Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Alabama’

From Soup to Sanity

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 27, 2024| Leave a Comment »

This has been the winter for strengthening one of my super powers – SOUP! During the pandemic, while Bob honed in on his sourdough bread, I discovered a delicious Asparagus Vegetable Soup recipe courtesy of Jamie Oliver https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetables-recipes/creamy-asparagus-soup-with-a-poached-egg-on-toast/. I don’t do the egg on top nonsense btw. Now, due to unforeseen circumstances, I’ve been experimenting with more healthy and hearty soups. My take on these liquid elixirs is usually thick, like a stew.

But I’d rather not label these gastronomic efforts; or maybe I should just call everything I make in one big pot “chowder”? Thinking chowder was meant only for fish stews, I went in search of its meaning and yes, it’s mostly fish, but not always – https://www.foodandwine.com/soup/chowder/chowder

The problem with Bob is he’s not happy when I whip out the immersion blender. He likes a chunky soup, he wants to identify the vegetables. Maybe it’s just that we still have all our teeth? I did manage to win him over with a beautiful, cauliflower soup from the New York Times: Creamy Cauliflower Soup with Rosemary Olive Oil! https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1020764-creamy-cauliflower-soup-with-rosemary-olive-oil that surprisingly has no cream whatsoever!

I’m probably best known for the soup I deliver to new moms and friends recovering from an illness. We have a cousin who was in need of some Jewish penicillin, so last week I taught his wife, Peg, how to make it, Reform Jewish Style. When I was in the middle of converting to Judaism, the rabbi arranged a cooking class for me. You guessed it – Real Chicken Soup! No matzah balls, no noodles or rice, just the basics. I’ve never felt so professional as I passed on my secret recipe to Peg in her new kitchen! She was a delightful sous chef, while also archiving the lesson for all eternity.

I brought my Starbucks apron and we traded tidbits of of gossip, chopping away, slowly perfuming the air with chicken fat. Maybe the world needs the next Southern Jewish French Irish Julia Child? My cousin is also a writer, a prolific expository health journalist, for major digital and print news outlets. In fact, she already has a cookbook… and I might have major writer-envy… but in a good way. I’m so happy Peg and her husband moved right across the river.

The Bride’s famous Sweet Potato Soup was recently discussed in detail here https://mountainmornings.net/2024/01/24/gray-swan-events/ and it continues to be a favorite in my winter soup rotation. Don’t despair if you don’t have any V8 on hand, you can substitute a can of fire-roasted tomatoes. I love the dollop of peanut butter you add at the end. This might be my favorite soup of 2023, and next on the list?

I’d like to try my hand at Pasta e Fagioli, a classic Italian pasta and bean soup. The Flapper used to make this all the time. I asked my brother and sister if they remembered a favorite soup from their childhood, and they both said Pea Soup. They like to remind me that their early years were much harder than mine. After our Year of Living Dangerously, Kay told me she had to do all of the housework, including cooking, while our mother was “… lying on the couch in the kitchen.” Jim told me if they had a ham to eat during the week, they could count on pea soup made with the bone that weekend.

They had no TV in 1949, and the radio was stuck in a big box in the front parlor, so the Flapper read aloud poems from a little red book, “A Thousand and One Poems.” Kay has all these poems stored away in her brain that she can recite at will. Just ask her! Occasionally a nurse would visit the kitchen in Scranton, trying to stretch out the Flapper’s legs, while I imagine my Mother screaming obscenities at the top of her lungs. Poetry and cursing in motion.

Making soup has become my antidote to cursing the media for leading every story with you know who. What about calling anorexia “terminal” so that patients can enter hospice? “In Colorado, a state where medical aid in dying is legal, [patients] would also be eligible for MAID (medical aid in dying) drugs…” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/26/terminal-anorexia-mental-illness-diagnosis/

What about Alabama calling embryos “babies”? “In a recent court case over embryos accidentally destroyed at a fertility clinic, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled under state law that all embryos are “children”. However, the global medical and scientific consensus on when reproductive cells become human life says otherwise.”

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240226-what-is-an-embryo-global-medical-definition-of-personhood-ivf-ruling

Ooof. I’ll continue making soup to calm my Novemberphobia.

