My Birthday—A Day of Sun, Bright Blue Skies, and Gratitude
Today is my birthday, and what a beauty it is. I decided to give myself the day off—more or less—so that I could take pictures, have lunch at a Chinese restaurant a couple of towns over, and later have drinks on the patio with Clif.
Birthdays, especially as you get older—and at 57 58, I certainly qualify as older—are often a time of reflection. This birthday is especially significant as five years ago, almost to the day, I had surgery for breast cancer. I was lucky. My cancer was lazy—a good thing for cancer to be—and not aggressive. And here I am five years later, feeling ever so grateful to be writing and taking pictures, to be living in Winthrop at the little house in the big woods. Better still, I have a wonderful family and terrific friends.
This is not to say I don’t have worries and troubles. Of course I do. Everybody does. But all in all, I am one lucky woman.
Birthday Pictures:
A Trip to Rockland
Our vacation is over. Yesterday, we dropped off Dee at the bus station and bid her a sad farewell. We had a busy but oh-so-fun week, culminating with a Saturday trip to Rockland, which is on the Maine coast.
Once upon a time, say, when I was young, Rockland was what you might call a gritty place—my mother actually called it “tough.” There was a sardine factory right in town, and the harbor was a working waterfront. But then the factory closed, as so many did in Maine, and as an entry in Wikipedia puts it, “Since the early 1990s, Rockland has seen a shift in its economy away from fishery and toward a service center city.” In other words, Rockland had to reinvent itself.
Being on a lovely harbor helped. A lot. Those from away, as we Mainers call non-natives, were drawn by the area’s natural beauty, and many of those who settled in Rockland are affluent. The same is true for a lot of the tourists who come to visit.
Since the 1940s, the town has been anchored by the Farnsworth Art Museum, and gradually, over the years, art galleries followed. So Rockland went from being a gritty place to being an arty town, which, like so many things, has its pluses and minuses.
But in this post, I am not going to get into the pluses and minuses of what happens when a working-class town becomes arty. Instead, I’m going to share some pictures I took of the town and the lovely harbor. I do want to note that we saw a broad range of first-rate—albeit expensive—art. Yes, there were seascapes, but there were also abstract art, minimalism, and everything in between.
Here are some photos of Rockland.
Now it’s back to work as I try to catch up on all the things that were put on hold while Dee was here. (Library minutes, here I come!)
We Got the Beet!
A busy, busy week but a fun one. Dee is visiting from New York, and as she is a movie buff, we’ve made quite a few trips to Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville. They’ve had a terrific line-up of movies, and all four that we saw were good. (We saw Mr. Holmes, Mistress America, A Walk in the Woods, and Phoenix.)
With all this fun, there hasn’t been much time for blogging, but I did want to slip in a recipe, as promised. This week’s—a beet fajita—is a quick one that incorporates the egg technique used in the fried-rice recipe I posted a while back. That is, make a well in the center of the ingredients, pour in the beaten eggs, let the eggs set, scramble them, and blend them in with the rest of the ingredients, which have been sautéed until soft.
Like most fajitas, this one is easy to prepare, and it doesn’t have many ingredients—beets, corn, garlic, egg, and cheese. For a smoother flavor, I dry roast the garlic in a skillet before peeling and chopping the clove. (I also do this for any recipe that calls for raw garlic.)
Another good point about this recipe is that even if—ahem—beets are not your favorite vegetable, they are tasty prepared this way. These fajitas didn’t get a “pretty darned good” from Clif, but that is his highest praise reserved for only a few special dishes. The fajitas did, however, merit a “not too bad,” which means he liked it well enough to go back for seconds.
Not too bad, indeed, for a husband who is not too fond of beets.
Beet Fajitas
Makes 4 fajitas
Ingredients
- 1 medium raw beet, peeled and grated
- 1/2 cup cooked corn
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1 clove of garlic, minced
- 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil for sautéing
- Salt and pepper to taste
- 1/2 cup of grated cheese (Monterrey Jack is my favorite for fajitas.)
- 1/4 cup of chopped parsley, for a garnish (Optional)
- 4 fajita tortillas
Directions
- Heat the oil in a skillet. Add the corn and the grated beets and sauté until the beets are soft, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté for 30 seconds.
- Make a well in the center of the ingredients. Pour in the beaten egg, let set, and then scramble. Once the egg is scrambled, mix it in with the beets, corn, and garlic.
- Warm the tortillas according to the directions on the package.
- Spoon the beet mixture into the tortilla shells and top with grated cheese. Sprinkle with parsley, if using.
- Rice is a good side for this meal.
Silent Saturday: September 5, 2015
And a Cooling Wind Came
“If there is fulfillment and perfection, surely it is among the trees, the oldest living things we know.” —Hal Borland
Last night, a cooling wind came, thrumming through the trees and rippling with a great sigh around the little house in the big woods.
“Can you feel it?” I asked, pressing my face to a screen in the dining room and breathing in the sweet, cool air.
