AncienTrails

Eating

Lughnasa                                    Waning Artemis Moon

A wonderful lunch with chicken/leek pie, a tomato, onion and feta salad and a fruit tart for dessert.  I didn’t make it to dessert, having had two pieces of the chicken/leek pie. The number of ingredients from our own garden: leeks, onion, carrot, tomato, raspberries made the meal that much more special.

The MIA has training tonight for the 3rd Thursday evenings, a sort of hip young single crowd draw.  I decided I’d go just for fun, see what it was like.  One Thursday a month wouldn’t be a lot. Of course, I’d have to keep track with our sheepshead night.

This and That

Lughnasa                                       Waning Artemis Moon

An inside day. E-mails, sorting out tasks ahead.  Doing online stuff like ordering pink daffodils for granddaughter Ruth, same for us plus some fall blooming bulbs and more daffodils for naturalizing.  Also bought a honey cake bundt pan (Nordicware!) and an Armenian Honey Pot with Good Year written on it in Hebrew from the source for all things Jewish.  That kind of thing.  Domesticity.  Kate’s sewing and I’m doing this sort of thing.

Going up now to reheat and brown the chicken leek pie for lunch.

Chicken Leek Pie

Lughnasa                                Waning Artemis Moon

The chicken leek pie has cooled down and sits in the refrigerator awaiting lunch tomorrow.  Using our own leeks, onions, carrots, parsley and thyme made the cooking fun and satisfying.

Kate’s first night back at work and she was the only physician scheduled.  Unusual.  She came home tired, but no more tired than I would have expected after major surgery and a two month lay off from the standing and walking she does at work.

Well, tomorrow will come soon.

Eternal Tru Luv

Lughnasa                               Waning Artemis Moon

Kate’s at work.  Two months almost to the day after her hip surgery she has returned to the Allina Clinic in Coon Rapids for her last four months of full time practice.  I anticipate a successful evening and final four months for her, having seen a remarkable recovery in terms of her day-to-day pain.  The hip is wonderful, the back’s pretty good, the only clinker right now is her bursitis on her left hip.  Still, compared to the awful weeks just prior to her surgery, she’s a different woman and it’s great to see.

Having her home full time, practice retirement, helped us see the possibilities in the next phase of our life together.  We’ll manage our gardens and our orchard and our bees with greater ease, two persons engaged from the start of the growing season.  We’ll have time to go into art galleries, out to lunch, just wander around more.

Other people must find the one who gets them, around whom they can be their authentic selves, I’m glad to say I’m among them.  And that the experience is reciprocal.

Eternal tru luv, as we used to say.

The Garden in September

Lughnasa                                       Waning Artemis Moon

The onions, red, yellow and white, are in the storage room ready to go on the wooden racks when I have a minute.  The honey, too, is on the bottom row of our shelving unit, collected in canning jars and resting in the boxes that held the canning jars in the store.  Kate’s just put up 7 packages of frozen kale and swiss chard, for use in the dead of winter when greens from the garden seem very special.  She’s also making applesauce from our six apple crop.  I picked them a bit too early for eating.  Chicken breasts and pie dough have been set out to thaw since I will make chicken and leek pot pie later today.  This is a busy time of year, but it is also a fun and satisfying time.

The potato plants have not died back, so they await digging and drying and storage.  The garden of 2010 has begun to wind down.  I still have to plant garlic, mulch a few beds, weed the perennial flower beds and later plant the bulbs, but the number of tasks has begun to dwindle even though the size of some of them make a lot of work still left.

A Waning Taste For Politics

Lughnasa                                      Waning Artemis Moon

Bob Feemster owned the Alexandria Times-Tribune which my father served as editor for many years.  In 1951 Bob bought us a black and white TV because the believed newspaperman should be aware of this new media.  My earliest memory of television and politics comes from watching that little TV in the 1952 race between Stevenson and Eisenhower.  A Democratic household, we were pulling for the Unitarian Stevenson against the former General of the Armies, Eisenhower.

This  was long before news organization using exit polling and computer modeling to declare victors.  The actual number of votes was what mattered and they showed up at different points in time.  The far west results didn’t begin to come in until midnight or so.  Dad let me stay up and watch the election returns with him.  Of course, it was partly staying up late at night that intrigued me, but I had also caught my father’s passion for the process.  What would happen?

