Snapshots from Stay at Home, Save Lives

  

              The greenhouse is packed. It’s always pretty full this time of year, when tomatoes have been bumped up, some summer greens are waiting to go out, and the vines have just been planted in the four inch pots. But, this year, it is also holding all of my classroom plants, with some hanging from the ceiling because there was no room on the shelves, as well as a napping cat, and my work computer on sunny mornings. Add in a sweater or other piece of clothing needing some sun, a used mug or two, and a folding chair so that we can both eat lunch in the steaming warmth of plant growth, and it is packed.

                The shed has been cleaned out. Much like the cozy room closet, I was looking for some wood stored in the open loft and discovered a mess.   

This time, it was hazelnut shells that the squirrels had feasted on as well as rodent droppings and some leaves that had blown in. I was handing down boards to Mark when I spotted the nests so he climbed up the ladder and sighed. “I guess we’d better haul everything out from below,” he observed. “It’ll only be worse if we don’t.” We exploded the shed, pulling everything, including the shelves, out. While Mark swept inside, I cleaned up the piles—corralling the bird netting back into its tub, putting remay into a tin so that it could not become a nest, sorting out stuff we no longer needed. After we were done, we tucked everything back in. And there was more space.

          

      I have succumbed to the sourdough trend. After the Yeast Panic early this week, I began a starter. I’ve always wondered about the wild yeasties floating around my kitchen and now they are cheerfully bubbling away on the top of my fridge. We had our first batch of sourdough pancakes for breakfast on Sunday morning.  I miss the library—figuring this out would be much easier if I could sit on the floor, surrounded by various cookbooks, because there are so many variations on this theme. MY book was written by a homesteading woman who spends her entire day in the kitchen and garden, raising five kids. Her system is pretty labor intensive and productive. I don’t need that much starter! So I will be experimenting, sorting out systems that work for us when life becomes more scheduled once again.

               

Sweater Compost

   

        

     While putting away the Easter decorations, I discovered that two of my oldest sweaters had been destroyed by moths. They had eaten their way through the middle of one sweater completely and were on their way through the second. To be fair—these sweaters were on their way out; I had been patching and repairing them for several years. But, it was still a shock. I quickly cleared out the entire closet, flinging the contents all over the living room. No more sweaters were damaged! My great-grandmother’s shawl was fine. I moved onto the chest of drawers that holds our hats and scarves. Two of Mark’s ancient wool hats were munched. I dug through the yarn stash (probably the source of the moth problem) and cleared out a ball and a half of yarn. Then I checked the bedroom—there was sweater dust, but the sweaters were fine. I washed down the closet and the chest, then carried the remaining sweaters out to the greenhouse, where they are airing in the sun.

                This morning, Mark was in charge of disposal. My plan was to lay them in the bottom of the compost, but he was worried that they would not break down quickly enough. They are both all wool and rather sheepy, but thick. One was natural, untreated wool, still a little oily after twenty five years. Because he was reluctant to compost them in the hoops, he dug down into one of the garden beds until he hit the base layer of clay. As he dug, he considered the power of double dug bio-char to deepen the soil, but was just a theoretical consideration. When he was down to clay, we spread the sweaters out and buried them. They were good sweaters—the black one I knit my last winter in New England, while in graduate school. The brown one was my first Portland sweater, a lovely rug on a damp and rainy day, which I wore canvassing for OSPIRG in the early spring. They had served me well—and now, they will take care of us one more time, as compost.

Strong Towns

            Mark and I have been reading Strong Towns by Charles L Marohn, a chapter at a time. It becomes the focus of our walking conversations—a vast improvement over the latest corona virus details or fuss over local politics. Right now, Mark is ahead, so he keeps dropping tantalizing hints as to what is to come. Last Sunday, we walked out to the edge of the city to deliver some quick breads. On the way back, right at the edge of town, we passed a patch of untrimmed blackberries about to take over the sidewalk. “That’s exactly what he’s talking about!” I realized. Here, in Corvallis, we have infrastructure that we cannot maintain over the long haul. 

