Lugnasa                                                                  New (Garlic Planting) Moon

This afternoon as Kate and I drove out for a late lunch, the clouds were high cirrus, horse-tails against a robin’s egg sky.  The angle of the sun tells the story of seasonal procession and the temperature hinted at fall days still a ways ahead.  We’ve lost 97 minutes of daylight, having long ago turned the corner headed toward the winter solstice.

A lot of the garden activity now happens inside the house.  Herb and fruit drying, soup making, soon canning.  These are the harvest months of August, September and October.  No, we don’t subsist based on our garden’s produce, but eat it we do, over most of the year, either directly from the garden or laid by in any of various methods.  In a sense we only continue the long Midwestern cultural tradition laid down by ancient necessity, the life or death need to eat during the cold months.

Our harvest and preserving echoes that tradition since necessity long ago gave way to grocery stores and farmer’s markets, but in that echo we can hear the voices of our grandmothers and our grandfathers as they worked in the fields, filled the farm kitchen with the heat of their cooking, preparing themselves and their family for winter.

Lack of necessity, however, does not mean lack of need.  I believe there is a need for us to plant a seed, or nurture a transplant, to care for a tree or bush or a flower.  And more.  To gain in reciprocity something from that nurture: a fruit, a vegetable, some sustenance.  And more.  To use that food on our own tables, to create the magic of the true transubstantiation, flesh of the earth, blood of the sun, work of the plant made into our body.

This is an ancient necessity, to know this transformation from plant to food.  Why?  Because no matter our physical location, it is still and will be for the foreseeable future the source of everything we eat.  If we do not understand it, we will not protect it.  If we do not protect this source, we are in danger of losing it.  Ancient.  Necessity.