food, wine, poetry

Full moon now. And the word is that it's a mega-potent one. A harvest moon. Called Mid-Autumn Moon in China and celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th lunar moon which happens to be today. I had the privilege of spending Friday with Pearl Huang here in Taos, with a small group of women. She explained the mid-autumn festival to us, read poetry in Chinese and English and shared traditional pastries called Moon Cakes. At some point we all tried writing Chinese couplets and now I'm obsessed with learning more about the form.

lotus-eaters
The moon cake dough is placed into hand carved wooden molds (presses) and the calligraphy on the top reveals what is within. Ours were filled with dates, bean paste, lotus seeds. I may have mixed up the top to bottom order, I was jotting notes and more anxious to sip my tea and taste each cake than write . They were pretty and sweet.  Like the woman on the box cover. The pastries are made in the traditional way by Sheng Kee Bakery in San Francisco.

Traditionally the festival includes food and wine, family, friends, songs, discourse, poetry, and is "impromptu and organic" according to Pearl. Until recently she taught calligraphy and Chinese language and culture at UNM and took student groups to China. She is a multi-talented artist, designer, tai ji master, working and teaching from her own RuYi Studio in town. And it turns out that we were born one day apart in the Year of the Dragon. She was born in Fujian Province in the Republic of China, I was born in the south Bronx, New York -- and somehow we ended up as friends in Taos, New Mexico! Go figure. There's lots more information about the Chinese Moon Harvest on the internet if you're interested. Sheng Kee bakery is now on my itinerary next trip west.

so-American harvest
Prompted by Pearl's stories of harvest time I remembered how, when we lived in New England, we'd go for drives on country roads and stop at produce stands overflowing with pumpkins and apples. When when we got home we'd pour the wine and I'd make an apple pie. Voila! Manifestation of same. Will have to write an apple pie couplet to go with it.

Refusing worldly worries,
I stroll among village strollers.

Pine winds sing, the evening village
smells of grass, autumn in the air.

A lone bird roams down the sky.
Clouds roll across the river.

You want to know my name?
A hill. A tree. an empty drifting boat.
               Hsu Hsuan (916-991)

back of beyond

A night of intermittent rain. I awaken early, look out the window toward the west, see the ocean. Not really, of course, but so like it that it makes me shiver. I expect to see waves, rhythmic movement. But no, only low clouds, remainders of the wet night. Now I'm imprinted for the whole day. Can't get the ocean out of my mind. Feel restless. Bags packed. Want salty air, curly hair. Reality of dry high desert air, straight hair, wild yellow chamisa, purple asters. I can adapt, always have. Suppress the thing that overwhelmed the morning. Coffee. Yarn. Reality. I wear the Mexican jade necklace every day lately. Weight of amber grounds me, dusky old jade tickles imagination. He said it was centuries old.

and then she said...
I can show, now, what I've been working on. Handwarmers. What I call Knitz Mittz. Beginning to feel sense of accomplishment. Getting ready for big 3-day craft show at November's end. They love fingerless mitts -- and no one makes them quite the way I do. Sell out every time.

September's end so close. Where did it go? Autumn.  I missed the equinox. Realized it after. Remembered that for decades, in other places, I wasn't even aware of the dates of seasonal change. So different here. Sunset, sunrise. Seasons changing dramatically. Obviously. How can one not be aware? Nature reigns in spite of humankind. Herds of cattle in fields. So many babies. Usually see them in spring. Maybe the Indians know that the winter will be mild. But how do they know? They know things we don't -- in spite of Walmart and Jack Daniels. Wish  grandbaby Dante was here. I understand that he's in love with cows! He would have been delighted today. The green field dotted with brown and black, yellow aspen backdrop.

