Faith in Potato Planting

 

                It’s spring. Potato planting time. I like to get them in as early as possible so that they can grow on rain water rather than city water. In the ideal world, I water them twice from the hose and then let them dry down for harvest. Then, one bed sits idle for months and maybe hosts the chicken coop first in September while the other is planted with fall greens.  As I was laying out the spuds, I considered the faith that farmers—and teachers—have. We plant potatoes and start new classes on opposite sides of the yearly calendar.

                Potatoes are just lumps in April. The ones I have kept in the larder since late summer are so wrinkled and sprouting that I lay them in trenches quickly, trying to not knock off the long, wandering tendrils while I work. Blue and white worms poke up from the dirt when I am done. The new chunks are dusty, but just beginning to sprout from a week in the greenhouse sunlight. I dig them in as well. We don’t know what will happen. Will we have weeks of cold rain, stunting the growth? Will it dry out too soon, forcing me to water more often? Will something come in and munch the new potatoes, like the moles in the old community garden? With Climate Change, it is harder to know. It’s a risk. A small risk for me; a much bigger risk for the small organic farmers that surround us in the valley.  We will know if it pays off months from now—just about when we are all getting ready to go back to school.

                Students are just symbolic lumps in September, unknown and not sprouting. We move back into the building, sit through days of “training” and wait for students to pour back into our lives. We plan, and hope, and dream of where we will go this year, how far our students will grow and develop by the late spring.  But so much growth is (or, sometimes, is not) happening under soil of high school. We don’t know. We see small signs of learning, flashes of understanding, moment when we stand still in awe—but almost all of the development is under the surface. We have to have faith.

                And, right about the time that I am putting in the potatoes, they begin to show what they have been doing in the dark. Papers have a thesis and paragraph structure. Discussions flow with students adding a new idea, rather than just repeating what someone else has said. A kid who has refused to read the book decides to give in and read…and suddenly, they know what is going on in class. Imagine that! We laugh.

                It is good that the two actions balance each other out, every year. When I am doubting my potatoes, my students display all of their growth. And, before I go back to the building to start a new year, I pull my harvest from the ground, reminding me to have faith, always, in what is happening underground.

Kayli

 

                Kayli, the sun kitty, died on Saturday morning, just a few weeks short of 19 years old, which is pretty impressive for a cat. On Thursday, she spent the day in the greenhouse, negotiating the entire house, three cat doors, one low fence, and a chair climb up to her preferred spot in the sun on the planting shelf.  On Friday night, she basked by a fire until all of the heat had gone. The end came quickly, although we knew she was fading.

                She was about six months old when I found her, isolated with a nasty, drug resistant respiratory   infection, at the shelter. She was in her own cage, huddled far in the back. When I talked with her, she came forward slowly, and then pressed her head against mine, purring. That was her last purr for several months as we took her home and battled the infection. It finally broke on sunny afternoon in late November when we took both of our new kittens outside to explore the yard. While Lucy ran up the tree, Kayli faced the sun, eyes squinting, basking in the warmth. I will be your cat and you will be my people, she told us, under one condition: I go out.

                And so, she went out. She roamed the neighborhood for power nap spots, spending days on the neighbor’s porch (they put out a pillow as she grew older). She was trapped, not once, not twice, but three times in structures around the block because she loved to explore. She rode in the trunk of someone’s car all the way to McMinninville. Fortunately, they caught her as she jumped out and hosted a cat sleepover before she was brought home the next day. She sat under the Ark and accosted people walking by; she had a fan club in China for several years. It was not uncommon to see someone sitting on the curb, holding a conversation with our fluffy, flirting cat.  

                Kayli was a social beastie. She liked a potluck, a gathering of people, and loved a meeting. She would greet each person as they entered the space then sit in the center for appropriate worship. Online, she would wrestle the door open, then howl loudly, weighing in on whatever the pressing issue of the day was. There are countless council shots of her very fluffy tail waving across the camera as I tried to redirect her interests elsewhere.  She even liked to visit Mark at work on the way home from the vet, always on the back of my bike. Bike rides were better than van rides.

