audreywhitson.com

Category: Food

  • Summer Solstice 2025: What We Know

    “To be native to a place, we must learn to speaks its language.”
    Robin Wall Kimmerer

    The land where I now live was known as River Lot 20 in fur trade and settlement times. But of the layers (the people and their stories) “before contact,” I know almost nothing.

    To show these layers on a page, this screen, I would need reams of blank space. A great silence. Not because there was nothing there but because so much was erased with colonization. So much forgotten. Or buried. In the earth but also buried in our psyche. Do I even begin to feel the loss? The land holds billions of years of story, most of it in pieces.

    Just metres below the surface of this city, according to the archeologists. Within walking distance of my home, on both the north and south sides of the river at Queen Elizabeth Park, Walterdale Flats, Rossdale Flats, Victoria Flats, Groat Road and more. What they’ve found.

    We know this: How these First Peoples cooked (from the ash and charcoal hearths left behind). How they processed their food (from the fire-broken rocks). How they hunted (from spear and knife points). We know some of what they ate; kin we can still recognize: seeds of kinnikinnick, bunchberry, pin cherry, and choke cherry. Bones of bison and ungulates (deer, elk and moose). Used for medicines, for food.

    We know some of what they traded with the first Europeans who came to this part of North America: lynx and beaver pelts for glass beads and clay pipes. We know where some of their bones lie, the Papachase Cree and the Métis, alongside the Irish, English, French and Scottish traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company Fort. But even this sanctioned graveyard, until it was uncovered by a utilities expansion, hadn’t survived the collective memory.

    There is so much we do not know.

    Yet there is a longer history to this land. Buried for centuries within Indigenous communities where language has been kept alive. Visions, ceremonies, sacred societies, and stories have been passed on, searched out, and sometimes shared. For myself I have learned from the work of so many Indigenous authors: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Wagamese, Maria Campbell, Tomson Highway, Joy Harjo, Thomas King, Louise Erdich, Drew Hayden Taylor, Tommy Orange, Augie Merasty, Eden Robinson, Billy-Rae Belcourt, Tanya Tagaq, Patty Krawec. I can’t name them all.

    One project where I live has been gathering stories of the North Saskatchewan River, many of them told by Indigenous elders. The North Saskatchewan had many names before the Europeans arrived: the Kisiskâciwanisîpiy (Cree for the swiftly flowing river) and omaka-ty (the big river to the Blackfoot), to name just two. As we approach National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada, Indigenous people have events planned everywhere across this land.

    They have prepared a feast for us. They are inviting us to the table.

    When we sit down to the first meal of this Summer Solstice, we too gather around food and story. Maybe we make kinnikinnick tea or have last year’s pincherry or chokecherry syrup on our pancakes. Perhaps we are gathering like the ancestors of this land, to give thanks for the greening of things and for the land that feeds us body and spirit. For what we know.

  • Winter Solstice 2023: Green Point

    Winter Solstice 2023: Green Point

    Winter Solstice. It’s an ending and a beginning. A point in time and a repeating. At the crux of an old year and a new one, a journey around the sun both familiar and yet unfamiliar. Imagine 4.5 billion years. This is about how many times the Earth has been around the sun. Our piece of it as humans is so small.

    This past summer one of my sisters and I had the privilege of visiting the island of Newfoundland off the east coast of Canada. We hiked the east and west coasts and many points in between. The island is a place of contrasts. Boreal forest surrounded by ocean. Northern latitudes where Partridge berries* and bakeapple+ and semi-tropical rhododendron grow side by side. As islands go, it’s big. Count on at least twelve hours driving from L’Anse aux Meadows (where the Vikings first came) on the Great Northern Peninsula to the city of St. John’s.

    Newfoundlanders are fond of calling their big island, “The Rock.” There is very little top soil anywhere, yet they love their gardens, rocky soil and all, and their root cellars. It’s not uncommon for people to use the ditches on either side of road to grow their vegetables. It’s here too that the northeast corner of the Appalachians, the oldest mountains in North America, emerge from the ocean floor. Where glaciers have cut fjords into the land and time has changed them from saltwater to fresh water lakes.

