The Daily Decorator

On a recent trip to L'Isle Sur La Sorgue, known as the antiques capital of France, I fell in love with this French Miss and her new twist on the old (left). She fashions antique linens and textiles into fresh accessories for the home using old-fashioned rickrack and swooping monograms to embellish her designs for pillows, tablecloths and aprons.

Economizing? Visit the Wisteria catalog instead for this look-alike apron:

Throwing on an extra layer.

It's slush city today, which makes for chilly linoleum, filthy Wellies, and a happy border collie. I'm taking solace in all things sweater-y:

Seats recovered in wooly remnants. WholeLiving.com makes it seem easy ...

Ahh, recycled sweaters underfoot, from Viva Terra. Could I make one of these, cotton-loop-potholder style? Someone shout if they have easy steps to recreate...

A make-your-own-nap kit. (Thanks, BHG.com!)

I'm not *quite* about to join the Made from Recycled Sweaters group on Flickr, but I sure will peep there a while this morning.

Country Essentials #472

We've had bats in the parlor, chipmunks in the bathroom, birds in the kitchen and mice in the living room. Whadayagonna do? Reach for your trusty butterfly net. No country house should be without one. When not corralling critters you can take to tiptoeing through the tulips with net in hand.

Mail Call

Hoodlum neighbor-kids got you down? Pesky posts just won't stay up?

Plant your mailbox in a tree. Hmm.

Oil Lamp

Oil Lamp, Zhen Hua Lu

Dogsitting for my neighbor's terriers and saw this gem on the wall. It was just a poster, but made the room so ... still. And inviting. Lovely.

bye bye Ranger

One of the inevitable purchases all country dwellers consider is the truck. It's easy to justify---weekly trips to the dump, hauling dirt and mulch, carting dogs back home after a mud-season outing, and honestly it does look good in the driveway.

So I succumbed. I'd always said that if I could find a truck for less than say $500 I would buy it. My neighbors found one on the side of the road "$450 Or Best Offer". True to my word, it was found for less than $500, I bought it and all that came with it: a cap, 5 speeds that sort of worked, and lots of duck-tape to cover the rust.

Well it's a year later and I just had to let it go to another country dweller who needs it for parts.

By my calculations each trip to the dump cost about $78.00 (accounting for the needed repairs over the last year + the purchase price). So another country experience crossed off the list.

Wipe your feet!

Now that we've entered The Month of Pine Pitch, I'm running our kitchen throwrug through the wash weekly (an exponential increase, trust me), and looking for stand-ins. Just found these beauties from Hooked on Vermont, which I'd be just terrified to see smeared with pitch:

They've a sale section from which my Mom-in-law may receive that Song Bird rug for Christmas...

I like an excuse to cook. Sometimes my neighbors and I join forces, share ingredients, and make dinner together- that was Wednesday Night. And sometimes, today, I cook in return for favors. A friend is coming to reattach the ice coils to my roof. Hence the menu for this morning.

Wednesday Dinner 

Lamb Stew (lamb from the farm next door)

Baby Lettuce and Frissee salad with avocado and blue cheese

Fresh baked French Bread

Pear Calfoute

on the menu today

Oatmeal Walnut Cookies

Corn Chowder

recipes to follow

Boot Debacle

While Carol's putting together her hit list of Best Boots, I'm aching over these:

Which I find equal parts awesome, functional, and ugly. The lining is redeeming ... maybe?

They're certainly more practical, at least, than these (El Naturalista Organico N051 and Earth Juniper Vegan, respectively) which also are tugging away:

(A friend turned me on to planetshoes.com, which seem to have more gravel-driveway-appropriate footwear than Zappos.)

Is There an Aerialist in the House?

So, I'm standing in line at my favorite cafe in Hadley, MA, Esselon, studying the pastry case when I ease drop on a conversation the barrista is having with a long, lanky fellow (LLF) wearing a knit cap pulled way down over his head.

