It's late on a Wednesday evening here in Chang Mai. By this time tomorrow I should be in a (rather charmless) hotel room in Rangoon. I'm booked into my usual hotel, the Eastern, not far from the Botataung temple. I'm not really packed yet of course, but I think I have most of what I need assembled, including books to read, books for a friend, and my Burmese language book. Perhaps I should take a bigger bag, just to not feel squeezed? That's always the question. I like to try to get away with having just hand-carry, but it's a pretty silly objective when flying a short distance into an airport that's not big and not really busy. If these are the small things I'm wondering about, you'll say, then clearly I'm fine.
I agree.
Today I went with a friend to a talk/seminar at Chiang Mai University, CMU as it's known. It's a good bicycle ride away. In the morning rush hour it can be a slow trip in a rot daeng (shared taxi) or a car, but on bicycles, weaving in and out of the cars, we got there easily. The last part of the ride was through the leafy airy campus grounds, with a cool breeze blowing. The talk was about the Karen in the camps and other places along the Thai-Burma border, about their networks of relationship based on religion, and on how humanitarian aid is affected by and affects those networks and connections. Dry stuff you mght think, but the speaker, an academic from Germany who works in Mahidol University in Bangkok named Alex Horstman, had very interesting findings and analysis to share.
He linked his research, which is primarily with the Christian networks (his colleague is focussed on the networks and relations of the buddhist Karen), with the early conversion of Karen by missionaries in the nineteenth century. There's still very active missionary work going on amongst the Karen in Burma and in the camps, but the missionaries are Karen themselves. And much of the leadership of the KNU, the Karen army that is battling the Burmese, is also Christian. The speaker suggested that there's an increased militarisation happening amongst the Karen along the border, those who have come to believe that theirs is a struggle of good versus evil. He suggested to us all, but especially to the KNU guys who were there, that they think about changing the model, perhaps giving up their arms, and trying to work another way.
It's the old old problem of exile and the ongoing struggle of the persecuted: attitudes harden and it's hard to see another path. Meantime there's been sixty years of struggle and suffering and still there are refugees, and attacks by the Burmese army and a seemingly dead-end fruitless struggle.
All the more reason to be impressed by the willingness of the opposition in Burma to be flexible, to agree to participate in elections and engage with the current government. It's very difficult to step back from a hard-line position, even when the other side gives a little. For they never give all that one wants, just a little. Instead of holding out for the moon, Aung San Su Kyi and her party have engaged in dialogue (while asking for more openness, a stop to bloodshed, etc) rather than digging in their heels and refusing to be at all flexible.
How can we ask people who have suffered a lot to move on and compromise? Well we do ask it all the time. In South Africa the Truth and Reconciliation Commission didn't end people's pain. It did allow the victims to face the aggressors and murderers, but that's all. And for some it must have been excruciating and unfair and impossible. But they did it. And somehow that country has managed to move forward rather than staying locked in the past.
I know all this is simplistic talk in some ways. But it seems important to acknowledge how difficult, almost impossible, it can be for people to move past old pains and grievances. (Look at how divorcing couples can stay angry and bitter for years, even when it damages their children and their mental and physical health to stay so angry and stuck.) And how much more difficut to move forward when the conflict has been going on for three generations, as it has with the Karen, and when people on both sides are so committed to their version of the story?
Human beings are creative and have a great capacity for problem-solving. But when the emotions are engaged so deeply, it takes a huge effort of will, personal and political, to move forward beyond the patterns of thinking and reflexes of the past. it hasn't happened in israel-Palestine; it hasn't yet hapened in Burma; it has happened in Ireland and in South Africa.
So there is hope, at least conceptually, for us all.
And meantime, to get down to the level of basic human pleasures, I have been eating very well these last days, especially because I've been out with Eating Asia - Robyn Eckhrdt and Dave Hagerman - several times, and in between I've been frequenting some of my favorite roadside/streetside stands. Last night with Robyn and Dave I was at a small place at the edge of town that specialises in fish laap. We had that, and a brilliant village-style northern tom yum with chicken, a plate of pla som (soured fish patties that had been fried), and some pak kana, Chinese kale, stir-fried with crispy pieces of pork belly. Yum.
