Tag: #amwriting

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Living in Society Reviews Social Commentary Writing

Parade and Fragments

Sprayer in the Solon Beef Days Parade

A summer parade in Iowa is a chance to showcase lives for the entire community.

Farmers, restaurateurs, insurance agents, bankers, retailers, construction companies, government organizations and more cleanup their equipment and parade it through town handing out treats and small gifts along the route.

People line the street to watch, sitting on lawn chairs, standing under shade trees and chatting with friends on the sidewalk. It’s mostly for children yet adults get involved as well. Anyone can stand almost anything that marches by in the span of a couple of minutes.

Solon Beef Days Parade Watchers

I.

In 2013 our situation got dire. I had run out of money and held no job that paid enough. Not wanting to return to transportation, I took one low wage job after another to earn enough to get by. Most of the work involved standing on concrete floors, which precipitated a case of plantar fasciitis. Not only did my feet hurt, on a physician’s advice I gave up jogging after 37 years because of it. While the condition is resolved, it persisted until I left full-time work in 2018.

Expenses got delayed during this period, as did preventive health care. It wasn’t clear how tight money had been until I began taking Social Security benefits which brought relief.

II.

An Early Thanksgiving

The story begins with the proximity of relatives. Our maternal grandmother and grandfather made visits to our home. I never knew my paternal grandparents except in stories and photographs. As much as anything, my grandparent story is about my relationship with Grandmother from my earliest memories until she died Feb. 7, 1991.

We were lucky to have her with us for so long.

Grandmother had five children and 15 grandchildren. She spent more time with our family because of our proximity. She lived with us off and on during my early years, but eventually maintained her own apartment. In later life she lived at the Lend-A-Hand, a residence for women at the time, then moved to the Mississippi Hotel where she lived the last years of her life in an apartment until moving to the Kahl Home for a brief period. Grandmother had many sisters and a brother. We had a lot of relatives, or so it seemed.

III.

I read The Overstory by Richard Powers. It engaged in a way most fiction fails to do. The author must have spent an enormous amount of time researching trees, forests, and the culture around them. He wove them into a spellbinding narrative. I could go on gushing about the book, but just pick it up and read it. If you do, and are interested in the environment, I doubt there will be any regrets.

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Environment Kitchen Garden

Heat is Here

July 18, 2019

I stood outside in early morning darkness where there was a refreshing yet decidedly warm breeze.

The overnight low was 80 degrees Fahrenheit. I’m not sure if that’s warm enough to hinder apple production but scientists believe at some point failure to cool adequately at night does impact taste and texture.

They don’t fully understand the impact of climate change on apple production. For the home fruit grower it’s one more thing for concern.

The breeze dissipated with arriving sun. The forecast is clear and hot with ambient temperatures rising to the mid-nineties. We’re getting used to the heat, especially after the 2012 drought.

After sunup I went to an apple tree, picked one and ate it. The sugars are beginning to form but it is still a “green” apple.

Tonight begins the two-day festival in the small city near which we live. The ambient temperature is expected to peak around 6 p.m. when things are just getting going. Tomorrow is the parade through town when it’s pushing 90 degrees. I’m not sure it is a good idea to attend this year so am skipping the famous hay bale toss tonight and will re-evaluate the parade in the morning. A friend from across the lakes in Big Grove Township is running for sheriff so I want to be there to support him.

It’s blazing hot! We have an air conditioner and refrigerator with an ice maker that both work. There are also three bushels of vegetables that need processing. There will be plenty of inside work to keep me busy now that the heat is here.

Categories
Environment Writing

Sunny Day in Iowa

Prairie Restoration Area at Lake Macbride State Park

Each time I walk on the state park trail there are different wildflowers in bloom. Today’s offering was some of my favorites.

After returning from the day’s exercise, I mowed the front yard and couldn’t make out the line where the back yard started. Grass apparently wasn’t tall or thick enough to need cutting so I stopped and put the mower away until there would be enough to use as mulch.

