229 K i m b e r l y C o b u r n ‘Until Further Notice, Celebrate Everything’: On Fermentation and Grief In Julia’s kitchen, the dead go right on living. They don’t just limp along. They teem, froth, effervesce. Mason jars with their mouths draped in faded blue plaid kitchen towels exhale quietly and burp unexpectedly along the shelves of a steel baker’s rack. Radishes bleed their crimson into a blushing brine. Tiny bubbles labyrinth their way through finely shredded cabbage studded with juniper berries. Fish parts caked in salt liquefy into a tarry ooze. Meads, vinegars and tinctures refract the late afternoon light. Like cathedral windows, they cast prismatic puddles onto the floor. The colours turn Schmoo, the affectionate, ice-eyed white cat lounging on the cool terracotta tile, into a psychedelic liquid light show. Julia lifts a tawny jar from the top shelf where her other jars stand in sealed and orderly rows. It’s labelled with red marker on masking tape: Grandma’s Vinegar . She unscrews the ring, pries off the silver lid, and holds it out for me to smell. A sharp tang singes my nose. It mellows quickly into something warmer, earthier. It’s a thick scent, redolent of orchards and windfall apples browning at the wasp-eaten edges. ‘I made it from the last apples I shared with her,’ she tells me, a smile beginning at the corner of her lips. ‘It smells like her house.’ Ferments are Julia’s subtle kitchen witchcraft, her microcosmic magic. By making vinegar alongside a loved one or with the fruits or vegetables they held – such as her grandmother’s apples – she untangles the lies we wrap around grief. Not only does that person’s unique microbial signature become enmeshed with Julia’s own in each ferment, it also keeps living, evolving and responding to the world. ‘This way, a bit of them is always alive and with me,’ Julia says. ‘It’s so much more dynamic than looking at a picture of them as if to say, ‘Well... you existed.’ In the clotted heat of the early afternoon, Julia’s front yard is a green and yellow tangle of proud weeds and garden plants gone rogue. Gnarled fingers of spent mullein with one or two buttery blossoms still clinging to them gesture toward gathering storm clouds. Ambitious goldenrod nods 230 over the picket fence. A cherry tomato plant sprawls out of its pot and across the cracked cement walkway, tempting the squirrels. Everything that has been thoughtfully planted in one place is on the move to another. By the mailbox, a small piece of wood stands staked among the plantain and hyssop. Its faded lettering – a deliberate, almost runic white script – reads: This garden is filled with plants used for food + medicine cultivated to honor my late mother, Margaret, and her wild + curious spirit. Please do not spray or mow. (thank you!) I have come to visit Julia, like I often do, to daydrink, to laugh at the strange antics of her too-many cats, and to catch up on each other’s lives. She opens the door and greets me in faded leopard-print leggings, red clogs and a stained purple T-shirt. Her wavy auburn hair hangs loose around her shoulders. When she chooses to be, Julia is a dead ringer for a 1940s screen siren, but most days she dresses with the sanguine exuberance of a toddler. This has included on more than one occasion: sweatshirts with pickle puns, knee-high red velvet boots over pyjama leggings, and a zip-up, hooded onesie with an image of Dolly Parton playing the autoharp astride a winged opossum. I have come to visit Julia to check on her. When death arrived at her door, he didn’t just darken it; he took his shoes off and made himself at home. She had lost her mother, her grandmother, and one of her best friends in the span of a single year and was still surfacing from those murky depths, inching steadily to avoid the bends. An only child and only grandchild, Julia was forced to navigate the bureaucratic logistics of settling two estates at once. She had to accommodate two lifetimes’ worth of belongings crammed haphazardly into cardboard. Grief is a land no one calls home, but Julia understands the terrain. She grew up in a small Iowa town whose younger population dwindled away to cities, to depression and to the opioid epidemic. When she was a teen, she told me, she’d lose ten friends a year to overdose or suicide. She became acquainted with the way grief moves, the range of space it demands. She remains patient with its loping perambulations that begin and trail off seemingly out of nowhere, to nowhere, and double back on themselves like hare tracks. She leaves it offerings, feels its pull to the soil: ‘I usually bury or plant something,’ she told me, ‘and I make something. It used to be art. Now it’s vinegar.’ darK mountain · issue 23 231 Kimberly Coburn I have come to visit Julia for another reason, one I can’t yet articulate as I take in the boxes teetering like Jenga towers along every wall and corner. The floor is a maze of framed photographs and piles of paper, half-open boxes of shells and shoes. Julia has learned her way around them so instinc- tively that she doesn’t even look down on her way to the kitchen. If a stranger walked into her home, they would assume she had just moved in. ‘Sorry about all the stuff.’ She waves vaguely behind her, her back toward me as she stirs something on the stove. ‘You’d never believe it, but I’ve actually gotten through about half of it.’ After death, the ephemera of a life becomes haunt or clutter. Socks are just socks until the feet that wore them no longer walk the earth. Then they, along with everything around them, stubbornly insist on meaning: purses full of crumpled tissue; yellowed ticket stubs forgotten in coat pockets; a voice message about nothing in particular; the familiar scent in the ward- robe that, like some portal in a children’s story, provides passage into another world where she’ll be home soon, where he’ll be looking for his scarf, where they’ve merely left for a few hours and not forever. Closets are cleared, yard sales held. The dead peer quietly out from fading photographs, moored along the banks of life while the current chutes the living along. Julia opts for utility. She incorporates these objects into her days where, like a re-recorded cassette, they retain the faint magnetic signature of lives lived before. The black canvas slip-ons her mother wore at the end of her life became her kitchen shoes, stained with sprinkles of flour and sloshes of shoyu. A stoneware crock her friend had once used to store dog food was cleaned up and restored to its original, fermentation purpose. ‘The other morning,’ Julia tells me, ‘I realised I really needed new socks. Later that day, I was unpacking a box of dishes, and it was full of Mom’s socks. I must have used them when I ran out of packing stuff.’ She looks down at her feet. ‘It’s nice to know she’s still looking out for me.’ Julia’s house is a magpie’s dream – a cabinet of curiosities displaying her interests and hobbies. She is one of those people who has crammed several lifetimes into just under 40 years. She has managed rare book collections at a local university and started her own small business cultivating commu- nity through fermentation and food history education. She has driven buses and published books on fermentation and one on the history of afternoon tea; she has advised on Hollywood films and exhibited her art in Italian galleries; her scholarship in library science has been cited in hundreds of papers; she pens arabesques in inks she steeps herself from oak galls and poke-berries. Her shelves are a hodgepodge of dark vials and 232 darK mountain · issue 23 bundles of herbs perched casually beside 17th-century cookbooks and first- edition grimoires. I have a misplaced memory from my childhood that is so fantastical, I must have cribbed it from a movie or book. It’s of a mansion library: floor to ceiling bookcases, ornate carvings along their edges. A gentle push and one gives easily, the whole behemoth rotating on a centre axis, revealing a hidden room. Julia’s home, for all its charm, is more bungalow than mansion; there are security bars on the windows. But in it, I’m filled with an urge that has followed me my whole life – to nudge the bookshelves. Just in case. ‘Here,’ Julia says, handing me what appears to be a glass of hot tea. ‘Taste this.’ Those words are Julia’s love language. I sniff at a coil of steam: strong black tea, equally strong whiskey, and something else, like lemon dipped in amber. I take a sip. It is the best hot toddy I have ever tasted. ‘Green pine- cone syrup,’ she says, arching a conspiratorial eyebrow before turning back to the countertop. I sit down on her moss green velvet sofa, forcing no fewer than four cats to rearrange themselves. A spotted one named Pierogi kneads biscuits on my lap. Several times early in our friendship, Julia had to cancel our café dates to fly to Colorado as her mother’s health declined. The trips became increas- ingly sudden and closer together, and her mother was approved for home hospice. In her final days, Julia’s mother writhed in a distant discomfort, too far from the living world for solace. One cold and snowy night just on the edge of morning, Julia’s mother was gone and with her, Julia’s clarity and sureness. The untamed instinct with which Julia navigated her life abandoned her until she second-guessed even the most mundane details of her days. ‘For months,’ she says, ‘I was capable of dealing with this massive loss but had trouble holding a conversation in an elevator.’ Surrounded by quiet cardboard and burbling jars, I realise the other reason I’ve come to visit Julia. I want to know how she found her way back to herself, how she let herself be ground beneath grief’s pestle and grew stronger for it, how she spends whole days unpacking the lives of the people she loved most and still manages to feed kittens and fill her kitchen with shelves of flavour and colour and light. I want to wiggle a corbel and have a shelf give way to a room filled with esoteric tomes and figures inked on calf skin diagramming the calculus required to endure loss without becoming less. 233 Kimberly Coburn For Julia, the path through her grief snaked around the backroads of Tennessee. After a few weeks adrift, she was accepted into Sandor Katz’s fermentation residency. Katz is the patron saint of crocks, cultures and kraut. His book Wild Fermentation sparked a resurgence in bacteria-led foodways and imbued these ancient practices with a revolutionary edge. For over 15 years, he has hosted residencies in his Walnut Ridge cabin that draw people from every walk of life to share in cultural collaboration. He insists on little in these residencies: cleaning is a matter of soap and water, salt proportions are to taste, the selection of what to work with based on season, colour or whim. But a spirit of play and a willingness to experiment are non-negotiable. Fermentation may not be grief’s most likely handmaiden, but each process unmakes the world and rebuilds a new one from the rubble. Decomposition is the stock-in-trade of the microorganisms responsible for fermentation’s strange magic. These miniature architects work in reverse. Bacteria, yeasts and fungi chisel apart sugars and starches into alcohols, acids and enzymes. Fermentation unlocks a suite of vitamins, increases the bioavailability of minerals, breaks down anti-nutrients and creates an environment hostile to pathogenic bacteria. Through the chaos of this controlled decay, what would have mouldered into rot takes on a vibrant crunch; what might have sickened, nourishes. In a culture obsessed with individuality, fermentation exposes the lie of the solitary self. We ferry within us an elaborate ecosystem, an entire cosmos. Our cells are, by some accounts, only 43% human. The remainder, the hidden half of us, accounts for most of our DNA. Study after study reveals that the microbiome is responsible for everything from immunity to mental health. We are covered, from eyelash to toenail, in invisible squat- ters – one hundred trillion of them – whose elaborate comings and goings may determine our wellness. We do, as it turns out, contain multitudes; there are more bacteria in the cloistered coils of our guts than stars pricking our galaxy. Every jar of sauerkraut is a unique conversation between microbial communities: that of the fermenter, the farmer that cut the cabbage from the soil, the people at the market who palmed its weight and passed it over. Each touch changes the ecosystem that calls the cabbage home, ever so slightly altering the final flavour of the ferment. The ingredient list for a jar of sauerkraut may be brief – cabbage, salt – but in truth, it encompasses entire lineages. 234 darK mountain · issue 23 If you’re paying attention, the depth of this connection can feel danger- ous. To recognise everything as kin renders you vulnerable to a host of heartbreaks. Climate change. Late-stage capitalism. Mass extinction. We are beset on all sides by loss – of cultures, creatures, certainty. The grief is so overwhelming that we pathologise or anaesthetise it to banish it from our consciousness. We amputate whole slabs of experience in an eagerness to distance ourselves from discomfort. But fermentation whispers that death is not a diminishment. It hitches us in intimacy to everything. After all, decomposition does not end life but merely makes it fractal. Each of us carries the engine of our own transfor- mation within us from the moment we slip into this human skin until microbes rename us, too. Grief charts the territory where love has lived. It reveals the holy, messy tapestry of relation. In the same way that it’s revolutionary and subversive in the Frigidaire Age to leave crocks percolating on the counter, filling the kitchen for days with the pungent smells of decay turned delicacy, it’s equally radical to invite the pain and ecstasy of grief for the world into our experience. And in the liberated laboratory of Katz’s backwoods cabin, Julia found a spell allowing her to reach across time, distance and even death. Julia got the news of her grandmother’s cancer only months after her mother’s passing. She clocked endless hours on the flat expanse of