About six weeks earlier, Tiffany had contacted me on Facebook Messenger; she wondered if I had any public author events scheduled in the Twin Cities area this spring. Audrey, who adores sock monkeys, had read The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea and she’d loved it.

I have a couple of school visits scheduled, I told her, but nothing that is open to the public. Then I asked, off the top of my head, whether she and Audrey ever went to Wild Rumpus bookstore in south Minneapolis. I said I’d be happy to arrange a “meet and greet” there sometime in March.

We agreed to get together on Saturday, March 17th, at 10:30 in the morning. Located in the Linden Hills neighborhood, Wild Rumpus is always busy on Saturday mornings. I checked the store’s online calendar in advance and didn’t notice any special events planned.

The store was especially crowded when I arrived. Two elaborately costumed people wearing silver masks nudged past me. Rambunctious toddlers darted between the shelves chasing clucking chickens. The cats—Booker T., Trini Lopez, and Walter Dean—had gone into hiding. The caged cockatiels were squawking.

I told Tiffany in advance how to recognize me: I’d be the woman carrying a sock monkey. It worked. Audrey spied me first; the rest of the family followed. We tried to visit in a corner of the bookstore, but found it too loud and distracting. With Audrey again in the lead, the seven of us exited through the little purple door toward two sun-drenched benches on that chilly spring day.

Each member of the family wore a touch of green; they were Irish and looking forward to a meal of corned beef and cabbage. Audrey had a green and white shamrock scarf tied around her neck and a shy, but delightful smile on her face.

Looking back on it, I remembered that a few weeks earlier on a flight home from Newark, I sat down next to an attractive, well-dressed woman, perhaps in her early fifties. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said in a calm, all-knowing voice.

Her professional name, I discovered, was Guru Mata. She is a Hindu spiritual healer from New Jersey who was returning to her birthplace, in the Twin Cities to celebrate her widowed mother’s 70th birthday. I rarely speak to strangers on airplanes; however, much to my surprise, she and I engaged in a wide-ranging conversation about matters of spiritual faith and healing that lasted almost the whole flight. “In life,” Guru Mata asserted, “there are no coincidences.”

Perhaps not …

A few days later, there I was … sitting on a bench with a young reader who loved sock monkeys. Ironically, Audrey’s sister’s name, McKenna, is that of a main character in my earlier book, Tango: The Tale of an Island Dog. Dangling from Ellia’s fingers was a shiny plastic, silver link necklace with a silver heart charm. (The plot of Tango turns on the loss and discovery of a silver link dog collar with a silver heart identification tag.)

On the bench Audrey told me what she’d liked most about The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea: ALL the sock monkeys, the details, the mystery, and the fact that the ending wasn’t a fairy tale’s happily-ever-after ending, but happy enough.

“During all the years I struggled to write this book,” I told Audrey, “I held out the hope that someday, some way, a child just like you would love the story of Annaliese Easterling and Throckmorton, her simply remarkable sock monkey, and I’m so pleased that you did.”

The family thanked me for coming. I signed Audrey’s copy of my book and also the copy of Tango I’d brought along for McKenna. I suggested that the story of the little dog’s adventures on Prince Edward Island might be a good family read-aloud. In my imagination, I can picture this book-loving family doing just that.

I walked away smiling, and waved goodbye, feeling blessed.

frame copyright: tanais / 123RF Stock Photo

However, lately I’ve decided that I did something even more important: As a child, I played. Growing up in the 1950’s I played with dolls I named Ginny, Cindy, and Saucy. I cut out Betsy-Tacy paper dolls. I took stuffed dogs named Lady and Tramp on long walks, holding their red plastic leashes tightly in my small hand. I spent hours with a family with six children who lived in a tin, two-story dollhouse.

And, it was through this act of playing that I practiced and learned the most valuable skill of all: I developed an imagination. I developed my innate ability to form stories in my mind, an ability to create.

A year after I was born, the American Character Doll Company introduced Tiny Tears^®, a rubber doll with a hard-plastic head and molded hair. Tiny Tears had a round face, blue eyes with thick lashes, a pinched button nose, and an open hole in her tiny red mouth. The diapered doll came in a box with a baby bottle, pacifier and bubble pipe. In addition to drinking, wetting, and blowing bubbles, Tiny Tears could cry real tears.

No seven year-old girl was ever happier than I when Santa Claus left a ‘crybaby’ under our family’s Christmas tree.

