vegetables and other matters

With time, I’ll not compare my hours now with my hours last week, or the weeks before. I wont remember that I had too many photos and too many stories for Ocean then and not enough time to give them a thorough airing.

But right now, I still remember and I compare.

How can it be otherwise? I go out to the grocer’s and I take my camera, but I am not inclined to use it. Street scenes? Not here. Not outside my grocery store anyway. It’s a parking lot. The entire commercial scene here is a massive parking lot.

Oh, there are three tables. For those who need to pause between the door of the store and their car in the lot. Or something.




When not shopping for food, I’m working. My course, yes, there’s that, but I'm also getting photos up and ready for a café exhibition. I’m happy with this, because it will be at my favorite place for coffee this side of Ohio. [More on this later.]

And I’m biking again. That’s good. I like my bike paths. (By comparison, Parisian bike paths suck, and Rome’s bike routes are suicidal.) And I notice that my city is creating huge incentives for bikers. Did you know about the discounts all around town for those who show up with their bike helmets on? And we're not unique! Fourteen states have these! (Click here for more info.)


My balcony has flowers now. I eat breakfast there and stare out at the parking lot and think – it’s better to look out at a quiet parking lot than a street full of traffic, no? I mean, cafés on busy streets are way overrated, no?





No. Miss ‘em.

Even though I love smelling my balcony rosebush.


And I’m so pleased to be cooking up a supper that has vegetables. Seasonal vegetables that are not limp broccoli. Scotland, you have to tackle vegetables next, okay?

mail drift

I haven’t seen my mail for over a month. Not even in the three days that I have been back. Somehow no one seems to know where it is.

This “no mail” state has me in a drifting mood. As if normal life hasn’t quite picked up yet. (Even as I’ve both unpacked and started the laborious task of outlining a new course for next year.)

As always after a return, I wake up early. I think about calls that need to be made and I wait until the world wakes up and I can start hassling it again. For instance, at 8:30, I called my doctor, found out she is on vacation, talked to a substitute and discussed the ticks Ed and I found all over us after an unfortunate romp in a field that seemed to be their Scottish headquarters. (We did not encounter ticks after that day.)

Yes, pulling them out with your nails is fine, so long as you don’t tear them apart. Pretty small down up there, aren’t they…You think you got them all? Come talk to me if you’re feeling feverish or sick.

I ask Ed if I were feeling feverish or sick, should I worry about Lyme disease or Swine Flu (Britain has a number of cases). We tossed a coin. Heads you worry about Lyme, tails – flu. The coin showed heads.

For recreation, I pulled more Texas weeds (a reference to their size) at Ed’s farmette until I realized that the man himself was reclining and I was using a diverse set of muscles to clear his land.

We took a coffee break and then went back to the strawberry stand to buy two more lovely boxes of berries. We wanted to tell the seller that she was underpricing the whole lot of them ($2 per quart for yesterday’s pick), but she seemed not to speak English well and so we just smiled and said thank you many times.

Ed can eat a quart of strawberries at a sitting. I returned the empty containers later in the day and talked for a while to the dad who first started tilling the land here two years ago. Great berries! Selling at the markets yet? We can only go to two markets each week and one is very far away. We have more to sell than that. We do better here.






In the evening, I drift in and out of work, pausing occasionally to pick a weed. And to smell the lavender – a flower that I planted here several years back because it always reminds me of travel.

suddenly summer

If you were to ask me why my longest weeks away from home are always in spring, I’d probably say something about how summer in Madison is a treat. Spring is fickle: there, or not there, depending on the mood.

But also, it’s easier to return to a summer here than to return to a loaded schedule of classes in fall.

Now for the tough part: it’s hard to have the first Sunday back home. Elsewhere, Sunday is a time of inclusion. Of communal spaces. Of long meals and even longer people watching sessions.

At home, I clean house and do what every other American does: chores around the house.

It struck me that I live such an “un-communal Sunday” life that I don’t even know where the communal spaces are in my home town. Are there any? (Don’t tell me the Union. Student hangouts don’t count. You never see the same person twice there.)

And, I don’t have a grocer or baker who’ll ask me if I was glad to be back and how was my time away.

Yes, the first Sunday home is always very difficult.


On the other hand, I was handed a day of infinitely beautiful summer weather. After the usual house cleaning, I biked to Ed’s farmette. We pulled weeds the size of Texas and generally reveled in being outside, without the summer nuisance of mosquitoes (too early). A frog looked on.





