And the winner is...

Carolyn MacDonald! She will win a signed copy of The Pantry as well as a vintage apron from my extensive collection. It was a difficult selection to make from many fine entries (I would like to include all of them here in the coming weeks, if I may) and I thank you for all of them. However, Carolyn wrote about a variety of pantry memories in the process of building a new pantry of her own (we hope that she will share photographs of the finished pantry with readers here). In the meantime, here is Carolyn's winning entry: 

I am having a pantry built.  I am so excited about it that it is all I can think about!  The construction started about 3 weeks ago and it is almost completed except for cabinet fronts and painting. It is a space in the back of my garage but it is attached to the house with a hallway that leads to my kitchen.  I am trying to have it be a tribute to both my grandmothers who loved to cook.  It will have open shelving and cabinetry with glass doors.  I had a piece of marble in the garage that will be used as a small counter.  It will have scalloped brackets similar to the ones on page 18 of your book. I have your book The Pantry.  I have read it several times.  I am going to display it in my new pantry.  I love it! Along with the book I am going to hang my grandmother’s aprons that they sewed or crocheted.  I am going to display one of my grandmother’s canister sets.  I have random dishes from my mother and aunts that will be proudly displayed.

My maternal grandmother had a wonderful pantry.  I tell my daughter about it all the time.  She had jars of clarified butter for baking, canned vegetables from the garden and lots of rolling pins.  I have one of her rolling pins and I am going to hang it in my pantry.  My grandmother always made sweet cookies and they were proudly displayed on the counter of her pantry. She had beautiful handmade doilies hanging on the shelves and bottles of rose water or orange blossom water used for baking in the cabinet. When you opened the cabinet you would smell the fragrance from these bottles.  I tell my daughter that she never wasted anything.  All jars and containers were used and filled with nuts, golden raisins and chocolate sprinkles for baking.  You never knew what was in a recycled coffee can or cookie tin until you opened it.  But, she knew what each container held.  An avid gardener, my grandmother always had a bowl of apples, mulberries, tomatoes or cucumbers on her counters.  I hope to do the same.  My grandmother passed away in 1986 the same year my daughter was born.  I tell my daughter about her and I always mention her pantry and how she loved to cook for her family as I do.

My mother also had a pantry and she tell me that as a little girl I would ask her to stand me up on the counter to look out the small pantry window at our back yard.  I don’t remember this but I love the story and I can picture myself as a small child in the 1950’s climbing up to see out our second floor pantry window.

My husband remembers his grandmother’s pantry also.  He said she had a wonderful wooden ladder that helped her to reach the top shelves.   He used to climb up on it.   Oh, how I wish we kept some of these things!  I do have a salt and pepper shaker collection of his grandmother’s and I am sure they will look fantastic in the glass cabinet.

I have let everyone in the family know about the construction of the pantry and it puts a smile on their faces.  I am sure they will give me mementos to display. I am trying to find a quote from your book to hand paint on my pantry walls along with my favorite saying “count your blessings."   

Thank you for letting me "count my blessings" here In the Pantry on a regular basis these past five years. I appreciate, as always, your stopping by for some sugar or salt. 


Blessings,

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...

Where Would I Be Without Emily?

I have always appreciated the poetry and life of Emily Dickinson–especially since I discovered when writing The Pantry that she had a penchant for writing poems in her pantry and kitchen. Today I thought, mmm, I wonder what Emily had to say about spring? She wrote about so many things, often in allegory, that I also like to muse about: the weather, gardens, hope, faith, God-in-nature, birds, beauty, virtues, the presence of God or the spiritual realm, oh so many things. To think that she wrote from her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, where I have been as it is preserved as a museum, without ever hardly leaving it or traveling much further than Boston (and I believe that was only once for medical issues)! Yes, it is possible. The mind is a marvelous thing and Dickinson was the ultimate arm-chair traveler through books and her glorious imagination.

I think of Emily as this Zen-master poetess, beyond time and place, really, ethereal in her earthly presence. Her words are timeless and even transcendent. We are blessed to have them today, thanks to the efforts of her sister-in-law who found them and published them after Emily's early death. Imagine–writing for writing's sake and nothing more? I often wonder if Emily would have embraced blogging or delighted in the anonymity of posting on other blogs. I'm almost certain she would have preferred email to the phone, however a voluminous correspondent she was in her day. She may have Twittered but Facebook would have been too public for her. I don't blame her for wanting her solitude or embracing her home and gardens. I often feel the same way in a kind of self-imposed seclusion, at times. Perhaps she was a reclusive agoraphobic or depressed (or had S.A.D.) or maybe she just got all that she needed from books and her own place in the world.

Here is a poem (812.) that she wrote about spring (I just discovered that the Emily Dickinson Museum has also posted it as their "poem of the week"):

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay —

A Quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament –

~ Emily Dickinson

NOTE: Here is a very early blog, one of my first, written back in the spring of 2005 about Emily Dickinson and her pantry poetry. Part of this blog was turned into an essay on cleaning my kitchen that appeared later that year in Old-House Interiors [I will have linkable PDFs of most of my published writings up very soon at my website.] The photo in this early blog (I am still updating and tweaking early entries with links and minor corrections–these were back in the day when it was more difficult to make formatting changes) is of one of the early, original built-in cupboards from our former historic home in Hancock, New Hampshire (c. 1813). Oh, how I miss that kitchen and my pantries!

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.

Oscar Night

I love the Oscars®. I've watched them every year since college days, often with girlfriends or my daughter but now even my husband and boys get in on part of the fun (but I still tape them in case I miss anything and that includes the pre-game Barbara Walters show and any follow-up).

We saw Avatar today and I was a bit skeptical about three hours of science fiction (not my favorite genre). I was, instead, moved by the beauty of the cinematography and the interconnected spiritual message. The movie also seems to favor interplanetary harmony and had many messages about occupation and colonization, and an indigenous respect for nature–all quite relevant in today's world. And there was a fantastic, beautiful "Tree Home," center to the plot and the locale of the natives. I came away thinking we all need a protected "Tree Home" in our lives. The allegorical quality to the movie also appealed to me as did the imagination and work it took to create it.

So I won't linger but I'll be back soon this week with more blogs. I've been reinvigorated to write again and have missed the blog world. I've posted an odd self-portrait: part homage to Meryl Streep's hooded cloak in The French Lieutenant's Woman (great English period pic, c. 1980) and to the veiled Roman and Jewish women in Ben-Hur (c. 1959). The aqua scarf is another story and one I want to blog about very soon. In the meantime, here's to Oscar night! My boys just came in with my husband from wood-splitting and have surprised me with pizza. You can't go wrong with that.

PS I'll also be posting several food-related blogs this week, from my recent trip back to New Hampshire, at our book group blog, Cupcake Chronicles. Join the conversation and check us out for some fabulous recipes.