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Food Friday: Summer Sunshine

July 23, 2021 by Jean Sanders Leave a Comment

The Black-Eyed Susans are in bloom. They have taken over a wedge-shaped flower bed in our front yard. Their bobbing, cheerful heads are covered with busy pollinators, with some dragonflies hovering nearby, in an advisory capacity. Just a few of the plants have fallen victim to passing bunnies, but we think it would be churlish to complain much. Last year I waged a war with the hungry rabbits, trying to repel them by spraying a noxious homemade liquid, which combined Tabasco sauce, garlic powder and watered-down dishwashing liquid. It was not a pleasant way to spend the summer, and the bunnies won in the end. This year we share nature’s bounty. And the atmosphere is much less fraught.Karma being what it is, we seem to have even more Black-Eyed Susans than we did last year.

The Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) is the Maryland state flower. They are integral to the Preakness Stakes. We missed out on making Black-Eyed Susan cocktails for the Preakness this year, mostly because we had an irresistible bottle of Prosecco standing by. This summer it is fitting to cut an armful of Black-Eyed Susan flowers as a floral tribute to summer when you make a batch of cool Black-Eyed Susan punch. I daresay you will be cheered up when you taste this fruity cup of Maryland sunshine.
https://gardenandgun.com/recipe/black-eyed-susan-a-cocktail-for-maryland/

Here is a little Black-Eyed Susan cocktail history, as its ingredients seem to vary from year to year. You need to find your favorite era: https://www.thespruceeats.com/black-eyed-susan-cocktail-recipe-761413

We haven’t done much entertaining yet this summer, as we are still being COVID-cautious and slightly neurotic. We will be celebrating a family birthday in a couple of weeks, and it will be the first time we’ve seen this branch since November. The children will have grown like weeds (that the rabbits would ignore), and will be unrecognizable, and brilliant, and hilarious. We will need to keep our wits about us, so the idea of cold and tasty mocktails is appealing. You might not want to have an alcoholic drink for your summertime revels. Here is a delightful, refreshing and decidedly non-alcoholic punch for the whole family: https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/virgin-hurricanes/ It is hurricane season, after all.

Our clever friends at Food52 have done lots of valuable research regarding non-alcoholic drinks. They work tirelessly for our behalf! https://food52.com/drinks/non-alcoholic/26300-best-nonalcoholic-cocktail-recipes?

We are halfway through summer, with all of August heat looming up ahead. Pace yourself, stay cool, lurk in the shadows and watch for bees, bunnies and burgeoning summer flowers in the garden. The zinnias are just beginning to bloom, and soon there will be sunflowers.

“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.”
― Ray Bradbury

Not Your Grandmother’s Women’s Club: A Chat with TCWC President Nancy Lutes

July 21, 2021 by The Spy Leave a Comment

Just as men’s service clubs started to appear in greater frequency in the early part of the 20th century, the same was happening with women’s organizations. Motivated to provide philanthropic support to local communities as well as a social outlet for sometimes isolated wives and mothers, women began to create independent clubs that encouraged members to gather and have an impact on local problems.

That was certainly the case of the Talbot County Women’s Club. Seeing the number of men’s social groups growing on the Mid-Shore, the founders of the TCWC saw a real need to form their own organization with a special interest in supporting public health in the region. And for decades, they gathered in school classrooms or used men’s clubs like the Chesapeake Bay Yacht Club to bring together a membership that had reached over 250 women by the 1930s.

That’s when Elizabeth Dixon, one of the Club’s founders and president, made it her mission to find a permanent home for the Women’s Club. And to the delight of the membership, the TCWC bought one of the most historic homes in downtown Easton in 1946.

Much has changed since then. Over the next several decades, membership began to drop as women were liberated from domestic duties and were free to pursue professional careers. And, according to current club president Nancy Lutes, the Club has had to make several changes to keep interest in membership relevant to a 21st-century woman.

To that end, Nancy and her board members have begun to modernize the TCWC programming, with a particular emphasis on leadership skills and financial literacy, for the 150 current members. Those changes have already shown signs of success in attracting new members with its modest $50 per year dues.

But as Lutes points out in her interview with the Spy, the TCWC has a special responsibility to maintain their 18th-century clubhouse as their top priority. And that obligation is not an easy one for a building that needs constant maintenance, including their current immediate need to remove lead paint from the home’s exterior to the tune of some $20,000.

This video is approximately four minutes in length. For more information about the Talbot County Women’s Club, please go here.

