Thursday, October 1, 2015

HARVEST TIME

#LaBelleEpoque #47
"Poster Making"
From Lots of Things Like This, a section of McSweeney's #27

The days are getting shorter and the nights are getting cooler.
We are in the best days of the year as the grapes ripen and the sugar rises.
I do the rounds of the ex-pats who have gone home to Blighty, to stock my larder:  apples and persimmons at La Blanchière (figs soon too!); yellow plum tomatoes and enormous zucchini in Les Closures; apples from the Haute Rue in Montsoreau; and precious little from TrogloPhil's cave after the Czechis left.
I am looking to taste some mushrooms from Alain's hunting to complete my ratatouille.

Playlist:

Harvest Moon
Neil Young and friends


Trouble in the Fields
Maura O'Connell, Nanci Griffith


Harvest of Plenty
Woody Guthrie, "This machine kills fascists."


Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)
Los Super Seven



DEPORTEE
(also known as "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos")
Words by Woody Guthrie, Music by Martin Hoffman
© 1961 (renewed) by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & TRO-Ludlow Music, Inc. (BMI)

The crops are all in and the peaches are rott'ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"

My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?



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