{Small but brilliant.}
As crops go, it was a small harvest. One not really worth the effort of sliding on a pair of old shoes and heading out into the garden, had it not been the first tomato of the season grown. A singular tomato picked and rosy red and tiny, but how best to enjoy it? As yet I am not inclined to test my new tooth’s biting abilities, preferring instead to cut up pieces of watermelon, cantaloupe and apple into bite size pieces. Grapes, for this reason, and cherry plums too, are favoured for their size. I toss them back and let my molars set to easy task.
There are few culinary pleasures I rate higher in summer than stone fruits. Plum, apricot, cherry, peach, and mango, especially mango, its large stone perfect to gnaw upon, if eating at home in privacy. I hold it much like a squirrel with a prized nut, and chew and suck all the goodness from the stone, chin covered in stickiness and yellow flesh. It is, as I mentioned, not an act to be done in a lunch hall or seated on the state library steps. The very act reminds me of a scene drawn in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford concerning oranges and their eating.
When oranges came in, a curious proceeding was gone through. Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit; for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where; sucking (only I think she used some more recondite word) was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms, to indulge in sucking oranges.(Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell)
{Cilla and my Mum get along just swell. My Mum cannot get over the shape of her face having never known a Persian cat.}
+ Our zines arrive in dear Ritva's hands.
+ Our zines arrive in dear Thereza's hands.(Photos of our zines in the hands of dear friends never ceases to draw a smile to my face and a little more rose to my cheeks. Thank you for sharing these photos.)
+ An expected gift arrives by post from the folk at the Australian Ballet. 2010 covered, one month at a time, in the form of a brand new calendar. Why, I am feeling more organised at the sight of it. Thank you.
