Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

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Archives for 2012

Most Serious Small Stone Ever

   I drop in the peeled chunks of orange, fibrous and glistening, along with the firm, fragrant pieces of banana. Spooning in a tub of plain Greek yogurt and then drizzling over that some local honey, I suddenly feel so thankful for these fresh ingredients. So ready for the burst of energy they’ll provide. 
   After two months of over indulgence and relative inactivity, this moment at the kitchen blender is a turning point. I lay my hand on top and press a button at the base. The motor whirs to life, and reflexively my mind counts off the days to bikini season. 

Espionage and the Ballerina*

   This afternoon, in the bright January sun and with that great emotional conflict I always feel at the end of a really special read,  I finished one of the richest and most view-widening books I have ever had the pleasure of opening. 



   The True Memoirs of Little K penned by Adrienne Sharp is a glimmering piece of historical fiction set during pre-Soviet Russia and told from the perspective of, as a narration by, in fact, a Prima ballerina named Mathilde Kschessinska.
Holy smokes, you guys, this was a wonderful book!
Read this book. Read it in a cold month,
when you can brew yourself many pots of tea.
And read it while wearing as much perfume
and as many strands of pearls as you wish.
Do you own a fur jacket?
Wear that too.

Okay, back to a proper review…

   I was gifted this novel again by our beloved Julia, and I have once again discovered an author worth following. Ms. Sharp can count on future purchases from me.

Isn’t she beautiful? 
In addition to being a novelist of this and other books including 
White Swan, Black Swan, Adrienne Sharp  is also a ballerina herself.
And no, the Natalie Portman movie is not connected.

   The story is told as a first person narrative by an aged woman, a woman whose life is not only a fascinating story unto itself; but it runs parallel to a truly remarkable chapter in world history. Kschessinska was a native of Russia during the rule of the Romanov Empire, a child of the ballet, a product and purveyor of passion, and ultimately a victim of the greater picture, though I doubt she would ever use the word victim to describe herself. Her view of events from the most mundane to the vast and global is both maddening and enchanting. 
   Here, I have to admit a great deal of ignorance. Maybe it is my Americanized perspective. Maybe it is the fact that my childhood was back-lit by that unforgettable Reagan-Gorbachev feud. The Iron Curtain of the twentieth century was seemingly effective in closing off my knowledge that anything interesting happened on that continent before Ronald Reagan stopped acting. Yes. Let’s just say that.

   Remarking on the reading experience itself, allow me to say that the first little section of the book establishes the speaker’s voice which proves to be very natural if a bit long winded. Page after page of compound sentences and unfamiliar (Russian) names and cities was a little daunting, but that first impression quickly evaporates in the warmth of the woman’s true voice. Mathilde has all the depth and elegance and color that young women crave but will never attain until their own old age, when they have amassed their own collections of stories and scandals. On a personal note, I imagined Mathilde wore my grandmother’s perfume, Youth Dew by Este`e Lauder.

   Beyond style and implication, though, Sharp lays out almost Shakespearean patterns of love, lust, ambition, and politics. How she managed to excavate so much Russian and world history and then distill it into 400 pages of beautifully written prose is far beyond me. Between the love stories and the descriptions of families, wars, and ballets, the reader is teased with mention of names like Rasputin, Lenin, Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, and of course Czar Nicholas. I think maybe a person’s career could be based on the body of knowledge Sharp has managed to weave into the tapestry that became this novel.

   So which imitates which; art to life or life to art? Do we have this answer yet?

   This is a thorough pleasure to read. When Sharp spoke of Siberia, I was chilled to the bone. When she described the great imperial palaces I could hear imaginary echoes against clean marble. When she took me to the ballet, I could almost touch the velvet drapes. And the parental struggles of a mother giving birth to a child who was destined to leave her side, well… that hit so close to home that I read through tears and felt real compassion for this old woman I will never meet.

   The book’s emotional scope is great, and its educating potential is impressive. By the way, I did notice some interesting common ground between the life of our ballerina and that of Nitta Sayuri in Memoirs of a Geisha. Both women were entertainers. Both were bound by custom but complicated by love. Both, with their beauty and charm, held unnerving power over important men and were hated by more proper women. To make that discovery even more intriguing, we learn in this memoir that these two great nations, Russia and Japan, were at war during the time frame in which both fictional women would have lived.

   How’s that for exploring an alternate universe?? How I would love to be at the cafe table where Adrienne Sharp and Arthur Golden chat over a cup of coffee, comparing notes and dreaming up new stories.