“I sure can,” Clif said.
Such relief after the horrible humid weather we’ve been having. In the dining room, the drawer that holds the good green napkins has swelled to the point where it won’t open. Ditto for the top drawer in the fold-up desk. This drawer started giving me problems mid-week, and in an uncharacteristic act of thinking ahead, I removed my address book and put in the section where the desk flips down. This part still works as it should, and as I am someone who will send a card just because I feel like it—no occasion necessary—I needed that address book. (I have used it twice in the past two days.)
When fall really does arrive—in a few weeks, I hope—and the humidity takes its leave, then the drawers will return to their normal size. Every summer, this swelling is a problem, but as Clif observed, we’ve always been able to open the drawers. We just had to work hard at it. But not this summer. The high heat and humidity have sealed them shut.
Yesterday, I received a call from Shannon. Mike’s appendix was giving him trouble to the point where it had to be removed that very day. Fortunately it had not ruptured, but as Dee is coming today to stay in Maine for the week, and Shannon was supposed to pick her up at the bus station, this changed the schedule, shall we say. The cookies I planned on making on Sunday will be made today. I went grocery shopping last night rather than on Saturday. Never mind! Mike went through surgery with “flying colors,” and he is doing very well. After a night in the hospital, he’ll be going home this afternoon.
How different this is from when I was young. Then, if you had your appendix removed, you were in the hospital for quite a while, at least two weeks. The same was true for gall bladder removal. This really is progress.
The gardens are winding down. A lovely white phlox—David—along with the black-eyed Susans and the sedums, bring some color to the front yard. But mostly all the plants look tired. It’s as though they know have they done their part, and now it is time to rest.
Usually, I clip back old stalks and dead-head the lilies and the balloon flowers. But this year I was so taken with the emerging pods, that I let many of them be, and the pods are so fascinating that next year I just might leave them all until the final fall cut-back.
Tonight, we pick up Dee at the bus station in Portland. We have a busy week planned of movies and art museums. Believe it or not, for a rural area, central Maine has a wealth of art museums—at the colleges—and a few galleries, too.
We will also spend time on the patio as we grill food, and if the weather stays crisp, we will even make a fire in the fire pit for s’mores.
Accordingly, I won’t be writing much until Dee leaves, but I might be able to slide in a picture or two and a recipe for grilled veggies with herbs and pasta.
A busy week, but Mike is recovering nicely, and it will be oh-so-good to have Dee home.
A Quick Pasta Sauce for When You Are Just Sick and Tired of the Hot, Humid Weather
All right. Here it is September 3, and yesterday the weather was so sweltering and humid that by mid-afternoon all I could hold in my mind was the next chore on my list—I just couldn’t think ahead—and it was so freaking hot that from time to time I had to wipe my sweating face with a cool wash cloth.
Oh fall, where art thou? The leaves are starting to change, the apples are turning red, the goldenrod and asters are in bloom. It is dark by 8 p.m. But somehow, the weather doesn’t have enough sense to turn the page and follow the season. Temperature wise, despite all the signs of fall, we are in mid-summer.
To a lifelong Mainer, is this very, very weird? You’d better believe it.
But the larger problem, of course, is what to make for supper on a day when by late afternoon all you want to do is grab some ice water with lime, The New Yorker, and an apple and head to the patio. Supper is the last thing you want to think about.
Fortunately, I have a few tricks to fall back on, and one of them is an easy pasta sauce using a 28-ounce can of Muir Glen’s crushed tomatoes with basil, some garlic, some green peppers, and some summer squash. Add, say, tortellini and broiled olive-oil toast, and you have a pretty good meal that comes together in a flash. (Especially when you have made said sauce a week or two before and have frozen some of it for future use. Oh, happy freezer!)
But even if you haven’t, this sauce is so easy to make—and like most of the food I cook—so versatile that even on a hot day it isn’t too much trouble. I used garlic, peppers, and summer squash. You could use onion, sausage, or ground beef. Or zucchini. Or eggplant. Or whatever combination you like.
Get all the vegetables ready. For my sauce, I minced three cloves of garlic and cut one green pepper and one small summer squash in large chunks. In a skillet, I heated one tablespoon of olive oil and added the squash and peppers, sautéing them until they were just barely soft. I added the garlic and sautéed it for 30 seconds or so. Last came the tomatoes with basil. I turned the heat to low, covered the skillet, and let everything simmer for at least forty-five minutes.
Add cooked pasta, and Voilà. Supper on a hot night.
Clif and I took our plates out to the patio. A bottle of white wine came with us. As the dark settled over the backyard, we heard the crickets sing. In the dim woods, a pair of barred owls called to each other as they hunted, and Clif and I smiled as we listened to them.
After that nice supper and a couple of glasses of wine, well, the hot day didn’t seem so bad.
Nevertheless, fall can come anytime now. We are certainly ready.
