Category: Writing

Writing about writing, autobiography, cross posting selected work from other places.

Categories
Home Life Writing

Moving On to Fall

July 15 Harvest

My supervisor at the orchard called yesterday to ask me to work this weekend. I said yes.

We’ll be selling blueberries from Michigan for a few hours on Saturday and we’ll discuss plans for the upcoming season.

It is my earliest start in six seasons. It’s also a sign the year is on the back slope. Fall will soon arrive.

Being home more has helped make the garden our best ever. Just an hour a day after planting has been enough time. Some of the new techniques: using composted chicken manure for fertilizer, mulching pepper and cucumber plants immediately after planting, using a fence to grow cucumbers, and putting a deer fence around the tomatoes have facilitated Mother Nature’s growth. I still haven’t had to buy a single onion or head of garlic at the store this year. We are eating something fresh from the garden daily.

I’m used to having events to which to look forward. That means I’m not used to the five-day weekends semi-retirement and completion of spring farm work brought this July. I’ve been doing a lot of resting in between activities. I’ve made a conscious effort to reduce the number of activities. So resting outranks doing for the time being.

Based on more than 50 years in the workforce, I’m used to a scheduled shift being the focal point of each day. In retirement, that changes and will take accommodation.The idea is not to replace work shifts with other, different kinds of events. Rather focus on awareness of tasks being required and doing them as needs rise to the surface of our new lives together.

For example, I planted 48 celery plants. Yesterday I harvested five to see how they were growing. I trimmed the heads of bad stalks and used what was salvageable in a stir fry for lunch. The five cores, or what grocery stores call “hearts” I bagged and refrigerated for later. What I learned was celery is about ready for harvest and that means a big project of cleaning, trimming, slicing and freezing for winter use in soup and stir fry. That task is lingering and will rise up soon.

The point of retirement is to perform tasks like this in time, but when fancy deems best. It would be a waste not to get this done, but I’m reluctant to write it on my calendar. I’d rather wait for the right intersection of seasonable temperatures, personal energy and peak vegetable readiness. That time will reveal itself outside the unforgiving tyranny of a calendar.

Milkweed Pods Growing

Even the milkweed plants are doing well this year. I did little other than weed around them and cut away the vines wanting to grow up the stem. Several plants are forming seed pods. I’ll learn a little bit about them and harvest the seeds to grow more in a different spot. Someday I hope to see a butterfly caterpillar on one of them.

It looks like as I’m writing the presser in Helsinki, Finland with Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump is about to begin. A reporter claiming to be from The Nation has been forcibly removed. Neither leader is a fan of a free press, although both use it to their advantage when they can. We also know about the many journalists who “disappeared” under Putin. I’d rather look at butterflies than think about U.S. – Russian relations. It’s hard to avoid, just like it’s hard to stop thinking about my next work shift.

If we’re to change habits, we have to work at it. That may be why I continue to write these posts, work at the orchard, and at the home, farm and auto supply store… for now. My life would be worse without it.

Categories
Writing

New Potatoes and Cucumbers

Morning Harvest

The ambient outdoor temperature is 89 degrees and the heat index is 100. Another midday spent inside.

I feel caged.

Near sunup I harvested cucumbers and watered. I tasted a red tomato — they are not ready.

Won’t be long.

In the kitchen I emptied the crock of fermented dill pickles and started another batch. I washed and sorted cucumbers on the counter: first the dills, then sweet pickles, then some for eating, then a pile of too plump ones for juicing. There are so many cucumbers I could be selective. Soon I’ll run out of things to do with them… not yet.

I felt restless. I feel restless.

Cucumbers

I cleaned under the kitchen sink and returned the soaps, cleaning supplies and waste basket to their appointed places. I’m glad that work is done. I’ve been putting it off.

Using fruit thawed from the freezer, I made a smoothie for lunch with cow’s milk, kale, a banana and the fruit. It was satisfying…  and very blue.

There is only so much kitchen time a person can take before moving on.

Someone spotted water coming up through the ground near a main water line junction. I emailed our crew of well volunteers and we met near the leak. We saw water seeping up but couldn’t diagnose the problem. I told them I’d call our well service to come out and fix the leak. It was a productive exchange as I hadn’t seen some of them for a while. It was a chance to do something outside home. It will be an ongoing project for the weekend.

I came back. It got hot and here I am.

Our president had tea with Queen Elizabeth II today. I wonder if they had scones like she did with Ike. In Washington, D.C. Robert Mueller’s investigation produced 12 indictments of Russian intelligence officers who had been hacking U.S. computers in the run up to the 2016 general election. The hacking was with nefarious purpose and intent. The press event was at the same time the president was having tea. It will give him something to discuss with Vladimir Putin next week in Helsinki.

