Mulberry Jam

I realized that I never have posted about one of my favorite blogs: Shorpy. It’s quite different from the text-based blogs I usually follow. This is a photo blog, that draws on national archival photos for high-resolution images dating back a hundred years and sometimes more. It’s especially strong on photos from documentary photographers like Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine. Civil War-era photos also get included with regularity.

The most touching entries are the many photos of working children. These little factory workers, oyster shuckers and tobacco pickers show faces and bodies marked by hard work, but also by a kind of pride. They have a self-possession and self-reliance you won’t see in our era, but many also look old before their time. See this photo of an oyster shucker in 1917.
What fascinates me most are the unsentimental shots taken of mundane, everyday scenes. Places like street corners and fairgrounds, community gatherings and schools. The clothes, the architecture, the advertising signs! I can look for hours.

The heat of August has finally broken here in Washington. About time too! Finally we’ve returned to open window season. Aaah, this is the best time of year here. Today is clear and sunny with very low humidity. All my windows are thrown open to the air. I’ve always avoided air conditioning as much as I could, mostly because I hate being closed up indoors without any contact with outdoor air. Growing up in upstate New York we didn’t have central air, and didn’t really need it except for a few hot weeks in mid-July. No-one I knew had air conditioning, and we went through the summers running in and out of screen doors and setting up fans in open windows. I tried to carry that lifestyle with me after I moved to Washington, and actually lived my first three years in this town in an apartment without A/C. Still, I eventually broke down under the weight of steady temps over 90 and dewpoints near 80 degrees, and my house is kept closed up tight through most of the summer. I’m not sure I could make it If I had to work at home every day without relief from the sticky heat. But that’s all the more reason why I’m overjoyed when we can go back to living an indoor-outdoor existence. Now Mark and I can exchange offhand comments about “good sleeping weather” and clearly hear the birdsong chatter at my feeders. Last night was cool enough to make my down duvet feel delicious with the windows open, and the morning was just nippy enough to make my cup of hot tea feel extra good running down my throat. Opening the windows at my house has a special thrill for me, beyond just letting in the fresh air. The windows on my house are secretly one of my favorite things about it. They’re steel casement windows, with metal frames painted black. They’re original to the house, which was built in 1948, and make no mistake, they’re rickety, leaky and very inefficient, energy-wise. But they swing out to open on hinges that take them all the way out and flat against the house. There’s nothing so fancy as a crank, you just unlatch the window and push. Whenever I stretch to sweep one out into open space I feel like Snow White. Each and every spring we get a parade of window salesmen stopping to ask if we plan to replace them (because they’re rickety, leaky, etc.). I send them quickly on their way. No! You shall not touch my windows! I think we all miss something, being closed up indoors so much of our lives. We lose touch with the place where we are when we can get away with wearing sweaters indoors in August and have no idea when it last rained. I’m not saying we should do away with air conditioning and climate control altogether, especially in a climate as unforgiving as Washington’s. But I wish more folks would be more conscious of taking opportunities to open up their houses in that yummy season that lies between unbearably hot and uncomfortably cold. Are your windows open today?

I recently had a really good experience with an organic mildew cleaner that I thought more people would want to know about.

You may remember, if you read this blog regularly, that my husband and I suffered a serious flood in our finished downstairs after torrential rains in late June. (The weather forecasters swear this was a hundred-year flood and I sincerely hope they’re right!) Our carpeting and padding were thoroughly soaked. I suppose we could have decided to just toss it all, but I’m incurably frugal and the carpet was only two years old so we decided to see if we could save it. We successfully got everything bone dry and went about putting it all back in place, only to have a faint odor of mildew crop up about a week later.

Everyone knows mildew is bad news, causing allergic reactions in sensitive people (like my husband). Normally the only way to get rid of it is to use toxic chemicals like chlorine bleach or alcohol. Well not in my house! I keep an organic vegetable garden and am very loath to use poisons of any kind. But I really hated to give up on all that carpet, so we took a chance on a new nontoxic product I had read about in the Washington Post. (See “Summer Nice Smells, Summer Not,” August 3, 2006)

It’s called SAEM, which stands for Super Activated Efficient Microbes. It’s an all-purpose cleaner that works with live friendly bacteria that kill the mildew by eating up its food supply. According to the Post, it’s the product of choice for many relief workers in New Orleans post-Katrina.

