At Christmas I told my friend Mary-Ellis that I had gotten rid of all my cookbooks and was devoting the rest of my life to Joshua McFadden’s new one.  She wanted to hear more about that and here is my answer to her:

I have not been a good cook since the 1970s. When I was first out of college, I exulted in being in the kitchen without anyone yelling at me.  As I recall I had several specialties: cinnamon rolls, cardamom bread, pea soup and cornbread, quiche, which at the time was quite nouvelle in the United States. We were all trying to be vegetarian at the time on account of Frances Moore Lappe.  And we did the best we could with Adele Davis even though her recipes were awful and Euell Gibbons even though we lived in the city.

I remember a later golden period where I made orange cake. It was like a vanilla cake only with orange juice and orange peel with creamsicle orange butter cream frosting. And ooh, ooh: the orange bread recipe from the Nantucket Diet Murders, one of the first of the mystery genre that has recipes stirred into the narrative. It’s the only one I ever read, not having a taste for them, really, but I think I made that orange bread several times a year for a long time.

Somewhere in there I learned to make chicken soup, roast a turkey and make gravy. I started making my mother’s celery almondine, which probably sounds awful to you but it is delicious and I still make it several times a year. My finest culinary accomplishments came about when there seemed to be nothing in house to eat. I could open the refrigerator and cupboards, muse for a bit and put together a meal. That was fun.

Then I started having digestive problems and “joint issues,” which I immediately diagnosed as diet-related. I had taken over this practice from my mother. (“Your problem is you don’t get enough broccoli”)I didn’t need her to blame my diet, I did it myself. I commenced upon a series of experimental diets which did absolutely nothing for me and which I don’t want to re-live here. In any case, most American women reading this know exactly what I’m talking about.

When I first started eschewing –as opposed to chewing—gluten, I made awful mock graham crackers and swore I liked them. In the 90s, gluten free eating was a desolate business. There were no tasty substitutes or decent recipes. After expensive experiments with xantham gum and rice flour, I stopped trying. In the end, I gave up bread and cake and pretty much everything I loved to eat.

Then there was Abascal Diet craze, which I faithfully followed for three years. Here’s the diet: shop for vegetables, chop vegetables, roast vegetables with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. Eat. Repeat. There’s no time for anything else.

This is what was going on with me when everyone else was watching cooking shows and raving about Elizabeth David and MFK Fischer and Julia Child and Craig Claiborne and Irma S Rombauer and Julee Rosso and Ina Garten and I can’t think of any more without resorting to research. The point is that everyone was cooking and everyone had their favorite book and show and everyone was developing fusion tastes except me. I was chewing weeds and tree bark and herb tea bags.

I have two friends who are ingenious cooks and who somehow have made it their practice to feed me. Former professionals, they have both taken on the challenge of cooking within my diet restrictions, which fortunately now are few.

Four times a year, once a season, Tim invites me and a mutual friend, Julie to a soiree at his apartment. He spends the entire day cleaning his place (because he is the child of 1950s’ parents) and cooking. The meal always consists of some surprise cocktail, a plate of three different hors d’oeurves and preliminary conversation. We move to the table for the entrée, two sides and a livelier, if not heated conversation about books, movies, politics, religion, our childhoods, the book I’m writing, Julie’s Mexican family and whatever Neil de Grasse Tyson said recently. Then dessert.

Every few months I go down to Burien to have lunch with my friends Susan and Mike. Susan’s kitchen could be in a cooking show. Her cookbooks could stock an entire bookstore. She says she likes just looking through them. When her grandchildren were babies, she read to them from the cookbooks in a soothing voice.

Susan’s lunches start with a display of appetizers, artistically presented. I sit at the bar and chomp away on homemade and fresh everything while Susan puts the finishing touches on the main meal and the three of us talk.

The meal is always splendid. There’s dessert and usually some chocolate for Afters. Then we play poker or Scrabble or the Great Dalmuti or a card game, which I believe is called “Oh, Hell,” or “Go to Hell.”

My point in going into all this is that Susan and Tim have inspired me to believe that I can re-learn to cook. Or up my game, anyway.  I was itching with this aspiration when I happened upon a cookbook in the Peak Picks section of the library. Six Seasons, a New Way with Vegetables by Joshua McFadden.  Part of the attraction besides all the lovely photographs were the chapters on the late winter vegetables that come in my Imperfect Produce box and I’m not sure what to do with them except roast à la Abascal. I checked out the book. Three recipes in I ordered my own copy.

Part of my difficulty, I have learned, is that today’s cuisine does not lend itself to the mindset from the Betty Crocker kitchen of my childhood. Recipes in old cookbooks tend to have a list of six ingredients and three sentences of instruction. They are begging for improvisation. That is how I learned to cook: by trying whatever is available. Today’s recipes are like chemical experiments and you have to approximate exactness.

In the past if it called for parsnips, I might substitute carrots and potatoes. If it called for lemon zest, I might use Rose’s lime juice. A yellow onion would substitute for shallots, chives or leeks. If I don’t happen to have marjoram or oregano, I’d use thyme. If I didn’t have parsley, I’d leave it out. I almost never had parsley. And don’t get me started on vinegars. Apple cider vinegar was all anybody needed. I would try a recipe according to these slovenly standards and end up with some shlock and think, well, that recipe’s no good.

So when I bought this cookbook I told myself I had to follow the recipes exactly. It takes some doing. Halfway down the list of ingredients will be some concoction I was supposed to have made ahead of time and those instructions are on page 30.  This might require me to wait another day to try the dish. More than once I have put off a recipe because I needed golden raisins and I only had currants in the house. But I have been amazed at how wonderful food can taste when prepared with enthusiasm for the details.

“Parsnip Soup with Pine Nut, Currant, and Celery Leaf Relish: Its flavor was just astonishing.

