Category Archives: Family

Family, Feelings, Friends, Great Wheel, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Remarkable

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Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Monday gratefuls: Feeling loved. Ruth. Jon. Gabe. Chuck roast in the instapot. Pull apart good. The Maids coming tomorrow. The cool nights. Having the lawn furniture up closer to the house. The Ancient Ones. The duckling rescue. The heart of Bill Schmidt. The openness of Mark Odegard. The sensitivity of Tom Crane. The doggedness of Paul Strickland. My buddies for over thirty years.

Remarkable. Yesterday was remarkable. That is, I will re-mark it again and again as a special day. Let me tell you why.

Ducklings in the sewer. When I meet on zoom with my ancient friends, mentioned above, Tom, Bill, Mark, and Paul, we have a topic chosen by each of us in a rotation. Yesterday was Bill’s day and he gave us this song to investigate, especially it’s lyrics.

This was his prompt: “Bob Dylan is an insightful writer/singer.  Here’s a link to his song, It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) and the lyrics are attached in a pdf file. It was released in early 1965 and every verse is for this time, right now.  Listen, reflect, and share.  Hi light for us any part of this song that says something to you.”

It’s the task of the topic creator to sort of gently guide the discussion, so it was strange when Bill didn’t show up on the call. When we’d all popped up on the screen except Bill, Tom told us Bill had called and said he had discovered a distraught duck mother quacking and looking into a sewer grate. 6 of her ducklings had fallen into the storm sewer.

Bill. I called 911. I said this, This isn’t an emergency, but it’s important. A bit later three trucks and six men show up. A fire and rescue truck among them.

These men didn’t quit. They took the sewer grate off, climbed down. Meanwhile, I talked to the duck mother, tried to calm her down. Eventually I sat down on the curb beside her.

They got five ducklings up and returned them to the mother, who then stopped quacking and waddled off with what she thought was all of her ducklings.

No. I hear another one. One of the rescue guys. One of the ducklings had gone the opposite way from the others, sewer drain pipes lead off in both directions. I hear him. I’ll get him. They flushed out the sixth duckling.

When they got out of the sewer, the mother had disappeared. Four of them took the sixth duckling and began searching for the mother to reunite them all. They found her.

Bill made it back to his apartment before we finished and told us this story. What you do to the least of these, you do unto me. Yes. Bill. Yes.

The mailbox. Jon installed our new mailbox. It took an hour plus, but he worked away at it. I helped a little bit, but not much. My help really consisted of trying to get the old one removed. I told you yesterday how that turned out.

This morning I went out to get the Denver Post, an every morning jaunt. The new mailbox was there and I opened the road facing door. Was it smooth? Yes. It was.

Oh, wait. What’s that? There were two cloth bags inside it, one labeled grandma and the other grandpop. I put Kate’s at her place at the table and brought my bag upstairs with me.

Inside it were several small items. A Donald Duck stuffed animal, a Pokemon card, a picture of a smiling gap toothed man glued to a piece of paper, a small iron coyote baying at the moon, a bracelet, and, a piece of lined note paper.

Ruth. Dear Grandpop, I wanted to do something for you that would help to brighten your day and mood. I collected and made all of these things to make you happy. I made the bracelet of these colors because they reminded me of the sun which I think of as a very bright and happy thing in our solar system, so I hope that when you see it you will feel happy.

Her note goes on this spirit. She found the coyote in a box of her special things, Donald Duck was her favorite Disney Character. “I figured he could be your buddy in the loft.”

“I hope this brightens your day, and mood! Love, Ruthie.” How about my life? She’s brightened it from the beginning.

As I said, a remarkable day.

Family, Health, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Hard Stuff

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Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Amber. Lisa and the humming bird feeder. Dr. Pullikottli. Kate’s fingers healing. Ruby and her a.c. Mule Deer Buck. The intimacy of difficulty. All those carboniferous trees and plants that gave their lives so I can drive my car. Electric Cars. Go, Tesla. Echocardiograms. Chicken breasts. Read to eat meals.

