A Reverie on Snowflakes and Squash

  I have been seeing my friends writing about snow on their facebook walls all day...I am so jealous.  If there is one thing I will miss being in Dakar, it is the changing of the seasons. I have already accepted that Autumn has passed me by.  No crisp apples off of the trees, nor red leaves lying on the ground for me to collect and press in my numerous anthologies, dictionaries and thesauri.  I was green with envy today when I read about the snow hitting the East Coast.  I am fully expecting some snow when I come home in December, even if I do freeze my butt off because it is so warm here! Unfortunately I will not get to catch any of the "good" winter snowflakes on my tongue since I will be leaving again January 1...Lucy from Peanuts warns the viewer of "Charlie Brown's Christmas" about the sub-par quality of December snowflakes, *sigh*.  And for the record, Lucy made no comment on October snowflakes, I cannot imagine she would have much to say, and if she did, it would be sassy.

 

I suppose the one benefit of living in Dakar is the ever-present array of fresh fruit and vegetables.  Soon mango season will be wrapping up, but let's be serious, I'm allergic anyway!  In place of mangoes, Senegalese oranges will flood the market and I will sit back waiting for the first mangoes to arrive from the south in May. To counterbalance the good fortune of fresh fruit all year round, I will find myself missing squash: spaghetti, butternut, acorn, buttercup, mother hubbard; you name it, I have cooked it in some form.  I stocked up on squash at the Geneva farmer's market last fall for fear that I would be broke in January and my only source of veggies would be a squash...you would imagine my surprise when after one of our band-in-basement parties my darling mother hubbard was in the rafters!  I do not know how it got there, but I guess she got her boogie on before I got my boogie on by cooking it up in a squash stew, yum!

 

 On the vein of fruits and vegetables I was reminded of this classic William Carlos Williams poem, enjoy! And remember, I will actually be able to eat ripe plums when you are pulling out the tomato sauce you canned in August and the squash you stored away in September, mwahaha!

 

William Carlos Williams

This Is Just to Say 

 

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold 


Also, if Becca reads this, I probably could have written a similar poem of apology every time I stumbled across your mother's pesto in the fridge...I just could NOT help myself, I am so weak, haha.