At the little house in the big woods, the tradition on birthdays, anniversaries, and other special days is for a home-grown party of some kind, with the person or persons being fêted choosing the food for the celebratory meal. This meant that on Sunday—Father’s Day—Clif got to pick what was on the menu. He decided to go with fried chicken pieces and French fries, a meal we hardly ever make at home.
But what fun Shannon and I had working together to fry the potatoes and the chicken. Everything just fell into place, even though neither of us is exactly an expert at frying. I made a honey-mustard sauce to go with the chicken, and that was pretty tasty, too. For dessert, there was strawberry shortcake, one of Clif’s favorites, and in our house that means strawberries on biscuits. I’m not saying it’s the only way or the best way, but it is our way.
We ate every bit of the chicken and fries, and we tucked into the strawberry shortcake. The only thing that would have made the day better would have been to have Dee and Mike here as well. But Dee lives in New York—too far to come for the weekend—and Mike had to work. Still, we had a jolly time talking and cooking and eating, and Clif pronounced it a very good Father’s Day indeed.
Here are some pictures from our little party:
Appetizers—radishes with a bit of mustard on crackers—on the patioFrying friesA plate of friesThe chickenStrawberry shortcake for dessert
Summer has done what it always does in Maine. It comes in a rush. One day it is spring, and all the leaves are new and tender and bright green. Then, seemingly overnight, summer arrives, bringing with it full-size leaves that are deep green, nights so warm the windows can be left open, and the start of the summer flowers. Daisies and lupine by the roadside, tall irises in the garden.
Because the nights are warm, we can now eat supper on the patio, and Clif is perfecting his grilled pizza. (Long-time readers will know that his grilled bread is legendary.) The pizza, of course, is just a variation on the grilled bread, with sauce, cheese, and toppings added after the bread is cooked. However, as simple as this sounds, there is technique—stretching the dough—and timing—leaving the pizza on the grill long enough for the cheese to melt but not so long that the bread will burn. A complicating factor is that our grill’s burners need to be replaced. Right now, Clif doesn’t have much control over the heat, and sometimes the bottom of the pizza is a little charred. However, in the next two weeks, we will be ordering new burners, and then Clif should be ready to wow family and friends with his grilled pizza. I know I’m bragging, but in central Maine, nothing beats Clif’s grilled pizza, even if the bottoms are a little charred.
This weekend, Shannon and Mike (and Holly!) came over for grilled pizza. Mike is quite the pizza hound, so Clif made two. The day was sunny and warm, and we spent most of the time on the patio. The dogs sniffed and played and begged for food while Shannon told us the highlights of her New York trip, where she visited Dee.
There were two standouts on this trip—a food tour of Little Italy and China Town and a play, Of Mice and Men, staring James Franco Chris O’Dowd. My mouth watered as Shannon told us about sampling olives, cannoli, dumplings, and egg rolls. The tour lasted 3 hours, and they ate and walked and ate some more. My kind of event, that’s for sure. The guide also pointed out the Tenement Museum, which Shannon and Dee plan to visit on Shannon’s next trip to New York.
Both Shannon and Dee thought Of Mice and Men was excellent, with James Franco being able to do as well on stage as he does on screen. This is no small feat. Stage acting requires a different set of skills than does acting in front of a camera, which can pick up the smallest nuances that would be lost on stage. In turn, the larger gestures required for a play look absurd in front of camera, and to get a sense of this, you only have to watch moves pre-Marlon Brando.
“There’s nothing like a good play,” Shannon said, and we all agreed as we ate pizza. We also had salad made with greens from Farmer Kev’s garden.
Summer time, summer time. This is just the beginning of many more meals on the patio.
Our own Farmer Kev, bringing the first CSA delivery of the season—lettuce and spinach and turnip greens. There will be salads—tonight and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Yesterday was finally a warm, sunny day after too many cold, rainy days. From time to time over the past week, we have needed to turn on the electric heat. When the house is only 60 degrees, it is simply too cold for Clif and me.
But all was forgiven on a day when the sky was a cloudless blue, and it was fine enough to hang laundry on the clothesline. It was even warm enough to have lunch on the patio,which is right beside a large garden bed, where I could see that the dwarf irises were starting to pass. However, the flowers still smelled as sweet as ever.
The dragonflies have emerged, and one clung to Temple Dog’s small stoney face. “Come, little mosquito eaters,” I said. “And do your thing.”
