Sustainability rituals

Fall is here. I have been going through a familiar counterpoint to the Spring cleaning cycle. It is the harvest of course, and the 'putting up' of produce from the garden. But it is more.

Yesterday, I 'canned' 5 quarts of applesauce from the tree in the backyard. The apples are yellow, and sweet this year. Sometimes they are only edible after a frost, and taste like Granny Smiths. This year they are more like a yellow delicious. I share in a statewide bounty and  have filled a plastic milk crate and three 27 gallon litter buckets, as well as a 10 gallon Rubbermaid container with drops and the proverbial low hanging fruit. A neighbor and friend has made several quarts with apples from the same tree, and I have yet to pick any of the apples that are out of easy reach. These are the blessings of sun, and soil picked out of rock-hard landscape a century or more ago.

I 'canned' 10 pints of chutney made with apples, onions and green tomatoes and huge amounts of spices. It won't be ready for another month, so I have to hope that the 3 pounds of still green Sungold tomatoes and the apples will be happy partners when I open a jar at dinner beside the wood stove.

I threw out some of my earlier efforts at 'canning', from before I knew to label everything with its contents and a date. There was rhubarb, one jar of that same chutney and a few jars of applesauce. Once open, I realized that they were probably made two years ago when a friend was visiting because one bottle of applesauce had a tiny stick of cinnamon that she had included in the ones she made. I wish I had labeled it because it was a good weekend with friends, and that tiny cinnamon stick was a marker.

There are more things to be done. The oregano and rosemary are thriving but need to be transplanted to pots as it is supposed to freeze tonight.The brussels sprouts will be ok in the ground, but the rest will be gone. The dahlias will be blackened, the nasturtiums limp.  I got an extra week out of the garden as I thought we would lose it all over the weekend with rain and very cold temperatures, but there has been a reprieve.  And I am feeling grateful for the slight extension on the fall. The leaves have not yet peaked. The grass is still green beneath the leaf fall. The mushrooms that remain behind, in the circle of leaves where I picked last week, are still growing, though the Blewits that were intensely crayola blue have now gone to mauve and the caps are curling up rather than down. I have some remarkable spore prints from these and what may be a 'Xerula' that was growing beside a freshly cut maple tree. And I feel as though there is time yet. Winter is not yet here, though we have taken the air conditioners out and have ordered two truck loads of wood to add to our substantial pile in the garage.

I have swept, and peeled apples, and chopped onions and tomatoes. I have washed dozens of 'canning' jars, sterilized them, moved the antique plate set we bought at auction into the rubbermaid bucket in the basement. I have picked potatoes, made spore prints, brought in inside plants that were on vacation beneath the maple tree. And the garden is about to be done. With the ending of the season, I will turn to spinning fiber rather than gardening. I will drag carts of wood from the stacked pile to the wood boxes, and will continue to sweep the debris out the door, only now it will be wood rather than grasses and leaf litter.

This is an important time for me. I love Spring, and it has its rituals, but there is something about these last days before the cold settles in to the mornings, when bare feet on the kitchen floor is unthinkable; there is something about this time before cocoa and tea from a new tea pot, before wind that howls outside, before low sun disappearing early in the day; there is something in this I love. And it centers me. I don't talk much. There is no music on the radio. There is a sound of Fall that I listen for, as there is that cool edge to the dusk before the light is gone. And I find myself cleaning and washing and packing and sweeping and watching the leaves scatter before the winter.


Intermission (time for a glass of wine or some chocolate ...)

I am struck by how near sustainability is to me here. I compost the apple cores and peelings, the dried flowers that graced the garden a few days earlier. It is easy to walk outside between the lilac and the pear tree and dump them into the pile beside the cemetery wall. It is clear that the thermostat is linked inextricably to the use of the wood stove, and the mornings are cold because it is both too expensive and inappropriate to use the oil when there is a supply of sustainable wood from a local friend. I will take my trash to the dump on Saturday with bins allotted to recyclables, but the glass that was once pulverized to be used in roads as a mix with asphalt, is no longer collected because people complained that overtime, the asphalt wore away and the broken glass was damaging their tires.

But in the city, these are distant concerns. I am always carrying too much to walk or take the subway to work. I wait for the bus, but that can add an hour or more in waiting time to the journey. There are no compost piles; there is no thermostat on the pre-war radiators - just a valve to be turned on or off. And my mother (now 91) is always cold, so I swelter. I am used to keeping the thermostat around 50 and supplementing with the wood stove. In her apartment it is often 80 or hotter.

So how do we make change in places that are disconnected? Not so much from the natural landscape, but from the patterns and rituals of unsustainable practice? In some communities, there are movements to bring composting back. A colleague and her husband have just gotten the other 800 apartments in their coop to agree to sub-metering their energy use. Will Allen got a McArthur genius award for the work he has done in urban green markets in working class and poor areas of Milwaukee. But these are exceptions, worthy of note. We need to switch the balance so the thermostat-free apartment, private-car urban transit, energy-unconscious coop is "the exception that proves the rule" of sustainable communities as far as we can see.

Sometimes the distance seems too great for hope. I think that's why people try to solve the problem with technological and legislative means. I keep thinking that it isn't technology or legislation that will save us, but us. What's the phrase: "the fault is in us, not in our stars"?

Robert Frost wrote:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

I am going to take a walk in the leaves for a lunch time break and then I will be back to work. And tonight I will peel more apples for sauce while the leaves lie "dark and deep."