Take one pandemic, add a mixture of political ineptitudes, fold in a liberal measure of social protest aimed at convincing too many non-believers that 13.4% of the population matter, sprinkle with drought in one of the hottest summers I can remember – and you got yourself a recipe for one heck of an Armageddon my friend! Remember when this would have been just poetic license and/or hyperbole? Not so much now. 2020 is one for the record books ain’t it? COVID 19, murdering People of Color is legal in all fifty states, 20% of Australia burned to the ground, and in all our military delusion we somehow didn’t see the advantage in keeping the most beloved and trusted diplomat in the middle east alive. Which reminds me, don’t underestimate this drought that is very much underway regardless of a few superficial rainstorms scattered here and there. Alas, my only real question is – “where them hornets at”?
With all of this “Book of Revelation” Cosplay around death, disease, and famine while languishing in lockdown, I realized, in a sudden, that it’s the first day of the Red Corn Moon!
I sure wasn’t out “in the field” this season, and could further bemoan, any field! Had I been it would have been a day like today, the first day of the Red Corn Moon, a new moon introducing of the next coming 28 days. Had this been any given year in the past my fingernails would have been caked with soil from thinning beets and broccoli, from making room for collards, radishes, and spinach. Potatoes and garlic would be ready to grabble and roast – and if you had any strength left at the end of your twenty hour day you could start batches of root beer and ginger ale (and while you’re at it, get yourself together a nice lot of kombucha); the alternative being to fall asleep with your boots on and do the aforementioned tasks upon waking.
Your enchanted year-round modular and multi-purpose “Sugar-Shack” should by now be outfitted with all the gear for making worts, teas, and sheafs of any brew your mind and pallet could impetuously conduce! – all with an emphasis on the medicinal properties of course. After all it is the moon in which we make our first winter medicines in earnest. Any medicinal garden worth its salt would be filled with mint, oregano, rosemary, thyme, savory, basil, parsley, coriander, chervil, fennel and bay at this time of year. Flowers the like of calendula, chamomile, st. john’s wort and lavender should delight your soul at every turn about each overgrown corner. Marshmallow is beginning to flower. Borage, Lemon balm, mallow – yarrow, mugwort and meadowsweet. Nettle seeds are in plenty and ready for snacking by the fistful (fistfuls may vary).
Squash are ready and if your lucky, you get to surprise that someone special with the ripest melon this side of the fall equinox. Had it been a day of planting, it would surely still be the time-approved traditions of sowing beans, endive (to “force” in the Wolf Moon), Fall peas (If you have yet to have a pea that matures in the cool autumn nights then you have yet to have a pea!) – and Lettuce – that essential salad staple that flaunts so many assorted and delectable varieties! I would then be returning home, ideally just feet away, with armloads of strawberries, basil, and corn on the cob. It would have been soba noodles with pesto, strawberries in vanilla almond milk, and an immobile gardener in an over-sized outdoor chair with a lost count of how many ghee and seaweed flaked cobs were at his feet!
No time for twisted edutainment and misunderstood world-wide pneumonias, nor great divides around face masks, nor this seemingly relentless I.Q. test that is currently civilization – there are beds to clear and broccoli to fertilize, disease to catalog and insects to hand pick – the natural world stops for nothing and no one – neither global calamity nor the gathering of war lords. The garden year is rightfully thought of as a flurry of activity leaving no time to rest, so I nudge you towards the quiet in the moments before sleep and dream; speak your poem however brief, invent a new brand of prayer, and sing a song, even if you don’t make it to the end.
As the aimless breeze finally attempts to come the right direction through my thin and tall and single window, I recall a time from a past Red Corn Moon evening – finding a wee cache of birch syrup we had managed to mash out during a particularly blustery, wet, and recent Crow Moon…finding the right proportions for such a small batch of birch beer, five bottles as I recall; we sipped a fleeting taste, a scant libation of legends.
In the twist and draft of dispiriting events both local and global, I still hold a vision of a quiet life in the forest. Growing all I need for the year and building the most recent me from the ground up. Plenty to eat and owl to wake me back to sleep – all I’ll need is a note book, a guitar, and a puppy – it will happen; I have dreamt it!