Tiny Tears

Tiny Tears was just one of my many dolls, carefully selected by my mother. My mother loved dolls; she kept her own until the end of her life. No doubt I will too.

Tiny Tears wasn’t my first baby doll, but she and her predecessor, a cherub-like infant named Susie, were, and still are, my favorites.

Susie-doll

Like the hand-sewn, sentient sock monkeys in The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea, my dolls were well-loved. Wear and tear from squishy hugs and frequent handling are evidence of that.

Tiny Tears now has a break in her head and a fissure crack above her faded blue eyes. Her left arm is loose in its socket. Susie-Doll’s once soft and rubbery body feels like wood. Her right arm is crumbling, her left arm long gone. Meant to look like real human beings, these toys willingly assumed the endless variety of voices and personalities and roles that my young imagination assigned them.

Eventually another baby doll came into my life, one I’d most likely seen in Wish Book, the Sears Roebuck annual Christmas catalog. At first glance, Baby-doll was perfect every way. She had a pink bonnet, a ruffled pink party dress and pink slip and bloomers. In truth her perfectly formed plastic body was too large to carry, too hard to snuggle with, too cumbersome for quick and easy wardrobe changes. Her eyes seemed too blue and sparkly. She was a doll to be looked at, a doll who was difficult to love.

Baby-doll

A few weeks ago, the importance of play in the development of creativity was brought close to home when I spent a week in New Jersey with my granddaughter. Like all young children, her imagination is wild and fearless. The lines between the real and the imaginary are wonderfully blurred. She invites giraffes and dinosaurs to tea parties. She scrubs down Rody, a play riding pony, with a vegetable brush in the kitchen sink. She diapers Pippa, a stuffed rabbit, with paper towels.

Knowing my history, it should come as no surprise that soon after Ofelia’s birth I started thinking about the kind of baby doll I was going to buy for her. When I shared my desire with my daughter, she promptly said, “No, Mom. No baby dolls.”

Luckily my daughter has changed her mind. For my granddaughter’s third birthday in May, my present will be a custom-made Waldorf baby doll. My daughter found the doll maker on Etsy.com. We co-selected our desired eye color, skin color, hair color and style, as well as the colors, fabrics, and yarns for the doll’s first outfit, making me a very happy grandmother.

Waldorf dolls

My own precious dolls and our endless hours of play left an indelible mark on my heart and memory. In ways both conscious and unconscious, our long-ago time together leaves its mark on the kinds of stories for children that I’m trying to tell.

Eileen in front of the Emily Carr House

Settee, Emily Carr House

Parlour, Emily Carr House

Jan Ross was generous with her knowledge and time. I’d known that Emily Carr was a published author, but not that she’d first gained widespread fame and recognition for her vivid and beautifully written books. Carr’s “word sketches” (her name for the kind of writing she did) reached millions of listeners when read aloud on CBC public radio, subsequently spurring great interest in her paintings.

Emily, who kept journals and created sketchpads throughout her life, starting writing when she could no longer paint due to chronic and significant health problems primarily related to her heart. In fact, all of her great writing was done from her sick bed. She was 70 years old when her first book Klee Wyck was published. An evocative work that describes in arresting detail her experiences amount First Nations people and cultures on British Columbia’s west coast, the book won the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction in 1941.

Books written by Emily Carr, or collections based on archival material

The Book of Small, published in 1942 by Oxford University Press, is a collection of thirty-six word sketches in which she relates anecdotes about her life and times as a girl growing up in what was then the frontier town of Victoria. The last book published during her lifetime is titled The House of All Sorts: heartfelt, heartbreaking, and humorous stories about the trials of being a landlady in a small apartment house she built as a source of income to support herself as she pursued her creative calling. Right around the corner from the Emily Carr House, the building still stands to this day.

The House of All Sorts

As my husband and I toured the Emily Carr House and Gardens, Emily Carr’s presence was felt in reproductions of her paintings, passages from her books, furnishings from the time period, artifacts that once belonged to the Carr family, and sepia tone photographs of Emily, her parents and her four sisters.

The Breakfast Room

In February 1945, with no specific complaint except weariness, Emily checked into the newly opened St. Mary’s Priory nursing home in Victoria. Biographer Paula Blanchard writes, “Although she had another show in mind and unpublished manuscripts next to her bed, all her major work was done. “I used to wonder,” she once wrote to her closest friend Ira Dilworth, “what people who were facing death thought about it. They seldom mentioned it and I often wished they would. (We are rather cowardly about that thing.) Now I look at it very much as I used to look … on going out into the woods in the van in the old days, busying myself in the preparation of leaving things as straight as I can, and leaving the new camp to be itself when I get there.” On 2 March 1945, in the middle of the afternoon, she got there.

