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It is winter now, a brown season in Indiana, and a particularly daunting one for families who eat from their own backyard. My husband, with careful foresight, mulches the vegetable beds and prunes the fruit trees and bushes, which are dormant in this cold season.
On days when a bit of warm sun penetrates into the midwest afternoon, he takes our one year old daughter out to the garden, so that they may examine the leaf litter and bare branches. Together, they cover the back porch with their found goods– organizing small dead twigs and the recently pruned branches. They meticulously seek out cold frosted leaves and seed pods turned golden and brown, to fill in the hollows of their winter bouquets. Brambles and bits of their discoveries are carefully arranged now in jars and in water carafes- and they present them as gifts, to me and to the neighbors in turn– these bold lined cold-season collections.
Now, with a tall jar of last years growth as our table center piece, I too am forced to admire the world gone dormant. The seeds, scattered across our table and dining room floor, hide a hard-knobbed bit of life inside. I sweep them up and toss them into the yard, where they will wait for spring, to wake.
In the evenings, I fill jars with whole grains and pulses, covering them in a bit of water and whey so that they may germinate. It is a false spring rain, cracking shells, softening seed bodies. Sprouting neutralizes enzyme inhibitors and makes a long list of vitamins and minerals and other nutrients more available. The composition of the seed is transformed in this waking. Rising from its dormant hour, a bit of life, once stored deep in the small grain-stones, sends out a cautious growth.
While it is winter, here, and I can talk all I want of the brown and the dead, I must not fail to recognize that there is life waking in my kitchen each morning. The realization of the life within our food must change the way I come to understand and dismiss winter’s death. While death is bound up in our cold garden, in the centerpiece for our dinner meal, it also, perhaps more importantly, graces our plates. Our family, raising forks together, are marked by the life and the death that we bring to our tables and into our bodies. Our food has lived, and died –all of it– before it comes to our plates. And then, in some miracle, it is converted again into the living matter of our bodies, meted out in days, joys, growth spurts, and health.
In the evenings, before we eat, we have begun something shy of a prayer but more than a list: we utter a bit of thanks for the richness of a meal wrapped up in the living and dying that the land offers us, fecund with seeds, even in the dormant hours of the coldest months.
In my early adolescence, when I was busy trying to separate my meaning from my mother’s I found a church-going family who helped me in this task. They -like I- were quick to point out her sacrilege: her poverty, her politics, her single parenting (they did not know, like I did, what the alternative would have looked like). And I, like them, became spitefully critical of the church she’d taken me to when I was a child: A place marked as irreverent for its open willingness to negotiate through the beauties and follies of a number of faiths.
I borrowed the criticism of the Unitarian Church, like I borrowed the criticism of my mother. I refused her christianity, and so she made a new round of it, refashioning her faith in a new space that I did not snub at the time (though I wouldn’t put it past myself now, knowing my history).
I began looking too, sure that the “real” church could provide what I needed in a community and faith, if it was so self-assured and critical of everyone else. After years of looking around, blinking dumbfounded at congregation after congregation, often as numbed and insensitive to me as I was to them, I came to question the right for religious institutions and their spokespersons to point fingers.
It has been a long time since I’ve stepped into a church building. In my time away, I have let my imagination run wild with the grotesque possibility that all churches– indeed the buildings themselves–would represent everything I wouldn’t want a church to be: exclusive, apolitical, self-protective, anti-humanistic, gold-plated and in the clouds.
I walked in this weekend to wood. To the smell of it. To walls, darkened in places with old oak knobs and lit with the honey of split planks. There was a wooden rocking chair in the tall ceilinged meeting room– in case someone like me, wandering in, would want to keep a small child with me, rather than turn her over to strangers. And in all that crafted wood, and the murmur of forested voices, there was a whisper of worship at the pulpit- but worship, identified in working hands and good rest, in the richness of the land and the possibilities of music.
The man picked up that old book, laughing, laughing and proceeded to tell us the things in it that he found useful: A young prophet, politically radical enough to have been executed by the state. A message of peace and disarmament; the pounding of weapons into ploughshares and scythes.
