My fiddling in the flower beds is never done. These past two days, though, rain has forced me indoors to watch the garden instead of work in it. I went out today between showers to get some photos.
I spent last week’s daylight hours almost exclusively outside. I drank my morning coffee indoors, then put on my gardening gloves and hat and spent the days digging, carting, planting, and shoveling. I calculated on my gardening blog that I spread more than 2 tons of mulch in about 3 days. I was exhausted by the end of the week, but now everything is so pretty I can’t help but just stand at the windows (it’s raining) and admire all the plants that are about to burst into bloom. I ventured out into the drizzle today to capture these early buds and blossoms.
These photos aren’t great due to low light, but I want to preserve them here so I can see where everything was this time of year when I look back at my blog next year :-).
And just because I’m proud of the work I did last week, here are before and after photos for the mulching, from my April 10: Two tons of mulch spread. And I got a spicebush post on my gardening blog.
I traveled to Belgrade, Serbia last week to produce our first ever European Support Driven conference. I did not know what to expect from Belgrade, other than knowing it was a great pleasure to work with our event coordinator, Jelena, who is from Belgrade. I was very work-focused and hardly thought about the location part except in logistical terms for the event. The city would be whatever it would be. I’d eat, I’d work, and then I’d go home to Virginia.
And then I arrived in Belgrade. Jelena picked me up from the airport and took me to the old part of the city, to the waterfront down the hill from the fortress that overlooks the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers. We ate a lazy sun-drenched lunch next to the Sava river, at a place called Sofa. She told me about growing up in Belgrade, and pointed out the bridges where there had been live concerts every day during the 90s to form a living shield so the bridges wouldn’t be taken out in the bombings. She said this all very matter-of-factly, describing the sounds of the air sirens and the bombs. Now Belgrade is a peaceful place, and she laughed because she liked that she missed school for a year during that time.
Our hotel was across the river in New Belgrade, and after our warm, drowsy lunch, she showed me some coffee and pastry shops near our hotel, then dropped me off since I had been awake for more than 30 hours at that point.
The next morning I walked to a pastry shop I didn’t learn how to say the name of until my final day in Belgrade — the shop name was written in Cyrillic. It’s written Хлеб и Кифле and pronounced Hleb & Kifle. I couldn’t decide among the pastries, so I bought (and ate) two: an almond croissant and some sort of tubular pastry that looked like a 6-inch double-shotgun barrel with cinnamon apple filling.
The morning was crisp and sunny, a beautiful spring day, and I didn’t want to go back to my room. I texted my colleague Scott to see if he was up and wanted to take a walk before we started working on conference setup that afternoon, then I crossed the river on foot and we wandered around Belgrade.
One of my favorite things about Belgrade was the street art. The sun was low when I walked, so most of my photos have harsh shadows, and I wasn’t able to capture as many of the murals and graffiti as I would have liked. Our daughter is really into street art and would have loved to see all this. I wish she could have been there with me.
We wandered streets with no goal in mind, and ended up first in a little Bohemian section of town, and then the fancier city center.
After our walk, we got to work, and I didn’t stray far from the hotel until the conference was over. When it was finished, Jelena took us to celebrate at a restaurant on the bank of the Danube River in Zemun — a rustic old part of town that looks like a Hungarian village — with live music and lots of happy revelers celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, and just being with friends. It was loud and happy and wonderful. The band, set on a small stage in the corner of the bright-art-covered dining room, featured an accordion player, a guitarist, and a vocalist, and they played an eclectic mix of American and British covers (sung in Serbian), Serbian pop and rock, and traditional Russian and Gypsy songs. The large table next to us, which ordered round after round of food, sang along with gusto to the Serbian songs.
We walked the cobbled streets of Zemun to the Gardoš tower, which overlooks the rivers and the city.
