SUMAC TEA
Those chilly mornings earlier this week got me in the mood for sumac tea, so I visited a thicket of sumac near the barn and snipped off a few clusters of fruits. Back at the camp I dropped the clusters into a pot of boiling water and after a while had some tea. It's sour stuff, made eminently better with the addition of sugar or honey, and milk or cream.
The acid taste comes from the bursting of tiny glands at the tips of very small, stiff hairs covering the fruits. When the hot water causes these glands to burst they release acid into the water. When you collect the fruits you can clearly see the glands with a good handlens, and just barely see them with your naked eye. So many acid-filled, hair-top glands cover each fruit that the fruits look and feel sticky.
I've been noticing these fruiting sumacs for a few weeks. Among the very first harbingers of fall, the bushes show up as random splashes of scarlet in the landscape. Now they are a little past their color peak and are losing leaves. Many of the remaining leaves are black, and the fruiting clusters are brown and drooping at the ends of branches.
The sumac we have here is the Winged Sumac, Rhus copallina. Sometimes it's called Flameleaf Sumac, and many books refer to it as Shining Sumac. In fact, the English naming of this plant has always been a bit shaky. The dictionary accepts an alternative spelling of "sumac" as "sumach," plus they say it can be pronounced either "SHOO-mak" or "SOO-mak." The word "sumac" appears to have come into English from the Arabic summaq by way of Middle Latin and Old French, so there's no wonder its pronunciation is squishy by now.
Some people worry about making sumac tea because they've heard of Poison Sumac, Toxicodendron vernix. Poison Sumac does occur in southern Mississippi, but I've not seen it around here. It lives only in very moist spots such as bogs, pocosins, wet pine barrens and stream borders. Certainly it wouldn't be growing in our weedy, upland fields.
When gathering fruits for making tea it's easy to be sure you're not getting Poison Sumac fruits. Winged Sumac fruits are red while Poison Sumac fruits are white.
*****
MARSH HAWKS HAVE ARRIVED
On a particularly cold, windy morning early this week one of our most welcome bird winter residents made its first appearance of the season. It was the Marsh Hawk. You recognize this hawk as much by its manner of flying low over flat fields, its steady gaze directed onto the ground just below, as by its physical features.
Another striking field mark is its conspicuously white rump -- the rump of a bird being the lower part of the back connecting with the base of the tail feathers.
Sometimes Marsh Hawks are called Northern Harriers, which is the name preferred by those wishing to preserve names used in Europe. Other authors continue to call it Marsh Hawk, the name early American settlers gave it. I use the name Marsh Hawk because that's what I learned from my old Peterson Field Guide back in the 60s.
Marsh Hawks must be very successful at what they do because they enjoy one of the most extensive bird distributions I know of. They're found not only throughout nearly all of North America, to the southernmost tip of South America, but also throughout much of Europe and Asia. During my travels I've enjoyed learning its names in the various languages of its native countries. In England it was the Hen Harrier. In Spain the Aguilucho Pálido. In France the Busard Saint-Martin. In Germany the Kornweihe. In Italy the Albanella Reale, and in Portugal the Tartaranhão.
One reason I have a special feeling for Marsh Hawks is because of a certain memory. One very blustery, cold, windy winter day when I was a farmboy in Kentucky I was walking along our gravel road when I spotted a black cat silently slinking across a wide, flat, rain-soaked, brown field of soybean stubble. It was as forlorn a sight as you can imagine, the cat looking starved and emaciated, and the cold wind just howling beneath a brooding, stormy sky. Suddenly the cat crouched as a Marsh Hawk came sailing low toward it. The hawk circled, rose to get altitude, then dove. But the cat arched its back and raised a paw and the hawk broke off its dive just before striking. For fifteen minutes the hawk circled and dove, again and again, and the cat kept hissing, spitting, arching its back and pawing at the air.
Two great hungers and two great fears in conflict in so much cutting cold, such wind-thunder, such achingly broad horizons with fearfully curdled dark sky...
In such a conflict, which side do you support? Why is nature stuck together in such a way that there are predators and prey? Why is life possible only when others keep dying?