Interstate 75 between Atlanta and Tampa to visit her, returning home with trunks of briny treasures her grandmother had found during her career as a marine biologist, instruments she had played or never learned to, knick-knacks and family photographs. Julia’s mantlepiece is strewn with sea stars and spiky spired shells, the worn purple braille of sea urchins and bleached sand dollars. She shows me a photograph of a young woman at the beach, the fero- ciously joyous smile on her sepia face identical to Julia’s. Comparing the two women is a compliment of the highest order. ‘She’s like me, only older,’ she says proudly, her cheeks lifting. ‘She never knew a stranger and had the perfect dirty joke for any occasion.’ Just before her grandmother died, Julia returned home with apple cores from what would turn out to be their last meal together. She packed them into a jar she found in the pantry and submerged them in sugar water. She labelled it with a red Sharpie and masking tape. Grandma’s Vinegar is placed prominently among Julia’s library of 235 Kimberly Coburn ferments. Some jars have straightforward labels written in a steady hand with the date they were made: sourdough koji with bread from a local bakery, pineapple sage mead, datil pepper hot sauce. Alongside them are jars labelled with names, places, events. Justin’s Vinegar. Asshole Rooster Garum (Mulberry + One V. Mean Quail). New Moon Kraut with Honey & Juniper made with Atlantic Ocean & Iowa Water & Antarctic Salt. This last one also carries an additional note written along the bottom: (allow the world to show you how good it is ). These jars are Julia’s culinary conjuration. In them, she bundles the breath of another country or a moment in time and keeps it on a shelf, a little living library. A single drop and the tiny terroir of a sunlit Iowa corn- field or a brooding Icelandic hot spring become, once again, a part of her interior landscape. The microbes of a long-gone loved one can mix and mingle once again with her own. We are constantly inoculated, given ‘new eyes’ , by the places and people that touch us. And Julia’s ferments make a timeless kaleidoscope of her days. It took Julia a few more trips to Florida to sort and settle her grandmoth- er’s home and affairs. Among the maelstrom of boxes and papers that came back with her, she kept track of three things. The first was her grandmoth- er’s ashes in a marble box the same lustrous pink as a conch. The second was a blue jar labelled Adventure Brine. On a whim, Julia had put pole beans left in her grandmother’s refrigerator in salt water to ferment. She situated the jar in her cup holder for the drive home and lifted the lid at rest stops and restaurants so that the microbes of the region might drift in. What had started the same way as every other ferment slowly became much more. It went backpacking and road-tripping throughout Appalachia with her. She even decanted little thimblefuls to take with her to Iceland and Alaska, to ferry home the unseen multitudes of those places. ‘This little jar is the start of a continuous ferment that I’ll add to the rest of my life,’ she explains. ‘The story of a life well lived paying tribute to those who came before, and the story of new beginnings even in times where they’ve seemed both deliciously close and perilously out of reach.’ For all the loss she’s experienced, Julia found that if you lean your weight against grief, allow it to work its rough transfiguration, it gives way. It reveals a feral joy on the other side, the balance forever turning on its centre axis. On her last trip to Florida, a combination of exhaustion and highway hypnosis lulled Julia into a waking dream, a reverie in which a procession with the energy of a New Orleans-style second line paraded up a mountain road in Appalachia. In her mind’s eye, Julia saw her grandmother strutting 236 darK mountain · issue 23 at the head of the boisterous crowd of brass instruments and bright para- sols. The old woman turned, beaming their shared smile, and handed Julia her baton. Without missing a beat, the procession lined itself up behind Julia as she led them back down the dirt road, kicking up a cloud of clay dust in her wake. Upon returning home from her travels, Julia nestled her grandmother’s seashell-coloured urn among her nautical keepsakes. She opened the adventure brine, letting it breathe. She had brought another memento with her, one she hung on the wall between her mantlepiece and her sighing fermentation shelves. She sees the small, framed sign every time she tends to the boisterous, invisible communities that call her home their own. Its gold foil letters shimmer against a navy background. They read: ‘Until Further Notice, Celebrate Everything’.