Storytorch

In retirement, people often find time to do the things they never bothered with when busier. On Friday afternoon for example, my husband Mark was concocting a marinade for steaks we planned to grill later when he ran across TWO bottles of cayenne on the spice shelf, one that looked new, and another quaintly packaged.

"I think I moved this box of crab boil spices up from Texas when we got married," he observed. "And it might have old then," I called back from my sewing room, "nine years ago!" Soon Mark was operating at full throttle, unloading the cupboard onto the kitchen countertop, opening jars, sniffing, sneezing, and coughing.

Despite task resistance, I soon came aboard. I filled the sink with sudsy water and retrieved empty plastic, glass, and metal containers from the trash barrel as Mark tossed them in, emptying the dry, compacted contents, coughing along with him, and washing everything up.

McCormick's new jars have black, snap-up lids. The green-lidded ones are the oldies. Anything Schilling in a little oblong, metal tin is toast, but the Watkins 100% organic ground cinnamon, with text in French as well, that's new, nostalgia packaging. If there's no Web site address, toss it for sure.

Today's Fortune Cookie Fortune:
Wine bottles in your recycling bin will be outnumbered this week.

As anyone paying attention is aware, newspapers are having a hard time staying in business these days. Online media sources keep edging out traditional print journalism, a situation the current movie State of Play addresses as part of its entertaining plot.

My husband Mark and I have noticed the Des Moines Register, Iowa's largest newspaper, getting thinner—recently by scratching the New York Times Daily Crossword! Sure, the Register ran the puzzles a week behind their actual premiers in the Times, but out here in Winterset, Iowa, we didn't mind.

If you're a crossword fan, you know that the Monday Times puzzle is super simple. Grids get progressively harder each day. Friday and Saturday are true brain challenges that Mark and I love to tackle.

With images of the fictitious Washington DC newspaper's economic struggles in State of Play still fresh in mind, I could understand the Des Moines paper cutting costs by dropping the Times' puzzle. Feeling guilty, I considered how rarely we actually buy the daily Register. Instead, we pick up abandoned copies at the coffee shop, or earn one free by buying gas at a local convenience store. As for the New York Times, I receive its headlines every morning free (!) on my laptop. Hey, they offered!

On Mother's Day, after completing the Times' Sunday Crossword (also a week behind but still carried) in the Sunday Des Moines Register (to which we subscribe), I spent $40 to receive the the Times Daily Crossword online. The price works out to about .10 per puzzle if one downloads each day. I now pay for the right to print the puzzles on my own paper, using my own toner cartridge and electricity.

Today's Fortune Cookie Fortune:
You will respond to the dictates of your conscience.

Trees have been in bloom all around Winterset and Madison County the past few weeks. Flowering crab apples, plum trees, and red buds wear mantles of snowy white and robust pink. Gentle breezes from day to day send delicate petals to the ground as the trees work through their seasonal cycle.

This morning when I opened our front door to let the day in, blossoms from our crab apple in the yard were drifting across the sidewalk, falling onto and dotting the concrete exactly like giant snowflakes.

During my recent visit to New York, that city's trees were also blooming. In every park and in open squares of pavement on every sidewalk, New York was ablossom. On my last afternoon, I stopped by the little public triangle across the street from Macy's department store to call my daughter Hannah. The park was full of people chatting in pairs at square metal tables, reading newspapers on benches, and walking through with their dogs.

As I took a chair and dialed Hannah to make our evening plans, I was entertained by a peppy city employee making rounds with a short broom and pop-out dustpan. The park pavement was covered in white petals, and a breeze was constantly sending down more. Still, the compact Hispanic man clad in a navy blue uniform worked vigorously, creating little mounds of blossoms with his broom and sweeping them into his pan.

Had he been at it since first thing in the morning? Or was he simply energetic at the start of his shift? Was his assignment cigarette butts, or was he after the petals?

