Hungry Times Two

This is not a food or garden post. One of the few good things about 2020 is time at home to reflect, so this is part of my process. A note of caution: this post contains a few references to racial epithets.  How long have magnolias symbolized Southern femininity? Surely before the 1989 film that I and so many daughters born in this region can quote by heart.  A few weeks ago I walked down a street one block from my own, and took in the scent of magnolia blossoms in morning humidity. Heady but not overpowering, and slightly sweet and sensual. I stopped to admire the large creamy ivory flowers opened fully at their peak, and a memory came.  Credit: Andrew Butko My Grandmother Hazelene, my father's mother, and I used to sit and have a picnic in the low branches of a large old magnolia in the front yard of the home where she grew up, in Badin, Stanly County, North Carolina.  "The Old Home Place," as she called it, had an old Frigidaire refrigerator with a chrome handle ...

It’s officially eight weeks into the “Stay Home, Stay Safe” directive here in Asheville, NC, and today I had the most epic day of mishaps thus far. In North Carolina, Governor Roy Cooper and state officials tout the three Ws as “flattening the curve” practices. I’d like to propose a fourth, inspired by the opening line of most of actor Leslie Jordan’s Instagram posts . “Well, shit.” That’s my motto. Casual, to the point, and very much over it all. (This being said, I am aware of my privilege to work from home and remain inconvenienced thus far, and I send much love and respect to those who cannot.) Ouch First I woke up with a sore neck. What could I have done? I quit doing half-assed yoga weeks ago! Then I remembered last night I washed a particularly gritty bag of romaine lettuce using my salad spinner. I recall thinking at the time, "This is why I don’t use this Ikea spinner that often. This thing is stubborn and churns like a cement mixer.” I must have over-aggres...

I'm planting my garden this spring like I always do, but it's got extra meaning for me now.  It's May 7, 2020 and we've been living amidst COVID-19/coronavirus since early March, and in addition to so many other upheavals, food security's come up.  Meat-packing plants  are shut down due to employees falling ill, food banks have miles-long lines, and restaurant owners are feeding their former  bar/restaurant workers . Additionally, there have been some references to the Victory Gardens of World War I and more so from World Ward II. Things are nutty right now, so looking to history, and gardening, can teach us some things. Gardening is Good for Your Mental Health Just as COVID-19 really started becoming a reality, and subsequent lay-offs happened at bars, restaurants, etc., I ironically started a job on March 20, 2020.  I'm a warehouse worker at a local garden center, stocking shelves, loading 50 lb. bags of soil and fertilizer [manure] into customer's cars...

Scott and I are so many things right now.  Jobless. Unemployed. "Between Jobs," which is one of my least favorite terms, as I imagine us physically bookended by work.  We prefer the term our financial advisor shared with us - the "Intentional Sabbatical" - when we told her we'd both gone and resigned from our jobs in Oregon and planned to move back to North Carolina. We thought she'd "Tsk" us into shame, but she was actually supportive of our need to stop the needle on the record of life and make some drastic changes.  While we're not in a terrible situation financially, we're trying to watch the spending, and though I avoid a spreadsheet like most steer clear of the plague, I know one of our biggest spending categories is food. Like, duh. Have you seen Scott eat? Do you know the damage I can do in a cheese shop?  I won't pretend that I fully know what I'm doing, but I have made some adjustments to our meal expenses...

West Asheville has some big damn hills. I forgot about them after 15 years away, but my quads now remember. Yesterday I walked almost four miles round-trip to see my first West Asheville residence, on Hudson Street. In 2001 I split rent with two UNC-Asheville friends, paying less than $300 each per month for a three bedroom house. During my junior year of college, my dad came up to visit from Concord, NC one December day, bringing a Christmas tree and treating us all to a holiday lunch at Asiana Grand Buffet on Smokey Park Highway (now the Yao Buffet & Grill). He also may have gotten a U-Haul truck stuck in the front yard while backing into the very steep driveway. Hudson Street looks nothing like what I remember. Two-story McBungalows at the top of the street replaced the small cottage where a nice older man used to live, a man I once called 911 for when I saw him fall around the corner on State Street.  After Hudson Street, I rented my first solo place on Oakwood Stre...

Road trips in books and films always seem so fun, carefree, and adventurous.  Or they can be devolving nightmares that can't end fast enough. Our Oregon to North Carolina trip wasn't quite the latter, but it didn't nearly have enough of the former. Read on for an authentic account of Scott, Erin, and Loretta the dog, packed into a Ford C-Max hatchback for seven loooooong sub-caffeinated days. 

If you've kept up with us over the years (thanks Moms, for reading) you'll know we moved from Charlotte, North Carolina to Gresham, Oregon in April 2018.  Therefore, deciding to move back to North Carolina this summer definitely raised some eyebrows.  What can I say? When you know, you know. That female intuition is some powerful stuff.  It was harder for Scott to leave the Pacific Northwest. Have you seen that man around tall evergreen trees and all the IPAs one can drink? Yet my insistence that one more winter in dreary, dark rain would end me, coupled with the high cost of living and the diminished shine of his PNW college days, were the reality checks to help make this giant U-turn of life. This was no '90s free-wheeling Oregon. 2019 was all too real.  To quote Marc Maron , we don't know how much time we have left. Rather than harp on what Oregon didn't provide, I'd rather think about what our return to Asheville, North Carolina can. I'm ...

