Familial Oddities (where do You go when you...well, whatever?)

So I'm making a faux-nouveau version of my Grandma Ruth's familially famous chopped liver, playing around with an extra hard-boiled egg here, some sauteed pecans there, when I happen to look at the windowsill above the kitchen sink. Semi-hidden among the potted plants and glass tchotchkes and the little round top piece to the pressure cooker is...

"A pet cemetery for cat whiskers?"

My mother startles out of her anti-dumb-American-actors conversation and looks momentarily chagrined before doubling over in laughter.

"Mom?" I ask. "Is this you?" She's laughing so hard she can't talk. My father watches us, bemused. I look back at the window ledge, just to make sure I haven't imagined it. Sure enough, on the far side of a small, potted succulent, a miniature modern art installation rises out of the soil at haphazard angles. There are six whiskers in all; all white, all different sizes. My mother is still laughing.

"You're the first one to notice," she gasps, and for some reason, the idea of my father and brother standing inches away from the little cat shrine/totem/hidden message every day as they wash their dishes or walk to the bathroom is too much. I slide down the counter, hysterical, and sit on the kitchen floor, hooting with laughter.

"How long have you been doing this?" I ask her, when I finally get my breath back.

"I don't know," she shrugs, and cocks her head to the side.

"I guess it is kind of macabre. But they're body parts. I couldn't just throw them away." She pauses reflectively, then shrugs again.

"Besides, as far as strange personal habits, this one isn't so bad. I hear someone on your dad's side used to keep a jar of toenail clippings."

I stare at her, aghast.

"Toenail clippings?" I ask.

"Uh-huh." She nods. There's a pause.

"I'm blogging this," I announce.

It's a strange house. My brother psychoanalyzes the cats (depressed and anti-social), and my father plays the baffled pater familias with disturbing accuracy. And none of us can make it through a simple conversation without breaking into song. Right now, Evan is singing "Hurts So Good" under his breath.

"Why are you singing that?" I ask.

"Because," he replies, totally serious and without a moment's hesitation, "The ginger ale I just drank burned my throat when I swallowed, but it tasted so good. It was pretty apt, actually."

He pauses. "I didn't even know I was singing."

Garlic Fest! (Saugerties NY)

I am such the smelly hippie right now.
By which I mean I smell delicious.
Today I went with Evan and his lovely friend Jane to the wonderfully antique-shop-and-used-bookstore-laden town of Saugerties, for the annual Hudson Valley Garlic Festival!

Here's a short list of some -not all- of the foods we tried:
garlic ice cream
garlic and butter pizza
garlic-stuffed olives
garlic-flavored pickles
pickled garlic scapes (three varieties)
pickled garlic cloves (about a bazillion kinds)
garlic scape pesto
garlic and basil pesto
garlicky dips, dips, dips, dips, and more dips (did I mention dips?)
raw garlic (about 6 different kinds)
garlic and marscapone cannolis
garlic and honey infused balsamic vinegar
garlic infused olive oil
garlic jerkey

...you get the idea. By the time we left the fairgrounds and got back in the car, we were so saturated with garlic, I smelled like an Italian restaurant, though that may have something to do with the bag of delicious Spanish Roja garlic bulbs that I bought.
After the Garlic Festival, we went over to Annie and Vlad's place for a while, which was a nice treat - Annie and Vlad are two of Evan's friends that came to visit this summer, and we had a great time down at Hampton Beach playing ski-ball in the arcades and drinking enormous frozen drinks on the second-floor balcony of a skeevy dive bar. It was fantastic.

...I keep sniffing my arm, just to test, and I'm happy to report that I still smell like a breadstick. A really tasty breadstick.
And now I'm kind of hungry again.

Wildcrafting and Crafting (Bard College, NY)

(a note on the second floor bathroom door in one of the dorms)

So I'm staying with my "little" brother, who is in point of fact quite a bit taller than me, and about half as wide. He's a senior this year, which kind of blows my mind, but not nearly as much as the massively heady conversations we've been having about Art and Meaning.
I love my kid brother. He's such an amazingly cool person. He's majoring in studio art, and has this wickedly keen eye for design and space, as well as a ridiculously oddball sense of humor. Not only has he been totally generous and offered up his bed -several nights in a row!- he's paternalistically taken me under his squash-muscled wing, showed me around campus, introduced me to his friends, and shared meals from the quasi-awful dining hall.
I think he thinks of me as some sort of visiting pet/sidekick.
I am so tickled by this arrangement, I can't even say.
Tonight there was a craft party in the Campus Center, with "bad" 90's music that quickly turned into actually bad 2000s dance music. Luckily, the sequins were rollin', the fabric was stylin', and the tacky glue flowed in veritable rivers of crafty awesomeness. Glee!

Yesterday I went for a wander, and hung out at an apple farm for a while, learning about cold storage and the effects of temperature on various fruits' sugar contents from an incredibly knowledgeable man named Fred. I'd hoped to get a job picking for a day or so, just for the experience of it, but the boss wasn't hiring, so I said goodbye to Fred, thanked him for the apple and the lesson, and hopped back in the car to see what I could find. The answer? This:


It's a black walnut from this beautiful tree:

Here's what the fruits look like on the ground after I've stepped on them, and next is what I came away with (and used): a field guide to ID trees with, my gloves (now turned completely orange from all the oils!), and in the basket is the bounty: a scant cup or two for this winter, but a beautiful memory of the harvest...

After I harvested the nuts, I stomped on them to get them open, pulled them out from the fruit, and took them across the railroad tracks and down to the Hudson River, where I scrubbed them against a rock and each other until they were relatively clean. Even though I used gloves, my hands (and feet where they got splashed) are still pretty stained, and I have some cuts from the shells - not surprising, since black walnut hulls are so tough, they're actually used as industrial abrasives! The oils/juices are used for dying fabrics, and once upon a time, when I actually bought into this sort of thing, I had a fake tanning spray made with black walnut, which I recall working exceedingly well.
Did I remember that when I started harvesting the nuts? Nope! But I did remember the scene in Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees in which Taylor describes how when she was growing up in rural Kentucky, you could tell who the poor kids were because their hands were stained from picking walnuts. Once again, everything I need to know in real life comes from reading fiction.