Tag: homelife

Categories
Kitchen Garden Writing

Spring Burn Pile

Spring Burn Pile

Part of yesterday was spent outside — in the garden, working compost, cleaning buckets, collecting the bits of drainage tile used to support celery plants, tending the garlic, planting turnips and radishes.

Using a bag of shredded office paper and a match, I started the burn pile created in the aftermath of an unusual wind storm last year. An arborist cut down the big branches and I sawed them into smaller logs and branches. The wood was dry and burned quickly even though it was covered with snow a couple days ago.

The first spring burn pile marks the beginning of gardening season.

I didn’t connect the garden hose as we are expecting freezing temperatures again this weekend. There is plenty of moisture in the ground to give the seeds a start.

A week ago I got a haircut. Partly it was too shaggy and in my eyes while working outside at the home, farm and auto supply store. Partly it was about casting aside the experience it represents for a new start.

My retirement March 16 has been something of a crash landing. Long anticipated, I know the major themes — writing, gardening, farm work, home maintenance and community organizing. I’ve had to add a need to deal with my aging frame and life systems. I made an appointment to see a medical doctor for a physical next week.

Even though I have more time, there never seems like enough to get what I want accomplished. With that in mind, I’ve come to believe what I said in February, that low income workers and retirees can’t afford social media. I posted this on Facebook this morning:

I’ve decided to end my relationship with the Facebook application on or about April 30. I joined in 2008 to follow our daughter and she deleted her account a couple of years ago. It’s not you fair reader, it’s me.

I listened to Mark Zuckerberg testify to Congress yesterday and his plans for dealing with public issues here. I have no interest in artificial intelligence reading my every post to determine if it is worthy according to Facebook criteria.

That said, I will miss the exchanges, likes and shares and appreciate your interest in what I’ve been doing. Facebook has been a creative outlet for me and I plan to channel those impulses elsewhere.

You are invited to continue to follow me elsewhere. I plan to keep my twitter account @PaulDeaton_IA and my WordPress account pauldeaton.com. If you are on WordPress click the button on my home page to add me to your reader, or click on the Follow Via Email button if you are not.

So that’s it. Hope to see you around… literally.

The burn pile was hot and I had to keep my distance while using a hoe to move partly burned branches to the top of it. By supper time it was a pile of white ashes with minerals returned to the ground and carbon released into the atmosphere. I plan to add another garden plot where the burn pile was.

We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. A burn pile reminds us all of the natural world is in transition. In a burn pile there’s no judgment, just the heat of released energy and beautiful, ever changing orange-yellow-blue flames.

In this moment that’s all we require to sustain ourselves.

Categories
Home Life Writing

Healing in Big Grove

Along the Trail

A thick, wet snow blanketed the landscape overnight. Being a lifelong Iowan, driving on snowy roads across the lakes to today’s political convention shouldn’t be an issue if I take it slowly.

I am on the arrangements committee and have to be there at 6 a.m.

My mind is not on that, or the myriad other activities that filled my days since entering retirement a week ago.

After 50 years of work a person needs healing. That’s going to take longer than I thought.

On Monday I dropped my car for repairs in town and walked the three miles home along the Lake Macbride trail. The trail was pretty beat up with deep ruts from construction equipment along the entryway from town. Iowa Department of Natural Resources must be up to something. It looked like hell. Walking home was a mistake.

My plantar fasciitis has been in abeyance but the day after the walk, my heels started to hurt. It was exacerbated by standing to soil block at the farm yesterday, reminding me there is no such thing as “good as new” for a sixty-something.

More than physical ailments I need to heal my mind. When I entered the low-wage workforce back in 2013 it was hard to focus on bigger issues. Perspective was reduced to a few inches beyond my nose. Interaction with newly met people was framed by the idea I didn’t really want to be there. It tainted my perception, hopefully not permanently. It too will take time to heal.

There is a lot to get done during our brief time on earth. Sometimes we need to stop and just breathe. If we can manage that, perhaps our bodies and minds will heal.

Categories
Home Life

I Might Die Tonight

Spring Flowers

BIG GROVE TOWNSHIP — It’s a little crazy for a 66 year old male to make plans.

