Bee Pollen In January!

It was warm and sunny on Sunday afternoon, so I went out back to check on the flowering hazelnut catkins. The catkins first appear on the trees in late November, tight like pinecones in mid-summer, and slowly lengthen through December and January, when they develop tiny bright magenta blooms and shed pollen everywhere. These blooms are a sign of spring in the back yard, so I was hunting. While I stood on the garden bed bridge, studying the tree, a bee landed on my arm. I looked at her twice—she had saddlebags full of pollen! It’s January, I thought—where is this coming from? Then I looked up into the hazelnut tree rising above the hive and watched the long catkins moving slightly in the breeze and saw bees dancing among the branches, culling pollen from the tree. Food in January—my hive will be around to pollinate the fruit trees this year.

The quince bush is blooming. The rhubarb is just unfurling a leaf. One primrose is budding. Snowdrops are open in the front yard. Spring is on the way.

Emergency Rations

What do we eat when there is nothing in the house and we are too tired to go out?

When I was living with my mother, our emergency food was frozen cheese ravioli with Ragu sauce from a jar (the plain variety, nothing fancy added), and hot Italian sausage. It was always around in the freezer and on the shelf, fast, and easy. You could even leave out the sausage if you wanted, as I did when I turned vegetarian, much to my mother’s dismay. There was something lovely about the way the pasta poofed up in the boiling water, how neatly there were divided into two bites, and how easy they were to chew. Exactly what we needed.

When I moved out of my mother’s house, I discovered ramen noodles, pretty gross on their own, but. If you add in frozen peas and corn and some finely diced carrot, you have a decent meal. For years, when I was eating alone, I turned to this soup when I could not wrap my brain around anything else. Later on, I discovered a fairly nasty, but delicious, substitute—steam a bunch of veggies, cook some noodles well, and throw them all on a bowl with a ton of grated cheddar and tamari. It was a guilty secret that I only shared with one person, camping in the White Mountains. She also loved it.

For a long while, my standard was roasted veg—usually potatoes—or a fancy potato chip, when I sliced the potato thinly, rather than in chunks, before I threw it in the oven. Lightly salted, I felt like I had eaten when I came home at nine o’clock at night, having taught adult GED classes after student teaching in the high school all day. My first year of teaching—tuna noodle casserole, truly a low point in my kitchen. Why would anyone eat tuna noodle casserole?!

Now, what do we eat? When I’m alone, I like Welsh Rabbit—cheese melted on bread—and steamed veggies, falling back on the old frozen pea/corn standards. If I feel fancy, I throw some tomato chutney under the bread. When Mark is around, we turn to Annie’s Mac and Cheese and a jar of home-canned green beans, maybe with a jar of homemade canned peaches for desert. Or I’ll grab a jar of roasted tomatoes from Sunbow last summer from the basement shelf, pick up an onion from the larder on the way up the stairs, and stretch it out with olives, or broccoli, and cheese, whatever is around. Once or twice a year, we eat French toast for dinner, with maple syrup. Oh yeah…

The goal has always been, fast, filling, and light on the dishes. It usually totally throws off all of my calculations—no left overs for lunch the next day, no local produce, lots of fat and salt and cheese—but that is, somehow the point. Especially, if, while digging though the freezer for the frozen peas, you find some ice cream that also needs to be eaten, way in the back corner….

Compost

Composting is Hot in Corvallis right now. There are classes in How To Compost, delivered by Composting Gurus. They describe how to build the three bin system, complete with a cover, how to layer brown and green materials, what kitchen scraps can and cannot be thrown into the system—no fats, no meats, no oils, no cheeses….There are restaurants that are buying compostable plates and bowls and cutlery, probably because there is a business in town experimenting with these wares—they had a huge compost pile out at Sunbow this summer, experimenting with how long it would take for the stuff to break down. (the plates are gone in a few weeks, the cutlery sticks around for months.) You can even compost in your yard waste cans!

When I first met Mark, he was living in an apartment on Belmont street in Portland, furnished with a futon on the floor, a folding table, and an old couch left by a previous tenant. He was not planning on staying and wanted to travel light, but, while he was in Portland, he wanted to raise some red wiggler worms, which eat your food scraps. After consulting Worms Eat My Garbage, he bought a tub, drilled some holes in the bottom for drainage, ordered a pound of worms, and set up the bin in his kitchen. The bin quickly filled up with food scraps layered with newspaper, just like the book said. The worms migrated from food source to food source, clearly preferring easy to digest stuff like oatmeal scraps and damp bread to orange rinds and greens. After a few weeks, they laid egg sacks and a new generation began. It was pretty cool to watch. However, it was also the ideal conditions for fruit flies and I came over one day to find him vacuuming the flies out of the air in desperation. He moved soon after and set the bin on the back patio, where the worms continued to munch his table scraps for two more years.

Five years later, we bought our house and placed the compost ring back by the fence, near the garden and away from the house (in my last rental, it lived under the bedroom window…). That was fine until the rains began and I stepped into about six inches of ice cold water in the dark one evening. I moved it the next day. In the spring, we built a traditional, recommended compost bin, three sections, each about two and a half feet square, out of scrap wood and wire. The idea was, one section held the new material, the next was used to turn the scraps into to increase aerobic activity (no smell), and the last held finished mulch, waiting to be used. We laid slabs of the old sidewalk in front of it to keep down the mud. It worked. I could stand on the frame to use the compost turning tool, which made my neighbor rather nervous whenever he saw me from his driveway, especially as the wood began to rot and it was less stable. But, it was a pain. It was never quite big enough to heat up. The wires caught on the pitchfork. The chickens loved it, but they were constantly tossing the material two or three feet out of the bin. We had a resident rat.

This summer, the three bins finally collapsed. I was on top of one of them when they began to go, but survived. We considered our options… rebuilding larger bins? Those stackable frames like Paul has in his back yard? Purchase a black plastic container, so the rat couldn’t get in? “I like the hoop system, “ I suggested. ”It’s simple.“ We went to Robnett’s and bought enough wire to create a hoop three feet around along with some clips to hold it shut. Mark dumped all of the compost that was strewn around by the chickens, along with some cardboard and old rotten wood, into it. We added some bruised and wormy apples for moisture. Three days later, the pile was hot. A week later, Mark opened it up, moved it over to the open patch, and turned the reduced and steaming pile in. The chickens gathered around and ate the bugs left behind. Simple. Efficient. Neat. Cheap! What’s not to like. So that is our system right now. We do a little kitchen presort—carrot tops and old apples to the bunny, dead bread to the chicken coop, but most of the scraps are either thrown on the bare ground where the wire will be soon, so the chickens (as well as possum and probably rat) can eat them. Masses of veggie garden plants and cuttings are thrown into the bin, with scraps—including cheese—and whatever I rustle up from the side of the road. Flower garden trimmings are mulched in place (i.e. dropped into other garden bed where they came from…). It is simple. It works. And I don’t risk my neck balancing on rotting wood to turn it in the winter….

The Two Faces of Yule

Yule, which encompasses New Year’s Day, traditionally has two faces—there is the open to the world, celebrate, eat lots of food, see everyone you know face, which is the popular conception of the season—but there is also the inward-looking, coming out of darkness, evaluating the past year, asking for forgiveness aspect of the season, which our culture often forgets about, to our detriment. We spent the first week of Winter Break in the public realm, visiting with everyone, eating way too many baked goods (apple-cranberry pie, two rounds of stollen, whole wheat anise cookies, a plate of food from our neighbor who can bake!), not a day unscheduled. It was great! This week, we moved into the back side of the season, the private realm. After Amy left on Monday afternoon, we had nothing scheduled for the rest of the week (which is practically unheard of in my schedule book—just ask Mark). It’s been a week of long walks, staring into space, considering life and the pile of ninth grade debate papers I collected the week before Break (notice I did not say grading the papers…), working on a puzzle which I think is missing pieces, knitting a sweater, reading John Irving’s newest novel and various other books from a library cruise, and contemplating the disaster of a decade we just lived through. Today, I’m going to bring out the Territorial Seed Catalog and begin browsing tomatoes.

Winter Solstice

I woke up just at dawn on the Solstice this year and lay in bed with Lucy The Purr, waiting for the house to grow light enough to see in the kitchen; we don’t turn on lights or the radio on Solstice Day, so there is no point in hopping out of bed. The sky was a pale grey green. The house was silent. When it was light, I climbed out of bed and made oatmeal with dried apples and honey—all from within ten miles of home. After breakfast, I cleaned out the chicken coop and rabbit hutch, then harvested the last of the fall salad greens from the cold frame. All that is left is some slug-munched lettuce and a lot of vigorous weeds. The garden beds are dormant—not covered in snow, but leaves. I suppose I could coax some more greens out of the earth, but my energy shifts inward—literally and figuratively—when school begins. Dormant is good.

After lunch, we headed for Finley Wildlife Refuge for our traditional walk along the Mill Hill trail, tied in with over The Woodpecker Loop—about five miles, total, over all of the diverse ecologies of the refuge. The sun was out—a rare sight in December, but there were some clouds backed up on the hills near the refuge. Some years, we have been drenched on this walk. I clearly remember taking off my old rainpants once because they were cold and clinging to my legs. “I’d rather be wet!” I yelled when Mark (in well-treated pants) asked what I was doing. That year, water was streaming down the trail and puddling several inches deep in the low spots. This year, it was a gentle trickle down the middle of the path. It grew dark quickly under the trees and we could hear drips all around us, but it did not rain. When we broke out of the woods to the upper oak savannah near the end of the walk, the sun was shining on the snow covered Cascade foothills across the valley and we could see the Three Sisters as darker grey mounds against the far clouds.

