A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery -- as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source.
—”The Gift of Strawberries” Excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer
It’s been raining all day and I can taste the mulberries.
A wild grainy rain-fed memory-taste. The red under-ripe ones planty and tart citrusy like grapefruit and the riper ones more balanced, warm and low like something between a tomato and a blueberry and something woody fresh the berries don’t fall of their stems like blackberries. You see them first as sidewalk stains. I set out into a fine mist looking for them.
I love my neighbourhood. I live on a short street with a chocolate factory at one end and slight dip behind the house where the streets still curve around the shape of what used to be a creek that now runs underground. Past the dip there’s a school with apple trees, an old brick YMCA and a cheese shop. Across the street there is a little grove of young oak trees where I find oak galls. Towards the Y there’s black walnut tree whose branches are too high to collect from but they drop walnut hulls near the crosswalk beside an old apartment complex and the nuts are just small green spheres now but it looks like it’s going to be a good year. Investors bought and then divided the once Portuguese family homes on either side of me, painted everything charcoal grey and planted some decorative tall grasses and turned the homes into Air BnBs and then rental apartments but the neighbours are usually nice and a little further down the street there is a guy that looks like Nabokov who wears an dishevelled overcoat in all weather. Lots of dogs. Dandelions. Roses. Smoke Trees. A maple tree out front that we planted that first sprouts red stems with dangling chartreuse flowers that become the tiniest little pinky green maple keys in the spring and fall to the sidewalk then later in the fall the whole thing goes almost on fire with red leaves that drop all at the same time some cold autumn night. There is almost always something to forage for but the beginning of the ink harvesting season for me is always marked by purple-ish stains on the sidewalk. Mulberries. The ripe mulberries splat when they hit the cement, get squished by pedestrians and cars and bicycles and get pooped out by the various birds that love them. It’s a mess but it doesn’t really last long. Over a week or two the stains go from purple to blue to almost black to grey and then just kind of fade away after a few rains.
Yesterday I went over to Nadia and Gord’s house because they have the biggest mulberry tree in the neighbourhood and they’re right across the street and I haven’t really been talking to anyone all weekend and so I crossed the road and said hi and collected mulberries from the sidewalk mostly just the ones that were big and black and ripe but not yet squished. Meanwhile Gord pruned the vines around their fence and we talked ceramics and books and municipal politics and education and about how there seemed to be more or at least louder birds in the city than last year. A young girl with a nordic looking ponytail riding on her mother’s shoulders reached high up in the branches and found a ripe mulberry and ate it and found another one for her mom and they said something maybe in Danish and kept walking. Nadia joined me and Gord and she said every year she makes something called mulberry shrub which I looked up later and is a kind of pioneer cocktail syrup made with apple cider vinegar and mulberries and she promised to save me some when she made it. They’re happy to share their harvest with friends and neighbours and squirrels and birds a just a few days before a local group I’ve worked a few times before called Not Far From the Tree had harvested a load of berries which they share with local food banks. And always there were more falling. It felt good to chat with the neighbours while picking berries but my interest was the inky mess on the sidewalk. Its changing hues. The gravity-powered happenstance stains framed by the cement sidewalk segments that make a sort of temporary abstract expressionist installation or a Francis Bacon drop cloth. Somehow the tree feels like the middle of our neighbourhood. A gift.
I ended up going down a bit of a mulberry rabbit hole because I kind of sensed that a tart urban berry you can make into a cocktail or purple ink that turns grey wasn’t the whole story of mulberries. Pretty much any plant you can find in a city seems to have proved useful to humans over the years but mulberry tree seems to be in a league of its own.
The fruits look and taste a bit like blackberries but have a little woody green stem and each berry is actually a collection of fruits called an infructescence which makes them more closely related to pineapples and figs than blackberries or raspberries. Their colour-shifting staining properties were immortalized by Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe which starts with lovers from two feuding families who fall in love through a crack in the wall. It’s romance that ends in an accidental double suicide recognized by the gods by changing the colour of the berries to blood red. Theirs is a story Ovid borrowed from early Greek myths and which later became the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The roots of the mulberry plant are kind of a crazy bright orange colour that you notice when people are digging out their basements for renting. You can make a dye from that orange root bark and the leaves make a tea with a delicate taste that supposedly stops your hair from going grey.
