summer bounty

A big bowl of tomatoes—so many that I can save a small bowl for the next two days (there are more ripening behind those I picked today) and throw the rest into a big pot to make a simple sauce that I will freeze for the winter. I have refrained from cooking inside during our heat wave—hot food never tastes good to me when it is hot—preferring to grill a bit of protein on my small electric grill (A nod of thanks to Cindy for gifting the grill to me when I left Madison.) and making huge salad with bought greens and herbs from the garden. Everything from the garden has more flavor and vegetables melt into one another so much more companionably than their supermarket cousins.

I let the tomatoes cook down for hours and what is left is the sweet essence of summer. I expect the pleasure long after I’ve pulled up the plants and cleaned the garden for winter.

We are quiet today with nothing planned. Some drawing, a load of wash, some editing for me and reading. Julia plays her music—Ukulele chords are just beginning to make an impression and she has a new cello piece. Then, Julia picks up her basketball and bounces it around the house until she becomes bored. She wants to go to the small park around the corner. She wants to go alone, but capitulates to my entreaty to go with her and sit far away. I am.

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Posted on 30 July 2022 by Suzanne Buchko 0

joni

“The wind is in from Africa, last night I couldn’t sleep . . . my fingernails are filthy, I got beach tar on my feet . . .”

Once, the reedy soprano slid up and down her registers as quickly as her fingers slid around on the neck of her guitar.

She had long, straight hair, as fine as mine but very much blonder. It was flung over one shoulder with a deft flip of her head. Slight with a sweet, high voice concealing genius and gravitas. (Although now I wonder why genius does not routinely speak in a breathy soprano.) Hippy clothes or terribly cool apparel—cooler as she got older. Never quite settling down but moving in the company of splendid and beautiful musicians. Never quite molded by the commercial music scene but brilliant enough to wedge her way in, to command attention. Singing about quitting the crazy music scene and then going on to write and sing more and again.

Joni Mitchell sang at the Newport Folk Festival Sunday night as a surprise special guest of Brandi Carlile. It was a carefully orchestrated appearance, her first public performance since a stroke and brain aneurysm in 2015. A friend posted an early morning YouTube video on her Facebook feed. I clicked on the link and then got lost down a rabbit hole of videos catching Joni performing song after song—the highlights of her old masterpieces and the kind of standards that I loved to sing—and playing her guitar. Her voice—low and chesty, a voice that had come back from near death, an old voice so rich with meaning and inference and innuendo that it was like some rich, decadent dessert.

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Posted on 27 July 2022 by Suzanne Buchko 0

eve

I woke up with such a heaviness on my heart. This is never a good holiday to think beyond my smallest world—No, I honestly thought that I had passed that stage. That this year I was free to take on the biggest world on this the eve of David’s Death Day, but the missing of him, the sorrow of the loss of him lingers, it scents the air like roses in a garden, it is in the fabric of the comfortable capris that I pull on to grab a cup of coffee before Julia gets out of bed.

The radio’s first story is about another Black man in Ohio, fleeing the police, who was shot 60 times. The eight officers involved in the shooting were put on administrative leave which signals at least some question of appropriate behavior.

Tears escape my eyes.

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Posted on 4 July 20224 July 2022 by Suzanne Buchko 2

newport 3

A closed gate to a garden we never entered.

Our final morning here, we drive the 10 mile Ocean Drive and look for a beach to visit for a few minutes before driving home. We get to see another side of Newport. Big and small, mostly modern beach homes with wonderful views. It is quiet here—and I have no idea if it is the middle of the week quiet or just the nature of this side of the town. No restaurants, no where to tour. If I was to live here, this is where I would find home. This area is still not far from where the cottages are and we pass a few former carriage houses and footprints of old green houses.The surf is very small here but it is the ocean sounds in miniature. The beach is a rocky and coated with a layer of dried sea weed but there is some sand in which Julia can play. How many times, we have travelled to lovely beaches without sand toys! Forgotten at home, or impossible to carry. This time, she has her pails and shovels and there is little to use them on. No matter, she is happy wading in the surf, picking up and discarding rocks and letting hand fulls of dry sand pour through her fingers.

When ever I am at a beach, I wish hard to live by water. Listening to the smallest of waves brings me home, home to a place I have never been.

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Posted on 30 June 20222 July 2022 by Suzanne Buchko 2

newport 2

Tonight is our last evening here, our last vacation evening for the summer. Five days in Newport is a short vacation but somewhat adequate. I feel separated enough from the regular round to miss it and want to get back into it.

All of that is good.

I missed the latest SCt decision. Checking in on Facebook, I see it is about prayer in schools and that is a soap box I have climbed onto too many times. Not tonight; however, I do look forward to all the Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, wild UU and pagan prayers that will be heard all over the USA in classrooms and on the 50 yard line next year.

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Posted on 29 June 20222 July 2022 by Suzanne Buchko 0

sconces

This is a silly collection of pictures although I wish I had taken even more pictures. There were many, many sconce designs in every cottage and I became intrigued by them!