I had COVID-19 in August and September 2024, so I did not get garlic planted before winter. Once recovered from the virus, I checked soil conditions each day into December and did not find them right for planting. One thing led to another, winter came and went, and I planted garlic on March 29. My friend Susan told me long ago garlic could be planted in the spring. Ever since I began growing it in my home garden I over wintered.
I began to freak out when the plants did not seem as tall as in previous years. On July 9, I ordered one pound of garlic seeds from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, the first time I ever did that. If my crop was a bust, I wanted something to start over. It was an expensive insurance policy.
When scapes emerged, they seemed of mixed quality. A few looked normal, yet some sprouted multiple scapes, and some were puny. They tasted fine, it’s just the overall volume for 100 plants seems lighter than in previous years.
By August, my garlic is usually harvested, racked, and curing in the garage on the special rack I made. I want the first couple of leaves to start turning brown before harvest, and we just aren’t there. Some are starting to turn, so harvest can’t be long. I dug one head (see photo) and it looked good. Maybe I’ll be alright.
It never occurred to me what life would be like without garlic. It wouldn’t feel like a real life. Fingers crossed I make it through a decent harvest and fall panting in October.
When the email from Macmillan Publishers arrived I knew I would purchase The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb, by Garrett M. Graff. I immediately logged in to Amazon and found I could order it to be delivered the next day, on publication day (Aug. 5, 2025), for full price. I hit the pause button. Didn’t I tell myself I was going to slow down my ordering from the behemoth book seller?
Next I found the website for a local bookseller who was offering pre-order for delivery to the store also on Aug. 5. It was also full price, so I said what the hell. No time like the present and ordered it on their website. It was an experience compared to Amazon.
First, when I received my automated order confirmation, it was detailed, giving me everything I needed regarding the order: tracing, question outreach, price, and so on. One curious bit was the order showed being from an outfit called BookPeople, which is a large independent bookseller located in Austin, Texas. Austin is less like the rest of Texas, so I am okay with that. Besides, I assume my local bookshop does what it must to reduce acquisition cost and build margin on sale. Both of those are necessary to stay in business. So far, so good.
Next came the email from the local bookstore. It was sent by an individual at the store to advise me they would notify me when the book arrived. Nice personal touch.
All was going well when my contact reached out with this message: “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky has arrived and I have set aside a copy for you at the back information counter. All of the copies which we received were damaged so I picked out the least damaged one to set aside for you. Have a look at it and we will order another copy for you if you don’t like this one.” Seriously? Well, it is not my bookseller’s fault the book was damaged in shipment, so I started a string of emails, which turned into text messages. The text exchange took 30 minutes and included photos of the damage and discussion of price for damaged goods. We were able to work it out and I drove the 25 minutes to the county seat to pick up the book, paying cash.
If a book got damaged with Amazon, I know the drill. I contact them and would get disposition instructions while they credited my account and shipped another book. Most likely, if I had to return it, I would have had to drive to their return consolidation point at a local big box store. Goods damaged in shipping is always a hassle and the blame always lies with the party that packaged and did the shipping. It is a rare occurrence to receive damaged goods from Amazon.
I will just assume this situation is a one-off and will order new books I want to add to my library locally, especially when there is no price difference. I don’t like taking so much time dealing with a local store, yet hopefully we will get to know each other better and develop a relationship. When my annual book-related budget is about $1,000, it’s not like I am the biggest fish in the sea. It is one more way I can spend more of my life relating to people, even if it’s because of a glitch in the process.
The more I walk on the state park trail, I notice the way light filters through the foliage. The familiar reveals itself as varied in presentation. It takes an active mind to notice.
Here is a series of photos about light on the state park trail. Some are subtle. Some, less so. They are all valuable as part of my journey with photography.
Light on the state park trail.Foggy October sunrise.On the state park trail.Emerging from the trail.Light on a clump of trees.Clearing ahead.Sunlight crosses my path.Light on tree trunks.Cloudy day on the trail.Sunrise reflection.
Hiroshima, Japan after U.S. Nuclear Attack. Photo Credit: The Telegraph
The anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Aug. 6) and Nagasaki (Aug. 9), found me without useful things to say. Enter President Trump on July 25, “(New START is) not an agreement you want expiring. We’re starting to work on that.” He added, “It’s a problem for the world when you take off nuclear restrictions, that’s a big problem.” This from the president who dismissed the New START arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia as too favorable to Russia during his first term in office.
Talk is cheap. Despite Trump’s statement, no plan or policy to reduce nuclear arms has emerged, according to Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association. The president spoke with Russian President Putin at least six times this year. According to call readouts, the topic of nuclear arms control was not broached. Meanwhile, the recently passed budget reconciliation calls for almost $1 Trillion in nuclear complex spending.
Without clear and sustained efforts by world leaders to prevent nuclear war, our luck in avoiding one may run out.
