Mulberry Jam

We made a discovery last Sunday, when Mark and I went out for a drive in our little convertible. In the Virginia countryside north of the town of Orange, Virginia is an old-fashioned barnstorming air show– The Flying Circus in Bealeton, Virginia. Not Monty Python’s, but the real deal with biplanes and stunt planes, sky diving and wing walking demonstrations.

We had no intention of stopping when we set out in the morning, but as our route took us in that general direction I saw the airfield marked on the map and steered us in that general direction. As we got close we could hear the sound of the plane engines up in the sky and looked up to see a yellow biplane going into loops and stalls in a bright blue sky filled with puffy white clouds. We pulled over next to the gate at the airfield and we could see it’s a small operation– no tarmac, just grass runway and handmade plank benches next to the field for the spectators. A little shack selling hot dogs and ice cream, a gift shop and some bathrooms complete the setup. We impulsively decided it looked like too much fun to miss so we decided to stay.

One of the biplanes in the Flying Circus

And I’m so glad we did! The actual airshow started about forty-five minutes after our arrival and lasted for 90 minutes of non-stop entertainment. By the time the show started there were a couple of hundred people there, mostly families with kids of various ages. The grassy airfield setup makes it easy to tailgate or picnic, and many people had wisely brought beach umbrellas to ward off the strong July sun. With the admission ticket price of $10 a person plus a $10 lunch for two, it was bargain entertainment. If you’re really enthusiastic, you can even buy rides in the open-cockpit show planes. Prices this summer are $70 for a standard ride, or $130 for an aerobatic ride, where the pilot will take you through loops, rolls, dives and stalls in an open biplane.

To get there by the most direct path, go south of Manassas on Route 28 for about 25 miles and turn left onto Route 17 South. Continue for 4 miles, then make another left turn onto Ritchie Road (VA 644). The Aerodrome will be on your left. They have shows every Sunday from May through October. Coming up in August is a special weekend balloon festival when there will be balloon rides on both Saturday and Sunday August 15-16.

Madison Square in NYC

Back to work this week, after a grand holiday season. Christmas was quiet and very enjoyable after a busy, busy fall. New Year’s was even better, with me tagging along as happy arm candy while Mark worked as producer and director of NPR’s New Year’s Eve broadcast, Toast of the Nation.

I’ve been to New York several Januaries now. (This was not Mark’s first New Year’s broadcast). Yet I’m always surprised how cold the city can be, temperature-wise. The people I find quite warm. I think sometimes New Yorkers have the reputation for being harsh and unfriendly, it’s not true at all. They’re fast-moving, but quite open with visitors. I still can’t get over how much more livable the city seems nowadays than in the 1980s when I first began visiting. Back then I remember running around on the upper west side, near Riverside Drive. The apartment buildings were grand and gracious, but many cars parked on the street bore signs saying, “No Radio In This Car.” I haven’t seen anything like that in years.

I had to trek through the Times Square subway station on New Year’s Eve, but it was a controlled bustle. Tons of city and transit police out keeping a jaded eye on things. Wind chills were in the teens that night– I thought the folks on their way to stand in the cold out at Times Square were insane. I was on my way to the nice cozy club where the broadcast was hailing from: The Mingus Big Band, live at The Jazz Standard. I felt like I was truly where it was at that night. Poor Mark, meanwhile, was out in a drafty sound truck parked in front of the club, directing the show with voices from NPR in Washington filling in his ears. He promptly came down with a nasty cold once we got home!

A highlight of my trip was a visit to the Iyengar Yoga Institute of New York. The studio is a lovely, airy space up on the eleventh floor of a building in Chelsea. I was there on a clear windy day and enjoyed a class with one of their senior teachers, Bobbie Clennell. She taught a restorative class for Level III students that was a revelation to me. I’d never taken a restorative class that wasn’t also a gentle class, suitable for beginners. We did a lot of intense supported backbends that had a tremendous opening effect on my shoulders and chest. I have immediately introduced several of them into my home practice. Another pose was supported headstand using the rope wall in the studio. We hung with our hips supported by the ropes for more than five minutes so our heads were in mid-air. Exhilarating!

