King Schwartzie and the Strawberries

I went though the 2nd third of my new book over the last few days, editing, proofing.  It’s first draft, so rather rangy.  But in first draft, I just write and don’t look at it critically until 2nd draft.  Parts get shortened, parts disappear, parts get longer. I have no idea if any publisher will take an interest, but it’s what I feel like writing along with poems of course. 

My dear friend Gigi came over on Wednesday bringing fresh fruit popsicles – a great treat on a hot day.  We’re in another dry period and have to water constantly.  Woody is going to pull the lettuce today.  As soon as he does, I’ll plant more zucchini, patty pans, dill and arugula.  The paste tomatoes are flowering and some plans have tiny green tomatoes.  We are getting many zukes, but only one kind.  The Lebanese is doing well, but the American kind didn’t do anything. 

We discovered that Friends Market in Orleans has ripe local strawberries, consistently.  I froze 15 pints, one quart and I made eight half-pints of freezer jam. We had Chaim and Theresa over last night.  We had our gravlax, then Woody roasted a chicken. I made a huge bunch of my own tabouli--it has some of our garden vegetables chopped fine in it. We’ll have it again tonight.  I also made zucchini in custard with many herbs.  For desert we had strawberry shortcake. I fucked up the biscuits.  An egg had somehow broken and I hate to waste it [I of the Great Depression] so I added it do the biscuit dough.  Great mistake.  It made tough, flattened things like fat pancakes instead of the biscuits I wanted.  Anyhow we had a great time with them, always so much to talk about and share

Now it’s time – after the sour cherries and the strawberries are processed, to think about processing more rhubarb and checking on our red currants and black currants.  Red currants make wonderful clafouti and black currants I marinade in vodka and also make freezer jam.  I make black currant vinegar every few years but still have plenty.  It makes an excellent vinegar.  We enjoyed the last of our lettuce in two salads and now it’s bolted and weary.  Time to pull it.

We both trying to locate the presently recommended booster vaccines. We’d like to get it enough in advance of going out to the Berkshires to the play Jay co-wrote and is performing. We’re worried that one or both of us will have a bad reaction to the vaccine, as we have often experienced. 

Garden-wise, the goatsbeard has flopped over my astilbes and will kill them if I can’ get it off.  We have many flowers in bloom but not enough pollinizers for our crops.  Something is nibbling on the zucchini – chipmunks or rabbits.  It isn’t any bug as there are bites the size of a smallish animal’s mouth.  The robins are sitting on their nest with a clutch of eggs right outside our bay windows in the living room.  They take turns on the eggs.  Woody is impressed by their efficiency and diligence.  He has never been a birdwatcher, but they interest him.

Black, long-haired, Schwartzie is suddenly not only top cat, as he has been all along, but a bossy one.  He is asserting his authority over Shaman now that Shaman is a year old and no longer a  kitten or youngster.  He is also trying to boss us around. He came in and woke Woody to feed him @ 5:45 this morning and wouldn’t leave the bed.  Kept walking around.  The hall door is going to have to be shut.  We hate to do that.  But Woody isn’t getting enough sleep with Schwartzie waking him earlier and earlier.  He has also taken to tapping my elbow when I’m at the computer working, asking for lunch or attention. I don’t care for that either.  We are going to have to set some rules for him.  He’d never needed them before.

I am making my way through CLOUD CUCKOO LAND by Anthony Doerr.  I was so passionately involved in THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE that I resented doing anything else – but of course, work and obligations and chores don’t vanish because I’m obsessed by a novel.  But this 2nd book doesn’t grab me the same way.  I read it when I have the time, but it isn’t a priority.  Interesting enough but not obsessional.  Just another novel.  With LIGHT all the characters and the jumps in time were all during World War II and times leading up to it, in the middle of it or after it.  In this novel, he’s jumping from what seems to be the present day, to world War II to Byzantium to sometimes during the Ottoman Empire to the distant future in a generational space craft seeking a new planet to call home.  The story of the man who sought magic and became a donkey is not sufficient to tie the stories together.