Month: June 2011

UVA’s stunningly successful season came to an excruciating halt Friday, June 24 in the 13th inning in Omaha. Trying to get an out at third base, relief pitcher Cody Winiarski threw the ball into the dugout after fielding a bunt, and a South Carolina runner scored to end the game 3-2. The result sends the defending national champion Gamecocks back to the College World Series final against Florida.

"Wow. What a college baseball game," UVA coach Brian O’Connor said. "Unfortunately, we came out on the wrong end of it."

Pitching was red hot all game, even after Virginia ace (and No. 2 overall MLB draft pick) Danny Hultzen left the game in the third inning due to a stomach illness. Virginia had plenty of scoring opportunities in the late innings, including bases loaded in the 10th and 13th innings, but couldn’t get anyone home—a result in contrast to so much of the rest of the season.

The team, with a school record 56 wins and only 12 losses on the season, was welcomed home Saturday night at Davenport Field.

Well, it’s wineberry season, suddenly, once again and undeniably!

They’re getting fat on the vines, and redder by the day.

Sunday morning, Mr. Green Scene made some excellent buttermilk pancakes with wineberries and chopped pecans. I’d probably put some on my cereal too if I didn’t already have blueberries in the house from the farmer’s market. Tonight we added them to a salad with goat cheese, as you’d do with raspberries.

However, their extreme deliciousness in the pancakes made me think that their ultimate ambition as a fruit is probably to be eaten warm, inside some kind of carb-rich breakfast or dessert. Thus I am considering just freezing all the wineberries I can pick, in amounts that are sized for batches of muffin and pancake batter. Mmmmmmm.

The other option, which I’ve exercised several years in the past, is to make them into jam. I’ve always used the basic 1:1 recipe–that’s equal amounts berries and sugar. (Same goes for raspberry jam, blackberry, strawberry, etc.) Needless to say, such a spread is not the healthiest thing in the larder.

I read that it’s safe to decrease the amount of sugar in a jam recipe (or substitute honey)–certainly worth a try. I can always taste while it’s cooking. Say it again: Mmmmmm.

One other tip if you’re going to make wineberry jam: It’s worth straining out the seeds with cheesecloth before you seal it in jars. Seeds are the wineberry’s main disadvantage compared to raspberries.

What do you do with wineberries?

There’s been lots of buzz in Charlottesville this week about the goal of "greening" businesses. Better World Betty (a longtime ABODE contributor) and LEAP kicked off the Better Business Challenge, which seeks to get local entrepreneurs to slash their energy use, water use and overall environmental footprint.

Excellent idea, if you ask me! As private individuals, we can only have so much impact. We need the business and government sectors to flex their eco-muscles, too. (Recent eco-unfriendly developments notwithstanding, Albemarle County is a partner in the Biz Challenge, as is the City of Charlottesville.)

I’m glad to see that some of the businesses I patronize are already signed on, and I hope many more will get on board. I also liked reading about the conversation some local business leaders had about why they’ve committed to sustainable practices. It’s common sense that going paperless, for example, would save you money.

So here are my two cents. I’ve written before about one of my pet retail peeves: Stores that leave their front doors open while simultaneously running their A/C. Then there’s the habit of handing restaurant patrons 12 more paper napkins than they need. In my opinion, many local establishments are still missing the boat when it comes to preventing waste.

Whether or not a particular business signs on to the Challenge (and the worst offenders probably won’t), they still deserve to hear from their customers when they’re doing something dumb. Readers, what do you observe? Which local stores, eateries and services need to green up their act?

As Jolie Holland once sang, "Goodbye, California." Last night, UVA pitcher Tyler Wilson held the University of California Golden Bears to a single run during his more than seven innings on the mound. Meanwhile, second baseman Keith Werman went two-for-two and scored two runs, and left fielder John Barr knocked in two more en route to an 8-1 UVA baseball win.

UVA now faces the University of South Carolina this evening. If UVA can beat USC tonight at 7pm and tomorrow, then it will take on either the University of Florida or Vanderbilt in the College World Series. And fans will most certainly be watching: Last night’s game attracted 25,833 spectators, the largest number to ever watch a UVA baseball game.

"Places" is a new feature by where local artists show us the places around town that inspire them.

Guest post by Chelsea Hicks

Much like Emily Dickinson who wrote beside a window looking out over a graveyard, the poet, UVA professor and recent recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, Lisa Russ Spaar has found her muse living among the noble dead. Although—Spaar takes it a few steps further than Dickinson. Literally.

A short walk away from Spaar’s office window in UVA’s Bryan Hall, is the University of Virginia Cemetery and Columbarium at the corner of Alderman and McCormick Roads. Spaar returns to the graveyard for a moment away from her life as a constant mentor and teacher.

In "No Picnic," a poem about death and seasons, she describes the cemetery as a “supernatural asylum," with “petal-blooded grass” (as described in “Home”) and marble slabs "lined by starlings,” (from "Permit me voyage, love, into your hands") that act as keepers of the graveyard.

It’s not hard to believe that the graveyard has been a wellspring of inspiration for upwards of 30 years since her time as an undergraduate student at UVA.

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What do you do when you come here?

I like being perched partly in the world, but also partly sequestered from it. Porches, windows, places where I feel like I have a sort of sanctuary but I’m also very open to the world. This is also one of those thresholds…You’re outside of time. I feel that here.

Does this site come up in your work at all?

A lot. In fact, many of my poems are set in this graveyard but you wouldn’t know it. I have a poem that will be in the new book (Vanitas, Rough due out from Persea Books in Fall 2012) about a girl [on her cell phone] walking through the graveyard in a really beautiful pair of high heels and she says something like, “That’s so not on my vagenda.” […]

Vanitas is a school of painting where you mix up things that are decaying or dying: like skulls that represent time passing, musical instruments that have come unsprung or flowers with bugs coming out of them, fruit that’s partly molding. 

Does the graveyard remind you of any other places?

It reminds me of my grandparents’ farm in South Jersey that we don’t have anymore. It had orchards and this sort of casual order of horticulture. It’s New Jersey, so all around us were highways and across the river on a certain kind of day you could see northern Philadelphia but on the other hand it was this 100 acres on a river with big sycamore trees, lawns, birds. Going to this farm was where my imagination unrolled.

As a writer, perched in windows at my grandmother’s house and looking out over the river and farm I found sort of an inner life. Like I had an inside. I think my beginnings as a writer were in a place like this so I think I seek them out.

(Photo by Anna Caritj)

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Back in her office, Spaar marks up some of her “graveyard poems” for me to look over. Behind her, a portrait of Emily Dickinson looms out of the dim light beneath the window. I notice the cover of her 2004 collection of sensual and sacred poems, Blue Venus: a window with blowing curtains. It suggests the sequestration of graveyards, of Spaar’s childhood at the farm, and of Dickinson looking at neighboring tombstones from that liminal space between isolation and the world.

Dickinson seems as comfortable below the window as Spaar does in the graveyard, and I consider the irony: they’re living half-lives through each other. Dickinson’s heavy bun, iron-straight nose and budding lips exude all the pathos of the graveyard, of Spaar’s poems and the “horrifying and wonderful” prospect of Lisa and Emily sitting together in the graveyard or even beside the window, here—in their office.