    The island is built on Cambrian rock five hundred million years old. And in some places, like the Tablelands at Gros Morne, the earth’s dark green mantle has pushed through and oxidized into an eerie rusty orange, a kind of moonscape telling the tale of plate tectonics, the formation of continents and mountain ranges.

    Geology comes from the Greek word for “earth” and “speech” or “word.” In other words, geology is earth talk or the story of the earth. The Desert Mothers and Fathers who lived in the deserts of Egypt in the 3rd century of the common era, often spoke of reading the Book of Creation. Creation was their everyday bible, their Divine Word. In some Indigenous cultures, rocks are honoured as grandfathers because they are old and hold stories.

    That’s how I felt encountering Green Point on the west coast for the first time, where the Cambrian Period moves into the Ordovician. One of those places on the Earth where the connection is primal. Being in the presence of, being close to the beginning of everything, the beginning of time. So many ancestors, their stories flung out like a scroll across the ocean shore, telling of other oceans, other species, other continents, other times. A glimpse into the Earth’s many changes, restructurings, sheddings and reformations. The way time builds layers, leaves a seam stitched and a trail. Leaves a story. The layers revealing the first signs of complex life, life forms long extinct and others adapted, evolved. Still others, like ours, geologically and spiritually speaking, just emerging.

    This photograph of my sister among the rocks captures how I felt about that moment at Green Point: Curiosity. Awe. But especially, humility (of the soil; of the earth). A context for all the changes I might live as an individual and the world’s changes in my lifetime and beyond. The realization that our time as humans on this planet is so fleeting, so recent. The land, so powerful. The miracle that is this Earth home. If we just listen to her story.

    * low bush cranberry

    + cloud berry

  • Winter Solstice 2022: Imagine

    Winter Solstice 2022: Imagine

    Lately I feel a little like I’ve been walking through the streets of Charles Dickens’s London, with waifs on every corner and debtor prisons in the form of credit cards and food banks, or perhaps the byways and highways of John M Synge’s Ireland in the late 1800s and his accounts of tenant farmers turned out of their small huts to survive in the ditches when they couldn’t pay the rent. Or even better, walking through Maria Campbell’s account of growing up Metis on the prairies, as one of the Road Allowance People because these were the only places available to them to scrape together a living. Different times, different places, all of them people disenfranchised. Without the rights or privileges of a free person. Without place.

    But no, I go about my business—bank, bakery, grocery store—in Edmonton, Alberta. A dynamic, modern and civilized city by most accounts, part of a prosperous province and country. At three o’clock in the afternoon, I pass the single men’s emergency shelter off 97th Street, people already lining up for a bed for the night. I pass the young women trying to sell themselves for a meal or a place to crash. I stroll past the dozens of makeshift tents that line every available strip of public land between private fences and public sidewalks off 95 and 96 streets. I live in a building in Boyle Street, a mature neighbourhood just east of downtown Edmonton, the other side of the tracks from the same encampments. Some days people seek shelter between our front doors. Sometimes they are just trying to warm up. Sometimes they are reorganizing their meagre possessions or putting on some clean clothes. Sometimes they are doing drugs. Break-ins are not uncommon on our property.

    What to do? It’s a dilemma for all who live here. Call 211 for help? Ask them to leave? Call the police? Pass them a sandwich? Pretend we don’t see them? My response is never the same and never enough. Sometimes they don’t take help. More often than not there’s no help to be had.

    The number of people without a home in Edmonton has doubled (at 3000) since the start of the pandemic. More than fifty percent are Indigenous. The city only has 620 emergency shelter beds and just over 400 supportive housing units (most occupied) for those with addiction and mental health issues. This for a city of one million. Where are they going to go? It’s a debate within the neighbourhoods too, one that has been playing out in City Council meetings.

    Perhaps it is fitting that on the longest night of the year, we ask hard questions of ourselves; I have no answers except for stories.

