Tuscany, with the girls' choir

Sarah's choir (the Elm City's Girl's Choir) is on tour in Tuscany, and I was fortunate to be selected as a chaperone. It is pure joy to spend these days in a beautiful place with an incredible group of 37 young women. They are brilliant musicians, and between rehearsals and performances I am surrounded by wonderful harmonies many hours each day. As to "seeing Italy," it is not the trip I expected. But as Rebecca Rosenbaum, the choir director, said to the group on the bus to the airport, "Expect the unexpected and find the opportunities in that."

I came expecting to see "the sights." But the Ponte Vecchio in the picture above was a quick glimpse out a window of the Uffizi, one of the great museums of the world, during what became a fast walk to "finish seeing" the paintings. To be clear: the issue was the guide, not the girls. Still, there is not enough expertise or group interest to take us in detail through the millenia of history embedded in the buildings and land of Tuscany.

Instead, I have the chance to see this:





What could be better?

Strawberry Jam

Friday night in the car, Amy and I were listening to Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which we have been listening to a bit at a time when Amy is driving, others are sleeping, and I am either sleeping or not. It's an interesting book about Kingsolver's family's recent efforts to grow some of their food and eat locally for a year. She tries to be sufficiently down-to-earth to avoid sanctimony, with mixed success. But there are wonderful moments in the book. Friday night we listened to Kingsolver's thoughts about the way growing, harvesting, cooking or eating food can connect us instantly with long-gone relatives. And there we were, on our way to a weekend with our friends Miriam and Brett. We had planned to pick strawberries together, and then Miriam would teach Sarah and me how to make strawberry jam.

My mother made huge batches of jam every year. She made strawberry jam, blackberry jam, cherry jam, blueberry jam, and peach jam (along with apple sauce); and when she was finishing one fruit and starting another she would mix one bit with another (blackberry-blueberry jam happened frequently). The counters of our summer kitchen always had jars lined up (empty and waiting to be sterilized, or full and cooling). The jams were delicious. We three boys elbowed in to try to get the prized "foam," the top of the jam that was skimmed off the pot and put aside before the real canning began. For some reason, the jam foam was the best part. By the end of the summer there would be sixty or eighty jars of jam for eating and giving away as visiting presents.

My parents took great pride in their strawberry beds. (I remember being about 12 years old and standing in the dark holding a flashlight so my parents could plant the strawberries that arrived that day, before they "dried out.") They also grew peaches and apples on their 1/2 acre lot. Blackberries had to be found growing wild in an undeveloped lot. I don't know where we got blueberries. It was a great revelation to me to move away and discover "pick your own" farms where you can pick as many berries as your stomachs and larder can hold.

This weekend, we picked over 20 pounds of small, intensely delicious strawberries (above you see Miriam and Brett with our harvest). Miriam, who spends more hours cooking than any other working person I know, topped most of them (thank you Miriam!). We probably ate a third of them raw for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. The rest we made into jam.

The jam didn't quite set. I can almost, but not quite, hear my mother explaining why. (It could be we didn't add enough sugar or pectin, but I think she's saying we didn't boil it long enough.) In any case, it is incredibly delicious. It's probably too messy for a peanut butter & jelly sandwich, but is wonderful on a slice of toast or waffles. And it looks beautiful in the jar.

We shared the foam.

Ways of Thinking

I just started hearing the phrase "blue sky thinking," although apparently it has been around for awhile. We are being encouraged to get out of our day-to-day rut, think creatively, and imagine that perhaps not even the sky is the limit.

On the other hand, I have been a believer in Anne Lamott's "Bird By Bird" thinking ever since I read her book by that name. The book's title comes from Lamott's father's advice to her brother, who having procrastinated was then melting down the night before his school report about birds was due. "Bird by bird, Buddy," Lamott's father said, "just take it bird by bird."

Another related bit of great advice from this book "about writing and life" is Lamott's helpful admission (and suggestion) that "the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts."

Since hearing about "blue sky thinking" a few weeks ago, I have been playing with the metaphor. Here's my current try: A lot of the time we are dealing with clouds and even rain, not blue skies. The challenge is: to deal with the reality of the rain (an umbrella might be useful!) and still realize that there are blue skies above the rain clouds ...

Poison, Medicine, or Food?

Digitalis (foxglove) has burst into bloom all around our house. It is a biennial plant that only blooms in its second year, before leaving seeds and dying. I don't think we ever planted digitalis; our annual display must be courtesy of the local birds spreading seeds.

Foxglove is a fairly toxic plant. It can cause nausea, blurred vision, and vomiting. But despite these symptoms, some folk healers have considered it a medicinal plant, and in the 18th century Digitalis became one of the first medicines to be used (as an effective medication for heart disease) by modern medicine.

I also put most of this year's tomato plants into the ground this weekend. We have become enormously enamored of "Sun Gold" tomatoes, a variety of cherry tomato that is amazingly prolific, sweet and tasty.