And now I'm headed to the land of brilliant noodles and fab lunchtiime rice meals featuring lots of condiments, as well as curries and salads, etc. I probably won't be able to post here while I'm gone, though occasionally I've been able to break through the firewalls or whatever they're called, while in Burma. If I don't find a way around, I won't be posting again until after I fly back to Chiang Mai on December 11...
Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans among you (I admit to being thrilled at not having to eat turkey at all this year). Let's hope that we all get better at compromise and at reconciling ourselves to a less than perfect relationship with our more difficult neighbours.
Showing posts with label Thanksgiving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thanksgiving. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Friday, October 15, 2010
NEW HORIZONS AT THANKSGIVING AS THE SUN TAKES LEAVE
How can it be Friday already? The Thanksgiving holiday last Monday put all my internal orientation out of wack - and friends have said the same thing. So suddenly we're butting up agains the end of another week and yikes!! the to-do list is still pretty full to overflowing.
But the holiday was truly wonderful, so no complaining allowed, I say to myslef. We had fabulously good weather, I got out for a long bike ride and explore in Scarborough, the leaves brilliant and the sky an intense blue, then Monday went into cooking mode. I made bread for the first time in two years, baking it off on Sunday, but Monday there was time to enrich some leftover dough with butter, flatten it, and press chopped pears with sugar on top for a Baker's Fruit Tart. The other end of dough earned its keep under sliced potatoes, slat, and minced shallots, as a version of pletzel. The small Berkshite pork roast melted its fat nicely to cook the roast potatoes to a kind of dreamy perfection... And most amazing of all, the pumpkin pie effort was a huge success.
I wanted to give proportions and method, while it's still in my head: Cut top and bottom ends off 2 or 3 small pie pumpkins, so they sit up, but are still fleshy at each end. Bake at 400 for about 90 minutes, or longer, on a baking sheet. Let cool, then scrape out seeds and set aside, and scrape out flesh. Mash flesh as wellas you can with a slotted spoon, and set aside.
(Wash seeds thoroughly, discarding all stringy bits and flesh, and finsih the job by putting them in a sieve and rinsing them off well, then bake on a sheet in that 400 oven until just touched with colour. These were the best pepitas I have ever had. They've been a great snack for passers-by all week.)
You will need a blender for the next step: Use the proportion of 2 cups pumpkin flesh to 1 cup 10% cream; 3/4 cup sugar (I used organic cane sugar that was light brown); 1/2 teaspoon salt or so; generous teaspoon cinnamon; 1/4 teaspoon cloves; scant teaspoon dried ginger; 1/3 nutmeg clove grated. Put them all in the blender and liquify. You may have to stop and stir a little in between, but eventually you will have a smooth thick liquid. Set aside in a bowl and repeat with another batch.
Whisk six eggs (three per each batch of 2 cups pumpkin) and stir into the mixture just before using. I then got a little anxious so I stirred in, this will maybe make you laugh, about 3 tablespoons pastry flour: why? I had an obscure idea about thickening it I guess. No harm done, as it turns out.
This will give enough to fill three pies, and maybe some small tartlets too. I made a double recipe of pate sucree (6 eggs, 1/2 pound butter; sugar, salt, and a blend of pastry flour and all-purpose), prebaked it for 10 minutes at 375degrees, pricked and also weighted down with dried limas on a sheet of foil. After it had cooled, I poured in pumpkin liquid leaving more than 1/4 inch clearance, and baked it at 350 until firm. For tart pans I used one small thick (Calphalon) baking sheet (11 by 15 inches or so) and one pie plate. I had some pumpkin liquid left over for steaming the next day, and a little bit of remnant pastry that became a small batch of sablees, dusted with sugar and cinnamon.
The rectangular tart and the pie were both spectacular, tasted of pumpkin, subtle and good, not just of the spices or other additives. I was delighted. I am ready to do it again, in fact. Maybe for Hallowe'en??
The leaves on the huge maple tree out back are a blend of red and green, lovely, and changing colour moment to moment it seems. We're racing toward winter as the sun heads south. And we're squirreling away food, at least I have been: I collected black walnuts, taking them from the squirrels, you might say, from under a tree on my daily run and from under another on my bike ride last Sunday. What to do with them? Any ideas? They stain hands of course, but what about an eating idea? or should I just crack them open and enjoy them one by one with friends?
