The Consolation of Cabbages

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

—Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”

All fall, I’ve been wanting to write a poem about cabbages. About the idea of cabbages, the constancy of cabbages, the consolation of cabbages. I’ve been wanting to say something about the cabbages themselves; in particular, the ones that live in my basement storage fridge—and now, since it’s winter, the ones that live in a crate in the garage. I’ve been preoccupied with how buxom cabbages swirl out from the center—and how rows of them patch and quilt the landscape. I’ve been haunted by the particular pleasure of purple and green when they appear together and the imagery of thick leaves and curly leaves and waxy leaves and wrinkled leaves. I’ve been jotting in my journal about deep veins tracing patterns like winter tree branches and tight balls that close inward like my tired heart. And how, when you slice one open and take a look at the cross section, it seems like a stained-glass window mandala celebrating a bygone wisdom. All autumn, I’ve been sad, and so I’ve been wanting to write a poem about something beautiful, and it’s cabbages that keep appearing in my mind’s eye and halting me at the grocery, demanding a quiet reverence, begging for a poem.

*

It’s late in the autumn and my husband, Dylan, and I are in the Ocean Avenue Elementary fourth grade hallway, sitting in little chairs, waiting for our daughter’s parent-teacher conference. After we tire of reading expository pieces concerning the big heart of Anne Frank that hang on the walls, I ask Dylan to tell me about cabbages. A dozen years of marriage, and sometimes it seems hard to know how to make small talk. But the chatty teacher is running a bit behind, so I ask him, tell me about a cabbage-eye view of the world. What he offers, I lap up. Many cabbages need to go through a hard frost in order to have their flavor. They are very hungry little plants: big drinkers and drainers of soil nutrients. They’re host to a slew of insects. As an organic gardener by trade, he traffics in cabbages; as a reader-writer by trade, I traffic in metaphor. As usual, he makes a joke. From a cabbage-eye view, everything looks tall.

*

In my past life, before marriage and children, when I spent summers on Tuscan vineyards, we would slice cabbages for salads. In Italy, these cavolo salads were versions of coleslaw minus the mayo. Cabbage with fennel and onion, olive oil, salt. Maybe some balsamic, but not necessarily. Maybe some thinly sliced peppers or cucumbers, but not necessarily. Crunchy and colorful, cooling and filling on a sweltering July afternoon. A far cry from canned sauerkraut. So much easier to fall in love.

*

There’s a lot these days that I don’t want to write about. Too painful. Too banal. Too mired in my own insecurities. My big-feeling child’s best friend no longer wants to be friends with her, and the pain of it cuts into my gut, and my tears flood out every morning in the car on my commute to work. My therapist suggests that the grief is so profound because this loss touches my identity as a mother. To compound the heartache, the friendship breakdown has spiralled out from the kids and has shifted dynamics among the adults and I’m finding it harder to be fully forthright with friends I’ve long held close. Instead, small talk prevails and my nuclear family unit has resigned itself to a less social being. On the rare occasions when we do find ourselves at a party or gathering, the elephant in the room is so immense that I sometimes swell up with tears and need to excuse myself. The small talk only seems to get harder. I, for one, want to talk about cabbages. About hard freezes and nutty flavors. I want to talk about how I long to be hardy, able to endure the frosty rejections. How I want so desperately to believe in friendships that persist, how to pull back a few bug eaten leaves and still find so much nourishment underneath.

*

‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,

   ‘To talk of many things:

Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—

   Of cabbages—and kings—

And why the sea is boiling hot—

   And whether pigs have wings.’

*

Early in the pandemic, Dylan planted rows of cabbages in the backyard. He made a bonafide patch. By the beginning of June, we were gifting them to neighbors and friends. We were grilling them and sautéing them and souping them and shredding them for salad. I was also photographing them and making Mother’s Day cards out of the photographs, matting the images on purple cardstock and thinking there was nothing more maternal. Thinking about how for centuries, women used cabbage leaves on their breasts, battered and swollen from nursing. Cabbage leaves seeping out the pain. Cabbage leaves as poultices for wounds. Cabbage leaves cloaking our backyard with nutrition for the neighbors. Shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings. I take solace in the way plants paint the landscape with nourishment; I find comfort in the way words and their rhythms fill your heart with sense when other relations fall silent.

*

My go-to cabbage soup recipe: Heat olive oil and chili pepper in a large navy blue Dutch oven. Then, carrot/celery/onion. Shit-ton of crushed garlic from the garden. Probably too much thyme (no such thing). Heat and stir and stir and heat. Salt and pepper. A can of diced tomatoes. A can of chickpeas. A can of cannellini. A box of organic bone broth and perhaps some extra water. While it begins to heat up, thinly slice as much cabbage of whatever type as the pot can hold. Let it boil. Let it simmer. Serve with parmigiana and more hot pepper and toasted brown bread. Adapt however you like. Add whatever you will. Make it up like I have. See how cabbage sponges up the stock. See how the soup warms your spirits. Let it be something rather than nothing. Even if you’re eating alone.

*

The speaker in Wendell Berry’s often-quoted poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” narrates the process of waking in the night in despair and then seeking consolation. When I’m in despair about what my children’s lives may be, I think of cabbages. Berry thinks of the peace of the wood drake and heron down in the pond. I think of buxom cabbages in patches in the garden and then tucked away in the crisper in the downstairs storage fridge. Like potatoes and onions in the root cellar, they’ll endure into winter, keeping the garden alive and the Dutch oven simmering. Generous and consoling; a refuge in a world gone awry.

*

In ancient Egypt, cabbage was worshiped as a god. The ancient Romans (my favorite ancients, the Italian ancients of Horace and Virgil) thought cabbage was a good remedy for a wine hangover, as it had a natural competition with the vine in the field. The cabbage has endured and spread and stayed stable through centuries of cold winters. Napa, savoy, red, white. And don’t forget that Brussels sprouts are tiny cabbages. And so is bok choy, and they’re all beloved brassicas, cousins to cauliflower and broccoli and broccoli rabe. And they all taste divine with garlic, olive oil, and chili pepper. Like most suburban moms, I find myself in the grocery store a couple times a week, and each time I pause and take a deep breath by the cabbage display. I dwell in the thought of deep agricultural time. It’s become an altar of sorts, a place for prayer in moments of despair. Most often, I murmur a quiet mantra for my children. May you be peaceful, may you be happy, may your hearts be free from suffering.

*

It’s just past New Year’s and one kid is already home from school with a stomach bug. More is coming as we run the inevitable gauntlet of seasonal sickness. Now that I have a little downtime between semesters, I return to the essays I was only able to pay fledging attention to over the fall. One of them is about the drought we experienced, the other about roller coasters. They’re really about being a mother and ruminating on what I can and can’t do to help my kids in this terrible moment where there is so much misinformation, all the screens stealing their spirits. Through the writing, I cultivate metaphors to guide my heart as it seeks some way of caring for my beloveds and grounding myself. Especially when they get hurt; especially when they get hurt, and I can’t seem to find a cabbage leaf big enough to wrap them in—to draw out all of the inevitable heartbreak of being human. All fall, I’ve been wanting to write a poem about something beautiful. Instead of line breaks, here’s an essay of sentences about cabbages; perhaps the most-something-beautiful I know.