Wreathery

This is a special request post. A friend of mine keeps asking how one makes wreaths, and though I have given answers like, “You just wire the stuff onto a form until it’s done,” that hasn’t seemed to be answer enough. So here you go:

1. Get your stuff.

“What kind of stuff?” I am asked. Well, shoot. Any kind of stuff. This is a cheap project. Look around. Some folks buy their materials (shudder!), but, really, is that necessary? When we lived in town, I made wreaths from the old fir tree in the back yard, the boxwood shrub, and the arbor vitae hedge. If you don’t have your own, it’s not too hard to find someone who will share. Everyone who has a hedge wants it pruned. Landscape evergreens make great wreath materials.  Take a drive in the country, stop someplace that looks friendly, and ask to cut enough for a wreath. Just seek out evergreen foliage, berries, cones, and things that look like they will last a while.

Avoid: Holly. I mean it. If you have body armor and can work in gloves, then go ahead and make holly wreaths. They will be beautiful, and I will kneel before you in  homage. Holly is the most awful thing to work with I have ever imagined. You cannot hold onto it anywhere without it sticking you, and if you get some built into a wreath, then you can’t pick up the wreath to show it off. And you bleed. You bleed out of a hundred tiny wounds. Saints used to bleed like this.

If you want to bleed just a little, perhaps to make yourself feel like the princess in a fairy tale? The stems of the wild roses (see below for my list of ingredients) will work fine.

But you can also de-thorn them and work safely in the world of real things. If you make this wreath, you won’t have to be a fairy-tale princess; people will think you are a Queen!

Maybe avoid: Juniper.  Garden beds around offices and schools are full of juniper plants. Juniper has attack spines on the ends of its lovely fronds. They stick you and leave itchy welts. It’s not as bad as holly, but you really want to be prepared to have a good rash for the rest of the weekend if you use it in wreathmaking.

My stuff presently is Douglas Fir, native Salal (Gaultheria shallon), Scotch Broom — or Common Broom, to those across the pond — (Cytisus scoparius), and wild rose hips. But the recipe changes from time to time. I just look around for what might be had.

Buy some wire. You do have to lay out something for the wire. I buy 24 gauge “paddle wire” at the craft shop: $1.49 gets you enough for a couple of wreaths on forms about 12 inches in diameter.

2. Make your form. No! don’t buy one!

When I was young and foolish, I did buy them. And then one year I came up short on forms, so I twisted a couple of limber branches into hoops, wired them up, and went to town. It may not be perfectly round when you start, but by the time you’ve worked all the way around it with your greens, it will be.

I ask you to use a little restraint here. A 12-inch hoop will make into a finished wreath of about 24 inches in diameter. That’s big enough for a door wreath. I’m warning you: if you start out with a form the size you have in mind for the final product, you will be really surprised at the end. You will be able to hoola-hoop it around your hips. You will be able to jump through it on horseback.

3. Make some greenery into small pieces.

Pull or snip off pieces that can become little bouquets, and…

4. Wire them onto the form.

You already have wire going around the form to hold the branches together. Just keep on spiraling the wire around the form, catching the ends of the fronds or other branches under the wire.

5. Add new ingredients in layers.

Don’t skimp on material. Make your wreath thick and bushy. You can always trim later, but it’s a real pain in the butt to add stuff in after you’ve finished and realize, too late, your wreath is skinny.

Some things can be added on the back of the wreath. Here I’ve put on some Scotch Broom that will stick out in swishes off the sides of the wreath:

6. When you get to the end, fold back the material you laid in first and find space to tuck the last few stems of foliage.

Work the wire back and forth between leaves to keep them perky and undamaged while you find a place to wrap.

7. Sew in the end of the wire someplace on the back, and there you have it. Hang your wreath someplace and stand back to admire it.

(Click any images for bigger display.)

Ever Feel Eyes on Your Back?