But the holiday was truly wonderful, so no complaining allowed, I say to myslef. We had fabulously good weather, I got out for a long bike ride and explore in Scarborough, the leaves brilliant and the sky an intense blue, then Monday went into cooking mode. I made bread for the first time in two years, baking it off on Sunday, but Monday there was time to enrich some leftover dough with butter, flatten it, and press chopped pears with sugar on top for a Baker's Fruit Tart. The other end of dough earned its keep under sliced potatoes, slat, and minced shallots, as a version of pletzel. The small Berkshite pork roast melted its fat nicely to cook the roast potatoes to a kind of dreamy perfection... And most amazing of all, the pumpkin pie effort was a huge success.
I wanted to give proportions and method, while it's still in my head: Cut top and bottom ends off 2 or 3 small pie pumpkins, so they sit up, but are still fleshy at each end. Bake at 400 for about 90 minutes, or longer, on a baking sheet. Let cool, then scrape out seeds and set aside, and scrape out flesh. Mash flesh as wellas you can with a slotted spoon, and set aside.
(Wash seeds thoroughly, discarding all stringy bits and flesh, and finsih the job by putting them in a sieve and rinsing them off well, then bake on a sheet in that 400 oven until just touched with colour. These were the best pepitas I have ever had. They've been a great snack for passers-by all week.)
You will need a blender for the next step: Use the proportion of 2 cups pumpkin flesh to 1 cup 10% cream; 3/4 cup sugar (I used organic cane sugar that was light brown); 1/2 teaspoon salt or so; generous teaspoon cinnamon; 1/4 teaspoon cloves; scant teaspoon dried ginger; 1/3 nutmeg clove grated. Put them all in the blender and liquify. You may have to stop and stir a little in between, but eventually you will have a smooth thick liquid. Set aside in a bowl and repeat with another batch.
Whisk six eggs (three per each batch of 2 cups pumpkin) and stir into the mixture just before using. I then got a little anxious so I stirred in, this will maybe make you laugh, about 3 tablespoons pastry flour: why? I had an obscure idea about thickening it I guess. No harm done, as it turns out.
This will give enough to fill three pies, and maybe some small tartlets too. I made a double recipe of pate sucree (6 eggs, 1/2 pound butter; sugar, salt, and a blend of pastry flour and all-purpose), prebaked it for 10 minutes at 375degrees, pricked and also weighted down with dried limas on a sheet of foil. After it had cooled, I poured in pumpkin liquid leaving more than 1/4 inch clearance, and baked it at 350 until firm. For tart pans I used one small thick (Calphalon) baking sheet (11 by 15 inches or so) and one pie plate. I had some pumpkin liquid left over for steaming the next day, and a little bit of remnant pastry that became a small batch of sablees, dusted with sugar and cinnamon.
The rectangular tart and the pie were both spectacular, tasted of pumpkin, subtle and good, not just of the spices or other additives. I was delighted. I am ready to do it again, in fact. Maybe for Hallowe'en??
The leaves on the huge maple tree out back are a blend of red and green, lovely, and changing colour moment to moment it seems. We're racing toward winter as the sun heads south. And we're squirreling away food, at least I have been: I collected black walnuts, taking them from the squirrels, you might say, from under a tree on my daily run and from under another on my bike ride last Sunday. What to do with them? Any ideas? They stain hands of course, but what about an eating idea? or should I just crack them open and enjoy them one by one with friends?
Saturday, October 9, 2010
COUNTING MY (UNPLANNED!) BLESSINGS AT THANKSGIVING
As I sit here typing, the sun is golden and getting low in the sky, it's nearly 6 pm, but the air is so balmy that I'm still in short-sleeved cotton. This Thanksgiving weekend is like a reminder of all the wonderful weather we've had since June, a truly memorable summer for gardeners in Toronto. North of here, in Grey County, there was more rain and many market gardeners had too much wet weather and problems with mould and blight etc. But here in the Toronto area and down into Niagara, it was hard to find any complainers!
I should revisit the subject of Nuit Blanche, that I wrote about in anticipation last week. But really, there's too much to say, and I am not a reviewer. I'll just mention a wonderful installation called "The Big O",by Zilvinas Kempinas, a 7 metre diameter circle of magnetic tape that floated and rippled continuously, sustained and animated by six fans, three on either side about 5 metres apart. The piece was aspirational, optimisitic, and memsmerising. I thought "sight unseen" by Lee Ranaldo and Leah Singer was memorable. And "Arrivals and Deparatures" by Michael Fernandes, a pair of large notice boards like those in European train stations, with horizontal lines closely spaced, on which all night people wrote, and erased and wrote more, in the form "I am arriving from...(Sault Ste MArie, or a place of depression, or Whitby...) and I am going to (hope, or Harbourfront, or Europe...)" was very effective and engaging; it perhaps sounds trite, but it worked...
