Might as well do my nails while I’m watching the walnuts dry.
In the lower level, by the woodstove, the walnuts are bagged and almost ready to be hung above the woodstove to finish drying. I think I’ll have to get another burlap bag or maybe two more, to hold all those nuts as they dry. All the messy work of scraping the black goo from the shells has been done. Now we wait. Most days, I sneak a few to bring out to the squirrels.
I wonder if there will be any walnuts left by Christmas.
This is a copy of Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus, a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.
Icarus and his father Daedalus, the architect of the labyrinth of Crete, were trying to escape imprisonment. King Minos thought Daedelus had given away the secret of how to escape the labyrinth thus allowing King Theseus of Athens to escape it. So King Minos imprisoned Daedalus and Icarus.
In an attempt to escape by flying, they put feathers on their arms and stuck them together with wax, but apparently Icarus, in spite of his father’s warning, flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax, and without wings he tumbled back to Earth. You can see him falling into the water just below the ship.
So in the 1500s, Pieter Brueghel included this event in one of his paintings. About 400 years later, W.H. Auden was inspired by this painting to write a poem about human indifference to suffering. Watch for examples of this as you read his famous poem.
When Emma was only about a year old, we took her for an outing at the beach one day.
What looked to us to be just tired sea grasses was probably a shoreline full of life.
“Did I see something move out there?”
“Whoah! Is that water closer than it was a second ago?”
“Are we safe here?”
“Okay, then. Just say the word, and I’ll go bring you that bird I saw down the beach.”
I had a dream about my friend Percy who told me about a guy he met who had just come back from a trip to Egypt. This traveller went on a desert tour with a group and saw some cool remnants of large monuments. Rulers of the ancient lands liked to leave their mark with colossal statues of themselves to remind the people who is the boss, and to intimidate any would-be conquerors of his land.
One monument, in particular, left a big impression on him. It must have been spectacular in its day, but you can imagine how a couple of thousand years of weather and blowing sand would erode even the imposing 57 -foot statue of Ramses II who ruled Egypt from 1279 – 1213 BCE.
The tour guide pointed out how, even though only the legs were left standing, you could tell from the broken pieces of the king’s face that the sculptor had a real talent for showing emotion on the statue’s face. It showed the lips wrinkled up, sneering and dominating, as he frowned at any potential intruders.
Even though the whole, humongous monument was broken up (except for the legs left standing), there still remained an inscription on the pedestal that was laughable in view of the condition of the statue of this mighty king.
The whole scene told an ironic story, so Percy thought it would make a good poem.
Here is the poem Percy wrote:
*** Did you know that Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a sailing mishap in 1822 just before his 30th birthday? Apparently, the boat was not seaworthy and the three people aboard were inexperienced when it was caught in bad weather off the west coast of Italy.
wordsfromanneli 