our lavender is blooming.

60 plants worth, on our front hillside, right beside our beehive. Can you spot one of our girls in the photo? I wish I could insert smells into my posts, because this Provence lavender is eyes-rolling-back-in-your-head fragrant. I really ought to film the flurry of bees out there so you’d believe how many there are–one morning I counted more than twenty on a single plant. This new little colony is taking its time building up comb, though. I’d assumed that with the abundance of lavender, the comb production would pick up quickly, but that hasn’t been the case so far. A beekeeper on the Beemaster Forum explained that despite popular belief, a new colony won’t build comb to keep up with a nectar flow; it will build comb as needed to keep up with its population, and therefore might not be ready to take advantage of a nearby flow. So I just need to be patient, and let Queen Bee-atrice keep doing her thing. But one of these days, I hope there will be enough honey for me to steal a frame. I know exactly where I’ll put it:

a pot for my honey.

Isn’t it perfectly splendid? Wouldn’t Pooh love it? I found it at, of all places, Anthropologie. (Actually, Anthropologie seems to be a bee-loving company: for Earth Day, they had a neat little online honeybee promo, with some art that inspired my kids. If you click on the arrow near the bees in the promo, you’ll be led through a few pages of honeybee info.)

a new book.

If you’re a plant lover with a dark sense of humor, then you must get your hands on Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart. It’s a compendium of–from the back cover–”plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend.” Fun stuff! It’s also a beautiful little book, with faux-aged pages, old-fashioned etchings and creepy drawings.  I photographed it in my morning glory vine, the seeds of which are, apparently, capable of producing “an LSD-like trip if eaten in large quantity.” (I find the vine to be more violence-inducing, as I am constantly ripping at it whenever it strangles my more tender plants.)

healthy cookies.

No, it’s not an oxymoron. I saw the recipe for Nikki’s Healthy Cookies on 101 Cookbooks a while back, and finally got around to making them. Yum! They’re not so decadent as your typical chocolate chip cookie, but they’re surprisingly tasty given their list of healthy ingredients. We like them frozen, which makes their texture a little nicer. Whole Foods’ Dark Chocolate Chunks work especially well in the recipe. (And you’ll have extras to nibble on and call them antioxidants.)

a new knitting project.

Don’t tell my sweater coat! This is the short, simple number I mentioned in my letter. It’s actually my own bastardization of two patterns that I like: the Jane cardigan from Custom Knits, and the Lacy Skirt with Bows from Greetings from Knit Cafe. Details forthcoming on my Ravelry page for you knitting geeks. (Sorry about those Ravelry links, if you’re not a Raveler.)

Spanish design blogs.

Back in June, I posted this photo of Mr. T with some of our ollalieberries to the Flickr group 100 Things to Love About Summer (’cause if ripe ollallieberries aren’t one of the top 100 things to love about summer, I don’t know what is.) A month or so later, I got an email from Spain, asking for permission to use the photo. Which is how Mr. T ended up on a Spanish design blog, under the heading 100 Razones para Amar el Verano. Which tickles me in an it’s-a-small-world-after-all kind of way.

And even though the kid doesn’t look Spanish, he’s a full one-quarter. ¡Viva la familia Zaballos de Macotera, España!

fun in the sidebar.

I’m adding a place in the sidebar that links to exciting stuff I wander across on my internet ramblings. Mosey on over to the tab that says ever-changing list of wondrous links. I’ve posted a link to the Healthy Cookies recipe there, to keep it up for a while, and also links to some fantastic writing by Michael Chabon and Pico Iyer. That spot in the sidebar will give me a place to share little bits of wonder–even if I’m not keeping up with these atwitter posts.

So I’ll ask yet again, what has you all atwitter?

We’ve been through so much, you and I.

Do you remember when I first laid eyes on you, three years ago? In that Rebecca magazine at the yarn shop? I swooned over the fuzzy mohair-ness of you, and that modernish lace pattern of yours, and your lightness, your length. I fell so hard that I wrote a love story about it, and read it on a podcast.

