Big rain, some lightning and thunder. Over an inch of water in the dog bowl, the larger one (about three feet across and rubber) overflowing. This last is the one Vega curls up in while lapping the rising water, a pasha in a clean clear pool. She’ll enjoy the soft rain water, I imagine.
Back continues to ouch. Not fun. To think Kate has dealt with this or worse for 15 years.
Beltane Garlic Moon
A docent friend, Bill Bomash, who fell on a trip to Brazil several years ago and broke his leg, spent three years recovering from a series of infections and other problems. Learned last Wednesday that his wife has stomach cancer and that he’s not been touring to care for her. Sounds like they may be on the last leg of this treament, three months more chemo and the docs have used the word cure. The Big C still exacts its requisite amount of pain and anguish, but is no longer the absolute death sentence it was when I was a boy.
Going to a gathering of our docent class, 2005, this afternoon. The docent classes become and remain very close over time. We spend two years of Wednesdays, many other days of practice together. In that time we become part of each others lives, friends. The average docent is curious, loves art, has a keen interest in the world at a global level. I’m glad to have gotten to know this fine group of people.
Mother nature’s air conditioner is on its way, course we might have to pay for it with a tornado strike or two, but there you are. I always think of Minnesota as a safe place when I read about Santa Ana fanned fires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami’s, hurricanes, then a sudden storm reminds of me derechos and tornadoes. Oh, blizzards and 38 below zero, too. Yes. And ice? Well, yes. Other than that, though.
Inside with the air conditioner on and the heat outside. Back ouchy after lifting a bag of not heavy at all mulch. Geez.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Reading a novel right now called the Hundred Days. A fictional rendering of Ceausescu’s last months in power it offers a picture of Bucharest in 1989. Grim doesn’t capture it. A genuine horror show.
Example. Queues. People would line up for whatever was available, even if they didn’t need or want it. Buying the shoes or bread or meat or alarm clock would allow you to barter on the black market for things you needed. You could never count on any particular thing being there.
Other examples. Rampant corruption. Bribery for even basic care. In a hospital. Women charged after a miscarriage for damaging the integrity of the Romanian family. Beyond understanding.
Now. What’s really beyond understanding is that Mariana and Vasily, Nicoleta’s parents, lived through this. I sat in their house, shared food with them with only a vague idea of what is, in fact, the very recent past.
Only a block from the Best Western hotel where I stayed was a Carrefours with plenty of food, produce, meats, cheeses. Sounds like this kind of grocery would have been available only to those in the party elite. In 1989. Less than 23 years ago.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Cleaned off the air conditioner, mulched the blueberries, asparagus, onions, mounded the leeks (2nd time), mulched the chard and the beets. Also took notice of the garlic scapes. Soon it will be time for spaghetti with olive oil and the scapes. Put a bit of mulch down in the perennial garden.
Any particular day can be hot just because, but when a whole year, in fact, a whole millennium, think of that for a minute, trends warmer then it’s not just because. A jump to 7.4 degrees above average points a bony finger at anthropogenic causes and if you can’t see that you haven’t been outside lately.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Well, it’s happened already. Kate and I have begun adjusting our gardening times for the upcoming heat. Any of you with time spent in the south or the tropics will recognize the strategy. Get up early and get stuff done.
Out right now to clean off the cottonwood fluff from the air conditioner and lay down mulch in the vegetable garden. May get into the colony that still has only one box, too. If not today, then for sure tomorrow.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Kate picked strawberries and rhubarb yesterday. Two pies later we still have a plastic container filled with strawberries. We have two separate strawberry plantings, the ones that are only June bearing have not begun to mature quite yet.
With well over 150 apples and four pears bagged over the last three or so days, the currants, blueberries, cherries and plums still come and the raspberries arriving in the fall, we’ll have an abundance of fruit this year and for years to come.
We’ve also had asparagus already, are eating green onions and small shallots now and I had a sandwich filled with young beet greens. Though we’d starve if we had to depend totally on our own produce, still we grow more and more each year; the variety of what we grow has lessened somewhat as we get more intelligent about what it makes to sense to grow and what to buy.
