Category Archives: Family

Family, Great Wheel, Science, US History, World History

The Journey and the Moon

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Samhain                                            Thanksgiving Moon

The last two nights the Thanksgiving Moon has hung like a pale lantern behind the clouds. The moon draws out of me such tender feelings, yearnings.  Maybe it’s the corollary of the old lover’s cliche, we’re seeing the same moon tonight.

What crosses my mind are all those long ago relatives, bearers of my genetic markers, on the trip out of Africa.  They may have moved on nights like these when the moon was full. Or, would they have huddled around the campfire, wary of predators who saw better in the gloom?

In either case they would have looked at the same moon unchanged from the time they began to move on that most ancient human trail.  Unchanged, that is, until July 20, 1969, a hot night in Muncie, Indiana when my flickering black and white pulled in the live–live–signals of Neil Armstrong setting a space-suit (space-suit!) boot on the lunar surface.

What a journey, if you think about it, from that trek across northern Africa, up into what we now know as the Middle East, to that boot touching down on the eons long undisturbed (by other than passing meteoroids) moon.  Even now when we look at the moon it appears the same as it did then.  Really, it’s only our knowledge that has changed, not the way it looks at night.

It pleases me to think of those, my people, in this season of the year, somewhere perhaps in a temperate latitude after thousands of years of journey, feeling a November wind chill in their face and what would become my Thanksgiving moon overhead.

Cooking, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Travel

Over the Plains and Through the River

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Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

Beginning to get that over the river and through the woods feeling.  This coming Sunday we head out for Denver.  Kate discovered, in a drive to Denver that she made this spring, that if she drives, her back doesn’t give her fits.  So, she’ll drive and I’ll watch.  Lot of good book thinking between here and the Rockies.

Holiseason has begun to assert itself more and more.  I’ve heard the occasional Christmas song, seen the articles about Hanukkah and Thanksgiving, been asked what we’re doing for them.  Now the feelings, those old, yet always new feelings, Holiseason feelings have begun to bubble up.  They’re positive for me, though I know they aren’t for a lot of folks.

As a pagan these days, I focus on the lights, the many festivals of light, the Christmas tree, the Yule log, the Thanksgiving medieval banquet, the turn of yet another new year, but reserve my real longing for the Winter Solstice.  It has become my favorite and most significant holiday of the sacred year.  I’ll be writing more about it as it approaches.

Now it’s Thanksgiving.  When growing up in Indiana, we went to my Aunt Marjorie’s for Thanksgiving.  She was the acknowledged queen of the kitchen in the Keaton family universe, consistently turning out great meals.  The kids got the card tables in the family room while the adults had the dining room table.  After the meal, the men would retire to watch football and smoke cigars.

I would read comic books, generally try to huddle in a corner somewhere, usually overwhelmed by the mass of people.  Too many and too little chance to escape.  Even so Thanksgiving was a strong part of the glue that held the Keatons together, me and my 21 first cousins.  It’s now a shared memory, several blocks in the quilt that covers our generation.

Later on Kate and I cooked many Thanksgiving dinners here in Andover, for many different configurations, but those days have waned with the movement of the kids to lands far from here.  So now we pick up and go to Jon and Jen’s who cook in their renovated kitchen.

We’ve done a couple of family Thanksgivings at Lutsen and I hope we can again.

And I don’t even like turkey.  Go figure.

Family, Politics

Collaborative, Getting Along

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Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

Kate’s in Clear Lake, up Highway 10 toward St. Cloud, for a sewing day.  She goes once a month or so and sews with two, sometimes three other women.  This is a tradition as old as needle and thread I would guess.  These sessions offer a time for getting work done, for learning from others and being with each other, visible.

Women have made more opportunities in their lives like this than men have.  Child rearing, cooking, sewing and the keeping/making of a home have provided chances to share the load of what could be lonely work.  Men usually left the home for work, for hunting and left the woman home with the children.  Now that’s changed a lot, a whole lot, and in my lifetime, but the traditions of mutual support and aid still work.

Of these women, for example, Kate was a doctor, Carol a dentist.  Contemporary young women have joined in groups Stitch and Bitch and child care co-ops.  Women’s culture has tended more toward collaboration and this is a valuable trait women now bring to the work place.

