Talking to Strangers

 

                Honors Ninth graders are reading The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. Despite the fact that, as my favorite table observed, “Our parents read her books!”  it’s been a popular for several years.   It is easy language, a solid plot, fairly humorous (although the humor of my favorite scene, where Taylor visits the late-stage hippie house looking for a roommate is lost  in time now), and morally sound. Small acts of heroism and friendship keep us alive, every day. And the discussion of sanctuary and immigration feels very relevant once again. That’s all to come, though. Right now, several of them are pondering the notion that people, in the pre-cell phone world just…talked to strangers. In bars. On the street. In stores.

               

                I read an article in the New York Times, today, about group chats. The author is engaged in many, loves the connections, and was considering all of the different levels of communication involved, for constant to occasional, and what it all meant for communities and society. To be in constant communication with all of your friends, all the time…when she turned her phone off for two hours, she had over 200 chats to read when she returned. She felt positively about the venture.  As someone who has yet to break down and acquire a cell phone, it sounded exhausting. During the course of one class period (95 minutes), I probably process that many different direct requests for attention – both from me and from peers, which I can, for the most part, ignore—but the rhythm of live interactions feels different. More doable.

               

                Yesterday, Mark and I went out for lunch at the local pub on Monroe. We were sitting in our window booth, eating French fries, when a middle aged man slipped into the booth behind Mark. He had the weathered face of someone who spends most of his time outside, a large bag of stuff, and a reflective vest. One of the wait staff greeted him quietly, “Hey Joe, you want a Dr Pepper?” He nodded and sat, peacefully muttering to himself, while he thawed out. Over the course of the next twenty minutes, all of the staff checked in on him. He was clearly a Regular. Right before we moved to leave, he woke up and called to me over the bench.

 “Sorry bout talking to myself,” he said.

“Sometimes that’s the smartest person in the room, “ I replied. He laughed and we exchanged clichés on the weather while we pulled out our gear. Talking to strangers in public places.

               

Heated Mattress Pad

 

Back in late October, I checked a very funky, very opinionated book of permaculture ideas from the local library—Build a Better World in your Backyard. He opined on all sorts of topics: saving urine for fertilizing plants, rocket stoves to heat the house, living with room-mates and hiring a housecleaner if you all cannot agree on standards of cleanliness. It sat on the bench for several weeks and we dipped into it regularly.  It was a fun read.

One of his theories was that you should keep your house pretty chilly and heat the locations where you spend most of your time to save energy. He had invested in a heating pad to rest his feet on under  his desk and an incandescent bulb to light his reading space because the heat from the bulb kept him warm as well.  Mark quickly picked up on the heating pad for the bed; the author does not heat the bedroom but does a prewarm of the bed each night.  Mark has been complaining for years about how cold our bedroom—and the bed—are. He has been known to wrap himself up in enough layers to survive the Alaska backcountry to read for half an hour in before falling asleep and his grumbles have been getting louder this year.

So, when I received not one but two Amazon gift cards, I broke down and ordered a heated mattress pad. It came a few days before Christmas and we put it on the bed when we changed the sheets.  I turned it on for about ten minutes before bed and…it is lovely. Relaxing. Comforting. Warm.  It may be better than a heated car seat.  We are thrilled.

Gratitude

 

We are moving into the time of Advent, the darkest time of the year. On Halloween, we put our gardens to bed with the guardians we carve out of pumpkins and lose out the time of the year for growth. There is a long still time before the seed catalogs come out. The first half of this six week stretch is a deep breathing of stillness, usually punctuated by some cold, bright nights. We burrow in. And then, after Thanksgiving, we move towards waiting for the return of the light. I often use this time for specific daily actions. One year, I took an extra step for preventing climate change and wrote about it. Another  year I used the Beat idea “Be in Love with Yr Life" and remembered everything I love about my life here in this corner of the world.

This year, I am thinking about gratitude. Despite some rough patches is year, I am so much to be grateful for in my life.  Thinking about something every day—and writing it down—will help my focus on all of the light in my life and fight the darkness.

 

December 1:  My physical therapist, Maggie, who, in the course of several months, pulled all of the nerves and muscles that had jammed together when I fell on the ice apart, allowing me to walk fast and confident, again.