Indian Church, Emily Carr, 1929

Final note: Inscribed on her simple tombstone in Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria:

EMILY CARTER, 1871 – 1945
ARTIST AND AUTHOR
LOVER OF NATURE

A few hours later, at the entrance to the Victoria’s Empress Hotel (where Emily often endured ‘high tea’ with her parents and four sisters), Emily herself greeted us, or so it seemed, sketch pad in hand. Emily’s Javanese monkey ‘Woo’ perches on her shoulder. Her beloved purebred Bobtail sheepdog ‘Billie’ stands nearby.

Barbara Paterson, sculptor, Emily Carr, 2010

Cast in bronze, the commissioned statue is a masterful rendering of this visionary artist who captured the coastal forest landscape, generally around her Victoria home, in a way previously unseen in British Columbian art.

Over the next three days, Ralph and I walked the paths Emily once walked:  along the Victoria waterfront, through Beacon Hill Park where wild peacocks roam, past Parliament buildings, and totem poles and First Nations monuments in Thunderbird Park.

Eileen viewing totem poles, Thunderbird Park, Victoria, BC

While viewing the First Nations collection in the Royal British Columbia Museum we came face-to-face with two and three-dimensional representations of the history, art, and culture of the people to whom Emily Carr paid homage in her paintings and writings.

Documentary photo, First Nations Gallery, RBCM, Victoria

Totem pole, First Nations gallery, RBCM, Victoria

On her many—often solo—travels to Native villages in and around the northern part of Vancouver Island, Emily discovered how closely the Indians were linked not only to their traditions but to nature itself: their lives were regulated by the tides and seasons as well as by the myths that surround their guardian spirits. For her, an outsider, nature and tradition were memorably combined in “the great stillness, the solemn old grey poles towering above the tent, the shorter mortuary columns crowed with their crusted coffins, the water softly lapping the pebbly beach, & the sullen roar of the distant surf.”

According to biographer Maria Tippet, in these deserted villages Carr was able to experience the wholeness that she sought all her life: everything was part of everything else.

Big Eagle, Skidigate BC, Emily Carr, oil on paper, 1930

Picturing the Giants: The Changing Landscapes of Emily Carr was the name of the major exhibition of Emily Carr’s work at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Carr was an early and ardent environmentalist who championed the preservation of old-growth forests she portrayed in her work. Among her most famous is Above the Gravel Pit.

Above the Gravel Pit, oil on paper, 1936

About this haunting painting art critic Andrew Hunter writes in “Clear Cut,” an essay: “More boldly even than her scenes of heavily-logged terrain, the gravel pit expresses the dramatic transformation taking place around Carr: the steady growth of Victoria and its methodical encroachment on the surrounding landscape … Not a virgin wilderness but a space transformed and scarred by human presence and industry.”

While in Victoria, I was reminded that Carr had years of formal art training in British Columbia, San Francisco, London, and Paris. She began her artistic career as an art teacher. She converted the barn at her family home into an art studio in 1894 where she taught art to children. Later, in 1906, she moved to Vancouver to start a job as an art teacher at the Vancouver Studio Club and School of Art, but left to open her own studio and to teach children’s art classes. Carr dabbled in a variety of styles prevalent in the early 20th century, such as Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism. She was not, by any means, a self-taught child prodigy.

Months later and back in Minneapolis, I still smile when I think about how Carr travelled around Vancouver Island sketching and painting landscapes in a caravan outfitted for herself and her companion animals, a caravan she named “The Elephant.”

And then, from time to time I think about how incredibly interesting it would have been to travel with her.

Patricia Morley, Emily Carr and Her Caravan at the South-west End of Esquimate Lagoon, 1934

Middle school students at Vancouver Art Gallery

Art is our memory of love. The most an artist can do through their work is say, let me show what I have seen, what I have loved, and perhaps you will love it too.

— Annie Bevan

In the weeks before traveling to British Columbia to see two major exhibitions of paintings by Emily Carr—one of Canada’s most celebrated and fascinating artists—I read and researched everything I could about her.

Emily Carr Books

Born in 1874 in Victoria, British Columbia, she lived a complex life filled with tension between conventions of society and her own originality, between happiness and despair, within her personal relationships, and an often lonely struggle to overcome obstacles, both real and self-inflicted.

