Time of uprooting

Dozens of heads of garlic hang drying in the entryway to our short-term summer rental apartment; a place to live, but not quite a home.  We harvested these just before leaving Oregon, a task squeezed into the end of one of those very busy days of packing and moving preparations.  Digging and pulling out of the long beds at the B-street farm at dusk after integrating our 6 hens into their flock, it was the most literal sort of pulling up roots.  Some came out easily, giant, plump heads and thick necks.  Others took a bit of digging; the garlic harvest was an impromptu addition to the chicken drop, so we dug without tools, sinking just our hands deep in the warm floodplain soil in the almost-dark. 

Here in Missoula, with hot August air carrying a bit of forest fire smoke, the garlic seems to be curing well.  The outer layers of skin have dried and tightened to a papery sheen. The roots, curled and frazzled at the base of each head, have dried to a crackle too.

I have a habit of testing them as I walk by, brushing my fingers against those roots that still cling to some small clumps of Willamette Valley clay.  I’m not sure I’ve ever felt a kinship to garlic before, but something about them hanging suspended soil-less in the air strikes a bit close to our own uprooted state.   We’ll have to move out of this summer rental next week, garlic and all.  As we clean and box up the garlic for winter storage, we’ll leave some of those biggest cloves at the top, hoping to find some new local soil for all of us to sink into before winter. 

Current Local Time

Why put writing here?  Because there are lot of people with whom I want to share the stories, but when is the last time I wrote you a real letter?  Probably not as recently as I’d like. 

When Noah and I first started writing each other we were on different continents.  You might expect geography to be the biggest challenge, but an emailed letter doesn’t necessarily take longer to arrive from Madagascar than from Montana.  Instead, it was time that was the tricky element.  Even something as simple as evening, morning, or day of the week was convoluted.  When someone is that far away, half the time it is already tomorrow for one or the other of the parties. 

We dealt with that in two ways.  One trick I soon discovered was that  typing “current local time…” with any country or city filling in that blank, brings up a line at the head of the search results that gives the time in that area.  As our correspondence grew more frequent, “current local time….” searches quickly began to accumulate.  Sometimes I could track his progress through a long multi-country assignment by the ways google suggested completing the search terms:  current local time….Madagascar…Sri Lanka…Kuala Lumpur…. Papua New Guinea.   

But we also fell into a practice of simply creating our own references of time based on bits of the letters, events that had happened and been shared in stories.  A vivid stormy run labeled the end of a rough trip in Ghana the time of the mango lightening.  Back in Forest Grove, I was trying to keep my head above water at the end of my first year of teaching in the time of the maple buds . 

I like this way of telling time.  It has no sharp time-zone borders on the map, but it ties us in to the place we are in in a wonderful way.

Some of my favorite work has been the fieldwork that let me know the seasons of a place in that kind of time-telling.  On a recent drive through Montana, reminiscing about my graduate school fieldwork, I remembered how I knew when it was time for different stages of my plant surveys.  It wasn’t that June 1^st was the time to count the lupine plants.  That was a good range to start from, but the real measure was when the camas was almost done blooming and starting to fruit.   

When you spend every day, especially long Montana summer days, walking the land scanning for seeds, seedlings, new plants, you notice a lot of things.  When you part the grass to find every single shoot of stoneseed in a long strip of grassland, you see a lot of other things along the way.  You get pulled, deeply, into the local current.  You learn the current locals—carrion beetles in ludicrous colors, ants, voles, nests of baby vesper’s sparrows with open begging beaks, the paradoxical moonwort (it sounds magical, and it may be, but it’s also real—Botrychium paradoxicum).  Part of the move, the job-leaving, the attempts to make new jobs of our own that fit a bit better, includes the goal of noticing and knowing in that sort of detail again. 

My goal in sharing writing here isn’t just to have a nature journal, though.  It’s a venture and a practice in storytelling of all sorts, and a reminder to notice the local currents--a way to share the stories from wherever local currently is.