Where are your feet planted?

I think a lot about my feet. They are my foundations, after all: the roots to my tree pose in yoga, the vehicle for exploration, a way to connect to the earth ( those long solitary hikes in the canyons north of Malibu), and the key to my mobility (even when it's just those twenty steps I take to get in my car to drive to my next destination).

Longhouse ladder, Northern Vietnam.

I thought a lot about my feet when I was traveling through Southeast Asia. I was backpacking after all, so my foundations were taking on another 15 or so kilograms and an untold number of kilometers.

And I've owned a lot of shoes. Not necessarily the ones that immediately spring to mind when a woman mentions shoes, either. I'm talking about trail runners, cross trainers, MBTs and well-made boots. I'm talking about moccasins, cork-soles, clogs and comfort-engineered flats. Though you might find a pair of patent leather pumps for fancy occasions amongst the Clarks and Danskos, I've invested in lots of different shoes to keep my body in healthy alignment and happily pain free.

I took two pairs of shoes with me on my trip: a brand new pair of light, low top hikers purchased four weeks prior to my trip from the local sporting goods store that was going out of business, and a very old pair of Teva sandals that I purchased the day I started UCLA back in 2001.

Angkored feet. Pre Rup, City of Angkor.

I've hated those sandals for years (about ten years, now that I see the figures in front of me). They are light gray synthetic material with coral accents. In theory, they can take me slipping through rivers, get kicked off by the campfire and be equally supportive pounding the city pavement. In reality, they always made my sensitive right knee ache a bit and my feet kind of stinky from the incubation of sweat and dirt on the plastic petri dish sole for hours at a time. And I guess I was always a little grossed out to see the swirling patterns of dirt crusted into my toe prints at the end of a day and mirrored like a Rorschach blot inside the sandals.

What I noticed in traveling, though, is how my feet toughened up. My first hint of it was on the beach in Nha Trang. There is little else to do in this central Vietnam town except enjoy the waterfront. I woke up, put on my swimsuit, grabbed my towel, and walked across the street to the beach after a quick breakfast of fresh banana, pineapple, dragonfruit and mango and very strong french-style coffee.

I peeled off my sandals to sink into the beach experience, and walked to a high spot on the sand near a pair of European tourists. They were sipping green bottles of Saigon beer and frolicking in and out of the waves. (I checked my watch and it was before 9am. No judgment. I don't usually drink beer at 8 in the morning, but then I don't usually sunbathe that early either.)

Occheuteal Beach, Sihanoukville, Cambodia.

My feet burned on the coarse white grains as I walked. The kind of warm, tingly burn you get when you put your feet in hot bathwater after a day on the ski slopes. I spent a day and a half walking along the turquoise verge of the South China Sea, and eventually I stopped noticing the hot jagged-edged sand.

Other jarring experiences befell these tender feet throughout the trip. After a rainy day of hiking in the hills of Sapa in the far north of Vietnam, right near the border with China, I lost my big toe nails. My feet were water logged and pruney when I finally peeled off my soggy socks. A white ridge ran the width of my big toenails where the top layer of the nail sort of buckled up. Eventually the last quarter inch of the nail simply peeled away.

I got hot spots on my instep and the ball of my left foot. Blisters puffed up on the inside of my pinkie toe, which likes to sneak under the adjacent fourth toe when I'm trekking long distances, much to its disadvantage. Bedbugs and mosquitoes left a constellation of itchy red bites of varying magnitude that it took all my discipline to ignore. And I got used to seeing my feet dirty, powdered with the red dust of Cambodia.

The last day of my trip I stood on the veranda of Wat Mahathat in Bangkok, staring at the feet of a saffron-clad monk in front of me. "Stepping, lifting, forwarding," he instructed us in the mindfulness of walking meditation. I looked at his feet. Callouses lightened the caramelly skin in spots, and a rim of white, dry, cracks defined his heels and big toes. The toenails were craggy. He lifted one foot slowly, where it hovered over the cool pavers momentarily lost in his robes, until the heel softly met the gray stone.

Reclining Buddha. Nha Trang, Vietnam.

By the time I got back to Los Angeles I loved my old sandals. I kept grabbing for them despite the chill winter temperatures that normally bring me chilblains this time of year. I was used to having my feet exposed to the elements, and the skin was thicker, more resilient. My foundations had been transformed.