But I wasn’t ready to commit. I was a beginner, and you were so intense. Just your name scared me: Coat with Lace Pattern. Not just the plainspoken German practicality of it, but the presence of both coat and lace in one name. Clearly you would be no small fling.

But what’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

It took me two years to feel confident enough to take you on. Finally, last September I gathered up ten balls of Sublime kid mohair at the yarn shop and embraced you right there.

It was so exciting in the beginning. All that experimentation, remember? Needles and swatches. You swept me off my feet.

And we had such passion early on. We were together constantly. Your sleeves flew off my needles like a spin around the dance floor. Soon I was climbing up your back, loving your lace. Then suddenly, sometime in November, something changed. All that lace. All those purl rows. I got bored. I got distracted.

So I dallied. There was the Pickle Hat in December, and the Toasty mitts in January. But you must believe that they meant nothing to me. Nothing. I never even took a photo of Toasty and me together for Ravelry.

By Valentine’s Day we were back together, and had that little second honeymoon up in the mountains. I finished your back and cast on for your fronts. That excitement carried us through for a while.

But we had issues. I won’t say we aren’t compatible, but I guess I need a little more from a sweater. You know I’m not a purl kind of girl. Too much of that and my eyes start wandering to other projects. And here I was, having to purl back every other row, all the way up your two…long…fronts. Some weeks we didn’t get together at all. Then there were those two weeks of constant bickering in April. I kept tinking back on your same lace row, again and again and again, and we still couldn’t get it right.

I’m sure all my friends at the park got tired of seeing us together week after week. Me so despondent, you so–unchanged.

But spring fever hit and we slowly became inseparable once again. You started to change in beguiling ways. You decreased! You lost your lace pattern! There was grafting and i-cording and even seaming was new and thrilling. And finally you were finished! We batted our eyelashes at each other and fell in love all over again.

We had those romantic photos taken in the garden. You were all over me.

You’re everything I dreamed you’d be. You’re delicate and airy and dramatic. But despite that halo, you’re hot stuff. (What more could I expect, given your mohair.) You’re longer than I thought you’d be, but, well, let’s not go there.

And that little brown cardigan you may have seen me messing around with lately? Don’t worry. She’s short. And simple.

There will never be another sweater like you.

So I’m trying again. Having a week to write is a bit paralyzing. Where to start? What to work on? I have a handful of essays that I need to throw back out to the rejection merry-go-round. Those need cover letters, as well as rewriting and re-formatting, depending on the publication. It’s time-consuming. I have an essay I’ve been working on, about helping H with his junior term paper for English, that I’d like to finish. I have my workshop to prepare for the HSC homeschooling conference in Sacramento in August. And while that isn’t writing, per se, the topic of the workshop, Nurturing Young Writers, is just what I’m focusing on with my book idea.

A few of you have asked me about that book. I haven’t gotten to the actual writing yet, but I’ve been taking pages and pages of notes, and playing with ideas for format. It’s a writing conundrum: you don’t want to start before you have an idea where you’re going, but you don’t want to wait too long to start either, because so much unfolds during the writing process. 

I’m also considering how I might share bits of book draft here with you, as I work on it. When I’ve written here about my kids’ experiences with writing and reading, I’ve gotten the most interesting, curious, discussion-provoking comments. It seems that many of you like to discuss this stuff! 

In the meanwhile, I’m here alone, writing. Which is unthinkably wonderful. But I do miss my kids.

Mr. T is attending a day camp this week, up in the redwoods. It’s an old-fashioned hike, build-stick-forts, and sing-camp-songs kind of camp, not one of those schoolish-classes-held-in-the-summer-months-under-the-guise-of-a-camp kind of camps. He comes home looking like this:

Tired and dirty. Which is a good day of camp, in my book.

Lulu is at a sleep-away camp with her cousin for a week. I miss her every morning when I don’t get my usual good morning, Mama hug, and when the kitchen is quiet because she isn’t following me around, telling me her plans a handful of times each day. But we’ll be picking her up on Saturday. Not too far off.

