Contemplating Stuff

 

The Book of Form and Emptiness, by Cynthia Ozeki, considers the nature of the stuff we surround ourselves with--- what if it could speak? What stories would it tell us? Do we really need all of this stuff—and the stories it holds—around us all the time? Or does it drive us crazy? Because I have been working my way through it for a week or so—trading off with Regime Change—I have been hearing the stories of my own stuff.

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Over ten years ago, Mark bought me an android tablet with a seven inch screen. I loved—still love—it. It connects to Wi-Fi, so I could check email and post photographs easily. I could  read the news, search up information, and download podcasts for long car rides. It allowed both of us to go online at home in the evening (we have one computer). It was great for traveling. It did not, however, tether me to a cell tower and constant connections, so there were clear boundaries built in. It was perfect. Over the years, though, its use has faded. It is too old to take some upgrades, so functions have faded. First, no photos with the newspaper, then no newspaper, then no searching at all. It takes much longer to charge the battery. It is going to stop working completely someday soon. But, when I went to replace it—it is no longer being made. That niche product, hovering between a tablet and a phone, is gone.  Like the perfect pair of pants, it is no longer there.

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Confession—I am a dish hoarder. I can resist the call of everything else, but not a vintage dish. We could feed sixty people and not run out of plates…

When I was in my twenties, I was wandering around Bar Harbor Maine one day and stopped to peer into a Fancy Kitchen store window. There was a new line of dishes displayed: Lindt-Stymiest Colorways.  I fell in love. But, in a Fancy Kitchen store, items are not cheap, so I moved on that day.  Later that year, I bought the butter dish which is featured in Still Life with Menu from the same era. My boyfriend bought me the large teapot to replace the one of a different design that he broke dropping by a cast iron pan on it. Years later, I found the mugs in a fancy used kitchen store in San Francisco; the plates about ten years ago here in thrift shop.  Mark bought the yellow oil cruet online. They are beautiful on the outdoor table.  If they could speak, they would talk about food and friendship and everyday life.

 

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Finally, a friend died this week. She lived a full and rich life—one of the generation that went to college, married, raised children, traveled all over and then said—this is not enough, so they joined the League of Women Voters to spend countless hours tracking local and federal elections and ballot measures, writing and applying position statements, and testifying at all levels of government. They gathered around kitchen tables, drank far more coffee than anyone should, and talked. Brilliant women with time to work for change. She will be missed.

I loved meeting at her house. It felt like stepping back in time. They bought their furniture when they married—mid century modern, beautiful wood—and then moved into one of the ranch houses that abound here in the Pacific Northwest, clinging to the side of a hill, surrounded by trees, with a deck, rather than a yard, birdfeeders and a daylight basement, with another possible entire house down below.  The furniture, the house, the dishes, the coffee and conversation, were all of a piece and evoked that mid century time when we felt like there could be profound change and we, as local citizens, could bring it forth.

 

 

Fireworks!

 

I have come to hate the Fourth of July.  Not because of the current administration and some of the changes we have seen, but because of fireworks.

When I was little, fireworks were a communal event. On the Third of July, we gathered around the Kingston Green to watch the bonfire—a tall pile of railroad ties with a car perched on top. People bet on which way the car would fall. As a toddler, I was terrified by the sight of the flames reflected in the houses surrounding the Green; when I grew older, I loved running around exploring the carnival, playing games and riding the Tilt-a-Whirl while my parents watched the blaze and chatted with relatives. Real independence at seven years old!

