I am back on a hunt – I dream to capture humming bird in flight. So far I have only managed to snap a shot when it is sitting, but if one looks carefully on this photo the humming bird is sticking his tongue out. They are amazing creatures and I will never tire of watching and filming them. Many years ago we had a neighbor who was Tennessee negative. She had this adorable southern accent. (That’s when I realized that Scarlett O’Hara did not speak cultivated British of Vivian Li but rather had southern drawl in her speech). Anyway, my neighbor had more than five humming bird feeders in her yard. She called us to visit her at dusk. Hundreds of hummingbirds were there drinking sugar water from the feeders. They made a noise of an army of airplanes but the view was amazing. My camera back in the day had no capacity of capturing them and I had to let it go and just stand there and watch. Humming birds tend to go to the feeders as the sun is setting down. The light is fading and I really have to crank up the ISO the get the speed I want. I have not succeeded yet and I won’t be able to do it for some time after surgery. The lens of my camera is heavy and I simply won’t be able to keep it in the air for ten minutes at a time in hopes that the hummingbird will simply get into the view and stay there so that I can take a shot. One can always dream….
I am enjoying simple pleasures in the meantime – juicy strawberries that actually smelled strawberries and were sweet (not a frequent combination in the US). Back in Latvia strawberries were only available seasonably and the season was really short. We would get them in the market, 200 grams at a time (a small bag). I can still reproduce the smell of strawberry row in my memory. Oh, those happy days when no one was afraid of salmonella and a simple desert of strawberries (any berries for that matter), sugar and egg whites beaten together into pink foam was light and delicious. I love wild strawberries even more and some years ago we were growing them in the yard until squirrels, opossums and rats started eating it all. Wild strawberries would always elicit another memory of Cafe Greco in Rome where we ate wild strawberry mousse for 8 euro for a small glass. Knowing that we were standing in the same room where writers like Goethe, Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Stendhal, Mark Twain, and Nikolai Gogol, composers like Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt set their foot, sat at the tables and enjoyed their meal, yea it was worth every eurocent! I’ve been there twice, first time I only had enough money to get a thimble sized espresso porter via, second time it was strawberry mousse. I really hope it won’t be closed if and when I get to Rome again. Then it is going to be Torta Della Nonna.
On the meantime I am thinking about a shorter trip to Sonoma to drive through the orchards of Sevastopol and smell the aroma of ripe apples. It triggers whole slew of memories. Early summers in Jurmala (beach city in Latvia) where gardens were covered with clouds of white apple blossoms and then late summer when the smell of apples was everywhere. Klarapefel (White cloud apples) were light, twangy, sweet and almost white. Grafenstein apples were bigger, sweeter and spicier. I have only seen them once here in the States…. In Sonoma. Apples were the main winter fruit of my childhood. Tangerines and oranges if we were very lucky. Grated apples with cinnamon were part of pancakes, pastries. We used them to top one’s oatmeal. There were endless recipes and ideas.
I will leave you tonight with all the sweet and nostalgic memories.