Lost Cat

 

                Mark and I went camping overnight—foggy walks on the beach, quiet campground, fish and chips for lunch—it was great. When we came home, I called the cats in. One came running, all purry and begging for tummy rubs. The other—no sign. “She’s a deep sleeper,” Mark said, “She’ll wake up soon.” I did another round of calling before the council meeting, then left, figuring she’d be home by the time we were done. When I came home around 8:30, no cat. Because there was quite a bit of food in the bowl from the weekend, we thought she might have disappeared on Sunday evening.

                We prowled the neighborhood, calling, for two hours. Mark made fliers and put them up. I posted on social media and talked the numerous people on the street (it was a warm night!). No cat. Finally, we went to bed, one cat tucked under my chin.

                Around 1 AM, I heard the cat door slap. There she was, eating crunchies. When I picked her up, she smelled like…soy sauce. She went outside for a drink of wild water, chased something into the bushes, and took a lap of the back yard with her sister. By two am, we had both cats asleep on our feet. We are all fine; the cats are happy to be prowling the house and yard this misty morning .Soon, they will curl up and go to sleep.

                But the question remains—where was she? Where do cats go when they disappear? I can look in the greenhouse for a cat, find no one, turn around two minutes later, and there a cat is, sprawled on the floor like she has been there for hours. Do they fall into another dimension where the cat treats re better, and just stay there sometimes? How far afield do they actually travel?  Do they gather in cat packs under the street lights and Look at each other? Whose clean laundry are they sleeping on?            I’ve been wondering about this for a long while; yesterday, I looked up tracking collars. The technology is there. I may soon know.

Wheelbarrows

 

Wheelbarrows.

We have seven. Three are holding strawberry plants, keeping them out of the reach of slugs. One holds the plant starts in summer so that I can move them from sun to shade depending upon the temperature. And three big old metal beasts move stuff around in the yard.  Some days, we use them all.

The old metal beasts all came to us used and a bit battered. Our friend Mark brought one that he had just cleaned up and replaced the handles on after after a year’s long grump about “how you can’t buy anything new that will last”  when our first barrow broke (it is now holding berries) and I was looking for a replacement. I bought the second for about ten dollars from the used goods place down the street; our neighbor dropped the last one off last spring—he had found it somewhere.  They are all solid, but needed some love. This week, they have been transformed.

The barrows have spent the summer resting against the garden fence in the chicken run—out of the way and handy. So, first, they needed a wash. I scrubbed off moss, rust, and years of dirt and they looked better already. Mark took off the wheels so they would not be in the way and then I gave them all a nice coat of primer—we had ghost barrows on the lawn for a couple of days while we decided on paint.  On Monday, I rode out to Winco and bought spray paint for the metal barrows and then rummaged through the basement for the handle colors.

The paint changed everything. It is deeply colored and shiny and covers all of the funky battered spots on the sides. I sprayed all three one afternoon and then left them overnight to dry. Yesterday morning, I spent a couple of hours on the handles, lying on the ground to hit some awkward spots while the cat observed. The result is glorious. Three wheelbarrows, three body colors, with contrasting handles.

Did I need to repaint them in three colors? Not really. They will last longer with the care, but they are work tools. They do not need to be vibrant or distinct. It’s not like they have different uses that need to be quickly defined—one barrow hauls compost as well as another. All painted grey and they all work just as well. But the colors help define their solid working forms, bringing out how each is unique in how the wheels are attached or the back plate is shaped, and it gives each its own personality. This winter, they will glow against the grey days.

 

Fall Equinox

 

                It is the Fall Equinox and the weather is changing to misty fog which burns off in the afternoons. The damp air smells, some mornings, of the ocean and others of the woodland duff from the forest which is north of town. The scent of apples and figs mixes in with field burning and a bit of dust on warmer days. The world feels like it has slowed way down and is balancing for a few moments before it slides into winter.

                We have been moving slowly through the local woods this weekend. Yesterday, we wandered out to the wildlife refuge to observe changes in the fields and forests. The woodpeckers have loaded their oak tree branches with acorns; the ponds are dry, but damp; all of the flowers have dried down and sent their seeds into the soil. Leaves are just about to turn and fall. This morning, I walked up to Bald Hill with friends and took my trimmers to cut back hawthorn and rose hips (as well as the occasional blackberry vine in the path) for the dining room table. Again, the world was hazy and quiet.

