Last day of Applemoon

Almost all the apples and pears have fallen. Tomorrow I pick pick the very last. They will be sweet.

The small, sweet-smelling juniper berries are blue and ripe. There are many types of juniper around here. People think they're common, but I like them all.

The pyrocantha has also just come into red berry.

Autumn Sere

There was a rain shower last week. It's early for the season, and didn't cool things down for long. Today it's warm but lovely, sunny and in the 80's. Why am I so afraid to walk? I must eschew sweets. Yearning for the cool, pure rain.

First Rain

First rain today. Nice and gloomy. Nice and cozy in my roomy. Love those clouds. Love that gloom.

Socks and Dishrags

Non-stop y'all.

Charlie down at the Creek

Charlie keep busting out of the fence and going down to the creek to roll around in the mud. It isn't even that hot out. Yesterday he stunk like he had rolled in dead animals or feces or sumpin. Nasty. Andrew and Kent washed him off in the yard. Wet diggety dawg.

Fat Quails

Another sign of the season is the packs of fat quail that frequent our yard. They are their fattest at this time of year and can often be seen grazing on the seedy, dry meadows around our house. They graze in the seed-strewn meadow behind the house. The ground is the color of straw. Mostly they come in the late afternoon, around 5 pm.

The turkeys start coming out these days too.

I was lucky to have 3 coolish days in a row in which to do yard work.

Signs of Seretowet

Applemoon? Appeloon? September is the season of apples here. Apples and pears. What once upon a time were maids-in-the-mist, all blue and blowing, now are wee tan balloons brittle as papyrus. Some have burst tiny black beads - seeds are all around. I've started clearing the yard.

Sere-to-wet Pears

I'm making up my own seasons for where I live.

Seretowet

September 1 - November 30 is "Sere-to-wet", which begins with merciless, dangerous, dry heat that seres the hills to crispy tinder. It is a season of local harvest hurrah with the best of tomatoes, apples, pears, peppers. Seretowet begins the school year, celebrates the harvest, endures the height of fire season, revels in Halloween, feasts at Thanksgiving. The Jewish High Holy Days fall within its purview, as does the late November preparations for Yuletide. The colors of this season are orange, brown, yellow and green. In the latter part of the season, sometimes not until November, the rains begin.

Our pear tree gave a bumper crop of pears this year.

Gravid-stein

The Gravenstein apples are spilled all over the side yard.

Sant' Egidio Abate

Something strange happened this morning. I woke up early, at 5 am, to make Art a lunch to take to work. After he left I couldn't go back to sleep so I came into my office to knock around on the computer. Looking back into my browser history, I still can't figure out what led me there. I was updating some pages, then I was researching 2012, a date the mother of one of Alfred's friends assures me is "when it's going to happen." She is a New Age Mormon, a character of relative rarity, but if she were to be found anywhere, it would have to be here in California. Then again, I'm pretty sure I did that after I found the Linguaglossa link because I remember being really bleary when it happened. It was soon after I started browsing but how I got there I still don't know.

There was a link to Linguaglossa somewhere. Linguaglossa is a town at the foot of Mount Etna in Sicily, not far from Catania. My father's father Alfio was from there. Its name means "glossy tongue", as in a glossy tongue of lava lapping at its city limits. Suddenly I was in a Google satellite map of Linguaglossa itself, zooming in and out - in to the sere summer piazzas and small irrigated plots, out to the hard, curvy, volatile slopes of Etna. Then there was a Wikipedia entry. The patron saint of Linguaglossa is Saint Egidio, Abbot. Today is his feast day.

Saint Egidio (Saint Giles, in English), was a 7th century French hermit who lived with a hind ( a female deer) who sustained him with her milk. A Visigoth (or Frankish) king who was out hunting tried to capture the hind, but Saint Egidio managed to miraculously create an invisible shield to keep them back. The king came back another day with a bishop and one of his party, trying to shoot the deer, shot Egidio instead. The king felt badly and established a monastery for Egidio. Egidio became the patron saint of cripples, maimed people, lepers, the poor, and for some reason, weavers.

Today is the day, the first of September, the saint day of the town from which my father's father, my namesake, hailed. Part of me feels very Sicilian, which isn't surprising given that I grew up in a house with a Sicilian-American father and his immigrant family. Even though I am adopted, I feel this way. I talk with my hands, I yell, I hug and kiss, I worry irrationally about the evil eye, I attribute magical powers to olive oil. Linguaglossa, non ti domenticaro.


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