Summer Moon of the First Harvests
At 4:45 pm today I finished the third revision of Missing. It is 109,000 words long and is broken into 3 books. The work I have to do before I give it to Kate will take a bit of time, but certainly less than a week. Whew. Feels, marvelous. Light. Freeing.
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
Kate’s in Anoka at an all day quilting retreat, sewing and talking. She took along fat quarters with Halloween themes, so she’s feeling her way into the fall season, too. Her sewing day friends come to these retreats as have a few people she knows from the now defunct Fat Quarter Quilting. There’s skill building and a chance to get focused and make progress on a project.
The revision is on the last lap. I’ll finish either this afternoon or tomorrow. Then all those putzy things I mentioned a while back and I’ll be ready to move on for the time being.
Kona’s in serious decline now, most of what she eats feeds her tumor and she is listless. This is when the vet advises euthanasia but I discovered with Buck, well over a decade ago, that euthanasia violates some primal norm in me. So we keep our dogs comfortable, as comfortable as we can, hospice care or as near as we can replicate that, and wait with them as death comes.
Kona’s illness and decline has come when third phase issues are very present to me and at some point after her death, I plan to reflect on what she has taught me. And all the others, too.
| — | Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina |
| — | George Carlin |
| — | Chief Dan George |
| — | Mary Olive |
| — | Anne Leclair |
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
When I picked up our rug from American Rug Laundry, the guy said he couldn’t believe 
how much dirt he got out of it. I told him, but I’m not sure it registered, that our dogs really, really like this rug. All of them. And they come in and lie down on it. Roll on it. Transfer the sand from the Great Anoka Sand Plain to it, deep in its fiber. As he now knows. Not many folks let dogs on their multiple thousands of dollars oriental rugs, I imagine.
(this rug. with favorite dog objects. the one to the far right is a stuffed squirrel. a big hit.)
On the same trip I took a baby quilt in to Margaret Levin. She’s due sometime in the next couple of weeks. Says a lot about our society that she’s in her last term of pregnancy and still running the Northstar Chapter of the Sierra Club. Kate makes lots of baby quilts. This one used cloth made from our neighbor’s mother’s stash. When she died, it fell to Pam who gave it to Kate. This particular cloth was from the 1930’s.
We talked about politics, of course. That was my entré to the Sierra Club and what I did with them for 5 years or so. I asked her if she has the same sense I do that a cultural shift has begun on global warming. A positive one. She said yes, but she also said the movement thought one was happening in the 1970’s, too. Still, you add in a Democratic President and Senate, plus the changing demographics of the U.S. population and there could be real grounds for optimism. Whether such a shift would happen soon enough to matter? Hard to tell.
Stopped by the Northern Clay Center as well. It’s only a block from the Sierra Club. There are a lot of able potters represented there. I’m in the market for another tea pot since I plan to return to brewing tea from tea leaves rather than tea bags when I start Loki’s Children. A reward for finishing the third revision. Didn’t find anything. I plan to look on Sunday at a large pottery show, but if I don’t find anything I’ll head up to St. John’s and Richard Bresnahan. I’ve wanted one of his teapots for some time.
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
Sister Mary begins teaching early this year, a course beginning in August at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. The haze has lifted there, but the suicide rate has replaced it as a concern. Suicides are up significantly over last year. As I noted here a while back, Singapore came in very low in overall happiness in a global ranking.
It’s a tough culture. As Mary told me when we discussed this finding then, parents routinely tell their children that they have only themselves to count on, that you can’t trust others. My sense is that a same or similar message gets passed onto children in mainland China where it must get some strange reinforcement from the one-child policy.
As I’ve tried to learn about contemporary and ancient China, the question of what matters most in Chinese society has puzzled me. In ancient times, like the Warring States Period for example, there were many schools of thought contending, notable and surviving were Taoism, Confucianism and Legalism. Legalism had less purchase after the end of the Qin Dynasty, but Taoism and Confucianism both vied for attention among the elites. Buddhism came in and added another ingredient to the stew just when Taoism and Confucianism seemed to have lost favor.
But by the time we get to the 20th century there was no longer a consensus, if there had been even a tentative one before, about what might guide the Chinese individual or Chinese society. The revolution with Mao and his communist party as victor seemed to settle the question for a time. Communism would provide moral and ethical authority.
