I had fondly deluded myself that I was going to get back on my regular writing schedule, but I am still on vacation, with the additional welcome distraction of a very dear friend who is paying us a four day visit in our little Adirondack cottage. Before she arrived, I drew up a list entitled Things to Do Here and we've gotten to about a third of them. As we toddle about, spending money like drunken sailors at the tag sales, immersing ourselves in icy mountain streams, and eating far too many local delicacies (the cider donuts! the Maple Creemies! Daily Chocolate in Vergennes!) I console myself with the assurance that, after my friend leaves, John Wirenius' Phineas at Bay will show up on the dining porch (it's the country, you see - nobody steals your unattended mail, and parcels are simply dropped off wherever their owner is most likely to see them, and where they won't get soaked in case an unexpected mountain thunderstorm comes along) and I will have the pleasure of reading it for the fourth time and then writing a well-thought-out, profound, witty review, all the while stroking the pretty white pages and emitting little coos of delight about the fact that it's a really, truly, honest-to-goodness book, made out of really, truly, honest-to-goodness paper. (But don't let me stop you from ordering the e-book, if that's how you roll.)
So what are some of the things we have done up here?
Well, the first day was given over the the activity known in our family as Vermonting. In other words, we transported a female who is over the age of consent across state lines, forcing her to binge on the aforementioned cider donuts while still in New York State by emitting shrieks of, "Look, look, there's Gunnison Orchards, we have to stop!" careening into the parking lot, and tumbling out of the car like Eliot Ness in pursuit of Al Capone. I mean, the donuts are that kind of good. I go for the plain ones, although they have fancy, too. This year, they got a little silly and added maple-frosted donuts with crumbled bacon on top, thus getting on the "put a little bacon on everything that used to get cilantro/wasabi/black pepper on it and charge 30% more" bandwagon. But as far as I'm concerned, this is what is known in musician parlance as "gilding the turd." The plain cider donuts are so exquisitely perfect that to bedizen them with anything at all - even a dusting of cinnamon sugar - strikes me as being the sort of bad idea endorsed by those who waste their time embroidering brocade. The plain donuts are masterfully restrained as to their sweetness, tender to the tooth, and reveal a moist, yielding interior after crunching through a superb surface crispiness. They do not travel well, and must be consumed within an hour or two of purchase. On a good day, they last that long, but most of the time we just gobble them up while we're still standing in line to pay. There's always a line, because everybody knows about Gunnison Orchards and their cider donuts. The fruit pies are pretty damn good, too, but we didn't want to be piggy.
As we all know, eating sugar initiates the phenomenon of craving more sugar, until you are finally so bloated and sated that you crash hard and start behaving like a cranky toddler in need of a nap. Luckily for everybody's sunny disposition, the next stop was Daily Chocolate in Vergennes. For this, we had to cross the recently built bridge from Crown Point, NY to West Addison, VT. It's a beautiful bridge, and the second you're across it you realize that Vermont is different from New York. You're still in farm country, but it's somehow lusher, greener, and, in addition, prosperous-looking in that discreet way that Old Money is prosperous-looking. Which is not to say that all Vermont farmers are rich - far from it. It's the land itself that is rich, and it doesn't hurt that the earth is lovingly curated by those who farm it. New York Adirondack soil (as I can testify, having coaxed a pocket-handkerchief-sized Schroon Lake flower garden into existence) is chock-full of rocks and varies wildly in its quality - all the darkest, loamiest dirt seems to be lurking sullenly under thick copses of underbrush that dare you to chop them down and make anything of them. There's a wildness to the New York farmland that never seems to quite be tamed; there's always a sense that Nature is just waiting to leap on those hard-wrested cornfields and turn them back into pine land.
But Vermont land seems to purr under the plow like a sleek, well-fed kitten being stroked by a gentle hand. No mater where you go - the farmers have made it look easy. Like the land just naturally got that way.
