the joy of packaging

My sister Caroline likes to preface the Christmas season with a warning against greed by saying, "We're all on a budget, so it's no good asking for a pony." Every year I ask for a pony. This is how families operate.


This year she finally came through, and my delight with this object knows almost no bounds. This is, according to the package, an official "Grow Your Own," the "sixteenth in a series."


The instructions on the back (in what looks like four-point Franklin Gothic) say that the pony will reach full size (600 percent!) if you put it in some room-temperature water and leave it there for three days.


Three days is a long time for a toy to become fully operational, and the instructions also concede that when you take the pony out of the water, "it will slowly shrink back to its original size."


But this is not a problem--it's a feature: "Your grow item can be grown again and again!!" I relish the weird sexual subtext and the sheepish guilt implicit in those two exclamation points. Bang! Bang! I have a longwinded screed about the misuse of this blob of punctuation, but we won't go there. Not today.


Still, it's partly true, as the package says in on the front, that "Your new pony is the best pet in the world. He is very easy to care for and will love you very much." The love part is silly, but he's certainly easy for me to care for, since I never intend to take him out of the bubble pack. My only challenge is figuring out where display him until regifting; my sister will appreciate her own joke just as much when it returns to haunt her.


But wait--why is the pony a "he"? Is another one of the sixteen in a series a mare or a filly, or is the Chinese manufacturer restricted to a production line of geldings? That sounds like something I didn't mean, but this creature is definitely not a stallion. No stud worth his salt would consent to living inside a drinking glass for three days.


Other features explained on the package include, "This pony can live in your house," "Grooming is unnecessary," and, somewhat redundantly, "Your growing pony never needs to be fed, only watered." 


Sometimes if you jumble up a platitude it comes out true--small things can come in good packages.

The news from St Kilda

From  Atlas of Remote Islands, Judith Schalansky

St Kilda

Uninhabited; evacuated in 1930.

Last case of neonatal tenatnus in 1891.

"There are sixteen cottages, three houses, and one church in the only village on St Kilda. The island's future is written in its graveyard. Its children are all born in good health, but most stop feeding during their fourth, fifth, or sixth night. On the seventh day, their palates tighten and their throats constrict, so it becomes impossible to get them to swallow anything. Their muscles twitch and their jaws hang loose. Their eyes grow staring and they yawn a great deal; their open mouths stretch in mocking grimaces.

"Between the seventh and the ninth day, two-thirds of the newborn babies die, boys outnumbering girls. Some die sooner; some later; one dies on the fourth day, another not until the twenty-first. Some say it is the diet: the fatty meat of the fulmars and their eggs smelling of musk that make the skin silky smooth but the mothers' milk bitter. Or that it is the result of inbreeding. Yet other say that the babies are suffocated by the smoke from the peat fires in the middle of the rooms, or that it is the zinc in the roofs or the pale pink oil that burns in the lamps. The islanders whisper that it is the will of the Almighty. But these are the words of pious men.The women who endure so many pregnancies and bear so few children who survive the eight-day sickness are silent.

"On 22 June 1896, one woman stands on the deck of a ship that is bringing her home. Like all the women of St Kilda she has soft skin, red cheeks, exceptionally clear eyes, and teeth like young ivory. She has just given birth to a child, but not at home. The wind is blowing from the north-east. Long before she can be seen from the shore, she lifts her newborn high in the air."

This book makes me envious and greedy.--HH

A place among the arts

Vince gave me a book for Christmas, the "Atlas of Remote Islands," by Judith Schlalansky, subtitled "Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will."


According to the colophon, the books was voted the most beautiful German book for 2010, and I believe it; the author not only wrote it, she set the type, drew the maps, and did the book design.


Under the doctrine of fair use, I quote from the entry for Lonely Island:


"Loneliness lies in the center of the Kara Sea in the northern Arctic Ocean. This island is worthy of its name: it is cold and barren, trapped in pack ice all  winter, with  an average annual temperature of -16 degrees; at the height of summer the temperature sometimes rises to just over freezing.


"No one lives there. A former polar observatory has sunk into the snow and abandoned buildings doze in the belly of the bay, facing the narrow spit of land beyond the frozen marsh.


"A prehistoric dragon's skeleton was found here."

Pete the Moose redux

Vermont's governor-elect, Peter Shumlin, has made it clear he intends to right a wrong--the issues described in the longwinded tantrum I engaged in last July are about to be addressed and reversed. This makes me glad I voted for Shumlin, although I admit I did it holding my nose--I wanted Doug Racine, who tied Shumlin in the primary but lost on a recount.

The Burlington Free Press reports, "Key lawmakers and Governor-elect Peter Shumlin are ready to reverse a 2010 law drafted in secret and passed at the 11th hour that gave an Northeast Kingdom farmer ownership of wild deer and moose on his property, an action that provoked an outcry among hunters.


"A bill already in draft form restates the longstanding principle that wild animals belong to all people of Vermont. It requires the wild deer and moose trapped inside Doug Nelson’s elk hunting park to be removed, probably through hunting. It also allows for protection of young Pete the Moose, an orphaned resident of the park."


