Category Archives: Family

Family, Garden, permaculture

Extra Work Raises Grade

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Lughnasa                                 Waxing Artemis Moon

Up early and out in the garden.  This is the way I like it, working in the garden before and during sunrise, a coolness, some damp lingering from the night, stillness carrying only the softest of sounds, the earth friable and eager, weeds willing to come up and the garden’s purpose easy to discern.

Kate worked on in the orchard, going back over intensive weeding of a week ago and pulling up sprouts and rhizomes, making the place just that more inhospitable for the weedy plants.  With a second load of mulch we’ll have this place looking ship-shape heading into fall.

A few grasses have begun to turn brown and there’s a slight hint of autumn in the morning air, a certain clarity and crispness.

After inspecting the garden again yesterday, I’m moving my grade from a B- to a B+.  Why?  I did three plantings of beets, greens, carrots and beans.  Now the second planting has come to maturity after many other plants finished their summer and gave up their yield.  We have a good crop of young beets, a lot of juicy carrots, plenty of greens and enough beans for a couple more freezer bags at least.  This planting weekly or so for a while, creates a series of gardens, all in the same place.  We even have a number of Cherokee Purple tomato plants which I did not plant.  They are volunteers from last year’s tomatoes.

Add to these the onions, garlic, greens, beans, beets and various fruits already harvested we have a good gardening year, not a great one, but a good one.

Plus those potatoes are still in the ground, the raspberries have begun to fruit and the fennel and leeks look good.  All in all, not bad.  I said at the beginning of the growing season that I saw this as a consolidation year, a year when we make sure we can care for what we have.  A week ago I would have said we hadn’t even met that mark, but now I believe we have.  Caring for the orchard, the vegetable garden and the new plantings from last year in there, managing the bees and getting ready for the honey harvest, plus pruning out and restoration in the perennial flower beds.

This advance is mostly thanks to Kate’s back surgery and her hip surgery.  She can now care for the garden, too, as she has in the past and it requires the both of us, what we have now.  Getting back to normal speed.

Aging, Family, Humanities, Memories

Memorable

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Lughnasa                                            Waning Grandchildren Moon

Katie slipped her hands around my arm and stroked.  Then stopped and put some pressure on.  Then stroked some more.  Katie was my birthday present from a thoughtful wife.  She learned her trade from Sister Rosalind and the Sister’s school for massage.  I’m feeling knot and kink free.  Massage clears out the mind as well as the muscles.  As Katie moved around my body, memories came flooding back.  Mom’s hands on my neck when I had polio.  The Alexandria 4-H county fair.  That afternoon in Bangkok when I let a tiny Thai woman loose on my just ruptured achilles, not knowing what it was.  Steel fingers and pain.  Lots of pain.  Then the night I stepped in the sewer grate while my body moved forward and my right foot stayed in place.  Body memories, unlocked by Katie.

Memories have a fluid, slippery existence, just like Katie’s hands as she followed the process of my spine from neck to tail.  As I write about Mom and polio, an image of stuffing tissues into hardware cloth followed.  The float for homecoming for my class, seniors at last.  Being pulled away from that by who?  I don’t recall.  Then I was in Anderson, 9 miles away, at St. John’s hospital where my mother had been taken after collapsing while serving a funeral dinner.  After that the sculpted green plastic and aluminum tubing of waiting room furniture at Riley Memorial in Indianapolis.  Mom on a gurney, now 7 days after stroke, me riding with her as they took for an operation.  She reached away from me and said, “Son.”  The last words I heard from her.  The painful early morning talk with my father, should we remove the life supports?  Yes, we both decided.  Yes.  Then the funeral.  And the days and weeks and months after where I failed to integrate mom’s death as a powerful life lesson and instead took it as an emotional blast that rocked my very foundations.

