Category Archives: Family

Aging, Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Our Land and Home, permaculture

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Beltane                                     Waning Flower Moon

There is here the action:  taking the hive tool and wrenching loose the propolis, moving the frame, all the while bees buzzing and whirring, digging into the soil, placing the leeks in a shallow trench, the sugar snap peas in their row, inoculant on top of them, around them.  The plants move from pot to earth home, their one and true place where they will root, work their miracle with light and air.  The dogs run, chase each other.  Vega plops herself down in the water, curling herself inside it, displacing the water, getting wet.

There is, too, this other thing, the mating of person and place, the creation of memories, of food, of homes for insects and dogs and grandchildren, for our lives, we two, on this strange, this awesome, this grandeur, life.  This happens, this connection, as a light breeze stirs a flower.  It happens when a bee stings, or a dog jumps up or leans in, when Kate and I hug after a day of making room for  more life here.

In a deep way it is unintended, that is, it happens not because it is willed, but because becoming native to a place is like falling in love, a surprise, a wonder, yet also a relationship that requires nurture, give and take.  In a deep way, too, it is intended, that is, we want to grow vegetables, flowers, fruit, have room for our dogs and for our family, for our friends.  The intention creates the space, the opening where the unintended occurs.

Sixteen years Kate and I have lived here.  A long time for us.  Now though, we belong here.

Art and Culture, Family, Garden, Health, Humanities

Fitter

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Spring                                                       Waxing Flower Moon

Kate called from the Northstar.  She arrives in Anoka at 5:52.  She took the light rail to Target Field and caught the train home from there.  Feels like living in Connecticut.  I’m glad to have her home.  This is a two-person house and needs both of us to make it run smoothly.

Got the results of the fitness assessment I did last week.   The heart rate thresholds were not very dissimilar from the ones I had been using, though the max is about 10 beats higher and the mid-range of low is about 3 beats higher.  I got some good recommendations on how to modify my aerobic work and, as I hoped, the whole experience gave me a jump start back to the more comprehensive workout I had been doing before Christmas.  It involves flexibility, muscle warmup and stretching and resistance.  I kept faith with the cardio, but I’d let the other stuff slide.

Spread more compost and worked it in.  I’m almost ready to plant.  In fact I may plant tomorrow morning before I amend the soil in the next bed, the one with the garlic and the lilies.  The garlic and onions and parsnips look healthy, as does the asparagus and the strawberries.  The bed for the leeks and the sugar snap peas and the bok choy needs some weeding and some soil amending, too.  In the next day or two I should have all the transplants and seeds in that go in now.  Just got word that the potatoes are on their way, so I have to get some more composted manure for the potato/bush bean bed.

Last night I did research on four of the ArtRemix objects and I’ll finish all 8 of them before Friday.  The tour itself is not until May 7th.  Thrashing around the enlightenment, romanticism, modernism, Liberalism, post-modernism, Vico and Rousseau.  I want to arrive at a synthesis between enlightenment thought and the thought of its primary critics, those in the romantic family of thinkers:  Rousseau, Hegel, Kant, Vico, Burke, Hume.  Maybe somebody else has done it, but I want to do it my way.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Great Work, Health, Memories, permaculture

Leeks, Shame and Ancestry

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Spring                                                           Waxing Flower Moon

The new dog food must be a mistake.  The whippets did not eat at all this morning, the big dogs ate little.  Hilo (our smallest whippet) is in her crate with what I take to be a belly ache since she doesn’t look seriously ill.  How do I know?  Well, I don’t really, but I’ve seen multiple dogs in extremis over the years and she just doesn’t look like one.  I diagnose it to be a tummy revolt against the salmon and sweet potato I found so alluring.  I bought six bags at 35 pounds a bag.

As any good chef, if the public refuses to eat the food I’ve chosen, I have to have a different menu selection.  In this case it will be food they’ve always liked.  Off to Costco.  Oh, and I can get that salt for the water softener, too.

Leeks, basil, thyme, fennel, marigolds, lettuce and oregano starts sit in the front yard right now, still in the cardbox carriers Mother Earth Gardens gave me for them.  Later today, in the mid-afternoon, when it warms up into the high 50’s, I’ll continue planting this year’s garden.

