"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

fearless French toast

Yesterday morning I was making French toast, and thinking about my upcoming Fearless Writing workshop, which will be in Little Rock this coming January: two seemingly unrelated tributaries of thought and action joining together.

First, the French toast. Here in Vermont, there are lots of good artisanal bakeries. When I'm short on time, or don't feel like  mucking up the kitchen counter in that singularly messy flour-and-sticky-dough-bits post-kneading way (inevitable when baking bread at home), the choice of good local breads is abundant. When I purchase, rather than make, bread, our current household favorite is the crisp-crusted, texture-y  "Mad River Grain" loaf from Red Hen Baking Company, in Waitsfield, Vermont. How can you not like a company that describes this particular loaf on their site as "A veritable orchestra of grains and seeds! (Or maybe a 70's funk band is more your style?). " The Red Hen breads are made with levain, a natural, moist slightly soured leavening which helps them keep very well, for at least two days, right in their nice brown paper bags.

What was on hand yesterday was a part of a loaf of Mad River Grain that was four or five days old. We are talking hard. Not spoiled, not moldy, way too good to waste. But hard. Seriously hard.

French toast was in order, if I could saw through the loaf. 

Now, the day before, I had done sawing of a different kind. I had --- I think --- solved a consistent problem about set-up on a workshop I teach,  Fearless Writing (which will also be a book, to be published by Ten Speed Press in 2011). 

See, I just love teaching this workshop and I have infinite confidence in it. It substantively transforms the way people write and think about writing. It makes sense of and utilizes the feelings of anxiety that inevitably arise in creative endeavors. It works for writers, would-be writers, and even people who don't identify themselves as writers at all. Many people take it for the fearlessness, using the writing practices as a tool for personal development (though they, too, often find themselves better writers by the end of the workshop). There are always breakthrough moments (and pieces of writing done in session) that take my breath away: surprising, moving, strange, fascinating, funny, unpredictable.

And I get to witness all this! I even, as the teacher, get to "facilitate" it (quotes because the word "facilitate"  is too manager-speak for me). The process energizes us both: me and the students.

But even though I am the teacher, and a good one, I am also, at the same time, forever and always a student of that process. 

Fearless is, after all the same map I follow when I write (48 published books and counting, though the unpublished work is equally important to the process of growth as a writer). It's the map I use when I take on almost any challenging life-endeavor. And each time I teach it I get a refresher course, for, as psychologist Richard Price once said, "You always teach what you most need to learn. You are your own worst student." 

But when I was also the one who was responsible for organizing the workshop --- registrations, confirmations, promotion, and so on --- the experience was not energizing, but frustrating. 

Naturally, I want registering for the class to be impeccable and simplified. But this isn't easy when an individual, rather than a sponsoring institution, does it, and in a wildly varied number of locales. And when that individual is me, whose real work is teaching and writing, well, handling this aspect is like  speaking in a second language, one which I can understand and function well in, but only with effort, only if I pay attention to every word. Since each possible venue had different physical arrangements, parameters, expenses, directions, add-ons, and options, there seemed to be no way to make it systematic: each time I did a workshop independently, the registration-wheel had to be reinvented.

Besides being time-consuming for me, it wasn't simple and easy for students. I wasn't set up; I didn't take credit cards. Poor old Fearless Writing students had to go through low-tech high-bother shenanigans: printing out a registration form, filling it out by hand, writing a check, putting it in an  envelope, sealing, stamping, and addressing that envelope, getting it to the post office, etc: things that once might not have been a big deal but are now dinosaurish ways of communicating and transacting. For sure, though, my students, being willing to go through all that, were always a very committed bunch.

Doing this type of administrative organization was, for me, possible ... but as hard as the five-day-old loaf through which, yesterday morning, I was trying to saw. Which is why in the past few years I've mostly taught Fearless only when there was a sponsoring organization or institution (like Rowe Conference Center or The Studios at Key West, to name two of my favorite recent hosts). 

I did finally succeeded in getting through the very hard loaf, using a serrated knife and much determination. Thin, even slices were out of the question, but yes --- there would be French toast. And this was the point at which it and Fearless Writing began merging in my thoughts.

Because the day before I had finally solved the organization/registration problem, this, and problem-solving in general, were on my mind as I began the next step of the French toast: whisking together  eggs, milk, dash of salt, and a good healthy pour of Tahitian vanilla (first opening the small brown bottle and sniffing it, an automatic small kitchen reflex, simply for extra sensual pleasure).

Because how did I solve the registration? The same way, at least at the start, that I had just sawed through that boulder-hard bread: with frustration and determination. First, I'd gotten annoyed enough to think "Oh, for crying out loud! There has to be a better way to do this!" (I wonder how many good discoveries, small and large, have begun this way. Probably about as many as books written by former non-writers, who, reading something they were partially engaged with and partially irritated by, said to themselves, "Hey!  I could write better than this!" And then did.).

The Red Hen folks kindly offer a page they call "our favorite uses for day-old bread". French toast is not on it, presumably because everyone knows how to make it. But in case you happen not to know, basically what you do is beat everything listed above (except the bread) together. Then you put the dry bread in this mixture, allowing it to soak it up and soften. And then, after awhile,  you brown the soaked bread in a hot buttery pan.

