It's better than it sounds

Beloved's Advent candles

[posted by risa]

It's, as usual for December in these parts, nasty out there. The snow line, like a dithering hemline, has been up and down all week, dusted us twice and whitened our world once -- for a brief hour -- and is currently off the valley floor and onto the second line of hills. A few days ago, leaving the house, I caught a "blue hole" -- a bit of rare sun -- and almost slunk back into the house for dark glasses, as the snow on the hills behind the River was stunning, like the January photo of a New Hampshire calendar. Today, though, we're just drowning, which is more usual fare for these parts.

The small city library where Beloved has picked up work has been needing more and more of her time, and she's gone today, while I rattle around the house alone, a reversal from the past year's practice that I had wished would come more frequently. I've made the most of it.

All of the baubles have come down from the tree and been packed away in their paper wrappings in the bauble-tub, which is back in its spot on the high shelf in the garage; Susie Snowflake, the angel who was handmade in 1952 or thereabouts, receiving the greatest care as she is quite fragile now and has earned household-goddess stature.

The "tree" was, as is now traditional for us, a branch sawn from one of our fir trees (and the tree's wound painted over), which had had to be trimmed quite a bit to simulate a properly conical tree. The trimmings had been used all along the long mantel in the living room. These, as well as the "tree" itself, have been gathered, reduced to small bits, and added to the day's consumption in the woodstove. The house has been straightened, dusted, and swept (we almost never vacuum anymore) and the dishes have been washed and put away (no dishwasher either).

I have made next month's kindling, riving some old cedar fence boards with a hatchet down to lath thickness and an inch wide, then leaning them on the kindling-block and stepping on them at intervals to make sticks about a foot long, piling them handy to the mornings' fire-building rituals.

I've steamed some black beans and made a soup with them, adding home-grown corn, pok choi, tomatoes, Yukon Gold potatoes, some creamed butternut squash leftovers, beet greens and a small onion. It's better than it sounds; I had some for lunch.

The rest of the leftover squash has gone into a loaf of bread for Tallest Son and his family, who live near the Big City to the north.

Tallest Son (he's around 6'5" [!!]) is an independent sort and has always banked on youth to overcome life's troubles, but he is now twenty-seven or so. He recently lost a best friend in a very sad way, involving hospital-borne infection, and so is feeling his own mortality. So he was understandably stressed from learning he would have to undergo a rather debilitating oral surgery, which took place a few days ago.

While his friend was dying, Tallest Son ran out of his own sick time, so the recovery from his own surgery represents ill-afforded lost income. They couldn't easily come here for the holidays, so we will go to them -- for just a few hours, so as not to be too much of an intrusion -- deliver some of Beloved's free-range eggs and the loaf, exchange a few gifts, make a discreet investment in the household, and return.

The next day, Beloved works yet again -- so I get yet another home-alone day. I may find it hard to give up all this solitude, come Wednesday!

I wish it were not so far. I've come to detest the internal combustion engine, but there are just no real alternatives yet -- given the route.

With the curtains pulled back, there is enough light coming through the storm windows (even with our pea-soup sky) to do most things without artificial lighting. The afternoon's natural illumination, alternately grey and golden, suits the mood of a day like this, and helps remind me to slow down, to not rush at tasks, to pace them through the whole day and not tire myself.

:::

I have just checked the bread. The baking stone Beloved gave me seems to have heated unevenly and broken, the two pieces springing apart about an inch. I did think it was rather wide and thin for bread -- it's meant for pizza, but I don't do pizza as a rule -- the bigger shard would do for small loaves on its own, but I think I'll be going back to the green-glazed ironstone dish, which has lasted me for three decades so far.

I didn't make it outside much. There are some potted lavender plants that are in danger of becoming root-bound. perhaps on New Year's Day I will indulge myself. Then, early in the year, fruit trees.

"God willin' and the crick don't rise."

-30-

Quality of life

I read that an old lady met a National Guardsman on his way back to yet another tour of duty in Iraq. She told him she appreciated his protection from the terrorists and such, and asked what she could do to thank him.

"Use less oil," the young man replied.

:::

I've spent the day hanging around the woodstove, preparing a relatively simple dinner without going with it to the electric range or any of the other "modern conveniences." It's an entertaining exercise, but I'm not about to pretend that it's meaningful in the wider scheme of things: the wood I'm using was sawed with a chainsaw, the manufacture, transportation, sale and use of which was rife with both oil and coal usage, and brought to us in a truck that is much, much more of the same, over roads that are much, much, much more of the same, and so on.

I anticipate hard times when we all figure out our actual planetary energy income and how far ahead of ourselves we've spent. I was ranting to Beloved about all this, as I tend to do over coffee ("coffee?" says Dear Reader. "Risa -- do you realize --" Yes, I do. Hush! This is my blog.) -- ranting to Beloved, or as she experiences it, at her -- and she posed a question.

"So, what does this mean to us? Not the kids, I get all that, but just thee and me?"

"Well ... " I was brought up short. "Umm, not so much. We're both over 55, now, which is a pretty decent life expectancy given the design. So, we could starve, or have our heads bashed in and our stuff shared out by people who then get their heads bashed in, or pick up the latest epidemic, etc. But these are things that have happened to a lot of people and will happen to a lot more. And we've had a whole heck of a lot of things go our way, just the two of us. So, it's like nobody can really take that away. And if either of us were to lose the other tomorrow, thirty-one years together is the history that we had, more than most."

"Right. So what's the beef?"

She has a point.

As recipients of a portion of that lion's share of the world's resources that privileged people have received in this devastatingly "successful" generation, we've come most of our way already.

Looking back over such opportunities as there have been for finding more equitable, more appropriate, more just, and more sustainable ways of comporting ourselves, we see that we -- as a couple, as a family -- could have chosen some actions more wisely, so far as our own ethical record was concerned, but the whirlwind the world may reap will not be much affected, one way or another, by us. The scale of the problems is just too great.

I could offer to share with you a glass of water, or a meal, because you are thirsty or hungry, and I should -- and sometimes I do -- but it will not change the course of the tsunami coming our way, or the distance from here to higher ground that running will not -- now -- cover.

So, given the distance to higher ground and the speed and height of the tsunami, there's little use in my worrying about the tsunami. I might be a little disturbed by the thought that a better warning system could have been installed, or that the powers that be might have decreed that the city must be built elsewhere, etc -- I know the metaphor is getting strained, but bear with me -- since this is where the jobs were, I did not move, myself, to higher ground, because there was not going to be a way for me to live there, or to offer you food or water there, unless the city came with me, so to speak.

That is, libertarian survivalist behavior is -- it's just irrational. When you fall into the ocean off the stern of the ship, sure, you swim -- it's what you do, we're programmed to keep trying to live -- or you don't. It could be a matter of choice, or of individual temperament. But the outcome is not so much in doubt when you are 500 miles from, say, Anchorage.

So I don't feel much resentment when someone up and builds a blockhouse in the middle of nowhere, stocked with food and ammunition. That's their swim. Doesn't change the size of the ocean, but maybe they know that. So, I don't bug them about it. In fact, I enjoy practicing some of the same skills.

