break

…from blogging, from the world, actually. Here, I took a drive to the old neighborhood and I took a photo, one solitary photo in Owen Woods out on the west side of Madison. It is fitting: not profound, humorous, edgy, it just points a lens at a bunch of trees and says – you, you’re it for the day.

See you tomorrow.

...as apple pie

I need to get some cider. Want to go?

I met Ed a year ago under these exact circumstances. He needed to get cider. He had read Ocean and thought I might want to come along and take some photos.

We should celebrate! It’s been a year since we met.
Celebrate? Don’t scare me. I don’t do celebrations. Let’s just get some cider.

Yes, but…

Such a brisk October day. It's morning, I am at the market. Shivering. Vendors stamp feet and blow on mittens. Scarves are drawn tight. Caps cover heads.











I think I should stock up. My grandmother had a cellar, back in the Polish village. Wooden shelves, with apples arranged neatly. There must have been other things, but I only reemember the apples.

Run down and get me some apples, she tells me. Creaky ladder steps, smells of earth and apples, small apples, something for her to peel and slice and turn into apple cake. Thick on the dough, but a good dough. She was a baker once, in her years in New York (yes, she had a stint in the States before she returned to her village life in Poland) she worked nights turning out the breads and apple cakes. She knew her dough.

Ed and I drive out to Ski Hi, an orchard just north of the Wisconsin River.




Ski Hi no longer sells at the market. It used to, Ed tells me. And occasionally I would buy their pie. And eat it all in the same day. He says this munching cheese curds and honey crisp apples, all at the same time.

My sister writes me this email today: I am going up to the village to shut off the water for the winter.

No apples in the cellar there now. My grandmother died fifteen years ago, in Berkeley. Maybe she had nightmares about the cellar. More likely she had nightmares about the furnace in the old house. That thing needed loading for the night. Heaving coal. Some bedtime routine! I pick up Gopnik’s book and read about New York before turning out the light. She heaved coal.

There are a number of others who drive out to Ski Hi today. But no one had a cart that looks like this:




Making apple wine? I am asked.
No, Ed simply likes cider.
Others like pie and caramel apples and the Badgers.





In the orchard, the branches create sweeping arches. Don’t trees grow up? Toward the sun? If, as a kid, I had the assignment to draw an apple tree, I would not draw it like this:





My grandparents had fruit trees in their yard, but they pretty much ignored them. The cherries, we picked the cherries. But the pears and apples fell to the ground and turned into soil the next year, for all I know.

Babciu, can we eat the apples off the tree?
No, no good. Forget about those. Pick the berries instead. Here – go and find some wild strawberries. Diversionary tactics on her part.

But my little room in their village house looked out over the orchard, so how could I not think about all those apples, there on the tree and then somehow gone? Not to the cellar, no, not there. Gone to the compost pile or given to any passerby who would want shriveled little apples.

At Ski Hi, the apples are big and beautiful and the colors are of autumn.














Apple cake, your grandmother has sent us apple cake again. My mother says this in an exasperated voice. Too much dough? Is that her worry?

I eat it silently. It is such a familiar taste.

Apple pie at Ski Hi is absolutely perfect. These people know how to grow apples and turn them into wonderful tasty beverages and sky-high pies. I take a forkful. Another.

It’s a different country out here, in central Wisconsin. The apples grow, the people come and take them home by the bagful. Make pies, press cider. Year after year.

what does it take to woo an educator?

It is telling that I am spending the second evening at Borders Books, enthralled with their bi-annual Educator Days.

They know how to drag me in. Yesterday I was here for the discount. Today I am hoping for a free café latte. They don’t quite have that, but they are generous with snacks. It is a shame that I do not really care for late-day snacks. The day I am that desperate for food, I should hang up my passport, stay home and pay the bills.

Twice a year I do enter their drawing for a gift basket. I don’t otherwise gamble or buy lottery tickets and I think the whole thing is bogus anyway. No one I know has ever walked away with a Borders gift basket. I think it has a handful of low-selling books that they want to clear off the shelf, with some chocolates thrown in. Educators like to think of themselves as addicted to chocolate.