“Brussels Sprouts with Pickled Carrots, Walnuts, Cilantro and Citrus Vinaigrette:” Here are my notes from my first attempt: “Next time I wouldn’t use the burnt walnuts and I’d want the pickled carrots to be more pickly. Use the vinegars he says and let it pickle for more than two hours.” I made myself try the recipe again exactly as it’s written, even including the cilantro, which I didn’t think I liked. I ate it for two meals that day: a pound of Brussels Sprouts and all the trimmings. I thought nothing could taste so good as this.

One day I’ll have Tim and Julie and Susan and Mike over for dinner. And Mary-Ellis.

Nina (rhymes with Dinah) and I went out to dinner a few evenings ago. After the how-was-your-day conversation, Nina quoted a friend (who was quoting Woody Allen) saying that if this election turns out badly, she’ll be in the basement in a pool of blood. It’s come to that. There’s nothing to do but that .  .  .or vote. Nothing more to say. So this was the rest of the evening:

“God, this rain. What are all these cars doing backed up like this?”

“It’s Seattle drivers. The first rain and you’d think it was snow instead.”

“Is this where I’m supposed to turn?”

“No, I think it’s up there. No wait, that was it. Sorry. This is exactly we did last time we came here. Now we have to go under the freeway and make a U turn at Target.”

“Really? Was it Target?”

“I think so. But it wasn’t raining and there weren’t all these cars.”

Looking at our menus in the warm, inviting restaurant, we had the coupon conversation.

“Tell me how much you want to spend so I know what I can order,” I said.

“No matter what we order we can save $10,” Nina said

“But only if we each get a meal of $20 so we can get half off the second.”

“That isn’t the kind of coupon we have. We have the second meal free as long as we order two entrees.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, and two drinks.”

“That part’s not a problem. Can I see the Scotch menu please?”

After the enjoyable meal came the check /tip conversation:

“OK, here’s the adjusted one. It looks like we just split it.”

“Can I have the other one for my tax deductions?”

“Not yet, I have to figure the tip without the discount. Are you paying with your card or cash?”

“I’ll give you cash.”

“Oh, good, then I’ll have some cash.”

And scene.

The next day my friend Nancy and I saw Seattle Shakespeare Theater perform Arms and the Man. We always park halfway up Queen Anne Hill so we can get a bit of a walk.

“It feels like Sunday,” I said.

“This is the first Saturday performance we’ve seen this season.”

“Haven’t we always gone on Sunday?”

“No we always go on Saturday. This is the first Saturday performance we’ve seen this season because we changed our seats for Richard III and went on a Sunday.”

“Isn’t this the first season we’ve had Saturday seats?”

“We always go on Saturday.”

(We don’t, you know. We’ve always had Sunday season tickets but we changed to Saturday this year. I just didn’t remember that in time to back up my confusion.)

Then Nancy reminded me of our trek to see Richard III at Seattle Rep theater.

“Where are you going, Nancy?” I had asked. I stopped at the Cornish Theater. “It’s here at Intiman.”

“No it isn’t. It never is. It’s either at the Center House or Seattle Rep.”

“I’ve never been in Seattle Rep with you. That’s Bagley Wright up there.”

“That’s not Bagley Wright, that’s Seattle Rep. And we always go there.”

(For those of you not from Seattle, Cornish Theater used to be called Intiman and to some of us it always will be even though it’s now named after a doyenne of the arts in Seattle, Nellie Cornish and I should celebrate that. I do, actually, I just can’t ever remember that the theater is no longer Intiman. Up the street from Cornish/Intiman Theater, the Seattle Repertory Theater has a main stage, Bagley Wright and a smaller stage, Leo K Theater. I’ve always thought of the whole boiling as Bagley Wright. Period.)

Arms and the Man was fabulous, especially S.F. Kamara as Capt Bluntschli.  Even so at the first interval, Nancy said, “I want to get some tea. I’m starting to fall asleep.”

“Me too.”

I wonder if Susan Sonntag ever talked like this?

I’m listening to my conversations with my friends even as they are becoming  spoken words and I see an image: My two great aunts tottering and doddering in downtown Olympia, their shoulders pressed together as though they are holding each other up.  And yet if we were twenty-somethings having these conversations while texting each other, we’d be .  .  . hmmm. I was going to say “young and lively and cute,” but actually I think we’d be supremely annoying.

Or as Nancy, always the Libra, said, “Aren’t we all just human?”

I think the larger point with which I started this post was that there’s nothing much to say anymore. Just make sure you VOTE.

My new Little Free Library is open for business! I’ve wanted one of these charming things forever and I finally sprung for one. I got the least expensive preassembled one I could find. I painted it the same color as my house and did as much of the hardware as I could figure out. I put in a request for a village volunteer to help me plant (read: do it for me) the library in the ground.

In case you (cousins in England) don’t know what I’m talking about, Little Free Libraries are all over Seattle, practically one in every block. Tiny houses, larger than a birdhouse, smaller than a doll house, they offer books to a community of dog walkers.

Actually anyone can take a book and add a book.  Lots of people walk in Seattle. They walk their dogs, walk to the bus, walk to the store. My neighbor Gwen, who already wants to know how many books she is allowed to put in the Little Free Library, walks every morning just to walk. So do I. I’ve been walking in the cemetery behind my house because I love it in the morning mist with the falling leaves. Just to be clear, though, there aren’t any Little Free Libraries in the graveyard.

One of my reasons for wanting a Little Free Library is my book room.  A small room in the cabin behind my house has welcomed all the books that I years ago dragged up by the car load from my parents’ house in Olympia. When I purge the book collections in my house, I add to the book room. People used to give me books by the sacksful:

“Do you want these for your yard sale?”

“Oh sure, just think of me as the Crown Hill Good Will northern division.”