Vergennes is one of those postcard-pretty New England towns that seems too good to be possible. Daily Chocolate is a tiny basement-level shop tucked into a tiny side street off Main Street. (The main street really IS Main Street, and once you've rolled through that, you're back in farmland.) When you walk into the shop, the aroma of high-quality hand-dipped chocolate grabs you by the nose and marches you to the counter, where you swiftly find yourself in a trance of greed, trying not to drool on the glass display case as you point at things and say, "I'll have the pistachio-chili bark...dark, I think...oooh, and some of the Delight bars, the ones with the coconut, please...one of the pine nut-caramel dark chocolates - no, make that two - umm, some of those ginger-orange ones... I forget, how many pieces of the English toffee did we get last time?" Then you pretend you're buying it as a present for your aged aunt in Brooklyn, but you aren't fooling anybody, because all the while you've been surreptitiously noshing on the little plate of broken-up chocolate samples that include white chocolate with lavender infusion, until, to your dismay, you find that you've eaten it all while you were pointing at things in the case, which embarrasses you so much that you order a few more things, just to make it up to the nice lady behind the counter who has been patiently waiting for you to finish your impulse-buying.
We each ate a little more chocolate, and were about to drive off, when the two females in the car (myself and our guest) set up a clamor for my husband to stop, stop, stop, there's a farmer's market on the Village Square! Being the soul of resigned indulgence, he managed to find a parking spot, and we happily bounced off to look at more food. This time there were actually a few healthy things, and, since we were already stuffed with goodies, we were able to salve our consciences by buying sungold tomatoes and local cukes. There was also a man who made intricate and detailed hand puppets out of plastic cups, construction paper, and a bit of string; since he was selling such creations as a unicorn, a pink cow, and a lion with puffy cotton cheeks at a dollar apiece, I picked up a few to bring back and give to the arts & crafts counselor at our summer community's children's day camp, figuring that they would be a treasure on rainy days and the kids could use them as prototypes to try and make their own puppets.
At last we continued to our stated (non-food) destination - the Shelburne Museum.
Now, I have been to the Shelburne half a dozen times, or maybe more, and have never yet managed to see all of it. Partly this is because it's the country estate of the immensely wealthy Electra Havemeyer Webb. If you've ever been to the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, you may recall that there is an entire wing named after the Havemeyers, and that their name is carved into the marble across the top of the entrance. I'm talking ridiculously, ludicrously, insanely, top-one-percent-of-the-one-percent rich. As my friend Corinne once muttered, as we gazed upon the Lauder collection at the Neue Gallery - "Nobody should have this much money."
When my son was small and first learning to talk, he used to point at objects that caught his fancy and plead, "Have-a-dat! Have-a-dat!"
I think Electra Havemeyer should really have been called "Electra Have-a-Dat." If she saw it and she liked it - she bought it, simple as that. And since she had 45 acres to put it on, she never worried too much about storage space.
There you'll be, walking along the rolling green fields, cresting a hill, and suddenly you're looking at a lighthouse that seems to be warning the steamboat Ticonderoga not to crash into that grove of trees on its right. The steamboat is up on cinder blocks, in a bizarre twist on those trashy neighbors who used to have half a dozen rusted-out cars up on cinder blocks in their junk-strewn driveway. The steamboat is beautiful, with gleaming polished wood, with perfectly restored everything, and the floury-looking ersatz rolls and lustrous, shiny fake cherry pies arrayed on the table of the little below-deck kitchen were so real-looking that I poked a surreptitious finger into one to see whether I could pull out a plum. It's the Collyer Brothers, all right, but it's Collyer Brothers who are willing to throw around some money.
Another thing Electra (and you have to wonder - why would any mother want to name her daughter Electra?) couldn't bear to give up was her Park Avenue apartment, and the five Monet paintings in it. So, she didn't. She had the whole thing dismantled, shipped, and reassembled in a house that she ordered custom-built to put it all in. Did I mention that she was born with a full set of Louis Comfort Tiffany silverware in her mouth? And that each hand-turned piece has a different image - a beetle, a butterfly, a ladybug - on the handle? And that it's in the Breakfast Room, along with the Tiffany tables and the hand-painted Japanese wallpaper?
