CREDENCES OF SUMMER: THE BUTCHER'S GARDEN (recipe: Scrapple, Pear Chutney & Gorgonzola Pizza, with Matter of Thyme Crust)

A garden is a cutting place. At Summer's end, I can still hardly talk about what's happened in mine—almost. It's been a place of brutal wonder, of savage, raw tastes and devastations, of sun-in-zenith expectation; a place of soul crimes run florid, a cacophony of buzzing and birdcall, of juices in every cleft, and violences I never imagined I'd actually love--much less thrive on--when I cast out heirloom seeds in early June.

I had envisioned a simple kitchen garden--and by this I mean 86 tomato seedlings, 54 glossy potato plants, double rows of curling, hopeful beans along one whole side of the paddock, rows of appropriately redemptive cruciferous vegetables—broccoli, cabbage, kale. A place I could draw from all Summer to Fall; to catch, to can, to freeze these labors in time.

It started with the digging; it always does.

One overgrown barnyard, one persistent, prodigal faith, one bramble vision. It's true, I'm a roto-tiller when I want something, and what I wanted this Summer was to turn over this hard rocky ground after years of living here; to get into it. This is not the activity for you if you don't like to sweat or if you need Lotto ticket proof of something, instantly. If you love to claw and rut, if you don't mind the constant saline trickle between your breasts, your body gone ropy or just plain gone, then yes, this is just the job for you.

Oh, this garden, this post!: Stage of archetypical dramas. There is bloodshed! There is subterfuge! There is suspense! There is song and dance! Costume and wild things! A pack of vicious groundhogs and doppelganger doves leaving mysterious eggs in white-platinum shells of Magical Realism. WARNING: Enter here, and you will find only the shade of a leafless, lightning-shivved Cherry tree for cover, uneven pieces of trunk fallen hard to the sides for seating, all of it some crumbling amphitheater in which to view these acts and these actors.

when the cherry tree comes down in the garden of metaphor, there is just no shade to be had.

I will also laugh and warn you now, most everything I learned about gardening this Summer was animal in nature anyway.

First, let me tell you what I've seen:

-A groundhog, a band or throng of despicable groundhogs, can raze a substantial garden to nubbins, to broken stems, in a single night. The hateful fatback or whistle pig can take five rapid shots to the body with a 22 Hornet and still run 150 yards, unfazed, still turn to leap-leer right at you before finally keeling down. You can butcher a groundhog on your patio furniture with some simple modifications, including plywood, latex gloves, a small supply of lawn and leaf bags and a hatchet. The sneer of the thing, the scythe-tooth, even lifeless, is unconscionable, however scattering the leftover body parts in the garden at points of entry is reputed to eradicate further threat.

-Doves--whether ash, wild or dark, turtle, rain or mourning--known for their softly urgent call (Coo OOO ooo, ooo!) are common but deeply selective and monogamous birds, often nesting in barnyards and gardens. Once in a long while, a dove will lay an egg in plain, low-lying sight—like right in your seed tray--allow your seeking hands in her nest, and will work alongside you in onyx-eyed company as you sweat, unruffled by clanging, swearing and sprays of dirt, mutually encouraging this daily suspension of disbelief, this bird-human breathlessness.

a watched egg is the only kind that hatches

Watch out, though! Doves are tricky! Because the male and female are eerily similar in appearance, and both incubate their egg, they're never seen together unless spied trading off, so you'll not realize it's two doves. The effect of a single seamless & tireless bird, a perfect egg hatched from a single parent, can be deceptive. Oh, and I have some news for you about doves: they're not there to bring peace.

-And finally (I told you this was a carnal post), contrary to what Freud--who is everywhere in this garden--said, a zucchini is NEVER just a zucchini.

What if I told you…told you it was all true? Well, it is all true.

The problem with writing in metaphors is that people think nothing real ever happens to you—let's just agree on this now. Poor Aesop!—what self-limiting face-to-face conversations could
he have—once the word was out? Could anyone trust him not to do the voices? Cloak everyone around him in skins and furs to make his points? Could friends count on him to just say it? Did they open their mouths in friendly conversational protest, only to be shocked to draw a wet incriminating feather from their OWN lips? A bone? A hank of hide? A gullet-slick pebble?