Bangkok, stumbling away from the 7-11 and the amulet stand in front of it, hurrying to get to the ATM.  Traffic making me anxious, not careful.  Blinding pain, yet running anyway because of the traffic, the cars.  All the traffic and the cars.  The night air humid as the flashing neon of Chinatown bathed the sidewalk in alternating colors, like the northern lights.

As I know, we change our memories each time we access them, so all of these events, crucial as they are to my story, may not represent the truth at all, at least not the veridical, the actual truth.  But, in a more important way, they are the most truthful of all since they are the truth that has shaped my response to all these things and the thousands more accreted over the years of my life so far.  Even my account of the massage, who knows how close it is?  Yet the feeling lingers.  Good.  Feeling.

Asia, Commentary on the news, Family, Politics, Sport

Congratulations, Mary Ellis

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Lughnasa                                            Waning Grandchildren Moon

A big shout out to sister Mary.  She got her degree!  Dr. Mary Ellis.marygetsdegree670 How about that hat.  She owns all that regalia now.  This was in Singapore last week.

Heard an interesting theory today on Favre’s ankle angst.  Allison’s husband thinks Favre has plans to come back after the first game of the season.  Why?  It’s against New Orleans.  New Orleans is the home team for the Mississippi fan boy.  Who knows?  I do know this.  Favre’s played football for many, many years.  At this point he knows his body very well and he knows/has known the impact of the ankle surgery.  In addition this is a guy who makes split second decisions on the field, about football.  He’s not indecisive.  My guess at this point is that his wife is leaning on him to quit.  He has enough money, a pick-up truck, a dog and a farm.  What more does a country boy need?

Spoke with a docent who taught political science at U of Wisconsin in Eau Claire.  Neither one of us have a clue what’s going on in this election, either at the state or federal levels.  These are peculiar times in American politics, unlike any I have seen.  Right wing nutjobs in ascendancy within the Republican party.  An African-American President.  A recession that will not die and unemployment that will fall away.  Environmental catastrophes and congress can’t even consider a bill on climate change.  Health care legislation at the Federal level challenged at the state level.  Arizona comes out as a state of anti-immigrant bigots.  A California judge overturns prop 8 in California prohibiting gay marriage, a decision that will almost certainly send this lightning rod issue all the way to the Robert’s Supreme Court.  I know I missed a few things.  Who ever said politics were dull?

Kate spent the day with her sister Anne going to quilt shops in the southwestern burbs.  She got home about 7:00 and went almost straight to bed.  Exhausting.

Tomorrow more gardening and maybe bees.  Probably bees.  We’re getting set to order extracting equipment.  That means I gotta keep these lil buggers alive and producing for years to come.  Artemis Hives.

Art and Culture, Asia, Family, Garden

Camp Fire Girls

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Lughnasa                                     Waning Grandchildren Moon

Last night over edamame and potstickers I discussed gardening with a fellow docent who had just seen Ran.  We agreed it had been a peculiar gardening season with plants blooming two weeks to a month early.  We also agreed no one could care for our gardens like we do and produced examples to prove it.  Hers:  a $10 an hour weeder who took up Astilbe instead of the stinging nettles.  Mine:  ok, I didn’t have one since only Kate and I weed here.  August finds our gardening spirit on the wane, too, and we both look forward to the blessed onset of snow.  She plants no white in her garden because winter provides it.  Don’t have many occasions to discuss gardening with somebody else obsessed by it.  Fun.

Kate has really done a knockout job on the orchard.  We’ll have it in tip-top third growing season form before the end of August with mulched paths, new plants for the guilds and mulch on the mounds around the trees.

Finally back to resistance work and it feels good.  I need to get stronger, both for personal stability reasons and for ability to do the gardening tasks I want to do.  Bee keeping requires strength with full honey supers at 50 pounds and honey laden hive boxes heavier than that.

