MY VENISON LIFE

               Our friend, Ryan, made a batch of venison stew and sent some over.

               His stew is much better than anything I ever made and it got me

               thinking.

               My late husband, Michael, was the most unlikely hunter. A Jewish
               kid from Washington Heights, he went to Bronx High School of
               Science.   He became a New York lawyer whose trial and
               appellate firm represented people who, for the most part, would have
               been against hunting anything, ever.

               Michael had a large collection of guns and was a terrific shot. He shot

               birds including turkeys and pheasants and, at deer season, he had a

               special stand in the woods -- quite a luxurious arrangement fitted,
               I think, with a heat source.

               He hunted almost every deer season at Martha's Vineyard with friends.

               "Meat" at the Vineyard in those days, meant venison. It could also mean

               goose breast, but usually it meant venison. Many times, it was eaten

               so rare there was red ooze dripping down someone's beard. Freezers

               were always full of venison -- cut, wrapped and labeled by an itinerant 

               butcher.

               

               My mother's people were farmers and for them also, venison was "meat."

               In those days, there were no freezers, so the venison was canned and I

               remember my Aunt Mary dumping the contents of a large Mason jar

               into a hot frying pan, letting it brown and then serving it up with potatoes

               and gravy. 

               My father, also a city boy, had all the gear for deer hunting. He kept a

               deer rifle under the bed and his pre-synthetic hunting clothing included

               a black and red Macintosh that must have weighed ten pounds. His

               hunting boots were enormous, heavy things that laced way up. I don't

               remember his ever "getting" a deer but if he had, my mother would have

               known what to do with it.

               The best way for me to approach venison was to make it into a stew. I

               started with bacon and onion and garlic, then added carrot and parsnip 

               and then the venison and some beef broth and a little red wine. 

               I may have put something else in the pot -- I can't remember. But I do 

               know this: the venison was always overcooked and dried out even in 

               the stew. I made it whenever Michael brought venison home but I 

               never dared to go beyond stew and maybe this is too bad.

               Our old friend, Angus Cameron, wrote a game cookbook and he included

               a recipe for venison with boysenberry jam. Like lamb, venison is

               often accompanied with a flavorful sweet.

             

Trees and Gardens of British Columbia

The 1935 painting "Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky" (below) is by Emily Carr, 1871-1945) Canadian artist

and writer whose work had been completely unknown to me
until last week when I joined a Road Scholar group on a tour
of gardens and parks in British Columbia.

The programme was fairly ambitious, taking us by ferry from Vancouver to Victoria, the capital of BC at the southern edge of Vancouver Island. This was a wonderful world for this Vermonter and I wondered why it never occurred to us to relocate to Vancouver.  I can say it has occurred to increasing numbers of mostly young Asian people beginning with the Hong Kong exodus in the 1990s. There is big money in British Columbia now, making real estate values crazy and the entire area expensive to live in. There is ambitious building happening in downtown Vancouver -- high rise office and residential space, changing the character of the old neighborhoods.


We began our tour with a visit to Stanley Park in downtown Vancouver, a 125-year old public oasis surrounded by seawall and bike paths, walking trails and deep forest. It was fair weather for us, warm for that area with not a drop of rain. Wait, we were told,  until winter when it rains all the time but rarely freezes. Trees love it.

A constant throughout the trip is the enormous public support there
is for these green spaces. Friends of This and That, scores of
volunteers who weed and plant and do the work of professional gardeners for free. The planning and foresight to create these
spaces makes our own efforts here in the US seem lacking. We do
it, but with the zeal of the Canadians. "Don't forget to look up,"
said one guide and this advice about looking at the trees and sky

was the key into true wonder. Trees! Trees I've never seen or heard of! Gigantic, towering trees in the parks and in people's yards. Sequoia, Red Cedar, Douglas Fir -- Trees lovingly planted and protected. What a surprise. What a gift.