About softening: bear with me for a second here.

Back when I used to live in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, I'd go to a remarkable physical therapist / healer, a sweet,  smart funny guy named Michael Avenoso (pictured, unflatteringly blurrily, left) who eventually became, and still is, a friend, as is his wife, Jae. (I've mentioned Michael before, in the post Blue-Ribbon Silliness. ) Back then, Michael did a kind of bodywork called myofascial therapy.

(He'd still be doing it today, were he not himself --- so unjustly! --- nearly crippled by advanced Lyme Disease, which he got when quite young, and which went undiagnosed for many years. Why this should happen, to someone who gave so much, and still had so much left to give, is one of those mysteries that stick in my craw big-time whenever I hear people say things like, "Everything happens for a reason." But now I am digressing).

Michael examined, with eye and hands, my left trapezius (upper back). There, for years, I'd had intermittent, sometimes debilitating spasms which could last days, even weeks, and for which I had tried every type of mainstream and alternative therapy I knew of, with no success. Michael was going to be my last last attempt at treating a pain I'd come to view as inconstant but chronic. "Hmmm," he said, "I think we can get it healed in ten, maybe twelve sessions." And we --- he --- did.

Now myofascial therapy hurts. Fascia, in case you don't know, is a type of connective tissue. If you've ever cut up raw meat --- how weird is this for a vegetarian to say? --- you've seen it. The red part of the meat is the animal's muscle fiber; the white, its fat. Now think of those very thin, translucent stretchy strands of connective tissue,  called, by chefs and cutters-up of meat, "silver-skin," for it is a sort of bluish-silver.  Silver-skin is fascia. And what Michael did was somehow, without actually breaking the skin, was to somehow reach beneath it and manipulate the fascia, ripping up the adhesions that presumably kept the dysfunctional muscles in place.

And I mean ripping.

It all hurt, but there were certain especially painful manipulations. When Michael was about to do one, he warned me. We had to work together, he explained: for him to get in there and do his thing, I had to unclench, relax. This --- in the face of pain I knew was about to be inflicted on me --- was about the most active, willful, focused relaxation I've ever been called on to do.

And here's what Micheal would say.   

"Soften. Soften to my fingers. Soften."

Somehow, I did. He was able to heal that injury, which has thankfully not been part of my life for more than a decade now.

Over the years, when I find myself tightening into resistance --- resisting getting down to work (or resisting finishing work for the day. even though it's one in the morning and time to go to bed), resisting listening to something I consider asinine, ill-informed, unfair or downright loony, resisting hearing news that I know I won't want to hear --- over the years, as I feel the quills rising and the tightening shell of anticipatory defense, I say to myself, "Soften."

I say to myself, "What does it hurt to listen?"

I say to myself, "Just start, set the timer for 15 minutes, do it, and then see how you feel."

I say to myself, "Listen, Dragon, strong people can stay open to anything. They stand on their own two feet, they know where there integrity is and they don't need anyone else to validate it. They know they're not going to fall over if someone disagrees with them, so they're not reactive, just open. They can just quietly take in whatever is being said to them, and then decide what, if anything, they want to do with it. They can afford to listen. Don't you want to be strong that way, CD? "

I say to myself, "Soften."

(Above right: a recent picture of me, taken by Walter Fogg, of the Brattleboro Food Co-Op. I'm the December cover girl for the Co-Op's monthly magazine, Food for Thought. They've named me Producer of the Month, though what I produce is not honey or wine or vegetables but books, though many are about food. When I looked at Walter's photograph, in comparison to earlier photos of me, I thought, yeah, I have softened. And no, I don't mean just around the jaw line. ) 

As I put that good but extremely hard bread, in its big chunky ungainly slices, into the egg-milk-vanilla mixture, I thought about the process of softening.

About how it had taken frustration to saw me open, and "There has to be a better way" to make me consider the possibility of finding some kind of new, workable approach to the registration problem.

Of course, I'd have to find the ingredients in which it would make sense to soften. Something which would be worth absorbing. ("Solution": both the answer to a problem and a liquid into which something has been dissolved.) 

That's where research came in (and where the analogy falls apart; obviously the Mad River Grain bread slices didn't decide to soften and then go out and research milk and eggs). But so what? Though the bread was still so hard it really didn't want to absorb, it was sliced and in the liquid and I I had it in my sights now, just like I had, the day before, the conviction that a potential Fearless admin solution existed.

Research is an incredibly easy, even fun, adventure, thanks to the Internet (I am of an age to have researched in libraries using card-catalogs; you still had the thrill of the chase, but it was clunky, slow, and full of dead ends). As I turned the bread pieces so both sides could bathe in the eggy vanilla liquid, piling the dipped slices on top of one another, and repeating the process, I reflected that at the research point, you could say that although I was still hard, I had been sliced, literally opened, to possibility. 

And it turned out there was a solution.

With a little persistence, Internet research is remarkable. It's one whoa! There are options! A lot of them out there! experience after another. And as I'd done it, the previous day, I began, like the bread, to soften in earnest. There were conference registration services!  This service does this? And this? You mean I wouldn't have to... And I'd be able to find out if... Research moved into analysis, comparison... I was absorbing, in short.

