How To Knit A Love Song Release Day!!!!

More pics on the weekend but right now a quick shout out "CONGRATULATIONS!" to Rachael for the release of How To Knit a Love Song.




Lynn, Juliet, Lisa, Rachael, Gigi and the BOOK! :)

Nothing to See Here

L.G.C. Smith

I don't do revenge. It has a certain dramatic appeal, but when you get right down to it revenge done properly usually requires more time and energy than it's worth. Beyond high school (where all bets are off) or when someone very, very seriously harms your child, practical concerns dictate that most folks are too lazy for revenge.


When wronged, I stew a bit, then move on. There may be a fantasy or two where the offending party undergoes a humiliating public revelation of their true (dastardly) character. I may have, a few times only, pretended I was a powerful witch able to hurl bad karma acceleration curses at the odd malicious soul I've run across. Then...onward. Sometimes forgiveness is required. Fairly often a little perspective does the trick.

Fictional characters, however, have carte blanche to indulge revenge impulses of towering magnificence. This is one of the joys of fiction. As in romance where manly men readily learn to deal with emotion in ways satisfying to women, so can wronged characters fritter their lives away in service to revenge without wearying of the ass-backwardness of it all. Currently, I'm writing a couple of characters based on real people for whom revenge was as mother's milk. These guys were seventh-century Anglo-Saxon kings.


Early Germanic societies seem to have put a high premium on revenge. I comment as a novelist here, not an expert, but the legal systems in use in the early Anglo-Saxon period (450-700 AD) had a lot to say about blood feuds and compensation for crimes against persons and property. Everybody had a price, from the kings and their kin down to the slaves who cleaned up after the pigs. Families, especially those worth a lot, generally seemed to have a right to revenge. Or, possibly it would be more accurate to say that they had a duty to revenge.

My characters are based on the very real Northumbrian kings and rivals, Æthelfrith of Bernicia and Edwin of Deira. Bernicia encompassed much of what's now the county of Northumberland, while Deira was centered on York and the surrounding area. This picture is taken on the beach just south of Bamburgh, which was the main fortified settlement in early seventh century Bernicia.


Æthelfrith took over Deira to form the basis of what would become the kingdom of Northumbria. He killed Edwin's father and assorted family members, married Edwin's sister, and forced Edwin into exile.

It's not hard to understand why Edwin was impelled toward revenge on Æthelfrith, and he did achieve it ten or fifteen years down the line. Thus when Æthelfrith was killed in battle by Edwin's allies, Edwin took over a combined Northumbria and became perhaps the most powerful ruler of his time.

Then Æthelfrith's sons who were children sent into exile when Edwin took over, came roaring back another fifteen years later and killed Edwin. In succession, they they ruled Northumbria as perhaps the most powerful kings of their time. And so it went. Lather, rinse, repeat.

For men like Æthelfrith and Edwin revenge was a defining aspect of everyday life. It's not precisely fair, but one can describe the history of Britain in the seventh century as a series of revenge-driven raids by warlords who were heavily intermarried with all the other warlord kings. It was the original family feud.


Against this backdrop of constant squabbling --deadly squabbling in a population that could ill afford to lose too many farmers, blacksmiths, or cheesemakers -- I can see why the Anglo-Saxon kings, like Edwin, accepted conversion to Christianity. It offered them a way out of the endless cycles of revenge. God took over retribution duties, and paying penances to the Church reduced the toll in dead farmers and pillaged fields when the warlords couldn't contain their violence.


Times have changed when it comes to the role of revenge in our lives. We now trust many aspects of revenge to governments and call it the justice system. Flawed, yes. Very. Better than warlords? Most definitely. Ethically, we have several millennia of religious history urging us to let evildoers take their chances with the the higher powers and karma so the rest of us can worry about getting three kids to four different sports activities in three cities in two hours.


In the meantime, my time-traveling Anglo-Saxon kings are finding themselves in a world that doesn't give a rip about their mandates for revenge. What's more, they now find that the person they most seek to annihilate is the only person alive who shares their past. That's way more interesting than any revenge scenarios that may have come up in my real life.

