In the beginning there was wild mustard and it was good. It was pretty tasty and the seeds were good for spicing up food, especially sausage which had just been invented. It was nutritious and everyone was fine with this plant as it was.
Then it was cultivated and the cultivation led to collard greens. And this was okay too. Collard greens were also nutritious and while some didn’t like them most people were just fine with them.
Then more cultivation led to cabbage. Some people didn’t like cabbage but most did. Cabbage was useful. You could boil it or wrap other foods up in the leaves. Cabbage rolls and coffee got a lot of people going in the morning. Or the afternoon. Or whenever. It was good for making cole slaw. It was also good for serving with corned beef, which was called that even though it had no corn in it. Corn hadn’t been invented yet.
Then came brussels sprouts. Brussels sprouts were basically tiny cabbages that grew on a stem. No one could explain why this was necessary, but the prevailing belief was that it was because Belgium was annoyed with the Netherlands for also being called Holland and for having people known as the Dutch, which is too many names for such a small country. Brussels sprouts were divisive. People either really hated them or were moderately okay with them. They were pretty good roasted and were deemed acceptable when drenched with cheddar cheese, which had just been invented.
Somewhere in here kohlrabi came along. No one was sure what to do with kohlrabi or how to eat it or if it should be cooked or served raw. Finally everyone just decided that the best thing was to give it a weird name and move on.
Then came broccoli. People were okay with broccoli. It was like eating tiny trees, and everyone got a kick out of that. It didn’t have a lot of flavor in spite of being a descendant of wild mustard but people could at least claim they were having something healthy at office parties by eating broccoli smothered in ranch dressing, which had just been invented.
Shortly after broccoli cauliflower came along. No one was sure why and half the people wanted to call it a flower and half the people wanted to call it an amniotic membrane. No one was sure what to do with cauliflower but since it was related to broccoli it was put on the vegetable trays with ranch dressing. Cauliflower could also be boiled and mashed into a paste so that people would think they were getting a nice big serving of potatoes until they ate it and it just tasted like wet cardboard.
And then there was kale. No one was sure where kale came from but everyone agreed that it should go back. In spite of efforts to make it palatable by turning it into chips or mixing it with bacon, which some falsely tried to claim had been invented for just that purpose, no one liked kale. Cheese ran in terror from it.
Kale would have been the black sheep of the brassica family but not even sheep would eat it. Regardless of when it had been invented it was the dead end of a once proud lineage, a cultivar that only existed because some cabbage grower somewhere hadn’t stopped when they were a head.
The honeysuckle is in bloom which always takes me back to a day in my childhood when my friend Troy and I were waiting for the bus to go to school and he picked a honeysuckle flower and showed me how to pull it apart, gently grasping the green base and tugging it until the stamens came out revealing a single glistening drop of nectar. It was sweeter than any sweet drink I’d ever had. I started wondering if it would be possible to fill a glass, or even a small bottle, with honeysuckle nectar, although the drops were tiny and it would take a lot and I couldn’t resist just sucking up each one as it came out, like it was a drug. We also tried to figure out if there was a difference between the white blossoms and the yellow. There wasn’t, but together we probably destroyed a hundred honeysuckle blossoms waiting for the bus, which I now realize because honeysuckle is a terrible invasive weed that can destroy forests. Not that I necessarily have anything against invasive plants. Some can even be good. Dandelions are invasive, technically, and they aren’t bad—they’re great for bees, and it’s really fun to go into other peoples’ yards and blow seeds all over them, but that’s another story.
Anyway I was out clearing the honeysuckle in our backyard. I know it’s futile. I’ve spent more than one volunteer weekend at Radnor Lake pulling up small honeysuckle plants and even cutting it down where it’s turned into looming trees that block the sunlight and prevent other plants from growing, but at least I can sort of hold it back, and by taking it out while it’s blooming I can prevent it from producing seeds.
And while I was cutting it back I stopped and pulled out some of the blossoms and pulled them apart, trying to get that sweet hit of childhood once again, but they were all dry. We’ve had more than enough rain lately so that shouldn’t be the problem. Maybe my hands are too big now and I’m damaging them as I pull them apart so I can’t get that sweet drop of nectar. Or maybe something’s changed about honeysuckle and it doesn’t have that drop of nectar anymore. Or I was just unlucky and not getting it right. Whatever the problem was it really sucked.
This is a revised version of an essay originally titled “Live And Let Live” I offer each year on the first night of Hanukkah.
