My Saturday Snapshot is a Buddha's Hand

Saturday Snapshot is a meme hosted by Alyce at At Home with Books. To participate post a photo that you have taken then leave a direct link there. Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you.

According to an article in the L.A. Times,
"Shoppers usually stop in their tracks, jaws hanging down, the first time they see a Buddha's Hand"

That's exactly what I did when I saw this fruit in my local market! Ralph's I think. Not much of a gourmet, I hadn't seen it before. Apparently it's a citrus, its ancestor, "the ordinary citron, is one of the three original species of citrus and looks like a large, lumpy lemon; in the Buddha's Hand, the fruit splits at the end opposite the stem into segments that look somewhat like human fingers - whence the fruit's other name, fingered citron. This prodigy is a genetic mutation that arose many centuries ago somewhere in the citron's homeland, southwestern China and northeastern India."

It took me right back to a book I used to read to my son in his preschool days. The Witch's Hand is a
sweet and wonderful book that I highly recommend to anyone who still has small kids or grandkids they read to. It is not just for Halloween! This is what the publisher has to say about it.

"The power of stories to seem more true than reality is the theme of this clever first book from a British author/illustrator. To explain the appearance of "a horrible, brown crinkly thing pinned to the wall" of his art studio, George's father tells his son that in the middle of the night he heard the "slither-slither-pat-pat-cackle-cackle" of a witch coming to steal the children. Just as the witch was ready to stab George's father with a dagger of vipers, he was saved by George's mother, who cut off the witch's hand; his father has pinned it to the wall "to remind me to lock all the doors at night." When George's father admits that the "hand" is just a leaf and his tale of horror "just a story," George laughs and says, "Why, you rotten fibber!" Although the story's ending may seem unsatisfactorily abrupt, Utton's suitably silly text and slapdash watercolors skillfully blend fright and humor into a story that retains its excitement even when the reader, like George, knows it can't be true. Ages 3-up."