Got a tour together for the Camp Fire girls tomorrow.  We’re going to look at how artists have represented women and women artists:  Woman of La Mouth (20,000 years old), Lady Teshat (the mummy), a japanese dancers garment from the Noh theatre called a choken, a Japanese woodblock print showing beautiful women, the Lakota fancy dress, the MAEP’s gallery with women artists and finally, if we have time, the clay and wood gallery, all by women artists.  Should be fun, too.

Cinema and Television, Family, Politics

Leafy Streets, Expensive Cars

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Summer                                      Waning Grandchildren Moon

Kate and I drove 20+ miles to the Edina part of Hopkins, directly across from Blake school’s driveway.  This is the home of former State Senator Steve Kelley, also a former candidate for governor.  This was a Sierra Club fund-raiser.  We listened to speeches, talked to friends, ducked out and then drove past her old home on Highwood Drive in Edina.  This part of Edina has lots of mature trees, leafy and atmospheric, homes with long driveways and expensive cars, landscaping that looks natural, yet manicured.  Her old home had received a new story, slightly curving windows and wooden garage doors.  It was strange to think of her living there, it seems so far from our life here in Andover.

We enjoyed being out together on a fine summer evening.  Cirrus clouds curled and twisted into mare’s tails as the sun set over South Dakota.  We crossed the Mississippi on highway 610 and we were back in the northern ‘burbs.

When I asked Kate why you would send a kid to Blake instead of Breck, she said, “Legacy, maybe.”  I thought, demographics and met geography.  She added, “Some people get their undies in a bunch if you send your kid to the wrong private school.”  It’s hard to be upper class.  So many rules.

Since I have Netflix and it doesn’t cost more to get anything, I watched the first Twilight movie.  The guy looks like a schlub to me, shows you what I know it comes to pretty boys.  The girl, Kristen Stewart, has charm, but is unconventional in her attractiveness.  The plot line weaves teen angst into a bit of supernatural and the favorite theme about vampires since Anne Rice:  the misunderstood, empathic vampire.  True Blood, the Vampire Diaries, Twilight and even the Gates have the vampire who wants to fit in and be friends with their food.  I’m sure ‘ol Vlad is spinning on his home turf inside the coffin.

The movie as a whole is weak, but since my standards for supernatural fare have a lot of flex, I watched it to the end.  Not worth it.

Family, Humanities

The Full Grandchildren Moon

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Summer                               Full Grandchildren Moon

The full moon has risen over the seven oaks outside my study window.  It stands high, calling to mind the grandchildren of the world, how they come into our lives as gifts and remain as loved ones.  Ruth and Gabe, my grandkids, are in my life only because Jon and Jen found each other and felt enough love for each other and the future to give kids a chance.  Too often couples worry about the stability of their relationship (I know I did when I was married to Raeone.) or find the future too scary.  I didn’t.  I trust the future.  Even with all the gloom in the world, I believe there is something inherently hopeful and positive about humanity and about our often fractious, conflict laden existence, a richness and a starry-eyed vision, a many armed, many legged super-organism part of our nature that works through us for good.

A beautiful 70 degree clear night, moon-lit and calm, a time to play a bit of jazz piano, hear the tinkle of wine glasses and head up to the dance floor for once last fling before going home.

Art and Culture, Asia, Family

He Lives

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Summer                                              Waxing Grandchildren Moon

By God.  I’m beginning to feel human, here in my own skin, awake.  No, not enlightenment, in fact, I don’t even think I want enlightenment, but recovered.  Feels pretty damn good thank you.

Had no takers on the Kachina spotlight.  I’m not a carnival barker for art.  When I go to a museum, I like to wander, reflect, not get pulled into a conversation by a stranger.  The tour, that’s something else.  People choose to go along, to have a companion who guides their experience.  I like that.

The Anishinabe to Zapotec tour though had 10 including two docents.  We had a lively and interesting conversation about the Kachina, the house screen, the Valdivian owl, and Chalchiuhtlicue.  We finished with the Lakota ceremonial dress and the Whiteman.

