Mulberry Jam

The sky reflected in a new window

After fifteen years of living in this house, Mark and I finally bit the bullet this fall and put in new windows on the front of our forties-era house. For quite a while we’ve had mismatched windows on the façade, with some new windows where we’d renovated rooms and some old, where we still had the house’s original steel frame windows.

Partly we’d left the old windows in place for cost reasons. Windows are shockingly expensive! But also partly we’d left them in place because I loved them. I’ve written before about my attachment to the old swing-out casement windows. With their small panes and wide swing-out style, I always felt like Snow White opening the windows out into space. The black-painted square leading dividers were a real design feature of the house’s distinctive and sort of retro-modern look on a street full of colonial Cape Cod style cottages. For the first ten years we lived here I fended off all itinerant window salesmen with vigor. (If I only had a nickel for every time I opened the door to hear “We were doing work in your neighborhood and noticed you still have some older windows…”)

But in the last two years even I had to admit that the windows were past their natural life span. The single-pane metal frames leaked heat and cold like sieves, and in winter were so cold ice crystals formed each night on the inside of the panes. The condensation would melt with the sunrise, only to drip onto the wooden sills, rotting them out unless we left stacks of old towels on the sills to protect them. Sound also came right through, so we heard each car and conversation passing on the street. The screens were battered and ill-fitting after sixty years of constant use. And each fall there was a string of repair work to be done to fix panes that had been cracked by the constant flexing of the metal frames with changes in temperature.

At last we had the time and the cash to make the change, but I admit I gave my go-ahead with a lot of trepidation. Windows are such an essential part of the style of the house, would I still be happy after the work was done?

I shouldn’t have worried. The window installers did meticulous work and we are now enjoying the interior quiet that the low-e windows provide. I’m even happy with the outside look, now that all the windows match and have a clean appearance. I’ll be even happier snuggled into a warmer, cozier house this winter. And with the price of heating oil having jumped so much this year, we will definitely be glad to have a more efficient home. I hope now we can rest up from the summer’s extensive renovations and just enjoy the house. At least until next year. Anybody know a good roofing company?

Last night I went out the ball game with a couple of girlfriends. This was my first opportunity to see the new Nationals Ball Park even though my husband has been, oh, dozens of times!

It was a beautiful night, not so hot as it has been. The end of the game was a total nail biter. The visiting team was the Arizona Diamondbacks, and most of the game had been a pitcher’s duel, with lots of great defense. The score going into the ninth had the Nats behind 0 to 2, but they tied it up with some good hitting (finally). So there we all are with no outs and bases loaded.  The whole crowd is on its feet, but the Nats can’t get their men home before the inning gets closed out. So the game goes into EX-tra Innings (as George Carlin says).

In the bottom of the tenth the D-backs go ahead, 5 to 2. The Nats come back and tie it up again, but again they are unable to eke out the winning run. No-one in the park has left or sat down since the ninth inning. Finally, in the eleventh inning the D-backs score one more run, which the Nats couldn’t match. Game over, sigh.

But it was a great night anyway. Jamie’s five-year-old daughter caught a tee shirt AND got onto the jumbo-tron, and there was much enjoyable junk food consumed. All in all, a terrific summer night.

Naturally since the weather over the three-day holiday was not so good, today is just lovely. Sunny, blue sky and not horribly hot considering it’s July in Washington. The mulberries are finally fading after five weeks of creating their usual sticky, jammy mess on the front walk and street. I did get to make a batch of mulberry jam this year, and I think it turned out well. Now to decide who deserves one of the little labors of love. (Fritz, I’ve got one with your name on it, you lucky devil!)

This Spring raced by, filled with a heavy schedule of consulting and yoga teaching. At last the yoga studio session has finished, and I’m looking forward to a break from teaching. I’ve committed to just one class per week during July and August, which should allow a bit more breathing room in my weeks. I plan to use the extra time to catch up on some overdue writing projects, re-invest in my own personal yoga practice, and hopefully post to the Jam a bit more regularly. Most of all, I want to slow down and enjoy the summer by spending more time with friends and family.

We had the unexpected pleasure today of hosting our good friend and neighbor Chris Apostolou and his father for lunch. Chris’ father is a spry Greek gentleman with a gift for cooking. He’s sent many traditional pastries and other goodies our way through Chris, and today he finally accepted a long-standing invitation to drop in.

