A different kind of life

Undoubtedly, it's a very different kind of life we live here now. This is the third fresh peach cobbler I've baked from scratch in about a week's time. The peaches come from a nearby orchard, and the crust of each cobbler is half of the infallible Martha Stewart recipe for Pâtee Brisée.

The first cobbler I made about a week ago when I had a former student and a new colleague-friend over for fried chicken. The fried chicken was disappointing (I'm still mastering that dish), but the cobbler was alright, especially since the peaches were so fresh and juicy.

After having that little dinner party (sans my husband), Dr. S returned from England last week and on Monday evening she invited a group of colleague-friends and a former student for dinner at her apartment, which used to be mine. An accomplished cook, baker, and basically accomplished at anything she sets her mind to do, Dr. S had us over for some gloriously scrumptious garlic shrimp pasta, a mozzarella, tomato and pasta salad, and fresh blueberries and vanilla ice cream.

The second cobbler I made Tuesday for a dinner at our dog-loving colleague-friends who teach the 18th century. That cobbler was a little overcooked on the bottom (I'm still figuring out my new oven), but everyone liked it.

Accomplished cooks themselves, our colleague-friends treated us to their famously delicious Indian cooking (I've never had lamb the way they prepare it!), and while I had promised myself that I wouldn't eat a lot, I had to repeat on the lamb palak because it was simply too good to have only once.

The third cobbler, the one pictured above, I made this afternoon for a meeting I have tonight with two boricua colleague-friends. One of them is hosting us at her house in the nearby town so we can plan a Latin@ film series for which we got some funds from my small college on the hill.

OK, so that's four social engagements in about 10 days. That's about the number of social engagements we had in a year when we lived in the tiny city! When I told my husband (who's not a social butterfly by any means) that we had another dinner invitation for Tuesday evening, his skeptical eyebrow came up and I could hear him thinking: "A second dinner! Didn't we have one last night?"

Before he balks I'll have to start accepting invitations only on my behalf, and leave him contentedly behind at home, or he'll suffer an overdose of socializing. And while I'm no social butterfly myself (I do cherish my solitude and the time I spend alone with my husband), I love the feeling of being part of a community of colleagues and friends who gets together often and cooks marvelous food and has a good time together.

In any event, just like the tiger-striped one that graced my new garden recently, butterflies, even the not-social kind, are welcome.

We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto

Yesterday, a former student and I went searching for birthday cards at the Hallmark in the larger town next to the tiny town where my small college on the hill is located. I was particularly interested in the Maya Angelou collection, which is always lovely both aesthetically and in terms of the written thoughts it offers.

"We've discontinued that line," the attendant at the store said after I inquired.

"Do you mean Hallmark has discontinued the line, or this store?" I asked to know more precisely.

"This store," she said, a little defensively. "Not a lot of people got them so the store doesn't buy them anymore."

This area of Ohio is clearly 99.9999999% white so it might not be surprising that people here wouldn't buy the Angelou cards but I was still a little taken aback.

"This town is simply too white," I murmured while the attendant, now somewhat apologetically, went to find me the one last remaining Angelou card in the store: one expressing sympathy. I thanked her, but said: "No, thanks," and moved on to peruse the funny Hoops and Yoyo section to see if I found anything remotely adequate for what I wanted.

On my way there I passed the large "Christian Sentiments" section of cards, which I'd never noticed at any of the city Hallmarks I'm used to shopping at, and then I was reminded how Christianity in these parts trumps diversity.

It was one of those "We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto" moments when you realize you're no longer in (or remotely near) the place where you come from.

Oh, well. That's part of the price one pays for moving to a small place like this, I know. But when that price becomes that evident, even in a simple moment like this when I can't find the type of greeting card I want for what might just be a somewhat racist reason (after all, the Angelou cards are not just for people of color, right?), I get an uneasy feeling.

Where there is light, there is shadow (and vice versa), I remind myself. And I know I can always find my favored Angelou cards at the Hallmark near my old tiny city, or at the mall, or at any of the places where people of color exist in enough numbers that Angelou (and, with her, the recognition that not all in this world is whiteness) cannot be discarded.

To race a swallow, Part II

Yesterday gave us another gorgeous summer afternoon, perfect for getting on the motorcycle once more and for racing the swallows as we searched for the lazy hay bales that have sat on green fields all summer, like fat sea lions sunning.

As our luck, and my absolute lack of knowledge about the cycles of farming, would have it, 9 out of 10 fields we passed (the same ones we'd seen on Saturday) no longer had bales strewn around but they had all been picked up and neatly collected (if boringly, for a picture) on the edge of the field.

