Looking for some background on the bandoneon (more on that in a week or two) I came across the word bandoline: “a mucilaginous preparation made from quince seeds and used for smoothing, glossing, or waving the hair.” (Random House Dictionary of the English Language). Yes, it was that mucilaginous that pulled me in to read the full definition. The eye alights on an icky word (even the sound of it is icky, the slimy look of mucilaginous on the page) and the reader is trapped, swamped, bogged down, enveloped.
All these years I have been making do with dulce de membrillo, or with my mother’s delicious quince jelly on toast. I ate jellied toast (it was even Mom’s bread) for breakfast just this morning. I never thought to smear the jelly on my hair. I went to work unglossed, not at all smoothed.
I remember there was a quince bush on the Michigan State campus, behind the old horticulture greenhouses (I think they’ve been torn down by now–you graduate and move away and they change everything, there’s no stopping them, but that’s another problem…)
Behind the old hort gardens and the greenhouses, a quince bush, overlapping the parking lot, forgotten or forgettable, except for those salmon-bright blossoms and the ugly, secretly delicious, fruit. I remember walking by it on an afternoon in college, wondering if that was the source of my mother’s appropriated harvest, wondering if I might harvest some myself.
We used to glean quite a bit of fruit off the abandoned orchards on the edges of campus when I was growing up. I wonder if they’re still there, or replaced, rebuilt, replanted. I haven’t been back to East Lansing for many, many years. (Not on purpose. Just the way it worked out.)
Quince doesn’t belong in the Bs, does it? I promise words of the day and wander far afield. But that’s the beauty of it, if there’s beauty to be had. Alphabetical order is a delight: so rigid, so rational, and yet–where meaning is concerned–so random, serendipitous, obscure.
This is my writing life today, a squirrel in search of an acorn that I must have buried the next yard over, because it certainly isn’t here. But there are hazelnuts here, black walnuts: what treasure!