Saturday Morning Meanderings . . . and one of the prettiest, easiest desserts ever

One of my favorite mystery series is written by Vicki Lane; the Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mystery Series. It just so happens, Vicki also writes one of my favorite blogs. Sometimes she writes about her writing, sometimes she writes about what wonderful foods are cooking in her kitchen, and sometimes she takes us for a stroll around her farm in these beautiful North Carolina mountains, which is a pure piece of heaven. Always she includes some of the most gorgeous photos imaginable.

I love Vicki's books. And I'm not alone - her In A Dark Season is up for an Anthony Award this year - a very prestigous award in the mystery world. The Anthony Awards are presented at Bouchercon, this year to be held in Indianapolis. While I'm waiting for Vicki's next book, I get a great deal of joy from her Vicki Lane Mysteries Blogspot. I hope she'll take my little attempt at copying the peace, serenity and joy of her lovely blog here at Meanderings and Muses this morning in the spirit meant and remember that "imitation is the greatest form of flattery."


It's a gorgeous, cool day in the mountains. We're lucky for not having to suffer extreme heat or humidity here in Boone, but I must say - this is the coolest summer I can remember. Perfect!
Let's get out and enjoy it -


Time for a walk, Harley!!


hmmm. . .
maybe not.


okay - I'm going without you . . .


oh? changed your mind, huh?


well, then - let's take a little stroll








wonder when this bed is going to fill in enough to hide the telephone pole thingie, since that was the whole purpose of putting it here . . .




okeey doke, Harley; let's run run run -
back to the house.

Time to fix a dessert.


When Donald and I were still in Atlanta and working at Georgia Tech, I worked for awhile with a young woman named Gigi Markyna. Gigi is a fantastic cook, and an even better baker - ooooooh mercy - those desserts! One of my favorites is her Obsttorte (or fruit torte) which she bakes from her mother's recipe, and which she was gracious enough to share with me.

Funny coincidence concerning Gigi and her Obsttorte. I made this lovely dessert for our neighborhood 4th of July party. I had not made it in forever; simply because I had forgotten all about it. Donald suggested it, saying "how 'bout that dessert Gigi used to make?" I remembered immediately which dessert he meant, and we wondered how Gigi might be and what she was up to.

Then not even two weeks later, Gigi and I rediscovered one another at Facebook and are in the process of playing "catch-up."

So - get yourself a torte pan, like this one - - -


and pull out your prettiest platter (I happen to be addicted to pottery. More about that another day in another blog).


Whip up your torte, and choose whatever fruit and/or berries you want to use on top. On this one I used strawberries and blackberries, but the choices are endless.


Spoon a little whipped cream on top, and Voilà, a taste of summer!

In my mind I'm goin' to Carolina . . . by Nikki Strandskov aka Auntie Knickers

Nikki Strandskov was born in Maine and lived in several U. S. states as well as three German cities before settling in Minnesota, where she lived happily (mostly in Minneapolis) for 32 years. In 2005 she and her husband, Henrik, "retired" to Brunswick, Maine, near her brothers and sister and many other relatives. She and Henrik have one son and two daughters, plus one daughter-in-law and one daughter-outlaw, all of whom live too far away. At home, they have a tricolor English springer spaniel, Rusty, and a calico cat, Heidi.

Besides reading 100 or more mysteries a year, plus other books, Nikki enjoys genealogy, collecting Christmas music and stories, collecting hymnals, watching movies and blogging. Henrik writes hymn and sometimes song lyrics (two so far with North Carolinian George Keck), takes photographs, and also enjoys reading mysteries and books on Polar exploration -- a great interest to have when one lives in the home of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum. Nikki blogs at http://auntieknickers.blogspot.com/ and at http://queuingup.blogspot.com/ (the latter is all about movies), and also posts book reviews at http://www.goodreads.com/ as Auntie Knickers and on DorothyL as "Nikki in Maine." She is awed to find herself in the illustrious company of Kaye's guest bloggers on http://meanderingsandmuses.blogspot.com/.
--



“In my mind I’m goin’ to Carolina….” (James Taylor)

…North Carolina, that is.



And, except for two brief drive-throughs (one on a train) when I was 2 or 3, that’s the only way I’ve ever been to North Carolina. Yet, it’s one of my favorite states, and except for the odd politician, I’m predisposed to like anything that comes from there. Why is that?

