Acorns

I moved into my cozy little cottage in October of 2003. It's surrounded by ancient oak trees; this development was built in the 1940s and 1950s and the developer built around these magnificent old trees. One week after I moved in, I was outside raking leaves. Raking all the leaves from the oak trees is a huge job. My neighbor Margie, who is one of the nicest neighbors anyone could ever have, and I spend every weekend from late August through December raking, and then, come Spring, we start in again where we left off. It's good exercise, I tell myself.

Oak trees make more than leaves, though. They make, to the vast delight of our large population of squirrels, acorns.

A few days after Miss Thing and I moved in, the acorns began to fall on the roof. Oak leaves may waft softly onto the grass, but acorns bang loudly on the roof. They congregate on the step and the walk and threaten to roll out from under your feet, re-breaking your already patched-together broken ankle. They get incredibly heavy when they get wet, and you have to rake them up with the leaves; there's no way to separate them out. And, every year, I miss some, which try to grow oak trees in my flower beds, in my herb beds, in the middle of my lawn where the squirrels stashed them for an acornless day.

There's a great book about the effect of weather cycles on human population called The Long Summer by Brian Fagan. In it, he describes how large ares of Europe were once oak forests where our ancestors gathered and subsisted primarily upon acorns. Every Fall, I marvel at that, as I'm raking up pounds and pounds of acorns. Inside even a large acorn is less than a teaspoon-full of meat. It would take so many acorns -- gathered, shelled, and ground -- to make a small, fairly bitter, piece of acorn bread. And, yet, I am sure that I carry the genes, the mitochondrial RNA, of women who spent their entire lives gathering, shelling, grinding, and baking acorns. They survived long enough to procreate and that is the only reason that I, the daughter of a long line of survivors, am here today, living in a little cottage with my cat, spending time with Grandson, enjoying my friends, and reading, writing, and making law, serving as a priestess to the Great Mother Earth.

An important part of my religion is a focus on what we call "the turning of the wheel," the cycle of the year from Spring to Summer to Fall to Winter and back again. One of the great gifts, for me, of being in a coven, is the chance to celebrate that turning, year after year, with the same women, to remember where we were at this time last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and to commit the radical and magical act of imagining, describing, and plotting a route to where we want to be by this time next year.

And, this week, the acorns have started, at their own gloriously irregular intervals, banging on the roof again. Miss Thing no longer, as she did the first year, dashes under the bed to hide. It's ok. We know this part of the cycle. It's just the acorns falling from the oak trees and dropping hard and fast onto the tight cottage roof.

The second year that we lived here, there were 17-year cicadas in the Summer. They go up into deciduous trees, such as oak trees, and lay their eggs inside tree branches, just where the soft, new, green growth meets the old, hard, brown branch. Then, those ends of the branches fall to the ground and the cicadas crawl into the soil to hide for the next 16 years. That year, Margie and I raked up oak branches all Summer, but there were almost no acorns at all, most of them having been mere tiny buds on the ends of the branches that fell off the oak trees. The third year that we lived here, the oak trees, responding to the natural pruning that the cicadas provide, put all their energy into regrowing new branches, and made almost no acorns. Many of "our" squirrels died, and a new colony of dark black squirrels moved into the neighborhood. My fox grew fat, because those dark squirrels may blend into the oak branches nicely, but they stand out against the snow and the brown, dead grass of Winter. This year, my fourth Fall here, the trees, having re-branched last year, have produced a mammoth acorn crop. I've never seen so many acorns in my life. The squirrels are either in squirrel heaven, or they are overwhelmed, working overtime to bring in their harvest -- the harvest that, in ancient Europe, they'd have been competing with my ancestors to bring it. It's a blessing from the Goddess Ceres, which is what I tell myself even as I nurse my first set of real raking-blisters of the season.

The oak trees shade my cottage in the summer, but leave it exposed to the warming sun in the Winter. They breathe in the carbon dioxide that Miss Thing and I expel, and they give off the oxygen that Miss Thing and I breathe. Their acidic leaves and bark biodegrade, giving me rich, humussy soil in the middle of Virginia's red-clay country and turning my hydrangeas a bright pink. They determine what other plants I can hope to grow. And, they speak to me, the one in the backyard in particular. I've come to love them madly, even as I curse the weekends spent raking up tons and tons of leaves and, yes, acorns. Arlington County, wonderfully, collects the leaves and acorns and makes mulch, that is free for anyone who lives in the county. I like to think of the yards and gardens made lovely with the mulch from the acorns and leaves.

What natural occurrence tells you that the wheel has turned?