In the hottest part of the day I feel an urge to go somewhere else. I felt the same way when I lived near the main train station, the Hauptbahnhof, in Mainz, Germany, especially on weekends away from the kaserne. I would drive to the big box stores over in Wiesbaden… or maybe walk to the small grocery store down the hill and buy fresh fruit and a liter of Coca Cola. I had to time it right because they closed for a couple of hours in the early afternoon. About the same time it is now. I feel connected to those days 40 years ago.

I just got the call the well technician is on his way. Guess I can meet that urge… for now.

Categories
Writing

Writing My Way Out

Compost Bin

The culprit is a long, engaging worklife. The crime? Diminished creative output.

Early on I realized, with a few exceptions, creative endeavor doesn’t pay. To support it I took work… for over 50 years. We raised a daughter, built a home, worked outside home, and lived an often exhausting life.

Older, I’m not sure I’m much wiser. I’m worn down and less productive than I hoped to be. Yet the creative impulse persists. I hope to write my way out of the current situation into new energy and creativity.

I haven’t given up.

The wellspring of creativity has been several things, most important among them is meeting and engaging with new people. If we are to be successful as artists we need an audience. I’ve been lucky to find one on this blog and in our community. Relationships with people are important.

Here’s my problem. For too many years reading and writing has been a way of processing society and the world around me. Such processing engaged me and produced two results: a good quantity of writing and distraction from more specific creative output. At age 66 there’s no time for distraction so I must renew focus on writing.

Like the compost bin in the garden I keep throwing life experiences in, hoping to get to something elemental and nourishing. It’s time to spread compost on the garden plots and see what grows. No doubt there will be some weeds… and hopefully a flower or two… and vegetables for nourishment.

Life, its beauty and ugliness, is all around us. An artist must be able to perceive it, process and make something useful of it. On a summer Tuesday that’s what I’m hoping to do.

Categories
Living in Society Writing

Pickling

Pickling Cucumbers

Beginning Monday, I’ll be covering the editor’s desk for Trish Nelson at Blog for Iowa for the month of July.

Everyone needs a vacation and Trish works harder and more persistently than most to get a progressive message up every weekday.

That means a lot of writing for me. It also means I get better with the work. I’m looking forward to the renewal.

With work at the farms finished and the home, farm and auto supply store down to two days per week, There is more time for writing.

For today, it’s home repairs, cleaning and making the first batch of dill pickles with this morning’s harvest. It is expected to be a full day and for that I’m thankful.

Categories
Environment Home Life Writing

Under a Rainbow

Rainbow Framing the Garden

Clouds broke while I watched it rain through the west-facing garage door. It was a slow, steady, gentle and soaking rain of the kind remembered from childhood.

Realizing there might be a rainbow I rushed upstairs and looked out an east-facing window. I saw a double rainbow framing the garden plots and our back yard.

The colors were as intense as I remember ever seeing. A sign the shit-storm of American politics would eventually end and our lives might heal.

Earlier I’d been on the roof cleaning gutters. A tree branch had blocked one of them, collecting leaves and impeding water flow. The view of the nearby lake was obscured by trees and vegetation that had grown up since we moved here. In the beginning there had been a clear view of the lake from the roof peak. We, people and plants, are older now.

Refraction of light through rain is simple and powerful physics. Outside quotidian affairs of which lives are mostly made, a rainbow brings hope. For a few fleeting moments we marvel at the colors and reflect upon the role rain and recovery can play in our lives. We notice.

Rain clears the air and washes away dust created by simple lives. On days like that, a better life seems possible. We weathered the storm and that may be enough.

A rainbow reminds us of that.

Categories
Kitchen Garden Work Life Writing

Last Day of the Season 2018

Chicken at Sundog Farm

Beginning on Feb. 25, and 862 trays of soil blocks later, my 2018 farm work season ended today at Sundog Farm. I finished at Wild Woods Farm on Friday.

More than anything, farm work has been time with young people — doing the work and talking about crops, challenges, and everything else.

In my sixth year of soil blocking I kept up physically. I plan to do it again next year if able.

Now to take a break from farming until returning to Wilson’s Orchard for the fall season.

This will be the first summer in a long time we haven’t taken a share from the CSAs. Our garden is big enough to provide most vegetables and I’m confident of the yield. What we can’t get at home I’ll secure elsewhere. Getting enough to eat is never a problem when working in a local food system.

Next on the practical agenda is home repairs and cleaning. There is never a shortage of work for home owners.

It’s also an opportunity to resume writing. Each time I rejoin the project I lose track of everything else. Hours and days pass and like a coal miner I follow the seam wherever it goes. There is a lot more reading, thinking and organizing than writing at this point. I’ve forgotten more than I know about my own life and it can’t be re-lived, merely touched through a gauze woven of memory.

