Tiny recipe (I still cook, sort of!)

Oooh... a few squares of mushroom stuffed ravioli. A little sauce of melted butter, fresh garden tomatoes, chopped leftover bacon, and a spoonful of pesto. You will serve it with a glass of 2011 Principe Corsini "Le Corti" Chianti Classico, a wine it seems to me at the peak of its life. It's just beginning to "brick," or turn reddish brown with maturity. I'm not much interested in vastly overworked  fruit basket metaphors, but it was delicious. All of a piece, "all through." Just wine.

 

Tiny, real world update

I was talking to a youth who mentioned Hillary Clinton's health problems. How did you know about it? I was going to ask rather snarkily, since I gather Facebook and Twitter have prevented the topic from 'trending.' But I didn't get a chance to ask, because the nice youth launched into an obedient recital of her official history. "She had a concussion in 2012, and then pneumonia -- "

I made the 'pshaw' sound. "I don't believe a word anyone says about her. I mean, anyone from her camp." The youth giggled nervously. Then we talked about what might happen if, God forbid, she is ill enough to withdraw from the race or too ill to serve if elected. Not that I want her; I simply don't want the Democrat party troweling in Elizabeth Warren to replace her.

"In that case," the youth said, "Obama would probably just sign an E.O. postponing the election, and say, 'Hey, I'd like a few more years anyway.' "

"Ah, well, he can't do that," -- I did not snap, but only said -- I think. The youth's utter, easy seriousness and his tossing out of an abbreviation for "Executive Order" annoyed me and yes, shocked me. This is an American? And he wants to be a lawyer? I went on, "There are laws about that, at least for the moment. Of course you know about that," delivered not snarkily but pleasantly (I think) -- "you're going to law school." Then, musingly, "that's what it means to have a government of law, not men."

The youth giggled nervously. We carried on to neutral ground, talking about how there must be protocols -- laws? -- for situations where high elected officials or those running for election are sick or get sick. Remember the president who caught pneumonia and died three months after his inauguration? Yes, we both knew of that, the youth and I, but neither could remember his name. Garfield?

No, Harrison, William Henry (1773-1841), as it turned out. Last president to have been born a British subject, first to die in office; grandfather of another president, Benjamin Harrison. And he died only one month after his inauguration, not three. He lived an interesting and full life: soldier, farmer, representative in Congress, Senator, territorial governor, ambassador to "Gran Colombia" for eighteen months. What were the stages of travel from Washington D.C. to Bogota in 1828? The mind reels.

It's not "powder of antimony"

Even after At First Glass' and Pluot's many incarnations and designs and re-boots, and subsequent plunge into comparative obscurity -- did I once get 12,000 hits one Thanksgiving week? -- I still from time to time am offered a sample bottle of wine by nice people at nice publicity firms. It's not Insignia or Troussard anymore, and of course this summer with the hullabaloo of my move to a new house I could not respond to a surprising glut of invitations. Besides, "Dear things!" I want to exclaim honestly. "You know I have no readership to speak of. But thank you!"

Now as the hullabaloo moving dust has somewhat settled, here comes a delightful bottle of something from Sicily. I found the time to say yes.

The maker is Lamuri, the grape Nero d'Avola, the wine a darkly succulent, whiff-of-cherry-and-mocha bargain that would pair well with what you might call strong, lantern-jawed Mediterranean foods. Remember when archetypical handsome heroes were called lantern-jawed? A recipe in the "Wines of Sicily D.O.C." booklet that came packed with the bottle seems perfect: the fine print says that Victor Rallo, host of Eat! Drink! Italy! devised a Grilled Lamb Chops Scottadita, lamb with spicy Sicilian almond red pepper sauce, to go with our robust red Sicilian sample.

Delicious, but I can't help raising a question. I just looked at the news this morning. Shouldn't Eat! Drink! Italy! read Eat! Drink! [Muslim] Italy!? "UN chief: 235,000 more migrants in Libya ready to embark for Italy," to add to the 300,000 already arrived (in Europe) this year.