                We will miss this fluffy orange cat who was so engaged with the world that she helped read council packets and the newspaper; who slept on the foot of the bed because it was too warm to be too close, but moved into the pile of covers when we got up; who loved the sun and a fire and warmth on her face, as well as tummy rubs and rolling around on the fence, almost but never quite falling off. We buried her in front of the greenhouse, very close to the spot where she decided that we were her people.

Third Winter

 

Last week, there was some serious lobbying to go outside during class. The sun was out and the temperature was in the fifties, which is pretty darn nice by Oregon standards for early March.  I am often susceptible to pleas to read outside; I want to be out as much as the next person.

“We neeed to go out, Ms. Ellis,” they implored. “It’s so nice and you know Third Winter is coming.”

It’s true. Third Winter is coming. In the Willamette Valley we have First Winter, from November to late December, where the days are growing shorter and the clouds are low. But First Winter is improved because of Christmas lights which go on in mid-November and stay on until ….well, there are still some on now.  And there is Winter Break. And the hope of a snow and ice day. And presents. Then there is Second Winter, which starts when school begins again and is plagued by sniffles, colds, flu, and the end of the semester. It rains and drizzles and no one wants to go out ever. Not even the cat. It’s grim. But, the light is slowly coming back and the snowdrops bloom. We can handle it.  Barely.

 Third Winter is the worst. Early March teases us with dry, clear, warm days. Buds swell. We go out to read in the sun.  Gardeners clean out old beds, plant seeds, and monitor the soil for warmth and moisture. There is hope. Then Third Winter hits, usually the week of Spring Break. The sweatshirt you have worn every day all winter is dingy and unappealing, so you leave it home and shiver in the morning instead.  It’s cold and rainy and the clouds are low. There’s hail. Downpours. Creeks flood.  Anything that you foolishly planted out sits in the ground, dodging slugs, and refuses to grow. Third Winter is the worst.

This year, I have been struggling with this knowledge.  For some reason, I am ahead in the garden. I have turned and prepped four beds—the early peas and leeks and parsnips bed, the spring greens bed, and both potato beds.  The starts in the greenhouse are bursting with life. The peas, especially, are ahead of the growth curve, dying to be planted out. “It’s only four feet,” they call to me. “Four feet away, on the other side of the greenhouse wall, is our bed. You even put the strings up!”  Like a bunch of sophomores on a sunny Friday afternoon, they clamor for release.  It is perfect pea planting weather. But….there are no volunteer potatoes up yet, a real sign that the soil is warming. And, after  thirty years here, I know that Third Winter is coming.  We will wait. At least another week.

 

Revenge Pee

 

                Our cat is elderly. Her back legs are weak and her bladder is small and grumbly with an occasional bladder infection. Last year, we all gave in and put a litter box in the bathroom.

                Although she has always preferred going outdoors—under the Ark in bad weather—to a litter box, she is also the master of what we call the Revenge Pee.  This is the perfectly targeted pee (or poop) right by the door, or at the bottom of the stairs, or, once, in the middle of a laundry pile in the basement.  She occasionally indulged in Revenge Pee when we locked her in the house with a litter box because we did not want her roaming while we were gone for a few days, or when we did something else to cause her wrath.  It was always a statement.

                For the past month, we have been struggling with a variation of the Revenge Pee. We set up two litter boxes when her infection was bad. One in the bathroom and one by the front door, because she was peeing on the floor in an attempt to go out.  She really liked that, but I did not. So, I slowly moved the second box across the living room and into the bathroom. She moved with it. It paused over the heater’s intake grate in the hall for several days and then I moved it the last few feet. She showed her displeasure by peeing in the grate. I showed my displeasure by pitching her out. To clean up the mess, I stacked the two litter boxes in the bathroom.

