PARAPHRASES from Fall on Your Knees, a novel by actor and playwright Ann-Marie Macdonald   Bagpipes are drowning out the pain--this is what bagpipes are designed to do.  The bagpipes do people's keening for them.  She had a little zizz (catnap).  Memory plays tricks--memory is another word for story--nothing is more unreliable.  Her smile is a mile wide, fingers snapping, palms percussing.  They say that the body of water stretching east of Manhattan is the ocean, but when I look straight up at the buildings, I see a granite ocean.  See also http://annmariemacdonald.com/biography/

Use fresh or dried fruits with meats, salads, pancakes, bread, muffins, desserts, baked beans, tapenade, peanut butter sandwiches, cereal, or yogurt.

Tapenade is a Provençal dish consisting of puréed or finely chopped olives, capers, anchovies and olive oil.  Its name comes from the Provençal word for capers, tapenas.  It is a popular food in the south of France, where it is generally eaten as an hors d'œuvre, spread on bread.  Sometimes it is also used to stuff poultry for a main course.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapenade

Recommended by Muse reader:  Novel Interiors:  Living in Enchanted Rooms Inspired by Literature by Lisa Borgnes Giramonti   I borrowed this book from the public library and found quotes next to some of my favorite pictures.  “The hall at Charbury was the most lived-in room of the house.  You came into it through the narrow lobby where the hats and coats and walking-sticks were."  Monica Dickens  MARIANA.   " ... and as he passed over the bridge, he looked with the old deep-rooted affection at the respectable red brick house, which always seemed cheerful and inviting ... "  George Eliot  THE MILL ON THE FLOSS   "I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. ... Look at these maple branches.  Don't they give you a thrill—several thrills?  I'm going to decorate my room with them."  L.M. Montgomrty  ANNE OF GREEN GABLES

Jill Churchill (born Janice Young Brooks January 11, 1943 in Kansas City, Missouri) is an American author, winner of the Agatha and Macavity Awards for her first Jane Jeffrey novel and featured in Great Women Mystery Writers (2007).  In addition to writing under the names of Jill Churchill and Janice Young Brooks, she has written under the names of Amanda Singer and Valerie Vayle.  Titles in the Jane Jeffry series are puns on literary works; for instance, The Class Menagerie, From Here to Paternity and War and Peas.  Titles in the Grace and Favor series are names of songs, including Anything Goes, In the Still of the Night and Someone to Watch Over Me.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Churchill

SIX DAYS IN FRANCE  September 2015:   We saw olives and grapes being harvested, toured a goat farm, olive factory, salt flats and museum, markets and towns, Roman ruins, and drove by vineyards and a truffle farm in a cart driven by two horses.  We glided down the Canal du Midi, learning about and tasting wines of the region. We stayed at Domaine La Véronique, an inn on a one-acre site near the village of Puisserguier in the Languedoc-Roussillon region in southern France.  Many plantings on the grounds include pomegranate, olive, prickly pear, fig, lemon, almond and kumkuat.  Our chef provided three excellent meals a day, and on one morning went foraging nearby bringing back wild herbs, rose hips and hawberries.  Weather was so fine we ate outside most of the time, sometimes under fig trees with the ripe fruit showering our table as we sat.  Once we spotted a hoopoe near our picnic site.  A favorite lunch meal was cassoulet, a specialty of the region.  Cassoulet is a bean stew with meat.  Legend has it that an authentic cassoulet has white beans from Lavelanet, is cooked in pure water of Castelnaudary in a casserole made of clay from the village of Issel over fire of wood from the Black Mountain.

Puisserguier is a mediaeval village built as a circulade around its castle.  Brother Clement de Puisserguier gave his name to a tasty variety of mandarin oranges we now know as Clementines.   See before and after pictures of Domaine La Véronique at http://www.domainelaveronique.com/history/

The hoopoe (Upupa epops, "hudhud") is a colourful bird found across Afro-Eurasia, notable for its distinctive "crown" of feathers.  It is the only extant species in the family Upupidae.  Like the Latin name upupa, the English name is an onomatopoeic form which imitates the cry of the bird.  See picture of the hoopoe at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoopoe

Crataegus is commonly called hawthorn, thornapple, May-tree, whitethorn,or hawberry, is a large genus of shrubs and trees in the family Rosaceae, native to temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere in Europe, Asia and North America.  The name haw, originally an Old English term for hedge, applies to the fruit.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crataegus

Castelnaudary is a market town, and the capital of the territory of Lauragais.  The town is located 50 km southeast of Toulouse, about midway along the route from that city to the Mediterranean.  This route has been used since at least Roman times, and today carries road, motorway (A61), rail and canal links.  Castelnaudary is the main port of the Canal du Midi to which it owed a period of prosperity in the 17th century when agricultural and manufactured produce became easier to export.  The name Castelnaudary comes from the Occitan Castèlnòu d'Arri, in Latin Castellum Novum Arri, or Arrius' new castle.  Read much more and see pictures at  http://www.catharcastles.info/castelnaudary.php

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1348  September 18, 2015  On this date in 1502, Christopher Columbus landed at Honduras on his fourth, and final, voyage.  On this date in 1998, the nonprofit organization Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers  (ICANN) was formed.