The truck farmers who have been working the land to the side of the farmette have become exceptionally enterprising. They set up a stand where the children sell produce to those who drive by. Not many people drive by randomly on Goodland Park Road, but still, the kids tell me they're doing well.





In the evening, I put on Scottish music from a CD that we were given at the last b&b on the Isle of Skye. I made a supper of eggs with cooked tomato and mushrooms.

from Paris: her world

I will say this about Paris – it makes me feel absolutely happy to be a woman here.

It could be in my perception of things, but in Paris, for whatever reason, I take tremendous pleasure in all that makes me different from that other gender. At the superficial level – the identification comes in the style of dress and the presentation of self. But not only. A woman's tastes and pleasures are respected in so many venues. Many of them having to do with food to pick up for home.



















I make no claim that this joy in womanhood is universal here. Or that men do not partake in some of the pleasures traditionally handed to women.





Or, for that matter, that men and boys, engaged in manly and boyish routines aren’t pleased as anything with their own masculine world. Indeed, I watch them and I smile at their exuberance and joy in life. It’s all quite beautiful. (Ed says – and they’ve got great hair! I’ll add – and hats.)
















And, too, I’ve paid homage on Ocean to mixed gender partnerships. You’ve seen couples here lots of times, right? Happy to be together. Mostly.






But, as I sip a rosé on the park bench and munch on a baguette with Ementhal and crudités, I think – let’s focus on this one essential truth: to be a woman here is grand!





And what I see around me – the flowers, the chairs that fit my body so well, the public spaces that make me feel protected – it’s all so terrifically woman-friendly.











(Even as I do understand that here, as elsewhere, men do continue to tower in so many professional and artistic environments.)





Okay, granted. Still, at least in Paris (in my opinion), women of all shapes and sizes and importantly, of all ages, seem to understand their beauty and valor, their unique beauty and their unique valor. They walk with pride (and so I, too, walk with pride). As if they know they’re being watched, admired, respected. For what they bring to the table.






Late in the day, Ed and I are in a shop that sells lovely summer clothes. (There are so many! Sweet boutiques, sometimes even affordable – Maje, Zadig & Voltaire, Et Vous – beautiful and tempting.) I’m fingering a dress the color of a pale rose.
Should I try it on? It’s way less than 100 Euros.
How much way less?
Way less.
The clerk turns to Ed. You’re American, aren’t you? You have to know that in this country, the woman has the final word.

Well, I don’t know about that. But it sure feels good to be there in that dress, or to be at Le Bon Marche sampling paté and apricot almond “milkshakes.” Or to be anywhere at all.


We walk a lot in Paris. I love my routes around the city. For example, the one to the Bastille and back. This time, I want to stop at the Centre Pompidou. My musician hosts from last year told me that I should revisit it, because it’s superb now. I remember their words when I see photos of Obama and his daughter here just this past week.

We ride up the escalator…





…for a glorious view of Paris…











We look first at the special exhibitions – of works by Calder and Kandinsky. The first is completely fun – coat-hanger art. (Well, a little more elaborate than that, but in that style.)





I think about the audacity of assuming you can survive (and raise a family?) on creating coat-hanger circuses.


At the Kandinsky exhibition, we look at paintings donated to the various museums by his wife, Nina. Wife, and not necessarily lover. He had another woman (more?) who served that role. (I’ll bypass here the entire discussion of Paris and sex and marriage and sex in addition to marriage – I’m not going there with this post.)


In the permanent exhibition rooms, we look at art by women artists. Their art is strikingly absent from so many collections, even of modern art (I say “even,” as if we can forgive the previous centuries for being unkind to women).

The art here covers the range of expression. It’s bold and sometimes very disturbing. But the fact that a major museum in Paris devotes so much space to it is, to me, extraordinarily gratifying. Paris: a place where the difficulties of being a woman artist are openly confronted and talked about. Paris: a place where your failures in reaching any level of prominence are made more palatable because you are in a community of others who have had greater things to show, paint, and describe than you and yet, they, too, felt themselves to be at the margins of success.











So I’ll end with this womanly side of Paris. Even as I walk past Sorbonne and I am tempted to take a photo of a handful of men who look so, well, Parisian-male-professorial. I resist it. This time I’ll stick with what feels right here for me. From childcare to family life to beauty and the idolization of creativity, from food to conversation and to open spaces where both can combine – Paris. If you were a person, I’d say I love you. Even as I am so happy to be returning home today.

from Paris: with a traveling companion

A city of light, love, food, fashion, art, architecture, politics, personalities, a city of great beauty, with probably the best people watching opportunities anywhere. A place to share, with someone, anyone, with, for example, an occasional traveling companion.

