It’s not summertime until you eat a tree-ripened peach. I hope I will always remember that on this day I ate the first real peach of my summer 2015, sent to me in the morning by Mrs. Bread from her own beloved tree.
It’s also the day that my pool is being chopped up, and I’ve been taking lots of Work Machine pictures and videos for the grandchildren to enjoy, but I can’t bear to post one of those here until I have something constructive to go with it.
This picture is of the peach I haven’t eaten yet. My friend actually sent me two juicy globes to warm my heart with the assurance of the seasons continuing as a sign of God’s constancy. Tomorrow will be another good day….
rooted a cutting from her own plant, I think, which has been blooming enthusiastically ever since. But I couldn’t get mine to make a flower until last week. Here it is posed with another event: my first Sunsugar cherry tomatoes of the season.
into her heart and gave me of her self: her motherhood of thirteen children, her married womanliness shaped by devotion to a passionate and visionary man, her thankfulness to a loving Father.
at she liked to write in, her Gnome Gnotebook, repository of decades of treasures she had collected in the form of poems, quotes and proverbs. I had enjoyed exploring the original book whose pages had long ago been filled up; when she ran out of room Bird simply wrote any new notes and poems on scraps of paper and kept them tucked between the pages, the whole bundle getting fatter and fatter, held together with a rubber band and always kept within arm’s reach.
Our friends Mr. and Mrs. C drove Mr. Glad and me to San Francisco this morning for a visit to Holy Virgin Cathedral, the “Joy of All Who Sorrow.” We were going there for the same reason many people come from all over the world, to pray at the relics of St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco.
were coming to power there he helped 5,000 of these expatriates to emigrate, eventually to the United States. Later still he established the cathedral in San Francisco where his incorrupt relics remain.
Afterward we needed some lunch, so we followed the advice of the candle desk attendant at the cathedral and ate at a Russian restaurant called The Red Tavern that was also in that Richmond District neighborhood. We were the only people there, too, though from the name we half expected when we went through the door to see a group of Bolsheviks plotting in the back corner.
man only recently from Ukraine was our waitress and we enjoyed talking to her and eating the wonderful food. I didn’t think that I liked Russian food much, but everything I tasted was superb: dark brown bread scented with caraway, fresh cabbage salad with golden raisins and tomatoes; thinly sliced fried potatoes; and barley-mushroom soup with a complex and rich flavor. We all shared some Polish poppy seed dessert that we could tell had marzipan in the filling. We cut the two pieces into two more and ate them off these pretty dishes that the waitress said were their “dessert plates.”
The forecast had been for cold and foggy weather in San Francisco today, but the sun was shining on our day and we didn’t even need our sweaters. Also, in our souls, we felt the warmth of Christ and of our friendship.
Gladsome Lights 