“That night he drove her all the way north to Sweetgrass, on the Canadian border, to see the Northern Lights. Great sheets of violet, amber and pale green rose from the distances. Shapes like the head of a falcon, a scarf and a wing rippled above the mountains. They sat in the truck cab, the heater blowing on their knees. Behind the aurora the Milky Way burned.”“The Hunter’s Wife,” by Anthony Doerr
I liked All the Light We Cannot See so much, I got a copy of Anthony Doerr’s short story collection, The Shell Collector,and read “The Hunter’s Wife” (astonishing) while I had tea at Wegman’s today. One reviewer said about this collection: “Eight stunning exercises in steel-tipped feathery fineness….[Doerr is] able to pin down every butterfly wing and fleck of matter in the universe, yet willing to float the unanswerables….”
The snow was really coming down this afternoon. I watched people buying groceries for the evening’s dinner, rushing about and remarking on the weather, telling each other to drive safely. I bought some juniper boughs, white button mums, a ruby-red poinsettia. (And a meat loaf for supper.) The snow was still falling when I left. I swept about four inches’ worth off my car.
“For me, windowsill arranging is almost a spiritual practice. When I am looking for materials to display and placing them on the windowsill, I feel more like a poet placing words in a haiku than a floral designer placing stems in a vase. I love the limited space, the double connection to the outdoors (through the window and my materials), and the structure that repeating the same activity over and over provides.”Nancy Ross Hugo,Windowsill Art
I was inspired by Nancy Ross Hugo’s delightful new book, Windowsill Art, to create this for “In a Vase on Monday,” the blog series by Rambling in the Garden. I used borage and pachysandra. The borage blossoms had flopped over from heavy rain the night before, so I decided to snip them off and enjoy them indoors.
I wrote about flowers and flower-themed books this past summer to commemorate the Ohio floral shop I grew up in (we just sold the building where my parents had the business for some fifty years) and to chronicle a renewed desire to have more flowers in my life. When St. Lynn’s Press asked me to review their new book, Windowsill Art, by Nancy Ross Hugo, I was thrilled. There is much, much more to this small, hand-sized book than meets the eye.
Windowsill Art is, first of all, about discovery: using seasonal blossoms and other easily accessible gifts of nature all around us – seedpods, cones, leaves, twigs, foliage, fruits, and vegetables – to make simple, striking designs we can display in the modest spaces of our windowsills.
Secondly, it is windowsill art as artist’s practice. Hugo writes, “Windowsill arranging can be to floral design what pen and ink drawing is to oil painting: a way to strip the art form to its basics and distill the essence of it.”
Nancy compares her windowsill practice to the work of a vegan cookbook author she once heard speak. The cookbook author focused exclusively on vegan cooking even though she was not a vegan. “She limited her universe in order to investigate a small part of it more deeply.” The simple art of windowsill arranging, Hugo writes, can be “a path back to….innocence and [the] beginner’s eye….And it can help focus a lifetime of practice and observation.”
The author is a naturalist and floral designer who, for three years, created floral windowsill art every day and posted photographs of it on her blog, Windowsill Arranging: Creating Nature on the Windowsill. She learned that her work greatly increased her readers’ sense of artistic freedom: techniques and ideas they hadn’t thought of before opened up new creative paths and possibilities.
Hugo offers instruction in how to find plant material and choose containers; ways to explore the process, including combining and shuffling materials and letting arrangements evolve; and experimenting with styles and techniques. She is suggestive and encouraging; there are no hard and fast rules. Nancy wants you to feel artistically uninhibited, free to try new things. Windowsill Art is generously photographed, featuring a gallery of Nancy’s arrangements through all four seasons.
You’ll want to keep Windowsill Artclose to your work area for inspiration.
April’s Lenten rose blossoms on the left, set against Japanese kerria blooming outdoors; daffodils and violas on the right. Windowsill Art features nature on the window ledge for every month and season. By Nancy Ross Hugo.
Windowsill Art has inspired me to try some arrangements myself. I’ve noticed bits and pieces from nature in our yard I would have overlooked for use in an arrangement. We have a great deal of moss because of shade from our huge hemlock and beech trees, so I hope to use moss in my next arrangement.
I’m expanding my collection of vases and containers, too. At a local dairy, I bought large and small glass bottles of milk and cream; the empty bottles are terrific vases. I recently put aside a small jug that was filled with maple syrup, as well as an empty balsamic vinegar decanter.
