Mulberry Jam

One Saturday in late April, Caroline and Iain and I were walking back from somewhere - probably Alon's or the Farmer's Market - and Caroline noticed the mulberries on the tree in Vita and Alex's yard.  She told us that she'd never known mulberries were edible, til one day when - as part of a school-organized field trip - she and some classmates and their advisor had spent the day riding MARTA and visiting local sites in Atlanta.  Somewhere they had come upon a mulberry tree, and her advisor picked some berries and ate them. 

We talked about making mulberry jam.  It seemed like it might be fun to do, even if it wasn't very good.  When I got home, I found a recipe on line, and emailed Vita and asked if it was okay if we picked some mulberries.  She said yes, and I bought some jars and pectin (we had plenty of sugar), but then I left town for a trip and we didn't get any made that weekend.

It wasn't til a couple of weeks later, on Mother's Day, that Iain and I walked up the street with a metal colander and picked what I guessed to be a quart of mulberries.  They were beautiful, I thought, so I took a picture of them:

Each berry had tightly attached to it a quarter-inch-long green stem.  In the instructions with the on line recipe I'd found, the writer said it was too much trouble to take off the stems, but I cut them off with scissors as I sorted the berries.

I washed and sterilized the jars and then started on the jam.  It didn't seem possible that the jam could boil - the recipe just called for berries and sugar and a little bit of lemon juice - but it did, and at some point something magic happened and it suddenly turned translucent and a beautiful claret color.  It was, I think, the most beautiful jam I'd ever seen. 

It also was, quite possibly, the best jam we'd ever had.  It was delicious!  I left a jar for Vita and Alex, and gave one to my friend Karen when she was in town.  Now we have about half a jar left, of the six half-pints that we made that day.  I was hoping that we could make another batch, but Caroline and I walked by the tree earlier this morning, and there are no more mulberries.

She is sitting at the dining room table across from me, now, eading the New York Times and eating wild plums that we just got at the Farmer's Market.  No more mulberry jam til  next year.  We'll just have to make do, somehow.

The Day After the World Didn't End

It's May 22, and the world didn't end yesterday.  It wouldn't have been a good time for the world to end - Sarah is in Germany, and Iain at a Boy Scout outing.  It was not that clear to me exactly when it was supposed to happen (6 p.m. local time or 6 p.m. Pacific Time?), but if it was local time, Tom and Caroline weren't home either - it was just me and the dog.  I think I was sorting laundry.  It wasn't how I'd want to spend my last moments before the world ended.  It would definitely have been a waste of time doing the laundry at all, much less sorting it.

There was an article in the Times on Friday about a family in Maryland.  The parents were convinced that the world was going to end - the mother had quit her job and they had stopped saving for college for their 3 teenage children - and the kids were just embarrassed by the whole thing.  You have to wonder about the people who emptied their savings accounts to buy billboards announcing the world was ending.  What do you do, when it doesn't?

The last time Harold Camping announced the world was ending and it didn't was in 1994.  He said, afterwards, he'd made a mistake in the calculations, but this time he was absolutely certain.  There's been no word from Mr. Camping since yesterday, so we don't know yet what he's going to say this time.  But in the press stories this morning there's puzzlement from the people who believed, and some expressions of sympathy and concern for them from others.  (And of course plenty of material for Jon Stewart and the other late night comedians, as if they needed any more.)

Tom and I had decided, earlier in the day, that if the world was going to end we might as well be drinking champagne, and if it wasn't going to end, well, that was something to celebrate.  So I put a bottle in the fridge during the afternoon, but when we pulled the cork, it was flat and not drinkable.  We'd kept it too long.  So we put another bottle on ice that I thought might be newer and once it was cold, we opened it, and it wasn't drinkable either.  By this point it was well after 9 p.m. (6 p.m. PDT) and the world had not ended.  The third bottle still had some bubbles left, and we all drank to the world not ending.

So here's the take home message, besides not quitting your job and emptying out your savings account when told by an elderly religious broadcaster from Oakland that the world is ending.  We clearly are not celebrating enough.  It should not take the end of the world to open a bottle of champagne.  We'll do better, going forward. 

But now it's time to get dressed, walk the dog, and enjoy the day.  I'm glad we're all still here.  The mockingbirds are queued up to get to the suet feeder at the window, and there's a cardinal on the other feeder.  Bullwinkle's asleep just outside the back door.  A chipmunk just ran across the back yard.  Time to get going for the day.