Mr. Apostolou emigrated to America from the mountains of central Greece in the early fifties, with no English and just $60 in his pocket. He’s a fantastic story-teller and an inveterate leg-puller. I was charmed to learn his name is Pericles! Greek names are so wonderful. I’ve met other Greek-Americans with names like Socrates or Athena. It’s enough to give a person a cultural inferiority complex.

We lingered over lunch for a couple of hours, listening and laughing over Mr. Apostolou’s stories of working as a haphazardly trained waiter at high class hotels like San Francisco’s Fairmont and Washington’s Mayflower in the fifties. His best punch line: “And how do you want your steak tartare done?”

If I worked in an office I’d never get to have lunches like that.

Every place has its spring rituals. A few days ago I read about the spring ice lottery in Nenana, Alaska. Since 1917, each year this town has held a lottery to bet on exactly when the Tanana River will “go out”, or melt. In early March, townspeople erect a tall tripod of painted spruce logs, attached with a guywire to the shore. When the ice melts enough to topple the tripod and snap the wire, that’s the official time. I read about it in connection with a study of climate warming, since this precise timing of the ice melt has given climatologists an almost 100-year record of conditions at this far northern town. When I went to the town’s official site, I was charmed by all the photos documenting the event. Putting up the tripod is a big festival in Nenana, marked with snowmachine and dogsled races, dances and big parties. Last year the winning time was 3:47PM on April 27, and 22 winners split $303,273. Big money is this small town I’m sure. I love that they’ve developed their own holiday tradition here. Maybe the world isn’t yet completely uniform and predictable, with a single global culture created by Madison Avenue. I hope not.

Here in Washington, this week has been full of signs of spring. This daffodil was the first to bloom in my garden. I thought for a moment about leaving it, but decided I’d enjoy it so much more if I brought it inside. The weather has been alternating between days warm enough for a top-down convertible and days so cold and raw all I want to do is stay inside under a blanket and a cat. The birds are beginning to sing more each day, and as I stepped out several mornings this week I saw large flocks of geese heading north. I wondered what it must look like to them, flying over a metropolis like Washington.

I have a new toy tool this week, a sheet feeding scanner from Fujitsu. I hope to use it to get rid of some of the paper I’ve amassed over the years. And there is a lot of it. My husband and I are both writers, plus we’ve had our own business for years and have all the IRS-required paperwork to prove it. I have nearly a dozen banker’s boxes of papers I don’t expect to ever need but am afraid to throw away. If I can scan them into digital files and keep them on one of my extra hard disk drives, then I can save a ton of space.

But I admit to some nervousness, too. At least with paper you don’t have any software format problems. Plus you know paper will last. Who’s to say what the long-term durability of DVDs and hard disk drives will be over the decades?

And I’ve experienced the problems outdated formats can cause. Remember zip disks? For a few years in the 90s that was my backup solution. Zip disks were great for a while, but pretty soon they were just a problem. My external zip drive output to a parallel cable, but after 2001, my iMacs all came without a parallel port. For years I hung onto an old Dell laptop, vintage 1996, so I could read the files. However I still had no way to get the info off the zip disks onto anything else since that machine only had a floppy disk drive (remember floppies?). Like most backups, nine tenths of the stuff was useless junk, but the other one tenth included the only copy of my book manuscript. So I hung onto the vintage Dell, afraid to get rid of it, even though it could only run Windows 98 (and just barely creaking along at that). A friend finally came to my rescue last month with a laptop that had both parallel port and a USB drive that I could plug my thumb drive into. Now the old documents are on a DVD, which I sincerely hope will have a longer shelf life than the zip disks.

Despite my trepidation at the prospect of shredding most of my old paper and shifting to digital, I feel like I have to take that step. I live in a small house, and twelve boxes of boring records are taking up space I could use for better purposes. So I’ll take my chances and hope for the best. Have any of you faced these format problems? How did you solve the issue?

An unexpected dose of winter weather hit us last night.  The result was beautiful, but dangerous.  This was one of the few times I can remember when the weather forecast was not more dramatic than the actual weather itself– the TV and radio weather people really missed a chance to get everyone all alarmed this time.

By the way, technical difficulties from earlier today have hopefully been resolved by now.  A little upgrade attempt that didn’t go quite as planned.  Thank heavens for webmeister Seth and his amazing multi-tasking skills!  Bless you Seth.