But mostly, over the years, I have traveled to and through Paris alone. I’ve learned how to do it. So much so that when Ed does join me here, like, for example, for these two days, I’m at a loss on how to proceed.

Much as he does not hide his dislike for all things urban, he knows not to dislike Paris to my face. It would be like me telling him that his two cats are flawed. We aren’t that unkind to each other. In conversations about it, we talk about the parks, the good food we have eaten here, the walks we have taken, the art we have seen.

But in making plans for a day here, we are at a conversational volley that often ends with the ball falling off somewhere beyond reach.

Where do you want to go?
Wherever you want.
Where do you want to eat?
Don’t know.
How about at that bistro with a reasonable fixed price menu?
Maybe.
Anything there that you like?
I’ll find something.

I tell him he is merely going along, that the enthusiasm just isn’t there.

But then come the good comments.

Let’s just sit for a while and enjoy the scenery.
Just for a minute.

You want to stop for a refreshment?
Okay...

I remember this shop from the last time.
I once bought a dress for my daughter there.

A smile, fleeting, but there, in the entryway to a shop, on a park bench, looking at a statue, a bridge, a person on a rented bike speeding by.



We arrive in the early afternoon, unload our gear at a still less expensive left bank hotel (the perennial challenge here is to find a place that is special and cheap; you cannot get to attached to any one choice, because some time in the future it will leave your budget range and you will have to search again) and set out.

Where to? Oh, green spaces of course. With Ed, there’s no hope for even a polite nod to the city if you don’t spend at least a little time in traffic free zones.

We walk through the parks where children ride ponies and chase balls between old trees.


Jardin des Plantes





Jardin des Plantes





Jardin Luxembourg


The skies turn partly cloudy and the air loses the Scottish nip that had been with us up north. We watch people take time out to be alone or with friends, or companions.




















Past shops, food shops, so many food shops. Ice cream places. I eat a cone with the absurd combination of salted caramel and cherry ice cream…

Don’t you want any?
Still full of breakfast.





…and drink a kir at an inconsequential sidewalk café.

What will you drink?
Nothing.
You can’t drink nothing. Have mineral water.
It’s more expensive than wine.
Have wine.
You have mine.

(Correction then: I drink two kirs at an inconsequential sidewalk café)





… and we walk again. Endlessly, until we can walk no more.

We do eat dinner at the bistro with the good fixed price menu (La Petite Chaise). It’s a fine meal. A good fit for us, just on this day.


[Note: I’ll post after my flight back home.]

from Scotland, one last time

In truth, neither of us is in the mood to be in Edinburgh. Ed dislikes most cities that are noisy and chaotic, and me – I prefer to keep my images of this place as I had them when I was young: I thought of it then as a cold and dark city, but one that grew on you, especially in the afternoon, especially if you stopped for a long tea and let it roll into the evening meal. With a pint after, to end the day.

Still, we could not pass it by. For all our time in Scotland, for our love of this tremendously beautiful country and its generous people, I thought we should at least spend a day poking around the capital.

In the end, a full day proved to be too much. Indeed, I can truthfully say that the best part of our stay here was within the first few hours, when we searched for Pickham’s -- the store with good cheeses for supper.


And the day after that? It could be that we were stuck in another world – of mountains and lakes, of sheep and fields of heather – it could be that. For both of us, the city felt like a trap. Around the commercial downtown, you could not escape the chaos of the tram construction. And so we placed our hopes with the Medieval Royal Mile, up there on the cliff, stretching from the castle to the palace.










But there we found a different sort of chaos – of tour buses and souvenir shops, of kilts and imitation kilts for sale, of fast eateries with prepackaged scones, prepackaged everything. You could not shake it. I could not shake it. There was no room for strolling, for contemplation. The place of historic momentum, of old buildings where poets and politicians spun their stories over the centuries appeared to have sold its soul to t-shirt shops and tattoo parlors.


The rain came and went and the afternoon turned first somber then downright sad.





The escape into a tearoom was the final slap: it felt far removed from the Scotland that I had loved so deeply up there in the Highlands.


Of course, the fault is our own. As I said, for many reasons, we were not ready and willing to take on this great tourist destination. And I have to note that there were some stellar moments to the day: the walk through the park, the visit to the Art Gallery, the climb up Arthur’s Seat in Holyrood Park behind the Royal Palace.





And the quick visit to the People's Museum, depicting life of the commoner in past centuries here was informative, if not a little depressing.






