In a year of good films, Io Capitano [I Captain] stands out as both incredibly moving and well-crafted. It is the story of two teenaged cousins who leave their home in Senegal, hoping for a better life in Europe. Their dreams are big, but their ignorance and naiveté are way bigger. Italy is their intended destination, but first they must get to Tripoli in Northern Africa. They encounter unspeakable horrors on the way, and we, the audience, keep wondering if they will succeed in their ambitions or be crushed. What judgment will the film render on their decision to leave... Continue reading

El Glorioso is my goofy clown daylily: its gigantic, floppy blooms sit on top of a rather short, stubby body of leaves and scapes. Five years old, it has never bloomed for more than one month, if that. This year it stopped blooming after one month, then a few weeks... Continue reading

Close relatives all blooming at the same time: Cordovan Skies, Pink Charm, and the ubiquitous tiger lily. Cordovan Skies and Pink Charm were both bred directly from the tiger lily. Pink Charm (center, partially hidden by a Cordovan Skies blossom) was the first pink daylily ever bred. The three cousins... Continue reading

A friend introduced me to a daylily farm in Alabama, and my choices turned out to have huge, dramatic blossoms, well beyond my expectations! Isabel's Spider Off to See the Wizard These beauties are not for sale yet, but I've had multiple inquiries. Continue reading

Three-year-old Teahouse Rainbow is the first out this year! (June 24, 2024) It kept blooming until August 20, nearly two months! Teahouse Rainbow, August 20, the last blossom. Continue reading

Wim Wenders’ first narrative feature to be nominated for an Academy Award, Perfect Days is beautifully shot and perfectly edited but is not the perfect film some have dubbed it as it often feels flat in its repetitiveness, too much like Groundhog Day. Despite the benign satisfaction that protagonist Hirayama, so named for the many Hirayamas in Ozu’s films, takes in his daily routine, he is an elderly version of the lonely, isolated, alienated young men who can relate to children but are terrified of women that populate Wenders’ early films. Wenders, in fact, includes deliberate references to those films.... Continue reading

This recipe is modified from one that appeared in the New York Times in 1973. For most Americans at the time, Afghanistan held next to no significance whatsoever, but someone at the Times was moved to share a recipe that may have been loosely connected to Afghanistan. It seemed exotic.... Continue reading

We had an awful lot of rain this summer, but according to Arjen Vriend of the Pioneer Gardens in Deerfield, "Our garden was soaked with well over 20 inches of rain this summer, and the daylilies loved it." (Greenfield Recorder, 10/10/23) Indeed! Daylilies at Mill Brook House in September, 2023 Continue reading

Daylilies that begin in mid-August and last into September can be considered "late" and serve to brighten the garden when other flowers have quit for the season. Some will last through October if there is no sustained freeze, but their behavior changes. With cold nights and shorter days, their blooms... Continue reading

Rose Water, one of my not-so-late late daylilies went out with a splash! All the rain has sometimes meant extra big blossoms. Continue reading

For years, I've rescued milkweed from being mowed down or strangled by vines, but this is the first year I've actually seen monarch larvae eating the milkweed. One caterpillar formed its chrysalis not on the milkweed but among the gladiolas. The chrysalis hung by a thread but survived storm after... Continue reading

These make a fancy breakfast or a light supper. Pancakes 1.5 cups flour ½ t BP ½ t baking soda ¼ t nutmeg ½ t salt 2 T sugar 1 cup ricotta cheese 2 eggs juice and grated rind from 1 lemon 1.5 cups milk Beat the wet ingredients by... Continue reading

After eating their fill these beauties pupate and emerge as gorgeous black and yellow butterflies. Between the volunteer dill (seen above) and a dozen parsley plants, which these caterpillars favor, our garden has hosted at least ten this summer. Continue reading

I am forever pulling vetch out of my daylily garden, but these common, volunteer daylilies make a pretty picture mingled with vetch. Continue reading