I mean, really, imagine the murk, the scrutiny you'd have to apply to his Facebook updates--all of them suspect or open to interpretation, except this: "Aesop is …totally FUCKED."

Most of us have a general sense we sew ourselves up tightly within our own stories, that it's an inside job, and that despite this, our treacherous tags flap away on the outside all the while. Mine says: "The Girl Who Cried Metaphor." Like any cliché, it's all right there, fully provable, knowable as a punch in the gut (to this end, I provide full documentation & photos where possible).

Nature is a real metaphor to contend with: pulverizer, long-vined redemptress, grueling schoolmarm, scrutinizing the details of our souls and bringing them right up between our toes and through the very ground where we must then walk.

Now, you and I know that attempting to grow anything under "controlled" circumstances is a risk--it's just another exercise in loss of control and vital fluids. The garden lets us toil in it, makes us beg to wait to see what comes next—but it does not yield to our hand. It cleverly generates body-specific soil we can't wash away when we leave, I will tell you, not seventeen cold showers and an aloofa later. It draws us in again and again by the possibility that we can change rock to loam, that we can protect our constructs and poses, even as we know there are no secure perimeters in the garden—in or out--what grows, grows.

Let me tell you, the dawn I entered the garden to find the doves had gone unceremoniously, saw the rodential massacre, the razored green ruin (I think this was the same day I fell into a rut and twisted my ankle), all I could get out was so simple, it was "But WHY now?"

It was exactly like the one you love turning away from you in the dark, no explanation but the smell of freshly turned earth, sheets of dove music, bloody post-its and gravel-cum-cuttlebones on the pillows; summer sorrels grown rangy and wild, leggy, gone to seed, rooted up and spread over all the furniture and the bed to dry to save the seeds. A shotgun, safety off, and the Wallace Stevens hid under the bed; a cloud of dust in the lane.

But didn't I get what I wanted? (and come on--can we save anyone else from what they want, even if we try?) Wasn't this the best Summer in ages? Under the bull fire dailyness of the sun, to find purpose, and during the night under stars, to rediscover the childhood game of connect-the-life. And under all of it, big splashing tears for being able to feel anything at all again, salt licks and rivulets of cathartic sweat—a salt deluge.

It was the Summer of raising foods beyond foods—metaphor and metafoods (email me privately if you'd like the recipe for bake-your-own-manna)--of cooling water from the Eden of old wells, of ancient barnyard taps painfully rushing the confines of slim copper conduits with murderous certainty, of the sudden vengeance of wriggling subterranean things, of weeping for consistency and pattern, of licking ice cubes falling into the grass from just-missed glasses on still-warm seats at the cosmic barbecue. Summer of carnival delights, of ether love escaping through the baking ground.

This is the Summer I dug up my old feelings and planted new ones, cut them down cut them out every night, only to have them spring up again by morning, espaliered. So I seasoned and seared them. I arranged them on a plate, I photographed them, ate them up—ate the evidence. Is there any evidence something happened here? In the garden overrun, can you see the fault lines?—There is no fault in the garden!—or, depending, simply piles of it to go around.

I suspect there aren't enough garden gloves to point all the fingerling potatoes.

Still, can you think of anything worth our time—no matter the outcome--like attempting to sustain and sate ourselves in the most basic ways? I can't. It was a fine Summer to grow tired, quite organically, of feeling desire could ever be too much--that I could ever be too much--of apologizing for vision, for the need to ascribe meaning, for the ways of webbing and weaving. The irony is, that in this leaf-shorn garden full of nothing but ghost-fruits, I have nothing left to offer you as a good hostess but my hungers and desires.

putting the boot down on guilt for dirty desires manifest

So, then. I can't apologize for my vision or my belly, for my animal nature, for hanging like a schoolgirl on the barndoor of the words. For planting my rows and my feet wide and trying. For believing my hands, my specifically dirty hands, must have some effect. I must continue to believe I can move landforms with my words, change my landscape, amend my soil, to believe that matter matters and exists even unseen.

The huge, the dizzying attempt, it's kind of my specialty.