Ecosystem Long Form: Nick Carter’s Half Century of Helping Save the Bay

July 18, 2021 by Dave Wheelan 1 Comment

While it might be a surprise to some of our readers, one of the key objectives of our educational mission at the Spy is to preserve Mid-Shore history. With now over 1,000 individual interviews with key regional stakeholders, we’d like to believe we serve both the immediate need to know about issues and people, but also keep an oral history of those leaders and their times as part of our permanent public archive, now safely protected forever in the Internet cloud.

With a few of these folks, we’ve made an editorial decision to use a long-form format, which means we intentionally go longer in length of an interview since we believe the quality and historical value of the subject and their stories are so important and rich to preserve.

We took that option after our interview with Nick Carter, the former fisheries biologist with the State of Maryland, a few weeks ago.

For well more than fifty years, Nick has been on the front lines of the region’s efforts to save the Chesapeake Bay. Starting fresh out of grad school at the University of Washington, Nick’s first assignment in Maryland was to find the cause of a major fishkill at the Coningowino dam in 1965.

And every year since then (he’s eighty-tw0) there has not been a day where he hasn’t been thinking that dam and all other things that continue to permanently threaten our fragile bay ecosystem.

In this Spy interview, we talk for the next twenty minutes or so about this remarkable life of service, his sometimes frustration with local governments like Kent County, and his long view of the Chesapeake’s prospects for survival.

This video is approximately twenty minutes in length.

The Talbot Boys Conversation: American Battlefield Trust Leader Jim Lighthizer

July 17, 2021 by Dave Wheelan 25 Comments

While Jim Lighthizer resides in a very rural part of Dorchester County these days, quite some distance from the Talbot County Courthouse and the controversial Talbot Boys statue that rests on its lawn, he comes into that debate with significant “street cred.”

For more than two decades, Jim has spent his professional life making Civil War history both prominent and relevant as the president of the American Battlefield Trust. During that time, he and his small staff and board of directors saved 52,000 acres of open space and 130 battlefields in 24 states by raising over $500 million to keep history alive.

Jim’s name might also ring a bell for some Marylanders. Before his involvement in preserving Civil War battlefields, he was a major player in Annapolis politics for most of the 1980s and 90s. First as a Democratic state delegate, then as Anne Arundel County Executive, and finally as the state’s Secretary of Transportation under Governor William Donald Schaefer, Lighthizer gained a real appreciation for preserving history and saving land in those positions.

With that kind of unique background, the Spy couldn’t think of a better subject to interview for our ongoing series entitled “The Talbot Boys Conservation.”

At 75 years old, Lighthizer is enjoying the freedom in retirement to speak one’s mind. With echoes of his friend Donald Schaefer’s famous frank way of speaking, Jim does not hold back in making his argument that the statue should stay right where it is.

In fact, Lighthizer also notes that having the Talbot Boys located just feet away from the Frederick Douglass monument as a contributing factor in not moving the C.S.A. memorial. He makes the case that this unique juxtaposition is just the kind of thing that keeps memory and history alive for generations to come.

We stay down with Jim at the WHCP studios in Cambridge to chat this week.

This video is approximately five minutes in length.

Developer Bob Greenlee Wants Easton to Live in Silos

July 15, 2021 by Dave Wheelan 11 Comments

A common phrase with organizational experts starting in the early 1980s was that specific staff were “living in silos.” This was a catchy way of saying that people were not interacting enough to stay on mission in a company or group.

But for Mid-Shore developer Bob Greenlee, that is precisely what he wants people to do; live in a silo. And not just any silo, but one that could indeed be one of the Eastern Shore’s remarkable architecture gems of this century if it becomes a reality.

Working with Easton and London-based architect Mitch Hager, Greenlee’s firm has developed a novel way to convert the silos owned by the Perdue Company in Easton into residential use. Perdue has been eager to sell the site due to grain farmers unwilling or unable to drive the narrow streets to get to the facility. They turned to Greenlee and his team to come up with new plans for the site.

While one option was simply to level the existing silos and replace them with straightforward residential housing, Greenlee and Hager saw a new and radical way to use the space. Instead of tearing down the silos, they would form the foundation of a design of some 40 plus apartments or condos right next to the popular rails to trails pathway.

Appropriately using the name “The Granary” for the complex, Mitch and Bob see this as not only a way to keep these iconic structures in place. This approach could also be a unique model for other communities on the Eastern Shore facing similar challenges with these aging facilities.

