Be n Love With Yr Life-- Dec. 1st until Solstice

I love walking home in twilight, under a wide, high cloud sky, watching all of the lights come on in and around houses.

Be in love with your life:

Teaching Green Club how to write an email to an elected official, using Sara Acres Gelser Blouin as my source.

Be in love with yr life: latkes cooked in saflower oil for extra crispy Ness.

Be in love with yr life: local veg for dinner. Beans, carrots, onion, celery, tomatoes, cornmeal, and, yes, garden zucchini.

Be in love with yr life: Some cold, damp days, Mr Beezhold decides that, really, the hutch is the best place to be. Especially if there is an apple quartered just for him in there.

Be in love with yr life: Therapy hand putty. After two broken arms in four years, I have not one, not two, but three containers of it. They sit on my desk at school. Every day, in every class, a couple of kids snag them, roll long logs, create spirals, shape ramps for hot wheels, make art, and just fondle the stuff during class. And then, it comes back to my desk for the next round.

Be in love with yr life: Watching the Forestry class take out the bushy, falling over into the garden trees that will be replaced by a Fall Fruit Orchard in the CHS garden.

Be in love with yr life:

It is raining outside, cold, dark rain. Inside, the twinkle lights dispel the gloom, bean plants line the windows, ninth graders are bent over papers and chromebooks, encountering Alan Ginsberg and the Witicha Vortex Sutra. The task begins with looking up five people Ginsberg calls upon to help him. This is a bit of a teacher dilemma....one person he calls upon for help appears on Wikipedia naked and covered in ashes. Do I call attention to him by telling the students to not go there? Do I remind them to Be Mature? Or do I figure, with at least twenty people to choose from the odds are low that someone will stumble across him?

We are about 15 minutes into the task when four girls gasp, laugh in delight and horror, and slide to the floor. They found him.

Be in love with yr life: HOT WATER! Mark is taking a shower.

Be in Love with yr Life: Lucia Day in the rain...cocoa, buns, a dog, and brave friends who gather despite the weather.

Be in Love with yr Life: I live with a Stud Muffin in a sweater vest, who wanders around creating vocal bass riffs on funky songs from the 1970s.

Be in Love with yr Life: if you make one pie shell, you might as well make two, and use up the cherries in the freezer.

Be in Love with yr Life: browsing the public library.

Be in Love with yr life: walking to the end of the street to buy our tree from the boy scouts and walking it home.

Be in Love with yr Life: Yule begins on the afternoon that student interactions end.

Be in Love with yr Life: Chard on a sunny Friday afternoon. And then, we went for a walk. Snow covered Cascade mountains against the high clouds and almost full moon rise while the sun went down. We live in a beautiful world.

Be in Love with yr Life: Saturday...Kayli has brought in 78 twigs since November 18th.

Sunday: newspapers, tea, toast, and birds on the feeder outside the window.

Be in Love with yr Life: The moment when the City recorder pauses, then says, "All councilors present" and the meeting begins. I love democracy.

Be in Love with yr Life: The Light begins to return on Tuesday.

8Laurie Kaptur Chaplen, Stewart Wershow and 6 others

Laundry

                 Laundry was my first real household chore, beyond feeding the dog, washing the dishes, and keeping my own room in order.  It became mine when my mother opened her hair dressing salon, which brought in several loads of small white towels every week. For about six months, I rolled an old fashioned grocery cart down the road to the Laundromat and sat for several hours with a book while the machines churned away at the five loads. I loved it. I could read or people watch. But, as the towel piles grew, we needed a new system. My mother bought a dryer, which she set up in her bedroom, and an ancient wringer washing machine. The thing was dangerous! If you were not careful with the wringer, buttons went flying and there were rumors of smashed fingers. But there was a rhythm to the process—hot water for washing whites, followed by colored clothes because the water had cooled, then a rinse cycle where I reloaded the whites, then the colored, followed by washing the really dirty work clothes in the rinse water.  I hauled the sheets and our clothes out to the lines and devised ways to fold sheets neatly while still hanging up. It was an adult accomplishment.

