SEASON OF MISTS AND MELLOW FRUITFULNESS~

~

John Keats wrote those words that  so perfectly define Autumn.

Two weeks ago the clocks went back one hour  - at least they did here in Greece. It always feels like something of a landmark to me when this date comes around – definitely the end of summer at last. Man can impose his will on Time to some extent but there is still little he can do about the weather, as we are once again being reminded.

We were promised storms a few days ago, after a long spell of mild and sunny weather, and sure enough a storm arrived, right on time. Friends wrote on Facebook that snow fell in Devon and Scotland and my sister in Canada said that three weather fronts were set to collide over her house in the next few days – a multiple storm system labeled at once by the Americans, who have a way with snappy sound bites – ‘Frankenstorm’!

Today, suddenly, here in Corfu, it feels colder and a long-drawn out autumn seems to be giving way to winter. Thoughts turn to log fires and knitting and comfort food.

So I am going to write about apples.

Robert Frost wrote a poem called ‘After Apple Picking’ which implies that this apparently simple rural routine is more of a mystery and a ritual than we realize.

Perhaps it is – and autumn is after all the season that bridges life and death, that triggers in creatures the instinct and the ability to do something that Man has not yet mastered – to hibernate.

Autumn has inspired many poets and songwriters – remember this?

The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold

Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall

Above all, for me at least, autumn is a time of nostalgia tinged with a little mild melancholy.

It is a time to meditate and contemplate and think about – apples.

Cezanne painted apples - 

-over and over again

and so did Grandma Moses

Why apples? It’s just that some of my happiest childhood memories are about apples and picking plums and blackberries, and helping my mum make jam. We had apple and plum trees in our  garden then, and I remember my favourite uncle used to make a weekly visit to check the fruit for ripeness. The first blush of ripe redness on the Worcester Pearmains, the first soft yielding of the huge Victoria plums to a surreptitious squeeze, were greeted with cries of delight by Uncle Frank. He would be the first to sample the autumn fruit again!

It’s a pity that these days if you mention ‘apple’ to someone, the first thought that flashes into their mind is likely to be about computers. Google ‘apple’ without any further qualifying words, and Steve Jobs pops up.

Say ‘apple’ to a person of my age, however, and a host of wonderful memories and associations  is likely to burst out of the memory banks.

No-one knows for sure what the fruit was that Adam and Eve ate with such disastrous consequences. Historically, all fruit that was not a berry was called an apple and the Biblical apple may well have been a pomegranate but apples featured strongly in Greek mythology and this could have influenced the interpretation of the story of the Original Sin. The Forbidden Fruit has been identified variously as the fig, the grape, a type of mushroom and even the Datura, a variety of which is known as – Thorn-Apple!

Apples have been around for thousands of years, originating in the mountains of Western Asia, and subsequently carried, with the westward migration of humanity, to Europe and the Mediterranean basin and on to North America and ultimately the rest of the world.

Truly a universal fruit.

Today there are more than 7500 varieties of apple, yet ‘thanks’ to the influence of supermarkets it sometimes seems that there are only three types of apple available - red, green and yellow. In fact the most widely grown and sold modern apple varieties are ten in number and include Macintosh (red), Granny Smith (green) and Golden Delicious (yellow).

Greek supermarkets are no different from their counterparts in other countries in the range of apples on sale, but some of them, and certainly the markets, also sell the sweet, tiny Firikia apples that used to grow only in the Mount Pelion region. Another well-known Greek apple is called ‘Xinomilo’, literally ‘sour apple’, which it certainly is.

Greek Firikia apples

Here in Corfu, we tend to eat our fruit and vegetables according to their own natural season. All summer we revel in sweet juicy ‘soft’ fruits such as strawberries, apricots, cherries, peaches and nectarines, melons, figs, plums  and grapes. Come the first rains, the cooler days and chilly evenings, and the first seasonal apples and pears begin to appear.

Modern storage methods mean that we can if we wish buy apples and pears all year round at the supermarket, but there is nothing quite like the taste and texture of a fruit that has ripened naturally. To me, there is, moreover, nothing like an English apple, one of the old-fashioned varieties that are at last enjoying a revival of interest.

Perhaps the most famous and best-loved English apple is the Cox’s Orange Pippin. The names of the great apples read like poetry – Worcester Pearmain, Laxton Superb,  Bramley, Blenheim Orange, Five Crown  Pippin and the Beauty of Bath, that always sounds to me like a character from Chaucer.