H, though. He’s gone for a month. How did I agree to that? On Saturday, Chris and I drove him down to southern California, to Cal Arts in Valencia. He’s attending Inner Spark, which is a summer school for the arts, for high-school-aged kids. He got accepted into the film program, and it seems like an incredible opportunity. Which, of course, is why I agreed to let them have my kid for a month. (If you live in California, and have a teen especially interested in the arts–music, theater, dance, creative writing, visual arts, animation or filmmaking–do check out the program. It’s partially funded by the state of California, so the tuition is reasonable, and what they offer seems quite amazing. I’ll have to share some of H’s experiences here in another post. A friend of a friend whose daughters attended said it “changed their lives.”)

Knowing H will be gone so long makes me miss him so much it hurts. And I mean that literally. When I walk by his room I feel a small hollowness inside. It’s especially hard because this seems like a trial run for a little more than a year from now, when he’ll be leaving for college. How did his childhood go so fast?

I suppose the hollow feeling comes from part of my heart being in Valencia.

But in the meanwhile, we can talk on the phone, and email, and we’ve even set up Skype for videochats, so his little brother can grace him with goofy faces. And in between, I’m here alone, writing. Which reminds me that I should sign off now, and get to some of those plans…

I was supposed to spend my afternoons with E.B. White. I promised you I would–or at least I’d promised to devote June to him. But I was behind in reading for my little project and had planned to use the long weekend to catch up. Then Molly Wizenberg hopped into my book bag and poor Mr. White never got even a glimpse of the lake.

If you aren’t addicted to blogs, there’s the chance that you’ve never heard of Molly’s A Homemade Life, the book which grew from her popular blog, Orangette. I came to Orangette late, maybe six months or so ago. I was quickly smitten though, because Molly’s posts are long and writerly. She writes about food, but each post reads like a short essay. And you know I’m a sucker for that.

When the book came out a few months back, it got mentioned on several blogs I follow, almost invariably, it seemed, with a nod to the recipe for coconut macaroons with chocolate ganache. I assumed the book was a cookbook. I imagined recipes and glossy, artsy food photos. I found the book’s virtual waitlist at my library’s website and got in line.

Was I surprised when I finally had the book in my hands. There wasn’t a single photo. It’s a book of essays. There are recipes, sure, and some pretty tempting ones at that. But the recipes are secondary, really–codas to the stories which precede them. Stories, well-told, about food. After reading Orangette, I don’t know why I expected anything less.

It’s funny–I don’t write much about food here. Which means I’m giving the wrong impression. You probably don’t realize that I’m the sort of person who plans vacations around where we’ll eat each meal. Who goes to New York City without seeing a show because that means we can fit in one more restaurant. Who thinks that when it comes to birthdays, getting to eat your favorite foods is as important as the gifts you’ll get. For H’s seventeenth this year, I went to Bakesale Betty the day before, bought one of their famed fried-chicken sandwiches, disassembled it into separate containers so it wouldn’t get soggy, and sent it to school in his backpack for his birthday lunch. (He requested bacon for breakfast and burgers for dinner. This is what comes of having a vegetarian mother.)

Molly’s book charmed me right off. I’d read an essay, and then another. It was like having a plate of her chocolate-glazed macaroons beside me. Oh, just one more, I’d think. And I’d turn another page.

The fact that I find myself referring to her as Molly, rather than Wizenberg, speaks of her chatty, candid style. She may write about food, but she also writes about her embarrassment at being a debutante (albeit one with a pierced nose), about sleeping in her French boyfriend’s tiny bed at twenty-one, and about her beloved father’s death. She writes about meeting the man who would become her husband via her blog, a story with as much romance as the meeting of Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson in that poppy field in A Room with a View.

I suppose this collection is a bit less weighty than most of the others I’ve read for this project. It’s a book of small stories, about first kisses and first apartments, about pies and pickles. But the telling compels you to keep reading, which is a fine quality in an essay. It also makes you very hungry.

