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Notes From Boomerang Creek: The Call from Afar
Cathy Salter
Journeys often take root in the blink of an eye. You begin the day in one place and end it contemplating a major life change. In 1987, Kit and I were walking home from work at National Geographic on a stretch of Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. when we passed a shop that brought us to a halt. In the display window a large work of art struck us like a lightning bolt. Two planets, each home to a single house, stood out in a constellation filled with gold sparkling stars. A bolt of neon light connected the two worlds. At the base of the painting by Michael Pello Pinuotti were the words “The Call from Afar.”
Notes From Boomerang Creek: A spring weekend in the nation’s capital
Cathy Salter
In the fall of 1967, I arrived at Pranakorn Teachers College near Bangkok, Thailand a 21-year-old Peace Corps volunteer assigned to teach English.
Chomsri, a 16-year-old student at the school, lived with me for the next three years. She and I became fast friends, traveling all over Southeast Asia on jam-packed buses without doors, sleeper trains, rot-tuk-tuks (three-wheeled motorcycle cabs that spewed black smoke), ferryboats and un-air-conditioned taxis.
A few years ago, Chomsri invited me to meet her in Washington D.C. a city that I never tire of exploring on foot or by Metro. We arrived on the first day of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival, just as pink blossoms were emerging around the Tidal Basin between the Mall and the Potomac River.
Notes From Boomerang Creek: President Garfield’s dream deferred
Cathy Salter
When Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of the United States and I was in the fourth grade, I memorized and could recite the names in full of every president. I learned brief facts about the great ones and others who came and went from office having achieved little worth noting in my classroom history books. I’d recite
“There was Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison…
Monroe, Quincy Adams, Jackson, Van Buren…
Harrison, Tyler, Polk and Taylor…
Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan and Lincoln…
Johnson, Grant, Hayes and then…
For only 200 days, there was James A. Garfield (1881)….”
Notes From Boomerang Creek: Celebrating the common cannellini bean
Cathy Salter
One of the simple joys in life is a pot of homemade soup. Winter, spring, summer or fall, soup is always a welcome addition to a meal.
Recently, I perused soup recipes in my kitchen library in an atlas-sized cookbook edited by Debra Mayhew called “The Soup Bible.” One recipe in the chapter titled “Hearty Lunch and Supper Soups” immediately caught my attention, because I had a pot of cannellini beans simmering on the stove and a colander filled with ripe tomatoes.
The recipe was for a fresh tomato and bean soup. To my delight, it specified not just any bean, but cannellini beans large white Italian kidney beans about 1/2 inch long with firm texture and skin and a nutty flavor. Before long, a copper soup pot was called into action.