I observe ravens bathing at the top of the monolithic fountains in the center of the new roundabout as I drive by. Can't stop to take picture. Old Pueblo Indian man once said to me, "you write, you don't need a camera". But how can I show you? Wings flapping. Wet shining black feathers. The frenzy of pure avian ecstasy.  It seemed so. And, here, they gather on latilla fences as if to leave -- but stay.

the twilit trees are full of crows
                    Tu Fu

the valley is full

In spite of having new editing work to do, around noon yesterday I suddenly wanted to go on a road trip. Turned out that Ron felt the same and with the new car sitting in the driveway and the promise of great gas mileage, we packed up some chocolate, apples, water, camera, and set off. We weren't quite sure where to go, but found ourselves heading toward Abiquiu. It's been a while since we were there and I'd almost forgotten how incredible that landscape feels.  Once again we are assailed by the subjects of Georgia O'Keefe's paintings all around us! We were in them! The Red Place, The White Place. Chimney Rock, Ghost Ranch. And, of course, the Pedernal (Ghost Mountain).

Lots of our own memories reside in that landscape. Hot summer day with our two best friends - one of the Gambler movies (Kenny Rogers) being filmed there -- the "Indian" extras with bows and arrows and full Hollywood war paint galloping toward us, scaring us, and then inviting us to stick around and chat.  By the following year all four best friends had moved to Taos. There was swimming at Abiquiu lake with granddaughter Kira when she was a child; introducing Spike-the-dog to car and lake the first week we had him and he confidently waded into the cold water up to his floppy ears; the incredible week-long poetry workshop at Ghost Ranch with Joan Logghe who later became Poet Laureate of Santa Fe; another writing workshop (where I assisted) and we hiked with Natalie Goldberg to her secret green-water pond and I watched a bunch of hopeful writers plunge in, splashing and swimming until someone spotted a water snake and everyone ran out shrieking! And nobody's cellphone worked and our caravan of cars got lost on the way back. Or the time I went to Ghost Ranch alone and stayed in a Zen-like room and spent mornings under the trees with my notebook writing bad poetry and good journal notes that eventually led to published essays.

All of it is still there. The chairs, the pond, the mountains and sky, the magic, the inspiration to write and take pictures. We noted the same apple tree I photographed in the late 1980's with my new (then) Canon Elph camera (APS film) -- heavy now with 21st century apples. That camera (which I still have) was my first taste of a compact point & shoot that never disappointed in sharpness and dependability. I'm still a Canon fan, only now we've gone digital and smaller and I'm into instant gratification. Wonder if that film is still available somewhere? Wonder if I want it?

early autumn haze
on the painter's mountains
we leave with apples
                     in the camera 

in the blue light

surrounded by dusty dreams
It seems lately that every time I have a free day, it gets taken up with a craft show, a fest of some kind, or a yard/rummage sale. Yesterday it was the Taos Trade Market - a casual gathering of vendors with stuff to sell, on a graveled half acre or so in town.  Once again my poet friend Leslie invited me to share space with her and her necklaces called Bead Poems. It was a fun day -- gorgeous weather -- and a mix of yard-sale stuff and good quality crafts. I didn't bring my handknits since I'm gathering them together for the 3-day Yuletide Crafts Fair at end of November. That show requires a large inventory and I don't want to reveal what I'll be adding this year (which would be too expensive for this trade venue anyway). Nor the fiber "aht" I'm preparing for the exhibit at RuYi Studio in early October. Instead I showed and sold some quality things I've gotten over -- including yarn stash. So. Yesterday's winner of The Most Original and Best of Show? (my unofficial award) is friend Krista's great wedgey-stillettos!

I would have bought a pair if there was any chance of my being able to even take one step in them without breaking my neck! I can't even wear Danskos without tripping! Some guys in big trucks showed up with stuff decidedly not local (the selection and the guys!). Don't know if they actually sold anything, but they added exotic interest to a mostly ordinary flea market. Dig this chair.

