Celtic New Year. Dross into gold. Treacle.

Travel

1 Nov

It’s dark, cold, and rainy. The year has turned. Turned under. It’s hard not to feel heavy, a sodden, dark blue-black. We’ve entered Scorpio, the sign of death, of letting go of the old. The year lets go of its accumulated growth - leaves, fruits, biomass returning to the soil.

The trees’ leaves tell this story best. It takes weeks for them to let go of green, turn all the colors of flame, lose water, whither and brown with frost, and finally release themselves to the wind, or be dragged earthward by rain. Each leaf must form its abscission zone — decide what is leaf and what is to remain tree, and break there.

Though it is dark by mid afternoon, and often dark all day under grey skies, when the sun strikes slantwise — as it does at this time of year when its arc is so low in the south — the trees light up with gold! There’s golden light bouncing and shimmering, seemingly all around. Light not just from the sky or one source, it’s actually infiltrating even down to the ground. Cottonwood litters the soil with bright gold coins. Maple leaves make a carpet of stars in crimson, blood, and cranberry. Oak, more somberly, turns a burnished russet and pelts down its acorn mast.

This mid-Scorpio moment is one of the cross quarter points of the year. In the Celtic calendar these points reflect the beginning of a season. You can really notice them in the garden —or in your mood as the seasons change. This is Samhain — our understanding of Halloween is an overlay. A time to mark death. And then All Saint’s Day, to note the transcendence of suffering and death, a new beginning. The Celts call this day after Samhain, Celtic New Year which I always find heartening. Though we have a ways to go to the darkest time of the year, the real rebirth, at least we’ve crossed over the threshold. We’ve dropped our leaves.

The next cross quarter point is Imbolc, around the first of February. It’s when the light really does return. I always notice my greenhouse greens start to push after their winter dormancy. They have something to reach for at that point.

Right now they are reaching inward, the spinach slows, the dead leaves around the arugula rosette catch up with its ever-renewing core. I cart weakened greens to the compost. Even blackberry vines seem less tenacious all of a sudden. The vineyard crew digs mountains of them out from amongst the grapes. We stack them up ten feet high on cleared ground to rot down in a special blackberry and ‘woody waste’ compost I call ‘brash piles’ after the medieval woodsmen’s practice. By next year the pile will be four feet high simply by the action of microorganisms (and especially mycorrhizal fungi, this being woody material) coming up from the soil beneath the pile, quietly turning ‘waste’ into fertility.

Compost is my favorite exemplar of this turning inward into darkness and transforming into (black) gold.

The sludgy piles now show all the wrecked remains of summer - blackened tomato plants, the pressed apple pulp from the cider making, porous wood infiltrated by white mycorrhizae... By spring it all will have transformed into a uniform, fluffy, sweet smelling soil food.

Another tradition from Britain, all muddled up with Samhain and All Saints’ Day is Bonfire Night and its connection to gingerbread. From my recent trip to Britain I brought back a tin of sticky black treacle. This is their molasses and sends my mind down the dark corridors of the history of the sugar trade — in no way a story of sweetness and light! Nonetheless, all of this is baked into my loaf tin of gingerbread. Darkness, sticky-black, fragrant transformation.

Gingerbread is essentially a riot of sugars scented with spices.

I like to replace a bit of the flour with cocoa for an added note of deepness that’s elusive when you’re distracted by caramelization, ginger, cloves, and cinnamon. Nigella Lawson has a most unabashed recipe.