Uncategorized | mulberryshoots

July 30, 2016

It’s not the place, people, . . . it’s the people!

“whaleback cottage” where we stayed for a few nights this weekend. . .

view from our cottage window, G. in the distance. . .

Less than twelve hours in Nova Scotia, the Canadian people have shown themselves to be extraordinarily helpful, friendly and full of energy towards being positive in life. A man at the airport told us about how the seats were listed across the rows; the head of a big piano dealership specializing in new Steinway and Yamaha pianos described his business to us, proud of it despite his being blind; his staff helped us find a bank open after 5 p.m. where we could exchange U.S. dollars to Canadian currency; a woman at a market nearby was amiable as she cut a carton of eggs in half with a small knife so that we could buy half a dozen for our stay; a young boy about ten years old said “hello” to me in the store even though I’m Asian.

After that, we had a delicious supper at a restaurant called “Rhubarb” which served homemade buttermilk biscuits. The maitre D’ – a woman – told us about how out of 29 staff, there was only one 52-year old woman who could make the recipe turn out right. (The secret is not to twist the biscuit cutter so as to allow the biscuits to rise unencumbered.) The wit and grace with which she told us about it showed how much she enjoyed her job (and life) and how refreshing it was to watch the way she greeted all the diners in a similar fashion including a couple who bought two small oil paintings off the wall after they finished their meal.

And there’s more: the affable manager of our cottage, offered to let us use his phone anytime because he has an economical plan (and because our cellphones don’t work up here,) leaving it out on the settee of his porch when he’s away on errands during the day. After meeting us for less than five minutes last night, “Ted” offered to treat us to a lobster dinner one night – and we accepted as long as he will join us to have it together tomorrow night.

He regaled us (that’s the only word) with stories about his life including a serious bout with cancer two years ago wherein heavy radiation and chemo treatments were perpetrated upon his body. He said to his team of seven doctors at Dalhousie Medical Center: “Do whatever you think is best and if it doesn’t help me, maybe it will help somebody else.” That’s an incredible attitude towards life and survival, at least to me. How we live when we think we’re dying is a testament to our will – and his, believe me, is way beyond anyone whom I’ve ever met.

Today, we’re planning to drive to the Mahone Bay area where “Ted” gave us a recommendation for a local restaurant to have lunch at called, “Oh My Cod!” and to visit Lunenberg where the museum for the famous 19th century schooner, “Bluenose,” is found.

We hardly travel at all, much less to another country. We picked this picturesque cottage called “Whaleback Cottage” on the edge of Peggy’s Cove outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia. We have been surprised by the plentiful scrub pine trees growing everywhere (with irregular spaces between the branches that are never available at Christmas time.) The land and sea are beautiful as they are everywhere in the world.

But what I have been so impressed with in so little time haa not been a sense of place (although it is beautiful) but the kind and vibrant spirit of the Canadian people we’ve come across who seem to live life with so much joyful energy and generosity of spirit towards others. It is such a refreshing breath of fresh air. And what a stark contrast it is to the America we all know and worry about these days.

More later.

P.S. Our trip to Mahone Bay and Lunenberg were just about as expected. Except that when we decided to split an order of a 3-decker grilled cheese sandwich with fries – and a slice of coconut cream pie for dessert, we were informed our meals were “on the house!” “Ted’s” friend then came over and introduced herself – and we chatted about his health and his generosity. We left a big tip for the waitress who was working her 2nd day at the restaurant.

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July 27, 2016

“rebirth” . . .

There’s a lot of talk about rebirth these days, it seems. Older couples finally decide to throw in the towel when the kids leave the nest and go to college. What used to hold marriages together doesn’t seem worth it anymore. We have a friend who is going through a separation and divorce. He has been eating dinner with us once or twice a week for the last few months ~ and we have become close family friends after having been good neighbors for years.

In parallel, a poignant interview story appeared in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about Chuck Close, the portrait painter who was confined to a wheelchair after an accident decades ago. He recently left an unhappy marriage after over forty years and started dating younger women. Or maybe not even dating, it sounded like. He’s seventy-four years old and his grown daughters say they worry about him day and night because of his behavior. Why is that, I wondered when I read the article? One thing he said about his unhappy marriage and his uneasy relationship with his daughters was:

“You would think by now that they would just want me to be happy.”