By late afternoon we were ready to call it a day. Though in the end, we rescued the mood with a wonderful meal of Shetland Island mussels at Fishers. We had begun our Scottish adventure at Fishers several weeks back and we were ending it there now.





Thursday should get us to Paris. Just for a day. Saturday, we’ll be home.

from Scotland: three bridges

First living on the islands, now leaving the islands and highlands, rolling back as if it were all a movie reel that is now spinning in reverse.

Our last night up north is at the Braeholm, the b&b that welcomed us when we first arrived on that windy evening in Skye. Tony’s off to teach on the mainland in the morning (are the British Isles “mainland”?), but his wife and son are here, greeting us with the breakfast foods we’ve come to love (and they get an extra high grade for offering fresh fruit, in addition to the large pieces of smoked salmon with the eggs, and home made jams from Skye berries. That, on top of muesli or porridge.)





Kristen, our hostess, speaks with such a strong Scottish accent that I am sure we are finally in the home of true Scots. And we are. But not from Skye! Skye people move away for work, mainland people come back and set up homes and new businesses. The Isle is a way of life and not everyone likes its laid back airs.





You’ve been here four years? Your son is a Skye boy then!
Actually, they don’t let you give birth to your first here. They make you travel to Inverness where there are proper facilities, just in case. So he was born there. But he’ll be going to school just up the hill.

Life in Skye. After a while, do you take the scenery for granted, sort of like the living room carpet?










We walk to the bus stop one last time and now we are crossing the bridge. We are no longer on island time.




We have many train connections to make (all on our cheap senior day pass!). The first is on the line that took as here just a few days ago, right to the water's edge.





But now we're rolling back, returning to Inverness. This is the most scenic stretch – through the heart of the Scottish highlands.





There is a tour group of Scottish seniors (they love to explore their own country; none of this stay home and watch the telly stuff – you see groups of seniors on buses, trains, in towns and castles – trotting up and down in groups, waiting at stations, moving in sync, happy with all that is bright and beautiful around them) and I glance to look at them. They're taking it all in, carefully, reflectively.





And we, too, are seduced by the scenery. For once, Ed takes his face out of the tattered magazines that have traveled with him from home, through the Great Glen Way, dunked in the waters of the Spey, stuck in his pants' pocket on the Isle of Skye. Because if you look out long enough, you'll catch a glimpse of a fleeing stag. Or of an RAF plane zipping low, right at the water's edge.















At Inverness we don’t pause: we hop on the next train out – to Perth. And this one is a roll back to an earlier set of days as we yet again speed along the River Spey, past Aviemore – where I waited for my man on the boat to come back. Oh! Snow fell on the hills in our absence! How can such a small country have so many different weather systems passing through it all at the same time?





And finally in Perth, we change to the train for Edinburgh. We go over yet another body of water, on a bridge parallel to this one…





…the bridges that all of us northbound travelers take to put us in the sometime heathered and sometime forested hills of the Highlands.


It’s evening in Edinburgh. Dinnertime. Except Ed has had enough of eating out. Do you mind if we just get bread and cheese and bring it back to the room?
How can I mind – he’s been good about meals, my occasional traveling companion who like nothing better than to hunt down odd foods in a refrigerator at the most irregular hours.

And so we amble out, on the streets of the city that is ripped by tram construction and still covered by the soot of history.





We’re staying near Haymarket, in a nice guest house at the edge of a rather scraggy side of town (but who can really tell when all looks hellish out there on the broken up streets). Our trip to the local supermarket brings out my loathing for these big food stores. If Ed wanted interesting cheeses, we weren’t going to find them here.

I suggest we head in a little toward to the commercial heart. Along the way, I’m lucky enough to ask a person who knows food.
There’s just the place! Not too far. I go there myself for the good beers that they sell. Past this square, around the next two circles of houses, down the hill, across the bridge and to your left – Peckham’s.

And so we go down, just as he tells us…





… until we cross that bridge – not anything as magnificent as the Skye bridge, nor the one over the Firth of Forth, but a bridge nonetheless, my bridge not to nowhere at all, but to the wonderful little shop that sells great cheeses and wheat biscuits and breads, and my favorite Scottish shortcake for dessert.









And on the shelf, we spot them – dark and light, Black Cuillin and Hebridean Gold – for us, the king and queen of beers, from the Isle of Skye.


Up we climb now...




... with too many cheeses and too many crackers and breads, up to the rubble of the torn up city to the quiet of the room that, unfortunately, does not have a view onto the highlands.