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.

The Norge

 

     

           We have a very old stove—a Norge from the 1950s. Over the years, Mark has, in consultation with a hardware store in Portland that knows old appliances, kept it working. But, right now, he’s a bit stuck. There are now four challenges to be dealt with.

                The first and second are in the oven. The thermostat blew on it about a month ago. That’s not a huge deal; we can buy a new one and install it. But the roof has begun to corrode and the broiler is hanging down (which is probably why the thermostat went). So, in order to fix the oven, we need to fix the roof and find a new bracket for the broiler.  We have a small oven which bakes a loaf of bread, a pie, or a quarter sheet pan of roasting veg, so we are still eating. But, I miss the efficiency of the big batch big oven. And cookies. I don’t want to fiddle with a quarter sheet pan for cookies.

                The third relates to a burner—one of the big ones. The switch that regulates the heat has broken and it is a seven wire switch. This doesn’t sound like a big deal to me, but it is. There are lots of standard five wire switches out there but no seven. I suspect the Portland guys would know what to do with this, but Mark is still formulating questions about amps and circuits to ask them. He’s been a little nervous about measuring amps since he fried his little measuring gadget by using it wrong a few years ago.  Because I have spent so many years on a camp stove with two burners I’ve been ok with three. But the dead one is my favorite closest to the chopping and rolling spot.  I want it back.

                The fourth is the result of having young cats. One of them caught a rodent and brought it in one night. It set up housekeeping in the side of the stove, coming out at night to eat the cat food. If the oven had been working, it would have been driven out pretty quickly, but it wasn’t. And then I put off moving the stove away from the wall for cleaning for an extra week. It was gross. Mark left the house when I went to take the side panel off because he was afraid of asbestos and lung cancer. I kept going. The insulation that I pulled out was white and fluffy—remarkably new looking. I think someone had reinsulated the stove before we moved in. However in order to clear up the mess, I took out all of the insulation from the left side. Now that needs to be replaced.

                And you could ask—which Mark did, in the middle of the rat pee in the side of the stove debacle yesterday—why we don’t just Buy a New Stove? This is partly aesthetics. The stove has a sturdy, long lasting charm that fits into our very low tech kitchen perfectly. The oven is huge. It is electric, not gas, so it can be powered by our solar panels. It is simple. It’s a beast. And the other part is pride.  We can keep this thing going. It’s going to take some work and some research, but it will last far longer than a new stove. Reduce. Reuse. Repair. Rewire.

Earth Day 2026

 

                Mark and I went down to Finley National Wildlife Refuge this morning, leaving even before “we  had a sip of tea!”  We brought bagels and tea in travel mugs and sat at the prairie overlook to eat. Around us, camas bloomed and red winged blackbirds held their morning conversations under a cloudy sky. The air was still and just a bit cool—perfect for April.  It has taken a long while—half my life—to learn to read this landscape nd I spent some time thinking about the difference between the landscapes we were born to and the ones we come to know.

                I was born to New Hampshire and that landscape is in my blood. The hills, the glimpses of sky, the winding roads, and the crazy highways around Boston where I learned to really drive.  I grew up chasing waves along the tideline on Cape Cod, standing in the center of a huge maple tree in late September, staring at the range of color from green, to yellow, to orange, to red and all of the combinations in between. I watched the stars—and encountered skunks—from granite outcroppings in an old field, followed logging roads and stove walls deep into the second growth of old farms, and buried my nose in lilacs in May. I could smell snow on the air before it started and knew the particular silence that comes with a storm in the night. And thunderstorms punctuated the summer days. Houses had square shoulders and faced the street and, by the time I graduated from college, I could date their construction within 25 years.

                When I moved west, I lost all of the knowledge of place. It has taken thirty years—and a much closer application of plant guidebooks and trail maps—for me to learn my way into the Willamette Valley and the Cascade Range. For a long while, facing north, I wanted the ocean to be on my right hand, not my left. I would walk along trails and feel like the deep place was just beyond my grasp. Someday, it said, you will know. I know now. I know where the first fawn lily will bloom near the beaver dam, just where the elk kicked it down the embankment about ten years ago. I know how dry sunlight feels at elevation, while I stare at the mountains over a high lake where I have just plunged into the water to wash away the sweat of the trail. I know when to plant out the greens, and the tomatoes, so that the slugs will not eat them to nubs before they grow. And I know how the light shifts in my classroom which faces north, from mid-day to late afternoon. The huge high skies, the long, long summer evenings, the endless cloudy days of mist and rain are all part of my psyche now.