It would be easy to “go on the draw” as people I know have done. This framing comes from relatives and friends in Appalachia, where my father’s family came up, who found a way to collect a monthly payment from the government in the post-FDR era. It seems universal in American society to expect the rewards of a life of work and trouble in order to take it easy. Going on the draw has a subtext of relinquishing part of the self-reliance that has come to characterize being American.

There is plenty in society to engage our mind, heart and soul, without adding a layer to it. Social groups abound. Paid and volunteer work create human relationships. There’s shopping, movies and restaurants. Central to many are public libraries — one of the few remaining places with no expectation patrons have money. As much as I’d like to self-identify as a “retiree” and take advantage of all this, the feeling “I want,” as Saul Bellow aptly described it in Henderson the Rain King, nags at me. We may not know what we seek, but are always looking.

Is it hubris? Ecclesiastes instructs.

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. (Ecclesiastes 1, 2-4, King James)

A simple truth is I might die tonight.

I hope not.

When we live our bodies break down from use. We are broken through trauma, physical and emotional. What we need more than treatment for symptoms is healing. Such healing falls to the care of a network of family and friends who look after us when we are broken. Health care is so often more about family and friends, home remedies and rest, than the health care and health insurance which takes an increasing proportion of our income.

Once we accept the underlying fragility of the human condition, many make plans and that’s positive. Our lives have meaning only if we find it in useful, social activity. Once we cease engagement in life and society, the truth that we might die tonight is rendered moot.

We would be dead already.

Categories
Home Life Kitchen Garden

Late Winter in Big Grove

Sautéing onions for a casserole

It is time to use up fresh onions, garlic and potatoes, then rotate the canned goods so oldest jars are consumed first.

Winter means soup, casseroles, pasta and hearty meals made from pantry and ice box ingredients.

As the ambient temperature warms, we are ready to move into the new year’s fresh food cycle. But not so fast!

There are egg sandwiches, chili mac and soups to be made before spring buds.

I donned my LaCrosse rubber boots and toured the yard and garden.

The ground is too hard to plant lettuce. Garlic is not up. The only bit of sprouting green was flowers I transplanted from Indiana. Tips of green were frosted on those that emerged. A thick layer of sand lies on the side of the road. Time to sweep it up and save it for next winter.

At 13 days until the transformation of worklife, I’m spending time organizing time and tasks.

To be successful means purging old habits and developing new. The work seems much harder than it should be. While working at the home, farm and auto supply store I’ve developed some questionable habits around internet usage, resting and eating. They produced the current result, so they were not all bad. One only gets so many chances to start over.

There are two problems with my transformation. First, I’m limited to 12 hours per day of primary activity. Not everything I want to do will fit. Second, I’m not used to working 12-hour days. To get things done, I need to ramp up. The situation is complicated by keeping two days of paid work in the mix. We’ll find a use for the money, but I’ll also need to figure out how to get more productivity out of a day to meet overall goals.

Paul’s Pie

Drawing the pie chart was fairly simple. Making that fit among rigid schedules of paid work, writing and farm work has proven to be challenging. Where I suspect this will end is with a hard schedule that includes writing, food ecology and paid work, leaving everything else flexible.

I’m committed to this now, so no turning back.

The week of the county party central committee turns into a session of drinking politics from a fire hose. As you can see in the pie chart, community organizing gets a 20 percent allocation of time and politics is a subset of that. I’ve limited myself to one social event per week and expect most of those to be related to politics for the next couple of months. I learned a couple of things:

Rep. Dave Jacoby explaining plan to run 100 Democrats for 100 House seats.

Iowa House Democrats are planning to run 100 candidates for 100 seats in the midterm elections. We don’t usually run everywhere, so that makes this year different.

In the governor’s race, Democrats are working to win the primary. With seven announced candidates at the beginning of the filing period we’ll see if everyone files and if there is anyone else. It takes 35 percent of votes cast to win the primary. Cathy Glasson’s campaign is playing a side bet that the governor candidate will be chosen at the state convention with no one getting enough votes to win outright. The campaign claims to have won 30 percent of delegates at the caucus, which may or may not translate into 30 percent at the state convention after counties pick their delegates at the March 24 county conventions. 30 percent seems unlikely to win at the convention.

There are still too many geezers like me on the central committee. I’d gladly step aside and let someone else take my seat, but the truth is these women, millennials and newly registered voters who are supposedly playing a key role in the midterms don’t come to the meetings, don’t want the job. It’s a truism that flying at 30,000 feet, political strategists come up with all manner of demographic projections about the electorate. Our local elections of everyone up and down the ticket are made at a distance of six inches in front of our noses, rendering strategist musings moot.

