Fall Flavor

Fall Colors; Deb Marshall photo

 

It’s been a strange and sometimes glorious summer and late summer, and frost totally destroyed my squash plants and basil the other night, so even though the daytime temperatures are up into summer ranges again, it’s fair to say we’re in autumn; in fact, now the warm days count as Indian Summer, since frost happened. 

The Mouse Colony, which had a poor year last year, seems to be on the ascendant again – the furry people have been doing nightly battle with them for about three weeks now, and from the signs I’ve found behind toaster oven and spice rack, they’ve lost a few mouse warriors that they hauled upstairs from down cellar to finish off. This morning I found half the basket of unripe paste tomatoes scattered all over the dining room floor – either the furry people have taken up hockey – it is the season, the Tall Dude and the Canadian tell me – or there was a skirmish that took place amongst the veggies.

On the floor in the dining room – I choose that space because it faces west and north, and is farthest from the chapel, where our woodstove resides, so is fairly dark and relatively cool all year round – are two baskets of winter squashes, one of butternut and the other of buttercup, and three baskets of green tomatoes that I whipped out of the garden the day before the frost. Green tomatoes – besides being excellent for making fried green tomatoes, picallili, and green tomato mincemeat – will slowly ripen and while not the best flavor for fresh eating (though they’re as good or better than anything you’ll buy in the grocery store), are fine in soups and spaghetti sauces. The tomatoes on the vine have to have switched from a dull green to a shiny green before you pick them, if you want them to ripen, and you need to check them regularly – if they start to rot, they need to be moved out to the compost before they encourage bad behavior in the rest of the basket. Interestingly, tomatoes ripen from the inside out, so you don’t want to store them in the sun, which makes them mealy. 

Love Lies Bleeding and Sunflowers; Deb Marshall photo

 

One year, back in the dark ages when the Husband and I lived in an old farmhouse in Maine, we covered the floor of our very wide upstairs hall with newspapers, and covered the newspapers with green tomatoes. We had ripening tomatoes that year into January. Folks with space and healthy vines will pull the vine, green tomatoes and all, and hang them in a barn or garage or attic room for ripening, risking a sticky splatter if they don’t check the vines for ripe fruit often enough.

There’s much left to harvest in the garden. Carrots, a few beets, celeriac, parsley root are largely unharvested; the lone remaining zucchini near the house is still blossoming, saved by proximity from the last frost. Parsnips will stay in their beds, freezing over winter, to become sweet and delicious for early spring digging as soon as the snow is off. The Love Lies Bleeding has long, lovely tresses that pool about the tall plant’s feet, and the Jerusalem artichokes have just started to bloom. Nasturtiums, running wildly vine-like escaped the frost, and a few remaining scarlet runner beans and the cherry tomatoes may yet fill out and ripen. The California poppies are still abloom, and I find fava bean pods that have filled out every so many days. Even the morning glories escaped this frost; and the hardy hibiscus has still a few buds yet to open, forming huge, darkly maroon, lunch-plate-sized blossoms. The passionflower vine also sports new buds – the kaffir lime and bay tree and the non-hardy hibiscus returned to their winter homes in the chapel last weekend, but I’m hoping the passionflower will have time to bloom before I have to cut it back and haul it inside. 

Buzzy Boy the hummingbird left shortly after the first frost, which we had on 1 September; a week or so later, there were a couple of hummers using the feeder and gorging on the late –blooming flowers  in the garden, and one was, I believe, the same noisy-winged female we spotted last year, on their migration route from norther places. I haven’t seen a hummer for the last week, so will soon take in the last feeder. I hope Buzzy made it to his winter digs safely, and didn’t get swept up in the hurricanes.

Warty Pumpkin amidst dining table collection; Deb Marshall photo

All the bees I see out now are slow and move tipsily, as if drunk. It’s too cold for them even on sunny days, and by dusk, the ones who are still out are barely moving and look like ornaments.  Our fall-ripening raspberries are in full production, and I need to look carefully before I pluck, for fear of plucking a bee as well.  In a few weeks I’ll need to cut down canes that produced this year, making room for next year’s bloomers. 

Slowly the tomato cages are piling up next to the shed door, and clay pots that held spent annuals are beginning to gather. In the place of the summer beauties, pots of mums in startling colors and pumpkins in even more startling colors are herding together on the wart.  A small square of row cover material nearby imitates a will o’ wisp, as it gently flutters in the breeze.

