After Van Gogh Things are growing strange these days, like Van Gogh’s yellow trees. Oh, do not be surprised by these yellow immensities, how out of proportion things in the picture seem. What you see in a way makes sense: the enormous, barren trees eclipsing the unimportant buildings at Arles station, the people all small, shadow-like, cast to the side. Perhaps Van Gogh should have left us out entirely, but then who would be left to blame for the strange blurring of the seasons in the forefront, the way summer bleeds into autumn, the forests burning deep into the winter, those winters where the snow piled so high, we were all nearly buried alive. Soon we’ll vanish, and no picture will even exist—unless, unless someone will answer (who will dare to answer), where in the world is spring? ~Jodi Hollander “Avenue of Plane Trees”
Who might dare to answer: where in the world is spring?
Who can know with any certainty? Sometimes it feels like time skips forward and a whole season is left behind.
The signs of the seasons might blur so there is no telling whether it is fall or spring without a calendar.
Are those trees just leafing out or simply trying to shed? Is the sunset’s golden glow from an early October light or April?
I can’t feel the movement of the earth under my feet. It needs to slow its spin on its axis and lengthen its orbital oval trip around the sun so I have more minutes in the day and more weeks in a year.
But, of course, that would make a huge mess of things. It is a good thing I’m not the design engineer.
It is as it is, and meant to be this way.
Though it may be blurry to me, it is clear and good and intentional to God. So He dares to answer where in the world is spring? Only He knows precisely where we are in the heavens…
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St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.”
No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller. ~Flannery O’Connor from “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”
How close the clouds press this October first and the rain—a gray scarf across the sky. In separate hospitals my father and a dear friend lie waiting for their respective operations, hours on a table as surgeons crack their chests. They were so brave when I talked to them last as they spoke of the good times we would share in the future. To neither did I say how much I loved them, nor express the extent of my fear. Their bodies are delicate glass boxes at which the world begins to fling its stones. Is this the day their long cry will be released? How can I live in this place without them? But today is also my son’s birthday. He is eight and beginning his difficult march. To him the sky is welcoming, the road straight. Far from my house he will open his presents— a book, a Swiss army knife, some music. Where is his manual of instructions? Where is his map showing the dark places and how to escape them? ~Stephen Dobyns “No Map” from Velocities:New and Selected Poems
Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed. ~G.K. Chesterton from Tremendous Trifles
No, this is not the end— hardly an end, but a hard beginning. There will always be a morning— a rebirth.
So, here in the dark— in a night bleaker than bleak— in a time outside of time— there is a mark on the Holy map of your soul where you found your Maker in the hard, dark night— and then lived to see the light of dawn. ~Kimberly Phinney from“An Ode to Hard, Dark Nights
May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out. ~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
<Here there be dragons> was any place on the ancient maps that was unknown and unexplored, a place to avoid at all costs~ or for the daring and carefree, pointing to exactly the place to explore.
<Here there be dragons> marks the remainder of our days that dwell at the edge of life’s roadmap ~ scary, unpredictable, impenetrable ~ and often full of peril.
So many are lost without a map, unable to find their way in the dark, wrecked and wandering, weeping and wretched, believing they have come to the end.
Yet this is not the end, only the beginning. A hard start – all rebirths are hard.
As I have been shown mercy, so I must become mercy, be loving where others show hate, be giving when others take away, build up while others tear down.
We walk together into the emerging light – it’s right there where darkness used to dwell… following God’s holy map of our soul.
On a rusty iron throne Past the furthest star of space I saw Satan sit alone, Old and haggard was his face; For his work was done and he Rested in eternity.
And to him from out the sun Came his father and his friend Saying, now the work is done Enmity is at an end: And he guided Satan to Paradises that he knew.
Gabriel without a frown, Uriel without a spear, Raphael came singing down Welcoming their ancient peer, And they seated him beside One who had been crucified. ~James Stephens “The Fullness of Time”
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At times these days I think of the way the sun would set on the farmland around our small house in the autumn.
