Merry Christmas. May there be peace on Earth, especially in South Sudan.
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Christmas 2013
Category: Home Life
Historical category no longer used.
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Christmas Eve 2013
LAKE MACBRIDE— Sixteen degrees below zero on Christmas Eve morning and the furnace just ignited. The Internet connection is down, but there is phone service to connect us to the world as the coffee steams and the laptop glows along with the colored lights of our decorated Christmas tree. The sound of the dishwasher creates noise that muffles the outside. Now the water softener cycles, adding to the score. And then the furnace turns off, having warmed the thermostat to 60. It seems quiet as memory reminds me it should be this day, despite the symphony of sight, sound and touch.
Ours is a small family, spread around the country. We have never had a Christmas holiday where we needed to do more than set up a card table or two away from the grown-ups. No card tables needed today. Do people even have card tables any longer? No travel plans, so I took a nap. After waking, the Internet connection was up and so was the sun. A brilliant day to be thankful for our many blessings and to make contact with friends and loved ones. There is more contact in the era of telephones, social media and Skype than previously, especially when it is too cold to go outside unless one is required to do so by work or trade.
Yesterday I made a batch of shortbread cookies― a contribution to holiday treats. Regardless of what we cook at home, Christmas gifts add to the edible bounty, with a fruitcake from Mother and some apple butter from a friend. Having enough to eat has never been a problem in our household, and the festive fare won’t last long. One batch of cookies is enough this year, although since writing the first sentences of this paragraph, I took a bag of rhubarb out of the freezer and made rhubarb crisp for dessert.
This year I left the lump of coal in the bin with other unused Christmas ornaments. It was a joke gift and except for 2013, it has been under our tree every year. Not this year. We’ve all been naughtier than we should and nicer than we thought. No need to joke about it. We just need to be better after this day of rest and quiet.
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After the Winter Solstice
LAKE MACBRIDE— Snow weighed upon the blue spruce and pin oak trees begging someone to shake it loose so the branches won’t break. That someone is me. It snowed between four and five inches overnight, framing up several hours of outdoors work to add to the plans for decorating the house for Christmas and baking a batch of cookies. Today, with its simple pleasures and honest work, may be one of the best days this year.
Having done my tour of duty on the Salisbury Plain, memories are scant. I stayed at a youth hostel, and made visits to Salisbury, Bath and Stonehenge. Another traveler, who spent the previous few weeks wandering about the moorland of southwest England, invited me to accompany him. I declined. It sounded too much like Iowa, and a bit dreary. I bought a post card at the Stonehenge gift shop and worked my way from the chalky plateau to the chalk cliffs of Dover and then to Calais, where my journal of Salisbury and England was pinched with my backpack after crossing the channel in a hovercraft.
I never looked back on England, and don’t understand the fascination with Stonehenge at the winter solstice. It is an old thing, shrouded in lost history. I’m more thankful that the days start getting longer, and planning for 2014 can begin in earnest.
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Retro Saturday
LAKE MACBRIDE— Vague recollection of Saturday morning trips to downtown Davenport have been haunting me of late. It’s the holiday season, and the stillness of the house leaves a perfect canvas against which memory paints images of days gone by. Trips to the newspaper to pay my paper route bill, a stop at Parker’s Department store to dine on automat food heated under a reddish light bulb, to Petersen’s, Woolworth, W.T. Grant, Hanssen’s Hardware, and a stop at the Source Book Store. The latter being the only business still there, now run by the son of the founder.
There were places to eat. A lunch counter at Woolworth, the Griddle where my grandmother cooked and served lunch, Bishop’s Buffet, The Tea Room, and others, I suppose. Over the course of youth, I tried them all.
There were three movie theaters, the RKO Orpheum, the Capitol and the State. My classmates would go shoplifting in the downtown and then meet up for a $0.35 movie and swap stories, men’s cologne and other plunder. They didn’t view themselves as criminals, and with time, they grew out of it. I didn’t join them for fear I would get caught.
Now my Saturdays are much different. The day began with work proofreading the newspaper, followed by a series of errands. A drive to Oxford to meet up with a farmer, a trip to the orchard to pickup some apples and chat with the staff one last time this year, and a trip to the farm where I worked for news and another chat. It was not retail outlets I sought, but people I knew or wanted to get to know. And that’s the difference in my life today.
After the farm I went to the public library and brought home an armload of books, and a jelly jar full of hot chocolate mix. I cooked a dinner of stir-fried tofu and vegetables served over rice for the two of us. I opened a bottle of wine and had enough to taste it. The beer from summer is all gone.