Cold and frosty as the ground is today I can justify another day indoors to file our tax returns, work on community organizing and get caught up on everything else. However, it won’t be long before lettuce and potato planting. Next Sunday I start my first trays of seedlings in the greenhouse.

There’s everything spring brings and for which we yearn.

Categories
Home Life

Goodbye 2008

Poor Richard’s Restaurant, Colorado Springs

Driving through ranch and mining country along Interstate 76, large square bales of hay are stacked four high as a windbreak around feedlots. The harvest is in and irrigation rigs idle.

On the distant horizon are wind turbines, It’s difficult to see if their blades are turning. Empty coal trains are on the move and motor traffic was light. Cloud formations played against an azure sky coming into Colorado.

As we exited to the Denver bypass, an enormous flock of birds descended onto a surface of water. We too were intending to settle for the night in Colorado Springs.

After dinner at Poor Richard’s Restaurant, we checked in at The Antlers Hilton.

The Antlers was opened a couple of years after the founding of Colorado Springs in 1871, situated with a view of the mountains and close to downtown. It was and is a resort designed to be away from the rough and tumble of the mining community and daily life. There were not a lot of cars in the adjacent self-park garage, and the hotel staff has been personable and helpful. It has been quiet during our stay.

At the end of 2008, the patterns of our lives feel played out.

Getting through the year marks us as survivors, pragmatists, realists and as individuals pitted against a society that rebukes our endeavors to rise above the trivial and petty. There are powerful interests at work.

As individuals we can cope through focus on family and friends and by renewing our efforts to take actions that result in improvement of our life in society. Our hope is that after the family retreat, and we head back home through rural Colorado, Nebraska and Iowa, there will be a new opportunity to repair the society in which we have been participants for much longer than there have been retreats in the Colorado mountains.

From this mile high view, it does not look like we will miss many of the events of 2008. It was a year of reality staring us in the face, and was not always pretty.

Will we make something of the coming days, or will we resemble revelers at a ball, donning a mask to look through the rigid certainties of the maker’s design. We must work toward the former with all of our energy as we return home to the next work.

~ An earlier version first posted December 31, 2008.

Categories
Kitchen Garden Writing

Jambalaya Reprise

Vegetarian Jambalaya

In a throwback to my work at a major logistics company I made a batch of vegetarian jambalaya for this week’s lunches.

The dish was born in Thomas County, Georgia as I was sequestered in a hotel for four months implementing a logistics project at a clay mining and processing plant. I had access to what was then called the TV Food Network and Emeril Lagasse. I made the techniques I learned my own.

Here’s a recreation of today’s recipe:

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons high smoke point oil
4 tablespoons butter
4 six-inch vegetarian sausage links sliced 1/4 inch on the bias
1/2 pound frozen sliced okra
2 cups diced onions
1 cup diced bell pepper
1 cup diced celery
4 cloves garlic minced
1 15 oz can red beans drained and washed
1 cup long grain brown rice
1 pint diced tomatoes
1 quart prepared vegetable broth
Salt, red pepper flakes, curry powder, prepared hot sauce to taste

In a Dutch oven, brown the sausage in cooking oil. Remove and set aside.
Melt the butter in the same pan and heat the red pepper flakes until aromatic.
Add the onions, celery and bell pepper. Saute until soft.
Add the garlic and stir together. Cook for five minutes over medium heat.
Season with salt, pepper, curry powder and hot sauce.
Add the pint of diced tomatoes and rice and stir together.
Add the quart of broth and bring to a boil.
Add the okra, beans and cooked sausage and mix everything together.
Cover and bring to a boil. Turn the heat to medium low so the liquid bubbles gently through.
When the rice absorbs the moisture, stir and serve with fresh, sliced green onions on top.
Makes six generous servings.

Categories
Home Life

After a Holiday Weekend

Muesli

Three-day weekends are rare at the home, farm and auto supply store. However, this year the retail store was closed Monday for the Christmas holiday.

I managed to get some things done. Mostly I slept, not understanding beforehand how much sleep I needed.

Three days was not enough time to catch up on sleep.