It's a great way to spend an afternoon, and you never run out of lovely things to look at. Far too soon, the helpful and courteous guard/docents are telling you that the museum is closing and they want to go home, so off you go, still having seen only a fraction of the Have-a-Dat Estate. We managed to see a magnificent temporary exhibition of French Impressionists, as well as some truly impressive quilts (don't laugh - they are hand-made and represent thousands of hours of painstaking stitchery.)
After all that walking, of course we were hungry again.
So we went to Burlington, because that's where A Single Pebble, arguably the best Chinese restaurant in the Northeast, is. We have been going to A Single Pebble at least once a year since we were first introduced to it, and it never disappoints. The mock eel! The dry-fried green beans! The Ants-Climbing-a-Tree! It's perfectly amazing cuisine, and it's always our destination when we have a guest with a discerning palate. Since this particular guest is an Upper West Sider from way back, she knows her food.
So we drove the long, long way home, and crashed out in food comas, and nobody got up until very late the next morning, and the dog was simply furious with the lot of us for staying out late and coming home smelling of food that she'd never gotten a chance to beg for, even though I'd hired a dog walker to take care of her and give her supper at six, just as she's used to. So she pooped in the house to punish us, but her aim was bad and it landed on the linoleum instead of on the braided rug I'd bought at a tag sale. And that's why my homework is so late.
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Atoning to the Chipmunk
Gentle Readers, I am all to aware that the atonement ought rightly to be laid at your feet. I have been - let me be painfully honest here - lazy, slothful, and inattentive to my blogging duties. I have salved the chirps of my conscience with the excuse, "But I need to rest really hard after all the horrendously overwhelming work of moving the contents of a five room apartment into an eleven room house, one room of which was a kitchen so filthy that the Leatherface family from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would have collectively held its nose and stalked out, rather than cook anybody in it."
The truth is, I have been enthusiastically atoning to myself for all the many fancied wrongs and slights that leaving Manhattan has inflicted upon me, and that atonement has taken the form of a month in Paradise - Paradise, in this case, being a tiny Adirondack town about an hour and a half north of Albany. We have been renting the same summer cottage here every year for decades, and it's all so bucolic that it makes my new home, which has deer, foxes, and flocks of wild turkeys trotting about in the backyard at all hours of the day and night, look like Times Square at rush hour. While I've been AWOL, plenty has happened that I will talk about at greater length in other blogs, the chief event perhaps being the release of my friend John Wirenius's novel Phineas at Bay, which is now available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon. As you may recall, I was the midwife cum domineditrix to Phineas, and I will have plenty to say about the delights of seeing this splendid book at last take physical shape - a sort of literary Pinocchio, joyously shouting, "Look, Father! I'm a real book at last!"
However, for today, let me just stick to the topic at hand - namely, atoning to the chipmunk.
One of the things that gives me infinite satisfaction about life in the Adirondack cottage is that I have a flower garden behind the house. (Incidentally, if any of you Gentle Readers can talk me through posting a few cell phone pictures here, then you, too, can have the pleasure of looking at my day lilies, New Guinea impatiens, lavender, and astilbes.) Now, as every gardener knows, gardening consists of a certain number of surprises every year - "pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be," to quote dear Lady Bracknell, (or, as she is more fondly known to fans of Oscar Wilde, "Aunt Augusta.") This year's pleasant surprises included the fact that, despite reports that the region endured three solid weeks of 20-degree-below-0 temperatures over the course of an exceptionally brutal winter, many of my perennials made it through, including the azaleas, those un-killable day lilies (they grow wild in the ditches here, and for some occult reason the deer don't eat them), the hostas (nibbled to nubs by the deer - that was one of the nasty surprises, but they are rebounding), the astilbes, and a lovely little heather patch that always gets me to murmuring about Heathcliff and Cathy under my breath, as I weed out the wild strawberry fronds that will try to strangle it.
