Recipe for Planetary Peace (Miracles From the Gnarly Brown Tin Box)

Thanksgiving is tomorrow. I'll travel with Wood Tick to his friend John's house outside of Kalispell; a mountaintop where John has patiently constructed a western town replica for a dozen years. There's a saloon, land and law office, trading post and a block house. There's an old hotel (where visitors stay) and his simple little two-room cabin. Every building is filled with antiques authentic to the theme of the shelter. It's a site to behold, and tomorrow his efforts will be graced with a couple dozen people and a big outdoor fire.

I've just chopped two heads of red cabbage. It' simmers away on the stove, filling the house with an unmistakeable aroma. I grew up with this Danish dish, a recipe passed on from my Grandma Nealson and who knows, perhaps her mother from Northern Denmark, Andrea. Aunt Sarina had her version. So did Minnie and Aunt Clara. As much as Thanksgiving and the holiday season cuts deep with remembrances, nothing pierces my heart like opening up my small brown file box and pulling out a recipe in a beloved's handwriting. Mom's mincemeat cookies. Willie Mae's Chess Pie. Aunt Fondelete's Baked Corn. Chlo's sweet potato casserole.  Inga's Danish Pancakes. Just the names are enough to send one reeling. And today, it's Aunt Clara's Red Cabbage, scrolled in red ink and large, swirling handwriting. She comes alive on the stained index card, where cups and teaspoons are interspersed with comments and mild admonishments. "You notice the recipe calls for red cabbage but I use the white," she wrote, "the red is always so high priced." Or her final words, "I don't know if you can figure this out. Wish you had watched. It's hard to explain. You know how I cook."

Yes Aunt Clara. I know how you cooked. I spent infinite hours in your kitchen as you kneaded bread and mixed cookies. There was no place else on earth I wanted to be but next to you. But somehow I missed the days before Thanksgiving when you started the red cabbage. Just like I never saw you make my tall angel food birthday cake with clouds of double-boiler frosting that magically appeared on October 23rd. A handful of this, a dash of that. A taste to adjust. Life permeated with heart.

Thanksgiving. I give thanks for the potent combination of creativity and love. For those with the courage to live their dreams. To lay their passions upon this planet, from kitchens to mountaintops. On behalf of all life upon this planet.

Blessed Be.

AUNT CLARA'S RED CABBAGE (in her own words)
1 head good sized cabbage
2 T butter or oleo
1/3 c vinegar; 1/4 c water
1 tsp salt
1/3 c sugar
2 T grape jelly
Shred the cabbage. Melt butter in large pan and add cabbage; stir to coat.
Add everything except the jelly and cook at least 3 hours over low heat. Then, if it doesn't taste right I just  add a little sugar, vinegar or whatever I think it needs. The jelly I put in last hour or so. It helps to color it. (If you use white cabbage.)


(She made this at least a day ahead of time; let it sit, reheated and adjusted it the next day. It's a luscious sweet and sour dish; the kind of thing you either loved or disdained. Dis-Daned. :^)


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Dear Readers, I'd love to see your comments. There's a problem. Many can not post. Hope you'll try. I've exhausted remedies on my end. Christina

Be Here, Shovel Now

Silent woods cloaked in a foot of new powder. It is twelve degrees. The inside is warmed with a wood fire; the spirit with candlelight, fed with hot coffee. When darkness lifts I will step outside into crystalline clearness; earth dons a sheath of quartz points upon her brow.  My urge to pack and move south to warmth and ease is strong. The necessity to stay in this world of white looms larger. Be here, shovel now. The grip of physical exertion; the disappearance of  blockage, row by row. Palpable progress. Like watching the beaver, checking his work every day as he downs willow and lodgepole pines. His slides, first through long grass and mud, are now deep troughs through snow. Progress deeply apt on the cusp of 2012 and its unprecedented evolutionary push. Stay with instinct. Stop rolling tires down the road. At least until Candlemas, when light is palpable and the spirit might see her way clear.

