ON NESTING

Like a woman due to deliver her baby, I bustle around cleaning this, organizing that. I've harvested elderberry for syrup, tomorrow for tincture. I've cleaned the peppermint so the leaves are ready for tea all winter. I've made pesto. This is uncharacteristic. Perhaps my activities are born of being gone frequently this summer and finding my home a joy to return to. Perhaps the winter is going to be rough, and like a squirrel who intuits the coming storms, I tuck and tidy in my little nest.

The list is endless, of course. Like breaths untaken, there is no end to the list of tasks I'd love to complete, including new flowerbeds, gravel on the driveway, making plum leather, deep cleaning my home and training the dog, clean the files in my computer. The function of these desires is to assure me I am needed and that my energy has an outlet any time it needs one.

The current wave arose yesterday when I found an old wire wreath, hanging ignominiously from a fence post. My brain immediately linked it with Rowen berries, which are ripe and hanging heavily in several places in the yard. Quick as a wink I had fashioned a bright orange wreath, prelude to Christmas, to hang by the front door. I like leaving the berries for the fruit-eating birds, but I also found a piece about stringing them, like a rosary, and using them for story telling. Of course their European history is enormous.

The rowens led to the elderberries, equally heavy. Early this spring, I found an article about their ability to boost the immune system and the picture accompanying it showed removing the berries with a fork! Last year I didn't have that clue, and ended up putting twigs, stems and berries into alcohol. The fork worked very well for syrup, and today my granddaughter, Sarah,insisted she wanted Nana's elderberry syrup instead of Sambucol, a commercial syrup, for her sore throat! Hanging, they are dusty light blue, an unusual color this time of year. In syrup they're a rich deep purple-magenta. Sarah remarked on the patterns they made when cooking: swirls of pink foam, lavender, and grape. Tomorrow when I can get vodka for tinctures, I'll harvest more for the flu season and little gifts.

We've had a lovely summer. A cruise up the Inland Coast to Alaska, an ecstatic hike in Glacier National Park, a joyous Dance Camp near Nelson, B.C. and October brings a quick week to see the colors in upper state New York with my family. We've not traveled this much in years. That's definitely the impulse. Being away has brought my home treasures ever closer to my heart and hands. I am truly blessed.

Well, off to mow the lawn. Our clippings have not a trace of herbicides on them so I can put them right into the compost. Then there's the rose garden to weed, and the clipping along the borders, and, and, and...