Auld Acquaintance

Perhaps you have often wondered where I've been this year. Well, I have, too. It's been a busy one, full of many continued transitions, adjustments and a few minor blips on the radar. Nothing bad–just disconcerting at times and occasionally transformative. I realize it is the year, of the five of the In the Pantry blog, that I've written the least. It's not that I haven't wanted or intended to blog, it's just that some things–like real life–take precedence at times.

Books and gnomes––two of my favorite things.

We have been busy on the farm and building more needed buildings, while increasing our cattle herd. I tried, for much of the year, to pursue several full-time writing-related jobs off of the farm. Several potentially ideal opportunities were presented to me but none came of anything. What did happen, after six months of pursuit and follow-up, is that I realized, for now, that I'm supposed to stay in my own back yard. And I'm meant to write, right here. I've been publishing, too: several articles this year. It's never all for naught, just remember that!

I've been told these gnomes are really creepy, perhaps even inebriated.

A favorite gnome from a dear friend.

So, 2011 will begin with a new and renewed focus. I'm going to be launching a new blog in the coming weeks, one that better reflects my life as it is now. When I started In the Pantry I was living in an 1803 Federal mansion, filled with family heirlooms and layers of history. We were in the midst of a Currier and Ives New England village setting. I was writing my first book. Our daughter was a teenager and our boys were eight and five! Visions of a farm of our own were dancing in our heads with various scenarios and outcomes. I have often shared those here and will continue to do so in the new format.

Our hen house on Christmas morning––of course we were up before dawn!

Fast forward and here we are, five years later, on a farm on a ridge in Kentucky. Now we have land spreading out so far and wide, we have stuff in storage and we live in a comfortable doublewide. We raise much of our own food or buy it from local farmers. While there is much I often think about or miss in New England, we are blessed!

My husband's birthday "Robert E. Lee" cake.

I promise that my new blog will be integrating the essence of In the Pantry that you enjoy, while also adding other "bits and pieces" of my life [thank you, Katherine Mansfield for forever imbedding that quote in my mind]. I will also still post here on occasion, especially if it is pantry-related, or The Pantry book-related. [And copies of the book are still available from my website at CatherinePond.com]

Our annual pudding of York! [Yes, that's its real color: from our own eggs!]

I am also looking forward to starting my 11-year journal tomorrow! I just ordered a 10+ Journal from Lehman's (on sale!) and it chronicles 11 years (A decade plus) in small format on one page per date (with eleven entries: one for each year's date, in five lines or less). So you can track, in Twitter-like brevity (or let's make that more like haiku-style notation, as I will never be a Twitterer!), the events of your life, day by day: or the weather, or your diet, or highlights in your family. I used to keep many extensive hand-written journals, many years ago, but this will be a short chronicle. I'm looking forward to the exercise and the meditation of it, while the blogs will continue to be my postcards to the world.

I wish you a very happy, healthy and special New Year and thank you for visiting here all of these years! I'm not going anywhere, I'm just shape-shifting a bit. Stay tuned for an announcement of the new blog in the weeks ahead.

My very best wishes to you and yours,

Catherine

Coming Soon to a Ridge Near You!

Harvest Home

I've never been so glad to see the summer end. It's not that I don't enjoy summer, it's just that it is prolonged here in Kentucky and sometimes unbearably hot. By early August you're done already! Fall and spring are lovely, and also long, and you enjoy going outside whenever possible. [We have four seasons here, which I am glad about, and this reshifting of what we're used to having back in the northeast for seasonal duration also provides us with a much shorter winter in Kentucky.] Today was in the 90s, but it's a dry heat and a cold front this weekend will bring more seasonable nights and days again. Despite the lingering heat, fall has arrived in the landscape and in the air. IMAGE: The last of the summer watermelon, along with an assortment of knobbly pumpkins and giant cushaws at our local Casey County Produce Auction.

Usually I get a bit melancholy with the earlier darkness, the shorter days and the cooler weather. Or saddened to see the Big Dipper start to drop down into the starry night of the northern skies by late August. Not any more. This year, summer's end is like a welcome balm. I am glad to see pumpkins and squash, crisp apples, withering cornstalks. I continue to can great quantities of things from summer's bounty. 

This was the sunset exactly a month ago, on August 22, 2010, with a tinge of fall in it. I love to watch the changing big skies throughout the seasons here in Kentucky. This is the view from my office window looking up towards the knob.

We have already enjoyed some cooler nights. I look forward to quiet time spent knitting, reading, and long hours working on new writing projects and other lingering tasks. I like a reason to be indoors and yet, here in winter, it is often possible to be outside, too. It will be great to go out walking again without misery.

Come, ye thankful people, come, raise the song of harvest home;
All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin.
God our Maker doth provide for our wants to be supplied;
Come to God’s own temple, come, raise the song of harvest home.

