days both good and old

Whatever happened to the days when I used to write a post nearly every other day? I was just doing some reading, back to December 2004, in preparation of the big to-do I'm going to have for my fifth blog birthday, and I realized that I would knit together scraps of the day to present to my blog readers about every 3 or 4 days! And, if I may say so myself, they were quite well written!

It's also funny how there are moments that I actually don't remember anymore, like the moment where I tasted the strawberry jam in winter and felt transported back to summer. Or the moment where I watched two dogs, that I called Scrap and Shepherd, duke it out with doggy joy on the snowy meadow of Odell Park. This is why I'm glad I blog, to remember things like this years later, and in a way, to remember how I saw the world then.

I'm thinking very seriously of printing off all five years of Huminbean, sometime in 2008, and putting them in a very nice binder and keeping it for myself. If I can get my old printer working again (it will take a downloaded driver burnt onto a CD), then I just may be in business. If not, there's a place in town that will print it for me, but due to the oh-so-lovely usefulness of technology today, they can't print it double-sided. Thus, it would use up twice as much paper as I would like to use. And considering that a project of this scope will take up about 400 pages, it matters whether it's 200 (double-sided) or 400 (not double-sided).

In the meantime, we're getting more snow, and true to form, it is cold white fluff that makes our neighbourhood look like a Christmas card. Sometimes it even feels a little surreal to be walking down the road to my neighbour's house, like I'm in a card, like I've fallen into it by mistake.

short(er) and sweet

(Credit goes to the "Iris Folding" website at http://www.irisfolding.circleofcrafters.com/ for the photo. This is a technique of folding paper to make cards and pictures, that I discovered along with this photograph. Crafters in the audience, check it out!)

Time passes for everyone for different reasons -- busy-ness, healing, lack of noticing, noticing as hard as one can -- but it still passes. Here we are heading into late July, the year more than half gone by, our lives ticking along as if they didn't know we wanted to stop and reflect just a bit more. So whether you prefer "F" to stand for "fiddlesticks," "fudge," or something a little stronger, we can all say a collective: "WTF !?!?"

However, since no amount of rambling will make time go any slower, I'll move on. This is also because it's truly summer now: we're even getting hot weather in Cape Breton, imagine that! At least, when it's not raining, that is.

Hot weather = less energy to write or read long tracts, and it also = more outdoor, fun stuff to do. Therefore I'm going to prove that that I can be brief and concise, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and save us all some energy in these days of hot, hot heat.

It's strawberry season here -- everything's a little late this year -- and the other night Mum got a flat (12 baskets) from Hank's Farm in Millville. We sat down in the living room with the baskets, bowls and knives, in front of a movie, our yearly tradition. (This year the film was Pedro Almodovar's Volver.) We chop the stems off, then chop each berry into a few pieces, quickly filling a big bowl with glistening, ruby-red fruit. We then freeze the pieces in small bags, ensuring a strawberry supply all winter long.

As I worked, my fingers turned an incriminating crimson, which matched the film perfectly: Volver is set in La Mancha and Madrid, and the screen is lush with beautiful food, houses, and dark-haired women, and everywhere the color red in clothes, cars, red peppers, and so on. The scarlet berries we chopped were so ripe that when we ate the odd one (or ten), it seemed to disintegrate on the tongue with barely any pressure, the water and sugar of the berry in a precise, sweet balance. Who says there's no such thing as perfection?

I hope you're able to taste good, ripe, locally-grown fruits and veggies, wherever you are this summer. Nothing makes time slow down, but these come awfully close.