                When we moved into our house, there were two sets of washers and dryers—one installed in the basement and one stored in the garage. We hauled the garage set away. The basement washer was avocado green, solid as a rock, and huge. I caught the greywater in a 55 gallon drum and pumped it up to water my newly established perennials and I had to watch it closely if I did more than two loads. When it finally died, we replaced it with a very efficient front loader which used half the water and worked about half as well on really dirty clothes. The dryer was from the 1950s. When a part burned out, Mark replaced it. When it happened again a couple of months later, we bought another wooden drying rack and unplugged it forever. It was hauled away with the avocado green washer.

                Having just a washer, no dryer, has worked well for us. For long stretches of the year, we can hang everything out. In winter, we use the drying racks and the rafters over the wood stove in the dining room.  We held onto sheets and towels, doing huge loads on the mid-winter days when it is bright and sunny. If they did not appear, Mark hauled the sheets down to the laundromat at the end of the street and did a massive wash and dry. He brought a book, read, and enjoyed the time. We ran loads of laundry at the same time as house cleaning, once a week.

                A few months ago, the washer died for the third time. Last time, the repairman had to dig the part out from a dark corner of his van, because the model is now obsolete. “I don’t know if we can fix it again,” he muttered to Mark. Neither of them were happy with the thought. “It’s not that old,” we complained. Because it died on a Saturday morning and we needed clean underwear, Mark loaded up the laundry duffel and rode the load down the street. He came back less than an hour later, quite chirked up. The new remodel they completed during the pandemic was great, he reported. New, big machines, that were highly efficient. The spin cycle pulled almost all of the water out of our clothes, even better than our machine downstairs. It was like….Denmark. We hung up the clothes. He was right. They dried faster. Why buy a new washer?

                And so, here we are, full circle, back at the laundromat. We still hang our stuff up at home, but the washers are great and our clothes are cleaner. Is it, overall, more energy efficient? We are using a communal machine, rather than replacing our own. That counts for a lot. The water heater there has to be better than ours. We are using less water. When we dry the sheets, it is faster and the heat from the machine heats the building, not the outside air. And it is faster—all of the wash is done at once, in 47 minutes, rather than over the course of the morning. We could do the calculations, but, so far, it is working.

Thanks

 

November, the time for bringing in the harvest and giving thanks for making through another year with provisions for the winter. And I have been thankful, lately, in many aspects of my life. More to come, each day this week.

1.       I am deeply thankful to be able to browse the public library once again, to haul home a stack of books that I stumble upon while wandering through the stacks. I will never take browsing for granted again.

2.       I am thankful for ninth graders who are returning to “normal” after a year and a half of fear, restraint, and silence. They are sharing cookies before class, laughing at each other’s jokes, and rocking pink powderpuff football shirts.

3.      

I am, as always, thankful for the people who grow our food—beans and grains, winter greens and squashes.

4.       I am thankful for leaves and cornstalks which pile onto my garden beds and become living soil by spring planting time.

 

Leaf Moving

  

              Last weekend was glorious—dry, sunny, and bright. When I came home from school of Friday afternoon, after two hours on the Spartan Garden blackberry bramble, our neighbor had lined up all of his leaves from the linden trees in a neat windrow along the road. Leaf Time! We gathered our tools—wheelbarrow, shovel, rake—and began moving leaves until dark. The next morning, we looked at the leaf pile, the back yard, and the housework list. I crossed off everything inside and we moved outward. Mark shifted leaves. I cleaned out beds. He chopped up compost. I pruned grape vines. Then we ate lunch and went back outside. Right before dark, we washed and hung the last storm window. The yard and garden were snug for the winter. The next day, we went for a long walk at Finley Wildlife Refuge, basking in the late fall sun while eating a picnic. We watched white swans take off against the blue sky when a coyote crept up on them. In the late afternoon, we carved our pumpkins to protect the house and gardens on Halloween night, then came inside for lasagna and apple pie by the fire. It was a lovely weekend.

