The Roving Locavore

No, not the food staple, but the writers’ conference.  I went up to Ripton, VT, to spend the last night of the conference with Peter.  It was a great evening.  Peter gave a late-afternoon reading of poems from his most recent book, The Lions, in the century-old clapboarded Little Theater.

After the reading, some went to change into their party-wear, while others ambled across rural Route 125 to one of the little yellow cottages, where the cocktail party was happening.  There was plenty of imported gin going around, along with some local beer.  The choice: Otter Creek Copper Ale.

The dinner that followed was full of local yummies, including nasturtiums, though not much grows on this Green Mountain ridgeline but trees.

The conference began as an idea of early-twentieth-century-poet Robert Frost’s, in the 1920s.  I love so many of his poems, it would be hard to choose a favorite, but here is one that has to do with a local crop:

After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.