In the coming weeks and months I will try to blog more, too, and have some photos and other things to share along the way. Thank you, as always, for stopping by here in the pantry!

As the sun set on summer for the last time in 2010, the Harvest Moon was rising to the east over a distant storm front. Both photographs were shot around moon rise/sun set at 7:15pm on September 22, 2010 from the top of our knob on the farm.

My son Henry and I had supper together on a rare after school time to ourselves. At dusk we went to the top of the knob to watch the Harvest Moon rise and the sun set on summer 2010. Today is the first day of Autumn ~ one of my favorite words in the English language (next to "summer afternoon" and "crisp" and "luscious," of course).

Meet Woodrow. Bull about town. He's a ladies' man who knows what he likes. Prefers green pastures and strong women. Not into the dating scene or even monogamy and wants to get right down to business. Loves children. Surprisingly sweet, too (but you can never turn your back on a bull!).

Our first eight Angus calves, here with some of their mamas: born from early May to early August. This is our "Long Field" where they will spend much of their autumn days munching on Kentucky grasses.

Farewell to the summer!

A Sultry Summer Sunday

One of our two new Hereford bulls in with the ladies (and some of their new calves).

I don't know what it is about Sundays lately, but I do seem a bit obsessed with them. Yesterday it was hot and humid, probably the muggiest day of the summer so far. We spent much of the day in the air-conditioned house, the boys and my husband exhausted from wrangling calves on Saturday morning to tag and give shots. [One lesson learned: wait until it's cooler to do so as the calves get even more stressed in the heat.]

A palisade on a back road in Pulaski County.

Later in the day we thought it would be fun to take a little Sunday drive. This is something we've always enjoyed, usually with a destination, but this was on some back roads we wanted to explore to the south of us, down near Lake Cumberland. Here where you reside is defined by what ridge you live on or underneath: the geography defines your community. Our farm is on the southern edge of south-central Kentucky's knob region. What this affords is a rolling, hilly landscape with deeply etched hollers carved by creeks, and higher ridges or plateaus where most people prefer to build upon. It is not as jagged as parts of eastern Kentucky, more plateau-like with finger like-ridges, bumpy hills and secret valleys. Either ridge or holler have large pastures for hay or cattle, dotted by copses of trees or wooded hillsides. It is beautiful countryside and, while it can be rough and tumble on occasion, it has a particular kind of untamed, almost untapped, wildness that we appreciate.

On our little journey, we came upon this old country store, now closed. Of course I had to jump out and take a photograph but I did spare my husband my best Eva Gabor-as-Lisa Douglas imitation. And where is Sam Drucker when you need him, any way? We would have liked a cold drink, at least.

Our boys preferred to stay home and watch a movie and, with cell phone in hand, we set off solo. It is always a chance for us to talk, one on one, and we really hadn't had this opportunity for a while without some kind of interruption (it's summer vacation, after all!). Our favorite way to "off road" is to not take a map (OK, well on longer trips we do bring a Kentucky Gazetteer for backup). As I have a built-in understanding of maps and direction sense, and only usually need to look at a map once or twice to absorb its spatial relationships (yes, this is an idiot savant skill I seem to have been born with), my husband has learned to trust this about me. Doing this kind of "off-roading" (or off-mapping?) is not being afraid of making the wrong turn or the thrill of the wonderment of where we might come out. I rather live my life this way, too: taking many roads and exploring new ones around the constant fixture and presence of home and family. And, as long as I can catch a glimpse of our little "monadnock" here, Green River Knob, I always know where we are.

Green River Knob rises to the west of our own knob pasture on our ridge. It is not only the highest knob in the region but the highest point in Kentucky west of its eastern mountains. The Kentucky knobs, I've realized, are very much the last western gasp of the Appalachian mountain range that forms a long spine up to the northeast.

This same phenomena occurred when we lived back in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire, too, as wherever you go, or soon nearby, you can see the great mass of Mount Monadnock as both a presence and beacon. These geographical fixtures define our places and provide an odd kind of security, too. When we are on top of our knob looking out and I see Green River Knob watching over us to the west, I always find it rather comforting. There is wisdom, truth and solace in the hills around us.

At dusk there was an odd, brilliant light from the east that cast itself on the lawn in an eerie glow. We soon realized this was created by the reflection of the setting sun on the edge of a large thunderstorm system which went around us to the south. A perfect night for a "Thunder Moon."

The chicken house at dusk, just after they'd gone into roost.

