the scrooge

true stories

I've never had much of an interest in writing fiction, because (among other reasons) it seems to me the best stories come from real life. Take, for example, the one about the morbidly obese man who went to the hospital for medical attention. Problem was, he was so big he hadn't reclined in ages because the weight of his own chest made breathing difficult. So the nurses and doctors helped him on to a gurney, which caused a massive resettling of his flesh for the first time in years, which in turn caused an old cheese sandwich to fall out from the folds.

Doctors have some of the best stories, whether tragic or funny or poignant or humiliating. A fourth-year med student told me last night that a woman brought her young daughter to the pediatric emergency unit, worried about a lump on the girl's chest. Could you, as the doctor, explain with a straight face that the girl will likely develop another lump, on the other side of her chest, and that these lumps are normal and commonly referred to as breasts? No need for surgery today.

But that's why stories are so good. They make you look at yourself and your perspective and your own history and biases. They keep me going.

I leave tomorrow to celebrate the birth of some peoples' lord with my unbelieving family, then I'm off to sail in clear blue Caribbean waters for 10 days. If all goes well, I'll return with stories to share (hopefully not medical in nature) and a tan to be smug about. Happy new year. See you on the flapjack.

sloppy seconds

The Yankees are like that friend you had in high school who waited until you had a serious crush on a boy, then she pounced. On that same boy. And stole him away, utterly sans remorse. In fact she wanted you to be happy for her.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, New York can have Johnny Damon. I am so over him. Whatever.

an open letter to the young man with the green coat and bad judgment rubbing up behind me in the subway this morning

Dear dumb-ass young man,
Maybe you're going through a dry spell in your social life. Maybe all your college friends settled in New York, but you wanted to try out Boston because Aunt Susan said she'd keep you well-fed if you moved nearby. Maybe you just got out of prison and the bus dropped you in unfamiliar surroundings with only enough money for a T fare. It's tough meeting new people. The ladies, especially. We can all probably relate.

But really. Is that any reason to press the entire length of your lonely-ass body against mine? Sure, the train was crowded. Sure, that crazy lady and her bags were taking up three seats and you didn't want to risk it and get too close. Fine, you needed to hold on to the pole. But really. I'd like to tell your mamma what you did. With that breath of yours, she'd probably tell you to brush more often--something I can actually get behind.

life's little mysteries

This morning I found a cat turd in my dresser drawer. It's the middle drawer--third from the top and third from the bottom. It has pants in it. I'm not a filthy pig. I simply cannot explain this.

Any ideas?

from a craptacular low to bumpin good times

Even if a dental procedure has a 98 percent chance of success, someone has to make up that other two percent. That someone is probably the same unlucky fool who gets stopped for speeding in a hoard of cars traveling at the exact same speed. Or the one who trips and falls, causing skirt to fly over her head, while the rest of the marching band is getting into position on the field for the Thanksgiving-day half-time show. Or whatever. Just some examples that pop into my mind.

Anyway, I found myself in that unlucky two percent on Friday. And you might not think it's such a big deal, but among my talents, I am skilled at blowing the smallest, most insignificant detail into an utter debacle. And I did. "They took out," sniffle drip drip, "the implant," pathetic sobbing, "and now it's going to be another year," snotty dribble, "and another pile of bills not covered by my freaking dental insurance," WAAHHH, "before I get a tooth," I cried to my poor sister. She kept all "WTF?"s to herself. Instead, she booked me on a train--the Acela, no less!--and let me mark the anniversary of her birth with new pants and Mexican food in New York. I had the cheese enchiladas with a side of dental sutures. Then there followed a celebratory game of bowling. In New York's Port Authority, the place you'd hate to spend an extra two minutes if you could avoid it. But the bowling was spectacular. Three strikes in a row (remember that, guys?) and a score in the triple digits--something that happens as often as those Olsen twins eat a hamburger and keep it down.

a friday treat

It's the freaking holiday season. To celebrate, you and your credit card plan to spend the weekend developing headaches from the blaring of Christmas carols in stores hawking crap. Work is the pits. You have to go to yet another yankee swap. The public-radio station is doing another fund drive. You think you might lose it before Santa arrives.

Stop. I offer you this dose of goodness. I dare you. Go ahead, poke around, no one will think less of you for it.

the cat ate my gymsuit, and everything else in the fridge

Good people have asked me, "Why no photos of your cat--what gives?" The sorry truth, I'm afraid, is that The Pickle is difficult to photograph. I don't have a wide-angle lens wide enough, for starters. (That incline leading up to her belly--merely the foothills of Mt. Kitty.) Plus, she's jumpy. Sure, she's big as a barn, but she's fast. As soon as you focus on her, she jumps out of the frame and is off fixing herself a sandwich.

confession

My eye has been somewhat swollen for the last two days, and I'm secretly hoping there's a hair or eyelash or something buried in there, waiting to make a dramatic exit. Have you ever pulled a hair out from behind your eyeball? If not, you haven't lived. If so, you smell what I'm stepping in, and you know you like it. You just have better judgment and wouldn't go announcing it to all of the world wide web. And I can respect that.

working overtime

The good thing about not having a job is that, when a friend who recently gave birth to a beautiful peanut of a human is planning to go back to work in two days' time but hasn't yet found a super nanny/babysitter, I can step in to help. My days are, like, totally free. Or they were.

Now they're all about bottom-wiping, bottle-fixing, and drool-catching. I also spend a great deal of time burping the wee one. A LOT of time.

So I wasn't all that surprised to find myself trying to burp my cat last night in my sleep. She didn't really mind, because she takes affection in whatever shape it takes, but I was annoyed that it took her so damn long to produce a belch.

his words, not mine

Walking through Davis square the other night, I'm behind a gentleman pushing his daughter in a stroller. Now, winter has hit New England like Muhammad Ali thumped George Foreman in the rumble in the jungle. It's cold out. Not frozen-booger cold, but it's not far off if trends continue.

So the guy and the stroller: Daughter is clutching something. It appears to be a coffee cup, but with a straw coming out of the sippy hole. She seems to be otherwise dressed for the weather, but her hands are bare, clutching her cup. Another man--silverhaired, probably pushing his golden years--walks alongside the father-daughter pair and offers, "No gloves for the little person?"

Dad, taken aback, has no comeback whatsoever. Then, a moment later, "I tried to get them on her, but she won't wear them. If you think you can get her to put them on, be my guest."

"Oh, no, it's just that I noticed she wasn't wearing any, and it's cold out, and I thought she should be wearing some." Long awkward pause. I'm not even a part of the conversation, and I feel like crawling out of my skin.

Dad: "Listen, do you make a habit of criticizing people on the sidewalk, or is just a pastime for you?"

Unsolicited criticizer: "Um, well."

Dad, clearly uncomfortable: "Look, I'm sorry. I'm from New York. Maybe I'm just socially impaired."

homewrecker

It's the classic story, subject of endless hours of daytime programming and countless trade paperback romances: Me, underemployed and slouching toward boredom, with all the love and wet-nosed canoodling a woman could hope for at home. Enter a handsome house guest, with strong features, monogrammed luggage, and the most charming patches of toe hair ever have I seen.

I'm sunk. Hopelessly falling for someone else's dog. Please, don't judge me. She does that thing where she whips her stuffed animals around in her mouth, trying to snap their plush little necks. And the ear hair? I can't be helped.

the old nag

I set down 40 pounds of dog food on the passenger seat, without buckling it in, and I sense that my car doesn't like it. "Bing, bing, bing," she says, like a mother gently reminding her child. When I respond by taking my foot off the brake, she gets increasingly on edge. What if we're in an accident? What if we can't stop in time? What if . . . ? I ignore her and start to leave the parking lot. "Bingbingbingbingbingbingbing!" she cries. I step on the gas and proceed into traffic, sending her into a panic. "BINGBINGBINGBINGBING!" All the way home, this nagging. And me without a button to turn off the Swedish smart-assitude.

overheard

The setting: Harvard square knitting store, nerds aplenty, myself included.

The characters: A huge, pizza-faced college boy, speaking in annoying, didactic tone to earnest-looking and much cooler female friend. While bandying about advanced knitting terms like "hank" and "swift" (in the noun form), he brags to salesgirl about the "fabulous Chilean wool" that's been sitting, unused, in his knitting bag for three months now, as if that's a sin on par with puppy killing.

"This stuff will treat'cha good," he says to his friend. "Sure, it can get kinda kinky, but if you're going to be a knitter, one thing you're going to have to get used to is ripping out your work and starting over. You'll be alright, I'll show you."

house of cosby

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you stumbled upon a hair belonging to Bill Cosby, then spent 10 long years building a cloning machine, finally managing to fill up your house with Cosby clones? Wonder no more. Try number one, then proceed at your own risk.

June 21, 1936

My great-aunt Florence was no petit thing. (In fact, in 1924, as a high-school senior, she led her basketball team to a 70-2 victory over the no-doubt-humbled Geneva Eagles, scoring 52 of those points herself. This article recalls the 80th anniversary of that night, when she still held the county all-time single-game scoring record--probably still does.)

