Category Archives: Family

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Family

Still sinking.

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Beltane                    Full Dyan Moon

Kate can tell when I begin to submerge, move below the surface of day to day contact.  I become short, irritable.  She gets the feeling of walking on egg shells.  By the time this happens I’m not in touch with my effect on the outside world.  Distraction and self-absorption reign.

She brings it up.  We talk.  Today I said, “I’ve moved into melancholy.”  The distance between closed.  We both know this journey and its dark side.  I ate my chirashi and she her teryaki bento box.

“What precipitated it?”

“I have no idea.  Chemicals, I think.”

“No. Wait.  It began, I think on Hilton Head.  Maybe it was the weather.  I now that sounds absurd, but then, I know it happens, too.  Gloomy outside, gloomy inside.”

“I love you.”  Said with the grasp of both the condition and the afflicted.  Therapy in their own right.

Otherwise, the day had bees and money.

Mark Nordeen came over and we popped the top on the second hive.  Lotsa bees.  Took a long while to get the smoker going.  The smoke calms them down.  They stop flying, go back into the hive.

The top hive had brood on several frames and the number of bees has tripled at least.  There were three queen cups and I got to see exactly what they looked like.

“If you ever see a queen cup that has a queen in it, don’t knock it off.  That means they’re about to swarm and you’ll need the second queen for those who stay behind.”

We moved the bottom hive on top because there had not been as much work done down there and we wanted to encourage more frames filled with brood.

Later in the morning we saw our cash-flow adviser.  We’ve done very well and continue to  do so, but as we move to retirement she says there is a big trick to moving from paid employment to retirement income.  In the case of Kate we’ve been lucky to have her producing large quarterly bonuses which have enabled us to do many different things:  dogs, permaculture, long trips.  After retirement, those kinds of bumps in income will disappear and we have to decide how to deal with that.  Turns out cash is the primary tool, having lots of it in liquid investments like CD’s, bonds or money market.

The moral here is that no matter how you feel, life goes on.  Decisions have to be made.  Bees need care.  The garden goes through its season.  There is something reassuring to the constancy and permanence of natural change.

Bees, Family, Woolly Mammoths

A Sunday

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Beltane                  Waxing Dyan Moon

A second cold wet day reminds me of the time I just spent on Hilton Head Island.  Why travel if I can experience a southern coastal climate right here in Minnesota?

The cold weather and drizzle today made working outside unattractive, not impossible, but I didn’t get out there.

Mark Nordeen intended to come over to check on the hive this morning, see if we need to put a third hive box on the two we have now.  He called and said bees don’t leave the hive when it’s cool and wet; they resent intrusion then so the better idea is to wait until the weather warms.  We settled on early Thursday.

This afternoon Melina, Taylor and Chaska Helgeson had a big graduation party with asian themed food and rapping by Nerve, aka Taylor Helgeson.  There were a number of people there, though few I knew.  Sarah and Paul Strickland were the only guests I recognized except for Stefan’s dad.

The noise and the mix of people made hearing difficult so I eased away after about an hour.

We spoke with Jon and Jen on Skype tonight.  Ruthie got an owie at a birthday party.  Gabe had an elbow bleed and required three doses of factor.  He has small veins so it took a lot of needle sticks.  It sound painful and frustrating.  Herschel, who has hemangiosarcoma, is home from the hospital and feeling pretty good.  He has three months as a prognosis.  Sad.

That’s about it.  A quiet Sunday.

Family, Great Work, permaculture

Pictures. Puppies and Plants.

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Beltane                    Waxing Dyan Moon

dogfamily

Poppa (the big gray wolfhound, Guiness) and his children.  Our new pups are in this picture, but I can’t pick them out.

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orchfirstgrowseas

The orchard early in its first growing season.  Currants in the foreground to the right, cherries and plums the trees in mid-ground.

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potatoeyeview

A potato eye view of its bed.

