From Word To Word

I have been away for a while, first on Manitoulin with some friends and then at camp, and I have returned home with a whole list of things that I need to write about but will probably not find the time to write about very soon, especially considering the new semester that is lurking only a few days away.  I would like to write something about what it means to go away together, in togetherness, as family and as friends, something about how increased wealth produces increased isolation, something about John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues, something on the idea of the call in Heidegger, something on the relationship between ideals of individuality and the experience of depression, and this is still a very partial list.

I was full of these and other things  as I drove into the driveway on Saturday, full of the need to do something about them, but coming home disrupted them with its welcome, disrupted them with the pleasantness of the home and neighbourhood.  There were tomatoes, hundred of tomatoes, ripening on the vines, the first ripe tomatoes I have ever managed to grow from seed.  There were apples, a very few apples, our first ever crop of apples, ready to be picked.  There were sunflowers, the sunflowers that my eldest son had purchased with his own allowance and planted with his own hands and watered relentlessly, and they were blooming.  There were the friends who dropped by for pancakes on Saturday night, and the friends who came by for pasta on Sunday night.  There was, in short, a fullness of those things that make the home and the garden and the neighbourhood what they should be.

You will not blame me for choosing them over writing the poor things that I might have written.

We have been cutting and drying herbs at our place (oregano, lemon balm, tarragon), and though this is a time consuming undertaking, it is one of those mundane tasks that leave plenty of time for thinking and conversation, and I quite enjoy the labour of it, particularly when friends drop by, not quite unexpectedly, as Don Moore and his family did the other day.  While the kids played in the back yard, Don began helping me prepare the herbs for hanging, and we talked, about the book that he is writing on post-9/11 film, about City of God, and about other things. These moments, when others are able to join the rhythm of the home, both practically and intellectually, gratify me very much.  They affirm in practical ways the truths I hold most closely.

The garden marks the space of the cultivated between the spaces of the home and the world, between the spaces of the domestic and the natural.  This cultivated space lies beyond the home, but it is nevertheless a part of the home, an extension of the home into the world.  It is the space that marks the transition from the domestic to the natural.  It signals that the door to the home is near but has not yet been entered, that the threshold of the home is close at hand but has not yet been crossed. It bears the marks of both the domestic and the natural, and so it is less a border between them than it is a borderland, a place of transition, where they are brought into a relation.

It is the space in which the domestic orders the natural so that it might be more aesthetic or more productive, but it is also a space that is always open, by necessity, to some degree or another, to the natural.  This is true even in the most urban situations, even where the natural has been most disrupted and displaced, even where the natural has been reduced only to the weather and to whatever remnant plants and animals have learned to survive in the midst of human development.  Even in these places, so long as the home is bordered by a garden, though it be only a hanging planter or a window box, the cultivated space marks the transition between the home and whatever remains of the natural, and it comes to offer itself as a space where the natural and the domestic both might better live and grow.

The nature of the cultivated space, therefore, marks the nature of the relation between the domestic and the natural in any given place, whether it be the unrelieved concrete of an urban neighbourhood, or the vast and ordered lawns of suburbia, or the fields of the farmhouse.  In each case, the garden reveals how the domestic relates to the natural.  For this reason, the creation of a garden is more than a merely aesthetic or a merely productive act.  It is also a political and a social act, and the choices that are made in its construction are not without their political and social significance.  The choice of whether to make the garden organic or edible or native; the choice of whether to make it hospitable to whatever might enter it, whether it be human or animal or vegetable; the choice of whether to keep only carefully maintained lawns and a few well pruned shrubs or to have a whole range of plants and trees: these all become significant, because they reveal how we cultivate our relation to the natural.

Words are like stones.  You must work with them.  You must heft them, turn them in your hands, feel their weight and their shape, know each one for what it is before you can find its proper place, not its perfect place, for no stone and no word ever fits perfectly, and each word and each stone must be held in place by other stones and words, by earth or by mortar, but each will have its proper place, a place that fits it, a place for which it might have been fitted if it had been fitted, though it has not been fitted for any place at all, and what these words and these stones become is precisely this, a proper place that is the sum of their proper places, where they come to be something that they always could have come to be, one of the many things that they could have come to be, and perhaps, oh, let us rest in this perhaps, they will come to be something beautiful.  This is the work of the mason and the writer, both.  It is what makes words like stones.

I have been building a drystone retaining wall in my backyard.  It will eventually edge the bit of lawn that I am seeding in the backyard for my children to play on, and it will have a single terrace for a garden where I will plant some shrubs to block the view of our neighbour’s driveway.  It is pretty rudimentary stuff as far as stonework is concerned, but it has been taking me some time to complete it.