Biographer Paula Blanchard writes: “Fiercely independent and defiantly individualistic, Emily Carr was considered an eccentric by the society around her. Working largely in isolation, without the influence of strong women artists to look to, and years ahead of the art of her time and place, Carr demolished some traditionally cherished notions about women artists.” (And she did so, I might add, at great cost to her physical and emotional well-being.)

Emily Carr self-portrait

Carr was also a defiant Victorian, drawn to the deep forest and the open sky; an early recorder of Northwest Coast monumental art; a painter, writer, and humorist; a daughter, sister, friend; a student, teacher, mentor; a landlady, animal lover, and dog breeder. And, of personal interest to me as my next birthday approaches, a critically renowned painter whose talents would only fully emerge in her late 50s, a popular and award-winning writer first published at age 70.

In last week’s blog post I raised the question that I’d asked myself long before my husband and I entered the “Emily Carr: Into the Forest” exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery: “Will the artist’s great, swirling images of the mighty forests of the Pacific Northwest, which no one before or since has painted as she did, be all that I imagined them to be?”

Absolutely.

Eileen standing next to Tree Trunk, 1931, oil on canvas, at Vancouver Art Gallery

Seeing her forest paintings from the 1930s, both canvases and oil on paper works, three key early works completed during 1913–1918, and the remarkable, Grey, 1929-1930, quickly confirmed that the two-dimensional color plates of her work that I’d seen before only in books were inadequate representations of the vibrant colors, rich texture, bold brushstrokes, and spiritual aliveness I encountered in the originals displayed

 Unlike my husband Ralph—who’d had only a passing knowledge about Emily Carr before our trip—my study of Carr’s life informed my deep appreciation of the work I was seeing, the sometimes raw, sometimes tender, emotions and deep spirituality depicted within each frame: anger, fear, joy, awe, reverence, innocence.

A Rushing Undergrowth, Emily Carr, 1935

Ralph described his experience to me: “Standing in front of more than one original Emily Carr painting, I got a sensation that the trees and undergrowth in the painting were actually moving.  I don’t know how she achieved that effect, but it was palpable.”

Of this effect, so intense as to seem almost tangible, Emily Carr herself once said, “I figure a picture equals movement in space. Pictures have swerved too much toward design and decoration. The idea must run through the whole, the story that arrested you and urged that desire to express it, the story that God told you through that combination of growth … There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit …”

Or, as German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche observed, “An artist chooses his subjects: that is the way he praises.”

What I do know is, that after “going into the forest” of Emily Carr’s magnificent paintings, I would never see a tree, moss, or any aspect of the natural world in the same way, be it in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver, in Beacon Hill Park in Victoria, or in my own backyard.

Beacon Hill Park, Victoria, with Ralph in front of tree

Sun Yat-Sen Garden three, Vancouver

My invitation to do so appeared on the front page of the New York Times Travel Section on October 2, 2017, with the headline: “Vancouver Island, Through an Artist’s Eyes.” Beneath an intriguing photo of a trail into a Pacific Coast rainforest, the feature’s first line revealed the artist’s identity. “Revered in British Columbia, little known in the U.S., the artist Emily Carr, born in Victoria in 1871, may be from another era, but amid environmental concerns, her works and images resonate.”

Zunoqua of the Cat Village, 1930

I’d been introduced to Emily’s Carr’s ground-breaking work in a Canadian Literature class taught by poet Deborah Keenan at Hamline University in 2004. Emily Carr: An Introduction of Her Life and Art by Anne Newlands was one of the assigned texts. The book was only 64 pages long, yet the color plates of this unconventional woman’s paintings spoke to me in a way no other visual artist’s work ever had.

I couldn’t articulate why. All I knew was that these images—created by an artist who nicknamed herself ‘Small’ as a child—brought to life a hidden part of me, raw and tender, foreign, yet totally familiar. Later, when I researched and read more about Carr’s life, she became a kind of imaginary friend, a kindred spirit much like I’ve always felt about the Anne of Green Gables author Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Emily Carr (Small, 1876)

The Times article highlighted two major exhibitions of Carr’s art: “Emily Carr: Into the Forest” (at the Vancouver Art Gallery, May 13 – December 3, 2017), and “Picturing the Giants: The Changing Landscapes of Emily Carr” at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (June 10 – April 1, 2018). The window of time in which to see both exhibits in a single trip to British Columbia was running out.

My desire to see the originals was so strong that I decided I would travel there alone if I couldn’t find a travelling companion. To my surprise, my always-busy husband Ralph cleared his calendar for a week to accompany me.