Nor do I think some environmentalist-activist behavior is really rational either. Given the scale of the problem, as outlined by the author of Life After the Oil Crash (whose math looks pretty irrefutable to me), haranguing someone about not having yet changed out their light bulbs is an exercise in about the same amount of multilevel futility as the survivalist's.

"But, Risa," interjects Dear Reader, "you have in fact changed all your light bulbs and I've heard you recommending it, too."

Mmm-hmm.

Just because I think something's ultimately futile doesn't mean I can't indulge in it. Especially if I think, rightly or wrongly, that it's good for me, or my soul, or my neighbor's well-being, for me to do so.

By hanging around the woodstove, stirring, tasting, putting in another stick, and preparing to feed company, and also sitting by the window stitching a young friend's name into a Christmas stocking, and by sweeping the house, and by looking up fruit trees in the old Organic Gardening Encyclopedia and thinking of setting them out by the south wall, I'm enjoying myself.

And I'm not out frantically shopping, which means a lot to me right now ... on several levels ...

I'm experiencing the quietness of spirit that comes with relatively low-impact living. Somehow I think that will pay small dividends between now and the apocalypse. Big dividends may never come of it. But quality of life is where you find it.

The commons doesn’t have to be a tragedy

We were driven to the train station by my wonderful in-laws (a privilege, as they seldom drive any more), and made our way onto the Amtrak Surfliner, expecting to get home around three o’clock the next day, i.e. two hours late.

Didn’t happen. We got home about seven. So, five hours late both ways. What did happen? A. there was a freight derailment that took two days to clean up. B. Another suicide, this time in front of the Coast Starlight previous to our own). These incidents, besides the desultory and endless track repair work being done on Union Pacific rails, good enough to keep freight moving, but often not good enough for passenger trains, which need to be able to do eighty miles an hour sometimes in order to meet schedules, put all the dispatching in disarray, leaving us stranded for hours at a time between boring weed-infested embankments -- and the weeds were spindly from repeated doses of Roundup, and therefore not at all pretty.

We were bracketed the whole way by screaming infants whose mothers seemed not to have gone to infant-care school (and all the babies were going to Seattle), and the train attendants seemed to have shorter and shorter fuses as we crept through the night.

But there were pluses.


For one thing, the Santa Barbara shore from the train is a once-in-a-lifetime treat; I would brave the horrors of much worse trains to see it. On this trip there were many dolphins and a few whales as a spectacular bonus.

"Look! Whales!"

The area around Mount Shasta is all it’s cracked up to be in the brochures.

Going north from Dunsmuir to Klamath Falls

The Willamette Pass and the gorge of Salt Creek (The Middle Fork of the Willamette doesn’t turn up until you are almost in the valley) is one of the truly great mountain railroad vistas on the planet.

Why can’t this journey be as unstressed as most other Amtrak routes, such as the (horribly named) Empire Builder, where they apologize for pulling into your destination five minutes after the posted schedule?

Well, there are social, political and economic issues. Engineering ones, too, but those could be managed with a little foresight.

Socially, we’re ill adapted to train travel in this country. We’re rude to our passenger trains and their passengers by diving under them with our expensive cars whenever we’re crossed in love, but I’ll leave that for another post.

I’m thinking about the politics and how it’s been driven by the needs of large corporations, but while noting the pressure from the corporations in their ubiquitous promotion of advertising/consumer culture, we have to remember that what they are pandering to is a focus on self that comes natural to human beings. We’ve, as a people and as individuals, earned our overstuffed Wal-Marts.

Consumer Choices Destroy Downtowns and Family Wages could be a title, on the model of “guns don’t kill people, people do.” I’m acknowledging there is some truth to that...

Our collective obesity, to give but one instance, is an outward sign of an ongoing illness that has no end in sight.

This is the point at which my progressivist friends who believe in spiritual evolution may say, “but...” Unh-unh. There is no such thing as a free lunch. And human nature is to spend nearly all of our time looking for a free lunch. (the large corporations know this; and this to some extent why there are large corporations).

This is known, over on the right, as “the tragedy of the commons” and is used as a basis for much head-nodding over the mutilated body of the commons as the pie is divided up by corporatist CEOs and their cronies. Conservatism this is not. But I’m starting to digress. More about that another time, God willing and the crick don’t rise. Or maybe I’ll try to do it all here, this once; have patience, though. It all takes time to say.

Suffice it to say, right now, that people are a mess and Amtrak, especially in the far west, gets to be an expression of that mess. We want whatever we want, such as to get from point A to point B, now, not tomorrow, and without screaming, toy-throwing, mother-punching, mother-punched babies.

So we go by car (much more resource consuming per capita) and skip the babies, or by plane, putting up with the screaming but for much less time (but again consuming, relatively massive amounts of planetary capital).

And here my other friends (how is it I have so many of these? I’m a bleeding heart, fer crying out loud. have they no taste?) will say, perhaps: Well, you worked hard, you’ve earned the privacy and the speed because you can afford it.

But the middle/upper class privilege game has its limitations too. On a finite, crowded earth, when I travel (and this includes travel by train, and, yes, I’m aware that I’m a hairsplitting white liberal -- so sue me -- ) I take from others. Some of whom might fit the “well, they were lazier, that’s why you have and they are the have nots” argument.

But not very many. The moms with the screaming babies on the train, for example, didn’t have much of a clue (in my all-judging view) but they both had labored mightily (one overhears these things) for minimum wage at two jobs at a time for years and had little prospect of more. Some of that is race and gender barriers, along with the stigma that STILL attaches to single moms. Yes, Virginia, racial and feminist analysis does have some valid things to say.

And even dolphins and whales could have better water and air prospects than they’re getting right now. I'm, just all for that. I just am.

The commons doesn’t have to be a tragedy. But there’s that digression, almost, again.

So.

The discretionary dollars have, for decades now, stayed away from trains, and the corporatists, who make better short-term money on freight, trucking and auto infrastructure, cars, gasoline sold to individuals, airports and their attendant hotel and ground transport industries, aircraft, and jet fuel than they do on trains, and blame the discretionary dollars for it, thus driving both discretionary and indiscretionary dollars to themselves, and to be sure all this is self-fulfilling, lobby Federal, state, and local governments to keep it that way.

It’s not a deliberate conspiracy, except on the part of a relatively few particularly astute pirates, but the effect is the same. Pay attention, now: where self-interest is assumed to be the greater good, social, economic and political practice tends to feed on that assumption, draining the public good to the eventual detriment of that self-interest.

Again? Okay. Where self-interest is assumed to be the greater good, social, economic and political practice tends to feed on that assumption, draining the public good to the eventual detriment of that self-interest.

This is why Amtrak seems to perform poorly overall, and more poorly on the West Coast than throughout the system (partly because the Union Pacific is rather hostile to Amtrak and partly because U.P. has let its infrastructure fall into disarray through corporatist raids on the till).
But we’re going to need the trains. They use much less oil than planes and cars, and, leaving aside for the moment arguments about global warming (where I do think my “side” has the edge), the stuff just went to eighty dollars a barrel and this is a trend that will continue, as the flow of blood in the Near East attests.

