Eve, Persephone, and Thanksgiving

Today my usual pomegranate-seeder is on her way to Valparaiso for Thanksgiving so I got this messy but beautiful task myself. (Valparaiso, that's fun to say!)  I have always loved seeing the beautiful arils when you open the plain fruit, they sparkle like cut jewels hidden away inside. 

I have a theory that the pomegranate is the fruit offered to Eve in the garden. I would have taken it, myself. That would also explain how the Persephone story got its start. 

Why do we have pomegranate at Thanksgiving? We cut a pineapple in quarters and then chunk each quarter and replace the pieces in the shell, and set three of them out on a platter. Then we sprinkle with pomegranate seeds. I did this one year because I thought it would be pretty, and my brother announced, "Look, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria... and some of the pilgrims have been swept overboard." And thus a tradition was born.

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I will give you the treasures of darkness and the hoards in secret places, that you may know that it is I, the LORD, the God of Israel, who call you by your name. ~ Isaiah 45:3

Please Do Not Mention My Housekeeping Skills

Look at this, would ya? I went to check through my random extra spices if I have bulk whole cloves or if they need to go on my shopping list for making orange pomanders. I didn't find any but instead found this bottle of yellow food color, with the lid so so corroded:

So. Not sure what you are thinking but my thoughts ran pretty much like this: Look at how corrosive yellow is. What does that mean about hope? I decided to scratch corrosive for something more positive. What do you think about transformative? I like that one. Hope is transformative. It cannot even be bottled up (think of Pandora, ye random thinkers) but escapes the bottle. I like that.

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apologies for the excessively rambly nature of this entry. Mr Music is reading through Histories of Herodotus and believe me, I stuck to the point by comparison. 

One Moment, Please

Anyone else have a washing machine like this? My washing machine has a countdown timer. Only it is totally erratic... it will rest on 2 minutes for about half an hour... sometimes... and sometimes for only a few seconds from 2 minutes till zero... 

It just may be payback for all the times I tell my dear children, "Just a minute." :P 

Whittington

I want to post book reviews of things as I finish reading them. This one is out of order but it is short and the book is at hand. I picked up a copy of Whittington by Alan Armstrong at one of those "fill a bag for a dollar" sales at our library. Big risk there, huh? It made it into the bag because the cover picture looked, um, interesting.

My copy doesn't have the Newbery seal on it and at first I wasn't sure if it was for adults or children.

It is interesting, though not as I expected. It is a heavy-handed didactic barnyard Charlotte's Web with 16th century lore woven through (the more interesting part to me) and a strong moral lesson on the value of hard work and Learning to Read. 

My favorite parts were a quote near the end which I read aloud at lunch to Devastatingly Handsome and Mr Music, where, IMNEHO, an editor might have been useful: "He went to the side of the ship and untied the blue silk he wore around his neck. He wiped his face and tossed it overboard as a token for the cat." (Mr Music guffawed.) You will be stunned to learn, only a few pages later, that apparently his face was still intact, as we read that the beautiful Mary "touched his face gently, tracing his scar."

The other thing I liked was the listing of sources cited in the endnotes. I appreciate the author's thoroughness in listing everything from 1605 plays (the perfect date to encounter here on November 5th :) ) to The Blue Fairy Book to Robinson Crusoe and Herodotus.