Stove Troubles

Upstate is cold now.  Windshields are coated with frost in the morning. The storm windows are up.  And regrettably, my apartment feels like an icebox.  The heating system has changed since last year which means that the coal stove was replaced by a gas stove.  This is a definite upgrade for my landlord who was responsible maintaining the coal stove's 12 hour cycle.  Each morning and evening without fail, he had to rock the grates on the stove to shake out any ash.  When that was done the ash had to be cleared and then sifted for bits of coal that had not yet burned. Those bits were placed in a bucket that was then topped off with fresh coal to be dumped into the stove.  

The whole process was complicated by a rather tricky thermometer system that I didn't fully understand.  What I do know is that shaking the grates was an exhausting task that could not be stopped until the heat had spiked above a certain temperature.  I never got the hang of shaking and the few times I tried to stoke the stove, the results were catastrophic.  On those occasions, I was responsible for almost putting out what I came to think of as the eternal flame and would then need call in a rescue stoker, usually my landlord, to return order to the cycle.  

Still, the new gas stove has proved a definite downgrade when it comes to getting heat into my apartment.  The problem lies in the proximity of the stove to the thermostat, no more than 10 feet away.  Both are located in the downstairs kitchen that my landlords inhabit and the thermostat is set to 68 degrees.  This would be a very reasonable indoor temperature if the small pocket of warmth were not counted upon to heat the entire three-story stone mansion.  To make matters icier, my apartment is located in the tower which has no insolation.  In fact, it gets so cold in the back rooms that the closet doors must be kept open to keep the pipes from freezing.       

I don’t do well in the cold.  My tendencies are frog-like--slow down, move as little as possible.  Now I spend my evenings tucked under wool blankets with a hot corn bag on my feet and a space heater at my side dreaming of South America.  

My Future, My Bicycle

I am back in Essex armed with a plan: 1) Apply to Journalism MA program at University of Missouri 2) Work 3) Save money 4) Spend winter/spring 2011 in Buenos Aires with my sister.  So far, the plan is on track.  I have fussed of over my application essays, snagged four jobs and an internship, stopped traveling on weekends, and sent a letter of inquiry to over 20 English language institutes in Buenos Aires.  It is my hope that I will be able to support myself there by teaching ESL.  

It is my beautiful black bicycle, referred to by friends as my cadillac, that is making this all happen.  My future is quite literally riding on it.  Without my black beauty, I could never commute between all my jobs.  

Four of the jobs are sources of greatly appreciated income.  I take a ferry and then pedal my way to a little grocer/cafe in Vermont, pump up two steep hills to the preschool where I must build my own fire and set about sorting through hopelessly confused files, speed back down hill to paint trim in town, and then wearily wobble home to write some press releases for a freelance gig.  These efforts are for rent money, food, and the ticket to Buenos Aires.  For school, I ferry and bike three more times a week to Vermont and intern for a healthy food and living magazine.  Though they don’t know it yet, they will reimburse me with a fantastic letter of recommendation--hopefully raving about my smarts and sharp writing skills--for journalism school.    

Sunday is my day off.  The day that I have time to go rock climbing, cook a huge pot of quinoa for the week, do laundry, catch up on emails, and write this blog.  My bicycle stands still, safely perched on the back porch protected by the awning.  We are taking a deep inhale before turning into the wind and starting another week, another hill.   

Brotherly Love

Making faces in the train station.

For two and a half weeks now I have been with my brother Anthony, who lives in Philadelphia.  He has been the most gracious host and has allowed me to live out some of the college life that I never experienced.  

I sped through college--in and out in three years while holding down a part-time job.  It was high school that Anthony skipped.  When he was 16, instead of starting his junior year, he jumped into an early start college on the East Coast.  At the time, I was his only immediate family within reach by bus or train.  He spent many of his vacations with me in Manhattan.  

Anthony in turn was the one who knew my world there most intimately.  He came to class with me and played Simon and Garfunkel for my students.  When visiting, he joined me for my nightly walks to Washington Square Park and sat with me at my favorite coffee shop in the East Village.  He was my sidekick.

Now it’s my turn to visit him.  Without work, I am the one with the time to visit for a few weeks.  He comes home from work to find me hanging out in his apartment.  He treats me to coffee.  