Trains are also more easily converted to electricity. Electricity does not HAVE to run on coal, which is pretty much irredeemable stuff from all angles.

Trains can run fast. The tracks we have now were not given to us by God, as tracks in Europe and Asia make very clear.

There’s a need. And the inaction re that need is generally expressed as “market forces.”

So, what exactly is at issue here?

Where there is a need, but market forces do not adequately address the need, create a government and pay taxes.

SOME things, that’s how you do it. You nationalize the rails you need to have passenger traffic, or, if that’s too distasteful, you build a national system without harassing the private entities for access to their dilapidated resource. Hire them to build it, if you wish, but build it and maintain it and don’t take “big government can’t run a business” as an answer.

Because, well, it just isn’t. Our fire stations are expensive and don’t turn a profit so we don’t turn them over to private industry (no money in it and they might insist on putting out only the fires they can make money on). So we maintain them with tax dollars.

It’s not business. It’s service. You could run it cheaper -- no one really needs to make sixty thousand dollars a year running a train (but no one really needs sixty thousand dollars a year -- to live with food, a roof, and education and health care for the kids -- in the first place, for providing a SERVICE, mister CEO). But there’s no requirement that the results be shoddy.

I’ve seen good government-run trains. On-time trains. Clean trains. Without seat assignment right by the screamers. Tax supported.

All it takes is the will, in the community, that the commons shall not be raided for short-term profit ... Elect the representatives, make the laws, close the loopholes, assess the taxes, build the system, keep it as simple as you can, and pay a family wage to keep it running on time and clean.

If you can do it with firehouses you can do it with trains. Yes, really you can.

:::

And oh, hey -- market forces: Eighty dollars a barrel? Ridership is up. Way up. And Amtrak is hiring.

-30-

Death in the cornfield

We were headed south on the Coast Starlight, only 53 minutes behind schedule, between and Vacaville and Dixon, California, when I noticed two very slightly separated thumps, after which the train rapidly decelerated. We were suddenly parked across an intersection in the middle of nowhere, with a square mile of corn on one side and a square mile of (corn? sorghum?) on the other; a place that resembled, to me, nothing so much as the Illinois cornfield in North by Northwest. I suspected the worst, but hoped it was not so, and awaited some announcement but none was forthcoming for some time.

At length, after nearly an hour, one of the crew came onto the intercom.

"Folks, we've had a vehicle strike, and there is a fatality. I'm sorry, but we'll be here for some time."

People began craning their necks out the windows, or running to the front of the train with their digital cameras, a behavior which I felt I could avoid, though I felt the same morbid curiosity. I think this curiosity may be inborn. We can train ourselves, but only with some difficulty, to sit still and show a bit of decorum, as if it were to honor the dead, not that the dead know anything about it.

Conversations sprung up, that had about them the hum of a kind of elation, as when the lightning has struck elsewhere and spared us. Speculation: farmworkers en route to the fields? Kids from high school on their way to opening day?

An ambulance arrived, followed by a fire truck, about eight police cars from all the jurisdictions, three pickup trucks that turned out to be local reporters, two wrecker trucks, five highway safety trucks, and several railroad inspectors, whose job was to make sure the engine could continue its journey and that the rails had not been twisted enough to stop trains (including ours) coming through.


I watched a young EMT return to the ambulance with his defibrillator, clean the wires rather dejectedly, and slam the back door of the ambulance. The slam had a finality that told, more than any words, how the incident had ended.


Firemen came through the train, stopping every four seats or so, and asked each of us whether we were injured. The train backed up about 100 yards and this gave the wrecking crew a chance to tug the wreckage from the tracks.

Eventually an Amtrak crew member came through the cars and shed some possible light on what had happened. A young man had waited in his pickup, alone, for the train to approach the crossing at sixty miles per hour. At the last moment, it seemed, when the engineer could not possibly have stopped, he dodged his vehicle around the crossing bar and waited to die. It had been, so far as anyone could tell, deliberate.

I watched a young woman on a quarter horse or thoroughbred approach the scene, her face a study in speculative interest.


She approached the area where the wreckage lay, turned her horse immediately, and disappeared in the direction from which she had come, at an urgent, insistent canter, throwing clouds of dust and earth clods. Was the dead man someone whom she'd known? Did the policemen know him? Was his story one the end of which had been half expected? Everyone not from the train seemed terribly resigned, as if this death in the cornfield had been known to them all beforehand.

The golden corn rattled on in the stout breeze.

We left the scene after another four hours, and though the mood in the Coast Starlight might seem a little subdued, returned one and all to our admiration for the light on the distant hills.

risa b

-30-

Rough and ready pepper bread

I baked today, for a wedding up north. Hmm, turned on the bread machine, set it for MIX ONLY, and then cut up very small: 1 jalapeno pepper, throwing away the seeds; 1 clove elephant garlic; 1 hank of chives with a few leaves of lavender; about 10 cherry tomatoes -- these were from Beloved's garden -- Romas are better for this but they are still green -- in September! --

-- and threw on about 1/8 teaspoon dried basil and some thyme.

Dumped all that into the bread machine.

Two handfuls of oatmeal.

Four dripits of virgin olive oil (a "dripit" [my word] is, you tilt the bottle. Some comes out. Tilt it back up right away. Should be about an eighth of a teaspoon per dripit) in the four corners of the mixing pan.

One scoop (I think it's a quarter cup scoop) of brown sugar, spread evenly over the heap.

1/4 packet of yeast.
16 oz. of warm (in cold weather) or lukewarm (in warm weather) water, vegetable stock, or whey as available (today, about half tofu whey and half well water).

Went away for half an hour and let the heap grumble a bit.

Came back and added a smallish handful of salt to one corner (about half of what the sugar was).

Fired up the mixer.

Took a small bowl, about 12 oz. size, and shook three scoops of whole wheat flour over the whirling stuff.

Let it rise up and make a sticky rotating ball.

Opened some white high gluten flour and took a bowlful and slowly shook it all over the ball until the ball was not sticky to the touch. The less sticky, the taller it will rise in the low-sided dish it is destined for. Though there is a limit to this -- experience will guide.

I then let the mixer finish its cycle (1 hr 20 minutes on my machine). Went to find the ironstone platter with vertical sides, shaped like a low, round cake pan, that I like best for this (I think we had a place setting of these once, and these were the plates. This is my last one, and I treasure it). Greased it up with vegetable shortening.

With my (CLEAN) hands well greased, I picked up the mixing pan from the bread machine, held it upside down over a well floured bread board, listened to the satisfying plop, set down the pan, and worked the loaf a bit, keeping the ball shape. Turned it right side up (the smooth balloon like surface that was the down side on the board) and set it in the center of the platter. Grabbed a steak knife and swiped three little canyons in the top, about 3/8" deep and 4" long (I don't know what these are for but they look good!).

Set aside to rise in a warm place under a sheet of vegetable-oiled plastic (so it won't stick to the loaf and let the air out when it's pulled away).

In my oven, I set two racks so that one would be about 3" above the other, with room for the loaf to rise in baking (at least three inches of headroom).

