Do you remember a classic children’s picture book starring a little red house in the countryside that watches — through two window eyes on either side of a front-door nose, with white-curtain eyelashes and a curl of smoke rising from a red-brick chimney like a thought — as the seasons pass, and a road appears, and then gas stations and more houses, then apartment buildings, a subway, a railway, and, finally, tall, mean skyscrapers elbowing in at all sides? (It was “The Little House,” 1942, by Virginia Lee Burton, who also wrote and illustrated “Mike Mulligan.”) My situation in my own little house, with a curl of smoke coming from the chimney, often reminds me of the picture book one. I’m persistently surprised to see the march of progress whenever I venture outside. How did those streetlamps get there? Who left that concrete curb at the foot of the driveway? I try to shoo the progress away from my front door, like a diligent but crazed housekeeper trying to brush the rising waters of a flood away with a broom.
Which is to say, I have a psychological profile that prefers to cling to old ways. I’m a clinger. I wouldn’t make a very good Buddhist; I have problems accepting the transience of being and perceive permanence, incorrectly, everywhere I look.
One way I’ve refused to budge or concede to the passage of time is in insisting on still going a-gathering — in the woods, dells, meadows, and dunes — for this and that seasonal item that needs a-bringing-in: cranberries, beach plums, Montauk grapes, and, in December, the holly and ivy and evergreens. And so I find myself dancing from foot to foot with the hot, black asphalt burning my soles, standing not atop a lonely wind-swept dune but in a parking lot, as I pluck beach plums from the bush and drop them into a pail with a kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk. (That’s a reference to “Blueberries for Sal” by Robert McCloskey, 1948. As a young kid I thought that picture book took place on the low-growing Napeague gorse at Promised Land, among the beach heather and bearberries.)
I’ve persisted in going out a-gathering even as all the square miles around us have become perfectly privatized and built up. You have to be delusional to pretend we still live in a rural place and are surrounded by woods and wilds, but some of us — me — do pretend. I go out and get holly for wreaths, and I get green moss and tiny “trees” four or five inches tall for the seasonal scene I make in a kitchen mixing bowl, with a mirror for a skating pond and miniature cows and sheep (old nursery figurines, the sheep missing a leg) that stand on the green velvet of a moss hill creating a peaceable kingdom in miniature.
This habit has strongly peeved certain cousins of mine who point out how self-entitled you have to be to feel welcome to trespass to do your gathering, just willy-nilly, as if you had some right, but I just shrug as if to say, “Well, we all have our faults and one of my faults is that I’m a trespasser.”
To the store-bought Christmas wreath I retort, “Piffle.” That’s one of the easiest things you can do with wild-gathered stuff: make your own wreath. All you need is some floral wire and maybe a yard or two of bottle-green or berry-red ribbon from the Sag Harbor Variety store. Form your gathered boughs or holly branches into a circle and tie it all together with twists of wire. Stick in some pine cones you found on the ground beside the garage, next to the Norway spruce, if you’re feeling fancy. One of the only decent or honorable uses I can think of for the South Fork’s omnipresent Green Giant (the Thuja arborvitae of ill repute, whose name shall be cursed) is to cut off branches for a wreath or front-porch spray. Stick in some holly sprigs. Go crazy! Twist some English ivy around the vase.
Christmas, to use in decorating their classrooms and churches and dining rooms. This sounds like fun to me. They probably took sandwiches and hot drinks in Thermoses. They probably sang “Good King Wenceslas.”
I know about these holly-cutting expeditions from close reading of archival issues of The East Hampton Star. Indeed, inconsideration when cutting holly for December decorations was one of the first complaints I found in print about the manners of out-of-towners — the out-of-towners, in this instance, being people from elsewhere in East Hampton (Springs, Wainscott, the village, Montauk) who came to Amagansett in winter to pillage greenery.
“Large quantities of holly are being gathered in the woods back of Amagansett,” reported The Star in December 1909. The editor published a complaint repeatedly that month: “People come from all over town to this holly section and carry off loads of it. Some are not content with breaking off small branches, but cut down whole trees and thus reduce the supply for the future.”
Clearly, he was being urged on by indignant Amagansett villagers — who, while they may have supported the poaching of greenery, expected it to be done according to certain inalienable codes. I can hear a faint echo of my ancestors (when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even) in both the poaching and the indignation.