Two weeks of no workouts. Marking a slow down or at least different focus for daily life. Dug down into my psyche. Like a retreat. Still surfacing. Yesterday I found myself up against it. I can’t keep cleaning the house, I said. I can’t manage the cooking in the way I have been. More tears.

I felt like I was letting Kate down. No, she said. You have been my pillar, my strength. I don’t say it often enough. Oh.

This, she said, is why people downsize. Yes. There’s a moment when you realize, no, I can’t take care of all this anymore.

Is this that time for us? No. We can afford a house cleaner. Kate will find one. I can buy meal kits, ready to eat food. Cook much less. Occasional take-out. Relief.

Derek has done a fabulous job in clearing up our downed trees. The pallets are gone. The front stumps have been ground. The place looks so much better. Will James will take down the remaining fire mitigation marked trees. Next week the gutters get cleaned and the week after the windows.

Ordered beef stroganoff with egg noodles from a chef run ready to eat meal business with an unlikely location. It’s at the base of Conifer Mountain, about 5 minutes away. Ezentrees.com. Looks pretty good.

We both love mountain living, even with its obvious drawbacks for our mutual lung issues. This house suits us. Large enough to house family on occasion, small enough to feel homey for us. The loft for me. These decisions are so fraught, so wrapped up in the past, in our expectations, in cultural values around home. And, independence.

We’ll keep jiggering with paid work, family help, and our own efforts. Hard stuff though.

Anoka County, Bees, Dogs, Family, Garden, Great Wheel, Hydroponics, Memories, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Plants, The Move, Third Phase

Greenman

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Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Tuesday grateful: The Lughnasa moon just setting below Black Mountain. That one violet volunteering near our front steps. The daisies. The faint whoosh of folks going to work. Ruth. Her eagerness to see us. Their garden and her joy in it. Seeing Patty yesterday. Banking. Socrates, the teller.

Gardening. At the end of my time on the Ancient Ones zoom, I surprised myself by summing up my life as having one regret. Gardening. That we hadn’t pursued it here on Shadow Mountain. I miss, I said, growing our own food. Working with soil and plants. I do. Miss it.

Once Kate and I moved to Andover a transition began for me from city boy to horticulturalist. I wouldn’t have predicted that necessarily. We’d done some perennials at our home on Edgcumbe road. Starting with the small bed I planted in the front yard, finishing during the great Halloween blizzard of October 31st, 1991. Daffodils and Iris, if I recall correctly.

It’s true I had a big garden back in 1974 on the Peaceable Kingdom, my failed attempt, with Judy, to develop a spot for the movement to have respite care. My only Psilocybin journey happened there. I watched our Potato plants growing. But the Peaceable Kingdom did not last and neither did gardening.

A bit of gardening at the first house, the one on 41st Avenue, but Slugs took over. There was no gardening at home in Alexandria. A few Flowers maybe, but nothing to remember.

Andover, though. When we got there, the front yard was bare, as was a sloped area behind the house in the back. About an acre of Woods were doing fine, as undisturbed Woods will do. In between was a large patch of weedy, scrubby Grass with a large grove of Black Locust. They didn’t look good, some of them were dead. BTW: many of the Weeds were actually Hemp plants seeded during a World War II field planted in it.

We hired a landscape architect who helped us with the bare Land. I wanted to sow a Prairie on all of it. Kate said no, we could never sell it. We settled on two large areas of Prairie with sod and some new Trees in between them, directly in front of the house. On the sloping area behind the house we decided to do a terraced garden. Irrigation went in with all of it.

In the beginning I wanted to do only perennials. I imagined our house overflowing with fresh cut flowers throughout the growing season. I had a lot to learn. Having flowers blooming from spring into fall requires so many skills.