I don’t want to be saddled with uninteresting books. After all, they just lured me in to empty my wallet on stuff that I really like. But I feel bonded with educators the world over by filling out one of those entry cards and dropping it into the big fish bowl. We swim together!

Of course, this educator stuff is all rather suspect. I am standing in line today (yes, I’m buying, shoot me for it.) and I whip out my faculty ID the minute it is my turn to fork over the cash and I hear the teller next to mine ask her customer – are you and educator? And he answers… yeeees… with the greatest of hesitations. I mean you should at least follow up with something like – really? -- to show that you are serious in asking. But the teller does no such thing. Okay! – she beams. 25% off all your purchases today!

It turns out that the so-called educator is actually a librarian. I suppose it counts. Though I personally would hesitate to show up for his librarian days at Borders, where they to come around. But it did deflate a little the feeling of solidarity I had had in plunking my name into the fishbowl. I was probably in there with a bunch of librarians, baristas and computer geeks.

By the way, I want no more complaints about lawyers stretching the meaning of words.

when it snows

So immediately after writing here, yesterday, that I have blocked all thought and recollection of the nightmarish garage sale and move of last year, so that even my subconscious cannot recall it and I, therefore, have no vivid dreams about any of it, I proceeded last night to have a beastly nightmare just exactly about The Move.

I am back in the suburbs, sneaking stealthily into the old house, now inhabited by the newer, younger, richer, better ones. I am inside now, cleaning out heaps of family belongings that I had left behind and I am hurrying, hurrying before the new owners show up (they are gone for the week-end). I try to leave no trace, I turn out lights and fold the toilet paper in the bathroom just as they had left it, but I take too long and lo, just as I am leaving with the last armload, I see HER pull in, the new owner in her new Smart car, the Smart car that is environmentally friendly and that I rent in Europe but cannot afford to own here.

No, no, do not make me get up. I know I have an early class, but I have to finish this dream so that it is forever purged!

I am unhinged after that. I get up, turn on the computer and find an email from an old friend in the old ‘hood, mentioning the regular meetings of the book club that I no longer attend because I do not have time to read books. No, excuse me, I read books, but I do not finish them. I used to not finish books that I did not adore. Now I adore them and yet they get the half way mark, no more, because, well, because there are too many books and besides, I blog and writing each day takes time.

…And so I am not surprised to also get an email from Brandon – one of my favorite story bloggers of all time – explaining that the reason he is giving up One Child in a few months is that he lacks the hours it takes to be blogworthy.

To remedy my reading deficiencies, I rush to Borders after work because today commences the educators’ discount there – everything, EVERYTHING is off by 25% and I love so many books right now that I want to have them here next to me, so that they can collect dust and I can dust them off fondly and recall days when I did not blog.

I leave Borders late, except that I cannot leave, because two cars proceed to have an accident in the back of the car I am using and the police ask me to kindly wait until they have resolved their differences. I stand dumbly with my stack of books and watch snowflakes fall.

In the evening, I write to my good friends from the old ‘hood and tell them that I desperately want to see them before I die and preferably this coming week. I insist on driving out there, to the suburbs, to the place I had condemned over and over and over again here in the blog but never in reality. Not fully, that is.

In the meantime, as I am firing emails and making plans for a trip, for it is a trip, back to the ‘burbs, my sister writes from Warsaw and I have not heard from her either, for ages and ages and she tells me of deaths of friends and of singers who came to fame while we were teens. I suppose you could call these dudes Communist-regime balladeers because they sang in spite, yes in spite of the totalitarian regime. And we loved them then and still love them now for their music and for the era where it was actually okay to be a kid. Totalitarian regime and all.

It’s been a long time since I have been out in fancy places drinking cosmos. When WAS the last time I even had a cosmo?

