Category Archives: Family

Family, Garden, Humanities

Gotta Get Back to the Garden

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                          Harvest Moon

A full day with the garden, spreading fertilizer, working it into the soil, mulching the beds. Also pulled out the tomatoes, ground cherries and peppers while Kate removed the cucumbers, hot peppers and marigolds.  The compost pile looks colorful.

As I worked, I wondered about the significance of our garden for our lives, for the questions around reimagining faith.  At one level it feels like aesthetic statement.  A claim about the beauty of productive land and its products.  At another it embodies our relationship as a joint work, a family project that yields food and time together.  Going against the grain of the modern emphasis on surface and the phenomenal it places us in touch with the under ground, the chthonic and its rich resources.  Too, it puts the natural world into our lives, integrates our life with the seasonal rhythms.  This goes against the modern emphasis on the new and making things new.  Growing food goes back 10,000 years in human history and eating from plants back to the first proto-human.

I wondered today if the post-modern might be a more eclectic era, a time with a willingness to look back into the human past and ahead into the human future with no need for the ideology of reason, fragmentation, the new, yet not being afraid to acknowledge the fruits of scientific reasoning, manufacturing, globalization.  Just putzing as I raked.

Bees, Family, Feelings, Garden, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

Wholeness

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                  Harvest Moon

Mabon eve.  The night before the fall equinox.  Tomorrow the light loses its struggle to own more than half of the day, a gain achieved back at the Summer Solstice in June.  From this point on the light diminishes and the darkness increases to its zenith at the Winter Solstice.

Been meaning to report on an interesting feeling I had at the Woolly meeting on Monday night.  I took two pies Kate had baked:  ground cherry and raspberry, both of fruit from our garden.  I also took a box of honey from our  hive, Artemis Honey with the label made by Mark Odegard.

When I left, after having sold 18 pounds of honey, I had a feeling of wholeness, that’s the best way I can describe it.  I had worked all season on the garden, the orchard and with the bees and somehow that evening I felt one with it all.

When I told Kate how I felt, I said it felt like something private was made public, that those two worlds knit together in one moment.  She said she got a similar feeling when she took food for a group, as she did so often for work and as she does now for her sewing days.

It was a good feeling, however understood.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Myth and Story, Writing

My Mythic Past

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                           Honey Moon

Most of the day among the eddas of Snorri Sturluson and various books on German and Scandinavian mythology.  This is the material that lies beneath the Tailte trilogy, this one at least, and it has fascinated me for a long time.  Since over half of my ancestry is Germanic, this is the song of my people, the stories and tales which knit the world together for ancient northern Europeans.

(Snorri)

In my writing, mostly, I have focused on Celtic and northern European lore because they are my heritage, a vein I can mine without approbation of cultural encroachment.  I don’t believe that’s necessary, but it makes my psychic life easier.

I’m still trying to understand the elusive Loki, often called a trickster, but in the end an enemy of the Aesir, leading the giants and the unworthy dead against them.  The einherjar, the worthy dead, those who died in battle and were chosen by the Valkyries to feast in Valhalla until Ragnarok and the Aesir, the pantheon of Nordic gods fight to keep the world whole.  Loki is a character central to Loki’s Children and the book after that, The Unmaking, but he’s tough to define and will be a challenge to create.  That’s what makes him interesting, of course.

(Loki, the Trickster — artwork by Arthur Rackham, 1910)

A lot of the best scholarship on the eddas and other poems of the northern European tradition are in German and Scandinavian languages so it is sometimes a struggle to find decent material.  I’m lucky in one regard in that years ago, on a whim, I picked up a multi-volume work called the Norroena:  the history and romance of northern Europe.  It contains translations into English of the major works, up to date as of 1905.  I have read all the works in the Edda volume, a fascinating collection of stories put together by an Icelandic scholar, politician and Skald, Snorri Sturluson.

 

Cooking, Family, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Our Land and Home

Midwest Grimoires

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                  Honey Moon

Finished spraying.  As the crops come in, the amount of spray needed diminishes.  Today I really only needed the reproductive spray because the remaining vegetables are mostly in that category:  tomatoes, ground cherries, egg plants, cucumbers, peppers, carrots. Granted there are a few beets, some chard and the leeks yet to harvest but they seem substantial already.  They also benefit from the showtime, nutrient drenches and the enthuse that I will spray on Saturday morning.

Kate roasted the broccoli and froze it.  She’s also making pickles today, cucumber and onion.  She’s in back to the land, earth mother mode and has been for several weeks.  She consults her canning, pickling, drying, freezing books like grimoires from calico clad wise women of the rural Midwest.  And does likewise, tweaking the recipes when she wants.

Family, Third Phase

Third Phase: A Defining Stage

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                    Honey Moon101

We renewed Kate’s medical license today for another two years.  She’ll almost certainly not use it but a career defining document like that, woven tightly into her daily life for several decades, is not surrendered lightly.  Wrestling with who we were and who we are now is a defining stage of the third phase.

 

Family, Garden

Garden Diary: 8.22.2013

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                           Honey Moon

Perk-up soil drench and showtime for insect protection this morning.  Got up too late to do the brix blaster and qualify.  Tomorrow.  As the gardening season moves toward its end, I feel less urgency.  We’re on top of the tasks right now; we’ve already got a substantial harvest in and preserved.

BTW:  A lot of this gardening info is for my reference next year and in years to come so I apologize if it seems repetitive.