Last week I got my first pair of five finger shoes, those little split toe sheaths that are as close to barefoot as any urban dweller would sensibly be. I recall I almost broke my toes when I tried on a pair in a sporting goods shop in Hawaii in 2010. I would be hiking through ochre mud up to a waterfall on Kauai and I was sure my Tevas would not hack it. I'd heard how five finger shoes can improve your muscle tone and bring you back into alignment, and my yoga teacher swore by the barefoot lifestyle. "These things have got to be terrible for you. Not enough cushion between me and the world. I'm sure they'll make my knee/back/hip hurt," I thought to myself in that shoe store in Hawaii. My inner skeptic and reluctant consumer battled with the sunshine-and-lollipop part of me that is sure the open market has a fix for anything that ills me.

Walking around town at the weekend in my new shoes I felt like a poster child for REI. But I could feel my feet. I felt light. And I got that there is nothing wrong with any of my shoes. Nor is there anything wrong with me that a pair of shoes will ameliorate. There is nothing wrong with my feet, which erstwhile spent so much time cloistered in Italian leather boots, pumiced to vulnerable smoothness, with toenails painted to a gainly shine. My feet have toughened up. It may hurt a bit when I make contact with the hard surfaces of the world. It may register in my feet, or in a more subtle place in my being. But those hard surfaces become less so the more mindfully I walk. I continue lifting and forwarding and stepping, noticing all the while where my feet are planted.

In Phnom Penh.

Postscript: as soon as my toenails finish growing back in I'm going to get a pedicure!

Worth a Thousand Words

A picture is worth a thousand words, but a smell can leave you speechless. It can take your breath away, reducing expression to phonemes and diphthongs: sigh, grunt, ick. Sounds that would never be spelled were it not for the Sunday comics.


I just returned from a six week journey in Southeast Asia. Yesterday I left Bangkok at 10am, connected in Shanghai, and arrived in Los Angeles around 4pm. All on a very, very long Wednesday. 


There was a hint of autumn in the air and the light, that slight golden crispness of late afternoon that makes my heart float a little. I was glad to be back in LA's embrace.


Tonight I took a walk around my neighborhood in West Hollywood. It was quiet. It is that lovely window between xmas and new year when the city smiles and rests. The evening air had a watery freshness. I strolled by rosemary and lavender bushes and drought resistant yards full of sculptural succulents and agave.


The sidewalk sparkled a bit in the high pressure sodium glow, an even, smooth right angled path washed free of detritus and edged with greenery.


I took hundreds of pictures in Southeast Asia. But in as many moments I just had to stop, glitteringly aware of the swirl around me that a camera can't capture. Sounds. Snippets of conversation. A brief altercation between young lovers on the street that made my heart tighten, or a conversation in sign language on a sidewalk in Bangkok that made me smile for human creativity.


And scents. The tropical heat and bodies and manic pace of life pressure cook everything into nuclear strength in Southeast Asia. As this was the mild season.


As I walked through the cool, simple almost odorless air of Los Angeles, these are some smells I recollect:

Offerings to Ly Thai To, Hanoi.

burning. incense burns constantly in vietnam. a woman lights a single stick and, clasped between flatted palms, she waves it in the air before placing on her fruit cart. small shrines on the street curb in front of a house, or affixed to a telephone pole before a business, hold a flower, a portrait, a few joss sticks poking out of sand. massive censers in public parks push smoke into the air.


burning leaves. gathered garden waste smolders in yards. it is warm and feels like fall. the incense and wood smoke waft in and out of each other, weaving a rich warm tapestry, a hug.


the rainbow of the marketplace. fruit in various state of ripeness or rot, the cold metal smell of blood from open animal carcasses. the tang of drying fish.

this insistent freshness meets the smell of cooked food on the perimeter of the raw goods market. women squat beside cookpots, faces obscured as they watch their work: sweet earthy yams over charcoal; the bright smell of corn in roiling pots of water; the headiness of bubbling cooking oil working springrolls, fresh bricks of tofu or bananas a golden crisp.

