Let me tell you how thoughtful my little girl Eloise is. She knows daddy has been making all sorts of videos lately about preparing and eating acorns. She was looking over my shoulder the other day as I was editing a video about making acorn flour, and she asked me, “What is your favorite video that you have done?”
I thought about it for a second and said, “Probably this one.” (The newest video of whatever I’m working on is always my favorite.)
She said, “It’s my favorite, too.”
A day or so later she was taken to the park by her mother. Today, she handed me this small, modest bag of acorns that she had collected for me while she was there.
Her time at the park was her time - time to lose herself in the things she likes to do and be self-absorbed. And yet, she thought of me and took the time to collect these acorns for me.
The effort for her to collect this modest amount of acorns for her at eight years old is a much greater investment than it would be for me, or you, as adults. Three weeks ago I collected about 8 times this amount, and I remember that being a big expenditure of time and energy for me.
I’m really grateful to her for this kind act of genuine love. I hope it’s a memory I never lose.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