Well, of course there’s the folklore. As an old folkie (non-performing variety), I’ve been enjoying the music of Earl Scruggs,



Doc and Merle Watson,



and James Taylor



for many years. Appalachian folklore – music, storytelling, handicrafts –



doesn’t take much account of state lines, but I do know that the famous Jack Tales, collected and published by Alabamian Richard Chase, came from the Ward family in western North Carolina. As a native and resident of Far Northeast Appalachia – Maine – the Scotch-Irish basis of much North Carolina culture is part of my culture too.

The land itself is beautiful, as I am reminded nearly every day in Vicki Lane’s blog – her photographs make you want to be there. I’ve been to the Rockies, which are majestic and amazing, but – I’m afraid of heights. The Appalachians are good enough for me – beauty and awe without the paralyzing terror. Kaye, my hostess for today, takes some great photos too, most recently giving us a taste of the Carolina coast on Topsail Island. Every description I’ve read of the Outer Banks has reinforced my belief that I’d like it a lot.

And then, there are the books. You knew I’d get to the books, right? At 10 or 11 it was Inglis Fletcher’s The Scotswoman. I had become a staunch Jacobite from reading Sally Watson’s Highland Rebel and then found Fletcher’s book on my mother’s shelves of historical novels.

A few years later, I discovered Thomas Wolfe – Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again. Anne Tyler is now best known for writing about Baltimore, but she too is a North Carolinian, and I “knew her when” – having read her first two, North Carolina-set books, A Slipping-Down Life and The Tin Can Tree, shortly after their publication. Reynolds Price is a fine novelist, and his memoir of disability, A Whole New Life, gave my church Faith Exploration group much to discuss, as did Kate Vaiden. Clyde Edgerton, Lee Smith, Charles Frazier, Jan Karon, and Tony Earley are also favorites of mine and all North Carolina authors. I mustn’t forget to mention a publisher – Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill – whose imprint has proven to be a guarantee of good reading.

Now, since I “met” Kaye through the DorothyL list, I need to say a bit about mysteries. What a rich crop of writers have been born in or adopted North Carolina! From Sharyn McCrumb’s Ballad Novels (and I am thrilled to hear that a new one is on the way, featuring Nora Bonesteel), to Margaret Maron’s series featuring Judge Deborah Knott and her large, loving, and sometimes eccentric family, to Kathy Reichs’s books about sometime Tarheel Tempe Brennan – I’d thought maybe that was all there was and then Vicki Lane started publishing her Elizabeth Goodweather books. She not only writes a charming blog and takes great photos, she’s a heck of a mystery writer, and I’m impatiently awaiting her next, The Day of Small Things. Looking back a bit, do search out the stories and novels of Manly Wade Wellman, which are also deeply informed by Appalachian folklore.

But – what is it I really love most about North Carolina? The people. The first Tarheel I recall meeting was Sunnie Strauss, the wife of my 10th-grade social studies teacher. Jack Strauss was one of those stellar teachers who still influences me after 40+ years, and not least because he and Sunnie opened their home to me and my friends with a warmth that seemed natural then. Only as I have grown up, been a teacher’s wife, and had kids of my own in school, have I realized how unusual they were. We had great, deep discussions, a lot of laughs, and enjoyed their unique blend of Jewish and Southern hospitality. Jack is gone now, but – thanks, Sunnie.

In my junior year, I was in a different school, a Defense Department-run high school in Germany. I know I met many North Carolinian students, but what I remember most is my U.S. history teacher, Jerry Pierce. For someone who was taught Union marching songs in my Maine first grade class, his Southern take on the Civil War (oops, I mean The War Between the States) was a salutary lesson in the different ways one can view history. He also was brave enough to be faculty advisor to a weekly “journal of opinion” that I and some other students started. We’re talking about an Army high school in 1964-65 – need I say more?

One summer in college, one of my flatmates was Cathy Haas from North Carolina. It was a pleasure living with her and I still remember that she knew James Taylor and had a great recipe for whipped cream pound cake. A couple of my old friends from various high schools now live in North Carolina at least part time (both being somewhat peripatetic professors) and seem very happy there.

