quidnovis61

Yes...spring is the BEST time of the year....It is so full of life, promise and re-birth.
And my apple tree in the garden is a living proof of that particular brand of Beauty...
It is stunning...this metamorphosis that occurs every year and ..every year one is just as surprised and gloriously happy for yet another spring...to contemplate and redifine oneself and ones life. Spring is about growing, setting off for newer pastures and adventures...it is not about stagnation....

My apple tree is the James Grieve variety... I believe it was a Scots breeder in the late 1800s who first cultivated them. They are delicious...big ,reddish/gold ,sourish...and absolutely wonderful when stewed in the microwave or dried in my hot air oven into winter-time-tv-chips!!!

Apples are very much a part of our mythological world...Not just in the Biblical sense of Adam and Eve or Grimms Brother's Snow White but even in Greek Mythology and so on.

In the Norse Mythology of the Scandinavian peoples, apples it seems, was given by the goddess Idun to the gods so that they may remain youthful...(From Prose Edda writtten in the 13th century). Here are two lovely pictures painted by my favouite Swedish artists - Carl Larsson where his daughter Britta is playing at being Idun....This was painted in 1909. And John Bauer on the same theme: Loki and Idun....painted in 1911.



Some years ago I visited Oslo, Norway and visited the Oseberg/Viking Ship Museum and remember reading that buckets of apples were found in the site excavated - among a lot of other things...and two female skeletons...

It is indeed interesting to think of the apples in my fridge or soon on my tree...has such an illustrious past!!

"Since golden October declined into sombre November / And the apples were gathered and stored, and the land became brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud."....TS Eliot

I kinda like that quote...

Signing off for now!

CS
= (Cresat Scientia/ May knowledge grow/Må kunskapen växa)