tea and apples

It's only the first day of November and already the unpicked apples are shriveling on the trees. We've been feasting on local apples for more than a month and the best seem to come from Dixon. The farmer's markets are over. A wind is howling down from the Rockies as I write and stringy white/gray clouds blur the sun and jog through the washed out blue sky. It is cold, which makes me happy because I can wear my new sweater (the Dream in Color Classy wraparound that I'm loving) and anxious because winter is getting closer. The orange fields, yellow aspens, silvery Russian olive leaves have given way to earthy tones of rust and brown.  The apricot tree, lilacs and cottonwoods are still green. Days have been cool and sunny. Perfect sweater weather which I've tried to take advantage of by being outdoors as much as possible. Not easy when I have stuff to write at my desk, but necessary if I am to catch the elusive colors of a forest floor in November.

Tea
Have you ever noticed that in cozy British mystery novels tea is nearly a character? Someone is always drinking, preparing, or calling for it. When the the dead body of the gardener has just turned up in the pantry the inspector calls out, "tea Rosie, good and strong, with lots of sugar!".  Or when the heroine, believed to be deceased, suddenly shows up alive: "it's alright Bertha, I'm not a ghost, go and fix us some tea". I have a thing about tea, teapots and cozies. I prefer tea over coffee, knit cozies, sell them occasionally and give them to writer friends (the only Americans who seem to appreciate the poetry inherent in teapot hats). They aren't much of a presence here in northern New Mexico (maybe in all of the US) but  because I can't get enough of them, I ordered Tea Cozies 2, the next volume (after Tea Cozies, 2007) published by Guild of Master Craftsman in Sussex, England. It has all the lovely British spelling of words (like cozy instead of cosy) and 30 new patterns with names like "Battenberg slice", "School tweed", "Cornish ware", "Toast". For a few mad moments I thought I might start a knitting project marathon using both volumes. I'd knit every one in a year starting in January (sort of what Julie Powell did with Julia Child's recipes). Reason returned when I calculated that I needed to make 5 per month and would end up with 60 tea cozies and probably not have time to knit anything else. Plus the fact that I don't really like all the patterns. Whew! that was close. I suppose I could do one per month. I'll rethink this while I go upstairs and fix a cup of afternoon tea.

The ancient haiku master
saw the moon in his teacup
he said it was
a poet's silver disc