Watermelon Rind Preserves

When I first heard of watermelon rind preserves, in an ancient (to my young eyes) Pogo comic strip, the idea seemed miraculous. It seemed like soup from a stone – too good to be true. And what quantities of watermelon rind I had so thoughtlessly discarded! Texas watermelons – Hempstead, Texas – are gourds almost beyond belief, so I imagined gallons of sweet preserves.

This year, for the first time, I made them! But they aren’t what I thought they would be. At least, this recipe wasn’t. It was a pickle, actually – an Indian-style pickle, with ginger and lemon peel and allspice berries and cloves. It needed to mellow for a month or so in a jar – now it’s been three, so I had some today as a relish for some hot dogs – yum! Many years ago I made a green tomato chutney that was a surprise hit as a hot dog relish. This isn’t quite as perfect, but it is still a good match. Just imagine – soup from a stone. I mean, just imagine – you can eat those rinds!

Not everyone has a marsupium.

HELP, I’M A WOODLOUSE – GET ME OUT OF HERE! (WOODLOUSE SHEDDING SKIN), originally uploaded by yeblit.

There are firewood rounds sitting on my driveway arranged around the basketball hoop.

A tree leaned its way across my driveway in a winter windstorm and the inexperienced handyman cut all of the rounds at an angle, so they are devilish to split, but I’m making progress, if only to make basketball less treacherous now that Robin has grown large enough to play.

Lifting one onto the chopping block, I disturbed dozens of tiny shelled creatures who had made their home in the decaying wood at the bottom.

Woodlice.

Sow bugs, these are called.

They’d be pillbugs, if they rolled that way. (or any number of other names)

Crustaceans, like lobsters and shrimp and such.

Woodlouse seems like a nasty name for a creature that come out of the wood looking so clean and does no harm in the world, really – mostly just helping already decaying things along their way.

Detrivores.

One of them was the largest I’d ever seen, as big as my fingernail, bigger than the biggest watermelon seeds from my childhood memories of gargantuan Hempstead, Texas watermelons. In Texas I was told that like armadillos, they could carry leprosy. This is a canard, but there is some size at which crawling things go from almost cute to almost creepy, and this one edged toward creepy. She was large enough that I after I coaxed her onto my hand, I could feel her individual feet as she ran along the back of my finger and eventually to my arm. I flipped her over to see the gills on her undersides, the 14 wiggling legs, and what I think was the white marsupium where she would store her eggs – or could have been storing them yet.

In this picture you can see one shedding its skin – they do one half at a time, for some unknown reason.

Don’t be shy.

I walked out on the front deck this morning to knock the dried bits of grass off of my best pair of jeans so I could wash them. I shook them a couple times and startled the young deer that was feeding on my landscaping. My deck is high off the ground, and he spun around, a bit of greenery still in his mouth.

It doesn’t seem to matter how quiet I am – the deer run away. So I went ahead and shook the pants some more, struck them against the railing and brushed them with my hand. The deer must have decided that I was noisy enough to be harmless without being too startling, since he went back to feeding.

He looks young and frail, ribs showing, tiny nubs of antlers barely visible, if I’m even seeing them right.

Bellevue Jazz Festival

This looks good — lots of free acts and some pretty quality ones at that. And some pretty well known names for pay, if you like them enough!

Here’s a link to a list of the artists and show times — I think I’d like to check out one of the ones at one of the restaurants.

http://bellevuejazz.com/artists/index.php

The trees were hailing

 

Yesterday, when I went outside, I found nearly everything clouded up in fog and the trees were hailing, shedding thawed lumps of  frozen dew to fall like rain with an icy filling. The humidity was nearly 100% and I suppose the thick dew had condensed on the branches and frozen overnight. Now the very tops of the trees were in sunshine and there were tiny localized showers under just the tallest of the trees – like stereophonic rainstorms, the sound came from only some places and not others, giving an eerie feeling to the shortest stroll. I decided to escape the fog and head out to the logging road where I could gain some altitude and get some sunshine before my movie (this would result, as any who know me well might suspect, in my being too late to see the showing I had planned, but it was worth it – one of the pleasures of being alone is that you can change your plans and not feel as though you have failed or that someone else will be disappointed.) I protected my camera from the wet branches and dripping trees in a makeshift camera bag (plastic, grocery), and set off, maneuvering my shoes on nearly one-handed (as I type this as well – injured my wrist). The trail we blazed last year was surprisingly passable, and I was nearly out of the fog by the time I hit the main trail. It’s amazing how much the logging road has closed up over the last decade. It seems a bit of a shock (although not as much as I was to have shortly) to not be able to spot the old spot of the slash pile that was for a time a fine black raspberry patch. I remember noting it the first year, relishing sharing it for years to come with the bears. Little did I realize what a temporary and fleeting thing each years plants are on a clear-cut, as one species flourishes for a season or two or three and then is overshadowed and overtaken by another. There were many things I took for granted that year that are gone now. Thinking about it makes me melancholy – I’m not ready for the new look of the overgrown trail maybe because I’ve failed to stay in touch – illness, divorce, my job… The twins and I don’t share the same connection with this trail as Robin and I once did, and even we don’t have the same connection we once did, either. I look forward to the less changeable view from the valley overlook at the edge of the logging road just as it turns into the untouched part of the forest. But I’ll not find that spot on this trip.
When I reach the main logging road that curves all the way down to my left the 700 or 800 feet of elevation to the road on the other side of the hill from my house,  I am in the sunshine, glorious sunshine, and I see that it has been covered anew with fresh rock, gray and black. To my right lies a shocking sight – new cutting. The fog brings the same beautiful depth to the upper hills as it always does, but the foreground is now a jumble of slash pile and stumps and bark and soil.