Love as a Practice of Freedom

L.G.C. Smith

At fourteen, my reaction to reading "Romeo and Juliet" was "Really? Did they try talking to each other?" Too stupid to live was invented for that pair.

My approach hasn't changed much over the years. Faced with the power of love in a public forum (that isn't fiction), I intellectualize it. In that spirit, I offer a bit from the conclusion of my my doctoral dissertation, an ethnographic study of romance writers completed a very long time ago (1997). I still stand by it.

The romance genre is not devoted to providing erotica for women readers, even though sexuality and sex are important components in many books. It is not about simple stories for bored housewives who need to be reconciled to the indignities of patriarchy. It is not about changing gender relations, even though almost all of the writers I studied consciously addressed those issues.

Romance novels are about love. Not love as a syrupy excess of florid prose, flowing locks, and brandished sabers. Not love as the sweaty realism of hormonal need and available bodies. Not love granted as a reward to pretty girls by powerful men. Or to pretty men by powerful women.

Romance novels are about what hooks (1994) calls "love as a practice of freedom." They are about the kinds of love that are willing to explore differences when one human being spies a speck of humanity in another that they did not expect. Romance novels are about love as a border crossing. The borders lie between two individual, historical subjects. Often they involve the types of borders that confound us so much in our public and personal lives: race, ethnicity, class, gender. Some writers are more skilled than others, certainly, but the stories told in romance novels are inherently and necessarily about transformation.

As a society, we need to learn more about what it means to love as an act of will and choice, and this is the purview of romance novels. It may be fevered glances and glowing smiles that bring romance lovers together, but it is determined practice that keeps them there. The primary message in romance in that love is possible for everyone, the kind of love that is strong enough to build families and communities out of individuals with differences that might just as easily isolate them.

Read the novels, and this becomes apparent. Read Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Kathleen Eagle, Laura Kinsale, Barbara Samuel, Judith Ivory, Loretta Chase, Lynn Kerstan, Pamela Morsi, Connie Brockway, Nora Roberts, Jennifer Crusie, and so many, many more. hooks (1994) writes that the "moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others." The vast majority of evidence I found in romance writers lives demonstrates that they use literacy practices as part of liberatory life practices that understand love as the fundamental basis for action in the world.



hooks, bell. 1994. Outlaw Culture:Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge.

How Lovely Art Thou, Damned Cruel Shoes

L.G.C. Smith

Like every other aspect of material culture, the shoes we choose, wear and keep for decades after we last wore them say something about what matters to us. Or the state of our feet, which is more of an issue for some of us than others.

Here's the thing: I have problem feet. They hurt. A lot. Often. This is a family trait from my mom's side. When I was a kid, as soon as the morning wake-up call sounded, all of us responded with a chorus of "ow, ow, ow, ow, ow" as our poor little feet hit the floor.

We didn't know it then, but we have a loose ligament disorder. My brother has pectus excavatum, which presents as a big dent in the middle of his chest where the ligaments failed to hold his rib cage in the proper position. All of us are pretty bendy. Including our feet and ankles, which, sadly, bodes ill for being able to take more than two steps in high heels. Heck, my sibs and I can fall off tennis shoes on a flat surface.

Added to this, my foot is wide across the toes and narrow in the heel with a really high arch. Very few shoes fit well, and the ones that do tend toward utilitarian at best. My sisters use the word 'ugly.' I haven't been able to wear heels for two and half decades. I keep a pair of high heeled boots I bought and wore three times in 1979. I adored them. They crippled me. Yet I've kept them all these years. Why? So I can look at them every couple of years, and remind myself of what might have been if I'd had stronger feet.

Blisters. How many thousands of them have I had over the years? I always had them as a kid. I can get them in thirty seconds from the wrong shoe. When I realized most people didn't have them all the time, I grew resentful. It's so not fair.


