A Russet Blanket
It’s time to get weaving, beauties.
Imagine a long, soft line of russet-hued yarn. Imagine a line of russet-hued yarn so long it falls unspooled into pillowy heaps in the wide basket on the floor next to your favorite chair. Imagine that this russet-hued yarn is charmed. The more you knit, sew or weave, the longer the line of yarn grows: overtaking your high-backed chair, mushrooming to the ceiling of your home and spilling out the windows and doors. Growing as tall as your home building. Soft, russet-hued yarn unfolding to blanket the ground surrounding your home place. A russet blanket covering the land. Tucking us in. Preparing us for dreaming.
This time of year, on this hallowed Muskogee ground east of Atlanta, golden fall and silver fall bounce the sun back and forth like a ball. This day I’m writing will peak at seventy five degrees but temperatures are trending lower and silver will win this volley, as she does each year. Her grey and russet palette belong to the lone deer buck who visits my yard each morning and whose antlers have grown a foot since early summer and it belongs to the red shouldered hawk who hunts with a quiet stealth that barely disturbs the thinning air. Silver fall’s cool light hangs suspended in morning fog and it fills the space between these near-bare trees. Every still place cozies under the magic color of poplar, oak and pine leavings. In silver fall our own thoughts often turn to the textile. After all, if we must move into the subterranean darkness of hibernation, we want comfort. If we know winter is coming, we prepare, like the earth and her creatures, by weaving ourselves into blankets, shawls, carpets, sweaters, cocoons, nests.
This season encourages us to think of ourselves as weavers. Maybe to think of the way we move through the world as a weaving, or a knitting together. Maybe each week, day, or hour is a loop. Each breath. The season reminds us to attend to each loop with care, for what we loop in we are also interlinking, knitting closer to us with a continuous, regenerating line of russet-hued yarn. Who are you sewing into your blanket to keep close and warm this silver fall? Are you able to experience yourself as woven into the fabric of your community—however defined? Is your chosen family close-knit? How can you extend your blanket’s reach?
Like cake baking, textile arts like sewing, knitting, and crocheting have been cordoned off over time from the revered spaces of guild and high ritual and enclosed within the spheres of feminized care and domestic labor only to reemerge each generation, reimagined through the hands of activist artists and everyday human makers who reharness their power in service of resistance. See here, here, here, and here. See all the stitch and bitch sessions ever, see this upcoming weave and grieve happening on my old stomping grounds, and even the Sweet Grief cake workshop I hosted at my home last year. Add your own favorite examples in the comments.
We know we are in for a long winter. The incoming administration, committed to fortifying the upper tiers of the white supremacist pyramid, is relying on an ever-strengthening and emboldened and perhaps at times unwitting base of support. This commitment will reveal and intensify the ways many of us—in particular those of us in marginalized bodies and communities—are vulnerable and always already reliant on each other. How do we stay soft in the face of this bricklaying? How do we cultivate fierce determination to practice looping for strong fabric? How do we knit ourselves into one another’s arms for shelter and support? When we remember that grief is collective and so too healing and strength, can we learn from sociable weavers that interlocked nests are warmer and stronger, housing even those beyond our immediate family?
Can the anti-fascist front be soft like a (very) big blanket?
One thing I know is that it’s time to get very real about our relationships and how we deepen, nourish and fortify them.
My baking this silver fall has been a long, soft line of russet-hued yarn. I wove my younger self and her monstrous wisdom into my heart with a pumpkin rye cake with ginger, orange, and miso. She and I honored the earth, in whose cloth we are always woven; whose scent of soil and rotting pine needle and teacher fungi were softly mirrored in the cake’s gentle, spiced tang. I baked a double-batch version of Benjamina Ebuehi’s lovely apple cake with sage caramel and cast slices and tiny jars of fragrant, deep brown caramel out wide to family and friends to loop them to me with sweetness and care. The curled apple crisps did indeed “mimic the [russet beauty of the] fallen leaves” as Ebuehi suggests in her headnote.
And just last week, I relaxed my Virgo preference for solo kitchen work and invited my niece over for baking and movies on the couch. We baked a pungent loaf of gingerbread sticky with molasses and scented with fresh grated ginger and turmeric. We binged A Nice Girl’s Guide to Murder and (probably because Virgo had been asked to leave the room), we overbaked the loaf. But my nibling, my husband and I stood around the kitchen work table and laughed while we gobbled hunks right out of the pan, still soft and warm and comforting. Like a favorite russet-hued blanket.
My baking, in its current form anyway, is not activism. But it is a community care and a mending. It is a needle guiding the thread of my intention through the weft of a disheartening and uncertain time.
What are you weaving?
As promised:
Pumpkin Rye Cake with Ginger, Orange and Miso
This recipe may be developed further with future attempts and my notes are scant (I didn’t weigh everything and I don’t recall exactly how long I baked it for example). But this quiet revolt against Pumpkin Spice Nation came out beautifully, with a velvety, richly scented crumb. Perfect for snacking or earth-based rituals in which you give your rage back to the land to compost.
1 cup/ 135 g all purpose flour
3/4 cup / 95 g rye flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp clove
1/4 tsp allspice
2 eggs
3/4 cup / 145 g brown sugar
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup oil
Juice and zest of an orange
1 can pureed pumpkin
20 g white miso (1 gently rounded TBLSP)
Preheat oven to 350 and prepare and line loaf pan. I used a pullman but any aluminum 8 or 9 inch loaf will do.
Whisk the dry together in a mixing bowl.
Add eggs, sugar to the bowl of a stand mixer. Using paddle attachment, mix on medium high a few minutes. Add syrup, oil, juice and zest. Mix until blended. Add flour mixture in two or three scoopfuls, mixing on low and scraping in between. Add pumpkin and miso. Mix only just until all ingredients are fully incorporated.
Bake until done—maybe 45-50 minutes (top browned with a slight springback when touched; knife pulls out mostly clean with a few crumbs dragged along)???