Statue of the King of Fruits in Kampot, Cambodia.

the perplexing smell of durian. and the ghost of it. on the east moat road in chiang mai i passed a sidewalk seller with rectangular cello wrapped trays of the golden strips. walking back after dinner and craving a sweet bit of fruit, i looked for the little cello trays. they were gone, but i knew where he had been. i could smell the empty husks that must've been behind darkened metal shutters.

waste. animal, human, raw, rank.


five pots of steaming rainbow-colored rice on a xoi cart: green, pink, deep aubergine, orange, brown. white speckled with cedar-colored raw peanuts. a glutinous pillow of starchy steam caressed passersby.


rain falling and mist rising from the terraced hills in sapa, in the hills of northern vietnam.

Phnom Penh

synthetic perfumes. strawberry hand soap, whatever the local laundry used for my floralized clothes, the rolls of scented toilet paper that ribbon up out of square candy colored dispensers on restaurant tables for napkins, rosy brand wet wipes. i could not wait to get home and wash my clothes with unscented soap.


devilishly black coffee beans steaming on woven trays on a side street in phnom penh.

unfiltered exhaust. fumes so potent they were almost chunky. emissions controls on cars and petrol pumps in california were contemporaneous with my birth, so the rich, cloying backspray from thousands of scooters took some getting used to.

garlands of jasmine that beckon you forward before you even see them, a sensual bath that half closes your eyes. offerings to a thousand buddhas and the buddha in each of us. 

Offering at Angkor Thom

The sense of smell roots you wholly to the present. It's like a moment in architecture: you round a corner and find yourself in perfect relationship with right angles of stone, a decorative flourish, the aspect of the sun's light, the intersection of building and nature and your own fragile life. You are caught in full awareness of yourself in present space, as a rush of chemicals tingles in your blood. And all you can do is stop and take it in.

Invocation

This past August I made my first trip to the Playa. This is the familiar and affectionate term used by attendees of Burning Man to refer to their home away from home.


The whole trip was deeply spiritual. An effigy of a man is the hub of the space, a center in nothing, the middle of desert expanse. He is burned on the final Saturday night. There are fireworks, there is screaming, drums, dancing. Firespinners spin. When the man burns there is chaos. 


There is also a temple built each year. It is a reflective place where people leave their pain, loss and grief to be consumed by the flames. The Temple burns on Sunday night. People are transfixed. This year it was called the Temple of Transition. There is total silence when the Temple burns. Total.


The burn hollows us out, relieves us of wooden weight. We then re-create.


I wrote a poem for a Rite of Passage taken by the women I camped with this year. The poem was a gift I received a few weeks before I left LA for the Playa. It was a moonlit night. From a quiet space, it welled up. 


I share it here as a reminder of the strength and beauty that inspires us to be wholly who we are, newly who we are, wherever we are: gifts, on and off the Playa. 

The Temple of Transition, Tuesday.

Invocation:


We come to the verge, where earth and ocean meet

With the support of our sisters

Beautiful women, all

We invoke the strength of these elements

That hold and embolden us

As we be in the world

Beautiful women, all

This beach

shows no footprints

Not because no one has come before

But as testament to the power

Of the earth,

The air

The water

to hold, absorb, transform

every gesture we make

beautiful women, all

Under the moon and the stars, we close our eyes

Stars bright as a sun, or dim and distant

We turn inwards

And with a vertical gaze

Sense the stillness

Hear the quiet

And be held in the calm darkness

Inside us

Beautiful women, all

We invoke the earth

The air

The water

The safety and strength of what creates us

these elements that hold us

Beautiful women, all

We turn inwards,

Safe to gaze at all that’s inside

With the support of our sisters

The sun moon and stars

We are curious observers

Of the marvels of our selves.

We explore.

Follow the footprints, our traces on this earth:

We acknowledge, we honor, we clearly see

what we’ve done

Who we’ve been

What we’ve created

We discover, in the light of these stars, our sisters

So we can offer it all

To who we are becoming

The best we keep, the rest we release

We invoke the power of

Earth and ocean

It’s immersion, conversion, transmutation, transformation

And humbly seat ourselves

Before ourselves

Before one another

Beautiful women, all

In stillness, peace and trust

For all that we become.
Beautiful women, all.

The Temple of Transition, Sunday.

Suburban Harvest

Every year my brother and his family celebrate the harvest festival at Ardenwood Historic Farm in Fremont, CA. You may recall Fremont as the stateside setting for Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kiterunner. Amir settles in this quiet suburban town after his dramatic escape from his native Kabul. With the largest Afghani population outside of Afghanistan, Fremont is known as "little Kabul" and hosts incredible culinary delights such as fluffy bolani and pillowey aushak at its local Afghani restaurants.

