Jane Alynn

Fennel and Road Trips

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:38:06 +0000

Summers, when I walk the trail out to the Cap Sante breakwater in Anacortes, tall stalks with silvery-green fronds heavily perfume the air, making it sweet and licorice-y. Fennel—the merest whiff and I’m back on the Pacific Coast Highway. We’re pulled off at a wayside, lying on the warm sand beside thick patches of wild fennel, lulled by the sway and scent of their feathery plumes. We watch gulls soar and believe summer will go on forever, like the sky, like the highway.

But recapturing childhood memories isn’t the best thing about fennel. And why did I not know this? . . . [Read the full essay in Essay pages.]

Learning to Cook

admin — Mon, 03 May 2010 05:40:35 +0000

Learning to cook, like so many of life’s great initiations, presents us with a series of tests. In the early sixties, still a teenager, I moved to New York City. First I shared a ninth-floor railroad apartment, essentially a long, narrow hallway, in a Westside tenement building with an ever-changing cast of roommates. At the far end of the front room was an efficiency kitchen. Technically, it fit the definition. This kitchen in miniature had the basics—sink, refrigerator, two-burner stove with a tiny oven, and one wall cabinet the size of a cereal box. Functionally, it was quite the opposite. Inefficient (as well as unsafe), I quickly realized this wasn’t a workable lab. Crammed in behind an eating bar, there was hardly room for one. The oven worked only sporadically, and lighting a burner always caused a certain panic, match-lit and flaring up as it did, we’d stumble over each other in the dim light to find the baking soda. It was dark as the stage pit, and ventilation was an issue. Too much use seemed like a bad idea.

That, and being at the peak of ballet student poverty, meant meals took the form of fast food—quick, easy, and most of all, cheap. If we cooked anything, it was fatty hamburger patties (grease hung in the air for days), ramen noodles, and cheese omelets. Otherwise we ate peanut butter spread between slices of Muenster, sandwich-like, and lots and lots of bad fad foods. Since my roommates showed little interest in food other than the obsessive high-carb, quick-energy remedy to hunger, I kept my culinary curiosity to myself, hungry for the day I would have a kitchen of my own where I could learn to cook, where no one would notice my kitchen cluelessness . . . [Read the full essay in Essay Pages]

A is for Apple

admin — Mon, 03 May 2010 04:02:40 +0000

The orchard was my magical kingdom. A once upon a time in a land not so far away kind of place, where old knuckled trees whispered secrets to us kids who entered there. We couldn’t wait to run down the grassy corridors and disappear in the dark tunnels of arching branches. Losing ourselves for long hours among the colossal trees, we’d sit at their feet and read the sky or climb up and lie in the crook of a limb, as if it were a hammock, and start, “I’m thinking of an animal…” for the other to guess which orchard creature it was. Hide and seek was a favorite game, too. The prizes were always sweet, juicy apples. As we spit out the seeds, we’d imagine ourselves a couple of Johnny Appleseeds whose dream it was for the land to produce so many apples that no one would ever go hungry. When the hot day’s wind left us dusty and in need of cooling off, we’d race to the edge of the orchard where an irrigation ditch flowed fast and clear, its grass-lined banks slicked our impulse to jump in. It was a jungle, lush paradise, our Eden. We reveled in this domain of fantasy and memory, myth and history.

My grandparent’s orchard was located a little more than a mile south of Tieton, Washington. Tieton is a tiny town perched on the western edge of the Yakima valley. They had thirteen acres of fruit—apples mostly, but some pears and cherries.

I returned to Tieton recently, with apples on my mind. The fruit-laden trees, like buxom sirens, had me pulling to the side of the road to partake of their sweetness. The apples are crisp and sweet as ever. But the orchards are different . . . [Read the full essay in Essay Pages]

Beginnings

admin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:21:47 +0000

Welcome to my new blog on poetry, photography, the creative life, and other journeys.

And I’m reminded how beginnings are useful places, uninhabited spaces, free of preconception and fixed ideas. Wonderment raises questions, set us to looking for what comes next. Wide-eyed then, with a kind of wet-behind-the-ears naiveté, I take on this new life as blogger, a small thing full of hunger.

For this blog to be a living thing, as I hope it will be, comments are encouraged.