Country Dog

Nala the city dog went country this weekend. For the first time she got to run beyond the confines of a small, fenced yard, and I got to walk her without a leash.

Sounds simple, and great, but from the front porch of our Takoma Park colonial, the prospect of Nala off leash was daunting. This is a dog who, when she slips the leash, gleefully runs away, moving like a souped up gazelle, all muscle and motion, joyfully speeding in and out of neighbors’ yards and scaring all of us with an abandon that shows her ignorance of moving vehicles. She has gotten into the middle of a six-lane highway and we felt lucky to have gotten her back. The country place we visit is far enough from any big roads to feel safe, but I couldn’t be sure that a taste of freedom might not tempt her to mindlessly run until she was exhausted, and then not be able to find her way back.

I didn’t give her enough credit.
Nala is nothing if not loyal, and she stuck pretty close to me in her initial hours here at Misty Mountain, a sweet little spot in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. By day two, she was comfortably mingling with new friends at a party on the deck, and I’m sure had no idea where I was.

Having dogs in the country is an entirely different enterprise than it is in the city. No one goes around picking up their poop, for example. They come along for the ride when it’s time to go to the grocery store, or the beer store, or to pick up seed at the farm supply place. They do not go in these places. They wait in the vehicle patiently – or not.

Country dogs don’t wear leashes, though they do have collars and tags. They are in and out of the house all day. They have their own lives.

Nala’s country life included:
Running free through acres of woods
Swimming in the pond
Riding to the general store
Chasing a wild turkey
Carrying a dead rabbit around in her mouth – killed, I am guessing, by the resident cat
Flopping, exhausted, at my feet.

And although I suspect she would have come by all this naturally, Nala has a compadre at Misty Mountain. Daisy, the resident dog, is a chocolate lab puppy and the first dog I’ve seen out-energize Nala. (That's her in the photo, before she met Nala.) She joyfully bounded around, showing Nala her favorite runs and leaping into the pond – while Nala watched from the shore.

Our city girl’s experience with water had been limited to tentatively dipping her paws into the very shallow Sligo Creek. Curious about not only Daisy’s swimming, but the humans splashing around, she put her paws in, then backed off. One of us gave her a push off the dock and she plopped in, surfaced and swam the short distance to shore, unconvinced she’d like to do it again.

Two days of running with Daisy and watching her plunge in and out of the pond, and that began to change. On Sunday, Nala ventured in a few inches, drank some of the water and backed out. Next time, she went in up to her chest. Finally, she swam into deep water – and, as if encouraging her new friend, Daisy got in, swimming so close their sides were touching. Then the two of them got out, shook off, and ran.

Country dogs.

Coloring Book

We love color in our kitchen. Nothing beats vibrant red and yellow peppers on various shades of mixed green lettuces, done up in a sea-blue bowl with a sheen of olive oil to set it off. And did you know that the red peppers have twice as much vitamin C as the green ones, nine times the carotene plus the cancer-fighting phytochemical lycopene? True fact: I learned it from the American Institute for Cancer Research, home of all things healthy and cancer-preventive.

Experts often tout color as an indication of a healthy diet – the more color, the healthier the plate. Now Michael Pollan, our household’s hero du jour, has added his voice to the chorus. In his latest book, he suggests, “Eat your colors.”

I bought this book, Food Rules, on impulse, thinking I’d read it and then leave it out for the kids and their friends to pick up when they’re sitting around the living room, hanging out (sneaky way to turn them on to good health, I know). Formatted in micro chapters, it is an easily digestible, entertaining list of do’s and don’ts: what to eat, what to avoid, and a bit about why. I imagine it’s a condensed version of Pollan’s other books (In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I have not yet read -- I am admittedly nonfiction-averse, someone who starts a non-fiction book with enthusiasm, gets distracted two chapters in and returns to the world of make believe. Food Rules is so short, though, I got through it just fine).

Food Rules includes such witticisms as “Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of your milk” and “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.” Some of my favorites include “Eat meals” (as opposed to endless stand-up snacking); “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”; and “Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.” I also like, “Have a glass of wine with dinner.”

The kids haven’t had a chance to pick the book up in the living room – yet – but Clara wound up choosing it as the nonfiction assignment in English class. She read it with a friend, and now the two of them are experimenting with new habits – chewing your food until it’s liquid, for example, and crowding an omelet with veggies.

Not that I’m surprised -- many of the teens I’ve met care about what they eat and are various shades of vegetarian, have sensitivities to dairy or wheat, recognize the value of organic and would like to buy from local farmers (it helps that some of them have worked for the farmers at our nearby farmer’s market, selling produce on Sundays). Now that the Pollan book has made it into their consciousness, I am pleased not only for them, but for myself: They are reinforcing my belief in some of what he has to say. Clara even made her own rule, which she illustrated with fresh carrots and homemade pesto noodles on an orange colored plate: “Never eat food that is the same color as your plate, unless your plate is orange or green.” Makes for a beautiful meal.

