The Battery Rooftop Gardener did all he could to secure the garden against Irene.  There is no word yet on how the garden has fared, and a post will follow early in the week with post-hurricane photos and a damage report.  In the mean time, riding out the storm up here in the Hudson Highlands, I came across the following rather strident poem by D. H. Lawrence, which I thought might provide food for thought for other locovores trapped indoors on a stormy Sunday morning:

MYSTIC

They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the experience

          is considered.

So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it

the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth

and the insistence of the sun.

All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.

Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour

and some of too much sun, brackish sweet

like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.

If I say I taste these things in an apple, I am called mystic, which

          means a liar.

The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig

and taste nothing

that is real.

But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.

Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.