Back from the Potawatomis

Last Thursday was the 51st anniversary of Earth Day, and it was fitting that I was reading Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), the collected essays of Robin Wall Kimmerer, a native Potawatomi, about ecology and right relationship to the land, inspired by her dual life as a Native American and as a university professor in botany.

She writes with passion and poignancy about how the nature-based wisdom of Indigenous People—who figured out over the course of centuries how humans could fit into the rhythms of Nature, rather than how we could control it for our implacable greed—has been systematically discounted and ignored by the dominating white, European-centric culture. As the realities of Climate Change and the limits of Earth's resources come into greater focus, this is tender stuff to read. We could have done so much better.

Especially powerful for me was the chapter entitled "People of Corn, People of Light," which relates the Mayan cosmology, taken from their ancient text, the Popul Vuh. It's a creation play in four acts:

I. The gods made the first humans from mud, but they were ugly and ill-formed. They were crumbly, could not reproduce, and melted in the rain.

II. Next they tried carving a man from wood and a woman from the pith of a reed. These were beautiful, lithe, and strong. They could talk, sing, and dance. They learned to use and make things. They had fine minds and bodies, and could reproduce, but their hearts were empty of compassion and love. All of the mis-used members of Creation rallied together and destroyed the people made of wood in self-defense.

III. The third time the gods made people out of pure light, the sacred energy of the Sun. These humans were dazzling to behold—beautiful, smart, and very powerful. They knew so much they thought they knew everything. Instead of being grateful, they believed themselves to be the gods' equals. Understanding the danger this posed, once again the gods arranged for their demise.

IV. On the fourth try, the gods fashioned people out of corn. From two baskets—one white and one yellow—they ground a fine meal, mixed it with water, and shaped a people made of corn. They could dance and sing, and they had words to tell stories and offer up prayers. Their hearts were filled with compassion for the rest of Creation. They were wise enough to be grateful.  To protect the corn people from arrogance, the gods passed a veil over their eyes, clouding their vision as breath clouds a mirror. These people of corn are the ones who were grateful and respectful for the world that sustained them—so they were the ones who were sustained upon the earth.

Kimmerer goes on to challenge the reader with these paraphrased paragraphs:

Creation is an ongoing process and the story is not history alone—it is also prophecy. Have we become people of corn? Or are we still people made of wood? Are we people of light, in thrall to our own power? Are we not yet transformed by relationship to earth?

How can science, art, and story give us a new lens to understand the relationship that people of corn represent? Only when people understand the symbiotic relationships that sustain them can they become people of corn, capable of gratitude and reciprocity.

Science lets us see the dance of chromosomes, the leaves of moss, and the farthest galaxy. But is it a scared lens like the Popul Vuh? Does science allow us to perceive the sacred in the world, or does does it bend light in such a way as to obscure it? A lens that brings the material world into focus but blurs the spiritual is the lens of a people made of wood. It is not more data that we need for our transformation to people of corn, but more wisdom.

I dream of a world guided by the lens of stories rooted in the revelations of science and framed with an Indigenous worldview—stories in which matter and spirit are both given voice.

While scientists are among those who are privy to the intelligence of other species, many seem to believe that the intelligence they access is only their own. They lack the fundamental ingredient: humility. After the gods experimented with arrogance, they gave the people of corn humility, and it takes humility to learn from other species.

We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans do have words. Language is our gift and our responsibility. I think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land. Words to remember old stories, words to tell new ones, stories that bring science and spirit back together to nurture our becoming people of corn.

• • •

Inspired by what Kimmerer wrote, let me tell you a story. 

I grew up in northern Illinois, which is territory that was home to the Potawatomi before the Europeans pushed them aside. While I had no contact with Native Americans growing up, I gradually developed a sense of place, and connection with the living land—which happened to coincide with Indigenous beliefs, as described in Braiding Sweetgrass. It started with my mother's sister, with whom I shared a birthday (albeit 42 years apart). She lived in the two-story homestead house that her grandparent's built on the windswept plains west of Chicago in 1899. Today that house is smack in the midst of Elmhurst, a well-established suburb, but when it was constructed more than a dozen decades ago there wasn't another house in sight.

Growing up in the 50s, it was always a treat to visit Aunt Hennie, and stroll through her well-tended backyard gardens, which included a well-tended birdbath, grape trellises, and an amazing mix of flowers and small fruits—especially raspberries and currants. I took cuttings of her black currants to establish a patch when I moved to northeast Missouri in 1974 and started Sandhill Farm.

Years later, the entire 2006 crop of those currants were consigned to fermentation, which was the featured adult libation at my wedding the following spring. In fact, there's are still a few bottles of that vintage in the basement of Susan's and my house in Duluth. I use it mainly as a secret ingredient when the recipe (or my inspiration) calls for cooking wine, and every time I pull the cork I think of Aunt Hennie and my ties to her homesteading roots.