The squirrels have stayed out of the attic. At the start of every Hanukkah I think about this because several years ago we had a squirrel infestation. There was at least one family nesting in the insulation. The scrabbling sounds that woke us up in the middle of the night were a minor inconvenience, as was the possibility the squirrels were using whatever we had stored up there for nesting material. A bigger problem was that they might be tearing up the insulation, as was the possibility that they might chew through wiring which could start a fire and burn down the entire house, leaving all of us without a nest, and unlike the squirrels we couldn’t easily move to a clump of leaves in the nook of a tree. So I unfolded the rickety wooden ladder and climbed into the attic through the door in the hallway ceiling. I was able to chase some squirrels out but that was a temporary solution so I also took some traps smeared with peanut butter. I used the spring bar traps, the kind that used to be sold under the slogan, “Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Since we were dealing with squirrels, though, I used the size intended for bigger animals. These had the slogan, “These will cut your fingers off,” and could be sprung from ten feet away by a good sneeze. I discovered dexterity I never knew I had and set the traps carefully, hoping they’d serve as a deterrent and convince the squirrels to move out. I wasn’t so lucky. I had to bag a few bodies, their necks broken by the steel bar, and carry them to the garbage then reset the traps, trying not to sneeze. Then one night I found a squirrel still alive in one of the traps. It was struggling to get away but badly injured. I knew I couldn’t let the squirrel go. Even if it survived its injury, which wasn’t likely, even if it avoided being run over by a car, even if it escaped neighborhood dogs, stray cats, coyotes, foxes, owls, hawks, even if it wasn’t attacked by other squirrels, it could get back into the house. And it would spend whatever life it had left in excruciating pain. I’d caused it to suffer and I had a responsibility to end that suffering. I knew all this, but I wasn’t looking forward to what I had to do either. My wife suggested I use a hatchet but that would mean I’d have to look at the squirrel, I’d have to aim carefully, and I wasn’t prepared to do that. A history teacher once told me that Mary Queen of Scots, as she approached the chopping block, turned to her executioner and said, “Be mercifully quick.” Her request apparently made him lose his nerve; it took him three tries to finish the job.I put the trap with the squirrel still in it into a white plastic garbage bag and took it out to the driveway. I got a shovel out of the basement. The squirrel struggled a little in the bag, which I appreciated because it told me exactly where to hit. I wanted, for both of us, to be mercifully quick. After the clang of the shovel faded, I heard a flute playing. Someone a few houses away was in their backyard practicing “Jingle Bells”. For some reason this song always makes me think of people and woodland animals sharing the sleigh ride together, a sort of Eden with snow and blinking lights. The sun had just set, and in the stillness I realized that in some houses and places of worship the first candle of the menorah had either been lit or was about to be lit. I’m not Jewish. I’m not even religious in any traditional sense, but I know Hanukkah is a holiday that celebrates hope and perseverance. It’s about a miracle of light and life–one day’s worth of oil burning for eight–coming to people who have just been through darkness and death. It’s a celebration by people who survived an all-out attempt to wipe them off the face of the Earth. It may not be the highest of holy days but it’s usually celebrated around the solstice, and there’s something fitting, even poetic, about candles being lit against the darkness on the darkest nights of the year. I first learned about Hanukkah when I was a Boy Scout and working on a project about religion. I was supposed to learn about a faith other than my own. I was raised in a very relaxed Presbyterian church and because I wasn’t particularly religious then either I could have picked just about any other Christian sect and had friends who were Catholic and Baptist and Methodist, but I didn’t know any Jews. I’d read stories about Jewish families and traditions. The minister of our church had a sign on his office door that said, “Shalom!” I decided I wanted to know Judaism better. I went to a local temple one afternoon when it was empty. First the rabbi took me to his office and started asking me questions. How long had I been a Boy Scout? What was my project about? Why had I chosen Judaism? It was nice to have an adult take an interest in me but also confusing. I knew “rabbi” was the Hebrew word for “teacher” and I was there to learn, not talk about myself. When he asked if I knew anything about Judaism I panicked. I should have done some cursory background reading before coming, I thought, but I hadn’t done anything to prepare. I admitted this and prepared myself for his disappointment. Instead he smiled. “There’s no sin in ignorance.” Suddenly I felt relief. I’m sure adults had told me that before, but it was not what I expected, especially from a teacher. I spent most of my youth feeling like I was supposed to know things that I’d never been told; everything seemed to be a test, and I frequently thought I was failing. At that moment I felt assured that it was okay to not know anything as long as I was willing to learn. “Do you know any Jewish holidays?” he asked. Since I’d learned about Passover in Sunday school I didn’t think of it as a Jewish holiday. Instead I said, “Hanukkah,” which I knew sometimes overlapped with Christmas. “Do you know the story of Hanukkah?” I still didn’t feel great about not knowing anything, but he smiled again and told me the story of the Maccabees, and the destruction of the temple, and how the oil that was only supposed to last for one night burned for eight, and Hanukkah is the celebration of this miracle. Then he took me into the main sanctuary and showed me around. It was