The poetry of seasonal change in everyday life (the AI-suggested title for my post today)

But no comments on the glory of spring or the weight of cherry blossoms on the tree or a haiku. However, the Haiku Generator https://www.haiku-generator.com/came up with this:

A tree burdened low,

Cherry blossoms in twilight grief,

Heavy skies above.

I tried again with better, more upbeat results:

Cherry blooms paint sky,

Pink whispers of spring's embrace,

Hope in each petal.

Tax Day Today - we almost forgot to send in our usual delayed extension request. Even though we have someone else fill out the forms, we cannot manage to get the documents in on time. Probably because we always have to pay something. Or do they even care these days? Now, if any of my writing earned a dollar or two, maybe I'd be more excited about publication.

Latest essay from my memoir pondering the vagaries of memory is here: https://watershedreview.com/nonfiction/mary-kay-feather/

I sat down to write to you feeling perky post pool only to encounter a cursed plumbing disaster which Himself had decided to fix but, at this point, we have to call in the plumber brothers who know our kitchen as well as we do. My fault. I tossed old stale spices down the sink assuming the grinder and running water would render them disposable but they clumped. All the way down. The brothers sound like they just arrived from Brooklyn and one is an opera fan.

It has been a week - do troubles really come in threes? First his computer went down. Second I disabled the coffee grinder. Third, my attack on the kitchen drain.disposal. But if it's only my actions, there's another one on the way!

Probably all we need is a dose of this:

Don't know this man from the demo last week but love his shirt.

Two podcasts consistently entertain bookish me: one is Backlisted which features older rediscovered books (lately Kazuo Ishiguro, Sybille Bedford, Hannah Arendt, Lore Segal, Norman Lewis, Melville, Dostoevsky, etc.) and the other is two guys talking about translated books, usually, on The Mookse and the Gripes. I subscribe through Patreon but they are available on the usual services. Today the latter was recommending the short novels of Norwegian Hanne Ørstavik for her brilliant, emotionally precise novels: The Blue Room, Love, The Pastor, Ti Amo and Stay With Me, all from Archipelago. In the past, they sent me to the works of Claudia Pinheiro and Elena Knows about a mother suffering from Parkinson's who's convinced her daughter's suicide was murder and traverses Buenos Aires seeking the culprit. Short and propulsive. They seek out books from interesting small presses like Archipelago, Charco Press, Dorothy; they also do film reviews and catalog The New Yorker fiction.

Watched a good documentary on creativity about a young artist in Paris who goes to a prestigious art school and tries to get recognition without selling her soul; the filmmaker follows her for thirteen years. Oscar nominee called Apolonia, Apolonia.

What are you reading? Watching? Did you get through Adolescence? Capitulate to White Lotus? We watched both just so we could keep up with the NYT Style Section!

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CELERY has so little glamor that I usually ignore it except stuffed with peanut butter or cream cheese. But we keep trying to up the vegetable intake and I found this recipe on Food 52 which was delicious, really:

Marcella Hazan's Braised Celery with Onion Pancetta & Tomatoes

• 2 pounds celery

• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

• 1 1/2 cups onions sliced very thin

• 2/3 cup pancetta, cut into strips

• 3/4 cup canned plum tomatoes, coarsely chopped, with their juice

• Salt

• Freshly ground black pepper

Directions

1. Cut off the celery's leafy tops, saving the leaves for another use, and detach all the stalks from their base. Use a peeler to pare away most of the strings, and cut the stalks into pieces about 3 inches long (cutting on a diagonal looks nice). Alternately, if you plan on cooking long past tender (an hour or more), you can skip peeling the strings.

2. Put the oil and onion in a saute pan, and turn on the heat to medium. Cook and stir the onion until it wilts completely and becomes colored a light gold, then add the pancetta strips.

3. After a few minutes, when the pancetta's fat loses its flat, white uncooked color and becomes translucent, add the tomatoes with their juice, the celery, salt, and pepper, and toss thoroughly to coat well. Adjust heat to cook at a steady simmer, and put a cover on the pan. After 15 minutes check the celery, cooking it until it feels tender when prodded with a fork. The longer you cook them, the softer and sweeter they will become. If while the celery is cooking, the pan juices become insufficient, replenish with 2 to 3 tablespoons of water of juice from the canned tomatoes as needed. If on the contrary, when the celery is done, the pan juices are watery, uncover, raise the heat to high, and boil the juices away rapidly.