Tonight. I have a beautiful glass with blue swirls on the outside and pink cranberry stuff on the inside, along with the citron vodka and lime juice.

odd tidbits and unexpected utterances

[Prologue: A little over a year ago I had a moving sale. A total hell. So awful was it, that I refuse to even have recurrent nightmares about it, in the way that I do about being unprepared for exams, for example. And so when a friend said -- I have an old wooden desk to get rid of, I did not immediately recommend the garage sale. Sell it on ebay or give it to St. Vinnies -- would be my inclination. Ever on top of Internetty things, he put the desk up on Craig’s List.]

People now sell junk on Craig’s?
There’s a whole section with just furniture.
I thought the desk was a piece of junk.
I listed it at $35. No one has even called to inquire about it.
It's ratty and old.
You know that and I know that, but if I list it for less, people will think it’s a piece of junk.
It is a piece of junk. It’s not worth $35.
Right. And so when they come over to look at it, I’ll accept $15.
Why don’t you just put it out on the curb with a sign saying FREE.
I couldn’t do that. It’s embarrassing.
I have seen you appear in restaurants with torn shorts and ratty t-shirts. But you think putting out a desk on the curb is embarrassing?
I have a German friend who told me in Germany they would never even contemplate garage sales because it puts on display your private life, with all those knick knacks and lotion jars for 50 cents...
This is America, everyone does curb-side sales!

I sort of can’t believe I said that. I am advocating apple pie and garage sales.

I stop at Borders and contemplate purchasing Ann Tyler’s most recent novel about a family where the woman, after some thirty years of living in America, still has trouble viewing herself as American. My kind of story.

But today I am wondering if something has shifted within. You have to wonder about a person who advocates apple pies and garage sales. I mean, what have I said on behalf of Poland here in recent times?

In the late afternoon I pull into a parking lot and listen to the news of the day. Since I drive a car now at the rate of once or twice per month, I no longer listen to news much. I am, therefore, so caught up in the recount of world events that I hardly notice the clouds.

There’s white stuff pouring forth from those clouds.

A minute later I am taking a photo of something I could use for a winter greeting card. Happy October to you. From Wisconsin, na zdrowie!

brightness/contrast

If you use any version of a photoshop-esque program for your digital shots, you will have the option of correcting a handful of standard photo problems. (No, the biggest – poor framing and the wobblies cannot be corrected, but many others can.) One that I always check in on is brightness/contrast.

Contrast can set a story. By analogy, consider my two dining experiences from yesterday and today.
Yesterday, I sunk into a leather couch and watched the waiter bring this to the low, wooden table:





In contrast, today I sat upright and swirled bubbly stuff in a tall glass, through which I could see up and down State Street.





Brightness, too, can oscillate. Sometimes it can be so poignantly sharp that it hurts. It reminds me of a committee I’m on at the university. We meet maybe three or four times a semester (this afternoon we had one such meeting). I am funny there. I make ‘em laugh and laugh. This is not a goal of mine, nor do I consider myself especially prone to witticisms of the type that make you totter under the table because you just can’t stand the humor of it.

But there, at the meetings, I am John Travolta, coming alive on the Brooklyn dancefloor. I am Clark Kent, shedding his staid attire in favor of the skintight suit. I am somebody else.

I recommend this to anyone who is just bored with their take on a given exposure. Fiddle with brightness and contrast. Go ahead, give it a try.

forest walk

I know, I know, you’ve seen it all. One more blog photo (here or elsewhere) of a splash of orange and you’ll quit blog surfing forever.

(It’s not going to happen. You wont quit.)

But I drove three hundred miles up and three hundred miles down just to walk through Wisconsin's northwoods on a nice autumn day! And so you are going to stare at fall colors here on Ocean, or bust.



Maybe you live in Texas and actually get all misty eyed at the sight of Autumn colors. I never thought I’d say this, but Texans, this post’s for you!

But actually, I did my postings of orange trees yesterday. Today you get a little drama with the dish of dried leaves.

(The drama is not significant drama. A little drama should raise no expectations of me being shot at in the forest or something equally thrilling. Okay, I’ll do the spoiler: we got lost and it rained. It seemed big then…)





The thing is, most people do not get lost in national parkland. The trails are marked. Go this way, you dunce. And then here, come on, follow the little blue diamond like a kid following the crumbs of Hansel & Gretel, come on, deeper and deeper into the forest and suddenly ha ha ha, no markers here anymore ha ha ha.