I was thunderstruck by this sentiment because we, in this country, don’t think about old people in this country having a right to be happy at the end of their lives. Sure, younger generations have a right to be happy: to have big weddings, new careers, have children, buy houses, dogs and go on vacations. But with older people, I think there’s too much talk about who’s going to take care of them, what their health is like and who’s turn is it next to visit them?

Moreover, there might be tons of baggage, resentments from the past, estrangements resulting in boundaries set up high and expectations set down low among various members of a family. Just witness women’s fiction these days and that’s all they’re about – family reunions, conflict, bitterness, resentment. There probably isn’t a dysfunctional-free family in the whole country, it seems to me.

a family of “little peeps” . . .

But hey, I forgot I was writing about rebirth. Yep, I think it’s a good idea, ESPECIALLY if you’re pushing seventy or more. Why not reach out for something (big or small) that you’ve always dreamed about that you would like to have in your life while you’re still around? For me, it’s publishing a book that I hope will affect a reader’s life down the line. I wrote it four years ago and for some reason, I resurrected it a few months ago and began to re-read it. I found myself enjoying it and laughing out loud at different parts of it. Since then, I’ve been revising it and making some corrections to the plot that it needed. But the most important thing is that I (still) like it. And I’ve found beta-readers (like beta-testing for computer programs) who are reading hard copies of it now and letting me know what they think. In fact, I was kind of surprised that so many of them said they’d like to read it when I sent out a general S.O.S. a few weeks ago.

As an Indie (independent-self-publishing) author, I have been fortunate to have met a seasoned literary editor and a professional book designer who are “excited” about helping me self-publish my book. That’s my aim. Fortunately in New England, there’s also a very active volunteer-run organization called IPNE, Independent Publishers of New England who support and organize themselves to provide Indie authors with a place to learn about the book publishing and marketing business and have fun too. There is a two-day conference scheduled in October to be held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire where guest speakers will talk about self-publishing and what’s entailed in promoting your books (way more than you ever thought you’d have to do, it sounds like.)

So, Chuck Close is still painting his self-portrait while he leads what sounds like a wild last-ditch life that he imagined for himself. I hope that he’s happy even if his daughters disapprove of what he’s doing. As for me, I feel that the only way to be happy “by now” is to follow my dreams, no matter how old I am and to do something creative every day. That’s about all and if it takes some rebirthing to do that, then that’s fine too.

Whatever it takes, right?

(Daphne, thanks for writing – this post’s for you. K)

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June 15, 2016

“hope springs eternal. . .!”

the “mama” shoot, now growing multiple leaves!

Here’s an “against all odds” kind of post.

We had a money plant that was over eight feet tall, grown from a shoot we bought at the grocery store that grew on the kitchen windowsill. Then it collapsed for some reason and we were told by a plant expert to CUT IT OFF down to about four feet.

No leaves or branches left. A bare stump of a trunk. I kept it barely watered since the radical surgery taken last March (2015) and it lay dormant until and about ten days ago. I looked at it and saw, miraculously, that there was fresh growth coming out of a couple of “eyes” on the bare trunk.

one of four more “baby shoots” coming along. . .

Since then, the “shoots” are lengthening every day (about an eighth of an inch per day.)

Now if that isn’t a sign of hope and renewal, I don’t know what is!

What do they say about perseverance? “Love Conquers All,” “Hope Springs Eternal,” and most of all, “NEVER GIVE UP!”

POSTSCRIPT: June 18, 2016

Here are three photos taken 12 hours apart in the last 36 hours showing exponential growth. To the adages quoted above, one more comes to mind this morning which is: “Its Never Too Late!”

It also occurred to me this morning how encouraging this truism might also apply to us humans as well as the plant kingdom. Right?

GROWTH since June 18th:

photo taken june 23rd

photo taken june 26th

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May 22, 2016

musical miracles on a Sunday morning!

