I’ve showed up again to tell you that summertime is the best thing. Lucky me, I live in a temperate climate, and do not have to rush about meeting deadlines put upon me from other people; my days often pass in what seems like a natural and unhurried way, even at my work: in winter I carry wood and build fires, and at this time of year, there is lots of strenuous gardening to do.
Excepting the occasional heat wave, it’s typically just Very Warm midday, with the nights down to 50, and the cold fog often hanging on until late morning. One morning in July I used the furnace, which showed me that I am turning into an old lady. This week included another extra-chilly awakening, but I took the conservative route and added a wool cardigan to my first two layers.
Peder Monsted
So, summertime is perfect, in my case, for sharing a poem mentioning The North Wind. His counterpart around here is The Marine Breeze. I’m not that close to San Francisco, but I do often think of the comment (mis)attributed to Mark Twain: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”
What I love is that at least by noon, and usually much earlier, I can walk around my garden in the pleasant air and eat breakfast next to the pineapple guava tree, where graceful arches of salvia flowers lean in, and the Sun persuades me to take off my sweater.
Coucher de Soleil Sur le Village, Leon DeSmet
THE NORTH WIND AND THE SUN
Betwixt the North wind and the Sun arose A contest, which would soonest of his clothes Strip a wayfaring clown, so runs the tale. First, Boreas blows an almost Thracian gale, Thinking, perforce, to steal the man’s capote: He loosed it not; but as the cold wind smote More sharply, tighter round him drew the folds, And sheltered by a crag his station holds. But now the Sun at first peered gently forth, And thawed the chills of the uncanny North; Then in their turn his beams more amply plied, Till sudden heat the clown’s endurance tried; Stripping himself, away his cloak he flung: The Sun from Boreas thus a triumph wrung.
The fable means, “My son, at mildness aim: Persuasion more results than force may claim.”
-Babrius, aka Aesop (2nd century) Syria Translated by James Davies
Crape Myrtles are in full bloom in my neighborhood, including on my own property. Mine is not more than five years old, and in the last year it seems to have doubled in size.
I’ve been walking down to the creek bridge and beyond several times a week, and all the trees and plants growing in and on the banks of that stream also seem to have mushroomed, so that I can barely see the water below the bridge.
I love the summer, because it’s only in the occasional heat waves of the season that I can feel fully at home and in sync with the earth. In this climate with marine influence, where the evenings get cold and breezy even in the summer, it’s a treat to fully sink into the warmth and stay there all evening; even when I climb into bed I am relaxed, and don’t have to pull several layers up to my chin against the chill. Of course, this sounds crazy to those of you who live in high-humidity summer zones!
Even when it was over 100 degrees last week, I was able to spend a lot of time in the garden morning and evening, and then work on other projects in the middle of the day. I have plenty of paperwork and sorting yet to accomplish. If I ever finish that — Please God, help me! — I could sew, or read, or get back into writing book reviews …
When I read on my phone, I’ve started taking screen shots of quotes that I don’t want to lose. And I often look up words I don’t know — On Substack there are so many good writers with vast vocabularies — and take screenshots of the definitions.
Spider in the plum tree.
One morning as I set out on my usual walking route, I passed by the house down on the corner, where a vegetable garden has been carved out of the lawn, next to the sidewalk. For months I have been admiring the health and size of the plants, and that morning I spied a dozen beautiful yellow summer squashes peeking out from under the leaves, several of which should have been picked days earlier; on my way back I debated about whether to inquire about them. If the owners didn’t want them for some reason, I would take them… and if the gardeners had suddenly been incapacitated and couldn’t pick their own squash, I could offer to do that for them….
It sounded reasonable… and one hates to see beautiful vegetables going to waste… but what if I got involved with people I found disagreeable? Or who were needy beyond my abilities to help? I stood on the sidewalk and thought a while, then walked up to the door and knocked. The result: I made a new gardening friend.
Dee gave me three overgrown squashes, though none of the size I’d have preferred, and she invited me to come back for more. She enjoyed talking about her garden, and told me about her family that she lives with, including her recently widowed mother, who she said is the cook of the household. I wondered if that cook prefers overgrown zucchinis…. On one of the less sweltering days I did cook the squashes into a spicy, satisfying stew, which I was glad to have..
That’s my own chard and collards in the picture above, the leaves that were not eaten by insects or mollusks; I picked almost all of my greens and now my own little squash plants are spreading out in the planter boxes. Recently I transplanted the tarragon out of a pot into one of those boxes where it will get more regular watering, and it is thriving.
I used several sprigs of it to make Anytime Apricot and Tarragon Cookies from the Dorie’s Cookies book. They were in the chapter called “Cocktail Cookies,” and the recipe includes no sweetening beyond the dried apricots and tarragon.