I had unloaded hundreds of books at my annual yard sale but I’ve retired from that career. The last sale was three years ago after which I took a deep breath and packed everything up while trying to not look at it or think about it. In three carloads, I took it to Good Will. But I could not bear to get rid of the books. After all there were some I hadn’t read. There were others I had read but might want to read again. They are books. Books, books, I love my books!

Book Room

One of the beauties of a yard sale is that people carry junk off your property.  Thinking in those terms resulted in a guy from Books for Prisoners collecting all the paperback mysteries. I still have shelves and shelves of fiction, history, biography, humor, poetry, essays, a 12 volume Groves music dictionary (anyone?), a set of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization and a nearly complete set of Dickens from three summers ago when I read all the novels.

I enjoyed my summer of Dickens but none of the novels made the cut of books I want to re-read. Except maybe A Tale of Two Cities, which I’ve already read five times principally for the build-up to the scene at the end where Mme Defarge makes her murderous way through the streets for her final battle with Miss Pross.

But I digress. A delightful village volunteer, Jack, came over one Friday morning and dug the hole for the post, while I pulled what I call weeds and Tim (fellow gardener) calls ground cover in the winter garden. Jack set up a support to hold the post level. He mixed the cement and tamped it in. Then he came back a few hours later to affix the little library atop the post. I learned a lot, like I really need to get an electric screwdriver.

In progress

Vibrating with anticipation, I had already picked out the first books to go in the little library. I thought I’d be putting them in on Friday afternoon but Jack said to wait until Sunday. To appease my excitement, I put a sign in the little window saying “Books Coming Soon.” My maiden stack of books sat by the front door like Christmas presents waiting to be opened. Sunday morning I put them under my arm and marched out to the parking strip. I opened the door and to my great consternation found that someone had gotten there first. Someone had already donated two books. It took me all morning to stop feeling slightly cheated.

I understand that’s hardly in the spirit of the Little Free Library, whose registration plaques (I’ve ordered mine) say “Take a book. Share a book.”But do these people understand I have hundreds of books to get rid of? It’s been 24 hours and they are all still there!

I am making this a news free weekend because I am exhausted after the heart wrenching testimony on Thursday of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and the ensuing pissing match between Lindsey Graham Cracker and Brat Kavanaugh to see which could spew their putrid stream of testosterone the farthest in service to their own egos.

So.  .  . well, I went to an orientation meeting to become a volunteer for The PNA Village. The PNA (Phinney Neighborhood Association) began life as a community center for an area of town called Phinney Ridge. It has expanded into a Seattle octopus of good will and services that encompasses other neighborhoods, kind of a community center on steroids but in a bighearted way, not like the toxic steroidic display of the senators on Thursday.  The Greenwood Senior Center where I hold “All Present,” my song circle for people with dementia is now part of the PNA. My neighborhood of Crown Hill is touched by one of the tentacles (again in a good way, a protective way not the insidious way this administration is poisoning the country) of the PNA.

The Village is a program happening all over the country that helps people age in their homes. Earlier this year I had to make a decision about whether to sell my house (and free up some equity) or try to remain in my home without pots of money to actually keep it standing. In my research for this decision, I learned about a lot of programs and services that I was now eligible for because I am aging. I’m on the young side of aging but it is inexorably happening. It helps to identify facts, look ahead and just get on with things. Some people might want to identify the fact that women are human beings but I’m not thinking about that this weekend.

The Village, among other lovely services, deploys volunteers to do things for people. All kinds of things. One morning, five able-bodied and energetic young women came over and worked in the yard for an hour in a half, doing things I and my gardening buddy Tim couldn’t have done in months of work.  Another time someone grounded four electrical outlets for me. I’ve gotten wood chopped and trees pruned.  One volunteer who has come twice, brings his adorable little miniature-pinscher-chihuahua-ish dog named Smalls.

After five volunteer visits I was so grateful, I wanted to volunteer as well. I can’t do any of the physical things that have been done for me, but I can do other things: visit, play piano duets, play Scrabble, sing songs, take walks. But the salient thing here is the gratitude. In my earlier life as the self-erasing daughter of alcoholic and mentally ill parents, I often felt taken for granted, used really. As many women have felt when their feelings are dismissed and they aren’t entitled to throw a tantrum in front of the entire nation when they don’t get what they want. For me to actually choose to do something that in my earlier life I would have resented is a measure of how grateful I am.

So I went to the orientation. I already had an exhausting seven hour meeting on Thursday along with much of the rest of the country but I really want to be involved in the Village. I rode my bike to the meeting, got through it and came home.

Oxi-Fresh arrived to clean the carpets. While a cheerful guy named John attacked all the cat vomit stains, I worked in the garden. Tim and I are creating a little cat cemetery under the lilacs where there are already five cat graves: two of mine, two of neighbor cats and the bones of The Unknown Cat. We’ve got a little wall and a little entrance and five indicators of where the bodies are buried. We’re priming the area with succulents. Photos in the future.

OK, a paragraph without mentioning anything political. Not that I don’t think of politicians when I think of graves. Some of those guys on Thursday looked like they had crawled out of graves to come sit on the judiciary committee.

I talked to my friend and former college roommate, Mary-Ellis on the phone. She expected I would be all wound up from the hearing on Thursday. I told her I had been but that this was a news free weekend. Uh- huh.

Mary-Ellis said she hadn’t seen a blog post from me in a while. Once when I published a diatribe about rape culture, she commented mildly that she missed those “slice of life pieces you do so well.” Today I told her I would try to write something if for no other reason than I usually find it therapeutic. It’s been a challenge to not make any comment on politics or the lack of respect women get in this country. I think I’ve done pretty well all things considered.

The framework to this post is that here in the Pacific Northwest there is unrelenting heat. We’ve had no rain. Temperatures are in the high 80s and low 90s, which for some of us is unbearable. We are not an air-conditioner culture. The most we have is an AC sticking out of a bedroom window.