   Okay, you guys, if I continue writing I will soon be describing and summarizing every single delicious chapter of this book. Please find time to read it for yourself. Borrow mine if you like, remembering that my only condition for sharing books is that you write your name and a brief review on the inside cover.

Record Your Own History.
Learn About Someone Else’s.
xoxoxoxo

* P.S.  I borrowed the title for this post from a line in Sharp’s novel, which suggested the title for a scandalous book written then about our main character. I hope neither our ballerina nor our author mind. Imitation, after all, is at its root flattery.. xoxo

Raised Beds: Foundation Day

   A scientist is in Heaven. He walks up to God and claims to have cracked the code for creating life, that he knows how to manipulate small amounts of common soil to become a living, breathing organism.

   The Lord smiled patiently and said, “Okay.”

   “I’m serious.”

   “I can see that, my child, so let’s go to My Laboratory and you can show me what you can do.” So God leads the scientist to His Laboratory and welcomes him inside.

   “Okay,” says the scientist eagerly, “all I need is some dirt.”

   “Uh-uh, sorry,” the Lord replies laughingly, “get your own dirt.”

********************

   So I’m making my own dirt. Not to blasphemously create life, just to grow some delicious fruits and veggies. Today Mia the Gander helped me fill the first three beds. It was a luscious way to spend another unseasonably warm January afternoon, with photos to prove it this time. I am feeling really optimistic about the garden this year, you guys. 
First, we have some scrap cardboard cut to lay flat on the ground.
This is eventually decompose, but in the mean time 
it should block the worst weeds.
Yay for no plastic!!
The whole cardboard cutting event was highly fascinating to Mia.
Can you blame him?
Then I layered on a few inches of dried leaves.
Just for fun, take note of the X shaped shadow up on the wall.
Over the dried leaves went a lot of manure.
A little manure scooping advice:
Whenever possible, scoop uphill
Let gravity be your friend.
Oh, and speaking of fascinated animals, as I scooped manure
our two geldings could not be more enrapt.
At one point Dusty nosed my very full wheelbarrow
and I had to urge him NOT to eat it.
He asked me why, pointing out the obvious fact 
that his manure is little more than compressed grass, hay, and excess grain.
Which is exactly his daily diet.
He had a legitimate question: at what point does food cease to be food?
That raised questions of cannibalism, etc, for which I had precious few answers.
Things got very philosophical in the middle field today.
The last ingredient was slightly moist, matted together shred.
Hey, did you notice the X shadow move? 
The sun was receding as I worked.
But Mia never left my side.
He nibbled winter greens 
and supervised my activities tirelessly.
He is the world’s most faithful, 
most affectionate, most curious gander.
Amend Your Soil!
Get a Head Start!
xoxoxo
   

Happy First Anniversary, Book Club!!!

 In January of 2011, almost exactly a year ago as I write this, my friend Tina and I decided to start a book club. We each invited one woman to join us, making a group of four. I invited my cousin Emily, and Tina invited her coworker Desiree. It was awesome. Our initial goals were threefold: to get thinky more often, to expose ourselves to a greater variety of literature, and YES to socialize. Because we’re girls. We really had no idea how things would go. I mean, January is famous for quickly abandoned though brilliant ideas, right?
   BOY HOWDY that is not how things went down
for our little Oklahoma Book Club.
   Since last January, our group of four has grown to twenty-two.  22. TWENTY-TWO. Veinte y dos. That is a 450% growth rate, you guys. And we didn’t advertise or anything; it’s all been just by word of mouth. In fact, in late October we made the rather uncomfortable decision to close enrollment due to a potentially unmanageable crowd. Seating and feeding people is one thing; but more importantly, in gigantic crowds we lose the intimacy needed for really satisfying book discussions.

  In our first year we devoured eight novels as a group and have shared many hours of great conversation with each other, exploring and debating the content of these selections. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve made each other blush. We’ve challenged our belief systems. Thanks to a Los Angeles book industry hook up we have with one of our members (her name rhymes with Frulia) , we even conducted a telephone interview with Aimee Bender, the author of one of our books! DO YOU KNOW COOL THAT IS?? So cool it’s almost awkward.

   As suggested by our club name, Dinner Club With a Reading Problem, we also eat.  We eat really well.  It goes without saying that every one of our gatherings has been a passionately convivial affair, sometimes themed to the book and other times a wild pot luck free-for-all. Even the self-proclaimed kitchen-challenged among us have participated happily, and we’ve traded fun recipes along the way. Again, because we’re girls.

