1. With a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction, I finished The Mosquito this evening. I'm not quite sure I can sum up what I learned from this book or what affected me most strongly -- which is to say I learned a lot and was rattled by much of what I learned about the mosquito, disease, evolution, genetics, world history, and the persistent effort of humans to control nature and how these efforts can seem successful and then often turn out to be futile or to have harmful unintended consequences. (I'm thinking at the moment of how DDT seemed to be the answer to eradicating mosquitoes, but the mosquitos adapted, the DDT became impotent, and the aggressive use of DDT turned out to have terrible consequences. as Rachel Carson examined in her transformative book, Silent Spring).
I'll go to Auntie's Bookstore on June 2 and see what the members of the Science and Nature book group have to say about The Mosquito.
2. This morning before doing much else, I made a rice salad for this evening's family dinner. I already had a batch of rice in a container in the fridge and I decided I had enough good ingredients on hand that I didn't have to go to the store for anything else. So I put the rice in a salad bowl and added raw almonds, dried apricots, dried cranberries, red pepper, cucumber, Kalamata olives, feta cheese, tomato, fresh squeezed lemon juice, and olive oil. It worked.
I walked into Christy's house not really knowing what we were having for dinner, only that I completed my assignment to bring a salad.
The dinner was terrific, built around a theme of spring flavors or, put another way, spring tonic foods.
We started off with the perfectly delicious appetizer Zoe prepared: baked prosciutto-wrapped asparagus.
Christy fixed a very tasty main dish: baked chicken breast with spring vegetables -- what spring vegetables, you might ask, did Christy bake? Radishes! Green onions! Pea pods! Cucumbers! Green beans! She made this potpourri of items zesty with lemon juice and dill.
Carol added more zest to our meal with a side dish called Vibrant Greek Lemon Rice. That's a good name for it! It was vibrant!
Using rhubarb snagged from our back yard, Christy made a very delicious baked rhubarb crisp and coupled it with a scoop of Oregon strawberry ice cream.
3. Following Carol and Debbie's lead from a week ago, Christy gave us an assignment for tonight: we understood the assignment and each brought and read a favorite poem.
Paul read two poems by e e cummings: "pity this monster, manunkind" and "next to of course god america i".
Carol presented an Advent poem by Madeline L'Engle: "Love Incarnate Birth".
I read a Lisel Mueller poem: "Brendel Playing Schubert".
Christy loves Judith Viorst's writing and read a poem of hers in honor of the life she lived with Everett: "The Pleasures of Ordinary Life".
Zoe didn't bring a poem, so Paul read a sonnet he'd written to/about her several years ago.
These poems ignited a lot of discussion and stories about all kinds of things philosophical, personal, educational, financial, theological, historical, biblical, and more.
I left dinner stimulated and beginning to wonder if I'll come up with an assignment when I host family dinner next week . . . stay tuned.
