water power

for all you foodies out there

Here are some of the blogs posted by Eliza's friends.
She has shared them with me because, well, I'm into blogging.
And cooking. And reading about cooking.

zoe's blog
Zoe goes to NYU and lives with some friends in Brooklyn.
She runs a farmer's market at NYU, not an easy thing to pull off.
Eliza met her on the high seas when she did a semester at sea during college.

alison's blog
Alison started a pie blog that she has not updated in awhile. Eliza and I had lunch with her in Santa Fe last November. She was working as an intern at Outside magazine at the time. Her father is our dog Calley's vet.

annabelle's blog
Many of you may remember Maddie, Eliza's co-host on the radio show last year. This is Maddie's sister's blog. She is from Evergreen, Colorado and presently in school in Boston. She is a serious foodie and may be a professional food person some day. You will see what I mean.

brown green red white

What a difference a day can make. Had a great day gardening yesterday; raking, clipping, welcoming spring.
Today: snow.
I must admit, it is pretty.

just desserts

I have come across a plethora of cooking blogs lately, especially posted by people in their twenties. I love this excitement about cooking. Maybe it is partially due to the success of the movie Julie and Julia. I also think Food Network has shows like Top Chef that have captured our interest in what happens in the kitchen, often "backstage" in a restaurant. Chefs are becoming celebrities in their own right. Julia Child really started something.

My parents had friends who had gotten to know Paul and Julia Child when they were (all four) foreign correspondents living in Paris during the war. When Al and Margory Ravenholt visited my parents in Brookline, they were invited to the Childs' for dinner in Cambridge. I was in high school at the time and was most interested in having use of the family car. That meant driving Mom and Dad to their dinner date across the river in Cambridge and then I was on my own. So I drove them over to Kirkland Street, letting the car idle while they got out. As Mom walked down the red brick path toward the white clapboard house she called,
"Are you sure you don't want to come in and just meet her? "
"No," I answered, anxious to get on with my evening. I mean she was just a chef on a cooking show. What was the big deal?

Julia Child's Cambridge kitchen is now reassembled and on display at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC. including the peg board with the outlines for all her copper pots and utensils. I could have saved myself a trip by simply going in that night.

Oh well. I hope I had a good time, where ever I went those many years ago. My parents reported the next day that they had had a lovely time. I wonder how they got home.

Seasons Up High

Things on Mt. Washington this past weekend looked a little different than I'm used to. Here are some fun before/after images:

Love to all! -Eliza

In the field

Every once in awhile I like to bring readers up to date on the lives of my daughters and fellow blog writers (Eliza and Carrie) when they may not be near computers to make their own entries.

Eliza is living in Conway, New Hampshire this month studying to be certified as a Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician. Here is a description of one of her days. I should warn anyone who is squeamish (you know who you are) to skip ahead.

"Today I had my last clinical rotation at Memorial Hospital in North Conway. First thing in the morning, there was an adorable three year old kid who'd taken a spill off his scooter and cut his upper lip, so I stood with the family (including their 6-month-old baby who had had 3 open-heart surgeries) and watched as this kid toughed it out through four stitches. The parents were really talkative and generous about letting me be part of the "action." Next up I watched an older guy w/ stomach cancer get an IV put in, and get hooked up to drugs that negated his painkillers, which was disturbing - watching the gradual dawn of pain on his face, from peaceful sleep to awake and grimacing.

Then a thirty five year old man was wheeled in from the ambulance. He had been skiing with his wife and friends at Wildcat, and ran into his buddy whose ski edge sliced his lower thigh.  The result was (Mom don't read on) an eight inch laceration of the skin and muscle down to the bone.  So, blood oozing out everywhere (not an arterial bleed, so oozing rather than spurting). Luckily this guy was totally cool and the cut was deep enough that he wasn’t in much pain. I basically watched the entire process from triage to surgery prep, and then, they let me into the SURGERY!!! I was sent into the locker rooms to change entirely into scrubs, head to toe, with booties and hair thing and mask and gloves and all, and then I went into the operating room and helped monitor/assist the surgeon throughout the whole thing. The surgery took about an hour total not including prepping and wrapping, and I saw a lot of blood and a massive gaping hole in this guy's thigh being dug into by the surgeon. It was an intense hour."

For a break over the weekend, Eliza climbed Mt. Washington with friends. I like knowing that this evening, she is back in her room, curled up with her books, studying for the exams at the end of the week.

Carrie is in Georgia, by the Black Sea. She is there to evaluate several programs on domestic violence and human trafficking. This trip is the culmination of a semester long project at Columbia where she will soon earn a degree in International Public Policy. Here is a recent email.

"Georgia is beautiful in a crumbly, ancient way. The streets snake up into tall mountains and are twisty and have no names. Tiblisi is a lot like other European cities, but everything is covered in graffiti and all the buildings lean in on each other and into the streets because they are so old. But when you walk by a window and look in, you see a cheerful apartment full of plants and bright colors. Most people live in Soviet era tenement style housing. The organization we are working for is run by a group of women activists who are working mostly on increasing women's participation in politics and raising awareness about issues like domestic violence and trafficking. They are very accommodating and kind, and have shown us all around and want us to understand Georgian patriarchal culture and recreational alcoholism. We have about four meetings a day with different NGOs working on these issues, which so far has been very interesting.

