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.

The Greenhouse in March

 

  

              In Late March, the greenhouse comes into its own. For months, it’s been quiet—chilly and damp, holding the yard’s plants that cannot tolerate frost or freezing as well as the succulent collection that survives without water for the winter. All of the pots line the high shelves. The grow lights are strung up out of the way from the summer house plants, even though they have long moved back to my classroom. The volunteer spider plant crouches between two pavers, but does not grow. No one goes in or out. The door sticks.

                But March is a busy month in this space. The plant shelf is full to overflowing with starts; the first round grows, is bumped up into four inch pots, and moves out just in time for the tomatoes and summer crops to move onto the heating pads.  Extra starts are tucked in on wire shelves under the windows until they find homes. The lights are lowered and set on timers which I shift as the days grow longer. Last week, the succulents started to bloom so I watered them all and topped them off with compost (a few need homes if you are interested…) I started to root a few scented geraniums as well.  Plants are everywhere.

 

               But, the plants are not the only living things using this space now. The cats have both discovered it. One likes the high shelf over the door—the warmest spot—while the other sprawls on the bricks or the bumpy burlap sack that covers the potting soil. They hunt bugs in the corners. It is warm and light but protected from the wind. If we are home for lunch, we carry the tray out and set it on the planting shelf.  In the late afternoon, Mark and I like to read in the space, cat on lap. The desk is a good place to write—sometimes the internet reaches, sometimes not. It’s ok either way.

                The greenhouse also becomes the space to dry sweaters that need to be washed after a long winter. Bread dough rises better out there. It’s a holding spot for hand tools from the garden. Next week, the garden goddesses in their newly painted finery will survey the yard through the milky windows waiting for assured dry weather to be tucked among the plants for the summer. Soon, we will set up the shower with towels, shampoo, and cucumber scented soap and we will slip outside in the moonlight to bathe.

Early Spring Days

 

 

            It ws a beautiful day yesterday—warm and sunny and dry. Rare in western Oregon in late winter. We did the laundry early, hung it all up outside to dry, and walked up to the Farmer’s Market. By the time we got home, we were both humming Greg Brown’s song:

Love calls like the wild birds-
It's another day
A Spring wind blew my list of
Things to do...away

            “I don’t want to clean the kitchen, even though it is a mess,” I told Mark, who did not want to attack the bathroom, either. So we called it a truce for the house and wandered out into the back yard. There was compost to cut up, beds to toss over to help work the leaves and chicken straw into the soil, trimming to do, and cats to chase around. Mark brought us lunch and tea to the sitting area by the arch covered with honeysuckle, and one cat basked in the hooped bed, warm and dry, while we ate and read for a bit. After lunch, we went to the local nursery, bought a columnar apple, and planted it between two raised beds, bringing the number of fruit trees in the yard up to ten.

             It is that time of year where several hours in the yard does not more the dial very far on tidying up. I will come in, look out the back window and wonder “What did I just do?”  So, as I worked, I reminded myself—this is not a garden, full of flowers in matching pots and cute little signs, with perfectly mulched paths where bantam chickens wander and never eat the kale. It’s really a small farm, a homestead, raising food for the household, populated by people, cats, a rabbit, chickens, and, yes, slugs and aphids. Jays claim their space loudly. Squirrels dig up nuts they hid in October and taunt the cats. We’ve had possums for years, although there are none right now, sadly. It is a workshop, a studio, a living room, a meditation space, and a retreat from the world. It is far from perfect. But, on a sunny day in March, it is our home.

 

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.

 

 

Notes, for Robert

 

                Do you remember writing notes in high school?

                I was watching a couple of girls elaborately folding paper on Friday while they waited for the rest of the class to catch up with the work.  One was creating a cootie catcher, the other, a lotus. Either could have been a note, to be passed hand to hand in a crowded corridor between classes. But students don’t write notes any more, even though they are still sitting in the back of math class, daydreaming.

