Any Day Now…

"Cherry-ripe," wrote poet Robert Herrick of Julia's lips.

Trees are full of cherries, and equipment is in place (shaker, truck, vats) for tart cherry harvest in the orchard around my old farmhouse. My guess is that the farmer is only waiting for the Brix reading to be right where he wants it. 

 

Meanwhile, trees so full of cherries are not so full of leaves, so there’s another question, and my tentative answer is tied to the fact that my black walnut tree (not sprayed with anything) is also dropping a lot of leaves. I think the trees are hedging their bets. In the economy of a plant, it’s the seeds that matter for the future: leaves are there to take in needed nutrition, and when that work is done, and as we come into hotter, drier weather, the tree’s economy is best served with fewer expenditures of moisture – a sparser population to provide for, in other words. That is the explanation of a bookseller, not a scientist, you realize.

 

Yes, summer is hurrying along, and on Sunday morning I saw the season’s first goldenrod in bloom. In July!

 

Sneaky little devils!

I have monarda and tall phlox blooming now in my garden. Black raspberries keep on coming, too, and I finally have two batches of my patented (not really, but it is my specialty) ‘blackstraw’ jam made, with no end in sight. I use twice to three times the amount of raspberries to the smaller amount of Bardenhagen (local) strawberries, and mine is cooked, not freezer jam, because I don’t want to worry about losing all my work in the event of a winter power outage. For the same reason, when fall arrives I will be drying and saucing my apples. Let’s not have fall arrive too soon, though! That goldenrod makes me nervous….

 

Jammin'!

Time flies by because these are busy days, and the coming week will be an endurance test for this old bookseller. I will be closing at 3 p.m. on both Tuesday and Thursday this week, selling books at events at the Willowbrook Inn both evenings. Tuesday is the third of four FOLTL Summer Writers Series evenings, with Abra Berens as guest author. Northport claims Abra for her eight years at Bare Knuckle Farm and Friday farmers market. Her three cookbooks are Grist (grains), Ruffage (vegetables), and the latest, Pulp (fruit). Doors for her presentation open at 6:30 (with cash bar), and the event will begin at 7 p.m. It's free, and the public is cordially invited.

 

Showcasing Abra's books today in Northport --

Abra will be doing a special chef’s dinner on Thursday, but if you don’t have tickets already for that, you're too late. Not surprisingly, tickets to the dinner sold out early. Here is an interesting, if slightly outdated, interview where you can learn more about author/farmer/chef Abra Berens.

 

Is it any wonder my reading is suffering these days for lack of time? Between customers at the bookstore, slowly I make my way through Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, but at home there seems to be very little reading time at all, what with (Sunday, for example) hanging laundry out in the sun, watering gardens when it doesn’t rain, mowing grass, making jam, and, on all-too-rare occasions, vacuuming floors and catching up on recording and filing business expenses and decluttering (which means picking up things I dropped on chairs rather than putting them away throughout the week, because the majority of my time at home, when not sleeping, is spent outdoors). Every morning lately has also held a stint of editing, rather than the reading in bed with morning coffee that I did all winter and spring. But soon I will make time to read new books, and then I will report to you on some of them.

 

Part of every single day, of course, involves outdoor time with Sunny Juliet. We take long walks, work on agility practice, and have agility sessions with Coach Mike. I throw tennis balls for her, and there are frequent though unscheduled romps with her new friend and neighbor, Griffin. Below are Griffin and Sunny at rest (rather than running like crazy or wrestling and rolling around, which allowed me to get a halfway decent photograph of them for a change), although they are “resting” in this shot only because Sunny had retreated from the field of play, determined to keep possession of one of her precious tennis balls. 

Griffin and Sunny take a little break.

Do you think life is going to slow down? Any day now? Ha! Not a chance! Yet I recall, dimly, the long summer days of girlhood, when hours barely seemed to move at all, and if we try we can still find a few moments like that now and then. Make them, I should say. 

My little heaven on earth --

Another point of view --