 

               This weekend, the clouds have come in, so we did all of the housecleaning we avoided last week. Mark cleaned out the fridge. I washed the floors. We folded the last of the laundry drying in the living room, put away all of the small objects that tend to float towards the bench in the living room, and watered all of the plants.  The house is clean and tidy. Tonight, we may have another fire and smores while we read The Economist and begin knitting the purple sweater vest I have been planning to clear out my yarn stash. Winter is coming.

The Second Coming

      

          I have been haunted by “The Second Coming,” written by William Butler Yeats at the beginning of the last century, for a week. In so many ways, it feels, “the centre cannot hold” in 2021. Politically, the gyre widens every day—we have lost the sense that we are all pulling for the same ideals, even if we do not agree on the paths to get there. The worse are full of passionate intensity, the centre is missing. The climate crisis continues to grow. The pandemic is not over; we have not begun to reckon with the fall out economically or socially while we argue over masks and vaccinations. The words I hear at school echo this falling apart—students cannot regulate themselves, children are feral after two years at home, away from the order of the classroom. Mere anarchy.

                 This afternoon, I left the house, stepping into a wild and windy afternoon. There had been one downpour. Clouds suggested that another might be on the way. I tucked my poncho into my bag. The sky was huge and grey, ocean driven clouds. The streets were slippery with fallen leaves. It all swirled around me as I began to walk, caught up in the whirling world, my mind matching the air around me. Then, the walk settled in. The rhythm of my steps, matching the beat of my heart. My mind followed my feet, settling down. Where is my center—the center I can hold onto? My feet. The earth. The cycle of the seasons, thinking about how the leaves flying around my head would soon settle onto my garden beds, break down, become next season’s greens and tomatoes.  How do I bring this center into the widening gyre of the world, as I am called to do, every day, in the classroom? Because the poem shifts, in the second stanza, towards a Second Coming, perhaps, out of all of this violence, a second chance to do thing correctly, to have a second birth in Bethlehem, a second savior that just might, this time, pull the world out of chaos? Surely, something good must come out of this?

     Yeats, like me, is not sure—the monster, slouching towards us, feels pitiless and violent, hot and dry as the sun or a wildfire. Darkness follows it. Hope is not a guarantee. It was not in 1919. For those of us trying to hold the center, on the front lines of this anarchy, it is not in 2021.

 

Be kind.

 

The Second Coming 

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

 

Classroom Numbers

 

I have been trying to figure out how to explain or describe the amount of extra energy my job is taking this year. This is one class, by the numbers. They don’t really like to read or write the assigned work, although one loves to write confessional poetry and they all love to read text messages on their phones, but that’s not reading. There are about 21 kids in class.

·         1 kid who wafted through before class, to check out the vibe, so that he might come to class at some unknown time.

·         2 kids who needed to discuss plans to deal with stress if they need to leave class because of an incident on Friday.

·         Several girls peacefully eating breakfast—juice and a sticky roll.

·         1 student in a lovely velour jacket, who decided to come to class for the first time in two weeks. He had read ahead, so it could be worse.

·         1 student who is being observed by admin because of anger issues in class. He left for a long pep talk in the hall.

·         2 kids whose masks “slip off” their noses all the time, but who put them back up if I look at them.

·         2 or 3 kids who like the mask beard look and argue about masks.

·         1 couple who like to sit very close together—I told them last week they cannot hold hands in class.

·         2 kids feeling guilty about being butts on Friday.

·         2 kids NOT feeling guilty at all about Friday.

·         2 kids who have to leave class because of anxiety—one who talked to me before class, the other who talked to me weeks ago.

·         2 kids who have to slip out for medication during class. They are subtle.

·         1 kid who shows up with his mother an hour into class. Mom has no pass, so I send her back downstairs. Really, we should not have any one in the school right now.

·         1 mom who come back with the principal, who proceeds to lurk outside my room for the last twenty minutes of class.

Not all of my classes are this weird, but all of my classes have very high levels of anxiety, low turn in rates, and an underlying feeling of tension as well as exhaustion. We shine some days, but it is hard.

