Lynchburg, Poplar Forest, Mr. Jefferson and Me

When the University of Virginia is your alma mater, you hear a lot about its founder, Thomas Jefferson. Not just its founder, but its architect, the man who designed the classically beautiful Rotunda and the Lawn, "the Academical Village," that graduates, including me, spend a lifetime reminiscing about, this special place where they spent their college years. Mr. J. also personally designed his famous Charlottesville home, a plantation really, the one on the back of the Jefferson nickel, the "little mountain": Monticello. So unique, such "masterpieces of human creative genius" are the Academical Village and Monticello, that they have been jointly named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Not bad for a self-taught architect.

I did not set foot on the Grounds* of The University* until the day I arrived for first-year* orientation in 1974 (more common back then, to go to a college you had never seen), and although I can't remember for sure if my parents took us to Monticello during my childhood, it wasn't long after starting college that I visited there and started learning about Jefferson's innovations and inventions -- the seven-day clock in the hallway, the polygraph that allowed him to make a copy of every letter he wrote, his alcove bed, the nifty revolving bookstand. And I didn't just go there once or twice. Every time family or friends came to visit, they were eager to see Monticello as well, and I used to joke I had been there so many times I could give the tour as well as any of the guides. I do not, however, remember any mention of slavery.

[*At UVa students do not say campus or quad, they say "Grounds," because that is what Mr. Jefferson called it. And students are never referred to as freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, but first-, second-, third-, and fourth-year, because Mr. J. felt that these four years were but the beginning of a lifetime of learning. We also like to say "The University" a lot. Yeah, I know, pretty pretentious.]

I don't know when I first heard of Poplar Forest. Located near Lynchburg, Virginia, Poplar Forest was Jefferson's country home -- again, plantation really -- used in his later years as a retreat, his pied-a-terre.

The Poplar Forest (and also the Monticello) websites cover the history of Poplar Forest quite thoroughly, but in brief, Jefferson and his wife Martha inherited the plantation upon her father's death in 1773. In the early years, Jefferson manged the plantation -- it mostly grew tobacco -- from afar, but in 1781 the Jefferson family left Monticello and stayed at Poplar Forest for two months, possibly in the overseer's cabin, to avoid capture by the British.  That was thought to be Martha's only trip to the plantation, as she died later the same year. After her death, Jefferson continued in the role of absent landowner, with overseers managing the plantation, and enslaved laborers performing the work.

At some point Mr. J. decided to design a country getaway there. In 1806, during his presidency, Jefferson traveled to Poplar Forest to supervise the laying of the cornerstone for what was to become the one-story, brick, octagonal dwelling you can visit today. After he left office in 1809, although Monticello remained his primary residence, Jefferson began visiting Poplar Forest several times a year, a practice he continued until the age of 80, three years before his death in 1826. Each visit lasted between two weeks and two months, as the trip from Monticello to Poplar Forest, which takes only an hour and a half by car today, took two days by horseback and three by carriage.

As important as Poplar Forest was to Jefferson, there are reasons for its obscurity. It was sold by Jefferson's grandson Francis Eppes in 1828, only two years after Jefferson's death (Francis and his wife moved, of all places, to Tallahassee).  The house burned in 1845 (thank goodness for stone foundations and a brick exterior), was substantially remodeled, and remained in private hands until 1983, when the Thomas Jefferson Foundation bought the property and undertook the daunting -- and expensive -- task of restoration. Thus, it is only in recent years that it has finally been open to visitors, and even today the restoration is still ongoing and hardly complete.

When our nephew Chris took a job in Lynchburg and moved there with his then-fiancée-now-wife Kata, it seemed like the perfect excuse to combine a visit with them and a trip to Poplar Forest. Although Dan and I actually saw Chris and Kata in Lynchburg twice en route to other places, when they had lived in Lynchburg less than a year Chris took another job and they moved again before we had a chance to execute the plan. But the seed was planted, and I was committed to seeing Poplar Forest. My husband is as much of a history geek as I am, and it took little persuading to talk him into an overnight to Lynchburg, which is, after all, not even 2 1/2 hours from our home in Durham.