My introduction to harvest was through a different but equally exotic culinary experience.

The main bounty at Ardenwood's harvest is the dried corncobs which feed the animals who reside on the farm. Those same cobs go through an amazing transformation in the common kitchen with the addition of a paper bag and a microwave oven. I was introduced to this wonder while watching Finding Nemo at my brother's house. One cob, folded into a plain paper bag, three minutes. I stood with my nieces in delighted anticipation staring at the glowing box (the one in the kitchen) listening to the staccato explosions inside the bag. Opening it revealed the lightest, freshest popcorn in the world. Half popped kernels still clung to the cob like snow on a branch.

It's become a tradition to visit my brother's family at the tail end of October, when I'm in San Francisco for the Fall Antiques Show, and I've selected the raw materials for my jack o' lanterns from the Ardenwood pumpkin patch three years running. This year I visited during the weekend of harvest at the start of the month, so not only did I find my jack o' lantern to be, I had my first chance to pick future popcorn in the Ardenwood cornfields.

Entering the farm you pass neat rows of crops bordered with bright flowers: lettuces, peas, pumpkins, depending on the season. A small stand just inside the main gate sells freshly picked produce. 

Ardenwood is a working turn of the century farm, and the site of a Victorian home and garden built by George Washington Patterson in 1847. Eucalyptus lined pathways guide you through the grounds. You might encounter Tucker, the massive quadruped in charge of the horse drawn railroad. You'll find a smithy banging the fire out of metal to produce workable farm tools and practical art. The kids can muscle the old water pump or crank the handle of the cider press to extract the golden juice from winter's best fruit. You can commune with the animals who eat the corn you're about to pick: cows, pigs, sheep and goats among them. 

During harvest women in bonnets and plain cotton dresses bake cookies in old wood burning stoves and serve them to the guests. Those same women hand out gloves and huge hemp sacks at the edge of the corn rows to all those who come to pick.

Walking down the aisle between fields of indian corn on the south and yellow corn on the north, my feet sank into the dark black dirt. This is not the dirt I'm used to, that pale powder in empty lots in the city. This, in fact, is not dirt at all, but soil, rightly distinguished for its richness. Against the pale color of the dried out stalks the earth was radiant. We took big empty sacks and work gloves (the corn scratches at your skin so even on this hot October day we wore jeans and long sleeves) and parted the stalks to enter the corn. 

The dry stalks rustled, and the closely planted rows hushed the sounds around us. I quickly lost sight of my nieces and sister in law as they pushed through to find the downward hanging husks that indicate unpicked corn inside the tightly bound package. I dropped the scratchy burlap sack from my shoulder and grabbed a husk nearby. I could feel the weight of the hard corn inside, and began to pull back the papery vanilla leaves a handful at a time. I plucked the yellow cob and dropped it into the open sack waiting at my feet. 

There was something soothing about grabbing the stalk, pulling the husk back, plucking the corn, adding it to the growing weight of the sack. Working my way down the line all I really saw was the stalk towering before me, corn filling my vision completely, my hands working purposefully, almost rhythmically. I added cobs to the bag, hoisted it over my shoulder, and moved on to another stalk. 

Looking back down the row, each emptied husk looked like an overblown flower. The tall stalks were covered with the pale flames of them.

With our bags getting heavy we moved to the other field where the indian corn grew. These stalks were more heavily picked, and more thinly planted: the indian corn is, after all, only decorative. The stalks were bent low where people had pulled them low to grab for corn at the top. I began to pull back the husks to reveal the cranberry glow inside, when my nieces stopped me. "We like to play a game where we guess the color inside as we shuck them." So I began to wrest the whole unopened packages off the stalk and plop them in the bag.

When we had picked our load (it was a great lesson in greed - the 4 foot sacks are incredibly heavy even at half capacity so you feel the burden in proportion to your movie treat gluttony). We carried them down to the eucalyptus grove to clean them up and divide them. We did our work on a carpet of discarded husks. The farm takes a third or half of what you pick to fill the cribs for the year, and you get to keep the other portion. This is all on the honor system - no weighing or bag checks, you simply fill your grocery sacks, deposit some and carry some out. 