And last but not least, there are the cyberfriends. Kaye Barley in particular. Yes, I know Kaye is originally and always a Marylander, but she does live in and appreciate North Carolina now. She’s the unofficial social secretary and cheerleader for DorothyL, and, I suspect, of any group she’s involved with. I’m glad to know her. I’ve also had some nice email exchanges with Vicki Lane and Margaret Maron. Reporter Allen Breed, who’s writing a book on Malaga Island, Maine, where some of my ancestors lived, has helped me with my research and I, I hope, with his. I’m pretty sure some of my RevGalBlogPals are in North Carolina too. I’m just going to have to go there some day!
--
Nikki Strandskov
Bayberry Hill Genealogy
auntieknickers.blogspot.com
nstrands@suscom-maine.net

Vicki Lane - Writing Appalachian

Vicki Lane is the author of the critically acclaimed Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mysteries: Signs in the Blood, Art's Blood, Old Wounds, In a Dark Season (2008), as well as The Day of Small Things, a standalone coming in 2009.

A descendant of pioneer Floridians and Alabama farmers, Vicki was raised in Tampa, Florida. She married her high school sweetheart in 1963 and taught high school English at a prep school in Tampa. They should have been happy.

But in 1975, seduced by The Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News, Vicki, her husband, two dogs, and their three year old son moved to a mountain farm in Madison County, North Carolina where they learned how to milk cows, butcher pigs, plow with mules, and raise tobacco. Twenty five years later and still on the same farm with the same husband, one more son, and many more dogs, Vicki remembered that she was an English major and decided to try her hand at a mystery novel.

Working from the premise ‘Write what you know’ she chose a middle-aged woman on a mountain farm as her protagonist and started writing. Five years later, Vicki’s first novel was published by Bantam Dell.

But wait! There's much, much more at http://vickilanemysteries.com/ and http://vickilanemysteries.blogspot.com/

WRITING APPALACHIAN by Vicki Lane

Before I was published, a well known writer of Appalachian novels gave me a piece of advice – actually, it may have been more of a warning – don’t write about the mountain people in a patronizing manner. “We’ll come down on you if you do,” I think was what this writer said. Well, it scared me some and I tried very hard to make sure that the deep respect and admiration I had long felt for those tough, wise mountain folks who were my neighbors came through loud and clear in my writing.



Here’s the thing: a native Appalachian novelist can write as one whose family roots are deep in this region. I, on the other hand, since I’ve lived on our mountain farm for only 33 years, am a transplant -- one of those “damn Florida people.” I can’t pretend to know Appalachia as a native does but I can bring to my efforts at depicting mountain culture, the eyes and ears of one to whom Appalachia is utterly fascinating -- at times as familiar as the memory of my grandmother’s voice, at other times as indecipherable as a song in an unknown tongue, heard at a distance.

No, I can’t be a native, but even a transplant can put down roots that grow deep and take nourishment from an adopted home.

The Appalachian poet and essayist Thomas Rain Crow, in his lovely memoir Zoro’s Field, uses a term “the new natives.” This is his name for those who come to a place and “strive to work reciprocally and in balance and in harmony with the native people and the land.”

I like to think that that my protagonist, Elizabeth Goodweather, and I are new natives – we may be Florida people but at least we saw the error of our ways and moved to the mountains where we got to know our older neighbors and tried to learn from them, to work with them. Rather than sealing ourselves away in an
exclusive compound comprised of other newcomers, we tried to make a place for ourselves within the existing community.

And there was so much to learn from that community! Those folks who had lived on and with and by the land for generations had a wisdom that couldn’t be found in books. They were attuned to the weather, the seasons, the phases of the moon in a way that seemed almost uncanny to someone like me who’d grown up in suburbia where central heating and air conditioning made weather almost irrelevant and the moon was only occasionally glimpsed through a web of power lines and television antennas.

Like the song catchers who once roamed these mountains, writing down the old ballads and recording the old tunes, I listened and learned and remembered and often jotted down some of the wonderful things I’d observed. And when the day came that I began to write a novel, there was all this wonderful material just begging to be used– characters who became Miss Birdie and Aunt Omie, the landscape and life of the mountain farms and forests, the history of the region, and the language -- oh, the language like poetry!