On the lower shelf, I put a pizza pan as a deflector, so as not to burn the bottom of the loaf when the middle isn't done yet.

On the upper shelf, the loaf platter, centered above the pizza pan.

Baked it one hour at 325° F., checking at fifty minutes (by tipping the loaf out and thumping its belly. A drum sound means done. I'm too deaf to go by sound, but I know the look and feel).

I set it on a drying rack to cool. Will bag later.

Ready for the wedding!

Tears in all the right places

Beloved visiting the OSF Elizabethan stage in the 1970s

Last Son and I went to Ashland, where Beloved took me every summer in the mid-seventies, to have a look at a couple of Shakespeare plays and to walk around and gawk at all the rich Californians. The walk-around was all the horror show it promised to be, and we found ourselves spending more and more time in remote corners of Lithia Park in recovery from exposure to humanity. He's far more sensitive to this sort of thing than I, as he's dealing with a mild case of Asperger's, and sometimes I had to get up and walk, relying on him to stay with me, so that he could vent without terrorizing the objects of his dismay. It's a little like going for a walk with Dr. Swift, at his most misanthropic, through the heart of the madding crowd.

I suppose, if driving a huge SUV through hundreds of miles of scorched semi-arid country to buy bits of jewelry for two hundred dollars and sit down in sun-blasted open-air bistros to thirty-dollar plates is the kind of thing that you like, you will like the kind of thing that downtown Ashland is becoming.

Son appreciated the Green Show and The Tempest but had little liking for As You Like It. My views were in accord with his, though more muted, though for me there's relatively little harm that a company can do to AYLI, even when they try.

I had forgotten that there is a tendency for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to experiment wildly with the temporal settings of the plays in the Bowmer, as compared to their more conservative treatments on the outdoor Elizabethan stage. This AYLI was done up in Great Gatsby/Depression styles, complete with Charles the Wrestler spouting off in Brooklynese and the forest of Arden as a hobo jungle. The Shepherds were Oakies... this sort of thing can be hard to watch when lines about "What shall I do with my doublet and hose" must be declaimed by a character in overalls, complete with hammer-loop and screwdriver pocket.

To their credit, the players were full-on in both their comedy and pathos, none of the set pieces sounded at all trite, and the Rosalind (Miriam Laube), a very New-York-socialite Rosalind, reached and won over the audience and provoked tears in all the right places. Her relationship to Celia (Julie Oda) was also delightful. Son and I were in the second row, far left, so we often missed facial expressions in crucial scenes front and center on the thrust stage, which were to our right in the midst of most of the audience, yet I felt the blocking was well-directed and as fair as it could be to those of us on the periphery. Worth going to see? Yes, though perhaps not all by itself after such a harrowing drive...

The Green Show that opened for the Tempest was pleasing, though not at all what I would have expected from bygone days. We had been raised up, so to speak, on sackbuts, crumhorns, and peasant blouses, whereas this was sweat-glistening dancers in red and black Spandex. In keeping with the sense of aerial spirits from the play, though. The music was original compositions in a traditional Irish setting, with pennywhistles, drums, keyboard, fiddle, contralto and soprano. Very world-class.

I mentioned to Son that while the music was as good as its kind would be even in Ireland, the dancing was, while terrific, clearly not New York. To which he replied, "You forget, even New York is not the New York everyone hopes for. This is just fine."

When we got into the Allen Pavilion, I saw that the changes to the structure were unobtrusive even though there were now far more seats. Ours were in the last of the old rows, Q, behind which were the standing room only spaces. Far from the stage, yes, but with the acoustically enhanced balcony directly above us, the sound was improved from what I could remember.

This Tempest proved very spare, with minimalist attention to staging or costuming, and required much of its magic to come from within the actors, particularly Prospero (Derrick Lee Weeden), Miranda (Nell Geisslinger), Ariel (Nancy Rodriguez), and Caliban (Dan Donohue). They all delivered, and this was the best Prospero I had ever seen. The father-daughter relationship was strong and completely believable, and Prospero's conflicts in letting go -- of her, of Ariel, and of his mastery in his "arts" -- foregrounded beautifully. Shakespeare seems, through this interpretation, to be saying that that which renders us most human is a capacity for abjuring power over others.

The "entertainment" for Miranda and her Prince was one of those classic show-stoppers of the kind for which OSF is known. The backdrops of the inner stages were lit with a myriad of stars -- light-emitting diodes, I would guess -- and the ropes that had served earlier for rigging for the King's ship became climbing ropes for balletic spirits, softly lit from above, spinning slowly in unison while singing a capella. I caught myself with my mouth hanging open, and I'm sure I was not the only one.

The standing ovation for this production was richly deserved.

At the Tudor Guild, Son bought a Renaissance hat for Daughter and a "claymore" letter-opener for her young man.

For Beloved, I bought a refrigerator magnet with this quotation (Sonnets 119):

A RUINED LOVE,
WHEN IT IS BUILT
ANEW, GROWS FAIRER
THAN AT FIRST,
MORE STRONG,
FAR GREATER.

-30-

Hours of amusement

The geese, ducks and chickens grow on apace. The first and rather skimping plum crop has been gathered and savored. Conditions are rather dry, so those plums which fell before we could get to them were found and commandeered immediately by ants. The rush to get at the plum juice was a bit of a risk for the ants, some of whom were trampled and drowned in the cracks on each dropped plum. We gather these separately, along with the bruised fallen apples, and toss them into the poultry yard, where they seem to afford hours of amusement, along with the thinned lettuce and such.

There should be free-range eggs in about three weeks. With this many birds there will need to be extra refrigeration for eggs, and Daughter has left her mini-fridge with us for the purpose.

Beloved's lush vegetable garden surpasses any we have ever had, showing her dad's wisdom in providing to us a homestead-sized compost tumbler, among the many things that have gone well. There are cucumber beetles and aphids, but almost everything looks healthy -- perhaps too much so. All the plants seem to be much more interested in foliage than fruiting. Shortage of bees? It would hardly seem there is too much nitrogen, as we don't apply commercial fertilizers.

Patty-pan squash is coming in, and is a big hit with us this year. Beloved slices these thin, radially, so that the result resembles slices of pear, and stir-fries them with her purple kale in a sauté of home-raised onions and garlic.

There are green and yellow zukes and straightneck summer squash as well, and great expanses of winter squash and pumpkin vines, though I don't see much besides the greenery at present. The brassicas mostly succumbed to the early hot spell but eggplant and peppers have recovered, and there will be crops. All the various beans look good, and the corn is spectacular, despite aphids in the silk. We will make a batch of very dilute soapy water and harass them a bit.


The cordwood is coming, and Beloved and I are stacking together when not doing other things. A delivered cord of firewood necessarily blocks the driveway and stacking cannot really be put off. A friend wanted me, or us if I could manage that, to come to a barbecue in town, and I had to say we were spoken for, which is true; we are more place-bound than most of our friends because of the high level of personal labor that goes into what we could call rural intentionality.

