“There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
A gardener learns to take bits of fruit and vegetables and make something of them. These pears came from the tree outside our kitchen, a tree that has been producing almost every year since it was planted in 2003. Most of the fruit goes to wildlife, yet I picked this bowl full to make sure we took advantage of the sweetness inherent in them while we can. They did not disappoint.
Here is a post written in 2014 during pear harvest. I feel much the same way today:
Pear Harvest
Our pear tree is very tall. So tall the highest fruit can’t be reached without a ladder and a picker. Even then, some will be left on the tree.
That’s okay because the shelf life or pears is very short, and we have all the pear butter we can use already in the pantry from last year. We’ll bask in the glory of fresh, organically grown pears for a week or so, and give a lot away during that time.
The money spent to purchase this tree was paid back years ago. Just this year, I paid attention to how to harvest them, and found this information from Stark Brothers to be useful. If left on the tree, pears ripen from the inside out and taste mealy. Don’t want that.
This one tree has been the perfect producer for us. Not too many pears, and not too few.
It turns out I’m okay with eating pears for a few short weeks when they come in, and have little craving for them the rest of the year. One more way to sustain ourselves throughout the year with local food without eating the same thing over and over.
The deal for private equity firm Sycamore Partners to buy Walgreens closed on Aug. 28. We know what that means.
Private equity will restructure the company, sell off what parts it can, restructure real estate holdings, close stores, layoff employees, and increase company debt, while making their executives an obscene amount of money. Walgreens bankruptcy seems likely in the near-term future based on what happened with companies like Toys R Us. Sycamore Partners’ deal is leveraged with “more than double the average debt level used by private equity firms to acquire companies last year,” said U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren in a letter to them. All of this is what private equity does in the United States. It does not contribute one whit to improving the consumer economy. Importantly, some consumers will lose access to pharmacy services when stores close.
On my way to the wholesale club I pass two Walgreens stores, which seems like a lot. I notice neither of them is within walking distance of residential housing. In other words, they depend upon our automobile culture. A person doesn’t go to Walgreens except to get something specific. This kind of shopping faces competition from online retailer Amazon where we can point, search and click to have a product Walgreens may or may not carry delivered to our home within a day or two. Amazon trucks are ubiquitous in our rural neighborhood. We see them more often than we think of going to Walgreens, whether or not we buy from them.
I have a Medicare Part D prescription drug plan and the company that administers it dictates which pharmacies are available to me. I wanted to use the nearest pharmacy to support their small business but they weren’t on the list. I picked the warehouse club because I go there twice a month for groceries anyway and getting my prescription would save a trip. The last time I went inside a Walgreens, it was because they are a UPS drop off point. I have also shopped there to review their large inventory of over the counter medications to find a specific dosage of vitamin B-12. They did not have it, so I got it by mail order from the manufacturer.
When I was a grader we had a locally owned drugstore with a pharmacy a block and a half from our home. In the mid-1960s, whenever I had extra money from my newspaper route, I would go in there to see what they had. Mainly, I looked for reading material (comic books or paperback novels) and candy. I was infatuated by baseball cards sold with a stick of bubble gum. Over the years, the drug store disappeared as automobile culture and larger scale retailers influenced our shopping. During the ten years I lived there, they were a part of the cultural landscape. In part, discounters like Walgreens contributed to their demise.
The only person I knew who depended upon Walgreens was my maternal grandmother who lived in downtown Davenport. There were no grocery stores there — today we would call it a food desert — but Walgreens sold a few grocery items like milk, butter, eggs, bread, and selected canned goods, all of which she bought. Without an automobile, it was a big production for her to visit a supermarket, involving a bus ride or having a relative pick her up and take her there. She got her prescriptions from Walgreens which was within walking distance.
Access to Walgreens is not important to me. I buy all of my bandages, ointments and sundry health items at the pharmacy in our nearby city. We went without a pharmacy for a while, and I’d like to see them be successful. Thing is, I don’t buy $100 of sundry items from them in a year, so Walgreens or no, it has been a struggle for them to survive.
The world we knew continues to change. Some parts of the future are hopeful and some definitely are not. Big Pharma will figure out how to sell us their medicines. As Walgreens begins the slow dance toward going out of business, I accept it as the failure of large retail franchises that can’t compete with Walmart or Amazon. It is a condition of modern society, and retail in particular. I hope they make it yet doubt they will. There are other causes than saving Walgreens that deserve my attention more.