A view of the horizon, the entire circle of it, if you turned, the sun setting behind you, the sky in front becoming pink and soft, then slightly blue again, as though it could not stop going on in its beauty, then the land closest to the setting sun would get dark, almost black against the orange line of the horizon, but if you turn around, the land is still available to the eye with such softness, the few trees, the quiet fields of cover crops already turned, and the sky lingering, lingering, then finally dark.
As though the soul can be quiet for those moments. All life amazes me. ~Elizabeth Strout, from My Name is Lucy Barton
I have learned, from those much wiser than I am, to recognize moments meant for quieting.
The news of the world constantly rushes past; there is suffering beyond imagining in the lives of a few I know well and for millions I don’t know at all.
What little can I do to make a difference? So much need lies beyond my short reach.
Instead of feeling abandoned on the shores of overwhelm, I seek out the familiar, the routine, and the ordinary, lingering immersed in the recurring patterns of the day and night as the world keeps on spinning on its axis.
I too turn around to witness that which surrounds me, and in so doing, my soul is quieted. And amazed.
One year ago, my teacher and mentor Jane Goodall passed into eternity, leaving behind this message for us all…
Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.
He loved mountains, or he has loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire. ~J.R.R. Tolkienfrom The Lord of the Rings
This time of year, we feel a call to drive up the highway an hour or so to witness grander things than our own worries or the chaos of yet another election season.
There is always that moment as we turn the bend into Heather Meadows when Mount Shuksan suddenly appears, overwhelming the landscape and everything and everyone else.
There is simply nothing else to look at so I stand there gawking, forgetting to breathe.
Then I realize that I become more self-conscious rather than less: here I am at the foot of this incredible creation, wondering at how blessed I am to be there; that moment becomes all about me. Yet the mountain has been here for eons and will continue to be here for eons. Just a mere blip in that continuum, I feel summoned.
We leave behind all the political divisiveness and drama and talking heads: up in the mountains there is such sheer stillness all around us – nary a breeze or a bird call or even a bug making ripples on the lakes to spoil the perfect reflection.
I bring these images back with me to remember that moment of awestruck witness. The photographic image isn’t the real mountain or the pristine perfect reflection. Yet it means I was privileged to watch this mountain watching me back, welcoming me home.
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. ~ C. S. Lewis from Till We Have Faces
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From steady rain we step to sheltered ground in the dark cathedral of the barn, breathe in scents of damp wood and hay, assume a reverent stillness. The dog, with the sudden confidence of one engaged, at last, in good work, trots through the barn’s far doorway heading seven white-faced ewe lambs. Not knowing me, they halt, uncertain, until you smoothly bucket corn from storage to trough, and they— as sheep will—follow where hunger leads. Hard teeth crack dry kernels in percussive counterpoint, a muted consort mimicking the fall of winter rain on wooden shingles. In entiring darkness, we stand, until from your post beneath the hayloft beams, you turn to me, grinning, and say, That’s a good sound. And it is. ~Brian Volck “Visiting”
Every now and then, I forget to turn off the lights in the barn. I usually notice just before I go to bed, when the farm’s boundaries seem to have drawn in close. That light makes the barn seem farther away than it is — a distance I’m going to have to travel before I sleep. The weather makes no difference. Neither does the time of year.
Usually, after turning out that forgotten barn light, I sit on the edge of the tractor bucket for a few minutes and let my eyes adjust to the night outside. City people always notice the darkness here, but it’s never very dark if you wait till your eyes owl out a little….I’m always glad to have to walk down to the barn in the night, and I always forget that it makes me glad. I heave on my coat, stomp into my barn boots and trudge down toward the barn light, muttering at myself. But then I sit in the dark, and I remember this gladness, and I walk back up to the gleaming house, listening for the horses. ~Verlyn Klinkenborg from A Light in the Barn
…let me live in a small room up the narrow stairs from the stalls, the horse shifting comfortably below, browsing and chewing sweet hay. A single bed with blanket the color of factory-sweepings will suffice, each day shaped to the same arc, because days can only end when the lock slides free on the stall’s Dutch door, and I lead the horse in, then muscle the corroded bolt shut. That’s what days are for: I cannot rest until the horse comes home. ~Julie Bruck from “To Bring the Horse Home”
The best moment in the barn is in the evening just following the hay feeding, as the animals are settling down to some serious chewing. I linger in the center aisle, listening to the rhythmic sounds coming from their stalls. It is a most soothing contented cadence, first their lips picking up the grass, then the chew chew chew chew and a pause and it starts again. It’s even better in the dark, with the lights off.