*****
PICKING UP PECANS
This beautiful Sunday morning I biked a few miles to a certain spot I know along Second Creek west of here, where Pecan trees grow next to a small country road. Here I can pick up pecan nuts without trespassing on private property. We have many Pecan trees on this plantation but I like these bottomland nuts better and I enjoy the ride through the countryside. The ride there was a pleasure. Farmers have picked their cotton recently and now white fluff blown from wagons and trucks lies along the road looking like patches of snow.
Pecan nuts are big business around here. Lots of people have groves of them and sell them commercially. In town several stores have cardboard signs in their windows reading "We buy pecans." In the countryside sometimes you see whole Black families out picking them up to sell.
Last year the crop was poor because of the drought and I didn't get to send any to my grandmother in Kentucky until after Thanksgiving. This year the crop is bounteous. In this morning's fresh air and dazzling sunlight it was a pure pleasure to rummage among the dry brown leaves finding all the shiny nuts I wanted.
Around my trailer the squirrels are keeping busy eating and burying pecans. Yesterday I heard a squirrel making a funny noise next to my cistern head. He was trying to bury a pecan in the very thin soil atop the cistern's flaring underground concrete shoulder. With a pecan in his mouth this squirrel just kept scratching at the concrete until I felt sorry for him. Finally it gave a violent flick of its tail, issued what was surely a squirrel-cuss, and rushed away.
This morning during breakfast an Eastern Chipmunk scampered from beneath my trailer, put on his brakes just a couple of feet from me and for a couple of surprised seconds looked at me goggle-eyed with his cheek-pouches hilariously bulging with what surely was pecans.
Pecan trees are native to this area and I can hardly imagine how they must have been appreciated by the Natchez Indians. For, pecans can be kept for many months. If a family has a cache of them, there never needs to be any worry about going hungry.
*****
FERNS AROUND MY TRAILER
With a few trees losing some of their leaves, the forest floor is a bit better lighted now and maybe that's why this week I've been paying special attention to ferns. Ferns are abundant here, especially on the near-vertical walls where roads and gullies cut through thick loess.
In the woods around me, these are the most common ferns, listed approximately from the most common to the least:
Christmas Fern, Polystichum acrostichoides
Southern Shield-fern, Thelypteris kunthii
Ebony Spleenwort, Asplenium platyneuron
Resurrection Fern, Polypodium polypodioides
Lowland Fragile-fern, Cystopteris protrusa
Torres' Fern, Thelypteris torresiana
Japanese Climbing-fern, Lygodium japonicum
Japanese Holly-fern, Cyrtomium falcatum
Oblique Grapefern, Botrychium dissectum
Sensitive Fern, Onoclea sensibilis
Broad Beech-fern, Phegopteris hexagonoptera
Northern Maidenhair-fern, Adiantum pedatum
There are other species on the plantation but these are those near my trailer.
The Christmas Fern and the Ebony Spleenwort would appear at the top of a similar list for my home area of western Kentucky. In other words, these two species are extremely common throughout much of eastern North America. The Southern Shield-fern is tropical and semi-tropical, however, not making it to Kentucky, but ranging south all the way to Venezuela and Brazil.
Resurrection Ferns form dense mats on the spreading lower branches of large oaks, the ones usually heavily festooned with Spanish Moss. Most of the time this fern looks like dried-up, crinkled leaves, but when it rains the fronds quickly fill out and turn from brown and green, thus "resurrecting."
In the old days, plantation owners vied with one another to see who could import the most exotic and interesting plants. The Japanese Climbing-fern and Japanese Holly-fern are from those days, having escaped cultivation. Now they reproduce with spores just like our native species, and compete with them. The Climbing-fern is a vine.
*****
ON THE PLEASURES OF SIMPLE TASTES
During the recent yearly visit with my family in Kentucky I was regaled with several sumptuous meals which included such dishes as an apple salad with walnuts and honey, gooey pimiento cheese, and sweet banana bread. After a full year of hermit fare based on cornmeal, flour, oatmeal, vegetable oil, vinegar, and what I gather from the forest and gardens, the tastes of these aunt-made and grandmother-made foods were nothing less than explosive. Also I drank store-bought herbal teas with industrial-strength flavors.
