Summer, etc.

This may be difficult to believe, dear reader, but during my absence from this journal I managed to find a moment or two away from the citrus groves, freeing my mind, if only for a few minutes, from the obsessive concerns of a common farmer, whose livelihood depends on the whims of the weather, and perhaps the exposure of his living room.

Rather than subject you to the tedium of a full show-and-tell, I present to you a picture or thirty with some snide comments thrown in for kicks, organized into chapters. I suppose that makes it a full show-and-tell. But you will enjoy it, god damn it.

I. Beijing


China has been blessed with ample reserves of flexibility and balance.






Pigeons?


Scorpions.




Neerav, aren't you vegetarian?



II. Summer


Ginna's old-school Jamis Dakota AL was a Craigslist special. Look at those vintage Judy XCs. Sure, the cartridge blew and leaked oil all over the place, and the elstomers are mush, but just look at them. Awesome.


Jumping at Fort Tilden on the hottest day of the summer in NYC.


Campobello Island, New Brunswick.




The twilight lasted for what seemed like hours.


In the moonlit night we took long exposure shots.


Sometimes the camera sees more than you do, and you are glad for it.


Then we went north into the Bay of Fundi, where ...


... extreme tides have carved extraordinary shapes out of the rocky coastal bluffs.


Franconia Ridge, New Hampshire.

III. The Wedding of Eunnie and Eric

Is there any experience more wonderful and humbling than the wedding of your little sister?

Calamondin

I have not tended to my blog in nearly a year. What have I been doing instead? Have you been to the produce section lately? Witness the piles of oranges and clementines that have replaced the seasonal fruit bins; it has been a busy season for us citrus farmers.



Sunkist may be proud of its bazillions of orange groves, but I have chosen instead to concentrate my love and labor into a single indoor tree, which Ginna had left in my care before moving to Costa Rica and which I have since semi-verified as a calamondin tree. In the past year and a half, it has produced exactly three calamondins, one of which looked ripe enough for harvest this morning.



I expected the fruit to fall off the branch at the slightest caress, but the damn thing did not yield without a fight, during which it suffered a veritable scalping at my brutish fingers.



Wonder of wonders: the fruit, which measured maybe an inch and a half in diameter, was a perfectly formed specimen of the ideal citrus. Underneath the thin but hardy skin, there were six perfect little sections of calamondin.





Naturally I separated a section and put it in my mouth. It was a tiny grenade of tart; I was overwhelmed by the thing and had to spit it out immediately. There was no sweetness to it at all. A later Wikipedia investigation revealed that the calamondin is extraordinarily sour and that only its peel carries any sweetness.

I am thinking of adding an orange tree to the farm.