First Frost

Friday morning I woke to the sound of my neighbor scraping frost off her car window. First frost. I knew it was coming when earlier in the week I noted the first morning my breath made fog on the way to a meeting. These details help anchor us in the seasons. "Why do you celebrate Thanksgiving?" asked a woman visiting from Holland. First frost marks the end of the growing season. I said it was started by the first settlers who wanted to celebrate surviving another year. Can you imagine what a slog it must have been to get the crops in before they freeze? Did you make of the note of the first day you put the heat on in the house? Farmers and gardeners remember those sorts of things. They notice climate change.

Of course, there had already been a frost in Saskatchewan. Mom told me that it was not a hard frost and she was surprised that many of her flowers, including her sweet peas were still blooming. My mother grows beautiful fragrant sweet peas in candy box colors, gladiolas aka "glads", her own forest of sunflowers, and petunias. I'm not a big fan of petunias, myself--sticky, garish and common if you ask me. In Saskatchewan, they're always peeking up from mint-colored container beds made of recycled painted car tires. Maybe some day I'll find it in my heart to love them.

Today I am leading a workshop on making seed balls for memorial gardens. As I was sifting the chunks out of the sea soil I was using and thinking this was a tedious job and it would be much better to use mushroom compost, I had an idea. If you are making memorial seed balls--why not use soil from the person's place of birth or somewhere meaningful for them? You could use soil from their favorite garden. You might need to get someone to package it up for you and send it in the post, but what a lovely ritual that would be. Paula Jardine had the idea that the family could put their loved one's ashes into the seed balls as a way of distributing them among family and returning them to the earth. This is the context I am creating the workshop in.

I like going to the graveyard. Traffic whirls by on 41st and up Fraser while in the heart of the cemetery, it is quiet and calm. Time is suspended. When my grade five history teacher told us time was a man-made concept, it blew my mind. It's true, time is cultural, but it is also natural. Death shocks us into remembering that nature has its own time, measured by soil temperature, the earth's rotation around the sun, micro-climates, and some say the fluttering of butterfly wings. This kind of time is not man-made. It is formed by everything that exists and it is mysterious and unknowable. When my grandma died, it must have been about this time of the year because I remember a farmer saying, "She's found a good place for the winter." In a small prairie town, even the most shy, laconic person in the community shakes your hand at the funeral and says something to the bereaved about death and time.

We try to stop time artificially by creating concrete memorials that withstand the rain and the wind and the passage of time. But even those slowly wear down and become mute witnesses to the mystery. Seeds are the best kind of memorial. They remember life and create new life from that memory. Diaspora--the spreading of seeds. Seeds remind us we have made it through another year and we have the resources to make it through another if we're lucky. This thanksgiving I will celebrate the pumpkin seeds, the seeds in the gullets of the turkeys, the spelt and the wheat not yet contaminated by genetic modification, the marigold, arugula and coneflower seeds ripening in my garden. Which seeds will you celebrate?