What more could you want from a summer fling?

a few lines to love:

On dating:

“…I learned some important lessons. I learned that some things, like whether or not a man makes the bed, aren’t that important. I learned that men who like to dance are, in general, more fun than their non-dancing counterparts. I learned that kissing a man while leaning against a warm dishwasher is a lovely, lovely experience. (Go ahead! Try it! I’ll wait.)”

Still haven’t tried it. Are you reading, Sweetie?

“I’ve never liked the word blog. It’s kind of weird and lumpy. When you say it, it tumbles out of your mouth with an unbecoming thud.”

Yep. Here’s more on that:

“I guess you could say that having a blog is a little like the windows of a house I used to live in during my sophomore year of college. I loved opening them wide during the day, so that the smell of the eucalyptus trees outside could drift in and sweep out the rooms. But occasionally I would come home and fine a squirrel on my desk. A live squirrel. He would have climbed up the tree outside and jumped in through the window, and now here he was, rifling with his tiny, scratchy claws through whatever he found, tearing up every paper and scrap. Blogging is a little like that. It’s an incredible pleasure to open the window, to put yourself out in the world that way. It’s even better than the scent of eucalyptus. But occasionally you come home an find a squirrel on your desk, so to speak: a nasty comment, maybe, or even worse, something you wrote yourself, probably late at night, when you should have been sleeping, something that makes your cheeks hot.”

Such an apt analogy.

After scattering her father’s ashes in Paris:

“I say that Paris is the place where I’ve been loneliest, and also where I’ve been happiest. But what I mean is harder to say. The thing I call loneliness is delicate and lovely, like a blown-out eggshell. It’s both empty and hopeful, broken and beautiful. Paris couldn’t be anything else for me now, because it’s full of my father.”

Another nice analogy. (And another example of her tendency to overuse the word lovely. A tendency I share. It’s a lovely word.)

“Plus, Brandon once showed up at my door with a quarter pound of a very rare type of cured pork, and nothing makes a girl feel googly-eyed like getting pork from a vegetarian. Especially if he’s just visiting, only for ten days, so the gesture is especially poignant. And even more if, over the span of those ten days, he makes her a batch of pita, a vat of hot sauce, ten caneles, two lunches of Thai green papaya salad, rocky road candy with homemade marshmallows, a quart of milk chocolate ice cream with cocoa nibs, cilantro chutney, sticky tamarind sauce and the finest chana masala ever to flirt with her lips. There’s no reason to ever look elsewhere.”

There’s nothing like a well-placed list in an essay. This one is pretty irresistible. (And so seems Brandon.)

And more on that chana masala:

“After the onion comes a small but spirited parade of spices, a tin of tomatoes, and some cilantro, cayenne and chickpeas. Then things simmer for a little while, during which time you can safely enter the kitchen to do some dishes or kiss the cook, which will cause him to wrinkle his brow and mumble about cumin.”

It’s the brow-wrinkling and mumbling that I find endearing.

In addition to many more lovely lines of writing, there are all those recipes. I’m looking forward to trying the Fresh Ginger Cake with Caramelized Pears, the Pickled Grapes with Cinnamon and Black Pepper and, of course, those chocolate-coated macaroons. I’ll have to return my library copy for the next person in the queue, and buy one of my own.

the plan for july: I’ll stay out of hammocks and get back to E. B. White. I’ve already read several of his essays and have found him quite charming in his own right. How can you not be charmed by a man who loves pigs?

Kayak.

Learn to drive a boat from your grandfather.

Swim with your siblings.

Be patriotic, even in the act of climbing up a ladder.

Show your dancer’s training while taking a dive.

Take a big jump, and fling your little brother into the air.

Watch fireworks from a boat.

I’ll be back soon with a wordier post. Just thought I’d pop in, so you didn’t lose me altogether to the glories of summer. Hope you had a fabulous 4th.