Says LLF, "Four lattes to go. They're for a meeting I'm having with a group of circus performers."

"Oh," says barrista as he tops off the espresso with steamed milk.

"Yeah, just what they need, more caffine," adds LLF. "It's not like they're not flying off the walls or anything. See ya later."

Next day, having lunch at a cute, crunchy deli cum bakery cum bistro, Amy's Bakery Arts Cafe in Brattleboro, VT, I overhear:

"I know you. We met at my gallery opening. You're the trapeze artist!"

Just another day in the country with circus performers. Is there a lion tamer in the house?

See ya, Cottage Living

I live in a little house on an equally small lake.

It once was someone's summer home, loved so that the owners winterized it, threw on a few wonky extra rooms, and then finished the basement.

Today, Cottage Living magazine folded, which is a bummer for folks like me. Cottage Living was one of those magazines that I could flip through that had, page after page, rooms that I could nab ideas from: Rooms that were scuffed and colorful and loved, and weren't always 20x20 with echoey ceilings or sprawling, manicured lawns.

I could go on for pixels about how crappy it is that another great interiors glossy has died, but that makes me itchy and nervous. Instead, some of CH's sweet homes:

Makes me want a pergola real bad.

Funky fireplace. Wish this pic could bet bigger so I could get a better look at the coffee table...

Love the punchy red table ... sets off the gingham (my personal horror).

See, I never think I can do anything too classic in our house, but this makes me think it wouldn't look overly stately. Have a hard time with bare walls, but could sure find something to throw up there--botanical posters, maybe, or a gaudy faux renaissance with a scruffy frame.

Here's to hoping they don't take down their home plans ... gal's gotta dream.

Gave Me Lemons

In a neck of the woods with a completely different clime, fall's given way to some serious fruit:

These are ripe for the pickin' ... and it only takes a swing out to Scottsdale.

(Ahem: Don't people know how mean it is to send photos of their gorgeous, temperate worlds when we're layering another sweater over our Cuddle Duds?)

So, some lemonade...

Keep table, need new chairs

I am hoping to reconstruct my kitchen. But a friend told me I need to get rid of my kitchen table. Which is not possible. 1. because it is one of my most favorite pieces of furniture and 2. because I think I'm finally going to pull the trigger on these chairs.

photo from baileys home and garden

If the Boot Fits, Buy It!

To live in the country is to have a shoe wardrobe. This is great news if like me you believe there's no such thing as too many pairs. The bad news is that your killer stilettos are now going to be used to dig holes for your bulbs.

My first year of country living was all about the wrong shoes. Once my smooth leather-soled Prada kitten heels came in contact with our icy driveway the result was hazardous to my health. However, not being ready for steel-toed work boots, I made it my mission to find shoes that looked good and kept me upright (This is BC Yak Tracks--website TK)

This year, I found possibly the best boot ever. Beautiful, comfortable, faux-fur-lined, these leather boots are absolutely New York chic. They're by Camper (camper.com), the impossibly eco-trendy Spanish shoe company whose Barcelona (??) headquarters store combines foot fetish with food fetish (a shoe store and an organic cafe). Camper, by the way, is no ordinary shoe company. It is "...a Mediterranean dream that stands for a way of doing, a way of living, a way of feeling..." I can tell you, I feel good about these boots. Get this, this boot lets me be in contact with the earth energies. As the boot tag states: "'Contact earth' is a system which allows the electrostatic energy accumulated throughout the day to discharge and at the same time allows you to be in contact with the earth energies." Who knew?!

Any way, back to my boots, they have cool lace ties which give them a very bohemian flair but best of all, their heavy-duty, rubber tread soles assure I will not be found face down in a snowbank this winter.

