A Bit of Early Spring Drama

As often happens here, the first days of spring were more wintry than the last days of winter. Like a rude guest that overstays its welcome, winter always lingers too long.

Because I wasn't able to work outdoors for much of the week, I spent a lot of time entertaining myself indoors with mental adventures. The first of these cerebral excursions came about on Monday. I was bored and daydreaming as I sat looking out on a chilly and inhospitable morning. I spent some idle time watching reels of those flash mobs where an orchestra suddenly materializes in a plaza to play Beethoven or a group of dancers performs Footloose in a mall. I've always wanted something like that to happen to me. That brought up a vague recollection of a skit that I saw once on television, probably in the early '70s, maybe on Love, American Style (yes, we watched that) about a man who wanted his life to be like a Hollywood musical and everyone kept telling him that life wasn't like that, but at the end of the skit, the scenery opened up to a big musical finale. I tried to search online for the skit, but found nothing. I do wish sometimes that life was like that with sudden orchestral accompaniment and choreography.

That set me off on a binge of listening to songs from musicals. I've written before about my love of musicals, a love that began in my very early childhood days. That morning, I felt like listening to love songs. I'm not particularly demonstrative when it come to romantic things. Just ask my wife. That might be partly due to my early exposure to love songs and scenes from musicals. They are so wonderful and romantic, they set an unrealistic standard for me that I knew I would never attain. No orchestral accompaniment? No lyrically beautiful words? No perfect voices? Why try? I'm exaggerating, of course. Maybe. So on Monday morning, I made a queue of some of my favorite love songs from musicals and spent an hour or two indulging in them. Some are rapturous, some are sad, all of them are lovely. I listened to Something Wonderful and Hello Young Lovers from The King and I, On the Street Where You Live from My Fair Lady, If Ever I Would Leave You from Camelot, People Will Say We're In Love from Oklahoma, Some Enchanted Evening and This Nearly Was Mine from South Pacific, Somewhere and Tonight from West Side Story, and others. Caught up in the magic of the music, the day seemed a little less gray. This is Brian Stokes Mitchell as Emile de Beque in the Carnegie Hall concert performance of South Pacific.

Decanting vinegar.

While listening to those lovely love songs, I decanted vinegar. It brought a sour edge to balance out all those sweet songs. If you will recall, last year we had a great apple crop and in October we pressed fifty-five gallons of cider. I took fourteen of those gallons and began a batch of vinegar in two seven gallon vats. Those vats have been fermenting under the shelves in the pantry since then. I checked them on Monday and they were ready, so I decanted the finished vinegar into one gallon jugs. I ended up with thirteen gallons of good, raw, unfiltered apple cider vinegar. That should last us a year or two.

Thirteen gallons.

We had the makings for another corned beef and cabbage dinner, so on Monday afternoon I cooked it all up and we had a Second St. Patrick's Day feast. The Shilligs came over and we ate a pleasant meal together.

Tuesday morning was pretty dreary. My mental exploration that morning was focused more on the belly than the brain. Because of my restrictive diet, I think a lot about what I eat. I have a list of can and can't consumables. One of the things I eat a lot of are nuts. And one of my favorite nuts is pistachios. Tuesday morning I was cracking and eating pistachios when my curiosity kicked in. What are they exactly? Where do they come from? How nutritious are they? And away I went on another voyage of discovery. It turns out, pistachios (Pistacia vera) are not technically nuts at all, they are seeds. In the culinary world, the terms seed and nut are often used interchangeably, but in the botanical world, there is a distinction. I tried to decipher the difference, but found so many conflicting explanations, that I gave up. To me they are all nuts. So what about the pistachio? It turns out they are quite an exotic treat. They grow on a desert tree that originated in ancient Persia going back as far as 6,750 B.C. The major producers in the world are the United States (California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas), Turkey, and Iran. A pistachio tree can live as long as 300 years. The trees are dioecious, meaning some of them are male and some are female and to get nuts, you need both. The flowers form in clusters and when fertilized, make a clump of fruit with a hard shell. When they are ripe, the shells split open, revealing the nut, seed, whatever, inside. They are very nutritious, full of healthy fats, protein, fiber, and antioxidants. They are especially rich in vitamin B6 and thiamine. So I felt pretty good sitting there feasting on my bowlful of pistachios. Back in my ice cream eating days (alas for bygone days), pistachio was one of my favorite flavors.

