Apple Pieces

Apple season looms. I keep thinking about getting back to apple cake making and wondering if today will be the day that it sounds like a good idea. So far, no dice really. It is still warm and the sun is (as Suess says) "still sunny" so the oven has mostly stayed off and I haven't even felt inspired enough about the topic to dig through my recipes for untried options. No, not even A's incredibly kind aunt soliciting my best contender yet encouraged me to get out my binder and have a look-see. Am a genuine inspiration swamp about it. (So sorry Aunt A!!! I promise I'll get that recipe to you soonish!)

I do think about it though and still believe in the idea heartily. The best apple cake recipe on earth has to be found. It has to be a classic cake...it has to be soft and has to be thick with apples and spices and it must, must, must be moist and delicious.

Going home, I realized that part of why the apple bug is so deep in me is because I without a doubt come from a land of apple paradise. There are apple trees, wild, abandoned,  forgotten, thriving, loaded, glowing apple trees on almost every tract of untended land...most houses seem to have an apple tree.

One of my paintings, "Four Apple Glow"

Plato represents to us that in the old days the apple was a symbol of love and tossing one to a person you fancied was a symbolically deep offer of affection.

"I throw the apple at you, and if you are willing to love me, take it and share your girlhood with me; but if your thoughts are what I pray they are not, even then take it, and consider how short-lived is beauty."

—Plato, Epigram VII^[21]

I had to have an apple tree at our new house, it is a deeply connected home-piece for me. Apple trees mean peace, familiarity and utility and even on some level a kind of whimsical mystery. I know Eve didn't really eat an apple but I think about it anyhow, and Avalon, the land of Arthur had nothing to do with apples, the name just means "apple land" but it somehow still feels important...I even think about the old name for the tomato "love apple" when I find myself in an orchard and smile to myself thinking that it sounds right.I think it is not for without reason that I feel really home now that I have made my own sauce and feel that if I need to have a good cry, a mug of cider is one of the best companions. Aphrodite and I like our apples.

Processing Central

We rolled back into town last night at a record-early time for us, we made the drive from Michigan, leaving at 7 something AM and pulled across the border into Connecticut again by 9 PM. We were psyched. We are just insane enough that it sounded like a good idea after all of that rigamarole to reward ourselves by whirling through a grocery store trip before we actually made landfall at the old homing pad. I know it sounds five levels of lost wits but actually was somewhat helpful. Here we are, Monday, first day of our untried homeschooling season and we have a full larder, even if the washing is teetering tall and I can hardly keep my eyes open. (Am doing mad penance for all those early morning chats with my dad PLUS late night discussions and card games and family jam sessions...but OH WELL...it is worth it.)

Today I am printed off menus for the next two weeks, listened to all the new words Nib learned over vacation tumble merrily out of him, took a nap (Hi ho! Sleep, you old acquaintance you!) and generally indulged in the massive, indulgent and very important job of over-processing every single little bit of the vacation. Somehow, I feel like this sort of thing is important after a holiday...but it really seems especially rampant with me when I've been to visit the natal homes of myself and A. I feel like life and my own personal experience and the thoughts of our siblings and the food of our mothers and the hobbies of our fathers and every other little tidbit id a small clue about "what it all means" and "how it all works" and my marriage and my parenthood and any number of other small and un-thought-of connections.

So, I'm running through the grand mass of experiences we had this past week and trying to synthesize. Am I the only one who does this? Tell me that I am somehow normal or sane or ideal or maybe even part of an elite club of special thinkers who are more sentient than the rest of the world. It isn't madness, right? Poor A thinks it is madness. I drive him bonkers with my effervescent desire to wade in the past and the minutiae and my starvation-level search for meaning in the center of it all. A is a raw experience person. He likes to do and then move on. His life is a storage wall of honeycombed cells. Mine is a mass of moving, sticky web strands, woven into a gigantic, sometimes beautiful, sometimes bizarre sculpture that is meant to stay on the wall but has ended up being a room-filling, experiential art-piece-cum-costume for anyone who attempts to come appreciate it. I know that my own personal brain-spill after trips can be a bit um...shall we say...suffocating? I also know that for me it is important and healthful and for those in my life it can contain bits of helpful information and the occasional brilliant insight but it has to be admitted that the mechanism is a bit over-the-top.

This is my attempt at taming The Beast that is my own processing machine. I tried to talk less during the drive home...at least less about all the little things that ran between my ears, and more about the weather and concrete plans for homeschooling and the book we're reading out loud together. And now that I am home, and able to be alone more...or at least buffered from A a bit...I am buzzing through all the things that make my brain whir about what I just experienced.

I am hoping to do a lot of writing, some phone calls with sympathetic/similarly demented pals, and maybe even a little talking to myself out-loud. I don't want to drive my partner insane, I don't actually want to make him allergic to my inner self and I don't want to suppress the very helpful digesting I enjoy doing, and find key to really shelving experiences I've had and also to genuine growth. I am hoping a little distance and self-reliance will be the answer. We shall see. We shall see.

In the meantime, if you need me, and you call me...when I don't get to the phone in time, you'll understand that it is a bit hard to be speedy when wading through a living nest, all plaited with endless strands of thought-tenacles. I will be out again and answering phones and emails and carrier pigeons more handily soon.

Poetry Friday: A Poem For Grace

A pile of Sungolds in my shirt

Happy Poetry Friday everyone! I hope that your weekend is beginning as sunshiney and full of promise as mine. We're packing the kids in the car tonight and hitting the road with a tent, a guitar, loads of good books, my paints and all the tomatoes we can manage to fit in. We're in the thick of it, tomato season that is, and what a beautiful season it has been this year.


I wrote about Sungold tomatoes this year, a variety that I really love, they're super sweet and a little bit tangy, very crisp skinned and just the most amazing orangey gold color. I wish I could send my dear sister-in-law a big box full of them. They were so fun to pick together last year at our CSA and it is such a really wonderful reminder to be gathering them here in my own yard and thinking of her. I hope that she gets to read this...I may have to send her a copy just to be sure.


Tomatoes for Grace

In December I ordered seeds for Sungolds
The only hybrid tomato I planned to plant.
All the rest were beefy, rippled heirlooms
Sungold, a golden marble of a cherry tomato
Was my one modern concession.
The seeds grew, in their little peat pockets
Drinking in the weak February sun,
There, on top of the sill-side radiator.
I bought another potted Sungold in May,
(When you think you can't have too many tomatoes)
There they were, so turgid and fuzz-leafed.
And so, I tucked it into bed, next to the one
I'd raised from seed and they grew up, twisting their
Arms together, embracing their round cages.
Now it is September and every day I walk
Out through the dewy grass and pick a handful
Of their shining school bus colored fruits.
They pop under my teeth just like they did in
Our toddler's hands when you visited last summer
I think of you, so far away across the ocean and
The way our laughter ran together down the rows
When we watched the baby totter after
A summer butterfly.

And this is last summer in the Sungold row, on the farm.

Such a beautiful plant.

And Grace herself. (often call her Penny here on the blog)

Well, I'm off to Michigan...I hope you all have a great week and that time somehow managed to hold still so I don't miss anything during my sojourn in the northland. Much poetic beauty can be found today at The Miss Rumphius Effect, the host blog for Poetry Friday. Drop on over, take a little browse through the offerings and maybe you'll be inspired to pen a few lines yourself.

Take care of yourselves, I'll see you all again soon!