The leeks especially excite me because I want to learn how to grow this delectable vegetable.  It is, after all, the crown vegetable of Wales.  By that I mean Welsh soldiers would often wear a leek stuck in their hats.  No, I don’t know why, but the leek and Wales have a long standing relationship.  The ancestry I can trace most clearly is Welsh; I can put us in 17th century Denbigh, so I gotta learn how to grow leeks.  Besides, I really like them.  Their delicate onion like flavor is great in soups and wonderful as an addition to vegetable dishes, too.

Welsh Leek on Reverse of 2008 Proof Gold One Pound Coin
Also Used in 1985 & 1990

The time while Kate’s been gone has been busy even adventure packed, though all the adventures were domestic in nature:  hiving bees, doing the complete reversal on the over-wintered colony, buying vegetables and herbs, dogs and their diet and today–the garden.

Forgot to mention something that warmed my heart yesterday.  I called Kate yesterday and she put Ruth (granddaughter) on the phone.  Ruth told me she was about to go gymnastics and a few other things even Grandpop’s good ear couldn’t grasp through cell phone reception and voice quality.  When she gave the phone back to Kate unexpectedly, I told Kate to tell Ruth I loved her.  Kate told her.  Over the phone came a loud and confident, “I know.”  Gossh.

Also, while on the drive out to Nature’s Nectar yesterday I began to analyze my feelings when I get under pressure.  I had a bit of those feelings then and noticed a faint, dull ache in my lower left abdomen.  To make it feel better I could tell my body wanted to lean forward and down, then to bow my head.  Oh.  Shame.  Explained a lot.  Somehow either pressure triggered shame or shame triggered pressure, perhaps both.  So, when did I remember shame and pressure together?

When I was maybe 12 or 13, the Ellis family had moved from rental quarters on East Monroe Street into our first home purchased with a mortgage, and our last for that matter.  This house, 419 N. Canal, has that magical valence that home has.  It also had a basement that flooded during heavy rains.

Dad was not a handy man, if anything, he was the anti-handy man.  When the basement flooded, his solution was to bail it out with buckets.  Yeah, I know, but I’m sure it was the best he could think of at the time or else he considered other solutions too expensive.  I don’t know, but I do know I had to join him often at night  in the damp to carry buckets of water up from the basement to dump outside.  I didn’t like it, hated it in fact.

I couldn’t get away from it though and I remember having more than one fight with him over doing it.  That’s the memory I have, the one that came up when I thought about pressure and shame.  It was the perfect metaphor, too.  Bailing out a flooded basement is what my defensiveness and short-temper try to do when I sense myself backed into a corner.  Too much in the id, the just below the mainfloor area in my psyche, needs to get taken out somehow, but I still don’t like the work.

One solution to this, if I can remember it when pressure hits again, is to stand up.  I’m an adult now, not a 12 year old and I can make my own choices about bailing the basement.  I can choose another option, like, buy a sump pump, put in a drain field, landscape the area around the house so that it slopes away from the foundation.  Lots of options. I don’t have to bend over, bow down and be conflicted.

Just to be clear.  This is not Dad’s fault. It was the way I responded to what he thought was the best way to handle a difficult situation.  One that probably caused him pain and shame, too.

Bees, Family, Garden, permaculture

Whew.

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Spring                                  Waxing Flower Moon

Whew.  First quiet moments since 5:45 am.  Kate and I got up, ate breakfast and headed out for the Northstar station.  The plan:  put Kate on the Northstar and I return home to get ready for my tours.  However.  Those of us in our golden years have something we take with us that is more precious than money–our meds.  In Kate’s case we weren’t sure she had packed them.  So we turned around for home.

She needed gas in the truck, so, assuming we would need to go into the City, I stopped to get gas.  Kate looked for the meds.  They were there.  We might make the next station stop.  So, quick like a bunny we hit the road again, pulling into the Coon Rapid’s station just a bit ahead of the train.  But.  It was on the opposite set of tracks heading south.  Kate would have had to climb several stairs, scurry across the walkway, then descend a number of stairs.  Scurrying is not part of Kate’s repertoire right now.