Carpe Diem, Carpe Musica

Okay I’ll admit it. I haven’t sung with a choir since I was in high school, and that was a very long time ago. But here, in this spacious rehearsal room at Strathmore, a center for the arts, I get to do it again – carefully pick out my part in the sheet music, then blend my voice with the sopranos on either side of me. I love that leaning-in moment when two singers are listening to one other, and I love that surround-sound feeling of many voices – nearly 100 in this case – striking full-on harmony.

It is the third rehearsal of Carpe Diem, the ad hoc chorus I wrote about here. The music is lovely – Malcolm Dalglish’s Song of the Earth, with fluid, undulating harmonies and rippling rhythms evocative of flowing rivers and breezes blown through leafy trees. It will be sung, appropriately enough, for Earth Day.

But I think I’m enjoying the comradery of singing just as much as the music itself. Just as it did in high school, the music transcends the other things that define us as individuals. In school, chorus was the one time I stepped out of tracked honors classes like chemistry and English, and into a more diverse group of kids, where we thought about voices, not grades. In this adult chorus -- with a few teens sprinkled in – singers are more interested in musical experience and tone than who’s working what job and for how much salary.

Still, I do know that the woman next to me teaches young primary schoolers music – I asked if she sang professionally, as her strong voice was nailing that high A pretty well, and she admitted her job did keep her tuned in, so to speak. On my other side is a woman I know from my neighborhood, a minister mom I run into occasionally at yoga class. Last rehearsal I met a professional story teller. My carpool buddies include a psychotherapist, and I know there’s at least one doctor in the mix, plus a midwife, a land conservationist and a landscaper.

Here, though, we categorize ourselves not by profession but by voice: soprano, alto, tenor, bass. And then by height, so the director can hear each of us, and we can each see her. That feels like another throwback to school days – tall, lanky folks in the back, so they inevitably feel gawky and awkward; short ones up front, where they can feel stumpy and small. You would think we’d have grown past all that as adults but I can see by the way people shuffle themselves around that we’re not quite over it. No matter. The music does transcend – body image¸ age, profession, all of it.

I’m looking forward to the next rehearsal – last time, our director admonished us that we must do our homework, and I’ve been dutifully sitting at the piano, practicing. And here’s an improvement over high school days: I can listen to a CD of the music and sing along or I can use an MP3 player or my computer to hear an explanation of dynamics from the composer, Malcolm Dalglish. Yes, a few things have changed – but the inspiration of the music remains.

Carpe Diem will be performing April 23 – for more info see the web site.
(Image from Oolitic Music)

The Chopins: Bringing Music and Literature Together

This week my daughter, Clara, came home from school and announced she likes Chopin. Both Kate Chopin, whose book, The Awakening, she is reading for high school English, and Frederic Chopin, the 19th century composer. Clara’s fabulous English teacher (thanks, Mr. Anderson!) had the students listen to Chopin, to see if the piece referenced in the book matches the mood of the story. Talk about value added. I love this class.

So as Clara played Chopin through Pandora (do you know about this? Tell the web site what music you like and it will play it, plus music like it, for hours), I recalled how I once played Chopin on the piano, myself. I don’t play much anymore, but, inspired, I took out the old music books.

Playing a piano is a little like riding a bike – once you’ve done it, it comes back quickly. But if you’ve been away for long, there’s a whole lot more wobbling, and if you could fall down on a piano, there would be a lot of pileups and scraped knuckles on the keyboard. The muscle memory in my fingers allows me to run pretty accurately over grace notes and trills and magically land (some of) the right chords, but precision and consistency are long gone. And if I start to actually think about the individual notes, they leave me stumbling.

Still, going through my old piano books and trying some of these pieces was a little like going through an old photo album. Things are familiar in an “oh, yeah, I remember this!” way. I was amazed at how much I could play – and so very grateful to my parents for giving me lessons (and enforcing practice time) for so many years.

These occasional forays into reviving my piano playing always bring to mind the salons of the 19th century, when instead of turning on the television, people would play music for one another in the parlor. I get the feeling that most people (of a certain stature) learned music of some sort. And I often wind up thinking about how much more beautiful our world would be, if we chucked the t.v. and instead played music and read novels and poetry to one another each evening (a little needlework, anyone?)

On our Chopin night, Clara wound up turning off Pandora and I played for her (and, admittedly, myself) while she did her homework. Turns out that in addition to Chopin, she likes Mozart, too. Later, she dug up “Bastien Piano Basics, Primer Level,” and reviewed what she’d learned at around age 11, when I (briefly) sat her down on the piano bench and gave her lessons. And yesterday, she came home from school and made a beeline for the piano to play some more. I can’t tell you how lovely it was to sit in my office and hear I’m a Little Teapot, Skip to My Lou and Scarborough Fair drifting up the stairs.

First blossoms, all over again

It has been a long winter. The longest in memory for me and my Maryland neighbors – but perhaps that’s just the way it feels in the wake of weeks of snow and ice, followed by an uplifting but too-brief peak of sun, then bone-chilling dampness and rain for days. Cold, again? Yes. So the garden gloves go back on the shelf and we pull on our sweaters and wait it out.

