August Eats

 

The Good food month is here, with fresh; locally grow produce filling the refrigerator and bellies. I put in a lot of Roma tomatoes this year and they are producing bunches of lovely bright red little globes glowing through the greenery, I use then for cooking, eating and looking at. They’re great with basil, onion, garlic, olive oil and balsamic vinegar over angel hair pasta. I also have the regular kind, ready for the BLT feast. I don’t ear a lot of bacon, because, you know, it’s full of all sorts of things that will kill you, but when there are tomatoes jumping off the vines, a person is obliged to combine them with good bread, mayonnaise and bacon. It’s obligatory.

Corn is excellent this year, too, all buttery with a touch of salt. Green beans are melt in your mouth tender and sweet. I haven’t planted beans in years, mainly because the squirrels just dig them up. The farmers’ market provides plenty. Gently steam them until they are tender, throw in a bit of butter and savor. The green peppers are scarce again, but there are enough to flavor other dishes and salads.

Peaches, apples and pears are coming on, too. Beeckwith’s Orchards already have their cider available, which seems a little early. They no longer press the cider on the premises because of some health laws, but it’s still the best there is.

We’ve had a spell of sticky weather, after some beautiful crisp days and nights, so summer is ending the same way it began. It went too quickly, heat, humidity and all, but I look forward to fall and visits from my fafaway daughters.

Nature Here and There

 

\The garden is thriving, thanks to the rain, along with those beautiful August sunshine and blue skies. Yesterday was on of the most perfect, with billowy clouds against the bluest of skies. Not a day when one would think of driving over to Youngstown, but we went to the Mill Creek park, a great contrast to the Detroit-like ambience of the former steel. We went in search of Lanteman’s Mill, and an attempt to find a bizarre exhibit at the Ford Nature Center. The mill is an historic structure which has been restored to working order, actually grinding grain.

The whole experience was rather dispiriting. The park is beautiful in itself, but it is apparent that there is not enough money to maintain any kind of meaningful nature center, which was staffed by a couple of rather rather apathetic women who barely made eye contact. A few kids were trying to interact with some pitiful learning exhibits, and one room was full of mournful, moribund turtles in glass cages.

The exhibit I was looking for, which has haunted me for years was a few glass jars of pickled snakes. Years ago we saw these at the mill, along with drawers full of dead songbirds, which someone had probably donated to the place. Several years ago, I found the snakes at the Nature Center, but these were only a few of the birds left. I wanted John to see them, but there was nothing left. Apparently, collecting birds was quite a hobby, and they were preserved somehow, so that their feathers stayed bright. It had been such a weird sight to see those drawers full of little, colorful bird bodies and wonder how they had cone to be victims of some nut-case bird collector.

The mill, when we finally found it, was staffed by the same sort of uninterested employee. I asked her if they had corn meal or flour for sale. She replied that they did, when they had any, as if that didn’t happen very often. There were a lot of people wandering about, but not many seemed to be interested in touring the immense building. It is something like four stories high, which means a lot of stairs, too many for me right now, so we just wandered around. It’s obvious that this park needs better funding, but Youngstown is struggling, as are many rust belt cities. It actually is a very interesting place, with a first rate art museum, a state university, and great ethnic restaurants.

We drove back via Rte. 422, which I’ve written about before, the road that used to be lined with the pre-historic like remains of giant steel mill, most of which have now been demolished. However, thee are several new ones, much sleeker and stream-lined compared to the old ones. I miss them, even though they were depressing, but in a good, artistic way, making me think of the thousands of people who spent their lives in these industrial hives.

We seem to have our own little nature center right in the back yard. The see have been at the tomatoes. Since we will be having bumper crop of the Roma variety, I guess we can share without too much trouble, Poor deer are losing their habitat and frequently wander the neighborhood, looking confused, but enjoying the vegetation.

