Aroostook County, Maine

I came back home to find a house infested with fleas. It's our fault, really—not for the fleas but for the mice, and not really for them either but for the cat, which was left out to become feral and live in a truck. Which didn't work to keep the mice away. Mice are the reason we adopted him in the first place, less than a year ago. It's the reason why, catless, we had fleas last summer—we'd catch one mouse, and the next would move in, bringing with it its own troop of fleas.

So I was unsurprised to find a mouse dead between layers of crocheted afghan on my second day back. It was big, too, bigger than the tiny field mice with tails as twice as long as their bodies, the ones that generally move in. I thought it was dead because of the clouds of methoprene I'd sprayed on everything for the swarming fleas. I kid you not. I could see them squirming on the kitchen floor.

The mouse was big, with a big belly, and the next night the cat caught three baby mice in a row, in the same spot, and ate them all, nose to tail. I was told, later, that I should have snatched them away and bashed their heads in. I was cowering in horror in the back part of the house. However strong my fear of being a girly girl, I hate mice.

So the fleas are driving me to depression, and new appreciation for the quotidiana of medieval life. One day, I thought to myself: if they're like that here now, we're going to have to start preparing for black plague. (One should assume by now that I will correlate any entomological shift to climate change.) That same day, driving to the store for yet another chemical (I'm on my fifth), I heard there's a case in Kyrgystan. Black plague. The first in twenty years. Probably from fleas.

Fleas also bring a form of shame. It's not the shame that comes with bedbugs or lice, but it's pretty close. It's the same feeling as when you find mouse turds in your condo--everyone leaves bread in the bread box, fruit on the counter, dry pasta in the cupboard—but suddenly your doing so is a condemnation: you! You there! You're not clean enough! Do you see the way you live? It's disgusting.

And that empty popcorn bowl that you leave for morning becomes a scarlet badge.

So the last week has been a bit depressing for me. But the fleas—and grief about the things I have lost, still—and grief at leaving this place for an uncertain expanse of time--and leaving now, with summer's end in full bloom, giant crickets jumping away from the weeds around the back step, echinacea with drooping purple heads, yellow jerusalem artichoke named for the sun and smelling of honey and love, burdock beginning to tangle, and sugar maple beginning to turn—all of it is breaking my heart.

Every moonbeam

Burdock in wok

Last night I made burdock root for the first time. Here's the recipe I used, and it took much convincing both myself and others. I let the sandy whole plants K. dug up from the garden sit in the sink in water for about a week before I could bring myself to clean them, before I could contemplate eating them. When I first searched online for them, what I was looking for was an effective way to kill them.

Murder them, I should say. Their roots go sometimes three feet deep, according to the internet, and I feel like I've seen them go deeper. Even the smallest, innocent-looking little weed seedling sprouts a massive, impenetrable, herculean root. When they grow, they become tree-like shrubs with purple flowers that quickly turn into clinging prickly seedpods that cling to anything they touch, especially a dog, or a dog's tail, or gloves, or a hat, or my hair.

I hate them. I've been doing everything I can to kill them since the day I figured out what they are, but unless you dig up every last hair of a root, unless you catch and burn every last burr—they sprout up again come spring.

Burdock kinpira with pan-fried whole trout, caught at Lake No. 9 that morning--it doesn't get any more local than that. 
(Except yes, the lemon came from the IGA, and the basmati rice came from Thailand.  Sticklers.)

I knew they were, theoretically, edible. It's one of those rural myths up here. “You know, you can eat burdock.” So I was surprised to discover, that when I searched “best way to dig up burdock root” that what I discovered was urban foragers, Japanese sushi blogs, and how-to sites on making burdock tea. Evidently burdock, called gojo in Japan, and in restaurants where my sister eats, is a food perfectly designed to supplement the immune system, providing mammoth amounts of manganese and vitamin C and who-knows-what-all vitamins.

Still, I had to convince the collected assembly they were not poisonous.

The flavor is unique. I struggle to describe it—something, perhaps, like a musky wild mushroom, an oyster or a shiitake, with a hint of earth and parsnip. Surprisingly delicious, although still tough. I'm not sure if that's because I didn't let them steam long enough, or because I let them sit in my sink for a week, or because they were stringy new ones. In any case, I can check that off my to-do list. And if we ever run out of things to farm, we can always sell dehydrated burdock-root tea.

K. likes to do sushi-style bites.  This is rice with fried bluefish, from Massachusetts last year, and Thai nam chim, sweet chili sauce.  Delectable.