It is not that I am completely without experience in stonework.  I used to lay flagstone sometimes for my brother Nathan in the summers, and I put in a cobblestone path in the garden of our last house, and I have been setting stones to edge the garden paths of this current house, but stone never seems to get easier for me.  It is always as difficult as when I first began, no matter how much of it I do.

A mason does not build with stone.  A mason works with stone.  This is not a meaningless distinction.  Stonework is like doing a jigsaw puzzle, only none of the pieces are designed to fit together, and so they may need to be shaped a little with a hand sledge and a cold chisel, and they all weigh ten pounds or more.    Yet there is something deeply satisfying about working with stone, about seeing what the stone can become.  Every time a block finds its place, the wall comes closer to being what it will be.

I love Serviceberries (Amelanchier canadensis), or Saskatoon Berries as they are sometimes called.  The fruit tastes wonderful and makes great pies; the flowers are white and delicately fragrant in the spring; and the leaves are a beautiful red in the fall.

This is why I decided to try and grow some Serviceberries from seed last fall, collecting seeds from two very nice specimens in my neighbourhood, and working from Henry Kock’s Growing Trees from Seed, a book I have posted about before.  This is also why I went through the painstaking process of teasing the prematurely germinated seedlings apart and planting them in my seedtable this spring.  I was able to plant a whole tray of thirty-two seedlings, and I was eagerly anticiapting my own Serviceberry grove in ten years or so.

Unfortunately, the seedtable was initially placed in my basement, and the temperature was apparently not warm enough, because every one of those thirty-two seedling withered and died in a matter of week.  I moved the seedtable upstairs immediately, but the damage had been done, and I had no recourse but to console myself with the knowledge that I could collect more seeds in the fall.

A few weeks ago, however, I noticed some strange seedlings mixed in among the yarrow that I had planted very shortly after the Serviceberries.  They were quite definately not yarrow, but they were also quite definitely not the little weeds that creep into potting soil when it is reused over time.  I decided to let them be, and it quickly became clear that they were in fact Serviceberry seedlings.  I had taken the soil in which the Serviceberry seeds had been stratifying all winter and mixed it back into my potting soil, and this discarded soil must have contained at least a few seeds that had not germinated but still could.

So now, against all hope, I have five Serviceberry seedlings.

I wrote last week about making a seed table, and I must admit that the post did deem to imply that I was starting tomatoes in my seed table as of this past weekend, which horrified several of my gardening friends.  Now, I am new to the gardening game, but even I know that it is still early for tomatoes, and I plan to plant red peppers in two weeks or so and then tomatoes one or two weeks after that.  Though it was the tomatoes that made the table necessary, the seeds that I put in the dirt this past weekend were of a very different sort.  They were the tree seeds that I had been stratifying in the refrigerator this winter, and they were technically no longer even seeds.

This was the reason, actually, for my hurry in making the table in the first place.  I had not expected to need the tables for a week or two yet, but I went last week to check the moisture levels of my stratifying seeds and discovered that they had all germinated, every one of them.  I no longer had little bags of dirt and hibernating seeds.  I had little bags of dirt and tangled masses of germinated seedlings, all pale and straggly and searching for light.  So, my first task was to build the table a little ahead of schedule, and my second task, accomplished this past Saturday, was to detangle and plant in seed trays the still very delicate seedlings.

The plum and cherry plants were fairly simple.  There were fewer of them, and they were stronger, and only a few of them had germinated in the first place.  The roses were a little more difficult, but there were still only a couple of dozen of them, so I planted them out without too  much trouble.  The Saskatoon seedlings, however, were a nightmare.  There were something like a hundred of them, all very delicate, and all woven together like a mat.  I was forced to pick through them one by one and to use a toothpick to help place them in the soil without breaking their roots.  This is definitely not how the manuals recommend that you plant seeds, and after several hours of tedium I would also second their judgment, but the results seem good.  I had relatively few of the seedlings die off from shock or breakage, and the cherries and plums are responding very quickly to the light.  It was good just to see the rows of little plants, and I was motivated to plant several trays of perennial herbs that can stay in the table until spring.

As our first real snowstorm of the year rolled in yesterday, it was good to have a little bit of spring growing in my basement.

There are three principal reasons that I have not been writing over the last few days.

Two of these reasons are of the sort that I am a little ashamed to confess: first, I have been playing Zelda: Twilight Princess with  my eldest son, since he is old enough to be interested in the game but is still too young to work his way through it by himself; second, my wife and I have been watching the final season of Battlestar Galactica in the evenings.  I do not often indulge in these kinds of things, and I have been getting much less done because of them, but I remain entirely unrepentant.