Council Shawls

         

I have a confession—I have been knitting during council meetings for months now. I started when we were receiving Covid updates at the beginning of the pandemic, because we were off camera and no one could see that I was working away on my sweater jacket under my desk. When we came back on camera I was good for a while, just doodling on my notes, but….my new shawl was calling to be finished and I wanted to see how the final design would emerge; I broke it out at a work session.  We were looking at slides, which are always too small for me to read anyways, so….

I have finished two shawls.

I have long known that knitting, doodling, playing with the putty they give you to strengthen your hands after an injury, all helps people focus. I have never stopped a student from knitting in class—we have gone through several cycles in my years at CHS—and have occasionally helped out with a dropped or a weird stitch. One common beginner mistake is still named after Thomas, who was working on a scarf for his girlfriend in class for several weeks. I also know that Eleanor Roosevelt, a model of political productivity if there ever was one, knit blankets during long meetings. So, why should I hold back? Hauling wool, needles, and pattern down to Council Chambers along with a big packet could be daunting, but I am at home. Who would know?

And that is what I thought for several months. If you were not watching me every moment, you would not see the occasional long arm reach to free a tangle of yarn or the shawl emerging from under my desk to settle the needles. And then I saw a screen shot of council one night. Everyone else is scowling at their second monitor, trying to read the slides. But there I am, serenely working under the desk, Knit Faced, just listening. You can tell.

I have finished my second shawl now. I have a third planned, but then….if three skeins of Brown Sheep yarn landed on my doorstep, you too could have a Council Knit shawl.

Equinox Rains

 

 

               The Equinox Rains came through on Friday night, shifting the seasons once again. Inside, the changes had already begun; outside, we spent the afternoon preparing.

                When I came home on Friday afternoon, after working with students in the school garden to lay down some cover crop, I found Mark up in the fig tree, picking ripe fruit. “I thought we could get one more round in the dryer,” he called down. “You know, before the rain creates Fig Bombs.” I agreed and wandered into the back yard to finish picking the tomatoes, tuck away the electric lamp, and pull the potted plants out to where they would catch the rain when it fell. Mark finished his compost sifting project and moved his favorite chair inside. We tucked the rabbit in early with a bag of baby carrots I pulled out of the school trash can and went inside. Let it rain.

                That evening, I shifted the mantle and table decorations from Lammastime—or the early harvest—to the Fall Equinox. Every six weeks, the decorations evolve. I will change the plates, the candles and holders, the fabrics that sit under the lamp on the kitchen table to reflect the seasons. Right now, the mantle is green and gold and orange with my mother’s old glass pumpkin and the orange candle holders. Dried foliage from the coast and two brown and green plates from the 1940s, plus the turkey butterdish. Late Harvest.

                The clouds were moving in fast over the moon when we went to bed, chased by the wind. Just before I fell asleep I thought “wind in the corn.” An hour or so later, the rains came in a rush like the high tide, smelling of salt water and wet forest and far clear spaces. Rain. Rain like the sea. Rain like a blessing. Rain to shift the seasons, once again, from summer to fall, right on schedule.

               

Canning Season

 

                When I was 14, we lived in an old house with a crab-apple tree in the back yard. I gathered the apples in the fall and attempted to make applesauce. It was awful. The apples were tart and wormy; I was dismayed. “Wrong apples,” my father muttered when he saw the results. “Crab apples are for cider.” Who knew?

The next weekend, we made our first trip to the apple orchards, where I picked half a bushel of beautiful MacIntosh apples under a bright blue New England sky. I even climbed up in the tree to reach the highest, ripest fruit. My father pretended not to notice. When I came home, I had apples. After consulting Betty Crocker c. 1958, I made real applesauce for the first time, peeling the apples and tossing the unbroken skins over my shoulder. I had read that the skins would fall into the initials of the person you would marry; it was worth a shot.  The puree bubbled in the new harvest gold crockpot, sending the sweet scent of cinnamon throughout the house. Once the sauce was frozen, I moved onto pie, making a crust for the first time. Then I tried turnovers. And we ate apples for days. Next year, I vowed, a full bushel.