                Notes were the glue of our friendship. Maybe because we went to a regional high school, where it was 45 minute drive between houses. Maybe it was that long distance calls were expensive and we were not allowed to talk on the phone for hours after our parents got the first bill. Maybe we just had more down time in our lives because there was less to distract us, especially during the cold, icy road winter.  The first note you gave to someone marked a new level in your relationship—you were someone they were thinking about when you were not around!

                We wrote about everything and nothing. My friend Barbara had spiky handwriting, drew horses and dragons in the corners of her paper, and continued the Dungeons and Dragons stories we were all considering—early Romtasty, some days. Mark wrote epic poems. Robert, with the nicest, roundest handwriting of all, wrote out Spanish verb conjugations as mini-lessons (he was the only one of us excited about learning another language).  My notes, with the same slanting the wrong way, slightly smudged ants on a log handwriting that earned me a failing penmanship grade in first grade, ranged from complaints about the English teacher to reporting on my most recent reading and the exploration of the heroic journey across novels.

 

                I was thinking about note writing already this weekend when I heard that one of my constant pen pals had died from a heart attack that day.  He was my high school friend, which is a deep, old friendship, even though we have not spoken in years. We were lab partners, dissecting a frog together. We shared English and Social Studies teachers, were in the same clubs, on the same field trips. In the afternoons, we rode home on the bus together, laughing, or, when we were older, borrowed his mother’s car and wandered the mall. We watched Grease three times because he loved Olivia Newton John. And—this is true friendship here-- he called me the day after prom to assure me that I had not missed anything. 

So much, in retrospect, went unsaid, even in those volumes of letters. No one ever said “I am gay” or “my parent drinks too much and they argue all the time” or “I am afraid to grow up because the world is dark right now”.  We had time. We would get there. We were young. And still, we were all haunted by James Taylor’s song, Fire and Rain on those long, cold bus rides, 6:30 in the morning, to pass a note written the night before, before class started at 7:25 AM…

Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you, baby
One more time again, now
Thought I'd see you one more time again
There's just a few things coming my way this time around, now
Thought I'd see you, thought I'd see you, fire and rain, now….

Cooking Lessons

 

                We have a very clear delineation of labour in our house—Mark holds the cat, I pill the cat; I hold the rabbit, Mark clears his butt; I prune, Mark processes compost; I cook, Mark washes the dishes. The divisions work well and save considerable argument, until one of us falls ill and takes to the couch. Usually I can fill in for Mark for a couple of days (I know how to do all of his chores but the taxes, and they can wait) but he can’t cook dinner without a lot of fuss, questioning, swearing, and crashing around.

                It is my fault. When we first met, he was not strong on any household skills, although, after a nasty night encounter with cockroaches in Texas, he understood why you needed to wash the dishes every day. I started teaching him how to cook from scratch early on. We talked about how to hold the knife, how to use a whisk with a firm wrist, and how to tell if something was done in the oven. I even made him a cookbook, divided into sections, where I copied recipes from my cookbooks and note cards, so that all of the information was in one place. He made progress. He taught himself how to make hot and sour soup and stewed beef in wine and thought about doing the same thing to some chicken. And then, we stopped.

                He says it was because I expected him to wash the dishes after cooking, rather than trading off the chore. I think it was because he moved into my kitchen and I am kitchen turfy. The truth is somewhere in between. So here we are, thirty years on, and he is not a confident cook. When I am not around, he can rummage in the fridge and cook a couple of eggs, heat up the leftovers, stem or roast some veg. He’s not above the co-op’s salad bar on a busy night. When I broke my arm, he was a decent prep cook, chopping veg and slicing the bread until I could bend my elbow again. He wants to do well, so he asks lots of questions.