I don’t like extremes of temperature. I was born into what used to be a mild climate and that’s the way I like it. I’ve noticed over the years that extreme heat affects me in odd ways, ways that are reminiscent of PMS except without the uterine pain. Sweaty, headachey, nauseated, dizzy and unusually petulant.

This week I announced that I am in the running for being the crabbiest woman on earth. I’ve been annoyed at the amount of push back, which you’d think might appease me but doesn’t.

My neighbor Gwen, who I ran into (not literally though it might have come to that) at the grocery store said she could beat me in her sleep not that either of us are getting much.

“When the hell are we doing another movie night? I expect you this weekend if I don’t throw you out.”

“Oh yeah? Get out of my way. You’re blocking the aisle.”

Other friends have challenged me. My neighbor Bill said if I expanded the category to Persons, he’d win hands down.

I feel like snapping at all of them, “I’m not looking for sympathy. Are you looking for a fight? Because I’ll take you.”

Here’s some of the fallout from my heat-induced bad mood: On Monday I made what I decided was my last call to a podiatry clinic before I asked my doctor to refer me somewhere else. It had been 2 months. I tried their number 4 or 5 times, went through their menu, got put on hold for half an hour at a time. I left messages.

Finally someone called me back to say they’d been “having a little trouble with their intake.” This helpful and informative person suggested I log onto their website and go into the patient portal and create an account although he wasn’t sure I would be successful because I wasn’t yet a patient.  Then I could send them a message and perhaps someone would be able to respond to me that way.

I’m not sure why I even went through these motions. Probably because I was feeling masochistic—and this was before the heat. In any case, I created the account and sent the message. A month went by. Nothing came of it.

Which brings me to the hot weather and getting the new roof on my house, the dust and the disturbance, all of which I have already written about. The roof got finished and I reclaimed my life. While burrowing through a mound of neglected paperwork, I found the clinic referral and decided to try one more time. I was put on hold. Before I shook the dust from my feet of this referral, I let loose with a piece of my mind, detailing all the steps I had taken over the past few months and ending—right before I started to sob—with “Are you even taking new patients?”

Two minutes later, a friend called. “Elena I picked up the message you just left at the clinic. I’m the receptionist here and I can’t imagine what went wrong all the other times you called! Let me take care of this.”

This particular friend is one of the calmest, most measured people I know. She’s smooth and gracious and completely unflappable.

I cringed, “Oh no! You heard my freak out. I’m so embarrassed.”

“No, no, not at all. I can get you all booked in right now. The doctor is wonderful. You’ll love him.”

In some ways, her graciousness made it worse. One never says rude things or, let’s face it, is hysterical over the phone to people one knows. Answering systems are as faceless as comment sections. Real people aren’t affected by hideous remarks –or so we tell ourselves if we even think that far.

Anyway, that was Monday.

By Wednesday, I was even less in charge of myself.  In the evening the OK Chorale was coming to my house for a potluck rehearsal, always one of the highlights of the quarter. Everything that Tim, my head –gardener, also a baritone in the Chorale, and I had done in the garden for the past month and half had been with the tag “before the potluck.” As in, this doesn’t need to be done before the potluck or I need this moved before the potluck—you get the idea. God this post is taking forever. See, I’m cranky.

Anyway the day of the potluck it was 94 degrees. I’m glad I didn’t know that at the time or I would have just hanged myself and had done with it. I spent the day trying to stay calm and cool. I didn’t make any irritating phone calls or do anything requiring a lot of exertion. Tim was coming at 5:00 to help set up.

At 5:10 I texted him to ask when he was coming. No answer. At 5:30 he rang the front doorbell. Tim never comes to the front and never rings the doorbell. I opened the door and took one look at him grinning in what was probably a cheerful and anticipatory manner but that I read as sheepish.

“Are you drunk?” I demanded.

He looked wounded. “Why would you ask me that?”

“Because you seem a little weird right now.” Textbook projection.

I was on the edge of exploding into a tirade of everything he has ever done that irritated me and the list is long because we’ve been working together at this garden for four years and neither of us is used to collaboration. I managed to grab hold of the axe head that was my current existence and keep it firmly attached to the handle that was 64 years of social conditioning and apologized.

We went into the kitchen. I yanked open the refrigerator door and dislodged a bottle of sticky red liqueur that broke open on the floor. Glass fragments under my bare feet. Red wine like blood in the St Antoine district of Tale of Two Cities. I was Madame Defarge.

However no heads rolled. One of the Chorale members arrived and cheerfully wiped up the sticky mess declaring that she liked to be helpful making me feel worse than I already did.

Thursday morning was when I started telling people up front without saying hello that I was in a foul mood. People are so damn nice. That doesn’t help.

When you are in the middle of certain milestones of life, people around you aren’t so much interested in what you are going through as they are in telling you the story of what happened to them. Labor comes to mind. Weddings. Menopause. Death of a parent.

I’ve been through a few of these. I don’t have a good menopause story but the deaths of both parents provided me with copy. I’m now in the midst of another milestone: getting a new roof. Not just a new roof on the main part of the house, but also torch-down on the cabin roof, a new sun room roof and skylight replacements in the kitchen and bathroom. On top of the noise, disruption, dust and debris, the roofer’s schedule has coincided with a heat wave in Seattle so I am doubly, triply, no quadruply miserable.

Let’s start with the falling debris: tar paper, bits of moss and unidentifiable detritus in the garden. Vibrations from the hammering dislodged toxic powder that had been sprayed into a crevice to eliminate a wasp nest ballooning next to the sun room door and right over my organic tomatoes. I had been at great pains to protect the tomatoes from the dust for several days after the deadly deed was done, congratulating myself on my rescue op, when a fresh load of white dust was dumped on the sun golds.