And If you'd told me it would all end up this way?: the horrible groundhogs, the dove abandoners, the hours of sweat, the dark scary magic of the garden, I wouldn't have believed you anyway—mostly because NOW I get that it never ends. You can't garden for a single season, out of context. Fall follows, Fall will be here soon, sturdy and quiet and as plainly unappreciated as a root vegetable. And next Summer?—it'll be just the same but brand new, too. These may be the Credences of Summer, but this particular Summer's not the opus, the garden itself is a fine life's work, if we are very lucky.

So in the Fall, I will bow out of my too-warm kitchen, toasted spices secreted to coat pockets, and slip out again under the cover of rime. I will steal back to this garden and strike again with my spade-a-spade. At home in my thickening pelt, I will keep digging in the cold shrine.

And now an update, because here's how the Universe works:

The exact moment you doubt that all the garden love you sweated out went unnoticed or came to nothing—that you're empty-handed? The following will occur--ESPECIALLY if you're good for a clumsy dramatic exit, which I am (think Katharine attempting to leave Count Almasy with "something to think about" under the bleachers).

The precise second you give up on the garden, slam the paddock door and try to stalk off? Be assured, you will trip over a sheaf of wild thyme which conceals, rather unfortunately or fortunately, another fucking groundhog burrow, and so, run your forehead smack into a Pear tree, which has been just outside the garden fence, seemingly dormant--a tree you suddenly notice is...now bearing.

You will stand, in knee-buckling pain, tears sprouting from your eyes, one foot in a groundhog trench, feeling very, very sorry for yourself for a second, but also contemplating, almost instantly, pear chutney. You will turn back one last time to curse the garden and all its labor pains and see red.
No seriously—RED. As in, oh my Word, hundreds of little cadmium flecks of it on the garden floor.

a surprise red carpet, the garden's drama is not over

Apparently?—undermining groundhogs are not interested in tomatoes. Ignored, unstaked, unwatered—they grew new leaves, they grew anyway. The corn made its way up, frowsy and unnoticed, and the peppers were only slow. Only slow—can you imagine? In fact, the only thing I lost were the cruciferous vegetables—and I got their first and sweetest cuts, anyway. Frankly, you really only need redemption once.

Lovey Dovey--wait, are you sure?!--and Maybe Baby~

And okay, I used the two doves for dramatic effect—they didn't actually go anywhere. The hatchery served its purpose nicely, and the two, plus their squab (christened Maybe Baby) continue to circle and light in the garden at will, without need of shifts now. And sometimes they come to my window.

You see it only takes a little Magical Realism, come to roost in the slender arms of a tree, to be stopped in your tracks, returned to the garden, new perspectives and recipes in mind.

All I have to say is, Mr. Newton, you had it wrong. Sir, it was a pear.

Go ahead and make the chutney now. You're going to need it for the Fall.

Scrapple, Pear Chutney & Gorgonzola pizza, with Matter of Thyme Crust

PEAR CHUTNEY:

This is not rocket science, it's a chuntney. Chop the peeled green fruit you have—10 pears here—and put it in a pot with 3 cups of brown sugar and 6 of cider vinegar. Add things in amounts that taste good to you: chopped crystallized ginger (1C), golden raisins (1C), chopped onion (1), some lemon peel, cinnamon (if you must), dried mustard (1 tsp), salt. Cook the heck out of it, tinker with the consistency, follow someone meticulous for canning if you like (I got 4 pints canned, plus enough for a pork roast).

PIZZA CRUST:

This is the basic dough recipe I use and then abuse for pizzas, pretzels, etc. You may be disappointed to learn I often substitute 2 cups of pedestrian cornbread/muffin mix for some of the flour because it gives it a great texture, and because, if you think with all this patient rhetoric I am immune to looking for the shortcut, you are insane. This recipe makes one enormous pizza, or about 4 smallish pizzas.

1 ½ C warm water , 2 tsp sugar , 2 tsp yeast
4 ¼ C flour combination (use unbleached + wheat + cornmeal mix, etc)
1 T kosher salt , ¼ C + olive oil
Leaves from handful of thyme

Combine the water, sugar and yeast until it foams—10 minutes.
Put everything except salt and thyme in the bowl of a stand mixer with dough hook attachment. Run, gather, oil the dough in the bowl, cover with a clean cloth & put in a greenhouse window (if you have one). Punch down in an hour, then continue to let rise until you use it.

