Author Archives: John Cutrone

Aug 01 2016
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Book of Days Calendar

Your August Book of Days

Saltbox Stencil

Our gift to you each month is a printable calendar to accompany this blog; here now is your Convivio Book of Days Calendar for August. And lest you think a good deal of planning goes into these calendars, this month’s calendar will dispel any suggestion of that: the photos for the calendar were taken just last week while we were vacationing in Maine.

We miss Maine but we are back to our regular routines. The sun is strong and the humidity is high and we keep hoping it will rain but it doesn’t. My garden survived my absence, though the okra got woody and the sunflowers are looking bedraggled. It is that time of summer where a bit of delirium begins setting in. It was nice to have a break of cooler New England weather, but we realize now a bit of a tactical error: there is still so much of a Florida summer yet to be endured.

Be that as it may, Lammas, today, reminds us that summer is indeed waning. Even here in this land where summer is king. It is, as well, the month of Obon, the traditional Japanese festival honoring the dead, and it is the month of the Assumption, which gave my grandmother Assunta her name. It is the month of cakes 21 feet tall and of St. Augustine, patron saint of brewers, and of St. Bartholomew, patron saint of bookbinders and book artists, whose day brings the traditional Printers’ Wayzgoose. And we begin to realize that autumn is on its way.

 

Jul 31 2016
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Lammas, Lughnasadh

Old Man Summer: Lammastide

Harvest Rest

The wheel of the year turns another notch, July gives way to August, and the shift brings us to the next cross-quarter day: Lammas, or, in the Celtic tradition, Lughnasadh. It feels most definitely still like summer, but Lammas brings the first suggestion that summer is ripening into autumn. Indeed, in the traditional reckoning of time, Lammas brings the first day of autumn, as we are now well past summer’s zenith, which came with the June solstice: we are about halfway between that solstice of midsummer and the upcoming autumnal equinox.

And I know this is bittersweet, this idea that summer is passing, but with Lammas, we enter into my favorite time of year. Don’t worry, I see the irony; this blog I write about the wheel of the year constantly reminds us to live in the present and to enjoy the ceremony of each day, but here’s my confession: This is the time of year I look forward to, always. I like the ripening bounty of summer, the increasing darkness on the way toward the midwinter solstice, the gathering in, the harvest. So while Lammas these days gets short shrift in most places, it is a signal to me that we are coming into the months I love best, and so I have a soft spot in my heart for this old, practically forgotten holiday.

Lammas is the celebration of the first harvest. It is truly a holiday of our agrarian past, when most folks earned their livings off the land. While most of our celebrations and holidays are rooted in this past, Lammas hasn’t translated very well to contemporary life. Most folks are not interested in celebrating the waning of summer. We look around at all that is thriving now in summer’s gentle days, but we understand that it won’t be here long. Shakespeare understood this well. His Juliet was born at Lammastide; his play Romeo and Juliet takes place in the heat of the last week of July, and Juliet never reaches her birthday; she is, in a way, a sacrificial first harvest.

So is John Barleycorn. Tradition would have us bake a loaf of bread for Lammas. It was considered bad luck to harvest grain before Lammastide, and so this Lammas loaf was baked always with the newly harvested grain. It is traditional also to break out a bit of the other stuff that is made from grain: whisky and ale are typical candidates. John Barleycorn is the personification of the grain that makes both. Barley, corn, wheat: he represents them all, and in the old song about him, John Barleycorn must die before he can be resurrected as bread and as warming, inspiring drink. (To be honest, the old song doesn’t care much about his appearance as bread; it is an old drinking song, after all.)

Out of Lammas come the county fairs we know so well, celebrations as they are, at heart, of the first harvest. Ours, here in Palm Beach County, Florida, is in January… which may seem to most like an odd time of the year for a county fair. But here in this topsy-turvy land, we begin planting our fields in September and October; January is our first harvest. It is, in a way, our local Lammastide.

Topsy-turvy though we are, we still keep time with the rest of the country, and even if our transition to fall is a subtle one, Lammastide keeps me going through these waning days of a long Florida summer. If you, like me, are looking forward to all the bounty of autumn and the quaint celebrations of winter that call down the light even in darkest night, then Lammastide may be days you, too, should consider marking. Lammastide begins with Lammas Eve on the 31st of July, continues through to Lammas on the First of August. The baking of a loaf of bread would be perfect, but fetching a good crusty loaf at the bakery would be just as fine. You might accompany this with a bit of whisky or ale, raising your glass to Old John Barleycorn and to Old Man Summer, drinking down the warmth of summer, seeing where the inspiration leads you.

 

Image: “Harvest Rest” by George Cole. Oil on canvas, 1865 [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons. Our summer vacation, by the way, has passed. We are back home again in Lake Worth, which also is bittersweet; missing the place and the people we left behind, but also happy to be home in the other place we love, with other folks we love. If we could gather them all up around us whenever we wanted, that would be a wonderful thing.

 

Jul 27 2016
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Summer Vacation

Meet You at the Cemetry Gates

Mary

In my family, it is common practice to think and speak of those who have gone before us as very much present. They are part of the continuum, they are not forgotten. And just as we visit friends and family amongst the living, so too do we visit those amongst the dead. And so cemetery visits were commonplace from as far back as I can remember. We would go, we would brush off the stones, plant some flowers, perhaps. It was often my job to walk over to the spigot and bring back a bucket of water for those flowers. We would spend some time, utter a few prayers, say goodbye, and move on to the next visit.

In the summertime, the cemeteries we visited were usually lush and green with big trees. I’d read the stones, wondering about the people whose lives they memorialized, wondering also about their families amongst the living who brought things to their graves: flowers, trinkets, flags, coins––the small gifts we leave for the dead. I loved the old stones best, the weathered ones, the ones with lichen and moss. Back home in Lake Worth and West Palm Beach, the old weathered ones are from the 1800s. Here in northern New England, they are from the 1700s and earlier, carved with angels and skulls, crooked in the ground after all these years.

I know people who would be content to never set foot in a cemetery, and perhaps that is you. And I understand that. But that is not me. Me, I’ve been known to visit cemeteries, even if I know not a soul in them, just to walk through on a pondering ramble. And it is not my cousin Marietta. When I suggested I drive down to New York to visit her while on this summer vacation in Maine, she got so excited. And when I suggested we make the cemetery rounds during that visit, she responded, “You are so me.” It’s a rare cousin indeed who you can invite to join you on a trip to visit cemeteries and who will agree with excitement and enthusiasm. This may be why we get along so well.

Here in Maine, while on this summer vacation, we have visited family and friends most every day. We sit, we talk, we laugh, we eat, we talk and laugh some more. But we have visited, too, the ones we visit quietly: Seth’s grandparents, the great grandparents he never met, great aunts and uncles, even his great aunt Mary, who died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, just a girl, who in a way I probably know best, only because her parents were so grief stricken at her passing that they erected a large stone that even has her photograph on it. The photo, now almost a hundred years old, is still clear as day, while lichen covers more of the stone with each passing year. Beneath her photo, the words engraved are rapita dagli angeli––stolen by angels. She was 15. No one left amongst the living has ever met her, and yet she is a presence we know well. I see her picture and I think of an old neighbor on Victor Street, where I lived as a boy. I don’t even remember her name, but I do remember her telling me once that her sister had died in 1918 in that same epidemic. I think of Mary’s sisters, the ones who lived to be old women, the ones that I did know before they left this world, the ones whose living rooms Seth and I sat in on visits past. The lines between the living and the dead get blurred at times, and this is, I think, a good thing. The dead are here in their way. We are the richer for their presence.

 

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