Gloating, and still in some wonderment at what I'd been able to do the day before, I left the bread in its egg-milk bath alone for a few minutes, while I began slicing some good Vermont apples of several varieties (Black Oxford, Macoun, Cox's Orange Pippin) to saute with brown sugar and cinnamon for the topping.

After the slicing, I visited the bread again. It was at last starting to absorb, sufficiently softened so that I could poke each piece, gently, with the tines of a fork, allowing it to soak up more.

On the previous day, I finally choose an online company called, logically enough, regonline. It does only conference and workshop registrations, hence A) has a system, B) it has it down.

By now, back in breakfast world, I had a little butter sizzling in two skillets. Into one, the apples. Into the other, the finally tender slices of egg-soaked bread, fragrant with vanilla.

Heat is the magical alchemist in cooking, changing one thing to another, in countless tiny increments. The apple slices soften, then brown; their juice, sweet and autumnal, cooks down and concentrates, its water turning into fragrant steam on the way. And because heat solidifies protein --- the eggs in the milk in this case --- the soaked bread, now sizzling in the buttery skillet, becomes firm and golden brown and a little crisp on its exterior, and moistly tender inside. Quietly, but automatically, given the right set of ingredients, techniques, elements, and just a little knowledge, transformation  happens. Hard bread becomes French toast.

The heat of finally focusing and taking action yesterday had firmed and changed me. My action, once I'd decided on the site, was the flame, the dynamic change element. Inputting the data, writing the descriptions, learning the program, spending some time on the phone with the amazingly helpful and available tech support folks. And then wow! No more reinventing the registration wheel for Ms. Dragonwagon! 

So now I can teach, and Regonline can do registrations (you can see what I did here if you haven't already). I am happy to pay Regonline a percentage of workshop fees for this service, which is not just registration, but full details,  payment, location (Little Rock, January 11-14, 2009). Everything is now there, even directions to the Historic Arkansas Museum, where it's being held. There's even the ability to take credit cards (but without my having to mess with them. for which, hallelujah --- it was a prospect that filled me with horror). 

But suddenly, it was figured out! Suddenly it was easier for everyone! As the Staples people say, "That was easy."

I flipped the French toast in the pan. I  stirred the apples, which were ready for a small handful of brown sugar now, and a bit of Saigon cinnamon. I called out to David and asked him to set the table. He did, and made tea.

Then we sat down to eat, in the dining room of our house (the short end of its L shape pictured left, about two months ago). By now the trees are leafless, and the ground dusted with snow, beauty still present, but subtler and chillier. But the dining room still faces out the two downstairs windows visible in the picture, and though it was a winter day, there were a few patches of blue in the sky and just a bit of sun shone in. And the French toast pieces, which at last had softened properly and browned nicely,  lay overlapped and golden on the blue plates. The fragrant apple slices, translucent and shiny with their glaze of brown sugar, barely holding their shape, were in a pile beside the French toast. The whole was topped with a dab of exquisite honey-flavored cream-colored Greek yogurt, and a sprinkle of chopped pecans. Veggie soysage, too, and half a pink grapefruit for each of us. Ah.

"I'm really impressed by what you did yesterday with Regonline," David told me. "It's really good." I smiled. "Thank you," I said. "I'm pleased too." And of course, I was.

Later that afternoon he and I would go for a walk, way up into our neighbor's maple-sugaring lot. For awhile we walked rhythmically, enjoying the crunch of the icy snow and the way it sometimes alternated with the shh-shhh of the leaves underfoot. "One-two-cha-cha-cha," called David, and we cha-cha'd our steps noisily through the woods. We agreed, panting, that dance-walking was not only much more musical but considerably more aerobic than just walking. 

But that was later. After we finished breakfast, David did the dishes and I went upstairs to my office (the two windows on the right, second floor) and went online.

And discovered that my first Fearless student had registered.

Eleven places left now. Maybe one of them is yours!

P.S. on December 24: only eight places are left now. Maybe one of them is yours!

Ohhhhhhh-krahoma: eat/be eaten, "write naked" , vegetable chameleons

Ohhhhh-krahoma! (Or, the color purple).

On Thursday I found actual okra plants, starts, seedlings! (If this doesn't seem like big news to you , please go back and read the post for May 27). So maybe I will get some honest-to-goodness non "curiosity" okra from my very own garden this year. I'm still going to plant my okra seeds, though, anyway.I've now got two varieties of seedlings, one the old standby Clemson Spineless, (this is the type I have seeds of, and are probably the ones pictured left; I think I planted this variety in the Ozarks for a good twenty-five years). The other is the showier "Burgundy".

This latter variety of okra shares a strange horticultural/ culinary habit, one of transformation in hue. I know of only a few other plants that do this. Like the string-bean" Purple Queen " (which has beautiful purple pods) and the asparagus "Purple Passion" (which emerges from the ground with its proud, rather sexual helmets and stalks a reddish-pink purple), "Burgundy" retains its eccentric, splendid color only while raw, turning green once cooked. Perhaps some master gardener or botanist out there can tell me why? Or if there are other edible plants that do this? (Pictured: one of my darling new okra seedlings, safely nestled in the ground in our garden. I swear it grew a quarter-inch overnight, and then another quarter-inch on Saturday afternoon, when there was a light, warm, on-and-off rain).