                And so here we are. I had a cold last week that took out my brain for about twelve hours which spanned dinner. The options: order out, have Mark make something, which is often loud, or make dinner myself.  Last summer, I canned two dozen jars of tomato sauce just for these nights. Chop an onion, boil the spaghetti, and warm the tomatoes. Dinner. We can talk about cooking lessons later.

 

Pruning, Planning, and Pumpkin

 

This Sunday has been bout the three “p”s of January—pruning, planning, and pumpkin.

Pruning began last week, when I trimmed the laurel hedge hard on either side, enabling the neighbors to climb into their spare car on either side and open the fence gate while also shedding some light on the day lilies on our side of the hedge. Today, I worked on trimming the fig back off of the roof of the house. Then I hauled the branches back to the compost area, where some laurel, the Christmas tree, and some English ivy where waiting for processing. I am working my way counter-clock-wise around the house. Next is the apple and the plum, then the compost laurel and the hazelnut.  

Seed dreaming is also happening. I have my catalogs with pages marked—do I want to try the tomato that climbs 15 feet this year? Can I find the Green Grape tomato seeds again? What about plain petunias? This afternoon, I sorted through the seed tin to see what was left from last year and what needed to be purged. Soon, we will be ordering and planting, so the greenhouse needs a tidy s well.

Finally, there’s the pumpkins that I baked a few nights ago because they were about to rot. I’ve made soup and shepard’s pie with the results and, right now, there is a pumpkin cake for a potluck and pumpkin bread for our breakfasts in the over. And that is all of the pumpkin. There’s not even ny hiding in the back of the freezer.

 

The China Buffet

 

It was just dark when we walked over to the China Buffet last night. The sky was clear and an almost full moon leaned over the trees. Down all of the small, gridded streets of my neighborhood,  colored lights twinkled and shone from roofs and porches and branches—we leave our lights up for a long while in Oregon.  The air was cold and dry and it felt later than it actually was. The streets were quiet. In houses, groups were gathering, knocking on doors with one hand, balancing a platter in the other. New Year’s Eve.

Chinese food for New Years is traditional in my family. My urban cousins, from my father’s side, introduced my family to the concept and it felt very sophisticated, especially in comparison to the dreaded sauerkraut and pork my mother’s family swore by. One New Year’s Eve while I was still in college and home on Break, my mother and I found ourselves without plans for the night (no surprise for me, but very unusual for her.)  We went to the local Chinese restaurant, where you could get pink edged pork strips, and chicken chop suey, and pork fried rice, along with drinks in glasses shaped like the heads of Easter Island. We had just ordered when our neighbors from 15 years before, whom my mother had lost touch with, showed up. They sat down, ordered, and spent the evening remembering the past. We drove home in the cold dark, glimpses of lights in houses along the way, feeling rooted to the place.

A few years later, I lived in Newton, right down the street from the same sort of establishment. The big booths were covered in red “leather” and there was hot mustard along with the soy sauce on the table. We ate there at least twice a month—once, late at night on New Year’s Eve, when we left First Night before the fireworks to come home ahead of the crowds. It was dim, and warm, and welcoming. Home.

New Year’s Eve has always felt a bit melancholy for me. Even when I was young, it was never a great party night. So, because Mark loves a buffet, especially one where he can have two bowls of hot and sour soup, melon, sushi, and something deep fried,  we visit the New China Buffet once a year. It is warm, and bright, and welcoming. And then we walk home, start a fire, and see the old year out.

On Tyranny and Advent Season

 My juniors are reading Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng; it is a dystopian novel written during the pandemic, thinking about what would happen if the chaos of the early months of that crisis were intensified. I like it because it talks about 21^st century examples and issues—Asian American hate, all of our information on computers and not books—as well as the old favorite of silencing dissent by, as Timothy Snyder would say, obeying in advance.  As we moved through the book, I handed them Snyder’s list of acts against tyranny and asked them to find examples in the book and, if they can not, then in the world. It was hard.  The language is challenging and the concepts are fairly abstract. I spent an hour and a half talking students through different actions. Corporeal politics? The frog outside of ICE. Professional ethics? Teachers can’t tell you what to think but they can present you with challenging assignments that make you think. We are not done with the assignment; each student or pair is going to pull one of the actions out of the hat next week and make a poster, using the graphic version of the book as an example, where they explore how these ideas play out in the book and in our world.