My nieces began to play their shucking game, one calling out a color of the rainbow as the other pulled back the leaves to reveal the hues hiding inside. The colors of the corn were simply breathtaking. Purple and red and yellow. A single cob could have every color of the spectrum. And each kernel itself was a gem: a close look showed swirls of color on each shiny fat kernel, like someone had streaked red ink through the white, pink or orange. It reminded me of marbles, excellent cookery, those tubes of plastic paste I got as a kid.  It came with a straw and you blew a blop of the paste into a particolored balloon.

We made a trip to the pumpkin patch after depositing our corn haul in the van. Standing in the black soil I watched the gourds bask in the deepening afternoon light. Families meandered, each member looking for the perfect shape, the fruit that would best express their vision. Children were dwarfed by some of the largest ones. Others, a deeper red orange, were squat and close to the ground. Those droplets of autumn color, the orange of new beginnings, creativity and joy, glowed on the rich earth. It was warmth, perfection, fullness. I held all that bounty in my heart this harvest.

Ardenwood Historic Farm
Fremont, CA
http://www.ebparks.org/parks/ardenwood

Salang Pass Restaurant
Fremont, CA

http://www.salangrestaurant.com/

Eat it or wear it!

In my early twenties I worked for an English firm that specialized in toiletries and fine comestibles. The connection between food and soap was jarring and unnatural to some (the same people who squinch up their noses at my favorite lavender fondant chocolates from Harrod’s of London, or rose saffron ice cream at Mashti Malone’s in Hollywood, or perhaps even the juniper nose out front of a Pliny the Elder from Russian River brewing). But in fact the best soaps and lotions as well as the best lunches come straight from the garden. Nature inside and out.

With the trend toward natural organic products we’ve all seen soaperies alongside berries at our local farmers market, and we've trod the miles of aisles in Whole Foods dedicated to lotions and potions, natural toothpaste and cosmetics. If you’re looking for a local gem from Portland come to Camamu.

Two lovely women named Sarah and Laurie handmake an amazing range of soaps in a converted residential property on Clinton street in a neighborhood full of artisanal breakfast joints. You can stop in to Compote for a spoonful of their signature berry goodness, then hop across the street to gobble up soaps that are totally natural, vegetable and gorgeous.

A table piled high with every variety of soap greets you when you enter the Camamu. I stood transfixed reading the simple ingredient labels and indulgently sniffing each bar. The names of their signtuare blends made me smile. The Lovely la LouLi (rhymes with Patchouli) is a bright orange bar crusted with safflower petals. Atlas Scrubbed, Lucky Lemongrass, Green Goddess, Zen Yen. Also on display are Sarah Love’s handcrafted inspirational works: decks of brightly lettered round cards that remind you to release expectations or enjoy your body with every breath.

When my olfactory glands were finally exhausted from breathing in the soapy goodness, I looked around. The shop, properly speaking, is a workshop. Brightly colored canvases painted by a local artist decorate the walls. The center of the space, though, is a huge worktable in the middle of the old house kitchen. A huge 60 gallon vat of olive oil stands next to the side door. A main ingredient in all of the soaps, the barrel gets refilled about every 6 weeks.

Each Camamu bar is a cornucopia of amazing ingredients that you might pull from the pantry for lunch. When I visited, Sarah was at work on about a 60 pounds of soap. The soap is made in batches in large trays that remind me of brownies in a cake pan.  Once the soap has set, the tray is sliced into bulk slabs with a custom wood and wire cutter, then further down into bars. Each tray weighs twenty pounds, which translates into 80 perfectly sized bars. Leaning in to a calmly speckled blue gray slab I inhaled the slight licorice scent of the neem flower. The mottled leopard print blocks contain coffee, perfect for the kitchen since the coffee naturally neutralizes odor.

I was smitten with the first Camamu bar I tried: Unreprentant Rose. The scent is as fresh and light as the rose blooming in your garden, rather than hyped up and perfumey, and the lather is soft and silky. My skins tends toward dry, and I was amazed at how soft and smooth I felt out of the shower, even on my face: healthy helpings of olive oil, milk, and the essential oils add the right blend of scent and moisture to each bar.