It felt like progress as I went through the prints laid out on a table from one shoe box of photographs. I bought some 4.25 x 6.25-inch brown envelopes into which I duly sorted the prints and labeled with the contents. Since prints are scattered all over the house, this should make it a). easier to find a home for loose ones, and b). enable whoever inherits the collection to move quickly through them with a clue as to what they are about. I even managed to pick a few to shred because the images were repetitive or hard for me to know what they were. There were six of those. That’s not many given the scope of the project yet it was a big, personal step. I ran right over to the shredder so there would be no going back.
The photo above was taken when in 1979, friends with whom I worked at a department store in high school visited me in Mainz, Germany. They had married while I was overseas. We drove a rental car around France, stopping whenever and wherever it suited us. We visited a number of cathedrals, including Reims and Amiens, as well as Normandy, Mont-Saint-Michel, Belle-Île-en-Mer, Bordeaux, San Sebastián, Lourdes, Carcassone, and then traveled along the Mediterranean coast to Italy. We crossed the Swiss Alps from Italy and headed back home to Mainz. The two weeks were filled completely and passed quickly.
Hard to say where this sign was located. Somewhere on the Mediterranean Coast. The places we went on the coast were not very touristy. That was one of the ideas that energized the trip. We found our own path and the trip was better for it. We went places where an American Visa card was a novelty and the clerk had to contact someone to make sure it was legit.
I shot two or three rolls of film on my Minolta SRT-101 camera. The highlight of the trip was in Saint-Paul-de-Vence where we overnighted in a small hotel. The artist Joan Miró was in residence at the nearby Fondation Maeght where he was making a film for French television. It was interesting to see the director coaching the artist about how to move for the camera. We toured the gallery and bought posters of the show to remember it by. I framed and still have mine. Alas, no photos of the artist as it wasn’t allowed.
As an organizing principle, putting photos taken on a specific trip together is conventional. None of them found their way into an album, although the makings of one was there. In retrospect, It is hard to believe I could get two weeks away from work as a military officer. Images like this one help me remember how close I was to my small group of high school friends. Isn’t that one of the purposes of photography?
~ Read all the posts in this series by clicking here.
I’m getting to a place where I wrote the best of what I will about Labor Day. In 2022 I wrote this post, which covers the bases. No need to re-write it this Labor Day weekend. There is more to life than annual traditions.
It is no secret unions are in decline. In his new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, Robert Reich points to the problem. The post-World War II economy was so affluent that unions did not seem necessary to most people in the wake of reforms that happened during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. As a result, there was less impetus to form unions, and in right to work states like Iowa, a union could represent a workplace but workers were not required to join. The latest from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024) is, “The union membership rate of public-sector workers (32.2 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (5.9 percent).” As we know from the administration’s move to invalidate union contracts among Veterans Affairs workers, the pressure will be on to diminish union strength among public-sector workers.
While summer is not over, the garden is winding down with leafy green vegetables, tomatoes, hot peppers, and apples remaining to be harvested. Instead of time off this weekend, I need to focus on work in my kitchen and garden, then digest what just happened. Short version: I withdrew from in-person society and reduced my contacts with people I know to focus on the immediate place where I live. I strove to make that life better.
Vegetables and fruit grew as well as they have ever done in my garden. The abundance produced from a small number of seeds and minimal cultivation is astounding. In particular, the green beans, cucumbers, and leafy green vegetables have been of good quality and mostly pest free. All five apple trees produced fruit. So did the pear tree. This year has been a bin buster.
As my concept of a kitchen garden matures, I have become a better meal planner and cook. One of the benefits of writing a meal plan has been a reduction in our grocery bill. If we write the meal plan to the garden, and then shop to the meal plan, the tendency is to spend less money, waste less food, and cook better meals. When I go to the grocer, my cart looks a lot different from other shoppers (yes, I look). More fresh fruit and vegetables and a small percentage of branded products. Life around the garden and kitchen makes more sense. I’m thriving in it.
Right now I have three pots going on the stove: two tomatoes and one hot peppers. Learning to process these items took time, but I know where I’m going. I mostly can tomato puree from plum tomatoes. I pickle a couple of quart jars of sliced hot peppers and then make a hot pepper paste to use on tacos. I learned to can only what we need.
This summer I exercised daily, even when the weather kept me indoors part of the day. That, combined with counting calories, led me to lose about a pound of weight per week. I have a way to go to get my BMI below 30. However, I feel healthy and that is important.
It has been a summer of plain folk living our best life. There are challenges, yet it was a decent summer in a turbulent time. For that, I am thankful.
