Farewell to October
The season of mists is getting darker
Before we dive in, some seasonal color
Check in
These words from a morning writing exercise:
Unfeeling. Selfish. Self-centered. Empathetic. Compassionate. Loving. Which am I? Truth is, all of them. I am perfectly imperfect. The question now is, can I tip the balance? I’d like to be unbalanced toward the light. Think about balance. Think about half. Half time. Halfwit. Glass half full. 50-yard line. Center court. Average. Half-hearted. Half hitch (an aborted marriage?) Half mast, half staff Half-and-half. No, no. I vote for imbalance. I don’t want my life defined by the stasis of halves.
Although a good half hitch is worth knowing how to tie.
Good-bye, October
October was the month of here and away. One last thought:
Moving away
The children have fled To other venues. Fresh surfaces to write on, Like chickens scratching for grit— Flapping wings, scattering feathers. That’s the way of escape. First college, then work. Wresting from the mother city The mother Who her own self has moved From abode to abode: Smaller Then bigger Then smaller still. From a house to a treehouse. The children make their nests: A farmhouse in Vermont An apartment in Manhattan. Tea is the same No matter where you sip it.
The Dark is Rising
Susan Cooper’s book of that title was a Newbery Honor Book in 1974. The scuttlebutt at the time was that it should’ve won outright. The fourth book in the series, The Grey King, did win in 1976. But The Dark is Rising actually made my hair raise the first time I read about the Rider on his black horse in the night. I’ll write more about this book in November, when the theme for the month is “the dark is rising.”
Fiction aside, darkness really is descending. The long slide from the Jewish High Holy Days in September ends in ceremonies steeped in light: Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, near the Solstice.
In the Celtic calendar, Samhain (November 1) is the beginning of the dark season. The eve of Samhain is Halloween (sometimes spelled Hallowe’en), and the day itself in the Christian calendar is All Saints’ Day or All Hallows Day.
Celtic festivals were always celebrated on the eve of the day itself because darkening was considered liminal time—when the otherworld crowded in on known reality.
Susan Cooper makes good use of this notion in The Dark is Rising.
Still looking
My purse is gone. I know that. It’s been two weeks since it fell off my wheelchair when I wasn’t looking. No sign of it anywhere.
And yet, I can’t stop looking for it. When I’m out riding the bus, I’m scanning the sidewalks to see if somebody didn’t abandon it. My heart leaps up when I see a tan object, but that’s always just a crumpled paper bag.
I tell myself the journal would be ruined, anyway, mostly written with fountain pen ink that runs when wet. It’s been raining hard.
I thought I was at peace with losing all the little things that mattered to me that were in that bag. I don’t understand mourning after all. I miss my pens and the bag I kept them in. I even lost one of those vintage handkerchiefs I write about below.
This week, I took a field trip to Sarah Bellum’s Bakery & Workshop in the Multnomah Village neighborhood of Portland. The shop is full of fabulous mini and regular cupcakes with inventive flavors like chocolate-salted caramel and red velvet. Sadly, I’m avoiding carbs these days.
I came to buy a few more tension balls in the shape of a red cranium with the bakery’s logo on it. The bakery’s website notes that while the name is a play on “cerebellum,” the name “Sarah” might also evoke the comfort of Sara Lee.
The red brain I lost with the purse came from the bakery’s booth at the Multnomah Days street fair in August.
At least I got one thing back.
Prefer another color? The shop next door to the bakery, Annie Bloom’s Books, has lime green brains in its window.
I must have an honest face
Or maybe it’s hard to conceive of someone in a wheelchair lying. A kindly barista at the coffee kiosk at Kaiser restored my drink card once I explained that I had lost it with my purse. She gave me a new card with 10 stamps on it, good for $5 off my next order. I put it in the plastic snack bag that I’m substituting for my missing wallet.
I really did have 9 of 10 stamps on the card I lost. The tenth was for the drink I bought. This woman listened, and credited me. Bless her.
Piney Flats
A woman named Janet D. Taylor sold me a dozen handkerchiefs on eBay. I use vintage hankies, cotton squares with floral prints or embroidery, the way they were originally intended. That is, I blow my nose in them. It’s been awhile since I had to pick pieces of forgotten Kleenex out of the wash.
But back to Janet. She carefully laundered, starched and ironed these precious squares. Then she sent them to me from Piney Flats, Tenn. What a great name!
Piney Flats is an unincorporated area in a Tennessee region known as TriCities. Nearby burgs are Boring and Oak Grove, same names as places near Portland.
I had thought only Oregon had a city called Boring. But there’s a Boring in Maryland, near Baltimore, too. There may be more.
Itchy internet fingers also discovered that Boring, Oregon, has taken tedium a step further. It has forged a sister city relationship with a town in Scotland called Dull.
Don’t get me started on Halfway, Ore., a town that agreed in 1999 to change its name to Half.com for a year as a publicity stunt for a business now owned by eBay. Halfway is in Baker County and had a 2020 population of 351.
Slimy fruit
My mom liked things I thought were slimy and bland, like avocados and persimmons.
Love of persimmons stretched back to her childhood in the 1920s, but avocados dated from her time in California. She lived in San Francisco in the glory years, the Maltese Falcon years, when a nurse who worked at the the University of California Medical School could afford an apartment on Green Street. So romantic! She only left to go to war, four years in the Army, most of it in England.
When she got back to San Francisco, she had had enough of nursing, so she took a job as a teller at Bank of America. Then my father, whom she had met in England, began a long-distance romance from Syracuse, N.Y., and she married him and moved there.