All in all it was a fun day with lots of visiting, conversation, some sales. I'm still in declutter mode and beginning to see the light! Occasionally I feel a twinge of regret about something that got caught in the outflow wave, but not often and on second thought, not important.

blue light of the tent
gravel that recalls shells
field of yellow ox-eye daisies
sparkle of beads in the sun
a basket of yarn and wind
     carrying scent of yearning

dust in the wind

 I sit quietly surrounded by dust that was once a storm...
(Alvaro Cardona Hine, Thirteen Tangos for Stravinsky, 1999)

Floods of memories unleashed tonight after a phone call from dear granddaughter Kira (pictured above with me in 1990). How well we remember her yearly summer visits to Taos when she was growing up. We sat at the kitchen table tonight recalling some of the adventures we had with her as she became our charge for a few weeks every year -- until her fifteenth birthday. How empty the first couple of summers were without her. But our bond holds fast. She's a busy mother, college student, partner, nurse-in-training.... smart, savvy, and beautiful.

Dear Dante (who was supposed to be napping) today told grandma-in-new-mexico, "I love you". He doesn't really know me, but he will, he will... On the weekend I'm going to buy the blue yarn to make the hoodie cardi I promised his mother. A cool guy needs a cool sweater.

those 13 tangos...and other things...
Last month, with my visiting friend Mag, we stopped at the (Alvaro) Cardona-Hine Gallery in Truchas on the High Road to Taos. Alvaro wasn't available but we spent time with his artist/writer wife Barbara Macauley and I bought his memoir. It came out in 1999 and is about his arrival with his family in Los Angeles, as a boy from Costa Rica. He's in his mid-80's now and was resting when we arrived so we didn't get to see him this time.  I'd wanted to read the book for years, having taken workshops with him, attended social gatherings and readings of his poetry -- but time passes and things get overlooked.

He is also a painter, a Zen Buddhist, and has written other books. We had a good long chat with Barbara surrounded by their paintings in the lovely gallery. Barbara is an accomplished writer and artist in her own right. She's published a memoir, just had an early novel reissued, and is working on a new play. They are an amazing couple who live in a beautiful ungentrified area surrounded by miles of landscape, trees, flowers and sky.

Alvaro's book was cited by Marjorie Agosin as "A vibrant as well as lyrical memoir shaped by an exquisite language and a wise heart."
Yes. It's pure poetry and I highly recommend it.

roll out the barrel

Thanks to my friend Leslie Ullman, poet and bead artist, I was invited to share her tent space at the Taos Ski Valley Oktoberfest yesterday. Expecting it to be cold at 9,000' altitude, I loaded the car up with sweaters, fleece vest, jacket...and it turned out to be a perfect warm Indian Summer day! With aspens turning vivid yellow against the cloudless cobalt sky. I never wore the jackets and gradually peeled off my mohair sweater and first layer. Crowds of visitors attended this annual event, some in costume.

There was beer, wine, bratwurst with sauerkraut, frito pies, desserts, horseshoes and music...

...polkas, oompah-pah, generally lively and loud.  Songs my parents used to sing. Music sailed through the high valley and into the thick evergreen woods. I could almost see the waves of music -- like in an animated movie. The yodeling contest was cancelled (no comment).

The spire that looked so moody last Saturday in misty rain and low cloud shone against the clear crisp September sky.

I displayed a few shawls/scarves, lots of socks, a couple of hand warmers and hats. Didn't sell much. But met a young woman who is going to spend early November polar bear watching in Canada! How cool is that! She bought a pair of hand warmers. Otherwise, it was too warm to think about wool, and Oktoberfest isn't about crafts, it's about beer and music! Leslie and I drank wine and ate a delicious German crumb-thing with thin-sliced glazed apples and a dollop of fresh whipped cream on top (gone before I could take a photo). The ski lifts are closed down after a summer of use and preparations will soon begin to ready them for the ski season opening in November.

 

Since I'm not a skier and don't love snow and cold, I prefer the Ski Valley in summer and fall. But I do think there should always be balloons.

stories & food

It's here! Ready for the October 5th launch party at the La Fonda Hotel in Taos.  This is the book I've been working on and losing sleep over -- so pleased to see it manifested at last.

Each recipe is accompanied by a 200 word original story. 

