There's strength in the root: pruning and editing and the sharpness of choices

Pruning is fascinating. Would you believe that—and that editing is fascinating too? This time last year I wrote a post called “Pruning and editing”--in haste, because the editing I was doing was heavy and under deadline. This year I'm digging deeper. It's sinking into me. I know this may sound strange, but as I learn better and better how to prune—I find it helps very much to love the tree or vine. But love doesn't look quite like what you'd expect.

I'M NOT DEAD!

Have you ever seen a tree that's been pruned very hard? Or a grapevine? Commercial orchards and vineyards are unsparing in their pruning, eye on the bottom line and the highest possible fruit production—those trees and vines seem cut down to nubs. Our instinct when we see that is that the tree's been killed—like the instincts of a farm intern I had once, who became very worried when I picked all but the smallest leaves off the kale. Our instinct is that most of the plant is gone, so how can it survive? We forget how much, and how vital a part, we can't see.

The life in a plant is in its root. If we ever did to the roots what we do to the tops, the plant would expire in a hurry. But if the root is sound, you can cut the whole tree down at the base of the trunk and it'll send up a dozen shoots the next spring around the stump—so never worry about those nubs, come spring they will branch out in every direction in leaf and flower. There's strength in the root. I sing that to myself sometimes, while I prune or garden, to the tune of the hymn There's power in the blood: “There's strength in the root, there's strength in the root...”

I recently learned to prune grapevines properly. (I know apples and cherries now, and blueberries too, but grapevines were still an “OK, hope I'm doing this right” mystery last year.) First you have to know what good fruitwood looks like on a grapevine, then you make a goal to keep a certain number of fruiting buds per vine and take off, well, everything else. It's that per vine part that tripped me up—no one had taught me to look at each vine before. Our vineyard looked to me like a tangled mass of leafy streamers twining along the cables, sending down a root here and there. No wonder it was a mystery to me! I was starting at the wrong end.

Writers do this too, until we learn.

We start at the wrong end, at the surface, at the leaves. We start at the words. We don't see the words' source; that is underground. Beneath the surface of the page, beneath the dark sweet earth drawing life into our words, is the Story.

When I start at the source, at the root, I prune differently. I don't go branch by branch, bit by bit, asking “Should I cut this?” I look at the plant entire, I draw into my mind a vision of what it can and must be. The good fruitwood stands out to me, and I choose it. In choosing the good, it becomes easier to cut off what I don't need. The question is not “What should I cut?” but “what should I keep?” Ruthlessness is—strange as it may seem—a positive course, a joyous one. It's driven by the lovely vision of the thing as it should be.

Of course I'm talking about editing—though it's true about pruning too.

The rough draft is like the first wild growth of the vine. Sprouting in every direction, opening leaves to the sunlight, photosynthesizing, gathering strength into the new young root. You do need that part. You need to write till your story has substance, till your characters become real in your mind, even if many of the words you write at that point serve no other purpose. (I remember the moment Elisa became real. She was climbing the steps to the Fourvière basilica that towers over Lyon, looking apprehensively at the massive gold statue of Mary over it. None of that's in the novel. Cut. It was the right choice—writing it and cutting it both.) You write and write, till the root gains strength and shape—you write till under the words you see the Story. That is what you are making.

You keep going then, till the Story is made, till the end. Even if you see where you branched out wrongly, you don't start pruning yet. Pruning out of season is a dire mistake—the sap drips out of the cut (I've seen it drip and drip), microbes and insects get in, whole limbs can sicken. Editing out of season drains the energy from your story, leaves you open to attacks of discouragement and loathing. You prune in February, when the sap is not flowing, when the vine has already been dormant a long time. It's hard to wait—it used to make my brain itch, going on and leaving passages I knew weren't right. One chapter I left behind was mostly scene fragments with half-a-dozen empty lines between them. But I could see the shape of the story going forward, so I followed it. I knew it was the important part.

There's strength in the root

Then the break. I was beyond exhausted after I wrote the last word. The book and I rested. The sap ceased to flow. I came back to it after awhile, and that, that's the moment when you do it. The choosing. You look at the story entire, you carry a vision into your mind of what it can and must be. The good writing stands out to you, the passages that shine because they're not only good prose but are filled with reality, because they are moments where someone makes a choice she knows she can't turn back from, feeling both the weight and the freedom of choosing—they are Story. And then you cut around them, cut and shape and rearrange. In choosing the good, it becomes easier to cut what you don't need.