Cut down the broccoli this morning and picked a few more tomatoes.  We have 17 pints of tomatoes canned already with many more on the vine.

Kate’s taking advantage of her birthday present this morning and learning how to use the long arm quilter, a three-hour, one-on-one class.  When she gets the quilting side of quilting down, she’ll be able to take a project from start to finish.  Many can’t because the long-arm quilters are expensive take up a lot of space.

Family

A Quiet Birthday

1 Comment

Lughnasa                                                                   Honey Moon

A quiet birthday as phone calls come in wishing the birthday girl well.  We had a long nap and have spent time reading after it.  Kate’s reading Orange Is The New Black, the prison2009 11 10_0592 memoir turned into a Netflix series which we watched a couple of weeks ago.  I’m reading Ninety Percent of Everything, a narrative about the merchant shipping industry.  After seven weeks of visiting ports throughout Latin America, I developed a strong curiosity about containers and container shipping.

This reading is a bit unusual since neither of us read a lot of non-fiction, leaning more toward mystery, thriller, fantasy and the classics.  I find I buy non-fiction and often leave it unread, or read it much later.

Later on tonight we plan to have a bonfire, a celebratory one, with sparklers and smores for Kate.

Family

Kate

Aside Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                      Honey Moon

Tomorrow is Kate’s 69th birthday.  We’ve known each other since 1989 and have IMAG0808celebrated many significant birthdays.  50.  60.  65.  All milestone birthdays.  This one is not a milestone in that way, the next one is three score and ten, the birthday after which, according to Jewish custom, all the years are a gift.

(Kate discovering the wonders of the Fabric Outlet store)

Kate treats herself like a thoroughbred, that is she changes her age at New Years, so by her reckoning she’s been 69 since January.

Age is funny.  It’s meaning changes as you age.  To me, with her, this is just another birthday, or, said differently, this is a birthday!

What I mean is that 69 is the same as 50 as 60 as 65 as 70, a day to celebrate the unique and wonderful woman I married on March 10, 1990.  In the last century, hell, the last millennia. Yes, we’ve been married through two different centuries and two different millennia, not many throughout history who can say that, well, not that many considering the grand total.

We have the privilege of meeting many people over the course of a lifetime and of becoming close to only a few.  I’m grateful my life and hers intersected, thanks to classical music.  And turning 69 doesn’t seem old at all anymore.  Not at all.

Family, Retirement, Third Phase

Visiting Our Money

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                   Honey Moon

Our financial planner has an office across 169 from General Mills.  When we go see him, we call it visiting our money.  The reason for going today resulted from thinking about retirement money in a somewhat new way.  It involves recalibrating expectations currently set by an “abundance of caution” approach, an approach that understandably conservative advisors use.

According to the best projections our money can buy, under current conditions (not guaranteed to continue) our assets should last well past my 100th birthday with a sizable nut still available.  In fact, a nut larger than our current assets.  Now this is good news of course, but I view these projections as a speedometer and this one tells me we’re going too slow.  That is, we’re leaving money on the table that we could be using to see the grandkids more often, do more work on our lawn, take a trip, whatever.

So we went into negotiate some ground rules with RJ about withdrawals.  By making certain conservative moves years ago, at the advice of yet another financial counselor, Ruth, we have put together a fairly large savings account which we hold in a low volatility mutual fund outside of the IRA and under our immediate control.  This account allows us to self-fund any shortfalls from our IRA withdrawal in case of a correction and, even, a crash.  This is necessary because we have set our withdrawal rate at a steady 4%, no matter what, the 4% number arrived at in order to preserve capital over the long term.

With this safety mechanism in place it then becomes possible to identify an asset floor, if you will, above which we do not need to retain the money in investments.  Which we did today.  When our assets move above this floor, we’ll make occasional withdrawals that exceed our monthly draw.  Below it we won’t.

Feels good.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, General, Great Work, Our Land and Home

Dancing in the Garden

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                         Moon of the First Harvests

We’ve settled into a rhythm that will continue until the last substantial harvest.  I go out in the mornings and harvest.  Kate then pickles, cans or freezes.  I helped with the garlic drying, but otherwise she’s done all the work.  We’ve had to clear the detritus out of the food storage room, gathered there over the winter and spring, because now trips down there for empty canning jars or to deliver full ones have become frequent.

Kate said she needed a calico dress and a gingham (Gangham?) apron.   I suggested a bonnet.  This work for her, right now, is primary in her life and she reports getting energy from doing it.  She must because she stands long hours in the kitchen.  Of course, she’s one tuckered out gal at the end, but the pantry has more stores and she feels good.

This whole garden is a dance with each of us playing different roles over the course of the season.  I have overall responsibility for the gardens and their health.  I do most, but not all, of the planting, all of the international ag labs supplementing and survey the various beds for plant health over the course of the growing season.  If there’s corrective action to be taken, that’s my job.  I bag the apples and take care of the fruit trees, also harvesting. (but not pruning.)

Kate weeds and that is one huge job.  One I don’t like.  She says it brings her satisfaction. I can’t get no satisfaction there so I’m glad she can.  At harvest time Kate takes the lead and chooses what kind of recipes to use and what methods of preservation to employ.  Near the end, when the leeks come in, I’ll make pot pies for freezing.  We both do fall clean-up and I plant bulbs.  Then the garden takes its long late fall and winter nap.