I did not want to do annuals. And, I didn’t. Along the way I learned about soil amendments, spading forks and gardening spades, trowels, and hori-hori. Killed a lot of plants. Cussed at Rose Chafers, Japanese Beetles, Colorado Beetles. Along the way I fell in love with the families Lily and Iris and crocus. Learned the amazing recovery powers of Hosta.

The Black Locust and their small swords taught me caution and how to use a chain saw, a commercial grade chipper, a Peavey, a Swede saw. Hired stump grinders. I cleared, with Jon’s help, enough area that we could imagine a vegetable garden. Jon built us raised beds from the start, anticipating the day when bending over would not be easy. He made some in whimsical shapes, others square, some rectangular. I filled them with top soil and compost.

We had various compost piles, none of which worked very well. We built one that used split rail fencing and a large metal gate to keep the dogs out. Tully, one of our Wolfhounds, kept finding her way in. But she couldn’t get back out. Strange.

Speaking of Wolfhounds. Jon built a fence around the raised beds to keep them out. They loved to dig in soft garden soil.

More on this later. This has gotten long.

Commentary on Religion, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays, Memories, US History

Head, Heart, Hands and Health

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Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Sunday gratefuls: The framers. Jon’s print. Ode’s. Ruth’s painting. Kate’s heirloom needlepoint: Love is Enough. All beautiful. Art by friend and family. Pho. Singapore noodles. That woman and her kid who needed money. Ruby and her air conditioning. Driving through Evergreen with the window down and the AC on. Allergies. Sympathy for my father. Blue skies, cool nights. No wildfire so far. Lughnasa

Lughnasa in the mountains. Lughnasa is a first fruits harvest festival. In ancient Celtic life it would have meant, like all the major holidays do, a market week. Games, trading, drinking and feasting, contests. State fairs and county fairs are Lughnasa influenced. They tend to fall between August 1st, Lughnasa and the autumnal equinox, or Mabon.

The Madison County 4-H Fair, which was held in Alexandria, my hometown, rather than the county seat of Anderson, Indiana, is a good example. I don’t recall, or maybe just don’t know, the reason Alexandria’s Beulah Park got the honor, but it was great for us as kids.

A carny setup strings of lights, cotton candy machines and hot dog stands, rides, and games. We would go early, watch them setup. Mom holding me on her shoulder, a blue blanket wrapped around me, a string of lights above my head is my first memory. A faint chill shuddered through me. I’ve always believed that was the first sign of my polio.

Local men erected tents with thick stakes and strong rope. Vendors of all sorts came to the fair. My favorite one was the dairy that passed out dixie cups of chilled buttermilk. I’d sprinkle mine with salt and pepper, going back as often as they’d allow it.

Car dealers brought out new model cars. I saw my first 1957 Chevy at the Madison County Fair. Farm equipment dealers brought tractors, hay balers, wagons. Those big yellow and green John Deeres. The red Massey-Fergusons. Tires taller than all of us kids with deep tread.

There were entertainers: magicians, singers, choirs, local celebrities. A queen contest. But the most important part of the fair, the Madison County 4-H fair, were the 4-H exhibits and shows. Some of you city folks may not know about 4-H: Head, Heart, Hands and Health.

4‑H Pledge

I pledge my head to clearer thinking,
My heart to greater loyalty,
My hands to larger service,
and my health to better living,
for my club, my community, my country, and my world.

This was small town America, rural America at its best. That pledge works. Can you imagine djt taking the pledge, for example?

4-H, the county extension office, and the cooperative extension offices from public land grant universities made room for kids with sheep, pigs, cows, rabbits, chickens, ducks, geese, horses. The kids came with their animals, often slept in their stalls during the fair. They made room for kids who cooked, baked, painted, did seed art, crafts like crocheting. County extension offices sponsored contests for wood-working, pie baking, honey making, quilting. County 4-H’ers could win blue ribbons, go on to the State Fair in Indianapolis.

