Kitchen Dramas

I can’t watch the television shows where cooks scream at each other or swear vehemently at the food they’re preparing. I would not want to eat food that had been cursed. My kitchen has seen its share of drama, though. The time the kids were being careful with a candle resulted in impressive flames, a dishwater flood and an enduring scorch mark.

The week when two Sagittarians took the kitchen apart and put it back together again was fairly spectacular. They did a great renovation job, ultimately, but for a while it looked like a herd of wild horses had been let loose. I eventually located my pie plates a couple of months later.

Cider is safer.

Our friend Rowan gave us a bottle of mead from the first batch he had ever brewed. We put it away for a special occasion. The mead, however, chose its own holiday. It exploded in the kitchen on the Fourth of July.

The cats consider the kitchen prime hunting territory, with accompanying feline territorial disputes. The mouse hunts are not limited to the kitchen, of course. They ramp through the house, usually in the small hours of the night, with a tendency to end up in somebody’s slipper. The time I woke up with a cat offering me a live mouse in my bed was a definite low point, from the human-monkey point of view.

My daughter clipped one of Jim Davis’s Garfield comics for me. John wakes up appreciating nature, then wakes up a little more and wonders how it all got inside. Garfield is responsible, of course. This seems to happen regularly around here. My daughter and her cat once kept an opossum from coming through the screen door by means of a circus performance requiring claws, a broom and a long-handled duster.

The opossum I evicted was already inside. I first saw her in the living room, ambling down the stairs. The cats sat up attentively but made no move to intercept. Their postures expressed various levels of “I’m not touching that.” The possum sauntered across the floor into the kitchen, cruising for catfood dishes.

Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana).
I was too busy getting rid of her to take a photo.

When I was ten or so, my father rescued an opossum from the local dogs. He grabbed it by the tail and hoisted it up above his head. It wrapped its prehensile tail around his wrist and held on for dear life, all the while pretending to be dead. Accompanied by half the dogs in town, he walked out toward the timber. The neighborhood kids turned out to try to call off the pack. We yelled and threw things at the dogs. The dogs yelped and leapt at the possum. The possum opened one eye, then shut it again quickly: “I’m still dead.” Eventually our entourage reached the end of its territory. My father and the possum went on across a pasture into the woods and disappeared into the trees.

I had never caught a possum by the tail, but I knew it could be done. I opened the back door, put on my wood-hauling gloves and followed the interloper into the kitchen. She hissed and squirmed when I seized her tail. I lifted her as high as I could and flung her out the door. She landed several yards from the house, still hissing. I was certain she was female because of her righteous indignation: “Don’t you understand? I have babies to raise!”

“Sorry,” I told her. “Not in my kitchen.”

Kitchen witch, a little cracked but still flying.

Western Buckeye

Most springs I notice the buckeyes only when the flower spikes peep out from among the trunks of taller trees, behind barricades of greenbriar and buckbrush. This year the slow spring left the timber open for me to watch more of the cycle.

The woods and underbrush put out leaves later than usual, but the buckeye kept close to its solar schedule. I cleared a new trail during the winter. Hidden under a hillside, the path led through a thicket of slim trunks with bark like mosaic, bare branches and saplings with large end buds. By late March, the buds had taken on rich reds and browns, some of them swollen to show shiny golden beads inside.

I missed a couple of days of walking in early April. When I looked down the hill again, the thicket was bright green. Each bud had released six compound leaves with seven leaflets each, plus a budding flower spike — like clowns bursting out in all directions from a circus car. The rest of the woods had barely begun to change color.

The bud spikes grew slowly, standing tall above the branches. The weather turned chilly again. The leaves drooped a little but lost none of their color, vivid as green fire beside the bare hickories. When the sun finally returned, the buckeyes rushed to bloom. The flowers rose almost six inches tall in golden pyramids streaked with red and orange.

Watching the buckeyes, I learned to spot them in thickets along the roadside, at the edges of the neighbors’ timber and in the deep cuts of creeks. I began to recognize the spreading shape of the larger trees, broad at the base with an overhang of branches above.

Western buckeye (Aesculus glabra), also called horse chestnut, grows in thickets because of the seeds produced by those abundant flowers. By late September the fruits ripen into dark brown nuts, each marked with the pale deer’s-eye scar that gives the tree its name. The nuts are toxic and not considered edible, although indigenous people boiled and leached them for food. The wood was used for cradles; tannic acid was extracted from the nuts for curing leather. It’s good luck to carry a buckeye in your pocket.

My father made a necklace of buckeyes for me when I was in junior high. He pierced each one and strung them on a piece of twine, with the larger beads in the center. They clacked like a percussion instrument when I wore them. Years later I learned that in some Wiccan traditions, women wear ritual necklaces of nuts or seeds or shells — something that was once alive — to honor the Goddess.

I wear my buckeye necklace to honor the spirit of these woods, the genius sylvestris, and to honor my father and my ancestors. Holding a buckeye in my hand, I touch the life of the woods: the seed that will become root and branch, the bud that will burst into leaf and blossom. Stag looks out of each buckeye, watching over generations of wilderness to come.

Buckeye was one of the National Arbor Day Foundation’s candidates for America’s national tree. 

(Oak won the competition.)

Ancestors

The first owner of record of this land was the Union Pacific Railroad, which bought up wooded tracts from the U.S. government in the 19th century. The government had resettled the Lenape people nearby, then forced them to relocate to Oklahoma and merge with the Cherokee. As far as I can tell, this spot would have been part of the Lenape hunting runs and probably hunting territory for the Osage and the Kanza before that. None of these groups are my ancestors of blood.

By the time the Lenape came to this part of the country, they had been shoved halfway across the continent, converted to Christianity and renamed the Delaware, for the main river near their original home. The river was also renamed for an English governor of Virginia, Lord De La Warr. Our township is named for a chief of the Turtle Clan of the Lenape, John Sarcoxie, who farmed the Delaware Commons with his band on the banks of the Kaw River, south of here. One name seems a small survival, compared to all that has been lost.

Delaware Indians who participated in negotiations in Washington, D.C., in 1867. Seated (Left to Right): James Ketchum, James Conner, John Conner (Principal Chief), Charles Journeycake, Isaac Journeycake, John Sarcoxie, Sr. Standing (Left to Right): James McDaniel, a Cherokee present at the discussions, Black Beaver, Henry Tiblow (interpreter), John Gill Pratt (U.S. Indian Agent), Charles Armstrong, John Young. The identifications are made in Weslager,  The Delaware Indians: A History. The photograph can be found in the Western History Section, University of Oklahoma and at the Bartlesville Public Library.


Along the north face of the hill a small stretch of older oaks and hickories still stands despite the railroad and its logging. The rest of the land runs more to black walnut, honey locust, elm, hedge, redbud and hackberry now, with Eastern red cedars taking over wherever they can. The steep north slope ends in a ravine running beside the road. A deer trail follows the contour of the hill near the top, taking advantage of a small ledge above the drop-off.

This corner of the land was considered too rough for farming. A previous owner ran cattle below the hill, after putting up barbed wire to keep them from tumbling down into the gulley. The hilltop and the north and west slopes seem to have been left alone.

I recently heard the original inhabitants of a place referred to as “ancestors of bone.” The ancestors of this place were transients: Kanza, Osage and Lenape hunters, French trappers who married into the Kanza, railroad loggers. They left nothing here, not even bone. I can’t actually be certain that anyone hunted or camped here or stood near the hilltop to watch the sun set over the creek.

The deer still walk here, although the hunters have vanished. Today I walked the deer trail and left an offering of tobacco near an old oak, in thanks for the gift of one small survival of wilderness.