As I consider “full retirement” this spring, out of the box I’ll need two weeks to do nothing but catch up on sleep. Being bone weary makes it difficult to get things done and there is plenty I want to do after leaving full-time, lowly paid work. Getting rested equals getting started on a new life.

That’s not to say the weekend wasn’t festive. I made Christmas Eve dinner, baked shortbread cookies, and we spent time together and talked. We phoned and texted friends and family. We talked a lot.

Corn and Apples for Wildlife

Birds were not coming to the feeder so I changed bird seed. I dumped piles of apples and whole corn for wildlife and watched as crows came first to feast. I spent no money and didn’t leave the property a single time after arriving home on Friday.

I long to take retirement. We can’t afford to stop working. How to sustain our lives needs to be worked out by spring. Treading water, I wrote our budget with enough income to cover expenses for 12 months. I’ll use that time to determine how to make things work. If it’s possible, we’ll figure it out.

I’m enrolled in the federal retirement program and Jacque signed up for federal health benefits. We each carry a deck of insurance cards — Medicare, Medicare supplement and Medicare Part D. We hope not to need any of them. Without the federal retirement program we’d both have to work until we die.

I’m counting on being able to write during retirement. I spent Christmas morning writing an article for the Cedar Rapids Gazette. One never knows if writing will be accepted, but it’s free to the newspaper and I have a unique perspective. I like publishing in the Gazette because of it’s comparatively large circulation. Fingers crossed. I’ll write more going forward.

I’ve had my car on the trickle charger for 12 hours so it should start this morning. Thursday is my appointment at the auto clinic to have the charging system diagnosed. Hopefully it can be diagnosed and fixed — the same hope for every 20-year old vehicle. The alternative is the scrap heap. I won’t need transportation as much after retirement. I budgeted half the gasoline next year compared to this, hoping to use even less.

The time between Christmas and New Years is weird. Because of the paid birthday off work I’m at the home, farm and auto supply store only three days this week. What’s nice about this time is the ability to withdraw from society enough to get our bearings.

That will have to be good enough this year.

Categories
Home Life Writing

Going Home – 2018

Raw Vegetables

I’m going home now that my applications to the U.S. federal retirement program are approved.

My first payment from Social Security is scheduled around Jan. 24, 2018. We both have health coverage through Medicare, a Medicare supplement policy, and a prescription drug plan effective Jan. 1. We’ll need the money and hope we don’t need the health insurance.

It’s not clear what “going home” means today, but for sure, I’ll be leaving employment at the home, farm and auto supply store in the first half of 2018 — likely late winter or spring.

I don’t write in public about family, but plan to nurture those relationships.

Compensated work is on the 2018 agenda, specifically farm work for the sixth season at Community Supported Agriculture projects and at the orchard. I’d work for wages after my retail experience but need to transition out of driving a lift truck and lifting 50-pound bags of feed in long shifts. If I took a new job for wages, the commute would have to be less, the pay more, and personal fulfillment high. I hope to get better as a gardener, transitioning to a more productive vegetable patch and more fruit trees.

Uncompensated work is on the agenda as well. Scores of household projects wait for time and resources. I expect to have the time and some of the resources in 2018. We built new in 1993 and that reduced our home maintenance expenses in the early years. Things now need attention and preparation for the next phase of our lives in Big Grove. I expect to reduce the number of things we possess, converting current warehouse space to better livability.

I’ll continue to be active in our local community, but less outside Big Grove and surrounding townships. The home owners association, sewer district and membership on the political party central committee will serve as primary volunteer activities. I’ll also seek volunteer opportunities in nearby Solon. For a broader perspective I belong to the Arms Control Association, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Practical Farmers of Iowa and the Climate Reality Project.

Importantly, writing is on the 2018 agenda. I’ve been planning an expanded autobiography and that will be the first major project. With it I hope to develop a process to research, write and re-write a 20,000-word piece for distribution, if not publication. If my health holds and the wolves of an increasingly coarse society are held in abeyance, there will be additional projects. My first six decades have been in preparation for this. I believe positive outcomes will result.

I’m going to home to the life we built for ourselves. We’re not from here, yet after 24 years we have deep roots in this imperfect soil. I’m ready to settle in and grow.

Categories
Home Life Writing

Holiday Fun

Frosted Squash Plants

Hard frost and cooler temperatures make way for end of year holidays. Stress diminishes as plans for outdoor work become moot.

