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Not Deadly, but Bittersweet
Cool and damp, Summer has developed, much like the Spring.July is gone, usually our hottest month, now lost in a long, gray week.
Rain, and more rain, and when there is no rain, only a dim, diffracted light,
diffuse reminder of the absent Sun.
By this time last year, heat and drought had singed the Park, withering grasses, and turning soil to dust. This is probably better, we’re still making up for the drought. But not a single ninety degree day in July?
The weather infiltrates one’s mental state.
Interiorizing the drabness, I drift aimlessly, barely kept awake by a faint breeze, emanating from future events I’d rather not face.
Will the Sun ever shine again?
My posts have slowed a bit, I know. It’s the slowness of Summer, to some extent, but also pressures from the everyday world... all the usual stuff.
My travails are trivial, no doubt.
Still, I’m struggling to keep up the pace; I’m trying to manage at least one a week.
I’m committed to that much.
I suppose I’m committed to it all.
Maybe it’s trying to tell me something.
I don’t know how many times I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to get a picture of the Bittersweet Nightshade.
It just won’t work out.
Granted, it’s a thin vine, with little flowers, hard to focus on, but I’ve photographed other things of equal difficulty.
I think it’s the plant.
Nightshades have a dark reputation. Bittersweet sometimes gets mixed up with Deadly Nightshade, which is a confusion unto itself. There’s an American plant known as Deadly, in the same Solanum genus as the Bittersweet (itself an introduced species), but the name (in a process typical of colonialist taxonomy) is borrowed from a reminiscent European plant of the genus Atropa: the famous Belladonna. That is the Deadly Nightshade of legend and witchcraft, and a powerful drug plant it is. Bittersweet Nightshade is regarded as poisonous, but it’s potency is not of the same dimension as that of Belladonna.
Still, the plant has some power, if only to concentrate my mind, through meditation on its resistance.
To resist the dolorous spirals of individual psychology, we may look to the Holidays, which provide orientation on a broader scale. Today, or yesterday, or perhaps on the 6th, but about this time, is Lammas, the Celtic celebration of the start of the harvest season.
We really have no such Holiday on our schedule, any longer.
Advances in transportation and refrigeration have made all kinds of produce available virtually all the time. We forget that our food is not just a commodity, but a direct link between the Earth and ourselves.
Friends who frequent the green-markets remark on the quickly passing parade of fruits and vegetables, and how narrow the window of opportunity is, for many local crops.
The fruits of the season were the flowers of the Spring.
Thanksgiving is the closest we come to a harvest holiday, but it’s celebrated far too late, at the back door of Autumn.
Lammas inaugurates the procession of harvests. The Mulberries are gone, but now the birds are finding black cherries, while crabs, and haws, and tree nuts ripen, each in its own time.
They will not want for watering.
The sun, of course, will shine again.
It managed an appearance this afternoon, eliciting a steamy sigh from the well soaked city. More thunderstorms are forecast, but that’s just August as usual. I’m hoping that we’ll have it all wrung out, and hung up to dry, by the weekend. Maybe I can start to harvest some photos of the swelling fruits.
In the center of my fuzzy photo of the Nightshade, you can find a focused patch, showing the Nightshade berries, even while flowers still linger on the vine. Green now, they will ripen to bright red, always one of my favorite transformations.
Humans do not eat the berries, but wildlife will.
Just another harvest, though to us, the plant remains resistant.
Even so, it has its place,
along with rain, and drear, and dumb distractions of a sultry afternoon.
These may bear fruits as yet unguessed at.
What we cultivate will be our choice, but we can only choose from what will grow for us, under our local conditions.
It is our fate to accept the bitter with the sweet.