Kindle-Free Zone.

I've had a lifelong romance with books; as a child I was kind of a dreamer, and loved nothing more than to curl up with a story and while away an afternoon reading. When I think of those afternoons, I remember the stories but I also remember the books themselves; summer afternoons at my grandmother's North Carolina house I would prowl the upstairs bedrooms and attics, where bookshelves abounded, and help myself to whatever was there. I read "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House", "Cheaper By The Dozen", "Little Black Sambo," "The Little Colonel", the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris.. so vivid in my mind: "Tarbaby, he don't say nothin....' There were :Kidnaped:, "Treasure Island", "Gulliver's Travels", I didn't discern between the books and nobody ever looked to see what it was that I was reading, so I just plowed through, devouring everything there was. There was a loveseat in the window on the stair landing, just large enough to curl up in completely, and I would disappear into the pages of a book for hours at a time, where I went down the rabbit hole with Alice, and to the English moors in Wuthering Heights, slipped into the sidewalk chalk drawings in Mary Poppins and through the wardrobe to Narnia. Toad Hall, Piglet, and Wilbur the exceptional pig were all my childhood friends.

I loved those books, but a love some of the strange ones because I loved that time, still nights with cicadas humming, bobwhites calling, old metal fans in the windows trying to move the still, humid air; reading on the porch by lantern light while June bugs clung to the screens. The house was rambling, a Gothic fantasy with rooms that roamed forever, and those books smelled of that wonderful house. Between those pages you might find a faint whiff of mold and mothballs, old paper, and leather, names scrawled on the flyleaf going back generations, stiff, faded illustrations protected by tissue-paper overlays, the simple yellow bookplates of my great-great grandfather pasted on the inside cover of many of the oldest ones. When I read those, (I have a set of Dickens of his of which I am now reading David Copperfield), I marvel at the faint smudges that appear to have been caused by long ago fingers, the occasional scrap of ephemera tucked in as a bookmark, wondering if it was he who'd been reading it and what he'd thought about it, back in 1880 when the books were new.

I imagine the creak of a harness and the measured clop of working horses as the mailman approaches the old home place, ringing the bell at the iron gate at the front of the drive until a figure comes to meet the mailman, a box is procured--a crate, slightly heavy, the postmark from overseas making the event even more exotic. Opening the lid impatiently, the governor picks up the first book and holds it reverently to him, the way you might hold a child, or an icon. The green cloth bindings are unpretentious, these books are for reading, not for show.

When I think of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, I think of the woodcut illustrations that brought those books to life for me. (They belonged to my mother, and have her bookplate pasted onto the flyleaf.) Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, as well; Alice's attenuated neck as Tenniel depicted it, I think of the wonderful covers of those books, the feel of the cloth, paper, or leather bindings, their typefaces, the way the books are constructed. Some slim and compact enough to tuck into a pocket or a palm, like the Oxford Anthony Trollopes I have a few dozen of, some bulky and requiring a table for perusal, like the wonderful ancient botanical reference books with their hand-colored drawings that my Aunt Joan still has, that I remember leafing through in fascination, and the old family Bibles, with their frightening illustrations and pages of calmly recorded marriages, births, and deaths. The smell of leather bindings, fine old paper, and dust mix with the smell of furniture polish, lemon, and mothballs. And more dust.

I'm not anti-Kindle, though you might assume so. I can see right away that it has advantages, particularly in my own version which is on the iPad-- I can use Kindle, iBooks, Kobo, or a handful of other book apps that have libraries, and I've read Moby Dick, for example, for the first time, on my e-reader and loved the ease of it: the built-in dictionary, the brightly lit screen for darkened rooms. Lightweight, in the case of reading Moby Dick, easier to handle. I love tossing the lightweight iPad into my handbag and having all that printed matter at my fingertips.

But I think ultimately it is this, that when you buy a physical book, in analog. you own it. It belongs to you. You put your bookplate on the flyleaf, perhaps, or maybe just you scrawl your name on the inside cover, or even just scrawl your opinions in the margins, that book has been slightly altered by your reading it and in that process has developed further, even if that book has been around 200 years. My bedtime, as a child, was supervised by both "Goodnight Moon" and "Chicken Soup With Rice", tiny and weatherbeaten books with damp crumbly pages that barely hold together. But I don't own the Kindle version of "Atonement" I've just read, as much as I loved, loved, loved the story. A physical book will end up a bit dog-eared, perhaps, or with a couple of scraps, snapshots, or receipts tucked into its pages. A kindle story is untouched by human hands, pristine, belonging to some other world and unspoiled by contact with air and prodding clumsy human fingers.

