This past fall, my partner and I decided to walk parts of
the Tay Trail that we don’t normally go on.
In sections, we walked from Waubaushene to Midland and back and then to
Coldwater and back. In all, we walked
around 50 km. We discovered new plants and plants that we
already knew. All along the way, we
encountered wild grapes hanging from vines that clung to bushes, trees and
fences. They were a beautiful blue
purple and they seemed to beckon to us.
We began to take plastic bags with us on our evening walks, but the
offerings of the grapes were so abundant this year that we returned with buckets
to some locations. We always left lots
for the birds and wild animals as well.
My partner steamed and pressed the grapes, strained the juice and froze
it in batches as we picked the grapes over a number of weeks. Depending on the light available, they
ripened at different times. So, we walked some sections of the trail
repeatedly, waiting for them to turn purple.
And then, one cold, November Saturday, we made five batches
of wild grape jelly and put it in sterilized jars. We wanted to share the delicious grape juice
with all of our friends and family. Robin
Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass that when nature shares its
abundance with us, then it is a gift.
And gifts are meant to be shared.
And so, we wanted to share the delicious abundance of wild grapes with
other people who didn’t walk that same trail or didn’t see the grapes, or saw
the grapes but didn’t know that they were edible.
We are having a lot of fun dropping in on friends and bringing
them a jar of wild grape jelly. It tastes
really good and we love it ourselves. We
made it a few years ago in another bumper year and remember the taste vividly. It tastes like Welch’s grape juice which we
both loved as kids.
In this season of gift giving, which apparently happened
long before Christmas was celebrated, we are sharing the gift that the grape
vines shared with us. We are bringing
the vibrancy of the summer into people’s homes and mouths. For some people who
have never heard of, or tried wild grapes, we are connecting them to this
lovely plant.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes
about gifts from nature. She writes, “Gifts
from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an
obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. (Braiding Sweetgrass,p.25) In her Potawatomi culture, gifts from the
earth should never be sold because they are gifts. This makes sense to me. The wild grapes were abundant and calling to
us from the vines. It makes sense that
we share their gift with the people in our lives. Kimmerer writes, “A gift creates ongoing
relationships.” (Braiding Sweetgrass,26)
 |
| Robin Wall Kimmerer |
She writes about how she and
her siblings picked wild strawberries to make strawberry shortcake for their
father’s birthday each year. “That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases
with their passage. The fields made a gift of berries to us and we made a gift
of them to our father. The more something is shared, the greater its value
becomes.” (Braiding Sweetgrass, p27)
This proved to be true in our
case. We were gifted in reciprocity by
those we shared the jelly with. We received
strawberry and peach jam, muffins, a wonderful scone recipe, bows of Fraser
Fir, colourful prayer ties and even some venison from a Metis hunter. As we were attending an Indigenous
celebration, my partner made venison stew to take to the feast. The value of the gift became greater with the
sharing. One woman told us that she used
the whole jar of grape jelly in the sauce for meatballs for a holiday get together. “Everyone raved about the flavour,” she told
us.
I received another interesting gift this week from a
friend. She made a donation in my name
to Indspire, a national non-profit group that helps to fund post-secondary
education for Indigenous youth. I had
not heard of this group before so I looked it up and was very happy to think about sharing a gift
with them as well. I am trying to imagine how that gift will grow in value as
some young person learns and shares what they have learned.
I recently spent time reflecting on the nature of gifts in
order to share the idea with my 11-year-old grandson. I was thinking about the gifts we are born
with, those attributes or abilities that come easily to us. I believe that since these are gifts, they
are meant to be shared with the world. I
reflected with him what I thought his gifts were and that the world needed him
to share those gifts so that the world could work well. At my grandmotherly age, I am reflecting on
what my own gifts are in order to decide how I should best spend the time I
have left on the Earth.
This week, I was also gifted with Richard Wagamese’s final
posthumously published book One Drum: Stories and Ceremonies for a Planet. It is his final gift to the world. In One Drum, Wagamese wrote, “In the
Ojibway way of seeing, a gift is an empowerment, something that allows us to
travel further on our way to the highest possible expression of ourselves. In this way, even difficulties are gifts,
even hardships, even sorrow or the perception of loss are gifts because they
all have the energy within them to teach us something vital about ourselves and
the nature of our lives in this reality.”
And so, it seems that gifts are meant to be shared. They
are meant to create relationships and they are meant to empower us to be our
true selves which we can then share with the world. Economists are starting to write about gift
economies and sharing economies. The
gift fatigue that occurs at this time of year is based on a growth economy, one
of taking, one without reciprocity. It
is time that we rethink giving and share our gifts with the Earth. Think of how the value of those gifts will
increase with the sharing.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) Braiding
Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of
Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
Richard Wagamese (2019). One Drum: Stories
and Ceremonies for a Planet. Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre.
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