Out of Time into Memory

Ellen Frye in Amazon Story Bones has a passage that cries out for an annotation by a scholar of botanical history.

A river that brings us sweet water, quince trees, apples and pears. The land's rich here. Stony, but rich. the wheat grows high, the tomatoes grow red, the melons sweet. The gods are good to us.

In this fictional world, tomatoes grow in ancient times in the Mediterranean basin. This is not the case in the actual world since tomatoes were introduced after contact with the New World. I like to think of this distance between the actual and the fictional as a trope that supports the book's concluding theme that Amazons are everywhere.

Much like a cornucopia depicting fruits and flowers out of season reflects abundance, the transhistorical reach turns the telling of old myths and the wish for survival into a future possible.

And so for day 455
12.03.2008