becoming my great-grandmother?

I've been confronting a problem that no one in my family (I'm guessing) has discussed for generations: root cellars. I do bet that Ida Augerson in Soperville, Illinois, had one. But that was a loooong time ago!

What to do with the September/October bounty that overflows during the last few weeks of the farmers' market? I can't bear to just not buy it. So I've been asking everyone how to build a mini-rootcellar. An experiment, for this year, so something perhaps best suited to someone who lives on the 17th floor on 42nd Street in New York City!

And thanks to some website, I got an idea. Peat moss. That what they recommended, so I got some. And I made a little vegetable hotel. Remember, this is small scale. I put it in the garage, which is cooler than the basement but rarely freezes. So fa

r so good, though I see a little sprout coming up from an onion already. I just wanted y'all to see it, and if it does well, fine. If I soon have squashed

squash and smelly potatoes - then I'll admit it and try

something else next year. This is it:

Thinking about fall, even at the zoo

The red twig dogwood bush and a rainbow tree

November, when I picture it, is harsh and angular, colored gray and dull brown, with a chance of rain. It follows October, of course, a round, full month overflowing with red, orange and

yellow, especially orange. Is this because of the “N” in

November, which doesn’t hold a candle to the “O’s” in October

and orange, when it comes to warmth and coziness?

I spent two hours outdoors today, waving confused people toward a drive-through electronics recycling event, on a classic November day. Trees bare, except for one with little bunches of rattling brown leftovers; gray sky that only spit at us, offering to let the sun through and then reneging at the last minute. I was too cold for comfort. Yet, being alone with several kind of flora that were taking a break from being growing things, I got to see a lot that I liked. In this part of the suburbs some prairie grasses have miraculously survived, and they were reddish if you looked at them just right. That reminded me of my red-twig dogwood bushes at home, which are more beautiful now without the distraction of leaves.

This seems to be one of my tasks, living in the Midwest - to relish everything I can about fall and winter, not just because the promise of spring is lurking under the soil, but because they are fall and winter!

This is the last winter when I’ll be in my sixties, and somehow the seventies sound a little more autumnal. Of course, when I hit seventy, maybe it’ll only be the eighties and on up that sound like that, and the seventies will be, if fallish at all, then more Octoberish, with bright colors and abundance.

Here's a very accepting look at the season:

Autumn Song of Fearlessness

I am surrounded by a peaceful ebbing,

as creation bows to the mystery of life;

all that grows and lives must give up life,

yet it does not really die.

As plants surrender their life,

bending, brown and wrinkles,

and yellow leaves of trees

float to my lawn like parachute troops,

they do so in a sea of serenity.

I hear no fearful cries from creation,

no screams of terror,

as death daily devours

once-green and growing life.

Peaceful and calm is autumn’s swan song,

for she understands

that hidden in winter’s death-grip

is spring’s openhanded,

full-brimmed breath of life.

It is not a death rattle that sounds

over fields and backyard fences;

rather I hear a lullaby

softly swaying upon the autumn wind.

Sleep in peace, all that lives;

slumber secure, all that is dying,

for in every fall there is the rise

whose sister’s name is spring.

Ed Hays, Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim

Thanks to Rose-Therese, who read that poem at the last SSC meeting.

And here's a more light-hearted approach to autumn, seen on pumpkin day at the zoo:

two of my great-grandparents

So much to do, so little time (okay, a cliche, but it's true. I thought that during my captive time with Echo during dialysis I could do lots of useful things, like getting back to genealogy. As it happens, that time flies by. But the other day I got to thinking about not having picture of my grandmother as a girl, and looking for names of likely relatives got me curious again. So let me introduce two relatives from a side of the family that no one that I knew was interested in: the Henry's.

This is John William Henry, not a prepossessing looking lad, I admit, on the day he was wedded to Caroline (Lena) Anderson, who was 19 years old and recently arrived from Sweden. As far as I can tell from the dates, at this time (May 20, 1886) my grandmother, Stella Mae, was already on the way. She was to be the oldest of eight, a situation she wouldn't have chosen. Please, Grandma, forgive me for telling this - in 2009 it's not a shocking thing to say.