PIZZA ASSEMBLY/LAYERS, bottom up:
Thyme Crust
Pear Chutney
Grated Romano
Firm pear, sliced
Fried scrapple in exceedingly compulsive matchsticks (see next post for scrapple discussion, methods & a visual trip to the butcher)
Crumbled gorgonzola
Drizzled fig vinegar
Thyme leaves ~ leave these for last, so they will stay tender and green. Be patient and wait till it's almost done, then add them in the final minutes.

Notes:
-I used scrapple because I happen to have tons of it right now. Marrow would also be fantastic.
-I used thyme because this Summer was all about thyme for me—but marjoram might be amazing. Or even rosemary.

Okay, this was a huge meal--It's a lot to eat by yourself, but it keeps, you'll see. It's kept just fine.

NO REGRITS, FOR TWO: (REGRET VS. GUILT)

The phrase “No Regrets” has always seemed exasperatingly short-sighted to me (like I can’t live and think compulsively about it at the same time?), more suitable for stitching on a pillow, barmop or apron than for actual daily consumption.

Let’s face it, a stitch is something painful you get in your side when you’re running; a mantra should be something you can do standing stock-still.

I don’t want to scoff at mantras or affirmations—they work. Whatever they are and whatever we call them, about everything we say long enough to ourselves becomes true, except, “I am taller with good legs and perfect pitch”—but I would feel fraudulent if I said I can tolerate this concept of “No Regrets.” This doesn’t make me a fraud—it means I think it can’t be done.
It means I’m not sure I want to.

Now, I have Norman Vincent Pealed away at a mess-hall pile of negative potatoes small and large in the past few years, and I invest fully in the power of positive thinking, but currently I am torn in little pieces, like a crisp head of romaine, wrangling this concept of Regret. Because I don’t think it’s a question of semantics and stresses, syllables and hard and soft beats--I think it’s just a matter of timing. Even term is a question of time.

Like most words attributed to the dark little weevil pile of human motivation, the endlessly composting heart and festering places of an eggshell-mind, there are words people misconstrue, and exchange and interchange, which have absolutely no business being so. Whether sound-alikes or dopplegangers, Guilt and Regret--like Tuna and Chicken of the Sea—are terms which have similarities but which--sorry Charlie--don’t mean the same thing at all (if that were true, I’d be out of a dissertation some day). And this is where the confusion…um...lies.

It is generally recognized and even screened onto boardwalk t-shirts in a variety of menacing neon colors that the difference between Regret and Guilt is action (but if overthinking your actions is a crime, I’m sunk): the belief being that Regret is about things not done, while Guilt is for things under-done or well-done, but oh fuck, we really shouldn’t have done.

I’m not sure what I think about this—and read this next in a breathy, sarcastic tone:“I have never regretted the things I’ve done, only the things I haven’t done.”

This might be true, the quote certainly forwards around the Internet like a cheerful airborne noxious event, the kind of thing given pixilated credence by being falsely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt or Thomas Edison or even Mae West (ask yourself if you believe Mae West really talked that much, or if only a few people could have possibly said all the seminal things, in convenient Facebook application form).

Because then it sounds like maybe we could just collapse these terms into one Gold Medal All-Purpose, greased and floured pan that’ll turn out our perfect definition every time:

“Regret is all the things I wanted to do most, but didn’t because I felt too Guilty even thinking about them and was paralyzed by thinking about how I could realistically get away with doing them or making them a reality anyway.”

Sounds too easy, probably a hoax.

Nope, we need two different words and we need to keep them very, very separate: we need Guilt to keep us in line; we need Regret to keep us coming back to the starting line. There is a big difference between plaintive and just plain sad, linguistically speaking.

I love my Regrets because, like anything worth considering on a humid summer afternoon, there all the possibilities for self-discovery lie.

I “trust” my readers, a lot some would say. I serve you my underpinnings and my foibles and I just go ahead and tell you the ways to thrill me or undo me, because then, though you may disappoint me or think you know me, you probably won’t surprise me. So now you know: I have Regrets.