Unripe pistachios on the tree.

Ripe pistachios ready to eat.

It stayed cold all day. I tried to satisfy my need to do something horticultural by checking my seed trays. The old proverb says that "a watched pot never boils" [the original phrase comes from Benjamin Franklin and is actually "a watched pot is slow to boil"] and the same can be said of seeds germinating. I knew it was too soon, but no matter, I checked anyway. Staring at them does nothing to speed up the process, but I gazed at them hopefully regardless. There was no new development on Tuesday.

After the afternoon chores, I took a walk around the garden despite the cold. I needed to see flowers. The crocuses were at their best. The little iris reticulata made me happy. The first of the squill and chionodoxa were starting to show and there were signs of the daffodils, hyacinths, and tulips that would soon grace the garden. But the wind was cold and I did not stay out long.

Crocuses at their peak on Tuesday.

The happy patch of iris reticulata.

For several days we were told that we might see the Aurora Borealis if the night sky was clear. I looked on Monday and Tuesday night, but saw nothing. On Wednesday night, there it was. Miriam took this picture from an upstairs window just at bedtime.

The Aurora on Wednesday night.

On Wednesday we woke up to snow. The world looked like December again, all the flowers buried under a layer of white. It was depressing. To keep from staring out the window in dismay all morning, I hid in the world of music. I let my mind wander on a random search through my music files. Did I want something bright and cheerful? Some vivacious Vivaldi perhaps? No. A boisterous bit of Beethoven? No. Maybe I was still under the influence of Monday's love song queue. Maybe my snow-induced sadness was too strong to overcome. Whatever the reason, the music that caught my fancy was torch songs. In case you don't know what a torch song is, it's a sentimental love song, usually about lost or unrequited love. Sad songs, but somehow cathartic. 

Wednesday morning.

There are crocuses under that snow.
 It's the same shot as the one above that I took on Tuesday morning.

My first encounter with torch songs came about back in 1983 when, on a whim, I bought Linda Ronstadt's album What's New. The album is a collection of standard love songs, many of them torch songs in arrangements by the incomparable Nelson Riddle. I loved it so much, I went on to buy her next two albums in the same genre, Lush Life and For Sentimental Reasons. From that introduction, I've gone on to explore other torch song singers and found some I already knew like Judy Garland and Ella Fitzgerald, and discovered new ones like Julie London, Edith Piaf, Diana Krall, and others who, although they might sing other things, sometimes lend their sultry voices to torch songs. Julie London, who I knew as a child as nurse Dixie McCall on the TV show Emergency!, is considered by many to be the Queen of Torch Singers. And not all torch singers are female. Frank Sinatra is one of few male singers that can carry off a good torch song. I love his albums Only the Lonely and In the Wee Small Hours, also arranged by Nelson Riddle. So I set up a queue and started with Linda's albums, moved on to Julie London, then Diana Krall, and ended with Sinatra. It was great music for a snowy spring day.

This is Linda Ronstadt singing But Not For Me from her album For Sentimental Reasons.

On Wednesday when I went to the woodshed to check my seed trays, I found sprouts! The bunching onions had germinated and it made me so happy, a small triumph on a snowy day!

