Braiding Sweetgrass

“But just because we don’t think of them as humans doesn’t mean they aren’t beings. Isn’t it even more disrespectful to assume t ...

who have kept this language alive and passed along its poetry. I still struggle mightily with verbs, can hardly speak at all, an ...

TENDING SWEETGRASS Wild meadow sweetgrass grows long and fragrant when it is looked after by humans. Weeding and care for the ha ...

Maple Sugar Moon When Nanabozho, the Anishinaabe Original Man, our teacher, part man, part manido, walked through the world, he ...

Plink. On an afternoon in March, when the late winter sun is starting to strengthen and moving north a degree or so each day, th ...

who cherish the plink of sap into a metal bucket, and that requires a spile. One end is formed into a tube like a drinking straw ...

the buds keep the calendar. But those baby buds need energy for their growth into branches—like all newborns, they are hungry. W ...

end of the spile, growing invitingly into a larger and larger drop. The girls stretch out their tongues and slurp with a look of ...

can frozen hard. As I got the fire going again, I remembered something I had heard about how our ancestors made maple sugar. The ...

squirrels. In late winter, the hungry time, when caches of nuts are depleted, squirrels take to the treetops and gnaw on the bra ...

spring-wet earth, the sugar streams upward as rising sap to feed the buds. It takes a lot of sugar to feed people and buds, so t ...

roll their eyes and groan, “That was s o much work.” They remember hauling branches to feed the fire and slopping sap on their j ...

shady path of back and forth for that young family. I realize that those first homesteaders were not the beneficiaries of that s ...

Witch Hazel As told through the eyes of my daughter. November is not a time for flowers, the days short and cold. Heavy clouds d ...

she had pasted on the tall windows were faded from shafts of summer sun and plastic poinsettias on the table were draped in cobw ...

I suppose, given the way she is with plants, there was a time when some might have called her “witch.” And there is something ee ...

to smother my sister and me in her deep, soft arms. Sam was disabled, couldn’t work but received some veteran’s benefits and pen ...

the distillery down by the river, but my mother was charmed by Hazel’s stories. I know my mother loved being a scientist, but sh ...

My mother understood this, the longing for home. She was a northern girl, born in the shadow of the Adirondacks. She had lived l ...

remnants of barns. We stopped before a grassy swale under a thick grove of black locust trees. “Here it is,” she said, “my home ...