Two lengths of fence were removed in order to let the gigantic dumpster park itself two feet from my bedroom window. There was actually an upside to this. Not its proximity but its existence. Having that drop box sitting there for a week allowed me to dispose of a collection of oversized, awkward and/or broken possessions like the card table from which I had inadvertently wrenched a leg. I was sorry to finally give up on that table as it was one of those leather-topped ones from the 1950s. My parents used to set it up for games of bridge and my mother had printed “Richmond” on its underside in her first grade teacher’s hand.

Toxic powder and small roof droppings aside, the roofer has been good about heaving trash to the neglected north side of the house, away from the garden. In fairness the north side already looked pretty bad, but now it looks like a junkyard. I’d list all the junk out there but I try not to look at it. This is the same reason I’m not posting photos. I have a vague impression of ladders, tarps, roof shingles and limbs of a locust tree that used to be growing across the cabin roof.

My inestimable neighbor, Bill (architect, woodworker, contractor, carpenter, furniture designer) found me the roofer and has been functioning more or less as the contractor on this job. Every morning he comes over to see what’s happened and what’s going to happen and then he interprets it to me. He is also putting in the skylights. All for the price of me feeding his cat Suli when he is gone for months out of the year. Or so he says. He may need some of those tomatoes, triple washed, of course.

I’m not getting enough sleep partly because of the heat but also because I am getting up earlier and earlier in order to have a few quiet and cool morning hours to read. The roofer comes at 7 so he can work while it’s cool. He drives away in the heat of the mid-afternoon leaving me with new piles of refuse to maneuver around and the hoses to coil.

I didn’t realize there was so much hose work in roofing. He’s got hoses and cords crisscrossed all over the roof and into the sun room and garden. I had only just trained Tim, my gardening partner to not leave the hoses lying around after he’s watered. I don’t think I have it in me to train another man. I complained about the hoses to Bill who on top of everything he’s already doing for me, also listens to my complaints.

“We’re guys,” he laughed. “You’ve got too many guys in your life right now.”

In truth I don’t have many complaints (that I’m voicing.) I am just so grateful that the work is being done and it’s not costing me my entire retirement. But long ago, 9 days to be exact, after the roofer had been at it for exactly six hours, I said to Bill, “This is taking forever!” But that was a kind of joke.

My brain is squishy. I can hear it when I move my head. Between the heat and the disruption and lack of sleep, I feel like a brown banana. The other morning I got out of bed and saw that I had left the front door standing wide open all night. If that wasn’t worrying enough, my next thought was even worse: “Did I just open that a minute ago?”

As I write, I am sitting in the back yard of my friend, Andrea whose cat I am feeding this week. I had this gig last year when Rocket the whippet was still with us. Now it’s just me and the soulful Fang. The timing is propitious. The same week that Seattle is sizzling and a roofer has taken over my house, I have a place to boil eggs and potatoes for potato salad without adding to the heat in my house. There’s also a lovely backyard and a cat I love.

The only down side is that two houses down, somebody is roofing a house.

Most of you are used to me writing about my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything. Just to recap, Gwen knows how to take apart and put back together a computer, a Porshe, a dress, a suit and the upholstery of a sofa.  She can figure out a solution to nearly any problem one might put to her. That she sometimes stumbles with her Smart TV is, I believe, because I am sitting there, emanating confusion about technology and gumming up the ether. It’s not her fault. In any case the little story I have to relate is under P for potatoes, small, in the Gwen Book Encyclopedia.

It all begins with me swinging from being a yard sale aficionado to someone who is aspiring to minimalism. I am getting rid of stuff hand over fist, trying to consolidate my possessions. To that end I have gotten rid of carloads of stuff and extraneous furniture. The secret is to grit your teeth, don’t think too much, be ruthless and don’t look back.

The resulting room flow and livability has been gratifying, leading me to greater excavations of stuff and more discriminating feng shui. There was a dark, creepy little area at one end of the piano where I sit when I teach. (Note to piano teachers: always sit on the treble end. When you demonstrate, you aren’t rumbling down there in the bass and frightening the children.) I always have a little table in this dark area to put stuff on: pens, pencils, stickers, my cup of tea. More recently, I’ve been using the old piano stool that goes with my grandmother’s (over 100 years) old Haddorff and upon which I will let no child sit because children squirm and the stool creaks and squeaks and disturbs my equanimity. I am all about not frightening the children.

I got rid of the table/stool concept altogether by ordering one of those overarm pouch thingys that hang off chairs and sofas into which one can put a TV remote, knitting, cat treats, baggie of marjiuana, whatever. The item came and it was way too big. Half of it worked perfectly, the rest hung off the side.

The problem

I couldn’t figure out a way to work with it. Then I got pen stains on it so I couldn’t send it back. I thought about just cutting it in half and duct taping it together so it would match the other side of my classy teaching chair.

The heretofore classy end

I knew, of course, that the solution was across the street, probably watching the cooking channel. I am judicious (or so I tell myself) about what I ask of Gwen because, well, you know, she is from Wisconsin. If her clothes caught fire from your lit match, she would apologize for being such a flammable person. She doesn’t say no easily although she has gotten better about it in the 17 years we’ve known each other. It’s also difficult to return a favor in kind because she can do everything better and faster than I can. This is the difficulty with living across the street from Wonder Woman.

After a week of deliberation, cursing the thing and threatening it with a utility knife, I took it across the street. I outlined the difficulties I was having and asked Gwen if she could do something about it.

“I can do anything,” she said.

I put that in as Gwen stating a fact, that’s all. Plus it delighted me. But she wasn’t saying she would do anything. I am keenly aware of these nuances.

“Just cut it in half” (she could even do that better than I could) “and stitch it up on one of your industrial-sized sewing machines.”