   Reading has never been so much fun.  We always set attainable deadlines depending on the time of year and most members’ life groove at the time, so that no one seees book club as a burden or work.  We keep in touch with each other throughout the reading weeks. And we have grown to know each other in deeper ways than you normally do in a casual acquaintance.  Hearing a woman’s thoughts on a hefty read can reveal incredible things about her life and heart.

   So anyway… If you do not yet have a book club, I double dog dare you to start one.  It will not cost you much time or money, and what it DOES cost you will return to you tenfold in a rich life experience.

********************

   Curious about who we are or what we’ve read?  
Here are some vital stats:
The average age of our 22 members is 35.78 years. (Our most junior member turned 21 the same day as our most recent dinner, and our most seasoned lady is 55, though you would never guess it to look at her.)

Among the group we have 13 children and 4 grandchildren, ranging from infant to college aged.

Roughly one third of our members is married, one of them being half of a Derby Union. More on that another time.

Professions: By coincidence, a different one third of our members is in number-crunching professions. Accountants, analysts, IT whizzes, auditors, etc. Also in the group is a paralegal, a credit union manager, a college student/part time employee/ Mom of two teens, a literary publicist, a hair design student, a computer nerd, a social worker supervisor, a receptionist, a project manager for a major investment house, an oil & gas accounting/ payroll manager, a verification associate, and a dorky farmish blogger. We are a motley crew, and I love it.

These are the books we’ve read as a group so far, though we always find time to discuss our additional private reads along the way:

  1.    The Manhattan Hunt Club by John Saul
  2.    The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
  3.    Hunger Games by Susanne Collins
  4.    Catching Fire by Susanne Collins
  5.    Mockingjay by Susanne Collins
  6.    The Shack by William P. Young
  7.    The Help by Kathryn Stockett
  8.    Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson

By the way, you can find my reviews for most of these books somewhere on this blog.

How Do We Choose Our Books? In the beginning we planned to take turns like nice, polite little ladies. I mean, there were four of us. It was easy. Then throughout the year, as membership grew, we started kind of stabbing in the dark, just sort of brainstorming over plates of food and deciding wildly what to read next.
   It was working out alright, but last week we decided to take a slightly more orderly approach in 2012 and draw names two months out, that person being the one to choose our next title. We meet every six weeks, more or less, and we recently started meeting at different places! All of our 2011 events were here at the farm, which I loved dearly, but I also love going to other people’s homes, and fortunately our group is overflowing with willing hostesses.

How Big of a Deal is This, Really? Well, it’s a really big deal. It just is, you guys. One member (her name rhymes with Flacie) expressed that of all the activities in her busy life, if she ever felt pressed to sacrifice something, the last thing she would sacrifice would be Book Club. That speaks VOLUMES. ha-ha-ha-ha…
   Another member (her name is definitely not Margaret) has been making six hour drives from Austin, Texas to join the fun. Still another member (her name rhymes with Blephanie) reluctantly picked up the burden joy of reading by joining the group for a book she had started three years prior but never finished. And guess what? She not only stuck with us; she hosted the next party!
   Personally, I am amazed to discover so much depth and stimulation at such an easy price. The events plan themselves, really, because we are all so eager to see each other and spill our guts about the books. We definitely have  found some kind of magic here, and I can see it lasting many years.

********************

   So Happy First Anniversary, Ladies!! You have each found a very special place in my heart because of this uncommon adventure. I have thoroughly enjoy getting to know everybody and stretching my reading muscles beyond what I would read on my own. Please stick around… 2012 is going to be incredible!

Much Love, 
xoxoxo
Marie

Self Sufficient (Small Stone January 18th)

   This morning was cold. Beautiful, yes, but definitely colder than the deliciously warm days we’ve enjoyed all month. The pond wore a thin skin of ice even where the sun could reach.  The grass was crunchy with frost. And all the animals were heaving out plumes of steamy breath as they patrolled the farm. One of my jobs this morning was to make sure everyone could find fresh water to drink throughout the day.
   I did that and some other things and was quietly distributing piles of hay for the four-leggeds and tearing off bits of stale bread for the birds when I heard it. A loud, crushing sound and then a splash behind me. Chunk-hi had hammered his great, square chin and then his massive horns against the ice in his trough, releasing the loose water beneath it.

   “Oh I’m sorry, little buddy, I totally forgot about your trough!”

   “That’s okay, Mom. I got this.” His long beard was dripping with water, his horns shiny and steaming. Long black eyelashes blinking calmly at me.

   He can’t really talk, you guys. He’s a buffalo. But we understand each other just fine.