This country got an anti domestic violence law only a few years ago. It's 30 or 40 years behind the rest of the world. Stalin is from here! We are going to his birthplace sometime this weekend."

biblical proportions

Forty days and forty nights it rained in the Old Testament story. Noah built an ark and floated away with animals paired two by two. I have always found that story disturbing and feel sorry for the animals and people left behind. To drown. And what kind of God would punish people in that way? But that is another discussion.

There is a flood right here in eastern Massachusetts. After a WEEK of hard driving rain, rivers are overflowing their banks, roads are closed. I saw kids kayaking down the street in Concord yesterday. A great sight. My little blue car felt like an ark as I drove it through water and over broken pavement. Yesterday was our first day without rain in a week. I am sure records have been broken. There is something exciting about extreme weather, I feel like a pioneer fighting the elements, or a person during biblical times dealing with plaques! I hope we won't be seeing locusts this spring! Although deer ticks are just about as bad.

Fact is, scientists tell us we will be seeing more extreme weather in the future. As the seas heat up due to climate change, the storms become more fierce. Hurricanes! Weeks of Rain, Wind, torrents of water rushing down my street. Hold on to your hats, grab that sou'wester and forge ahead! I am glad we cut down the two huge pine trees in our front yard. The Boston Globe is full of photos of bohemoths lying on houses, crushed as if a whale had leapt out of the Atlantic Ocean, took a wrong turn and landed in a neighborhood in Chelsea. Stranger things have happened.

Above are some photos of sunlight in the front hall. Ah... a relief.

A memory of summer

Summer on Lake Memphremagog seemed to last forever. I looked forward to spending the summer at our family retreat in Canada all year long. When I returned home to the humidity of late August in Summit, NJ, I felt like a stranger in my own house. It seemed I had been away for a lifetime.

When I was five, I learned to swim off the dock with my father’s help. He’d stand, long legs reaching down to the stony lake bottom and long arms reaching out towards me. I clung to the wooden ladder, reluctant to leave my perch. Eventually I jumped and he caught me as I plunged into the cold water. From that day on, I was rarely out of the water. Even on chilly days, I was in, bobbing in the waves, clutching a shiny black inner tube.

“You are warm blooded!” my Aunt Peggy called out on a particularly cool day. “What does that mean?” I wondered.
Isn’t everyone warm blooded? Maybe grown ups are cold blooded. I noticed they didn’t go swimming as much as I did and only on warm, sunny days. My parents and Aunt Peggy preferred to sit on the wooden dock playing Scrabble, smoking Player’s cigarettes and eating chocolates.

I truly pitied them. “What a boring life they have!” I thought as I floated and paddled and kicked around in the cool water. “I am so glad I am warm blooded!”

Note: The above photo is of our friends, Susie and Linda Corby when they visited us at the Lake. Being the youngest of four children, my parents had tired of taking photos by the time I came along. They had aquired a movie camera by then and somewhere there may be some scratchy footage of me jumping in the water, but I doubt it. My parents were otherwise occupied! I include the photo to show the actual ladder I clung to, complete with my mother's white bathing cap and a deflated inner tube.

got sap?

There are no leaves on the trees, barely even any buds, snow still settles in the shadows, there's a cold wind and mud underfoot but the world is awake and heading towards spring. How do I know this? There is a steady drip in every sap bucket I pass. The sugar maples are waking up.

The run generally starts in mid-February and wraps up in mid-March. It has to be freezing at night and it has to be warm during the day for the sap to run. Once it starts, sugar houses around Lincoln and Concord have smoke billowing out of their chimneys non-stop. Farmers, friends and volunteers keep fires burning by loading cord wood into the furnaces. Steam rises as evaporators boil away the water. The ratio is 40:1. That is forty gallons of clear sap collected from trees boils down to one gallon of syrup.

When their children were grown up and living on their own, my parents and their Summit friends went to Hardwick, Vermont every year to help Hugo and Liza Meyer with the "sugaring off." Faded color photos, curling now, show piles of snow on the ground and the grey haired crowd wearing red and black plaid wool jackets and rubber boots, hauling buckets. Hugo drove the tractor and the others put the buckets on the flat bed. There was a lot of frivolity and I am sure the bourbon was plentiful in the evenings. What a wonderful time that group of old friends had together every year as the sap began to flow.

summer fun

Great news!

An ancient picture I just found of my in New Orleans after Katrina that I get a kick out of. This feels like a long time ago.

I think that all of the good energy that has been produced from these beautiful babies coming into the world this winter/spring has rubbed off on me. I am happy to report that I've been accepted to a masters program at Harvard School of Education. I get to design my own program and work with a professor who has become my mentor and put off the cruel job search for another year. I'm thrilled, and wanted to tell everyone! Tim also got into a PhD program so we are Boston bound.