Forager II

Foraging tools:

1 Basket, draped on arm

1 snippers, to exterminate poison ivy

1 pocket book:

1 belly full of food I don't normally eat, ready for a light and fibrous supper

1 orchard

1 field

1 woods

Mix Together:

Ingredients: sour grass, dandelion leaves and flower, redbuds, violets, wood cress leaf and flower, plantain leaves, and wild asparagus. Optional adds: olive oil, balsamic, salt, sunflower seeds, some little dried berry perhaps?

Serve at evening's fall:

 

This turned out to actually be a lovely salad. A sweet dried berry might have helped. I wanted to add the buttercups swaying in the grasses, but the book says they're considered to be slightly poisonous.

Also blooming now is Mustard. It's yellow flowers look much like wood cress, but they're milder and look more like plants in the col or brassica family. I harvested some  this morning along the roadside and fields. 

The Weeds book was a gift from Mom and Dad, I think for Childrens' Day, when I was maybe eight (judging by the hand-writing). I still love it! 

road-side finds

I walked about 2 miles for my groceries this morning: roadside vegetables.

A forager friend of ours introduced me to the profile of wild asparagus growing along road-sides.  Especially in the fall it's easy to spot, since feathery yellow stalks and red berries flag attention. In the summer of course you see its wispy bunches of green.

To my delight, a tall stand of it, seemingly out of nowhere stopped me in my tracks the other morning and I came home squeezing a handful of green, crisp, dripping-sweet chompo bar (a family joke).

Our road is positively loaded! This morning I discovered another section of the road nearest us with at least 10 more plants. These seemed to be younger plugs with more spindly shoots. You can see the variety I found. I was astounded at how sweet they are- as much or more than sweet corn.

 I'm already wondering if I could transplant some plugs? (Any advice here?) Some of them are obviously well established, putting up finger-thick stalks.

Speaking of stalking, it's such fun to walk along and train the eye for the elusive vegetable. They blend in with the current color of thick-bladed grasses and are often just the same height. I took M hunting with me once and he said "Aren't you going to get that one?", a tall succulent stalk that I could not see right in front of my eyes!

The asparagus is helping to tiding us over while we await more greens and veggies from the garden. I also harvested some wild plant from the brassica family and some land cress or mustard, I'm not sure which. The wild garlic harvest is also big. This has been a real delight.

Fuel

I drive over breathtaking Afton mountain every week to a grand institution of learning, whose founder turned 250 yesterday. It's my day to go to the city, use the buses or walk, be small and yet part of vitality, conversations, and notice faces from other continents. It's my day to explore what I dream of and soak in the minds and lives of others and ponder...which is one of my favorite activities.

I arrive in time for business and leave the fresh morning streets for finger-grunge-work on a laptop pad, indoors, floor three. I've been hired by a team of professors to assist in the work of a funded grant that facilitates the higher education goals of nurses in distant areas. I feel like the mouse who had the luck of chewing a hole through the right wall, conspicuously getting the insider's view, and gobbling scraps of expensive fair. These professors eat food that I like: public health leadership, rural health, community health.

By afternoon, I close the computer and join the ranks of graduate students piling in for an intro-course on research. We're much like all students, plus work/life experience and families. Nurses are a scrappy lot- quick to fight for what they think is right, generally eager to learn, and quick to criticize even their own. This research class is all women.

Back at the satelite parking by bus or foot, rush-hour finally squirts onto the interstate, rising over the mountain. I re-enter home-world with a brainful buzzing, fresh light on my own life, grateful for my husband, stirring some novel idea in realms where I may or may never go.

These school-days are stimulation and connection, and I'm growing on the fuel.


P.S. For an example of my latest inspiration: In historical research, we learned that FDR invested money in photographers during the Great Depression and that is why we have the records today of that period. During this health system crisis in this country, if we could deploy photographers, using the networks already within the healthcare system, we would literally look at what we're doing from a third-person yet intimate perspective. I think this could be a powerful tool for evaluating what's happening, and envisioning new ways. Of course the answer I got to this was: "You should really do your doctorate on this." But that's always the answer in academia. I'm more interested in putting solutions into motion.