The curious thing is that after three days these tastes did not please me. In fact, the constant presence of rich food began to bother me. My eating and drinking became like an addictive experience with gross superficiality, like being at the circus too long.
In regular life I delight in the taste of a freshly pulled raw carrot, a hot piece of cornbread smelling of simple baked, slightly scorched cornmeal and hot oil, the mysterious astringency of an omelet based on a certain mushroom. When a meal consists of simple elements you have put together yourself, every swallow has a meaning. It's not hard to make the connections between what you are eating, and Nature and human society in general.
There was corn growing, people harvested it and ground, packed and sold the grain, and now you eat it. There was a carrot, you pulled it from the ground and now you eat it. The sun radiated energy that flowed through space, bathed the Earth, the corn and carrot used that sunlight energy to convert air, water and nutrients into substance, and now you eat that substance. One eats with feet flat on the ground, in a knowing communion with the Universe's broad patterns.
*****
MEXICAN TEA
Because of that rich food, this week I began feeling the need for some kind of inner cleansing. I know that it's silly, but somehow my insides felt gummy with too much sweet, salty and greasy stuff. Wednesday I realized what I needed: I needed a good hot mugful of Mexican Tea.
The plant known as Mexican Tea, Chenopodium ambrosioides, appeared without invitation in one of my gardens, and I let it grow, as often I do with interesting visitors -- "weeds." By summer's end it stood four feet high and was a handsome plant. Many times this summer when passing by it I'd crush a leaf between my fingers and sniff the powerful odor, then chew on the extraordinarily bitter pulp. The plant is native to tropical America but now it grows throughout much of North America, as far northward as Wisconsin.
Despite having worked a lot in Mexico (I've published five books based there) I've never heard of any Mexican making tea with this plant. However, known in Spanish as Epazote, its leaves are indeed one of the best-loved seasonings for bean soup and Mexican stews.
Mexicans also know its medicinal value, as US country people also once did. The wonderful book "Las Plantas Medicinales de México" by Maximino Martínez claims that the herb cleans out the lungs, helps digestion, soothes toothaches, and ameliorates nervous conditions in general. The main medicinal use, however, is against intestinal roundworms. The plants contain an alkaloid called Chenopodine, which induces roundworms to release their hold on intestinal walls and pass from the body.
Actually there are different varieties of Mexican Tea and among the varieties exist various "chemotypes." Two chemotypes may look exactly the same but because they contain different chemicals they may smell or taste different. A variety of Mexican Tea with larger leaves is preferred for use as seasoning, while another with reduced leaves is mainly medicinal. Among the various chemotypes is one with a citrus odor -- something hard to believe if you've ever smelled what's in my garden! The one in my garden is the kind used medicinally, sometimes named "variety anthelminticum," "anthelminticum" meaning "against worms."
Anyway, I was feeling syrupy inside so on Wednesday I picked some sprigs of Mexican Tea, put them in a pot of water and brought it to boiling over my campfire, drank a steamy mugful and -- though surely it was purely psychological -- felt better immediately!
*****
ARRIVAL OF FALL MIGRANT BIRDS
It's clear that fall migration has caused a major revolution here among the birds. You may not even notice it unless you look with binoculars and discover that what you assume to be the usual summery titmice, chickadees and wrens are instead species found here only during the winter.
Eastern Phoebes are absent here during the summer but now throughout the day I hear one calling from the Pecan Trees its comically hoarse "FEE-be, FEE-be," and sometimes I spot this plain-looking gray bird wagging its tail -- something it does and no one knows why. Phoebes are insect eaters and often they dart from their perch to snap up a winged creature, then fly back to the same perch to eat their catch.
Hermit Thrushes likewise are winter birds here and all week one has been flying around making it's winter call, a single-note, very monotonous sort of nasal "meep." However, for about 15 seconds on Friday morning it inexplicably broke into its spring call, one of the prettiest of our birdcalls, a single high flute-like note followed by a rapid series of rising and falling notes, a sort of fluty gurgling.
All of our woodpeckers are permanent residents except one: The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker migrates like the above birds, living mostly in Canada and the northern US during the summer, down here in the winter. A pair has been chasing one another through my Pecan trees as if it were spring and their hormones were getting the best of them.