I’ve been thinking about this assignment and the list of actions for about a year now. Some people find Snyder stressful because you can see how authoritarianism, according to his work, is increasing all over the world. It feels both very close to home and very hard to stop. I find him hopeful. Grim, but hopeful. There are 20 actions we can all take to halt the spread of authoritarianism, they just need a bit of grounding in our daily world.

Every Advent, I try to take on a focus. Some years it’s big, like democracy or climate change. Some years, it’s small, like what do I love about my life or daily image in my notebook. The practice helps me get through this, the darkest time of the year, while we are all waiting for the world to shift and the light to return. This year, I want to attempt to ground On Tyranny in daily practice. I will strive to take action on all twenty of his points, but I will give myself a little leeway, because I hope I do not have to “be reflective if you must be armed” or “stay calm when the unthinkable arrives.” For those, I will substitute actions of my own—build community and participate in ritual—because I believe that will also counteract tyranny.  I start on the first night of advent and work until Solstice Eve.

This is the list. Please, join in. There is nothing more empowering than taking action.

December 17: Do Not Obey in Advance

I have been thinking about this action since I began this project. Do not give in silently to something you believe to be wrong. It is, in some ways, one of the hardest to sort out. As a teacher and as a city councilor, I find myself constantly confronting things I believe to be wrong or misguided. Should we read the entire novel aloud to the class because they do not want to read? Should we continue to post camps that are not in the Approved Sleeping Places during the Point in Time Count? Should we push back on a state regulation that we do not agree with? At what point do we say—No.

There is a constant calculation involved in deciding when to push and when to back down. Sometimes I ask—am I own my own here? Will someone else take the lead? More importantly, does this push back align with other ideas that I lean against or am I reaching beyond my usual boundaries to take this on? Do I have the energy to take on one more fight? And if I don’t who will.

Sometimes, in conversations, after considering all of the options, we will say “ I don’t agree, but this is not the hill I want to die on.” Or I will decide to not take the issue on at all, even though I believe that it is important and needs support. And so, am I obeying in advance? Am I taking the easy route out?

December 18: Make Eye Contact and Small Talk

I learned this from my parents.

When I was eight my parents took a cross country road trip—we left New Hampshire and headed West. According to my mother, we were in California one day when a man walked up to my dad and called out “Whitey?! How are you?”  (My father had very light blond hair…) He recognized my father from when he was a truck driver, years before in Boston. “Your father knew people everywhere…” she mused. Because she was a hairdresser, she also knew people everywhere, but that did not strike her as unusual. Hairdressers, after all, are the spider in the middle of the web of women in small towns.  

On a sunny afternoon it can take me 45 minutes to walk the ten blocks home from work. I stop and talk to people sitting on porches, walking their dogs, taking a smoke break on the corner…I learn a lot about what is happening in the neighborhood during these chats. When I head downtown, I pass the homeless guys sitting out of the rain. I don’t usually carry money, but we always nod and smile at one another, acknowledging humanity. When I lived in Portland, I always put out the bottles and cans and no one ever bothered our house. When I moved out, it was broken into. My old room mate had kept the deposit cans.

Know your neighbors. Acknowledge their existence.

 

• December 8: Defend Institutions

  One thing I have been working on since I began to engage in local action is defining who’s responsible for a specific action. Landfill? County. Pothole? City—but it also depends on the street.  Report a Problem! Mental health for low income people? County. Tearing down Sunflower House? OSU. Knowing who to talk to makes you more effective. Spending hours at the wrong meeting is just..a waste of time. I try and connect people with the right person who can make the changes they want to see or explain, better than I, why not.