In rural intentionality, you do for yourself many of the things that, in convenience-oriented Western society, are handled by "labor-saving" (and often much more carbon-intensive) appliances. We hand-wash our dishes, sweep, use hand tools almost exclusively in our farm carpentering and maintenance projects, gather seeds, plant seeds in flats in the potting shed, "pot-on" our seedlings, transplant wild trees, hang clothes in the sun when we can -- all of which uses up precious time that could otherwise be spent sitting in front of a television.

And we like it better.

The downside will be that we don't see as much of people we like as maybe we'd like to do. However! Some of these will not want to "come over and help pull weeds." Some will think they'd like to do that but find out, in the process, that it's not really their thing. A few do find that this is a way they like to visit, yet we often discover we're a bit distracted and withdrawn while they're here; the fact is, we're something like hermits. We each want heaps of alone time, either working on our chores or having down time, or we want time together, as when stacking the wood. There has been so little of that, the doing of chores actually together, and we've really noticed of late that we're getting on in years.

I put on my gloves and take a chair down to the woodshed and begin laying a course of logs, perhaps sitting in the chair to avoid back strain. Then Beloved arrives with her own gloves and chair, and maybe a couple of glasses of homegrown mint tea, at about the time the row has reached knee height. She puts the tea and the chair in the shade and begins handing me the Douglas fir "sticks" -- each weighing five to fifteen pounds -- two at a time, which I place in the stack, with a rhythm which I once described to an acquaintance as "like playing Tetris." When we reach the ceiling of the woodshed and have tucked in the last bits on the top of the row, at about seven feet, we back out of the woodshed and the pile, remove our gloves, sit down side by side and drink the tea, murmuring over the profound work of art before us.

"Nice stack."

"Mmm-hmm."

"Looks better than last year's."

"Yep."

"I love this stuff."

"Me too."

"We're only going to get to do this maybe twenty more times, though."

"If we're lucky."

"Yep."

"Yep."

Back in the house, later, the phone rings. It's my mom.

"Whatcha been doing?"

"Stacking wood."

"Oh, you poor things. Why don't you put in some gas, already?"
x

It was a good home

A few words about alternative energy.

Some of us think alternative living maybe comes first.

Greentech is a hot topic, but the unglamorous fact is that using less stuff will generally give you the most returns.

Beloved and I are currently residents of that worst of all worlds, empty-nest suburban two-car commuting. Yes, we're working on that, but, with middle-class outgo, deliberately or otherwise, calibrated by our industrial/consumerist society to stultify downwardly-mobile home innovation, it's been slow. Like the rest of our generation, we've aged, and age seeks the line of least resistance. Economic comfort and personal-environment comfort being closely related.

T'wasn't always so for us. Low-energy low-tech living is practiced by most people on the planet, and it's something Norteamericanos can re-learn if they have to. If you are young, or if you have an extended family, it's not all that difficult.

In the late '70s and early '80s the Bear Family lived on twelve acres in the middle of the Coast Range here in Oregon. We didn't have our extended family with us, as is often the case, but we were young. So we built our homestead for off-grid living.

We had a friend level off a platform on our hillside, with lots of eastern exposure, bought some pier blocks and a lot of 4X4s, 2X10s, 1X12s and the like, and assembled several structures. The largest was a 24'X48' double-loft house with almost 1400 square feet of floor space. Most of the construction was done with an 18" level, a chainsaw, a brace-and-bit, a hammer, and a 9/16" socket wrench. The lumber for this house came to, at 1979 prices, less than eight thousand dollars. Needless to say, the county building code would not have permitted this. But it got through an eighty-mile-an-hour windstorm without a scratch, and kept us warm and dry, and two children were born there, so I'd say it was a good home.

We were several miles off-grid. Sanitation was provided by an outhouse. We piped in water from a springhouse with a pitcher pump at the sink, cooked with a propane stove and a wood cook stove, refrigerated with a propane refrigerator and also in the spring house, and lighting was 12 volt, with propane and Aladdin lamps for backup.


Clothes could be washed in a tub. When the kids came along, we added a washer that ran on a gasoline generator.

We raised much of our food, which we still do, but also canned a lot, which we haven't had the "time" to do for many years.

Our transportation provided the structures with juice by means of a storage battery on site, coupled to golf cart batteries in the car, which were charged whenever we went anywhere by a RV dual-battery switch.

We wired the house with heavy-duty solid core wiring suitable for running DC 50 feet or more, and spot lighting was provided by 1/2 amp car taillight lamps. For lampshades we used carved-up gallon milk jugs and the like. They worked fine.

For ambient lighting we waited for daylight or moonlight. That worked fine, too. Our skylights were insulated horizontal windows, facing east under the clerestory provided by a double shed roof.

Besides the inefficient but rather appreciated washing machine, our one real luxury was a freezer kept at a friends house, for which we paid a small rental to cover the electric bill.

The county did discover us, but was disposed to adjust our tax bill for "agricultural sheds" rather than for a home, which was fine with us. When we sold out and moved away, for what seemed to us good reasons at the time, the new owner changed over the twelve volt system from automotive to solar, but otherwise kept things the same for eighteen years. When she decided to replace the main house to meet code, she was able to recycle all the original materials into the new structure, as we had used lag screws throughout, to enable waste-free dismantling.

I don't know how "green" our footprint was -- I worked in forestry, and had to commute great distances in order to run a chainsaw for a living sometimes. But I do know that life was an adventure that we were able to live to the full, at an annual family income of some ten thousand in 1980s dollars.

At Stony Run we keep hoping to re-learn some of the things we knew then. If anything worthwhile comes of that, you'll be the first to know.

risa b

A press run

Gate for new deer fence

We have settled into our summer routine, carrying greywater to fruit trees, packing grass clippings around the trees and into the compost tumbler, watching to see how the ducks and chickens will fare with the imperious and quite territorial geese, and having at least some of our meals outside.

The gate for the deer fence is made with a frame of old cedar fence boards about seven feet square, filled in with the same fencing -- two rows of two by three inch mesh utility fence -- that went into the fence itself. The hinges are just baling wire wrapped around the framing and a fence post. The gate handle is a steel utility door handle that I originally bought to use on the house in Deadwood -- that would be 27 years ago now!

Daughter and her Young Man brought over a rental truck today, and, with Last Son's help, we loaded her few worldly possessions into it --they only filled about half the truck -- gathered for a last meal of mostly pineapple and watermelon, and we reluctantly saw them off. Daughter now lives 100 miles away.

I only cried a little.

:::

Now that there is a little more space in the garage, it occurred to me to clean it up a bit, oil the press, and do a little volunteer work. I have thousands of small paper bags, left over from a project, and am imprinting them with "Safe Schools Are Everyone's Bag. pflag-es.org."

The press, a 10X15 Chandler&Price, was built in 1886. I got it with a high-torque low-speed electric motor that looks like it is from the 1930s -- the motor more or less died on me a decade ago, so to run the press, which I don't do very often, I have built a simple treadle, using a two-by-four hinged to the floor, which I am just strong enough to operate.

Tonight's run was 500 impressions. Watching the windsock rippling in the sunset as I worked, I remembered some lines I wrote , after working at this same press in the same spot, more than a decade ago:

She'll choose two cans of color, exploring them
for the soft caramel of good set, putting aside
flakes of air-dried dross with her inking knife.