I read A LOT .. so I can't remember now where I first saw this.  Oh yeah, it was on a planning listserv that I follow.  I recall reading a Linus Pauling quote noting, "The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas."  I'm a community gardener and think this is a great idea - for the elderly (or "HonoredCitizens" as Tri-Met aptly notes) and anyone looking to meet new people. Grey fingers: Ageing Singapore uses gardening to fight loneliness http://www.thisisplace.org/i/?id=57e0917e-7682-4585-a77e-78b47072a724 The article has a great video in it as well, and if you're not familiar with the Queen's English (Singapore was part of the British Empire), an "allotment" is simply a garden plot and a "scheme" is simply a program - think of "schematic" (i.e. diagram) rather than "scheming" (up to no good). Simply put, community gardening combats loneliness, depression, and dementia, all of which can...

I started to think we had bad food luck in Portland. There was the "legendary" riverside spot with mediocre $35 salmon platters.  The "authentic" longtime Chinese place off 82nd that, for what it lacked in flavor and freshness, rocked a lively karaoke and lounge scene.  A three-hour wait for a table at a tiki bar.   The inedible greasy burgers and fries at a much-lauded dive bar.  The Indian restaurant that refused to let us order off the menu and instead demanded we eat from the buffet, where oil seeped and pooled from each dish and the stale, acrid odor of layers of fried food in the alcove should have been the first flag to deter us.  The chicken and rice place that, just as we stepped up to order, ran out of...chicken and rice.  And there were more! So. Many. More.  Until there weren't. For months Scott and I slogged through some bad choices, purposely avoiding the cool new spots for what we'd heard were local mainstays or h...

In the 13 months Scott and I have lived in Oregon, we've done our best to visit the varied landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. To mark our 12th wedding anniversary in April, we chose the coast. Or, as the highway signs here redundantly declare, "the Ocean Beaches." We've twice day-tripped to Astoria, camped at Bullards Beach State Park near Bandon, and spent a terrific weekend in Pacific City . On that last trip, we visited Neskowin's Ghost Forest on one of the lowest tides of the year, and we were eager to return.  We tend to be procrastinating trip planners, so we we decided to go about 10 days before our anniversary, which fell on the Easter holiday. A quick Airbnb search later, we had a condo with a kitchenette reserved at Proposal Rock Inn in Neskowin, a funky creekside condo complex with views of the Pacific Ocean and, of course, Proposal Rock. The Inn allows dogs, so our pup Loretta came with us.    The view from the condo balcony As a Sout...

Telling people you've just returned from a Viking River Cruise will earn mixed reactions. A few people smirk and ask how old I really am (yes, I know from the PBS Masterpiece Theatre underwriting promos that I'm a little under their target demographic). Some want to know what makes it a Viking cruise (no, I didn't don a winged helmet and pray to Norse gods, but that would be pretty amazing ). But most seem interested to hear about the Danube River trip and what I enjoyed the most.  Spending some relaxing time with my mom on the cruise was tops, as well as taking advantage of all the ship's perks: unlimited espresso drinks and sparkling water whenever, fully-catered meals for nearly all of the eight-day trip, and a lovely "Aquavit Terrace" lounge to sip drinks and in our case, refine our Scrabble skills, while the ship cruised upriver from Budapest, Hungary to Passau, Germany.  And the CHEESE. At every breakfast, there were at least 3-5 different...

After our Budapest stop and a cursory tour of a pleasant-but-not-incredibly-memorable Bratislava, Slovakia, our ship cruised on to Austria's capital city of Vienna. I'd visited Austria before in the mid-1990s during a high school spring break trip, but my tolerance and appreciation for art, architecture, and history thankfully improved since my teenage years. The Viking ship was docked at a remote location away from the main city center, so we were bussed and taxi-ed into and out of the Ringstrasse, a main boulevard loop of the city. For fans of classical music, art, Baroque buildings, cafe culture, and royal history, Vienna is your place. The Hapsburg monarchy was based here, and the Hofburg Palace and surrounding complex of related residences, museums, monuments, and gardens could take days to see. My mom and I did a cursory walking tour with our group and then once that was over, we unintentionally toured a good bit more of Vienna by foot on a gray day. Traveling wi...

Something is amiss. I'm not waking up to breakfasts of small hot cups of macchiato, a ridiculous range of soft cheeses and breads, or eggs made to order. I'm not checking my daily agenda for included and optional excursions, and there's no one to make slightly awkward small talk with at meals. Nope, I'm definitely not on a Viking cruise ship anymore. Last summer my mother invited me to join her for an eight-day Viking cruise on the Danube River, a trip Viking coins " The Danube Waltz ." I'd never taken a cruise of any kind before, and she and I travel well together, so I quickly agreed. So on April 30, we took off from Charlotte, NC, enjoyed a brief layover in Munich, Germany, and touched down in Budapest, Hungary. We boarded our ship, docked at the famous Chain Bridge  on the eastern Pest side of the city, and took the first day to get our bearings and, most importantly, eat and sleep. We'd flown over on Lufthansa and while the service was eff...

My preciouses Can you tell what I've been up to in my first summer in Oregon? It turns out if you put 12+ tomato plants in your garden, you best be ready for the tomatoes. Despite a historically hot and dry Summer 2018 here in Multnomah County, our Early Girls, Oregon Springs and San Marzanos thrived. Being "job free" this summer had its perks. After breakfast and feeling fully caffeinated, every other morning I'd take my best garden assistant, Loretta the pup, for a walk to the community garden at Gresham City Hall. I'd tether her to a garden stake under a tree and give her a bucket of water, and she'd turn full Goat, nibbling at the weeds along the border of the nearby garden plots. While Loretta grazed and supervised as my personal Garden Security Guard, I'd water every plant twice, filling up the "dirt collars" Scott built around each plant, which served as nice trenches for water. Then I'd pick off the ripe or nearly ripe...