Walnuts and the Squirrel

A few days ago, after the family returned from the UK, I developed a mild cold. As a result, I've been largely lurking indoors until I stop feeling contagious, still working on the same essay and watching Wartime Farm followed now by Tudor Monastery Farm. But on the last day before the cold I made the quince-and-elderberry jelly and fruit leather (or quince paste, if you will); and, having finally figured out — after two sad attempts in past years — that the jelly needs to reduce and boil at 104°C before it will gel, it was a triumph.

Today I therefore avoided the crowds at the Berlin marathon, instead of photographing it and cheering on the runners as I've done in past years. I also avoided applying for a mini-job over the weekend.

Instead I went to the allotment gardens again. I returned with a haul of walnuts that are not yet ripe, Concord grapes, quinces, and a flower that had been ripped off and dropped on the walkway. These grapes turned out to be delicious, as the gardener who put them out in a basket promised, and the flower looks pretty in its vase and comforts me for not having floristry in my budget. We haven't had a proper frost yet, so I didn't bother picking sloe berries on the way home. But I did notice amongst the sloe bushes that a fresh crop of blackberries (the berries were a bright red, like a medieval painting of a bleeding knight) had sprung on their brambles, despite the lateness of the season.

As I was gathering the fallen walnuts in the gardens — the nuts partly looked sepulchral when the green flesh had turned brown or black, mouldering away, some seamed with whitish fibres — I heard more objects plop to the ground at a fairly regular rate in the garden behind me. There was a wind, but it felt too gentle to shake the trees enough to make many fruits or nuts fall off. So I looked up and found a squirrel making its way gracefully, on all four paws and tail trailing behind, along a branch. In consideration of the squirrel's work in dropping the walnuts to the ground, and of its need for winter feed, I decided to take only one more nut before leaving the rest of the harvest to the squirrel. As I am used to the squirrels in Victoria, Canada — who would nibble the green-and-white husks off of the walnut shells from their perches in the walnut tree, chucking down fragments like rain (these fragments stained everything brown with the walnut juices) all over our lounge chairs and us — this Berlin squirrel also seemed remarkably polite. Now, at any rate, my share of the walnuts is lying on a newspaper on my windowsill, waiting to dry in the upcoming days of late summer sunshine.

Inspired by Edwardian Farm, I have also begun tracking the atmospheric pressure with a homemade barometer: a jar with water, which I turned green using water colour paint, and an empty bottle inverted into it. Happily the day on which I made it was just before the high pressure front really came in, so the very first morning I already saw a dramatic rise of the green water level into the bottleneck. Now I'm drawing little lines on the jar and adding the air pressure measurements in hpA that are reported each day on the Deutscher Wetterdienst's website.

Other than that, I cooked a cabbage soup and made oat cakes today. In the morning I listened on the radio to a Catholic church service, which celebrated/commemorated both Thanksgiving and the upcoming 800th death-day of St. Francis of Assisi. When I was little I thought that St. Francis was one of the more interesting saints, even if he did not die in a memorably gruesome way; I liked the imagery where he communicates with birds and animals. In the afternoon Gi. dropped by, so the siblings went off to bond over archery and bouldering as they usually do on the weekends, but we didn't end up looking at the photos from the UK travels as we'd intended.