And now here we are at Thanksgiving weekend, with the markets and farmers' markets jammed yesterday and today with optimistic shoppers, me among them. A bicycle is a great mode of transport, and imposes some good constraints. I do NOT have a large box or basket on mine, something I regret from time to time. But as I rearranged my load today, putting the pears and tomatoes and olive oil in my small day pack, and the lighter lumps like bread in an over-the-shoulder bag, I realised that I'm better off without a basket. If I had one I wouldn't be as restrained/constrained, and would shop even more optimistically and generously.
This impulse to buy because the vegetables are fresh and beautiful, and also just because there they are, is a fine one. But it leads me to a kind of hoarding mentality, "I'd better get a lot of X, just to be sure I have enough"; or, another version, "Maybe I'll take these dandelion greens too, because maybe the beets and the purple cabbage and the leaf lettuce and the celery root that I have already bought for this weekend won't be enough". It's crazy thinking. And it's predictable, especially at a farmers' market before a holiday.
Somewhere there lurks in me, and perhaps in many of us (I do like to think that I have company in my weaknesses!), some kind of atavistic fear of being caught short, not because of real threats of food scarcity such as invading armies or plague, but just because the stores are going to be closed for a day or two... (It's a little pathetic, phrased that way, isn't it?) So I stocked up on extra butter and eggs, in case i want to make a cake as well as a pie as well as, oh, perhaps a different pie...
It's lovely, picturing all these possibilities, but it also shows that I don't really want to pin myself down or have a plan. I want to play the whole weekend or holiday by ear, and have the freedom to decide at the last minute what I am going to cook and how I am going to cook it.
If I think of earlier times, when the challenge in the home kitchen was to work with a narrow range of foodstuffs and still make meals interesting or festive, then this wonderfully rich choice at Thanksgiving weekend is even more astonishing. No wonder my eyes are bigger than my planning!!!
Which leads me to, yes, the plan. What is it? Well in the last few days a kind of shape has emerged: I'm expecting a loose collection of various people over for an early supper on Monday. I have some Berkshire pork (a small roast from Sanagan's), and some merguez, and a little beef too, to grill, and there are potatoes and a rich assortment of vegetables that will get used and eaten, but I don't know exactly in what way. A friend called today to ask us over for a Thanksgiving meal, and I suggested that since there were already people coming here, she and her family join us. It sounded like a good plan to her, which is great. And so now after all there will also be turkey (not my favorite, but loved by many): She is bringing over a small turkey that she'll have roasted ahead.
I have a load of pears, a mix of Bosc and Bartletts, maybe for a cake? or a custard tart? And I have some small pie pumpkins that I'm baking right now, so I can use the flesh, appropriately mashed and processed and smoothed with coconut milk and spices and an egg or three, as filling for several tarts/pies, on Monday. So that should feel generous and festive, don't you think?
I should revisit the subject of Nuit Blanche, that I wrote about in anticipation last week. But really, there's too much to say, and I am not a reviewer. I'll just mention a wonderful installation called "The Big O",by Zilvinas Kempinas, a 7 metre diameter circle of magnetic tape that floated and rippled continuously, sustained and animated by six fans, three on either side about 5 metres apart. The piece was aspirational, optimisitic, and memsmerising. I thought "sight unseen" by Lee Ranaldo and Leah Singer was memorable. And "Arrivals and Deparatures" by Michael Fernandes, a pair of large notice boards like those in European train stations, with horizontal lines closely spaced, on which all night people wrote, and erased and wrote more, in the form "I am arriving from...(Sault Ste MArie, or a place of depression, or Whitby...) and I am going to (hope, or Harbourfront, or Europe...)" was very effective and engaging; it perhaps sounds trite, but it worked...
And now here we are at Thanksgiving weekend, with the markets and farmers' markets jammed yesterday and today with optimistic shoppers, me among them. A bicycle is a great mode of transport, and imposes some good constraints. I do NOT have a large box or basket on mine, something I regret from time to time. But as I rearranged my load today, putting the pears and tomatoes and olive oil in my small day pack, and the lighter lumps like bread in an over-the-shoulder bag, I realised that I'm better off without a basket. If I had one I wouldn't be as restrained/constrained, and would shop even more optimistically and generously.
