GATHERING BEAUTY

AUTUMN IS A TIME FOR GATHERING, FOR HARVESTING, FOR PUTTING UP STORES TO GET US THROUGH THE LONG NIGHTS OF A LONG, COLD WINTER. After the monstrous drought this summer, there's not much to harvest in my yard—tomatoes accumulate on the vine, but only enough to sprinkle on my salad; the peach trees bloomed early in the premature spring, but then met with a late frost; the walnut tree drops a few nuts one by one, instead of dozens by dozens as it does in most years. I kick 5 or 6 green ones into a little pile to let the husks darken and begin to rot off before I bring them in to crack. Last year I filled bushel baskets and couldn't keep ahead of them. I won't have that problem this year. I keep my eye open for other harvesting options and I found a little feral apple tree over by an abandoned storefront. It wants pruning, but somehow, despite the drought and lack of care, put out a bumper crop of golden apples that are just now starting to fall. I park my car in its shade and pull a canvas shopping bag out and bend to pick up the windfalls.

After the Monstrous Drought

As I come over to the other side, I start. A woman stands silently with her own bag in her hand. “Oh, hello!” I laugh. “I'm glad I'm not the only one who appreciates these apples!” She is friendly, but seems disappointed in the apples. “These are bad apples,” she tells me. Judging from her lovely, colorful clothes and her accent, she is from the Indian subcontinent. I look into my bag. Yes, many are a little wormy and some are bruised from falling off the tree. They seem to be a golden delicious, nicely firm. I tell her that I just pick them up anyway and cut out the bad parts, peeling them and freezing the good parts for pies. We chat a little at our work, and walk away with maybe a half a bushel each. I take my harvest home and that night I sit in the Adirondack chair and peel and core them until it gets dark, then move my production in the house, collecting a big bowl of parings for the chickens.

I stop to watch the flow
of golden kernels..

 But I am not the only one harvesting. Yesterday I came home to find Jim and Sean in the fields, cutting the corn. I didn't have high hopes for the bounty of this year's crop, but I still love to watch the big combine slowly making its way across the field, leaving a wake of cornstubble. The grain truck waits by the road and periodically the combine creeps over to dump its load of corn into the waiting truck. I stop to watch the flow of golden kernels. Dust rises and the pile grows. The air fills with the ringing of grain flowing through the metal tube and dropping into the truck. When the combine is empty, it turns slowly back to cut more corn.

 I stood for a moment and watched. I had laundry to hang and bread to loaf, lessons to plan and papers to grade. I thought about shirking my duties and shedding my cares, running out into the field, waving my hand and chasing down the combine. Whoever was driving would stop and let me climb aboard, sitting up in the glass paneled cabin high above everything. Jim or Sean would kindly listen to my questions about the rhythms of the farmer's year, and entertain with kindly amusement my latest crazy ideas for what to plant in the grass waterway. But this evening, responsibility wins out and I gather my bags and turn to go into the house, thinking that I'll catch them when they harvest the beans.

Harvest Beauty;
Reap Peace;
Blessed Be.

ROGUE HARVEST

WE HAVE LEFT THE DROUGHT BEHIND TO VISIT OUR FAMILY IN THE BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS OF VIRGINIA. We started in the middle of the night and got into Ohio just as the sun was coming up. This was Ursula's first big trip with us, and she was sleeping in the back. My dog comes up to Chicago with us often, but that's only a short jaunt. She is quiet and patient in the car. At rest stops she is eager for a walk and water, a little break from lying down. But we hadn't thought ahead about what we would do for a longer stop for a late breakfast. We decided to take turns in the restaurant. I wasn't particularly hungry, so Ursa and I went on a walk around the cluster of chain restaurants. I'm not fond of chains, since they are all the same no matter if you're in the mountains or the prairie or the seaside or the middle of nowhere. But here at the sausage place on the border of Ohio and West Virginia I made a discovery. I had noticed before that sometimes at the corporate chains, you can find poorly pruned apple trees amongst the ubiquitous flowering crabs, but here, with time to ponder, as I walked my little black dog I figured out why. These chains tend to landscape with what they probably think of as low maintenance trees, hence the flowering crabs. But if you just plant a crab and don't prune it, it will sometimes revert back to the apple tree in the rootstock. These apples may be smaller, and more on the tart side, but they are very respectable eating and great for pie making.

