four simple pleasures

1. Last night, I made a meal I hadn’t made in over two years — something involving pork chops, cider vinegar, shallots, and slices of tart Granny Smith apple.  It was better than I remembered.

2. M and I had a lazy Saturday.  We stayed in bed until gone 9.30.  We had a lazy summer lunch on the porch at Parker and Otis.  And in the evening we watched two movies back to back.  He introduced me to one: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Verdict: better than I’d expected.  I introduced him to one: The Notebook.  Verdict: ridiculous, stupid, critically terrible movie that everyone must endure.

3. Tonight I made pasta with the basil I’ve been growing on my porch.

4. L is on her way over with a batch of blueberry muffins.  She said the blueberries are too tart this time.  Perfect.  It makes the roof of my mouth tingle to think of them.

(It seems most of my simple pleasures involve food.  Or M.)

end of summer

Fall 2009 has officially begun, and I need to come to terms with that.  As do my plants, incidentally.  Despite a morning drink, they are still shivering in the heat, surrounded by dry, dry soil when I get home.  This is definitely still summer, they say.  I wish it were true.

This weekend, I tried to do things that would lull me into a false sense of continued summer.  Went to the farmer’s market and bought happy bright red flowers.  Had Sunday brunch with L at Guglhupf.  Had tea with A & C at Parker and Otis (incidentally, P&O’s Bangkok green tea and sticky macaroons are a coconut-flavoured dream).  Engaged in random frenzied apartment-cleaning session.  Watched Julie & Julia with L (cooking + writing + Meryl = time very well spent).  Drank wine.  Read Dickens.

But today summer ended.

It began with a tutoring tutorial. (I’ll be working in the Writing Studio this semester.)  Eight-thirty-till-four training will continue until the very-much-anticipated weekend with M (beginning with a literary-themed food party on Friday night!)  My sofa is a little shell-shocked from a pressure-free day.

Fall 2009.  It was freshman move-in day on campus.  As I negotiated for an early parking place on a side street near East (resorting to a mental “please, Mr. Traffic Cop; don’t enforce the two-hour limit today”), shiny SUVs unloaded Moms, Dads, boxes, laundrey hampers, and the Duke Class of 2013, sporting flourescent yellow freshman move-in t-shirts.  They wore their dorm room keys in plastic name-tag pouches around their necks and milled around with frightened eyes and heads held high.

I never did “Dorm Move-In.”  The most I could unload had to fit into two suitcases, and I lived in a small apartment in Mississippi with LNB, just off campus.  The closest I got to dorm-life was the semester in Pontlevoy, France; but LNB and I shared there, too, so there was none of that strange-new-roommate business.  The same story in Exeter.   Still, watching the scene on campus today brought to mind the familiar rush of that fresh new move, the smell of unpacking and adrenaline.   For me, it’s just another school-year starting; and, I suppose, if I stay in academia,  I’ll witness many more like it.   But even if there’s no substantial change, buying new pens and paper from the stationary store always brings with it a sense of possibility — a new leaf to turn.  I like using this time of year to refresh and re-think my routine.

Perhaps I’ll go to Office Depot tomorrow.

lust

Exhibit update:

Today I held in my hand a first edition of Sense and Sensibility and a first edition Jane Eyre.

And I discovered that I might be just a tad materialistic.

a rare kind

Man sitting beside me at Parker and Otis:  What’s the big book?

Me (flipping book over so he can see the cover — at least as well as you can “flip” a 1000-page novel): David Copperfield