SOMOS (Society of the Muse of the Southwest) is the literary organization here in northern New Mexico. This book will be its premier fundraiser -- eighty-four stories and recipes submitted by writers who also cook and bake. This book was the brainchild of editor Bonnie Lee Black, author and Gourmand International Award winner. Many people were involved in it's inception and I served as Production Manager and co-editor. We're pretty excited about the way it turned out.

Author John Nichols said:
"These recipes from all over the world are more fun to make than the spaghetti sauce in Goodfellas. You can replicate potent Arabic coffee, nosh Italian calamari or zeppole, and gobble treats made by a Greek poet. Each writer has a story that can be gory (like the night the canary died), or full of glory (like the day Emeril blessed this food to your youth). SOMOS has mixed up a goulash that is great to read, and even more fun to eat. Buen provecho and bon appetit. Enjoy!"

I couldn't have said it better. The book can be ordered at www.somostaos.org.

if you ask me

It feels so good to feel peaceful again. Confident that the book project will work out well after all is said and done -- and all is almost done. Tomorrow the printer proof comes in and something inside tells me that it will pass muster. It feels good to sleep through the whole night, to feel the future will unfold the way it's supposed to and no matter what it brings, it's all okay. It has to be. There are uncertainties, more every day, but what should I do? Cave in? Not likely. At least not tonight. I also know that this is a very middle-class American point of view that doesn't apply to so much of the rest of the world. Or to the friends who have been recently diagnosed with cancer. Or to the ones who are are in limbo waiting for diagnoses, or chemo to begin...

outflow makes way for inflow
Yesterday was a sweet day with new women friends at the rummage sale at RuYi Studio. How good it felt to sit outside under the portal and in tree shade on a lovely cooler day filled with sunshine. To send off the things I didn't want anymore to buyers who may love them anew.

The African mudcloth zafu will be installed in the meditation studio from now on.  The Zen-white teapots on the tables of the fiber artist and the psychoanalyst. The yarn will comfort the 8 year old boy whose allergies are so bad that he needs something soft when symptoms of agitation strike. He chose several balls from my yarn stash -- some hand dyed in colors that appealed to him; a ball of muted earth colors; a ball of thick and thin fuzzy blue yarn that I once made a scarf with and wore to Italy. A beautiful boy with a delicate constitution in this edgy world. Precocious and smart, with an attractive young mother who allowed him to chose on his own. And the little handwoven pouch from Bolivia where he wants to stash small treasures. That's what makes this sort of endeavor worthwhile. I'm grateful for the small amount of cash, just as the studio was grateful for donations to keep the doors open. I scribble in my notebook during lulls in activity.

coming down from the sky
The night has grown colder now. The kitchen slider, still wide open, let's in a breeze that feels fresh and ocean-like. I wonder what happened in the middle of last night when the sound of yelping coyotes awakened me. There was no sign of disaster this morning. I hope my neighbor's goats and chickens are okay -- I didn't ask. No cricket sounds tonight. When did they leave?

A freshness lives deep in me
which no one can take from me
not even I myself --
         Gunner Ekelof

poetic & passionate

reality is fine with me
Yesterday we traded in my beloved ten year old red Toyota RAV4 and drove home in the rain in a brand new dark metallic gray Corolla. Not the most exciting car in the world but affordable, new, reliable, comfortable, fast, and good on gas. It rained from Santa Fe to Taos, on and off all night, and a light mist is still falling. Itching to try out the new car alone, early this morning I drove up to the Ski Valley where it was mysterious and moody. And cold! 48 degrees at 9,000 feet.

Muffled sounds. Hardly anyone around. A raven. Low clouds you could almost walk through. No coffee to be found in the closed up cafes.

Tops of mountains invisible (if you can't see the mountaintops, are they still there?).  Scent of wet pine, earth and aspens. River water rushing ice cold through trees and over rocks, down and down.