My husband, however, was not to be deterred, and we rode road after road, many with very cool names, until we hit upon a field with the bales as I'd wanted to show them to you.

The roads with interesting names that we were on included Dog Hollow Road, Eden Church Road, Clutter Road, Camp Ohio Road, and Divan Road (on Saturday we'd gone looking for Owl Creek Church Road, but didn't find a way in, only passed the way out...).

We also went on Black Snake Road, which lived up to its name by being full of potholes and rough stretches, but which led to Purity Road, which was smooth and well maintained. Who says life doesn't speak metaphorically, too?

Summer in Ohio is glorious, as I've already mentioned, and this photo essay is aimed at sharing some of this agricultural country's beauty with you. Even the weeds, the humble milkweed, and the prickly one whose name I don't know, bask in the sun and add something to the view.

My husband had planned for us to leave around 7:30 p.m., about an hour or so before sunset, to get the benefit of the best light, and he was right. Everything we saw shone with the glow of late afternoon sun.

We whizzed by farm after farm after farm, and I remembered fondly the Fisher Price farm set I had as a little girl, which included a black-and-white cow, a red rooster, and a brown horse. I absolutely loved that set but, before moving to Ohio, it was as close as I ever came to a farm. Now, farms are all the eye can see as far as it can see, and now the cows, including the black-and-white (Holstein) ones, and the handsome brown, black and white horses, are all real.

Horses are, of course, a mainstay of life around here, especially for the Amish, who depend on their horses for their transportation.

We, on the other hand, were on a motorcycle, perhaps as far on the opposite end of the spectrum of ground transportation as you can get from the sign above. As the day faded, we raced toward the sinking light, aiming for the little piece of this countryside county we now call home.

To race a swallow

The weather forecast for today might as well have read: "Glorious. A perfect summer day." So my husband and I decided to get up before 7 a.m. to run and walk (he ran, I walked) a 5K through the winding trails of my small college on the hill's environmental center.

The trail turned out to be the most difficult either one of us has either run or hiked on, one that not only snaked through the forest through impossibly narrow trails, but included not only one very steep hill but also what to me looked like the side of a tall mountain, on the second loop around.

I'd already completed almost 2 miles when I faced that second climb, and a part of me was like: "Hell, no! Turn around and quit." But the woman warrior in me chaffed at the idea of quitting, so I decided to take it slow, and to enjoy the scenery as the climb got higher and higher and higher. Do you know the metaphor about facing a mountain that must be scaled? Well, this felt like the literal experience.

But once I got to the top I was elated. I thought: "Not bad for a near-47-year-old survivor of two major surgeries, an asthmatic, and the only non-runner among all the 30 people or so who ran the race today, including the kids!" So I patted myself in the back and kept on going to finish the 3-mile walk in about an hour (my husband finished in half that time). The athletic pre-college teenager who won did the 3 miles in 22 minutes so you can just imagine how difficult the course must have been.

He told my husband that when he faced the mountain he considered walking up to the top, rather than running, since not a soul was behind him. But when he saw the person who awaited with the Gatorade and words of encouragement at the top he decided he didn't want to chicken out in front of that guy, so he ran up. Kudos to him.

I also had no one behind me (I was the last of all those who participated), or in front of me, for that matter, since I had been promptly left in the dust by all the runners. But I had no qualms about taking my time going up the mountain, and I'm glad I did.

Once we were back, exhausted but happy, I cleaned up and went with one of my very favorite former students and a new colleague-friend to the farmer's market. We stocked up on fresh goodies, and I came back to take a much-needed nap. Later in the afternoon, my husband and I suited up and hopped on the motorcycle for a perfect ride through the hills and valleys and farms and little towns of this county.

Several times, it seemed like we were racing swallows, who would fly by our side for a short distance before veering suddenly away. The white cumulus clouds hung low and heavy in the horizon, the sun shone bright on a blue-blue sky, while the breeze tickled the white wildflowers, which seemed to be laughing. The short soy plants appeared to wave goodbye as we whizzed by, and the tall corn stalks stood like an army at attention, waiting for some Deity to command them into motion. Field after field flowed in waves of green, like an ocean of leaves.

In one turn we saw one farmer on our right side plowing his field with a tractor, and on the next turn, to our left, we saw a young Amish farmer doing the same with a team of horses. This is country country, no doubt about it.