The freezers are filling: applesauce, blueberries, tomatoes, zucchini, scarlet runner and fava beans, green peppers, corn, spaghetti sauce, a few raspberries, green and yellow beans. I’ve dug the potatoes – some with rosy red flesh, others with deep purple flesh – and the shallots are in a woven bag hanging on the wall in the pantry, and the onions are in braids hanging from pegs in the kitchen. The rosemary plant is back in the kitchen window along with a parsley plant; in the garden, tall dried dill stalks haunt the partly-empty beds, and the tarragon and sorrel look tired and worn. My one lone cilantro plant scattered its dry seeds to emerge somewhere else next spring, the calendula and Johnny-jump-ups and catnip have sent out hundreds of seeds that will take root next year, and the gladiolas, which had a terrible season, will soon need to be dug and their  bulbs stashed away in the cellar until next summer.  

Late Summer Critter; Deb Marshall photo

Scurrying about from one garden chore to another, I feel rather like a member of the Mouse Colony or Chipmunk Coterie myself.  

I’m keeping an eye on a huge, handsome hornet’s nest that hangs from a maple tree over the driveway. As soon as the hornets desert it – where do they go in winter? -  I’m going to snag it for a house decoration. The Tall Dude has a his house filled with these, and I’ve long coveted one for myself, but so far the only nests we’ve had have been built on the sides of shed doors or the corners of roofs, so came down in pieces. In a cracked antique wooden bowl that used to make a nice cat lounger, I have some decades-old paper wasp sheets from one of those nests, and the furry people will no longer venture near the bowl. Every so often I’ll take a strip out and marvel at its resilience and grey beauty. The driveway nest will find a home, still attached to its branch, somewhere in a corner near the ceiling in our living room. At the moment, that’s just a dream, as the hornets are still very busily going in and out, doing whatever it is hornets do with their days. 

The hornet's nest I covet; Deb Marshall photo

Most the sunflowers have turned their heavy heads down, now, and I’m starting to see the empty shells left behind by birds in the cups of the flower head backs. One tall many-flowered giant was so heavily burdened it actually fell over; I hefted it up and rested it on the back fence so the birds can get at its seeds. I hear them fluttering away working on seed removal when I’m in the garden.  And now that so many of the tomato plants and giant squashes have been pulled – I discovered that the butternut was climbing the scarlet runner bean’s fence – I can see the solar-powered orb that changes colors in the night more clearly from the wart when I let the barkie boys out to pee at night.  This orb is a plastic ball that was designed to float in a swimming pool, delivering some cleaning fluid; I put it atop the pedestal of the birdbath, saved after I dropped and broke the bowl during garden clean-up last fall. Watching the ball turn red-green-blue-violet-white makes my French-Canadian blood sing with joy, and that gets me thinking it’s almost time to make corton for Mom’s birthday.

Grape Vines and Mountain Ash berries; Deb Marshall photo

Corton is a French-Canadian pate. My great-grandparents had it on their table always, and we often had some made by my meme; we ate it on buttered toast in the morning for breakfast, and it also makes a nifty sandwich. There are many recipes for it; Meme didn’t have one, but I watched her make it many times and, hey, if you can cook, you can usually figure these things out. Traditionally it’s made with ground pork butt; I prefer to use grass-fed beef, beefalo or bison. Here’s the basic recipe:

Corton

 

1 lb or more of ground pork butt or beef, bison, etc.

A whole lot of minced garlic – start with 4 large cloves, and work up from there

Ground cloves (the spice, not the allium)

Salt

If you’re using beef/bison rather than pork, some good butter

Olive oil

A little water

2 or 3 small bowls to pack it into

Heat some olive oil in a saucepan large enough to hold the meat easily.  Add the meat and garlic, and stir, stir, stir, breaking up the meat into tiny pieces, incorporating the oil, and not letting it brown. To this end, add a little water as needed to help keep it from frying – you’re really boiling the meat in oil, and the water should thoroughly boil off before you’re done, so don’t use too much. Pork butt is quite fatty so you won’t need much olive oil but might need more water; beef/bison is quite lean, so you’ll need more olive oil and less water. As the meat becomes well-broken-up and begins to look partly cooked, add salt (try 1 tsp for 1 lb of meat) and ground cloves (try 1 tsp for 1 lb of meat). Continue to stir, and when the meat looks cooked through, taste it and adjust seasonings. The flavor of clove and garlic should be clearly present, not subtle. When well-seasoned, if using beef/bison, or if your pork was not very fatty, add several tablespoons of butter and stir in thoroughly.