Most of our warbler species spend summer here, then go to Latin America for their winter. However, one species, the Yellow-rumped Warbler (called Myrtle Warbler in older fieldguides) spends its summers in Canada and New England, and winters here. Now it's wearing its drab, gray winter plumage but sometimes when it flits away it unexpectedly flashes its yellow rump.
Even the Dark-eyed Juncos, once called Slate-colored Juncos and sometimes known as Snowbirds, have arrived. This species hops about on the ground and when they fly away flash conspicuously white outer tail-feathers. If you're a hawk attacking them, maybe the white tail-feathers will distract you and your talons will end up grasping tail-feathers while the drabber, business part of the bird escapes.
A small flock of Brown-headed Cowbirds has discovered the pleasure of watching the sun rise from the top of the big Pecan I look into as I prepare my campfire breakfast each morning. Cowbirds remain in Mississippi year round, but they only come in flocks around my camp in the winter. On the one hand they are a bit disagreeable because they are nest parasites -- they lay eggs in the nests of other bird species, and then the parents of those species raise young cowbirds, often to the detriment of the parents' actual offspring. Cowbird nest-parasitism is very damaging to local small songbird populations. On the other hand, since Brown-headed Cowbirds make no nests of their own and so have plenty of time to do other things they are extremely social beings. In these morning gatherings above me I watch them gesturing and displaying to one another in many subtle and not-subtle ways, almost as expressively as flocks of parrots in the rainforest.
It is good to see these species who have been away all summer, but I regret that their main message is that "it's going to get colder... "
*****
EVENING ARMADILLO
Animals seem to fall into routines that last for varying lengths of time. Sometimes every morning for maybe a couple of weeks I'll see a certain deer, a rabbit, some Wild Turkey or something else, and then abruptly they'll disappear completely, apparently establishing a similar routine someplace else. Right now immediately after each dusk a certain armadillo comes rustling through the dry leaves around my trailer, noisily scrapes between some corrugated tin sheets on one side of tahe trailer, and in the dust beneath ghe trailer grunts and digs around for a few minutes before moving on. He's like clockwork and we'll see how long this goes on. Before him a certain Opossum was exploring my woodpile at a certain time each night, but he's gone now.
*****
THE FERN PROTHALLUS
This week I've added a picture I scanned of a fern prothallus to my nature-study page dealing with ferns. I consider that a coup, since finding fern prothalli in the wild is hard. Here's what a prothallus is all about:
Ferns reproduce by spores, not seeds. When a fern spore germinates, a fern does not result. Instead, you get a prothallus, which is like a tiny, green, flattened heart lying on the ground. Tiny means maybe 1/8 of an inch across. This prothallus has male and female parts. Sperm from the male part swim through water to fertilize an egg in the female part, the resulting zygote then develops into an embryo, and that embryo develops into a fern frond, which bears spores, and the life cycle begins all over again. Ideally sperm from one prothallus fertilizes an egg on another prothallus.
Let that sink in: In a fern's life cycle, there are actually two independent, self-supporting plant-forms alternating with one another. One plant-form is the tiny prothallus, and the other is the thing we think of as the fern itself. Moreover, the prothallus is actually the most complex member, since it is responsible for sex -- the mingling of genetic material for the next generation.
If this reproductive strategy were adopted by humans, human females would give birth not to human babies but rather to something completely different, perhaps something like a tadpole. Then this tadpole would live its own independent life and upon its maturity it would participate in a sexual encounter. Then a human baby would sprout from the tadpole, the baby would grow up and at maturity give birth to another tadpole-thing, thus starting the cycle over...
The reason for this amazing "alteration of generations," as botanists call it, is that ferns are very primitive beings. They were among the first land plants to evolve and as such they share a problem with amphibians, which were the first vertebrate animals to evolve on dry land.
The problem these two very different but very primitive organism-types have in common is that the male sperm must travel through water, the way it did for the ferns' and amphibians' immediate ancestors, who lived in the sea. In other words, both ferns and amphibians evolved so early in the history of life on earth that when they appeared nature hadn't "figured out" a way for them to have sexual reproduction outside of water. Consequently, even today frogs and other amphibians must return to water to mate, and similarly fern prothalli must be wet for fertilization to take place. A tiny prothallus growing flush with the ground in a shaded place is more likely to have a film of moisture on its underside, where the sexual organs are located, than is a regular fern frond, which must reach into dry air during its search for sunlight.
Finding these prothalli has set my mind to reflecting all week on nature's general blossoming toward ever greater sophistication, ever greater diversity, and ever greater beauty.
At least on Earth, our human ability to reflect on these beauties and to be struck with awe as we behold what is around us is, in my opinion, the crowning achievement of life-on-Earth's irrepressible evolution toward ever greater sophistication.
*****
FIRST FROST OF THE SEASON
At dawn this Sunday morning the thermometer in my Waxmyrtle tree read 31° and here and there in the blackberry field patches of white frost showed up in the green grass. I am sitting here now visualizing ice-crystal splinters materializing inside the cells of many of my smaller neighbors, in the tissue of untold numbers of insects, spiders, ferns, wildflowers and other beings, crystals puncturing delicate cell membranes and shattering complex molecules needed for the most critical and persnickety of life's chemical reactions.
This morning I am celebrating these dying organisms' vigorous and beautiful summer blossomings and breedings. I feel no sadness about their passing but rather reflect on the fact that life includes such moments as these, and that the dignified beauty of the landscape this mornings proves that there's nothing bad about this kind of death.
During this next week I'll be looking closely at the changes this cold has wrought and I shall admire the cold-neutralizing adaptations of the beings who have survived.
In my own case my trailer is so small that I have placed over it a tarpaulin covering three sides and the top, so that this morning the temperature inside is 48°, and I am content. The afternoon sunlight will be gorgeous and much appreciated as I sit reading surrounded by glowing tussocks of broomsedge in the blackberry field.
*****
STUMP PUFFBALLS
Recent rains have brought forth a rainbow of mushrooms and I've been adding several species to my morning omelets. Bushels of tan-colored, tightly clustered-together Stump Puffballs, Lycoperdon pyriforme, about the size of very large grapes, grow on an old oak log rotting near my camp and nowadays most mornings I go pick a hatful.
Stump Puffballs are common, often abundant. They should be picked when small, when they are pure white inside -- before the white flesh differentiates into spores. I break each puffball in two, then drop the sections into a bowl where I mix in two eggs and, from the garden, sliced garlic and peppers. Then I fry this in an oiled skillet over my campfire, and the results are painfully good. The puffballs themselves don't have much of a taste, but somehow they perform magic with garlic and other things in a skillet.
There's a story about the genus name for this puffball, Lycoperdon. "Lyco" in Greek means "wolf." "Perdon" in Greek means "to break wind." Sometimes book publishers provide English names based on direct translation of the Latin name, but in this case they have chosen the innocuous name "Stump Puffball." I'll bet Shakespeare would have stuck with the direct translation and gleefully referred to them as Wolf-farts.
*****
DAY OF THE BUOYANT CRYSTAL CROW
The big storm front that moved across Mississippi Monday and Tuesday wasn't nearly as violent here as elsewhere. The four to six inches of rain we received was welcome after so many weeks of drought. I'm not sure how much it rained because the tin cup used to measure it overflowed long before the rain ended.
Wednesday morning dawned with an exquisite, washed-clean, freshened-up feeling. The air was cuttingly clear with sharp yellow sunlight avalanching in from the east. Though wind had shaken only a few tree leaves off, the forest surprised me with its new relative openness, its sparkling airiness. Somehow the morning's glaring, puckery light made tree leaves look smaller and harder. Summer's warm, soft greens had clotted to hard, glossy greens splattered with stark black shadows, all overlaid with random speckles of yellow and red. Now clear air and light steamed where just a few days ago suffocatingly humid and hot shadows hung in trees spewing mosquitoes and bats.
So here was a kind of day worth celebrating. It seems strange to me that in our culture we don't formally recognize such special days. Certainly we seem to crave celebrations. People hang cardboard skeletons from trees and place huge plastic pumpkins in their lawns a month before Halloween, and by Halloween already Christmas decorations are up.