I grew up as one of five children—a typical number in the 50s—and it happened that when my father was horsing around with us young 'uns he would (for reasons that are obscure to me) often threaten to send us "back to the Potawatomis" if we didn't straighten out. To be sure, this was done in jest and only when he was in a jocular mood. While I had no idea where that came from (or why it was a bad thing to have come from the Potawatomis, much less to go back there), here I am reading the wisdom of an actual Potawatomi, and it has all come back to me.

While my father was a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist and was never seen with his hands in the soil, I am pleased to recall that I grew up in the land of the Potawatomis, and have come—over the course of my 71 years—to understand the power of a respectful relationship to the earth, and the need to curb the acquisitive lifestyle that my father so uncritically embraced. 

Sixty-five years after my father was tossing my sisters and me around on his double bed and threatening us with transportation—not to Australia, mind you, but back to the local Native Americans—I am humbled to take my inspiration for the way forward in these troubled times from a Potawatomi.

Aunt Hennie's Fruit Cake

This morning I laid down the fruit cakes.

Let me explain…

Most all of us have family traditions with roots back to our childhood. Sure, they can be quirky and idiosyncratic, but cherished nonetheless. One of the ones that bubbled up for me recently was homemade fruit cake—far better than store-bought—which was deemed an essential contribution to the Schaub family Christmas hoopla. lovingly assembled by my Mom's older sister, Aunt Hennie.

As it happens, Hennie and I share a birthday (a sure omen of astral connection). She was born in a two-story frame house built on the open prairie 20 miles west of Chicago in 1899 and lived a homesteading life growing up. Over the years, of course, the inexorable march of the suburbs gradually overtook her and today the house—which still stands—is located smack in the middle of an established residential neighborhood in Elmhurst Il. 

As the acorn that wandered furthest from my suburban upbringing, I helped start Sandhill Farm  a homesteading community in northeast Missouri when I was just a callow youth of 24. One serendipitous result of that was that I was the beneficiary of much homesteading equipment that had been languishing in Hennie's basement, looking for a good home. I'm talking about a major league cabbage shredder (think sauerkraut in quantity), a bunch of ceramic crocks, a start of hard-to-find black currant cuttings, and a massive wooden butcher block contributed by my mother. 

In any event, Hennie got along in years (it's a trend, I've noticed) and at some point she was no longer able to deliver the fruit cakes. I believe that ended in the 80s, but the memory persists and she passed along the recipe. Once or twice my sister Tracey had a go at it, and another time my daughter Jo did a batch. This fall, in the Year of Quarantine, I decided it was my turn in the barrel and I took advantage of my weekly trips to Mayo Clinic (in Sept and Oct) to lay in a supply of dried fruit and nuts.

Not finding a ready source of dried orange and lemon peel, I made my own (isn't that what homesteaders do?). I chopped and combined all the fruit, nuts, and spices in late October and the sticky conglomeration all went into an airtight container where it marinated in a sacred concoction of brandy and whiskey. This got carefully stirred and replenished from time to time until yesterday, when it the baking happened!

This entailed creaming sugar and butter until my arm cramped, adding the fruit, and finally some. flour before pouring it all into tins (think banana bread size) and slowly baking for a couple hours.

They turned out beautifully and I'm now in the finally stage. This morning I took the cooled down cakes (there are four) and wrapped them in brandy-soaked cotton cloth (did you notice the alcohol theme?) and then in tin foil to retard evaporation of the precious liquor. They now rest on the basement floor in an airtight container for two weeks of seasoning. They'll be ready Dec 17—just in time to be mailed to my kids for a renewed under-the-tree tradition.

What could be a more loving gift?

There's No Place Like Home

Last week Susan and I attended a local production of the Wizard of Oz. Toward the end of the show, we witnessed Dorothy, acting on the guidance of Glinda, figure out how to return to Kansas. All she needed to do was close her eyes and click the heels of her ruby slippers three times while chanting the magic words, "There's no place like home." Voila! I-70.

It's Christmas Eve and I was reminded of Dorothy's lesson yesterday in a surprising way. This is a time of ritual, when many of us set aside business as usual for a fortnight, to celebrate family, friends, and relationship to the divine. One the ways we do that is through food—in particular, traditional dishes or libations. Perhaps tied to ethnic heritage. Perhaps linked to an old-time family favorite. Perhaps something clipped years ago from a newspaper food column.

In my case that includes plum pudding, a steamed English dessert featuring plenty of dried fruit in a thick, sweet batter, and served with hard sauce (powdered sugar worked into butter until your wrist falls off) and a warmed up sugary bechamel laced with bourbon. You can feel your fillings dissolve when you eat it. The roots of this dish go back to Aunt Hennie, my mother's homesteading older sister.