Over six-feet tall and full of spunk, she must have towered over all of Europe during her visit in 1936. I love to imagine what it was like for a couple of girls from Ohio to navigate their way through Europe in a convertible--with hairpin turns on roads not intended for cars and a king-sized language barrier everywhere they went.

A few days after crossing the Atlantic and disembarking in Plymouth, England, in June 1936, Florence wrote a letter home: "Well, here we are in Ireland, by gum, and it is swell."

Killarney, Ireland
11:15 PM

Dear Arlene and Mel,
We stayed overnight in Cork last night and left there after breakfast, about 10:30, in a dreary rainstorm, on our way to Blarney Castle. About 12 miles from Cork we started our hike through the fields and by paths to the castle. Of course our goal was to kiss the blarney stone. You can imagine our surprise when we discovered the stone was on the very top of the edifice, 120-some feet high, and that the only way to kiss the stone was to have someone hold your ankles while you would lie on your back with your hands on a rail and gradually go over backward until your head fits through a hole in the wall. Then you kissed the stone (if you weren't dizzy, etc.). Not to be outdone, and sadly needing that eloquence promised to the kissers of the stone, we proceeded to break our necks and backs and all kissed the stone--we took pictures to prove it. Then, you know us, the outdoor girls, we came down a narrow circular stone passageway out and, as a result of our combination of big feet and long legs, came near coming down on our hinders instead.

From Blarney Castle, we drove back to Cork and thence westward to Glengariff, a resort town, where we had lunch. Every time we stop, a crowd of people gathers around the car to give it the once-over. To them it's a spectacular thing, I guess.

From Glengariff to Killarney the scenery is exquisite. Sometimes things are so beautiful you can't say a thing, and you're fortunate if you can swallow the lump in your throat. The road was little used; grass would be growing between the two-wheel tracks. All the people ride in two-wheeled wagons drawn by a burro because a horse wouldn't be sure-footed enough to take them up the rocky mountain roads. Hairpin turns suddenly bring you into a flock of mountain sheep, cows, and burros in the middle of the road, or a crowd of people doing some odd dance to the music of the accordion, in the center of a bridge.

Fields are covered with a blanket of dwarf daisies about the size of a dime, or buttercups of the same size. Then, for contrast, rhododendrons grow the size of our large trees and have waxy leaves. Then, as if that weren't enough, Canterbury bells and bright red fuchsias are everywhere. The fuchsia are also trimmed for hedges. We'd get out and pick every strange flower and have to ask people what they were. This section is also filled with peat or turf, as they call it. As far as you can see will be places where trenches have been dug and this peat taken out in brick-like slabs. Of course we had to crawl out and paw that. It is used for fuel and resembles nothing so much as bricks of cow manure.

Roadside crosses; lovely spired churches; field after field of "taters"; ruins; waterfalls; stands where Irish laces, linens, and woolen goods are being sold; men in groups, gossiping (not women); cyclists everywhere you turn, even up that mountain pass; horses and burros with their front leg tied to the back leg to keep them from wandering too far; rather small towns where it's a waste of time to look for a restaurant because there are none. All this and plenty more just in this one day's journey.

We're having better luck with our food now that we know better how to order. The inevitable tea is getting to taste better than coffee. In fact, anything would taste better than the kind they make. Toast has been an unheard-of luxury, but their pastries, especially in Wales, would be hard to beat. You have your choice of meat--either mutton for breakfast, mutton for lunch, or mutton for dinner. Sometimes they surprise you and offer lamb chops. Soup is gravy with a little water, and nothing is salted. Before we can use the butter, it has to be salted. Sugar is served in large salt shakers, and salt in a small dish like a bird dish. You almost have to beg for a glass of water. They never serve it with meals. We are strange creatures to them, and we find them staring at us as we eat, changing our fork to the right hand, etc.

Hundreds of other things, but I'm getting sleepy so I haven't good sense. Goodnight.

Love, Florence

made in the USA

Here's just the thing for the love-lettuce reader on your Christmas list. Plus, free shipping! Yay!

stranger love

I squished a squirrel with my car. It was as unavoidable as it was gut-wrenching. For both me and the victim, I guess, though to varying degrees.

Determined to turn the day around and lift my spirits, I put a leash on my secret weapon and jammed a tennis ball in his mouth, because he likes to walk that way. We set out for a walk around Davis square, where nearly every college student, 30-something, tottering munchkin, teetering oldster, and cranky meter maid stuffed in a too-small uniform I passed produced at least a grin, if not also a greeting. "Hello!" "What a cutie you are!" "Look what YOU found!" "Aren't you adorable!" And even: "Hi! I LOVE you!" Amazing how it can change a person's mood. Even if they are talking to my dog.

giving thanks

On Tuesday, my dad and step-mom braved the torrential rains and drove up to Boston to spend the holiday with us. Before they arrived, I pulled on a jacket, leashed up on the dog, and in the 6:00 darkness walked the four blocks to the fresh-pasta store, crossing Broadway en route.

I spent a few minutes deciding what to get, then watched the guy behind the counter feed the wide, fresh noodles through the pasta machine. He sprinkled the spaghetti with flour, wrapped it in white paper, and sent me on my way. Within a block of my house, I reached Broadway. From the intersection, I could see the lights I'd left on in the living room, and I imagined the cat curled up on the couch, just where I'd left her. I imagined my parents, still driving in our direction, and my husband, hopefully heading home from work, and how we'd all wind up around hot plates of my step-mom's homemade gravy at the dinner table. The first of several good eats we'd share.

Broadway is long and wide and can feel more like a highway than a neighborhood road. Despite the crosswalks, it is always a dangerous crossing. So much so that Burton, a while back, sent an e-mail to our then-new mayor, complaining about the speeds and the dangers and asking him to do something. But other than a personal response, nothing happened.

At the crosswalk, I looked to the left. I looked to the right. No cars coming from either direction. In fact, two blocks to the right, three or four cars were stopped in the middle of the road, blocking anyone who might want to pass. In the headlights, I could see their doors were open. People were yelling. There was no traffic backup, no police officers, no flashing lights. It looked like a small accident or argument. I crossed and headed home to get ready for dinner.

The following night, Burton came home from work and told me that a 22-year-old Tufts student from Bulgaria had been hit by two cars as she attempted to cross Broadway a little after 6:00 the night before. She was declared dead an hour later.

The headlights and yelling. A young student. Her friends, or whomever she might have been going to visit when she didn't show up. Her family, far away. My family, in the next room. With our health and our lives and our hearts intact, none of it taken for granted.

kids these days...

They make me feel so inadequate.

waste not, burn in hell not

I once attended a lecture by her highness Madeleine Albright, who told a crowd of 3,000 women: "There is a special place in hell for women who don't support each other." I am inclined to believe her.

But this morning, while putting our assorted recyclables out on the curb, I found myself hoping there's also a special place in hell for people who can't get the concept of separating paper bags from plastic, thereby rendering their recyclables garbage. Or those who can't be bothered to break down cardboard boxes, preferring to jam them into a garbage can? Please, let's not even mention the bottle-and-can-throw-awayers.

Forgive me, but I like to imagine them passing their eternal damnation in a small, windowless room with a forced-air heater set to "high," and with piles of fetid trash in leaky, plastic bags nearly reaching the low ceiling. Like Huis Clos, but with no one to blame for the trash but yourself.

Too harsh?

(sp)ahhh...

It started so well. My mom and I headed north from Boston, timing our departure to correspond with a lunchtime layover in Quechee, Vermont, home to Simon Pearce of the ceramics and overpriced hand-blown glass fame, a sort of personal Mecca. Within the walls of the old brick mill, overhanging a dam as scenic as any, they also have food. The really good kind. We were seated at a two-top, right over the waterfall, and immediately served tiny, doll-sized buttermilk biscuits. Their size made them all the better to cram in your cramhole. We gobbled salmon with various roasted autumn-colored accoutrements, and a dish of caramelized walnut ravioli, plopped in a lemongrass-ginger-cream sauce that I’m pretty sure you get to drink in mug-sized servings in heaven. Dessert? And how. Let me just say this: chocolate, fleur de sel, blood-orange coulis, and an amen for elastic waistbands.


Fat and happy, we got back on the road, promising ourselves that the healthful living started now. The whole object of the trip, anyway, was to provide rest, recuperation, and a beginning to a new and healthy us.

After checking in to our room and judging the quality of the place by the personal-care products provided in the bathroom (June Jacobs—very promising), we decided to check out the spa. To get there, we walked down the longest hallway ever built by man, seriously. Once there, we were overwhelmed by the Moby Dick-sized book of treatment choices. Naturally, we put off the decision of whether to pamper ourselves with salt scrubs, Swedish massage, or herbal wraps, and instead walked back to our room, back down the longest hallway ever built by man, to change into our exercise clothes. After an extended drama involving hotel robes (Do we change into the robes here? Do we use the spa robes? Do we change AND wear the robe? What if they’re out of robes at the spa? What will we do with the extra robes we come back in? And so on, like a pair of Dustin Hoffmans, had Rain Man had been set at a spa, until one of us shouted a definitive: NO ROBES), we returned to the spa, robeless, and traveled—for the third time—down the longest hallway ever created by man.