I raked what few grass clippings there were for the garden, checked the moisture in the last few seedlings, and went inside to spend the rest of the day as temperatures climbed toward 90 degrees. We’re to have several days like this without rain.

We enjoy sunny days while we can. The restored prairie shows its pleasure in them with wildflowers in bloom.

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Environment Kitchen Garden

Hot Weather Harvest

Neighbors Haying

On a fine summer day conditions were perfect to harvest hay and garlic.

My CSA friends recruited volunteers to bring in the garlic and across the county farmers were baling hay in large round and small rectangular bales.

On Independence Day farmers came to town to buy cultivators, salt blocks, pumps, feed, big pedestal fans, bedding (for horses), air compressor parts, nuts and bolts, and other stuff of life. At the home, farm and auto supply store we also sold a lot of propane, grills and kayaks, but that was not to farmers, as a farmer plans his/her kayaking and grilling ahead of time.

The rain has been good enough my garden doesn’t need much watering. Predatory insects are noticeably in abeyance, I suspect because of the polar vortex and extremely cold temperatures last winter. Tomatoes look as good as they have in years. It is already hard to use all the cucumbers. There will be green beans, okra, hot peppers, eggplant, squash, kale, carrots and more by the time August is finished.

We love summer.

Actually, we love life even in the extreme weather brought on by our own assault on nature. That we have perfect conditions for haying and garlic harvesting may well be an anomaly going forward. It was enjoyable this year and will be for however long it lasts.

I viewed the president’s speech on the environment on YouTube. It was not about climate change, human-made or other. In fact, the speeches by the president and about half a dozen others were devoid of any mention of the science of climate change, or solutions to solve the climate crisis.

I feel certain the bait shop owner from Florida has seen improvement in his local environment by the administration’s work on red algae. His speech was unprepared and somewhat random, but a slice of Americana available for public consumption and that, maybe, was the point. There was praise for the president from his staff, including the despised Andrew Wheeler, current head of the Environmental Protection Agency. If one adds up everything in the 56 -minute event, if we didn’t know the science of climate change, it would be believable. The climate crisis was absent from the environment Trump depicted and that is the problem with the Trump administration.

What bothered me the most, as it does any time I listen to the president, it’s the assertion that covers up a lie. Wheeler was bragging on how many super fund sites have been deleted from the list. Were they actually cleaned up or just declared clean and deleted?

I agree with Al Gore’s analysis:

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the origin of hot weather. Is it coming from Anthropogenic climate change, or from politicians in Washington, D.C.? Maybe a little of both.

Categories
Living in Society

Can Educationism Solve Anything?

Big Grove Township School #1

Blaming the woes of society on our K-12 education system is a habit I need to break.

In the post below the target was a failure to teach children about their responsibilities when signing student loan papers. A high school graduate is an adult at age 18 in our culture, so when taking on debt that has the potential to cripple them for decades, they should be equipped to know what they are doing.

Parents also play a key role in educating youth, however my grievance with the way the Iowa legislature funds public schools is they are not spending enough money where it is most needed, and the results show in the form of an ill-educated electorate that makes what I believe are bad decisions.

It is unfair for me to pin this on public schools as State Senator Claire Celsi immediately pointed out:

In the July issue of The Atlantic, author Nick Hanauer addresses the tendency to blame public schools in an article titled, “Better Public Schools Won’t Fix America:”

Long ago, I was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could cure much of what ails America.

This belief system, which I have come to think of as “educationism,” is grounded in a familiar story about cause and effect: Once upon a time, America created a public-education system that was the envy of the modern world. No nation produced more or better-educated high-school and college graduates, and thus the great American middle class was built. But then, sometime around the 1970s, America lost its way. We allowed our schools to crumble, and our test scores and graduation rates to fall. School systems that once churned out well-paid factory workers failed to keep pace with the rising educational demands of the new knowledge economy. As America’s public-school systems foundered, so did the earning power of the American middle class. And as inequality increased, so did political polarization, cynicism, and anger, threatening to undermine American democracy itself.