Tornado Season

I was out of town when the tornadoes hit, week before last.  Seeing the images on CNN that Thursday morning was heart-breaking.  Calling home, to make sure Atlanta had not been hit.  (I figured CNN would have mentioned that if it had, but just checking.)  Since then, reading about the devasting tornadoes that hit Tuscaloosa and Birmingham and lots of other towns with names that aren't so well known.  Little towns that probably were struggling to keep their downtowns from closing and people moving to bigger towns even before the tornado hit.  Now their downtown is gone and so are a lot of the houses.  Towns where people were born, grew up, got married, and had their children are just gone.

I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas, and I have strong memories of fear of tornadoes.  Not actual tornadoes - I lived in towns that experienced devastating tornadoes, but they were either before I was born or when I was too young to remember them (and not in the part of town where we lived) - but hearing sirens, and (when we lived in a house with a basement) a few times going to the basement until a particularly strong storm passed.

I went to high school in Woodward, Oklahoma, which had been hit by a devastating tornado in 1947.  Hundreds of homes, damaged or destroyed, and about a hundred people killed in Woodward.  I remember a grave, at Elmwood Cemetery, marked "Unidentified Girl," but there were two unidentified children found in the rubble of the tornado in Woodward, a girl of about 12 and a baby girl.  According to Mike Coppock's compelling accound of the Woodward tornado, there was speculation "that the powerful storm blew them in from Texas, even though the farthest a human body was known to have been carried by a tornado was a mile."

Caroline and I were in Woodward, visiting my mother, in May 2004, when a storm system unleased a series of tornadoes south and east of Woodward.  One of them hit Geary, the town where my parents met as school teachers in the 1930s.  The storms were moving away from us, not toward us, so there wasn't any sense of personal threat - but we kept the television on and watched, mesmerized, as the storm system moved across western Oklahoma.   They knew exactly where the tornadoes were, with great precision, and tracked them from intersection to intersection.  Talking about that evening later, to friends in Atlanta, I said that the local TV stations in Oklahoma cover weather the way the Atlanta stations cover traffic.  Driving back to Oklahoma City to the airport, I remember we saw some storm damage north of Geary - a galvanized metal structure on its size, and broken trees - but it wasn't a really strong tornado and there weren't many people in its path.

The paths of these tornadoes - the ones that just hit Alabama and Georgia and other southeastern states - were long and wide and went through populated areas.  Hundreds of people died, thousands lost their homes.  Lynsley shared the information the other day that there will be a truck at Morningside Presbyterian Church on Wednesday to collect relief supplies.  We bought peanut butter and a big corregated box of diapers at Target yesterday and will be doing some more shopping before Wednesday.  So check the list of what they need and make a trip to your favorite store so you can give a little something to some people who have lost everything.  And if you can't make it this week, they will be there every Wednesday through the end of the month.

Caramba Cafe Reopened

I think I was out of the country last June, when there was a message on one of the neighborhood message boards that Caramba Cafe had closed.  The word was they had lost their lease. 

Caramba Cafe had been a neighborhood destination for at least 20 years.  When I first moved to Atlanta, I think there was a rotisserie chicken place in the location on North Highland (I remember eating there with the real estate agent who helped me find my house), but they moved into that space not long after that.  It was child-friendly and popular early in the evening with families with young children, but there was a lively neighborhood bar and great Margaritas and the child-free crowd later in the evening.  We often took friends or relatives from out of town there, and one December the Wessyngton women had our Winter Solstice celebration at the big round table in the corner.  We had to pull up extra chairs, that night.

But mostly I remember being at Caramba with my family.  Tom and I celebrated our first anniversary there, with Caroline - two weeks old - beside us, outside on the breezeway (that was before it got enclosed and turned into retail space).  We were new at being parents, and terrified, and the pediatrician had told us to not have the baby around other people if we could avoid it until she was at least six weeks old, so we did - and had we not been able to eat outside at Caramba, we probably would have had take out from somewhere for that anniversary dinner.

And there was the night that something caught on fire on the roof of the building.  There didn't seem to be any imminent danger, but they told us all to leave, so I took the kids and we waited across the street for Tom, who stayed behind to pay the check.  But he didn't come out for what seemed to be a very long time, and the kids got frightened.  (I suspect he was just finishing his drink.)  Fortunately, whatever damage there was seemed to be confined to the roof, and the next night they were back open.

There were postcards to Tom and me on our birthdays, and sometimes a cupcake with a candle when the kids chose Caramba for a birthday celebration.  We celebrated report cards and making it to the weekend and sometimes we went there when we just didn't feel like cooking.

