Jean Ponzi

Shop for a Better World

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:47:55 -0600

Immersed in Air

Thu, 3 Jul 2008 12:14:58 -0500

The 1990s may have been the hottest decade on record, but the St. Louis Summer of 2000 was no slouch successor to that torrid title.

As such, it was doubly unusual for me to have spent so little time in water, an activity I relish beyond all summer choices.

I missed swimming at two summer milestone events. It was 60 degrees, downright chilly, the weekend of our friends The Teachers’ annual School’s Out Summer Party in the end of June. I am wearing a sweatshirt jacket in all the photos of that event this year.

The 4th of July sizzled like rockets, but I was travelling with my Gramma a thousand miles north of the celebration I’ve attended for the past ten years, on Lake Tekawitha in the green hills of Franklin County.

I traditionally hold court on a Fun Noodle throughout the langorous afternoons of both these fabulous celebrations, surrounded by friends and jokes dragonflies that are as central to our traditions as corn chips and sun screen. But not this year, not on either occasion.

I finally got into water on my 46th birthday, July 23rd, Jean Ponzi Day. I think I would have swum if I’d had to break through ice to do it, but that was far from necessary. July, and the entire month of Leo, lived up to caloric expectations. In fact, heat rose with the corn crop, interspersed blessedly with regular rain, but simmering high in every outdoor thermometer.

I specify “outdoors” because I’ve noticed a striking climatic difference within buildings almost everywhere during the summer months here in America, where climate is controlled as if by magic. I also happen to know the fuel for this environmental magic was formed over thousands of millions of years, and we ain’t growin’ any more of it, while we use it up fast, particularly on summer-eradicating Air Conditioning.

We have air conditioning at my house, but we don’t use it. I personally hate air conditioning, and therefore chose a dwelling that can support my life without it. Our house, more than a score and a hundred years old, has excellent cross-ventilation, and the modern inhabitants installed big ceiling fans in every room. These too run on the burning former bones of prehistoric ferns and dinosaurs, but use less of them, and happen to run more cheaply than that summer antidote, Air Conditioning.

I do not wear suit jackets in the summer, not even in freezing hotel conference rooms. At those times, I resort to short sleeves and get by with occasional breaks for a glass of water in the real air.

This summer I became acutely aware of that real air, since I was immersed in it, and so rarely in water, throughout the long, steamy season.  
I did enjoy one traditional water-based fete with friends the first weekend of August, Camp Bocklage, in which we celebrate the birthday of our dear friend Sharon with a tube flotilla on one of the nearby upper-Ozark rivers. Gin and Tonic tops the menu as we glide a lazy river, two long miles in one idyllic afternoon, followed by a picnic in the nearest state park to the takeout point.

Finally, on the day my husband Dale turned 48, I reached the zenith of my Summer 2000 water recreation, when we took an inaugural float trip in our new canoe. This sleek green vessel was a surprise gift last October, and it only took us nine months to get it into water. In the course of that outing, which started at about 5 p.m. one August day, I plunged into the Cortois River for about ten minutes, but those were pure heaven before the sun dropped behind the trees, on another of those periodic, remarkably cool weekends that dotted this summer.

That was three opportunities for swimming, three times I got to immerse myself in the most restorative of elements, water. The rest of this summer, I was immersed in (hot) air.

The last two weeks of August brought a record heat-wave to this part of Missouri, although ours was mild compared to western wildfires or the sixty-three days of temperatures over 100 with no rainfall that scorched most of Texas and Oklahoma. Here we had a run of days with temperatures in the mid- to high 90s. Coupled with Missouri’s famous thick humidity, the heat index hovered in the teens of triple digits. It was hot here.

Dale and I had both been craving a little more togetherness, a boost for our feelings of closeness and intimacy. Amazingly, given the intense summer weather, we found our thrill by reviving a dormant activity: home improvement. In the hottest two weeks of the year, we built a garden shed, from scratch, and added a portal over our basement studio, enhancing our home’s ground-level entrance.

