Dried-out Bee Balm, Brown and tan woods of late fall, Garlic mustard

**Photo of bee balm dried seed pods, by John Lodder, Flickr Creative Commons. 

          Having just returned from the woods, I’m being still, letting the natural remain about my shoulders. I'm in a dim, November-dusk room--sitting near a clear bag of bright-green garlic mustard, an invasive plant that raises havoc nationwide, but tastes succulent. It has round, rippled leaves, a bit like those of an English violet. 

          Not having seen it before, I held onto the bag until I reached home, wondering if I had simply harvested violet leaves past flowering time. Even so, I was pretty sure it was the right thing, and I felt proud of my weighty zip-lock. 

**Photo of Garlic Mustard, by Jacob Enos, Flickr Creative Commons. 

          Now -- having checked several photos and descriptions online -- I'm sure it is garlic mustard, which is good news. It’s energy-full stuff, despite being bad for soil here in North America. But harvesting it (and not adding it to any compost or yard waste) is a good way to clear the woods, while gaining vitamins. Hurrah. That’ll help, because my energy is low. I'm congested, and have been for days. Dust and indoor allergens that flare once the heat is turned on each fall have caused the problem. Mold causes it, in particular. There are other indoor factors: In other apartments, I've noticed the effect of chemical fragrances in winter – laundry detergents, harsh cleansers. Pre-chemical use, we all cleaned with Bon Ami and maybe lye, or rosemary and other essential oils.

          That said, perhaps mold wouldn't trouble me if I lived in a yurt and moved it from place to place, or if I knew all the herbs to boost my immunity each winter. Meanwhile, I’m planning how to cook the garlic mustard--and having nettle tea, which contains Vitamin C. It seems to be helping.

   **Photo of a log in fall woods, by Yo La Tengo, Flickr Creative Commons. 

          The forest has leaf molds too, but I love walking its paths—and they don’t bother me because of the open air. Other than the green garlic mustard scattered in small patches, the woods were all shades of brown and tan. There were beds of brown leaves, bare branches, and many walnut-colored seed pods on long, bent stems.

          After seven years in the Northwest, seeing deciduous woods in winter -- not the damp, moss- and fern-thick woods of the Cascades -- is striking but invigorating. In the garden outside of my house are dark brown pods, a bit like I imagine dried husks of bees would look. These, the gardener told me, are what is left of our spring/summer bee balm—a pink and sprightly flower and herb that is used in teas and other concoctions. It’s exciting to see this cycle, to know that the bee balm isn’t gone, just different.

**Photo of seed pods by Lindy, Flickr Creative Commons.

          Walking along the rock wall that lifts the sidewalk on my street, one passes under trees, past rows of sere and brown varieties of seed pods. All of those are changed now from the bright young plants they were in late spring--but they're still beautiful, if a bit melancholy. It’s only melancholy, though, because I want them to last forever, in my human way. Eventually, hopefully, I’ll know how each pod appeared in its past, and be able to contrast that with its current look.

          Walking the brown paths was calming. I thought about my need for nature, and reflected that maybe we aren’t meant to see crowds of people, humans all the time, our faces rarely interrupted by tree branches, sedge seed pods, tall grasses, clear streams.  

          I thought about how to be in nature more often—it's an age-old question. How can we do that while still being among like-minded, like-aged people and well-employed? There’s a graduate program that focuses on nature and creativity. I wondered if that would be a good idea.

For now, I’ll give myself an assignment: Cover nature weekly.

Peace, happy late-November--it’s time to cook garlic mustard!

**Photo of garlic mustard and orange cup fungus, by Mightyjoepye, Flickr Creative Commons. 

Back from Maine

          
          The short season of adding ice to tall glasses of water has ended, it seems.  We are in mid-September, and my recent trip to southern Maine has punched up the view toward fall.