I stocked up on pooch bar shampoos for the sensitive-skinned dogs in my life. And I couldn’t leave without half a dozen yummy bath bars: another Unrepentant Rose for those days where I am feeling girly; sweet and mild Miel Oat; Rosehip Mint; the rich earthy scent and swirled brown and cream color of See The Forest Soap; and Lovely la LouLi.  My mouth watered reading about Hops in the Bath (hops are a natural anti-inflammatory), Chocolate Bliss which contains vanilla bean and cocoa, and the green tea infused Zen Yen. Which are destined for friends and which ones are for myself remains to be seen. 

The only bad thing about visiting the Camamu shop was the dozens of varieties I didn’t take home. Mildly therapeutic or just downright luscious scents like Summer Garden, with palmarosa and sweet orange, Queen Bee, with mallow and calendula, and naturally anti-microbial Turmeric Tonic are next on my list. Luckily, the lovely ladies at Camamu ship, so all the blends I didn’t take home this time are just a few clicks away.


And then, back home in Los Angeles, the quandary of which bar to pop open in the shower first. What a delectable treat.

Camamu

2021 SE Clinton Street

Portland, OR

http://camamusoap.com/

Perpetual Harvest

Sometimes something happens that makes your life feel small. You suddenly know something you didn't know before. Your eyes open to the presence of an entire universe you'd never considered. And all of a sudden, you’re just not sure.

I was cleaning out papers the other day and I came across a newspaper from Oak Glen, where I went apple picking for my birthday last year.

Oak Glen is an adorable if hoakey apple farm area on the way out to Palm Springs. You drive a short winding road off the main highway that takes you up out of the desert. All of sudden you're amidst fruit orchards, rows and rows of trees tucked into the contours of the hills. There are people in somewhat periodesque dress (bonnets and aprons, hats and suspenders), but there are also piles of apples, pears, melons. There are roadside turnoffs where you can taste freshly made cider or local apple blossom honey. And you can get your apple picker and comb the orchard aisles when the fall harvest is on.

The local paper and most of the orchards list the apples they're harvesting that year, and at what time. One of the larger farms had a market where you could try slivers of at least a dozen different varieties. (Sadly, the cider doughnuts seemed to be the bigger draw.) It was here in Oak Glen that I met members of my favorite fruit family that’d I’d never known: Red Astrakhan, Mutsu, and heirloom varieties like Winesap, too, which weren’t yet ready for picking.

How wonderful! As I wandered the orchard aisles and spied the ribbons fluttering from the branches where a scribbled name proclaimed the variety fruiting from the limbs I wondered why I’d never seen these at my local store. I mean, there were hundreds of apples here, surely enough for a few bins at a local grocer!

Leafing through last year’s harvest list in the Oak Glen paper I got to wondering what other apples I might find that I‘d never tasted. Or seen. The short list from just one of the local orchards included: Arkansas Black, Courtland, Double Red Delicious (double red? double delicious!) Starkey Delicious, Staymen Winesap and Virginia Winesap.

Growing up I picked a thousand apple stickers off my Washington apples, and knew that this is where all apples, certainly the best apples, come from.

Right?

When I googled apples I was taken by a suspicion that was quickly confirmed: there are distinct regional varieties of apples. There are common west coast and east coast apples. Northeast and southern apples. Apples I had never even heard of. Oh my god! It’s like someone gave me a nibble of forbidden fruit, and the dozen varieties I'd savored and loved for years, suddenly, were not enough. There was even more forbidden, or at least geographically inconvenient, fruit to be had. Get me outside this garden gate!

Stayman, Criterion, York Imperial. Devonshire Quarrenden, Ellison’s Orange. The Northern Spy. Northern Spy?! I must try this apple, which is described as: sprightly, acidic, moderately sweet, very crisp and juicy. (Wait, are they describing me?)

I pictured a drive down minor roads in the northeast amongst dense trees in the softer seasons between summer and fall, winter and spring. Much in the manner of wine tasting, stopping off for a nible of this variety, a taste of that hybrid. Just to see the waxy bloom and red blush of a Paula Red. Such a lyrical name, such a character.

As it turns out, there are 2,500 varieties of apples grown in the US, a mere 100 of which are grown commercially. There are 7,500 varietes grown worldwide. Imagine it: That is a different apple a day for over 20 years!

