I wish November could last forever.
But then, almost every year I wish November, or at least the first two weeks of it, could last forever.
This month in particular, though, it’s increasingly obvious that we are in the midst of the most perfect few weeks of the whole year. October impresses with warm days and blazing colors, but in November, the pale gold sunlight streams through the bare branches and slants across the burnished dying grass on the fields. Mild days like we’ve had this week seem like a remarkable gift this late in the season, especially after the snowstorm with which October ended. I’ve gone running in temperatures in the mid-50’s the past few mornings, and it seems like such an unexpected bonus.
This is a quiet time of year, a time for in-gathering. Fall sports are wrapping up. The school year is well under way; the kids are comfortably established in their classroom routines, but it’s still too early for major projects or productions. The report cards, conferences and concerts that mark the end of a term are still several weeks away.
And just as far away, mercifully, are the holidays. Well, not quite. Thanksgiving is next week, and I should already be planning the menu and table settings, but it feels like even that can wait a few more days, maybe ‘til the weekend. As for Christmas and New Year’s festivities, I won’t even think about that until we’ve finished cleaning up the kitchen after Thanksgiving dinner.
This is a quiet week. I’m immersed in work and community events, and fitting in as much time outdoors as I can while the weather is still so mild. With the early sunsets, the filtered November daylight seems all the more vital.
Next week, I’ll start thinking about Thanksgiving, and then figuring out the December schedule with all its parties and events, and then Christmas itself. This week, I’m just savoring the quiet and peace and beautiful days of mid-November.
Showing posts with label autumn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label autumn. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Summer fruits
I’m eating one last plum. One small, soft, juicy, purple-black plum, its pulp sweet and cold, its skin tart and fibrous. One last plum before the summer fruit season ends.
Many of my friends talk about the mixed feelings of changing over their wardrobes from summer to fall: the end of cotton skirts and sleeveless blouses; the ushering-in of wool sweaters and blazers and suede boots. This year, with warm humid temperatures extending into the beginning of October, some of them have sounded more eager than wistful about saying goodbye to bathing suits and sandals and reaching for their autumnal wardrobe.
For me, the wardrobe turnover isn’t all that meaningful. It’s in the fruit crisper that I mark – and lament – the change of seasons.
Goodbye to sweet white peaches, tangy yellow peaches, intensely flavored apricots, red and purple and black plums. Goodbye to complicated cherries, delicious despite their tangle of stems and messy pits, and nectarines, the fruit that seems to have an agreeable disposition, neither as sloppy as peaches nor as mealy as apricots.
Goodbye to summer vegetables as well: plump sweet corn kernels lined up along the cob; dark flavorful tomatoes in blobby irregular spheres.
I’m not adamant about locavorism, mostly because I can’t imagine forever giving up bananas, avocadoes and coffee. But the very best of the summer fruits and vegetables simply aren’t available in the supermarket off-season. And even without being proactively locavore, I appreciate the annual rhythms of the harvest: asparagus in the spring, an abundance of juicy tomatoes and fruits, and flavorful lettuces, in the summer, pears and apples in the fall, oranges and grapefruit in the winter.
So today I say goodbye to summer’s delicious stone fruits. One more perfect plum, and then eight or nine months without. Time to turn to the autumnal harvest for cooking and snacking inspiration. The wheel of the year turns, and we’re at the start of a new season, once again.
Many of my friends talk about the mixed feelings of changing over their wardrobes from summer to fall: the end of cotton skirts and sleeveless blouses; the ushering-in of wool sweaters and blazers and suede boots. This year, with warm humid temperatures extending into the beginning of October, some of them have sounded more eager than wistful about saying goodbye to bathing suits and sandals and reaching for their autumnal wardrobe.
For me, the wardrobe turnover isn’t all that meaningful. It’s in the fruit crisper that I mark – and lament – the change of seasons.
Goodbye to sweet white peaches, tangy yellow peaches, intensely flavored apricots, red and purple and black plums. Goodbye to complicated cherries, delicious despite their tangle of stems and messy pits, and nectarines, the fruit that seems to have an agreeable disposition, neither as sloppy as peaches nor as mealy as apricots.
Goodbye to summer vegetables as well: plump sweet corn kernels lined up along the cob; dark flavorful tomatoes in blobby irregular spheres.
I’m not adamant about locavorism, mostly because I can’t imagine forever giving up bananas, avocadoes and coffee. But the very best of the summer fruits and vegetables simply aren’t available in the supermarket off-season. And even without being proactively locavore, I appreciate the annual rhythms of the harvest: asparagus in the spring, an abundance of juicy tomatoes and fruits, and flavorful lettuces, in the summer, pears and apples in the fall, oranges and grapefruit in the winter.
So today I say goodbye to summer’s delicious stone fruits. One more perfect plum, and then eight or nine months without. Time to turn to the autumnal harvest for cooking and snacking inspiration. The wheel of the year turns, and we’re at the start of a new season, once again.
Friday, November 5, 2010
In admiration of November
Ever since moving back here in late fall of 2001, I’ve believed November to be the loveliest month on the farm. Absent the verdant brilliance of June or the stunning golden and crimson colors of October, November has a quiet splendor, with its yellowed fields, early sunsets and bare gray tree branches. Five days into November, here are some of this year’s hallmarks of a magnificent month:
* The sight of the ten-year-old who lives next door on her cantering horse, the sunlight falling across the girl and horse in flashing planes of yellow as they carve wide circles over the yellow-green grass of the pasture
* The sheep hustling out of their enclosure in the morning as soon as I unlatch the gate to get their share of the hay before the cows decimate the bales
* A six-point antlered buck crossing the driveway just in front of me, stopping turn his big head slowly to look at me with big brown eyes before he steps on into the woods
* Yellow leaves so thick across the footpath that I can’t see the border between gravel path and the grass
* Frost making a smooth white plane across the lawn as the sun rises
* Hank, a very large bull, breaking the top plank of the fence as he pushes his neck through to eat the few remaining leaves on a tree at the edge of our yard
* A border of ice on the brook first thing in the morning
* Squirrels skittering along the fences
* The dog, uncharacteristically barking into the darkness when I let her out before bedtime. Maybe she sees a coyote? A bear?
The growing season is ending. The ground will freeze soon. But living things are busy at this time of year: some growing, eating, foraging; others – leaves and plants – dying. November’s assets repeat themselves year after year, appearing to me to be lovelier with each year that goes by.
* The sight of the ten-year-old who lives next door on her cantering horse, the sunlight falling across the girl and horse in flashing planes of yellow as they carve wide circles over the yellow-green grass of the pasture
* The sheep hustling out of their enclosure in the morning as soon as I unlatch the gate to get their share of the hay before the cows decimate the bales
* A six-point antlered buck crossing the driveway just in front of me, stopping turn his big head slowly to look at me with big brown eyes before he steps on into the woods
* Yellow leaves so thick across the footpath that I can’t see the border between gravel path and the grass
* Frost making a smooth white plane across the lawn as the sun rises
* Hank, a very large bull, breaking the top plank of the fence as he pushes his neck through to eat the few remaining leaves on a tree at the edge of our yard
* A border of ice on the brook first thing in the morning
* Squirrels skittering along the fences
* The dog, uncharacteristically barking into the darkness when I let her out before bedtime. Maybe she sees a coyote? A bear?
The growing season is ending. The ground will freeze soon. But living things are busy at this time of year: some growing, eating, foraging; others – leaves and plants – dying. November’s assets repeat themselves year after year, appearing to me to be lovelier with each year that goes by.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Autumn picnic
Early last week during the unseasonably warm weather, Holly and I took a late-afternoon walk. We passed a field near our house, and Holly noticed that a very tall oak tree had toppled over from the woods edging the field and was now lying almost all the way across it.
As she looked at it, it wasn’t so much like an idea formed in her head as like a snapshot popped into her brain. “I would like to have a picnic there with Samantha,” she announced.
Holly has several close friends, and she doesn’t usually plan picnics, so why this particular conflation of details – a picnic, Samantha – I can’t explain. I also suspected that by the next day, or at least once the warm weather broke, she’d forget about the plan.
But she didn’t. Two days later, she was still asking me if I’d emailed Samantha’s mother yet to invite the two of them on a picnic. So I sent the email, and they graciously accepted, and then it was menu-planning time.
Apparently to Holly, planning (and hosting) a picnic means drawing up a complicated menu that I am then expected to execute. Tea sandwiches – three or four varieties. Fruit salad (which would have to be made the morning of the picnic, for the sake of freshness). Apple crisp for dessert, Holly requested: warm from the oven.
I managed to make a few modifications. Two kinds of tea sandwiches rather than three. Sliced banana bread, which we happened to have in the freezer just waiting for an occasion. And how about those fancy chocolates I received for my birthday last week in place of the freshly baked apple crisp? (The fact that I was willing to break out my secret stash of fancy chocolates attests to just how much I didn’t want to have to worry about making an apple crisp.)
Holly was amenable, and I found little jobs for her to do as I prepared the food that Saturday morning: she fetched plastic plates and napkins from the paper goods closet, and then cleaned out the wagon, which we would need to transport our bounty to the field.
When we got there, everything seemed to unfold just as Holly pictured it. We shook out our picnic blanket, and the moms sat in the sun chatting (and munching on the sliced apples and brie that our guests had contributed to the meal) while Holly and Samantha examined the tree branches and jotted down their observations in small spiral notebooks Holly had brought along specifically for this purpose. (It turned out she had chosen the location because she recognized that when a tall tree falls down, it gives you a rare opportunity to examine what’s in those high branches that you can never see in a standing tree.) After we ate our tea sandwiches and drank our lemonade, Holly pulled out the songbook she’d brought along and sang a couple of songs she wrote last week. Samantha was a great sport: she seemed perfectly content with the remarkably micro-choreographed event Holly had planned.
For the two moms, it was a great chance to catch up; we’d both been busy all fall and hadn’t seen much of each other. For the girls, it appeared to be a happy fall afternoon, though the weather had turned a lot cooler since Holly first conceived of the plan, and we were wearing hats, gloves and fleece jackets. Mostly, Holly seemed pleased that the plan had unfolded just the way she pictured it.
But she also seemed unsurprised. She invited Samantha on a picnic; Samantha accepted. She brought notebooks for writing observations; observations were duly made. She gave me a picnic menu; I prepared the food. It’s nice to be eight years old and able to control an event to that degree, and I suppose it worked mostly because I went along so willingly. But this was a rare case where I was happy to take orders from my child. Holly had a plan and with help from me was able to make it come to fruition. The results were pleasing to everyone.
Usually, life is a lot more complicated. Parties don’t work out exactly as you expect; menus don’t turn out just as you imagine they will; the weather changes in unpredictable ways. But not this time. This time everything worked out just as Holly planned. I’m not sure if she realizes how rare that is, but I know it was a happy day for her, and I can only hope she’ll remember how happy she was on this day at some point in the future when plans turn out to be not quite always so easy to enact.
As she looked at it, it wasn’t so much like an idea formed in her head as like a snapshot popped into her brain. “I would like to have a picnic there with Samantha,” she announced.
Holly has several close friends, and she doesn’t usually plan picnics, so why this particular conflation of details – a picnic, Samantha – I can’t explain. I also suspected that by the next day, or at least once the warm weather broke, she’d forget about the plan.
But she didn’t. Two days later, she was still asking me if I’d emailed Samantha’s mother yet to invite the two of them on a picnic. So I sent the email, and they graciously accepted, and then it was menu-planning time.
Apparently to Holly, planning (and hosting) a picnic means drawing up a complicated menu that I am then expected to execute. Tea sandwiches – three or four varieties. Fruit salad (which would have to be made the morning of the picnic, for the sake of freshness). Apple crisp for dessert, Holly requested: warm from the oven.
I managed to make a few modifications. Two kinds of tea sandwiches rather than three. Sliced banana bread, which we happened to have in the freezer just waiting for an occasion. And how about those fancy chocolates I received for my birthday last week in place of the freshly baked apple crisp? (The fact that I was willing to break out my secret stash of fancy chocolates attests to just how much I didn’t want to have to worry about making an apple crisp.)
Holly was amenable, and I found little jobs for her to do as I prepared the food that Saturday morning: she fetched plastic plates and napkins from the paper goods closet, and then cleaned out the wagon, which we would need to transport our bounty to the field.
When we got there, everything seemed to unfold just as Holly pictured it. We shook out our picnic blanket, and the moms sat in the sun chatting (and munching on the sliced apples and brie that our guests had contributed to the meal) while Holly and Samantha examined the tree branches and jotted down their observations in small spiral notebooks Holly had brought along specifically for this purpose. (It turned out she had chosen the location because she recognized that when a tall tree falls down, it gives you a rare opportunity to examine what’s in those high branches that you can never see in a standing tree.) After we ate our tea sandwiches and drank our lemonade, Holly pulled out the songbook she’d brought along and sang a couple of songs she wrote last week. Samantha was a great sport: she seemed perfectly content with the remarkably micro-choreographed event Holly had planned.
For the two moms, it was a great chance to catch up; we’d both been busy all fall and hadn’t seen much of each other. For the girls, it appeared to be a happy fall afternoon, though the weather had turned a lot cooler since Holly first conceived of the plan, and we were wearing hats, gloves and fleece jackets. Mostly, Holly seemed pleased that the plan had unfolded just the way she pictured it.
But she also seemed unsurprised. She invited Samantha on a picnic; Samantha accepted. She brought notebooks for writing observations; observations were duly made. She gave me a picnic menu; I prepared the food. It’s nice to be eight years old and able to control an event to that degree, and I suppose it worked mostly because I went along so willingly. But this was a rare case where I was happy to take orders from my child. Holly had a plan and with help from me was able to make it come to fruition. The results were pleasing to everyone.
Usually, life is a lot more complicated. Parties don’t work out exactly as you expect; menus don’t turn out just as you imagine they will; the weather changes in unpredictable ways. But not this time. This time everything worked out just as Holly planned. I’m not sure if she realizes how rare that is, but I know it was a happy day for her, and I can only hope she’ll remember how happy she was on this day at some point in the future when plans turn out to be not quite always so easy to enact.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Fruit bowl
As happens every October, all around me appear magnificent tableaus. The trees burst with crimson, scarlet, peach, gold, russet; small yellow leaves float on the dark water of the brook. Against a bright blue sky flies an arrow of Canada geese.
Yet just as beautiful is the tableau on my kitchen counter: one of the loveliest arrangements of fruit I have ever seen. And I didn’t even try specially to arrange it that way; it just happened. A round, shiny, red tomato; a verging-on-ripe yellow banana; a pale green pear; an avocado as dark green as green can be without turning to a shade of black; an orange. I have to restrain myself from fishing for adjectives to describe the colors; the fruits themselves are the best modifiers for these colors. Crayola would name these colors banana yellow, pear green. The fruits are such perfect hues.
Their spectrum catches my eye every time I walk through the kitchen, and I just can’t stop marveling at how beautiful this arrangement of fruit is. At other times of year, I have just as much fruit in the house but don’t always keep it on the counter. Summer fruits – sweet, juicy peaches and nectarines – attract fruit flies, so keep them in the fridge, as I also do with winter apples and grapefruit. But the fall harvest stays out in the silver fruit bowl, making my kitchen more beautiful than any intentional work of art ever could.
I’m reminded of one of Mary Oliver’s best-known poems, The Summer Day. (I’m no poetry scholar; in all likelihood, any poem I know is quite likely to be “one of the best-known” by that poet.) Oliver wrote:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
…and I find myself wondering accordingly, who made all of this beautiful fruit with its rainbow of colors, and why? Each piece would taste just as good if their skins or peels were dirt brown. They didn’t need to be so beautiful….but they are. Every time I eat arugula, I think to myself something similar to Mary Oliver’s questions: “Who made this lettuce?” We could have been just as satisfied with endive and romaine, and yet whoever made Oliver’s grasshopper also made arugula, a green that tastes garlicky and musky and delicious.
Who made grasshoppers, and oranges, and arugula? I could get a lot of different answers to that question if I asked even the smallest subset of people. I wouldn’t want to have to try to answer it myself. And yet there’s a feeling today that Divinity nestles in my fruit bowl, reminding me every time I pass it of all that is inexplicable and yet beautiful in the world.
Yet just as beautiful is the tableau on my kitchen counter: one of the loveliest arrangements of fruit I have ever seen. And I didn’t even try specially to arrange it that way; it just happened. A round, shiny, red tomato; a verging-on-ripe yellow banana; a pale green pear; an avocado as dark green as green can be without turning to a shade of black; an orange. I have to restrain myself from fishing for adjectives to describe the colors; the fruits themselves are the best modifiers for these colors. Crayola would name these colors banana yellow, pear green. The fruits are such perfect hues.
Their spectrum catches my eye every time I walk through the kitchen, and I just can’t stop marveling at how beautiful this arrangement of fruit is. At other times of year, I have just as much fruit in the house but don’t always keep it on the counter. Summer fruits – sweet, juicy peaches and nectarines – attract fruit flies, so keep them in the fridge, as I also do with winter apples and grapefruit. But the fall harvest stays out in the silver fruit bowl, making my kitchen more beautiful than any intentional work of art ever could.
I’m reminded of one of Mary Oliver’s best-known poems, The Summer Day. (I’m no poetry scholar; in all likelihood, any poem I know is quite likely to be “one of the best-known” by that poet.) Oliver wrote:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
…and I find myself wondering accordingly, who made all of this beautiful fruit with its rainbow of colors, and why? Each piece would taste just as good if their skins or peels were dirt brown. They didn’t need to be so beautiful….but they are. Every time I eat arugula, I think to myself something similar to Mary Oliver’s questions: “Who made this lettuce?” We could have been just as satisfied with endive and romaine, and yet whoever made Oliver’s grasshopper also made arugula, a green that tastes garlicky and musky and delicious.
Who made grasshoppers, and oranges, and arugula? I could get a lot of different answers to that question if I asked even the smallest subset of people. I wouldn’t want to have to try to answer it myself. And yet there’s a feeling today that Divinity nestles in my fruit bowl, reminding me every time I pass it of all that is inexplicable and yet beautiful in the world.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Hoping to turn my kids into hikers!
The weather is beautiful today, a quintessential New England mid-autumn day. Blue skies, the foliage a mix of green, yellow, peach, chartreuse, crimson. (It’s probably not quite yet peak, but we forget at peak that the emerald can be a really lovely contrast with the brighter colors, before all the leaves have turned.) Belle and I ran 2.3 miles midmorning, up through the Center, looping around at the Highland Building and back past the school: Running Streak Day 789.
We’re coming up to a 3-day weekend, Columbus Day, and I’m fervently hoping I can get my family outdoors for some kind of organized, dare I say, hike? Hiking is probably way too strong a word for my family’s abilities. I doubt we’ll be tackling Mt. Monadnock any time soon. But I’d settle for a walk on one of the town’s many conservation trails, or even the loop around Walden Pond. Before I had children, I went trail-walking all the time, and I just naturally pictured I’d have kids who bounded through the woods with me. But so far, that hasn’t been the case. When Tim and I were running every day, one of the benefits was simply getting Tim outdoors more often, even if it was for only fifteen or twenty minutes a day. Now, between biking to and from school, playing baseball twice a week, and daily recess time during the week, he still gets a reasonable amount of time outdoors, but it’s a bit vexing to me that neither of the kids likes the idea of just walking in the woods or fields all around us and all throughout this region. Rick has never taken much of an interest – his famous quote about this from long before we were married was that if a recreational sport doesn’t involve fights, finish lines or scores, he’s not interested – so I don’t even expect him to join me, but I no longer have the excuse on the kids’ behalf that they’re too young or too little. They could be fine hikers if they wanted to. The problem is that they don’t want to.
With the forecast fine for this weekend and it being such a beautiful time of year, though, I think I’m going to dig my heels in. They don’t have to conquer any mountain ranges, but surely we can walk the perimeter of our local conservation land or do a mile on the nearest public trail, can’t we? As I always say, writing a goal down takes you at least 60% of the way to making it happen. I sometimes invoke the acronym WIDMIH: Write it down [to] make it happen. I hereby write down that I will get my kids outdoors for an off-road walk lasting at least 20 minutes (hey, might as well start with really really low expectations) this weekend, once during the three days we have off. We’ll see how that resolution plays out.
We’re coming up to a 3-day weekend, Columbus Day, and I’m fervently hoping I can get my family outdoors for some kind of organized, dare I say, hike? Hiking is probably way too strong a word for my family’s abilities. I doubt we’ll be tackling Mt. Monadnock any time soon. But I’d settle for a walk on one of the town’s many conservation trails, or even the loop around Walden Pond. Before I had children, I went trail-walking all the time, and I just naturally pictured I’d have kids who bounded through the woods with me. But so far, that hasn’t been the case. When Tim and I were running every day, one of the benefits was simply getting Tim outdoors more often, even if it was for only fifteen or twenty minutes a day. Now, between biking to and from school, playing baseball twice a week, and daily recess time during the week, he still gets a reasonable amount of time outdoors, but it’s a bit vexing to me that neither of the kids likes the idea of just walking in the woods or fields all around us and all throughout this region. Rick has never taken much of an interest – his famous quote about this from long before we were married was that if a recreational sport doesn’t involve fights, finish lines or scores, he’s not interested – so I don’t even expect him to join me, but I no longer have the excuse on the kids’ behalf that they’re too young or too little. They could be fine hikers if they wanted to. The problem is that they don’t want to.
With the forecast fine for this weekend and it being such a beautiful time of year, though, I think I’m going to dig my heels in. They don’t have to conquer any mountain ranges, but surely we can walk the perimeter of our local conservation land or do a mile on the nearest public trail, can’t we? As I always say, writing a goal down takes you at least 60% of the way to making it happen. I sometimes invoke the acronym WIDMIH: Write it down [to] make it happen. I hereby write down that I will get my kids outdoors for an off-road walk lasting at least 20 minutes (hey, might as well start with really really low expectations) this weekend, once during the three days we have off. We’ll see how that resolution plays out.
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