In the first part of the Spy’s extended conversation with Bob about his significant commercial projects on the Mid-Shore, we sat down with both of them last week to learn more about this exciting proposal.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about SVN | Miller Commercial please go here. For Mitch Hager’s firm, please go here.

Minary’s Dream: History and Music Join Forces in the Chesapeake Heartland

July 14, 2021 by James Dissette Leave a Comment

For four weeks, Washington College student mentors and Kent High School students have been meeting at Minary’s Dream Alliance to pluck sound bites out of Kent County’s recorded history and shape them into contemporary collages of music and spoken words wrapped in a hip-hop beat.

Sponsored by Washington College’s Starr Center, the “Hip Hop Time Capsule” is an innovative learning program developed to explore the rich traditions of Kent County’s African American music, culture, and history.

The three-week program immerses students in workshops learning how to research Chesapeake Heartland’s digital archives in search of the perfect spoken phrase or gospel lyric. The collected sound bites, “samples,” are selected by the students and handed over to WC sound engineers to be “cleaned” and ready to overlay with others. Original student lyrics are sometimes added or snippets from the oral history archives.

To add to the sound lab experience, professional musicians and writers hold workshops to discuss their creative process. Poet and playwright Robert Earl Price recording artist Kentavius Jones (appearing in this video), and Karen Somerville were a few who discussed history through the lens of art.

Faithlin Hunter, a Junior at Washington College and classical violinist, was surprised at how the experience affected her.

Originally not a fan of hip-hop, Hunter began to appreciate the history of Kent County through the discovery of its archives. “I found inspiration in the stories of growing up in Kent County and taking those experiences and sound and making something new. It made me grow as an artist and violinist,” she says.

With one week left in the program, students hope to have a substantial catalog of original sounds to present at the end of the month.

The Spy interviewed Starr Center’s Asst. Director for Programs and Experiential Learning Kacey Stewart and Kentavius Jones about the summer program.

Chesapeake Heartland is an initiative of the Starr Center working in partnership with numerous partners in Kent County (including Sumner Hall, the Kent Cultural Alliance, and the Kent County Public Library), and with the collaboration of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture,

This video is approximately eight minutes in length. For more about Chesapeake Heartland, a collaboration between Washington College and the Smithsonian please go here. For more about Minary’s Dream go here.

Mid-Shore Arts: Linda Harris Has Found the Harriet Tubman in Herself in Cambridge

July 12, 2021 by Dave Wheelan Leave a Comment

The Mid-Shore has benefited greatly over the centuries in having folks from the Western Shore not only adopt this rural region as their own but actively engage in the life of the community. From helping local churches to mentoring children, these “Come-Here’s” have played critical roles in the development of some of the Eastern Shore’s most important institutions.

But the story of Cambridge’s Linda Harris is a special one indeed.

Raised in DC, and someone who would grow up to be very successful in property management, Linda’s real vocation, her first passion, was actually music. While she was a consummate professional and delighted in raising a family, she never let go of the absolute love of her life: singing jazz and playing classical piano.

And at 60 years old, she began performing in places like the Mid-Atlantic Jazz Festival, Mr. Henry’s in DC, the Stateside in New Orleans, and abroad in Paris and Goteborg. In fact, she had a full schedule set for 2020 with gigs in Tokyo and Africa planned, but then COVID hit.

Like many performing artists, Linda was staring at an empty calendar when she remembered that her father gave her a book about Harriet Tubman and her life and perseverance. That memory led to gathering a small group of women who all agreed to walk the Underground Railroad trail from Cambridge to Freedom House in Philadelphia last September.

That seven-day trip tested Linda and her middle-aged body far more than she had predicted. On day three, she retreated to a washroom and wondered if she could actually make it all the way. And it was at that moment, as she was looking exhausted into the bathroom mirror, that Harriet Tubman’s image seemed to appear to push Linda to get back on the road.

Linda had decided before the walk that any money she raised would go to the Harriet Tubman Museum and Mural in Cambridge. Still, it was after the hike that she made the bold decision to move to Cambridge full-time and devote her time and energy to help the small education center.

Since then, she has brought together her love of music and added it to museum’s programming in the form of a concert series, entitled “Jazz at the Mural,” which is designed to raise funds but also use her substantial network to bring some of the best names in jazz to town to perform in front of the now famous Tubman mural in downtown Cambridge Saturdays from 6 to 8 pm every other week.