Usually when we take a trip together, Ralph—a more experienced traveler than I—makes the arrangements. But this time, I quickly booked flights from Minneapolis, reserved two seats on the ferry between Vancouver and Victoria through BC Connector, pre-purchased tickets to the art exhibits, and took advantage of off-season hotel rates for accommodations at two grand, historic Canadian Pacific railway hotels.

The Fairmont Empress, Victoria, BC

Since the Emily Carr House in Victoria, her childhood home, was closed to the public for the season, a friend suggested that I request a private tour. Jan Ross, the curator of the provincial heritage site, graciously agreed to do so.

We departed Minnesota on November 8th with only three “must-do’s” planned in advance. We left the remainder of the sightseeing and dining adventures to chance, as our spirits and the unpredictable rainy-season weather dictated.

I have always loved being in Canada; once I arrive, I always feel like I have come back home.

The Homecoming, Nathan Scott, sculptor,Victoria, BC

Were Emily Carr’s richly drawn paintings of First Nations villages and totems, dark, haunting forests, wild beaches and vast skies all I imagined they would be?

In next week’s blog post, I’ll share my answer.

Eileen at Vancouver Art Gallery, November 9, 2017

In Chapter 23 of The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea, “Tea Party,” Annaliese hosts a tea party for her three cousins and their sock monkeys. Nora, Nadine, and Nell Ann have a surprise for Annaliese … their mother gave their sock monkeys away! So how will the cousins be able to attend Great-Grandmama Easterling’s birthday party? Only the sock monkeys received invitations. 

It was a lovely tea party that Annaliese and Miss Pine set out for their guests. Throckmorton sat at the sock monkeys’ table, covered with a lace tablecloth and Throckmorton’s favorite doll dishes, “the ones with daffodils and aqua rabbits.”

“On a larger table, also set for four, a three-tier silver serving dish held dainty petit fours and finger sandwiches cut into hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades. Devonshire cream, lemon curd, and rosy-red jam accompanied a basket of freshly baked currant scones.”

“Serving the catty cousins,” illustration copyright Sarah Jane Wright from The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea, Beach Lane Books

One of the sources that provided inspiration for this tea party is The Anne of Green Gables Treasury (Carolyn Strom Collins, Christina Wyss Eriksson, Ruth Macdonald and David Macdonald, Penguin Books Canada Limited, 1991,) Chapter Five, “Tea Time.”

“The teas that are described most fully in the Anne books are of the special-occasion variety that consisted of treats such as sandwiches, fresh or preserved fruits, cheese, breads, cookies, cakes, pies, tarts, and other desserts. “A splendid tea,” as Anne described one of her Sunday School picnics, would have included those kinds of dishes as well as more substantial fare—meats, salads and vegetables. Extra-special treats such as ice cream assured the success of such occasions.”

The authors go on to say:

“A variety of tiny sandwiches served with the first cup of tea is a fitting beginning for any tea party. Finely textured white bread is most often used for tea sandwiches, but you can also choose whole wheat or light rye or a combination of breads. Slice the bread as thinly as you can—about 1/4 inch slices are ideal.”

Here’s a recipe for finger sandwiches from this cherished book.

_____________________________________

CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICHES

From: The Anne of Green Gables Treasury

1 cup finely chopped cooked chicken
1/4 cup finely chopped celery
1 hard-boiled egg, peeled and finely chopped
1 Tbsp finely chopped sweet pickle or sweet pickle relish
1 tsp finely chopped green onion
2 to 3 Tbsp mayonnaise
Salt and pepper to taste
6 thin slices bread
Butter, at room temperature

1. In a bowl, mix together the chicken, celery, egg, pickle, and green onions. Stir in the mayonnaise until you have a nice moist mixture. Add salt and pepper to taste. Keep the mixture in the refrigerator, covered, until you are ready ot make the sandwiches.
2. Butter each slice of bread on one side. Spread the filling on three of the buttered slices and top with the remaining slice of bread. Trim the crusts off the sandwiches and cut each sandwich into shapes.

Makes 3 whole sandwiches

In early September, at the time when Hurricane Irma was thrashing coastal South Carolina, I read for the first time one of Conroy’s later works, South of Broad, set in Charleston. Ironically, the climax in South of Broad takes place during Hurricane Hugo in 1989. I also rediscovered one of my favorite cookbooks, a signed copy of The Pat Conroy Cookbook, a gift from my daughter. Not only does the cookbook feature one of our family’s favorite recipes, “Summer Chowder,” but also includes a collection of personal essays by the author about the art and joy of cooking good food.

