7 Wonders of Ariel Gordon's World

Ariel Gordon, photo by Mike Deal

Towards the end of my first pregnancy, my husband and I moved to a new town and bought our first home, a 1950’s split-level bungalow surrounded by overgrown gardens and beautiful-but-mostly-dying trees.

We’d made the decision to move back to Ontario from Seattle to be closer to our families when the baby came, and it hadn’t made sense for me to start looking for work so close to my due date. I spent my days puttering around the house and garden, trying to transform myself into a person who knew how to take care of a child and house. By late afternoon, I’d feel hopelessly trapped and in need of escape. Unable to drive, I spent hours and hours restlessly circling my neighbourhood on foot, dipping in and out the wooded trails that ran behind and between the quiet streets.

It was in that season of my life that I first encountered Ariel’s work, in the form of her 2010 collection Hump (Palimpsest Press). Hump weaves together poems about pregnancy, mothering, and marriage with poems about the gritty-but-fertile seam where city and wilderness meet. It was the book I didn’t know I needed, an unsentimental counterweight to all the parenting blogs and birthing books I was dutifully consuming.

Fast forward almost a dozen years, and another one of Ariel’s books, Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest, has found me, this time in a different house, on the other side of town, grappling with the terrors and joys of the current era of my life. I have two children now, aged 9 and 11. I’m also the keeper of a very moody, high maintenance dog.

While I loved all of the poetic, funny, and thought-provoking pieces in Fungal, there was one passage from the essay “Mushrooming” that brought me to tears, because it reflected so closely my experience of the mucky, irksome, beautiful work of parenting pre-teens. In the aftermath of a spat with her daughter, Ariel reflects on the difference between her relationship to her child and her relationship to her cat:

We spent the rest of the drive to the grocery store in silence. After we’d found a parking space, I handed the girl a loonie and asked her to go get a cart. I’d opened the trunk and was preparing to transfer our bags and bins to the cart when Anna returned, parking it next to the car.

“Mama,” she said, her face pink from crying and bashful. “Can I have a hug?”

And I didn’t need the Internet to tell me that this was submissive behaviour, or, more simply, that she was looking for reassurance. That she was trying to apologize for shouting at me and for pouting before that. But the difference between Anna and Kitty and even the neighbourhood dogs of my childhood is that my relationship with my daughter is slippery; we are both alternately dominant and submissive, sad and looking for solace. More than that, we are just people, trying to get along, even if I built her in my body, cell by cell, limb by limb.

“Yes,” I said. And I pulled her close, holding her tighter than usual. I wanted her to remember that once neither of us could remember where she began and I ended. I wanted her to hear my heartbeat, thudding irrationally in my chest.

-Ariel Gordon, Fungal

Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Treaty 1 territory/Winnipeg-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. She’s the author of many books, including Siteseeing: Writing Nature and Climate Across the Prairies (At Bay Press, 2023) and Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests (Wolsak & Wynn, 2019). She’s also the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project in collaboration with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival and the Winnipeg Free Press, and poetry editor at The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. Her new book of essays, Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest, launches TODAY from Wolsak & Wynn, and will be available soon at your local library and wherever you like to buy your books!

*A note From Ariel about her 7 WONDERS:

I’m someone whose favourite thing is the thing that’s in front of me. So this list of wonders is not only specific to spring but to this spring. It’s also site-specific.

1. Feral Rhubarb

Rhubarb is seriously underrated. It’s one of the first fruits to emerge in the spring, it’s a lovely pink, and I deeply appreciate its tartness. I’m not a baker but I make rhubarb crisp several times every year, often with rhubarb I’ve liberated from my friend’s yards. Often, they’re like, “Yah, we have it in our back garden or between my house and the neighbour’s, but we don’t pick any. Come take as much as you want.” And I do.

That reminds me, a friend said to come pick her rhubarb and I somehow haven’t gone to harvest any yet!!

2. Wild Morels

I have only been foraging for morels for a couple of years, but I love them. They’re hard to spot amidst the leaves and moss in young stands of aspens they prefer, they’re conical and have a honeycomb texture, and they’re delicious, full of umami.

Looking for morels in the spring means looking at the ground, burgeoning with wild ginger, nettles, and purple violets, with your peripheral vision. It means that after you find one, you have to crouch down and look all around for the ones you missed. Many times, there’s a morel just by your foot.

But when you find a handful of morels, you’re not just foraging, you’re dopamine mining. By which I mean: the surge of pleasure you get when you finally find something elusive. I don’t usually don’t like using the language of resource extraction to describe the natural world, but dopamine mining means digging in your own head and I can live with that. I have never felt more like a successful human than when I’m driving home from a morel picking foray.

Looking for morels in the spring also means collecting wood ticks on your clothes and in your warm crevasses.