So we drove along seeing old homeplaces, new roads and different pastures and felt refreshed by the drive, the company and the air-conditioned car. To take a drive like this, whether for an hour or for the day, is always like a mini-vacation not too far from your own backyard. We came home to a build-up of thunderheads that didn't rain on us, unfortunately (it was the full "Thunder Moon" last night) and shucked some fresh corn a neighbor had given us. That, with some grilled chicken breast, was supper. Ah, a summer Sunday, to paraphrase Henry James, two of the most lovely words in the English language.

"The quality of mercy is not strained..."

South Fork Creek Road on Monday morning, after the historic flood of May 2nd.
When we saw the road on Sunday evening, at almost peak, it was impassable
and the water had risen to the top of the signs at right.

In my freshman year of high school, one of my best teachers along the way, Anne Sirois Pelletier had us memorize Portia's courtroom speech in The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare.

It begins:

"The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath.
It is twice blest–
It blesseth him that gives
and him that takes."

I thought of this passage over the weekend as we got record-breaking rain in many parts of the South. I'd been praying for some rain for weeks–selfishly because of the awful tree pollen this year but also for all farmers and gardeners who rely on the rain to make things lush or to fill water tables. The irony is, of course, that in Shakespearean English "strained" actually means forced–so mercy, according to Portia, should not be so. It should be gentle and for all, no matter whom. However, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "The good rain, like the bad preacher, does not know when to leave off." [Yet Mark Twain also noted, "Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt any body."]

We were blessed to get the rain we needed on our ridge and that it didn't destroy anything, except to carve a few unwanted channels in newly seeded areas. [And I did discover, just today because I happened to be listening to a local radio station, that the roads on our ridge are on a boil order–no idea why and it would have been nice if they'd called us!] Other parts of the region were not so fortunate. The Highway 127 bypass around Liberty was flooded from Green River (it is located on a flood plain but no one has seen this kind of flooding in years) and many businesses were affected. Historic Penn's Store, which I have often visited and blogged about, located in northern Casey County, has also announced that due to flooding, they will be closed indefinitely. There were only a few flood-related deaths in the state but many homes and bridges were damaged or destroyed in low-lying areas.

On Sunday night we drove down to our creek farm. It is only a mile away but the passage from our home on this ridge can be treacherous even in good weather. So we went the nine or so miles around over to the next ridge and down, with occasional moments along the way of crossing water on the roads, even on high ground. I have never seen our creek so fast and furious. We could barely speak over the rushing water and the entire creek bed was full of it, some twenty five feet across and easily five feet high in places, with still higher rapids. Where the branch ran into the larger creek–and where we can normally cross the ford in drier weather and lower water–there was another rush of broiling, angry murk. Filled with sticks and logs and other debris, it was not safe to near it and yet, as at the side of Niagara Falls where it goes "over the drink," as my father used to say, there is this strange pull towards its sheer force and powerful beauty.

Not long after we arrived, with my husband and sons further down the bank, I watched as a good-sized black walnut tree dislodged itself from the banking. It was as if a giant had just pushed it out, as we humans might pull a willing weed. It was soon heading downstream and I hollered at them to watch out. By the time it rounded the bend at the ford and joined the larger creek, it had been stripped of all of its limbs. It all seemed to happen slowly and deliberately, as if in a dream.

Next we headed back up the ridge and over to South Fork Creek–or what we like to call the Mennonite valley–to see what was happening there and to check on some friends. We entered the back way on higher ground and soon realized as we came down into the creek area, near several stores like Sunny Valley, that we would not be able to pass. The water had flooded the banks into the fields and over the roads in many places, some two or three feet. When we came down a hill towards another state road we looked out towards Highway 127, about seven miles south of Liberty. All of the pastures in the Green River valley were an ocean of brown water with small islands of trees here and there. I'd never seen anything like this before except in a disaster movie.

We met people we knew on the road and many friends, out looking like we were, and learned that school would be canceled in the county the next day. We were certain that the boys' school would be, also, as there would be few, if any, ways to reach it on the ridge where it is located above South Fork Creek. We also learned that the Highway 127 bypass near downtown Liberty, the Casey County seat, had been closed because of excessive flooding of the businesses and residences along the way. As it began to get dark, and with fewer options home, we headed back over high ground to our farm on the other side of the Casey County line.

Two empty oil tanks floated up from beneath the pavement on Hwy 127.
We frequent many businesses in this section of town and 80% were affected.

The volleyball nets in Gateway Park in Liberty captured river debris as it passed–but the force of water was not strong enough to move the Army tank.

For some reason, I forgot to bring my camera the night of the flooding. I'm realizing it is OK to experience life without one sometimes, but this would have been one of those occasions, and unfortunate historic events, where it might have been a good idea. The next morning we did go out again, to a glorious sunny day, and saw that the flood had receded but the damage was done. Maybe this is what Noah and the people and animals on his ark may have felt after the flood as they watched the blue skies and white clouds and perhaps felt the sorrow of an Earth changed but cleansed.

