Dandelion Jelly: or; One More Reason Not to Chem Your Lawn

Here's the recipe, courtesy of The American Country Inn and Bed and Breakfast Cookbook, vol. 2, by Kitty and Lucian Maynard:

Dandelions
1 quart water

3 cups dandelion liquid
1 teaspoon lemon or orange extract
1 1 3/4 oz package Sure-Jell (fruit pectin)
4 1/2 c sugar

Here's my paraphrase of what you do:

Pick and wash dandelion blossoms. Crispina and I have been gathering them daily as they open, boiling and putting up the liquid in the freezer to use later for both jelly and wine. The recipe warns that boiling for more than three minutes will turn the liquid green;  so far mine has been a lovely pale gold. When they're boiled, we strain out and compost the blossoms, pour the liquid into freezer containers, and we're done for the day.

When you have three cups of liquid, you boil that with the lemon or orange extract and the package of Sure-Jell, which comes with additional handy jelly-making directions, good for the neophyte like me. Add the sugar and boil for three minutes, stirring constantly. After three minutes, remove the mixture from the heat and decant into jars. Again, the Sure-Jell package has very useful canning instructions if you don't already know how to do it.

I had more liquid than jars, as it turned out, so I poured some into a bowl to set and use right away. 

 

The inn proprietor who contributed this recipe notes that dandelion jelly tastes like honey. I've got bread in the oven right now -- 3 cups wheat flour, one cup almond flour, two cups quick oats, oil, a  glob of molasses, water, and 2 packs active dry yeast -- so we'll see how it all turns out. 

Annunciation Quicktakes

1.   I think the alternator's kaput on the van. Here is how my week has gone:
    
a. Monday. School at home all day. Scout Court of Honor at 6:30 p.m. Payday not till Friday;  pantry contents eccentric. Bake weird no-rational-ingredient apple-gingerbread thing that you dust powdered sugar over to try and make it look like something another person, aged 12, would recognize as dessert.

Dash to van, herding kids ahead of you -- "Hurry! Hurry! Get in! Sit down! Buckle up! Hurry!" -- actually, it was the Scout telling everyone to hurry, not me so much -- get in van, plunge key into ignition, turn that baby, and --

b. Wednesday. At home all day. I guess we were at home all day Tuesday, too, though I didn't realize it until Wednesday evening, when we were rushing out for Mass and choir. "Hurry! Hurry! Get in! Sit down! Buckle up!" This time it was me saying all that, over and over again, just to wind myself up good and tight before falling on bended knee before the Lord God Almighty. I mean, you know. Hurry, hurry. Get in van, plunge key into ignition, and --

c. Today.

Yesterday we were out all day. Aelred jump-started the van in the morning, and I drove it to church, I drove it to Panacea Falls for the violin lesson, I drove it back to church where the other kids were playing with their friends, and ultimately I drove it back to Panacea Falls again to fetch the string player from youth orchestra. Surely, surely, I'd revved up the battery enough that -- so that it wouldn't -- I mean, so it would --


2. So it's the Feast of the Annunciation, and most of us stayed home, with the inanimate shell of a Ford E350. What was that "be it done unto me" part, again?

3. When life hands you a dead battery, you . . . uh . . . don't make lemonade, because all the lemons are at the store, and you are at home. But you can do breakfast like this, if you think of it in time:

 

4. Which, for once, I did. Lately, as in for probably the last eighteen months, the liturgical year has been blasting past me just as fast as the regular old world time has done, whipping my hair back and leaving me staggering in the slipstream. "What?" I cried in mid-December. "Christmas? But I didn't make an Advent wreath!" Long about that time, too, I looked at the calendar and remarked that Ash Wednesday wasn't till March 9, which seemed a yawning, painful eternity away. It's not that I love Lent so very, very much;  I like it the way I like eight glasses of water a day, because it's good for me. But those acres of green across which we had to drag ourselves, like the girl on the ground in Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World -- how will I ever, I thought. And then suddenly.