It has been a week of great weather. Temperatures were in the seventies, scant rain, and plenty of sunshine. I tried to capture a bit of it for this post.
Cherry Tomatoes in the dehydrator.Morning on the trail.Wildflowers on the trail.Sunrise.Green Zebra tomato.Pre-dawn on the trail.Red Delicious apple tree in August.Mist on the lake.
There is a lot of chatter in the national news media about the price of electricity. We are apparently in a war with China over dominance in artificial intelligence, which requires a lot of electricity. National Public Radio reported, “Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation.” We don’t hear that so much here in Iowa except on national media. Why? According to Bill McKibben, “The average Iowan will spend 39% less on electricity than the average American because it produces 57 percent of its electricity from the wind, the second-biggest wind state in the country.” If you throw solar arrays, and other renewable energy into the mix, Iowa’s total share of renewables is 64 percent.
Spoiled as I am by normally low electricity rates, when last month’s electric bill arrived it was 51 percent higher than the same period last year. What the heck? Although the total amount of the bill was comparatively low — typical for Iowa — I had to look at it.
The price per kWh of electricity from our electric cooperative has been stable and predictable. It wasn’t a rate change that caused our increase. Our monthly usage increased from 429 kWh to 745 kWh. The average American household usage is much higher than that. The reason for higher costs was this increased usage.
What happened? The average temperature increased by four degrees year over year. We likely ran the air conditioner more because of it. It was also oppressively hot this July, which meant spending more time indoors and using more electricity with the washer, dryer, stove and our electronic devices. We also had a millennial house guest for an extended stay. They did online streaming from here with a multitude of electric devices which sucked more juice. In sum, the increase was explainable.
Why are people concerned about increasing electricity costs? Donald J. Trump is president. He does not seem well educated about electricity.
On Trump’s first day in office he declared an “energy emergency” for made up reasons. The unstated reason is he extorted oil, gas and coal companies. “Candidate Trump literally told the fossil fuel industry they could have anything they want if they gave massive contributions to his campaign, and then they did,” according to McKibben. Trump’s payback for the bribe was to hobble the renewable energy industry.
The Trump administration immediately began to do absolutely everything in its power to stop this trend (to develop more sun, wind, and batteries) and replace it with old-fashioned energy—gas, and coal. They have rescinded environmental regulations trying to control fossil fuel pollution, ended sun and wind projects on federal land, cancelled wind projects wherever they could, ended the IRA tax credits for clean energy construction and instead added subsidies for the coal industry. Again—short of tasking Elon Musk to erect a large space-based shield to blot out the sun, they’ve done literally everything possible to derail the transition to cheap clean energy. (Trump is shockingly dumb about (electric) energy, Bill McKibben on Substack).
More than ninety percent of new electric generation around the world last year came from clean energy. This was not because everyone in the energy business had “gone woke,” McKibben wrote. Texas, arguably the most un-woke place in the U.S., installed more renewable capacity than any other state last year. It was because you could do it cheaply and quickly—we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.
I don’t know what happened to Republicans. Senator Chuck Grassley used to be one of the big supporters of wind energy in Iowa because of the way wind turbine arrays meshed with farm operations, giving a farmer another revenue stream.
Under Trump we have taken a step backward and let China, Europe, and literally everyone else take the lead in developing the electricity of the future which taps power directly from the sun.
We can and must do better than this as we consider our energy future.
If I had a nickel for every time someone said today’s Democrats need to get in the game, I’d be rich. The trouble is what do Democrats do differently to overcome the Republican advantage in Iowa?
Democrat Catelin Drey is the case that conventional Iowa political organizing can be effective. On Wednesday, after her 4,208-3,211 victory in Iowa State Senate District 1, that Trump won in 2024 by 11.5 percent, she enumerated what worked for her in an interview with Laura Belin and Zachary Oren Smith. In descending order, she said door-to-door contact, telephone contact, and person to person contact within their existing social networks helped identify her voters and get them to the polls. This is so old school, I remember my father doing it during the 1960 Kennedy campaign.
The special election environment helped. Governor Reynolds set the date for the special election to replace deceased state senator Rocky De Witt on June 30 for Aug. 26, 57 days later. The short duration meant there was no time to wait for anything. The campaign ignited with energy. Volunteers, including multiple state senators and representatives, rallied immediately to help. Importantly, volunteers arrived from all over the state, contributing to knocking some 17,000 doors during the campaign, Drey said. She had plenty of volunteer help. Money wasn’t a problem either, enough so that Republican Party of Iowa chair Jeff Kaufmann complained about it.
