Re: Say the first word that comes to mind...
gravy -- one gravy to go with one potato
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gravy -- one gravy to go with one potato
cranberries, for your plate looks mighty lonely with just the sodden potato.
Ha -- that reminds me of the great cranberry scare way back before you were born. Someone included it in a spoof of The Night Before Christmas:
And the children huddled all frightened in their beds
With visions of poison cranberries dancing in their heads.
You should see their Lab Full of Exploding Things #5.
Storm?
“A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway.” – Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Storm?
“A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway.” – Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
What a picture! But...
Ripe: If I could, I'd like to talk with Ms. Bronte about ripe apples in June; besides, her lovely picture of a late spring snow storm, I mean.
I grew up in a climate that was probably very similar to the one in which Ms Bronte saw her June snow storm. ¿Perhaps, she was looking at a Yellow transparent apple tree? I believe Yellow transparent may be the proper name for the early apple I loved as a youngster. We called them June apples in the mountains of Virginia. I used to get sick from eating so many of them.
I'd want to ask her if she chose June to have her snowstorm for meteorlogical reasons or from a childhood memory.
I'd tell her the story my now-ancient aunt told me about a lynching that happened in the late 19th century in my mountains. One day in June, they hung a black man in a June apple tree for stealing two chickens. That evening a snow storm hit.
I'd like to have ripe apples on my June apple tree when I next describe for my grandchildren the snow storm that hit Blue Ruby in June.
Memphis
Whether the weather permits is a phrase you'll hear here.
They say the British are obsessed with the weather. There is a reason.
We are in a weird place geographically. In the air, the frigid wind from the north and warmer air from the Tropics collide over the UK, whilst on the surface the warm gulf stream currents meet the cold currents from the north to create the UK's highly changeable and unpredictable weather.
If you consult the world map you'll observe Britain is at a latitude where to the West, Canada is frozen solid in the winter and to the East, Denmark, Finland, Russia etc. are equally frozen stiff. Far to the south and west US cities like Boston and New York may be under snow, in Germany, Berlin is frost-bitten, yet in London, England we are in our shirtsleeves.
An island system of micro-climates, Britain endures regular if random days of summer in winter and vice versa. Often the weather is regional and I've driven from an Artic whiteout blizzard into a blissful summer landscape that looks as if it has never seen a winter. Different worlds within the space of 20 miles and 30 minutes.
Although we generally follow the seasons, our weather can flip out and change day to day. The temperature can vary 10–15 °C (18-27 °F) between one day and the next.
England in it's entirety was under a blanket of snow on June 2 1975.
'Gravenstein' and 'Dorsett Golden' apples ripen in June whilst 'Crimson Gold' apples ripen in November.
Charlotte Bronte lived on the Yorkshire Moors which hosts a tempestuous micro-climate and she probably wrote what she saw and experienced. As strange as an earthquake a volcano or a banana was to Tudor Yorkshireman, I suppose you'd have to live or have visited the area of such phenomenon in order to relate.
If you seek truly unfeasible seasonal oddities within a work of literary fiction for your grandchildren to appreciate, I suppose the bible with the late December lambing season is the most infamous example.
I didn't know all that about weather in England, Dill! Thanks for that!
Memphis, I'd love to taste a June apple in the mountains of Virginia!
I'd want to ask her if she chose June to have her snowstorm for meteorlogical reasons or from a childhood memory.
(I) think this scene is intended to reflect the main character's devastation in this moment. Like the way poetry impacts through visuals. Apples have a connotation within a poetic piece which seem to scream from this June (JANE!) snow. And the storm sweeping through and killing everything new, and everything hopeful is the scene which precedes this passage. So June = "everything is blooming most recklessly," so why in the world is it destroyed by winter? Is this the winter we've just finished or the winter to come? We are surrounded by winter. Everything is winter, and it's unpredictable and it devastates the delicate, the new, and the tender shoots. And it's the same winter which began the novel and made walking so difficult.
The apple is a laughingstock now. It had no right to ripen. It is a Jane apple and a Jane snow, and it really is possible to be in both winter and summer. To be at the start and the finish, to be cold and most hot, to ripen even as you are dying.
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