#brause ef66

[2013yearoflettering]

It is good people who make good places. -Anna Sewell Day 10 of 366

[2013yearoflettering]

Day 3: “Adversity is like the period of the former and the latter rain -- cold, comfortless, unfriendly to man and to animal; yet from that season have their birth, the flower, and the fruit, the date, the rose, and the pomegranate.” - Sir Walter Scott

I freed pomegranate seeds from their white honeycombed flesh today and it was such satisfying work. I sought out a pomegranate quote to letter and fell in love with this one. I wasn’t familiar with the former and latter rain so I looked it up, it’s a Biblical reference to the rains in the spring and autumn that lead to successful harvests. I especially love the acknowledgement that even if the result is good the rainstorms still suck while you’re in them. Apparently Sir Walter Scott is the man.

I’m also now totally obsessed with pomegranates and spent quite a bit of time reading about their history. It seems that every culture that has come across them couldn’t resist injecting them with meaning (from Ancient Egyptians believing they represent ambition and prosperity to representation of Jesus’s suffering). I’m also enamored with the history of the word, pomme-grenade is the old French (seeded apple) which led to the military use of grenade (also pomegranate is just ‘grenade’ in France now), there’s a folk etymology that pomegranate meant “Apple of Granada,” the word garnet for the color and gem are related to the color of the fruit, and grenadine was originally a pomegranate juice though now it is often an unholy mix of various juices and colorings.