My worries about nuclear attacks began as a child. Gathered with family in the backyard, we watched the Soviet satellite Sputnik fly over. If they could launch Sputnik, could they send a nuclear bomb to Iowa? In school we performed drills on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. Today we pray the president will stop talking about nuclear arms control and do something. It is an open question whether he will.
~ First published by the Cedar Rapids Gazette on Aug. 3, 2025.
Green slime on the state park lake due to over-application of nitrogen in the watershed.
Weeds will grow anywhere in Iowa with open ground. I use plastic fabric to suppress weeds in the garden, yet a weed will find even the tiniest pinprick, plant itself, and grow. The purpose of weeding is to favor one side in the competition among plant life and improve crop yields.
This post isn’t proceeding how I thought it would. I am from an agricultural state, so when I think of weeds, I think of how it impacts row crops, corn and soybeans. I feel obliged to discuss that first.
On Sunday crop dusters flew over the house most of the day. It’s time to spray pesticides and herbicides, I guess. In 2024 Iowa corn yield was 211 bushels per acre according to the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. According to Farm Progress, failure to control weeds, especially early in the crop cycle can lead to anywhere from 20-40 fewer bushels per acre. When the corn is taller, and has established a canopy, competing weeds can reduce yields by about 3 bushels per acre for every day they are left uncontrolled, according to Iowa State University. Corn farmers live on tight margins, so they usually don’t hesitate with a generous application of glyphosate. Those 20-40 bushels can mean the difference between a good year and a bad one.
I have been reading Chris Jones’ book The Swine Republic. In the way the universe sometimes comes together, Monday morning’s reading happened to be the chapters on glyphosate and Dicamba, two herbicides widely used in Iowa. I was already writing this weedy post, so it added a certain something to my mood. This isn’t the rabbit hole I intended when I began.
I would use the weed paradigm differently. Whenever I enter the room where most of my artifacts live, they compete for attention. By getting rid of some, they would be out, freeing me to follow the vein of an idea where it may lead without distraction. Part of me doesn’t mind the diversions. Empirical me understands I only have so much time left on this jumping green sphere and I’d better make the best use of it.
I should weed out things of marginal interest to the broader thrust of my work. I don’t want to. My wants and urges have little to do with logic. They arise from a complex experience of a life that seldom conformed to social norms for their own sake. This is part of what makes me unique. Unwillingness to execute a plan to downsize possessions is a feature of my creative life, not a problem. Rational me understands the house will explode if we try to fit much more in it. Creative me says if it will, let it explode and we’ll see how it unfolds.
When I’m in the garden I pull weeds as I go. This is especially important as soon as seeds germinate and emerge from the soil. Like the corn farmer, I know this is the time to eliminate competition for nutrients, light and space. It is better to do it before seedlings emerge. I do what I can to produce a bountiful harvest. My creative issue is the seedlings in my life emerged long ago and have grown to become part of the living landscape. Weeding the stuff would create a new way of seeing. What if I don’t like it?
Maybe I’ll feel better about weeding my stuff after I finish the autobiography.
Anyway. It’s time to set all that aside and get to weeding. We can’t take it with us and don’t want to leave a big mess for my heirs to clean up.
Stump cut to make a resting place for the gardener.
With four weeks left until Labor Day, summer is about finished. A lot of work remains. The only compensation I receive for any of it is the satisfaction of a job well done.
Is my work the same as working for an employer? I think so, yet there is an attitude shift when we work for ourselves. I find more personal risk and am particularly careful I don’t get injured or make a bad financial decision. There is no malarkey in my work life. It is based on empirical tasks, cash flows, and bank loans, all of which are necessary to piece together a life. Most things break down into short projects upon which I can work until completion. There is no overtime pay, or any of the benefits allowed many workers. My spouse and I pool our pensions and hope they cover the bills.
I came up in a work environment where I earned more money than needed for minimal survival. It enabled buying a house, saving for our child’s education, and then later, when our savings proved to be not enough, it allowed us to pay the student loan to take that out of the child’s bucket. I also earned enough money to be able to quit my job multiple times without immediate prospects. The biggest adjustment to living on pensions is there is no longer any “extra” money.
From the time I left the job where my spouse and I met, until we moved back to Iowa and our child left to attend college, she worked at home. The work she did was valued and important to raising our child. There was the avoidance of child care expenses, and a clear division of labor, yet it was more than that. It was a way of life that had little to do with money except treating it as the fungible commodity it was. Ours wasn’t a perfect life, yet we got by.
I resist framing what I do every day as a job. The old farm word for it is “chores.” It’s more than that. With our more sedentary lifestyle, we need exercise, a healthy diet, and some amount of socialization. I suppose that makes us more than a cog in the machine of life. I hope we are more than that.
In the end, photographs are objects. They have qualities — paper, coloration, moisture, processing technique, subject matter, and many others. In the beginning, one has to take a pile of them and just start organizing. This is especially true if during the collection process, there was no organizing principle, other than all photos go into a certain box labeled “photos.” It’s a process, or may be one once I have gone through everything on an initial pass. Here I’m talking about paper photographs.