Men have tended more towards competitive approaches, seeing other men as challenges rather than potential collaborators.  Who will bag the deer?  Catch the fish.  Bring home the money. Advance to the next position.  Win the game.

Yes, of course, there are men who collaborate and women who are competitive, and sometimes these are even the same person, perhaps competitive in one sphere of life and collaborative in another.

I don’t know what a macro look at these trends would reveal now.  As many women have entered the work place and left the full-time stay-at-home role, they are in cultures that emphasize competition and getting ahead rather than collaboration and getting along.

And, yes, there are work place gurus who try to coach folks into more collaboration and less mutual throat cutting, but this aspect of our overall culture will, I suspect, die hard.

Still, I’m hopeful that the collaborators and the getter alongers will eventually make in roads, creating more humane work places and homes.  That is, if global warming doesn’t make all so irritable than we can’t sustain attention long enough to change.

 

Aging, Bees, Family, Garden, Our Land and Home

Good-Bye Garden. See You On the Flipside.

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Samhain                                                          Thanksgiving Moon

The transition from growing season to fallow season creates a sudden release from one IMAG0604domain of chores.  No more spraying, harvesting, weeding, checking the health of the plants.  No more colony inspections.

Many baby boomers, the paper says, have migrated to downtown apartments citing outdoor work and home maintenance as primary motivation.  While that once might have made sense to me, now I wonder.  The outdoor work, as long as I’m able, keeps me active, close to the rhythms of the natural world.  It gives more than it takes.  Cut off from it in an apartment doesn’t sound appealing.  If you don’t like it, if it takes more than it gives, then, yes.

I know that feeling. Home maintenance would take far more than it gives if I felt IMAG0944 Kate and me1000croppedresponsible for doing it myself.  So I can understand wanting to move away from that.  In an apartment the building takes over the plumbing, the furnace, the windows, the doors. Even there, however, being responsible for seeing that the maintenance gets done, though it does feel burdensome, maintains our agency.  And I like that.

More than any of these matters, though, is the single word home.  This is home.  Though we could, I don’t want to create another one.  At least not now.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Friends, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

The Samhain Bonfire, a bit more.

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Samhain                                                             Samhain Moon

Frank said as he left, “Casual gatherings.  Low key.  That’s what I like best.”  It was low key, but in its own surprising way, profound.

The bonfire stayed interesting for 3 hours plus, the last hour or so the result of the five four foot lengths of ironwood cut in the morning.  There will be a number more of those logs cut over the next few weeks as we prepare for the Winter Solstice bonfire on December 21st.

The calling of the ancestors to the circle worked.  When we finished, they stayed with us, entering our conversations, adding layers to the people gathered around the fire.  Our group of 7 grew by generations of Fairbanks and Charles’s and Wolfe’s and Perlich’s and Zike’s and Spitler’s.  Some of us called in our tribal ancestors from those days long ago before settlement of Europe and all of us gave a nod and a toast to the Tanzanian man whose y chromosome all the men share.  Mitochondrial Eve, too.  (Though I understand that picture has gotten more complicated.  But the idea is sound.  That woman and that man, far enough back to have entered all our DNA.)

Warren and Sheryl threw their names into the fire wrapped around logs from long ago cached wood for a barbecue.  When they did, sparks from the fire flew up toward the night sky.  Reminded me of Beowulf’s bier, where “heaven swallowed the smoke.”

More memories gather around this place.  It becomes richer with each event, especially with the crowd of ancients who filled it last night.  Some of their spirit will linger on, remembering us and being remembered.

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Our Land and Home, Third Phase

Samhain, 2013

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Samhain                                                                    Samhain Moon

Tonight is Samhain, also known as All Hallow’s Eve, and Halloween.  An abbreviated thick description (see post below for thick description) for this Samhain, in this place, 3122 153rd Ave N.W., Andover, Minnesota could begin with any aspect gathered in to this day and its night, but we’ll begin with the firepit.

