Getting Overwhelmed

I’m working my way through the first comments on my book –critiques by the prose editor. I’m about 2/3s of the way through her comments. I try to do five or six pages six days a week, but sometimes I can’t get to it that day.

The garden is belching out zucchini, eggplants and patty pans as well as Swiss chard.  I did get to use most of the leeks Woody thinned. Last night we had company. I roasted a shoulder of lamb, made tabouli I soaked and drained overnight. I have my own way of making tabouli that includes less parsley and lemon but more small cut vegetables. I also cooked ambrosial zucchini –zukes with a lot of herbs in a custard, basically. Gigi brought a great peach pie from Marion’s pies in Chatham.

I am not likely to run out of zucchini recipes no matter how many we grow. So far I have plenty of patty pan recipes, although for those I could conceivably have to look for more. But Oriental eggplants do not like any of my recipes designed for Italian type eggplants. I need more recipes suitable for the long thinner Orientals. We are growing more than we can eat. We overplant some because you never know what will wipe out some crops or threaten others. Every year is different. There’s a limited number of way to conserve produce – freezing, canning, drying. The only way I’ve ever found to keep zukes are to make them into soup.

I have noticed lately in ads trying to sell body deodorants that corporations are trying to convince women our cunts stink and that our whole bodies are disgusting. More recently they have moved on to the elderly.  They call it old people smell – which they maintain, to induce paranoia, that seniors can’t smell it but anyone else can. They talk about coming into old people’s houses that have an unpleasant odor. We all stink unbearably they tell us to sell their crap.

I’m planning to get into the garden today once I get the personal laundry on its way.  I didn’t do it Friday, as I always do, because so much had to be done when we have company over. So, I put it off till today. 

My poetry group met on Wednesday and that was very useful. I revised my two poems we shared’ I always work on them first thing the next day while their criticisms and suggestions are fresh in my mind. I miss writing poetry while I’m putting in my writing time on the first set of revisions asked for by my new editors. I sent off one of the poems my group critiqued to the Monthly Review. Dale and I sent out two more submissions, one of which was rejected by the next morning; a place I used to publish in a lot but that editor died. The new editor changed everything.

We drove over to the mouth of the Herring River to check on the work on the bridge. A huge crane is there. The workmen had left for the day, so gulls were sitting on the crane, a wonderful commanding high perch above anything natural they could light on. I know huge beams for the bridge are supposed to arrive this week – so the streets will have to be closed briefly as they transport them from the Wellfleet Harbor to the bridge site.