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Tuesday, August 12, 2014

August Flavors


I've done my share of complaining about August.  The heat, the drought, the seed ticks, the weeds, and, when I was a kid, the end of the summer and the start of school again.  Sometimes I wish August could be stricken from the calendar.  But August has its own magic.  There are hazy, soft mornings and deeply still afternoons with only the sound of whirring insects.  The light changes, the sun grows lower, the shadows longer, the nights cooler.  The court of High Summer is bowing to make way for mellower energies. Pods, seeds and grasses are ripening and the air takes on a distinctive August smell - goldenrod, walnut hulls and one hundred other scents mixed together, maybe dying beetles, who knows?


A slight but faintly pleasant melancholy settles over me on those days, because, although summer is dying, Autumn will soon bring its invigorating energy.

And for those dog day afternoons, there is sumac-ade to fortify the body and spirit.  We have two kinds of sumac growing on our property, maybe more, but I've found the winged sumac, with drooping clusters of purplish fruits, and the smooth sumac with upright, fire-engine red cones.  Making sumac tea is as easy as picking the clusters of berries when they're ripe (along about now) soaking them briefly in room temperature water and possibly squeezing a few times if you're in a hurry, straining, and drinking.  It has a very pleasant sour taste with fruity undertones.  The taste comes from a sticky resin on the outside of the seeds, so pick it on a dry day when rain hasn't washed the resin off.  Sumac-ade is very high in vitamin C and antioxidants.  Plus it's nice to lick your fingers after handling it and enjoy the sprightly sour flavor.


In the art world, I have been struggling mightily with a collage that started out with no particular idea in mind (never a good idea!) except to play with shapes and colors.  I began it as an abstract but it wasn't working.  Then it briefly morphed into another seascape, but I wasn't happy with that either.  Finally I saw that it was supposed to be a tree, so I'm trying to make a tree emerge from the hodge-podge chaos.  Maybe I'll succeed - I certainly hope so after putting so much time and materials into it.  It still looks ghastly, but it has potential, so I'll keep working on it.  I want a new collage to enter in a fiber arts show at the end of the month.  I hesitate to show it, but after all, chaos is part of the artistic process!  Maybe the mellowness of August will help me tame this unruly beast.



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