[To give you an idea of how far back this particular recipe goes, it's often called "suet pudding," after what used to be its most prized ingredient: beef fat. Back a century or more, people craved calories—of course, they still do in less developed and overpopulated countries today—and nothing delivers like fat. In my modern adaptation I substitute butter, but this dessert has never been a good choice for dieters.]

In the fruit department, my recipe calls for raisins, currants, figs, candied orange peel, and citron. While I've never had any trouble in the past (I've made this pudding many times) I was frustrated this past week in my attempts to locate orange peel and citron. I struck out at three grocery stores as well as at a hoity-toity gourmet food emporium. It turns out to be easier these days to find sriracha, hoisin sauce, or wasabi peas than candied fruit. Who knew?

Thus, I returned home yesterday evening empty handed after my final forays in the hunt for orange peel, resigned to my fate: I would need to substitute or do without. How about candied pineapple and dried cherries? As I was mulling this over, Susan decided to take a look at what we had squirreled away on the top shelf of one of our kitchen cupboards—you know, the shelf you need a step stool to access and have forgotten what you have up there.

When what to my wondering eyes did appear
But miniature containers of holiday cheer.

I'm talking about a pint of candied cherries and a small stash of orange peel. Hallelujah! 

Dorothy was right. There's no place like home.

The Spirits of Christmas Past

For all practical purposes, I spent my entire childhood in a single home in the western suburbs of Chicago. My family moved into that house a month before I turned four and I have only the sketchiest of memories from before then.

While my recollections associated with that house are rich and varied, today it seems appropriate to narrow my attention to Christmas there, about which I have memories that are rich and varied enough.

The house was a two-story split-level. All the upstairs was given over to bedrooms and bathrooms. Downstairs, the primary living area was a square ring of kitchen, dining room, living room, and hall. Three steps below that was a secondary ring comprised of less public spaces: laundry room, half bath, furnace room, den, and playroom.

The "official" start of the Christmas season at our house was when my mother unpacked the Twelve Days of Christmas ornaments and installed them on the paneling above the living room fireplace. These were colored paper constructions of a partridge, turtle dove, French hen, calling bird, golden rings, goose on a nest, swan, milking maid, dancing lady, leaping lord, piper, and drummer. My mother had handcrafted these yuletide decorations following patterns she found in Ladies Home Journal (or its socioeconomic equivalent—you know Martha Stewart would have been all over this but it was before her time). 

Next, Mom pressed into service the myriad glittering and multicolored Christmas cards we received, turning them into a seasonal frieze taped along the front facing of the valence lighting in the living room. Eventually, of course—somewhere in the vicinity of solstice—we'd buy a tree (always a long-needled Scotch pine), installing it in the corner of the living (right beneath the twelfth drummer).

Gradually, presents would start accumulating under the tree. One of the cherished games among us children was hiding and searching for a small paper mache brown owl (about an inch or so tall) that had been rescued from the packaging for a long-forgotten gift to become a favorite homemade tree ornament that was damn hard to find amidst the many lights and shiny objects on the tree.

My favorite time of all though was Christmas Eve, when the bulk of the presents made their way to the tree. The ritual that evolved at my house involved sequestering the den as Santa's Workshop, such that by eight or nine pm you had to have an appointment to go in there. The 3'x5' table had been cleared of mundane household detritus and given over to scissors; tubes of wrapping paper; boxes of ribbons, bows, and name tags; and Scotch tape in unlimited rolls.

My unflappable mother would be nursing a highball of watered scotch (carefully consumed at a leisurely rate: high enough to maintain holiday cheer yet low enough to avoid dropping any balls when it came to choreographing the dawn raid on the present horde, followed by holiday feasting), and we'd negotiate den times through her, acting in the capacity of the Workshop's majordomo.

In my teen years I liked to take one of the last shifts (circa 2 am), where I relished gathering up my stash of goodies and entering the inner sanctum of the Workshop. There I got to select the wrapping paper for each gift (curling my own ribbons), and trying to concoct word play and obscure references for the name tags. For that night only, wrap music meant Burl Ives.

Christmas morning was always a blur of flying paper and excited voices. While it was mostly a free-for-all when all us kids were under 10, it became more civilized as we grew older and were able to understand the nuance of deferred gratification—where it was OK to open presents one at a time and we could all appreciate the giving, even when it was neither from us nor to us.

I remember Christmas breakfast featuring homemade coffee cake laden with a cinnamon and brown sugar topping—the perfect foil to strong coffee with half and half. The dinner menu would vary over the years. While turkey was a popular choice, it might as well be ham with pineapple rings and hot mustard sauce (Coleman's mixed with a dab of water and honey), or roast beef with Aunt Hennie's red currant jelly. 