Clearcut with Logging road

I’m saddened a bit, but in a way it feels like a renewal, a chance to start over – even though I actually arrived years after the last cut of the land behind my house, it feels like a new beginning. (This seems nonsensical, but it is so.) I don’t really know what to think – I don’t find our favorite overlook, instead I take a few pictures from just inside the scarred area, and head back to drive into down for some books (essays, thriller, the letters of E. B. White), some dinner (Thai – green curry) and a movie

Slash Pile

It’s Sunday now, the brink of midday, and I hurriedly type this out. I want to go back out, but I know that if I don’t write this now, I’ll never write it because I’ll have new thoughts after going out again. It’s warm and sunny out there this morning – the inversion that trapped the fog yesterday has brought its warmth all the way down to ground level now – 61 degrees outside, scarcely cold enough to warrant a coat.  There are terrific gusts of wind though, so I’ll wear one, and a hat, too. Probably I’ll return with a different sense of things.

jazz with frogs

I like to have the jazz on downstairs while I read upstairs – as though I was in a reading room above a jazz club… but that means that I have to rouse myself to turn off the music before I can sleep. I sit on the stairs to read a bit before I descend. In the pause between the songs the chorus of the frogs from the ponds in the front yard fill in the gap with their own improvisations. I stand on the deck, the rain has stopped, the moon is the merest thumbnail in the West through the trees. The frog music overloads the senses. I don’t have the ear for it — it needs long listening, I suppose, to fully appreciate the patterns. But one theme is clear…Spring is really here, they sing – At last, spring is here! My muscles ache with it, after the labors of yesterday’s sawing and mowing, but it is a good thing, certainly a good thing.

the utterly unrequired nature of the task

 

On Sunday I got out into the yard to scope out my newest project. My 5 acres is backed by 100+ acres of former clear cut, and I’m planning to blaze a trail so that I don’t have to go through my neighbor’s property to get to the logging road that leads up to the view. On a clear day you get a fantastic good view of Seattle and the full sweep of mountains to the North and West, not the merely very good view of the Cascades you can see directly from my property. I wasn’t sure if it was feasible, but it really looks like it will be — and without going onto my neighbors property at all. Making it bikeable will be a bit more of an effort, but I think it will be worth it — it will be a whole different thing if walking to the logging road is as easy as walking down the driveway. Although Brodie, don’t worry, we’ll still go down there and feed you apples! (Although, if you are reading this, then you, sir, are a most talented pony!)

 

Robin is worried that, like so many home projects, this will come to naught, but I am determined (in my flush of good health) and am confident of progress, even eventual success. It’s not clear how long it will take to  cut my way through all of the debris left by the loggers a decade ago. I am sure I am as much driven by the utterly unrequired nature of the task as I am by the brilliance of the idea

 

But on Sunday, I was clearing away the undergrowth to make a path from the driveway to the beginning of the clearcut. Per Robin’s suggestion, I used my Dad’s old machete, newly sharpened by my samurai-sword wielding yard man who helped out last year. Actually, it’s my grandfather’s machete, made of some pretty high quality steel. My father wrote on a napkin that it was made in the early 1940’s in Canada, where his family lived at the time. You can see from this picture of the handle that it has seen some wear before today…

 

100,000 steps so far

I got a pedometer over the holidays, and I’ve worked my way up to a goal of taking 10,000 steps a day 6 days a week. I’ve posted my current progress since I started writing down the totals on a page linked at the top of the blog under the heading 10,000. As you can see from looking at days like January 24 when I walked 10,002 steps, I sometimes barely make it — forcing myself to walk ’round the house for the required distance, in that case just before tumbling exhausted into bed. It’s not the exercise late at night that I think good for me, but the exercise I do on other days in order to avoid the discomfort of strolling around the house instead of relaxing or working in the evening.