So while the Kindles and e-readers have their place (particularly nighttime reading with that handy lit-up screen) I will always love my old, analog, decrepit books that, each time I read them, I make my own.

Pie for Dummies

When I say "dummies", I refer to the clueless, the culinarily challenged, the how-do-you-boil-water variety of chef. Which would have described me until fairly recently-- but the last few years have seen my cooking skills improve through practice, mostly because we now have a kitchen with some counter space. Remember the expression "easy as pie"? Here's how to make one, and don't be intimidated-it's supposed to be fun. AND easy. Plus, how bad can it possibly come out, it's fruit and sugar for goodness' sake.

1. See "pie crust for dummies", below.

2.Preheat your oven to 450 degrees, then butter a nine-inch pie plate.

3. Divide the dough into two roughly equal pieces, the slightly larger piece for the bottom. Squish down the ball a bit until it's flattened, then roll out your crust. Now, if you want to "cheat," here's a handy tip: I find handling the crust to be somewhat unwieldy, especially on a humid day, so the way around that is to roll it in between two sheets of waxed paper, then peel one back and use the remaining sheet to pick the crust up and deliver it to the pie plate.

4. Wash and pick over your fruit; for most berry pies you will need around six cups for a deep dish pie, four cups for a regular. Add in your sugar, usually around a cup depending on your sweet tooth, and then add your thickener: I recommend quick-cooking tapioca, this will keep the pie from being soupy when cooked. The tapioca container will give proportions for various fillings, usually somewhere around 1/4 cup is about right. For blueberry pie use a little lemon juice and a dash of cinnamon, for cherry-rhubarb use a little amaretto or almond extract, for peach pie use some vanilla. Play with the fillings, experiment, and have some fun, you may make a wonderful discovery (I discovered cherry-rhubarb and peach-raspberry, for example, and can't begin to tell you how amazing those combinations are!) Let the filling sit with the sugar and tapioca mixture for fifteen minutes before spooning it into your pie dish, this allows the tapioca to thicken properly. Dot the fruit with butter for a rich finish.

5. Roll out the remaining dough and cut it into long strips around 3/4" wide, placing them in a crisscross pattern on the top of the pie. Don't worry about getting it geometrically perfect, you can hide any mistakes with cookie-cuttered dough shapes as decorations. I often use star or flower shapes, or sometimes free-formed leaves and branches. When you have the top ready, use a chopstick or fork to flute the edges, then brush the surface with a little cream and sprinkle it with sugar. Put the pie plate on a cookie sheet to prevent the oven from getting all gunky if the filling spills over.

6. Place the pie in the middle rack for 10 minutes, after which you will turn down the oven to 350.

7. Tear several strips of tinfoil around three inches wide and pleat them together to form a circle; this you will place around the edges of the pie crust to keep the edges from scorching. Add this at around your ten-minute mark and the edges will still have a nice brown to them but won't burn.

8. Let the pie continue to cook at 350 degrees for around 45 more minutes, checking it occasionally, until it is lightly browned on the surface and smells irresistible. Remove the pie from the oven and let it cool.

9. Eat the pie.

10. Repeat.

Pie Crust for Dummies.

Don't bother with those frozen pie crusts---they aren't terrible, but this pie crust is really almost as easy as a pre-made one. I used them for years but then found this recipe was nearly foolproof.

Sift: 2 and 1/2 cups of unbleached all-purpose flour with 1/2 teaspoon salt and around 2 teaspoons of sugar (more to taste). Now, as far as shortening goes, it's a matter of taste. Butter will give you the best flavor, but some people insist that vegetable shortening gives a flakier crust, and others claim that half butter and half shortening is ideal. Sigh. Do whatever you want. But anyway, take a half-cup (that would be two sticks of butter) and cut it into the flour mixture with a pastry cutter or a fork. Work it in until the texture resembles little peas, and then add in a bunch of ice cold heavy cream, starting with around 1/4 cup. working it into the dough with your hands. Slowly add more cream if necessary, until the dough holds together nicely---don't make it too gooey, a dryer dough is easier to handle. Form the dough into a ball, wrap it in a tea towel, and chill for at least 20 minutes.