December 2: Unity Shelter, which works, with great grace and focus, to shelter the most vulnerable in our community.  It is a constant battle to survive.

December 3: Local cinema that shows Monty Python and the Holy Grail on rainy Sunday afternoons.

December 4: I am grateful, tonight, for community-- for everyone who shows up at council meetings to speak, observe, and be present.

December 5: I am grateful for...Snapchat, which allows students to see where their friends are and then call them and put them on speakerphone so that they can explain that they were too tired to come to English class.

They find the thought that I might join snapchat and allow my location to be seen with a little avatar very entertaining.

December 6: The ritual of holiday cards, like small shouts of love across the miles. We make our own and send them across the country.

 December 7: I am grateful for tiny people, who walk around their preschool garden in one piece rain outfits with traffic cones on their heads. Gnomes!

December 8: I am grateful for SAFE Corvallis happy hour(s) when there are so many bike helmets they spread onto neighboring tables until the very patient waiter asks us to move them.

December 9: I am grateful for our Lucia Day ritual-- wake up at 6:30 to bake the rolls, then meet friends at Bald Hill to break bread and sip cocoa before climbing the muddy trail up to the view over our beloved valley. Rain, snow, sun-- this Saturday, we are there.

December 10: I am grateful for our crockpot which cooks the best beans ever while we sleep or go for a hike.

December 11: I am grateful for our local farmers, who feed us even in the middle of winter.

December 12:I am grateful for fire drills on sunny afternoons, even when the reason we are standing out there forever is because one of MY students did not listen at the beginning of class when I told them where to gather, wandered off, and had to be called on his phone and talked in to the correct location.

December 13: I am grateful for small holiday rituals on dank nights: winter lights on porches, small trees and menorahs in windows, and latkes for dinner.

December 14: I am grateful for Ilene McClelland, who organizes the It's Lit bike ride every year, when we light up our bikes and ride around the neighborhoods.

December 15: I am grateful for Winter Break.

December 16: I am grateful for Government Corner, Sat. morning at the public library. You never know who will show up to talk with you so it is a pretty perfect example of Democracy in action.

It would be a little better if I was not backed up to the water fountain when some slurper decided to gargle over the bubbler.

December 17: I am grateful for long quiet walks in the December woods.

December 18: I am grateful for the sacred pause right before a meeting begins.

Describing Climate Doom

 

Mark and I were talking about Climate Change this morning. It’s not an unusual topic of conversation around here. I am always wondering what I need to say or do to have people take the issue seriously and make profound changes.

                “I don’t think we are doomed,” Mark said.  “Human being are not going to be totally wiped off the face of the planet.  That’s just not possible.”

                “ I don’t think so either,” I agreed. “I just think we are going to go back to the Dark Ages. No energy, very little food, no medical care…”  It was kind of a revelation; we had never really tried to quantify or describe what Doom looks like. The Dark Ages—we could both agree on that.  But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that, in Europe and The United States, it might look more like Ukraine, right now, going into the second winter of the war. Or Maybe France during World War II. Or any other war torn country. Very limited fuel. Bombed out buildings. Restricted  food, mostly locally produced. Poor health care. Tainted soil and air.  Add in drug resistant viruses so basic infections are no longer curable and nowhere to go that is not in the same situation. There will be no escape. James Kunstler called it the Long Emergency.   That sounds like Doom to me.

                Then I continued with the thought experiment. What if we all lived with the same consumption patterns as people in the early 1950s, but with the newer, more efficient technology?   Average house size was about 1400 square feet, rather than 2200. That’s half the space to heat, cool, maintain, and fill with stuff. There were 380 cars per thousand people in the U.S. in 1955; 808 per 1000 in 2012, when the chart ends.  Regular people did not fly for vacations. If my Betty Crocker cookbook—and my mother’s cooking—are any indication, people ate meat, potatoes, and a veg for dinner almost every night. Mostly fresh, some frozen. But portion size was much less. Gong out for a meal was a special occasion. People had fewer clothes, coats, pairs of shoes, toys and bikes. But this was not a time of deprivation; consumerism was just ramping up after the war.   But the life style, just by scale of home and not flying, is less than half of a carbon footprint today.

 We can do this. We just have to want to.  