The fireworks happened the next night (two late nights in a row!) either in Kingston or in Hampstead. Mothers sprayed us down with Off to keep off mosquitoes, we found sweatshirts and blankets, and gathered in the local field to watch the display. Beforehand, we cruised around, seeing classmates and hiding on each other while parents stayed is the designated spots. As it grew darker, we settled down. Fireworks exploded overhead and each was greeted by a gasp or sigh of awe. Ooooo, aahhhh….ooooo…..The show went on for about half an hour, one shot at a time. Sometimes, there was a glitch in the system and we had to wait, patiently, until it was resolved.  Sometimes, the sounds freaked out a younger sibling or cousin and we’d cap our hands over their ears. Dogs stayed home, peaceful in the house or yard.  We cheered at the end, then gathered up sleepy kids, and headed for the car and the traffic jam at the gate. My mother and aunt sang popular songs—Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head or The Green Berets—while we waited, dozing, in a pile in the back of the station wagon.

We still have local fireworks and the traffic jam afterwards, but no one coos over the show; many people are watching through their phones. But that’s all still good. What I hate is the hours and hours of illegal booms that shake my house until three in the morning. It starts at nine, at dusk, and goes, peaking around eleven, until the wee hours. Just when we have all nodded off, another boom shakes the windows.  And again. And again. And again. We have lost the communal ritual and need to replace it with individual actions. And, right now, we need the communal rituals more than we ever have.

 

 

Lettuce in Tins

 

                I hesitate to write about this because, every time I talk about a new innovation and how great it is working, it fails, but….my lettuce system is working really well this summer.

                I have been planting out starts for all of my greens for years because it saves seed and improves germination, and lettuce has been no exception. For five or six years, planting the starts out worked beautifully for the spring and early summer and then fell by the wayside by mid-July. The heat, maybe?…the refusal of any seed to germinate after the Summer Solstice? Pill bug munch at germination?  If it did germinate, it was eaten by something, and that “something” changed regularly. I was without lettuce for a vast swath of the year, so we ate cabbage salads. It’s not the same.

                Last year, I decided to plant the lettuce starts in olive oil tins. First, I thought it would look cool—which is does—and it also gave me greater flexibility during dramatic changes in temperature. Cold snap—move them to the greenhouse. Heat wave—move them into the shade. Nice weather—line them up along the fence to admire. The harvest was also very clean.

                This year, I started doing the same thing with the starts and it has worked really well. Two heads per tin. The greens are thriving. As I harvested a tin, I replanted it with another set of starts waiting in the greenhouse. Sometimes, I mixed a little compost or fertilizer in the soil to give it a boost. Last week, I didn’t have any starts waiting, so I direct seeded a tin every evening that we had salad. Germination looks nice. We will have bit of a lag in lettuce in a week, but that’s ok because we are going camping anyways.  The tins are all living in an old wheelbarrow with a hole in it already for drainage, so I can move them round depending on climate. We shall see. It is my hope to keep it going well into fall this year, even if I have to put the tins under lights in the greenhouse. That is, if the system survives being written about….

Summer Solstice

 

We celebrated the Summer Solstice well this year.  Winter Solstice we have had down for many years, but the summer has been more challenging. Winter is about turning inward, reflection, and hoping for more light. Summer should be moving outward, growing in the sunlight, and building towards the harvest.

On Saturday morning, we cleaned the house, putting our space back in order. Laundry flapped on the line; Mark cleaned the bathroom; I scrubbed the kitchen sink and hauled some notebooks up into the attic because you never know when you will need your 2006-2007 school year planners. We returned the chicken feed to the basement and swept the back stairs.  I was even able to hang the huge sun mask that has been over my classroom desk for many years; it now graces the high point in the dining room. While we were cleaning, I watered the back garden and the front bed under the persimmon tree. After we were done inside, Mark mowed the yard with the electric mower that he repaired because it is such a tidy cut and it collects all of the mulch. We were ready for guests. We had a potluck on Saturday evening, bringing people together over good food. Friends spread out over tables in the back yard and voices rose to the sky. Positive voices, telling stories and laughing, building community, solving the problems of the world. The light lingered for hours, finally fading to a quarter moon rising while Mark washed dishes and I brought in the tables and chairs.