Hanauer assigns blame to our economic system: income inequality and the fact workers are underpaid.

“Allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it,” he wrote. “By distracting us from these truths, educationism is part of the problem.”

While sad that my participation on Twitter is sometimes a distraction, eventually I can get around to a more reasonable position thanks to the commentariat. One commentator accused me of adopting the policies of U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst. That’s not the case, but at least we didn’t have to invoke Godwin’s Law to resolve the issue. Despite any issues with an ill-educated electorate, hope for a better world remains.

Read Hanauer’s entire article here.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa

Categories
Living in Society Social Commentary Writing

Independence Day 2019

Flags at Oakland Cemetery -2012

Happy Independence Day… reluctantly.

I’ve not been a fan of the Independence Day holiday since military service. It’s not that I paid much attention to it previously. As a military officer I had time to reflect on the meaning of independence while stationed far from home among strangers.

People celebrate the Declaration of Independence and its grievances against the King of England. I don’t mind. While I’m as glad as anyone Elizabeth is not our queen, and Prince Charles will never be our king, Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas was an affront to human society. 284 years later the damage had been done and the founders were formalizing a relationship with the King as the hegemony of natives had been diminished by disease and warfare.

Few things point out the advancement of pre-Columbian society, and what was lost, as much as the recent book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann.

The premise of Mann’s book is there were societies in the Americas that were as sophisticated as any on the globe. They endured for multiple millennia, coming and going over time before Columbus arrived, cultures unknown to Europeans. The Declaration of Independence was an insider deal among participants who had no standing to occupy and exploit the Americas. Yet they did.

It was not unusual for Americans to side with natives at the time of independence, especially when compared to living under English rule. I side with Frederick Douglass who said,

Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

If I celebrate anything this day it is the renewed opportunity to get along with neighbors and friends, something I believe is critical to healing our broken Democracy. While we may not agree about the meaning of Independence Day, it is better to find common ground every way we can. We’ll need that in the Anthropocene Age.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa

Categories
Environment

Living in the Anthropocene

Lake Macbride State Park Trail, July 1, 2019

The combination of advancing age and a world heated by human-made global warming has me looking for ways to cope.

When temperatures are forecast above 90 degrees Fahrenheit with high humidity I get my outside work done early then head into the house. I keep the thermostat at 83 degrees so as not to use too much electricity, but to take the edge off the hot, humid days. I manage to sustain my sanity.

I used to work outside in blistering weather until beginning to black out. It is a concession to age that I refrain from scheduling work to spite such conditions. Mother Nature always wins.

If the political failure to address global warming takes us all out, I can live with that. The extinction of humans would be fair if everyone goes together. Such fatalism serves no useful purpose if there is still a chance to slow greenhouse gas emissions and eliminate the use of fossil fuels that power our economy. What choice do we really have but to go on living? Part of that has to be political advocacy.

If we are individuals in the Anthropocene, we are doomed already. One has to wonder what Ayn Rand would have to say about the prospect of an end to humanity. One supposes as long as government doesn’t tax individuals and corporations she’d be okay with it. Although, she too signed up for Medicare and Social Security.

2019 has been a time of personal rebuilding. I made it across a career finish line and it took time for life to settle. I signed up for Medicare, then Social Security, and have begun to take better care of myself and effect repairs around the house. I spend a significant amount of time at home where reading, writing, gardening, yard work and cooking take a majority of my time. Something will be next.

I know what part of it is. The 2020 general election looms large in our efforts to engage the government in addressing the climate crisis. How to impact the election is complicated. In part I plan to band together with like-minded citizens and work for candidates, Democratic candidates for the most part. Everything from president down to township trustee requires positive change. There is more than politics.