Thomas Jefferson was a passionate gardener (check out the care with which he recorded matters in his garden book ... if they had made digital cameras in his day, oh, good God). Late in life, he was asked his age and is said to have replied, "I am an old man, but a young gardener." By which I think he meant, that gardening, like writing, always has something new and unlooked for to teach the person who practices it with humility and devotion, And when you are learning and in wonder, are you so often are when practicing in this way, you are always young.

Here is how Cathy, who blogs at Growing Curious, put it, in a May 18 post:

I don't think it's possible to "do a garden."  I think the garden "does us."
Before I began gardening... I imagine(d) (a) contained experiment:  growing a few things for the summer just for the fun of it.  I didn't realize how even that would change me. Now, I truly think part of me would shrivel up and die if I didn't organize parts of my life around the garden.  Every month -- sometimes every day -- something out there astounds, bewilders, or humbles me.

I grow with the plants.

David is here, safe and sound, arriving in a Chevy Aveo, the rental car du jour, late Wednesday... The car was so schoolbus-taxi bright yellow that he took a picture of it when we went out to Walker Farm Friday and bought more seedlings: the okras mentioned above, tomatillos and muskmelons (I've never grown either of these before), plus a variety of eggplant I'd never even heard of, Jilo Tingua Verde Claro. It's from Brazil of all places, and it allegedly starts out green and turns a bright streaky red-orange as it ripened. That makes three types of eggplant in this year's garden, the other two being the large classic Italian (the one you see most often in supermarkets), and the thinner, elongated Asian. The latter is said to be prolific and fast to bear, important in climates where spring comes late and winter, early, though the summer days in between are incredibly long. And we got two more heirloom tomato varieties, one called Japanese Black Trifle (!) and the other Zapotec. And they're all planted. And watered and tucked in.

It could certainly be said that I live in my head too much. I'm a thinker, perhaps an overthinker; I'm content spending hours at the computer and sometimes have to remind myself to get up, get out, move around, go for a walk, maybe work-out... But oh my lord, for all the brain-business, I do revel gratefully in the five senses, too. This time of year smelling and touching probably predominate in the Parade of Sensual Pleasures. Soft hands? Pretty fingernails? Not a chance; I can't force myself to wear gardening gloves. Not when the feel of the moist rich soil, and especially of crumbling the homemade compost that was once our kitchen scraps, egg shells and watermelon rinds et al, into the garden, is so irresistible. It's as intoxicatingly full of life to my lucky fingers as the humus-y fragrance of the earth itself is to my nostrils.

Though I imagine, like Ned and my father and many of the people I love, I'll opt for having this body cremated when I'm done with it, part of me thinks it would be just fine, in fact, rather lovely, to be buried directly, bare, in the earth, to quietly decompose way down below someone's vegetable garden (maybe this very one?). It pleases me to imagine the matter which makes up my physical being reincarnating in the form of a pod of burgundy okra, or a Jilo Tingua Verde Claro eggplant, a sugar snap pea, or a Brandywine tomato.

But then, I think the basic stripped-down contract of life as an incarnated being on earth is this: everyone eats and is eaten.

It's such a fragrant time of year. David caught me, left, as I was burying my nose in the lilacs outside the front door. And digging holes for sorrel in the herb garden yesterday, my arm brushed against some creeping thyme, some rosemary, and the herbal fragrance came up into the sun-warmed air powerfully and traveled into my nose, and as the smell arrived in my brain, more swiftly even than thought could arrive, I found I was singing: "Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley sage rosemary and thyme..." Nearby, the cats stretched, lolled, did languorous show-offy rolls in the warm dirt, waiting for me to wise up and give them some attention. David, coming around from the other wide of the house with a red wheelbarrow full of compost, did so, pausing to do some kitty belly-scratching, softly murmuring their names.

"So much/ depends /  upon / a red  wheel / barrow," wrote William Carlos Williams, and it does.

(Click here for an interesting essay and discussion of that poem. Or, on the other hand, don't; just roll in Williams' words, like the cats in the soil. Pick your pleasure.).

Gardening with David. You know, as much as I adored Ned and as many activities as we shared, Ned was color-blind. Green and brown were the same color to him (he used to have me pick up out which tie went with which shirt for him). So, while he would occasionally indulge me by working with me in the garden, he never really enjoyed it. (Though he used to joke about creating a "gigantea garden", where everything would be Ned-sized; he was 6 feet 4 inches tall. There'd be, for instance, elephant ears, no short little wussy caladiums; tulip trees, not mere tulips, and for garden furniture gigantic stone benches, Stonehenge-ish, that everyone else would need to use steps to be able to clamber up. But all this was just riff, never an actual on-the-books project.)

Now, David loves gardening. Gardening with a partner, even one who isn't around all the time and so misses some of the small and large daily revelations, is for me new, different, and deeply satisfying. Indeed, our self-satisfaction with this state of affairs is evident in this snap DK took, holding the camera away from him and clicking.