One, a can of orange stuff, she's been given
for imprinting brew-pub six-packs; the knife
scoops up a dollop and ferries it to the disk.

The other is your standard black; the smallest
bubble of this she'll add to the orange, and stir,
in hope of a decent brown. A heave of the flywheel

begins the inking-up: the disk turns a bit
with each revolution of the wheel, and the ink,
smashed paper-thin by rollers, spreads evenly

across its face, painting it, painting the rollers,
as her foot pumps the treadle, and her face
admires, as it always does, the view from here,

of garden dressed in straw, of mountain air
training the rainbow windsock northward,
of Jasper Mountain becoming a hill of gold

in the sunset. Gathering the furniture, reglets,
quoins, quoin key, and the new magnesium cut,
she locks the chase, fastens it to the bed, turns

the press, this time with impression lever on,
and lets the cut kiss the clean tympan paper
with an image. Around this image she places quads,

tympan bales, and bits of makeready, and prepares
the stacked sheets to be fed from the feed board
into the maw of the Chandler & Price, known

to pressmen for a hundred fifty years as the
Hand Snapper. She reaches for the radio's knob.
Rachmaninoff? Damn. Oh, well, turn

wheel, pump treadle, lean forward, lean back,
click-click, click CLACK, work-and-turn,
deliver the finished sheets to the delivery board,

admire mountain, lean forward, lean back.
Rachmaninoff gives way to Mozart's glorious
forty-first symphony, and Jasper Mountain

gives way to night, and in the black window
a woman in her fifties, leaning forward,
leaning back, critically appraising the music,

the printing, and herself, click-click, click CLACK,
sour bones and a game leg but a job well done
and the Mozart's Mozart. Four hundred sheets

later, and well into Bruch, the wheel stops,
the chase is unclamped, the disk and rollers
washed up, and rags canned. The reflected

window-crone lifts a sheet of work
to the light, examines impression and matter.
Reaching to silence Bruch, she sees the stilling

silhouette of the rainbow windsock:
it waits for dawn and a fair and lofting wind.


.

A reading ...

We pose for our 15 seconds of fame.
Photo by Sabena

... took place at Mother Kali's under the auspices of Gertrude Press and Equity Foundation. The audience was about thirty people, including Beloved and Daughter. I followed a poet and a novelist and there were a poet and a novelist after me; I was the autobiographer and read from the opening pages of Homecomings. The readings were well received and a good time was had by all. If you haven't been to Mother K's, go have a look-see and do support them; it's the oldest continuously operated feminist bookstore in the United States, and a real treasure.

Measure and cut

Daughter nails it down

The barn leaked a bit more this last winter than ever, so I bought a few rolls of 90 lb. roll roofing, in a light color, for more reflectivity, than last time around.

This was partly an experiment to see how much of my strength I've retained into my old age: answer, not much. Once upon a time I was able to walk up a ladder with one of these things thrown over my shoulder, but no more. Now it's measure and cut, with most of the pieces under 25 feet long, which is plenty hard enough to deal with as it is.

Daughter elected to pitch in, and we got the entire barn done in one evening after work. She suggested we go get a brew afterwards, but I declined, on the grounds that at my age it takes many more "Miller killers" to erase a beer's influence than it does at hers.

The moon rose full,while we were roofing, so afterwards I sat in the front yard with a pair of binoculars, watching the scarred, silvery behemoth climb into a darkening sky. I believe our summer has begun.

When money's tight

Airing out the ducklings

Granddaughter has been here for a lovely three day visit. I read her a book in Spanish, which was a risk, since all my rusty Romance Languages training is in French and Italian.

I asked her how she liked it and she said, "I think you better learn Spanish."

Sigh...

We read a lot of old Richard Scarry books, on which we we had raised her dad, but which were new to her, and a good deal of time was spent watching Pokemon and Ranma 1/2 DVDs or playing with puppets or painting with tempera. And hours were spent tending the new family members.

There are now almost a dozen Barred Rocks, half a dozen Araucanas, eight or so Khaki Campbell ducklings, and three goslings -- I think White Chinas, though I forgot to ask -- they're yellow right now. Basically the chickens and ducks all remember being wild somehow, but the geese are sweet and trusting and regard Beloved as their mom.

Some drainpipes somewhere in our 18" crawl space have plugged up, so I'm putting in a temporary greywater system by setting a used bathtub underneath the washing machine's drain pipe, which I've opened at one of the unions, and am feeding trees from there by means of a quickly constructed yoke with 4 gallon buckets These one fills halfway (to avoid staggering around sloshing eight gallons of water) and, shrugging into the yoke, one walks with a kind of drunken, measured rhythm, which is dictated by the buckets, to wherever one wishes to go.

It's pleasant to rediscover sensations that have mostly been read about, or that have been disappearing from knowledge, in our rather out-of-touch civilization. The yoke, like the wheelbarrow, easily negotiates tight squeezes and gets quite a lot of water to wherever it's wanted, with a minimum of fuss.

Last Son has also been here, as well as Daughter and her young man, so there has been bread baking and veggie-burrito making and beer-tasting and general bedlam.

In the midst of all this activity, as there are no sheep at present, I have been mowing, an activity Beloved detests and about which I'm ambivalent, as we are still relying on gasoline to get it done. But I console myself by using a mower with a bagger, and windrowing the clippings to make hay. After the hay dries, we gather it into the "barn" (poultry house really) or pile it round all the trees, shrubs, and especially the garden.

We have lots of lettuce, peppers, eggplant, squash of various kinds, and tomato starts ready to go in the ground, but it's Beloved's garden this year (we tend to take turns) and, as she's taking Granddaughter back to the Big City to the North right now, there's a pause in activity on the premises.

After the other two ladies drove off, I napped a little bit, then drove to the Big Box to get five rolls of ninety-pound roofing felt, in light grey, to re-roof the barn and the playhouse after the day cools some. Grey is a compromise. White would have better reflectivity, which we're going to need, but black goes better with our general color scheme. Hence the light grey. Much, much better would be a solar membrane, but one has to do one thing at a time when money's tight.

And why, one may well ask, is the money tight?

It's thus: We're both twenty minutes away from our jobs with no bus route nearby, requiring us to have two vehicles for now. We have have 40 mpg/hwy Saturns, but filling them now takes 35 dollars. Our tanks are lasting two weeks. So that's $150/month for gas (petrol to some of you) or $1800/year just for the work commute. And Beloved has just had to spend $700 on maintenance on her ride, and I expect to do the same for mine within a month (it has 190,000 miles on it).

We're what used to be called middle class, but that seems to be going away now, thanks to peak oil, global warming, globalization, and the policies now in place that won't allow the once vaunted American ingenuity to tackle these problems in time to do any good.

That's fair that it's happening to us at Stony Run; we've had a good turn; but aside from the question of what's going to happen in Granddaughter's time, think about the effect of these things on those who haven't had the margin for economic security that we've had.

Minimum wage here right now is a whopping (to Republicans) $7.50 an hour. If that's you, and your ride is a 12 miles/gallon used Plymouth, the transportation range of $7.50, hereabouts in 2001, was 66 miles. Currently it's 26 miles and dropping. Under these conditions there is no route from here to the American dream for many more Americans than has been true for a very long time.