Nietzsche once said that most people don't see something until it has a name, and I think that that's right. So Wednesday morning as I sipped steaming mint tea from a mug, I sat thinking up a name appropriate for a season's first day of the kind we had Wednesday, a name that would help people actually see such a day and appreciate it the next time one rolled around. Gradually my idea for a name built toward "Day of Wind-chill, Washed-blue Sky and Open Forest."
But, then a crow flew overhead, white feather-gloss rimming his wind-buffeted, black body, and when that crow looked down at me and laughed, I understood his opinion of my name, and I knew what name he was offering himself:
Henceforward I shall celebrate such days as "Day of the Buoyant Crystal Crow."
*****
WIND-DISPERSED SEEDS EVERYWHERE
My breakfast campfires are on the trailer's eastern side so the sun comes up right there in front of me. Sunlight fractures while passing through tree limbs, then shows up as slender, straight sunrays stabbing through campfire's smoke. From my perspective the rays radiate from the sun like spokes of a wheel, exactly as in those pictures on funeral-home calendars showing Jesus walking on water beneath a stormy sky with the sun just breaking through.
With the morning sun in my face, whatever stands between the sun and me is backlighted. If the object is solid like a crow, it makes a black silhouette encased in a close halo. If the backlighted thing is fuzzy, the fuzz explodes in the light like sparks in the wind.
Wednesday, wind coming from the west, from behind me, bore untold numbers of tiny parachuted fruits of goldenrod and Little Bluestem, from the Loblolly Field. As the fruits sailed past me sitting in the trailer's wind-shadow and facing the sun, the closer they drew to the sun, the more light they gathered, until finally I had to avert my eyes.
After breakfast I went to see if my newly sowed mustard green seeds were sprouting. When I got my face down next to the ground I was amazed to see the numbers of goldenrod and Little Bluestem fruits that had parachuted there, along with a few fruits of aster and eupatorium.
All summer these plants had grown green leaves and stems, then in the fall they'd adorned themselves with flowers that painted the landscape with bright colors, especially the goldenrod, and then for weeks the flowers had matured into shaggy fruiting heads, and finally the plants waited for such a day as this, a very windy day with dry air.
If the Day of the Buoyant Crystal Crow was worth my celebrating, then how much more were the goldenrods, Little Bluestems, asters and eupatoriums rejoicing as they accomplished their last task of life in such a beautiful manner as I witnessed Wednesday?
*****
THE SIX MIRACLES OF NATURE
While reading Bill Broder's The Sacred Hoop I was surprised to see his reference to Earth's "three miracles." Those miracles were:
1) that things exist at all
2) that life came out of things
3) that life became conscious of itself
My surprise is that I have always believed that I had thought up "The Six Miracles of Nature" all by myself, yet his three miracles were included in my six. Well, more than once in my life what I thought were original ideas (even original tunes) turned out to be old hat.
Here are "my" Six Miracles of Nature:
1) that things exist at all
2) that things began evolving as soon as they existed
3) that life came out of the evolving stuff
4) that life evolved into many forms
5) that life became conscious of itself
6) that mere consciousness evolved into an ability to reflect and be inspired
When something came out of nothing, the Universe could have remained an infinite volume of hydrogen atoms equidistantly suspended in space, but it didn't. Miraculously, matter began coagulating, changing its nature in many ways, engendering stars and planets, antimatter, black holes and all the rest.
Similarly, when life arose it could have simply replicated itself unchangingly for eternity. Instead, something charged the spirit of life with the capacity to evolve, so that now we have amphibians, birds, mammals, and whatever may emerge later.
And when life became conscious of itself, it could have remained concerned merely with the pleasures and pains of the body, and it could have restricted its thoughts to the brain's genetically fixed patterns. Instead, now, at least briefly, some of us can sometimes rejoice in the abstract patterns of music and art, we can laugh at the good joke that we are ourselves spiritual beings stuck in animal bodies, and on occasion we can even glimpse the unity of all things.
Maybe the Creator's crowning achievement on Earth so far is that some of us sometimes reflect back on the Creative Force out of which everything has sprung so rambunctiously and elegantly, recognize the beauty in it all, and feel awe and honor to be part of it.
Astronomers, geologists and biologists can tell us approximately how long ago each of the first five miracles occurred – when the Earth formed, when life appeared, when hominids first walked the Earth.
