cutting, cursing, pasting, pressing, watching

I spoke too soon about the French hollyhocks -- they've all produced blooms now, except for one, and that one is one of the larger, healthier-looking stalks, so who knows if it offended the bees or is simply taking its longer, even sweeter and perhaps every-other-year time than all the others. Even the one growing diagonally. (I laced some of the others to the fence for support, but that one looked runt-y enough that I hadn't bothered.)

In the toiling and spinning department, I'm waiting to hear back from various contacts about this and that, doing a fair bit of homework, and inching along in the never-ending quest to turn things right:



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"I want to be good..."

From "Calculated Seduction," Betty Fussell's 1998 review of MFK Fisher: A Life in Letters (New York Times Book Review):

We can see in the letters how the split in her desire to be fully a writer and fully a woman shaped her daily life and career. As a writer, she explained to [Lawrence Clark] Powell in 1947: ''I want to be good, but I also want children and love and stress and panic and in the end I am too tired to write with the nunlike ascetic self-denial and concentration it takes. If I live to be 50 . . . ah, that is my song . . . if I live to 50 I'll know how to write a good book.'' As decade followed decade, she changed the number but not the tune. At 55 she wrote, ''I have now raised the ante to the fairly imminent goal of SIXTY.''

Betty Fussell is herself the subject of a current NYT article, by Melissa Clark:

Betty Fussell, the 87-year-old food writer, never took the main road anywhere. If there was a beautiful, sensual, messy path, Betty took it, even if it meant getting lost along the way. Which is just what happened to me in that oak grove one morning last spring.

When I finally found my way out, I saw her, leaning on a walker. It had been years since we had last seen each other in New York, and I was struck by the change.

"Oh, did you fall?" I asked gently.

"You betcha I fell," she said. "I was coyote hunting in Montana with my son."

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