Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Practicing thankfulness and gratitude keeps me focused on the positive, no matter what else is going on in life. We celebrated the holiday at home yesterday by cooking in the morning and decorating our harvest table with a big bouquet of sage, one of the only things still green out in the garden, and a few small pumpkins. Then met up with my parents and aunt and went over to my younger sister's house for a family gathering and some incredibly bountiful good food. (They set up a separate table just for the pies...) We brought two dozen biscuits (Ryan's grandmother's recipe), creamed leeks and pearl onions, a blackberry crisp, and potatoes from the garden, with butter and cream for mashed potatoes. Thirteen people present, many more not present but in my thoughts nonetheless. We drove home after dark through thick fog, with a heaping plate of leftovers and some quiet talk about the strength and meaning of family traditions. Feeling replete today, and grateful. Not planning on going shopping. Everything we need is already here.

When Hodge gets restless his favorite thing to do is see how high he can climb in whatever room he happens to be in. In the living room stands my favorite bookcase, purchased from a local antiques dealer who bought it at the auction of a Bar Harbor summer estate. I love the bookcase itself, and then found out the house it came out of is just down the road from the house my parents built when they moved to Bar Harbor. So, a piece of home. And Hodge has figured out how to scale it. He launches himself from the arm of the couch, then scrambles up the last shelf. I will have to remove the fine bindings so they aren't damaged. Or move the couch.


Here he's wondering if he can climb any higher in this room (the wide ledge of crown molding up over the windows tempts him every time, though he hasn't managed to get there yet):

When last I wrote, snow was flying, but that didn't stick and in fact the weather has been beautiful, and I've been standing in various fields and on various beaches painting while the painting is good. And already thinking about next year's garden, with the arrival of the 2010 Fedco catalogue. Which, besides being the great seed and garden resource, contains amusingly doctored clip art (and original art) and highly enlightening reading material. This year's catalogue quotes Goethe throughout. From the section on soil amendments:

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words."

At the dining table, I just wrestled some stretcher bars into square, to get ready to stretch canvases, and now I'm reading Goethe in a Maine seed catalogue, and Ryan's writing code. Hodge The Cat is prostrate before the woodstove. A typical Saturday night around the homestead.

The snow is coming down this morning, in Maine. And in the garden I left the carrots in the ground a day too long, because instead of working yesterday when it was sunny and beautiful outside, I headed down the coast to paint and didn't get home until just after dark. Which is mighty early right now. (I found out I can paint outside when it's only 40 degrees. Good to know.) So today after breakfast I bit the bullet and hurried outside in my pyjamas and gardening boots and coat, hat, and gloves, and dug up the rest of the carrots. It (I, that is) wasn't pretty, but such is life when one works at home. As with potatoes, digging carrots is a satisfying job. They have a great scent and the fresh green tops were good to see as the snow flew around my trowel.

It amazes me to consider a handful of seeds in my palm, and what eventually becomes of them:

Shown here during their bath. I snipped the tops off and put them on the compost pile, gave the carrots a quick rinse and pat dry, and loaded up the crisper drawers in the fridge. I've started making a stew every week, my usual pattern as colder weather approaches. This week's version has chicken, barley, potatoes, carrots, celery, onion, stock. Delicious. Even better knowing I grew some of it myself.

One of the books we found at last weekend's library sale is a lovely little reprint of John Evelyn's discourse about gardening and garden vegetables and plants, his Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, originally published in London in 1699, here reprinted by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 1937. (Sallets = salads.) It is, according to its introduction, "... a book of directions for gardening and cooking... written in a discoursive style and with a leisureliness and in a rhythm suited to the slow pace of a horse trotting through the winding lanes of the English countryside." I've never read Evelyn's famous diary, so this will serve as a good introduction to the workings of his mind. Before I attempt the entire diary. Since I don't yet have a copy, I'm not putting any pressure on myself to do so - as with many great books, it is enough to know it waits for me, someday.

Until then, I putter. And take to heart Evelyn's words from his dedication to this book: "...how much might I say of Gardens and Rural Employments, preferrable to the Pomp and Grandeur of other Secular Business..." He describes an interesting recipe for Pudding of Carrot (p.141) which calls for grated carrots, bread crumbs, cream, butter, eggs, sugar, salt, and nutmeg, beaten together and then baked in a quick oven. Hmm. Here I am with many carrots on my hands and cooking on the brain, after seeing the film Julie & Julia, and reading the book afterwards. But I can't see myself cooking my way through Evelyn's Acetaria. Gardening through it, perhaps...?