And that's nothing like the trouble that's brewing elsewhere...

I have always loved the National Geographic, and of late they have been doing even more splendid -- and brave -- work than ever.

In their article on Darwin, they noted that more than 40% of Americans believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old. As this is the same 40% that is largely the "base" for current policy, it's a thing to worry about. Other recent articles have noted the continued automobile-dependent paving, urbanization, and suburbanization of more and more land; the fading of oil supplies; destruction to the arms and legs and brains of tens of thousands of good kids sent by the Bush administration's policies to wrest other people's oil from them; the dreadful conditions in Darfur and the specter of genocide; the destruction of most of the fish in the seas; the theft of Nigeria's oil by large corporations and conniving politicians and the desperate resistance of the local people (who are then labeled "terrorists"); the rapid disappearance of millions of acres of carbon-sequestering forests; the intensification of typhoons, tornadoes and hurricanes; and the fading away of glaciers and icecaps at twice the rate predicted by those scientists who have escaped the administration's censorship.

It's a wonder the Geographic hasn't been lobotomized on these topics the way most television networks and newspapers have. I know they have been losing some stiff-necked subscribers, and probably some advertisers as well. Hat's off to them.

But about those glaciers.

The article did mention that seas will rise, which most of us will have heard by now, but it also noted that water for irrigation, power, and industrial and domestic use is disappearing along with the glaciers -- often in very poor regions of the world. Setting aside for a moment yet another brilliant Geographic article that documented the worldwide "corporatization" of ownership (and bottling and sale) of indigenous people'sown water to them--

-- When the lands beneath the peoples of the world's arid and mountainous areas dry up, who do you think they're ultimately going to come after?

And we think we have an immigration problem?

Guest post by Beloved

"I have just finished regrouping baby chickies for day and night lodging.

"It has only been in the last few years that I have recovered from CHICKEN TRAUMA experienced in Gold Hill 1972. I was caretaking an 80 acre kinda farm that had recently changed hands. The place was run by 50+ white leghorn bitches and sundry killer roosters all at large. Everyday I made the rounds feeding American saddle bred horse, jersey milk cow (dry, thank goodness), various dogs and cats. The Flock of Terror followed me everywhere. I stood over each feeder, broom in hand standing guard as animals hastily choked down what they could. No place was safe. The cabin I stayed in had no window coverings. I ate breakfast swatting intruders. My early morning visits to the outhouse took courage only a full bladder can produce as countless beady eyes escorted me.

"About seven years ago we took a motley crew of runaway chickens that had taken refuge at a friend’s place. Sure, why not. We can always eat them (sorry). The raccoons beat us. Although one mama banty did raise a family. Out of five, two reached adulthood. One survived the entire flock. I named her Julia after a character in a movie with Jane Fonda and, I think, Vanessa Redgrave. It was about the Resistance. Every morning I would greet Julia. It’s a good day. If Julia can survive against the Nazi Raccoons I can survive my country’s administration. One day at a time. Over the next several years Julia befriended our turtle and one of our cats. She did not understand why cats got to come inside when she had two legs, same as the Big Folk. She did slip in a time or two skidding about on the linoleum very pleased with her self.

"Julia caused Risa a certain amount of grief over dismantling flower beds. The damage that one small chicken can do! She roosted in a Douglas fir above Gracie’s, beloved cat’s evening napping spot. When Gracie passed on, Julia began roosting on the wood pile by our front door. What a mess! Each morning I fed her. Blue jays and quail figured they were extended family.

"This fall a couple of black labs paid Julia a visit or two. On one occasion Julia crashed into the window. I held her for a couple of hours, put her in a rabbit cage, and kept her inside for a week. She survived though she sustained some neurological damage and was not able to completely hold her head up straight. This spring when I got the baby chicks I moved things around in our tiny barn. Julia was unable to find a place to roost. The poor dear was completely blind. I could see she was using her beak as a cane to tap at her surroundings. What a marvelous adapter. I moved her to an outside rabbit cage and she seemed relaxed to have a predictable environment. She also seemed to enjoy being held and taking walks with me. Julia perked up during daily visits with the baby chicks. Her last day was spent visiting with us on the grass in glorious sunshine. She appears to have died in her sleep and is buried next to Gracie.

"I have learned to love a chicken.

"Next week I will be getting 10 khaki campbell ducklings. I have raised several flocks back in the day. Risa has built a small, but totally netted, poultry run. I can let the chickens and ducks have supervised visits out in a larger area with little plastic baby swimming pools for the ducks to play in. Hopefully, we will stay ahead of the coons and hawks."

Spring cleaning

When I think of farming I think of fruit trees. So does Beloved, but much more of her thought includes a section called Animal Husbandry. We've been down to one chicken (a legally blind Banty hen) for some time, so I was not really surprised to come home, the other day, to find, on the freezer in the mudroom, a large carton with twelve cheeping Barred Rocks in it.

We can assume they'll grow like rockets, so that moves the long-forestalled Barn Projects to the front burner.

When we bought Stony Run, back in 1993, the place was even more run down than it is now, and Beloved wanted a barn but none came with the place. There was a stamping shed up at the other end, across the creek, right next to the neighbors' back yard, but that was too inconvenient to consider, so it slowly filled with all the trash from the place that couldn't be recycled in place or conveniently hauled to the county dump.

Much nearer to the house, and in a convenient location, there was a shed roof on posts and beams, in dreadful condition, which had contained much of the detritus that we moved up to the stamping shed. The neighbor had come to the fence to beg us to take it down, and we murmured something that might have sounded mollifying. But I had noticed that the beams in question were too massive to dismantle safely while working alone, and the more I looked at the mess the more I thought it could be made into the barn that was wanted.

A friend who works in landscaping after office hours connected me to the steady stream of fence boards that she was hauling away from various job sides. There were unbroken sash windows and sliding glass doors lying about the place. And I had a few squares of three-tab roofing asphalt left over from re-roofing the house.

So I did a remodel -- of sorts.

Beloved asked me the "style" of the result and I told her it was "Vernacular Architecture."

"A vernacular of one isn't vernacular," was her reply. "That's Idiosyncratic Architecture."

What-EV-er.

Two-thirds barn and one-third greenhouse-potting shed, the structure has met our needs over the last decade. Its very is that it never looked not saggy and so has forgiven us for those times -- which was nearly always -- that we deferred maintenance.

With new chickens a-growing in their box under a heat lamp, we went shopping for poultry netting and the like, and have been putzing about the barn in trousers and chore coats ever since.

When not working.

Weather permitting. It's been a very icy spring.

I've painted the barn -- our regulation colors are Red With Green Trim -- and made a few desultory repairs to the woodwork.

Among the things I got from my landscaper friend are heavy-duty iron t-posts that had all been pulled by a tractor, with the result that they are all bent out of shape.

These I've been straightening and repainting and hammering into the wet ground (something that could not be done -- by me, anyway -- in August). There will be a chicken run along the east and south sides of the barn, with netting all the way to the roofline (for raccoon prevention), and a sheep fence (replacing an older one that had seen better days), with a gate.