The cardio room was mostly empty and seemed approachable. (One nameless individual, wearing headphones to listen to the TV, shouted to her daughter, on the elliptical machine immediately adjacent, over the volume in her head, “HOW DO YOU WORK THIS THING? WHAT’S YOUR HEART RATE?” not realizing that all of Vermont and some parts of Canada could hear her. But who cares! We were getting fit!) After a healthy dose of cardio, the weight room was empty, and we felt emboldened to enter. We pressed and pumped and pulled and pretended we knew what we were doing. By then, all that was left was a soak in the whirlpool.

Feeling we had worked off at least one doll-sized biscuit each, we decided it was time to get a nibble for dinner. It was quarter past eight. We were in the showers when the fire alarm went off. After several minutes of our brains quivering from the shrillness of it, we decided it was best to evacuate, even if we hadn’t yet managed to try to June Jacobs conditioner. Donning spa robes (thank god for them!), we padded yet again down the longest hallway ever created by man to the entrance of the hotel, where all 12 guests had gathered. They were dressed for dinner. In clothes. We were wearing spa robes. Otherwise mostly naked.

As we waited for the fire department to arrive, the wait staff brought around trays of coffee, then hot cider and a bottle of spiced rum, then a platter of cookies that could satisfy most of the school children in the county. “Can I get anyone anything?” the bartender practically pleaded. “A pair of pants?” I offered. “A real fire,” someone else suggested. As the evening wore on, those of us in the vestibule became fast friends. We helped ourselves to the computer perched atop the check-in counter, seeing if news of the not-fire had made CNN yet. “Might as well check my e-mail,” the guy celebrating his first anniversary said. “Might as well change our room rates,” Peggy countered. Together, we slid into a state of crying, giggling hold-your-shit-togetherdom. But even over the chilly temperatures and the impossibly slow response by the fire department and the unceasing BWEEP BWEEP BWEEP BWEEP BWEEP BWEEP BWEEP of the fire alarm as it destroyed our chances of ever hearing another fire alarm ever again, it wasn’t so bad.

An hour after the ordeal started, the fire chief excused us from the vestibule. To celebrate our freedom, Peggy and I embarked on a fifth journey down the longest hallway ever attempted by man. But by the time we got there, the spa—with our clothes and room keys in it—was locked. This meant, impossibly, another trip down the longest hallway man ever had the gall to create. Before we completed the trek, we ran into the maintenance man, who walked us back and let us in to collect our belongings. And then, dear friends, it’s true: We walked down the freaking hallway one time more, as blistered and dehydrated as any marathon runner, to return to our room. At least we were getting our exercise.

r & r

After all of that me-time yesterday, love lettuce is ready for a break from itself. Perhaps you're feeling likewise. We are driving north, to Vermont, for a few days of pampering. Until we meet again, be well and eat your leafy greens.

the self-indulgent 100

Gentle reader,
As much as doing so made my skin crawl, I have put together a list of 100 things about me. For you. It's a tradition, albeit an ancient one in blog time, which I hope explains away the most vainglorious post my brain can imagine. Without further ado, a glimpse into my darkest corners. For all to read on the internet. Great.

1. Except for baby animals, there are few foods I won’t eat.
2. I last ate veal in 1995. I thought it was chicken. It was delicious.
3. I pretend that I’m an organized person, but in truth I always feel scattered. I think I fool some people on this count, while others will be not surprised in the least to hear this. Does everyone feel this way?
4. Amelie is one of a short list of movies of which I could never tire.
5. In general, I don’t like to watch movies (or read books) over and over again. I’d rather try something new.
6. If I don’t like a book, I won’t finish it. I labored through all but the last 40 pages of Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, and I’m not even curious about the ending.
7. A warm dog curled in my lap is the best therapy.
8. I take my coffee with cream and sugar.
9. But I’d probably rather drink tea.
10. I don’t understand people who don’t love food.
11. I always wanted to take piano lessons but never got around to it.
12. Haven’t gotten around to it yet, I should say.
13. The most challenging course I took in college was Oceanography. My mind is not cut out for science, yet it was one of my most memorable courses.
14. The smell of garlic and ginger sautéing in butter is one of the finest I know.
15. Smell, in general, is the most sensitive of senses for me. Before I buy a new piece of clothing, for example, I sniff it. I want to know if it smells like a factory or someone’s hands or plastic wrapping or a musty basement.
16. When I was a baby, a sheepskin lined the bottom of my crib. I carted Meep around with me for the next few years, burying my nose in its fur. My parents took it away from me one night, but I quickly found a stuffed animal to take its place. By coincidence, the sole surviving scrap of Meep is sitting on the desk next to me at this very moment.
17. I hate talking on the phone. It is a challenge for me to stay in touch with people who don’t use e-mail.
18. Over the years, I’ve wrecked a few significant friendships due to personal flaws other than my phone-talking skills. I miss those friends and their presence in my life.
19. I’d rather live in an apartment that is sunny than spacious.
20. The first things I noticed when I met Burton was his big blue eyes.
21. I fell for him hard on our second date, when he cooked me dinner.
22. He still cooks for me. And I am still falling for him.
23. There are few foods I don’t like. But if I were to make a list, it would include tongue, headcheese, and the sorts of pates that taste like dirt.
24. In high school, I played soccer, softball, and ran track—and I was no better than mediocre at any of them.
25. Oysters on the half shell? Absolutely. Clams? No thanks.
26. I prefer to take the stairs over the escalator, and I’d always rather walk than drive.
27. When it rains and earthworms wash up on the sidewalks, it is impossible for me not to toss at least a few of the healthy looking ones back onto the soil. I remember a children’s book in which a character chucked one of many beached starfish back into the ocean. “You’re not making a difference,” another character chided, “look at how many are out here.” The starfish-tosser pointed to the one settling back into the water and responded, “But I did make a difference to that one.” Earthworms drowning on the sidewalk always bring that to my mind, though I wish I could remember what book it was.
28. My compassion for bugs does NOT extent to those many-legged creatures that find their way up my bathroom drain.
29. The national anthem makes me cry. Always.
30. So do marching bands.
31. I am a softie.
32. I heart cheese. Of all kinds.
33. New England, for me, is almost perfect: It has ocean and islands and chowder and autumn and smart people and old houses and a wicked pissah accent. But I’d give my left eyebrow to drop it 100 miles closer to my family.
34. I type fast and with accuracy. I learned in summer school, with Mr. Krieger.
35. I am not a list maker. When I do make lists, I forget to look back at them to check my progress. Instead, I make a new list. Which I never look at again.
36. When people ask me if I loved college, I always think of the death of my roommate a week before the start of our junior year. In truth, I spent much of college wallowing. But that’s not the answer people are looking for when they ask, so I usually say it was a great time.
37. I still think about her often.
38. The semester after she died, I helped organize a memorial service on campus. I found a florist about 20 miles away to supply us with flowers for the service. With the buckets of flowers crammed into every available space in the car and while driving on unfamiliar roads, I slammed on the brakes for a red light, which caused many, many gallons of water to be liberated from their containers and flushed through the car. If you’ve ever ridden the Log Flume, you know the kind of wave I’m describing. Alone in the car, soaked, I laughed until I almost peed myself.
39. I can be quite morose.
40. Six Feet Under and Arrested Development are (were) the best shows on television.
41. I have major crushes on Jason Bateman and Peter Krause.
42. American’s Funniest Home Videos always makes me laugh. I’m not proud of it, but cats falling off ledges and people crashing on sleds make for good watching.
43. When we were kids, my sister and I practiced movie-star-style kissing with our best buddies across the street. I thought it was slimy and did not like it. At all.
44. As cliché as it sounds, I’d rather do what I love than make money.
45. I doubt I will ever make a lot of money.
46. I felt more pride in the piles of vegetables I helped produce this summer than the lion’s share of the work I’ve produced in my career so far.
47. My sister and I fought day and night when we were growing up. I always felt less cool, clever, and cruel than her.
48. Now we’re very close, even though I know my habits still annoy her and hers me.
49. I never knew my mother’s mother, but I have ideas about what her voice sounded like.
50. I’ve almost forgotten the sound of my other grandmother’s voice, but I can clearly picture her hands and remember her smell.
51. When I was in the third grade, I pooped in my pants and hid my crappy underwear behind the garbage can in the bathroom. For the longest time, my sister tried to leverage this fact against me in front of other people, but now that I’ve shared it with you, Internet, her weapon is disarmed! Everyone knows!
52. I can’t help but stare at people while riding the subway.
53. “I want my two dollars!”
54. I have little sympathy for people who use their/there incorrectly.
55. As much as I’ve tried to remember the rule, I bungle the distinction between lay/lie, so I try to avoid using those words altogether.
56. Sleep always comes easily for me.
57. When I was in high school, I wore a retainer at night. One morning, I woke up and couldn’t find it anywhere. I later found the retainer tucked in the cassette player, on the opposite side of my room.
58. I wonder what else I do in my sleep.
59. I love artistic handwriting.
60. My own penmanship is crap.
61. Why anyone would read all of this is beyond me.
62. I saw American Werewolf in London when I was much too young, and I was never the same afterwards. More jittery, mostly, and terrified of open fields at night.
63. For many years, I watched how people walked up stairs because I thought that if I hit the same stair with the same foot, I would turn out like that person. Conversely, if I used the opposite foot, I would turn out differently. It was time consuming and somewhat depressing to always think about whether or not I wanted to be like the person ahead of me on the stairs.
64. When a bartender asks me what I’d like to drink, my mind goes blank, even though I’m expecting the question. I usually just ask for what someone else has ordered.
65. Things I love: The Triplets of Belleville, drivers who stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk, fondling yarns in a knitting store, scallops wrapped in bacon, and seeing people smile to themselves.
66. Things I cannot love: Cell phones, mean kids, aggressive drivers, and the Republican party.
67. Things I cannot understand: Adults who don’t know how to swim, opposition to gay marriage, and people who don’t try new foods (see #9).
68. My relationship with my dad has long been complicated and difficult, but with every visit it gets better and better.
69. I love finding treasures in other peoples’ trash.
70. I wish I were better at getting rid of my own trash.
71. Based on the way I speak, people often ask if I’m from the Midwest.
72. My face often reminds people of other people they know.
73. Slipping between clean sheets on a Sunday night is heavenly.
74. The best part of any meal is dessert.
75. If I had to choose whether my superpower would be flight or invisibility, I would by flying my ass to Fiji faster than you can utter the phrase, “wind burn.”
76. Anyone who claims they don’t like tater-tots is lying.
77. My nicknames over the years have included Monchichi, Stinker, Pookie, Poof, Jenny-honey, Big J, and, meant unkindly, McFartland.
78. I am often late. In fact, another of my nicknames was LM Jen, for “last-minute.”
79. For third grade, I attended an elementary school in Canada, where we had outdoor track and field competitions when we weren’t under multiple feet of snow. I did the standing long jump, an event that involves standing in place, swinging your arms three times to build momentum, and praying for a brisk wind at the moment of take-off. I remember watching a competitor from another school whose arms were about half the usual length and thinking, “At least I’ve got this guy beat.”
80. I wish I could forgive myself for unkind things I said to people long ago.
81. I can’t stand Julia Roberts.
82. Scorpios scare me.
83. I get indignant about SUVs.
84. Am not good at remembering details.
85. I look much younger than I am and don’t mind this fact in the slightest.
86. I like my nose.
87. My mom is a wicked-good cook.
88. I feel incredibly vain, making this list.
89. Once, after riding the Round Up at the Our Lady of Peace fair, I barfed. My downfall was going on that nausea-inducing swing ride beforehand.
90. I was once fired from a job and, as humiliating as it was, I think everyone should experience that particular shame.
91. I had never worked as hard as I did for that piece-of-crap job.
92. I still regret losing the down vest that my mother made for me as a tot and which I left in a public restroom somewhere. I wonder if it’s on the bottom of a landfill now, or whether it’s keeping some other kid’s core temperature up?
93. I love getting new haircuts and rearranging the furniture—both give me a new outlook on life.
94. Although I am fairly crafty, I am not nearly as handy as my husband, for whom I am grateful every day.
95. Sometimes I worry that my hearing is going bad.
96. I have one surviving grandparent, with whom I am not at all close. He is a cranky old bugger.
97. Why would anyone want to attend a bullfight? I don’t get it.
98. Ice cream: Much of it, and often.
99. I love wrapping presents.
100. The fact that you are reading this embarrasses me to no end.