Over lunch I perused the newest Daedalus Books catalog. I saw lots of interesting titles—some for presents, some for me. As I spotted one book after another, I was sadly reminded that my friend Barbara is gone, dead for 9 years this spring. Barbara was the one person with whom I could share all my bookish enthusiasms, and I so miss our regular book talks.
Now, it must be noted that I am blessed with a literate family and many literate friends, but somehow Barbara was the one whose tastes almost exactly matched mine. In the catalog, I saw What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. We both adored William Maxwell, a legendary editor at the New Yorker and a fine writer as well. And we, of course, admired Eudora Welty. When I came to a section featuring books by Angela Thirkell, I wondered if Barbara had read her. Ditto for The Town in Bloom by Dodie Smith, who also wrote The Hundred and One Dalmatians.
How lucky I was to have Barbara as a friend for so long—12 years, I think. On the other hand, is that all? I felt as though I knew her all my life. One thing is certain, friends like Barbara only come along very rarely.
The weather forecast for Memorial Day weekend turned out to be wrong, and for the most part, the weather was pretty nice—sunny on Saturday and Sunday and good enough on Monday for us to have our first outdoor gathering on the patio. This meant that on Memorial Day, there were 6 happy people at the little house in the big woods because Clif was able to serve his legendary grilled bread. I had a backup plan—biscuits—and although I make pretty good biscuits, they can’t compete with grilled bread, fresh and warm and dipped in olive oil.
Shannon and Mike came, as did our friends Joel and Alice. We spent most of the time on the patio as we enjoyed Clif’s grilled bread (along with other nibbles); potato salad; corn; and grilled teriyaki chicken. For dessert, Alice made some oatmeal cookies spiced with ginger and cinnamon. It was all pretty darned good, as Clif would say, and made even better because we were able to eat most of it outside. (When it was time for dessert, we came inside.)
We are all movie buffs, and one lively topic of discussion was Belle, a movie Clif and I had recently seen with Alice and Joel at Railroad Square Cinema. Belle is based—very loosely, as it turns out—on the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, a woman whose father was white and whose mother was black. Fortunately, by today’s standards, this is not especially noteworthy, but Dido was born in 1761, and she was the illegitimate daughter of the English Admiral Sir John Lindsay. When she was young, Dido was sent to live with her great uncle, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield.
Now, anyone with even just a passing knowledge of English society in the late 1700s would realize that Dido was in a difficult social situation—she was illegitimate and she was black, but she was also the great niece of an earl. While the movie accurately acknowledges some of the realities of Dido’s life, it blithely ignores other aspects, some of which are known and recorded. (I’m not going to get into a detailed discussion of the ways the movie disregarded the known facts. I don’t want to turn this post into a spoiler.)
However, I can safely write that while I did enjoy the movie, which was well acted and well filmed, as I thought about the movie afterwards, I realized that parts of it didn’t make a lick of sense, given the realities of eighteenth-century England. When I read a little about Dido’s life and what was known about her, I could see how the filmmakers had decided that some of the facts didn’t matter and how they went their own foolish way with Dido’s story. David Denby, from the New Yorker, called the movie “a fraud,” and he is right.
I am of the firm opinion that facts do matter, and when making a movie or writing a book about real people, the film makers or authors have an obligation to stick to the known facts. Obviously, there is going to be a great deal of unknown details that will be imagined and recreated. I understand this. But to blatantly change the known facts seems, to me, just plain wrong, and it makes me a little cranky to think about it.
However, to end on an upbeat note: Clif and I are lucky to have family and friends with sharp intellects, and our discussions are always spirited and interesting, whatever the topic.
And that, readers, is a fact.
Addendum, May 29: My friend Joel Johnson rightly pointed out that I only included a snippet of the sentence of what the film critic David Denby wrote about Belle. Here is the whole sentence: “Factually, the movie is probably a fraud, but it’s crisply entertaining, and Mbatha-Raw, born in Oxford and acting since she was a child, delivers her increasingly confident lines with tremulous emotion and, finally, radiant authority.” Denby is right about Belle’s good points, but there is no probably about it—the movie is certainly a fraud.
Mary jane Auns, trustee chair, and Richard Fortin, libary director, beside the new sign
On Thursday, we had our Kick-Off Celebration at the Charles M. Bailey Library to begin the public phase of the library’s expansion campaign. We need to raise 1 million dollars for the addition, and to date we have raised almost $750,000, enough to get us started some time in the next few months.