Last year our friend from church, Pat Mann, hatched out eggs for us in her incubator. She hatched them and then raised them for a month before she gave them to me. That was perfect because she likes caring for little chicks and I prefer not to. She has offered to do that again for us this year and I have three dozen eggs ready to give to her. But even better, she offered to go to Runnings on a chick shipment day and get a dozen chicks for me. She went on Wednesday morning and reported to me later that it was a bit crazy. There were people waiting at the doors for the store to open and they rushed in and ran to the back where the chicks were. The limit was a dozen chicks per person, but she said one family had six people there getting a dozen each. Pat got what we wanted and she will raise them until the eggs I'm giving her hatch. So my flock saga continues.

The snow melted a little. Same shot. Poor little crocuses.

Thursday morning just after sunrise, I went down to do the morning chores. I hadn't looked at the thermometer before heading out. The sky was clear and the bright sunshine looked deceptively warm. I was two steps across the front porch when the cold hit me. I was wearing my warm hoodie, but it wasn't enough. It was 12°. I turned around and went back inside and bundled up before making my second attempt. Down at the barn, the rain barrel that I had over-optimistically set up last week, was frozen so deeply, I could not crack the ice to get any water out. I had to bring a bucket back up to the house and carry water down. After the chores were done, I came in and sat by the electric heater at my desk to warm my hands and feet. I'm tired of the cold. There was a happy sight that morning. One of my amaryllis began to bloom. 

I needed a new book to read. I'd gotten bogged down in a history book and needed a change. It's a good book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I've always been interested in Lincoln and that time period, but at over 700 pages, not counting the extensive footnotes, it was too much. I wanted something a little lighter. So that morning, I went looking. I scanned my shelves. These searches are both fun and frustrating for me. I love looking over the spines of the books on my shelves. As I peruse, certain titles bring me flashes of happy memories, some titles from as yet unread books beckon to me. I pulled several books and looked them over, but none of them felt right for my mood. I didn't bother looking over the shelves on the back wall of the music room. They are all history and reference books and exactly what I was trying to escape from. There were some tempting re-reads on the long shelves above the piano, books by Evelyn Waugh and Terry Pratchett. I only glanced over the religious books. I wanted entertainment, not enlightenment. I went upstairs to the work room. The shelves there cover a wide variety of genres, but most of them are paperbacks, sci-fi, children's books, and young adult fiction. Finally, on the top shelf, in Miriam's collection of books, a title caught my eye, Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson. I've read some of Stevenson's most famous works, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Master of Ballantrae, and I love his A Child's Garden of Verses. But I'd never read Travels With a Donkey and it called to me. It's a short book in a pretty edition published by the Folio Society with a slip cover and great illustrations. It seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. And so I embarked on a twelve day hike across south-central France in 1878 with Robert Louis Stevenson and a stubborn donkey named Modestine.

This week we had a Big Event, another theatrical performance involving Hazel and June. This time it was a production of Bye Bye Birdie. Miriam and Hannah drove down to the Thayn's house on Wednesday evening. Stacey and I went down on Friday. This is Hazel's fifth production and June's fourth. We've been to see them all and they have been great. We went to the Saturday afternoon performance. It was a fun and energetic musical. Hazel had a bigger part in it as one of the Conrad Birdie Fan Club members. June was part of the ensemble. It's so fun to see them up on the stage singing and dancing.

Hazel is front, second from the left.

After the show.

While we were at the Thayn's, we celebrated Florence's fifth birthday, which is really on the eighth of April, but since we were all there, we celebrated it early. After church we had lunch and a birthday cake and she opened some gifts. We had a great weekend. It went by so quickly.

After church today.

Games, of course.

A jigsaw puzzle, of course.

Sunday lunch.

Florence.

We got home forty-five minutes ago, just as it was getting dark. When we got out of the car, we were greeted by the happy sound of spring peepers singing from the beaver pond across the road. I also found that my onion order arrived while we were gone. Kurt and I will be hastily preparing a bed and planting them in the next few days. The weather this week looks variable, so we will have to make good use of every dry moment. It looks like spring is finally trying to win with winter in reluctant retreat. I hope.