As Michael Pollan writes in Botany of Desire, "high in the hills of Kazakhstan, you can find an astounding variety of examples of what the apple could have been, from large purplish softballs to knobby green clusters." I for one am happy to have our current varieties as they are, "portable, durable conduits for sweetness." I just want more of them. 

Back at Oak Glen, the Fujis and Galas were quickly picked over, testament to the fond familiarity that our local grocers create by what they stock. And truly there was twinge of disappointment that I would miss the opportunity to pick some of my familiar favorites here in the orchard amidst the excitement of a half dozen unknown varieties.

And the apples I know, I love. Red Delicious, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, Pink Lady or Jazz or Honeycrisp, depending on the year, the crop, the culinary trend. They are the perfect fruit in my eye: they've been found in my salad and my spicy sun dahl; grilled along with Jarlsberg in my sandwich; sliced with a sprinkling of bee pollen, a dash or cinnamon or a luscious dollop of peanut butter.

Below is a list of about seventy common table apples, aka dessert and dual purpose apples, that comes up on Wikipedia. And this doesn't include cooking or cider apples!

Adams Pearmain

Alkmene  

Ambrosia*

Antonovka

Arlet

Ariane

Arkansas Black*

Ashmead's Kernel

Aurora Golden Gala

Baldwin

Ben Davis

Blenheim Orange

Beauty of Bath

Belle de Boskoop

Bohemia

Braeburn*

Brina

Cameo*

Clivia

Cornish Gilliflower

Cortland

Cox's Orange Pippin

Cripps Pink (Pink Lady)*

Delbarestivale® delcorf

Delbardivine® delfloga

Discovery

Ecolette

Egremont Russet

Elstar

Empire

Esopus Spitzenburg

Fuji*

Gala*

Ginger Gold

Golden Orange

Golden Delicious* 

Granny Smith*

Gravenstein*

Grimes Golden

Haralson

Honeycrisp*

Idared

James Grieve

Jazz*

Jersey Black 

Jonagold*

Jonathan*

Junaluska

Karmijn de Sonnaville 

Knobbed Russet 

Liberty

Macoun

McIntosh* 

Mutsu*

Newtown Pippin

Nickajack

Nicola

Paula Red

Pink Pearl

Pinova*

Rajka

Ralls Genet

Rambo

Red Delicious*

Rhode Island Greening

Ribston Pippin

Rome*

Roxbury Russet

Rubens (Civni)

Santana

Saturn

Sekai Ichi

Spartan

Stayman

Sturmer Pippin

Summerfree

Taliaferro

Topaz

York Imperial

Zestar

I starred the apples in the list I know I’ve had. Back at home, even in the blossoming foodie culture of Los Angeles, I’ll probably never see some of these in my store. We all know the monoculture monopoly of the local grocery store: an apple a day means one of a limited few varieties. Even if I never meet a Taliaferro at my neighborhood Whole Foods, I'll still pick apples, wherever they're from.

Equinox, equilux

Yesterday marked the autumnal equinox.

I hunger for fall every year, and all that the season symbolizes to me:


Turning inward, nesting, drawing close to family, letting the crispy leaves that are dying on the trees fall, and become mulch for the next growth season.


It's my favorite season of celebration, too: 


My birthday, on the ides of October. 
Halloween, which inspires me equally to revel in cute spookiness and honor the macabre.
Thanksgiving, a day to continue practicing gratitude and welcoming abundance.


This year more than most, with so many things to shed and so much abundance becoming manifest, the equinox seemed to me a pivot point within the ultimate balance: equal parts dark and light. 


I read a little more about the nature of the equinox this year, and realized that, like most "holy days" I actually knew little about what I was celebrating:





"Although the word equinox is often understood to mean "equal day and night," this is not strictly true. For most locations on earth, there are two distinct identifiable days per year when the length of day and night are closest to being equal; those days are referred to as the equiluxes to distinguish them from the equinoxes. Equinoxes are points in time, but equiluxes are days. By convention, equiluxes are the days where sunrise and sunset are closest to being exactly 12 hours apart."*












By the time I understood the equinox, it had already passed. The sun had moved on past the equator, that moment in time was gone. What I was really celebrating was the equilux, and I didn't even know when that was!


What a beautiful notion to bring to bear on celebration: it is always just a moment in time. It is always about what we are holding in our hearts and minds, what is inspiring our spirits. No matter the season, we get to hold the dark and the light as long as we like.


*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinox