Gatherings
by Julia Sneden
“Come, ye thankful people, come,
Raise the song of Harvest Home;
All is safely gathered in
Ere the winter storms begin…”
In this time of plenty, with its
scientifically advanced agriculture and the myriad methods of preserving
foods, (canning, drying, refrigeration with all its permutations like freezers,
freeze-drying, etc.), the words of the old hymn may well be a mystery to
our children’s children. They have only to accompany their parents to a
grocery store to see that there will be plenty of food to last through
the storms of winter. When I was a classroom teacher, I found that I needed
to explain the term “harvest” itself, never mind trying to convey what
it might have felt like to know that your root cellar didn’t have enough
potatoes to see you through to the next growing season. We are so far removed
from our past as an agrarian society that we‘ve forgotten that respect
for the cycle of seasons was once a matter of survival. These days, we
think about the seasons in terms of clothing, heating/cooling bills, and
festivities associated with the time of the year.
Even as far back as my own childhood in the
late ‘30’s and early ‘40’s, my experience of sowing and harvesting was
pretty much limited to the old songs I learned in Sunday School:
“We plow the fields and scaaat-ter
The good seed on the land…”
we piped, we who had never sown seed anywhere. My Mother, in
a fit of wartime patriotism, did plant a Victory Garden, but the hill where
we lived backed up to a game preserve, and as soon as her vegetables appeared
above the ground, the deer leapt the preserve’s eight-foot, barbed-wire-topped
fence, and mowed her vegetables down.
Still, every Sunday we sang:
“See the farmer sow his seed
Up the field and down.
God will make the golden wheat
Grow where all is brown.”
To the small children that we were, the whole
business was nothing more than a song. I doubt we even figured out that
flour came from the wheat. Flour was something that Mother kept in a big
bin that pulled out from under the kitchen counter.
Still, there must be some kind of harvest
memory in my genes, because every fall I find myself in the gathering mode.
When I go out to walk, I pick up bits and pieces of autumn: acorns of different
sizes; a rock with interesting lichen; a twig with a large gall on the
side; leaves of every shape and color; seed balls from the sweet gum tree,
and spiky chestnuts, some green and unopened and some brown and cracked
open to show the two smooth seeds tucked into the nest of their furry lining.
I press the leaves between sheets of newspaper
and set them under my big, heavy Columbia Encyclopedia. In a couple
of weeks I’ll use a small circle of clear tape to stick them on the panes
of my dining room windows. Not only are they lovely seasonal décor:
the tape residue left when I pull them down after Thanksgiving ensures
that I must wash my windows before Christmas. I’ve lived with myself
long enough to know that strong motivation is necessary.
The other oddments get tossed into a flat,
bronze, leaf-shaped bowl on my coffee table. Their placement was a happy
accident: one time I came in with my hands rather full, and simply dropped
my findings in the bowl and then forgot them. The next thing I knew, my
family was complimenting me on my artistic arrangement. Nowadays they tease
me about my “treasures,” but I observe that they enjoy rooting through
them, and have even been known to add a few.
At the grocery store, I find myself gathering
again: lots of cans of soup; some lacquered gourds for a table decoration;
so many boxes of pasta that I’ll never use them all by spring. I fill my
cart with the ingredients for chowders and crumbles and other warming foods,
and even toss in a box of long matches for lighting the fire. I stock up
on paperbacks, just in case winter comes early and we’re snowed in, a premature
thought in October, but one never knows….
Outdoors in the garden, I pull up the
frost bitten annuals, and gather the seeds of the lab-lab beans and moon
vine. I shake the dried heads of the tithonia and sift the falling seeds
from chaff, and store them in a jar in the door of the refrigerator. I
take cuttings from a favorite double impatiens, and set them under a grow-light
in the basement. We plant some tulips, hoping that this year the voles
won’t get them even though we know they will. We clean and put away the
garden tools, drain the hoses and store them for winter. We set a couple
of pumpkins out on the porch, and hang some ears of Indian corn on the
front door.
I begin to toy with menu ideas for Thanksgiving
dinner (in the end, it always remains the same) and I start making lists
of presents I’ve already gathered for November birthdays and, heaven help
us, Christmas. I count up how many beds will be needed when the family
comes together for the holidays, and realize that we’ll need to haul out
the crib again for the new grandchild.
The thought of my grandchildren brings a smile
as I hum:
“Come, ye thankful people, come,
Raise the song of Harvest Home…”
Those children, of course, are the best harvest
of all.
