Maison Tranquille Blog

  Un café, s'il vous plaît. Some sentences I have mastered. I spent much of my life assuming that learning was supposed to lead, eventually, to knowing. Now I suspect it mostly helps me find the next thing I don't know. I spend a good deal of time trying to learn things. I have been studying French for years, and it is slightly humbling that I still can't speak as well as a three-year-old. A French toddler can ask for a biscuit without first considering the gender of the biscuit and whether the verb requires any special treatment. I would like to have that kind of confidence. There are words I recognize easily on a page that seem to vanish entirely when someone says them aloud. Then, just as I am wondering whether all this effort has accomplished anything, I understand a sentence. An actual sentence, spoken by an actual French person, at an actual French speed. That is usually enough to keep me going. Lately I have been collecting common expressions, the kind people really ...

🌿🌿🌿 Thoughts about watching 84 Charing Cross Road starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.... I watched 84 Charing Cross Road expecting a pleasant movie about books and letters. It was that. But somewhere around 1951, I became aware that I was there too. I was three years old, living a very different life from Helene Hanff in New York or Frank Doel in London. I have no memory of their streets or their bookshop. Still, while Helene was writing letters across the ocean and Frank was hunting down books for her, I was somewhere in Louisiana and Arkansas, busy being three. We were sharing the same time. The film makes space for the ordinary things. Helene wants a particular book. Frank finds it, or can’t find it, and writes back. Helene sends parcels of food to the Marks & Co booksellers in London, where meat is still rationed years after the war. Someone passes along a bit of news. People go home to their families. Years go by, and another letter turns up. Nothing happens quickly...

  I have been on Duolingo for 1,545 consecutive days. That sounds much more impressive than it is. It does not mean I have spent 1,545 days becoming fluent in French. Some days I have done several lessons. Some days I have only done enough to keep the flame from going out. At this point, I am not even sure why I maintain the streak.  Is it because I am devoted to French or because I refuse to be defeated by a cartoon owl. For a long time, learning French had the usual framework around it: lessons, levels, progress and the distant possibility of becoming fluent. Fluency is a fine goal, but it can turn an interest into another job. There is always more vocabulary to learn, another verb tense to master and another level showing how far I still have to go. Maybe, instead, I can simply be interested in French. I do not have to become fluent to justify the time I spend with it. I can like the sound of the language, enjoy recognizing a sentence and remain curious about how French peo...

  I opened the freezer the other day and decided things had gotten ridiculous. It was packed, with vegetables crammed into every available space. Broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, carrots, corn, peas, beans, berries and assorted bags of things I would have to pull out to identify. I took a picture, which somehow made it look even worse. Then I remembered this wasn't our only freezer. We have another freezer in the garage, and another refrigerator with a side freezer. Apparently I was preparing for the apocalypse. Or maybe I was planning on catering the apocalypse.  Anyway, the apocalypse has been canceled. We're eating the freezer. This comes at a good time. We're trying to pay down some bills, and I'm also working on downsizing our lives a little. Buying more groceries while several freezers are already full doesn't help either project, so for the next couple of weeks we're shopping at home first. We will still buy fresh produce, bread and other things we need, b...

  Let’s Cook It Right by Adelle Davis was more than a book that sat on a shelf. This one helped feed my family. I have spent an inordinate amount of time reading about nutrition for most of my adult life. My interest may have developed during a few years of food insecurity, but from my discovery of Prevention magazine back in the 1970s until now, I have tried to figure out the healthiest way to eat. I have been vegetarian, mostly raw, Mediterranean-minded and several things in between. I am still interested, still experimenting and still trying to do better without making food the only measure of a healthy life. Because it isn’t. How we move, rest, handle stress, love our people and enjoy our days matters too. When my family was young, I regularly made a ground beef and vegetable soup from Adelle Davis’s Let’s Cook It Right . I had almost forgotten about it until I started looking for ways to use some of the food already in our freezer. Suddenly, I remembered that soup and how mu...

  Travis and I were born at exactly the right time to witness one of the greatest transformations in human history—from radio to artificial intelligence, from handwritten letters to video calls, from encyclopedias to carrying nearly all human knowledge in our pockets. Through it all, I have tried to remain curious. I hope that when I am ninety-eight, I'll still be asking questions like, "What words are my age?" Curiosity is one of the qualities that keeps our world from shrinking as we grow older. That matters deeply to me, and I think this little dictionary reflects that. What words are our contemporaries? It's almost impossible to know exactly when a word was "born," but dictionaries usually record the first known appearance of a word in print. Together, these words tell a story. Travis arrived as the world was ending a war and beginning the long work of rebuilding. Three years later, I arrived as America was turning toward technology, psychology, sports,...

  I bought a jar of Juan Valdez freeze-dried coffee at Walmart yesterday. It all began with a simple question.  What is the best quality of instant coffee?   I’ve always assumed instant coffee was something you drank when there was no other option.  It was convenient, but convenience at the expense of flavor.  I remembered bitter granules, flat taste, and the knowledge that certainly this was settling for less than the best. But yesterday, I discovered that instant coffee has undergone a transformation. It’s important to know that the difference between traditional spray-dried coffee and the newer freeze-dried varieties is enormous. Freeze-drying preserves much more of the coffee's aroma and flavor.  What I brewed yesterday was smooth, full-bodied, and genuinely pleasant.  The freeze-drying process, which removes water through sublimation rather than heat, preserves the coffee's aromatics in a way the old spray-dried methods couldn't. Who knew tha...

  For many years, I searched for good books. I read bestseller lists. I looked at award winners. I followed book club recommendations. If a book was widely praised, I felt it might resonate with me, too. I trusted the algorithm to recommend titles suited to my reading preferences. Yet the results puzzled me. Many books that were supposed to be perfect for me left me unmoved, while a handful of others stayed with me for years. The same pattern appeared in television. Some highly acclaimed series failed to capture my interest, while others spoke directly to my heart. Only recently have I begun to pay attention not to the categories of stories I loved, but to the qualities they shared. At first it seemed I must like historical fiction. Then perhaps it was mysteries. Then literary fiction. But none of those labels quite fit. What I have realized is that I am drawn to stories about people learning what matters. My favorite characters are not necessarily brilliant, powerful, or successfu...

  For years I tried to find the perfect way to eat. These days I'm more interested in ways of eating that are simple enough to do every day. My current Maison Tranquille meal plan is uncomplicated: Breakfast: Avocado toast with sprouts plus a rotating side of eggs, sardines, apple and walnuts, tomato and cucumber, or oatmeal. Lunch: A big smoothie made with coleslaw mix, spinach, bananas, frozen mixed berries, flax seeds, apple juice and water Dinner: A house salad topped with whatever proteins, veggies, or grains sound good that night The salad dressing is mixed right in the bottom of the bowl: • 1 tablespoon olive oil • 1 tablespoon lemon juice or red wine vinegar • 1 teaspoon Maille French mustard (or any dijon mustard) • 1 teaspoon of Season-All Whisk, add the greens, and toss. I've been growing broccoli, radish, kale, and sulforaphane sprouts again and adding them wherever I can. It's amazing how much nutrition can come from a few simple habits repeated day after da...