I ordered it directly from the website of the company that makes it, Sustainable Community Development. It came quickly in a one liter plastic bottle of liquid concentrate that looks and smells rather like apple cider that’s starting to ferment. I mixed a few tablespoons of the concentrate with water in a plastic spray bottle and spritzed it on the downstairs carpet where the water damage had been the worst. The next morning when I bent to sniff, it smelled yeasty and slightly sour, a little beer-like but not unpleasantly so. Definitely better than the smell of chlorine bleach. The first application took care of 95% of the mildew smell but not all, so I sprayed it again after five days. After the second application the mildew was gone and it hasn’t come back.

If you read the SCD website, this stuff is the greatest thing since sliced bread. They suggest you use it for weed control in the garden, controlling odors from your compost pile, in your laundry as a deodorizer, on your cutting board to discourage harmful microbes, etc., etc. I haven’t tried it yet in all those ways, but it certainly saved my bacon (and my carpet) downstairs.

My favorite place in my house isn’t actually in my house at all, it’s my back patio. That’s where my husband and I take many of our meals and spend an awful lot of our free time, chillin’ and watching the birds come and go. This well-loved activity is often accompanied by a cocktail of some sort at sunset. Out there I have an assortment of potted plants, a dining table and chairs, and a string of festive party lights that were one of the best presents my mother ever gave me. But the highlight of the space is the little fountain that my husband (rather grandly) calls “the water feature”.

It’s not grand at all, but I am absurdly attached to it. It’s an adapted planter that I plugged with plumber’s putty and then set up with a solar-powered fountain unit. Before I built it I had hunted for months for a fountain that I liked, without success. Too many fountains I saw were cutesy-pie or cheesy looking, or just too plastic. The ones that weren’t cheesy were very expensive, way out of my limited budget. Building my own wasn’t exactly dirt cheap—parts and pot cost me about $200—but I did get to choose exactly the vessel I liked. I fell in love with a two-and-a-half-foot tall earthenware planter from Viet Nam in a deep blue glaze.

After two problem-free years, it suddenly sprang a leak last week. In the course of a single afternoon all the water drained out of it and my fountain pump was sitting dry at the bottom. It turned out that the putty I used as a plug for the drain-hole at the bottom had dried out and become dislodged. So I tipped the pot over on its side and there it sat for about a week until I could fix it. Boy, did I miss it. I didn’t realize how much I’d grown accustomed to the gentle splashing sound and the motion it brought to the patio. Just listening to the sound of that water can make even the hottest afternoon seem cooler, somehow.

Yesterday afternoon I got it patched up and re-filled, and I’m listening to it among the background sounds of my garden right this minute. I highly recommend that even if you garden in the smallest of spaces that you consider getting your own water feature of some kind. It’s soothing, it’s good feng shui, and it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Today’s the first full day of spring, although it doesn’t feel like it. We’re having a little wet snow and the temperature isn’t supposed to get out of the thirties all day. But when I look out the window over my desk I can see my daffodils blooming out in the garden, so I know it’s only a matter of time before the days get warmer for real.

I love daffodils. I have many different kinds, so the bloom time is spread over at least a month. Over the fourteen years I’ve lived in this house I’ve planted daffodils in every nook and corner until I’ve begun to run out of spaces to stuff them. I love them because they bloom so early and in such profusion. I also love them because they’re tough—once you put them in you can generally forget all about them and just let them do their thing without any help from the gardener. Leave them alone and they’ll multiply year after year after year. I’ve seen ruined homesteads in the Manassas Battlefield Park where cheerful clusters of daffodils have long outlived the farmhouse where they were planted. In fact, when my husband and I moved into the house, daffodils were the only blooming plants in the very-neglected garden. I suppose they may be as old as our fifty-year-old house. I would love to know what kind they might be—they have ruffled golden cups surrounded by pointed petals in a clear yellow-green.

My first loves were the miniatures. I have many plantings of a small narcissus-type called Jack Snipe. It stands about 8 to 10 inches high, with a dainty yellow cup and white swept-back petals. It’s among the very earliest daffodils to bloom. I also have some very thick clumps of an even tinier daffodil called Tête-à-tête. They’re the ones in the photo at the top of this post—bright golden yellow and only about six inches high. They bloom very thickly, often having two blossoms per stem. I actually have a few daffodils even smaller than that—an unknown incredibly delicate flower that snuck into a group of muscari grape hyacinth I planted years ago. The blossoms are no bigger across than a nickel, and they stand between five and six inches high. I have them planted right beside my front steps, mixed in with the blue-purple grape hyacinths they’re quite striking.