5. So, here it is the Feast of the Annunciation, and not only did we not go to Mass, but oatmeal was what was for breakfast, albeit on pretty dishes. Just this past week I bought a 25-pound bag of quick oats, and today some people were happier about it than others. To those in the disappointed camp quoth I:  "Be it done unto you . . . " But I let them have as much brown sugar as they wanted.

6. Ironic, actually, not to mention heartbreaking, that on the day when a woman said yes to motherhood, I should read of an adoptive mother who said yes, and a judge who told her no,  on the grounds that her prospective son's Down Syndrome made him "socially unacceptable." 

7. Incidentally, if you counted four places at my breakfast table, and you noticed in the sidebar that there are six of us, not counting the dog, who does not quite have his own chair yet, that's because Aelred and Epiphany left -- in the car that does start -- before five this morning. The girly was catching an early plane out to what may or may not turn out to be her college, for an "Accepted (not "Acceptable") Students" weekend. She called when she was on the ground at her destination, ostensibly to tell me she'd gotten that far in one piece, but also to solicit my advice regarding the obtaining of the SuperShuttle ride we'd reserved for her.

"Ask someone there," I said ultimately, though not unfeelingly, I hope. How could I help feeling? There she is, a thousand miles away, and here I am, trying to figure out where the time goes, never mind where the courtesy phone is, and once again -- because it's always the truth, isn't it -- the whole thing is out of my hands.




Seven Quick Takes is happening at Conversion Diary as it does every week, whether I keep up with it or not. Many thanks to Jen for her constancy and her having a clue.

Last Year's Gethsemane

I took this picture of our back yard during Holy Week last year. It seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that no place could be so touched with beauty, freshness, life, and consolation as this shady north corner, where the red camellias weep their discarded petals onto the violet-scattered grass. Then, it seemed to me to be a living icon of the garden where Jesus knelt to pray that the cup of death would pass from Him.

This year the camellias are dropping their blooms at the end of the first week of Lent -- and what iconic sense can I make of that? I'm not sure, except that of course we're headed in that same direction, from Eden to the garden of blood and tears.

At any rate, for much of the year my back yard is nothing to look at, but in this holy time it comes into its transitory own.

Getting By With a Little Help

Ten-thirtyish this morning, at the Boy Scout pancake breakfast, sitting at a table in the church social hall, nursing my fourth or fifth cup of coffee and catching up with a friend, the mother of many, including a young adult with a severe but undefined developmental disability which renders her a perpetual two-year-old.

Says my friend:  "For years the doctors ran tests. I said, You find out what's wrong with her, and we'll name the syndrome after you. I thought she was broken.

"Then I realized:  I'm broken. And she's here to help me."

Anyway, I don't know whether any of you out there were looking for some quotation to give, like, focus and meaning and stuff to your life, but if you were, might I suggest that you've just found it?

Or, to put it another way, do I know why I got up and drove four miles to eat pancakes this morning?

Yes, I believe I do.

P.S.  Oh, and. There's got to be something to the fact that this conversation transpired on the Feast of Saint Joseph. We know what the Holy Family looks like, but a holy family? My money is on any family that bears its heartbreaks as if they were -- because they are -- blessings.

Poetry Friday: Donald Davie

Enough with the me-me-me already. The other day, out of the blue, Donald Davie's Selected Poems turned up on the trunk at the foot of my bed -- that is, being a book I've owned since 1986, when I took Mark Jarman's Auden and After contemporary-poetry class at Vanderbilt, it didn't come truly and utterly out of the blue, but off some shelf in my house. Still, I hadn't picked it up in ages, and clearly it wanted to be picked up.

And here's the poem which wanted to be read:

House Martin


I see the low black wherry
Under the alders rock,
As the ferryman strides from his ferry,
And his child in its black frock

Into his powerful shadow
And out of it, skirmishing, passes
Time and again as they go
Up through the tall lush grasses.

