October

Here is a forest that will not be.

It is a peculiarity of kept sheep and cattle that the bountiful fall of acorns becomes a threat of poison. Goats can take a few – with quercetin and vitamin C – but the addiction takes hold quickly. Once they sicken, there is no cure. They die slowly. Sometimes entire flocks are lost.

I have gathered this unplanted wood. They shoot in the warming oven, germinating into sweetness, and my mother or daughter sit and shell them at the table – hull from skin from nutmeat – vulnerable, rotund. They’re richly scented. We will try to make acorn flour. Try to bake some cakes of this nevergrown wood.

Outside each morning, the trees have bared a little more of their contortions, accumulated stories of long winds. But the whole season is disquieted by unlived lives.

I have a few small pieces of news and some of them are good. I have welcomed home a prodigal daughter – and her own daughter too. Three generations outside as well as inside now. There has been some hurly burly, but there is also love.

We have harvested, more carrots than I could count – 400 at the least – pumpkins, parsnips, beans and broccoli, canned or fermented or laid in lines in dark wet sand until – at some point in all the long months without light – we’ll retrieve and consume them. This year, more than any of our previous though, our storeroom seems filled with other people’s hungers.

Of the hospital date, no news. But she’s a burst of life and I want to say unstoppable growth as she starts becoming a woman, my daughter – and the words fall short, inside other mother’s silences.

Here we are in October 2023, gazing forwards.