to school because the funk was too much for teachers to bare.  This is the sort of thing that I could check, now that we have Google, but it’s also the sort of thing I don’t want to know isn’t true.  So take it with a grain of salt.  Or better yet, some bacon fat and fried ‘taters.

 Doug and Cindy Llewellyn from church were kind enough to give me this big bundle of ramps; the first of several to come.  This harvest was just enough for a three-pint batch of Ramp Kimchi–that unholy mixture of the stinkiest food known made by man and the stinkiest one found in nature.  (There is actually a line in the employee handbook of one of the last places that I worked forbidding anyone to bring Ramp Kimchi to the office under any circumstances.  As the only person in the world who makes this stuff–as far as I know–I feel honored!)

The process of making the kimchi isn’t as difficult as most folk expect.  The secret is to replace all of the leeks, scallions, and garlic in your favorite kimchi recipe with ramps and to only use the bulbs and purple stems.  The green, leafy parts of the ramp won’t hold up to the process, and you’ll get a mason jar full of black slime.  A lesson learned from hard experience.  Also, ramp kimchi takes a little longer to sour.  I tend to like my kimchi a little “green” and usually let it ferment for only 3-4 days.  But the ramps take longer to mellow and blend with the other ingredients, so I usually let the jars sit in the basement pantry for at least six days before refridgerating.

For the next batch of ramps, Cindy has lent me a wonderful cookbook called The Mediterranean Pantry that includes a recipe for green garlic pickles.  She reports that the ramps stayed very hot pickled this way, and I’m looking forward to trying it.  Usually my ramp pickles, which are made the traditional way with lots of sugar, get mild and a little un-rampy within a month or so, but she reports hers kept for probably a year. 

So, thank you Cindy and Doug!  At least, from me, the other folk in the house–who don’t eat ramps, want to smell ramps, or understand my obsession with local wild foods–aren’t quite as grateful.  BUT I’ve also discovered that making Ramp Kimchi is a great way to drive them out of doors to do yard work!

The Old Gray Sedan with the Tragic Blue Door…

It’s summer weather today, though there may be snow by Monday.  I am thinking a lot about love and nostalgia and seasons passing this morning, which probably means that I shouldn’t have had that second martini last night.  A slight hangover is indistinguishable from melancholy.

It was this time last year that I first met Mot.  I was still reeling from the attempted rape in the hallway of Friendship Room and my horrified surprise that, rather than rallying around me, the participants became increasingly violent towards me.  After the attack, they knew how to keep me from getting my footing again and that meant a kind of freedom for them, I suppose.  But what a miracle it was, amid the threats and violence, to suddenly have this kind and sheltering friend.  A gentleman, maybe of a kind we won’t see again when his generation is gone.   Someone who recited poetry and talked about sitting on the beach in France flirting with the pretty young girls who brought him wine and books in English.  Someone who came by on a Sunday to help scrub the floors instead knocking over a coffee cup and leaving the spill for me to find later. 

I watched on the news today as a homeless man robbed a young soldier who was having a seizure.  Only moment before, the soldier had given this man money from his own pocket.  The newscaster said, “I hope everyone realizes this is just an isolated incident.  I hope this won’t stop anyone from helping the next homeless person who asks for assistance.”  I do, too, but only because you never know whether the person asking is Mot or some street junkie.  It’s hard to tell the two apart, and too easy to assume one or the other, depending on your bent.

It’s more than strange to me to know that Mot is afraid of me now, thinks I’m in league with the voices in his head, and that he can’t even tolerate receiving emails from me.  Crazy fights hard and it doesn’t fight fair.  The sun is out and there is a breeze from the west.  All I want to do is hop in the car and head for Texas.  But he and the old gray sedan with the tragic blue door aren’t there any more.  I don’t know where he is now, and probably never will again.  The car was abandoned near an a reservation in Oklahoma, the keys given to a kid at the auto parts store who probably sold it for scrap.

Whatever kind of love this is, it is more constant than I would have imagined, and some days, more so than I can bear. 

Dayenu Reconsidered

The problem with praying in English instead of Hebrew is that the words have meaning beyond the sound of them–their rhythm in the cant.  Praying in a language one does not speak is a different thing all together.

And so I look back on my most recent post, the one in which I say that the song Dayenu is my favorite prayer, and am a little horrified.  To me, this is a prayer sung around the seder table… “Ilu hotsi, hostionu, hotsionu mi Mitzrayim, Hotsionu mi Mitzrayim Da-ye-nu…”  It’s the sound of the voices of my family, young and old, frum and gone over to the other side, all together on this one night of the year.  It is the sound of thanks and of saying, “No matter what happens to us from here on out, we have been blessed and we will not complain.”  Although, of course, we will.  Still, it’s a nice thought.

But in writing it all out in English, I am stunned by the actual words of the song.  It’s not that I didn’t know them–I did.  It’s that, sung in Hebrew, I hadn’t thought of their meaning in decades.  Not since I was a little girl in Sunday school, just learning to ask the four questions.  “Why is it that on all other nights, we eat herbs of every kind, but tonight we eat only bitter herbs?”  I am forced to look beyond the meaning of “it would have been enough” to what, in fact, I am saying would have sufficed to make G-d worthy of my worship.

And there, I am forced to ask myself:  is it really enough for me that G-d killed the first born sons of the Egyptians?  Does that make Him fit for worship?  Or is it not enough, not by a long shot?  Don’t I have the right to say, “If You want me to worship You, how about not killing any more infants in my name?  In fact, You could lay off the smiting all together, thank you very much.  Tell the Angel of Death to pass over every door, not just the ones with a smear of lamb’s blood.  Tell him not to come until he’s called by the old, the weary, the ready to die.”  Do I really want to take a drop from my own cup of wine in thankfulness that G-d slew babies to secure my freedom from Egypt, or would I rather be a slave unstained by the blood of all those sons of other mothers?

I will thank G-d for parting the sea, and for allowing me to cross on dry land.  Dayenu.  But must I really thank him also for drowning my oppressors?  Can I not instead wish he had simply gentled them back to their own land, changed by having seen a miracle performed and been shown a kindness?  Must vengeance and murder really be enough for me?  Can I have no hope of peace?

Dayenu is no longer my favorite prayer.  My favorite prayer is the silent one I say among my Mennonite brethren as we light the Peace candle and hold in the light all those in our world afflicted by violence.  Or maybe it is the gentle, steadfast prayer of the Dalai Lama as he turns away, again and again, from a violent struggle for the freedom of his people.   Or maybe it is the prayer you will say for me tonight, afraid for my soul because I have blasphemed.  But it is not a prayer thanking G-d for the deaths of infants or the drowning of enemies.  Not any more.