In the past, I’ve enjoyed listening to the eating sounds at night from the remote vantage point of my bedroom TV monitor system set up to watch my very pregnant mares before foaling. A peculiar lullaby of sorts, strange as that seems, but when all my farm animals are chewing and happy, I am at peace and sleep better.
It reminds me of those dark deep nights of feeding my own newborns, rocking back and forth with the rhythm of their sucking. It is a moment of being completely present and peaceful, and knowing at that moment, nothing else matters–nothing else at all.
If I am very fortunate, each day I live has a rhythm that is reassuring and steady, like the sounds of hay chewing, or rocking a baby. I awake thinking about where my next step will bring me, and then the next, like each chew of sweet hay.
I try to live in communion, without distraction by the worry of the unknown.
But the reality is: life’s rhythms are often out of sync, the cadence is jarring, the sounds are discordant, sometimes I’m the one being chewed on, so pain replaces peacefulness.
Maybe that is why this lullaby in the barn~~this sanctuary~~is so treasured, the chosen place of Jesus’ birth. It brings me home to that doubting center of myself that needs reminding that struggle is fleeting, and peace, however elusive now, is forever. I always know where to find it for a few minutes at the end of every day, in a pastoral symphony of sorts.
Someday my hope for heaven will be angel choruses of glorious praise, augmenting a hay-chewing lullaby.
So simple yet so very, very good.
TEXT O magnum mysterium, et admirabile sacramentum, ut animalia viderent Dominum natum, iacentem in praesepio! Beata Virgo, cujus viscera meruerunt portare Dominum Iesum Christum. Alleluia!
TRANSLATION O great mystery, and wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the newborn Lord, lying in a manger! Blessed is the virgin whose womb was worthy to bear the Lord, Jesus Christ. Alleluia!
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Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give you a Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! – These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart rears wings bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Hurrahing in Harvest”
This poem is (in Hopkin’s own words) “the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the [River] Elwy.”
This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight; The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves; The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves, And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows. Under a tree in the park, Two little boys, lying flat on their faces, Were carefully gathering red berries To put in a pasteboard box.
Some day there will be no war, Then I shall take out this afternoon And turn it in my fingers, And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate, And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves. To-day I can only gather it And put it into my lunch-box, For I have time for nothing But the endeavour to balance myself Upon a broken world. ~Amy Lowell from “September 1918”
There is no point in seeing without responding; there is no way to respond without seeing.
Christian life and practice require both faith (the sight of the heart) and works (the lurch of the heart toward him in obedience). ~Kathleen Mulhern from “A Christ Sighting” from Dry Bones
Am I the only one who awoke this morning praying today might be a day of healing between peoples, when the barbarous becomes beautiful and we seek to become balanced rather than broken?
A day of no drone missiles being launched, no threats of annihilation and winner takes all, no one gunned down in the street, no vehicles used as weapons, no harsh and angry words spoken, no child misused, no one sold into slavery, no one overdosing, abandoned, homeless and starving.
Am I the only one who awakes and only seeks to watch the clouds to praise the heavens to see the leaves turn color to take out this one day and taste it and find that it is good, then put it away for self-keeping to share when and if I find someone else as hungry for grace and mercy as I am,
so as to balance myself somehow in the beauty of this world while teetering on its brokenness?
