Lately

I am currently knitting this snood to take with me to Norway in the fall. Seems as if it would be useful, plus it's an easy knit and that is nice to combine with the more complicated Seychelles that I am slowly working on.

Blue Skies Woolstok, Earth Ivy

And I made another Cherry Clafoutis, yum, half recipe since no one else in the house likes it and I get to have to eat it all by myself. Poor, poor me.

But I will NOT be making any more jam. At first I did think it tasted ok, but it really doesn't. It wouldn't jell as quickly as I thought it should (a no-pectin recipe) so I would add more lemon juice, and then I would think that it would taste too lemony and I would add more sugar, and it made for the weirdest sweet sour jam. It just doesn't taste very good. It is edible, in the sense that someone desperate for sustenance would probably eat it, but I will leave jam making up to the professionals. My attempt at blueberry jam does not compare to this:

It's so good that I ate it all! On my second batch of crumpets. But not to fear. I bought more.


Speaking of desperate for sustenance, I have finished reading The Best Land Under Heaven, by Michael Wallis, and what a terrible story. Of course cannibalism is a terrible choice to make, and some did not choose to eat cannibalized peers. I guess I had always thought of the choice as the result of sort of a reasonable conversation amongst reasonable people, but starving people aren't necessarily reasonable. Some were so starved that they hallucinated, and others truly went mad. It's no wonder that they did what they did.

However, each person did agree not to partake any of their own cannibalized family, but I'm not sure that that even held up as time went on. One young boy was seen eating a live mouse he had just caught; others ate raw organs as they were taken from the bodies. Necessary? I guess they thought so. I don't know why others survived without resorting to cannibalism.  

On a lighter note...sort of...Abraham and Mary Lincoln were good friends of one of the couples who went on the trip and these friends, the Reeds, tried to convince the Lincolns to go too. Abe was fascinated by the idea of the west coast and had indicated interest in going, but finally decided that he was more determined to have a political career. Mary had no interest in leaving her comfortable life in Springfield, Illinois in order to travel in wagons through very difficult terrain, populated with native Americans---some friendly, some not.

Imagine how different American history would be if Lincoln had gone on the journey with the Donners and Reeds.

The End!

My New Grandson, Abraham Lincoln Gardner

I’ve been reading The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, written by Daniel Mark Epstein, as part of my lifelong fascination with Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. I don’t know why I and others are so interested in them, but I think it may have something to do with the fact that they are the first accessible President and First Lady. I don’t recall ever seeing photographs of previous presidents, but thanks to the development of photography and the work of Matthew Brady and his staff, we have many, many pictures of the Lincolns and notables of their age as well as of the Civil War. I have heard that there is even a recording, scratchy and poor, of Lincoln speaking; I don't know if this is true. I think that part of the fascination may also be because Lincoln would seem to be such an unlikely man (very poor, unschooled, and born to a mother who was apparently an illegitimate child) to have become president. (Although, perhaps in his era, he was not as unlikely a possibility as someone like him would be now.)

I have even gone so far as to bid through an online auction site on a hair purportedly from Mary Todd Lincoln. I didn’t really want it, but I bid early in the auction so that I could send links to both daughters telling them that one of them would be receiving it for Christmas--and no fighting, you two! I figured that there were people a lot more obsessed than I and that surely I would be outbid. The joke was almost on me as time went on and on and there were NO competing bids. What on earth would I do with it? Ick. But at the last minute, several bids came in and I lost. Whew….

Anyway, the book is very interesting, well researched and has a lot of letters and documented statements from both of the Lincolns and from people who knew them. History comes alive, but without the soap-opera aspect of the book I read before this one, which was so bad that I can’t remember the name of it.

This book was a novel about the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, and boy, did the author take liberties with what little research she apparently did. Part of the plot? Mary Todd Lincoln seduced Abraham Lincoln (on the sofa at a friend’s house, no less-while the friend and her husband stayed out of the way in the kitchen) in order to get pregnant so that he would marry her. The author seems to have “channeled” MTL in order to be able to write her thoughts as she plots to trap Abe into marriage. I realize that Mary is long dead, but it still seems wrong to me to take such liberties with the life of a real person.

I have always thought that it would be interesting to be the descendent of someone so famous (NOT infamous) that the whole world knows about him. I wonder what that would be like. The only lead I have on finding out is the sister-in-law who claims to be descended from President Polk. He seems mainly notable for starting an unnecessary war for reasons that were, at best, exaggerations of fact (sound familiar?)and my sister-in-law seems only interested in feeling somewhat superior because of her ancestor. But the last descendant of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, a great-grandson, died in 1985 and so there are no descendents to protest what history does to their story.

I suggested to older daughter, who is having a baby and seems to be having a problem coming up with names, that she should name it, if it is a boy, Abraham Lincoln Gardner. She says no, but I think it would be a lovely tribute to someone as significant as our sixteenth president.

Abe Gardner, anyone?