The bitter scent of coming winter

Back when I was dating my opposite, the racist homophobic conservative hunter J., I was a regular reader of Gourmet magazine. I would prepare special meals for J., smoked salmon ravioli, pissalidière crisscrossed with anchovies and dotted with bitter black olives, pears braced with crystalized ginger and honey and baked to a custardy finish. J. and I had chemistry, an easily bruised love, so we each tolerated the other's differences, limped along even though he lived in another town and had very real reasons to keep me at arm's length.

I remember prep
aring a meal for him in the decay of autumn, after the leaves had dropped from the trees and lay rotting in the gutter and the breeze was turning cold and harsh. I was just 21 years old and could focus on the kitchen, had the time to think about cooking, and it was all still new, too, love and cookery. There was a recipe in Gourmet for roasted fall vegetables. I skinned and hacked a heavy butternut squash, added knobby shallots, garlic, and chunks of red potato, then tossed the vegetables with olive oil and roasted them in the oven. Near the end of cooking, I added slivered sage leaves, the bitter scent of coming winter.

sageleaves


Sage takes well to butter and olive oil, get crisp and intense, medicinal over gnocchi, tucked among thick slices of potato. My husband and I grow sage in our front yard. The plant sits between the flat-leafed parsley and the lemon verbena, its silver green leaves upright, purple flowers still drawing honeybees. I’ll have to trim it soon, deadhead the flowers and clean off the spider webs in preparation for the feasts and sadness of fall.

Here is the original recipe, from
Epicurious. Add 2 tablespoons slivered sage in the last ten minutes of cooking to recreate my more winter-scented dish.

Roasted Autumn Vegetables

1 1/2 pounds small red potatoes
1 pound shallots (about 24), peeled and trimmed
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled
4 garlic cloves, crushed
2 pounds butternut squash, peeled and cut into 3/4-inch pieces (about 4 cups)
fresh thyme sprigs for garnish, if desired

In a bowl, toss together the potatoes, quartered, the shallots, 4 tablespoons of
the oil, the bay leaf, the dried thyme, the garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. Spread the vegetables in an oiled large roasting pan and roast them in the middle of a preheated 375°F. oven, shaking the pan every 5 to 10 minutes, for 25 minutes. In a bowl toss the squash with the remaining 1 tablespoon oil and salt and pepper to taste and add it to the pan. Roast the vegetables, shaking the pan occasionally, for 10 to 20 minutes more, or until they are tender. Discard the bay leaf and garnish the vegetables with the thyme sprigs.

Gourmet
October 1990

Image: Attractive sage bush, much nicer than ours, from eHow.

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Hello ... Columbus?

By the time the lease ran out, I was barely speaking to Joan and Alistair. I owed Alistair money – someone in a group of kids I brought home from d.c. space had landed on the coffee table in a dramatic drunken loss of consciousness, permanently bending the metal frame. Post-fall, the table sat with one leg propped up on a thick paperback, its glass top tilting slightly to the left, a reminder of my dissolute ways. I started hiding out in my room, emerging only to eat and use the bathroom. Then Joan didn’t invite me to their spring engagement party, bluntly telling me that I had to find someplace to be when Alistair's wealthy Westchester County, New York family met her working class Baltimore clan. When it was time to move, I looked only at studio apartments, determined to live alone this time.

capitolplaza
Capitol Plaza Apartments


The studio at Capitol Plaza Apartments was cheap and within easy walking distance to Union Station. On the first floor of an eight-story building, it had a large window overlooking the basement roof and a hemmed-in view of surrounding structures. Small and dark, with parquet floors and “apartment-sized” appliances in the not-even-galley kitchen, it was a cozy cave, the right place to hide out for my final year of college. I moved in August 1991.

To pay the bills, I took out more student loans, got a better paying part-time job working in a library at a high-profile law firm. That’s where I met Chas.

Chas had recently divorced and was trying to figure out his newly single life at 39, the house gone, his routine changed. I was a loner 21, a strange combination of vulnerable and shuttered, talking more to the homeless men who bivouacked on my street than to my fellow college students. We were both in love with DC, with its high crime rate and crack wars and the insane mayor-for-life Marion Barry. The brick rowhouses, the policy wonks, the strange political celebrity, the feel of it all: It was home.