A later love affair
I came to adore avocados, once I moved to California. I even had dreams of owning a tree. I would probably get tired of them, because basically every avocado is just like every other avocado. Smooth and green. Or bumpy and green.
I sprinkle avocado slices with ume vinegar, an intensely salty concoction made from pickled Japanese ume plums. It’s worth seeking out.
Speaking of fruits that are always the same, I once grew kiwis (both the male and female plants), but I took the vines out because I got so tired of the fruit. Kiwis are mildly flavorful and a pain to peel. And they are all exactly the same.
I will be writing later about Frieda Caplan, the produce entrepreneur who took the Chinese gooseberry and reintroduced it as the kiwi. It’s quite a story.
Persimmons
Persimmons just don’t taste good to me. I know you have to wait till they’re very ripe, and that degree of squishy softness does not appeal.
Persimmons are mouth-puckering astringent if they are not perfectly ripe. I wonder about the astringency. Is it like bitterness? Or could it be a sixth flavor?* A cursory Google indicates that the jury is still out on that one.
*The five identifiable flavors are sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. I discussed umami in a previous posting back in April.
There are two main varieties of persimmons: Fuyu, the squashed ball-shaped ones, and Hachiya, an oblong, heart-shaped fruit. The latter seem to soften more easily. I’ve bought Fuyus in the grocery that never ripened.
My husband, Robert Jaffe, adores persimmons, as did my mother, Pearl Pollak. I have yet to warm up to them. The Hachiyas are hard to find at the greengrocer’s.
Quince
Another fall fruit that few people know how to use is quince. These hard, applelike fruits are very fragrant. Sometimes I pick up a few just to have them on my counter. They are too hard, sour and astringent to eat out of hand.
Besides quince paste, I know of few recipes for this difficult fruit. A quince marmalade comes from Tall Clover Farm on Vashon Island in Puget Sound. There’s so much pectin in the fruit you don’t have to add any extra.
My friend Sevin Koont, a retired professor of philosophy who was born in Turkey, gave me a delicious recipe for chicken braised with quince. Long cooking softens the fruit, and everything gets very mellow.
I’ve misplaced the recipe, but here’s a Greek variation called Kotopoulo me Kythonia.
Pawpaw
Pawpaw is one of the few fruits native to North America (others include some grape varieties, cranberries, blueberries and one variety of persimmon, Diospyros virginiana). Pawpaw’s scientific name is Asimina triloba.
Greg Adams, a copy editor at The Oregonian, had a pawpaw tree and used to bring some fruit into the office for us to sample. Pawpaws are interesting to eat, the interior soft and custardy, with fat seeds. The flavor is not strong: maybe a little banana, a little cantaloupe without the crunch. Some say mango. I can’t really remember.
Making art
My daughter Lyza Danger Gardner, a software developer, was recently laid off, along with most of her colleagues, when a startup fizzled.
Since then, she’s been hanging in her Vermont farmhouse, drawing things. Some of it is for InkTober, a challenge to draw something and post it every day on Instagram.
To help head-scratching artists, InkTober gurus posted a list of 31 prompts, one for each day, with intriguing entries like Chains, Dagger, Castle, Dangerous, Remove. Also Sparkle, Drip, Saddle and Celestial.
Here’s Lyza’s interpretation of prompt #4, Dodge.
Another drawing, for prompt #1, Dream, “Harried Dreams in Time of Unemployment,” is remarkable because everything used to craft it was handmade (except for the paper).
Lyza cut the quill she used to sketch her dreams from a wild turkey feather she found on her lawn. The ink was homemade, too, from oak gall and ferrous sulfate. I wrote about the process last May. Lyza adds:
I can’t believe how nice the homemade ink is! It’s not just satisfying because I made it, it’s satisfying because it’s awesome.
In a twist of irony, she made the drawing on “résumé paper.”
Check out
I recently wrote some random thoughts about living and yearning and writing.
Heart is first. Heart is last. Spirit matters. Spirit whispers. Spirit leans on you to love, To forgive, To stamp out regrets, And to abandon guilt. Do what you must— But only If you can be Authentic, The real you. No hedges, no excuses. This is where writing can help you. Own up to your faults, forgive your missteps. Write it all out. Wring out your heart onto the page.
And then what? Burn those pages, if you must. Consign them to the digital trash and tell your computer to empty the trash regularly.
If that is what it takes to get you to write.
A hoarder of ideas
As for me, I can’t stand to trash my thoughts, any of them. They are like precious children. Yes, it’s narcissistic to love my thoughts that way. But that is my nature.
In advance, I mourn the loss of my words when I am gone. I will leave behind a hard drive full of bons mots that nobody will ever see.
But now, I do mourn. For my lost ideas, my golden words I won’t get to share.
Loving my work
Oh, ego, you have me in your thrall. Words pile on words. I marvel how clever Those words move together, Dancing like birds Drunk on proximity.
Words are electric. I touch them and jump away, feeling a thrill. I could be touching a live wire. A minor shock, like from a light switch. Static cling.
And in the static, the spark. The golden apple. The thing that is mine.
—30—
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What can I say? You are very brave.
Great article, Fran. Boring is a very small and indeed boring (read: peaceful) community near us, on the way to Kingsport. No one hardly ever refers to it anymore, but there was a fairly affluent family by the name of Boring who settled and farmed there beginning in the 1850s. There was also a dedicated post office and a church named Boring Chapel.
My centuries-old homeplace is located in Piney Flats, which has an interesting history as well. Here's a link that tells a little about the area. My family has lived and farmed in the area for 160 years. https://www.anamericanfamilyhistory.com/TennesseeFamilies&Places/Piney%20Flats.html
Thank you for bringing attention to our little map dot!