Who loves a little boiled cruciferous vegetable for lunch? I do! Cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts are all prime contenders for a wholesome bowl of midday sustenance.
Here, cauliflower from Volante Farm is topped with British cheddar, recently made herb butter (using aromatics from the garden), and threaded with kale that a friend grew and gave me earlier in the week. Plus salt. Of course, salt.
It is so simple — what my mother would’ve called “peasant fare” — and yet beyond satisfying.
It stinks up the house for a minute, but who cares? It is totally worth it.
In other news, our turkey family is missing its fifth member. Is it the mother? I can’t tell because the chicks are full grown now.
I’m busy convincing myself it’s the mother, so that I can tell myself that her absence is purposeful and natural. To imagine otherwise? Not today.
The sun came out for a minute today. Got out and raked, swept leaves from the curb, fed the turkeys, and ran to Volantes Farm. Also, a friend came over for coffee early and we wrote postcards to voters.
An old heart quilt surfaced last week. There’s a weaving section that wasn’t finished so I took care of that today. This piece was begun during one of Jude’s classes and her recent posts about weaving prompted this effort.
I’m also adding some yellow and blue to brighten it up and outlined that little heart (lower left) in red.
I bury comfrey leaves in the dusty soil under the holly and next to a hellebore. It is an act of faith, but also a ritual informed by grief for look how dry and pale the soil is, even after a weekend of rain.
And, as if such a calculation mattered, I wonder which is bigger, my grief at all the injuries to the natural world or my grief at the passing of my younger son.
Does one grief nest inside the other like two Russian dolls? It can’t possibly be that neat. More like the two griefs permeate the air, the yard, and my body in undulating waves that cannot be measured or even separated one from the other.
I listened earlier to the parents of a young man stolen on October 7 and murdered some 300 days later and though the circumstances of our boys’ deaths have nothing in common, our sorrow is the same.
“I am broken,” says the mother. “And I will be broken for the rest of my life.” They feel their son near. The father says he thinks of him every minute of every day.
I too am broken. I too think of my son constantly – more, in fact, than when he was alive, which is some contorted form of irony.
I have regrets they will never have. That is one of my burdens. The regrets come and go like the sadness: unbidden, unwelcome, excruciating,
Why didn’t I talk to you more in those last two weeks? Why didn’t I ask you to tell me why you thought life wasn’t worth living anymore? I picture myself patting the couch saying sit for a minute and putting my arm around him for what could’ve been the last time.
The nitrogen–uptake capacity of the comfrey makes it ideal for composting. You can make salves and teas and poultices as well, but this year I plan only to bury its leaves in the garden beds.
Is there anything I can bury near the barren patch of my being that might at some later date afford growth?
Today, I doubt it.
But I will gather chive, thyme, and rosemary from their pots and chop them up to make herb butter. Lemon zest, salt, and garlic for extra flavor. The act signals belief in sustenance ahead. There will be tasty dinners down the road and some above average snacks. That there is a reason to harvest aromatic herbs even when swimming in grief offers me a droplet of satisfaction. No more. No less.
The goldenrod nods over the dried peony, asserting the ruthless march of time, but delicately.
I listen to the children on the playground yelling with joy and think: all of them will die, a few of them before their parents.
The house will not give up its secrets, so stop trying. “What about that time?” No. Just stop.
The passing sirens shred your nervous system anew. This is your life now —
your life without your second born.
Perhaps the gods, in their greed, grabbed him, wanting both his anguish and his grace for their lofty club.
“Two contradictory things can be true,” a friend said to me.
On occasion the dog howls back at the firetrucks and ambulances. I never know when or why.
That’s the thing about sudden violent death, too. You may never really know why.
I prefer the idea of jealous gods stealing my son even if it’s capricious or comical to them, like a magpie collecting string. Better that than some theorem about how matter can be converted but never lost — carbon and hydrogen molecules returning to soil and clouds, etc.
Listen, the coffee drips through the machine after I push the button, telling me it’s the start of another day — but it doesn’t tell me if it’s a day I’ll want to inhabit.
Hush, say the elegant, nodding goldenrods. Just take things one sweetened caffeinated cup at a time.
And then what?
And then what?
When the wicked force of grief rips open a chest, the ribs make room for a new kind of breathing, a softer listening. It’s a catastrophe with an upside, the poets say.
The needle I ply goes in and out as if nothing has happened — except now every completed cloth creation puts me in a bind. Do what with this?
A row of felt houses capped by an indigo moon sounds lovely, but nothing can stop the thing from being, ultimately, clutter.
Grief reorients us to stuff. How little any of it seems to matter!
The maple leaves drop first. The birch and ginkgos will follow.
I don’t know where all the sparrows went – I feel lonely without them. At least when the turkey family comes, I get to feel glad. They trot over, all five of them, the chicks nearly as big as the mother now.
There are places in my mind that I cannot go. They’re all in Colorado. Even some random image of the Rockies taps my shoulder and hisses in my ear: he’s gone, he’s gone.
Soon the black walnuts will fall with a percussive fury and for a week to 10 days, we will feel under assault.
That dangerous thudding happens every year, but now so many occurrences will never happen again. Do I, for instance, set a place for him at the Thanksgiving dinner table? An empty plate.
Someone asks, Do you speak to the Ancestors? Do you call out to them?
Does desperate need jinx my chances of an answer? Willpower and sorrow don’t necessarily partner well.
I feel up against it.
The coffee gets brewed. The children run out of the school building and yell. The yard crews come and they go.
Maybe I’ll put radishes in my salad today.
If I’m lucky, the turkeys will run over to me when I head out to the garage.
But please turn off the music. All of the music. Every note. I cannot take it.