Things might be different in a general election when folks can’t travel to the west side of the state because local races depend on their work at home. I expect Kaufmann will add this seat to his target list when it is up again next year. Drey seemed quite talented during the interview. Maybe she can pull off a 2026 re-election in a Trump district without all the statewide help. I hope so. Well done Catelin Drew!
I’m from Iowa so I am used to working hard for a candidate and then losing the election. I can think of some things Democrats need to change to turn the Republican advantage around.
Some history. When the worm started to turn on Republicans after the U.S. Supreme Court gave the 2000 election to George W. Bush, Democrats slowly began to change. When Bush won re-election in 2004, it was game on. In Iowa, we came back in 2006 by electing Democrat Chet Culver as governor and Dave Loebsack defeated long time Republican house member Jim Leach. The 2008 Iowa Democratic Caucuses had the most interest and biggest attendance I’ve seen in 32 years living here. As we all know, and may be weary of hearing, Barack Obama won Iowa and the nation in 2008. In 2012, Obama’s margins deteriorated yet he won Iowa again. In retrospect, 2008 was the high water mark of Democratic political activism in Iowa. Loebsack got elected to seven terms, but Culver turned out to be a one-term wonder and we haven’t had a Democratic governor since.
I love memories of the 2006-2008 campaigns but the electorate has changed. I would argue it changes at least every presidential cycle. Trump successively grew his vote count in Democratic Johnson County, Iowa during each of his three elections here. Recognizing such demographic changes is the first thing Democrats must change. Nothing stays the same. We should be like Catelin Drew and talk to everyone possible.
Marc Elias of Democracy Docket did Iowa Democrats no favors when he prosecuted Rita Hart’s 2020 six-vote house race loss in the Congress. When the Iowa Secretary of State certified the election, Hart should have accepted it, even though the path to appeal was there. Given the political climate at the time, the case was dead on arrival. NBC News reported, “Republicans sought to cast her litigation as Democratic hypocrisy for trying to undo a state certification of an election after Democrats criticized 138 Republicans for objecting to the Electoral College count on Jan. 6.” The place for Democrats to win elections is in voter contacts, not in courtrooms, or in the U.S. House.
Finally, Democrats should talk in terms of the voter’s interests. For Catelin Drew, this came naturally. Because childcare was an issue for her personally, it lent credibility in conversations where childcare was the voter’s concern. We can set aside all the verbiage about the whys and wherefores of needing childcare, like Rita Hart raised in an op-ed in the Solon Economist. Candidates seem better off sharing their authentic selves and empathizing with voters as best they can.
I think we need a better name for it than grassroots politics. The electorate has changed and is changing. Democrats need to find voters where they live: on the grass, on the internet, at work, at the grocer, and at the gym. We have done it before and we should get back to it. We need a change and that could be the change we need.
When I visited the Iowa legislature, one of the people I sought was Rep. Chuck Isenhart from Dubuque. Almost every bill regarding conservation, climate change, renewable energy, and water quality involved him in some way. We were sad to see him lose his last election. Since then, Isenhart has been staying active including writing about environmental issues on Substack.
Why would our national legislators back away from clean energy? Isenhart has some thoughts.
“Just because our gardens are growing cucumbers doesn’t mean we have to make pickles,” Isenhart wrote. “Backing away from clean energy while continuing to subsidize fossil fuels and mandate biofuels puts us in a pickle, making even the wildest dreams come true for those who advocate for an “all-of-the-above” energy future (meaning ‘don’t leave fossil fuels behind’).”
In an Aug. 18 post, Isenhart outlines the damage done to renewable energy programs by Republicans. He starts with his personal story of installing solar panels on his roof and what a good deal it was for him, the utility company, and the environment. The story arrives here:
So – good for consumers, good for business, good for workers, good for the environment. Win-win-win-win. Thus, good for government to keep promoting, no?
Ahhhhh, no. Iowa’s Congressional delegation voted unanimously to unravel most of the federal government’s support for clean energy. Your chance to use the incentive I did is fast running out.
We may know how bad Republicans are with advances in renewable energy and the environment. Isenhart lays it out with specifics. Read his entire post here.
Frank Shorter in the 1981 Bix 7 road race in Davenport, Iowa. He placed second. Bill Rodgers placed first. Photo by a friend using my camera while I ran the race.
When in November 1979 I returned from Germany to Iowa after serving in the U.S. Army, I was driven to continue running. The first road race I ran was seven weeks later on Jan. 2, 1980. As I finished graduate school at warp speed in May 1981 (17 months), I didn’t know what to do with myself. To use the pent up energy, I went on long distance runs and very long bicycle trips around Johnson County, sometimes both in a single day, and typically alone. In retrospect, it was a compulsion.