How do I really feel about these corporations that suck the culture out of a region and wash it with a deadening homogeneity? Well, “hate” is a very strong word. Let's just say that I dislike immensely to drive 8 hours to arrive at a restaurant identical to the one at home. But here, in a cardboard, artificial community encompassing the sausage place, the 24 hour breakfast place, a couple of hotels and gas stations, and a drive through taco place and a couple of burger joints, I figure I can pinch a few apples if I happen to find them. Clearly nobody else wants them, except maybe a rogue squirrel or a rat that frequents the dumpsters out back of each of these places. I fill my arms with apples and hope that another sharp-eyed baker of pies will find the rest. 

Back on the road, over hills and under them, we find ourselves on a two lane highway snaking through the mountains. Here, everything is green, and flowers bloom as they do in my dreams. I believe the Blue Ridge Mountains also suffer from a drought, but not as heavily as we suffer in the Midwest. At any rate, the ramble of Black Eyed Susans at the side of the road gave me a melancholy homesickness for what I didn't have at home. We arrive in time for hugs and a tour around the hunting lodge turned family homestead, and a walk down the path to see the remains of an even older dwelling. Nothing left but the stone fireplace and chimney, about 30 feet tall. A great place, we are told, for a barbeque picnic, especially in the winter, and it sounds lovely. Ursula thinks she is in heaven, tearing ahead on the path and racing up the hills. In the fading daylight we find our way home to dinner. Inside we are temporarily distracted with catching up and visiting, and my dog snatches two steaks from the counter before being caught. Babs, ever the hostess, graciously brushes off our apologies, and she and I rethink the menu, cubing the meat and piercing it alternately with mushrooms and peppers for shish-kebabs. Ursula sleeps off her crime, while we talk and visit and eat and drink into the night.

 In the morning, Ursa and I take a walk down the path and scare up a turkey family. They crossed the path about 20 yards ahead of us, 2 or 3 adults and several half grown poults. My dog took off, but then thought better of the chase when I called her back. Then I thought better of an early morning walk with just the two of us. It's not that I don't want to meet the resident bear; I do. I just don't want to meet him alone, or even with a silly dog. Even with one who looked exactly like a bear cub when she was little. Even one who shares his name.

RAMBLE IN BEAUTY;
WANDER IN PEACE;
BLESSED BE!

O CHRISTMAS TREE

MY FATHER AND HIS SIBLINGS PLANTED THE CHRISTMAS TREES UP BY THE CORNER CEMETERY UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF THEIR GRANDFATHER, PAYNE HEATH. I imagine Great-Dad giving stiff orders, tossing bundles of bare-root white pine seedlings into 8 piles, kneeling in the soft earth to straighten a crooked tree, bending slightly to pat one of my aunts on the head, stifling arguments amongst the kids with a firm look. I am, of course, idealizing the story, but I can clearly see the patriarch with his grandchildren in the sun on the terraced land. My great granddad was a learned man, and I’m guessing that my father inherited his love of nature and of teaching, from him. I’m sure that tree-planting day included lessons in soil make-up, tree identification, agriculture, and history. In those days, the farm had fences and hedgerows, but they, along with the terraces, were plowed under long before I arrived on the scene. Only the terraces hidden in the piney woods remain.

 My dad once told me that selling the Christmas trees was to furnish college tuition for the grandkids, and were to be harvested the year I was born. My dad was the oldest, my youngest uncles not much older than I am. Unfortunately, that was also the year Great-Dad died—he and I shared a mere six months on this planet—and the trees never got harvested. Instead they quietly grew to great heights of 40 to 50 feet.

 I remember the first time I saw them as a child. One Christmas my father brought us out to cut our tree. Perhaps they were not as tall then as they are now, maybe only 20 or 30 feet high, but to my eyes they were giants. You cut a tree, and then top it. To me it didn’t matter that the branches were crooked and showed a lot of bare trunk, or that it was not really shaped like a Christmas tree or that the needles were too limp to hold an ornament; going out in the snowy woods to cut a tree was quintessentially romantic. I think we probably did this only once when I was growing up, but when we moved out to the farm we continued the tradition.

 The piney woods were an artificial monoculture—by now they have grown into a little more diversity—but I loved them. They have an aura of an enchanted grove. Regular rows of great tree trunks curving along the terraces, dark and cool (even in summer); and dreamy, cushioned by a foot of rusty red needles, scented by sticky pine sap, it’s quiet in there. They grow so close together that the light doesn’t get in. They’re green only at the top and you feel like you’re deep in the interior of the forest. I say we are thinning them since they’re so crowded, but at the rate of one a year, I’m not sure the plot will ever be thinned by our Christmas tree habit. Along the edges the undergrowth blocks access and you have to find the secret entry. You walk back to the edge of the bean field and step carefully over the downed barbed wire, balancing the chain saw that was carefully sharpened for this ritual. Everyone looks up, craning their necks trying to see the shape of the treetop from below. You try to find one with room to fall, but even so, they usually get hung up on another tree halfway down. When that happens you cut the felled trunk again, as high as you can reach. Sometimes you have to cut the trunk three times before the top finally comes crashing down in a splash of needles and cones. Then you top it, hold it up to check the shape (though we rarely reject a tree once we’ve cut it—checking the shape is mostly ceremonial), and drag it back to the car.

 Once home we stand it in a tub of water and weight it down with bricks and stones, balancing the trunk carefully. We wrap it in garlands and strings of lights, hanging the strange ornaments we’ve collected over the years. We hang stockings by the wood stove and string up Christmas cards in all the doorways. I’d like to say that this year we had hot mulled cider and cookies, but our decorating was accompanied only by chamber music on the radio and me, reading some of the more interesting letters inscribed in the Christmas cards, explaining to Ellis who sent some of the older ones—friends we may have lost track of before he was born. I smile at the messages, the pictures, and think fondly of these friends, enjoying my annual visit.

COLLECT BEAUTY
PERSIST IN PEACE
BLESSED BE

A DAY IN BIRDLAND

IN BIRDLAND THE FIELDS ARE SHORN OF CORN AND BEANS. The air is crisp and chill this morning and the sky is bright blue, and empty, save the puffy white stripes of the ghosts of trips above the prairie, crisscrossing towards Chicago, New York, San Diego, St. Louis, Atlanta, all from parts unknown. Ursula tugs at her leash as we walk toward the aviary to let the chickens loose below, to cluck and strut in the yard for the day. Perhaps a traveler will look down from the window in the sky to see us, tiny bugs crawling along my green patch of lawn. My dog is friendly with the chickens, but a little too rambunctious. Maybe someday they will run together, but not today. Tomorrow it will rain, but we don't realize that yet, and go right ahead and do the laundry and hang it out on the line. Who knows how much longer we can hang it without freezing our fingertips. We hang the first load, and then, what the heck, start a second load too, of towels and bedding. Sometimes we have a little too much confidence in our ability to finish a project.

We hang the first load,
and then--what the heck-- start
a second load, too.

 The harvest is in, but Jim and Sean are out in the fields again, the big tractors crawl across the stubble in the distance, pulling tanks of fertilizer. Farmers are always busy, like bees. I hang socks and jeans and dish towels, and they dance in the breeze while the tractors crisscross the fields, and the jet trails dissapate above. The mellow weather and the gentle wind make me feel optimistic, and I go to the basement to pull red tomatoes from the upside-down vines I hung under the stairs last week. They were green when I hung them, but they ripen one by one, so quickly that I have to make sauce every other day to keep up with the basement harvest. I use the lazy, crock pot method—quarter them and puree in a blender with half an onion and a clove of garlic, pour into a crock pot with herbs to slowly cook down to a thick sauce. If I weren't so lazy I would have jars of sauce lining my pantry shelf, but instead I pour it into plastic containers to freeze. Not as picturesque, but easy-peasy. The smell of tomato sauce fills the house and makes me think of pizza, so I start some bread dough, and then the rich, yeasty aroma adds to the party atmosphere. I get lonesome for my sister, so I call her. The next thing I know, I'm walking down the road toward the grass waterway, we chat about our plan to send cookies to the kids next week. Ursula tugs at her leash and I let her lead me, so involved in my plans that I don't notice when we turn into the waterway. Suddenly I see we are in the field, and my dog is rooting up fallen ears of golden corn from the stubble and husks. I pick up a few snaggle-tooth ears, trying to carry them in the crook of my arm as I juggle the dog leash and the phone. I find more—too many to carry back—I'll have to bring a sack next time. I'll toss these ears in the yard as a treat for the chickens, maybe shell some it for winter. It would look nice in a jar.

