Five-Acre Almanac: Here and Now

Week 13

Yesterday when it was raining buckets outside, we cozied up our living room. We pulled all the furniture aside and vacuumed the dust and dog hair out of the corners. We took everything off the bookshelves, wiped them down and reordered all the books. We dealt with the pepper plants that had been in our south-facing window by moving some to a cool dark place where they can be dormant for a while, putting a few under a grow light to finish up, and harvesting one that was loaded with tiny hot red fruits.

We cleaned off all the horizontal surfaces, dusted off the house plants and the instruments, moved the couches around, and sorted through a bunch of old magazines. Then we pulled out an extra lamp and a few more candles. We’re in for a long stretch of darkness and my compulsion to do this deep cleaning and comfort making comes from having experienced many long winters in Alaska. Borrowing the term from the Danish, we call this time of year hygge-season and with equal measures of self-preservation and gratitude we fully embrace it.

Having a warm and snug home is something we don’t take for granted, especially since both Dean and I regularly meet people whose living situations are much more tenuous than our own. Our home is small by today’s middle class standards and it needs about a million upgrades, but when we look out at the trees being tossed about in the wind and hear the rain pelting the windows, we feel wealthy in our green-carpeted living room with our wood stove thumping and a pot of chili simmering in the dutch oven.

I read a book this week called To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest. The author, Diana Beresford-Kroeger, now in her seventies, is a renowned botanist and biochemist who went into her formal education after having first been schooled in traditional Celtic knowledge that had been passed on to her by a community of Irish relatives after both of her parents died. Much of her work as a scientist has been driven by what she learned about the natural world through stories and plantlore on the hillsides of Ireland as a young girl.

Reading the book made me wish I could go back in time and walk through wild places with my ancestors. It made me wish for long hearthside afternoons with my grandmothers and their mothers and those even further back. If I could, I’d keep a record of all the little tidbits of information they must have had about plants and people and keeping home and getting by. Plus it would be fun to know them, these random people who came together from so many different places in such a way that made my existence here and now a possibility.

I imagine my life is so very different than theirs must have been, driving thirteen miles a day to town for a job, flipping a switch to make the lights come on, buying food that was grown in one place, processed in another, and shipped a thousand miles so that I can have the convenience of not cooking something from scratch if I don’t feel like it. I’m sure the number of choices we have in our daily lives—what to eat, what to watch, what to wear, what to listen to, what to read—would overwhelm them. I wonder if they would celebrate the number of choices we have or if they’d worry about our sanity. Probably a little of both.

I like to think about the things I can still learn from those in my family that I did have the privilege of knowing. My slow moving nature came straight from my dad and sometimes when I’m moving from one task in the garden to the next I imagine his commentary and advice. When I’m at my desk writing, I think of my Grandma Acree who was studious and thoughtful and always careful with her words. When I’m looking at the jars of herbs in my pantry wondering what I’m meant to do with them all, I think of my Granddad Acree, autobody repairman by trade, who in the final decade of his very long life took a deep dive into learning about alternative healing practices and herbalism. When I’m feeling scattered and overwhelmed, I think of my Grandma Ross and the gentle way she moved through her days, grounded in her unwavering faith.

Life on Earth changes continually, but there are still a few things that our ancestors experienced that we can experience too, and it makes sense that one way to know those who came before us is to get to know aspects of the natural world that they must have known. We can watch a storm brewing the way they did. We can walk a dirt path through the forest. We can dip our toes into cold running water. We can eat some of the foods they ate.

In To Speak for the Trees, Diana Beresford-Kroeger writes that medicine men and women of ancient and modern Indigenous cultures call wild food “bush food” and they understand that when people stop eating bush food, they lose their health. Then she goes on to state that “wild foods of all kinds, from untainted, pure, genetic sources, have a phytochemical regulation system that modern science is just now trying to understand.”

Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s discussion of “bush food” confirmed to me something that feels instinctual. Food that is foraged, that is freely given from the earth, has value that goes beyond caloric intake and wonderful flavors. Wild food can serve as a link to our ancestors. It can connect us to the wild, biological, animal side of ourselves. It can restore our health on more than just a physical level.

The possibilities are enough to inspire me to get outside and pick another bucketful of rose hips and to keep adding dried nettle to every kind of soup and sauce that I make. It’s enough to keep me tossing a few wild blueberries into my pancake batter and to keep experimenting with all the wild plants we collected and dried throughout the summer. Brewing things up, trying things out and pouring through books on how to use all of these plants is the perfect thing to do now, in this season between harvest and winter solstice. With any luck we’ll have a few gifts worth giving at Christmastime. After that we’ll be looking at seed catalogs and plotting next year’s garden.

Right now though I’m not going to think about all of that. I’m going to go outside and enjoy the break in the weather, then I’m going to come in, make a cup of tea and settle in for the evening. It’s the season for settling and I’m ready.