**Photo of Saco River, by Carter Brown, Flickr Creative Commons.

            Of my four days there, two were gray, two were glowing. They included pancakes, a house tour by a charismatic six-year-old, and dark, tannic river swimming. Also a meeting; local cheese and beer in an Edwardian neighborhood; and a Saturday farmers’ market that is everything organic-farm and progressive and LGBT and collective in culture in southern Maine, at an Olmsted-ian downtown park.These crunchy views are less visible where I live, in Staten Island. 

**Photo of carrots at Deering Oaks Farmers' Market by Mebrett, Flickr Creative Commons. 

         That said, Portland’s overlay of organic and tech and foodie culture is only an overlay, it seems. For a city of 40,000 to have a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe’s is surprising--but it clearly has a hard-bitten side as well. It might be part Burlington, part Boston working-class suburb in a natural setting.

My last afternoon in Portland was spent near the bus station, hearing about a non-working EBT machine at the convenience store across the street, about coffee house offerings being too expensive and too strong in flavor, about how much money is left on food-stamp cards this month, and a long bus trip to Corpus Christi, Texas for a job and a return to Maine after finding only overnight heat and contaminated beach water.

**Hilltop Superette, Munjoy Hill, Portland, by Kate, Flickr Creative Commons. 

People are friendly. At the bus-station convenience store, the counter-women at the pizza/Italian sandwich counter peer toward me as I choose a drink and call, “How are ya?” in a kind, harsh-voiced way that sounds close to a Boston accent to me, but different. I hear that only tourists eat lobster rolls, although I can’t tell, because they seem only to be sold on the coast and in rural areas, not in Portland.

At a coffee shop, people smile to be in one another’s company in the line for espresso. In some regions, smiling appears to be more of an obligation—but here, people seem glad to be with one another, happy to be in a natural place.

**Photo toward Mackworth Island, from Portland, Maine, by Jeff Dunn, Flickr Creative Commons. 

            Outside of town, the rural roads have a kinship with small-town anywhere: mountain-side burgs in Washington state; wooded East Texas. 

Leaving Portland, my bus passes pine woods and rocky areas blasted for the highway.Two retired women behind me are discussing Mount Holyoke and whether Devil in the White City is indeed based on a true story.

As we near Boston, we cross from woods and a certain amount of dereliction into the Northeast Metropolitan Complex--there is a palpable feeling of emerging into the swift click of the cities. With surprise, I realize that I have spent four days outside of the metro area between Boston and Baltimore, which seems to be pulling us in. Now we're in the Tip O’Neill Memorial Tunnel, then passing a farmer’s market on a busy square. City dwellers in business suits shop for dinner, not looking up to make eye contact--they can't show a reaction to every passing Greyhound bus, after all.

At Boston’s South Street Station, a young man asks me to watch his trail backpack while he fetches food. Noticing an Appalachian Trail patch ironed onto his pack, I mention it when he returns. 

He completed the trail the day before, he says—he and others drank champagne and made toasts after fog cleared at the Katahdin summit. It seems magnificent and unusual and world-breaking--I have the urge to give him five, but I refrain from some sense of big-city decorum that I’m not sure is even necessary. He is a laid-back trail kid, a recent NYU graduate with a green-careers degree. I grin and say it’s amazing, how exciting that he did the trail.

After Boston, we drive in darkness past conifers and across waterways. The passengers who boarded in Boston are visibly more diverse and more prosperous: Back in the urban areas, middle-class people use public-transit, and ride long-distance buses between metro centers. In Portland, Somalian and other African refugees were most of the non-white residents, but middle-class African-Americans live near and south of Boston. The passengers around me seem buoyed by suburban security and education. Because only a few of the electrical outlets are working, people allow others to plug smartphones into their outlets. They assure each other that this is fine:“Thank you very much!” and “You’re welcome." This feels like kindness, but also like the urban politeness of strangers.

