bringing in the harvest

Summer lingers with its warmth and brightness, but the smells in our kitchen belong to fall.  We're bringing in the harvest and sealing it in glass and plastic.  The freezer and pantry are filling up with tasty things, mementos of summer.

Preserving and freezing go hand in hand with gardening and we're delving deeper into all three.  To save money.  To not waste.  To eat local food.  And for fun.

I checked this book out of the library have gleaned a few good ideas from it.  Apparently cabbage can be blanched and frozen.  Apples last longer wrapped in newspaper.  We'll give it a try.

Do you put anything away for the winter?

bread

I woke up this morning to an overcast sky and the sound of drizzle falling in the tree outside my window.  The weather report assures me that summer will be back tomorrow, so I'm celebrating this early taste of fall with an inside day.  That means laundry, a top-to-bottom house cleaning, and, as a reward for finishing all that, I'll make bread.  I've discovered the ideal bread-making compromise.  Quick and easy -- let the mixer do that hard work -- yet long and slow -- stash the dough in the fridge to ferment and rise overnight.  It's a method more than a recipe, so I highly recommend Artisan Breads Every Day by Peter Reinhart.

"God's Grandeur"

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
   It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.  Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
   And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
   And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell:  the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black  West went
   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins --


Today is seared, bleared, smeared.  I feel like I have trod and trod an unchanging road -- monotonous and exhausting.  Where are those bright wings?

"The Limit of Suspension"

On three small scraps of paper
grandmother writes

     how the suspension bridge
     fell down

     how the cotton wool
                                    crash
     pulled her from
     starched sheets to the
     lung-stopping chill
     of the january night

     how her shoes squeaked
     in the snow

and looking at the
suspension bridge
                           lying
broken-backed against the ice
like an injured dragon

                                    grandmother
must have wondered at
each of her magic crossings

but writes here
                      only
the suspension bridge
                                      fell down
and it did make a noise

Jane Urquhart
False Shuffles, 1982.

"Grandmother Crosses"

I have long loved Jane Urquhart's novels but only recently disovered her poetry.  This poem is the first of a grouping about "the undertaker's bride", who is also "grandmother".  Jane's real grandmother?  Who knows, but this is definatley the same character -- the undertaker's widow -- in the novel Whirpool.  In this poem she rides her tricycle over the suspension bridge that once crossed the Niagra river, just below the falls.

Grandmother Crosses

Grandmother crosses
the suspension bridge

she is seven years old
in the process
of eliminating
                    errands

she watches amazed
as the loaf of bread
                             she has carried
from the american side
slips from her hands

somersaults gently
to the rapids below

light
       as an angel's gold brick

eighy years later
the streetcars passing
on mainstreet
will bring to her mind
                                this bump of

rubber wheels
on wooden planks

as she rides her tricyle

thinking of home

Jane Urquhart
False Shuffles, 1982.

books

My favorite books from 2009 -- no particular number of them in no particular order.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
I read a couple chapters in high school and always meant to go back for more.  When a copy of the book turned up under last year's Christmas tree -- thanks sister -- I prepared to tear through the pages in record time, but quickly found that I couldn't appreciate Dillard at high speed.  It took me weeks to read this book because I kept flipping back to favourite passages, then wondering off on my own thought adventures.  Beautiful.  Leisurely.  Provocative.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel
I'm the last person I know to read this book.  It's amazing that no one let the end slip.  Of course the end is all important and I can't say much about the book without giving it away.  Read it.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marques
Earlier this year my sister and I formed an exclusive book club -- just us -- and this was our first pick.  We met downtown on several Sunday afternoons to talk about it, but found the design district and the capouccinos more compelling.  Thus ended our book club; but we both agree that this is one of the best stories we've ever read.  You have to suspend belief to read Marques because however real his world may seem at first glance, it's fantasy at the core.

fortitude

I'm reading about Botticelli in the evenings. The book was a birthday gift from my mom in answer a request for "an art book about a specific artist". I hope the nature of that wish list item acquits me of any charges of art snobbery. I know nothing -- really nothing -- about art, but two summers ago I visited the Louvre.

That single day didn't change me. My heart beat normally; I experienced no difficulty breathing. The soreness of my feet from standing all day and doing the slow "museum walk" stands out strongly in my memory, but so does the Winged Victory. I strolled up and down the long halls of the Louvre with no pretensions -- a tourist with my purse strap looped securely across my chest and a point-and-shoot camera in my pocket. Surprising, even to myself, I wanted to linger before a favorite painting, sketchpad or journal in hand, or at very least, to know something of the style or significance of what I saw. That desire persists. My mom gave me an art book for my birthday and now I'm reading about Botticelli in the evenings.

This painting is called Fortitude.  It was, so my book tells me, painted to hang behind the judges' chairs in the Florentine Tribunal -- one of seven Virtues.  I still can't comment on technique or significance, but I think she's beautiful -- strong and maybe a little bit sad. 

Someday, when I travel to Florence, I'll wonder the halls of the Uffizi.  I'll pause, camera in hand, and say, "That's Botticelli's Fortitude.  Isn't she beautiful?"

Image copied from http://www.artchive.com/

beginning

I'm watching for sparks -- gold-vermilion with life and beauty -- that burst unexpectedly from bleak embers. I want to trap them for a moment, encourage their brilliance with my breath, and bring a jar of them home to glow on my coffee table. This blog is the jar.

To give credit where credit is do, I'd like to begin my blogging advanture with a poem by G.M. Hopkins -- a Jesuit priest from the 1800's who knew a lot about trapping sparks. This poem describes the power and beauty of a windhover in flight and the even greater power and beauty of the bird's sudden "buckle" as it dives. The poem is inscribed "To Christ our Lord" who, like the windhover, achieved the hight of his brilliance and beauty in the moment of his buckle.

The Windhover
To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on a swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.