Monthly Archives: June 2014

Garden

Bit? Or Stung?

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Beltane                                                                 Summer Moon

We leapt again from winter to summer, missing most of the early start that comes in April. Two years in a row. So I’m mulching now, at the same time as second plantings, with the first plantings emerged and growing, but not advanced by, say, a month or a month and a half as they would have been by now in a normal year.

 

Laying down mulch this morning I transferred some of it by hand from a pile at the end of the bed. That was a mistake. Small red ants like the mulch-old leaves, soil and straw-as much as I do. They took exception to my invasion of their home, streaming up my back and arms, onto my neck, face and ears. They bit or stung, I don’t know ants well enough to know which. A bit of formic acid I imagine. Like stinging nettles and honey bees. Not big, blistering stings like a bee, not even as strong as brushing through a nettle with a bare hand, but more than you’d want voluntarily. So, I switched to the spade. Much better.

(cornfield ant. most like the ones I found all over me this morning.)

When I spray the orchard, including the currants, blueberries and gooseberries, I’m treating the trees and bushes in the same way I will treat tomatoes, peppers, egg plants, beans and cucumbers. The spray encourages the plant’s reproductive system to produce gooseberryfruit or other seed bearing vessels like bean pods or cucumbers.

(gooseberry)

As will be the theme in the moving time, I wondered how much of what I know of gardening will transfer to the arid west. Planting, then watering in is a staple of Minnesota gardening, but it would have to be a more spare process on the high plains. The challenge of transferring and adapting my skills to a new, less forgiving climate excites me. This kind of knowledge transfer and adaptation of one climate zone’s skills to a new one is something temperate latitude agriculturists and horticulturists across the globe will face, most spots without having to move at all. In that sense this is pioneer work for a new era.

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Beltane                                                                   Summer Moon

Out to the orchard for the bi-weekly spraying, going to hit the gooseberries and the flowers, too. Then, plant another round of beets. Stuff’s hopping here, house getting emptier, though not much visible yet, boxes getting packed, dressers emptied. That sort of thing.

 

Dreams

Nocturnes

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Beltane                                                                      Summer Moon

Nocturnes. That’s how I think of these nighttime posts. They come from a desire to add closure to the day, to respond to the peace around me. If they were music, they would be raw jazz of the sort played by John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk. Not intended to express thought, but to evoke emotion.

A sense of quiet elegy, the poetry of stars and high cirrus wispy among them, an owl in the distance. These are interiors, moments of the slow merging between consciousness and the inner world, when the dream songs begin to sing themselves into existence, waiting only for sleep.

The passing between seasons, between waking and sleeping and sleeping and waking are fraught for me, at times with a simple longing to remain either awake or asleep, in winter or in fall; but, at other times with melancholy and the darkness, states that obscure the inner life, even cause it pain, or come from the pain it creates.

Tonight the music plays low and sweet in the background, the lights are going down and the time for the set to finish has arrived. Good night.

(Alphonse Osbert – Les chants de la nuit)

Colorado, Commentary on the news, Great Work, Politics, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

An Underlying Question

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Beltane                                                              Summer Moon

As I saw the video and read the article on fire in Colorado, the underlying question became slowly evident to me. Here it was couched in hotshots, firemen, national forests and parks employees and the complex budgetary manipulations of the Forest Service. Along the ocean coasts of the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific in this country it will involve underwater construction crews, builders of seawalls and levees and drainage systems, the Coast Guard and numerous other federal and state agencies and their employees. And the underlying question is this: how much money, state or federal, and how many lives will we spend in defense of neighborhoods, businesses, cities built in predictably dangerous environments?

Climate change has begun to push the numbers of such places higher and higher: whole nations like Vanuatu and the Maldives, large portions of heavily populated coastal areas, those spots where humanity, in wealthier and stupider times, has planted itself in defiance of environmental barriers like deserts (the American Southwest and California), wildfire, and many riverine settings.

(from the Phoenix city guide: Phoenix rises from the floor of the northern tip of the great Sonoran Desert)

This is the question of adaptation, how much will we modify our current reality as the climate changes, as opposed to the question of mitigation which the EPA has put on the front pages of America’s newspapers. It is not a question of doing one or the other, we will have to do both. But. How much should we do to defend poor decisions on the parts of others?

(The Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs last year.)

There are, of course, as always, a lot of gray here. It’s one thing to buy a lovely forested home in a Colorado red zone and another to have an apartment built years ago near the Atlantic Ocean. Much of the change will be gradual and the costs to adapt can be made gradually, too. This is true of sea level rise, though the sums of money involved are enormous. But. There are others, like moving into wildfire habitat as its frequency escalates by factors as high as 400%, that are not gray at all.

Colorado, The Move

End Times

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Beltane                                                                    Summer Moon

It must be a little like dying. When I touch something here and imagine the last time, the last time planting seeds in that raised bed, the last time coming down these stairs, the last time leaving our driveway, a hint of sadness gathers around my fingers. Not yet, I say. Not yet.

It is not the same now. And will never be again. Not here. Last month I touched these things and imagined my stewardship of them, how today influenced not only tomorrow, but next year and ten years. Not now. Now I wonder how new hands will care for this soil, the carpet on the stairs.

How will the house feel when it is not our feet that walk its floors? Will it miss our pressure and gait, after all that’s all it’s ever known? Inanimate objects, you might say, are inanimate, but I wonder.

Right now Kate’s playing music on the parlor grand piano. The sound feels lonely, as if it wonders why it has to go. Why can’t it stay with these hands, feel the music played as she plays it? Perhaps it will be sad to go. Or, perhaps it will end up in the hands of a rock and roll, jazz and blues sort who will tickle it in ways it’s never known. Could be. And, it might like it.