Man: It’s good to see people reading real books.

~~~ Interval in which T & K, their new housemate S (a first year in the program) and his fiancee stop by my table to chat for a while ~~~

Man: So not only do you read good books, but you’re popular, too.

Me: ::uncomfortable laugh::

Man: Do your friends read real books?

Me: We’re all Ph.D. English students.

Man: Oh, I see.  What’s your specialty?

Me: I’m a Victorianist.

Man: I didn’t know they made those any more.

to the mountains…

It’s been another whirlwind weekend.  It seems M and I never settle for a relaxing time at home.  This weekend: the mountains!

M was meant to get in on Friday night, but he missed the plane (by one minute!) because a meeting ran over, so I stayed late at a reading/party/games night at A’s place (and met cool new people, to boot), and picked M up first thing Saturday morning.  We celebrated a successful inter-state crossing with lunch at Blue Corn Cafe (yummy guacamole) and a spate of garden shopping.  I’m a little bitter about this.  I bought plants — happy, colourful, fresh new plants — and some soil and terracotta pots… I bought everything an aspiring-gardener-without-a-garden would need to grow things on a balcony in the sunshine.  I potted, watered, and cooed lovingly to said plants.  And when I came home this evening from our weekend away, I found them drooping their little plant heads in dispair.  Following suit. I am throwing up my decidedly un-green thumbs in dispair.  But not in a thumbs-up kinda way.  Hmpf.

Dinner in (broiled tilapia and a vegetable stir-fry), a night out at the movies (the Proposal – surprisingly funny), and a beer on the balcony ended a perfect Saturday evening.

The next day: breakfast at Guglhupf (where I got a free lunch. Thank you mistaken server; I am a convert to the ham-and-cheese now), a visit to L’s kitties (I’m looking after them for the week), and we were off to the mountains.  This trip: Boone and 96 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway down to Asheville.  We’ve already traveled the parkway from its end in Cherokee, Tennessee, up to Asheville, so this time we added another stretch to our map.

The drive involved lots of playing name-that-song.  M is frighteningly good at this game.  I’m sure it only takes two beats or a bar of music and he’s nodding his head and naming artist and title.  A useful skill, only it usually involves a whole lot of country music listening.  I’m a sucker for country music.  I mean it: I get goosebumps and tears listening to songs about little boys who love their daddys or men who love their wives.  Who wouldn’t want to be loved like a country song?

We stopped off in Boone, a fantastic little college town, for old-style pic-n-mix at the General Store (where M directed me in the ways of old-fashioned American candy) and lunch at Macado’s, a sports bar with a sandwich menu unlike any I’d ever seen.  The server must have been by three times before we’d finished reading the list of possibilities.  Then on to the Blue Ridge Parkway.

I’m continually amazed by the scenery in this country.  It’s so… big.  The Blue Ridge Mountains fade into one another in hazy shades of (you guessed it) blue — a transluscent greyish-blue — a postcard backdrop for silhouetted pine trees.  We parked and walked to the summit of Mount Mitchell, the highest spot east of the Mississippi.  Up here, the skyline is dotted with the carcasses of spruce and fir trees that have succumbed to acid rain, harsh winters, and aphids.  A sign told us that at 6,684 feet, this is one of the coldest spots in the south.

It was my third trip to Asheville, and this time we splurged and stayed at the Biltmore Inn.  Actually, M found an incredible Sunday Web rate, and surprised me.  There’s something about checking in to a fancy hotel that fills me with childish joy.  I’m also easily amused at being referred to as Mrs. K.  The receptionist looked a little embarrassed when I handed her my I.D.  Yes, indeed, we’re checking in together and We Are Not Married.  Oops.

A 10.15 p.m. dinner was fabulous.  We sat on the terrace drinking Biltmore wine and overlooking acres of night.  Eight thousand acres, to be exact.  Back when George Vanderbilt created his chateau, the grounds were a modest 125,000 acres.

In the morning, we awoke to find a room with a view of the sun-scorched mountains.  After breakfast, we packed in a visit to the gardens and a (fabulous) lunch at the Deerpark restaurant before racing back towards RDU for M’s flight.  We made it with 2 minutes to spare.  Seems to be the theme for the weekend…

archival

I’m properly back into the swing of things now, and wish that these weeks before the semester officially begins could be stretched a bit to prolong this period of quasi-preparedness.  I feel a little like I’m working ahead of schedule, when really I have a whole summer behind me worth of work that should have been accomplished.  It’s still summer, I keep telling myself.  I have time.  And long days of reading with L and M are supposed to keep me focused and goal-oriented.

But there are different levels of work, and this week I’ve spent most of my time working on fun things.  I’m helping to put together an exhibit about nineteenth-century women writers in the university library.  I think I might have gone a bit overboard today, showing up at a meeting with 20-pages of handout notes.  But before you start thinking I’m one of those kids that used to do extra homework in school to make sure I had it down (erm…), the reason for this insanity was actually the amount of fun I’ve been having with this.   In the rare book room, hidden away in the archives, is an entire cart that displays my name in large sharpie letters.  And on this cart are diaries from the 1840s, 50s, 60s; a first edition Pride and Prejudice; serial copies of Middlemarch, with their crumbling green paper covers; feminist pamphlets and periodicals; Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1865 illustrated copy of his sister’s Goblin Market; Virginia Woolf’s cousin’s childhood diary, in which the entry for June 22, 1897 (Victoria’s Jubilee) is penned in red ink; unrequited love letters from 1803; and so, so much more.  It’s a little slice of paradise.  A few weeks before I left for England, I was carefully combing through some papers, looking at letters from the “anti-feminist” writer Eliza Lynn Linton to a man named Thomas Wardle.  They are hidden amoungst Wardle’s papers in the archives.  And I stumbled across a handful of letters which had tiny pieces of fabric attached to the corners.  Wardle was a calico and silk dyer, and the letters were from William Morris.

