On the ground with the White Horse.

Last week The Garners posted about G.K. Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse, which caused me to dig out my cassette tapes of the author reading his own poem -- how thrilling! Too bad they were made from a scratchy recording so that it's very hard to appreciate the poem itself. Still, the directness of the connection to the very voice and person of the poet mean a lot to me.

What made me interested in the Ballad in the first place was taking a trip to Britain with daughter Pippin nine years ago. We both very much wanted to see White Horse Hill in Uffington while we were there, and we found it quite empty of any other humans the day we visited. We hiked up the hill to the chalk art that is thought to be 2,000 to 3,000 years old, and wandered around the horse's anatomy. We couldn't pull ourselves away. I just could not get over -- here it is again -- the earthy material link to ancient peoples and the mysteries of their culture and history.

One thing we share with the ancient people who carved the trenches of this design is human nature, the gifts of the Creator who made us in His image, glorious even in a tarnished condition. The horse reveals the creative aspect of that image, and Chesterton's ballad shows his own artistry while it tells a human and Christian tale set in King Alfred's day. The imagery in this stanza, which I think pertinent to the Lenten season, illuminates another aspect of our humanity that we share with our ancestors: the impulse to stand before God in worship, fighting with the desire to be God:

Pride juggles with her toppling towers,

They strike the sun and cease,

But the firm feet of humility

They grip the ground like trees.  

                       -G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse

Thinking again about this world history and my history, I want to revisit the horse vicariously, by means of the poem slightly more removed from the poet than my old cassettes. So I just ordered this edition of the book, which I think is the one I bought two copies of in the past for gifts. The American Chesterton Society will be sending me this CD, read by Aidan Mackey, who sounds as though he is very likely, once I put that disk in the player, to send me right back to England and White Horse Hill.

Linking up to Weekends With Chesterton

Beauty and Function - Rugs

On a day when some people are shopping early and late, we went to the countryside to celebrate our oldest grandson's nineteenth birthday. Didn't enter a store all day! But I do have a shopping story all ready to tell you:

The home-decorating saga of unhandy people continues.

Mr. Glad and I have more time lately, for home-improvement projects of all kinds, but we aren't the sort to relish this sort of activity. I'd rather rummage through my sewing room clutter, or read blogs. My husband likes to practice on his drums. And when more responsible homeowners might be painting or sawing to improve their surroundings, we might be taking a walk to Starbucks to sip our caffeine and read poems for an hour.


But on the way home my mind might race ahead and arrive before us, to contemplate the physical realities of our house, and the danger that our procrastinations pose to our guests.
 
This monchromatic photograph may remind some of you of a time two years ago when I asked you dear readers for help with our entryway floor safety problem. I am embarrassed to say that we have taken this long to solve it, though not for trying somewhat faintheartedly again and again.

We researched Amanda's rug idea. We contacted several people about Mark's wood inlay idea. I borrowed a dozen books from the library thinking I might stencil the floor myself. I lay in bed thinking how some lights such as Celeste suggested could be installed under the lip - thinking how at Christmastime it would be fun to switch them for colored lights!

All this time guests went on stumbling and occasionally going all the way down, as we envisioned broken legs or noggins and how ashamed we would be of our negligence if that happened. Recently, when we were waiting for one of the contractors to tell us exactly when he was coming to do the job that it turned out was too small for him to even use his good manners on, I applied zig-zags of thin red masking tape. We were expecting first-time guests and feared for their safety. The tape aged and cured while we came to realize that Something Else must be done.

Now we have a rug. I photographed it without vacuuming it first because my husband was watching a movie and I didn't want to disturb him with the noise.

It's not the most stylish rug, but it is the narrowest one we could find in a workable color. Perhaps someday someone will like to do something more artistic and permanent to this step, but for now we are just relieved to not have to think on it any longer.

[Update: I didn't stop thinking about it after all, but kept noticing how that chocolate brown runner was too dark a mass of color drawing unnecessary and conscious attention to itself, so I bought a red version and am happier now. This picture including the red-toned rug next to the wood stove shows how things have become more coordinated.]


For some reason I put the most ho-humly functional rug at the beginning. The other solved-by-rugs situations include more beauty.

An expanse of wall that has been needing something for three years now has a rug to make the toy area of the living room more cozy. This is my view from the kitchen, of a wallscape that has warmed up considerably.

While I was rug shopping I decided to update and brighten up our entry with a new rug for the front door. I had to open the door to get enough light on my subject; that is a little piece of its blue exterior lower right.






Rugs are my new favorite artistic indulgence, and I'm enjoying all the time that has been freed up now that I'm not perusing decorating websites anymore. It's a beautiful life.

Books have beauty inside and out.

I love it when the AbeBooks newsletter shows us interesting book covers. This particular edition features "The Prettiest Publications of the Past" and there are some lovelies. It's almost enough to make me enter my credit card number right now so I can get a copy of The Book of Bugs for only $139.37.

Seas and Lands would cost not much over $80.


I could pick up Poppies and Wheat by Louisa May Alcott at $200...

