again

everything cycles; nothing repeats.

hints from heloise

Today I was reminded that some years ago I discovered that if you plop a towel or some clothes over them, you can keep your glasses from fogging up while you're in the shower.

plums!

Biked down the hill by way of the Boulevard on the way to my first ASL class today, and on turning off the path: lo, sand cherries! Which are really basically a kind of plum, a tasty tasty little plum, growing in ample quantity on each plant.

These lovely things have taken on a kind of semi-mythical quality for me ever since I first ran across them in Dr. Frank T. Siebert, Jr.'s documentation of the Penobscot language. In the Penobscot Dictionary manuscript we find listed two basic terms.*

First is nekawαmkimin 'sand plum, sand cherry (Prunus depressa Pursh)' pl. nekawαmkiminal. And then the plant itself: nekawαmkiminosi 'sand plum or sand cherry shrub (a low matted shrub of gravelly or sandy beaches)' pl. nekawαmkiminosəyal.

Second is αtawαmkimin 'sand cherry (Prunus pumila)' pl. αtawαmkiminal, along with αtawαmkiminosi 'sand cherry shrub or bush (Prunus pumila L.)' [erect shrub of dunes and sandbars, uncommon in northern Maine] pl. αtawαmkiminosəyal.

Quick etymological roll call:

-min 'fruit, berry, grain'
-αmk 'sand, gravel, granular material' (a classifier, in many uses, for you fans of such things)
nekaw- 'sand(y)', αtaw(e)- 'climb'

So here's the deal: since I'm obsessed with fruit (and free snacks from nature in general), I've been on the lookout for these for nigh on fifteen years. Something lurking in the back of my brain suggests I may have run into them once before a few years ago...but whether that blurry recollection is true or not (thank you, o brain of recent years), here they are now, right down the hill from me! And tasty.

Evidently Prunus depressa is now Prunus pumila var. depressa, and it looks from the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service materials like it might be the only P. pumila variety in the area. So we might think that either there's some special sub-variety or other distinction made by Penobscot speech community, perhaps reflecting the two different reported growth patterns, or these are two variant names of the same plant.

The plot thickens (who wants pudding?), however: the first thing Wikipedia tossed at me when I went looking for a photo was an entry on beach plums. Sadly, this kid is listed as endangered here in Maine. And P. pumila seems to be threatened too, though I'm not sure if in Maine as well.

I don't know my sand-vs.-beach plums well enough to tell for sure what they planted on the Boulevard---yep, these were planted, not wild, which in this case I think is actually much cooler: always nice to see humans using their distinctively rich capacity for agency in this world to help out another species.

So I'm an untrained plum-identifier, yes, but given that our friends at Wikipedia tell us that P. pumila ripens in early summer, while P. maritima ripens in August and early September, I think it's the latter we're looking at. That, and its photo matches what I saw today much better.

Oh, and the photos and descriptions of P. pumila var. depressa are low-growing, while P. maritima is a much taller plant (as again are the ones I met today), so there's a decent chance that nekawαmkimin is P. pumila var. depressa and αtawαmkimin is P. maritima.

So I am happy. How can an awesome little plum, possibly skittering back from the edge of extinction, not make you happy?



*(Omitting original acute accent marks, which don't render reliably on most browsers, but in the words cited here would be on the third vowel from the end, skipping "ə".)

ng

Today I actually wrote the sentence Why a capitalized engma? as part of my regular, official, plain old normal job. This is weird on so many, many levels.

lesson learned

Don't snort the inside of a bag of karkaday that you just emptied, as attractive as the prospect of hibiscus dust is.

Lilacs are in bloom: window's full of their waft.

palmarian update

How things come together: just a few days ago, I actually heard a Passamaquoddy speaker spontaneously use the word "dulse". And as expected, he used it in the plural. Since masses of discrete (typically stringy) objects are consistently spoken of in the plural in this language, rather than the singular used in corresponding English terms like grass, hair, spaghetti, macaroni, rice, and seaweed.

The last of these is presumably a model for dulse-ol, which is what I heard, the -ol being the expected plural ending.

Oh, and yes, I really have heard the plurals spaghettiwol and macaroniwol used hereabouts, the latter while we were at the elementary school cafeteria.

Again, this is what I do.

palmarian joy

I'm so happy: yesterday at the Eastport IGA, they had dulse for sale!

As you head up to the northern Atlantic coast, it's a popular snack, but this is the first I've seen it this far south in a non-health-food-store context. Just a big wad of dulse, in a regular styrofoam-and-saran-wrap setup, like any other produce. It's hands-down my favorite kind of seaweed so far, all salty and purple. Last had it, I think, in my patrilineally ancestral town of Cill Chaoi (Kilkee) a couple summers back: there was a girl my age selling it as "dillisk" (cf. Irish duileasc---sounds kind of Scandanavian...is it a loan? Indo-Europeanists?) on the beach in little brown paper bags.

So now I have a big mound of sea-reeking mauveness to deal with. Almost a quarter pound of it. Which is a hefty bit of snackery when you're talking dried seaweed.

Now here's the tasty possibility: somewhere online I ran into a recipe for dulse which involves frying it up with oatmeal. Or am I confusing that with a recipe for boiling down carrageenan (cf. Irish carraigín) into a pleasant goo? Oh well, I'm sure something salty plus oatmeal is bound to be good, especially if you toss some lipids into the mix.