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| After church today. |
February gave us a teasing taste of spring last week. It warmed into the 40's for a few days. Most of the snow melted. The air smelled like spring. It was nice while it lasted. But I knew it wouldn’t last. Such teasing weather makes me feel even more winter weary. This is a moody time of year when my longing for the world to be normal intensifies. And by normal, I mean NOT WINTER. My brain registers summer as the normal state of the world. Spring and fall are the exciting fade in and lovely fade out to summer. Winter is anti-summer. How could a world locked in ice and snow and sleeping through winter dormancy be its normal state? Is my normal state the hours I spend in sleep each night? No, it’s when I am awake, aware, and active.
But then the reasonable part of my brain reminds me that winter’s sleep is necessary just as is my nightly sleep. Winter makes important things possible. The garden gets to rest. The fruit trees in my orchard won’t bear fruit unless they get so many cold days per year. Most apple trees’ Minimum Chill Requirement is around 1,000 hours of temperatures below 45° F -- but not necessarily below freezing, 32°. So for the sake of my orchard, I could wholeheartedly accept a winter that is 41 days long and 44°. That’s five weeks of not so cold weather. No snow or ice needed. Not the 20+ weeks, November to March winter with so many days well below freezing that we have now. So much for normal.
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| A sunrise last week. |
Normal is an odd word. It came to English around the 17th century, from the Latin normalis, which means “made according to a carpenter’s square, forming a right angle.” In his 1658 dictionary, The New World of English Words, Edward Phillips defined normal as “done exactly, according to the rule, or square.” From that meaning it has changed over the years into its present day definition, “conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern, regular.” What is considered “normal” is subjective, with widely varying opinions on what constitutes such things as normal behavior, normal weather, etc. The standards change as societies change and as we gain new knowledge or forget old wisdom. As we grow older, we tend to see things as becoming less and less normal based on what we remember. We usually don’t like the things presented to us as “the new normal.” I know I don’t.
Is there anything resembling what I consider normal in the world anymore? It seems that nearly every aspect of our society has plunged far below anything I consider normal. Every day I look at the headlines in the news and the world looks more and more like the dystopian societies in so many of the science fiction novels I’ve read. Although I try to keep things as normal as I can in the small sphere of my influence, it seems more and more that I’m living on a shrinking island in a rising sea of abnormality.
All this pining and pondering might seem a bit glum, but that’s how I get in February. It didn’t help matters that I turned 65 yesterday. Seeing yet another year of my life fly by so quickly always puts me in a mood. Feeling especially mortal last week as I approached my birthday, I took a look at my family tree to see at what age most of the men in my family died. I know that sounds pretty morbid [from the Latin morbidus meaning “diseased,” connected to the root mori “to die.” Transferred use to mental states, suggesting an unhealthy attitude; unwholesomely gloomy.”], but that’s how I often feel this time of year. Anyway, I went back four generations and averaged the age of my forefathers at the time of their deaths. It came out to 72.5 years. So if I’m average (normal?), and I hope I am, it looks like I still have a few years ahead of me.
As a special treat to cheer me, my night-blooming jasmine (Cestrum Nocturnum) decided to bloom in the dead of winter. That’s never happened before. It usually blooms on warm evenings in high summer. Last week I noticed its lovely scent one evening when I was sitting in the music room reading. The flowers are small and not at all conspicuous, but their perfume is intoxicating. What a happy gift, a reminder that winter will not last forever, that spring and summer are waiting somewhere up ahead.
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| My night-blooming jasmine in flower. |
I dabbled in Russian music last week. I made my way from the Classical era, through the Romantic, and into the Modern. There were several hundred composers to choose from, but I stuck with the most popular, some of whom I was familiar with, some not much at all. I started with Dmitry Bortniansky (1751–1825), then moved through Alexander Borodin (1833–1887), Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), Sergie Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), Sergie Prokofiev (1891–1953), and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975). What a wild adventure! I listened to some amazing music! My favorite pieces were:
Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition
Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, Symphony No. 6 “Pathétique”
Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio Espagnol, Scheherazade
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concertos No. 1 & 2, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Stravinsky: The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Symphony of Psalms, Pulcinella Suite
Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet
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| Borodin, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korakov, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev |
I love YouTube if, for no other reason, than because I can watch performances of classical music there. Every time I watch an orchestra perform, I feel like I’m witnessing a miracle. That a human mind can compose such music and that such talent resides in us that we can bow and pluck on strings and blow through pipes and reeds and make such glorious sounds is wonderful beyond comprehension to me. I think it is one of the highest achievements that human beings can create.