When I was a child, born and brought up in Essex, still a very rural county in those days, I had an Uncle who was Head Gardener at an old estate. 

The house was called Gosfield Hall   and was built in 1545 by a member of Cardinal Wolsey’s household. Like so many of the great houses of that period, it was visited more than once by Queen Elizabeth I and her entourage.

Gosfield Hall  underwent various additions and renovations over the centuries but by the middle of the 20^th century, after a few years of war service as a billet for members of the American Air Force, it was virtually abandoned and my uncle was more the Last Gardener than the Head Gardener. Alone, he struggled against the advances of Nature and concentrated on keeping the old walled garden and the fruit trees in good repair.

I loved that garden. It dated back to Elizabethan times and had beds planted with herbs and vegetables, neatly raked paths bordered by giant lavender bushes and a row of espaliered peach and apple trees that clung to the rose-red bricks of the old, often sun-drenched, walls.

My favourite place, however, was the apple loft.

If you Google ‘apple loft’ you will be offered an endless selection of accommodation, in Britain and North America for the most part, most of it described as ‘former’ or ‘converted from’ old apple lofts.

There is no mention of the apple lofts I remember, and there are no photos.

Gone forever, perhaps, like so much of our English rural history.

I used to climb the outside wooden stairs up to the lofts, which were dim, the only light coming from small cobweb -festooned  windows.  The lofts were dry and airy, lined with simple shelving and the central areas were occupied by big tables on which were trays and trays of apples.

My uncle used to set me to work – I had to earn the generous tea that would be provided later, with scones and fruit cake baked by my Auntie May.

I had to sort through the trays, checking for any sign of rot or mould, making sure that the apples were not touching each other. Spoiled apples went into a special bin, the ‘cider-bin’, to be used later for making cider.

Uncle Will grew English apples, mostly Cox’s for eating and big green Bramleys for cooking. Superb baked in the oven with brown sugar, lemon juice and cloves, Bramleys made a fluffy crumble and a fine apple pie.

Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness." -- Jane Austen

Auntie May used to core and peel apples and slice them into rings which she then hung on strings in a dry, preferably sunny, place, to make chewy dried apple for winter use. She also pickled eggs, walnuts and onions, as did my grandmother. Ladgie (my grandma) also tried her hand at making ginger beer, with disastrous results – the explosion almost wrecked our stairs, under which the big stone flagons were stored in the dark to ferment and mature.

In those days too, we used to tour the countryside in late summer and early autumn, seeking out the plums and damsons and wild sloe berries that would be turned into jams and hugely alcoholic beverages.

Bitter Seville oranges would be snapped up as soon as they appeared at the greengrocer’s shop, to be turned into tangy marmalades, sometimes spiked with ginger and/or whisky.

Visits to Uncle Will and Auntie May were memorable in many ways, none more so though than the sight of a brood of chickens using an ancient Rolls-Royce as a chicken coop. Along with the old Hall, the car had fallen into decay and disuse, until the hens discovered it. Once, it must have looked like this.

I leave the rest to your imagination.

A is for Apples – and Apple Pie and Apple Cake. Recipes abound for these dishes but few call for as much patience and devotion as this one

Finished off with innumerable pastry leaves, each one fashioned individually.

When I worked in an office at Nissaki, Corfu, set beside the local church, the local cafeneion and the mini-market, the local ladies vied with each other to bring me the tastiest morsels. Our office cleaner made a mean apple cake, with roughly cut apples and a hefty pinch of cinnamon. The woman who ran the mini-market sent upside-down apple cake drenched in icing sugar  and dripping with syrup. Asked to say which was the most delicious, I felt as if I were being asked to make some mythological judgment, possibly with frightful consequences. I played it safe and declared a tie.

I was chilly with the November breeze,
and it was a courtly thing you did
draping the sweater over my shoulders,
taking care to smooth the wool
with a touch that whispered
that later you would claim the garment,
and the shiver taking it would bring
was something you coveted
with breathless avarice.

“Sweater weather,” you said.
And I am swept like a crisp oak leaf
into a duvet and down dream,
where the pillows do not speak
of the warm, the moments large and small
when I nestle near you,
demanding that arms dress me
to close kept comfort.



Arms around my waist,
legs entwined to akimbo,
and my last thought before sweet drowse
is that fall will never come
without you to chase the cold
in the season of sweater weather.

Sweater Weather by Lisa Shields

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SHORT TERM MEMORIES

HOW EASY IT IS TO FORGET THAT IT HAS ALL HAPPENED BEFORE.....