Today was a beautiful autumn day. Oh, my. Sun and breeze. Damp left over from the rain last week.  It’s the best of seasons, in my opinion. Winter has its harsh beauty, its washed colors and sharp-edged air. Spring is a delight, all bursting open and fragrant. Summer is full of scents of its own, and the lingering memory of when we could be lazy for weeks at a time. But autumn, autumn is the one. Between the days of rain returning after the summer, there are golden afternoons, so short in the seasonal clock they’re precious as a lover’s kisses. There are nights with crystalline skies, Orion tipping onto his head in a slow saltation. Dawn comes wrapped in mist, making familiar places secret and unknown. And the sun, the sun is orange in the day.

It was an afternoon of common chores. Because the steel walls of the studio we warm, we opened the door to let in the air. We made firewood of the long bones of the old house. Richard cut the old framing members into stove lengths and I stacked.

It was pretty casual labor. After a while I left him to it, and walked into the woods with my hand clippers and some buckets. It’s greens cutting time.

These are the ingredients:

I love the trips into the woods for cutting. It’s a bonus if I can go on a brilliant afternoon, but a good seasonal storm won’t keep me in the house. Here I have the makings for several holiday wreaths: Douglas Fir, native Salal, Scotch Broom, and wild rose hips.

Here’s the result. This one is last year’s wreath. No rose hips. Last year they were few and soggy for some reason. This year, they’re abundant as ticks on a dog.

The wall on which that one was hanging is now deep into recycling, maybe part of someone else’s house.

Delightful as the day was, I kept looking over my shoulder as I went along the path. It seemed like there was something out there, nearby… some eyes on my back… some presence I couldn’t quite put a name on.

Even when I had my buckets full and was headed back, I kept glancing along the way, looking, listening, sniffing…

So when I came into the open track,

well, he scared the bejeepers out of me. He’s there in the picture, left of center, in the brush at the turn of the path.

This:

William: Mule

Perhaps, he was just keeping an eye on me. He’s good that way. But a person wants to know if they have a guardian mule walking beside them through life.

Murder Most Fowl, and Other Miscellaneous Fall Events

Vegetarians and tender souls, avert your eyes.

Sometimes, when you live on a farm, you become an angel of mercy.

Friends of ours, who also have a small acreage, are far too sympathetic to the members of their chicken flock to dispatch them when they are in need of it. A couple of times now we’ve had to respond to emergency medical matters by delivering the coup de grâce for them. This afternoon we had a distressed phone call. Would we take their fine, though obnoxious, Wyandotte cock, and kill him? He’d been found flopping about in the morning with a broken leg.

Naturally, we are only too happy to help out. Though Richard usually ends up doing the killing around here, even I can put down an animal in distress. In this case, the lovely 7-month bird was also to be ours to keep for the table. He arrived nicely settled into grass in a ventilated box. We visited briefly with his parents, and then excused ourselves to take him away to the back of behind. The stroke was swift. Since we’d had advance notice of his arrival, a pot of hot water was ready for his dunking. He plucked beautifully and very shortly was ready to be cleaned inside.

Now he looks less like a bird to engage your heart and more like what comes from the market. He had a very good life, however, unlike the chickens wrapped and displayed in that supermarket cooler, and he’ll make a far healthier several dinners for us, too.  We’ll let him rest for a couple of days in the refrigerator, “hanging” used to be term for it, and then we’ll bring him in for preparation.

The gift rooster was the wrap-up of a fine weekend. The weather has been autumnally gorgeous: sunshine, mild air, foliage in color. I drove off across the valley with a friend on Saturday and came home with another beautiful Jacob sheep for the flock. This is Bide a Wee Ida:

Ida is a yearling ewe, and arrived just in time to step into the breeding paddock with Eldon the ram and the other women. Ordinarily I would quarantine a new ewe for a period before introducing her to the flock. But Ida has effectively been in quarantine at Bide a Wee Farm since the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival in September, so I wasn’t concerned about her.

Eldon seemed quite pleased to make her acquaintance, and Ida, too, appeared receptive to the matter. A ram follows an interesting ewe closely, sniffs her personal cologne at intervals, and curls his lips in delight. He licks his nose, and advances for another whiff. He bumps her hips lightly, and speaks, I am quite sure, French into her ear: You are so beautiful, my sweet. I do very much adore you. Your scent causes me rapture. Come close again, don’t go, my dear. Am I not handsome to you? Meanwhile, the ewe plays a coy game. If she is not in the mood yet (meaning, not ready to breed), she trots ahead of him, turns irritably away, and keeps him running along behind. If she is open to the moment, however, she will pause now and then to let him come close. She’ll squat ahead of him, and maybe pee a little. He raises his front leg and rests his chin on her rump. Oh, dear, she thinks, and sets off again for another pass around the paddock, but not so fast he might lose interest. This little dance goes on for a while, until they come to an agreement about one another. Then he steps up to the job, commits the act in a trice, and walks off to investigate some other woman in sight. To judge from the indications given last night, Ida was no longer a virgin by dawn.

Ida had an adventure in arriving here.  When I brought Jenna home in the back of the car last December I was a little unnerved by the clacking of her horns against the windows. So this time we thought about the matter a little, and decided that, since you hood a hawk to calm it, and blinder a horse, why not cover the eyes of a sheep to keep her from trying to get out the windows? We took along a pillowcase and, once Ida was loaded into the car, slipped it over her head. We cut a corner off the case to make a breathing hole. Ida seemed to be all OK with the matter. She stood quietly all the way down the hills from the farm, through Newberg (where we stopped for coffee at a little coffee shack and amazed the server who looked in the window and asked if we wanted a dog biscuit. “I think she’d love it,” I said, “but it’s a sheep.” “No way!” said the girl. “Way! It is!”, and withdrew the offer of the doggie biscuit), across the valley, and up into the east-side hills to home.  Except for the loss of the dog biscuit, Ida was untroubled. One wonders in passing, did she notice we had a pillowcase over our dog’s head?

Sunday dawned as beautiful as Saturday had. I took advantage of the weather to clean out the chicken nests. This might not sound like a pleasing task, but it doesn’t take long, and doing it in sunshine is so much more pleasant than doing it in the rain, that, yes, I enjoyed it.

I went into the loft and tossed bales of hay to the floor, and watched the bits and flecks of hay dust drift in the sunlight. I tied the ladder to the roof truss, too. Why? Indeed.

Let me tell a small story. A couple of weeks ago I went up to throw down bales. It was my first trip up the ladder this year. I’ve just now used up the hay stacked on the floor of the barn, and had to move upstairs for more. The first bales to come down are always a little scary to deal with. They’re stacked to the very edge of the loft floor, so must be hooked from the stack by clinging to the ladder and coaxing them out. Then, once a bale-sized rectangle of floor is exposed, I can step off the ladder and, by turning smally in the rectangle, shove the next  bales off into space. The first part of this worked fine. I’ve done it before and have a pretty good method worked out. I didn’t worry too much about the second part. By then I’m standing on the floor. No problem. Except… the second bale down elegantly takes the ladder with it.

I consider the matter. I am upstairs with a lot of hay and not a lot of room to move around. The ladder is downstairs. I try to think like McIver. I have tools. I have: a hay hook. I have: clothes. I have: a very, very small Swiss Army knife with a nail file and a scissors in addition to the manicure-sized blade. I can think of no way to use any of these things to get the ladder back.

So I start tossing bales onto the floor. I’m thinking, if I stack up enough of them down there, I can hop down onto them. The first couple land neatly where I intend. The next few bounce, fly, roll, and cannonball everywhere. They are scattered all over the floor, not even one on top of another very exactly. This is not working. I have more bales on the floor than I really want down there, and I am still up in the loft with no good way to join them. But I do have enough space cleared on the edge of the loft now that I can lie down there. I lean wa-a-ay out with the hay hook, and just snag the top of the aluminum ladder, and pull gratefully on it.

This is an extension ladder. Pulling on the top only makes it longer and longer and doesn’t really put it anywhere I want it. By this time I am sweating as in August, have shucked off my chore coat, am not admiring the motes in the sun anymore, and might even have said the “F” word: “Fooey!“

As I am writing this in comfort, and at a computer, you must know I did in the end get out of the loft. I struggled with that ladder for a good 20 minutes, making it “walk” from side to side and trying to find a place among all the shattered bales below to set its feet. I hugged the center post of the barn as I slithered down the wobbly rungs. I stamped about a little, restacked the bales, picked up my coat and hat, and snarled at the sheep who were watching it all in fascination.

So, y’know, tie your ladder.

The sun was still up, and I needed to make a gathering of greens for holiday wreaths. One of the things about having almost everything in storage is, you can’t easily remember if you were smart enough to save out things like hand nippers and branch loppers. I was, and was able to find them even, so set out to gather some leafy things into buckets. I’ll be making gift wreaths for the next few weekends. I started with one this afternoon, working in the sun on the back steps.

When I came in, Richard took one look and me and said, as he has quite a few times lately, “You really need a new coat.”

I don’t see the problem myself. It’s hardly broken in. It still has two working buttons. What? It’s the coat that held new-born lambs. It goes over fence wires to protect me. It has good pockets for apples and bottles of animal medicines.  It’s softened up. It fits over sweaters. It’s taken me a good 10 years to make this coat what it is. You mean, I have to start again at the beginning?

Well, I’ll give that some thought.

Meanwhile, this is the kind of weekend that makes me love autumn most.

We Were Never Going to Do It again

Pause for a couple of minutes at eleven o’clock in the morning,

to remember the day 90 years ago,

November 11, 1918,

when the Armistice signed

was to end the War to End All Wars.

Treasure in the Woods

Well, now, that’s enough of that citizen activist stuff. Too many hours in Town.

Yesterday I spent some time wetting my feet in the rainy woods, looking for a small reward. It’s mushroom time in the little hidden places. Last week I found a couple of nice messes of Shaggy Manes (Coprinus comatus)

in my Usual Places (that’s a specific as a mushroom hunter ever gets). You have to be quick with Shaggy Manes. They appear, white and frilly, and almost immediately start to decay. You can see that the one on the right in this picture is darkening at the bottom. It won’t be delectable for long.  As it melts, releasing its spores on the way, it turns a watery, black ink color. Its other name, the one my mother used when I was a child, is “Inky Cap.” You take them when you see them, hurry home, and do them up in the sauté pan with a bit of butter. They don’t need much else. Serve them on buttered many-grain toast and you will launch into low-earth orbit.

Shaggy Manes favor grassy areas and open leaf litter places so, on my way to town in the afternoon I turned out at a little cemetery enclosed by woods. It was raining. It didn’t matter how high I stepped, my feet were wet through by the time I had crossed half of the low rise to the markers. I was scouting the margins for those white pillars, and not seeing any. Of course, most of the time a mushroom seeker does not see any. It’s like fishing, though. The worst afternoon mushrooming is better than the best afternoon doing much else. The air was fragrant with fallen leaves, rotting fruit, and woodsmoke from nearby farm houses. I detected a whiff of the many, many fungi pushing their way into secret, damp places. Rain pattered through the last leaves of maples. The fronds of Douglas Fir brushed each other in the breeze, making the soft sound of spirits shifting underneath. I love the afternoon light in the fall, how certain colors blaze in the grey of a drizzled day.

From the other side of the fence, a certain near-incandescent flash of gold caught my eye. A scatter of butter on the woods floor. From 50 feet away, I knew what they were: Cantharellus formosus, the Golden Chanterelle. One’s heart leaps to find a new patch of desired edibles. It’s pleasure made of a combination of recognition, sudden joy, and guilt.

Guilt, you ask?

Well, the mushrooms are always on the other side of the fence, you know.

That’s why we wear a coat, so we have something to throw over the top wire of a barbed fence.

Let me say now, if you choose to trespass in the chase, it’s an unspoken rule (of course it’s unspoken, given the circumstance!) that you come and go without trace. You do not hurt fences. You do not mess up the woods with your coming and going. If you get hurt, it’s your own thing; you weren’t supposed to be there anyway. You never open gates. You are swift and silent.