John Henry apparently struggled to provide for his rapidly growing family; he was said to be a good woodworker, but apparently jobs like that weren't plentiful. He may have come to Illinois from Iowa to be a miner, but to my grandmother's everlasting shame, he eventually settled on bartending. At 48 he died of pneumonia, leaving Lena (and the older kids) with this unruly brood to raise.

At the time John Henry died, my grandmother had finished the required one year of teacher training at John Knox College and was the only teacher in a one-room school, dealing reluctantly with boys who were bigger than she was, tougher, and almost as old. She hated it.

No wonder that she was attracted to my grandfather, also an oldest child, who didn't get on with his father and was probably already making plans to move west. He was also tall and handsome and was known to run his horses fast. Perhaps she knew, perhaps she didn't, how much like her father my grandfather was going to be. I think that on both sides there was a long line of creative men who didn't have a way to fit into the culture they were living in, and that included both of them. My dad could have been one of them; it's been good fortune for us all that he was able to find and explore his gift for art.

By the way, for you who are Augerson-family-savvy - less than two months after John William Henry died, Elisabeth Roblee (Betty) was born. And life goes on.

Yellow Yard Yet Again

Am I obsessed with yellow in my yard? Perhaps, but look at this giant plant; it loves it here! What you have to imagine is that every so often a vivid goldfinch sits on a post just over my squash plants and then flits colorfully around the yard. Much too fast for a photo; just a streak of yellow. Oh, and don't forget to imagine the sound of some twenty or thirty bees smacking their little bee lips at whatever this generous plant offers them in its yellow blossoms.

My Yellow Yard

I tried to arrange everything artistically, but blogspot seems to want to do its own thing. So I spared you the commentary and just gave you a jumble of the yellow in my back yard. The

coneflowers, reading for the sun; the precious first and second lemon squashes (they don't taste like lemons, just look alike), the first squash in the pan, and the exuberant cup plant, which has reached some ten feet and think they're a prairie all by itself. The bees think so too. My poor little garden was a slow starter, so every success in it is very sweet.

I am not my grandmother

My grandmother never went to the farmer's market and deliberately picked a bunch of leaves she's never tried before, from an African refugee woman selling fresh vegetables that she grew to augment her family's meager income.

Grandma never had the chance to do that. She cooked the familiar vegetables that the people in the neighborhood, mostly Midwest transplants, grew. In fact, my mother was the salad person; I don't remember Grandma ever making salad unless it was wedges of iceberg lettuce.

Anyway, this is a far cry from iceberg. It's purslane, and I recently planted a couple of little plants of it in pots on my deck, liking the cheery yellow flowers. But edible? I only found this out today. Now I've interrupted the laborious task of removing leaf after leaf, in order to write.

Grandma did lots of laborious things, darning Grandpa's socks (I wish I had her well-worn

wooden darning egg!), plucking chickens, sorting berries...tasks that she didn't choose but seemed to accept as just another part of life. I don't have to prepare purslane; I do it because I want to try another taste, to prove that Americans will buy something new, and somehow because it's a part of a more down-to-earth approach to consuming. Taking what's near at hand and figuring out how to make something good out of it.

I kind of thought that purslane was something that grew by the roadside, and Wild Bill something online says that's true. He also eats the stems, avoiding all this work, but I just tried one and it tasted kind of like sourgrass. I thought it was great fun to chew sourgrass when I was a kid, but I think I draw the line at a salad of it!

This leisure to sit and pluck comes to me courtesy of Echo's kidney dialysis, during which we sit like Darby and Joan (or Joan and Joan?) in our recliners by the fireplace while she gets her blood cleaned and I play at many entertaining things. Here's Echo all set up. Usually we don't have the IV pole and bags; the little box under the machine holds the fluid into which the toxins in her blood ooze by osmosis and then flow out and away from her! It's a remarkably ingenious system.

Environmentalism circa 500 b.c.e.

Have you ever noticed that an idea keeps coming at you from lots of directions until it’s about to hit you over the head and you want to yell, “Enough, already – I’m getting it!”  This year’s idea is a piece of the environmental movement, loosely called conservation.  Quakers named a testimony for it: simplicity.  A bright nutty person on the Prairie Village Environmental Committee invented a subcommittee and named it Glidepath to Frugality.  Of course, I volunteered to be on it.  And then I opened the Tao te Ching at random, as I often do, and I read Chapter 80:  (as you read this, remember that it was written roughly around 500 b.c.e.)

