Is there anything better than the month of June?
Our old hammock that Eleanor gave us in our California days finally bit the dust. Literally. With me IN IT. Telfer hung a new, fancy hammock up yesterday late afternoon.
I tested it out first:
Then was joined by one little person:
And then two:
And finally, my favorite image of the summer so far:
In the market for a hammock? Highly recommend this one.
1. Sherry and I walked home last night from a very fun evening at Bayview School of Cooking (a local grocery store) where we listened to Molly Wizenberg read from and talk about her new book Delancey. Oh and we ate (gobbled) five of her new recipes. Amazing. Will be adding each recipe to my regular rotation. [For those that you that own the book the recipes were Vietnamese Rice Noodle Salad, Sweet-Hot Pork Shoulder, Stone Fruit with Prosciutto and Fresh Mozzarella Salad, Tomato and Corn Salad and the Coconut Rice Pudding. Yum.]
2. Our garden is going bananas. Telfer does most of all of this, I must admit. I love to plan with him, buy the seeds, watch the plants grow and take their little pictures and do an occasional watering. And eat them at the end. We added two more garden beds this year and just today Telfer whipped up a little container box and filled it with mint plantings.
3. Cate and Jane are loving playing in their little pool and then stretching out on their towels. And Jane’s swimsuit has a skirt on it this year. I love these long afternoons where the sun is shining and the girls are playing and my main job is popsicle procurement.
4. On Sunday evening we took the girls and George to a local trail area and did a 1.4 walk (the girls would correct me here – it was a HIKE!). Last year we had dreams of doing this but Jane was at that awkward age where she was too big to carry and too small (slow) to walk. This year, she was our line leader much of the time. These trails are about a two-minute drive from our house and I am looking forward to a summer of “hiking” with my little family.
Also random thankfulness shoutout: the older I get the more I appreciate my girlfriends. It’s so worth the time and effort and deliberate planning. Sherry walked into my house last night and was wearing both a shirt and a sweater that I own and had no idea she owned as well. It’s not like I want my friends to be exactly like me but it feels so wonderful to be almost 36 and know that someone else in my town gets me. I spent a lovely day in Seattle with Bekah a couple of weeks ago. We hadn’t seen each other in six full years and a lot of life has happened to both of us but we had the most meaningful connection. Anna is also coming tonight for one night and the whole day tomorrow. We might even make jam together. My cup runneth over.
Thirteen years (yesterday) with this man. We have grown up together and I think the world of him. He is my best friend and truly my favorite person. We splurged last night on wild salmon and a good bottle of white wine and the little chocolate corks from the Bread Peddler. And our girls. And took a lot of pictures, some of them where we all pretended to be babushkas (cue the folded napkins). Life is so much better when you think you’re really funny.
Actually, I think most of my posts are either about the girls or reading with a bit of food thrown in here and there. Jane and I got to hang out for a couple hours while Cate was at a birthday party this weekend. I gave her several fun-for-her options including going to the grocery stop (I am always so devastated when the girls correct their little -isms) but she chose playing with a bag of marbles and then taking George for a walk. Jane is so very easily pleased. Cate and I got to spend a couple hours together last week while Grammy had Jane. We went to ice cream of course and then sat outside and chatted away. She’s such a dear.
Memorial Day weekend was actually very fun (we haven’t had the best track record with long, holiday weekends and so I am always surprised when Tuesday arrives and I actually feel refreshed). It was a nice mix of getting things done including yard work and weeding and the amazing transformation that is laying sod. We socialized – our next door neighbors came over for dinner after the girls went to bed one night and then Telfer made his pizza for our life group. We also managed a one-night getaway to the Lake House with the girl where we watched The Sound of Music for the first time (on VHS no less!) and did Lake House things. Lovely.
I finished two of the books on my Read A Shelf Project last week. Dirt Candy, a graphic novel cookbook, that makes me want to fly to New York immediately and go to Brooklyn to eat at the restaurant. Eleanor gave this to me for my birthday last year and I just stuck it on the shelf. So bad! And then an intense novel, The Affairs of Others, also set in Brooklyn about a young, grieving widow who owns a brownstone and becomes overly involved in the lives of her tenants. I could not put it down.
I know, I know. I always have some book project that I start and then don’t quite finish but I am hopeful this time!
So I am reading this:
I picked it up at Powell’s last weekend and am almost done with it. The author, Phyllis Rose, picks one shelf at the New York Society Library — LEQ to LES — and reads her way through it with the usual surprising results. I enjoy the project/memoir type of book. It appeals to my type-A ness and it’s true, surprising and meaningful connections can be made in the midst of a bit of structure. Of course, chaos brings its own connections and meanings but I always crave a little bit of structure (and so do my girls, especially Cate, understatement of the year).
While I am reading in my comfortable chair in the little office that Telfer built for me, this shelf is at eye level. I will be reading and become distracted, look up from my book and think to myself, I have so many books that I haven’t read, this is ridiculous, why haven’t I read these books? And then I am comforted because if there is a natural disaster or I am on bed rest again for some reason I will never, ever run out of books to read. Anyway, The Shelf inspired me to read a whole shelf and this is the one I chose. And I get the luxury of choosing a shelf at home, books I have already curated and decided at one point that I wanted to read, but haven’t yet for a variety of reasons. I did not tamper with the shelf in any way but the fact that the next pick for our college girls book club is on it pretty much sealed the deal (The Map of Enough). Also, remember my 52 in 52 project from a few years ago? The leftover books are all on this shelf! So I can finish two projects at the same time.
Here are the 28 titles:
The Map of Enough: One Woman’s Search for Place (Molly Caro May)
Dirt Candy: A Cookbook (Amanda Cohen & Ryan Dunlavey)
The Family Dinner: Great Ways to Connect With Your Kids, One Meal at a Time (Laurie David)
The Affairs of Others (Amy Grace Lloyd)
Burning the Days: Recollection (James Salter)
Townie: A Memoir (Andre Dubus III)
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Kay Redfield Jamison)
Blue Nights (Joan Didion)
Turn of Mind (Alice LaPlante)
Running the Rift (Naomi Benaron)
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (George Packer)
The Accidental (Ali Smith)
A Rope & A Prayer: The Story of a Kidnapping (Davide Rohde & Kristen Mulvihill)
The Sorrows of an American (Siri Hustvedt)
The Widower’s Tale (Julia Glass)
A Novel Bookstore (Laurence Cosse)
The Good Life: The Moral Individual in an Antimoral World (Cheryl Mendelson)
The Panopticon (Jenni Fagan)
Slammerkin (Emma Donaghue)
The New Yorker Stories (Ann Beattie)
The Whole Five Feet (Christopher R. Beha)
Nocturnes (Kazuo Ishiguro)
Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life (Marta McDowell)
Thirty Girls (Susan Minot)
Little Bee (Chris Cleave)
Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (Stanislas Dehaene)
Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (Philip Pullman)
The Art of Fielding (Chad Harbach)
Has any one read any of these books? I haven’t started so if you have an obvious recommendation, please share.
Andrea Y. Griffith 