We came home just before dark. As the light dimmed and I could no longer read, I fell asleep, furry beast of a cat on my lap, purring. Mark startled us all awake half an hour later, when the outside lights came on. It was time for the Solstice Night rituals—a fire with a piece of last year’s tree, which we grandly call a Yule Log, even though it’s more like a Yule Stick. Dinner from nearby foods—pumpkin, tomato, and pinto bean soup this year—and an apple cranberry pie. Planting paper whites which will bloom around Twelfth Night. Listing the highlights of the year and establishing goals for the next. Reading a section of A Christmas Carol aloud. We do all of this by candle light, quietly. The night moves more slowly without the radio, without being able to plunge into a book for several hours.

Before we went to bed, I slipped out to check on the chickens and close them in for the night. The moon was out, slipping in and out of a thin cloud cover. The backyard was bright. The sky dark. The cats followed me and chased each other around, thrilled to have a person out with them at night. George, our elderly chicken, talked in her sleep as I swung the door down and I could here the other two shifting softly on the perch. Everyone was fine. For a moment I stood, watching the moon, surrounded by the dormant gardens. The Earth paused, shifted, and moved, once again, towards the light of summer.

When Mark and I converted the garage to a dining room, I created a little space…

The stairs to the basement, which are in the garage, had a gap between the stairwell and the outside about four feet wide and six feet long. An awkward space, but there was a window in the outside wall and, when we first moved in, an old washing machine rested there that the cat loved to sit on to view the world. When I cleaned out the washer, I built the cat door into the window, with a perching shelf inside and out. So, when the conversion time came around, I had an idea. If a shelf was built up near the window and the wall for the room built about the stair wall, we could have an enclosed window seat, with storage underneath (which is a different story). Then, if a little kid came for dinner, after we finished eating, she could climb into the window seat, read and dream, and eavesdrop on the grown-up conversation without ever being kicked out of the room, because everyone would forget that she was there. My childhood dream space. (I was kicked out a lot when my cousins squealed on me…)

It worked. It is, some days, my favorite aspect of our new room. There’s an old futon, a pile of pillows, several blankets, a hanging light, and a windowsill to rest a tea mug on. One window looks out into the yard. Another lets light through to the stairwell and looks back into the house. The space above reaches up to the peak of the garage, which keeps it from feeling claustrophobic. You can still see the old wiring for the house in the peak. When we first finished the space, I graded papers there, but I quickly realized that that was a Bad Idea, so, now there are rules for being in The Nook: No grading or school related thinking. No Major, Meaningful Conversations—the neighborhood, our relationship, the state of the world are all banned. No list making. Napping is okay. So is staring into space, reading, or worshipping a cat. When you leave, take your mug and turn off the light. Kayli, our fluffy casual cat, has The Nook down. She’ll do a bit of kitty cleaning yoga, then curl up in the blankets for a long nap, only rising when she needs a snack. She is our role model.

Winter Break is coming in two days. I plan on having lots of Nook Time for the next two weeks. But, we’ll share. There is room for two—plus two cats—if you are willing to squish in a bit.

Red Cups

“High school English Teacher Arrested for Trespass,” Mark muttered to me as I ran to catch up with him. He likes to try and scare me with possible headlines when I do something illegal, hoping to dissuade me. It never works. For someone who believes in anarchy, he is exceptionally law-abiding….And I wasn’t doing anything really bad—I was cleaning up the neighborhood.

Until l a few years ago, when the Idiot Fraternity moved into our neighborhood, I had a live and let live attitude towards college student drinking. It was part of the college experience. Just don’t drive, or have unprotected sex, and I didn’t really care. Then I was kept up for three weeks straight by their beer-pong games and bellowing and my frame of mind shifted to a Let Me Sleep or I’m Calling the Cops attitude. It was at this same time that I developed my antipathy towards the big red beer pong cups that were littering my neighborhood. After a fierce game, they were spread all over the yard and no one ever picked them up. The piles grew larger and larger, suggesting more and more drinking games. Trashy!

One day, while stomping to school at 7 AM, after calling the cops at 1 AM, I snapped. I Gathered up the cups and flung them at the offending house’s door. They spilled over the porch. Humpmph, I thought and moved to the next mess. Pick and toss, pick and toss…No cups were left in my path. On my way home, I noticed that they were all gone. And they didn’t come back the next weekend. The red cups were not new every week—they were leftovers from parties months before. I spread out; coming home from the movies, I pitched several beer boxes and bottles onto another porch, while Mark kept walking, pretending not to know me. A few days later, I pulled an offending couch out of the parking strip and back into the yard of the owner before calling the Code Enforcement officer. And it worked. With the exception of one very trashy house with a cracked foundation, the block was cleaner. Simple.

Now, I just have to trespass about once a month. Mark still mutters at me when I catch up with him, but he’s resigned. So, if you’re in a house with red cups in the yard and hear something hitting the porch, it’s just me, on a rampage once again. Throw them in the recycling on the way out….and call the GT. I’d love to be in the paper again.