North Cape May is, according to the USGS, is fill. Just north and west of us are nice, loamy soils. Strawberry festivals, lima bean festivals, even barley festivals (if beer counts)
But fill that’s mostly sand makes for good potato gardens–some compost, some nice seed potatoes from Pinetree, a tiny bit of sulfur, a little bit of hilling, and then a ridiculous amount of fun while on all fours digging up potatoes with your grandbabies.
Yes, it’s early–they haven’t even flowered yet–but the kids are here this week, and we needed blue potatoes for a patriotic potato salad.
Every year around this time of year we have a local triathlon, Escape the Cape. People pay good money to jump off the ferry, push their bodies to exhaustion, and buy a few beers.
I don’t do that, but I do grow garlic. (OK, garlic mostly grows by itself–some of my plants literally grew from cloves too small to bother to peel–I just toss them towards the garden.)
So when we hear the noise from the terminal starting at 5:15 AM on an otherwise lovely early summer Sunday, it reminds me to go cut the scapes.
And in just a few short weeks after the scapes, we’ll get the bulbs.
Bottled last summer’s beach plum wine, fruity, a tad astringent, but hey, practically free, as a private jet flew overhead. The beach plums come from two bushes in the backyard.
Made some bread from home ground wheat, cheap and good.
Eating kale from the garden tonight, as cheap as cheap gets. Kale grows like a weed in North Cape May, and requires little more effort than stooping to drop the seeds in the ground.
The chair was made by a local man. We bought two, the price not cheap, but was more than fair, and he was surprised we opted not to oil them. We like to see things age as much as we do, and, in the local way of acceptance that is under-rated, he nodded and went on his way.
Because we chose not to oil our chairs, they have turned grey and are covered by lichen. They are now over a decade old, and will likely last another 5. With oil, they may have outlived us.
Wheat grown in our backyard by my toddler grand-daughter on an aging cedar chair made by a local craftsmen.
When we need new ones, we’ll seek the same man. We do not need chairs to outlive us. That’s what plastic is for.
Because we chose not to oil them a decade ago, I got to see a wasp explore the lichen, which might not seem like much, but I enjoyed seeing that a wasp could be as easily fooled as a human.
We are all easily fooled–life is foolish, in the best sense of the word.
I am not about to burn my clamming spots, though I did get one ridiculously cheap by tipping the bartender at the Villas Fishing Club $10 on two $1 beers. (Rumor was he loved to clam in his younger years.)
Another mess of local clams, and plenty more if you know where to find them.
The first $5 tip got me this–if you want fresh clams, go to the Lobster House.
The next $5 got me a lovely mudflat I only share with close family.
What’s not nearly as secret though are the oysters hanging off the jetties in North Cape May.
The rainbow is for gold, the jetty is for oysters.
Are they sandy? Yep.
Are they way too close to the discharge pipes? Yep again.
(I cannot vouch for their safety but I can vouch for their tastiness; I’ve eaten a couple raw right off the jetty.)
Avoid the canal, the rest of the bay is fine.
You’ll need a license ($10/year for state residents) and little else. Just beware that they’re going to be a bit sandy.
You can dine at Heather’s On The Bay–just tell them you’re with the band or the kitchen. You cannot beat the view, and its a more intimate setting than Harpoon’s On The Bay.
Beach plums were ubiquitous in these parts long before the Europeans arrived, and despite their excellent flavor and ease of growing, beach plums have eluded commercialization.
I suspect it may have to do with their predilection for real estate rich folks like to own for their seasonal beach homes. (It may also have to do with their capricious fruiting–some years branches are laden with fruit, some years barren.)
This particular plum hangs from a bush in our backyard, one we (and other animals) missed, though it looks like a six-legged critter found its way in. The beauty of the decaying fruit on a burgundy branch more than makes up for a few drops of juice.
Tonight we may share some beach plum melomel bottled long before the flower of this plum erupted last spring
In just a few short months, the beach plum flowers will return–hopefully I will have last fall’s fruit bottled by then.
In January, nothing feels certain but decay and death–tonight we’ll toast to the returning sun.
When we bought our home in North Cape May years ago, we stumbled upon the LCMR plant sale, a work of love by Joanie Dilling and her students. We paid a couple of bucks for a small rosemary plant, planted it next to the house, and pretty much left it alone.
The tiny plant is now a sprawling lovely aromatic mess threatening to take over the driveway, and continues to give and give and give.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Every time I walk by, I stroke a few sprigs then bring my fingers to my nose, remembering again what I thought I could not forget.
The periwinkle flowers. feed the few foolish bees who wander out of the hive on the rare, deliciously warm December days.
The sprawling trunk holds its own beauty, wood arising out of the Earth like a writhing Naga.
Chopped rosemary, a staple in our home
A few sprigs of fresh rosemary will run you $2.49 at the local Acme, about the cost of the seedling I carried home, started by a struggling high school student shepherded by a kind woman from Ocean City.
Or you can swing by here, snip a few sprigs, and thank the universe for living in a land as blessed as our neighborhood.
If you’re local, you can grow one, too. We are blessed by our bay, our skies, our weather, and our sand.
Yesterday was warm for late December, warm enough to clam barefoot. So I did.
Mudflats remind me of my mortality, not that anyone needed much reminding this year. Every empty shell had the same ending to share.
The back bay waters were quiet. A reddish-brown sea weed has, for now, taken over the shallows. A few shotgun blasts broke the quiet. Someone enjoys ducks as much as I enjoy clams.
A small blue claw clung to my rake for a few moments, then let go–I saw it scurrying back under the brown blanket of seaweed.
I do not know what the word “perfect” means. I know what we think it means, but its meaning crumbles in my hand when I squeeze it.
So here’s a tomato, an unexpectedly beautiful November tomato I found in the garden last fall.
It’s not perfect in a Platonic sense, but it was perfect for that particular day in this particular life.
I ate it, of course (what else would one do with a tomato), but its image lingers because I took a picture of it when I saw it. A picture is all that is left of this tomato–soon after this photo it became tiny particles breathed and pissed out of my body.
The Greeks have proven troublesome, at least to me. John gets right to the heart of the problem. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.
Logos.
Western culture picked that up and ran, creating all kinds of masterpieces we ogle (or are supposed to ogle, anyway) while the tomatoes get eaten, breathed and pissed out, then reconstructed again, over and over.
The perfect tomato above no longer exists but still feels real. Photographs and words will do that.
Halloween tomato, picked this morning (October 231, 2020)–it reflects the kind of year we’re having.
A spoken story dies with the storyteller. The parts of the stories that matter or resonate or are crudely funny get passed along to younger mortals, who, after sharing stories and eating tomatoes that they exhale and piss out, also eventually die.
Somewhere along the way, several thousand years ago, written language was invented. When the stories can no longer be changed by the wiser among us, words become our prisons.
We work for words, for the abstract, for the future, for money, for fame, for recognition, for a lot of things, but unless you are directly working with the ground or water or air, you are living in a world that does not exist. Literally.
When we confuse the abstract with the real, and we do–every single day–we are reliving the story of original sin, a story that survives because it’s a story that matters.
And still does.
Pay more attention to the voices of the living. The letters of the past are no longer edited, no longer ours. Let them go.