My family and I first travelled to Sicily 14 years ago, in part to re-connect with my father’s relatives. That was when I discovered Theresa’s splendid books.
Reading them again on our recent trip was like meeting up with an old friend. When I see Sicily through Theresa’s eyes, I see the island so vividly, with a more nuanced understanding of the complex people, culture, and history of this stunningly beautiful place.
We usually stay on the outskirts of Scopello, a small fishing village that is now a quiet, secluded haven for tourists. On this trip, we rented a villa halfway up a mountain on the edge of Zingaro Nature Reserve. Once the home of a tonnara (tuna factory), in years past Scopello celebrated the mattanza, the ritualized killing of bluefin tuna, every May and June. The mattanza was first practiced by the Arabs, or perhaps the Carthaginians before them. The custom died out in the 1980s when industrial over-fishing made it obsolete.
Scopello’s former tonnara, converted to tourist apartments
Theresa’s book is a love letter and an elegy to the mattanza and the people whose lives were intimately bound to it. During one of the last years of the mattanza, Theresa befriended the fishermen (tonnatori) on the island of Favignana and accompanied them on their boats as they watched and waited for the tuna to become trapped in their underwater chambers of ropes and nets. When several hundred tuna had been captured, the tonnaroti lured them from one chamber to the next, while chanting thanks and prayers to God, the Virgin Mary, the saints.
The bluefins’ final destination: the chamber of death.
“After a while huge black shapes rose up into the backlit square. Their slow rising was mystical, like a birth. They rose higher. Dorsal fins swirled, wild animals drawn up from a silent abyss.
They were giants, eight feet long, some bigger, and there were hundreds of them. The net was drawn taut and they skittered in front of us, half out of the water. I looked into their glassy black eyes. The fish were as big as men, some bigger than four men. When their tails slapped the water it rose in columns above our heads. I remember the din, the thunder of falling water, and their frantic thrashing. They darted to the corners of the net, but there was no way out.
The crowd went wild. People were soaked, screaming and cheering….The fish were churning the sea into a white froth, and then the froth turned pink.”
Tonnara anchors
At one time, these hand-made tuna traps were in Spain, France, Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey, Dalmatia and Corsica, as well as Italy; some sixty tonnaras dotted the Sicilian coast.
“Gone, all gone,” writes Theresa.
The old tonnara in Scopello is beautiful, but I didn’t like seeing it in the hands of tourists. In their heyday, the tonnaras employed, directly or indirectly, thousands of men and women; some even had child care centers on site. Theresa writes with great sadness of the tonnaroti who netted fewer and fewer tuna each year until they had to stop.
I don’t like a world where men and women who love working on or near the sea, who make their living by physical labor, can no longer do so because it is not profitable. I’ve never seen a mighty bluefin tuna, but I’d prefer to have our seas teeming with them.
Theresa Maggio is a compassionate and keenly intelligent traveler. Her passion for discerning the heart and soul of a people and a place will enrich your own explorations.
“It was a particularly good evening to begin a book.” The Summer Book, Tove Jansson
Reading in the hammock
I’m discovering Tove Jansson this summer, thanks to Claire McAlpine and her blog, Word by Word. I don’t know how I went this long without delving into this amazing Finnish, Swedish-speaking writer and world-renowned creator of the Moomintroll comic strip.
Next week I’ll show you her Moomins, but today I’m reading The Summer Book, a novel about a girl spending the summer with her grandmother, who lives on an island at the end of the Finland archipelago. The island in the book is like the one Tove lived on with her partner for many years, a wild and beautiful place superbly evoked in this story.
I’m lazy on these idyllic summer weekends, so I’m going to borrow the copy that’s written on the back of the book, which captures the novel much better than I could:
The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson
“….Jansson distills the essence of the summer – it’s sunlight and storms – into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love.”
This slim paperback, a New York Review Books Classic, was originally published in 1972. I love the cover illustration by Tove Jansson, which was on the original jacket cover. Jansson’s simple, black and white sketches are scattered throughout the book.
Her novel has inspired me to begin planning a summer vacation in Sweden, where my grandparents are from. It would be fun to stay in a fisherman’s cottage like the one Sophia’s grandmother lived in, perhaps near to the farm where my grandmother grew up.
To come: Jansson’s memoir, Sculptor’s Daughter; her collection of stories about the artist’s life – Fair Play;and the Moomins.