**Photo of woods in Maine, by Bryan Alexander, Flickr Creative Commons. 

In the four hours between Boston and New York, we pass land, land, the insurance buildings of Hartford, rivers, then more land. I drowse, then wake to realize that buildings are on all sides, and this must be the Bronx. On one side, a stacked garage like a cruise-ship has an outlet mall's name in Roman letters that shine into the night. We whoosh past innumerable buildings, glimpse the tiny red spire of the Empire State Building far ahead, cross a river, then land on Amsterdam or Lexington and head south past the small shops and cafes of Harlem.

Near Times Square, we turn down an alley and find what seems unlikely: a two-story, yawning opening into a garage, our secret entrance into Port Authority. Our bus tucks in with dozens of other buses. I ask the hiker, who is across the aisle, what it’s like to be in the woods for days and days, then here.

He grins, bending to pick up his large knapsack, and says, “It’s—scary, that’s what.” He pauses, then says with decision: “I’m not sure I like it here anymore.”

For the next couple of weeks, he’ll hide out in New Jersey. “Hopefully, I can ease back in,” he says. He plans to work as a bike mechanic in the city, then seek work in sustainability.

I wonder to myself whether I still like New York, either. I’m sure I’d dislike it if I were returning from months on a trail. I’d react against it. I reflect on how it felt to be in a smaller city, with nature not so far beyond it. 

Admittedly, there’s a security in the Mid-Atlantic that I like—it’s an established place, with jobs and culture and milder weather. The temperature is 12 degrees higher here than it was in Portland, and the air is less freighted with chilly moisture. 

As it happens, I have returned to the mega-metropolis at an optimal time, 11 p.m. on a weekday. In the 42^nd Street subway station, people move about but there's room to drag my roller bag behind me. The platform is relatively quiet until a man starts singing, his voice like James Brown with a busted voice. He wheezes and shouts, “I *need* you!” in a way that’s a little disturbing. Many performers here seem like naturals, but I wonder how long he's been at it—it’s more that we’re doing him a favor by listening. A man glances over in bemusement when I move further down the tracks, toward the front of where the R train will stop.

The Staten Island ferry, which I’ll ride to go home, stands quiet as a ghost ship. It is like a dream I might have had but didn't realize could materialize: The doors stand wide open to let a trickling stream of people onto the boat, not the usual shopping-mall size crowd. 

**Photo of Staten Island Ferry (daylight), by Rev Stan, Flickr Creative Commons.

I rest on the orange benches on the ship’s side, 10 or so seats from the next person, and gaze into clear night toward Brooklyn and Governor’s Island. 

         I have never seen the boat or the city this peaceful, and I think of the articles I've read about night workers here. Perhaps I can only go forth after 11, I think. How would that feel?

On Staten Island, I board a bus with many others, people returning in a business-like manner to their homes. It is midnight, but the evening feels benign. At my stop I debark with three others, and we walk quickly along the streets. It seems well-lit, as if the streets are quiet but alive. 

        The city is large, its boundaries unseen from here, and I reflect on how that feels around me. I'd been staying in a house with a roommate for a few days, and I wonder if I'll miss the companionship in this city. 

On the way up my block, I pass a woman walking a small dog. I don’t know her. Still, filled with Maine largesse, I wave. She calls out hello, then she continues singing a song in a strong voice. Her dog is scrappy, a Tramp-like terrier.

I don’t know whether I’ll be glad to be away from Portland's easy nature, or easy-smiling Mainers. It's possible that I will miss it. Still, I feel a certain goodwill toward New York as I walk the last incline up my street, and climb the rocky stairs to my house. 

##

Summer Places

**Photo by Pleasant Point Inn, Flickr Creative Commons. Maine. 

Our setting: a 1930s kitchen with wide windows. Peonies, pink and white and multi-layered, brim from tin cans. All is quiet. 

Yesterday was trains and crowds and noise. 

This morning I stood and looked at the impervious blue horizon of New York Bay, the view from my housemate's tall window. 

This is an island in the Atlantic Ocean.

Each day in these boroughs is stirring in countless ways. Moods change like air currents, like the ocean. In the summer, energy builds--and it is nice to release it in a calm day. 

