Fall

a girl in love with land, waxes emotional about the bounties of fall

It’s a slow morning here in the fog belt. Bat’s eaten her breakfast and is washing herself daintily with a paw, atop the couch. I’m eating and writing, having woken up early wanting to write a new year’s card to a family dealing with cancer.

I can feel fall arising in the air, and in my heart. This morning, I collected a tiny handful of bright red madrone berries, and found the first bay nut of the season enveloped in a deep purple and yellow squishy enasement. Until now, they’ve all been hard and green: knocked out of the branches by squirrels.

As I strolled down the trail, berries in pocket, I thought of what my friend said last night: that a successful hazelnut forage for him is about three nuts. This weekend on my solo campout, I found five, and got properly scratched up in the process. There’s something special about a species that doesn’t give humans the glory of its crop. The squirrels and birds get first picking, and hazelnuts are a hot commodity. That I found any at all uneaten was special; that I found five was miraculous (and a feat of devotion, since it literally drew blood from my leg, and required scrambling down a composting hill side).

There’s something about fall that just innately awakens my fire for foraging. The cooling weather, sure, though in the Bay we had over 90 yesterday— just in time for Jewish New Year. But I think it’s that the animal part of me remembers this from long ago… the part of my ancestors in my bones, who literally had to forage to survive in the cold winters of Poland, Korea, Ukraine and Lithuania. Whatever you gathered before the snow came was what you had, for winter. I like imagining the fermenting crock pots underground in the cellar, safe from rain, the lid just askance enough to let the kimchi or sauerkraut burp. The feeling of a full pantry, shelves heavy with preserved jams and drying nuts. I wish I could call to mind the contatiners my ancestors would have stored these things in… were they made from metal like aluminum? Ceramic? Wooden? What shape were they? How did the light hit them, when the less expansive sun graced their edges as it set early, at 5 or 6 in the evening.

I suppose I’m not like my sister, or the millions of other people with seasonal affect, who dread the shortening of days.

I relish the permission to turn in earlier, to go out for starry walks in the evening, to collect the last of my tomatoes and imagine drying them and storing them in a jar filled with oil and spices. My chest yearns to feel the smell of apples baking, and bay nuts roasting. The feeling of plopping things in a basket as I trawl the land, like Demeter. We’re lucky in California: we can load our baskets with greens wrought from the Earth year round.

But fall has a special something: the rich colors. The cute little dimpled caps on dark smooth acorns. The wild fires of green and yellow, purple and red exhibited in the fallen bay leaves & drupals.

To be in love with the land is to feel called to take care of it. That’s why, in just a couple weeks, I’ll begin moving into the cabin up the hill from my parents’ house I’m calling the “Witch’s Hut,” and what someone else referred to as a fire lookout. It’s true: I want to be on the lookout for this hill, these trails, this canyon. I want to plant manzanita and thimbleberry and watch as they take back the land from the colonizing poison hemlock and Italian thistle. I want to continue grooming the land of gentle cape ivy (which feels like it’s just been waiting for someone to come and pull it, like a sheepish child who turns themself in), and struggling to pull and hack away at pernicious English ivy (which is like a stubborn child who refuses to admit any wrongdoing). I want to feel free enough to hear the voices of the trees and land, remembering a time when caring for them was as natural as caring for ourselves.

Wishing everyone a L’Shana Tova, and next year in whichever land you feel most at home in.