Really, once we started sweating, it wasn’t all that bad out there, except for the mosquitos. They are a detriment to enjoying hot air. For the last few years we’ve had a huge population of tiny, voracious black and blue striped mosquitos. They are barely bigger than gnats, but they have appetites that could shame a cockroach. Virtually undeterred by wind, they know no periodicity and seem to steadily eat all day. Dale and I provided an ongoing hot lunch for these persistent creatures all the while we worked on our projects, together. He wore blue jeans, socks and shoes, and I swatted at my legs a little, but mostly, after the first hundred bites or so, we just ignored them.

At the end of the day, tidying up the job site, I’d run upstairs to turn the fans on and open windows in all four directions, so the house was aired out when we came up from working. We’d take a cool shower, which relieved the last traces of mosquito bite itching, have a light supper, watch a little Star Trek and head for bed amid insect songs, under a fan. Next morning, over a big glass of iced coffee, we’d admire our work and then begin again.

Some of our friends may have thought we were crazy, like Bob, an internationally respected scientist, who called one day about a possible family outing. When we replied with regrets, and described our projects, he said incredulously, “Are you building these things outside?”

It was delightfully quiet in our city neighborhood, as everyone was barricaded in their air conditioned houses. TV news proclaimed its Heat Advisories, and schools began their season briefly, then cancelled classes or curtailed their days to “heat schedules.”

Our dog Murphy, a thick-coated Terrier, had a fan of her own that we moved to cool her favorite day and night sleeping places. Kitty migrated to the relative concrete comfort of the basement. None of us were very peppy, but there was no need to speed through any kind of activity. We ambled along, consuming gallons of water, but rarely having to pee.

The garden shed, shingled in cedar shake to match our house, was completed, stocked and landscaped in a week. It turned out so beautifully, with curved-out bottom corners to run water away from the foundation, and Lake Superior stones lined up beneath the threshold, that I began to call it the Tool Temple, and we charged our shovels rent to move in there.

Saturday night we went to the movies, a break into air conditioning – which is good for a change, in dark public places – but we were back outside at our favorite café, the first patrons that night to sit in that section. I was proud when others braved the summer air to follow our dining example.

We honored America’s traditional work ethic by adding to our house on Labor Day weekend. Other than one stock-up trip to our local Home Depot, we never got into a car that weekend. We enjoyed each other’s company while Dale built and shingled and I handed him hammers.

That Saturday and Sunday were brutally hot again, and we moved at a pace appropriate to the weather. Then Labor Day dawned with – no humidity! In fact, the sky was overcast! We were able to work on our project throughout the day, with no need for a break to avoid heavy sunshine. A brisk northeast breeze kept mosquitoes at bay, and we finished our structure as the weekend ended.

While we were both too hot and tired for more than the bond between building companions, our relationship itself had been remodeled. And when that dramatic change in the weather occurred, both of us could really feel it. We were cleansed and renewed through the strength of our efforts, and immersion in air.

Back at work, right after Labor Day, I listened to people exclaim over the weather, and I felt smug in my dual accomplishments, construction and direct experience of one of summer’s hallmarks, hot air.

I may get into water one more time, since summer lingers here often into October. But from the Summer of 2000 I’ll always cherish my recreational outings, in the air.

Summer Kitchen

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 10:54:27 -0500

Because I will eat pretty much anything, no matter how it turns out, cooking was not a strong point through most of my life. I don’t recall enjoying it either.

Only in the past few years, dating from the time I became a homeowner, have I grown to love cooking and my workspace in the kitchen. I come from a long and sturdy line of people who relish “a little something,” and I guess the giving end of that trait was late-blooming from its roots in me.

Treats and their making favor every page of the calendar in my home today, from holidays to personal milestones, but I find the year-round cycle of food hospitality most pleasing in my favorite season.