I baked those savory shortbread cookies to take to friends who’d invited me for lunch, who I knew didn’t care for sweets very much. But they are winemakers, so I thought they might like the kind of savory cookies one could nibble on while sipping a glass of wine. We all thought they were really nice; it was amazing how much subtle sweetness we tasted in them; I think the level of saltiness helped bring it out.
I got together with several women who are collaborating to share homemaking skills; for our first meeting we focused on knitting. I had two cotton dishcloths I’d knitted a while back, which I decided to join together. I tried crocheting them together but I couldn’t figure out how to do that while at the same time chatting with everyone, so I just sewed them together with a blanket stitch.
I don’t have hopes of becoming an expert knitter, but I like to be with these women. And their babies! (At church there is a new family with a little guy just turned one, and he is the friendliest love bug. He loves me! And I never tire of holding him.)
Our host had an awe-inspring jar of kombucha scoby on her kitchen counter, and two of our group were happy to take home a quart of it to get their own kombucha production up and running again. My own fermenting experiments stalled decades ago with yogurt-making, and a succession of three yogurt makers that never satisfied. I never tried making sauerkraut, because that was a food I have been prejudiced against ever since it made a regular appearance on our table when I was a child; I did somehow manage to enjoy kimchi when my son “Soldier” brought it into the family’s already international culinary repertoire.
But I have made Lemon Verbena Sugar Paste! Lemon verbena is one of my garden treasures, but I haven’t pruned my plant often enough or used its leaves much, and it has gotten very leggy. So when I saw a young and well-shaped specimen in the grocery store, I brought it home and now have two such treasures. When I pruned the older plant, I took all the leaves to make Lemon Verbena Sugar Paste. There were more or less potent recipes online; I used the one with the highest ratio of herb to sugar, 2 cups to 1/2 cup.
I stuck the paste in the freezer and hope I will remember to bring it out to add to tea, sprinkle on desserts, use as a glaze, etc. Maybe I’ll also remember to tell you here if I do.
After I asked my friend Cori what were her summer reading plans, naturally she asked me back. I should have anticipated that and not asked her to begin with — because I have no real plans, and feel like an imposter. I have been reading less than usual. I see that of the nineteen books I pictured here five months ago, I have read just two. Only one of those I got to the end of was from the stack I was going to “try extra hard” to read this year. Well, the year is half over, so it doesn’t look promising for those selections. I took new pictures of the “summer books” to show Cori, because it was easier than typing out the titles.
Four of those I have at least started reading, and the Undset book is my current reading-while-falling-asleep choice. I have, typically, read several books that I didn’t anticpate back in February, and some of them were not worth talking about, or even reading to the end.
But let me just mention a young adult novel I did read to the end and liked a lot, What the Night Sings. Written by Vesper Stamper, who was one of the speakers at the Symbolic World Summit I attended earlier in the year in Florida, this is a coming-of-age-in-the-Holocaust story, illustrated by the author. First I listened to the novel, and then I borrowed the hard copy from the library, because I wanted to see the illustrations, which are many, and are very well done, as is the whole story. Stamper’s Berliners, is at hand, too, waiting for me.
If you have read — or even scrolled — this far in my ramble, I’m impressed! There is some reason you stayed so long, though there were doubtless some topics along the way that didn’t interest you. Whoever you are, I appreciate you very much.
Li-Young Lee has written at least two poems about peaches; I am guessing they are in many ways connected in his memory to his childhood. Here is the most recent one I came across, which is about much more than the sweet fruit itself:
THE WEIGHT OF SWEETNESS
No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.
Song, wisdom, sadness, joy: sweetness equals three of any of these gravities.
See a peach bend the branch and strain the stem until it snaps. Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness and death so round and snug in your palm. And, so, there is the weight of memory:
Windblown, a rain-soaked bough shakes, showering the man and the boy. They shiver in delight, and the father lifts from his son’s cheek one green leaf fallen like a kiss.
The good boy hugs a bag of peaches his father has entrusted to him. Now he follows his father, who carries a bagful in each arm. See the look on the boy’s face as his father moves faster and farther ahead, while his own steps flag, and his arms grow weak, as he labors under the weight of peaches.
-Li-Young Lee
And here is the poet reading another poem more focused on the subject, which I shared some years ago without the audio. This one really makes me want to drive an hour or two into California’s Central Valley to find some peaches that fit his description:
I love the summer, because it’s only in the occasional heat waves of the season that I can feel fully at home and in sync with the earth. In this climate with marine influence, where the evenings get cold and breezy even in the summer, it’s a treat to fully sink into the warmth and stay there all evening; even when I climb into bed I am relaxed, and don’t have to pull several layers up to my chin against the chill. Of course, this sounds crazy to those of you who live in high-humidity summer zones!
their babies! (At church there is a new family with a little guy just turned one, and he is the friendliest love bug. He loves me! And I never tire of holding him.)
in February, and some of them were not worth talking about, or even reading to the end.
Gladsome Lights 