Now it’s back to my quiet mat at home. No rope wall, but I’m content. I have a quiet space with an open wall, and I make my own steady progress. I had a list of goals for my practice in 2008 that were mostly met. Time to make new plans now that it’s 2009.

Yesterday was Sunday. Mark and I looked at each other after breakfast and said, “What will we do today?” Both of us had worked on Saturday, so it would be our only day off together of the week. We look around the house and the bathrooms need cleaning, there’s laundry to do, and the backyard is full of leaves that need to go down to the curb in time for a Wednesday pickup. But our hearts are saying, “Nooo! It’s a nice day! Go out and play!”

After a bit of debate– will we be grasshoppers or ants?– we decided to be bad and go have some fun. We drove out west to Leesburg and north from there to the Old Lucketts Store. I wrote about the Lucketts Store a few years ago. It’s the world capital for shabby chic. Three stories in an old house on a crossroads, packed with everything from antique radios to vintage clothes to full size stained glass windows from actual churches. We had a ball. We followed our successful shopping expedition with a long Italian lunch in a little cafe in Leesburg and roamed the old town center until it got dark.

After we returned, I was straightening up a pile of books and found this quote from Albert Schweitzer:

Do not let Sunday be taken from you…If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan.

I like that. No more feeling guilty about taking a day off from responsibility now and then. And if I’d missed the trip to Lucketts, I would never have found this little fellow:

A little bronze frog sings and plays the violin

He reminds me a bit of Toad from The Wind in the Willows, and made me smile so much I had to bring him home. He is now sitting on top of a bookcase in the office so he can serenade me while I work. He ought to do wonders for my soul.

On Saturday, Mark and I finally managed to get out to Mount Vernon for the first time in more than a year. We were excited to see the new museum that opened on site late last year. It has an amazing collection of paintings, household items, clothes and other objects that relate to Washington’s family, life and times. Basically, it’s a museum all about how great George Washington was. And what a worthy topic that is!

Mark and I are donors to the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, the non-profit organization that owns and administers George Washington’s former home. We try to go out to visit the site at least a couple of times a year. Both of us are fascinated by Washington and his role in American history. He’s one of those remarkable public figures that stands up to close scrutiny. In fact the more I read about him, the more admirable he comes across. Managing to win the Revolutionary War despite all odds against one the world’s great military powers. Serving as the nation’s first president and the only one ever to be elected unanimously. Twice. Then stepping down to private life despite widespread sentiment that would have made him president for life. What new nation ever had such a figure as its founding father?

In addition to the very enjoyable museum, there are many new exhibits at Mount Vernon that relate to the life of the slaves who lived there in Washington’s time. The multiple farms owned by Washington relied upon the labor of more than 300 slaves during his lifetime. Some 100 of them lived on the Mansion Farm, where George and Martha lived. There’s a newly built slave cabin down the hill from the mansion on the bluff, a simple one-room wooden structure with a loft for sleeping, situated beside the fields. It’s very similar to the kind of simple houses early settlers of all kinds lived in. I thought the topic of slavery was well handled, though I’d be interested to know what African American visitors think.

The day we went was sunny and clear, with low humidity. The kind of day we often dream of during a Washington D.C. summer but almost never get. We spent part of the afternoon happily just sitting on the grass in front of the big house, watching sailboats passing up and down on the Potomac below. A glorious day, and one I hope to repeat at least once more before the summer is over.

Mmmm. Still haven’t come down from a week of yoga with a teacher I admire immensely. Last Sunday I returned from the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, where Kofi Busia was teaching. We had yoga classes twice a day for a week.

This came along at just the right time for me. I was feeling kind of burned out after a six-month stint of teaching five classes a week. Because I was pouring so much energy into my classes, I was really neglecting my own personal practice. To have the luxury of a full week where I had nothing else to do but work on my own form and strength was heavenly. My great friends Fritz and Donna joined me to carpool up together and we had a ball, hanging together like the three musketeers the whole week.

The teacher was Kofi Busia, a yogi I admire tremendously. I wrote about him with enthusiasm last year after meeting him for the first time. Fritz and I had planned ever since that time to try to go to one of his longer workshops as soon as we could.  I love his teaching because he’s not only extremely knowledgeable about yoga asana and a million other topics (music, sports, physiology, you name it). He’s also a really warm human being. Sadly, that can’t be said about all well-known yogis. They tend to be intense, serious people and not always the kindest or most approachable. Kofi believes that yoga should make us better people, not just bendier people. It’s so typical that his website has no photos of himself, only of his teacher, BKS Iyengar.

The Omega Institute is like summer camp for grownups. It’s a little slice of new age heaven, with locally grown vegetarian food. It’s in the upper Hudson River valley just east of the Catskill Mountains. While forty of us were there for the yoga workshop, other visitors there for topics like Buddhist meditation, watercolor painting, songwriting, shamanism and “past life regression”. One afternoon the whole yoga class burst out laughing as we heard the most bloodcurdling screams coming from the past life workshop. (I don’t know if I’d want to know about my past lives!)

My practice has been tremendously influenced by that one week. It may be some time before all the ways it has affected me become clear.

Washington in springtime is most famous for its cherry blossoms, but I know something just as beautiful that you won’t have to share with 200,000 of your closest friends. Just a few miles outside the beltway on the banks of Bull Run are thousands of Virginia Bluebells, and they’re blooming right now.

Each April I keep an eye on the weather, waiting for the moment when the timing seems right. Just as the lilacs in my garden begin to bloom I drop whatever I’m doing and take a drive out to Hemlock Overlook Park, in Fairfax County. This virtually unknown park is where the bluebells live in vast colonies on the banks of Bull Run, and on many days I’ve had the place to myself—it seems very few people visit it regularly.

A walk of about a mile takes you downhill on a winding trail through tall trees. When the trail reaches the bottom you’ll find yourself in the narrow floodplain of the Occoquan River, or Bull Run as it’s known in its upper reaches. Everywhere along both banks are sky blue flowers—the bluebells. They grow in dense colonies of thousands of plants clustered together. The flowers themselves are tiny groups of bell-shaped blossoms, each as long as a man’s thumbnail. Hanging from the ends of delicate stems reaching shin high, they seem to float above their bright green leaves like a blue mist. It’s a magical sight on a sunny day, but on a cloudy day they take on even more mystery as their blue seems to deepen.

My husband and I went this spring with a little bit of trepidation. Last June our entire area was inundated with 13 inches of rain within three days. This was a hundred-year flood according to area weathermen, and it left many sections of the parks along the Occoquan scoured into sterility by raging high waters. We were very afraid the bluebells would have suffered, and we didn’t know what we’d find.

To our delight, the flowers seemed completely unharmed. The ground they grew from showed distinct signs of the flood, to be sure. Trees were down everywhere, and the earth was overlaid with a new layer of soft silty soil. Other portions of the river valley are still piled with debris from the storm, including trees tossed like tinker toys. But the bluebells were as thick and lovely as ever.

If you have the time, go now. The blooms last for about a week. After that they quickly fade and their foliage completely disappears. By late May there will be no sign they were ever there. Until next April.

Directions:
To reach Hemlock Overlook, take I-66 west to Route 123. Go south on 123 to Clifton Road, turn right on Clifton Road and drive 3.7 miles. Turn left on Yates Ford Road and follow it down hill all the way to the park entrance. At the park entrance is an outdoor education center which is open by reservation only, but the trails are open to the public daily, with no entrance fee. Park at the small gravel parking lot near the trail head, and start walking down the hill. About a quarter mile along the trail, you’ll see a trail blazed with a red painted horseshoe turn off to the left. Follow this trail through the forest as it winds gradually down towards the river.

Today it’s snowing. Again. Not that I don’t enjoy a bit of winter wonderland, but by mid March I’m thinking, sheesh. Enough already. It’s even harder since Mark and I were in Jacksonville visiting family over the weekend. Even there they were having a cool weekend, but we got out to the Jacksonville Zoo on Sunday and it was a brilliant sunny day with a high in the upper sixties. Felt great after all the cold weather up here in Falls Church.