I began reading the library books I brought home last week. I started with Pests. I was disappointed. It seemed so promising – a look at the creatures we regard as pests, the history of our interaction with them. It did have that, but it was so riddled with woke preaching about climate change and racism and poisonous white male dominated Western culture, that I stopped after a few chapters. Next I tried Pig Years. Although it had moments of fine writing, the author was a bit too much of a cosmic liberal hippie and it just didn’t click with me and I gave up on reading it. Another disappointment. But I can’t stand being without a book, so I started to feel a bit desperate at that point. I decided I needed to go to the library again.
I wasn’t in school on Wednesday and I needed to run errands. I needed a haircut. I needed to drop by the chapel. So while I was out and about, I stopped at the library to return books and look for something else to read. I spent an hour looking at the new fiction and nonfiction shelves. I wandered though the shelves in the upstairs rooms looking for something, anything that looked good. Nothing appealed to me. At last I went downstairs to The Stacks. The Stacks is where all the “old” books reside. It is a wonderland, like visiting a sort of Literary Catacombs. Rows and rows of shelves, seven high, packed with books. It feels like a secret place to me. Besides the occasional library employee, I’m usually alone down there. And it smells like books, a rich and indescribable odor.
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| Down in The Stacks. |
After wandering through The Stacks for a while, I found myself standing in front of the travel books. Specifically, the books about Italy. Even more specifically, a book by Marlena de Blasio, The Lady in the Palazzo: At Home in Umbria was beckoning to me. I’d read that book before. I read all her books six or seven years ago and I love them. In them she tells of her life as an American married to an Italian man, living in Italy. She is a chef and her books are filled with stories about food, which makes them even better. When I took the book off the shelf, I noticed that someone had left a bookmark in it. When I looked at the bookmark, I found it was a piece of mail addressed to me. I guess I was the last person to read the book. I took that as a sign and checked it out along with a few other books about living in Italy. They fit right in for what was just a day or two ahead – our Italian Weekend Celebration.
It was four years ago that we went to Italy, an experience that changed my life. Ever since then, on a weekend in February, we celebrate the memory of that trip. Stacey, Hannah, and I drove down to the Thayn’s house on Thursday evening. The Fosters and Miriam, and my niece Kailie and her husband Ian arrived on Friday.
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| In Italy four years ago. |
On Friday, those of us who had already arrived the night before went to the Phipps Conservatory to see their annual Orchid Show. I love going there. The orchids and other plants were beautiful.
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| The Phipps Conservatory. |
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| Some of the many orchids we saw. |
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| Grand kids in the Phipps. |
Saturday morning some of us went to DeLallo’s Italian Market to make some food purchases. During the day some of us went to Hazel’s basketball game. All day long food preparations were underway. Our celebration focused mostly on food, of course. The menu for the main meal was discussed at length for quite some time. Finally it was settled:
Primo (First Course): Cacio de Pepe Gnocchi, Focaccia.
Insalata (Salad): Cold Tortellini Salad, Insalata Caprese.
Formaggi e frutta: various cheeses, grapes, pears.
Dolce (Dessert): Crostata al Limone e Mascarpone (Lemon Mascarpone Tart)
Crostata di Albicocca (Apricot Tart)
Gelato con Composta di Frutti di Bosco (Gelato with Mixed Berry Compote)
Gelato Gianduja (Chocolate Hazelnut Gelato).
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| The antipasto counter at DeLallo's. |
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| The pastry counter at DeLallo's. |
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| Food prep. |
We sat down to feast at 4:00. It was all so delicious. Everyone sang happy birthday to me before we had dessert. Our celebration was a great success. I feel pretty blessed to be part of such a wonderful family and to have so many great cooks in our family.
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| Dinner. |
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| Diners. |
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| Dessert. |
This morning we went to church at the Thayn’s ward. After church they had a linger longer lunch. Then we went back to the Thayn’s, packed up, and headed home. There was a beautiful sunset as we drove into Potter County. We arrived here half an hour ago. It’s nice to be home. The weekend went by too quickly. I’m already anticipating the next time we will all be together again. And so we go on into a new week.
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| Sunset on the drive home. |
