the sun strikes the north like a flint strikes steel
and leaves purple fingerprints on the sky
The north swings away like a bell at the peal
and spends a proud season ringing wide
burning obsession and magnetic attraction
trapped like the strand and the tide
the sun loves the north in some furious fashion
that’s sweetest in lingering goodbyes
1. These stories and photos from the Yukon flats. I am interviewing with a somewhat (ha!) nearby school for a position that would start in January. More on that later, if it comes to pass.
2. This package from the incomparable Becky of Westwick Dreaming who will soon be receiving something in return. Probably something strange.
Note the marvelous lady swineherd card
3. On a related note, reading in French has made me happy. I’m finishing up with Harry Potter the first and getting ready to tackle the second.
4. Pancetta. Especially on pizza. Thank you Sean. You’re an everloving wonder.
5. Friday ‘s sushi party at Pearl Street. Marianna doesn’t see a lot of sushi parties.
Scallop sashimi
6. Swift and efficient butchery of chickens that left us time to spare for laughing at this not-rubber chicken
7. Trapped in the Closet chapters 1-12, which makes an appearance in my life about every five years, go figure. Maybe it can sense when I need to split my sides guffawing. Thank you for this inspiring and delightful film, R. Kelly.
8. Daydreaming about our “Holiday Residency” at the farm with Jesse and Chelsea. I’m planning to focus on video projects and eating.
9. My wonderful, comfortable kitchen in the sunshine
10. No school this week. Time to enjoy the sun and the quiet and maybe even to start on one of the thousand projects I have waiting in the wings.
this morning on the screen porch
a bird trapped in still cool shadows
impossibly whipping her insubstantial body
failing against the breathing wall.
her lover fluttered outside crying
and there were two silhouettes slamming wretched
and pointless
do I wish now for a bird’s eye view?
I wonder, could they see the screen?
I raised my arms and skirted behind her
she flew the long way round and out the door
Bonus Points: I also froze a couple quarts of stock today. Stock is not photogenic.
Today, I confirmed what I had long suspected: Arkansas is no place for garlic. We may be the only people in Lee County who grow it, which should have tipped us off. Several weeks back, we hung thirty heads or more to dry on the porch. It’s the only dark place with any air circulation that we could think of. Ideally, you hang your garlic someplace cool, dark and dry with plenty of air circulation, but we had to settle for just dark. Cool and dry don’t exist here in the summer. When I cut one head off of a bundle recently, about half of it smelled horrible and the skins had gone to brown slime. Most of the garlic inside was fine after a few rinses, but it was worrying. We were off on vacation a day or two after that, so I put it out of my mind.
After summer school today, I cut down three more heads and they were all as bad as that first one. I asked the oracle (internet) and it yielded a bounty of suggestions. We’ve decided to try a few different methods for putting up our garlic just to see what works for us.
Word on the street is that frozen garlic tastes right but loses its texture. Garlic packed in vinegar is supposed to taste close to fresh garlic. We’ll see.
In addition to garlic, we’ve recently found ourselves swamped with cucumbers and corn.
The cukes seemed to fly out of our garden like missiles for a week or so there. We’ve already eaten some of the quick-pickles that Sean whipped up and stuck in the fridge before we went to NC and they are wonderfully crunchy. That crunch is something you just can’t get with canned pickles. I wish we’d made more. We canned seven quarts of dill pickles already, and if the cukes keep up the good work, we’ll put up plenty more before we’re done.
The corn came from a friend. M invited us over to pick some of her sweet corn a few nights ago and we couldn’t resist. We nearly filled the trunk! Her husband put in more than an acre and it’s just for their personal use and for giving away. I have never tasted sweet corn so sweet. We couldn’t resist biting into it in the field, and that first syrupy crunch gave us enough of a rush to keep us picking until we were fixin’ to drop. Pulling the ears from the stalks made a satisfying crunch, and it left my hands sticky and my neck itchy from where the tall leaves had brushed my skin. We shucked and blanched the corn on the cob, then cut it off into a bowl. I tried to vacuum seal several bags of it but the corn was too juicy! The machine couldn’t seal the bags because the vacuum would pull all the liquid up to the edge. I have been freezing the corn on trays prior to vacuum-sealing, which is working well. Putting it up is a lot of work and we bit off more than we could chew, so we gave away bags of the stuff today to the women we work with at school.
Sunrise Run Poem
I saw a buck in velvet
still in the green puddle of his shadow
that shattered on the gravel
I never saw him move
only saw him hanging over a field of sorghum
like the moon hangs in the sky
I have missed the pace of summer. When the weather is like this, I go outside in bursts to do chores, swimming through a bathtub of hot and humid air, wading through a sea of glittering, waist high grass, watching for snakes. When I walk through the door, the world is bright and hot and loud and flashing like the Vegas strip, but clean: bluebirds scudding from tree to wire to bending weed, the sprinkler tiktiktikking, flowers thick and logy with perfumed dew, Cappy pompously hollering at everything that makes a sound, grass so green and sparkling that it hurts to look at it, pigs chatting and slapping themselves down in the mud. My skin is instantly slippery with sweat and the dirt turns to mud on my arms and legs. When I come in, I rinse. Sometimes I rinse in the shower three times a day, just to get the salt and grass off and ease mosquito bites. It keeps my skin from itching right off my body. In the house it’s cool and dark and quiet except for the ceiling fan tapping out a slow count to mark the time, which wouldn’t seem to pass at all, otherwise.
you might think I’m vain
so I beg your pardon
but selfies with lettuce should be a thing
because I look my best in the garden
Hey, this What Would Jeeves Do stuff really works! My kids were killin’ it today. Here’s what I did:
This is just a modified slope-formula, but I think it really brings home the meaning of slope and the thinking behind the formula. Instead of relying on identifying x one and x two, my kids are thinking about the change in the x coordinate from one point to the other. Sean was extremely unimpressed by my innovation, but it has allowed me to bypass big sources of confusion in my class, which is critical right now.Freckles’ family is doing well. They’re all snuggling in a nest-box at night. The babies have no problem getting up to it, which I assume means they’re flying significant distances already. I love this zero-maintenance chicken-motherhood business. No stinky brooder to clean out, just little cuties to love on. 
Here’s my Pinkie sonnet from yesterday:
a chill cracked the air
and a gunpowder smell
that caught in my hair
as the massive beast fell
no silence, no still
for the great fallen hog
just the knife and the kill
and the gathering fog
in the trust in the eyes
never trembles or shakes
as the animal dies
and the heart in me breaks
though the blood’s on my hands and not on my breast
my compassion is stuck like a blade in my chest
Farming and teaching both use and abuse my compassion. I wonder whether compassion eventually runs dry or is strengthened by strain. I’m sure it withers if it is never exercised.
chasing piggens 