I often want to broach this same question to the Old World vendors, or winemakers and distillers, who come to the store to show us their latest products. No one says a word because to do so would, I suppose, mark one as an embarrassing killjoy. A Chicken Little, the-sky-is-falling type. But I want to ask, of them, of Sicily, of Chef Rallo: you do realize these people, these newcomers in the hundreds of thousands forbid alcohol, yes? They remain for the moment a minority and yes, perhaps those who come are the type not to like their religion's strict rules and to be glad to reach the wine-lands. On the other hand, judging by the look of those young, strong men, they may be the type to like their religion very much and to be eager to impose it on the winelands. I am glad -- I want to go on saying, to the vendors, to Sicily -- glad all of you are making such strides in trellising and quality clone selection and things, but do you never wonder if you might be forced to sketch a Plan  B or even C for your life and for the land?

No one wants to be a questioning provincial killjoy. Google a bit and you'll find there are vineyards in majority Muslim Lebanon. There are some in Morocco and Tunisia. I don't think it takes too much breath, however, to acknowledge that these are outliers and that my question still stands. It stands because of more than immigration. We must expect not only that, but that the gates are opened by our own leadership, against our will, as an ideological act. That's a new thing in history, isn't it? It accompanies one of the most important marks of our age: we vote, but eighteenth-  or nineteenth-century election cycles move too slowly to keep up with progressive rule by fiat, or to accommodate any of our changes of civic mind. It all gives a pointed freshness to calm schoolbook-style descriptions of "cultural influence of successive waves of Phoenician, Greek, Roman, and Arab," etc., say in a place like Sicily. In a pamphlet about Sicily. And that was when kings did defend their own shorelines.

Hence the idea of winemakers being forced to sketch a plan C. I don't see why it's inconceivable that a vineyard or a region could be overrun, or be told to cease production, before the good people in it could vote for a leadership willing to close the gates, or otherwise leave them alone. Why not? The Muslim mayor of London -- itself a phrase once inconceivable in my lifetime, and I'm not old -- wants to banish any billboard and bus stop advertising showing pictures of scantily-clad women. That's a little wavelet of cultural influence, wouldn't you say? Why shouldn't I worry about the wine? Because that would never happen, because it can't happen here?   

All in all, it occurs to me that in this extraordinary era when, to pick another marker, the Pope in six months might variously condemn murder in God's name as "Satanic" having humbly washed the feet of the people who tend to do it, possibly the most useful thing the Westerner can do for his tattered civilization is to support the liquor industry. To work in it may be to really man the towers. By the by, I am always encouraged when I see a woman in a hijab buying a bottle. She buys it as a present for someone else I presume. If a Muslim man buys one you can't tell, but of course the women stand out. I have seen it happen twice in two years.

Here may be what it will come down to. Whether you care about voting or religion or music or art or those same women having their private parts cut up, or not, if it comes to it -- will you give up the booze? Or might "they" be satisfactorily seduced by it? So far, outliers aside, their rejection of it has been firm. Won't it be remarkable, if in time alcohol -- an Arabic word, originally meaning for them "powder of antimony [kohl]" and for us, alcohol -- is the last hill we turn and stand on.  

" 'Judge ye' "

But Peter and John answered and said unto them, Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye; for we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard. Acts 4: 19-20.

Sometimes you do come across the most remarkable things on the interwebs. Last night PJMedia posted an article about the state of Massachusetts now forcing " 'LBGT accomodation' " on churches in that state, in other words, the churches like any other institutions with buildings and bathrooms must deny that men are men and women, women, and ensure that the bathrooms are open to all. More, congregants are not to be permitted to criticize the matter. Churches tolerating such "harassment" could be sued under anti-discrimination laws.

Down in the comments section, which yes are full of sad angry trolls, as on every site, bickering at each other, nevertheless I found an extraordinary bit of information. You do find those, too, written by your talented fellow citizens who probably should be in elected office or running newsrooms but who, for many reasons, are not. This one commenter said, regarding Massachusetts demanding obeisance about our apparatchik-run insanity du jour, that "the great Christian response is Acts 4:19."

I looked up the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 4, verse 19, and found the quote above. "Whether it is right in the sight of God to obey you more than God, you decide; but we can only say what we have seen and heard."