    A friend reminded me recently that poverty is structural. Social problems are compounded when populations and services are disproportionately concentrated.

    Poverty too is a form of violence, a Chilean friend once patiently explained to me. As with any experience of violence, people respond as best they’re able. In Edmonton in 2022, that sometimes plays out in addiction, crime and anti-social behaviour.

    Maybe we need a new way of seeing. A good friend and priest, René Fumoleau, who worked with the Dene in northern Canada most of his life, told the story of a time when he asked a local artist to draw a scene for Midnight Mass. He wanted a picture of the holy family arriving in Bethlehem, only it would be a Dene village and they would have a tent and a dog team. The artist kept putting him off. Yes, he would do it. Yes, he was thinking on it. But as weeks, then months went by and still no drawing, René finally cornered him. That’s when the artist told him, he just couldn’t imagine Mary, Jesus, and Joseph left to fend for themselves. Why, if they had arrived at any Dene community, any one of them would have made room. They would have been welcomed.

  • Fall Equinox 2022: Harvest Moon

    Saturday, September 10th, just after 3 o’clock I got a call from my tailor, Kim. I’d left a couple of things for hemming. She was closing early. “We have a celebration tonight,” she told me. There had been some Chinatown festivities at the Farmer’s Market that day, with dragons and lions dancing in the streets, games of chance, a long table feast, music and vendors. Everyone was welcome to the long table. I noticed houseless and residents, settlers and Indigenous lining up for lunch, but I had been in a hurry. Now I hurried to search the Internet: the Moon Festival or the mid-Autumn Harvest Festival is celebrated across Asia. It’s a time when extended families gather to share food, hang lanterns, watch the moon and give thanks.

    Could I come and get my clothes now? I couldn’t get to her shop fast enough, so we agreed to rendezvous at her home (not far from mine) about five o’clock.  At the appointed time, I hopped on my bike, braved football stadium traffic (Calgary vs. Edmonton), skirted the road closures/barricades and arrived just after the hour, the house full of company. Kim was in the kitchen cooking. A daughter and then a granddaughter handed me my articles through the front screen door. This gathering, I thought, was its own passing on, generation to generation, the traditions that bind us; however we call them, to the land. I was grateful to glimpse this family’s celebration, even if just from the doorstep.

    That night, when I woke in the middle of the night and peered out the window, I found the full moon shining through the trees, joined by Jupiter and Neptune. The whole sky was lit up. I lingered in the glow.

    Ten days before I had experienced a harvest moon of my own, a re-aligning of the planets. A few months ago, I made a decision to leave my day job at the end of August to dedicate myself to writing full-time. I had been planning it for a long time. Leading up to the day, colleagues would ask what it felt like.

    Like falling off a cliff and not knowing what was on the other side.  

    Or jumping out of an airplane. I had a parachute, I’d done the training, but would I land okay?

    A kind of death, I told someone else. It is an ending, she agreed. But also a new beginning.

    Well, now I’ve landed and it’s as if I’m experiencing each day from a new angle as I find my way into new routines and new habits. Working full time and writing part-time, there was so much that I needed to cram into each minute. I was good at it: eating and working. Getting to work and getting exercise. Reading and commuting. A double, even a triple life, endemic in our culture, rich at times, but also exhausting.

    It is a blessing to be able to slow down, to do one thing at a time. Walking for the sake of walking. Rising later, more with my natural rhythms. Making lunch when I’m hungry. Doing the laundry any day of the week. Sundays were for so many years my writing shift, now I have whole weekends to enjoy like other people do! And regular work days to focus on my passion.

    Some days I wake with trepidation. Can I meet my many goals? Will I be as productive as I think? Most mornings on rising, I’m reminded of other times in my life when I’ve set out on a new adventures: moves, travels, studies. I feel exhilarated, reinvigorated and alive. The mundane still enters in: the pin valve that broke on my hot water heater last weekend, the neighour’s shower that (somewhat) overflowed into my suite last week. Life still happens. But there’s a simplicity that comes with being able to focus one’s life—a clarity in connection. Like looking at that full harvest moon in the night sky: pure joy, surrounded by all the world.