Looking Forward

There are different kinds of gardening. One kind I will call "Ta-Dah" gardening, because it involves buying fully-grown plants and flowering annuals, troweling them out of their flats and cell-packs and into the flowerbeds, standing back to admire one's handiwork and crowing, "Ta-Dah!" This is what I did for years, and I can assure you that it is immensely satisfying. Not only for your own instant gratification, but because then you can stroll with your admiring friends through the lovely petals, sagely taking credit for the nurseryman's toil. As long as you remember that they have to be watered, you look like a gardening genius.

More recently, however, I have discovered another kind of gardening. There's not much Ta-Dah-ing, or crowing, involved-- more like a variety of oaths from mild to scathing, occasional gnashing of teeth, and some tearing of hair--one could probably safely call it Tilting at Windmills Gardening. Why? Because it involves the quixotic, often fruitless, masochistic, deluded idea of starting the plants from seeds. Why, again, you ask--and it's a damned good question, considering that in March and April you can hardly get inside my front door for all the seedlings packed into the sunny south-facing foyer. And I'll tell you how it got started. Sweet Peas.

Even the best nurseries and farmer's markets have a relatively narrow selection of plants, while the larger nurseries have the advantage of space they nevertheless have to limit themselves to what they can expect to sell. But I started to run across seed companies that had hard-to-find heirloom varieties of things i was lusting after and couldn't find in nurseries, and eventually a few years ago I started with hollyhocks and sweet peas. Sweet peas became a yearly tradition, every south-facing sill in the house crowded with little peat pots holding tiny bamboo tripods. One year I found a treasure trove of sweet pea seeds: heirlooms, antiques,bouquet sweet peas, container sweet peas, and prizewinning new hybrids and even perennial varieties. I began to fill trays of peat pots by the front door. Then a few heirloom columbines, wild strawberries, heliotrope, herbs, cucumbers, baby lettuce and curly endive, and of course wonderful, luscious heirloom tomatoes. I harvest seeds from my best plants: jars of the tiny lobelia seeds, tiny waxed-paper envelopes of tomato seeds (cherokee purple, striped german), jam jars full of nasturtium seeds, marigolds, sweet peas, cosmos, nigella, hollyhock, hyacinth bean vine, moonflower. Curled up by the fire, I leaf through seed catalogs and place orders for new things to try.

In the dead of winter, often while there are still drifts of tinsel on the living room carpet and thank-you notes unwritten, I start soaking seeds and making little greenhouses from takeout food containers. (The kind with the clear plastic tops are perfect little terraria, the clear dome is ideal for humidity retention and the size is perfect for fitting three peat pellets across and four over and then tucking nicely into the windowsill. ) When there are still arctic winds and snowdrifts, and the cold ground seems so sterile and forbidding, I watch the little seedlings sprout and lift their tiny heads to the sun and it reminds me that, outdoors , there are stirrings below the ground and that spring is not so very far away.

When the snows finally melt and the days begin to feel more temperate, outside the daffodils leap out and remind me that I can start hardening off the seedlings outside, which is a tricky process because the nights are still frosty enough to kill off any young plants I may carelessly forget to bring indoors at sunset. There are many other hazards at this stage, too: damping off, which is usually a result of overwatering and will cause the young sprout to wilt and die, and of course the opposite--the peat pellets dry out; a mere half-day of dryness and a seedling will give up the ghost entirely, suddenly shriveling up altogether. Sometimes the seeds don't sprout at all, for various reasons. Or unknown reasons. Or no reason. There are seeds so tiny they are nearly invisible, and will just dissipate unless they are mixed with sand. I put my terraria on the radiator covers for a couple of days to start the germination process, then relegate them to their place in the sun so I can watch and marvel as they sprout their tiny green hopeful shoots.

There are always two little baby leaves on a sprout, ovoid and featureless, leaves that like a child's baby teeth eventually fall off when the adult leaves are out in full force. When the seedling has four of its adult leaves, it can, in theory, go outdoors. That theory doesn't always hold, because there are other danger factors like soil temperature, air temperature, neighborhood teenagers, peeing dogs, curious squirrels/raccoons, drought, flood, vandalism, well-intentioned weeding assistants, big feet, and absent-mindedness when it comes to watering.

