Dare I say it? The weather at Pleasant Pond is lovely. Last night - though not a full moon, that is tomorrow - the moon was exceedingly bright and large, and the loons were in excellent form, calling to each other from every corner of the pond, beckoning, teasing, coaxing; it was a noisy orgy of loons out there. It would be a challenge to even the finest loon-call-imitator out there (you know who you are) to replicate the audacity of the love songs last night on the pond.
And if you have not heard enough about cucumbers this summer, and who could ever hear enough about the versatile cucumbers?
While making corn fritters on the vast wood burning stove I noted that right after the recipe for corn fritters in the 1967 edition of
The Joy of Cooking is the section of cucumbers, which begins thus:
“How often the Japanese draw these decorative plants! That their formal values were missed when the cold weather came was poignantly noted by Isaiah when he said, “As desolate as a cottage in a cucumber garden abandoned in winter.””More tidbits like that, and my book on cucumbers comes nearer and nearer to a reality.
(Lest you think we suddenly have acquired Internet at the pond, never fear, we have not. I am just now ensconced in a leather sofa at Northern Outdoors, a lodge for rafters, hunters and beer drinkers, not necessarily in that order, where there are no less than 8 stuffed deer heads, one huge moose head (2 of us could comfortably sit in the hollows of his antlers)over the stone fireplace, 1 stuffed wolf (the whole thing), 1 stuffed beaver (ditto whole) and one creature I can't identify. They also have Wi-Fi.)
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