On the campus of the University of British Columbia, we were
guided through the Nitobe Japanese Gardens, by a
knowledgeable student who may have weighed 90 pounds. Her
small body scintillated with energy and she herded the group
of large Americans with humor and aplomb. I thought if I were
her mother, I'd be so proud of her. From this quiet retreat, we
crossed the road to the Museum of Anthropology, an interesting
building housing a collection of Canadian First Nation artifacts including many totem poles, some inside, some out.

Canadians say, "First Nation," when referring to indigenous people rather than "Native American," for example. I prefer the Canadian
usage for its breadth and respect. To me, "Native" has negative
overtones, a kind of high-to-low perspective. That's just me. The
few people I talked to about it did not recognize my qualms.

We went to Vancouver's thriving Chinatown for a visit to the
Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Gardens, a pure rendition of a Chinese scholar's
garden.
                        
                           
Everything about this garden is meticulous. Every planting,
every element of the structure, has been done with the greatest
care and respect for tradition. When you look up, you emerge
from the distant Chinese past and catch glimpses of new
skyscrapers -- perhaps being erected by present-day developers
of Chinese ancestry.

After returning to Vermont and thinking it over, my
favorite garden is the Van Dusen Botanical Garden in
Vancouver. Developed on the 55-acre site of an abandoned golf course, this garden is another tribute to community cooperation and public will, an oasis in the heart of the city. Described as "a living
museum...playing a vital role in education, scientific research and
education," it did have a head start with trees on the original golf course and open spaces cleared for fairways and such. There is a maze and water features, shady walkways, ponds and lakes,
flower and herb gardens, and just about every kind of rhododendron
and laurel.  Nothing seems studied although everything is planned. There are no fakey floral displays just whisked in from the nursery
to spend time in a garden until they fade and another batch is tucked in.

I found peace and joy in this garden and hope some of it sticks in my memory.

We got on a huge ferry boat for the 1-1/2 hour trip to Vancouver Island (pop. 759,000) -- 290 miles long and 62 miles wide -- the southern part of which lies south of the 49th parallel. The capitol
of all British Columbia is Victoria (pop. 350,000) at the southern
tip of Vancouver Island. From this coast, you can see across the water to the snow-capped Cascades in Washington State.

European exploration began in the mid-1700s with quests for fur, lumber and, of course, gold. The English established settlements of the Hudson's Bay Company and Victoria became the capitol in 1866. There is a major Canadian naval installation here and the
island has encouraged a new tech industry in addition to tourism.
Viking has a large nearby manufacturing operation for the STOL Otter air and amphibious planes. The mild weather has always drawn the retirees from British civil service and there is a lingering
but fast-changing whiff of Empire.

One one of our tour days, we took in three very different Victoria gardens. In the morning, we visited a private garden created by a
woman who began with nothing. Slowly she tweaked and changed, planned and dreamed of a spectacular space. A house is enfolded
by various planting beds and walkways, all privately maintained and tended and recently given a major Canadian garden award. Deer have become a scourge and the entire place is now surrounded by a high fence.

                         
Next was the romantic Abkhazi Gardens, a refuge and tribute
to love and the determination of two people separated by
concentration camps and the fortunes of war.  The story begins
in Paris just after WWI when Marjorie Pemberton-Carter first met the exiled Georgian Prince Nicholas Abkhazi. They wrote
back and forth and went on with their lives: Peggy as a companion to her awful adoptive mother after whose death in 1938, Peggy settled in Shanghai. Nicholas settled with his mother in Paris after his father was executed in 1923. Everything was lost and he somehow managed to survive for the next 20 years. When WWII
began, both were interned: Nicholas in Germany and Peggy in a Japanese camp near Shanghai where she actually managed to
keep a garden. After the war, she made it to San Francisco using
money she hid and wound up in 1945 with friends in Victoria. So far, is this not an amazing story?