This is not the first time I have realized a need to restitch myself to a history I rejected in my youth, but its the first time I’ve considered that task to be spiritual. Something in me feels deeply drawn to the idea of building a community in a place that wrestles (faithfully) with environmentalism, human rights, and peace, in ways that have been instilled in me since my childhood. I see room here, not for me to agree with everything, but to set a course down, and learn from others, in a community of people who hold on to whatever point of religiosity seems to make the most cultural sense to them, while still insisting on sharing a conviction that there’s something spiritual about the loves and joys and politics that we might live together.
When I arrived home, I called my mother, to tell her I knew something — some little thing– of what she’d lent me in life. and to apologize.
Despite my lack of time this month, the press to start writing and processing some of the harder parts of my life has been keeping me up into the night, after B and Andy have bedded down. Writing for me has always been, before other things, a tool for processing my world.
Some of the stories might be submitted for publication, if I can adequately and carefully determine how to tell stories that I do not have solitary claim to (for they are always, also, it seems, my mother’s and daughter’s story). Many of the stories are not polished- and I do not intend to make them “publishable.” They have simply been good for me to get out of my head, so that I can keep them from rattling around up there and getting in the emotional way of other things that I’d like to write. And that, so slowly, is beginning to happen: I have almost said enough about myself, to start to need to make things up. I am almost –almost– back to writing fiction.
I’ve started a second journal that will focus more on food and health. You can see it here.
If you follow this journal from the facebook link, my journal will no longer auto-update there. I’ve made B change my facebook password and hide it from me so that I can’t get into my account. This is only one of many ways that my charming husband is helping save me from myself. I have arranged a subscription-link for this site (Check the side bar on the left if you are interested), but I can’t seem to do the same for the other site.
This (Last Maple) journal will still contain my less food-related ramblings- but I’ve decided to change the structure here a little as well: I’m giving up on monthly reviews. I find them tiresome, and sometimes anxiety producing. I’d prefer to write when I have something to write about, rather than putting myself on a mandatory calendar.
and so it goes, from here on out.
We are a few days into November — a month that has bled in from the one before it, in a few red leaves and a lot of brown ones. My dear family, ever optimistic, continues to bundle up and take color walks. I stay in, also bundled, and work on papers while they are out in the woods.
When they return, they share their best finds, and usher winter in, with sticks and other dead bits of forest matter. Andjoli is thrilled with it all. She is walking, dancing, saying more and more.
These autumnal remainders cover our back porch, our table, our kitchen floor. They, alone, mark the month of October. Otherwise we spent it, mostly, one meal to the next, and onward, to the bigger question: With all this talk of being done with teaching and classes in December, with no work lined up, no places we are burning to leave for, no real aims outside of what we are already living, what precisely will we do?
After some long discussions, we have settled on more of the same. I have decided to continue on in school, and am applying to a second PhD program. B is also preparing to go back to school in the fall, and is deciding what programs will best suit his interests and skills.
And so I’m un-doing all my former talk about being done because it seems like this is the best possible way for us to keep living this life we love. Graduate school, for all its hard moments, has provided paid opportunities for education, with an additional stipend that provides just enough to live on. And there’s some flexibility in being a student, some time left over that a real job would not allow, to keep investing in our beautiful home, family, and community. Of course, we’d like to find a better balance for all of these things. And so we are also evaluating the way we move through life (too fast, too heady, too scattered). If we’re going to keep on at the university, I’m going to need to learn something about rest and restoration in the present- rather than continuing to put it off until i’m finished with my degrees.
This must start, I presume with an intentional reduction to the way I (over) schedule my time. I’m not sure, precisely what I intend to do to teach myself to slow down, but I am starting now, to plan a mild spring- committing to fewer things than I’m used to. I have been offered teaching for next semester, and with it, I have tuition coverage. I have decided to take two classes pertinent to my work (as apposed to this semester’s four classes). I will also take a creative nonfiction class which will encourage me to write/process/do something good for myself.
I don’t imagine that a lightening of my academic load will un-train my tendencies to do to much. But it is a beginning.