The light of the evening grieves
For the stout house of a father,
With martins under its eaves,
That cracks and sags in the weather.

 Poetry Friday this week meets at a wrung sponge.  Go there for more.

Curriculum Website Updates

As those of you who follow anything I do may have guessed, I work in fits and starts. Not surprisingly, it's been a couple of months since anything new has happened at the Abandon Hopefully integrated-humanities-curriculum website.

Today, however, I got up early and spent two hours working on the Grade 10 page, devoted to English/European history and literature from the Anglo-Saxon period through the Renaissance and Reformation. The Anglo-Saxon unit is more or less up now, with readings and links to lectures and many historical and literary resources.

More to come . . . eventually . . . but meanwhile, go check out what's there.

Reading for the Lenten Season: Monday

God's will is to save us, and nothing pleases him more than our coming back to him with true repentance . . . Indeed, God's desire for our salvation is the primary and preeminent sign of his infinite goodness. It was precisely in order to show that there is nothing closer to God's heart that the divine Word of God the Father, with untold condescension, lived among us in the flesh, and did, suffered, and said all that was necessary to reconcile us to God the Father, when we were at enmity with him, and to restore us to the life of blessedness from which we had been exiled.

                                     Maximus the Confessor:  Letter
                                     from Christian Prayer

A General Feast of the Universal Church; or, My Wedding Anniversary, Transferred, With Dandelion Wine

Really, it was Thursday;  every year, it's somewhere in the depths of Lent, because that's what happens when you get married in the Methodist Church on your graduate-school spring break and then later convert. We're counting on one of the children's becoming Pope someday (my money is on Helier, personally) and declaring us saints and March 10 a Holy Day of Obligation, but this year one girly had orchestra on Thursday night, and another girly had scouts, and many of us wanted to go to Holy Hour and Confession, it being the day after Ash Wednesday and all of us feeling especially penitential and prayerful and fastacious and almsgivingicious.

So we're celebrating today. In our house, at least, it's a solemnity.

Meanwhile, remember this from last year?

Well, here it is now:

Looks pretty, doesn't it? And it's . . . not bad. You don't really want to drink it in large quantities, mostly because, as Aelred says, it tastes like pure-grain alcohol, which I guess is basically more or less what it is. It's very yeasty, at any rate. Maybe I didn't strain the mix strenuously enough before I bottled it. But it has really a . . . not-bad  . . . finish, as they say, and if you squint hard, mentally, you can see that it came from dandelions out of the yard. This batch isn't exactly Ray Bradbury's bottled golden summer, but it's . . . not-bad . . . enough that I think I'm going to try again this year.

So, because it's Lent I wasn't going to talk about dandelion wine, but because in my house at least it's a solemnity, I am.

Poetry Friday: Poetry as Explanation

Well, Peter J. Leithart said it, not me. And unlike Lucretius, I don't really know what, exactly, I'm explaining, unless it's how to stand by Charleston Harbor and channel The Poet Known in My House as Alfred, Lord Tennisball, or somebody, sort of:

Observation

The winter harbor’s rumple and fall,

Pewter-colored, slaps the pilings.

Black on the white sky, seagulls call,

And pigeons stalk the railings.

The day is full of wind and wings

And screams and wordless hungerings

Of a million wild inhuman things

And the salt grasses growing.

From the pier’s end you can see the tide

Reaching in and in and in.

Beneath its surge the dolphins ride:

Now and then a fin

Rises, glossy-brown and thin,

A shadow on the water’s skin –

You see it, then you don’t again --

And a wet breath blowing.

Unseen, they drive the schooling fish

Like bonfire sparks a storm wind harries

Across a shifting twilit grayish

Atmosphere. From aeries

Of open water, while daylight tarries,

They rise and stoop while the surge-tide carries

The flickering wide-eyed silver flurries

Against the steepening sand.