You know the result.  Far from turning me away from politics, that long ago late night served as a foundation for a life of modest political activism.  You know, student politics in high school, student politics in college, radicalization during the Vietnam war era and engagement since then in various levels and kind of activism from Indiana Presidential politics and Minneapolis City politics to Minnesota state politics, neighborhood politics in Minneapolis as well as community based economic development and a raft of other state and local efforts.

In some ways politics has been the defining theme of my life.  I’ve been at it, more or less, since that night in 1952.  Rarely I have gone for more than a year without some concrete form of political engagement.  When I encounter problems in our broader community, my first thought is of a political response, how to organize it, where to start.

But.  I’m losing my taste for it.  Why?

These days I work on political issues related to environmental concerns.  I have a responsible position in a large Minnesota organization with a track record for achieving change at both the state and national levels.  My role is directly political in that I serve as a sort of manager for the organizations legislative work.  My passion for a peaceful, verdant, and just world (as some foundation says) is not less than it has been.  So, what’s the problem?

It may be broadly an analytical problem.  That is, my political work has a good deal of calculation attached to it. Analysis of political realities and the nature of changes we want often conflict.  The political path is the one on which something can be made to happen.  This puts the work largely in my head, when my motivation comes largely from my heart.  Over the years, now the many years, of political work, I have learned dispassionate detachment perhaps too well.

The work no longer serves as a vehicle for my passion.  Where has that passion gone?  Into art and writing.  When I have downtime, art comes to mind.  The world of art has drawn me, given me space for my passion and an arena in which to share that passion.  Writing has done the same.  I even have a passion for the Latin work I’m about to start up again.  But, no longer for politics.

This is a difficult place for me to be.  It feels as if I’m denying a part of myself or about to become irresponsible.  However, here’s what I’ve concluded.

When I pressed my way into the Sierra Club’s work a few years ago, I did it through the political committee, which seemed the natural fit for me.  Long experience in non-profit organizations and in political contexts have given me skills that helped me move up in the organization’s leadership.  Yet it feels increasingly like a burden.  I wonder now whether this work with the Sierra Club isn’t a regression like my return to the UU ministry.

Regressions, my analyst told me, occur because there is something you need to retrieve or repair.  In this case it might have been my agency.  Agency is the capacity to have an impact and I wondered, when I reengaged with the Sierra Club, if I still had it.  Yes.  The answer is yes.  A more important question now, however, is this:  Do I need to assert my agency at this point in my life?  No.  I don’t.

Shame, Guilt, Fear

Lughnasa                                                  Waning Artemis Moon

While it’s fresh.  A meeting this morning with our financial manager where we went over, again, the various moving parts of our investments.  It resulted in a down feeling, almost defensive.  What was this?  He said we’d be fine financially and I believed him.  We overhauled our whole approach to money now over ten years ago and have a great track record since then.  When I mentioned my feelings to Kate, she said she trusted in our ability to adapt.  Again, I believed her.  We have and will adapt to changed circumstances.

It took a while to delayer my feelings.  First, I noticed anxiety (my unfortunately favorite response to the unknown), as if a vast pit were about to open ahead of us.  A pit of this and then a possible that and more stuff we didn’t know, or have impact on.  A little deeper I recognized a fear about being dependent on a bag of gold held in some financial dragon’s lair and only won back by dint of great effort.  Silly.  Obtuse.  Still, the case.

Pushing a little further, a different layer.  Retirement.  When Kate retires, my long tenuous connection to the world of work would fray, then vanish.  It’s as if she’s retiring for both of us.  Or, rather, that I feel the imminence of retirement perhaps in a manner similar to the couvade, a strange situation in some cultures where a husband takes on the characteristics of his wife’s pregnancy, often placing a heavy rock on the belly near the birth moment and heaving it off.  So, there’s the unknown, the strange sense of money coming in from a pot somewhere far away, a feeling of retiring that is sympathetic or empathetic rather than actual.  But, that wasn’t the end.

What finally came to me was a mixture of shame, guilt and fear, all related to no longer having a viable connection to the world of work.  This is my middle class roots talking.  As long as Kate practices, I have a tangible though fragile link to work and the income it produces.  After she retires, all semblance of that relationship vanishes.  In the central Indiana world where I grew up not to work was shameful, weak, irresponsible.  Kate responded with, “Well, I’m upper middle class and I don’t care! (about the abandoning work)”

All of our life comes along for the ride and we never knew when one part or another will express itself, rise up and claim attention.