On Sunday, we took the bus to the coast and wandered around Newport for the day. We listened to sea lions barking, walked along the tidal mud flats where the river meets the sea, picked up trash from the dunes, and wandered down the beach to lunch outside. Fish and chips eaten in the shade while a small dog watched—very politely—and the birds observed every French fry with greedy eyes. The cashier in the local co-op wished us a Happy Solstice when we stopped in to buy an apples and some fizzy water in the late afternoon. We sat in the sand to read for a while and were buffeted by sun and wind all day long. It was glorious.

Sunday night, we set up a fire in the back garden after dinner. Fire swirled in the chiminea while I pulled the tarot card for the next six weeks – The Wheel of Fortune—and Mark considered what he was grateful for that day. All around us, the garden plants were growing, reaching towards the sun, at peak explosion before they begin to set fruit in the next few weeks. Rustles in the night. Maybe plants. Maybe cats. Who knows. We read, watched the flames, and considered this moment of the year, full of light, and love, and possibility.

Free Piles

 

                I have always been a fan of the Free pile. I can’t walk by one without peering in, rummaging around, evaluating. You never know. In fact, most of my classroom supplies came from free piles. So, last Monday, as I was clearing out my space, I pulled a table from the staff room and began piling stuff on it. Art supplies. Props.  Yarn and knitting needles. A very fluffy black and pink prom dress (a couple of boys had to try it on). The electric kettle and a glass tea pot….My neighbor, who was also clearing out, added some games and play dough, but most of it was mine. Students swarmed over it. Items disappeared rapidly. It was amazing.

                Then, something else happened. I began to hear where the items had landed. One girl was thrilled to find the oil pastels because she wanted to try them out over the summer. Another found the Juliet dagger (plastic, retractable, a perfect prop of the end of the play). The wooden swords went down the hall. The skulls became a prop in a final video, and then went into a backpack. The unbelievably ugly Christmas t shirt showed up the next day on one of my most creative dressers, complete with the required furry tail attached to the belt. Everything that I had collected was moving on, finding a new home.  High school may be the perfect place for a Free Pile. By Friday, all that was left was a very ugly polyester green jacket, the turn in basket, and some knitting notions. Even high school students have standards.

                My books joined the table on Tuesday. During slow days last winter, I pulled out the few I wanted to keep, then I told Green Club they could sort through them and take books home. For the last two weeks, books have been leaving by the armful. Two boys stayed in my room after I left for a meeting one afternoon and left gaping holes in the science fiction shelves. My OSU student observer took several boxes that would work for middle school. And there were still piles of good books, so we carried them out into the hall and lined them up on the second table. Again—swarms of students, slowly picking through the collection. I bribed my juniors with five extra credit points on their final to drop an armful into their local little free library.  By Friday, I was down eighty percent, with some good reads left on the table. I left some for summer school and bagged the rest up.

                Friday afternoon, I took the last two bags of books on my bike downtown. The Rotary club has transformed some of our old trash containers into little free libraries-- which is a cool idea, but little libraries need love and decent books. They take more effort than you would think. Most of them are empty and a bit dirty. I looked around, found one by a coffee shop window, and pulled my bike over. Totally empty. Kneeling down, I loaded it up with books, tucked the canvas bags into my bike basket, and headed off. When I glanced back, two guys who had been waiting in line had exchanged glances, moved over, and opened the door.       

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Graduation Speeches

 

                Graduation speeches…although I have never really wanted to stand before thousands of people and address the graduating class, I have pondered what I might tell them, given the chance.  This might have been the hardest year of all. Even the principal, known for nailing his speech every year, struggled. How do we bring a note of hope in this difficult time?

                When I first started teaching, I thought a great deal about the choices we make in adolescence that ripple through our lives.  Maybe it was because I had just come off years of working with ELL students and people working on their GEDs. One night, one of my best GED students mused on the years he lost to drugs, sleeping outside, and what a wonder it was that he still had his brain when he returned to the working world. We both knew what could have happened.  I had friends who had children early and were moving into a freer time as those children grew up and graduated. So, I thought, choosing wisely was important.  This is not wrong, but outside forces loom larger to me now. We can choose “correctly” and still struggle because of actions beyond our control.