There is also something very particular about the criss-crossing fibres of mulberry wood. The inner bark of their twigs after being pounded into a pulp soaked in water, mixed with the mucilaginous root of a rare wild hibiscus then snow-bleached in sheets of special wood makes some of the finest Japanese paper. The very strongest thinest of these mulberry papers are called tenjugo kōzo and are so transparently thin that they’ve been used in repairing the most delicate works on paper in the Louvre and British museum. Tenjogo kōzo is a paper softer and thinner than skin and it reminds me of an afternoon in Los Angeles searching for archival tape. An afternoon that now feels a lifetime away
As useful as the fibres of mulberry trees have been through human history it’s the leaves of the white mulberry that have singularly changed the course of human history. It turns out these leaves are the only diet of the domesticated silkworm. These worms after exclusively chomping away on mulberry leaves (they don’t even drink water) form a kind of extraordinary white cocoon made of fine filaments of what can spun into silk thread. Silk is tough, and flexible easy to dye and catches light in a way particular to silk. Because of these qualities, spun and then woven silk became the preferred textile for signifying wealth and power and its manufacture was for hundreds of years a closely guarded secret. Silk was a Chinese monopoly. The trade of silk defined a branching set of routes by Mongolian horseback, ship, camel caravan and a series of international handoffs beginning in the ancient Chinese capital city of Chang'an (now Xi'an) and ending in Constantinople. The Silk Road. With silk came spices, paper, inventions, poetry, oranges and ideas.
But silk predates the Silk Road. At a recent archeological dig at Jiahu in the middle of Henan Province in central China the bones of bodies were found in tombs and the surrounding soil chemistry suggests that the bodies were wrapped in silk from domesticated silkworms. The tombs are 8500 years old. Silk it seems is Palaeolithic. Silk predates ink, and paper, and writing. And at the same time it seems like a kind of language. A worm eats a leaf and spins out a fine line to make a home for itself. That line unravelled is twisted by humans into a long even thread. The thread is arranged in a series of parallel lines (the weft) and then a second thread is woven under and over to form a flat, flexible, sturdy sheet. Something gossamer thin and beautiful. Something to wrap a body or an artifact in. A layer both beautiful and protecting. Was silk a kind of proto-paper?
Clair Kail a French researcher and designer working with memories, digital & traditional crafts writes eloquently about the relationship between text and textile in an article for Tools magazine. She notes that “In Mali, in the Dogon language, the word “soih” (cloth) means “the word,” and “soihti” (weaver) means “the one who makes the word.”
There is another strange connection between ink and silk. Several research groups around the world are currently testing “ink” made from silk proteins to print human tissues, implants and even organs as and more natural, less expensive alternative to 3-D surgical printing with collagen. The natural bio-ink from silkworms in printed form creates a delicate scaffolding for internal repairs. Eventually the body’s cells regenerate tissues around the silk armature and the silk proteins break down and are reabsorbed into the body
And all this has been set in motion because of a plant currently staining the sidewalk a few houses down the street from me. Just before I left with my ziplock bag of ripe mulberries Gord asked if I would make him some ink. It turns out I had offered him some natural ink years ago and he had declined, feeling like he wasn’t enough of a drawer, or painter or calligrapher to warrant something so precious. I said of course but then he went on. Gord told me that he had kept the memory of my offer to him as its own kind of gift. He had even used the story of the offer of the ink for a reading of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass that mentions the unexpected gift economy of wild strawberries. After my neighbourhood visit and all the mulberry research I was left with the feeling that mulberry is one of the most generous of trees. I know in a week or two after a few more rains the berries will be gone and the sidewalks will be clean and the tree will just kind of fade back into the foliage of the city. Mulberries seem to exist like a gift, as Kimmerer puts it, in a realm of humility and mystery.
I took the berries home and started crushing them up first I made a deep purple-grey ink and but then I felt like I wanted some other way to share this colour with you. Something more like the mulberry itself something silky and squish-able, something held and felt and endlessly possible. And so a recipe….
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