very much like other churches I’d been in, very much like the Presbyterian sanctuary I went to every Sunday, in fact, with pews and a raised section at the front, but with slightly different decorations. He explained about the Torah, how the ark that holds it is positioned so those who face it are facing toward Jerusalem. Then he pointed upward to the Eternal Light. It was just an electric light, made to look like a flickering flame, but the specifics didn’t concern me. I was captivated by the symbolism. I had only a vague idea of how unkind history, particularly the 20th Century, had been to the Jews but here, I thought, was the central symbol of a belief system built around hope. In college I took a class on Judaism, and attended services at the local synagogue. The first time I went I picked up a prayer book and opened it. On the first page there was a short story about the prophet Isaiah, who stood at the door of the temple and said, “I cannot go in, this temple is full.” The people looked in and said, “There’s no one in the temple. Why do you say it’s full?” And Isaiah said, “The temple is filled with prayers that are not sincere. Only prayers offered from the heart will ascend into Heaven.” Again I felt that deep sense of hope. Faith, the ultimate expression of hope, is worthless if it’s not sincere. I went to services at the temple several more times, and took part in Passover seders in the spring, and, with a friend, lit the menorah candles for Hanukkah. One day while I was doing research for a paper in the synagogue library I sat in on a talk the rabbi gave parents about coping with, and hopefully preventing, teen suicides. He was emphatic that “l’chaim”, “to life”, wasn’t just a toast made at meals but a philosophy, that to be a Jew meant taking joy in life. In my studies of Judaism I kept going back to Hanukkah and its traditions. I read how, over a thousand years ago, two rabbis, Shammai and Hillel, had competing ideas about how Hanukkah should be celebrated. Rabbi Shammai said all candles should be lit on the first night and then one extinguished on each night as a literal representation of the diminishing oil. There’s a strange beauty in Shammai’s literalness, and I assume the growing darkness would end with a grand blaze. Rabbi Hillel said that one candle should be lit each night so on the final night all eight candles would blaze with glory. Instead of increasing darkness there would be growing light and hope. Hillel’s tradition is the one that’s survived. None of this has anything to do with the squirrels, but it all came to me anyway. I was extinguishing a light even as in other houses flames were being offered up against the darkness. It seemed like the universe was conspiring to make me feel bad about what I’d done, but I accepted the responsibility. I’d even say I welcomed it, even if I wished the epiphany had come more easily. I can rationalize until I’m blue in the face. I can say that even though one-fourth of all mammal species are presently in danger of extinction squirrels aren’t one of them. I can say that at least I’m not actually harming another person, and that through history people have done terrible things to other people with less justification than I have for killing the squirrels in the attic. Nothing I can say changes the fact that, hokey as it sounds, I don’t want to be directly responsible for the deaths of squirrels. I don’t think squirrels are a cornerstone species, or that the disappearance of Sciurus griseus would tip the balance and lead to the extinction of Homo sapiens, but being too casual about extermination threatens us all. As long as the traps were killing them I could shirk responsibility. I was just a caretaker; the traps were doing the work. When the trap failed, I had to face what I was doing. I thought about a poem by Maxine Kumin, who was Jewish, called “Woodchucks”, about her efforts to protect her vegetable garden. She opens with a quick description of first using gas, “The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange/was featured as merciful, quick at the bone,” but it doesn’t work and over the poem’s thirty lines she quickly escalates to shooting them, “The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling/to the feel of the .22.” One woodchuck evades her and in the end she laments, “If only they’d all consented to die unseen/gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.” This is the danger that comes from being too casual about death. She feels herself becoming her own worst enemy. It’s not a perfect metaphor. The only perfect metaphor that I know of in English literature is from Gertrude Stein, also Jewish, who wrote, “a rose is a rose is a rose”. There is no justification for the Nazi concentration camps. The woodchucks, on the other hand, threatened Kumin’s food supply, or at least her rhubarb and brussels sprouts. The Biblical land of milk and honey is called that because, in theory anyway, called that because nothing has to die to provide them, but we can’t live on milk and honey alone. Part of the web of life is death. As a counter to that I also thought of a poem by Gerald Stern, also also Jewish, called “Behaving Like A Jew”, about finding an opossum shot and lying in the road. He says, “I am going to be unappeased at the opossum’s death./I am going to behave like a Jew/and touch his face, and stare into his eyes.” What exactly he does next isn’t clear, other then moving the opossum off the road, but what is clear is that he refuses to let a death pass; he is going to mourn the loss of a life so small and seemingly unconnected to his. I didn’t reset the trap in the attic that night, or again. Something in me had broken, but in another strange coincidence the squirrels left and didn’t come back. There were still a few traps up there at either end of the attic, where I’d balanced carefully on the rafters and tried to avoid stepping through the insulation, but they stayed empty. Maybe the injured squirrel had frightened the others away. Maybe it was just a coincidence. If I were religious I might believe they knew I’d prayed for the killing to stop and that because my prayer was sincere it rose up.