After the A to Z Roy Wolf brought two friends and Judy, his wife, to see the Matteo Ricci map.  We had a good conversation about it.  They all had Jesuit connections.

Back home tuckered out from 2+ hours on my feet.  Long nap and out to eat with my sweetie.  We sat next to a table of 40-50 somethings who were out on a date.  The table talk included a lot about the scumbags they’d left and the things they didn’t do:  no dancing, no dining out in public and not anything normal like hanging out at the mall.  Wish I’d had a tape recorder or a note pad.

Now I’m back with a few free days ahead, only a China tour coming up next week, a tour type I enjoy with a group, a Chinese language study class, I’ve done before.  Bee day looks like Sunday.

Kate gave Ray, the kid who mows our yard, a packet of comb honey and promised him a jar when we extract.  He smiled.

Aging, Family, GeekWorld, Health, Politics

Leviathan

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Summer                             Waxing Grandchildren Moon

I decided to take a month off from Latin tutorials.  Not from Latin, just the every week preparation of a new chapter.  I need to cement my learnings about verb conjugations, pronouns and certain uses of the ablatives and genitive.  Also, I need a break from expectations.

Kate’s up seeing her Physiatrist, a regular check up on pain meds.  She considers Beewin her medical home since her health issues focus on spine deterioration and arthritis, both of which have pain management and physical fitness as key treatment components.

Over the last two weeks I’ve had an ear infection and pink eye.  Good thing this 63 old kid has an in-house pediatrician.  I got expert care for these afflictions of the rug rat set.  Makes me feel young again, but not in a good way.

Have you caught any of the Washington Post’s report on the US counter-terrorist establishment?  It’s a fascinating example of how a genuine problem can breed responses that I’m sure make sense to each person who created each entity.  The whole, probably largely invisible in the–I know it’s way overused, but I’m gonna use it anyway–silos of various bureaucracies, is a Hobbesian Leviathan.  Hard to know whether to be amused, frightened, outraged or complacent.

Aging, Family, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Whew

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Summer                                      Waxing Grandchildren Moon

OK.  This will be last of this.  But.  Kate reminded me of her surgery on June 30th.  Which preceded preparation for and the arrival and stay of Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe followed then, as I said yesterday, by our too inclusive preparations for the Woollys. No wonder I wore out yesterday.  Let my prop it up and keep going inner coach have the day off.  Better rested and more clear-eyed today.  Ready for ancient Rome.

These two paragraphs came my way in the last two days.  Their conjunction speaks for itself.

“Speaking of heat, NOAA reports that June was the hottest  month in recorded history, worldwide. That is the fourth
month in a row of record warmth for planet Earth. June also marked the 304th consecutive month “with a global temperature above the 20th century average.” The last month with below-normal temperature worldwide? February, 1985. 2010
temperatures from January to June were the warmest ever recorded for both land and ocean temperatures, worldwide. Stay tuned.”
Check out Paul’s blog startribune.com/pauldouglas

(I imagine it’s photoshopped, but still…)

Mark Odegard found this quote in a book he’s reading about walking with caribou:

Henry Beston in the beginning of book.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of wild animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, greatly err, For the animal shall not be measured by man, In a world older and more complex than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethrern, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

Asia, Family, Humanities, Literature

One Cute Ruth

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Summer                                      Waxing Grandchildren Moon

ruthThree out of three grandparents agree.  This is one cute Ruth.  She’s four and smart as a whip.  Athletic, artistic and stubborn, too.  Watch out boys.

I’m still exhausted from the last week and a half.  Spent today getting to 95% in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  This is an amazing work of art and one I will reread for sure.

Tried Latin but my eyes wouldn’t focus.  Tomorrow.  If I can’t get far enough, I’ll just cancel class.  When you’re paying by the hour–literally, you can do that.

Night’s quiet cloak has fallen over us.  Again.  A time of serenity, of possibility.  Of vulnerability.  It’s allure is so strong, so winsome.  Easy to create in this time.