Reality Check

 

When one reaches an advanced age, that is, becomes a genuine geezer, one has a rather panoramic view of the history one has lived all those years. Events come and go and come again. The BIG Decision Makers develop policies that they deem necessary, start wars, decide who counts and who doesn’t, argue about what the Founding Fathers really meant when they constructed the Constitution, and even though we vote for them, the government machine takes over and we have no control over what happens. Really.

One of the areas I have seen kicked around is that of our right to privacy, out right not to have the government looking over our shoulder and using the information gleaned to abridge our “freedom.’

Let me take you back to the so-called idyllic 50s, the era that some people want to bring back. The scene is Kent State University, to Fr. James Fleming’s Social Theory class. It was a senior level class in which we studied how, over the centuries of civilization; men had developed the means of forming society in workable ways to create the best possible outcomes for all – or in some cases for a chosen few. Included among these social philosophers was Karl Marx, naturally. Now in the class was an older student we had never seen before,; since most of the rest of us had been together for at least three years as sociology majors we all knew each other. He was very quiet in class, not asking questions or commenting. He was also dressed very formally, not in the casual way of the average student,. One day, after class, he joined a group of us at lunch. He had a lot of questions about Dr. Fleming, a wonderful teacher and scholar from Georgia. “He sure talks a lot about Karl Marx,” he said. We just stared at him. “It’s a social theory class,” one of us said. “You can’t ignore Marx.” He didn’t look convinced. He disappeared from class soon after that. He had FBI written al over him. SO far as I know, Dr. Fleming was not assigned to a list of subversives, but the watching had begun.

In Columbus, the state of Ohio had its own House Un-American Activities Committee, which forced the Ohio State University to establish a loyalty oath for all faculty, including graduate assistants.  To teach at Ohio State you had to swear that you were not and had never been a member of any organization that threatened to overthrow the government of the USA. They also established a gag rule on certain speakers invited to speak at university and class events. McCarthy and the Congressional un-American Committee were gearing up for the major witch hunts of that time. Nothing was too absurd: an acquaintance of my husband’s in graduate school was in charge of the classic film series, showing such films as “Grapes of Wrath,” “The Ox-Bow Incident,” “Citizen Kane,” etc., the kinds o films to stimulate discussion as both art and human behavior. (In those far-off days college students were actually interested in ideas, rather than special effects.) The young man was called before the Ohio Un-American Activities Committee because – gasp! – some of them had been written by the notorious Hollywood Ten, writers who had refused to testify against others who may or may not have once belonged to the Communist Party, or perhaps had fought with the rebels in the Spanish Civil War against the Fascists. It was the committee which decided what was subversive; they had a little list, which included groups like Blue Star Mothers, those dangerous government over-throwers who had had a son serving in WWII.  Our friend had to face these yobs who probably thought “Grapes of Wrath” was about the wine industry. Our friend was not hauled off for violating the loyalty oath, but the film series was cancelled.

The atmosphere in Columbus was oppressive, but worse was to come.

For reasons that I still do not understand, Joseph McCarthy was allowed to run roughshod over the civil rights of hundreds of people. People lost jobs, were black listed for years; He kept waving papers around, shouting that he HAD NAMES!!! Interestingly, one of the young lawyers on his committee was Robert F. Kennedy,

Two brave men stopped him, finally. One was Edward R. Murrow, and I you saw “Good Night and Good Luck.” you know what he did, when even the president seemed to cringe and avoid confronting that major villain of his presidency. The other was Joseph Welch, a Dickensian old Boston lawyer, who took him on during the Army-McCarthy hearings and smashed him but good.

Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover took up where McCarthy left off and created similar violations of free speech and illegal spying on American citizens, not presumptive terrorists, but civil rights workers, anti-war demonstrators, journalists, and commentators.

And now we have the IRS snoops checking out certain groups. It’s still wrong, but the magnitude of the offensive actions doesn’t come close to past skullduggery in the name of national Security.