Chicken Dark

 I realize it is chicken-dark—that time of day when the chickens go in, and we turn back toward the house, going right across the field still talking with my sissy. If I hurry I can use the corn to lure the chickens back into the aviary for the night. Just yesterday we lost Michael's favorite chicken. I noticed she was missing and found a pile of light brown feathers under the apple tree where they like to roost. They go after the corn, and I count my feathered friends. I can never remember exactly how many we have, and anyway they're always moving, so I have to count like a chicken: Two roosters: check. Two barred rock, one little silver spangled: check. Only one :( light brown one left: check. Two white leghorns: check. Three French Hens (I don't know what they are, but that's what I call the three sisters): check. Yep. All there. I latch the door and let Ursula off leash. I make a fateful decision that I will regret in the morning, to leave the laundry hanging so Ursa can chase the frisbee in the darkening evening.

Count Beauty; Collect Peace; Blessed Be.

RAIDING THE NEIGHBORS' TOMATO PATCH

Birdland is full of Fall.

BIRDLAND IS DAMP AND CHILLY AND FULL OF FALL. Leaves fall, walnuts fall, rain falls, temperatures fall. Night falls early and the day comes late. Last Monday I lay in bed and convinced myself that it was so dark when my alarm went off that surely it was time to set the clocks back again. It was nearing 7, and the sky was just lightening. But when I got up to check, instead of finding I had another hour to get ready for work, I discovered we still had a few weeks left of daylight savings time, and this morning I had to pay with my hopeful thinking by rushing to get ready for the day.

I don't know if I've mentioned it, but this year I just didn't have it in me to garden. Instead, I've been keeping my eye on the tomatoes at Barb and Dave's house. They have the best tomato patch with assorted varieties. Big, chunky salad tomatoes, summery grape tomatoes, sugary cherry tomatoes. I've invited myself over to help keep them picked, and they are very generous with their bounty. The vines always seem to be full of fruit in all stages of ripeness. We've been keeping an eye on the weather, too, hoping to strip the vines just before the first frost. This afternoon I received a frantic text from Barb, asking me to come by and pick. We're supposed to get our first frost tonight. I had told her about my method of ensuring a winter's crop: just before the frost, cut the vines and hang them upside-down in the basement. The vines die, but the green tomatoes slowly ripen, and we have red tomatoes into January. They tend to get a little wrinkled on the outer skin, but they taste at least as good, or better than, grocery store tomatoes. Barb told me she wasn't going to have time to harvest, so I should go and cut all I want. I picked up Ellis and his friends and drove to Barb and Dave's. Their oldest son was home with a cozy fire, and I popped my head in to tell him I was raiding the garden. “That's what it's there for,” he said. I raided the kitchen, too, for a salad bowl and some plastic bags, and first set about picking the red tomatoes, and there were plenty. I left a big bowl of all varieties on their counter, and we filled several bags to take home. Tomorrow we'll have fresh tomato soup.

The sun was setting and the air was crisp. The fruit was cold, too, and the chill was beginning to seep into our hands. The boys thought we had plenty of tomatoes, but the hard work was ahead of us. Barb and Dave's tomato patch has lovely wooden cages, pointed at the top, like tall pyramids, and painted green. The bushes grow tall into these cages, sometimes two plants together, so that big beefy tomatoes are intertwined with the cherry or grape tomatoes. Pulling out whole plants was impossible, so we began cutting off branches and piling them into the back of my car. The boys were glad when the car was finally full to the top, but the work was still not finished.