In the last week or so I’ve started to notice a significant improvement in my health. I remember reading somewhere that 60 years ago the average American did a marathon’s wort of extra exercise each week. I thought that sounded incredible at the time, but I now realize that I’m walking about 26 more miles a week than I did before I started taking the bus to work (adding 2 miles a day) and now going to 10,000 steps (adding around 2 more). Still leaves me a bit sore and tired each day, but I’m needing less sleep(!) and I’m sure that my body is slowly strengthening and adjusting to the extra effort. I think I may be in better shape now in some ways than just before the first surgery almost 5 years ago.

Tracks of Tracks in the Snow

[this is an edited version of a personal letter I wrote shortly before I started this blog]

On Tuesday, I was snowed in and worked from home. Alas, without the kids here, I really did spend almost every moment of the day working, but I did get out for a couple of short walks on the property. I should have pulled the sled down and taken a few spins — 1 or 2 usually satisfies me. But I kept wanting to get one more hurdle overcome on the project I’m cooking up and so spent the day in bits and pieces.

 

It’s too bad that the kids didn’t get to see any real snow — next year we will get to the mountains no matter what! Perhaps we should take ski lessons, or just go cross-country skiing…or, in any case, we shall certainly go tubing or sledding.

 

In any case, it looks like I shall have the chance to go up to the mountains after all, since my group at work is going on a group outing into the snow in February, either to go tubing or snowshoeing.

 

But I was going to tell you about the snow at our house. I like the snow for making a record of the goings on around our property. Like a photo or, in a way, like this letter, the snow preserves a memory of the animals so that others can share them. Of course, we know that many creatures live on our property, but even the deer seem like a treat to see. But I’m sure that they visit our property every day, as do the possum, coyote, field mice, owls, and raccoons that we see only occasionally. And the snow lays out the tracks like a story. I have a book here with me, rather melodramatically entitled Mystery Tracks in the Snow, one of those marvelous near gifts from the library discards. Someday I hope to find a mysterious track that I can eventually decipher — to puzzle out a porcupine path, perhaps, or decipher those of a bobcat or some other of the wildcats that are known to come to our area on occasion, but for now I fancy I know what the tracks are just from the fact that there are so few animals that they could be from. I see my book has a description of a porcupine’s tracks (so I’ll be ready):

 

…life is easy for the porcupine, and it is neither intelligent nor highly motivated…

If you do find the tracks of a porcupine, you will see that it walks with a waddling gait, with the back feet stepping almost in the tracks of the front feet.

In dust or light snow its swinging tail will make swishing marks between the tracks.

The flat-footed tracks look much like miniature bear tracks. They are about three inches long and the long claws show plainly. There are five toes on the back feet and four on the front.

With its short legs and heavy body, it plows a deep furrow through soft snow.

 

Of course, porcupines don’t have it too easy — everything has its checks and balances. Given that the world isn’t overrun with porcupines, we can know that there are some forces out there keeping their numbers down. In some parts of the world, people eat them. Mostly Africa, but also, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, in parts of Italy — presumably the parts where porcupines live — and in Vietnam. We can also excuse porcupines their lack of a quick wit — their fearsome quills mean that they don’t have to use their brain to evade most predators, and a diet of bark, needles (conifer needles, not to be confused with the needles that the porcupines grow on their personal skin), leaves and other plant parts don’t put up much of a challenge either. I suppose there is a rather conventional lesson here about the challenges in life making us who we are, and a life of ease being a dissipative and weakening one.

I’m particularly interested in spotting porcupine evidence because they are cryptic creatures that I’ve never encountered. I’m sure that I’ll see one someday.

 

It’s funny that we all take such an interest in the large creatures of the world. Not just the so-called “mega-fauna,” or lions and tigers and elephants, but the mammals of all sizes, even though there are so few of them. Do any of them really live a more interesting life than a wasp or a spider or a butterfly? Of course, at this exact moment a surprisingly large moth flutters through the room where I am writing, as if to remind me that beside my bed upstairs is a book titled Moth Catcher, the memoir of a biologist, a resident of Arizona, by the way, who has devoted his life to studying them. (I bought it on the trip to Elliot Bay Books when the kids were here — managed to buy a few presents without notice, also.) There are many people who love bugs and birds, but I think they are many who wouldn’t be interested to hear about a butterfly or a Stellar’s jay, but who would be excited by reports of a porcupine or a ‘coon. (perhaps even by the story I intend, eventually, to relate.) It is interesting, though, that I have a book that lists and describes nearly every species North American mammal (lumping only some of the rodents into entries together). This task would be futile for the insects. There are only about 5,400 different species of mammals in the world — a good portion, nearly half (around 40%), are rodents. One could imagine a nice set of bound volumes with all of the mammals of the world laid out, one or two per page… Try to imagine, now, that there are also around 5,000 described species of lady bugs. I say “described” because there are almost certainly at least a few species overlooked to date…