I keep talking about Story with a capital S—I know, it sounds a little funny. But that's what I've learned these past two years, is that it's a real thing, like the root, invisible and really there—and it's the source. What is Story? Short version, it's made of two things: forces and choices. Forces that oppose each other, the desires and aims of the characters, the forces of nature and of need, things that press together to a point and a dilemma: will this character choose the gun, and can he survive if he doesn't? And choices: once and for all, he either takes up the gun or throws it away. All the words of the scene, maybe all the words of the story, come to a point just at that moment—they serve that moment, they have no other purpose. They may be individually beautiful, they may make a beautiful pattern together, but if you cut them off from human dilemma and choice and action they will wither into sad, lightweight things, maybe keeping a melancholy beauty—but dead.

If you understand your characters' dilemmas, the forces they're up against, their choices, the consequences of those choices, you understand your Story. And the role of pruning is to bring it to light.

That's the last thing I learned about pruning grapevines this year—you want your fruitwood as high as possible. You want the fruit to grow on the top, in the light. This keeps the grapes dry and safe from bacteria and mold—and it helps the picker to see them. When your story is finished, those moments of choice will be the fruit—those moments when a character stands at a crossroads for a long moment, then turns and plunges down the path they've chosen, and we see where that path leads.

So I guess, if we're going to make the analogy precise: the forces, the dilemmas, are the root. The turning points, the moments of choice, are the fruit. The rest is a path between the two. If one of your scenes doesn't lead from the root to the fruit—you know what to do. Or if your moment of choice is buried in your scene, de-emphasized, you rearrange it, bring it up to the light.

To bring the strength from the root to the fruit; to bring the fruit to the eater. To sink the root deep into the soil of human experience, and draw up vitality. Those are the great things. And that's what happens when you love the vine—or the book—you see its true nature. You see where its true strength and glory lie, and you want to bring it out. I've become far more ruthless in pruning than I ever expected to be, and I'm glad, because I can see the thing as it can and must be. I don't mourn things I cut anymore—whether branches or pages.

I know what trees know now. You can always make more leaves.

The harvest is over, the summer is gone

I just got the official title for my book yesterday. I'd been calling it A Flame in the Night; the publisher decided to go with just Flame in the Night. It'll also have a subtitle, which they say is important now for making it more findable in internet searches: A Novel of Resistance in Vichy France.

I also have a release date--well, not a date but a season: Fall 2018.

It's awhile (thankfully, because there's still plenty of work to do to make the book perfect) but I'm already excited...

I had a whole complicated post planned for today, but I don't have time to write it, because the weather finally remembered it's almost the end of October and we're finally getting frost. Followed (allegedly) by an actual hard freeze tonight, so it's time to get everything in. I spent Thursday morning gathering my squash and digging most of my sweet potatoes, and yesterday afternoon pulling turnips, digging carrots, and picking my little handful of late-planted pumpkins, still mottled green and orange, in hopes they'll ripen up further inside.

The soil is moist and soft and cold, and clings to the roots as they come out. In the woods in the distance you can hear the chattering of a couple hundred migrating grackles. This has been my favorite time of year since I started farming--especially in the two or three years I ran the CSA section of our now defunct communal farm. The last couple weeks of the CSA, packing boxes filled with squash and potatoes and onions and garlic, hearing those birds chatter with hundreds of voices in the bright woods. They'd fly up in black clouds from one section of woods to another. I'd watch them, relishing the nip of cold air after pouring so much sweat all summer into the land, relishing down to my toes the sensation of slowing down, the anticipation of a warm fireside and immobility. Sweet, sweet immobility.

We used to work so hard, you guys.

I remember the first year I did that job. It was a year of upheaval, the farm manager quitting before the season was half done; I had to take over the CSA garden in mid-season as well. The CSA shares had been paid already. My job was to make sure we didn't have to refund the money. I was theoretically a half-time worker. I remember working eleven hours one day. I worked till my vision was blurry, till I was literally stumbling with weariness. It's hard to explain that sheer bodily exhaustion, in a world where work is mostly made of mental labor and coffee and stress. Which I know is hard too. But that draining of your body, it's different, because you can reach a point (and I routinely did, that year) when there is literally nothing left. You can't do anything more.

I mean maybe if a bear came out of the woods. Maybe then.

And I used to get through it by dreaming about fall. The last CSA share, the first big freeze, were my continual daydream. Something about that combination: abundance and rest. I used to sing the hymn to myself all through September: "All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin..." That was the key, safely gathered. Everything neatly in the fridge, in the root cellar, in the pantry--then you could relax. It wasn't a tidy process. The weather people would announce a freeze and we'd scramble--the potatoes aren't all dug, quick, the squash are still in bins outside the barn and also we need to empty the hoses so the freeze doesn't burst them--we'd scramble, check the temperatures, make our calculations whether we had time to get things up to a heated building, or whether the temperatures meant our produce would be all right if we just shut the doors of the barn. Once during a scramble--a really hard freeze was coming, I guess--I carried fifty pounds of garlic up our steep woods trail, in two very inconveniently sized bags. Which kept slipping. I weighed them when I got to the top; I wanted to at least have some bragging rights to show for that. I don't remember why I couldn't use the truck.