Just before I left last year, I found myself with too much time on my hands, as well as a pair of garden loppers that called out to me that the devil finds work for idle hands, so let's get to it. So, I went wild with the loppers and cleared out all the underbrush that had rendered the wooded glade beyond our yard completely impassable. The grounds-keeping crew was not best pleased at being expected to cart away mountains of chopped-down scrub pine and maple saplings just when all the other Summer People had gone home and they thought they could relax and drink a beer. However, we have great chiaroscuro light this year, and the lilies-of-the-valley have taken advantage of the newly-created space to hurry down the hill and stake their claim before the maples and the pines come back to shriek they were unfairly evicted and have been reinstated on an appeal. That was another of the good surprises. I've sown a wildflower seed shade mix from The Vermont Wildflower Farm in the shady area, and if those come up, it will be another nice surprise.
What I didn't reckon on was the disagreeable surprise that something other than lilies-of-the-valley might find the nice, clear, richly fertile ground that has been quietly slumbering under a thick layer of composting leaves for decades appealing, too. Something with four feet, a stubby tail, and fur. Something that likes to tunnel.
That's right, we've got moles.
Or maybe it's groundhogs. Or then again, it could be chipmunks. Whatever it is - and I've never caught it in the actual act of popping its begrimed little whiskery head out of the neatly-dug little hole that appears like magic under my suddenly-wilted annuals, whose roots have undergone an underground assault in the Tunnel Construction Project - it is pissing me off royally. Not only that - it's been winning. No matter how many times I go out and stomp down the tunnels, there they are again the next morning.
Now, in all fairness, the gopher, or mole, of chipmunk - the Offending Rodent, in short - is undoubtedly saying to itself, "Whatever this creature in the absurd outfit consisting of a long-sleeved man's Brooks Brothers shirt with frayed cuffs and ring around the collar, ancient dungarees filth-encrusted at the knees, leather-palmed gloves, battered old shoes that are too disreputable to be worn around town lest the charitably-inclined offer their wearer a quarter and a cup of coffee, and a perfectly ridiculous over-sized straw hat may be, it is pissing me off royally. No matter how many times I laboriously construct my beautifully-engineered tunnels, the bitch comes out and, like some sort of sartorially-challenged Godzilla, stomps them back down."
Naturally, I have the advantage, in that I have bigger feet. I also have the Internet, which the mole, chipmunk, or gopher does not. (I think.) After the second or third appalled morning of tunnel-stomping, I got online and started researching how to persuade the little bugger that it had better go try exercising this Eminent Domain crap elsewhere.
Some of the online mole-haters got quite vituperative, and advocated wholesale slaughter, arguing that the critters deserved death and destruction for the havoc they wreak in carefully-tended gardens. I feel their wrath. I feel their pain. But a certain degree of fair play deters me. The critters were here first, after all. Besides, I'm a vegetarian. True - I'm a vegetarian who eats lobster - but there aren't any lobsters digging up my garden, or we'd be having an entirely different - and far more interesting - discussion.
What I finally did was ask my Husband the Chef to mix up a vile concoction of vegetable oil, Frank's Hot Sauce, and dishwashing liquid in a discarded water bottle. I shook it up vigorously, and the resulting witch's broth looked just like a Creamsicle Smoothy, though it smelled far too nasty to be anything of the sort. This elixir was then poured into the tunnels, which I had deliberately left un-stomped so I could ratchet up the warfare by rendering the tunnels unusable.
So far, no new tunnels have emerged. My flowers and I are jumping for joy.
But I also have a weakness for chipmunks, mainly because they are so darned cute. And since I had some leftover birdseed from last year, I decided to extend the olive branch. Choosing a spot that was far enough away from the garden to prevent the chipmunk from claiming that I was sending Mixed Messages and inviting it to come gorge itself on the roots of my plants, I poured a pile of birdseed (grain, mixed with a generous proportion of sunflower seeds) on the ground in a spot I could see from my bedroom window and from the kitchen door, and waited.