I love boots. Can I wear them? Rarely. I have gargantuan calves, and not just because I'm fat. Then beneath my monster calves I have narrow, weak ankles. Bad combo, I have to tell you. But I keep trying boots. I have a pair of ancient cowboy boots that I wore a lot when I lived in South Dakota. When I still worked at universities, I fantasized about having custom boots made. I even found a place that could do it. But I made do with ankle boots, which, while nice enough, aren't the same as ones that go all the way to the knee (no comment on the over-the-knee boots one sees lately; oh, maybe one comment -- trashy). It's hard to justify custom footwear in a middle-class life with a career that allows pajamas as acceptable work attire.

On top of all the physiological failings of my feet, I've had many bouts of plantar fasciitis. Most of my attempts to develop a regular exercise program (cross-country ski machine, treadmill, even regular walking) end up in long months of excruciating pain and recovery. Now I have exercises that help a lot, but the miseries of PF have left a lasting impression on my shoe wardrobe.

The result of all these foot woes is a boring collection of sensible shoes with wide toe boxes and good arch support. Clarks and New Balance are my cobblers of choice. I will never spend hundreds of dollars on a juicy pair of Jimmy Choos. Stacy and Clinton would kick me off "What Not to Wear" in less time than it takes me to trip in a pair of low-heeled pumps.

I love cute shoes. Elegant shoes. Stratospheric heels. Strappy little sandals. Boots of all sorts. All kinds of shoes. Alas, they don't love me. So for this life, I'm resigned to being happy if my shoes don't look too nasty and I can actually walk in them. Sometimes it's all about scaling down expectations.

Breathe It In

L.G.C. Smith

I'm writing in a Pens vacuum. In the last ten days, while visiting my brother, his family, and my parents, when I had time to myself, I wrote. I didn't spend any time online. Hard to imagine for many, I know, but I'm such a dinosaur I can remember when blow dryers were the sparkly new miracle of modern technology. Now I'm home, but my laptop won't connect to my home network. Gah. I feel lost not having read what Sophie, Rachael, Juliet and Adrienne have written about Muse.

What inspires me? My instinctive answer is too simple: Life. Anything. Everything. I need to try harder.

So I made a list of things from which I've taken inspiration, and it's long. Too long. A fraction of it includes: Trees. Rocks. Ruins. Landscapes. Language. Culture. Changes in all those things. Time. Anything unknown that's left clues about what happened before. Space. Stories. Hidden things. Forgotten words. Will. What makes people sacrifice self-interest to do something that makes someone else's life better?

So many things. Life. Anything. Everything.

The traditional Greek Muses were born of Zeus and Memory, and I feel Memory's influence keenly in what draws my attention. More than her daughters, she prods me. But more than ancient mythology, a medieval sense of pilgrimage defines how I perceive my inspirations. I've spoken here of writing as pilgrimage; a journey with intention. No aimless ramble, however entertaining. A feckless choice of path, however, can be as inspiring as one chosen carefully, as long as it is traveled with intent.

What kind of intent? For me, most often, it's the intent to learn. To pick up rocks to see what they look like on the other side, and what's beneath them. To poke into the sound and meaning of a word, looking at how the individual components, phonetic, morphological, syntactic or semantic influence all the others and are shaped by them in turn. To delve into DNA analysis to see where our ancestors came from long, long years ago.

So that's my answer. My greatest Muse is Pilgrimage, those journeys undertaken with the intent to learn whatever lessons come along, to traverse paths that welcome mystery and tempt me to discover what I do not know. Memory whispers in my ear as I walk, and her daughters dance along with us, different Muses on different pages of each book, each day, each step.

Grumpity Crumpity

L.G.C. Smith

I'm the Grinch of New Year's Resolutions. If I could steal them all and dump them off the top of Mt. Crumpit, I would. Bad enough, I had to break out the last of the Christmas M&Ms (the ones I told the Leezlet had been poisoned by a wicked witch so she wouldn't eat them all in one sitting -- my sister told me not to give her candy; that was my solution; it worked) before I could contemplate writing my grumpy thoughts on resolutions.


For many years, I boycotted resolutions out of the puritanical conviction that anything that was good for us, we should be doing every day. It was weak to need a holiday to spur us on to virtue. Yes, I was a real funster back then. Not that I held others to my strictures yet, but still. Very grinchy-grumpy of me.