The Spy sat down with her yesterday to discuss the importance of keeping Harriet Tubman’s legacy alive and the role of music in celebrating her lasting impact on American history.

This video is approximately four minutes in length. For more information about The Harriet Tubman Museum & Educational Center please go here.

Spinners by George Merrill

July 11, 2021 by George R. Merrill 5 Comments

I’ve noticed something, lately.

Since our lives were turned topsy-turvy when we were blindsided by my diagnosis, my wife and I have begun talking nonsense more frequently. As a result, we have grown remarkably closer. We used to consider mindless chatter like the weather and political discussions the bread of airheads. Now it’s food for the soul, a welcomed piece of our lives, a kind of non-sectarian speaking in tongues.

Our lives at this juncture are confined mostly to appointments with doctors and other medical facilities or just being with each other at home.

We’ve become dogged by one fear; that someone ‘out there’ could infect me with some simple germ that I am not prepared to defend myself against. I have a marginally functional immune system which leaves me a sitting duck. I’m not a danger to others, but others may be a danger to me. I feel restricted. This does not encourage a robust social life.

Living in this kind of climate for a few weeks has bred a certain habit of –– I’m not sure how to describe it except maybe, mindlessness. This to say that we have come to enjoy talking pure nonsense –– actually getting absorbed in the nonsensical excursions of our ‘spinners’. Spinners have earned a significant place in securing a hold on our sanity.

My wife, Jo, has kept flower pots on the porch for years. She’s placed spinners in the pots. Spinners are florid, burlesque, dime store bugs or flower decorations that have wings or petals that spin in the wind. They are goofy enough to retain my attention and help our minds go totally blank.

We check them out daily. Just the other day we talked about the spinners nonstop for a full hour and a half, like people might talk of their children or pets. I would describe our conversations as something like pillow talk only we’re sitting up in chairs, more focused and not as dreamy.

Coincidentally, about the time I learned of my diagnosis, some of the previous spinners had begun falling apart. We’d had them for years. Jo ordered new ones. One day, after spending most of the day engaged in the tedium of medical and doctors’ appointments, we came home to find our order of new spinners had arrived. We placed the spinners in the old pots.

As we putzed around arranging and rearranging them, we began to talk of their particular ways of being, how they behaved in the wind, in stillness or how their florid colors radiated brilliantly in bright sunlight.

We had one concern: the hummingbird spinner. As soon as the wind rose, his spinner/propeller would rotate lustily. It was evident that soon his spinning blades might clip off the small wings which were fastened with tiny springs to his body. We considered at some length how some strategic interventions might spare the hummingbird this misfortune and increase our pleasure in aiding his safety as well as extending his life.

For at least an hour and a half we arranged and rearranged all the spinners, musing particularly about the hummingbird’s peculiar habits and imminent danger to his torso.

Poets will often discuss exhaustively the distance between words in a poem or the unique way sentences or paragraphs get placed. They speak glowingly about the significance of the blank spaces and how they contain all kinds of subtle intimations of greater truth, deeper realities and infinite possibilities.

I’m of a mind recently, that some blank spaces should remain just that: blank spaces, especially mental ones. We need blank spaces in our lives. They should signify absolutely nothing. The spaces can become a respite from the search for significance or purpose or whatever problems we find that are driving us nuts; always trying to figure them out. These searches can become tiring enough as you know, so when I suddenly noticed that both of us were caught up with the particular habits of spinners to the extent that we had lost all sense of time and place, I could see we had inadvertently discovered a small harbor of refuge at this difficult time.

After half a day keeping medical appointments we’d take a break, repair to the spinners, and enjoy ‘spinner time’ as we came to name it. We reveled in the spiritual fecundity of mindlessness and even gained positive energy from our fanciful and frivolous musings. We got more than we gave, I can tell you that.

Even as I write this, I begin to see our romance with spinners is a form of play, the way kids play, and how deeply healing just playing can be. This kind of healing is not formulaic, but spontaneous, often eliciting belly laughs and gallows humor that provokes tears and guffaws alternately, often in the same moment. It’s fun.

We continue with one concern: the hummingbird spinner. A strong wind places him in a precarious position. I worry that his rotating prop as it furiously spins and bends backwards, sooner or later will whack the small fixed wing just behind it into spaghetti.