This morning we got up early and drove over the Red Ox, a real old timey restaurant and had breakfast. When the waitress asked if we’d like homemade bread, we said sure and I asked who makes it? Robin. She’s here 7 days a week and she opens and closes five. Wow. That’s a lot. She must like it. The waitress gave a low chuckle, Yeah or she doesn’t like it at home. That’s what I’m beginning to think. Made sense to me.
After breakfast we drove over to the Cedar Creek Nature Preserve, a University of 
Minnesota outdoor lab and nature center that trains ecologists, botanist, biologists, entomologists, herpetologists and the like. It’s usually close to the public, but this weekend they’ve partnered with the Bell Museum to put on naturalist oriented programs for an evening and a day, last night and today.
We went on the snake walk. Our guide, Brian, a totally hairless biker, knew a lot about snakes. He works as an engineering tech for a pharmaceutical company, but spends his off years hunting for and tending snakes. The picture to the right is a bull snake, a rodent eater.
They are, apparently, mistaken for cobras because they fan out their head when threatened. (Why anyone would fancy a cobra in Minnesota is beyond me. But, hey.)
A walk along a shaded trail produced a sighting of a prairie skink. It released its tail after capture, the tail continuing to wiggle, looking for all the world like a tasty earth worm. Clever trick. Sacrifice some body mass and live to eat another day.
This snake is a prairie garter snake, identifiable by the black stripes down from its mouth. She looked gravid.
Anyhow, the outdoors providing a lot of the entertainment this week with the transit of Venus, fruit and bee tending and Cedar Creek today.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Still bagging apples, plums and pears, too. This seems like a lot of work, but for our size orchard it makes sense. Whether you could scale it up to commercial orchards I don’t know. Would depend on access to cheap, competent help at the right time of year. The rewards are certainly there. A fruit crop without the worms that come from insects depositing eggs on the fruit’s surface or under its skin. In a bad year the difference between a decent crop and almost no crop would be the bags.
Each year the land and the plants speak to the gardener. So a key part of gardening, even critical, is listening skill. If you don’t hear the news that there is not enough light here, no matter how many7 times you plan the zinnias in the shade you will be disappointed. If the stunted growth and yellowed leaves of a vegetable doesn’t tell you the soil needs amending, you will not have good vegetable crops. If wormy fruit doesn’t tell you you need to do something, you’ll have poor apple and pear and plum crops each year.
Kate takes care of another form of communication: weeds. Weeds are just a plant out of 
place so there’s nothing inherently wrong with them. You just don’t want them there. Usually natives or imported exotics, weeds are plants that have found what I call a happy home, a place where they can thrive. That means weeds can crowd out, out feed, sometimes frankly poison plants you want to grown.
Often vegetables and flowers we want to grow are not native to our region, may not even be native to our gardening zone. Any pressure on their growth makes them more vulnerable to weed competition. So often time the gardener is in the peculiar position of championing plants that may not want to grow in your particular garden while trying to eliminate those that are perfectly happy there. Some times you can use natives, many only use natives these days, and they make gardening much simpler. Since they grow like weeds.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Over. The last Sierra Club legcom meeting, the end of the 2012 session, a wrap up meeting and evaluation. Over. My return to politics, which lasted a bit over four years. Out because after the cruise I wanted to focus on work only I could do. That means, to me, bee keeping, garden tending, novel writing, Ovid translating and reimagining faith.
A combination of sadness and exhilaration. Sadness because a time with good people, working on important matters, in an arena I have loved all of my life has passed for now. Yes, a choice, a personal choice, yet, still a loss and some grief. Exhilaration. I have made a choice and decided to guide my life in a particular direction. That’s a positive.
Now we’ll see if the things I mentioned above and the work at the MIA is enough to hold my life together. I think it is, probably more than enough, but more than enough in a way that will give me some synergy.
The Sierra Club work, no matter how good, involved drawing my attention away from the novel, from the Latin, from the garden and the bees. Both the distance and the time commitments had begun to chafe. It’s time for someone else to step up and time for me to step back.
Beltane Garlic Moon