The thing I didn’t do that I wish I would have is explore the concrete Communist architecture of the Blokovi — the urban section of New Belgrade divided into 72 bloks. My friend Denise took a long walk exploring the oppressive buildings, the architecture of which is termed “brutalist,” and after hearing her talk about it and after seeing photographs in Discover the Grit and Glory of New Belgrade’s Communist Architecture, I regret that I didn’t carve out time to explore this fascinating part of Belgrade.
I turned the final page last night on my third book set in South Carolina, and now I am in the home stretch of my Andrea Reads America tour of the United States. I’ve read three (or more) books from 40 states and the District of Columbia so far, and I’ve got these states left to read:
I think I might actually finish in 2019. Thirty books in nine months is totally doable. Even if I take a break now and then to read Anna Karenina or books our 15 year old son recommends to me, like Challenger Deep, which I’m reading right now to celebrate this milestone of only ten states to go, I think I can finish this year. I want to aim for it.
I once speculated it would take me a decade to read three (usually more) books from each state. I’d be delighted to finish this year. I’ve read remarkable, eye-opening books, excellent new-to-me authors, and a broad spectrum of landscape, provincialism, privilege, and oppression. The more I read — especially when I throw the occasional non-US-set novel into the mix — the more it crystallizes for me that humans are the same everywhere, throughout history, no matter where they live. This is weirdly comforting to me in the same way that thinking how small and insignificant we are in the vastness of the universe is comforting. I don’t know why. Maybe because it gives a sense of proportion.
Despite the deep experience of the US I’m getting from reading all this American literature, I’m eager to read these final ten states, write them up, and be free. I have a TBR stack of “I’ll get to this when I’ve finished my project” I’ve been building up these five years. I know I want to read more Tolstoy, and I’ve got a books-recommended-as-funny-charming list I cannot wait to get to. But mostly I’m looking forward to the freedom of picking up whatever book I want, whenever I want, without the unfinished business of this reading project looming in the background.
I’m not sure when the desire to read a great Russian novel made its way onto my bucket list, but when I attempted Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and did not get it, and did not finish it, I knew a Russian novel was on the list as surely as traveling to Italy is.
When I completed Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and disliked it, I knew my desire was not just to read a Russian novel, but to enjoy one.
I am giddy that I just read the final words of Anna Karenina. In finishing it, and more importantly, in loving it, I know I have done and experienced something I wanted very much. In my e-reader, I highlighted almost 100 lines and passages. I enjoyed Anna Karenina so much that it has moved into my top five favorite novels of all time. It may have taken over the top spot. It has everything: charming and despicable characters, romance, betrayal, marriage, infidelity, Society and the peasantry, balls and teas and mowing with scythes, cities and agriculture, gorgeous scenes of golden light on fields of grain, a search for the meaning of life.
I was thinking the other day, before I picked this book up, about the rating system in Goodreads and how I use it. I was trying to figure out how I choose how many stars I give a book. I can love a cozy mystery, and read it in two days, and really really enjoy it, but it’s unlikely I’ll give it more than 3 stars. I couldn’t tease out why that was — if I loved it, why only 3 stars? — until I thought about what makes me give a book 4 or 5 stars.
When I give a book 4 or 5 stars, it’s because the book is layered. It has the story, but also meaning underlying the story. It has depth. If I read it again at a different point in my life, I might take a different meaning from it. Or if I read it only once, I might find meaning about multiple things: belief, people, nature, love. A 4 or 5 star book has altered me fundamentally in some way: has changed the way I see, has opened my eyes, is memorable, and has become part of the fabric of who I am. I might not know exactly what that change is immediately, but I know I have been affected in a way that will make itself known at some point.
And the difference between 4 and 5 stars? I don’t know. I just know when a book is 5 stars for me. And Anna Karenina is undoubtedly a 5 star book. When I read the final words of it, my mind bounced in a dozen different directions about what it all means, with the first and most important question being, But why is it called Anna Karenina? So I explored that question first, and came to a conclusion that I have no doubt is only a small part of the reason Tolstoy titled it Anna Karenina even though I felt the central character was not actually her.