One of our sons asked, "Where did all that water go?" Where, indeed. It is my understanding that the area's rich and abundant bottom lands and quiet hollers were once the bottom of an ocean. The salt water receded and fresh water from the eventual glacier melts carved the long-fingered ridges that form our knob region. It was not hard to see on Sunday night how water carved these hills and creeks and ridges and occasional palisades that form south-central Kentucky's beautiful and rugged landscape. By Monday morning, less than twelve hours after their height, the waters had receded again back into the Earth.

Our creek in quieter times–note the Great Blue Heron on the little island.

There is a passage in the novel A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean that describes the interconnectedness that we share with water. We humans are mostly water, of course, and we need it to function and to live, like all life forms. But there are times that we need its mercy, too.

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

~ Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

I have a new respect for the power of water and how it can be a mere drop, or a gentle rain or a raging torrent from the heavens. It is an element, like all of the others, that must be respected. And I now better understand an oft said Appalachian expression, "The good Lord willing, and the creek don't rise."

+   +   +

Last Friday we attended the local Mennonite community's first Haitian Relief Auction. It was a pleasure to buy a locally-made picnic table and benches, a much-needed garden cart, some new baking dishes, as well as delicious barbecued chicken dinners, fruits, vegetables, pie and other baked goods and to know that 100% of our money will go to Haiti through Christian Aid Ministries. I was disappointed that more in the local community did not attend beyond the local Mennonites and Amish, who also came from other states to be there and bid on items they could easily have made themselves (many fine quilts, for example). But it was the first such auction held by the local Mennonite community, it was held on a Friday and next year will be on Saturday, April 30th. I'm sure there will be more people attending next year.

Sometimes misfortune hits closer to home, too, as in a flood of this kind of proportion and devastation. In the coming months there will no doubt be more relief efforts for local families and businesses in need. Our thoughts and prayers go out to those who have suffered from the devastation of the flood waters. Many of those affected live below the poverty line and have no insurance. If you would like to help those in Casey County who have been hard hit–both residents and businesses alike–you can give through a fund set up through the Liberty-Casey County Chamber of Commerce. For more news and photos on the flooding and its aftermath, you can follow coverage at The Casey County News.

Also, If you buy a copy of The Pantry this month, I will happily sell it to you for a reduced rate of $12, including postage, and donate $5 from every book sold to the Liberty and Casey County Disaster Relief. Email me at info@CatherinePond.com and I will bill you directly via PayPal or you may send me a check. If you've already ordered a copy of The Pantry since May 1st, I will also donate $5 from each copy sold. 

Please spread the word! I will sign and send your book to you or your mother, a teacher, sister, friend, or anyone who loves pantries and old kitchens and the security and comfort that they provide.

Thank you ~

Catherine

SpRiNg BrEaK!

Long Field, below our knob pasture, with red buds blooming.

Our nine bred heifers (so far 3 calves have been born and there are 6 more to come). Tonight on our walk I decided that we should name them Cora, Dora, Explora, Flora, Gomorrah, Lora, Moira, Nora & Zora–as they are heifers, we will keep them for a long time to have more calves.

One of our new Buckeye chicks.

If you are wondering what became of the pantry essay contest in honor of In The Pantry's 5th anniversary, the winner will be announced on April 21st (the exact five year date from my first blog entry). There were many fine and varied entries and I probably need a committee to decide (so I'll consult the hens if you don't mind). If you've wondered why I haven't blogged in a month–I think an embarrassing record for me here–this is what I've been doing instead:

• Walking, a lot. The weather has been opportune and winter was long. I've been really getting to know our farm a bit better this way and enjoying longer stretches of the ridge roads, sometimes solo and sometimes with my menfolk and always with our puppies. (I still call them that, even though they are a year-and-a-half now–but hollering "PupPEES!" out the door is easier and more vocal than saying, "DOGS!")
• Delighting in spring in all ways but not in the intensive cleaning that I should be doing.
• Submitting queries and article ideas to new magazine possibilities.
• Spinning my wheels about "what's next" and excited about what dreams may come (isn't having something to look forward or hope for always the best way out of any funk? Not that there is anything wrong with being "funky"...).
• Planting seeds for some summer flowers and vegetables.
• Planting some fruit and ornamental trees, as well as blackberries, near our future farmhouse site across the road (and adjacent to existing farm buildings and Ida's old house and future guest house).
• Tending to new Buckeye chicks (30 arrived in early April from Welp Hatchery).
• Enjoying our new cattle: 9 bred heifers and three babies, also since early April.
• Baking snacks for, and helping to coordinate, our fencing crew.
• Entering photography contests here and there (and taking lots of photos of our glorious Appalachian spring).
• Enjoying our boys' nice Easter vacation week.
• Reading everything but what I'm supposed to be finishing at Cupcake Chronicles (and catching up on lapsed reads, as well as this month's selection, too: so gaining on that! Right now we're reading the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout).
• Singing with the Pleasant Hill Shaker Singers (it is so great to be singing again!).
• Doing a lot of rain dancing of late (drought here) and missing our usual April thunderstorms.
• Helping with a benefit Haiti Auction run by the Old Order Mennonites in Casey County.
• Polishing my resumé, dusting off some clips and gathering more recent ones, and applying for an amazing job opportunity.

