essence

“the permanent as contrasted with the accidental element of being”

When I walked down the hall, I could smell the apples stored in the back room, in a box on cool tiles. They won’t last, I thought. And I thought of the pies I made a few weeks ago, unbaked, frozen for winter. The crumbles, one for a friend and two for us. The apples eaten with chunks of cheese, sliced into salad, melted with shallots to have with dinner.

They won’t last. So yesterday I put 5 pounds into the slow-cooker, cored but not peeled, with sugar (cane and coconut palm), preserved ginger, a vanilla bean. 10 hours on low. Then overnight I left the crock by an open window to keep it cool. This morning I used an immersion blender to make a smooth butter (I forgot to remove the vanilla bean until it was too late but the blender is so good that it hardly matters; there are just a few flecks of vanilla here and there), along with a few tablespoons of minced fresh rosemary.

Reader, it’s delicious, the essence of fall days. I processed 10 jars for 15 minutes and there’s half a jar leftover; I’ll have some with my lunch–a chunk of aged cheddar on a slice of cheese and sage bread I made the other day.

This morning, swimming, I wondered how much longer I’ll go down to the lake first thing, before the sun, before anyone else, fish surfacing for insects, ravens loud in the trees, and the sand scribbled with tracks: raccoons, ducks, those ravens, the heart-shaped hooves of deer. The water is cool but not as cool as the air. Yesterday it was 9 degrees. I didn’t look this morning.

Yesterday I asked John to help me with a long length–4 meters– of coarse linen. When I’ve finished another load of wood, he said. He’s been splitting wood beyond the garden, cedars that we had taken down the year before last because they’d died during the heat dome. (Cedar’s not the best firewood but it will supplement fir and alder.) When he’d emptied the wheelbarrow, he held one end of the linen while I twisted it and wrapped it with hemp string. I won’t have time until the weekend to prepare a dye vat but I have other fabric waiting: more linen, wrapped around pvc pipe, cotton with beach stones tied in a random pattern, and some old damask tablecloths (stained, bought for a dollar each at a thrift shop) to overdye for the texture I’m hoping will result. I am hoping to preserve summer’s sky, the long blue mornings, the reflection of clouds in the surface of the lake. And when the fabric is dyed and washed and ready, I’ll think about how to use it: quilts, curtains, a tablecloth.

The Merriam Webster online definition of essense:

the permanent as contrasted with the accidental element of being

I like that. Is apple butter more permanent than the accidental element of being an apple? Flavour distilled, concentrated, preserved? Cedar rounds on the forest floor split and stacked into a firewood wall, each piece finding its way into our woodstove where even now, as I write, a warm fire is burning? Indigo powder made into a starter with a reducing agent and a base, the stock added to hot water, and after resting, prepared fabric added, given a number of timed dips with a chance to oxidize, rinsed, unwrapped, rinsed again, hung to dry, and admired over and over again. Then used. I think ahead to beds weighted down with quilts, a few apples remaining in the box in the back room, the fire damped down for the night.

             …there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
                        –Robert Frost, from “After Apple Picking”