                The garden is closing down. The tomatoes are putting out just enough ripe fruits for dinner; the squashes are all into the larder; the greens are about as big as they are going to grow. We will just be eating down in the garden from now on.  The fig, jujube, and persimmon trees are bent down with fruit. At night, we sit under the Bee lights and read until our toes grow chilly while the cats prowl around.

                Making dinner these days is an in and out affair. I start in the garden with the basket, harvesting beans, eggs, greens, and zucchini. Then I come in and plan—what can we eat with what we have? Inevitably, I need to go back out for lettuce, or basil, or some small tomatoes….continue cooking, and wander out once more for something else.  We eat what is in season and in the back yard; September is an easier time to do this. Soon, it will be days of greens and squash and rice.

                I am not working this year, for the first time in a long time. I love September—always have—but, this year, the golden slowness of the days and light is especially beautiful. I feel my mind and body coming back into balance with the natural world as I watch these changes.

 

September 11, 2026

 

It is a cool, sunny morning. The table and the ground are damp with dew. The cats are sprawled in the sun on our bed. The chickens are quietly poking round in the compost. The world feels peaceful.

Twenty five years ago, I woke up to the announcement that a plane had just crashed into one of the Two Towers. “Weird,” I thought as I turned off the alarm, dressed, ate half of my breakfast, and climbed on my bike to ride to school. Once there, I stuck my head into a colleague’s room. He had the T.V. on. As we watched, the second plane crashed.  “This is not good,” we observed, staying calm because there were students around. I spent the day in my classroom, tucked way in the back of the building, teaching. Others kept the T.V. on all day—I saw no reason. We will learn what we need to know when we get home, I thought. We need to stay calm here. Students talked before class, sharing their ideas, but we did our work. My house does not have a T.V. and this was before we spent days of our lives online. I never did see those overwhelming images over and over again. Maybe it gave me some needed distance in the days to come.

Corvallis responded to the threats of war in its usual fashion. The Veterans for Peace started their vigils in front of the courthouse. Professors on campus organized a series of Sunday night lectures where they talked about our foreign policy leading up to this, what was happening in the Middle East, and how we could respond. Information is power. We paced the rug at home, hoping for cooler heads to keep us out of full scale war.  The night we began bombing Afghanistan, I went out to check on the chickens.  Their small, fluffy bodies were warm and snug in the coop; their world was still. Half way around the planet, other lives—and coops—were being destroyed. Anger had prevailed.

Ten years later, I had brought my junior U.S. history class as far as 9-11 (we started with the labor movement in the early 20^th century). It was an amazing class; there were students from every continent besides Antarctica. What did they remember of that day? They were five or six years old. Some classes and families watched the news non-stop.  It was terrifying. Zion Lutheran sent home a letter telling parents, in no uncertain terms, to NOT turn on the news while their children were in the room. That child had no idea what had happened for months. Exchange students remembered feeling sympathy for the United States. The discussion went on all period. Everyone knew that the world changed that day and now, they knew what had lead up to it and where we chose to take it.

Six years ago, I started teaching remotely from the desk at home. Outside, the world were and unearthly greeny-grey with ashes falling from the sky.  Inside, the classroom world was silent. As students wrote, there was no sound from them—no shuffling, coughing, giggling, tapping of keys—because they were all in their bedrooms miles apart. The silence is what I remember from those classroom days. The isolation. 9-11 and those huge fires are related, both by the impact they had on our collective memory, but also in the roots of anger and greed, in our failed human desire to control each other and the planet we live on.

Last night, I took Barbara Kingsolver’s collection of essays, Small Wonder, off of my shelf. She wrote the essays the year after 9-11 and they are full of that time. The anguish, the fear, the small hope that we might bring something good from this underlies all of her writing. In the face of the news today, the essays feel ….quaint. The violence, the hatred, the anger that we encounter every day is an order of magnitude worse that it was 25 years ago. The adults have left the building, as it were, and angry, fearful children are in charge.

                Part of me would leave this essay there. But it is fig season. Like Kingsolver, I take faith in the natural world, in the small rituals of friends and family, in the turning seasons. Cedar Waxwings have just discovered our ripe fruit and their bodies are etched against the deep blue sky as they rise, and turn, and settle once again. Maybe we can learn to do the same.

 

85 Day Tomato

 

We are having a very good tomato year. The plants are eight feet tall and loaded with fruit. The part of me that loves putting by food for the winter is thrilled. The part that worries about climate change is not.

