Is Spring here? I don’t know. I just know that last week Aberdeen was covered with enough snow that we were able to sledge across town (seriously) and everyone around me looked 10-days-of grey-skies glum, and that this week the sun was shining on my coat-less back and I noticed my rhubarb had punched its first leaf up through the soil. So exciting! The rhubarb crown was from a lovely friend who gave it before she left the country to move back to her homeland. :^( It will be nice to have a seasonal reminder of her family on our porridge and in our puddings. On on particularly snowy day, L. and I invented a delicious dessert: we cooked up the last of our frozen brambles, strained the juice (eating the fleshy seedy bits separately), added a little honey, and waited until it was cool before pouring it onto fresh snow. Yum!
I just saw this documentary about traditional environmental knowledge of the indigenous peoples of California. Highly recommended!
I finished my first Kate Grenville novel–The Lieutenant–this morning. I’ve been meaning to read one of her books for years, and just found this one at my local community centre second-hand book shelf last week. I shall be reading more! I loved the subtle development of the main character through his (platonic) relationship with a young girl who teaches him her land’s indigenous language. At the end of his time in New South Wales, he looks back from the ship to where his friend, Tagaran, is standing, and the image of her starting to blur into the landscape has a beautiful symmetry with this observation of learning her language:
“What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you. His friendship with Tagaran was not a list of objects, or the words for things eaten or not eaten, thrown or not thrown. It was the slow constructing of the map of a relationship. […] Learning a language was not a matter of joining any two points with a line. It was a leap into the other. […] Until you could put yourself at some point beyond your own world, looking back at it, you would never see how everything worked together”
slow growing 