Tag Archives: smells

blackberry wine and a white fence

food and cooking, home, my garden, nature, , , , ,

At various spots in our town and country I’m sure I smell the blackberries turning to wine on their bushes – even as I am driving down the street or road that particular scent of summer-into-fall invades my car. I’ve never noticed it before…it’s probably all kinds of fruits breaking down into soil and earth and giving out their last sweetness on the way.

The sweet olive is blooming at the same time, and I must say, this is almost too much deliciousness to absorb in one day. I roasted pimientos from the garden last night, to loosen their skins, and that filled the house with…what shall I call it…Old Mexico? If Autumn has its special atmosphere, it must include all these ingredients in the recipe. We haven’t initiated the wood fires, and I’m wondering if I put off generating smoke, maybe I can prolong these other more subtle experiences. But pretty soon — maybe tomorrow?! — I will be shivering too much to care about that aspect of the season’s loveliness.

And there is plenty of visual feasting to do, with various plants making their seeds now, or putting out the last blooms, the flowers seeming even brighter in the slanted light. They are brave to emerge into the cold mornings when any day now they might get cut down by Jack Frost.

Echinacea Sombrero Hot Coral

 

October is the best month to plant any kind of peas in our area, and I haven’t had sweet peas in the garden in too long. The excitement of the fall garden is making me feel up to helping the little pea seedlings through the winter, so I went to the nursery to buy some seeds. Look what I found – an Echinacea Sombrero Hot Coral. When Kim at My Field of Dreams found something like this last month I ran to the store to get my own, but found nothing. Is this the name of yours, Kim?

Not all the fall colors are orange. Ground Morning Glory

A few weeks ago we had automatic irrigation installed, in the form of a system of plastic tubes running just under the surface of the ground all over the yard. Little black plastic emitters stick up at various places and cover the soil with a spray of water at whatever time intervals we program into the control panel.

Little fence is in the background near the street.

Not a week had gone by before one emitter very close to the front sidewalk was broken off, so we had the guys return and move that line back a few inches, and Mr. Glad installed pieces of wooden fence with stakes that poke into the ground. The paint was a little thin, so he put another coat over it first. I think it’s cute, and when the plants nearby have grown up bigger the white picket look will complement the foliage and flowers nicely.

This afternoon I’m headed back out to plant that echinacea, and also some stock and snapdragons. I’ll clear the pine needles off the cyclamen and trim the rosemary, and sniff and breathe in all these goodies of my garden.

Mountain Air – Stars and Storms

nature, travel, , , , ,
top of a little fir tree

I’ve mentioned the smoke from the Rim Fire, and the stinging of eyes and throat. It all was a bit distracting. The discomfort made any mental focusing difficult, and one thought kept coming back to me: Will I have to cut my time short and go home? By the second morning, I knew I would be able to stay.

Naturally the stars were still there where I’d left them in July, and I did spend some time with my friends, but not the first night – I was a little altitude sick, and spent. Just give me a good bed, and I’ll leave the window open so the cool mountain air will brush my cheek in the night, gently. The second night I also did not feel great, because of the smoke and the headache it gave me. I could only imagine that the stars were somewhat blocked out anyway.

But – surprise! – I woke at 2:30 in the morning, quite wide awake. It’s not very cold, and I feel good. So I dragged a sleeping pad out onto the deck, shook my sleeping bag (brought just for this purpose) out of its stuff bag, and crawled inside. Hmmm….I am not in the best location; the eaves of the roof are blocking part of the show… so I hauled myself out, moved my bed and scooted back down inside.

I lay there looking up at the Milky Way and noticing again how the tall Lodgepole pines make a kind of ruffled edge to the pool of stars. They also hide some constellations I’d like to have seen, like the Little Dipper. Next I found that the umbrella was cutting into my view, so I rearranged myself and my pallet once more, and then stayed put for an hour and a half. During that time I stared a lot, and saw many shooting stars. Stars appear to be so alive, making the sky coldly electric and exciting with their sparkling. And I felt alive, too.