An hour later, she called to say it was ready and I nipped across the street. I said I wished she were the huggy, kissy type because words were inadequate to express how grateful I was for how beautifully she had taken apart the pouch and put it back together per my needs. This alarmed her so I controlled myself.

“Oh please, the hardest part was matching the thread.”

That wouldn’t have mattered to me. I’d have grabbed the first spool in the box or the one with the least amount of thread on it so I could then get rid of THAT piece of household detritus.

My new pocket-pouch made me so happy, I showed it to the next five people that came to my door, including the guy delivering my Imperfect Produce box.

The solution

Not frightening the children

Here I am, equanimity in tact, in my feng shuied teaching corner, futzing around with pens in the pouch. Since I don’t know how else to thank Gwen and since I am already watering her plants for the weeks she is at Lake Pewaukee, this post is my thank you. I hope it’s not too much exposure, her being from Wisconsin and all.

My neighbor Gwen read my previous blog The Solstice Zone, which ended with the teaser to stayed tuned for part two. She wrote me “I look forward to your next post to find out What Actually Happened at the Ocean.”

This alarmed me because nothing actually Happened at the Ocean. I thought about 1) making a bunch of stuff up 2) elaborating outrageously on what little happened 3) not writing a follow-up post.

I have chosen door number #2.

Kay and I were almost to the beach, decidedly punchy after being on the road for 4 hours longer than we expected to be, when, for some reason, we got to talking about gin. Odd because Kay drinks vodka and I drink Scotch.

Kay said, “What are those things?”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Those little pickled round things that you put on salads.”

“Capers?”

“Yeah, capers. Aren’t those Juniper berries?”

“No, capers are— well I used to know what capers are. They’re some kind of plant. Which I guess Juniper berries are, too.”

“I think capers are Juniper berries.”

“They’re not.”

“I’m going to text Lisa and ask her if capers are Juniper berries.”

Lisa who is Kay’s daughter, came through with the laconic “pickled flower buds.”

“What flower?” Kay texted

“Capparis spinose.”

This got us no closer.

“I’ll ask my guy, Eric,” Kay said. “He knows everything.”

“Just ask him if capers are the same as Juniper berries,” I said.

Meantime, I took the correct turn off 101. There was an arrow pointing west that said “Ocean Beaches.” So, hard to miss. I didn’t tell Kay but now I had to negotiate the spot where I got lost with Nina when I was here once before. Did I or did I not turn left at Humptulips and what exactly did I do at Copalis Crossing? And is that what I wanted to do this time?

I had time to get my bearings at Copalis Crossing because that’s where the goats were. See reason #4 for why this two hour trip took six: The Solstice Zone.

“Tell me another Violet story,” I said.

Violet is someone we both know. She’s a world class whiner. I think she has a microphone in her nose; the whine stands behind it and bleats: my back is bothering me, I have this pinched nerve, I have all these papers to grade, I’m terribly busy, I have family staying with me. She hasn’t a single excuse that all the rest of couldn’t easily employ except we don’t. We either don’t volunteer to do stuff or we get on with it and make it work.

So she’s not fun in a meeting but she was great fun to have along on our weekend getaway.  We invoked her continually as in,

“Kay, will you reach over and turn on the blinker for me? I have a pinched nerve and it hurts to move my hand.”

“Of course, Violet. Let me just get this arm out of its sling so I can reach across the car to accommodate you more easily.”

We got to The Sandpiper whining like Violet. At reception we were given one key by Heather who was in her Eighth hour of Day One on the job as the new manager.

“Can we get two keys?”

“There’s only one,” she said.

This was odd since our cabin (Cabin A better known as the A-frame and my favorite place at the resort) could easily sleep eight people.

I looked at Kay. “Are you planning to go anywhere?”

“Nope.”

I turned back to Heather. “We’re good.”

It was all moot, however, because the key didn’t work. Violet and I tromped back to reception while Violet and Kay lugged things out of the car to the bottom of the twelve steep steps required to get into the cabin.

Heather came back with me and we jiggled and pulled with the correct combination of huff and puff until we the got the door open. She said she would send someone over to fix the lock.

I’ve never traveled with Kay. In fact, the six hour car ride was the longest amount of time I’ve spent with her at one time. So it was delightful to find out that she wears well and, when we got to the cabin, she is as much a nester as I am. We fell all over ourselves getting everything tidied away.

Kay urgently needed to know what meal and what day we would have the little steaks she had brought. We mapped out our meals as we assembled all the food we had brought: we had enough to feed the entire resort. We were sitting down with mango Cosmopolitans when the answer came through from Eric that capers are not Juniper berries.

“I used to think capers were fish roe,” I said.

We did not have the little steaks that night. We had potato chips, chocolate and vodka. Wait, I seem to remember something healthy in there. Avocado slices? Some cheese? Yes, I think so. But principally Cosmopolitans and chips.

I prefer whisky for many reasons, one of which being it’s not sweet. Sweet plus alcohol and I feel dizzy and nauseated almost immediately. I knew this when I started in on the Cosmopolitans. I was already tired from lack of sleep for three nights. Add the alcohol and the Violet factor and I was in bed by 9:00. Kay was no doubt glad to see my whiny butt ascend up the steep stairs of the A-frame to my favorite room overlooking the ocean.

At 10:30 the next morning I finally felt like I entered back into my own body. I had slept til 7:00. Kay and I had already had one session of what we had come here to do: watercolors. I had gone for a walk on the beach and was settling back down to paint until lunchtime. A little bell went off. Ding! Here I am!

A rap at the door. Lupe and Luis. Lupe wanted to know did we need towels and Luis was here to fix the lock. I found out their names because I asked but in a fit of white privilege, it didn’t occur to me to introduce myself. I rectified that when I walked after painting session #2.

“Luis. Me llama Elena.”

Luis looked confused. Then he smiled uneasily.

