Patsy Pridgen

I’m home from Italy, where I ate and ate and ate. My wonderful Italian food experience ranks right up there with seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa and climbing to the top of the Duomo in Florence.

My husband and I consumed some excellent lasagna and a dish made with wild boar while staying in Florence, but the real Italian fine dining began once we joined our friends in a villa near the tiny town of San Donato, 45 minutes or so outside of Florence.

Here we were lucky enough to rent from Alfonsina (known as Fonsi), a woman who once owned a restaurant in Florence and, for a reasonable rate, would cook breakfast and dinner for us each day.

Fonsi with her husband Enzo

After our first delicious four-course dinner of lasagna with pesto, Florentine steak and potatoes, salad with homegrown tomatoes, and homemade gelato, we said sign us up for the week!

Each morning for breakfast, we had a healthy fresh-fruit platter. Then we forgot calories while eating an array of cheeses, breads, and cake. Our protein was a big plate of ham and some of the fluffiest scrambled eggs I’ve ever eaten.

Yes, I ate cake for breakfast

One night’s entrée was osso buco, a dish I’ve never had. Osso buco is Italian for “bone with a hole.” Within that hole was a sauce that we could use on the surrounding meat. Delicious!

Just one of four courses

Wine was included with our dinners. The bottles on our table had no label but were filled with our hostess’ house wine, a local Chianti. One night we were served pre-dinner cocktails. The orange Aperol Spritz is a local favorite—we’d seen people drinking it in sidewalk cafes. It’s made with prosecco and a liquor called aperol. Our appetizer was a chicken liver pâté with capers on crostini.

Almost too pretty to eat and drink

The last afternoon of our visit, we ladies signed up for a cooking class with Fonsi. She showed us how to make homemade pasta, eggplant parmigiana, zucchini flowerets stuffed with ricotta, and potato gnocchi with pesto.

To be honest, I was a cooking school dropout, leaving after the first hour and a half before the pesto was made. I was tired and needed to pack for our middle-of-the night-trip to the airport.

Still, I enjoyed our last dinner, eating what was prepared that afternoon, relishing the gnocchi enhanced by the homemade pesto Fonsi and the other ladies created.

First course of the last supper

School bells are about to ring—but not for me. I retired from teaching almost five years ago. Still, I couldn’t resist buying one of these only-a-quarter composition books at Walmart.

I miss buying school supplies, but I can’t say I miss teaching. I just sent in a column (to appear in the Telegram’s Sunday August 26 edition) where I talk about why.  I was exhausted by years of grading essays. Even more than the paperwork, though, was the classroom experience.

When I first started at the community college back in the dark ages of the early 1980s, nobody had a cell phone. When I retired in 2013, everybody did. First I went through semesters of phones ringing in class. Then the problem became texting, which was even worse. Some students seemed positively addicted to their phones.

I felt I had to be more and more entertaining to capture the students’ attention. I needed to use technology myself, not one of my strong points. I was born in the days of typewriters and landlines.

I taught a lot of wonderful students over the years, people who finished their degrees and went on to become productive citizens. Nurses and police officers, early childhood workers and bank employees. I sometimes bump into former students around town. They smile and call me by name although, to tell the truth, I’ve usually forgotten theirs. So many students, so many years.

Me on the far right with my technical writing class who wrote a newsletter as a project

But I had some lazy students too. Students who would stroll into class late or not come at all. Students who wouldn’t turn in assignments on time and then ask me to accept late work at the end of the semester so they could pass.

Usually these were younger students, kids who’d just graduated high school and were at the community college because they didn’t know what else to do with their lives. Older students were more serious about their education. They’d already been in the job market and seen the need for a degree to advance or enter a more lucrative line of work.

Teaching English is hard work if you do it right. I was glad when I turned 60 and could collect my retirement—and my clock.

This post is intended for critical thinkers. Warning: there are no pictures.

Recently, I attended a three-day writing workshop on the campus of NC State. (Click here to read the column I wrote about my Friday morning parking woes: http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/Patsy-Pridgen/2018/08/12/Campus-parking-poses-a-problem.html

Each participant was asked to submit a writing sample for others to critique. I sent in the beginning of Chapter One from my novel in progress, Life and Death in Narrow Creek.

In the section provided below, part of what I submitted, one astute reader found a content error (not grammar, spelling, or any other mechanics, but something in the story itself). See if you can find what’s wrong.

Post your answer if you don’t mind. I guess it goes without saying that if you want to find the error yourself, you shouldn’t read the responses (if any) before reading the excerpt. I’m curious to see how many people pick up on the mistake.