  On Saturday, I had Government Corner, where I sit in the library for two hours and talk with whoever shows up. It can be fascinating. It can also be exhausting; after the school shooting in Florida I had a woman who had lived in Sandy Hook right before the shooting, moved south right before the shooting there, and then came here. We were both a bit freaked out. Right now, we have an elderly man who loves Government Corner and asks about everything. He wanted to know what I thought about school closures.

  “That’s not my jurisdiction,” I told him. “I don’t tell the school board what to do.”

  He was puzzled.

  “I also can’t talk about the landfill. That’s the county. I have opinions, but not all of the facts.”

  “Other councilors (he named names) are talking about the schools,” he told me.

  “They can do what they want,” I replied. “But, as an elected official, I shouldn’t  talk about their choices here. I can talk about the city.”

• December 2: Beware the One Party State

  The last line of this statement talks about engaging in local politics as a way to maintain a healthy democracy.  Benton county has ranked choice voting, so I am a registered member of the Green Party—have been since Ralph Nader!—because I believe in a multitude of political parties, not just two.  Not everyone has ranked choice voting (it can be a challenging sell to voters) but we can all participate in local politics. Showing up is the most important thing you can do to work for change. Sit in the audience, look your elected officials in the eye, and dare them to vote against what you and everyone else in town has been asking for.  I promise you, it matters.

  I am about to head out to a meeting on downtown and economic vitality, if you want to come along. Madison Avenue room at four o’clock. 

• Be wary of paramilitaries.
• Be reflective if you must be armed.

December 3: Remember Professional Ethics

Education around the country is struggling after the pandemic; students are not coming to school as well prepared to learn and we have been making adjustments. However, some of those adjustments are starting to fray in a way that is reminding me that I, too, have professional ethics. When I give students credit in my class, it means that they have made significant progress on their journey to become better readers and writers as well as thinkers. They don’t all start in the same place; they don’t all make the same amount of progress in the time allotted for many reasons; they don’t all go gracefully along the path. But, my professional ethics remind me that a credit means something—progress.  We have many students this year that won’t make progress. It’s not that they can’t do the work—I know what to do to help those students—or they don’t do the work because they are on what I call a Work Strike because they are making  statement to someone about control in their lives. It’s a softer action. Won’t.  They can, but they won’t. There is pressure to drop the bar and push these students over—but, where does that leave us? Their skills stagnate, then fall behind. I’m a grouchy old teacher—they have to show progress to earn credit. I’ll work with you, but I am not going to do it for you. Professional Ethics.

December 1^st: Stand Out.

Standing out means saying what you believe, even if it goes against the popular will or thinking of the group. I am getting good at this—last night, I was the minority vote three times. Once to not raise the city manager’s salary five percent after a 4 percent COLA; second to not send social service funding to the county to distribute; third to establish sanctioned camping spots in town so that people do not have to move every 12 hours. Each time, I was trying to remember the impact of my decisions on the people who have the least money and influence in our community. Not everyone has the “benefit” of being on the city council, but we can all urge our lawmakers to consider the impact of the decisions on the least powerful.

December 5: Be Kind to Our Language (read books)

When I read the extended piece connected to this action it became very clear—this one is easy! Read, rather than watch screens. He had an extended list of very serious books to consider, but, when I was done with this section, I turned to my other bedside read right now, one of Madeline L’Engle’s journals/ stylized reflections. It was a popular style when I was in college and I have been revisiting some of my old favorites this autumn.  In the pages I read last night, she was musing on how all of writing connects to the issues of the day and what the author is wrestling with personally and politically. And then I flashed back onto A Wrinkle In Time.

