Cedar on Shale
On a December morning long, long ago
On a cold winter morning, we drove down to the Knobs to fetch our Christmas tree. It would have been December 22 or 23, as in those days one didn’t put the tree up right after Thanksgiving. Saint Nicolas had actually brought the tree to my father’s Kentucky childhood home, the Swiss family waking up to a candle-lit tree on Christmas morning. In our house heated by coal- and wood-burning stoves, the air was very dry, and a tree became brittle within a few days. But for those few days from Christmas Eve through New Year, the tree was magical.
This morning, my sister and brother rode with my father and me in our ’57 Chevrolet – down the drive paved with gravel from the Green River, over the Peyton Creek bridge and across our cattle guard to McKinney Road. We turned right and headed south, past Neal’s Lane, past the lane to the Rickenbacker’s farm, past my father’s first-cousin-Richard’s farm on the left for a few miles to McKinney. The fields were bare sprinkled with pale corn stubs; their stalks and ears had been neatly chopped at the end of summer to ferment in the silos standing beside each barn. The hay was put up – the alfalfa, fescue, orchard grass, and red clover - to feed the cows over the upcoming winter. Queen Ann’s Lace and milkweed pods were dried and sprayed with gold paint to decorate the Christmas mantels. The crickets and grasshoppers were quiet this winter’s day, and the squirrels and groundhogs were lying low to avoid the farmer’s relatively free hunting time after a holiday meal.
We drove past McKinney’s Main Street with its local branch of the Lincoln National Bank and the Cincinnati Southern Railway Station, past Boneyard Hollow Road through Geneva and Yosemite to Jumbo. Just past Peck Hollow Road, we turned into a dirt road and parked at the end of the bottom, just before the track rose onto the shaly hillside. Trudging up the hill in search of the perfect cedar tree was easy in the winter, for the copperheads were dead asleep. The leaves of hickory and sycamore, maple and oak, sassafras and tulip trees rustled underfoot.
My father owned these 80 acres of woods in the Knobs. It was the source of straight young sassafras saplings to act as walking sticks, leaning around the barn to guide a wayward cow into her stanchion or to wave around while getting the cows out of the field into the barn for milking each summer afternoon. I’ve often wondered how and why we had that forested land some 15 miles from the farm.
My father’s first cousin’s son recently wrote a memoir of his childhood and wrote of a small parcel of wooded land, around 80 acres which normally came as an ‘extra’ when farmland was purchased in Kentucky in the mid-to late 1800s. A bit like today’s “subscribe to this, and we will send you a free tote bag.” The Knobs are a series of conical hills made of shale that circle Kentucky’s central limestone region, a region with more fertile soil and better for crops and cattle. The rocks are younger than those of the uplifted limestones of central Kentucky, and the Knob’s rocks actually have some hydrocarbons. More on that another time.
Aside from searching for a well-formed tree, we looked up to find mistletoe clinging to a black walnut tree. Daddy would use his shot gun to bring it down from tall trees decades old, and we picked up the bits and pieces broken up by the shot. We knew to find mistletoe in walnut trees but their hemiparasitic relationship was something I learned decades later.
Cedars are the first to reinhabit fields turned into pastures originally cleared by industrious immigrants eager to feed their livestock. They grow along fence rows and in untended fields and are rather unkept and homely, roundish with ungainly empty spaces among their branches. They are not the Hallmark Christmas tree. But, oh, the fragrance! Boughs and wreaths of Eastern Red Cedar Juniperus virginiana filled the houses and churches with Christmas fragrance.
Daddy put the tree, bottom first, into the trunk and tied down the lid with baling twine. Back at the house, we made thick chocolate fudge with nuggets of black walnuts from our own farm – fat green hulls turning black and lying in the driveway for the car and trucks to break up to yield the rough black shells, finally giving up their nut meat. Hickory nuts were precious – my Aunt Clara spent November evenings by the coal stove, listening to the radio, cracking nuts, and picking nut morsels from their shells to adorn her sugar cookies – one piece of nut on each cookie - a special treat for favored Presbyterian friends and family.
Today, I don’t eat fudge, and my daughter likes soft sugar cookies, so unlike my grandmother’s hard, thin discs which I prefer. No one I know wants to try three versions of fruit cake, and I don’t have enough friends to meander from house to house to sample other people’s Christmas treats. I now buy bottled, essential oil of cedar and a bottle of bourbon to find my Christmas joy.
Why I Love this Rock
The video explains why I like this mineral - Brucite - and the photo is just fun. I collaborated with Boulder artist, Russell McDougal, to create a photo using his paper ephemera and my minerals. It took me years, maybe decades, to take minerals less seriously.
More about Earth to Susan
I am writing a book about how people experience the Earth in different ways. I bring science, poetry, music, theology, literature, philosophy, history, geography, politics, and economics to these pages – all in relationship to Earth.
This month’s newsletter is how we perceive the Earth through place -always with some link to the Earth.
I believe that helping people understand that we all see the Earth in different ways will open conversations to help find solutions for the many issues facing the planet we call home.
I hope to return to one newsletter per month, and I hope you will continue to read this and share with your friends! It’s free.
Until next month,
Susan
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