There was something about it, though. The years I worked so hard, by fall I felt this sensation of power in my body, even alongside the tiredness; going up the trail carrying nothing was so easy as to be a pleasure, feeling that extra energy coursing through your veins. Like a runner's high or something. And the weariness lent such a sweetness to the anticipation of being able to stop, to rest. Even thinking about it was lovely. How could simply not moving possibly seem so sweet? The way a warm and lighted house seems sweet from outside in the cold and the dark. You take it for granted, when you've been inside it for hours and hours. Not so much, out on the road.

What was I working for, pouring my sweat into the land for, those years? I was working to save the farm. I knew I had done my part, a distinctly measurable part, to save the farm that year. I was proud of that. I also knew the saving was temporary: we don't go under this year. But it seemed hopeful. The new farm manager was making good changes, sensible ones--and he was a guy you could work with, too. It makes a difference. But what can you do in a system completely stacked against the small farmer--what can you do when Mother Nature decides to get in a few licks as well? Disease reduced the yield of the strawberries. The bitter, bitter cold winter my son was born half-killed the blueberry bushes. The raspberry canes started dying the year after that, from a combination of an aggressive fruit fly and disease. There's a verse from Isaiah that I learned from our farm, that I never would have understood without it: The harvest is over, the summer is gone, and we are not saved.

What was I working for? I'm not even sure. The farm went under. Almost everyone is gone. But the land is still here. The garden I tilled for the CSA, I still grow food in it, for anyone who can use it. The soil is moist and soft and cold, and clings to the roots as I pull them out of the ground. Big lumpy sweet potatoes, flattened and bulging in odd places, like flexed muscles, out of that soil I've come to love. Because I do love it. Having your hands in it till they're drawn to it, rootlike, pouring your sweat into it day after day, will do that. I know that soil. It's my friend.

It could be that I worked for. I'm not sure.

Cucumber-Raspberry Ices

I was making this yesterday with my friend Brandie, and found it was easier to put the recipe up on the blog than to print it out before running out the door to her house! I'll leave it up here in case anyone finds it useful.

It's a recipe I invented by accident, based on a recipe for cucumber-lime paletas that I found online due to having way too many cucumbers. (It's odd that only zucchini has the reputation for overproducing in the summer. I've found cucumbers keep up with them very well.) I made the recipe as a granita (sort of like a sorbet made without benefit of an ice-cream maker) for a party I was going to. I didn't have lime juice (so I used lemon) but I did have a few raspberries, and threw them in for color. Then I stirred it, and their pink color bled through the whole pale-green mixture. It didn't look great like that, so I blendered it, and added a handful more raspberries. Now it was all pink--and it was delicious. I never looked back--I've actually never made a cucumber-lime paleta yet! Maybe someday.


This tastes like raspberry with a subtle refreshing melony hint. Really discerning palates can sometimes guess it's cucumber. To me it's reminiscent of watermelon. Which might also be worth trying...

Refreshing Cucumber-Raspberry Ices

• 1 large cucumber (10–12 oz.), peeled
• 1 cup simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water, boiled till mixed & then cooled)
• ⅓ cup lemon juice
• ½ to ¾ cup raspberries (fresh or frozen) or more to taste

Puree cucumber, adding some of the simple syrup if necessary to get enough liquid in the blender for it to work smoothly.

Strain the pureed cucumber, keeping the liquid part. You can do this with a sieve or, for the easier method, a slotted spoon. It doesn't have to be perfect.

Mix all the ingredients in the blender and puree. You can save out a few raspberries to put them in, or on top, whole.

Freeze. There are several possible methods:

1. Process with an ice-cream maker if you have one.
2. Put the mixture in the freezer, and pull it out at intervals and stir it thoroughly. When it gets almost too difficult to stir, you can leave it, it'll retain its texture in the freezer indefinitely. (This makes a slightly grainy sorbet texture, but it's perfect after about a minute of thawing.

3. Simply freeze the mixture, then take it out of the freezer about ½ hour before serving, break it into chunks with a knife once it's thawed enough, and puree the chunks in the blender until smooth and icy. This makes quite a smooth texture but you'll need to serve immediately.

