Month: August 2012

Obamacare

I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent and well educated person, self-aware and theoretically aware of how the world works… It makes me crazy, then, that I have such a hard time understanding healthcare- as it is now, as it will be, what that means for me and Sweetheart, nomadic and self-employed but (thankfully, for now) healthy as oxes. Amid the furor and electioneering, I found this extremely/necessarily simplified breakdown of what Obamacare actually entails and what that actually may mean for me. I found it to be super helpful and enlightening… and if you don’t feel like delving into it, enjoy this video of a cat knocking over a bottle of pills instead.

Mixes

It just so happened that a late model pickup truck needed to get from the fresh and salt-blown Maine coast down to Virginia for the gilded fall. It just so happened that the last lobstery gusts of New England summer were blowing us south too, so we volunteered to drive it down. We leave in a bit, and since the truck only has a CD player, we’re sitting on this rock, where The Checkley no longer stands, making mix CDs to take us into fall like it was ten years past when we didn’t know the preciousness of adventure, but we certainly understood well the value of a good mix.

 

fabulous Checkley image from here.

Things of Beauty

My dear Charlotte sent me this cinemagraph at the tail end of a nitty gritty logistical e-mail regarding me possibly borrowing this glorious harlequin jewelbox tent (as Charlotte says, in her infinite old-soul wisdom: every backyard bacchanal needs something like this). I know she just sent it for the mundane purpose of giving me an idea of its dimensions, but I can’t stop looking at it and wishing to dive into this world of strange and beautiful contortionist vagabond poets. She made it for this video (which she directed), for the band The Hill and Wood, which I simply can’t stop watching:

The HIll And Wood — The Call from Ryan De Franco on Vimeo.

Say Cheese

I simply can’t get enough of the divine and positively louche cheese spread on Saxelby Cheese over at the Selby. She arrived at the Essex Street Market around the same time I started frequenting it, and in one of those weird secret girl-crushes, I think trail blazing cheesemonger extraordinairess Anne Saxelby is one of those ladies that, you know, we’d really hit it off if we ever met in person, you know, just like Zooey Deschanel or Michelle Obama, but with cheese, you know? Here, in typical Selby fashion, her illustration of the ideal cheese cave, why parmigiano is like Elvis, and instructions on how to make something that sounds absolutely incredible, her “bourbon soaked grape leaf cheese wrap”:

Amen.

“A bad day of hiking beats a good day of work”. Amen.

From the top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park (4 miles up, picnic lunch with Maine-made blueberry soda at the summit for a treat, 4 miles back to a swim in the very cold ocean, not too shabby).

A Bushel and a Peck

Sweetheart and I camped right along the extreme tidal flats up where Maine becomes Canada and the water rises and falls 25 feet with every hi-lo tide. We were in Cobscook Bay, “cobscook” being the Passamaquoddy tribal word for “boiling tides”. Part of the allure of our state park campsite was that at low tide “adventurous campers” (said the park literature) were permitted to go out into the expansive mud flats and get very dirty in the search for heretofore unknown to me softshell clams. Clams so fat and juicy and salty-sweet they can’t even close their shells all the way. We arrived just at low tide and ventured out to secure our dinners, while all the while the incredible fast and furious waters chased us back to land. We pulled a bounty, put them in fresh water to let them filter out their grit while we prepared the fire and tended to our sore fingers. When the coals were jewels, we banked and stoked and roasted the clams over the new open flames. Their salty juices hissed and spit, we melted butter in an enamel coffee cup by setting it at the edge of the fire, and spooned from the jar of cocktail sauce we picked up in Lubec (it was the easternmost cocktail sauce of the United States). Washed all down with dark brown beer it was a joyous supper indeed. And for dessert? The berries we had picked along the hiking trail that morning. It may seem simple to say, but it’s a certain city epiphany: how honest and good it feels to catch, pick, or harvest the food you eat yourself. To provide. When the fruits of your labors are actual fruits, foraged in the open, free in every sense.

Night Magic

One of those nights of the incredibly full moon we all walked from the river’s edge inland to the no-lane road that lopes along the border of Canada to light giant sparklers and dance in our own circles to their woozy comet trails. When the last one burnt out, we lay in the middle of the road spooling out in either direction knowing, somehow, no one would be coming along and looked up at the stars, made almost dim by that huge moon. It was night magic.

Wanderlust vs. Homesickness

Oh, hello. It’s been a bit since I’ve been here. Sweetheart and I arrived back in Brooklyn late last night, flash floods, lightning, and Hyundais with no headlights and Jersey plates changing lanes without signalling choking every feeding vein back into New York City, returning to the apartment to find a broken window, a few (dead) cockroaches on their backs in the living room, and a liquefied melon we’d forgotten to take with us. Oh my. To say we’ve been out adventuring is a bit too simple, adventures we’ve had for sure (I’ll share some soon!), but really, we’ve been out searching is more like it. You might could tell that I’ve been bitten by a pretty serious wanderlust this summer, an itch I’ve been doing my damndest to scratch with hot springs and sweet corn, headscarves, big dinners, and old, best friends, but it wasn’t until I got to my dear friend Jay’s house (the one he’s building from scratch with his own Sweetheart, embedding carved Buddhas into their poured concrete footings to protect and serve) that I got it. The heart of the matter: that I’ve been out wandering to find home. I’m not sure exactly where that is yet, honestly at this point it’s more of a feeling than a location, but I’ll keep you posted on my searches and adventures. Because home is where I want to be, pick me up and turn me round, this must be the place.