A lot of things can go wrong, what can I say. And, when you've nurtured the seedling from its infancy, you really take it personally when the birds eat it or the squirrel digs it up or the neighbor's dog pees on it. My language has gotten pretty scandalous, I am thinking of starting up a cursing jar, dropping in a dollar every time I turn the air blue, and donating the contents to a charity. I save the foulest epithets for my own stupidity when I accidentally step on one of my own babies, or under/overwater it, or hack off a root when I am transplanting.

But eventually they do get transplanted, and they are out there now in the beds and containers, but my seed-started plants are way behind. The rows of green are healthy and happy, but haven't bloomed yet: lobelia in rows, its dark curly foliage happily trailing over the sides of the beds, is still entirely green. The zinnias are happily shooting up, but only a couple of tiny buds have appeared yet, and though a few of the cosmos have started showing some flowers, the nigella is a haze of green fern-like foliage, lovely but still without a single flower. Sweet peas, trailing up their trellises, just starting to form a few little clusters of buds at last, and the cypress vine with its delicate spirals is a quiet deeper green.

Then I look at the strawberry plants, not the big patch of everbearing strawberries but the tiny delicate ones that in France are called "Fraises du Bois', or woodland berries. There are similar wild strawberries in New England, but these berries are sweeter, tiny but plump, and the flavor is insanely, disorientingly, divine-- almost narcotic in its hypnotic intensity, a pagan ode to summer, a dionysian revel, a trip down the rabbit hole. I started some from seeds two years ago, beginning one January afternoon with microscopic seeds and soggy peat, and watching as tiny leaves the size of pinheads eventually emerged, dismayed and thinking I would never live to see these bear fruit, they were so tiny and the odds seemed so long. I nursed the tiny fragile plants and tucked them into the pockets of a couple of strawberry pots, then planted the rest of the seedlings in shady corners under the grape arbor in the back.

I started some more this spring, too, partly because I have friends who clamor for some of the plants. This morning I was looking at their tiny leaves in in a strawberry pot and thinking about the advantages of Ta-Dah gardening, grousing about how tardy all my seedlings are. Later in the afternoon I was weeding in the very back, though, and lo and behold on last year's plants were a huge crop of fat little berries, and as I greedily ate them and inhaled their intoxicating aroma, I felt as though I'd done a particularly successful magic trick, turning microscopic little seeds into pretty little plants that flower and fruit. And therein lies the lure of tilting at windmills, because success against all odds feels so damned good, and that success has been earned.

I guess some things are worth a wait.

Can You Dig It?

I have a chaise lounge in the garden, one I bought years ago--in fact, since before we bought this house with its' higher-maintenance garden. The chaise was to be the scene of much lounging and reading, sipping of tall icy glasses of lemonade, in my ferny but flower-laden bower and sighing happily in the sweet summer honeysuckle-scented breeze. Not happening.

I was used to a garden that had been two-thirds flagstone and more or less minimal maintenance, but when we saw this house with its peach tree, its berry patch, rosebushes, and grape arbor, we didn't think twice. Sometimes I'm not sure we thought once. But I get ready to sit out there, putting on a pair of shorts, getting my book and a glass of lemonade, a sunhat and an ashtray, and by the time I have the mise-en-scene prepared I have noticed some crisis or another that needs doing immediately: there are carpenter ants in the peach tree, or a thousand morning glories have sprouted in the tomato bed where Dale, not quite believing in the miracle of germination, plowed under all the seed pods and dried vines left from last year. Well, I tell myself, I won't be a moment--I just want to get those morning glories up but what on earth is that? Beginnings of black spot on the roses? And the roses need to be staked, there's a lot of precarious new growth, and oh dear the peonies, too, I haven't done the peony rings yet, so before you know it I am dusting the roses with organic fungicide, transplanting foxgloves, potting up some lily of the valley for a neighbor, and weeding, weeding, weeding.

