The color of tartness

A meme!  I stole it from whatifoundthere after she posted a beautiful Ten Violet Things sort of photo essay.  For this meme, describe/post ten things you like of a particular color.  If you want to play, comment and I will assign you a color!  whatifoundthere assigned me: Granny Smith apple green.
I’m cheating a little.  Some of the greens are light but not bright greens. Several of the objects I chose are in fact apples, or representations thereof.  Some of my “objects” are actually text.  Too bad.

#1: Tart, almost sour green apples.  An obvious choice!  But tart, almost sour green apples have only become a favorite thing of mine in the last year, so they are worth noting. I used to not love apples at all – the only ones I’d eaten were mealy supermarket long-shelf-life apples.  When I had my pick of farmer’s market apples,  I discovered that I could love this most prosaical fruit (I was wrong about the prosaicality too).  In particular, I like apples that make you want to pucker up.  They are my favorite to put under soft sweet cheese and into a rich red sangria.

#2: a description of a Dutch care philosopher eating (or not eating) a Granny Smith apple.
Here is what Annemarie Mol has to say about Granny Smith apples.

“Let’s leave Braeburns out of this, but, let me tell you, I don’t like Granny Smiths. In the late 1970s and early 1980s we (my political friends and myself) invested a lot in disliking Granny Smiths. At the time they were always imported from Chile, and thus stained with the blood spilled by Pinochet and his men. Once Pinochet had gone, it turned out to be difficult to re-educate my taste.  It should be possible, but so far I have not succeeded. Yes, I can eat a Granny Smith apple: bite, chew, swallow, gone. But it does not give me pleasure.”

The rest of this article is awesomely ruminative and useful; the theory therein is central to my first dis chapter.

#3   

I love this shirt.  I wore it at least once a week from the time I bought it (January?) to the advent of warmer weather.  It is soft, layers comfortably, allows me to crawl through tunnels, etc.

#4  Speaking of soft sharp green cloth, here is a lovely little prose poem.  In The Book of Salt by Monique Truong,  Alice B. Toklas appears as a woman for whom sensuous pleasure is religion, and this is one of my favorite characterizations of her aesthetic:

“When Miss Toklas knows that their drive will take them outside Paris, to places where a taxi cannot be hailed at a moment’s notice for the return trip home, she packs along their ‘waiting kits.’ Hers contains a set of knitting needles and several balls of apple green yarn, the disheveled kind with wispy hairs tangled on its surface. She likes the color, so unripe it makes her pucker just to look at it. But most of all, she likes how the crispness of the color serves as a foil for the texture of the yarn, a melt-in-her-hand sensation. The eyes tell her one thing, and the hands tell her another.”

#5  

These might be my favorite apple-green thing of all time.  This tattoo is the best thing that happened to me all March.

#6  

I made guacamole earlier for this week.   I didn’t have quite the right ingredients: lemon juice instead of lime, and my cilantro was dried and full of stems.  But our ladycraft circle housed my two-avocado guac anyway.  I love the richness of avocadoes – I once described them as “cheese that grows on trees” to my cousin who’d never tried one – but guacamole is bright, cheery in color and taste, as tangy as early summer tastes should be.
The pictured avocadoes are about to meet that fate, but I had to capture their weird Stepford Avocado flawlessness before mashing them up.

#7  When I petsit for Elana’s parrots – both of whom wear some bright green plumage – I sing them different songs.  I whistle “Alouette” for the green parrot with an orange patch on her head.  I sing “Pretty Bird” by Jenny Lewis for the greyheaded parrot with bright green wings:

Pretty bird
There‘s a mirror in heaven
Pretty bird, pretty bird
There’s a window on earth
You go west for the black setting sun
You south to the white spirit world
You go east for those real green eyes
You go north walk the good red road

#8  

This is a picture of Ascher unabashedly enjoying my bedsheets, which are a light (more sagey than appley) green.  When I moved to Philly I started from scratch as far as furniture is concerned, and I made the decision to keep my bedroom linens all in green tones: forest, sage, hushed light and dark greens that glow gently in the morning light that streams in my south-facing windows, and that beckon in the mellow lamplight while my cats are demonstrating how awesome it is to be horizontal.  Restful greens, not bright ones.

#9  Aquariums.  Also a bit of a stretch for the apple-green category, maybe – but Magritte’s green apples are frequently in the blue range of light green, so that made me think of light filtered through water and reflected off of the green- or blue-painted  sides of a fish tank strewn with plants (and a little algae).  Maybe like the tiny Macquarium that housed my three college-dorm fish in an old upright Mac unit, but I like going to big aquariums.  Fish are neat, and a little scary.

#10   I was hard pressed to choose just one last thing.  Should I choose another food item – bright green cilantro?  the algae-green Superfood I used to drink instead of lunch when I was tourguiding in hot humid summer and needed weightless fuel?  Should I choose something pretty – like emeralds or jade, of which I have always been fond?  Should I quote more poetry?  The bright green parrot wings of #7 reminded me of Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” a poem that makes an appearance in my dis and on my skin in tattoo form.

Well, I couldn’t choose.  So #10 is something that comes in a bright, cheerful color and also something that I loathe.

Spiny, poisonous green caterpillars that fall out of trees (and into your open-toed sandals, sometimes!) throughout April in NOLA.

[Photo by kosova cajun.]
If it’s a hot day and they hit the sidewalk, though, they do sizzle in a most satisfactory manner.

Advertisement