Chapter 1

My hand-me-down Electrolux was certainly keeping a fuss, as my grandma used to say. Three-year-old Heather, her blonde curls bent over a coloring book, dropped a fat red crayon and clapped her hands over her ears.

“Too much noise!” she shouted. I had to laugh hearing the exact words I often said to her when she ran around the apartment squealing, delighted to be chased by her silly daddy. Her silly daddy and my husband, Joe Bulluck, who on this crisp Saturday morning in October was not at home with us but rather forty miles away in the woods hunting deer.

I cut off the ancient vacuum cleaner I’d bought at the Salvation Army thrift store. It wasn’t working all that well anyway, but I couldn’t splurge on a new one. Joe and I were still in the early years of our marriage and although I’d finally gone to work full-time so that we were now a two-income family, neither of us made a lot of money. …

Did you find it?

In just a few weeks, I’ll be in Italy. The Tuscany area, to be exact. Florence, the capital of this beautiful district in central Italy, is where my husband and I will spend the first three nights of our trip.

We’ve been to Florence before, for a one-day excursion on our first trip abroad in 2006. I remember it being magical—and overwhelming.  So much to see in so little time.

David reproduction in Piazza Del Signoria

Michelangelo’s David is my most distinct memory. This is a statue that is so famous there are reproductions of it worth photographing, which is a good thing since we weren’t allowed to take pictures of the original in the Accademia Gallery.

In Florence, we’ve booked a hotel room in a historical building that was once a former noble residence. Or so the hotel’s website says. We’re supposed to be in a lovely, quiet area just a few steps from the River Arno. Maybe this will be the view from our hotel window.

In 2006, our guided tour stopped at the Ristorante Il Bargello for lunch. I wrote down what I ate and drank that day: lasagna (not the main course), flattened beef with gravy, spinach, potatoes, sparkling water, champagne, and Rosellino Toscano (wine). Lots of food and lots of wine. That’s what I remember about dining in Italy.

One of the days my husband and I are based in Florence will be spent on an excursion to Pisa. On our last trip, we didn’t see what is probably one of the most famous sights in the country: the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Gotta get that wacky tourist photo of me holding up the tower!

After Florence, we’ll join our friends for a week at a villa in the Tuscan countryside. I’ve been reading Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun and picture something rustic yet romantic. Something medieval yet picturesque. I’ll have to let you know how reality measures up to my imagination.

Our group plans to take day trips to various Tuscan towns—maybe Siena, Bologna, Lucca, San Gimignano. We’ll drive (the guys, anyway, who’ve applied for international driving permits) through the beautiful countryside of Tuscany. I expect cypress trees, vineyards, hills, and valleys. Here’s a field of sunflowers I saw in June of 2006.

I’m excited! Ciao!

The dog days of summer are here. Uncomfortable heat and humidity. It’s a given that temperatures will be in the 90s unless a rare “cold” spell brings the mercury down to the upper 80s.

Parts of my yard are thriving. Parts aren’t. Between my big holly tree and my equally big maple tree, the once-green grass is dead. I guess those trees suck up too much water when the hot days of summer set in. Never mind that I have a sprinkler system.

The cucumber crop is about shot too, but I think it’s time. As least that’s what I remember from my youngster days when I was a professional cucumber picker. The cucumber season ended in early July, and then I began helping with the tobacco crop.

(See recent Telegram column: http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/Patsy-Pridgen/2018/06/03/What-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation)

I’d rip out these half-dead, yellow vines, but they’re still blooming and I continue to get the occasional cucumber.

Other parts of my little backyard garden are thriving. This year’s sleeper hit has to be my okra plants, bought on a whim to replace some pepper plants that had died.

I’ve learned okra are like cucumbers. I need to check my plants every day, or the produce gets too big to be tasty. I’ve harvested quite a bit of okra and have to fry it to get my husband to eat it. I don’t do a lot of frying anymore. It’s time to give some okra to the neighbors.

I’m also proud of my squash, and they’re easier to cook. I simply put a little olive oil in a sauté pan, slice up the squash, and fry/simmer until the vegetable is kinda mushy. Just like my mama used to cook it, except she probably used a few spoonfuls of bacon grease to get things started instead of olive oil.

I haven’t spent all of July monitoring my yard, however. This past weekend, I attended an intensive writing workshop.  Intensive as in sit in a classroom from nine to five. Along with some tips for writing fiction and helpful critiquing on a piece I submitted, I also learned there are a lot of smart, gifted people who are serious about the craft.