Hannah answered her phone, and the busy gentleman moved on down the park, sweeping as he went.

Today's Fortune Cookie Fortune:
You will nominate someone for Employee of the Month.

In the South of France, not far from Avignon, two small companies still produce classic eighteenth century French indiennes, printed cotton fabrics so named because French artisans used printing techniques that came, to Provence, via Marseilles, from India. So popular were these delightfully delicate French florals, stripes, and dots, the fabric style is known still today as Provençal.

The factory of Les Olivades is in St. Etienne du Gres. Inside a single-story building at the end of a shady lane, French men in framboise T-shirts and jeans use semi-mechanized silk screens to turn out border-print tablecloths. Each color requires a separate screen. Roller-printing machines also produce yardage in colors beautiful enough to make a quilter weep.

Near Tarascon, Souleiado is headquartered in a circa 1806 chateau. Souleiado's indiennes are now produced elsewhere, so the chateau is a museum filled with antique fabrics, sample books, costumes, wood-and-metal printing blocks, tableware, and furniture. The term souleiado, according to the short video available in English in the salon, means "the moment the sun comes out."

During the past month, spring has been reluctant to arrive in the Midwest; yesterday in southern Iowa, though, the sun came out and stayed all day. The exact shade of sky blue in the afternoon reminded me of the sky over the courtyard at Souleiado.

Using my computer, I checked the international weather report.

Tarascon: 22º (73º Fahrenheit), and clear.

Today's Fortune Cookie Fortune:
You will remember standing under a similar sky.

Having grown up in the semi-tropical climate of Houston and having stood in an Iowa cornfield during more than one July, I should have have been prepared for the atmosphere of the Bikram Yoga studio. Perhaps, like waiting for a bus in a snowstorm, the moment and the memory just aren't the same.

Jeans and jackets on over our spandex, my daughter Hannah and I made the twelve-minute walk from her East Village apartment to 172 Allen in the Lower East Side on sidewalks crowded, as always in Manhattan, with pedestrians. That Thursday evening, many were probably headed to delightful 8 p.m. dinner dates. Hannah and I, fasting pre-yoga, had by then fully metabolized our 5:30 pieces of peanut-buttered toast.

The studio, up a flight of stairs and populated with yogis and yoginis pulling their mats from the mat bin, was comfortably warm in the reception area. I signed a three-page waiver, paid $22 for session, towel, and water, stripped off my outer clothes in the ladies' locker room, and followed Hannah down the hall to the class space.

We packed in, not like sardines, but like club-cracker hors d'oeuvres, rectangles lined up on a baking sheet in evenly-spaced rows. Two feet from Hannah, I stacked towel atop my mat, sat down, and worked on breathing in a tank of dense, 105-degree, 40%-humidity air. Soon, instructor Carrie began coaching us through the opening sets of standing poses, including Half Moon, Eagle, Bow, and Tree, exhorting us by name to "reach back, stretch back, push back, more back."

Forty minutes in, I was feeling not-so-hot. Maturely holding my nausea at bay, I knelt and returned to deep breathing. "All you have to do is stay in the room," Hannah had told me.

Breathing under stress reminded me of childbirth, and I soothed my bruised ego by remembering how I hopped off the delivery table and walked to my hospital room after each of my three daughters was born. "I am the only one here pushing sixty," I noted. None were even pushing fifty, but all were actively pushing their bodies from one beautiful asana into the next, reaching for the ceiling, the back wall, the floor.

Hannah, in rabbit pose, checked on me with side glances. "Nope, not passing out," my expression replied.

Picking up pizza slices and sorbet on our walk home, we laughed and compared notes—the slipperiness of our ankles, the kindness of the instructor who opened the door slightly to let in a little cool air toward the end of the ninety minutes, the amazing bendy-ness of the long-time practitioners.

"You were fabulous, Nan," I told her.

"So were you, Mama."

Today's Fortune Cookie Fortune:
Your children will consider you a good sport.