For most of Thursday the sky had been gray, but just before the Kick-Off, the sky cleared, and it was sunny and warm. Bailey Library sits close to the street and has very little land. Therefore, the police department graciously agreed to close off part of the street so that the short ceremony could be held outside.
And a good thing, too, because people came and came, spilling from the sidewalk and onto the street. We clapped and cheered as the various speakers—members of the community—extolled the virtues and the beauty of the library. They all spoke from the heart, and it was clear that Bailey Library was dear to them all and of vital importance to their lives.
The crowd listens
Our library is of vital importance to many people’s lives. Winthrop has a population of about 6,000, which increases in the summer as people come to stay at the many lakes in town. In April, circulation at the library was 4,888, with half of the materials borrowed being honest-to-God books made of paper. As Mary Jane Auns, the chair of the trustees, put it, “What a town of readers!”
Yes, we are!
Judi Stebbins, chair of the campaign team, spoke at the Kick-Off Celebration, and the sentiment she expressed mirrors what I have been thinking for the past week or so. She spoke of how Charles M. Bailey, a wealthy Winthrop resident who helped established the library in the early 1900s, started something that not only benefited the town in his own time but has also benefited Winthrop residents 100 years later. Now, she said, it was our turn to pay it forward so that residents 100 years from now will be benefiting from the work we have done to expand the library.
Judi Stebbins
I want to add to Judi’s lovely, generous notion. It’s not every day that ordinary folks can come together to work on a project that is larger than themselves, for something that will benefit not only their current time but for something that will also ripple forward to benefit children who haven’t even been born yet. Our lives are short, but the library will continue long after we are gone.
What a good feeling it is to be part of this project.
On Mother’s Day, in central Maine, we got oh so lucky with the weather. The day was sunny and warm. At the little house in the big woods, Shannon and Clif made a bang-up brunch for me and Gail, Mike’s mother. While brunch was being prepared, Gail and I sat on the patio, chatted, and luxuriated in the sun. How wonderful to be able to sit outside without a jacket! And how nice, just for once, not to have to fuss over a meal, to relax and talk while someone else fussed.
For our Mother’s Day brunch, Shannon and Clif made home fries, waffles, a sausage and cheddar breakfast casserole, and a fruit salad.
Then there was dessert, chocolate soufflé cupcakes with mint cream, a Smitten Kitchen recipe. This cupcake is rich and flourless and has become a favorite of mine. Shannon made it last year for Mother’s Day, and I requested it this year. Best of all, these cupcakes can be made the day before and still be moist the next day.
We had dessert outside on the patio, while the dogs ran and sniffed around the backyard, and the goldfinches tweeted and twittered. Gail and I complimented the chefs—Clif for his wonderfully light waffles, and Shannon for the tasty breakfast casserole, crisp home fries, and incredible cupcakes.
I commented on how Shannon only started cooking when she was in her late 20s, and Gail was surprised. “She’s such a good cook. I thought she had been cooking for a long time.”
Then Shannon said something that I’m still mulling over. “Even though I wasn’t interested in cooking, I had a mother who cooked, so I knew the basics—stir frying, sautéing, baking. I wasn’t completely inexperienced.”
Maybe so, but if my memory is correct, Shannon didn’t do many of those things when she was at home. Could watching me really have given her a head start? Or, is she just a quick learner? Whatever the case, Shannon has become a fine cook, and I’m always eager to eat a meal she’s prepared.
After everyone left, it was still light, and Clif and I went on a bike ride. After the ride, we sat by shimmering Marancook for a while, watching the sun set and some brave souls wade in water that must be very cold.
This year, spring is coming in fits and starts. One day it will be warm and sunny, and I can have lunch on the patio. The next day it will be cold and gray, and time spent spent outside involves wearing a fleece jacket and maybe even gloves. (Thank goodness I’ve been able to ditch the hat!)
But however fitfully, spring is here. Above the bird feeders, the maple tree is fringed in red. In the garden, irises and day lilies are a tender green. Finally, the peepers are singing at night. A most welcome sound.
Chickadees, purple finches, goldfinches, tufted tit mice, and nuthatches come to the feeders. So do the squirrels—red and gray. They are stymied by two of the feeders—one has a baffle, and the other is weighted so that it closes when the squirrels step on the bar. The birds, much lighter than the squirrels, can land on the bar and eat without the feeder closing on them. The squirrels yearn to eat from the feeders, but experience has taught the squirrels that it is a waste of effort to try to get seed from them, and nowadays they seldom try. Most of the time, the squirrels just gaze longingly at the bird seed, so close, but so inaccessible.
