Lydia Likes It

Meet me in Nuala

The fictional town of Nuala, in 1930s Ceylon, reminds me more than a little bit, and not by accident, of the real-life town of Kandy in the tea-growing mountains of modern-day Sri Lanka. Police Inspector Shanti de Silva and his English wife, Jane, find a world of trouble in what he thought would be a sleepy posting outside the capital city of Colombo. If you love getting lost in a book series, Harriet Steel's Nuala books, 11 volumes and counting, will keep you amused with an endearing ensemble of recurring characters, good mysteries to solve, and great descriptions of the countryside, the gardens, and the food. Start at the beginning and read your way through summer vacation.

Joseph Palmer, bearded man

Atlas Obscura has introduced me to some surprising and wonderful people, places and things that I never would have discovered on my own. Recently, my husband and I made the acquaintance of Joseph Palmer, a 19th Century farmer who resides in Evergreen Cemetery in Leominster, Massachusetts. The Atlas Obscura write-up is so perfect that I'm sharing it with you here, word-for-exquisite-word: 

"Despite the conception that the past was a hairy wonderland of bearded outdoorsmen, bushy facial hair was long considered the mark of lunatics or worse, heretics. Today there is a Massachusetts gravestone that still remembers one man’s heroic fight against the forces of anti-hirsute vigilantes and a whole town’s persecution against his epic mane.   

"A veteran of the War of 1812, Joseph Palmer began wearing a beard in the 1820s. Beards had gone out of style in the 1720s, and Palmer was considered by most all in his small town to be slovenly and ungodly. He was even criticized by his local preacher for communing with the devil, famously responding to the accusation, “…if I remember correctly, Jesus wore a beard not unlike mine.”

"In May of 1830, Palmer was attacked by four men outside a hotel in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Armed with razors and scissors, the men attempted to forcibly shave Palmer’s face, but the bewhiskered man stabbed two of his attackers with a pocketknife, and was subsequently arrested for assault. He could have avoided jail by paying a fine and court fees, but Palmer refused, maintaining his innocence, and more importantly his right to a glorious beard. He was subsequently jailed for 15 months, including time in solitary confinement.

"Upon leaving prison, Palmer joined the Fruitlands utopian community in nearby Harvard, Massachusetts after being influenced by his friendship with fellow Fruitlander, Louisa May Alcott. The character Moses White from Alcott’s Transcendental Wild Oats is later based on Palmer. Palmer died in 1865 and his tombstone displays a portrait of him with a long beard, and as a final act of rebellion, the inscription Persecuted for wearing the beard."

Tenements, Towers & Trash

I heart New York. It's the city of my birth, and the city of my granddaughters, and my husband Ted and I both have deep ties there. So it's especially pleasing to see the city through a different lens. In Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City, illustrator Julia Wertz offers a comic-style black-and-white view of all of the nooks and crannies of New York City. My favorite pages show street views from different time periods: how the markets, shops, music venues, and apartments have changed over the decades. This is a book you'll want to stroll through at a leisurely pace, maybe while nibbling on a bag of roasted chestnuts or sipping an egg cream.

Okonomiyaki: food as theater

On our third trip to Japan a couple of months ago, we wanted to focus not on shrines and temples and impossibly beautiful scenery, though we did see all of those, but on friends and experiences. In the friends department, we are blessed to have known Rika for more than three decades, and her family -- husband Ichiro, daughters Nagisa and Misaki, son Shumpei (who climbed Mt. Fuji with my husband Ted), and brand new son-in-law Takumi -- are like family to us. They live on the west coast of Japan, which gives us the opportunity to step off the tourist trail whenever we go to visit them, and there are no more generous hosts anywhere in Japan. For experiences, we took classes in shibori dyeing, spice blending, cooking, and painting of the little plastic food models you see everywhere in Japan.

Perhaps our best discovery on this trip, however, was okonomiyaki, a cabbage pancake to the max. Going out for okonomiyaki is more than a meal -- it's a complete entertainment, as the dish is made on griddles, often right at your table. The basic pancake consists of a thin batter, sometimes noodles, always what seems like an entire head of cabbage, and optional mix-ins like shrimp or pork, with special Japanese barbeque-like sauce on top. In our cooking class in Osaka, Ted and I learned to make a "chopstick" version that you can find at a street festival. These photos are from a tiny restaurant in Hiroshima called Hassei. I'd go far out of my way to eat their okonomiyaki again.

Seeing in color {orange}

I have a thing for brightly colored trucks. This one (seen at a roadside stop in rural Fukui prefecture in Japan), with attachments and hoses here and there and everywhere, looks like it's ready to take on any task. I love the gold ladder on top, too.