It starts with taking care of ourselves but cannot end with the individual. That’s the outlook that brought us to today. What we know is government’s reduction of taxes and deregulation of business have played out in front of us. They fail to address the core issue: our survival in a turbulent world. What seems important is answering the question what role should government play in our lives? Finding a new answer is essential while living in the Anthropocene.

Categories
Living in Society Work Life Writing

Pushing Age’s Envelope and the Debate

Apple Tree June 25, 2019.

Wednesday I worked outside for five hours at the home, farm and auto supply store.

As temperatures reached toward 85 degrees, a colleague and I consolidated the remaining plants and supplies and opened up traffic flow where the garden center had been. I used a lift truck although there was plenty of physical labor. Our permit with the city expires soon and it’s time to make the parking lot a parking lot again.

Lifting numerous bags of mulch, soil and garden products took a toll. I was tired when I clocked out at 4:30 p.m.

Stopping to pick up provisions at the warehouse club, the trip home took an hour and 40 minutes. I followed a large sprayer from North Liberty to Solon and it drove really slowly. There was no way I could make the trip to the county seat for a meeting where a group is coordinating a presidential candidate debate on our issues: nuclear abolition and climate change.

Aware of the televised and webcast first presidential candidate debate, I skipped it for complicated reasons, but mostly because I couldn’t stay awake until it ended at 10 p.m. With a large glass of milk and an appetizer plate for dinner, I retired early and slept through the night.

I woke around 2:45 a.m. and picked up my mobile device without turning on the lights. A friend from one of the farms where I work participated in a CNN discussion panel after the debate and sent me video. She represented our community well in the brief amount of air time.

My main conventional news sources, Associated Press and the Washington Post each had their spin about what was most significant. AP framed health care and immigration as the top issues debated. The Washington Post headlined economic policy, although they presented multiple articles on several topics.

My social media scroll showed partisans supporting their candidate and little else new. What stood out was broad support for Elizabeth Warren’s performance and a breakout for Julián Castro. In the honorable mention category, de Blasio was not as bad as expected and U.S. Senators Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar came across as knowledgeable and presidential. Of the ten in the first debate, it is time for Bill de Blasio, Tim Ryan, Beto O’Rourke, Tulsi Gabbard, Jay Inslee and John Delaney to make their way to the exits and find other Democratic work needing to be done. If we have too many presidential candidates, there is no shortage of work to regain a Democratic majority in the legislature.

No regrets about missing the debate as I feel rested and ready to start another day. When you get to be a certain age, physical limits are familiar. One hopes to keep our powder dry and live to fight when it really matters. I can’t honestly say sifting through dozens of announced presidential candidates matters that much.

Editor’s Note about June 27 debate: Survivors of the second debate, according to accounts I read similar to those mentioned, and not from watching the debates, are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders (only for their high ranking in the polls), Kamala Harris (for her discussion of the importance of race relations in 2019), and Pete Buttigieg for his millennial status and as a reminder of the promise of youth. As U.S. Senators Michael Bennet and Kirsten Gillibrand get honorable mention, they should make their exits from the presidential race to work on electing additional Democratic U.S. Senators to secure a majority. Eric Swalwell, Marianne Williamson, Andrew Yang and John Hickenlooper should recognize the exit music and gracefully seek other important work in the Democratic Party to improve our chances of securing majorities in both federal legislative chambers.

Based on this analysis, there are few choices for me: We need to turn the page on Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders even though their current standing in polls is evidence many like them both. That leaves Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Julián Castro. I’d like to hear more from each of these candidates in the next debate. The field needs to reduce by half again after that process is completed. Of everyone that is running, on June 28 I’m more likely to support Elizabeth Warren than I was. My willingness to listen will decrease as summer continues. Making a decision of who to support should be doable by Labor Day.

Categories
Environment

Trail Walking

Grass

The garden was muddy making it difficult to plant… so I waited.