I checked A Wrinkle in Time out of the school library one afternoon in mid-March, when the world was washed clean and bright. I read through class, stopped for the bus ride home (car sickness is not fun), and finished it before dinner in the back yard. I remember just…inhaling the story.  It was unique, fascinating and deeply metaphysical all at the same time—and there was something about the very awkward Meg that I could relate to. It wasn’t until I reread it to Mark as an adult that I realized both how deeply strange it is, as a story, and how deeply it impacted my thinking. She is wrestling with the ideas of communism and total control of the mind and free will—the the analogy of free will and a sonnet still resonates with me.

Children’s stories are often deeply radical. In them, we learn to be independent and to work together, to love the world, and to stand up against tyranny. It may be time to revisit some of those lessons.

• Believe in truth.

December 11: Investigate

One of the most frustrating things about our news media is the short clip that everyone is fussing about. It’s a couple of minutes long, at most, taken from the middle of a longer meeting and it is almost impossible to track down the original video. I have spent an ridiculous amount of time trying to find the video, say from when the president of South Africa visited the White House and was shown something… but I never watch the entire meeting.  How do I know how accurate the commentary is if I cannot see the primary document?

This weekend, Robert Reich put out a video on Trump’s mental decline. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQHLciC67V8

I like Mr Reich’s work—I have always found him to be thoughtful, well informed, and able to back up his thinking with deep details. And he has a sense of humor. So I thought I would do a bit of fact checking on the video as part of my Investigate action. He has a clip from a “recent” cabinet meeting where the president is musing on the décor of the Oval Office for 15 minutes. Seriously? Was this part of a conversation about the “renovation” of the East Wing? Because there was no date— Mr Reich, we need footnotes on your work!-- I scanned the most recent cabinet meeting using captions and time stamps—to find the conversation.  Not there. I looked at the first video again and noticed a gold tie, so I started searching for cabinet meetings with gold ties. It took about ten minutes, but I found one back in early July where the tie matched. I scanned that one until the end. Victory. There it was. Fifteen minutes of end of the meeting musing on picture frames and the presidents within them (that section could use its own fact checking, but I am not doing that today) and polling the audience about using gold leaf on the corner moldings. Mr Reich was accurate.

It is deeply frustrating to this trained historian to be unable to find the actual work that every pundit is riffing on. Because we are in such a divided and fractious state of affairs, I want to see the original, in context to understand the full picture. And that takes some serious googling. 

December 19: Practice Corporeal Politics

Also known as putting your physical body into the action.

Teachers are not supposed to touch students. We use our bodies in so many ways in the classroom. Some days, I lean over a desk on my hands (thus making myself a little taller) and demand to know what a kid is doing, because clearly they are not doing their work. It’s effective—hundreds of times, over the years, a six foot tall boy has commented when we are walking down the hall “You’re way shorter than I thought.” I’ll sit between two students while we are watching a movie or in a boring assembly in a (often failed) attempt to keep them quiet. If I can’t, and the assembly has gone on for an hour, all three of us have gone for a walk.  Some days, I sit on the chair or the balancing stool at the same level, working my way through a story edit while chaos swirls around us. Other times, I scoot down to look at a kid from below, so that I can see their eyes which is how you know what is actually going on.

 This year, I’ve had some serious melt downs in my room—deep sobs, shaking, I can’t move kinds of meltdowns. I’ll place my hand on the middle of their back, feel them lean into the pressure, and walk them slowly down stairs to the counseling office where they will be both safe and quiet until they can rejoin the class. 

December 12: Maintain a Private Life

In many ways, this one is easy for me, so I am using it on a Friday afternoon at the end of a long week. I do not have a cell phone. I do not want to be traced everywhere I go and connected to the world all of the time. And, on Friday afternoons, after I check my home emails, I shut the computer off until Sunday and take a complete break.  We call it Technology Shabbat. It has made a huge difference in my sanity. This evening, I will be signing off for 36 hours.

