Wassailing the Apple Trees

A winter landscape can look bleak and barren but it may contain the promise of plenty in the year to come.

Much has been written (and refuted) about the benefits of talking to your plants, singing to them, and even playing music to promote their healthy growth.  This clearly isn't a new idea, as an old English custom involved singing and toasting the apple tree and other fruit trees on the Eve of Epiphany.  In wassailing the apple trees, workmen went from farm to farm with pitchers of cider.  Following the farmer into the fields and orchards they encircled the trees and sang their toasts to the trees.

"Here's to thee, old apple tree,

Whence thou may'st bud, and whence thou may'st blow!

And whence thou may'st bear apples enow!"

*****

"So well they might bloom, so well they might bear,

That we may have apples and cider this year!"

 A new  field of scientific study is called 'plant neurobiology.'  It seeks answers to questions of plant intelligence.  Are plants capable of their own type of cognition, learning, communication with other plants, memory, response to environmental input, and information processing?  The wassailers would answer with a definitive 'yes.'

Clouds of Christmas Eve Morning

Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:

"Pipe a song about a Lamb."
So I piped with merry cheer;
"Piper, pipe that song again."
So I piped; he wept to hear.

           Songs of Innocence [1789 - 1790]
           Introduction, st.1,  2
         
           William Blake 1757 - 1827

Fifty Years On

To all my classmates, teachers, friends, and family who were together on that Friday afternoon and the days that followed.  Fifty years on and I still see you as though it were now.

 We know that three hundred years before that day Shakespeare expressed our thoughts most clearly.

When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
          
                            Romeo and Juliet, III, ii, 21

Saint Teresa of Avila

Today is celebrated as the feast day of Saint Teresa of Avila.  This is a portrait of her painted by Peter Paul Rubens many years after her death.

Teresa died at Alba de Tormes in 1582.  She died either shortly before midnight on October 4th or early in the morning of October 15th.  This was the time when much of Europe was switching from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and the transition required the removal of October 5 - 14 for that year.

In the twentieth century many women of intellect, including Beauvoir, tried to place Teresa within a pantheon of postmodern "subversives" against patriarchal power structures.  For her daughters in Carmel, and her thousands of followers over the last five centuries, Teresa's courage, wit, tenacity, and lively intelligence cannot be confined or defined by these academic theories.

Thoughts on an Annual Tradition

It's almost Halloween and so it's time for the annual "guess how much the pumpkin weighs" contests.  You find them all over the country - in stores and farmers' markets and parking lots.  Sometimes it's just a large pumpkin sitting on the back of a pickup truck. This one, like so many enormous pumpkins, seems to have almost collapsed under its own weight.  I wonder if this is the one that cartoon character Charlie Brown is waiting for - The Great Pumpkin!  Wait a minute!  I think that Cinderella didn't make it home on time and the glitzy golden coach was turned back into a splendid and real orange pumpkin.  A pumpkin like this one will make many pies and custards and make many people happy.

September Afternoon Visitors

The urban birds of my neighborhood seem to raise their families year round.  I shouldn't have been surprised to see such a young mourning dove outside my window this afternoon under the watchful eyes of an adult.

I stopped reading the book in my hands and flipped the pages back to a most appropriate line of writing.

". . . one listens to the mourning dove terracing its sweet calls . . ."

from "On Beauty and Being Just"  by Elaine Scarry

Still Life with Watermelon, Pears, and Grapes

This painting by Lilly Martin Spencer is in the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.   It is oil painted on canvas and generally assumed to have been painted around the year 1860.  I love the balance of rich colors, the detail of texture given to the surface on which the fruit rests, and the top of the watermelon which appears to have been bitten in enjoyment.

I need to make a correction to my post of February 15th.  It's true that Lilly was painting right up until the time of her death, at her easel, but she died in New York City, not Highland, New York.  She is buried next to her husband, Benjamin Rush Spencer, in Highland.

Nearly every day of the year is a national food holiday here in the United States and today, August 3, is National Watermelon Day.  Foods from apples to popcorn to zucchini all have their own commemorative day - sometimes a whole month will celebrate one food.  For some reason that I don't understand, National Watermelon Day is celebrated in August but July is designated as National Watermelon Month.