I have a cool job.

And it’s made even more fabulous by our amazing collections.  We should feature a feminist pamphlet?  Sure – there’s one in the archives.  We need to feature a good example of a professional writer’s autobiography?  Okay, there’s a first edition of Margaret Oliphant’s in special collections.  Need an example of a woman traveling alone in the nineteenth century?  Mary Kingsley’s first edition Travels in West Africa — check.  It’s like a treasure trove.  I’m hooked.

Next step is to sort through the material to make final decisions on which items to include, as well as to comb through the pages to find images that might be appropriate for the exhibit.  I’m not getting paid a penny to do this, but sometimes I feel like I should be paying someone to play with these papers.  Two days ago, I was reading a set of eight letters from a woman named A Maria Williams to John Dovaston, a minor poet and naturalist.  The letters were sent between November and December of 1803, and we unfortunately don’t have the replies, so you have to piece together bit-by-bit what was going on.  It’s not to hard to figure it out: “A Maria” was in love with Dovaston.  She’s a little desperate, actually, pouring out her desire for his friendship (she underlines a lot of important things in her letters), but noting that if she were in a different type of situation things might be different.  In about the sixth letter, she tells him about a terrible rumour she has heard: someone has been saying that she had visited his house with the base intention of sleeping with him.  Thank the Heavens, she writes, that she is perfectly innocent of such a heinous affront to female delicacy.   It’s obvious where she’s going, and the last letter pours it all out.  He has found her out.  Yes, she loves him.  But she is going away now, putting herself into service (perhaps as a governess?), with the hopes that one day she will be able to live without him.  She wants to close her eyes to this life.

Dovaston never married.  He obviously never returned Williams’s rather childish devotion.  Yes, it is childish; and I probably wouldn’t give these letters much thought if I read them in Times New Roman.  But I can’t explain quite what they did to me as I gobbled up the words on those yellowed pages.  I spent over two hours reading through these letters, feeling like a voyeur, my fingers where his fingers lay, my gaze tracing her thin, slanted script.  Each letter was folded and sealed with bright red wax.  I wondered if her A was the same as mine.

The exhibit will appear in December.  Perhaps I should consider library science after the Ph.D…

check

Going to bed at close to 1 a.m. and getting up at 5.45 a.m. does not a wide-awake-at-9-p.m. girl make.  Especially if you throw in an early-morning drive to Nashville airport and a flight back home to Durham.  Unable to face much work today, I opted for the odd-job option: answering mail, paying bills, writing emails, filling out conference fellowship forms, etc.  I’d like to report that the amount I’ll get reimbursed for conferences is more than the amount I paid out for bills today.  But I can’t.  Blame the car insurance.  Apparently, despite having had a clean driver’s license since I was 17 (no accidents, no claims, and can drive a stick-shift on crazy English roads to boot), I am the American equivilant of a 16-year-old with a brand-new license and a love of thrills when it comes to car insurance premiums.  It’ll take another couple of years before my American license kicks in and lowers those dreaded 6-monthly bills to a reasonable (?) size.   For now… ouch.  Add to that my car tax, medical bills, academic society dues, cable bill, and credit card payment, and it was not such a happy picture.

But despite the bills, there’s something oddly theraputic in cleaning out the in-tray.  (Okay, I’m just going with the phrase here.  I don’t have an in-tray.  I have nothing that remotely resembles an in-tray, unless you count the big wicker box that sits beside my desk, and into which I periodically shove the papers littering its surface in an attempt to be tidy.  I didn’t clean out the in-”box” — that might take a week.)  I even called my credit card company in an attempt to finally solve the rejection-at-gas-pumps mystery.  Turns out that, despite two phonecalls over the past two years to confirm that my address has indeed changed since I lived in Alabama (where I first got the card), the address they had on file was the emergency contact address I had initially provided… in Mississippi.  First clue should have been my lack of paper statements.  (What can I say? I’m a digital girl.)  Mystery solved.

But in amongst the unpleasant mail today was my season-ticket confirmation for Durham Performing Arts Center’s Broadway Series!  Woohoo!  Grease, Beauty and the Beast, Wicked, Spring Awakening, Mamma Mia, Phantom of the Opera, and a Cirque de Soleil-inspired show all in one year.  Yes, while I may whine about spending money on car insurance, some bills are so much more fun to pay!

water thrills

I can’t walk down my stairs.

Well, I can walk down my stairs, but it’s not a spectacle I want anyone to witness, and it illicits a series of sounds that fall somewhere in between a squeak and a grunt.   But, boy, was it worth it!