Chas had left Columbus, Ohio in the early 1970s and headed straight for the District. He would tell me stories of growing up the city, where his large family lived in a massive brick Victorian. It sounded exotic in its blandness, the spread-out burg with the solid architecture. “They just don’t make houses here like they do in Columbus,” he would chuckle, and I'd smile as if I knew what he was talking about. Chas got his own apartment at 16, a few years before he moved to DC. Since I’d been emancipated from parental supervision from the age of 14 or so, he felt like a kindred spirit, another concealed soul, self-protective and insular.

Most of our conversations took place on my early evening library shifts where there was no one else in the office to interrupt us. He would discuss the pursuit of church ladies (they were a tough bunch), explain his theories on electromagnetic radiation, how the destructive energy fields from power lines were spreading cancer and causing miscarriages. We would stare out the window at the office building across the street, watch the after hours workers work or not work, watch them watching us. There was one man who was always talking on the phone, standing with his back to the full-length window glass, earpiece pinned between head and shoulder. It was a performance just for us, the man’s hands swooping and slicing the air as though the person on the other end would be persuaded by gesture. On the street below, commuters dallied or rushed, flagged down taxis, spilled out of the Metro station on the corner.

lonewolf
A lone wolf on the streets of Dupont Circle.


I told Chas all about my former roommate Martha, my escapes to visit her in Chestertown, where our evenings at
Andy’s were blurred through multiple glasses of Dark and Stormies, a potent mixture of Goslings Rum and ginger beer; he’d get the details of the Bass Ale-soaked nights we had at the Irish Times or the Dubliner. Sometimes I would give him sanitized versions of barhops with Abe, an old friend from Delaware. Abe and I usually mixed our liquor, beer, wining and cocktailing it to the final rounds of Long Island Ice Teas. These evenings generally ended in an argument over something petty. We screamed across disco lights and crowded dance floors, tossed barbs in the back alleys of Georgetown, only to do it over again a month later.

In none of these conversations did I tell Chas about my drunken flirtations, about the Marines Martha and I dragged back from the bar one night, about the make-out sessions with Eastern Shore acquaintances, the booze-fueled pursuit of contact. Alcohol always uncovered the chasm, brought the need for other people to the surface.

In between the pickups and the throw-ups and the work and the studying, I’d occasionally see my faraway half-boyfriend. But most weekends were quiet. “Friday night drinking night?" the corner liquor store owner asked me during one regular visit, to which I gave a weak nod and smile. I’d drink, study, write papers, maybe catch the PBS Saturday night movie on my crappy box of a television. The Capitol Building was close to my apartment and I would walk around its lit-up beauty at night in all kinds of weather, braving bracing November winds, floating through the incredible sweetness of spring, when the cherry trees and azaleas were in bloom. (“I am alive, I am alive” I would think as I walked a path of fallen pink petals, feeling the joy rise up in me).

The week before Martha drove me out to Illinois in a battered U-Haul truck, Chas and I went out for one last round of beers, a temporary goodbye. I had every intention of returning to DC immediately after graduating from library school. But then I met a guy who got a job and we moved to a new town together: Columbus, Ohio. We started to build a life, adopted some animals, and finally bought a house. It was a four-bedroom brick Queen Anne in the Old Towne East neighborhood, a steal at $125,000. When I gave Chas the address, he was quiet for a moment.

“That’s the same block I grew up on,” he finally told me. Almost exactly across the street from our new house was an empty lot, the location of Chas’s childhood home.

franklinave
Franklin Avenue house and neighbor (we never had a flag up and the neighbor will have to be a story for another day). Photo from Old Towne East Neighborhood Association.


It was a strange coincidence. What were the odds?

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Writing prompt: Watch it!

Tuesday’s prompt, tidied up a bit. Although the people depicted here are real, the event is fictitious. The tone reminds me of the Eavesdrop Writer Blog, a site definitely worth checking out.