Peter and John were answering the authority figures of their day, who demanded they stop talking about Jesus even though an entire crowd in Jerusalem had just seen them heal a paralyzed man, in (the resurrected) Jesus' name, and walk with him into the Temple precincts. But even that background story is less striking, for our purposes for the moment I think, than the utter subtlety and truth of the Apostles' response to authority's eternal demand: which in the end always seems to be, Shut up and obey. Their answer, "whether we should listen to you more than God, you decide. But we must say what we have seen and heard;" is simply an announcement of reality; of truth, because God has not made an absurd world. To look about you and see and hear, and to testify, is to testify to truth, and therefore to God. It's also to testify to the ordinary person's ability to see truth. And therefore to have authority. G. K. Chesterton notices that this is one of the things Christianity's critics dislike about it. Orthodoxy tends to stick with you even if you didn't like his sing-song paradoxes as you drove to work listening to his book on tape a few months ago.

In these two sentences in Acts, the Apostles also put the onus on authority to declare whether or not it deserves Godlike hearkening. "Judge ye." Authority must either shamefacedly say, No we do not, which negates them; or, pompously, Yes we do, which is false. Peter and John thus give us a refreshing dismissal of the webs that authority so often catch us in -- especially our modern liberal world's teaching, nanny state authority, coolly eliding, um, "God" -- when it insists that we sit up before its demands and discuss and explain why we think we should remain in error as in the bad old days, when people had unjust thoughts. No, no discussion. "You," authority, "judge" your rank. Of course it does, shamefaced or not. Don't forget the apostles must have known the risk they were taking. Authority executed every one of them except John just for a start.

So the interesting problem of authority hating truth, and hating the ordinary man's testifying to it, seems to be very old. Our quandary seems to be, what risks we take in refusing debate, but throwing truth in their laps, to do as they like with. 

I think I'll just have a Brunello in the garden

It takes years before you begin to understand, that is, unless (I suppose) you make a frantic study of it, in order to become a "somm." We have a new staff member in the department, promoted yesterday God bless him, and I can only imagine what the tossing sea of shelves crammed with bottles looks like to him.

To refresh our memories, re: -- oh, I don't know, pick one. Italy. The simplest thing is to imagine a map of that country, with two spots highlighted, Piedmont in the northwest and tourist Tuscany in the central west of the peninsula. In Piedmont, we have the wines Barolo and Barbaresco, grandest of the grand. Both are made from the nebbiolo grape.

In Tuscany, we have that slew of wines all made from sangiovese or its close relatives and clones. Chianti, Chianti Classico. Brunello di Montalcino. Rosso di Montalcino. Whenever a fine Italian wine has a sort of humbler little brother, it's called Rosso, "red." Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. Rosso (ah!) di Montepulciano. Still Tuscany.

It takes years, sans frantic study, just to get that straight. Then comes the tasting. In sum, know that Barolos and Barbarescos (back to Piedmont, or da capo you might say) are magically silky, startlingly brownish, but are also so acidic and full of tannin that, after one swallow, they can seem empty and disappointing. The lady buying her birthday treat from our cellar last weekend described to me just such a Barolo. I knew, and could confirm for her, exactly what she meant. You must drink them with great food, or else wait until your bottle is twenty years old or you are on vacation in Milano before opening it, or all three. For a sure thing right now she chose Verite La Muse instead, all plush merlot velvet and Sonoma-cult price (circa $400 a pop).

Brunellos, now. Brunello di Montalcino, Tuscany. They are different. At least they seem so to me, but you know my Barolo problems ....

Brunellos also are among the grandest of the grand. In starting to like them, in noticing "they are different," one's years of experience are, perhaps, beginning to tell. They are silky, again, but they suffer less tannin and acid, and give more agreeable depths of fruit flesh; in a Brunello the sangiovese grape that makes a Chianti of  black tart berries and dry sandpaper, and a bit of olive brine and horse stable thrown in, remember? -- in a Brunello this same grape and this same region (did you remember? Tuscany) make a lovely, light, complete and liquid thing inexpressible in mere and discrete greengrocer's metaphors. Similar to a Rioja -- that's in Spain -- it's just wine. And it's the kind of thing you look forward to coming home to and planning a meal around. Almost like a person, no? A guest.
 