And so you take the wrong path. Not because you’re stupid. You apply all your fantastic much coveted reasoning skills to the situation and you come up with the wrong answer. Happens all the time, no?

Anyway, take a look at one more.





And then this one, when we came to the lake, looked up and noticed the clouds.




I don’t mind getting wet. I take showers, I dance in summer rains (once I did. You don’t want to hear it. I was young). Wet is okay by me.

But my new camera! The one that put me over the top in credit card debt! It says in the long info booklet which I read cover to cover – do not get the damn thing wet! It says so in ten different languages. I understand the message even in languages that I’m not sure come from any authentic, U.N. recognized country. NO WETNESS EVER! THIS IS A SAHARA (or Gobi or Mojave, whatever your language) LOVIN’ APPARATURE! KEEP IT DRY.

So I huddle with my camera under my tight little shirt (I want to look good there in the forest, for the squirrels and deer, in case they care).

And lo & behold, my camera appears to have survived. My shirt is stretched, every last part of me was wet wet wet, but the camera – she be dry as a desert flower.

(I had to test if she was okay in the end, so here, a photo of leaves. Wet leaves. At least they’re red, not orange. You’re welcome.)

notes from the north

Waking up in the Wisconsin northwoods, some 300 miles north of Madison. Last week-end the fall colors peaked here, they say. But this week-end has the weather sewn up tight.

It's early. We find a café with an espresso machine. Ed rolls his eyes. I munch contentedly on a cranberry scone. Sometimes an isolated nod toward the tourist is okay by me.

A few miles north we stop at the Bear Country gas-station-bait-shop-canoe-rental place.
Can’t drop you folks on the river now. Gotta mind the shop. Come back in the afternoon.

Excellent. It gives me an opportunity to plead my case for a morning at the Bayfield Apple Festival.
You can’t come all the way up north and not see Lake Superior.
Surely there is more to Lake Superior than Bayfield and the Apple Festival. There will be crowds at the Festival. (Ed doesn’t much care for crowds.)
There’ll be apples. You love apples.

The sky is a gentle blue, the trees are pretty as can be, all this puts one in an agreeable mood. We head toward Bayfield.









Indeed, a detour toward the shore of Lake Superior is a highpoint. The stretch of sand is empty. The waves play with a few drifting leaves. The water is clear and still not too cold.














But the traffic into Bayfield is heavy. Cars are directed toward big parking lots at the periphery of the village. Not us! Ed is convinced we can find a free spot downtown, near someone’s house. Ed is right. There, he’ll enjoy hearing that.

There are way more than 651 (Bayfield’s pop.) at this fair, Ed notes glumly.
Of course! It’s the event of events! I’m thrilled.





I am especially tickled because much of the attention at the Festival is on food and much of the food has to do with apples.











I show great restraint. Apple brats draw crowds, but the biggest line is in front of the “Indian taco” stand.

Me, I’m in search of the grandstand (it’s a pretty small grandstand; you could pass by it and not know you've put yourself out of its reach). There’s to be an apple-peeling contest. I want to watch. 436 inches was the record length of an unbroken peel. Can anyone top that?

Not this peeler:





Maybe this one:





It’s a slow moving contest. The emcee notes it’s sort of like watching grass grow. Ed is fascinated. I nudge him to the car. We are creeping into the afternoon. The Bear Country gas-bait-boat-etc. guy is waiting for us.

Gotta be careful on the river, we’re told as we kick up dust in his truck, heading with the canoe to the White River. The first time I did it with my wife, we flipped. You get into the brush, lean too hard and over you go.
Oh great. This river will require work.
Lived here long? I ask.
For a while now. But I’m heading back to Montana soon. Better bear hunting there. (There’s bear hunting here?)