4. Simply make popsicles.

Eden

I remember the cooing of the doves, in the town in France where I grew up. They were collared doves, and they roosted up among the rooftops of the town, like pigeons do in other towns. I had forgotten about them, the way they used to coo when the sky started to grow soft with evening. I remembered it the other night and almost cried.

I don't know if I can explain how it is. How you can see one thing like that, those doves, and for a moment that is everything. It fills your vision like God's final word. Doves among the rooftops.

I almost cried because I wanted the cooing of the collared doves to be the gentle meaning of everything.

Sometimes I can't be rational about all of this. The world is so terrible. There has always, always--almost always--been so much death. There is so much scorn, so much loneliness, so much hatred. We are told God gave us a garden, made us fresh out of earth in the light of a young world no evil had touched. The world is old now, and we have invented tortures not fit to be written of. We have invented elaborate reasons why everyone unlike us is lesser than us. We have invented machine upon machine designed brilliantly to destroy.

We are told God gave us a garden. In it was the tree of Life. I believe it. Its seeds are still everywhere, tiny leaves unfurling slowly into the light. I don't know where the seedlings go after that, what happens to them, what blight strikes them down. I only know that I only see them young. But so real.

They are real. The cooing of doves in a window. The sun's light through a perfect young oak leaf, the color green come alive. The light that can rest on a face, come from no lamp or sun--you've seen it, I've seen it, the light in the eyes is real light. In the eyes of a laughing child or an old woman touched with joy. The light lies on the water. The swallows come in spring. Again and again they come, in spite of all our sins. The apple trees forgive us, and bloom.

And I can't take it sometimes, with the wanting, the wanting for these to be the meaning of things, the light that fills your vision, God's final word.

I don't want the world to end in a burst of light. God's final word is God's first word too. I want Eden. I want it painfully, the end of the road, the promise, the day the seed becomes the tree. I want the terrors we have made wiped away. I want the earth we have trodden down and paved over made fresh and new as in the first spring sunrise, and us all there looking at each other wide-eyed in the new light. I want it. I want it sometimes till it hurts.

I have seen the seeds. I have heard the promise. Now is the waiting. I can cry if I choose. But I must go to bed, and get up, and try my best to love my neighbor. Ask God for the strength to treat my neighbor, in the meantime, as if we stood in that new light. As if, if I look again, I'll see the uncreated light resting on his face and shining like a glory in his eyes.

Stay with us, O Lord Jesus Christ
Night will soon fall
Then stay with us, O Lord Jesus Christ,
Light in our darkness.

____________

The grass is still singing
The words I will say
When I walk with You barefoot
In the cool of the day

Pruning and editing

This week I took some hours off from writing to prune fruit trees. Normally I wouldn't do this, with the novel due in just over a week. But in just over a week it'll be too late to prune, with the temperatures rising.

I've done two peach trees and two overgrown cherry trees. There's two apple trees, one small cherry and a row of raspberries still to do.

I live in an intentional community, so they're not "my" trees. But I feel responsible for them. My friend Erin, who used to live here and taught me everything I know about gardening, also taught me how to prune them. I always remember her attitude about it: I thought of her as the Little Red Hen. She would come by and try to rope me into pruning, because she knew I was probably the only person in the community who would say yes. And then later in the year when the trees fruited, she would come by and rope me into picking with her and we'd each take home a share. I had a right, because I pruned.

And now she's gone, and I'm the only one still here who really knows how to prune fruit trees, so here I am...

I used to be very intimidated by pruning. It's not an exact science, and Erin was always hemming and hawing over what to take off, making me feel "if the expert isn't sure, how will I ever know??" Ever since she left I've done it... hesitantly. (Till last year when I learned from an online tutorial that the bulk of what you have to do for an apple tree is cut off everything that points straight up--finally something simple!) But this year I think I've actually hit my stride.

The fun thing is just how similar pruning is to editing.

There's the importance of looking at the big picture. Seeing the tree as a whole, feeling its balance. There's the need for confidence, even ruthlessness: yes, you have to make some fundamental changes sometimes, cut off some big limbs. (I've neglected those poor cherry trees in previous years, out of lack of confidence. Due to that I had to saw off four limbs as thick as various parts of my leg this year. Timberrrr!) It's actually very hard to kill a tree.* There's the different sizes of tools, which could be used a great symbols for the different stages of editing: the pruning saw for the developmental edit, the loppers for the mid-level work, trimming out unnecessary transitions and consolidating scenes and such, and the little clippers for tightening everything and cleaning it up. The work feels very similar: the mid-level stuff, for instance, always involves seeing if anything's redundant. Do these two scenes basically do the same thing? Cut one. Are these two branches parallel and close to each other? Cut one. The small-scale work is clean-up: go through and cut all the small twigs that point upwards. Go through and cut all the words you don't need.