                It is Earth Week. Today, at Finley, I made some notes on what was blooming, but not a complete plant list. We will do that in two weeks, on May Day, because we walk the same trail and observe its changes every six weeks. I have notes going back 20 odd years scattered through my notebooks. Thoreau did the same thing around Walden Pond, returning to the same spots close to his home to observe and record what he saw there. First blooms, first birds, seasonal changes of all sorts. Scientists now use his notes to track the impacts of climate change; some plants are blooming two weeks earlier than in 1840.                 We see serious changes happening in real time right now—we could trace them back in our own notebooks if we brought them all together.  

                Thoreau—and many other writers—loved their places so much that they chronicled all of their changes. I do the same. And I wonder, can we possibly love our home places enough to make the profoundly difficult changes in our lives needed to slow the impacts of the carbon we have spewed into the atmosphere enough so that my friend the first fawn lily will survive? I do not know.

 

  For the Children

Gary Snyder

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

 

               

Laundromat Love

 

                Mark and I no longer have a washer or drier. We bring our clothes down the street three blocks to the remodeled “eco” Laundromat once a week. It is easier.  

                The house came with an avocado colored workhorse of a washer that got the clothes clean and filled two 50 gallon barrels with  greywater which I pumped out of the basement onto newly planted shrubs. We also had a dryer from the 1950s, which broke down once, was repaired, and broke again. We gave up, bought two new stable drying racks, and put up clotheslines in the yard. No more dryer. When the washing machine gave out after 35 years of service we replaced it with an efficient front loader, which used a third of the water, was not as good at getting the dirt out, and no longer watered my yard. It broke down several times in the next 15 years. The last time, the repairman found the needed part in the back recesses of his van and warned us that there were no more repair parts.  

                When I was 12, I was assigned the household laundry. We had no washing machine, so I loaded up some wooden crates and tugged the clothes a quarter mile down the road to the Laundromat—right by my mother’s business. She very quickly bought me a rolling metal cart just like elderly ladies used for groceries. Clothes, soap, change, and a fat novel—I was ready. While the clothes spun and chugged along, I watched humanity and read, sitting on one of the folding tables. When we added the towels from her beauty shop to the mix, my mother bought a dryer and an old wringer washing machine. I no longer had to haul clothes but worked in our kitchen, washing whites and running them through the wringer, rinsing them in another round of hot water and washing the dark clothes in the rinse water, then put them through the ringer, rinsing, and washing another batch of towels. I found laundry with the old wringer to be deeply satisfying; maybe the danger of nipping a finger or sending a button through the air helped.  Our clothes went on the line; the towels went into the dryer.  

                Over the years, I toggled back and forth between laundry in house and in Laundromat. Even when I used the commercial washers, I often took the wet clothes home to dry. I can load an entire week onto one small folding rack—it is a skill. When I finally got my license, I bought extra socks and underwear so I could put off the trip for two weeks. It was a treat to move into a house with a washer and dryer; we put off laundry for a couple of weeks and loaded the machines while we moved furniture ad books into the house.  We used the laundromat down the street occasionally even when our washer worked. In the middle of the rainy season, it was helpful to wash and dry all of the sheets and towels in one fell swoop, rather than doing them every week and having them hang, limp and sodden, for days to dry in the basement.

So, when the washer died for the third time, Mark loaded the laundry into his bike cart and took it down the street. He came back pleasantly surprised. They have remodeled, he told me, it’s nice. The washers spin the water out of the clothes far better than our home washer. It takes 45 minutes to do the entire wash for the week, rather than running up and down stairs while trying to clean the bathroom and sort through the bills. Mark did a quick calculation and decided it was not worth it to buy a new washer between initial investment, repairs, and energy and water use.  His first chore on Saturday is laundry. He washes and we hang—outside when we can on the folding racks when we cannot. No more fussing. No more repairs. We have come full circle. But, if I take the task on, I want a wire wheeled cart.