And here are some fruit shots emailed in from Maui, with a couple of cats for a bonus. Above, Mama Maya.
Gandalf the Gray
Month: December 2008
What they're eating in the south of France #1
A friend in Perpignan sends an email with the subject “The slaughtering of a Pomelo” with three photographs.
“Remark,” she writes, “how great a part of the Pomelo constitutes skin and albedo,” sending me to the dictionary, because I’ve only encountered the term “albedo” in technical discussions of global warming. Note also that, in the south of France, especially when a fruit or vegetable is head-shaped, like a pumpkin or a cabbage, they speak of “slaughtering” it or “killing” it, as some of us do here.
I think I’ve seen pomelos in grocery stores in California, but I have not seen one in North Carolina. As for this poor pomelo that met its death in Perpignan, I believe it was imported from China.
Winterscapes
The winter sky soon after sunrise on Dec. 1. A rainy front from the Gulf of Mexico is being pushed away by cooler, dryer air.
Christmas wreath with woodpile
The woods behind the house
The house, from the woods behind the house
Even though 1.3 inches of rain fell in the last two days, only a tiny trickle of water is flowing in my little stream. This is good, really. The water is clean — no runoff. Most of the rain soaked into the ground. Not until the ground has been saturated, I guess, will the stream start flowing again. The summer of 2008 was not as dry as the summer of 2007, but more rain would be nice.
A stumpscape. This is in an area below the house where I removed old pine trees but left the stumps in place. I’ll let this area return to the wild, as part of the transition from woods to meadow.
Sonnet XXXV
Clearly my ruined garden as it stood
Before the frost came on it I recall —
Stiff marigolds, and what a trunk of wood
The zinnia had, that was the first to fall;
These pale and oozy stalks, these hanging leaves
Nerveless and darkened, dripping in the sun,
Cannot gainsay me, though the spirit grieves
And wrings its hands at what the frost has done.
If in widening silence you should guess
I read the moment with recording eyes,
Taking your love and all your loveliness
Into a listening body hushed of sighs . . .
Though summer’s rife and the warm rose in season,
Rebuke me not: I have a winter reason.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay