The tomatoes came from a farm within a stone's throw, the eggplant from our front yard. Our neighbor two homes down gave us the flounder he caught within a couple of miles of here. The basil got plucked from the backyard patch. The peach melomel came from local honey and peaches brewed under our roof a year ago, with help from a local vintner when I ran out of yeast nutrient. I biked over to the Cape May Winery, and he shared what he had.

This is how humans made it before the industrial age, when we depended on this year's sun, this year's crops, and this year's kindness.

Leslie's secret to her cooking in August--keep out of the way of the ingredients.

***

The sun went as far north as it's going to go, and is now sliding back, picking up momentum day by day. The bees know this, more frantic now as they store their honey. The plants know this, shedding captured calories into the fruit we call vegetables.

Food is good, food is abundant in these parts. We eat, and we put some by.

We'll freeze tomatoes and basil and beans. We'll ferment peaches and blueberries and honey. We'll collect seeds and store them in brown paper bags, in the pantry closet, until the creaking light of February prompts us to start sowing again.

***

By February, I will be diving into ribonucleic acids and adenosine triphosphates with kids who will be diving into McDonald's as we defrost last summer's pesto. McDonald's is cheap, and McDonald's is, to many, tasty.

A year ago I grew a batch of basil in class, eventually making a batch of pesto. I offered to share it, but my students were shocked I'd eat something we grew in class.

We are so disconnected from our earthy roots that even food has become abstract.

Biology, or any science for that matter, is not abstract. Oh, the models can get a bit wacky, and just about all of them are wrong here or there, but none of them come from thin air. Our hypotheses are human inventions, true, but our conclusions are not--our ideas are weathered by the natural world, by reality, by an uncertain sense of truth.

We eat, we breathe, we shit, we pee--pretty much all animals do. You can get through formal education all the way to a PhD and not have even a vague notion of how life works, how matter is transformed, and energy caught.

August is the month of accounting--the solar feast wanes, do we have enough to survive the winter? For most living things on this part of the world, the answer comes in a slow unraveling, as mitochondria are no longer fed pyruvate, as another life ends beneath the snow, silently, held in ice until the feast resumes in March.

And what do we offer the nascent adult? A diet of DNA, ATP, and ribosomes, a subcellular abstraction that answers nothing that matters to a child just starting to shave.

I hope to fix that....

And while we're at it, food is not energy.

P.S.: Perseids tonight!

READ MORE - August light

Yep, mostly the same post third time around--I like the rhythm of the year.

We call it August now, for Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, a short guy with bad teeth, but this was less of an issue before television--the name was dragged over to England by William the Conqueror, who enslaved both the Anglo-Saxon people and their language with the support of the Pope.

The English had a sensible name for this time of year before William blew through--weed month (weodmonað). We teeter towards the dark months. Things fall apart.

The sunlight diminishes perceptibly now. The plants know.

The past week we've eaten deep purple eggplants and bright pink brandywine tomatoes, yellow summer squash and green-and-red striped beans. Today we will pick basil for pesto, some for tonight, some for February. A bowl full of ripe blueberries waits for us, sunlight incarnate.

But the sunlight is dying, and the plants know.

We do not speak of religion in class, at least not formally, though students will occasionally ask religious questions, and I will deflect them. I explain that some things cannot be known through science, and that what I believe beyond the limits of science falls outside the province of class.

In class we talk of light and hormones, photoperiods and abscisic acids, to explain how plants know. We talk under the hum of fluorescent lights, time marked by defined blocks of time. In class, September light is exactly the same as February light, and class is always 48 minutes long, no matter where the sun sits.

Sunset today marks the start of Lammas, or Loaf Mass Day--joy for the harvests that are coming and regret for waning sunlight. Lammas used to be celebrated--the first wheat berries of the year were ground into flour and baked into bread offered in thanks, some used for Communion, some for the feast that followed.

We thank God (or Tailtiu or Lugh or some other forgotten gods)--harvest time reflects death and grace, whatever the culture. Death and grace feel foreign in the classroom, indeed foreign in our culture. We pretend, at our peril, that life is linear.

Lammas falls halfway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. The days are shortening, winter is coming. Until you feel the seasons in your bones, until you follow a grain of wheat from the ground to plant to bread to you then back to the ground again, the modern myths may be enough.

Science can explain why plants produce fruit when they do, and I can teach the steps. We can test whether a student learns what I present, and the students that do this best have access to all our culture offers.

You can become very powerful, very rich, without knowing grace. You can go far in life if blessed with intelligence and beauty, degrees and citations, without ever knowing what a wheat berry looks like, without ever kneading a lump of flour and water and yeast into glistening dough.

In the end, we don't know much, and may never know much. We can, however, recognize grace. We might not grasp it rationally, but we we can grasp it--a good reason to celebrate Lammas.

The Skeleton of Death dances every hour in Prague--photo of the Prague Astronomical Clock by Sandy Smith found on VirtualTourist.

READ MORE - Weodmonað