Category Archives: Confessions

about this plant. It’s one of the most beautiful, prolific, and enormous plants that actually grows in our backyard in Michigan. Pokeweed. There are more than one in the yard now, but the one that sits right next to the garden path, well not sits, more like towers, is about 8 feet tall. I did not plant it. I’m pretty sure a bird did when they pooped the seeds onto the soil, along with instant fertilizer.

This pokeweed has a thousand times more berries than the thornless blackberry I planted 9 years ago and have so far reaped a total of 3 berries from. (Not joking. We went sailing in the North Channel two weeks ago [yes! a post for later!], and when we returned, every last blackberry, apple, and peach was noticeably missing from the trees and brambles.) No harvest for the humans. For the raccoons and squirrels? All kinds of fruit cobblers and sweet treats.

In Washington, the weeds in my Mom’s garden grow low to the ground and stubborn, fighting for their spot rather than taking it over with such exuberant eagerness. Weeds in Michigan are definitely not shy–or benign.

Every part of American pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) is poisonous. It’s main stem is the size of a young tree’s trunk, and its taproot probably reaches down another foot or so, firmly anchoring its succulent weight in our sandy soil. From most to least toxic: roots, stems, leaves, berries. When it’s young, some people twice-boil the leaves and shoots for poke salad.

It looks out of place, too abundant, too red and purple and loud. No wonder it makes people uncomfortable.

There’s a lot online about how to manage pokeweed in an agricultural setting. Crop rotation, moldboard plowing, and disking. All techniques I studied as a graduate student at Ohio State University as I talked to organic farmers about the ways they managed the weeds in their fields without chemicals. Only pokeweed isn’t really a “weed.” It’s native to this part of the United States.

I recognized it this spring, when the long, thick stand of flamboyant green leaves literally shot up from the soil early and strong.

I let it grow.

A quick google search, “Should I remove pokeweed?”

“Yes. If pokeweed grows in your landscape, take steps to remove it.”

I’ll tell you what those steps are, because two of my neighbors and I volunteered to weed the community center’s garden beds during Covid and pokeweed was standing front and center.

Step 1: Put on gloves.

Step 2: Bring your best pruners.

Step 3: Attempt to pull it from the ground. When that fails, along with your back, weild best pruners and attempt to cut it off a few inches above the soil.

Step 4: Go back to shed to get shovel and large pruning shears, or possibly a hacksaw.

Step 5: Manage to finally mash/cut the main stem. Begin to dig around taproot.

Step 6: After struggling for 15-20 minutes to pull up taproot, cover what remains with soil and call it a day.

Step 7: Repeat the following year.

In Michigan, pokeweed is native. In Washington State and all along the Northwest Coast, pokeweed is invasive. It’s the same plant, poisonous to people, livestock, and pets. In Oregon, it’s considered an “Early Detection Rapid Response” species! Danger! Danger! In one particularly distressing case, “The berries stained our white dog purple.”

When it grew up to my waist, about 36”, I still didn’t chop it down.

Pokeweed is a member of the nightshade family, the most sinister sounding of them all (tomatoes, eggplants, beware!). Possibly you’ve heard of the deadly nightshade, or belladonna—the beautiful woman. Venetian women in the Renaissance used eye drops made from belladonna berry juice to dilate their pupils for an enchanting effect, and probably a few days of hallucinations, too.  Agatha Christie’s serial killer Tim Kendal used belladonna to give his third wife hallucinations before he planned to poison her properly.

Even though people, pets, and potential murder victims should steer clear of nightshade berries like those bursting from the pokeweed in my backyard, birds and Hawk moth larvae love it. Like a lot of food and medicine, it’s the way the plant is used that matters.

The pokeweed creates her prolific toxins for self-defense. Her roots secrete proteins to protect against root rot and invasion by soil-borne pathogens, and her seeds contain peptides that protect them against fungal diseases. And, in certain well-prepared forms, pokeweed can protect rather than harm humans. Indigenous people made a salve from her juices to ease rheumatism and arthritis and to treat fungal infections, ringworm, and eczema. The extracts from pokeweed, according to some recent scientific work, are shown to have “antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, anticancer, antiparasitic, and insecticidal activities.”

