Sep 14, 2008 - 04:05:23 CDT
Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, I am lamenting the loss of light. I'm not meteorologist enough to understand it, but between June 21 and some point in early September, the evenings linger endlessly in a way that feels constant and uniform - and perhaps permanent. Then one late summer or early fall day - as if out of nowhere - it's getting dark at 7:45. There is some moment at which a switch seems to have been thrown, and our summer revels are declared over, and the summer light is packed up with the boat and the family-size tent. It makes me literally want to cry out in anguish.Now we begin that gloomy and inexorable slide toward existence in the dark: children heading off to school in the dark, darkness awaiting us as we return home at the end of the work day. Even the lowering winter clouds seem to signify that the hidden sun has been switched to "energy saving" mode.
I do not mind the cold, no matter how cold. But, like Dylan Thomas, I want to rage, rage against the dying of the light. The sole compensation for this loss is the little seed of knowledge that half a year hence the evening will come when I look around the prairie like a pronghorn antelope on alert and say, out loud, "The light's back!" I'll be outside, trying to untangle the hoses from the heaps that I tossed unceremoniously into the garage the day the first big freeze was announced this fall, and I'll suddenly notice - in a recognition of pure joy - that light has returned to the world.
The recent freeze near Hettinger was a shock that threw me into tomato processing. Some sort of creature has been taking one bite out of each of my beautiful tomatoes, so I decided to make tomato juice to preserve what they did not eat. I bought a dozen new jars and lids, sterilized them in the way that my grandmother taught me long ago. I washed and trimmed the tomatoes and then blanched them, all to the tune of Handel's "Largo."
I pressed the juice through a French colander with a wooden pestle. I filled each jar to the proper mark with warm - almost hot - thick tomato juice that was so sensuous, so magically red, so pregnant with the earth's fertility, that I had an impulse to bathe in it. Then I wiped the tops of the jars with a paper towel, placed the rubberized lids on top of the jars as carefully as if I were docking the space shuttle, and then spun the brass screwtops into place with a kind of flourish, like a '50s DJ.
The rest was simple: Lower the jars into the mottled canning pot, make sure they are covered with an inch or more of water, boil slowly for 40 minutes, extricate carefully, cool slowly. Voila.
I know I am making a big deal out of something many of you do with cool efficiency year after year, but for me it is a very big deal. I have now stored up a handful of jars of tomato juice against the apocalypse. It's the first time I have ever canned all by myself, and - frankly - the second time I have ever canned. My life mostly has been about hectic consumption and wastage. Now, in mid life, home where my heart always has been, I have finally turned a corner and begun to exhibit a teeny glimmer of stewardship. For me, canning those few jars of food I have actually grown in my own garden was a sacrament as powerful as baptism. I have more jars and many more tomatoes and I am going to try to see this through - for a change.
The jars I have already "put up," as my grandmother used to phrase it, are on the shelf in my front entry, glowing with the life force, right next to the lone jar of pickles she granted me when we canned a dozen quarts of her prize cucumbers together 20 years ago. I have carried that jar of pickles from house to house and town to town across America since that day in her linoleum kitchen in September 1988, when she was still in her late prime, still storing up produce against the lean times. Every time I have moved, I have attended first to that jar of pickles, wrapping it carefully in big fresh sheets of packing paper, then in towels, and placing it in the center of a big box marked "FRAGILE."
The ancient Romans had something called Penates - the household gods unique to each family - which they treasured up in the most important place in their homes. The Penates were a little like American Indian medicine bundles. They protected the household and the sanctity of the family. The word Penates actually derives from a Latin word for "provision of food." I have my Penates now, in Bismarck, in North Dakota, at the center of the North American continent, presided over by Rhoda Straus' alpha jar of cucumber pickles. Every day when I walk by those jars of tomato juice, I feel a wave of pride and also a sharp rush of loss.
The softer fall light, glowing rather than shining through air clarified by the recent rains, has made North Dakota's countryside a paradise. The fall light somehow brings the buttes and the coulees and the ridgelines into greater relief. It's as if "flat" North Dakota is being rendered into 3D. I have discovered buttes I never bothered to see before. Each time I see something as if for the first time, I say to myself, "I'm going to climb that butte and see what the world looks like from up there." Soon, while there is still light.
The other night, I went out walking the trail near my house with a good book. There is almost nothing I enjoy more than that. Before I could turn back for home, I was squinting in the dusk to read about events that happened long, long ago and far away in a world that never could have conceived of North Dakota. By the time I stumbled onto my home street, there were a million stars and Jupiter bright and proud in the southern sky. There are compensations for the loss of light.
I am making two resolutions, one of which I know I will keep. First, on Dec. 21, the darkest day of the year, I'm going to uncork the first of those jars of tomato juice and drink it. Second, I'm going to roll up my hoses properly this year. Really.
(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He is also the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)
Mary Ebach wrote on Sep 20, 2008 10:06 AM:
le wrote on Sep 19, 2008 4:43 AM:
Once a teacher wrote on Sep 16, 2008 1:11 PM:
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