I pointed upstairs. “Se llama? Te llama? Elle llama? Kay”

Now he looked alarmed. I guess he thought I was trying to quiz him as to who was upstairs whereas I was trying to say I didn’t know how to conjugate Spanish verbs, which didn’t need to be explained.

He backed away. “Sí, sí. Kay.” He pointed to me. “Elena. Gracias.” He started up the twelve steps to the A-frame.

After a few seconds to think, I said “de nada.” I didn’t think it was appropriate to repeat the one Spanish phrase I remember from grade school Spanish. “Pablo está bien, pero Luisa tiene catarro.” Who the hell cares? Luisa has had that damn cold for 55 years.

I told Kay.

“How did he take it?” she asked.

“I think he was just trying to get away from me.”

She nodded as though to say, “I would, too.”

The painting day was lovely. The sun was bright and warm though the wind was cold. The sea was bathwater warm. I walked three times, barefoot, in the surf in between our painting sessions.

I discovered another thing Kay and I have in common: the day we go home, we are like horses pointed toward the barn. We had the car packed in record time and were on our way.

The evening before we consumed everything we could manage so as not to have to lug it down those stairs—at least not in a box held in our arms. We had done our best with the flat of strawberries Kay had bought at the Farmer’s Market in Hoquiam and the two bags of lettuce I had picked from my garden the morning we left. All the avocados. Four bars of chocolate. (I bought more in the gift shop when we checked out.) We never did get to the little steaks.

We broke out the lunch: hard-boiled eggs, Cheetos, mango and peach nectar when we stopped for gas. We both needed to pee.

“You go first,” Kay said. “And bring back some paper towels.”

A woman who looked like a prison warden watched me go into the rest room and come back with wet hands. I held them out to her, palms up.

“Do you have a paper towel?” I asked.

She handed me a napkin from behind the counter. The kind that disintegrate upon contact.

“They have a condom dispenser and a needle disposal but no paper towels,” I reported to Kay. “And keep your hands in plain sight around the woman at the counter.”

Kay came back with four little lottery pencils, new and sharpened. White, brown, green and red. “Here,” she said. “Pick two.”

“How’d you get these past the warden?”

“I stole them while I was waiting in line.”

That was when I realized why this trip had been the most fun I’d had since I could remember. Fun in a child in the 1960s kind of way if you had still been of pre-consciousness-raising age. It was like a road trip with my Aunt Frances.

“We have to do this again,” I said as we got on the buzz-kill that is I-5. “Let’s rent a Winnebago and go somewhere for a week.”

“We’ll stuff it full of food,” Kay said.

Maybe we’ll have those little steaks.

The summer solstice can be a fuddling time, what with the veil between the worlds and all.  It’s really mid-summer, you know, not the beginning. But I don’t need to rock on that horse for this post. Much better to just relate the adventures of the past few days.

My birthday is solstice adjacent, which puts me in the solstice zone. It’s that period when the days in the Pacific Northwest are so long that it stays light until 10:00 PM.  Theoretically I love it but it messes with my sleep.

This year the zonal days gave me additional hours to obsess about what is happening on our southern border.  I had been living at a low news level since my week on Whidbey Island at the beginning of June. On the island I watched one hour (Ari Melber, he’s from Seattle) of MSNBC a day and came home determined to adhere to that practice.

I was so determined that I even told my neighbor Bill that one hour was the new normal.

“Uh huh,” he said.

Bill’s news consumption consists of the New York Sunday Times.

Wednesday, the longest day in the year but one, I made myself hoarse screaming at some poor staffer in Patty Murray’s office. The news footage of migrant children being smuggled to some jail in New York City under cover of night and with black blankets over their heads had just come out. I knew that if they were sending children to New York, they must be sending them to other states. I demanded to know where they were in Seattle –the exact street address, mind you. I wanted names of contact people and exact hours when I could personally go down there to hold them and listen to their fears and try to comfort them.

Bill came over as I was hanging up from this highly unsuccessful call. My cheeks were wet, spit was jumping from my mouth and my eyes were probably spinning around in my head.

“Do you know what they –babies –Have you heard about—Fuck trump–nursing –a three month old—all over the country  .  .  .”

“How many hours of news have you watched today?” he asked.

“You’re right,” I said. I snorted snot back into my nose and turned off the TV. The images stayed on the computer. I closed the computer.

Bill returned a lovely wooden cookbook holder that I had purchased for two dollars, not realizing that the reason it had been marked down from $35 was because the ledge at the bottom that actually makes it a book holder was missing. He took it to his shop, added the ledge with a gorgeous piece of wood and sanded, stained and buffed the entire item until it might have been priced at $50.

We chatted and Bill mentioned he would be out that evening. After he left my house I watched until his car pulled away from his parking strip. Then I turned the news back on and watched it, becoming increasingly agitated and upset until he came home at 10:00. Bad sleep and not enough of it. This was the Midsummer night’s eve.

The actual long day was balancing. I had a splendid tea and conversation with my friend Anna. Nancy and Scott came over for our biannual Scotch evening, the other one being on the Winter Solstice. We stayed up late (for me.) They left after dark. Another restless night and not enough of it.

The next morning my friend Kay who shares a birthday with me—this was her 80^th— and I left for a weekend at the ocean. The normally 2 ½ hour drive to my favorite beach resort, The Sandpiper, took us 6 hours for the following reasons:

1) A tie-up at Joint Base Lewis McChord (When did they start calling it this? Since I was a child it was just Fort Lewis. Period.) The tie-up was expected.

2) Not paying attention on the road and ending up in Matlock, which I only know as a TV show but turns out is also a town 30 minutes off Highway 101, which should have easily taken us straight to the Pacific Ocean. I’ve been to the ocean a hundred times in my life and I seem to manage to get lost someplace different every time.