Lupines are a big deal in New England. People take day trips in June to view them growing in fields and up mountainsides. I tried to persuade my lupines to leave my garden and grow out in our fields, but they were having none of it. Instead, they arranged themselves... Continue reading

World War II left millions of children wounded, homeless, hungry, impoverished and often orphaned in defeated and victorious countries alike, as the V-mail below attests. In the United States, the kids were, for the most part, all right, although the stress and dislocation of the war years left some homeless, as a youthful Maya Angelou discovers in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. But impoverished or not, universally, across the globe, children waited for their fathers to come home. My sister Gretel was born within a fortnight of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and for most of her first... Continue reading

Many cooks and most restaurants add strawberries to their rhubarb pie, but I prefer mine straight. Mix up a double pie crust, roll out half of it and line the bottom of a pie pan. Roll out the top crust. Cut up 6 cups worth of fresh rhubarb and mix... Continue reading

If you haven't read the book but you'd like to see the movie, here is the link: https://youtu.be/lISq-7bID94 Continue reading

Mix this batter the night before and bake for breakfast the next morning. This batter uses yeast, not unlike blini or other raised pancakes. 1 T dry yeast + ½ t sugar dissolved in warm water. Let it foam. **** Mix together the following and add the dissolved yeast: 1... Continue reading

Max was like a delicate flower that faded too soon. He had a water fetish and loved to drink from a running tap, from an unguarded cup or glass or even a watering can; he tracked kitty litter into the bathtub as he examined the droplets that gathered around the drain. A mischief-maker, he chewed on paper documents and tipped over waste baskets to get attention. He had a purr like the running engine of a Mac truck and engaged it incessantly, signaling hunger, affection, or pure joy. He slept on our bed by my feet or cuddled up with... Continue reading

The first of at least four films paying tribute to old movie theaters, The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) involves a relationship between a middle-aged woman (Cloris Leachman) and a teenaged boy (Timothy Bottoms). Sam Mendes has updated the story to a tourist town on England’s South Coast in the 1980s. Stephen (Michael Ward), who is Black, is trying to get into college when he takes a job at the local movie palace, whose upper floors are shuttered. He begins an affair with co-worker Hillary (Olivia Colman), a mentally fragile, middle-aged woman, whose love-life consists of having sex with... Continue reading

Gertrude Erlich was born in Rotterdam, New York, not long after her father, Sam Erlich, had immigrated from Poland, possibly at the behest of his sister Betsy and her husband Jake Coplon. The Coplons settled in Schenectady in upstate New York, where they opened a successful children’s clothing store. Sam, who immigrated with his second wife and three children from his first marriage, opened his own store in Rotterdam and fathered five more children, including Gertrude, but found the community unsatisfactory, due to either anti-Semitism or a lack of Jewish neighbors or both and relocated the family to Brooklyn. Gertrude... Continue reading

A delicious variation on pumpkin pie... Mix the following ingredients together: 1 15 oz. can pumpkin puree or 2-3 cups puree from a sugar pumpkin 1 12oz. can evaporated milk ½ cup cream ½ cup light brown sugar 3 eggs 1 t cinnamon ½ t nutmeg ½ t ginger ¼... Continue reading

A cranberry sauce you can keep all year... 1 lb. fresh cranberries, washed and sorted 1 cup raisins 1/3 cup sugar 1T cinnamon 1.5t ginger ¼ t cloves 1 cup water Combine all of the above ingredients in a saucepan and simmer for 15 minutes. Then add: 1 medium onion,... Continue reading

In 2017 I decided to write a book about the Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, and I spent the next three years closely analyzing his 33 extant films along with 3 fragments, researching the historical background, and catching up with what other scholars had written. I had been writing about Ozu since 1983, and my most recent article was published in 2010. That article went into the book almost unchanged, but, in fact, every article I had ever written about him went in in some form, sometimes as only a paragraph or a single sentence, along with material from my earlier... Continue reading