But not really. I just like to look at the covers briefly, and then I go inside and delight in the artistry of the words, or I get caught up in the story or the vast worlds of ideas between the covers. I forget the pictures outside.

Still I wondered, do I have any pretty 19th century books on my shelves?

I own this copy of The Saints' Everlasting Rest by the Puritan Richard Baxter. It was published in 1850 though he wrote in the 1600's. I don't actually find it pretty, but it's the only one I found that has any decoration at all. It was given to my great-great-grandmother Margaret in New York City on the first day of 1859, when she was 24 years old and soon to be married.

I wonder if she read it? At the very back some words were penciled in and then erased. It wasn't her fiancé who gave it, or anyone obviously family, for the message on the front flyleaf is signed somewhat formally "H.E. Browne"....




Well, you see how right off I'm concerned not with art but with the people or the book's contents.

My favorite older book is from the 20th century, this copy of The Faithful Wife by Sigrid Undset. It was a recent gift to me from the shelves of an elderly friend, and I haven't read it yet. But I think the design is very homey and wifey.







I'm reading The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts these days, which is all about what's inside the books and what goes on in our minds when we are reading literature. That paperback is on my nightstand, so it doesn't show up on this handy-dandy bookshelf that Soldier made for me many years ago.
 
A disclaimer is in order: This son was pleased and happy to build a tabletop shelf according to the vision I described to him, but he made me promise to fill in the screw holes and crevices and paint or varnish it, because he wasn't happy with the roughness of the finished result. I lied, or broke my promise, and never finished it, and here I am showing the whole world.  My children put up with a lot.

But it is beautiful, isn't it? And when our older son Pathfinder saw it he immediately knew that he wanted several for his house, too.

Now go look at or inside a book.

Fennel and Curd

Monday when I was on the cooking roll it was partly to use up some produce I'd bought when I shopped unwisely. It's always unwise to make purchases when sleep-deprived, and I've had lots of experience with making tired and muddle-headed decisions.

Fennel: In this case I'd been shopping at Trader Joe's and I was trying to make it the only stop, even though I needed some vegetables and don't usually buy much produce at that store. The fennel bulbs seemed to be a good price, so I picked up a package of two medium-sized bulbs (20 oz.) for $1.99.

The wisdom I lacked was from being too tired to know that I was too tired to cook. I didn't have a plan for using fennel, so I got along for a couple more days by raiding the freezer. But I didn't want the vegetables to go bad so eventually I read recipes online and opted to make a simple soup.

I started by chopping and sauteeing the vegetable. Already I can't remember if I used olive oil or butter, but some people liked to use a combination. I was looking for a caramelized or roasted effect, and I didn't want to heat up the oven for such a small amount, so I used a cast-iron skillet. I sprinkled on salt and pepper and cooked the fennel slowly. Some of the pieces were too large to actually caramelize, but there was enough sweet roasty flavor coming from the licorice-flavored bulbs to make for a great taste in the resulting soup.

After all the fennel was at least tender, and some was very brown and some was even black, I blended it with water (I meant to use some chicken broth but forgot), then tasted and tested as I added small amounts of cream, sugar and lemon juice, more salt and pepper. I chopped up some of the unused ferny green top to sprinkle on top before serving....and Mr. Glad declared it fantastic. I didn't take a picture of it, but it was brown and full of browner flecks. We ate the whole panful.

Curd: The big bag of lemons I bought even earlier would have lasted weeks more in the cold garage, but lemon curd was easy to put together, and it makes a prettier picture than brown soup, too.


Lemon Curd

1/2 cup butter
grated peel of 1 large lemon
1/2 cup lemon juice
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt if using unsalted butter
3 whole eggs
3 egg yolks

Beat the eggs and yolks together slightly. Melt the butter in the top of a double boiler and stir in all of the other ingredients. 

Cook over boiling water, beating constantly with a wire whisk, until thick and smooth, about 20 minutes. Store the refrigerator up to 6 weeks.

Lemon curd makes a nice gift if you put it in a little canning jar with a flowered lid. Too bad for my friends, I just happened to have a pint jar that conveniently held my whole batch. But if you come by for tea really soon we can makes some toast together and slather it on.

Can consumers be saved?

In trying to understand ourselves, people have worked out different ways to analyze aspects of the human person. Are we spirit-soul-body or mind-emotions? Is it body-and-intellect, or heart vs. head? It's too bad we have to be always chopped up into warring interests. God intended for us to be unified creatures, as the Holy Trinity is a Unity, but only by God's grace can we begin to know some of that intended wholeness.

What is the heart? Surely it's not just the emotions, as many moderns seem to think. The Orthodox Church understands the heart very differently and more deeply than this. The Greek word nous, the fathers tell us, is not easily translated into English. But some current writers have been able to get through my dullness and give a little more clarity.

One of these is Fr. Stephen Freeman, and his recent blog post "Shopping for God" contains a lot of nourishment that will take me some time to soak up thoroughly. My title is a question posed at the end of his article written on Black Friday Eve.