And yet, back aching, when I finally do sit on that chaise to the now-warm glass of lemonade, I still don't look around and see the progress I have made--I am always looking askance at how much I should really be doing, or how much will look bad because I didn't spray or dust in time, and assessing what went wrong with this or that. But still, there I am year in and year out, on my knees before the miracles I witness every year in the garden: the transformation from season to season when the first green shoots peep out in spring, the families of finches giving flying lessons from the high branches of the old spruce where they have their nests, the dainty maiden lily of the valley and the brazen hussy peony, the countless splendors that make the aching and the swearing worthwhile.

Meanwhile, we probably end up paying forty dollars a tomato.

Press 2 if you've had it up to here.

I found myself yelling into the phone today, screaming like a lunatic, frothing at the mouth, and using the most shocking language, never mind that I was talking to a recording. Usually when I do this I am talking to a tech support person in Bangalore, but this time it fell on the nonexistent ears of one of those automated-response machines that fail to understand complicated words like "yes" and "no."

What difficult task was I performing? What life-and-death situation was at hand, you ask? I was canceling, or attempting to cancel, a subscription to a magazine that has been arriving weekly and that I read rarely, to wit, that paragon of mammon-and-real-estate-worship, the inimitably poorly-written piece of semi-tabloid journalism, "New York" magazine. I am old enough, mind you, to remember the magazine in its intellectual heyday, when Pulitzer-winning reporters wrote thought-provoking articles and there was even a rather cerebral word-game competition in the back rather than a less than lukewarm crossword puzzle that only TV Guide's equals for inanity. (though they do still, I believe, print one from the "Guardian" in London to tack on to theirs for a tinge of pretension to respectability.) Other than the "approval matrix", the occasionally interesting article amid the spam and money-fawning didn't seem to justify the yearly deduction from my credit card that had been going on automatically for something like the last decade, and I finally decided it was time to sever ties. (Besides, they insist on capitalizing the R in the word "realtor"! If the first letter isn't capitalized in the words "lawyer", "tinker", "tailor", or "candlestick maker", I don't see why "Realtor" must be written that way: it's a pet peeve, what can I say. ) Anyway, time to cancel.

Should be easy, you say? Well, the first step was going to the magazine's website. After a bit of clicking around, I found a customer service tab which then gave me all kinds of options: renew my subscription, get a new subscription, find out when my present subscription expires, and so forth, but no option whatsoever for "cancel subscription". Finally after much clicking and swearing, I found a "contact us" tab that allowed me to ask a question, and I sent an email explaining the complicated task I sought to complete. Twenty-four hours passed before a reply was posted in my inbox explaining that my subscription was through an outside service, and that I would need to contact that service in order to cancel. Fair enough. Weird, but fair enough. I contacted them, via that ancient instrument, the telephone. And this leads you to the scene I have described.

The recording asked me whether I would prefer to punch in numbers or use voice commands, and I perhaps wrongly assumed that the number-punching would be more frustrating, so I chose the latter option. "What would you like to do?" the recorded voice asked brightly, " would you like to renew your subscription?" "CANCEL!" I bellowed into the receiver. "Okay," we can renew your subscription." This kind of thing went on for several minutes until I finally got the machine to understand what I wanted to do, and with a sigh of relief the recording gave me a confirmation number.

I should have hung up immediately then, but I wanted to make sure I had dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's, so I kept going. "We're sorry you didn't like your magazine", said the recording, "so we are going to send you fifty issues of "American Whitetail" at a price of 2.94 an issue, and a subscription to "Ranch" magazine, all at a below-newsstand price. If at any time you decide to cancel your subscription, simply..." at this point I have been bellowing "NO" into the phone for ten entire minutes while the recording prates on and on obliviously. "I'm sorry", the recording cooed into my ear, " I didn't understand what you said." "Nooooooooooo!" I howled. "Nooooooo!" "Noooooooo!" I had decided to indulge myself in a new subscription if I succeeded in cancelling, perhaps getting "The New Yorker", and/or "Harper's", but "American Whitetail?" Thank God I hadn't chosen the button-pushing options, or I'd be accidentally subscribing to "Linoleum and You" and "American Roadkill".

It took me several minutes to get to a point where I was fairly confident that the recording understood I was not interested, but I won't rest easy until my mailbox has gone a full month without any strange magazines appearing. And I am going to stay off the phone for the rest of the day, all my swearing has got my little bird giving me dirty looks, and anyway I don't want her repeating my fowl language.