Braiding Sweetgrass: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Kimmerer briefly mentions that her husband abandoned her while they were living in Kentucky, leaving her to take care of Linden and Larkin alone. The three then moved back to upstate New York, where Robin looks for a new house and, wanting to be a good mother, tries to meet all of her daughters’ criteria for what they want in a home (including big trees and a pond to swim in). Robin eventually settles on an old farmhouse on seven acres of land, surrounded by enormous sugar maples and including a frozen-over “trout pond.” She and the girls move in that spring, and soon Linden and Larkin’s wish-list is complete—except for the swimming pond.

As the ice melts, Robin realizes that the supposed “trout pond”—which some of the neighbors say that people used to swim in decades ago—is now a thick mass of weeds and algae. Still doing what she thinks a “good mother” would do, Robin adopts some baby ducks for the girls to raise. When they grow up, the ducks move to the pond, but their feces only provide more nutrients for the algae to grow. In the winter the ducks become a nuisance to Robin as well, leaving the shelter she built for them and crowding on the back porch instead, eating the dog’s food and covering the porch in their frozen feces. Robin gets so annoyed that she considers giving them away, but instead she continues to try to be a good mother and feeds them and cleans their leavings. In the spring they return to the pond, and they are gone a month later.

In the ducks’ aftermath, the pond is greener than ever. A family of Canada geese move in, and one day Robin sees one of the chicks actually walking on the surface of the water because the algae is so thick. This is the last straw for her—“you should not be able to walk on a pond,” she thinks. Kimmerer then describes what has happened to this particular pond: something called eutrophication, “the natural process of nutrient enrichment that comes with age.” Eventually the pond would become a marsh, and then even a field or forest. However, Robin wants to be a good mother and offer a swimming pond for her girls before they get too old, and good swimming ponds are not eutrophic but rather oligotrophic, or nutrient-scarce.

Robin thus decides to alter the pond’s natural process and to clear it for her girls to swim in. Her first attempts at raking up the algae from a canoe are futile, and as she does more research, she realizes that she needs to remove the nutrient-rich muck at the bottom, not just the algae. A regular snow shovel and a window-screen sieve both fail to collect much muck, however. She resolves to remove the nutrients not by shoveling soil, but by hauling away the plants that store them. Robin takes a sample of algae from the pond and examines it under her microscope, feeling an obligation to know about the living things that she is trying to remove. She identifies three different kinds of algae, her “partners in restoration.”

Going forward with her project, Robin must schedule her “pond restoration hours” in between her regular work and all the duties of a single mother with two daughters. Her time at the pond becomes special to her, however, a chance to actually “do ecology” instead of just teach it. She develops a new strategy of raking the algae up from the shore and tossing it into a wheelbarrow. Eventually she progresses from raking only from the safety of dry ground to actually wading into the pond to work, first wearing waders and then just her shorts. She changes her ideas about mud as well, no longer trying to avoid getting muddy but simply becoming oblivious to it.

One day Robin notices a large bullfrog tadpole struggling in the mass of algae that she has just raked up. She puts it back in the water, but her next haul has many more. This new development leads Robin to a moral dilemma—she is trying to be a good mother and make a swimmable pond for her children, but she feels that she cannot sacrifice another mother’s children (the tadpoles) in the process. She adapts her work, now not only raking the algae but also picking out tadpoles and returning them to the water. As she works, she thinks more about the choices she is forced to make in her work. In theory she believes that “all lives are valuable, protozoan or not,” but in practice she is prioritizing some lives over others, and she reluctantly accepts that fact.

Because the loads of wet algae are so heavy to haul away, Robin begins leaving them for a few days to dry and bleach in the sun before moving them. The remaining plant matter is incredibly rich in nutrients, and she adds it to the compost pile to eventually be reborn as vegetables in her garden. Along with the algae, Robin now starts to cut back the willow trees along the pond’s edge, as they are another storehouse of nutrients. The more plants she removes, the more grow back, as they gradually draw more and more nutrients from the muck in the pond. One day she is cutting willows with careless enthusiasm and notices that she has almost chopped down a stem holding the tiny, exquisite nest of a nearby yellow warbler.

This incident makes Robin muse again on the casualties produced by any kind of habitat manipulation, no matter how well intended. She has once more risked sacrificing another mother’s children (the warbler’s eggs) in the process of making a home for her own daughters. She wonders how the warbler envisioned her as she approached with her shears, and compares herself to a force of destruction like industrialism or climate change “advancing inexorably toward her children and mine” in the wider world. Again she wonders “what does a good mother do?” in the face of such threats.

Robin lets the pond settle for a week, and at first it looks better, but soon algae reappears. She compares the pond to cleaning a kitchen that will always get dirty again soon. She considers the fact that when her girls eventually move away from home and her kitchen is finally clean, she will probably long for the messy, “eutrophic” kitchen that accompanied their presence.

One day Robin finds a new kind of algae in the pond, a fine mesh of green lace called Hydrodictyon. Hydrodictyon grows outward via “daughter cells” replicating the mother cells’ hexagonal net formation. Robin thinks to herself, “what does a good mother do when mothering time is done?” and starts to cry as she stands there in the water. Hydrodictyon is Latin for “water net,” she explains, and she muses on how a water net “catches nothing, save what cannot be held.” She compares the act of mothering to this net: caring for and enclosing that which cannot be held and which will eventually pass beyond. Potawatomi women are the “Keepers of the Water,” connecting the water of the womb to motherhood. “Being a good mother includes the caretaking of water,” she writes.

Years pass as Robin continues to work at restoring the pond whenever she has a free weekend day. Linden and Larkin grow older, and the family dog who accompanies Robin at her work eventually dies. One day there is a nearby rally for the cleanup of Onondaga Lake, a place sacred to the Onondaga Nation but now one of the most polluted lakes in America. Working on her own pond that Saturday, Robin considers the decisions she has made to take on certain responsibilities over others, choosing to spend so much time cleaning up her daughters’ pond but neglecting the cleanup of Onondaga Lake.

Robin muses on the apple tree beside the pond, who acts as a “good mother” sending out her fruit to be shared with the world. Linden and Larkin have also grown up here, but are now ready to leave like the apples or the seeds of the willows. Linden leaves for college before the pond is clean, and Larkin continues to help Robin in her work. The water is much cleaner now and Robin herself enjoys swimming there, but the girls only briefly get in to please their mother, and Robin recognizes that she hasn’t succeeded in “turning back time.”

On the last day of summer vacation, the last summer with Larkin at home, Robin watches the apples floating on the surface of the pond. Musing on motherhood, she references Paula Gunn Allen’s book Grandmothers of the Light, which describes women as walking different paths over the course of their lives. As the years spiral outward and a woman grows, first she walks the Way of the Daughter, then the Way of the Mother, and finally the Way of the Teacher. The spiral continues outward until she can even mother the earth itself.

Robin imagines her grandchildren swimming in the pond, but also the “water net” connecting every living thing, and the “circle of care” growing larger until her work tending to the pond spreads to a mothering of all the world’s waters. A good mother knows that her work doesn’t end, she says, “until she creates a home where all of life’s beings can flourish.”