I haven't finished my Christmas shopping, but even when I come to the end of that I know there will be other anxiety-producing prompts to and from my false self, so I appreciate Fr. Stephen's reminder of my inheritance in Christ, and His Kingdom within.

Here are some excerpts:

Shoppers desire beauty, acceptance, self-confidence, power, intelligence, pleasure, excitement, a host of intangible needs. They are not natural needs, but the passions of the spiritually disordered. Our unnatural existence is centered in the false self -- the sense of identity generated within our memory, thoughts and emotions. It is burdened with uncertainty. Comparing, judging, measuring, revising are constant activities of the mind in its role of the false self.
 .........

Christ at the well

The human life was created to be centered in the heart, the spiritual seat of our existence. The heart is not subject to the passions, not driven by desire and necessity. It is not the same thing as the mind. It does not compare or judge, measure or spin tales of its own existence. It simply is. It is in the heart that we know God (truly know). Its aesthetic is true beauty, found within the most ordinary of objects as well as in the greatest efforts of man. The heart is content.

a smell worse than skunk

How lovely to shop at a farmers' market and buy peaches and green beans fresh from the farm -- how icky to bring the produce into my kitchen and notice an awful stink! It is coming from the plastic bags that the farm stand provides handily just above the bins of appetizing fruits and vegetables.

The bags themselves make me sick to my stomach if I keep them around very long, so twice or three times I have quickly emptied whatever it is into a different (reused) bag, and taken the disgusting plastic with its smell directly outside to the garbage can or recycling bin.

What on earth is in these bags that can make them reek much worse than an old garbage truck? It reminds me of the horrible stuff you can get to use systemically on rosebushes to prevent bugs and diseases.

On every successive trip to that market, I have completely forgotten about the bags until I'm already loading one with beans again! Tonight when I got home I held my nose and took some pre-disposal pictures. Then I checked out the URL.

The only grocery bags listed on this website www.xo16.com are made in China, but the bags say they are made in the U.S.A.

I think it was at Trader Joe's in San Francisco that I was given similarly odiferous bags that advertised themselves as completely compostable; printing on the bag instructed me to re-use the bag and then when I was finished with it to put it in my yard waste bin. (In my county, however, we are not allowed to do this.)

Why would I want to carry around a bag that makes me smell like a toxic waste facility? There are plenty of bad smells around on the earth without me contributing more by being that Green, and after all, a significant aspect of our environment is olfactory. Many people these days would like it if we all went perfume-less. Would they really be o.k. with everyone toting their anti-perfume around town as they did their errands?

Somehow it didn't occur to me to talk to the farmers about the offensive bags. I did find that at the other end of the table, above the peppers, they offered a traditional bag that now seems innocuous by comparison. So next time I will try to avoid the sickening ones, maybe bring paper bags from home to weigh my beans in, and I will be bold enough to ask the farmers if they aren't bothered by that foul smell?

After I had removed the bags from the house, the stench still clung to my hands, but thank goodness I had just opened a bottle of geranium-infused soap at the kitchen sink. I lathered up and the air began to smell like flowers. Now everything is nice here again, and I can end this post on a sweet note, in the category of Things I Like.

Maui Diary 5 - Longs Lives!

Who knew that one of the pleasures of being on a Hawaiian island would be re-connecting with one's old favorite drugstore? Longs Drugstores used to be plentiful all over the West, but a few years ago they were sold to CVS Pharmacy. Only in Hawaii were they allowed to keep their old name. We noticed that they kept way more than that.

The Longs stores where our family shopped for decades were unique among chains that we knew of in that they kept a local flavor, perhaps by letting the lower management have more control.

I admit that I didn't fully appreciate the stores until they were gone and I was left with only more bland chains to choose among if I wanted something smaller than Wal-Mart. All of those stores still seem equally disorganized to me and irritating to shop in.

On Maui, the Longs store was just a few paces down the road from our condo. The first time we shopped there, laying in some supplies that we hadn't brought with us, I reveled in all of the souvenirs, Asian snacks, and a whole aisle devoted to Kona coffee and macadamia nuts.










I saw more Asian snacks than I've ever seen in my local market that carries nothing but Asian foods, and I got carried away taking pictures of the vast collection of exotic concoctions.

The names of the items are hard to read even if you click to get the large photo, so I'll just tell you that in addition to packages of the more common rice crackers and wasabi pea snacks, there were bags of pickled apricot, fried cuttlefish rings and dried cuttlefish legs, dried mango and banana chips, and lemon peel both wet and dried. I love lemon, but neither of those lemony snacks appealed to me. Many items with only Hawaiian or other foreign names filled out the array.

I was awfully excited to find really cheap re-usable carry-out bags with not only the Longs name but also the Hawaii symbols of turtle and hibiscus -- it seems my heart was longing for just such a souvenir to bring home.

At first I also thought that the Asian snacks were going to come in really handy to keep around during our vacation, but when I read the labels for a few minutes it turned out that almost all of them contained MSG or aspartame or both, so I only bought a fairly simple food that fit with the island theme: dried coconut.

dried coconut