When I first started growing food in our backyard, thirty years ago, I searched for tomatoes that were varied in color and shape, but also ripened early.  I wanted the 70 day tomato, not the 85. I had too many stay green on the vines my first few years and green tomato pie did not sit well in our stomachs.. OSU had been breeding such fruits for years, and I planted those seeds and harvested the fruit in late August.  I often wrapped the cages or placed milk jugs over the plants for a few weeks for extra warmth. I  did not start the irrigation until July because there was still rain and drizzle until the fourth. The season has changed.  
 

These days, my tomato plants are growing rapidly in May and June, even though I start the seeds a month later. I plant them out in late April most years without covering them up. The irrigation is starting in late May or early June, a full month early. The nights are warm, and then hot, by the Summer Solstice. This year, I planted several 85 day plants—ok, I ordered three different large fruited varieties without thinking it through late February because who doesn’t want a two pound ripe tomato in February?—and they are thriving. The plants have been over Mark’s head for a month. The fruit set early and it is rolling in beautifully ripe and colored this week. Early.

Our world is changing. Today, all of the fields are dry and golden, the hawthorn berries are ripe, and the air smells of the distant forest fires, even though the sky is clear. This may be the year of the perfect 85 day tomato here in the Willamette Valley, but other areas are losing their ability to grow our food. Where are we headed?

 

Fruit Season

 

                It is the season of fruit. Starting in late June, we are awash in fresh fruit and berries: strawberries, raspberries, cherries, gooseberries, blueberries, currants all fill the bowls in our house, week following week. We pick blueberries by the pound, eating them by handfuls after lunch. By mid-July, we have the larger fruit. First, the plums in the front yard ripen over several weeks, east branches to west branches. Then peaches cross our paths, although we do not have a tree. Apples thump on the roof of the van at midnight, echoing into the backyard. The fig trees branches are so loaded down that they reach the ground, and the persimmons and jujubes are slowing ripening to finish the season. Last year, we planted a pear tree; this year we added an Italian plum and cherry, as well as two columnar apples.  We live in an orchard.

                A month ago, I cleaned out the shelves in the basement that hold our canned goods. I threw out the old zucchini relish (really, we don’t eat it) and a batch of pickles that was too salty, and then evaluated what I needed to process this year. NO apple butter. Yes to rhubarb marmalade. Every few days  throughout August, I dry or jam or press our fruit—including tomatoes. Using the steam canner, which lets me process on batch of crock-pot tomato sauce at a time, I slowly fill the shelves downstairs. We will eat this bounty all winter long.

 

 

Lammas

 

Lammas—the season of early harvest—is perhaps a contraction of the words loaf mass because all of the early grains are ripening now in the fields. This is when we see if our efforts to raise food to hold us through the winter have been successful. Of course, some years are apple years and others are cabbage, but the hope is that it will all balance out and we will come through the dark times in good health. It is also the time to soak in the light and warmth of summer sun against the dark and damp winters. We are striving to do both.

In the garden, I am prepping for the canning season. I purged the shelves of ancient attempts to preserve zucchini (really, we do not eat relish) and some dried herbs and I will vacuum the shelves and reorder what is left this week. While purging, I made the season’s list: how much of everything do we need with a bit extra thrown in just in case it is not a pear year in 2027.  I’ve already stocked up on lids; after the pandemic surge in canning, when I had lids shipped from Tennessee and they traveled back and forth on UPS three times before arriving here, I buy lids in April. We picked blueberries last week and dried several jars worth on Friday. Today, the drier is humming with local peaches, which are like gold in the Willamette Valley. Tangled in vines, the winter squashes are putting on weight and I count them in the mornings. Apples are falling from my trees and I spend half an hour most days with the picker and ladder, then sort the fruit into eating and juicing piles. All of the potatoes are in, tucked under the cellar stairs in their paper bags and crates.

At Finley Wildlife Refuge, ten miles south of town, the season is shifting as well. The hay is piled high in bales, waiting to come in. The wild fields are golden; thee snowberry and blackberry bushes are covered in berries; the vernal pools are all dried and full of rushes and pennyroyal. The birds gather where this is water and the woodpeckers have loud conversations about where each one is storing acorns in the big dead oak for the winter. As always, once you leave the gravel road and parking lot, there is no one on the trails, which are being overtaken by summer brambles. We ate lunch on the new pavilion that looks out over the valley and swatted away the yellow jackets that came to see if we had tuna fish for lunch. We did not.

Last night, we had a fire and s’mores for desert, rather than a pie. As always, I pulled a tarot card to guide me on the next six weeks. The Hermit. Turn inward, it read, focus on what is true and real, not the mad getting and spending of the world. Be quiet. It is harvest time before moving forward again.