 

If a country is governed wisely,

its inhabitants will be content.

They enjoy the labor of their hands

and don’t waste time inventing

labor-saving machines.

Since they dearly love their homes,

they aren’t interested in travel.

There may be a few wagons and boats,

but these don’t go anywhere.

There may be an arsenal of weapons,

but nobody ever uses them.

People enjoy their food,

take pleasure in being with their families,

spend weekends working in their gardens,

delight in the doings of the neighborhood.

And even though the next country is so close

that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking,

they are content to die of old age

without ever having gone to see it.

                    Tao te Ching  translation by Stephen Mitchell

 

 

If you believe that Lao Tzu was generally on the right track, what do you do with a concept like this?  It’s heresy to most progressive people, even lots of environmentalists and Quakers!  When I look up travel quotes, I get this one, which I’ve agreed with all my life:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” - Mark Twain

Of course!  People who stay put are the embodiment of narrow-mindedness.  Don’t you agree?

But now we have to look at it differently.  A website I just looked at said that a round-trip flight to Europe produced 3-4 tons of carbon emissions, more carbon than 20 Bengladeshis cause to be emitted in a year.  I’m not going to Europe any time soon, but I am going to California next month to help sort out Betty’s bequeathed possessions, and for a multitude of reasons, I’m not going to take the train. 

I’m feeling compelled, somehow, to figure out when a trip, a purchase or an expense or extravagance of any kind is the right thing to do and when it’s merely an unjustified drag on the future quality of life on Earth (as well, perhaps, as on my personal finances).  This stuff is really hard to think through, and I’m struggling as I write.  But I got some good hints at our last Quaker Meeting retreat. 

In a small group discussion, Kathy said (and I hope I paraphrase all right) that simplicity has a lot to do with paying attention to the small voice inside – or That of God – and asking ourselves if what we are planning to do or buy is something that will help us hear or heed that voice or if it’s more likely to interfere with our hearing.  That made so much sense to me! Examples poured into my mind.

It reminds me of a woman from Africa who spoke here or was on a film – I think she was here.  A group of Americans went there regularly to help with projects that the people in the village considered important.  The help was important, and the money that came in was important, but she said that the greatest thing was that people showed up.  A woman raised her hand and said that a trip to Africa costs a lot, and wouldn’t they rather have the money.  And she said no, not always.  It meant more than she could express for people to actually make the trip. 

Making a trip like that might be a way of expressing what one was lead to do – if the voice within was clear that it was the only way.  On the other hand, the myriad business trips that clog the system of air travel, and which most people admit that they loathe, don’t appear to do anything for anyone’s spirit.  Maybe the key is to sincerely consider what’s going on – will this trip (or new car or new shoes) help me feel more contented, better able to fulfill what I’m here for?  Or will the excitement wear off and leave me looking for more? 

Back (for those of you who remember my blog’s theme: Becoming my Grandmother) to my grandmother.  More and more I find that when I do grandmotherly things, I am content.  Twice this week I’ve started listening to music (my grandmother didn’t have an iPod – we have made some progress) and found a great well of energy for …..cleaning!  I was in one of those zones that are hard to describe, especially to people who think they don’t like cleaning while listening to Simon and Garfunkel (Wednesday Morning, 3AM, to be exact).  But when I’m busy in the kitchen with music on and a breeze coming in the window, I really don’t feel like I need to go anywhere.  I love to read about places.  Right now I’m on my third book about Marco Polo and people who followed his path, and those certainly aren’t my first books about the Silk Road and the Gobi Desert.  But I’m beginning to realize that not going there is okay.    

If you have any ways that spending less money and at the same time being easier on the planet is working for you, I’d like to hear them.  That’s the idea of our little subcommittee: helping people see that a little less spending can contribute to the greater good and maybe even make them happier.  What do you think about traveling less?

There’s a fence between us and our next-door-neighbors’ swimming pool.  When I’m in the yard I can here their grandchildren playing in the pool, but I can’t see them, and that’s okay.  I’m happy pulling weeds and encouraging my veggies to grow.  That’s what I picture when I read Lao Tzu.