Ou sonts les cukes d'antan?

Last year, a neighbor gave me some of his leftover cucumber starts. Against my better judgment, knowing how prolific they are, I planted them all. Good LORD what a lot of cukes! One morning I went out and picked eighteen cucumbers... Fortunately that was the morning of the annual New England Children's Book Writers and Illustrators picnic, a great event which has been going on in these parts  30-some years. So, of course, I made a huge vat of cucumber yogurt soup, spiked with mint, sweetened with pureed green grapes, given a little textural heft with a handful of walnuts; it was very well-received by the assembled, who drank cup after cup of it...

Oh! Speaking of children's book writers! My friend Peter Gould (novelist, performer, director, playwright --- it is impossible to read or see his "A Peasant of El Salvador" performed without weeping --- teacher, activist ) just dropped me an email. His first young adult novel, Write Naked, has just been published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. He described it as being about, "... a teen-age boy, a teen-age girl, a log cabin, Vermont, salamanders, global warming, young love, and (an) old typewriter." It's the one he's holding in lap in the picture he sent, left. This description alone tells me this book will be right up my alley. And knowing how really hard it is to get fiction published these days, the book had to be excellent to get a place at FS & G ... Thus, my interest would be piqued even if I didn't have so much long-time admiration for Peter's writing and other work. I think I'll do a book party for him here sometime this summer, and maybe review the book here, too. More to come. 

Anyway, back to the cukes. So, last summer, given their abundance, just as an experiment I froze some raw cucumber puree, figuring that A) given its high moisture content it would probably freeze beautifully and B) there might be some hot days when cucumber soup would hit the spot but our own cukes might not yet be up, and wouldn't it be handy to have some in the freezer?    
   
Night before last was the night it was handy. I'm happy to report this simple method of preserving cucumbers works well. Dinner, unintentionally, was green and white (and easy). The cucumber soup from the thawed frozen puree from last year's garden was delicious. Then there was asparagus, roasted as described on the May 9 post (it was so fresh it was almost slapping itself; it came from about 30 miles south, in Massachusetts). A vegetable burger from the co-op. A small slice of feta cheese. A large slice of some toothsome, serious olive-and-rosemary sourdough artisinal bread, toasted and buttered with herb butter (the herbs from my own garden). A glass of Cortese.

Eating, together, a meal which included something from last year's garden, but with the dirt from this year's-garden-to-be still under our fingernails. In time, out of time, timeless, life's red wheel barrow slowly spinning as David and I ate dinner.

I don't think it's possible to "do a garden."  I think the garden "does us."
Before I began gardening... I imagine(d) (a) contained experiment:  growing a few things for the summer just for the fun of it.  I didn't realize how even that would change me. Now, I truly think part of me would shrivel up and die if I didn't organize parts of my life around the garden.  Every month -- sometimes every day -- something out there astounds, bewilders, or humbles me.

I grow with the plants.

Playing Scrabble with the dead, feasting at the Brattleboro Farmers Market (with the very much alive)

The other day, Saturday, I'm driving down the unpaved road which leads from from my home at the top of the down to Westminster West Road. I'm with Traca Savadago, my "pan pal" and all-around buddy. She's a friend in the meet and instantly feel you've known each other a long time category, though we've actually only known each other since 2006. Traca lives in from Seattle, where I've visited her the past two springs; now she's come to visit in me here in Vermont. Today we're off to the Brattleboro farmer's market. The market takes place every Saturday, May through October; its atmosphere is like a festival or a fair, as perhaps you'd expect after our long, long winters. 

As we travel down the shady curving canopied tunnel, so green this time of year, we start talking about carbon footprints and "relentless incrementalism." The latter is one of my favorite concepts, one I return to in thought over and over: that small steps, taken incrementally, make a difference in aggregate and over time, individually and collectively. These days, living as far out in the country as I do, I am religious in trying to limit driving. Traca talks about wishing she'd kept her Metro instead of upgrading, as she saw it at the time, to an Accord and "driving around with the trunk full all the time because I now have a trunk." I say, in passing, "Well, of course given how much air travel I've done between now and when The Cornbread Gospels came out, I could not drive the whole rest of the year and I'd still have a carbon footprint the size of a yeti."

And then I pause, having quickly gone somewhere else in thought. I tell her the following story, because. since I trust narrative, I also trust digression, and my friends, fortunately, accept this:

"Ned and I used to play cutthroat Scrabble religiously. We actually kept a running tally in the Official Scrabble Dictionary --- we tracked the scores of individual games, our lifetime wins and losses (at the time he died he came out exactly equal), the bingos we had in individual games... Once I won on the very last turn with a bingo, the word towhee, which is a kind of bird. For weeks afterwards, out of nowhere, Ned would suddenly turn to me with a look of disgust and say 'Towhee!' and shake his head...