So it was wrenching for us when Caramba closed.  We were glad to get the news that they were going to re-open elsewhere, but it took a long time.  But now they are open again, in a new building at 349 Decatur Street, and last night we went there to celebrate my birthday.  George and Rachel and Mia hugged all of us when we walked in (3 x 5, 15 hugs total), and we were glad to be back.

We can't walk there anymore, but it's not so far.  You can park in the deck behind the building for free, or there's also some parking on the street.  If you go, say hello for me.

Lockdown in Morningside

On leave, yesterday and today.  I think I was planning on buying a new car (since the old one is now property of State Farm) but the idea of having to drive around to car dealerships and talk to car salesmen is just not something I can force myself to do right now.  So instead I've done a little work in the yard; the strawberries are mulched, now, and I discovered there are some volunteer tomato plants that have come up in the bed where we planted the heirloom tomatoes.  So maybe we will be more likely to have tomatoes for more of the summer, with more varieties growing.

Yesterday Tom and I went out to lunch and stopped by Home Depot on the way back and bought a couple of small Japanese maples for the backyard.  Put them in the ground or leave them in pots on the patio?  It was while we were still moving things to the backyard when we got back that I noticed the helicopter that kept circling, low, and just a few blocks to the south.  Tom said it was an Atlanta Police Department helicopter, and they must be looking for someone.  I checked my email - the neighborhood message boards are good about posting safety and security warnings - and signed up both Tom and I for the APD alerts.  But no information anywhere, just the incessant circling of the helicopter.

The first email came at 1:55 p.m., with the alarming subject line, "STAY AT HOME!!!!!!!"  There was "an incident with gunshots on Greenland Avenue," and a request from APD that "EVERONE stay in their homes til this incident is sorted out."  We locked the doors and I forwarded the email to the neighbors.  More emails, that streets from Courtney Drive to Amsterdam Avenue were closed.  The helicopter kept circling.  There was a report on channel 11's website that someone had thrown an explosive into a house on Greenland.  Tom said that probably meant we didn't have much to worry about, since people who throw explosives are usually pretty crazy.

Morningside Elementary School went on lockdown but it was lifted around the time the kids would have been leaving school anyway - a message from a parent at the school was that the kids would be released just a few minutes late.  At 3:16 p.m. there was a message that they were no longer concerned about Greenland Drive, but the "person of interest" was said to be on Kings Court.  By 3:51 p.m. there was a notice that the person of interest had been apprehended.

By yesterday evening, the story was on line at the AJC, that there had been a disagreement between two men that had been playing out on Facebook - Facebook?? - and that the one of them had shot a gun into the other man's house; no one had been injured.  By this morning, the AJC reported that an arrest had been made and that the shooter had been taken to Grady Hospital for evaluation.

Last night, Iain and I stopped by Lynsley's to say hello, when we were out walking the dog.  She had been at Murphy's with an old friend, and (thanks to a new Blackberry that wasn't working yet) had no idea what had brought the SWAT team and the K-9 Unit out.  This is not usual for our neighborhood, she told her friend.

Since I was home (and indoors, with the doors locked, for much of it, I would add) while all this was going on, I did forward all the emails to the neighbors.  That's the good thing about all this connectivity.  The bad thing, of course, is that disagreements get amplified the same way.

More Current Events

I looked, earlier this morning, but couldn't find it.  It was a small booklet that might have fit in a business-size envelope.  I remember when I got it years ago, looking at it in fascination.  There were drawings of girls doing all the things Girl Scouts do - outdoor activities and cooking and first aid and child care - but the text was foreign and completely indecipherable.  It was in Arabic, with curved lines and dots that conveyed no meaning to me, but because of the pictures, I could tell what most of it was about.  What I don't remember is exactly how the girls were dressed.  Were they wearing something I would recognize as a Girl Scout or Girl Guide uniform, or traditional attire?  I'm not sure - I think the latter, but I don't remember.

I've been a Girl Scout leader since Caroline was in 1st grade.  There is a Girl Scout holiday called World Thinking Day, that is celebrated worldwide by Girl Scouts and Girl Guides on February 22 each year.  Sometimes Girl Scout troops get together with other troops and have a festival of some kind (that's what our Girl Scout troop has done in recent years), but back in 2002, we picked a single country to learn about.  In 2002, that country was Yemen.

So I invited a friend who was from Yemen, and she came and talked about her country with infectious warmth and enthusiasm.  I remember she said that coffee was from Yemen.  Sarah, who was in 1st grade at the time, remembers a pair of ornate beaded shoes.  I bought the flag of Yemen, and we hung it from the ceiling in the classroom at Haygood.