I think my favorite Christmas dessert is plum pudding with rum sauce and hard sauce (Hennie, take another bow). This traditional English recipe features: a) a steamed pudding with lots of fruit; b) a sweet roux laced with rum and/or bourbon, poured warm over the pudding; and c) butter with all the powdered sugar mixed into it that your wrist and forearm can stand, served cold. When consuming this delectable you can virtually feel your fillings dissolve in the sugar.

This year Ma'ikwe will cook a ham, and there's just enough time to get the ingredients for plum pudding. While it may not be possible to go home again in all ways, we can nonetheless embrace rituals that invoke memories that bridge the rose-colored days of our youth to loved ones today. 

Merry Christmas to all.

Vernal Reflections in Passing

I've just returned home from a six-week road trip. I left Missouri March 11 in snow and returned April 21 in spring. It was a world of difference.

We (Sara Peters, Ma'ikwe, and I) woke up Saturday morning at Hummingbird, an established community of about 20 gentle souls where we have many friends. They own a breathtakingly beautiful 500 acres of land outside Mora NM (about 50 miles northeast of Santa Fe). Before getting into the car for a back-to-back days of close confinement, the three of us took a few minutes to commune quietly next to a babbling creek that runs through the property, the water clear and ice cold from snow melt.
 
While our reality Saturday morning wasn't as green as this view from Hummingbird (which was probably taken in late May or even June) it accurately captures how much snow was still visible on the tops of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to our northwest.

The last leg home was 930 miles, descending gradually from an altitude of 7500 feet at Hummingbird to 800 feet at Sandhill Farm in northeast Missouri; from a place that averages 20 inches of annual rainfall (and is currently choked in the grip of a horrific drought) to a place that gets 38 inches of rain on average (and has been blessed with more than five inches the last two weeks). We may as well have been coming from the moon, the difference was that stark.

Our drive home started by winding down from the foothills of the Rockies, traversing northeastern NM, and then threading the needle through the panhandle of western OK. According to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) much of that stretch is in "exceptional" drought (which is their most dire category). When we crossed the Cimarron River (a major tributary of the Arkansas) northeast of Guymon OK, there was no water in it. I don't mean little water; I mean none. When you reflect on the fact that we were traveling through in April—ordinarily the wet season—that's Dust Bowl sobering.

From there we went across southern Kansas, where the drought gradually lessened to "extreme." I want you to get a clear impression of how dry it's been in the Great Plains. While there were occasional green shoots visible on some of the more precocious trees, it seemed more a measure of silvicultural bravery than an indicator of subsoil moisture. These areas are badly in need of rain.

Happily, we were working our way toward water the whole drive, and by the time we got past Wichita (in east-central Kansas), the drought had improved all the way to "severe." Lawns and wheat fields started looking positively Irish. After crossing the Missouri at Kansas City the moisture pendulum continued its swing toward the moist and we witnessed standing water in low lying fields all across northern Missouri. What drought? What a juxtaposition!

Driving the last segment in our home state, I started translating the landscape into what I'd likely find at home. My first concern was whether the season was advanced enough to find morels. It didn't look like it. Usually you need to see a substantial amount of leafing among elms & maples, and there were only smudges of green among the trees as we zoomed passed at 55 mph. Whew. I was only going to be home for 60 hours and was loathe to miss mushroom hunting.

Next I thought about what would be flowering. For sure, the henbit would be making its annual appearance, smearing the gardens and cultivated fields in broad swatches of tiny pink/purple flowers, rather like a delayed splash of Easter excess (where they had to do something with the surplus pastels). This wildly successful and broad-ranging plant is a relative of the mint family. Though a weed, it provides a beneficial early pollen source for honeybees and is not much of a nuisance because it disappears from the agricultural scene before we get into serious soil cultivation. Besides that, it's offers the eye a mood-elevating contrast after the monchromatic palette of winter.

While the forsythia was already in decline, and the redbuds were just coming into their prime, the thing I was most looking forward to was a little cluster of grape hyacinth just outside the back door of the White House (which is the hub of Sandhill). They are one of the things that evokes my Mom's older sister, Aunt Hennie—my patron saint of homesteading. Because she had them in the backyard of her rambling house in Elmhurst IL all of my childhood years, the sight of these delicate blooms invariably evokes her presence in my soul. Her I am basking in their aura:
 
Finally, I thought of these whimsical and topical four lines of doggerel that were first published in 1951—when I was a mere tad of two—and which I got reacquainted with this past February while randomly skimming through a copy of Pogo, happily available as reading material in Harvey Baker's necessary at Dunmire Hollow. This is what Walt Kelley had to say about spring:

How pierceful grows the hazy yon!
How myrtle petaled thou!
For spring hath sprung the cyclotron
How how browse thou, brown cow?

It was good to be home again.