            The basic premise of Strong Towns is that we have broken our old development patterns of incremental growth and slow upgrading of “infill” in favor of building out entire neighborhoods far from the economic centers of towns and cities. Even if developers pay for the original infrastructure (roads, pipes, storm water run-off, parks), the city will be paying for the upkeep and maintenance for hundreds of years. And, because we have sprawled over the landscape, we do not have the money to do so. He is also worried that these neighborhoods will all “fail” at the same time; every house on the block will need major repairs within five years of the first house.  Just think of 25 year roofs; even if a few last longer, they will all need to be replaced at about the same time. If the repairs are not done, the housing stock will degrade very quickly, as will the tax base. It’s a grim future he sees for many cities and suburbs in the United States. I am a little over half way through, so I am hoping that he has a glimmer of hope for us all.

            The blackberry vine taking over the sidewalk encapsulates the problem. First, it is on the public side of a backyard fence of a house that was built on a cul-de-sac, a recent development pattern.  Cul de sacs are “good” for families because they provide a “safe” place for kids to play, but they are bad urban design because they reduce connectivity, which supports walking and biking, thus discouraging community interaction. They also create some nasty sidewalks, because people want privacy, so they build fences along the back yard, which is often along the sidewalk of the larger collector street. It is not comfortable to walk long blocks of fences in various states of repair, dodging overgrown shrubbery that belongs to everyone, thus no one maintains it.  That aggressive, thorny Himalayan Blackberry, grown from a casual seed dropped by a bird, becomes a menace.  And, because we have so many collector streets in the newer parts of town, it is impossible for the city to trim them all back in a timely fashion.

            The blackberry is only one example of this problem. Keeping all of our streets maintained to a decent level to reduce even more costly repaving projects, fixing leaky pipes so that we waste less water and the energy needed to clean it at both ends, planting and pruning street trees, keeping the park bathrooms open….the further from the town centers we go, the more expensive it becomes to do all of this. Marohn argues that we have to acknowledge this problem and make some hard decisions. What areas of our cities do we need to hold onto? What areas will be let go? His primary audience, I believe, is me, as a city councilor wrestling with budgets and policy decisions, but it’s a clearly written, if not frisky, piece of work. And it will change the way you view that blackberry that just snagged your sweater as you walk by.

             

the Peace of Knitting

Stress knitting… it’s a thing. I have been avoiding the action for the past three weeks, but on Friday, I broke down. It was a combination of trying to focus on online meetings—in person meetings are hard enough!—wrestling with technology, constantly changing and vague answers, lack of daily human contact, a rapidly diminishing supply of reading material, and rain. Cold, downpouring rain for days. My mind was jumping from one thing to another, unable to settle, much like the weather.

I knew it would come to this. I had purchased a complex sweater pattern and yarn several years ago, but I had not yet begun the sweater. I did not need another sweater, especially not a heavy one made with grey, sheepy yarn. I have enough sweaters. I do not wear the ones I have…all sorts of reasons to not begin.  The yarn was sitting in the closet and the bottom of the yarn bag, mocking me every time I sorted through the stash, vowing to knit it all down. Six skeins of yarn…. Waiting.

On Friday, I realized that I may not need a sweater to wear, but I did need a sweater to knit.  Socks, hats, earmuffs for bike helmets are all quick projects, to be begun and done over the weekend or on a long car drive. Sweaters, especially complex ones, are a commitment. They engage the mind in a different way; they grow slowly in the evenings, an inch at a time. I am fast enough to see growth after about 45 minutes, but a complex sweater will take weeks, not days, to finish. Knitting a sweater, you are in it for the long haul. And knitting is a calming process, engaging just enough of the mind to settle it to wander into calming paths, not jumping from action to action, thought to thought.

So I hauled out the pattern, rearranged it to be knit on circular needles all at once, not in pieces to be sewn together (why would anyone sew a sweater together?!), and cast on 173 stitches. Before long, the rhythm settled my mind. By dinnertime, I was done with the ribbing, counting stitches to set the pattern, and settled in. Peace.

If this goes on for months, Mark and the cat will be sporting Irish Knit sweaters next winter.