Looked at the moon this morning, which was veiled by clouds. Still quite visible but the borders are fuzzy, as if dodged lightly with Photoshop. It’s a full moon, and a beauty. A brilliant icy white.
Since it was one a.m. and I knew that it would be at least an hour before sleep would return, I was maundering about the premises when I looked up and noticed our old friend in the sky.
Maundering? I come from a long line of maunderers, going all the way back to Olaf the Feckless around 700 CE. He was supposed to be caring for the hogs on a hardscrabble farm in Norway, but lost interest and instead strolled idly away. When Olaf finally snapped to and paid full attention to where he was, it was on the coast of Greenland.
He sat down on a big chunk of driftwood, pulled a herring from his pants pocket, and began to munch. Always being careful to avoid those little bones, just as his mother had told him to do a thousand times.
Olaf, slow down, you are eating that fish too fast. You will choke on a bone and just die! And I won’t even help you because you are such a dumbcluck!
While reciting this litany his mother would mime someone choking and it was such a ghastly spectacle that Olaf never forgot it.
When he tried to put down roots there in Greenland, though, he realized that the night life was severely wanting in just about every way imaginable, and there were no women at all. This set him maundering again and before he knew it he was in Minnesota where he opened a C-store to sell stuff to the Native residents. It wasn’t much … some firewater, jerky, books on woodcraft… but it was a living.
And he spent time looking at the moon. We know this because of runes that were discovered on some large rocks on the shores of Lake Minnewaska. Olaf had scratched them onto the stones while admiring lunar displays, probably much like the one I am looking at today.
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This is blossom end rot. It happens to tomatoes. The experts tell me that it is mostly due to not enough calcium and water at the right time.
I personally think that blossom end rot is a visible manifestation of God’s laughter. You know, the kind that happens when we tell him our plans? Let me give you an example of a great celestial chuckle.
As regular readers know I started plants from seed this Spring, and at first everything went swimmingly. They sprouted, became strong little seedlings, sturdy plants, and before long all of them together formed a jungle of tomato vines that were a bit dangerous to walk past, as they would make a snatch at you if you weren’t cautious.
But then came BER. Not to all of them, but only to the varieties that were to provide the allstars. The kind you bring out to show off when the neighbors come by.
And here’s where you can start to hear the guffaws emanating from above. There were two identical planters containing the identical tomato variety, watered and fertilized identically, and located side by side. Both had been given calcium supplementation of the proper sort in the recommended amounts.
One plant is turning out beautiful fruit, the other … every single tomato a loss to BER. One planter 100 % success, one planter 100 % loss.
Go figure. I can only explain it through the concept of adverse divine intervention.
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Not quite sure where this summer is going. We’ve had two Augusts already in terms of heat and aridity, and you have to wonder what this third one will be like.
Apparently this summer has been an eye-opener to a handful of local Republicans, who brought the matter up at a recent conclave. Their resolution read something like: “Resolved that there may actually be such a thing as global warming, and furthermore it is possible that humans had something to do with it.”
They were, of course, shouted down by the rest of the attendees, who far outnumbered them. (It helps to remember that we are in Cluck Country here on the Western Slope.) Once the tarring and feathering of these upstarts was over, the conference concluded by issuing a statement denying that anything of the sort was happening at all.
Their thesis was that the problem is that the Chinese-made thermometers that we are using to measure the temperature are faulty, and that every one of them reads at least ten degrees high. All the rest is hysteria raised by the liberal mob that is ruining America by woking it to death.
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On one of our trips to the Yucatan peninsula, we rented a small casita right on the beach near Tulum. There was a day when we bought a few groceries to nibble on when we tired of sun and ocean and watching pelicans and acquiring a tan. We bought a couple of mangoes, which were grown locally.
The expression “to die for” is terribly overused, but it would describe these things to a tee. After eating the two we had purchased, we returned to town to buy all we could find. Then we returned to the casita and … there is no other word for it … we pigged out on fruit. Our shirtfronts were soppy with dripped-on mango juices, our eyes were glazed, our speech thickened and clumsy. Anyone walking in through our door and seeing the growling, crazed beasts we had become would probably have called the Mexican equivalent of 911, or perhaps the police.
After we had downed them all, we lay back, spent. When our strength had begun to return, we dragged ourselves to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and plunged in to bathe away the stickiness before the ants found us and dragged us off to one of those gigantic hills in the jungle.
Now … this week … there was a sale on mangoes in our local market. And they were just as miraculously delicious and melt-in-your-mouthy as those in Tulum, all those years ago. A total flashback. The only thing missing was the Gulf of Mexico.
A small matter, really, but one we noticed.
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Little Home In The Valley 