                While we were gone, she came in, ate some crunchies, and went into the bathroom. Then, on her tired old back legs, she climbed into the stacked boxes and pooped. Mark thinks it was a sign she is ready to make peace. I am not so sure.

 

 

 

Saturday Chores

 

The weather report read  heavy rain on Sunday, so we spent all of Saturday outside. First, we walked to the market, had some excellent chats, and bought the vegetables for the week. Then, when we came home, we went outside, without even stopping for lunch. Mark worked on compost. I cleaned up.

·         Transplanted several small plants I’ve been rooting inside.

·         Watered all of the starts and adjusted the lights so they would not wake Mark up in the morning.

·         Cleaned up the area around the recently remodeled and planted rose bed.

·         Pulled nails from the rotten wood and tossed it into the compost area.

·         Moved large and small bricks back to the storage area in the chicken run.

·         Turned over the first bed so that the organic matter would break down faster and moved the hoops over so that I can start drying it out in a week or so.

·         Cleaned up the strawberries in the wheelbarrows; they were surrounded by dead and rotting foliage and needed some air to breath.

·         Moved empty garden barrels around.

·         Trimmed some branches for vases in the house. 

When I was finished, I came inside, took one look at the very messy kitchen, and put my boots back on. There was clearly a storm coming on, but it hadn’t started yet. I grabbed the second pair of trimmers and headed back to the compost piles. Working together, while the wind rose around us, Mark and I  trimmed the ENTIRE pile of branches into the rings. There is no plant matter waiting to be composted at this precise moment. It’s won’t last of course, but, as the rains began, we felt like we had accomplished something major. 

Snow Days

 

Snow Days.

When I was young, living in New England, I dreamed of snow days. When a blizzard moved in, I fell asleep to the sound of the plows out, clearing the roads. If they lost the battle, my mother and I turned on the radio at 5:30 to listen to the list of closures, read in alphabetical order. Hampstead was a third of the way down the list; Pinkerton Academy was much further—and the decisions was not always the same.  My mother remembered the radio just saying “all schools in all towns are closed today” which was more efficient, but lacked the drama of the long list. Now, the district sends out a robo call at 6:25  and then posts the information on the website. I lie in bed, listen to the weather, and hope.  A Snow Day,  for teachers, is a gift from the Weather Gods. And I treat it as such (we’ll have to scramble to make up the time later, so there’s no point in doing school work).

 

Thursday was a Snow Day. This was my day.

·         Muffins for breakfast.

·         Second mug of tea, with the cat, watching the birds at the feeder. Bluebirds came through. The birds got a second coop of seed; it was cold out.

·         Finished a book.

·         Washed all of the great grandmother’s dishes that are on the open shelves in the kitchen. They were covered in dust.

·         Swept the basement. De-sprouted the potatoes.

·         Cleaned the kitchen, getting a jump on the weekend.

·         Read the news online.

·         Walked downtown to escort Mark home.

·         Spent an hour looking at bills in the legislature in preparation for the Council committee meeting, which we had online.

·         Made dinner.

·         Watched an episode of the Great British Bakeoff with the cat.

·         Went to bed, hoping, not for a snow day, but a late opening, which is what happened.

The key to a good Snow Day is completing a project or two that would not get done in the normal flow of things, balanced with time spent just staring out the window, watching the weather. I have it down.

 

 

 

 

Seed Starting in Cold Times

 

                It has been a colder than usual few weeks; there was a week and a half of bright clear sun and cold nights, followed by a week that threatened “Wintry Mix” but never quite followed through. Because of this, all of the outdoor plants are in the greenhouse or the dining room and all of the greenhouse plants have come into the house. It’s a bit crowded everywhere.