I was so impressed with the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens. It’s an old zoo, founded in 1914, but it was completely redesigned in the 1990s and feels very modern. The animals are THIS CLOSE. All day I kept saying things like, “I’ve never been that close to a giraffe… a jaguar… an anteater… a lion.” I now have a collection of animal photos that look like something out of National Geographic.

The first thing I usually want to see at any zoo are the birds, especially if they have a free-flight aviary. The Jax Zoo has two. We went to the one in their Australian section where there are lorikeets flying around free. Lorikeets are brilliantly colored birds from New Guinea; as you can see in the photo of my husband with a friend, they look like small parrots or really big parakeets. I was delighted to find out that for a dollar you can buy a small cup of fruit nectar and feed the birds by hand. Our instructions were “hold on tight, or they’ll pull the cup out of your hand!” And with that we went into the flight cage.

Almost immediately we had interested birds hopping onto our hands and shoulders. You can see by the look in my eyes that I was thrilled. At one point I had two on my shoulders and another on my hand, drinking the nectar by dipping its tongue into the cup and lapping up the juice. One of the birds on my shoulder got frustrated at having to wait, and started poking into my hair. Next thing I knew, he’d grabbed my ear and tweaked it, hard. Ooww! Yes sir, Mr. Bird! Let me get a nectar cup for you right away!

My parents were visiting me this week. I look forward to their visits since they live a day’s drive away and we only see each other a few times each year, much less often than I would like. On this visit we were blessed with warm and sunny autumn days, and we took advantage of the weather to make a trip to the Hillwood Museum, one of my favorite lesser-known Washington attractions.

I’ve lived in the Washington area for long enough that my parents have seen all the better-known sights many times over. There’s not much interest left for monuments or major museums. But Hillwood, the former home of Marjorie Merriweather Post, is a charming little gem that feels very off-the-beaten track even though it’s in the middle of the busy Connecticut Avenue corridor. Although it’s large enough to spend the better part of a day there, it feels intimate and manageable compared to the enormous and thronged museums down on the mall.

Marjorie Merriweather Post was heiress to the fortune amassed by her father, C.W. Post, the founder of the company that later became General Foods. She came into her money in her late twenties and spent the rest of a long and busy life enjoying it to the hilt. She purchased Hillwood in 1955 with the specific intention that it would eventually become a museum for her collection of French and Russian decorative arts. The mansion sits amid 13 acres of natural woods and beautiful formal gardens, and houses an extensive collection of rare porcelain, French furniture and Russian imperial paintings and jewels.

I knew my Mom would love the place. She has a deep fascination with pre-revolutionary Russia along with a life-long appreciation of gardens. What I didn’t expect was that my Dad would also find it fascinating. He followed our skilled docent guide closely and gently peppered him with questions about the rare materials and history of the wealth of objects displayed in the house. And it is a wealthy collection in more ways than one. Rooms full of precious objects include a large number of jewels and personal items created by the workshops of Faberge, including two of the famous Imperial Easter Eggs. There are silver and silver-gilt chalices from the Russian Orthodox Church which were saved from being melted down by Mrs. Post’s exporting them during the 1930s from Russia. She was especially enamored of rare porcelain from French and Russian courts of the eighteenth century. The brilliant colors and fanciful shapes of these pieces from formal service are as lovely as Easter eggs themselves.

In addition to the permanent collection in the mansion house, the museum sometimes has temporary exhibits that are relevant to the Hillwood’s focus on porcelain and decorative arts. Last year, for example, the Hillwood hosted a special show of elegant porcelain designed by 20th century modernist Eva Zeisel, who began her long career in Russia. (I wrote about that show last fall, see the post here.)

