9 October 03
Full Moon over Walnuts
Numenius and I wandered out this evening to look at the moon. It may not seem like much, but it’s the first time I’ve been able to match his strides in this way since August 10th. The boot is still on but every day I get stronger. I am even walking with a shoe on my left foot at the PT’s, doing certain exercises with it.
The moon and the walnuts remind me it’s time once again to get busy making walnut ink. Since this involves simmering a huge pot on the stove for three days, the weather needs to cooperate. I was thinking this year of expanding my repertoire and trying to make oak gall ink; the valley oaks seem to have been hard hit in the last few years and the galls are lying about on the ground, ready for something. Sybill Archibald suggests that in medieval times the symbolism of the wasp-evil inversion of the bee, attribute of the Virgin Mary-meant that oak galls were a bridge between good and evil, and that the process of writing with ink prepared from oak galls was spiritual. I’m interested to try it, though I have no idea where I’m going to find ferrous sulphate.
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And I like the oak-gall ink. Gall and wormwood: what some of us dine on, these days.