So I drove her into the LRT station at 1st ave and 5th street where she boarded the Hiawatha line bound for Lindbergh terminal.

Back home.  With much less time than I’d thought.  I can still scurry.  So I did.  Shower, dress, review tour notes, drive back into the city for the tours.  Great kids, good tours.  Worthwhile in many ways.

Over to Mother Earth Gardens to pick up leeks, some herbs and some marigolds.  Before that though I ate lunch at a coffee house right across the street.  This was full of denizens of the Longfellow neighborhood, looking at home in a genuine third space, a young woman reading a book, another watching her two kids as they burrowed through a large pile of toys.  The clerk, a tatooed young woman said, “My back is much better.  She did much better work on the back than she did on the arm.  But, what the heck, it’s only permanent.”  Wry laugh.  She had a short blue cocktail party dress and cowboy boots.

After buying some plants, I drove back home.  Took a nap.  Got up at 3:30.  Ate a snack and tried to figure what I needed for the bees.  A few things yet to do.  I felt pressured, since I had expected the bees on Saturday.  When I feel pressured, I get confused, short-tempered and generally perform below expectations.  On my into the grocery store to pick up a spray bottle (which doesn’t work) and a four pound sack of sugar I felt that knot of worry, a diffuse sensation of not quite having things together.

A question I had not asked before flashed through my mind.  Why do I react this way when I feel pressured?  I don’t have an answer, but I want to get one, find a way to calm myself and get into a less distracted space.

Another 45 minutes over to Stillwater to pick up the bees at Nature’s Nectar.  I liked the folks there.  When I drove in the circular driveway, there was a garage with its door open.  The garage had packages of bees stacked on pallets with a few strays flying and buzzing through the air.  There was also a pallet load of pro-sweetener, a pre-mixed sugar water used for feeding new hives.  I’ll mix my own.  That’s what the sugar and the spray bottle were for.

Another 45 minutes back home, but this time with  7,000 buzzing passengers and their fertile Myrtle, the queen.  Tomorrow morning I’ll level out a foundation and put them in place.  I had planned to put them the new hives in the orchard, but I’m rethinking that now and may end up putting them where the current colony is.

The bee guy said I can go ahead and do a complete reversal tomorrow with my current colony and plan to divide in a week or so.  He has queens already.  The season is about two weeks ahead of normal.

Anyhow, now I’m gonna kick back, then crank up for the bees tomorrow AM.

Aging, Family, Friends, Health, Memories

The Moratorium Years

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Spring                                   Waxing Flower Moon

As the moon makes its circuit from its crescent form in the west to its fullness in the east, it passes over the skylight in our living room, at about half full.  It was there tonight, shining and visible to me as I sat in my chair.

To get my sunglasses back I had to park in University parking, then wend my way through skyways and the labyrinth that is the University of Minnesota’s medical complex.  In several buildings there is the school of dentistry, the medical school, a hospital, a heart hospital and a children’s hospital plus numerous organizations that have some relationship to the world of medicine.

There were kids with backpacks leaning against stoplights, chatting in small groups, a girl sitting cross-legged on a high wall reading a novel, signs:  Are you bipolar?  Pediatric Grand Rounds.  University Brain Tumor Center.  What a time, those university years.  Hormones on high, ambition oozing, a heady mix of freedom and new ideas all combine to create the combustible reality that is and has been college for several decades, perhaps even centuries.

A grand time and one I wouldn’t revisit.  Getting older has much to commend it and among its sweeter pleasures is a certain calmness, a centeredness impossible, at least for me, to obtain when I was in college.

Kate came back from work tonight with sad news.  Her colleague Dick Mestrich, who has been battling multiple myeloma for 2 years plus, has begun to die.  He’s Kate’s age and had just begun retirement when he got sick.

Aging, Bees, Family, Politics

Cyber Demons At Play

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Spring                                         Waxing Flower Moon

Parts of my website have disappeared over the last couple of weeks or so.  All of the liberal faith parent page got eaten by cyber demons, some I may have called myself.  The handy moon widget I had right next to the latest blog entry also went missing.  I have been unable to restore either one though I have not made a concerted effort.

