So I am moving on. Being in a wildly dreamy, exhausted state of mind, I have been catching up with lots of reading, especially some of the blogs I follow. I have enjoyed beautiful pics, friendly cooking advice, interesting facts and tidbits about the state of the food industry. (I especially like the link to "endangered foods" that I found at Civil Eats.) (Most of the blogs I follow are in the blog roll; I definitely recommend checking them out.)
As I was reading them, one reason I like them so much came to me. The photos--beautiful, composed, and professional though they may be--don't feel like catalog photos. They don't make you long for things you don't have. Or, to be more precise, they don't make you long for things to buy. They often make me long for things I can create, but that's an altogether different kind of longing. And I like that.
Another thing I like is that they show glimpses of real lives, of real pockets of beauty nestled within the everyday. In an everyday I can find if I only try and look for it.
In the spirit of finding my own pockets of beauty, I took my camera out back to the garden I have woefully neglected for the last month. Sadly I let lots of tomatoes die on the vine, but there's still a little beauty left back there. At least I think so.
Here is the lemon I thought a rascal of a squirrel had stolen when I couldn't find it the other day. But here it is, still attached to my little lemon tree.
Signs of new life on the lemon tree. I am thankful. Especially because it lost most of its leaves over the winter.
False indigo floating in a puddle left after Irene.
Winslow, my fat grumpy cat. He thinks he's a tiger. I hate to break it to him...
The basil still looks good. Soon, I will harvest it and make a batch of pesto to freeze for later.
An out-of-control stalk of grass, almost ready to reseed itself.
A cluster of cherry tomatoes left from a wilderness of vines that reached more than seven feet high at one point, which are now a brown and ugly mess. I'll leave these in the hope that I can make something of them.
A sprig of ivy, taking over the fence.
The bird feeder Mike's uncle Melvin made for us, chewed by squirrels.
A lovely fern, growing by the compost box.
Some of our harvest bounty--still not sure what to do with it all...
I also decided to start some plum jam. I bought a whole mess of plums at the farmer's market on Saturday morning, before the rain from Irene began to roll in. Most of them are prune plums, but I am afraid I can't remember what the bigger ones are. I like the red etchings on some of them. Looks like a galaxy of stars trapped within a thin skin.
I love the contrast of the purple skin with blue bloom against the strange green of the flesh. I wonder what color the jam will be? Of course, I won't know until tomorrow, because I ran out of sugar. No matter, I will let the plums macerate with the sugar I have and then we will see. It may be beautiful. It may be weird. That's part of the fun.
