Feeding the Hungry Ghost (25 page)

Snow is for other people. From Key Biscayne to the Everglades, my beloved waterbirds are nesting — brown pelicans flying above in phalanx; snowy egrets rocking their vampy breeding plumage; plump, placid purple gallinules that look like bath-time rubber ducks dressed up with jewellike iridescent feathers.

Now is our planting season, a time of growth and nurturing. Yet at the same time that I’m putting in my kale, arugula, chard, peppers, radishes, and tomatoes, I can also sense the presence of ghosts.

Even in Miami, where October heat and humidity can turn
a fierce jack-o’-lantern into a pile of pumpkin puree overnight, something is in the air. We shift back to standard time, and by early evening, the sky is black, as though the sun had decided to call it quits forever and it’s the end of the universe as we know it.

You can see how this might weird people out.

Before Halloween was an excuse to eat candy and a ghost meant a costume made of a bedsheet with two holes cut out for eyes, the ancient Celts believed late autumn was the time of the dead, when they came back to earth because they hadn’t gotten to cross everything off their to-do list. The Celts marked the time with feasting and celebration to honor the dead. They hoped if they acted nice, the dead would feel mollified and go back where they came from. Druids did the same thing but added orgies.

By the eighth century, the Catholic Church had grown in influence; the church said, enough of this orgy business, cleaned up the sex, and designated November 1 as All Saints’ Day. But you know, the people like their sex and wildness, so the church had to add All Souls’ Day on November 2. People didn’t get to have sex, at least not church-sanctioned sex, but they could have bonfires and dress up in funky gear.

Benjamin and I observe a cleaned-up, modern Halloween. We take our young niece Nikki to pick out a pumpkin from the Boys Club sale, then bring her back to our house to carve it. This tradition dates back not to the Celts, but to my girlhood. I did it — and still do it — with my father. We’ve been doing it for decades, and yet our carving skills have scarcely improved. Each year, our jack-o’-lantern features triangle eyes and nose and an orthodontist’s dream of a snaggletoothed smile.

On Halloween, we light our jack-o’-lantern and dispense candy to adorable trick-or-treaters, me doing it with a fair amount of guilt for feeding them junk. On the other hand, I’m not going to be the neighborhood mean, crazy lady doling out apples or
homemade flaxseed bonbons. I tried giving out handfuls of pennies one year, shining them up with lemon juice and salt, pretty, pretty. Never again. No wonder we’re left off any orgy A-lists.

Things, though, are far from tame.

Pumpkin, Poblano, and Spinach Tacos

Seasonal produce delivers heat, sweet, and nourishment with vitamins A, B, and C, calcium, iron, potassium, and oh, I could keep going. Jack-o’-lanterns, though tempting to use (because we hate to waste, don’t we?), go mushy and bland when cooked. Choose a more flavorful variety like cheese pumpkin or sugar pumpkin for this southwestern-inspired meal.

Epazote, a traditional Mexican herb, has a grassy, savory flavor and has been used as a stomach soother. It also goes by wormseed and the more appealing name Jesuit’s tea.

Serves 6 to 8

4 poblano peppers

One 2-pound pumpkin, cut into bite-size cubes

2 tablespoons olive oil

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

1 good-size onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped

Pinch dried epazote, or pinch dried oregano and pinch dried thyme

Leaves from 1 sprig fresh sage, chopped

4 big handfuls spinach

6 to 10 multigrain or corn tortillas

Toasted pepitas (pumpkin seeds) for garnish (optional)

Shredded vegan cheese for garnish (optional)

Hot sauce for garnish (optional)

Place one rack in the uppermost position of the oven and another rack in the middle position. Preheat the broiler. Place the poblanos on a baking sheet on the top rack and broil until blackened on both sides, 8 to 10 minutes per side.

Remove the poblanos from the oven and immediately wrap them in a kitchen towel or seal them in a paper bag. Let the poblanos sweat for at least 20 minutes. When they’re cool enough to handle, slip off the blistered skins. Remove the seeds and cut the peppers into bite-size strips. (The roasted peppers can be wrapped and stored in the refrigerator for a day.)

Turn off the broiler and set the oven to 425°F.

Spread the pumpkin cubes on a rimmed baking sheet. Drizzle with 1 tablespoon of the olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Roast on the middle rack until light brown and tender, about 30 minutes, giving the vegetables an occasional flip or stir so they roast evenly.

Meanwhile, in a large skillet, heat the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion and garlic. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is softened and golden, about 8 minutes. Add the epazote, poblano strips, and sage.

Reduce the heat to medium. Add the roasted pumpkin and the spinach, a handful at a time, and cook until the spinach just wilts and the pumpkin and poblanos are heated through, 5 to 7 minutes. Taste and season with salt and pepper

To warm the tortillas, wrap in a kitchen towel and steam in a double boiler for a minute or two, or wrap in aluminum foil and place in a 300°F oven for a minute or two.

Mound the filling onto tortillas. Top the tacos with toasted pepitas, shredded vegan cheese, and perhaps a splash of hot sauce, and enjoy.

I’ve barely pitched the putrefied Halloween pumpkin into our compost bin when bang, it’s time to do the big cleanup and cook for Thanksgiving. Then comes the wave of holiday parties, and it’s a quick skid to Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s Eve, all coming at you so fast, you don’t even have time to take the leaves out of the dining-room table. Where did the past few months go? Where did the year go?

We see the end of the calendar, have the sense that time is running out, and start to feel the wee-est bit desperate. Silly us. Time is a human construct. For the planet, winter is just another cycle, a gearing down, a storing up.

On the surface, the world may show itself as forbidding gray skies, barren trees, snow-covered fields or slush-crusted streets, and other End of Days indicators. Really, the party’s just starting.

