Pumpkin Spirits, remembered

This si an old post, but I think we all need a little more protection in the coming Winter.    

Pumpkin Spirits guard our house on the thinnest nights of the year.  

            The first two spirit guards are the big pumpkins, carved with faces. We light them in the house and carry them out  the  front door. We walk around the house—North, East, South, West, through two gates, asking the spirits to protect the space for the winter. Mark places his in front of the dining room door; it is a face made from leaves this year. I carry mine to the front steps; a huge smile and a third eye watch the night.  Gaurdian Spirits.

            The second  two  are carved gourds from Sunbow farm, with thick skins. The designs are simpler—triangles and slits let the light through. These leave via the back door and  round the house as well. As I walk, I remember all of the fruits of the gardens—grapes, raspberries, flowers, figs, tomatoes, greens—and we place these in the back veg garden. Mark’s is on the bridge, mine under the collard patch where the rabbit likes to hide. Garden Spirits.

            The third spirit gourds are actually two votive holders of pumpkin faces that have been in the family for years. I gave my mother one for her birthday when I was twenty years old; I just liked the smile. We carry these small figures out of the dining room and around the house, still heading clockwise. One sits on the potting bench; the other watches from the thick wooden plank in front of the fireplace. They look towards the house, leading spirits in. I tuck my mother’s glass pumpkin into the strawberry plants at the feet of Saint Francis. Guiding Spirits.

            At night, before we climb into bed, I look outside. Small golden lights gleam in the darkness.

Dinner in the Time of Covid

 

    

            Wash hands. Turn on the frying pan and line it with olive oil. Chop the onion. Start dinner. Repeat. And again. And again.  The pandemic has stopped us from going out for the casual meal, but I have always cooked dinner regularly. It is the transitional ritual from work to home.

                My mother was a traditional daily cook. Every night, she made dinner—meat, potatoes, veg. Some nights it was pasta. Some weekend nights, it might be a roast. But she cooked from scratch (except for an occasional can of tomato soup for the top of the meatloaf and frozen veggies), every night. When we were traveling across the country in a camper, she cooked. We ate dinner on Fisherman’s Wharf, with the tourists walking by peering in. We ate dinner perched on the Western edge of the country, in rest areas in the Southwest, every night. Even when she worked full time,  it’s not like there were a lot of options in Hampstead New Hampshire—pizza and meatball subs, a fried clam bar in the summer,  a Chinese restaurant in the strip mall that held the grocery store ten miles away.  But everyone cooked. It was what you did.

                 When I was in college, cooking was my job. My roommate woke up at six AM on Saturday morning and cleaned the bathroom while I slept in until eight. I planned the meals, made the Friday afternoon grocery list, and cooked. We washed dishes together, harmonizing along with The Doobie Brothers “Black Water” and the Beatles. Even when I lived alone, for years, I cooked dinner. The menus shifted away from meat and potatoes and more to soups and bread, pastas and rice, mounds of local and seasonal  veggies, cooked and uncooked. On the road, I became the master of a finicky Coleman stove, slow cooking pots of beans while reading in the late afternoon at a campground. I kept the wok under the shelf. Even now, I make flatbread and farls, soups and stir fries when we travel. Mark jokes that he thought he might stick around when I handed him a hot dinner on a real plate in the back country off China Hat Road on an early road trip.

                So the pandemic hasn’t really changed much for us around dinner time. I cook. Mark washes dishes. We miss going out to dinner, not because of the food, but because we can just let someone else do the work and, more importantly, because you always see someone you know when you go out to eat in Corvallis. We are just not that big a town.  And I think that is what I am missing, far more than the break from cooking. The casual interaction with my neighbors—the parents of an old student or the table with a newly minted ninth grader eating with her family and wondering—do I say something?  Nod and smile? Or just announce it in class on Monday?  Eating at home every night breaks those delicate bonds that hold a community together, even as it strengths the ones that keep a small family close.