Picking apples and making sauce became an autumn ritual. When I was in college, my room mate woke up at six on Saturday morning and peeled all of the fruit before I even rolled out of bed. We ate applesauce for a late breakfast that morning and on pancakes for weeks.

These days, I make far more than applesauce in late August and early September, as school starts up again. Every day, something is processed. Salsa. Tomato sauce. Dried pears. Pickles of all sorts. Whatever overflows from local gardens and old trees finds its way into our house, waits its turn in the dining room, and becomes something we will eat this winter. Tonight, it was dried pears and salsa verde. Tomorrow will be another batch of tomato sauce, cooking down in the crockpot that looks exactly like my first one, that I made my first batch of sauce in, back in high school.

Apple Pressing Partnership

 

One benefit of Long Term partnerships—getting the work done efficiently.

                Last week, I roamed the neighborhood with my fruit picker, finding early apples to press for cider. I filled the larger laundry basket, then the heat wave settled in and I ignored them for several days.  By Saturday, there was a line of ants heading across the dining room floor and something had to be done. “Let’s get it over with before it gets hotter,” Mark sighed. I agreed. We divided jobs without discussion.

                Mark: prep the press. He hauled it out of the greenhouse and turned on the hose to rinse it off, then took it apart and gave a couple of pieces a good cleaning. He found the bowl to catch the juice.

                Charlyn: prep the chopping. I found the cuisinart, the fruit cutting board, and the bowl for the choppings. I hauled the apples out of the dining room and hunted down the bucket for the compost. After plugging everything in, I began chopping.

                Mark: is in charge of pressing. It is more fun, but it also requires more leverage to press all of the juice out. He can stand on the mounting board and crank down much better than I can. More weight.

                Charlyn: is in charge of apple prep. I am much faster at chopping and slicing without cutting my fingers, even when there is apple juice everywhere. I have better knife skills and can eliminate more worms, too.

                Mark: does compost delivery and outdoor clean up after the pressing. As compost in general is his area, he knows which ring will like a nice boost of apple moisture to move things along. He also feeds the chickens some of the mash. He hoses off the table and rakes up any big piles of residue.

                Charlyn: does the canning. As soon as the pressing is done, I heave the big pot of juice onto the stove to boil, then pour it into quart jars and can it. Later, I tuck it onto the shelves in the basement.

                We are pretty good at this. And, somewhere in the process, when everything is set up and cranking along, Mark will observe: This wasn’t as bad as I remembered. And the final product is always better.  Partnership.

A week in Zucchini

 

It is that time of year, when the number of zucchini in the dining room exceeds the number of dinners in the week.  To help us all out of the dilemma, we are eating at least one a day—and I will post the recipe for each. If you find yourself needing a zucchini to try one of the recipes, I think we can help you out. Just ask. Or guard your doorstep….

Thursday… Zucchini, Indian style:

This is tasty, but  improved with flatbread and raita, along with a peach chutney.  It also uses up the tiny potatoes that I harvested, which is preferable than letting them shrivel and die in the bottom of the storage crate.

1 onion, chopped

1 zucchini, chopped

2-3 medium potatoes (or a lot of very small ones), chopped

A handful of raisins

Any other veg on hand

1-2 half pints of roasted tomatoes from the basement—or 2-4 large tomatoes from the garden

 

Drop into the big soup pot or cast iron pan and cook, slowly, in a bit of olive oil.

 

Meanwhile, in a small pan, pour oil, two cloves of chopped garlic, 2T ginger, 1t cinnamon, 1t cumin seed, and 1t of coriander seed, and cook for a few moments. Add to the stew.

 

Friday….Seedy Zucchini Cake, because we are having a meeting this evening. This is from Snacking Cakes.

 

2T of poppy, millet, and flax seed (can change!)

Zest of a lemon

¾ cup of sugar

2 eggs

¾ cup of oil

1t cinnamon, 3/4 t salt, 1t BP, ½ t BS

1 cup of white flour

½ cup of whole wheat flour

2 ¼ cups of shredded zucchini

 

Mix, use a square brownie pan or 8 inch round springform pan. 350 oven.