Anything but blogging or writing. In fact, I'm not on the computer much at all these days. I have had a flurry of book orders from some rejuvenated press and if you've ordered a copy of The Pantry in the past two weeks, they will be shipped out asap on Monday, April 19. I try to be Amazon.com but, alas, I am not always as expedient. When you are the writer, marketer and distributor, and live off the beaten track from the local post office, these things don't always get tended to as quickly as they might be. Thank you for your patience with the lack of blogging, too. I do intend to write more soon.

In the meantime, enjoy the beauties and wonders of spring wherever you are.

Blessings,

Catherine

PS In fact, it's been so long since I've blogged that Blogger has gone and changed some formatting things like ways to insert photos and the whole "Compose" bar is different. So I'm hoping for the best here! I'd like to think that every new Facebook or Blogger change is for the better but we do get set in our ways...

Low, How a (Lenten) Rose E'er Blooming

Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming from tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming, as men of old have sung.
It came, a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.

Old English Carol

This has been an unseasonably cold winter with either constant flurries or enough snow to keep people hunkered in or our kids home from school–a lot. I realize it is all relative to what we were used to in the northeast but when there isn't sufficient salt or snow-clearing equipment to treat the roads, you realize how treacherous a few inches of packed snow-turned-ice can be on a back road. And after a few months of colder-than-usual temps for what are usually balmier winters, and snow upon snow, well, it gets old. Spring will never be so sweet. That said, I do love that we still have four seasons here and that the spring and summer are both longer in duration.

This week I've been taking advantage of the warming weather and have been hiking up our knob almost every day: sometimes with the family and always with the puppies and other fauna. Today I went alone to the top of the knob (remember all of those hay bale images last summer–where it looks like you will fall off of the Earth?) and lay down on the warming ground and just took it all in. The "merry little breezes"swirled about, sometimes gathering leaves up into the air. Remember those in Thornton Burgess' Old Mother West Wind stories? My grandmother shared those books with me and I thought of them today and Burgess' love of nature.

The earth is different in spring: it is warm and fecund, full of promise. The same ground is cooler and more fallow in the fall as the woods release the wet, dank smell of decay. The sun is lowering in the sky and by spring it is climbing higher again. SUN! What a glorious thing it is! I always enjoy the inward time of winter but welcome the sun again like some kind of crazed animal.

So I lay back on the ridge and breathed in the air around me, listening alertly to the few sounds around the knob (where we can see 365 degrees around), and drinking in the sunshine. The animals were playing and lying around or near me, too, and we just all seemed to be in the moment together. When I came down a bit later, I was struck that over an hour had passed. It's not that I had walked that far, all told, but that I had allowed myself to enjoy the space–and place–without interruption or attention to time.

The other day when we all walked together after school, Henry turned to his Dad and said, "We sure do have a nice farm here, Dadda." It made me happy to hear that. I am starting to send out new growth shoots here into the land but to our boys this has probably already become their homeplace. We don't have the dream farmhouse yet, we long ago left the mansion. Ultimately it's not about the four walls but who is within them. A friend of mine said the other day, "Home is always where the people I love are." Like the "home tree" in Avatar, we now connect with each other and with the world from our farm on a ridge in Kentucky. It's been the journey of a lifetime.

IMAGE: In our first winter here, two years ago, we discovered two colors of Lenten roses (helliobores) blooming on the north side of our doublewide. They start to emerge and blossom in late February.

Wolf Moon

The Wolf Moon in January is the largest and brightest of our full moons each year because it is at its closet point to the Earth in its 12-month cycle. Last night around 6 o'clock, as I was shutting in the chickens for the night, I watched it rise against the dark blue winter sky. It was an odd cast of blue, perhaps a midnight blue, and unlike any night sky I had seen before. There was also a ring around the moon–a sign of bad weather to come–and I'm sorry that my camera does not do it justice.

Tonight, the actual date of the full moon, we are getting an unusual snow storm for Kentucky: 8-10" inches predicted over the next 24 hours. This monstrous storm has girdled the country, barreling right through the Midwest but at its own leisurely clip. So I expect that is why it will slowly work its way across Kentucky–and, of course, is the reason why we can't see the moon tonight. A year ago we had a major ice storm here but fortunately we were too far south to be affected by it. This storm is the opposite: the further north you go in Kentucky, the less snow that is expected.


