Winter greens for the winter blues

Have you ever wondered why the winter holidays celebrated by Northern cultures involve evergreens? When deciduous trees and shrubs drop their leaves and flowers are long gone, when daylight disappears and nights grow long, when the soil itself freezes and snow mantles the ground, we need a reminder that life will indeed continue. Hence the evergreen Christmas trees, wreaths of fragrant fir and pine, ivy garlands, and holly centerpieces with shiny leaves and bright red berries.

Those are things I love about Christmas--especially the resinous smell of pine and fir sap, a fragrance that reminds me of sun-warmed summer days even as icy winds blow down the valley and snow dusts the peaks.

But when I find myself feeling the winter blues, I need more than the fragrance of evergreens or the shine of holly berries. I need fresh greens to eat. There's something about ingesting crisp leaves full of chorophyll, the green pigment that plants use to capture the sun's energy, that lifts my winter mood. We live less than a block from the local grocery store, so it's easy to go buy a box of those organic greens from California. But I'd rather eat greens I've grown with my own hands here in my own soil. And although we plant spinach and market greens in fall, and manage to keep some of them alive over the winter, they grow so slowly once the day length drops below 10 hours and the night's lows drop below 10 degrees that the harvest is occasional and tiny.

So this year Richard and I decided to experiment with growing fresh greens inside. Our house is designed to capture the winter sunlight for heat, which means it's got lots of windows facing south and thus can function as a decent greenhouse. In mid-November, long after our last real garden harvest, I planted one flat of spinach seeds (Catalina, my favorite variety from Rene Shepherd) and another flat of Rene's Paris Market salad mix. The Paris Market mix started sprouting in less than a week; the spinach took a bit longer. They're putting out their first real leaves, and looking a bit leggy, so I've taken to moving the two flats from our bedroom where they get sun for less than eight hours a day through the 8-foot-wide sliding glass door, to the living room, where a 16-foot-wide bank of windows occupies one whole wall. If my experiment works, we'll be eating fresh salads in the New Year.

And that--along with a spicy-smelling piñon pine tree cut to thin our overgrown local forests--takes care of my winter blues.

(Thanks to local artist Rod Porco, maker of extraordinary sculptural baskets and talented woodsworker, for the wreath above and for our firewood and Christmas trees!)

Making lemons into lemonade

Richard and I drove to Denver last Tuesday to prepare for his surgery for bladder cancer. First came a day at the VA Hospital--a wonderful place despite the many difficult cases it serves, because the staff has a culture of caring and competence. (It's what healthcare should be, with equal emphasis on "health" and "care.") After six hours and lots of tests, we found out that he's very healthy, but for that "beautiful" carcinoma with its filmy petals waving gently in the current of his bladder and for the fact that his blood is too thin--it's not clotting well. So he's got to give up his daily pot of green tea and give his blood time to thicken up, and his surgery has been rescheduled for July 1st.

Hearing his surgeon say that she was pushing back the surgery for a month was like sucking on lemons. We just wanted it over with. But you can only feel sorry for yourself for so long. So we made lemonade: We spent the rest of the week we planned for his surgery in Denver with my folks and Molly, our daughter, who had already flown in from San Francisco. It wasn't a vacation. But we did take all five of us in our Subaru Forester on a picnic to Barr Lake, northeast of Denver, where we walked a boardwalk over a lapping marsh--my Mom clumping along in her special boot after foot surgery and my Dad spotting birds passing on the breeze. We saw more orioles in the spring-green cottonwood trees lining the shoreline there than I've ever seen at one time in my life. And Molly and Richard spent a morning exploring art galleries. We took walks through the Capitol Hill neighborhood where we stayed, admiring the architectural details in the old stone mansions and 1920s apartment houses. We smelled irises and roses and lilacs in gardens growing from spring into summer.

And when we returned home, our kitchen garden was bursting. We picked a huge bag of spinach along with the first harvest of mixed lettuce. When we sat down to dinner that night our thoughts were not of bladder cancer or postponed surgery, but of the culture of caring at the VA Hospital, the chatter of orioles, and of tender new greens flavored by our very own patch of ground.

It seems to me that being healthy is not just about the technology and pharmacology of modern medicine. It's about how you take what comes, whether you use the lemons for lemonade, or let them lie bitter on your tongue. It's about taking joy where you can, and never forgetting to stop and smell the lilacs drooping over the garden wall, to walk hand in hand with the people you love, and to savor the taste of new lettuce, fresh from the soil.