This is a hot week-end for hunting, isn't it? I see a lot of men in hunting attire milling about the villages.
Oh, it’s mostly grouse hunters.
But I've spotted deer in pick up trucks as well. And I hear the sound of gunfire as we begin our paddle down the river.





Do you think we’ll get shot at? (I am rubbing a sore arm. I got stung by a wasp at theBear Country gas station and I'm hoping to be done with pain for the day.)
I think the chances are small, Nina.
Another sound of a rifle close by.
…And when they hit someone by accident, they’re real sorry.

We paddle in silence, but the splash of the oars is enough to scare the river life. Herons and loons take flight as we come around each bend. A white tail stumbles through the river in a hurry to get away. Her partner scampers off on the other side.

Hey, you’re missing all the good photos!
I feel like I should help keep us away from the fallen timbers and sandbanks. The best I can do is this:





We paddle on. The early evening is beautiful. The trees along the river are mostly bare now and still we appear to be moving through an Impressionists’ canvas.





…With an occasional Norman Rockwell moment throw in: The woman is hanging the sheets to dry, the dog runs towards us on the river, the flag is up, the silos stand tall.






It’s dusk by the time we drive back with the paddles to the Bear Country gas-bait-boat rental. You can’t see much of the forest now. Unless you pull over and stare deeply within.





The moon is out again. Neither of us feels like driving much to get food. We go to the Black Bear Inn, a local place, just across the street from the Bear Country gas-bait-boat etc. store. Is there a theme here?

I'm guessing Black Bear is a place to go with your girlfriends while the guys are counting their deer, or with your spouses and pals after you’ve put away your grouse. It’s musty inside. It looks as it did however many decades back, when it first started cooking for the locals.





The food is great. I appreciate seeing iceberg lettuce salad at the Black Bear. It fits well here. It’s not a retro act, it’s the real thing.

The whitefish from the lake is gently grilled, just enough so it remains moist, and the ubiquitous red paprika does not detract. It works with the generous squirt of lemon juice. I’m not quite sure where the chardonnay by the glass came from but for $2.50 a glass, I'm not complaining. Dare I say it's actually good. Not rose from the Languedoc good, but good.

A northwoods day. Beautiful up there, it really is.

words

canoes
bears
apple dumplings
guns
wasps
sand
apple pizza
deer in water

...all that and more. Tomorrow, when I am not dead tired (from the above, of course).

for lili, wherever you may find her

One of my fairly regular commenters, lili, the lili of Massachusetts, took one look at my post on soybeans a few days back and asked – but where are the cranberries? (Massachusetts is in great competition with Wisconsin over cranberries. Those darn coastal states – first California goes after our top cheese ranking, then Mass. tries to pop our berry success!)

Lili, this post is for you.

We are heading north, Ed and I. Up up, close to Lake Superior but not quite, up where our famous cross country skiers race each winter, up where the trees are already shaking off past season’s foliage.

But first, a search (en route) for the berries.

On the map, the cranberry bogs of central Wisconsin are clearly marked. Getting to them – oh, now wait, how do you do that? Dirt roads and packed sand hit the bottom of the car. I brace myself, knowing that any minute I will lose the floorboard. Ed dozes.

Far, far easier to find are... the vineyards. Burr Oak wines are made here. At the sight of the vines, I am flooded with nostalgia. We stop.





So how would I rate the wines? Don’t know. (Thankfully?) the proprietors posted an "out to lunch" sign when we stopped by.

Perseverance is a good thing A lone farmer finally directs us to the bogs (straight ahead… can’t miss ‘em… both sides of the road…)

So these are they: strips of boggie field. Visited now by me and a crane or two.





Still, the fields do not display the colors I had hoped for. . Beautiful indeed. Heather-like. But not the plump red you would find at your Thanksgiving table.

We continue our drive north.

I had picked our week-end destination of Cable, some six hours due northwest of Madison -- and that’s if you take roads that actually have pavement. I had some opposition, sure (how far did you say??), but I got stubborn. I like the idea of being north of north. North of Minneapolis, north of Poland. No, that’s wrong. Nothing in the U.S. is north of Poland. Only Alaska, and we’re talking the Arctic circle there.

