Saturday morning, going on ten o'clock, the sun is shining bright, it's 58˚F and heading for an 80˚ high. The river is low and clear, a slow-moving mirror that reflects the blue sky overhead and the patchwork progression of autumn along its banks.
Seasonal color has finally started to show its stuff streamside. Mostly yellows, oranges, and golds, and the pale, washed-out reds—almost pinks—of the Virginia creeper which twines up the boles of the big sycamore leaning over the pools. During the next few days I expect their red will darken, intensify, becoming a deep crimson. Unfortunately, there are no red maples hereabouts to punctuate the otherwise warmly burnished landscape with their vivid scarlet flame.Today's agenda includes several necessary shopping errands, chores around the cottage, and somewhere in there time for a walk in the woods with Myladylove. Maybe we'll put a hunk of rat cheese, some smoked sausage, a few apples, and a bar of dark chocolate in a pack and make it a picnic.
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8 comments:
Hi Grizz and happy Saturday. Sounds like a great day on all fronts, from chores to the weather to a walk and picnic with your love. Enjoy. :-)
Love Gail
peace.....
Looks and sounds like a lovely day.
Penny…
It was, thank you…though we worked more and played less than planned. But tomorrow is supposed to be just as nice and we have nothing on the slate.
Gail…
Loaded, hauled, and stacked two pickup's of firewood, added gravel to walkway, ate dinner out, shopped at various stores…have just now gimped in where we're looking forward to collapsing on couch and snoozing to mindless TV.
No walk. No picnic. But a more fun day than it sounds—and tomorrow is free time!
Hope you're having a good weekend, too.
I was completely blown away by that lovely river with its Autumn colours until you mentioned the picnic! Oh yum.
Rat cheese? A local specialty?
Weaver…
After our unintended full day's work, the picnic got shelved. Maybe today. But to be quite honest, we eat many meals here outside—breakfast on the deck, dinner or supper at our own picnic table up on the rise at the downstream corner of the property where we have a sort of overview of stream and cottage.
Scott…
Allow me to increase your country education and vocabulary with a short history lesson.
"Rat cheese" is a long and widely used term—though probably not so much any more. Early on, the first British colonists immediately began making cheddar cheese. Later, it was called "store cheese" or factory cheese" because even as early as the mid-1800s we were starting to produce much of our food on a large scale. "Rattrap cheese" or "rat cheese" as a term arose in the 1920s to distinguish factory cheddar from handmade cheddars.
I've heard the term since childhood, mostly used by older folks, from the Appalachians to the Deep South.
On my brook trout expeditions to Michigan's U.P. I used to stop at a wonderful little ramshackle backwoods market to pick up apples, smoked whitefish and ciscos, and cheese. The old guy who ran the place always had, in addition to the dozens of cheeses in the glass cases, a few 100 pound "wheels" of different cheeses sitting around, and would happily carve you off a hand-sized sample for tasting. He always referred to his big round of cheddar—which came wrapped in mesh and coated with red wax, as was as fine a cheddar as you ever tasted—as "rat cheese."
So…the cheese I called "rat cheese" in the post was cheddar.
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