Getting grounded is high on my list of making it through this year with my sanity (such as it is) intact.* But I’ve been surprised at how often grounding has come as a result of getting off my bottom and doing brand new things. Of wanting to.
For one thing, I’ve visited Monmouth Battlefield three times in as many months. This is a major Revolutionary War site, about half an hour away, where George Washington and the Continental Army were able to hold the field. It’s also where I find my Concord grapes in August. A few weeks ago I visited a small clapboard house whose family hightailed it out of there when the fighting got intense; the British used it as a makeshift hospital. Since building is prohibited on that hallowed ground, except for the soldiers and the whites of their eyes, the countryside for miles around looks the same as did was back then. And yesterday I visited a church that served as a Continental Army hospital, still bearing bloodstains on its wooden pews after 242 years.
These places of brutality are now serene; all I ever hear is crickets, birds, and the wind through the drying leaves. But I feel the ghosts there. They’re not scary. They were in the same situation in this country, in their own way, in their own time. They get where I am, and it’s comforting.
From my quince tree (that no one pays attention to, hooray), I also nabbed more fruit this year than in any other. Cinnamon-poached quinces and turnovers resulted so far. Got another recipe, a new one that a friend remembers from a trip to Turkey, on the horizon. This feels enormously peaceful to me.
Plus there’s the below. For years — I mean it — I have wanted to put up tomatoes, but always chickened out, scared of botulism. But this year, with the help of two online resources, a print one, and a Zoom with a smart friend, it finally happened. They’re in the coolest place in my house. In my bedroom closet behind my sweaters, obviously. I laugh when I see them every morning, my own docile army of Redcoats.
It doesn’t make sense that following my nose to new and different and surprising would be grounding, and not Sticking to What I Know Thank You Very Much, but exactly what makes sense these days?
There will definitely come a point this winter when I ease up on doing new stuff and park an open book on my lap. Maybe.
*’Why fight it? I’ll just go crazy and be inconspicuous. — Hawkeye, M*A*S*H (the episode where Klinger and Colonel Potter start doing yoga)