At 20, he is somewhere between his friends at college that he still visits on weekends and his coworkers at the laboratory.  He stays up late and stumbles out of bed moments before pulling on pants and running out the door to work.  On the weekends, he slips into what I call coma sleep and cannot be awoken before noon.  He cleans up the apartment more to appease me than out of preference.  

Living with him, I am allowed to unleash my own 20 year old or as much of her as I can let out.  I have learned to just shut the door and go out and have fun even if the apartment looks like a tornado just blew through.  I am getting better and better at this, although I still worry that the stacks of dirty dishes will attract house pests.  When it comes to sleep, my internal alarm clock has rolled back and I wake up around 8 instead of 6:30.  

Best of all, I had my very first ever crash on some random person’s couch.  Actually the couch wasn’t exactly random and it wasn’t exactly by choice, but I did sleep on a properly beer stained college futon in the living room of his friend’s house.  We meant to go home on the train as it was my one request to sleep in my own bed.

I should have known this request might be too much to ask since Anthony is notorious for confusing schedules and missing busses, trains, and flights.  That’s what happened and all we could do is go back to the apartment from which we had just said our goodbyes.  They were gracious hosts and welcomed us back to their living room furnished with a hodge podge of fold out chairs and a large table with a sticky top that was covered with bottles of alcohol, plastic coffee cups, and an unclaimed jug of Clamato juice.  

As I said, the hosts were gracious and when I said that I couldn’t possibly keep my eyes open a minute longer, they separated my futon from the other half of the room by pulling across a make-shift rod and offering a blanket.  I gratefully accepted and was asleep before they got back to their drinks and games.  

The part that really made me proud was only relayed to me the next morning.  A roommate who I had not met arrived home late and needed to walk past me to get to the party.  I was told that he flung back the curtain and asked, “Who the hell is this girl on the couch?”  I have never been that girl on the couch and for that I can thank Anthony.  

I woke Anthony up early the next morning and we took a train back into Philadelphia.  To my surprise, I didn’t feel half bad being in public with yesterday’s underwear and morning breath.  A small inconvenience in comparison to spending time with a brother I love dearly.           

Being There

Morels, cereus flowers, fiddle heads, tomatoes—I adore all of these plants that are so dependent on season and in some cases luck. I have never actually eaten a morel. However, I have heard them referenced often and have always thought they sounded delicious. I cannot imagine feeling anything but love for a secretive mushroom that is best cooked in butter and cream. It is my hope to someday find and gorge on my very own patch of morels.

The other plants I have consumed and/or gazed upon, and can say that my life is richer because of them. They all have a short window in which they can be optimally enjoyed. Of course you can buy a tomato at the grocery store all year long, but I am not talking about that kind. The ones I am thinking of are the tomatoes that are a vibrant red or gold color (not necessarily uniform), which are so ripe that they sometimes burst their skins leaving a fissure that extends deep into the meaty fruit. When you cut them open the meat falls apart into thick steaks and I like them best with a sprinkle of salt. It is the end of the summer and the tomatoes in Upstate New York are replete. I am doing my best to eat as many as possible.

There is voracity to my eating. Not only do I love fresh garden grown tomatoes, but while salting the slices I recall that there were no tomatoes last year. The blight took them all; only a few green tomatoes were salvaged, picked way before their prime. I breaded and fried them but they are incomparable to this year’s crop. I eat more than I should; I eat for when they are gone.

Last year I was introduced to fiddle heads. They are something that must belong to the world of elves. Small green coils, like the wood carving of a fiddle’s head, they push up in early spring and within a week start uncoiling and become mature ferns. For that week, I picked them, making sure not to thin out the patch too much. I sautéed them to eat plain and boiled them in soup. They have the snap of a green bean and were the first living color after a longer winter of root vegetables.

The night-blooming cereus flower, a native of the Sonoran Desert, is a feast for the eyes. The large bloom with its white petals and coral-like inside parts releases a strong perfume. The flower spends all her beauty in one night; by morning, she is ragged and limp. I was there. Last night, under the full moon one bloomed on the patio below my window. It was everything fresh, new, and fleeting. It was the debutante at her first ball, the wedding, and the wedding night. This morning, to my surprise she was fading but was not completely gone. By noon she was dead. What glory and tragedy to live a lifetime in one magical night!

The fleeting nature of these plants encourages me to be single-minded. I cannot be stopped. I will eat tomatoes three meals a day, troll the river banks for wild fiddle heads, and continue to search for my very own morel spot. And should I be privileged to see another cereus bloom, I will stay in the dark watching and wordless.