The Metro is packed. The threatened end-of-day thunderstorms have arrived and I am jammed in with other hangdog federal workers, soaked tourists, and a crowd of high school students all wearing identical Smithsonian raincoats. I stare at a man’s hairy hand, thick gold ring on his index finger, as I hang on to the pole by the doors. We breathe in the heavy air, faint with adolescent sweat.

tigerlady
Picture from The Janus Museum.

As the warning chime rings and a disembodied voice tells us “Doors closing,” she walks in. I see her almost every day at Union Station sitting by the Christopher Columbus fountain behind a phalanx of plastic bags. “Got any money to spare today, baby?” she’ll ask. Before I encountered her there, she once sat next to me on the Metro, in one of those seats half hidden behind plexiglass at the back of the car.

She’s hard to forget, this middle-aged African American woman, probably homeless, maybe a little crazy. Every morning she gets up and puts make-up on her face, stripes of beige and dark tan, giving herself the face of a bland tiger. Her eyes are always hidden behind sunglasses. Today she wears a threadbare, stained trench coat, tan, stylishly cinched at the waist.

Commuters flatten themselves against daytrippers as the tiger woman forces her way into the car, except for man beside me. “Hey, you: watch it!” he yells. She ignores him, the doors close, and we’re on our way. Next stop, Judiciary Square.
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Seven facts

Ellumbra of Smoke Signals passed this meme along some time ago and I am finally getting around to completing it! 

Instead of passing it along, I offer it up to anyone who would like to participate. 

7 FACTS about Jennifer 

1 - WORK: I was a reference librarian for about ten years, first for a state legislative agency, then for a Washington, DC think tank, and finally for the "world's greatest deliberative body." Four years of working 40-50 hour weeks in a basement paging through Congressional Records, locating report language, and watching C-SPAN with my colleagues for the laughs led to disillusionment and burnout. (Note: There is really much more to the job than that, but an exhaustive listing of what we did would bore most readers). I quit to go to culinary school. 

Took a detour to be a stay-at-home mother and freelance writer. 


2 - EDUCATION: After one false start, I received a bachelors in philosophy, a masters in library science, and a certificate from a culinary school. My first college experience was about drinking; my second, about thinking, my third, about getting a job, and my fourth about taking a chance while I still could. 

3 - FRIENDSHIP: When I do make a friend, it is generally for life (even when I am not good at keeping in touch). I’m still figuring out how to make connections as a reserved person without a traditional working life in a place I don’t know very well, since we’re still fairly new to Northern Californa. It isn’t easy, but I am getting there. I don’t need a posse, just a few confidants. 

4 - RELATIONSHIPS: My second husband and I have been married five years as of last Saturday, and have been together for ten. After a tough 2007, we’re in a good place now. Happy belated anniversary, honey! 

5 - WWW: The Internet was just taking off when I was in graduate school. I remember becoming quite engrossed in the usenet groups. Gopher -- a kind of menu-driven WWW -- was the hot technology during my first library job. It’s a totally different world now. Completely addictive, too, especially now that I am blogging. 

6 - FITNESS: Run 3x a week when I can, other exercise on the off days, walk almost everywhere. I’ve been mainly vegetarian (some fish) for 13 years and don’t see going back to eating meat. 

7 - DREAMS: One basic dream: that I make an authentic life as a writer. A better way to put it: I am living an authentic life as a writer, making the dream a reality. (Thank you to 
The Fearless Blog for cheerleading the idea that we must think something to make it so.)

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Leaving on a jet plane ...

tomorrow morning as C and I accompany H on a business trip to DC. Back home, essentially.

Since I can't bear to tear myself away from the blogosphere, I'm bringing my trusty laptop along. Hopefully I will have time to write other stuff, too, though that will be tough in a hotel room with little respite from watching the kid. I also want to work on a new layout for the blog. Naptime will be packed.

We'll be seeing my mother for the first time since last September. C is excited (this breaks my heart; even though they've had very little contact, he clearly loves her). I'm sure she is, too. I guess I am as well. If the air is clear and we're all feeling friendly and happy, the show will go off without a hitch. We will link arms and walk offstage, filled with warmth and love. If anyone's mind is clouded with worry or with things left unsaid, the performance will be off. Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief when it's over.

I'll let you know how it goes.
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