Walking through the stalls with Holsteins, Guernseys, Jerseys, Angus, Hereford, and smelling farm smells, the ordure mixed with hay and urine. Seeing the biggest Boar lounging in his pen, his testicles usually visible and the scene of much laughing and pointing. The fancy Pigeons and high-strung Banty roosters. Rabbits with their long ears and velvety fur.

The buildings held jars of pickles, honey, jam. There were live Bees, honeycomb, and jars of amber honey ready to be judged. Decorated cakes. Plates of cookies. Bird houses and hobby horses, hand made. Quilts. And much more.

We knew where food comes from. Our friends and family grew it in their fields, raised it in their barns and pens. This was, and is, a celebration of Mother Earth.

The 2020 Madison County 4-H Fair was canceled due to the pandemic. But it will be back, spreading the country gospel of head, hearts, hands, and health. What we need right now.

Beyond the Boundaries, Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Family, Health, Science, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Travel, US History, Weather +Climate

America’s Id

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Summer and the Lughnasa Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Amber and Lisa. Hummingbirds. Simple joys. Lisa. Her obvious concern and help. Derek, who offered to complete our fire mitigation work. A day of sunshine yesterday. Drove 150 miles yesterday to medical appointments. In air conditioned comfort. Tisha B’av. A day of mourning for the loss of the first and second temples. And, later, for all the trials of the Jews, including pogroms and the holocaust. A somber day. Yesterday.

A video maker held his Black Lives Matter sign in what he called the “most racist town in the U.S.,” Harrison, Arkansas. Here’s an edited version of that experience.

This video could be titled, America’s Id.

Also in America’s south, NASA successfully launched its Perseverance spacecraft. Headed to Mars with a helicopter and water seeking instruments, Perseverance continues the human fascination with life not of Earth. It will land in the middle of February, 2021 in Jezero Crater. An excellent explainer about why NASA chose Jezero is this July 28th article in the NYT.

Though Earthbound and isolated on Shadow Mountain Perseverance gives me a thrill. And, not just a thrill, but a scientific extension of my own interests. It pleases me in a deep way that we’ve not abandoned space exploration. Humans need to know, to explore, to test ideas and equipment. And, Mars! Speculations abound. I’m glad we Americans can still pull together for such an event. Looking forward to next February.

America’s Id and its shiniest example of hope. We are both, all. This time calls for Perseverance.

Family, Health, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Writing

Let The World Be New

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Summer and the Lughnasa Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Mountain Waste. Garbage truck drivers. Mail folk. Snow plow drivers. All risk their lives on curvy mountain roads with limited sight lines. Summer and winter. Everyday bravery. Kate’s better day. Lisa, seeing Lisa today. Get some next steps with Kate’s shortness of breath and nausea.

I named the Lughnasa Moon as a reminder that the Great Wheel underlies most of what I believe these days, as a way to get back to the Celtic, the mythic, as a way to remind myself of the wonders floating in my imagination. Easy to lose sight of in Covid days and feeding tube nights.

George Will. An honest man. Writes superbly. His column today in the Washington Post, Biden’s election will end national nightmare 2.0, references Gerald Ford’s comment at his inauguration that “our long, national nightmare is at an end.” In conclusion Will writes: “Forty-six years later, an exhausted nation is again eager for manifestations of presidential normality.” I hadn’t considered this, but it would take one huge source of angst off the domestic table.

I’m looking for brightness, for the upbeat, for the comforting. Will provided some. Grateful for it.

I’m also looking for fairies, for Gods and Goddesses. Ready to get back to Jennie’s Dead. A place of refuge. A place where the world can become new with my fingers on the keyboard.

Aging, Coronavirus, Family, Health, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Dealing With A Rough Patch

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Summer and the Lughnasa Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Almost reorganized living room. Kate’s hands. Dreams. Rains. Cool. The life we live. Nyquil. Pollen. Tramadol. THC. End of the staycation tomorrow. Perry Mason on HBO. Wet earth. Petichor. The tragedies and joys of our days.