The songs of small birds fade away into the bushes after sundown, the air dry, sweet with goldenrod. Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters flare in the dusk. The aged voices of a few crickets thread the silence. It is a quiet I love, though my life too often drives me through it deaf. Busy with costs and losses, I waste the time I have to be here—a time blessed beyond my deserts, as I know, if only I would keep aware. The leaves rest in the air, perfectly still. I would like them to rest in my mind as still, as simply spaced. As I approach, the sorrel filly looks up from her grazing, poised there, light on the slope as a young apple tree. A week ago I took her away to sell, and failed to get my price, and brought her home again. Now in the quiet I stand and look at her a long time, glad to have recovered what is lost in the exchange of something for money. ~Wendell Berry “The Sorrel Filly”
I am reminded at summer’s end — when it is already dark and chores not done yet, and horses waiting to be fed — of the value of decades of moments spent with long-lashed eyes, wind-swept manes, and velvet muzzles.
True, it appears to others to be time and money wasted. But for a farmer like me, sometimes deaf and blind to what is in front of me every day, not all valuables are preserved in a lock box or a bank account.
Golden treasure can have four hooves, a tail, a rumbling greeting asking if I’d somehow gotten lost since I’m a little later than usual and they were a bit concerned I’d forgotten them.
If only I would keep aware, remember where my home is, how easy it is to wander from the path that somehow always leads me back here.
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She lingered in that charming little garden to say hello to the gnomes, such a glorious infestation! How few wizards realize just how much we can learn from the wise little gnomes- or, to give them their correct names, the Gernumbli gardensi. ‘Ours do know a lot of excellent swear words,’ said Ron… J.K. Rowling in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
It is hard to say exactly when the first one moved in. This farm was distinctly gnome-less when we bought it nearly forty years ago, largely due to twenty-seven hungry barn cats residing here at the time in various stages of pregnancy, growth, development and aging. It took awhile for the feline numbers to whittle down to an equilibrium that matched the rodent population.
In the mean time, our horse numbers increased from three to seven to over fifteen with a resultant exponential increase in barn chores. One spring thirty years ago, I was surprised to walk in the barn one morning to find numerous complex knots tied in the Haflingers’ manes. Puzzling as I took precious time to undo them, literally adding hours to my chores, I knew I needed to find the cause or culprit.
It took some research to determine the probable origin of these tight tangles. Based on everything I researched, they appeared to be the work of Gernumbli faenilesi, a usually transient species of gnome preferring to live in barns and haylofts in close proximity to heavy maned ponies. In this case, as the tangles persisted for months, they clearly had moved in, lock, stock and barrel. The complicated knots were their signature pride and joy, their artistic way of showing their devotion to a happy farm.
All well and good, but the extra work was killing my fingers and thinning my horses’ hair. I plotted ways to get them to cease and desist.
I set live traps of cheese and peanut butter cracker sandwiches, hoping to lure them into cages for a “catch and release”. Hoping to drive them away, I played polka music on the radio in the barn at night. Hoping to be preemptive, I braided the manes up to be less tempting but even those got twisted and jumbled. Just as I was becoming ever more desperate and about to round up more feral cats, the tangling stopped.
It appeared the gnomes had moved on to a more hospitable habitat. Apparently I had succeeded in my gnome eradication plan.
Or so I thought.
Not long after, I had the distinct feeling of being watched as I walked past some rose bushes in the yard. I stopped to take a look, expecting to spy the shining eyes of one of the pesky raccoons that frequents our yard to steal from the cats’ food dish. Instead, beneath the thorny foliage, I saw two round blue eyes peering at me serenely. This little gal was not at all intimidated by me, and made no move to escape. She was an ideal example of Gernumbli gardensi, a garden gnome known for their ability to keep varmints and vermin away from plants and flowers. They also happen to actively feud with Gernumbli Faenilesi so that explained the sudden disappearance of my little knot-tying pests in the barn.