I tried to go back to sleep out on the deck, which is why I stayed so long. But that didn’t work, so I went back to the bed by the window, from which I could actually see the stars a little.

One reason to make one’s mountain vacation at least four nights long (or should we make that ten?) is so that you can have more possible nights for star-gazing. In the mountains you never know when a thunderstorm will come through for a couple of days, and that’s what happened next. My remaining nights at the cabin were rainy, so I was really thankful that God had awakened me in the wee hours to have my Star Time.

I was sitting on the deck that afternoon, reading or sewing, when I noticed the sky clouding up. I could see that rain was falling in the northeast, and I heard the thunder very loud. Then lightning…but I resisted being driven indoors until an hour or two later when the sky was completely clouded over, and the temperature was dropping.

The kind of fire I’ll build next time.

I had moved inside to the dining table by the picture window when I heard the patter of rain, and looked up to see dark spots appearing on the deck boards…what a blessing to have this Mountain Storm experience! It made me very contented. I thought of building a fire in the massive rock fireplace, but the weather didn’t really call for it; I still had the doors and windows open as the temperature hadn’t dropped that much.

Me sitting by that window in yesteryear

When the rain had stopped, and it was still not dark yet, I went out and stood looking out beyond the deck to the lake. I smelled the earth and the trees — for the first time! I hadn’t even noticed as I was entering the forest on my drive up, or anytime in the first two days, that the mountain air hadn’t pressed its heady aromas on my senses. All I could think was that the smoke had been filling those olfactory spaces until the rain washed things up.

As I looked out and soaked up the quiet, and the moist and piney smell, a small doe picked her way through the rocks and little trees right below the cabin, not aware of me. It’s the first time I’ve seen a deer that close to the house, and I counted it one more gift of the mountains.

Honey is what it is, thank God!

church, nature, quotes, , , , , , , , , ,
from Fr. Ted’s blog

My parish is lucky enough to have our own vineyard right behind the church. This is very handy on the Feast of Transfiguration; at the end of the liturgy we can process out the doors and around the vineyard, to bless the grapes. It’s traditional to bless grapes or apples or any fruit, really, on this day.

Earlier on the feast day morning people brought into the church baskets of fruit and herbs and flowers. I carried a wooden bowl of blueberries and peaches. While we sang and communed and focused on the main event being commemorated, the fruit waited. The incense was particularly sweet that day, and I didn’t notice the smell of the beeswax candles as much as I usually do. Though I could see basil in a couple of the baskets, I didn’t catch its aroma either.

At the end of the service, with the prescribed prayers for the event, Father L. (and all of us) thanked God for all His bounty, and then he sprinkled holy water over the representative sampling.

He explained to us that this is not a superstitious rite we perform, using holy water to do magic on the fruit. When we bless anything in this way we do not make it into something other than what it is, but ask God to reveal it to be what it has always been.

Whatever created things we are talking about, they have always been meant by God to bring us into communion with Him. The service of blessing of fruit brings our thoughts back to Paradise, and the right and good use of the fruits of the earth that God has given us. We are reminded of how in the beginning God made Adam and Eve to be stewards over the Garden of Eden; human beings were called to exercise a loving and thankful dominion over the earth.

Russia

But we by our sin have instead caused destruction on the earth. Mankind more often than not has overused, abused and consumed in perverse ways the gifts of the Creator. Personally, I often gobble my food and eat without attentiveness to Him.

We have prayers for the blessing of bees and beehives and honey, too, usually in a separate service. Around here it’s August 1st, but I found pictures of honey blessings in Bulgaria where they do it dramatically on February 10 (see the bright cross picture down the page).

People like to take pictures of little girls and honey, I was happy to discover, and I am posting some of them here. The Russian ones are from Optina Monastery, and the Oregon photos from the Facebook page of New Martyrs of Russia Orthodox Church.

These honey and bee pictures are so enjoyable that I ended up with way more of them than of fruit. I hope you will hop over to the blog of Father Ted Bobosh where he posted a large and glorious photo collection of bees and other pollinators, such as the one I put at the very top, along with quotes about bees and Orthodox prayers for them. Just looking at the pictures will likely make you burst into prayer, too. Here is one of the prayers he posted:

From Father Ted

O God, who knows how to work benefits through human labor and irrational living things, You instructed us in your loving-kindness to employ the fruits and works of the bees for our needs. Now humbly we beseech Your majesty: Be pleased to bless the bees and increase them for the profit of the human race, preserving them and making them abundant. Let everyone hoping in Your majesty and Your boundless compassions, and laboring in the care of these living things, be counted worthy to receive abundant fruits of their labors and to be filled with heavenly blessings in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom is due glory, honor and worship unto ages of ages. Amen.

The photo above is from my church on Transfiguration, baskets of all kinds of fruits of the earth waiting for the prayers of blessing. Some of them were inspiring in the variety and arrangement of items, but one of my favorite baskets is the big one in front, full of apples picked just that morning.I don’t eat much honey these days, but I get a whiff of it in the candles every Sunday in church, and I can imagine the heady scent emanating from these tables laden with jars and bowls and plates of honey.

Doesn’t it just tell you something about our God, how sweet He is, and how extravagantly generous, that He would give us something as intense and rich as honey? The bees, of course, are also in the business of pollinating the fruit. The whole Creation and its interconnectedness is reflected in the Church and in our salvation history, all of a piece and orchestrated in love by our dear Father God.

Fr. L blessing beehives
Blessing honey in Bulgaria
Honey blessing in Oregon
Oregon honeycomb

Oregon – long good-bye

family, nature, travel, , , , , ,

On our last day in Oregon we woke up in a little old room in a lodge by a lake. Lake O’Dell, where Mr. Glad had come a couple of times as a child and where we thought we might row or paddle around on the glassy water in the morning. But I was impatient, knowing we had a long day of driving ahead of us, to just get on with it and get to Pippin’s.

The night before, we had sat on the deck and continued our reading of The Hobbit. Then we retired to our rustic room, likely designed for a fisherman type who doesn’t read in bed or need a nightstand for anything. The fisherman doesn’t have any bottles or jars or pillboxes in the bathroom, either, so it’s o.k. for him that the floor is the only horizontal surface other than a narrow windowsill.

It was kind of sweet, actually. The room smelled just normal, not like disinfectant or stale cigarette smoke or fake deodorizer. Maybe partly because the windows were letting in the fresh air from the forest, into a room that mostly houses just plain folk. We could see the lake through the trees, and hear the birds.

A well-dressed tree trunk by Lake O’Dell

Nothing and nobody woke us out of our good sleep, not even a motorboat of fishermen going out on the lake in the wee hours of the morning, as Mr. Glad had predicted. But we did wake and get on our way, south toward our home state. It would take the better part of the day, by way of long straight roads in the high and dry eastern side of Oregon.

Forest, forest and more forest, with “fields” of short lupines in bloom along both sides of the highway, thickest out in the open between the road and the trees.

When we were still at least 200 miles away, I got my first glimpse of the top of Mt. Shasta, that volcano that stands by itself over 14, 000 feet high as a dramatic landmark an hour’s drive south of the Oregon-California line. And then I really got excited, like a horse on its way back to the barn, and it struck me how much I love that mountain for telling me “Welcome to California!” and “Welcome home!” while I was yet a long way off.

It’s summer, and summer in the West means the highway department is repairing the roads, so this trip was marked by many many extended stops waiting for the flagman to let us go on.

The last of these roadwork episodes was near Weed, California, and I was driving, and could roll down my window and snap this picture of the mountain from a normally impossible spot. “It’s my lucky day!” I said, as once again we were sitting motionless on the blacktop.

But only a few minutes later we were playing with the grandchildren and eating strawberries with our dear ones. The Oregon loop was lovely, but not more so than the feeling of home.