I recall heat-wave days in Seattle, rare spans adding up to two or so weeks each summer. Skirts, sandals, hollering. Outdoor seating, bars, green-markets. Full Lake Washington beaches, bathers in patched-together thrift-store swimsuits. A populace suddenly finding use for sunglasses. A normally quiet people who hollered as they walked streets late into the night. Beaming rowdiness. 

**Photo in Maine by Carl Lender, Flickr Creative Commons.**

Each summer weekend in New York is a bit like this, but with the addition of hundreds of thousands of tourists.

I often like to lie low. I love Monday through Thursday because they are more normal, less whooping.

In summer, New Yorkers go to their habitual places. Many drive or train to un-fancy cabins and little houses that aren’t outfitted for winter, set in woods, by quiet lakes, along the Hudson River.

They return on Monday, talking about zucchini and tomatoes and sugar snap peas. They love these spots with wood-paneled walls, afternoon light, drinks on the porch, chats at little stores.

**Currants, by Liz West, Flickr Creative Commons 

The introvert in me appreciates such breaks. I like to be sheltered by forest and find mysteries among the tall trees.

By contrast, yesterday ended loudly and fulsomely, after dinner in a non-green section of New Jersey on the Hudson’s edge. Then a train under the Hudson, a subway to the ferry. Waiting in the large and mall-like ferry landing. A band played ‘70s-style R&B electro-funk music. It was midnight, then 12:05, and the ferry had not arrived. With the delay came uncertainty: Until recently, the ferry arrived hourly on weekends, and none of us were sure we weren't returning to such a schedule. Two children under seven whirled and slid a breakdance. Their skill was exhilarating--but how many of us clapped willingly and how many were captive onlookers there in the fluorescent lighting? We watched for the ferry's arriving orange/blue bulk, for wide glass doors to slide open to admit the massive, waiting crowd.

It was a lot for midnight, as it sometimes is.

Today, I am in the 1930s kitchen, here on Staten Island.  I sit at a formica table, looking toward a plane tree and a vegetable garden. A different house-mate rolls ruggelagh dough. She has poured chai iced tea into glasses for us both. 

The craftsmanship makes me happy: the preparation of the dough, the addition of fig jam, and lemon and sugar in the tea.

This kitchen is like a summer cabin, here on this island that was New York's summer escape in decades past. “Must be the wood paneling,” says my housemate, referring to the wood cabinets.

**Photo of Pennsylvania forest, by Nicholas A. Tonelli, Flickr Creative Commons. 

I will talk to nature-seekers. Cabin-goers. Ecologists and naturalists and nature writers.

We'll see what I learn.

##

Early Heat

**photo of lower Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry, by DieselDemon, Flickr Creative Commons.

Today’s high is 82 degrees. It is bunched and muggy and mostly euphoric on the sidewalks. The temperature has set the city into a different tone today, one of skirt-awareness, bare-arm awareness, warmth-on-skin awareness.

My route to the ferry landing passes a bus stop that is a long, peopled alcove, like Venus’ half shell. People there seem bored, waiting, like they could be prone to catcalls or sneering. They haven’t, so far, and I’ve needed to grant (reluctantly, sometimes, and the reluctance is with good reason) points to Staten Island. 

This morning I passed the bus stop without incident, but next went by two teenage boys, one of whom was speaking to the air in front of me as I walked past.  I was surprised by the anatomical specificity of what he was saying. The other boy said to him, “Are you talking to her?” The first boy spun away and said, “Hell No!” It was one of those teenage things. I have no idea to whom he was talking. He was a good-looking kid, which might help him--and I do think our culture tells him it’s fine to be that direct. Maybe this will last a year or two, his way of talking.  In a way I felt sympathetic for his raw teenage struggle, his awkwardness.  I wondered how far this would get him. (On the other hand, ick, boundaries.)

But it was just part of the heat-wave morning, and I breezed onto the ferry, where the front and back doors of the ship were left ajar for air to waft in from the bay, and we multitudes sat on long, multi-colored benches, trying not to crib body heat in our proximity. The sun was low and a heated yellow in the sky, the Statue of Liberty glinting in its light. The water had a muggy, blurred edge.