What if memories of youth had been something other than shopping and going downtown on Saturdays? Why do those memories play now? What I’d rather do is live now, in the world constructed from my new life with practical farmers. In a society where government seems corrupt and bankrupt of morals, and shopping for necessities is all we can afford. Where splurging means buying a new book on Amazon.com, getting a slice of pizza at the gas station, or making holiday cookies at home. The commerce of life seems least interesting to me now.
Yet these memories of Davenport play. I can’t escape them, they are part of me. I’ll let them play against the screen a while more, until leaving the house for a round of Sunday morning work and what new adventures might be found outside of memory.
LAKE MACBRIDE— So begins the quiet time. Snow covers the ground, temperatures are well below freezing, and life turns inward toward family and friends, and reading, writing and cooking, as we approach the winter solstice. Somewhat spontaneous, and upon us all at once, there is practiced ritual to help us make it through the days.
Since making the last CSA delivery during Thanksgiving week, these days have also been a time of recuperation. The year’s physical labor was not without its toll. Tendons, ligaments and connective tissue are not as flexible as they once were, so despite a cautious approach to work, I have been a bit sore. Recovery is well under way, but I don’t recall that aspect of life from previous holiday seasons. Who knew naproxen sodium and skin moisturizer would become as prevalent as Christmas greetings and holiday lights?
Today, I’ll write and mail the fundraising letter for a social group. I’ll read a book, and plan for next year. There are a few errands in the hopper as we move toward the weekend. Then there will be the bustle of house cleaning, and decorating from the boxes of stored memories kept below the stairwell. One can get lost in the pattern and there is a yearning to do so because of its comfort and familiar warmth.
A time to let go of ambition and desire, and to return to being native.
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After the Shuffle
LAKE MACBRIDE— Having a headache rots. Having one on Saturday rots more. Last Saturday, my headache was bad enough to cancel the whole day’s schedule with the exception of working at the newspaper. That wasn’t the worst of it.
Something happened to shuffle my memory, creating chunks and particles that float before my mind’s eye like the colored shapes in a kaleidoscope. As it happens, I try to recognize the bits and pieces. They are familiar, but disjointed from whatever associations may have existed. The sense is they are important, but maybe not. It has been a weird few days since then.
Whatever it was, Saturday stands as a line between my past and what will be— something I need more than want. We all cling to memories and forget they serve our future, not nostalgia for days of yore. It was a clean cut, enabling a fresh approach to each day’s endeavors. Yet the bits and pieces persist.
The effect has been to concentrate on creating well considered cultural objects: writing, food, trips in the car, segments of time spent with others. One fears, and to some extent welcomes, the idea we only live once and had better make the best of it. That is where I’m finding myself today.
Whatever was lost on Saturday may not be found, and it’s time to let go and move on after the shuffle.
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50 Years Later
LAKE MACBRIDE— The school crossing guard at Fillmore and Locust told me President Kennedy had been shot on my way back to school. I don’t recall walking the last block, but upon arriving at the sixth grade classroom, our teacher pulled down the window shades while we waited for news.
In the fifty years since, this memory persisted, with immediacy, and its uncertainty. I’m still don’t understand what it meant or what it means.
The crossing occurred three blocks from where I was born, a block and a half from where my mother had just served lunch, and a couple of hundred feet from the Catholic church where my parents wed, my grandmother had worked, and where I was baptized, confirmed and attended my father’s funeral. A couple of hundred feet ahead was the duplex where as a toddler I visited my maternal grandmother. That neighborhood was at the core of who I was.
I don’t recall much from the rest of sixth grade, after which we attended school in the new building, and experienced the first of many renderings. I was placed in a classroom with the group of kids who were bound for college, and separated from most of my neighborhood friends. In high school we were rent further as the boys were separated from the girls. After high school, we belonged to the world, and college, and I left not knowing I was also leaving Davenport for good. None of it had anything to do with the Kennedy assassination, and I’ve known that all along.
50 years later I attended an event in the county seat where a local author, the owner of an independent bookstore, one of my graduate school professors and someone else spoke about the day Kennedy died. Familiar icons were mentioned, and the bookstore had a table full of JFK books for sale outside the room. That hour provoked this post, and that seems okay. Because without the noon event, I would not likely have thought of President Kennedy at all today, as I had long ago moved on, almost forgetting how simple life was then.