Marie Sibylla Merian – botanical engraving (c. 1705)

Just a quick note about how miraculous (that’s the only word for it) the technological world we live in is that allows us to access art, artists and beautiful music on a Sunday morning at home.

Here’s my little tale: this a.m. I was browsing concert schedules for ones that we might want to go to this summer. Happened upon a French pianist I had never heard of: Lise de la Salle, on the Rockport Chamber Music Festival website.

And while we’re unable to attend her concert on June 18th due to a heavy schedule, I looked up her recordings on I-Tunes. For a 24 year old, she has EIGHT albums that comprise a huge repertoire including Bach, Mozart, Schumann, Liszt, Prokoviev, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovitch and more. Looked her up on her website and discovered she concertizes mostly in Europe including the prestigious Verbier Festival in August, 2016.

Back to I-Tunes, I listened to a bunch of samples from her albums, purchased 3 for 99 cents each and made a playlist on my Library after they were downloaded. Found Youtube clips of these pieces and posted on my Facebook page to share this wonderful music on a quiet Sunday morning (both G. and I were very impressed with the clarity and musical depth of her playing.)

THEN, I looked up the IMSLP (International Music Score Library Project) website where you can search for music scores and found Rachmaninoff’s (Rocky) 2nd Etude Tableaux Op. 39, No.2 which I downloaded and printed in about 7 minutes time.

I’m planning to sightread it today and am looking forward to learning this piece. In my high school days, I played another Rocky Etude Tableaux but not as beautifully poignant as this one.

All of this new music (audible and legible) has materialized from virtually nowhere (except the Internet) and it’s not even 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning – thanks to the instant access available to us on our laptops.

WOW! Aren’t we lucky?!

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April 23, 2016

extra-thin, crispy gingersnap cookies!

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up a small packet of gingersnap cookies at Market Basket. They were extraordinarily tasty: crisp, very gingery and not very sweet. One cookie or even half of one with a cup of hot coffee after dinner was very satisfying.

The weather is kind of overcast and grey today so I thought maybe I’d make a half batch of cookies to share with the folks across the street and to have when G. returns from a day’s piano tuning appointments in Boston’s environs.

Since I’m trying to avoid having too many sugary snacks around, I found a recipe that I cut in half which still yielded about two dozen cookies. I erred on the side of adding a tad more spices than called for: cinnamon, ground cloves and ground ginger – and a little less sugar. The dough was creamier than the recipe indicated so rolling balls by hand wasn’t feasible. I did scoop up melon ball sized batter, set them three inches apart and sprinkled with a sugar before baking for about fifteen minutes at 350 degrees in a preheated oven.

They spread out and baked to an even light brown color – and I sprinkled a little more granulated white sugar on top of the warm cookies, dusting off the excess as they cooled to crispy thin cookies. I bit into one to see how they tasted before posting this piece – and next time, I might add even a little more ground ginger – or how about some freshly hand-grated gingerroot! Now why didn’t I think of that earlier?

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March 24, 2016

our little screech visitor this a.m. – 3rd visit!!

THIRD visit this morning, 24 March, 2016!!

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March 3, 2016

march madness . . .

Boy, if you have been breathing here in the U.S. of A. you’ll know that what we are seeing happen on TV and in other news could be only be described as “March Madness” – and I am talking about politics, and not basketball either!

Now that Super Tuesday has come and gone, there is finally talk about the possibility of brokered conventions, at least for the Republican party should no one including Donald Trump have the required number of delegates required on the first ballot. That magic number turns out to be 1237. And Trump now has only 285, 952 short of the required number of delegates. That’s a long way from Tipperary if you ask me – and so I don’t really understand all the hype that says that Trump is now unstoppable. Really? Even with plump Chris Christie playing the royal syncophant standing by in case the Donald wants a drink of water?

Last night, Greta Van Susteran devoted almost an hour to featuring Melania Trump in an “up close and personal” peek at their luxury apartment in Trump tower. I have to say that Melania does well in the couple of interviews I’ve seen on TV. She even offers up good marriage advice: be your own person and speak your mind. Just don’t expect the other person to do what you think they should, even if you disagree with their behavior. Most of us know how to voice our opinions, but implicitly, at least I find, you want the other person to follow your advice. That doesn’t work, it seems.