This impulse to buy because the vegetables are fresh and beautiful, and also just because there they are, is a fine one. But it leads me to a kind of hoarding mentality, "I'd better get a lot of X, just to be sure I have enough"; or, another version, "Maybe I'll take these dandelion greens too, because maybe the beets and the purple cabbage and the leaf lettuce and the celery root that I have already bought for this weekend won't be enough". It's crazy thinking. And it's predictable, especially at a farmers' market before a holiday.
Somewhere there lurks in me, and perhaps in many of us (I do like to think that I have company in my weaknesses!), some kind of atavistic fear of being caught short, not because of real threats of food scarcity such as invading armies or plague, but just because the stores are going to be closed for a day or two... (It's a little pathetic, phrased that way, isn't it?) So I stocked up on extra butter and eggs, in case i want to make a cake as well as a pie as well as, oh, perhaps a different pie...
It's lovely, picturing all these possibilities, but it also shows that I don't really want to pin myself down or have a plan. I want to play the whole weekend or holiday by ear, and have the freedom to decide at the last minute what I am going to cook and how I am going to cook it.
If I think of earlier times, when the challenge in the home kitchen was to work with a narrow range of foodstuffs and still make meals interesting or festive, then this wonderfully rich choice at Thanksgiving weekend is even more astonishing. No wonder my eyes are bigger than my planning!!!
Which leads me to, yes, the plan. What is it? Well in the last few days a kind of shape has emerged: I'm expecting a loose collection of various people over for an early supper on Monday. I have some Berkshire pork (a small roast from Sanagan's), and some merguez, and a little beef too, to grill, and there are potatoes and a rich assortment of vegetables that will get used and eaten, but I don't know exactly in what way. A friend called today to ask us over for a Thanksgiving meal, and I suggested that since there were already people coming here, she and her family join us. It sounded like a good plan to her, which is great. And so now after all there will also be turkey (not my favorite, but loved by many): She is bringing over a small turkey that she'll have roasted ahead.
I have a load of pears, a mix of Bosc and Bartletts, maybe for a cake? or a custard tart? And I have some small pie pumpkins that I'm baking right now, so I can use the flesh, appropriately mashed and processed and smoothed with coconut milk and spices and an egg or three, as filling for several tarts/pies, on Monday. So that should feel generous and festive, don't you think?
Monday, October 12, 2009
THANKSGIVING LIGHT AND WARMTH
On with the heavy wool socks, or at least some kind of socks! The chill in the air this last week has been, well, chilling! I've brought in the curry leaf plants, at last, though have yet to bring in the ficus or the hibiscus. They're toughening even as I write!
Today is Thanksgiving Day here in Canada, and the whole weekend has been one for giving thanks, filled with the treat and privilege of spending time with friends and family.
The "dead bird" meal today was fun, the turkey from Gerald, free-range and healthy at 13 pounds, cooked at 450 degrees F. (down to 425 F for the last hour) so it was done and beautiful in just over 2 hours. I didn't stuff it, just shoved some wedges of onion inside, and a handful of chives and garlic chives from the garden. The outside i rubbed with olive oil, some coarse sea salt, and some tarragon, also from the garden. I tied the legs together with string, and also flipped the end of the wings, so that they were braced against the body; that way I could use the wings to hold the flap of skin closed at the neck end, sealing in moisture. High temperature roasting (see Barbara Kafka's classic book Roasting, edited by wonderful Ann Bramson) keeps the bird moist and makes great crisp skin, especially if you start with a healthy bird, not one of those faked grocery-store over-breasted pre-basted aberrations.
We put small sort-of-peeled spuds around the bird, and the neck went into the pan too, so our friend Dina who is a bones person, had her neck to gnaw on. There were other potatoes, boiled to firmly done, then stripped and chopped, then cooked in flavoured oil, Indian style, with mustard seed, fennel, nigella, a little turmeric, onion, garlic, minced ginger,,, delish. And I stir-fried a rainbow of peppers, cut into strips, and seasoned with Sichuan pepper and not much else. Beautiful. Sides included a tart cranberry sauce flavored like Georgian tkemali. Desserts were from Dina: a cranberry studded cake, perfect, a new creation by her; and an open-faced flat pastry topped with sliced Courtland apple. What could be better?