Later, a package came.  There were T-shirts, with the emblem of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts and more Arabic writing, and color copies of pages illustrating stamps from around the world that had been issued commemorating scouting, and the Girl Guide handbook.  It was a slim booklet, with small drawings of girls doing the things that Girl Scouts and Girl Guides around the world do.  

Fast forward to now.  We have been watching recent events in Yemen, where the president made the mistake of saying it was un-Islamic for women to join men in protesting against his rule.  Since then, even more women have taken to the streets.  The pictures on Al Jazeera are amazing.  A large group of women, marching in the center of the street, with a ring of men around them, at enough distance that it is clear they are there to help provide protection if they are needed.  Another picture, from a video story, of three women in doctor's white coats, with black veils nearly completely covering their faces. 

The world is a complicated and interconnected place, but what's going on in Yemen is breathtaking. Hoping for a transition to new and more responsive leadership without more bloodshed. And thinking about those women who have taken to the streets, with great courage. Wondering if, as children, they had a slender Girl Guide handbook, and promised to do their duty to God, and then to country.

I still have the flag.

A Dark and Stormy Night

The weather has oscillated between chilly (although perhaps seasonal) and too warm for the calendar.  Monday was very warm, and that night we had the upstairs windows open and the attic fan on.  Not much sleep that night.  First, it was hot upstairs, and it seemed like every time I went to sleep the weather radio would go off, with a warning that there were severe storms in the area.  I grew up in Oklahoma, in towns that periodically got wiped off the map by tornadoes, so I have great respect for weather; I would listen each time for long enough to make sure that it wasn't a tornado warning for Atlanta, and then hit the button to end the message but leave the radio on.

It was sometime around midnight that there was a really loud crash.  I went downstairs in the dark to make sure things were okay; I didn't see anything wrong, but I didn't look very hard.  Whatever it was, it didn't seem to be inside the house.  It wasn't long after that that I was up again; the power was off, and the alarms on the uninterrupted power supplies on the computers were beeping.  Outside, it was still windy with rain.  Caroline got up too and she turned off the computers and we unplugged other electronics; upstairs, we closed the windows to keep out the rain.  She was texting her friends and got updates from around the area, who had power and who didn't.  (High school kids apparently only sleep in the daytime.)  She looked out into the street, into the storm, and said there were tree branches in the street, but my car looked okay; we saw a driver made his way, then, past the downed branches so it must not be too bad.  Whether the car was okay or not, I wasn't going outside to check; even if the storm wasn't still going on, it wouldn't be safe to go outside in the dark with the possibility of downed powerlines.

I personally have gone over that list from Ready.gov with the Cub Scouts, for what you need to be prepared at home, but in the morning we couldn't find any of the probably 20 flashlights that are somewhere in the house; I couldn't even find - without Tom's help - the matches.  The battery powered lantern - which I did eventually find -  hadn't been recharged after the last camping trip.  So Tom made an early morning trip to Home Depot for flashlights, making his way through the neighborhood in the dark with trees down blocking streets at random.  But before he went to Home Depot, he was standing in the doorway and told me that the large limbs that had fallen from the tulip poplar across the street were on top of my car.

We were still worried about downed power lines so I didn't get out to check the damage until it was light.  That loud crashing sound the night before had almost certainly been the back of my car, exploding.

An early morning phone call to the 24 hour toll-free claim number at State Farm ("There's a tree on my car"), and a vague assurance that I would hear back sometime ("This morning?" "Probably not").  Retrieving stuff from the trunk through the broken back window.  It was back to being cold again, and I had to wear a jacket.  The one thing that had been in the car that mattered - the box of material for updating my overdue book chapter - wasn't damaged by the rain that had gotten in through the broken window over night.

The power came on around midnight the following night, and then went off again.  When I got home from work, I called Georgia Power and the automated voice (with a warm Georgia accent) said they expected to have the power back on that day.  I took the kids out to dinner, and just as we returned, a convoy of Georgia Power and Altec trucks appeared in front of the house.  Tom and I sat on the porch and watched them, working under bright lights on the darkened street, put the power line that had slipped off the insulator on the top of the pole back into place.  I told Tom, those guys, they're heroes.  They moved on up the street, and it wasn't long before we noticed the street lights were back on.  We turned around and looked inside, and the lights were on in our kitchen. 

I found Iain upstairs asleep, with his bedroom light on; the power had come back on after he had gone to bed.  I switched it off, and went to bed.