Poplar Forest ended up being the last thing we did on our 30-hour excursion. During our preparatory research, Dan noticed that the last home of Patrick Henry, Red Hill, was basically on the way to Lynchburg, and we decided to make that our first stop. A lovely, peaceful, place, especially on a sunny, hot July afternoon without many tourists in evidence. "Give me liberty or give me death!" "Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings -- give us that precious jewel and you may take everything else!" The guy could really turn a phrase.

In Henry's time, we learned, Red Hill encompassed about 3,000 acres. Another plantation. Our tour guide pointed out where the slave cabins once were located. As we have learned in other places, they were generally not visible from the main house and are virtually never still standing, these humble, roughly-built cabins never intended to stand the test of time. We squinted, looking into the distance. Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings.  With the midafternoon sun blazing, we did not walk up the hill to bear witness. But at least this history is no longer ignored, invisible. Red Hill's website has a section, Slavery at Red Hill.  It includes an excerpt of a letter written by Henry in 1773, where he says of the fact he is a slaveowner, owns human beings: "I will not, and cannot justify it."

The next morning, since our hotel was in downtown Lynchburg and Poplar Forest vaguely on the way back to Durham, we decided to first stop at the Lynchburg Museum, located in the old courthouse. The exhibit in the large entrance hall on the main floor is a history of Lynchburg. In a section called An Upward Struggle, I read:

State-sanctioned segregation increasingly became an issue in the 1950s. Schools were separate, parks were separate, seating in theaters was separate, and the separateness was not equal.

Near those words is a photograph of Clarence W. Seay, assured, looking ahead, a hand in the pocket of his topcoat. The caption states that he was the principal of Lynchburg's Dunbar High School, an all-black, segregated high school, for 30 years, and that in 1970, he became the first African-American member of the Lynchburg City Council since the 1880s.

As I gazed at the photograph, I thought about how, on the way into the museum, we stopped by a statue facing the courthouse, a statue erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1890, "to commemorate the heroism of our Confederate soldiers." 1890, after Reconstruction, after the Yankees finally decamped, when blacks had the vote and even were elected to the City Council. Time to put up a statue, a statue complete with a time capsule filled with Confederate currency, photographs of local veterans, and some hair from Traveller, Robert E. Lee's horse. Time for Jim Crow. Time to wait nearly a century for the next African-American to serve on the City Council. And the Confederate Soldier still stands, on the top of Monument Terrace, in 2016.

Poplar Forest at last. Hot again. We eat our picnic lunch in pleasant solitude in the shade, looking at a grove of trees, grateful for a breeze.

The plantation was about 5,000 acres in Jefferson's day, and even with today's reduced size, is a thing of beauty, of symmetry, with the house placed in the center of a circular curtilage.

And there are still poplars on the property.

So yes, I loved the house, both back

and front.

I loved the light-filled interior (sorry, no pictures allowed), but the internet yields one of Jefferson's recliner -- a reproduction, not the original -- where he sat and contemplated the world.

Evan was a great tour guide and with only two others on our tour, we got to ask lots of questions.

But unlike my first trip to Monticello, Jefferson the slaveowner weighed deeply on my consciousness throughout our time at Poplar Forest. Again, on the tour itself, in the exhibits, on the website, in the brochure, as best as it can from the available historical evidence, this story is now being told. So we now, at last, can say their names, names inventoried and written in Mr. Jefferson's own hand: The Hubbards, Hannah and Jame and Phill and Billy. Bess's Caesar. Fanny's Rachael. Cate's Sally. Suck's Stephen. All endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Dinah. Lucinda. Armistead. John. Isaac. Briley. Prince. Melinda. Milly. Daniel. Flora. Hercules. Abby. Nace. And so many more.

            

A Luscious Plum Torte for Summer

I have two posts in mind that I hope to commit to writing this weekend, one somewhat reflective in nature, the other more cheering. Let's start with the cheering -- hence food-related  -- post. 

A few days ago my son Quentin texted me "Is there a way you can send your new york times plum cake recipe? I kind of want it for my b day."  My immediate reply:  "Nothing would make me happier!"