Sunny but cool today.  Closer to normal.  Tomorrow is Gabe’s second birthday and Grandma flies out on Friday to celebrate.  Grandma levitates literally and figuratively when she has a chance to see the grandkids.

She had a hip injection yesterday and though the full benefit of it has not yet appeared, she got enough relief to convince her and the doctor who manages her pain that a hip procedure would help a lot.  That’s good news.  She’s also exploring a more rare procedure in which the bursa over her left hip would be removed.  No consensus on that one yet.

I’m about to leave for the city to have a meeting with Margaret Levin and Justin Fay, evaluating this year’s legislative work and getting ready for next year.  Gotta pick up my sunglasses at the UofM (I left’em at Brenda’s class last Tuesday.), buy some mochi for the grandkids and pick up some leeks.  Legcom call tonight.  Busy beaver for a few days here.

My hand has deflated and has returned mostly to normal.  Not quite, but almost.  That’s good because I get a package of bees this Saturday and I may have to start this whole process over again.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Garden

Buried

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Spring                                      Awakening Moon

Business meeting mornings always kick up stuff to do.  Sometimes it’s an odd collection.  This morning is a good example.  I saw an article about VO2 testing and decided to make an appointment. I go on April 20th at 2pm.  We agreed to at least register for cremation services so I printed out two forms.  In tandem with that I decided to look at columbariums in the interest of having a place for descendants to visit.  Yikes!  They’re expensive.  Real expensive.  In the 5,000 to 11,000 range.  Much more than a grave.  Then there was the person who might be able to help us think through our medicare options.  Out until April 19th.  Kate wanted me to look up information about the Segway so I did that.  I needed to see if the guy from whom I ordered bees cashed our check.  He did.  That means I’ll get some bees on April 24th.  Ordering the insect shapes bundt pan from Solutions, Inc. and getting a frittata recipe from Williams-Sonoma.  That sort of stuff.

We also discussed Kate’s possible hip replacement, as in when to do it if the minimally invasive guy says it would work for her.  We had a moment of silence for the money we thought had and now know we don’t, then moved on past it.

After the nap I worked out in the garden, repairing damage created by Rigel and Vega last fall.  I found residual anger, sadness, frustration not far below the surface as I tried to recreate the beautiful work Ecological Gardens had done just a month or so before all the digging.  It’s not hard work physically, but I’m finding it hard emotionally.  I love the dogs and I love the garden.  When the two conflict, it leaves me in a very unpleasant place.  We did put up the fence that should preclude any further damage.

At the moment I have Wheelock open on my desk, blank file cards ready and a yellow pad for the translation work that will follow.  Last week I found a notebook to contain my translation of Ovid and notes I make as I go along.  It’s ready, too.  Valete!

Art and Culture, Family, Health

And Then Again

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Spring                                     Awakening Moon

OK.  Turns out I had read the numbers right.  No sudden shower of wealth.  No happy Buddha of good fortune.  Also, no tears.  We have enough, more than most.  We have each other, family, the dogs, our property, our friends, our creative work.  And our Latin.  None of that changes, so the amount of money is just what it is.  Still, that brief interlude when we thought we had an unexpected windfall made us realize that we could absorb any amount of extra cash.  Big surprise there, eh?

In for my 6 month eye exam.  A space invaders day with visual field dots and the clicker.  The machine thought I pressed the button too frequently, but I just followed the tech’s suggestion to press the clicker when I thought I saw something.  My pressures are normal, my nerve unchanged.  Jane West, my eye doc, said, “Someone else might look at this and say its physiologic.”  How’s that?  “That you were just born with unusual nerves.  Still, they’re round and they stay the same from photograph to photograph.”  They took portraits of my retina’s every once in a while.  Physiologic, eh?  Explains a lot.

Home.  Reread my e-mails.  Oops.  Education for an exhibition I’m touring, Until Now.  So, brief nap, back in the car, back into the city.  I spent an hour after the education wandering the museum, looking at the Art Remix objects.  I have a Remix tour on May 6th.