October

     

October. Maybe it is being raised in New England, surrounded by maple trees that range from deep red, to orange, to yellow, to green on one tree—sitting in the center of the glory, on a strong branch. Or it is the result of living for half of my life here, in the Pacific Northwest, knowing that, for every glorious day, there’s a cloud lurking over the hills, waiting to descend in its own delicate beauty over the hills. But I find myself drawn outside every afternoon to work the ground or walk the hills, storing up the beauty of the golden light for one more winter. October is the time to finish up the summer’s projects.

Yesterday, we washed the windows. We’re not good window washers. There are always streaks and spots left behind, but we get off the worst of the dirt and dust and bug poop from the summer. This year, between the mess we made washing the house for painting plus the ash fall in September, it was a major task. Mark washes outside. I wash inside. We also scraped paint. “You missed some glazing here,” he observed. “Next summer,” I replied. We are at that point. Next summer’s project list begins.

This afternoon, we worked in the school garden, realigning a couple of beds  and tossing down the cover crop. I’ve been prepping a bed a day all week and an hour on Sunday finished up the roughest beds. There’s plenty still to do- -tomatoes to pull, kale and carrots to weed, paths to mulch. But we took a few moments to consider future plans. We could tear out those evergreens and plant fruit trees. Put out benches so classes can come out and read. Keep pulling thistle and nut sedge and clear out the grass in the herb mound. Some of that will happen this fall, as long as the weather stays dry, but some is for next summer or the summer after that. The light slanted across the playing fields, struck the stained glass piece hung above the pollinator habitat, turned the world gold for a few moments.

We turn inward in the evenings, light a fire, eat a squash for dinner, wear wooly socks while we read. Soon, the clouds of winter will lay over us without a break—“there will be months of rain.”  But, right now, we hover on the cusp of the turning year, not quite ready to come inside. And  we start the plans for the next year.

Autumn Rituals

 

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               Sometime between Friday and Sunday, the season shifted. On Friday, walking home, I was thinking about socks—in a future tense sort of way. Someday, I would need socks again.  This morning, I was wearing socks. The rains had come blowing in--downpours in the night—and the temperature dropped.  We have moved into autumn behaviors.

1.       We have a fire in the fireplace.

2.       I turned on the chili pepper lights in the kitchen.

3.       Laundry is hanging on a rack in the living room.

4.       There are squashes and onions in the larder, potatoes under the stairs, cider in the fridge.

5.       The windows are closed.

6.       The cat did not go out last night, by her own choice.

7.       The chickens are living on a garden bed.

8.       There are no zucchini in the house, although there may still be a few in the garden.

9.       Socks. Big woolly sweater.

10.   Damp raincoats hang in the back hall.

11.   Piles of books, the New York Times, magazines scattered on the couch for Sunday reading.

12.   Lentil soup bubbles in the crockpot.

This winter, we fear, will be more challenging than others, but we are Hardy Folk, knowing how to both snug down for the afternoon and embrace the wild winds and rain on a morning walk.

Larder Repair

     

In early October, we finish up the filling of the larder for the winter. This year, it required a little more work. Because of a funky foundation that shifts as the ground grows wetter and then dries out in the summer, we have cracks between the wall and the foundation in the space that was once the garage and is now our cool storage area. There are already vents into the space and insulation surrounding it, so it was not the cold air that was the problem. It was the large slugs that found their way in last winter, slimed all over the walls, and munched on the beets. Gross!  When we emptied the space this fall to examine the problem, we also realized a rodent had visited once or twice, leaving behind some droppings. Gross!!

Mark has spent the last week consulting and working on a solution. We filled a large crack in the floor with sand, first. We considered a caulking material that could fill in the gaps around the foundation, but Mark was afraid it would not hold when the foundation shifted in the winter. I wondered if it would not just squirt out the other side. After several conversations, he decided on a fine hardware cloth, to tight for slugs or rodents to squeeze through, held in place with a wooden rail on top and heavy shelving bricks below. It would move with the foundation, he thought. As he worked, he also cleaned slug slime off of the walls and washed down the board and block shelves. It looks much better. We lifted the two 25 pound bags of onions in, added some garden squash and pumpkins, and some seed potatoes. Or the next few weeks, the stores will grow as we add more squash and garlic, some fermenting veggies, and an occasional haul of greens.