Kate and I hired Javier Celis to finish a firepit begun several years before by me, worked on by brother Mark two years, but needing some finishing work.  Javier and his crew made the granite paving stones, from a cobbled street in Minneapolis, into a neat circle, lined the firepit with ground stone and put crushed marble around the outside of it.  They also laid down landscape cloth and thick mulch over the entire area, a former compost pile.

Kate’s family had a firepit in their home in Nevada, Iowa and we both enjoyed them at other’s homes.  The firepit hearkens back to campfires of native americans and pioneers here in the U.S., warming, lighting and provided heat for cooking.

The fire itself pushes back further to a fundamental separation between hominids and their close primate relatives, the domestication of fire.  Who knows how it happened? Embers from a lightning struck tree conserved overnight by accident?  A fire on the veldt which left grasses aflame and led to their use as early kindling?  This basic transition, an elemental moment, as essential to our future as a container for water, lives on in our fascination with fireplaces and bonfires.

Bonfires, especially, may be linked, probably are linked, to the fear of night stalking predators, meat eaters for whom human meant food.  So we feel safe around a bonfire, huddled around it, just a bit of the thrill left over when that thrill came from the very real possibility of death by fang or claw.

In the Celtic tradition, which we celebrate tonight, the bonfire had sympathetic magic at its core.  In the spring, on Beltane, the fire transferred its vital energy to the soil where it could quicken the seed and ensure a successful planting.  The opposite end of the year, Summer’s End, or Samhain, finds the bonfire a way of ensuring our warmth and protection from the cold and hungry months ahead.

My Celtic roots run through Ireland, the Correls, and through north Wales, the Ellises, and, perhaps, through County Kent, the Keatons.  The Correls came as potato famine immigrants in the late 19th century and we have no information about the Keaton immigration though it might have been in the same era.  The Ellises we know came here first in 1707 when Richard Ellis was put ashore by a greedy sea captain, sold as an indentured servant to pay his fare.  His mother had paid his fare in Dublin, Ireland where her husband, a captain in William and Mary’s occupying army, had recently died.

Searching in my own and the more general Celtic past led me to the Great Wheel of the Year.  It has gradually become a center point for reimagining my faith, helping me find the rhythms of the year and of human life as key sacred moments.  Thus it is, at least in part, that we go to our firepit this year, to build a bonfire and say the names of our ancestors, standing there around the universal symbol of human protection, warming our hands and waiting as the Great Wheel turns from the bounty of the growing season to the Great Rest of the fallow time.

Cooking, Family, Music

Far Out

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Fall                                                                           Samhain Moon

Jazz at Barbette.  Kate and I have begun to go, every once in a while, to the jazz and dinner combinations co-ordinated by Kevin Barnes of KBEM.  Tonight the meal was at Barbette and the music, jazz guitar, by his brother, Brian Barnes.

If you’ve not been to Barbette, it’s a stainglass lights, art of many qualities on the walls kind of place coupled with the sort of small, but beautiful presentations that mean you’ve just paid a lot for the meal. Tables are set somewhat close together and there was, at least tonight, a genuine air of bonhomie.  The wait staff are quick, delicate and attentive.

Each course had a different craft or Belgian beer associated with it so I passed mine to Kate.  The first, a Duvel, came with the pretzel course.  Never have I seen pretzels so daintily and prettily presented and accompanied by a hot mustard sauce, a shallot marmalade and a wonderful gouda cheese sauce.  Tasty.

The second, a Maredsous, came with gravlax, collard greens and small discs of grits. Sounds weird, but it was pretty good.  The third, a Chouffe, graced a strange and new food experience for me, pork belly.  Now when I say pork belly you may think of bacon but in this case I believe they cut a square section out of a pork belly and cooked it.  I have a very broad palate, more gourmand than gourmet, and I like most things, but this had way too much fat for my taste.  And, of course, I didn’t have the Chouffe to wash it down with. Quel domage.

The final dish was a deconstructed smore with a square of marshmallow topped by a scatter of broken nuts, a tablespoon size and shape piece of ice cream all on a swoosh of chocolate. Outside my low to no carb emphasis, as was the pretzel, but I went ahead anyway.  Pretty good.