I don’t know that either of us have the particular skills to make appropriate repairs. Actually it “ain’t really broke” at the moment. We’ve decided our task right now is not to try fix anything else in our lives but to just enjoy our little spinners and let them take us to a dream world as long as they can.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Food Friday: More Than S’Mores

July 9, 2021 by Jean Sanders

Everything tastes better when it is cooked over a campfire. It is a truth universally acknowledged. That’s why Dinty Moore Beef Stew tastes like nectar after a long hike. That’s why those extra crispy bits of charred marshmallow are savory and delectable, the stuff of summer memories. There is more to cooking over a campfire than s’mores, but they are the beginning. There is panoply of meals that can be prepared over an open flame – it is your decision whether to take them on the camping trail, or stay in your own back yard.

Preparing your own food as a child is thrilling. It’s nighttime, and you are in the backyard. You’re allowed to play with fire. You’re encouraged to jab with sharp sticks or sharper skewers. You’re in charge. It is the beginning of your journey toward epicurean independence, and the stakes start low – with marshmallows.

There are distinct stages of marshmallow appreciation. It might take all summer for all the lessons to add up; acquiring knowledge and experience can be slow and measured. First: gobble up some raw marshmallows, right out of the bag. They are cold and powdery, with a delightful give as you bite, leaving tooth marks in the plump, yielding sponginess. After skewering a marshmallow, or two, or three, you learn how to delicately twirl and rotate the marshmallow a few inches above the open flame, lightly browning the exterior. You are perfecting your technique while you watch the marshmallows cooking in the hot gasses emitted by the dancing flames. You are learning science and compromise, because, undoubtedly, you are sharing this fire with a sibling. Diplomacy becomes important – which color flame produces the best marshmallow, and where is it in the campfire? Is it possible to share? Compromise or dominate?

After settling back on your camp stool, it is time for another taste test. Hmmmm. There is now a caramelized crisp surface, yielding a warm, runny center. With trial and error you are becoming a judicious connoisseur. Next, smug and secure with your new skill set, throwing caution to the winds in your sugar rush, you allow the marshmallows to catch fire, watching the blue flame engulf the surface: crisping, caramelizing, scorching, blackening, and incinerating before you blow it out. (Remember those lava-lamp marshmallows you weren’t fast enough to salvage? How they bowed and sagged and dripped off the skewer into the grass?) Delicately nibbling the remnants of the next batch, you have discovered that there can be too much of a muchness, and some restraint is necessary in life, and in marshmallows. This is a valuable cooking lesson.

A few how tos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%27more

Classic S’mores: https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchen/classic-smores-recipe-2108470

Sadly, there are s’mores kits available for the folks who require such things. They are expensive and fussy. The Spy has higher expectations. Remain true to the classic s’mores: https://food52.com/shop/products/2069-diy-s-mores-kit-set-of-2?

Although this sounds intriguing:
https://www.delish.com/cooking/a22550134/smores-grilled-cheese-recipe/

And soon it will be time to advance to hot dogs.

“The echoes of beauty you’ve seen transpire,
Resound through dying coals of a campfire.”
-Ernest Hemingway

The Case for Trees (Lots of Them) for the Shore: A Chat with CBF’s Robin Clark

July 8, 2021 by Dave Wheelan

It’s hard to argue with the proposition that our communities can always use more trees. Beyond their sheer beauty, trees have provided much-needed shade during hot summers, improved the quality of our public spaces, and served as hosts for birds and other small creatures along the Eastern Shore.

Those are some reasons that local governments and small nonprofit organizations have promoted and organized efforts to plant trees for decades. But as our region starts a long and difficult war against climate change and sea levels rising, it turns out that trees can be one of the most successful defenses with global warming.

In the first place, they soak up carbon dioxide from the air like no one’s business. Their roots prevent soil erosion, and their branches provide shade that can cool our streets. The list goes on.

And that is the reason why the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the region’s largest and oldest conservation organization, has double-downed on increasing the tree population on the Eastern Shore.

With the help of a new bill passed in Annapolis that calls for Maryland to plant 5 million trees over the next decade, CBF has joined forces with the Chesapeake Bay Trust, Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and Maryland Department of Agriculture to encourage towns, counties, and, most importantly, the farming community, to take advantage of this with a full range of incentives to make this bold goal a reality.

The Spy spoke with CBF’s Maryland Attorney, Robin Clark, the other day about the program and how critical this will be to save the Shore from the catastrophic impact of climate change.

This video is approximately six minutes in length. For more information about the Chesapeake Bay Foundation please go here.

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