  
2011 Sassetti Livio Pertimali Brunello. Retail, about $40.

Now moving on, to the garden. It's best not to have your Brunello there, really, since in this late summer we find ourselves again in the season of the yellow jacket or "meat bee," hungry for any and all food and drink. They will pester you and your picnic right indoors, although Wikipedia tells us that Vespula maculifrons is a valuable predator of other annoying insects.

One of the attractions of this particular condo building, otherwise no different from the several tucked along a quiet street here, and all backed by their parking lots, open land, and walking path beneath the huge high tension wires, is the garden. Somewhere in the details of the condo association's thirty-year-old bylaws I saw something about every owner having approximately an 8 percent stake in everything. I thought, "won't it be nice if that means we all get 8 percent of the garden, to do as we like with?"

One evening my gentleman friend and I approached. The sun was setting. Everywhere were red cannas, yellow Black-eyed Susans, and purple phlox; and huge lavish green prehistoric-looking leaf clumps that turned out to hide butternut squash, hanging in modest salmon-hued glory in the shade, and acorn squash too, sitting modestly green on the earth beneath more yellow blossoms of the same, shaped weirdly like elegant drooping half-clenched yellow hands. Gentleman friend is a grower of cannas and begonias and a tender of tomatoes, too. This gives him an almost professional interest in everything. (An ex-girlfriend taught him to garden. He still shakes his head. "I never thought I'd like it. If anyone ever told the guys...." ) "There's someone who can tell us," he now remarked. A middle-aged lady had straightened up from her work in the really huge plot.

 We asked questions. Who started this, who participates, etc.? "Oh, no, it's just me," Carla said. She told her story of dismay at seeing nothing but a stand of dead, collapsed poplars from her third floor balcony -- with its view of the high tension wires -- when she moved in twenty years ago. So she planted a little plot of zinnias. And then, over the years, her project expanded.

"Just me." I should have guessed. How many people like to garden? I can only measure it in human terms. How many people like to garden, such that a plot as big as this, about forty-five paces broad and ten or fifteen deep, might be maintained by the enthusiastic common effort of an at least occasionally-changing cadre of owners in this one building, across twenty years? Count twelve units, times twenty years, plus or minus, let us say, three owners leaving and three more arriving per, let us say, -- every five years? Already the arithmetic is too complex to think about. Far more likely that it's just one person, everlastingly, who likes to garden. Just Carla. That explains the variety too. A group effort would have installed flowers by committee consensus, and you would have nothing but petunias and vinca vine ground cover.

"Things come and go over the years," she went on. The wagon wheel was an anonymous gift. "The bench is made of deckwood," so it proved too heavy to steal. She spotted it one summer morning, halfway across the greensward under the high tension wires, on the way to the woods beyond and to some other home and garden. But the thieves had given up. The beautiful heavy glossy brown bench returned, thanks to the efforts of honest condominium owners, to its rightful place. Carla's father built it.

Sometime during our evening talk, when gentleman friend and Carla were quite hitting it off -- he was telling her all about the feral parrots of the inner city, and they do exist, I have seen them -- I said, dear me, I would like to play a part in this garden, but I wouldn't want to intrude.

"Oh, it wouldn't be an intrusion." So kind, but I couldn't help but wonder. Really? Human nature being what it is, and considering her twenty years of effort, and never knowing whether or when the condo association, or ComEd under their high tension wires, might say Stop That, we're going to get sued for something or other, I couldn't help but wonder. No intrusion? You mean I could help clean it up, and get rid of the Welcome mats and strips of carpet keeping down weeds at the back? How about less dead brown vegetable growth and more interesting things? The cottage garden look is all very well, but then where are the foxgloves, delphinium, and hollyhocks? No lavender, no potted orange or lemon trees? I see a few remnants of lilies, but otherwise no glorious peonies, no spring bulbs? No cinder paths where one  may really walk, almost no bushes or trees (except Rose of Sharon, which I am sorry I do not like), "the bones of the garden"? And why the huge central bed of raspberries? I am glad to feed the birds and voles, but it looks a bit exhausted.