I think that The Sixth Miracle is occurring just now -- "now" including the last few millennia. This blossoming is taking place as a greater and greater percentage of us Homo sapiens at least sometimes, at least briefly, project our minds beyond matters dealing with the daily maintenance and navigation of our bodies -- the hurting feet, the mechanics of acquiring mates, power and status, etc. The Sixth Miracle flashes into being whenever any one of us reflects on the Cosmos, the selfless and beautiful abstract patterns in music and art, the pale-orange broomsedge field lightly touched with frost at dawn as the White-throated Sparrow sings its "I'm here" song... and we are moved to emotion.
*****
CRICKET CHIMES
During recent weeks night-time summer's unyielding, almost raucous roar of katydids and other grasshopper relatives has gradually metamorphosed into a peaceful chiming of crickets. I am reminded of a few lines in the ancient collection of Chinese verses known as The Book of Songs:
In the sixth month the grasshopper vibrates its wings.
In the seventh month, out in the fields,
In the eighth month, under the eaves;
In the ninth month, about the doors.
In the tenth month the crickets
Get under our beds
This verse may be as old as 3,000 years. Just how many generations of country people all over the Earth have noticed -- even cherished -- this seasonal shift, and felt snug and content with the chirping of fall crickets? I now sleep inside my trailer, with my nose at the open window, and what a pleasure to awaken in the middle of the night to breathe in the chilly, moist air, while crickets chime right below me.
*****
FIRST ICE
Wednesday morning the thermometer in my Waxmyrtle showed 27° F. The water in my teapot was encrusted with a thin layer of ice, and the pastures along my dawn jogging route were white with frost. It was a dry cold, however, so it didn't feel bad. Later at breakfast as I drank hot water my exhalations created impressive steam clouds that lifted into the Pecan trees, where early sunlight cast a pink glow into them.
Frost damage in the gardens was spotty. All the basil in one garden was destroyed but that in another mostly survived. None of my peppers was hurt, but the gourd vines were devastated, and the cannas were half killed back. Unfortunately the cold didn't seem to faze the aphids which right now are wrecking havoc in the turnip beds and among the cabbage.
The gardens remain beautiful nonetheless, particularly because this year I made substantial plantings of various marigold varieties here and there and now those plants could not show up more brightly with their orange and yellow blossoms. These xanthic eruptions among green beds of kale, mustard greens, turnips, green onions and collards, and many rows of cabbage and cauliflower, is a wonderful thing to see. On outsider holidays I try to keep a low profile, but on Thanksgiving morning I couldn't avoid going for a peep at the gardens, just to see how pretty everything was.
*****
MIST TORNADOES & FROST SPARKLES
Last Sunday around noon my thermometer read 80°, then that night a strong front moved through leaving an inch of rain, and by Tuesday morning we had our first freeze of the season, at 25°. In Mississippi I have never seen such a heavy frost, making the neighbor's pastures at dawn silvery white with Black-Angus silhouettes. In the Loblolly Field, hoary-headed goldenrods rose hunchbacked from an infinity of arching, crystal-margined leafblades of Little Bluestem. The Loblollies themselves were almost black in contrast, and their green-needled outer branches were frosted as prettily as any plastic Wal-Mart Christmas trim.
When the sun's first rays flooded in from the east, I stood next to the pond facing the sun, glad to feel warmth on my legs and face. No ice had formed on the pond, but mist rose from the dark water in dense billows. The pond lay between the sun and me so the backlighted mists glowed with uncanny energy.
An erratic breeze caused the mists to curl and scoot across the pond's surface with a swift nervousness almost out of place on such a placid morning. Sometimes the mists would build into nebulous statues and igloos, then suddenly they'd all be swept away, and the mist-theater would reformulate.
Black Willows with yellow, frost-laced leaves stood along the pond's banks. When a breeze stirred, a few leaves would fall -- yellow flutterings onto black water -- and powdery frost crystals would spray through the sunlight, sparkling white, red, green and blue.
Most amazingly, ever few minutes the mist-causing tension between warm pond water and freezing air would cause the mists to spontaneously curl into fast-moving, arm-thick, yard high, silently spinning mist-tornadoes. At one time five mist tornadoes spun across the black water. Simultaneously a certain breeze spread a spray of backlighted yellow willow leaves and glistening frost crystals across the five-tornado scene.