The fat in the pork, or the butter you’ve added, causes the meat to hold together in a paste when it cools – think cat food consistency. (In fact, when we were kids, we used to compare the way it looked to Calo cat food!) Press it into your bowls, pressing down to take out all air pockets and cause the oil/butter/fat to partly rise to the top and make a thin layer. Cover tightly and put in the frig to cool.

Once cooled, it will have the consistency of – well - cat food, which is pate consistency. It spreads easily on hot toast, and buttering the toast first adds a second level of unctuousness. Brought to room temperature, it will spread easily on slices of baguette.  If it doesn’t, you didn’t add enough butter – make a note for next time! Corton is traditionally eaten with cornichon (a kind of sour pickle) to balance the fat. It also makes a fine sandwich when paired with a nice seedy mustard.  Some people’s recipes include the addition of cinnamon and bread crumbs, but my version matches the flavor and mouth-feel of Meme’s perfectly. It was traditionally made at the same time the Christmas/New Year’s pork pies were made, using the same fatty cut of pork and similar seasonings  - unless  you made it all the time, as my great-grandparents did. 

Bon appetite!

Cardinal whirligig and morning glories; Deb Marshall photo

For the blog, October 3, 2017

Hardy hibiscus; Deb Marshall photo

 

From the Edge of Darkness 9: Gun Gal 3

Trash can; Charley Freiberg photo

Just call me Gun Gal.

I don’t want anyone to take away your guns, not the ones you use to keep pests out of your garden, not the ones you hunt deer with, as long as they’re actually guns and not weapons and you use them responsibly. But I don’t want there to be fools with weapons wandering around in public – or even in private - in an active daily relationship with their weapons, and often with the demons in their heads that point out danger in every other person,  in every situation, and sometimes whispering tales of glory and revenge, self-inflicted justice and power. And I especially don’t want them walking about with hidden weaponry, putting you, and me, and the cops my Dad and friends used to work with in danger. 

I don’t want there to be that opportunity for tragic error - not in this country, where no one’s ensuring that weapon owners are trained and remain trained – which they aren’t -  and are responsible gun owners – which, clearly, many are not; or sober; or don’t have hate and anger issues; or aren’t medicated with any number of mind-affecting drugs; or aren’t a hormone-stupid kid who stole a weapon from the Dad or Grandpa who was too poorly trained or stupid to heed the absolute responsibility to keep his weapons locked up; or are even wholly sane. If you’re completely honest, gun owner or not, you’ll be nodding your head in agreement when you read that, and if you’re not --- well, you draw the conclusion.

Last month, someone walked into the hospital in Lebanon and shot his mother. In Concord recently, a couple of gun-owners were waving their guns around at each other, and shooting happened; in another incident in Concord, one person was shot and two others shot at. In another state, yet another teenager shot yet another bunch of schoolmates. In Manchester, a 17-year old was shot in the face. There were shootings in Penacook. Earlier this summer, some proud gun owner shot another person’s dog at one of the rest areas. 

Those were the weapons instances I heard about recently in a casual glance at the news – you know there are more, and you wouldn’t have to search hard to find them. And that, neighbors, is a problem: our neighbors are doing an awful lot of shooting at other people.

Let’s talk about near misses. Let’s talk about near misses that turned into tragedy.

A dear friend is now struggling with what to do about her aging father’s guns and weapons. The man is retired military – very well-trained. And yet, the guns are loosely stored in a closet, not in a gun safe. And he’s not in good health. His physical ailments are starting to affect his mental health. He’s easily angered; he’s impatient, and irritable. He’s becoming unpredictable. My friend is afraid to take his guns away; she’s afraid to leave them where they are; and he’s so easily angered – and becomes so over-the-top angry - that she’s afraid to try talking to him about it. He has become a volatile and unsafe gun owner, but he would disagree vehemently with that assessment. My friend, raised in a military family, was carefully taught safe gun ownership. She gave up her own guns when her health deteriorated in a way that made her fear that she would not always have them under safe control. That was the responsible, correct thing to do. Her father should have done the same – but here’s a big problem with our free-for-all attitude about not really regulating guns: gun owners, even those who have been well trained, can precipitously become unsafe, or become unsafe so slowly that no one is paying attention. 