LAKE MACBRIDE— With the Thanksgiving holiday upon us, thoughts turn to turkey in a lot of households. Unlike during most of our vegetarian holidays, I am dealing with 100 locally grown, free range slaughtered birds tomorrow. Along with others, we are taking delivery from a local farm, sorting and weighing, and preparing them for delivery in the CSA shares next week. I’ve never been a dead (or live) turkey wrangler before, so despite the implications, I am looking forward to a new experience.
We see a lot of wild turkeys near our home. Mostly, they browse in the field near the lane to the highway, or are seen flying over the road. For those of us that remember when Iowa turkeys were an endangered species, it is always a happy sight. But enough turkey talk.
If the farm work has been winding down, it comes to a halt after delivering the final shares on Tuesday. We’ll settle up and settle in for winter. That it’s snowing as I write this post is a sign of the time of year. Confronted with the end of year holidays, it’s time to take stock of home life and work life, and make plans. This year’s planning will be as important as in any previous year.
Home life is patterned by habits formed over a lifetime: more indoor work— cooking, cleaning, writing and reading— and the part of work life devoted to research and development— studying opportunities and determining viability. As with most who live an alternative lifestyle, funding cash flow during 2014 will be a pressing issue, although I am not yet willing to sell plasma to do so.
If 2013 was anything, it was an experiment in lowly paid work, first in a warehouse, assembling kits for Whirlpool, and then on a number of farms. What I’ve found is my aging frame can take the work, but there are limits to how the tendons and muscles can tolerate increased physical activity. I am optimistic about performing physical work in more active jobs.
That said, I don’t plan to return to the warehouse, even though they invited me to return when the farm season was finished. The pay was low, and the social networking not good enough to distill further benefit. So what’s next? That’s the question for answering during the next few weeks. There are ideas, but no plans yet. I am thankful for the ability to be in this position as the snow falls and winter approaches.
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Random Notes on a Saturday Morning
LAKE MACBRIDE— Politicians glom on to veterans like there is no tomorrow. Veterans vote, we live in society, and most of us served and left the military behind without comment or regret. Politicians should work to reduce the number of veterans we are creating as a society, rather than glomming onto our service for political reasons. That could be their service, and the nation would be grateful.
The newspaper work is finished for today. The focus will be on home work. The atmosphere is calm, so the brush pile can be burned, preparing a space for planting garlic tomorrow or next week. There are lots of apples for processing into applesauce, apple crisp and maybe some dehydrated apples. That is, once the dried herbs in the dehydrator are removed and cleaned. The last of the fresh tomatoes will be turned into a pot of chili for supper. There are more turnip greens for soup stock, and a drawer full of root vegetables in the refrigerator— plus whatever else is harvested today. There is a whole afternoon of kitchen work.
Having gone to town this morning I hope to remain on the property, or within walking distance. Maybe once the brush is burned, I’ll take a walk on the lake trail, but no further. It’s what’s called living, and we don’t do enough of it. And it’s time to get on with it.
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Daily Chronicle — Autumn Catch-up
LAKE MACBRIDE— Since July, my agenda has been packed with paid and unpaid work. As autumn yields to winter, I found myself working twelve days straight. Feeling similar to how I felt after returning to garrison after long periods of military field work, I’m making time to take care of basic necessities, and have created this chronicle of how things went.
3 a.m.— Rise, make coffee, read messages and articles, write emails, daily planning.
5 a.m.— Breakfast of pancakes with apple butter on top.
5:30 a.m.— Read the rest of The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan.
7:05 a.m.—Rearrange cupboard above the refrigerator (clean off thick layer of dust on top). Organize shelf stable goods in the pantry.
9:16 a.m.—Create work space in garage and downstairs.
9:45 a.m.— Pick up paychecks and empty canning jars, chat with two of my favorite farmers, take recycling to Iowa City, get groceries at North Dodge HyVee.
11:47 a.m.— Lunch, start dish washer.
12:32 p.m.— Scan paychecks into the bank account.
12:57 p.m.— Take a nap.
1: 27 p.m.— Select the ripe tomatoes from the counter to make pasta sauce, and get started.
2:09 p.m.— Sort cracked garlic for planting/eating.
2:37 p.m.— Finish prep work and start pasta sauce to simmer.
3:03 p.m.— Pay bills. Read mailers from Wellmark and Delta Dental on changes to plans for compliance with the Affordable Care Act.
3:34 p.m.— Take nap #2.
4:25 p.m.— Clean up to do prep work for dinner, and bask in the glory of a day on my own.
4:26 p.m.— Realize the the existential struggle for existence in the post-Reagan society restarts tomorrow.
4:27 p.m.— Was thankful for today.
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