A Poem for November Third: Planting Garlic

One never knows quite when. November third,
this time. Forking and rooting one long patch,
white hands belie heart's warming, while they scratch
at living for its clove of grace. I heard

a bitter night comes, soon. So — now to grope
in stiff, chill soil, against the stillness near,
or never. Apple leaves cling late, this year —
dusk-green, blight-mottled, holding dear to hope:

small ears, curled, cupped to hear the Delphic lyre
one last time, before falling off — to sleep
down on this narrow bed, perhaps, with sheep
snow-wool pulled high. Nearby I nurse a fire
of twigs. Hands warmed, I plant, then — and I keep
ears cupped, for dying fall. Flames, too, expire.

Rhubarb Wine

A five-gallon crock ... plus just an awful lot of chopped rhubarb ... with the crock filled to maybe the four-gallon level.

With there being so much liquid within rhubarb stalks, I figured I might have enough to fill a three-gallon secondary fermenter.

Such was the volume of rhubarb remaining that I had enough for only two one-gallon secondaries, when I emptied the crock two days ago.

For this batch, I had only chopped the rhubarb, not crushing it with a rolling pin as I had last year. The rhubarb pieces were still holding onto a fair amount of liquid within them. By the simple expedient of leaving the chopped, fermented rhubarb in a stainless steel colander overnight, I might have managed to get some of that third gallon. I probably should have had our small fruit press ready, to crush out the remaining juices.

I did, at least, leave the pieces in our largest stainless steel bowl overnight. By morning, it was evident some liquid had settled out. So our refrigerator now has a quart jar of much-too-new rhubarb wine in it. Have I tasted the wine? Strangely enough, no.

I ate a piece of the rhubarb, though: crunchy, tangy. Yesterday was another unseasonable day -- still over 90 degrees after 5 p.m. ... in May! -- so that it was in the evening, some twenty hours after working on the wine, that I dumped the partially alcoholified rhubarb pieces in a patch of dirt that I had been preparing for some planting. Air temperatures had dipped below 90; humidity was such that I sweated away only half my body weight every fifteen minutes. I forked the rhubarb wine remains into the dirt: for were not the rhubarb pieces already biologically composted, to some degree? I plan to plant in that dirt some squash vines that were volunteers in our compost bin.

Cheers ...

Author Shot

An Author Shot

Actually no more than portions of two hands, one of them hidden within a wrecked leather glove, are visible here of the author. In most of my previous lives I looked like what these hands hold, however; and no doubt in my next earthly cycle, having earned enough cosmic bonus points by writing the Kornbluth biography, I will return to the simple and contented state of once more looking this way.

March is not quite over and already Bufo americanus has come twice into my life, both times because of my spadework. As best I could tell, fortunately, I hurt neither one. (Last year Martha dug up two, too, around this time of year.) A few days ago I uncovered one next to the blueberries; yesterday, I spaded up some dirt to fling it deeper into another garden plot -- and saw this upside-down, pale-bellied thing with gangly limbs akimbo where I had tossed the spadeful.

I brought it inside to let it say hello to Martha; and since Martha happened to be photographing a few small items in the kitchen, I thrust the philosophic creature into digital immortality -- a little close to the camera, admittedly.

Cheers ...

The Real Wizard of Oz

I have read Rebecca Loncraine's The Real Wizard of Oz -- the first biography of L. Frank Baum I have had the pleasure of taking in. The book offers a great deal of information and some quite valuable and insightful perspective. The difficulty it presents, however, is its occasional imprecise language (some effort seems to have been expended in making passages poetic and evocative), and its lack of footnotes. I am in the position of wanting to cite a book on this subject and am feeling a bit irritated that it is impossible to know where exactly the various facts (or "facts") in the book were found, and whether the insightful perspectives were suggested by other Ozmaticians -- there must be legions -- or were the insights of Loncraine herself.

The book does end with a few pages of general notes on sources. (As did I for the Kornbluth biography, Loncraine spent time in Syracuse for this one. She, however, had grant support.) While the notes she provides are helpful, they still are of almost zero value in establishing where any particular bit of say-so came from.

Several lines toward the end of the book echo with the stated purpose of this "Vines, Wines and Lines" blog: "His writing became inextricably linked to gardening at Ozcot, the process of tending and pruning plants mapped onto the process of telling stories" (p. 266); and "Digging about in the garden, hat on and cigar in mouth, strangely mirrored Baum's writing process, in which he dug about in the turf of his own mind. And for Baum, both writing and gardening were an essentially intuitive process" (p. 267).

I am puzzled at a "process" being "mapped onto" another "process" -- which seems at least fuzzy in its expression; but I am not at all satisfied with "turf" in the second quotation. The garden-pottering Baum would have been digging about in soil or dirt or such. He might have been alarmed to think he had turf in his mind, as a dedicated flower grower.

What a minor quibble -- yet if examples of hazy language were not somewhat common in the book it might have gone unnoticed ... or if yet more questions were not being stimulated within the same passage. Why "strangely" mirrored? And should the second sentence not read, "For Baum, both writing and gardening were essentially intuitive processes" -- ?

Cheers ...