$225, Black Parrot, Rockland, ME (website TK)

--carolbrf

TK:
Woodsie Guide to Scaling Shoe Mountain
(here our picks and pans for best boots/shoes)

Kitties in the House

So, we're having a little dinner party, you know, a nice one with cloth napkins and sauce made from scratch. Conversation is animated and Obama-laden. Lots of wine. Mid-fork I see something scurry by. Welcome to the country where men are real and so are the rodents.

So what's a girl to do?

Bring home the kittens! Our girls are rescue kitties from Mississippi (vet website here), sassy little felines who had us from first meow. They're 12 weeks old, weigh 2.6 pounds each and whether or not they ever catch a mouse they've made mousse out of us.

Franny, top; Zooey, bottom (cuteness all around)

Design+Library = Love (minus country, of course)

Very cool: Design*Sponge (yummy design hints daily) teamed up with the NY Public Library to showcase some smart young designers' work as inspired by the book behemoth.



Note to self: We've got smartie designers hidden in these hills ... must unearth and unleash them on our townie libraries and see what unfolds.

Bag Wise.

I'm having a purse dilemma. In my mind's eye, I can see that out there in the great retail abyss somewhere, there's a lavender-grey handbag fashioned after vintage snap-top change purses. It has a moderate shoulder strap, maybe some rouching on one side; there's no loud hardware or shiny patent details. It is large enough to hold a paperback book and a magazine (though maybe not W), but doesn't look like a feedbag. It's made of leather so soft that my new boots are jealous, and it looks vintage without smelling like someone else's basement.

This bag--my marvelous bag--does not exist.

Still, because I live at least a couple hours away from anyplace that might have Dream Bag in ready supply, I spend an impressive number of hours on Etsy, poring over the Colors Tool, seeing if somewhere out there someone is picking up what I'm telekinetically putting down, bag-wise. And that is how I came across this bag, which has set off my purse search in a completely new direction:

Because though this bag is the wrong color (I'm looking for lighter and purplier) and less structured than I'm looking for (ahem, gorgeous), it is striking in its material: recycled leather.

Now, last I heard, we weren't in a cow hide shortage. And I don't mean that in any crass way: I've not eaten meat in 10 years (save for last Christmas' fried turkey incident, which we shouldn't discuss), and I've tried on my share of veg-tan "leather" footwear, only to be certain that they'd fall apart three dog walks into the muddy season.

I don't feel particularly strong about wearing leather at all, but the idea of having a fab bag made of something that once was headed for either the landfill or one of enormous shipments of secondhand clothes shipped overseas and then shirked is, well, appealing in this time of RECYCLE (OR ELSE!). Additionally, if repurposing leather means less jackets like this and this are taunting Goodwill-goers, yahtzee.

And I'm a-mazed by the great used-leather bags I've found, though none have yet struck me as The One:

So, the search continues. Though I *might* have just been convinced to sate this repurposed leather craving with one of these envelope totes ...

Happiness is....

...a basket of cozy baby alpaca wool after 16 toddlers have left the building!

The Farmer Takes a Bow

Second-best thing about Saturdays (beside no limit on streaming 30 Rock episodes on Netflix) is getting the email from Farmer Dan about what's happened that week at our CSA. He waxes poetic about strawberries and snapdragons and salad greens all summer, turnips and kale all fall. He thanks specific shareholders for their recipes that week, which he then disseminates to us masses.

And I eat.up.every.word. Farmer Dan can turn a phrase as well as he can a field:

Giving Thanks

It's dark out there. And pretty cold too. Now its' raining. With a threat for a little snow and ice mixed in. Seems like a good time for a matinee. Or maybe a good time to dig 5000 pounds of parnips out of the ground. Let's see. Matinee or parsnips? Hmm. Tough call. Okay. Let's just get this done.

It's not that we don't like going to the movies. Or the beach. Or the mountains. Or out to dinner. It's just that there's something we've got to take care of. Once those parsnips are out of the ground, then we can head to Cinemark. Well, maybe after the cabbage and the carrots are finished next week.