The plum cake Quentin was referring to is Marian Burros's Plum Torte, a recipe originally published in 1982. It was so popular that in those pre-internet days it was apparently published annually for a number of years. My mother clipped her own copy from the Times in 1984, in an article entitled Purple Plums: From Tree to Torte. (The link does not include the cute graphic in the original article, not to mention that the formatting of the recipe is a mess. The text, however, is charming.)  My photocopy of the clipping includes my mother's handwritten notation "TRY -- Looks easy." I can't remember if Mom actually ever made it (she has clipped many a recipe that never made it to table, but come to think of it, so have I), but at some point I initiated myself into the wonder of this simple and delicious torte. I know that my husband has made it a number of times as well.

A variation of Burros's plum torte also appears in Richard Sax's Classic Home Desserts. Sax rechristens it "All-Time Best Summer Fruit Torte" and turns it into a peach or nectarine and blueberry cake, with Burros's 12 purple plums merely listed at the end of the recipe as a variation. Sax does, however, give Burros full credit for the original recipe, noting that it first appeared in her 1960 The Easy But Elegant Cookbook. Sax also suggests the felicitous addition of vanilla, but erroneously lists a tablespoon of baking powder rather than Burros's teaspoon.  Trust me on this; it should be a teaspoon.

This might be a good place to summarize my cook's notes:
As to ingredients, it's definitely a teaspoon of baking powder, not a tablespoon, and thumbs up to Sax's teaspoon of vanilla. Use of cinnamon and lemon juice depends on the fruit and your personal taste. As to the pan, either 8 or 9 inches is fine; ten seems big to me. Burros specifies a spring-form pan, which I think best, as you can easily remove the cake, with its lovely pattern of plums on top, to a serving plate, but a regular round cake pan (as Sax uses) also works. But honestly, if you don't have at least one spring-form pan, you really should, as there are many not-especially-pricey models out there. My Kaiser brand pans were bought years ago, were downright inexpensive, not even nonstick, and work fine. Finally, as many reviewers noted, Burros' cooking time of one hour is excessive. Sax says 45 minutes; I'd at least take a look after 30.  Here's a picture of Kaiser's "basic" spring-form pan like the ones I own.


I was also delighted to discover in my search that many food-related websites and other bloggers have sung the praises of this plain, buttery, plum-or-fruit-laden treat. A good photo of the finished product is found at Kvell in the Kitchen. Looks like The Kveller didn't use a spring-form, although she does engage in some pretty rhapsodic prose about the torte itself.

And finally, I don't want to be a total purist here; other fruits of course can be substituted as plums are not always easy to find, not to mention seasonal. As one reviewer noted: "Use any kind of nice fruit or berries, just make sure that they are firm, otherwise they can release too much juice during baking." Almond extract instead of vanilla doesn't sound like a bad idea either, nor does adding a little almond flour, but these are ideas I have not yet tried out. Last but not least: whipped cream is an optional but fine finishing touch.

So happy birthday, dearest Quentin! I only wish I could be there to make and share a plum torte with you and Mary and Dino and Bradley and Dad. Can I at least buy you a gift of a spring-form pan? 

The Tenth Anniversary of a Great Meal

As we mourn, stunned, the unbearable murders in Orlando; as we fight against the insane availability of assault weapons, without apology we must yet continue to seize life. 

Recently I was doing a bit of decluttering (although I have not yet perused The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up) which included finding a number of notebooks, canvas bags, and the like loaded with endless scribbled drafts of poems and essays. In one little book I find, inter alia, the following:

In the bed 
my sunburned husband snores
21 years married
an anniversary of no
particular importance

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
and later on:

His head is served up
on a huge white collar
his forehead, too, is white.
His lips are serious, sealed,
His mustache narrow.
His eyes point sideways
but somehow pin us in his gaze.
He holds a small book in one hand
atop a brown Bible
one finger a bookmark.
He is seated.
He is standing up.
His robes are flowing toward us
black and white
marked with a spidery cross.

This poem (which I have edited a bit as I transcribed it here) is about El Greco's portrait of Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, which I have long loved to distraction, and who actually once came to visit me in Durham at Duke's Nasher Museum of Art as part of an exhibit, which meant I was able to go to the museum obsessively to get my fill of Fray Felix (as I always call him in my head because I like the alliteration) during his stay in the Bull City. And in finding this picture below, I also just learned that Fray Felix was himself a poet who dedicated four sonnets to El Greco! How great is that?