‘’This year’s incredibly hot, dry summer had the doom-merchants out in force.

Quote: ‘So this is global warming – Europe is going to turn into a desert!’

Quote: ‘All the fish are dying in the Med, Spain and southern France are burning, people are dying in thousands of heat – this is a Biblical catastrophe!’

Between them, the Greek TV channels and the Daily Mail had us all in a panic, gasping for breath.’’

I wrote the above paragraph in an article for The Corfiot in September 2003!

Nine years ago.

So there really is nothing new about this wonderful extension of summer  that we have been experiencing in October 2012.

The article went on: ‘The heat is going to continue at least to Christmas!’ said the Corfiot soothsayers – and within days the weather had changed and our first September storm took its toll.

But then October came on stage, dressed in gold, with azure skies, new grass sprouting emerald beneath the olive trees, swathes of autumn crocus and cyclamen, trees, refreshed, lifting their heads again to the sun that was still surprisingly warm. ‘’

‘’For anyone who has not yet experienced just how quickly the seasons can change in Corfu, the middle of October must have been a revelation. ‘’

 Barbati two days ago

Barbati yesterday

  But back in 2003,  a very special storm was looming, one that pitted the might of the north against the spite of the south, and..

‘’ One evening, after a wet and blustery day, the wind swung round abruptly to the north, gathered strength and reached Force 10 to 11, and swept into the bays of Coyevinas and Avlaki at about midnight, screaming like a banshee, behaving like a tornado. The sea was whipped into three-metre high waves of astonishing power, and tons of stones were scooped up from the seabed and the beaches and dumped several metres inland. The Avlaki road disappeared beneath the pebbles, its wooden decking was ripped up and hurled away, with whatever was left in place looking like a railroad along which a tornado funnel has traveled – wood splintered and ripped into freakish shapes. The road along the beach at Coyevinas sank and buckled as the stones on which it was laid were scooped out by the waves. Tourists staying in a beachside villa found the sea lapping at their front door.

By the next morning, the beaches were completely re-shaped, and the sea was calm, with the still menace of a raider waiting to make another surprise attack.  On the Albanian mountains opposite, a thin layer of the first snow greeted early risers, to vanish quietly as the sun came out to illuminate the destruction.

A week later, a night of continuous hard rain, and a sullen southerly wind has laid its own gifts at Corfu’s door. South-facing beaches, such as Ipsos and Barbati have been  desecrated by a thick tidemark of seaweed, which has brought with it the most amazing amount of rubbish. Not just natural debris, such as tree branches, weed, planks torn from distant jetties, but also tons of the ugly plastic rubbish we so thoughtlessly throw away, to find its way into the sea. Plastic of every kind – disposable cups, empty containers that once held everything from water to bleach, punctured lilos and beach toys, broken chairs.

A natural justice – all that we so carelessly throw away to pollute the sea and the environment, returned to us again by the sea, ultimately ours to dispose of  again, but responsibly this time.

In the end, it seems, Nature gets its revenge and flaunts our predictions in our faces.

Just to underline its point, the dragging clouds over Albania lifted briefly to reveal the highest peaks draped in the first real snow, glinting in the sun, here to stay this time.

So much for the hottest summer ever. ‘’

2003. Nine years ago.

Today, as so often happens, we had rain and thunder near Corfu Town but not a drop in the north of the island. The unpredictability of Corfu – one of its greatest frustrations, one of its greatest attraction.

Not a drop fell in the north of the island.

It is impossible to be bored in Corfu, with weather like this. It is also impossible to be completely accurate in our predictions.

Bittersweet October.  The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause

between the opposing miseries of summer and winter.

-   Carol Bishop Hipps

Another autumnal day, today. That old autumn feeling creeps in. A touch of melancholy, a tinge of nostalgia. Katie Melua’s sweet, sad ballads on iTunes. Thinking about making apple pie or walnut cake. Thinking, too, about putting on some socks and maybe throwing a fleece around my shoulders.

Is this goodbye summer? Feels about right, feels about time. Funny thing is, all the blogs I read are about autumn, too.

Photos are my own and also by Frosso, Chris, Bob in Michigan and my sister.

FALL HAS COME TO PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY ONTARIO

CountyKate tracks down the proof with her trusty camera and nearly breaks a leg in the process

The summer comes to an abrupt end, here on The County, with the Labour Day Long Weekend on the first of September, followed by commencement of school.  Over that weekend, traditionally, the cottages, trailers and campgrounds are closed up for winter, not to be reopened, again traditionally, until May 24 as we call it; actually the Victoria Day Long Weekend.

lAST VISIT TO THE SUMMER HOME

 Everything must be packed away, in critter proof containers, inside and outside of the property, but people forget, or underestimate, the ability of the animals, and it’s not always done tightly enough.