                Last Sunday was Candlemas. We took a long walk—without threatened rain—finished up the pruning, and planted greens in front of the fire. But, it was too chilly to move them out to the greenhouse, even with mats, so they have been living on a drying rack in the Cozy room for the last week. Kale, mustard, arugula, lettuce, leeks, early cabbage, celery, broccoli, and cauliflower, plus pansies. I planted extra, just in case and so we can share.  They are all sprouting now and starting to lean towards the light, reminding me that, even though the groundhog saw his shadow, spring will come. Until then, I am checking NOAA weather, hoping for a break in the cold so that the starts can leave the house. They need the light; we need the space.

Social Media

 

I have seen a great deal of worry about social media, Face Book, and other platforms in the last month, with the new administration’s election. In fact, the concern goes back further in time, as I just finished reading The Anxious Generation, which connects our mental health crisis directly to the rise of cell phone. I agreed with the author’s premise the smart phones are not good for our mental health; we do not have smart phones at home and still answer (or not) a landline.  Obviously, we are not a technology free household but we have some limits that help to keep us sane.

First, all of our engagement with anything online is through our shared laptop. Mark has a computer, but it is in the basement and its cold down there. So we negotiate for my laptop upstairs.  I use it when I come home from work because I have council business to deal with. Mark works on his stuff while I cook dinner. If one of us has an online meeting, we have to arrange ahead of time. It’s like having only one car (we have one car, too).  Because we are not always online, we have a break. There’s not a constant pinging in our lives.

Second, I have curated my Face Book account.  After the first Trump election, I deleted everything political. I unliked all of my news sources and political pages. It was amazing. This left me with a whole lot of potato sellers and garden seeds, which is lovely. And it has held. I have no political junk cluttering up the feed. I do have underwear ads (the nice socks have disappeared) and some photos of Boston in the 1970s, but I can live with that. I post nothing political.  It helps.

Finally, every Friday evening, I shut down the computer for a technology Shabbat.  No email. No New York Times—not even the games. No checking social media. No packet questions, or printing. The laptop is closed. Mark usually participates as well, but he is not bound by it. If you want to reach me, you have to call. Or catch us on the way to the market. Or stop by with a question.  It’s all good.

I have found that having these limits keeps me sane and rooted in the real world. I have control of my online life—we all do. We just need to take it back.  And it’s Friday, so it is time to make dinner, read my book, maybe draw the garden plan, stretch my eyes away from a screen, and have a real life. In this, as in so many other ways, we have agency.

Late Fragment

 

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

House Cleaning

 

          

      Ceres Bakery used to have—maybe still does—a series of metal baskets over the sinks, where we stored all of the utensils. Scoops of all sizes, spoons, forks, whisks, anything that would fit, was washed and tucked in the baskets to dry. It was usually a joyous chaos of stuff. Occasionally, someone would tidy it up, bringing like items together in a basket. That was usually a sign that their life felt a bit… messy…and they needed some small part of it to be orderly. Something, if only the cookie scoops, was in the right place.

                Weekends are the time to bring order back into the chaos of our house.  It’s a small space, so piles of paper build up quickly. Cat litter is dragged out of the bathroom; the cat, despite her tired back legs, still manages to thrust considerable litter onto the floor. Shoes cluster by the front and back doors. There are hats and socks in weird places. There may be chicken poop in the back hall from the bottom of our shoes and there is clearly mud. The recycling needs to go out and there is no food left in the fridge. Spiders move into undisturbed corners. Nothing is written in my planner and I have a deep and abiding suspicion that I have forgotten to do something or meet someone. I couldn’t just have an empty day….

                We divided the tasks. Mark did the laundry, including the huge sheet pile, while I washed the floors. He defrosted the freezer and we finally composted the second half of his birthday cake from last January 16th.  I put away piles of stuff and made a food plan, and we went to the Farmer’s Market and the co-op.  I even started the seed inventory. There is something deeply satisfying about bringing order back into our home; it has the same resonance as the scent of a crock pot full of cooking beans wafting into my bedroom at night.  All is right with this small section of the world—even if the cat has already pulled down the afghan I had so neatly folded over the back of the rocking chair.