"Well, once I played the word 'yeti.' He challenged it, and of course he lost, because it's a real word. So he forfeits a turn, and he's bummed, or mock-bummed. And then, either in the same game or the one following, I had that same combination of letters, so I once more put down Y-E-T-I. And Ned looked at me mournfully and said, 'Yeti again.' "

Traca and I traveled conversationally as we drove the West-West Road through Putney, down 91 and into Brattleboro and to the Farmer's Market. This would be my first visit this year. I always forget how much I love the experience of this particular farmer's market. It's in a tree-covered, park-like area, not a parking lot, and as Traca pointed out, it's both inviting and inclusive. "There are actually places to sit," she says, waving one hand.
"Look, if you buy something to eat there are tables, it's not just, fine, you sit on the curb. And it's so kid-friendly...That sandbox? You would never see that in Seattle." Traca always, and I mean always, has her camera at hand.

She started with the sandbox (left, above), and soon she was finding, and taking, pictures everywhere. Two little girls sitting together on a tree trunk, giggling, wrapped in a a shared sweatshirt. Flats of basil plants, arugula, snapdragons. Farmers, customers, musicians, close-ups of plates of food and bags of homemade granola.

I'd skipped breakfast and Traca had only had a couple of blueberry corn muffins leftover from breakfast yesterday, so we started out by sharing a corn-and-black bean tamale. (As at any market, if you shop while hungry you wind up buying twice as much food). As we sat, picking apart the tamale (a little underdone, but what a wonderful smoky sauce), I caught sight of Andy Reichsman, who sometimes does camera work with my filmmaker boyfriend, David. Andy's also the brother of my friend Judith Reichsman, who teaches Interplay, an improvisation, movement, and storytelling melange I go to most Thursdays. I introduced Traca to Andy, and then we meandered a bit, separately. (Pictured left, dinner at our home about a year ago. Left to right; Andy, his wife, film-editor Kate Purdie on his lap, Kamoji, an old friend of David's, Lisa Merton, a Vermont-based filmmaker, David, with the silver beard, me in the green sweater with Cattywhompus on my lap, and Alan Dater, Lisa's husband. Alan, Lisa, Kamoji, and David have a long and lovely two-degrees-of-separation relationship, involving Taking Root, Alan and Lisa's most recent film, about Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan Nobel-prize-winning environmentalist, and David's 1973 film, White Man's Country).

But back to the Brattleboro Farmer's Market. Though I had intended to purchase vegetables (David was coming in later that night, from L.A., I wanted glorious ingredients on hand), I wound up spending most of my cash, and a little of Traca's besides, on starts for the garden instead. The tomato varieties alone were intoxicating in their names: Mr. Stripey, Brandywine, Rubygold, Aunt Ruby, Boxcar Willie , San Marzano. But I got peppers, too: cayenne, jalapeño, red bell, Thai. And lots of lettuce, five different varieties. And cauliflower, broccoli, and eggplant seedlings (two varieties) as well. Growing lettuces and cabbage family members is a revelation to me, because in Arkansas it was always way too hot; just seeing the small familiar leaf shapes of the tiny cauliflowers-to-be made me happy. Another summer in Vermont, where we don't need air-conditioning! I'm here! And I was: present at the farmer's market, anticipating this year's garden, looking back to last year's. Thinking about how these tiny optimistic seedlings would, presumably, become like the broccoli I kept running out to cut from August through frost last year, and the strange, extraterrestrial-looking Brussels sprouts which got sweeter and sweeter the colder it got until there was a hard freeze (Check the link to see just how odd a stalk of Brussels sprouts is in its manner of growing... but I couldn't resist this picture, taken by David, of Wislawa, the sister of Cattywhompus, above, in last year's garden, in the late fall. She's crouched beneath the leaves of one of the Brussels sprout plants).

As much as I love living in Vermont, there is this major drawback: it is almost too cold here to grow okra. I say 'almost' because know it can be done. My favorite farmstand, Walker's, does sell okra each fall, but they sell it as "an ornamental curiosity." And for 50 cents a pod! I'm an okra girl from way back, and I am determined to grow it here, though you probably have to start the seeds indoors, which I didn't get done this year, so I may not succeed until 2009. And it probably will never thrive as it did in my Arkansas garden, with its spectacular circus-yellow hibiscus-flowers and its pods pointing straight up, little dicks with enthusiastic erections. 50 cents a pod? A curiosity? Puh-lease! Horrifying, if not downright insulting, to me. I may have one foot in the North and one in the South, but I am a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, after all, and proud of it.

I heard someone call my name, loudly, and looked up from these meditations and general seedling-selection samadhi to see Ami, my friend whom I somehow haven't seen for several months, wearing an orange velvet jacket, her young grandson clinging to one of her ankles. Our hug is long. We have so much to say that we actually say, in words, very little.

I continue buying seedlings greedily from a couple of different farmers (John and Tessa, the folks from Dutton's) who are kind enough to let me leave the flats with them while I go off in search of Traca and more lunch. Traca has fallen into a deep and soulful conversation with an older German artist, whose beautiful silver hair and bangs caught the sunlight. She was wearing what looked like a hand-knit shrug-wrap of a deep rose pink, and carrying a basket of posies, their green leaves silvery as her hair, their flowers as pink as her sweater.  Traca (who took a picture of her basket, left) was getting her story: how she'd come to the U.S. many years ago as a student, married an American she'd met just a few days after she'd arrived in New York. They were still married, 40-some years down the line, twenty of which had been lived in Vermont...  (Traca has the gift of connection big-time; if she was in Tibet and yetis did exist, she would have one telling her his favorite restaurant; she would be asking if he had tasted the yak butter sorbet in that little place in Lhasa; it would turn out the yeti's brother-in-law had worked in the kitchen there.)