It wasn’t long before more Gardensi moved in, a gnomey infestation. They tend to arrive in pairs and bunches, bringing their turtles and dogs with them, like to play music, smoke pipes, play on a teeter totter, work with garden tools, take naps on sun-warmed rocks and one even prefers a swing, day and night through all four seasons. They are a bit of a rowdy bunch and always up for a party, but I enjoy their happy presence and jovial demeanor. I haven’t yet heard any bad language as we have a “keep it clean” policy about bad words around here. They seem quite hardy, stoically withstand extremes in weather, wear masks when asked and only seem fearful when hornets build a nest right in their lap.
As long as they continue to coexist peaceably with us and each other, keep the varmints and their knot-tying cousins away, and avoid bad habits and swear words, I’m quite happy they are here. Actually, I’ve given them the run of the place. I’ve been told to be cautious as there are now news reports of an even more invasive species of gnome, Gernumbli kitschsi, that could move in and take over if I’m not careful. In fact, several new little fellows moved into my hanging baskets and back into the barn this week – someone obviously had put the word out this is a great place to winter over. Now I need to watch for more mane tangles again.
A gnome explosion.
I shudder to think. There goes the neighborhood.
photo by Tomomi Gibson
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The meaning of marriage begins in the giving of words. We cannot join ourselves to one another without giving our word. And this must be an unconditional giving, for in joining ourselves to one another we join ourselves to the unknown. ~Wendell Berry from “Poetry and Marriage” in Standing By Words
Our vows to one another forty-five years ago today:
Before God and this gathering, I vow from my heart and spirit that I will be your wife/husband for as long as we both shall live.
I will love you with faithfulness, knowing its importance in sustaining us through good times and bad.
I will love you with respect, serving your greatest good and supporting your continued growth.
I will love you with compassion, knowing the strength and power of forgiveness.
I will love you with hope, remembering our shared belief in the grace of God and His guidance of our marriage.
“And at home, by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be–and whenever I look up, there will be you.”
(our wedding vows for our September 19, 1981 wedding at First Seattle Christian Reformed Church — the last line adapted from Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd”)
Sometimes our life reminds me of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing and in that opening a house, an orchard and garden, comfortable shades, and flowers red and yellow in the sun, a pattern made in the light for the light to return to. The forest is mostly dark, its ways to be made anew day after day, the dark richer than the light and more blessed, provided we stay brave enough to keep on going in.
We enter, willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy. ~Wendell Berry from “A Country of Marriage”
…Marriage… joins two living souls as closely as, in this world, they can be joined. This joining of two who know, love, and trust one another brings them in the same breath into the freedom of sexual consent and into the fullest earthly realization of the image of God. From their joining, other living souls come into being, and with them great responsibilities that are unending, fearful, and joyful. The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the community, to heaven and earth. It is the fundamental connection without which nothing holds, and trust is its necessity. ~Wendell Berry from Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community
We married forty-five years ago today in our Seattle church with Pastor Peter Holwerda officiating, with a small group of family and friends as witnesses.
It was a wedding of two frugal people with little to spend – I sewed my dress and Dan’s shirt from muslin, we grew our own flowers, our families helped potluck the lunch afterward and our tiered carrot cake was made by a friend.
Yet our vows to one another were not frugal and held nothing back. They were extravagant and comprehensive, coming from our hearts and spirits. The music we asked our amazing organist to play (versions below) inspired us by its simplicity and complexity – very much like the families that raised us and the God we worship.
Our vows have taken us from the city to the countryside, to the raising and rejoicing in three amazing children and now soon to be seven grandchildren. We served more than forty years as a public-employed attorney and physician. We have laid down those responsibilities, and picked up the tools of farm and garden along with church and community service for as long as we are able.
We treasure each day of living together in faithfulness, respect, compassion and hope – knowing that how we love and find joy in one another mirrors how God loves and revels in His people.
We pray for many more days to fill us with what endures.
I want to remember us this way— late September sun streaming through the window, bread loaves and golden bunches of grapes on the table, spoonfuls of hot soup rising to our lips, filling us with what endures. ~Peter Pereira from “A Pot of Red Lentils”
Here are versions of the organ music we selected for prelude, processional, recessional and postlude
The kitchen is sweet with the smell of apples, big yellow pie apples, light in the hand, their skins freckled, the stems knobby and thick with bark, as if the tree could not bear to let the apple go. Baskets of apples circle the back door, fill the porch, cover the kitchen table.