The hell with life-changing magic; I'm not getting rid of anything I've written. Maybe one of these days I'll finish Fussy Eater, which starts, " 'Poison peas' my dad always said to me whenever they were served, knowing of my dislike for them." 

But I thought this post was supposed to be about the tenth anniversary of a great meal? Ah yes. Well, my notebook also includes some entries from a 2006 trip to Germany and Spain, including the description of a meal the four of us ate on Monday, the 3rd of July, in the Catalan city of Girona. The facilitator of the writing group I was part of at that time had recently been there herself and recommended a restaurant that she said was both excellent and reasonably priced, called Draps. (I'm delighted to report that it appears Draps is still alive and well -- "Draps: A Culinary Experience To Be Shared in Girona!" one recent diner proclaimed  -- and affordable -- "at convenient prices!")

On the way to the restaurant, I recorded, we heard nuns singing in their ancient stone convent, the music coming through the window-grill that separates them from the world, and then the clink of silverware on plates as their evening meal was served. 

I've written MEAL AT DRAPS at the top of one page. And then I describe the meal:

Water from a little blue glass bottle

2 Spanish wines -- white (slightly effervescent) and red

Cold melon and ham appetizer drink served in a tiny martini glass

3 dishes (which we shared)

Fresh thin ribbons of pasta with shrimp, duck, spinach, and mushrooms served over a bed of lettuce and radicchio

Grilled vegetables -- peppers, eggplant etc. (oh what were the et cetera?) on a tart of puff pastry, topped with strong goat cheese sprinkled with black sesame seeds, drizzled with some sort of vinaigrette

"El Pop" -- roundish pieces of octopus served on small square pieces of potato (one piece of octopus per potato) covered with red olive oil, sprinkled with paprika. Bread to soak up every last drop of the red, paprika-scented oil (must have been smoked paprika, pimenton)

2 decaf Illys (for Dino and me as I recall), a brandy for Dan, and two desserts:

El Pecat ("The Sin"): a dark chocolate pudding on a pool of creme anglaise

Crema Catalana -- a sort of Spanish Crème Brûlée topped with caramel ice cream and cinnamon sauce

Total bill: € 57, or about $80. Oh my.

As I recall, the restaurant itself was quite moderne and stylish but I cannot really recall the details -- why did I not write about that? But then I turn the page; I did!

Water glasses were curved and multicolored

Tables were square dark brown wood with fresh pale brown table runners and napkins (which were folded into long narrow rectangles)

The plates were white and in unusual shapes (I had drawn a sort of curved crescent with squared ends to demonstrate one of them). Below the crescent, I wrote: "We laughed and ate and talked about Dalí," as we had gone to the Dalí Museum in Figueres earlier that day. 



"We leave at midnight. The upstairs of the restaurant is still filled with people." 

What a memory! What a meal!

A Kosher Cake for Irit

A little context might be helpful here. This blog post is actually the ninth in a series of essays I have written about baking Kosher cakes for Irit Weissman. The Weissmans were Orthodox Jews who lived next door to us for six years before returning to Israel in 2011. Since then, Irit’s work occasionally takes her back to Durham. Out of privacy concerns, all names have been changed in this essay except Dan’s and mine.

On a Saturday afternoon last April, I check my email and see a message from Irit. In a moment, I am running through the house screaming, "Dan! Dan! Irit is coming! Irit is coming!" She will arrive only a week or so from now, on business -- has it really been three years since we last saw her -- and fortunately we will be in town. Can she stay with us Saturday night, after Shabbat? Of course. No sooner do I send her an enthusiastic reply do I start to think about food. The Kosher birthday cake tradition established when she lived next door has morphed into "any time we are lucky enough to see Irit, there must be a Kosher cake," and last visit we even upped the ante, with Irit's permission, by cooking a meal in our decidedly un-Kosher kitchen, in brand-new pots stirred with equally virgin utensils, all of which have been carefully marked meat, milk, or pareve, and optimistically stored in the basement awaiting a next visit. 