Like the yard and woods around our house, my kitchen changes with the climate. Temperatures rise and foods gets lighter, quicker, needing less preparation. The fruit and vegetable bowls and bins fill and empty and refill rapidly. No beverage container lingers on a pantry shelf for more than a week.

Pots and pans go on vacation while the knives and cutting boards maintain a vigorous workout. Kitchen tools migrate to the veranda, accompanied by glistening glasses, the countertop compost bucket and a colorful cadre of shatterproof bowls.

Food emergencies are not uncommon, with so much traffic from market and garden, but a speedy response will avert disaster. Succulent peaches may collapse while simply laying in a bowl on a hot kitchen table. A whirl in the blender with yogurt and ginger saves their sweetness from untimely decay in tall, cool goblets.
 Co-workers have been experimenting with a Solar Oven. This simple technology powers whole community kitchens, especially in arid parts of the world, where cooking fuel is scarce in continuous summer. One colleague recently brought to work a lofty, golden loaf of bread he had baked with sunshine.

Friends Dan, Laura, Chris and Libby tend a large farmhouse garden that sustains their circle of pals and kin all year long. When days are hottest they’ll be steaming in the kitchen, working together to process the harvest. I love to get to help with these putting-up projects, employing pitchers of tea, sweaty endurance and culinary sets of equipment and skill that have endured for generations. Potatoes, peppers, corn, beans and tomatoes come into the shade of this kitchen in wicker basket-loads, while we are blanching, peeling, slicing, seeding, straining and singing together in marathons of red-faced, drenched determination. Mason jars travel from cupboard to pressure cooker, with a pause for a sterilizing dip, and return in rows to their cold-season places packed with sauces and preserves in every vivid shade of summer.

My Dad has his own summer kitchen, a metal kettle with legs and a lid, outside the regular kitchen door. With his hot mitt, platter and tongs he grilled the summer suppers of my youth, while Mom sliced up and mixed inside. When I go home for a hot-weather visit, a cookout is a nostalgic treat, since I never learned to barbeque. I did, however, master use of my childhood’s ultimate summer kitchen convenience, the supermarket deli.

I remember a long-ago summer visit in a lean-to kitchen with a wood stove, attached to the house where my Grandma’s father had cleared a farm out of Minnesota forest on a bend in the St. Louis River, a thousand miles from here. He was an ore miner in the open pits of the Iron Range, north of Lake Superior, and he also worked his land summer nights and weekends. That second job put food on the table, and it refreshed Great-Grampa’s spirit, after his long days underground. In a memory almost half a century old, I see a little girl in a sailor dress, puzzled by the extra kitchen outside an unfamiliar house, and fascinated by big-boy cousins who could make a real fire in their Grandma’s funny oven.

Celebrations for best friends born in the midsummer month of Leo necessitate birthday baking, no matter how hot it is. I like to drink a cup of coffee with the 10 o’clock weather on the kitchen TV and then get out the cookbook and cake ingredients. Cranking up the oven in midnight’s relative cool, the heat is balanced by a breeze from the ceiling fan, songs of tree frogs and cicadas, and late-night black and white vintage movies. Such ingredients nourish a baking heart in the summer night kitchen.
 Tofu Salad, my float-trip specialty, is made with kitchen scissors. Black olives, fresh parsley and cherry tomatoes are a snap to snip on a gravel bar. Sprinkle these pieces with garlic granules and mix into mashed tofu with a silver fork. Hand off the bowl with a bag of corn chips and flee the floating kitchen for the paradise of your canoe or – even better – your Fun Noodle.

By the Dog Days of August, the ground around our screen door is golden with leaflets, first poignant heralds of the approaching cool-down season. Almost time for the big pot to return to the stove from its summer home deep in the cabinet, for the first ceremonial soup of autumn. Tomato-lentil will be simmering soon, savory and rich with plenty of pesto, product of the final fragrant fling in my summer kitchen.