The almost full Wolf Moon over Hickory Nut Ridge: January 28, 2010.

I have enjoyed this January: lots of time in the house, puttering, some writing, working on projects, closets, office, working on the diet again after a self-imposed plateau. We've kept to our goal of not going out to restaurants too often, we're working our way through freezers and foodstuffs, and enjoying a bit of winter weather here. We've had cold and snow off and on throughout the month. I like a bit of winter and a month or so of it here will be just enough (the rest of the winter seems like a perpetual muddy November). By mid-late February here it can be quite balmy: it even was last January when they were building our chicken house and shop.

School was canceled this morning but the snow didn't really start until 5pm. Oh well. No one complained–as the cold will go right through next week, the snow that falls will be on the ground for a while. It will be interesting to see how that affects school for our boys next week. Today they were supposed to have celebrated their 100th day in the school year but now it will have to wait. They've more than passed the midway bump now. The years just pass so quickly, the older they all get–the older I get! I have a good feeling about this decade for some reason: my daughter and I were talking about this on the phone last night. How we as humans seem to go through 7-year cycles in our lives, some better than others. But there is this necessary sloughing and growth, a renewal of sorts, that occurs within me every 7-years or so. Wintertime provides a sort of annual sloughing and soul-renewal, too: I welcome the introspection and occasional solitude, as long as I do not get consumed by it.

Picturing that first snow felt comforting. But why?...something deep inside me seemed to relax when I thought of seeing, just outside my window, those first thick white flakes begin to fall...like a white curtain, closing off the rest of the world. They would cover everything. I could sense them muffling my grief, hushing my tumult, damping my sense of loss...The world will be fresh and white, and I will start again.

~ from Leaning Into the Wind–A Memoir of Midwest Weather by Susan Allen Toth [University of Minnesota Press: 2003]

So a snow day–or a whole stretch of winter confinement–is just permission for lots more puttering, some blogging, cooking (I'll post some more recipes, too, and that "Friendship Quilt" blog at last!), ordering chicks and some seeds, and just hunkering in. I need that for a bit of time each year as I am, by nature, an old crazy hermit woman. I embrace this now where I used to fight this aspect of my nature. I'm going to finally get to our Christmas cards, too (besides, they say "Season's Greetings" and our printed letter says "Happy New Year-ish"). It would seem the perfect weekend to sit down in my big comfy chair with a cup of tea and a pile of holiday cards. It's just been that kind of season: leisurely, no pressure, lots of rest, sleep, time for reading, and a renewed sense of who I am and what I'm trying to do. Hopefully it will also be a time of renewal for the world and for our country. We can only hope. In the meantime, I know what I can manage in my own little haven here on our Kentucky ridge and sometimes, most of the time, that is enough.

Here's to comforting blankets, warm food in our bellies, the love of friends and family, peace down in the valleys and high on the ridge tops, and to a better decade ahead. Hurrah for the 2010s!

NOTE: While adding a few more thoughts and the Susan Allen Toth quote here tonight, I was serenaded by a chorus of howling dogs. I guess they don't call it the "Wolf Moon" for nothing! [If you are obsessed with weather, like I am, you might enjoy Toth's book of ten essays on Midwestern weather, Leaning Into the Wind. She also wrote three excellent travel books on her love affair with England that I highly recommend. Her writing style is seamless and approachable and there are times I feel like I'm reading chapters, or at least excerpts, from my own life and perspectives. ]

Old Chestnuts

An Appalachian Spring is the most sweetly-savored seasonal experience I've ever had: long, with gradually emergent flora–and certainly fauna–over the span of about two or more months, and filled with bird song. While I was delighted to find that we have four seasons here, of varied durations from a New England year, the spring is my most favorite time to be in the knobs and hollers of Kentucky.



Composer Aaron Copland's glorious symphony, Appalachian Spring, captures that beauty and emergence of spring in music. I often listened to it as a young girl with my father on the hi-fi in our suburban living room, where Appalachia seemed like a distant and dreamy place somewhere on the map south of our little corner of northeastern Ohio. Little did I know that one day, by way of New England, I would be living here or that "Appalachia" also technically includes most of New England and much of the northeastern corridor. Now we live in its most westerly foothills, the lovely, rolling "knob region" of south-central Kentucky.

Over at Cupcake Chronicles, we're getting back on track with our mutual reading and blogging. This month we are enjoying Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. This is the first novel I have read by her, having enjoyed her essay collections and her nonfiction gem, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which we read together last summer. A Kentucky native and a biologist by training, the natural world, landscape and its people inform much of Kingsolver's writing and especially this novel. She is certainly one of our finest living writers.