I have so many ideas left to explore, like the double standards of what happens to a man’s reputation when he commits adultery (nothing, it is expected of him and the wife must just bear it) compared to what happens to a woman’s reputation when she does the same thing (she is ruined), how people’s motives affect their happiness or misery, who the likeable characters in the book are and why, because those same reasons carry out into the real world, the differences in conclusions from someone who arrives at them through intellect and someone who actually does the thing, and just a million ideas Tolstoy presents in this masterpiece.
I’m so happy to have read this book and loved it.
When I found out I was going to Nashville for a conference, I did two things: I looked up how far Ann Patchett’s Parnassus Book Store was from my hotel, and I researched donuts. I like to find gourmet donuts when I travel, and I’ve yet to read an Ann Patchett book I didn’t love. I don’t usually seek out book stores when I travel, except maybe Powell’s in Portland, but I love Ann Patchett. State of Wonder, Bel Canto, The Patron Saint of Liars, and Commonwealth are all beautifully written books. And she, the author of them, has a book store! In Nashville!
So I went. It was as wonderful as I’d hoped it be.
I bought a couple of books, sat on the leather couch in the middle of the store, enjoying the warm wood floors and shelves, and I wrote. I soaked in the books and the quiet for a while. Then I went around the corner to Fox’s Donut Den, got some coffee and a maple cruller donut, and I wrote some more. The donut shop was a better place to write, with the red and grey squiggly formica countertops, the bell on the door that jingled every couple of minutes as people poured into the shop, and the joyful sound of voices ordering donuts.
That evening, back in my room, as I spread my books and journals around me on my hotel bed, I realized, oh my God: I’m living my dream. When the kids were small, and I was a stay at home mom, my entire life revolved around caring for them. It could be suffocating, being responsible for these little peoples’ every need. I couldn’t nap, I couldn’t go away. I could barely shower or use the bathroom alone. I certainly couldn’t read a book. There was no break. I had no escape.
In those times, my dream wasn’t “Calgon take me away.” My dream was “What I wouldn’t give for a hotel room, all to myself, where nobody will need anything from me. Where I can just read my book in peace.” And here I was in a hotel room, all to myself, where nobody needed anything from me, and I was just reading my books in peace.
On my final day in Nashville, I visited the donut shop I had been drooling about for two weeks: Five Daughters Bakery. Go look at their Instagram and see if you don’t drool too. They have a 100 layer donut, which is really a cronut, but cronut doesn’t sound very dignified so they don’t call it that.
As I stood in front of the case, I was overwhelmed by the selection. I knew I wanted the blood orange donut. For sure. But I couldn’t decide on the croissant-donuts — would that really be something I’d like? So I asked the woman behind the counter, very originally, “What’s your favorite?” (every person who approached the counter after me, which was about 10 in the 30 minutes I sat there, also asked her “What’s your favorite?” or “What do you recommend?”) She said the vanilla bean 100-layer is a classic and isn’t overwhelmingly sweet, which is what I wanted to hear. I got one of those, too.
Would the buttery, 100-layer donut be something I’d like? Um. Yes. It was indescribably good. It was satisfying to bite into, with its crisp give. And the sweet glaze over the buttery pastry, and the crisp of the layers, and the hint of salt in the buttered layers to go with the sweet of the vanilla bean glaze and glllaahhhh.
The blood orange donut was phenomenal as well, with its crisp-chewy, golden-brown, fried-dough outside and its soft-chewy, warm-sweet inside, and the tangy citrus icing on top that had just the right balance of sharp and sweet, and omg it was so good.
Nashville was a cool place, I’d go there again. But these donuts from Five Daughter’s? They are a destination. They are worth planning a trip around. If you have any reason to go to Nashville and are undecided about it, you should go for these donuts if for no other reason. And also the bourbon and popcorn at Merchant’s Bistro.
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