• December 7: Contribute to Good Causes

• For people with a bit of money, this is an easy action, although I have long found that my poorest students are often the most generous when we are collecting change for Winter Smiles at CHS. I give money and time regularly. Today, I spent hours working to distribute the boxes of citrus for the League Of Women Voters fund-raiser. Mark and I have maintained the spreadsheet of orders then he manipulated it to organize delivery routes and email addresses to the purchasers. Today, most of the fruit went out. We’ll spend a few more days mopping up the mistakes before we rethink how to do it for next year.

  If you don’t know, the League of Women Voters has been round for over one hundred years, informing people about voter’s rights, candidates, and local and state politics. It is non-partisan, education focused organization. And you don’t have to be a woman to be a member. J

December 15: Learn from peers in other countries.

We had latkes for dinner tonight. We have latkes at some point during Hanukah every year, but it feels a bit more poignant this year, after the shooting in Australia.

The first year I did not go home for Christmas was right after I moved to Portland. I didn’t have a lot of money; taking time off of work during the holiday season is difficult if you are a cook; it was hard to spend quality time with people who were not family because of their work and family schedules.  I went home in February when everyone was thrilled to see anyone new or different, instead. My roommate in Portland was Jewish. We got along well. I learned a great deal from him and his responses to American winter holidays—Christmas was everywhere, he complained. There was no break from it. In Israel, he told me, it was not this way.  He was right—and, every year, when someone at school sets up a tree, I remember his concerns.

One December evening, I was lying on my bed, recovering from work, feeling a bit depressed and exhausted. “It’s Hanukkah” he told me, “Come with me.” Every Friday night, he made a big bowl of hummus and took it to a huge extended family gathering (not his family). They laughed and sang and ate and had a grand time while small children careened around the space just below everyone’s elbows. That night, I went along. I ate latkes with sour cream for the first time and watched the candle lighting ceremony.  They took me in without question. A few nights later, I went back for the eighth night, when they lit a dozen menorahs and put them all out on the porch, blazing against the darkness. And I was there for Christmas Eve.  Someone gave me a Hanukkah mug. It was a warm, welcoming space for a transplanted Transcendental New Englander.  

I m thinking about that warm space this evening, as we eat our latkes and burn two small candles on the table. And I am hoping that we can all live in a world where we take strangers in, not keep them out. 

December 6: Listen for Dangerous Words

Although I usually strive to hear or read an entire passage before passing judgment on what was said (context is everything!) I did not need to her all of the current administration’s rambling at the recent cabinet meeting where he referred to an entire country’s people as “garbage” to take action.

 December 11: Stay Calm When the Unthinkable Occurs

Last night I went to two hour training on ICE Watch that focused on our rights and responsibilities to our community. The room was packed and seriously silent—this felt like essential information.  I don’t feel ready to volunteer as an observer but I do feel better informed on how to act and what to watch for if I stubble into the situation. I hope to be able to remain calm and repeat the key phrases: “I wish to remain silent.” “I do not consent to this search.”  “I wish to have the search conducted by a woman.” And “I would like to speak to an attorney.” 

We also covered what to look for: a count of officers and vehicles, the location and direction of action, the equipment being used, the activity, and to record the entire action.

The last point covered was to Not Spread Rumors. Fact check statements before reposting. This is just good social media practice but reposting something that is not true can cause real harm to people in our community. Stay calm. 

December 14: Be a Patriot

When I was 17, I won a five hundred dollar scholarship from my essay—What is an American? I argued that an American is someone who believes in human rights and freedom and is willing to stand up against authority to defend their rights and the rights of others. The United States was not perfect—it was 1979 and we were in the middle of the Malaise—but we were a work in progress, reaching for the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

I am not sure where I picked up this idea. New Hampshire was not a radical place in the 1970s and my parents, although they questioned authority constantly, where not liberal hippies, but children of the Great Depression and WW II. My U.S. history teacher was very interested in battles and foreign policy; he tolerated my little notes on my quizzes and taught us well, but did not spend any time on social movements. Some of it came from being a throwback musically, as the songs of the late 1960s appealed to me far more that the music I heard on the radio on the bus every morning.  I think some of it came from my love of fantasy and the heroic journey.  But, by the time I wrote that essay, I knew every reference in the Declaration of Independence  and had a pretty solid grasp of the protest movement I had just missed. And, although, I went on to study literature and material culture (food, architecture, clothing) rather than political movements, I still believe in these ideals, that we are, as a country, a work in progress, and that we are constantly striving to become a better place for all of us to live.

