Apples and Winter

We recently made our annual fall trip to the apple orchards at nearby Cosby. We have visited several in the area over the years, but usually end up stopping at Carver's, as well, for their wide selection.



My wife is partial to Rome apples, particularly for cooking, and so we bought our usual bushel. A friend had mentioned that we needed to check out a new Carousel apple, and so we bought one and included it in a small bag of samples. Later, when we tried it, it was crisp and sweet and had a particularly good flavor - so we may have to return and free a half bushel or so of them as well :)

 

Apples, apples, apples

By the bushel

 

And by the bag

 

Along with turnips

 

Winged gourds

 

And outdoor festivity

The Sunday afternoon that we drove out was beautiful and clear in the usual way of fall, but what was unusual was the early snowfall from a day or two prior. When we see snow in East Tennessee, it's typically not until December or January, particularly these last couple of decades of increasingly warmer winters. We sometimes have flurries in November and we can get some pretty fierce cold snaps in December, but for snow to lay in early November is pretty rare.
Several inches had fallen in and around the Cosby area, and in the high Smoky Mountains it was said that there had been 2 feet of snow. So after we left Carver's, we circled back along the park border and stopped in Greenbrier to take a few photos on our way home.









Now I'm just waiting for that incredible cooking smell to come wafting through the house sometime later this week...

Re-blogged from cwmetz.com

One Rainy Night...

Dark mist rising,

Drum beneath a keening sky -

 

This scent of loam, of leaf, of yearning,

 

   Of memory’s wail

 

   And piacular’s cry…

 

This fragment of verse sprang from a rainy summer evening full of smells, sounds and dark, misty half-glimpses into the surrounding forest. Peering out through shadowy trees, I could have been sitting around a campfire with my Neolithic kin so many thousands of years ago.

The mood became a pensive, quiet centering that gradually gave rise to what I can only think of as one stream of those ancient, primal feelings that seem to lie hidden beneath daytime’s logical, civilized veneer.

The wonderfully descriptive and rarely used word, piacular, captured the sense of need for expiation that seemed to swirl with the dark and broody rain. The feeling wasn’t what I would consider religious in any organized sense, but was rather a nebulous sense of diminishment-of not meeting expectations or, perhaps, potential. Neither overwhelming nor possessive, it was more a gentle sorrow.

It suggested, for me, a bit of insight into the feelings of sacrificial desire for atonement that might have prompted the efforts of those early kin to find release to these emotions through ritual. Together with my clan, I might have wailed to unseen spirits so many thousands of years ago, but that night, alone in the dark, a simple fragment of verse served to capture a moment which ultimately proved as evanescent as the passing rain. 

But for one brief instant, I felt an unexpected kinship with – and numinous understanding of – my ancient kin that went beyond words…and that feeling and realization has stayed with me ever since.

Re-blogged from cwmetz.com

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