It wasn't long till I glanced out to see an ecstatic chipmunk who seemed to be suffering from a dozen impacted wisdom teeth, so bulged-out were its cheek-pouches. It clearly couldn't believe its luck, and kept looking around from time to time to see whether anybody else in the rodent family was coming to despoil it of this inexplicable bonanza. It worked busily away for half an hour or so, hastening under the house to carry off the spoils to some little chipmunk-stash that will not, I hope, be raided by some larger animal. It was the happiest chipmunk I ever saw. I hope the little guy understands that this was my way of saying, "I'm sorry I had to stomp your tunnel, and I would like to co-exist in peace."
The truth is, I have been enthusiastically atoning to myself for all the many fancied wrongs and slights that leaving Manhattan has inflicted upon me, and that atonement has taken the form of a month in Paradise - Paradise, in this case, being a tiny Adirondack town about an hour and a half north of Albany. We have been renting the same summer cottage here every year for decades, and it's all so bucolic that it makes my new home, which has deer, foxes, and flocks of wild turkeys trotting about in the backyard at all hours of the day and night, look like Times Square at rush hour. While I've been AWOL, plenty has happened that I will talk about at greater length in other blogs, the chief event perhaps being the release of my friend John Wirenius's novel Phineas at Bay, which is now available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon. As you may recall, I was the midwife cum domineditrix to Phineas, and I will have plenty to say about the delights of seeing this splendid book at last take physical shape - a sort of literary Pinocchio, joyously shouting, "Look, Father! I'm a real book at last!"
However, for today, let me just stick to the topic at hand - namely, atoning to the chipmunk.
One of the things that gives me infinite satisfaction about life in the Adirondack cottage is that I have a flower garden behind the house. (Incidentally, if any of you Gentle Readers can talk me through posting a few cell phone pictures here, then you, too, can have the pleasure of looking at my day lilies, New Guinea impatiens, lavender, and astilbes.) Now, as every gardener knows, gardening consists of a certain number of surprises every year - "pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be," to quote dear Lady Bracknell, (or, as she is more fondly known to fans of Oscar Wilde, "Aunt Augusta.") This year's pleasant surprises included the fact that, despite reports that the region endured three solid weeks of 20-degree-below-0 temperatures over the course of an exceptionally brutal winter, many of my perennials made it through, including the azaleas, those un-killable day lilies (they grow wild in the ditches here, and for some occult reason the deer don't eat them), the hostas (nibbled to nubs by the deer - that was one of the nasty surprises, but they are rebounding), the astilbes, and a lovely little heather patch that always gets me to murmuring about Heathcliff and Cathy under my breath, as I weed out the wild strawberry fronds that will try to strangle it.
Just before I left last year, I found myself with too much time on my hands, as well as a pair of garden loppers that called out to me that the devil finds work for idle hands, so let's get to it. So, I went wild with the loppers and cleared out all the underbrush that had rendered the wooded glade beyond our yard completely impassable. The grounds-keeping crew was not best pleased at being expected to cart away mountains of chopped-down scrub pine and maple saplings just when all the other Summer People had gone home and they thought they could relax and drink a beer. However, we have great chiaroscuro light this year, and the lilies-of-the-valley have taken advantage of the newly-created space to hurry down the hill and stake their claim before the maples and the pines come back to shriek they were unfairly evicted and have been reinstated on an appeal. That was another of the good surprises. I've sown a wildflower seed shade mix from The Vermont Wildflower Farm in the shady area, and if those come up, it will be another nice surprise.
What I didn't reckon on was the disagreeable surprise that something other than lilies-of-the-valley might find the nice, clear, richly fertile ground that has been quietly slumbering under a thick layer of composting leaves for decades appealing, too. Something with four feet, a stubby tail, and fur. Something that likes to tunnel.
That's right, we've got moles.
Or maybe it's groundhogs. Or then again, it could be chipmunks. Whatever it is - and I've never caught it in the actual act of popping its begrimed little whiskery head out of the neatly-dug little hole that appears like magic under my suddenly-wilted annuals, whose roots have undergone an underground assault in the Tunnel Construction Project - it is pissing me off royally. Not only that - it's been winning. No matter how many times I go out and stomp down the tunnels, there they are again the next morning.
