every day is a good day
Nothing says summer is over than a fire in the wood stove. Yesterday, to take the chill off, I lit a fire in the wood stove. Summer is over when the hubbard squash are ready to eat. Summer is over when the vine maples turn crimson. In July, summer seemed like it would go on forever. Rain was a distant memory. I began to question if it ever got cold in the Pacific Northwest. Ha! The joke was on me. With a fire crackling in the wood stove, summer is now the memory.
It’s a pumpkin kind of day. Time to bring in some pumpkins. You know it’s not pumpkin pie if it comes out of a can. Before you can make a real pumpkin pie, you have to feel the pumpkin in your hands, count its ridges, close your eyes and let it tell you how much cinnamon, how many cloves, how much cream it wants. Dream with the pumpkin and get to know it. You can’t do that with the pumpkin in a can. By then it is long dead and past sharing its dreams with you. Most likely, it’s not even pumpkin. It’s probably butternut squash or some other pumpkin wanna be. Life is too short not to have the real thing.
On a pumpkin kind of day, Madge’s chicks are glad to spend the day with their mother. Such days are numbered. Yesterday evening she flew up to the top of the roost to spend the night. Her chicks panicked. “Where is our mother?” they chirped and chirped as they ran around looking for her. The chickens on the roost weren’t about to let them fly up and crawl past them. Her chicks ended up spending the night, sleeping in the nest on the ground where their mother used to curl up with them. It was their first night on their own.
It’s a traumatic ordeal all chicks go through: that first night without their mother. No doubt it is a common topic chickens vent about when they lay bare their hearts to their therapist. “Describe your first night alone, without your mother,” must be a mantra of chicken therapists. It all goes downhill from there.
Madge’s chicks are very content this afternoon. They spent all morning and afternoon with her. Under the hawthorn, they preen and nap. As adults, I wonder if they will dream of this happy afternoon they spent with their mother on this pumpkin kind of day.
Mother hens have a field day when I clear brush along a drainage ditch to prepare for the winter rains. The brush and fallen leaves are so thick, you can’t see their little chicks digging for things to eat in the moist ditch. Chickens love spending much of their day in the woods.
The leaves are turning more each day. It is all the leaves which make the forest a paradise for chickens. The leaves blanket the forest floor when they fall, making a feast for the worms and bugs the chickens savor.
How much time do the chickens which provide the eggs you buy get to spend in the forest? Did the chicken you buy get to walk through a forest to look for tasty grubs to eat?
Looking at the food coming out of the garden, I wonder how we ever came up with the idea that food can be industrialized. I wonder about it when I cut open a cabbage I just picked. It is so different than any cabbage I find in the stores, even the local co-op. Store potatoes don’t have the deep flavor that the potatoes I dig out of the ground have.
Perhaps it’s that to have a cabbage that can endure going through the food industry, from growing in a field with thousands if not millions of other cabbages, to being picked quickly, industrial processes demand efficiency so industrial cabbages need to be picked as speedily as possible, packed, shipped through warehouses, trucked to stores, and stacked on shelves; such cabbages need to be tough and endurable.
Cabbage varieties that don’t go through the food industry can be sweet and delicate. Eating cabbage picked moments ago is sweet, crisp, and full of love. Real food can’t be industrialized, just like a parent’s love can’t be canned and sold on the shelf.
A blue whale is 30 meters, 98 feet, long. The green whale in the southwest corner of our property is longer than that, 31 meters, 103 feet, from where it was cut to the tip of the longest branch. Add the height of the stump, the upper branches which broke off when the tree fell, and the roots below ground, and the green whale resting in the corner of our property is a giant compared to the magnificent blue whales, a giant no Greenpeace film crew will ever want to document.
At one time, these branches were a hundred feet in the sky, where they waved in the wind and rested the feet of many a weary bird.
The green whale is now the home to a myriad of green plants, this fern included. They are to fallen trees what barnacles are to blue whales. Only beached trees don’t rub their skin on gravelly ocean floors to remove their green barnacles.