After the miniatures, I went through a phase of infatuation with scented daffodils. I have many groups of an elegant creamy white daffodil called Thalia. It has pointed petals and a narrow cup, plus a sweet and delicate scent that suits them perfectly. They’ve grown thicker over the ten years since I first planted them and now I have enough to bring large bunches inside to enjoy the perfume when they bloom in mid-April. At about the same time I planted my first Thalias, I put in several groupings of a yellow daffodil called Quail. They also had a lovely scent, but rather than multiplying, they’ve grown sparser and sparser over the years. I have only a few left now. Most recently I’ve put in several clusters of a double white daffodil called Sir Winston Churchill. They are very late bloomers, coming out in late April to early May. Their scent is so intense that I find myself standing many feet away thinking, “What is that lovely smell?”

Now I’m looking forward to my first spring with a new daffodil that was a gift from my Aunt. These are supposed to be a delicate peachy-pink, a color that will be entirely new among my many varieties. They’re throwing up robust-looking leaves by my front walk right now, so I shouldn’t have too long to wait.

I may have given the impression in these pages that I’m a devotee of naturalism in all things. That is far from the whole truth. Oh sure, I’ve posted entries about home-made granola (almost the definition of hippie-dippy natural). I write about gardening a lot. I’m kind of a tree hugger, as evidenced by the name of this blog (see link to my page titled “Why Mulberry Jam?”). But I don’t believe in naturalism all the time. How boring that would be! In fact, under certain circumstances I am a big believer in artifice and surface decoration.

Take nail polish, for example. I am almost never without some bright color painted on my toes, and frequently add a complementary color to my fingertips. Since taking up a fairly serious yoga practice in recent years, I spend a good amount of time looking at my own bare feet. This has only encouraged me in my little vice. I don’t go for girly shell pinks or translucent beige, either. I’m more likely to wear a dark red, royal blue or iridescent green. Glancing down to catch a glimpse of something bright just makes me smile.

I realize that I may be sacrificing readers’ respect for me by admitting this. When I was in graduate school many years ago, makeup of any kind was seen as unserious and shallow. Let alone nail polish. I used to indulge furtively on weekends when I thought none of my professors or fellow students would see. After I left school and started working, I expected to find a broader range of opinion about such decoration. But I had to admit to myself that it was often secretaries who had the manicures, while female managers left nails short and unpolished. (It could be that my sample is skewed because I live and work in Washington, which has to be one of the more uptight cities in the nation.)

But I finally decided it was simple insecurity that led many people to avoid the bright fun of a painted digit. Now I say, hang what anyone else thinks. Have fun! I’ve almost become an ambassador of polish. I once took a small bottle of lavender to a friend’s house for a touch-up before a summer rock concert and wound up painting the toes of every woman in the group. One woman (who I would have considered far too serious for that kind of thing) called me later to ask the name of the color so she could find it. And why should women have all the fun with this kind of body-consciousness? I’ve painted the toes of men more than once, and you wouldn’t believe the sheepish delight even some manly hockey-playing types will take in it. For the guys, use a dark blue-black or gunmetal gray color, and it really doesn’t look as odd as it may sound.

My favorite conversion story is my own mother. She happened to be born with club feet, quickly corrected while she was still a baby. The casts she wore as an infant left her with a few toenails permanently creased. She’s always hated her feet, and I can seldom remember her wearing open-toed sandals when I was young. Two summers ago I presented her with a bottle of a soft blush-apricot color and got down on my knees to paint her toes myself. She was thrilled. It was a revelation to see her enjoy her own feet that way. She tells me now that she almost never goes without polish anymore.

What harmless little pleasure would you be enjoying if you didn’t care what other people thought?

Just when I thought it was safe to go back to my mailbox after the deluge of Christmas catalogues, a new season is now overstuffing my little box. Now is the time of the seed catalogues. Each afternoon I bring in at least one or two, with their bright, optimistic, and oh-so-tempting covers. Brilliantly colored tomatoes, exotic greens and lettuces, abundant flowers. All can be yours for the price of a simple packet of tiny seeds.

Of course, that assumes you have the space (not to mention the patience) to actually set up the flats of soil, label the seeds and carefully mist the soil daily until they germinate. In my dreams, I fantasize about puttering around in a full-size greenhouse, where I could set out seeds that would enjoy direct sunlight, space and humidity in carefully controlled conditions. Reality is that I have to make space somewhere within my small house. Since only a few windows get enough sun to grow healthy seedlings, it’s a challenge. Some years I can barely manage to squeeze in a single flat. Other years, I have no room at all, and am forced to rely upon the farmer’s market for my vegetable plants in mid spring.