Now it's your turn.

a humungous fungus among us?

While weeding the blueberries last week, we discovered dozens of these cottony eggs and at least a few of the penile protruberances peeking up from the wood chips. I summonded all my reserves of courage before cutting one of the eggs in half, all the while praying--ok, begging--to anyone who would listen that I wouldn't be slicing a baby turtle, bird, or the Cadbury bunny in half. S/he listened, apparently, because all we found was a layer of goo surrounding another egg, which was filled with a spongy pink and green material.

We speculated about all the obvious explanations--a War-of-the-Worlds-type alien, the hanta virus, or a preppy fungus of sorts. But in the end, we still had no idea what we'd found. Love lettuce is currently accepting explanations. Please write your suggestions on the back of a 40-inch end-grain Boos butcher-block counter and mail it to our offices. Prizes will be awarded. Thank you.

too much wallace and gromit?

I had a dream the other night that I was on the Wellesley campus with my dog and a Land Rover that was tricked out for a fishing trip (I could tell by the cooler of beer lashed to the hood). I needed to get to the other side of the campus, which can be quite a hike. I remember my dog jumping up to the driver's seat and asking if he could take the truck and meet me there--he'd take the route alongside the walking path, so I could flag him down at a moment's notice. It sounded reasonable enough to me, so I waved him off. He waved a paw back at me, then immediately took a wrong turn and sped off down another road, the wind blowing back his ears like you see in the cartoons. The lures clattered around in the wind, barely audible above the stereo, which the dog had turned up to 11. I remember thinking, "Great, there goes my dog and my truck and my fishing trip."

I don't even like fishing.

forgive me

Stuck to a friend's refrigerator, which she shares with roommate and brother, is a computer printout with curling edges, cut to the size of the following three stanzas, written by William Carlos Williams:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

hot off the needles

Two of my favorite recent arrivals will be sporting jennymcflint originals this fall. As soon as they grow several inches, at least. Welcome, autumn babes!

nothing gold can stay

probably not even for free, thanks

Part of the fun of this blog, for me, has been discovering who reads it: old friends, new friends, and people I don't know from Adam. How do they find me? Search me. Or just search google for "sniff my fanny for cash," as one recent English visitor did. (Though s/he searched without the quotation marks, which explains why love lettuce was the fifth hit on the list--between sniffing pickles, fanny packs, and my boy Johnny Cash, we cover the requisite ground here.)

But wouldn't you be thoroughly disappointed to land upon love lettuce if, in reality, you were looking to hire an English fanny sniffer? And do people really do that? For money? Am I the last person on the planet to discover this fact?

saturdays last

Some have questioned the veracity of my snow-related claims. Luckily, I anticipated this and snapped a photo from my living-room window. Kids built a snowman, for cripe's sake, although I didn't leave the house to get close enough to photograph it. Point is, white flakes, falling from sky.




And for those of you who have never seen the sun rise on a Saturday morn AFTER a night of sleep, I offer you this photo, taken two Saturdays ago, on the occasion of the last farm harvest. Even though my photography teacher said sunrises and sunsets are cheezy and trite.

tough love

Under my roof, if you can't stop chewing on your ass, you have to wear the lamp shade. Sorry, them's the rules.

carrot codependency

total crap

It was the first Saturday since May when I wasn't expected to be working. I had big plans, involving Scott Simon's buttery radio voice. Coffee. Bed. Morning sunshine. Reading. And observing (from a distance) Burton's Saturday routine, which took shape during my absence and included a vacuum, Swiffers, a variety of earth-friendly cleaning products, bitchy Swedish mops, and the manliest of elbow grease.

But somehow, without my consent, Scott Simon had the day off (he's not gone, right? RIGHT?). There was no sunshine, on account of the SNOW THAT FELL ALL DAY LONG. And Burton informed me that the cleaning-routine offer expired when I stopped working Saturdays.

To that, I say pththbst.

before the fat lady sings

Pulling up plastic mulch: It's the equivalent of that most-awful clean-up job that, even though you know you shouldn't, you save for the very last minute before moving out of an apartment. After you clean out your fridge and decide whether to chuck the whole butter dish with butter still on it or actually go to the trouble of washing, drying, and putting away, which you really can't stand to do after days and hours of packing. After you take care of that mess behind the litterbox, or maybe the greasy dust bunnies that--who knew?--had been breeding and growing like gremlins in the darkness behind your garbage can. After all that, the only thing standing between you and getting-the-hell-out-of-Dodge, in this farm metaphor, at least, is the plastic mulch.

For those plants that prefer warmer climes than New England can provide (peppers, eggplant, melons, and okra, for example), we put down a layer of black plastic mulch. The edges are tucked under the soil, thanks to a really cool plastic-laying machine, and the plants grow through small holes in the plastic.

To get rid of it, we mow down what's left of the plants: The eggplants, shriveled and brown and crispy, look like the walking dead; the peppers look perfectly fine, still dangling shiny Thai hots, jalapenos, and assorted bells. Then two people, one on each edge, pull the plastic out from under the earth and weeds and plant nubs. It takes significant effort. Rotten peppers have been decomposing on the plastic for months, cooking in the heat and leaving behind just skins and stench. It gets on your hands, clings to your pants and boots, and the stank sticks to your upper lip like an unwelcomed guest who won't leave.

There is one redeeming aspect of pulling up plastic, though. After all the mowing and pulling and yanking and kicking, the ground is littered with thousands of peppers, some rotten, some grocery-store pristine. And as you make your way down the row, they pop underfoot. Like bubble wrap. Little crunchy pepper explosions.

