Autumnal Ch-ch-changes
Saving daylight, taking a writing break, & fire cider-making
This is the first time in my whole entire life that I’ve been excited to ‘fall back’ for Daylight Savings. Absolutely STOKED. Every morning I wake in the pitch black of the middle of the night, nearly trip over cat toys and other piles of things I’ve booby-trapped the bedroom with as I make my way to the kitchen in the dark (an effort to allow my partner to continue sleeping) to make coffee. I spend the first hour or two of the morning looking out at the night sky and its visible stars, using a sun lamp to try to convince my retinas that it’s time to be awake.
It’s funny when we imagine we’re exempt from the rhythms of the light and the dark and the way they change throughout the year. I certainly did not expect the change to be so dramatic - we only moved three hours away from our home in eastern Illinois! But we moved across the arbitrary line that separates central time from eastern time, going from the very eastern part of the central time zone to the westernmost part of the eastern time zone, and my animal body is having a hard time adjusting.
Wait a minute, you might be saying, especially if you’ve known me a long time. Doesn’t Mere get up at an insanely early hour to do an incredibly elaborate morning routine? And while that definitely was true when I was doing farm work, these days I’m sleeping up to the time I used to have to be clocking in by, overalls clipped and harvest knife sharpened. Sunrise this morning in Champaign was 7:02am, and it was 7:53am in Bloomington, Indiana. Maybe it doesn’t sound like a big difference to you, but it is really fucking with me.
“Like any other language, a system of time speaks of a shared world,” Jenny Odell writes in her book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. “Standard time zones could also be seen as a ‘blasphemous interference with the divine natural order’; Eviatar Zerubavel notes in his study of standardized time” and I know, I know! the world we live in requires standard time to exist and I also love the thought-exercise of what it would mean, what kind of society we would have, without it. If we decided to live by the sun, wherever we were. “Maybe ‘the point’ isn’t to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, to be more alive in any given moment - a movement outward and across, rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track,” is one of the thoughts that Odell ends the book with.
But here in the world where ‘spring forward’ and ‘fall back’ inescapably exist, it’s the very first time in my life where daylight savings - another attempt to keep people more productive through the dark, winter months that historically were times of slowness and feasting - is a day I am gleefully awaiting; ironically, counting down the time. Only a couple weeks to go!
I am going to be pausing the regular newsletter editions for a bit. This desire to write publicly came out of many years of seismic internal shifts - I wanted to slough off the way that poetry MFA school had made it feel impossible to put anything out into the world, to unfreeze myself creatively by putting out a steady stream of small, low-stakes pieces of writing, to quiet the terrified perfectionist inside me who believed nothing I wrote would ever be good enough for another human to lay eyes on (and the clingy preciousness about writing that is its twin), and I wanted to be accountable to thinking through the ideas that were percolating in my brain in ways that felt exciting to me. I am really proud of myself for putting these little missives out on the schedule that I set for myself, and I feel like I’ve been able to grow in ways that wouldn’t have been available to me otherwise. I am deeply grateful to all of you - friends and strangers, at every subscription level, whether you’ve been reading since the beginning or a month ago - for wandering with me thus far.
But the thing about being a person is that things keep shifting! I’ve started to feel like the every-other-week container I set for myself, which once felt spacious, is much too small for the kinds of writing that I want to do. I just went absolutely buck wild at the public library (truly the version of me on my baddest behavior these days) and brought home a huge stack of books that I want to spend time with. I am wondering what it would feel like to have more time to simmer in the sauce, which sometimes for me means more time to be in the world instead of writing about it.
One thing that really terrified me when I started meditating in earnest, around the time I quit drinking, was something said to me by a meditation teacher about how it’s impossible to be fully alive to the world when you’re running the narrative about your experience in the background at all times. Genuinely, I thought: but then what ‘me’ exists at all without that constant narrative? But I sat with it for a long time, and at some point space opened up where I continued to exist without the incessant explaining myself to myself, and where maybe the container of ‘self’ didn’t have to matter quite so much all the time - “a movement outward and across, rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track.”
This newsletter pause feels something like that. And I want to be clear: I do intend it to be a pause, not an end, but I also don’t know what it’ll look like when I come back. I may send sporadic updates - I’m sure I’ll send one about the books of 2024 I loved the most because I love to read and to write those lists. If you do Instagram, you can follow me @tender_thickets on there if you like.
If you’re a paying subscriber I’ve also sent you an email about this! I’ve paused monthly subscriptions and I’m happy to refund annual subscriptions with any amount of time left on them, so please do not hesitate to reach out! Email me at tenderthickets@gmail.com.
Okay business is done, let’s get to fire cider. For the uninitiated: fire cider is an “herbal health tonic” that really feels like the epitome of “throw everything against the wall and see if something sticks.” Any and every anti-inflammatory root, fruit, or leaf can go into the mix. I really like Julia Skinner’s template recipe, which gives some guidelines and many examples of what-all can go in there. I came back from Ireland with a gnarly cold, despite wearing my N95 on the planes, and it reminded me how much I hate being sick (lol, just like literally everyone) so I made a big batch - three big mason jars’-worth - and it’ll be ready to drink in November.
Here’s everything I put into my fire cider this time around (based entirely on what I had in the pantry and the fridge at the time):
lemons
onions
garlic
dried hot peppers
raw ginger
raw turmeric
rosemary leaves and stems
dried juniper berries
sticks of cinnamon
cloves
Once you’ve chopped and divvied the ingredients amongst the mason jars - and you can pack it in there, my stash was a little light so these are a lot less packed with goodness than they usually are - cover with apple cider vinegar and wait for a month for everything to steep. Gently wiggle the jars around every day so all the ingredients get really marinated together. Pro-tip: I put a couple squares of wax paper between the glass jar mouth and the lid to keep the vinegar from eroding the lid gasket too much. After a month, I’m going to add a couple spoonfuls of honey to the strained concoction and then down it like a shot every morning.
Some folks do some really cool variations on this process with foraged ingredients - spruce tips and spruce pollen, for example - and with homemade fruit cider vinegar, but I didn’t have the gumption for all that this year. But it’s nice that the process is so flexible and un-fuck-up-able. We love that around here.
So - take care till next time! Thanks for following along with me so far. More to come.
<3, mere