We had a university lecturer and her husband, a businessman and his wife, and two militant atheists, one of whom worked for the health insurance industry at our table.

In these settings I find listening to conversation can be a challenge though Barbette wasn’t terrible.

A fun evening.  Oh, and every one said oh! when they asked where we were from and we said Andover.  “So far.”  “That’s a ways.”

 

 

Art and Culture, Asia, Cooking, Family, Garden

Outdoors

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Fall                                                                              Samhain Moon

The mid-point of October and we’re almost done with gardening.  We broadcast under the cherry and plum trees today, removing the mulch, taking up the landscape cloth, laying down the fertilizer and spraying the biotill, then replacing the landscape cloth.  After the nap I helped Kate get the landscape cloth back down, then while she rejoined it with staples to the ground, I sprayed biotill on the vegetable garden beds and mulched all of them but the herb spiral.

(Persephone and Hades)

The raspberries, which I picked this morning, are still producing and the leeks await a cooking day when I will make chicken leek pot pies, next week probably.   The leek bed will get fertilized, sprayed and mulched when they are inside while cutting down the raspberry canes, then spraying and fertilizing has to wait until they quit bearing.

This was significant manual labor and we’re both in the weary phase.  A quiet evening leaf tea bowlahead.  Some Latin right now for me.

My new teaware came, a clay bamboo holder for my tea utensils, a new pitcher made of yixing clay with a white ceramic glaze inside and a rosewood tea scoop.  All of this from a shop in Vancouver that has excellent products, The Chinese Teashop.

Family, Garden, Our Land and Home

Samhain for the Vegetable Garden

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Fall                                                                                Samhain Moon

While picking raspberries this afternoon, I looked at the garden beds we cleared this week.potatopatch670 There is the suntrap where we had all those tiny tomatoes and the two plants of huge heirloom Brandywines and Cherokee Purples.  The asparagus bed, the little mound still tufted with the green of asparagus stalks, got over taken this year by the exuberant ground cherries that grew and grew and grew and would still be growing if we hadn’t decided enough and pulled them.

South of the suntrap is the first bed in the vegetable garden, one made of logs, made long enough ago by Jon that I’ve had to replace the logs around it already at least once.  This year it had sugar snap peas, cucumbers, egg plants, broccoli, and hot peppers.  It’s had many crops over the 16 or so years its been in place.

Next to it is a bed that we’d given over to dicentra and bugbane because of the wonderful ash tree we allowed to grow large in the garden.  They’re shade lovers.  This year, with the emerald ash borer coming and a long standing desire to open up more sun in the garden, we had the ash taken down and planted this bed with its first vegetable crop in years:  yellow tomatoes and yellow peppers.  They thrived.

When Jon originally built the raised beds, I asked him to be creative, mix up the shapes and the materials.  The first one he tried was made of tin roofing.  It worked ok, but he preferred working with 2×4’s after that.  Now it’s half daisy.  The other half this year had a productive small tomato plant and couple of so-so pepper plants.  I made one obvious mistake.  I planted a pepper to the west of the tomato plant and it never thrived.

The long bed, the extra large bed, this year had beets and carrots, a couple of crops.  It also has a persistent asian lily crop that comes from the short time I used the beds as cutting gardens.  After treating the lilies as weeds (a plant out of place), they have become confined (mostly) to the extreme south end of the bed.

To the east of the extra large bed are two similar sized beds.  The north one this year hadIMAG0955cropped1000 onions and garlic and the southern bed had beets (didn’t do well) and greens (which did).  The leeks are in the long mound west of the extra large bed, doing well, still growing.

Our raspberry patch is up against the fence and behind the wisteria.  Its growth has shaded out a small bed that this year had only a crop of asian lilies.  North of it is the strawberry bed and north of that the herb spiral.

The beds we cleared are the ones on which I broadcast fertilizer last week and they’re now mulched, extra large and two similar sized ones, or awaiting mulch from this year’s leaf fall.  These beds are brown, bare of plant material for the first time since May.  They look bereft, but they’re not.  In the top six inches of soil small colonies of microbes, bacteria, fungi, worms and insects are busy, working together to create a fertile spot for next year’s garden.  It’ll be the best one ever.