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Today at Mary's Farm
Edie Clark has written extensively about New England in award-winning feature stories for Yankee magazine for the past thirty years. Her column, Mary's Farm, has been a popular feature in Yankee since 1990. A collection of those essays, The View from Mary's Farm, was published in 2005; a new collection, Saturday Beans and Sunday Suppers, Kitchen Stories from Mary's Farm, was published last year. A new edition of her memoir, The Place He Made, has just been published. This and her other books are available on www.edieclark.com.
Update on the Kindle
Never say never
December 9, 2008 at 7:56 AM | 2 Comments | Post a Comment
A while ago in this blog, I wrote about the new kind of "book," the Kindle, the e book that's being marketed by Amazon.com. These "books" are electronic tablets you hold in your hand. Purchase them, like an I-pod, and you buy the ability to download almost anything available in the printed world -- newspapers, magazines, books, even the ones that were just published yesterday. You pay for each download as you would a book at the store except it's paperless and comes to you instantly in this device. The screen displays the reading material one page at a time, like a book except it's electronic. Because I'm a baby boomer and I have no children, I'm more than casually interested in knowing how young people feel about things like this. I teach at a local university so I often pose questions to my students when I'm unsure how things like Kindles play with the younger set. In a recent class I asked what they thought about the Kindle and my students recoiled. I have eight students, mostly seniors. They spoke with some passion about the experience of reading a book, how tactile it is, how visceral and how comfortable it is to curl up with a book. They were not just immune to the idea of the Kindle, it almost seemed like they were repelled by it.
Good Bones
The end of a great feast is just the start of another
December 1, 2008 at 9:51 AM | 3 Comments | Post a Comment
I went down to Connecticut for Thanksgiving with my cousins. We were many and there wasn't much left over by the time the roasting pan had been scrubbed and the last counter wiped down. But there was the carcass and I begged to bring it home with me, a request that was gladly granted. Everyone said, oh gosh, that's tough duty, getting all those bones out. It is, but I think of it as a fair trade. And so, in the trunk, in the basket that carried pies down to the feast, the carcass traveled home with me to New Hampshire.
The Rise and Fall of October
The Stock Market's Astrological Sign
October 7, 2008 at 5:50 AM | 4 Comments | Post a Comment
All this talk about the stock market and its fickle fortunes reminded me of this column I wrote ten years ago, when the stock market did its last dip and roll. What is it about October? Here's my column from October, 1998:
My mother was born in the month of October, a fiery month. According to astrologists, she was a Scorpio: passionate, strong-willed, secretive and with a tendency to enslave. The stock market crashed in the month of October. It happened on my mother's 13th birthday, an unlucky day. She says it was the quietest birthday she ever had. She remembers the silence at the dinner table and the ticking of the hallway clock. The stock market has fallen again, and again, in October, causing financial analysts to wonder why. What is there about the month of October that brings the markets down?
The Bluebirds of Wall Street
Changing colors provide respite
October 1, 2008 at 7:20 AM | 4 Comments | Post a Comment
The news on the television is pretty grim these days. I've decided not to watch. I have moved my laptop from my desk to the kitchen table where I can watch the colors change while I work.
In most places, yesterday was a gray and drizzly day, but here, we are a bit above the clouds so it became the most amazing show of light and color as the trees have begun to blaze.
A Stash of Perfection
The blessing of a bumper crop of tomatoes
September 21, 2008 at 2:14 PM | 3 Comments | Post a Comment
With a frost warning up, last week I picked all the tomatoes left on the vines. And I do mean vines -- these tomatoes were among the most vigorous, the most aggressive I've ever grown. I planted them, probably ten or twelve plants, in early June, as usual. I had dressed the garden with a fresh layer of compost this spring. I make my own compost but never enough to completely cover the garden so every few years, I take my little pickup down to Agway and have them fill the bed with a yard or so of compost. They store this black magic in a big pile in their yard, next to the bark mulch and the loam. They say it is organic. I hope so.