A Real Boy

Lughnasa                                               Waning Artemis Moon

Had an odd experience as I rode the lawn tractor back to the garage after putting all the no longer needed honey supers in the shed, putting the spun out frames back on the hives and heading back along the vegetable garden toward the truck gate.  I felt like a real boy.

A la velveteen rabbit, that is.  Something about having followed the bee-keeping from last year’s single colony, a package that Mark Nordeen helped me hive into hive boxes he loaned me, through the divide and hiving a package on my own this spring, over the course of the summer and the nectar flow, through to this moment, with the honey in jars, stored now at home, in the bee’s care no longer, triggered a gestalt, a deep link between my Self and this cycle of nature in which I had participated.  Somehow that made me feel real.

Now, I don’t go around in skeptical philosophical clothing all day wondering whether or not I exist.  At least not any more.  Joke.  I mean I have a developed sense of who I am and what I am, but this particular feeling, a oneness, an at-one-ment with this place and the work of another species, I’ve never experienced.  It may relate to my relatives who farmed, a now, finally, getting it, what it meant to milk the cows or bring in the corn harvest, even to gather a clutch of eggs in the morning.

Whatever it is, it felt good.  Right.

Bee Diary: Honey Extraction, Photos

Lughnasa                                           Waning Artemis Moon

By Kate’s calculation we have 4.875 gallons of honey.  Not bad.  In terms of, say, filling up your car, 4.8 gallons doesn’t sound like much, but in terms of filling up canning jars filled with honey, it’s a lot.  The following photos will give you an idea of how the day went.

The gear.  I wore the white suit and the gloves for the extraction because it protects me better when the bees get defensive.

Each time I have tried to work in the hives without this essential tool, the smoker, I’ve gotten stung.  Every time.

Doing the extraction. The frames with honey go in the extractor, lid up.  Then they whir around and centrifugal empties them of their honey while leaving the honey comb intact.  That means next year’s bees won’t have to waste energy building comb.  They can go straight to honey production.

Afterward, my fastidious wife (as she referred to herself), hit the extractor with soap and water.

The lawn tractor got a workout today.  Here I’ve loaded it with honey supers that now have empty frames.  They go back on the hives for a couple of weeks so the bees will clean them out before storage for winter.

The bees on the parent colony just before I put back on the recently spun out frames.  BTW:  Kate made all the wooden ware you see here.  I think it’s beautiful.

Bee Diary: Honey Extraction, Day 2

Lughnasa                                       Waning Artemis Moon

Artemis Hives have given up their surplus honey, all under the Artemis moon.  We started this morning with Kate putting a plastic drop cloth down on the deck while I went out to the colonies to see what was still there.  The divide had, as I expected, nothing.  That means, oddly enough, that they will need to be fed over the next few weeks before winter sets in.  The parent colony, the big dog as far as honey production, produced a good bit.  Two full supers plus maybe half of a third.  We’re well over three gallons now, probably closer to five.  I’ll get an exact count soon.

Honey extraction has its straightforward side.  Take the full frames, stick them long side up in the honey extractor and turn it on.  If there is a significant amount of capping, there is an additional step, uncapping.  Kate did this chore with the electric uncapping knife.  We had at least one extractor run with 80% or more capped.  This honey was darker.  We can bottle it right out of the extractor after filtering.

(Kate inspecting a frame to see if the honey has been extracted.)

The rest had less to no capping.  That honey has a higher moisture content and, as I said yesterday, has to be heated to kill the yeast and thereby avoid fermentation.  The taste difference is insignificant to my palate.

When we spun out the first six frames, all went well.  We emptied the extractor, took the honey in and Kate heated it.  By the time I brought the next two supers full of honey frames, however, the bees had found us.  It took a bit longer because we were further from the hive than the honey house (at least the building I’d intended to serve as a honey house.), but they found us.  After that, all sticky, sweet operations had numerous bees in attendance.  They were not aggressive, but they made the process a bit more nerve racking.

Once again the heat caused sweat to cascade over my eyebrows and into my eyes, inside the bee suit where the eyes cannot be reached by hand.  I wore the bee suit because the bees are more defensive during honey removal.  Makes sense.  But that damned bee suit amps up the humidity and heat.  Not fun.

We now have half-pint, pint and quart jars filled with an amber liquid, a sweet product made, collected and bottled right here at Artemis Hives.