every day is a good day
The giant cottonwoods have gone to sleep. They’ve shed all their clothes. Their naked branches rustle in the cool, winter air. What is it like when birds endure their first winter? Oh, no! Oh, no! Everything is dying. Whatever am I going to do? For them, their first spring, when the cottonwoods awake, and new green leaves sprout, must be rapturous. It’s rapturous for me, and I’ve been through many a winter and spring.
The heavy freezes of last week are gone. The baby carrots are no longer stuck in the frozen dirt. Deep freezes turn carrots into orange candy. When it gets below freezing, the starches in carrots turn into sugars to keep them from freezing. What you get are carrots much sweeter than summer carrots. These little gems are what’s for desert.
At dawn’s early light, BB and I came across a pot of gold, a dump truck’s worth of cottonwood leaves. During the night the cottonwoods decided to drop all of their remaining leaves. Was there a leaf shaking party we weren’t invited to? Did a parliament of owls shake branches all night long, screeching and hooting at the cascades of falling leaves they made? Or did the trees tire of their leaves and with a frenetic shake, toss their leaves to the ground, because they wanted to feel the wind and rain with their naked branches?
You know, nature so often does unexpected things at night that it makes you want to stay up all night, flashing a beam of light about, just so you don’t miss the party.
The owls and the trees had their party last night. I’m having my party today, raking up the leaves, mixing them with litter from the chicken roosts, to fill a bin of compost. Why not drive around in a small tractor and scoop up and mulch the leaves in ten or twenty minutes? Because then I’d just be sitting on my butt and missing out on all the fun of raking, and gathering armfuls of leaves, and having the chickens race after me as I dash to the compost bin.
Svenda and the other chickens do their chicken dance, round and round the compost bin, as I fill it up with one wheelbarrow full of golden cottonwood leaves after another. I don’t think the cottonwoods realized that when they partied during the night, the chickens would party the next day, dancing on their fallen leaves. That’s the way nature is, one party after another.
A group of mushrooms is called a troop, but the tight cluster of purple mushrooms I found the other day poking out of a cushion of moss looked like a family to me. You could imagine that I stumbled upon them while they were taking a break on the moss after walking through the woods all morning.
This is a great time of year to find mushrooms of all kinds. They seem to love the cool, wet weather. When you see them it’s hard to imagine their complicated lives, from spores to threadlike mycelium to mushroom primordia to fruiting mushrooms. Fungi are essential for creating compost, for decomposing plant and organic matter. Without them we wouldn’t be here. It’s comforting that our lives depend on such beautiful organisms.
When I went to bed last night, I knew the morning was going to be magical. I could feel it in the way the cold night air stung my nose. This morning we had our first ice. You can have many a frosty morning before first ice arrives, the morning when the surface of the puddles freeze over. The leaves which yesterday were floating on the small pond by the front entrance, are trapped in a layer of clear, cold ice this morning.
We’ve gone beyond dainty frost to the wilds of hoar frost and ice hair, phantasmagorical creations of a deep freeze. They can look like an army of flesh-cutting glass shards to soft, cuddly blankets you want to wrap around your shivering body.
The freezing nights do wonder for kale. Icy weather turns the starches in kale to sugars, making it much milder than kale picked during the summer. It becomes a mild, crunchy green, great for salads. It’s the middle of November and I’m still harvesting a bin of salad greens for Tweets every week. I wonder sometimes where the kale and other salad greens I gather each week end up. I imagine travelers stopping in at Tweets, devouring my eggs and nibbling on my greens, only to fly off that night or the next day to the far corners of the earth. By the time the kale comes out of their bottoms, it could be on the other side of the world. Bon voyage my hearty greens. Send a postcard if you can.