You've got to wonder, though: What possessed anyone, hundreds of years ago, to decide to put these things in their mouths? Digitalis makes people sick; but somehow someone figured out that at some exact dosage, Digitalis could make certain sick people well.

Tomatoes are in the nightshade family, which includes the pesky plant that grows locally here called "Deadly Nightshade" or Belladonna. Every part of the Deadly Nightshade is severely toxic, to the point that ingestion of a small amount of root, leaf or berries can be fatal. And yet European explorers brought Belladonna's cousin, the tomato, back from South America.

There are so many ways in which our "modern" lives are built on the sacrifices and even the mistakes of our ancestors. When the first pint of delicious Sun Gold tomatoes reaches my table next month, you know I'll be thinking about the unknown South American hero who long ago had the courage to pop a tomato in her or his mouth, not knowing if it would bring illness or health.

Periodicity

Every year we go to Block Island for Memorial Day weekend. We always rent Pat and Tom Doyle's lovely second-floor apartment; we always go biking and walking, and have delicious fruit-and-pastry breakfasts in the apartment, and go out for some nice dinners. We always have some lunches sitting on the beaches. This year, as I ate lunch watching the waves come in against the rocks, I thought about the rhythms all around. Sometimes we notice things (especially when they come into bloom!):

Some things are easy to take for granted, unless you are rushing to catch the last pendulum swing of the day:

And some cyclical events seem magical no matter how many times we see them.

Seeing Rebecca and Sarah in this context, I thought about our family joke about the pictures we take of them each year on Block Island: If we lined up all of our photos of the two girls in front of the ocean at Block Island, year by year, we could make a flip book and watch them grow up!

And then something very different happened this year. On Sunday, we took our annual bike ride out Corn Neck Road, to the beach at the North Lighthouse. As we walked along the beach, Amy suddenly said, "Look! Seals!!"

There were perhaps a dozen seals (we think they were harbor seals), including a huge male, swimming off shore. At first they were about 60 feet out, but as we spent the afternoon watching them, one started surfing the waves at the point, and two came right up to the beach. They seemed as fascinated with humans as we were with them; they spent a lot of time staring at us when they weren't playing or floating. We were told that this visit was very unusual; seals are common in colder weather but are not usually seen in such warm water. What took the seals out of their usual rhythm -- a change in the currents, some change in available food, the seal equivalent of missing the last ferry? In any case, their change provided us with an unexpected pleasure.

Aliens

A small forest of these weird fungi appeared in our back yard this week. And then Sarah and I were in New Hampshire and saw these wonderful moss sporophytes:

These eruptions don't look anything like the "normal" plants and flowers I am used to. That probably has something to do with my expectations, rather than the real population of the natural world. I think these extraordinary growths are probably coming up all over, but we don't tend to spend much time in the places they are growing.

Which then sent my thoughts off to the people we Americans often call "aliens" -- which is to say, people who have come from another country. (Uncharacteristically, I am not talking about Star Trek creatures from another planet.) When we talk about "aliens," we mean people whose families came to America more recently than our own families came to America. There are many legal categories of such visitors / new arrivals, but one commonly applied distinction is between people who are "legal" and "illegal" (although of course it remains legal to be a person, it's just her or his presence in this country that is either within the law, outside the law, or ambiguous).

Two things to think about:

• We Americans tend to forget what a young country we live in. By European or Asian or African standards, we are all "new arrivals."
• It is quite odd to use the word "alien" to refer to these new neighbors. There is almost no difference between us and these "others" -- especially if your field of vision is broad enough to encompass the difference between us and the aliens whose pictures I have posted here this week.

(If you were wondering: that's the reproductive organ of the skunk cabbage.)

Reflections

I saw this heron when I was paddling my kayak back to Chaffinch Island State Park in Guilford a couple weeks ago. There was so much beauty in the scene: the heron standing perfectly still, the bird's reflection broken across the ripples in the water, and the green grass and blue sky also reflected in the water.

The way the water shone back the scene around reminded me of a conversation Amy and I had about the picture below, which I took a couple years ago in the Canadian Rockies:

Amy had said, "It's so hard to tell which way is right side up in this picture! Why is the color in the water more intense than the color in the sky?"

"Because I set the exposure of the camera based on the reflection," I said. "The camera can't adjust exposure for everything, and I chose to focus on the reflection."

Focusing on reflection is not necessarily a good thing. One thinks of Narcissus. But also, those of us who live near the woods think of male cardinals, which fly over and over again into our windows. Why? Territorial behavior: the bird mistakes his reflection for another male, and attacks the window to drive off the competition. Ouch.

So reflection has its dangers, but of course its benefits as well. After many hours in therapy, I find myself aided by self-awareness, when I can achieve it. Our music group Just Harmony has been singing a song we learned from a recording of Michael Jackson: "If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, then make a change!"