Now, in all fairness, the gopher, or mole, of chipmunk - the Offending Rodent, in short - is undoubtedly saying to itself, "Whatever this creature in the absurd outfit consisting of a long-sleeved man's Brooks Brothers shirt with frayed cuffs and ring around the collar, ancient dungarees filth-encrusted at the knees, leather-palmed gloves, battered old shoes that are too disreputable to be worn around town lest the charitably-inclined offer their wearer a quarter and a cup of coffee, and a perfectly ridiculous over-sized straw hat may be, it is pissing me off royally. No matter how many times I laboriously construct my beautifully-engineered tunnels, the bitch comes out and, like some sort of sartorially-challenged Godzilla, stomps them back down."
Naturally, I have the advantage, in that I have bigger feet. I also have the Internet, which the mole, chipmunk, or gopher does not. (I think.) After the second or third appalled morning of tunnel-stomping, I got online and started researching how to persuade the little bugger that it had better go try exercising this Eminent Domain crap elsewhere.
Some of the online mole-haters got quite vituperative, and advocated wholesale slaughter, arguing that the critters deserved death and destruction for the havoc they wreak in carefully-tended gardens. I feel their wrath. I feel their pain. But a certain degree of fair play deters me. The critters were here first, after all. Besides, I'm a vegetarian. True - I'm a vegetarian who eats lobster - but there aren't any lobsters digging up my garden, or we'd be having an entirely different - and far more interesting - discussion.
What I finally did was ask my Husband the Chef to mix up a vile concoction of vegetable oil, Frank's Hot Sauce, and dishwashing liquid in a discarded water bottle. I shook it up vigorously, and the resulting witch's broth looked just like a Creamsicle Smoothy, though it smelled far too nasty to be anything of the sort. This elixir was then poured into the tunnels, which I had deliberately left un-stomped so I could ratchet up the warfare by rendering the tunnels unusable.
So far, no new tunnels have emerged. My flowers and I are jumping for joy.
But I also have a weakness for chipmunks, mainly because they are so darned cute. And since I had some leftover birdseed from last year, I decided to extend the olive branch. Choosing a spot that was far enough away from the garden to prevent the chipmunk from claiming that I was sending Mixed Messages and inviting it to come gorge itself on the roots of my plants, I poured a pile of birdseed (grain, mixed with a generous proportion of sunflower seeds) on the ground in a spot I could see from my bedroom window and from the kitchen door, and waited.
It wasn't long till I glanced out to see an ecstatic chipmunk who seemed to be suffering from a dozen impacted wisdom teeth, so bulged-out were its cheek-pouches. It clearly couldn't believe its luck, and kept looking around from time to time to see whether anybody else in the rodent family was coming to despoil it of this inexplicable bonanza. It worked busily away for half an hour or so, hastening under the house to carry off the spoils to some little chipmunk-stash that will not, I hope, be raided by some larger animal. It was the happiest chipmunk I ever saw. I hope the little guy understands that this was my way of saying, "I'm sorry I had to stomp your tunnel, and I would like to co-exist in peace."
Sunday, July 13, 2014
I Take a Swipe at John
I know I've been neglectful of my blogging duties, and I have no excuse whatsoever, except that it's so bloody marvelous to be doing absolutely nothing for a while. However, in proof of the fact that I do sometimes do something quite assiduously, I shall hereby present to you a recent blog written by my partner-in-crime John Wirenius. (I know, I know, I keep swiping his posts, and sooner or later I am going to be haled into court for blog-pilferage.) In this post, John is talking about the publication of his book, Phineas at Bay, which is coming out very soon now. However, like a true selfish-to-the-end writer, I am giggling like a fool because he said nice things about my novel - remarks that I cannot help but want everybody else to read.
Thank you, dear John, and it was an absolute pleasure reading and editing Phineas at Bay. In fact, as soon as it's available on paper, I am going to read it again, and that will be even more enjoyable, because I like books on paper much better than I like books on the screen. (And of course, once I have the paper copy of the book, I will keep flipping back to the incredibly fulsome and effusive inscription you are going to write to me on the title page, and giggling like a fool again.)