Anyhow, the growing rumble of conversations about how to stop Trump have revealed a few other idiosyncracies about the Republican National Convention rules – more than you or I ever wanted to know, probably. It turns out that if there is no majority in the first ballot, then ALL the delegates can vote for anyone they feel like on subsequent ballots. Apparently, there could be as many as 100 or more ballots if you read about past brokered conventions! Sounds like voting for the Pope and seeing when the grey smoke will appear, it sounds to me!

The only Catch-22 is that there is a current rule that says no one can be nominated as a candidate who hasn’t won a majority of delegates in EIGHT STATES during the Primary. Well, I guess that lets out Paul Ryan, who seems to be champing at the bit to be the putative nominee, a dark horse who seems to be trying to become more visible by the day.Have you noticed that the Koch brothers have been sitting on the sidelines, along with some of the other billionaires although the Ricketts family seems to making its move now to fund a Super Pac to oppose Donald Trump or to support a third-party candidate. Is this a reality show or what?

Sure, Donald Trump has brushed Ryan’s viewpoints away, threatening him, just as he has anyone else who has gotten in his way who has said a cautionary word about him. People are not silent either about Christie’s stooge-like stance beside Trump for over a half hour as though he’s already the VP candidate to the Donald. Six New Jersey newspapers published a joint editorial complaining that Christie is spending taxpayer money running around the country campaigning, first for himself and now for Trump while ignoring his responsibilities to New Jersey. But what do they expect from a lame-duck governor whose hubris and ambition is so obvious that it is painful to watch? Even the New Hampshire Union Leader published an editorial saying “Boy, Were We Wrong!” to have endorsed Chris Christie prior to the NH primary a couple of weeks ago.

And so it goes. Ted Koppel appeared briefly on Bill Reilly’s show last night in which he succinctly placed the responsibility for the shift of news broadcasters from Walter Cronkite (as “the most trusted man in America”) to Reilly’s influence in the past decade by making it all about HIS opinion, rather than providing objective news to the American public. This trend has now opened a Pandora’s Box where each and every broadcaster now feels it’s their right to voice their opinions and ask dumb questions while they are on the air. Never mind that the major networks spend all of their budgets showing EXACTLY the same news features with only a few customized People-Magazine human interest features every night!

Oh, how I wish Tim Russert were still alive. He would have made this political season truly interesting. As it is, we get to watch Megyn Kelly joust with Donald Trump tonight.

What must the rest of the World be thinking about what’s happened to us and what’s going on in this country?

Don’t answer that!

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February 23, 2016

“Tidying” – the Japanese way . . .

my de-cluttered kitchen “sparks joy”!

If you haven’t heard about it yet, Mari Kondo’s book entitled “the life-changing magic of tidying up” has been on the best-seller list for quite awhile. If you are interested in de-cluttering your surroundings and your life, you might try her process of what she calls “tidying.” Her pitch is that if you truly tidy things up, you will never have to tidy again!

Simply put, she advocates dispensing of ANYTHING that does not “spark joy.” If you go around and intuitively take down and do away with whatever doesn’t make you extremely happy to see or have it, you will have prioritized what you want to have around you. The second rule is to have a place for everything that you do keep. This is important because without each thing having its place (like scotch tape,) it will float around where you can’t find it or clutter up some other space.

I’ve tried reading this book a couple of times. This past weekend, I read it again in large-print, borrowed from the library while waiting for a two-piano concert to begin. Imprinted with the messages, I went home and looked around me. Just about everything I have in my home “sparks joy” – mainly because that has been my criteria for having them in the first place. My problem is that although my things spark a lot of joy, there’s too many of them around.