Regret is a word with a melancholic, wistful tinge to it—Regret is a word with longing. It is not entirely painful or ugly; in fact damnnnn, it has pretty good mouth feel. You can feel a savoring fondness for regret that you just can’t feel with guilt, which you want to flick away in fear and with haste, like a leech from a very small pair of swimming trunks. In fact, you can’t feel anything with Guilt but more Guilt. Guilt is just an old fact we can’t change about ourselves, limiting as hanging onto an expired racing form with all the wrong picks.

Listen up, all you GRE-takers~

Guilt : death, screech, scab, hector, roach AS Regret : rue, moan, spark, sparrow, rustle

...and Yes, I am known to love the sounds of just the latter.

If it sounds like I am Romancing regret, so be it. The definition of a "Romantic" is not one who makes things bigger than they are, it’s one who makes them bigger than we ever thought they could be.

So, Regret is about longing—a self-fufilling gerund if ever there was one. It’s about the possibility of becoming bigger—that’s why it’s called a longing, not a shortcoming. Guilt is stunting, but Regret?—stretches us to be better, greater, longer, longing versions of ourselves.
Sure, Guilt’s a familiar recipe: it’s Peeps in the microwave for 30 seconds, it’s predictable results, while Regret is absolutely wondrously unpredictable, ineffable. Regret isn’t all the things we didn’t do—it’s all the things we might still do, and all the things we might be, if we gave ourselves the chance. And for that reason, it is a vastly superior state to Guilt; for that reason alone we need it.

Put another way, Guilt is grocery store ice cream. I open the freezer case of Guilt at Shoppers Food Warehouse, Westminster, and I’m greeted with a well-lit environment maintained by a careful, evenly chilled temperature. If I choose to get something out of there, well, I know what I’m going to get: stale rows of cardboard half gallons of predictable chocolate chip and plain old vanilla bean guilt. One half gallon=20 hours on the treadmill to pay it off—and you can pay it off. Guilt is an open and shut case. Even Karma can be repaired, given enough time. I mean, for heaven's sakes, they sell kits on the Internet.

But Regret…Regret is located in the monstrous old chest freezer in the deepest part of where you live. You go down to the damp cellar and force that one open, you break the hasps for good-- you may never get it closed again. But the homemade stuff is maddeningly good in there, so unlike anything else, that it calls to you and you just have to do it anyway.

Guilt is broadcast, it’s public domain and transgression like holocausts, genocides and abuses. Regret is a private communication between one or at the most two people—Regret says--thank you, Elvis Costello--You Belong To Me.

Since Regret is about longing, I am giving it points just for being forward-thinking, just for sheer momentum. Guilt is a very stuck, guttural, one-time word we fell ourselves with at the knees. You’re not getting anywhere with Guilt—it won’t let you—but Regret implies the possibility something new and different could still happen, and really, the point of words is that they go somewhere. I like that in my words.

the nature of confession
I’ll be a Confessor of anything I am Guilty of and hand it to you, but don’t ask me to give up my Regrets— they get me up in the morning just to see if they’re still there.
No one should have to give up their longings or their possibilities.

And you know, as far as where things lead, I can’t resist a good breadcrumb trail. It’s not where the breadcrumbs lead, it’s who they lead back to which is interesting to ponder (even if it's just ourselves), imagining the palm and sweat-slick knob of the wrist of the breadcrumb-owner. How did he scatter them? Was it a big, cruel casual spray all at once, or a determined parsing of the crumbs, plucked from a coveted cupped pile, careful, a little at a time, lovingly, line by line?

What we call a thing to ourselves is important—no matter what the rest of the world calls it. The definitions we make for ourselves and ways we make a word mold up against or even between our bodies so it will never, ever fit someplace else but in that space between those bodies again. No need to fear them…they’re just…words—right?

But certain terms are ridiculously impersonal and utterly unsuitable for personal use, and it seems to me should be abandoned immediately--if we are smart, we keep the words and make new definitions for ourselves. Grits do not taste gritty, for example--or shouldn’t—now do they?

Regrits, or instant grits, or Guilt are instant Anti-Gratification—same thing as the grocery store ice cream. You know they will leave you with "that taste" in your mouth. True longingly satisfying Regret takes time and space--no instant grits sold or bought here. All things are questions of time and the little tiny spaces in between: whether it’s the old moisture trapped under the glass of the stopwatch, the wriggly things under the sundial on the garden floor, the bits of sand rubbing up against and slipping past each other, endlessly turning at sixes and sevens in the hourglass.