Read Full Post »

Freedom’s Just Another Word

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, criminal justice, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 29, 2020| Leave a Comment »

We just got back from meeting Amy Klobuchar at the Loews on Broadway. She is a dynamo, and joked about being the shortest one on the debate stage. Tonight she stood on a small podium, which barely made her visible to the audience but we hung on her every word. Her heart, her heart is as big as the state of Minnesota. Bob pushed forward after her speech and told her about our MN Vikings connection.

She looked at me and smiled, “My dad wrote many stories about your brother, Mike Lynn,” she said.

“It was the private jet that did him in,” I said.

And then she was off to another fan. I thought about her dad, a recovering alcoholic, old-fashioned newspaper man who saved his pennies in a tin can. I thought about my foster father, Daddy Jim, a transportation man at Picatinny Arsenal who saved his pennies in a Prince Albert tobacco can. We women, who had loving fathers, who knew the difference between right and wrong, we are the lucky ones.

“Sen. Amy Klobuchar is pitching herself to America as a teller of hard truths. She has charted a path to the White House that goes through (not around) certain hard-luck swaths of Middle America now known as Trump Country but which used to be Democrat Country, and which still is Klobuchar Country. Places like the 8th Congressional District in Northern Minnesota, which saw one of the biggest swings in the country, from President Barack Obama to President Trump, but which continued to support Amy, as well.”  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style/wp/2019/05/07/feature/amy-klobuchars-complicated-relationship-with-her-father-has-defined-her-as-a-person-and-a-candidate/

Yesterday Bob and I returned to Nashville from a trip with friends to Montgomery, Alabama. We visited the Legacy Museum; From Enslavement to Mass Incarcerations; https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/museum

It taught us about lynchings, about how you might get lynched for staring at someone, about how they would advertise a lynching in the newspaper so thousands of people would show up, like a carnival. We saw a sign that warned “Negroes, Jews, and Dogs” were not allowed, and we saw the dirt.

Row upon row of large mason jars, filled with so many shades of brownish/red dirt – with the name of the African American and the place of their hanging. The Jim Crow South was a cruel substitute for freedom.

Afterwards, we drove to the Peace and Justice Memorial. We drove by the corner where Rosa Parks waited for the bus. We drove by the roundabout where Martin Luther King gathered his marchers for the bus boycott. https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/  A school bus let off groups of Black teenagers and we all walked amid the memorial as the sun appeared, streaming through countless hanging steel rectangles with the county, state and number of lynchings etched into every single one in this country. For every documented racial killing, there were ten more…

4,400 plus people lynched. Times Ten.

Tonight, our African American Uber driver told us about being stopped for no reason by the police, with his brother in the car and a dog sniffing all around the chassis. As we drove toward Rosa Parks Blvd, and I mentioned the lights were on in a school being renovated, he told us his mother was one of the first to integrate that Elliott School in our Germantown neighborhood. It’s now becoming an upscale condominium complex. http://elliottatgermantown.com/the-story/

I told our driver, James, he’d better vote like our lives depend on it.

I’ve been thinking Amy might be able to beat Trump because she’s got a steely, mid-western demeanor. She doesn’t suffer fools. She IS the decency check, the patriotic check. But I wonder who will win South Carolina? And can a 5’4″ senator forged in the Iron Range rise above the noise?

IMG_7200

Read Full Post »

Staycation

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on November 8, 2019| 2 Comments »

Since Bob has retired, I’ve found our roles have reversed. I was always the one in the know, collecting local news and crafting interesting stories that would eventually help light up the wood stove. Newspapers still sell, but mostly online today. Without my deadline, I write whenever I please about whatever I want, and I’m no longer constantly on the hunt for tidbits of local lore.

Bob, on the other hand, has been picking up garbage once a month with a dedicated group of neighbors, and has joined a few Nashville associations; he’s become a regular social activist!