 

Saturday: Mark likes zucchini bread with peanut butter for breakfast and we just picked blueberries.

1.5 c white flour

1.5 c whole wheat flour

1/2 BS

1.5 t salt

2 t cinnamon

1 t nutmeg

1/2 t cloves

Mix dry ingredients

1/2 c milk

2 eggs

1/2 c oil

1/2 c sugar

2 c shredded zucchini

1.5 c blueberries

mix wet and add to dry. 2 loaves, 350 degree oven.

Sunday:  The classic summer dinner-- zucchini, tomatoes, onion, and basil tossed over pasta. Never fails.

 

 

 

 

 

Lammas and the potatoes

 

Lammastide is the time of early harvest, traditionally grains, but, here, potatoes. I don’t have enough land to grow enough wheat and oats to feed us, or the technology to harvest and separate out the grain, but I can produce potatoes. And, if I put them in the ground early enough, they need less water and are ready to give up their beds to other crops in early August.  The pandemic, plus a seed potato shortage, has made this a bit more challenging this year, but I pulled them on Monday, August Second, Lammastide.

This year, I put in a half bed of kennebucks, a large white potato that is a solid producer. They grew alongside leeks and carrots to create a “soup bed”; the potato leaves, despite my best efforts,  overwhelmed the celery before I could really get going. Next year. They came out—22 pounds—last week and were quickly replaced by the direct seeded fall crops. Arugula. Watermelon radish. Tat Soi. Lettuce.  If last year is ever an indication, these greens will keep producing until Winter Solstice.  They are already up.

This morning, I tackled the full bed, planted a couple of weeks later. Even with the water turned off for two weeks, a few vines were still lush. I tried working around them, but gave up. Two rows of Yukon Gold (17 pounds, medium sized tubers) and two rows of Blue (16 pounds, not as lovely as some other years) appeared as I expected, in terms of size and production. But, then, I had run a small row of huckleberries down the middle of the bed and they were….amazing. Huge! They beat out the Kennebecks, which are traditionally the largest potato. Clear and clean. Beautiful tubers. Deep purple outside, golden inside, and, I remember from last fall, yummy all the way through. 22 pounds from less than four. The bed emptied pretty quickly. I use my hands first, finding about 70 percent of the tubers while the compost I dumped on the straw mulch last week works its way into the bed. Then I take the pitchfork, with bare feet, and gently dig up the rest. This allows me to prep the bed for the next fall crop while harvesting the spring planting. Any big chunks of straw are set to the side, to be laid back on the bed later.

Once everything was out, I planted two rows of potatoes for a late fall harvest. It’s not as big, but it works! Then the hoses went back down, followed by the straw mulch. The other side of the bed will be filled with fall starts next week—kale and mustard, first, then the broccoli and fennel and cabbage. Depending on the fall, we will have a late harvest of potatoes and greens. Meanwhile, harvest begins.

Apple collection on Tuesday….

               

Downtown

 

                Why do some downtowns thrive, while others die? What can we do to improve our own downtown, so that it remains vibrant and healthy? Mark and I tossed these questions back and forth as we drove across the country in July, wandering through desolate and deserted places, followed by booming towns with the latest building codes.  We formulated and tested theories and this is what we saw.

A functional downtown has:

1.       A solid economic base. This is the most important aspect of a thriving downtown. Towns that had at least two of the following were thriving: a county seat, a college or university, a hospital, or manufacturing with middle class wages. If there is no solid economic base, there is nothing.

2.       A small block grid makes it easy to negotiate downtown on foot or in a car.

3.       Fifty percent old buildings help by lending charm and variety.

4.       Slow moving traffic.

5.       Not a tourist economy—practical businesses.

6.       A mixture of uses—food, clothing, drugstore, offices. There has to be a reason to go downtown on a Tuesday afternoon, not just to buy a tomato on Saturday.

