Stay and Eat

Dan in Beech Tree

An Elixer of Leaves :

I like to imagine that the hill was once contained within a much larger beech woods.

A half-mile to the east of the farm is a crescent stand of old beeches hugging the curve of Pitman creek, and here and there in the fields between isolated beeches stand as reminders of a long-gone forest. Their numbers increase inside the sagging fences of rusted wire that mark the edge of our farm, many of them old, prone to hollow, and as a result often topless. As it is, beeches are the queens of the hill, and I have a rather hopeless dream that they will remain long after I leave their service.

The lower limbs of some beeches bell downward gracefully into a skirt that just touches the earth, and some hold onto their delicately ribbed leaves, like pale ghosts of hammered gold paper, throughout the winter.

The gold color deepens in dampness, flaring as lovely as flowers in the sunsets of sodden grey winter evenings. On windy snowy days they shiver in the wind with a spectral hiss.
The tips of beech buds are wrapped, by little bronze sheaths, into conical spearpoints; unfurling spring-green from the top of the tree to the skirt. The emergence is seen first as a distant haze in high branches raised up into the limpid skies of April, descending to enrobe the Queen of May.

These new leaves are as dainty as the finest tissue, with a downy velvet texture that further softens delicate green. On a lucky Mayday the beech will quiver gently in balmy breezy sunshine, your feet will be bare, stepping gingerly under the beech on account of the hard little halves of last year’s boatshaped nuthulls, and you will be selective and restrained in your leaf picking, only one here and there. You may have to visit many beeches to collect a pint of the smallest tenderest leaves, but that will be pleasant work.

Once you have filled your jar with leaves, pressed close but not packed hard, take it back to your chamber of alchemy, which I presume will have a liquour cabinet, or at least a bottle, of the best, lightest flavored gin you can afford. (Hendricks perhaps?)

Fill your beech leaved jar with gin and wait. In a couple of days you may change the leaves, straining out the ones now depleted of their springtime charge, the vital xeros of the sun transferred into firewater. Replace them with new ones for as long as the supply of soft new leaves lasts, which will not be long. I’m sure that you can practice numerical divination by counting the days, if you’re inclined that way.

What you have in your jar now is the liquid state of the philosopher’s stone; a substance capable of changing base things into gold. It is said to prolong life indefinitely, an understandably base misconception; it is rather a drink capable of making life worth prolonging.

Nothing under the sun may extend a well-lived spring one moment beyond its elusive boundary, but careful maneuvers may deepen the experience into its true and infinite dimension. This tincture is called noyeau.

Perhaps it may be sweetened to your tastes by dissolving in it a single crystal of rock sugar, which you will grow on a string. Only you know the answer to that.

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