My grandparents had a little place on Lake Ontario that we called The Cottage, a manufactured home that sat right on the shore. I have a vivid memory of asking my mother for a snack while we were at the cottage, being told it was too close to dinner, and walking across the gravel road to lie in the field, picking the tiny wild strawberries that grew there to fill my belly as I pleased. My grandparents' cottage wasn't too far from where Robin Wall Kimmerer grew up, and wild strawberries are the plant she uses to introduce the idea of a gift economy in Braiding Sweetgrass.
"Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery – as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source."
I remembered the wild strawberries of my childhood this morning, lying in bed in the very early dawn of northern spring. I'd been awakened by the first song of the year from a Swainson's Thrush. I've been anticipating the return of the thrushes for weeks now. It is my third spring in this home and it is a nourishing joy to know the life of the forest just enough to look forward to the arrival of the exquisite, lilting tune of the thrushes echoing through the trees, to know that I will fall asleep and wake to this for a few months now. There was just one call from one bird today! I wonder how long it will take for the calls to fill in, until the lilting echoes repeat and call out to one another from all over? I will listen, I will learn.
What brought me to the strawberries this morning was a nearer memory: last night's dinner. Drunken clams: butter, garlic, lime juice, tequila, and clams. Incredible.
What really made the meal special was that the clams came home like this:
On Sunday James and I took a workshop called Digging for Dinner where some lovely people from our county and state educated us on foraging for clams in state-held local tidelands. The education was kind; we might not elsewise, for instance, have known that it's vital to take the long way out and stay on the path, because the mud in the shortcut is so ferocious they've had to call first responders to get people out of it. We learned how to use the information these folks from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife gather about what's growing in the water to know when it's safe to eat. Then we used trowels to scrape the bed of the bay, jam-packed with Manila Littleneck Clams. We measured each clam carefully to be sure they were mature enough to catch and be counted: 40 each, the daily limit for gathering.
I grew up with a family garden kept by my mama. It was normal to be sent outside to gather sugar snap peas, lettuce leaves, or chives for dinner. We'd also hose the lawn before heading to the cottage so that the earthworms would rise up. We'd gather them by flashlight to use as fishing bait. I spent long days in my grandfather's little aluminum boat, reading books and catching fish which would be cleaned and eaten for dinner. As a young woman, though, I moved to New York City, then to San Francisco, and while there are people who garden and fish and lay crab pots in those places, I was not among them. It is a tender return to my roots to gather food from the land with my hands.
Lying in bed this morning I was reflecting on this: the wonder of gathering food from the Earth. How meaningful it feels. How grateful and joyful I was, how careful: aware that this food was someone, that it was a living part of a living system, that I should take only what I could use and use it with care. I took care last night to figure out how to dislodge the adductor muscle from each crab with my thumbnail so that I could eat every bit. I took care on the tidelands to rebury clams too small to bring home so they could continue to live and thrive. I'll clean and crush the shells and add them to the garden path this weekend.
Lying in bed this morning, warm with the echo of the thrush's song, savoring dinner and the gathering of dinner, I thought of telling all this to you. I thought of my first experiences with foraging: the tiny strawberries. How empowering it had been to be able to fill my belly when I wanted, alone in the natural world, using knowledge, effort, patience. The same lesson, then and now: how beautiful it is that the Earth feeds us, that we belong, that in time we feed the Earth, become the Earth. I am deeply reminded that food is not inherently of-capitalism, it just gets sucked into that. What we eat is the life of the Earth. We are all that, weaving.
The spruce trees behind the house have sent out fresh shoots. I picked some and packed them in sugar to start my first batch of spruce tip syrup. Today when I walked with a friend we went farther down the ridge and I discovered that in the shadier lower elevations, the tips are just coming in. I feel my mind mapping the land and the seasons in new ways, tucking this away with the skills I am learning. "Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery", Robin said. A realm of gratitude and love, of mutuality.
May you, too, experience this, dear friend: gratitude and love in your nourishment, in your days. If the roots of your food feel distant, a simple practice can bring more meaning there: to imagine all of the people who worked to bring this food to you, passing it hand to hand so that you might eat. Who tilled the soil, planted the seed, irrigated, fertilized, and harvested? Who packed it up? Drove it to the market? Who sold it, who bought it? Who considered it, cut it carefully, cooked it? Perhaps who carried it to your table or to your door? What a caring thing, for so many hands to feed you; another form of blessing and connection.
Resources
That Recipe
I'm sure someone is going to want to try those clams, and you don't have to dig in the tidelands to cook up a batch! Camille's Drunken Clams:
4lbs of clams
4-6 cloves garlic, minced
2T butter
1 large shot tequila
1 lime
1/2c chopped cilantro
Melt butter in a large pot over medium heat. Sauté garlic. Add clams, in their shells, and toss to coat. Add tequila and cover. Steam for 6-8 minutes, until clams are open. Remove from heat, sprinkle with cilantro and juice of 1/2 lime; more to taste. Serves two.
Thanks to Camille
That Whole Light and Dark Photos Thing
Last week I mentioned a new scientific theory about the double-slit experiment, the famous experiment which was thought to prove that light was both a particle and a wave. A new theory posits that instead, light consists of visible (light) and invisible (dark) photons. This week we watched some folks discussing this new theorym which helped me wrap my head around it a bit more. I thought you might enjoy it, too.
On Love
The New York Times' Modern Love column has turned 20 and Daniel Jones, who edits Modern Love, write about what he has learned from his immersion in love for two decades in "Seven Ways to Love Better: Reading some 200,000 love stories has taught me a few lessons about love and life. Here are the ones that help me most." Lessons include, "Love is more like a baseball than a vase", "Your curiosity is more appealing than your accomplishments," and "Relationships don't have to last to be good". It contains links to many of the most popular columns of that 20 year run; great treasure here! Gift Link
On Hope
I have this little file where I keep things I might share here; I'm always tucking things into it so that each week has the balance of heft and light, science and sparkle that I wish for you, and each week I sit and sift and choose what feels right for the day. Just now I clicked on the link I'd saved to Andra Day singing her song Rise Up in an NPR Tiny Desk Concert and my eyes just welled with tears; it's that magic kind of R&B that makes you cry and lifts you up all at once. Tiny Desk Concert. Lyrics.
Resistance
June 14 will be the next big national protest: No Kings Day!
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