When she came up to my chin, still, I let her grow.

Inkberry, coakun (not much on where this comes from), scoke (from m’skok, that which is red), whatever you call her, pokeweed was here long before I was, feeding the birds and moths, tapping the ground to let rainwater percolate through and oxygen fill soil cracks like a breath. She provided shade to wild rabbits and rolly polies. She defended herself.

I suppose she might be the one who decided to let me pass each time I measured her height, and now her sprays of white flowers have ripened into fruits that will spread across the neighborhood, a lot like the milkweed seeds that have populated the sidewalk crevices and fence lines of my neighbor’s yards.

An aggressive colonizer, she’s called. Well, I’ll let her be. She has been providing for the people and more-than-human beings with beauty and strength for centuries.

I think she’ll stay.

“The Timberdoodle…”

I mumbled out loud in my head. It was a store in De Tour Village, (pronounced dee toor) Michigan, and we were De “Tourists” that summer.

I said the name again out loud to my husband.  “Timberdoodle? That’s cute. Like a picture of a tree doodled on paper made out of trees. Like all the kitschy things we’ll probably find inside.”

“Whelp, let’s go in!”

It was a colorful store of rooms filled with eye candy that made me want to buy a lot of things and also say no to everything my kids brought to show me. “This will make me so happy,” their eyes pleaded. “I’ll do whatever you say afterwards if you just buy me this one thing that I love.” I was trapped in consumerism and eventually in small talk with the owner who looked like her native habitat might have been a store on the corner of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. This place was more than two thousand miles from there, across a bridge even longer (and some say more impressive) than the Golden Gate.

The street in front of the store was open and wide, sloping up to a neat ridge of pine and deciduous trees. As a De Tourist, I could have lingered for hours on the brightly painted porch in front of the Timberdoodle while considering the most pressing issue on this end of town—which of the two restaurants we would choose for dinner (if they were even open). Main street was 3 blocks long and ended at a ship shape marina that was three times that. Getting around was more boat inclined than wheeled here.

The Timberdoodle was a distillation of Michigan’s rugged independence mixed with cottage charm and long maritime history that saturated the Upper Peninsula’s freshwater lakes. The tiny store overlooked the St. Mary’s river where 1,000 foot (“footers”) freighters slipped by practically unheard and unnoticed. Eighty-six million tons of raw materials and 90% of the US’s iron ore glided by the Timberdoodle’s back alley.

No rush.

If a freighter could make it to this narrow water crack between the Eastern UP and the last island before Canada from China at that speed, what could possibly be so important to rush off to?

We had time, so we browsed, and the Timberdoodle’s charm grew on me like a barnacle on one of the footer’s hulls. It had more character than just quaint. There was local art and soap, local jams, local jewelry, and a bulletin board for community events they hosted (pop ups at the farmer’s market, local authors and the like). There were a lot of Melissa and Doug toys for the kids, and Taylor Swift inspired bracelets,of course. A few whispy articles of women’s clothing on a rack that I thought might make me look carefree and slightly hip, along with strings of exotic, but earthy beads on silver chains. A few frog umbrellas, bug catchers, whirligigs, and glasses that compound vision like a fly’s, multiplying every trinket in the store by 1,000. I also found (and bought) a pair of “Safety Sasses.” Thick, oversized, horn rimmed tortoise shell safety glasses for women to wear while constructing things out of wood, perhaps a Timberdoodle, whatever that was.

As I warmed up to the store, I felt my inner critic quiet and my good nature gather courage to speak with the woman behind the counter.

“Hi” and “How are you?” and “The store’s name isn’t anything I’ve heard of before. Is Timberdoodle something you came up with?”

“Oh no,” she said, and smiled at me like a mother explaining the most basic thing to her child. “It’s the name for a game bird you find here. Also called a woodcock.”

“Oh! I’ve never heard of it.”

I googled it.

A bird appeared on my screen: short and pudgy with deep pools of water for eyes and a long plover-like bill not for piercing sand, but for exploring forest duff, for slurping up worms that wriggled beneath the rich decay. Timberdoodles snuffle their lives along the earth’s spongiest floor, but they aren’t bound to it. Every spring, they soar straight up into the early morning and late evening sky to show the world and a lucky Timberdoodle lady their dizzying sky dance, a whirling cyclone drop accompanied by exuberant song.

Imagining this was like suddenly discovering my elderly, teetotaling, tractor-bound Great Uncle Harold could break out the smoothest, mind blowing dance moves if I got up early enough to watch.

“Crrrck! Crrrrck!” The Timberdoodle peents to announce his amorous intentions, hidden at your feet among leaves and old pine needles at the edge of a field or bog. He lifts into the air, higher and higher, and falls in exuberant twirls, like a helicoptering maple seed, and the whole forest pauses to admire the wild, acrobatic feat. Later, when the curtains close on his last performance, he will lift his brown belly and long bill into the air and migrate to New Orleans for the winter, which seems like a fitting place for such a surprisingly talented, unassuming, and exuberant bird.

Had I ever seen one in the sky?

Never.

I suddenly longed to see and feel those feathers the color of mud and soil—a soft, beautiful brown camouflage. Could I sneak up on a Timberdoodle? Lay in wait one early morning? Or was it enough to suddenly and simply know it existed? To know it danced? What would I gain if I saw it? Would witnessing the dance shift my awareness of the world, and for how long? Are tiny shifts enough to move a life in unexpected directions?

Like the fox I have yet to spy, my eyes still haven’t rested on a Timberdoodle in the wild. I knew that to create such a moment meant I needed to make more than a passing, hopeful effort. It meant asking local experts and concocting a certain means of planned patience into existence. But where to make those efforts?

At my high school in Washington State, I was a Timber-wolf.

Incredibly cool, I used to think, but a very different kind of Timber. One of my brief boyfriend’s dad and his friend traveled to Alaska when they were young and spry and shot a Timberwolf to taxidermy for the trophy case in the high school gym. It was still there 25 years later–a dull gray brown, one paw lifted, nose pointed towards home, trapped in a glass box and surrounded by trophies of the achievements of teenage athletes, including our 3^rd in state volleyball team and 4^th in state basketball team. Tennis players and track stars and this wolf, who could have out run us all in speed and distance, who showed her cubs how to howl at a night sky shining with the ancient claw marks of the milky way, who had been removed, cut down like so many timbers around her, and frozen among brief, human victories, herself being one of them.

What is this world where materials are removed along with the animals attached to them like spiders on the end of their glorious silk? Wolf and iron ore, forest and water, fur and metal, feather and foot. We rearrange earth’s body to fit our idea of bodily need until we stumble into a gift shop at the end of the Upper Peninsula and find time to become wild and warm and discover the ancient, flighty, and astonishing; until we slowly layer new awareness of the more-than-human upon our hearts and want to repair our relationship with them, break the glass, preserve the duff, wonder at doodling Timbers.

I stood, stunned, by the Timberdoodle.

In this store named after a beautiful, shy bird, I found strings of pearls and quilt squares, trinkets that, taken time and focused attention, can be gathered and stitched back into each other by gently pulling on threads of old and local knowledge, new and unviersal wonder, humble and uncomfortable conversations. These pieces are what will revive our inner and outer landscapes until wolves run unhindered, doodle dance floors remain intact, and we are beautified and remade to be part of something bigger, a whole reality rather than a split one.

I contacted two local wildlife gurus when we got back home, and they knew exactly where to find Timberdoodles. Not a hundred miles from my house in the wilds of the UP, but a mere 20 miles east of East Lansing. It was astonishing. Who knew they were so close? Upper and lower peninsula realities collided—brushed up against each other like brindled feathers. Like De Tour and San Francisco and New Orleans. Like wolves and doodles.

Timberdoodles.

It sits on our deck, huge and dare I say looming, eyeing our two actual cats through the sliding glass door, its little paws resting contentedly on its light brown belly, perfectly balanced on its back legs and long, gloriously flowing tail, waiting very insistently for something….for food.

It is the biggest squirrel I have ever seen.

It is not at all like the ground squirrels, or gray diggers as we call them, ubiquitous in Eastern Washington. Those squirrels do not live in trees, but in rocky outcrops and underground tunnels dug entirely too close to the septic tank’s main line. My Mom once hired a high schooler to eradicate said gray digger from our garden by “local means.”