You know how a good night’s sleep smoothes out your forehead and your spirits, and makes it possible for you to keep on with a smile? That’s how the earth feels, too. A winter’s nap perks up the planet. Your body temperature drops when you sleep. Earth’s does, too. But deep within, there’s still sweetness and warmth and growth. This is the time for filling, nourishing root vegetables, like beets, carrots, and sweet potatoes. They laugh at cold temperatures and keep for months in your larder. Note their tonality, in the red-to-orange scheme of things — the colors we associate with heat. You could almost think there was some grand design behind it.

With the colder, shorter days of winter, we, too, seek sweetness and warmth deep within ourselves, the promise of renewal. Think of it as a spa experience for your soul — a spiritual sloughing off, a mystical exfoliation.

There’s a reason the evergreen is a Christmas symbol. It’s green even in the heart of winter, reminding us this is a season of regeneration. For all of us. The liturgical calendar begins not in
the springtime with obvious new life and pretty green leaves, but in December. Now is the season of Advent, of contemplation and togetherness, of readying, of preparing to party, should the Savior come, of being cheerful and carrying on if he gets hung up in traffic or if it doesn’t happen at all. We are ready to begin.

In Judaism, winter is the time of Simchat Torah. We have read through the entire Torah, the sacred Hebrew scroll, over the course of the year. We have reached the end. And yet not the end. We get to end and begin again, at the beginning.

The planet teaches us things do not end, or if they do, these endings are never as neat or dramatic as we humans make them seem at the time. I’m glad. I hate good-byes.

We can’t erase the past. We need the past. We couldn’t have reached this shiny, new moment without it — even Janus, the god of beginnings, knows that.

January is named for Janus. You can tell him from all the other gods because he’s the one with two heads, one looking forward into the future and the other facing backward, to gaze into the past. You are not who you were ten years ago or even ten months ago. Every year, every season, lays the groundwork for what is to come. Think of time as metaphoric compost, primordial muck, the broken-down organic matter creating the perfect environment in which to grow, to begin again.

Life is messy. Just working on an art project with your kid will teach you that. It’ll turn your dining-room table into a Jackson Pollock of glue-gun dribbles that, like Lady Macbeth’s bloodstained hands, will never come clean. But your child doesn’t see that; he sees a priceless work of art he created. You want to crap on that? Look, he has the rest of his life to wallow in guilt and disappointment. You helped bring a masterpiece to fruition. You
have prepared the soil, you have created a fertile, sacred space. Birth comes from decay. Kinda odd, but there you go.

WILDCAT SCATTER

If you live long enough, someone you love is going to die. What happens then, whether the dead enter the realm of heaven, receive divine enlightenment, come back as a ghost or a cow or compost, is unknown to those of us still living. What happens to us, though, is no mystery at all. Losing someone you love hurts like hell.

This is when formal religions should step it up, plugging in faith and support. In the West, your bigger religions often provide a guidebook — when you feel this way, read or say or do that. This isn’t always far enough, to judge by the uptick in secular ceremonies, a DIY approach to death, as it were.

You want more than words; you want a ritual, one that says hey, world, pay attention — we’ve lost one of the great ones. You want a ceremony that’s meaningful, not just to you, but to the person you’re honoring. So you do something like spread your beloved’s ashes somewhere that mattered, somewhere that provided joy. And if it means doing so without getting approval, you will do it anyway. Furtively. Under cover of darkness. With a backup plan in case it all goes wrong, and armed with a bottle of the dearly departed’s favorite brand of booze for communion and comfort. This is known in the funerary biz as wildcat scatter.

A large and solid person in life becomes light after cremation. Spreading the ashes (“cremains” — another funerary term) feels rather like spreading organic fertilizer, which, in a sense, it is. But
nature has its limits. Even the most fertile soil won’t grow the person you lost back to life. There’s no way to bring back the dead.

Unless it is memory. Memory is its own sort of wildcat scatter. Call them ghosts, call them memories of the dead, they surround me, infuse me. I believe in ghosts. John Milton did, too. Or at least he wrote about it convincingly enough in
Paradise Lost
:
“Millions of spiritual creatures
walk the Earth / Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep.”

I feel their presence as a tender ache in my heart, a whisper in my ear, the sizzle of something in a pan, a whiff of Marcella’s L’Air du Temps or the tang of the gin my father-in-law loved, a poke in the ribs, a desire to laugh and cry at once that isn’t PMS. I do not hear voices telling me to fight for France, but sometimes, especially toward the end of the year, I’ll hear, “I could go for a little something before lunch,” and I’ll smile, remembering Patrick, my first boss, who loved coffee and cookies and, oddly enough, me.

Almond Cookies

Patrick and I agreed life is hard enough without hard cookies. These tender treats are Chinese in origin, but untraditional, being lardless.

Makes 2 dozen cookies

½ cup (1 stick) vegan margarine, such as Earth Balance, softened

1 tablespoon almond butter

2/3 cup evaporated cane sugar

2 teaspoons amaretto

2/3 cup almond flour

2/3 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon aluminum-free baking powder

A neutral oil like canola for the baking sheet

24 blanched almonds
*

In a large bowl, use a mixing spoon to cream together the vegan margarine, almond butter, and sugar. Stir together for a few minutes, until the mixture is light and fluffy. Mix in the amaretto and almond flour until just combined.

In another large bowl, sift together the all-purpose flour and baking powder. Add the flour mixture to the butter-sugar mixture and stir until just combined. The dough will be slightly sticky.

Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured surface and shape it into a log about 12 inches long and 1½ inches in diameter. Wrap well in aluminum foil and refrigerate at least 2 hours or up to overnight.