My disdain of the New Year's Resolution (NYR) is partly motivated by my own feelings of abject powerlessness in the face of the standard issue NYRs -- exercise more, lose weight, be a better advocate for myself career-wise, blah, blah, blah. I don't hate the idea of resolution as a practice. I make resolutions all the time about all kinds of things from writing every day (three years running now), and learning to bake gluten-free, casein-free treats for my niece with food intolerances. These are not, as a rule, NYRs.

I do hate the idea of NYRs as a social undertaking. There's something unlovely about the earnest zeal on people's faces as they trot off to the the gym in early January. Especially all the thin people who gained six and a half ounces over the holidays and profess deep shame over such indulgence. Are you kidding me?

Or the shopaholics who mournfully vow to reform after discovering three cashmere sweaters from Ross and a non-stick ebelskiver pan hidden in the garage in a plain brown Trader Joe's bag to throw their weary spouses off the trail...what, two, maybe three Christmases ago? Come on, people. An NYR isn't going to help you.

(That's an ebelskiver pan, in case you were wondering, as sold by Williams-Sonoma.)

Real change requires real commitment. Some people put that into their NYRs. Not all that many, as far as I can see. Most folks feel momentarily virtuous, catch themselves electing to read another chapter instead of taking the dog for a walk, think "Remember that resolution. Drat. Ah, next time, good enough." On they go with their sloppy lives, business as usual, content that having made a list of NYRs, they're on the path to a better world. Bah.

Now if people would keep their NYRs private and make them matter, cheers all around. I wish you well as long as I don't have to hear about it. And, for God's sake, don't ask me about mine. I'll steal your last can of Who Hash if you do.

Not Quite a Dab Hand

L.G.C. Smith

I suck at crafts. About a month ago, I mentioned my flat DIY Christmas tree that hangs on an old screen from Cost Plus in my living room. This is my Pride and Joy, Craft Department. Unlike many of the Pens -- Sophie with her beautiful quilts and stitchery and Rachael with her stunning sweaters come to mind -- I don't have much to show and tell about when it comes to crafts. (I have to pad things with a photo of something I can do well, which is cook. Hence the caramel corn I made today. Ta-Da!)

But once, ONCE I made something glorious that wasn't food. Something I loved. Something I designed, made, and used. (Never mind those books I've written. We're talking things with tiny screws that require tools here!)

My flat tree consists of three pieces of bamboo painted green and wired into a triangle with red wooden beads and Costco ribbon zigzagging back and forth across the middle. It has rosemary branches attached to the edges, a sassy nod to pine needles, and it was outlined in lights that actually worked. I hung my favorite ornaments on it and it was cute. Sort of like the plastic plate I glued macaroni to and spray painted gold when I was in first grade. (Can you believe my mother threw that out? Before I was forty even.)

Now? My flat tree is a little past it's sell-by date. The rosemary long ago dried to a crackly crunch, and most of the leaves fell to the floor where some are still lodged in the crack between the carpet and the baseboard. They have to be picked out by hand. Since my vacuum can't budge 'em, I decided to keep them around in case I need some stale old rosemary for spaghetti sauce for someone I hate.

The gently draped ribbon, once as white as winter snow, is now dingy with dust. I do vacuum it occasionally, but the suction from the attachment hose seems to have loosened the knots affixing the ribbon to the frame. (See how I used 'affixing?' I watch HGTV. I know things.) Some of the ribbon swags are kind of droopy, but that adds character, right?

The lights... Oh, the lights. A few of them still come on. I thought about replacing them a couple of years ago, but I was afraid the whole tree would fall apart if I jiggled any part of it. Always better to be conservative in housekeeping matters, I say. Even if it's broke, why fix it?

For the past three years, I've tied Advent presents to the tree for my niece. This winter, unfortunately, I'm not sure it isn't harboring a black widow spider come in from the cold. We've had a lot of them this year, and it's been a while, like, mmm, maybe nine months -- okay, make it a year -- since that corner has been cleaned. I put the Advent prezzies in a bowl on the coffee table in the family room instead, and have kept Clean the Scary Living Room Corner at the top of my To Do list since the day after Thanksgiving. I'm pleased to report that I've cleaned all around that corner a couple of times since, but...Spiders. Gah.

