Thomas Jefferson's Vanilla Ice Cream

2 quarts heavy cream
1 vanilla bean
6 large egg yolks
1 cup sugar

1. Bring the cream and vanilla bean to a simmer in a heavy bottomed saucepan over medium-low heat. Stir frequently until fragrant--about 5 minutes. Whisk egg yolks in a bowl until smooth and whisk in sugar. Mixture will be thick.

2. Slowly beat about 1 cup of the hot cream into the egg yolks and gradually stir this egg mixture into the hot cream. Cook, stirring constantly until lighly thickened--enought to coat the back of a spoon--about 5 minutes. Strain the custard through a double layer of cheesecloth or a fine strainer--and remove vanilla bean. stir until slightly cooled. Cover and refrigerate until chilled--at least 1 hour or overnight.

3. Freeze the custard in an ice cream machine according to the manufacturere's directions until set but still a little soft. Scoop the ice cream into a 3-quart mold, or several smaller molds, running a spatula through the ice cream and tapping the mold firmly to remove any air bubbles. Fill the molds completely. Cover and freeze until set, about 2-4 hours.

Recovery

There is no miraculous day.
One bleeds into another,
fibers of the soul clash and tear
and scar and rip and heal.

There is no day to look back upon
and say, "that was it."
It either happens or it doesn't
or you end up somewhere in between.

You can't say Saturday the 14th,
not until twenty or thirty years later
and then what do you know
beyond the air you breath.

People tell strangers
but they don't like to talk to the one's they love
about pain.

Do you know the taste of hot, ladled soup
when it's -44 below?

Life

Step onto the gray ice.
Is it thick or thin?
Carefully slide toward the horizon.
Ice bubbles, a rough surface.
When did it freeze like that.
3:32am two Thurday's ago?
Nature's photograph.
An icy gunshot reports across the lake.
Souls wake at the sound.
Some have fallen in.
Each step, at least, provides an answer.

A Day at the Farm (1993)

Grandpa says he lived in this white farm house for some sixty-three years. Time passes and all is not the same, but as we made the turn off of the highway and onto the stretch of gravel, a part of the past came to life.

The fields on this February day are covered with snow, which pleases grandpa. As he says, there is nothing worse than watching your field blow away. The snow cover prevents this nightmare. It also adds needed moisture to the soil.

Somehow I can see him working the fields which were his life and love, as if it were 1950 or 1962 or 1974. I ask him how many hours he thinks he has spent sweating in the summer heat, praying for a good crop. He smiles and says he's wondered that himself.

The sky today is pure and light blue. The winter sun shines brightly on the spring like day. For a long uninterrupted moment, I see myself on grandpa's tractor, I see the black earth stretch as far as my eyes can see. I hear grandma calling me for lunch. I wish for the strength to work a day from dawn til I can no longer see. My friends are my family and an occasional visit from neighbors. The World Series comes to me over a crackling radio, and I must imagine all that I hear. Outside the house are the sounds of the winds and of the thunder, which often last into the night. I see myself look out of the window of the house, which today I can only look into.

The snow makes it hard to get around to the barn and to the old tree where my mother once played on a swing. I make a path so grandpa can join me. I go to the front door because its beauty is magnificent and because I can see the hands of my family open and close it as they did long ago. Grandpa tells me the back door was used most, so I join him back by the bush that is home to the bees during summer months.

On a near window are two thermometers. They must have been looked at and relied upon as much as television and the Weather Channel are today. A rain gauge stands atop a post not far away in the yard. What would have grandpa talked about over breakfast and coffee if not for its ability to count the rain?

I look in one of the windows and see my mother and her sisters around the kitchen table. I wonder how many times they have looked out my way at the fields, into the night. The upstairs windows must have been places to look out at the world and dream. I wonder what has taken me to a place once so full of life?

The barn stands back behind a row of trees. I trudge through the snow to get to it. Much of it is empty, but somehow memories remain. Oil stains an old swather, and sun shines eagerly through a window. This must have been quite a place when it was used so frequently.

As I look over the place with grandpa from our view in the car I feel so much of what must be in his heart and mind. Our two hours fast gone, it is time to return to Grand Forks. Grafton will provide us with a snack and some time to remember more, but it too moves by quickly. I know we will be back again.

Just outside Grand Forks grandpa tells me he never dreamt as a young man that he'd ever meet a woman so kind, intelligent, and warm as Georgia. I smile and say I've wondered myself how I was so lucky that grandpa was so lucky.

All the stories flood my mind as we drive our last mile, and I can no longer remember if 1961 was a year that it snowed a lot, didn't rain enough, or passed without significance. Grandpa seems to remember every year, every day. He tells me of 29 inches of snow in one falling, of politics, people and places. None seem as significant as the one we just visited.

