There’s energy and optimism in the air the weekend before Christmas that I find does not exist the weekend after. The holiday parties, grown children returning to the roost, family photos and news arriving with Christmas cards from childhood friends and college pals of 30 years ago, pretty packages growing slowly in number beneath the tree that hasn’t yet dried out and sagged and dropped ornaments.
This weekend brought me to my friend’s annual holiday gathering at their farm and elegant food shop in Borodino, N.Y. on Rose Hill Road, near the flashing light on Route 41 beside Skaneateles Lake.
Products on display at the Borodino Market, Schoolhouse Farms
Becky's kamut grain salad with vegetables and feta. Yum!
Becky and Richard Malcolm demonstrate the possibilities of the products they sell in a healthy, light, adventurous culinary sampling. Champagne and wine add to the cheer in this novel historic, one-room schoolhouse setting of unusual domestic and imported items. Superb.
This afternoon I just finished rendering beef suet which I strained and combined with some egg shells I’d been saving and a big spoonful of peanut butter. It’s all cooling in a loaf pan at the back door so I can slice it, place it in the suet cage outside my kitchen window and await the woodpeckers. I’ve become the crazy bird lady of the University neighborhood and admit to delaying important tasks so I can spy on the birds with binoculars.
I have dozens of plump and satisfied cardinals, chicadees, pygmy nuthatches and red-breasted nuthatches, titmice, junkoes, gold finches, house finches and purple finches. I’ve seen a hawk out back which I don’t know how to identify because they all look the same in the bird book and I can’t get close enough, even with binoculars, to get a better look at his markings. 
By far my favorite backyard visitors are the woodpeckers. I have five varieties and one particularly beautiful and bashful one, the red-breasted woodpecker which made a dozen appearances at the suet cage yesterday. The red-breasted woodpecker doesn’t seem to have a red breast as much as it has a brilliant, orange-red band extending like a mohawk from the beak, up and down the head and ending at a perfect cape of delicate black and white stripes. Best yet, he announces his arrival at the feeder with a loud cluck so I can stop what I’m doing and admire him.
A chickadee comes in for a landing at the sunflower seed
This weekend I’ve also kept close tabs on my friend Dee who is snowed in with her three boys in northern Virginia. Dee is a native of Syracuse so she knows snow, but she doesn’t know it well anymore for having relocated to the south after college. This weekend she got reacquainted real fast with two feet of snow dumped on her yard by the Blizzard of ’09.
Like her old Syracuse days, Dee gets snowed in in Virginia
Don’t you admit to feeling just a little left out of all the fuss? I know 2 feet will fall on us too eventually, but the scenes of a white White House and gauzy Rockefeller Christmas tree gave folks up and down the coast a little something that we couldn’t have this weekend.
Still to come before darkness descends on this darkest time of the year; my walk with Eika around the neighborhood which is getting soaked in sunshiny vitamin D today, only this time I’ll tape a note to the door advising Otto not be allowed outside until the shepherd and I return. Scroll to the article before this one and you’ll know why.
Loading ...
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
We got over a foot of snow. Parts of the cape had nearly two feet.
Yes Jenna, you thought you escaped that stuff when you left Syracuse. Not!