Then I had a fresh thought, which may seem soapy but I hope is not. Anyway "she'd probably appreciate the help," my friend had said. And I thought: the garden is a metaphor for the world, isn't it. You find it lacking; yet here it was before you arrived. Step back and look, and you may find suddenly you see, you metaphorical insect, that it is a privilege to participate.

In a tearing hurry, again, but "ancora imparo"*

Sometimes Saturday nights are a tad slow at work, so I use the time to self-crash-course my way to more wine knowledge. Last night, what started out as a simple mnemonic project, with the computer and a couple of encyclopedias at hand -- write down all the names of the 61 Bordeaux chateaux from the 1855 classification -- turned into an interesting bit of sleuthing. And now I know a wine I want to try, but that I don't know how to get.

In the middle of the official list of the classified growths, right in the middle of the "Troisieme crus," is Chateau Langoa-Barton. I had never heard of it, even though being in charge of the French wine section for the past four months has left me with at least a working knowledge of Bordeaux. My plan for last night's self-crash-course was to focus on the chateaux I did not know, cross-reference them in our store's chainwide inventory, and, if it turned out we did not sell them, investigate if possible why.

This turned interesting quickly and it showed a pattern quickly. I really needed to look up only one or two names, here or there. (We sell a lot of Bordeaux.) Rauzan-Gassies was unfamiliar; turns out it is known as an underperformer. Same with Durfort-Vivens. Both are "second growths." Then came Langoa-Barton, as I say in the middle of the third growths. If you scroll down through its reviews at a site like Wine Cellar Insider, you see it gets a lot of scores in the high 80s or low 90s. We don't carry it, either. That's the pattern.

But Langoa-Barton is not regretfully labeled an underperformer. I took notes on its reviews because they, too, all showed a pattern: "tannic." Masculine. Strict, classically styled. "Classic personality." Tannic, classic, earthy, cedar tobacco. Tannic and firm. Tannic, classsic, old school. Austere, tannic, firm. Powerful, masculine, beefy, "well suited for fans of traditionally styled wine." And tannic -- did we mention tannic?

So it's interesting that this low-pointed wine, I should say this chateau's wines, high 80s and low 90s, is not faulted by its reviewers as unsound. Only they seem to struggle to give it fruit metaphors, while images of dryness and inanimate things, or vegetal things, abound. It's as if the wine is less like fruit and more like the wooden box the fruit came in. Yet they keep calling it classic and traditional, and thus my curiosity is piqued, all the more because my research tells me Langoa Barton is the only classified growth still owned by the same family as in 1855. That's good, surely, if you want to reach back in time and get your hands on a bottle of a cabernet-merlot blend (that is what we are talking about) not overwhelmed by the modern love of 95-point, blueberry-pie-with-caramel-fudge "monsters."  

I'll let you know where else my self-crash-course wine learning takes me. Thank God I found out what Abacus is before the nice man browsing the wine cellar pointed it out to me as one of his favorites: I was able to do something besides nod and smile about it. He left not with Abacus but with a three liter bottle of Chateau Giscours 2005 (Troisieme cru). That was fun. It's amazing how the store staff suddenly seem to lurk while a purchase like that is being gently cossetted out the door. I mean, we're not on commission or anything.

Now I have to pack up and move.

* "I am still learning," attributed to Michelangelo at the age of eighty.

I entered the Hendrick's gin contest

Captain Tarquin Shakespeare met the great alien Zephirine Felicite immediately upon leaving the galaxy's edge. She was all wings and eyes, and did not understand time. "How is it," she asked, "that your planet, merely in orbiting its star, causes living beings to 'age'?" 

See here.

A question of sight

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to attend another of the wine seminars which are, whether large and official or small and on the fly (because the sales rep dropped by with some new bottles), a permanent part of the job. As usual, they are as intriguing for the chance they provide to observe human nature as they are for the things one learns about wine.