I don't often do this but I am double-posting today at Cupcake Chronicles and here at In the Pantry. I needed a bit of spring today as we begin to thaw and warm again, and hope you might, too. In the meantime, perhaps you'd like to read this book along with the Cupcakes–you are more than welcome to join our conversation!

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In Chapter 3 of Prodigal Summer we are introduced to Garnett at the start of a morning in May. Already I know that this novel is so richly tied to Appalachian place and landscape and the people in it: home places, farms, cabins, hollows. Last night I had to pause to reread this short and luminous chapter again. Because of its beauty, and its resonance for me here in Kentucky, I couldn't wait to include it here this morning in its short, breathtaking entirety:

Eight years a widower, Garnett still sometimes awoke disoriented and lost to the day. It was because of the large empty bed, he felt; a woman was an anchor. Lacking a wife, he had turned to God for solace, but sometimes a man also needed the view out his window.

Garnett sat up slowly and bent toward the light, seeing as much with his memory as with his eyes. There was the gray fog of dawn in this wet hollow, lifted with imperious slowness like the skirt of an old woman stepping over a puddle. There were the barn and slat-sided grain house, built by his father and grandfather in another time. The grass-covered root cellar still bulged from the hillside, the two windows in its fieldstone face staring out of the hill like eyes in the head of a man. Every morning of his life, Garnett had saluted that old man in the hillside with the ivy beard crawling out of his chin and the forelock of fescue hanging over his brow. As a boy, Garnett had never dreamed of being an old man himself, still looking at these sights and needing them as badly as a boy needs the smooth lucky chestnut in his pocket, the talisman he rubs all day just to make sure it's still there.

The birds were starting up their morning chorus. They were in full form now, this far into spring. What was it now, the nineteenth of May? Full form and feather. He listened. The prothalamion, he had named this in his mind years ago: a song raised up to connubial union. There were meadowlarks and chats, field sparrows, indigo buntings, all with their heads raised to the dawn and their hearts pressed into clear liquid song for their mates. Garnett held his face in his hands for just a moment. As a boy he had never dreamed of an age when there was no song left, but still some heart.

I am already reveling in the natural and peopled world of Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer and perhaps am enjoying it all the more because it has been a very cold and snowy January.

NOTE: I had to look up prothalamion: it is a song or poem celebrating an upcoming wedding, from the title of a Tudor-era poem by Edmund Spenser, written in 1596.

NOTE on MY PHOTOGRAPHS: The indigo bunting is a common bird here in south-central Kentucky. At first we thought they were bluebirds darting back and forth in front of us, but the feathers of an indigo bunting are an even more intense blue. I actually saw our first bluebirds here a few weeks ago on a fence post behind our house. [Apologies for my not owning a zoom lense–that would have enhanced these photographs.]

As you might expect by now, old home places are a recurring photographic subject of mine: the window image is from an abandoned Greek Revival farmhouse near the community of Forkland and Gravel Switch (now used to store hay and farm equipment) and the root cellar is built into a cool, shaded northern hillside across the street from it on another property. Both images were taken in May 2009.

Snow Days

Eli led the way to the sleds, which surprised me as I'd forgotten all about them, and then I only had to give Henry a nudge out the door and the promise of homemade cocoa later on. Once outside they had an absolute blast. Who knows, I might even join them tomorrow!? [But I don't have a Carhartt® jumpsuit!]

Assembled winter decor on our mantel. The little log cabin came with balsam incense years ago. Our son Eli made the popsicle stick snowman in school this December and the painted outhouse was made by local artist and historic Penn's Store owner, Jeanne Penn Lane, over in Casey County, near the Forkland community and Gravel Switch. [I've blogged about Penn's Store several times in the past few years.]

I didn't realize how much I actually missed having snow around in winter until our two "snow events" in the past month. The first storm was a sloppy slushy snow which barely lasted a day but gave us about 4 inches for a brief time. The snow didn't pack on the roads and melted quickly–those kinds of storms can produce ice or a treacherous "icy mix," however. It happened a week before Christmas and just got us all into the spirit of things, especially while I was getting packages shipped off via the U.S. Postal Service's "if it ships–it fits" campaign (not only that, the packages got everywhere they were supposed to by Christmas Eve: for one price, flat rate and mailed within a week before Christmas Eve–I'm sold on that concept or maybe it was the luck and good spirit from a festive snow storm).


I bought that lit cabin a few years before we moved here–little did I know that it is a reminder of a Kentucky-style home place. The "Frosty" hat was bought at a nearby local craft store in Liberty, Kentucky. I like to pick up handcrafts whenever possible, especially for the holidays.