I don’t know if you’d find these mushrooms on Tove’s Finnish island, but that’s what I thought of when I saw these in our neighborhood.
“There were Lupines, Sweet Peas, Phlox, Bluebells, Day and Tiger Lilies, Monkshood, Peonies, Columbine, Daffodils, single and double, a Bleeding-heart bush in the front yard, and vines at each corner, which at times nearly covered the house. And always there was Golden-glow by the kitchen door.” An Old-Time Gardener
Grace’s Garden lilies
In The Language of Flowers, the main character, Victoria Jones, is a floral designer with a knack for choosing just the right foliage and blossoms for her customers, based on Victorian-inspired flower dictionaries that she’s studied. Having grown up in an Ohio floral shop, I was intrigued by the contemporary, upscale San Francisco flower scene depicted in Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s story.
In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, our shop carried the standard blooms – roses, carnations, gladiolas and the like – which were shipped from California and South America – and laden with pesticides, though at the time we didn’t give that much thought. Nowadays, floral designers are artisans who use seasonal, locally grown, pesticide-free cultivated and wild flowers, in artful, natural-looking bouquets and arrangements.
In both books, Debra highlights American flower farmers who are passionate about sustainable methods and land stewardship. Slow Flowers is a colorful, lush, small-sized, book with flower arrangements for every week of the year. As in a cookbook, Debra lists the “ingredients” (4 stems hydrangea, 9 stems pink snowberry, 5 stems Dahlia ‘Nijinsky,’ 15 stems amaranth), provides instructions, and suggests vintage and unusual vases and containers.
In The Language of Flowers, Victoria Jones falls in love with Grant, a flower farmer. She first meets him at a flower market, where he is selling varieties of lilies: tiger, stargazer, imperial, and pure white Casablancas. Here is what Victoria has to say about Grant:
“His face had the dusty, lined look of a manual laborer. I imagined he planted, tended, and harvested his flowers himself. His body was lean and muscular as a result, and he neither flinched nor smiled as I examined him…
He withdrew a single orange tiger lily from a bucket.
“I wanted to spend my life choosing flowers for perfect strangers.” The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Grace Gardens, Penn Yan, NY
Flowers were part of my earliest days and inseparable from family life. My parents opened a flower shop in July, 1952. This month, fifty-eight years later, we sold the building that housed our shop, though the floral business closed some years ago.
To commemorate the flowers of my past and mark how flowers remain part of my life, I’m highlighting a handful of books and authors, and a Finger Lakes “secret” garden. First, a book. Here’s an excerpt:
I’m single but I don’t want to be, the woman said.
She watched me work, arranging the white lilac around the roses until the red was no longer visible. I wound sprigs of rosemary–which I had learned at the library could mean commitment as well as remembrance–around the stem like a ribbon. The rosemary was young and supple, and did not break when I tied it in a knot. I added a white ribbon for support and wrapped the whole thing in brown paper.
First emotions of love, true love, and commitment, I said, handing her the flowers.
In a review of the novel The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh,Paula McLain (author of The Paris Wife and herself a foster child) writes: “I feel it’s only fair to warn you, dear reader, that Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s central character, Victoria Jones, is going to break your heart three ways from Sunday.”
The character of Victoria Jones and her fate drew me to The Language of Flowers,as did the lush California landscape of flowers against which this story is set.
Victoria has lived in more than 30 foster homes, and when she is emancipated at 18, she isn’t ready. It’s difficult to imagine any child emerging intact from our foster care system. I don’t know which was more heartbreaking, to see foster care let down Victoria time after time, or to see the ramifications of this in Victoria’s adult life.
Victoria’s talent with flowers, which may ultimately be her salvation, is another dimension of the novel that intrigued me. Her one kind and loving foster parent, Elizabeth, passed on to Victoria her floral “genius.” Victoria can not only artfully arrange flowers, she has a knack for giving people the particular flowers they need.
I loved this book and plan to read it again.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh cofounded the Camellia Network to support youth transitioning from foster care to independence. The flower camellia means my destiny is in your hands.
Hidden away in the woods on a hillside overlooking Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes is a stunning collection of over 40,000 day lilies. Grace Rood planted her first lilies in 1957, and now her son oversees Grace’s Garden. We visited the garden in mid July, when the day lilies were at their peak.
In the language of flowers, lily (Lilium) stands for majesty. A white lily stands for purity and sweetness. In Kate Greenaway’s dictionary, a day lily stands for coquetry.