That's the illustration for the cover of the book, Gentle Readers. Doesn't it look great?
The Model for the Maitre d'Armes
Thank you, dear John, and it was an absolute pleasure reading and editing Phineas at Bay. In fact, as soon as it's available on paper, I am going to read it again, and that will be even more enjoyable, because I like books on paper much better than I like books on the screen. (And of course, once I have the paper copy of the book, I will keep flipping back to the incredibly fulsome and effusive inscription you are going to write to me on the title page, and giggling like a fool again.)
That's the illustration for the cover of the book, Gentle Readers. Doesn't it look great?
The Hereditary Grand Falconer-Delfico
The Model for the Maitre d'Armes
Thursday, July 3, 2014
I'm Back! (And Forth!)
Well, Gentle Readers, I have been looking forward to writing this blog almost as eagerly as you have been looking forward to reading it. (What little stinker just said "That's not very much?" Oh, yes, I heard you. Go stand in the corner until your hair turns gray. Or, as it were, grayer.)
I could probably write a tome approximating the size of Moby Dick about the joys of moving to Rockland County - especially dwelling on the part where I spent two weeks scrubbing down all 27 of the oaken kitchen cabinets with Brillo, Murphy's soap, and dozens of rolls of paper towels, because they were crusted with thirty-five years' worth of filth and cooking grease. My fingers are permanently pruney. And that's not a typo - I have 27, count 'em, t-w-e-n-t-y- s-e-v-e-n, assorted drawers and cabinets in my new old kitchen.
One of the reasons this kitchen cleansing has been taking so long is that Her Ladyship, as I have dubbed the former owner of this home, left quite a lot of her material belongings in the cabinets. Predictably, most of it is junk. On the other hand, some of it is pretty nice, and I wonder what she was thinking when she decided not to take all that Spode china along. Not to mention the two Wusthof chef's knives, which, a trip to the second floor of Zabar's will tell you, run about a hundred bucks apiece.
On the other hand, I wonder what she was thinking when she stashed the Hopping Peter (I know it is called a Hopping Peter, because it was still in its original box) - when, as I say, she stashed the two-inch-tall plastic penis - the one that jumps up-and-down on a wee pair of plastic feet when you wind it up - behind the Norman Rockwell mugs and the inevitable "WORLD'S GREATEST GRANDMA" coffee cup. And, as I believe I have already mentioned, Her Ladyship left her false teeth behind in the bedroom closet.
So I have spent a good deal of time getting very hot and dirty and out of temper in the kitchen, ordering take-out food nearly every night because the place wasn't yet fit to cook in. However, by the end of the two weeks, I had scrubbed down most of the cabinets, scoured the wallpaper, and discovered that the ceiling fan with the big globe light wasn't actually yellow - that was just caked-on kitchen grease. (The ceiling fan consumed three and a half hours of my life that I'll never get back, which I could have spent blogging.) We had cooked several meals, and they were good meals, and we were not afraid to eat them, or afraid that the Health Department would come along to close us down. Not only that, but - mirabile dictu, as Virgil was so fond of remarking - the kitchen looks rather charming, in an old-fashioned, country kitchen sort of way. (I mean, allowing for the fact that not one of the cabinet doors hangs straight.) There's not a single granite counter-top in sight, and the first time we turned on the oven there was a blinding flash and a puff of smoke, and I thought my husband had been killed - but, luckily, he hadn't, although he was saying it was a pity that Her Ladyship hadn't been exploded by her own oven. As for the dishwasher - technically, it "works," in that it makes the appropriate noises when it is turned on and then turns itself off after a decent interval. However, since the dishes emerge bone dry (without being at all warm from air-drying) and just as dirty as they were before the appliance was activated, it does not actually work.
