Tangents

Today's subject line comes from an interview of Michael Van Valkenburgh, a landscape designer who "never met a tree I didn't like." Also: "When a new garden is being constructed, Van Valkenburgh has been known to use his body as a tree" to figure out where things should go.

We've had some weather this month. Not every tree on my tree made it through:



My foot injury from about a year ago is doing its flare-uppity thing. Some days I can bop and bounce with the best; some days, tree pose is out of the question. Most days, I stretch and limp and lope and swear and slide and shimmy (and in heels, too) depending on the hour, the surface, and how long I've been seated or supine.

On an upside, a kind friend who is an herbalist gave me a salve containing frankincense that I've been applying to the affected heel during breaks at work, and my office consequently smells fantastic.

Some evenings, it doesn't matter what's (over)due or how devil-long the damn list of other damn things to make has become, it's time to half-ass together a nectarine tart (loosely based on Brooklyn Supper's riff on Florence Fabricant's instructions; the linked-to tutorial on browning butter is a keeper):



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We have a bit of snow right now. Last week, there was a lot of wind. It flung penny-sized pinecones from a neighbor's tree into my driveway and front yard. They are adorable (but I have in turn been flinging them into the compost pile).



I wanted some short comfort reads last week, so I brought home a stack of picture books. I ended up discussing a couple of passages from Tomie dePaola's Christmas Remembered with an Italian American friend ("have you ever eaten scungilli?"). Of the rest of the books, the two I enjoyed most were Karen Hesse's Come On, Rain! (1999) and Kathryn Lasky's Georgia Rises: A Day in the Life of Georgia O'Keeffe (2009), respectively illustrated by Jon J. Muth and Ora Eitan.

Come On, Rain! -- Muth's watercolors are terrific, and what's more, the book features a diverse cast without making a big deal of it: Tessie, the narrator, is African American; Jackie-Joyce is maybe black or Latina; Rosemary is white, and Liz is Asian. Also, city!

Georgia Rises -- Eitan's style is interesting. Her choices of when to be precise (as in her spot illlustration of Georgia tugging on a stocking) and when to leave things rough-edged or blurry (as in many of the main paintings) could occupy me for days. (That's not an adequate description, actually -- it's clear that when Eitan decided to let the paper or lower layers of paint show through the upper layers, that was every bit as deliberate as the placement of a crescent moon or the half-circles delineating a dog bowl.) I liked that the illustrator was not attempting to ape O'Keeffe, and -- this is unusual for me -- that the paintings had a folky, somewhat primitive feel to them. Kind of 2.5-D - not quite flat, but not full-bore perspective.

Speaking of artistic choices, Jessi Graustein (whose press, Folded Word, has published some of my micropieces from time to time, has been posting some photos of her calligraphy practice/work on her Flickr photostream now and then. The glimpses of her playing with an Icelandic greeting are nifty.

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...what with yesterday-today being Tu B'Shevat...


Mepkin Abbey (South Carolina), December 2012

A few knots away
from the graves of soldiers and gadflies,
trees entwine
with the remnants of promises.

From things that make me happy

An apple tree in my mother's yard (Kentucky), April 2008

Briyah

On the New Year of Trees,
I squeeze the last
of the backyard grapefruit
my sister picked for me.
The lemons from her yard
are steeping in a jar,
the vodka from a friend
who died six years ago.
The pantry holds olives
for when I miss Greece,
which has been at once
for ever and never --
its unburied garbage
and unappeasable ghosts,
its sunlit branches
and well-tended ruins.
Now and then,
I dream of my mother
in a house that is neither
hers nor mine
and yet we know
our way around it,
the way I know
how this pie will taste
even though I have
not yet cut into it.

- pld



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