You lean on the rail, and you watch the sea

Overturn itself as the pelicans row

Rough tides of wind overhead, and the gray

Dolphins breach and blow.

The shoals of fish surge on;  although

They live, hopeless, to die, they go

Forward while the grasses grow,

And the sun walks on land. 

Okay, rhyme schemes are fun, all right? Really, really fun. You can have your old Sudoku and your crosswords:  this is how to lie awake at night. And I didn't give it up for Lent.

 Meanwhile, go visit Liz at Liz in Ink for the rest of the Friday fun.


P.S. This is quite unfinished. I started it the other day, and am not at all happy with the final stanza, where the "conclusions" the poem reaches, if "conclusions" is even the right word, are marking the place for something else that's supposed to be there. (See "how to lie awake," above.) 

I Am Writing This On My Heart

From Peter J. Leithart, in the new issue of Touchstone: 

Poetry as a mode of explanation:  That's an ancient and medieval instinct. Lucretius chose poetry as the vehicle for exploring the nature of things because it sweetened the hard doctrines of his Epicurean atomism. But he also thought poetry was a suitable, even revelatory, medium of explanation. Apparently, so did David, and Isaiah, and the author of Job, and Jesus, and John on Patmos.

Ash Wednesday: From the Office of Readings

Offer your soul to God, make him an oblation of your fasting, so that your soul may be a pure offering, a holy sacrifice, a living victim, remaining your own and at the same time made over to God. Whoever fails to give this to God will not be excused, for if you are to give him yourself you are never without the means of giving.

                                                              Peter Chrysologus, sermon

Ash Wednesday: My Hand to the Plow

Jesus said to him, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."

Before me, the metaphorical field. Really, it looks like things I know already:  my husband, my children, my house, the ratty weeds in the garden which once again I can't bear to pull because they're blooming with tiny blue flowers. The red prayer book on the shelf. 

Forty furrows. That's how wide the field is;  that's the job laid out for me. It's better than having nothing out of the ordinary to do. Last week is dead, and so is day before yesterday, and so is last night. The yellow flowers droop in the green glass vase on the counter. Here at the table, my seven-year-old eats her toast while the aquarium filter gurgles and the steely daylight outside says, Six more weeks of winter, no matter what you thought. My seventeen-year-old wanders through, her copper curls a sailor's warning. Every instant, time is bearing us forward. Now the seven-year-old has brought me a crown she's made out of green plastic bead-stringing filament, pink and blue birthday candles, and those cotton loops that come with little-kid pot-holder weaving looms. It's not remotely a crown of thorns, but it will serve.

Meanwhile, the day is here. The season opens. The field lies fallow, waiting. The earth at my feet is cold, but where the blade breaks it, it smells like life.

The Lenten Life

You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins. 


The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing;  erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over;   I hope birds ate the crumbs;   I hope you will toss it all and not look back. 


The line of words is a hammer. You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. After giving many years' attention to these things, you know what to listen for. Some of the walls are bearing walls;  they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity;  you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out. Duck.

                                                Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, 1989

Poetry Friday: Poem to Song

 A friend of mine maintains that songwriting is all about stringing cliches together, and there's some truth to that, for sure. In a song, constrained by the needs of the music, you do -- it seems to me, a non-songwriter -- have to trade on a shorthand of whatever commonplaces go with the genre:   the blues song's repetition of infidelity metaphors, for example. To misquote William Carlos Williams, a poem is a thing made wholly of words, whereas in a song the words function as a decoration to hang on the music, where it's really happening, and to give the vocal instrument something to do.

Anyway. Remember this? I woke up the other day with a little refrainy thing in my head, and it struck me that I could plunder that poem for some verses that might sort of go with it. The whole thing doesn't make much narrative sense (think "tone poem" here), and I don't have a tune in mind, especially, but it was an interesting exercise, and I can't really think of anything else to post today.