The past few days we've had flurries and periods of snowfall. We've also had sustained cold which guarantees that the snow will stick around a bit. While it's just barely a few inches, at least on our ridge, I now understand why they cancel school so readily down here: our ridge road is 8 miles long and it hasn't been plowed, or at least sanded or salted. Meanwhile, the state highways and parkway are supposedly fine. However, our road, more like a long driveway/lane that connects between two points of our ridge road (which makes it lovely and private), is quite hilly and treacherous right now because it has nothing on it to treat it. Our wimpy Toyota 2-wheel drive remains at the bottom of the driveway. Even our 4-wheel drive Honda Pilot is not too happy about climbing our hills with these road conditions.


Dashing past the chicken house...

The other factor about roads here is that they are usually narrow with few, if any, guard rails, let alone any shoulders for emergency breakdowns. I'm not complaining except to say that people drive way too fast in general and it's always the other guy I worry about. [Or maybe it's just advancing old age and I'm becoming more cautious.] Our neighbors and friends tell of us of heavier winters, back in their childhoods within the past fifty years, of such heavy snow fall that school would be canceled not just for a few days or a week, but often a few months. Talk about cabin fever! An ice storm hit our ridge several years ago, before we moved here, and people were without power for several weeks–the same thing happened just a bit north of us last January. It's good "in these parts" to have a full pantry and root cellar, a reliable spring, a wood stove and perhaps even a generator. [Just remember if you have a tomten or two around your farmyard to leave him some food and warm hay to keep on his good side.]


The red tin match holder was an eBay purchase a few years ago–part of the estate of a Kentucky farm and only a few dollars.

Another eBay "find" and a gift to my husband a few years ago was this Warfield cardinal, a rare catch on eBay and I was astonished at the bargain. Robert and Virginia Warfield used to carve and paint birds (he carved and she painted) in my hometown of Jaffrey, New Hampshire and became quite renowned for them. Their cardinal graces our mantel year round and I was reminded today–with a flurry of birds raiding the dog food on the back porch–that I need to get a good feeder and seed this week.

With the sustained cold for a few more days we're guaranteed that the snow will stick around a bit longer. We're making the most of our possibly brief glimpse of winter weather–a window on the old-fashioned kind of winters we used to know that aren't mixed with sleet or just damp rain for four months. It's still a great pleasure to know there are four seasons in Kentucky–but with a shorter, generally milder, winter. [But hey, remember all of those squirrels running around all fall for nuts and how cold October was here? If you believe the old-timers and folklore, which I generally do, signs were pointing to a colder, snowier winter.] PHOTO–What, you don't have a bobble-headed gnome in your home? A gift from my friend Linda a few years ago with a "Snow" ornament sent from my dear sister-in-law (the gnome is out all year).


Aunt Cynthia amidst the post-Christmas decoration pick-up. We both like to make "meany faces" at each other. Sometimes it is a guaranteed cure-all for cabin fever! [And she loves the Christmas sweater we gave her a few years ago.]

This weekend I've been (slowly) putting away our Christmas decorations. It's not that I want them lingering around but that I actually hate to pick them back up again and put them away–but once I do, it feels like a new year and a clean slate again. So, because I also enjoy some holiday decor throughout the seasons, and we are down to one mantelpiece, I decided to do an homage to winter for another month or so–OK, until the end of February. PHOTO–My sister-in-law gave me this primitive-style snowman just this Christmas (with a Cracker Barrel® gift certificate–yee ha! We all enjoyed that last weekend already) and I love it.

I have a growing collection of snow men–some vintage, some made by our children, some made locally, and some made in Occupied Japan or more recently, China. [Sometimes I wonder what I don't collect...] It was fun to redo the mantel with some lingering Christmas decorations, that didn't exactly say "Christmas" (alright, yes, two of the snow people are holding a "Noël" sign)–and that could segue well into "winter decorations." And, to be honest with you, right now it is the most orderly part of the house–so I look at that mantel and its tranquil snow scene and I think, yes, it is possible to organize things and have them in some kind of harmony around here. PHOTO–The salt & pepper snow people were $1 finds at Dollar General last Christmas. And yes, I'm not above buying cheap "junk" from China on occasion, especially if it's well made. And besides, the kids love them.


We're hunkering in for the rest of the weekend and dealing with some frozen pipes at Ida's house across the street. I'm doing a lot of cooking (I'll post some recipes tomorrow) and relaxing. I was supposed to have friends for lunch on Monday but with the freeze lasting through then, pipe stress, and the state of our driveway and lane, I decided to enact our "snow date" instead. By Martin Luther King Monday, who knows? It will likely be back in the 50s again, our winter magic put away for another time.

Some winter scenes from a vintage c. 1950s linen Christmas apron in my collection–the recent snow makes it feel like Christmas all over again.

Snow or no snow, may your days be merry and bright all the year!