Sometimes family or friends recognize the problem in time, and are able to divest that person of their weapons. But often the family or friends don’t act – they don’t want to upset the gun owner, to point out their deterioration, to question their judgment,  or even their state of mental or emotional health. Or, like my friend, they don’t dare remove the guns, either because they don’t know how to handle them safely or because they’re afraid of stirring the gun owner’s wrath. They don’t want to call the police to help because they don’t want the neighbors to see cops going into the relative’s house – scandal! There may be no relatives to handle the situation and friends may not feel it’s their business; and the gun-owner himself may not recognize – or be willing to admit to - his own deteriorating judgment. Nor may he consider how his deteriorating sight or hearing could lead to a tragedy; or how his short-term memory lapses, or physical wobbliness, could cause an unintended shooting. I was happy to sign a statement for the local police department saying I thought my Dad was a responsible person and should be given a hidden gun permit; one year later, when his health had deteriorated radically, I thought exactly the opposite. But one year later, no one was asking – Dad had the permit, and that was the end of it. I had to take Dad’s gun away myself. 

Aging people are often taking a mixed cocktail of pharmaceuticals. Do any of the drugs, or the combination of them, affect the mind? Who’s responsible for the drug-affected elder’s guns? How about the young fella who owns an arsenal, and is taking mind-bending drugs for a sprained back, or dental surgery, or depression – or should be, but isn’t? Who’s monitoring the safety of the person who just suffered a major trauma – a divorce, a nasty break-up, a firing, the death of a dear friend or beloved relative? Who’s monitoring the gun safety of the person who is slowly experiencing mental changes? Who’s testing whether my being armed doesn’t make me act like a person who will take the law into her own hands? Who will shoot another person’s dog rather than call the actual authorities? Who will shoot the suspicious person rather than call the police? Who will threaten, with my weapon, a next-door neighbor who’s making too much noise, or stealing my parking spot, or whose dog poops regularly on my lawn, or a stranger who cuts me off on the highway, or looks at me funny in a bar? Who’s monitoring that, and who, amongst my acquaintances, will take away my guns if I do any of those things?

Another friend is divorced from a man who has remarried. Their children, now teens, visit their dad at his house – where an array of guns, all loaded, are kept casually setting about in the house. The man has very young children from his current marriage; nothing is keeping those children from playing with those guns, except daddy and mommy saying “No.” The man isn’t always sober. The man has anger control issues. The man is not a safe gun owner, and no one who knows him dares broach the topic with him. Everyone just holds their breath and keeps their fingers crossed. So far, there’s been no sequence of unfortunate events – but no one who knows this gun owner feels safe; and he doesn’t improve with age.

Many decades ago, one of my second cousins and all his siblings and his mother were shot to death by their father. An hour before he shot them, the killer was perfectly normal, having a casual conversation with friends before going home for lunch. No one knows what happened; but instead of eating lunch, he killed his wife and five children. One of the boys died trying to wrest the gun out of his father’s hands, enabling one sister to escape. Shortly after he killed them all, my second cousin’s step-dad was again a perfectly normal, seemingly reasonable man.

This tragedy happened so long ago that the gun used was a tool, not a weapon; had that scenario happened today – as it does, extraordinarily often – there wouldn’t have been time for the son to wrestle with his father. The weapons people casually have about them today would have killed the lot in seconds.  

We need to talk. We need to talk about who, really, we feel comfortable owning guns. We need to talk about how often guns are misused. We need to really think about how many ways, and how often, a gun owner can become an unsafe gun owner. We need to rethink the reasons people want to own guns, and decide whether we really want our neighbors arming themselves against their neighbors. We need to think this whole right to bear arms through, carefully. The world has changed, a lot. If you’ve never owned a gun, you need to think this through carefully. And if you’re a gun owner, planning your scathing response to me – first tell us – what arrangements have you made to protect your family, friends and neighbors if you precipitously, or very slowly, become an unsafe gun owner? And do you really want all your neighbors with substance abuse, anger, paranoia, emotional and physical ailments, poor or no gun safety training, hidden PTSD, and all the other danger-making issues to be able to freely arm themselves, so they can protect themselves - against you?

I woke up today to the news: current count, 58 killed, 500+ wounded in Las Vegas, a very gun-happy state.  Once again, we have clear, tragic evidence that guns carried for self-defense doesn’t work in such instances - but in a moment, the gun-dogs will start to howl: guns don’t kill, people do; we need to be able to defend ourselves. Let’s send the howling dogs back to their kennels, and have a reasoned, mature discussion about what we should do about uncontrolled, unreasonable private ownership of weapons. We haven’t been able to control the people with the guns, so let’s seriously talk about what we need to do to control the guns. And let’s stop listening to the gun-dogs' howling.

Published in the Concord Monitor, 4 October 2017, as "Conversations Should Start at Home."

Turn, Turn, Turn

Partial Eclipse of the Sun; Deb Marshall artwork

The world turns, the seasons turn, the garden turns, and memory turns.

