I saw that Hunter’s Moon the night before it was full, then out my bedroom window the next morning as it was near to setting, and again last night at its max. I got to feeling very familiar with that lovely Hunter. This was the view from my front yard to the east:
After a few drops of rain, we are back to mostly clear skies, with cool mornings and pleasant afternoons. The feijoas keep ripening, and I discovered that I don’t have to wait for them to fall, to know if they are ripe. Many of them are so near to falling, they come off at the merest touch, so I’ve taken to touch-testing them.
I read more about the feijoa on websites in New Zealand, where it is considered by many to be the unofficial national fruit, and it’s common to have one or several trees in your back yard. People might harvest pounds and pounds of feijoas (down there they don’t call them pineapple guavas) and eat them in many ways during the winter. They don’t like to throw away the skins, even after they have scooped the flesh out. If compared to the lemon peel, they say 
it has a “floral and eucalyptus-tinged green note (from its myrtle family) that lemons lack.” Its tartness has been described as less intense than that of lemons, “a blend of citrus peel and green apple skin.” Eating the whole package together sets my taste buds to ricocheting wildly.
For more than a year, off and on in the briefest of spurts, I have worked at memorizing the “stanza of the month” of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Poet’s Calendar”; there are twelve verses, one for each month. I even got so far as writing a few in one of 
these little booklets that are handy to take on walks. This afternoon I wanted to read poetry, but I also wanted to wander under those blue skies, so after making sure the autumnal stanzas had been added to the Mini Composition Book, I headed out the door. My phone’s battery was nearly dead, so I left it at home, and was blessedly without the option to take pictures.
I had ignored this poem through several months, but today I tackled the October and November parts as I walked, crunching acorns, along the paths and sidewalks where in some places the scent of baking redwood needles came up from the ground, and in other places leaves lay waiting there for me to notice and pick them up.
October
My ornaments are fruits; my garments leaves,
Woven like cloth of gold, and crimson dyed;
I do not boast the harvesting of sheaves,
O’er orchards and o’er vineyards I preside.
Though on the frigid Scorpion I ride,
The dreamy air is full, and overflows
With tender memories of the summer-tide,
And mingled voices of the doves and crows.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In “The Poet’s Calendar” all but one of the months of the year are characterized by an astronomical constellation and/or a mythological figure that Longfellow ties into the weather and agricultural customs of the season. Was it the perfect weather of this afternoon that made it easy to learn these few lines? Or maybe only the particular, evocative images he sketches. I hope my memorization project will be a little less sporadic from now on, so that my own “tender memories” might be enriched by more Poems Along the Paths.
My neighbor’s Fuyu persimmon tree is certainly decorated beautifully, its whole self an ornament to our street. And it might be that same front yard where I saw a lone honeybee drinking at a rosemary bush. The poor thing seemed to be finding most of the flowers empty, and moved quickly on….
A few roses hang on to the tall hedge along the path. I hope the bushes can let go of summer pretty soon and enjoy a nice rest in dormancy for at least a few months. I’m looking forward to some of that myself — but not while it is still October!
The sun was hot on my back as I reached up on the trellis to gather the dried Painted Lady runner beans. I separated the beans from the vines and carried loads of still vigorous leafy matter to the green bin. After a while the sun went behind the pine tree, but the balminess hung on.
Reading ideas for how to use a heavy crop, I learned that people do eat the skins. So I tried a few with their skins on and they are nice that way. The skins are a little more tart than the flesh, but they add another layer of complexity to the overall flavor, and a little crunch. The neighbor’s redwood tree looms over my pineapple guava, so that the dried and prickly twigs that fall are always interspersed with the fruit, and usually tangled in my hair when I come inside from picking.
The king was in the counting house,
I’ve had several house guests in the last week, for anywhere from three hours to one night’s stay. First, son Pathfinder came down for work, and this time we had dinner here. It included polenta, which I hadn’t made for a long time, and I cooked up a big batch; then later in the week I served some of it to Maggie and Wil with a meatloaf that I also hadn’t made in years.
The next guests were three young children and their mother whom I’d invited over for an afternoon of play plus a snack. The snack I decided to serve was mochi. I baked my old standby that I adapted from one of the recipes in this book that a friend brought me from Maui a long time ago. I’m not going to show you another one of my messy and annotated recipes, but will just say that this one uses lime Jello, sweet rice flour (mochiko) and coconut milk. The sweet cubes cut from the slab of baked and cooled mochi are dusted with potato starch. Everyone loved it. But next time I’m going to try making a version without Jello’s artificial color and flavor — even if the color is pretty!
Oh blessed state, when mere quiet weather, trees and grass, sea and clouds, can make you forget that life has anything in it but rapture, can make you drink in heaven with every breath! How long will it last, this joy of living, this splendid ecstasy of the soul? I am more afraid of losing this, of losing even a little of this, of having so much as the edge of its radiance dimmed, than of parting with any other earthly possession.”
I had another super exciting day when the Monarch chrysalis we’ve been watching matured and the butterfly emerged. The pupa stage lasted about three weeks, which is on the long side, and I wondered if possibly the insect had died. But the delay was likely just due to the week of cool and drizzly weather we had recently; the case darkened, and I began to see the Monarch colors inside.
the neighbor’s redwood tree. There’s no flower nectar to drink there, so I imagine he came down soon, but by then I was very late in Getting On With My Day, and had to go in.