Okay, all you Dread Pirates Roberts, let me sum up: Regret is necessary if the past has any hope of not repeating itself, or of creating itself from its ashes—of morphing into something new.

my, what a long cord you have
So the kitchen Regret line is ringing off the hook—so what? Regret’s lovely and circular, and nothing at all to fear. It’s just that old rotary business again, ringing away. No voice mail, no answering machine, no impersonal text function available, no off position for the ringer. It will keep ringing until it’s answered by your own hand. Personally?--I love the sound of it, I love that voice I know so well on the other end and the electric, frizzly charge running all along my arm when I lift it off the cradle, gently & expectantly, but that’s just me.

Oh, and I Regret to inform you, in the psychic phoneline to your true self?--only you can answer the call.

NO REGRITS, FOR TWO:

I have always found there’s almost no situation which can’t be improved by a clean, hard sweat, a big dose of the sun, a long eurybathic dunk in the waters of self-awareness, full-fat dairy products and a rasher of bacon—but that is my personal formula and it’s taken years and years of tinkering. Notice I say the situation can be “improved;” I never say, “eradicated.” I never said I wanted to.

A simple breadcrumb veil--butter and crumbs and some fresh flat-leaf parsley under the broiler for a minute—would also be appropriate for this dish. Start collecting your breadcrumbs now, possibly years before you expect to put this on the table.

INGREDIENTS
1 lb. center thick-cut cured bacon
2 giant handfuls fresh spinach, mostly de-stemmed and pulled apart
4 long green onions, sliced into rings, with greens
Purple basil leaves
1 cup slow-cooking grits
4 cups half and half
4 tbs/one half-stick unsalted butter
Grated salt cube or generous smattering of sea salt
Ground black pepper

METHOD
Fry the bacon as you like
Very slowly, melt the butter in a big saucepan, add and bring up the half and half to scald; immediately reduce heat to low.
Add the grits, stir.
Keep the heat low, stir, stir, stir the pot.
Wait for consistency. It's hard to tell how long this could take.
Season with the salt and pepper.
Divide into two large bowls and top with the torn spinach, scallions and basil, crumble the bacon over top or make a festive timbale, ever-heavenward as here.

I forgot about the pine nuts, but of course those work too. They’re a natural accompaniment to most foods; I do love them, even when they sit on a cookie sheet, nicely toasted, seemingly, "accidentally" forgotten.

Eh, I can always find a place to work the pining into a later dish.

NEXT UP, reader essays: "MANNA: Man cannot live by words alone."

drawing, courtesy of chestofbooks

BLACKBIRD PICKING & THE MERCILESS EDITOR; 4 & 20 TART

In the language of our people, this will be a quickie.

I just finished picking a gallon of what I am almost certain are blackberries from my back field this morning, in a still-warm, too loose camisole and my dirty slogging boots. The boots are a pale robin’s egg blue, the berries black, the sun coming up, the straps slipping down.
You can see dichotomies are only slightly lower on my personal food chain of loves than ironies.

I’ve been picking berries for several weeks now, a task to which I am well-suited and with which I have a long history. There is a lineage to which I belong: of berry-pickers, Scrabble players, note-pluckers, painters. Compulsive all of us, in issues of small gestures of placement, the scrutiny and one-at a-timeness, whether additive or reductive.

I like to think my compulsive nature serves me at these times.

There has been some question of what to call them—are they black raspberries? Are they blackberries? Are they, in masterful, uncoy three-year-old summation, “backberries?”

Oh, I know myself--and if I am not careful, I confuse myself with my words. Still, I tend to know better what I am doing, gain confidence once I pluck a name for it.

Let's scrap certainty for anything literal and call them “Blackbirds,” then. I like everything about this word; it multi-tasks; it has inherent forward flight and references some past (I once sang Sing a Song of Sixpence badly but honestly and I believed upon request, 200 times in a row).

I suppose it is a risk to give something a name and especially wings when you’re unsure of your audience. “They” also say it’s a great risk to think we can pluck words for our own or keep them for pets, furthering the case for a bird name—you can’t get to them so easily, to own them.

