September 16, 2007

• I love living here.

  Last evening, I put my nebulizer in my pants pocket, picked up my camera, walked out the door, around the front end of the trailer, and off into the woods north of here.  I stayed in my yard and got no farther than about twenty feet from the house, and found things I hadn’t known were there.

  Crowberries are some of my favorites.  Along with lowbush cranberries, they are among the last berries to ripen each year, and they are not as abundant in these woods as most other edible species are.  Usually, I find a few of them thinly distributed over a large expanse of woods, but this time as I was looking for fungi on the forest floor and fallen trees, I came upon a wide and dense patch of crowberries, with a few lowbush cranberries and the usual mosses, right there outside my windows. 

  Around the edges of that patch of crowberries I found a few blueberries still clinging to their leafless bushes.  There were also lots of ripe rosehips.  I hadn’t picked in that area, mostly because it is shady there and when I was out berry picking in the sunnier areas out on the muskeg, I could see from a distance that the rosehips here weren’t ripe yet.

  The flavor of crowberries is intense, not very sweet, and slightly astringent.  Lowbush cranberries are tangy and tart, and their flavor complements that of the crowberries.  I picked and ate a few handfuls of both.  Then, to take away the puckery feeling in my mouth, I ate a handful of the fat, sweet blueberries for dessert.

  Where we lived while Doug was growing up, our old place about a half mile away, across the highway, mushrooms were more abundant than here, and berries were scarce.  The land over there had been cleared, topsoil scraped away, and gravel from under the topsoil used to surface the roads around here.  That gave me a great microclimate for gardening, with better drainage and a longer frost-free period than even my nearest neighbors.  Outside the clear area of my yard, the woods closed in on all sides, making a green wall in every direction I looked, all summer long.

  Here, there are two things that have come to mean more to me than my garden and the shrooms over there.  They are two very different things, at opposite ends of the lifestyle spectrum.  One is the power grid, the electricity that gives us year-round light and refrigeration, and access to the web.  For the fifteen years that we lived over there, we had a freezer all winter in the great outdoors, and could keep food cold in the house by keeping it on or near the floor and monitoring the temperature so we could raise it higher to keep it from freezing when the outdoor temp dropped way subzero. 

  In summer, there was no lack of natural light, but in winter there was the continual hassle of propane lights.  They always lit with a whoosh and a bang, and no matter how many times I experienced it or how prepared I thought I was, it would startle me.  Mantles would disintegrate at the slightest touch or a puff of air.  Tanks had to be disconnected, hauled to the station, filled, hauled back heavier than before, reconnected, connections tested for leaks… I do prefer electric light at the flick of a switch.  The microwave, the fridge, the PS2… icing on the cake.

  The other thing I didn’t have there is the muskeg across the street east of here..  There is just a narrow strip of trees between here and a wide open area that, depending on the season and the variability of weather from year to year, might look like a lawn or a lake, might be an ice skating rink or a huge berry patch.  Early this morning, the light was lovely.  I stuck my nebulizer in my pocket again, crossed the street, picked my way over the rough ground under the trees, and came out the other side in time to see a neighbor walking his dog back from the cul de sac.  They’re there, in the shot below, but you might need to enlarge it to see them.

  

  

  • 6:14 pm
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