So, I decided to cull some thing away to create a more peaceful aura: I took down the metal branch chandelier from the holidays. I moved a flowering cyclamen plant to a table near the canaries in the other room where it actually gets more sun than here on the kitchen table. A fresh bouquet of tulips in one of my favorite vases was moved to a corner bookcase shelf rather than sitting on the table. Now, there’s just a pair of deep burgundy twisted candles in antique brass candlesticks and a lady-slipper orchid with an antique tin of dried pods on the cherrywood tray at the end of the table. I also culled items from the kitchen windowsill.

Before simplifying the visual landscape of our kitchen/living room space, I tackled cleaning out all the kitchen drawers. I’ll bet you know what that’s like. There’s always one drawer that is a catchall for everything: twisty ties, rubber bands, measuring tape, cough drops, picture hangers, screwdrivers, packing tape, flower frogs, miscellaneous thread, string, pens, pencils (you get the picture.) Anyhow, I did it, taking photos of all the things I emptied out on the kitchen countertop in order to reassemble them back into empty, cleaned-out drawers. You should try it sometime! If you’re like me, you’ll have a bunch of leftover stuff that you don’t know what to do with. Kondo recommends ditching it – either throwing it out in the “garbage” or giving it to Goodwill.

Which brings me to the big flaw or omission in Kondo’s theory. What do you do with things that shouldn’t be thrown away or recycled? Auction them off? Give them to people who probably don’t want them anyhow? I guess we’ll have to figure that out for ourselves.

In any case, I’ve given myself this week to “tidy” our living space, next week for clothing and the week after for books. That’s not the same order that Kondo recommends but it’s the one that works best for me. I started with the hardest one first: miscellany!

I was tempted to post some of the “before” photos that I took to show my husband because he was out tuning a piano while I had the kitchen drawers taken apart. I find it’s easier to do these kinds of tasks when he’s not around, looking over my shoulder or worse, going through the stuff himself and making even more work out of a simple sorting exercise. You might have this same experience yourself. For example, if I ask G. to put something in the pantry, he’s still out there minutes later, starting to rearrange things to his liking. Plus, I have discovered I often can’t locate what he’s put out there until some months or years later. The pantry clean out isn’t scheduled as yet until the other phases are completed.

By that time, sparks will fly all over the place as our rooms, clothing, books and whatever is left over are “tidied up” once and for all. It does feel good to know what’s where and that you know why you’re keeping it. The pantry should be a cinch by then.

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January 27, 2016

a nocturnal visitor in our chimney flue . . .

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January 24, 2016

rosemary roasted cashews . . .

It’s about an hour before the kickoff for the Pats vs. Broncos game in Denver today. Otherwise known as “Brady vs. Manning.” Last night, I had a recurring dream that I had made some Asian dumplings with a special energy powder in them for the Pats. In fact, in the dream, G., my husband, was supposed to bring them to Danny Amendola (I kid you not.) Anyhow, it was a humorous dream to have.

But this afternoon, I was casting around for something to make as a snack for us to eat during the game since it starts mid-afternoon. Lemon pound cake was an idea but had two sticks of butter and two cups of sugar in the recipe even though I have some Meyer lemons in the fridge that would have been perfect to bake these little treats.

I did remember that I had some raw cashews in the pantry – and then came across Ina Garten’s recipe for roasted cashew nuts with fresh rosemary. Since we’re having lamb loin chops for our supper tonight, the fresh rosemary was on hand, and I also liked the idea that the nuts would be roasted first and then coated in a mixture of fresh rosemary, brown sugar, butter, cayenne pepper and salt rather than the old standby of coating them with egg whites which I’ve tried a couple of times with walnuts and which were sticky and unappetizing to deal with.

So, here are the nuts, resting in the still warm oven after being coated with the mixture. It seemed like common sense to put them back into the oven (350 for 8 minutes) to dry out a little and crisp up on their own since they were raw to begin with.

This isn’t Asian dumplings similar to my comical dream last night, but our good wishes are there for the Pats to win today.

Here’s hoping!

Afterword: Well, that was a painful game to watch if you’re a Patriots fan. We enjoyed the nuts but wished the Pats were going to the Super Bowl. In hindsight, this season has been a meaningful one for us in New England given the bad press and hype regarding the NFL’s punishment of Tom Brady. Go Pats!

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