The whole time I drove I listened over and over to Billy Joel singing "New York State of Mind".  I love that song. It fit the mood so well. The lyrics mention evergreens and the Rockies and letting reality slip away.

all those amber needles! dear me!
After the intensity of the last few weeks, it's a pleasure to be enveloped for a day in clouds and rain; to enjoy wearing a sweater and wool socks, no matter how brief. Indeed, knowing it will probably be hot again tomorrow, enhances the experience. And I can look forward to knitting with my friend Mag who informs me she will be visiting again in a couple of months and that she already started her winter sweater in San Francisco. I'm just musing over mine. A cardi, I think. Thick and light. Maybe Lopi? The Wool Festival of Taos is happening in less than a month, will something special speak to me? One night that same weekend, Storied Recipes will be launched at a book party. Wool and yarn and wine. Sheep and words and food. A super-busy weekend, but in a nice way.

I always knit in the wintertime, and I can't endure doing that in the summer! But as soon as the days grow shorter, I hunt for my bag of wools and all my amber needles, and I am perfectly content to sit in the window and knit and knit and knit and ponder and remember and get into a kind of even rhythm of thinking, feeling, breathing, knitting; that is, somehow, a very satisfactory activity, like a dance, or like the slow, sure motion of a constant star.  Out of this purring intensity there are produced many little sweaters.
                      (excerpt from Mabel Dodge Luhan, Winter in Taos, 1935)

free bird

Looking forward to a day that I expect will unfold organically, like the (expensive) matcha green tea bag floating lazily in my serendipity mug. The book deadline was met last night and now is in the hands of the person working with the printer. I don't foresee any glitches (she says with fingers crossed and hope in her heart) and I'm designating myself "free bird" for a couple of days. Finished sock #1 late last night (and fell asleep before Bill Clinton's nominating speech at the DNC) and this morning in the hot sunlight streaming in onto the kitchen table, I notice the orange stripes match Ron's small maquette. Space now to think about autumn's inevitable arrival soon, warm sweaters and new socks. New yarn...

And speaking of Clinton, wasn't his speech great! There seems to be a lot of agreement about that -- including a positive comment from Fox News! We watched the speech this morning in its entirety on my mac, at the kitchen table (mission control), over morning coffee and tea. Good, positive way to start a new day.

Intense hot red sun,
heartlessly--but already
autumn in the wind
                  Basho

and so it goes

This may be the most extended busy time for me, ever! (The clock is Big Ben of course -- it seemed appropriate -- not in my neighborhood though, more's the pity!). It seems I haven't stopped racing and stumbling through details (which I hate) toward deadlines (which I tolerate) since June. I thought the trip west in July would set me on a different path -- and it did in some ways -- but mostly (due to technology and other unexpected events) it ultimately didn't. Perhaps I expect too much. I know I'm responsible for creating my own world and it's filled with projects I kinda wanna be involved in and said the fateful yes! (probably even with enthusiasm).  My new outlook, gained from bitter experience, is to say no more often and not look back. If I ever finish the three (good) projects still pending (one is due tomorrow) maybe I can pay attention to my own pleasures, if I can remember what they are. And today, after only four hours sleep last night, my brain is too foggy to remember much of anything except what I need to do in the next hour.

time marches on
So there hasn't been much time to knit. When there is a gap at night, I'm usually too tired. But I'm trying. Picked up a cheerful sock found (on needles) in a forgotten bag in my closet.

I'd abandoned it in early summer one year (when?) because the colors didn't fit my pastel mood (this I remember) but here we are again, end of summer, autumn looming. Fading golden sunflowers are everywhere, brown seed centers, variagated grasses in the fields; exactly like this yarn, except for the aspens way up there that haven't turned orange yet but surely will before I finish this entire pair of socks. It's made with Italian yarn that actually still had a label: Lana Grossa Meilenweit color #3110. I bought it a long time ago. But now I have to move on. Only able to glance at the rich colors and figure out how to find the time to gather stuff together for a Rummage sale on Sunday to benefit the Taos International Society at RuYi Studio founded by Pearl Huang, Tai 'chi master (check it out) and all-around Zen-type good person. I hope to gather enough of my stash to tempt others into yarn-desire. If you're in Taos this weekend, come by between 10 and 4 to 108A Civic Plaza Dr., back parking lot off Martyr's Lane. There will be signs. There are always signs....