Wordless Wednesday: 9/2/15—A Walk Up the Narrows Pond Road
Helping the Community in Ways Big and Small
Yesterday was what might be called A Very Good Day. When I went to the town office to pay the registration for the car, I discovered I only had to pay $96, almost half of what I expected to pay. After that, it was on to the library, where I received a little money from card sales. (Clif and I have developed a line of library cards, where half the money goes to the library and half to us. It’s not a huge fundraiser, but it helps promote the library, near and far. )
Finally, the cherry on the sundae, so to speak, was when a missing library book I had borrowed was found, right on Shane’s desk. The book’s barcode is old and faulty, and the book wouldn’t scan into the system. I had put the book in the library’s book bin, which meant Shane had no idea who had returned the book. But now he knows, and my record is clear, Such a relief!
In the afternoon, my friend Barbara came over for coffee, and she brought chocolate peanut butter cupcakes. Among other things, we talked about the women’s suffrage movement and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, two leaders of the movement. They both died before women got the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Stanton died in 1902, and Anthony died in 1906.
It made me a little a teary-eyed to think of how they didn’t live long enough to see the results of their hard work. It’s also a lesson to the rest of us. The improvements to society that we work on, big or small, might not happen in our lifetime, but that doesn’t mean we should give up on them.
Sometimes, I think, we are too impatient. We want results, and we want them now. When there are great injustices, this point of view is completely understandable, but the “arc of the moral universe” can be very long indeed. Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote those words, would not live to see the first African-American president. Yet he worked timelessly for civil rights that would allow for the possibility of the first African-American president.
We can’t all be great leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, or Martin Luther King Jr. But we can work in our own communities and do what we can to improve them. I feel that my work on behalf of the library makes Winthrop a better town. Last month, the library’s circulation was 5,764. Not bad for a town of 6,000. (The population does increase in the summer because of our beautiful lakes.)
For other people, it might be some other work that benefits the community. I think of Jason, of the blog Garden in the City, and his lovely gardens, a gift of beauty to those who live in his neighborhood. There’s Bill, of Practicing Resurrection, who grows and sells organic vegetables. For that matter, there is our own Farmer Kev, who does the very same thing in Winthrop, and his partner Kate, who will be teaching art in middle school this year. This list could go on and on.
I’m gong to end with a Gladys Taber quotation: “I cannot influence the world. I can only live every day as well as I can, keeping my home, cherishing my neighbors, helping the community in a small way.”
And in Gladys Taber’s case, her wise words, written in the 1950s, do, in fact, make the world a better place.
The Last Cocktail Party of Summer
In Maine, the end of August usually heralds the end of summer, despite what the calendar might say, and indeed here and there, the leaves have started to turn. Accordingly, Clif and I decided to invite friends over for the last cocktail party of summer. (What a sad ring that has!)
Since learning to make them for our Fourth of July party, Clif and I have become proficient at making Moscow mules and our very own Maine mules. The nice thing about both drinks, which take vodka and ginger beer or ginger ale—the Moscow mules—or vodka and seltzer water—the Maine mules—is that when you’ve had enough, say, after a couple of drinks, you can then turn to plain ginger ale or seltzer water for a refreshing drink.
The weather was splendid, and we were able to host the party on the patio, one of my favorite places. We filled the cooler with soft drinks and tucked it under the round glass table. On top, we had glasses for everyone as well as a bucket of ice, sliced limes, maple syrup, and, of course, vodka. Those drinks don’t contain the word mule for nothing.
Then we gathered around the rectangular glass table. There were six of us—Margy and Steve, Cheryl and Denny, Clif and me. The day before, I had made crackers, and I served them with a homemade cream-cheese spread made with roasted garlic and basil. There were chips and salsa. Grapes. Those luscious peaches. And, of course, Clif’s legendary grilled bread.
“I was hoping you’d make grilled bread,” Steve said as he grabbed a hot piece of bread.
I am not kidding when I call Clif’s grilled bread legendary. It truly is, at least in the Winthrop area.
As we ate, the crickets sang. Birds came to the feeders, and Liam barked at noises we sometimes heard but most often didn’t. We talked about many things—the conversation never flags when we get together—but we spent a fair amount of time rhapsodizing about the poet Richard Blanco.
We also discussed how it was time for the state to stop trying to lure big businesses to Maine. This seldom ends well. If businesses can be lured into the state, then they can be lured out of the state. Instead, we all agreed that it was much more sensible to support small businesses run by local people and to help local businesses grow into larger businesses. There is never any guarantee that these businesses will succeed, but at least they will not be heading for parts of the country, or the world, where the labor is cheaper.
Gardiner is an example of how a city can support its own through various grants and tax breaks and reverse a decline that started when the great factories closed. (Note: The link may include some irritating pop-ups, but the information is worthwhile.) Not so long ago, Gardiner’s main street was dotted with far too many vacant buildings. Now, with more businesses opening their doors, the main street looks decidedly more lively.
And, let’s face it, any city that is able to attract Frosty’s Donuts is on the right track.
Notes From the Hinterland 