Singing Down the Seasons

Yesterday was the Autumn Equinox, a wonderful day, as far as I'm concerned (I love fall, beyond many other things). I spent it enveloped in a dense fog in Port Elizabeth, Maine, 100 feet from the sea. It was eerie and gorgeous. I was in Maine for a Slavs retreat, at the home of one of the Slavs, a lovely, wooden-smelling 100-year-old house. It was a fun weekend, full of singing (three 2-hour rehearsals on Saturday), wonderful food (kugel, chicken, spinach pie, and challah from the Jewish center at Yale, and lobster, clams, potatoes, fresh sweet corn, and blueberry corn bread courtesy of the parents of the Slav at whose house we were staying), and a lot of tea drinking--there's nothing more comforting than tea on a foggy day. At night, we would all fall asleep to nothing but the mufled sound of the sea; It was gloriously quiet. (Though the noise of Elm Street has perturbed me surprisingly little, it was wonderful to get very, very far away from it.) Today dawned glorious and clear, the sun shining off the ocean like hope or faceted glass.

The drive back from Maine was a lovely one as well (we were mostly in the dark on the way there--it took us six hours). The trees are beginning to look as though they are aflame, the deep red of the zarza (Virginia Creeper) climbing up the trunks of trees and telephone poles. Coming from a larger state like NM, it's strange to drive for five hours and have passed through four states. It takes that long to get to Alamogordo from Santa Fe. At a rest stop just past the Massachusetts turnpike, there was the most curious and wonderful thing:a tiny farmer's market--really tiny. It consisted of three stall, two of which were selling apples and squash, the third selling honey and other bee products. It was an adorable thing. I bought a miniature pumpkin for a dollar--tis fall.


Though there isn't much chile to be found in Connecticut, you can find it on NPR--the link I posted will lead you to an article on their website about New Mexico chile--I was very excited to see that. I was also excited to recieve a package from my mother containing two small chiles--chrismas, thank you.