I object to this "orphaned" designation--it's false--but at least the smarmy, disagreeable behavior of Susan Bartlett has been dragged out into the open. Bartlett engineered a cheesy, behind-the-scenes deal to allow a single wealthy constituent, Doug Nelson, to claim de facto ownership of the native wildlife that were accidentally or deliberately enclosed in his fence--a fence put up so that unfair-chase hunting could bring him a bit more dough. It was junk politics at its very worst, and not how we normally do business in this state.


The real back story on this moose is that some dogs, unrestrained by leashes, injured a moose calf; the owners of these dogs then decided they would rescue the calf by appropriating him and taking him to an unlicensed rehabilitator, who then turned the animal over to Nelson. The moose wasn't orphaned--to be accurate, the cow was scared off by dogs and people, and the dogs did what dogs do when not properly restrained, and  then the people did what people sometimes do when they fail to grasp the difference between a wild animal and a domesticated one. 


I personally don't care one way or the other about "saving" Pete--he's toast no matter what. He has been petted like a dog and fed all manner of junk food, and he's been deprived the the environment he was designed to live in (or die in, as the case may be). He's gone a long way past the point of redemption. But the key doctrine--that wild animals are held in public trust and cannot be domesticated or owned by any individual--has been confirmed and reinstated.


Temper tantrum over.

Deck us all with Boston Charlie

.

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,

Walla Walla, Wash, and Kalamazoo!

Nora's freezing on the trolley,

Swaller dollar cauliflower, alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,

Lullaby Lilla boy, Louisville Lou?

Trolley Molly don't love Harold,

Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,

Polly wolly cracker and too-da-loo!

Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon,

Willy, folly go through!

Donkey Bonny brays a carol,

Antelope Cantaloup, 'lope with you!

Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,

Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!

sweet potatoes baked with apple butter

Sweet potatoes are all very well, but this time of year they need all the help they can get--there's a lot of competition around the holidays for truly festive food. So here's what I'm doing with sweet potatoes this year.


Get yourself  bunch of sweet potatoes (I have a big family, so I've got eight monsters lined up).


Boil gently until the spuds are just tender,  maybe 20 minutes. Don't overdo it or you'll get mush, which will mess up the next step.


Let them cool off just long enough so you can handle them, or wear mitts, and peel the skins. They will usually just slide off the sweet potato with very little coaxing.


Slice the partially-cooked spuds about 1/4 to maybe 1/3 of an inch thick


Use some of that Pam-for-baking stuff or your usual shortening to grease a deep baking pan, and then put a layer of slices in there. Salt lightly, sprinkle maybe a quarter-teaspoon of lemon juice around, maybe a bit of pepper, maybe some nutmeg, and then top with a fairly thin layer of apple butter. Use the thick, brown, yummy kind. 


Repeat the layering  and sprinkling until the spuds are gone. Top with pats of butter (don't get too carried away) and bake about 25 to 35 minutes at 325.  


You can make this the day before the feast and reheat it in a 300 oven until hot clear through. It may look a little messy on the plate, but it's yummy.

A hole in the water

The mountain, unmoved

Ever since early October, the so-called music room in our house  has been filled with deck cushions, boat hooks, charts, logs, cruising guides, throw life rings, chafing gear, dock lines, bumpers, life vests, deck brushes, fishing gear, electronics, and even a large non-skid  mat that normally covers the floor of the pilot house. 

It gets worse. Underneath all these items is a very large blue plastic chest, a sort of monstrous Tupperware container the size of a Shetland pony. I don’t remember what it’s full of and it’s too late to find out now—there’s too much stuff piled on top. 

This minor mountain has been sitting there six or maybe seven weeks, ever since  a big Nor’easter came through and forced our boat (and many others), out of the water and up onto what’s known as “the hard.” (I’m charmed by this usage and deploy it in a showoffy way whenever I can. Like now, for instance.)

Of course we talk every now and then about putting  this great tangle of gear in the loft of the barn where it belongs, but we can’t seem to do it—for some reason we like it right where it is. 

It’s said that a boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money, and maybe that’s true. I have to add, though, that a boat, once purchased, costs quite a lot less than a horse, and the boat hardly ever goes lame or needs shoes more expensive than the ones I wear, and mine don't wear out every five to seven weeks.

I’ve also read that, when people are asked to name the one purchasing decision in their life that made them utterly miserable, buying a boat is invariably at the top of the list. 

I understand that—boats make you work hard, and you are often wet and anxious, sometimes hungry, and always  a long way from any sort of internet connection. Boats also attract insects at the dock and repel bass when you’re away from it. We have a fish finder, so I know this to be true. This instrument displays fish with great accuracy as they light out for the territories, and these vanishing edibles show up on the instrument display looking exactly like those little Pepperidge Farm cheese snacks; all that’s missing is the little baked-in smile. 

And yet we cannot move this pile of gear. 

It’s not laziness—we’re talking about two people who spent most of the past summer moving things in and out of storage boxes and up and down steep stairs to accommodate a major kitchen renovation. And it’s not sloppiness, either—my husband is as tidy as a cat, and the sort of person who unplugs toasters, alphabetizes sheet music, and folds laundry so swiftly and neatly I’m shamed by my lumpy halfwit efforts. (I do cook and wash dishes, but it seems inadequate penance.)

Here’s the honest truth: This mountain fills a hole in both of us, and the dimensions match  almost exactly the length and beam of Clancy's Jig. It seems likely that the mountain will not move until the boat comes off the hard and displaces the clean, sweet water of Champlain  again.