(Untitled Incoherent Folk-Songy Experiment #1)

Last night the wind blew bitter

From somewhere outside town:

A trailer burning to its bones,

A woman in a nightgown

Smoking her last cigarette

While her cat ran down the creek,

And the stars kept circling over her,

Beautiful and bleak.

And the sky is full of roses

Above my barren tree.

The sky is full of roses,

Though they’re not for me.

Main Street’s ghosts go prowling past

Blank storefronts in the night.

Behind those empty windows,

No hope, no grace, no light

Warms the cold wet sidewalk,

But here before the dawn

The catbird in the sycamore

Unravels his stray song.

And the sky is full of roses

Above my barren tree.

The sky is full of roses,

Though they’re not for me.

My love wanders beside me

In the lost land of his dreams.

The house sleeps in the shadow

Of the daybreak’s silent wings.

 And the sky is full of roses

And the rain shines on the street.

The sky is full of roses

Blowing wild and sweet.

And the sky is full of roses

Above my barren tree.

The sky is full of roses,

Though they’re not for me.

And when the party's over in this neck of the woods, you can wander on to The Small Nouns for the rest of today's poetry crawl. 

The Seldom Scene

Because, you know, do you need a reason?

Question of the Day

At the Guardian Books Blog: Do you give books as presents?

I'm not being sarcastic when I call this the "question of the day," because, to misquote my favorite literary priest, we do not live in particularly literate times in these days. On the one hand, of course we do live in more functionally literate times in these days, in the sense that, at least in our culture, more people can now write their names instead of making Xes at the bottoms of land deeds and divorce decrees. On the other hand, it's hard to see that books, as a commodity, have increased in value. To give someone a book is not the same way of saying I love you as giving them a Kindle.

I'm painting with a hugely broad brush, I realize, mostly because I'm writing this at the breakfast table in the brief interlude of calm before the younger children get up. But I know, I know. You like books. I like books. Probably everyone each of us knows likes books, but that doesn't mean we're not part of a subculture.

Also, if you're interested in whatever implications the Guardian's question might . . . uh . . . imply, you might consider the various reasons why people give books as gifts, if and when they do. Do adults give books to children, for example, primarily because they themselves loved those books as children, or because reading is good for you and should be encouraged, like eating five servings of fruits and vegetables daily and avoiding saturated fats? Or because, as well-meaning outsiders, they wish to offer some kind of corrective to whatever values said children are imbibing from their parents, which would explain the Annual Book of Greater Religious Virtue For Unfortunate Children of Unbelievers As Defined By Aunt Augusta, or the Book of How Tolerance Is Good And Other Breaking News, or whatever, which may turn up under the Christmas tree.

It does seem to me, offhandedly and anecdotally,  that the book-as-gift phenomenon is mostly an adults-to-children occurrence these days, and often for these medicinal purposes. Obviously, however,  that's not always the case. I give Aelred at least one book for Christmas and more for his birthday, for instance, though choosing the right ones isn't easy.  He is a constant reader, but one of a very narrowly defined and idiosyncratic set of interests which do not include, for example, the detective mystery. My typical gift-book-shopping MO is to walk into the secondhand bookstore, have a conversation about gallstones or algebra with the proprietor, and then say a prayer that as I fumble my way through the labyrinth of shelves, all packed two-deep with books, the right thing will fall off into my hand. That's how, this past Christmas, I came out with a book about German lieder, which at the very least was a theme I hadn't already mined to death. Nothing, I tell you, speaks love like remembering in the heat and dust of the moment that a certain person loves Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

So, as my thoughts unravel despite or maybe because of all these cups of coffee I'm drinking, I'll leave you with the assumption that of course, if you read this blog at all, your answer to the question of whether you give books as gifts is a funny look that says, Somebody doesn't? But I'll also assume that like me, you're interested in the why of it all:  why do people give books, and why exactly does the Guardian want to know?