 

 How did a mouse, one winter, get inside a corked bottle of olive oil for instance, and why? To flavour the oil for future cooking?  Many are the summer toys, removed from 'secure' wrappings, found to have mice or chipmunks nested in them, for warmth and hibernation.  I had dried flower arrangements rearranged one year, into nest shaped bundles, and my hubby had his golf club covers, made lovingly by his daughters from old socks, chewed to blazes by mice!

Another routine in late August, is to clean and inspect the school buses, for another nine months of abuse  - sorry, use, and to make sure the engines are in perfect running order.  All the equipment must be checked - the blunted axe, for checking tire pressure;  the seats mended, windows realigned; all the lights, brakes and automatic doors, all must operate smoothly.

I like kids and I love  driving. To operate a huge yellow bus gives a great feeling of power, but I was warned in training '  just because you have the power to stop traffic ' don't get cocky.  Its very tempting though, to stop a police car in his tracks, when he is doing his coffee run!

I thought it would be an easy job, pickups and drop- offs.  What else?  I've mended broken dollies, wiped dirty faces, cleaned up vomit, played with dogs, refused hockey sticks - it might be a weapon - accepted presents and generally been accepted as a 'good un' by the community.

So, the buses are up and running, no unpleasant weather yet, but the trees are definitely turning orange and red, a sure sign Fall or Autumn is approaching.  We Spring Forward and Fall Back here, and will do so in early November.

Now is the run-up to Halloween, which you either love or hate.  A  contrived festival now, who really remembers it for All Hallows Eve, when Spirits walk amongst us?  Now it’s the time when ' ghosties and ghoulies and long legged beasties' run riot through our neighbourhoods, which are decked out in gravestones, swirling mist and eerie shrieks. Children don costumes and walk from door to door, with their parents in costume as well, taking treats from householders.  The parents dress up too; even the ladies in the bank don demure dresses, and the school crossing guard becomes a werewolf for the day!

Even the cat wants to be dressed up!

But nature plays her part too; there are fields full of orange pumpkins, some already picked and put on display in the farmers’ stands. 

Not a monster caterpillar - just  wrapped hay bales

There is a gamut of scarecrows, and witches decorating homes and stores, mum plants everywhere, and multi colored tomatoes, carrots and beets, and even purple potatoes.

Varieties of gourds are on display too - the Swan Neck, and many smaller, knobbly shapes and colors.

The contest pumpkins are on show too, only reaching 1500 lbs this year, because of the drought, not the normal 2500lbs we expect! 

 Fall colors deepen, light fades to darkness much earlier now, and the day after  Halloween, when the ghosties have returned to the tomb, we begin the preparations for  Christmas! 

Visualise National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and you have the picture. Huge balls of lights are rolled from garages, to untangle and display – can’t wait!

I’m placing some lovely photos of Fall color in this blog, obtained at risk to life and limb.   I parked alongside a beautiful old church in Picton, and attempted to walk up the short, steep grassy slope to the footpath.

Carrying my camera, wearing my new slide type backless sandals, my foot slipped out of the slide, tossing me backwards, and flinging my camera over the white picket fence to rattle down amongst the tombstones.

I came to rest on my back, facing the wrong way, half under my car, shoeless and feeling stupid.  I lay there, stunned, aware of many curtains twitching along the street, but no one came to help. Probably as embarrassed as I was, watching the vision of me sliding backwards, arms flailing, camera whirling through the air, crashing to earth, partly in a puddle, and lying there as if I meant to do it.

I heaved myself upright, replaced my shoes, and walked, sensibly, up the steps provided.  I found my camera against an ancient tombstone, dedicated to Captain Tripp, lost at sea in a violent storm. Hmm.

I took some lovely pictures, and drove home, but it was not until I tried to walk to my door, that I realised I had torn ligaments or tendons in my calf, and needed a walking stick for three weeks.

It’s possible, next time I blog, the first snow will have fallen.  October to May, it has lain in frozen drifts in sheltered places, though most has gone by late March.  My garden will sleep again until the end of May, my bird and chipmunk visitors will clamour for sustenance all those months and I will continue to write , paint and quilt too.

All my own work!

All photos except the one of raccoons are my own