Last week my grandmother died. My mother’s mother was 96, and the matriarch of a large extended family centered in Delaware. She was an important presence in the lives of her children and grandchildren right up until the end, and we will all miss her very much. At the funeral on Friday my mother delivered the eulogy, and it was just right. We all felt she captured Grandma’s spirit and the reasons we will miss her. I wanted to include an excerpt from the address here:

Our mother left an indelible mark on all of our lives. We find ourselves, to this day, quoting her maxims. One of her favorites was, “Don’t make a song and dance of it.” This was said when we were crying and making a fuss over something. We were permitted to cry, but then she expected us to get on with things.

Mama and Daddy had a very good marriage and set a good example for all of us. Their arguments were few. We always hated it when they were mad at each other and not speaking. We were just not use to family dissension. I remember that once I told Mama to make up with Daddy because I was so bothered by their silence. She told me, “No, I am not going to this time. I always have to say ‘I’m sorry’ first.” I never knew if she said it first or not, but they never stayed mad for long.

As children we loved to see her dress up and wear perfume. Daddy liked her to wear perfume and she did so often. We kids thought she was beautiful when she was dressed up. She always cared about her appearance an freshened up every day before Daddy came in for supper. When she was working around the house she always wore fresh, stiffly starched aprons of print or flowered material over her house dresses. She never wore slacks until long after we had all left home. She loved shoes, and always had many different styles and colors.

I think she was as fair as she could be in the disciplining and treatment of the four of us. She always demanded total obedience, and there was to be no sassing or questioning her decisions. I sometimes felt that she was too hard on us because we never got to tell her our point of view. On one of my visits to the nursing home last year, we were having a good visit and reminiscing about old times. I told her that I thought she had been a good mother. She smiled and said, “Well, I sometimes think maybe I was too hard on you.” That really made me laugh. That was the very first time she ever admitted that.

She had a wonderful sense of humor, and sometimes at the dinner table we would all get silly and laughing. She and Daddy were always in the midst of it. Sometimes when we got carried away she would tell us we were going to have to go and sit on the cellar steps until we calmed down. I never remember any of us doing that, even once. She very seldom got mad at us, and then it was usually on rainy days when we could not go outside to play. I only saw her cry a very few times, when her four small children would finally wear her down.

Mama was always there for us, no matter where we were. When Doris was working in France, she mailed a homemade angel food cake and a separate container of icing for her birthday. When the postal clerk said, “Ma’am, it would be cheaper to send her the money and let her buy a cake,” Mama replied, “But it wouldn’t be the same.” She was a very caring and affectionate person, and her “never minds” were comforting when I had been hurt. As she got older, whenever we called her on the phone and when we were leaving after a visit to see her, she never failed to tell us that she loved us.

We all consider ourselves very lucky that we had a caring, loving mother up into our sixties. Not many people are that lucky. We always knew that she prayed for us every day and that was very comforting to us. We will all miss that.

My beloved mulberry tree had another gift for me this week.

This blog, of course, owes its name to the mulberry in front of my house. (See “Why Mulberry Jam?”) The masthead on this page is a photo of the tree in autumn. This fall my mulberry faithfully turned its usual spectacular shade of gold. You would laugh if you saw my photo library because it has WAY too many pictures of this tree. Every year I can’t resist taking another series of shots trying to capture the evanescent beauty of the turning leaves.

As it happens, this year we’ve had a very warm fall, with only a few light frosts all the way up through mid-November. As a result, the leaves have hung on much later than normal. Up until Saturday the mulberry held all its leaves, hovering protectively over the house and lighting up the whole street with the brilliance of their yellow color.

Finally on Sunday morning we woke up to a heavy frost with temperatures well below freezing. A light coating of silver lay over everything. From my kitchen window I looked out and saw the morning sun beginning to strike the tree. And then it started. As the sun warmed the leaves that were made heavy by their coating of frost, they began to fall. At first just a few here and there, but in a few minutes, the tree was creating a rain of golden heart-shaped leaves. There was no breeze, so the leaves fell straight down to the ground, fluttering gently and turning over in the sunlight on their way.