And then there's the feeling when it comes together, this kind of gestalt. Or maybe it's just the feeling of seeing how it should be in your head and then seeing how you can make it that way.

And the contemplation of the job done, of course, your eyes on the whole thing clean and tight and right. I really look forward to that.





_________________________

* If you've tried to kill a tree, you've probably noticed! If you've cut down a tree and don't want watershoots sprouting up around it, paint the cut stump immediately with herbicide. It's the only thing I condone using herbicide for, and it works. If you're pruning, avoid a common mistake, and have the confidence to say: that's right, I only want the tree to be this tall, and I will automatically cut off anything above that.

Crème de marrons

This might not be very obvious yet, but this isn't meant to be exclusively a WWII history blog. Although there will be plenty of that. But I also hope to share some thoughts on wilderness and garden, some spiritual thoughts, some thoughts on writing. And not always 100% super-serious. It's just that I happened to start this blog at the same time that a certain person got elected, doncha know.

I mean I really, really want to do a little bit of nature writing. It's just that it's winter and everything is gray out there right now--the sky, the bare trees, even the dirt is gray. (Well, the dirt is gray because I keep scattering ashes from our woodstove on it, because did you know wood ashes are packed with plant nutrients? That's why slash-and-burn works so well despite being such a lousy thing to do to the rainforest. But anyway.) Actually it was warm enough to take my little guy out today; he pretended to be a bear and walked along logs. I know that's not really a good sign. (The weather, not the bear thing.) I told him the other day the world was getting warmer, and immediately felt like a character in the kind of book that ends with the character wistfully remembering what it was like back when we still had plants. (Little guy wasn't impressed though. He's three. As far as he's concerned last winter was the Ice Age.)

Anyway, since it's winter, I'm going to share a recipe instead. This is how I stay connected to the earth & the garden in the winter, and actually it's no small thing. I think cooking from scratch is the first step to saving the earth and a bigger step than people think, and if you do it or are learning it, kudos, because modernity doesn't make it easy. And then cooking from the root cellar, from the pantry, from the freezer; I've been learning this since I moved to the country and started living, to a certain extent, off the land. An art that we're losing, the art that since the time of the caves has made traditional women and other cooks so necessary to their people's survival, the art of saying "What has nature/God provided, and how do we make it into food?" Because you don't place orders, with nature or with God. Probably you've noticed. You get what you get.

What I'm trying to say is, I have chestnuts. A LOT of chestnuts. Why's a long story beginning with someone planting about ten chestnut trees, but anyway, they are here. And I have to figure out what to do with them.

So I looked up something from my childhood: crème de marrons. It means chestnut cream. If you're American you might want to think of it as chestnut butter, like apple butter only browner. And sweeter. It's a traditional local product in south central France where I grew up--a traditional kid food, actually. And turns out my little guy loves it too.

So here's the recipe, for fun, or, you know, in case you have a ton of chestnuts too. Because that's likely.

Crème de Marrons

2 lbs unpeeled chestnuts
1 1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup to 1 cup water
2 tsp vanilla
pinch of salt

Peel the chestnuts. This is tedious. Although, if you've got a three-year-old and a floor you're going to vacuum tomorrow anyway, this is actually fine; just sit there and peel them for an hour with a knife while the kid pretends to be a bulldozer and pushes the unpeeled ones around the floor. If you don't have a kid of the appropriate age, you could try the recommended methods I didn't try: score an X in each chestnut with a knife, then boil them or roast them at 400 degrees for 10 minutes, which makes the skin start to peel off, then cool them and peel them.

Boil the chestnuts till they're soft. This takes 15 minutes, maybe 20 at the outside. Stick a knife in them, it should go through easily.

Make a syrup with the sugar and water. Boil it on high heat not only till the sugar dissolves, but till the syrup foams up & starts making slightly larger bubbles. There's a technical term for this but I forget what it is. I don't think it has to be super precise, but I think the more you boil this syrup the thicker your crème will be.

Puree the chestnuts and the syrup together. Use something heavy-duty. I was lucky enough to have a blender they made in the good old days. Add the vanilla and salt at this point. Add more water if your food processor or blender's getting stuck.

Heat the crème de marrons in the pan again till it's thick enough. You're basically just boiling the extra water out of it, but when boiling a thick puree you do need to stir constantly. You can be the judge of how thick you want it, but it's good if it's spreadable rather than pourable. Get a spoonful, see if it falls off the spoon. If not, you're done.

Enjoy! & share it with the kids. It's pretty sweet, so it tends to be a hit--and also very nutritious.