A nasty upper respiratory
infection kept me home from the beach yesterday and is
keeping me home from nowhere I was going to be going
anyway today.
I'm almost finished with reading
Jinriksha Days in Japan finally. It's a slow read
because it has no narrative thread whatsover, well,
except for the part where she climbs Mt. Fuji and gets
caught in a storm. It's essentially a series of prose
sketches of places. The descriptions are highly visual
and richly detailed, almost like looking at a painting.
It finally occurred to me to look up Scidmore on the web
and lo and behold I found out she was a photographer for
National Geographic. That explains the intense visualness
of her stories. I don't recommend reading the vivid
description of eating bits of flesh off a live carp with
chopsticks at bed time though. Not unless you want to
have nightmares involving twitching carp. OK, that's the
only really gross and disturbing section. My favorite
section, and the reason I bought the book in the first
place, is the one where she goes to a bunraku performance
and describes not only how they do some of the puppet
special effects but also what each member of her party
ate as snacks and how much each item cost. I felt like
I'd been to the theater with her.
I'm simultaneously reading Bernd
Heinrich's latest, The Geese of Beaver Bog. My
favorites of his are Ravens in Winter and The
Trees in My Forest. If this one is half as good as
those, it will prove quite satisfying. Geese seem an
unlikely subject for him, but it turns out a gosling
imprinted on him and that got him interested in their
lives.
Between reading and drinking tea to
try to decongest my sinuses, I am also eating beet soup,
which I made yesterday. One of the problems with cooking
for one is that you can't just buy one beet with its
greens. So I bought a bunch of the most gorgeous beets at
the market yesterday along with some plum tomatoes and
turned them into a huge pot of beet soup using a new
recipe I read in the latest issue of Martha Stewart
Living. Me reading the domestic goddess magazine?
Well,I bought it specifically because it has an article
about beets, along with several beet recipes. Beets are
fabulous vegetables because they simulatneously appeal to
my craving for root vegetables and my craving for leafy
greens. Anyway, this recipe is decidedly un-borscht-like
as it uses cumin and coriander to give it a vaguely
Indian taste. It also includes the greens. The recipe
called for cayenne pepper to taste and when I tasted it I
decided it really needed Eros Pista, which I still have a
little bit of in a jar in my fridge. With a little bit of
Brown Cow plain yogurt on top, this is one satisfying
incarnation of beet soup. And there's plenty left over
because one bunch of beets makes enough soup to eat it
for every meal for a couple of days. I don't know if the
NIH has studied the effects of beet soup on upper
respiratory infections, but it's at least as efficacious
as chicken soup and a whole lot tastier and
vegetarian.
I'm also treating the upper
respiratory infection with hot lemon and honey just like
La Madre used to give us when we had colds as kids. I
bought a bag of lemons so I can administer this cure
several times a day. Basically I roll the lemon around on
the counter top for several minutes to loosen it up, then
juice it by hand on one of those old fashioned juicer
things, add about a cupful of almost boiling water and a
teaspoon of honey and drink it. Nancy insists this is a
Mexican cold remedy because she first encountered when
she studied Spanish in Mexico as a teeanger. I have no
idea where it originated but I remember drinking it as a
small child in Massachusetts nowhere near Mexico.
I've had whatever this is
since Tuesday but it didn't really cause me to be felled
until yesterday. In fact, on Thursday I woke up at 5:30
AM,saw the bright clear blue sky, immediately threw on
clothes, grabbed the binoculars, jumped in the car and
drove to the refuge. I had to. It was like the willets
and bobolinks were forcing me to go there. And were there
ever a lot of bobolinks!?! The fields were full 'em doing
their skylarking thing. I saw my first eastern kingbird
of the year, which means it is now officially summer no
matter what the calendar says. Astute readers of the bird
list will notice not a single warbler species. There were
plenty of them but they eluded me as I realized I was
actually still sick (and this was before yesterday so
little did I know). I was suddenly too tired to walk more
than a few steps along the roadside to peer into the
shrubs. I limited my list to birds I could see from the
car. There were plenty of them. And many of them were
attacking crows. Bobolinks after crows. Redwinged
blackbirds after crows. An oriole after a crow. A Canada
goose after a crow... Then it was back home to work and
sneeze. At least I didn't miss the last nice day there's
ever going to be.
And now to make more hot
lemonade...
