Searching Strings Huckleberries Seeds

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”

“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”

“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.

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Courtesy of web wizard Marius Constantin, my Blog has a new feature called Search the blog. Type in any word or name and hit Return, and up will come all my blog posts containing that word or name dating back to 2008. I just entered banana and up came 32 posts that have banana in the title or in the body of the post. If you enter the word the all 884 posts will come up, so I don’t recommend that. Santa Cruz brings up 84 posts. Fun! The posts are also archived by the year and month.

When I was in my twenties I kept a journal. Sadly, after several people “borrowed” my journal without my permission and read things not intended for them to read, I stopped keeping a journal. However, my blog turns out to be a kind of a journal of my last eighteen years. Some wonderful essays and memoirs, and lots of fiction, too, most of which I barely remember.

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Last night I put new strings on my little guitar I haven’t played in several years. I wanted to see how it felt to play the guitar again. Ouch! My fingertip callouses are gone. Nevertheless, I enjoyed playing again enough to inspire me to play a little every day, toughen the fingertips, and activate the dormant brain maps that once guided my playing.

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Courtesy of the local nature gods and through no effort on our part, the huckleberry bushes on our property are heavy with perfectly ripe fruit this September.

Huckleberries are small compared to blueberries. If you pick huckleberries one at a time it takes a long time to get a cup. So what I do is hold a bowl under a clump of berries and gently massage the clump to make the huckleberries rain down into the bowl. The consequence of using this technique is that along with the berries come all sorts of plant detritus and myriad little insects that live in and around the clumps, all of which must be removed through a laborious cleaning process before we can enjoy eating the huckleberries with our granola or baking them in a crisp. Definitely worth the effort.

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Some of our apple trees are hosting bumper crops this year, which means it’s time to make apple yum, an apple sauce variant Marcia has perfected over the years. This morning I cored and chopped five pounds of delicious apple flesh to be cooked down into the yum.

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These warm sunny fall days always incite me to plant another round of seeds in my tubs before the cold gray days of winter befall us. If we have a warm sunny September and October we’ll surely get another harvest of radishes, salad turnips, lettuce, scallions, and chard. But if October is cold and wet… well, we’ll see what develops as my Uncle Howard used to say in response to such questions.

fin

Here in the Heart guitar/cello/vocal song from Todd and Marcia’s fabulous album So Not Jazz