**photo by Lindsey Turner, Flickr Creative Commons. 

Later, at a Midtown elevator, a man in a suit said to me, “I was waiting for you." I said, “Ah. Well, thanks,” meaning for not letting the door shut too fast. I remarked about the weather. “Hot day!” he declared. I observed that we were expecting rain, and that it might get cooler. “Yes, but HOT rain!” he said. We laughed, though I was a little uncertain. “You will not be satisfied!” he said. “By this rain,” he continued after a pause.

Heat waves bring out strange things, yes. It is an electric day. 

Snow and ice and carbs and geese.

 Photo of Canada Geese, Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, Queens, NY, by Howard Brier, Flickr Creative Commons. **

After a sunny day by the salt marshes in Marine Park, Brooklyn, I raced home and ate a red-garnet spud as if it were the last food in the pantry.

This was all part of the “Love this cold” and “Boy, this winter my diet is best described as ‘farm-hand deluxe’” line of thinking.

Honestly, cold ranks high in my esteem. Shorter days—I’m never certain about those. But chill weather seems thrilling to me. Indeed, all winter sports seem great -- and the presence of snow, ice, and blue skies are why I like the season.

True, very little snow remains here lately. But winter is still around.

The part of me that is excited by Antarctica and ice caves and frozen-over Lake Superior’s edge and the other pole and glaciers and Greenland--all of those sled-dog locales--and Maine and the rest of New England and eastern Canada and Scandinavia and maybe even Siberia to some extent, thinks that’s cool.

One of the benefits? Winter can amp up the adventure feeling.

A few things first, though. Today at the salt marshes was mild and beautiful. A trumpeter swan arced into the sky like a massive crane (like the basis of all European child-origin tales), a flock of Canada geese flew against blue sky, and an osprey nest sat on high. We were at the breathing edge of Brooklyn, mere steps from detached row houses and basketball courts and pumped-up vehicles and deals on tanning salons. Those things, so nearby, were a little hard to forget. But the flock of geese made an image for me. They fixed in my head, and they also fixed my head a bit.

But the sun was low as I headed back to the subway, and was nearly gone when I emerged near Prospect Park. Heading up an avenue, I donned the hood on my down coat. It had seemed like too much to have along, earlier in the day.

Reaching the brownstone, I shook myself at the fast descent of cold, the chill that rises from beneath bright, sunny days once winter sun fades.

Indoors, I found pasta and red sauce in Tupperware, and looked around for more carbs. 

Yes, white-flour pastas are on my "avoid" list, because they’re sugar--and because, hey, I saw that episode of Portlandia. That's the one in which Fred Armisen asks Carrie Brownstein if he looks fat and demonstrates by standing behind a sheet and casting his shadow, a la Hitchcock. They decide, in their horror at the results, to eliminate the pasta--but later, he main-lines noodles and ziti in a seedy hotel room, in homage to Breaking Bad.

At any rate, the pasta with sauce seemed damned good. I ate it cold, too, so you know that’s, um, something.

Looking around for other scarf-able food sources, I recalled (with a really questionable degree of joy) that I had another Tupperware containing wedges of roasted sweet potato.

Fetching it, I sliced the beautiful orange wedges--and had it with sliced sausage and brown rice.

Then it became necessary to prepare and consume lots more food. 

I cooked low-fat Kielbasa. And quinoa. And steamed kale.

True, none of these ranks too highly in the "sinful food" category. But I was trying for balance--and basically, let's not give me too many points--they were around.

I have plans, too, to steam some spinach and drink a bit of whiskey.

Not sure why I’m sharing all of this, except that that’s what cold does: Makes one able to main-line calories, as long as we move around a good bit, too.

Seeing geese flying against the blue sky doesn’t hurt, in a good day, either. ## 

                                     *Photo of Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, by EdenPictures, Flickr Creative Commons.