Accidental Forager

Our adventures in foraging began purely by chance. One day, several summers ago, my son pulled me out to the field to see a cluster of daisies he’d found growing there. Hidden beneath the happy white flowers was a treasure trove of wild blueberries, their small bushes spread out through the field like a lagoon of barely hidden delectability.

We picked those berries for days, eating some as soon as we’d plucked them from the bush – sweet and sun-warmed – and dropping the rest into small buckets for later. Further into that summer we discovered a bumper crop of blackberries ripening in a tangled thicket grown up from the front field. The thorny canes were so tall we were sometimes encompassed within them as we picked, earning many scratches in our efforts. By the end of the season, we had a freezer drawer filled with summer berries, a taste of sunshine to pull out and enjoy in the coldest, darkest days of winter.

Our foraging has evolved since then, although I’d place us still firmly in the novice category of finding wild food. We are casual foragers, not like the wildcrafting pros who make flour from acorns, dig up cattail rhizomes, batter and fry milkweed flowers, and who-knows-what else.

Beyond our favorite berry patches, there are a few small stashes of chanterelle mushrooms we look for after a summer rain, when they pop up in clusters. This year we found a chicken-of-the-woods mushroom, blooming like some exotic forest flower, on a tree in the neighborhood and added that to our list of good things to eat. Morels remain elusive, but perhaps someday we’ll stumble across those, too.

The kids know that the leaves of wood sorrel are edible – and tasty. A couple summers back they took to calling these heart-shaped greens “snacks” whenever they’d spot them along a hiking trail or at the edge of the garden. They’ve tasted ramps and fiddleheads and use the leaves of plantain growing wild about everywhere to ease the itch of horsefly bites and bee stings.

Nearly all of our first foraging expeditions emerged by happenstance, when we were out doing or seeking other things. A brief flash of orange during a bike ride revealed a throng of chanterelles. While playing under the lilac bushes, the kids have found huge meadow mushrooms tucked away there. The ramps, just the smallest cluster, we discovered at the corner of an old dump beyond the field as we were examining items discarded by some long ago stranger and somehow, now, intriguing. One year on vacation, as we walked back from the beach, we found – and devoured – a stash of wild blackberries.

I’ve taken to stowing plastic containers in the car in case we find something good to gather during our various travels. Even the dog is in on the action, wandering her own path through the fields and eating blueberries straight from the bush.

Some people find these meager hunting-and-gathering expeditions odd. How do we know these things are safe to eat, they ask. (When unsure, I always check with friends who are well-versed in eating wild things.) They wonder why we’d spend an hour in a hot field picking berries when the grocery store down the road has them by the pint for a few bucks.

It is, of course, about more than the food. During our foraging forays, we gain awareness of the places where we find our edible treasures, form a different perspective of some familiar places. We take notice of things we otherwise wouldn’t. Is the soil wet or sandy? In the sun or the shade? What kinds of trees grow near where we find chanterelles? What else is blooming or ripening at the same time? How many different types of interesting creepy-crawlies can we find in the blueberry field – grasshoppers and spiders and caterpillars covered in fuzzy prickles.

There is also something therapeutic to taking a break from summer’s whirlwind of activities to crouch in a field of wild berries on a hot summer day, a calmative effect in the rhythm of plucking berries from a bush and dropping them into a bucket. No matter how many times we find fiddleheads pushing through the leaf litter in the spring, or how many chanterelles we pick, or how many berries we gather, there remains a sense of wonder that these things grow. That they are simply there for the taking. That they taste so good.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the July 28, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record. 

Back to school blues

Lined up and ready to go.

Three days after school ended in June, I could hardly wait for this day. It was a bumpy transition from organized days and end-of-school-year busyness to the laidback anarchy of summer vacation. I struggled to fit work into fleeting by-myself moments as the kids, left with free time stretching from morning into afternoon into long evening into weeks of no school – all of it spent in sometimes painfully close proximity with each other – filled a good bit of the emptiness with bickering. By the third day out of school, I was reaching my wit’s end (which, really, seems a daily occurrence for me, but this was beyond normal limits).

Then summer happened.

We adjusted to lazy mornings spent in PJs, hours each day of playing outside, a week-long visit from cousins, another week spent at the ocean, trips to the beach, hot afternoons at the pool, visits to a variety of ice cream joints, and later-than-normal bedtimes. There was still bickering, to be sure. My work and home chores to-do lists have grown long, and it will take me many days of the kids at school to catch up.

But this year was as close to summer bliss as I’ve been since I was a kid.

Alas, this morning I will drop my children off at school and come home to an empty house. I have packed favorite foods into new lunchboxes and zipped up the backpacks for the first time in two and a half months. I have started prioritizing my to-do list and hope to tackle an item or two today. But my mind will undoubtedly wander often to my children, as I wonder how their first day of the school year is going. Are they nervous? Are the other kids being nice to them? Are they being nice to the other kids? Are they happy?

The littlest one is excited to return to preschool, where she will be one of the “big kids” this year, where she knows the routine, the lay of the classroom and playground, and where she adores the only two teachers she’s known. She has been asking me every day for a week or more if she gets to go to school today, and this morning she will finally get the answer she wants.

The older two start first grade today, with a new teacher and endless new things to learn. My daughter is nervous about being in a new classroom with a new teacher and a longer day. But they’re both excited to be with their friends again and to return to art class and phys ed and music and chocolate milk at snack time. At drop off I expect to see other nervous kids, along with parents who will range from tearful (with the knowledge that this day marks one more year of the they-grow-up-so-fast movement) to giddy with joy (at having regained some freedom in their days).

We filled the last week of summer vacation with plenty of fun. We camped in the backyard. We picked as many berries – the season’s everlasting blue and the newly ripened black – as we could. We rode bikes and went swimming, roasted marshmallows and played mini-golf, visited with friends and soaked up all the sunshine and fresh air and unscheduled time we could.

                 

We’re all hoping for more summer, a few more days of hot sunshine and cool water to jump into, a few more berries picked fresh for breakfast, a few more hikes and bike rides. But it won’t be the same as summer vacation. So, it’s a good thing we filled up with the sweetness of summer while we could.

Today begins the weekday shuffle of getting everyone up and out of the house early. Soon we’ll have soccer practice and dance class and homework to add to the after-school schedule. I guess it’s fitting that this morning the sky – so bright and sunshiny yesterday – is gray and raining. It suits my back to school blues.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings from a full life.