A few points still stand out, seminar after seminar. About wines: they, especially reds, are getting more uniform in taste and weight, and dare I say, more scentlessly bland? even as Master Sommelier candidates are called upon to struggle fiercely with identifying their differences as a proof of  expertise. The official class yesterday treated of Oregon pinot noirs, and of the Court of Master Sommeliers' program. Delicious, and most interesting, as Miss Marple would say. Only, no longer will I breezily tell customers how different the Oregon "style" tends to be from the Californian .... 

Here are some more points. About people: people still want to be perceived as having innate grand taste, especially when they are sampling blind. Wow, my favorite was the Chateau Latour! But we also want to be perceived as non-snobs able to recognize a sleeper, $12 hit. So a group of fifteen or twenty souls tread very carefully when asked "what are we tasting in the glass? Any thoughts?" No one wants to say olive brine or tar when that might be wrong. But if you say olive brine, you won't be told you're wrong. "Good! What else? Anyone?" There is an almost audible sigh of relaxation as more guesses are proffered. This is the nub of it all, for it's not nonsense. There are specific things to be perceived and named in the glass, and they do have a chemical structure and an origin in the grape or the place. Most importantly they give pleasure. Someone chances to mention a scent you thought was crazy at first. Meat. "Yes! Savory!" Good! What else? 

The idea of tasting and talking in a group is to train your palate, which is perfectly legitimate, too. But you can only bring to each seminar the palate you've developed so far; so that when everyone excitedly asks the moderator to "taste the next one blind," and we do, and you think it might be a Chianti (Italian, sangiovese) and it turns out to be a northern Rhone (French, syrah), you do stop and marvel inwardly. Good grief, I have probably only tasted three or four expensive northern Rhones in my life. No wonder I couldn't tell. Or else my faculties aren't good. Or else red wines are all the same. Meanwhile the man next to you, who had believed it was a Cotes du Rhone (mostly southern French, grenache-based blend), now breezily forgets that, and exults how he knew all along. "That classic northern Rhone profile. Syrah all the way. Beautiful." As an aside, and most curiously, we hear confirmed that when the blind tastings for final exams at the Master Sommelier level are done, the wines the candidates struggle over are never identified, not ever. In the film Somm the exhausted aspirants discuss their wildly divergent opinions. "You called Vacqueyras?" "I called boutique Sonoma gamay." They will never know. It must be a precaution against anyone's really developing a palate memory, and returning confident next year. I can't think what else it might mean.

So I drive home, marveling. Note how the seminar turns out to be much more about people than wine. My old WineStyles colleague's words come back to me -- he of the thirty-five years in the business, retail, wholesale, and crushpad, he who started out selling Paul Masson Cracklin' Rose and also tasted Chateau Petrus when young liquor store clerks still could. "Folks. Please. It's just wine." And I think, what other product, what consumable, has this bright-eyed anxiety attached to it? It's a sort of unintentional humbug, if there can be such a thing. Customers look for guidance in spending their money to people in the trade. We can provide some, but you see what goes on when we're together. Yesterday we also heard confirmed that Oregon and California pinot noirs are not getting more lushly alike, the proof being that the nice man who reviews Oregon for Wine Advocate is an Englishman steeped in the spare Burgundian tradition. When he first arrived in Oregon he gave the wines low points, in the 80s, but now he has "gotten his head around the style" and he routinely rates them 92 and 95. That didn't really answer my question, but the moderator wanted to move on. It was on thinking of that, driving home, that the word humbug occurred to me. 

What other product has this anxiety attached? Very gourmet beef? Orchids? Perfume? Maybe perfume. Another mysterious bottled liquid, been around forever, expensive, hard to describe, marketing is everything, capable of being very good or very mediocre. You have your iconic examples, like Chanel No. 5, and your cognoscienti treats, like Chanel No. 19. Germany has been making 4711 for two hundred years, in Cologne. There is a whole background world of the stuff that only sommeliers as it were know. One can imagine, at the perfume counter, a customer's same anxiety not to instinctively like a "cheap scent," or the same ready dismissal of what grandmother wore or what one liked in college. And remember in old Hollywood movies when the perfume counter girl is understood to be no better than she should be?