There certainly is a good amount of sacrifice we need to accept when we do this job, day after day, week after week, month after month all through this long sprint of a season. And sometimes it seems like more of a sacrifice than others. Like when the weather is 80F, sunny, and without a hint of humidity and we've got to pick 2000 lbs of tomatoes instead of sitting by a rushing waterfall in the woods.

But the bottom line with all of this, is that we chose to do this, and not out of any masochistic, holier-than-thou, look-at-how-much-we've suffered mentality. We're not trying to prove
how good we are by listing a long litanny of things we've missed. We actually like doing this and are here by choice, of our own free will.

Which of course, begs the question, why would we choose to do this, after all? At this time of year, the season of Thanks Giving it seems all to clear why this is the work we've chosen. Not for the glamour (Farmer needs a wife!) or the money (farmer needs some money!), but for the chance to serve something greater than ourselves. We are frequently reminded of the value of our work to the people who we feed. Whether it's the apple pie brought to the farm shop without warning, or the near-constant thank yous at the farm shop, or in the e-mail thanking us for the bellies we are filling with food. Knowing that our work has value to people, value that they can actually eat,
reminds us how lucky we are to be doing this job. So now, we are especially reminded of the thanks we want to give, to all of you, for giving us the opportunity to serve you. To be useful. To be productive. To be partly responsible for feeding you.

Sure we'd like to go to the movies. As soon as those carrots are out of the ground.

We hope you have a great winter and we look forward to seeing you again next spring,

Dan (for Karen, Adan, Kerry, Danya, and Lisa)

This morning I read his note over a skillet of garlicky greens, potatoes, carrots, and eggs, which we'd picked up last weekend. Thankful, indeed.

Couldn't Hack It.

You must, must, must download this article from the August 9, 1908 edition of the NY Times, if only to appreciate, "That hill-top seat of learning didn't turn out any mollycoddles, you can bet your back hair."

JOYS OF MOVING TO THE COUNTRY; The Weeds Tire of City Life and Add to Their Stock of Experience by Acquiring a Suburban Residence

Hunkering Down

Freezing rain and sleet. All the color's washing away in Western Massachusetts, and even the cities are wearing nubby grey sweaters right now. The Boston Harbor was fully dressed in a chilly fog today, marking the official commencement of Turtleneck -and-Wool-Hoodies season.

Thusly, I'm nutty for these bright, lovely things by Cara Lyndon:

Dispatch from the Hen House

“To Kill a Housefly”
All day it flew aimless patterns overhead. I needed Jimmy Stewart and the Strategic Air Command to bring it down. It had a green head, transparent wings, bzz bzz bzz. I started by ignoring it. I concentrated on the formula instead. I had been working for several weeks on the formula. The formula for happiness. I was getting so close. I needed to jigger things. So far I was up to hapiness, one p. I couldn’t get the second p to stay. The first p, as far as I can tell, stands for parity. The second p, I knew, could stand for almost anything. Purity. Paradise. Pathology. Penguin.
Mosquito in the bedroom at night,
Sailor’s delight.
Housefly in the office by day,
Sailor’s Mandalay.
I rolled up the want-ads section of my local paper and kept it at hand. Every time the fly came close, I lashed out at it. I knocked over an old milk bottle filled with fresh snaps from the garden. I knocked over the lamp. I went and got a fly swatter from the other room. I lay down on the fainting couch and waited, armed. It made a pass. I tried to take it out of the air. I missed, feeling the shooting pain of tennis elbow. All those years I’d worn the copper bracelet, to no avail.
Bzz bzz bzz. Did the noise come from its wings, or its choppers rubbing together diabolically. I’d seen the original The Fly and all its macabre remakes but I couldn’t remember if any of those flicks explained how the maddening sound of the housefly is produced.
If I was increasingly preoccupied with my housefly, the housefly was growing more interested in me. Once in a while it would alight on a distant windowpane, the perfect killing field, to catch its fly breath and stare in my direction, only to take off after I got up from my desk and came near, clutching the swatter. I swatted the glass pane anyway, warming up my stroke of death.
I tried to concentrate on the formula. Love + Luck – Love + Wealth – Health + Surgery – Deductible = Safe at Home.
I stood in the middle of the room, holding the swatter in a ready position. I wanted to give the housefly a deviated septem, something it would always remember me by. It widened its orbit in response, staying just out of reach. I turned in circles, refusing to let it get behind me. After a while I became quite dizzy and had to sit down.
I got a can of Spectracide, which advertises a 22-foot jet spray. From my desk I could hit any corner of the room with it. I waited. Bzz bzz bzz, but where???? I could not locate the housefly though I could hear it. It had taken cover behind something. It too had read the entire label before use. Finally I saw it sally forth from the table where I keep my orchids. I let it have it. Bzz bzz bzz. I missed. I had splatted my favorite phalaenopsis. Pink and white petals began to float to the floor.
I began to associate each sudden appearance of the housefly with certain failures and mishaps strewn along my path through what we laughingly call my life, my life. Missing the cut in Babe Ruth League baseball. The botched foreign service oral exam. Trouble adjusting to “uncomfortable civilian life” following a hitch in the army. Marrying Madame X. Falling backwards and breaking chair at important company function. Losing my Jack Benny autograph. Et cetera.
After lunch I brought my English setter, Buster, into the housefly’s haven. Bzz bzz bzz. When the dog’s ears perked up, I knew I had an ally. Buster sat alertly on the floor, head swiveling slowly from side to side, like the gun turret on an Abrams tank. Not really aware of the speed of its new adversary, the housefly did a loop-de-loop in front of Buster’s muzzle. Buster lunged and jaws snapped with a heartening click. Bzz bzz bzz. A narrow escape. The housefly retreated to the ceiling and appeared to be mulling over future tactics.
A shot of Spectracide missed it by six inches. The poison dripped into a tiny puddle on the floor, I cleaned it up before Buster could have a taste.
I went back to the couch, book in hand, and pretended to read. Soon came the drowsy numbness, the jaw snaps of Buster receding into the back of my consciousness. Bzz bzz bzz. The life in re-run. Losing $500 in casino winnings to a felonious cleaning lady in the Bahamas. Buying a Ford Pinto with the infamous exploding gas tank. Drinking a Bud in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on St. Patrick’s Day, 1978. Trading in the Pinto for a Yugo. Getting mixed up with a woman who lived above a funeral parlor. Ordering riz de veau in a restaurant in Paris, to impress my companion, thinking it would come to the table as veal with rice, not marinated cow brain. Et cetera.
I had the housefly woes. Refreshed from the nap, however, I resolved on a new tack. I flung doors and windows open. Buster went careering across the field; he would not return until dark. I prayed the accident-prone dog would not happen upon a porcupine or a skunk this time around. It was October, the end of gardening days, chilly but no frost in sight as yet. I stood outside, shivering, waiting for Harry the Housefly to leave the premises. No housefly worth its name hesitates when it sees an opening to the outside world. Or so I thought.
I did a little weeding, killing time. I observed that my Japanese morning glories were finally coming into bloom after a summer-long gestation period. I made a mental note not to re-sow same next year.
An hour passed. I returned to my work chamber, closed doors and windows, and went back to work on the formula. By now I’d forgotten all about the housefly. According to my calculations, happiness is one part DNA, one part hard work, two parts money, one-half part the belief in one or more deities, and one part a full tummy. Nowhere is it given that to drink, to smoke, or to love gives one a leg up on the happiness quotient. But what did the second p in happiness really stand for? That was driving me crazy, keeping me from my lofty objective.
Bzz bzz bzz.
The fly had alighted on the telephone there before me on my desk. I froze. I grimaced. The swatter was over on the couch, out of reach. I stared hard at the insect-like creature. It seemed to be grooming itself with one of its raspy tentacles. Slowly and deliberately my hand moved behind me, grasping at air, at air, at air, and then at last at something solid, a hardbound book behind me on the shelf. My hand began the return trip, slowly, slowly, slowly, until with its weighty purchase it hovered over my head.
Down came book crashing into phone. The handset went flying across the room. The front cover of my dogeared copy of Great Expectations stared me in the face. I turned it over. There on the back cover, to my amazement and gratification, was the splattered remains of Mr.Housefly.
How I howled! What a gay dance I did on my own wood floor, causing the orchid blossoms to tremble. Happiness indeed! I was in the very heart of happiness.
The moment I replaced the phone on the desk, it rang, startling me so.
“Yes, hello?” I said into the mouthpiece.
“Doctor’s office,” announced a female who sounded a bit off her feed. “We need to see you as soon as possible. Your medication needs adjustment.”
“But I’ve never felt better!” I declared.
“That may be the problem,” came the voice. Did I hear a titter?
“Well then of course I’ll come by.”
“We have a cancellation tomorrow morning at ten.”
“All right, I think I can be there tomorrow at ten.”
I hung up without saying goodbye. I hate goodbyes. I hate goodbyes almost as much as I hate my meds, the things the meds do to me when they need adjustment. I sat down, adjusting to my fate. Oh fiddle faddle, were my last words on the subject.