I hung out with some artist friends who encouraged me to be physically active. One August Saturday, we drove together to the Bix 7 road race in Davenport: I went to run the race and they accompanied me as friends sometimes do. Before I headed to the starting line, I gave them my camera to take some shots, including the one above.
In addition to Frank Shorter, they photographed the race winner, Bill Rodgers. Rodgers was just a speck on the print, hardly recognizable unless someone explained it. I favored this image where I could tell who it was. In an album somewhere I have images of myself in the crowd of runners, yet those are not kept with the ones in a box where I found this one and half a dozen others from that day.
In Part IV I wrote about orphaned photographs. What does a person do with leftover prints once the album is made? For me, I sometimes put them in an envelope with the negatives and tucked them in back of the album. Mostly, though, they get separated from the rest and placed in a box. Orphans in practice, I guess. The only thing to do with them in 2025 is label and place them in an envelope to go back in the box.
At that Bix 7 it had been a while since Frank Shorter won the 1972 Olympic gold medal in the marathon. This photograph means something in that it captured a famous person doing what he’s famous for. In 1981 it was not clear what career path might exist for a former Olympic champion. It was said at the time he entered every kind of road race he could find to further his career. I was literally there, with him.
A thing about photography is that while it can prove physical proximity, it does not demonstrate a relationship. I had no relationship with him or with most of the runners in that race. I am fine with that. My main concern was to finish the race without a mishap and then enjoy the company of friends on our way back to Iowa City.
I can see from this single print how difficult it would be to devote the same attention to the thousands of orphaned photographs in our house. I want to get through all of them for maybe the last time. Yet there is only enough time to live life once. It is a fine thing, though, to remember that specific August day in my home town.
~ Read all the posts in this series by clicking here.
Detail of the Centennial Building at 402 Iowa Avenue, Iowa City, Iowa. Photo Credit – The Daily Iowan.
The decision to close the Iowa Historical Society Research Center in Iowa City has been made. On Saturday, Aug. 23, I participated in a rally to reverse the decision in a packed room at the Iowa City Public Library. The main ask from the event organizers and from State Representative Adam Zabner, who represents the district where the building is located, was to sign the online petition to reverse the decision. Click here to sign the petition. There was more.
My takeaway is the decision to close the facility is pure amateurism. Archaeologist and historic preservationist Kathy Gourley questioned whether the dire financial picture the state reported is true. She presented information about negotiations with the state legislature last session to secure an additional $1 million in funding for the center. While the legislature only provided a half million, that is not chump change at the historical society. The main thrust of this decision was that “your history” doesn’t matter.
Jonathan Buffalo, historian and director of the Meskwaki Historical Preservation Department told friends, relatives and neighbors about the proposed closure. They replied, “What about our stuff?” The Meskwaki house a collection of early photographs at the Research Center. We might all ask the same question. Communication about the closure was a surprise to almost everyone who read or heard the news. There appears to be only the vaguest of plans for the move. A lack of transparency runs throughout.
Here’s the rub. The state archivist is not following professional procedures for closing a facility like this. Donors gave consideration to what items they may have donated to the State Historical Society. Part of the deal was the artifacts would be cared for in perpetuity. Instead of assuring the public that any change would meet this obligation, it’s been like, “Let’s go to Walmart and get us some plastic bags to haul what we don’t like to the landfill.” It is amateur hour.
Rebecca Conard, native Iowan and historian at Middle Tennessee University outlined some of those professional procedures during the rally. Things like looking at the Iowa collections as a whole and then making a transparent, public decision on what to do with items that are less relevant today than they were when donated.
What about our stuff? Will it go to a warehouse? Will it be discarded? There have been no good answers. If the state had considered the public impact of closing the Iowa City Research Center, they would have researched and provided some of the answers when they announced the change. They apparently didn’t. This made a difference that, in part, created the social anxiety on display at the Iowa City Public Library on Saturday.
Valued collections live in that building today. What will happen to archives of Meskwaki photographs, the Iowa Musicians Project, pioneer diaries, manuscripts, and the rest of the materials? Let’s hope they are not rendered into oblivion either by tucking them away on a shelf in a Des Moines warehouse or by discarding.
To learn more, read Trish Nelson’s backgrounder on the issue here.
Sign the online petition to reverse the decision to close the Iowa Historical Society Research Center at the Centennial Building click here.
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