in which our plucky heroine starts thinking of the pantry...
Suddenly/not suddenly, it is that time of year when much seems to be getting ripe at once. I picked up the windfall apples, hoping that there is enough unspoiled flesh to get a small batch of applesauce. There are still quite a few on the tree still, and sadly it looks like I didn't get the footies on the lil fruit soon enough to prevent bug damage. So, sauce, not eating apples, but still... backyard fruit!
Every day there are more ripe plums to pick and freeze, and the chest freezer needs sorted out of any old excess to make room. The quinces and the persimmon aren't ripe at all yet. The figs in the freezer can be turned into
fig lemon jam, and the tomatoes into
Awesome Sauce, both will give me more space for plums.
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~ creativity challenge ~
While doing research for the presentation last month on Scythian artwork
this blog post showed up, which mentioned
a Metropolitan Museum handcraft kit (from 2011)... much to my surprise, the kits were still available, and at a reasonable price, from book resellers online. Needless to say, I sent off for one.
While the project is of necessity a sort of a child's guide to
chasing and repoussé, the results are rather charming nonetheless. The finished griffin is about 3" tall, so about three times the size of
the actual gold Scythian griffin ornaments, but I think it looks quite splendid, and can either be displayed in the box the kit came with (which is designed for just such use), or I may mount it on some stiffened felt and use as a holiday ornament. As it is made from metal foil, it is rather delicate, so probably unsuitable for attaching to a garment, unless the metal was filled with a resilient padding, though perhaps with some carefully deployed hot glue, it could become a hat ornament.
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had an interesting conversation about cookware with my friend Stuart yesterday that started with my admiring his photo of what looked like very tasty Scotch Eggs... One of the things I miss from the Before Times is the sort of food I never cook at home, that is, fried things... Tempura, or Kalamarakia, or Scotch Eggs. Rather than using a dedicated appliance, Stuart uses
a Japanese fry pot, which is basically a small pan that holds a thermometer, with a clever slanted lid for draining the just-fried food. I am wondering if such a thing might find cupboard space here, since the "eating in restaurants" is unlikely to be a thing any time in the forseeable future, and even with needing to figure in the cost of the oil, it might make for a very occasional fun treat. Something to mull over...
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beauty in the time of isolation:
late summertime alley zinnia
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This essay, by Riva Daffodil, has a lot of food for thought:
The Jewish year that we are trundling into, 5782, is a shmita year - the sabbath year, the sabbatical year. The image of the sabbath year is this: fields lie fallow. Soil goes unplowed. Vines curl in ringlets around their staking posts, their tendrils going unpruned for a season. Fruit is gathered by the itinerant, the impoverished, and the wild. Those of us living in less impecunious circumstances are to live off our stores, or to harvest only enough for our immediate needs, rather than further stuffing our larders. Debts are to be forgiven.
Debts are to be forgiven, so I’ve been contemplating what it means to be entering a shmita year during a time when the question of what we owe to each other* has been ripped open with such ferocity. The shmita practice of debt forgiveness was designed to set things to rights for people who had dug themselves into such a deep and untenable financial hole that there was no way to crawl out of it. Not simple altruism, our ancestors knew that society couldn’t function if too many people ended up in this situation, so they took steps to prevent it. There’s a larger political point that can and should be drawn from that, but if you’re my friend you probably already know where I’m going with this and agree, so I’ll leave it unmade.
The discourse around forgiveness and whether it’s important often seems to suffer from a conceptual overstretching and philosophical haziness that I wonder if some material grounding might remedy; in particular, the remembrance that forgiveness references the existence of a debt, of something that is owed. To forgive is to treat that debt as if it has been paid. Not to erase the record of the debt, not to expunge the memory of it - I doubt that even in the ancient times of shmita anyone was obliged to lend some freewheeling spendthrift another shekel once the columns had been marked as balanced that last night of Elul before the first day of the sabbath year. That the debt existed can be remembered. It is just that there is no longer anything to collect. The relationship between debtor and collector is reset into one wherein all the owing that must be wrestled with is nothing more the complexity of giving and taking between two citizens. The illusion there, where we must take care not to be deceived, is the image of the slate being wiped clean, a restoration from something complex to something simple, pure. But in fact, it’s the opposite. The restoration of the relationship between debtor and collector to citizen and citizen is actually an abandonment of the simple in favor of the complex.
Citizen and citizen. I don’t say human to human because the American obsession with individualism and its new-agey counterpart, sovereignty, has erased the reality that to be a human IS to be a citizen, the most social animal to have ever evolved, driven to form and exist within societies no matter how thoroughly disgusted we become with one another, and I certainly do. In these troubled times, it’s very possible that in addition to whatever material debt we may carry, we are all that freewheeling spendthrift of antiquity spiritually, relationally - we’ve been racking up unpaid debts to each other all over town. We hardly think of ourselves in terms of citizenship anymore, and yet here we are, a virus doing all it can to remind us that we’re citizens whether we like it or not. Of course, some people choose to live in denial of that. But those of us who are not have probably been living in denial in other ways for a long time. We’re not off the hook.
Except for maybe in the ways that the shmita year says our debts have been paid. So that’s something to think about.
There is also the question of rest, another concept these troubled times have made muddy, the boundaries of work and rest no longer delineated but blended into some sort of diabolical 24/7 melange where the drum of productivity and monetization is constantly being beaten. What does it mean to rest in a society that rages against it? What does it mean to lie fallow in a culture that demands unseasonable fertility and determines the cost of the desertification of our lands, hearts and bodies to be an acceptable one? What does it mean to let our tendrils go unpruned in a world that distrusts wildness and reifies unceasing effort towards cultivation
We’re reaching the crescendo in the rhythm of my writing. If you’ve been with me for a while, you can feel it here. But we aren’t getting there this time. This time, there is no conclusion to be drawn, no meaning to straighten the fibers together, to spin them into a shape that can be unhooked from the spindle and then woven into something that shields us from the scouring of the wind.
No; this time is not for that. Instead, we will allow this holy disorder, this messiness that signals something different is underway. This year, may your fields lie fallow. May your soil go unplowed. May your seeds go unsown. May your tendrils grow unpruned. May your fruits be found by those who need them, irrespective of their deservingness. May your wildness go uncultivated. May your debts be forgiven. May your citizenship be restored
*h/t to T. Scanlon via The Good Place which I’m currently rewatching
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September SMART goals (x=extra)
| # | THINGS MADE | THINGS FIXED | THINGS GONE |
| 1 | Greek masks block carved
| rodent removal
| yard waste bin
|
| 2 | pillowcases printed
| bicycle tube replaced
| recycle bin
|
| 3 | snood for Ariadne
| - | - |
| 4 | memorial calligraphy
| - | - |
| 5 | tiny fox "Almandine
| - | - |
| 6 | - | x
| x |
| 7 | - | x | x |
| 8 | - | x | x |
| 9 | x | x | x |
| 10 | x | x | x |
| 11 | x | x | x |
| 12 | x | x | x |
| 13 | x | x | x |
| 14 | x | x | x |
| 15 | x | x | x |
today's gratitude - The plum thicket is a wonderful reminder of unearned bounty. Every year, even this one of dreadful burning heat, it continues to provide me with as much delicious fruit as I am able to gather. I am required to do nothing other than appreciate it
