...and slices of quince

This is what was in the surprise seasonal package I received from my friend Karen's farm. Those sensuous yellow fruits are quinces, walnuts in the background, and the mahogany fruits in front of the walnuts are jujubes. Here's what Karen says about the jujubes: "The Jujus are perhaps an acquired taste. Just pop them in your mouth--they do have a pit. They are chewy, with a date-like quality and they are ripe when slightly dry and wrinkled." I've been doing just that--popping them in my mouth--and they are like dates, a little less sweet, with a crispy dry skin.
As for the quinces, with their subtle, appley fragrance--she suggests making quince paste. She enclosed a recipe for cotognata (Italian) that refers to the nuns making it and pressing it into special ceramic dishes. I do love quinces, but not quince paste; it's just a little too medieval for me. Luckily, I have Jane Grigson's Fruit Book, which has some great quince recipes and this wonderful poem about quinces, composed by Shafur ben Utman al-Mushafi, an Arabic-Andalusian poet who died in 982:

It is yellow in color, as if it wore a daffodil
tunic, and it smells like musk, a penetrating smell.

It has the perfume of a loved woman and the same
hardness of heart, but it has the color of the
impassioned and scrawny lover.

Its pallor is borrowed from my pallor; its smell
is my sweetheart's breath.

When it stood fragrant on the bough and the leaves
had woven for it a covering of brocade,

I gently put up my hand to pluck it and to set it
like a censer in the middle of my room.

It had a cloak of ash-colored down hovering over
its smooth golden body,

and when it lay naked in my hand, with nothing more than
its daffodil-colored shift,

it made me think of her I cannot mention, and I feared
the ardor of my breath would shrivel it in my fingers.

This is the kind of thing I adore Jane Grigson for. I think I will make Quinces Baked in the French Style (sort of like baked apples) with them, after I enjoy them for a while in their glass bowl.

Poem from the Bar Mitzvah

There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.

The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.

And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

--Mary Oliver, first four lines of "Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?", in Why I Wake Early.

Red Gate

Red gate on the hill:
Is it only the wind that
Passes through it now?

Birthday Sun

Solar energy
squirting out, yellow, shouting:
A new one is born!

Haiku for Willets and Marbled Godwits

We keep our feet wet
We stand where waves lick our toes
Where sand mirrors sky

It's a relief for me that NaBloPoMo is over. By the end I felt emptied out of all I wanted to say. But there were some days, and stretches of days, when I was looking forward to my next post, thinking of a string of posts on a theme, having fun planning out which photo to use. I thought about posting a lot more when I posted every day. Some of my posts were dull, but I did write more of them!

I'm thinking now about whether I want to narrow my focus. I'm kind of all over the place. There's a lot of different labels accumulating: pumpkins? worms? shopping? But then again, I like to cast my mind over many different topics. Probably I will just keep going as I have been, with three main themes: parenting, garden/nature, food. I'd like to post three or four times a week and see where that takes me.

Haiku for Nov. 12

Sinking into soil,
Grins turned into grimaces,
Pumpkins don't last long.

November 1 Haiku

Two pumpkins gossip
Over last night's partying:
"We didn't get smashed!"

White Butterflies

I'm crazy about this poem by Mary Oliver, from her collection called "West Wind" (1997). In fact, I'm crazy about butterflies in general. Everything seems to be undergoing metamorphosis right now. My sons eat like caterpillars, cocoon, and burst forth with brightly colored wings every day.

On this day, the autumn equinox, we pose teetering between the seasons, day and night the same length, before we slide irrisistibly toward winter. My husband and I celebrated the equinox by buying plants at Flowercraft. While we were digging a spot for the raised bed frame, two white butterflies fluttered over and around us and on our grapevines. The photo is of a Cabbage White tasting the Mexican sage in front of our house.

Seven White Butterflies

Seven white butterflies
delicate in a hurry look
how they bang the pages

of their wings as they fly

to the fields of mustard yellow
and orange and plain
gold all eternity

is in the moment this is what

Blake said Whitman said such
wisdom in the agitated
motions of the mind seven

dancers floating

even as worms toward
paradise see how they banter
and riot and rise

to the trees flutter

lob their white bodies into
the invisible wind weightless
lacy willing

to deliver themselves unto

the universe now each settles
down on a yellow thumb on a
brassy stem now

all seven are rapidly sipping

from the golden towers who
would have thought it could be so easy?

--Mary Oliver