Honey for the Ears
Every day I check the news and every day ads pass before my eyes or over my ears and I think “Boy, I am just about the most Not The Target Market that anyone could be,” and then the next day comes with its news and ads and I find am even morer not the target. And it’s always louder than the day before. I don’t know if this is to make everyone feel included (you know how you always shout at people who don’t speak your language) or if it’s just to bludgeon us all to death so we stop protesting. I am reminded here of the Dorothy Sayers novel The Nine Tailors in which the villain is (accidently) murdered (spoiler alert) by being locked into a bell tower while a peal is being rung. He is overwhelmed by the sound and dies with face contorted in horror. (more…)
Our woods are small and began the year terribly overgrown with brush, pokeweed, bittersweet, raspberries and a number of dead trees. The little ones called it “The Forest” in a wide-eyed way, as if expecting to meet Red Riding Hood’s wolf behind one of the larger trees along the path. And really, who could blame them? When even I started to peer cautiously around the pokeweed and in back of the brush before heading down the path to dump a barrow of clippings on the compost pile, it was apparent we needed to start on a tidying-up project. We began it in the late winter and while The Hunter took care of the dead trees, I attacked the bittersweet. Seven months later, this appears to be a project that will last out my lifetime. 
A few days ago I was re-reading Angela Thirkell’s The Brandons. For pure escapism into a lovely cloud cuckoo-land, Angela Thirkell can’t be beat. Her novels take place in the fictional English county of Barsetshire, which is where Anthony Trollope set most of his books. Thirkell took Trollope’s Victorian characters and wrote about their descendants in the 1930s through the 1960s.
In the spring and summer, The Hunter turns into The Farmer. At the moment we are drowning in tomatoes. This is not by any means a bad thing, but two people can’t possibly eat them all, no matter how creative I get. One day last week at lunch, I wasn’t very creative at all and served the orange, yellow and red cherry tomatoes, halved and heaped up in a bowl. 
Originally, I thought this story began with me rolling over in bed, opening my eyes, and saying to the man next to me – the man, by the way, I had promised to love, honor and cherish though all manner of things – “I want to rip your face off.” 
Listening to the school kids who walked out of class to protest gun violence, or the kids who marched on the Boston Statehouse to demand more gun control, I was struck by several thoughts. One was that it’s wonderful to be passionate and idealistic and want to change the world at a global level. Another was that doing something loudly on a grand scale always feels good. You sense you are doing something important. 
The ground is white. The trees are white. The sky is white. None of this is surprising as we’ve had three nor’easters in 10 days. Looking out, you would be perfectly reasonable in concluding it was the middle of January rather than the middle of March. 