being with people

[asakiyume]

Every time I get to exchange friendly words with people, it's a shot of pure joy. Every time I get to be (safely) in proximity to people, it's a rush of euphoria.



Last week I got to meet up with B, one of my former tutees from Holyoke, and I was able to get her together with J, a guy who raises, rides, and promotes paso fino horses (these horses have a gait that looks like they're dancing; they're very popular in Puerto Rico and Colombia--coincidentally the two Spanish-speaking places I've visited. I've known of J for years because he always rides in the B'town fair parade in September (no fair this year, obviously), but I found out a bit about his outreach to young people in Springfield and Holyoke through social-justice activity. Since then, I've wanted for the two to meet, since B lived in the Puerto Rican countryside until she was 12 and misses horses and other animals something fierce. So it was a huge thrill when it finally worked out.

B taking a photo as J leads out Cancionero, his stallion


See the stable? J built it himself. Amazing guy.

Lovely Cancionero running in a paddock.




Then yesterday I decided to harvest all the apples from my tree. One very prolific branch hangs over into my neighbor's yard, so I asked her if I could bring a ladder over. (Can I just say how wonderful and right it is to have to go up a ladder to get apples? I realize that in terms of the apple industry and simplicity of harvesting dwarf trees make sense, but OH THE JOY of a full-sized tree.) I said I'd share the results.

Her two little girls came over, and I explained about why some of these apples looked a little funny and what scale was and so on. They're in kindergarten and third first and second grade. They sat so close--wonderful.


Here is the harvest!


The ripe ones are so red they're almost black.




And today, after an unfortunate and depressing encounter with a Trump rally in a nearby town, I came back to a gathering in B'town supermarket of a motorcycle club, a largely Latinx group, playing great music. These women let me take their pictures. So cool! They look like they're about to star in a movie about motociclistas.



"Are we in Mass?" asked one of the women.

It took me a minute to realize she was asking me what *state* she was in and not, like, what town.

"Yes," I said.

"Damn, then I can't get cigarettes."

"Oh I think you can, over there," I said, pointing to the gas station kiosk.

"But not Newports," she said darkly.

What? Don't they sell Newports in Massachusetts? I haven't a clue.

Anyway.

This is how I satisfy my need for connection in a time of coronavirus.

Comments

[sartorias]

Lovely horse.


Mmmmmm apple pie!

apple pie

[asakiyume]

I made one yesterday and am making another now!

Re: apple pie

[osprey_archer]

Hope you're enjoying the pie! The only thing better than homemade apple pie is homemade apple pie with homegrown apples...

(Actually this probably depends very much on the type of apples! But still. Truly the most local food!)

Re: apple pie

[asakiyume]

Tonight after dinner we had pie and then second pie (which wasn't actually from the second pie but was a second piece from the first pie .... the second pie remains not yet finished: I made the crust and started cutting up apples, but I'll finish it in the morning. I'm making it for my neighbor :-)

Re: apple pie

[osprey_archer]

Second pie is always a good follow up to first pie, whether it comes from a separate pie or not!

Re: apple pie

[asakiyume]

100 percent agree

[athenais]

Your APPLES! They are so beautiful! I miss apple trees, they don't grow here. Apples were such a part of my food life growing up. Washington State grows a lot of apples. We even had an apple dispensing machine at my high school instead of soda or candy!

[asakiyume]

I think there was one of those in my kids' high school (briefly? I have a memory of one, and I'm sure it wasn't in my own high school)

[queenoftheskies]

You have the most interesting life. :)

Those apples look delicious.

And the horse is beautiful.

[asakiyume]

I don't know about most interesting, but it's definitely a good life, and I'm very grateful for it!

[mallorys_camera]

Beeee-UUUU-tiful apples!!!! 😀

[asakiyume]

And I am also in possession, just now, of some fabulous peppers, some of which I cooked with tonight at dinnertime :-)

[threemeninaboat]

I love this post!

[asakiyume]

I'm so glad--I loved every item in this post!

[cmcmck]

Thanks for sharing all this fun! :o)

[asakiyume]

My pleasure! Thank you for stopping by!