It seems to me that it is unfair to think of squirrels as rats with bushy tails, as some people do, and to resent them. Like the birds, squirrels are concerned with making a living, and they must deal with harsh weather and predators, two of which live with me. Given the opportunity, my cats would gladly kill the squirrels, but the squirrels are fast and watchful and so far have eluded capture.
However, it can’t be denied that squirrels will clean out a bird feeder in a day or two, and my budget simply isn’t big enough to support the squirrels’ big appetites. (Like me, they are good eaters.) So I compromise. Once a week, I fill the tube feeders that are not squirrel proof, and when the seed is gone, it is gone until the next week’s filling. As always, life is a series of compromises, some big, some little. For me, this is an acceptable compromise. The squirrels, no doubt, have a different take on the matter.
After the hard winter—the snow and the storms and the wind—the backyard was a tangle of blown-down sticks, pine cones, and dog-do. In other words, a real mess. I am happy to report that while almost nothing is in bloom, the backyard is clean and raked. It is ready for us and for family and friends as soon as the weather allows.
Now, onto the front yard, to rake, to remove the leaves from the flower beds, and to the most dreaded chore of all, cleaning the heavy sand from the edge of the lawn and the end of the driveway. Last year, I hurt my back when I scooped that heavy sand, and I was out of commission for several days. This year, I am going to take it very, very slowly.
This is no time of year to be out of commission for several days.
Our daughter Shannon’s birthday is today. Happy birthday, Earth Day girl! What a cool day to have a birthday.
Because of everyone’s schedule, we celebrated Shannon’s birthday on Sunday, which turned out to be such a warm, lovely day that we were actually able to have appetizers on the patio. The first patio gathering of the season and a great way to kick off what I hope will be a long string of patio days.
The yard is certainly not at its best. There is much clean-up to do, and there are no flowers in the garden. Only green shoots. But it didn’t matter. As we ate, drank, and talked in the warm sunshine, the dogs ran and sniffed around the yard. Chickadees and nuthatches and tufted titmice came to the feeder. The red buds of the maple tree were in crisp outline against the deep blue sky. So what if the mud by the gate had to be barricaded with a pallet, a wheel barrow, and two trashcans so that the dogs wouldn’t be a muddy mess? We didn’t need hats and mittens to be comfortable outside. Welcome, welcome, spring!
Cheers on the patio
For the meal, we had grilled steak—one of Shannon’s favorites—as well as tortellini tossed with roasted garlic and olive oil; glazed carrots; and homemade cornbread. There were presents, cake, and ice cream. Shannon also loves our homemade peanut butter balls, so the previous day, Clif and I made a half-batch to give her, and we recycled a Valentine’s Day box for the chocolates.
A special meal
Shannon is keen on playing games, and she brought a rather complex board game—TheEldritch Horror—for us to play. After cake and ice cream, we cleared the dining room table and spread the many pieces out. At first we all just moved randomly around the board, but gradually we dimly understood how to find clues and stop the monsters, and we moved with more purpose. One of the things I really like about this game is that rather than stress competition, where player is pitted against player, this game encourages cooperation, where to win against the monsters, the players must help one another. Because the game is complex, there is nothing cheesy about the cooperation. I have never played a board game like this, and it was a good change from the usual knock the other players off the board kind of game.
All in all, a good day with fine weather, a birthday celebration, and an interesting new game that we agreed could be played on the patio when the day stays warm into the evening.
This morning, when I looked out the window, this is what I saw in my backyard.
Never mind! Yesterday, I went to Portland, where I had lunch with Shannon and Kate to celebrate Shannon’s birthday. We had a long, long lunch and a great chat. After eating, we took one of our famous selfies.
Although we had a wonderful time, it was also a bittersweet get-together. Kate has moved from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania, and if her house in New Hampshire sells soon, this will likely be our last birthday gathering. Another “fellowship” has broken up. We have been meeting to celebrate birthdays for quite a few years—I can’t remember exactly how many—and we have had such good times, not to mention terrific food.
Well, life is like that. People move away, for excellent reasons, and although we miss them terribly, we also know it is best for them.
Shannon and I have decided to continue meeting for lunch for our birthdays, but it won’t be the same without Kate.
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Notes From the Hinterland 