33 ~ The bounty of winter, and no GS.
As I start to write this on a late December afternoon, the winter sky like a watercolor, outside the window nuthatches and downy woodpeckers drill into slabs of thick, white suet from a doe I shot a couple of weeks ago. An hour earlier I watched two golden eagles spar over the doe’s rib cage, which I’d placed in the hayfield in view of my writing desk (first trimmed of any possible lead fragments); in Wisconsin, golden eagles, like brook trout, can be found pretty much only in the Driftless Area - and golden eagles only in winter, attracted by the shelter of our wooded stream valleys. My neighbors Judy and Allen pressure canned most of the doe’s meat, for us to share - 14 pint jars of their delicious labor went onto my shelf. And my hens and I recently had a good time working together to clean the last bits of flesh from the doe’s hide prior to salting it for eventual tanning. This single doe has already fed many this winter. We remember her well.
Somewhat paradoxically, as we enter the lean time of year, my larder is at its most abundant. The chest freezer is filled to the lid with vegetables, berries, trout and other venison. A few days ago I pickled and canned some veggies for the final time this year - Brussels sprouts found sheltering under a cloak of snow (photo above). Of course, I also ate some of them fresh - picked in the cold, they are at their sweetest, most flavorful of the year.
My final canning tally for the year (not including last spring’s production of maple and birch syrup) stands at 237 pints (112 liters) of vegetables and fruit, of more than twenty varieties. Venison sausages and jerky are in process as I write, and potatoes, onions and dozens of winter squashes slumber in the garage (my version of a root cellar). The cupboard is stocked with dried beans, and cornmeal ground from my beautiful Mayan blue corn, descended from seeds from Guatemala. I am ready for winter. These short days of the solstice are the abundant time.
Today marks exactly one year since I last went grocery shopping. I’ve made just a few tangential forays into the aisles since then: to buy a goose for Thanksgiving, and a few ingredients to make deviled deer heart, and recently this sublime recipe for savory leek bread pudding, with the last, snow-bound leeks from the garden.
This month in the Voice of the River Valley I share some reflections and images from a year of the no grocery shopping experiment, which you can see here. It’s been a year of unfolding connection and abundance, rather than isolation and deprivation. And it proved to be good practice for the pandemic - looking for opportunities where I can find them, even in a time of apparent limitation. Every limitation brings opportunities, if we can turn toward them. As Oscar Wilde observed of the human condition, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
After the trials of 2020, none of us yet know what 2021 will bring. But I do know it will also hold opportunities. May we have the grace and fearlessness to recognize and embrace them, with gratitude - to turn our faces toward the stars.
What I’m listening to for Christmas and can recommend: I’'ll share three small Christmas treasures, being an American, an Irish-American, and an Irish-American with a connection to Italy:
~Let’s just call this a classic American Christmas carol, by Texan Robert Earl Keen: “Merry Christmas from the family”.
~From the Irish in me, “Fairytale of New York”, by the Pogues (with Kirsty MacColl).
-Not precisely a Christmas song, but hard to go wrong at this time of year (and the end of a pandemic year…) with this swing version by Tony Bennett (born Anthony Dominick Benedetto) of “My favorite things”.
[Note: I apologize that the “Comment” feature was inadvertently deactivated on the last couple of posts. Now fixed, so feel free to go back and pile in there or here!]
Silver white winter at the farm, December 2020.
Photo by friend of Bob