FRIENDS AND VEGETABLES ARRIVE ALL AT ONCE
I am recovering from a bad case of food poisoning contracted on the road or at a gig. I think it was salmonella, from the symptoms. I had fever and chills as well as the usual digestive stuff and it lasted 8 days. This is the only the second day I’ve felt a hundred percent.Today I went to the Wellfleet flea market. I was looking for little dishes in which I can give my cats medicine mixed with babyfood, and this time I found them. I also found a pair of black & white earrings I wanted. Took 50 minutes of shopping and I ran into three friends and sat on a picnic bench and chatted for a while. Two old good friends are on the Outer Cape on vacation, so we got together with them last night. They had been invited for supper, but it kept raining. Eleanor is allergic to cats, so when she eats here, we always eat in our screened in gazebo. But it leaks now. We have to get it fixed, but that will not be easy or cheap, so we live with it leaking a bit – but not a night for guests.So I made a complete dinner and we carried it to their rental house two towns over. One of those rentals where time has stood still and the furniture and décor is mid 1950s. I made baba genoush out of 6 oriental eggplants from our garden. Their son Thai and his girlfriend Logan were there too besides Eleanor and Jeff. Eleanor and Logan don’t eat meat, so we brought some gravlax we’d made and I put together salad nicoise – tuna, green beans, potatoes salad, oil cured olives and tomatoes. The eggplant, beans, potatoes and tomatoes were from our garden. The olives were from Greece.This afternoon we canned 6 pints of tomato sauce. We live well for serious writers, because we raise a lot of our own food, barter for eggs and fish and seafood, freeze, can, dehydrate. We enjoy it. It’s as much game as work. We usually play music. We’ve frozen 24 pounds of beans so far but need more so they last through. 27 pints of tomatoes plain. 14 other tomato sauces. I am also freezing peppers. Big pepper and tomato year.We went up to Maine and picked up the naturally grown lamb we get every year. Also hit the outlets in Kittery and Freeport for some clothing. Woody has been gardening in shorts hanging in shreds and that will no longer approximate clean no matter what I do to them. So he finally broke down and replaced them.He gave his first reading from the new book YOU’RE MARRIED TO HER in the Wellfleet library. He has five more readings set up on the Cape and one in Brookline. We’re both reading at the festival in Ithaca on September 8th along with music and bellydancing to launch Kathryn Machen’s anthology about Adrienne Rich. She was a friend. So many old friends of mine are dying off.I sit at my computer and watch six male goldfishes come and pick out seeds from the row of rusty red sunflowers I planted along the main garden, close to my office. Then half an hour later, just now, I look up and see a bevy of female goldfinches going after the seeds. That’s one reason I plant them, besides their beauty. These are nice tall ones, six feet round abouts, and they stick up over the fence a grapevine has almost smothered.Xena, our youngest and largest cat, has a new nickname, Big Baby, like the Celtics player. She is trying to figure out why the fly she can plainly see on the screen can’t be grabbed – it’s on the outside. But she did scare it and drive it away, which is just as well.