Today was the solar eclipse – only part of it here, and the Husband and I were outside, looking at the shadows the sun threw through a colander’s holes when our peak was at its peak. It was possible to see the cover of the moon in the colander shadows, but it wasn’t very exciting, and in fact, the whole thing wasn’t very exciting – it sort of looked like 5 pm at 2:45 pm, which isn’t very different at this time of year. The critters didn’t even notice. I had a headache that didn’t go away until after the eclipse resolved, but that may have been coincidence. The Tall Dude showed up at about 3 pm with his welding helmet (rated 10 on the won’t burn your eyes scale) and a piece of something square and black from another gadget (rated 6 on the won’t burn your eyes scale) and we put on the helmet and held the black square up in front of our eyes inside the helmet and had a look at the bite out of the sun that the moon took – that was a little more exciting – then the moon moved over, and  the world turned.

Last week I found the first red leaf – the season turned, and you can see it in the late afternoon shadows, hear it in the crickets’ chorus and in the birdsong, feel it in the coolness of the breeze when the day’s hot. This week there are several branches of swamp maple blazing red, visible from the wart. The winter squashes have suddenly gotten big; the green, yellow and purple beans have finally stopped producing flowers and I’ve begun to pull the plants as I divest them of their last pods. The shell beans  are thickening up, and Buzzy Boy, the hummingbird, is very, very busy protecting the scarlet runner flowers and his feeders from all invaders. Most importantly, our decade-plus old peach tree produced an amazing crop of fruit for the first time ever this summer, and the peaches got ripe this week. If you stand under the tree, your head becomes filled with the perfume of peaches; and there are two baskets of peaches on the dining room table waiting for us to eat or freeze them. We’ve had peaches to eat every day for the week, sweet peaches with juice that runs down the arm and tastes like the end of summer. 

The biggest garden surprise this summer is that my seckel pear tree has produced one perfect pear – a first for it, also, and especially surprising because I don’t have a second pear tree with which it may share pollen. Morning glories are finally and beautifully covering the gardem fence, the sunflowers have dropped their heads and are busily turning flower to seed, the potato plants died back and onions, too, so I’ve been digging and plucking those, and the garden has that special quality about it that only happens in late summer, when everything is at its fullest and the heart swells and nearly breaks with the bitter-sweetness of it all. There are moments of pure perfection, fleeting and tender. The garden turns.

The Historian came by a few days ago with a box of apples from his trees, and a long answer to a couple of questions I’d asked him about incidents in my own family history that I was too young to understand clearly when they happened, and that I didn’t think to get explanations about before my grandparents and father died. This is one of the wonderful things about living in a small town, where pretty much everyone knows or knows about everyone else, and there are long-time residents who are repositories of all the history of the area. 

Love Lies Bleeding and Sunflower; Deb Marshall photo

Last year when I was working on the Plastic Bin Project, I became curious about a murder that happened when I was quite young. My father’s cousin, and her children and her husband’s children from his first marriage were murdered one day by her husband/their father. I was young enough when it happened that I wasn’t told all the details of the murder, and picked up only a few more details when I was a little older, but it wasn’t something the family discussed in front of children when it happened, or at all, years later. It had nearly slid out of my memory until I started working on a family tree and going through my Nana’s bin of family stuff; I was  surprised that amongst all the obituaries and other newspaper clippings she’d kept about family members, there wasn’t a single item about the murder. 
This struck me as odd, especially since, carefully preserved, there was a long clipping about the death of my grandfather's younger brother, who burned to death as a child. Was the lack of news about the murder not because of the fat of horrible death, but that the means was murder rather than fire? Then a few weeks ago I found a photo my father had taken of what appears to be the five coffins lined up in one grave – but no explanation written anywhere,  just a date. The Niece and I had both searched on the Internet for old newspaper stories about the murder, and found only a couple of short, slightly contradictory pieces – one of them from a newspaper in California! 

It’s a curious thing to look back into family history and discover that there is more than one mystery, and some were within reach of being solvable had I – or someone – known to ask the right questions when the people who knew the answers were still living! I vaguely remember my first cousin once removed, and one of my second cousins who were murdered – but he was a boy, and we were young enough that we didn’t really play together and the other kids were either enough older or enough younger to be of no interest to me, and his mom was an adult and so mostly out of the sphere of a kid my age at the time. But now – memory turns. Enter The Historian.

As I read his recounting of what he remembers about the murder, I found myself realizing that some of it was stuff I knew, once; and some of it’s brand new. There are now more questions than before. 

Written for the blog, 21 August 2017

Wowie - this is a sunflower! Deb Marshall photo