But I'm no risk-taker, merely a picker; a plucker and namer.

I am very conscious that each berry is an action, a choice, has an entirely different flavor, depending on the chosen and the chooser. There I go confusing myself with my words again. We all need to believe that the component of choice goes both ways.

All I can say with certainty is that what I choose becomes a handful of words crushed to my mouth, a pie, a post. And what I take, I hope, gives some kind of life back to the bushes.

This year has been different, with new insights. I have always picked what I’ve seen at the sides of roads or conversations, simply blazed or backed into, protecting my eyes. Though there is meditation and contemplation in berry-picking, it’s funny that up until now, I always believed that what I was doing was random. Somehow, I had it worked out that the entire act was random, based only on the fact that I had not planted any of these bushes—that they were in existence before and outside my control. Maybe I did stumble on the bushes, but I selected carefully, painfully what I took.

I did it: I picked the glittering, wobbly, dark ones that suited my vision of what a berry should be and that I believed sang only to me. I have always been especially fond of those berries with their backs to me, as if I will not see them, and perhaps unduly fond of the scratches incurred while seeking those.

These bushes at the back, from this morning, are wild, and difficult to get to in ways that are maddening and possibly dangerous. This entire flank of bushes in the lower field backs up to someplace rough and a drop off you can’t see, but you can hear is there, if you are listening. It was there I recently discovered an old well. Unplacably familiar noises come from back there, songs and words I can’t decipher but must assume are some kind of benevolent encouragement meant only for me, else never come back. Of course, being compulsive, who am I kidding.

Then, also, there is the whole copse of berries in the barnyard. I have lived here for years, and till this year let it be overgrown. Berries I either never knew were there until now, or which have sprung up spontaneously, from the sun-warmed skull of Athena—from my own wishing them into existence now.

Which is more likely?

And I know that I am reckless, even in my order. I know, without looking, that by 10 am I will ditch the boots or anything which keeps me from feeling the unevenness of the ground beneath my feet, that I will look like the victor in a hillbilly barfight after a lost weekend in Ocean City: gasp-trashy bra-strap sunburn, scratches and track-marks up and down my forearms, my feet inconsolably black despite an hour’s soaking. Hands, like Lady Macbeth’s, stained red with ghosts.

“Oh,” gasped 5 year-old Sylph, running across the field to me this morning, small, confident and reverent-hungry fingers reaching past thorns, finding, plucking--me watching her train her eye on a single berry and pulling just that one, not minding the soft tear-scratch of the thorns and actually smiling just a little:

“they’re jewels.”

I fear she has the gene.

Damn words: potholes, portholes, birdholes, keyholes.

Sigh. When I want to get closer to my thoughts, I cook. So here’s the Blackbird Pie; The 4 & 20 Tart, on a nest of kitchen twine & lemon peel. It wasn't quite what I envisioned, but it is good.

BLACKBIRD PIE, OR 4 & 20 TART RECIPE:
[Wasn’t that a funny thing to set before the King? ]

CRUST:

1.5 C unbleached flour

1.5 cups toasted sunflower seeds, almonds, hazelnuts (or other mix)

1/4 C. light brown sugar

sea salt

1.5 sticks chilled, cubed butter

2 egg yolks

Grind nuts in a food processor, add other ingredients, pulse and gather dough. Reserve 1/3 dough to make cookies and bird top to tart. Press into a 10" tart pan, prick.

FILLING:

4 tsps water

6 egg yolks

1/2 C light brown sugar

2 C half and half

vanilla bean, split length-wise

1 cup sour cream

Make a custard (sigh, again with the brooding custard), cook and stir everything but yolks; temper tolks and return to pan and stir until thick. Cool.

BERRIES: Blackbirds, about 4 cups

Assemble: crust, custard, top with berries and bird cut out from crust. Bake at 400 degrees about 35-40 minutes. Cover crust when it gets brown.

People always say, but why did you make that--why that recipe?
As if I had any choice at all in the matter. See, the recipe was already there--I just named it.

Though I wish I was special enough that it chose me, specifically, I know in my heart that if I have any choice at all in the matter, it was only whether or not to act.

To paraphrase Yoda: Do or Not Do, there is no Why.