I write my memories as I listen to music from a movie titled Stealing Home. It seems so appropriate. Grandpa writes about the house, "Nothing is as full as a life filled with love." Now I understand why the trip down that gravel road to the fast aging white house came to life so much for me. It is our lives, together, and our love that will stand in those fields and in my mind much longer than the sun will ever rise and set. So I visit the day eighty years ago when it began, and I will never stop going back.

My life

I have kayaked the Missouri and read Hemingway on a sandbar under the raining hot sun.

I dream of floating from Pick City to Bismarck, camped out overnight along the way. See that old stump fire sparkle in the night from the far hills?

I have read thirty books, but want to count a 100 titles in less than a year. Steinbeck, Cather, Forster, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Oppenheimer. I can start a conversation and talk for two hours about books, ideas, people and places. Erdrich, Bellow, McCarthy, Burton, Speer, and Weizel.

Make that six.

The Elkhorn Ranch is sublime. I love the bend of the river, the jagged buttes, and haggard trees. The beauty of imagination lives in that valley.

Bullion Butte must not escape me. I see it in the horizon. Things must look different from the top. There's Little Heart Butte, and Crown Butte, and the Square Buttes. I must make a list of 10, and cross them off. You will be with me.

Let's sleep on the pontoon, sip wine into the night.

Heirloom tomatoes, such beauty. They will grow in the garden this year. Wait until we slice in September, a juicy kaleidoscope.

Surround yourself with life and I will do the same. Quiver for the quaking aspen, hearts beat for the butterfly bush. Hummingbirds how do you fly backward? I hear you Mary Oliver, words play within me. And oh, cottonwoods in a breeze how you dance with delight.

There is so much to do. Tonight I will turn a page, and then another. The creep toward 100. I'll dream of that sandbar, watching Orion sweep across the blackened sky.

Join me on the boat.

I'll close my eyes, thinking of Lawrence, Eliot, and Rand, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Conrad. Are you smirking Billy Collins? This is only the beginning.

Art, light and life

I love light, how my eye moves to it in art and in life. I love lights aesthetics and its energy. Like the curve of a smile, I am drawn to it. Like my new favorite painting by Van Gogh (Enclosed Field With Rising Sun), it bursts in my heart and awakens my soul.

I am now most aware of light. It is October, and each day it swings more quickly into the horizon. But in fall light seems extravagant in sight and feel. It frames colorful leaves and ripening apples, and falls softly on fields of golden stubble. Like a cake dripping in chocolate, it is rich in taste and texture.

Light can come unexpectedly. Two clouds part. A trio of quaking aspens filter the shimmering sun by a park. The moon outlines the curves of whitecaps on the river.

Sometimes light comes in the pages of books. I like what Marilynne Robinson says in Gilead about light within light, a flickering candle set in the warmth of a rising sun. I think of my soul within all of humanity.

The other night, the light-soul of life began to creep into the pages of Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow. 'Grun-tu-molani," says a character from an African tribe. It's the desire to live despite challenges faced.

We battle our humanness, looking for light in our lives, feeling our way through darkness. A poet I am reading (Charles Baudelaire) says it's natural for people to fail and lust and envy. He says sinning comes naturally. That is darkness. It is work to be good. Truth and honesty, compassion and hope come at a price. That is light, and light feels so good.

I want to open a favorite red wine, a Mondavi merlot and gently fill my glass. I'll wait for a gripping sunset, one that steals my eyes. I'll stand guard for the perfect occasion, waiting to see the jagged horizon in the distance and feel the wind. Then I'll lift the deep color before me into the light of the sun and fill the red lips of my soul.

How I long to be like the titan Prometheus. I want to steal fire from Zues, and bring light to all lives.

The importance of coffee

Grandma grew up near the Tamarac River in northern Minnesota. It was seven miles in two directions to the nearest towns, and the only way to get to Stephen or Argyle was by horse or by foot.

She says Bill and Jerry used to build rafts for the river, as most brothers would, but she preferred to swim. Of course the woods were close, too. She remembers the berries. There were chokecherries, juneberries, wild cranberries, plums, one place with raspberries, and some spots with wild grapes. Great grandma Laura used to put the grape leaves inside each jar of pickles. She made the brine, packed in the cucumbers, added a good amount of dill, and put those grape leaves right on top. Through time grandma says she can still taste them.

A lot of things were different back then. They called the old wood stove"Leapin' Lena." Most times the house was too hot or too cold. Many days were used to chop wood for winter. When they stuffed that old stove full of fuel before bedtime, she says you'd as soon break a sweat as you'd catch a chill. By early morning, it was time to pull those old blankets up around her ears.

Great grandma could cook. There was another wood stove that kicked out hot, fresh bread. It wasn't easy to get the right temperature--you had to know just the right amount of wood to put in. There weren't any knobs like today, no "medium" or low, no automatic 350 degrees. But they learned, and grandma says the food was really good, especially summer peas and potatoes with cream from cows they milked.

There was a lot of work to do. It would have been nice not to have those cows on the farm. It was hard to get away, hard to take any time off. She says they were kind of chained to the place. She says, "I can milk a cow alright." Life wasn't easy. She says great grandma told her she would go off to school because she wouldn't have her staying on any farm when she got married.