There’s a large orb web at the corner of our house. It’s dark now when I get up in the mornings and I see it in the light. Since the year is winding down the spider in it—which I’m pretty sure is an Aranea cavatica—is stepping up her efforts. It’s not an accident that their webs become more visible at this time of year, or that the crickets seem to get a little louder, the bees a little bolder. This is their last chance.
Last year I wrote about finding three Aranea cavaticas in my yard and, as a tribute to Charlotte’s Web, I named them Joy, Aranea, and Nellie. The one at the corner of the house this year is Charlotte, and next year the cycle will begin again with Joy.
After all these years spiders still fascinate me, and after all these years it still surprises me that they don’t fascinate other people as much. When I pick up a spider in the house my wife usually says the same thing: “Put it outside. No, put it outside. No, I don’t want to see it. Don’t bring it over here. PUT IT OUTSIDE.”
Intellectually I do understand why most people don’t like spiders. It’s all the legs and the way they move. And the fact that some spiders bite. Some people say it’s the multiple eyes but if you don’t like spiders you’re probably not going to get close enough to see its eyes.
In spite of the widespread dislike there’s a whole web of folkore that’s grown up around spiders. Historically spider webs were, and occasionally still are, used as bandages. Maybe it was the silky nature that prompted this use but scientists have found there are antibiotic properties in spider silk. There’s the belief that it’s bad luck to kill a spider, and there’s some truth in that. If you find a spider in your home think about what it’s probably eating.
Then there’s the Tarantella dance that might have originated with the belief that the bite of a certain spider was poisonous and could only be cured by dancing. The likely arachnid was a wolf spider whose bite is harmless to people but I guess people thought they needed an excuse to dance. Some scholars think people used the Tarantella dance as an excuse to have sex and, hey, I’m not sure why you need an excuse, but that does throw a whole new light on Little Miss Muffett and why she dragged her tuffet outside, but that’s another story.
Maybe deep down spiders also give us a sense of our own mortality. As I said spider webs, and the spiders that make them, get bigger as the year winds down. It’s a reminder of time slipping away—although in my yard at least Joy will always come around again.
Every year, usually in the early fall, somewhere in our yard I find a large orb weaver, an Aranea Cavatica. This is the time when they’re at their largest and their webs are biggest which makes me a little sad because it means they’re nearing the end of their life; the size and prominence of their webs reflects a special urgency. This year, glowing with light reflected from under the eaves, I found three side by side, all extending from the ground to the same branch nearly six feet up. And I said, “Hello Aranea, Joy, and Nellie,” and if you’ve read Charlotte’s Webyou’ll understand that reference, especially if you’ve read it as many times as I have.
The real life spider who inspired E.B. White’s novel by building a web in his barn just above where he was nursing a sick piglet, was also an Aranea Cavatica, which is why, every time I find one, it reminds me of this scene from the book:
“What are you doing up there, Charlotte?”
“Oh, making something,” she said. “Making something, as usual.”
“Is it something for me?” asked Wilbur.
“No,” said Charlotte. “It’s something for me, for a change.”
“Please tell me what it is,” begged Wilbur.
“I’ll tell you in the morning,” she said. “When the first light comes into the sky and the sparrows stir and the cows rattle their chains,when the rooster crows and the stars fade, when early cars whisper along the highway, you look up here and I’ll show you something. I will show you my masterpiece.”
I always think Charlotte sounds a little testy when she tells Wilbur she’s making something for herself, and she should. She’s spent so much of the summer devoted to saving Wilbur’s life she’s almost forgotten her own. A spider’s life is only a fraction of a pig’s. And you know, if you’ve read Charlotte’s Web, that her masterpiece is her egg sac, that in the spring, like so many spiders, she’ll have hundreds of children whom she’ll never see. Three of them stay behind to watch over Wilbur, though he doesn’t need it anymore.
That’s why I usually go through a four-year cycle naming the spiders I find but this year finding three lady Cavaticas all in one place forced me to move things up a little. The one I find next year, if I find only one, will have the same name as the one I found in the fall of 2017. She will be Charlotte.