Gardens and mortality

Just finished watering the plants, the sky again hard blue and not yielding a thing. The snow I grew up with ... and the mists and damps of the West Virginia mountains ... didn't prepare me for Piedmont summers when the red clay turns itself into bricks. So I water, and weed, and prop. Jack doesn't like floppy plants (read: wildlings or close to wild) so I keep having to offer excuses for the foamflower and the Peruvian lilies that sprawl and lollop between stauncher plants.
We just added some more Stella d'Oro, a plant surely anyone could love for its cheery persistence, and blue potato bush.
"I like plants that stand up," Jack said as he watered the Stellas. We have a division of labor - he arranges, I dig, he waters, I weed. He has a better eye for landscaping but not such close discrimination between young hellebores and the random cherry seedlings.
He also doesn't care for plants that fade, leaving yellowing clumps of leaves, or for the foundlings that I try to make grow when they don't have the heart for it. He's not into salvage. If it looks dead, it is dead. As for me, I like to bring things back from the edge, maybe because I know very well how plants die even when conditions are right.
I remember my father's pine tree. The Christmas before they left West Virginia, my father stuck the unwanted artificial Christmas tree in the front yard - temporarily, to hold treats for the birds. But it looked pretty good there, so he planted the plastic base and made like it was the real thing. It was a small running joke on the neighbors for those months, perfectly green, perfectly shaped. I wonder if it's still standing at the corner of Route 73 and Prickett's Fort Road. It sure does stand up straight.

Waiting for the mail

I may be one of the last folks who actually wait on the mail. Wait for the mail. Desire it to arrive, which at our house comes with the alarm barking of Turbo, our dappled dachshund and general factotum.
Today the mail brought Susan Meyers' new book, Keep and Give Away, with three bright apples on the cover waiting to be awarded as prizes. Susan is a fellow Queens University graduate, although I was on the fiction side during the MFA program.
And the 2006 Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets, arrived as well - visit Kakalak for more info on the book with 170 pages of poetry including work by Susan Meyers and me and many friends across states both north and south.
More on both later.
Now it's back to work - Kevin Watson at Press53 says that Wake Wake Wake is to go to press the end of this week. One last look at the proof ....

Best books

The May 21 issue of the New York Times Book Review will feature a list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years. The list itself, as well as the names of the judges, were posted today on the website
The list of judges was long, impressive, and diverse, including writers and critics, men and women, popular and experimental, old lions and young. The list of winning works, however, was overwhelmingly from the white, male and elderly. Except for the winner.
Toni Morrison's Beloved topped the list, but from there the winners were Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike and Philip Roth. In the list of others receiving "multiple votes," Roth came up five more times, while DeLillo and Updike came up again twice and McCarthy once. The rest: John Kennedy Toole, Tim O'Brien, Mark Helprin (one for the fantastic side, with Winter's Tale!), Raymond Carver, Norman Rush, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford and Edward P. Jones.
Oh yes, and Marilynne Robinson. With the note that her novel Housekeeping "was not reviewed by the Times." That was the only book among the winners that was so mentioned.
I don't know that I could support tossing any of them out, though I could think of some that I would have voted in. My reading is erratic, and I've read too few of the latest novels to be any sort of expert. The consensus, however, among so many polled was certainly striking.

The best ten-buck dinner in Grand Case

I'm working on a new novel, digging into the notes I made last spring at St. Martin for a crucial chapter. The pictures still vibrate in orange, magenta and turquoise, whether opening on the computer screen or in my thoughts, but tell you the truth, what comes back the clearest is the scent of barbecure smoke from the lolos in the center of Grand Case.
Fish, shrimp, chicken - the aromas blew up the street on the sea breeze - for an adopted Carolina girl made even sweeter by the memory of barbecues and smoky fire pits here in the Piedmont.
I've attached a short essay on the lolos - wondering if Jacqueline is still at her post at Sky's the Limit. I'll always treasure her greetings in the morning as she prepared food for the day, and I carried a baguette back to the room for breakfast.

GRAND CASE, ST. MARTIN - We walked into the village that first night, quickly becoming accustomed to the Alphonse-and-Gaston of car horns – please watch out, please go, thank you! Too travel-stained for fine restaurants, we were lured by the swirling smoke of the other culinary secret of Grand Case, the lolos.
Tall chalkboards present the day’s offerings at open-air pavilions. The lolos offer grilled ribs, chicken, crab backs and fish – with side orders of fried plantains, mac and cheese, French fries. The “plates of food” for $8 or $10 would be familiar in the American South as “meat and two,” and just as satisfying.
We slid into a Formica-topped table at Talk of the Town, where Jack ordered swordfish and I chose snapper – along with plantain and rice and beans. Slabs of fish arrived sizzling off the grill, smoky dark, with a coating of olive oil and garlic, tender and white inside. No room for homemade coconut ice cream – alas, it wasn’t to hit the menu again during our stay.
The lolos have established a reputation on “Restaurant Row.” Oil-barrel cookers, sliced in half and raised on legs, are fired with chunks of locally made hardwood charcoal. The half-dozen enterprises wedged between the beach and the busy street each offer something unique, from lobster to goat.
“This July will give us two years,” says Jacqueline Lake, owner of Sky’s the Limit. “Someone had it before, they put it in the paper, it had to be someone from Grand Case, not Marigot or Colombier.” (The capital and a town on this island totalling 37 square miles, including the Dutch side.) “My husband said you always like to cook, so I wrote a letter, and we were lucky enough to get it.”
Meat is seasoned with a mixture that includes salt and a coloring agent – one of Jackie’s helpers holds up an orange box, Sazon. Each table has a bottle of Matouk’s Calypso Sauce - mostly it seemed made of Scotch bonnet peppers.
The blend of flavors and nationalities is characteristic. This is a creole culture of local folks and visitors from St. Barth’s, people who speak French from school and American from the radio. Three women from the Ivy League ponder a menu close to the island philosopher who leans on the bar with a plastic shot glass. A shih-tzu on a leash keeps its distance from island dogs with yellow Arawak eyes.
The food brings everyone together.
The hardest thing, Jackie says, is to “make sure the girls are straight, all happy, You bust your head to keep the customer happy. Cooking is a whole lot of work, but no problem.”