3. Introduced lilacs

Lilacs are an introduced species on the prairies. As Andrea Eidinger writes in her excellent social history of lilacs on Unwritten Histories: “Lilacs are actually native to Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, though the most common and popular form in North America, the common lilac (S. vulgaris) is actually from the Balkans.”

In Winnipeg, lilacs and caragana were widely planted by settlers, as ornaments and hedges/windbreaks. They’re a part of the settler flora and fauna in this place: I used to walk around my neighbourhood, nibbling on the yellow caragana flowers and tearing off branches with lilac blooms on them when they lined a park’s edge or an alley. These days, I still eat caragana flowers but I try to restrain myself to leaning deep into lilac bushes and huffing their scent.

I actually get whiny if I don’t have enough time with lilacs in the spring time. And one of the things I do with Noelle Allen, publisher at Wolsak & Wynn, when I visit Hamilton is to visit the Royal Botanical Gardens just out of town. They have a ridiculous collection of lilacs and I swear I almost wear out my nose by the end of the visit. The RBG also has a selection of magnolias, which I think are wildly improbable.

I prefer the deep purple and white lilac varieties as opposed to the mauve, which is most common here. There’s a house in my neighbourhood that is bordered by all three colours, which seems sort of unfair.

I recently learned that if you want your vase of lilacs to last, you have to hit the stems with a hammer, which seems about right.

4. Feral asparagus

Asparagus is “a Eurasian plant originally of seashores and riverbanks,” according to the Smithsonian, and is probably one of my favourite veg.

On the prairies, it is a perennial planted in gardens. 'I like that gardeners plant "crowns" of asparagus instead of starting from seed, mostly because I like to imagine wearing an crown of asparagus. I love that songbirds raid those gardens to eat asparagus's bright red fruits and poop out the seeds at the safety of the treeline, where after several years, the asparagus plants can be identified in the fall by their ferny fronds.

I know someone who in the early spring and summer takes her dogs to vacant lots in industrial areas and collects two or three pounds of feral asparagus PER DAY. That’s riches! I went with her at the beginning of the season this year and introduced her to eating fresh young asparagus raw. Like most tender green things, it tasted a bit like peas. Yum!

5. My half-grown daughter

My daughter will turn 18 a few days after the launch of Fungal and I’m heading east for Wolsak & Wynn’s group launches in Hamilton and Toronto between her birthday and her high school graduation.

The first time Anna made and brought me a cup of tea, I said that was all I needed from her. Her familial obligations had been met. But then she made me a carrot cake with cream cheese icing for my birthday this year, which seemed like more than anyone could want. More recently, she saw that someone she followed on social media was posting about heaps of morels in Assiniboine Forest, which is one of my favourite places on earth and where I’d only ever found one or two morels. So she screencapped/sent me the info, but at the same time remarked: “I can’t believe I just brought you local mushroom news.” I responded: “You’ve reached your final form.” Like she was a Pokémon.

(We chatted about it and decided that I’m a Conkeldurr and she’s a Scrafty.)

6. Builder’s tea

My little Irish granny made me my first cup of tea with great ceremony when I was eleven. It was weak as shit with lots of milk and sugar. And I imprinted on it. My version is extremely strong orange pekoe with 10% cream and sugar.

In the UK, tea doctored like this is called builder’s tea. Because the sugar and fat were just as important to the workers who drank it as the caffeine and the warmth. At various points, I tried to replace the cream with skim milk and the sugar with stevia. But I realized that tea makes me happy, more consistently than any person, so I’ve stopped fiddling with it.

My partner Mike wooed me with tea, bringing me cups of Tim Horton’s tea at all hours of the day and night. Nowadays, I’m trying to do away with single-use items, so I bring a travel mug (and a water bottle) with me when I’m out of the house.

When I’m heading out foraging, I will often make a cup of tea in my travel mug and leave it in the car, so that when I’m dirty and tired and covered in ticks, I can sip at the tea and feel comforted.

7. Denim shirts

My uniform, when mushrooming, is a t-shirt, long pants and sturdy shoes or rainboots. And, always, a denim shirt. For whatever reason, it’s the article of clothing that makes the most sense to me. It’s got a breast pocket for my phone, it’s durable, almost designed to get dirty, and I like how medium-dark denim ages.

I generally don’t like fancy denim shirts, but the one exception to the rule was the shirt I got at a western store in Utah that was going out of business. They had every kind of cowboy boot you could want and, in the corner, a rack of cowboy shirts that had been made in India. I spied one that had embroidered scales in teal on the top of the front panels and lapels in addition to pinky-purple snaps. I wore that shirt to shreds.

My most recent denim shirt is cheap and sturdy, like me. It was purchased in Prince Edward County, Ontario, when I was writer in residence at the Al Purdy A-frame. Specifically, at the Giant Tiger in Picton. I am wearing it now.