Then, the Great Leap Forward and other self-inflicted disasters killed millions of Chinese and communism lost a lot of its traction. After Deng Xiaoping, the central economic premises of communism began to fade away as capitalism, albeit a highly altered and state stimulated capitalism, made getting rich glorious.
Now it is not clear what the guiding values of China are. If they are only getting ahead, either financially or politically, then China will face significant and growing strains as the years push ahead.
I admit my knowledge of China and Chinese history is rudimentary and I may have missed something obvious, probably have missed something obvious. I hope so because a world power without a value center is a scary thing to contemplate.
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
Brother Mark says Dallas has begun to grow on him. He’s there after the Ellis family reunion in Mineola. He flew the flag for our generation of Ellises as the only Ellis male and the only person still named Ellis. Charyn Ellis, now Baker, hosted the event.
Summer Moon of the First Harvest
Our youngest grandchild, Gabe, has hemophilia. Hemophilia puts a lot of demands on his parents and on his older sister Ruth, but they all handle it with the same kind of grace that Gabe displays. The goal of course is for Gabe to have a normal childhood, as normal as possible, and to that end Jen and Jon inject him with factor three times a week to prevent bleeds. He takes this with a kind of stoicism not normally found in five year olds.
There is a regional branch of a national hemophilia center in Denver not far from Jon and Jen’s home and they do a lot of education and outreach in addition to clinical management. Each year the center and their volunteer support group has a camp in the Rockies for kids with hemophilia and their siblings. Ruth went for the first time this year. Gabe’s not old enough yet.
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
As you will see in the picture below, the colony now has six honey supers. This means beekeeping is over until the honey harvest since I won’t add more supers and I don’t inspect the hives during the nectar flow.
This year we plan to pay close attention to the varroe mites and treat them if necessary. I hope that will increase the likelihood of this colony surviving the winter, giving me two colonies for next spring. I have a new site picked out for the bees. It has southern exposure, protection from the northwest winter winds and is close to the honey house. I will move the hive in the winter though I plan to prepare the site in the fall. My goal going forward will be to keep four hives, two parent colonies (honey producers) and two colonies for overwintering, then dividing in the spring.
Summer Moon of the First Harvest
Rain last night. A morning walk through the garden shows many beets ready to harvest, 
carrots, too. The last of the onion and garlic crop out of the ground drying in the sun. Most of the crop is on its second week in the shed for further drying.
Our several tomato plants have both blossoms and fruit. Two of the heirlooms have large beefy tomatoes, Brandywine and Cherokee Purple. We also have cherry and roma varieties. All have fruit and blossoms, presaging a bumper year. We planned for this because our pantry stock of tomato based canned goods has almost reached depletion.
I did buy, for the first time, this year two non-heirloom varieties from Gurney’s. A brix test will tell the difference, if any, in nutrient value. Of course, the heirloom is not a highbred, so the seeds will breed true, meaning growing them retains and preserves the genetic diversity in our vegetable crops. That’s a valuable tradition to support. I prefer heirlooms, but didn’t want to be in a purist rut.
It also looks like a good year for peppers with several large peppers already on the plants. 
The eggplants have more fruit coming, too. The cucumbers have begun to climb the bamboo, have blossoms, but no fruit so far.
The leeks, our remaining allium crop, have begun to fatten. Which reminds me, I haven’t mounded them yet. Oops. Gotta get on that. It creates longer white sections on the stalk and white is usable, green not.
Our pear crop has been harvested as has been most of the cherries. The plums fall to the ground, not quite ripe and I have yet to find a ripe one on the tree. Not sure what to do next with them. Our quince with its first fruit has not yet begun to ripen. The currants are ripe and we may not harvest them this year. The apples grow inside their plastic ziploc bags though right now the apples I couldn’t reach to bag look just fine, too. They’re a much later harvest.
I did find one raspberry on our canes in the vegetable garden but this is very early for them. We have golden and red all in one patch.
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
Most of the day on Missing. As I near the end of this revision, the stakes get higher for the story. I’ve cut out a lot at the end, a whole story line in order to make Missing focus on, well, missing. I had what I considered some exciting stuff near the end, sort of a teaser for Loki’s Children, but that’s gone. Now the satisfaction with Missing stands or falls on its primary narrative, a missing boy and the search for him.