Aside from space considerations, I’ve had other obstacles. One year I carefully set up three flats of mixed tomatoes and other vegetables, painstakingly labeled with popsicle sticks to distinguish the five varieties of tomatoes I planted. My efforts at organization were destroyed when one of my cats thought it was a tremendous game to gently pull the sticks out of the little cups where my tomatoes were sprouting. She never harmed the plants, but after three days of her concerted efforts, I had no idea which seedlings were which.

Despite such difficulties, I try to start my own seeds whenever I can. In exchange for a bit of extra effort, I can grow things I would never find at the local garden center. Forty-nine different kinds of tomatoes are in the Burpee catalog, including many exotic heirloom varieties. More than thirty kinds of lettuce and twenty varieties of bean tempt me in The Cook’s Garden catalog. Plus mouthwatering copy I’m helpless to resist. Lettuces are described as “lustrous”, “succulent” and, most enticingly, as “simply unavailable in supermarkets”.

I have to set limits, of course. My garden is only twenty feet by ten feet, quite small for growing vegetables. In such limited space I can only grow the plants that really reward my effort, either with abundance or unique flavor, preferably both. The product of my labor has to be better than what I can pick up at the store or forget it. I have a short list of things I don’t bother with; for example, onions and broccoli don’t taste any different to me than the ones at the grocery store. Melons are out of the question because they require too much room. Ditto potatoes, corn and cabbage. Still, that leaves a great deal of leeway, since most vegetables are distinctly better when you grow them yourself.

I encourage anyone with the least interest in vegetable gardening to seriously consider starting your own seeds. It takes the pleasure of growing your own food to a whole new level when you move beyond the basic varieties sold in flats at the garden center. Follow your whims! Try something just for the fun of it, like a green striped tomato! You may find a new favorite that will become an old favorite soon.

[This post was previously published in The Washington Examiner newspaper, April 6, 2005]

During the early years of my marriage, as my husband and I adapted to cooking and living together, we learned to share a tight kitchen space and limited list of equipment. The one item he would never touch, however, was my beloved cast iron frying pan, purchased at a hardware store in my days as a poor student. “You have a relationship with that pan, and I don’t want to come between you,” was his comment. Since then I’ve added many fine pots and pans to my batterie de cuisine, some of them fairly expensive. Yet all of them remain mere equipment, without the emotional aura of that beat-up, homely, black skillet. These days every retail outlet from Williams Sonoma to QVC sets great store by an upscale collection of brands: All-Clad, Calphalon, and Le Creuset among them. All of them make very fine pots and pans. But I’d like to put in a word for the kind of humble cookware that’s still made in much the same way it was in the 19th century.

Plain cast iron is unsurpassed for even heat retention and cooking without hot spots. When properly seasoned, it develops a non-stick surface rivaling that of Teflon while retaining the ability to get hot enough for proper browning (unlike Teflon). It heats up slowly compared with aluminum, copper or steel, but then gives that heat back evenly and at as high a temperature as you need for searing or frying. That means that you can sear a steak without burning it, cook perfect sunny-side-up eggs, bake a light crispy cornbread right in the skillet, or get your breaded catfish filets done to the ideal golden brown.

I admit that my pan is not perfect. Cast iron isn’t good for sauces or for acidic foods like tomatoes. It can rust if not cared for properly, and it is not for the fastidious cook: over-scrubbing can damage the non-stick properties of the surface. It’s really best if you can relax enough to overlook a bit of oil or grease left in the pan, which will keep it from rusting as well as preserving the silky surface you may have worked hard to achieve. That’s not to say you can’t clean it out; just that you want to stick to a swab with pure hot water and a soft nylon brush. No SOS pads or detergent, please!

It used to be that cooks guarded their cast iron cookware jealously, for the best seasoning could take many repeated uses to achieve, with frustrating results during the breaking-in period. One of my aunts still tells the story of how her teenaged son, asked to help with the washing up, diligently scoured her iron griddle clean of twenty years’ worth of seasoning. Thankfully, cooks no longer have to invest years to achieve good results. Now you can buy cast iron cookware pre-seasoned at the factory, and enjoy instantly the wonderful properties that used to take months or even years to fully develop. Try it, and you too might find yourself developing a sneaking affection for a homely (but oh, so effective) skillet.

I’m back at my writing desk today, after more than a week away. My husband and I went to visit family in Florida for the Thanksgiving holiday, and coming back made me feel I’d missed a step somewhere. We left on a warmish autumn day with leaves still falling from the trees and piling up in the gutters. We returned to winter. Not that the temperatures have been unbearably cold, but the trees are all bare and the sky has the low-hanging gunmetal colored clouds that make me think of snow.