The third reason is at least a productive one: I have been making a seed table to start my seedlings for the garden this spring.  Last year’s experiment with putting the seed trays in the window sills was mostly a disaster.  There was too little heat and too little light in the front windoew, and there are really no better places in the house.  A seed table was necessary, and so a seed table has been made.  The photos are perhaps not entirely clear, but the table has two levels, each of which is divided into six sections that are the same dimensions as a standard seed try, so I will be able to start twelve trays of seeds at a time, which should meet all of my foreseeable needs.  I still have to add the plastic cover and buy the grow bulbs, but it is otherwise ready to go.  Best of all, the thing cost me only the price of the light fixtures.  The frame was constructed from some wood that I salvaged from my brother-in-law’s futon, and the cover will be cut from some poly that was left over from insulating the attic of our previous home.

I hope to have seeds in dirt by saturday.

Part of my fall ritual includes drying the herbs and spices that grow in my garden.  This year, for example, I have already dried wild carrot flowers and greens, lemon balm, camomile, purple clover, basil, oregano, chives, and I still have a fair amount to do, including rosemary, mint, and rosehips.  This past Saturday, as I was considering what still had to be done, I noticed the purple shiso, which grows wild in my garden and which I only just learned is edible this past summer.  I had heard that both the leaves and the seeds could be dried and kept as spices, and I was fairly confident that I could dry the leaves without much problem, I was not sure how to go about harvesting the seeds.  I had no idea when they were mature, no idea how they should be extracted from their husks, no idea whether they should be dried before or after they were extracted, no idea, in short, at all.

The internet told me nothing very useful, so I decided that some experimentation was in order.  I stripped the seed pods from a few stems and tried rubbing them between my palms to remove the husks.  This operation was somewhat less effective than I hoped.  The husks could eventually be removed, but the moisture made them cling to the seeds, and the seeds cling to each other.  I noticed, however, that the seeds from the pods at the very tip were white and soft, while those nearer the bottom were brown and harder and tasted quite strongly when bitten.  Whether or not these lower seeds were mature enough to be fertile, they were certainly mature enough for my purposes, so I cut the whole plant.  I stripped the leaves into one colander and the seed pods into another, rinsed them both, and left them to dry over night.  I then dried them as I dry everything else, turning my oven to its lowest heat, putting a large cookie pan on the lowest rack to block the direct heat from the element, placing the herbs in a second cookie sheet on a higher rack, and leaving the oven door ajar to allow the moisture to escape.

The leaves dried easily, as I expected they would.  Though they are larger than basil or mint leaves, they are of a similar thickness and texture, and they dry much the same.  The seeds also seemed to dry well, but they were still in their husks, and I was still faced with the question of whether I could extract them.  I rubbed a few between my palms again, and the husks broke up quite easily, but the seeds still clung together in their little clusters.  By rubbing more vigorously, I was able to separate the seeds, but I was left with a handful of chaff mixed with the seeds that I wanted.  I tried sifting this mixture through several sizes of colandar and sifter, but anything large enough to let the chaff through let the seeds through also.  I tried picking the seeds out of the chaf by hand, but gave this up as too tedious after a single seed.  In the end, I was reduced to putting the seeds and chaf together in a small mixing bowl and shaking it gently until the heavier seeds gathered on top of the lighter chaff.  I would then tap out the gathered seeds into a second bowl, repeating the process until I had removed as many of the seeds as my patience would allow.

There are probably more efficient ways to dry purple shiso seeds, and I would appreciate anyone who could offer advise on how to make the process simpler, but I am quite satisfied with the end product of my experiment. The seeds do seem well dried, and they have certainly retained their flavour.  Now I just need to learn how to cook with them.

Today is tomato sauce day.  Actually, it is the first of what will need to be two tomato sauce days, which is apparently what happens when you have the assistance of two children under five years of age.  To this point, we have been harvesting and processing the basil, the oregano, and the garlic from our garden.  Our tomatoes, the very few that we have, are still too green, so we had to buy a couple of bushels from the market on Saturday.  I hope to start making the sauce this evening.

I have always loved this process.  I love cutting the herbs and digging the garlic.  I love stripping the leaves from the plants.  I love washing and chopping the ingredients.  I love blanching and peeling the tomatoes.  I love these things, not despite the fact that they are mundane, but precisely because they are mundane and because they therefore allow me a kind of solitude to think and to reflect. I have always found that it is theses mundane tasks, those that do not require my attention but that nevertheless occupy me physically, that seem to open a space for thinking.  It is weeding and kneading bread dough and processing vegetables and cleaning cupboards that permit me a kind of solitude in the midst of everything, an intellectual clearing in which there is nothing do but reflect.

Labour of this sort, therefore, is often more restorative for me than simple relaxation, because it takes me away from myself for a time, beacuse it forces me to confront myself for a time.  I am forced, not just to do the mundane task, but to think through it.  Though I do not set out to think, though I do not even know how to go about thinking, it is in these spaces that I find myself thinking nevertheless, that I find myself unable to do anything else.