“A Recipe is a Story …” is the title of the cookbook’s seventh chapter, and I include, for readers and writers alike, a few of his observations from pages 96-97:

Stories have always hunted me down, jumped out at me from the shadows, stalked me and sought me out, grabbed me by the shirtsleeves, and demanded my full attention. I’ve led a life chock-full of stories, and I know now that you have to be shifty and vigilant and ready to receive their incoming fire. Sometimes it takes the passage of years to reveal their actual meaning or import. They disguise themselves with masks, disfigurements, chimeras, and Trojan horses . . .

#

Alertness is the requirement of the writing life, staying nimble on your feet, open to the stories that will rise up and flower around you while you are walking your dog on the beach or taking the kids to soccer practice. The great stories often make their approach with misdirection, camouflage, or smoke screens to hide their passage through your life . . .

#

But sometimes stories hide themselves from writers like trolls under bridges. Then the writers of the world must keep their bodies attuned for the sudden appearance of the story that is powerful enough to change their stories and their lives. They must train themselves to recognize the divine moment when a great story reveals itself.

#

I was so saddened when this great author passed away on March 4, 2016, my 67th birthday. But still, I thank him for his compelling and beautifully written stories, for signing my copy of his cookbook, and for sharing his recipes and life wisdom.

_____________________________________

SUMMER CHOWDER

From: The Pat Conroy Cookbook

6 slices smoky bacon, coarsely chopped
1 cup minced red onion
¼ cup finely diced celery
3 cups fresh corn kernels (about 5 ears, or 24 ounces, frozen)
3 cups whole milk (maybe a little less, the frozen corn will create some liquid)
½ pound new red potatoes, washed but not peeled and cut into ¼ inch cubes
½ cup heavy (whipping) cream
1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce
2 tablespoons snipped fresh chives
1 pound sea scallops, rinsed and patted dry
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground white pepper

1. In a medium stockpot over moderate heat, cook the bacon until the fat is rendered and bacon is almost crisp, 5 to 8 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, removed the bacon and reserve. Drain off all but 2 tablespoons bacon fat, reserving the extra in a small bowl for later use.
2. Reduce the heat to low, add the onion and celery to the stockpot, and cook in the bacon drippings, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables begin to soften, 12 to 15 minutes. As the vegetables begin to exude their moisture, use a wooden spoon to scrape up any browned bits clinging to the bottom of the stockpot.
3. Using a food processor fitted with a metal blade, puree 1 cup of the corn kernels with 1 cup of the milk. Add to the stockpot and stir well. Add the remaining corn and milk and the potatoes, stirring to combine. Lower the heat and cook until the potatoes and corn are tender, about 35 minutes. (If using frozen corn, I would cook the potatoes for about 20 minutes and then add the frozen corn)
4. Stir in the reserved bacon, heavy cream, Tabasco, and chives and simmer until chowder thickens, another 3 to 5 minutes.
5. While the chowder is thickening, place the reserved bacon fat in a small heavy skillet over high heat. When the fat is hot, sear the scallops until golden brown on each side but still slightly opaque in the center, about 2 minutes on the first side and 1 minute on the other.
6. Season the chowder with coarse salt and ground white pepper to taste. Ladle into deep bowls and float scallops in the center. Serve immediately.

Serves 4 as a main course or 8 as a first course.

In Tango: The Tale of an Island Dog, the setting is Prince Edward Island. What foods are found on this island in the sea?

Try some clam chowder? Here’s Martha Stewart’s recipe.

There’s a lovely book called The Anne of Green Gables Treasury (written by Carolyn Strom Collins and Christina Wyss Eriksson) which is unfortunately out of print, but I’m confident you can find a used copy. It has ideas for crafts, activities, and parties, all set on Prince Edward Island, a setting our two books have in common!

To celebrate, this poem by Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” is apropos for our times. Written in 1883, Lazarus was determined to help raise funds for the pedestal on which the Statue of Liberty stands. Today, her poem is inscribed on that pedestal.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Learn more about Emma Lazarus in these two exceptional books, Emma’s Poem by Linda Glaser and Claire A. Nivola (for early elementary readers), and The Story of Emma Lazarus: Liberty’s Voice: A Biography of One of the Great Poets in American History by Erica Silverman and Stacey Schuett (for later elementary readers).

Enjoy this NPR article on Emma Lazarus.