It all put me in just the mood to say "The hell with it, let's go on vacation." So we did, and now we are in the Adirondacks in our usual summer cottage, which is far too small to have a dishwasher (other than myself) but which has a magnificent view of the lake and quite a few mountains beyond it, not to mention a little garden out in back of the kitchen that I race out to water while swatting frantically at the myriad mosquitoes, all of whom are far craftier and more intrepid than I, and who seem to have a sort of kamikaze approach to existence and don't care if they die as long as they can lay some hurt on me first. And aside from garden-watering and mosquito-swatting,I am doing very little, indeed, but with a great deal of vigor and determination, and they're going to have to wing me with a rock to get me down off this mountain and back downstate to finish cleaning the rest of that kitchen.
I could probably write a tome approximating the size of Moby Dick about the joys of moving to Rockland County - especially dwelling on the part where I spent two weeks scrubbing down all 27 of the oaken kitchen cabinets with Brillo, Murphy's soap, and dozens of rolls of paper towels, because they were crusted with thirty-five years' worth of filth and cooking grease. My fingers are permanently pruney. And that's not a typo - I have 27, count 'em, t-w-e-n-t-y- s-e-v-e-n, assorted drawers and cabinets in my new old kitchen.
One of the reasons this kitchen cleansing has been taking so long is that Her Ladyship, as I have dubbed the former owner of this home, left quite a lot of her material belongings in the cabinets. Predictably, most of it is junk. On the other hand, some of it is pretty nice, and I wonder what she was thinking when she decided not to take all that Spode china along. Not to mention the two Wusthof chef's knives, which, a trip to the second floor of Zabar's will tell you, run about a hundred bucks apiece.
On the other hand, I wonder what she was thinking when she stashed the Hopping Peter (I know it is called a Hopping Peter, because it was still in its original box) - when, as I say, she stashed the two-inch-tall plastic penis - the one that jumps up-and-down on a wee pair of plastic feet when you wind it up - behind the Norman Rockwell mugs and the inevitable "WORLD'S GREATEST GRANDMA" coffee cup. And, as I believe I have already mentioned, Her Ladyship left her false teeth behind in the bedroom closet.
So I have spent a good deal of time getting very hot and dirty and out of temper in the kitchen, ordering take-out food nearly every night because the place wasn't yet fit to cook in. However, by the end of the two weeks, I had scrubbed down most of the cabinets, scoured the wallpaper, and discovered that the ceiling fan with the big globe light wasn't actually yellow - that was just caked-on kitchen grease. (The ceiling fan consumed three and a half hours of my life that I'll never get back, which I could have spent blogging.) We had cooked several meals, and they were good meals, and we were not afraid to eat them, or afraid that the Health Department would come along to close us down. Not only that, but - mirabile dictu, as Virgil was so fond of remarking - the kitchen looks rather charming, in an old-fashioned, country kitchen sort of way. (I mean, allowing for the fact that not one of the cabinet doors hangs straight.) There's not a single granite counter-top in sight, and the first time we turned on the oven there was a blinding flash and a puff of smoke, and I thought my husband had been killed - but, luckily, he hadn't, although he was saying it was a pity that Her Ladyship hadn't been exploded by her own oven. As for the dishwasher - technically, it "works," in that it makes the appropriate noises when it is turned on and then turns itself off after a decent interval. However, since the dishes emerge bone dry (without being at all warm from air-drying) and just as dirty as they were before the appliance was activated, it does not actually work.
It all put me in just the mood to say "The hell with it, let's go on vacation." So we did, and now we are in the Adirondacks in our usual summer cottage, which is far too small to have a dishwasher (other than myself) but which has a magnificent view of the lake and quite a few mountains beyond it, not to mention a little garden out in back of the kitchen that I race out to water while swatting frantically at the myriad mosquitoes, all of whom are far craftier and more intrepid than I, and who seem to have a sort of kamikaze approach to existence and don't care if they die as long as they can lay some hurt on me first. And aside from garden-watering and mosquito-swatting,I am doing very little, indeed, but with a great deal of vigor and determination, and they're going to have to wing me with a rock to get me down off this mountain and back downstate to finish cleaning the rest of that kitchen.
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