Dreams. Trying to find third gear in a GTO going up a snowy hill. A new phone, different design, metal plate beside the screen. Meeting folks in a coffee shop. Choppy memories.

Kate’s going through a rough (rougher) patch. Breathing more difficult. Feeling weak. Not eating much. Scares me. Good thing we see the doc tomorrow. Hard to know how to be. Honest? This scares me. Me, too, she says. Or, should I try to remain upbeat, better tomorrow, some new drug?

Not wanting to send her down, but not wanting to be dishonest either. I find it hard since my default is to go with the clearest, most real. Not sure what helps her. Me.

It’s been a cool week plus here, nice sleeping. That’s helped both of us. On the other hand the cooler, cloudier weather also dampens the inner weather.

Derek works hard, moving logs first on a dolly, then with his jeep over to his house and his wood pile.

Good seeing Mary and Mark this morning. Things are still in between for them both. He’s awaiting the late August, early September startup of his school in Riyadh. She’s waiting for Malaysia’s borders to open so she can go there into 14 days of quarantine. After she’ll be with Guru until the next academic year in Kobe, Japan. Retired. Sorta.

Family, Garden, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Mop floors, Clean bathrooms

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Summer and the Lughnasa Moon

Monday gratefuls: Clean floors, bathrooms. Good wonton soup. A Kate good day. Rigel’s eating well. Kep’s eagerness in the morning. Brother Mark in his old haunt, Hail, Saudi Arabia. Ragweed misery. Rain, more rain. Keep it coming. Bacon. Eggs. Covid. The revelations about us it is revealing. The USA, humbled. The vasty deeps and the airy heights.

Ruth sent us a video of the garden at her Dad’s. It’s growing. Lots of rain recently has helped. Jon’s got so many skills to share with Ruth and Gabe. He’s an artist, first. And, a good one. He has remodeling skills which he’s using to renovate his house. Ruth and Gabe are learning along the way. He’s a good cook. A maker of skis. A skier. A teacher. A gardener. A man filled with love, too. They both need it.

Kate had a better day yesterday. Her stoma site looks good, healing. She sees Lisa this week for a cortisone injection-bursitis-and a DEXA scan for osteoporosis. They’ll also discuss a focus on nausea. If we can get the nausea under control, then she can gain more weight. She’s hanging on to what she has, but to gain weight she needs to be able to eat at least some during the day. Tough for her with this recurrent nausea.

She’s moving through my fiction library. Her goal, she says, is to read it all. She just might at the rate she’s going. Yesterday, she read Recursion, a sci fi novel. Yesterday! Science nerd turns liberal arts major.

The weather has turned monsoonal. Although Weather 5280, my best source for weather in the mountains, says we’ve not made into the monsoons. The monsoons, typically July and August, feature a flow of moisture north from the Baja that gives Colorado afternoon rains. That flow is not set up. The monsoons used to mark an end to the high stress part of the wildfire season. Not so much now, though they help when they come.

Considering what to do with my mini-sabbatical, as Paul called it. I may extend it another week. I’ve gotten a lot of different sorts of things done. Finished the final touches on the loft, cleaned out the living room, coordinated several trades people for electrical work, tree felling, mowing, window washing, got rid of the pallets, supported Derek.

Chop wood, carry water. The Zen adage. Realized that first comes the fireplace, the pots for the water. The house is my fireplace, my pots for water. Mop floors, clean bathrooms. Daily life, as the Zen masters knew, is daily life. We are in it and of it. If we treat it as a burden, then it burdens us. If we treat it as a spiritual exercise, then we receive nurture.

Choosing nurture.

Coronavirus, Family, Health, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Save Baron

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Summer and the Lughnasa Moon

Sunday gratefuls: The Wolf’s Trail. A gift from a close friend. Thanks, Tom. Amazon. (I know. But, still.) Pick-up. Yet more rain. 49 degrees this morning. Sushi Win. Spring rolls. Wonton soup. Sushi Win special role. Rigel, head out the window, ears back, facial fur streaming back. Ivory. Old reliable. 120,000 miles. Still fine except for air con and a couple of dings. Black Mountain Drive. Brook Forest. Evergreen.

