I had plans to walk in the forest yesterday wildcrafting berries and other edibles to make a wild harvest meal for my own Lùnastal celebration. Maybe there’d be pigtails and a handwoven collection basket involved… it was all a very romantic fairy tale in my head. Of course, that’s not what actually happened. A letter slipped through the mail slot said that the house would be painted the next day and that I was to remove all my garden planters and anything attached to the walls.
So I spent the day moving planters inside and downstairs, unscrewing things, cutting back my giant 6-foot catnip plants, and digging up the potatoes and the fennel so I could stack planters inside. What I could leave on the porch I covered in tarps and old sheets to protect the plants from wet paint. My poor garden, it’s never gotten a chance to sit still this year with all the renovations our co-op has been doing. The poor bees keep coming to my porch this morning looking for the flowers, but they’re all gone.
There wasn’t much to harvest due to our cool cloudy summer, but I did dig up enough red potatoes for a potato salad and three huge fat smoky fennel roots which smell like carrots. I created a flower arrangement of some trimmings from my Rowan tree and flowers of henbane, sunflower, bittersweet, oregano, and catnip in an old milk bottle vase as an offering of what I grew with my own hands and hard work. Then I set up an altar in the kitchen with my root harvest, bread, and two yummy acorn squashes I bought a little while ago and dedicated it to the Fat Lady and the Good Tree.
Then I made myself a meal of floured and roasted chicken thighs with sourdough, roasted mushrooms, and grapes and put a portion aside for the Fat One and the Tree with a glass of my mead (in crystal of course ’cause it’s only the best for my deities). I poured out offerings of honey, oil, and mead in more tiny crystal goblets for the beloved and mighty dead and put them on the ancestral altar. They all got to eat first, as is polite, and then I got to eat my meal with a goblet of huckleberry-devil’s club mead. Sometimes it’s the simpler rituals that are the most enjoyable.