The sun is getting terribly close to the horizon and we are still quite a number of miles from our stopping point.

And right there, off our backroad, we see the pickers.

Cranberry harvest. I can smell it. Indeed, a flooded cranberry bog…





…and a hardy crew, corralling the berries toward the conveyor that will carry them to a tractor and then maybe to an Ocean Spray juice container or a baggie stamped “organic,” to be sold at Whole Foods – who knows.





Before reaching our B&B, we stop at a micro brewery (the Angry Minnow). I'm told they cook well there.





I order the Wisconsin northwoods Friday special – bottomless fish (the bottomless referring to the amount of fish you can request, all for $10.99) accompanied by "Polish potatoes." Yes, in the village of Hayward, starch from my old country.




It’s dark when we pull into Cable. There’s a moon, sure, but I haven’t the inclination to linger and stare at it. It’s just a moon and the air is a month ahead of us there in Madison.

Tomorrow, I’ll look around more. Tonight – a bottle of rosé from the Languedoc and the warm laptop picking up the brilliant signals of the Internet.

chasing autumn

The sun is out and I forget about shivering down State Street just yesterday. I choose the pavement today with the greatest amount of sunlight and I am content.

Tomorrow, I head up north. The weather appears to be stable. I hear a hike through the woods now is magnificent. Apple festivals and northcountry brews and grills, dazzling lake waters and even more dazzling foliage -- it all sounds pretty good to me.

Not that I would put down our own golden corner here, in downtown Madison. Golden and red, of course. It's football season I hear.


autumnal eating: I'm guessing it's brats.

when Johnny came to town

Two years ago, R.W.Apple Jr. came to town. I wrote about his visit here, on Ocean. I even took a quick photo. He did not mind. A few weeks later, I read his story in the NYT detailing his stroll around the Madison farmers market, especially as it traced the purchases made by l'Etoile, the restaurant that continuously exhalts the work of the small family farm. It was not the first time that the Times mentioned l’Etoile, but it was the first time a whole (short) paragraph in the paper was on my work. Not at the Law School, but in my moonlighting hours at l’Etoile (you really need to chase down to the fourth page to find it, but it’s there!).

Comments made by insightful and wise people stay in your head and so I remember quite well our fragmented conversation as he and I circled the Square (I was then the market forager for l’Etoile). Especially when he paused right there, on the corner of Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd and said – Nina, there is nothing as important as travel. Spending time in different cultures is a prerequisite to intelligent living.

Johnny Apple (as he was called) had his own additional imperatives: good foods, good wines. Did he ever appreciate fresh and honest foods on the table!

A writer of heroic proportion. In many senses. But someone who never claimed that his stories did anything more than report on the work of others. He claimed not to be a mover and shaker, simply an observer. He did not like to tell people what to do and he was forever willing to learn from rubbing shoulders with those who lived life differently.

If I can wish anything for this blog it would be to write it exactly in this way: to observe – yes. Talk about my own impressions – yes. Knock down and make light of the work of others – no.

He died earlier this week.

notes from a wet and cold October morning

…leave early morning seminar at the Department of Justice on the Square… face mile-plus walk back to campus.

If I hug my notes to my pressed and ever-so-professional-but-also-too-thin-for-this-weather white blouse, that adds a layer. The pink sweater that was to tame the severe look of the black pin-striped pants is no shield against cutting winds.

I am cold, damn it.

Everything is wet. Empty, passed over, wet.





…wait for three minutes for Urban Outfitters to open. See scarves in window. Mmmm, scarves. Walk in just as clouds let out significant amounts of rain. As always, feel dumb shopping at store meant for people half my age. Wonder why most gloves on shelf have fingers cut off. Not good for Wisconsin winters. Fingertips get just as cold as palms of hands.

Walk out with scarf, black and white, very nice, very long. Still cold, but better. Stop in bookstore, take two minutes to study books about places with warmer climates. For the hell of it.

…get to law school, keep scarf on, look weird, feel warm.