So here I am, still fond of my decrepit flat Christmas tree. It took me eight hours to make the thing. I got green paint all over my clothes, my hair, the patio and my sister's German Shepherd, Elsa. She was cool about it, and still cheerfully helps me whenever I look like I might be heading for the paint cupboard, just like she never spent a December sporting one green ear.

Sad to say, I think this may be the year the Craft Project of Christmas Past bites the dust. As lackluster in the cleaning department as I am, I do know black widows and children should not be in the house together. When the real tree comes down, I'm thinking my old friend will be coming down, too.

I'll reuse the beads and ribbon, strip off the wire and put the bamboo stakes back in the garden supply pile. The wall behind the screen will need a little work to cover up that ugly incident with the double-sided tape. No hurry of course. The mess will remind me of my flat tree.
In the meantime, I'm weighing my options for the next Craft Project. With only one allowed in any decade, I have to think carefully. There's the clunky headboard I've been meaning to spruce up for, let's see, about nine years. Or the ugly fake brick in the kitchen that I've hated since we moved in -- what fourteen years ago? Or maybe I could decoupage Disney Princesses and Dora onto sturdy little chairs for my rough and tumble nieces. Who knows? I think it's going to take me a good two years to decide on a worthy follow-up for my flat tree.

Place Names Rock

L.G.C. Smith


Place names are my research passion. When I've been to a place that moves me, a place that begs me to write a book set there, I go to maps. I trace rivers and hills, valleys and plains. I learn their names. Over and over I hear them in my head. I chant them under my breath, and soon a story takes shape, a tale born of a particular landscape in a particular time.

Then I dive into history and archeology to see if what I'm dreaming up makes sense. One such saga I've spent a lot of words and years developing came out of the landscapes of western Cornwall where one line of my mother's family originally came from.


Oh, the research orgy that ensued. I became fixed on the end of Roman Britain, even though all I knew about it was that it had existed. I'd have been hard-pressed to give more than the most general dates. I didn't know much about Cornwall, either, but the place names sang in my head. Crowan, Crenver, Perranuthnoe and Drym. Helston, Germoe, Marazion and Hayle. Gwinear, Godolphin, St. Ives and St. Erth. Gwithian, Goldsithney, and Gweek. More. Many, many more.

I started with the language, working my way up from the little Shire Books sold in every tourist haunt, the ones filled with Cornish place name elements, to whatever I could find on the structures and sounds of Cornish as it had been before it died out in the late 18th - early 19th centuries. Then I branched into Breton and Welsh, and, eventually, into proto-Welsh, or the p-Celtic British dialects spoken in much of Britain before the Anglo-Saxons came. Even with a pretty hard-core background in linguistics, I found it rough going.

The history, archeology, and folk lore angles were easier, but Cornwall didn't appear in many Roman-era records so the history was thin. The Roman road network that reached into so many corners of Britain didn't seen to have made it out to Land's End. They probably used boats. Archeology was more promising, but again, there were very few Roman finds. Iron Age villages were better represented, like the one at Chysauster, so at least there was something. It appears that Cornwall was, at the end of Roman Britain, well removed from the hustle and bustle of Roman administrative, civic, and commercial activity.



This was all perfect for the historical fantasy books I was writing. I needed a backwater, the butt-end of the Empire, where passionate men and women were free to indulge ambitions and emotions unchecked, though not unaffected by civilization.

Yet for all the study I've done in this area, there is one tidbit that tickles me all out of proportion to its relevance to my novels -- which is zero. But it came out of my fascination with place names.


Somewhere in the midst of all this research, a friend told me that one of her ancestral Cornish names was Trecembo, which sounded a lot like Tregembo, a place I knew of in western Cornwall. I remembered Tregembo Hill because my sister, my parents and I were nearly flattened by a speeding semi in the middle of the road there, which was far too narrow for a large truck to be taking at sixty. Anyway, I deduced that my friend's family must have originated at a place called Trecembo in eastern Cornwall. Based on all my research, I knew that people continued speaking Cornish in the west much later than in the east; as a result, sound changes continued to take place in the west, leaving older forms of the language fossilized in eastern Cornish place names.