Once the netting is in place, I'll redo the leaky roof with 90-lb. roll roofing, then do the sheep fence. No sheep yet -- or ducks or geese. But I know the signs. They're probably already on their way.

risa b

Rhodie roundup

Spent the weekend cleaning up the yard and orchard, throwing bagged grass clippings at the feet of apple trees or onto the garden, and planting rhododendrons.

Before Beloved left for her trip, we talked about how we would replace the torn-down fence with rhodies.

"Red rhodies," she said. "No white flowers."

What I remembered was "no white flowers." What she remembers is "red."

It makes a difference.

I went to Gray's and they had lots of red-blooming rhodies but only in the $29.99 size. I felt I was on a budget and picked out four nice-looking pinks for $9.99 each.

Took them home, dug their holes, watered them in, and pulled the grass-clipping blankets up around their little green chins.

Stood back and admired. Nice!

I picked Beloved up from the train station.

Among other news, I told about getting the rhodies.

"What color are they?"

"Pink!"

We said red."

Uh-oh.

I burst into tears, and it took rather awhile for the conversation to proceed from there. It was true, red had been specifically mentioned. She's not as into pink as I am and it didn't help in this instance that at least I hadn't gotten anything with white blooms, which neither of us cares for.

Friends of our like to give us plants -- but invariably the giveaways bloom white, and we'd have overdosed on white even if we really liked it. In flowers.

At home, when I had recovered somewhat, we cautiously reopened the discussion and I went to the whiteboard and drew a grounds plan with the row of pink rhodies across the top, by the driveway and along the road.

"I can pull these two and put them here" -- drawing quickly -- "and here, and then get three red rhodies and put them here, here, and here."

"That would work," she said. "But you say there aren't any red ones?"

"Not in our size, not at Gray's right now. But somebody might have them."

She had other errands to run, so I went out and hit the nurseries. All red rhodies, such as Taurus or Vulcan, were in the $29.99 size. Until I got to Jerry's.

Jerry's Home Improvement is mostly about paint, tools, and lumber, but there is a fenced-in plant sales area in the parking lot, and here there were hundreds of white, pink, or purple rhodies in $9.99 pots -- and three red Vulcans in monster 4-gallon tubs for $19.99 each.

"I'll take them."

While I was putting these in, I noticed that men in pickup trucks wave to me these days. They didn't used to. But, then, in those days I didn't look the way I do now.

I do like it that they do that, even though I have feelings about equality that are maybe in conflict with that feeling.

But when all is said and done, I don't mind smiling and getting smiles, while putting a red rhody in among the pinks.

-- Back in the house, later, I found a heart drawn on the landscape plan, and in it, the words "Thank You!"

--risa b

a flat of snow peas

Beloved and Risa pose for a family photo in the orchard.

Orchard is likely from Wort-Yard, "an enclosure for plants or herbs." Ours includes filberts, six kinds of apples, four of cherries, two of plums, and one of pears, as well as the unkempt grapevine shown behind us and the elephant garlic-bordered garden area beyond, to the right. I would like to add kiwis, more pears, and peaches. She would like to try blueberries again (they went sickly before) and raspberries (more work to maintain than we were up for). And we have lots of blackberries, but, around here, who doesn't?

During a warm, sunny hole in the wacky weather, I tore down the half-collapsed creek bridge and finally rebuilt it on pier blocks I'd bought for this so long ago that moss had grown over the blocks. Several of the antique 2X10 treads had to be retired, but most were recycled back into the bridge. The pressure treated 4X4 timbers are holding up well, though they curved over time, so I rotated them and used the curvature as camber for the new bridge

I celebrated the new bridge by dragging a mower across it, and now the whole place has been mowed, with the clippings piled on the garden, the garden tilled, and the fruit trees pruned.

We'd prefer not to mow at all, but we still don't have quite enough money for a sheep fence. So we keep and use all the clippings, as well as the prunings, wherever we can, and are thus able to avoid the neighborhood ritual of backyard burning.

I also cleaned up the potting shed a bit, and planted a flat of snow peas and a flat of mixed lettuces. The garden will need to be tilled again before these can be planted out. Already the beheaded dandelions have returned, each one sporting a jaunty yellow blossom at ground level. Cheeky!

Beloved says she is this year's primary veggie gardener, so I may be heading into trouble by putzing about the potting bench, but I couldn't resist. Our winters are long and dark. When we come away from our firesides hereabouts in March, we enter the unaccustomed sunlight squinting and blinking like so many moles ...

risa b

Bringing In the Chicken

Jasper Mountain with snow plow.

This morning we awoke to the proverbial winter wonderland. I was wondering whether to attempt to go to work, so I walked (in almost five inches of white stuff) out to the end of the driveway and found no traffic at all except for a snowplow, something I had never seen on our road before. Beloved checked all the news programs, and concluded that everything, even the Federal courthouse, was down for the day, except of course the University, which traditionally ignores anything short of a half inch of glare ice.

And tonight it's supposed to go down to 10 degrees (f.) with a lot of moisture still on the roads.

In days gone by, I would have chanced going in, which I could have done by about 11 a.m., and getting stuck in town, maybe. Daughter has a roommate and a boarder, though, and Last Son hasn't been feeling well and has nowhere for me to sleep but his armchair. I'd have to go to a motel.I'm less comfortable having such adventures than I was, possibly partly because I'm grandmother age, but partly because I'm a girl now.

Being stuck in a ditch is a little different for us than it is for guys.

So I called in and took a Personal Leave day. I have three of those to burn as it is, and they have to be used up by July.

I felt confused when I made the call, as though I were letting down the team, But immediately after I hung up, Beloved announced that lines were down on Jasper Road, and there were wrecks blocking the main highway, so there was no way I could get there in any case.

Then the lights went out. But they came right back on a few minutes later, so that hardly counts as an outage, But there were clearly things going on around us.Maybe it would be okay to hunker down a bit.

I went back outside and gathered a few beets from underneath the snow, and a few chard leaves and cabbage. I discovered green shoots of the border of elephant garlic protruding from the snow in a circle all round the garden. Some of the shoots are eight inches tall already!

I took over the kitchen and made a steamed veggie dish for brunch. Also baked whole wheat/oatmeal bread, with chopped fresh garlic in the dough, in our new oven, which turned out well. And steamed a sweet potato and shucked and whipped it, to have with a trout dinner later in the day.

The sweet potatoes or yams (we have both on hand) are a revelation. Simply slice lengthwise and leave in the tray of the rice steamer for twenty minutes on the timer. Set aside and let cool. slip the skins off the halves, drop in a bowl, add a small pat of butter or margarine and stir a fork around vigorously in the bowl until the halves have combined with a pudding-like consistency. Serve hot or cold as you wish.

Beloved has announced that she is Bringing In the Chicken (in a guinea pig cage) for the night. A sure sign of cold. I had better put a lamp in the wellhouse for tonight. This, if the power stays on, should keep the pump from freezing. I'll also fill some gallon jugs with water, in case the lamp isn't enough...

risa b