A passionate bouquet could consist of bird of paradise for magnificence, bougainvillea for passion, and lily for majesty.
Doesn’t the secret language of flowers inspire you to make your own bouquet for someone you love?
Some lily names: Serene Madonna; Miss Jessie; Golden Chimes; Angels Unawares; Little Dancing Dress; Little Fat Cat; Buttered Popcorn; Coyote MoonGrace’s cottage
If you enjoy flowers, check out Rambling in the Garden, and join the “In a Vase on Monday” crowd.
I found this lily-laden tablecloth in a Finger Lakes antique shop. Perfect for a summer picnic.
I am now thoroughly in the grip of Donna Tartt’sThe Goldfinch. (In book circles, it seems as though half the universe is reading Tartt’s latest novel.)
After surviving a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (a hellishly claustrophobic, terrifying scene masterfully written), a shell-shocked Theo Decker is making his way home amidst dozens of fire engines, blaring sirens, and chaos in the streets, where he is certain he’ll be reunited with his mother, who had been in the museum gift shop during the blast. Knowing Tartt, I believe things will only go further downhill for Theo in a tragic – comic, picaresque way. I’ll keep you posted over the next few weeks, without spoilers, of course. Having read Tartt’s previous books, The Secret History and The Little Friend, her latest book is a must-read for me.
In my perpetual online quest for good reads, I happened upon Kim Barnes the other day. I can’t believe I haven’t yet sampled her writing. In my stack of library books, I now have In the Kingdom of Men, the 1960s story of “a barefoot girl from red dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that” who marries a college boy from her hometown. He takes a job with the Arabian American Oil Company in Saudi Arabia. The novel is loosely based on the experiences of Barnes’ aunt and other American women married to oil executives who worked in the Persian Gulf in the “Mad Men” era. I’ve also placed library holds on Barnes’ two memoirs, In the Wilderness and Hungry for the World.
As usual, I’m overly ambitious, but I’ve decided to take on Norwegian Karl Knausgaard’s three-volume My Struggle after reading intriguing reviews. The fact that our local Barnes & Noble did not have Volume 1 only makes me more determined.
I just purchased Turn Right at Machu Picchu by Mark Adams (someday we’ll get there) and The Shelf: Adventures in Extreme Reading, by Phyllis Rose. (She wrote A Year of Reading Proust.) Rose read, straight through, all the 30 or so books from LEQ – LES on a random shelf in the New York Society Library stacks – no matter how obscure the author. The books and authors include The Phantom of the Opera, California detective fiction, a novel by an Afrikaans writer, stories of French Canadian farmers, and one “feminist, humane earth-mother Jewish writer” who raises award-winning Newfoundlands.
Domestic Matters
We’ve been putting in raised beds at our house, and my latest obsession is backyard domesticity. I just bought Gill Heriz’s delightful AWoman’s Shed. From our local library I borrowed three or four how-to titles about building fences (made of wood, stone, metal, and plants) and backyard sheds, gazebos, cabins, and other nature retreats.
I’ve also been browsing through Sylvia Thompson’sTheKitchen Garden Cookbook (1995). Thompson has also written The Kitchen Garden, which I’ll have to track down. Both are semi-classics endorsed by Alice Waters and other culinary experts. The cookbook is good reading, and if you’re growing your own vegetables you’ll like Thompson’s tips about when to harvest. The recipes are inventive and sound delicious – I’m looking forward to trying some of them out. How did I find this title? It was on display at our library – a great way to discover good, not-so-new books.
In my quest to learn about gardening and raising vegetables, I’ve been reading Eliot Coleman’sFour-Season Harvest, as we hope to experiment with raising food through the winter. Eliot’s neighbors were Helen andScott Nearing, who launched the modern-day homesteading movement. He has made the Nearing’s home farming techniques accessible to home gardeners and small organic farmers. (The Nearing’s influential book, Living the Good Life (1954) is a fascinating read, by the way.) I like Coleman’s book because it is simple and straightforward, especially accessible and inspiring to the lay person. I’ve also rediscovered a book I purchased years ago, Barbara Damrosch’sThe Garden Primer.Reading the forward to Coleman’s book, I discovered that he and Damrosch are married to each other.
I love to visit the many small second-hand and consignment stores in our village. We have a used crafts supply shop I like to browse in, and there I discovered old copies of Betty Crocker’s delightful Kitchen Garden (1971) by Mary Mason Campbell with illustrations by Tasha Tudor;and Gardening Made Easy (1995), International Masters Publishers, a collection of full-color pamphlets that you order individually and store in a three-ring binder. (I believe these are now out of print.)
