Making Mysteries

6th Century BC Corinthian painting: a sheep led to the altar.

Sheep, alas for them, have long been the honored sacrifice at ritual moments. Solomon sacrificed “an hundred and twenty thousand” sheep to God in the dedication of his temple recorded in 1 Kings 8; among the Copts of Egypt, the blood of a sacrificed sheep is spilled upon the threshold of a wedding groom’s home, and his bride must step over the outpoured blood; the Romans offered sheep at the purification of the boundaries between fields in a ritual known as the Ambarvalia; Muslims sacrifice their best domestic animals, usually sheep, as the symbol of the sacrifice of Ibrahim at the Eid ul-Adha; Christians portray the heart’s blood coursing from the

breast of the Agnus Dei, or the Lamb of God; Aphrodite accepted the sacrifice of sheep from Cyprians who performed the ritual wrapped in sheepskins; and the Inca, seeking the Sun’s approval, sacrificed a lamb before undertaking acts of war. Though sacrificial killing is usually quick and humane, I like the practice of the gentle Sherpa of Tibet, among whom a sheep dedicated to Khumbe-yul-lha remains with the flock, but may not be killed, shorn, or sold. When the dedicated animal dies, its flesh is cooked within the village temple. Most who bring animals to sacrifice either eat the meal themselves or offer it to the unfortunate in the community.

The act of making sacrifice, of course, is a means of symbolically returning wealth to its source, whether the wealth be material goodness or spiritual well-being. The unfortunate sheep has its history because it has always been a good and reliable creature, fertile, adaptable, giving plentiful yield to the shepherd, and meek into the bargain. It’s easy to catch one and bring it smiling (see the Corinthian sheep above) to its altar.

We do not actually sacrifice our sheep, though I suppose it makes little difference to the sheep whether it dies for ritual fulfillment or for dinner. When we kill our sheep, we do it as swiftly as possible. The sheep spends its last half hour or so on a patch of sweet grass. It’s forgotten by then that it was separated from the flock just a bit ago. It hasn’t been away so long it’s begun to worry because, you see, there is this matter of fresh grass, just here, to be dealt with. The sheep has had a good life here. Then, at one moment, it’s over, all done.

We’ve fed ourselves from sheep who gave us meat, warmed ourselves with their wool, and relied on them to breed well and produce a crop of new lambs.

And we have this new house project going on, where just this week the forms have been laid down for the foundation. It seemed we needed some kind of dedication in which we included the life of the farm. We needed to include the sheep.

A house dedication is a various kind of ritual. Look at ethnologies from around the world, and you’ll find many, many possibilities. We didn’t want to actually sacrifice anyone from the flock, didn’t need to spill actual blood on the site, but wanted to evoke some kind of connection between ourselves, our new house, and our flock of Jacob sheep. Doorposts are a common site for dedication of new houses, but we have no doorposts yet. It’s not without precedent, however,  to bury items beneath the floor of a new dwelling. The Maya of Belize, for instance, buried offerings during the construction of houses. Dedication caches included burned or unburned whole items.

So down we went on ladders left by the absent construction crew (no need to alarm the workers with this kind of thing) and dug four small holes at the corners of the foundation.

We took with us the skulls of four fine sheep who had served us well. Two were rams and two were ewes.

Now, in the absence of a shaman, and feeling that this was a private matter in any case, we made our own reasoning what to do with them. I, being the female principle at work here, placed the two ewes under what will be the floor of the greenhouse. A greenhouse wants fertile ground. Both these ewes had bred well for us, and I thought they would be comfortable there, under the greenhouse.  I talked to them a little, reminding them they had been fertile in life, and now could go on to help us grow healthy food. “Be good,” I said. “You always were.” I brought out the smudge stick again, and burned some smoke over the holes.

Then we covered them up.

Here is a good look at the clay ground we live on. It’s officially called Jory Clay Loam. Sometimes the loam seems in short supply.

So then we went “upstairs” to the living floor and placed the rams. This is PissPot, our first-born ram lamb who went under the NW corner of the foundation.

It was Richard’s turn to speak to the boys.  Big John, who had been our first flock sire, went under the bedroom. Richard’s choice. I think this has something to do with shared manliness and Y chromosomes. He talked to John for a few minutes, about strength and courage and prosperity. We covered him up like the others, gathered up our things, and climbed the ladders out of the foundation hole.

Though we didn’t kill any of the sheep for sacrifice, it was somehow a reminder of how this has been done for millennia. The farm animals sutain us with their heartbeats. Their lives and deaths are important. It seems fitting they should be a part of the house where we will live.

Hot Weather, Ripe Apples

It’s my opinion that temperatures in the F 90s are way more summery than is enjoyable. When I can taste the salt on my lips, it’s too warm.

However, there are some things well-suited to late summer heat, and one of them is the late summer apple.

The Gravensteins are ripe again. Since I haven’t found an Early Transparent tree for the orchard collection, these are the first to come ripe for us. Last year I wrote an encomium on the Gravenstein apple. It was the first year we’d had a real harvest off the tree, and I was thrilled with it. This year, again, we have a good yield. At least something in the garden is doing well.

Most summers we make plenty of applesauce for the larder, and a good bottling of cider as well. But this year, given the shortage of storage space in our arrangements, we thought it might be best to dry the apples. It’s been a few years since we dried some, and it’s time to renew the stock. They make good snacks and lunch fruits. They reconstitute into breakfast fruit. And, of course, into desserts. In any case, the weather right now is in perfect harmony with the Gravenstein crop, so here am I:

setting out apple slices to dry. I am somewhat surrounded by the construction site, so things are not as picturesque as they might be. But the studio, built of steel arches, is a marvelous reflector. The racks are set on the south side, and the apple slices are drying fast enough they were leathery within a couple of hours. Now, that’s solar energy at work.

So last year, my apple panegyric was on the old Gravenstein. This year I will nod to the Hewes Crab.

The Hewes crab apple

These days we have become so accustomed to the very few apple varieties that appear in the markets, only home orchardists really get to enjoy the pleasures of old, favorite apples. As with so many of our vegetables and fruits, commercial cultivation of apples demands uniformity of size, color and flavor. Besides, only apples capable of withstanding the rigors of large-scale picking and shipping operations can make it into the mainstream of grocery marketing. As a result, so many classic flavors have been lost to the common palate that few folks these days realize the value of, for instance, a crab apple.

Note well: a crab apple is not the same as a crabbed apple. Merriam-Webster would have us know the verb, to crab, this way:

Main Entry: ⁵crab

Function: verb

Inflected Form(s): crabbed; crab·bing

Etymology: Middle English crabben, probably back-formation from crabbed

Date: 1662

transitive verb 1 : to make sullen : sour <old age has crabbed his nature> 2 : to complain about peevishly 3: spoil , ruin intransitive verb : carp , grouse <always crabs about the weather>

— crab·ber noun

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As applied to an apple, that would be one of those small, puckery apples from an old tree aging into retirement.

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A crab apple, on the other hand, is a small, strongly-flavored apple, tart, sweet, tannic, usually intended for cooking, pickling, or, best of all, cidering.

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Back When… that is, back when European folks were first putting down roots on this continent, the greatest number of trees in a New World orchard were grown from seed, not from graft as is more common today. Apple seedlings (or pippins) are notoriously variable. When you grow a new tree from a graft, by taking a cutting of the old tree and placing it into the wood of the new rootstock, you get a new tree above the graft that is just like the old one. It is genetically the same tree. It’s, if you like, a clone of the old one. More on the value and mystery of that in a minute. When, however, you grow an apple tree from the seeds of the fruit, you get all kinds of results. Some are good. Some are not so good. They vary from their parent in size, texture, scent, shape, flavor, fruit color, hardness, keepability, cookability, disease resistance, and vigor. Seedling orchards are the source of all the apple varieties we might treasure today, varieties with outstanding names like Ashmead’s Kernal, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Kentucky Limbertwig, Bloody Ploughman, Burr Knot, and Foxwhelp. But few of those make it into the Safeway franchise, and today can be found only in backyards and small collections.

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Henry Thoreau mourned the loss of seedling cider orchards and expressed his taste for apples “sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” He thought little of the “selected lists of pomological gentlemen” whose “‘Favorites’ and ‘Nonsuches’ and ‘Seek-no-farthers’ commonly turn out very tame and forgettable. They are eaten with comparatively little zest, and have no real tang nor smack to them.“

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Yeah. That’s where I am.

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But to get back to Back When, the apple back then was most likely to be used in cider. Certainly it was eaten as whole or cooked fruit, but its usual destination was the cider glass. And I do not mean, when I say this, a beverage like that jug of apple juice on the shelf at the supermarket. I mean a cider made of all the varieties in the orchard, blended in the crusher, each cider no doubt irreproducable, each cider rich in tannins, fruit flavors, sweets and sours… and that cider mostly not taken fresh when it was most properly called juice, but let to ferment and held into the winter until it was ready to drink, all heady and fizzy and — it’ll give you a lift, a real cider will.

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And this is where varieties like the little Hewes crab shine. The Hewes is an old variety, also called the Virginia crab apple, known to have been grown in the cider orchards of the colonists.

“The liquor flows from the pumice as water from a sponge,” wrote Philadelphia farmer Henry Wynkoop in 1814, of the Hewe’s crab.

When a seedling variety showed itself to hold special promise, it was grown on in the orchard through grafted trees. The little Hewes crab came to the orchard of Thomas Jefferson in this way, and he thought enough of it to keep it as a favorite in the cider orchard.

And so, in my own little orchard, there grows a Hewes crab apple that came to me as a grafted sample of the trees of Thomas Jefferson. I’m not sure how to express this, but imagine if you can that when I place my hand on the bark of my Hewes tree, it is the same tree that grew under the eyes of Thomas Jefferson. His glance might have fallen upon my tree. When I slice into one of those Hewes apples, the aroma that rises is the same one that filled the orchards of the American colonists. And when we crush our apples into golden juice and raise the glass to our lips, that mix of scents and flavors and darkening color is like, but not like — since every year’s cider is unique — that cider that calmed the thirst of those first orchardists on the North American continent.

OK — maybe that’s enough of that. I’m weary from a too-hot weekend when we moved the greenhouse out of the way of the construction site and dug up and moved plants to be saved (what unfortunate weather it is for that!), and maybe I’m overwhelmed by the possible connection to spirits (spirits of more than one kind) of another time. But it’s true, the historical continuity of the cells in a grafted plant is unarguable. Given careful husbandry, those varieties are immortal. There is no reason for us to lose them. If we value the opinions of our ancestors, there is every reason to keep them.

I give you:

the Hewes crab.

Golly. House Gone.

This is profound. Or so it seems to me.

Crunch.

A neighbor came by just now, to see whether we’d had a tornado hit. “Are you OK?”

If you’ve wondered why I’ve posted nothing the last couple of weeks… we’ve been busy. We’ve been busy getting out of the way, more or less, getting everything we own into storage.

Yes, indeed, we are OK, and kind of excited. And it’s been a long time coming.

For various technical reasons, the house project is about a year behind the anticipated starting.  But it’s underway now, and there is no turning back. Once they set that big jaw to work on the house, all is committed to the future.

It may seem like a profligate abuse of resources to rip down a standing house to create the site for building a new one. But consider, aside from defects of the old house, how this will proceed. This isn’t called demolition. It’s called Deconstruction, and though it looks like a disaster, it’s surprising how orderly it is. As the walls come down, the big machine picks off the studs and delicately breaks them at places where wiring passes through. Then a brave and agile man comes in and pulls out the wiring. Already, the windows, doors, sinks, toilet, tub, roofing metal, flashing, gutters, metal pipes, all that stuff has been taken out of the house. Wiring will go for reclamation of the metal, as will the gutters and other sortable bits. The sinks, tub and thrones will go to the Rebuilders Center (Remember them, where we found the wonderful arched window for the studio, and the cabinets, and the sink?) along with the doors and windows. A lot of the dimensioned wood will remain here, some for re-use, some for winter heat. What isn’t suitable for either of those purposes will be taken away and chipped up for landscape application or composting. Very little of this house is going to be thrown away. About 15% of it, the wall board [ed. note Sep 7, 2008: I am informed this morning that the gypsum wall board is also recycled], vinyl flooring, carpet, LP engineered wood siding, fiberglass insulation [ed. note Sep 9, 2008: apparently the fiberglass insulation is recycled as well], plastic pipe… that stuff will have to go to landfill. But the other 85% will go on to higher purposes.

One of the aspects of all this that gnawed at both of us a little was the thought that this old, cheaply done, inconvenient, impractical, unappealing house was the major accomplishment of someone’s adult life. We had met them, a couple of times, the old folks who built it here. They came down the road for drive-by look-sees twice in the first years we were here, and noted changes with a critical eye. Now, we thought, it’s good to know they’ve gone on before and won’t drive out here one day to find their house not here at all and another in its place.

Here it is just before deconstruction began. (That’s Bart in the foreground; he’s one of the crew who will build the new house.)

The truth is, I never liked much about the house. Aside from internal inconveniences, it didn’t feel good. It had… hmmm. It had bad vibes. I’m sorry, old Mr. Trainer, but your house felt bad inside.

So, just to make sure about things, and to set the project off with the right outlook, we went in this afternoon (Monty will have a fit, I suppose, but we wore the hard hats he gave us), and smudged out the bad cess in what was left of the house.

I lit off a bundle of sage I’d brought back from a collecting trip through the desert some years ago.  Smudging is said to clear the air of unwanted influences. We blew smoke around and into the corners. “Bad things go away,” I said. “Good things come home.” Not knowing exactly what else to say in exorcising bad vibes, that seemed like the right thought. Then I took the smudge stick over to the new studio and smoked in some good thoughts there, too.

It smells nice, as well.

So that seems to be about it for the old house. Since the crew isn’t here on the weekend, we spent the day sorting pieces of lumber and clearing out the old greenhouse which will have to move down the hill into the garden.

Except, as I was picking through things, I noted the pile of wall board set aside by the deconstruction crew. Face up on top was a piece of wall on which I had written a last testimonial by flashlight one night last week:

So.

‘Bye, house.