With the hidden money, Peggy bought a little treed and rocky lot where she built a tiny summerhouse and began planting more trees. In 1946, she received a letter from Nicholas after which they met in New York City and got engaged. They were married in Victoria in 1946.

The garden became their focus and their "child" and they continued
to experiment and refine it for 40 years. Nicholas died in 1987 and Peggy in 1994 at the age of 92. The garden was acquired by The Land Conservancy of British Columbia and rescued from a high-density development.

So that's a pretty romantic story and the garden reflects the taste
of the couple as it flows around the rock, weaves along pathways
lined with rhododendron and woodland species.  Let me say now
that we missed the rhododendron which is everywhere in these
gardens. We missed the azalea of which there is plenty. We kept
hearing how glorious it all was a couple of months before although it certainly was plenty glorious when we were there. Still, I think
an earlier trip to Vancouver, say in May, would have been the
better time.

So we all trudged along, in and out, stopping for soup and tea out of nostalgic mismatched dishes and pots in Abkhazi.

We loaded onto the bus and were off to the gardens at Government House, official residence of British Columbia's Lieutenant Governror. Started in 1911 with armies of gardeners, by the 1990s, austerity reduced the professional staff to one and an ambitious volunteer gardener program began.

Our guide, a longtime volunteer, was pulled away from his work that day to be with us. The house sits in a large park with extensive gardens and walkways. Open free to the public. Oh, goodness. You cannot imagine the extent of this place. It has every kind of garden under the sun: rose, rock, herb, country, cottage, woodland, sunken,  -- on and on -- all maintained primarily by the volunteers. I liked this garden for its scope and the old plantings. The trees, of course, are fabulous and they inform everything.

Was this an exhausting day? An overload for the senses? Good
thing I'm writing this down because even at a few days remove,
all has become a blur. The thing to do would be to see maybe one
garden a day, take your time, spread it out.  We couldn't do that, so
on we pressed and after a walking tour of the inner harbor at
Victoria, we loaded up for Butchart Gardens about 20 miles out
of Victoria.
                     

This is the Disneyland of all gardens. It has everything but the kitchen sink, all in a playland of blooms and the occasional breathtaking moment. "Exit Through the Gift Shop" would be
the title for this blog if I weren't so enchanted by everything else.
Fleets of buses, thousands of selfie-sticks and crying toddlers. Dogs in baby carriages. How come they allow dogs? This is most
surprising! So, dogs, babies, tourists -- almost a million a year at about $30. an adult pop -- including sometime gardeners like us.

Spectacular is how you'd describe the rose garden -- the biggest and most extensive I've seen anywhere.

                          

And the amazing thing: it is a vision of a person, a fabulous attraction that began as an unused quarry and cement factory in 1921, by Jenny Butchart, a woman knew what she wanted and I'm assuming she had deep pocket to work with.  The garden remains in the family today and the scope of it truly is breathtaking. Again: the vision, the energy, the velocity! The annual beds are replaced four times a year and each one is deadheaded and tended almost hourly.
  
 

There is a serene Japanese garden with several quiet pools. Walkways wind through sun and shade. Always there are the crowds but somehow the gardens seem to absorb them. There is no real privacy but one can find quiet spots. 

We stayed on and had an excellent early dinner at Butchart.

Maybe saving the best for last, we met with guide Joan Looy
for a morning in Victoria's 200-acre Beacon Hill Park. 

Joan is a fabulous presence who knows everything and everyone in Victoria. She trudges along throwing out nonstop facts and figures, local lore and hilarious asides. She is devoted to conservation and to the heritage of the First Nation. She lives her job as scholar, teacher, gardener and narrator of everything.  She is also devoted
to the life and work of Canadian artist, Emily Carr. More on that.

The land for Beacon Hill Park was set aside by Sir James Douglas (as in fir) governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island in 1858. In
1882, the land was officially made a municipal park. The vision!
Again.  The hill was a special site for the First Nations Coast Salish people who were the original inhabitants of the Victoria region. 
Preservation of the native flora has been a challenge and it is one of Joan's main concerns. As she goes along, she'll stoop and pull a
weed or a bit of something invasive. She will tell you a lot about camas, a flowering tuber cultivated and harvested in three-year
cycles as an important indigenous food source. 