Family, Travel

Green Stars and Irish Wolfhounds

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Beltane     Waning Flower Moon

Another gray morning, but the temperatures will head up today.  Low 70’s by this afternoon and high 70’s tomorrow.  That will change the look and feel of Hilton Head Island.  A lot. Sunshine, of which we have had none since I got here on Sunday morning, will also alter the appearance of the gray Atlantic.

Kate and I had supper last night charlie’s etoile verte.  The setting was French provincial and the food lived up to the French gastronomic standards.

We talked again over dinner about Irish Wolfhounds.  They present us with a delicate dilemma.  We loved them, each one of them, with an intensity that made them members of our family.  I don’t know how to describe the difference between our feelings for them and for the whippets, whom we also love, but the difference is qualitative.  Each of their deaths felt and feels like a family member died.

These big dogs occupy a space in our lives commensurate with their size.  We have had 8.  Their short life span, often as little as 5 years and in a couple of instances even less than that, makes loving them an exercise in sweet torture.

We would love to have more Wolfhounds, but I can’t imagine another Wolfhound death.  Too, the size of the Wolfhounds, Tor weighed 200 pounds, creates a problem.  Moving them when they are sick is difficult.  As we age, it becomes more and more difficult.  So, at least for now, we have decided against any more of these animals we love.  A hard place.

Family, Travel

Leaving on A Slow Train

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Beltane                         Full Flower Moon

A week from tonight I will be asleep or almost so on an outbound train from Chicago to Washington, D.C.  After several hours during the day on Saturday in D.C., the train for Savannah leaves Union Station, arriving around 6:30 a.m. the next day.  Slow travel seems to fit with the life I’ve come to lead, one that waits on the natural rhythms for flowers and vegetables, fruit and honey.

Travel became a family insignia, we should have trains, planes and ships, buses and taxis on our family crest, the Ellis family crest that is.  We are a peripatetic group.  Mark travels regularly around Southeast Asia, frequenting Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam while basing himself in Thailand.

Mary will travel sometime this year to Athens from Singapore where she will present the results of her Ph.D. work.  She gets to England now and again in addition to returning to the US.  She will not, however, be able to come this year because the Singapore Government has banned official travel to the US due to the H1N1 flu.  Her travel is official because the university for which she works pays for her ticket and the university is an arm of the government.

Faith and Spirituality, Family

Projection Is Not Just A Machine In A Movie Theatre

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Beltane                    Waxing Flower Moon

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.” – Herman Hesse

This is a fundamental tenet of Jungian psychology, projection.  I mentioned this acquaintance a while back whom I have begun to despise.  It became clear, as I wrote that, that projection was at work.  There is something about him that I despise in myself, just what I’m not sure.  It may be that I don’t think through things as clearly as I imagine since that’s the main problem I have with him.  It may be that his anger, a strong undercurrent in his approach to life, reflects a similar emotional undercurrent in mine.  As I write about it, that one makes sense to me.

One of the difficulties I’ve noticed in the transition from 60’s political work to the millennial political work I’ve done with the Sierra Club has its roots there.  In the 60’s our anger, our rage against the system fueled a willingness to live on the fringe of society and take the consequences.  Today, though, politics on the left has a quieter, more plodding nature.  I want to build a movement, mount the barricades, define enemies but my new colleagues use reason and persistence.  In part this mirrors the relative failures of the left in the last three decades, we have been weaker.

It has caused me considerable self-examination.

I’m not sure where the underlying anger comes from, but I suspect its origin lies in perceived mistreatment by my father and fate.  When I approach either of these from an older, calmer perspective, I can see both my role in them and their unintentional nature.  Anger and fear have ruled my life at critical junctures.  This may be the point where I finally confront them.

Family

Life At A Right Turn Off A Moderately Busy Secondary Road

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Beltane                 Waxing Flower Moon

Most of my life happens at a right turn off a moderately busy secondary road somewhere in the heartland of the North American continent.  This thought crossed my mind as I retrieved the orange fluorescent sign for our garage sale, the one posted at the corner of 153rd Ave. NW and Round Lake Boulevard.