  • Winter Solstice 2021: A Pot of Green Lentils

    As I set out to write this midwinter reflection, I cook a pot of lentils. (This is our earth.) Cooking my way to clarity. Or as Montreal writing friend Kate Henderson said in her Christmas card to me the other day, “writing” these days “takes the form of thinking.” Thinking. Cooking. Reading. Listening. I’ve been eavesdropping on many conversations: Indigenous-Ukrainian Relationship Building Initiative on the Canadian movement for Truth and Reconciliation (no I am not Ukrainian, but it doesn’t matter). Jonathan Franzen and Greg Jackson on climate action. Margaret MacMillan and Roy Jacobsen looking back on the paradoxes of war, the aftermath: both the benefits (the way positive societal change is accelerated) and the destruction (how people and species are destroyed and displaced).

    And so in this season of peace, their questions mix and mull in my mind: What happens when we share our stories of this land, human being to human being? What healing, what joy, and what partnerships are born? What if we approach the climate fight like a war, investing all of our resources in it, all of our labour, accelerating innovation, and recovering a common purpose as we do so? What if the climate war is already lost and the way forward instead is to build stronger, more resilient communities, finding hope through smaller victories? Tackling the battles we know we can win now: stopping the overfishing of the world’s oceans; eliminating plastic waste; preventing the desertification of arable lands; halting the destruction of boreal forests; rainforests and peat bogs; welcoming the displaced of our own and other species (offering sanctuary to the migrant, conserving and rebuilding habitat); supporting our local farmers market; starting a community garden?

    I wrote in my journal the other day: “Dreams are trying to force their way to the surface of my mind.”

    I wonder if this pandemic, as it drags on, is a preparation (Rest, Renewal, Dream) for this much greater struggle already upon us?

    My pot of Green Lentil Soup with Curried Brown Butter is done.  I serve myself a bowl and give thanks. This is our earth. In a year of drought, fires, and flooding: water from the North Saskatchewan River, du Puy lentils from southern Saskatchewan, salted butter from the interior of British Columbia; yellow onion, chili peppers and Russian garlic from Edmonton farms. Aroy-D Coconut milk from Thailand (my haircutter says it’s the best). Indian curry powder from who knows where. Hands passing to hands passing to hands, from picking, to packaging, to shelves: my vision of “supply chain management.” My vision of the networks, human and otherwise that have been laid bare by this pandemic, urging us to reach out and take hold as we welcome a new year.  

  • Brighid’s Wheel: The Perpetual Fire

    This past Wednesday I saw my doctor for my annual physical. Last year at this time my blood pressure was 80/60. I had been feeling the fatigue for months and would for many more. This January my blood pressure was back to 104/72, normal for me. I had always had low blood pressure, but never so low. Was it the long hours involved in publishing my second book? Was it stress at work? Was it diet?

    I tried salt. I limited my intake of carbohydrates. I initiated a 360-degree feedback process for self-awareness. A few months ago my energy started to shift; this past week I was even up early some mornings at my desk writing again. Friday I walked to work with the light beginning to break on the horizon. The first time in months. And I remembered that we are at the Celtic spring, the feast of Imbolc and the return of the light.

    I am put in mind of the perpetual fire at Kildare, Church of the Oak, a sanctuary pre-Christian in its origins, tended by a group of nineteen holy women, each taking a turn holding vigil over the fire for one day, then on the twentieth day leaving it for Brighid to tend herself. Though the fire consumed fuel, it was said to leave no ash.

    There were vestal virgins in Greek and Roman times as well. But historic chroniclers tells us that the fire at Kildare was still burning in the twelfth century and probably not extinguished completely until the British suppression of the monasteries in Ireland, during the sixteenth century. The fire was re-lit in Kildare in 1993, where it is tended once again by a group of women dedicated to Brighid.