And, in this grey landscape, we cherish the bright spots: like the first daffodils! I saw them just days ago. They were still tight in their buds, but like a lesson learned over and over again, I knew they would emerge, and today, here they are, open to the first sun we've had in a what seems like a very long time. Spring, I think, is the very origin of faith.

Other signs whisper of warmth and color to come: patches of purple crocuses (does anyone ever plant these, or do they just come up on their own every year?), an early spray of yellow forsythia down the block, a sprinkling of snow drops in my own front yard.

Last week (in that brief sunny period) I watched as my neighbor crouched in his curbside garden with his two young daughters (ages 2 and 4), showing them how to draw a line in the soil and sprinkle lettuce seeds in a (relatively) straight line, then gently cover them up. When the tender leaves emerge, and the girls taste what they’ve planted, it will be an epiphany – look at what we did! Even though I have sprinkled lettuce seeds year after year in my own garden, when the babies appear like green fuzz on the soil, it still seems like a miracle. And it is.

The twist to this lesson in faith: Planting a garden only underscores the promise of spring. The earth will come around, whether we believe in it or not.

Play It Again

Yesterday I slid a CD into the player and selected my favorite track and just as it began to play, was filled up with missing my son, it was like he’d gotten in the car after a long time away and we were both grinning over the opening riff of a Dave Matthews song, and then that piercing vocal interval, and the lyric, “I’d like to show you what’s inside, but I sure don’t care if you do or you don’t like it.”

What do I miss about Tyler, as he travels the world? I could tell you I miss his creativity, his fearlessness and disregard for convention. But words don’t quite get at the way we miss our loved ones. Thank God, then, for music.

There’s another tune running around in my head that brings me back to when the children were slippery fish in the bath tub, and I was a young mama singing to them: “You’re my little potato... my sweet potato, dug you up, you come from underground.” I thought it was just a quirky tune from a children’s cassette but now I realize that (of course) someone wrote it and arranged it and, imagine this, will be performing it April 23 at the grand Music Hall at Strathmore. And – surprise! -- I’ll be singing it there, too.

As a member of Carpe Diem, an ad hoc chorus pulled together to perform at specific events, I’ll be singing with Malcolm Dalglish, the very man who wrote “Little Potato” – and a plethora of other songs for dulcimer, drums and voice. The event celebrates the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, so while I may have visions of bathtime, most of the music will evoke the rhythms and beauty of the natural world – another grand subject difficult to capture with just words.

The potato song goes on -- “The world is big, so big, so very big – it’s new to you, it’s new to you.” Its bounce and upbeat melody convey the simple joy of discovery – or rediscovery, the privilege of parents everywhere who see the world anew when they look through the eyes of their children. Happy travels, Tyler. Happy Earth Day, all.

Rising ambition

I have had this recipe for 7-grain bread for too many years to count. It was tucked into the wooden recipe box I inherited from my mom – the kind sized for the little “recipe cards” we used to exchange, before the days of Cooking Light and Epicurious.com. You remember them: variations on index cards, with cute pictures in the margins and a little spot that says, “From the Kitchen of. . .” where you fill in your name. I have plain ones, too, with my grandmother’s handwriting (meatloaf, apple cake), the neighbors’ (Scotch shortbread, spiced nuts), and my mother’s (too many to list).

This recipe – on one of the fancy cards -- is in my sister Jean’s hand, so as I gather ingredients I picture her pantry, always stocked full of grains and beans and home-canned fruits and vegetables. I don’t know what her pantry looks like anymore – she lives several states away, and the last time I saw her food shelves was years ago. I know without looking, though, that her shelves are always well stocked, and that is a comfort to me.

I use a breadmaker for the first time on this bread, a breadmaker unearthed after 25 years of storage from my friend’s pile of things-untouched-for-years. I’m sure it has its own memories and people attached to it, but I don’t ask much about that. I am busy adjusting my attitude toward mechanized bread making.

Breadmakers have always felt a little like cheating, which is why, when my mother sent me money years ago to buy one for myself, I bought a juicer instead. Maybe it’s because I still love the feel of silky dough between my fingers, and I don’t mind the 10 minutes of kneading – it is a quiet break in an otherwise hectic life. I love to punch down the pillow of dough after its first rise, losing my fist in its yeasty ambition, knowing it will overcome this small act of aggression and rise all over again.

But I’ve also heard enough converts point out that, if you can make bread in less time, with less effort, it’s more likely you’ll make your own instead of caving in to the $5 loaves at the farmer’s market (which, in fact was the inspiration for this bread making session). So I give the breadmaker a whirl:

Pour all the ingredients into the machine, yeast first, lukewarm water last. Flip a switch, and watch it gyrate into what becomes a blob of living dough. Take a nap on the couch. Four hours later, gently extract an enormous, cylindrical loaf of seven grain bread your sister would be proud of.

Wow, was that ever easy. I am already picking out the next recipe to try.