These phenomena coexisted for only three or four seconds. Then the tornadoes vanished, the yellow leaves and frost sparklings were extinguished in black water, and all mists cleared from the pond's surface.
Then long I stood, unwilling to break with the charmed moment. But the new mists that formed atop the pond were of a common type. Now when willow leaves fell, no frost crystals accompanied them.
I think that only once in a lifetime can such a conjunction of magical events occur, and I was honored to have been a witness.
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FREEZE DAMAGE
On no single day in the year does the garden change more profoundly than on the day of the first heavy frost. What a sight my gardens were Tuesday morning as the frost melted.
The Elephant Ears and cannas, which for so long have pleased with their robustly broad, glossy-green leaves, now lay crumpled in pitiful, darkened heaps. Basil leaves dangled limp, dark and greasy looking. The tomato vines were blackened, the cucumber vines looked as if they had been scorched, and the okra leaves were warped and twisted.
Some plants survived without visible damage. The horseradish, radishes, turnips, turnip greens, mustard greens, cabbage, broccoli and kohlrabi all looked good, as did the garlic and green onions.
Having gardened for many years, I had known which plants would die and which would live. Still, I was again impressed by how well the green onions survived. At dawn I had pulled a big one to snip into my cornbread batter. The onion's hollow, cylindrical blades had been so packed with white ice crystals that the blades were stiff. Yet, once the onions remaining in the garden had warmed, their blades returned to being as green, pliable and healthy as ever.
Back in the 70s when I studied plant physiology, freeze damage to plants was regarded mainly as a consequence of sharp ice crystals lacerating sensitive cell membranes, and expanding crystals bursting fragile xylem and phloem tubes. Since then, ideas on freeze damage have shifted in new directions.
In a 2001 paper called "Plant Freezing and Damage," in the eminent technical journal Annals of Botany, I read that "The single most important cause of freezing-damage is when ... dehydration exceeds what cells can tolerate." In other words, instead of physical damage done by ice crystals, now it is known that freezing mainly affects plants by depriving their tissue of water.
The paper also focuses on the fact that for an ice crystal to begin growing it must first have an appropriate very tiny item to serve as a nucleus, something called a nucleator. It's now known that often certain bacteria produce a protein that can serve as a nucleator.
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FROST AND GREEN TOMATOES
On Monday, knowing that the freeze that night would kill the tomato vines, I went around collecting green tomatoes, to store until they ripened. It seemed easiest to pull up each plant by the roots, then hold the vine before me as I plucked the tomatoes, so this I did. However, it felt funny.
I felt queasy because all summer I'd babied those vines, and the vines had been good to me. I'd eaten from them, watched Green Anoles and Fence Lizards stalk quarry among them, I'd savored the architecture of their blossom anatomy and watched individual flowers gradually develop into perfect fruits. Yet now I broke roots and stems, plundered half-grown fruits, and tossed the mangled plants onto the ground to be forgotten.
The uneasy feeling haunted me all day, and I wondered why. Something here touched a deep chord within me. Something toyed with my subconsciousness.
After a couple of days I understood. The act of uprooting treasured tomato vines before the first big frost was nothing less than a metaphor for how I have conducted my own life at many critical junctures. Again and again in this life I have come to understand something that had been hidden to me before, and then I have quickly and irretrievably uprooted treasured, even sacred and certainly society-encouraged notions and beliefs, I have abandoned comfortable and safe routines, and at those times I have left much in my wake to molder as it would.
When I had those pitiful tomato vines in my hands, prematurely ripping off their long-nurtured fruits, it was exactly like the day in the mid 60s when I became a vegetarian, like the day in the mid 70s when I stopped being a botanist at the Missouri Botanical Garden, never again to lead a standard life. It was like so many times I have behaved absolutely rationally, and perfectly within the letter of the unspoken contract between the world and myself, and accomplished a change that all too often was accompanied by pain on many levels.
These words you are reading right now, and my being where I am and what I am, are part of the most recently planted, modest little tomato plant just poking from the soil, the latest seedling of many that vines and fruits. We'll just see what happens to this one as my own Big Frost draws nearer and nearer.