                And so, I thought about shifting to the idea of recycling. Recycling alone will not save the planet; we know that there are warehouses full of “recycling” waiting for a market and, for many years, we shipped trash to China. But, I do believe that the practice of recycling can shift our thinking in profound ways. When you have to stop and consider where every item you throw away goes, it slows you down. Can I get a couple more months out of those shoes? Probably (then suddenly, no, they are leaking…) What do I do with this?  Can I repurpose it? Repair it? Where did all of these binders come from?!   Do I really NEED that item, or do I just want it? When we get to the needs vs. wants question, we have hit the crux of a life well lived. What do we need to be well? What do we think we want to be well? Are they the same? How do we get to a place where everyone has what they need before we work on what we all want?  

                I have always believed that we should do work that we love. Work that feels meaningful and, in a quiet way, world changing. That can be just about anything, really. There is as much worth in being a deli clerk, handing over the 2/3 of a pound of thin sliced roast beast to a person with a smile as solving for world hunger. It’s just smaller. I have always been blessed with work I love—or, if I needed to do something less positive to me, the knowledge that I am working towards a change in occupation. I want to encourage everyone to love their work, but I wonder if that is possible. It’s hard to put a positive spin on  work life these days.

                I have been teaching people to read for thirty five years. It took me some years to come to this occupation but I knew, in second grade, that this is what I wanted to do. Because, as Tim O’Brien and The Things They Carried, his best novel about war, and friendship, courage, and the nature of story says,  In the end, stories can save us. They allow us to keep the dead—and missing-- alive through our memories: hear each other’s pain and joy through a true telling of past actions (Norman Bowker commits suicide, remember, because no one listens to his stories): help us make sense of our world. Your life, in a story, is both unique and universal. Maybe I need to circle back to the seven year old in the basement, beside her chalk easel, teaching her dolls to read on a winter afternoon, and, as all teachers do point you to the information  and allow you encounter  it yourself. Because that is how we learn. Four words, people. Shortest graduation speech on record.

“Stories can save us.”

               

               

               

 

Mower Repair

 

                About a month ago, our neighbor showed up in the back yard with an old electric corded mower he had found on the street. I’d been looking for an electric mower for the school garden, so the timing was excellent. We tried it out at home and it worked. We pushed it over to school and it worked for one clump of grass, then stopped. Mark eyed it and pushed it home. “If I can get the top off, maybe I can see what’s wrong,” he mused. It was worth a try.

                Getting the top off was not as easy as it looked. The screws had rusted in place. He gave them a blast of some chemical that breaks up rust and tried two days later. No luck.  “I my need to drill them out—but I don’t have the tool,” he told me. We pushed it under the awning of the greenhouse and I squeezed by it for a couple of weeks.

                Last weekend the same neighbor was over helping me take off the side of the oven with his electric drill. Once the oven was free, he wandered outside with Mark. The drill was in hand, so they tried it. No luck. They wrestled with the mower for about an hour, but failed to shift the screws. However, he did tell Mark what to buy to drill it out. Two days later, we were on a Wilco run for mulch and Mark made a few purchases for the mower.

                That afternoon, he drilled the screws out and lifted the lid. After about an hour of cleaning out dead grass and dust and wiggling the wires, he tried it out. Success! The mower roared to life. He dropped the blade down to the lowest settling and mowed the entire yard. “I feel a little sinful,” he told me. (He mows with a hand reel mower). The mower cut beautifully—so crisp and even. And the basket in the back—which the cat loves to claw!—gathered all of the trimmings to mulch the recently planted tomato crop.  We were thrilled.

                It is not the stove—but it is a small repair victory.