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. 

Rediscovering a friend on a bus; gooseberries

  

 

Photo of red currants by Liz West (Muffet), Flickr Creative Commons license.
**

      

Yesterday on a bus to Seattle’s Eastside suburbs, there was something familiar about the older woman sitting next to me, and the copy of the New Yorker that she was poring over.

Surreptiously, I checked out her eye-glasses. Had I seen them before? Had her hair been that exact shade?
 

I wasn’t sure, you see, whether she was the lady whose seat I'd shared a month and a half before, on the return trip from an Eastside park where I’d gathered a bag of golden plums so ripe that some fell off their pits en route. 

On that bus ride, my new buddy and I had talked avidly about politics, Harper’s magazine articles after 9/11, her war-protest activities downtown, and gathering edible plants. We had even exchanged email addresses, but I couldn’t recall whether I’d contacted her. It had slipped between the cracks of looking for possible roommates, considering whether to relocate to a sunnier city, and finishing out the field notebook I'd been using that week.
 

Yesterday, I decided I would lose out if I kept silent. When she had turned away from her New Yorker pages to look at me, her face changed and she smiled. “Well,” she said in her slight English accent, “Can we believe this?” We had indeed met on that previous bus trip, going the opposite direction.
 

It was great to see her again. This is what I like about talking with people about plants and gathering: Standing alongside a trail in any quiet park, I’ve met inquiring people who can either tell me more about the plants I see, or about the land where we stand, or who have questions for me. In every case, I have felt the sparkle of exchanging vital, life-giving information with another person -- and learning a bit about them.

 

Was I gathering plums again? my friend asked on the bus, then smiled to acknowledge that she had remembered: Right, plums were no longer around, weeks later.

 

Not this time, I said: Going hiking. As I flipped through a field guide I’d brought, Trees & Shrubs of Washington, by C.P. Lyons (Lone Pine Publishing, 1999), my friend said that she’d like to see gooseberries around, that she missed the days when they were considered standard pie material, especially in England.
 

I'd also like to see gooseberry pie early and often. Gooseberries and currants are about and they're being used, I said – although it’s true that they’re not the commonplace pastry material they once were. These days they aren’t standard; they’re pleasingly retro.

 

Still, I’d seen both berry types sold at mid-summer in the standard grocery store near my house. The farm name on the boxes, when Googled, turned out to be in Washington’s Yakima Valley.  It's an area known for its berry farms. The farms, it turns out, are supported by a network of irrigation systems that carry water from mountain snow-melt.

  

At a farmers’ market I’d talked with another farmer from the Yakima Valley, who said that his family grew blueberries in the soil, which was rich from age-old volcanic activity in the area. “The blueberries love it,” he assured me, shaking his head. I imagine that the gooseberries and currants do, too.
 

On the bus, my friend and I looked at photos of gooseberry and currant bushes in Trees & Shrubs of Washington. “That’s it!” she said happily.

In the same park where I’d picked the golden plums, I’d gathered a few currants and gooseberries that grew nearly pushed out by over-eager blueberies, I told her. I grew up in a warm climate, one with its warmer types of berries, like dewberries -- so I had been excited about picking blueberries, and especially marveled at the currants and gooseberries. 
 

It was a fine bus ride to have before a hike: Rediscovering gooseberries. My friend said, "Have a good hike," as I headed off. We decided we'd meet again.
 

Photo of black currants in a bowl (these are like the ones I found in the Eastside park, though mine were smaller) by Glen Fleishman, Flickr Creative Commons license.