When I last saw granddaughter Ruth, she told me about a movement among her peers, 14 years old or so, called Save Baron. I love this. His age peers taking either an ironic or a genuine interest in his welfare. Not exclusive notions. What would it be like, they think, to be Baron? With Melania the naked first lady and the orange topped donald as a father? Who better to underline his predicament than those entering high school this year? I hope they succeed. The world does not need another person with the donald’s politics or, even worse, his aesthetics.

Doom scrolling is impossible to dodge unless you never look at the news, online or on the tube or at your breakfast table. Headlines. Numbers with arrows. Graphs. Maps with red states, orange states, brownish states. A vaccine comment here. A why did they wait so long to lock down article there? An article on the economy here.

And it’s not like we don’t care. We do. But everyday. All the time. The slow drip, the fast drip. Hard.

Kate’s had more bad days than good ones recently. Shortness of breath, nausea, general ickiness. Episodic. A bad stretch right now. A lot of it down to Sjogren’s. The rest? Don’t know. Makes things darker here on Shadow Mountain.

I’ve had another round of allergies. New this year. Not sure what’s up with that, but it’s unpleasant. Stuffy. Runny. Headache. Colors the days here, too.

Wanted this to be more upbeat, but…

Aging, Family, Feelings, Health, Third Phase, Writing

Living

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Summer and the Lughnasa Moon

Friday gratefuls: The Norsemen, a funny sendup of the Vikings. (which I also liked.) Derek’s continuing to cut up and cart away our felled trees. Children of Time, a sci fi book about terraforming, genetic manipulation, and the end of earth’s history. Spiders and ants and humans, oh my. Peter Praski who fixed our fan and our lights. Alan’s commitment to the political process. Sally’s thaw. The Mussar crowd.

Still on vacation. Enjoying my focus on domestic chores like putting up smoke detectors (10-year batteries. Thanks, Tom.), laundry, getting the fan fixed, the stumps ground down, windows washed, and gutters cleaned. Cooked a bit, not up to my pre-Seoah standards. Out of practice. Will improve.

Pleased with the healing of the angry skin around Kate’s stoma site. Gradually. Gradually. Next up we have to knock down the nausea that ruins her days. Not sure how to do that, but we’re gonna focus on it. Help her have more strings of better days. So dispiriting when she has to leave the breakfast table to lie down.

Still feeling that limbo Kate talked about. In between. Not at a threshold, not in a liminal space, though I’ll appreciate that when it comes.

Getting things cleaned up and reorganized has been good. Feels good. My mind has fewer anchors like, oh, when will I get around to that? That being those books and papers on the bookshelf in the living room. That being getting the final trees down for fire mitigation. That being the gutters that need cleaning. That being the disorganized state of the loft.

As I pull up the anchors, I can feel the engine beginning to rumble below decks. No idea of the destination when I can finally slip away.

A friend recently talked about all the volunteer work he’s been doing since retirement seven years ago. Do I still need to feel productive, he asked? Maybe there’s something deeper going on here?

Has made me think about our American obsession with work. A Calvinist slant to our hearts. If we work, we’re good. If we don’t work, we’re lazy. Or, bad. Makes retirement a conundrum. Work is over with. Let’s get to it, then. Get to what?

Work. In my imagination a post-neolithic revolution idea. Tend the field. Care for the animals. Fix the house. Govern the village. I’m sure the hunter-gatherers had their obsessions, too, but I don’t think it was work. In the third phase we try to leave work behind us only to reinstate it covertly. Or sometimes vertly.

My suspicion is that we all need something that gratifies us, satisfies us, gives us a chance to be who we are. I cast off the mantle of work for those things and name them living.