The Fire Colours of Fall

 

Red and yellow and orange.  October’s colours comfort us as the green of spring and summer transitions.  It may be the end of the warm weather, but it is hard not to be warmed by the fire colours all around us.  Colours feed me.  They are food for my spirit.

And so, after a long workday, I rewarded myself by buying pumpkins at a farmer’s road side stand.  Payment was by the honour system and I spent a few minutes calculating how many different sized pumpkins I could get for my twenty dollar bill that has been in my wallet since the pandemic started.  After doing the mental math that reminded me of elementary school word problems, I chose a large eight dollar pumpkin and four three dollar pie pumpkins.  It felt good to support a local farmer.  It felt good to hold all that orange food.  I was renewing my relationship with pumpkins as I do every October.  After Hallowe’en, I will cook the big pumpkin and freeze the soft flesh in one cup amounts to be used in pumpkin muffins all winter.  And I will make pumpkin pies from the small ones.  Despite the world being turned on its head, I can still feed myself with my orange relations.

At home, I lugged the big pumpkin to the end of the driveway and placed it in front of the tiny corn plants that grew there in the summer.  Then, I balanced two pie pumpkins beside it for artistic flair.  Perhaps the colour will warm other people in its glow.

Last Wednesday was Orange Shirt Day .  Started by Phyllis Webstad this day is designed to educate people and promote awareness in Canada about the Indian Residential school system and the impact it had on Indigenous communities.  Many schools have adopted this day and the kids wear orange shirts to school on that day.  I wore my shirt to work and had a few conversations with people about this issue. 

Every Child Matters is the slogan for Orange Shirt Day

After arranging my pumpkins, I decided to hang my shirt above them from the Cedar tree.  The shirt reads, “Every Child Matters”.  The two shades of orange against the green Cedar is beautiful.  Hallowe’en or All Hallows Eve is actually a Christian appropriation of the Celtic New Year, Samhain when the curtain between this world and the Otherworld was the thinnest.  That's why we still have children dressed as ghosts and witches wandering the streets, well maybe not this year.  And some of the Christian churches ran the government Indian Residential schools and perpetrated great harm to thousands of children.  There's a lot of history in these orange symbols.  The orange shirt was chosen because Phyllis Webstad’s granny gave her a new orange shirt to go to her new school.  But, when she got there, her shirt was taken away from her and she never saw it again.  You can hear Phyllis tell her story here:  

The next day, we headed north to buy cranberries, those beautiful shiny red jewels that are just now being harvested.  We passed through the Mohawk Territory of Wahta First Nation to get to the cranberry bogs.  At the end of many driveways were the signs for Orange Shirt Day.  I must have sensed that coming when I hung my shirt up earlier. 

These are the signs that I saw at the ends of driveways

The frozen cranberries disappeared months ago from the store where I get my food.  We like to eat them every day in our oatmeal.  And so, I bought lots from the farm store to put in our own freezer for the coming year.  We were no longer in the farming country where I bought the pumpkins.  Now we were on the Canadian Shield where the soil is acidic, boggy, and perfect for cranberries.  After buying fresh, dried, juiced and chocolate covered cranberries, we wandered along the edge of the cranberry bogs and examined the machinery used for harvesting.  The land was filled with people escaping the city on an overcast fall day.  We all feasted our eyes on the red, orange and yellow maple leaves that fluttered down and decorated the earth.  We stocked up for the long winter ahead and we renewed our relationship with cranberries.

The next day, I pulled up the remaining Tomato plants.  There were still some green and orange tomatoes on the vines but I need to get the soil ready to plant garlic soon.  I will go to the beach down the road and harvest washed up water plants to put on the raised bed.  They will add nutrients to the soil and more biomass.  I will dig it in and then in a few weeks, I will renew my relationship with Garlic as I pop each clove into a hole in the earth and cover it up for the winter.  Then I will put more mulch that the lake washes up on top of it.  I won’t see it again until the spring when green shoots will break through the soil and reach for the sun.

As I pulled up the tomato plants and extricated the wire cages, I got a strong whiff of mint.  Looking more closely, I discovered a mint plant that I had pulled up as well.  I took it into the house to dry for tea.  I will collect seeds from my Morning Glory plants soon, full bean pods from the Scarlet Runner Beans to plant next spring and seed pods from the Nasturtiums.  I will store the seeds in paper envelopes until the spring and then I will renew my relationship with these plants as well. 

Morning Glory flower, leaves and seed pods

Scarlet Runner Beans and flowers

Red Nasturiums. green tomaotes
and Maple Leaf

As I took the tomato cages behind the shed to store for the winter, a group of white flowers caught my eye.  I hadn't seen them before. I had bought a White Snakeroot plant last fall from a woman at the Farmers' Market and planted it beside the shed not knowing if it would survive a transplant so late in the season.  This spring, there was no sign of it and I gave up.  It must have come up sometime this summer and flowered at the end of September. What a great surprise to renew my relationship with this little plant that I thought was dead.  I burst out laughing at its tenacity.

White Snakeroot flowering

As we traverse the transition from summer to fall, the bright, fire colours help us.  The delicious harvest makes us thankful and we stop to feel grateful for all our relations, human and more-than-human.  And as our world transitions, those same relations will help us by feeding our bodies, our hearts, our minds and our spirits.  The distractions that used to be normal are now unavailable but the real sustenance is all around waiting to be in relationship with us.