Like the apple cut horizontally instead of vertically from yesterday, it does something to your perception of an object to hear it pronounced so differently. For me, it’s always been “GOODa,” which sounds about right. It’s goodanough. Not my favorite cheese, unless it’s an aged Gouda, with lots of salt crystals, about which I learned a lot today. But if it’s “GOWda,” like “COWda” or “Gouge Your Eyes Out,” a lot more comes into play.

The cheesemaker was so my type, in that he was lanky, intense, passionate about his cheese, and not entirely comfortable. There’s a hilarious moment of him standing with his family as they toss two huge wheels of cheese down the line as they pose for a portrait–he anxiously holds his arms out, ready to catch it if anyone misses it. It’s never passed to him. He’s like the stereotype you see in the oldest, middle, youngest child memes going around now: DEAD serious and ready to do it right. (I thank my sister Amber Miller at this moment for absolutely not being that sibling.)

The other half of the episode was about sardines and sea shantys, and the sardine part was more interesting. But what both halves shared was a focus on how many great things don’t get their credit because there simply isn’t a space for them. The cheesemaker’s best aged cheese . . . he only has a few wheels of them because he simply doesn’t have the room to store them. The sardine stand owner said he left fishing and opened the stand because he was frustrated that he saw most of the fish go elsewhere. “People don’t realize they have the best thing RIGHT HERE and they’re just not trying it fresh out of the water, on the grill.”

It’s a classic foodie argument (you must watch The Menu, btw), but what I found potent is that sensation of anxiety when someone has something great–that someone needs to know MORE about it, that MORE Someones need to know about it. Students used to tell me we needed to teach more of particular authors, and we’d say, “We only have ten weeks” (and would generously not point out they often didn’t read everything within that). I’ve had that anxiety about my book–shouldn’t I be doing MORE to promote it? I didn’t have the time last year–I was getting married, (am still) looking for new jobs, and working at three places.

And, anyway, how did books become more like sardines–only good when they’re fresh out of the water–and less like aged cheese, which might be even better in a couple of years?

Here’s to _Amplified Heart_ and the acceptance that, for now, what I’ve done is gouda nuff. Gouda, after all, saved the family farm.

All reactions:

11

Shattered Ankle Scenery goes to . . . Cornwall!

Ann Tandy and I often discuss how the scale and geography of the British Isles evades us more than we’d care to admit–you spend your life reading British novels and only later realize you don’t really know where “Suffolk” or “Dover” might physically be. It’s both a testimony to reading and a potential mystification caused by it: you’ve “been there” and were not there. Wherever “there” is.

I’d tried to look into Cornwall before, simply because I have spent more time in northern England, and because Tintagel is there. I’d definitely gone through my King Arthur phase in junior high (Mary Stuart books, anyone? Merlin’s cave was in Bryn Myrddin–it gave me a thrill to see my name in a book because I never had) , and I loved the way the word “Tintagel” sounded. (At least, the way _I_ heard it: TIN ta gel. It’s Tin TA gel, isn’t it?)

So, for today, I rewatched the Rick Steves episode on it as a start, but then I stumbled upon Rick STEIN, of whom I know nothing, but he’s BBC and seems to be interested in everything from painting to cooking. I am SURE this is no news to someone, and for sure, he may not be everyone’s cup of tea, no matter how well brewed. But I am committed to honoring charm where I find it.

He spent half the episode talking to a painter who paints on the beach and uses sand for texture. I’ve already forgotten who the painter is, but god, how I loved his paintings. They remind me of Ryan Molenkamp’s earlier work, where somehow a whole waterscape rises up from smudged color and gritty inclusions. Rick Stein also opens the episode talking about how he and his sister would have a contest to see who could spot the sea first, just as my siblings and I would to see who would see the mountains first, and it reminded me that what seems far off and exotic is always someone’s childhood vacation.

He then went to an heirloom apple orchard, a “kind of Noah’s Ark for Cornish apple species.” I just finished reading Elena Passarello‘s _Animals Strike Curious Poses_ (which is wonderful), and her penultimate essay is about “endlings”–the last living specimen of a species before it becomes extinct. (I preferred the word “terminarch,” which had also been considered.) So, the idea of an orchard which, from above, looks like an elegant variegated moss patch, as a haven for vanishing species appealed to my sense of continuity today, in a time when my days’ only continuity is pain and stillness. I actually gasped when the cardigan-wearing orchard keeper cut a Crimson Queen in half, horizontally. There is something in seeing a mundane object dealt with in a way you never have before (as when a friend of mine told me she used to eat tomatoes like apples). It’s like you realize you’ve been missing an opportunity to reenchant the normal.

Of course, there was a lot of head shaking about the state of apples today, and the cliched rhetorical question about why we settle for apples so far from the tree. But the colors revealed to me in that half-world of an apple, red ombred to pink then white, as if the apple skin had been washed in the wrong temperature of water . . . I mean, we all know a Red Delicious is anything but. What would it be like to eat an apple and be really in awe of it.

Overall, Cornwall, then, was pretty. Sometimes I worry living in Seattle / the PNW has made me appreciate real natural beauty less, instead of more. You start to realize, as you travel and when you are surrounded by it, that so many places are beautiful for the same reasons (water, tiny rock isles, flowers, birds) and that people tend to do the same things there (beaches, buying, eating, walks). I sometimes miss those early years when I’d moved from Kansas and would just be stunned by the sharpness of a mountain peak against a cold sky or how sunlight on water seemed “charged with,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, “the greatness of God,” whether God is a presence for you or not.

I like this chance to immerse in a different way and rediscover the apple.

All reactions:

16Ann Tandy, Barbara Saari Combs and 14 others

Welcome to Shattered Ankle Scenery!!!

So, I broke my ankle in a million places, so I thought I’d visit a million places–virtually. I’ll be here for quite awhile (in bed, that is–probably a month), and it seems like a good time to see the places I want to investigate and listen to things I want to listen to. Tune in every day as I “travel” somewhere or listen to something.

Yesterday, I watched a documentary on Bormarzo: The Sacred Alchemical Grove. Also known as the Garden of Monsters, it’s the kind of place I deeply regret not having visited while I lived in Rome; however, not having known of its existence, I exempt myself from said regret and will save it for later–the visiting and the regret. Having a working knowledge of Jungian psychology was helpful when watching this documentary, but for sure, being on a strong opioid made it more interesting. What must be it like to walk through this particular park every day?

Today, I “went” to the Isle of Wight, which I DID visit when I was on the SU study abroad trip, albeit an all too brief visit. I was sick as a dog and made the pilgrimage to Julia Margaret Cameron’s house, since I had a chapter on her in my dissertation. The museum director kindly took me next door and gave me tea in a house Darwin had once stayed in, then drove me back to the ferry in his convertible, all contributing to the feeling I was in a Victorian fever dream.

I watched an episode of Crown and Country, in which Prince Edward talks you though the Crown’s relationship to different areas of the country (hence the title–what thinkers); it focused mostly on Charles the First and Victoria, and there was a lot about wine smuggling.

Then I watched the following tour of Osborne House and loved. Did you know that Prince Albert built the Swiss Cottage so his children could–and I quote–“learn about being adults by playing”? They cooked, played, and gardened, each with their own little plots, and would sell their produce to Albert, in order to “learn about commerce.” I’ll bet he would have made them sell their own Girl Scout cookies. Mom, you will love all the fire places.