7.       Far enough away from a big city that it cannot pull economic development out of town.

 

So, towns can build bioswales on streets were every business is empty (Tucumcari) and nothing will change. We can make our downtown pretty, and people will come down for a summer afternoon, but that won’t help keep businesses alive. Or we can have a vibrant economic base, not based on the interstate, and naturally support our downtown.

 

 

Butte, Montana

 

Butte, Montana.

Although Butte was on our list of places to stop—Mark has always wanted to see the Berkley Pit—I did not expect to drive into down the historic district with my mouth hanging open in shock, awe, and a disconcerting sense of déjà vu. Butte is the quintessential city of my northeastern childhood, shifted 2000 miles west and on the edge of an open pit mine, rather than blocks of closed factories. It looks like Manchester, and Haverhill, and Worcester, and all of the other post-industrial towns of the 1970s, before some of them were rediscovered and remodeled and others fell apart. Butte hovers on that edge; I was at home.

It’s not a huge town, although it is surrounded by the commercial sprawl of the interstate, abetted by a large “shop-shed” and the proximity to some amazing natural scenery.  Coming in at ten at night, looking for a motel room, we were watched by a 90 foot tall Virgin Mary perched on a hill and lit from below, glowing in the darkness. We crashed into bed on the fourth floor of an over-priced hotel, after glancing out the window at the city lights, and headed into town the next morning, searching for breakfast and the open pit mine, still foggy from a 450 mile drive the day before.

The edge of the old part of town is working class housing, surrounded by empty weedy lots. There are fourplexes built before that was a term—squared off shoulders, porches on the first and second floors, all of the doors lined up off of the first floor porch, a few chairs to sit and have a smoke, and a couple of old cars in the driveway or on the street. It looks like Haverhill, I thought. I have seen those houses—and those empty lots—before. Right next door were small single family houses, old windows, peeling paint, funky design with something added on as the family grew. A few of the houses were well maintained, with flower gardens an cheerful paint jobs, an some looked like grandparent’s houses, where the occupants cared, but were limited in what they could still do. Not all of the housing was working class; there is a lovely street lined with solid middle class houses built for the mine managers and the businessmen who ran the downtown, as well as a few amazing houses built for and by the very wealthy. Several spires from Catholic churches dominate the skyline. Familiar patterns.

As we climbed the hill into downtown, which was, according to a roadside sign 50 miles out, the largest historic district in the country, the buildings changed. Three and four story brick buildings, still surrounded by the empty lots, rose up. On their sides were old advertisements for hotels and diners, targeting a population that was in town to make a deal or do a job, not settle down forever. On the sides of other buildings, you could see where something once was, but has now come down. There were not so many gaps in the built environment in Butte’s heyday.   Some had windows for second and third story apartments, and curtains blew out from them and tough houseplants balanced on the sills. I know those windows, I thought, they have not changed in 50 years.

Downtown still held signs of the glory days of the mines, when Butte was the wealthiest city between Chicago and San Francisco. Elaborate facades from the late 19^th century, when turrets and carving were popular, lined the streets. Banks, hotels, businesses, dance halls, social organizations—as well as labor unions—all built and inhabited these glorious buildings. There were stairs dropping down to basement establishments. Apartments and rooms for rent on the upper floors.  Amazing. But, the upper stories were, for the most part, boarded up and empty. There were occupants for most of the first floors—which is a positive sign, unlike some other downtowns we have seen on this trip—and there were going concerns…a couple of new coffee shops, banks, stores. But the streets and town were built for a much larger population than we saw on a Friday morning in July. This was a town that once had  money—a lot of money—that has left the area.

And it was that feeling, more than anything else, that haunted me as we drove the streets, looking for breakfast (which we did find) and then wandered around, staring at the beautiful old  buildings that were all empty upstairs. We walked by a mission and a collection of people waiting for it to open, the first group of clearly down and out, if not homeless, we had seen since Oakland, two weeks and 2,500 miles before.  There was once money, jobs, union activists, families, and now, there is not. Butte in a northeastern city, 2000 miles west.