June 18, 1936

Florence's letter-writing slowed during the cross-Atlantic trip. She described in long detail the seven-course meals ("French coffee is foul.") and the daily movies, horse races, and lack of mingling, but I wonder if the tedium of life on board the ship got to her a bit. Finally, though, they arrived:

Thursday P.M.

To bring our chronicle up to date: We were called at 5 A.M. Tuesday by our porter and went to breakfast. Before that we had to do our tipping: 2 dollars each to the dining room steward; same to the room steward--you're supposed to tip the deck steward but we didn't bother, then 25 cents to the porters who carry your luggage to the tender. I certainly was surprised to find out that we didn't land at Plymouth. The harbor is too shallow, so they send out a floating dock and the trucks, baggage, and people are all crowded on and taken to the dock.

First of all we were sent to have our passports checked by the British officials and to get an alien or "landing card." You have to have one of these to get on the gangplank to get to the tender. That gives them a double check on the people--so stow-aways can get off.

Maybe you think it wasn't wonderful to see grass and land! The entrance to Plymouth Harbor would have looked wonderful even if it hadn't been pretty. The first thing we say was "Pilly," the car, waiting for us. They never found the cigarettes Jim gave to us for that fellow. We're only allowed to have 50 each. They used the "hit and miss" system for checking luggage. While we were waiting to be called to the customs official, we thought we'd have a cup of coffee--first boner we pulled--no English money, so we dashed over to the Cook's exchange and got $50 changed to English pounds. Honestly their money looks like waste paper. I'm half afraid I'll throw it away by mistake.

The car was finally OK'd. You should see the license plates! Great big black and white things about four times the size of ours. When we first left the Plymouth dock we nearly died laughing 'cause we certainly had a guilty feeling driving on the left. The people are such polite drivers we've been shocked to death. Hurry is a word not in their dictionary. The people in cafes and restaurants say "Thank you" every time they get your order, say it again when they place your meal before you, and again when you pay. What they're thanking you for is more than I can tell you.

Those pictures in the National Geog. didn't lie. That's exactly what we've seen all the way. The roads are very narrow. All the people ride bicycles. Automobiles have to treat "bike" riders as if they were other cars. I'd guess, as a conservative estimate, that we've passed 25,000 bicycles these 2 days.

I'll send some pictures home but be sure to save them for us. It is 10 to 12 so I'll hop for bed. Chris has been sawing them off for some time now.

Loads of love,
Florence

recyclables: my cross to bear

At a lecture last night, food was served on those saucer-sized black plastic plates--the kind caterers must live, breathe, and cough up in the night. And while recycling bins lined the hallways, inviting cans, bottles, and paper goods, there was no option for my black plastic saucer-plate. I reread the options: cans, bottles, and paper goods. Then, off to the side, a trash can.

Flashback four years. Burton and I enjoy two weeks of honeymoon bliss on the islands of Maui and Kauai. But in a land covered in pineapple plants and fine arts and crafts, my only souvenirs were empty cans and water bottles, spilling out of my suitcase and carry-on. (Well, there was also that new ring on Burton's hand--not the one he got at the wedding--and my insurance company's number on speed-dial, but that's another story.)

Burton stood beside me last night and watched me survey the options, still gripping the saucer-plate with its clearly visible recyclable number on the back. "You're going to bring that home, aren't you?" It was pouring rain. We had bags and umbrellas and jackets to fumble with. But obviously, yes, I did.

ah, the domestic life

A nor'easter is blowing through the area, so farm work was called off for the day. I'm tucked inside, watching my recycling bins stumble down the block like blue plastic tumble weeds, trying to finish up a knitting project, and mediating conflicts between the cat and dog, as they battle for the best spot on the couch.

FAQs

It’s pretty much over. Everyone keeps asking, so let me explain: Our last harvest was Saturday. Temperatures were in the 30s. Bippies were frozen. People were sick, we went home early. It was much more of a whimper than a bang.

Now, all that remains is the taking down and putting away of farm equipment, weeding the blueberries, mulching the strawberries, and a few other tasks that we never got around to, all winter-preparation-related. I will likely be unemployed by the end of the week.

Then what will you do? Look for a job. Hopefully not too far away from writing and editing, but also not too far away from food, organics, sustainability, and the like. I’m open to another adventure. Like making cheese. Because as much as I love lettuce, cheese is where it’s at. Stay tuned.

let the games begin

Every year, we stock up on apples at Phil's U-Pick in Harvard. Every year, his identical twin brother, not-Phil, takes our money, guesses our ages, and makes inappropriate jokes about the interrelationships within the group. This year, Leah "The Nanny" suffered the brunt of it. Poor woman, thought she was getting out of the house for a spell of fresh air. Never imagined she'd be harassed by a man in a pumpkin hat. But bad things happen to good people.

Anyway, our fridge runneth over with apples. They must be eaten, and preferably with heaps of sugar, raisins, and crumbles. I smell another Annual Apple Bake-Off. Who's in?

on dirt

A fifth-grade class from the Cambridge Friends School paid a visit to the farm yesterday. We greeted them in the driveway, next to the barn, where they were introduced to the farmer. As he explained a bit about the farm, he peppered them with questions : Who knows what 'organic' means? Do carrots grow on trees? What is genetically modified seed? Several dislocated their shoulders as they shot their arms into the air, hoping to be called on to rant against GMOs. They grow them wicked smaht in Cambridge.

I took a group out to harvest leeks. No one knew what a leek was, and when I explained that they're like onions, the level of satisfaction sank. I demonstrated how to harvest one: Step one: grab firmly. Step two: pull. When I got to step three (shake off excess dirt), a petit girl in a pink track suit and black leather boots shrieked and recoiled at the flying dirt. I thought we were sunk for sure.

Eventually, though, she found jobs she could manage: Telling everyone else how many they needed to pull and directing the leek-stacking system. She didn't notice the dirt as much, although she did complain to me about the slime on the leeks--something I can't disagree with.

When we had wrapped up the leek harvest, it was time to dig potatoes, an activity that brings out the child in adults and small children alike. They ran. Screamed. Grabbed. Made up songs. Threw. ("WE DON'T THROW POTATOES," the farmed screamed back.) In essence, they had a blast. By the end of it, pink tracksuit girl had stripped off her hoodie, spread it on the soft, moist soil, and used it as a potato-collecting device. And she was having the time of her 10-year-old life, dirt and all.

closure

With two harvests remaining in the season, the farm crew stands on the newly germinated cover crop in the eastern field, where row after row of tomatoes, strawberries, cabbages, and broccoli once stood. Gazing toward the sun's last gasps of the day, they contemplate what the future holds for each of them, particularly as it relates to dinner.

on gravity

It's Saturday night in Boston. We walk past the Hard Rock Cafe. Under the awning, sheltered from the rain, a small crowd of smokers huddle together. They look like a herd of some tacky breed of animal, with their hairsprayed dos and gaudy clothes and scowls. We turn the corner. Burton points out a pair of grungy undies in the street, flattened by that day's steady rain. Their owner is long gone. "They must've fallen off?" Surely.

a grand outing

My grandfather’s cousin, Florence, was a tremendous lady. She lived and died in Ohio, never married, and even in her 90s towered near six-feet tall. I remember our rare visits to the one-story house she shared with Marie (candy! they let us eat candy!), but despite the distance, Florence was a pro at keeping in touch. Like clockwork, she sent birthday cards. Inside, you could count on a crisp bill and pages of her tiny, slanted handwriting, sending news of relatives whose connections I could never keep straight.

In June 1936, while in her early 20s, Florence and her friend, Chris, traveled to New York City, where they boarded the steamer, Ile de France. With “five bags, a hatbox, armloads of junk,” and a convertible, they set sail for Europe. Over the summer, they visited Great Britain, France, Italy, and that year's summer Olympic games in Berlin. Florence, always the faithful correspondent, documented their trip in letters home to her parents and family.

Thursday 11:30 P.M.
Greetings. Can you hear my dogs barking? We’ve been seeing N.Y. And how! Got up at eleven, ate breakfast, then started for the AAA office in Rockefeller Center. We walked from there to the Grand Central Terminal and watched the mobs of people coming and going. It’s a mammoth building, but not so new as the Cleveland Terminal. There is a door there that opens when you cross a beam of light.

Our next stop was to visit some of the model homes in the Fifth Avenue shops. Whew!! It’s hard to believe, but in Saks, on 5th Ave., one pair of fuzzy anklets cost $3.50!! You should see the gorgeous promenade from 5th Ave. to Rockefeller Center. St. Patrick’s Cathedral was next. It’s difficult to realize that such a quiet sanctuary exists right in the heart of the exclusive shopping district.

Eating came next. There are so many different and clever places to eat that you could find a different place every day of the year and all of them would be novelties. Rockefeller Building (where N.B.C. Studios are located) was as interesting as a carnival. The window decorations could amuse one for days. We hurried on our way to the Battery. We rode our first “L”, or elevated R.R., to the Battery (lakefront section), where we visited the aquarium. You would have enjoyed that, Mom. Penguins, turtles, seals, pelicans, and every kind of fish imaginable.

