Happy December, food & foraging friends!

I’m often asked in my foraging workshops, “how much of your diet is actually foraged?” Most days I’m eating something I’ve foraged (and/or grown) myself, particularly greens, herbs, nuts, fruits and mushrooms, but most of my calories I buy, especially my dietary staples like eggs, beans, pasta and olive oil.

almost didn’t write my newsletter this month… but I love a good streak, and I haven’t missed a month since I started The Wild Life in August 2021 (read em all here) — a more impressive feat than my current 164-day Wordle streak!

2025 has been one wild ride, so it feels right to put a cork in it with a final few words to the community that has helped sustain me through the year’s twists and turns.

This time of year I frankly don’t feel like getting out much, but my other streak, my daily step count, somehow keeps me going. I have hard walking limits with my chronic illness ME/CFS, but I try to dance up to the line without going over and into a post-exertional crash. Today I stepped out to make sure I hit 7,000 daily step average for the year, watching my iPhone like an odometer as it flipped over from 6,999 — a fair improvement from 2024.

My step goal out of the way, I could focus on the wild and wonderful things in my neighborhood. A massive parade of geese streaked across the sky, honking like NYE partygoers with noisemakers — a longer train of them than I think I’ve ever seen.

I traipsed between Park View’s book ends, my twin community gardens, cataloguing everything edible in between. There was fresh, tender chickweed, clingy cleavers, beautiful scalloped leaves of mallow, and discarded holiday fir and pine. There were pretty red hawthorn berries still clinging to their thorny branches, which kept snagging my hat as I went in to forage them. There were flowering purple henbit and bluish-black juniper berries flush on scaly green branches I snipped for a sugar scrub.  There were acorns missing their little berets and woolly-leaved mullein and even shiny red reishi lacquered on a tree. All in all, it really wasn’t much if you were looking for a meal, but I knew that very soon some winter weather would wipe much of that away, and that I should be grateful for what I could get today.

I feel maudlin this time of year, as I feel time slipping through my fingers, life’s little losses piling up next to the gains. Over the break, I devoured the short Netflix series The Residence, a delight for lovers of birds, mysteries and politics (it me). I had not thought of the actor Isiah Whitlock Jr. of The Wire fame in ages, but loved seeing him play MPD’s Chief of Police in the show — a relevant role in DC today if ever there was one. Today, I woke to the news he passed yesterday — apparently peacefully, but still! Carpe diem — we truly don’t know what tomorrow may bring.