The culprit: a mean green wave-riding machine on Center Hill Lake.   (Okay, they weren’t exactly waves, but they sure felt like it at 45+ mph).  This weekend I had my first experience on a jet ski, part of a fantastic weekend of fun with M.

I hadn’t been to Tennessee since April (hard to believe), so M and I decided to take the weekend off and spend some time together outdoors.  Middle Tennessee is experiencing a strange burst of cool summer weather.  Days that can peak in the triple-figures have seen the thermostat idling around 80, and reaching down to the mid-60s as night sets in.  For the first weekend in August, this was a special treat, and perfect weather for an unexpected weekend outside.  I flew to Nashville on Friday night, and headed to Sparta with M after a stop for dinner at Stoney River Steakhouse (where we witnessed a champagne-toasted, down-on-one-knee proposal two booths over.  I was proud of myself for resisting the urge to demand a look at a stranger’s newly-acquired ring.)  The next morning, after a leisurely start, we packed an ice chest, grabbed to-go barbecue sandwiches, and headed for Caney Fork River for our planned canoeing trip, only to find that, despite our careful research (by which I mean M had checked the website that morning), they were generating at the dam.  Canoeing was out.

Undetered (swimming gear on, nothing was going to stop us finding some water to play in), we headed up the road a little way to a spot M knew to see about renting jet skis.  Back in law school, M would save his cash in the summers and buy a SeaDoo to play around on and blow off some steam before hitting the books again.  He grew up on Center Hill Lake, a 46-mile long, 18,220 acre, magnificent body of water that sprawls within 415-miles of coastline, about 70 miles east of Nashville.  And that’s where we headed with our newly-rented WaveRunners.  Oh boy!  I’ve never had that much fun on water.  Come to think of it, I’ve rarely had that much fun, period.

There’s something slightly surreal about riding what feels a bit like a motorbike on the water.  I’ve never been one for boats.  Blame it on debilitating sea-sickness (as M can attest from having to look after me on our oh-so-fabulous — read: long and nauseating– whale-watching trip around Kauai’s Na Pali coast.  Bleh.  At least we saw a whale!) and on an irrational fear of deep water at night (shrug).  But this was no boat.  This was a toy.  A powerful, water-squirting, bone-rattling toy.  They made us sign lots of I-will-not-sue-you forms to borrow this toy.  At 40 mph on glassy water, it didn’t even seem to touch the surface.

The roar of the machine and the wind in my ears disappeared the moment we paused our jetskis to talk; then, all was silent but for the crickets singing and the gentle plop-plopping of the water against the “hull.”   From beside me, M gestured the way, occassionally riding my wake to confuse me and appear on the other side, laughing.  He showed me the places we have visited by road over the past two years, including the dock and park where he grew up, swimming or waterskiing or just lazily fishing in the green water.  It’s hard to believe that anyone could grow up beside this magnificent wonderland, let alone my boyfriend.  What is “home” to him is another world to me, so far removed from the thatched roofs and hedgerow-paths of my childhood.  He enjoys showing me this, and I lap it all up.   The glass-bottomed valleys we skirted through on these strange little machines were the stuff of far-away picture-books from my childhood, but they are real memories for him.

As our five-hours on the water drifted to an end, the rain began, and we fled the approaching storm at full-speed, dodging the wakes of passing boats.  This is where the idyllic jet-ski experience becomes not all smooth sailing, so to speak, and the I-will-not-sue-you forms spring to mind.  When you hit a wake, the ski leaps, and then falls.  And it hurts.  It only hurts a little bit at first — it’s fun, thrilling.  Like standing on the stirrups to canter on a horse, it helps not to sit on the seat, M taught me, so I lifted myself up to ride over the little waves.  But the larger ones are tough to handle at high speed (for a novice like me), and my knees gave way, sending me thudding onto the seat with a ripple-effect through the spine that wasn’t all too pleasant.  Also, at 45 mph, rain stings.

We made it back to the dock, sopping wet but laughing and triumphant, and indulged in a well-earned (or at least much-anticipated) dinner on the dock as the storm rolled in, rapping rain against the plastic awnings that separated us from the approaching darkness.   Exhausted, we drove home, took long warm showers, and fell into bed.

Sunday morning, getting out of bed wasn’t so easy.   I may not be a stranger to exercise (ahem), but certain muscles in my body sure are.  Ouch.  My thighs are pierced by iron rods.  They’re tender to the touch.  I can feel each vertebra quaking.   And of course M, whom I like to tease for being older than me, complained of nothing but a slight soreness in his calves.   I guess years of football training and SeaDoo fun paid off.  For the record, I’d like to state that his impressions of my ungainly limping were vastly exaggerated.  (I hope.)

Of course, considering our (erm… my) aching muscles, Sunday should have been a leisurely day.  We headed for Fall Creek Falls state park to get some good country cooking for lunch at the park restaurant (and to enjoy the sunshine, albeit through the SUV windows, on the way).  Quite how I managed to convince myself that a 2-mile hike from the falls to the nature center was a wise plan when I could barely sit down without my thighs screaming, I don’t know.  I just know that I now ache in every conceivable physical location.

But it was a magical weekend.  And we still have canoeing to look forward to!  Just not until my body has remembered I’m young, fit, and agile.

(The picture above was taken in the Fall of 2007.  I’ll upload pics from this weekend soon.)