On the other hand, everyone can see an orchid and decide about it. "You like what you like." It must be a question of sight.     

The Fableist pinot noir, 2014

He's playing you like a fiddle

After you go and see and reject the tiny yellow house with its charming old neighborhood, retro clotheslines, and immense yard and snowblower-unfriendly gravel driveway, then, because you are still insisting to your realtor that you "want to try for a house," well, then you open up your email the next day to see the subject line, from him. "K ------- has sent you 78 properties matching your requirements." That is, they are all in your budget and are "detached," all houses. (A condo or a town home is "attached.")

Seventy-eight! Wow, you feared there would be, like, three! Unhappily they prove, all of them, to be way the hell out in the boondocks and they all need major if not catastrophic-level "work." One or two have actually been condemned and must be torn down. So it's the land that is valuable; whether or not you have the means to build is your affair, not K-----'s.

Still you trawl through all of them, all the pictures and all the information on all the houses. Just for fun, as Nana used to say. It's very enjoyable to imagine oneself inside these walls or looking out these windows to that backyard, and thinking, now this is mine. The lawn could be turned to native grasses -- the upstairs ramshackle porch could be a fabulous sort of indoor office/greenhouse -- look at the overgrowth of lilies beside the stone steps, already such a Michigan-cottage feel. You recall delightful movies and magazine articles in which some intrepid woman gets off the tour bus to buy, on the spot, a ramshackle Tuscan farmhouse or a trulli in Apulia, complete with crabby old gardener who turns out to be heroic and has a handsome middle-aged professor son also.

But chances are she, the impulsive heroine of the tour bus, was a well-to-do real estate broker in San Francisco to begin with, with money to pay the masons to relay the medieval steps, and the gardener to tend the olive trees. Here you are going to be -- you are imagining yourself -- in a ramshackle and badly carpeted old house maybe fifty minutes' drive from your job. You know perfectly well you do not, after all, want to come home from work to mow the lawn, relay medieval stone steps, or more likely hang on the phone to contractors asking for price estimates on what it costs to repair their modern concrete equivalent. Don't forget the neighbors are watching, concerned about weeds and their own property values. This isn't relaxed, eccentric- and ruin-friendly Europe. (Then again, is Europe?) "I don't know, Nance," a co-worker I'll call David shakes his head. "When you're a single person, it's awfully nice to come home from work and be able to sit down in a condo and not worry about maintenance. Maybe take a dip in the pool if there is one."

Oh, don't be so discouraging. On the other hand, go ahead, be discouraging. Why else do we ask advice? Besides, for all that Colette enjoyed her many-roomed villa in Provence with her cook and gardener and handsome boy, truly what single woman wants a midwestern Cape Cod that clearly calls out for a young family with children and puppies? What single woman wants to spend her days off vacuuming the silent upstairs bedrooms?

The tiny yellow house

So you plan to go with the realtor to see the little yellow house. Before the appointment at 6:45 you have of course been tapping away at your phone to sisters and other support networks, and when one replies "I can come with if you want," you text back "Sure!" thankfully.

She arrives. You drive back (it's your second visit of the day, the first one exploratory, solo) to the yellow house. The realtor pulls up behind you in his big black SUV whose license plates read REALTR1. He gets out holding a binder. He's young, stocky, somewhat wary-eyed, he puts you in mind of a polite but intense high school wrestling coach. He has the combination to the lockbox hanging on the house's front door handle. The box drops open to reveal the key to the house. That's how realtors get in. You go in.

It's very, very small. Six hundred and fifty square feet. That includes two bedrooms which seem to give abruptly on to each other, and to the tiny bathroom, simply as you turn around to avoid backing into an oddly-placed wall. Tiny kitchen, turn about, tiny laundry room. Now how is it possible that you are back at the front door already?