Diversity in the United States means holidays differ among social groups with each family developing a way of participating in a national culture.

Specific things have been on the agenda in our home. We discuss when to set up the Christmas holiday decorations, make and receive phone calls, cook a special meal, and pretty much stay within the boundary of our lot lines. It has been a quiet day for the last several years.

Some activities are particularly fun.

I mentioned the meal in yesterday’s post. What made it special was discussion about what to have combined with its simplicity. We made enough food for leftovers from recipes developed at home. The concession to consumer culture was an inexpensive bottle of Martinelli’s Sparkling Apple Cider. It was sweet and fizzy.

We don’t receive many seed catalogues in the mail yet I started online orders at Seed Savers Exchange and Johnny’s Selected Seeds. The activity informs visualization of next year’s garden. There is a lot of thinking and planning to be done prior to entering payment information and hitting the order button on the web sites. There are discounts from both companies for ordering online this early.

I read a couple chapters of Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving. Books to read pile up on the filing cabinet near my writing desk. I finish most of the books I read each year between December and February. Reading is part of the holiday quiet time and sustains me through winter.

Napping is a lost art. Balance between falling asleep on the couch from exhaustion and intentionally resting is hard to achieve. After the day’s activities I slept straight through the night. I didn’t take a nap this Thanksgiving, but should have.

As a schooler we had at least a four-day Thanksgiving holiday. In the work force, I worked on Thanksgiving Day countless times, even the single time Mother made it out to Indiana for the holiday. That day I coordinated holiday meals for some of more than 600 drivers based at our trucking terminal and missed the main meal service at home.

Indiana was a tough place to live in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Reagan era was noted for downsizing or eliminating large industrial job sites like U.S. Steel. I can’t recall the number of conversations about what used to be in the steel business. There were many. Even lake-effect snow from Lake Michigan couldn’t deaden the angst people felt. Electing Bill Clinton president didn’t change what the radio stations described as the “steel mill culture.” There wasn’t much for which to give thanks in that economic and political environment.

Memories fade with time and Thanksgiving presents opportunities to re-tell the stories of our lives together. Such storytelling has been wide-ranging and keeps the past alive. A past to inform our future, or so we hope even if the teller doesn’t get details right.

If we work a little, Thanksgiving can be a time to have fun. That may be enough to sustain us.

Categories
Kitchen Garden Writing

Thanksgiving Chili Bowl

Homemade Chili

We discussed plans for Thanksgiving dinner exactly three minutes.

It’s the two of us and we haven’t had chili with cornbread for a long time. We haven’t had an apple crisp this season either, so that will be our Thanksgiving supper along with a bottle of sparkling apple cider.

A person can eat only so many pizzas, bowls of soup, squash, rice and potato dishes in one month.

We don’t use the television much, so no Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, no movies, just us, chez nous with talk and naps. We get a signal from basic cable and have talked about getting a new television to replace the one that displays varying shade of red regardless of channel. The conversation was inconclusive.

People call it a holiday, but this year it’s merely a different day off work as I have to add Saturday to my schedule at the home, farm and auto supply store. A mid-week day of rest anyway… and some overtime pay.

We had a phone call with our daughter during which I was described as “Garrison Keillor-like” while telling a story about the orchard. Don’t know if that’s good or bad and I denied it. I claimed the Minnesota writer was much taller so how could I sound like him? The moniker stuck despite my denial. I’m okay with that.

I started talking about Minnesota where my Polish forebears bought land from the railroad. The only trip I made to the home place was the summer after Grandmother died. I brought back a turtle carved from pipestone for our daughter. She remembered the gift but not the context around it. We likely all have imperfect memories which should encourage us toward humility.

I understand why parents tell their children the same story over and over again. It’s a way of defining shared history. If we are honest, we craft the story to accurately reflect our experience, sanding off rough edges to help it along. Tricksters among us may misrepresent certain aspects of a story to see if listeners catch on. That’s part of the story telling craft, one that reinforces what is shared about our experiences. I believe we can be honest tricksters.

About now people are finishing their holiday feasts and winding down: viewing television, making phone calls, drinking coffee, putting away leftovers, et. al. I plan to read while the chili simmers, then make the apple crisp. It will go into the oven timed so it can be served warm.

Happy Thanksgiving!