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Beltane                                                                 Summer Moon

The quiet has descended. Night falls here with few sounds other than insects and animals.

During the day nature’s biplanes, the dragonflies, swarmed, flying their graceful, darting paths through the air. I love dragonflies, they’re beautiful and a wonder of nature, but seeing them means only one thing. Mosquitoes. One of the less alluring parts of living in the humid east.

There is in each of these realizations, dragonflies = mosquitoes, for instance, a hint of knowledge that will be past. In the arid west mosquitoes and dragonflies are not part of summer. Though lack of water and intense heat are. I’m collecting these upper Midwestern home truths, ones that I’ve often ignored, as I compare daily life here with what I imagine daily life will be like later. There.

Some day, either at this computer in this study or at this computer in my new study further west, I plan to sit down and try to pick out as much of this subtle cultural knowledge as I can. Duncan, Oklahoma, by way of stories of my parents will be my first stop, then Oklahoma at large, Indiana, followed by Wisconsin and Minnesota. What are the kind of things that we know that go unremarked because they are so ordinary, so commonplace? These are the real markers of our culture.

 

General

Mammoths seen above the pick-up line

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Beltane                                                                 Summer Moon

The clan convened north of 694 for the first time on a restaurant meeting night. I used a line in my e-mail inviting folks to Taste of Thailand on University mentioning the pick-up line. Nope, not a northern burbs e-harmony.com, rather an observation Kate and I made shortly after moving up here 20 years ago that there were more pick-ups on the road than sedans.

Tom, Bill, Frank, Warren and I dined in a quiet restaurant, spring rolls, papaya salad and fried bananas on my check. The conversation moved around, sometimes lighting on our move to Colorado, other times on general aging issues, then the recovery of our two o.r. patients, Frank and Tom, bits on Memorial Day and what serving our country means, Warren and Sheryl’s move from house 1 to house 2 and on the creek that’s ten feet high and risin’ out in the western burbs. Apparently Lake Minnetonka is at an all time high, breaching retaining walls and resulting in no wake zones that have slowed boat traffic on the Lake to almost nothing.

Since the drive only took 20 minutes, it felt like I was cheating, not putting in my usual degree of effort.

Colorado, Great Work, Sierra Club, The Move, Weather +Climate

400%

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Beltane                                                                 Summer Moon

New state, new realities. I’m reading the Denver Post online now and there was a story in today’s edition: THE FIRE LINE: WILDFIRE IN COLORADO. The 27 minute video is worth watching, especially if you contemplate purchasing a home in Colorado. Even if you’re not, you might find its underlying argument, made by fire researchers and fire fighters and natural resource professionals alike, intriguing. The oldest of them, John Maclean, draws an analogy between flood plains and fire habitat. If people move into a flood plain and experience a catastrophe, is it the Federal Governments responsibility to take care of them? Well, he goes on, fire habitat is the same.

From 2000 to 2010 100,000 people moved into red zone areas. What are they? Areas with a high likelihood of unmanageable fire. Just like a floodplain. Here’s the big question: how much money and how many firefighters should we risk saving structures willingly built within high likelihood fire habitat? Not much, according to the tone of this video. And it makes sense to me.

It’s an interesting case in the politics of the West where local control and individual choice are part of the political culture. It means state legislatures and even county boards hesitate to control developers and home buyers as they create neighborhoods, beautiful, yes, but also dangerous. Without getting engaged (yet) in these struggles it seems to me that it’s a false libertarianism which champions local control and individual choice on one end of a decision making chain, but then looks for the Federal Government and local firefighters to compensate for the risks on the other end.

Out of all the climate change material I’ve read and learned over the last year one of the standout predictions is that fire incidence will increase by 400% in the West. That’s 400%. I look forward to working with the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Sierra Club on issues like this one.

 

General

SortTossPack

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Beltane                                                                  Summer Moon

SortTossPack folks came out. Lot of good energy, ideas. They have a consignment store and will help us sell our higher value items for a split fee. Split fee is fine with us, get the stuff out and bring some cash in. We’re not sellers of things. They also have a truck that can help us move larger items to places for donation or to their store for sale. Movers and packers, too.

We’ll start opening up some holes in the house where we can begin to store items packed ahead of time. (the consignment store used by the SortTossPack folks.)

This is, as they say, gettin’ real.

Colorado, The Move

Underway

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Beltane                                                                Summer Moon

Meeting another move manager company rep today, SortTossPack. With the momentum gained from the garage effort, I can now see how to get through this work. The overwhelmed and torn between two places feeling came when the whole was abstract, pressing down all at once. Now that we have a plan for going through the house: upstairs June-July, downstairs August-September, and we have completed one segment we are in process, rather than OMG what’s next?

We’ve still got many, many moving parts to this whole process however. Staging the home may turn out to be one of the more difficult ones with three dogs and the need to get some landscaping work done in the back. We have to fill Vega-Rigel holes and reseed grass where the dogs have caused it to go bare. Plus we’ll have to corral the dogs during showings. Which may not be easy. It might be that we’ll have to board them during open houses and important showings. But, that’s all next year.

We have a realtor coming on June 9. We’ll get some idea of what our house and land might be worth. We have the meetings I’ve mentioned here before with our financial consultants, Ruth and R.J. this month, too. Kate will head out to Colorado in late June or early July to meet with a Colorado realtor and literally begin to get a lay of the land.

In addition to all this reality show material I’ve been considering what sort of Stetson and cowboy boots I should buy.  My books on the West and Colorado have to get concentrated into one place. It will take a couple of years of reading to get my intellect settled into a new area. Trips of exploration and plenty of historical and geological and horticultural reading, too.