The Red Hat

 

                I spent part of Saturday at a meeting to discuss what we can do about the chronically homeless in our community—providers and activists together, with cookies, pizza, and carrot sticks, thinking about what has been tried, what are serious barriers, and how much anyone has left to throw into this effort. Everyone in the room is already at 110%, and the experts working directly with the people on the streets are even higher. Even so, being in the room thinking about how to give face and voice to the people sleeping out in January, moving them from data points to human beings in the eyes of the broader community, was healing. After the meeting, I stood in the parking lot, listening to the new moral dilemma: do we house a person who has been a refugee in the U.S. for many years and who has a criminal record? Doing so many soon put the entire shelter operation and the church sponsoring the mircoshelter in legal jeopardy.  How do we answer this question? More lives are at stake than our own.  Deep sighs…”And on that cheerful note,” we both said simultaneously, “I will see you soon.”

                I wandered home thinking about these huge issues. And there, on my doorstep, was a small box. I took it inside, opened it up, and found a beautifully knit red cap—the design that was used in Norway, during WWII to indicate resistance to the Nazi occupations. It was made by an old student who practiced her knitting skills during class 20 years ago this winter. I put it on and went for a walk. It is warm. It is bright. It is beautiful.

                That evening, it was sitting in the living room next to the gnome I had just finished. An anti-fascist gnome (or person) from Oregon, I thought, would also wear a hand-knit wooly sweater. So I made an anti-fascist gnome, complete with hat and sweater, because, sometimes, as Mrs Who observed in A Wrinkle in Time, “the only way to deal with something deadly serious is to treat it a little lightly.”

Mr Beezhold, the bunny

 

                Mr. Beezhold the Bunny—NOT our friend we named the rabbit after—died on Monday night. He had a good long life in our back yard. He was about a year old when we adopted him from the shelter and he bunned around for eight years with us. He spent his mornings basking in the sun while in his hutch and hopped out on his own when the light shifted. Then, he followed the sun in the winter and the shade in the summer, creating little hidey holes all over the yard. One week, he’d be in the asparagus bed, the next, under the garden bench.  He would sneak into the potato bed and cover himself with the vines or tuck in under the tall tomatoes in August. Sometimes, he would just….disappear. We would look all over the yard twice, poking into all of his preferred spots and….no bunny. Then we would go into the house, look out five minutes later, and there he would be, sunning himself in a garden bed. He could shift into the fifth dimension, we decided. At twilight, we would go out and tuck him into the hutch for the night. For years we could herd him in the right direction and he would just hop up by himself (most of the time. Sometimes he liked a good chase around the hutch). Some nights, he liked a nose rub and being carried to bed. As he grew older this past year, jumping up was harder for him and we boosted him in most nights.

                He was a good bunny. He was tolerant of small children, having his butt washed, and kittens stalking him. He shared space—and crunchies—with the chickens regularly. He loved a good nose rub and to have his dead fur pulled out for him. On Sunday, he hid on us for a couple of hours, tucked in the way back among the wild hyacinth greens. Mark brought him in at dusk and dried him off thoroughly with an old towel. And that was it.  We buried him deep in the garden bed, in one of his favorite corners, and I will plant some broccoli, which was his favorite leaf, over him this spring. We will miss him.

Quiet Clouds

 

                It has been grey and misty weekend—low clouds, occasional rains, sweatshirt and wool hat weather. We have months of this in the Willamette Valley, from November until late May most years, and it feels comforting to walk downtown on Saturday morning in the light mist. Very few people are out; the charms of an extra hot beverage and wooly socks is strong in the small bungalows I pass on my way to the river.  I am on a mission to consider a Depression Glass pitcher I saw in a window last week, otherwise, I, too, would be at home with a book.

                There is not much to do in the gardens this month. I finished pruning a couple of weeks ago. We have planted two fruit trees to replace the ones that reached their end of life two years ago, adding to our little orchard. Last weekend, we bought the wood to repair some garden beds that were rotting and Mark has been working on that after work and on Sunday morning. We moved the coop over a bed. I cleaned out the greenhouse and prepped some planters and washed some signs for repainting. There are some early greens sitting in six-packs on a heating mat, just putting out their first true leaves, but we are in early growing days. The light is too muted by clouds to bring life out of the ground.

    

            Inside, we engage in cozy winter projects. I found one book on knitting gnomes and am working on one with a purple hat and multi colored shawl and another book on British food, which led to a loaf of Bara Brith tea bread. Mark and I rescued a batch of sauerkraut that I had made a month ago—I had miscalculated the amount of salt, basing it on pounds, not kilograms. Too Salty!  I bought a second red cabbage and we chopped it up and mixed it in with the first batch, added more garlic and red pepper but no more salt, and kept it on the top of the fridge for a week or so. It worked! We had kraut melts for lunch (new whole whet sourdough bread, a mound of red cabbage kraut, and chedder cheese melted over all) when we came in from yard work.  We now have A Lot of sauerkraut if anyone wants to try the sandwich.  We watched All Creatures Great and Small last night and remembered walking over the Dales years ago.  

                The larger world swirls around us in news and chaos. On Friday nights I turn off the computer and we take a short break from the fray. We will be back—I have a council packet on the couch beside me—but this weekend, we gave into the lure of quiet clouds.

               

 

Valve Turners

 

                Twenty five years ago, I made a plan to make our house more energy efficient; I even tried to calculate our carbon footprint overall.  We replaced light bulbs, insulated the entire structure, and installed a highly efficient gas furnace and on demand hot water heater. At the time, natural gas was considered the bridge fuel between coal and Renewables. By the time the heaters failed, we would have excellent electric options. Later, we installed enough solar panels to break even over the year.

                That was a long while ago. Last winter, the furnace started to go wonky. We had it worked on, but it was clearly at the end of its life. It took weeks for a part to be shipped in. Rather than wait for it to die (which we knew would happen during a cold snap) we scheduled a new electric heat pump to be installed last summer. The gas bill went way down!  I considered an electric heat pump hot water heater, but, considering how little gas we were actually using, decided to wait.

                This December Mark noticed a puddle of water under the on demand hot water heater. He opened it up and noticed that several spots were leaking, so he called around for an expert opinion. After a close inspector and several trips out to the van for parts, he came upstairs.

 “I think I’ve got it fixed for now,” he told us. “But….”

“How long do we have?”

He hesitated. “A week to a month, I think. If the leak gets worse, open the cabinet so it does not short out. That might buy you some time.” And no, he didn’t install hot water heaters, but he did have opinions on the various options. Heat pumps can be loud and expensive. We don’t use that much hot water, just showers and dishes. Maybe a basic electric tank? I called around and made appointments.  A month later, the gas hot water heater went way and we installed an old fashioned electric hot water heater. No new technology. Nothing fancy.  But the water is hot.

And, with that, the house is off of natural gas completely. We are Valve Turners. And, sometime this month the meter is going away and I can run one long garden bed along the south side of the house. Slow steady progress. More solar panels are coming in a few years.