Can you find me in the picture?

As the dog days of summer continue, maybe I’ll just stay in my air-conditioned house and get as serious as this crowd is about writing that great American novel.

“This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York island.” July 4^th always gets me in a patriotic mood. This year that mood has led me to ponder all the magnificent topography I’ve seen in my travels right here in the good ol’ US of A .

Oh, there are wonders abroad, too, mountains and rivers and shorelines. But it’s hard to think of any country anywhere that has the diversity of natural landscape that we do. Take the continental US spanning from the Atlantic to the Pacific, add Alaska and Hawaii, and you’ve got a land big and beautiful in so many different ways.

I’ve culled these photos from my travel scrapbooks. For more details, check out my column,  http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/Patsy-Pridgen/2018/07/08/America-is-a-land-of-many-sights-and-cultures

Redwoods in California, 2010

Smoke from Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii, 2008

Monument Valley, Arizona, 2013

Grand Canyon, Arizona, 2013

Glacier Bay, Alaska, 2016

Miami Beach, Florida, 2018

Volcanoes, deserts, glaciers, valleys, beaches–these different landscapes represent different ways of life, even different cultures.  For example, in Hawaii, I ate poi at a luau; in Alaska, salmon at a fishing lodge.  Miami Beach had a Hispanic vibe; Arizona, a Native American influence.

But vive la difference!  We’re all Americans, privileged to live in the most diversely beautiful country in the world.

Told you I was in a patriotic mood.

Every July the entire family—my daughters, their husbands and children, my husband and I—all go to “The Conference.” For three nights and four days, we kick back at the Holiday Inn in Wrightsville Beach. We’re not usually people who stay in a hotel for a beach holiday, so the grandkids love the novelty of it. I love the maid service and restaurant.

My husband and daughters go to morning meetings related to the family business, and the rest of us hang out at the pool, the beach, the halls of the hotel, wherever the action is.

On the last night, the action is on the dance floor. After the final conference dinner, a DJ spins tunes for a couple of hours. A few grownups shuffle around to the occasional beach music song, but for the most part, it’s all about the kids. They aren’t one bit shy about showing off their moves. Or bugging their grandmas to dance with them.

This year Sammy, my ten-year-old grandson, insisted I be his partner for a slow dance. “Why don’t you ask Maddie?” I suggested, nodding at a bubbly little thing who’d been jumping all around to every song played.

“Geez, Grandma, she’s only nine,” he answered. So I danced with him. When I thought about it, I was glad he wanted me to. After all, before long he won’t have any problem dancing with a girl who’s only a year younger, and I’ll be on the sideline, yesterday’s meatloaf.

Maddie got a partner anyway. Charlie.  He’s Sammy’s six-year-old brother and evidently didn’t mind dancing with a girl who was not only older but taller.

Eventually, I got to sit down while Sammy went all disco, “stayin’ alive,” with the new buddies he’d made at the conference. The boys of summer, possibly the next generation for a family business.

As many of you know (I hope), I write a column every week for the Sunday Life Section of the Rocky Mount Telegram.  I’ve just submitted Column #300. How do I know this?

I number my columns when I save them on my flash drive. I’m in year six, with Column #1 dating Sunday, October 14, 2012.

Three hundred ideas for 300 columns. Hope I can think of 300 more.

Now for a different kind of progress report. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?”  Well, good and not so good.  My cucumber vines are robust, as usual, but the cucumbers themselves are just a tad bitter this year.  I read up on causes and extremely hot weather can be a reason.  Someone set our state on broil in recent weeks (I got that clever line off Facebook), so I’m guessing that’s why my cukes are a tad off this year.

A less than stellar cucumber crop pales in comparison, though, to what’s happened to my tomatoes this year. Look at these vines.  I know I overcrowded the plants, squeezing four into an area where maybe only two should have gone.  (It’s hard to believe they’ll get this big when they’re seedlings.)  But I don’t understand such wilted, dying vines.  I’m getting a few cherry tomatoes, but I think I can kiss those big Better Boys goodbye.

Now for the good gardening news. My okra plants are thriving.  I’ve never tried growing okra before.  My husband doesn’t like it in any form, stewed or fried, so I haven’t had a real incentive to plant any.  But on a whim this year, I picked up four seedlings.  Glad I did.  I like okra in all its forms.

My squash plants are also coming along, which is a little surprising to me. I planted squash as an afterthought, simply digging an at-the-time wet, muddy hole in the shrub bed and plunking in a couple of hills.