The [g] in the middle of Tregembo must have originally been the [c] found in Trecembo (pronounced like /k/). The prefix, tre- is quintessentially Cornish, meaning 'home place' or 'farm,' frequently followed by a personal name or a descriptive term.


I recall thinking about all this while brushing my teeth one night. I ran the words over and over in my head. Tregembo Hill lies in the sharp, almost ninety-degree turn in the River Hayle. When I finished brushing, I put my hands on my hips and repeated the two names over a few more times. They sounded awfully similar to something else that I couldn't quite put my finger on.


All of a sudden, I found myself imagining the map of Tregembo Hill just east of Relubbus. I saw the same angle in my elbows in the mirror, and I got it: Akimbo. A bent elbow. Tregembo. Trecembo. The place where the river bends like an elbow. Different prefxes, same root. I checked my Welsh and proto-celtic dictionaries just to be sure. Yup. -cambo comes from a root meaning bent or crooked.


The word 'akimbo' seems to have baffled etymologists. I'm convinced it's not derived from Swahili or Dutch or whatever else the official Word Wizards posit it might be. It's an old British word that came from either Cornish or Welsh, or whatever came before them.


How fun is that?! Research. Ahhh. I love it.

L.G.C. Smith

I love the winter holidays. There are so many directions I could take this, and I have to pick just one? Oh, to be Martha Stewart and have decades worth of television segments in which to develop my vision of the holidays.

Food. Decorating ideas. Crafts (though I know my limitations here). I could write about safety tips for lighting real candles on the Christmas tree -- yes, I light 'em up when I have a fresh enough tree, or I want to scare someone.

There are all my slow food old-fashioned holiday recipes, and my new-fangled gluten-free ones. The picture above is a slow and GF Buche de Noel I made last year. There's my abstract Advent gift tree made from bamboo stakes, ribbon, and wooden beads, glue-gunned and tied together, then hung on a shoji screen.

Or, I could go the cultural commentary route. A childhood spent moving between American suburbs and non-standard places like Guam and assorted Indian reservations makes it easy to notice cultural weirdities. Like the enthusiastic Christmas light displays filled with Santas, reindeer, snowmen, and elves that filled the Filipino and Korean contract-worker housing enclaves in the tropical Western Pacific. Or my mother-in-law's 'stuffing,' which consists of tiny cubes of buttered, baked white bread. Nothing else. Bizarre.

Or the way we have these competing public conversations about holidays whereby the exact same experiences inspire loving behavior of the highest order in some folks, and angry condemnations of hypocrisy and gross consumerism in others. Or, why it becomes a mark of a more sophisticated holiday aesthetic to forego the classic Santa-suit red and Christmas-tree green color palette for, say, pink and turquoise. I can go highbrow or low. It's all good.

I could go the spiritual route because I love that stuff, and you can get away with it in public sometimes during the holidays. No matter what one's religious affiliation or lack thereof, holiday good-will embraces all comers. And personally, I love Advent. Love , love, love it.

When I was a kid, my mom made sure we always had an advent wreath. The year I was seven, my Sunday School class at the Presbyterian church in Window Rock, Arizona, I made a red construction paper cover for a tiny Advent book of folded, mimeographed pages. Inside was a Bible reading, a Christmas carol, and a single simple sentence that a second grader could memorize to say as we lit each week's Advent candle.

The next Christmas, my aunt gave us another little book called the "Advent Chain of Stars." It had a paper star to cut out and hang on a wide ribbon, one for every day of Advent, along with a little story to go along with it. For years we used these two simple books every day of every Advent season, and I loved the way the created the anticipation of waiting for a promise from God. I wouldn't say my sense of God is quite what it was then, but those daily, family observances of Advent helped me find deeper meanings to Christmas. They still do.