Somehow I ended up with large quantities of photos, stacked one-on-one, placed together only by happenstance. Now I review them, one-by-one, to see where the journey leads. The immediate task is separating them into groups according to when they were taken. For example, there is a set of our young child getting a home permanent. They obviously go together in their own stack. Another stack is photographs I took when I lived in Mainz and from the travels around the area. It is a tall stack because I avoided thinking too much about them. They are easily grouped for later analysis. Going through them quickly is a necessary first step.
The hardest part of a review and sorting is to turn off memory while doing it. That was a stumbling block because I easily got distracted by memories evoked by the prints. I also felt I had to turn immediately to my autobiography and write about a set of photos. Now, one pile, one box, is sorted at a time. I group the objects together as they appear before me and as I recall how they went together.
Each pile could be a story in itself. To get through them, the stories need to be set on the sidetrack to be hooked up to the train later. Maybe it’s not optimal, yet it is a way to get from randomness to a better understanding of what I have available… and how each image might be used. This process will be about my personal cultural attributes, some of which I know, and some lie unawares in the conglomeration of personal cultural artifacts.
For now, I decided to make a weekly post about how my photography process evolves. The first one is here. Going forward, I will use the tag A Life of Photos. I hope readers will follow along.
It was hot and humid outdoors all day Tuesday. I managed a hike on the state park trail between thunderstorms. A little after 10 a.m. I drove across the lakes to the wholesale club to secure provisions. My usual three-pound can of generic Colombian coffee had increased to $20.99 from $13.99 the last time I stocked up, a 50 percent price increase. The tariff on Brazilian coffee goes into effect on August 1, after which it will cost even more. I did not replenish inventory at $20.99.
At the end of June, I replaced the whole house water filter. Yesterday I sat down to order a replacement and the new price was $20.19. In February I bought the exact same part for $13.40, a 51% increase in 5 months. I only get two of these per year but this increase and others like it will make household financial management more difficult. It is a preview of what life under the oligarchs will be like.
The garden has me distracted from work on my autobiography. There is so much produce to process, there seems little time for anything else. To preserve the harvest, immediate action is required, so writing is pushed back. In the annual cycle of my life, this is a feature, not a bug. Our lives would be the worse without the garden.
Hours in the kitchen enable my thinking about life and writing about it. I am certain I have at least one more book in me as the urge to write an autobiography has been with me as long as I can remember. At its core, writing autobiography is part of a life well lived. Once I finish and get a copyright, what then?
I envision creating a new document, using the first two books as a base, to which I add autobiographical information and stories. The published books will stand on their own as moments in time, yet my story will continue to evolve as long as I live. Part of it is finding aspects forgotten during the first telling. Part of it is recording new insights on the same stories already told. It will be a continuous work in progress that may never be published the same way again. It will be a never ending memoir.
There are other books I imagine publishing. The most obvious one is collections of my essays first published on this blog. There is enough here to make a book about local food. There is another about sustainability. While I’ll cover the coronavirus pandemic in part two of my autobiography, there is a much longer story to tell about its impacts on my life and on society more generally. That story is just being revealed. Whether I get to any of this is an open question.
For now, I continue to process fruit and vegetables so we’ll have something for our dinner plate long after the frost comes in October. As the harvest winds down, I’ll work again on my memoir. I still hope to finish the draft by the end of year holidays.
I woke early and have been listening to boomers roll across the area. There is a severe thunderstorm watch according to the National Weather Service. Rain is expected to continue until around 10 a.m. It will be another good morning to spend in the kitchen.
There has been so much rain I haven’t unrolled the hose to water the garden for two weeks. That is a good thing on several levels. All the greenery has taken off, including plants I put in the ground and weeds. Indeterminate tomato vines are reaching more than eight feet long. When the rain slows down, I need to get under them and see if any tomatoes are ready. I planted the main rows four feet apart, yet the vines in all the rows reach up and touch each other. We like rain.
Thunderstorms are a characteristic of Iowa summer.
While picking green beans on Monday it was so hot and humid I pushed my physical limits. I was drenched in sweat and felt dizzy a couple of times, yet worked to finish picking mature beans. Sorting and cleaning them was a chore yet I got that done in the kitchen before dinner. We did not eat green beans for dinner, having broccoli from the garden instead.
Green bean harvest on July 28, 2025.
Lately I’ve been thinking about my decision to retire during the coronavirus pandemic. The combination of the lock down, becoming eligible for full retirement on Social Security, and the health risks of working in a retail environment brought the decision together. I’m having second thoughts about being retired. It was evident before, although is clearer today, that if the Congress does not address the shortfall in Social Security in 2032-2034, we will need more income than we have. Changing course to engineer a life that produces more income than our pensions produce is in the near future. That will give me something to think about while I work in the kitchen this morning. In the meanwhile, it is peak Iowa summer and we should enjoy it.
Journey Home 
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