“I wuz weedeatin’ in that ditch there and one a them big ol’ gorf rats like to run up my britchie-leg,” said my neighbor Mearl. Another lovely phrase rings in my memory from the time when, at the top of our mountain in October, we met a neighbor from down the other side. She and her grown son had been gathering apples from a volunteer tree there near the top. “We’re just walkin’ and feastin’,” she told us, smiling the sweetest smile and tossing away an apple core.

These mountains are full of stories. My first book, Signs in the Blood, opens with a scene described to me by a friend who was a home health aide – an old woman dying peacefully at home, surrounded by friends and family, a church choir is there singing, and two teenage grandchildren have just gotten saved in the kitchen. I wrote down the bare bones of this scene years before starting a novel. It was just too wonderful to take a chance of forgetting it.

Another story that I used in this same book is the tale of a young woman, who ran off with her boyfriend back in 1901, leaving her husband and infant behind. When I first heard this story, about thirty years ago, it was said that when the young woman came back for her baby, her husband locked her out and so she would climb up the logs of the cabin to look in the window and see her child. They said you could still see the scratch marks of her fingernails. This is the story that convinced the Big New York Editor who was looking at my manuscript to offer me a contract.

I tell people that my books are, in a way, a love song to the place I live. I’m trying very hard to write about a world that is fast slipping away. My husband and I were fortunate to have moved to our farm at a time when many people were still living as they had in the early years of the century, when there was no television, no internet, no cell phones. Instead, conversation, story-telling, and homemade music on the front porch were the entertainment. These people are the backbone of my stories and readers write from all over to say that they are reminded of their aunt, their granny, their great uncle, their childhood.

But I have to write about the changes too – the new people of all sorts who are moving to the area. Elizabeth’s world, like my own, is seeing an influx, for good or bad, of all sorts of pilgrims from all sorts of places – Florida people looking for cooler summers, Northerners looking for warmer winters, earnest organic farmers, telecommuters with jobs in far off cities, artists and artisans, New Age seekers, Latin American laborers, all adding spice and savor to what was once a dish with only one ingredient.

I remember back in ’76, being introduced to a young woman whose family had lived in the same community for seven generations. As I recall, she looked at me with a wary distrust, probably the same way the Cherokees looked at her folks when they first began to move in to the Cherokee’s hunting grounds. And it’s probably the same way, God forgive me, I look at some of the more recent newcomers to the area. And what changes are You going to make? the look says.

Not long ago I was talking with a lifelong resident of the area and the subject of her neighbor – another of those Florida people -- came up. “Him?” she said, “He ain’t showed me nothin’ yet.”

By their works shall ye know them, I think she was saying. And the fact is that many, many of these new people are enriching the mountains, bringing an energy and freshness of outlook to the on-going work. Those who do it best, listen to the long-time residents, respecting their wisdom and experience and hearing their concerns. Yes, Change is inevitable, but it can be done cautiously and respectfully so all that is good and lovely in the land isn’t lost forever.

Back when we first moved to the mountains, one of my neighbors invited me to go with her to Decoration Day at their family cemetery. A group had gathered there atop the gentle hill at the edge of our farm. It was a mild day, the first Sunday in June, under one of those crystalline blue skies that they say proves God is a Carolina fan. The invited preacher hadn’t been able to come, so some of those present took turns reading from the Bible or speaking a few words. And then Sylvie, another neighbor -- a short stout woman, known for her ability to outperform a man in cutting and barning tobacco -- Sylvie began to sing ‘Amazing Grace.’

Her voice was rough, with a heavy mountain twang, and she sang from her heart and her belly and her soul with the same strength she brought to the tobacco field. Her song was a shout, a statement of faith, a declaration of who she was and where she was – and an anthem for all who once were lost but now are found. It raised goose bumps on my arms and when the last fierce notes fell away, losing themselves in the trees and pastures around us, I was fighting back tears. I once was lost but now I’m found, I thought. Was blind but now I see. This is the place I’ve been looking for and here I am where I’m meant to be.

Amazing Grace – it’s here all around me in these mountains. And last year, when I was doing a talk at our local library, I got another taste of it. A woman, a native of many generations, brought up one of my books to be signed. She looked me in the eye and said, “We’re glad you moved here.”