Oh yes, he came, with his hunting license, his hunter’s orange, his rifle, and a lawn chair, sat quiet as a cat for at least two hours on our deck, his back to the house, watching the stone garden wall where the gray diggers were known to idle on warm rocks after stuffing their bellies with strawberries, and when the gun went off, “BAM!!” it scared us all ****less. Mom paid him. He packed up.

The next day, two more gray diggers sprouted from that same rock.

No, this “cat” is the eastern fox squirrel—brash, bold, beautiful, and as big as a cat. It’s as if an artist took a brush and blended the deepest shades of brown, tan, and rusted orange into one. Sometimes they drape themselves over our deck railing and sleep, waiting for someone to paint them. I’ve recently learned there is a name for this. It’s called “splooting.”

There are other squirrels in Michigan. Red and eastern gray squirrels (which include the black ones, somehow), and Michigan’s northern and southern flying squirrels (though I have never seen one) flitting in the treetops of our backyard and flirting with my newly bloomed tulips. I fire-walled those bulbs in the fall with black netting hidden under fallen leaves, fed them with bone meal and brought them through the last frosts of spring with burlap blankets, only to discover their superb, rich, red blooms decapitated one morning by hungry squirrels.

There are plenty of “local means” in Michigan that I could call.

A Michigan Department of Natural Resources wildlife biologist had this to say in January, “It is not like anything you can get in the store, and it just has a very unique, light taste but kind of a nutty flavor in it.” (Detroit Free Press)

One day, longing for freedom from mothering and hoping to fill that hollow spot that needed my mother nature, I went to a patch of woods near our house. A rhythmic gnawing snatched my ear, and in the crook of a maple branch sat a fox squirrel. She held a pine cone in her clever, furry fingers, and chewed the seeds and spit the chaff out the side of her mouth, which was turned up in a kind of sideways crescent. Eye level with me, happy to let me watch the bright brown fur that outlined her eyes, the perfectly shaped tail that exactly mirrored the curve of her back, her thin lips, moving so nimbly and fast that the pine cone came apart in a blur of precision, leaving shreds behind like leaves on the trail until just a cone-cob remained.

She chattered at me, loudly. I had watched long enough.

Watching squirrels, the Iroquois story goes, taught people how to tap trees. Robin Kimmerer, a mother, plant ecologist and writer, tells the story in her book, “Braiding Sweetgrass.” Squirrels were hungry, and so were people. It was the hungry time—the end of winter and the beginning of spring—so squirrels gnawed at tree branches with their spile-like teeth and licked the sap that seeped out while it flowed up the outer and inner bark from the tree’s underground “root” cellar. Last year’s sunshine for this year’s life.

The squirrel-tapped sap froze on the surface and then—sublimation. It was so cold that water in the sap transformed directly into a gas, leaving a bead of sweeter sap the squirrels returned to for food.

Kimmerer describes how Native Americans around the Great Lakes used long, hollowed out logs to sublimate sap on a large scale. They poured sap into the shallow channel so it would freeze. Then, they would chip out water that was now ice, distilling sap with cold instead of heat to save precious fuel.

Sublimation.

This is the second year that we have tapped a tree in our backyard. Can’t get much more Michigan than the simple fact that we even thought about doing it. And a Silver Maple, no less, not even a sugar one.

As the smoke from our fire curled into our neighbor’s backyard, he did not miss a beat. “Boiling sap?” It does smell delicious. Our arch was rudimentary. The sap, smoky. Ten gallons of sap, 5 hours of solid burning, and 1 pint of syrup. We were as excited as kids when we poured it on pancakes and used it in cocktails. We live in a city of 50,000 people, and our neighborhood is full of maple trees and squirrels.

An urban sugar bush.

Everything is flowing, the tree sap, the blood in my heart, the Red Cedar River, the stories about people and squirrels who lived here for thousands of years before we did, and my gradual understanding of where my family lives, eats, and watches squirrels.

Nothing is still.
​
Especially not the over-sized squirrel sitting on my deck that destroyed my tulips and taught people how to tap trees.