Wednesday, September 17, 2008

A Poem Lovely As A Tree


Okay, here’s the image. Isn’t it beautiful? It isn’t a painting, or not exactly a painting. It’s fabric applied in layers and touched up with paint. The artist is Doris M. Deutmeyer, of Dyersville, Iowa. She also quilts.
The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels is coming up September 29. There is a very, very old belief that if you eat goose on Michaelmas (pronounced in England "Mikkelmuss") you will not want for money for a year. We’ve been doing it for more than twenty-five years and it seems to work. It won’t make you rich, it just stops the fiscal emergencies. You know, there are some of us always a day late and a dollar short. Now you still might be late, but you’ll have the money – sometimes barely enough, but always enough. The big problem with trying to celebrate Michaelmas is acquiring a goose to roast. They are expensive – if you can find one at all. It’s too early for the Christmas trade in geese, and free-range farms are often still fattening them. One year we looked and looked and finally found a butcher who had a frozen one in the back of a big locker, left over from last year. This year we’re having a very small dinner (eight guests), having lost our site (we sometimes feed as many as forty). Not knowing if it’s the goose or St. Michael the Archangel that does the trick, we hedge our bets by saying a traditional prayer to the angel ("Defend us in battle . . .") and singing a parody: "Amazing goose, how sweet the flesh / That saved a wretch like me. / I once was broke, / but now I’m flush; / I’m saved from penury." It’s a pot luck, everyone brings a dish to share – maybe that’s what the secret is. If anyone else out there does it, let me know how it’s working for you. If you want to try it, contact me for the rest of the parody and the prayer and a good recipe.

3 comments:

Camille Minichino said...

No goose thanks, Monica, but I love your stories! And what a lovely tree ...

Terri Thayer said...

Love the quilt painting!

Betty Hechtman said...

The tree is really eye catching and then when I read how it was made was even more interesting.

It sounds like your gathering is a lot of fun and successful, too.