Next came a boat trip across the harbor to Bedloe Island to see the Statue of Liberty. Not to be outdone by anyone else, we hiked up a spiral staircase, and I mean spiral (about 1 ft. wide) to the top of the crown where we had a good view of the harbor. Our legs were trembling so we could scarcely stand when we got back on ground level.

We’re going to make grand sailors, cause we nearly spilled the beans getting to Bedloe Island. We saw the largest yacht in the world anchor right off the island. Such luxuriousness! All white and carrying four beautiful launches.

Back to the Battery, up to Wall Street and Child’s Restaurant, all via the latest stream-line model car, “Two Legs.” From there it goes on endlessly—subway to 42nd St., bus trip through Chinatown (Have to tell you about that later.), and back to the Hotel Astor Bar Room. I’m so tired I can’t make sense in this letter, so I’ll call a halt until tomorrow night.

Love to all,
Florence and Chris

everyone loves an implant

Yesterday, someone drilled a screw into my jaw. Despite all the Novocain, I felt the threads working their way into the bone. The sound of it didn’t help. Or the way the doctor’s hands shook from the exertion of his whole-body effort to jam the thing into my head, then the screw went in too far and—CAN FEEL THAT!—pushed up against the sinus wall. Do over.

I am one step closer to replacing a baby tooth—a tooth that went way, way, way beyond expectations. In nine months, hopefully, after this screw has fused with my bone, I may—just maybe!—get myself a new tooth. Sure, people grow entire human beings in that time, but what’s the rush? They sure don't make them like they used to.

true story

A fall day. Work has been called off due to rain, yet the rain never shows. I make myself a cup of peppermint tea, dig out a fleece, leash up the dog, and the two of us set out to the local farmers' market on foot. I am blissed out. Then a rusty Taurus wagon pulls up alongside me. An ugly dude leans out of the driver-side window and, from behind aviator sunglasses, screams at me: "Be nice to the little dog, bitch!"

not at all lost

In high school, George was always The Artistic One. Sure, the rest of us showed up to art class most days, and (perhaps for that reason alone?) Ms. Haness awarded us grades we didn't deserve, but few of us could have drawn ourselves out of a paper bag. I, for one, early on abandoned the idea of ever drawing a human figure. George made it look as easy as getting an A in health class.



Last weekend, those of us at Love Lettuce journeyed off-campus to see George's first solo show, "Lost World." The gallery, in Brooklyn, was at the back of a shop, where visitors could purchase--in addition to some fine art--vintage clothes, striped socks, and a haircut, if necessary. The show's guest book had all sorts of compliments ("Seals are my favorite!"), evidence that the works had been well received. And on Sunday, the last day of the show, a second painting was sold. Few things beat seeing an old friend successfully navigate his way on a path he started out on so. long. ago. Are we adults now? Ugh.

If you missed the show, you can visit George here.

between you and me

Would it be so wrong to play hooky in order to go see the new Wallace and Grommit movie? What if I physically cannot wait until next weekend? Seriously.

Please join me in praying for a thundering, soul-drenching, work-canceling rain on a non-harvest day.

not good with goodbyes

I cried at work today. Over a vole. I cried over a rodent. But it was dying, an unlucky victim of the roto-tiller, which had recently cleaned up the rows between the strawberry beds. I found him sitting in the soft, overturned soil, looking like he was slouched on a couch. But he wasn’t.

With my trowel, I picked him up and set him on a bed of weeds in a bucket. I carried the bucket to the edge of the woods and put him down in the shade, a feeble attempt at what I don’t know. The blades of the roto-tiller had taken out most of his back. No amount of ibuprofin, physical therapy, vitamin E, or any combination thereof would bring him back from this one. I tried to gingerly arrange his body into a shape that nature had intended for him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything more. I reluctantly walked away.

As I sat back down in the strawberries, I thought about the little thing laying in the shade, his vole chest no doubt still heaving up and down. When Ward came by to set about working, I told him what I’d found. We sat there quietly for a few minutes before I showed him the spot, at the end of the bed, at the edge of the woods. Then I ran off like a little girl, already crying, not wanting to hear the sound of it.

byo wool

I'm worried. Very worried. About what it's going to cost to keep my house from icing over this winter--I've heard estimates ranging anywhere from 25 to 70 percent increases over last year. Which may mean, by spring, Burton and I have 25 to 70 percent fewer fingers. We are cheap sonsofbitches, particularly when it comes to home-heating costs. We have a history.

Back when he was in school and I was earning about what I am now and we couldn't afford anything more, we set the thermostat to 55 degrees. At night, we reeled it back to 50. (Right about now, my mother is thinking: "How warm and toasty!" This is a genetic defect.) We slept in sweaters and ski hats, under double down comforters, and cut back on showers--because stepping out of the hot water and into the 50-degree air was like plunging into a glass of ice water. Friends stopped coming over to visit, sometimes because they didn't own enough sweaters to keep themselves warm in our apartment.

I suspect this year it will start with a challenge: How long can we go before we turn on the heat? By then, we'll be acclimated. The ski hats and sweaters will already be out. Bulk orders of chapstick and herbal teas received. By then, there's no turning back.

back at the office

what are YOU doing?

I had walked back to the barn to refill my water bottle when a CSA member stopped me. “What are you doing?” she said. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the end of the farm season and what in general lays in store for me in the next year, so at first I was taken aback by the right-to-the-pointness of her question. Until I realized she was speaking shorthand for: “What is keeping you farmhands busy, now that my share of the veggies is getting so darned small?”

Specifically, we try to get around to weeding the fall crop of spinach. There are four or five rows of it, much of which has been weeded by various people over the last few weeks. The rest of it struggles against the pigweed and errant grasses. Both competitors have been slowed by the shorter, cooler days, but the weeds have a definite Darwinian advantage. The project is mentioned just about every day on the list of urgent to-dos.

We try to get around to weeding the strawberries once more before we tuck them in for winter. There are so. many. rows. of. strawberries. Yesterday, my co-weeder and I set out there for the day’s last hour-and-a-half of work. I couldn’t say if it was a coincidence, but I was immediately blinded by a white-knuckle headache and had to go sit in the darkness of the barn for the rest of the afternoon.

We try to get around to weeding the blueberries. Haven’t been within spitting distance of them in months.

We dig potatoes. Saturday last, we hauled in 1,600 pounds of the suckers. They are plucked from the soil and dropped into buckets, which are emptied into tan crates, which are loaded (by two people) into the truck, which delivers them back to the barn, where they are stacked in a cool, dark corner, where they will sit and stew until they are distributed to CSA members in the next eight pick-ups. (If any of them suffer blinding headaches, they are well-positioned.)

More philosophically, we try to get used to the idea of not being around anymore. We patch together plans for the winter. We watch the crows and the hawks, the creep of fall colors, the comings and goings of familiar faces, and we wonder how many more visits we’ll have.

how?

Even if your diet consists mainly of dog kibble, which you eat with apparent delight day in and day out, and your general aesthetic includes such joys as rolling on dead birds and sniffing your friends' butts--even so, how can you possibly consider kitty litter critters a tasty treat?

little man

Johnnie from Berlin, Mass., (say it with me: BER-lin) delivered 200 bales of hay the other day. From the cab of the truck, he whipped the flatbed trailer up and down and around the farm road, guided by intuition or maybe god’s will. Making a tight turn (backwards) with no more than four inches to spare, he never looked nervous. As the cab passed me on its way to one of the drop-off spots, I saw a tow-headed thing asleep in a child's car seat next to Johnnie. Just then, the kid woke up and, after his eyes whirled around from the back of his head, he looked at me and must have wondered where on earth am I and who is this lady starring at me.

The little guy eventually got himself out of his car seat and came back to help unload hay bales. No taller than my waist but with easily twice my determination, Jason (as he was introduced) heaved the things over the edge, making the rest of us look real bad. With his little-kid jeans tucked into his working boots, he didn’t chat. He didn’t kid around. He was a working man. When Johnnie hopped back into the truck to back up to the next drop spot, Jason dropped down on his right knee, he left elbow rested on left knee, and with his right hand he made the back-it-up motion. At the appropriate moment, he gave the hold-it-up signal. Then immediately, back on his feet, hauling hay bales.

When the work was done and we stood waiting for the boss to get the check, Johnnie leaned on the empty trailer. Jason folded his arms and looked up at his uncle to make sure he got the pose right. Johnnie talked with his hands; Jason didn’t talk but copied the hand gestures. If he wasn’t so obviously six years old, you could have believed he was a little man. The only time he broke out of character was when he ran off to pick raspberries, then doubled back and said, “Can I please have a basket to put them in?”

up to our eyeballs in squarsh

and then summer ended

In the mornings, when we start working, the temperatures hover in the 40s. We bundle into fleeces and warm our hands on mugs of coffee. Our attention turns to take-down and break-down tasks, away from the mainstays of harvesting and weeding. This morning, we took down the electric deer fence. Our pant legs were quickly soaked by the dew on what's left of the leaves on the pumpkin plants. We wore gloves. The seasons are definitely shifting.