Yesterday, I walked around my backyard and picked several cucumbers, a few cherry tomatoes, and my first okra and squash. Before putting everything in the refrigerator, I arranged a still life of my produce and snapped a picture.

Despite some setbacks, looking at this photo makes me feel like a real backyard gardener.

I’m home from my six-day trip to Minnesota (the reason for no post last week). My husband and I went to Duluth to watch our youngest daughter run in Grandma’s Marathon, and then hung around for a few extra days to check out the sights.

Before I talk about “What I Did on My Vacation in Minnesota,” though, let me brag about my daughter. She signed up for Grandma’s Marathon with the goal of running 26.2 miles in under two hours and 45 minutes.  Doing so would qualify her for the Olympic Marathon Trials in 2020.

She succeeded, clocking in at 2:43:09. Here she is moments after crossing the finish line.

Making the team for the Olympics, she tells me, is a really long shot for her since there’s lots of competition.  But she’s happy and proud that she’s now qualified to try out.  I’m happy and proud too.

After she went home on Sunday, my husband and I left Duluth and drove an hour north to our accommodations for the next two nights, the Cove Point Lodge in Beaver Bay, located on the shores of Lake Superior. This was our base for exploring up and down the North Shore, the 148 miles of scenic highway and quaint villages stretching from Duluth to the Canadian border.

It’s hard to describe how HUGE Lake Superior is. I’m not sure my picture below does it justice either.

Here are some interesting facts:

• It’s the largest of the great lakes: in fact, it’s the largest freshwater lake in the world.
• There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America with water one foot deep.
• There have been about 350 shipwrecks on Lake Superior, and over 10,000 lives have been lost in her waters.

Okay, I realize your eyes may be glazing over, but having seen it, I find Lake Superior to be SUPERIOR!

My trip wasn’t all about gazing at the lake, however. Food is a priority when I travel.  I try to eat something I wouldn’t have at home.  At the Cove Point Lodge, I treated myself to the Scandinavian breakfast one morning.  What you’re looking at below is pickled herring, a cold boiled egg on crisp rye bread, pickled cucumbers, sausage, and cheese.   Delicious…and different.

A place called Betty’s Pies came highly recommended. Here I ordered a piece of Great Lakes Crunch Pie, liking the name as much as the ingredients: rhubarb, apples, strawberries, and raspberries, with a topping of oatmeal and brown sugar.  Oh, and a big dollop of vanilla ice cream on the side.  Maybe the pie wasn’t as much of a regional specialty as my Scandinavian breakfast, but I don’t often let myself have this kind of treat at home.

Minnesota, the land of ten thousand lakes (including one HUGE one), Grandma’s Marathon, and delicious food.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Africa. Specifically, American Christian ministry in Africa.  A couple from my church, Mickey and Jackie Bailey, founded an orphanage in Zambia several years ago and now have added a school.  They’re asking for donations for books, used or new, for pre-school through seventh grade students.  In English, the language the children are learning in.

Yesterday’s Rocky Mount Telegram featured a story about their mission.  Click here to read about the difference they’re undoubtedly making in the lives of these Zambian children, and consequently, the future of this impoverished country.  http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/News/2018/06/10/Couple-educates-African-kids.html  Wow, just wow.

In July, I’ll attend a writer’s retreat led by author Elaine Neil Orr, who grew up in Nigeria. Her parents were medical missionaries, and—get this—the family remained in Nigeria during its civil war.

I’ve just finished reading one of her books titled A Different Sun, which is a fictional account of a Baptist missionary couple, Emma and Henry Bowman, who set off to minister to the Yoruba people of Africa.  It’s 1853, and the wife is the daughter of a prosperous slave owner.  The husband, twenty years older, is a former Texas Ranger who’s lived a wild and ungodly life before hearing his call to the ministry.

Their hardships in Africa are many, and the story reminds me of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.  (If you’ve never read The Poisonwood Bible, get your hands on a copy ASAP.)

Both books explore the culture shock and misunderstandings between the missionaries and those they’ve come to help. And both examine the gradual adaptation of the missionaries as they learn about and adjust to the differences of their new home.

A Different Sun is a totally engrossing read. Elaine Neil Orr has also written Swimming Between Worlds, which I read first and endorsed on my Author Facebook page.

Her third novel, which I plan to order today, is called Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life.  It’s labeled a memoir, so maybe I’ll find out how the author fared during the Nigerian civil war.