A Little Patch of Sun

Today's pleasure:  a little patch of sun, against a quiet wall.

Image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Carmel Mission

Mulled Wine

Today's treat for the senses—mulled wine.  Spices, citrus, brandy; wonderful smells.  And I do love mulling.

My recipe:
2 cups water
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 bouquet garni bag full of World Market mulling spices
1 bottle red French table wine
1/4 cup brandy
1 orange, sliced



image: gourmetgirlmagazine.com

Poetry Reading

Today's great pleasure is listening to Billy Collins read his poem, Forgetfulness.  Sad but true! and funny too.  The text of the poem follows at the end.

Forgetfulness
    
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Billy Collins

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Pomegranates (Persephone, too, forgot—that she was not to eat this tempting fruit.  And so we have winter . . .)

A Coign of Vantage

I'm especially grateful today to gaze at this lovely painting by Laurence Alma Tadema, which we saw in the flesh—or the oils—just last week at the Legion of Honor.  I love the lazy garlanded beast with his sleek back turned.

I'm more grateful than I can say to be able to see it, to continue seeing as I do, having had a scare this morning about a torn retina.  Sight is precious, and I shall glory in it absolutely all I can.


image:  Sir Laurence Alma Tadema, A Coign of Vantage, Olga's Gallery

Whiskey Sour Balls

Tonight's sensual pleasure will be making a batch of Whiskey Sour Balls, with coconut, vanilla wafers, and bourbon.  

My Mother used to make Rum Balls, along with biscochitos and her Norwegian sandbakkels, and I remember fondly the amiable elf or gnome my friend Lilian created one Christmas in Santa Fe, who she christened Rum Ball.



image:  thecookbook.com.au

Ribbons

I was struck by the saturated colors of these ribbons in a window years ago at Allied Arts—and today went out shopping for Christmas ribbons.  The textures as well as the colors do good things for the spirit, on a rainy afternoon, and I've been brightened by the rolls and rolls of gauzy woven light.  I ended up with just a few, one bronzy and one melon shot with gold, and then a kind of snowflake ribbon, with the sparkle of ice crystals just about to melt on breath-warmed glass.


I was tempted as well by gorgeous taffetas, in bronzes too and little knots of red, thinking what scarves they'd make—but realized in the end that even sewing hems is something beyond me just now, my sewing machine buried under drafts of novels and other unfinished creative projects.

I did buy some squares of Bali batiks to wrap gifts in, complementing the ribbons.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Ribbons

Sage Tea

I go looking for more sage tea, since I can’t pick sage fresh in Crete’s high mountains as I did a few summers ago, the smell of the herb pungent as it gets trampled underfoot, the taste of it beyond delicious, made into tea in a copper briki, good for absolutely everything.

There’s puzzlement today, with everyone in Rose Market trying to figure out how to say “sage” in Farsi.  But in the end they find it and I buy a bag of silver or white sage, the kind the Navajos wrap with a length of colored thread, bind into smudges, whose slow smoke will purify a space, or celebrate a rite of passage.

I love that sage means wise; that sage is part of passage, message, presage.

At the market as well I buy a jar of sour cherry jam, and then kebabs of lamb grilled with spices, wrapped in lavash, with a generous handful of fresh mint, onion, and assorted parsleys on the side. The grilling lamb is not this afternoon sending a cloud of fragrant smoke into the winter air, but it still can't be resisted.

A young woman is squeezing a mound of pomegranates into juice near the front door.

So today’s treats—are multiple.

image:  Sage tea in a glass cup, Ottmar Diez

Reggae

Today's sensual treat:  reggae.

Dancing barefoot on the living room carpet to roots reggae with its irresistible beat and uplifting life-affirming bounce, the steel guitars and insistent drums and whiff of island rum under the whole.  The world assumes colors out of the ordinary spectrum.

Three absolute favorites are these—

The Heptones, Book of Rules

Desmond Dekker, Pickney Gal

UB40, Wear You to the Ball

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Bell, Blue

Kaleidoscope

Today, whether by sunlight or by flourescent office light, I will lose myself in the bright stained-glass chamber of my lovely small kaleidoscope with its refracted pattern of flowers and bees and ladybugs and grasshoppers and butterflies—a winter-garden with a summer’s air.

It’s like the rosy pattern on an English bone-china teacup, or indeed like stained glass, the wonder that is La Sainte Chapelle, the radiance of that Parisian chapel that I have compared (most recently in my novel Nude Against the Light) with the radiance of the roomful of Bonnards at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.

Here is a short passage from Rainer Maria Remarque’s Heaven Has No Favorites about the power of that stained glass, for a dying woman:

Lilian stretched her whole body in the rippling light.  It seemed to her that she could hear it.  One could hear so many things, she thought, if only one could be quiet enough.  She breathed deeply.  She breathed in the gold and blue and wine red. . . .  She was happy.  The happiness of radiance, she thought:  the most immaterial in the world.

And so the stream of the refracted light leads me from my concrete sensual joy in this moment outward to England, France, Bonnard, summer, and deep-down happiness.

image:  multi-colored view of a kaleidoscope, photo taken by H. Pellikka

Noni Soap

For fragrance and texture, today’s sensual indulgence—unwrapping a new bar of noni soap.  Its essence is that of the island it comes from, Hawai’i, whose blossom-scented air welcomes you like a languid bath, or an embrace.

The soap is made of coconut, palm, olive, kukui, and macadamia nut oils, grapefruit seed extract.  It’s then scented with white ginger, gardenia, plumeria.  It’s good for the complexion, for healing rashes or sunburn, besides transporting you back to the Kona Coast almost in time for morning coffee.

Noni, a Hawaiian evergreen tree also known as Indian Mulberry, has a fruit with a rotten smell and an unassuming bumpy yellow globular look, that yet has in it an array of healthgiving properties.  It’s one of the medicinal plants the ancient Polynesians brought to Hawai’i on one of their canoe voyages (cannily reading the stars, the currents).  Native Hawaiians have used it to treat diabetes, heart problems, high blood pressure.  Its roots, leaves, flowers, fruit, and bark are all used as herbal remedies, and the roots used to dye tapa cloth yellow, red, or purple.

In my quest for a suitable photo I am transfixed by the soaps here at The Soap Kitchen—scrumptious!


image:  Morinda citrifolia. El noni, aal, fruta del diablo o mora de la India (Morinda citrifolia) es una planta arbórea o arbustiva de la familia de las rubiáceas; originaria del sudeste asiático, ha sido introducida a la India y la Polinesia. Se emplea extensamente como medicinal.      Wilfredo Rodríguez