               

 

Winter Veg

 

Last weekend, we walked up to the Fill Your Pantry event at the Benton County fairgrounds. The place was buzzing with people picking up preorders of beans, grains, and veggies, as well as adding to their pile while eating samples of winter foods.  We dodged a downpour and came home with about 30 pounds of dried beans (our winter stores) and a poster that tells us to Eat Our Winter Veggies! For the fridge.

We don’t really need to be exhorted to eat winter veggies, especially local ones…we have potatoes stored under the basement steps, squashes and onions in the larder, canned tomatoes and salsas on the shelf, and dried fruit in jars. I made a batch of sauerkraut from a huge head of cabbage last Tuesday evening; it is fermenting on the top of the refrigerator.  There are still leeks and parsnips in the garden, as well as some volunteer mustards.  We buy our greens and other veg from Sunbow every week.  We are ready.

 We eat our local winter veg  first because it tastes better than summer food driven  in from the other side of the world. A fresh head of kales and mustard is alive in a way that a pale winter tomato will never be. It is also better for our planet; we are not shipping what is essentially water  thousands of miles. And it supports the local economy. We know the people who have grown our food and we know where they are spending their money close to home.  There is also the challenge to menu planning from what is at hand and how that ties us to the seasons. We eat asparagus until it is done then wait for next year.  Broccoli and cauliflower come and go several  in the course of the year.  We eat zucchini until we are bored but embrace it very early summer when it comes around again.

So it is time to shift, again, to winter foods. There are beans  for soup in the crockpot.  New bread. Cauliflower waiting to be chopped and roasted for dinner this evening.  Winter veg.

November Begins

         

On Halloween night, Mark and I opened the doors to the dark time of the year, but we placed our guardians around the place for protection. We started with serious local food for dinner: a quiche with leeks and apples from our yard, salad from Sunbow, and a peach pie to finish up the peaches Mac delivered to our doorstep back in August. While everything baked, we carved our pumpkins—elaborate faces for the door guardians and flowers and swirls for the garden spirits. I lit a fire using the branches of a tree we had taken down in September; it was the first fire on the hearth for this winter. After dinner, I shuffled the tarot deck to pull, yet again, the Five of Wands, which encourages me to focus my energies.

Since then, we have been bringing in food for the winter—dried beans, onions, wheat and flour—to add to the stock already in the basement. I grew enough squash to carry us through the winter; there are canned tomatoes, jams, and cider on our basement shelves and potatoes under the stairs. Today, we put the woodpiles into order, finally sorting the wood into fireplace and stove, small, medium and large pieces with the oldest, driest wood on top. Slowly, we are settling in for the winter, bringing our basement life, at least, into order.

Hard Frosts

 

I love a hard frost in Late October. One day, the cucumber vines are struggling along…maybe one more cucumber? Maybe? And the next—nope. We are done. Move on, people. Summer is over.

This year, we knew the cold snap was coming so we prepared. I went out and harvested the last beans and cucumber (there WAS one more!) in a misty rain early this week. We put up our new heavier curtains over the south windows in the living room to keep drafts off of our necks. We washed and hung the storm windows, making the house winter quiet. Mark walked in two nights ago with the last candy roaster squash in his hands. “I thought I may as well bring it in,” he said. “The vine is dead.” We bought bird seed for the winter. I pulled the extra blankets onto the bed. The cat even decided to come in and sleep on our heads until it was too chilly and she moved under the covers. We even did the laundry and hung it outside to dry because the clouds were gone

Saturday morning, we woke up to a changed world. The sun was brilliant; the sky deep blue. Sheets flapped on the line. It was 47 degrees in the house so we turned on the heat (I try ad hold out until November). All of the summer vines had wilted overnight. We spent the afternoon at Finley, admiring the new green grass and the dying leaves, the egrets and herons, the snakes and wooly bear caterpillars.  Sunday afternoon, I cleared up the garden, getting the beds cleared of fences, hoses, and dying plants so the space is clear for the coming leaf drop.

When the clouds break and we can see the full moon tangling in the branches of our trees, we remember just how far north we are—beyond Calais Maine! Halfway between the North Pole and the equator! – and how short the days will soon be. We reach towards the sun, knowing the clouds and rain will be back. But, right now, the world is clear and bright.