jar and cup

my friend sarah and i traded art. now her beautiful jar and cup hangs on my wall. it's even yummier in person. her paintings remind me a little of thiebaud in that i just want to eat them.

flickr faves this week are from some contributors to my book! (thank you all for your purchases!)
under the apple tree by mistubako
3d version of anna emilia laitinen's houses
9 july by shari altman

outstanding in the parking lot

bigger, more over here

this weekend jen and i picked berries and jammed. after about eight hours of making and preserving 17 pints of strawberry + blackberry jam yesterday, jen and bob's neighbors brought out the barbecue for an outstanding in the parking lot dinner, the city version of outstanding in the field. jayn set up her wind-up gramophone! and we watched the full moon rise over the warehouse building across the street. pretty sweet. we also discussed important matters like pig orgasms, which according to our resident pig orgasm expert, leah, (and then google for verification) last 30 minutes. we topped the evening off with vanilla ice cream served the freshest berry syrup on top. YUM. an all around delicious weekend.

norwegian film

whenever i go to lost weekend video, i always check out the scandinavian section. i am obligated to. usually, it's the same shelf all the time: babette's feast, show me love, together, italian for beginners, my life as a dog and a few more. but last time, there was a new addition to the shelf, a 2003 norwegian movie: kitchen stories. it looked like it would be a bad comedy. turned out to be a very sweet, quiet, interesting and a little sad film. it was mostly in swedish, as one of the two main characters is swedish. and much of it is silent, so i didn't actually end up reading any subtitles. i recommend it. i'm not going to tell you what it's about, aside from that it's about a friendship that develops between two men.

above are poor photos of the movie (on my tv). these awesome swedish camper trailers play an important role in the movie. so cute and round.

they're here!

i've updated the book site a bit with some new images from the book. the pre-order price is available until friday at midnight. starting saturday, the books will be $30.

my house smells like bindery glue. 20 boxes are stacked high. 3 empties, plus stray shipping envelopes litter the floor. the place is a mess. woohooo!

memory

pages from a proof

even though from orchards, fields, and gardens is filled with the writing and artwork of others, it feels so personal to me. not surprising i guess considering i've spent almost a year with its stories and images.

you know how you appreciate certain photos or paintings often because they evoke a certain feeling or memory? well, most of the artwork in the book is like that for me. when i first saw abby's photo, i was immediately drawn to and moved by it. i didn't realize until later—until even after i'd chosen it for the book from a group of abby's farm photos—just how closely it resembled a painting that is very familiar to me. the story—

after college, my friend laurel and i eurailed around europe before laurel left for northern spain and then college on the east coast and i left on a train north to go live in sweden. (our dramatic parting is another story altogether, involving multiple barcelona underground stations with the same name, losing each other, bomb threats at the train station, canceled trains to the basque region and phone calls from my fretful mother to the paris central train station, my hardly recognizable name announced over the loudspeaker several times in a thick french accent, just as my train for stockholm was arriving.)

laurel and i traveled around for a month, staying in hostels and rigorously seeing sites and attending museums, surviving on baguettes, fruit and hit cookies. toward the end of the trip, we traveled to cupra marritima, on the east coast of italy, where my mormor's brother torsten had a house. he was there for the summer, and my mormor and her sister, carin, were visiting him there for the first time, as luck would have it. we stayed with them for three days, the first physically relaxing days of our trip. we swam in warm, clear turquoise water and ambled up the beach strip to get our daily gelatos. in the evenings, we all ate on the roof of torsten's house. mormor, carin and torsten reminisced about their childhood. i wish i had a recording of their conversations. i don't remember a word of what they said, but i remember how close they seemed and how they basked in each other's company. i had never really seen my mormor as someone's sibling until then. i knew she and carin were close, but hearing the three of them, i got a different sense of their relationships.


mormor, carin and torsten


carin, laurel and mormor

anyhow, during that stay, torsten (an artist) painted in his front yard. he painted a blue ladder and the fig tree behind the ladder. the ladder stayed in place all day and night, there when laurel and i arrived, and there when we left. later, that painting graced the cover of a book from a retrospective exhibit of torsten's work. i often return to that book with the ladder on the cover. funny that i did not consciously recognize it when i first saw abby's photo.


bigger

beautiful bounty

bigger yonder

some weeks the csa box is more impressive than others. this is one of those weeks. (even pinky leon is impressed—basil sniffing kitty). all of the sudden the colors changed. deep purple grapes and figs and green green peppers. i'm not even a pepper fan, and these look good to me. they look like they are especially crisp, don't they? i had been refraining from buying the hyper expensive figs at rainbow grocery, but they were wearing me down looking so plump and soft and ready to burst. pretty sure i gasped when i opened the box this evening and saw all the figs. just what i wanted. YUM. feeling grateful and lucky.

right now i am reading eaarth (that's with two as for a reason), by bill mckibben. the first half of the book is all about how we cause(d) climate change and about the tragic consequences that change is having across the planet. it's eye opening to read about the crazy many small and large ways climate change is affecting the earth and just how badly we are screwing ourselves. parasite and insect booms, forests dying, species dying, tropics expanding, tundra thawing/releasing bursts of methane, drought, storms. mckibben writes about how we are altering large and important (for earth's climate and for our survival) natural features of the earth (the ocean, the rain forest, the ice caps) so extremely and in mostly irreversible ways! people who like doomsday stories, this might be a book for you. luckily, there's a second half to the book. i'm just getting to that part, but so far it's intriguing and oddly optimistic, given the frightening first half. i'll report back when i'm done with the book. (did you know reagan removed the solar panels from the white house when he became pres? it's almost comical.)