We know that when Irit comes to Durham, she stays with her Orthodox Israeli friends, the Zinns, and she had told me that I could surely bake the next cake in their kitchen. In fact, among the closing words of my last essay were, “Next time,” I said, “I think we need to have a chocolate cake!” “Next time,” said Irit, “you can make it at the Zinns!” So I email Irit telling her I would love to bake her a cake at the Zinns, and she sends me back Baruch Zinn's email. I send the Zinns an email with the subject line "Question from Friend of Irit Weissman" reading as follows:

Dear Baruch and Adira,

My husband Dan and I and our children were neighbors of Irit and Shimon and their children when they lived in Durham.  We became devoted friends, so we are very happy to be seeing Irit in a few days!

Irit will be having dinner with us on Saturday and stay the night.  We know how to make and serve a meal that Irit can eat, but I had a tradition of making Irit a cake for her birthday and on other special occasions. For this of course, I need a Kosher kitchen, and Irit thought you might be willing to let me use yours to bake a cake.

Is this possible?  I am free this Wednesday after work or any time Friday before Shabbat.

If this is possible, we can figure out the details. I would be most grateful.  Irit can tell you that I am familiar with the rules of kashrut and very respectful of them.

Kindest regards,

Maria

Baruch sends me Adira's cell phone number in reply. I call the number and a heavily-accented voice answers. I grew up with people speaking heavily-accented English, so I instantly feel right at home. Adira tells me she would be so very happy to have me come to her house to bake Irit a cake. And she sounds like she means it. My years of tracking down Kosher kitchens in which to bake these special cakes has convinced me that when you are trying to do a kindness for someone else, others are only too glad to help you. Friday is not so good, says Adira, as that is when she does her cooking for Shabbat. Of course I agree to come in the evening earlier in the week. Later, though, she calls me back -- a conflict has arisen, so please come Friday morning after all. "But what about your Shabbat preparations?" I ask. "Don't worry," she says firmly. I later learn she cooked for Shabbat earlier that week just so I could make my cake in time for Irit's visit.

So what to make? A chocolate cake, definitely, and I knew right away which one. The elegant Gâteau au chocolate: Le Doris, found in my copy of Simca's Cuisine. "Simca" is the charming nickname for Simone Beck, Julia Child's co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I found the book in a used bookshop, just happened to open it to page 107, and there it was: Le Doris, with the tantalizing English subtitle "Chocolate Cake with Almonds, Raisins, and Whiskey; Chocolate Icing." I scanned the recipe and promptly bought the book. I made a Doris for Dan's birthday several years ago when we went to the country home of friends located north of Winston-Salem where Dino and Bradley met us, so I knew how delicious it was. 

The only ingredient whose Kosher bona fides gave me any concern was the quarter-cup of Scotch. I thought I remembered from Shimon that hard liquor was generally Kosher, but my confirmatory Internet search threw me into the usual confusion of different websites and different rabbis coming to different conclusions. I decided that Adira must have some sort of whiskey that she would donate to the cause so I just assembled the other ingredients (German's sweet chocolate baking bar = Kosher!) and hoped for the best. 

On Friday morning I rang the Zinn's doorbell, ingredient box in hand. Adira answered and greeted me warmly. I was ushered into a perfectly neat and beautifully decorated foyer and living room, and taken back to the kitchen. Le Doris is admittedly is a teeny bit fussy, but Adira did not seem to mind my list of requests. An 8-inch cake pan? A little dairy pot to melt the chocolate? A food processor to pulverize the almonds?  And did she have a bit of Scotch or other whiskey that I might use for the cake (as I wasn't sure what kinds were Kosher)? "No problem!" she assured me with a wave of her hand, going to the cabinet and taking out a bottle.

I have written before about, to me, the special magic of making a Kosher cake, of entering into the world of Judaism's ancient traditions, but this baking experience was as much about my visit with Adira as it was about the cake. It became immediately apparent that she was not going to leave me to my own devices but keep me company as I baked. So as I melted and measured, pulverized and mixed, Adira and I talked, about our friendships with the Weissmans, our lives, our children, and in her case, many grandchildren. I told her my father had recently died, and although I had barely known her an hour, my eyes filled with tears. But I saw that hers did as well. She told me about her Russian immigrant grandmother, who had made heavy winter coats for the Cossacks, "like the ones they wore in Dr. Zhivago," she said, motioning with her hands to demonstrate the split skirts that enabled them to ride on horseback. 

While Le Doris is baking, I turned to the sink to wash the dishes. "No," Adira insists, "You are my guest." And she made us both cups of strong Israeli coffee and cut slices of a sort of chocolate-filled babka she had made. Not the time to bring up my low-carb diet. I ate every crumb, while she assured me it was "easy" to make. Then the cake was done -- it smelled wonderful. She told me it was fine to return the cake pan when we came to pick up Irit, after I had eased the cooled cake onto a plate at home. 

The next day, Saturday, Dan and I drive over to the Zinn's around 5 PM to get Irit. The sun is still out, which means Irit will not drive or be driven, but the plan is for Dan to take Irit's luggage back to our house in the car while she and I walk home. Which we do. We stroll back together on a lovely late-spring evening, talking about all the things we have always talked about, not hurrying, just happy to be relaxed and together.  Shabbat, the Sabbath, the day of rest!

The dairy dinner has been carefully planned and executed so as not to not violate a single convention of Kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws. Here is exactly how I recorded the menu in the little book I keep of favorite meals:

Saturday, May 2, 2015

A wonderful Kosher dairy reunion dinner with Irit Weissman

Hummus and Pita Chips

Costco Mixed Nuts

Salmon with Lentils (from Barefoot in Paris) Veg Broth

Sautéed Fresh Asparagus

Challah + Butter

Zanzur Carménère (2013, Chilean)

Kosher for Passover/Mevushal

Gâteau au Chocolat: Le Doris (Simca's Cuisine) 

Homemade "veg broth" had replaced the fleishig chicken broth called for in the recipe (no meat of any sort is allowed in a dairy meal); I had no Kosher colander or strainer so I gently squeezed the vegetables in my hands. The wine I had carefully selected at Southern Seasons (Baruch and Adira told me that they get their Kosher wine much more prosaically at Total Wine, the local big-box wine store), and it tasted quite good, maybe even surprisingly so after I learned the meaning of mevushal. Mevushal is the Hebrew word for cooked and is designed to deal with the fact that without this extra step in the wine-making process (um, "cooking" the wine to the boiling point) Kosher wine can be rendered non-Kosher by a non-Jew, such as yours truly, opening or pouring or even moving the wine. Or as crazyjewishconvert puts it in her blog, "You can do everything normally with a meshuval wine, with no distinction between Jews and non-Jews. That's why meshuval wine is so awesome." Apparently modern meshuval processes are pretty sophisticated (running the "must" through flash pasteurizing, whatever exactly that means) and wine-drinkers can't really tell the difference. Like I said, the carménère was good, and drunk in good company. I think we still had Irit uncork it, out of habit.

The visit was wonderful. We talked and talked and once the sun set and the Sabbath was over, looked at pictures of the children -- impossibly grown up, now -- on Irit's phone. Dan and I marveled at the fact that Avi, who we first laid eyes on as a bright-eyed one-year-old, would get his bar mitzvah next year and that the whole family hoped to come for a visit to the US sometime after that. Oh, we said, we certainly hope so! The next morning, when it was time for Dan to take Irit to the airport, I embraced her in farewell and murmured Arrivederci -- that is, of course, Italian, for until we see each other again. 

As I write this several months later, we have been to Baruch and Adira's for a memorable Shabbat dinner (it turns out that the babka was only the tip of the culinary iceberg and Baruch is a great raconteur), and Avi's 13th birthday is less than four months away. Arrivederci, dear friends. Until we see you again.

2015: A Reader's Year

In the fall of 1969, the year we moved to Vermont, when I was in the eighth grade, 12 years old, our English teacher handed out simple mimeographed forms on which we were to record the books we read outside of the class over the course of the academic year. I dutifully did so. My choices ranged from young adult lit (From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Across Five Aprils, and those Kate Seredy books set in early twentieth century Hungary that I still adore and have read, reread, and read to my children: The Good Master and The Singing Tree) to more mature choices (Profiles in Courage, Rebecca, Gone with the Wind).  We did this again in ninth grade, when, although barely a teen, it appears that I fancied myself a pretty adult reader (The Good Earth; Cry, the Beloved Country; The Secret of Santa Vittoria)  I even included that bestselling novella, Love Story, on my list -- it went through the girls of my set like wildfire; I can still see Janice E. holding the book under her desk, surreptitiously reading it during class.

And then, after ninth grade was over, I just kept adding to the list, until this very day.

From tenth grade until I finished my first year of college, I kept a continuous list, and then starting in the summer of 1975, I dated the list by years. Through 2005 I handwrote the lists, and since 2006 I have typed them. (I actually typed the list in 2002, but for some unknown reason reverted to longhand in 2003 and 2004.) The lists are in plastic sleeves and collected in a looseleaf notebook imprinted with Just Manufacturing Company, Stainless Steel Sinks, on the cover (absolutely no idea where that came from). They are not in a database and cannot be searched, except by manually looking through the lists book by book. 

This lifelist of books is not 100% complete. It does not contain any books I read for school or any academic pursuit (that would have made a nice separate list), nor does it contain the books my husband and I read aloud to our children at bedtime over the course of many years (a list which I genuinely regret not keeping).  And it is missing the names of four or five books after we suffered a computer crash in 2007 and realized one of our children had wiped out our backup. I didn't care about anything we lost except my booklist, about which I was pretty distraught. I racked my brains, searched my library checkouts and book group picks, but there remained a few missing titles. The list does, however, include books I have read for my book group since I joined in 1993, as well as audiobooks I have listened to.

Today is New Years Day, and I have just updated, printed, and filed my 2015 list in the Just Manufacturing notebook.  A bird's-eye view:

Favorites:  The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (can't do it justice in a parenthetical: the subtitle is A Family's Century of Art and Loss, about a wealthy European Jewish family; a collection of Japanese netsuke miniatures that miraculously survived World War II intact and is still in the family serves as an organizing principle); The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown (about the Washington crew team that won the gold medal at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 -- great book and great audio); the opening 75 pages of Two in the Far North by Margaret Murie, where she paints a vivid picture of life in Fairbanks in the post-gold rush early years of the last century, when mail was delivered weekly by dogsled.

Books I reread: I went on a mini-Shaker rereading binge, including June Sprigg's Shaker Gifts: A Memoir of a Shaker Village; Rumer Godden's In this House of Brede, published in 1969, about a successful businesswoman who becomes a cloistered nun; a descriptive passage about a year in the monastery told through the changing seasons is as about as lyrical a passage as I have ever read; and Love Story (see above, ninth grade) -- I found a copy at the thrift shop for a quarter or 50 cents and zipped through it in about 90 minutes; at some point I want to write about the careless and shocking sexism of the book.

Biggest disappointment: I 'm not sure I have a true disappointment, maybe the final book in Updike's Rabbit series, Rabbit Remembered, which he wrote in 2000 but I somehow didn't realize existed until this year. Is it me or did this not quite live up to the four books that preceded it? 

Books I am in the process of reading: Dan and I have been reading Middlemarch aloud together since 2014. We're about halfway through. Maybe we'll finish it in 2106. In addition to Middlemarch, right now I'm listening to Jeffrey Eugenides' (of Middlesex fame) The Marriage Plot, and reading The Seashell on the Mountaintop by Alan Cutler for book group. 

Book I meant to read in 2015: My Brilliant Friend, an English translation of the first of four volumes of Italian novelist Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet. I received the book as a birthday gift nearly a year ago from my friend Susie, whose taste in books I trust, but it seemed dauntingly dense. Over the holidays, it was again recommended to me by my cousin's son Peter, who assured me that it is not daunting but wonderful.  Intriguingly, "Elena Ferrante" is a pen name and the author's true identity is not publicly known. A reading resolution for 2016, then.

"The Artist's Garden" at Reynolda House

Today I went to the Reynolda House in Winston-Salem to see the exhibit The Artist's Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement (1887-1920) before it closes on January 3. What a stunning exhibit! I was, however, disappointed when I saw an icon of a camera with a slash through it at the entrance to the exhibit, Absolutely No Photographs, full stop, as I was hoping to put together a little illustrated essay about the exhibit. 

The unpleasant surprise of no photographs was counterbalanced by the pleasant surprise of walking into the next-to-last room of the exhibit and seeing an oil of irises in shades of blue and purple, white and yellow, nestled among deep-green spears of leaves. Before I could stop myself, I gave an audible gasp and exclaimed, "I know that!"  Reading the object label posted on the wall, I saw it was Iris at Dawn by Maria Oakey Dewing, a favorite of mine from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, a collection I have visited a number of times. Favorite works of art are like old friends, and I was delighted that this one had traveled to North Carolina to visit me. I shall content myself with a reproduction from the public domain:



It turns out that Maria Oakey Dewing and her artist husband Thomas (a younger man who she did not marry until she was 36) spent many summers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the artists' colony in Cornish, New Hampshire, where she cultivated a large garden that served as inspiration for many of her paintings. Here is one from the Smithsonian called Garden in May. 



A Bed of Poppies, below, lives at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts (the gallery being a part of tony prep school Phillips Andover, not to be confused with tony prep school Phillips Exeter). 




Delicious. I love the Smithsonian's description of Garden in May, which seems applicable to all three paintings:

"Dewing places the viewer among the living stems and blossoms that she knew so well. She has cropped a section from the larger bed for intense study, as if she had held a frame in front of the garden and painted only what fit in the rectangle."

I staggered out of the exhibit, art-drunk, watched the video about the history of Reynolda AGAIN (I'm obsessed with the Reynolda House, Gardens, and Village, as well as RJ and Katharine Smith Reynolds, but that is for another day), and went into the main house for a while to see it decorated for the holidays, lingering in RJ's study and the lake breakfast porch.

On the way out I treated myself to something from the gift shop, a long, heavy string of pearls that can be doubled -- very Coco Chanel -- once I overheard the stylish manager (today she was wearing a chic turquoise wool pencil skirt) say to someone else, "This is the best value in the store! Hand-knotted, cultured pearls!"  I can hardly wait for the Ansel Adams exhibit to arrive in the spring.

What's in a Name?

With time running out on my New Year's resolution for 2015, to start blogging, my son Quentin and his fiancée Mary helped set up this blog as their Christmas gift to me, less than a week away from the new year.  What did I want to call the blog, they asked me? For inspiration in making this decision I turned to my commonplace book. 

Commonplace books, which have been used for centuries (Marcus Aurelius apparently kept one) are simply personal compilations of quotes and notes and thoughts, perhaps pictures and images too.  I started mine in back in 1976, in an undistinguished blank book I picked up at the Dartmouth Bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire. Although some people use their commonplace books for their own words and thoughts, I use mine mostly for quotes and passages from my reading, both poetry and prose, sometimes written in longhand, sometimes typed and pasted in its pages, supplemented with articles tucked into the front and back covers. Forty years later, my Dartmouth book is a treasure whose precious contents I have read and reread many times over.

Leafing through my book, I scribbled down ideas on scratch paper, only to reject them, until I came upon a passage from Thoreau's Walden that I had not read in a long time:

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and
the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring. . . 

I learned to love lilacs in Vermont as a child, and have always missed them terribly over the years since moving south. My husband and I were fortunate to be in Vermont this very year during lilac season, and I was enchanted anew with their "sweet-scented" aroma, their purple and white flowers. We even visited Walden Pond this summer together for the first time. Thoreau's meditative words on time and transience, embodied in the lilac itself and energized by the word vivacious, resonated with me. The next thing I knew Quentin and I were scanning the web for images of lilacs to use on the title page.  

I also liked the idea of a pithy quote underneath the blog's title, and I knew immediately what I wanted, a quote from Muriel Rukeyser that I have committed to memory:

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

This, too, I had recorded in my commonplace book, and to make sure I had remembered it correctly (I had, as it turned out) I searched again through the book until I found the place I had written it down. According to Wikipedia -- and I have no qualms about relying on Wiki for this sort of thing -- Rukeyser was "an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism." All quite auspicious as far as I am concerned. 

So here I start, thinking about the lilacs of New England on a Christmas night in North Carolina, listening to the wind as it gently moves the blossoming flowers and the heart-shaped leaves.