There is no better way to celebrate the completion of a 5K than to eat locally made ice cream so we stopped at a famous site near my small college on the hill, and then came home to have a meal mostly comprised of fresh locally grown veggies. As the day comes to an end, the breeze still rustles the leaves of the trees outside and the swing calls me to keep it company with a good book before the mosquitoes leave their tiny coffins and come out for blood.

First and last

The first day of August also signals the last month of summer because although the season technically ends in September, once classes begin the feel of summer is over. This is also the day that I scheduled as the start of getting serious about preparing classes and organizing myself for my semester, which begins in 27 days.

This year has been one of moves: moving from being a seemingly eternal Ph.D. candidate to becoming Dr. G, moving from having a dismembered Monster to successfully putting it all together, moving from our large house in the tiny city to the little apartment in the woods at my small college on the hill, moving from the city to the country, moving from being a near penniless grad student to being a professor with more financial flexibility, moving from being a commuter to being a resident, and so on. That's a lot of moves.

All that moving hasn't been conducive to sitting down and reading, so I never did get to War and Peace, as I'd hoped, but I did start on Cranford and on Laughing Without an Accent, which I may yet finish before it's time to stop pussyfooting around and do school-related work once more. At least, for the first time in 2 years, I won't have to do the schoolwork and have my Monster crouching in a corner, too.

And there may yet be one more move, once we sell the house, which seems like it will never happen, and buy another one in the little pueblito that we now call home. I feel a lot more settled now that I'm living here and visiting the large house occasionally, although I know I won't feel wholly settled until the house is finally in someone else's hands.

But we've managed to adapt pretty well to cutting our living space by what seems like 100%. We even had some friends over for an informal dinner two nights ago and although we had to eat with our plates on our laps (the guests had dinner trays), we had a good time. Geni loved the attention while Rusty barked a little from the bedroom, where I ensconced him, but then quieted down and went to sleep on his rug.

With the two of us plus four furry critters, I really like the fact that the apartment is so easy to clean, and I know the old dogs appreciate that there are no stairs to climb. While Magellan seems to like it here, Darwin isn't as happy with his reduced circumstances. His latest idea of fun is to run in circles around the entire apartment as many times as he can before he exhausts himself. His favorite sleeping place, for some reason we cannot fathom, is among my husband's shoes in his closet. Magellan, meanwhile, likes to disappear under the oversized chair in the living room or under a tableclothed table there, too.

There's one problem about having the dogs and the cats so close to each other that I didn't anticipate, and that's Geni having access to the litter box. Because Geni was a street dog, she has a real taste for other animals' poop, which I guess was a way to get protein when she couldn't get anything else to eat. But that's not her situation anymore, of course. And while you can take the dog out of the street, Geni is living proof that you can't take the street out of the dog.

I had started to worry that the cat's digestion was affected by the move because I hadn't cleared any poop from the litter box in days when I caught Geni enthusiastically sniffing around the boxes. I will leave the rest to your imagination, but I've now gated the litter boxes to prevent her having access to what she perceives as a delicacy. Like my husband likes to say: Dogs are disgusting creatures.

When I'm not dealing with literal comemierdas, I am enjoying taking a bike ride into the pueblito to check the mail, or having access to all kinds of people who do all kinds of things. I had a parka with a broken zipper and found a woman who'll repair it for about $10. She also is going to repair a bed cover my 98-year-old grandmother gave me, which has started unraveling because of age. That's priceless.

And I really like being able to take the bike and meet a student or a colleague-friend at the college's cafe for a chat or to catch up on what's happening with our lives. It's really an idyllic life in so many ways, and I wonder when and whether I'll tire of it.

For now, there's nothing to get tired about, and while August does signal the end to my free time, which hasn't been as free as I would've liked, I'm not complaining. I've had a very good summer and there's still plenty of summer left to enjoy. That's definitely my plan.

Is this summer or what?

This morning my husband and I woke up extra early for a Saturday because he was going to a motorcycle event about 30 minutes away from my small college on the hill, and I was going to the farmer's market in the largest town nearby.

It's the second time this summer that I actually get to a farmer's market, but only the first time I go to this particular one. Five of us, three students and two faculty members, crowded into a new colleague's car and by 9 a.m. we were at the already-crowded farmer's market.

For me, being at a farmer's market is like being a kid at the fair. I'm a city girl who grew up with supermarkets where the food had been shipped from far away, most of which couldn't even be grown in Puerto Rico. Thus, I can't get enough of all the fresh produce, meats, cakes, breads, rolls, pies, cut flowers, plants, you name it!

