Back from the 6,000-foot elevation of the valley floor in Wyoming, surrounded by mountain peaks that soar to 13,770 feet on the Grand Teton, I traveled to sea level to even myself out. And to eat seafood.
Stone Harbor was very quiet, with most of the stores closed for the season. But the beach was wide open and beckoning. I attended another Lenni Lenape language class at the Lower Cape May library since I had fond memories from the June meeting.
Most of the dozen attendees had also been there in June, and anyone is welcome to drop in and stumble along in the Native Language or in Jersey vernacular. It was an especially festive session, with the leader, Teri, and her friend, Denise, recounting tales about a recent wedding in Cook Forest that they participated in. The bride was of Mi’kmaq and Taino descent and the groom was Norse, and the blended traditions sounded like a hoot. There was drumming and smudging and Odin’s blessing of the mead that was made months in advance of the event. Venison burgers and three sisters stew were on the menu along with pork ribs and Swedish meatballs.
The party mode seemed to be continuing to the class as Bernie’s wife sent in blueberry mini-donuts and Archie brought a big batch of his tasty coconut oatmeal cookies. He had made 271 cookies at the urging of his niece, and he shared a few dozen with us that afternoon. I was seated next to Pary, a kind woman who brought a batch of perfectly decorated and delicious Oatmeal Apple Cookies and shared her recipe (see below). It was a celebration that fueled us for rounds of identifying each other through animal cards that we placed on our foreheads. I was a white-tailed deer (òpahtu) and later a wolf (tëme), which I guessed from the group’s descriptive clues—though not in Lenape.
One of the women in the group, Norma, wore a Rea’s tee shirt and I asked if she worked at the farm, as it was on my to-do list to visit that afternoon. She did, and encouraged me to go and check out the field of sunflowers next to the barn.
Meanwhile, my sister Mary was on a visit to Hartley’s cranberry farm in Massachusetts and sent a photo taken by her husband Rolf, who was also waist-deep in the bog.
On my way back from Cape May I stopped at the Lobster House and picked up a dozen each of Oysters Rockefeller and Clams Casino, since I was having company that evening. Molly, the longtime girlfriend of my nephew Josh, was coming by.
Two big reasons for my October trip to South Jersey were to see the migrating Monarch butterflies and to attend the Cape May Lima Bean Festival. I happened upon the festival many years ago by chance and always intended to go back. It was time.
The Cape May Lima Bean Festival originated in 1985 when “West Cape May was a lima bean machine,” according to an article by James Fitzpatrick in the Cape May Star and Wave newspaper. Rea’s Farm (pronounced “ray’s,” according to Norma) was the epicenter of production in the 1950s with more than 1,000 acres of its sandy, loamy soil in lima bean production. Big food companies found beans elsewhere when the market conditions changed, and today the current Rhea farmer clearly needs more help. She looked tired at her busy market on Friday and even more tired on Saturday at the festival.
The festival started getting very crowded after 10, so I peeled out after enjoying my lima bean soup. I headed over to Cape May Point State Park to see the lighthouse and check out the butterflies. Many people were in the viewing stands when I arrived, counting the migrating raptors, but my sights were lower this day, aimed at the goldenrod that fueled the flight of the butterflies headed to Mexico.
I was reading a sad and bitterly sweet book called Sweetgrass Basket by Marlene Carvell. It’s a prose poem about two Mohawk sisters who are sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (operated from1879-1918) to be trained to work as domestics and to have their racial identities obliterated. It’s a story of resilience that I told Molly about the next morning.
Her reason for suddenly being at the shore was tragic. Her best friend’s sister had died on Wednesday, very suddenly, at 34, of pancreatitis. Her friend was bereft, and Molly came to comfort her. I had been in Molly’s company many times, but never without my nephew, a larger-than-life type of guy who runs the room. Molly and I got to connect over a Philly-style breakfast, that is, with the Eagles game on in the background, and I learned about her Filipino grandmother who had lived in South Philly since 1957. Molly looks at her Nanay’s old house on Google Maps and, because she is high-tech, knows how to view the house in the past. She can see when the gardens disappeared, when the rosebush beds were cemented over.
And now today is Columbus Day, aka Indigenous Peoples Day. It’s a time to celebrate—or condemn—the Italian explorer who sailed for Spain and initiated the cataclysm of colonization on the Native Peoples of the Americas.
When I was a child, we loved Columbus Day. Off from school, my brother and sisters and I made plays about the “discovery” of the New World, complete with cardboard ships—the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. No doubt, my brother and I were the sailors, and our little sisters, the found inhabitants. They were easy to conquer.
But nowadays, I have deep regret over the changes that Columbus’s voyage instigated, though I don’t know how to fix it. But getting to know who the First People were, and learning about their ways, is a start.
Things change, but we need to honor what came before us. And we need to celebrate what we have here in the moment—cranberries, apples, lima beans, and resilient migrating butterflies.
Pary’s Oatmeal Cookies
Pary said she used a Cosmic Crisp apple for her cookies that she purchased at the Acme.
¾ cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon apple pie spice
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
¼ cup unsweetened applesauce
1 cup flour
1½ cups oatmeal
1½ cups finely diced peeled apple
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Cream the butter and add the brown sugar, apple pie spice, baking soda, and the salt. Beat in the egg and vanilla, then add the applesauce and the flour. Fold in the oatmeal and the diced apple.
Scoop onto a parchment-lined or greased cookie sheet and bake for 12 minutes. Cool and drizzle with a glaze (½ cup of powdered sugar mixed with 1 tablespoon of milk, water, or apple cider) if desired.
Recipe generously provided by Pary and used with permission.