Fleur-de-MartinSong

Several years ago I was telling Cousin Ruthie about a book Richard bought me, and how much I enjoyed it.

The real treasure, she said, is having a son who knows what his mother loves to read.

How true.

Before Richard returned to Belgium in July, he gave me George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice five-pack: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons.

I had heard of the Game of Thrones series on HBO, but had not watched it. From bits and pieces I’d read about the shows, the whole thing sounded too violent, too weird, like too many dungeons and dragons for me.

But here I was, with my little library, and an empty nest shared with my 87-year-old mother. I started the first book and I told Richard I was enjoying it, but thought I’d alternate each volume with a “normal” book.

“Oh no,” he said, “I think you should read them one right after the other.”

Well, one-third of the way through A Game of Thrones, I was hooked. There was no going back to “normal”.

During the Olympics, I heard a journalist refer to a fencing match as sword fighting and I thought to myself, she must be a Game of Thrones groupie too. In September, I began wondering if the coyote/fox a neighbor spotted was really a direwolf. And soon, I started hungering for a glass of wine and a little snack to accompany my bedside reading.

What do I love so much about the books? The characters. The suspense. George R.R. Martin’s writing. And, perhaps the biggest surprise of all, I am drawn in (to the books as well as the refrigerator) with his descriptions of food.

The food connection carries throughout all five books, but it wasn’t until I was devouring A Dance with Dragons that I started making notes.

Page 79: “They nibbled on spiced sausage that morning, washed down with a dark smokeberry brown. Jellied eels and Dornish reds filled their afternoon. Come evening there were sliced hams, boiled eggs, and roasted larks stuffed with garlic and onions, with pale ales and Myrish fire wines to help in their digestion.“

Well, anything stuffed with garlic and onions makes my mouth water, and a Myrish fire wine sounds perfect for sipping with the fowl in front of a stone hearth.

Page 542: “The Lord of White Harbor had furnished the food and drink. Black stout and yellow beer and wines red and gold and purple, brought up from the warm south on flat-bottomed ships and aged in his deep cellars. The wedding guests gorged on cod cakes and winter squash, hills of neeps and great round wheels of cheese, on smoking slabs of mutton and beef ribs charred almost black, and lastly on three great wedding pies as wide across as wagon wheels, their flaky crusts stuffed to bursting with carrots, onions, turnips, parsnips, mushrooms and chunks of seasoned pork swimming in a savory brown gravy.”

Neeps, it turns out, is a Scottish term for turnips…I never knew that. It’s more than coincidence that I started gathering turnips in my market bag along with sweet potatoes and carrots for roasting. And just imagine “pies as wide across as wagon wheels”—what a visual—even though they wouldn’t fit in my oven!

Page 553: “The feast continued late into the night, presided over by the grinning skull on its pillar of black marble. Seven courses were served, in honor of the seven gods and the seven brothers of the Kingsguard. The soup was made with eggs and lemons, the long green peppers stuffed with cheese and onions. There were lamprey pies, capons glazed with honey, a whiskerfish from the bottom of the Greenblood that was so big it took four serving men to carry it to table. After that came a savory snake stew, chunks of seven different sorts of snake slow simmered with dragon peppers and blood oranges and a dash of venom to give it a good bite. The stew was fiery hot, Hotah knew, though he tasted none of it. Sherbet followed, to cool the tongue. For the sweet, each guest was served a skull of spun sugar. When the crust was broken, they found sweet custard inside with bits of plum and cherry.”

Wouldn’t that be the perfect Halloween spread? No feasting for me. I’m in withdrawal. Book No. 6 isn’t due out until 2017, and Winter is Coming. Happy reading. Happy eating. Laurie Lynch

Written on Blackwood Vale Slate: “Past a certain point, all the dates grow hazy and confused, and the clarity of history becomes the fog of legend.” George R.R. Martin

 

Fleur-de-SandyTales

Our dog Sandy is guilty. Guilty of robbing the ‘hood.

Just after midnight, I can hear his tail banging against my mother’s bed. His long, caramel-colored body starts doing a snake dance. It doesn’t matter if there is a full moon, a quarter moon, or no moon; he is raring to go.

Simply put, Sandy steals from the rich of bone and bauble, and gives to…himself. And us. He always shares his finds. As far as I know, he doesn’t bury them. He drops them with a clunk at the front door or smuggles them into the house, clenched in his jaws.

The stash of bones gathers in a corner beneath the stairs, or under the radiator, with the dust bunnies. We have a running joke that we never have to buy Sandy bones because, under the cover of darkness, he collects them from the neighbors’ dogs.

After one nighttime raid, about a year ago, I heard Sandy’s gentle scratch at the screen door. In he came. But what was that on the mat? A purple bottle of liqueur?

I brought the mysterious object inside, leaving it on the terrazzo floor. It looked like an upside-down purple mushroom, with the heft of a bowling ball. It was clearly no bottle of booze.

I went back to bed. My head on the pillow, the demons awoke. “Maybe it is an IED. What does IED stand for anyway? Improvised Explosive Device. It’s too big for a grenade. It could be an IED. I got up, walked down the hall, picked up the damn thing and put it outside again.

Daylight brings such clarity.

Turns out Sandy found a BusyBuddy, at least that’s what was imprinted on the surface. I typed b-u-s-y-b-u-d-d-y into my computer and found it is some kind of plastic dog toy. The owner hides treats inside to amuse the nose of the dog, even though the pooch can never reach the nugget without human help.

That weekend, Sandy’s puppy cousin Tulla came for a visit. Tulla took one look at the abandoned BusyBuddy and started knocking it around the wood floor. The BusyBuddy crashed into table legs and crushed bare toes as it was batted between Tulla’s paws. Long story short, the BusyBuddy went home with Tulla (named after an Irish whiskey named Tullamore Dew) to Connecticut.

I’ve known that Sandy is worth his weight in gold, trademark of the first name of his breed: Golden. It has taken a while, but it finally occurs to me that his thieving ways are also the result of nature, and his second name: Retriever. Laurie Lynch

Fast forward to this week: Around midnight I heard Sandy’s familiar rumbling. I let him outside and took a snooze on the living room couch. There was a whine at the door. Sandy. With a gift. Just in time for Halloween. A deer skull, teeth intact, below a crown of antlers—a four-point rack. Another mystery to solve.

Fast forward to yesterday: I snapped a few photos and took my laptop to Café Lemont to bask in the sun, have lunch, and write this piece. I got home around 3 p.m. The skull and antlers were gone.