In addition to the treasures of the house and gardens, there is a charming little café on site that is one of my favorite places for lunch in the entire city. The menu is limited and mostly consists of cold salads and sandwiches, but their quality is uniformly excellent and the service has never been less than wonderful. Our waiter on Thursday was charming and thoughtful, splitting a soup dish my parents decided to share into two generous portions without being asked. We sat in the shelter of a quiet courtyard overlooking one of the cutting gardens for the estate, enjoying the warm sun and low humidity of a perfect fall day.

To go you must first call or e-mail for reservations, but I’ve never requested a date and been added to the list. See the museum website at www.hillwoodmuseum.org. Take your mom. She’ll love you for it. Maybe your dad will too!

Yesterday my husband and I drove up to Downingtown, Pennsylvania on a one-day trip. Downingtown is about a half-hour west of Philadelphia in Chester County, an area that’s still largely rural but with a growing population of suburban commuters into the Philadelphia metropolis. Our visit was for the annual meeting of investors in Victory Brewing Company, a craft brewery that’s probably best known for its Hop Devil and Golden Monkey beers. It was an exciting trip, because after ten years of unrelenting work the brewery is really doing well. They’ve doubled in size in the last three years and have moved well beyond the micro-brewery category to become a successful regional brewery with solid sales throughout the mid-Atlantic and beyond. Mark and I have known the founders, Bill Covaleski and Ron Barchet, since long before the brewery was even a gleam in their eye. I’m delighted to see my friends doing so well and to know we had a part in that as two of their first investors.

I’ve always gotten a thrill from visiting the brewery, now just as much as in the days when Victory was a tenth its current size. It’s a surprisingly sensual experience, with fascinating smells from the natural ingredients that go into the beer—the floral green smell of hops, the earthy oatmeal smell of barley malt, and the unmistakable slightly sour, yeasty smell of the fermenting beer. The wing where the beer is brewed and fermented is toasty warm, with bright sunlight falling in from skylights overhead. The rooms where the shiny stainless tanks stand to age the beer are cool, dim and slightly damp, with water puddling on the tile floor.

The finished product is served in a family-friendly restaurant overlooking the lagering tanks. I used to be surprised by how many children I saw in the dining room, but now I understand why. It’s a roomy, casual place with oak tables and chairs and high ceilings. Kids can run around between the tables and no-one seems to worry if they get a little loud. The food is simple but very tasty. The menu includes burgers, salads and barbecue. Most popular is the pizza cooked in two wood-burning ovens.

What draws most people is the chance to sample the full range of Victory’s many beers. There are usually at least eight to ten beers on tap at the restaurant, in a lineup that changes seasonally. Yesterday I sampled a light, fresh-tasting kolsch, a style that originated in Cologne, and a brown ale that’s still in the tanks and hasn’t even been named yet. Both were delicious. Victory has won multiple awards for their flagship Hop Devil beer, an India Pale Ale. They’re also increasingly famous for a Belgian-style beer called Golden Monkey and for their pilsner, Prima Pils. Prima was recognized as one of the best pilsner-style beers in the world by both the New York Times and Men’s Journal magazine in 2005.

If I’ve piqued your curiosity, I encourage you to look for the beer. It’s sold in supermarkets throughout the Washington area and in a growing number of states across the country. The company website has a beer finder to help you find a local distributor wherever you may live. Or you might consider taking your own little trip up to Downingtown. I think you’ll find it worth the trip.

Cheer up! Spring is coming.

I took this photo at the U.S. Botanic Garden, the enormous conservatory up on Capitol Hill. Mark and I went to see the exhibit of blooming orchids that’s running through April 9: Orchids in an Art Deco Garden, January 21 through April 2. Hurry! I know a little bit about orchids, but I was still surprised at how many shapes and colors orchids can take. There were flowers that looked like they’d be happiest adorning the shoulder of some mother of the bride, and flowers that looked like life forms from another planet. Carnivorous life forms.

Yes, we took many lovely pictures of the orchids (us and everyone else that was there). But this photo is the one that I’m using on my computer desk top today. This cactus was in a small wing of the greenhouses devoted to desert plants, and the blossoms had just naturally formed in the shape of a smiley face! Sadly, I didn’t see a single other person notice this wonder on the day we were there. But I can share it with you.