I began addressing the chronology. I’m not sure that will be the presentation. As I delve into the volumes of writing and artifacts collected since college a thematic approach seems better. It would be cultural aspects of growing up, education, work life, how we developed an ecology of living as a family, and my path toward social responsibility. It will also focus on what readers may find interesting.

Writing is exhilarating at a time when the rest of the world seems weary and worn down. What a great way to spend the rest of this summer.

Categories
Sustainability Writing

Patriotism

Still in Service

Patriotism does not belong to a political party. Veterans pay attention to where the country is going, engage in public discourse, and believe it is our responsibility to do so.

Patriotism, concerns itself with ethics, law, and devotion to the common good. As a young Army officer, I understood the meaning of patriotism in three words, “duty, honor, country.”

There is a new form of patriotism that is unacceptable: patriotism that proclaims “country first.” New patriotism concerns itself with moral responsibilities toward members of “our” group and by definition diminishes responsibilities toward non-members. New patriotism manifests itself in English only legislation, poor treatment of battlefield casualties, and blindness to the effects of war on foreign populations. New patriotism can accept extreme poverty, famine and the genocides in Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia and Myanmar. New patriotism asks, “what’s in it for me?” without regard for the impacts on the rest of society.

My uniform doesn’t fit, but I keep it in a trunk with my fatigues, compass and decorations. From time to time I get out my compass and am reassured that patriots will never lose their way in this complex and changing society. It is up to us to speak out and watch over the country, just as we did on diverse and distant borders long ago.

Our country needs us now as much as ever.

~ From a letter to the editor submitted to the Daily Iowan on Sept. 29, 2008.

Categories
Writing

Getting Started

On the Back Porch – Fillmore Street

I was born in a hospital established in 1869 by the Sisters of Mercy on Marquette Street in Davenport, Iowa. Marquette was one of the first streets laid out by city founder Antoine Le Claire.

I attended Kindergarten at Thomas Jefferson Elementary school at 1027 Marquette Street, and in 1959 our family purchased an American four-square home at 2025 Marquette Street, a block and a half from my birthplace on top of the hill, a block from the church where my parents wed and I was baptized and confirmed.

My parents married at Holy Family Catholic Church on Fillmore Street. According to Mother it was a quickly arranged ceremony with her brother serving as best man directly from work with butcher’s blood on his clothes. There were no photos of the newlyweds or wedding party.

The Sisters of Mercy and Le Claire provided an ever present background to life in my home town. I remember visiting the cemetery on River Drive where 1873 cholera victims were buried in a mass grave. Sisters of Mercy had tended the sick in a makeshift hospital at a downtown warehouse. That there was a “downtown” is attributable in part to the grid of streets Le Claire laid out in the old part of the city. Antoine Le Claire’s grave marker is prominent near the entrance to Mount Calvary Cemetery where many of my family members are buried.

Davenport was home until the death of my father in 1969 when I left to attend university in Fall 1970. I returned to Davenport for visits, for a couple of summers during college, after returning from an extended trip to Europe upon getting my B.A. in English, and after military service. Davenport was never again like it seemed during my early years. We don’t often have such brutal delineation in our lives as when Father died in an industrial accident. The times I considered returning permanently didn’t last.

Davenport and my life there defined who I am. It was not just the grid of streets where things were measured in blocks in the benevolent presence of nuns.

My earliest defining moment was the day, at age 3-1/2, when a swing-set set up in the basement of our Madison Street home collapsed and injured my head. My parents were horrified. I remember the pool of blood on the basement floor, holding the thumb of the ambulance driver on the ride to the hospital where I had been born, taking ether dripped into a funnel to anesthetize me for the stitches to mend my gashed head. I am lucky to be alive.

What I learned and came to believe through the injury and recovery in the hospital was that in a city there is an infrastructure of knowledge and caring to support us when things happen. I watched the routines of the hospital staff, the doctor checking up on me, changing room mates and bed linen, daily visits from my parents and the handling of my propensity to get out of bed and walk around. This experience assured me that although we are vulnerable, we are not alone.

Over the years, Doctor Kuhl would examine the scar on my forehead and talk about my recovery when I visited him in his office. Today, I don’t think of the scar, and suspect most people don’t even notice it. What I do think about is that while we are not alone, we must be part of a society that helps protect those who are most vulnerable.

When very young, I made a withdrawal from the bank of social responsibility and now the debt needs repaying. Who I became in life was partly attributable to my parents, however the influence of the Sisters of Mercy in a home town laid out by Antoine Le Claire is undeniable. It is also inescapable.

~ From a draft of a personal memoir about living in Iowa.