I ran out in my bathrobe and stood beneath the tree. The sound was incredible on a quiet Sunday morning. Without the usual sounds of traffic I could clearly hear the leathery rustle of the leaves as they fell past their fellows and landed gently on the ground. I was surrounded by bright fluttering coins that brushed my head and shoulders as they fell. I ran back in for my camera and attempted to capture the image.

There is no word in English to describe that feeling of mingled joy and sadness at the beauty of fleeting experience. The Japanese have the concept of “mono no aware,” or the sadness of things. It’s very much connected to a Buddhist sense of the brevity of life and the transience of beauty, summed up in the old Japanese phrase “swirling petals, falling leaves.” It’s partly that spirit that encourages the entire nation to turn out for cherry blossom viewing or hanami, during the brief days when the sakura are in flower.

On Sunday morning, the rain of leaves continued, until within an hour the tree was almost completely bare. By afternoon on the same day the formerly brilliant leaves had faded to a dull brown that thickly carpeted our front walk and yard. Now the tree stands with naked branches, waiting for spring.

So I finally got some time to update the blog.  Actually I was forced into it by my mutinous body.  Mind was sailing along on its usual routine, getting things done and planning ahead.  Body put an abrupt stop to all that by succumbing to an acute cold, one of the worst I’ve ever had.  I spent the week of the Thanksgiving holiday lying on the couch with an ever-accumulating pile of crumpled tissues and endless cups of tea, whispering pathetically to my long-suffering husband since my voice had vanished.

I say long-suffering because as bad as it is to be sick, I know it’s no fun being the healthy one either.  Being the sole healthy person in the house means doing a lot of dishes, picking up a lot of the aforementioned crumpled tissues and listening patiently to a maddening assortment of pitiful wheezes and weak coughs.  So here’s a big official THANK YOU to the man who promised to love me in sickness and in health.

Can I just say how hard it is to go a whole week without speaking?  Silence is not my natural style.  At the worst point I couldn’t even whisper and was reduced to writing notes to communicate.  This was the one time in my life I’ve felt the disadvantages of not having a Blackberry.  Not that I intended to e-mail my beloved, but it might have been handy to have the knack of that text-message sort of shorthand people use to communicate quickly.  You know, the “how R U doing?” kind of thing.  As it was, all my notes contained grammar and spelling my fourth-grade teacher would have approved.

Thank goodness, I’m pretty much back to my normal garrulous self as of today.  I look forward to circulating my no-longer-infectious self back into normal society.

I’m back home in Falls Church after taking a week out of town.  Mid-August is a very good time to be away from Washington.  Months ago, I booked myself for a weeklong yoga intensive with a well-respected Iyengar-style teacher.  For weeks before I was beefing up my home practice to try to be prepared, since the man leading the seminar has a reputation as a precise and demanding instructor.  Sadly, the course had to be cancelled when our teacher suffered a serious injury the very evening before the course was supposed to begin.

So there I was last Monday morning, all dressed up in my yoga clothes and nowhere to go. When you’ve spent that long building up to something it takes a while to switch gears.  I was so flummoxed it took me a good hour to get my head around it.  I had come up to the retreat center in New York’s Hudson River Valley planning to be there all week, and I really didn’t want to go home and go back to work!  So I checked the train schedule and called my family in Western New York to see if they’d mind an impromptu visit.  My mother was flatteringly happy to hear I’d be coming, even though I gave them only a few hours notice.  The rest of the week passed not with a grueling yoga practice but with home-cooked meals and catching up on all the family news.

I was reminded again of how much I enjoy traveling by train.  I spent many hours on the train up to Rochester and then all the way back to Washington at the end of the week, and it couldn’t have been more pleasant.  No check-in hassles, a big wide seat, and huge windows with scenic views.  The Empire Limited runs from New York’s Penn Station up along the Hudson River to Albany and then straight west through all the old industrial cities of the state:  Schenectady, Utica, Rome, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo.  Along the river I saw mountains, forests, and dozens of water birds including no fewer than four bald eagles in a single afternoon.  Traveling west from Albany the views were a bit more noir-ish.  I saw many empty old industrial mills, faded ghost signs painted on old brick buildings (“Uneeda Biscuits, 5c”), and strangely quiet city centers.  I also saw lots and lots of cornfields in between.  That ethanol stuff is changing the landscape of rural America—from what I saw it seemed there was no other crop planted.

No photos, I’m afraid, since I was traveling without my camera.  I didn’t expect to want it at a yoga retreat!