3) Stopping at the Hoquiam Farmer’s Market to look at all the stuff for sale and to have lunch at Deirdre’s Café, Deidre being a talkative woman with a black eye’s worth of false eye-lashes and dark shadow and a Pierrette mouth painted on with black lipstick.

4) Stopping at a sign: Goats for Sale and coochie-cooing eight baby kids. The billy had a beard like Confucius and though he looked as fierce and mean as most studs, he was a big love who pushed his head against mine and licked my nose.

Back to Deirdre’s Café for a minute: I ordered an uneatable-because-too-spicy salad. Kay got a scrumptious looking sandwich of bacon, ham and cheese and dripping with sauce, which she was kind enough to share with me. I took a bite and started chomping. Immediately I coughed violently, sneezed twice, coughed again, almost choked and coughed a third time.

“You okay?” Kay asked, calmly munching.

I drank some water and when I finally found my voice, I asked “As we age, is it normal to sometimes have trouble swallowing?”

“Yup. You need to take smaller bites and chew everything really well.”

I looked at her, bacon hanging out of my mouth.

“Oh, and don’t talk with food in your mouth.”

Before I started to protest with dignity (although I really have nothing to protest,) she added, “I have to watch that, too.”

All right then.

Standing up to leave I looked at the uneaten salad. “I meant to ask her to leave out the spices but I forgot.”

“That happens when you age, too,” she said.

Read about our adventures at The Sandpiper in the next episode of The Solstice Zone.

I had a lovely birthday, thank you. I am now 64. There’s no more “when I’m.”  My friend and college roommate, The Very Miss Mary-Ellis Lacey who is actually now a Mrs. Adams, sent me a birthday card just before she and her husband left on a Rhenish cruise. (Yeah, look that one up.) Mary-Ellis said she hoped there would be a blog post awaiting her return. This is my receipt of that birthday card.

The morning of my birthday I sat in the garden on my chaise lounge amidst the hummingbirds, finches and crows, and one cat, and received visits and flowers and cards.  I was just out there to read the paper but still they came. One at a time, the way I like it.

Late morning Mai took me for brunch at Swanson’s Nursery. If you can avoid spending all your money as you thread through the plants, their lovely café, Barn and Field, has a superb menu.

We were sitting with our frittata (me) and our Portobello sandwich (Mai) when I had an urgent need of the waitperson who had stopped at the next table. I can’t remember what I wanted from her; that’s been eclipsed by my ensuing gauche and disgraceful performance. I wildly waved my hand at her and she easily resolved whatever I was about to erupt over.

I looked at Mai, quietly eating her Portobello sandwich, and was visited with a horrifying awareness of myself. Next to Mai, quiet, slight, soft-spoken and shy, Mai who I have known for 35 years, I suddenly felt like a kangaroo next to a turtle—the small pet kind, not the large snapping kind. Or a Great Drooling Pyrenees next to a middle-aged cat.

“Mai, am I a loud, bossy American?”

I watched her face, reserved and a bit sad. I watched her Chinese-ness struggle against 35 years of, well, me. I’ve never known her to say anything even remotely unkind.

“Yes,” she finally said, apologetically

“Does it embarrass you?”

She went all Chinese again but finally said, “It depends.”

It was a funny, touching little exchange. I could see her point of view and I felt loved. Still it had darker echoes of an exchange I once witnessed between my mother and one of her church friends.

“Am I abrasive?” my mother shrieked incredulously.

“Well, Mary you do come on strong at times,” the mild mannered Lois said.

There are days I console myself with knowing that no one currently in my life had enough exposure to my mother when she was alive, to accuse me of resembling her. But the exchange with Mai got me thinking about a cleavage within my personality that has unsettled me all my life (and did I mention I am 64?)

I am, at heart, an introvert: quiet, reflective, sensitive. I can spend not just hours, but days alone. When I was younger, I forced myself to be social every few day, treating the occasion like bad-tasting medicine necessary to basic health—kind of like exercise.

On those occasions, unless it was a small, safe group, I over-compensated. I became the life-of-the-party, spotlight whore, stage monster Great Drooling Pyrenees. Or so I felt as I cringed with shame on the way home. It was as though I had some crazy relative living inside me who I let run amok a few hours a week so she could get all the wiggles and shouts out of her and maybe pee in public for good measure.

I didn’t understand how uncomfortable I was maneuvering a crush of noise, people and social expectations. Nowadays I recognize that my ability to be among humans caps at about three hours a day, less if it’s a large noisy situation. Then I need 21 to recover.

A few years ago I forced myself to attend a friend’s Christmas party because throwing a large holiday party is her beloved tradition. The Christmas season can be a nightmare for me. I like the lights, the music, the gifts and food but there is such a glut of it that I want to cower at the base of the front door and not open it from Thanksgiving til after New Years. After all the choral rehearsals, concerts and holidays craft sales, the last thing I want to do is party. (I actually never want to party within the usual meaning of the act.)

Anyway I walked into this party a little late, indicative of how much I didn’t want to be there as I am usually constitutionally incapable of being late, ask anyone who knows me. The house was packed with brightly dressed people who had already gone through the buffet line and were sitting on sofas and chairs, chatting animatedly, smiling, laughing, squealing. Guests milled and pooled at the food table. Wine flowed. Jewelry glinted and gleamed in the lights. Music blared above the chatter.

I hung up my coat. I looked bleakly at the festivities. I was tired. I had just finished the teaching quarter, four choir performances and two weekends of art and craft sales. I circled around the house smiling insincerely, saying hello to a few people until I found my friend, the hostess, in the kitchen where the gleam of her earrings ricocheted off the toaster. I gave her a hug and said what a great party it was. Then I quietly threaded my way back to the hall, got my coat, drove home and got in my jammies. I had been there for all of 90 seconds.

That was the night I decided I wouldn’t even go through the motions next time. I can do what I want when I want. I’m 64.