Escape Story

I finished Bread Loaf two weeks ago and have been back in Essex for one.  Strange to go from being fully occupied to having all the time in the world.  For the past week I have been working at finding work and taking time to read anything that I could not during the summer.  Sometimes reading is an escape from dealing with the messiness of life.

A perfect example of this involves me, a mouse, and a semi-effective mousetrap.  The background to this story is: my house has a mouse, or rather several mice.  We had some last winter and thought they were gone but not so.  I cooked a large dinner last week and put off doing the dishes ‘til the morning only to find the plates cleaned off and the counter covered with tiny droppings.  Tim set the traps and we were in extermination mode. 

The inhabiting mice are smart(er than we thought) and quickly figured out how to snag the bit of ground sausage and peanut butter without tripping the spring.  Ingenuity on their part led to Tim’s greater ingenuity—BACON.  So the trap was set again, this time with a piece of fatty bacon hooked to the platform, and presto, the very next night the trap was sprung killing a tiny field mouse.  Tim disposed of our intruder in the woods and reset the trap.  I was sure that was the end of our mouse trapping.

Not so…the next morning, shortly after Tim left for the farm at 3:45 am, I went into the kitchen to get a bowl of homemade pasta (the pasta hell that I went through the day before merits its own story) and made a conscious decision to not look in the direction of the trap and ruin my snack.  I ate, read, and went back to sleep. 

Waking up, I returned the bowl to the kitchen and was starting to run the dishwater when I stopped to look over at the trap.  It was sprung, but no mouse.  I looked closer and saw a small trail of blood leading to the corner where a tiny mouse with a black tail the length of it’s entire body was hunched.  I looked closer.  It quivered a little and then seemed to move. 

It took no more than that to send me running out of the kitchen and to keep me out for the rest of the day.  When Tim got home I was in the bedroom, escaping the messy kitchen scene, reading.  He said, “There’s a mouse in the kitchen.  Did it just fall out of the bag I brought home?”

“Where is it?” I asked.

“On the floor by the door.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Look near the trap.  Is there a mouse cowering in the corner?”

“No.”

This Hercules of a mouse had managed to deliver it’s crushed frontal lobe (with a smashed nose and eyes) from the death grip of the trap and then pull it’s bleeding body from the counter across the kitchen to the door.  He was not lively, but certainly not dead.
I sat up high on my pillow with my feet tucked under me and asked Tim not to bring the mouse near the bedroom.  He took it outside and left it near the woods where it could die, or, maybe through some valiant effort, live and become a legend in the mouse world.  For my part, I promised to do the dishes the next morning.  I meant it too.  But I heard the mouse trap snap and now it seems easier to stay in bed writing this silly story.

The North Country

I sit in the diner with the chalkboard of specials and the stuffed bobcat leaping off the wall. From my seat at the counter, I can hear the griddle sizzling. I see the grease stained cabinets through the window, a sometimes the cook—a woman with hair coiled tightly into a bun and a matching moustache over her lip. I know her habits and her vices. I’ve watched her drink cold air on the deck off the kitchen, and sometimes cigarettes too.


See, my office faces the diner. We share a bank of the frozen Boquet River. We are set in the North Country, carrying out our lives as stories. It is a place where people get stuck, lost, or born. Those who weather a few winters rarely leave. The freeze and melt seem to push their feet deeper in. They are united by their resolution to love this land despite itself. I finish my sandwich and watch the neon clock above the window. I can’t be sure if I am sinking or leaving. I suspect that they might not be that different.

Landlocked

The Essex Ferry stopped running three weeks ago. Now the ice has collected at the dock; it rattles. There is no traffic on the road when I come and go. I pull out from the driveway after glancing just once in each direction. I won’t travel as often to Burlington and I am tired of the strip malls that Plattsburgh offers. A sleepy cold has settled in. It holds me to its lap, making me nap too. I think of my mother, tired of watching me, hugging me as she dozed in the late afternoon. So, I settle and watch the grey sky from my window.


These days have little curiosities. The nimble fox darting around the corner of the barn, the five deer standing together, as if conferencing, in the middle of a field, and the Asian man who rides his bicycle down Essex Road. He has not abandoned his bicycle like I have. I am in awe of these small things.