I bought a flag this afternoon. It is time to reclaim it. It will be hanging on our porch on significant—to me—dates.

December 16: Take responsibility for the face of the world.

This has been a practice of mine for years. I pick up trash. I toss  used red cups on people’s porches if they do not pick them up after a party. I dig through the trash at school and haul out recyclable and compostable material. So I saved this action for later in the month, when I thought I would need a quick activity. My plan—to return to painting over graffiti on the local mailboxes and electrical boxes in the neighborhood. I mean, even if I agree with it, do we need to see “Fuck ICE” every time we walk down the street? No. I dug out some pale green paint (flay gray is better, but I can’t find any premixed) and surveyed the local spots. Then, the weather changed. Two Atmospheric Rivers converged on the Pacific Northwest. So, it’s not a good day for painting. As soon as it is, though, I am ready.

 

• Be as courageous as you can.

 

December 4: Work Together

I’ve made a few changes—or additions—to the list. Work together is one because I feel like the list is to heavy on individual actions, rather than collective. Together, we can make change. Alone, it is harder.

Last night, I went to a potluck for the Corvallis Sustainability Collation, which has been working on climate education for 19 years. It has been an umbrella organization for dozens of projects and plans in our community and many of the people there have known each other for 20 years. My life has woven in and out of the circle over the years, but it has always been a touchstone of friendship and advocacy. Sitting in the circle last night, I thought of all of the moments when we—people all over the world—have sat in a circle, plates on laps, and worked for change.

December 13: Rituals

This is one of my additions. Rituals ground us in place and community. On Saturday, we are heading to Bald Hill to celebrate Lucia Day with hot cocoa, buns, oranges, a walk, and our friends. It starts at eight AM during the darkest time of the year so it is not for everyone. But people show up, year after year. Ritual ties us together.

 December 20: Believe in the power of community.

For the last 20 days, I have been living within Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. My original plan was to take an action, every day, above and beyond what I already do, that related directly to one of his statements. That proved difficult and the project morphed into a consideration of each statement and what we do on a daily basis to oppose—or support—tyranny in our lives instead. It has provoked some excellent discussions on our walks, so it was a valuable exercise. I recommend it, although, if you want to take action above and beyond, consider what else is happening in our life that month!

But Snyder’s statements and actions are…lonely. They are often Big Picture abstract statements: believe in truth. It is hard to ground them in our lives.

While I was working on this, I listened to three powerful women from our community speak, each from their heart and their work. Each one of them was addressing this same issue: How do we, as human beings in the place and time, stand up to tyranny and fascism? And each had the same answer which is, in some ways, the opposite of Snyder’s. We are not alone. Work together.

Senator Gelser Blouin reminded us that we are a choir, singing together. Sometimes, one person has to hold the note while another takes a breath. It’s ok to both hold the note AND take the breath, she says, because we all need to breathe. We all need to engage and step back. Do both.

Reverend Jen Butler reminded us that we need to come together in community to support the people most in need. It is going to get worse before it gets better and we cannot rely on the government to help us.  All we have is each other.

And, finally, Lorena Reynolds talked about our rights as protesters and citizens. We don’t have to know – or do-- everything in order to step up and do what we can.

So, that is what I am taking away from this season of Advent when I considered the nature of tyranny and resistance. If each of us, every day, steps up in small concrete ways, we will survive. If we don’t we won’t. What world do you all want to live in in 2026 and beyond?