So, you toss your coat over the fence wire, step into the forbidden ground, pull your plastic bag from your pocket, and unsheath your mushroom knife. You move, bent low to the forest floor, among the mushrooms, slicing stems and stuffing bodies into the bag. You do not take time to count. You notice the bag is heavy now but, like a card player, you don’t count while you’re sittin’ at the table. You recite poetry in your head:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here…

And you remind yourself that it is always possible to ask for forgiveness. In fact, it might be a good idea, in a Karmic sense, to ask for it even if you don’t get caught.

The bag was heavy. The bag was beautiful. Here are its contents.

When I arrived home with the fruits of my trespass, I was not unwelcome. I was pretty wet, and a little cold. But I warmed later, when we had a dinner of rabbit slow-cooked with dried plums and figs in Marsala, and a side dish of Chanterelle with garlic in a little cream…

It was only the deer were going to eat them anyway.

The Pendulum

About 30 years ago, I took a wonderful night class on the work of William Blake. We ranged through discussions of times and trends, philosophies and revolutions, madness and enlightenment. We discussed the climate of imagination. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, visual arts, music and literature reacted Romantically against the rational mode of the Age of Enlightenment. That may not sound like an especially good thing in the evolution of thought. After all, we think of the Age of Enlightenment as the time when science overcame superstition. But, seeking balance in all things, I and the Romantics happily embrace the flights of creativity that issued from the imaginative minds of that era. Blake wrote, “This world of imagination is infinite and eternal…” We were then just emerging from the exuberant 1970’s, and it seemed that must be true. “Imagination is the real and eternal world of which the vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.” It was the Age of Aquarius, right? We were on the way to a better humankind.

But Blake also wrote, “Without contraries there is no progression.” How were we to know we were about to enter a period of social and intellectual recession? How were we to know the gains of the last 2 decades would be greatly erased in the next years? We might have known because our professor Mariel in that William Blake class told us so. He warned us that, as in the time of Blake, we would see the pendulum of the public mind move. It would move away from the sweet left of liberal expression to, as we then and I now still think of it, the bitter right.

“The change comes quickly,” he told us. “You will wake up one morning in another world.”

He was right.

He promised us a return, however. “Thirty years,” he said. “That should be about right.”

Despair. How could I wait 30 years for everything to begin to come right again?

Here’s the thing. It’s started. It’s not just the election of a President in the USA. It’s everything on the ballot. Here in Oregon we voted down a whole batch of ugly, socially blind, xenophobic, and dangerous measures. Our friend Kurt Schrader is going to Congress. The old guard of reactionary and obstructionist holders of public office have been swept away as if a tide passed through the electorate. And, best of all from my point of view:

OUR LIBRARY DISTRICT PASSED!

By a lot!

I have never been so flat-footed astonished as I was when I saw the first returns. Our measure was passing. After a solid year of work by a small group of bookworms, Library Friends, and ordinary powerless citizens, a year in which we raised more than $90,000 to fund our campaign, and talked and wrote and phone-called and walked, a year when we watched people losing their mortgages and the economy falling into a pit, and we thought for sure our measure would fail and our libraries would close, after all that, it passed!

In that year I cannot tell you how many dinners at home we missed, how many meetings I sat, how I learned to beg for money, to stand up and beg publicly and to clasp my hands and beg person-to-person, how many hours we sat and contemplated the possibility that our libraries would close, how we cheered ourselves that our measure to form a District with its own tax base might just squeeze by… but I did not really think it would pass. The truth is, I think we worked at it month after month because we just could not accept the thought of a County without libraries, and if we kept on working, we didn’t have to look too hard at the reality of the situation: people have not been underwriting public services for some years now, and weren’t likely to opt for an addition to their property taxes to keep the libraries open with the national economy collapsing around them.

William Blake wrote, “One thought fills immensity.”

“You will wake up some day in another world,” said Professor Mariel, 30 years ago.

On Monday, the eve of election day, I thought Tuesday was going to be in the same world as the day before.

Imagine.

November 4