Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.
I guess, having written about sumac, of all things, which probably only a handful of people in the world care about – none of whom read this blog – I’m forced to keep writing about it, just to get my story straight.
Turns out that I was wrong twice (and counting?). I was wrong from the age of 12, let’s say, until last week, while I assumed that the sumac around here was staghorn sumac. O.K., no disgrace, I think I got the idea from my Boy Scouts manual, which was probably written by Yankees. (Staghorn is what they have.)
But I should have paid more attention to detail when I said that what we have, in profusion down in the Scrubby Field, is scarlet sumac. I think I liked the name. It isn’t. Apparently, it’s what they call shining sumac, or something close to it.
This I know because the leaves have ‘wings’ – as seen here:
The stem has a narrow band of green leaf running up along it, from leaflet to leaflet – those are wings. And the leaflets don’t have stalks. Botany is tough.
And it’s probably not over. I’ve previously described the fruit as clusters turning from the color of gold grapes to two shades of magenta. Well, maybe that’s only the female plants. The field is also filled with what looks like the same sumac, except the fruit clusters are flowering much more yellow – each flower with (I think) five bright gold stamens. We’ll see how both types of plants turn out.
Perhaps the only way I can ever make all of this up to you is to paint the field at some point.
On a different subject entirely, I made an interesting musical discovery tonight while cooking a sauce, for gnocchi, of zucchini, garlic and tomato. The first 67 or 89 times I played Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi,” from Love And Theft, I was just glued to it; it pretty much killed me. But then, maybe because my frame of mind was brightening a bit, the next 23 or 31 times I played it, it seemed kind of oppressive. Great, of course, but a little oppressive.
What I discovered while cooking is that if you sing along with Bob, and sing around him – almost doesn’t matter how – and sing the lines more loosely than he does, perhaps making them a little longer, it seems to transform the experience. Makes it like a new song. Of course, the people who know “Mississippi” may be the very same ones who care about sumac.
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William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.
Friday, August 7, 2009 at 08:22PM | by 
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Coal and the Power Lines
The ominous, vaguely bituminous look of last night’s sky inspires me to add this as a note here.
Today I was happy to find, up in the branches of a black cherry tree, a few wild blackberries ready to eat, along with just-ripened black cherries. It reminded me of one of the most frequently asked questions in American life: “Would you like to try our combo today?” Finally, I was able to say yes.
But the scarcity of blackberries around here, which I have previously attributed chiefly to the land-clearing activities of crews under contract to Rappahannock Electric, also reminded me that I had just received a most unfortunate mailing from that utility.
REC urged me to call my Senators and urge them to oppose the climate change bill already passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill, REC warned, might make electricity more expensive.
Well, I guess so! Any time you can’t just burn any old cheap dirty coal you want to, anywhere you want, something’s gotta give. (On the subject of coal and climate change, this article from The New Yorker is worth registering in order to read, and I believe this blog item doesn’t require signing in.)
As a customer-member (incredibly tiny minority shareholder) of the Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, I was not happy to see my money being spent in this lobbying effort. If electricity’s going to become more expensive, let’s not waste funds now on futile efforts aimed at halting human progress.
And despite the importance of coal to the economy, I thought I would register my dissent partly in the name of my grandfather, a Czechoslovakian immigrant who was a coal miner in Pennsylvania. I think working in the mines was probably not the primary cause of his very unpleasant death from throat cancer, but I doubt that it helped. I’d like to think that Grandfather Bezilla would be on my side of the climate change issue today.
After the blackberries and cherries, I saw something on my walk that made me feel a little better about this year’s aggressive land-clearing. Along the track we call the Power Line Road, growing out of the Nagasaki-like devastation, two bright green paulownia trees were shooting up like rockets – already some eight feet high, with enormous healthy leaves as big as the ear of a young elephant. Despite their rapid rate of growth, these paulownias could not come close to endangering the lines if they grew another 150 years. That may not save them when the crews come through again, but in the meantime – and regardless of how botanists may feel about them as an exotic species – their beautiful attempt to flourish is the best revenge.