    The number nineteen is significant astronomically. Babylonian, Hebrew and ancient Chinese calendars were based on a nineteen-year cycle worked out by astronomers to synchronize the number of times the moon orbits around the earth and the earth around the sun. Nineteen is also a common eclipse cycle for the sun and moon. Some standing stone circles in the Western Isles of Scotland were built with a nineteen-year cycle in mind; at Torhouse the circle is comprised of nineteen standing stones.

    Brighid’s wheel is a sun symbol and Brighid herself was a sun Goddess before she became a Christian saint. The women at Kildare were feeding the fire but more than the sun’s fire, they were feeding their souls, keeping vigil over the light within. The perpetual fire is the human spirit, the light that is never extinguished, even though we may see no evidence for its existence for long stretches, only ruins where it once shone. Sometimes it moulders unseen in our hearts, sometimes there are only coals, sometimes only memories.

    William Blake wrote:

    The Human Dress, is forged Iron
    The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
    The Human Face, a Furnace seal’d
    The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.

    And sometimes others tend the fire for us.

     

  • Dog Days

    The Romans called this time, the Dog Days of Summer, beginning July 24th and ending August 24th. Dog, after Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, which in ancient times would rise, like Venus, with the morning sun.  A season of super moons and harvest moons, languid days of heat and restless nights.

    Being a foodie of sorts, it is my favourite time of year for eating. And friends and family will tell you that I do like to eat. I inherit it through the Whitson side: all those smorgasbords our father took us to as kids.

    In Edmonton, Alberta, for a few days every year, produce in the markets is fresh and local: from lettuce to carrots, chard to corn, radishes to beets. I load up every Saturday morning. The stores are full of sweet BC fruits: peaches, nectarines, cherries, sugar plums. I grab as many as I can carry; stuff them into my fridge; spin them into smoothies; eat them in other people’s pies and crumbles. Eat them straight. Stuff myself.

    Dog Days. This is the season to gather honey. I go out more, I see friends more, I walk and walk and cycle. I don’t mind driving long distances. The horizon is open and whatever happens to me, it won’t be a snow storm or a snow bank I’ll be stuck in. I find I have days of complete relaxation. Maybe it’s because of vacation taken, maybe it’s a coinciding of vacation time in our collective unconscious. Everything slows.

    The other weekend, I called a friend up for a walk through the river valley. It was spur of the moment,  a perfect morning, and so good to have a wide open day with no plans written across it. “A joy” I said, to go off rambling with a friend and have no commitments pressing.

    “Golden,” she said, a little “like retirement.”

    A little like summer, I say.

    Golden.

     

     

  • Letter from Sage Hill

    Well, from the Sage Hill Writing Experience actually. As Philip Adams, the Executive Director, likes to joke, the name sounds like something cooked up by a bunch of hippies sitting around a circle smoking their favourite leaf. And may have been, but it is an experience. First there’s the people: the writers who come here from all over Canada for ten days to learn, to teach, and to read from work in progress. A meeting of the tribes, and some of the best writers in the business. Then there’s the landscape: the painterly Qu’appelle Valley near Lumsden in Southern Saskatchewan, the way the colours of the prairie hills change with the time of day and with the light, the way the barn swallows dive and dance the thunderstorms, the early and late airs. So many birds: meadowlarks, blackbirds, robins, catbirds, kingbirds, Baltimore orioles, so many singing sparrows. There’s the physical building itself, an interchurch retreat centre with a Franciscan legacy. The round chapel in the centre that’s a cool refuge from the heat of the day. The Franciscan Friars who do the dishes morning, noon and night. The bedrooms so narrow that one has to go outside to turn around. And I must mention the food, which reminds me in a good way of the best of farm kitchen cooking from my own childhood, especially the desserts, only Saskatchewan is a different country.  Nowhere else have I eaten exotic Half-Hour Cake or Pudding Cake or seen Matrimonial Cake (called Date Squares in Alberta) served with a spoon, and rice pudding baked in an oven. And yes, the coconut creme pie (think truck stop) is to die for.

    Now i’ll wait for the Saskatchewan ex-pats to correct me.