You really do try to look at the place, but it's difficult to do when you have no experience house hunting. Because I -- I am "you," it's me again -- because I spent lots of time clicking through photos of houses on line at Zillow and Trulia, including many times this very house, I see in life little more than what I saw in pictures: the decor, the yard, the color schemes. The portrait of Buddha in sage green and gray over the couch. The cats, who distract me. The daylilies. It's my sister the lifelong homeowner who wants to know where the electrical panel is. She noticed the wooden peg on a bedroom ceiling, which locks a trap door that descends and unfolds a sturdy ladder, Little House on the Prairie style, going up into the attic. Quaint. ("You're wearing a dress," Coach says. "If you want to go up and look I'll leave the room." Given the news we hear of other cultures every day, what a blessing the Western gentleman is ....) It's my sister the homeowner who asks "is your furniture going to fit?"

Then I realize. No. Of course it isn't. "Unless you put your glass-topped kitchen table and the chairs in storage ...." Certainly not. Strike the tiny yellow house off my list.

"Well," I say to the realtor, as we walk out the long, long summer gravel driveway towards our cars. That's a lot to shovel in the winter. I'm not sure if you can use a snowblower on gravel. "I have no idea what happens next. Do we look at more houses?"

"We sure do," he answers. "Do you think you want a house or a condo?"

"I think I'd like to try for a house. I look at condos online and they're pristine and beautiful, but it seems kind of sad to just own two rooms. Up to now I've always rented a house. I'm a gardener. I think I'd like a yard."

"Okay," he nods. He hands me his business card and writes down my email. I tell him that a bank has pre-qualified me for a mortgage, and I tell him that the figure they have pre-qualifed me for is much too optimistic because they seem not to have factored in property taxes to what they think I can afford. All this is a tale he could have told me I am sure. I, too, work in sales (of wine) to newbies.

What will happen next, he says, is that he will send me email links to, and pictures of, properties that fall in my price range and meet my "requirements." Requirements! Good grief, who am I to have requirements, I who have rented for decades and most of that time in a beggars-can't-be-choosers emotional posture!

All right, so now this is me. I have requirements. The realtor/coach and I shake hands, and he and my sister shake hands, and then my sister and I get into our car and he gets into his. We drive away. The first comment out of our mouths, in private, is the question why did these people in this tiny house need three flat screen t.v.s?

Step by step

So you are buying a house or a condo, after thirty years of renting through marriage and divorce? How interesting. Here is what happens.

Step one. Look at online real estate sites, endlessly. Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com. Plug in location and maximum price tolerable. You've been doing that for a while anyway.

Step two. Notice a stroke of luck. The owners of that promising little yellow house very nearby are hosting an "open house" on your day off. Set yourself two tasks that day, one, go see it, and two, go to the office of the realtor whose business card you saved just for the heck of it, back when his mass-mailing envelope stuffed full of information -- and business cards -- ended up in the mailboxes of everyone at the apartment complex last February.

Step three. Day off. Go to the open house. Wear a dress to impress the potential neighbors. (You've been watching three-minute instructional videos from Realtor.com advising on all aspects of home-buying, including when to look professional.) Imagine yourself living there. And mowing that huge lawn -- oh dear.

Why does it all look so impossibly perfect? Professional landscaping, wonderful, but why the everlasting stella d'oro daylilies? They are a mess to clean up when their bloomtime is finished, as you learned from gardening around the old rental farmhouse belonging to your ex-brother-in-law. Of course there are more important things to think about, but still. The lilies will be there too.

You walk around to the yard. How quaint. Actual clotheslines, as of yesteryear. It's very quiet. The neighborhood is charmingly of yesteryear, too. Now where are the owners of this cute little yellow house? The sign on the door says "Please knock." You do. A cat appears in one small window, and then another in the other. No one else answers. You begin to wonder. What if it's some psycho in there, who has not the remotest intention of "showing" the house? Seriously. What if it's a man, alone. Do you follow him in? One thinks not, somehow.  

Step four. After five more minutes, give this adventure up. Drive to the realtor's office, he of the mass business card mailing last winter. Explain briefly to his secretaries that you know nothing. Take a brochure, and give them your name, plus the address of the little yellow house.

Step five, and so on. Pretty soon you're going to forget what counts as a new "step" and what is simply unfolding with tumbling, not-quite-kaleidoscopic-but-still events.

In less than an hour the realtor calls. "I can show you that house tonight."

My goodness. Okay. I'll meet you at 6:45.