Joan leads us over a pebble bridge erected to the memory of Emily Carr whose work had been neglected and unrecognized until fairly recently.  At the end of the tour, Joan invited two of us to go
with her to the Victoria Art Gallery where some of Carr's work is
on display.   

Although she studied art abroad, Carr returned to Victoria to
live and often work in a quirky lady-in-the-van style accompanied by a monkey, some cats and a three-legged dog.  She was interested
in the art and people of the First Nation although she was an outsider. Her ravishing paintings pre-date O'Keefe although there
are resonances and they did meet. Her art remained generally unrecognized and unknown for most of her life although she was included and respected in the "Group of Seven" Canadian artists who exhibited in Ontario in 1927. 

A couple of Carr pieces at the Victoria gallery are on brown paper done in oil thinned with turpentine. She could work freely and fast with these materials and they dried quickly.

Maybe Emily Carr speaks to me because trees are her
main subject and unrestrained tree cutting was a danger she saw
early on.

          Ye ghosts of all the dear old trees, the oak, the elm,
          the ash. Nightly those gentlemen go tease, Who hew
          you down like trash.

She investigated forests, she lived in forests, she identified with
trees. "I ought to stick with nature because I love trees better
than people." Her trees are female and they have many moods
and moments. "Carr's trees form the axis around which her work rotates," says the Art History Archive, in which Carr is listed under
"Women Artists" along with Cassatt, Frankenthaler, Hepworth, Kahlo, Morisot, O'Keefe, and others. Good.

In the Spring of 2015, Carr's "Forest Light" sold at auction for
$1.53 million. In 2013, her "Crazy Stair" sold for $3,383,000
the most ever paid for a Carr painting.

So, thanks, Joan, for your generosity and your amazing spirit.
Without you, I'd never know about the camas or Emily Carr and
I never would have remembered to "look up." 

                                                         
                            Arbutus Trees   1931

  
  British Columbia Forest Service:
          The sad fact is that over 1,900 species found in BC are “at risk”, and in many instances it's because of the continued logging of their wild forest habitat. To make matters worse, climate change has also impacted our forests. More than 9 million hectares of forest lands, mostly on BC’s central plateau, have been hit by the pine beetle epidemic and other pests due to warming winters and forest mismanagement.

STUFF

The Luke 3 lines where John the Baptist says, "...whoever has two shirts should share with someone who has none..."make me think of a recent bestseller.

Here we are, digging for authentic JOY during the Christmas season when there is a book out there telling us to keep only things that "SPARK JOY" and to throw everything else away.

"The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The

Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing" by Marie Kondo has been a #1 bestseller for months. $10.19 on Amazon. 6,503 reviews -- most of them favorable.

You keep only items that "Spark Joy." You no longer roll your socks into a tight ball but you lovingly lay them flat, one on top of the other, and you tell them what a good job they've been doing, working hard to keep your feet warm, ...and so on...

You must throw everything away. Put it in black plastic bags and send it to the landfill. No leaving it up for grabs. No giving your joyless stuff to thrift. No passing it along to somebody else (Luke! Lookit!) including someone who actually may be able to use it. (John! You have your work cut out!).

This book says something to people, this idea of decluttering and going Zen with your stuff. I look around this room which is certainly cluttered with about a thousand books just sitting there. I see a wooden machine my granddaughter made in 6th grade. It is the most clever little apparatus: painted orange, big black propeller and a wire that will let it run along an energized third rail.
I will keep this.

I will also keep the model of an oil tanker up there on a high shelf. It is the kind of ship my husband went to sea on after he was kicked out of Columbia for a year after punching Dean?

