“Autumn Bouquet (Portrait of Vera Repina)” by Ilya Repin
The mind is never so open as such clear days in the fall, when the air has a special tang of flowers and frosty iron, and something flits lightly past you, a memory you can’t recall, a dream forever undreamt and forever far beyond. ~ Inger Hagerup (The Magic of Fjords)
This might be my last post tagged with “pandemic.” It’s been two and a half years! Not that I think we won’t eventually catch covid, but we have gotten our state-of-the-art bivalent booster shot now and we seem to be living in a new world, coexisting with a treatable endemic virus. We’re still masking inside public places but getting more adventurous…
The autumn equinox now seems like a perfect time turn over a new 🍁 and stop focusing on the virus. Yes, the mind is never so open as such clear days in the fall!
Further in Summer than the Birds — Pathetic from the Grass — A minor Nation celebrates It’s unobtrusive Mass.
No Ordinance be seen — So gradual the Grace A gentle Custom it becomes — Enlarging Loneliness —
Antiquest felt at Noon — When August burning low Arise this spectral Canticle Repose to typify —
Remit as yet no Grace — No furrow on the Glow, But a Druidic Difference Enhances Nature now —
~ Emily Dickinson (The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #895)
New London County now has 1,499 confirmed cases of COVID-19. Of those, 3 people are in the hospital and 106 have lost their lives. That’s 66 new cases but 3 fewer in the hospital since August 9. College students are returning to their dorms and time will tell how well they do with social distancing.
According to Wikipedia: “In Norse mythology, Iðunn is a goddess associated with apples and youth.” Iðunn is “a keeper of apples and granter of eternal youthfulness.” (Idun, Iduna, Idunn, Ithun, Idunna)
A few words following about October and apples, which we are enjoying daily since we went apple-picking last weekend. Nothing like crunching into a juicy McIntosh fresh from the tree! An old saying keeps popping into my head: an apple a day keeps the doctor away.
Now’s the time when children’s noses All become as red as roses And the colour of their faces Makes me think of orchard places Where the juicy apples grow… ~ Katherine Mansfield (Autumn Song)
There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October. The sunshine is peculiarly genial; and in sheltered places, as on the side of a bank, or of a barn or house, one becomes acquainted and friendly with the sunshine. It seems to be of a kindly and homely nature. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne (The American Note-books)
When my father was a boy growing up on a New England farm during the Great Depression, his family picked as many apples as they could and stored some of them in a barrel in the root cellar. Of course he ate as many as he could while picking them, but his parents had a rule about the ones in the barrel he found exasperating. If anyone wanted an apple later in the fall or winter, he was required to take one that was the least fresh. By the time they got to the fresher ones they had also become much less fresh! So all winter he was having to make do with eating not-so-great apples. If only he had known he might have called on Iduna to keep the apples fresher longer!
To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. The outdoor air and exercise which the walker gets give a different tone to his palate, and he craves a fruit which the sedentary would call harsh and crabbed. They must be eaten in the fields, when your system is all aglow with exercise, when the frosty weather nips your fingers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles the few remaining leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around. What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be labeled, “To be eaten in the wind.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript)
