Ursula Vernon's Blog, page 6

Travel Journal: Butter Museum & Kinsale

Still uploading my travel journals. According to the museum, some superstitions involved churning butter with the severed hand of a murderer. HOW AWESOME AND UNHYGIENIC IS THAT?!

I filtered the Rose Abbey photo just to keep my brain from breaking. The colors are positively demented.

Also, that oilcloth jacket is worth its weight in gold and I am dreadfully pleased with it.

Tiny Froggy

Somebody was lurking on my tomatillos…somebody about the size of my pinky nail…

Journal 9-5-16

Journal 9-1-16

Journal 8-30-16

Truly, Hound is a noble beast.

Kevin’s friend Ana is a Thai chef, and she grows her own peppers in pots for the sauce she makes. When she found out that Kevin’s new wife was a gardener, she brought me one dried pepper. I split it open and started the seeds, since you’re supposed to start peppers and tomatoes indoors and planted them out, and they did terribly and I was convinced I’d killed them all.

I don’t mind killing plants for the most part–gardeners slaughter plants right and left, it’s part of the process–but these were special. She’d brought them from Thailand decades ago, and you can’t exactly go out to the nursery and buy a beloved variety given as a gift to an old friend’s wife. So I was sad. I also hadn’t started any other peppers this year, because I didn’t want them to cross-pollinate.

And then Kevin looked in exactly the right spot and there it was. One of the ones I’d planted out and which had turned to a tiny, dying nubbin, and I had given up. But I hadn’t planted anything else in that planter, in case the planter was the problem, and apparently it pulled through and has been quietly growing all this time.

Kevin ate one and turned colors and assured me that yes, it was one of the Thai peppers. If I dry all these, I might get enough seeds to grow them with slightly less panic next year.

In Questionable Taste

People ask if gardening is hard

but that’s not the problem

the problem is it’s easy

and it really ought to be impossible.

What is this

putting stuff in dirt and expecting to get food back

what are you, a communist?

You bought a bag of cowpeas

not even a proper seed packet with a glossy picture on it

and shoved a couple in the ground.

You know it can’t work.

Even fairy tales know better

everybody laughs when Jack trades a cow for beans

a cow is worth something, after all.

The whips that twined up into the hydrangeas have three green leaves

so they must be poison ivy

that’s probably it

the things that look like bean pods are a coincidence

it’s a new kind of poison ivy

you’ll probably be even more allergic to this one.

And the funny thing is that I know this

when they come for me and say “You have to stop now–

you know people aren’t allowed to do this sort of thing,”

I’ll bow my head and say “I know.”

It was much too easy

it had to be illegal

or at least in very questionable taste,

thinking you could put almost nothing into dirt

and get everything back

almost for free.

Someday This Will Be My Memoir

Journal 8-27-16

Other weirdness–they wrote their insult on a print-out of an author website with my bibliography. On both sides of the paper. Because…uh…I guess they needed to fit in Jackalope Wives and a couple of Digger volumes on the back for…maximum…offensiveness…?

For those of a curious bent, the crushing insult delivered with such care was “Your photo broke my computer, ugh!” Alas, they did not include a return address, allowing me to reply with the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” response that I believe is traditional in such cases.

(Really, I’m mostly just impressed they spent stamp money on it. But the postmark was from Portland, OR, and I would certainly expect any hate mail from Portland to be small-batch, artisanal, and presumably free-range and hormone-free as well.)

On the bright side, my turmeric really is kicking butt. I wedged it under the fig. I just hope it overwinters. I’ve read reports of it being too tropical to survive less than 65 degrees, and others of it overwintering outside in 7b, so we’ll find out, I guess.

Ireland Journal, Part 1

Irish. I am told it is called Irish, not Gaelic, even if the linguists call it Irish Gaelic, because it’s Irish, goddammit.

Noted.

The song my grandmother used to sing was a terribly mangled version of Did Your Mother Come From Ireland? Grandma liked Bing Crosby. The fact that I have now both kissed the Blarney and visited Killarney would impress her to no end.

Back from Ireland

I have returned safely from the Emerald Isle, and holy crap, I don’t even know what to say, but being me, I will now expend a pile of words to say it.

First, there’s the color.

To call Ireland green is to commit glaring sins of omission. It is the sort of green reserved for gods and Pantone swatches. Kelly green, acid green, the greens you see in jars of pure mineral pigment, greens that blow out your photos the way that red roses or blue skies do. Green as primary color.

When I lived in Oregon, I thought it was green, and then I moved to North Carolina and realized that it had been grey-green. North Carolina, I thought, was green. Then I went to Ireland. Now I see how yellow the undertones here are, and how desaturated the greens are by comparison. Fortunately, I am told that the only color that compares to Ireland is in the depths of the rainforest, so it will stay green in my head for a long time.

Also, as with so much of Europe, things are relentlessly old. I stood on the battlements of a ruined castle built at the same time as Blarney Castle and I could see three other ruins from the top. “Oh,” said my friend Carlota, “that’s the NEW ruin, over there…” Eventually it became a running joke–“Oh, that’s the NEW standing stone…”  It became exciting when the new building wasn’t older than my country. Occasionally they predated Europeans in North America at all.

Yes, I’m including the Vikings.

But possibly the most intense thing was simply that it was relentlessly, savagely picturesque. You could point your camera in any direction and come away with a postcard. It was beautiful, and it kept being beautiful, and eventually it got to the point where you would look over the view and start swearing, because it was being beautiful again.

After awhile, you stopped going “How lovely!” and started going “How do people stand this?”

(I asked Twitter. Residents uttered some variation on “Whiskey” and “You get used to it, but whiskey helps.”)

You just have to figure that sooner or later, living in that kind of beauty would weigh down on you, and you’d either become hard as diamond or break and become a poet. It’s just…intense. I think of people who left there–my ancestors, some of ’em–to come to America because of poverty or starvation or hope or whatever, and I can get just the smallest glimpse of what that must have been like–enough to know what I can’t really imagine what it was really like. America is beautiful, don’t get me wrong! (I believe there’s a song about it.) But it’s a completely different sort of beauty, a sort that doesn’t much care about the people on it. If we all died tomorrow, I doubt America would even notice much, but Ireland would be sad that the people were gone. It’s the difference between the Rockies and a green field with a black horse grazing surrounded by rooks, under a hill covered in mist. They’re both beautiful, it’s just…scale.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m raving. I am only a tourist and don’t pretend to know anything about what life is really like there. It was just…so intense.