What finalized it for me was harvesting the giant pumpkins. Thirteen of the big-bottomed beauties kept us busy all afternoon. We heaved them into the bucket of the tractor, three at a time, then unloaded them onto the stone wall near the barn. Several of them would best me in a pound-per-pound competition. (Though I like to think I could beat them in a speed-reading contest.)

I remember planting the giant-pumpkin seeds into plastic cell packs, back when the weather was cool on the other side of summer. They were transplanted into a bed in a low-traffic corner of the farm, and they've been sucking up water and nutrients ever since, out of sight and mind.

In the next few weeks, there will be a weight-guessing contest, and the lucky winners will somehow hump the fatties home. The pumpkins will adorn 13 front porches until the neighborhood kids throw out their backs trying to smash them. By then, there will have been frosts. We'll be in jackets. Summer a memory. That soft thud, a giant pumpkin landing gently on a stone wall, sounds like the end of summer.

salvage mission

I brought my camera to the fireworks on Sunday night to see what I could see. Turns out, when you're using a SLR camera and long exposures, you don't see squat through the viewfinder. I might as well have been blind. Except if I were blind, maybe my other senses would have called an intervention and taken over operations to prevent a total loss.

Once the show had ended, a friend said, "Lemme see what you got." After scrolling through a lot of dark, blurred, fuzzy images--a LOT of them--he wrapped up the conversation as politely as he could manage: "It's HARD to photograph fireworks, huh?" Hard to photograph them well, maybe, because I apparently had no trouble taking loads of crap shots.

eggplant!

everyone loves a parade

To celebrate its 375th birthday, Boston had a parade. I love a good parade. I love the bad ones, too. It's the marching bands--I can't help it.

This one was not at all advertised, and attendance was appropriately thin. Paul Revere, or an actor who plays him in parades, started things off by riding the route on horseback, shouting, "The parade is coming!" Or maybe, given his inability to work the meager crowds, it was really William Dawes. Anyway, it was perfectly fitting that, as our mongoloid Mayor Menino marched by us--just about the only spectators in sight--I was looking down, fiddling with my camera, not even noticing.

By the time the Puerto Rican group came by, with their deafening music and dancing girls, things were perking up. The route was lined by spectators on at least one side. Some bands were actually quite good. The gay pride people were all smiles and waves, even though censors apparently required the taping of a rainbow flag over the word "gay" on their banner. But pride! So much pride.

Then came the Boston Parks Department float: Imagine a flatbed carpeted with Easter grass, with potted plastic plants that had long ago fallen over and never been righted, with a park bench and drinking fountain stuck in there. As it passed, a guy behind me said to his friend, "All they're missing is the stray shopping cart and a homeless dude on the bench."

yum. pus.

A quart and a half of raspberries came home with me yesterday, and later that day I turned them into jelly. Ever since, a little jingle my mother and her sisters used to sing has been stuck in my head. I hereby release it from my head to yours, Internet, in the hopes that it will leave me alone:

Old man Kelly had a pimple on his belly.
His wife bit it off and it tasted like jelly.

If that pimple pus tasted anything like my raspberry-peach preserves, Mrs. Kelly is a wise woman.

Enjoy.

sitting

on the tailgate of the pickup as it cruises the farm road, watching the ground zing by below you, it's impossible not to swing your feet.

a word from Emily D.

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on.
--E. Dickinson

unsolicited opinions

1. Johnny Cash is The Man, and I will forever be sad that he's gone.

2. Women should avoid wearing white shoes (excluding the athletic variety) at all costs. I'm sorry, but they're terrible. There, I said it.

3. The Cavendish banana, the variety you and I know and love, could be extinct in 10 years, and I am not prepared to live without it. (I know snopes says it isn't true, but I heard it on NPR, so it must be.)

unicorns: are they endangered or extinct? discuss

Yesterday, at the farmer's market, someone pointed a leek at me and asked me, "Is this a potato leek?"
"It's a leek," I replied.
"A potato leek?"
"A leek."
"A potato leek?"
Around and around we went, neither of us really understanding the other, until I started to wonder if she knew something I didn't about a shortcut for soup. Unfortunately, that's exactly what she was after.

This reminded me of a friend, who once believed the alphabet came in at 23 letters long, rather than the standard 26, on account of the uncommonly long one that precedes P: elemeno. [CORRECTION: Jerad knows his ABCs. But visit his site anyway.]

Another friend recently confessed that, to this day, she gets north and south confused. (A warning to the Internet: Don't travel America's highway system with someone suffering such delusions. You will not find your destination. In fact, I am still trapped in her car, trying to find Wrentham.)

The beloved This American Life's episode 293 documents what happens when we carry these unfortunate misunderstandings into adulthood. The result, usually, is massive humiliation (and sometimes costly gas consumption). Such as the guy, old enough to order a margarita with his meal, who figured "quesadilla" is Spanish for "What's the deal?" If it's not, I think it absolutely should be.

wakey wakey

Every tuesday through friday, I leave the house while Burton is still snoozing. In fact, most of the eastern standard time zone is snoozing. Because it's freaking early. More often than not, I get a kick out of being up before the rest of you, while the streets are quiet and the air is still and the intersection of routes 16 and 2 is mine, all mine.

Saturdays, though. I truly hope my next job doesn't require me to see 5:30 am every saturday. I fear this may mean the end of my donut-making career before it even starts. Helas.

in a day's work

When I tell people that I work on a farm, four out of five dentists reply, "But what do you DO?" I explain the planting, harvesting, weeding, et al, but people often don't get it. Understandably. To assist, a list:

1. If it rains, I get wet. Like today, for example.

2. I mess things up. Like today, for example. Sometimes I really should know better. Sometimes I follow directions but people change their minds about what they really want. Sometimes I get bad directions. Sometimes I think I know what I'm doing, but one factor has changed--the price of weenies, for example--and what I thought I knew no longer holds. As much as I've learned this summer, there is so much more I don't even know that I don't know. You know?

3. I pull large quantities of things out of the earth, like potatoes, beets, and carrots. I also cut things off plants, such as arugula, swiss chard, eggplant, peppers, edamame, and melons, for example. Then these things get hauled around in wagons, weighed, washed, and stacked into attractive piles.

4. I kill bugs. Yesterday I likely caused the demise of zillions of brassica-eating cabbage worms. No one mourns the cabbage worm.

5. I spend a surprising amount of time washing buckets. Although this gets old fast, my hose skills have come a long way since May.

6. I explain to many people why I'm doing this for the summer.

7. Planting and weeding. Lots of it, but never enough.

8. Chatting, bitching, and laughing with coworkers, CSA members, or the voices in my head. Banter gets us through many a tedious task.

9. I pray for rain and set up irrigation systems when it doesn't come.

10. I breathe fresh air and suffer the stink of compost. My skin drinks in vitamin D while I swelter in the heat. The rain, the dew, the birds, the bugs, and the afternoon breeze--I take it all in.

pee-yunk

Last night, just before bed, Lucas wrassled with a skunk. The professor isn't as smart as he looks. But our house is stinkier than you'd expect.

the professor

i say tomater

the talk of the market

I love the Saturday farmer's market--from the 6:30 am harvest, when the fog is still sagging over the fields, to the market itself, with its mix of earnest customers and those who couldn't tell you the difference between "heirloom" and "genetically modified." People mostly think I'm a college student and worry how I'm handling the workload this semester. Others greet me by name, asking about the harvests and my commute and plans for after the season. It's a mixed bag, for sure, but with enough redeeming material that I genuinely look forward to it--and the things I hear there--each week.

"That one doesn't have enough raisins. It isn't worth it."
-A woman who dismissed a 60-cent bread roll for its lack of raisin content.

[In an English accent:] "Why is it so DIFFicult to buy carrots?"
-One of a pair of women of a certain age--sisters, no doubt--upon learning they'd arrived too late for their favorite root veg.

"Why are you selling the tomatoes that the bugs ate?"
-A little boy, curling his lip at our heirloom tomatoes that were not at all nibbled at but definitely lumpy, warty, and the spitting image of a baboon butt. He opened the conversation by first saying, "Hi! I just saw a badger!"

thanks be to honda

In the midst of the terrible news last week, we received word that cousin Will made it out of New Orleans unharmed. He made his way to North Carolina, where he filed this story.

feeling outpaced

A week away from the farm, and nothing is as I left it. The fall kales and collards, just wee little things in my memory, are now big and tasty, their blue-gray leaves the size of dinner plates. Arugula, a spicy old friend whom we haven't seen since spring, is unbelievably back. Corn was a novelty before a week of vacation but will soon be over for the season. The tomato plants, once spewing fruit faster than we could pick it, are starting their decline.

Just a few weeks ago, the crew was consumed with trying to tie all the tomatoes before their growth overran us. Today, many of the plants are dead or dying, all brown and crinkley like autumn leaves left too long on the ground. Change is sudden: One job, seemingly impossible in scale and urgency, takes the place of another, equally pressing. And before your eyes, the landscape shifts. Crops germinate, wage battles with weeds, then get cultivated, harvested, and finally tilled under, when they disappear completely, taking with them your sense of direction.