She left home for schooling in town in 9th grade. She lived with her dad's parents Mary and Pat during the week. Grandma would go home on weekends. But those seven miles were just too much to cover on a daily basis by horse and buggy. Mary and Pat lived in Stephen. Life stayed that way until she graduated.

In 1940, grandma Vivian moved to Grand Forks to go to the beauty school. She lived with her aunt Rose--great grandma Laura's sister. It was the Hairdressers Ball that changed her life.

In walked Raphael. He had another date that night, but grandma noticed him. In fact she says, he called her later that night. She says she noticed him at church, too. He always used to walk in late, and head right up to the front pew. Grandpa knew how to make an entrance. Ralph finished three years of school at the University of North Dakota before the war called. They were married February 15th, 1944 in Joplin, Missouri, where he went for training.

While the two were dating and grandpa was in the service, grandma did something most remarkable. She moved to Seattle with her friend and worked in the shipyards. In months she went from beauty school to welding school. She welded the great naval ships of the sea to aid the war effort. Because of her height, or lack of it, she says she was sent into the tightest corners of the ships. She and her friend worked the midnight shift because they were able to earn more money. They lived with her friends sister, but moved back to North Dakota after a handful of months when illness struck her friends family back home.

Life got pretty crazy in 1945. We were in the middle of a war, my grandpa was in the Army, and my grandma found out she was pregnant. A couple months later, grandpa Ralph was on his way to the east coast to join the conflict in Germany. But orders changed after the German surrender, so grandpa was shipped all the way to the west coast to ship out to the Philippines. He told grandma half the guys got sea-sick before they left the Golden Gate Bridge, but he was able to hold his own.

En route, on August 6th 1945, President Truman ordered an atomic bomb (Little Boy) dropped on Hiroshima. On August 9th, a second bomb (Fat Man) was dropped on Nagasaki. My grandfather never saw combat. I wonder if that changed my life. My dad was born while my grandpa was in the Philippines.

Grandpa still had to do some work overseas. He was first in the post office in the Army. Then it was stint with the military police, before he finally moved on to work in the hospital. Grandma says he gave shots and "sewed up people that were stabbed."

Grandpa first saw his son when he was seven months old. It must have been strange walking in from war. Grandpa brought some things back from the Japan. There was that gun that hung in the basement for many years, a kamono for grandma and another for great grandma. He also brought some dishes, and a saddle for great uncle's Bill and Jerry. The gun is the only thing still around. Shawn took it when grandma moved. He looked up the serial number online and found out where it came from.

Grandma says they moved to Bismarck in 1945, when my dad was eight months old. They lived in a trailer house by the river, near the current Memorial Bridge. They moved several more times, including finding places and neighbors grandma really liked on Griffin Street and Assumption Drive. They finally moved into the house I know--1616 N 18th Street. She remembers it was close to Thanksgiving. Dad says 1965. It's a place grandma called home for 43 years. Grandpa wasn't as fortunate. He died in 1977. My favorite memory is the day he pulled up in front of the house with a shiny new apple red Lund fishing boat. Grandpa finished the basement in that home. He always had a hammer in his hand.

When I think about that house, and I think about it often, I remember malted milks, icy cold kool-aid in sweaty glasses in the garage. I think of the weeping birch I used to watch sway in the backyard, its rhythms and shadows casting me into afternoon trances. I think of sneaking out of bed and down the hall with cousin Jim to watch Johnny Carson. Relatives played pinochle for quarters, and there was all the laughter. I think of vegetable soup that no one else can make quite right. Of course there were dozens of cookies, and carmel rolls and homemade doughnuts with chocolate frosting. And we ate Cocoa Wheat's and cereal with half & half. Everything got a healthy dose of butter. At night we slept with the windows open and listened to the soothing sound of traffic on Divide Avenue. And I'll never forget the Thanksgivings and Christmas's and the thick brown gravy and piles of presents.

We were exploring Bismarck sipping coffee as grandma shared these memories. She likes to go for drives. She always says things have changed a lot since she first moved to town.

Eventually, I had to drop her off in her new apartment. Over the summer we moved her from that wonderful house on 16th Street. Found out her birth certificate says her first name is really Mary, and her middle name Vivian. "Must have been a mistake," she says.

The other night I saw for the first time a glow of light coming from grandma's north facing bedroom in her old home. Someone's moved in. It seemed strange at first knowing those walls hold the hopes and dreams of new lives. What will their memories be? I have a safe place for mine.

The move is quite a change for grandma and there's been a flood of memories. I wonder how she'll adapt. I wonder how often she thinks of the juneberries and the steaming-hot fresh loaves of bread. I wonder how often she thinks of her mother, her brother Jerry, and those wonderful pickles. Today she still swims. I wonder how often she remembers the waters of her first home, near the Tamarac River.