I went to a small library book sale yesterday and came away with three cartons of books ($82), and now have minor mountain of new reading, and even some books to sell, including a signed John Updike first edition - the best of the lot, moneywise (paid $1). But, these concerns are overridden, and all books superceded, since I stopped in at a favorite secondhand book shop this morning in pursuit of more Dorothy L. Sayers, and emerged with a softcover reprint of all the Lord Peter short stories and a tatty copy of Busman's Honeymoon. My dilemma: until Busman's Honeymoon is finished, I will get precisely nothing else accomplished. And it's already late in the day, today, if I want to sleep well tonight. So I feel I must put off starting it until tomorrow, when I can devote the majority of the day to its reading. Such sloth! Perhaps I should plan particularly unpleasant jobs on either side of all that pleasure. Turning over the compost pile, or doing the final weeding in the garden, say, or handwashing heavy sweaters. This Yankee work ethic is a rather dubious inheritance, when all is said and done. When I long for insouciance. Maybe I should read back-issues of The Idler, next? Or more Sayers - at one point in Strong Poison, Peter looks around his library of fine first editions (he is a book-collector, you see, another reason to love him) and wonders what good they are, in real life. And then quickly comes to his senses. Let us follow suit.

Apologies for a prolonged silence. Life has been insistently literal this fall. And my reading of late has been scattered and haphazard, mostly consisting of brief sojourns in fat anthologies. Two exceptions - I've been spending time with Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, via their published diaries and letters, and travel memoirs. I rediscovered an anthology they assembled in the early 1940s - I'd forgotten I'd owned a copy and found it again while moving books hither and yon recently - entitled Another World Than This... (Michael Joseph 1945). It combines two of my favorite literary formats, the anthology of quotations and the almanac. The jacket copy states that the compilers "...have been guided by no principle other than a desire to provide for every month of the year a small selection of passages which may interest or please the ordinary reader." The ordinary reader of the British 1940s, alas, is very different from the ordinary reader of today, but I find we can still meet on some common ground - that of recognition of beauty. I love the way a good anthology can weave a common cloth from disparate sources across time and space, and theirs is like a fine antique carpet. The quotations are short and long, from all eras except the current one (with a very few exceptions), and must have been a joy to find and mark in the first place, particularly as an antidote to the very visible destruction of the war (the antithesis of beauty and intellectual or soul-ful pursuits).

A quote (p.180), from poet Coventry Patmore (1823-1896, Magna est Veritas) which suits my way of thinking quite well at the moment, and a recent painting to match:

"Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world's course will not fail:
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not."

The other anthology I've been reading (I said two exceptions) is The Sayers Holiday Book, a thick Dorothy L. Sayers omnibus of mystery novels and stories (Victor Gollancz 1963). Not my usual fare at all, but I must say her Gaudy Night is a deeply sublime and satisfying story, and I wish in my heart of hearts that Peter O'Toole had been able to play Lord Peter in a film of this tale, when he was a young man. Gaudy Night is the kind of story you need a stack of reference books beside you while you read, if you want to be able to understand all the literary asides and quotations within, except the story itself won't allow you to break from its spell in order to do a little bit of dry research. Keep reading! Keep reading! it says.

And I read half the novel in one sitting, finally had to go to sleep it was so late, dreamed about who the culprit might be and whether or not Harriet Vane would allow herself to be loved, and woke up starving to read the rest of it over breakfast. Now that's a good book. I can say it took me away, and I couldn't ask for more than that.

This weekend I'm heading to Islesboro to paint for a week, so I'm packing and figuring out what to bring, and wondering how much like fall it will really be (Pants? Sweaters?? Long johns???). Packing the art supplies is always great - seeing blank canvases and panels and wondering what I'm going to fill them with over the course of the week. I've been painting on wooden panels lately and really loving it - here is one from my island trip last week (this is the finished painting that I was just starting in the photos from the post-before-last):

I've added a lot of new work from 2009 to my painting website, both in the oils folder and the available work folder. Many thanks to those who purchased paintings recently - I've been tallying up and realized I've sold 18 so far this year. A successful season, all in all. Now I'm looking forward to a long quiet winter of working at home, reading, painting larger canvases again indoors (most of my summer work is outside, and smallish, meaning under 18" x 24"), half-heartedly selling books online, and continuing to renovate the attic for my painting studio. After one more island week, painting with friends. One of the highlights of my year, and a wonderful way to bookend the summer.