When I turned back into our lot, then went back in the house, I realized how rich and thick the world is inside our house and how thin it is on the road leading up to it.  That’s not to say there’s nothing of interest along the way, of course there is.  Other people’s rich thick worlds for one thing.  The life of the oak, acacia and poplar woods  that surrounds our homes for another.

My comment is not so much about the thin world leading up to our door as the contrast between my experience of our home and of that space.  In here we have taken pains to have rooms devoted to particular needs.  In those rooms our life has taken place, at least our domestic life, for just at 15 years.  Memories.

We create here, too.  Kate quilts; I write.  We create a life together, a buttress of support for our family and our selves.  The garden and the flower beds, now multiple, have years of labor represented in their current configuration, labor that has made this place an intimate acquaintance.

This is  home.  Home is where the heart is, yes, but it also where life is.

Family

The Meaning of Garage Sales?

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Beltane             Waxing Flower Moon

The garage sale continues.  Kate’s out there right now, doing the crossword puzzle and waiting for customers.  They’ve been slow to come.  Kate thinks she’s got items that are too high end, though she advertised for collectibles.  That may be but my guess is the economy and the pandemic have squeezed shopping for other than essentials right outta folks.

We’ll see as the day progresses and she drops her prices.  There is some anthropological phenomenon going on with garage sales, the retailing of stuff and the occasional turn of domestic space into a faux business, like lemonade stands for adults.  Not only do we get to sell our stuff, but we get to display what we don’t need.  Look at this stuff I don’t need.  If I don’t need this, what more and better stuff lies inside!  Perhaps its a bargain-basement potlatch.

The pandemic seems further away right away now since Kate has four days off and we don’t have the daily updates from Minnesota Public Health.  Monday though she goes in to fit her N95, a special mask for doctors and nurses.  It needs to have an air tight seal around the nose and mouth.

Today is another day in the garden for me.

Bees, Family, Travel

Saling. Bogota. Bees.

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Beltane                 Waning Flower Moon

And on the second day of May we turned our garage into a retail establishment.

This reminds me of my first ever off the continent trip to Bogota.  The neighborhood of our small hotel was residential, living areas above garages, sort of like the San Francisco versions.  A middle-class to affluent neighborhood, not poor.

I went out one morning for an after breakfast walk, just to take in the unusual experience of a people who lived in a  country in South America, who spoke Spanish.  I was not at home and loving it.  As my walk went on, the neighborhood began to wake up and the garages, too.  Doors slid up to reveal small businesses.  This one had groceries, that one had cleaning supplies, another with snacks and pop.  The neighorhood was one giant, apparently perennial garage sale.

They had to do better than we did.  You’d think with a recessionary economy that people would turn out in large numbers.  But they didn’t.  The day was slow.  None of our big items the telescope, the dining room set, the bed sold.  It was a nice day, too.

The only significant retail moment for me came when I sold a Che Guevara t-shirt to a Mexican family.

Onions got planted today, a large bed weeded and prepared for peas.  The hive came open, too.  Inside the bees had gathered all at one end, working furiously on something, what I could not tell.  The smoker, filled with wet hay, smoked and the bees remained calm. The white bee suit and mesh head covering worked.  No bee got inside.

Did they accept the queen?  Couldn’t tell.  I’m glad Mark plans to come tomorrow.  We’ll look together and he’ll help with what I need to see.

Family, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays

Beltane Has Begun

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Beltane                Waxing Flower Moon

As is the case with all Celtic holidays Beltane began at sundown.  Over the years that I have kept the Celtic calendar, now 14 years at least, Beltane signals a real shift from the getting going of spring to the active growth of summer.  Some years that’s more obvious than others and this year the change has been slower than the recent past, yet the emergence of the daffodils, tulips, garlic and the blooming of our magnolia all point toward summer.

Kate’s back from work with new rules for influenza A(H1N1) novel.  They had a sick hallway at the Coon Rapids clinic tonight and they were, again, swamped by persons concerned about the flu.  She said a case has been reported at HCMC.  Tomorrow, however, her attention moves from pandemic to garage sale, the sort of odd shifts we all make between our work and domestic lives.