Categories
Milestones Writing

Friday in Spring

Retaining Wall

Fridays in Spring I soil-block for a farmer.

Yesterday I made 4,944 soil blocks which were planted in winter share. Leeks, broccoli and the like. It took four hours.

While driving north on Highway One I nodded off for a brief moment. After realizing it I sat upright, glanced in the mirror and concentrated on staying awake.

It’s not like I didn’t get a full night’s sleep Thursday… I did.

The combination of sun and repetitive work may have worn me out.

After arriving home I walked the garden, checked seedlings for moisture level, took a shower, and crashed into a two-hour nap. It’s become a Friday pattern.

Then I remember it was not soil blocking that wore me out but the news of Anthony Bourdain’s suicide in France.

Bourdain was a celebrity I liked. I read Kitchen Confidential a number of years ago and watched him on Food Network. In many ways, he is what I’d like to be as a writer, although with less inebriation. How little we know about celebrities. His suicide makes no sense. It may never make sense.

A memorable episode from Bourdain’s television work was when he returned to Borneo and got a chest tattoo on camera. He appeared to be drunk and uncomfortable. In a later CNN interview he recounted the process was much more painful than expected. We already knew that from the video. A reality came through in much of Bourdain’s work — one of his making. That’s why I liked him. The ability to depict a reality is essential to creative endeavor. Bourdain and his crew were masters at what they did. He’s gone too soon and will be missed.

I brought home a bag of groceries from the farm — lettuce, sugar snap peas, garlic scapes, kohlrabi, spring onions and kale. After napping I washed lettuce for salads and stored it in the ice box until supper time. I’m not sure what else got done. Maybe nothing, or something… whatever.

Fridays have been like that in spring.

Categories
Writing

In Fractions of an Inch

Tall Utah Celery Seedlings

A couple of weeks ago our association held a community cleanup.

We own a well, a wastewater treatment plant, two vacant lots, 25 acres of woods, roads, and sundry open spaces which require attention from time to time.

Teams policed up trash, landscaped near the well house, trimmed trees, inspected roads, and repaired a retaining wall around the community parking lot near access to the state park.

A group of us — men about my age — worked near an intersection where a tree blocked the view of oncoming traffic. We made quick work of the tree and piled the trimmed branches at the edge of the nearby parking lot. An adjacent retaining wall had fallen over and we couldn’t get the cement blocks to fit back into place. A retired contractor walked the short distance home and returned with a couple of paint scrapers to remove dirt built up along the joints of the blocks.

“It will only take an eighth of an inch,” he said.

We made short work of the wall and returned home for the rest of our day. As the African proverb says, “Many hands make light work.”

Our lives can be like these projects — they are our lives as we work them. We forget our origins and become crusted with habits accumulated in complex living to get by. To make a life work, we scrape off the residue of the past and make things fit in the present.

It rained yesterday and I went to town.

I recycled glass jars near the former grocery store on Dodge Street and drove into the county seat. En route I spotted a Charles Bukowski bumper sticker on a car not far from where John Irving lived and wrote during his early years.

There are always an abundance of construction detours in this UNESCO City of Literature. Parking in one of the ramps off Burlington, I walked past a construction site toward the jewelry store.

Wedding band in a pocket, I planned to resize it so it didn’t pinch and deform my ring finger more than it had. The jewelry store was gone… long gone from the look of it. I guess being a customer once every 36 years is not enough to sustain a local business. At first I didn’t know what to do.

I walked around the corner and found another jeweler. This one was established in 1854, 12 years after Iowa statehood. Staff was friendly and efficient. We determined one size larger would make the ring fit again. I’ll pick up the resized ring after farm work on Friday.

After waiting for an LTL carrier to back into the crowded construction site near the ramp I drove to Coralville.

This was my second shopping trip this month. The combination of adequate income, a worn out French press, and a wet, rainy day precipitated it. The fitting where the long rod of the plunger connected to the screen had become stripped with use. I researched on line and the Target store at the mall had what I wanted — something as close as possible to the French press I’d used for many years. It took me a while to locate it in the large box store.

I picked up a few items at other stores — necessities that fit our lives. I splurged on a bottle of Trader Joe’s organic ranch dressing. We usually make our own salad dressing but this is the season of spring salads and I craved something different. It cost $2.79. I visited the home, farm and auto supply store and bought three 16-quart bags of organic soil mix to transplant seedlings for further growth before planting. I appreciated the employee discount.

While rain kept me from gardening, the time was easy to fill with the habits of a creative life. We require a platform to create things the way my contractor friend kept tools to repair the retaining wall in his home workshop. Often that means fitting the bits and pieces of a seemingly random life into something stable and predictable — measured in fractions of an inch.

We depend on this more than we know.