No, I haven't decided what to write about. I find so many holiday ideas, images and icons productive and fun to play with. Like a total sap, I know I'll catch myself singing "It's the most wonderful time of the year" as I put together the gingerbread house with my sister and her daughter, all the while thinking about cultural reproduction and negotiation.

Fandom in the Midlands

L.G.C. Smith

Fan girls evolve. What we love changes through different stages of our lives. Last week, the Leezlet, age 3 ½, and I, age mumbledyflump, each got to indulge our deepest passions. The Leezlet got to meet Thomas the Tank Engine in person at Drayton Manor Theme Park near Tamworth, Staffordshire. I visited the early Anglo-Saxon stone carvings at the priory church of St. Mary and St. Hardulph at Breedon-on-the-Hill in Leicestershire and I attended one day of the St. Wilfrid conference at York Minster.

Thomas the Tank Engine

We were happy, happy Fan Girls.

There’s not really much to tell. The expression on the Leezlet’s face as she anticipates her first ride in Clarabelle, one of Thomas’s coaches, captures what both of us felt to a tee.

The left photo is of the interior at St. Mary and St. Hardulph, and the right one is of one of the sculptures. The church guide says it is probably a woman because the head is covered. I love her. :)

Gene Pool Tour 4

L.G.C. Smith

This week I’m ignoring our designated topic to write about the journey I’m embarking on Wednesday. I’m going to England, mostly, though dipping a toe into Wales and an elbow into The Borders of Scotland.

The best part is that I’m going for seven weeks.

You read that right. Seven weeks. Excess is my middle name.

In November of 2002 my parents, my sister, Sarah, and I took the first of what we call our Gene Pool Tours of Britain. We have a lot of English, Cornish and Scottish ancestry, so we decided it would be fun to see where umpteen generations of our forebears had lived. We started by visiting the parishes that bear our surname in England and Crowan Parish in Cornwall where some of my mother’s family came from.

The following autumn, my mother and I went back to Cornwall and tracked down her ancestors in churchyards between Hayle and Penzance. The photos here are from that trip. That’s a picture of my mother at Tintern Abbey.

Three years ago, my parents and I went again, this time to the Southeast and Cumbria. We visited places our ancestors had lived, almost all of which have silly names like Bletchingley and Dorking. I find myself maybe not quite proud, but sort of impressed that both my parents have ancestors who lived in Dorking. This, I suppose, makes me a double dork. But perhaps everyone already knew that.

Gene Pool Tour #4 will be a family trip, too. My parents and my sister and her daughter are coming, as well as one of my cousins, the brilliant and talented writer and artist, Natalie Sudman. We’ll have a week in the Midlands (don’t ask – it has to do with my dad and his time share points), a week in Yorkshire, and a week in Northumberland checking out the homelands of the seventh-century Bernician dyna

sty that inspired my Warlord Kings series.

Mom, Dad, Sarah and the Leezlet (that’s my niece) leave the tour at the end of September. At that point, Natalie and I will rendezvous with a trio of ultra-stupendously brilliant and talented writers, Alicia Rasley, Judith Stanton, and Lynn Kerstan for a week in a small village in County Durham. After that, Natalie and I will wend our way southwestward toward Cornwall, conducting a loosely structured Stone Circle and Used Bookstores Detour. Then comes a week in Cornwall within spitting distance of the houses our great-great grandfather and his cousins lived in a hundred and fifty years ago.

Despite all the coming and going and toing and froing, a journey like this is, above all else, a pilgrimage. I’ve been dreaming of this trip since I came home from the last one with new questions and ideas. I’ve studied: history, Old English, Welsh, church history, archaeology. I’ve poured over maps. I’ve formulated hypotheses about everything from who Æthelfrith of Bernicia’s mother might have been to why having loose ligaments might be of benefit to hard rock miners.

It’s almost time for the magic of walking new paths and meeting new people, time to listen to the voices my preparation has invited. Some may be the whispers of those long dead. Most will come from the wild array

of accents and opinions of 21^st century Brits. For the next two months, I’ll be sharing what I hear.