My mother and my grandmother are running the apple brigade. My mother, always better with machines, is standing at the apple peeler; my grandmother, more at home with a paring knife, faces her across the breadboard. My mother takes an apple in her hand,
She pushes it neatly onto the sharp prong and turns the handle that turns the apple that swivels the blade pressed tight against the apple’s side and peels the skin away in long curling strips that twist and fall to a bucket on the floor. The apples, coming off the peeler,
Are winding staircases, little accordions, slinky toys, jack-in-the-box fruit, until my grandmother’s paring knife goes slicing through the rings and they become apple pies, apple cakes, apple crisp. Soon they will be married to butter and live with cinnamon and sugar, happily ever after. ~Joyce Sutphen, “Apple Season” from Coming Back to the Body.
I liked how the starry blue lid of that saucepan lifted and puffed, then settled back on a thin hotpad of steam, and the way her kitchen filled with the warm, wet breath of apples, as if all the apples were talking at once, as if they’d come cold and sour from chores in the orchard, and were trying to shoulder in close to the fire. She was too busy to put in her two cents’ worth talking to apples. Squeezing her dentures with wrinkly lips, she had to jingle and stack the bright brass coins of the lids and thoughtfully count out the red rubber rings, then hold each jar, to see if it was clean, to a window that looked out through her back yard into Iowa. And with every third or fourth jar she wiped steam from her glasses, using the hem of her apron, printed with tiny red sailboats that dipped along with leaf-green banners snapping, under puffs of pale applesauce clouds scented with cinnamon and cloves, the only boats under sail for at least two thousand miles. ~Ted Kooser “Applesauce” from Delights and Shadow
1.
Through the night the apples outside my window one by one let go their branches and drop to the lawn. I can’t see, but hear the stem-snap, the plummet through leaves, then the final thump against the ground.
Sometimes two at once, or one right after another. During long moments of silence I wait and wonder about the bruised bodies, the terror of diving through air, and think I’ll go tomorrow to find the newly fallen, but they all look alike lying there dewsoaked, disappearing before me.
2.
I lie beneath my window listening to the sound of apples dropping in
the yard, a syncopated code I long to know, which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know
the meaning of what I hear, each dull thud of unseen apple-
I tell you, folks, all politics is like applesauce. ~Will Rogers
Once again, it’s applesauce season on our farm. The number of windfall apples lying on the ground is exponentially increasing, so I can put off the task no longer.
The old apple trees in our orchard are primarily antique varieties rarely grown any longer. I have the choice of a number of varieties: a Baldwin or two, some Pippins, a few Kings, and some Dutch Mignons, a russet apple undistinguished in appearance, not at all pretty, and easy to pass by for something more showy.
It takes no time at all to fill several large boxes. Sadly, some apples are already beyond hope; they lay rotting, half consumed by hornets, slugs, deer, possum, raccoons and other critters — so I let them be.
The task of washing, peeling and coring organic apples is time consuming. They require a fair amount of preparation: the bruised spots must be cut out, as well as the worm holes and tracks. The apples are cut to the core and sliced into the simmering pot to be stirred and slowly cooked down to sauce. Before long, before my eyes, together they become a pale yellow mash, blending their varied flavors together.
However the smooth sweetness of this wonderful sauce is owed to the Dutch Mignon. It is a sublime sauce apple despite its humble unassuming appearance. Used alone, it would lack the “stand out” flavors of the other apple varieties, but as it cooks down, it becomes a foundation allowing the other apples to blend their unique qualities.
If I’m feeling really homespun, I marry the sublime with cinnamon and sugar, to create something happily ever after.
So it should be with the fellowship of diverse people and so should it be during a painful political season.
We are bruised, wormy, but salvageable. We are far better together than we are separate. And through the process, with perhaps a sprinkle of cinnamon and sweetness, we are transformed into something far better than how we began.
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