Prepping to Mash, Bake, Fry, Fry, Fry

The Return of the Root Cellar: Food Storage as Grandma Knew It

Do you have one? Should, um, I?

Yes, We Sure Did

Oh-bama. What an awesome triumph, what a long time coming.

And now, back to ... what, again? The Big T and I have spent months watching CNN before bed, trolling for election coverage as we nodded off (maverick, maverick, mav ... er ...). An occasional sock was thrown at the tube; the dog hid his face when we raised our voices.

I'm clearly not alone in feeling a little glum now that the post-win hangover has waned. This woman interviewed in the WSJ said of her now-lack of hobby, "To fill the void I've bought some poli-sci books ... And I'll catch up on my medical journals." I'm not there, per se, but I am looking at my long neglected pile of abandoned knitting projects and boxes of photos to be filed and wondering if, finally, it's time to get started.


Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

(Thank you, The Onion.)

Annie, Get Your Gourd

We were lucky enough to nab a share at a CSA that's literally up the road from us last winter, which was exciting—as thrilling as rutabagas and turnips are—but the humongo bonus was the Summer Share we were first in line for this past June. And besides greens so sweet you had to look twice to see what, precisely, you were eating and squash the size of softball bats, what was so thrilling was that we got to ride our bikes to the farm every Saturday.

And though my 21-speed step-through, Little Brown, is pretty enough for her own post (really, I will introduce you to her later this week), it was an ingenious tool we borrowed from our neighbors that made Saturday Harvest Rides (about 2 miles, roundtrip) possible. I can explain it no better than as so: A beat-up version of this quickie-snap-on baby trailer.

Photos TK of the actual boarded-up crib-on-wheels, but suffice to say: Why, why has no one come up with a trailer not intended for human children but instead ... produce. Or at least a general grocery carrier? Was is the only good bike gear for actually transporting stuff outside urban areas the Milk Crate Solution (thanks, Make Magazine!)?

I'd be so thankful if you had ideas...

Colorful Cast

I had no idea who my neighbors would be when I moved to a 60-acre lake in Western Massachusetts. How lucky for me that this gal lives upstream from me, literally.

Amazing undergarments aside, I think what KrisCan is doing gets two wiggly thumbs up.

Role Call: Lexi

In the city, I never worried about who was defiling my pumpkin.

I'm Lexi, and two years in, I'm just getting used to living without curtains—what's the use when your only neighbors have fur?