I also checked out two print shows, The Wild Things and Old Testament prints.  These are well worth catching.  Prints are the ephemerals of the museum, their sensitivity to light means their exhibition has limits.  They can’t be exposed to even dull light for very long.  So they come up, like daffodils, hang out for a brief time, then they’re gone, often not to be seen again for years.

Kate went to see the back surgeon today.  He thinks her right hip pain may well respond to a hip replacement.  I hope so.  This has gotten pretty bad, too.  It’s not as bad as it was, but before was really bad.  More tests.  More doctor’s appointments.  Still, perhaps a little hope at the end of the tunnel.

Aging, Family, Garden, Great Work

This Day, So Far

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Spring                                       Awakening Moon

As the awakening moon wanes, its work done, life has begun to take on its growing season rhythms here at 7 oaks.  I’m hunting for weed free straw, leek transplants and onion sets.  Gotta lay down some bulb fertilizer because bulbs need extra help as they blossom.

It’s been a productive day.  Kate and I finished our budget work for 2011–retirement budget.  It has lots of unfamiliar factors in it:  COBRA for me,  Medicare part B for Kate, shifting to checks from our retirement account, social security.  Some unknowns.  But, we look pretty good right now.

We had lunch.  Now.  A nap.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories

The Colosseum of the Soul

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Imbolc                                                Waning Wild Moon

Fake Nostalgia for a Pre-Therapy Age Past

“I can tell you one thing,” he announced, as I recall. “Back in my day, you didn’t have young kids going around talking to shrinks, yakking about their fee-ee-ee-lings, getting all doped up on medications.”

This article in the March 8th NYT made me think, or better, recall.

In early October of 1964 my family was intact:  Mom, Dad, Mary, Mark and me.  We had extended family on both sides that we saw regularly, Mom’s more so because she was Indiana born and Dad’s less so because of his Oklahoma origins.  After my bout with polio when I was a year and a half, our lives had settled into a usual routine of those years, the late 50’s and early 60’s.

Mom stayed home, doing volunteer work for the church and being available to us, the kids.  She did occasional substitute teaching, but it was rare.  Mary and I moved our way through our small town school system where we were known and knew everyone else at least by sight. Mark was still at home.   Summers were long idylls of bike riding, game playing and lazy reading.  Dad worked at the newspaper, coming home with ad layouts from time to time, marking them up with a ruler and a thick pencil.

Of course our lives had the usual family dramas, the deaths of grandparents, an aunt’s long term confinement in a mental health facility, but for the most part things were calm, normal.

In late October of 1964 my 46 year old mother was dead and our lives would never again be normal.  Grief has its own rules, its own storm sewers of emotion and they track in and out, colliding with the needs and fears of others.  Our small family suffered and suffered a lot, both from the grief, the natural grief that follows an untimely death of a parent, Mom, and the sudden compression of the family into a new, undefined life, a life defined by loss and uncertainty.

Life happens as it does and we relate to the changes as best we can.  That was true then, true long ago in the past and will be true in the future.  I have wondered though what our lives, our mutual lives, the lives of the survivors in our family might have been like if we had access to even the most basic of therapeutic assistance.  If we could have, if I could have, for I can’t speak for Mary, Mark and Dad, grieved Mom’s loss and then moved on with my life, rather than heading toward a ten to fifteen year period where emotional ups and downs, too much drinking, too much smoking, too little in the way of sound relationships eventually forced me to do what I was unable to do in those horrible months following her death.

This is not a regret, for it is not what happened, rather it is a what if.  It is a what if informed now by many, many years of therapy, therapy that helped me see myself as I really am, accept myself and my feet of clay, feet not so different from everyone else’s. Analysis, Jungian analysis, that in the end gave me a place to stand that was my own, not a place over against the grief and the abandonment of those years.  Analysis that afforded me a chance to live into my own Self, live my own life and find, now, in my 60’s, a way of life that has a measure of peace and more than a measure of contentment and happiness.

I agree with the author of the article referenced in the beginning.  It was not a better time, those pre-therapy years.