Yesterday I made a pot of venison chile. Ground meat from the doe that Wood Tick shot with his bow several weeks ago. Red and green chile, oregano, some bacon grease, a few beans, tomatoes in various forms, jalapeno, onion, lots of garlic. It is the most delicious I have ever made, and my first venture into cooking the wild. I was surprised how mild the deer tasted. I'd always heard how venison was gamey. I now know that's the price you pay if you're looking for horns to mount (larger, older deer) as opposed to animal sustenance. And spirit. I taste her and these forests she grazed.

 I receive emails from friends who think I have lost my mind. It's been a decade since I've chosen winter in northern climes. One friend emails with the idea to spend Thanksgiving in Death Valley and a piece of my spirit leaps. How I'd love to return to that magical land.

But it feels that this winter is not about ease or new adventure of the physical travel kind. It is about organizing photos; writing; new book preparations and the next realm of work to come down the pike. Tracking down a thrift store to find some winter boots, buying a new battery for my truck, dragging deer blocks across the little river to watch the beauties feed. I will mine dreams that come from deep dark forests and skies alight with the Milky Way.  Step outside with Wood Tick into drifts of white.

I see snow angels in my near future.

Hunting Camp

I'm still in Montana. Friends are starting betting pools, guessing my day of departure and southern migration. Daylight savings time is a (grateful) thing of the past, as dazzling Jupiter hangs in the sky next to the Hunter's Full Moon. Recent spectacle includes two pileated woodpeckers swooping from pine to pine, a sighting of the beaver that has constructed an impressive dam 100-yards upstream from the house, and a moonlight-drenched elk herd at dusk...cows and calves at peace in nearby mountain meadow.

This place continues to enthrall. The human interface with the wild is like none I have witnessed. Woodtick reminds me, as he smiles and stretches his utilitarian elastic suspenders with his fingers, that I'm in the midst of a ultra hunting culture. People hunt huckleberries for food and shed horns for art and cash; they hunt character wood for furniture and big game for sustenance. They hunt mushrooms, herbs and trap small game for pelts. There's a bumper sticker around here that says it all: "I Farm the Forest." It's a serious bunch.

 "This place is hard on horses and women," is a common refrain. Many men have been abandoned by their mates and live in trailers or shacks with no running water or amenities. Couples that stay together make due with one of them working in a city, sometimes several states away. The women I've met are a striking, spirited group. I ran into feisty Donna yesterday. She'd been laid off from a newspaper management job in Missouri, collected unemployment for awhile but found her bored-self in the job service office after a few weeks, hunting for a new life. They had a list of jobs by pay scale. Her professional job was in the lower 25% and she said by the time she figured in overtime, she'd been lucky to make minimum wage. She looked at the top of the money list: heavy equipment operator. "Wish I could do that," she laughed.  "Why couldn't you?" countered the job counselor. "Oh no, I couldn't do that." "Why not?" came the coy reply. Donna applied a government unemployment grant to the one year school and found her tiny, 50-something frame in southern Montana on a road project twelve months later. She said she made more in her first week than in six weeks at her prior job. She also said she got seasick her first few weeks from driving the water truck that never stopped rocking back and forth. She explained that she didn't get breaks and had to eat on the fly; she lost twenty pounds the first few weeks. But she loves it. She gets winters off, on unemployment. She joins hiking and gem clubs in new towns. Said she's going to try a gold panning group. She returns home to visit the hubby on the occasional weekend but said it didn't happen often: "Why work all week and come home to housework?"

There's another woman I want to talk to soon. She offers refuge to the primo hunter of this area, wolves. A subject of volatile proportions in this neck of the woods, she keeps a low profile.

A hefty breeze fills the air with magical sheets of half-inch, soft golden needles from giant larch trees. The sky is filled with glints of gold; my walk silent, through the forest on a soft, yellow carpet. Today I hunted down a pair of red sequin suspenders on-line. My campy response to this place on edge.