Last summer's blueberries are now sitting in brown bottles, waiting for June. The blueberries are in communion with nectar collected by bees.
Honey, fruit, water, yeast, and time.
It takes about two million flowers to make a pound of honey. 5 gallons of mead takes about 15 million flowers. A bee makes about 50 to 100 trips each time she wanders away from the hive collecting nectar.
150,000 bees collected nectar and converted it to honey. Millions upon millions of yeast converted the honey to ethanol and carbon dioxide.
My job? Just make sure the honey and the water and the blueberries and the yeast end up together in the same bucket, and once started, keep oxygen out.
Pretty simple, very good.
***
I got my first quahogs of the season yesterday. A quahog leaves a keyhole in the sand--one siphon in, one siphon out. Last spring I could not tell a quahog hole from a skimmer hole--now I can. Good news for me, not so good news for the quahogs.
I wandered about the flats in Villas looking for a keyhole. I saw hundreds, maybe thousands, of holes left by jackknifes and razor clams, but no keyholes.
I wandered a couple hundred yards from the high tide detritus. Then I saw it. I jammed my hand into the sand, and my fingers recognized the firmness of the quahog. Spring has arrived.
Making mead is simple; eating clams more so. Open, then eat.
One was chowder sized, not much smaller than my fist, and not much younger than me. The other was somewhat younger, maybe 10 years old.
I took them home, put them in the fridge for a couple of hours, then tossed them back in the bay just after sunset. Won't be long before I get a mess of them for dinner.
Pretty simple, very good.
***
So why do we teach?
Few of my children know what a quahog is, and even fewer care.
I am willing to bet Bill Gates never dug up a quahog, but he thinks he knows enough to teach your children. I bet Melinda hasn't clammed either.
They have a lot of
The foundation’s education work in the United States is focused on two major initiatives: ensuring that all students graduate from high school ready for college and a new effort to improve postsecondary education so that more students earn a degree or certificate with genuine economic value.
"Genuine economic value."
Not sure what that means--Treasury bills? Stock in Microsoft? A killer instinct?
Here's the deal, Bill. We are still attached to our land, the placenta for those of us who have wandered from the womb. Technology, high or low, does not change that connection.
A quahog has genuine economic value. The quahog has protein and sugars and can keep me alive. It also happens to be delicious. I can now get them from a tidal flat to my kitchen with a little bit of knowledge and some low-tech tools (kayak, paddle, bucket, rake).
I doubt Bill Gates has eaten shellfish fresher than I have, unless he carries a knife on a tidal flat. If he did, though, he wouldn't be trumpeting "genuine economic values" as the vague modern notion that it is.
He'd be trumpeting clams.