There is a little jar of multicolored sand from the Negev. Lord. I can't remember who brought it back but it has been on one shelf or another forever. Then I see the glass pyramid-shaped prism with the Kremlin etched in it. That certainly is a treasure and brings JOY because I remember my father-in-law bringing it home from one of his frequent trips behind the Iron Curtain.

Goodness. There is an abacus! How did that get in here? We've had it forever, also, propped up on one bookshelf or another. It has moved around with us. Is it happy in Vermont? Brings JOY? I'll have to think.

This is only one room. It will take me days and weeks to go through everything, applying the SPARK JOY test.  Kondo tells us this is no good. It must happen all at once and it must happen FAST. 

How hard this is, Luke. We have such tortured relationships with stuff. Take the shirt. Don't tell Marie.

ANOTHER TRUE CONFESSION

A couple of days ago, my friend, James, slipped me a little
list of suggested reading:

     Isaac Bashevis Singer -- Autobiography
     Saul Bellow -- The Victim
     V. Nabokov -- Search for Lolita

He is a great reader but, hello, there is no way I'll get to any
of this. I read Saul Bellow years ago. Singer, ditto. I read a lot of Nabokov also a long time ago and remember little. Mainly, I think of the passage about N. seeing letters in various colors in "Speak Memory." Also, I hear James Mason reading a book on tape: "Lo, Lo, Lowleetahhh..." On Sunday, I came across some sparkly heart-shaped sun glasses and I thought of Lolita, the movie. But mainly, all is a blur, like everything else in my reading life.

James. Your list is too serious, too real. What you don't know is
I've gone down the tubes to junk reading and binge watching
TV series such as "Orange is the New Black," and the English
and Swedish versions of "The Girl Who..." After that, I am
re-reading the trilogy (now in the first third of "...Dragon Tattoo")
and it is like new! Ha. The aging brain does not recall much of
any recent reading.

More reveal: I bought from Amazon Kindle and read "Make Me" the latest Reacher by Lee Child. In this one Reacher goes on with his heroic monologues and the action is a little bizarre but clever and he does seem to like a girl so that's a little dimension. He has his toothbrush but no change of clothing, taking traveling light to the extreme. He uses cash only and I'm not sure how he gets it. ATM card? He doesn't drive. He takes trains and buses. Flying requires too much ID.

I've taken a break from Regency Romance but will probably reread when I need some happy endings. I've said this: some of
the writing in this genre is v. good. Much is bad but what isn't?
I know. The books on James's list require thought and effort and that seems so beyond me now. I have notes on the good stuff but forget to look at them.

Here is a question: is all reading a waste of time? Is only some
reading a waste of time? Is watching TV, looking out the window,
driving around doing errands a waste of time? Isn't it all just
living life?

WORKING MY WAY THROUGH A DITCH

As the DeSoto wound it way along country roads, I was
in the back seat, making myself carsick, scanning the ditches
for wildflowers and strawberries.

In the woods, I knew where to find Star of Bethlehem and
Bloodroot -- pretty but makes a messy bouquet. I looked for
Jack-in-the-Pulpit and lady's slipper. I dug up violets and
day lilies and planted them by the chimney of our house on
Spruce Street.

This morning, about 70 years after the above, I walked to the top of the dirt road, clippers in hand, hunting for loosestrife, the yellow whorled, but found only two plants this year and let them be. Usually I come back with feverfew but there is only one in bloom and that, too, can stay. Where is the tansy by the end of our driveway? How come this stuff moves around, will o the wisp?
Not to get too heavy on the metaphor, but change is, well,
change.

The road has been unchanged for as long as we've lived on it
and that's at least 45 years. We know land is owned on either
side and all it will take to change everything is for another hedge funder to buy it up and build a big testament to
success. They do that, even here on this island, although a belated town zoning law passed confining height and size, but that's relative.

Along the road, there is a deer path wide enough for a golf cart and occasionally I see deer using it. Skunks abound in the neighborhood and so do wild turkeys, although I do not know why the skunks haven't eaten all their eggs. 

