the other side

Who said the coldest winter they ever spent 

was a summer in San Francisco?

Temperature is a mental thing.

This place wraps around me like its fog, 

 feathery and prickly all at once.

harvest by-product

When you are down low digging or skeeting ramps and your glance approaches horizontal, 

a morel might come into view.

Suddenly like Charles Baker Harris

from the sweep of a field

you see only the intestinal luminescent amber

of the morel.

Butter and pasta tease your tongue.

It's best to freeze right then because you could easily squash several in one wrong move. Stay low or get lower. You need some butt and thigh muscle. If you are lucky, morels pop and scatter, making your eyes dart about the forest floor.

It's almost as good as a dream I had at ten when the sand in my sand box 

morphed into quarters.

technique or philosophy?

Writing on ramping, or anything for that matter, seems to come back around to relating how we move through the world, the pleasure we take in that movement, and the things we make. My pal, Kent Kleinman, reminded me of a couple of years ago that "aesthetic" is broader than simply looking good; it is about form more generally: sensual, intellectual, proportional, procedural. In this anonymous ether it feels safe to speculate on such elusive topics. 

HARVEST

patches and fields

Visually speaking, folks characterize the form or matter that gets arranged in relation to what it is arranged around (text on a page, flowers on canvass, church in a city) as figure and ground or object and field. The text is the figure and the whiteness of the page is the ground. Or a fried egg is the figure and the pan is the ground. A piazza in Rome is the object and the fabric of the surrounding city is the field. They need one another for legibility - the figure and its background. The trick is getting them to tango. 

In ramping terms, North Carolina and Michigan form a figure ground compliment: the South has patches and the Midwest fields. When you dig ramps in Michigan you make dents in the seemingly endless expanse. In North Carolina you search out intermittent patches from a ground of competing flora. 

RAMPING

It's become an annual thing, gathering ramps. They call them wild leeks here in Michigan, but most everywhere else, and for sure in North Carolina where I first met these wild edible delectables, they are called ramps. Makes for some fabulous pun foundations. 

Described by some as a truffle infused leeky shallot, ramps appear on forest floors for only a brief period between late April and the end of May. The entire plant is edible, but the most coveted, tasty part is the bulb. Simply yanking a ramp out of the ground is not effective because the stalk is fragile and breaks away from its roots. All leaf and no bulb is not where you want to be. Depending on soil conditions, you may be able to give a gentle tug and get it all. More likely, however, you need a small shovel. A couple of well placed cuts to the ground, then the oh so satisfying "pop" of the tap root giving way frees a ramp cluster to allow hand gathering.

In wrangling with my own version of OCD, (I prefer to think of it as continual technique investigation) I found digging ramps this past weekend in the Leelenau area of Michigan a perfect subject. Slowly I am forming my own set of standards for this gathering operation (no nicked ramps through careless shovel placement, no snapped off stems, no trampling of undug ramps preserved for future propagation, etc.)

image life

in plan or section

might there be a resurrection

?

the smell of time

Isaac's fur is an olfactory section; a slice through time in layers of preserved aromas. 

A prolonged sniff resurrects Friday's fish, Jackie's saturday perfume, 

cigarettes chasing a neighborly breeze.

Events suspend in the space of his softness.