In another sense, we are under constant scrutiny through our credit cards, computer pages, Twitter, Facebook, merchant preference cards, store cameras – we’re all in there.

Scary.

Black Beauties

They’re here. Here to brighten up my otherwise sweaty, unpleasant summer. The season is not a long one, but I do my part to consume as many as I can. I don’t remember their being around when I was growing up. IN those days we ate sweet green grapes, cold from the refrigerator. Now black cherries fill the bill.

One time when my friend Susan and I were in London, every day on the way back to the B. and B. from the Metro, we passed a wonderful fruit store, where we would pick up plums, peaches and black cherries for a pre-dinner snack. Soon it was just the black cherries. If we had enough left after dinner, they were good for dessert, too. I once spent a week up op Traverse City doing a storytelling workshop at the EMU branch there. Traverse City, MI is only the black cherry capital of the world, I think. There was black cherry sauce on chicken, black cherry cake, black cherry ice cream and black cherries on sale by the road side. I l loved it.

The best buy around here is at one of those discount grocery stores over in Ravenna. For all I know they come from Lower Slobbovia, but they are superb, sweet and juicy and beautiful to behold. That’s the extra kick with this fruit. You con sit and admire it before you eat it.

Summer Time

Like most of the country, we have been suffering from what Polly refers to as dog breath weather. Even though I grew up in the sunny South state of Georgia, I have never been a l over of the summer season. We had a very nice, shady backyard with trees to climb, an old cement fish pond we could fill enough to cool off in and a public swimming pool we could walk to. We had a front porch with a squeaky glider to slouch in. In addition, we were children who played hard all day and fell into bed too tired to notice the heat.

It was when we moved to Ohio that we began to notice the hot, sticky weather of summer.

Now I love Ohio. It is a beautiful state with lush countryside hills and lakes and rolling hills. Our spring and autumn seasons are heavenly. Our winter and summer seasons can be dreadful. So far this summer we have had varying periods of heavy rains and heavy humidity. The past couple of days were quite lovely, but we’re headed to the nineties again. We have air conditioners, which save my sanity at night, but I still like open windows and fresh air.

I look forward to August, when the skies are that deep blue and the shadows have sharp edges and the dog are breathing in some other direction.

Fleeting Spring

I have really neglected this blog. I think it’s probably because I seem to spend a lot of time playing with the IPad. I have not been feeling too well for the past few weeks, and I distract myself with Netflix, watching “Frasier,” which makes me laugh, and old Masterpiece Theater favorites.

 

We had a beautiful spring, even though it’s been a bit chilly and rainy, neither of which bother me too much, although to hear some people complain, one would think their lives are ruined. There have been enough blue sky days to suit me.

 

I find myself disturbed by the way the world is going, especially the Syrian issue. I fear that our government seems only too eager to jump in and get us in another quagmire which will involve more young Americans being maimed and killed for…what?? The “news” that the Syrian leader is using chemical weapons calls to mind another WMD excuse to spread our military/industrial complex into action, costing the billions which could better be used for life enhancing purposes, rather than causing more death and destruction.

 

I did this picture last month, and the lilacs are long gone, but they did leave a lovely memory of this spring.

Sun! Color! Green Stuff!

This has been an unusually beautiful spring around here. The numbers of flowering trees has been dazzling.  We’ve always had flowering crab trees, dogwood and the occasional redbud. But now, everywhere you look, there’s color, something we used to see, in terms of bright colors, only in the fall.

Behind the science building on campus there are a bunch of magnolias of all things. They were by a cou0le of folks in the botany division of the biology department. They don’t bloom vigorously every year, but my friend Tom took me up to see them once during a particularly spectacular display a few years ago.

Unlike the colorful fall season, these delicate flowering trees don’t last very long. They are, however replaced by lilacs and now the rhododendrons, which are much flashier than the early spring trees.

We didn’t have a very harsh winter this year, but we were rewarded with a beautiful spring anyway.