Laurel prune

 

                January can be rough in the Willamette Valley.  It’s chilly, and wet, and there is mud everywhere, and the tires from cars have turned all the leaves into slippery piles of goo. There are indoor activities, like browsing seed catalogs, reading, and repairing chairs, but we need to get outside. The one thing I can do in the yard right now is prune. I start on one side of the yard, with the laurel, and work my way round: laurel, fig, apple, plum, grapes, lilac, hazelnuts, back yard laurel. I try and stagger the laurels because of the vast amounts of biomass a big pruning creates.  

                This year, it was the side yard laurel’s turn. I do it in January so it has time to fluff out before summer; the laurel is our best privacy screen. When I first became the caretaker of this hedge, I worried about pruning it too hard—would I kill it? But then one of my students, who was helping me paint the house, gave a section a huge whack job. “Don’t worry,” he assured me, as only 15 year old boy can, “It will be back.” He was right. Before we took down the garage, the roofline was my guide to the right height. This year, I went lower, below all of the other year’s trimmings.  I wanted to clean up the huge masses of gnarly branches and suckers, all holding dead leaves. With my beautiful new pruning saw, it was a project. Without it, it would have been impossible.

  

              Pruning the laurel is a three step process. First, I work on our side of the hedge, pushing all of the branches back. Then I bring everything that I can reach down to the right height. This requires considerable ladder maneuvering and long reaches across the surface, stretching and pulling branches towards me while I saw madly. I toss all of the trimmings behind me into the yard, away from the ladder (I’ve learned a bit after tripping on a few over the years.).  Once I have brought down and pushed back about two thirds of the hedge—which takes two sessions—I clear up the mess, hauling most of the green branches back to the compost pile and cutting up the heavy logs for the street compost cart.

                Today, I finished the other side of the hedge. The neighbors moved their car so that they way was clear. In less than an hour, I had it all down and out of the driveway—a new record. Mark cut it up and moved the brush while I sawed and worked the loppers. It’s not perfectly even and there are few dead branches poking up that I still need to pull out, but it is done, just before the rain started up again.

New to Us Rocking Chair

 

Last summer, I acquired a small rocking chair for free; the landlords were moving shop and I admired it. “Take it,” she said. “Then we don’t have to move it.” Mark and I carried it home and I put it in the shade by the greenhouse. All summer, the cat and I traded places on the old cushions. When the rains began, I moved it into the greenhouse until I realized that the fabric was rotting away, so I brought it in for a refresh.  Winter Break is the perfect time for such a project.

1.       Choose the paint. I went for the deep golden yellow of my bookshelves in the Cozy Room. That way, it will blend into the room if I wanted it there.

2.       Find a new cushion—for three dollars, I nabbed a lovely cushion from the thrift shop across from the paint store.

3.       Strip off the old fabric, after taking photos.

4.       Remove the small tacks holding the skirt on. Chisel some out….watch your hands.

5.       Put the chair in the tub for a bath.

6.       Lightly sand the whole thing.

7.       Move into the dining room and prime it. Wait 36 hours for the primer to dry in the chilly room. Be sure to leave some areas, hidden from view, uncovered so that you can still know what the original color was.

8.       First coat of yellow paint, also in the dining room. Another 36 hours to dry…move the chair into the house for the second coat.

9.       While waiting for the paint to dry, cover the two cushions with some old blue fabric that was the living room curtains several years ago. Also, use the last bits of fabric from the couch refurb to make the skirt.

10.   Replace the burlap that covered the springs and protected the cushions.

11.   Tack the skirt on and tie the cushions down. This time, they can come off, so, if the chair is in the greenhouse, the cushions can travel in and out, depending upon weather and dampness.

12.  

Bask in the new seat in front of the fire. Argue with the cat on whose spot it is.