For good measure, I requested from the library a copy of The Supper of the Lamb, (1969) by Robert Farrar Capon; this “culinary entertainment” written by an Episcopal priest comes highly recommended by a friend.
So there you are, my summer reading plans – all over the map, highbrow and not, typical for me.
It was a bright winter’s day when I took this photograph, but it came out dark, evoking for me the deep winter chill of our snowbound evenings in upstate New York, which are perfect for reading books by the fire.
Before winter’s end, you must read The Snow Child. Based on a Russian folk tale, The Snow Child suspends readers between fantasy and reality in remote, 1920s Alaska. (One of many English versions of the Russian folk tale is “The Little Daughter of the Snow” in Arthur Ransome’s Old Peter’s Russian Tales.)
Mabel and Jack, a childless, middle-aged couple, move from Pennsylvania to the Alaskan Territory to homestead on 160 acres of land. For ten years, they’ve been locked in a private world of grief over their stillborn child; Mabel, especially, hopes to escape from and the young families and children in Pennsylvania who remind her of her sadness.
One day, Mabel and Jack build a snow child whom they dress in a red scarf and mittens. The snow child melts, but a little girl with a fox begins to appear in the woods around their cabin. Is she real, or is she an unearthly fairy child born of their own longing? You’ll find yourself seesawing between Jack’s harsh, real-world view of who, exactly, the girl they call Faina is, and Mabel’s wishful, fantastical, mystical one.
For me, The Snow Child (a Pulitzer Prize finalist) was ideal reading: perfect for the time of year, entrancing, deceptively simple storytelling set in a frontier that has fascinated me of late. I kept thinking of the breathtaking world evoked in Barry Lopez’sArctic Dreams. Lopez writes of virgin land, animals and people at risk from encroaching civilization, and I think of Faina as a metaphor for the wild and untamable.
Faina embodies, for me, my deep-rooted desire to have and love children. Mabel and Jack, through Faina, do find their hearts’ desire but, like all parents, they eventually must let go.
I loved how Mabel finds another kind of fulfillment through her art, and learns to channel grief, insights, and a growing love of the natural world into renderings and sketches.
We take “If All of Rochester Read the Same Book”very seriously here. We began marking it in January with countless book clubs discussing The Snow Child over tea and hot chocolate; writing workshops and readings by Ken Waldman, an Alaskan poet and fiddler; short, short plays that contain the word “fox” written and performed by locals at Geva Theatre Center;and for kids, making paper snowflakes and readings/discussions of fairy tales from Russia and around the world.
Still to come: on February 20 a presentation of “Alaskan Odyssey: Cruising the Inside Passage and Beyond”; on February 28 an exhibition of winter images at Image City Photography Gallery; on March 4 a demonstration of basket weaving in the Alaskan tribal pattern; and a Snow Day party with music, fruit pies in flavors inspired by the novel, and a scavenger hunt on March 7.
On March 8 a how-to-survive-in-the-snow adventure at Mendon Ponds Parksponsored by the local Sierra Club chapter will explore whether or not a little girl could survive in the winter wilderness.Also on March 8 there will be an Afternoon of Winter Fancies: Creative Movement Workshops and Flights of Winter Fancy at the Hochstein School of Music & Dance; and on March 18 – 19 an exhibition of quilts inspired by The Snow Child,sponsored by theGenesee Valley Quilt Club. Each quilt will be a “novel” and feature the artist’s love of quilting and reading.
On March 4, Rick French of Pack, Paddle, Ski, who has been to just about every country in the world, will host a Sleeping in Ice class at the Penfield Public Library. (Rick has spent many nights sleeping in igloos and snow shelters; my husband travelled to Alaska with him, but that’s another story.) Rick will demonstrate how to make an igloo in the backyard and how to survive a surprise blizzard in the mountains.
For those of you who are local, you can find a complete schedule of Snow Child events here.
I discovered James Fielden’s site more than a year ago. Ever since, I’ve been enjoying his writing, photography and, more recently, his music and audio meditations – all paths in which James explores aspects of spirituality and the inner life. James lives in Los Angeles, where he mixes sound for film and television.
His 23-minute guided meditation, Journey Across a Lake, is a wonderful way to begin the new year.