Since Traca was still grooving with her new friend, I stood in line for both of us at the Thai foodstall I prefer (there are two at the Brattleboro FM) while she finished up. The one I like is owned by Tuk, the chef at Cafe Lotus. Besides the food at the booth being excellent, Tuk, Pawntip and the third woman usually with them have extraordinary smiles: not just sweet and cheerful like most smiles, but radiant.

As I stood there waiting, the sunlight dappled down through the trees. U felt the heat play on my face,  sometimes shading, sometimes warming it. Ahead of me on line were three girls in their twenties, also deep in conversation. One had long, henna'd hair, a shiny blue-red from which the sun glinted, more colorfully, though no less beautifully, than off that of Traca's silver-haired friend. Another of the three friends had a darling sleepy-eyed baby, quiet, dozing, cradled in a sling made out of a huge fringed orange-and-yellow scarf around her neck.

All around me: people, all ages, all stages. A band with two women vocalists, two guitarists, a banjo player, several  a small self-assured little boy with a toy guitar(Traca later took his picture). "And I'm not gonna let 'em catch me, no, not gonna let 'em catch the midnight rider..." sang the women, a cheerful and harmonic version of the old mournful Allman Brothers song. A slim, lovely woman with dark hair in a self-propelled wheel-chair, buying a Thai chicken skewer and sharing it with her daughter, the child nestling her small head in the mother's lap. The smells: herbs from the farmstands, crepes and curry and African stews (brought by a mother and son from Mali), wood-fired pizzas, all mingling. The sounds: occasionally faint sizzles barely audible against the waves of conversations and greetings. Neighbors hailing each other and hugging. Music, children at play calling to each other, their parents calling to them.

It was life, life, life, its own sweet unfolding self.

Quiet for a moment in the midst of all this, I felt for the wonder and strangeness of being here. This version of life is still new to me, utterly different from what I imagined it would be seven years earlier, when Ned was alive. The twinge and ache of his loss, which so often comes up for me still, was there, of course. But by now it is a mild sadness, an inchoate longing, not the overwhelming grief that was my near-constant companion for so long. These days, certainly that day at the Brattleboro Farmer's Market, sadness resides side by side with joy. (Perhaps having my heart cracked open with his sudden death has, in fact, enlarged it, so that opposites can now both inhabit that beating muscle, clenching and unclenching, peaceably?)

And Ned was in a sense with me --- not in the "he's looking down on you" way at all (I have never felt that) but that he was present in me, because who I am is inseparable from who he was and who I became in those 23 years with him. That I was still amused, all those years later, at the very thought and recall of his expression as he said "Towhee!" back when we played Scrabble. (Pictured above left: Me, Ned, and Z-Cat --- Z-Cat is also deceased, now --- taken in 2000, a couple of days before Ned's death, on the front porch of my old home in Eureka Springs, Arkansas... another life for me. Photo, George West.)

Who are we, then? Future ghosts, enjoying the temporary and uncertain privilege of being embodied? And how is it that on that beautiful day, in the midst of all that presence and abundance, plants and food and people and spring, I could feel loss and longing, yet not be saddened by them... feel, instead, deep joy, amazement, appreciation, wonder?  Contradiction is rich, the discovery I make continually; again and yeti again. Each time, it feels new.

"Now", we're told, is all we have. Undoubtedly true. Yet once we reach the age of experience, memory, and forethought, our "now" is informed by "then" and the knowledge of the brevity of our sojourn here.  Curiously, this feels neither morbid nor depressing; rather, "now" becomes all the more luminous for its transience. As I said in an earlier post about transparency, more light shines in and out.

Traca joined me on the Thai line, and we eventually received two gorgeous plates of Thai food, mine  vegetarian, hers non-v. We were both very happy with the fresh, spicy, herbal, hot flavors that make Thai cuisine absolutely sui generis. (I especially loved an ugly but hauntingly good "tofu salad", crumbly white and brown.) And there was the delectable presence of the no-way-is-it-local coconut in some of the dishes. Though of course it was local, in one sense, because there it was, after all, in Brattleboro, Vermont, cooked and served by Tuk and Pawntip who had somehow --- I don't know now, but am sure  the particulars are fascinating and fraught, as are the stories of all immigrants and exiles --- made their way from Thailand. To right there, right then.

As I had. As Traca had. As David was doing, at that moment, aboard a Southwest Airlines flight from Los Angeles, California, to Hartford, Connecticut. 

As all of have traveled, uniquely and universally, from somewhere to somewhere else.

