“For pies and jelly and philosophy”

The gifts of woods:

Having known and loved deep woods in my childhood, I soon discovered the joys of the little woods on the hilltop on this farm. It gave us mushrooms — edible morels to eat and beautiful scarlet caps and orange shelf mushrooms and others to look at. It gave us sassafras roots for tea, wild blackberries for pies and jelly and philosophy; papaws for guests who like them, walnuts, glimpses of wildlife and flowers, snail shells; and a small demonstration of the way limestone breaks apart underground, swallows the soil above it and makes a cave. It gave us places for solitude, for thinking, a place where we could go and sort out our values and lick our spiritual wounds clean. It offered a place to walk with congenial companions and gave us, finally, a wide viewpoint. The wooded hilltop is high above and behind the farm buildings, which on a farm are customarily referred to as “the improvements.”

Rachel Peden, The Land, the People (Bloomington, IN: Quarry Books, 2010).

Also from Rachel Peden
Against school consolidation : Dry goods, &c. : Inspiration for writing

Inspiration for writing

Rachel Peden refers to her father, B.F. Mason, as “the orchardist”:

If we wanted time for playing on workdays, we had to sneak away without attracting the orchardist’s notice. One of his favorite admonitions, learned from his Quaker mother, was “Satan finds work for idle hands to do.” He reminded us that she had often said to him, “Thy time, thy precious time!” He himself believed “There is no excellence without great labor.” Without ever telling us in so many words, he made us realize we were expected to carry in wood and water to the kitchen. When he wanted something done well, he encouraged us by telling us, “You can do it to a queen’s taste.”

Unwittingly, he probably fostered everybody’s writing proclivities by a bit of wry advice he gave us when we complained: “If there’s something that doesn’t suit you, just write it down and burn it up.” There were so many things that didn’t suit us that we had abundant practice in writing.

Rachel Peden, The Land, the People (Bloomington, IN: Quarry Books, 2010).

Also from Rachel Peden
Against school consolidation : Dry goods, &c.

“My Review of Wine”

From The New Yorker: “My Review of Wine,” by Roz Chast.

Dry goods, &c.

A picture of retail past, in Ellettsville, Indiana:

Cort’s store is a leisurely place that sells a great many things, and nobody is urged to buy anything. There was an assortment of men’s and boys’ clothing, dry goods, hardware, kitchen equipment. A stack of milk buckets, tin pans, and small tools were displayed carelessly in the window. There were the red and black plaid caps that are standard equipment for farm men and boys; the soft, warm, brown gloves; the stiff canvas gloves; blue denim overall jackets; assorted boots and overshoes.

Rachel Peden, Rural Free: A Farmwife’s Almanac of Country Living (Bloomington, IN: Quarry Books, 2009).

What are dry goods anyway? The Oxford English Dictionary: “A name (chiefly in N. Amer.) for the class of merchandise comprising textile fabrics and related things; articles of drapery, mercery, and haberdashery (as opposed to groceries).” Merriam-Webster: “textiles, ready-to-wear clothing, and notions as distinguished especially from hardware and groceries.” First use: 1657. An OED citation: “Sellers and buyers of produce, hardware, dry goods and what-not.” I love the what-not, and its cousin, things of that nature.

This passage made me think of a store from my Brooklyn childhood, “the dry goods store,” the only name I have for it, on New Utrecht Avenue, a street in permanent semi-darkness under the elevated train line. I remember merchandise on tables and in boxes: household chemicals, kitchenware, and what I now know were dry goods — underwear and socks, the packages priced with a marker or grease pencil. No farm fashions though. Wrong universe.

Also from Rachel Peden
Against school consolidation

Sardines are in the air

Yes, they are. The Chicago Tribune says so. And The Boston Globe has recipes. (As if sardines need a recipe.) Boston has at least two tinned-fish restaurants, haley.henry and Saltie Girl.

I think that “the small oily fish” qualifies as an elegant or inelegant variation — like “elongated yellow fruit” for “banana.”

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Misspelled words

From Oxford Dictionaries, a handy list of words commonly misspelled. One word that always confounds me, not that I have much reason to use it: pharaoh, because a certain tenor saxophonist, last name Sanders, spells his first name Pharoah.

Related reading
All OCA spelling and misspelling posts (Pinboard)

“Ah, coherent”

Franz Kafka, “The Hunter Gracchus: A Fragment,” in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: Schocken, 1971).

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, November 5, 2017.]

Today’s Peter Max-like display of color is a marked improvement over October’s brown and green. Dig the blue and lilac tree trunks.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

People and their pencils

“They keep breaking”: artists, designers, a director and animator, a photographer, a writer, and their pencils, with photographs of the pencils (The Guardian).

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Lassie do-overs

Taking a suggestion from bink, I’ve redone “The ’Clipse” and “The Poet” to make these Lassie fan-fiction posts easier to read on the screen. Does greater readability equal greater hokiness? You decide.

[Thanks, bink.]