Peach Season

L.G.C. Smith

In the summer, food in my house is all about fruit. My sister, Sarah Coddington, co-owns one of the premier stone fruit farms in the country – screw modesty, the world-- Frog Hollow Farm, with her ex-husband and business partner, Al Courchesne. Frog Hollow Farm grows the sweetest, ripest peaches, nectarines, apricots, cherries, plums, pluots, pears and asian pears imaginable. Ever watch Iron Chef America? One of their frequent judges, Jeffrey Steingarten, once wrote that Frog Hollow Farm peaches were the best he could find.

Right now, my kitchen table is covered with bowls full of O’Henry and Cal Red peaches, Summer Fire nectarines, Flavor King pluots, and more. The dusty tang of ripe peaches permeates the room, the quintessential scent of a California summer.

The farm, in one form or another, has been in our family for almost ninety years. A cousin of my great-grandmother’s, Clara Smith, and her nephew, Clinton, bought it in the 1920s, and they grew apricots and cherries. In the Depression Years of the late 1930s, my grandparents, South Dakota teachers who didn’t get paid in the summer, packed my dad and his brother into the car and made the six-day trek to California. They worked in the orchards with the Okies and Arkies. When they returned home in August, they filled every free space in the car with canned and dried fruit. My dad was three and a half when he first lived in a tent in the orchard and built pretend airplanes out of wooden fruit boxes and tree props.

Shortly after we moved to the Bay Area in 1971, my dad trundled all of us in the car and headed for ‘the ranch,’ as it was called then. He didn’t so much as glance at a map though he hadn’t been there since he was ten years old, and he drove straight to Clinton’s. For the next fifteen years, Clinton, now an elderly bachelor with a penchant for travel and an impressive rifle collection, was a big part of our lives.

When Sarah and Al were first married, Al was farming on 13 acres next to Clinton’s place. My dad helped Clinton sell Sarah and Al a good portion of his land. It was tangled up in a complicated legal arrangement, and no mean feat to accomplish, but Frog Hollow Farm was born out of that transaction. Sarah and Al went organic in the late 1980s, and neither of them has wavered for a second in their commitment to sustainable agriculture and growing healthy, delicious fruit.

The best way to eat a peach is fresh at room temperature. To my mind, there’s no better breakfast than plain Greek yogurt topped with a sliced peach and a sprinkle of toasted almonds. Heaven. Cooking a ripe peach is practical criminal.

If you’re blessed with an abundance of peaches, here’s my favorite summer Peach Ice Cream recipe.

Peach Ice Cream

Makes about 2 quarts.

Ingredients:

3 cups organic half and half

1 1/2 cups organic cream (not ultra pasteurized)

half a vanilla bean

3/4 cup sugar

pinch of kosher salt

2 cups Frog Hollow Farm peach puree

Instructions:

Heat the half and half, cream, and vanilla bean in a heavy saucepan to 175°F, or a bare simmer, stirring often so it heats evenly. Immediately take the pan off the heat and remove the vanilla bean. Split it with a paring knife and scrape the seeds back into the hot half and half and cream. Add the sugar and a pinch of salt, stirring to dissolve. Let cool fifteen minutes or so while you prepare the peaches.

Wash and pit three or four large Frog Hollow Farm peaches. There’s no need to peel them unless you prefer them that way. Slice the peaches into a blender and puree until they’re nearly smooth. Stir the puree into the half and half and cream. (If the cream is too hot, the acid in the peaches may slightly curdle it. This is fine. ) Taste and adjust the sugar to your palate. The sweetness will vary depending on how sweet the peaches are.

Refrigerate the ice cream mix overnight, or for at least 6 hours. Aging it improves the flavor, and it has to go into the ice cream maker cold for optimal texture.

Process in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s directions. It should take 15-20 minutes to finish. Transfer the frozen ice cream into a chilled glass or hard plastic container, cover tightly, and place in the freezer for at least an hour before serving. For hard ice cream, leave it several hours.

Serve with fresh peach slices and a few berries for a simple summer sundae.

Note: When fresh peaches aren’t available, you can use Frog Hollow Farm Peach Conserve in place of the fresh peach puree. Either add it straight from the jars, or give it a whirl in the blender first.