My landmarks are gone. Muscles are sore. Summer is ending.

while you were out

Vacation was, for the most part, splendid. Herewith, highlights and lowlights:

- The boys' fishing expedition: Enough blue fish to feed everyone on day one. Reports that bro-in-law caught a seven-pounder confirmed by photographic proof.
- Naps. Twice daily.
- Two- and three-pound lobsters for dinner with the best corn succotash. Ever.
- Job Lot, the Sass-back Oyster, and other venerable Chatham establishments.
- Being taught, ever so gently, that even sandwiches have their limits. It's true, they do. Ask Peggy.
- Revisiting Jonathan Dead Seagull, an old vacation friend who somehow always finds us at the beach.
- My sister, bless her gentle heart, deleting all 200-some photos of the vacation on the second-to-last day, freeing me from the burden of saving, organizing, or otherwise fretting over those pesky vacation memories. Thanks, sis! With my new-found free time, I plan to enroll in law school and apply for one of them openings on the supreme court. (Proof of the blue fish--revised weight of 27 pounds--also lost.)
- Off-roading in the ultimate Land Rover beach rig, complete with a 12-pack in the front cooler, fishing rods a-plenty, a 4-month-old Chesapeake Bay puppy, and enlightening talk of "fudgers."
- Squeezing four adults into a canoe built for two, then thinking we could take it for a spin in low tide. Downside: sloooow progress as we scraped along the pond floor. Upside: A loofah-like effect on our bottoms!

Really, though, it was time with family, away from daily realities and chores and duties. (Doodies!) For that reason alone, it could hardly have been better. Which put the slow and awful realization of what was happening on the Gulf Coast in even starker contrast. Heartbreak. Helplessness. Crushing. Despair. Love. Peace. Hope.

gone fishing

Love lettuce will be away from its desk for the next seven days. If you need immediate assistance, please press zero now.

hypothetically speaking

Let's just pretend you had a whole mess of corn sitting around the house, and you've eaten as much as you possibly can for dinner, and your freezer is already crammed with the stuff. Could you turn the rest into kitty litter? Dry it out and keep it in your trunk as a salt substitute for winter? What about fashioning a false tooth out of just the right kernel? It doesn't need to be a gigundous molar or anything, just, say, the size of a baby tooth.

hit and run

I am an indignant pedestrian. It's in my blood, really. The first time I was almost killed in New York city was when my aunt thumped on the hood of a cab that had nearly mowed us down. Even a cabbie--up for three days straight, though he hadn't seen the inside of a bathroom since last Tuesday, hopped up on caffeine and uppers--was no match for my aunt, a fierce knitter and pre-school teacher. She left him quivering with fear. (At least in my memory.)

With that ancestral history in mind, imagine me making my way to the Davis square T stop yesterday. I come to a notoriously bad intersection, as far as any pedestrian who hopes to see tomorrow is concerned. A side street empties out to a major road at exactly the spot where humans--unarmed with seat belts or airbags or fenders or usually even a horn--are expected to make their way across the major road. Motorists on the side street are trying to cut into traffic, never paying much mind to us bipeds.

So I step off the curb, waiting to make eye contact with a driver on the side street, who is clearly hoping to merge into traffic. Only she's looking over her shoulder, away from me. So I wait. She inches out, towards my toes. I wait. She inches. At a break in traffic, she starts rolling into the intersection, turning her head for the first time to see me. I'm prepared with my best stink eye, a wilting look that I reserve for idiot drivers. Think mean nun, disapproving mother, and cranky police officer before his morning coffee.

Then I realize that it's a friend! With a fuzzy Snoopy steering-wheel cover! And I've given her my stink eye! Though she's kind, points out that she did in fact see me, and pretends to not have noticed my glare. Oh, dear. I wear my tail between my legs for the rest of the day.

hillbilly in the city

The harvests are getting really heavy. 600 pounds of tomatoes. 700 ears of corn. 140 melons. Buckets of carrots weighing more than certain crewmembers. It's so heavy and cumbersome that we haul it all back to the barn in pickup trucks, instead of the garden carts we used for the early summer, leafy-green harvests. So sometimes, when you take said truck into a nearby tawny suburb for an ice-cream happy hour, and the driver of the truck notices a burning smell from the cab, you might check to make sure you aren't towing several stalks and at least a few ears of corn, wedged between the tail pipe and jammed in the grill.

You can take the hillbilly out of the farm, but you can't get the farm out of a F150's grill.

change of plans

I was supposed to have spent the weekend visiting with old college friends. Instead, one of them found himself on the losing end of a battle with a bee and spent the night in a Pittsburgh hospital. Everyone is fine now, but the plane went to Boston without them. So I was suddenly free to spend the night sleeping in a car on the south shore of Boston.

If we'd had a tent, one might have called it camping. But there was no tent. There was, however, a campfire. There were weenies and brats, smores and mosquitoes, lanterns and headlamps. It smelled and looked like camping. But me and my mummy bag tucked in for the night in the back of the Bismark--a sweet Mercedes wagon with leather and a sunroof. It was more like a night of upscale homelessess than camping. But for a weekend when nothing went as planned, it was pretty good.

i was blind but now i see

Too early for words this morning. Instead, feast your eyes on the quilts of Gees Bend. How come no one told me they could look like this? This information could have completely altered my quilting career.

who me? i didn't say a thing.

Last night, I repeated Burton's name until I'd annoyed him awake--Burton. Burton. Burton. Burton? Burton. Burton!--to tell him he was sleeping on the tomato plants. I know I've said crazy things in my sleep before. At times, I may have thought I was weeding carrots or harvesting chard from his ear or who knows what all. That was crazy talk. Anyone could see that. But this time--for real!--he was sleeping on the tomato plants.

By the time I managed to get my point across to an awake and understandably humorless Burton, I realized my problem. So I flopped over and pretended I was asleep.

have you finished your christmas shopping yet?

I have. Sorry to ruin the surprise, but you're all getting pickles this year. When you open your package and wonder where the rest of the present is, maybe you'll think back to this cool August day, when we finally got a break from the heat, and I spent the larger part of the day saving some of my summer for later in the year, when the days are shorter and the flavors less juicy. You'd probably rather get an iPod Micro or seasons one and two of Arrested Development on DVD--and I would, too, believe me. But we don't get to choose in my family. So pucker up and enjoy. Merry merry.

please stand by

We at love lettuce are experiencing technical difficulties. While the narcoleptic iBook pays a visit to the land of Brighton, Mass., please use the extra time in your days to do some actual work. Or perhaps write a letter to your state representative, high-school band teacher, or French foreign-exchange host family. Or maybe you could figure out what Bill Murray and Scarlette Johansson whisper to each other in the final scene of Lost in Translation. And if you haven't seen that film yet, get thee to the rental store post haste.

We'll be back as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

lessons learned

Among the many dangers on the farm--from scuffle hoes and harvest knives to paper wasps and squash disease--it's the quiet, steady threat of the sun that worries me the most. I wear a Texas-sized hat and go through sunscreen like a Hummer does gas, but even so, the C word is often on my mind. It didn't help my confidence when Morning Edition reported yesterday that skin cancers among young adults have tripled in the last ten years.

If I could, though, I might offer the following bit of advice: If, on your way home from work, you feel a suspicious lump on your rump, before turning around and driving straight to Mass General to have what must be a giant cancer removed, stop at home to make sure it isn't just a cherry tomato that found its way into your shorts.

something new for my resume

Today, I drove a tractor. Not one of them green and yellow numbers with air conditioning and turn signals, but a Farmall Cub with peeling red paint and a throaty purr that's pushing into its sixth decade.

I am in love.

on burlington

There are walls to sit on! Harbors! Smiley husbands! Mini vegetables! And sunsets set to Mozart!

I don't know, though. Could I be a Vermonter? Do I have it in me? I hear they sometimes get snow. Then again, they make a lot of cheese, too. I do like cheese.

and how much do the morals cost?

This weekend, in Burlington, Vt., with friends, we faced a moral dilemma. It boiled down to the telling of a white lie which, if successful, would have allowed us to collect on something for which we had legitimately paid. Without the lie, we would have been up poop creek without a picnic. I won't go into the details, but you'll have to take my word that there were no nefarious intentions.

In our conversation, one person said, "My mother always said that if you have to ask whether or not something is wrong, you probably already know the answer." This seems like good logic when applied to some situations: On the sidewalk in front of her house, you find your neighbor's two-caret engagement ring, which you know she recently lost. Should you return it? Not even a dilemma. Right? Come on, people.

But what if you buy a used car and, several months later, discover a bag with $5,000 cash tucked inside the wheel well. Do you return it to the previous owner? What if you bought it from a smarmy used-car dealership?

And finally, what if you find a plastic shopping bag stuffed with $5,000 cash on the sidewalk outside of a store in which you just saw a fabulous pair of shoes on sale in exactly your size, but you just spent your last penny on a donation to Greenpeace. The answer, I believe, is obvious. Right?

The picnic, by the way, was splendid. Definitely worth a touch of moral turpitude.

crotchucopia

Look. At. Those. Eggplants. I know--they're weird!