Braiding Sweetgrass: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

This chapter, “told through the eyes of [Kimmerer’s] daughter,” begins with the narrator (almost certainly Linden, the eldest) musing on the weather of late fall days in Kentucky and the yellow flowers that decorate the bare branches of a witch hazel shrub. Linden visits a house that is now empty—though still decorated for a long-ago Christmas—and remembers when a woman named Hazel Barnett lived there.

Linden first meets Hazel while she and her mother Robin are looking for wild blackberries, soon after they have moved to Kentucky. Hazel is a very old woman who calls out to them as they pass by her fence. Linden only knows the name “Hazel” from the plant witch hazel, and so she decides that Hazel “must be the witch herself.” Hazel and Robin soon become friends. At the time Robin is teaching at the local college and writing scientific articles, but she spends her evenings gardening. She and Hazel discuss plants, sitting together on the front porch and drinking lemonade. Hazel lives with her adult son Sam, a physically disabled veteran who receives a pension, and daughter Janie, who is mentally disabled.

Linden describes how her mother Robin finds great joy in household tasks like splitting wood, sometimes saying that she was “born too late” and should have been a farmwife in the 1800s. Linden feels that Robin and Hazel’s friendship grew around this sense of work and the land: “both were women with feet planted deep in the earth who took pride in a back strong enough to carry a load for others.” One day Hazel starts to cry at the sight of Robin carrying firewood, saying that she used to be able to do hard work like that, but she no longer can.

Hazel often laments the loss of her old home. It’s just down the road, but she hasn’t been back to it in years, ever since Sam had a heart attack and she came to live with him. Robin relates to Hazel’s feelings of longing for home, as she herself has recently been “transplanted” to Kentucky from her native Adirondacks. One day Hazel calls and asks if Robin will take her to see her old house before the next winter. Robin drives Hazel and Linden to the house, and Hazel starts to cry as they approach.

They all get out and Hazel shows them around the yard, finally going inside on her own. Linden looks inside the house and sees a room decorated for Christmas, with a table set for a dinner for six. After a moment of contemplation, Hazel sets to work cleaning up the place while Linden explores the abandoned rooms. Later they all go outside, and Hazel points out the witch hazel plant, commenting on how she used to make medicine out of it for her neighbors.

After this initial visit, Hazel often calls Robin on Sundays and asks to go visit the house. Linden and her younger sister Larkin go along as well. One day they discover a wren’s nest on the old house’s porch, and Hazel describes how the bird has come to depend on her for shelter. Sometimes they also visit Hazel’s old neighbors, who live in harsh poverty. Hazel always sends Robin and the girls home with a gift of food.

As winter begins, Hazel expresses a wish to visit her old house for one last Christmas. Linden’s family isn’t traveling to be with Robin’s mother and father as they normally would at Christmas, and Robin is already feeling sad about it—until she decides to have a surprise Christmas party for Hazel instead. Robin arranges to have the power reconnected to Hazel’s old home for a few days, and she, the girls, and some of Robin’s college students clean out the filthy kitchen. They invite Hazel’s old neighbors and decorate the house with a tree and lights.

On the day of the Christmas party, Linden and Larkin welcome the guests while Robin goes to pick up Hazel. Hazel beams as she steps out of the car and sees her old home full of light, warmth, and people. She moves about like a “queen” that night, and falls asleep in the car on the way home. A few years later, Robin’s family moves back north. Hazel gives her a going-away present of a rocking chair and some old Christmas ornaments. Two years after that, they learn that Hazel has died. Linden reflects that “there are some aches witch hazel can’t assuage; for those, we need each other.” Hazel and Robin found a surprising bond in their loneliness, and together they made a healing “balm” for their pain. Even now, Linden goes looking for witch hazel plants in winter, remembering that long-ago Christmas and the “medicine” of friendship.