For exercise I took a walk on the state park trail, 20 minutes out and 20 minutes back… with stops for photos.

Wildflower

Although the pace was slow, I could feel the benefit of the walk. It energized me to install the deer fence around the tomatoes and perform a few garden chores before an afternoon thunder storm.

I picked turnips and sugar snap peas from the garden. The first Japanese beetles have arrived. The six-foot stakes worked well to protect the tomato plot from deer who eat the top shoots if they can get to them. It makes a significant difference in yield. Almost everything looks good.

With season’s end of soil blocking tomorrow comes blank space to fill… or not. I’ll do something but let go of filling every moment with intentional action a while back.

One of the most profound things I studied in art history was horror vacui, or fear of the empty. We looked at photos of Greek vases where every space of the surface had images on it. The human tendency is to fill everything the way a person gets a tattoo or two and ends up with a full sleeve. Fear of the empty. It is more creative and more difficult to leave spaces blank. Letting go the obsession to engage every chance to express ourselves frees us to produce better work.

A gardener gets time to think about things like this… and watch the arrival of Japanese beetles, and vegetables planted with one’s own hands grow in sunlight, and devise unique solutions like my deer fence.

Some days we have to stand back and look at what we’ve built:

Garden Photo June 24, 2019.

Categories
Environment Kitchen Garden

Garden is Growing

Cherry tomato planting area: Clementine, Taxi, Jasper, White cherry, grape, Matt’s wild cherry

I ran into a couple of neighbors at the well house while receiving a shipment of chlorine for our water treatment plant. They were checking to see if the dehumidifiers had dried out the well pit after the rain. They had.

We got to talking about the wet spring, polar vortex and the weather generally and predicted we’ll be going into drought next. None of us were kidding.

Other than that I spent the day in our yard and garden. I finished planting the fourth of seven plots and have about a third of number five in. As long as the weather holds I’ll keep after it. The soil is a combo of dry and muddy which is the best we can do this spring.

It’s been five days since I left the property with my car. Spiders made a web in the wheel well.

I planted these seeds in the fourth plot on June 3:

Hidatsa Red Beans, Seed Savers Exchange, 80-100 days.
Emerald Okra, Ferry — Morse, 58 days.
Clemson Spineless Okra, Ferry — Morse, 58 days.
Cilantro, Ferry — Morse, 45 days.
Extra Triple Curled Parsley, Ferry — Morse, 70-80 days.
Hercules Main Crop Carrots, Johnny’s Selected Seeds, 65 days.

I’ve never grown okra before, so fingers crossed. For the plant to be productive, once it starts fruiting, pods are to be picked once they are three inches long. Gotta get from seed to plant before I worry too much about that. The two rows of beans are a lot. The main purpose is to increase soil nitrogen for next year… and of course we’ll eat or preserve them. It’s the first time planting red beans for drying and storage. I have seedlings of cilantro and parsley, so this patch is for later on, assuming they germinate. There are never enough carrots.

Monday breakfast of scrambled eggs and sauteed bok choy with spring garlic, topped with green onions (scallions).

I picked the first green onions and used them for breakfast. There is a lot going on outside.

I left some of the volunteer garlic in the ground so we can get scapes. If my garlic stock from last year lasts, I’ll plant them as seed later in the summer to supplement the volunteers.

I inspected the apple trees and they fruited nicely. Apples form clusters of five blossoms which get pollinated if we’re lucky. When the fruit forms and starts tipping up, and the calyx closes, you know there will be a fruit. When we get to this point it is the time to cull the extra or non-productive fruits so the ones left will get decently sized. Because this pollination persisted for so long, I believe nature took care of the culling for me and rejected later pollination because the fruits are nicely spaced on the lower branches. That would be your folk-apple theory.

I’ll have to check in with the chief apple officer at the orchard when I next see him. I hope that’s soon.