A stream rushes downhill to the ocean and at its end, a patch of watercress thrives. It has always been there, along with the mint.
Beach peas grow alongside rosa rugosa with their rosy hips, rich in vitamin C. At wading depth when the tide is out, we gather mussels
attached to the rocks, the mussels also coming and going at storms' whim. Periwinkles, not everyone's choice, are also there.

Along the path to the water grow beach plums, some years better
than others. The dainty white blossoms of early Spring give way
to hard green pellets that ripen and grow into plum-colored, well, plums. Making jelly from them is a labor of love, boiling, straining, and messing with the magenta goo -- you need an awful lot of plums to produce a batch worth the trouble.

If you have an itch for candle making, you can use the bayberries
growing along the path but many of those bushes have been muscled out by the junk rose and other invaders. I don't know anybody who has ever made a bayberry candle but the berries are out there, just in case.

Our first house was out on the main road, about a half-mile north of where we are now. Amy Charak lived in an old saltbox across from us -- Amy, as in "Once in love with..." She asked me if we were rich and I told her no. "I hate it when people aren't rich," she said. I invited her and Walter to dinner and asked what she might like:  "Lamb chops." I saw her with a colander full of raspberries
and wondered where she got them. "I'm not going to tell you."
That was Amy.

Up the North Road to the end, then bear right and go past Polly Hill to a driveway on the left with a little sign saying "Eggs." Right there, now covered in summer grasses, is the spot where Bettyann
and Helen dug up jonquils by stealth of night. I planted the bulbs
and now, all these years later, I have a fragrant testimony to sisterhood and bold girls gleefully stoned.

GOOD HEAVENS, IT'S JUNE

Back from Turkey after an excellent trip with a most compatible
group. Praises to the organizers and to our Turkish guide as well
as to the breathtaking Turkish countryside. A good part of the
experience was the Bosphoros with its insane shipping four deep
as you look across to Asia. Plus there is a river running through it,
beneath, at surprising speeds.

So the Bosphoros, the Sea of Marmara -- that inland sea which
connects with the Aegean -- and the fabulous Turkish countryside
throughout Izmir. It was too early for everything to have ripened
but we saw lush fields planted with fruit trees and olive trees
marching to the tops of steep hills and mountains. This central
valley seems to go on and on and there are scarved women in the fields, weeding and planting, stooping low. The men are either on
tractors or in the shady taverna...

                         

SPRING AGAIN

It's Spring again...birds on the wing, again...

Around here it has been a long, hard winter and snow lies
in the corners of every field. Huge piles at the edges of parking
lots won't melt until May and the poor robins will find it hard
to tug a worm from ground frozen six feet down.

So that's the weather which has allowed for a lot of time spent
at the end of the couch. Basketball is winding down. Today
was baseball opening day, thank goodness. The sound of
baseball can occupy us day and night well into October!

Meanwhile, my reading has sunk to unfathomed depths.
Now and then, something worthwhile will get my attention
but that gets harder by the minute. The last bit of so-called
literature I read was "The Invention of Wings" by Sue Monk
Kidd and I didn't like it all that much. Set in the slave-holding
deep south, it follows the lives of several house slaves and
their masters ending in the abolitionist communities of the north
where Quakers and other radicals struggle for the cause. It is
about women finding their voice and about lifelong struggles for
freedom. What I'm saying here isn't quite fair to the book: it
is a lot better than I'm making it seem.

I've almost made it through tax time although I cringe when the
phone rings, thinking it might be the accountant with questions
I can't answer. Pure sloth makes me want to wave a magic wand
over all such tedious matters to make them go away. 

The best way to escape this slough is to get moving and I will
do that before long when I travel to Turkey on a group trip arranged by UVM. If a dip into Asia Minor won't do it, heaven knows what will. This is ambitious and not at all tame. For that: perhaps a garden tour to Scotland?  Oh, well. We will see.