At home I drilled hooks under the basement stairs and bundled the branches together with string to hang from the hooks. I used to hang whole plants, roots and all, from ancient nails in the joists. It worked well, but the roots brought in a lot of dust, and the plants were so big that picking the ripe ones was sometimes difficult. I hope that hanging bundles of branches will make picking easier.

Yellow Pear Tomatoes

When I finally finished it was dark, but I still wanted to gather the walnuts I've been stumbling over on the front walk. I did it mostly by feel and gathered about a bushel. I thought about how much I love the Autumn when we can reap what we sowed in the spring. And if we didn't have time to do our spring sowing? Our world is pretty fertile. We need only look around to see what is provided for us by the trees and by the generosity of neighbors.

Collect Beauty; Garner Peace; Blessed Be.

FALL HARVEST

TWICE THIS WEEK I'VE AWAKENED TO A COMFORTING FOG. The grey blanket muffles the landscape, and we can't see past the clothesline. It feels like the world has disappeared, leaving only domestic concerns. The shroud lends an intimacy to the yard, and tiny droplets of water hang in the air and hit me with their coolness as I walk out to the aviary to carry food to the chickens. I know this fog will burn off in a few hours, but I enjoy how it softens the landscape and brings everything closer, shrinking my world. I feel protected.

The illusion won't last and by the time I drive to town for work the fog has lifted, but caught in the roadside weeds I see thousands of spiderwebs, floating discs hanging from sprays of goldenrod and seed heads of grasses. The spiral patterns are made visible by the dew beading each thread. They sway gently in the wind, and I remind myself to keep my eyes on the road, but I am mesmerized and continue to steal glances at the bejeweled garden as it slides by.

 I get to town a little later than usual, and have to drive further from campus to find parking. That's okay. I discover a new route through a neighborhood thick with hostas under the shade of elderly trees. I find a yard that is all garden, bordered by roses with beds of vegetables in the center: tomatoes and chard and cucumber frames and raspberry canes. It has a cheery sign that says: EAT YOUR YARD! I decide that this gardener is my hero. I pass another yard that is really an orchard; pears and apples litter the sidewalk, and I hope the owner won't mind that I picked up two apples, one yellow and one red, for my lunch today. Plenty remain on the trees, and even on the sidewalk. They were both bruised from their fall, but delicious. Tart, and full of sunshine. Maybe one morning I'll knock on the door and ask permission to collect the windfalls for apple butter.

And then I remember that the recent passing of the Equinox means more than sweaters and early sunsets. It begins the fall harvest, and walnuts drop from the trees and roll around in the yards in various stages: some round and bright yellow, like rough tennis balls; some ripening to a deep brown and black, the hulls flaking away; some already peeled down to the wrinkled wood, and suddenly I know what I'll do when I get home. The young walnut in my yard is dropping its own harvest. I'll gather those nuts and sit out at the picnic table peeling the hulls and dying my fingers a deep, oily brown. Last fall I bought a nutcracker sturdy enough for walnuts, and gathering nuts is a satisfying job for a crisp fall day. The strain of the lever; the sharp crack of the nut, like a shot; a dishtowel to catch flying shards; the careful picking of the nutmeats; the growing hoard in a cobalt blue bowl.

The nutcracker looks like a medieval torture device, with a long lever, springs, and gears. The rhythm and squeak of the machine will mingle with the call of birds and frogs, the satisfying murmur of chickens scratching, the rustle of leaves. The shells of walnuts will join the mulch under my picnic table. I think about making pesto and chopping nuts for scones and cookies, maybe enough for a nut pie! I walk a little faster under the Autumn sky.

By afternoon, the fog is just a memory and I have shed my sweater. I open the window in my office to welcome the cool breeze that filters through the hackberry tree outside. I have work to do: papers to grade, classes to teach, students to guide, but my mind wanders to the jars of walnut meats I will put up for my winter baking.

Gather Beauty; Harvest Peace; Blessed Be.