[anna_wing]

And such nice, positive connection, too! I rode a gaited horse once, it was a revelation. Smooth as butter.

What is Latinx? Is it a short form for Latin American?

[asakiyume]

It's a created umbrella term to accommodate both Latino and Latina that gets around an implied gender binary--it's clever! And I see it a lot on Twitter and even hear it on the news sometimes ... I am not sure if it's just an Anglo term, though, or whether it's actually used by Spanish-language and Portuguese-language speakers** too.

**Or for that matter speakers of any other Latin-origin languages

[amaebi]

I definitely encounter it from Latinx people.

Yay, apples!

[asakiyume]

Good to know--thanks!

And thanks for your apple cheers :-)

[anna_wing]

I suspect this is a purely Anglo usage (and that only among a subset of Anglos). The 'x' ending looks very foreign to Spanish. Plus Spanish is regulated, and while the Royal Spanish Academy is less hide-bound than one would expect, I think the structural alien-ness of this construction would be unacceptable. If one needed a (personal) gender-neutral ending for persons (since Latinate languages use the masculine for the universal), I think an 'e' ending would be more consistent with the language, rather than an 'x'. It already exists. For instance, "Hispano-hablantes' - 'Spanish-speakers' is both sex and (grammatical) gender neutral.

Not that I am in any way knowledgeable about linguistics! I learned Spanish in a Latin American country, so there was quite a lot of interesting discussion with my various teachers about grammar, vocabulary and accent, and the differences in usage in different South and Central American countries. I still recall having my teacher absolutely refuse to help me translate a local tabloid (which had numerous words not found in any dictionary) on the grounds that I was a lady, and would therefore never in my life have occasion to use those words...

[asakiyume]

Which Latin American country? I've come late in life to Spanish, but one of my main ways of practicing has been to watch Latin American TV shows, largely (but not exclusively) Colombian ones. My husband and I loved one show so much we went to Colombia--first Latin American country for us!

Duolingo podcasts--and the Puerto Rican students I've worked with--have given me a good appreciation for the different accents and slang you can encounter. Puerto Rican Spanish sounds *very* different from Mexican or Colombian Spanish, and Argentinian Spanish surprised me with its differences, too.

[anna_wing]

Chile, long ago. Very difficult accent, spoken fast, with the mouth shut and word endings casually discarded. Bolivian is slower, Colombian and Venezuelan are fast too, but beautifully enunciated, so even a moderate speaker can understand quite easily. Mexican is a drawl, to me, and Argentinian sounds like Italian!

Chilean telenovelas in the 90s were very good. Mad, surreal comedies, not the weepy, Brazilian melodramas. If you ever get a chance to see "Oro Verde" or "Tic Tac" I recommend them highly ('Tic Tac''s soundtrack was entirely Queen songs by tribute bands, basically a homage to the music and spirit of Freddie Mercury). They have their own Wikipedia pages even!

[wayfaringwordhack]

What lovely apples and to think you started all that abundance from a seed.

Hope you get a new oven soon so many more lovely pies my ensue.

And I love the meet-up your arranged around that lovely Paso Fino.

[asakiyume]

The tree makes me so, so happy. It's like a child, and the apples it makes are like grandchildren .... mmmm, but we'd better not pursue this analogy much further or it gets terrifying.

The horse was a joy!

[noachoc]

I keep meaning to ask you, remember when you made something out of acorns once? (Something edible, that is). Could you tell me what you did and how?

[asakiyume]

Sure! I made a cake using acorn flour. It was complicated--let me see if I can find the relevant entries.

[asakiyume]

Okay; here's the entry where I started. If you click on the "acorns" tag, you'll get all the rest (plus, more recently, unrelated posts). Basically:

You need to extract the acorn meat from the shell
Then grind them up coarsely
Then soak the ground-up nuts, changing the water each day, until the water starts seeming fairly clear (for me, when I used red-oak acorns, it was two weeks).
Then dry them in the oven
Then grind them finely
Then use in a cake! (this was the recipe I used for the cake)

[noachoc]

Thanks!