Aside from catching up on all the development going on in North Nashville, including going to those dreaded zoning committee meetings, he’s signed us up for something called “The Villages.” And no, it’s not that place in Florida.  https://www.aarp.org/home-garden/livable-communities/info-04-2011/villages-real-social-network.html

This is a national aging-in-place movement that started in the Back Bay area of Boston – which is strangely enough where I started my college career at Emerson in 1966. We have a core group of people dedicated to keeping our community informed and helping our neighbors; almost like co-housing. Our weekly ride to T’ai Chi with a 93 year old friend, who stopped driving at 90, is one small part of this plan, which also includes pot-luck suppers. Mostly, it’s a way to stay connected, stay in our homes, and combat loneliness.

I’ve mentioned many times that our generation was going to age differently. After all, we brought you the Women’s Movement and the Civil Right’s Movement, so it’s only fair we bring you the Old Geezer Movement too.

Anyway, our Village has organized a day trip this weekend to Alabama. Why, one might ask would I want to go to Alabama just when the weather has dipped below freezing? The state that just might elect Jeff Sessions again to the Senate. The state with probably more Confederate flags flying than any other state in the union.

Because it’s the site of one of the prettiest Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the country and I LOVE Frank Lloyd Wright – and it’s in FLORENCE, AL! https://www.wrightinalabama.com/

“A genuine work of art—from the floors to the furnishings to the faucets—the Rosenbaum House grows naturally from its surroundings, cascading down a 2-acre lot facing the Tennessee River. It is one of the purest examples of Usonian design (named for the USA) with open floor plans and rooms that naturally flow from one to another. Built in 1939, the same year Wright delivered his treatise on organic architecture, this significant structure is cypress, glass, and brick and still has original hardware and furnishings designed by Wright.

Frank Lloyd Wright freed Americans from Victorian “boxes” and revolutionized art and architecture. He was born just two years after the Civil War and died two years after the launching of the satellite Sputnik and is considered to be America’s greatest architect. Originally built for $12,000 as an affordable, middle-class home, the house is the only Wright design open to the public in the southeastern United States.”

Call me excited! People fly in from all over the world to see this house! Our Rumson house had his Usonian style, and our home on a mountain in the Blue Ridge was designed with clean white oak floors and trim with lots of windows. I’ve been an Art Deco fan girl since forever and yet only managed to look from the outside at one of Wright’s homes in Minnesota once. Or was that St Louis?

Somehow, in all my trips from VA to TN, I never stopped at Falling Water in PA, and that’s something I’ll have to add to my bucket list now.

Note to self, don’t forget to Facetime with Aunt KiKi (my Daughter-in-Love) from Alabama since she is one super talented designer in California and working on many renovations of this vintage.

Happy Weekend Y’All! Oh and here’s an old pic of our VA not/so/big house. I do miss my little 3rd floor aviary.

snow and DC 09 004

Read Full Post »

Garden Guzzle

Posted in an expository essay, Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, religion, science, tagged , , , , , , on May 21, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Things are heating up here in Nashville. Literally. Temps are headed into the 90s this week, and Bob got the gas fire pit to work just in time for summer. Naturally I decided to make my famous not-too-spicy-turkey-veggie chili last night; always a good way to get rid of all the remaining vegetables lurking in the fridge, including some parsnips that were sprouting greenery.

On Sunday our little neighborhood had its annual “Sip and Stroll” garden guzzle! Basically it’s a good excuse to drink with your friends and neighbors whilst walking around outside. A truck leads the way to 5 gardens with wine and beer on tap! Last year we had a blast, so I packed up my insulated summer wine goblet and headed east. The magnolias are in bloom, redbuds are leafing out and flowers were everywhere – lucky for us, when the rain finally exploded, we could take cover inside an open garage.

My 92 year old neighbor Berdelle’s son was in town for another outdoor lesson in T’ai Chi on Saturday. I loved practicing under the trees in her secret garden with 7 other women, listening to the haunting sound of a train whistle among the bird songs. It transports you to another time and place. I remembered all my attempts at gardening; my border of rosa rugosa in Rumson, my feeble plot to plant fig trees in Charlottesville just so the deer could enjoy them.

This morning is T’ai Chi at the Y and I’ll ask Berdelle if she’d like to attend a rally right after our class downtown to support Planned Parenthood. Maybe we will laugh about the “great” state of Alabama because in the darkest time we must find humor. AL has added insult to injury today – not only did it pass the most restrictive anti-choice bill in decades, its public television station has refused to air a cartoon episode of an anthropomorphic aardvark named Arthur! Why?

Because Arthur marries his same-sex partner. Oh the humanity!

The Bride’s friend Tamara from Duke wrote an excellent article about her abortion, or involuntary miscarriage, years ago that still rings true. I double dare any anti-choice person to read it! https://www.huffpost.com/entry/heartbeat-involuntary-miscarriage-and-voluntary-abortion-in-ohio_b_2050888

Ultimately, these TRAP laws and heartbeat bills are incremental infringements on our constitutional rights as Americans. They are lead by far-Right zealots who would like us to follow their own brand of religion, which tells them that marriage is between a man and a woman and that life begins in the womb, with no exceptions.

Not even when a fetus has no brain tissue and would never survive after birth, not even if a child is raped… They really need to stop legislating a woman’s uterus! Our First Amendment guarantees our freedom from religious tyranny, of any kind. That’s why our ancestors immigrated to this country.

So I’ll put on my big girl boots and march again this morning for #StoptheBans after T’ai Chi, I’ll donate to Planned Parenthood, and maybe I’ll break out my insulated wine goblet too. I’ll carry a sign and chant a chant. I’ll stop to smell the gardenias and keep fighting as if my grand daughter’s life depends on it. She’s got the bees knees!

IMG_5504

 

Read Full Post »

Another Abortion Story

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on May 17, 2019| 5 Comments »

Hey Alabama, do you really know me? My generation didn’t discuss abortion, like we didn’t discuss cancer. It was 1967 and I was a budding feminist; I hated having my skirt length measured in high school, and couldn’t believe we had to wear skirts on the streets of Boston when I went off to college. Boys could always wear what they wanted, go wherever they wanted, and say or do anything. We girls had our reputations to think of, it seemed everyone was thinking about this. So many rules about our bodies.

I couldn’t wait to shed some of those rules – in the words of Henry Higgins, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”

When I walked into the UMass hospital with belly pain, I was shocked to find out I was pregnant. The word bereft comes to mind, why couldn’t the young doctor DO something? I almost think he felt sorry for me. So I did what many young girls did in that situation, I thought I’d better get married. After all, abortion was illegal in 1967.

But when I outlined my plan to marry some frat boy from MIT, my big sister had a better idea. She asked me if I really loved him, and that’s when I broke down crying in the stupid phone booth at the bottom of the stairs in my Beacon Street dorm. She told me to come to New York.  I had an abortion.

It’s true we don’t owe the world our abortion stories, because being able to control our bodies is an elemental human right. I was a teenager, a Freshman in college, I couldn’t support myself, let alone a child. I didn’t end up in a cult, or as Mrs. Frat Boy in a cul-de-sac in Colorado. Did I feel shame and guilt? You betcha.

That’s why I married somebody else pretty quickly;  my step-father had just died, I needed an anchor. I married a law student, because I was still bereft and unmoored, and my starter marriage lasted 4 years.

I’m pretty sure if you count all the women of my generation who had abortions, it would look more like 2 in 4, or maybe 3? We went to Puerto Rico, we went to Europe, we went to brownstones in NYC, and we went to back alleys in Boston – depending on our socio-economic status. We had bought into the idea of equality, until it was too late. The wealthy will always be able to get what they want, the poor will always suffer.

If you were the result of an unwanted pregnancy that turned into a wonderful adoption story, good on you. But you probably left a scar that never heals in your birth mother’s womb. If you were the result of an unwanted pregnancy, and you were raised by your teenage mom, and her mom probably, good on you. That was your mom’s choice. Some of you succeeded without a father, and some landed in the foster care program, which is where I landed as a baby in my Year of Living Dangerously.

Even though the Flapper always told me, “You’re the only child I ever planned,” I was born because of a lie. A doctor thought my father had lost the will to live, so he advised the Flapper to have baby number 6, me! I may have been wanted, but that didn’t change  our circumstances. My father was actually losing his brain to a glioblastoma, I was 7 months old when he died.

Women need reliable, comprehensive, reproductive healthcare. We don’t need a bunch of white men in Alabama telling us we could be imprisoned for a miscarriage… it’s no longer 1967. And I’m not sorry I postponed motherhood, it was my choice.

IMG_5470

 

Read Full Post »