Saturday when I went up to Grey County for an overnight airing, I stopped in to give my aunt a hug, and lots of her family, my cousins, too. They were in the middle of cooking a gigantic bird - twenty-seven pounds! yikes! which had been in the oven for hours by then. I didn't stay for supper, for I was headed on farther, to see Lillian and Jon. At their house in the forest there was a mostly vegetarian feast , with borek (the Serbian version, layers of phyllo with egg and cottage cheese between, lush! made by Jon's mother) and potato and mushroom pie by Lillian, and salad, some sausage made by neighbours and grilled over an open fire by Jon, and then an apple tart and some chocolate cake too, for dessert. Lots of warming foods for a very chilly night.
But I ate so much that I was awake in the night, digesting I think, or maybe it was the excellent coffee? I went out in the brilliant light of the half-moon, and walked on forest paths near the house, in the magical light-and-shadow. Bed was welcoming when I returned to it, creeping into the silent house. Suddenly sleep returned and I drifted happily through until morning sunshine on brightly yellowing leaves.
And it's lovely to think that the brilliant leaves at this time of year are kind of a farewell wave, but also a promise of the new life and warmth that will come, in due course, and after we've become truly impatient, yes yes, I know! but will come. Nature's promise to us all. We need glorious memories of all that warm colour to cling to as we head into the cold and dark!
Today is Thanksgiving Day here in Canada, and the whole weekend has been one for giving thanks, filled with the treat and privilege of spending time with friends and family.
The "dead bird" meal today was fun, the turkey from Gerald, free-range and healthy at 13 pounds, cooked at 450 degrees F. (down to 425 F for the last hour) so it was done and beautiful in just over 2 hours. I didn't stuff it, just shoved some wedges of onion inside, and a handful of chives and garlic chives from the garden. The outside i rubbed with olive oil, some coarse sea salt, and some tarragon, also from the garden. I tied the legs together with string, and also flipped the end of the wings, so that they were braced against the body; that way I could use the wings to hold the flap of skin closed at the neck end, sealing in moisture. High temperature roasting (see Barbara Kafka's classic book Roasting, edited by wonderful Ann Bramson) keeps the bird moist and makes great crisp skin, especially if you start with a healthy bird, not one of those faked grocery-store over-breasted pre-basted aberrations.
We put small sort-of-peeled spuds around the bird, and the neck went into the pan too, so our friend Dina who is a bones person, had her neck to gnaw on. There were other potatoes, boiled to firmly done, then stripped and chopped, then cooked in flavoured oil, Indian style, with mustard seed, fennel, nigella, a little turmeric, onion, garlic, minced ginger,,, delish. And I stir-fried a rainbow of peppers, cut into strips, and seasoned with Sichuan pepper and not much else. Beautiful. Sides included a tart cranberry sauce flavored like Georgian tkemali. Desserts were from Dina: a cranberry studded cake, perfect, a new creation by her; and an open-faced flat pastry topped with sliced Courtland apple. What could be better?
Saturday when I went up to Grey County for an overnight airing, I stopped in to give my aunt a hug, and lots of her family, my cousins, too. They were in the middle of cooking a gigantic bird - twenty-seven pounds! yikes! which had been in the oven for hours by then. I didn't stay for supper, for I was headed on farther, to see Lillian and Jon. At their house in the forest there was a mostly vegetarian feast , with borek (the Serbian version, layers of phyllo with egg and cottage cheese between, lush! made by Jon's mother) and potato and mushroom pie by Lillian, and salad, some sausage made by neighbours and grilled over an open fire by Jon, and then an apple tart and some chocolate cake too, for dessert. Lots of warming foods for a very chilly night.
But I ate so much that I was awake in the night, digesting I think, or maybe it was the excellent coffee? I went out in the brilliant light of the half-moon, and walked on forest paths near the house, in the magical light-and-shadow. Bed was welcoming when I returned to it, creeping into the silent house. Suddenly sleep returned and I drifted happily through until morning sunshine on brightly yellowing leaves.
And it's lovely to think that the brilliant leaves at this time of year are kind of a farewell wave, but also a promise of the new life and warmth that will come, in due course, and after we've become truly impatient, yes yes, I know! but will come. Nature's promise to us all. We need glorious memories of all that warm colour to cling to as we head into the cold and dark!
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