It's like going to a plaza del mercado in Puerto Rico, which, now that I think about it, are basically permanent farmer's markets. My husband and I used to go occasionally to the one in Guaynabo when we lived there to get fresh Puerto Rico-grown produce.

Today, I stocked up on fresh blueberries, which my husband likes to have with his cereal; a gorgeous Cherokee Purple heirloom tomato, which I bought mostly because of the name and because of its deep red and hunter green color; and a bag-full of purple-black sweet bell peppers. Next week, I'll get more produce but today we were in a bit of a hurry because one of the students was due at work only an hour after we arrived. Next Saturday I plan to purposefully dilly dally, as my husband would say.

I'm discovering that living in a tiny town and working at a small college means that you're always bumping into people you know and congregating in groups to chat. That happened yesterday in the center of my tiny town, as a group of us gathered by chance and stayed gathered long enough to be greeted by the college president, who walked by with two of her aides. And it happened again today at the farmer's market, when another group of us congregated and chatted before us five had to rush out to deliver the student to her work.

"Did you all come in a van?" one of the farmers asked, pointing to the two other students who were walking ahead of us. "Those two in front of you are young enough to be students," she said.

"Are you suggesting that we don't look like students?" I asked, jesting with her, and pointing at my new colleague and myself.

"Graduate students!" she said, smiling back. Of course, I'm 20 years older than my new colleague, but who's counting?

After our excursion, my new colleague and I decided to (not very environmentally good) burn some gas and go to the only Starbucks in town for hot beverages and get-to-know-each-other conversation. After I dropped her back at her place, I came to the new little apartment in the woods to work with my bounty.

In a short span of time, I made some gorgeous-looking and tasty sofrito with all organic ingredients (including an onion and garlic and basil that another colleague gave us in a bagfull of free home-grown produce). I also checked on the Ohio-grown whole fryer chicken, which I have marinating in Ohio-produced buttermilk in my refrigerator, and I prepared the filling and the crust for a cobbler I'm about to make with the fresh peaches I bought at a nearby orchard a few days ago. This afternoon, my new colleague and the student who worked are coming over for some homemade fried chicken and peach cobbler.

I also did a load of sheets and hung them out to dry in the sun in the new clothesline my husband put up for me. Hanging up the sheets gave me a great feeling, not only because I'm doing my part environmentally speaking (especially to balance the drive to Starbucks!), but also because I recall hanging clothes on a clothesline with my mom long ago, and I have very nice childhood memories of doing that.

This afternoon, when my guests arrive, we'll be eating outside, on the swing and the chairs my husband and I set out in front of our new little apartment in the woods, and which have become sort of a spot of congregation. The swing and the chairs around it tend to promote conversations late into the evening as their very presence and use clamors loudly that this is undoubtedly summertime.

The best of country living

While impertinent Daddy Longlegs and ugly centipedes and squadrons of mosquitos and gnats are some of the disadvantages of country living, residing near the woods does have its perks.

The constant singing, chirping, calling, cawing, and twitting of the birds is one decided asset here, especially in our very quiet neighborhood, which I hope doesn't get ruined as new people start moving into their apartments in the next few weeks. Being surrounded by hundreds of trees is also a bonus, as is even the close-by and whimsical mooing and braying of a herd of cattle whose location we have not yet determined.

To take advantage of this type of country living, as close to country as I'll ever get, my husband took an extension cord into the courtyard of our apartment complex, and has set himself up in one of our exterior chairs to work on his laptop. The chair, an Adirondack in good shape that some previous tenant abandoned years ago and which I rescued and cleaned, is ideal because he can set up his computer mouse on one arm and his coffee and phone on the other. Very, very cute.

That sure beats working all day in the dark basement of our large house, or even in the his new "office," a room with a picture window, here in the apartment. I also really like getting comfortable on the sofa and typing away at the laptop while enjoying the view out of the large picture window in the living room.

Today I had all these plans: finally getting back to doing yoga in the morning and then running errands and then being efficient and getting more things organized and sorted and stored. But instead I decided to take a nap and then it was lunch time and now I'm writing here and I might go and get some Ohio-grown peaches at the nearby orchard, just to say I did something actually productive, but that may be the extent of my efforts for the day.

Or I might just pick one of my summer reads and head out there with my husband. I've had my eye on our old swing seat (which we also set out in the courtyard) now for days, hoping I'll get the chance to read there. This might just be the day. Oh, how I do so love summer.