Anyway, it was pleasant and refreshing to walk through the property in the snow, seeing the beauty of the trees and land covered in snow and the tracks of the deer and the coyote, just where I’d expect them from seeing them travel our property — the deer tracks crisscrossing the back yard and the front, and the coyote still skirting the border and trotting down the part of the driveway running between our property and our neighbors to the south. The animals are neither indifferent to our paths or bound by them — they follow along them for a while, then it what seems a sudden departure, continue on, probably following some path well known to them. I saw the same thing from work out of Carl’s window — a sidewalk near the parking garage was a common path for all of the folks walking in that direction, but there was a fan of tracks across the lawn where the sidewalk took a jog to the right when everyone else wanted to head off somewhat to the left. The fan of tracks didn’t project the sidewalk’s path forward, but reflected the varied destinations of the walkers, each with his own idea of the best route. I’m sure that on most days they each walk that same course, at least when the lawn is not too soggy. But only with a great deal of attention, observation, and perhaps even careful record keeping, would the fan-like pattern of their tracks have been apparent to an observer, and never with the clarity of that fan of tracks in the snow, evident to anyone who cared to look. I think that was what I was trying to get at earlier in this letter — the snow records a path, or many paths, and plays them back all at once in a single glance, revealing all this interesting behavior that would have been so difficult to perceive, indeed would never have been perceived, without its record keeping. I suppose this is the job a writer or a poet or a reporter strives to achieve — to sum up an event or call up a scene in the mind’s eye with the brevity and clarity of tracks in the snow.

 

I saw a raccoon follow for just a stretch the path of compressed snow that I’d trampled with my truck tire at the bottom of the driveway, where the ground on either side is marshy. Or rather, of course, I saw the snow’s record of those nighttime perambulations. She — I call her she for no good reason as there were what appeared to be two set of tracks, or the same raccoon on two trips, and I find it convenient to think of one set as male and the other female– She came from the woods on one side, where we always crash our sleds when we toboggan down the straightaway, and walked along the track left by my truck before veering at an oblique angle across the driveway toward the dark pond where the stream descends to pass under the driveway.

 

A bloody small raccoon-edible something (formerly someone, I suppose), was dropped or rested on the snow, leaving a smallish blood-stained hole near the tracks, which then veer to the water’s edge in a V, headed to the water and then away. (I suppose the raccoon will have no qualms eating corn, or simply eating the mice directly) I fancy this visit was to indulge the raccoon’s habit of washing its food. The tracks head back along the water in a straight path, meeting and overlapping with the other set that come from the direction of the street, before, in what seems a surprising turn of events to me, beelining across the water to emerge on the other side. It’s natural, I suppose, that the ‘coons would live back there in the marsh, but I can’t really imagine that they enjoy crossing the icy water — they seems to choose a fairly narrow point to do so..

This leads me to reflect what a great invention shoes and boots are, even now in the warmth of my (perhaps overwarm) home. I’ll bet that a raccoon would appreciate a good set of waterproof footwear as much as any creature, so long as they were easy to put on and off…

 

I’m trying to read more poetry — I don’t always enjoy it, but when I do, it’s a different kind of pleasure than other kinds of reading — like carefully examining a photograph instead of watching a movie. Part of it is learning how to read some of the poetry — the Writer’s Almanac, and Garrison Keillor’s  evocative reading style, has helped.

 

 

Here’s my poem of the week:

 

What’s In My Journal

 

Odd things, like a button drawer. Mean

Thing, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.

But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable.

Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous

discards. Space for knickknacks, and for

Alaska. Evidence to hang me, or to beatify.

Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected

anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind

that takes genius. Chasms in character.

Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above

a new grave. Pages you know exist

but you can’t find them. Someone’s terribly

inevitable life story, maybe mine.

 

by William Stafford, from Crossing Unmarked Snow

 

I don’t have much of a journal, but that’s an apt description of what a journal should resemble, if not, perhaps, particularly for me (I have no especial genius for being agreeable, I fear.) Despite the joys of reflecting on one’s journal and the advantage illustrated by the snow of being able to scan over a record of events, I have not found it easy to write at length to my future self, although I am probably my most appreciative audience. The brain is better at recognizing and recalling things with a trigger rather than summoning them from thin air, and rereading an accounting brings black a flood of all-but-forgotten memories. But perhaps I can write a letter to someone, as in this case, then share it with others and preserve it for myself here on my blog. Perhaps few will be interested in getting barbs in their hands, and others will scorn marbles. But I will send it all your way and trust it does not find most of itself unwelcome. And if parts do, well, then I shall call them journal entries and be content with reading them myself someday, tracks of tracks in the snow.

 

p.s. Dusk from the deck