In the town I used to live in, occasionally I'd see a self-righteous bumper-sticker that infuriated me with its ignorant mean-spiritedness. "All of us here are NOT tourists!" it proclaimed. Well, duh: talk about patently obvious. And so hostile! And ignorant of Economics 101: how come Eureka Springs remained relatively pristine, without a chicken processing-plant and a 24-hour-a-day Wal-Mart SuperCenter like nearby Berryville? Because the appreciation of visitors, i.e., tourism, protected it!

But most of all, that bumper-sticker was dumb. We're human beings. We're here so briefly. We're all tourists, or at best, travelers.

My friend, the musician Bill Haymes, introduced me to a Leonard Cohen song called "Passing Through." 

"Passing through; passing through;
sometimes happy, sometimes blue,
glad that I ran into you.
Tell the people
that you saw me
passing through."

Bill, who is now passing through Paris. If Traca is a relatively new friend, Bill is... well, we've been pals since 1975.  Friends of the finish-each-others-sentences variety. Friends of the sometimes-we-don't-even-need-to-finish, or for-that-matter-even-begin some of those sentences variety. ( Here's a picture of him, taken by David in my kitchen here in Vermont, a few months back. Note the typical quizzical, smart-ass, slightly skeptical expression.) God, I love my friends. Go check out Bill's blog, Your Man in Paris.   

David would arrive safe and sound around 1:00 am that night (technically, the morning of the next day, but it's not morning to me until I get up). Traca was asleep by then and I dozing, but I woke up enough to greet him and be delighted that he was back, fix him a plate of homemade split-pea dahl and some Fair Trade Thai rice of a wild purple color. A dab of yogurt and one of some homemade chutney. And we caught up, and for once left the dishes (a radical break in my household protocol)  and then went upstairs to bed... I had put clean sheets on, the crisp cotton summer linens, as opposed to the warmly napped winter flannels...

That was Saturday. Sunday David gardened, I cooked and did battle with a huge stand of rhubarb, Traca helped with the rhubarb, cooking, compost-taking-out, plus ran out to Saxtons River for sugar and Pam spray. At twilight, the three of us went to a potluck to which I brought the rhubarb crisp and buttermilk ice cream Traca and I had prepared. The buttermilk ice cream, in particular, was very well-received.

"Do you know most of these people?" Traca asked me, gesturing around the gathering. "Nope," I told her, thinking about how in Eureka Springs I would have known every single one of them, and their kids, and their dogs, and their dogs' astrological signs. The fact that you only pass from youth to maturity once, if you're lucky in one place with one person (as I did with Ned, in Eureka Springs) is certainly bittersweet. I am in one way less rooted here. In another, I'm liberated from the corral of expectations, of those who, because they think they know about you, may not in fact know you. (Picture, left, taken by David during the cornbread tour at an event when I was visiting my former home town last December, held at the Old Stone Church , aka the Gavioli Chapel... me with two old friends in Eureka who DO know me; Barbara Kellogg, aka Farletta Farquardt, and darling Debbie Dye, who may know me too well. You can see we're not having much fun.)

Today, Monday, they left for the airport in Hartford, Traca to return to Seattle, David to work in Alexandria, Virginia where he'll be filming until Wednesday, when he'll return to Vermont. (More yeti-sized carbon footprints. But hey, even in An Inconvenient Truth, what was Al Gore doing but going airport to airport with his rollaway bag, poignant, spreading the message? You do the best you can, and something is always better than nothing.)

I sent them off with a breakfast of eggs scrambled with fiddleheads (a basket full of fiddleheads, left, from the farmer's market, snapped by Traca on Saturday), and Parmesan cheese. Since I was inexplicably out of fresh bread, I made a sort of improvised hashed-brown/stove-top stuffing to go with it:  sauteed onion, a fresh tomato this early from Micheal Collin's miraculous Vermont garden (how that guy extends the season is beyond me) with some chunks of some excellent wholegrain-y artisanal bread I had toasted dry and stashed in the freezer).

After they'd left for the airport, I ate the leftovers fiddlehead scrambled and hashed brown-style bread, sitting out on the screen porch (the screen porch is pictured left, but with Very Lemony Cornmeal Poundcake from The Cornbread Gospels, and hot tea, and cosmos from the garden last summer, and blue lustreware inherited from my old, long-deceased Arkansas friend, Virginia Carey, may she rest in peace and feistiness, as she lived. Again, presence and absence, side by side, inextricable. David took this picture). The view from the screen porch spreads out, on a clear day like today, twenty-some miles, clear into New Hampshire. And on days like this morning, so extremely fresh and clear, the air fragranced with the lilac in full bloom, Edna St. Vincent Millay's line echoes in my head: "Inebriate of air am I."

Then, after breakfast, I went out into the bright, now much quieter, morning. I had intended to go back to sleep but the garden and the seedlings were calling. I put eighteen of the assorted lettuce starts I had bought at the farmer's market into the ground, plus seven eggplants. Albert had tilled that garden earlier in the week; David, the day before, had laid out rows and made furrows. And of course Aunt Dot (as taken by David, last fall) --- still in the hospital, but, after a scary downturn, was finally on a liquid diet and tentatively scheduled to return home later this week --- she had had the foresight to buy the farm in the first place.

And I thought then, and think now, that we are always and never alone as we make our way on this spinning green earth.