For some reason, the most important thing I could think of to do on my first day back was to wash the windows. We recently had the house painted, and the windows were filthy as a result of all the scraping and sanding that entailed. Tuesday turned out to be quite warm and I thought I’d better seize what my last chance to work comfortably with the windows open. Washing windows is one of those chores I hate to do, but love to have done. It gets done only once or twice a year, usually in late fall. Something about facing the prospect of a whole winter looking out through dirty windows just bugs me. I think it has something to do with the look of the bare trees and empty garden. The coming of winter makes me want clarity wherever possible.

I’m very happy to move indoors for the season. I’ve already written about how glad I am to take a break from the garden at the end of a busy season. It isn’t just about stopping the hard work of managing a large collection of flowers and vegetables. I actually enjoy the dark and quiet evenings of the deep winter. I have an ample supply of firewood and every intention of using it to the hilt. I’ve laid in a good supply of candles, cozy blankets and soft pillows for the sofas and chairs. Even better, I have a stack of books that I look forward to reading. I’ve just become infatuated with two novelists who are new to me, and I happily anticipate spending the winter catching up on the works of Guy Gavriel Kay (Tigana, The Lions of Al Rassan) and Lian Hearn (Tales of the Otori).

And then there are the pleasures of winter food. Soups and stews, roasts and root vegetables. I love all those slow-cooked dishes that take hours of simmering on the stove. And this is absolutely the best time of year to bake, since the heat of the stove in the kitchen is so welcome. In summer, when I can’t face the thought of heating up the kitchen, all we eat are quick pastas and salads. Now I’m craving rye bread, baked butternut squash, roasted lamb, and coq au vin.

All through December, I revel in all the coziness of winter life. The winter holidays bring so much outward-looking excitement along with the quiet introspection that comes with the long nights. My pagan little heart loves all the ritual of tree and lights and Yule log. Isn’t it wonderful that we bring the wildness of mistletoe, evergreens and holly berries inside the house? Best of all is sharing a cup of cheer with good friends. Even though it gets hectic juggling activities and events, I wouldn’t miss any of it. Besides, soon enough will come February, when any one of us would kill to go to a party and the bare ground is starting to look sad instead of restful.

Inspiration is a tricky subject for writers. Some writers pride themselves on not being temperamental enough to require inspiration. They sit at their desks at the same time each day, write their allotted pages or number of words, then stop. Others are less disciplined, writing in spurts when the frenzy takes them, then stopping for hours or days at a time as their font dries up temporarily. Worst case, their creative wellspring may actually get blocked, and struggle for an even longer time to get the water of words flowing again.

I’m somewhere in between the two extremes. I’m not so structured that I sit at the same time in the same place each day, but I also try not to allow myself to go without working for very long. The longer I stop, the harder it is to get started again. When things are flowing I’m much better off just keeping the momentum going.

One of the things I use to keep myself on track is a bulletin board of inspiration. I got the idea from fashion design, since I’ve seen designers use an informal board to tack up fabrics, rough sketches and other odds and ends when they were creating a collection. I have something similar. On my bulletin board I put photos that struck my fancy, paragraphs from articles that grabbed my attention, and postcards from places I’ve either been recently or want to visit someday. It’s a great way to keep my attention focused when I’m working on larger projects. For instance, when I redecorated my living room last year, I had photos from catalogues, swatches of fabric and colors that I liked all tacked up on the board. As I picked out furniture items or curtains for the new look, everything harmonized because it fit into the scheme I’d envisioned. It works for writing, too. Right now I have a postcard photo of Eva Zeisel’s porcelain, tickets to events I’ve attended recently, and some inspirational words and phrases. Any one of them is a potential blog topic.

The very act of putting it together can be inspirational. To build your own, get a stack of magazines in different subject areas. My favorites for this purpose are travel and decorating mags, although any magazine with interesting type design or photos can work well. Sit on the floor or anywhere you can spread out and start going through them, cutting out anything that strikes your fancy. Don’t think too hard; these should just be things that appeal to you on a gut level. You may find unexpected patterns emerging as you do this. Once you have a good stack of images and words, arrange them on a large posterboard, bulletin board or just a big sheet of paper. Your methods don’t have to be fancy. I use tacks on a corkboard so I can move things around as I like, but I’ve also done this with rubber cement on sheets of cardboard. As grownups, sometimes we lose touch with the childish, creative parts of ourselves that love to play with beautiful images. I recommend this exercise for anyone trying to devise a creative vision, be it for fashion, decorating or the direction of your life.